Trump picks Stanford critic of Covid lockdowns to head NIH

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Bloomberg: President elect Donald Trump nominated health policy researcher Jay Bhattacharya to head the US National Institutes of Health, the sprawling agency that oversees close to $50 billion in biomedical research spending.

Bhattacharya, a health economist and doctor at Stanford University, is best known as one of the three authors of an October 2020 manifesto that proposed an alternative to Covid lockdowns, focused on protecting the elderly and those at high risk while opening up the rest of society to return to normal.

Trump said Bhattacharya and health secretary pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “will restore the NIH to a gold standard of medical research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges,” in a post on his Truth Social network.

“Expect reform,” of the NIH under Kennedy and Bhattacharya, TD Cowen analyst Dan Brennan wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. He called Bhattacharya “a longstanding critic of NIH’s internal structure and funding priorities.”

Exactly how Bhattacharya and Kennedy would reform the agency is unclear. Among the ideas that some Republicans have proposed is implementing term limits for directors of individual institutes, so that no single person overseeing huge amounts of medical funding becomes too powerful. House Republicans have also proposed consolidating some of NIH’s many institutes.

Bhattacharya gained prominence during the Covid pandemic with the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for an end to lockdowns before vaccines were available. Keeping shutdowns in place until a vaccine was available “will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” the declaration said.

Their ideas were vigorously attacked by the public health establishment, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Anthony Fauci, who called the declaration’s concepts “very dangerous.” But since then, the downsides of long pandemic-related interruptions have become more apparent, including in mental health and children falling behind as schools leaned on remote learning.

Bhattacharya said in a post on X that he was honored and humbled by the appointment. He said he aims to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”