Trump picks Stanford physician who opposed lockdowns to head NIH

President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist whose authorship of an anti-lockdown treatise during the coronavirus pandemic made him a central figure in a bitter public health debate, to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Together, Jay and RFK 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, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Trump wrote on social media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

If confirmed by the Senate, Bhattacharya would lead the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, each with its own research agenda, focusing on different diseases like cancer and diabetes. Bhattacharya, who is not a practicing physician, has called for overhauling the NIH and limiting the power of civil servants who, he believes, played too prominent a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.

He is the latest in a series of Trump health picks who came to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and who hold views on medicine and public health that are at times outside the mainstream. The president-elect’s health choices, experts agree, suggest a shake-up is coming to the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment.

Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto issued in 2020 that contended that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted to older people and the vulnerable.

Through a connection with a Stanford colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, who was advising Trump during his first term, Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex Azar, Trump’s health secretary. The condemnation from the public health establishment was swift. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were promptly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.

Bhattacharya also became a go-to witness in court cases challenging federal and state COVID policies. He joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration over what he called “COVID censorship,” arguing that the administration violated the First Amendment in working with social media companies to tamp down on COVID misinformation.

He also argued against mask mandates for schoolchildren in Florida and Tennessee. Judges in both states dismissed him as unqualified to make medical pronouncements on the matter.

“His demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda,” Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee wrote in 2021, adding that he was “simply unwilling to trust Dr. Bhattacharya.”

More recently, amid widespread recognition of the economic and mental health harms caused by lockdowns and school closures, Bhattacharya’s views have been getting a second look, to the consternation of his critics, who have accused those entertaining his ideas of “sane-washing” him.

Perhaps the most notable reflection has come from Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health. In 2020, Collins called Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists.” Last year, Collins suggested that he and other policymakers might have been too narrowly focused on public health goals — saving lives at any cost — and not attuned enough to balancing health needs with economic ones.

“I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset — and that was really unfortunate, it’s another mistake we made,” Collins said in December 2023, at a conversation hosted by Braver Angels, a group that addresses political polarization. He did not address Bhattacharya or the Great Barrington Declaration specifically.

But Bhattacharya still provokes extremely strong feelings. Dr. Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, who treated patients at Bellevue Hospital at the height of the pandemic, has assailed Bhattacharya in a book, “We Want Them Infected.”

Howard said Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” about the pandemic. In March 2020, for example, Bhattacharya suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that the pandemic was not as deadly as it was being made out to be, and that the death toll might top out at 40,000 Americans; in the end, 1.2 million died.

Bhattacharya responded on social media by calling Howard “unhinged” and his book “inane,” advising him to “take an epidemiology class if you don’t want to keep embarrassing yourself.”

The Great Barrington Declaration grew out of a meeting in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, convened by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles. Its authors, who included doctors, scientists and epidemiologists, wrote that they had “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” They called their approach “Focused Protection.”

Alarmed and angry, 80 experts published a manifesto of their own, the John Snow Memorandum (named after the 19th-century English epidemiologist), saying that the declaration’s approach would endanger Americans who had underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe COVID-19 — at least one-third of U.S. citizens, by most estimates — and result in perhaps a half-million deaths.

“I think it’s wrong, I think it’s unsafe, I think it invites people to act in ways that have the potential to do an enormous amount of harm,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, a Harvard infectious disease specialist, said at the time. Walensky later became director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when President Joe Biden took office.

Last month, Bhattacharya hosted a forum on pandemic policy at Stanford, saying he had hoped to bring together people of different views who would “talk to each other in a civil way.” But the forum itself became the target of attacks — a development that Stanford’s president, Jonathan Levin, called “dispiriting.”

One of Bhattacharya’s Stanford colleagues, Dr. Pantea Javidan of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was quoted in The San Jose Mercury News as saying the symposium gave “a platform for discredited figures who continually promote dangerous, scientifically unsupported or thoroughly debunked approaches to COVID.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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