Trump Picks Nih Critic Jay Bhattacharya To Lead The Agency

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University physician and economist known for his controversial views during the Covid-19 pandemic, as director of the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya, 56, has advocated for a major shakeup of the agency and accused former NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of suppressing scientific debate and research during the pandemic.

"The rot, having accumulated over decades, was plain for all to see," Bhattacharya wrote earlier this month on the British news and opinion site UnHerd, in an endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's pick for health and human services secretary.

Health officials failed the public during the pandemic by supporting lockdowns, school closures and mandates, Bhattacharya wrote, adding, “Yet the officials continue to deny their own culpability, avoiding a long look in the mirror.”

“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 said in a statement announcing his choice.

In a post to X, Bhattacharya said he was “honored and humbled by President @realDonaldTrump's nomination of me to be the next @NIH director.”

Bhattacharya said he’d work to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!," echoing one of Kennedy's themes. Kennedy called the Bhattacharya appointment "spectacular" in a post to X.

Other supporters of Bhattacharya’s lockdown critique also praised Trump’s pick. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who sparred with top NIH officials, including Fauci, during the pandemic and plans to reexamine the U.S. response to Covid-19 when he becomes chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee next year, congratulated Bhattacharya on X and said he had “no doubt” he would “lead the bipartisan reform the @NIH needs.”

Chris Meekins, an HHS deputy assistant secretary during Trump’s first term, said Bhattacharya was an “unconventional choice” because he doesn’t work in the hard sciences, but that the NIH was “badly in need of reforms and it may take someone from the outside to get the agency back on track.”

Bhattacharya was one of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The open letter, published in October 2020 and signed by thousands of public health scientists, argued against lockdown measures and in favor of a hands-off approach to the pandemic, relying on letting low-risk people build up herd immunity — a suggestion then-NIH Director Francis Collins called dangerous.

Bhattacharya is the latest in a series of contrarian health figures Trump has tapped for top health administration roles, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS secretary and celebrity TV physician Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, as administrator of CMS.

If Bhattacharya is confirmed by the Senate as NIH director, he would oversee the nearly $50 billion agency, which comprises 27 institutes and centers, and is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.