US President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary agency in the United States responsible for public health research.
Bhattacharya is known for his criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the COVID pandemic after it took power in January 2021.
Who is Jay Bhattacharya?
Bhattacharya is a physician, a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research at Stanford.
According to his resume, Bhattacharya completed his medical degree from Stanford in 1997 and received his doctorate in the economics of healthcare in 2000 from the Stanford University Department of Economics.
In 2020 when the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Bhattacharya advocated against complete lockdowns, arguing that they have detrimental impacts on physical and mental health. He co-authored an open letter, the Great Barrington Declaration, detailing this. While his take on lockdowns drew criticism back then and continues to be criticised now, some of his critics are reassessing their views.
One of these former critics is Dr Francis Collins, a former NIH director who called Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists” in 2020. However, in December 2023, Collins told New York-based nonprofit Braver Angels that back in 2020, he and his colleagues were “narrowly focused” on saving lives.
Although he did not directly mention Bhattacharya or the declaration, he stated: “You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.”
Experts say that this was precisely what Bhattacharya was talking about. Dr Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar, told Al Jazeera: “Regarding COVID-19 specifically, health policymakers erred on the side of caution, given the limited and evolving understanding of the virus.
“In retrospect, some restrictions or their intensity were unnecessary, as argued by Jay and colleagues.”
In 2022, independent journalist Bari Weiss cited an investigation based on internal company documents from the social media platform X (known as Twitter at the time), that showed that Bhattacharya’s account was one of several that had been “secretly” blacklisted. This occurred before Elon Musk acquired the platform.
When Musk acquired X in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to talk about how his voice had been restricted by the platform.
Bhattacharya was also a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case which alleged that President Joe Biden’s administration was improperly suppressing conservative views on social media regarding topics including COVID-19. In June this year, however, the court sided with the Biden administration.
Bhattacharya’s nomination as NIH head will have to be approved by the Senate.
What does the NIH do?
The NIH oversees medical and public health research in the US. The body comprises 27 research institutes, each with their own research mandate and area of focus.
The annual budget of the NIH totals nearly $48bn, according to its website, and it employs nearly 18,000 people.
The NIH is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This means, if both are appointed, Bhattacharya will work in tandem with Robert F Kennedy Jr, who Trump nominated to lead the HHS on November 14.
Kennedy’s appointment raised some eyebrows from both parties due to his controversial positions on some health issues including vaccines and COVID-19, during which Kennedy also opposed lockdowns.
“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 his social media platform, Truth Social.
Kennedy posted on X on Tuesday: “Dr Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine.”
I’m so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine. pic.twitter.com/NakHavsblX
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 27, 2024
What was Bhattacharya’s stance on COVID-19 lockdowns?
On October 4, 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration with Dr Martin Kulldorff, a then-professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Dr Sunetra Gupta, epidemiologist and professor at Oxford University.
It was published before the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were administered on December 14, 2020.
The letter proposed an approach to COVID-19 called “Focused Protection” and rejected the prevailing COVID-19 policies.
The letter stated: “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
The particular areas of health that the letter highlighted as being of concern due to lockdowns included:
- Lower childhood vaccination rates.
- Deteriorating cardiovascular disease outcomes.
- Fewer cancer screenings.
- Deteriorating mental health.
The letter argued that the impact on these areas of health would result in “greater excess mortality in years to come”. It added that the working class and younger members of society would be most affected by this. “Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” the authors stated.
The statement pointed out that it was older people who were more vulnerable to COVID-19. “For children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.”
Abu-Raddad told Al Jazeera that the question of whether focused protection is a more viable approach to a pandemic than a full lockdown was complicated as it depends on how severe the infection is and how it affects different age groups. “This also depends on what each society deems an acceptable balance between minimising morbidity and mortality and maintaining economic and social functionality.”
The declaration suggested that instead of imposing a complete lockdown for COVID-19, those who were not as vulnerable to the virus should immediately resume their regular routines and that herd immunity would be acquired.
“A greater reliance on data from regions outside the United States and Europe would have helped refine restrictions, particularly in areas with younger populations and lower proportions of elderly individuals,” Abu-Raddad said. “To his credit, Jay recognised and valued such data at the time, advocating for a more tailored approach to restrictions.”
The declaration has since been co-signed by 43 more medical practitioners and health scientists in the US, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, India, Canada and Israel.
Conversely, a few days after the declaration was published in 2020, 80 medical experts published the John Snow Memorandum, named after one of the founders of modern epidemiology. That memorandum claimed that the declaration co-authored by Bhattacharya would endanger Americans with underlying conditions.
