Prominent Lockdown Critic Chosen to Lead the NIH

President-elect Trump has chosen health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation's leading medical research agency, reports the AP. Trump, in a statement Tuesday evening, said Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, "to direct the Nation's Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives."

Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm. The document, which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines during the first Trump administration, promoted "herd immunity," the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said. "I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake," Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and "not mainstream science." His nomination would need to be approved by the Senate. Bhattacharya, who faced restrictions on social media platforms because of his views, was also a plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case contending that federal officials improperly suppressed conservative views on social media as part of their efforts to combat misinformation.

story continues below

The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in that case. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to the company's headquarters to learn more about how his views had been restricted on the platform, which Musk renamed X. More recently, Bhattacharya has posted on X about scientists leaving the site and joining the alternative site Bluesky, mocking Bluesky as "their own little echo chamber." (More National Institutes of Health stories.)