US President-elect Donald Trump has said he intends to nominate Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, known for his criticism of Covid lockdowns, as the next director of the National Institutes of Health.
“Dr. Bhattacharya will work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Nation’s Medical Research and make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday.
Kennedy is skeptical of Trump’s vaccine pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. yesetc etcpred controversial and controversial ideas about health, including HIV was not the only cause of AIDS and the coronavirus targeted certain racial groups.
He has argued for years that vaccines can cause autism, a position based on decades of discredited and retracted research. according to According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD. [autism spectrum disorder].”
In an X post after Trump’s announcement, Bhattacharya said he was “honored and humbled” to be nominated.
“We will reform America’s scientific institutions so they can be trusted again and use the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!” he added.
Separately, Trump also said Tuesday that he plans to nominate Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under Kennedy. A critic of the Food and Drug Administration, O’Neill held several roles at HHS during the Bush administration.
Bhattacharya gained national attention in October 2020 when he penned the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter urging public health officials to reverse the Covid lockdowns.
He and his co-authors, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, argued that the lockdowns had “devastating short- and long-term public health impacts” and “called for an approach that would enable those at minimal risk” while better protecting those at highest risk, while natural contagion death to live their lives normally to create immunity against the virus.
Released before vaccines were available, the proposal advocated a concept called “herd immunity,” which refers to the level at which a large enough portion of the population has been exposed to an infectious disease that it is unlikely to spread.
At that time, many experts spoke against this concept. Days after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, 80 researchers from public health, epidemiology and more published a joint letter in the medical journal The Lancet calling out the idea.is a dangerous mistake.”
Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called this proposal unethical.
“It’s simply unethical to allow a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to be released,” Ghebreyesus said. “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy to respond to an outbreak.” “
During the pandemic, Bhattacharya also publicly criticized how NIH leaders and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who will lead the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022, have managed the U.S. response.