Health Professionals Warn of 'Extremist' Trump Pick for NIH

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and Stanford University professor who shot to prominence during the pandemic due to his heterodox views around Covid lockdowns, is President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health.

In announcing his selection, Trump wrote that Bhattacharya and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, will work together to "Make America Healthy Again."

However, Bhattacharya's nomination was met by alarm from some health professionals who warned that the views he expressed during the pandemic make him a poor choice to run the globe's premier medical research agency.

"Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers and promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, and science back for a generation. He's not here to reform NIH. He's here to destroy it," wrote the virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen on X.

Biomedical scientist and public health communicator Dr. Lucky Tran wrote: "Please google Great Barrington Declaration. If it had been implemented, millions more people would have died at the start of the pandemic. Now, one of its architects will lead the NIH (if confirmed), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world," wrote biomedical scientist and public health communicator Dr. Lucky Tran.

Another doctor, Alastair McAlpine, echoed these sentiments, writing that Bhattacharya is a "terrible" choice for head of NIH.

Bhattacharya is known for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a treatise published in October 2020 that advocated for a "focused protection" approach to the pandemic.

"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk," Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote.

The document was named after the Massachusetts town where the three authored and signed the proposal. That work took place on the campus of a libertarian think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research.

The proposal caught the attention of Trump's White House in 2020. Trump, for his part, minimized the threat of the virus, chafed against lockdowns during the pandemic.

Public health groups criticized Bhattacharya and his co-authors, arguing that the proposal would threaten vulnerable individuals, according to reporting a the time. Then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, also denounced the approach in an October 2020 interview with The Washington Post: "This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."

"What I worry about with this is it's being presented as if it’s a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true," he said.

Now, four years later, Bhattacharya has been tapped to fill Collins' former seat.

Bhattacharya has also expressed an interest in shaking up NIH itself. "I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn't have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time," Bhattacharya said in a January 2024 interview with the Post.