Will Scientific Data Guide Jay Bhattacharya As U.S. Healthcare Official

Donald Trump nominates Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of the COVID-19 lockdown, to lead the U.S. National Institutes of Health

(Photo: courtesy Hoover Institure.)

November 30, 2024

Last week, while meeting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jay Bhattacharya “impressed Kennedy with his ideas to overhaul NIH,” according to The Washington Post. “Bhattacharya has called for shifting the agency’s focus toward funding more innovative research and reducing the influence of some of its longest-serving career officials, among other ideas.” Earlier this month, U.S. President elect Donald Trump choose Kennedy as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This week, Trump nominated Bhattacharya as the next head of the NIH. “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 posted on Truth Social.

If confirmed by the Senate, early next year Bhattacharya will head an agency, with a roughly $50 billion budget. The NIH oversees clinical trials and other efforts to develop vaccines and other drugs, to tackle public health issues; it also provides medical research grants.

Bhattacharya. 56 years old, is a professor at the departments of medicine and economics at Stanford University.

In March 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal stating that forecasts that COVID-19 would kill two million Americans were “deeply flawed”, adding that “a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem…” The pandemic killed more than 1.2 million Americans.

Later that year, Bhattacharya was one of three lead authors of a public note seeking relaxation of the pandemic restrictions. Known as The Great Barrington Declaration, the signatories called for “Focused Protection…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.” How exactly to carry out such a separation of those with minimal risk and those with highest risk was not explained.

Last month, Bhattacharya hosted a forum at Stanford which a colleague Pantea Javidan described as “a platform for discredited figures who continually promote dangerous, scientifically unsupported or thoroughly debunked approaches to Covid,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. Javidan is on the faculty at Stanford’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

Since 2001, Jayanta (Jay) Bhattacharya has been teaching medicine and economics at Stanford. Earlier, he was also teaching at the department of health research and policy, 2001 to 2020.

From 1998 to 2001, he was an economist at the RAND corporation and a visiting assistant professor in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Bhattacharya, who does not practice medicine, earned an M.D., from the School of Medicine, 1997, Ph.D. in Economics, 2000, and A.M., A.B., 1990, all from Stanford University. He was born in Kolkata, India.

Kennedy will be Bhattacharya’s boss if both their nominations are confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Kennedy says he intends to improve nutrition, including of food served to children in schools, by restricting ultra-processing, including use of unhealthy, excessive salt, sugar and other additives, as well as curbing the promotion of junk foods. But Kennedy may not achieve much since he “is taking a direct shot at Big Food, one of the country’s most powerful industries whose traditional allies are Republicans,” according to the New York Times.

However, Kennedy’s views on vaccines are raising major concern, including about Bhattacharya’s potential role at NIH. “While Kennedy has denied on several occasions that he is anti-vaccination…he has repeatedly stated widely debunked claims about vaccine harm,” according to the BBC. One of his main false claims - repeated in a 2023 interview with Fox News, was that “autism comes from vaccines.”

David Elliman, a consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, told BBC, "Vaccination has probably saved more lives and is better researched than most, if not all, aspects of healthcare. RFK Jr could set this back and be responsible for the death and disability of myriads of people, particularly children.”

From 2017-2019, during Trump’s first term as President, Scott Gottlieb served as the head of the Food & Drug Administration, which is under the Department of Health. This week, Gottlieb told CNBC that Trump acknowledges the importance of vaccinations. But Gottlieb fears a sharp resurgence of measles and other infectious diseases in the U.S. in a few years, if most of the senior health care officials, nominated by Trump, take office He told CNBC, “We face a grim and avoidable resurgence of once vanquished childhood infectious diseases.”