Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya is Trump’s Pick for NIH
President-elect Trump has picked Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The announcement came on Tuesday by the transition team.
During the pandemic, Bhattacharya expressed criticisms of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates. “Bhattacharya became the face…of a fiercely disputed open letter - known as the Great Barrington Declaration - that opposed widespread lockdowns,” BBC reported earlier.
Rachel Cohrs Zhang reported for STAT that if confirmed by the Senate, Bhattacharya would be in charge of implementing the incoming Trump administration’s goals to reform the agency. “The National Institutes of Health is a nearly $48 billion agency that invests much of its resources in funding tens of thousands of research grants. But some of Bhattacharya’s own medical research has stirred controversy in the medical community.”
Zhang added that Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has suggested replacing hundreds of NIH employees.
“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 said in a statement.
Bhattacharya posted on X the following statement: "We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!"
