Who is Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s anti-lockdown pick to head the NIH?
Al Jazeera
Bhattacharya would lead the National Institutes of Health, the primary agency in the US for public health research.
US President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary agency in the United States responsible for public health research.
Bhattacharya is known for his criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the COVID pandemic after it took power in January 2021.
Bhattacharya is a physician, a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research at Stanford.
According to his resume, Bhattacharya completed his medical degree from Stanford in 1997 and received his doctorate in the economics of healthcare in 2000 from the Stanford University Department of Economics.
In 2020 when the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Bhattacharya advocated against complete lockdowns, arguing that they have detrimental impacts on physical and mental health. He co-authored an open letter, the Great Barrington Declaration, detailing this. While his take on lockdowns drew criticism back then and continues to be criticised now, some of his critics are reassessing their views.
