President-elect Donald Trump has selected Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford-trained physician and economist who criticised coronavirus lockdowns, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nearly $50bn agency that oversees the nation’s biomedical research.
Bhattacharya will work with Robert F Kennedy Jr “to direct the nation’s medical research, and to make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives”, Trump said in a statement last week.
Trump also announced Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, as his selection to be Health & Human Services deputy secretary. That role would position O’Neill to help run day-to-day operations and shape policy at the nearly $2 trillion agency.
Bhattacharya’s and O’Neill’s roles are subject to Senate confirmation, reports The Washington Post.
Bhattacharya was a prominent critic of the federal government’s coronavirus response and was among several academics who held a meeting with Trump in August 2020, telling the then-President that the coronavirus pandemic was not as severe as public health officials had warned.
Trump had initially imposed lockdowns at the urging of his public health advisers, including Anthony Fauci, but came to regret the decision.
Bhattacharya attracted national attention for co-writing an October 2020 open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that called for rolling back Covid-19-related shutdowns while keeping “focused protections” for vulnerable populations.
The proposal won support from Republican politicians and some Americans eager to resume daily life but was rebuked by public health experts, including Francis Collins, then NIH director, as premature and dangerous whiles the coronavirus continued to spread and vaccines were not yet available.
“There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Collins wrote to NIH colleagues in an email later made public under the Freedom of Information Act, referring to Bhattacharya and his co-authors from Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford as “fringe epidemiologists.”
Dozens of public health groups also criticised the Great Barrington Declaration’s focus on “herd immunity”. Infectious-disease experts said that goal would be difficult to quickly achieve, given that vaccines were still months from being widely available and would lead to unnecessary illnesses and death.
“I don’t really understand how we could simultaneously protect the vulnerable in our current society and somehow get to herd immunity through a pathway of infection,” said Rochelle Walensky, then chief of infectious disease at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I think that pathway is just going to lead to a lot of death.” (Walensky would soon be tapped by incoming President Joe Biden as his director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.)
The backlash from the public health establishment, the federal government and some social media companies inadvertently helped boost Bhattacharya’s profile and attract fans who hailed him as a rare truth-teller.
Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centres that constitute NIH, saying some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent.
He and other critics have singled out Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centres for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022.
Collins, Fauci and other current and former NIH officials have defended their pandemic decisions and the agency’s broader response, saying federal leaders generally did the best they could to combat a new virus, and that much of the criticism is second-guessing.
Trump has also announced a flurry of other top healthcare appointments, including Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary as his planned FDA commissioner, former GOP congressman Dave Weldon as his planned CDC director and Janette Nesheiwat, a family and emergency medicine physician whom he tapped as the next US Surgeon-General. Those positions are also subject to Senate confirmation.
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