President-elect Donald Trump said he plans to appoint Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor known for his criticism of Covid lockdowns, as the next director of the National Institutes of Health.
In a statement Tuesday, Trump said: “Dr. Bhattacharya will work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the nation’s medical research and make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives.”
Kennedy, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is an outspoken vaccine skeptic who has spread controversial and debunked ideas about health, including that HIV was not the only cause of AIDS and that the coronavirus targeted certain racial groups directed.
He has claimed for years that vaccines can cause autism, a position based on decades-old research that has been discredited and retracted. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD [autism spectrum disorder].”
In a post on X after Trump’s statement, Bhattacharya wrote that he was “honored and humbled” to be nominated.
“We will reform America’s scientific institutions to make them worthy of trust again, and we will use the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!” he added.
In addition, Trump also said Tuesday that he planned to nominate Jim O’Neill to be deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under Kennedy. O’Neill, a critic of the Food and Drug Administration, served in several HHS positions during the Bush administration.
Bhattacharya gained national attention in October 2020, when he co-wrote the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter calling on public health officials to roll back Covid lockdowns.
He and his co-authors, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, argued that the lockdowns had “devastating short- and long-term public health consequences” and called for an approach that would “ensure those at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally and build immunity against the virus through natural infections, while better protecting those most at risk.”
The proposal, released before vaccines became available, advocated a concept called “herd immunity,” which refers to a level at which a large enough share of the population has been exposed to an infectious disease that is unlikely to continue spreading .
Many experts spoke against the concept at the time. Just days after the Great Barrington Declaration came out, 80 researchers in public health, epidemiology and more published a joint letter in the medical journal The Lancet, calling the idea “a dangerous misconception.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, called the proposal unethical.
“Letting a dangerous virus that we do not fully understand run wild is simply unethical,” Ghebreyesus said at the time, adding: “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy to respond to an outbreak. “
During the pandemic, Bhattacharya was also publicly critical of the way NIH leaders and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022, handled the U.S. response.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
