The Stanford professor of health policy was a leading critic of government-imposed lockdowns and restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, is a top contender to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the next Trump administration, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Bhattacharya was a key figure who spoke out against the lockdowns and mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The consideration, first reported by The Washington Post, comes after President-elect Donald Trump named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH.
If Bhattacharya is ultimately nominated and confirmed to lead the agency, he would be responsible for 27 institutes and centers on issues ranging from cancer and aging to drug abuse. Those include the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was formerly chaired by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The agency’s $48 billion budget funds medical research on cancers, vaccines, and other diseases through competitive grants to researchers at institutions across the nation. The agency also conducts its own research with thousands of scientists working at NIH labs in Bethesda, Maryland.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya was a lead author of the Great Barrington Declaration alongside Harvard University’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta. That document, which garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, called for an end to the COVID-19 lockdowns, which had been in effect for most of 2020.
“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” the letter reads.
In the letter, Bhattacharya and his co-authors described the COVID-19 vaccines as merely one aspect of public health policy, which they said should also focus on immunity through natural infection because of the low risks the disease posed to the young and healthy.
Bhattacharya and his co-authors were opposed to both lockdowns and mask mandates.
In emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, former NIH Director Francis Collins—who left the post in December 2021 but continued to work as a science adviser to President Joe Biden—expressed concern that the declaration was “getting a lot of attention.”
“There needs to be a quick and devastating public takedown of its premises,” the October 2020 email from Collins to Fauci reads.
Bhattacharya said during an April 2022 appearance on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” that COVID-19 policy was “the biggest public health mistake in history,” citing both the direct harms it caused to the economy and the indirect harms it caused to children.
Research by the University of California–Riverside released in March 2023 found that lockdowns alone contributed to a more than 5 percent dip in U.S. gross domestic product and caused a 7.5 percent dip in consumer spending.
NIH research into the effect of COVID-19 policies on children has also found that these policies caused children to miss important opportunities for crucial early socialization in the first five years of life. Since then, the NIH has found a marked increase in developmental delays, learning disabilities, and behavioral disorders in children.
Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times that these and other costs were ignored. He blamed senior health officials for this, who he said imposed a narrative of medical unanimity on how to respond to COVID-19 that didn’t truly exist.
If Bhattacharya is chosen and confirmed, he would be subordinate to Kennedy if the latter is also confirmed. Trump’s HHS secretary pick has said that he would fire about 600 NIH employees on his first day.
“We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on Jan. 20, so that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave,” Kennedy said on Nov. 9 at the Genius Network Annual Event in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Kennedy told The Epoch Times in September that he would order the NIH to focus on the sharp increase in autism, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopment disorders in recent decades.
The Associated Press and Jeff Louderback contributed to this report.