Donald Trump, the president-elect, announced his plan to choose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor who has been vocal in his opposition to Covid lockdowns, as the next head of the National Institutes of Health.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Trump stated, “Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health and save lives.”
As a strong opponent of vaccines, Kennedy, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has disseminated questionable and disproven health theories, such as the notion that the coronavirus specifically targeted racial groups and that HIV was not the only cause of AIDS.
His long-standing assertion that vaccinations can cause autism is supported by debunked and retracted data from decades ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that “studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD [autism spectrum disorder].”
Following Trump’s remarks, Bhattacharya posted on X that he was “honored and humbled” to get the nomination.
“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!” he stated.
On Tuesday, Trump also announced his intention to choose Jim O’Neill as Kennedy’s deputy secretary of health and human services. During the Bush administration, O’Neill, a critic of the Food and Drug Administration, served in a number of HHS positions.
When Bhattacharya co-wrote the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter urging public health officials to lift Covid lockdowns, in October 2020, it garnered national notice.
He claimed that the lockdowns were “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” and urged a solution that would “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” He co-authored the paper with Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff.
The plan, which was made public prior to the development of vaccinations, promoted the idea of “herd immunity,” which is the state in which a significant enough portion of a population has been exposed to an infectious illness that it is unlikely to continue spreading.
At the time, a number of specialists opposed the idea. In a joint letter published in the medical journal The Lancet a few days after the Great Barrington Declaration was released, 80 scholars from a variety of disciplines, including epidemiology and public health, referred to the concept as “a dangerous fallacy.”
The World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, referred to the plan as immoral.
At the time, Ghebreyesus stated, “Herd immunity has never been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak in the history of public health. It is simply unethical to allow a dangerous virus that we do not fully understand to run free.”
Additionally, Bhattacharya openly criticized the way the U.S. response was handled by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who chaired the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022, and the NIH’s directors throughout the epidemic.
