President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Jay Bhattacharya will serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health during his second term in the White House.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor and staunch critic of pandemic-era lockdowns, will be tasked with leading the federal government’s medical research efforts and will work “in cooperation” with incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president-elect said.
“Jay is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an alternative to lockdowns proposed in October 2020,” Trump noted in his announcement, referring to an open letter that called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink extreme measures in response to COVID-19.
Twitter secretly placed Bhattacharya on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending, over his views on the pandemic, the 2022 “Twitter Files” expose revealed.
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges,” the 45th president added.
Bhattacharya, who holds both a medical degree and doctorate in economics from Stanford University, said he was “honored and humbled” by Trump’s 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 wrote on X.
Bhattacharya must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority starting in January.
The NIH employs roughly 20,000 people at 27 institutions and centers focused on specific disease and research areas, such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – formerly headed by Anthony Fauci – and the National Cancer Institute.
The NIH also awards about $31 billion in funding grants annually for research into a variety of conditions.
The agency has been under fire from Republican lawmakers over its funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci and former NIH director Francis Collins have long denied any knowledge that scientists funded by US taxpayers were modifying viruses to make them more infectious at the Wuhan lab where COVID-19 is believed to have originated from.
