The Trump-Vance transition team announced that Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, author of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” is his pick to lead the National Institutes of Health. This is a terrific choice; Dr. Bhattacharya is highly respected and was right about the negative effects of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic when so many others were wrong. He didn’t back down despite numerous attempts to silence him.
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Trump was effusive in his praise:
I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health. 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.
🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼 @DrJBhattacharya pic.twitter.com/4HUzhedSAk
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) November 27, 2024
Bhattacharya’s long resume would take me half an hour just to type up, but lucky for me, the Trump-Vance team did it already in their official announcement:
Jay is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, and a Senior Fellow by courtesy at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and the Hoover Institution. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His Research focuses on the Health and Well-Being of vulnerable populations, emphasizing the role of Government programs, Biomedical Innovation, and Economics. Jay is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an alternative to lockdowns proposed in October 2020. His peer-reviewed research has been published in Economics, Statistics, Legal, Medical, Public Health, and Health Policy Journals. He holds an MD and PhD in Economics from Stanford University.
Bhattacharya expressed his gratitude at being nominated:
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I am honored and humbled by President @realDonaldTrump‘s nomination of me to be the next @NIH director. 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! https://t.co/FrLmYznhfw
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) November 27, 2024
Some of us at RedState have long been fans:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Blasts Stanford University’s Shameful Attempts to Silence Him on COVID
‘Rational Ground’: Inside the World of People Fighting COVID Insanity
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Advocates Against CA ‘Medical Misinformation’ Bill: It ‘Stifles’ Dissent
In October of 2022, I attended a “Rational Ground” (a group of like-minded folks who questioned some of the government’s responses to the pandemic) conference where I had a chance to meet Bhattacharya and hear him speak. I wrote at the time:
Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford and co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard in the early days of the pandemic. Released in October 2020, the document stated: “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 and recommend an approach he called “Focused Protection.” It was one of the earliest and most important criticisms of the pandemic response.
Bhattacharya asked a simple question: “how did a small group of people hijack the world?” He called the federal government’s response to COVID “the single biggest health disaster in peacetime history.” He also explained why so few doctors were willing to speak up, and the answer is simple: if you cross Fauci, you are risking your career.
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One thing I noticed about the professor—he was funny as hell:
The unexpected thing about Bhattacharya is how funny he is. Even when describing how his colleagues attacked him mercilessly, the smile never left his face.
He will make an excellent addition to the Trump team.
I’m so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine. pic.twitter.com/NakHavsblX
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 27, 2024
