Jay Bhattacharya: Trump’s research czar

 CREDIT: X/@DRJBHATTACHARYA

On November 26, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced that physician and economist Jayanta ‘Jay’ Bhattacharya will be the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s chief agency for medical research.

This pick makes Dr. Bhattacharya the second Indian-American selected by Mr. Trump for a key post, after Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been tapped to lead the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency, along with billionaire Elon Musk. The NIH, with a $48 billion budget, is one of the foremost agencies for biomedical research, with 27 centres dealing with a spectrum of subjects, including cancer research and diabetes.

The NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, will be headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “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, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Mr. Trump said in a statement posted on social media post.

Mr. Trump’s health picks are unconventional, with both appointees having expressed opinions on health policy and medicine which are out of the mainstream realm.

The Kolkata-born Bhattacharya migrated to the U.S. as a child. He earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford, and later completed a medical degree and a doctorate from the same institution. His Stanford association continues; he is a tenured professor in health policy and a professor of economics by courtesy. He is also the Director for the Centre of the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, and a Senior Fellow for both the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (by courtesy). His Stanford profile notes that he is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.

Dr. Bhattacharya is not a practising physician and counts public health policy, specifically centred on infectious diseases and COVID, as well as health economics as his domains of expertise. He came into the public spotlight during the Covid pandemic years for his forceful advocacy against lockdowns, his belief that civil servants had too much power over federal policy during that time, and his criticism of Joe Biden’s handling of the pandemic. Soon after the World Health Organisation declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya questioned the severity of the virus and said quarantines were not worth their economic, community and individual health cost. He also published research asserting that immunity to the virus was greater than believed.

‘Irreparable damage’

Along with Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford professor of theoretical epidemiology, and Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish epidemiologist and former professor at Harvard, Dr. Bhattacharya authored the 2020 ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, a public health manifesto, which emerged from a meeting organised by free-market policy think tank American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The authors mooted an approach called “Focused Protection”, whereby they suggested that COVID be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural herd immunity. Prevention efforts were to be focused on the elderly and at-risk populations.

The authors said they had “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” saying continued lockdowns “until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage.” The Declaration was signed by 43 other professionals in the health sciences and medicine.

The Great Barrington Declaration was widely denounced by public health experts. Dr. Frances Collins, then director of the NIH, called its authors “fringe epidemiologists,” while Dr. Anthony Fauci termed it “total nonsense.” Eighty experts published a counter-manifesto to the Declaration called the John Snow Memorandum, arguing that the approach laid out by the declaration would endanger citizens with underlying conditions and cause more deaths. About 1.2 million people eventually died in the U.S during the pandemic.

Dr. Bhattacharya was also a witness in court cases which sought to challenge government policies around containment of COVID-19. He, along with other plaintiffs, sued the government over “COVID censorship,” referring to efforts made to curb COVID misinformation on social media by the government in collaboration with social media companies. They asserted that this was a violation of the right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution. Dr. Bhattacharya also argued against school mask mandates in Florida and Tennessee, where judges deemed him unqualified to make medical pronouncements on the matter.

Dr. Bhattacharya recently hosted a forum in Stanford about pandemic policy, aiming to bring those with differing view-points together to “talk to each other in a civil way.” But the forum came under fire as providing a platform to discredited figures with unscientific approaches.

His appointment heralds a new chapter in American public health. Reacting to his nomination, Dr. Bhattacharya wrote on X: “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!”