Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Unpacking Trump's NIH Nominee

The economist is known to have recently come under significant focus in a lot of public health discussions as a result of a paper that opposed the implementation of lock down measures in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

US President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday said that he will appoint Indiana University’s George Benjamin as the new Surgeon General of the United States and Stanford’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The economist was once in the middle of a tense public health controversy because of his opposition to lockdown measures amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

“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,” Trump posted on social media.

The New York Times said that if confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Bhattacharya, a cardiologist, would become leader of the world’s top medical research agency that has a $48 billion budget and 27 different institutes and centres, each having its own research priorities, diseases and specialised focus such as cancer and diabetes.

According to the report, Dr.Bhattacharya has asked for revamping NIH and reduction of power or the civil servants. He says that these civil servants interfered too much in the formation of federal policies during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 Treatise

In the process of COVID-19, Dr. Bhattacharya is one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration which was released in 2020 with the main thesis being that the virus should be allowed to pass through young healthy people who are virtually powerless in the face of death.

In the rather contentious document, the authors stated that it could therefore help in the emergence of natural immunities, at the same time as prevention measures were aimed at those usually considered most at risk of complications – elderly and those with weakening immune systems. Also, Dr. Bhattacharya his perspectives to Alex M. Azar II, who was Trump’s secretary of health. However, many different people in the field of public health criticized him for his statements. Dr. Bhattacharya and his other co-authors were dismissed as cranks whose “extreme” policies would burden the rest of society with millions of avoidable deaths.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was also became a go to witness in court cases regarding federal and state covid policies. He also became a party to a group that sought to challenge the Biden administration on something that he described as “Covid censorship.” He had pointed that the administration infringes on the First Amendment in engaging with social media firms to curb misinformation on Covid.

The Stanford physician also raised eyebrows when he protested against the mask requirements for school going children in Florida and Tennessee. More judges in both states dismissed him as an unfit person to make medical diagnoses in the matter.

For instance in March 20, 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he opined that the pandemic was not as fatal as the world made it to be and dramatic actions to combat it would only help to increase deaths to 40,000 Americans tops, New York Times has reported, while about 1.2 million died.

Social media restriction

For his sentiments that were considered reprehensible, Bhattacharya was also banned from social media. He was an activist that was an accuser in a significant United States Supreme Court case that charged that federal officials had been rowing out conservative opinions on social networks to combat ‘fake news.’ The Joe Biden administration has won a case in the Supreme Court.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Bhattacharya was invited to the headquarters to look at how his freedom of speech has been restricted on the platform. Says, Bhattacharya more recently, has employed X to explain that a number of scientists using the platform has migrated to the alt site Bluesky, which he derisively calls as their own ‘echo chamber’.

Brief Information about Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya, the eminent economist was born in 1968 in Kolkata.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is Stanford medical school graduate who was awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1997. He also completed a Ph.D in economics at the same university three years later.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy, Medical School and a research associate at National Bureau of Economics Research. He leads another research center at Stanford University, the Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

His research includes exploring illness, health and quality of life, specializing in government programmes, biomedical development and economics of vulnerable groups.

He has contributed to the writing and publication of 135 articles that have appeared in popular peer refereed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistical methods, law and Public Health, among others.

Last month, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya recently organized a formal forum on pandemic policy at Stanford University, emphasizing the importance of civil discourse among individuals with differing viewpoints. However, the constructive nature of the discussion faced criticism, which Stanford’s president, Jonathan Levin, described as deflating. held a forum on pandemic policy at Stanford and he said that he envisioned getting together people with different opinions who will “discuss it civilly.” the very discussion became the subject of criticism — something that Stanford’s president, Jonathan Levin, referred to as “deflating”.