President-elect Donald Trump picked Stanford professor and outspoken US Covid-19 policy critic Jay Bhattacharya as the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Tuesday. NHI is one of the U.S.’s leading public agencies for funding medical research, with a budget of around $47.3 billion.

The announcement came at a time when the NIH has faced much criticism from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump has nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for overseeing the NIH. The head of the NIH is responsible for supervising 27 institutes and centres that focus on early-stage research, ranging from developing vaccines for emerging pandemic threats to identifying new drug targets.

A few days before he was nominated HHS secretary, RFK Jr. said he would quickly fire 600 people at the NIH and hire replacements. The agency has nearly 20,000 employees.Kennedy also said that he plans to shift the NIH’s focus from infectious diseases like COVID-19 to finding cures for chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Bhattacharya, a health policy professor and doctor at Stanford strongly criticized the US government's Covid-19 policies during the pandemic. In October 2020, he, along with two other scholars, released the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for resuming normal life for those not at high risk of the virus.
He later took legal action against the government, claiming that it pressured social media platforms to censor his views.

About Jay Bhattacharya

 According to Battacharaya’s resume, he graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and earned his doctorate from Stanford's Department of Economics in 2000. His research majorly focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular interest in the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.

Recently, his focus was on studying Covid-19 and assessing the policies taken during the pandemic. Dr Bhattacharya was also a prominent critic of the federal government's approach to Covid-19, co-writing the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020. 

This open letter called for removing coronavirus-related lockdowns while maintaining "focused protections" for vulnerable groups, such as older Americans. Throughout his career, he has published 135 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals across various fields, including medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health.