News Brief
Indian-Origin Covid Lockdown Critic Jay Bhattacharya To Lead NIH In Second Trump Administration—All About Him
Jay Bhattacharya (Pic Via Stanford Website)
US President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Jay Bhattacharya, an Indian-origin Stanford-trained physician and economist, as his pick for heading the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"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," Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
Responding to his appointment as NIH director, Bhattacharya said, "I am honored and humbled by President Donald Trump'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!".
Earlier this week, Bhattacharya met with Robert F Kennedy Junior, who was nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH and other health agencies.
He reportedly impressed Kennedy with his ideas to overhaul the NIH, which oversees US biomedical research, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The NIH also awards funding grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers, oversees clinical trials and supports a variety of efforts to develop drugs and therapeutics.
The nominee for the NIH director must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority beginning in January.
Bhattacharya was a vocal critic of the federal government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages.
This proposal resonated with Republican lawmakers and many Americans opposed to prolonged shutdowns who sought a return to normalcy.
However, it faced sharp criticism from public health officials, including then-NIH Director Francis S Collins, who warned that the strategy was premature and dangerous, particularly as vaccines had not yet been developed.
In addition, Bhattacharya has argued for reducing the influence of certain institutes and centers within the NIH, claiming that some career civil servants unduly shaped national pandemic policies while stifling dissenting viewpoints.
He and other critics have also targeted Anthony Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, accusing him of playing an outsized role in shaping the country’s COVID-19 response under both the Trump and Biden administrations before his retirement in December 2022.
Born in Kolkata in 1968, Bhattacharya earned a doctorate in medicine from Stanford in 1997 and earned a PhD in economics from the same university three years later.
Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Ageing.
