Trump picks Stanford critic of Covid-19 era lockdowns to head NIH
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Dr Jay Bhattacharya said he aims to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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WASHINGTON – US President-elect Donald Trump
Dr Bhattacharya, a health economist and doctor at Stanford University, is best known as a key author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 manifesto that proposed an alternative to Covid-19 lockdowns focused on protecting the elderly and those at high risk while opening up the rest of society to return to normal.
Trump said Dr Bhattacharya and health secretary pick Robert F. Kennedy 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”, in a post on his Truth Social network.
The concept of a return to a mostly normal life was controversial at the time Dr Bhattacharya and his colleagues proposed it.
Keeping shutdowns in place until a vaccine was available “will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed”, the declaration said.
Their ideas were vigorously attacked by the public health establishment, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Anthony Fauci, who called the declaration’s concepts “very dangerous”.
But since then, the downsides of long pandemic-related interruptions have become more apparent, including in mental health and children falling behind as schools leaned on remote learning.
Dr Bhattacharya said in a post on social media platform X that he was honoured and humbled by the appointment.
He said he aims to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.
Among the ideas that have been proposed for reforming the NIH is instituting term limits for directors of individual NIH institutes, so that no one director overseeing huge amounts of medical funding becomes too powerful. BLOOMBERG
