President-elect Trump has selected Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, his transition announced Tuesday.
If confirmed by the Senate, Bhattacharya would be responsible for carrying out the new Trump administration’s bold goals to reform the agency. Support for the NIH was a rare point of agreement for Democrats and Republicans before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the agency received budget increases year after year. But a more combative era is dawning.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick as secretary of Health and Human Services, has suggested that’s what he wants replacing hundreds of NIH employees the day Trump takes office. RFK Jr. has also said he wants to change the agency’s attention from infectious diseases to chronic diseases.
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. restoring the NIH to a gold standard for medical research as they investigate the root causes and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including our crisis of chronic diseases and conditions,” Trump said in a speech. statement announcing his selection.
The NIH has 27 institutes and centersincluding those focused on cancer, aging and chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart, lung and kidney disease, arthritis, mental illness and alcoholism and drug addiction. Only one of the institutes focuses on infectious diseases.
NIH director is the last major health position to be filled in the second Trump administration. Trump chose Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Martin Makary as head of the Food and Drug Administration, David Weldon as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Janette Nesheiwat as Surgeon General. On Tuesday, Trump also selected Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary at HHS.
Bhattacharya has spent almost his entire career at Stanford University. He is currently listed as a professor of health policy. He earned four degrees, including a medical degree and a Ph.D. in economics, also from Stanford.
The National Institutes of Health is a nearly $48 billion agency that invests much of its resources in funding tens of thousands of research grants. But some of Bhattacharya’s own medical research has sparked controversy in the medical community.
In April 2020, Bhattacharya published a preprint of a study he authored on the seroprevalence of Covid-19 to measure how many people were infected with the virus. The study found that many people infected with Covid-19 could not remember symptoms and that death rates were lower than initially expected. The study sparked controversy within the scientific community.
Bhattacharya rose to further prominence after co-authoring an open letter, the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed broad lockdowns and advanced the theory that the US could achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 even before a vaccine was available.
In addition to his work on Covid-19, Bhattacharya has filed a patent for a flexible calculator and has published research on health economics, including the cost of HIV care, insurance markets and how technology could impact health care costs.
According to his curriculum vitae, Bhattacharya completed his medical degree in 1997 and then immediately embarked on a career in academia. He was an economist at the RAND Corporation and a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1998 to 2001, when he began teaching at Stanford. He has not completed a residency and is not a practicing physician.
Bhattacharya joined a lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal government was censoring users across social media platforms for their views on Covid-19. The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision decided in favor of the platforms, saying that plaintiffs did not prove a causal link between government policy and the platforms’ content moderation policies.
In December 2022, Bhattacharya visited Elon Musk at the company’s headquarters, the platform then called Twitter to discuss why he was blacklisted for his posts on Covid-19 lockdowns. Trump appointed Musk head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Following a Washington Post report that he was being considered for the NIH directorship, Bhattacharya reported on the social platform X: “Whatever happens, I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of America’s scientific and public health institutions after the Covid-era fiasco, so that they work for the benefit of the American people.”
Republican lawmakers have called for that agency reformsincluding Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who will chair the Senate Health Committee next year. They have also criticized the agency’s investments in so-called “gain-of-function” research.
“I’m interested in how Dr. Bhattacharya used his background as a health economist to guide the NIH,” Cassidy said in a post on X. “I look forward to our meeting.”