by Kiera Butler
November 26, 2024
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... irector/(Mother Jones) On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, a government agency composed of more than 18,000 employees with an annual budget of $47 billion. Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford University, has no leadership experience in either government or large organizations, but, like some other Trump nominees, he is outspoken about what he sees as the tyranny of public health restrictions and censorship on social media platforms. Bhattacharya came into prominence as a strong critic of Covid vaccine mandates, though he has said publicly that he supports some routine childhood vaccinations, including those that prevent polio and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).
Bhattacharya, who didn’t respond to a list of questions emailed by Mother Jones, has held several appointments at Stanford, including at the university’s libertarian-leaning Hoover Institution. But it was during the pandemic that he emerged as a high-profile public health iconoclast, criticizing lockdowns, and then mask and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 document—developed at a meeting of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank—that recommended that the United States achieve Covid herd immunity by employing a strategy of mass infection. Bhattacharya and his co-authors—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta—suggested sequestering vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, while permitting other citizens to go about business as usual.
At a conference hosted by the anti-lockdown group the Brownstone Institute in November 2021, nearly a year after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.” He has repeatedly criticized the agency he is now poised to lead, suggesting that it punishes scientists who buck consensus by denying them funding.
Bhattacharya’s critique of pandemic protocols caught on in right-wing circles, and he became a regular at conservative gatherings.
