Senators may still have some real substantive concerns about President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services, but his decision to tap Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health is the right choice.
A Stanford University professor of economic and health policy, Bhattacharya rose to national prominence when he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published in October 2020 that questioned the lockdown policies promoted by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins.
While thousands of scientists ended up signing the declaration, or maybe because he inspired so many scientists to speak up, Bhattacharya was attacked personally by Fauci and Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist” whose supposedly misguided thoughts threatened to kill millions of people in the United States. Fauci and Collins then coordinated to silence Bhattacharya, whose social media posts were censored by Big Tech companies.
Collins has since admitted that he and the NIH underestimated the harms caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns, a complete vindication for Bhattacharya and his fellow Great Barrington Declaration authors.
Bhattacharya’s qualifications for managing NIH’s $48 billion budget and 27 separate research facilities go far beyond the declaration. He holds an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford and has published peer-reviewed papers on the NIH, including how the agency could better allocate resources to deliver more medical breakthroughs for taxpayers, a welcome focus.
Bhattacharya has also been a leader in raising awareness about the costs of obesity to both the obese and taxpayers who are forced to shoulder higher healthcare spending to treat the increased rates of disease experienced by obese patients. If Kennedy is confirmed along with Bhattacharya, expect an all-out campaign to reform government programs that enable high obesity rates.
In his statement announcing his nomination, Trump promised Bhattacharya would “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, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease.”
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That he certainly will.
For all the risks posed by a populist president appointing outsiders to shake up the Washington establishment, Bhattacharya is exactly the type of well-intentioned and well-trained personnel that can bring real beneficial reform to an agency that just recently terribly failed the American people.