Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s NIH Pick

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a loud voice from the fringes.

This piece has been edited from its original email version. Last update 11/27/24.

Donald Trump has named Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist known for his pro-infection advocacy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as his pick for director of the National Institutes of Health. The announcement, which came on Tuesday, was no surprise. On Saturday, November 16, The Washington Post reported that the controversial professor was a top contender for the position. If confirmed, Bhattacharya will oversee the largest funder of biomedical and behavioral research on the planet.

As the new Trump administration takes shape, each appointment has been more fraught than the last. The president-elect wanted Matt Gaetz, who had previously been caught up in a Department of Justice sex trafficking investigation, for Attorney General. Under scrutiny, Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration. Trump chose anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, who has mused that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was genetically engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews, suggested that chemicals in water are turning children gay or transgender, and falsely claimed vaccines cause autism, is an ally of Bhattacharya. So too is Dr. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, himself a critic of COVID mitigation efforts.

Bhattacharya is possibly the most extreme of the lot. While, as The Post noted, the professor has never held a position managing any position overseeing a large bureaucratic organization like the NIH with its $47 billion budget, he has been a central figure in an organized, well-funded campaign by the political right to undermine public health in America that has been raging since the onset of the COVID pandemic. Bhattacharya has spent years leveraging his credentials to argue in favor of the position of GOP politicians and business-aligned right-wing dark money groups that the government response to the crisis was worse than the virus itself.

The professor is one of the architects of a discredited herd immunity strategy reliant on so-called “natural immunity,” meaning infection-acquired. He has long claimed that the danger the virus poses to non-senior citizens is minimal despite COVID having been a top killer among young people. He has cast doubt on the safety and necessity of vaccinating that demographic and opposed government efforts to control the worst public health crisis in a century. The professor even spread conspiracy theories about the very agency he is on the verge of leading, alleging that a small number of top bureaucrats have been using funding to stifle dissenting views like his.

Should he assume the role, Bhattacharya would be in a position to inject unscientific right-wing ideology into the very heart of the agency responsible for leading the fight against infectious diseases.

Infection Advocate

Bhattacharya first taste of the national spotlight came in the spring of 2020. In March that year, he co-authored a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing against lockdowns and making the case that COVID was less dangerous than public health authorities were predicting.

“If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified,” it read. “But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”

That article, which suggested the pandemic might only amount to an epidemic that kills 20,000 to 40,000 Americans, preceded the release of pre-print study Bhattacharya co-authored purporting to show that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was far more infectious—and less deadly—than the global scientific community was warning. The study’s flaws, from methodological issues to undisclosed funding from the founder of JetBlue, a vocal critic of COVID lockdowns, were quickly revealed. Nevertheless, the paper was hugely influential on the political right and its findings not only impacted policy in the U.S. but abroad as well in countries like the UK.

Several months later, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely rebuked, discredited document calling on governments and scientists to reject large-scale COVID mitigation policies in favor of “focused protection” for the elderly. The idea was that by allowing widespread infection of the rest of the population, herd immunity could be achieved quickly and with minimal disruption to the economy. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the plan “unethical” and 14 major public health organizations published an open letter denouncing it.

The document itself was written and signed at a conference hosted by a libertarian think tank called the American Institute for Economic Research, a month ahead of the 2020 election. The group’s editorial director Jeffrey Tucker, a child labor and tobacco use enthusiast and opponent of anti-discrimination laws, was a key organizer. The document added a scientific veneer to the public health approach preferred by the Trump administration and right-wing groups like The Heritage Foundation, which saw lockdowns as a greater threat than the virus itself. Planning for the event had taken place over the summer and involved the Trump administration directly through health policy adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, who, like Bhattacharya, was affiliated with the Hoover Institution. Atlas helped secure passage to the U.S. for UK-based declaration co-author Dr. Sunetra Gupta under the pretext of a meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

While the declaration did little to help Trump’s 2020 prospects, it did propel Bhattacharya to right-wing stardom. He has used his megaphone to continue to evangelize the benefits of mass infection and the harms of government efforts to curb the spread of a deadly virus. 

Despite the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would ultimately go on to kill more than 1.2 million Americans and leave millions more suffering long COVID, Bhattacharya has never changed his position on lockdowns and other mitigations. His false and misleading statements about government efforts to curb the spread of the virus are too numerous to list here, though Bhattacharya has blamed “lockdowns” for all manner of ills, including possibly even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He has also asserted that masks do not work and harm child development without an expertise on the matter and was an early advocate to reopen schools with no mitigation measures in place. 

Conspiracy Theories

While the Great Barrington Declaration was not itself explicitly anti-vaccine, its central premise—that reopening could safely occur without them—has made Bhattacharya a natural ally of the anti-vax movement. Over time, the professor has moved steadily in their direction. He has repeatedly claimed, for example, that the small risks associated with COVID vaccines outweigh their benefits for young people. In a particularly ill-timed op-ed, he called universal vaccination in India “unethical” on the grounds that a majority of Indians had natural immunity, writing that “for recovered Covid patients…the vaccines provide no benefit and some harm.” Incredibly, several months later, in a piece making the same case for the U.S., he argued that mandating vaccines here would deny doses to countries in need of them, including India. 

In September 2022, Bhattacharya misleadingly claimed that the new bivalent boosters were insufficiently tested and alleged that the CDC and FDA were “flying blind.”

The professor has also spoken at events with anti-vaxxers like millionaire Steve Kirsch, who asserts that the shots are responsible for millions of deaths. In March, Bhattacharya spoke at the vice presidential announcement event for Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign. Bhattacharya recently appeared in the documentary “First Do No Pharm” by anti-vaxxer and Kennedy ally Aseem Malhotra.

Important Context readers will also recall that Bhattacharya was the organizer of a recent health policy symposium at Stanford seemingly aimed at rewriting pandemic history to vindicate fringe positions adopted by the political right. The event was stacked with conspiracy mongers and anti-vaccine voices like Alex Berenson. 

Beyond his promotion of anti-vaccine narratives, Bhattacharya has pushed the unsupported claim that COVID emerged from a lab leak and claimed that Dr. Fauci was involved in a cover-up. The professor recently joined the board of directors of BioSafety Now, a controversial scientist group pushing the lab leak origin story for COVID despite evidence consistently pointing to zoonosis. Makary is on its advisory board. Both professors appear in the new conspiratorial documentary, “Thank You, Dr. Fauci,” seeking “answers” from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. A description of the film on its website reads, “AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARIAN JENNER FURST SEEKS ANSWERS FROM DR. FAUCI ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF COVID-19, A BIO-ARMS RACE WITH CHINA AND WHAT COULD BE THE LARGEST COVERUP IN MODERN HISTORY.”

Bhattacharya has long held that the mainstream rejection of his ideas is not a reflection of their scientific merit, but rather the result of  “censorship” by key public health officials including Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who communicated privately over email about rebutting the Great Barrington Declaration. He has baselessly claimed that academics self-censor to get NIH funding for their research, suggesting that top bureaucrats like Collins used their positions to enforce their personal beliefs.

Political Operative

Bhattacharya’s contrarian views and pro-infection advocacy may have alienated him from the mainstream of public health, but they have earned him powerful allies, including, as The Post noted, billionaires Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who has supported his censorship claims.

Bhattacharya has also been a favorite in the world of right-wing dark money, having written for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank with ties to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, been cited by the Heritage Foundation, and spoken before the secretive, influential Christian Right group Council for National Policy, which connects activists with big money. Conservative legal activist Leonard Leo’s Teneo Network once featured Bhattacharya in a fundraising video.

The professor holds titles at organizations like the Hoover Institution, where he is a senior fellow (courtesy). He occupies various roles at Collateral Global, a UK-based charity focused on opposing lockdowns, including editor-in-chief and scientific adviser. He is a contributing author to the Australia-based Australians for Science and Freedom.

In the past, Bhattacharya was a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute when it was formed in 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker. He was part of the institute’s Norfolk Group, which put together a roadmap for a congressional COVID inquiry that mirrored a similar document produced by Heritage weeks earlier. This month, he was a speaker at Brownstone’s recent annual conference. When the Trump-allied Hillsdale College launched its Academy for Science and Freedom, Bhattacharya was one of the first scholars named. The professor was similarly on the scientific advisory board of the international pandemic denial group PANDA.

Although he has long denied receiving financial benefits for his work, Bhattacharya has been awarded with various honors for his work by dark money groups. In April, for example, he won the $250,000 Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of right-wing groups and causes. Last month, a new group called the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, which is tied to a larger organization working to establish conservative beachheads on college campuses, gave him an intellectual freedom medal. He has even had the opportunity to spread his message around the world, including doing a speaking tour of Australia in fall 2022 to promote his work with Collateral Global.

Republican politicians have unsurprisingly gravitated to Bhattacharya. The professor personally advised Trump in the summer of 2020 and has been a close adviser and ally of Ron DeSantis. Despite his advocacy for “focused protection,” Bhattacharya stood with the Florida governor as he defended a policy of excluding elderly incarcerated from vaccine prioritization, claiming that vaccinating the population would be pointless given that the virus had already spread through the prisons. 

“If someone who is older has already had an infection, I don’t think the vaccine would help them,” Bhattacharya said.

The professor has been an expert witness for Republican lawmakers in Congress as well. When the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held its first hearing in February 2023, he was one of the first expert witnesses called. 

He has also leant his expertise to GOP-led states in cases over their lack of COVID protections, particularly in schools. In those cases, Bhattacharya’s testimony served as a counter to the parents of medically vulnerable children, who argued the lack of safety measures put their kids’ lives at risk. 

Notably, several judges have questioned the reliability of Bhattacharya’s expert testimony. In his decision temporarily blocking Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s executive order allowing parents to opt their children out of school mask mandates, U.S. District Court Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw observed that Bhattacharya “offered opinions regarding the pediatric effects of masks on children, a discipline on which he admitted he was not qualified to speak,” adding that “his demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda.”

“At this stage of the proceedings, the Court is simply unwilling to trust Dr. Bhattacharya,” Crenshaw wrote.

Pursuing Grudges

Fueled by his support on the right, Bhattacharya has built up a massive online audience. He has over 544,000 followers on X alone as of the writing of this writing. Seemingly emboldened by this support, he has fired back at his critics, including scientists and journalists, asserting that they have misrepresented his positions. 

For example, Bhattacharya has denied that the Great Barrington Declaration was a herd immunity strategy even though the words “herd immunity” appear five times in the document, including in the sentence, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”

After Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler published an article documenting his misleading statements about the bivalent boosters, the professor went after her on X, encouraging his supporters by liking tweets suggesting she had ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

With pro bono representation from New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a dark money lawfare group that has received funding from Koch to wage a war on the administrative state, Bhattacharya and several other private plaintiffs joined a lawsuit against key officials and agencies within the Biden administration for allegedly coercing social media companies into suppressing their content. The case, Missouri v. Biden—later renamed Murthy v. Missouri—made its way up to the Supreme Court which held 6-3 that the plaintiffs lacked standing, having failed to prove they had actually been harmed by the government. NCLA is currently trying to revive the lawsuit.

As director of NIH, Bhattacharya would have an opportunity to lead an organization he has claimed censored and attacked him.

“What Could Go Wrong?”

Public health professionals expressed grave concerns about the prospect of Bhattacharya leading a national public health agency. For example, in response to The Post story announcing him as a top contender for the role, Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves skeeted, “This is all just getting worse.”

Mallory Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, earned her PhD in biology from Stanford in 2024, had a similar take. “His scientific judgment is questionable at best,” she told Important Context. “As an expert witness in multiple Covid court cases he consistently misconstrued scientific evidence—even going so far as to knowingly cite a retracted study.” 

Harris, who led a student group at Stanford to combat science misinformation, has long had Bhattacharya on her radar.

“He has been spreading conspiracy theories about this particular agency for years,” Harris said. “This [likely appointment] is a tremendous blow to independent, rigorous, publicly funded scientific research.”

Frank Han, an adult congenital and pediatric cardiologist, told Important Context that “while hearing a conservative viewpoint is not inherently dangerous to scientific institutions, Bhattacharya has shown through his actions, that he is entirely unsuited for any job at the NIH.” 

“Science even at the highest levels of government, places a high value on humility and realizing when you should change course,” he explained, noting that Bhattacharya never acknowledged the hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths he said would justice mitigation measures in his March 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Han accused Bhattacharya of trying instead to “cover his tracks.”

“Bhattacharya has never honestly engaged with his prior self, rather now consistently holding the viewpoint that COVID restrictions should have ended sooner and schools should have opened sooner,” Han said.

Robert Morris, MD, PhD, an epidemiologist who has taught at Tufts University and the Medical College of Wisconsin, noted that Bhattacharya would be “the first director in the history of the NIH with no clinical experience and minimal biomedical research experience.”

“He is a health economist who would run an agency with no budget line for health economics,” Morris said, adding that the professor “has repeatedly shown disdain for serious biomedical scientists.”

“What could go wrong?” Morris said.