Dr. Jay Bhattacharya speaks during a roundtable discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic hosted by the Heritage Foundation with members of the House Freedom Caucus on Thursday, November 10, 2022.
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President-elect Donald Trump On Tuesday, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University scholar and U.S. coronavirus policy critic, was elected director of the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of medical research in the United States with a budget of approximately $47.3 billion. Dollar.
NIH has been in the spotlight Robert F. Kennedy Jr..., Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH director oversees 27 institutes and centers that conduct early-stage research on everything from vaccines for emerging pandemic threats to new drug targets.
Just days before being nominated as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. said he would move quickly to lay off 600 NIH employees and replace them with new staff. The agency has nearly 20,000 employees.
In addition to the layoffs, Kennedy said he aims to shift the NIH’s focus from infectious diseases like Covid-19 to potential treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health policy professor and physician, has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. government’s Covid-19 policies during the pandemic. Together with two other scholars, he published Great Barrington Declaration In October 2020, those who were not vulnerable to the virus were called upon to return to normal life.
He later sued the government, claiming it pressured social media platforms to censor his views.
Bhattacharya’s resume shows that he graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and received a PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2000.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who served on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, has been criticized for his disagreement with some of Trump’s coronavirus policies and recommendations. The contradiction has made him a frequent target of Republicans, prompting calls for his firing.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and Fauci’s boss, defended Fauci in a July 2020 interview with STAT News, saying it was “unthinkable” to consider firing Fauci as some Republicans have demanded. ”. As a career federal employee, Fauci’s job is not subject to political dismissal under federal civil service regulations, protections that Trump has vowed to eliminate.
