Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, overseeing scientific research

President-elect Donald Trump selected Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford-trained physician and economist who criticized coronavirus lockdowns, on Tuesday to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nearly $50 billion agency that oversees the nation’s biomedical research.

“Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night.

Bhattacharya met last week with Kennedy, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and impressed him with his ideas to overhaul the NIH.

Trump also announced Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, as his selection to be HHS deputy secretary. That role would position O’Neill to help run day-to-day operations and shape policy at the nearly $2 trillion agency.

“He will oversee all operations and improve Management, Transparency, and Accountability to, Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said in a statement announcing O’Neill’s selection.

Bhattacharya and O’Neill’s roles are subject to Senate confirmation.

Bhattacharya emerged as a prominent critic of the federal government’s coronavirus response and was among several academics who met with Trump in the Oval Office in August 2020, telling the then-president the coronavirus pandemic was not as severe as public health officials had warned. Trump had initially imposed lockdowns at the urging of his public health advisers, including Anthony S. Fauci, but came to regret the decision.

Bhattacharya attracted national attention for co-writing an October 2020 open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that called for rolling back coronavirus-related shutdowns while keeping “focused protections” for vulnerable populations, such as older Americans. The proposal won support from Republican politicians and some Americans eager to resume daily life but was rebuked by public health experts, including Francis S. Collins, then the NIH director, as premature and dangerous as the coronavirus continued to spread and vaccines were not yet available.

“There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Collins wrote to NIH colleagues in an email later made public under the Freedom of Information Act, referring to Bhattacharya and his co-authors from Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford as “fringe epidemiologists.”

Dozens of public health groups also criticized the Great Barrington Declaration’s focus on “herd immunity” - when a population is protected from an infectious disease through a combination of immunity from prior infections and vaccines. Infectious-disease experts said that goal would be difficult to quickly achieve, given that vaccines were still months from being widely available and would lead to unnecessary illnesses and death.

“I don’t really understand how we could simultaneously protect the vulnerable in our current society and somehow get to herd immunity through a pathway of infection,” Rochelle Walensky, then chief of infectious disease at Massachusetts General Hospital, said on a podcast. “I think that pathway is just going to lead to a lot of death.” (Walensky would soon be tapped by incoming President Joe Biden as his director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The backlash from the public health establishment, the federal government and some social media companies inadvertently helped boost Bhattacharya’s profile and attract fans who hailed him as a rare truth-teller. The Stanford professor was “unfairly maligned” during the height of the coronavirus crisis, Joe Rogan said on his popular podcast this summer.

Elon Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur advising Trump, has said Bhattacharya was wrongly suppressed by Twitter executives before Musk bought the social media service and overhauled it.

Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that constitute NIH, saying some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent. Bhattacharya and other critics have singled out Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centers for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022.

NIH has also been investigated by lawmakers in the wake of the pandemic, including by Republicans who say the agency’s leaders mismanaged the virus response and have demanded the agency be overhauled.

Fauci and other current and former NIH officials have defended their pandemic decisions and the agency’s broader response, saying federal leaders generally did the best they could to combat a new virus, and that much of the criticism is second-guessing.

O’Neill joined the federal health department in 2002 and held several roles, including as a top aide to the then-deputy HHS secretary. He then went to Silicon Valley and became a close ally of investor Peter Thiel, who advised Trump during his first term and has championed Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the vice president-elect, across Vance’s political career. O’Neill served as the acting CEO of the Thiel Foundation and worked with Thiel on a number of projects, including the Thiel Fellowship, which provides a $100,000 grant to young people who skip or stop college to pursue major projects.

Tech executives had pushed O’Neill as a candidate for HHS secretary before Kennedy was selected for that role, the New York Times reported. If confirmed as deputy secretary, O’Neill could serve as the agency’s acting leader if Kennedy’s nomination runs into trouble next year.

Trump on Friday night announced a flurry of other top health-care appointments, including Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary as his planned FDA commissioner, former GOP congressman Dave Weldon as his planned CDC director and Janette Nesheiwat, a family and emergency medicine physician whom he tapped as the next U.S. surgeon general. Those positions are also subject to Senate confirmation.

Bhattacharya and Makary collaborated on a blueprint for a proposed commission to investigate the nation’s coronavirus response.