President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Jay Bhattacharya will become director of the National Institutes of Health during his second term in the White House.
Bhattacharyya, a Stanford University professor and vocal critic of pandemic-era lockdowns, has been tasked with leading the federal government's medical research efforts and is working closely with incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I will be working on it. Elect said.
“Mr. Jay is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an alternative to lockdowns proposed in October 2020,” President Trump said in the announcement. and an open letter calling on public health authorities to reconsider extreme measures in response to the emergency. COVID-19 (new coronavirus infection).
The 2022 “Twitter Files” revelation revealed that Twitter had secretly put Bhattacharya on a “trending blacklist” over his views on the pandemic, preventing his tweets from trending. It became clear.
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will examine the root causes and solutions to America's greatest health problems and restore NIH to the gold standard in medical research,” the 45th president added.
Mr. Bhattacharya, who earned a medical degree and a doctorate in economics from Stanford University, said he was “honored and humbled” by Mr. Trump's nomination.
“We will reform America's scientific institutions to make them trustworthy again and deploy the achievements of great science to make America healthy again!” he wrote to X.
Bhattacharya must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority starting in January.
The NIH employs approximately 20,000 people in 27 institutions and centers focused on specific diseases or research areas, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, formerly directed by Anthony Fauci, and the National Cancer Institute. are employed.
The NIH also provides approximately $31 billion in grants annually for research into various diseases.
The agency has come under fire from Republican lawmakers for funding gain-of-function research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been.
Mr. Fauci and former NIH director Francis Collins said that scientists funded by U.S. taxpayers modified the virus at the Wuhan laboratory where the novel coronavirus is believed to have originated. The virus has long denied the notion that it was becoming more contagious.
