The Stanford physician was excoriated by NIH’s director in 2020 for his “fringe” ideas on covid. Four years later, he’s poised for power in Trump’s Washington.
When three academics in October 2020 insisted it was time to roll back coronavirus lockdowns — writing an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures — public health leaders rebuked their proposal as premature. Francis S. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, privately dismissed the authors as “fringe” experts and called for a “take down” of their suggestions to reopen schools and businesses, according to emails subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Now, one of the authors of that declaration — Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist — appears poised for a top government health role, perhaps as head of NIHitself. Bhattacharya is a strong candidate to lead the nearly $50 billion agency in the coming Trump administration, with his name on an internal list of contenders being compiled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Kennedy was selected Thursday by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH.