(HealthDay News) — President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist and critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccination mandates, to lead the nation’s largest medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health.

In a statement Tuesday evening, Trump said Bhattacharya would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., potential head of the Department of Health and Human Services, “to lead the nation’s medical research and make important discoveries that will improve health and will save.” lives,” CBS News reported.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to the gold standard in medical research by examining the underlying causes and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including our chronic disease crisis,” Trump wrote.

Bhattacharya was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a paper published in October 2020 that argued that ongoing public lockdowns were harming Americans.

“I think the lockdowns were the biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021. He touted the idea that herd immunity would eventually protect the bulk of people and that the lockdowns were not. essential only for those most at risk of COVID-19. 19, according to CBS News.

But many other scientists disagreed with the Great Barrington Declaration, including Dr. Francis Collins, who was then director of the NIH.

Bhattacharya also opposed COVID-19 vaccination mandates, saying they prevented unvaccinated people from working and playing, while eroding trust in the public health system.

Another Trump nominee, Jim O’Neill, a former HHS official, would help Bhattacharya lead the NIH as deputy secretary. Trump said O’Neill would “oversee all operations and improve management, transparency and accountability to make America healthy again.”

The NIH has an annual budget of $48 billion and conducts its own research with a team of thousands of scientists. It also funds competitive grants for outside research on myriad health issues, including cancer, vaccines and infectious diseases.

O’Neill would be the only candidate from a health agency with prior experience working within a massive bureaucracy. His other choices — Kennedy, Dr. Mehmet Oz for administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Dr. Marty Makary for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration — are all outsiders.