President-elect of the United States, Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday that it has chosen Stanford physician Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The economist was a central figure in a fiery public debate health debate because of its anti-containment treaty during the corona virus pandemic.

“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 on social media. media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

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According to a New York Times article, Dr. Bhattacharya would rule the world first medical research agency, with a budget of $48 billion and 27 distinct institutes and centers, each with its own research program, focusing on different diseases like cancer and diabetes if confirmed by the Senate.

It appears that Dr. Bhattacharya has called for an overhaul of the NIH and limiting the power of officials. He believes these officials have played too large a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 treaty

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya was one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto released in 2020 that asserted that the virus should be allowed to spread among healthy young people who had “a minimal risk of death. .

In the controversial manifesto, the authors argue that this spread could thus contribute to the development of natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted at the elderly and vulnerable. Additionally, Dr. Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex M. Azar II, who was Trump’s Secretary of Health. However, various public health experts have condemned him for his views. Dr. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were quickly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.

Dr. Bhattacharya has also become a favored witness in court cases challenging federal and state Covid policies. He also joined a group of plaintiffs to sue the Biden administration for what he called “Covid censorship.” He had argued that the administration violated the First Amendment by working with social media companies to suppress misinformation about Covid.

The Stanford doctor also sparked controversy when he protested the mask requirement for schoolchildren in Florida and Tennessee. Judges in both states dismissed his case because he was not qualified to make medical pronouncements on the issue.

In March 2020, for example, Dr. Bhattacharya suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that the pandemic was not as deadly as claimed and that the death toll could reach 40,000 Americans; In the end, 1.2 million people died, the New York Times reported.

Social Media Restriction

While his views were continually condemned, Bhattacharya also faced restrictions on social media. He was a plaintiff in a key Supreme Court case alleging that federal officials improperly suppressed conservative viewpoints on social media in their efforts to combat misinformation. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Joe Biden’s administration.

Following Elon MuskAfter Twitter’s acquisition in 2022, Bhattacharya was invited to the company’s headquarters to examine how his opinions had been restricted on the platform. Recently, Bhattacharya used X to comment on the platform’s scientists leaving for the alternative site Bluesky, sarcastically calling Bluesky “their own little echo chamber.”

A look at the life of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

• Jay Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata in 1968.
• Dr. Bhattacharya earned a doctorate in medicine from Stanford in 1997. He also earned a doctorate in economics from the same university three years later.
• Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Health Economics and Aging.
• His research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.
• He has published 135 articles in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals in the fields of medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law and public health, among other areas.

Last month, Dr. Bhattacharya hosted a pandemic policy forum at Stanford and said he hoped to bring together people of different opinions who would “talk to each other in a civil manner.” the forum itself became the target of attacks — a development that Stanford President Jonathan Levin called “disheartening.”

One of Dr. Bhattacharya’s colleagues at Stanford, Dr. Pantea Javidan of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying that the symposium provided “a platform for discredited figures who continually promote dangers, without scientific basis or completely debunked.” approaches to Covid.