US President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, to run the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH), the first company in the USA accountable for public well being analysis.
Bhattacharya is understood for his criticism of the Biden administration’s dealing with of the COVID pandemic after it took energy in January 2021.
Who’s Jay Bhattacharya?
Bhattacharya is a doctor, a professor of well being coverage at Stanford College and a analysis affiliate on the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis at Stanford.
In response to his resume, Bhattacharya accomplished his medical diploma from Stanford in 1997 and acquired his doctorate within the economics of healthcare in 2000 from the Stanford College Division of Economics.
In 2020 when the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic took maintain, Bhattacharya advocated in opposition to full lockdowns, arguing that they’ve detrimental impacts on bodily and psychological well being. He co-authored an open letter, the Nice Barrington Declaration, detailing this. Whereas his tackle lockdowns drew criticism again then and continues to be criticised now, a few of his critics are reassessing their views.
One in every of these former critics is Dr Francis Collins, a former NIH director who referred to as Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists” in 2020. Nonetheless, in December 2023, Collins informed New York-based nonprofit Braver Angels that again in 2020, he and his colleagues had been “narrowly centered” on saving lives.
Though he didn’t instantly point out Bhattacharya or the declaration, he said: “You connect infinite worth to stopping the illness and saving a life. You connect zero worth as to whether this really completely disrupts folks’s lives, ruins the financial system and has many children saved out of faculty in a manner that they by no means may fairly get well from.”
Consultants say that this was exactly what Bhattacharya was speaking about. Dr Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad, a professor of infectious illness epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medication in Qatar, informed Al Jazeera: “Concerning COVID-19 particularly, well being policymakers erred on the facet of warning, given the restricted and evolving understanding of the virus.
“Looking back, some restrictions or their depth had been pointless, as argued by Jay and colleagues.”
In 2022, unbiased journalist Bari Weiss cited an investigation based mostly on inside firm paperwork from the social media platform X (often known as Twitter on the time), that confirmed that Bhattacharya’s account was considered one of a number of that had been “secretly” blacklisted. This occurred earlier than Elon Musk acquired the platform.
When Musk acquired X in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to speak about how his voice had been restricted by the platform.
Bhattacharya was additionally a plaintiff in a Supreme Courtroom case which alleged that President Joe Biden’s administration was improperly suppressing conservative views on social media concerning subjects together with COVID-19. In June this 12 months, nonetheless, the court docket sided with the Biden administration.
Bhattacharya’s nomination as NIH head should be authorised by the Senate.
What does the NIH do?
The NIH oversees medical and public well being analysis within the US. The physique includes 27 analysis institutes, every with their very own analysis mandate and space of focus.
The annual funds of the NIH totals almost $48bn, in keeping with its web site, and it employs almost 18,000 folks.
The NIH is overseen by the Division of Well being and Human Providers (HHS). This implies, if each are appointed, Bhattacharya will work in tandem with Robert F Kennedy Jr, who Trump nominated to steer the HHS on November 14.
Kennedy’s appointment raised some eyebrows from each events resulting from his controversial positions on some well being points together with vaccines and COVID-19, throughout which Kennedy additionally opposed lockdowns.
“Collectively, Jay and RFK Jr will restore the NIH to a Gold Commonplace of Medical Analysis as they look at the underlying causes of, and options to, America’s greatest well being challenges, together with our Disaster of Persistent Sickness and Illness,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Reality Social.
Kennedy posted on X on Tuesday: “Dr Jay Bhattacharya is the perfect chief to revive NIH because the worldwide template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medication.”
I am so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the perfect chief to revive NIH because the worldwide template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medication. pic.twitter.com/NakHavsblX
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 27, 2024
What was Bhattacharya’s stance on COVID-19 lockdowns?
On October 4, 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an open letter referred to as the Nice Barrington Declaration with Dr Martin Kulldorff, a then-professor of drugs at Harvard College, and Dr Sunetra Gupta, epidemiologist and professor at Oxford College.
It was printed earlier than the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine had been administered on December 14, 2020.
The letter proposed an method to COVID-19 referred to as “Centered Safety” and rejected the prevailing COVID-19 insurance policies.
The letter said: “Present lockdown insurance policies are producing devastating results on quick and long-term public well being.”
The actual areas of well being that the letter highlighted as being of concern resulting from lockdowns included:
- Decrease childhood vaccination charges.
- Deteriorating heart problems outcomes.
- Fewer most cancers screenings.
- Deteriorating psychological well being.
The letter argued that the influence on these areas of well being would end in “larger extra mortality in years to return”. It added that the working class and youthful members of society can be most affected by this. “Holding college students out of faculty is a grave injustice,” the authors said.
The assertion identified that it was older individuals who had been extra weak to COVID-19. “For kids, COVID-19 is much less harmful than many different harms, together with influenza.”
Abu-Raddad informed Al Jazeera that the query of whether or not centered safety is a extra viable method to a pandemic than a full lockdown was sophisticated because it depends upon how extreme the an infection is and the way it impacts completely different age teams. “This additionally depends upon what every society deems a suitable steadiness between minimising morbidity and mortality and sustaining financial and social performance.”
The declaration recommended that as an alternative of imposing an entire lockdown for COVID-19, those that weren’t as weak to the virus ought to instantly resume their common routines and that herd immunity can be acquired.
“A larger reliance on information from areas outdoors the USA and Europe would have helped refine restrictions, notably in areas with youthful populations and decrease proportions of aged people,” Abu-Raddad stated. “To his credit score, Jay recognised and valued such information on the time, advocating for a extra tailor-made method to restrictions.”
The declaration has since been co-signed by 43 extra medical practitioners and well being scientists within the US, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, India, Canada and Israel.
Conversely, a number of days after the declaration was printed in 2020, 80 medical consultants printed the John Snow Memorandum, named after one of many founders of recent epidemiology. That memorandum claimed that the declaration co-authored by Bhattacharya would endanger People with underlying circumstances.
