What to Know About Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s Potential NIH Pick

Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, of Stanford University in California, has emerged as President-elect Donald Trump’s top pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to reporting from the Washington Post.

Amid Trump’s stated plans to “restructure federal agencies,” Bhattacharya would indeed be an outsider coming in to lead the NIH. And Bhattacharya has previously said he believes top officials there hold too much influence.

Notably, Bhattacharya garnered attention during the pandemic for a document called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Written by Bhattacharya and two other public health experts from Harvard and Oxford, the declaration encouraged governments to lift lockdown restrictions on young and healthy people and to focus protection measures on the elderly. The purported aim was to allow COVID-19 to spread in a population in which it was less likely to be deadly, thereby encouraging widespread immunity that was not dependent on a vaccine, according to the authors.

Though the declaration generated publicity and was supported by the likes of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian, free-market think tank, its strategy was denounced by many in the scientific community.

Among those in opposition to the document was Francis Collins, MD, PhD, then director of the NIH, who “privately dismissed the authors as ‘fringe’ experts and called for a ‘take down’ of their suggestions to reopen schools and businesses,” the Post reported, citing emails released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Early in the pandemic, Bhattacharya also co-authored an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”

The piece noted that, “a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million,” and that a “universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community, and individual mental and physical health.”

Other work along these lines included co-authoring a study with Stanford’s John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, that suggested prior COVID infections (and possibly immunity) were up to 85 times higher than scientists originally thought, with the research becoming a tool in the political debate to reopen the economy while being criticized by others.

Before the pandemic, Bhattacharya was “best known as a researcher who led Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, writing papers on Medicare policy and behavioral economics, and serving on NIH review panels,” the Post reported.

Bhattacharya received his medical degree from Stanford in 1997 and doctorate degree in economics from Stanford in 2000. He has held professorship positions at Stanford since 2001, as well as research positions there and elsewhere during this time, including at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Acumen. He also is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford.

When contacted by MedPage Today with several questions regarding his potential nomination to lead the NIH, Bhattacharya pointed to a statement he posted on X this week that stated in part: “That decision has not yet been made, as far as I know. No matter what happens, I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of the American scientific and public health institutions after the covid era fiasco so that they work for the benefit of the American people.”

Milena Sullivan, MA, managing director at Avalere, a consulting firm focused on the impact of healthcare policy on life sciences companies, told MedPage Today that a first point to consider is that Bhattacharya is not an NIH insider.

Though there are reasons directors often come from within the agency, “every once in a while, it is important to consider the merits of bringing someone from outside of that institution and bringing a fresh perspective,” she said.

If Bhattacharya is “able to … really prioritize putting in place more incentives for scientific debate, and transparency, and innovative thinking, and less of a top-down approach,” she said, “this could actually be very positive for biopharmaceutical innovation.”

“When you think about organizational transformation, you always have those two viewpoints of the disruptors and innovators on one hand, and more of the traditional organizational memory approach,” Sullivan said. “And those two things are very healthy … both viewpoints are needed.”

However, she noted it is “inevitable that the views that [Bhattacharya] had on pandemic response will influence how the NIH may approach any potential future pandemics.” Still, she believes “there is a great potential for everything to land in some equilibrium where, at the end of the day, there is a focus on promoting open debate in science.”

Among those who have been highly critical of Bhattacharya’s viewpoints on how the pandemic should have been handled is Jonathan Howard, MD, of NYU Langone Health in New York City, who wrote about some of these concerns along with others in a book entitled, We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID.

Howard pointed out a variety of these concerns to MedPage Today, including the notion of potential mass infection of unvaccinated youths and adults in an effort to reach herd immunity during the pandemic, as well as low estimates of how many people would succumb to COVID, among others.

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