Trump taps COVID lockdown critic Jay Bhattacharya to lead top health agency alongside vaccine skeptic RFK Jr.

Donald Trump picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford doctor silenced for challenging Biden administration lockdown policies, to run the National Institutes of Health.

Trump says that Bhattacharya will work with Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while running the country's top public funder of medical research with a budget of some $47.3 billion.

The president-elect said in a statement: 'Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America's biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease. Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!'

Bhattacharya, a Stanford health policy professor and doctor, was an outspoken critic of the U.S. government's COVID-19 policies during the pandemic. 

The Stanford-trained physician and economist met with Kennedy this week and impressed him with his ideas to overhaul NIH. 

Bhattacharya has called for shifting the agency's focus toward funding more innovative research and reducing the influence of some of its longest-serving career officials, the report added.

Along with two other academics, he published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.

Trump cited the Great Barrington Declaration among the doctor's credentials for getting the job. 

The Great Barrington Declaration called for ‘focused protection,’ an idea that would mean the bulk of efforts to increase immunity would be centered on the most vulnerable groups – the elderly and the immunocompromised – with few restrictions on the general healthy population.

Without those restrictions, more people would develop Covid that would confer antibodies against infection, producing herd immunity.

As more and more people become infected and later immune for a period of time, the virus has fewer opportunities to spread and infect vulnerable people.

But the idea was slammed by many mainstream scientists, including those like Fauci and NIH Director Frances Collins, who worked in the Biden administration. Many criticized the idea as dangerous and would lead to many preventable deaths.

Bhattacharya sued the government afterward, alleging that it pressured social media platforms to censor his opinions. 

In 2023, a federal court ruled that the Biden Administration coerced social media sites to censor him and his co-authors. 

He graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and received his doctorate from Stanford's Department of Economics in 2000, according to his resume.

Just days before his nomination as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. said he would act quickly to fire 600 people at the NIH and replace them all with new hires. 

The agency employs nearly 20,000 people.

In addition to job cuts, Kennedy has said he aims to shift NIH's focus from infectious diseases such as COVID-19, to tackling potential cures for chronic diseases, such as diabetes. 

During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease who served on President Trump's coronavirus task force, became a frequent target of Republicans for contradicting some of Trump's coronavirus policies and recommendations, leading to calls for his dismissal.

Collins, the NIH director and Fauci's boss, defended Fauci in a July 2020 interview with STAT News, saying it was 'unimaginable' to consider firing Fauci, as some Republicans had demanded. 

As a career federal employee, Fauci's job was shielded from political firings by federal civil service regulations, protections Trump has vowed to undo.