Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, remains a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump announced in a statement on Tuesday that he had picked Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, to run the nation's leading medical research agency. He said Bhattacharya would work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to the Department of Health and Human Services, "to direct the Nation's Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.
"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."
Bhattacharya said he was "honored and humbled" by the nomination. "We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!" Bhattacharya wrote on X.
Bhattacharya was one of main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published in October 2020 that argued against lockdowns and promoted "herd immunity," the idea that low risk people should be allowed to build up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. It was rejected by public health officials, including then-NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous.
Bhattacharya has accused Fauci and other leaders of marginalizing those like him who opposed lockdown measures. Bhattacharya and Fauci have been contacted for comment via email outside regular business hours.
Fauci and Collins "created an illusion of scientific consensus around their ideas and marginalized anyone that disagreed with them even though there wasn't a scientific consensus," Bhattacharya said on Fox News last year. "It's a pattern of behavior that reflects an abuse of power by American scientific bureaucrats at the very top of our scientific bureaucracies."
Fauci became the face of the government's response to COVID-19 in early 2020, but he later fell out of favor with Trump, who was then president, as he continued to promote caution while Trump favored a faster return to normal life. Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH for nearly 40 years until his retirement in 2022.
Fauci has defended decisions made during the pandemic, telling the New York Times Magazine last year: "I don't mean to seem preachy, but I don't want to see people suffer and I don't want to see people die."
In 2021, Bhattacharya said Fauci was "probably the number one anti-vaxxer" because of his continued urging for Americans to follow COVID-19 mitigation measures even if had been vaccinated.
"Dr. Fauci is probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country in some sense, because he has modeled behavior that has made people think the vaccine won't give you back your life, but it will," he said on Fox News.
Bhattacharya has also accused Fauci and other leaders of suppressing scientific research and debate during the pandemic.
"The rot, having accumulated over decades, was plain for all to see," he wrote in an opinion piece published on UnHerd, a British news and opinion site, earlier in November. "The National Institutes of Health, whose annual budget is $45 billion, orchestrated under the leadership of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci a massive suppression of scientific debate and research."
Bhattacharya criticized Fauci's handling of the pandemic in a Newsweek op-ed co-authored with Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, in 2022.
The media and public had "naturally looked" to Fauci when COVID-19 hit, they wrote. "Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci got major epidemiology and public health questions wrong."
In another op-ed for Newsweek last year, they called for a commission to conduct "a thorough and open-minded" inquiry into the pandemic.
"While few public health scientists dared to speak out against COVID restrictions promoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, many of the scientists who did speak out are politically on the Left, including several members of our Norfolk Group," they wrote. "We must skip the politics and simply figure out what went wrong, so that it never happens again."
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