Trump picks US Covid policy critic Jay Bhattacharya to lead National Institutes of Health

The NIH manager oversees 27 institutes and centers that behaviour aboriginal signifier probe connected everything from vaccines for emerging pandemic threats to targets for caller drugs.

Just days earlier his information arsenic HHS secretary, RFK Jr. said helium would enactment rapidly to occurrence 600 radical astatine the NIH and regenerate them each with caller hires. The bureau employs astir 20,000 people.

In summation to occupation cuts, Kennedy has said helium aims to displacement NIH’s absorption from infectious diseases specified arsenic Covid-19, to tackling imaginable cures for chronic diseases, specified arsenic diabetes.

Bhattacharya, a Stanford wellness argumentation prof and doctor, was an outspoken professional of the US government’s Covid-19 policies during the pandemic. Along with 2 different academics, helium published the Great Barrington Declaration successful October 2020, which called for a instrumentality to beingness arsenic mean for those who were not susceptible to the virus.

He sued the authorities afterward, alleging that it pressured societal media platforms to censor his opinions.

Bhattacharya graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine successful 1997 and received his doctorate from Stanford’s Department of Economics successful 2000, according to his resume.

During the Covid pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, manager of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease who served connected President Trump’s coronavirus task force, became a predominant people of Republicans for contradicting immoderate of Trump’s coronavirus policies and recommendations, starring to calls for his dismissal.

Francis Collins, the NIH manager and Fauci’s boss, defended Fauci successful a July 2020 interrogation with STAT News, saying it was “unimaginable” to see firing Fauci, arsenic immoderate Republicans had demanded. As a vocation national employee, Fauci’s occupation was shielded from governmental firings by national civilian work regulations, protections Trump has vowed to undo.