Trump Taps Health Economist to Run NIH

President-elect Donald Trump announced last week that he intends to nominate physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and his work has focused on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. He gained national attention during the pandemic in 2020 for co-authoring The Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed protections for the most vulnerable populations but advised against restricting the activities of healthy individuals based on the theory that herd immunity against COVID-19 would be achieved rapidly. At the time of its publication, the declaration was welcomed by the Trump administration but criticized by public health leaders — including former NIH director Francis Collins — who argued its claims regarding herd immunity were dangerous and not grounded in science.

Bhattacharya has received dozens of grants from NIH during his career and has participated in various grant review panels for the agency. In 2018, he co-authored a paper suggesting that NIH research funding practices were becoming more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects. Bhattacharya’s stance on Republican proposals to reform the NIH and reduce the number of institutes it encompasses is unclear, though he has expressed a desire to revamp the agency.

“I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time,” he told the Washington Post early this year.

This news brief originally appeared in FYI’s newsletter for the week of Dec. 2.