Trump puts final piece in his MAHA puzzle with NIH nominee
Dr Jayanta Bhattacharya receiving an award from the Reason Foundation earlier this year
President-Elect Donald Trump has revealed his pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), completing the roster of appointments that will be charged with fulfilling his 'Make America Health Again' (MAHA) drive.
Trump has nominated Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and health economist at Stanford University School of Medicine, to lead the NIH, which is the world's largest public funder of biomedical research, with an annual budget of over $47 billion.
Rounding out his public health-related picks, Trump also nominated Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) department, reporting to Robert F Kennedy Jr.
O'Neill is an associate of billionaire Trump supporter and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and previously held a senior role in the HHS under the George W Bush administration. He also lobbied to be Trump's nomination for the top HHS job before that went to RFK Jr.
The selection of Bhattacharya is entirely in keeping with the President-Elect's decision to appoint candidates for his health team who have a history of challenging conventional wisdom.
The Stanford academic was a prominent opponent of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and was a signatory to an open letter published in 2020 – before the availability of vaccines – that called for focused protection of vulnerable individuals and allowing the virus to spread and generate herd immunity, which prompted furious scientific debate.
That is a view also voiced by Martin Makary, who has been nominated by Trump to lead the FDA and who has also criticised lockdowns for causing harm to society and the economy. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, has been a critic of Anthony Fauci, who led the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the pandemic and fell out spectacularly with Trump.
Bhattacharya and Makary were both among prominent researchers in the so-called Norfolk Group, who published a report on the government's response to COVID-19 in 2022 that highlighted the damage caused by policies such as school closures, the delayed approval of therapeutics, and failings in data collection, and set out questions that should be asked by a COVID-19 commission.
Trump's CDC Director pick, Dave Weldon, and RFK Jr have also criticised the pandemic response, although, their comments have focused mainly on vaccination programmes and, in particular, the safety of COVID-19 shots.
In a statement, Trump said Bhattacharya would work with RFK Jr to "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 its "crisis of chronic illness and disease."
In a post on X.com (formerly Twitter), Bhattacharya wrote that he was "honoured and humbled" by the nomination and – if his appointment is ratified by Congress – 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!"
