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On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, a government agency composed of more than 18,000 employees with an annual budget of $47 billion. Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford University, has no leadership experience in either government or large organizations, but, like some other Trump nominees, he is outspoken about what he sees as the tyranny of public health restrictions and censorship on social media platforms. Bhattacharya came into prominence as a strong critic of Covid vaccine mandates, though he has said publicly that he supports some routine childhood vaccinations, including those that prevent polio and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).
Bhattacharya, who didn’t respond to a list of questions emailed by Mother Jones, has held several appointments at Stanford, including at the university’s libertarian-leaning Hoover Institution. But it was during the pandemic that he emerged as a high-profile public health iconoclast, criticizing lockdowns, and then mask and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 document—developed at a meeting of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank—that recommended that the United States achieve Covid herd immunity by employing a strategy of mass infection. Bhattacharya and his co-authors—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta—suggested sequestering vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, while permitting other citizens to go about business as usual.
At a conference hosted by the anti-lockdown group the Brownstone Institute in November 2021, nearly a year after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.” He has repeatedly criticized the agency he is now poised to lead, suggesting that it punishes scientists who buck consensus by denying them funding.
Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.”
Bhattacharya’s critique of pandemic protocols caught on in right-wing circles, and he became a regular at conservative gatherings. He railed against what he called the stifling of academic freedom at events at the ultra-right-wing Hillsdale College, as well as the rally where then–presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.
But in other venues, Bhattacharya’s criticisms of pandemic management haven’t gone over as well. The Great Barrington Declaration was panned by the American Public Health Association; in a public letter in the Lancet, a group of 80 scientists called it “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” In 2021, as journalist Walker Bragman reported, Bhattacharya testified in a Tennessee court in favor of Gov. Bill Lee’s order to allow parents to send their children to school unmasked. The US district judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw, blocked the order and wrote that Bhattacharya’s “demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda.”
Bhattacharya has questioned the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of Covid, often citing a 2023 review by the medical database Cochrane Library. “It has been disheartening to watch once reputable experts discount the Cochrane review’s negative verdict on community masking to prevent Covid spread in favor of low-quality evidence,” he posted to his 548,000 followers on X. “Medicine has rejected evidenced-based medicine.” Yet Cochrane itself disagrees with Bhattacharya’s conclusion. “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” wrote Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library.
Meanwhile, Bhattacharya’s connections with powerful conservative groups and Silicon Valley titans have increased his status and visibility. PayPal founder and conservative super-donor Peter Thiel praised Bhattacharya and referred to him as his friend at the 2021 National Conservatism conference, WhoWhatWhy’s Allison Neitzel reported. The following year, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter, Musk invited Bhattacharya to the Twitter headquarters, where the two discussed the platform’s alleged “blacklisting” of him for his tweets that criticized public health guidelines around the pandemic.
It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule.4/4
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022
In 2023, a promotional video for Teneo Group, a political strategy organization helmed by the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo, included a montage that briefly showed Bhattacharya.
Since the start of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has been outspoken about the censorship that he claimed was silencing scientists who, like himself, questioned the wisdom of the government’s approach to pandemic restrictions. He was especially critical of the censorship he saw at his own university—specifically the pandemic disinformation-tracking work at the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project. Bhattacharya claimed that the group served as “a conduit to launder Biden Administration social media censorship activities” and embedding “within social media companies and pass on gov’t censorship demands.” Renée DiResta, a disinformation scholar who served as the group’s technical research manager, said she was instructed by her bosses not to publicly refute Bhattacharya’s claims—and that the damage he did to the group’s reputation may have contributed to the dissolution of the group earlier this year. Bhattacharya’s criticisms, she told me, “led to continued public pressure and the university deciding that some of the work was not worth continuing to support.” Stanford University didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
In 2022, Bhattacharya joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration, claiming that the US government had pressured social media companies to suppress posts that criticized pandemic policies. He was represented pro bono by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group that says it aims to “tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies,” and the case wound its way up to the US Supreme Court, which dismissed it earlier this year because the plaintiffs lacked standing.
As the pandemic increasingly receded from view, Bhattacharya became involved in causes beyond public health. Today, he serves as an adviser to Third Rail, a consulting group that says it helps “neutralize” “self-censoring environments” and “counterproductive DEI initiatives.” The group’s founder is former New York City Community Education Council president Maud Maron, who has crusaded against transgender inclusivity initiatives. Last year, Bhattacharya joined independent journalist Rav Arora in creating a podcast called Illusion of Consensus, in which the two hosts “dissect the misconceptions of consensus in science, from COVID-19 policies to gender-affirming care.” Earlier this year, Neitzel reported, Bhattacharya joined a group of scientists who aim to convince the public that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.
If confirmed as the director of NIH, Bhattacharya would be in charge of the agency responsible for allocating government funding for biomedical and public health research in the United States. He would help shape the research goals of the 27 institutes within the agency, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the group that Dr. Anthony Fauci led until he retired in 2022.
In a post on X, before he was announced as the official nominee, Bhattacharya vowed to his followers that “no matter what happens, I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of the American scientific and public health institutions after the Covid era fiasco so that they work for the benefit of the American people.”