US President-elect Donald Trump has named the Kolkata-born Jay Bhattacharya, who raised questions about Covid policies, to head the National Institutes of Health, the medical research powerhouse.
Trump announced Tuesday night that he was "thrilled to nominate" him for the job of directing the "nation's medical research and to make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives".
Accepting the offer, Bhattacharya said on X: "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!"
The NIH is an agglomeration of 27 separate research organisations dealing with different diseases and health issues, with an annual budget of $48 billion.
The post of directorship of NIH is not a cabinet-level post, but it would require Senate approval and would have an enormous global impact because of the range of its research that has cascading effects around the world.
Trump said Bhattacharya will work with Health Secretary nominee Robert F Kennedy, Jr, to "restore NIH to a gold standard of medical research as they examine the underlying causes of, solutions to, America's biggest health challenges, including a crisis of chronic illness and disease".
Bhattacharya is an interdisciplinary academic at Stanford University. He is holding professorships in medicine, economics, and a health professorship, and also has a medical degree as well as a PhD in economics.
He shot to national prominence during the Covid pandemic by questioning the prevalent orthodoxy of the government health establishment of imposing extended broad lockdowns to fight the disease and went head-to-head with Anthony Fauci, who was acclaimed as the architect of the official policy.
Bhattacharya has said he was being government-censored as Twitter had placed him on its "Trends Blacklist" due to official influence curbing his presence on the microblogging social network. now rebranded as X.
Trump posted in his message on Truth Social that Bhattacharya "is a co-author of The Great Barrington declaration, an alternative to lockdowns, proposed in October 2020".
Bhattacharya was among the signers of the declaration, which was a statement co-signed by doctors, scientists, and researchers, calling for loosening up the restrictions to release healthy young people from lockdowns through a policy of "focused protection" aimed at older people and those at greater risk.
This would permit them, it said, "normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk".
This fitted well with the split between the political establishments of the Democrats, for strict lockdowns, and Republicans.
Some Republican-run states such as Florida, which adopted parts of the declaration, did not have statistics significantly lower than Democrat-run states like California that strictly followed lockdowns but kept school closures lower.
As the social and educational fallout of the lockdowns has emerged, some former government officials who advocated those policies like former NIH Director Francis Collins have conceded that their narrow focus on lockdowns may have been unfortunate.
While Kennedy opposes vaccinations, Bhattacharya does not.
Kennedy advocates unorthodox treatments and theories which have raised criticism in the past. However, his and Trump's efforts to concentrate on chronic diseases are lauded by some critics.
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