Jay Bhattacharya, an NIH critic, emerges as a top candidate to lead the agency
The Stanford physician was excoriated by NIH’s director in 2020 for his “fringe” ideas on covid. Four years later, he’s poised for power in Trump’s Washington.


Stanford University physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya, whose views on the coronavirus pandemic response proved controversial, could be poised for a major health agency role in the Trump administration. (Anthony Behar/Sipa USA/AP)

By Dan Diamond
November 16, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EST

When three academics in October 2020 insisted it was time to roll back coronavirus lockdowns — writing an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures — public health leaders rebuked their proposal as premature. Francis S. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, privately dismissed the authors as “fringe” experts and called for a “take down” of their suggestions to reopen schools and businesses, according to emails subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Now, one of the authors of that declaration — Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist — appears poised for a top government health role, perhaps as head of NIH itself. Bhattacharya is a strong candidate to lead the nearly $50 billion agency in the coming Trump administration, with his name on an internal list of contenders being compiled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Kennedy was selected Thursday by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH.

The rise of Bhattacharya — from being scorned by the nation’s NIH director to possibly occupying his office four years later — reflects how the backlash to coronavirus policies has helped reshape conservative politics and elevate new voices. While Collins and other public health experts maintain that the Great Barrington Declaration’s ideas were rash and would have put vulnerable people at risk, many Americans have come to believe that school shutdowns and other pandemic-related policies lasted too long.

Bhattacharya, who has said he was a victim of what felt like a “propaganda attack” led by public health experts after the Great Barrington Declaration, has testified in Congress, met with lawmakers in both parties and offered advice to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other leaders navigating the pandemic. Republicans have hailed him as a truth-teller, contrasting the Stanford physician with government officials whom they blame for an overly stringent response to the health crisis.

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By Dan Diamond
Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2021 after five years at Politico, where he won a George Polk award for investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic.follow on X @ddiamond