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Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is President Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has traditionally been the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.
On March 5, the Stanford University professor of health policy will face questions from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee as he attempts to get confirmed to lead one of the country’s most powerful health agencies.
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Here’s what to know about Bhattacharya.
He’s the son of immigrants
Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata, India and said in a podcast interview that his mother came from a slum, while his father, an electrical engineer, was part of the country’s middle class. In the 1970s, his family immigrated to the U.S., settling first in Massachusetts and then in California, outside of Los Angeles. When he was 18, Bhattacharya converted from Hinduism to become a Presbyterian.
He’s interested in health economics
Bhattacharya earned four degrees at Stanford: a bachelor’s degree, master’s, MD, and PhD. He worked as an economist at the RAND Corporation before returning to Stanford to join the faculty.
Bhattacharya has researched health economics and studied the the U.S.’s vulnerable populations, analyzing how the country’s health care system and government policies affect the health of these groups.
He holds controversial views on COVID-19
During the pandemic, Bhattacharya became a familiar and contrarian expert on the disease, conducting numerous interviews and publishing op-eds on what he felt was public health officials’ overreaction to the virus. Based on data he was seeing, he believed that COVID-19 was far milder than health experts—including those in the government—were making it out to be, and claimed that COVID-19 tests were only picking up severe cases and people who developed symptoms, while far more people were infected but didn’t have symptoms. “There are many people walking around with evidence of COVID infection that we’re not going to count because they don’t show up to the doctor; they have relatively mild infections,” he said in a 2020 podcast.
In March 2020, he co-authored a controversial op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that questioned lockdowns. “A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health,” he wrote. “We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.”
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He also co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, an open letter that argued to stop lockdowns. The letter instead favored allowing people at low risk of COVID-19 infection to go about their daily lives, on the assumption that if they became infected, they would experience mild disease and contribute to building the herd immunity that would eventually protect the population.
Critics of the policy pointed out that the strategy would still endanger those most vulnerable to developing complications from the disease, such as the elderly and those with weakened immune systems.
He also opposed mask mandates in schools. In 2021, he co-wrote an article arguing that “the benefits of masks in preventing serious illness of death from COVID-19 among children are infinitesimally small,” and that “COVID-19 is less of a threat to children than accidents or the common flu.” His views conflicted with those of many public health officials, and he said at the time he received death threats for voicing them.
His challenge at NIH
If confirmed, Bhattacharya will head an agency at a crossroads. Under the Trump Administration, the NIH has changed its policy in issuing research grants to institutions, capping the amount they’ll pay for overhead costs at just 15% of the grant total (as opposed to 30-70% or more). The new policy has been temporarily stayed by a federal judge, but Bhattacharya would be responsible for navigating any shifts in the agency’s grant-making policies and reforms (which many scientists agree are needed) to make the NIH more efficient.
His medical degree and understanding of health data should be a strength in leading the venerable research institute, some experts say, but, as STAT reports, some are concerned about his interpretation of that data, which they believe can lead to misleading conclusions. “ I would rather see him appointed than not, because I think if he is not appointed, then whoever else is appointed will probably be worse,” Jason Abaluck, professor of economics at Yale School of Management, told STAT.
