Trump Taps Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Who Bravely Challenged Covid Lockdown Policies, to Lead NIH

Trump Taps Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Who Bravely Challenged Covid Lockdown Policies, to Lead NIH

Legal Insurrection readers may recall my reports on the Great Barrington Declaration,  an open letter published in October 2020 that challenged the response to the covid pandemic lockdowns.

The declaration proposed an approach called “Focused Protection,” which advocated for allowing those at lower risk to resume normal life, implementing strong measures to protect high-risk populations, and reliance on widespread immunity through reliance on natural infection. If this guidance had been followed, our society’s massive and expensive damage could have been avoided.

It was authored and signed by three prominent epidemiologists: Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University), Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford), Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University).

Now, President-Elect Donald Trump has tapped Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist whose authorship of an anti-lockdown treatise during the coronavirus pandemic made him a central figure in a bitter public health debate, to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will 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 our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the N.I.H.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Bhattacharya would lead the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, each with its own research agenda, focusing on different diseases like cancer and heart disease.

Of all the appointments Trump has made, this one brings me the most personal joy. To begin with, I consider this to be Trump’s way of making amends for relying on Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx as “experts” during the pandemic.

Meet President Trump's new Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

"A relatively small group – a cartel almost – of very powerful scientific bureaucrats took over the whole apparatus of science, dominated the media, dominated the message to… pic.twitter.com/VA8c6Ois0l

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 27, 2024

While the mainstream media derides Bhattacharya as a “COVID critic,” millions of Americans are celebrating him for his bravery in confronting the pseudoscience being foisted on the country.

BBC news endorses President Trump’s pick, Jay Bhattacharya, for NIH director. pic.twitter.com/YTCBfDPK7H

— Dara Marchica (@Dara1Marchica) November 27, 2024

Bhattacharya’s stance was a brave one. After the declaration was published, he encountered an extremely hostile work environment. He received death threats and hate mail and dealt with needless and tedious scrutiny about his funding sources (despite most of his funding coming from the NIH). Furthermore, Stanford University’s leaders failed to support Bhattacharya and permitted the hostile work environment to continue.

They banned and smeared him and now he is their boss.
Congratulations NIH Director
Jay Bhattacharya pic.twitter.com/CeylxmypK1

— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) November 27, 2024

Bhattacharya was also a victim of the collusion between Big Pharma/Big Government and Twitter. The Twitter Files, spearheaded by Elon Musk and a group of independent journalists after Musk purchased the site, revealed that he was placed on Twitter’s “blacklist” and subjected to “visibility filtering”.

Bhattacharya was secretly blacklisted because he “argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children,” and was thus unable to trend on the platform, Weiss reported in a Twitter thread.

The medical professional spoke with Laura Ingraham about the revelation Thursday night.

On “The Ingraham Angle,” Bhattacharya said the suppression of his voice, which questioned much of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s guidance and the COVID-19 policies, ultimately harmed data, children and the American public.

He believes he was essentially silenced because the opposing “arguments were not strong enough to survive the light of day.”

“If we had an open discussion, Laura, the schools would not have closed in the fall of 2020. If we had an open discussion, the lockdowns would have been lifted much earlier because the data and evidence behind them was so bad,” he said on the show.

3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

Bhattacharya has published over 150 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals across various fields, including medicine, economics, health policy, and epidemiology. He is also the author of a widely used textbook on health economics.

Bhattacharya is a champion of the people and real science who is well-qualified to contain and control a mammoth agency.

The National Institutes of Health falls under HHS, which Trump has nominated Kennedy to oversee. The NIH’s $48 billion budget funds medical research on vaccines, cancer and other diseases through competitive grants to researchers at institutions across the nation. The agency also conducts its own research with thousands of scientists working at NIH labs in Bethesda, Maryland.

I was going to go to be early, but had to stay up to write a @LegInsurrection post on this appointment. It's the perfect blend of hero's journey and karma. https://t.co/U5LsZw3UVK

— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) November 27, 2024

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