Jay Bhattacharya appointed head of the National Institutes of Health by Donald Trump.

Jay Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.An economist from Kolkata who studied medicine at Stanford University, Bhattacharya was against US COVID policy. He will now supervise a $47.3 billion budget at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main public funding agency for medical research in the United States.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the NIH, has raised concerns about the organization. From new drug targets to developing pandemic vaccinations, the NIH director oversees 27 institutes and centers dedicated to early-stage research. In October 2020, Bhattacharya and two other scholars released the Great Barrington Declaration amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The proclamation demanded that people who were not at risk of contracting the virus resume their regular lives.

Later, Bhattacharya filed a lawsuit against the government, alleging that it exerted pressure on social media companies to restrict his views. He received his doctorate in economics from Stanford in 2000 after graduating from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997. Bhattacharya is the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His studies concentrate on the health and welfare of marginalized groups, looking at the contributions of economics, biological innovation, and government initiatives.
Recent work by Jay Bhattacharya has included assessing policy responses to the pandemic and researching the epidemiology of COVID-19. According to Stanford University, his wider interests also include the effects of biological innovation on health, the evaluation of physician performance connected to payment systems, and the effects of population aging on health and medical spending.

On November 14, Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the next United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).