President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday chose Stanford academic and U.S. COVID policy critic Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health, the country's top public funder of medical research with a budget of some $47.

President-elect Trump selected a critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is known for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 manifesto that advocated allowing COVID to spread in order to achieve herd immunity.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Stanford-educated physician who gained prominence after questioning the efficacy of social distancing at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic

The physician and economist was the face of the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed widespread lockdowns.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Bhattacharya is a physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday evening that he has tapped Jay Bhattacharya, a prominent critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health.

President elect Donald Trump nominated health policy researcher Jay Bhattacharya to head the US National Institutes of Health, the sprawling agency that oversees close to $50 billion in biomedical research spending.

Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic whom Trump nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Both nominations are subject to Senate confirmation. "Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of,

The president-elect also named Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, to be deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.