What Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s NIH pick, has said about Anthony Fauci

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, remains a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump announced in a statement Tuesday that he had chosen Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, to lead the nation’s premier medical research agency. He said Bhattacharya would work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick for the Department of Health and Human Services, “to lead the nation’s medical research and make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a gold standard for medical research while investigating the underlying causes and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including our crisis in chronic disease and illness.”

Bhattacharya said he was “honoured and humbled” by the nomination. “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will use the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!” Bhattacharya wrote the X.

Bhattacharya was one of the main authors of the Great Barrington Statement, an open letter published in October 2020 that argued against lockdowns and promoted “herd immunity”, the idea that low-risk people should be allowed to build immunity to COVID-19 through infection. It was dismissed by public health officials, including then-NIH Director Francis Collins, as dangerous.

Bhattacharya has accused Fauci and other leaders of marginalizing those like him who opposed lockdown measures. Bhattacharya and Fauci have been reached for comment by email outside regular business hours.

Fauci and Collins “created an illusion of scientific consensus around their ideas and marginalized anyone who disagreed with them, even though there wasn’t a scientific consensus,” Bhattacharya said on Fox News last year. “It is a pattern of behavior that reflects the abuse of power by American scientific bureaucrats at the top of our scientific bureaucracies.”

Fauci became the face of the government’s response to COVID-19 in early 2020, but he later fell out of favor with then-president Trump as he continued to promote caution while Trump advocated a faster return to normal life. Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH for nearly 40 years until his retirement in 2022.

Fauci has defended decisions made during the pandemic and tells New York Times Magazine last year: “I don’t want to sound preachy, but I don’t want to see people suffer and I don’t want to see people die.”

In 2021, Bhattacharya said Fauci was “probably the number one anti-vaxxer” because of his continued call for Americans to follow COVID-19 mitigation measures even if they had been vaccinated.

“Dr. Fauci is probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country in some sense because he has modeled behavior that has led people to believe that the vaccine won’t give you your life back, but it will,” said he on Fox News.

Bhattacharya has also accused Fauci and other leaders of suppressing scientific research and debate during the pandemic.

“The advice accumulated over decades was plain for all to see,” he wrote in an opinion piece published on UnHerd, a British news and opinion website, earlier in November. “The National Institutes of Health, whose annual budget is $45 billion, orchestrated under the direction of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci a massive suppression of scientific debate and research.”

Bhattacharya criticized Fauci’s handling of the pandemic in a Newsweek op-ed co-authored with Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, in 2022.

The media and public had “naturally looked” to Fauci when COVID-19 hit, they wrote. “Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci got major epidemiological and public health issues wrong.”

In another op-ed for Newsweek last year they called for a commission to conduct “a thorough and impartial” investigation into the pandemic.

“While few public health scientists dared to speak out against the COVID restrictions promoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, many of the scientists who spoke out are politically on the left, including several members of our Norfolk group,” they wrote. “We need to skip the politics and simply find out what went wrong so it never happens again.”