President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday selected Stanford educational and US Covid coverage critic Jay Bhattacharya to run the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, the nation’s prime public funder of medical analysis with a price range of some $47.3 billion
The NIH has been within the crosshairs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choose to guide the Division of Well being and Human Providers, which oversees the NIH.
The NIH director oversees 27 institutes and facilities that conduct early stage analysis on every thing from vaccines for rising pandemic threats to targets for brand spanking new medication.
Simply days earlier than his nomination as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. mentioned he would act shortly to fireside 600 folks on the NIH and substitute all of them with new hires. The company employs almost 20,000 folks.
Along with job cuts, Kennedy has mentioned he goals to shift NIH’s focus from infectious illnesses reminiscent of Covid-19, to tackling potential cures for continual illnesses, reminiscent of diabetes.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford well being coverage professor and physician, was an outspoken critic of the US authorities’s Covid-19 insurance policies throughout the pandemic. Together with two different lecturers, he printed the Nice Barrington Declaration in October 2020, which referred to as for a return to life as regular for individuals who weren’t susceptible to the virus.
He sued the federal government afterward, alleging that it pressured social media platforms to censor his opinions.
Bhattacharya graduated from Stanford College College of Drugs in 1997 and acquired his doctorate from Stanford’s Division of Economics in 2000, in accordance with his resume.
Through the Covid pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illness who served on President Trump’s coronavirus process pressure, turned a frequent goal of Republicans for contradicting a few of Trump’s coronavirus insurance policies and suggestions, resulting in requires his dismissal.
Francis Collins, the NIH director and Fauci’s boss, defended Fauci in a July 2020 interview with STAT Information, saying it was “unimaginable” to contemplate firing Fauci, as some Republicans had demanded. As a profession federal worker, Fauci’s job was shielded from political firings by federal civil service laws, protections Trump has vowed to undo.
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