Trump's Indian-Origin Pick To Head Health Agency Was Covid Lockdown Critic

President-elect Donald Trump has announced Indian-origin Dr Jay Bhattacharya as the Director of National Institutes of Health, the country's top public funder of medical research with a budget of around $47.3 billion.

Announcing his nomination, Trump said Stanford academic and US COVID policy critic Dr Bhattacharya would work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to "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".

All about Jay Bhattacharya:

• Jay Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata in 1968.

• Dr Bhattacharya earned a doctorate in medicine from Stanford in 1997 and earned a Ph.D in economics from the same university three years later.

• Dr Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

• His research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation and economics.

• Dr Bhattacharya's recent research focuses on the epidemiology of Covid-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic.

• Dr Bhattacharya was a prominent critic of the federal government's Covid-19 response, co-writing an October 2020 open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that called for rolling back coronavirus-related shutdowns while keeping "focused protections" for vulnerable populations, such as older Americans.

• He has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law and public health, among other fields.