Trump picks Covid lockdown skeptic as head of key national health agency

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The next director of the National Institutes of Health will be a doctor who argued for allowing young and healthy people to become infected with Covid-19 long before a vaccine was available and later fought against mandating vaccination against the novel coronavirus.

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday said he will nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, currently a professor of health policy at Standard University and director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, to lead the National Institutes of Health, one of the world’s foremost medical research entities and oversee its $47 billion in funding.

In a statement, Trump said Bhattacharya would work with his Health and Human Services Secretary-designate, anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr, to “examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease.”

He added: “Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!”

Bhattacharya earned a doctorate in medicine from Stanford in 1997 and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the same university three years later. Born in Kolkata, India, he is a naturalized US citizen.

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