Jay Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of the National Institutes of Health.
An economist from Kolkata who studied medicine at Stanford University, Bhattacharya was against US COVID policy. He will now supervise a $47.3 billion budget at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main public funding agency for medical research in the United States.
The NIH has faced scrutiny from Robert F Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH.
The NIH director manages 27 institutes and centers focused on early-stage research, from emerging pandemic vaccines to new drug targets.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya along with two other academics published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020. The declaration called for a return to normal life for those not vulnerable to the virus.
Bhattacharya later sued the government, claiming it pressured social media platforms to censor his opinions. He graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford in 2000.
A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bhattacharya also directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
His studies concentrate on the health and welfare of marginalized groups, looking at the contributions of economics, biological innovation, and government initiatives.
Recent work by Jay Bhattacharya has included assessing policy responses to the pandemic and researching the epidemiology of COVID-19. According to Stanford University, his wider interests also include the effects of biological innovation on health, the evaluation of physician performance connected to payment systems, and the effects of population aging on health and medical costs.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nominated by Donald Trump on November 14 to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
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Source: HT
