President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya is known for his criticism of Covid lockdowns and for co-writing the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for herd immunity over lockdowns as a response to the pandemic. Trump also intends to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, despite Kennedy’s controversial views on vaccines and health issues. Bhattacharya expressed his gratitude for the nomination and stated his intention to reform scientific institutions in America.
In response to the nominations, many experts have raised concerns about Bhattacharya and Kennedy’s controversial stances and the potential impact on public health. The World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has criticized the concept of herd immunity as a dangerous and unethical response to the pandemic.
Bhattacharya and his co-authors argued that lockdowns had detrimental effects on public health and advocated for allowing natural immunity to develop through exposure to the virus, a proposal that received significant backlash from the scientific community. Despite the controversy surrounding their views, Bhattacharya and Kennedy are set to play key roles in shaping America’s health research and policy under the Trump administration.
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