Jay Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya
Bhattacharya in 2020
Director of the National Institutes of Health
Designate
Assuming office
January 20, 2025
PresidentDonald Trump (elect)
SucceedingMonica Bertagnolli
Personal details
Born
Jayanta Bhattacharya

1968 (age 55–56)
Kolkata, India
Alma materStanford University
(BA, MA, MD, PhD)[1]
Known forCOVID-19 views; Great Barrington Declaration
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Jayanta Bhattacharya (born 1968) is an Indian-born American physician and economist who is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care.[2][3][4] In November 2024, president-elect Donald Trump named Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.[5]

Bhattacharya opposed the lockdowns and mask mandates imposed in 2021 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[6][7] With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, while promoting the notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.[8][9][10] The declaration was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization.[11]

  1. ^ "Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D." cap.stanford.edu. Stanford University. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021. Retrieved July 20, 2021.
  2. ^ "Profile: Jayanta Bhattacharya". Stanford University.
  3. ^ "Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD". Stanford Health Policy. Retrieved November 10, 2020.
  4. ^ Jones, Kara (August 11, 2020). "Jay Bhattacharya on Understanding the COVID-19 Virus". Freopp. Retrieved November 16, 2020.
  5. ^ Stolberg, Sheryl Gay (November 26, 2024). "Trump Picks Stanford Physician Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H." The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 27, 2024. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  6. ^ D'Ambrosio, Amanda (October 19, 2020). "Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?". www.medpagetoday.com. Retrieved August 25, 2021.
  7. ^ Maxouris, Christina (July 31, 2021). "As Covid-19 cases surge in Florida, governor says parents should decide whether their children wear masks to school". CNN. Retrieved August 25, 2021.
  8. ^ * For "unethical", see Professor Sir Robert Lechler. "Navigating COVID-19 through the volume of competing voices | The Academy of Medical Sciences". acmedsci.ac.uk. Archived from the original on October 12, 2020. Retrieved October 10, 2020.;
  9. ^ D'Ambrosio, Amanda (October 19, 2020). "Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?". www.medpagetoday.com. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  10. ^ Toy, Sarah; Hernandez, Daniela (October 18, 2020). "Scientists Push Back on Herd-Immunity Approach to Covid-19". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved August 27, 2021. A group of scientists is pushing back on renewed calls for a herd-immunity approach to Covid-19, calling the method of managing viral outbreaks dangerous and unsupported by scientific evidence. ... If immunity wanes after several months, as it does with the flu, patients could be susceptible to the virus after being infected, they said. That, they said, would result in recurrent and potentially large waves of infection, a common occurrence before vaccines were invented.
  11. ^ Farzan, Antonia Noori; Berger, Miriam. "Trying to reach herd immunity is 'unethical' and unprecedented, WHO head says". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved February 20, 2022.