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Trump chooses Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH


Dr. Jay 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.
Dr. Jay 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. 

He is a supporter of Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert Kennedy Jr., commending Kennedy’s vows to end the United States’ chronic disease epidemic and clean up corruption in the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

If appointed, Bhattacharya would have no direct authority over the CDC and FDA, agencies he fiercely criticized during the COVID pandemic, The CDC, FDA and NIH are separate operating divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services.

At NIH, Bhattacharya vowed he would change NIH’s “top-down leadership,” setting term limits on institute directors to encourage the influx of new ideas, he told

WASHINGTON — President elect Donald J. Trump announced on Tuesday night that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of health policy and outspoken critic of the nation’s public health system, to lead the National Institutes of Health.

In a statement on social media, Trump said that “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will 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,” referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Bhattacharya would lead the $47.5 billion agency that is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. NIH is a collection of 27 institutes and centers focusing on cancer, infectious disease, mental health, heart and lung ailments and drug abuse, among other medical matters.

“I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of the American scientific and public health institutions after the COVID-era fiasco so that they work for the benefit of the American people,” Bhattacharya said on X before he was selected.

In choosing Bhattacharya, Trump is picking someone with expertise in economics and health care policy who leads Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. With an MD and PhD in economics, he is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, as well as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

But he has no experience in basic or applied clinical biomedical research and has never held a government post. For the past 50 years, NIH has been led by known authorities in fields ranging from radiology to genetics. Many of them directed smaller agencies before stepping up to lead NIH, a job with immense administrative responsibilities.

He would replace Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon and lab scientist who championed the use of artificial intelligence tools to create a research database. She also worked to make clinical trials more accessible to rural and minority patients.

Prior to spring 2020, Bhattacharya was a little-known academic who specialized in health policy issues such as physician payment, costs and quality of care, geographic variation in medical practices and regulatory surveillance of FDA-approved products. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was an economist at the RAND Corporation and taught classes in the economics department at UCLA.

But when the COVID pandemic broke out, Bhattacharya emerged as a leading critic of the interventions taken against the pandemic, such as business and school closings, mask and social distancing advisories and lockdowns.

The lockdowns and school closures created economic and societal devastation, he argued. He called for pursuing “herd immunity” through natural infections of those who were not sick or elderly.

He took aim at the NIH, saying it engaged in “massive suppression of scientific debate and research.” …read more

Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment

      

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