The start of the COVID-19 pandemic is now more than a half decade in the rearview mirror, but trust in public health institutions remains at a historic low. By nominating Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a top skeptic of lockdown policies and mask mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), President Trump is taking an important step toward restoring transparency and accountability in public health policy and the field of medical science more broadly.
Bhattacharya had his first hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions this week, where he acknowledged the challenge of restoring public trust in science. “American biomedical sciences are at a crossroads,” he said. “A November 2024 Pew study reported that only 26 percent of the American public had a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, while 23 percent had not much or no confidence at all.”
Trust in science and in the NIH in particular collapsed in 2020 and 2021 amid lockdowns and mask guidance that appeared based more on politics than actual data about COVID-19. The agency was also mired in scandal following revelations that it provided funding to the lab in Wuhan, China from which the virus may have escaped – a theory that was initially discredited by top NIH officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci but later confirmed by the FBI as the most likely source of the virus.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor with an MD and a PhD, was an early critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, arguing that the virus was far less dangerous to healthy individuals than the public health establishment was suggesting. He was mercilessly criticized, mocked, and even threatened for his view that lockdowns were doing more harm than good.
On March 24, 2020, at the height of the early COVID-19 panic, Bhattacharya published an op-ed along with fellow Stanford professor Eran Bendavid in The Wall Street Journal where he stated his belief that “current estimates about the COVID-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude.” Later research would prove him exactly correct.
“A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community, and individual mental and physical health,” Bhattacharya wrote. “We should undertake immediate steps to understand the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.”
History shows this warning was prescient – out of fear of COVID-19, patients canceled medical appointments and procedures that could have saved their lives. Suicide and opioid abuse skyrocketed, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths of despair.
Bhattacharya was also a co-author along with Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 which challenged the wisdom of blanket COVID-19 lockdowns.
The declaration advocated for an approach called “focused protection,” warning that lockdowns would cause “irreparable damage” to public health, particularly for the working class and children. The authors emphasized that “keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable harm, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”
Instead, they argued that younger, lower-risk individuals should “live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” while society took targeted steps to protect high-risk populations like the elderly and those with preexisting conditions. Their goal was to balance public health priorities, minimizing overall harm while allowing societies to function.
This was the approach that the first Trump administration had adopted by that time. But Democrat politicians and many in the public health establishment continued to insist on strict lockdowns despite emerging evidence that healthy individuals were at very low risk of hospitalization or death from the virus.
Bhattacharya penned another op-ed in July 2021 along with colleague Neeraj Sood opposing mandatory masking of children in schools. “The benefits of masks in preventing serious illness or death from COVID-19 among children are infinitesimally small,” he wrote. “At the same time they are disruptive to learning and communicating in classrooms.”
At any point during the pandemic, it would have been far easier for Bhattacharya to keep his reservations to himself and go along with the health establishment. He would have avoided conflict with his peers at Stanford, the World Health Organization, and political leaders. But instead, he boldly chose to challenge establishment thinking because he believed that science should be driven by data, not politics.
That is why Trump’s nomination of Bhattacharya to lead the NIH is so encouraging. Just as Trump appointed a critic of military wokeness to lead the Pentagon, an anti-Deep State crusader to be Director of National Intelligence, and a Big Pharma skeptic to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he has nominated a top critic of NIH policy during the pandemic to reform the agency from the inside.
But as Bhattacharya said during his committee hearing, he still “loves” the NIH. To that end, outlined five specific steps he would take as director to “help the NIH better achieve its mission,” including focusing “on research that solves the American chronic disease crisis,” prioritizing research that is “replicable, reproducible, and generalizable,” establishing “a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent,” recommitting to the agency’s “mission to fund the most innovative biomedical research agenda possible,” and “embracing and vigorously regulating risky research that has the possibility of causing a pandemic.”
Bhattacharya’s confirmation process won’t get nearly the same media fanfare as the high-profile battles over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But as the case of Dr. Fauci shows, under-the-radar government officials can sometimes have a dramatic effect on the direction of the country.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
