Jay Bhattacharya: another Covid-19 critic goes to Washington

Before President-elect Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine, to lead the National Institutes of Health, Bhattacharya rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. The doctor opposed lockdowns and, later, vaccine and mask mandates.

An elite doctor takes on the Covid consensus

Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata, India, and emigrated to the United States when he was a child. He attended Stanford University for both his undergraduate and Ph.D. work in economics as well as for his M.D. He first worked for the RAND Corporation as an economist during the late 1990s before securing a position at the Stanford School of Medicine. At Stanford, Bhattacharya has been a prolific researcher who focused on issues of aging, nutrition and wellness. He still serves as the university's director of the Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

In 2020, he became one of the leaders of a movement pushing back against stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the Covid-19 pandemic. A widely shared March 24, 2020, Wall Street Journal op-ed that he co-authored with Eran Bendavid speculated that no more than 20,000 to 40,000 people would die of the virus in the United States. A policy of indefinite lockdowns "may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health," they said. In terms of the "claim-staking" article's accuracy, "for every death his estimate implied, there were, in the end, more than 35," said David Wallace-Wells at The New York Times.

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Bhattacharya was also one of the three initial co-authors of the "Great Barrington Declaration," an October 2020 anti-lockdown open letter that was eventually signed by thousands of public health leaders and scientists. Existing Covid mitigation policies, including business restrictions and school closures, were "producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health," the authors said. Instead, they recommended a policy of "focused protection," which would allow "those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally" while concentrating mitigation measures on the highest-risk individuals. The letter's recommendations are "the epitome of arrogance," said Brooks B. Gump at U.S. News and World Report. Critics charged that the Great Barrington Declaration's "approach would endanger Americans who have underlying conditions" and could result in perhaps a half-million deaths," said Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg at The New York Times. More than 1.2 million Americans have died of Covid-19 since March 2020.

Bhattacharya also published numerous scholarly studies about Covid-19, including a 2020 European Journal of Clinical Investigation paper. Assessing the success or failure of various mitigation strategies in containing the spread of the virus, "we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures," they said. Bhattacharya also opposed mask mandates in schools. Masking schoolchildren can interfere with communication and "exacerbates the chances that a child will experience anxiety and depression," he wrote in a 2021 paper with Neeraj Sood.

Mixed reactions

Reactions to Bhattacharya's nomination have been mixed, breaking down largely along familiar Covid battle lines. Bhattacharya is a "serious scientist with a track record of success," said Justin Perry at The Dispatch, praising his courage in challenging the public health consensus during the pandemic. Bhattacharya's appointment will be a "major victory for science and academic freedom," said John Tierney at City Journal, who expects Bhattacharya to use his funding discretion to reward research universities that uphold conservative viewpoints about academic freedom. Bhattacharya is "actually qualified," said Zeynep Tufekci at The New York Times. While many of his predictions were wrong, he should be appreciated for forcing officials to consider the "societal cost of prolonging early pandemic measures," said Tufekci.

Bhattacharya is an "A-tier Covid minimizer" whose appointment is "very worrying in the context of what the NIH does," said Beatrice Adler-Bolton at the Death Panel podcast. His appointment is "a nod not only toward Covid and lockdown skeptics but also to those who might place economic concerns over public health," said Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic.