Stanford Doctor Tapped for Key Post by Trump Advocated for Letting COVID Spread

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice this week to lead the National Institutes of Health is a controversial Stanford researcher who was highly critical of the COVID-19 pandemic response, drawing pushback from the medical community and some still suffering from the long-term effects of the disease.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, was one of three co-authors of a 2020 letter that challenged policies like lockdowns and mask mandates and called for speeding up herd immunity.

The so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which was written before the widespread availability of a vaccine, argued that measures should be taken to protect those who were most vulnerable to dying of COVID-19 but that others “should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.” Allowing the virus to spread among younger, healthier people would help drive up natural immunity and “minimize mortality and social harm,” it said.

The strategy was brought to the attention of then-President Trump by his pandemic adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas — a Stanford colleague of Bhattacharya and Hoover Institution fellow — but the scientific community swiftly excoriated it. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dismissed it as “total nonsense,” and many physicians, scientists and other experts said the “fringe” approach was unethical and would endanger millions of people.

“Hearing from researchers who were pushing ideas for how a health department should be responding, when they themselves were not responding or seeing patients — to me, I was like, you guys have major gaps in what expertise you’re bringing to the kind of things you’re putting forward,” said Dr. Abraar Karaan, a Stanford infectious-diseases physician who helped lead Massachusetts’ COVID-19 response.

Bhattacharya is not a practicing physician. According to Stanford, his research “focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations.”

“Dr. Bhattacharya, who is a researcher but doesn’t see patients, was not on the front lines the way many of us as clinicians were,” Karaan said.

Karaan did point out Bhattacharya’s impressive track record as a researcher, including receiving the highest level of grants from the NIH.

The NIH conducts and funds major biomedical and public health research for the United States. If confirmed by the Senate, Bhattacharya would lead the sprawling agency — with a budget pushing $50 billion.

Many have concerns over where that research and funding will be directed under the next Trump administration. His choice to lead the NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist who has also called for turning the government’s public health focus away from infectious disease.

“I agree that chronic disease is a big problem; I totally agree with that,” Karaan said. “But we don’t get to decide where the spotlight goes when you have actual health emergencies happening. We don’t get to decide when infectious diseases are no longer something we care about.”

For some Bay Area patients with long COVID and their advocates, Bhattacharya’s nomination is especially concerning. Millions of Americans are estimated to have had the increasingly widespread chronic condition, whose symptoms often include brain fog and fatigue.

Much is still unknown about long COVID, including what makes people susceptible to it. Many of those still suffering from its debilitating effects were otherwise young and healthy — the same population that Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors proposed allowing to contract and spread COVID-19 during the height of the pandemic.

Charlie McCone, 34, has had long COVID since March 2020. The San Francisco resident said many in the long COVID community were already frustrated with how the NIH was prioritizing funding and research, though they had seen recent signs of progress.

“Zero diseases in the history of the world have been solved with a one-time investment of funds,” he told KQED. “We have to be serious about having substantial funds on an annual basis to actually get somewhere with this condition.”

McCone praised the direction of the NIH’s approach under Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who was named director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases last year. However, he noted that advocates are still pushing for annual funding for long COVID research and to give it a permanent home in the NIH.

“If we had allocated a one-time fund to the NIH for HIV in the mid-’80s … and decided we were going to just stop giving funds because we didn’t see a return on investment, that would have been deemed as completely irrational and completely nonsensical,” McCone said. “And so I think anybody who’s taking that perspective now, I think the same applies.”

KQED’s Keith Mizuguchi contributed to this report.