Jay Bhattacharya is currently the frontrunner to take over the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under President-elect Donald Trump.
The story was first reported by The Washington Post. A source familiar confirmed to The Epoch Times that the report reflected Trump’s plans.
The presumptive nomination comes after Trump announced he would place Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH.
If Bhattacharya is ultimately nominated and confirmed to lead the agency, he would be responsible for 27 institutes and centers on issues ranging from cancer and aging to drug abuse. Those include the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was formerly chaired by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya was a lead author of the Great Barrington Declaration alongside Harvard University’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta. That document, which garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, called for an end to the COVID-19 lockdowns, which had been in effect for most of 2020.
That letter opposed lockdowns and mask mandates, and argued for a public health policy focused on bolstering immunity through vaccination of those vulnerable to COVID-19 and natural exposure for those not at risk from the infection.
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In emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, former NIH Director Francis Collins—who left the post in December 2021 but continued to work as a science adviser to President Joe Biden—expressed concern that the declaration was “getting a lot of attention.”
“There needs to be a quick and devastating public takedown of its premises,” the October 2020 email from Collins to Fauci reads.
Bhattacharya said during an April 2022 appearance on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” that COVID-19 policy was “the biggest public health mistake in history,” citing both the direct harms it caused to the economy and the indirect harms it caused to children.
If Bhattacharya is chosen and confirmed, he would be subordinate to Kennedy if the latter is also confirmed.
Kennedy told The Epoch Times in September that he would order the NIH to focus on the sharp increase in autism, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopment disorders in recent decades.
—Joseph Lord
KENNEDY’S HHS PLANS
Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS promises to bring many changes to how public health is handled in the U.S.
Since he began his independent bid for the presidency, Kennedy has promised to effectively gut and rebuild federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the NIH, and others that fall under HHS.
Before he can make any of those changes, he’ll need to win at least 50 votes in the U.S. Senate. Senate Republicans have suggested they’re favorable to the nominee, but the outcome is still uncertain.
Staff Changes
Kennedy has promised huge changes to staffing HHS-related agencies.
In an Oct. 25 post on X, Kennedy told current FDA employees, “Pack your bags.” He’s promised cuts to entire departments, such as those related to nutrition, that he told MSNBC “are not doing their jobs.”
The same attitude extends to the NIH, where Kennedy hopes to replace as many as 600 people on day one.
Chemicals and Ultra-Processed Foods
Kennedy has also promised to make changes to what ingredients are used in American foods, particularly targeting harmful chemicals, like artificial dyes, and heavily processed foods, like seed oils.
He argues these are partially responsible for the massive increase in childhood obesity and chronic illness in the past decade.
Fighting Corporate Capture
Kennedy has said that these harmful foods have been allowed in part due to the mingling of corporate interests with the government bodies that regulate them, a phenomenon known as corporate capture.
“These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations,” Kennedy said on Aug. 23.
“With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding.”
Vaccines
Though he’s often dubbed an “anti-vaxxer” by critics, Kennedy has repeatedly insisted that he has no intention of banning vaccines.
Instead, he’s emphasized the importance of informed consent, and said that this requires greater transparency around safety tests and adverse effects.
“[Trump] doesn’t want me to take vaccines away from people. If you want to take a vaccine, you ought to be able to take it. We believe in free choice in this country. You ought to know the risks and benefits of everything you take,” Kennedy said.
Fluoride
In a Nov. 2 post, Kennedy said that one of Trump’s first acts in office would be to advise U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.
It comes after a federal court ordered the FDA to take action on a report that fluoride might lower children’s IQ “at dosages that are far too close to fluoride levels in the drinking water of the United States.”
At a Sept. 30 town hall in Philadelphia, Kennedy called fluoride “a poison.”
“The simple answer is, I don’t like it,” he said.
—Jeff Louderback, Joseph Lord
BOOKMARKS
Janice Trey, the CEO of The Epoch Times, came to the role after an unlikely rise from a childhood in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forced labor camp, The Epoch Times’ Eva Fu reported. After her experience of the communist regime, Trey said she hopes to “give a voice to the voiceless” in the role.
As ballots for the 2024 election continue to be counted and confirmed, The Epoch Times’s Aaron Giffords reported that election workers are running into an unexpected problem: namely, that the youngest voters never learned cursive. This has led to a mismatch on many ballots between the signature on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles and the signature attached to the ballot.
Adam Smith, a North Carolina resident, spent 17 years as a U.S. Army Green Beret. Now, The Epoch Times’ Samantha Flom reported, he’s using those same skills to direct the “Redneck Air Force” in western North Carolina, where residents are still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Helene.
Trump’s sweeping victory in the 2024 presidential election came due to vast shifts in the American landscape, The Epoch Times’ Joseph Lord and Terri Wu reported. Six charts show how Trump shifted voters based on gender, education, age, and race—and how those changes shaped the map.
