President-elect Trump selected a critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is known for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 manifesto that advocated allowing COVID to spread in order to achieve herd immunity.

President elect Donald Trump nominated health policy researcher Jay Bhattacharya to head the US National Institutes of Health, the sprawling agency that oversees close to $50 billion in biomedical research spending.

Stanford doctor Jay Bhattacharya is best known as one of the three authors of an October 2020 manifesto that proposed an alternative to COVID-19 lockdowns.