


After a slew of picks late last night by President-elect Donald Trump, there are only a few remaining Cabinet positions to fill, including who will be the head of the National Institutes of Health — and one candidate has risen to the top of that list.
According to a Washington Post report, Stanford University physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya is the top candidate for the high-level position in an agency that oversees biomedical research in the United States.
The report noted that Bhattacharya impressed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week at a meeting between the two about potential reforms of the NIH. Those reforms have included directing funding to more innovative research and lessening the influence of some of the senior officials at the agency.
Trump appointed Kennedy to lead the the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH and other health agencies. Trump announced the picks for some of those other agencies last night, including Marty Makary as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Dave Weldon as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy posted ringing endorsements of both of those picks on X earlier Saturday.
Bhattacharya has been a strong critic of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, directing specific attention at Dr. Anthony Fauci, a former NIH official and head of the pandemic response before retiring at the end of 2022. Fauci has faced intense questioning from Republicans over the years, including most recently in the House this past summer.
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Bhattacharya also co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that called for scaling down lockdown policies in favor of herd immunity for those less vulnerable to COVID-19, while still protecting those who are.
According to his Stanford University page, he is a professor of both health policy and economics at Stanford, while also serving as a senior fellow for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.