Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, proponent of scientific freedom and free speech, confirmed by Senate to lead NIH

UPDATE, 3/27/25: On Tuesday, March 25, the Senate confirmed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya along party lines, to lead the NIH.

11/27/24: Donald Trump has announced that he has selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya will work alongside Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who was chosen by Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services. “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Trump wrote in a statement on Truth Social.

Bhattacharya was a vocal opponent of lockdowns during the pandemic, arguing that they were harmful to children, and in October 2020 co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a document which recommended a different approach than what was implemented at the time. Former NIH Director Francis Collins had urged Dr. Anthony Fauci to do a “takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration. Now, Bhattacharya will sit in Collins’ former position. Bhattacharya wrote in an article in July 2023:

In an email obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Francis Collins, then-Director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), called Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorf [the Great Barrington Declaration authors] “fringe epidemiologists.”

Writing to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Collins called for “a quick and devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration. 

Fauci later sent Collins articles in Wired and The Nation that harshly criticized the declaration. Yet when Fauci was deposed in the Missouri v. Biden case he denied even knowing what the Great Barrington Declaration was. 

The Biden administration pressured social media platforms like Twitter to censor Bhattacharya for his views. A federal appeals court ruled in his favor in 2023, saying that the White House, surgeon general, CDC, and FBI “likely violated the First Amendment” by censoring Bhattacharya and other scientists and physicians who disagreed with the Biden administration’s coercively implemented censorship.

“I think this ruling is akin to the second Enlightenment,” Bhattacharya told the New York Post after the ruling. “It’s a ruling that says there’s a democracy of ideas. The issue is not whether the ideas are wrong or right. The question is who gets to control what ideas are expressed in the public square?”

While Bhattacharya does not appear to have publicly espoused his views regarding abortion, free speech is a value that the pro-life movement holds dear. The First Amendment rights of pro-lifers have been restricted in numerous places through the use of “buffer zones” which disallow any free pro-life speech within a certain distance of an abortion facility. It is specifically pro-life speech and actions that are restricted within these zones. On high school and college campuses, free pro-life speech is often either disallowed by school authorities or, if allowed, becomes the target of pro-abortion censorship and/or violence. Some cities and states have additionally attempted to trample on the First Amendment rights of pregnancy resource centers. The list goes on.

READ: Global attacks against pro-life speech at abortion facilities are an attack on women’s choice

Bhattacharya once wrote an op-ed talking about fighting government censorship, and the importance of not only free speech, but diversity of thought. “When I was 19, I became an American citizen,” he wrote. “… The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target.”

He added that due to the censorship he suffered, he “can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young. Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we, the people, who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, we will lose them.”

Bhattacharya is originally from Kolkata, India, and received both his MD and PhD from Stanford. In addition to his medical career, Bhattacharya has worked as an economist at the RAND Corporation, a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Department of Economics, and as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently a professor of medicine at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

According to the Stanford website, his research “focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.” More recently, he has focused on the epidemiology of COVID-19, and the policy responses to the epidemic.

Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.