Donald Trump appoints Jay Bhattacharya as National Institutes of Health director

United President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Jay Bhattacharya as the Director of the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya, an economist from Kolkata with medical studies at Stanford University, was a critic of US COVID policy. He will now lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public funder of medical research, overseeing a budget of $47.3 billion.

The NIH has faced scrutiny from Robert F Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH.

The NIH director manages 27 institutes and centers focused on early-stage research, from emerging pandemic vaccines to new drug targets.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya along with two other academics published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020. The declaration called for a return to normal life for those not vulnerable to the virus.

Bhattacharya later sued the government, claiming it pressured social media platforms to censor his opinions.

He graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford in 2000.

A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bhattacharya also directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.