President asks former COVID lockdown critic to oversee Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while remaining head of National Institutes of Health.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, is temporarily leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at President Donald Trump’s request, marking a significant shift for a physician who once stood outside federal health leadership.
Bhattacharya said the president personally asked him to assume oversight of the CDC until a permanent director is confirmed by the Senate, according to a Just the News report.
“It’s hard to say ‘no’ to the president. What it means is that I will still be the director of the NIH. That’s my main day job,” Bhattacharya said during an interview with “Full Measure” at NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. “But over the next couple of months, I’m gonna go work with folks at the CDC to help get the agency in a place where the new director, whoever ends up being Senate confirmed, we’ll have an organization that’s running well so that they can get their priorities in place.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya was a medical doctor and professor at Stanford University, focused primarily on academic research and journal publications. During the pandemic, he emerged as a prominent critic of government-imposed lockdowns, arguing on scientific grounds that the policies were causing unintended harm.
“I did a bunch of research that suggested that the lockdowns were not helping people, in fact, were causing tremendous harm to the poor children in the working class, all the school closures and all that,” he said.
Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that called for focused protection of vulnerable populations rather than widespread lockdowns. The declaration garnered thousands of signatures from medical and public health professionals.
At the time, he faced criticism from senior federal health officials, including then-NIH Director Dr. Frances Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was later disclosed that the two officials had discussed what they termed a “devastating take-down” of Bhattacharya and his colleagues in response to the declaration.
Now, Bhattacharya leads the NIH and is temporarily overseeing the CDC—two agencies that were central to the public health response during the pandemic.
He says his focus is to remove political considerations from scientific research and agency operations.
“The cultural shift is, is enormous,” Bhattacharya said.
“The purpose and the mission of the NIH is to do research that improves the health and longevity of the American people,” he added. “First of all, everyone should be behind that mission. And then second, once you say that’s the mission, that we’re only gonna be focused on the mission, it frees you up from all of the baggage.
“You don’t have to worry about looking over your shoulder, that you aren’t ideologically pure enough. You just focus on science that can translate over to solving the longevity problems that the United States has, the chronic disease problems, the real problems.”
Some in the medical establishment have criticized decisions made under his leadership, particularly regarding COVID policy and vaccine-related issues.
Bhattacharya responded to that criticism by saying: “If the NIH’s mission is to do support research that translates into better health and longer life for Americans, well, the NIH over the last 15 years has failed in its mission.
“And so the idea that it’s anti-science or politicizing the agency to remove political agendas from the agency, it’s almost Orwellian. And so when I see these stories, my general understanding of them is that it’s people that benefited from the old system where the focus was in part on ideology.”
He also indicated that the NIH would expand efforts to study vaccine injuries and potential treatments.
“We’re working on that,” he told “Full Measure.” “One of the things that Tony Fauci’s old NIAID is gonna be doing is studying vaccine injury.”
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