Trump to nominate COVID denialist as head of the National Institutes of Health
By 
Apparently Richard Epstein was unavailable:
President-elect Donald Trump said he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health policy professor and economist at Stanford University known for his criticism of COVID-19 lockdowns, as his director of the National Institutes of Health.
Bhattacharya would work in coordination with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic whom Trump nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Both nominations are subject to Senate confirmation.
“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 said in a statement Tuesday. “Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!”
If confirmed, Bhattacharya would take over the largest biomedical agency in the world. It has a $47.7 billion budget and encompasses 27 institutes and centers.
Bhattacharya is co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 manifesto in which he and other health professionals made the case against lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. They argued the virus should be allowed to spread naturally through younger Americans, who were at less risk to be severely harmed by COVID-19, to achieve “herd immunity” while older Americans took more protective measures.
“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls,” the treatise reads. “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”
In a March 2020 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bhattacharya argued COVID-19 could be a “20,000 or 40,000 death epidemic” in the U.S. Four years later, more than 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19, according to the latest figures by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among Bhattacharya’s biggest critics is Dr. Francis Collins, the NIH director from 2009 to 2021, who called the Great Barrington Declaration “a fringe component of epidemiology” designed to fit “the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.”
There’s a consensus forming that some jurisdictions, in retrospect, kept schools closed longer than was optimal. But among Republicans and a lot of pundits, this seems to be quickly morphing into a belief that virtually all measures to combat the COVID pandemic were unjustified, and in the case of most Republicans that includes the vaccine. It’s a not an encouraging situation!