President-elect Donald Trump has assembled a team of medical contrarians and health care critics to fulfill an agenda aimed at remaking how the federal government oversees medicines, health programs and nutrition.
On Tuesday night, Trump nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, tapping an opponent of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates to lead the nation’s top medical research agency. He is the latest in a string of Trump nominees who were critics of COVID-19 health measures.
Bhattacharya and the other nominees are expected to play pivotal roles in implementing Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s sprawling “Make America Healthy Again,” agenda, which calls for removing thousands of additives from U.S. foods, rooting out conflicts of interest at agencies and incentivizing healthier foods in school lunches and other nutrition programs. Trump nominated Kennedy to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH and other federal health agencies.“You’re hearing a very different tune as we head into this new Trump administration,” said Gabby Headrick, a nutrition researcher at George Washington University’s school of public health. “It’s important that we all proceed with caution and remember some of the public health losses we saw the first time.”
Trump’s nominees don’t have experience running large bureaucratic agencies, but they know how to talk about health on TV.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid pick Dr. Mehmet Oz hosted a talk show for 13 years and is a well-known wellness and lifestyle influencer. The pick for the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, and for surgeon general, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, had been frequent Fox News contributors.
Some of them have ties to Florida like many of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees: Dave Weldon, the pick for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, represented the state in Congress for 14 years.
Here’s a look at how the nominees may carry out Kennedy’s plans to “reorganize” agencies, which have an overall $1.7 trillion budget, employ 80,000 scientists, researchers, doctors and other officials:National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, with a $48 billion budget, funds medical research through grants to scientists across the nation and conducts its own research.
Bhattacharya, a health economist and physician at Stanford University, was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.
The document — which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
