Jay Bhattacharya and the Vindication of the ‘Fringe’ Scientists

Say this much about Donald Trump, he has a sense of political irony. Last week the president-elect tapped Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. Call it revenge of the Covid lockdown skeptics.

Francis Collins, the NIH chief between 2009-21, derided Dr. Bhattacharya as a “fringe” scientist for urging the government to focus on protecting the vulnerable while letting others go about their lives. Dr. Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta formally expounded this idea in the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.