David Faris
Before President-elect Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine, to lead the National Institutes of Health, Bhattacharya rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. The doctor opposed lockdowns and, later, vaccine and mask mandates.
An elite doctor takes on the Covid consensus
Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata, India, and emigrated to the United States when he was a child. He attended Stanford University for both his undergraduate and Ph.D. work in economics as well as for his M.D. He first worked for the RAND Corporation as an economist during the late 1990s before securing a position at the Stanford School of Medicine. At Stanford, Bhattacharya has been a prolific researcher who focused on issues of aging, nutrition and wellness. He still serves as the university's director of the Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
In 2020, he became one of the leaders of a movement pushing back against stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the Covid-19 pandemic. A widely shared March 24, 2020, Wall Street Journal op-ed that he co-authored with Eran Bendavid speculated that no more than 20,000 to 40,000 people would die of the virus in the United States. A policy of indefinite lockdowns "may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health," they said. In terms of the "claim-staking" article's accuracy, "for every death his estimate implied, there were, in the end, more than 35," said David Wallace-Wells at The New York Times.
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