The rise of Jay Bhattacharya

Looking at the Stanford physician's path, from being dismissed as "fringe" four years ago to holding influence with the next administration's health team

Image by Substack AI

You might not have heard of Jay Bhattacharya. But you’ve probably heard of his ideas — specifically the Stanford professor’s proposal, at the height of the pandemic, to start rolling back covid lockdowns.

The Great Barrington Declaration, released in October 2020, was written with professors from Harvard Medical School and University of Oxford. Its message of “focused protections” was embraced by conservative leaders, who wanted to end the months of lockdowns and resume daily life for many Americans, but its appeal crossed party lines; there were liberal parents who had grown worried about persistent school shutdowns and the long-term risks for their kids, for instance.

The declaration also made Bhattacharya a pariah in public health. The NIH director at the time privately dismissed Bhattacharya and his co-authors as “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a “take down,” per an email released under FOIA. Experts loudly warned that it was too soon to roll back covid protections, given that vaccines were still months away from being widely accessible. There were efforts to play down or even suppress the arguments that Bhattacharya and his allies were making, including on social media.

But things have changed.

At The Washington Post, I have a story about Bhattacharya and how he’s gone from a nemesis of public health leaders, scorned by NIH officials and the Biden administration, to a favorite of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who’s in line to be the nation’s health secretary. Public opinion on the covid response has steadily shifted, too, with Americans increasingly of the mind that restrictions like school shutdowns went on too long.

Now Bhattacharya is poised for a job in the coming Trump administration, perhaps atop the agency, NIH, whose leaders once derided him.

(I saw some prominent people on Twitter aggregating our story and claiming that Bhattacharya is definitively Trump’s choice to lead NIH. That’s not what we reported; my understanding is that he’s in the mix and certainly could be picked, but much can change very quickly, especially in TrumpWorld. More on that below.)

Our story provoked a lot of feedback — cheers for Bhattacharya from his outspoken allies, from Silicon Valley types, and even some left-leaning readers, as well as pans from people in the public health community who say he doesn’t belong in government.¹

You can read our story here:

Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya emerges as a top candidate to lead NIH

A few observations from the reporting process.

Bhattacharya remains a polarizing figure. The world may have largely moved past the pandemic, but that hasn’t healed the deep divisions left behind. Simply mentioning Bhattacharya still inspires wildly different reactions — sort of like Anthony Fauci, but just in reverse.

Bhattacharya is cheered by many people, mostly but not exclusively on the right, who see him as a hero for offering a dissenting view on how to handle covid. But he’s strongly opposed by people in public health and policy who can’t forgive the Great Barrington Declaration and see him as a major threat to public health.

Efforts to suppress Bhattacharya backfired. Public health leaders who wanted to knock down his arguments clearly didn’t succeed; many people found and embraced the Great Barrington Declaration anyway. Instead, attempts to blacklist Bhattacharya and his allies only made them into martyrs.

I’m often reminded of something I heard — I’m pretty sure it was John Dickerson on the Slate Political Gabfest years ago, talking about efforts to “Stop Trump”in the 2016 campaign — that whenever a “Stop this person” movement emerges, it usually is doomed to failure. First, it can perversely rally more people to the cause. Second, it’s a sign that there’s a lot of energy already building for said person and the establishment is growing nervous.

There’s lingering covid anger that may never be addressed. We got federal commissions to probe the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, of the 9/11 attacks. The goal of those commissions: helping Americans make sense of a major crisis, and doing it in a way that transcended party politics.

We never got a national reckoning on covid. We probably never will. The best opportunity to establish a federal covid commission was likely in early 2020, when there was relative unity on how to fight the virus and before divisions over covid had hardened into political differences. A bipartisan Senate bid to establish a commission in 2022 didn’t succeed.

Instead, we’ve had nearly five years of dueling committees in Congress that conducted their own investigations and released their own interpretations of what happened, a pattern that looks likely to continue. Both Democrats and Republicans have uncovered new details of the federal covid response, but there’s been little agreement on what those new findings mean. That’s probably contributed to the polarization of so many people and plans — including Bhattacharya and his proposals — involved in the covid response; you can choose your government explanation of what happened.

It remains chaotic to report on TrumpWorld. I’ve broken my share of news about the past few administrations. But it’s a very different experience to try to break a story about, say, the Biden administration — where internal decisions have tended to follow a certain, regular process that could take days or weeks to unfold — versus the Trump administration, where the ultimate decision could be TBD because Trump himself was so fickle and impulsive.

I remember Jonathan Swan, who was reporting for Axios during the first Trump administration, making a good point: simply reporting on a pending TrumpWorld decision could affect the outcome of said decision because Trump sometimes saw the story and changed his mind.

So in that spirit: I know that Jay Bhattacharya has been considered by Kennedy for a top health care role, and particularly to run NIH, per several good sources. I’ve been told he’s a favorite. I don’t know yet what his fate ultimately will be — and if our story changes things for him, one way or the other.

1. A small observation, but the social-media reaction seemed totally split between joy on X, which had a trending topic filled with praise of Bhattacharya, and anger on Bluesky, where users said they were agonized about the prospect of Bhattacharya in a big role.