1. Jayanta Bhattacharya was born on 1968 and is an American physician-scientist and health economist who has served as the 18th Director of the National Institutes of Health since 2025.
24 Facts About Jay Bhattacharya
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Jay Bhattacharya was an investigator at Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
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Jay Bhattacharya's research focused on the economics of health care.
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Jay Bhattacharya opposed the lockdowns and mask mandates imposed in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Jay Bhattacharya was born in 1968 in Kolkata, India to a Bengali Hindu family.
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Jay Bhattacharya continued his studies at Stanford, simultaneously pursuing a medical degree and a doctorate in economics.
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Jay Bhattacharya began his career at the RAND Corporation as an economist, while simultaneously serving as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the UCLA.
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Jay Bhattacharya later held a research fellowship at the Hoover Institution from 2006 to 2008.
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Jay Bhattacharya serves as a professor of medicine, with courtesy professorships in both economics and health research and policy.
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Jay Bhattacharya is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
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Jay Bhattacharya's research focuses on population health and well-being, with particular attention to the impact of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economic factors.
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Jay Bhattacharya was a lead author of a serology study released in April 2020 that suggested that as many as 80,000 residents of Santa Clara County, California, might have already been infected with SARS-CoV-w.
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Jay Bhattacharya is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19 through "focused protection" of the people most at risk.
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Jay Bhattacharya wrote the declaration with Martin Kulldorff, at the time a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University.
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At the beginning of 2021, Jay Bhattacharya wrote an op-ed in favor of reserving initially limited vaccine supplies in India for patients who had not been previously infected with COVID-19.
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In March 2021, Jay Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the "biggest public health mistake we've ever made" and argued that "The harm to people is catastrophic".
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In May 2021, Jay Bhattacharya was called as an expert witness for ten applicants who filed a constitutional challenge against Manitoba's COVID-19 public health orders.
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Jay Bhattacharya publicly opposed COVID-19 vaccine passports and mandates, although he called the vaccines successful.
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Jay Bhattacharya was named a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a new think tank launched by Jeffrey Tucker that published articles opposing various measures against COVID-19; Kulldorff and Gupta, his co-authors on the Great Barrington Declaration, have had roles there.
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Jay Bhattacharya alleged that "Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google" suppressed "our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation'".
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Later in 2022, when COVID boosters for the Omicron variant were available, Jay Bhattacharya made multiple misleading statements about them, including incorrectly describing how they were tested.
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In June 2024, Bhattacharya was listed as a plaintiff on the US Supreme Court case Murthy v Missouri but ultimately lost the case due to lack of legal standing.
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Jay Bhattacharya has said he plans to prevent grants from being made to universities that fail to support academic freedom.
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Jay Bhattacharya's nomination was confirmed by the US Senate on March 25,2025.