Trump’s health department is stacked with people hostile to the idea of public health. The People’s CDC, an anti-COVID advocacy organization, had this to say about NIH Director Bhattacharya in March prior to his confirmation:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a health economist with a medical degree but no further medical training or practice. He endorsed and promoted mass COVID-19 infections to pursue an impossible to achieve infection-driven herd immunity. His policies such as mass infections relying on natural immunity would have led to even more illness, Long COVID, and deaths across the US. His extraordinarily wrong views on the pandemic include predicting, even late in 2020, that US COVID deaths would not reach 50,000, and assuring Floridians in mid-2021 that enough had been vaccinated – though far more have died since then. Videos from as recent as 2024 continue to show him advocating ineffective treatments for COVID-19 such as ivermectin, opposing layered protections against COVID-19, and belittling the value of important tools such as masking and vaccines.

Instead of focusing on advancing the medical sciences, Bhattacharya wants to intertwine politics and policies at NIH and prioritize funding based on academic freedom instead of innovative and impactful medical and health sciences research. If confirmed as the director of NIH, he will continue to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 and potentially other infectious diseases, and steer NIH towards investment in ineffective treatments for diseases such as focusing on seroprevalence studies. Ultimately, this will harm and reverse the already monumental discoveries at NIH. He will likely assist Secretary Kennedy’s current efforts to delay and even prevent the development of effective therapeutics for infectious diseases, including COVID-19 – and for Long COVID. Finally, there is no reason to think he will fight this administration’s attacks on NIH staffing and cuts in research funding.