Trump’s health nominees want Covid vindication. Here’s how their critique has aged.

Politico December 2, 2024
Erin Schumaker, Juan Perez Jr., Chelsea Cirruzzo, Ben Leonard

Trump’s picks to lead the NIH and FDA were critics of health officials and their pandemic policies.

The Covid wars are still raging in 2024, and now the Covid contrarians are in charge.

President-elect Donald Trump has rounded out his roster of health agency nominees by picking Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University physician and economist who criticized lockdowns, school closures and health agency leadership during the pandemic, to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya joins a cohort of Trump nominees who made claims during the pandemic that were derided by health officials like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins as they led the Covid response. Those nominees include Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who criticized the Biden administration’s Covid...

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