Opinion: Trump’s pick to lead the NIH gets some things right

It’s a welcome sign that, unlike many of Donald Trump’s picks to lead parts of the nation’s health system, his pick for director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, is actually qualified. Though his record during the COVID-19 pandemic includes making catastrophically wrong predictions, he was also correct, especially later, on the need to consider the societal cost of prolonging early pandemic measures, including closures, hospital rules limiting visits, extended mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing rules.

Here’s some of what Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of health policy, got wrong about COVID-19:

• In the early days of the pandemic, Bhattacharya repeatedly predicted that the virus would likely kill about 20,000 to 40,000 Americans. (The death toll turned out to be about 1.2 million.)

• He co-wrote an influential early study that grossly overestimated how many people had already been infected and recovered from the disease, implying, incorrectly, that immunity was much more widespread than known and the disease was much less deadly than many assumed.

• In October 2020, he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for “focused protection” measures only for older people and the vulnerable while the virus swept through the rest of the then-unvaccinated population to supposedly grant herd immunity. But protecting older people alone while everyone else, including their caregivers, got infected was never going to be feasible. Additionally, those who were not older or obviously vulnerable could still be harmed from infections.

• In early 2021, with no evidence, Bhattacharya declared that a “majority of Indians have natural immunity” to COVID-19, claimed “vaccinating the whole population can cause great harm” and predicted his preferred approach would “reduce death rates from COVID infection to nearly zero.” Shortly afterward, India suffered a deadly wave that killed millions of people in just a few months — among the highest, fastest death rates of any country.

But Bhattacharya also has some valid points. He has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak and whether infections induced immunity. Public health authorities dismissed him and his allies as fringe and did not sufficiently address their views and assertions, many of which were demonstrably wrong. He also correctly wanted the societal costs of pandemic measures to be considered more strongly; Francis Collins, a former head of the NIH, agrees with that point.

If his many incorrect predictions had been correct, even the early pandemic isolation measures might have been excessive. But at the time Bhattacharya was making these predictions, it made sense to be cautious because we knew so little about COVID-19. Even he conceded then that a virus that could kill millions of people would need stricter policies, and we got just that.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, the course of Bhattacharya’s tenure will depend on whether he can concede what he got so wrong while remembering that now he will be the one who needs to keep an open mind and listen to his critics, even when what they’re saying is uncomfortable.

Zeynep Tufekci is a New York Times columnist.