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Analysis: Concern About How Trump’s Health Nominee Covid Contrarians Will Handle the Next Pandemic
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President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.
“If the worst case scenario happens and we have a serious public health crisis, the body count is going to be enormous because these guys don’t have the skills or the will to do anything about it,” said John P. Moore, a virologist and professor at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medical College.
None of Mr. Trump’s picks have deep expertise in infectious disease, and each will have to be confirmed by the Senate. “At the end of the day, if they are confirmed, we are going to have to figure out a way to work with them,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University.
Mr. Trump’s own commitment to pandemic preparedness is unclear. During his first administration, he dismantled a White House office that had been set up by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, to deal with emerging global health threats. Last year, President Biden created a White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness, which Mr. Trump cannot abandon because Congress mandated it by legislation in 2022.
There is no way, of course, to predict the arrival of the next pandemic. At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, experts called it the worst public health crisis in a century. But most do not believe that it will be 100 years before another one. The current outbreak of the H5N1 virus, commonly known as “bird flu,” in cattle and poultry is of particular concern.
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