Jay Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya (born 1968 in Kolkata, India) is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Bhattacharya's research focuses on the health and well-being of populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.
Most recently, Bhattacharya has focused his research on the epidemiology of COVID-19 and evaluation of the various policy responses to the epidemic. He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document proposing a relaxation of social controls that delay the spread of COVID-19.
Early life and education.
Bhattacharya has four degrees from Stanford, including an MD from Stanford Medical School and a PhD in economics.
Career.
Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a professor by courtesy of economics at Stanford, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a senior fellow by courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
From 2006 to 2008, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 1998 to 2001, he was an economist at the RAND Corporation and a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Department of Economics.
COVID-19 pandemic.
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. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. This would let the virus spread in low-risk groups, with the aim of achieving “herd immunity”, which would result in enough of the population becoming resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic. The authors conceded that it was hard to protect older people in the community, but suggested individuals could shield themselves and that efforts to keep infections low "merely dragged matters out". Bhattacharya wrote the declaration with Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University. It was published on 5 October 2020.
The World Health Organization and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the proposed strategy is dangerous, unethical, and lacks a sound scientific basis.
Writing for Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski speculated whether the scientists fronting the declaration were simply being useful idiots for American Institute for Economic Research, the organization promoting it, or whether they were actively being "motivated more by ideology than science", but said that the practical effect was that the declaration provided a narrative of scientific division useful for political purposes.
In an interview, Bhattacharya said he hoped the declaration would prompt a dialogue about the benefits and harms of public health interventions. In May 2020, Bhattacharya met with then-U.S. President Donald Trump's health officials to explain his criticism of lockdown policy and his proposal of "focused protection" on people.
In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the "biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made" and claimed that "The harm to people is catastrophic".
In May 2021, Bhattacharya was called as an expert witness for ten applicants who filed a constitutional challenge against Manitoba’s COVID-19 public health orders.
Publications.
Bhattacharya has published 135 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals in the fields of medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health, among others.