Jay Bhattacharya Age, Wife, Children, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Jay Bhattacharya

• Jay Bhattacharya served as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1998 to 2001.

• In 1998, Jay joined RAND Corporation, a non-profit global policy research institute, as an associate economist. He was later promoted to the designation of a full-time economist. He served in this position till 2001.

• Jay joined the Department of Health Research and Policy as an assistant professor in 2001. Later, he was promoted to the position of associate professor and then professor, a position he held until 2020.

• In 2001, Jay joined Stanford University as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics (by courtesy) and Department of Medicine. He was later promoted to the position of associate professor and then professor.

• In 2002, he joined the National Bureau of Economic Research as an FRF to research associate.

• Jay worked as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2006 to 2008.

• In 2007, he became a research associate at The SPHERE Institute and its partner firm Acumen, LLC.

• Jay has been a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) since 2013 and at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since 2014.

• Jay Bhattacharya was one of the first to question the strict lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as he was not sure how dangerous the virus was.

• On 24 March 2020, he co-wrote an article titled ‘Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?’ for The Wall Street Journal. In it, he argued, that there was not enough proof to support lockdowns and quarantines in the US.

• In April 2020, Jay helped lead a serology study in Santa Clara County, California. The study suggested that up to 80,000 people in the area might have already been infected with Covid-19.

• The serology study faced a lot of criticism for errors in the data and methods used. Critics also pointed out that the study did not clearly disclose possible conflicts of interest.

• In 2020, Jay co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested a different way to handle Covid-19. It recommended protecting vulnerable people from the virus while allowing healthy, younger individuals to return to their normal lives.

• In the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay and his colleagues, Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University, argued that letting the virus spread among low-risk groups could help the population build immunity. They believed this would eventually reduce the spread of the virus and end the pandemic.

• On 26 November 2024, Donald Trump nominated Jay Bhattacharya for the position of Director of the National Institutes of Health.