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Stanford University professor and Covid-19 lockdown sceptic Jay Bhattacharya has emerged as the frontrunner to run the National Institutes of Health, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The nomination of Bhattacharya, who rose to prominence during the pandemic for opposing lockdown restrictions, would put another ally of Robert Kennedy Jr, the vaccine sceptic who is Trump’s pick to run the US health department, in charge of one of the country’s most powerful public health agencies.

With an annual budget of $48bn, NIH is the biggest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world, providing more than 60,000 grants a year to support medical and scientific research.

Senior officials within Trump’s transition team have spoken with Bhattacharya, who runs Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, in recent days, the people said.

The pick for NIH director is likely to be announced in the coming days but plans may change and another candidate may emerge, the people added.

Representatives for Trump’s transition team and Kennedy did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bhattacharya could also not be reached for comment.

Late on Friday, Trump’s transition team announced a flurry of high profile nominations, including Treasury secretary, Labor secretary and three key health official picks.

Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine mandate, was nominated to run the Food and Drug Administration. Physician and former GOP congressman Dave Weldon, who has cast doubts on vaccine safety, was tapped to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bhattacharya appeared alongside Kennedy at a campaign event during his independent campaign for President, during which he unveiled his running mate Nicole Shanahan.

Since backing Trump’s bid for presidency in August, Kennedy has been given significant influence over the president’s healthcare policy agenda as part of his “Make American Healthy Again” campaign. Trump’s choice of Fox News medical contributor Janette Nesheiwat was the only one of the health appointees so far not close to Kennedy, the people added.

Alongside two other professors, Bhattacharya became the face of the “Great Barrington Declaration” during the pandemic, an open letter published in October 2020 opposing widescale lockdowns and instead calling for restrictions focused on at-risk groups, such as elderly individuals. The letter provoked criticism from then-NIH director Francis Collins, who dismissed the authors as “fringe experts”.

Much of Bhattacharya’s public criticism of the NIH has focused on how Collins and Anthony Fauci — former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of NIH — responded to the pandemic.

Bhattacharya told the Financial Times this month that he supported term limits for NIH directors. “I think there’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few people: there should not be another Tony Fauci,” he said.

Kennedy’s nomination as Health and Human Services secretary has worried the pharmaceutical industry and public health bodies because of his sceptical views on vaccines, his stated aim to eliminate “entire departments” within the FDA and his plans to remove fluoride from drinking water. However, Kennedy has promised not to limit vaccine access.

In an article on digital media site UnHerd published last week, Bhattacharya brushed away concerns about some of Kennedy’s debunked claims, saying: “Kennedy is not a scientist, but his good-faith calls for better research and more debate are echoed by many Americans.”

He added that “the American public voted for disrupters like RFK Jr in 2024, and academic medicine now has an opportunity to atone for its Covid-era blunders.”

Roula Khalaf

Editor

The shortlisted titles for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award are, by definition, some of the most compelling reads of 2024. For readers who missed the announcement of the shortlist, I recommend every one of the six books. Since I chair the judging panel, I can’t reveal my personal favourite and we have yet to decide on the winner. Stay tuned. I do most of the reading of the longlist over the summer. My rule, however, is to read one novel before I start. My pick this year was Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, an epic tale of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family. It has everything I love about a novel — sensitive character studies and the sweep of history.

Janine Gibson

FT WEEKEND EDITOR

If you are alive in 2024 you will know that X (né Twitter) is either haemorrhaging users or was the most important and influential spreader of misinformation during the US election campaign. Elon Musk, who bought the world’s 12th most popular social media platform for $44bn just two years ago, is either a delusional posting-addict in thrall to RTs or the man who won it for Donald Trump. And as one of X’s most enduring memes says, why not both? In 2024, where major newspapers do not bother to endorse their preferred candidates in public, a platform that does not officially at least consider itself media dominated another election campaign and its owner claimed victory. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The ballad of Elon and Donald doubtless has a few more verses to go, but in Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac have produced a deeply reported, revealing and slightly terrifying book that is considerably subtler than its subtitle. 

Frederick Studemann

Literary Editor

Much has been written about the chilling realities of Putin’s Russia. Yet, in a very crowded field, Patriot by Alexei Navalny is in a class of its own. This haunting autobiography ranges from vivid, often funny accounts of growing up in the lie-infested Soviet Union through the hopes of the post-communist years and on to Navalny’s emergence as the opposition leader prepared to stand up to state power for which he was hounded, imprisoned and poisoned. Unflinching, defiant and even hopeful, the book was published after Navalny’s death in unexplained circumstances earlier this year in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. It is — to borrow the author’s own description — a shocking and extraordinary “memorial”.

On a very different note, I enjoyed Long Island by Colm Tóibín. Sequels are often best avoided. But in this follow-up to his celebrated novel Brooklyn, Tóibín elegantly brings the story back to Ireland where he unfurls a poignant tale of paths not taken and opportunities lost.

Janan Ganesh

International politics commentator

Of the great 20th-century politicians, Zhou Enlai is probably the least documented, at least in the form of English-language biographies. In Zhou Enlai, author Chen Jian plugs the hole, perhaps too exhaustively at times. Whether the long-serving Chinese premier was Mao’s accomplice, or a bridge to modern China, is teased out over more than 700 scrupulous pages.

Nilanjana Roy

FT Weekend columnist

“Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing.” Hisham Matar’s profoundly moving and unsettling novel My Friends haunted my year. He writes of exile, of friendships woven from “great affection and loyalty” but also “absence and suspicion”, and you walk with him through a London filled with the whispers of writers’ ghosts, memories and betrayal. Unforgettable.

Rana Foroohar

Global Business Columnist

I’ve long thought that most of the world’s biggest problems — from climate change to rising inequality to the challenges of autocracy and oligarchy in a post-Washington Consensus world — will require more systems thinking. This is an area that is generally the wonky purview of engineers and the military, but in his very readable book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies looks at how discrete problems, from bad business management to disastrous political decisions, are often a failure of faulty systems. A great way to think about our current moment.

Camilla Cavendish

Contributing editor and columnist

Not the End of the World is the most uplifting book I’ve read this year. Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data, charts the progress being made on reducing global per capita carbon emissions and tells us what to stop stressing about and what to focus on. A call for action which is also an antidote to gloom.

Tim Harford

Undercover Economist

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman contains 28 concise essays on how to live our brief lives with less anxiety and more joy. Do you rarely see friends because the prospect of a dinner party is intimidating and exhausting? Read his note on “scruffy hospitality”, cook some pasta, and enjoy your imperfect existence with some company.

Robert Shrimsley

UK chief political commentator

Clever, funny and tragic, James is the superb retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave, Jim. Percival Everett wittily but devastatingly employs the literary device of elevating a secondary character from a famous novel into the lead to flesh out both Jim and the truer horrors of American slavery. Jim is not only given a full name but a rounded personality, revealed to be an intelligent, well-read man hamming up a slave patois to comfort white owners. You do not need to have read Huck Finn to enjoy this but it is a good excuse to do so.

Alice Fishburn

OPINION EDITOR

While devouring The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing’s beautifully told tale of literature, politics and horticulture, I started three lists: people to give it to immediately; writers to read immediately; plants to purchase immediately. Her account of the rigours of restoring a Suffolk walled garden is really a glorious meditation on what humanity’s Eden obsession tells us about ourselves.

Robin Harding

Asia Editor

An exemplar of the LitRPG (or Literary Role-Playing Game), a strange new literary sub-genre spawned by the internet, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman includes an AI with a foot fetish and sentient cat called Princess Donut who sends text messages in ALL CAPS. It’s very funny and was published in print for the first time this year.

Brooke Masters

US Financial Editor

If you are a big fan of books that tie together narratives across time, Elif Shafak has written a great one. There Are Rivers in the Sky uses rainfall to link the stories of the last great Assyrian king, a 19th-century Dickensian waif turned pillaging archeologist, a Yazidi refugee from the 2014 Iraqi purge and a modern-day London hydrologist.

Henry Mance

Chief features writer

The best royal memoir of recent years is Prince Harry’s Spare (seriously). Yet I was also moved by A Very Private School, an account by Charles Spencer, Harry’s uncle, of an English boarding school in the 1970s. The education was excellent, but the teachers were abusive and the separation from his parents amounted to “an amputation”. The book made me reflect on the damage done to generations of posh kids, including today many from overseas.

John Burn-Murdoch

Chief Data Reporter

With rightwing populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic, Vicente Valentim’s The Normalization of the Radical Right presents a striking argument: that what has changed in the past decade is not the rise of reactionary views, but the breakdown of norms that kept these always-dormant views suppressed. This book more than any other has changed how I think about the seismic political and social shifts of recent years, and what might reverse them.

Enuma Okoro

Life & Arts columnist

All Fours, is a funny, quirky and fantastically mischievous and necessary novel by Miranda July. I was not always sympathetic to the main character, “a semi-famous artist” but I loved the provocative questions about how women in mid-life might consider and boldly renegotiate what they want, what they desire and what they allow themselves to create.

Anne-Sylvaine Chassany

Companies Editor

With Houris, a brutal and poignant account of the Algerian civil war, Kamel Daoud has this year become the first author from the former French colony to win the Prix Goncourt. But France’s top literary prize has come at a high personal cost: Daoud has had to flee the country, where he risks criminal charges for daring to tackle the subject.

Madhumita Murgia

Artificial Intelligence Editor

Samantha Harvey’s diminutive and dreamy Orbital, which won this year’s Booker Prize for fiction, couldn’t have felt more otherworldly when I read it in a rustic Tuscan farmhouse this past summer. This luminous novel about the lives of six astronauts as they orbit the Earth in a spacecraft is a series of snapshots of the bonds that form in strange circumstances, the joys and sorrows of being human, and a love letter to our unique planet.

Gillian Tett

Columnist and member of the editorial board

Little unites the right and left today — except, perhaps, a sense of despair about the quality of information. The right rails against the allegedly liberal bias of the “mainstream media”; the left accuses the right of deliberately unleashing mass disinformation. So, is the answer to seek more information? Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari’s thoughtful book, suggests not. He argues that more knowledge alone will not solve our problems, since so much rests on the social and political channels that it passes through. Not everyone will like Harari’s grandiose approach, and his conclusions about AI are unnerving. But it is an important perspective at a time when the info-wars seem likely to only get worse.

Books of the Year 2024

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: FT Critics’ choice

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