Hi everyone, it's 4 o'clock in New York.

The country may be about to participate in a great big MAGA science experiment.

Donald Trump rounding out his picks to lead the federal government's top public health agencies last night.

Choosing Dr. J. Batacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation's leading

medical research agency, an institution that most of the time works quietly behind the scenes,

but is an incredibly important part of our federal government. The NIH has a

$48 billion budget and is the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

The NIH is behind some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, cracking

the genetic code, for instance, vaccines for hepatitis

and HPV, and even those MRNA vaccines that made it possible for the world to emerge

from the COVID-19 pandemic. Work done by the NIH touches practically every aspect of our lives.

Research it supports has led to clean air guidelines and the nutrition facts that are

on just about everything we eat, all the food.

To leave the NIH, Donald Trump has chosen a man who made a name for himself,

but pushing a policy that experts blasted as unscientific and feared would lead to millions of deaths.

NBC News reports this, quote, Batacharya gained national attention in October of 2020 when he co-wrote

the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter calling on public health officials to roll back

COVID lockdowns. The proposal released

before vaccines became available advocated for a concept called herd immunity, which refers to a level

at which a large enough share of a population has been exposed to an infectious disease that it

is unlikely to keep spreading. The idea of herd immunity was met with furious pushback by medical experts.

If you let infections rip, as it were, and say, let everybody get infected that's going to be

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