President-elect Donald Trump has selected one of the nation's most prominent critics of COVID-19-era lockdowns and mandates to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Stanford University physician Jay Batacharya famously co-authored what's known as the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 manifesto that advocated allowing COVID to spread among most people

in order to achieve herd immunity and focusing instead on protecting the elderly and other

vulnerable groups. It was widely criticized by top public health officials at the time.

For more on this pick, we are joined again by Jennifer Nozo.

She runs the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health. Jennifer, so good to

have you back on the program. So, Baratari is tasked with running the NIH, the nation's preeminent

biomedical research organization.

What do you make of this pick?

Well, it's a really controversial pick for a few reasons.

The first one is that typically the people tap to lead these organizations,

this organization are people who have a long history of doing clinical research,

or maybe they've spent a long time working in history of doing clinical research, or maybe they've, you know, spent a long time

working in laboratories, doing laboratory research. Dr. Botataria is an economist, and he is trained

as a medical doctor, but he is an economist and he works more on policy. So that's one way that

that's controversial. And then, of course, the second area of controversy is what you reference, which is that during the COVID-19 pandemic,

he was a really outspoken critic.

He was, you know, one who really questioned a lot of issues.

And for that, I think people sort of worried

whether his approach to this job will be driven by dogma versus evidence.

I mean, I went back and re-read the Great Barrington Declaration. And in hindsight, there is a part

of it that does have some grains of truth. And that was the low risk that COVID posed to young

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