Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya joins Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential marketing campaign kickoff
Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential marketing campaign bid by means of Twitter earlier in the present day on Might 24, garnering greater than 1.3 million views on his 2-hour Twitter Area stay. Stanford professor of well being coverage Jayanta Bhattacharya A.M, A.B ’90, MD ’97, Ph.D. ’00, was featured as a speaker on the stay stream alongside figures like Twitter CEO Elon Musk and PayPal founding COO David Sacks.
Bhattacharya and DeSantis have labored collectively up to now on COVID-related points, with each figures having traditionally supported the easing of pandemic restrictions. At Stanford, Bhattacharya is the director of the Middle on Demography and Economics of Well being and Growing older and a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Financial Coverage Analysis, amongst different appointments.
Throughout the stay broadcast, Bhattacharya mentioned it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ skills to make selections on COVID-19-related points regardless of criticism. He expressed help for DeSantis’ rolling again sure pandemic-induced restrictions, together with faculty closures, saying, “Governor, you probably did the fitting factor once you opened the colleges.”
The Day by day has reached out to Bhattacharya for remark.
Bhattacharya, who has been a critic of COVID-19 restrictions equivalent to masks mandates and lockdowns, co-authored The Nice Barrington Declaration. The declaration proposed herd immunity as a possible resolution to the COVID-19 pandemic, which sparked a collection of controversies inside scientific and public well being communities.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illnesses, referred to as the declaration “nonsense and really harmful.”
After providing reward of DeSantis’ curbing of pandemic-induced restrictions, Bhattacharya requested concerning the governor’s plans to reform the authority of federal public well being, together with the Middle for Illness Management and Prevention and Nationwide Institutes of Well being, “in order that the errors of the lockdown that occurred within the pandemic don’t occur once more when there’s one other pandemic.”
YouTube had beforehand censored a video of a COVID-19 coverage roundtable of DeSantis and 4 different scientists — Bhattacharya included — flagging it for misinformation. Bhattacharya introduced up the matter through the Twitter Area stay, particularly alleging the federal authorities’s position in suppressing scientific dialogue.
“It’s not simply public well being businesses, however different businesses contained in the federal authorities work to suppress the speech of People,” Bhattacharya mentioned through the stay.
On Bhattacharya’s YouTube channel, the Stanford professor and DeSantis had beforehand spoken concerning the COVID-19 lockdown and the general state of public well being. When DeSantis lifted Florida-statewide restrictions on companies, Bhattacharya recommended the choice on The Tom Woods Present, saying, “There’s this like mixture of… bravery, mental bravery and in addition willingness to take a stand and kind of a data that I’ve by no means seen in a politician,” referring to DeSantis.
Bhattacharya teaches quite a lot of undergraduate and graduate-level programs, along with supervising grasp’s analysis and Ph.D. dissertations.
The Day by day has reached out to the College and the Faculty of Drugs for remark.
