US President-elect Donald Trump has picked a Stanford physician and economist Dr Jay Bhattacharya to be the next director of a key US public health agency. A leading Covid lockdown sceptic,  Bhattacharya in age of 56 has been selected to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest government-funded biomedical research entity.

As the director of the National Institutes of Health, he would oversee the world’s premier medical research agency, with a 48 billion dollars budget and 27 separate institutes and centers.

Bhattacharya became the face during the pandemic of a fiercely disputed open letter – known as the Great Barrington Declaration – that opposed widespread lockdowns.

Born in 1968 in Kolkata, Bhattacharya immigrated to the US as a child. He has done his Ph.D. in economics and MD from the Stanford School of Medicine.