India, March 26 -- The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed Stanford University health economist and physician Jay Bhattacharya as the director of the National Institutes of Health under Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed with a 53-47 Senate vote on party lines.

Jay Bhattacharya rose to prominence with his critical views on pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates during Covid-19. He was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.

Just before his confirmation, the National Institutes of Health had laid off around 1,000 staff, froze grant activities and imposed a policy to limit the amount of research funding universities ca...