The Trump NIH Pick Who Wants to Take On ‘Cancel Culture’ Colleges

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said. Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.