Dr. Jay Bhattacharya argued against COVID-19 lockdowns and was in favor of using herd immunity to fight the pandemic.

President elect Donald Trump nominated health policy researcher Jay Bhattacharya to head the US National Institutes of Health, the sprawling agency that oversees close to $50 billion in biomedical research spending.

Trump’s and Bhattacharya’s views align when it comes to so-called herd immunity, which the president-elect repeatedly advocated for as a way to deal with COVID during the last year of his first term in office. But herd immunity would have been a disastrous way to deal with the virus.