Publisher Health

President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.

Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”

Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.

And Dr. Mehmet Oz, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.