Jay Bhattacharya

Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya (born 1968) is an Indian American professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care. In 2021, Bhattacharya was opposed to lockdowns and mask mandates as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through infection, while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be protected from the virus. The declaration was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Education Bhattacharya has four degrees from Stanford: a BA (Phi Beta Kappa), an AM, an MD, and a PhD in economics. Career Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a professor by courtesy of economics at Stanford, a professor by courtesy in Stanford's Department of Health Research and Policy, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, a senior fellow by courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, a research associate at Acumen LLC, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.