Donald Trump announced Saturday that he had chosen Chris Wright as the secretary of the Department of Energy under his new administration. Wright, who runs a Colorado fossil fuel company, is a climate change critic. In a statement, Trump said Wright “will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape, and ushering in a new ‘Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace.’” In addition to Wright’s appointment, Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and Stanford professor known for his controversial stances during the COVID-19 pandemic, might possibly get a new position as head of the NIH under Trump. According to the Washington Post, Bhattacharya’s name is on a list made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s newly appointed overseer of the Department of Health and Human Services. Bhattacharya raised eyebrows back in 2020 when he and fellow professors Martin Sunetra and Gupta Kulldorff published the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter criticizing strict COVID lockdowns. In the document, the three proposed allowing the least at risk to continue living their lives normally in hopes of eventually creating herd immunity. They called this idea “Focused Protection.” The proposal was met swiftly with backlash from the medical community, who found their ideas reckless.
