P2025 links: Bhattacharya is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank with far-right billionaire Harlan Crow on its board; Crow has also donated to a number of advisory groups of Project 2025. Bhattacharya was featured in a fundraising video for the Leonard Leo-backed Teneo Network and has spoken before the Council for National Policy, both Project 2025 advisory groups.

Qualifications: Stanford physician and professor of medicine, economics, and health research; heads Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health Care. Served as advisor to Ron DeSantis during the Covid epidemic. Former RAND Corporation economist. He's also named as a founding scholar at the Hillsdale Academy, affiliated with Catholic group Opus Dei, and also Leonard Leo-linked.

Disqualifications: Staunch ‘anti-woke’ and anti-Covid vax views.

Views: Bhattacharaya co-authored a controversial 2020 open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration (with Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta) that opposed the COVID-19 administrative lockdown and proposed an alternative of allowing otherwise healthy Americans individuals to potentially be exposed to the virus as a strategy to build “herd immunity” and reserve vaccination for vulnerable groups such as the elderly. This approach was already proving a failure then in several countries seeing high rates of death among non-vaccinated individuals.

A Christian conservative, his views also mirror Project 2025’s call of scrubbing NIH funding and research to eliminate any use of fetal cell lines (an anti-abortion goal) and curbing vaccine and pandemic preparedness and research  investments. He also wants to link NIH funding for academic research to a proposed ‘index’ of academic freedom as an anti “cancel culture” effort. He is close to Scott Atlas, Trump 1.0’s controversial health advisor, and a Stanford colleague.