26/06/2025
One of our founders, fully retired and out of the healthcare industry, personally got to thank Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who is the 18th Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States, having assumed office on April 1, 2025, after being confirmed by the United States Senate. He will oversee the US medical research agency, the biggest funder of medical research globally. We thanked him for very early in the 2020 global lockdown he was be able to articulate why lockdowns are bad for literacy, health, and mental health issues, and he responded to our emails then in the year 2020, which became foundational in our advocacy for the use of rapid tests as the proper response to the pandemic, not the hyper sensitive and expensive PCR machines. Our company lost some business because we encouraged clients to consider rapid tests instead of PCR machines, which we had set up and had engineers ready to serve and install. Because of the combination of articulateness, his medical and economics background, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, our company was able to somehow be one of the very lonely voices at that time that went against radical lockdowns and the push for PCR as the national standard for working and moving around the Philippines. Solid science informed by the social sciences were key and foundational to understanding the global health situation, and surely a significant moment for our company as a serious member of the healthcare space.
At Stanford University, Dr. Bhattacharya held multiple academic appointments. He served as a professor of medicine, with courtesy professorships in both economics and health research and policy. He was also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and directed Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
His research has focused on population health and well-being, with particular attention to the impact of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economic factors.
