Covid 19: Silencing the Opposition | Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya | EP 334

Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility! Put your life together! Develop a vision! Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within! Be a force for good in the world, and that'll be the adventure of your life.

So what we should have done was note this is particularly dangerous to obese old people who already have multiple illnesses and who are additionally suffering from vitamin D deficiencies. And they probably had—well, who knows what their case fatality rate was. But they're the ones that were particularly at risk. Whereas for anybody under 40 who is fundamentally healthy and reasonably well-nourished, it was clearly not worse than the typical run-of-the-mill flu. The key risk factor is age. So for instance, obese versus non-obese—that abruptly doubles your infection fatality rate. Every seven years of age doubles it, which compounds, right? So what you have is a disease that is a very high risk to identifiable populations. We in public health adopted this mantra that we were all equally vulnerable, and the idea was—and the ideology was very simple—if we don't force everyone to take the virus as seriously as an 83-year-old person living, you know, with multiple comorbidities does, then they won't comply with the lockdown orders. What we asked young people to do was immoral. We said—we essentially said stop! Sacrifice your life in order to save Grandma! We weaponized the empathy that young people have against themselves.

Thank you. Hello everyone! I have the privilege today of talking to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's been a very effective spokesman on the pandemic front during the COVID-19 crisis, both imaginary and real. Dr. Bhattacharya has fought in the public domain to bring accurate information about the pandemic and the potential negative consequences of lockdowns and other COVID-19 interventions to widespread public attention. He is a professor and researcher specializing in the economics of health care. Bhattacharya received all four of his degrees: an M.A., an M.D., and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. He is currently the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

Bhattacharya came under severe fire during the COVID-19 pandemic, believing as he did and publicly communicating that fact that mask mandates and forced lockdowns were a detriment, instead advocating for the development of herd immunity. He argued to allow the healthy and low-risk individuals—the majority of people—to continue on with everyday life and work while providing protection for those most at risk. Only recently, it was revealed through the Twitter files that among others, Dr. Bhattacharya was being purposefully silenced on mainstream media platforms.

Hello, Dr. Bhattacharya! I'm looking very much forward to this conversation today. We met recently at a Stanford conference on academic freedom, and that was really—it was the first time we met publicly. I've been following what you've been doing for a long time, but it was good to see you there and it's good to have this opportunity to talk through what's happened over the last three years, especially, I would say, in light of the—well, the recent Cochrane review, for example—that indicated there's no evidence whatsoever that masks were effective in preventing or even delaying the transmission of COVID-19. I've watched the usual apologists try to win their way around that review, but the Cochrane reviews are pretty damn reliable, and they're conservative too in their claims—and are known for that, right? I mean the Cochrane reviews aren't going to come out and say that masks don't work if the people who wrote the reviews aren't pretty damn convinced that masks don't work.

And so the fact that that's the case and that there was evidence about that beforehand—because in the epidemic planning that predated the outbreak of COVID-19, there weren’t credible people, as far as I could tell, that really thought that masks worked even back then. So anyways, the tide seems to be turning on the COVID narrative front, and that's not in not a small measure attributable to you. So why don't we go into that?

Jordan: It's a great honor to talk with you. It was really a delight to meet you at the conference. I've obviously been following you for a very long time; I admire your courage. You know, it's interesting because the science on COVID, on the lockdowns, on the mitigation measures, on a whole host of topics—if the public was listening, they would hear this idea that there was this univocal sort of universal conclusion—that you had to do lockdowns, you had to wear masks, you had to socially distance, you had to put plastic barriers up, you had to close schools, you had to do all of these things—that the vaccines would stop transmission of the disease—that therefore it was warranted to, you know, force people to lose their jobs over them. All of these ideas were sold as if there was a scientific consensus in favor of them. That was a lie. There was never a scientific consensus on almost any of the topics, and as you say on masks, in fact, the pre-existing narrative—the pre-existing idea among most scientists before the pandemic was quite the opposite direction.

What happened was a relatively small group—a cartel almost—of a very powerful scientific bureaucrats took over the whole apparatus of science, at least as far as the public eye was concerned. They dominated the media, dominated the message to politicians, and as a result, we had a catastrophic response to COVID, and you know, it's going to be paying the cost of that for a very long time.

So let's dig into that. The current political climate for discussion has become conspiratorial, right? And the idea of a cartel? Well, that sounds conspiratorial. Now, I've been trying to think that through, and so a system of ideas can act like a conspiracy, even if it doesn't make itself manifest as a direct conspiracy because a system of ideas has an internal intrinsic ethos and view, and implications for actions that unfold across time.

If you read "The Gulag Archipelago," for example, Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of indicating how the consequences—the brutal, tyrannical actions of Lenin and Stalin—were necessary concomitants to the—or necessary outcomes of—the axioms that were embedded in the Communist worldview. They weren't deviations from some properly utopian norm; they were exactly what you'd expect if you put those principles into operation. And I see similar things going on around us now.

Let's say on the politically correct front; I don't really believe there's this conspiracy of politically correct people who are meeting in secret to direct the world—though if there was, the WEF would probably qualify—but I do think that systems of ideas can act as conspiratorial agents. Now, in this case, it's more complex though. So there's a cartel who's pushing forward this narrative, and the question is, well, to what end? That's one question. And the other question is, who benefits now? And then the further question is, why would the media, for example, fall into lockstep shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation with those who benefit?

Now, we know perfectly well that the biggest punitive civil lawsuits ever levied in the United States were levied successfully against pharmaceutical companies, and the left has every reason to be entirely skeptical about pharmaceutical companies like they have been for the last five decades. But all of a sudden, we saw this massive spin around where everything the pharmaceutical company said was taken as gospel, and it's very hard to suppress the suspicions that something like massive lobbying and very narrow profit-seeking were driving this. What's your sense of the underlying motivations?

Dr. Bhattacharya: So I completely agree with you that this—what I described as a small cartel—was operating in the context of a very complex environment. And in that environment, many people took advantage of the opportunities provided to them by the set of events that unfolded. But let me just—let me defend the characterization of this as at least initiated. I personally blame Public Health authorities—the top Public Health authorities in the world and the top Public Health authorities in the United States and elsewhere—for the set of events that transpired in response.

And let's name some names on that front. So like in the United States, a primary architect of the lockdown strategy was Tony Fauci. Now, let me just describe why I think this wasn't—it’s not a conspiracy in a sense that, you know, there's this small group that has nefarious ideas. If you look at the decades before the pandemic happened, there was a concerted effort in the United States and elsewhere to prepare for the next pandemic. That preparation involved putting into, you know, into actuality a whole range of powers that previously we would have said were not consistent with liberal democracy—powers to close you into your home, to close your business, to close your schools, powers to basically force you to test and isolate if you're found positive—a whole range of almost dictatorial powers that would have been previously unimaginable.

The idea was that we are biohazards to each other, and the whole goal is if we can keep each other apart during a time of severe infectious disease threat, we will actually save lives. That was the premise of this, and that it was coming—another respiratory virus pandemic threat. Now, that actually was certain to be true. We've had respiratory virus pandemics time after time, you know, decade after decade. In the 20th century, we had respiratory virus pandemics 1918, of course, now is the most famous, but we had them in you know, 1957, 1968, 1976. You could just keep going on and on, most recently maybe 2009 in the swine flu pandemic.

So there was this infrastructure set up and this sort of ideology among the top scientific bureaucrats in this country and elsewhere that because a respiratory virus pandemic was coming, we needed better tools than we previously had to address it. And for them, the better tools meant essentially the dictatorial powers, the authoritarian powers that constitute a lockdown. And they, they—now, when COVID arrived—and we can talk about what the—you know exactly how it arrived, but let’s just take that as a given that it arrived—that entire infrastructure sort of powered into existence. And part of that infrastructure involves making sure that the people take the measures that are being proposed seriously—that the threat seriously. And the way they did that is by spreading panic and fear about the disease.

In that environment, what happened was that a small group of people at the head—but Tony, let’s say—he donned on himself the mantle of science itself, right? We're all looking. Yes, he took a guru. He took the name of Science in vain, he actually did. And he talks about it as if it's some sort of social religious system. So he designed a set of policies and ethos that said if you do these things, then I will rescue you from the threat that is going all around you—that's in the air everywhere where even your children are a biohazard to you—a threat to you.

And in that—so when that set of events unfolds, you have someone who essentially takes over what truth is in the minds of everybody. Then all these other actors come in and start to say, you know, if you mentioned the pharmaceutical companies, they jumped in—not I don’t think they’re in a nefarious plot; I think that they jumped in legitimately saying, okay, let’s help figure out how to address this threat. Now then they took advantage of the power they had in very abusive ways, but that’s a layer of development rather than the driving force, I think.

Jordan: And so how do you understand the practicalities of the relationship between the top Public Health bureaucrats and the pharmaceutical companies? Because there's obviously moral hazard there. One of the things that struck me is really beyond comprehension in some fundamental sense is that the Biden White House, for example, is essentially acting as a shill for Pfizer constantly. The Biden White House tweets out, around Christmas for example—this became particularly egregious—these constant reminders that if you loved your children, you'd go have them both vaccinated and boosted. By that time it was absolutely clear to me—and I'd be more than happy to be corrected on this front—that the evidence that vaccinating children was a good idea was not only lacking, it was—the best evidence was counter-evidence, is that children were basically at zero risk for serious consequences, serious side effects from COVID, and the vaccines in all likelihood posed a greater threat to them than did the virus. And so I couldn't understand at all why the White House would be supporting the marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical companies.

Now, there are tens of billions of dollars at stake here. And there is a revolving door, and people who are listening and watching—my understanding is that there's something of a revolving door in Washington between powerful companies and the regulators who regulate them. Those regulatory bureaucratic positions aren't necessarily particularly well-paid, and they don't last forever. And a lot of the people who occupy those positions are ambitious, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But it’s pretty damn useful to have— to hire someone to work for you who was once involved in the regulation of your company, let’s say. So there’s plenty of moral hazard on that front. How do you understand the interplay, like the dynamic interplay between the public health officials, quote, “who are there to protect us,” and these entities operating behind the scenes who, you know, do make products that are useful but also have an iron in the fire that isn't necessarily completely aligned with everyone's best interests?

Dr. Bhattacharya: I think in the idea is that in war a lot is possible and ethically permitted that would not be permitted outside of war, right? So that this— the same kind of principle attack applies here. So what you have, for instance, is again in the U.S. that a former head of the FDA was actually on the board of Pfizer. He then is on national TV all the time essentially pushing a line that benefited Pfizer and its sales of its products—sometimes and often, in fact, without disclosing the fact that he has this conflict. You know, so they're definitely—but you know, that's long-standing, right? You understand that those kinds of conflicts exist, and you're absolutely right. Like the regulatory agencies—there is this like just sort of—people work for the regulatory agencies, and then they go work for the drug companies and come back. Right? That’s like the FDA—that's a major problem the FDA in the U.S. faces.

So now that's completely understandable. What has to happen is policymakers—top policymakers understand that dynamic and act against it. Instead, what happened was that the top policymakers said to maybe to themselves—assuming they acted this way—that that kind of dynamic actually helps the public because what they’re doing is putting forward a product that’s going to rescue us from the pandemic.

Jordan: Yeah, we have a product. That’s this vaccine. And so it’s okay. I mean it’s implicit at least—that's my interpretation of how people acted. Because otherwise, you would have had top policymakers and top public health officials decrying these conflicts of interest, this sort of revolving door as you say.

Dr. Bhattacharya: Well, the problem is that in the face of an unspecified threat, it’s easy to make the argument that the ends justifies the means. And you can understand how we would fall into that, especially given—and this is something else that's very interesting to contemplate—the exaggeration of the severity of the threat.

Now, I've been thinking about this biologically. You know, I did a lot of work on the extended immune system—the behavioral immune system. And so we have an immune system that operates within us to protect us from disease, but we have a behavioral immune system too. And both disgust and fear are part of that behavioral immune system. What I mean by that is, well, we tend to be disgusted by such things as, let’s say, rotting food. And the reason we're disgusted by it is because the rotting food is full of bacteria that produces toxins to keep us from eating the bacteria’s food, and we're sensitive to that. So we stay the hell away from it, and so that’s part of what protects us against pathogens.

Disgust is one of the main mechanisms whereby that operates, and so what we saw happening was the use of fear, definitely, but also the use of disgust. Which, by the way, is much more dangerous because if you're afraid of something, you avoid it, but if you're disgusted by something, you burn it and destroy it. So if you start to leverage disgust in the political landscape, you're playing with fire. Certainly what the Nazi propagandists were very, very good at using disgust—Hitler’s anti-Semitic language for example is absolutely permeated with disgust metaphors—purity of the blood, purity of the race, the cockroaches and insects that were conspiring against Germany—it's all purity language.

And so I kind of think that what happened from a biological perspective might be construed as an overreaction of the behavioral immune system, right? So, you know, if you get COVID, you can have a cytokine storm, which is an immune system overreaction, and that can kill you—not the virus, but the immune response. And in this situation, what happened was we faced an uncertain threat, and then we had, as you pointed out, a pre-prepared response to it that turned out to be far worse on virtually every front than the threat that it was purported to reduce. But that metaphor of an extended immune system overreaction depoliticizes it to some degree; you know, we can think about that as more something like an existential threat, which is: how do we regulate our responses to unknown threats so that the response itself doesn’t become more pathological than the threat?

I think we're facing the same thing on the climate catastrophe front at the moment, by the way. And you know people can differ in their opinions about that, but certainly systemic overreaction is a constant potential catastrophe. And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state too, which was extraordinarily interesting, all across the West in a mad, panicked, herd-like response to—well, to what? That’s not what we're learning.

Yeah, I mean I completely agree. I think you're—that’s actually quite insightful to point to disgust as a central driving factor in this pandemic, right? So for instance, if anyone would get COVID, the first thing you'd ask is, “Who gave it to you?” Right? As if it’s some sort of sin! It’s treated not as a disease to be managed in a person who gets it to be cared for—it's treated as a sin that you've committed that you—and as a result, and once you have it, everyone around you needs to be so far away from you that there's no chance of the contagion spreading to them.

I mean, now, it is true there are diseases that are quite deadly, and you want to have quarantining. I mean, those are legitimate tools, but to deploy that at a society-wide level for extended periods of time essentially destroys the underpinnings of civil society. We made—we—I mean, when we are in community with each other, we implicitly accept that there's some risk of your spreading some diseases to me. That's just a normal part of how civilization works. It's a deal we’ve made with each other. Civilization tempers the inclination that we humans have toward disgust and transforms it into something where we're much more constructive.

And, you know, you can absolutely have pathologies of societies where that disgust is allowed to spread and marginalize people. Like, you know, I come from—I mean in the Indian culture, the Indian societies struggled forever with this distinction of clean and unclean, with certain casts of people being— I mean, so, I mean, I think that is a normal feature of societies.

Yeah, well there's good work too on the political front showing that societies where infectious disease prevalence is higher—like genuinely higher—are also substantially more likely to have authoritarian political structures. And the correlations like 0.7; this is not a trivial effect; it’s a walloping effect! And some of that has to do with, well, exactly what you’re describing, which is the distinction, the ritual, and even sacred distinction between what’s clean and unclean, and that does tie into bodily and physical purity, and then into a kind of metaphysical purity. And it’s very difficult to keep those levels of analysis separate.

I mean, the goal of public health has always worked to counteract that, right? Right! We tell people it’s not—you shouldn't moralize a disease; you shouldn’t treat a disease as if it’s something that’s neg—a morally wrong about the person that has these with HIV. We learned that lesson, I thought! Yet during the pandemic, public health authorities leaned into this; they leaned into this idea that someone who gets COVID has committed a sin. And, you know, they didn’t say it out loud, but they acted that way.

Now, I said that there was a pandemic template, but you know, that pandemic template is at odds with every other pandemic that we managed in the respiratory virus pandemic—we managed the last century! Right? In that whole of the last century, what we did is we identified who was most at risk, developed therapeutics, vaccines, and other methods to try to protect those people as best we could while the pandemic was spreading and but minimized the fear in society at large—minimized the disruption to the society at large. And the reasoning was so compelling; the idea is that if you disrupt society at large, you will do more harm to people than you would save them from the whatever marginal risk from the from the respiratory virus pandemic in spreading.

Yeah, well that’s a basically conservative, so to speak, a classic conservative concern, right? Which is twofold: One is to stress the law of unintended consequences. This is something I really learned as a social scientist—and as a biological scientist for that matter—don’t be so sure that your stupid intervention will only do what you think it will do. Only the good things! Don’t even be sure that it won’t be positively counterproductive. Be certain that it will produce unintended consequences because it will! You know, one of the most famous studies, for example, ever done on the prevention of anti-social behavior among kids: this was the Somerville Study done back in the 1930s, one of the first large-scale public health interventions on the psychological front.

They grouped kids who were prone to conduct disorder and then criminal behavior, let’s say later in their life, randomly into a treatment group and a control group and they hit the treatment group with every positive psychological and sociological intervention you could manage: literacy training, parent training, communication training for the kids. They paired them with mentors and they took the kids out of the inner cities and out to camp—summer camp for two weeks every year while the program ran. And when they released the results, it showed very clearly that the kids in the treatment group who would be the subject of all this positive attention—which by the way, the kids love, the parents love, the teachers love, the implementers loved—they did worse on virtually every measure. And the conclusion was that it was a really bad idea to take anti-social kids out of their environment for two weeks in the summer and group them together because they were basically camps for criminals.

And that was such a powerful effect that it overwhelmed all the other interventions—the Somerville Study. A very, very famous cautionary tale! And Joan McCord, who was one of the authors of that study—and one of the first female PhDs in criminology—basically spent the rest of her life traveling around to academic conferences telling people, "Do not assume your idiotic intervention is going to work. Build in careful outcome analysis to any social program that has a behavioral change mandate and have some humility in the face of the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve." And certainly, we just let all that go by the wayside in this.

Now, you said that we had a different strategy in place for pandemics in the past and that this new strategy emerged—like, emerged where and why did it dominate?

Dr. Bhattacharya: I mean, I think in the West it emerged out of the War on Terror. You know, if you— you can go back to the anthrax threat from, I think it was 2001 or 2002. And people reacted to that by saying we need a way to deal with biosecurity threats—a new way to deal with biosecurity threats that’s much more serious, that takes the threat more seriously. There’s a whole series of War game and, you know, sort of planning exercises around biosecurity threats. That’s not normally what you think of how you deal with respiratory virus pandemics, right? You would normally deal with them the old way, which was focused protection of vulnerable people, development of therapeutics, reducing—making sure that people don’t panic, right? So society can go on as best it can.

I think that does—so when the pandemic hit in 2020, in the U.S. and the world, what happened was that the World Health Organization organized—in the early days of the pandemic—a junket, if you will, to China. The Chinese authorities in January 2020 had locked—and had declared finally—a pandemic, had locked down their—you know, this major city, Wuhan. And those U.S.—the World Health Organization sent a junket that included, you know, a deputy of Tony Fauci, prominent officials within—you know, public health officials at the World Health Organization. They came back from that junket saying that what China had done had worked. Yeah. These authoritarian measures that China had taken—shutting people into their apartment, locking the door—essentially, like, had worked; the disease was gone!

Well, you know, lots of dim-witted Western intellectuals go to communist countries and conclude that it works.

Jordan: We certainly do!

Dr. Bhattacharya: We certainly do. And anybody dim enough to go to China under the control of the CCP and assume that their top-down authoritarian policies are working really needs to think a long and hard about how they view the long arc of history, let’s say. I mean your default—that your default presumption when dealing with the CCP is, “100%, everything you see is a lie until proven otherwise.” I mean, there’s an email from Cliff Lane, who’s a deputy of Tony Fauci, he comes back from this world, this World Technical World Health Organization junket into China, and he’s in the email. He writes that we have a—we have what China did worked—in fact, what we have a very difficult decision to make. It will take more than just the people in this room to make that decision. And he writes what China did worked, albeit at Great cost.

Oh, yeah, that pesky little—what would you say?—consequence! But, you know, you mentioned this classic social science study. The expertise of social scientists was denigrated early in the pandemic. The question was, "Are you an epidemiologist? Are you a virologist? Are you an infectious disease specialist?" And anyone else with any other expertise was not relevant to decision-making—only the science itself. How to say, right?

Oh, well, and then, as you said, "the science; follow the science." It’s like, "Well, okay, what do you mean here exactly?" Because there’s always a balance of risks. If you’re a sophisticated thinker, it’s like—even if there’s a pandemic—well, first of all, we better make sure that there is and that we know the scope. But there’s a hundred other considerations of risk that need to be simultaneously evaluated. And the way to protect yourself from that cognitive complexity, if you’re a narcissistic leader, and you want to forge the moral pathway forward, is just to demonize anybody who adds any complexity into the argument. So we saw plenty of that.

Dr. Bhattacharya: Exactly what happened. And anyone who has the notion of the law of unintended consequences, of trade-offs, of risk management in their soul or in their training at least—they were excluded from the conversation, right? So you could say, “Look, this is gonna really hurt the economy.” And then what the response you’d get was, “Well, you care more about money than lives.” And therefore you shouldn’t do that. But, you know, the irony is that the economic harm from the lockdowns, with 100% certainty, killed more people and is still killing more people than the lives saved by the lockdowns—which I think are very few.

Well, we’re not done with that yet; we have no idea how many people the lockdown and the associated panic killed. That’ll unfold over probably decades.

Yeah, well, especially when you factor in things like the decrement in educational attainment that emerged as a consequence of the suppression of schooling. Because that’s a whole lifetime of decreased economic productivity.

We’ll be back in one moment; first, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus.

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don't get away with anything! And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper; it’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. See that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question!

I can’t tell you how frustrated I was about this. My training is in health economics for a living. I’ve been following for the last two decades this literature obsessively documenting the returns to education on the health of children during their entire lives. And, you know, it’s pretty convincing; it’s a great investment we make when we educate our children in terms of they live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives. If—and even like small, small interruptions in their education is what the literature documented have long lifetime consequences.

Someone—this guy named Dimitri Kastakis, who’s an editor of JAMA Pediatrics—did this really interesting paper. He just extrapolated that existing social science literature and said, well, we closed schools for a short time in spring 2020. Well, what consequences will that have on the lifetime lifespans of children? And he estimated that we had essentially robbed children in the United States of five and a half million life years just from the short interruption in March of—in spring of 2020!

Well, you know, schools closed on the basis of Public Health, this cartel of Public Health people all around the world—in Uganda, in India—the schools closed for two years! Many people don’t have access to Internet or electricity or whatever that meant—no school! It also meant no social interactions; it meant way more time online; it meant way more time frustrated—it—it—yeah! Depression! One in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the U.S. according to a CDC survey in June of 2020.

I mean the consequences are just—the knock-on consequences were devastating. A hundred—the UN world health program was yelling as loud as it could that there were going to be millions—tens of millions—of people on the brink of starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by lockdowns, supply chain disruptions—absolutely!

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

You know, the pointy end of the supply chain disruption is some guy who makes five dollars a day or ten dollars a day of income selling coconuts to rich Mumbai, you know, a laptop class. And then he loses his job—he now earns less than two dollars a day of income; his family starts—

That is—that is the—so it wasn't—it was never lives versus money! Never! It was always lives versus lives! And if you talk to any competent social scientist, that’s exactly what they would have told you in that— in that early days of the pandemic.

So when did you start to become concerned about the overreach of the pandemic mandates? And tell me that story and how did that unfold?

Dr. Bhattacharya: So the day I heard about the lockdowns—I mean, I just—I was absolutely floored! I couldn’t believe that—that in medicine and public health we were recommending this approach that I knew with certainty was going to harm the lives of poor and vulnerable people literally everywhere in the world. I thought—I thought that we had made commitments to protect, you know, to—almost these rosy commitments to you—you structured public policy so that you don’t harm the least—the least capable among us to suffer from that! Right? The most vulnerable, right? That’s what I thought! Exactly!

And then when the lockdowns were announced, I mean, I actually had an argument with my boss, who’s like, it was in the— at Stanford medicine—almost that very day because his wife is the head of Santa Clara County Public Health, and we had this argument about whether lockdowns were a good idea on the eve of the lockdown. I just came away stunned! Like, this can't—and I actually gave an interview to a Reuters reporter who was doing a story on what lockdowns would do to kids—to domestic assault rates, alcoholism, depression.

And so I gave an interview in, like, April of 2020, and I emphasized these knock-on effects. I said they were certain to come! And I actually said in that interview that the lockdowns were very likely the biggest public health mistake we ever made.

Oh yeah? You think it’s a bigger public health mistake than an inverted food pyramid and the injunction to everyone to do nothing but eat carbohydrates till they weigh 350 pounds?

I mean, those—you gotta admit, doesn't at least compete for their—a lot of sins.

Dr. Bhattacharya: But this is certainly—it's certainly up there! Yeah, I mean, you know, just in terms of the catastrophic harm to poor people.

Yeah, we’re not done with that! So everyone listening and watching needs to know that the catastrophic consequences of harm done to poor people are still unfolding! And God only knows what the end result of that’s going to be because food is more expensive than it should have been, and energy is more expensive than it should have been, and there are multiple reasons for that. But the bloody supply chain disruptions were one of them! And we really toyed with bringing our supply chains to the brink of bloody disaster!

It’s still hard to buy a car in North America! And you know, it’s really difficult to screw something up like that because we’re pretty damn good at making cars. And so—and distributing them. And to see that there are shortages on all fronts for rich people—you just imagine what the shortages are like for poor people.

So yeah, you know, the other thought I had very early on was that we didn't actually know how deadly the disease was! Right? So in this one—during the swine flu epidemic, there had been—the early estimates by the World Health Organization was that the case fatality rate was four or five percent! Just like they said with COVID!

Yeah, but what happened in the swine flu epidemic in 2009 was a whole bunch of scholars ran studies called seroprevalence studies of measuring antibodies in the blood of populations, antibodies specific to the—to the, you know, the flu virus that was floating around. And what they found was there were a hundred times more infections or more than cases because the virus had produced a mild reaction in some people, generating an antibody, and they didn't go into the doctor—no one knew that they’d had the flu!

Yeah, or had the swine flu!

And so the infection fatality rate turned out to be 0.01 percent!

Okay, so that had already been established as a scientific precedent. What do you think the case fatality rate was for COVID?

Dr. Bhattacharya: So I ran a study in April of 2020, a seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County, California. Now, we didn’t include nursing homes. We’re much—we—the really high case infection fatality rate actually is. But if you include in the community, it turned out to be about 0.2. 99.8% survival!

And we ran another separate study in L.A. County the week after and found almost the same identical infection fatality rate.

Jordan: And how does that compare to your standard flu?

Dr. Bhattacharya: Well, you know, that’s funny because you ask that because I don’t know! I looked—people say that the flu has a 0.1% infection fatality rate, but I don’t know that’s true! It’s not backed by careful seroprevalence studies. So for instance, the swine flu, which was thought to be particularly deadly, turned out to be 0.01. Right? Right?

You know, one order of magnitude. So I do think that those—more deadly than the flu; there’s no question in my mind.

Jordan: Impact on that.

Dr. Bhattacharya: No question in my mind from the very moment I heard about this. This was something to take seriously! Absolutely! That 0.2%, while much less than the three or four percent that the World Health Organization was panicking people with—was still a very high number. And it’s especially high for older people, right? If you can think about it as like the risk doubles by every seven years of age. So you know, I was 51 at the time, my mom, who was 82 or 81 at the time—like what’s that? What is that like one, two, three, four doublings? My infection fatality rate was 0.2%. Hers was, you know, 0.4, 0.8, 1.6—3.2 percent!

Right? Right? So the proper response would have been to identify that the genuine risk factors for serious risk of hospitalization, let’s say. And as far as I can tell, these are what they are, and I would also appreciate being corrected! So age is a major one, obesity is a huge contributor, comorbidity—that hardly counts because of course, the more morbidities you have, the more likely you are to die of anything. But that still has to be taken into account. And then I've also concluded that the evidence for increased severity among people who have vitamin D deficiencies also seems to be quite robust.

And so what we should have done was note this is particularly dangerous to obese old people—people who already have multiple illnesses and who are additionally suffering from vitamin D deficiencies. And they probably had—well, who knows what their case fatality rate was—but they're the ones that were particularly at risk. Whereas for anybody under 40 who is fundamentally healthy and reasonably well-nourished, it was clearly not worse than the typical run-of-the-mill flu. Does that seem about right?

Dr. Bhattacharya: Yeah, I mean, I think I might modify the statement about the relative risk of the flu because I just don't know what that is. But I think it’s a very, very low risk for healthy young people. And I think—and I agree with you about the risk factors, but the key risk factors—age! So for instance, obese versus non-obese—that roughly doubles your infection fatality rate. Every seven years of age doubles it!

Oh yeah, which compounds, right? So what you have is a disease, you know, like 80% of the deaths are people over the age of 65 still! So what you have is a disease that is a very high risk to identifiable low population, and for the rest of the population—and the vitamin D, I agree with actually, although that’s some a little bit controversial. I don’t know why it’s controversial; it seems to me that the evidence is pretty clear on this. In any case, there’s no harm—is accessible and harmless! How about that?

Impossible! Exactly! That’s another problem! So you just tell people to go out and have—and have exercise, like what?

Yeah, I mean, instead of being locked at home and not being able to go to a park, for example! Exactly! So like that! So like having that as a modifiable risk factor would have been healthier, would have produced health in other ways as well, right? Instead we—in public health adopted this mantra that we were all equally vulnerable!

Yeah, that so if I remember watching this, this press conference by this Rudy Gobert, who was a National Basketball Association player, in the United States, and he'd contracted COVID early in the pandemic. And you know, he’s a young man, very healthy, didn’t appear to have to be particularly sick, but he gave his press conference where he, like, just was joking around—he licked the microphone, right? He was making fun of the clean and unclean trope that was starting to spread. And the whole world came down on this poor man! It forced him to apologize!

You know? And, and you have to take the virus seriously! Even young healthy NBA players who are at basically zero risk from dying from this disease have to grovel and apologize because they’re acting like young healthy people. It looks like disgust demonization—

That particular response! It absolutely is! And the idea was—the ideology was very simple: If we don’t force everyone to take the virus as seriously as an 83-year-old person living, you know, with multiple comorbidities does, then they won’t comply with the lockdown orders. What we asked young people to do was immoral.

We said we essentially said stop! Sacrifice your life yes! In order to save Grandma! We weaponized the empathy that young people have against themselves!

No! In order to produce a small decrement in risk to Grandma! But you know, that’s the funny thing—it didn’t really even protect Grandma!

Right! Right? You have a disease that spreads very, very easily, and the lockdown measures—people can’t really comply with them for extended periods of time unless you happen to be very well off and have a job that can be replaced with a laptop, right? Then, okay, maybe! But that's a very small fraction of the world population!

Yeah, maybe 20-30% of even the rich countries!

Right! Right? Okay, so you started to become aware of this back in March of 2020, right away essentially, as soon as the lockdowns occurred. And you talked about the first conversation you had with one of your colleagues who was involved in local public health. And you could see this miasma of paranoia and force spreading, and it was very concerning to you because of your epidemiological and economics training, and the economists, at least, are trained to consider, well, multiple trade-offs in terms of value, if they’re good economists, obviously.

They seem to be more reliable public policy formulators, by and large, I would say, than biologists who take a much more unidimensional view of the world and the epidemiologists as well, who specialize in a given illness. So then, as this marched forward, what did you find yourself doing?

Dr. Bhattacharya: Well, I mean there was a lot of—I published these studies or wrote these studies on seroprevalence, published them, and there was a tremendous blowback! My colleagues didn’t want to believe the result; they thought it was a much more deadly disease than we were finding with our— with our scientific studies. And actually, Stanford—where we met was the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference—I told a little bit about the story about how Stanford treated me, which is, I think, abysmally!

Yeah, well let’s delve into that a little bit because that’s par for the course at modern universities as well at the moment. So what happened? You published these studies. Now, we should point out to everyone who’s watching and listening that Jay is not exactly your fringe researcher, right? Stanford’s a major university; he has a Ph.D. in economics and an M.D. It’s a very, very well-respected researcher and certainly not someone who’s prone to grinding political axes—and that’s generally the case for epidemiologists and real scientists.

They’re not politically-minded; they’re trying to—as much as it’s possible—to follow the trail of the data and communicate that to the rest of us. More power to them! But it means that they don’t have a political bone in their body, especially the real scientists, especially in STEM. And so when the woke political mob of narcissists comes for them, they won’t have a hope of resisting. And, well, obviously, that’s exactly what’s happening in the California system now. UCAL system—80% of applicants to STEM positions are rejected on the basis of inadequate diversity, inclusivity, and equity statements!

You see that Texas, yesterday—University of Texas revoked its commitment to requiring DEI statements as a precondition for employment and then of course denied that they ever had such a policy in place to begin with! I mean, those are—those are—they’re just the de facto loyalty oaths. I mean, that’s essentially like—you’re—a statement of faith that you—but you belong to this particular, you know, faith tradition, documented by the DEI statements.

I mean, I just think it’s one of these things where like I never imagined that the free countries of the West would come to a situation where the basic civil rights, checks and balances of power—all these, like, norms of civil civilization—that I thought everyone agreed with where actually in question. I mean, you saw it earlier than most! I certainly—before the pandemic, I would have thought of them as annoying, but I wouldn’t have thought of this as an existential threat. And now I’ve literally come around!

Yeah! Yeah, well, the—you know, the other thing we could think about too here is that we don’t want to underestimate the pervasive attractiveness of this set of ideas. I mean it devastated Eastern Europe, Russia and China, and that’s still going on in China! It’s still going on in North Korea. These are attractive ideas! They promise universal brotherhood; they promise an egalitarianism that is not only impossible to produce but would be horrible in its realization!

But that looks on the surface extraordinarily attractive! They appeal to a kind of domestic ethos too! You know, Ben Shapiro said to me one time—he said, “Well at home, I’m a communist.” And what he meant by that was that in his family, he has children—it’s to each according to his need and from each according to his ability. And that might work perfectly well in the domestic environment, you know, in a limited manner. But as a scalable political enterprise, it’s a complete bloody disaster!

It’s not obvious why! It’s just obvious that that’s the case! And you know when I grew up, we had this Soviet Union as the evil example of this woke pseudo-communist ideology! And that kept everybody in check! But that threat diminished substantially in 1989, and it allowed these ideas to hold sway once again in the West, you know, aided and abetted by idiot intellectuals, especially on the literary criticism front!

But that’s just pervaded the institutions of higher education like mad! But we need to give the devil his due! I mean, these ideas hold sway over the minds of hundreds of millions of people because they offer attractiveness on the utopian front! That’s not easy for conservatives or classical liberals or scientists to mitigate against with their insistence on individual autonomy, responsibility, and the importance of tradition, and the necessity of rational inquiry!

Even communities like—I’m a big—I mean, I think communities are incredibly important, like thick communities where people are embedded and they draw support. Like even people who think like that should be opposed to these ideas because these ideas destroy communities! We need to have checks—I mean, just go back to our discussion about lockdowns. What did lockdowns do other than destroy communities?

It's not—it’s not an individual thing to set into individualistic to say the lockdowns are a bad idea! They destroy the communities that provide support for the poor and the vulnerable to working-class people!

Well, the other thing too is that look for all you leftists who are listening—all 15 of you! And this is why I like people like Russell Brand and to some degree Joe Rogan! It’s like, why do you believe, if you’re on the left, that fascist collusion at the highest levels of power is going to serve the communities that you might even rightly be attempting to serve? You know, the genuine left, just as I've known many in my life say labor leader types, you know, who are trying to give the a real voice to the working class, and that’s a necessary thing to do, and to push back against the gigantism and excess of the corporate world—that’s a valid thing to do!

Why in the world would you think that this top-down collusion between government, state, and media is in the interests of the people that you purport to serve? It's a preposterous notion!

I’ve encountered many people on the left—like the honest left—who joined the anti-lockdown movement. Sunetra Gupta, who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration for instance, is famously on the left. So I think that there is a tradition within the left that is solidly devoted to basic liberal ideas. It’s just as there is on the right!

And I think that’s the coalition that will win! And the lockdowns—the whole idea we followed that drive the pandemic is, at least for me, has just brought me to a realization about how unimportant other kinds of political designations are. You know, Democrat, liberal Democrat, Republican. I mean really the key thing—the key unifying thing is this commitment to checks and balances, a commitment to Enlightenment ideals, a commitment to religious tolerance, to freedom—freedom of speech and freedom of speech and conscience probably foremost among those. And I think foremost because, as far as I can tell, all the other processes that keep systems of good governance in place are dependent—how could it be otherwise?—on freedom of conscience, thought, and speech because that's the mechanism by which complex problems are solved.

And so if you give up that mechanism—that's the mechanism of thought itself! And I mean what we're doing today—well, both of us are trying to update our views of the world to some degree as well as to communicate with other people! But that's all part of the process of analysis, diagnosis, and repair of systems that have gone astray! And unless you can engage in that freely, then they just go more astray! And the consequences of that, as we saw with the lockdowns, and are continuing to see with the lockdowns—the consequences of that are—well, we'll see how cataclysmic they are.

You know, I thought for example that part of the reason we're in a war with Russia is probably—perhaps that—that maybe this is only 10% of the problem or less—world leaders weren't getting together and talking! Because the lockdowns—it’s like, I don’t know how often the President of the United States and the leader of Russia should get together and talk, but never is definitely the wrong answer! And if you think you can do that electronically and do it successfully, you’re naive and careless beyond forgiveness!

So—and I think it extends not just to, like, greatly, you know, top leaders of countries but also just the regular interactions with people. Like a lot of the fracture of communities of—of, you know, like just take my own example of like the friendships that have been broken. If we’d actually been meeting with other faculty members regularly just because we ran into them in the office building, I just find it hard to—like you would have been much more difficult to demonize me if Francis Collins or Tony Fauci had just called me and talked and spoke and said, here’s what we were thinking—here’s why we’re concerned—let’s change this—could you change it—do this way? You know, I might have gone along to, like, try to figure out how to accommodate their concerns. Like it’s rather than demonizing me, we would have found a better way to manage. I mean science works by those kinds of personal communications! You know, yeah, you write papers, but then you go talk to people! Those conferences are actually worthwhile because now you get to know really who they are, what they think.

Yeah. It’s a human endeavor!

Yeah, just as you know! And to, like, to have this ideology where you have to be apart—it will replace everything just by Zoom—it just doesn’t work!

Yeah, well, the other thing that’s lurking underneath all of this that we’re going to have to contend with is that I think virtualization breeds mistrust. And so what I’ve noticed when I've conducted virtualized enterprises is that they go fine when everyone agrees, but they go very badly as soon as disagreement emerges. And I think it’s because if I disagree with you, it’s easy for that to produce a halo and for me to think, "Well, we disagree on everything!" If we were getting together and having a coffee and bumping into each other in the hallway, we’d say that it’s one minor disagreement in a host of agreements, but person—that requires personal contact!

And so that’s foregone on the virtual world! And then I also think that this is worse! And I don’t know how dangerous the threat it is, but I think it’s a paramount threat! I also think that virtualization enables psychopathy because psychopaths are actually held at bay by the perils of face-to-face communication. And if they can operate behind the scenes—which they can certainly do online—there’s an immense amount of online criminal activity and exploitation! I mean, the whole pornography industry is nothing but that! And then immense, like swaths of criminals operating online! And then all the troll behavior as well!

Like we may be setting up a world in the virtual space where the psychopaths and the predators—the predatory parasites—because that’s what a psychopath is—they can just run roughshod!

I mean there’s a—I mean there's a counterbalancing! So I know people that speak anonymously because where they legitimately fear their job and they wouldn’t speak otherwise!

Yeah, so there’s a temporary—so I don’t—I don’t know how you manage that!

I don’t either! Maybe you—you authorize it! Just it’s a complicated problem, but I hear you! I mean it is one of the costs of going online—going on Twitter!

Oh, yeah, you’re subject to tremendous animosity from like random people. I don’t know! But you know, I think that was happening before I went on Twitter though!

And just in the minds of some people or the—the reputation destroying mechanisms of some people! It’s just so—you just—I view it as like, at least I’m in a position where I can speak and get my message out! And if they’re gonna—which they’re gonna—attack me in these vile ways, I just—I at the very least, I can have my own say!

Yeah! Yeah! Rather than staying silent!

Yeah!

Yeah!

Yeah, yeah!

No! People say things on Twitter that would instantly get them punched in real life! And so, yeah! And they do it all the time! And there are people who do that just for entertainment!

And I mean, the clinical literature on that is becoming extraordinarily clear! So the—the particularly pathological venom-spewing trolls, you know, a small percentage of the anonymous accounts are genuine whistleblowers! Most of them are Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic, sadists! And that’s what the clinical literature shows! And they have full sway on Twitter and disproportionate effects! And that’s warping the entire political landscape!

Anyways, that’s grounds for another conversation! We should actually wrap this up! I guess there’s lots of other things we can talk about, but we covered a fair bit of territory today! And so it’s a pleasure to get to sit down and talk with you at some length! We didn’t manage that at Stanford, although we got to know each other at least a trifle there!

So what’s next as far as you’re concerned? What are you attempting to do right now? Maybe we can close without this!

Dr. Bhattacharya: Sure! So the main thing is, the public health authorities made tremendous mistakes—we can just at least say mistakes during the pandemic. The public deserves a full accounting of what decisions were made, who made them, and why! There needs to be an honest COVID Commission on the order of like the 911 Commission that honestly looks at these and answers these questions!

So I’ve been working on a document called the Norfolk Group document—you can figure, go to norfolkgroup.org and find it— with a bunch of my colleagues where we’ve set an agenda. It’s just questions that an honest COVID commission would ask.

Well, maybe we should do a podcast with like two or three members of that group when you guys are far enough along to feel that that would be useful! Why don’t we do that, and you could suggest to me who these people should be?

Okay, let’s do that!

And so any sense about when that might be?

So the document is actually done; we’ve been working on it for the last eight months. And now I want to spend time educating, you know, willing legislators and others who are going to be conducting these inquiries.

Okay, so in—in basic—in every country, like so right now the next step, I think, is we’re going to try to translate—get it translated into multiple languages—and try to contact commissions that are already starting to form—you know, parliamentary inquiries or commissions that are already starting to form—so that they have these set of questions in front of them that they can ask. These are reasonable questions, like, you know, what was the basis for deciding that the children should have the vaccine?

Yeah, yeah! I’d like to know the answer to that!

So I was like, for sure! Because that would have helped us understand what better to do with the—the vaccine. Yes! So I think, I mean, like any of you—so we have like—we have like a just—it’s, you know, on 10 different topics—why were the schools closed? Did what was done to mitigate the harms of school closure? Things like this!

Yeah, so questions that need to get answered! The public deserves an answer! So—and that—the goal is, at least, my goal is not necessarily to indict anybody or anything in terms of like criminally or whatever! My goal is so that we in public health understand the right lessons—reform—repent even!

And then, so we don’t ever do this again!

Yeah, we respect civil liberties next time that I think the outcome of any honest process will be that lockdown will be a dirty word! That we will shudder in horror whenever we hear it! And anyone that proposes it will be seen as a charlatan!

Yeah! And I think that that is the ultimate outcome of any honest inquiry! And I’m working toward like making sure those honest inquiries happen!

Yeah, well Amen to that!

Okay, so for everyone watching and listening, I’m gonna—I’m gonna talk to Jay for another half hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I usually walk people through a bit of a biographical discussion about how their—how their career unfolded and how their interests—their meaningful interests made themselves manifest in their life! So that’s on the Daily Wire Plus platform!

For all of those of you who are watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention! Dr. J. Bhattacharya, thank you very much for talking to me today! It was a pleasure to walk through all this—I suppose a strange sort of pleasure to walk through all this dismal material with you! But to see it laid clear in the manner you managed it, that’s extraordinarily helpful!

And so, and thanks to the crew here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for helping me out today to make this happen! So good to see you, Jay! And, well, we'll talk again when the Norfolk Group project is ready to accrue some additional public communication!

Thank you!

Thank you, Jordan! A great honor to talk with you!

Good! Good to see you!

Hello everyone! I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWirePlus.com!