0:00

Beginning in March 2020, just over three

0:02

years ago, public health officials

0:04

locked this country down.

0:08

One man talked back, arguing

0:10

that public health officials were getting the fight against

0:12

COVID all wrong.

0:14

That got him into trouble, and he's

0:16

still in trouble today.

0:18

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Uncommon

0:20

Knowledge now.

0:32

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson.

0:35

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya came to Stanford

0:37

University at the age of 17 and

0:40

has never left.

0:42

In addition to his undergraduate degree, Dr. Bhattacharya

0:44

earned a doctorate from the Stanford Economics

0:46

Department and an MD from Stanford

0:49

Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya is

0:51

now a professor of medicine at Stanford and

0:53

a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Jay

0:56

is also one of the three authors of the Great

0:58

Barrington Declaration. I'm going to quote that

1:00

declaration. We have grave concerns,

1:03

Jay and his two co-authors wrote in that October 2020

1:06

document, we have

1:08

grave concerns about the damaging physical

1:10

and mental health impacts

1:12

of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.

1:16

Jay Bhattacharya, welcome. Thank you. Jay,

1:18

let's begin with a clip from your last appearance

1:21

on this program, which took place on October 13, 2021. My

1:26

question to you was, what needs to

1:28

happen? I mean,

1:31

I think the first thing that has to happen is

1:33

that public health should apologize. The public

1:36

health establishment in the United States and the world has failed

1:38

the public. The

1:40

first thing that has to happen is

1:43

that public health should apologize. Dr.

1:46

Anthony Fauci now retired, but during the lockdown,

1:48

the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious

1:50

Diseases. Has he apologized? No.

1:54

Dr. Francis Collins, again now retired, but

1:56

during the lockdown, director of National Institutes

1:58

of Health. Has Dr. Collins apologized?

1:59

apologized? No, unfortunately.

2:02

Federal public health officials, state public health

2:04

officials, county public health officials put them all together

2:07

and you get several thousand public

2:09

health officials in this country

2:12

who

2:13

are responsible for locking counties

2:15

down, states down, the country down. As

2:18

far as you're aware, has any of them

2:20

apologized? I think very, very few have

2:22

acknowledged any errors at all. All right.

2:26

What we know now, last

2:30

year Johns Hopkins performed

2:32

a survey of the literature on lockdowns.

2:36

We're defining lockdowns here as government mandates,

2:38

quote, such as policies that limit internal movement,

2:40

close schools and businesses and ban international

2:43

travel, close quote.

2:44

The conclusion of the Johns Hopkins study

2:47

that on average lockdowns caused

2:49

a reduction in COVID deaths

2:51

of only two tenths of one percent.

2:55

Does that sound right? You read

2:57

all of these things so you understand it in ways

2:59

that I couldn't begin to, but does that conclusion sound

3:02

about right?

3:04

And if the benefit of locking down the country

3:07

was a reduction in COVID deaths of two tenths

3:10

of one percent,

3:11

what do we know now about the costs?

3:14

So Peter, it is absolutely right. I

3:16

don't know the specific number, but the

3:19

magnitude of the effective, the protective

3:21

effect of the lockdowns, if

3:24

it's not zero,

3:26

it's very, very close to zero. And for

3:28

a very simple reason, you can see why it's right. The

3:31

lockdowns, if they were to benefit

3:33

anybody, it benefited

3:36

members of the laptop class

3:38

who actually had the wherewithal

3:40

to stay home, stay safe while

3:43

the rest of the population served them. Our

3:45

societies are deeply

3:48

unequal. It's a very small fraction

3:50

of the world population that actually could

3:52

stay home and stay safe. And so when the

3:54

lockdowns happened, a very

3:56

large number of people essentially were left on the outside.

3:59

They had to work to feed their families, to

4:02

take care of their

4:04

elderly parents or whatnot. And

4:07

that meant that the lockdowns had no chance

4:09

of actually working. The people

4:11

that conceived the lockdowns had an extent

4:15

of naivete about how societies work that it just

4:17

boggles the mind.

4:19

And then you asked me again about the harms

4:22

from the lockdowns. What do we know? What

4:25

do we know? They're tremendous and we're just still

4:27

just beginning to count them,

4:28

right? So domestically, for instance, I

4:31

think there's now a broad consensus that the lockdowns

4:33

harmed our children. In

4:35

many places, including California, children

4:38

did not see the inside of a physical classroom for

4:40

nearly a full year and a half. The

4:42

consequences of that play themselves out with

4:45

deep learning losses. By the way, it's concentrated

4:48

on minorities and poor populations

4:50

who didn't have the wherewithal to replace the

4:53

loss in classroom learning. But

4:56

it plays itself out over a long period of time.

4:58

The social science literature from before

5:00

the pandemic had documented

5:02

in detail about how valuable

5:05

investments in education are for the health

5:07

of children. If you deprive

5:10

children of education for even short periods

5:12

of time, it turns out it leads

5:14

to a lifetime of

5:17

lower income, worse health, even

5:19

shorter lifespans. One estimate from

5:22

early in the pandemic published in by

5:25

the editor of JAMA Pediatrics found

5:28

that just the spring lockdowns

5:30

in the United States alone cost our children five

5:32

and a half million life years in expectation.

5:36

That's yet to come. It's coming.

5:38

The toll

5:41

on skipped cancer screenings

5:43

and again, starting

5:45

to see it, but the full extent

5:48

of it is yet to come. In

5:50

the poorer parts of the world, the consequences

5:52

have been absolutely devastating. Something

5:55

like 100 million people thrown into dire

5:58

poverty, $2 a day or less of income.

5:59

Millions

6:02

of people were- India, Africa. India,

6:05

you name the poor country, you name the

6:07

poor people in the poor country, the lockdowns harm

6:09

them. The estimates

6:12

from the World

6:14

Food Program is that 100 million people

6:16

were put into dire food

6:18

insecurity, near starvation.

6:22

We haven't yet begun to count the deaths

6:24

from that yet, but it's going to be in the millions.

6:27

And the children

6:30

in poor countries, I'll just

6:32

take Uganda as a good example of this, they

6:35

don't have Zoom school, they just had no

6:37

school for two years, unless

6:40

again, if they were in the laptop class, relatively

6:42

small number. Four

6:44

and a half million Ugandan kids never came

6:46

back to school after two years out of school.

6:49

And it turns out many of them, especially

6:51

the little girls, were sold into sexual

6:53

slavery or married

6:55

off as child brides, many little boys

6:58

were put into child labor.

7:00

Their families were so poor that they faced

7:03

this terrible choice between starving

7:05

their kids or prostituting

7:08

them.

7:09

So we're in

7:11

a situation where the harms of the lockdowns

7:13

have become and are becoming clearer and

7:16

clearer every day. And

7:18

the

7:19

benefits in terms of protecting people

7:21

from COVID, it's becoming clear that they did none

7:23

of that. A million, I think it was

7:26

a 1.2 million people have died of COVID in the United

7:28

States, nearly 7 million worldwide,

7:30

those are the official estimates.

7:33

I mean, what benefit did

7:35

the lockdowns actually have?

7:37

All right. Let's go through

7:39

the life

7:42

of Doc J as

7:44

this is taking place.

7:49

Let's begin. In March 2020, as

7:51

the lockdowns are being announced,

7:56

you felt uneasy about them immediately.

7:58

I know this because we're friends and we're friends. we were talking about

8:00

it. I had no idea what was happening and

8:03

you said, what's happening here is wrong. I

8:06

think is wrong.

8:08

You're actually quite scientific about it, which

8:10

leads me to the study that you conducted, the

8:12

seroprevalence study that you conducted

8:15

right here

8:16

in Santa Clara County and

8:20

the whole public health apparatus in the country

8:22

is moving toward a lockdown

8:24

and

8:25

you, to my astonishment, I thought, well,

8:27

you must be, there must be hundreds of these seroprevalence

8:29

studies being done and it turned out the one that

8:32

you performed here in Santa Clara County with

8:34

a couple of colleagues at the medical school was

8:36

the first seroprevalence study ever conducted

8:40

and you discovered

8:42

that the population was

8:44

already much more infected with

8:47

COVID than public

8:50

health authorities had understood. I thought,

8:53

stopping by your office and chatting as

8:55

we do, you

8:57

will receive the thanks of a grateful nation.

9:00

These are serious findings.

9:04

You didn't. What happened instead?

9:07

It's kind of a painful story. So

9:10

that study, which

9:13

I was a senior author on in April

9:15

of 2020, early April 2020, the first week

9:18

in Santa Clara County, we found

9:20

that about 3% of Santa Clara

9:23

County had antibodies already. And

9:26

as you said, well, there's

9:28

several implications. One is that that

9:32

meant the mortality rate from the disease was much

9:34

lower than people were saying. The World Health Organization

9:36

had already said that the mortality rate was like 3%

9:39

or 4%. They're saying something, technically

9:41

something called a case fatality rate, right? The number of people

9:43

that identified with COVID, usually

9:45

in the hospital back in those days, divided

9:48

by the number of people, again, you have the number

9:51

of people who died among that set and then you get 3%

9:53

or 4%. That is a deeply misleading

9:56

number. 3%

9:57

or 4% of people who get COVID do not die

9:59

from COVID. That's just a lie.

9:59

lie. And

10:03

what that seroprevalence study

10:05

found was that it was 0.2%. So two

10:07

out of

10:08

a thousand. Now that's still a big number. It's

10:12

not the flu. And we also

10:14

found a very, very steep age gradient. Children...

10:16

Well, you depict that up in the seroprevalence. I forgot to

10:19

go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. So

10:21

children just didn't die at

10:22

very high rates from COVID, especially healthy children.

10:25

One in

10:27

a million on that

10:29

order. Whereas older

10:31

people had much higher rates of death from COVID. We found

10:33

that we saw that in the seroprevalence study. It

10:37

was much more

10:39

widespread, I think 40 or 50 case infections

10:43

for every case that public health knew about at the

10:45

time. And we found also

10:47

that... I mean, the third implication is that it's 3%,

10:50

right?

10:52

Very infectious disease. That means we still have

10:54

a long way to go before the pandemic's over. So

10:56

those were the three implications of that study. We

10:59

found also... We did a very similar study in

11:02

LA County the next week after that. And

11:04

then another more nationwide study,

11:06

less representative of Major League Baseball employees.

11:10

And what we found in LA was 4% of

11:12

infection,

11:14

right?

11:17

Of the prevalence of infections, 4% of the

11:20

LA County adult population

11:23

had evidence of having had COVID already and recovered.

11:26

The same exact infection fatality rate. And

11:31

so it was a confirmation of that study,

11:33

independent confirmation of that study. And by the way, if I

11:35

may add, in subsequent weeks

11:37

and months, the findings of these studies

11:40

would be confirmed again and again

11:42

and again and again. A hundred plus studies.

11:44

I like

11:44

this. Yeah. We found exactly what we found. So

11:47

instead of thanks you received. Okay.

11:50

So at

11:52

Stanford, at first there

11:54

was a lot of very...

11:57

I mean, it was actually quite touching. A lot of people

11:59

volunteered.

11:59

to help with the study, we put the study together

12:02

in basically three weeks'

12:04

time.

12:05

We worked very closely with the Human

12:07

Subjects Review Board at Stanford,

12:09

who helped us with the script, make sure we protected

12:11

the people that volunteered their

12:14

finger-picked blood, protected the people that

12:16

were drawing the

12:18

blood and drawing the samples, and so on.

12:20

And it felt

12:22

quite good. It felt like a community coming together to

12:25

do a very important bit of science

12:27

so that the world at large could

12:29

learn more about this deadly disease that was floating

12:32

around. When we first

12:34

got the results of the study, when we first started

12:36

coming in, that was when things

12:38

really turned negative. There

12:41

was, for instance, a pathologist

12:44

here at Stanford who wanted to make their own test

12:46

kit, their antibody test kit. We had actually

12:48

used a test kit that had been gifted to

12:50

us by some amazing

12:53

folks who work with Major League Baseball and steroid

12:55

testing. He had gotten these test kits

12:59

from a Chinese company actually, working

13:02

with an American affiliate.

13:03

And he

13:05

reached out to me after he saw a

13:07

Wall Street Journal piece I had written in March of 2020 and

13:10

said, look, I don't want to use these for Major League

13:12

Baseball, make money, I want to use them for science, can you

13:15

use them for science? So

13:17

it felt really good. But

13:19

the test kit itself

13:21

had, just like any medical

13:24

apparatus, has some error, false positives,

13:26

false negatives. And there was a lot

13:29

of,

13:29

like a race among lab

13:32

folks to create their own test kits,

13:35

including here at Stanford,

13:37

and then market them.

13:40

We got an email from the head

13:43

of the pathology department and then from the Department of Medicine

13:45

saying, well, people are concerned about your test

13:47

kit. Now we'd had actually a lot of

13:49

tests, independent

13:53

labs that checked the validity of

13:55

the test kit. And we found, because of small error, 0.5% in

13:57

the. in

14:00

the false positive rate. But we had these

14:02

statistical methods to adjust for this, right? So it was,

14:04

you know, it's an interesting statistical question, but it's

14:07

not something that was gonna invalidate the results

14:09

of our study, which were published, by the way, in

14:11

the International Journal of Epidemiology. But

14:15

Stanford made us change

14:18

after the fact, made us change the protocols

14:20

of the study.

14:21

It was unprecedented. I mean, I've been a Stanford professor

14:23

for, you know, 20 some years up to that

14:26

point. I've never seen or heard of

14:28

Stanford forcing professors

14:30

to independently change the results or change

14:32

the protocols of a study after

14:36

the data collection already been done

14:38

because of the concerns of the pathologists

14:41

and the medical school. They

14:43

made us bring back, okay, just,

14:45

I'm sorry to do math on you, Peter, but let

14:47

me just, I have to do just a bit of math. I'll go

14:49

right ahead. Okay, so. Because you

14:51

have to explain what it means to change a protocol because I don't

14:54

understand. So that goes like this specifically, right? So we have 3,000

14:57

people that we sampled

14:58

in Santa Clara County. 50 of

15:00

them were positive. Now we have to do some waiting because

15:03

there's too many people from coming from richer

15:05

parts than the poorer parts. That's how we got the 2, the 2.8%

15:07

prevalence. But anyways, we had 50 out

15:10

of 3,000 positive.

15:12

Okay, Stanford

15:14

made us bring those 50 people back

15:17

in to the lab, even

15:20

though that was part of our original protocol. And

15:23

test them, that means draw blood from

15:25

them, and have

15:28

them tested using the pathologist

15:30

test kit rather than the test kit we used. On

15:33

the premise that the pathologist test kit was completely

15:35

accurate and ours was

15:36

crap. He

15:39

found that of those 50, 35 out of those 50

15:42

were positive on his test kit.

15:47

Now let's say his test kit is 100% accurate.

15:50

Well, what that means is that we have 15 people

15:53

that we identified as positive, that he identified as

15:55

negative.

15:56

False positives, right? Right. 15 out

15:59

of,

15:59

out of.

15:59

So he sent an email around saying 15 out of 50

16:02

false positives, 30%.

16:04

That's devastating. That means you can't

16:06

use that test kit. Everything we did was terrible

16:09

and wrong. The problem is the math.

16:12

If you have 15 false positives, it's not out of 50, it's

16:14

out of 3,000,

16:18

which is a 0.5% error rate.

16:20

Which is exactly what you knew

16:22

the error rate going into it. Exactly.

16:25

So

16:26

Stanford then, when we found this out,

16:29

when I immediately noticed that the denominator

16:31

was wrong, I pointed this out to the folks

16:33

at Stanford in the medical school that

16:36

were forcing us to change our protocol. And

16:38

they told us we were not allowed to tell the world about it. At

16:40

a time when people were questioning the accuracy

16:43

of our test kit, the correctness

16:46

of our study, and so on.

16:48

OK.

16:49

There's more to that story, but

16:52

people will read that in the book that you're going to write

16:54

sooner or later,

16:56

if I have anything to do with it sooner.

16:58

Let's move on from that

17:01

seroprevalence study here at Stanford,

17:04

which again I repeat.

17:06

First of all, it was your idea to be helpful.

17:09

You noticed that no one had done one yet. You moved

17:11

as quickly as you reasonably could. You came back

17:14

with results that were valid

17:16

and that were confirmed again and again and again. All

17:19

right. The Great

17:21

Barrington Declaration in October 2020. Again,

17:25

I'm going to quote this from the Great Barrington Declaration,

17:28

which you co-authored with two

17:30

others whom I'll mention in a moment. As infectious

17:33

disease epidemiologists and public health scientists,

17:36

we have grave concerns about the damaging

17:38

physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing

17:41

COVID-19 policies and recommend

17:43

an approach that we call focused protection.

17:46

Instead of shutting the country down, you focus

17:48

on people who are at risk,

17:50

particularly older people, because of this age

17:52

gradient you discovered. This

17:55

is signed by Dr.

17:57

J. Bhattacharya of Stanford.

17:59

Dr. Martin Kuldorf

18:01

of Harvard and Dr. Sunetra

18:04

Gupta of Oxford.

18:07

We now know that just four days after

18:09

you published the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr.

18:12

Francis Collins, Director of NIH, wrote

18:15

an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director

18:17

of NIAID.

18:19

Quote, this proposal

18:21

from the three fringe

18:24

epidemiology. Let me just repeat that. Jay

18:27

Bhattachary of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta

18:30

of Oxford, and Martin Kuldorf of Harvard.

18:33

This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists

18:36

seems to be getting a lot of attention. There needs to be

18:38

a quick and devastating published takedown

18:40

of its premises.

18:41

Close quote. A week later, Dr.

18:44

Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great

18:46

Barrington Declaration. Quote, this

18:48

is a fringe component of epidemiology.

18:50

This is not mainstream science. It's

18:53

dangerous. Close quote. Still

18:55

later, Dr. Collins said on Fox

18:57

News, quote, hundreds of thousands

18:59

of people would have died

19:02

if we had followed that strategy.

19:05

Close quote. Jay,

19:07

what's going on here? So

19:11

we wrote this Great Barrington Declaration

19:13

in October of 2020.

19:16

We'd already tried the lockdown in March

19:18

and April of 2020,

19:19

and the disease had come back.

19:22

The effective implied promise

19:24

is two weeks to flatten the curve, and then we can figure

19:26

out what to do with the disease. Right.

19:29

On the basis, it turns out, of advice

19:32

from people like Francis Collins and Tony

19:34

Fauci, two

19:35

prominent government actors, including

19:38

President Trump.

19:40

The lockdown

19:42

strategy in part was a

19:45

reaction to observations

19:47

of what happened in China in January of 2020. Chinese

19:50

have locked down their society, especially

19:53

Wuhan and Hubei Province around it.

19:56

And American

19:59

bureaucrats like.

19:59

Tony Fauci

20:01

looked at this and thought, okay, what the Chinese

20:03

did worked, we need to do it too.

20:06

Now, these

20:09

are tremendous... Well, wait, how did they know that it worked? They

20:11

believed Chinese data? Yes. All

20:14

right. Carry on. So,

20:16

the... So, that... But

20:20

they had already staked their reputations

20:22

on this strategy.

20:24

And why fringe epidemiology?

20:27

Why would the head of the NIH go out of

20:29

his way to do this devastating

20:31

takedown? By the way, the devastating takedown turned out to be a

20:34

Wired magazine article. That was the best

20:36

they could produce. Well, I mean, you see a response

20:38

to that email that you cited, Tony Fauci

20:41

responded to Francis Collins with a

20:44

Wired magazine article. I see. They very

20:46

likely

20:47

cooperate with the... Anyways,

20:49

it's... All right. So, the

20:51

problem was that

20:53

you had thousands and thousands

20:55

of scientists, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford,

20:58

saying that what they were doing, their strategy

21:00

was a mistake, that there was no scientific

21:02

consensus in favor of their strategy.

21:05

And by the way, when you say thousands and thousands

21:08

of scientists, you put up the Great Barrington

21:10

Declaration online and invited

21:13

anyone who wanted to associate himself with it to

21:15

sign. And you did have thousands

21:18

and thousands of signatures. Tens of thousands

21:20

of doctors and scientists and epidemiologists, including

21:22

Nobel Prize winner. I

21:25

mean, so it wasn't actually a fringe idea. In

21:27

fact, it was the standard

21:29

policy for how to manage respiratory

21:31

virus pandemics that we'd

21:33

followed for a century. If you go back to March

21:36

of 2020, you can see op-eds in the New York

21:38

Times and Washington Post and elsewhere by

21:40

leading epidemiologists that

21:42

it looks for all the world like the Great Barrington

21:44

Declaration. It's the least original thing I ever worked

21:47

on my entire life here. So

21:51

the problem was for

21:53

Tony Fauci and Francis Collins was that

21:55

they had to solve a PR problem.

21:58

You have prominent scientists.

21:59

saying, look, what these guys are doing is not

22:02

actually the right strategy. That normally

22:04

should have led to a debate, a discussion,

22:06

some sort of like conversation. Because

22:10

if you're going to implement a policy as devastating as

22:12

a lockdown, you actually need to have

22:14

scientific consensus. It's not

22:16

okay to say that we

22:19

should lock the side down when only like part of scientists

22:21

agree with it, especially when it's

22:23

clear it didn't work in just a few months

22:26

earlier. And it

22:28

was already clear that it caused a lot of damage a few months

22:30

earlier.

22:31

So they faced a fear

22:33

problem. They had to make us into

22:35

fringe characters, fringe actors, destroy

22:38

us, destroy our reputations. So they didn't

22:40

have to have that debate. They needed

22:42

to create an illusion of scientific consensus

22:44

that did not actually exist.

22:46

All right. So

22:49

we're not discussing, in that incident, we're not discussing

22:51

science. We're discussing brutal

22:55

bureaucratic politics. Yeah. And

22:57

it's a hubris. All right.

22:59

Blacklisted on Twitter, you joined Twitter in 2021. Your

23:02

first tweet, you linked

23:05

to an article that you had recently

23:07

written on age-based risks

23:10

and you tweet, quote, mass testing

23:13

is locked down by stealth. By

23:16

the way, so very briefly, what's the argument there?

23:18

What point were you making? So mass

23:21

testing of children,

23:22

so that they stay out of school,

23:24

right? So you test

23:26

someone who's come in contact

23:29

with a child. You keep them out of school

23:31

for five, seven, how many days

23:33

until you're certain the person's ... the

23:36

kid's negative. Essentially that

23:38

essentially is a lockdown of that child, even though

23:41

they're not actually at lower

23:43

risk of spreading the disease in the population. Like,

23:45

what does the kid do at home? What if it's a crowded home?

23:49

What if the kid's healthy? Do they not go outside and

23:51

play with other kids? I mean, you

23:54

had already from the spring of 2020, evidence

23:56

from Sweden,

23:57

that first ... which kept

23:59

schools for kids under 16 entirely

24:02

open that, you know, not one child died

24:04

that spring from COVID and that

24:06

the teachers were actually at lower

24:09

risk of COVID than the population

24:11

of other workers at large. They actually,

24:13

being around kids actually protected them in some sense because

24:17

the kids are not super spreaders. They actually are

24:19

less efficient spreaders than adults. So

24:22

you already had all that evidence. So why are

24:24

we testing to keep kids out of school? It just harms

24:26

them with very little epidemiological benefit. All

24:28

right. Thank you for that explanation. So

24:31

and you continue to tweet. And

24:34

then

24:35

late last year, Elon Musk's takes

24:38

over Twitter

24:39

and the company releases internal emails

24:42

and documents showing among

24:44

other things that you had been intentionally

24:48

censored. And not long after that, Elon

24:50

Musk gets in touch with Dr. J. Bhattachary

24:52

and says, come on up here to headquarters and

24:55

take a look. I'd like you to see this with your own eyes.

24:58

What did you see? I mean,

25:00

it was surreal, Peter. So

25:03

when I joined Twitter, that was October,

25:05

you know, August 2021. And

25:09

I actually got a

25:11

lot of followers. I mean, like 200,000

25:14

followers, I think, by the time. But stop rubbing it

25:16

in. I have 12,000. I've tried to help

25:18

you on Twitter, Peter. No.

25:21

Now, the thing is, it's like

25:22

the blacklist that they put me on was

25:25

insidious.

25:26

Right. I could put a tweet out. I thought

25:28

I was reaching... The purpose of going

25:30

on Twitter isn't to reach people that already agree with me. The

25:32

purpose of going on Twitter was to

25:35

tell other people who hadn't heard

25:37

of my message or about lockdowns

25:39

and so on, COVID policy, that

25:41

maybe disagreed with me to engage with them.

25:46

The blacklist made sure that

25:48

my tweets, my message

25:50

never reached that audience.

25:52

It only reached people that already followed

25:55

me. That already followed you. Yeah, I see. So it

25:57

was just an insidious way of sort

25:59

of keeping me in a...

25:59

without my even knowing about it.

26:03

And Twitter was banning

26:05

you on its own

26:08

initiative, or it was being prompted to do so

26:10

by outside? I don't know that

26:12

for certain about the blacklist, but I very

26:15

strongly suspect that it was government

26:17

actors that had me on

26:19

a blacklist. All right. I can give you some

26:21

evidence for that, so I don't sound too much like a conspiracy

26:24

theorist.

26:25

Give us a sentence or two about

26:27

that. Yeah, so there's a lawsuit by

26:30

Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's offices

26:32

against the Biden administration, where we've deposed

26:35

Tony Fauci. We've deposed aides

26:37

to the Surgeon General, aides to Jen

26:40

Psaki, the former communication director of the White House. We

26:42

found direct

26:44

instructions and threats from the White

26:46

House and many agencies within

26:49

HHS, Health and Human Services, to Twitter

26:51

and other social media companies. Facebook

26:53

and so forth, right.

26:54

Essentially threatening them unless they censored

26:57

people and ideas that they didn't like. All

26:59

right. So here's

27:02

what you put up. Here's what you tweeted after learning that

27:04

you've been blacklisted. By the way, the term blacklist

27:07

is politically incorrect in itself, but it's

27:10

Twitter's term. They actually put you on a blacklist.

27:12

All right.

27:14

Quote, quoting you, the thought that will keep me up tonight,

27:16

censorship of scientific discussion permitted

27:19

policies like school closures and children

27:21

were hurt.

27:25

This is the story of your life during

27:27

COVID, beginning with a zero

27:29

prevalence study. Shut up. Great

27:33

Barrington Declaration, your fringe epidemiologist.

27:35

Sit down and shut up. Twitter,

27:39

if you won't shut up, we're going to censor him. Why?

27:43

What were

27:43

they thinking? This isn't science.

27:46

It's not science. I think that by 2021, we already

27:48

had tremendous policy that

27:52

kept kids out of school that forced people to

27:54

be vaccinated, even though the evidence was that

27:56

the vaccine doesn't stop

27:58

transmission.

27:59

you already harmed the lives

28:02

of so many people.

28:03

It's just inconvenient to have

28:05

Stanford, Harvard, Oxford professors

28:08

around saying it wasn't necessary,

28:10

that there were other strategies that might have worked better, that

28:12

might have protected people better without the collateral harm.

28:14

That's the lie.

28:17

When I met with Elon, actually it was surreal. Like

28:20

I drove up to go to

28:23

toward headquarters in San Francisco. The

28:25

whole way up, I'm thinking to myself, this trip cost

28:27

Elon $44 billion. And

28:30

I saw with my own eyes, it literally said blacklist.

28:35

They have a database called Jira, and

28:37

they put me on this black, I saw

28:41

prominent media people asking

28:43

for tweets of mine to be brought down, for me

28:46

to be censored. I mean, it was

28:48

a striking thing to know that there

28:50

were actors in the media

28:51

environment

28:53

to know from the Missouri versus Biden case, in

28:57

the government who wanted to silence me. All

28:59

right.

29:02

Back, so now we come

29:04

to what

29:06

we ought to learn, what should we know, and

29:09

what should we do now? Three

29:12

states. There was a study of three states

29:15

this spring by the Paragon

29:17

Health Institute.

29:19

It used an index of state responses to

29:21

COVID that were created at Oxford University.

29:23

So you have an objective set of indexing.

29:25

Illinois, for example, has an average score. California,

29:29

which imposes, imposed some of the harshest

29:31

lockdowns, has a high score. Florida,

29:33

which imposed lockdowns, but only very briefly, and

29:35

then opened up almost entirely, has

29:37

a low score.

29:39

The finding, after adjusting for age

29:41

and disease, quote, I'm quoting the study, all

29:43

three states, high,

29:46

medium, and low. California, Illinois,

29:48

and Florida. All three states

29:50

had roughly equal outcomes,

29:53

suggesting that there was no substantial

29:56

health benefit to more severe lockdowns.

29:59

Florida, how.

29:59

however, easily surpassed

30:02

California and Illinois in

30:05

educational and economic outcomes.

30:08

The kids went to school, the economy remained

30:11

open. That all sounds right to you?

30:15

Yes. So again, the

30:17

lockdowns were a mistake. I'm saying to you, you

30:20

who, this is almost the

30:23

wrong word to use for you because it's just so counter

30:25

to your temperament and personality, that

30:28

you campaigned against lockdowns throughout

30:30

COVID. You have no reason

30:33

to regret that.

30:34

No, I think that was the right thing to do. I'm

30:36

not by nature an activist.

30:38

I can attest to that. But

30:42

every aspect of lockdown just fills me

30:44

with...

30:45

It has nothing

30:47

to do with science. It's

30:50

damaging to the poor. It's damaging

30:52

to kids in ways that

30:55

public policy never ought to have done. And we did

30:57

it out of ignorance and fear and

30:59

hubris. Sweden, the

31:01

all cause

31:02

excess deaths in

31:04

Sweden is something like 3%.

31:06

It's among the very,

31:08

very lowest in all of Europe. In

31:11

other words... So in repeat, Sweden did not

31:14

lockdown. Sweden did not lockdown. Schools stayed

31:16

open. Very fast. The economy continued to

31:18

function. Yeah. And they have lower mortality

31:21

than lockdown Germany, lockdown UK,

31:23

lockdown France, lockdown even

31:26

lockdown, I think they've now surpassed

31:28

Finland and Norway. I mean,

31:31

it's almost no

31:33

excess deaths. Imagine

31:36

that. Imagine if we'd followed a policy like

31:38

Sweden, we could have avoided all the harms

31:40

to our children. We could have avoided all the suffering

31:42

caused by

31:44

the lockdowns, the closed businesses,

31:47

the unemployment, all of that. The economic

31:49

harm where we spent trillions of dollars, the inflation

31:52

is a consequence of the lockdowns and

31:54

still protected our people better from COVID.

31:57

So the question now is how do we do better

31:59

now?

31:59

next time around.

32:01

Commission, here's an idea. Jay Bhattacharya

32:03

with Martin Koldorf writing in the Wall Street Journal in June

32:06

of 2021. This is almost two

32:08

years ago. The first step to restoring

32:10

the public's trust in scientific experts is

32:12

an honest and comprehensive evaluation

32:15

of the nation's pandemic response.

32:18

Senators Bob Menendez, Democrat

32:20

of New Jersey, and Susan Collins, Republican

32:23

of Maine, have introduced a bill that

32:25

would establish a COVID

32:28

commission,

32:29

close quote. Now, there's a good idea, a

32:31

bipartisan COVID commission.

32:33

What has the commission found?

32:35

So they're actually meeting today to

32:37

report the results. It's a whitewash, right?

32:40

It doesn't mention the possibility of focus protection.

32:44

I mean, in effect, you can kind of get a sense of how

32:47

the establishment that imposed the lockdowns

32:49

is treating this. They have a once

32:51

in a generation opportunity to actually do

32:54

an

32:54

honest introspection and reform

32:57

the processes that led to this public policy disaster.

33:00

Instead, they're giving awards to Tony Fauci. Instead,

33:03

they're patting themselves on the back,

33:06

saying that what they did was absolutely necessary. I

33:10

think they're blaming, for instance, the

33:14

disaster on misinformation.

33:16

Right? So I think the head

33:18

of the FDA, Califf, just

33:21

did a interview with some public radio

33:23

station saying that misinformation is the number

33:25

one cause of death. It

33:29

is

33:29

irresponsible in the extreme. But I don't,

33:32

I mean, it's depressing to watch, right?

33:34

Because I think the problem is like,

33:37

if you don't have an honest evaluation

33:40

of what happened and the disaster that happened, this

33:43

will happen again, Peter. Yes, right. OK. The

33:45

lawsuit, you mentioned this lawsuit a moment ago. The

33:47

attorneys general of Louisiana, Missouri, and other

33:49

states have brought suit against the Biden

33:52

administration for censoring social media

33:54

during the pandemic. You've joined the

33:56

suit.

33:57

Let me quote for a moment from the testimony

33:59

of John. Sawyer, if I'm pronouncing

34:01

his name correctly, Special Assistant

34:03

Attorney General for Louisiana. This

34:06

is testimony he gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee

34:08

this past March. By the way, Sawyer

34:12

is a graduate of Notre Dame, Harvard Law School,

34:15

and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. So we're not

34:17

talking about a crank here.

34:19

This is from his testimony, quote, what

34:22

we discovered, and excuse me,

34:25

he's talking about the discovery process that you mentioned

34:27

a moment ago. People have been deposed. Emails

34:29

have been examined, and so forth.

34:31

What we obtained was astonishing, staggering,

34:35

and horrifying. A

34:37

veritable army of federal officials

34:39

pressures, threatens, coerces,

34:41

colludes with, demands, and deceives

34:44

social media platforms to censor online

34:46

speech.

34:50

You experienced that. I'm

34:52

just asking you now as a normal consumer. You're

34:55

not a normal consumer of news. You're a normal consumer

34:58

of news. In recent months,

35:00

you've become especially attuned to news about

35:02

matters such as this.

35:05

Has that testimony, has your lawsuit

35:07

received the kind of attention

35:10

that it feels it merits? I

35:12

think this is the most important First Amendment case since

35:15

Pentagon Papers 50

35:17

years ago. And it's received almost

35:19

no attention from the news media. And it's actually

35:21

kind of shocking, right? Because it's

35:24

the news media that, in principle,

35:27

ought to be standing up for free speech. Right.

35:29

Right. OK.

35:31

The political system.

35:33

The lockdowns are largely, we've

35:35

talked about Fauci and Collins, who are federal

35:38

officials, but the lockdowns are largely

35:40

a matter of state law. And in many states,

35:42

including our state of California,

35:44

the state tends to defer to county

35:47

health officials. So the lockdowns

35:49

are largely

35:51

imposed by county and state

35:53

officials. And now

35:56

some 20 states have enacted laws that

35:58

curtail the powers of the state. those health officials.

36:01

The laws vary a little bit from state to state, but they

36:03

require public health officials to narrow the scope

36:06

of their actions to achieve specific health purposes.

36:09

They call for an expedited judicial review

36:12

of such actions and they ensure that actions will

36:14

automatically expire after a certain period

36:16

of time.

36:17

Okay.

36:21

Is that a good idea? Yes.

36:23

I think the problem is that what happened

36:25

is you have the CDC which issues

36:28

guidance. You have the NIH which issues

36:31

proclamations from on high, I guess, of who's

36:33

fringe and who's not. And

36:36

the local state and

36:38

state officials essentially respond as if it were wholly writ.

36:42

It's not formal regulation that's been subject to

36:45

the public comment or whatever. It's just

36:47

a CDC guidance. They tell you not to eat sushi

36:49

when you're pregnant or something. And

36:51

usually people feel free to

36:53

ignore it, but during the pandemic, these

36:56

kinds of guidances were used in court

36:58

cases to defend indefensible things,

37:01

lockdowns, closures

37:03

of businesses that had no real

37:06

justification in terms of reality.

37:08

Yes. And the other point, the point

37:10

of view from the point of view of the political

37:13

system, almost from the point of view of political theory,

37:16

there are over 2,000, I think just

37:19

short of 3,000 counties in

37:21

this country. This

37:23

varies a little bit from state to state, but most counties

37:26

have a public health official and in most cases

37:28

that public health official is appointed,

37:30

not elected. Most people have never

37:32

even heard of them and suddenly it emerges

37:35

that they have, I was about

37:37

to say dictatorial powers. I'm going to stick with dictatorial

37:40

powers.

37:41

You have to live a certain way because they say

37:43

so

37:44

and there's no redress.

37:47

Okay, so these state laws are a good idea.

37:50

Does it bother you that it's only 20 states and

37:52

does it bother you that almost all,

37:54

I think all of the 20 states, almost

37:57

all, let me stick with that,

37:59

are run by Roe. Republicans, that there's now

38:01

a partisan divide in the response to

38:03

these

38:04

lockdowns. It's a disaster, Peter. It's

38:07

a disaster that it's become a partisan

38:09

thing. Public health, when it is partisan,

38:12

is a failed public health. It's not like politics.

38:15

You can't just win 50% plus one

38:17

and say you've done a successful job in public health.

38:20

You need 95% of the public to agree with you,

38:22

to

38:23

honor and respect what you're saying, or else

38:26

you failed. Trust what you're saying, or else you failed.

38:29

Public health is for everybody. It's not a partisan issue.

38:31

The fact that it is partisan, I mean,

38:34

I'm in favor of the laws, but I wish that

38:36

those laws were extended to the rest of the states.

38:38

I think it actually would help public health, because then at that

38:40

point, then public health

38:43

officials couldn't act as

38:45

dictators. They would have to reason

38:47

with the public and tell the public, look, here's

38:50

the evidence for why we're asking you to do

38:52

this.

38:53

And if they're persuasive, the public would agree. This is what happened

38:55

in Sweden. In Sweden, 95%

38:57

of people trust Swedish

38:59

public health,

39:00

because they were honest about their mistakes,

39:03

honest about their reasoning. They treated

39:05

adults like adults.

39:07

All right. So Jay, if

39:11

I could make you a

39:13

dictator for a day, I've just been real.

39:16

But

39:17

what do you want to see happen? We've talked about there's a lawsuit.

39:20

It's not getting the attention it deserves. There's laws.

39:22

They're good as far as they go, but it's only 20 states. It's

39:26

brought into view a partisan divide.

39:30

This just seems you

39:32

have the magnitude of these lockdowns, which

39:35

damaged millions of people and

39:37

did very little good. And

39:41

the response seems puny, certainly

39:44

insufficient. What

39:47

could still be done? Well, first, don't

39:49

make me dictator for a day. That would be

39:51

a mistake. But

39:54

I

39:55

think that the response is coming.

40:00

It's not done yet. It's unfortunate

40:02

that we haven't had the honest

40:04

evaluation. The extent

40:06

of harm to people is so much that

40:08

it demands a political response.

40:11

And I think that political response will happen. What form it'll

40:14

take, I don't know, you're the political expert, but

40:16

the expression

40:19

of the people that were harmed by the lockdowns, the expression

40:21

of the people that were harmed by COVID, the fact

40:23

that public health did not actually end up

40:25

protecting people, ended up harming people, that

40:28

demands a political response, which I think will

40:30

inevitably come.

40:31

All right.

40:33

A few final questions, Jay. Holman Jenkins

40:35

in the Wall Street Journal, quote,

40:37

the world inevitably will

40:40

face new respiratory viruses. There seems

40:42

to be no good reason why nature would afflict

40:44

us with a disease that spreads

40:47

as easily as the flu or COVID and

40:49

is significantly more deadly,

40:52

but neither can that be ruled out.

40:55

Are we ready for the next pandemic?

40:56

We're going to lock down again with the next pandemic, guaranteed.

41:01

With the current sort of configuration

41:03

of power in public health and politics stands,

41:06

that we will respond

41:09

by saying, look, the lockdown is the

41:11

only way. And just as it happened

41:14

in 2020, it'll be the laptop class that'll benefit and the

41:16

poor and the vulnerable and children who will

41:18

be harmed.

41:19

All right. We're talking about lockdowns,

41:21

but briefly, if I could ask you what

41:24

we know about other aspects

41:26

of the response. Just briefly, if you could take

41:28

us through these. Masking. February

41:31

of this year, the Cochrane Library conducted

41:34

what seems to be the most rigorous study

41:37

of the literature on masking, at least it's the most rigorous

41:39

of which I'm aware. The conclusion, quote,

41:42

we are uncertain whether wearing masks

41:44

or N95 respirators helps

41:46

to slow the spread of respiratory viruses

41:48

based on the studies we assessed. Close

41:51

quote. We're uncertain.

41:53

The lead author of the study, the Oxford epidemiologist

41:56

Tom Jefferson put it more bluntly, quote, there is just

41:59

no evidence that masking is a risk.

41:59

make any difference, full stop, close quote.

42:02

That sounds right to you? Yes. We

42:04

were all told we couldn't go into a store, we couldn't go

42:06

to church, we couldn't leave our homes

42:09

unless we had a mask, and they make no

42:11

difference. There have been now, before

42:13

the pandemic, there were something like a dozen randomized

42:15

studies

42:16

of masking and the

42:19

prevention of

42:20

spread of influenza.

42:22

Three randomized studies during the pandemic on

42:24

COVID. And all of them

42:26

have either find no effect or have trouble

42:29

finding any effect at all, or if they find effect,

42:31

it's a tiny, tiny effect.

42:34

Okay.

42:35

Right. So

42:37

here's what I think is some good news, the vaccines.

42:40

Dr. Fauci, this is last summer, even

42:42

though vaccines don't protect particularly well

42:44

against infection, oops, we thought they

42:46

did, but they don't, they do protect

42:49

quite well against severe disease leading

42:51

to hospitalization and death, close quote. That

42:54

bit we got right, correct? Yes,

42:57

I think so.

42:57

The vaccines, we did have this project,

43:00

what was it called, Project Lightspeed or? Operation

43:02

Warp Speed. Warp Speed, Warp Speed, I'm

43:04

a little vague on the Star Trek terms, but

43:06

Operation Warp Speed, the government got

43:09

that right. That was one place where the government mobilized

43:11

resources and we got it right. They don't protect

43:13

against infection, but they do help keep you alive

43:16

if you get it, right? Yeah, so I think that

43:18

that's true, but there's some nuances

43:20

that are very important there. So first, if

43:22

you've had COVID and recovered,

43:24

it's, I'm not, I don't know

43:26

how big an effect improvement there is

43:28

in the, so you already have

43:31

pretty good protection against severe disease and death or

43:33

reinfection, yeah, if you've had COVID and recovered.

43:36

The vaccine is, they might help a little, but

43:38

not as much as if you're completely immune naive. Second,

43:41

it's gonna have a much bigger benefit for older people than

43:43

for young people. For young people, the risk of death is very

43:45

low to begin with. Third,

43:48

there are some side effects from the vaccine,

43:50

like especially young men and myocarditis,

43:53

so it's not necessarily wise, just

43:55

because it reduces death, that automatically everyone

43:57

should automatically get it. Okay, so this brings

43:59

up.

43:59

brings us to the question of the mandates. They

44:03

varied from state to state, but we do

44:05

know that all federal workers were required

44:08

to get vaccinated to keep their jobs.

44:11

We know that

44:12

at this moment, as we sit here recording

44:14

this, foreign visitors are not

44:16

allowed into the United States without proof of vaccination.

44:19

Do these mandates make sense? No.

44:23

So just as a matter of policy

44:25

and economics,

44:27

if my vaccine only matters

44:29

for whether I die from if

44:31

I get COVID, well, then it's a personal medical decision,

44:33

right? Right.

44:35

If my vaccine

44:37

protects you against COVID, then there might

44:40

be some public policy around you're

44:42

sort of inducing me to get the vaccine.

44:45

So a necessary condition for the mandates

44:47

to be right is that the

44:49

vaccine stop transmission.

44:51

And they did? They don't. So after two

44:54

months, the protection against infection drops

44:56

pretty sharply. I personally, when I was

44:58

vaccinated in April of 2021, four months

45:00

later, I got COVID. I think

45:02

that's the experience of many, many people that have given me

45:04

vaccinated. The vaccines only

45:06

protect you against getting COVID for a very short

45:09

period of time.

45:10

And they don't prevent you from passing it on? That's

45:12

correct. All right. OK.

45:15

Jay, this brings us to my last set of questions,

45:18

and they concern you. We've

45:21

known each other for a long time, and I can testify that

45:23

before COVID, you were completely

45:26

happy

45:27

with the quiet life

45:30

of a man totally devoted to academia,

45:33

to his research, to his students.

45:36

You were one of the happiest men I knew.

45:39

I can also testify that the stress

45:41

of what you went through

45:43

took a personal toll on you.

45:45

You lost 20 pounds. There were plenty of us who

45:47

were very worried about you. And

45:50

by the way, while I'm testifying about offering

45:53

myself as a character witness,

45:55

you served as an expert witness in any

45:57

number of trials. You've now spoken at different companies.

45:59

conferences and events and I'm

46:02

delighted that you've made so much money,

46:04

you have refused

46:07

any payment whatsoever as an expert

46:09

witness, no speaking fees, zero.

46:14

Yeah. I don't feel right taking money

46:16

for my COVID work. Okay.

46:21

But here you are, Jay. In

46:23

at least a modest way, you're famous.

46:26

I've been with you in an airport when people stopped

46:28

and recognized you.

46:30

You have over 400,000 followers on

46:33

Twitter now.

46:36

What are you going to do with this platform? What's

46:38

next? COVID happened, you

46:41

did what you could, you were largely

46:43

ignored, honestly. What's

46:46

next for you? Well, I think

46:49

I really want to see the reform

46:51

of public health happen. So I've

46:53

been working on the...for instance,

46:55

I just did this document, what this document was some

46:57

of several of my friends called the Norfolk

47:00

Group

47:00

Blueprint. And it's a

47:03

blueprint for what an honest COVID commission

47:05

would do, what it would ask, the questions would ask. So

47:07

I'm going to work very hard on that.

47:10

I'm

47:11

not so...I'm still would

47:14

like to be a scholar. I still am

47:16

interested in some of the research questions. I think it's

47:18

very clear from how scientific

47:20

institutions responded to COVID that science is fundamentally

47:23

broken. And so

47:25

I'm going to work with this group

47:27

that I helped found called the Academy of Science and Freedom

47:30

to help to bring reform

47:32

to science. I think we have a...I

47:34

mean, I think Martin Kulldorf put it well.

47:37

During COVID, it felt like science had entered

47:39

a dark age, even though there were all these like advances,

47:42

same time you couldn't say

47:45

something that the powers that be the high clarity

47:48

of science like Tony Fauci or Francis Collins,

47:50

you couldn't contradict them without

47:53

being excommunicated. It felt

47:55

like the dark age. We

47:57

can't actually have scientific institutions operate that

47:59

way and still have...

49:55

of

50:00

Stanford Medical School and the Hoover Institution. Thank

50:03

you, thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge,

50:05

the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm

50:07

Peter Robinson.

50:09

["The Hoover Institution and

50:11

Fox Nation"]