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 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 population 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 as as an 83 year old person living in you know with multiple comorbidities does then they 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 weaponize 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 MD and a PhD 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 uh
We met recently at uh Stanford conference on academic freedom and that was really that was the first time we met public I’ve been following what you’d been doing for a long time but it was good to see you there and it’s good to have this opportunity to
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 and 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 was 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 in not a small measure attributable to you so why don’t we go into that show us it’s a great honor to talk with you Jordan it was really Delight to meet
You at the conference I’ve obviously been following you for a very long time uh admire your courage uh you know it’s it’s interesting because the science on kovid on the lockdowns on the mitigation measures on on a whole host of topics uh we’re if you if the public was listening
They would they would hear this idea that there was this univocal uh uh uh you know sort of universal conclusion that you 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 was warranted to to you know force people to lose their jobs over them all of these ideas were so 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 mass 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 the whole apparatus of science at least as far as the public eye was concerned dominated the media dominated the message to politicians and as a result we had a catastrophic response to covet and uh and you know it’s going to be paying the cost of that
For a very long time so let’s the dig into that the current political climate for discussion to 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 solzhenitson does a masterful job of indicating how the consequences the brutal tyrannical actions of Lenin and stellen were necessary concomitants
To the or necessary outcomes of the axioms that were embedded in the Communist world view 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 or 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 or a system of ideas that’s generating it 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 and very narrow profit-seeking were driving this what’s what’s your sense of the of the mode underlying motivation
So so I I completely agree with you that this what I 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 by the the set of events that unfolded
Uh but let me just let me defend the the characterization of this as a at least initiated I personally blame Public Health 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
The the the set of events that that trans transpired in response and let’s name some names on that front yeah so like in the United States a primary architect of the lockdown strategy was Tony fauci and he now let me just describe why I think this wasn’t
It’s not a conspiracy in what in in a sense that you know there’s this like small group that has nefarious ideas if you 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 that preparation involved putting in in into into uh you know into actuality a whole range of powers that previously we would have said were not consistent with liberal democracy powers to close close you into your home to close your business to close your schools uh powers to basically force you
To test and isolate if if you’re found positive uh a whole range of uh almost you know 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 he will actually save lives that was the that was the premise of this and that and that that it was coming another a new respiratory virus pandemic threat now that is 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 and this and the swine flu pandemic
Um so there was there was this infrastructure set up and in this 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 that constitute a lockdown uh and they the they uh now when covet arrived and we can talk about what the you know exactly how it arrived but let’s just let’s just take that as a given that it arrived that entire
Infrastructure sort of powered into existence and uh part of that infrastructure involves making sure that the 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 that’s the same names Tony fauci uh he dawned 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 uh it’s social religious system um uh so he he uh he took and what he did is he he uh designed a a set of policies in ethos that said if you do these things then I will rescue you from the threat that 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 yeah and in that so when that that that set of events unfolds like you you have someone who essentially takes over what truth is in the minds of everybody
Then all these other actors could come in and start to to 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 that’s a that’s a layer of development rather than the the driving force I think 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 a shill is acting as a shill for Pfizer constantly the Biden White House tweets out uh 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 and 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 uh serious consequences serious side effects from kovid 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 is my understanding is that there’s 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 the and the these
Entities operating behind the scenes who you know do make products that are useful but also have a an iron in the fire that isn’t necessarily completely aligned with everyone’s best interests companies aren’t just selling products anymore they’re selling you we’re talking about how these tech companies enrich themselves by taking your
Personal data they grab your web history email metadata and video searches to create a detailed profile on you and then sell that off to the highest bidder when you go online without a VPN internet service providers or isps can see every single website you visit they can legally sell this information
Without your consent to ad companies and Tech Giants who then use it to Target you when you use expressvpn your identity is anonymized by a secure VPN server so isps cannot see your online activity your data is also encrypted for maximum protection expressvpn is incredibly easy to use
Just fire up the app and click one button plus it works on all devices so you can stay secure on the go secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com Jordan that’s e-x-p-r-e-s-svpn.com Jordan and get three extra months free expressvpn.com Jordan yeah so I I think in the idea is that in
War a lot is possible and ethically permitted that was not 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 in again in the US that a former head of the FDA was actually on
The board of Pfizer he then is uh on national TV all the time essentially pushing a line that benefited Pfizer and its and uh and the sale of his products uh sometimes and often in fact without disclosing the fact that he has this conflict yeah you know so so they’re they’re definitely
But you know that’s long-standing right you understand that that that that that those kinds of conflicts exist and you’re absolutely right like the Regulatory Agencies there is this like just sort of people people work for the regular 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 um so now that’s that’s completely understandable what has to happen is policy makers top policy makers understand that Dynamic and act against it instead what happened was that the top policy makers 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 yeah we have a product that’s this this vaccine and so it’s okay I mean it’s implicit at least
That’s that’s my interpretation how people acted um because otherwise you would have had top policy makers uh and top Public Health officials decrying these conflicts of interest this this sort of revolving door as you say well the problem is is that in the face of an unspecified threat it’s easy to make the
Argument that The end 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 uh 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 uh both discussed and fear are part of that behavioral immune system and
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 fruit 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 defects uh protects us against pathogens and uh discussed is 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 uh the the Nazi propagandists were
Very very good at using disgust and Hitler’s anti-semitic language for example is absolutely permeated with disgust metaphors you know purity of the blood purity of the race the the Cockroaches and insects that were conspiring against Germany it’s all Purity language and so I 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 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 to reduce but that metaphor of a you know of a extended immune system over reaction
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 frontal 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 rush 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 that’s not what we’re learning yeah I mean I I completely agree I think you are that’s it’s actually quite insightful to point to disgust as as a central driving Factor uh in this pandemic right so for instance if anyone would were to get covered the first
Thing you’d ask is who gave it to you yeah right as if it’s um some sort of sin it’s treated not as a disease to be managed in a person who gets it to be cared for instead it’s a sin that you’ve committed that you that you uh and and
As a result and you and once you have it uh everyone around you needs to be so far away from you that there’s no chance of the the contagion spreading to them um I mean now it is true there are diseases that are quite deadly and you
Want to have quarantining I mean those are like those are legitimate tools uh but to deployed at a society-wide level for an extended periods of time essentially destroys the underpinnings of Civil Society we have we made we when we are are in community with each other we implicitly accept that that there’s
Some risk of your spreading some diseases to me that’s just normal part of 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 and and uh transforms it into into something where we’re much more constructive
Um and and you know you can absolutely have have pathologies of societies where that disgust is allowed to spread and marginalize people like so like you know I come from in the Indian culture the Indian Indian societies struggled forever with this this distinction of clean and unclean with certain cast 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 that there seems and the correlations
Like 0.7 this is not a trivial effect it’s a walloping effect and and some of that has to do with well exactly what you’re describing which is which is the 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 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 it is it’s something that’s neg like 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 the idea that someone who gets covid has committed a sin
Um it and you know they didn’t say it out loud but they acted that way um it’s now I said that there was a a pandemic uh template but you know that pandemic template is at odds with every other pandemic that we manage in the respiratory of our support advisors
Pandemic we manage the last century right in that whole of the last century what we did is we identified who was most at risk develop Therapeutics vaccines to and other methods to try to protect those people as best we could while the pandemic was was spreading and but
Minimized this 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 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 Vice pandemic and spreading right 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 is this is something I really learned as a social scientist and well and 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 um 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 um they grouped kids who were prone to conduct disorder and then criminal behavior let’s say later in their life
And 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 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 Somerville study very very famous uh cautionary tale and Joan McCord who was one of the authors of that study um 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 idiot intervention is going to work build in careful outcome analysis to any social program that has a behavioral change mandate and uh and and and have some humility in the face of the complexity the problem you’re trying to solve and certainly well 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 uh I mean I think in the west it emerged
Out of the the war on terror you know the the if you you can go back to the anthrax threat from I think it was 2001 or two um and uh and people reacted to that by saying we need a a way to deal with biosecurity threats
A new way to deal with biosecurity threats that’s much more serious that takes the the threat more seriously uh it they there’s a whole series of War games and uh 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 uh you would normally deal with them the old way which was focused protection of vulnerable people development of Therapeutics reduce making sure that people don’t panic right those you know so Society can go on as best it can um I think that that does so when when
Uh the pandemic hit in 2020 uh in the U.S and the world the what happened was that um the World Health Organization organized in in the early days of the pandemic a uh uh a junket if you will to to China the Chinese authorities in January 2020 had locked and had declared
Finally a pandemic had locked down their their uh you know this major city Wuhan yeah and uh uh that those U.S the World Health Organization sent a junket that included uh you know a deputy of Tony fauci uh prominent officials within you know Public Health officials the World Health Organization
Um 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 um essentially like had worked the disease was gone yeah um yeah well you know lots of lots of dim-witted Western
Intellectuals go to communist countries and conclude that it works we certainly do 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 the your default that your default presumption when dealing with the CCP is 100 of 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 this world this world
Technical World Health Organization junk into China and he’s in the email he writes uh that that we have a we have what China did work in fact uh 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 work albeit at Great cost oh yeah that that pesky little uh what would you say consequence but you know uh you you mentioned you mentioned this this uh classic social uh social science study the expertise of social scientists was was denigrated early in the pandemic
The question was are you an epidemiologist are you a virologist are you a infectious disease specialist yeah 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 sign like 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 um 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 a narcissistic leader and you want to you know Forge the moral pathway forward is just to demonize anybody who adds any complexity into the argument so we saw plenty exactly what happened
Yeah that’s 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 they were excluded from the conversation right so you could say look uh This is Gonna really hurt the economy and then
What the response you’d get was well you care more about money than lies yeah yeah and therefore you shouldn’t do that but you know the irony is that that the economic harm from the lockdowns with 100 certainty killed more people and is still killing more people oh yeah then
The lives say by the lockdowns which I think are very few yeah 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 and educational attainment
That emerged as a consequence of the of the suppression of schooling because that’s a whole 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 I can’t tell you how frustrated I was about this so I I my training is it is I
Have an MD in a PhD in economics I do health health economics for a living I’ve been following for the last two decades this this literature obsessively documenting the returns to education on the health of children during their entire lives and and you know it’s it’s pretty convincing it’s a great investment we
Make when we educate our children in terms of you know they live longer healthier more fulfilling lives if and even like small small interruptions the education is what the what the literature documented yeah have a long lifetime consequences someone uh this guy named Dimitri kastakis who’s a editor of Jama Pediatrics did this
Really interesting paper we just extrapolated that existing social science literature and said well we closed schools for a short time in in Spring 2020 well 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 yeah in March of in Spring of 2020. well you know schools closed on the on the basis of Public Health this cartel of Public Health people all around the world yeah in in Uganda in in India the schools closed for two years
Many people Don don’t have access to Internet or electricity or whatever that meant no school and millions of kids it also meant no social interactions it meant way more time online it meant way more time frustrated it it it yeah depression yeah wanted one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in
The U.S and according to a CDC survey in June of 2020. I mean the the consequences are just the knock-on consequences were devastating a hundred the the UN World Health uh world food 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 a lockdown supply chain disruptions absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah and the you know the pointy end of the supply chain disruption is some some guy who makes five dollars a day or ten
Dollars a day of income selling coconuts to to Rich Mumbai you know laptop class and that people 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 that so it wasn’t it was
Never lies 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 uh in that in that early early the early days of the pandemic so when did you entirely when okay when did you
Start to become concerned about the the overreach of the pandemic mandates and and tell me that story and how did that unfold um so uh the the day I heard about the lockdowns uh-huh I mean I just I was 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 to protect you know you know almost these Rosie and commitments to you you you uh you you
Structured uh public policy so that you don’t harm the least the the least capable among us to to just suffer from that right the most vulnerable right that’s what I thought exactly and I thought okay well that’s that’s the that’s the profession I thought I was in
Yeah and then when when the lockdowns were announced I mean actually I had an argument with my with my my boss who’s like it was a in the in in Stanford medicine um almost that very day because his 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 I just came away stunned like this can’t and I actually gave a interview to a Reuters reporter who’s doing a story on what lockdowns would do to kids uh to to
Domestic assault rates alcoholism depression yeah and so I gave it I gave an interview in like April of 2020 uh 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 the biggest Public Health mistake we ever
Made oh yeah you think it’s a bigger Public Health mistake than uh than a inverted food pyramid and the and the injunction to everyone to do nothing but eat carbohydrates till they weigh 350 pounds or I mean those you gotta admit doesn’t at least compete for for their their a lot
Of sins to to weigh but this is certainly it’s certainly up there yeah I mean you know just in terms of the catastrophic harm to poor people um yeah that’s not 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 so yeah you know the other thought I had very early early on was that we didn’t actually know how deadly disease
Was right right so in this one during the swine flu epidemic there had been um the early estimates by the World Health Organization was that the case fatality rate was four or five percent yeah just like they said with covet yeah but what happened in the swine flu epidemic in
2009 was a whole bunch of Scholars ran studies called zero prevalent study studies of of measuring antibodies in the blood of populations antibody specific specific to the 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 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 that they had had the flu yeah um or had the swine flu and so the the infection fatality
Rate turned out to be 0.01 percent okay so that had already been established as a scientific president what do you think the case fatality rate was for covid so I ran a study in April of 2020 a Serial prevalent study in Santa Clara County California and now we didn’t include nursing homes
Um we’re much we’re the really high case infection fatality rate actually is uh 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 LA county the uh the week after and found almost the same identical
Infection fatality rate and how does that compare to your standard flu well you know that’s funny because you ask that because I don’t know I I looked like the people say that the flu has a 0.1 infection fatality rate uh but I don’t know that’s true it’s not backed
By careful serial prevalent studies so for instance the swine flu which was thought to be particularly deadly turned out to be 0.01 right right um you know one order of magnitude so I I do think that those more deadly than the flu there’s no question in my mind
Impact about that and that was no question in my mind from the very moment I heard about this this was something to take seriously absolutely that point two percent while much less than the three or four percent that the world health organizations panicking people are 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 the risk doubles by every seven years of age so you know I was 51 at the time uh my mom who was 82 or 81 at the time
Uh like what’s that what is that like one two three four doublings uh my infection fatality rate was 0.2 percent hers was you know 0.4.8.1.6 3.2 percent right right so the proper response would have been to to identify that the genuine risk factors for 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 um comorbidity that hardly counts because of course the more morbidities you have the more likely you’re to die
Of anything but that still has to be taken into account and then I’ve also concluded that uh 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 yeah I mean I think I I might modify the statement about the relative risk of the flu because I just don’t know what that is but I I think it’s a very very it’s a
Very low risk for for relative for healthy young people um and I think and I agree with you about the risk factors but the the key risk factors age so for instance obese obese versus non-obese that roughly doubles your infection fatality rate every seven years of age doubles it oh
Yeah which compounds right so like so so so what you have is a disease you know like 80 of the deaths are people over the age of 65 still um so what you have is a disease that is a very high risk to identify 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 I don’t know why it’s controversial this seems to me that the evidence is pretty clear on this in any case there’s no harm 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 like having that as a as a modifiable
Risk factor would have been healthier would have produced health for other in other ways as well right um so it’s instead we we we in public health adopted this Mantra that we were all equally vulnerable yeah that so if I remember uh watching this uh this press
Conference by this uh this Rudy gobert was a National Basketball Association Player NBA basketball player in the United States and he’d contracted covet early in the pandemic and yeah you know he’s a young man very healthy uh 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 like spread and the the whole world came down on this poor man it forced him to apologize you know uh
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 I have to I’ll grovel and apologize because they’re acting like young healthy people it looks like discuss demonization a 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 as as a 83 year old person living in you know with multiple comorbidities does then they 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 weaponize 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 Grant right right still over the age of 65. yeah you have a disease that spreads very very easily uh and the lockdown measures people can’t really comply with them for extended periods of time except unless you happen to be very
Well off and have a job that can be replaced with uh with a with a laptop right um then then okay maybe but that’s a very small fraction of the the world population yeah uh maybe 20 30 percent of even the of rich countries right right okay so you started to become
Aware of this back in in March of 2020 right away essentially as soon as the lockdowns occurred and so and and you talked about the first conversation you 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 uni-dimensional view of the world and the epidemiologists as well who specialize in a given illness so so then as this marched forward what did you find yourself doing well I mean there was a lot of I I published these studies or wrote These studies on Sierra
Prevalence 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 um and actually stand I was as 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 um yeah well let’s 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 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 PHD in economics and an MD it’s a very very well respected researcher and certainly not someone who’s prone to grinding political access and that’s generally
The case for epidemiologists and rail scientists is they’re not politically minded they’re trying to as much as it’s possible to follow the trail of the data and I certainly believe that you’re in that category so you publish these papers showing what was good news essentially this isn’t as deadly as we
Thought and you produced a counter immune response from your call colleagues and so what did that gets consist of I mean I I got I got accused of of not knowing how to divide essentially not knowing how to divide doing the math wrong that that there was still a possibility that every single
Positive result we found on these antibody tests were all false positives and then I started getting hit pieces against me against my wife against against like you know my colleagues um I mean it was it was it was very stressful it’s never reacted to those hit pieces in the Press by giving them
Credence even when they didn’t when they knew for a fact they were false so for instance there was an allegation that that uh that somebody that that the head of the of a airline company had given five thousand dollars uh to me and to to and somehow I changed the result of the
Study but it was ridiculous the five thousand dollars went to Stanford in a gift account we used to offset study expenses we ran this study in two weeks or three weeks uh we organized it and ran it it was you know it was really a I
Mean quite a feet right and we demand it very inexpensively um I would never alter the result of a study to for based on what funders say it’s ridiculous and what benefit would that be to you anyways like if you’re going to convict someone accuse someone of a
Crime you should at least have a motive in mind and if five thousand dollars pretty cheap price for your soul by the way Jay and um and then and then like what’s in it for you exactly what what was the accusation you were falsifying the data for what reason
Yeah so I mean so Stanford rather than just dismissing the allegations out of hand they they they conducted but first they started to call it an investigation but then they realized they couldn’t call an investigation it was so ridiculous they called it a fact-finding issue oh one of those
Yeah and like I I spent that summer just incredibly stressed yeah I’ve never felt I’d never felt anxiety before I mean I I’d never really not bad before I just was a scientist Jordan I wrote I published papers for a living in peer-reviewed journals I was really
Happy with that life yeah yeah but join the club man yeah I know I thought about you a lot actually in those days Jordan um and and I I and I I uh I had to make a decision um you know after Stanford cleared me they’d set this very strong signal if I
Just went back to their whole life did you know just quietly doing science they would let just let me go they’d continue to be a good uh you know good faculty member and stand good you know faculty member good standing right so despite the fact that you were innocent
You should shut the hell up and go back to invisibility and then we’ll let you what what we’ll we’ll so what are the powers that be decided as long as you were compliant and quiet like a good faculty member should be then all the sins you didn’t commit would be forgiven
Yes exactly how lovely and that’s so impressive and he was it was so stressful Jordan I I mean like I said I thought about you a lot when in those days because I know what you went through um but you know I lost I I generally am
Very good at dealing with anxiety I’ve never in my life it felt felt anxiety I felt it in a deep way I I lost 30 pounds of weight yeah I at one point I was losing weight so quickly I couldn’t I thought I was actually afraid for my life
Um yeah I I was um I I couldn’t sleep I could I didn’t eat I just obsessively worked trying to like address the damage um and then some point at some point in like summer of 2020 I decided that you know what is my career for
It’s not if it’s just to like have a you know another CV line or a stamp it’s just I’ve wasted my life yeah um and I that I would I would speak no matter what the consequences and actually then the anxiety went away like at that at that point
That decision I think was the right one people have two big classes of fear and they’re archetypal and one is fear of Nature and the other is fear of culture those are good ways of thinking about it and you’re afraid of nature because you could die you could go
Insane you could lose your mind you could die you could die while you’re suffering that’s worth being afraid of second category you’ll get mobbed excluded and alienated and then you’ll die and so when and I’ve watched this with like 200 people now who’ve been mobbed and
Betrayed by the by the well by the powers that be let’s say and every single one of them with tiny exceptions responds exactly the way you did which is it’s as if something traumatic in an unprecedented manner has occurred and I’ve seen colleagues of mine who were well you said for example
Yourself you weren’t particularly prone to anxiety you know fairly emotionally stable person I’ve seen people colleagues of mine who were the most solid people you could possibly imagine like literally hounded into the Asylum by the by the mo by the forces of the mob it’s appalling this this this this this
Demonizing Council culture driven by narcissistic Psychopaths it’s like it could be the death of us all it’s really bad and so your response is absolutely typical it’s interesting though eh when you you make that decision to flip the what would you say to flip the the to
Invert the reality to go on the offensive rather than to be defensive and guilty then while that especially if you are basing that on a genuine apprehension of your own instance that does change the playing landscape substantially and so that happened to you when that was in the summer of 2020
Yeah sometime in some I talked to my colleague a friend of mine uh who was I’ve written with many times who sat inside and told him explicitly I’m Crossing the Rubicon I don’t I don’t care about my reputation anymore I what I you know my whatever academic reputation I’m going to use what
Knowledge and uh and uh you know sort of resources I have to say what I believe yeah because I think that were there many many lives at stake in the mistake mistaken uh policies we’ve adopted and I have the had the background and the the you know sort of the the the the
Um the life story where I could actually try to make some difference on that right right after that it was it was just transformative I mean I you know I also am religious and uh you know praying actually helped a lot but that’s the summer what were you praying for
Just out of curiosity at that just just for just just for clarity for what relief from the the anxiety uh and then Clarity for what I should do with my life yeah well you know one of the things that there is nothing that will save you in a complex situation except the truth
Now it might not save you as well but there is nothing else that you have and so when you’re backed into a corner well first of all you better scour your soul but second what you’ve got to defend you if you have anything is definitely words of truth words that
You believe to be the case and so and it’s useful to notice that that can be on your side and you know you have to I don’t know the other thing I realize is if I’m living my life just for myself it’s Hollow uh if I if the purpose of my work before
I mean you look back on my work uh I what I wrote when I applied for tenure was that I was I studied vulnerable populations the health and well-being of vulnerable populations and how government policies and economic uh economic uh realities affect the health and well-being I mean and if that if
That’s true that means what I studied was for other people yeah that my actions and my when my was was done inwardly focused but focused on on on the the the people that I studied right well so that means the crisis also forced you to really prioritize your
Values you know because and It’s Tricky as a scientist you know when you see this when you’re training graduate students is that well you have to follow the science properly and you have to be skeptical of your own results and you have to be sure you’re not publishing merely so that you publish
And merely to burnish your reputation and the same thing with attending conferences on the other hand you do have to publish and you have to Market and communicate there is a there is a career development element to every Enterprise now the question then becomes well what do you do when those are set
At odds with one another and the answer is well if you’re tilting towards pathological narcissism you sacrifice the mission for the message and there’s plenty of corruption in science that’s merely a consequence of that but when you’re backed into a corner the way you were then you have to
Really start to understand what that means it’s like are you in this to do the good that hypothetically motivates the science or are you going to sacrifice that apologize kowtow and hypothetically protect your reputation and that’s you’re done as a scientist if you do that I think you’re done as an
Ethical actor I think you’re done as a human being you are and you don’t protect yourself against the mob because all that’s happened is they’ve they’ve fundamentally emasculated you and you’ve been eliminated as a as a credible threat it’s a very bad strategy so well so it’s a relief to hear that you
You know we’re able to see your pathway forward in in the summer I’m sure that was utterly brutal it’s it’s hard to communicate to people just exactly what it’s like to be a respected scientific practitioner and then to have all of that inverted and to see your colleagues
Fail to support you or participate in the inversion it’s quite the it’s quite the illuminating experience let’s put it that way yeah yeah yeah I guess I understood how I understood how the how excommunication works right right exactly that’s what it felt like yeah you bet because that’s that’s that
Betrayal and excommunication that’s exactly what it is so then okay so you decided to yeah that you were the devil take the hide most and that you were gonna say what you needed what you believe to be true and so what occurred then so fast forward a few months I I there
Was some uh my colleagues got Atlas was advising the president United States and so I actually got to meet with the president there’s but but that that never went anywhere the the American president at the time president Trump um he was uh I think his instincts were
Against the lockdowns but his his uh he basically thought that if he if he lifted if he let Tony fauci not have the the Reigns that he would lose the election um and so you know that was quite frustrating fast forward a few months October 2020. and a colleague of mine from Harvard
Martin cooldorf was a fantastic biostatistician he helped design the vaccine safety surveillance systems that statistical systems that the FDA and the CDC use in the U.S uh with it with the statistical work invited me and sunetra Gupta who’s a great epidemiologist at Oxford University to a small conference in Great Barrington Massachusetts yeah
We arrived basically just to compare notes like we weren’t thinking about issuing a statement or anything but we realized that we’d arrived at the same place regarding the strategy of how to manage the pandemic the the summer had seen a decline in cases there’s some some spread in like Arizona in the South
And some other some countries but the the threat of March seemed to have subsided but it was really clear from the data that the disease was coming back in the fall that there was going to be spread of the disease again and and it was also clear to me as a social
Scientist looking at the pattern of political uh that the lockdowns were also going to come back because the fear was not gone the disgust was not gone all of that was still in place all the infrastructure for the lockdowns were there and so what we we wrote this very short
Document one page long um called the Great Barrington declaration it we wrote it in very simple language because we wanted to reach regular people because I I thought to myself and we thought to ourselves that it was really regular people that needed to know that there wasn’t a
Consensus in favor of the lockdown yeah that people were being misled that the idea that all scientists agreed that there was a consensus that the science said let’s lock down was not true in fact many many reputable scientists disagreed with that and yet they stayed silent because of the fear of of social
Ostracism fear of you know Tony facci controls billions of dollars of of federal money on for research um that what’s not just the money so you can do your experiments it controls a social status of scientists you know you don’t get tenure at a top university uh Medical University unless you get NIH
Funding yeah um in the United States so it’s the social status as well as even more than the money itself well it’s not just the social status either we should be clear about that it’s also your livelihood itself right because so it isn’t merely the fact that you want to elevate your
Up yourself up to status hierarchy it’s that you want to keep your job and so this is this is this is nuts and bolts this is this is nuts and bolts material here yeah you know I was very ill when the Great Barrington declaration came
Out so I wasn’t as uh what would you say aware of everything that was going on as I might have been under different conditions but one of the things I do remember and I’ve been struck by this continually is that while it was demonized and put off to the side as the
Work of essentially like scientific Outsiders and extremists and what’s so interesting about that I found this repeatedly because I’ve talked to a lot of reprehensible people over the last few years such as yourself and I found that even though I know as well as anyone how easy it is for people to be
Demonized for their views and how often that’s purely an invention of Psychopathic narcissists very often trying to score points at the expense of someone’s reputation it’s still the case that even the smallest slur in relationship to someone’s professional reputation is enough to make to make even me skeptical about who I’m
Talking to because you think it’s very hard to think well if there’s enough smoke there’s probably some fire right and that’s actually a pretty intelligent rule of thumb decision because there’s seven billion people out there you’re not going to listen to all of them and so one way you cut through the complexity
Of figuring out who to listen to is you don’t listen to people whose reputations have been salvaged and you don’t have time to sort that out like a legal trial you know but but what it does mean is that reputation savaging can be weaponized and the and and there are
People who are absolutely Stellar at that and the Great Barrington Declaration was definitely Savage ignored and Savaged both and so so okay so it launched win and this was in 2020 the October 4th 2020. um I mean the the uh you know people that’s like tens of thousands of doctors
And and epidemiologists signed it uh Nobel Prize winner signed it like almost a million people have signed it to date um it it would it went viral very rapidly like we just put it on a web page and people just found it and I started getting messages from people
Saying you know thanking me for like saying Common Sense yeah protect vulnerable people protect vulnerable people lift the lockdowns that was those are the two ideas the great Branch it’s the old pandemic plan it’s the least original thing I’ve ever written in my entire life I mean there’s nothing
Nothing new actually in it and certainly nothing radical I didn’t think so but four days after we wrote it the head of the National Institute of Health Francis Collins wrote an email to Tony fauci recalling the three of us that were the primary co-authors of the Declaration Fringe epidemiology right right
And then he called for a devastating published takedown of the premises I started getting hit pieces written against me in the New York Times again in the in the Washington Post a whole bunch of other I mean the CBC hosted a panel of scientists uh who Savaged us as
Wanting to let the virus rip and kill Graham yeah yeah you know thanks God Broadcasting Corporation that 1.4 billion dollars of government subsidy a year and a 1.9 market share they’re quite the they’re quite the Stellar Bunch boy uh the the the level of propaganda was remarkable like I I was calling for
Focused protection of vulnerable people I was calling for a conversation among Public Health people how better to protect old people who were dying in droves as a consequence of not being protected by the lockdowns um I wanted you know how to how do you protect all people is complicated right
So it depends on the local living circumstances of each person of the of the old people in the community the answer in you know Alberta uh in Canada is going to be very different to answer in in uh you know like in like highly in in like you know Southern California or
Something it’s just gonna be very different all those pesky complexities yeah well you need local public health who know the living circumstances to participate in that discussion think creatively about how to protect older people when you have this highly highly infectious respiratory virus pandemic going going on
Um instead we were demonized we were told that it was impossible to protect older people without a lockdown um that the lock time didn’t protect older people it hadn’t in the spring and it didn’t didn’t protect them in the in the fall and did continue to not protect
Them uh so so it it essentially they closed their the the the top of the federal Public Health bureaucracy close the minds of Public Health against the possibility of focus protection by demonizing us right and the purpose of the demonization was so that they could tell the public that that every
Reputable scientist the consensusive scientists agreed with their plan yeah their plan to lock down yeah well that and I suppose the motivation for that was the ability to publicly trumpet the Staggering Effectiveness and decisiveness of their simple and and and potent plan to protect right and so for
Me again that’s a kind of unbelievably narcissistic virtue signaling is you want all the credit that would go along with actually dealing with the problem while doing none of the effort whatsoever necessary to actually understand the problem and to implement the complex multi-dimensional solutions that would be demanded yeah I mean I
Actually I remember um seeing a podcast with you and your daughter I think uh during during that time I was I was quite moved actually by it both by the devotion your daughter has to you and also with the the illness you’re going through so I don’t think
You have anything to to I mean that you what you went through is tremendous um and uh anyway so so uh we uh we wrote this starting I mean but the thing is I was emotionally better prepared to deal with the blowback from that yeah yeah
And and it would it became this like um this this thing where where it was clear that the purpose was to limit the reach of the Declaration many people still have not heard of it yeah um that probably should have heard of it um and and that partly succeeded yeah
But it didn’t entirely succeed the nucleus of this anti-lockdown movement was was was put in place and then and then as time has gone on what’s happened is that that anti-lockdown movement as people have have seen the reality what the lockdowns really have meant well lockdowns is not just you know you’re
Forced quarantine at home lockdown is the ideology that we must keep people apart from each other the ideology that we have to treat each other as biohazard and that the state has the right to impose that from the top down right which is a major part of the ideology for everyone’s good
You know one of the things I also know knew and I don’t know how much you know about this and maybe you know a lot about it you know the Nazi eradication campaign started out as public health initiatives like the causal pathway is clear and so it the and that discussed
Demonization was part of that process but it was all put forward initially under the guise of protecting the public and doing the best even for the suffering so was they the the Nazis were extremely good at leveraging a false compassion on the narcissistic front to produce unbelievably pathological
Outcomes and that went along also with the notion the implicit notion that well the state has the right to do whatever’s necessary if public health is at risk and it’s whatever’s necessary that’s the that’s like really whatever’s necessary eh yeah well um maybe you’re well here’s my here’s my
New Theory my political Theory or part of it if your response to an emergency makes you terrified and tyrannical and one of the consequences of that is your claim that the emergency justifies the granting of all due power to you you are not the right leader and there’s
Three levels of evidence number one you’re frightened into paralysis by the emergency so you’re too small second you’re willing to extend the use of tyrannical power to justify response to your fear that’s also an indication that you’re not just frightened you’re a frightened Tyrant and third the claim that you’re making that the
Situation is so dire that you and the people who think like you must be given all the power is a moral hazard of the first order and so there’s three identifying features so that everyone listening and watching can understand who not to trust in the leadership position is the emergency terrifies them
They become tyrants and it’s so convenient that they also get all the power it’s like nope those are not the leaders you want not not even if the emergency is real let alone when it’s manufactured you know for the benefit of people who want all the power and all
The unearned credit yeah I mean I I agree with that I think that that the people who um draw power to themselves you you want you absolutely need to be skeptical at the very least you want checks and balances right so like imagine if we’d had an honest and open debate about
Pandemic policy like without this demonization without this canceled cancel culture kind of kind of overlay we would have won that debate Jordan because it was already clear in October 2020 uh first that the lockdowns have done tremendous harm we’ll continue to do tremendous harm to the poor the
Vulnerable to to Working Class People um it was all it was already cleared that they’d failed to stop the disease from spreading yeah like what success was there um and then and then the third it was already clear who the vulnerable people really were like the highest risk people
Like so at that point if there had been an open debate without this demonization the the P the authoritarians would have lost the scientific consent I mean I at the time when I wrote the Declaration I thought we actually were in the minority among scientists yeah I’m not sure
That’s true actually yeah no all right I suspect it’s probably not true is that but it’s also almost impossible to overestimate the probability that people will be silenced by intimidation and we should be take this very seriously like look you said and this is borne out by the experience
Of literally the hundreds of people I’ve talked to to whom this has happened you experienced the exclusion and mobbing as something akin to a life-threatening illness yeah so it’s no joke it’s no bloody wonder that people are afraid to speak out and could it be the majority
It’s like yes absolutely it could be the majority because it’s a minority of power mad um narcissists who twist The Narrative to their uh liking and their or to their advantage and they’re perfectly willing to take out anybody who stands in their way and so it’s certainly probable I
Would think that the more sensible scientists knew that something was amiss on the covid lockdown front and we’re very hesitant to step forward and speak and you can say well aren’t they cowardly it’s like yeah maybe wait till you find yourself in that position see how Bloody Brave you are because my
Experiences being that that kind of Bravery is vanishingly rare maybe one percent of people can manage it you know and they often have additional resources that aren’t available to everybody like me to the degree that I was Brave I suppose I at least wouldn’t shut my mouth you know I had three
Sources of income right so and I lost two of them but I didn’t lose the third one and most people aren’t in a position where they have established three independent sources of income so like I lost my professorship and I lost my clinical practice but I didn’t lose my business
And so and then I also had the support of my family like full support of my family and extended family and of a very large network of friends and so many many people who are put in a corner have some of them have none of those
What would you say force is in their corner and on their side I mean I I have tenure at Stanford uh I I wasn’t sure that the tenure would hold yeah I mean they did it was it was it was not clear to me I don’t have I’ve I
Had that one source of income but you know Jordan I just don’t believe that my life should be lived simply for for that tenure or the money I I think um I I lost a major source of support in the in many of my friends that I previously called friends I wrote
Broke with broke with me yeah um so I lost that but I didn’t lose my family I didn’t lose my my faith um and what what I found in compensation was this tremendous community of people that that saw what was happening and that that found what I was saying meaningful to them
I I mean I just it’s hard to convey to people how much that meant yeah right it would it it could it really it made me feel like my that what I was doing was worthwhile probably really for the first time I mean it’s fine to get CV lines
With like you know published papers and fantasy journals but to actually have that move people to to to to to to to action to to give them give them the ability to to speak up when when Injustice being done um that’s there’s something I just you
Can’t replace it yeah um yeah well I guess that’s the reward that’s the reward you accrue for having undergone the the trials of exclusion and mobbing right and that that that ability to Ally yourself to the degree that you’re extraordinarily careful and fortunate with with what you believe to be true
Yes and that’s definitely something worth that well there isn’t anything that’s more worth discovering than that some fundamental sense now let’s talk for a moment about you said that you know the Barrington Declaration was marginalized and demonized both of those with some success on both fronts and I
Would say yes with some success but not with entire success and but let’s also talk about how your communication on the public front was thwarted so I’ve been watching the Twitter trust and safety the former trust and safety executive Joel Roth being roasted over the slow
Fire or maybe a quick fire in congress with a certain degree of satisfaction and it’s clearly the case that social media Enterprises and Twitter the most egregious among them perhaps although we don’t know what happened at Facebook Etc um you are definitely persona non grata on the Social Media communication front and
So what do you make of that and how did that unfold yeah so I joined Twitter in August 2021 I mean I I never had a Twitter presence I in fact I told my uh assistant professors and graduate students don’t join Twitter just write scientific papers for a decade yeah yeah
So there was some irony in my joining Twitter um uh what I found was that uh that it I felt like it gave me a voice right I joined almost I immediately got a hundred thousand followers it was actually kind of kind of uh you know it
Felt like I could have had a platform yep um but you know I would write messages and it would get attention of my followers but it never went outside of my followers and I I wondered about that um when Barry Weiss wrote her Twitter files expose what she found was that the
Day I joined Twitter I was put on a trans Blacklist that guaranteed that that my tweets and I joined Twitter for one purpose essentially to communicate to the public the ideas of the Great Barrington declaration took to criticize Public Health when it was warranted to criticize Public Health to propose
Alternate strategies for managing a pandemic and to help create a community of people who uh of scientists and regular people who would then give have some tools to oppose authoritarianism where they were you know public health and storage units and where they were that was the purpose of joining Twitter
Um and then also to convince people that didn’t necessarily agree with me or just didn’t know my message that that I had something reasonable to say about the about these topics um so to be on a trans Blacklist essentially what it meant was that I could not actually even though it looked
To me like I was accomplishing something with Twitter and I was with my followers um but I I wasn’t accomplishing the broader purpose for which I joined Twitter yeah the purpose for which shooter exists actually I think is to allow those kinds that kind of communication to happen at scale yeah I
Actually I’ve said I I have a mixed emotions about it isn’t correct incredibly powerful tool Jordan as you know you reach uh political leaders you reach uh you reach journalists you you reach other scientists you in a way that and you reach regular people in a way that’s not possible with any other
Platform um and and uh I I think it in the right hands it is a it is a force great Force for good in society yeah but it’s also a place where like uh what would you call it Penny anti um Penny anti Petty tyrants can run roughshod invisibly behind the scenes
And we certainly see no shortage of that on Twitter despite the fact that the Legacy Media uh you know damned their calloused Souls seem to have no interest whatsoever on sharing the revelations that musk has made public about the unbelievably backbiting maneuvering that went around went went on underground
Continually on the Twitter landscape so it’s really pernicious eh when you’re subject to the authoritarian constraint of your Communication in a manner that’s actually invisible as well as lied about it’s really something pathological and so what’s your understanding of how your communication was restricted on Twitter
So I I actually got to go visit Elon Musk and see Twitter headquarters and they showed me their they have a system called jira where you know you have you have your own account I had my account and they would have you know sort of uh
Marks on my account for like what the the restrictions were literally said the words trans Blacklist um that Trends Blacklist I don’t believe Twitter put in place on its own I believe that that was the result of the American federal government essentially asking Twitter Executives to suppress now why don’t you say Trends
T-r-e-n-d-s or trans t-r-e-n-d-s okay yeah okay trans Blacklist got it yeah so so did that means we’re trending right go on it got it so that meant you couldn’t go viral essentially anything that you did yeah uh-huh yeah that’s right okay and you think that there was collusion between Twitter and the federal
Government and this would be the public health bureaucracy essentially designed to stop you from being able to communicate your your expertise let’s be clear about that yeah your expertise so uh I think a lot of governments did this but certainly American government did this they adopted the strategy of
Limiting misinformation in social media settings yeah the way they did that is they cooperate they they they garnered the cooperation of social media companies by uh essentially by threat right if you don’t if you don’t do this we’re gonna we’re gonna regulate you out of existence yeah
Uh that started with this like National Security issues around uh election election issues and National Security issues but I think it bled over into into this pandemic management Russia collusion conspiracy fraud um and so and so like you had it bled over into this into into like communication about about health risks
And covet right and so like the Surgeon General the United States had an initiative where he wanted to root out information um Tony fauci has an email with Frank with Mark Zuckerberg from the very beginning of the pandemic where Zuckerberg essentially offers him it’s redacted but from the context it’s
Pretty pretty clear some capacity to limit what Facebook actually what you can post people can post on Facebook to limit misinformation um the the ins the social media companies were in regular contact with the federal government receiving instructions about what to suppress and in many cases who does the Press yep regarding regarding
Specifically uh you know in information about covid um and you know I know this because I’m part of a lawsuit that the Missouri and Louisiana attorney general’s offices have brought against the federal the by Administration yeah right and that lawsuit isn’t covered we deposed Tony
Fauci we deposed uh I think gen saki is going to be deposed a whole bunch of like very prominent figures when is this going to unfold it’s been going on for like uh nine months now I mean it’s hopefully we’ll get some decision in this coming year
Um I’m actually quite hopeful about this because what we’ve uncovered they testified of fauci and Saki testified yet uh fauci has I don’t know yet if you had sake in yet but there was the the judges granted us the ability to depose 10 major figures inside the the the the
The buying Administration including including FBI agents um and others it’s revealed a vast censorship Enterprise well we should also Define for everybody who’s listening and watching what fascism means technically so fascism means to bind together and the fascist ethos is something like Unity of Corporation government and media at the
Highest levels of of function and so the idea is essentially that the uh a triumvirate acting as a Unity at those high levels can be extraordinarily efficient and if it’s benevolent there’s the rub then it can March forward you know with unparalleled success and you get people like our
Appalling prime minister admiring the CCP for example for its ability to move forward on the environmental front without you know paying attention to such niceties as let’s say Parliament and public opinion and that’s that delusion of fascist deficiency and the thing about United systems is they can
Move very very quickly when they need to and that’s well and good if they’re moving in the right direction but the right direction is hard to determine and if they’re moving in the wrong direction then God help us all and this collusion between the social media uh companies
And the security apparatus and the broader media World which is still occurring because they won’t cover the Twitter files is fascist in the highest order and it’s definitely a threat to the Integrity of well I would say proper governance worldwide but certainly proper governance within the United States it’s appalling beyond belief I
Think part of the reason the public hasn’t woken up to it is certainly true in Canada Canadians would rather believe for example that the trucker Convoy was run by Mega inspired American Republicans who wanted to destabilize Canadian democracy which is what our bloody prime minister told them they would ask Jordan
They had bouncy houses they had bouncy houses for kids I mean they had like seek seek music and I mean it was like well there’s a huge codery of seek truckers in Canada yeah well Canadians would rather believe that though that this was a conspiratorial Enterprise motivated really by and funded by Mega
Americans This is the Canadian narrative most Canadians still believe that 51 percent and the reason they still believe that is because it’s easier to believe that than it is to believe that you can’t that your your leaders Christia Freeland Justin Trudeau jagmeet saying are compromised entirely by their
Globalist utopian agenda and lying about absolutely everything and that you can’t trust the Legacy Media anymore and Canadians just they’re not capable of swallowing that bitter pill and like I can understand why you know in our country and in yours too to a large degree the fundamental institutions have
Been reasonably trustworthy for a long time and then to understand that no you have to now go out and you have to go and ferret out the truth and that there are conspiracy-like actions proceeding on all sorts of domains it’s like well it’s no wonder people don’t can’t go there
With ease yeah I mean I I don’t want to believe it either well right until I until I see it I I’m gonna I’m gonna assume the best of of people but when you see the uh the federal government acting in this way in direct violation of fundamental commitments to civil
Rights like free speech um and and you know it’s there and emails in black and white uh where and you know and and the way that they conveyed it’s it’s as if they that it’s so obvious that they’re doing the right thing oh yeah we just suppress this
Because we didn’t want people to be harmed by this bad information well how do you know this information is bad well that that this is the question like I I now virtually instantly distrust anyone who uses the word misinformation or the word disinformation it’s like I see you you think there’s some gold
Standard by which factual information can be revealed that its validity can be revealed that’s just self-evident you can set up some fact-finding Community Committee that can just differentiate between the true facts and the false facts it’s like why do we need the scientific Enterprise then if it’s so bloody obvious and why
Is there political discussion well no no there’s misinformation and we need committees to to deal with it and to suppress it which they certainly did at Twitter Jordan it’s an it’s a new Dark Age right that was the that was the feature of the old Dark Age was that
There was a a high Clarity that could just inerringly distinguish truth from falsity and and there and suppress falsities to for the benefit of the public at large right that if that isn’t the age we are currently living in yeah well it’s a degenerate it’s a degenerate
Theocracy right but the uh what running itself under the guise of a kind of rampant secularism it’s really something to see and it’s so interesting maybe we could touch on this in a minute I knew 10 years ago that the woke types in the universities would go after the stem
Fields and everyone thought at that point that I was being conspiratorial and paranoid and I thought no no I know how scientists work most of them are obsessively focused on their narrow specialization that’s not an insult that’s their job that’s their job is to be 80 hours a week focused on that
Specific issue to understand it deeply 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 percent 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 uh to requiring die
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 those are those are they’re just the de facto loyalty Oaths I mean that’s essentially like you’re you’re I mean it’s a
Statement of faith uh that you but you belong to this particular or you know faith faith tradition with uh you know documented by the Dei statements I mean I I just I think it’s it’s one of these things where like I never imagined that the that the free countries of the West
Would come to a situation where um the the the the you know like the basic civil rights um checks and balances of power all these like Norms of Liberal Liberal civilization that I thought everyone agreed with were actually in question I mean you saw it earlier than most I I
Certainly you know before the pandemic you 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 ComEd around yeah yeah well it’s yeah well the well you know the other thing we could think about too here is that
We don’t want to underestimate the pervasive attractiveness of of this set of ideas I mean it devastated Eastern Europe Russia and China and 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 uh an egalitarianism that
Is not only impossible to produce but would be horrible in its realization but that looks on 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 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 is due I mean these ideas hold sway over the minds of hundreds of millions of
People because they offer uh 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 and responsibility and the importance of tradition and the necessity of rational inquiry even communities like so I’m a big I mean I think communities are
Incredibly important like thick communities where people are embedded and they they draw support uh uh like even people who think like that should be opposed to these ideas because these these ideas destroy communities we need to have checks I mean just just couldn’t go let’s 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 uh the lockdowns are a bad idea they destroy the communities that provide support for the poor and the poorest communities most part well the other thing too is that
Look for all you leftists who are listening all 15 of you um and this is why I like people like Russell Brand and 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 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 these this top-down collusion between government state media is in the interests of the people that you purport
To serve it’s a Preposterous notion I I’ve encountered many people on the left like the honest left who joined the the anti-lockdown movement so natural Gupta for who wrote The Great branches declaration for instance is famously on the on the on the on the on the left
Um uh so I 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 there’s a and I think that’s the Coalition that will win um and the lockdowns the whole I the
Whole strategy we followed to drive the pandemic is to at least for me has has just brought me to a realization about how how how unimportant other kinds of political designations are you know Democrat liberal Democrat Republic I mean really the key thing the key unifying thing is
This uh uh you know this devotion this I this this this this commitment to checks and balances uh a commitment to sort of Enlightenment Enlightenment ideals a commitment to to religious tolerance to freedom freedom of speech and freedom of 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 lockdown and are continuing to see with the lockdown 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 maybe this is only 10 percent 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 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 uh what would you call it Beyond forgiveness beyond the requirement for 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 the fracture of of of of of communities of you know like just take my like my 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 on in the in the in the office building yeah I just find it hard to like you would have been much more difficult to demonize me if I 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 I might have gone along to like try to like figure out how to how to
Accommodate their concerns like it’s rather than demonizing me we would have found a better right better way to like manage I mean science works by those kinds of personal Communications it’s 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 with who they are what they what they how they think yeah it’s a human endeavor yeah just just as you know and and to like to have this ideology where you have to be a part will replace everything just by Zoom it just doesn’t work yeah well the the
Other thing that’s lurking underneath all of this that we’re going to have to contend with is that um 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 to 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 in 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 Virtual in the virtual space that where the Psychopaths and the Predators and the predatory parasites because that’s what a psychopath is they can just they can just run roughshod I mean there there’s
A there’s a counter balancing so I I know people that uh 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 it’s a it’s a complicated problem but I I hear you I mean it is um one of the costs of going online going on Twitter oh yeah you’re subject to tremendous alumni from from like random people I don’t know but you
Know I think that was happening before I went on Twitter though I mean just in the minds of some people or the the the reputation destroying mechanisms of some people it’s just so you just I I view it as like at least I’m in a position where
I can I can speak and get my message out and if they’re gonna if they’re gonna um you know sort of attack me in this in these vile ways I just I I at the very least I can have my own say yeah yeah rather than staying silent yeah yeah
Yeah yeah no 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 uh the
Particularly pathological Venom spewing trolls um 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 effect 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 uh what’s next as far as you’re concerned what are you attempting to do right now maybe we can close without sure so the main thing is uh the the public health authorities made tremendous mistakes we can just at least
That at least mistakes uh during the pandemic uh the public deserves a full accounting of what decisions were made who made them and why there needs to be an honest coveted Commission on the 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 with a bunch of my colleagues um where we’ve set an agenda it’s just questions that a honest covet commission would ask um
Well maybe we should do a podcast with like two or three members of that group when you guys are farther 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 uh so the the document is actually done we’ve been working for that on it for the last eight months and now I want to spend time educating uh 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 uh and try to contact uh commissions that are already starting to form you know parliamentary inquiries or right missions are already starting to
Form uh so that they have these set of questions in front of them that they can ask these are reasonable questions like you know uh you know what what was the basis for deciding that uh the children should have the vaccine yeah yeah I’d
Like to know the answer to that so I was like for sure because I just figure that out the evidence yeah we just lay out the evidence today we here’s but you know why wasn’t a why didn’t the randomized trials for children for this vaccine have as a clinical endpoint the
Prevention of hospitalization or death why did it only have antibody production as as yeah there’s a good one like things like this yeah to produce all-cause mortality as one of the outcomes it’s an excellent question because that would have helped us understand what 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 top 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 deserved an answer um so and that and the goal is at least my my goal is not necessarily 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 yeah
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 and horror whenever we hear it and anyone that proposes it will be seen
As a charlatan yeah and I think that’s that’s the that is the ultimate outcome of of any honest inquiry and I’m gonna I’m working toward like making sure those honestly 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 an hour on the daily wire plus platform I usually walk people through a bit of a biographical discussion about how they’re 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 that’s extraordinarily helpful and so uh 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 uh well we’ll
Talk again when when the Norfolk group uh project is ready to to uh accrue some additional uh 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
