We should have listened to the Great Barrington Declaration
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Summary
In October of 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a doctor at Stanford University, and two other medical specialists released an open letter, The Great Barrington Declaration. It called for a balanced approach to dealing with the Pandemic, but was quickly derided as letting people die.
Transcript
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I don't think I'll ever forget January 25th, 2020.
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I was getting ready to head out for a Robbie Burns night supper when suddenly I got an email
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telling me that Health Minister for Ontario, Christine Elliott, followed by what seemed
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like 15 doctor's names, would hold a news conference at Queen's Park at 5 p.m. on a
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Saturday. At that point, I knew we'd had COVID arrive in Canada.
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Hello, my name is Brian Lilly. I'm guest host for the Full Comment podcast this week, and
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we're going to look back at how things were dealt with in very specific ways when it comes
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to COVID-19, the pandemic, reactions, overreactions. But before we get to our guests, I do want
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to remind you that you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, Google
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Podcast, Apple, Amazon, Spotify. Make sure that you hit the subscribe button if you want
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My next guest is someone who was at the forefront of many of the debates that were front and center
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during COVID. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is an infectious disease specialist, a doctor at Stanford University.
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In October 2020, he penned, I guess you could call it an open letter, a document, a declaration,
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if you will, the Great Barrington Declaration, with two other medical specialists. And it called for
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what many thought was a balanced approach to dealing with the pandemic, but was quickly derided
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as letting people die. Dr. Bhattacharya, thanks for the time.
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You've had quite a ride since the Great Barrington Declaration was published. Let's talk about what
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it was and what it wasn't, because I think that you have been unfairly described by those who love
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you and support you, but they are of the COVID's not real variety. And you've been attacked by people
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who think that you just wanted people to die. So were you surprised by those polar reactions
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as you, after you released it, or is it about what you expected?
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Well, I was a little surprised by the reaction of public health officials, you know, people like,
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who should know better, people like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the National
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Institute of Health. The idea of the Great Barrington Declaration was not to let the virus rip or to kill
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anybody. In fact, the central idea of the Great Barrington Declaration was focused protection of
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vulnerable people. We knew certainly by October, long before October, actually, 2020, that it was
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older people and certain people with chronic conditions that were at highest risk of dying if
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they should get infected. 40% of the deaths had already occurred in nursing home settings that
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were clearly inadequately protecting. So the Great Barrington Declaration called for better protection
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of vulnerable older people. The idea that the lockdowns would protect those people, that was at
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the heart of the problem with our pandemic response, that lockdowns and controlling disease
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spread in the community, something that we've become clear, it's impossible to do without causing
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tremendous harm to children, to poor people, to the working class. The idea was that if we did that,
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we would, by osmosis, protect old people. I knew that wasn't correct. And that was the reason for the
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declaration. So what I was really surprised by, Brian, was that public health didn't engage with us
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in creative thinking about how better to protect vulnerable older people. Instead, it treated us like
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foreign invaders or something, you know, needing to repel us. Francis Collins, the head of the National
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Institute of Health, wrote to Tony Fauci calling me, a professor at Stanford, Sinatra Gupta, who was a
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professor at Oxford, and Martin Kuldor, a professor at Harvard. She called the three of us, the primary
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authors of the declaration, fringe epidemiologists, and then basically unleashed a propaganda campaign
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against us. I was stunned by that. The fact that the public at large sometimes gets things wrong. I
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mean, that's not, that's just normal. Our job as public health professionals is to try to tell people
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what the truth is. And public health professionals that at the top of these scientific bureaucracies
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fail to do that. I'm guessing your life now is much different professionally and otherwise than it
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was prior to the pandemic. Were you seen as a fringe epidemiologist before COVID-19? Were you
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someone who was really active in political circles? You know, because you've been described as many
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things over the last several years. How would you describe yourself prior to signing this declaration?
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Or let's just go back before COVID arrived. How would you have described yourself, your professional
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life, your work, your politics? Yeah, so I'm a professor of medicine with tenure at Stanford
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University. I've been a full-time researcher for 20 years. I've been at Stanford for 36 years.
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I teach a class in health economics, for which I've written a best-selling health economics textbook.
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I teach a class in statistical methods that people around the university and especially the medical
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school have taken over two decades. And I've trained many professors, people who are now professors
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at top universities around the world. I mean, I don't think anyone would have called me a fringe
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figure. They may not have agreed with everything I wrote, but that's just normal in science.
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I have 160 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, you know, 10,000, 15,000, I forget,
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15,000 public citations, something on that order. I mean, I'm not the most successful academic in the
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world, but as a fairly successful academic. I'd never written an op-ed before the pandemic. I had
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never, in fact, I never signed up for a political party. Still to this day, I've never signed up
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because I view myself in public health. We have to reach people of all political stripes, regardless
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of what our political opinions are. I've tried my best to keep my own politics out of my research,
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out of my, even during COVID, out of my advice. I mean, if you go to Sweden, I'm more allied with the
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Swedish left. If you go to Florida, you'll see I'm allied with a Republican governor. I don't know
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what my politics are as far as COVID is concerned. I think it's unfortunate that in the United States
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and Canada, these lockdowns have enjoyed a widespread political support among the left.
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It's not one of these things I would have expected before the pandemic, since the harm done to children,
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the poor, and the working class has been so high by the lockdowns. I would have expected the political
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left to be more sensitive to that. It surprised me as well how quickly folks that normally will say
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they don't want politicians or they don't want that particular politician who's elected at the
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moment, they don't want them to have any power, they don't trust them, suddenly wanted them to have
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all the power. Now, the declaration said, adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the
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central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff
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with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should
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be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to
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their home. When possible, they should meet their family members outside rather than inside.
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This does not sound like someone who denies that COVID-19 is real or that it's a threat, and yet
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that's how you and your colleagues were portrayed. Were you shocked at that?
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I was. Earlier in the pandemic, I'd run a seroprevalence study measuring antibody levels to
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COVID in the population. I've been at the forefront of measuring how deadly COVID is. It is a deadly
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disease for older people especially. The key thing is this thousandfold difference or more where there's a
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very, very high risk of mortality for people who are older versus younger people who have faced much
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lower mortality. The idea that if you've had COVID and recovered, that you have substantial protection
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against severe disease on reinfection, that's very clear from the data. So I've never argued that
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COVID isn't real. Of course it's real. It's caused tremendous suffering, harm, and death. But what we were
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arguing for was a better strategy for managing this risk rather than these blanket lockdowns,
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which when we wrote in October 2020, it was funny because there were some people who were arguing that
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we were combating a straw man, that the lockdowns were already gone from the spring. But we wrote the
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declaration because we knew that it was likely that COVID waves would come back. It was a real thing,
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and that it was likely that we would respond in the same panicked way that we responded in March of 2020
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with lockdowns, with school closures and whatnot. That's why we wrote it. We wrote it specifically
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because we viewed COVID as a real threat. And that the problem was that the public health authorities
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were not taking the threat seriously enough by accounting for the features of the virus,
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in particular, who was most at risk. It's remarkable that saying protect the vulnerable
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was considered so controversial. But I can tell you that I wrote many columns saying that. And you had
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public health doctors out there saying that that was inaccurate and that everyone was at risk. And
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making claims such as, well, if a toddler gets it and then they see their grandparents,
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then the grandparent could catch COVID and die. So closed schools, closed playgrounds,
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shut down social activities. It made zero sense to me. And yet the data shows that in Canada,
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anyway, the most prevalent groups to contract COVID-19, 20 to 39, 40 to 59, those were the two
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groups that got COVID the most. Hospitalizations, it was people 60 and up, deaths, 80 and up.
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More than half the deaths were over the age of 80 with underlying conditions. These were things
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that we knew after the first few months, but we didn't adapt until very recently, did we?
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No, it took way too long for public health authorities to come to terms with the fact
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that they had failed, that the lockdown recommendations they suggested had failed.
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We should have understood, if you understand anything about how societies function,
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we live in tremendously unequal societies, Brian. And the idea that everyone can stay home and stay
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safe, well, that's not true. Only maybe 20, 30% of even rich societies have a population that could
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afford to stay home without going out and risking getting sick. The rest of the population needed to be
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out and about. And not because of some frivolous thing, it's just out and about in order to pay the
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bills, to feed their families, to work. All of those were not optional. Only a small fraction,
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again, 30% of jobs could be replaced by Zoom. The policy makers assumed that everyone was in that
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same condition, that had those kinds of resources in order to comply with the lockdown orders.
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The fact that societies are unequal, this is well known to social scientists, it's well known to
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everybody. It should have been at the forefront of the minds of the public health authorities who
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recommended lockdowns. Because if they had had it at the forefront of their minds, they would have
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realized that there was no way it could succeed in protecting vulnerable people. That you needed
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separate, specific strategies that understood the living circumstances of the people in towns and
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neighborhoods and cities where people were in order to devise strategies that had any chance of
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succeeding. Blanket lockdowns, admonitions to stay home, stay safe, fear mongering, none of that was
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going to work in the long run. And certainly, it's unfortunate that those strategies were adopted
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because it harmed so many people. Do you think that any of the lockdown measures worked? Were any of them
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successful or are you against them, blanket? Because when you look at the death per 100,000,
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it really is a checkerboard pattern. You know, Italy's over, I think, 308 deaths per 100,000,
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according to Johns Hopkins. United States, 336. Britain, 330. Sweden, 230. And people say,
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aha, see, lockdowns don't work. But Canada, where we had stricter measures than some US states,
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less strict than others, we're at about 130 deaths per 100,000. Do you think that any of
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the measures worked? Was it personal choice? Why the discrepancies? Sweden's not the best performing,
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but not the worst. Some of the places like Italy that had very strict lockdowns, horrible outcomes.
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Yeah, I think that the key thing to me is that focusing on just COVID alone is a mistake. If you
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want to look at an outcome, what I would prefer to look at is all-cause excess deaths. And by that
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measure, for instance, Sweden has done better than almost all of Europe. I think it's actually done
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better than Canada, if I'm not mistaken. On all-cause excess deaths, California has done worse
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than Florida. Florida famously opened up in May or June 2020, whereas California stayed locked down.
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My kids didn't go to school. I live in California, didn't go to school in person for almost a year and
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a half. And yet all-cause excess deaths are lower in Florida than in California. If you look at the
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peer-reviewed literature on the effectiveness of lockdowns, and you stay focused on papers that
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actually compare places and correlating with the stringency of measures, you'll be hard-pressed to
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find any correlation at all. I don't think the lockdowns were successful in the long run, as you
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say, a checkerboard pattern, in the long run in protecting against COVID. And they caused tremendous
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harm. Swedish school children have no learning loss. California kids are almost a year and a half,
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two years behind. And it's not equal. It's poor kids. It's minority kids that suffer the most on
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that. And that will have long-term consequences on the health and well-being of these kids. Because
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if you have poor schooling, the social science literature is pretty convincing. You live shorter,
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less healthy lives. Because you're poorer. That's what we've consigned a generation of kids to with
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these lockdown measures. You think that it will be that long-lasting, that they won't recover?
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I mean, I do think that we are morally obligated to try to make up for it,
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you know, to provide some kind of catch-up. But I don't think it's possible to fully replace two
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years of missing school, effectively, or sort of inadequate schooling. And that's just in developing
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countries, at least in developing countries, or developed countries. We had access to internet and
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zoom school. That replaced to some degree. In poor countries, in developing countries,
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the results are catastrophic, right? So we recommended school closures to Uganda. They
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closed their schools for two years. And many children had no access to internet. Four and a
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half million kids in Uganda never came back from those two years of schools. I mean, it's a
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generational inequality that we've driven in poor countries. That's true, again, true in India.
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It's true in the Philippines. Every single poor country you look at, you see something like this.
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And it's heartbreaking, because I don't know how you make that up. I think we have a moral obligation
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to try, but I don't know how you make that up at full. When we come back, Dr. Patachari, I want to ask
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you about what it was like to have someone like Francis Collins, the man who mapped the genome,
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publicly, and viciously attack you asking for a takedown. We'll get to that when we come back.
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I'm Brian Lilly, guest host on the Full Common Podcast. More in moments.
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Looking back at how the pandemic was handled and the lockdowns, it looks like we got a lot of
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things wrong along the way. I'm speaking with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford,
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one of the signatories to the great Barrington Declaration. And doctor, you were attacked viciously
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from the beginning. Francis Collins, a man who, you know, he mapped the genome. I mean,
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that's an amazing feat with this guy. And he's emailing Anthony Fauci saying,
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we've got to take these guys down. I'm guessing you probably had some professional respect,
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may have looked up to Dr. Collins. What did it feel like hearing about that this man wanted to
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take you down? Brian, it was just disappointing. I mean, as you say, he was the head of the Human
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Genome Project, a tremendously accomplished scientist, had a great deal of admiration for
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him for that, but also for his principled stance in declaring that he was a faithful Christian.
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That took a lot of courage on his part in a context of science where that sometimes, you know,
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you look down on. And I, too, am a Christian. So it was, to me, to see in print this, essentially,
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like the evidence that he was abusing his power as the head of the NIH to call for a devastating
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takedown of ideas that he disagreed with from scientists, you know, that were putting out their
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ideas in good faith. That was a tremendous disappointment. What he should have done was
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called for a debate or a discussion. He should have engaged with us to understand what we were
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actually saying. Instead, he engaged in essentially a propaganda campaign to destroy our reputations,
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to destroy the idea. And I've long pondered why. Like, I try to understand what exactly was going
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on in his head. I wish I had access to him so I could ask him directly. But I think that he was so
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convinced that he was right that he believed that anyone that disagreed with him was posing a danger
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to society. He wanted to create an illusion of consensus in favor of his opinion, even when it
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was clear that that consensus did not actually exist, that there were prominent scientists from
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around the world, including the tens of thousands who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, doctors
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also, who disagreed with him. There was no scientific consensus. He wanted to create that illusion that
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there was, because he thought that he was so certainly right that it was it was immoral almost
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to disagree with him. We handed over a lot of decision making, a lot of authority during the
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pandemic to scientists, to medical doctors, to people who said, we've got the formula, we can model this.
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And while people would pick at everything that that you and your colleagues had written in
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the Great Barrington Declaration, there was very little challenging and questioning of the models.
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We had in Ontario something called the science table. And I called them various names from the
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Scientology table to the fake science table, the misinformation. These guys, you know,
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the Imperial College modeling at the very beginning that the whole world relied on was devastatingly
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wrong. Our science table would come out with predictions of if we don't lock down, we will have
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X many cases. And if the government didn't lock down and we had no more cases to say, well,
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it's just if we don't lock down again, we need to have more. And they were consistently wrong and yet
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not challenged. I know you're a medical doctor and not a psychologist, but why do you think that is?
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Why were people so willing to hand over authority to folks in your line of work who kept getting it wrong?
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Well, I think if you think back to 2020, in 2021, there was tremendous fear about COVID.
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And, you know, for the first time in a generation, we had a new infectious disease.
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And unlike HIV, which infected a particular part of the population, the idea was, at least in the
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early days, that everyone, as you said earlier, that this was the dogma, that everyone can get
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infected, which is true. Everyone can be infected. Everyone, unlike HIV, everyone really is at high
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risk from being infected. Whereas like, whereas, so, and so, and we, you know, in the West,
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we felt like we conquered infectious disease. Like really, for the most part,
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infectious disease was something that happened to other people. And so you have this panic.
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People look in that context of the panic to, you know, you know, gurus or something,
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some, you know, pundits to tell them, how do I get out of this? Wise men, or to tell them,
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how do I get out of this? A lot, a lot of the modelers put them, put that robe of, of, you know,
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wise, wise men who knew how to fix things around themselves. The problem was that those models
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were incredibly naive about the structure of societies. They were set up so that mechanically,
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if you just kept people apart, like lab rats kept in cages far apart from each other,
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they won't spread disease to each other. Well, societies don't operate like those models envision.
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And because that doesn't, they don't operate like those societies envision, those models were going
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to be wrong over and over again. And they were going to be wrong in a very particular way. They
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were always going to over predict the effectiveness of lockdowns. And of course, the models never had
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anything like a model of what the harms of lockdowns would be. And so you had these modelers and some of
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these scientists who were so confident about their, their, their, their wisdom, because they,
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because some computer model, you know, essentially like a video game, like the Sims, it spit out some
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answer. And, and, you know, when they were, when they were wrong, they were like, oh, well, the, the,
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the society just isn't cooperating with my model. The problem is the society, not, not the model.
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It was, it was a, it was an act of hubris on the part of scientists. And unfortunately, I think
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that a lot of public, of the public has lost trust in scientists as a consequence of the
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overreach of these modelers. It's funny, you said earlier that to you and your colleagues had
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issued the declaration when you did, I think it was October 4th, 2020, because you knew lockdowns
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would come back. Well, they came back quicker for us, perhaps than you, because in Toronto,
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restaurants were shut down. I think five days after you issued the declaration, it was the
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Friday of our Thanksgiving weekend with no notice, they were shut down. And when I asked officials,
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they said, I said, what data do you have to back it up? They had no data. And it was just being told,
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we've got to keep people away. Um, that has a, a, a detrimental effect on health as well. Doesn't
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it though, that keeping people isolated, I think we're seeing it with the mental health issues,
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with addiction issues, with social, uh, distortion, such as the, the, the violent crime that we're
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seeing carried out by young people, um, you know, across our country. Anyway, I think these can be
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related back to a total disruption of society for more than two years. Would I be incorrect in,
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in putting that forward? No, I completely agree with you, Brian. Um, we're not meant to be alone.
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Um, you know, in, in July of 2020, the CDC did a survey in the United States representative survey
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that found that one in four young adults had seriously considered suicide in that previous,
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uh, in, in that previous month. Um, the rise in, in, uh, uh, drug, drug abuse, all of these,
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I think are consequences of the isolation. We essentially, the, the, the, the central dogma
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of the lockdown is that our fellow humans are biohazards, that we are dangerous to each other,
00:26:08.440
when in fact, we need to be in company with each other in order to be, to really to live our full
00:26:12.680
lives. Um, and it's not surprising that this dogma, this anti-human dogma has had such a negative,
00:26:21.480
corrosive effect on the health, psychological health, physical health, and wellbeing of so many people.
00:26:27.080
Do you have any feelings about the fact that there were people, um, who were on the anti-lockdown
00:26:33.240
side, but well beyond just saying, we shouldn't lock down. COVID's a hoax. This is driven by the,
00:26:39.400
this is the plandemic. This is governments trying to control us. A lot of them latched onto your
00:26:46.200
declaration, obviously because they didn't read it because they were denying COVID and trying to
00:26:51.880
use your declaration. Does that give you any pause for concern? Does that bother you at all?
00:26:57.080
I mean, I have to say like, it's, uh, I'm, I'm used to writing scientific papers where I don't have
00:27:04.280
any control over it. I frankly, I'm very bad at predicting who uses the results of my scientific
00:27:09.720
analyses. Um, I think a lot of the people that were on that side, Brian, I think they had lost trust
00:27:19.080
with the institutions of public health and the institutions of government. Um, and I think that
00:27:25.160
it's, it's, it's, it's part of a longer term phenomenon. I mean, I think you have, uh, you've
00:27:29.160
seen these rise of these populist movements around the world as, as a result of essentially, uh,
00:27:36.200
people that don't have a voice and they don't, they're not always the, the, you know, they're not
00:27:42.760
articulate in how they, how they express their concerns, but they are expressing some honest
00:27:47.880
concerns that I think are worth, worth addressing. Uh, I, I'll just stay narrowly focused on public
00:27:53.400
health. Public health during the early days of the pandemic and frankly throughout the pandemic
00:27:58.520
has dismissed, uh, concerns by people who, who had legitimate concerns. Like I'll give you some
00:28:05.400
examples. Like you, you, you know, you, you can, you can have, uh, uh, an elderly parent die in a
00:28:11.320
nursing home. You can't, the nursing home says, well, no, you can't, you can't hold a, you can't come
00:28:15.560
and say goodbye. Uh, you have a child in a, in a, in a, a hospital on a hospital bed and only one
00:28:23.080
parent can come up and say, see him at a time, right? Or you have, uh, someone who loses
00:28:28.360
their job over a vaccine mandate, even though they, they see all around them, all these vaccinated
00:28:32.760
people getting COVID and saying, and they're, they're treated as if they're essentially lepers,
00:28:36.600
when in fact they're not at much higher risk of passing disease on to anyone else as a, as a,
00:28:41.360
as a, as a vaccinated person might be, especially if they've had COVID and recovered all of these
00:28:45.560
kinds of like, uh, mistakes that had consequences in the lives of real people. Well, what does it do?
00:28:52.140
It just, it undermines trust in public health. And a lot of what you're talking about, Brian,
00:28:57.160
I think is the fruit of that loss of trust in public health. And it'd be one thing if it was
00:29:02.960
utterly unwarranted, but I think a lot of it is the, the fruit of public health hubris, the fruit of,
00:29:09.980
of the lockdowns. Um, and I don't, I don't know, I don't know how I'm not a politician. I don't do
00:29:15.540
politics. I just try to look at the data and say what I, you know, say what I see. Um, but so I,
00:29:21.880
I, you know, please forgive me if I, if this is completely naive, but I think the, the, the best
00:29:26.980
way to deal with that kind of phenomenon is to, to be trustworthy, to be worthy of trust.
00:29:35.020
And public health unfortunately didn't meet that standard. If you had a public health that was
00:29:39.880
trustworthy, you wouldn't have people, uh, reacting in that way because then public health could
00:29:45.440
respond and say, you know, this is really not like that. Here's, here's the right way to think
00:29:48.620
about this and people would believe them. Um, Sweden is a good example of this. I mean,
00:29:53.220
very high levels of trust in public health because when public health made mistakes,
00:29:56.880
they owned up to it and they did their best to try to treat the population like adults.
00:30:03.000
That's not, that doesn't characterize American public health. I'm afraid it doesn't characterize
00:30:06.620
Canadian public health. I was on many of the, um, early, uh, news conferences, either in person or,
00:30:13.140
or by phone if they were up in Ottawa with Dr. Tam and all the things that they eventually
00:30:18.460
told us we had to do, they initially said, we don't, we didn't have to do it. Originally the,
00:30:23.880
the advice was stay home. If you're sick, cough into your elbow, wash your hands, practice good
00:30:30.140
hygiene. I think most of those are in the great Barrington declaration by the way. Um, and now the
00:30:35.900
public health advice, uh, but asked about masks. They said, no, there's no need. Um, even asked about,
00:30:42.460
uh, should we be screening at airports from hotspots? No, there's no need. It won't stop it.
00:30:48.040
Um, and on and on the list went and, and then they eventually all reversed themselves and not
00:30:54.420
only reverse themselves, but wanted to use the full extent of the state's power to enforce a view that
00:31:02.660
they once said was wrong and in vilified anyone who said, wait a minute, there's a problem here.
00:31:08.340
What's the longterm impact on public health from that? I mean, you're a public health,
00:31:13.180
uh, you know, doctor, do people just not believe the next time there, there is a serious concern
00:31:19.620
out there? Do the, do more people just say, Hmm, you weren't so right last time. I'm not going to
00:31:24.640
believe you this time. It's heartbreaking, Brian, because now what I've seen is a collapse in trust
00:31:32.080
of the basic vaccines that, uh, that, that are quite important for public health, like, you know,
00:31:38.200
the MM, like for children, MMR, uh, DPT, all these, uh, polio, all these vaccines that are absolutely
00:31:44.020
essential with a lot of good evidence behind them. The public trust in public health has collapsed so
00:31:49.060
that that movement has grown pretty widely. Um, and the, the, the kind of questions they're asking are
00:31:54.940
not illegitimate questions. They're like, well, what are the data show us that show us the information.
00:31:58.940
And when public health responds, they're not going to believe, they're not going to be believed
00:32:03.260
because they cried wolf. Think about masks. Like you bring up masks, um, in the early days of the
00:32:08.440
pandemic, Tony Fauci said, uh, well, masks don't work. You don't need them. Um, the reason he said
00:32:14.900
that actually, I believe is because that's what the evidence prior to the pandemic actually showed a
00:32:19.340
dozen good randomized trials for the flu had found the mask more ineffective in managing,
00:32:24.140
a reducing community spread. Um, well then later in the pandemic, just a couple of months later,
00:32:32.220
he turned around and said, Oh no, I was lying to you earlier. In fact, I was lying to you because
00:32:37.980
I wanted to make sure that the, that there were enough masks for, uh, for, uh, uh, healthcare workers.
00:32:45.180
Well, you know, there, there's kind of two lies embedded in that. He wasn't lying to them earlier.
00:32:50.200
That was his honest view about masks in, in, in January, 2020, that they don't work, but it's also
00:32:55.740
true that he was, he, he was, uh, essentially admitting to lying. Well, who would trust him again
00:33:01.280
after that, that, like you can't give noble lies and expect to be believed X after the fact.
00:33:08.000
You can't just say, ha ha, I fooled you. And then now I'm going to, going to trust you in the same way.
00:33:13.020
Um, that has characterized public health throughout the pandemic that, that they, they try to manipulate
00:33:17.660
the public by, by, by altering facts to the thing, the way that they want them to be, as opposed to
00:33:23.540
just honestly saying like, what if, what if Tony Fauci had gone up in front of public in January,
00:33:27.820
2020 and said, you know, uh, I don't, I don't think masks work very well. Uh, I know a lot of
00:33:33.120
people are, uh, want masks because they want to protect themselves, but it's very important that
00:33:37.720
the healthcare workers have, have access to these masks because there's a lot of good evidence
00:33:42.500
that in hospitals, they work well, that trained, trained professionals using them and then,
00:33:47.900
and then, uh, correctly can, can protect vulnerable people with them. So I'm asking you members of
00:33:53.480
the public to refrain from using them so that they can be used in places where they're most,
00:33:58.240
most needed. I think that the public would have reacted in kind correctly to that. They would
00:34:03.600
have responded by, by, you know, just as they did like tremendous sacrifice. Um, instead they,
00:34:09.880
he admitted to lying to the public, manipulating the public. And it was not just him. It's public
00:34:15.740
health at large that did this over and over and over again. I don't know how you get your
00:34:19.520
credibility back. The world health organization looking at lifting the, uh, the designation of a
00:34:25.160
public health emergency of international concern. Uh, I think it's probably long overdue, but I'm not a
00:34:31.580
doctor. I'm just someone who lives in this world. Where do you see us going? Um, do you have a positive
00:34:37.340
outlook over the next six months to a year, negative outlook? Uh, let's end on, on an upside,
00:34:43.580
I hope. Well, I, I think, uh, the COVID is a very, very different disease in one sense than it was in
00:34:51.580
March of 2020. Uh, first we know tremendously more about it. We have very good, uh, you know,
00:34:56.500
much better treatments, um, and, and ways to prevent the worst of it, including the vaccines,
00:35:02.280
actually, uh, for the most vulnerable. Um, a very large fraction of the population has had COVID
00:35:07.380
recovered and therefore has a strong protection immunity even against, uh, reinfection until
00:35:14.700
there's a new variant and also against severe disease on reinfection. So the threat of COVID is
00:35:20.600
so much less now than it was in March of 2020. The uncertainty by COVID is so much less. It is
00:35:25.420
absolutely time to lift this state of emergency. It's absolutely time to lift this idea that,
00:35:30.720
that we need to reorganize our lives around COVID. Um, that's the good news. Uh, the bad news to me
00:35:38.580
is that I believe that lockdowns are now a staple of public health responses to future pandemics.
00:35:45.860
I believe the idea of, of, uh, noble lies and manipulation of public behavior is now a staple
00:35:52.780
of public health responses to pandemics. Unless that is changed, unless, and I believe that's going
00:35:58.920
to take new leadership at the head of public health, uh, that acknowledges the harms of these
00:36:04.400
unethical approaches, unless and until people view lockdown as a dirty word in public health and
00:36:12.000
outside, uh, we are going to face the danger of this sort of thing happening over and over and again
00:36:17.360
in our lifetimes. And I don't see how that's consistent with liberal democracy. The last three
00:36:21.680
years have seen the rise essentially of an authoritarian power of public health. And I
00:36:25.880
think that, uh, as, as a, as a, as a, uh, as members of the public living in living in liberal
00:36:33.200
democracies, we just can't have allow that to happen. There needs to be checks and balances put
00:36:37.780
in place. So this sort of thing never happens again. I hope you're right on your first point.
00:36:41.660
And I hope you're wrong on, uh, on the rest, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Thanks so much for your time.
00:36:46.780
Thank you, Brian. Pleasure to talk with you. Full Comment is a post media podcast. My name's
00:36:51.560
Brian Lilly. I'm the guest host this week. This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music
00:36:56.760
by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer of Full Comment. You can subscribe to
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