Full Comment - We should have listened to the Great Barrington Declaration

00:00:00.000 I don't think I'll ever forget January 25th, 2020.

00:00:09.700 I was getting ready to head out for a Robbie Burns night supper when suddenly I got an email

00:00:16.520 telling me that Health Minister for Ontario, Christine Elliott, followed by what seemed

00:00:20.640 like 15 doctor's names, would hold a news conference at Queen's Park at 5 p.m. on a

00:00:26.580 Saturday. At that point, I knew we'd had COVID arrive in Canada.

00:00:31.860 Hello, my name is Brian Lilly. I'm guest host for the Full Comment podcast this week, and

00:00:36.260 we're going to look back at how things were dealt with in very specific ways when it comes

00:00:42.320 to COVID-19, the pandemic, reactions, overreactions. But before we get to our guests, I do want

00:00:49.260 to remind you that you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, Google

00:00:53.280 Podcast, Apple, Amazon, Spotify. Make sure that you hit the subscribe button if you want

00:00:59.200 to keep hearing great content. Make sure you leave a like, you leave a comment, share it

00:01:03.560 with your Aunt May and Whitby. Spread the word, spread the love. Don't spread the COVID.

00:01:09.140 My next guest is someone who was at the forefront of many of the debates that were front and center

00:01:15.840 during COVID. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is an infectious disease specialist, a doctor at Stanford University.

00:01:23.600 In October 2020, he penned, I guess you could call it an open letter, a document, a declaration,

00:01:31.200 if you will, the Great Barrington Declaration, with two other medical specialists. And it called for

00:01:38.380 what many thought was a balanced approach to dealing with the pandemic, but was quickly derided

00:01:44.040 as letting people die. Dr. Bhattacharya, thanks for the time.

00:01:49.580 Thank you, Ryan. Nice to be here.

00:01:50.820 You've had quite a ride since the Great Barrington Declaration was published. Let's talk about what

00:01:58.900 it was and what it wasn't, because I think that you have been unfairly described by those who love

00:02:07.000 you and support you, but they are of the COVID's not real variety. And you've been attacked by people

00:02:13.640 who think that you just wanted people to die. So were you surprised by those polar reactions

00:02:21.220 as you, after you released it, or is it about what you expected?

00:02:27.340 Well, I was a little surprised by the reaction of public health officials, you know, people like,

00:02:33.100 who should know better, people like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the National

00:02:37.460 Institute of Health. The idea of the Great Barrington Declaration was not to let the virus rip or to kill

00:02:44.100 anybody. In fact, the central idea of the Great Barrington Declaration was focused protection of

00:02:48.180 vulnerable people. We knew certainly by October, long before October, actually, 2020, that it was

00:02:54.600 older people and certain people with chronic conditions that were at highest risk of dying if

00:03:00.100 they should get infected. 40% of the deaths had already occurred in nursing home settings that

00:03:06.440 were clearly inadequately protecting. So the Great Barrington Declaration called for better protection

00:03:12.080 of vulnerable older people. The idea that the lockdowns would protect those people, that was at

00:03:18.260 the heart of the problem with our pandemic response, that lockdowns and controlling disease

00:03:23.120 spread in the community, something that we've become clear, it's impossible to do without causing

00:03:28.340 tremendous harm to children, to poor people, to the working class. The idea was that if we did that,

00:03:37.020 we would, by osmosis, protect old people. I knew that wasn't correct. And that was the reason for the 1.00

00:03:42.740 declaration. So what I was really surprised by, Brian, was that public health didn't engage with us

00:03:48.380 in creative thinking about how better to protect vulnerable older people. Instead, it treated us like

00:03:55.900 foreign invaders or something, you know, needing to repel us. Francis Collins, the head of the National

00:04:02.160 Institute of Health, wrote to Tony Fauci calling me, a professor at Stanford, Sinatra Gupta, who was a

00:04:09.400 professor at Oxford, and Martin Kuldor, a professor at Harvard. She called the three of us, the primary

00:04:16.100 authors of the declaration, fringe epidemiologists, and then basically unleashed a propaganda campaign

00:04:22.320 against us. I was stunned by that. The fact that the public at large sometimes gets things wrong. I

00:04:27.740 mean, that's not, that's just normal. Our job as public health professionals is to try to tell people

00:04:32.520 what the truth is. And public health professionals that at the top of these scientific bureaucracies

00:04:37.780 fail to do that. I'm guessing your life now is much different professionally and otherwise than it

00:04:43.220 was prior to the pandemic. Were you seen as a fringe epidemiologist before COVID-19? Were you

00:04:51.380 someone who was really active in political circles? You know, because you've been described as many

00:04:59.600 things over the last several years. How would you describe yourself prior to signing this declaration?

00:05:05.360 Or let's just go back before COVID arrived. How would you have described yourself, your professional

00:05:11.480 life, your work, your politics? Yeah, so I'm a professor of medicine with tenure at Stanford

00:05:18.720 University. I've been a full-time researcher for 20 years. I've been at Stanford for 36 years.

00:05:24.040 I teach a class in health economics, for which I've written a best-selling health economics textbook.

00:05:31.460 I teach a class in statistical methods that people around the university and especially the medical

00:05:37.220 school have taken over two decades. And I've trained many professors, people who are now professors

00:05:44.260 at top universities around the world. I mean, I don't think anyone would have called me a fringe

00:05:49.480 figure. They may not have agreed with everything I wrote, but that's just normal in science.

00:05:53.580 I have 160 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, you know, 10,000, 15,000, I forget,

00:06:00.540 15,000 public citations, something on that order. I mean, I'm not the most successful academic in the

00:06:08.280 world, but as a fairly successful academic. I'd never written an op-ed before the pandemic. I had

00:06:13.940 never, in fact, I never signed up for a political party. Still to this day, I've never signed up

00:06:17.560 because I view myself in public health. We have to reach people of all political stripes, regardless

00:06:21.820 of what our political opinions are. I've tried my best to keep my own politics out of my research,

00:06:28.720 out of my, even during COVID, out of my advice. I mean, if you go to Sweden, I'm more allied with the

00:06:35.940 Swedish left. If you go to Florida, you'll see I'm allied with a Republican governor. I don't know

00:06:42.900 what my politics are as far as COVID is concerned. I think it's unfortunate that in the United States

00:06:47.820 and Canada, these lockdowns have enjoyed a widespread political support among the left.

00:06:54.340 It's not one of these things I would have expected before the pandemic, since the harm done to children,

00:06:59.680 the poor, and the working class has been so high by the lockdowns. I would have expected the political

00:07:04.080 left to be more sensitive to that. It surprised me as well how quickly folks that normally will say

00:07:10.160 they don't want politicians or they don't want that particular politician who's elected at the

00:07:15.300 moment, they don't want them to have any power, they don't trust them, suddenly wanted them to have

00:07:19.760 all the power. Now, the declaration said, adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the

00:07:27.040 central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff

00:07:33.560 with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should

00:07:39.080 be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to 1.00

00:07:43.840 their home. When possible, they should meet their family members outside rather than inside.

00:07:49.360 This does not sound like someone who denies that COVID-19 is real or that it's a threat, and yet

00:07:56.720 that's how you and your colleagues were portrayed. Were you shocked at that?

00:08:04.320 I was. Earlier in the pandemic, I'd run a seroprevalence study measuring antibody levels to

00:08:11.680 COVID in the population. I've been at the forefront of measuring how deadly COVID is. It is a deadly

00:08:17.120 disease for older people especially. The key thing is this thousandfold difference or more where there's a

00:08:23.440 very, very high risk of mortality for people who are older versus younger people who have faced much

00:08:28.680 lower mortality. The idea that if you've had COVID and recovered, that you have substantial protection

00:08:35.440 against severe disease on reinfection, that's very clear from the data. So I've never argued that

00:08:41.840 COVID isn't real. Of course it's real. It's caused tremendous suffering, harm, and death. But what we were

00:08:47.640 arguing for was a better strategy for managing this risk rather than these blanket lockdowns,

00:08:54.120 which when we wrote in October 2020, it was funny because there were some people who were arguing that

00:08:58.280 we were combating a straw man, that the lockdowns were already gone from the spring. But we wrote the

00:09:05.880 declaration because we knew that it was likely that COVID waves would come back. It was a real thing,

00:09:12.920 and that it was likely that we would respond in the same panicked way that we responded in March of 2020

00:09:19.480 with lockdowns, with school closures and whatnot. That's why we wrote it. We wrote it specifically

00:09:25.080 because we viewed COVID as a real threat. And that the problem was that the public health authorities

00:09:30.000 were not taking the threat seriously enough by accounting for the features of the virus,

00:09:34.760 in particular, who was most at risk. It's remarkable that saying protect the vulnerable

00:09:42.760 was considered so controversial. But I can tell you that I wrote many columns saying that. And you had

00:09:50.280 public health doctors out there saying that that was inaccurate and that everyone was at risk. And

00:09:57.160 making claims such as, well, if a toddler gets it and then they see their grandparents,

00:10:01.160 then the grandparent could catch COVID and die. So closed schools, closed playgrounds,

00:10:07.320 shut down social activities. It made zero sense to me. And yet the data shows that in Canada,

00:10:15.880 anyway, the most prevalent groups to contract COVID-19, 20 to 39, 40 to 59, those were the two

00:10:22.520 groups that got COVID the most. Hospitalizations, it was people 60 and up, deaths, 80 and up.

00:10:29.160 More than half the deaths were over the age of 80 with underlying conditions. These were things

00:10:35.000 that we knew after the first few months, but we didn't adapt until very recently, did we?

00:10:42.040 No, it took way too long for public health authorities to come to terms with the fact

00:10:47.000 that they had failed, that the lockdown recommendations they suggested had failed.

00:10:52.200 We should have understood, if you understand anything about how societies function,

00:10:56.200 we live in tremendously unequal societies, Brian. And the idea that everyone can stay home and stay

00:11:04.040 safe, well, that's not true. Only maybe 20, 30% of even rich societies have a population that could

00:11:12.280 afford to stay home without going out and risking getting sick. The rest of the population needed to be

00:11:18.520 out and about. And not because of some frivolous thing, it's just out and about in order to pay the

00:11:25.960 bills, to feed their families, to work. All of those were not optional. Only a small fraction,

00:11:32.680 again, 30% of jobs could be replaced by Zoom. The policy makers assumed that everyone was in that

00:11:40.920 same condition, that had those kinds of resources in order to comply with the lockdown orders.

00:11:47.640 The fact that societies are unequal, this is well known to social scientists, it's well known to

00:11:51.560 everybody. It should have been at the forefront of the minds of the public health authorities who

00:11:57.160 recommended lockdowns. Because if they had had it at the forefront of their minds, they would have

00:12:01.000 realized that there was no way it could succeed in protecting vulnerable people. That you needed

00:12:06.920 separate, specific strategies that understood the living circumstances of the people in towns and

00:12:12.440 neighborhoods and cities where people were in order to devise strategies that had any chance of

00:12:17.240 succeeding. Blanket lockdowns, admonitions to stay home, stay safe, fear mongering, none of that was

00:12:23.160 going to work in the long run. And certainly, it's unfortunate that those strategies were adopted

00:12:28.280 because it harmed so many people. Do you think that any of the lockdown measures worked? Were any of them

00:12:34.520 successful or are you against them, blanket? Because when you look at the death per 100,000,

00:12:41.160 it really is a checkerboard pattern. You know, Italy's over, I think, 308 deaths per 100,000,

00:12:49.560 according to Johns Hopkins. United States, 336. Britain, 330. Sweden, 230. And people say,

00:12:55.960 aha, see, lockdowns don't work. But Canada, where we had stricter measures than some US states,

00:13:03.480 less strict than others, we're at about 130 deaths per 100,000. Do you think that any of

00:13:10.040 the measures worked? Was it personal choice? Why the discrepancies? Sweden's not the best performing,

00:13:17.720 but not the worst. Some of the places like Italy that had very strict lockdowns, horrible outcomes.

00:13:22.920 Yeah, I think that the key thing to me is that focusing on just COVID alone is a mistake. If you

00:13:33.240 want to look at an outcome, what I would prefer to look at is all-cause excess deaths. And by that

00:13:39.720 measure, for instance, Sweden has done better than almost all of Europe. I think it's actually done

00:13:45.320 better than Canada, if I'm not mistaken. On all-cause excess deaths, California has done worse

00:13:53.080 than Florida. Florida famously opened up in May or June 2020, whereas California stayed locked down.

00:14:01.240 My kids didn't go to school. I live in California, didn't go to school in person for almost a year and

00:14:05.800 a half. And yet all-cause excess deaths are lower in Florida than in California. If you look at the

00:14:12.680 peer-reviewed literature on the effectiveness of lockdowns, and you stay focused on papers that

00:14:19.960 actually compare places and correlating with the stringency of measures, you'll be hard-pressed to

00:14:30.680 find any correlation at all. I don't think the lockdowns were successful in the long run, as you

00:14:36.200 say, a checkerboard pattern, in the long run in protecting against COVID. And they caused tremendous

00:14:41.720 harm. Swedish school children have no learning loss. California kids are almost a year and a half,

00:14:49.480 two years behind. And it's not equal. It's poor kids. It's minority kids that suffer the most on 0.72

00:14:55.480 that. And that will have long-term consequences on the health and well-being of these kids. Because

00:15:00.600 if you have poor schooling, the social science literature is pretty convincing. You live shorter,

00:15:07.720 less healthy lives. Because you're poorer. That's what we've consigned a generation of kids to with

00:15:12.040 these lockdown measures. You think that it will be that long-lasting, that they won't recover?

00:15:17.160 I mean, I do think that we are morally obligated to try to make up for it,

00:15:24.920 you know, to provide some kind of catch-up. But I don't think it's possible to fully replace two

00:15:32.520 years of missing school, effectively, or sort of inadequate schooling. And that's just in developing

00:15:39.880 countries, at least in developing countries, or developed countries. We had access to internet and

00:15:44.760 zoom school. That replaced to some degree. In poor countries, in developing countries,

00:15:50.200 the results are catastrophic, right? So we recommended school closures to Uganda. They 1.00

00:15:57.640 closed their schools for two years. And many children had no access to internet. Four and a

00:16:04.360 half million kids in Uganda never came back from those two years of schools. I mean, it's a 0.99

00:16:10.840 generational inequality that we've driven in poor countries. That's true, again, true in India. 1.00

00:16:16.360 It's true in the Philippines. Every single poor country you look at, you see something like this.

00:16:21.560 And it's heartbreaking, because I don't know how you make that up. I think we have a moral obligation

00:16:26.760 to try, but I don't know how you make that up at full. When we come back, Dr. Patachari, I want to ask

00:16:32.680 you about what it was like to have someone like Francis Collins, the man who mapped the genome,

00:16:37.720 publicly, and viciously attack you asking for a takedown. We'll get to that when we come back.

00:16:44.760 I'm Brian Lilly, guest host on the Full Common Podcast. More in moments.

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00:18:03.160 Looking back at how the pandemic was handled and the lockdowns, it looks like we got a lot of

00:18:09.640 things wrong along the way. I'm speaking with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford,

00:18:14.440 one of the signatories to the great Barrington Declaration. And doctor, you were attacked viciously

00:18:21.240 from the beginning. Francis Collins, a man who, you know, he mapped the genome. I mean,

00:18:26.760 that's an amazing feat with this guy. And he's emailing Anthony Fauci saying,

00:18:31.720 we've got to take these guys down. I'm guessing you probably had some professional respect,

00:18:37.240 may have looked up to Dr. Collins. What did it feel like hearing about that this man wanted to

00:18:42.520 take you down? Brian, it was just disappointing. I mean, as you say, he was the head of the Human

00:18:51.320 Genome Project, a tremendously accomplished scientist, had a great deal of admiration for

00:18:56.840 him for that, but also for his principled stance in declaring that he was a faithful Christian.

00:19:04.520 That took a lot of courage on his part in a context of science where that sometimes, you know,

00:19:10.120 you look down on. And I, too, am a Christian. So it was, to me, to see in print this, essentially,

00:19:18.200 like the evidence that he was abusing his power as the head of the NIH to call for a devastating

00:19:26.520 takedown of ideas that he disagreed with from scientists, you know, that were putting out their

00:19:32.760 ideas in good faith. That was a tremendous disappointment. What he should have done was

00:19:37.800 called for a debate or a discussion. He should have engaged with us to understand what we were

00:19:42.280 actually saying. Instead, he engaged in essentially a propaganda campaign to destroy our reputations,

00:19:51.320 to destroy the idea. And I've long pondered why. Like, I try to understand what exactly was going

00:19:56.680 on in his head. I wish I had access to him so I could ask him directly. But I think that he was so

00:20:01.720 convinced that he was right that he believed that anyone that disagreed with him was posing a danger

00:20:08.040 to society. He wanted to create an illusion of consensus in favor of his opinion, even when it

00:20:16.120 was clear that that consensus did not actually exist, that there were prominent scientists from

00:20:21.400 around the world, including the tens of thousands who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, doctors

00:20:26.200 also, who disagreed with him. There was no scientific consensus. He wanted to create that illusion that

00:20:33.080 there was, because he thought that he was so certainly right that it was it was immoral almost

00:20:38.360 to disagree with him. We handed over a lot of decision making, a lot of authority during the

00:20:43.320 pandemic to scientists, to medical doctors, to people who said, we've got the formula, we can model this.

00:20:50.920 And while people would pick at everything that that you and your colleagues had written in

00:20:57.320 the Great Barrington Declaration, there was very little challenging and questioning of the models.

00:21:04.200 We had in Ontario something called the science table. And I called them various names from the

00:21:10.280 Scientology table to the fake science table, the misinformation. These guys, you know,

00:21:16.120 the Imperial College modeling at the very beginning that the whole world relied on was devastatingly

00:21:22.360 wrong. Our science table would come out with predictions of if we don't lock down, we will have

00:21:30.920 X many cases. And if the government didn't lock down and we had no more cases to say, well,

00:21:36.120 it's just if we don't lock down again, we need to have more. And they were consistently wrong and yet

00:21:41.960 not challenged. I know you're a medical doctor and not a psychologist, but why do you think that is?

00:21:50.120 Why were people so willing to hand over authority to folks in your line of work who kept getting it wrong?

00:22:00.520 Well, I think if you think back to 2020, in 2021, there was tremendous fear about COVID.

00:22:07.800 And, you know, for the first time in a generation, we had a new infectious disease.

00:22:14.760 And unlike HIV, which infected a particular part of the population, the idea was, at least in the

00:22:20.040 early days, that everyone, as you said earlier, that this was the dogma, that everyone can get

00:22:23.720 infected, which is true. Everyone can be infected. Everyone, unlike HIV, everyone really is at high

00:22:28.760 risk from being infected. Whereas like, whereas, so, and so, and we, you know, in the West,

00:22:35.960 we felt like we conquered infectious disease. Like really, for the most part,

00:22:39.880 infectious disease was something that happened to other people. And so you have this panic.

00:22:46.200 People look in that context of the panic to, you know, you know, gurus or something,

00:22:50.920 some, you know, pundits to tell them, how do I get out of this? Wise men, or to tell them,

00:22:56.040 how do I get out of this? A lot, a lot of the modelers put them, put that robe of, of, you know,

00:23:03.720 wise, wise men who knew how to fix things around themselves. The problem was that those models

00:23:09.880 were incredibly naive about the structure of societies. They were set up so that mechanically,

00:23:16.760 if you just kept people apart, like lab rats kept in cages far apart from each other,

00:23:21.560 they won't spread disease to each other. Well, societies don't operate like those models envision.

00:23:27.560 And because that doesn't, they don't operate like those societies envision, those models were going

00:23:31.560 to be wrong over and over again. And they were going to be wrong in a very particular way. They

00:23:35.160 were always going to over predict the effectiveness of lockdowns. And of course, the models never had

00:23:41.560 anything like a model of what the harms of lockdowns would be. And so you had these modelers and some of

00:23:49.000 these scientists who were so confident about their, their, their, their wisdom, because they,

00:23:55.480 because some computer model, you know, essentially like a video game, like the Sims, it spit out some

00:23:59.960 answer. And, and, you know, when they were, when they were wrong, they were like, oh, well, the, the,

00:24:05.320 the society just isn't cooperating with my model. The problem is the society, not, not the model.

00:24:11.160 It was, it was a, it was an act of hubris on the part of scientists. And unfortunately, I think

00:24:16.440 that a lot of public, of the public has lost trust in scientists as a consequence of the

00:24:22.120 overreach of these modelers. It's funny, you said earlier that to you and your colleagues had

00:24:28.120 issued the declaration when you did, I think it was October 4th, 2020, because you knew lockdowns

00:24:35.480 would come back. Well, they came back quicker for us, perhaps than you, because in Toronto,

00:24:41.560 restaurants were shut down. I think five days after you issued the declaration, it was the

00:24:48.120 Friday of our Thanksgiving weekend with no notice, they were shut down. And when I asked officials,

00:24:53.320 they said, I said, what data do you have to back it up? They had no data. And it was just being told,

00:25:00.360 we've got to keep people away. Um, that has a, a, a detrimental effect on health as well. Doesn't

00:25:07.240 it though, that keeping people isolated, I think we're seeing it with the mental health issues,

00:25:12.440 with addiction issues, with social, uh, distortion, such as the, the, the violent crime that we're

00:25:21.000 seeing carried out by young people, um, you know, across our country. Anyway, I think these can be

00:25:26.200 related back to a total disruption of society for more than two years. Would I be incorrect in,

00:25:32.360 in putting that forward? No, I completely agree with you, Brian. Um, we're not meant to be alone.

00:25:38.840 Um, you know, in, in July of 2020, the CDC did a survey in the United States representative survey

00:25:45.400 that found that one in four young adults had seriously considered suicide in that previous,

00:25:51.000 uh, in, in that previous month. Um, the rise in, in, uh, uh, drug, drug abuse, all of these,

00:25:58.440 I think are consequences of the isolation. We essentially, the, the, the, the central dogma

00:26:03.240 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

00:37:02.320 Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and Amazon Music. Listen through any Alexa enabled

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00:37:12.800 Thanks so much for listening.

00:37:16.780 Thank you.

Full Comment - January 30, 2023

We should have listened to the Great Barrington Declaration

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