Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 650 ｜ COVID Comeback, Depression Meds & Alzheimer’s Scandal ｜ Guest： Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. Today we are talking to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

00:00:06.300 You've probably seen him over the past few years doing interviews on COVID and the terrible

00:00:12.260 response of many states to COVID by placing draconian restrictions like lockdowns, shutting

00:00:20.020 down schools, mask and vaccine mandates. He is an epidemiologist and a professor of medicine

00:00:26.520 at Stanford University. He has been one of the most important voices in pushing back

00:00:33.400 against these destructive policies that we have seen over the past few years. And now

00:00:38.600 that we are seeing universities and cities, districts, public schools, re-implementing

00:00:45.320 some of these mandates that have been proven to fail, I wanted to get his perspective.

00:00:50.660 So we are going to talk to him about that, what the response should have been and should

00:00:56.220 be. We are also going to talk about this study that recently came out about SSRIs, depression

00:01:02.980 medications, and why they are so ineffective. It is apparently because this theory of chemical

00:01:09.540 imbalance is causing depression is actually not true. So he's going to give us his response

00:01:16.320 to that. And then we are also going to talk about this terrible story of this Alzheimer's

00:01:22.960 medication fraud and what that means, what happened there and what the consequences are

00:01:30.440 and what accountability should look like. Then he's going to give us some recommendations

00:01:34.860 for how we can reform public health and how public health entities can win back public trust.

00:01:41.040 As always, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com

00:01:46.880 slash Allie. That's goodranchers.com slash Allie.

00:01:59.560 So the theme that you are going to hear in this conversation is that science is not God. Scientists

00:02:07.600 are not infallible. That's what I kept on taking away from what he was saying about how science

00:02:15.820 changes, how it evolves, how it should evolve based on facts, based on the information that

00:02:21.320 we have. And when someone like Tony Fauci says before Congress that I am science and anyone

00:02:27.380 who disagrees with me disagrees with science, that is extremely, it's symbolic, it's representative

00:02:36.780 of where our public health entities, where the scientific community, if you will, has gone.

00:02:43.880 It's gone from trying to find the facts and trying to come to conclusions based on those facts and then

00:02:50.880 communicating those conclusions truthfully to the public to really a kind of scientism, a kind of

00:03:00.080 religion, basically asserting that scientists who have a particular position, if that position is

00:03:09.240 held by those who are in power, is infallible and it's indisputable. And this is the danger,

00:03:17.520 of course, of replacing God with anything, but particularly of science. People say that we

00:03:22.320 have to trust the science. We should follow the science. But look, science is created,

00:03:28.400 investigated, and discovered by human beings who are fallible. And ultimately, all of science,

00:03:35.840 all of the world was created by a God who is infallible. So we cannot place the same faith

00:03:43.320 in science or so-called science as we do in the God who is immutable, unchangeable, who is the

00:03:51.080 authority over what is and what isn't, what's good and what's bad, what's right and what's wrong,

00:03:55.700 what's true and what's false. And we have seen the deadly consequences of switching the God of

00:04:01.400 Scripture with the God of science over the past few years. So today, with Dr. Bhattacharya,

00:04:06.500 we are going to talk specifically about what those consequences have looked like and where we have

00:04:12.160 so disastrously got it wrong and how we can, in the future, get it right. So without further ado,

00:04:19.460 here is epidemiologist and professor, Dr. J. Bhattacharya.

00:04:25.900 Dr. Bhattacharya, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

00:04:30.320 Nice to be here. Thank you, Allie.

00:04:32.500 Yes. So you were dubbed in the beginning of COVID and looking at our COVID response as the

00:04:39.540 anti-lockdown voice. Of course, you had a lot of conservative media who wanted to talk to you and

00:04:45.720 gain your insight. And then you had some left-wing media who opposed you and who, I don't know if

00:04:52.060 they really scientifically disagreed with you, but they didn't like your message. Tell us what it has

00:04:56.600 been like over the past couple of years kind of being deemed the voice of anti-lockdowns during COVID.

00:05:03.100 I mean, for me now, it's a source of pride. I think I was right in 2020 and it's been the right

00:05:10.380 strategy. I have to say, it's been shocking to me to see the political polarization. I spent my

00:05:18.200 career writing scientific papers. I would write papers that go into journals and 15 to 50 people

00:05:24.420 would read it and be all excited about it. And then in 2020, to all of a sudden be thrust into

00:05:31.060 the national spotlight over what I thought of as just basic epidemiology is still absolutely stunning

00:05:38.960 to me. It's been, I mean, in many ways, it's been very, very difficult. Like a lot of my lost

00:05:45.600 friends, Stanford hasn't really treated me all that well. But I've also had the opportunity to meet

00:05:54.540 some incredible people and to participate in some of the most important policy decisions that I will

00:06:01.780 ever have the privilege to participate in. So it's been good in that way.

00:06:05.640 It's been interesting. I'm sure that you didn't think that you were going to be thrust into the

00:06:08.980 middle of a political debate when you were given your epidemiological position, right?

00:06:15.160 I mean, I'll know the pandemic is well and truly over when I no longer get invited to podcasts,

00:06:20.340 Charlie. Right, right. I know. It's a sign of the times that I messaged you on Twitter to have you

00:06:25.080 come on. But I'm thankful for it. For those who may not know, can you just kind of summarize what

00:06:29.680 your position has been on the COVID restrictions that have been implemented, especially the ones that

00:06:34.360 you and I both would agree are draconian, like shutting down businesses and schools?

00:06:39.160 Yeah. So basically, the key idea that motivated me throughout the pandemic is first, you have to

00:06:45.800 get good data on who are actually at risk from COVID in terms of bad outcomes. And if you look

00:06:53.600 at the data from the very early days of the pandemic, it was very clear that it was really

00:06:58.720 older people and certain people, some chronic conditions, but mostly it's older people that

00:07:03.540 face an elevated risk of mortality. I did a study early in the pandemic measuring the mortality rate

00:07:08.740 of the disease. And there's a thousandfold difference in the risk of dying. Maybe like if

00:07:15.940 you're over the age of 70, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 percent, very high risk, especially if you're in a nursing

00:07:22.760 home of dying if you get infected. Whereas if you're younger, it's very, very low. People under the age

00:07:29.540 of 70, maybe 99.95 percent survival. And this was before the vaccine. So there's this huge gradient

00:07:38.680 in risk in terms of the bad outcomes from the disease. Same time, the lockdowns themselves that

00:07:45.700 we adopted, especially the more draconian ones, are absolutely deadly, right? So just take children,

00:07:52.220 right? We've locked children out of school in so many states and actually many places around the world

00:07:56.180 did this. And yet we know from a huge literature that precedes the pandemic that this is actually

00:08:03.920 very bad for the health of children throughout their entire lives. Children that skip even short

00:08:09.300 periods of school have shorter, less healthy, poorer lives. That's essentially what we've consigned a very

00:08:16.940 large number of our kids to. And for young adults, the psychological effects are just devastating of

00:08:23.780 these. One in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020. So my position has been

00:08:31.240 that it's not ethical to harm young people to protect them against a disease for which they face

00:08:38.820 very low risk by lockdowns. We should not be doing lockdowns for younger people. Whereas for older

00:08:45.160 people, what needs to happen is very creative engagement with public health professionals to

00:08:51.900 understand how to protect them. Focus protection of the old. So those are the basic two tenets of how 0.99

00:08:57.900 I've been thinking about the right policy. Pay attention to epidemiological risk stratification,

00:09:04.740 lift the lockdowns, focus protection for the old.

00:09:07.540 Just to emphasize what you're talking about when it comes to consequences on children, there have been

00:09:14.400 several studies now that have been published in the past year proving this. The Telegraph reported on

00:09:19.820 one study that showed that COVID lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly.

00:09:25.000 And I'm sure that it wasn't just the lockdowns, but it was also probably the masking of their

00:09:29.740 teachers and even their parents, whether it's daycare, kindergarten, first grade teachers,

00:09:34.280 the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists raised fears that the gaps of being witnessed now

00:09:39.900 could widen in coming years. The disparities are 79 or it says, sorry, the Office for Health

00:09:47.980 Improvement and Disparities show that 79.6% of children who received a review last autumn at the

00:09:52.580 expected level in all five areas of development measured. But of course, that is down from years

00:09:58.260 prior. And so tell me what you think about the consequences that I don't even know if we've begun to

00:10:03.800 see the full extent of the consequences that we are going to see on child development,

00:10:08.580 on language development, on their ability to normally socially interact and communicate

00:10:14.020 with one another. That really makes me nervous as a mom.

00:10:17.520 I mean, it makes me nervous too, as a dad. I mean, although my kids are a little older now,

00:10:22.040 but other than, you know, they face their own challenges as a result of the lockdowns.

00:10:26.000 The effect on young kids is almost incalculable. Like, how do you teach a kid to read over Zoom?

00:10:33.360 Right.

00:10:33.700 I mean, that's essentially what we decided we're going to do for a very large number of kids.

00:10:37.200 And, you know, it's not even, it's not, it's, it's, it is one of these things where like,

00:10:41.940 you think, okay, well, it's just a couple of years, we can fix it. But, you know, those are

00:10:45.320 crucial time in the development of children. Fixing it is a major challenge. It may not be

00:10:52.500 possible for many kids. And the level of disengagement, really, it wasn't equal throughout

00:10:59.120 society, right? It's, it's poor families. It's, it's, it's minority families that pay the, 1.00

00:11:07.540 the bigger cost of this. You know, if you, if you were, if you had to, both parents had to work,

00:11:13.700 or if you were a single parent household, what do you do when you, you know, you're, you have a young

00:11:18.200 child, you have to work, um, and there have to go out, learn on Zoom. Um, and, and, you know,

00:11:24.140 and, and lots and lots of, uh, of what happens for development requires children to be in community

00:11:30.960 with other children, which just normally happens during schooling, during, during just, it's part

00:11:35.500 of the, the way that kids learn is by, by being with other adults, being with other kids. Um, and

00:11:41.220 so it's not surprising that we're seeing this. And, uh, the only question in my mind is how do we,

00:11:45.320 how do we address these deficits that we caused? Uh, I, I mean, I, I, I think we absolutely need to

00:11:50.760 have an all hands on deck try to approach to try to fix this. It's, it's a major, major problem.

00:11:55.240 Whether it's possible is not clear. Yes. And to your point about this disproportionately impacting

00:12:02.940 communities that we would typically call marginalized or however you want to describe it,

00:12:07.840 special needs kids, of course, for the brunt of this, I talked to a lot of speech therapists that

00:12:12.740 listened to this podcast that their job was basically rendered impossible because they were

00:12:17.740 forced to wear masks when they are trying to teach, whether it's a toddler, young kid, or whether it's

00:12:22.380 an older kid with special needs, autism, whatever it is, how to pronounce words. It's impossible. I mean,

00:12:28.480 it's impossible. The, I mean, the biggest aspect really of speech therapy is showing, not just

00:12:35.740 allowing them to listen to how a word is pronounced, but showing them how to pronounce the words.

00:12:40.760 I don't know if those kids are at, even if we have all hands on deck, I'm not confident that those

00:12:46.440 kids are ever going to be able to make up for the time and the care lost. And it's strange to me how

00:12:51.680 that has become almost a partisan position. Maybe it's not anymore, but it certainly was that you

00:12:57.420 were deemed uncompassionate. If you said, Hey, there are going to be some long-term consequences for

00:13:02.500 these underserved communities over here. I mean, the American Association of Pediatrics

00:13:08.400 actually put out a position saying that there was no evidence of deficits caused by masking. I mean,

00:13:15.480 I was absolutely stunned. Like, how do they know? And for older kids, for kids in middle school or

00:13:24.900 high school, the learning deficit is shocking. Grade school even, you have like fourth graders who

00:13:31.540 can do math barely at a first grade level. You know, you have, you know, not surprising given that

00:13:36.480 we've disrupted three years of schools in some places. You have like kids that just, you know,

00:13:41.560 they don't know how to read very well. It's, it is, yeah. And again, it's, it's, it's, it's very,

00:13:49.880 very unequal. If it's young, it's, it's older, I'm sorry, it's, it's poorer people, poor families, 0.94

00:13:55.620 working class families that have had a much more difficult time making, making sure that the kids

00:14:00.940 don't have these deficits. And I don't, I just, I mean, I look at the devastation caused by the

00:14:08.360 school closures and I am absolutely, I worked actually in summer and early fall of 2020, I

00:14:15.440 helped with this lawsuit. I advised this lawsuit that the governor DeSantis had decided to open

00:14:22.920 the schools in Florida in 2020, in fall of 2020, issued this order. And he was sued by the Florida

00:14:30.380 teachers unions. And, you know, they actually had trouble finding an expert on, on, on, on,

00:14:36.640 on our side to say, look, it's wrong to close the schools. And so there's one of my proudest moments

00:14:41.780 is like, I got to help with that lawsuit. We, we actually lost like, cause the, the, in the,

00:14:47.140 in the sort of like the district court. And I mean, I was just shocked cause I mean, it was clear

00:14:52.860 that the judge didn't understand the science at all. It didn't really fully appreciate the importance

00:14:56.860 of keeping schools open. And we finally won in, in the Florida court of appeals. So the school

00:15:03.700 stayed open. Well, again, one of my proudest, proudest moment is to be, be able to help with

00:15:07.140 that lawsuit.

00:15:07.700 Well, it does seem like the many of the so-called experts and certainly bureaucrats, people in

00:15:25.200 charge, teachers unions really don't care about the facts available. Still after all this time,

00:15:30.540 you've got San Diego school district saying that they are going to re-implement the mask mandates.

00:15:35.660 Look, we've got data upon data showing that mask mandates don't actually lower the case level.

00:15:43.540 They don't actually bring down the fatality rate. I mean, that is not even arguable at this point.

00:15:50.380 And of course, I've seen you retweet David Zwick. He is a journalist who has talked about the CDC

00:15:56.420 studies that said that they prove that mask mandates in schools work and how faulty those studies are.

00:16:02.640 They don't actually prove what the summary of the studies say that they prove. And so it really,

00:16:08.140 we're still back to these teachers unions, to these administrators, these politicians,

00:16:11.960 just wanting to quote, do something, whether or not there is any benefit. And there's not,

00:16:17.840 there's actually only harm to these kids. And it's really hard for me to understand at this point,

00:16:22.020 what the motivation could be.

00:16:23.240 It's, I'd say, if you go back to before 2020, there was an excellent literature on the effectiveness

00:16:32.700 of mask mandates in slowing the spread of flu. Now flu spreads in similar ways to COVID. It spreads

00:16:40.540 via aerosolization events. You know, you breathe, your breath contains tiny, tiny particles that sit in

00:16:49.880 the air forever, moisture particles that contain the virus. And so if you're in a poorly ventilated

00:16:55.280 room, when that, when those aerosols come out, the aerosols are like clouds, droplets like rain,

00:17:02.300 the masks may stop the droplets, but they don't really stop the aerosols. If you wear glasses and

00:17:07.120 your glasses get fogged up when you breathe through a mask, that's an aerosol escaping it, which, and

00:17:12.760 so there are a dozen randomized trials from before the pandemic with the flu, good high quality

00:17:21.400 randomized trials that found that mask mandates in community settings, and actually even, even

00:17:27.400 sometimes in, in hospital settings, have a very difficult time slowing the spread or stopping the

00:17:33.680 spread of, of the flu. That was the, that was the science before the pandemic. Nothing's changed.

00:17:39.580 The two randomized trials that have been done since the pandemic started, both in adults,

00:17:44.740 not in children, found very small or zero effects of protection by masking. And we still,

00:17:52.640 to this date, have not a single randomized study that shows that masking in children actually stops

00:17:59.640 the disease spread. And, you know, there's lots of reasons to think it doesn't. Children are not

00:18:03.060 particularly good at wearing masks, especially young children. The World Health Organization doesn't

00:18:06.540 recommend masking children below the age of six, but, you know, you have New York City masking toddlers

00:18:11.360 up until just a couple months ago. And, you know, the European CDC doesn't recommend masking kids

00:18:18.160 below the age of 12 on the basis of that might cause them some harm. I mean, and if you look at the,

00:18:24.400 you know, districts that wore masks, that mandated masking kids versus districts that didn't,

00:18:31.140 you find no difference over and over again in these, whenever you do a careful study that doesn't

00:18:34.920 cherry pick the data. So I just don't understand what science people are looking at when they

00:18:41.000 demand mask mandates. It's as if they have told themselves a story about how effective they are,

00:18:49.880 but that just isn't consistent with what the scientific data show.

00:18:52.860 You've been in epidemiology for several decades, for a long time now. So you must have been familiar

00:18:59.040 with Anthony Fauci. Maybe that you've worked with him before. I don't know if you have, but certainly

00:19:03.520 you said that you've been at Stanford for 35 years. I'm sure that you knew who Anthony Fauci was,

00:19:08.960 his work in the AIDS epidemic. Tell me your reaction to, or what you think about his leadership

00:19:17.380 and his response to COVID over the past few years. Does it surprise you at all?

00:19:24.660 I mean, I had a lot of respect for him at the beginning of the pandemic. I have on my bookshelf a

00:19:30.480 textbook that he edited, Harrison's internal medicine, which is sort of the, the, one of the

00:19:35.580 key texts in training, training, uh, internal medicine doctors that, that I read when I was,

00:19:40.540 when I was in training in medical school. Um, and, uh, of course he's, he's had this incredibly long

00:19:46.640 career where he's played such a, an important role in, um, in, in, in so many, uh, parts of American

00:19:54.040 science. Uh, during the pandemic, I have been absolutely shocked by his leadership. Uh, and,

00:20:01.180 and, and, and I, I don't know how to say this in a polite, more polite way. I mean, I just, I think

00:20:05.320 he is a, he's, he's a failed leader. Uh, you know, uh, probably the, the, to like the worst moment was

00:20:12.020 I saw, uh, him talking with Senator Paul, I think in a Senate hearing where Senator Paul was just asking

00:20:18.900 questions. Um, and he, Tony Fauci's response was, well, if you're, if you're questioning me, you're

00:20:25.780 not simply questioning a man, you are questioning science itself. Yeah. I, uh, that kind of hubris

00:20:32.640 is absolutely shocking to me. Like you can't, you cannot have anybody, uh, uh, at the top of the

00:20:39.180 American scientific bureaucracy thinking that he himself, the science beyond questioning. And, uh,

00:20:44.320 what he's done is he's the, the, the, the, if you want to characterize exactly the kind of action

00:20:48.580 he's done, he believes that he is right beyond all question. And then anyone challenging him is

00:20:54.800 therefore on the fringe and dangerous. And he's acted in ways essentially to create this illusion

00:21:00.160 of consensus, scientific consensus around the, his policy preferences, which are, which are essentially

00:21:05.120 locked down, um, in, in, uh, in, and, uh, and delegitimize or push to the edge or call fringe,

00:21:12.560 uh, anyone who, who disagrees with them, even if they have, uh, you know, sort of good scientific

00:21:17.480 data and arguments. Uh, it's not the way that, uh, a scientific, uh, like a, like science bureaucracy

00:21:24.280 or public health ought to behave. I mean, um, uh, public health can't work unless it's truly rooted

00:21:31.960 in science. Um, and the scientific discussion around what the right policy is, is not, there's no

00:21:38.020 consensus there hasn't been, even though, uh, the media and Tony Fauci has pushed this idea that

00:21:44.300 there is. Yeah. And I think that that's to me is the biggest disappointment. He has violated the

00:21:50.060 norms, the ethics, the, the sort of like sacred obligation of scientific leaders to permit that

00:21:55.960 scientific discussion to happen. He's essentially killed science around the science of COVID as a

00:22:01.760 consequence of his hubris. Right. Well, he has to have the same knowledge that you do, especially

00:22:08.060 when it comes to masking. And it seems like he did. In the beginning, there was this March,

00:22:12.640 2020, I believe interview where he basically said, look, you can wear a mask if it makes you feel

00:22:16.960 better, but we can't rely on it really to stop the spread of it. And that seemed like a pretty common

00:22:23.180 sense position with what we knew about COVID. But then that really changed. Not only should you

00:22:28.100 mask, but you have to double mask, even if those two masks are, you know, only the cloth masks,

00:22:33.480 which we know don't have a great, um, they're not very effective. Um, and so it was interesting to see

00:22:38.940 his positions change so much based on, I'm not sure what the politics of it, whatever the CCP was doing,

00:22:45.820 that's another disturbing aspect of it that we have tried to actually, in some ways, model our response

00:22:50.820 to what the CCP has done, which is still locking down millions of people in Shanghai today. Um, and so I

00:22:57.580 wish I knew a little bit more about what went on the behind the scenes and in those conversations

00:23:02.400 where he decided that he was going to reject and ignore the science and the studies that we both

00:23:08.640 know that he knew about in favor of mask mandates and policies that we know were ineffective.

00:23:14.340 I mean, on mask, it's really funny. Like he, he, uh, nearly in pandemic, as you say, Ali, he,

00:23:18.520 he said, uh, that, that mask mandates work, uh, that, that masks don't work. Um, and I mean,

00:23:24.140 there he was reflecting what the prior literature said with the, with these high quality randomized

00:23:27.540 studies, then he changed his mind and then admitted to lying before a noble lie in order

00:23:34.540 to preserve high quality, uh, masks for medical personnel, which is horrible.

00:23:40.520 Okay. So that itself means that, that, you know, if, if you have a public health leader who admits

00:23:46.400 to lying to you, that, that just demolishes the trust that people will have in you. I mean,

00:23:50.980 it's, it's stunning to see that people haven't responded. I mean, I mean, I actually, that's

00:23:54.620 not true. Many, many people now distrust him. Uh, and I think that the start of that was that,

00:23:58.620 that admitting that he was lying then. But the funny thing, the ironic thing is that actually

00:24:02.720 in February, 2020, his position on masks that they don't work was not a lie. That was the truth.

00:24:09.360 That was what the medical literature was saying at the time. In fact, when he said he was lying

00:24:14.300 later, that itself was a lie. Um, so I, I just, it's, it's a, it's a funny, it's a funny,

00:24:22.020 funny thing. I mean, uh, in public health, you have this like sacred obligation to tell the public

00:24:25.660 the truth, uh, all the way across, or you lose your credibility, uh, you know, to the best you know,

00:24:29.780 I mean, you could be wrong. I mean, that's a lot, like it's very easy to be wrong. And when you have

00:24:33.340 a rapidly changing science that we have, um, but, and, and, and the public will forgive you,

00:24:38.300 but to, to lie knowingly and then admit to lying knowingly and then lie about lying.

00:24:44.400 Yeah. That's something else.

00:24:56.440 I don't understand why Donald Trump didn't fire him, why he was able to stick around as long as

00:25:02.640 he did. Donald Trump made a statement in a, um, a speech yesterday, um, that he just did the

00:25:10.480 opposite of everything that Anthony Fauci said. But of course, that's not true. That's, that's

00:25:14.140 actually not a true statement. Unfortunately, even though I personally think there were a lot of good

00:25:18.660 parts of the Trump presidency, to me, one of the shameful parts was how much he listened to Deborah

00:25:23.540 Birx, uh, Birx and Anthony Fauci and allowed them to lead in the way that they did. I mean, that

00:25:29.520 kicked off the terrible and draconian COVID response that we've had.

00:25:35.460 Yeah. I mean, I, I actually sort of had a front row seat in this cause my friend, Scott Atlas,

00:25:40.180 Dr. Scott Atlas. Oh, you have. Oh, fantastic. Um, uh, he, he, uh, you know, president Trump actually

00:25:47.600 selected him in July as, as, as his personal advisor on, on COVID policy. Um, but he brought him in,

00:25:54.020 in, in the context of the leadership of the COVID, uh, the COVID commission by Deborah Birx and of

00:26:00.860 course advised and, and, and, you know, led behind the scenes by Tony Fauci. Uh, both of them, I think

00:26:07.100 were actually selected by vice president Pence and, uh, you know, uh, to Scott, uh, Atlas, he tried to,

00:26:14.320 he, he tried to bring me, uh, Martin Kulldorff, uh, Joe Latta, who's now the surgeon general of,

00:26:20.200 of Florida, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, uh, this, this very prominent pediatrician from troughs, um,

00:26:26.280 into the white house to advise the president just to have a meeting with him, just like to tell him,

00:26:30.720 look, there are scientists out there that disagree with Tony Fauci and the, and the lockdowns. And

00:26:35.100 you know, I think Trump's instincts were in that direction. That's why he hired Scott to, but the

00:26:40.680 problem was that, you know, you're the president of the United States. You've decided in the middle of

00:26:45.880 a war to change strategies. You, you bring in a new general and then you leave the old generals

00:26:53.060 around to destroy the reputation of the new general we bring in. I mean, you know, Tony Fauci and Burks

00:26:58.040 were using their media power to absolutely demolish the reputation of Scott Atlas during that, in that

00:27:04.920 summer, because they viewed him as a mortal threat to their authority, which he was right. Uh, and in fact,

00:27:11.680 if you read Debbie, Debbie Burks book, she admits that she essentially worked to manipulate the 0.96

00:27:16.420 president and get lockdowns in place successfully. She's averted the president of the United States,

00:27:23.000 asserted her authority over and above the president of the United States. Um, and, uh, I have to tell 0.91

00:27:29.340 you in terms of like Donald Trump himself, uh, the shocking thing to me is that, is that, you know,

00:27:36.320 the, the, the, he didn't fire them. He didn't fire Burks and Fauci, even though I think he might've

00:27:40.480 wanted to, because he was afraid that if he did, he would not get reelected. Um, that's not in my

00:27:48.520 mind, an excusable thing, right? The, the, the, the health of the American public comes above and

00:27:53.300 beyond the, uh, the, the, your reelection camp. Even if you lose reelection, you should do the right

00:27:58.160 thing on such a critical point. Um, and, uh, I, it's a, it's a huge disappointment to me that he

00:28:04.060 didn't, uh, he, he, he, he, he suspected and very strongly understood that, that they were advising

00:28:10.400 him incorrectly and still he left them on because if the, the political advisors were telling him

00:28:16.420 and he, he agreed with the political advisors that if he fired them, he would lose the election.

00:28:20.280 That's not, that's not acceptable to me. Yeah, of course. And I think the only people that really

00:28:25.440 would have cared about that were the people that weren't going to vote for him anyway. I don't think

00:28:30.260 it would have made that much of a difference. You wouldn't think this about Trump, but he actually

00:28:33.520 does care a little bit more than you'd think what people on the left think everyone wants to be

00:28:39.700 liked. I think that's a normal thing, but I think that that's kind of what got him is that he did not

00:28:44.460 trust his instincts there and he didn't go the direction of that people like you or Scott, Scott

00:28:50.720 Atlas would have advised. Um, let me read a little segment by Deborah Birx. She said,

00:28:56.200 I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the

00:29:01.800 vaccines and it made people then worry that it's not going to protect against severe disease and

00:29:06.280 hospitalization. Um, and then, so she said, so she's basically admitting she, uh, another part of

00:29:13.360 what I would call the manipulation or kind of how she communicated things to the public and to the

00:29:18.660 media versus what she really thought, um, is that she thought that the vaccines really weren't

00:29:24.980 going to be very effective. And yet they sold them, they sold them as if they were, I mean,

00:29:30.080 we heard over and over again from the media, from Anthony Fauci, from Joe Biden, from Rachel Maddow,

00:29:36.900 that if you get this vaccine, you will not get the virus and you won't spread it. That's why a lot of

00:29:42.780 people got it. And not only that, that's why a lot of companies mandated it. And people lost their

00:29:47.320 jobs over this because of this assertion that the vaccine was going to stop the disease in its

00:29:54.260 tracks. That's obviously not what happened. What do you make of that? Uh, she's lying. All right.

00:29:59.660 So she, she, uh, uh, I'll just tell you, like if she, if she actually believed that she would have

00:30:04.020 come out strongly against the mandates, uh, in 2021, um, I'll tell you like when, um, the, the science

00:30:11.180 and the timeline of the science is really important here in December of 2020, what we knew was based on

00:30:18.240 two very large randomized studies done, uh, actually three large randomized studies done,

00:30:25.740 um, on the J and J vaccine and the two mRNA vaccines. Um, from those, the, the end point

00:30:32.460 of those studies was not prevention of severe disease. In fact, they didn't enroll enough

00:30:38.300 patients to actually measure whether there was a statistically significant effect on a reduction

00:30:44.100 of severe disease. It wasn't even prevention of transmission because the studies actually didn't

00:30:48.760 look at transmission and the studies didn't look at whether people had any infection at all. It

00:30:54.200 didn't, it didn't actually have as an end point, the prevention of all infection. It had as the

00:30:58.280 end point, the prevention of symptomatic infection. Well, this disease that can spread asymptomatically,

00:31:04.160 um, that that's true. Um, so what that means is that like, you know, you, you know that it's

00:31:10.720 preventing symptomatic infection for about three or four months. That's what the randomized studies

00:31:14.320 showed, uh, in December of 2020, uh, that left you with having to make a guess. There's two

00:31:20.840 epidemiologically meaningful endpoints here. One is prevention of severe disease and the other is

00:31:25.980 prevention of transmission, right? Uh, I heard Burke say this, they, they made a guess based on hope

00:31:32.760 that would stop transmission. Now, why is that important? If it stops transmission, then that means

00:31:38.540 and the protection lasts a long time, then that means the vaccine can be used essentially to

00:31:43.880 suppress the spread of the disease effectively to zero, as long as sufficient number of people get

00:31:48.180 vaccinated. You heard Burke's Fauci say this, we just need to get 60, 70, 80%, uh, you know,

00:31:54.980 the number kept going up, uh, uh, of the population vaccinated and the disease will go

00:31:59.340 effectively. They were implying that the disease would go away because they assumed not based on the

00:32:04.360 evidence, but based on, on an extrapolation from a trial, um, which turned out to be false, that it

00:32:11.460 would stop transmission. In fact, as soon as it hit the real world, it was clear that it didn't stop

00:32:15.740 transmission. You know, you had a heavily vaccinated societies like Israel very early on, March, April,

00:32:21.400 May, I forget exactly the timeline of 2021, uh, seeing very large COVID spread, large amounts of COVID

00:32:27.900 spread. The myth of vaccine doesn't stop spread as we found out, uh, you know, sort of to our detriment

00:32:32.960 here. Um, so that means that the vaccine can't be used to stop the disease from spreading. It can't

00:32:38.660 be used. It can't even be used for herd immunity, uh, in the same, unless, unless you force people to

00:32:43.620 get vaccinated every three or four months. Um, and even then it's not clear because then there are

00:32:47.580 multiple boosters may not actually stop the spread of the disease for very long. It might be diminishing

00:32:51.400 returns to that. Um, so you have this like situation where they extrapolate, including Debbie

00:32:56.480 Burke's above and beyond what the evidence actually showed. On the other hand, um, the protection against

00:33:02.080 severe disease. Actually, I extrapolated there. I wrote an op-ed in December of 2020 in the Wall

00:33:06.940 Street Journal with Sinatra Gupta of Oxford. We are, we argued that the vaccine should be used

00:33:12.120 to protect older people against severe disease, essentially to use the vaccine as a way of, of

00:33:18.040 focused protection of the old. That extrapolation turned out to be right. The vaccine does actually

00:33:24.420 decrease the odds of dying or going to the hospital if you get infected. And, um, it was, I mean, if,

00:33:31.080 if, uh, what we, we argued in that Wall Street Journal article was you vaccinate older populations,

00:33:35.840 that's as good as protections you're going to get that we have available to us and then

00:33:40.280 lift the lockdowns, right? You've essentially done perfect focus protection, as good as

00:33:44.140 focus protection as we possibly can do. And then we lift the lockdowns. Um, uh, that was

00:33:50.120 the right way to use the vaccine. Um, it, it turns out because it does actually protect

00:33:54.480 against severe disease. Uh, I think the FDA and Trump, uh, White House should have been

00:33:58.940 calling for a vaccine trial that actually had a very large number of older people in

00:34:04.440 it to see if it could protect against severe disease. We could have made that decision much

00:34:08.820 more confidently in December of 2020. But it seemed clear to me that if it protects against

00:34:12.820 symptomatic infection, then it must also protect against severe disease, you know, hospitalizations

00:34:18.160 and deaths. And so that, that turned out to be right. And it turns out to be more durable.

00:34:21.940 Like I think eight, nine months after the vaccine, you still are getting pretty good protection

00:34:25.700 against severe disease. Uh, although I think it does diminish after a certain, uh, you

00:34:29.240 know, certain, um, maybe, you know, nine months to a year. Uh, I mean, in any case, the right

00:34:33.640 thing then is to do is to, is to lift the lockdowns, uh, you know, vaccinate the old, lift the lockdowns.

00:34:40.300 Instead, we had this crazy policy of continuing the lockdowns for the force vaccinating people,

00:34:47.820 violating their informed consent. As you said, Ali, like people losing jobs, um, you know, 0.66

00:34:52.540 their, their, their religious conscience violated because some, you know, some of these vaccines

00:34:56.000 are developed using fetal cell lines. Um, you know, I just, I think one of these, it's, it was,

00:35:00.520 it basically tore society in two, created an underclass of people out of people who were just making 1.00

00:35:06.240 decisions that, that they viewed as good for their health or, or consistent with their values. Um,

00:35:12.340 and, and, and really undermined, uh, the authority and trust that people had in public health.

00:35:17.060 Yes, definitely. Now, what do you make of the concerns around heart issues, myocarditis? Do you

00:35:25.960 think that is being overblown or do you think that is a sincere concern and a reason for people in a

00:35:32.760 particular age group not to get it? Yeah, the, the evidence is abundantly clear from everywhere

00:35:38.660 where these mRNA vaccines have been used, uh, especially in young men, the risk of myocarditis

00:35:44.540 is elevated. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart, uh, the, the, uh, heart muscle. Um, and,

00:35:51.220 uh, you know, it can be deadly. It's, it certainly can be debilitating. Uh, it is very clearly a side

00:35:56.420 effect of this vaccine. Uh, the, the estimates I've seen range between one in a thousand people,

00:36:00.940 a young men who get the vaccine to one in say 5,000. Uh, it's, it'll be somewhere in that range

00:36:06.060 who have, uh, myocarditis as a consequence of having got the vaccine. Uh, if I were in my early twenties,

00:36:14.260 as a young, and a young man, I would worry about that. I mean, cause the protection I get against,

00:36:18.660 against severe disease from the vaccine isn't actually all that important because I have very

00:36:24.220 low risk if I were in my twenties, um, from get dying. If I get COVID, whereas one in a thousand

00:36:29.740 to one in 5,000 of, of, uh, myocarditis is actually, I mean, I don't, I don't, I just don't want that.

00:36:34.340 Uh, and it turns out that, um, you know, it doesn't protect you against getting COVID.

00:36:38.360 So you still get the risk of myocarditis from COVID too. So it just doesn't, it doesn't,

00:36:43.640 it makes no sense to mandate it, uh, for a population for whom it's not clear whether

00:36:48.280 there's a net positive benefit. Now we heard, uh, Dr. Peter McCullough, when he was on Joe Rogan,

00:36:54.520 he said then that from the knowledge of the information that he had at that point, that

00:36:59.280 natural immunity was permanent. Now we know that that's not true. I know many people who have

00:37:03.980 gotten COVID twice. What is the benefit of natural immunity? Would you say that it is

00:37:09.380 better than the protection that you get from the vaccine? Or is it something that should be

00:37:14.260 totally discounted? Like it seems like the public health experts have done.

00:37:19.300 Yeah. So, um, in October, 2020, when I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, this idea to lift the

00:37:24.680 lockdowns and do focus protection of the old, um, that the, it was very clear from the, the biological

00:37:30.440 literature that, and the immunological literature, that there was actually pretty significant protection

00:37:36.060 provided by recovery from COVID, right? You, you, uh, you have all these immune cell response,

00:37:41.940 immune responses, including T cells and B cells and antibody production, um, that, that October,

00:37:47.980 that, you know, that lasted up to six months already, um, that protected you against, in fact,

00:37:52.760 even all against reinfection. Um, up until Omicron, there were all these studies that suggested,

00:37:58.940 like in, in, you know, the, the, the disease hit in Italy very early, right? Uh, there was a study

00:38:04.000 in Italy tracking people who had got COVID very early in the pandemic over a full year. And they

00:38:10.880 found that only three in a thousand had been reinfected over the course of that year. Now,

00:38:16.220 um, when Omicron hit the, even people who had previously infected and recovered, uh, started getting

00:38:23.240 infected again. Um, so Omicron evades natural immunity and it also evades the immunity provided

00:38:29.820 by the vaccine. Like a lot of people that are vaccinated, uh, got, started getting sick. Uh,

00:38:35.160 actually I got, I got, uh, I got Delta. So I, I had the vaccine in April of 2021 and then I got,

00:38:40.720 uh, COVID in August of 2021. Um, uh, so it, you know, the vaccine didn't provide,

00:38:45.980 protect against infection, even, even in the early days before Omicron, but certainly after Omicron,

00:38:50.360 you had this vaccine immune evasion. The key thing is it, although it, you had a probability of

00:38:58.120 getting sick, even though you've been previously infected and recovered, the risk of severe disease

00:39:03.560 in Omicron was actually low, uh, lower than the first time. Most people, the vast majority of

00:39:09.400 people who get it the second time are less likely to end up in the hospital, less likely to die from

00:39:14.660 it the second time. And that's going to be true for the rest of your life. I think, I mean, you're

00:39:17.860 going to, you're going to get this disease over and over and over again for the rest of your life

00:39:21.320 if there's other immune evasion variants. Um, but it seems to me like what is permanent is the

00:39:26.920 protection against getting very, very, very, very sick. If you've had the COVID before it recovered.

00:39:32.060 It's just sad knowing all that we know. I mean, the information, the facts that you're talking

00:39:47.220 about really are available to everyone. There seems to be something in the minds of both just

00:39:51.960 the general population and those who are in charge, experts, whatever. I'm not saying it's

00:39:58.200 completely nefarious on everyone's part, but there seems to be, um, an inability or unwillingness

00:40:05.020 to see that which is true. Either it's for political reasons or they've convinced themselves

00:40:10.120 that this is the, um, these are the right politics or this is the compassion, uh, compassionate

00:40:16.420 position to take when it comes to mask mandates and vaccine mandates. But really when you look at the

00:40:21.940 consequences of it, especially on young people, on vulnerable people, when it comes to

00:40:26.140 mask and vaccine mandates, even at universities and the public school system, it's really sad to me.

00:40:32.480 I think one of the saddest parts is that no one is going to be, certainly right now, no one is being

00:40:37.200 held accountable. And I'm just not sure if anyone is ever going to be held accountable. I mean, you're

00:40:42.160 talking about people who have died. I mean, I'm not saying that it is prevalent, that it is happening

00:40:47.960 every day, but have died from taking this vaccine or they have adverse health outcomes from taking the

00:40:54.740 vaccine that was mandated. They were going to lose their job or they weren't going to be able to go

00:40:59.560 back to college because of this. And it just kind of seems like people are throwing their hands up in

00:41:04.120 the air and not only that, they're willing to do it again. That's really scary to me.

00:41:10.460 Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, the, the fact that the, that, uh, public health bureaucrats have ignored

00:41:15.520 science on, on natural immunity. I mean, essentially they've spread misinformation on natural

00:41:19.860 immunity, the effectiveness of mass of, uh, the, the fact that there is this enormous risk gradient,

00:41:25.340 the, um, uh, the, the, they've overstated the effectiveness of the vaccines in terms of

00:41:30.940 stopping disease transmission and spread. Um, all of these things are, uh, I mean,

00:41:36.780 it's been absolutely shocking for me to watch, uh, cause these are not really all that controversial

00:41:41.960 in the medical literature. Uh, instead what you have is, um, you have like even like prominent

00:41:47.480 doctors trying to like toe the propaganda line instead of like reflecting what actually the

00:41:53.260 medical literature is saying in order to push their preferred policy. Um, it's a shocking

00:41:59.100 violation of, of the public trust. Um, I, I, I, you know, I think, I think, uh, maybe what,

00:42:06.060 what you're, what you're getting at, and I completely agree with, and I don't really don't have a great

00:42:10.580 answer is how do you regain that trust? How do you, uh, reform the public, uh, the medical profession

00:42:16.220 and the public health so that it becomes worthy of that trust again? Um, I think the first thing,

00:42:22.240 and I just have, still haven't seen it, is an open acknowledgement of error that, that look, uh, we,

00:42:29.320 we, we, we were trying our best when we made mistakes. I'll have to say like they, they, a lot

00:42:33.560 of the people, especially in the public health bureaucracies acted in ways that were not, I just

00:42:38.940 hard to impute good faith to them. Um, I think a lot of them were mistaken in good faith about the

00:42:45.140 science. Um, but then they were low to admit that they were wrong. And, and then they pushed

00:42:50.520 policies, like just take natural immunity, like immunity after COVID recovery. That was a basic

00:42:55.260 fact. Uh, you could see it in the data and yet they pushed it, uh, ignoring it. They called it a

00:43:02.100 conspiracy theory. Anyone who talked about natural immunity, I mean, for the first time, probably in

00:43:07.160 epidemiological history, someone who talks about natural, natural immunity was pushed to the side

00:43:13.120 as some kind of crazy kook. Yeah. I mean, I actually don't love the term natural immunity.

00:43:17.680 It's more, it's COVID recovery, like immunity after COVID recovery, but, but I mean, cause it's

00:43:22.060 that the natural immunity might be a little bit ambiguous, but I, but I agree with like, you know,

00:43:25.540 I think with like, with like HIV, you know, you get infected, you don't get immunity, but for the

00:43:29.820 vast majority of viruses, certainly respiratory viruses, certainly for all the coronaviruses,

00:43:33.760 you get infected and you provided protection against, uh, both reinfection and against severe

00:43:39.740 disease, uh, for a long time. Uh, you know, like you, you've had coronaviruses for sure. If you're

00:43:45.920 for, for a human other, they're like four or five, uh, coronaviruses that are in common human

00:43:50.320 circulation. Uh, you probably had it first when you were little, very little. And then, um, you

00:43:55.520 recovered from it was a cold. And then the next time you got, it was, you know, another cold and

00:43:59.120 another cold, another cold. The problem with this virus was that it was, you know, it was, it was

00:44:03.660 novel. Like we are most people, you know, the vast majority of us didn't have any protection

00:44:07.520 against it really. Um, and so, and some of us reacted very, you know, when we got infected,

00:44:12.820 we had this like horrible viral pneumonia. Um, and, uh, you know, for, and some it led to death.

00:44:18.840 Uh, it was most severe because we were immune naive. The, the population now is no longer immune

00:44:24.740 naive. Uh, the vast majority of the population has been infected and recovered. And of course the

00:44:29.500 vaccines provide protection against severe disease. Um, the, uh, by denying basic science,

00:44:35.760 they pushed forward policies that have incredibly socially divisive, harm the lives of millions and

00:44:40.740 millions. Uh, actually in the lockdowns themselves caused death and destruction on a level that that's

00:44:46.240 just unimaginable. Like, uh, yeah, I think there was an estimate that, um, uh, you know, we, we,

00:44:51.440 with all this economic destruction we caused with these lockdowns led to a hundred million people

00:44:55.740 around the world thrown into dire poverty, less than $2 a day of income with, with millions and

00:45:01.820 millions of children starving as a consequence. Um, uh, you know, I think that the UN actually put

00:45:07.580 an estimate in early 2021 that a 230,000 children had died of starvation as a consequence of the

00:45:12.940 economic dislocation caused by lockdowns in South Asia alone. Um, yeah, I mean, I thought,

00:45:18.440 so these lies have had consequences on the lives of so many really, really negative ones.

00:45:23.680 And wow, this is, I mean, this is a Christian podcast. And so one thing that we heard within,

00:45:27.900 uh, some people in the church was that these mandates, um, these policies that we would call

00:45:33.740 draconian were all about loving your neighbor. Well, there's always a flip side of that. When

00:45:38.700 you're talking about kids thrown into poverty, when you're talking about some of the consequences

00:45:41.900 that we talked about in the beginning, the increase in child abuse that we saw in this country,

00:45:46.220 not to mention, I'm sure what also, um, was seen worldwide, that doesn't seem like a very good way

00:45:52.320 to love your neighbor. Um, I want to stay in this theme of the distrust of public health institutions,

00:45:58.840 um, that we are seeing that really has grown over the past few years. I wouldn't have described

00:46:03.820 myself as someone who is distrustful or really questioned what doctors or epidemiologists or

00:46:10.300 Anthony Fauci says, because I don't have a medical degree, but over the past few years,

00:46:15.600 I am one of millions and millions of Americans who have started to question the recommendations that

00:46:21.560 we are getting from the people who call themselves public health experts. And it seems like there,

00:46:26.040 um, are new studies and new stories every day that kind of reaffirmed that suspicion and that lack of

00:46:32.000 trust that a lot of us have. One of them recently was about the effectiveness of SSRIs in treating

00:46:39.700 depression. So for those who don't know, SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

00:46:45.960 These are typically the, um, medications given to people who have depression because we have been

00:46:51.900 told for a very long time that chemical imbalance and low serotonin is what causes depression.

00:46:56.720 And there was a study that came out in the, in, uh, the journal of molecular psychiatry that said,

00:47:02.580 well, not really, it's not really a chemical imbalance. It's not really about low serotonin

00:47:07.440 and all of these medications that have been given to people for depression probably haven't been

00:47:12.360 working for a lot of people because the premise was wrong. So, I mean, again, you're talking about

00:47:18.040 something that has had massive, massive consequences on people based on what seems like kind of faulty

00:47:23.940 science. What is your take on all of that? I mean, when I went to medical schools in the mid nineties,

00:47:30.100 um, one of my professors told me, you know, half of what you're, we're teaching you is not true.

00:47:34.600 Uh, the problem is, you know, you're not going to know which half until much later. Um, uh, you know,

00:47:40.880 it's science does change. Uh, like we think about science as this like, uh, exalted knowledge of a,

00:47:48.180 a source of ultimate truth. Right. Um, but it's not, uh, what it is, is provisional knowledge. Like,

00:47:55.720 okay, given what we know and what we've seen based on like open discussion and, and, and experimentation

00:48:01.660 and, and testing, here's our, our, our guests. Now, like the idea that, uh, serotonin, uh, uh, uh,

00:48:10.160 low levels of serotonin are, that are really at root of, you know, the dark times of the soul people

00:48:16.160 have, um, can have during depression always seemed to me is like overly simplistic. Um, and so I, in

00:48:23.500 some sense, I'm not surprised that there is, there's a revision of this view. There's got to be more to

00:48:28.200 depression than simply low serotonin levels, or you can just, you know, I mean, or, or SSRIs would

00:48:32.420 have fixed, fixed all depression. And in fact, depression levels are quite high still. Um,

00:48:37.320 that doesn't necessarily mean that if you're on SSRI, it won't help you. I mean, I think a lot

00:48:41.340 of people have been helped by SSRIs. And as you say, Ali, a lot of people haven't been, um, I think

00:48:46.420 right, the right way to think, look about that, of that result is that we do not understand in any

00:48:51.560 really truly deep way what causes some people to be depressed. And, and, um, you know, the, the,

00:48:57.880 the, the, uh, a way to address it is multifaceted. Uh, and I think, uh, uh, a drug may not be the way

00:49:04.940 to, to, to help it for, for many people. I think as, as many people who've been on SSRIs have found

00:49:09.120 out. Um, and I think, uh, like expecting the healthcare system to solve those kinds of problems,

00:49:15.840 uh, you know, with 100% certainty where we just don't understand in any deep way exactly

00:49:21.480 what causes them, um, is, is, is, I think he's asking too much. Uh, we exalted science. We put

00:49:27.020 it as the, as, as, as the, as the sort of the highest source of all truth. When in fact, um,

00:49:32.320 if you look, if you do science, uh, for living really, which you, your, my impression is one

00:49:36.940 of humility before how much we, uh, how much we don't actually still know. Um, there's a lot we do

00:49:41.800 know, uh, but there's a lot we don't know. Um, and what makes science exciting and fun is this,

00:49:47.480 I, at this thing where you can like discover together as a community, what is true and what

00:49:53.160 isn't. You can have these, these fun fights with people tempered by data, tempered by experiment that,

00:49:59.580 that slowly reveal, you know, how, how the world works. Um, and I think that that's, that's the

00:50:05.700 spirit in which I look at that study. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, um, uh, the, the problem has

00:50:11.400 been the last 20 some years or 20, 30 years is we've overemphasized this chemical imbalance idea as a

00:50:17.160 source of knowledge about what this, what, what caused it. And before that it was the Freudian

00:50:21.020 idea, you know, it was like, what happened to you when you were little, uh, you know, with,

00:50:24.120 with your, your, with your, how your mom treated you or something. Um, uh, I mean, all of these like

00:50:28.780 simplistic ideas cannot possibly encapsulate why, uh, we have depression, why we have the, you know,

00:50:35.280 it's, these, these are like, uh, big human things. And to pretend we have a mechanistic, uh,

00:50:41.880 understanding that that's comprehensive to, to, to, to explain it all is, is always seemed to me as

00:50:48.340 hubris. Speaking of hubris, to me, a lot of scientists exhibit a lot of hubris in saying

00:51:06.740 things like trust the science, follow the science, and then marginalizing or intimidating anyone who,

00:51:15.260 as you said, bringing their own facts to the table, their own data, their own perspective to the table

00:51:20.400 disagrees with what the majority opinion in the scientific community is. People are kind of pushed

00:51:27.240 to the side as crazy or as kooky or as dumb for questioning things like masks or particular 0.99

00:51:36.760 side effects of, uh, the vaccine. Of course, there were people who 20 years ago were even saying, 0.98

00:51:43.720 hey, this whole idea of low serotonin levels being the sole driver of depression is probably not right. 0.97

00:51:50.700 And they were cast as crazy as quacks. That seems to be a big problem from my perspective 1.00

00:51:57.780 in science in general, that eventually science seems to come around and catch up to what some,

00:52:04.800 you know, that people were saying, some dissenters were saying, but it takes a, it takes a lot. It

00:52:10.020 takes a lot of courage for people like you to kind of stand against what people like Anthony Fauci are

00:52:15.140 saying when it really shouldn't, it really shouldn't take courage. Like you shouldn't really be worried,

00:52:18.940 not you in particular, but no one should be worried about losing their job for saying,

00:52:23.620 hey, here's what the science says. It's leading in a different direction. That to me shows that

00:52:29.960 it's become less driven by facts, less driven by data and more driven by, I don't even know,

00:52:35.660 politics, power, money, pharmaceutical companies. All I know is that it doesn't seem to be about

00:52:41.740 the wellbeing of the people that the scientific community is supposed to be serving.

00:52:46.740 I mean, there's, uh, all of what you said is entirely true. I mean, it's like, and it's,

00:52:52.600 it's not like that it's new. Um, there's this famous physicist named Max Planck who, uh, who,

00:52:58.540 uh, had this wry observation about how that's, he said, science advances one obituary at a time,

00:53:04.460 right? The idea is that, um, that, uh, there's this power structure within science and people at the

00:53:10.480 top of the hierarchy. I mean, there's a lot of ego. It's not even money of many people. Um, you know,

00:53:16.120 they, they, they want to be seen as the smart ones. Um, the, the wise ones and, uh, challenges

00:53:21.780 from, from, uh, to their, to their, uh, uh, uh, intellectual authority are, some of them react

00:53:27.980 very negatively to it. Like, you know, in my case, for instance, um, when we wrote the Great

00:53:31.760 Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH at the time, the National

00:53:36.900 Institute of Health, actually someone I admired, I mean, I'm, I'm Christian and he's been an outspoken

00:53:41.780 Christian in a, in a position of, of authority inside science. Um, he wrote an email, uh, to

00:53:48.160 Tony Fauci four days after we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. We were on October 4th

00:53:52.860 and October 8th. He wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me, Sunetra Gupta, who's one of the

00:53:57.380 world's best epidemiologists at University. And then Martin Kulder, one of the world's best

00:54:02.000 biostatisticians at Harvard University called the three of us fringe epidemiologists. And then

00:54:06.700 he called for a devastating published takedown, uh, of us. Uh, and then I started getting calls

00:54:12.020 from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus rip. In effect, why did I want to

00:54:15.240 kill people? Right. Of course. That's what they do. And I saw quotes from Tony Fauci and 0.94

00:54:19.520 effectively willfully, uh, sort of misinterpreting what we were arguing for in the Great Barrington

00:54:26.400 Declaration, which is focus, focus protection. They organized a media campaign to smear us and

00:54:30.940 destroy us, uh, in order to maintain the illusion that they were right, that they're, that they

00:54:35.840 had this, like this consensus behind them in favor of lockdowns when in fact, the consensus

00:54:40.480 never existed. The way that top scientists behave sets the tone for, um, for, for this

00:54:48.080 kind of behavior. I mean, here in this case, they explicitly created a propaganda campaign

00:54:52.400 in order to, in order to keep the, the public illusion that they, that they, that they, uh,

00:54:58.380 that they were reflecting a consensus of science, um, intact when in fact, there never was

00:55:03.900 one. Um, and I, I, I took, I've got to show you, I have a, uh, a card that I got, uh, that

00:55:09.520 now has, uh, here we go. It has fringe epidemiologist on it. There you go. Now you wear the title

00:55:14.820 proudly. Wow. It's, it's hard to even put into words how destructive that kind of attitude

00:55:20.960 and those kinds of actions are. And yes, Francis Collins has been held up as kind of a, a hero,

00:55:26.440 not just of science, but of the faith within Christian churches. I mean, he made his rounds

00:55:31.640 to different churches during COVID talking about the life-saving, you know, the life-saving

00:55:35.920 and also almost like the spiritually salvific power of like wearing a mask and forcing vaccines

00:55:42.260 and things like that. So that was very disappointing. Um, just to end, I want to get your thoughts

00:55:47.340 also on this Alzheimer's drug scandal. This was published, um, in science and it looked at this

00:55:55.020 six month investigation that, uh, provided really strong support for, um, the fact that this drug

00:56:01.760 and many of the drugs used to treat Alzheimer's, um, that the data had been manipulated to look like

00:56:08.600 they're actually more effective than they are when really they almost have a 100% failure rate.

00:56:15.520 So we're talking about hubris and power and money and all of those things really coming together

00:56:20.420 in one story, again, affecting disproportionately negatively the most vulnerable people among us,

00:56:27.420 beloved grandparents who suffered and died from Alzheimer's who put their hope in these drugs

00:56:32.220 and were told, Hey, maybe there's a good chance that they could work. And of course they failed.

00:56:36.120 What's your take on this story? Uh, so, uh, this is, this one's even worse than the SSRI.

00:56:42.020 The SSRI story is, is, is normal science. Like we, you, you, you have a new discovery,

00:56:46.240 which overturns an old idea, right? That's normal science. Um, here, what you have is, uh, a century

00:56:53.020 old idea, uh, that, that what causes dementias or at least one of the major causes of dementia is

00:57:00.820 the, uh, development of plaques, amyloid plaques in your, in your, in your, in your, in your brain

00:57:06.600 that cause the, the kind of like loss of loss of memory and loss of, uh, all the, all the things

00:57:12.020 that are connected with, with dementia and Alzheimer's. Um, that idea was, it was century

00:57:17.780 old, right? And, uh, when I was in medical school, I was taught that, that this was potentially a cause

00:57:22.460 of a lot of dementias, but you won't know unless you do an autopsy after someone's died to see if

00:57:27.580 those plaques existed. Um, that this was in the nineties, but since what happened over the, over,

00:57:34.000 over the nine, after the nineties was that, uh, people developed scanning methods to measure

00:57:39.280 the presence of, of amyloid plaques. Um, and there was a study done, I think 15 years ago,

00:57:46.740 16 years ago, published in a very prominent journal, um, that, that documented these plaques

00:57:53.520 were very common. Um, uh, it turns out that those, that study, which was again, published in a very

00:58:00.440 influential journal, had a big influence on solidifying this, this amyloid hypothesis as a

00:58:05.680 cause of Alzheimer's, um, used fake data. Like they just, they, it was, it was fraudulent.

00:58:11.180 The study was just pure fraud. Uh, that, that, that's come out. That's, that is exactly the,

00:58:16.240 the, what the, what's happened, what's happened recently. Like that, that the exposure of that

00:58:20.340 study is fraudulent has just come out. I mean, that happens in science too, right? You know,

00:58:24.280 people, again, you publish a paper in a top journal, all of a sudden you're, you, you, you get

00:58:29.480 invitations to conferences, you get grants, you get, you know, uh, uh, your, your social status rises

00:58:34.860 among other scientists. Um, you, you know, you get tenure. Um, and, uh, what's, what's happened

00:58:40.760 with, what the problem there was that that study by confirming the century old hypothesis led drug

00:58:48.000 developers to try to find drugs that could reduce the level amyloid in your brain. And, uh, so we have

00:58:55.720 a decade and a half of these, of drug developers who very successfully created drugs that do that.

00:59:00.820 But then when they run clinical trials on them, they don't actually help people in terms of,

00:59:06.740 you know, the, the, the, the slow deterioration of memory, the, the, all of the, the, the real

00:59:11.580 problems that come from, from, uh, from dementia that, that, that, uh, that turns out those drugs

00:59:17.500 just don't work. So essentially the main problem is that that paper led to a decade and a half of,

00:59:23.620 of, of, of a dead end, um, with, you know, billions of dollars thrown into, to research,

00:59:28.960 trying to address this amyloid problem. When in fact, the problem still is, how do you, um, 1.00

00:59:35.060 how do you care for, how do you treat someone who's, who has this slow deterioration of the

00:59:41.540 memory, the capacity to function in society that comes with Alzheimer's and with dementia?

00:59:46.520 Yes. Oh, sad. I know this has been really hard to read for people who have had people in their

00:59:51.320 lives who have suffered from Alzheimer's and maybe even took these drugs with the hope that they were

00:59:55.220 going to help. Um, this is a big question, but to close this out, if you were in charge

00:59:59.520 of all health, just health in general in the United States, I mean, we're talking about

01:00:06.080 you can make decisions for how the pharmaceutical companies run, for health policy, for how science

01:00:13.640 is developed and then published and communicated to the media, what would be your biggest reforms?

01:00:19.860 Like if you were put in charge and all of all of it, you got to make the decisions,

01:00:23.360 how would you change things so that the public could trust the public health system and the

01:00:30.860 entities involved again? Because right now the distrust is really high.

01:00:36.320 That's funny, Alec, because the, the, the, the, the key thing is, uh, is that I would make myself

01:00:40.720 not in charge. Um, you, you have to, you have to have a very wide diversity of voices for a topic as

01:00:47.020 complicated as that. And so the first thing I would do is I would bring in people that disagreed with me,

01:00:51.660 uh, to, to, to sit there and to tell me I'm wrong. Um, uh, you, uh, in terms of like the,

01:00:58.100 in terms of like, I think there's like several different kinds of issues around this. So for

01:01:01.980 instance, take the NIH, the NIH funds the research of, of very many biologists and medical doctors

01:01:08.660 and scientists who are working on, on health issues. Um, it's, it's really clear from the COVID

01:01:14.100 pandemic that what's happened inside the NIH is that a very small number of people, uh, have decided that

01:01:20.760 they know exactly what the right, what exactly where, where, where all the right scientific

01:01:25.340 investments are going to be, what, what's likely to produce the right, right results. Um, instead of

01:01:30.800 diversifying the ideas that they support, even supporting ideas that they may not think are

01:01:35.020 promising because you know, they, they, they may be wrong. Um, uh, they, they've focused all their

01:01:40.560 money and attention and not the Alzheimer's example is a good example on one set of hypotheses that you

01:01:45.580 create this like concentrated power structure. Um, and I think that needs to be disrupted. Um,

01:01:51.040 it met funding and science should be very similar to funding in, in like in the tech world where you

01:01:55.960 have, you know, you don't know which company is going to work. And so what you do is you fund,

01:01:59.560 uh, a very large number of companies. You expect many of them to fail, right? Cause you don't know in

01:02:04.640 advance. Uh, you, you diversify the portfolio. I think that kind of diversification desperately needs

01:02:09.560 to happen in science funding, uh, in public health. Um, I mean, there just needs to be a

01:02:17.060 recommitment to science and a recommitment to the values of, of the, of the public and an absolute

01:02:23.800 commitment to never telling a noble lie again. The purpose of public health isn't to manipulate

01:02:29.040 behavior of the public. The purpose of public health is to work with the public, give them as

01:02:33.820 good information as possible to know, and then understand the needs and desires of the public so

01:02:38.920 that, uh, that together it can create, uh, situations where health can happen. Um, the,

01:02:44.820 the, the current idea in public health, so clearly this priesthood who knows better about how to manage

01:02:51.940 you and manage the public. Um, and they'll tell you what to do and they'll be very disappointed when

01:02:56.460 you just, when you disagree with them or don't obey them. Um, and I'll tell you another thing in

01:03:00.920 public health, it's become clear to me is that, uh, so many people on in professional, uh,

01:03:06.940 physicians and public health are, are on the left. Now that by itself is not wrong. It's not bad.

01:03:12.120 There's nothing wrong with that. Um, the problem is that, that many of them look down on people on

01:03:17.480 the right. It's become a political position for them as opposed to professional position.

01:03:22.240 And that, uh, and what's happened on is this political divide in public health whereby, you know,

01:03:28.720 if, if you are being dictated to lecture to by people who are don't, you don't agree with

01:03:34.280 politically and look down on you because of your politics, you're not going to respond very well,

01:03:39.100 completely understandable. Um, and so what's happened is you have this like political divide

01:03:43.660 in public, but this, this public health where, um, uh, where half the country just doesn't agree

01:03:48.800 with this, just will not trust you because they think you're looking down on them. Um, you have to

01:03:54.820 diversify public health so that it has, uh, it reflects America. You cannot have one political

01:04:00.160 stripe in charge of basically every aspect of public health. Uh, and which is where we are.

01:04:05.300 Uh, and so if public health is going to regain the trust of America, it has to look like America,

01:04:09.160 uh, ideologically, I think, uh, I wouldn't have said that before the pandemic, but it's clear that

01:04:13.980 what's happened is, uh, public health, uh, cannot communicate with, with, with, uh, with red America 0.86

01:04:19.340 in a way that's trustworthy because they don't are unable to, I mean, in principle, they could,

01:04:23.640 if they respected, even if you disagree with someone, you can respect them. But it seems to me like a lot

01:04:28.420 of public health just doesn't respect people they disagree with politically. Um, and I just,

01:04:33.160 you just can't have that. So I would, I would work very hard to reform that. Medicine also needs to

01:04:37.400 return to evidence-based medicine. I mean, it's, uh, through the pandemic, it's become a tool of

01:04:42.220 propaganda and of, of dissemination of public health messages, message, uh, medicine for it to work,

01:04:48.520 doc patients have to trust their doctor as looking after their interests, not just for the public

01:04:52.760 interest. Um, and I think that's been a big problem in medicine is that, uh, is, is that a lot of

01:04:57.820 patients no longer trust doctors because they think that the doctors are up for something else other

01:05:03.220 than their own, uh, health and wellbeing. Yep. Yep. That's absolutely true. Well, thank you so much

01:05:08.300 for those recommendations and thank you so much, um, for your insight as well. I really appreciate it

01:05:13.720 as well as just for your, um, your courage, your willingness to kind of get in the public arena

01:05:18.720 and defend the scientific position. I really appreciate it.

01:05:23.160 Thank you. Pleasure to talk with you.

01:05:25.080 Thank you.

01:05:27.820 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - July 27, 2022

Ep 650 ｜ COVID Comeback, Depression Meds & Alzheimer’s Scandal ｜ Guest： Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

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