Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is also the author of The Great Barrington Declaration, a landmark document that served as a bulwark against the White House's attempt to stifle dissent within the scientific community. In this episode, Russell Brand takes a look at his life and career, and asks why the truth was so vigilantly censored during the pandemic response to the Global Flu pandemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and why we were so systematically denied access to the perspectives of those who could have helped solve the problem at hand. Russell Brand is an American academic, writer, and public speaker. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC, and is a frequent guest on the BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live. He has also been featured in the BBC World Service, the New Scientist, NPR, and other media outlets. His work has been widely praised, and he is one of the most influential people in the field of epidemiology and public policy, and has been a regular guest on CNN, NPR and other major news outlets, including NPR. Listen to this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand wherever you get your news and information. Remember, there's always more than one episode a week! Stay Free! Stay free! If you become a subscriber to our content, you get early access to an additional video every week of new interviews and interviews every week, and you get a chance to join us for interviews and get access to new interviews, you can access all sorts of great content. Once a week, including in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and more! You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, you'll get the chance to hear more by becoming a supporter of the movement that's going to help elevate your consciousness together. Stay free, and more like that in the coming soon. - The Awakening Wonders. . - That's a podcast delivering a podcast every single day, 7 days, 7-a-week, a podcast delivered to you get the best of what you can t live without it? by awakening wonders on your average American feminist, feminist, atheist, and feminist, and a podcast that s better than that?
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
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00:00:31.000Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:34.000Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
00:00:54.000Remember, if you become a subscriber to our content, you get an additional video every week, you get early access to our content, you get to join us for interviews, and you get to support a movement that believes wholeheartedly that we can change the world together.
00:01:06.000And we're going to need one because we have highly paid public officials lying to us for a living and when it comes to inquiries they take place behind closed doors.
00:01:14.000What incredible censorship we endured during the pandemic period with vital voices being shut down.
00:01:19.000People that could have been leading the response.
00:01:21.000People that could have been protecting your children's education.
00:01:23.000People that could have been protecting your health and your business were deliberately silenced and shut down.
00:01:28.000A new film explores the censorship that took place during that time.
00:01:31.000It's made by public and therefore I guess Matt Taibbi and Michael Schoenberger, people that we certainly admire over on our platform.
00:01:37.000Let's have a look at that film and ask once again, why was the truth so vigilantly censored?
00:01:42.000Why were falsehoods so aggressively propagated?
00:01:44.000The lockdowns hurt every single poor person on earth and for working-class people was a total disaster.
00:01:54.000The Great Venture Declaration was a document that I wrote in October 2020 with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.
00:02:02.000The three of us, Martin, Sunetra, and I could very clearly see that there were lockdowns coming again.
00:02:07.000It was a document that was mainstream.
00:02:11.000It was reflecting a mainstream position in opposition to the lockdown, even though at the time, if you read the press, it seemed like all scientists agreed that lockdowns were the right way.
00:02:22.000I didn't realize it was going to be this like touchstone document that was going to change how people thought about the pandemic.
00:02:30.000Because what I thought we were writing was utterly obvious.
00:02:32.000We put the Great Bank Declaration on a website and we allowed people to sign it.
00:02:37.000And tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists, scientists signed it, including Nobel Prize winners, people from top universities around the world signed it.
00:02:45.000I put it up a Facebook page and it got taken down.
00:02:52.000Many of the scientists and scholars who signed it, some of them lost their jobs.
00:02:55.000Many of them wrote to me and told me they lost opportunities to collaborate with colleagues on grant applications, that they were afraid the grant applications were rejected because they signed it.
00:03:08.000Signing it came at some professional risk.
00:03:10.000Dr. Fauci, there were reports that the White House may favor the so-called Great Barrington Declaration.
00:03:16.000Instead of having an honest conversation, again heated but constructive, they decided that we were anathema, that we needed to be excommunicated from the scientific conversation.
00:03:28.000Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense.
00:03:33.000Some of the most important professionals in the field decided that they had the answer.
00:03:38.000With the exception of the few that you know who we're talking about, they would all vehemently disagree.
00:03:44.000They had all the answers, and that anyone that disagreed with them was a threat.
00:03:48.000Jay Bhattacharya is the scientist that we needed.
00:03:51.000And even here you see that he's talking about his colleagues, the need for debate, for discourse, discussion.
00:03:56.000He's not saying, I am science, I am the future, listen to me.
00:04:03.000He's precisely the kind of public official or public servant, to give it a better title, that's required.
00:04:08.000Let's have a look at this article from Substack that investigates exactly what happened within the censorship industrial complex during that time and why we were denied access to voices like this one that could have created a completely different dynamic and far better outcomes for all of us.
00:04:23.000We tend to think of censorship as a violation of the rights of the censored.
00:04:51.000Notice that beyond the pandemic, remember we always say the pandemic was a window that revealed a template, a paradigm, a manner of behaving.
00:05:00.000Exhausted, everything's too expensive, I'm tired, I don't feel very well, I'm bored, I'm over this, I've got no connection to nature, no connection to love, no connection to God.
00:05:08.000That's how They drain you of your vitality and your ability to reject their ideas.
00:05:13.000Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans watched our political leaders stoop to these despotic measures.
00:05:18.000The Department of Homeland Security, the CDC and the FBI pressured and colluded with the big tech platforms to cleanse social media of anyone who dared to object to the directives of the state.
00:05:28.000Questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates and public masking rules was every bit as heretical as doubting dialectical materialism in Soviet Russia.
00:05:37.000Yeah, I've been in a lot of trouble for doubting dialectical materialism itself over in Soviet Russia.
00:05:43.000Jay Bhattacharya is an epidemiologist at Stanford University.
00:05:47.000Along with Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford epidemiologist, he wrote the Great Barrington Declaration.
00:06:00.000Which criticised the government's lockdown measures and called for focused protection of vulnerable demographic groups while the rest of the population achieved herd immunity.
00:06:10.000That idea is at least as good as some of the ideas that became public policy.
00:06:14.000This will never be emphasised enough because it's an admission of such a catastrophic failure that not only would you lose the party in government, you'd have to lose the system of government that led you there because there was no opposition.
00:06:24.000So no one, other than someone like Bloody Ram Paul, can say, well, I was all along saying this is crazy.
00:06:29.000There isn't anyone that can make those kind of claims, other than, like, you, maybe.
00:06:32.000When we reported on the Twitter files, we discovered that the very day that he joined Twitter, Bhattacharya was censored.
00:06:38.000His account was put on a trends blacklist, which radically reduced its reach.
00:06:42.000Bhattacharya also learned that in private correspondence, NIAID chief Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of the NIH, had maligned the three authors of the declaration as fringe epidemiologists.
00:06:55.000So will that come up in Anthony Fauci's private inquiry that he was engaged in orchestrating a devastating takedown?
00:07:06.000Bhattacharya and his colleagues were vindicated on just about every one of their views while Fauci's arguments were almost uniformly proved wrong.
00:07:13.000How many lockdown-induced deaths of despair could have been avoided?
00:07:16.000How many small businesses could have survived?
00:07:18.000How many children would have been spared from devastating learning loss had we been allowed a real debate over COVID policies?
00:07:24.000We will inevitably have new national emergencies in the future, potentially even more pandemics.
00:07:29.000We cannot allow ourselves to forget what the government did to destroy a democratic debate and consolidate its power as COVID-19 turned the world upside down.
00:07:36.000We must take steps now to dismantle the censorship industrial complex so they can never do it again.
00:07:42.000Plainly, the role of censorship is control.
00:07:45.000As long as you control the discourse, you can control the population.
00:07:48.000As long as you can prevent dissent, you can prevent opposition, you can consolidate and control populations, you can increase profits, you can govern in exactly the manner that you want to.
00:07:59.000Even though in many ways it was a unique event, all it really did was amplify tendencies were there.
00:08:04.000As Bhattacharya said, at the beginning, it was the working class that primarily suffered.
00:08:08.000That in itself is an indication of how the pandemic was deployed.
00:08:12.000Many people were able to handle the stresses of the pandemic.
00:08:15.000If you're a member of the laptop class, working from home, no disrespect if you are, it's easier than if you're driving an Amazon truck or if you're cleaning offices.
00:08:23.000It was clear from the beginning that as long as they could control the information, they could prevent the pandemic becoming what it could have been.
00:08:29.000An opportunity to recognize the corruption of the state, the corruption of pharmaceutical companies, the corruption of the media, and the relationship between all three.
00:08:36.000All of that became clear during the pandemic, and it's because of voices like Jay Bhattacharya's that we have a greater understanding of the literal, actual science that could have been discussed and shared more widely at the height of the pandemic, but thank God is being shared now.