In this episode, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya talks with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, who has been a leading voice on the pandemic front during the COVID-19 crisis, and has been fighting to bring accurate information about the crisis and its consequences to the public at large. Dr. Bhattachaara is the Director of the Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging at Stanford University, and is a professor and researcher specializing in the economics of health care. He received all four of his degrees, an MA, an MD, and an PhD in economics from Stanford University and is currently the director of Stanford's Center for Democratic Economics and Demography of Health & Aging. He has been an outspoken advocate for the public s right to know what the truth is about COVID and the potential consequences of lockdowns and other forced lockdowns during the crisis. In fact, he has been one of the most effective public voices in the fight to bring the truth to light about what actually happened in the wake of COVID19 and the impact it had on the lives of millions of people across the world. In this episode of Daily Wire Plus, we discuss how the truth was kept out of the public eye, and how it was kept hidden from the public by the mainstream media. and why it s now time to wake up to the truth about what really happened in order to prevent further spread of the crisis in the first place. Let s take a step towards the brighter future you deserve. - Dr. Peterson - Daily Wire Dr. P. Peterson is the first step toward the brighter futures you deserve, and a healthier, more productive, and more productive future you can all live in the best possible way possible. Subscribe to Daily Wire plus to receive notifications when new episodes are available. Subscribe to stay up to date on all things going on in your favorite news and social medias, wherever you re listening to the newest episodes of the Daily Wire + podcast, wherever else you get your news and information about what s going to be happening in the most important things in the world, including social media, social media and the most influential podcast on the most impactful places on the internet, and your most influential places on your favorite podcast. Subscribe and social media platforms, and don t miss out on the latest breaking news and more! Subscribe and subscribe to our newest episodes every Monday morning, starting on the newest episode of The Daily Wire PLUS! Subscribe now!
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:57.420Hello everyone. I have the privilege today of talking to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's been a very effective spokesman on the pandemic front during the COVID-19 crisis.
00:01:20.620Both imaginary and real, Dr. Bhattacharya has fought in the public domain to bring accurate information about the pandemic and the potential negative consequences of lockdowns and other COVID-19 interventions to widespread public attention.
00:01:39.260He is a professor and researcher specializing in the economics of health care.
00:01:44.720Bhattacharya received all four of his degrees, an MA, an MD, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
00:01:54.280He is currently the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
00:02:00.880Bhattacharya came under severe fire during the COVID-19 pandemic, believing, as he did, and publicly communicating that fact,
00:02:10.120that mask mandates and forced lockdowns were a detriment, instead advocating for the development of herd immunity.
00:02:19.200He argued to allow the healthy and low-risk individuals, the majority of people, to continue on with everyday life and work while providing protection for those most at risk.
00:02:29.820Only recently, it was revealed through the Twitter files that, among others, Dr. Bhattacharya was being purposefully silenced on mainstream media platforms.
00:02:43.640Hello, Dr. Bhattacharya. I'm looking very much forward to this conversation today.
00:02:49.100We met recently at Stanford Conference on Academic Freedom, and that was the first time we'd met in public.
00:02:56.520I'd been following what you'd been doing for a long time, but it was good to see you there, and it's good to have this opportunity to talk through what's happened over the last three years.
00:03:07.240Especially, I would say, in light of the recent Cochrane review, for example, that indicated there was no evidence whatsoever that masks were effective in preventing or even delaying the transmission of COVID-19.
00:03:21.580And I've watched the usual apologists try to wend their way around that review, but the Cochrane reviews are pretty damn reliable, and they're conservative, too, in their claims and are known for that, right?
00:03:35.220I mean, the Cochrane reviews aren't going to come out and say that masks don't work if the people who wrote the reviews aren't pretty damn convinced that masks don't work.
00:03:43.740And so, the fact that that's the case, and that there was evidence about that beforehand, because in the epidemic planning that predated the outbreak of COVID-19, there weren't credible people, as far as I could tell, that really thought that masks worked even back then.
00:04:02.260So, anyways, the tide seems to be turning on the COVID narrative front, and that's not a small measure attributable to you, so why don't we go into that?
00:04:14.700Sure, well, it's a great honour to talk with you, Jordan. It was really a delight to meet you at the conference.
00:04:19.100I've obviously been following you for a very long time. I admire your courage.
00:04:22.720You know, it's interesting, because the science on COVID, on the lockdowns, on the mitigation measures, on a whole host of topics, if the public was listening, they would hear this idea that there was this univocal conclusion that you had to do lockdowns,
00:04:46.760you had to wear masks, you had to socially distance, you had to put plastic barriers up, you had to close schools, you had to do all of these things,
00:04:54.700that the vaccines would stop transmission of the disease, that therefore was warranted to force people to lose their jobs over them.
00:05:01.620All of these ideas were sold as if there was a scientific consensus in favour of them.
00:05:07.900That was a lie. There was never a scientific consensus on almost any of the topics.
00:05:12.980And as you say, en masse, in fact, the pre-existing narrative, the pre-existing idea among most scientists before the pandemic was quite the opposite direction.
00:05:23.040What happened was a relatively small group, a cartel almost, of very powerful scientific bureaucrats took over the whole apparatus of science,
00:05:35.200at least as far as the public eye was concerned, dominated the media, dominated the message to politicians,
00:05:41.020and as a result, we had a catastrophic response to COVID and, you know, we're going to be paying the cost of that for a very long time.
00:05:50.200So let's dig into that because it's so easy in the current political climate for discussion to become conspiratorial, right?
00:06:01.240And the idea of a cartel, well, that sounds conspiratorial.
00:06:04.660Now, I've been trying to think that through.
00:06:07.040And so a system of ideas can act like a conspiracy, even if it doesn't make itself manifest as a direct conspiracy,
00:06:15.600because a system of ideas has an internal intrinsic ethos and view and implications for actions that unfold across time.
00:06:24.600If you read the Gulag Archipelago, for example, Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of indicating how the consequences,
00:06:34.900the brutal, tyrannical actions of Lenin and Stalin were necessary concomitants to the,
00:06:44.760or necessary outcomes of the axioms that were embedded in the communist worldview.
00:06:49.140They weren't deviations from some properly utopian norm.
00:06:54.280They were exactly what you'd expect if you put those principles into operation.
00:06:58.460And I see similar things going on around us now.
00:07:03.460Let's say on the politically correct front,
00:07:05.940I don't really believe there's a conspiracy of politically correct people who are meeting in secret to direct the world,
00:07:11.560although if there was, the WEF would probably qualify.
00:07:14.880But I do think that systems of ideas can act as conspiratorial agents.
00:07:22.100Now, in this case, it's more complex, though.
00:07:24.800So there's a cartel who's pushing forward this narrative.
00:07:29.600And the question is, well, or a system of ideas that's generating it.
00:07:34.400And the question is, well, to what end?
00:12:34.040I mean, he talks about it as if it's some sort of religious system.
00:12:37.360So, he took, and what he did is he designed a set of policies, an ethos that said,
00:12:48.280if you do these things, then I will rescue you from the threat that is going all around you,
00:12:54.700that's in the air everywhere, where even your children are a biohazard to you, a threat to you.
00:13:00.380And in that, so, when that set of events unfolds, like, you have someone who essentially takes over what truth is in the minds of everybody.
00:13:14.520Then all these other actors could come in and start to say, you know, you mentioned the pharmaceutical companies.
00:13:20.460They jumped in, not, I don't think they're in a nefarious plot.
00:13:24.340I think that they jumped in legitimately saying, okay, let's help figure out how to address this threat.
00:13:29.340Now, then they took advantage of the power they had in very abusive ways, but that's a later development rather than the driving force, I think.
00:13:38.700And so, how do you understand the practicalities of the relationship between the top public health bureaucrats and the pharmaceutical companies?
00:13:48.160Because there's obviously moral hazard there.
00:13:50.200One of the things that struck me is really beyond comprehension in some fundamental sense is that the Biden White House, for example,
00:13:58.060is essentially a shill, is acting as a shill for Pfizer constantly.
00:14:02.640The Biden White House tweets out around Christmas, for example, this became particularly egregious.
00:14:07.820These constant reminders that if you loved your children, you'd go have them both vaccinated and boosted.
00:14:13.020And by that time, it was absolutely clear to me, and I'd be more than happy to be corrected on this front,
00:14:18.140that the evidence that vaccinating children was a good idea was not only lacking, it was the best evidence was counter-evidence,
00:14:26.180is that children were basically at zero risk for serious consequences, serious side effects from COVID.
00:14:34.160And the vaccines, in all likelihood, posed a greater threat to them than did the virus.
00:14:39.500And so, I couldn't understand at all why the White House would be supporting the marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical companies.
00:14:47.460Now, there are tens of billions of dollars at stake here, and there is a revolving door.
00:14:53.060And people who are listening and watching, my understanding is that there's something of a revolving door in Washington
00:14:59.380between powerful companies and the regulators who regulate them.
00:15:03.700Those regulatory bureaucratic positions aren't necessarily particularly well paid,
00:15:08.160and they don't last forever, and a lot of the people who occupy those positions are ambitious,
00:15:12.700and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
00:15:14.880But it's pretty damn useful to hire someone to work for you who was once involved in the regulation of your company, let's say.
00:15:22.580So, there's plenty of moral hazard on that front.
00:15:25.000How do you understand the interplay, like the dynamic interplay between the public health officials, quote,
00:15:31.540who are there to protect us and these entities operating behind the scenes who, you know,
00:15:38.280do make products that are useful but also have an iron in the fire that isn't necessarily completely aligned with everyone's best interests?
00:15:46.660Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:15:54.040Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead
00:17:23.660Yeah, so I think the idea is that in war, a lot is possible and ethically permitted that would not be permitted outside of war, right?
00:17:36.000So the same kind of principle applies here.
00:17:39.600So what you have, for instance, again in the U.S., that a former head of the FDA was actually on the board of Pfizer.
00:17:46.440He then is on national TV all the time, essentially pushing a line that benefited Pfizer and the sale of its products.
00:17:59.800Sometimes and often, in fact, without disclosing the fact that he has this conflict.
00:18:06.300So they're definitely, but that's longstanding, right?
00:18:09.620You understand that, that those kinds of conflicts exist.
00:18:13.320And you're absolutely right, like the regulatory agencies, there is this like sort of people, people work for the regulatory agencies and then they go work for the drug companies and come back, right?
00:18:22.660That's like the FDA, that's a major problem the FDA in the U.S. faces.
00:18:29.880What has to happen is policymakers, top policymakers, understand that dynamic and act against it.
00:18:37.260Instead, what happened was that the top policymakers said, maybe to themselves, assuming they acted this way, that that kind of dynamic actually helps the public.
00:18:50.080Because what they're doing is putting forward a product that's going to rescue us from the pandemic.
00:18:55.320You have a product, this vaccine, and so it's okay.
00:18:58.680I mean, it's implicit, at least that's my interpretation of how people acted.
00:19:01.760Because otherwise you would have had top policymakers and top public health officials decrying these conflicts of interest, this sort of revolving door, as you say.
00:19:11.240Well, the problem is, is that in the face of an unspecified threat, it's easy to make the argument that the end justifies the means.
00:19:18.080And you can understand how we would fall into that, especially given, and this is something else that's very interesting to contemplate, the exaggeration of the severity of the threat.
00:19:27.100Now, I've been thinking about this biologically, you know, I did a lot of work on the extended immune system, the behavioral immune system.
00:19:35.360And so we have an immune system that operates within us to protect us from disease, but we have a behavioral immune system too.
00:19:42.500And both disgust and fear are part of that behavioral immune system.
00:19:47.840And what I mean by that is, well, we tend to be disgusted by such things as, let's say, rotting food.
00:19:53.740And the reason we're disgusted by it is because the rotting food is full of bacteria that produces toxins to keep us from eating the bacteria's food.
00:20:02.600And we're sensitive to that, so we stay the hell away from it.
00:20:05.560And so that's part of what protects us against pathogens.
00:20:11.440And disgust is one of the main mechanisms whereby that operates.
00:20:17.360And so what we saw happening was the use of fear, definitely, but also the use of disgust, which, by the way, is much more dangerous.
00:20:25.920Because if you're afraid of something, you avoid it.
00:20:28.840But if you're disgusted by something, you burn it and destroy it.
00:20:33.020So if you start to leverage disgust in the political landscape, you're playing with fire.
00:20:37.460Certainly what the Nazi propagandists were very, very good at using disgust.
00:20:43.280And Hitler's anti-Semitic language, for example, is absolutely permeated with disgust metaphors.
00:20:48.980You know, purity of the blood, purity of the race, the cockroaches and insects that were conspiring against Germany.
00:20:58.080And so I kind of think that what happened from a biological perspective might be construed as an overreaction of the behavioral immune system, right?
00:21:08.800So, you know, if you get COVID, you can have a cytokine storm, which is an immune system overreaction.
00:21:14.680And that can kill you, not the virus, but the immune response.
00:21:17.940And in this situation, what happened was we faced an uncertain threat.
00:21:23.020And then we had, as you pointed out, a pre-prepared response to it that turned out to be far worse on virtually every front than the threat that it was purported to reduce.
00:21:34.780But that metaphor of, you know, of an extended immune system overreaction depoliticizes it to some degree.
00:21:43.600You know, we can think about that as more something like an existential threat, which is how do we regulate our responses to unknown threats so that the response itself doesn't become more pathological than the threat?
00:21:56.140I think we're facing the same thing on the climate catastrophe front at the moment, by the way.
00:22:01.280And, you know, people can differ in their opinions about that.
00:22:04.480But certainly systemic overreaction is a constant potential catastrophe.
00:22:10.760And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state, too, which was extraordinarily interesting.
00:22:15.920All across the West in a mad, panicked, herd-like response to, well, to what?
00:22:45.560It's treated not as a disease to be managed and a person who gets it to be cared for.
00:22:50.760Instead, it's a sin that you've committed that you—and as a result, and once you have it, everyone around you needs to be so far away from you that there's no chance of the contagion spreading to them.
00:23:04.140I mean, now, it is true there are diseases that are quite deadly.
00:23:08.080You want to have quarantining—I mean, those are like—those are legitimate tools.
00:23:11.720But deployed at a society-wide level for extended periods of time essentially destroys the underpinnings of civil society.
00:23:22.720When we are in community with each other, we implicitly accept that there's some risk of your spreading some diseases to me.
00:23:34.220That's just normal part of how civilization works.
00:23:38.740It's a deal we've made with each other.
00:23:40.460Civilization tempers the inclination that we humans have toward disgust and transforms it into something where it's much more constructive.
00:23:52.920And, you know, you can absolutely have pathologies of societies where that disgust is allowed to spread and marginalize people.
00:24:00.980Like, so, like, you know, I come from Indian culture.
00:24:03.480The Indian society has struggled forever with this distinction of clean and unclean with certain castes of people being—I mean, so, I mean, I think that is a normal feature of societies.
00:24:14.940Yeah, well, there's good work, too, on the political front showing that societies where infectious disease prevalence is higher, like genuinely higher, are also substantially more likely to have authoritarian political structures.
00:24:28.320And that there seems—and the correlation is like 0.7.
00:24:35.220And some of that has to do with, well, exactly what you're describing, which is the distinction, the ritual and even sacred distinction between what's clean and unclean.
00:24:45.980And that does tie into bodily and physical purity and then into a kind of metaphysical purity.
00:24:52.520And it's very difficult to keep those levels of analysis separate.
00:24:55.320I mean, the goal of public health has always worked to counteract that.
00:25:01.720We tell people it's not—you shouldn't moralize a disease.
00:25:05.360You shouldn't treat a disease as if it's something that's, like, morally wrong about the person that has the disease.
00:25:12.100With HIV, we learned that lesson, I thought.
00:25:14.620Yet during the pandemic, public health authorities leaned into this.
00:25:18.680They leaned into the idea that someone who gets COVID has committed a sin.
00:25:23.380And, you know, they didn't say it out loud, but they acted that way.
00:25:28.120It's—now, I said that there was a pandemic template.
00:25:34.340But, you know, that pandemic template is at odds with every other pandemic that we managed in the respiratory virus pandemic we managed in the last century.
00:25:43.160In that whole of the last century, what we did is we identified who was most at risk, developed therapeutics, vaccines, and other methods to try to protect those people as best we could while the pandemic was spreading.
00:25:58.300And—but minimized the fear in society at large, minimized the disruption to society at large.
00:26:09.700The idea is that if you—if you disrupt society at large, you will do more harm to people than you would save them from the—whatever marginal risk from the—from the respiratory virus pandemic that spread it.
00:26:22.660Right. Yeah, well, that's a basically conservative, so to speak, a classic conservative concern, right, which is twofold.
00:26:31.240One is to stress the law of unintended consequences.
00:26:34.640This is something I really learned as a social scientist and—well, and as a biological scientist, for that matter.
00:26:41.020Don't be so sure that your stupid intervention will only do what you think it will do, only the good things.
00:26:48.980Don't even be sure that it won't be positively counterproductive.
00:26:52.460Be certain that it will produce unintended consequences, because it will.
00:26:57.240You know, one of the most famous studies, for example, ever done on the prevention of antisocial behavior among kids—this was the Somerville study done back in the 1930s—one of the first large-scale public health interventions on the psychological front.
00:27:09.980They grouped kids who were prone to conduct disorder and then criminal behavior, let's say, later in their life, randomly into a treatment group and a control group.
00:27:21.160And they hit the treatment group with every positive psychological and sociological intervention you could manage—literacy training, parent training, communication training for the kids.
00:27:32.580They paired them with mentors, they paired them with mentors, and they took the kids out of the inner cities and out to camp, summer camp, for two weeks every year while the program ran.
00:27:43.800And when they released the results, it showed very clearly that the kids in the treatment group, who would be the subject of all this positive attention—which, by the way, the kids loved, the parents loved, the teachers loved, the implementers loved—they did worse on virtually every measure.
00:28:00.500And the conclusion was that it was a really bad idea to take antisocial kids out of their environment for two weeks in the summer and group them together, because they were basically camps for criminals.
00:28:12.780And that was such a powerful effect that it overwhelmed all the other interventions.
00:28:17.780Somerville study—very, very famous cautionary tale—and Joan McCord, who was one of the authors of that study, and one of the first female PhDs in criminology, basically spent the rest of her life traveling around to academic conferences telling people,
00:28:32.780do not assume your idiot intervention is going to work, build in careful outcome analysis to any social program that has a behavioral change mandate, and have some humility in the face of the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve.
00:28:52.060And certainly, well, we just let all that go by the wayside in this—now, you said that we had a different strategy in place for pandemics in the past, and that this new strategy emerged—like, emerged where, and why did it dominate?
00:29:06.360I mean, I think, in the West, it emerged out of the war on terror, you know, if you can go back to the anthrax threat from, I think it was 2001 or 2002, and people reacted to that by saying, we need a way to deal with biosecurity threats, a new way to deal with biosecurity threats that's much more serious, that takes the threat more seriously.
00:29:31.020The whole series of war games and, you know, sort of planning exercises around biosecurity threats, that's not normally what you think of how you deal with respiratory virus pandemics, right?
00:29:43.140You would normally deal with them the old way, which was focused protection of vulnerable people, development of therapeutics, reduce—making sure that people don't panic, right?
00:29:53.100You know, so society can go on as best it can.
00:29:56.800I think that—so when the pandemic hit in 2020 in the U.S. and the world, what happened was that the World Health Organization organized, in the early days of the pandemic, a junket, if you will, to China.
00:30:16.580The Chinese authorities in January 2020 had declared finally a pandemic, had locked down their, you know, this major city, Wuhan.
00:30:26.760And the World Health Organization sent a junket that included, you know, a deputy of Tony Fauci, prominent officials within, you know, public health officials in the World Health Organization.
00:30:39.500They came back from that junket saying that what China had done had worked.
00:30:43.000These authoritarian measures that China had taken, shutting people into their apartment and locking the door, you know, essentially, like, had worked.
00:31:06.260And anybody dim enough to go to China under the control of the CCP and assume that their top-down authoritarian policies are working really needs to think along and hard about how they view the long arc of history, let's say.
00:31:19.500I mean, your default presumption when dealing with the CCP is 100% of everything you see is a lie until proven otherwise.
00:31:27.540I mean, there's an email from Cliff Lane, who's a deputy of Tony Fauci.
00:31:34.680He comes back from this World Health Organization junket to China.
00:31:40.120And in the email, he writes that we have a—what China did worked, in fact, we have a very difficult decision to make.
00:31:51.120It will take more than just the people in this room to make that decision.
00:31:54.960And he writes, what China did worked, albeit at great cost.
00:32:30.080Oh, and as you said, like, the science, follow the science.
00:32:35.580It's like, well, okay, what do you mean here exactly?
00:32:38.000Because there's always a balance of risks if you're a sophisticated thinker.
00:32:41.180It's like, even if there's a pandemic, well, first of all, we better make sure that there is and that we know the scope.
00:32:47.720But there's a hundred other considerations of risk that need to be simultaneously evaluated.
00:32:53.680And the way to protect yourself from that cognitive complexity if you're a narcissistic leader and you want to forge the moral pathway forward is just to demonize anybody who adds any complexity into the argument.
00:33:12.820And anyone who has the notion of the law of unintended consequences, of tradeoffs, of risk management in their soul, or in their training at least, they were excluded from the conversation.
00:33:37.100But, you know, the irony is that the economic harm from the lockdowns with 100% certainty killed more people and is still killing more people.
00:34:05.260Yeah, well, especially when you factor in things like the decrement and educational attainment that emerged as a consequence of the suppression of schooling.
00:34:13.820Because that's a whole lifetime of decreased economic productivity.
00:34:18.100I cannot tell you how frustrated I was about this.
00:34:20.660So, my training is, I have an MD and a PhD in economics.
00:34:26.840I've been following, for the last two decades, this literature obsessively documenting the returns to education on the health of children during their entire lives.
00:34:37.180And, you know, it's pretty convincing.
00:34:40.440It's a great investment we make when we educate our children in terms of, you know, they live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives.
00:34:48.820And even, like, small interruptions to education is what the literature documented have long lifetime consequences.
00:34:55.860Someone, this guy named Dimitri Kostakis, who's an editor of JAMA Pediatrics, did this really interesting paper.
00:35:02.300We just extrapolated that existing social science literature and said, well, we closed schools for a short time in spring 2020.
00:35:09.420What consequences will that have on the lifespans of children?
00:35:13.100And he estimated that we had essentially robbed children in the United States of five and a half million life years just from the short interruption in spring of 2020.
00:35:25.080Well, you know, schools closed on the basis of public health, this cartel of public health people all around the world.
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00:36:58.280Depression, one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the U.S., according to a CDC survey in June of 2020.
00:37:11.920I mean, the consequences are just, the knock-on consequences were devastating.
00:37:17.100The U.N. World Food Program was yelling as loud as it could that there were going to be millions, tens of millions of people on the brink of starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown.
00:37:35.280And the pointy end of the supply chain disruption is some guy who makes $5 a day or $10 a day of income selling coconuts to rich Mumbai laptop class people.
00:38:22.020So the, the, the day I heard about the lockdowns, I mean, I just, I was, I was absolutely floored.
00:38:30.400I couldn't believe that, that in medicine and public health, we were recommending this approach that I knew with certainty was going to harm the lives of poor and vulnerable people literally everywhere in the world.
00:38:44.100I thought, I thought that we had made commitments to, to protect, you know, almost these Rawlsian commitments to, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you structure public policy so that you don't harm the least, the least capable among us to suffer from that.
00:39:10.700And then, when, when the lockdowns were announced, I mean, actually, I had an argument with my, with my, my boss, who's like, it was in, in, in, in Stanford Medicine, almost that very day, because his, his wife is the head of Santa Clara County Public Health.
00:39:25.620And we had this argument about whether lockdowns were a good idea on the eve of the lockdown.
00:39:32.060Like, I, this can't, and I actually gave an interview to a Reuters reporter who was doing a story on what lockdowns would do to kids, to, to domestic assault rates.
00:39:55.480And I actually said in that interview that the lockdowns were very likely the, the biggest public health mistake we ever made.
00:40:00.980Oh yeah, you think it's a bigger public health mistake than, than the inverted food pyramid and the, and the injunction to everyone to do nothing but eat carbohydrates until they weigh 350 pounds?
00:40:11.980Or, I mean, no, you got to admit, those at least compete for, for.
00:40:16.920There, there, there, there are a lot of sins to, to, to, to weigh, but this is certainly, it's certainly up there.
00:40:22.820I mean, you know, just in terms of the catastrophic harm to poor people.
00:40:26.820Yeah, and that's not, we're not done with that.
00:40:28.760So everyone listening and watching needs to know that.
00:40:31.240The catastrophic consequences of harm done to poor people are still unfolding.
00:40:36.120And God only knows what the end result of that's going to be because food is more expensive than it should have been.
00:40:42.980And energy is more expensive than it should have been.
00:40:44.920And there are multiple reasons for that, but the bloody supply chain disruptions were one of them.
00:40:50.080And we really toyed with bringing our supply chains to the brink of bloody disaster.
00:40:55.040It's still hard to buy a car in North America.
00:40:57.280And, you know, it's really difficult to screw something up like that because we're pretty damn good at making cars and so, and distributing them.
00:41:05.000And to see that there are shortages on all fronts for rich people.
00:41:09.440You just imagine what the shortages are like for poor people.
00:41:12.860So, yeah, you know, the other thought I had early, early, early on was that we didn't actually know how deadly the disease was.
00:41:19.280So during the swine flu epidemic, there had been the early estimates by the World Health Organization was that the case fatality rate was 4% or 5%.
00:41:30.080But what happened in the swine flu epidemic in 2009 was a whole bunch of scholars ran studies called seroprevalence studies.
00:41:38.180Studies of measuring antibodies in the blood of populations.
00:41:43.260Antibodies specific to the, you know, the flu virus that was floating around.
00:41:47.700And what they found was there were 100 times more infections or more than cases because the virus had produced a mild reaction in some people, generating an antibody.
00:44:21.920Comorbidity, that hardly counts because, of course, the more comorbidities you have, the more likely you're to die of anything.
00:44:27.500But that still has to be taken into account.
00:44:30.140And then I've also concluded that the evidence for increased severity among people who have vitamin D deficiencies also seems to be quite robust.
00:44:39.880And so what we should have done was note this is particularly dangerous to obese, old people who already have multiple illnesses and who are additionally suffering from vitamin D deficiencies.
00:44:51.560And they probably had, well, who knows what their case fatality rate was, but they were the ones that were particularly at risk.
00:44:57.580Whereas for anybody under 40 who was fundamentally healthy and reasonably well-nourished, it was clearly not worse than the typical run-of-the-mill flu.
00:46:31.740So, if I remember watching this press conference by this Rudy Gobert, who's a National Basketball Association player, NBA basketball player in the United States.
00:46:43.240And he'd contracted COVID early in the pandemic.
00:46:46.480And, you know, he's a young man, very healthy, didn't appear to be particularly sick.
00:46:51.660But he gave this press conference where he, like, just was joking around.
00:46:56.600He was making fun of the clean and unclean trope that was starting to, like, spread.
00:47:00.180And the whole world came down on this poor man, forced him to apologize, you know, and you have to take the virus seriously.
00:47:09.140So, even young, healthy NBA players who are at basically zero risk from dying from this disease have to grovel and apologize because they're acting like young, healthy people.
00:47:22.400It looks like disgust demonization, eh?
00:47:27.220And the idea was, the ideology was very simple.
00:47:29.920If we don't force everyone to take the virus as seriously as an 83-year-old person living in, you know, with multiple comorbidities does, then they won't comply with the lockdown orders.
00:47:42.660What we asked young people to do was immoral.
00:47:46.580We essentially said, stop, sacrifice your life, yes, in order to save grandma.
00:47:53.000We weaponized the empathy that young people have against themselves.
00:47:56.940No, in order to produce a small decrement in risk to grandma.
00:48:01.280But, you know, that's the funny thing.
00:48:02.720It didn't really even protect grandma.
00:48:04.82080% of the deaths are still over the age of 65.
00:48:07.000You have a disease that spreads very, very easily.
00:48:11.200And the lockdown measures, people can't really comply with them for extended periods of time, except unless you happen to be very well off and have a job that can be replaced with a laptop.
00:48:33.460Okay, so you started to become aware of this back in March of 2020, right away, essentially, as soon as the lockdowns occurred.
00:48:40.040And so, and you talked about the first conversation you had with one of your colleagues who was involved in local public health.
00:48:46.120And you could see this miasma of paranoia and force spreading.
00:48:51.420And it was very concerning to you because of your epidemiological and economics training.
00:48:57.380And economists, at least, are trained to consider, well, multiple trade-offs in terms of value, if they're good economists, obviously.
00:49:06.560They seem to be more reliable public policy formulators, by and large, I would say, than biologists, who take a much more unidimensional view of the world.
00:49:15.400And epidemiologists, as well, who specialize in a given illness.
00:49:18.500So, so then, as this marched forward, what did you find yourself doing?
00:49:24.620Well, I mean, there was a lot of, I published these studies or wrote these studies on seroprevalence, published them, and there was a tremendous blowback.
00:49:33.900My colleagues didn't want to believe the result.
00:49:36.200They thought it was a much more deadly disease than we were finding with our scientific studies.
00:49:40.480And actually, where we met was the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.
00:49:47.320I told a little bit about the story about how Stanford treated me, which is, I think, abysmally.
00:49:53.140Yeah, well, let's delve into that a little bit because that's par for the course at modern universities as well at the moment.
00:51:07.280Stanford reacted to those hit pieces in the press by giving them credence even when they knew for a fact they were false.
00:51:14.240So, for instance, there was an allegation that the head of an airline company had given $5,000 to me and somehow it changed the result of the study.
00:52:09.660You were falsifying the data for what reason?
00:52:12.160Yeah, so, I mean, so Stanford, rather than just dismissing the allegations out of hand, they conducted, well, first they started to call it an investigation, but then they realized they couldn't call it an investigation because it was so ridiculous.
00:52:24.280They called it a fact-finding mission.
00:53:00.380If I just went back to their whole life, you know, just quietly doing science, they would just let me go.
00:53:05.820They would continue to be a good, you know, good faculty member and good standing.
00:53:10.940Right, so despite the fact that you were innocent, you should shut the hell up and go back to invisibility, and then we'll let you, what will, we'll.
00:53:18.000So what did the powers that be decide?
00:53:19.940That as long as you were compliant and quiet, like a good faculty member should be, then all the sins you didn't commit would be forgiven?
00:54:52.380And so, when, and I've watched this with, like, 200 people now who've been mobbed and betrayed by the, by the, well, by the powers that be, let's say.
00:55:01.620And every single one of them, with tiny exceptions, responds exactly the way you did, which is, it's as if something traumatic in an unprecedented manner has occurred.
00:55:13.800And I've seen colleagues of mine who were, well, you said, for example, yourself, you weren't particularly prone to anxiety.
00:55:22.400I've seen people, colleagues of mine, who were the most solid people you could possibly imagine, like, literally hounded into the asylum by the, by the, by the forces of the mob.
00:55:33.200It's appalling, this, this, this, this, this demonizing cancel culture driven by narcissistic psychopaths.
00:55:41.980It's like, it could be the death of us all.
00:55:45.100And so, your response is absolutely typical.
00:55:48.280It's interesting, though, A, when you, you make that decision to flip the, what would you say, to flip the, the, to invert the reality, to go on the offensive rather than to be defensive and guilty.
00:56:02.460Then, well, that, especially if you are basing that on a genuine apprehension of your own innocence, that does change the playing landscape substantially.
00:56:13.360And so, that happened to you when, that was in the summer of 2020?
00:56:16.900Yeah, sometime in some, I talked to my colleague, a friend of mine, who I've written with many times, who said, I told him explicitly, I'm crossing the Rubicon.
00:56:25.740I don't, I don't care about my reputation anymore, what I, you know, my whatever academic reputation.
00:56:30.740I'm going to use what knowledge and, and, you know, sort of resources I have to say what I believe.
00:56:38.660Because I think that were there many, many lives at stake in the mistake, mistaken policies we've adopted.
00:56:45.840And I have the, had the background and the, and the, you know, sort of the, the, the, the life story where I could actually try to make some difference on that.
00:57:06.920Just, just, just for, just, just for clarity for what, relief from the, the, the anxiety.
00:57:12.620And then clarity for what I should do with my life.
00:57:15.460Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that's worth knowing, and obviously you discovered this, is that there is nothing that will save you in a complex situation except the truth.
00:57:24.860Now, it might not save you as well, but there is nothing else that you have.
00:57:30.440And so when you're backed into a corner, well, first of all, you better scour your soul.
00:57:34.500But second, what you've got to defend you, if you have anything, is definitely words of truth.
00:57:41.260Words that you believe to be the case.
00:57:43.800And so, and it's useful to notice that that can be on your side.
00:57:47.560And, you know, you have to, I don't know, the other thing I realized is if I'm living my life just for myself, it's hollow.
00:57:53.680If I, if I, if the, the purpose of my work before, I mean, if you look back on my work, I, what I wrote when I applied for tenure was that I was, I studied vulnerable populations.
00:58:04.060The health and well-being of vulnerable populations and how government policies and economic, economic realities affect the health and well-being.
00:58:12.980I mean, and if that, if that's true, that means that what I studied was for other people.
00:58:17.620That my actions and my, and my, was not inwardly focused, but focused on, on, on the, the, the people that I studied.
00:58:26.080Right. Well, so that means the crisis also forced you to really prioritize your values, you know, because, and it's tricky as a scientist, you know, and you see this when you're training graduate students is that, well, you have to follow the science properly and you have to be skeptical of your own results.
00:58:42.680And you have to be sure you're not publishing merely so that you publish and merely to burnish your reputation.
00:58:49.380And the same thing with attending conferences.
00:58:51.380On the other hand, you do have to publish and you have to market and communicate.
00:58:54.740There is a, there is a career development element to every enterprise.
00:58:59.680Now, the question then becomes, well, what do you do when those are set at odds with one another?
00:59:04.240And the answer is, well, if you're tilting towards pathological narcissism, you sacrifice the mission for the message.
00:59:13.420And there's plenty of corruption in science that's merely a consequence of that.
00:59:17.680But when you're backed into a corner the way you were, then you have to really start to understand what that means.
00:59:23.620It's like, are you in this to do the good that hypothetically motivates the science?
00:59:28.120Or are you going to sacrifice that, apologize, kowtow, and hypothetically protect your reputation?
00:59:35.500And that's, you're done as a scientist if you do that.
00:59:39.060I think you're done as an ethical actor.
00:59:42.960And you don't protect yourself against the mob because all that's happened is they've fundamentally emasculated you and you've been eliminated as a credible threat.
01:00:02.420It's hard to communicate to people just exactly what it's like to be a respected scientific practitioner and then to have all of that inverted and to see your colleagues fail to support you or participate in the inversion.
01:00:20.060It's quite the illuminating experience.
01:00:31.020Yeah, you bet, because that's, that betrayal and excommunication, that's exactly what it is.
01:00:35.460So then, okay, so you decided to, that you were, the devil take the hindmost and that you were going to say what you needed, what you believed to be true.
01:00:56.500The American president at the time, President Trump, he was, I think his instincts were against the lockdowns, but his, his, he basically thought that if he, if he lifted, if he let Tony Fauci not have the reins, that he would lose the election.
01:01:16.580Fast forward a few months to October, 2020.
01:01:18.520And a colleague of mine from Harvard, Martin Kulldorff, who's a fantastic biostatistician, he helped design the vaccine safety surveillance systems that, statistical systems that the FDA and the CDC use in the U.S. with the statistical work.
01:01:33.960Invited me and Sunetra Gupta, who's a great epidemiologist at Oxford University, to a small conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
01:01:44.500We arrived basically just to compare notes.
01:01:47.320Like we weren't thinking about issuing a statement or anything, but we realized that we'd arrived at the same place regarding the strategy of how to manage the pandemic.
01:01:56.540The summer had seen a decline in cases.
01:01:59.580There's some, some spread in like Arizona and the South and some other, some countries, but the threat of March seemed to have subsided.
01:02:06.660But it was really clear from the data that the disease was coming back in the fall, that there was going to be spread of the disease again.
01:02:13.440And, and it was also clear to me as a social scientist, looking at the pattern of political action, that the lockdowns were also going to come back because the fear was not gone.
01:02:26.160All the infrastructure for the lockdowns were there.
01:02:27.880And so what we, we, we wrote this very short document, one page long, called the Great Barrington Declaration.
01:02:36.080We wrote it in very simple language because we wanted to reach regular people.
01:02:41.840Because I, I, I thought to myself and we thought to ourselves that it was really regular people that needed to know that there wasn't a consensus in favor of the lockdown.
01:02:51.360That people were being misled, that the idea that all scientists agreed that there was a consensus, that the science said, let's lock down, was not true.
01:03:01.040In fact, many, many reputable scientists disagreed with that.
01:03:04.900And yet they stayed silent because of the fear of, of social ostracism, fear of, you know, Tony Fauci controls billions of dollars of, of federal money on, for research.
01:03:15.780That, what's not just the money so that you can do your experiments, they, it controls the social status of scientists.
01:03:21.160You know, you don't get tenure at a top university, medical university, unless you get NIH funding in the United States.
01:03:30.000So it's the social status as well as even more than the money itself.
01:03:33.720Well, it's not just the social status either.
01:03:48.200And so this is, this is, this is nuts and bolts, this is, this is nuts and bolts material here.
01:03:53.980Yeah, you know, I was very ill when the Great Barrington Declaration came out.
01:03:57.680So I wasn't as, what would you say, aware of everything that was going on as I might have been under different conditions.
01:04:05.620But one of the things I do remember, and I've been struck by this continually, is that, well, it was demonized and put off to the side as the work of essentially like scientific outsiders and extremists.
01:04:18.360And what's so interesting about that, I found this repeatedly because I've talked to a lot of reprehensible people over the last few years, such as yourself.
01:04:26.160And I found that even though I know as well as anyone how easy it is for people to be demonized for their views and how often that's purely an invention of psychopathic narcissists, very often, trying to score points at the expense of someone's reputation.
01:04:45.820It's still the case that even the smallest slur in relationship to someone's professional reputation is enough to make, to make even me skeptical about who I'm talking to.
01:04:59.920Because you think, it's very hard to think, well, if there's enough smoke, there's probably some fire, right?
01:05:06.620And that's actually a pretty intelligent rule of thumb decision because there's 7 billion people out there.
01:05:12.260You're not going to listen to all of them.
01:05:13.440And so one way you cut through the complexity of figuring out who to listen to is you don't listen to people whose reputations have been savaged.
01:05:22.400And you don't have time to sort that out like a legal trial, you know, but what it does mean is that reputation savaging can be weaponized.
01:05:29.980And there are people who are absolutely stellar at that.
01:05:34.900And the Great Barrington Declaration was definitely savage, ignored and savaged both.
01:06:28.260But four days after we wrote it, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three of us that were the primary co-authors of the declaration fringe epidemiologists.
01:07:19.760The level of propaganda is remarkable.
01:07:22.620I was calling for focused protection of vulnerable people.
01:07:25.860I was calling for a conversation among public health people, how better to protect old people who are dying in droves as a consequence of not being protected by the lockdowns.
01:07:33.580I wanted, you know, how you protect old people is complicated, right?
01:07:38.580So it depends on the local living circumstances of each person, of the old people in the community.
01:07:43.640The answer in, you know, Alberta, Canada is going to be very different than the answer in, you know, in, like, highly, in, like, you know, Southern California or something.
01:08:23.220It hadn't in the spring, and it didn't protect them in the fall, and it continued to not protect them.
01:08:29.880So, essentially, they closed their, the top of the federal public health bureaucracy closed the minds of public health against the possibility of focused protection.
01:08:43.780And the purpose of the demonization was so that they could tell the public that every reputable scientist, the consensus of scientists, agreed with their plan.
01:08:56.520Well, that, and I suppose the motivation for that was the ability to publicly trumpet the staggering effectiveness and decisiveness of their simple and potent plan to protect, right?
01:09:11.400And so, for me, again, that's a kind of unbelievably narcissistic virtue signaling is you want all the credit that would go along with actually dealing with the problem while doing none of the effort whatsoever necessary to actually understand the problem and to implement the complex multidimensional solutions that would be demanded.
01:09:31.960I mean, actually, I remember seeing a podcast with you and your daughter, I think, during that time.
01:09:37.660I was quite moved, actually, by it, both by the devotion your daughter has to you and also the illness you were going through.
01:09:44.020So, I don't think you have anything to, I mean, what you went through is tremendous.
01:09:50.440Anyway, so, we wrote this, started getting, I mean, but the thing is, I was emotionally better prepared to deal with the blowback from that.
01:10:16.400The nucleus of this anti-lockdown movement was put in place.
01:10:20.440And then as time has gone on, what's happened is that that anti-lockdown movement, as people have seen the reality of what the lockdowns really have meant.
01:10:29.480Well, lockdowns is not just, you know, you're forced quarantining at home.
01:10:33.340Lockdown is the ideology that we must keep people apart from each other.
01:10:38.040The ideology that we have to treat each other as biohackers.
01:10:40.440And that the state has the right to impose that from the top down, right, which is a major part of the ideology, for everyone's good.
01:10:49.060You know, one of the things I also knew, and I don't know how much you know about this, and maybe you know a lot about it.
01:10:54.700You know, the Nazi eradication campaign started out as public health initiatives.
01:11:03.420And so, and that disgust demonization was part of that process.
01:11:08.540But it was all put forward initially under the guise of protecting the public and doing the best even for the suffering.
01:11:15.240So, the Nazis were extremely good at leveraging a false compassion on the narcissistic front to produce unbelievably pathological outcomes.
01:11:23.160And that went along also with the notion, the implicit notion that, well, the state has the right to do whatever's necessary if public health is at risk.
01:11:37.800Yeah, well, maybe you're, well, here's my new theory, political theory, or part of it.
01:11:43.840But if your response to an emergency makes you terrified and tyrannical, and one of the consequences of that is your claim that the emergency justifies the granting of all due power to you, you are not the right leader.
01:12:11.780Second, you're willing to extend the use of tyrannical power to justify response to your fear.
01:12:20.520That's also an indication that you're not just frightened, you're a frightened tyrant.
01:12:24.700And third, the claim that you're making that the situation is so dire that you and the people who think like you must be given all the power is a moral hazard of the first order.
01:12:36.900And so, there's three identifying features so that everyone listening and watching can understand who not to trust in the leadership position.
01:12:45.640Is the emergency terrifies them, they become tyrants, and it's so convenient that they also get all the power.
01:12:53.460It's like, no, those are not the leaders you want.
01:12:55.660Not even if the emergency is real, let alone when it's manufactured, you know, for the benefit of people who want all the power and all the unearned credit.
01:13:07.640I think that the people who draw power to themselves, you absolutely need to be skeptical.
01:13:15.400At the very least, you want checks and balances, right?
01:13:18.500So, like, imagine if we'd had an honest and open debate about pandemic policy, like, without this demonization, without this cancel culture kind of overlay.
01:13:29.340We would have won that debate, Jordan.
01:13:31.400Because it was already clear in October 2020, first, that the lockdowns had done tremendous harm or continue to do tremendous harm to the poor, the vulnerable, to working class people.
01:13:43.380It was already clear that they'd failed to stop the disease from spreading.
01:13:49.980And then, third, it was already clear who the vulnerable people really were, like, the highest risk people.
01:13:56.900Like, so, at that point, if there'd been an open debate without this demonization, the authoritarians would have lost the scientific consent.
01:14:07.480I mean, at the time when I wrote the declaration, I thought we actually were in the minority among scientists.
01:14:14.960Yeah, no, I suspect it's probably not true.
01:14:19.940But it's also almost impossible to overestimate the probability that people will be silenced by intimidation.
01:14:29.600And we should take this very seriously.
01:14:31.520Like, look, you said—and this is borne out by the experience of literally the hundreds of people I've talked to to whom this has happened—you experienced the exclusion and mobbing as something akin to a life-threatening illness.
01:14:52.220It's like, yes, absolutely it could be the majority, because it's a minority of power-mad narcissists who twist the narrative to their liking and their—or to their advantage.
01:15:05.780And they're perfectly willing to take out anybody who stands in their way.
01:15:09.220And so it's certainly probable, I would think, that the more sensible scientists knew that something was amiss on the COVID lockdown front and were very hesitant to step forward and speak.
01:15:22.860And you can say, well, aren't they cowardly?
01:15:53.860So, and I lost two of them, but I didn't lose the third one.
01:15:58.240And most people aren't in a position where they have established three independent sources of income.
01:16:03.640So, like, I lost my professorship and I lost my clinical practice, but I didn't lose my business.
01:16:09.020And so, and then I also had the support of my family, like full support of my family and extended family and of a very large network of friends.
01:16:17.560And so, many, many people who are put in a corner have, some of them have none of those, what would you say, forces in their corner and on their side.
01:17:08.180And what I found in compensation was this tremendous community of people that saw what was happening and that found what I was saying meaningful to them.
01:17:21.180I mean, I just, it's hard to convey to people how much that meant.
01:17:25.800It really, it made me feel like my, that what I was doing was worthwhile, probably really for the first time.
01:17:33.160I mean, it's fine to get CV lines with, like, you know, published papers and fancy journals.
01:17:38.200But to actually have that move people to action, to give them the ability to speak up when an injustice is being done, that's, there's something, just you can't replace it.
01:17:54.460Well, I guess that's the reward, that's the reward you accrue for having undergone the trials of exclusion and mobbing, right?
01:18:03.000And that ability to ally yourself to the degree that you're extraordinarily careful and fortunate with what you believe to be true.
01:18:13.760Yes, and that's definitely something worth, well, there isn't anything that's more worth discovering than that, some fundamental sense.
01:18:19.500Now, let's talk for a moment about, you said that, you know, the Barrington Declaration was marginalized and demonized, both of those, with some success on both fronts.
01:18:29.460And I would say, yes, with some success, but not with entire success.
01:18:32.600But let's also talk about how your communication on the public front was thwarted.
01:18:40.080So I've been watching the Twitter trust and safety, the former trust and safety executive, Yoel Roth, being roasted over a slow fire, or maybe a quick fire, in Congress with a certain degree of satisfaction.
01:18:53.660And it's clearly the case that social media enterprises and Twitter, the most egregious among them, perhaps, although we don't know what happened at Facebook, etc.
01:19:03.120You were definitely persona non grata on the social media communication front.
01:26:17.780And so the idea is essentially that the triumvirate acting as a unity at those high levels can be
01:26:27.120extraordinarily efficient, and if it's benevolent, and if it's benevolent, there's the rub, then it can march forward, you know, with unparalleled success.
01:26:35.520And you get people like our appalling prime minister admiring the CCP, for example, for its ability to move forward on the environmental front without, you know, paying attention to such niceties as, let's say, parliament and public opinion.
01:26:50.080And that's that delusion of fascist deficiency.
01:26:52.760And the thing about United Systems is they can move very, very quickly when they need to, and that's well and good if they're moving in the right direction.
01:27:01.220But the right direction is hard to determine, and if they're moving in the wrong direction, then God help us all.
01:27:06.980And this collusion between the social media companies and the security apparatus and the broader media world, which is still occurring because they won't cover the Twitter files, is fascist in the highest order.
01:27:21.280And it's definitely a threat to the integrity of, well, I would say, proper governance worldwide, but certainly proper governance within the United States.
01:27:32.060I think part of the reason the public hasn't woken up to it, this is certainly true in Canada, Canadians would rather believe, for example, that the trucker convoy was run by mega-inspired American Republicans who wanted to destabilize Canadian democracy, which is what our bloody prime minister told them.
01:27:54.280I mean, they had, like, Sikh music and—I mean, it was like—
01:27:58.380Well, there's a huge coterie of Sikh truckers in Canada.
01:28:01.260Yeah, well, Canadians would rather believe that, though, that this was a conspiratorial enterprise motivated, really, by—and funded by mega-Americans.
01:28:11.420Most Canadians still believe that, 51%.
01:28:13.980And the reason they still believe that is because it's easier to believe that than it is to believe that you can't—that your leaders, Chrystia Freeland, Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, are compromised entirely by their globalist utopian agenda and lying about absolutely everything, and that you can't trust the legacy media anymore.
01:28:35.160And Canadians just—they're not capable of swallowing that bitter pill.
01:28:40.320And, like, I can understand why, you know, in our country, and in yours, too, to a large degree, the fundamental institutions have been reasonably trustworthy for a long time.
01:28:50.940And then to understand that, no, you have to now go out and—you have to go and ferret out the truth, and that there are conspiracy-like actions proceeding on all sorts of domains.
01:29:03.780It's like, well, it's no wonder people don't—can't go there with ease.
01:29:08.320Yeah, I mean, I don't want to believe it either.
01:29:11.740Until I see it, I'm going to assume the best of people, but when you see the federal government acting in this way, in direct violation of fundamental commitments to civil rights, like free speech, and, you know, it's just there in emails in black and white, where—and, you know, and the way that they convey it, it's as if they—it's so obvious that they're doing the right thing.
01:29:41.900Oh, yeah, we just suppressed this because we didn't want people to be harmed by this bad information.
01:29:46.620Well, how do you know this information is bad?
01:30:32.540That was the feature of the old dark age, was that there was a high clerisy that could inerringly distinguish truth from falsity and suppress falsities for the benefit of the public at large.
01:30:46.140That is the age we are currently living in.
01:30:48.940Yeah, well, it's a degenerate, it's a degenerate theocracy, right?
01:30:52.860But the, what, running itself under the guise of a kind of rampant secularism.
01:30:59.140It's really something to see, and it's so interesting.
01:31:02.160Maybe we could touch on this in a minute.
01:31:04.040I knew 10 years ago that the woke types in the universities would go after the STEM fields, and everyone thought at that point that I was being conspiratorial and paranoid, and I thought, no, no, I know how scientists work.
01:31:20.380Most of them are obsessively focused on their narrow specialization.
01:31:55.540In the California system now, UCAL system, 80% of applicants to STEM positions are rejected on the basis of inadequate diversity, inclusivity, and equity statements.
01:32:07.620You see that Texas yesterday, the University of Texas, revoked its commitment to requiring DIE statements as a precondition for employment.
01:32:18.780And then, of course, denied that they ever had such a policy in place to begin with.
01:32:22.200I mean, those are just the de facto loyalty oaths.
01:32:26.180I mean, that's essentially what they are.
01:32:27.440Like, you're, I mean, it's a statement of faith that you belong to this particular, you know, faith tradition.
01:32:35.540You know, documented by the DEI statements.
01:32:38.140I mean, I just, I think it's one of these things where, like, I never imagined that the free countries of the West would come to a situation where, you know, like, the basic civil rights, checks and balances of power, all these, like, norms of liberal civilization that I thought everyone agreed with were actually in question.
01:33:04.000I certainly, you know, before the pandemic, I would have thought of them as annoying, but I wouldn't have thought of them as an existential threat.
01:33:15.400Well, the, well, you know, the other thing we can think about, too, here is that we don't want to underestimate the pervasive attractiveness of this set of ideas.
01:33:25.260I mean, it devastated Eastern Europe, Russia, and China, and that's still going on in China.
01:33:36.620They promise an egalitarianism that is not only impossible to produce but would be horrible in its realization but that looks on the surface extraordinarily attractive.
01:33:49.140They appeal to a kind of domestic ethos, too.
01:33:51.840You know, Ben Shapiro said to me one time, he said, well, at home, I'm a communist.
01:33:57.080And what he meant by that was that in his family, he has children, it's to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.
01:34:04.480And that might work perfectly well in the domestic environment, you know, in a limited manner, but as a scalable political enterprise, it's a complete bloody disaster.
01:34:16.240It's just obvious that that's the case.
01:34:17.960And, you know, when I grew up, we had the Soviet Union as evil example of this woke pseudo-communist ideology, and that kept everybody in check.
01:34:29.320But that threat diminished substantially in 1989, and it allowed these ideas to hold sway once again in the West, you know, aided and abetted by idiot intellectuals, especially on the literary criticism front.
01:34:42.340But that's just pervaded the institutions of higher education like mad.
01:34:47.940But we need to give the devil his due.
01:34:49.720I mean, these ideas hold sway over the minds of hundreds of millions of people because they offer attractiveness on the utopian front that's not easy for conservatives or classical liberals or scientists to mitigate against with their insistence on individual autonomy and responsibility.
01:35:10.600And the importance of tradition and the necessity of rational inquiry.
01:35:16.020Like, I'm a big—I mean, I think communities are incredibly important.
01:35:20.040Like, thick communities where people are embedded and they draw support.
01:35:26.020Like, even people who think like that should be opposed to these ideas because these ideas destroy communities.
01:35:32.820We need to have checks—I mean, just—let's go back to our discussion about lockdowns.
01:35:36.820What do lockdowns do other than destroy communities?
01:35:39.360It's not an individual thing to say—individualistic to say that lockdowns are a bad idea.
01:35:47.240They destroy the communities that provide support for the poor.
01:35:50.800And the poorest communities, most—well, the other thing, too, is that, look, for all you leftists who are listening, all 15 of you—and this is why I like people like Russell Brand and to some degree Joe Rogan.
01:36:03.500It's like, why do you believe, if you're on the left, that fascist collusion at the highest levels of power is going to serve the communities that you might even rightly be attempting to serve?
01:36:17.300You know, the genuine leftists, and I've known many in my life, say, labor leader types, you know, who are trying to give a real voice to the working class, and that's a necessary thing to do.
01:36:26.620And to push back against the gigantism and excess of the corporate world, that's a valid thing to do.
01:36:33.240Why in the world would you think that this top-down collusion between government, state, and media is in the interests of the people that you purport to serve?
01:36:43.760I mean, I've encountered many people on the left, like the honest left, who joined the anti-lockdown movement.
01:36:49.820Sunetra Gupta, who wrote the Great Banjo Declaration with me, for instance, is famously on the left.
01:36:56.380So I think that there is a tradition within the left that is solidly devoted to basic liberal ideas, just as there is on the right.
01:37:05.360And I think that's the coalition that will win.
01:37:09.660And the lockdowns, the whole strategy we followed to drive the pandemic, at least for me, has just brought me to a realization about how unimportant other kinds of political designations are.
01:37:28.420I mean, really the key thing, the key unifying thing is this, you know, this devotion, this commitment to checks and balances, a commitment to sort of enlightenment ideals, a commitment to religious tolerance, to freedom of speech.
01:37:46.160And freedom of speech and conscience probably foremost among those.
01:37:50.220And I think foremost because, as far as I can tell, all the other processes that keep systems of good governance in place are dependent, how could it be otherwise, on freedom of conscience, thought, and speech.
01:38:04.840Because that's the mechanism by which complex problems are solved.
01:38:08.900And so if you give up that mechanism, that's the mechanism of thought itself.
01:38:13.000And I mean, what we're doing today, well, both of us are trying to update our views of the world to some degree, as well as to communicate with other people.
01:38:20.740But that's all part of the process of analysis, diagnosis, and repair of systems that have gone astray.
01:38:27.860And unless you can engage in that freely, then they just go more astray.
01:38:32.400And the consequences of that, as we saw with the lockdown and are continuing to see with the lockdown, the consequences of that are, well, we'll see how cataclysmic they are.
01:38:42.380You know, I thought, for example, that part of the reason we're in a war with Russia is probably, perhaps, and maybe this is only 10% of the problem or less, world leaders weren't getting together and talking because of the lockdowns.
01:38:56.740It's like, I don't know how often the president of the United States and the leader of Russia should get together and talk, but never is definitely the wrong answer.
01:39:06.900And if you think you can do that electronically and do it successfully, you're naive and careless beyond, what would you call it, beyond forgiveness, beyond the requirement for forgiveness.
01:39:20.060And I think it extends not just to, like, top leaders of countries, but also just to regular interactions with people.
01:39:28.220Like, a lot of the fracture of communities, you know, like, just take my own example of the friendships that have been broken.
01:39:37.940If we'd actually been meeting with other faculty members regularly just because we ran into them in the office building, I just find it hard to, like, it would have been much more difficult to demonize me.
01:39:49.680If Francis Collins or Tony Fauci had just called me and spoke and said, here's what we were thinking, here's why we're concerned, let's change it.
01:40:23.740Just as, you know, and to, like, to have this ideology where you have to be a part or replace everything just by Zoom just doesn't work.
01:40:32.000Yeah, well, the other thing that's lurking underneath all of this that we're going to have to contend with is that I think virtualization breeds mistrust.
01:40:41.200And so what I've noticed when I've conducted virtualized enterprises is that they go fine when everyone agrees, but they go very badly as soon as disagreement emerges.
01:40:54.340And I think it's because if I disagree with you, it's easy for that to produce a halo and for me to think, well, we disagree on everything.
01:41:01.340If we were getting together and having a coffee and bumping into each other in the hallway, we'd see that it's one minor disagreement in a host of agreements.
01:41:13.440And so that's foregone in the virtual world.
01:41:16.480And then I also think that this is worse, and I don't know how dangerous a threat it is, but I think it's a paramount threat.
01:41:23.600I also think that virtualization enables psychopathy because psychopaths are actually held at bay by the perils of face-to-face communication.
01:41:34.160And if they can operate behind the scenes, which they can certainly do online, there's an immense amount of online criminal activity and exploitation.
01:41:43.360I mean, the whole pornography industry is nothing but that.
01:41:45.760And then immense, like, swaths of criminals operating online, and then all the troll behavior as well.
01:41:52.800Like, we may be setting up a world in the virtual space where the psychopaths and the predators and the predatory parasites, because that's what a psychopath is, they can just run roughshod.
01:44:08.100So the main thing is the public health authorities made tremendous mistakes.
01:44:12.900We can just see at least that, at least mistakes during the pandemic.
01:44:16.880The public deserves a full accounting of what decisions were made, who made them, and why.
01:44:25.080There needs to be an honest COVID commission on the order of like the 9-11 commission that honestly looks at these and answers these questions.
01:44:36.160So I've been working on a document called the Norfolk Group document.
01:44:39.780You can go to norfolkgroup.org and find it with a bunch of my colleagues where we've set an agenda.
01:44:46.620It's just questions that an honest COVID commission would ask.
01:44:50.800And so I want to help set that agenda.
01:44:52.340Well, maybe we should do a podcast with like two or three members of that group.
01:44:56.300When you guys are far enough along to feel that that would be useful, why don't we do that?
01:45:03.620And you could suggest to me who these people should be.
01:45:26.700So right now the next step I think is we're going to try to translate it, get it translated into multiple languages.
01:45:31.660And try to contact commissions that are already starting to form, you know, parliamentary inquiries or commissions that are already starting to form.
01:45:41.660So that they have these set of questions in front of them that they can ask.
01:46:01.260But, you know, why wasn't a—why didn't the randomized trials for children for this vaccine have as a clinical endpoint the prevention of hospitalization or death?
01:46:10.600Why did it only have antibody production as the clinical endpoint?
01:46:27.600So I think—I mean, like, anyway, so we have, like, we have, like, a just—it's, you know, on 10 different—why were the schools closed?
01:46:33.320What was done to mitigate the harms of school closure?
01:47:00.660But we respect civil liberties next time.
01:47:02.980I think the outcome of any honest process will be that lockdown will be a dirty word, that we will shudder and whore whenever we hear it, and anyone that proposes it will be seen as a charlatan.
01:47:12.400And I think that is the ultimate outcome of any honest inquiry.
01:47:19.580And I'm going to—I'm working toward, like, making sure those honest inquiries happen.
01:47:23.900Okay, so for everyone watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Jay for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
01:47:30.580I usually walk people through a bit of a biographical discussion about how their career unfolded and how their interests, their meaningful interests, made themselves manifest in their life.
01:47:41.060So that's on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
01:47:43.240For all of those of you who are watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.
01:47:47.440And Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, thank you very much for talking to me today.
01:47:52.540It was a pleasure to walk through all this, I suppose, a strange sort of pleasure to walk through all this dismal material with you.
01:48:00.700But to see it laid clear in the manner you managed it, that's extraordinarily helpful.
01:48:07.080And so—and thanks to the crew here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for helping me out today to make this happen.
01:48:14.820So, good to see you, Jay, and, well, we'll talk again when the Norfolk Group project is ready to accrue some additional public communication.
01:48:27.340Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. A great honor to talk with you.