00:04:03.740I have an MD and a PhD in economics, of all things.
00:04:06.540I've been a professor in the medical school at Stanford for 20-some years.
00:04:10.240I've written on infectious disease policy for a long time.
00:04:14.400When COVID hit, I sort of came to a different view than many people, I guess, that the disease was pretty widespread already, that there was a very steep age gradient in risk factors.
00:04:26.060And so we should follow a very different policy than we did follow.
00:04:30.540The policy, eventually, we labeled it the Great Barrington Declaration.
00:04:35.060The idea is focused protection of vulnerable people and then letting, you know, children go back to life, low-risk people get back to life,
00:04:43.120because the harms from the lockdowns themselves, maybe we'll talk about this during our podcast,
00:04:48.080but the harms from the lockdowns themselves are so bad that you don't want, you just want to avoid them.
00:04:52.720That document, which I wrote with a couple of people from, with Sinatra Gupta from Oxford and Martin Kulder from Harvard, that went viral.
00:05:02.920So anyways, I'm sure we'll talk about that, but that's my background.
00:05:06.640I've done this kind of work for a long time and been teaching the standard for a long time.
00:05:12.480And you were one of the people, together with Sinatra Gupta and others, who were articulating the view during the pandemic itself, the main section of it,
00:05:21.920that lockdowns were very harmful, that many of the other public health policies that were being pursued were mistaken.
00:05:29.220And one of the responses was to ignore you and, in fact, to censor many other things that were being said.
00:05:35.000So here we are, we can sort of look back and assess how things have gone.
00:05:41.300As you look back, do you think you were right? Do you think you were wrong?
00:05:45.720What is your assessment of how it's played out?
00:05:48.540I think we got a lot right very early.
00:05:53.420So we meaning, I mean, it wasn't just me alone.
00:05:56.080There was a very large number of other infectious disease epidemiologists and other health policy people that had shared my view.
00:06:06.420So, for instance, in April of 2020, I ran a study looking at how extensively the disease had already spread in Santa Clara County, California, where I live, in L.A. County,
00:06:19.280and then another study with Major League Baseball all around the country.
00:06:23.300We found in L.A. and in Santa Clara was that there was 3% or 4% prevalence of COVID antibodies.
00:06:32.180What that means is if you have the antibody, we can argue about immunity, but that certainly means that you've been infected and recovered.
00:06:38.240So that means that there's a lot more spread than people would realize.
00:06:46.080There's like 50 times more infections than cases.
00:06:48.440That meant the lockdown, in April of 2020, meant that the lockdown could not work.
00:06:51.960Like if you were thinking, okay, we get the lockdown, we get to zero, that was gone.
00:06:57.160Of course, that turned out to be true.
00:06:59.060We didn't actually end up getting rid of the disease, unfortunately.
00:07:02.740The, and there have been like 100 of these similar studies that have been done since that sort of verify the same result we found.
00:07:54.560The evidence for this is that there are antibody studies, again, from stored blood banks in Europe, in Africa, that find COVID antibodies from stored blood in fall of 2020.
00:08:10.460How did it get there unless someone, someone from China went there?
00:08:15.020You know, of course, you had these massive outbreaks in Italy in February, Iran in February 2020.
00:08:23.840By the time we locked down, this disease spread so easily, so fast.
00:08:28.880And it just doesn't take a ton of contact with the air of people, someone's breathing with it, that it was not, it was far too late to, if the idea was to get the disease down to zero.
00:08:38.940Now, if the idea was to get the disease, slow the spread so that we can build hospital capacity and things like that, well, lockdowns failed at that too.
00:08:47.960We didn't actually build hospital capacity, we did all kinds of other things that, and there was this like sense of we should keep locking down, like, you know, the disease would come and go based on, you know, its physics.
00:09:01.640But we had this illusion of control over the spread of the disease.
00:09:04.800We can talk more about why I think lockdowns failed.
00:09:06.660There's a deep social science reason, I think, why it failed.
00:09:09.160Mainly, I don't think lockdowns in a society that's as unequal as ours could possibly succeed.
00:09:40.120So I'm part of this case where we actually got to depose Anthony Fauci.
00:09:45.120In the early days of the pandemic, he sent one of his trusted aides, a man named Cliff Lane, to China on this, essentially this trip that the World Health Organization organized.
00:09:55.960They came back from the trip, completely impressed that China had conquered the disease in January 2020.
00:10:01.360Now, of course, there wasn't a lot of testing going on in January 2020.
00:10:07.300China, as you say, Francis, has this track record of authoritarian power that's just alien to the West.
00:10:14.980At least it was alien to the West before March 2020.
00:10:17.580And so it really – I think it surprised everybody.
00:10:22.460I saw this interview of Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist at Imperial College London, talking about the Chinese model and how stunned he was that the West actually adopted.
00:10:35.580He was actually happy about it, but he was very surprised.
00:10:38.820I think it was fear and panic, Francis, at the end of the day.
00:10:41.700People looked at the Chinese model and said, oh, gosh, they got rid of it by January 2020.
00:10:45.740They looked at Italy, which was a total mess.
00:10:49.340They looked at New York City, and they were just scared.
00:10:53.600I think fear led us to completely irrational choices, choices that we never would have made had we not made – had we not panicked in March of 2020.
00:11:02.520Jay, why didn't we look at – because – and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I understood by the Great Barrington Declaration is you were saying, look, this is a way we've always dealt with pandemics.
00:11:14.860Through centuries, this is the most effective way of dealing with it.
00:11:20.120Why did we suddenly throw away hundreds of years of learning how to deal with a pandemic and try this new approach?
00:11:28.620I mean, I think – I have a couple of things.
00:11:32.280I just told you the one about fear and panic.
00:11:34.180I think that that certainly was probably the most important explanation.
00:11:38.180But, Jay, that would have been the case always.
00:11:39.860People would always have been scared in a pandemic.
00:11:42.520But I think the problem was like this one looked – this one's – you know, if you look at the actual infection fatality rate, it's more than those century pandemics, like maybe 1918.
00:11:54.240I mean, so we're looking at this going, okay, this is the big one.
00:11:58.040This is the – we've waited a century for this pandemic.
00:12:02.880But there's some other aspects of this, right?
00:12:04.500So imagine – I don't know for certain this is true, but it may be true – that this was a lab leak from a gain-of-functional work, right?
00:12:11.940So from a program of research aimed at increasing the infectivity of a pathogen, what if you're responsible for that research program and you fear that it's like out of your lab or out of a lab that you supported?
00:12:31.500And you're a major figure like Tony Fauci or Francis Collins or Jeremy Farrar.
00:12:36.960I mean, you're going to want to do absolutely everything you possibly can to, like, put the genie back in the bottle.
00:12:43.480And, you know, they don't really have a lot of social science background.
00:12:46.700They really don't have a lot of – frankly, they're not even – many of them are just lab scientists, not really epidemiologists.
00:12:51.560They don't understand the limitations of these kinds of – or the harms from these kinds of interventions.
00:12:58.740For them, it's just, okay, it's a model.
00:13:01.500In the model, you make sure newborns don't interact with their moms and all of a sudden the disease goes away or whatever.
00:14:39.100I mean, you just, you know, it's like a very antithesis of science that one person puts on the mantle of essentially the high pope of science.
00:14:50.440Science requires people to, like, disagree with each other.
00:14:55.160I've been wrong lots of times in my life.
00:14:56.880And then the wrongness is adjudicated not by, like, some high pope or high priest.
00:15:01.860It's adjudicated by, you know, you run a study with some data, a fantastic study, and then it turns out that my theory was wrong, a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact.
00:15:14.900That's the point of the realm in science, not like Tony Fauci on high declaring this is the science.
00:15:22.740And that's what we've had through the pandemic.
00:15:24.160Martin Kulder wrote about this as, like, the end of the age of enlightenment, the return of the dark age.
00:15:29.160The dark age, what that means is science facts are determined by authority, not by data, not by reason, discussion, not by discussion and debate.
00:15:42.800And you mentioned Anthony Fauci several times, and I'll be honest with you, I haven't followed the details of COVID, particularly since in the UK it was kind of over, you might say.
00:15:55.860You know, certainly the public policy measures that I was so strongly against, they kind of stopped.
00:16:03.200And I think a lot of people felt the way I did, which is I just want to forget about this and never have to think about it again.
00:16:08.360I promptly then got COVID again, but never mind.
00:16:10.360But anyway, I haven't had to, I haven't, I haven't been forced to think about it in the way that I think I was before where I was going.
00:16:55.100I think the thing about Tony Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, the reason why they're so important is because they sit on a top of $45 billion, $50 billion of money that funds every single biomedical scientist of note in the United States and many in the UK as well, actually.
00:17:15.100And the problem there is not – that itself is not a problem.
00:17:19.440I mean, I fully support public support of science.
00:17:22.500But the problem is that if that person or that set of people then involves themselves in controversial topics of health policy, a lot of scientists will keep themselves silent for fear of losing that support.
00:17:38.380And it's not just money, actually, because many people don't know this, but like – so I've had tenure at a medical school, at a top medical school.
00:17:47.060In order to get tenure, you actually have to – you have to get an NIH grant.
00:17:53.600And if you don't succeed at that, you're not going to get tenure.
00:17:57.160Social status in science depends on earning the approval of people like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins.
00:18:04.680And so when they speak up and say, gosh, you know, this – all this other – all these other ideas, the Great Barrington Declaration is nonsense, a lot of scientists are going to take the message, take the hint.
00:18:18.280You know, they don't – they're not directly involved in health policy.
00:18:21.860They just won't speak up even if they have qualms about the policy.
00:18:25.680And some people will – you know, it's like, you know, will someone rid me of the troublesome priest kind of thing.
00:18:34.020Like you'll get like people just, you know, ad hoc attacking because they want to curry favor.
00:18:41.240It's, I think, very, very dangerous to have this kind of power over the social status and funding of scientists and then also be so closely involved with health policy decision making in a country,
00:18:53.360which is exactly, I think, why Tony Fauci has come under such criticism.
00:18:57.840And the problem is with this as well, possibly even more serious than that, Jay, is how much it damages the ordinary person's perception of scientists and doctors where they lose their trust in them, which is a really dangerous place to be as a society.
00:19:54.460And so to me, it's completely understandable.
00:19:56.860Now, on top of that, you have these vaccine mandates, which made it, you know, people that distrusted the vaccine now had to face this decision about whether they were willing to lose their jobs.
00:20:24.780I think what would have gone a long way is just humility by scientists, by doctors.
00:20:29.740Instead, maybe it's less so in the UK, but the United States – I mean, humility was probably the very last word I used to characterize the response of our public health.
00:20:38.240And it also seemed like the government and the health authorities, they didn't really treat people like adults in the sense that if – like, for example, if you tell me that a vaccine is 100% safe, it's safe, I know you're lying.
00:20:58.380It might be 99.99% safe, but it's not 100% safe.
00:21:03.480And anyone who claims otherwise is clearly lying or hiding something.
00:21:07.120And likewise, people who pretend vaccines don't have side effects or that they have, you know, high levels of efficacy when clearly they don't.
00:21:14.820It seemed like I think a lot of the undermining that you're talking about happened because actually the authorities refused to be honest with us and treat us like adults.
00:21:25.480I mean, in fact, you can look at how they talk about the vaccine rollout, actually even the lockdowns.
00:21:32.380Actually, in the UK, they actually had a group inside your SAGE, which is the scientific organization that advises the government, called the Nudge Unit.
00:21:41.200The idea is to manipulate the people of the UK, the use of behavioral psychology to try to manipulate people, essentially like a propaganda techniques, and then overstating just exactly like you said, Konstantin, about basic things, right?
00:21:58.200So vaccines, it takes a while to understand the full safety profile.
00:22:03.400You test it on, what, 50,000, 100,000 people in the trials, but then you send it out to billions.
00:22:11.680You're going to learn things about what the vaccine does, and it's not all going to be all good, right?
00:22:16.060So the myocarditis in young men from the mRNA vaccines, we didn't really know that from the trials.
00:22:24.340I work on vaccine safety for a living, and it takes decades sometimes to fully understand, certainly years, to promise that you're going to have no side effects?
00:26:51.380The problem is, most people are not in an economic situation that can abide a lockdown, or even a social situation that can abide a lockdown.
00:29:49.460Is that message is like, well, if I'm not able to stay home because I have to feed my family, I'm not, I'm not, I'm like endangering the community.
00:29:56.460That's a terrible message to send to, to the, to a community, to the vast numbers of people that actually couldn't stay home or stay safe just because of basic, you know, basic economic reasons.
00:30:07.140So I just, I think it's, it's, it's, it's that deep inequality and then this like valorization of, of being rich enough or having the resources to be able to, to comply with the orders.
00:30:18.340And then even there, you still have like, you know, like Matt Hancock violating them, Boris Johnson violating them, like in, in where I live, Gavin Newsom having this French laundry dinner.
00:30:30.320I mean, actually, frankly, whenever I saw that, I would celebrate, not, not because of the hypocrisy of it, although there was a little bit of that, I have to admit, but, but, but also because, you know, people being human, it's fine.
00:30:42.520It's like, I just, it's, it's just a reminder that everybody needs to be, needs, needs connection.
00:30:48.300Jay, let me explore, you know, the devil's advocate counter arguments here, because there are a lot of people who supported the lockdowns who would say, well, look, if we hadn't kept people physically apart from each other, to some extent, obviously it wasn't a hundred percent.
00:31:02.240But if we hadn't reduced the number of people, the average person came into contact, the disease would have spread faster.
00:31:12.440And the health care services, which were already struggling.
00:31:16.880I mean, the NHS, people don't know this, but like there's newspaper headlines from every year over the last 20 years saying the NHS is about to collapse, winter crisis, the flu, blah, blah, blah.
00:31:28.180So you take that, you add on top of that, this highly infectious disease that no one really knows.
00:31:34.020Because wasn't it the right decision, based on all those inputs, to go, let's keep people apart, let's reduce the spread, let's make sure our health care system is going to cope.
00:31:44.920You know, we built some hospitals, we didn't have the staff to put in them, but we built the hospitals that, do you see what I'm saying?
00:31:50.980Yeah, no, I do, I do, I do constantly.
00:31:52.760So like the key thing is there is, and there's some force to that argument.
00:31:56.840So I don't think the right thing to do is to do nothing.
00:31:58.820I don't think the argument, the right argument is to let the virus rip, because exactly what you said would happen, would happen.
00:32:05.540The right thing to do is focus protection on the most high risk people that were likely to go to the hospital, right?
00:32:13.540So just to give you an example, in New York, Governor Cuomo sent COVID infected patients to nursing homes, even though their older people were the highest risk of being hospitalized if they get COVID.
00:32:27.920The reason he did that is because the epidemiologists were telling him that you have to open hospital beds or people will die from overcrowded hospital beds.
00:32:37.980That was focus protection on the wrong population.
00:32:42.760If he had understood that older people were the most likely to be hospitalized, then he would never have done that.
00:32:48.880He would never have sent older people, put the older people at highest risk.
00:32:53.400So if you want to protect hospital systems, you protect older people, because that's who that's highest risk.
00:32:57.920By doing a focus protection approach, you minimize the risk of the hospitals overcrowding.
00:33:06.340If instead you do a lockdown, the disease is going to spread anyways, right?
00:33:10.620Maybe you delay for a short time, but not for that long.
00:33:13.980Like in Toronto, during the earliest lockdowns, the 30 richest neighborhoods saw no case spread.
00:33:20.280The 30 poorest neighborhoods had enormous outbreak.
00:33:24.620That was repeated everywhere you saw a lockdown.
00:33:28.080The lockdown was focus protection of the laptop class instead of focus protection of the vulnerable old.
00:33:34.920And that's why hospital systems were under stress, because we've protected the wrong people.
00:33:39.320Now, that does make a lot of sense to me.
00:33:43.960And coming to the conversation about the vaccine, you will know, as you alluded to, that there are a lot of people who are, who've got a lot of questions about it, who are concerned about it.
00:33:57.220What is your assessment of the safety and efficacy of the vaccines that we currently have at the moment?
00:34:03.260So, let me start with efficacy, because that's, I think, probably the most important thing.
00:34:12.000I mean, I'd say safety is quite important.
00:34:13.540Well, okay, but you're both, you're both important.
00:34:15.620Actually, can I start with, can I move, start with the conversation with immunity more generally?
00:34:20.240Because I think this is a key point that a lot of people, when they talk about the vaccine, they miss.
00:34:25.100If you've had COVID and recovered, you actually have pretty substantial immunity, right?
00:34:30.120Before Omicron, something like 0.3% who had been infected, there was a big study out of Italy, hundreds of thousands of people that had been infected were reinfected, 0.3%, three out of a thousand.
00:34:44.420It's very substantial immunity against reinfection until there's a new variant.
00:34:48.080And then the other thing is, if you have infection and you recovered, you actually have pretty substantial immunity against severe disease on reinfection.
00:35:00.300There's a study out of Israel suggesting that there's 10 times more, 10 times better protection than the vaccine.
00:35:09.360Now, I'm not saying, I'm not arguing you should have gone out and gotten infected intentionally, but the fact is so many people have been infected and recovered.
00:35:16.300You know, I think in the United States, it's above 90% of the population, same in the UK.
00:35:23.500So that changes the landscape about the efficacy of the vaccine.
00:35:49.740So what that means is that it's a very different population than in March of 2020, which was completely immune naive.
00:35:57.080And in that population that's less immune naive, the efficacy, the marginal efficacy of the vaccine against severe disease is less important.
00:36:04.960Now, there still may be populations that are where it's important, again, focused protection, older people who've not had the disease that are higher risk.
00:36:13.280You know, there still may be other populations.
00:36:15.500So I'm not saying it has no use, but it's much more limited than it was in December of 2020 when the vaccine first arrived.
00:36:22.440The vaccine itself, it's because it was designed for the old, you know, the Wuhan strain originally.
00:36:32.720Now we have these bivalent boosters that are designed for a strain that actually is mostly on its way out.
00:36:40.320So we have a, we're sort of chasing our tail with like exactly the formulation of the vaccine.
00:36:46.600But all that is actually much less important than the fact of the vaccine, the vaccine itself, if you're immune naive, does protect you against severe disease and death.
00:36:59.100Maybe just the rule of thumb I had before, before, before Omicron was every, let's say you're 50 years old, 0.2% mortality from the disease.
00:37:21.480And you go back down the other way, by the time you're, you know, you're, you're both young men, it's going to be pretty low, the mortality risk from the disease.
00:37:30.640The, the, the vaccine then is much more important for older people who face a very high risk.
00:37:35.740If you're over 80, it's got a very high risk of dying, 3, 4, 5%.
00:38:21.560You face the risk of the vaccine myocarditis and you face the risk of COVID myocarditis.
00:38:25.960Um, so, you know, for young men it's, and you don't get a huge benefit because you already are protected from COVID by the dint of being young.
00:38:34.960Um, so, uh, you know, I just don't, I don't understand the push to vaccinate children, for instance.
00:38:41.300Um, cause the, the cost benefit just doesn't work out.
00:38:44.060It's one thing if you have a vaccine, you have to vaccinate children in order to have the disease stop spreading.
00:40:17.100Reduce the risk of, of, of exposing older people to COVID before the vaccine, vaccinated older people.
00:40:23.020Now that we have the vaccine, um, second group are people who, um, uh, have these like lingering symptoms, right?
00:40:34.100Probably the classic one is, uh, you can't smell.
00:40:36.600Um, Omicron doesn't seem to produce at the same rate, but like there's some people, uh, so I, when I got COVID, I lost my sense of smell and it came back about three weeks later.
00:40:45.860I was, I was absolutely thrilled when I could smell, you know, I could smell mustard again.
00:40:51.720Um, um, but, uh, uh, some people, maybe one, one percent, less than one percent, um, can't, a year later can't smell, right?
00:41:03.420Um, there, there are some lingering effects like brain fog, things like that.
00:41:08.040Brain fog, meaning like people can't, people are fatigued and they, they have trouble having trouble, like, you know, with, with like regular activities in life.
00:41:15.340Um, people have done studies of this where, uh, in order to do the, to quantify the number, to answer your question, you can't just look at people who've had COVID and then ask them.
00:41:26.260You have to have a control group of people who've never had COVID because many of those symptoms are nonspecific, right?
00:41:33.040I'm often tired and, you know, I'll, you can call it what I have is brain fog.
00:41:38.180Um, uh, but, uh, but that, uh, that, so you have to have that control group and studies that have a control group, they find in children, basically no difference between the set of kids who had COVID versus who didn't three months later, having one of these like nonspecific symptoms.
00:41:53.660Um, maybe it's like 5% report at least one of the symptoms, um, in big studies, like in, out of France and elsewhere, uh, in, in adults, you see higher rates in people who've had COVID versus the control group, but it's like 7% versus 4%.
00:42:11.680So I think there's, there's, there's some legitimate lingering symptoms for COVID in a relatively small group of people.
00:42:18.000Um, there's also a third group that, um, I mean, I think we've been through a tremendous amount.
00:42:23.660And it's been, it's, you know, people have been gripped in fear over this, over the, not so, not, hopefully not so much anymore, but over, over the risk of getting this disease.
00:42:34.520And it, I think that there's a somaticization of the symptoms, um, that comes from that.
00:42:40.960It's why you see people who have not had COVID, uh, you know, in 2020 saying like they felt like they had long COVID.
00:42:47.480It's a lot of that comes out of depression, fear, anxiety.
00:42:50.560Um, and those are, those are, those are real things.
00:42:55.400And those are things, but you have to treat that very differently than you treat, you know, I can't smell a year later after I got COVID.
00:43:01.480Um, so it's, it's, uh, so I think it's, it's a combination of those three things.
00:43:05.380It may be in countries that have had these lockdown policies where the fear you're going to, because of group three, you're going to have a much larger infraction of it.
00:43:14.480Right. So you don't hear about long COVID in Africa, even though COVID spread all through Africa.
00:43:18.760Um, uh, so, uh, the, the, I mean, I think we, we have to treat it seriously.
00:43:23.180We have to think about it, about, about how to manage all of, all three of those groups seriously.
00:43:28.020Um, but you can't come to the conclusion because there's long COVID, therefore we should do lockdown.
00:43:33.960The lockdown didn't work to stop COVID.
00:43:35.960Why would you think it would work to stop long COVID?
00:43:38.220One of the things that I found very interesting about the illness is how it affected certain groups.
00:43:45.700So for instance, my, my mother's Latin American and in South America, it, it really affected the population.
00:43:57.460Whereas if you look at Africa, it was nowhere near as bad.
00:44:01.020And you look at, you go, well, obviously there's difference between groups of people and et cetera, but they're both third world countries.
00:44:10.060So do, do we know the reasons why it affected certain groups and not others as, as badly?
00:44:14.860I think we're still learning about that.
00:44:16.440So like Africa, I think the, probably the most important fact is I think something like 3% are over the age of 65.
00:44:22.380That's why it didn't really have, it spread everywhere.
00:44:24.780You can't lock down, but it didn't really affect, um, most of the population because most of the population is young.
00:44:31.020You know, a very large fraction under the age of 18, excuse me.
00:44:35.020Uh, Latin America is older, um, for one.
00:44:37.800So I think that's probably the primary reason.
00:44:39.900The other thing is like Latin America, I was, I was looking at the lockdown in Peru and my heart just broke.
00:44:44.240Like they, they, they, they, they were a massive poor population of poor folks in Peru who were just devastated by the lockdowns.
00:44:53.500And then, um, at one point they, uh, they reclassified all their deaths, the excess deaths as COVID deaths.
00:45:00.560And so you're like, oh, well, you'd had the lockdown and then you reclass, you had all these COVID deaths anyways, because of the reclassification.
00:45:07.620In fact, they were just lockdown deaths, um, deaths because they had this draconian policy that didn't let poor people, you know, go earn a living so that they could feed their families.
00:45:16.720And Jay, well, I want to ask you a slightly provocative question, um, because as you know very well, I'm sure, uh, a lot of, because so much of public health policy was so difficult to understand for people who were attempting to think rationally, who were not experts.
00:45:35.740I was trying to look at it and go, well, why on earth would you do this?
00:45:46.840And it has produced, as you alluded to earlier, a lot of people who think there's something deeply nefarious going on here.
00:45:54.240These aren't mistaken people who were trying to, you know, do their best and maybe cover up for the fact that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan and whatever.
00:46:01.620But actually this is an attempt by the public health establishment to take more control of people's lives, you know, permanent surveillance telling you, you know, you, you can't buy a train ticket if you haven't been vaccinated.
00:46:15.140And, you know, we see some new stories out of places like Canada where they do seem to sort of be heading in that direction.
00:46:20.720I read a story today about how I think somebody in Canada is recommending that unvaccinated people are treated as mental health problems to be solved.
00:46:39.400I mean, I think it's, it's complicated.
00:46:41.040Like there are, there are definitely people constantly who took advantage of the pandemic and took advantage like they're, and they absolutely did.
00:46:47.840So like, you know, the pharmaceutical companies pushed, there's a drug called remdesivir put out by Gilead.
00:46:53.900They, they, they, they was pushed really hard on the basis of really bad evidence.
00:46:58.480And a lot of patients got it in hospital.
00:47:00.720The claims is, the claim is that it may actually harm people.
00:47:04.900I don't know if that's true, but like it's, it's, it's, it certainly didn't help people.
00:47:08.940It didn't solve, didn't solve you from, from dying in hospital if you took it.
00:47:12.340Um, so I think, uh, I think that, uh, there are pharma interests that took advantage.
00:47:18.080There were politicians that took advantage.
00:47:20.080Um, there were a very large number of, uh, public health, uh, people, especially, I mean, it looks like anyone with an MPH on Twitter.
00:47:28.660They're just, they, they have this like this, like they, they convey this anxiety.
00:47:33.140Don't, don't, don't see your family at Christmas.
00:47:35.380Don't, don't, uh, don't hug your children.
00:47:37.620Don't, uh, if you, if they, if your kids come in from home from college, put, stick them in the garage.
00:47:41.300Don't, don't, don't, don't let them anywhere near you.
00:47:43.960I mean, you, you, you get this sense like the, that the, the, the whole profession of public health is filled with these anxiety ridden people who don't know how to manage risk.
00:47:53.500Um, so I think, uh, there's some aspect of, of people, people's, uh, foibles and, and, uh, and, and economic interests did play a big role in, in this, but I don't think it was the center of it.
00:48:06.640I think it was these opportunities presented themselves and, and, and people did what they normally do is they take it.
00:48:12.180They, they, they, they act in their own interest, um, not for any nefarious reasons, because this, it just is their own interest.
00:48:19.380I, I, I placed the central blame in public health authority, the top public health authorities who argued that we had to follow this policy or else.
00:48:27.660And all of the dominoes that came out of that after that are just, are, are like the, it, it, it came out of that, that first domino being pushed.
00:48:35.200And Jay, talk to me about something else, because one of the most difficult issues kind of intellectually for me to, to think about during this whole thing is I felt viscerally that vaccine mandates, the government saying you must inject this thing in your body.
00:48:52.040And I, we know, we knew at the time it had side effects.
00:48:55.160We knew that it would have side effects because all medicine does.
00:48:59.240Uh, I thought that that was wrong and I can't, I'm not a trained doctor or public health official or anything like that.
00:50:09.520So the only reason why you would ever want to do a mandate is there's a group of the, part of the population who essentially has to take one for the team.
00:50:45.740Um, so I think, um, so the first observation, if you're requiring a vaccine mandate, the public health agency has failed.
00:50:54.180It doesn't, it, it, it doesn't have the trust it needs from the population so that you, when you tell you, when, when, when, when I tell you, uh, you know, Francis, this, this, this vaccine is good for you.
00:51:06.400Um, so like, you know, Sweden didn't, had no vaccine mandate and yet incredible uptake of the, of the, of the, of the vaccine because people trust the Swedish public health agency.
00:51:18.500Second thing, um, I, I, I think there's a legitimate social debate to be had about whether, uh, whether if you have a vaccine that stops disease transmission and you have a group of people who don't want to take it because it's bad for them, whether it's, it's ethical to force them to take it.
00:51:35.520Um, I've, I've, I've seen good arguments both ways.
00:51:38.600Uh, and I, frankly, I, I, I'm undecided about that.
00:51:41.440I think it would matter a lot about exactly the nature of the disease and how it spreads.
00:51:44.980And it would be, it would be a complicated, difficult argument to have.
00:53:10.340But I think an important question that we should ask at this point in the interview, Jay, is what have been the long-term health effects of the lockdown?
00:53:19.580Because I'm seeing an excess death rate.
00:53:21.620We've got an excess death rate in this country.
00:53:23.740Nobody's really talking about it because it's long COVID, mate, all of it.
00:53:29.240Because it's an unpleasant truth that really nobody wants to talk about.
00:53:33.540So what has it have actually been the effects of these lockdowns?
00:53:53.760One hundred million cancer screenings have been, I shouldn't say people.
00:53:56.920A hundred million cancer screenings have been skipped.
00:53:59.460Um, and, uh, that's going to lead to a million people with cancer, later stage cancer that should have been picked up.
00:54:06.300Then, uh, that, that, that, that, that, that, they're going to, you know, often will kill them that shouldn't have killed them.
00:54:11.500The women will die of breast cancer stage two, stage three, stage four that should have been picked up at stage one, um, from rural screening that didn't happen.
00:54:20.320Um, that, that's, I mean, that's just one, one thing.
00:54:23.720Uh, the, the, the, the psychological effects in the U.S., something like one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020.
00:54:32.100The overhang for, uh, the overhang for, like, anxiety and depression is enormous.
00:54:37.140I think that's, uh, maybe, maybe it's a little less true in Europe and the U.K.
00:54:40.020because you guys had Freedom Day earlier.
00:54:41.200Um, but, uh, the, uh, uh, in, in, in, in, we, there are, like, measles cases now, outbreaks in the United States because people skipped basic immunization.
00:54:57.220We were, like, this close to eradicating polio.
00:54:59.680Um, in poor countries, it's even worse, right?
00:55:03.780In, um, I, I think Uganda, uh, the estimate is that four and a half million kids after two years of Zoom school, which, which is ridiculous in, in, in a country like Uganda, um, you, you, you, they, they never came back to school.
00:55:21.140That means it's a generation of, of poor kids in Uganda who will never get an education and will grow up, grow up poor.
00:55:29.380We, it's just, like, we, we've fueled inequality in a way that, like, it's, it's almost unimaginable.
00:55:34.820Um, and they will, they will lead shorter lives.
00:55:37.680Even, it turns out, like, even in rich countries, um, short interruptions in school has these, like, long-term negative consequences on the lives of people, of kids.
00:55:46.740Because, you know, they grow up poorer.
00:55:49.540One estimate published in JAMA Pediatrics early in the pandemic was that just the spring closures alone have led, will lead to five and a half million lost life years for American kids.
00:56:01.220Um, the, the, the overhang of these lockdowns in terms of what, what they've done to our health, our society, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the social, the social inequality, the, the, the poverty is almost, it's almost impossible to exaggerate.
00:56:15.900It is, it is catastrophic and terrible.
00:56:18.060I don't know for certain all those excess deaths you talked about, Francis, are due to the, to the lockdowns.
00:56:22.220But I, I do believe a substantial fraction must be, um, the, the long tail of the lockdown harms.
00:56:45.100I mean, they didn't lock down nearly as, as, as, as much as the UK did or the U, or the US did.
00:56:51.340I think that that's, I think that the lockdowns will ultimately play some role in, in explaining it.
00:56:56.720Joe, do you think we've learned our lessons from these mistakes?
00:56:59.640Or do you, or do you think we're going to, just going to make the same mistakes again?
00:57:03.820We have not learned our lessons, Francis.
00:57:06.180Um, I do have some hope that we might, uh, the UK, there's a, I think a parliamentary inquiry that's happening on, on COVID.
00:57:12.400And there's still now some fight over exactly what's going to be part of that.
00:57:16.040Um, I think any honest evaluation of these policies will conclude that they were a failure.
00:57:22.780And, um, they were a disastrous failure that has harmed the, the economic well-being, the physical well-being, the psychological well-being of vast populations.
00:57:33.180Any inquiry like the parliamentary inquiry that's happening in the UK that doesn't conclude that lockdowns were a disaster, I think, or won't have been an honest evaluation.
00:57:43.600There's a lot of people who made these decisions that have a strong vested interest in making sure that these inquiries end up saying, oh, everything was fine.
00:57:52.580We, we, we did the best we could under, under, uh, circumstances where it was difficult.
00:57:59.160They suppressed voices that opposed it.
00:58:01.880Um, they, they, they, they engaged unethical behaviors like stoking fear in the population using behavioral economics techniques to do that.
00:58:09.740Um, they, they, they made tremendously bad decisions by closing themselves off from criticism.
00:58:16.520They employed censorship in social media and a whole bunch of other settings so that people couldn't effectively push back.
00:58:22.640Um, so I, I think, um, the ultimate outcome of this needs to be these discussions needs to involve people who were, who were pushed aside in the debate.
00:58:32.000Uh, and I think the ultimate outcome has to be that lockdown has to be a dirty word.
00:58:36.500We have to look, whenever we think about the word lockdown, whenever we think about the concept of lockdown, we shudder in, in, in fear.
00:58:42.860We say, we should never do this again.
00:58:44.600Um, that has to be the outcome of these, but I'm very afraid that that's not going to be.
00:58:48.380The vested interests that pushed these, these policies, um, that benefit from these policies don't want it to be concluded that way because they, then my God, like it's a world historic bad thing that happened that they did.
00:59:03.500Um, um, now I think the outcome should also involve some level of forgiveness.
00:59:08.780I mean, you know, like this was so big a thing.
00:59:11.400It's like, uh, you know, you, you, you don't, we have to come together.
00:59:15.220We can't like put half the, you know, indict half the people in the world that made these decisions or very, very high.
00:59:22.020They, they, they, we have to live with them.
00:59:23.540So there has to be some, some kind of forgiveness, but not until we have a solid understanding and acceptance that what we did was deeply wrong.
00:59:33.960And Jay, this is perhaps a strange question to ask, but, um, Francis and I were both vocal.
00:59:41.700About some of what we thought was happening going too far.
00:59:46.060Uh, and a lot of other people were, but do you think, do you think we, as the general public, I know you, you and your colleagues were very courageous and actually attempting to, to speak up at a time when it was difficult and you, you were demonized and not allowed to speak on these big tech platforms as we, we, we had our issues with that as well.
01:00:04.040But do you think we, as the public did enough to stand up to this?
01:00:10.100Or do you think that, you know, it seemed to me like there were a lot of people who actually would have agreed with us, but just preferred to be quiet because that, that was the direction that the government was going.
01:00:19.120I mean, I think in March of 2020, it was basically impossible.
01:00:22.560I think that, that the, that the fear was so great that it was very hard for public work.
01:00:27.720I mean, I remember there was someone, some group tried to organize a lockdown protest and local, and they were just, I mean, normally protests in, in like, you know, hippie dippy California are fine, but you can't, you just can't do that.
01:00:40.140In March of 2020, but I, and I, but I think a lot of the, I mean, like the easy answer constitutes that we, the public didn't do enough, but I don't blame the public, right?
01:00:52.440You had deployed against the public, these techniques of social control that are very difficult to, to, to push back against, right?
01:01:02.200If you're, you know, you're censored on YouTube or whatever, well, now people like distrust me because gosh, the, these smart people in tech think I'm saying something crazy enough that they can't even be presented to the public at all.
01:01:15.320You, you, you, you, you organize a protest or something against the lockdown and then all these, these, these very smart people say you're doing something deeply irresponsible.
01:01:24.900It's very difficult for the public without, to, to, to, to speak up.
01:01:30.440In fact, one of the reasons we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration was to enable the public to say, look, there isn't a consensus on, on the lockdown.
01:01:39.060There are legitimate people who disagree with it.
01:01:41.420And so they could speak up and say, well, you know, we're not crazy.
01:01:45.220We're, we're, we're, we're actually engaging in the public fight over, over this deeply important issue.
01:01:52.620That was, that was one of the purposes was to like enable that to happen so that, because before that it's like, oh yeah, the entire scientific clarity agrees that the, the lockdowns are the way.
01:02:06.720So I think, I think that it's, it's, the answer to your question is yes, I think the public should have spoken up more.
01:02:15.860But at the same time, I don't see how they could have spoken up given the social pressures that were put in place to make sure that they stayed silent.
01:02:24.740Well, look, we're coming to the end of the interview.
01:02:26.320So we'll ask you our usual final question, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to very succinctly tell everybody what we should do next time.
01:02:34.760Let's say we have another pandemic that's exactly like COVID, but not COVID.
01:02:55.160It's not going to be one global policy.
01:02:57.000The living circumstances in London would be different than in LA, than in Billings, Montana.
01:03:01.320But it's going to require creativity, focus protection of high-risk people, and then develop vaccines, develop treatments as rapidly as you can.
01:03:15.280Do not disrupt the lives of people that keep society going, assuming that everyone is capable of the kinds of activities that the laptop class made.
01:03:26.860We have to understand that society really is unequal.
01:03:36.080Let's have, like, you know, it shouldn't just be scientists.
01:03:39.700These are two complicated decisions that involve values that scientists apparently are incapable of seeing.
01:03:46.000Jake, there's one last question I wanted to ask, because there is now an Ebola outbreak happening in Africa at the moment, which I'm sure you're probably well aware of.
01:03:55.060Does it worry you that as a disease, that kind of pandemic, where you've got a disease that is so deadly like Ebola?
01:04:03.740Does that have a chance of becoming a global pandemic?