TRIGGERnometry - December 05, 2022


＂Lockdowns Were a Mistake＂ - Dr Jay Bhattacharya

Topics
lockdowns were a mistake lockdowns failed economic dislocation from lockdowns lingering symptoms of COVID
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Dr Jay Bhattacharya
Mentioned
Francis Collins Anthony Fauci Beautiful Noise Trigger Ridge Jay Bhattacharya Sweet Caroline Sanjay Gupta Mark Collett Neil Ferguson Jeremy Farrar Boris Johnson Matt Hancock Gavin Newsom Cliff Lane Ron Paul Elon Musk Constantine Patacharya Hitler and 2 more
Iranian Historian Breaks Down Iran Protests - Prof Ali Ansari LIVE Episode with Destiny： Progressivism, Trans and Trump

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 6 minutes

Words per minute

179.26

Word count

11,989

Sentence count

810

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a landmark document that lays out a policy aimed at protecting the poor, the working class, and children from infectious disease.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.000 Is it fair to say then that lockdowns were just a mistake?
00:00:34.080 Yes. I don't think lockdowns in a society that's as unequal as ours could possibly succeed.
00:00:40.520 What have actually been the effects of these lockdowns?
00:00:43.520 100 million cancer screenings had been skipped.
00:00:45.920 And that's going to lead to a million people with later stage cancer that should have been picked up.
00:00:51.180 The psychological effects in the US, something like one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020.
00:01:00.000 100 million people is the estimate thrown into poverty worldwide by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown.
00:01:06.140 230,000 children had died in South Asia alone.
00:01:11.020 It was bound to destroy the lives of the poor, the working class, and children. 0.93
00:01:17.280 It's exactly what it did.
00:01:18.160 The lockdown was focused protection of the laptop class instead of focused protection of the vulnerable old.
00:01:25.520 And that's why hospital systems were under stress, because we protected the wrong people.
00:01:30.620 For vaccine mandates, if you are mandating the vaccine, you have failed as a public health agency.
00:01:36.360 Because what that means is that there's a substantial number of people who don't trust you.
00:01:41.880 For young men, the mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis at unacceptable rates.
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00:03:20.860 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.
00:03:23.580 I'm Francis Foster.
00:03:24.780 I'm Constantin Kishin.
00:03:26.080 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:03:31.340 Our brilliant guest today, among his very many titles, is a professor of medicine at Stanford University.
00:03:37.320 And one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
00:03:42.040 Welcome to Trigonometry.
00:03:43.320 Just a delight to be here.
00:03:44.440 Thank you for inviting me.
00:03:46.000 Oh, it's a great pleasure to have you on.
00:03:47.460 We've been meaning to have you on for a long time.
00:03:50.220 However, for those of our audience who are not familiar with you and your role, particularly over the last couple of years,
00:03:56.320 tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you here?
00:04:01.560 Sure.
00:04:02.040 So I have a strange background.
00:04:03.740 I have an MD and a PhD in economics, of all things.
00:04:06.540 I've been a professor in the medical school at Stanford for 20-some years.
00:04:10.240 I've written on infectious disease policy for a long time.
00:04:14.400 When 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.
00:04:26.060 And so we should follow a very different policy than we did follow.
00:04:30.540 The policy, eventually, we labeled it the Great Barrington Declaration.
00:04:35.060 The idea is focused protection of vulnerable people and then letting, you know, children go back to life, low-risk people get back to life,
00:04:43.120 because the harms from the lockdowns themselves, maybe we'll talk about this during our podcast,
00:04:48.080 but the harms from the lockdowns themselves are so bad that you don't want, you just want to avoid them.
00:04:52.720 That document, which I wrote with a couple of people from, with Sinatra Gupta from Oxford and Martin Kulder from Harvard, that went viral.
00:05:02.920 So anyways, I'm sure we'll talk about that, but that's my background.
00:05:06.640 I've done this kind of work for a long time and been teaching the standard for a long time.
00:05:12.480 And 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,
00:05:21.920 that lockdowns were very harmful, that many of the other public health policies that were being pursued were mistaken.
00:05:29.220 And one of the responses was to ignore you and, in fact, to censor many other things that were being said.
00:05:35.000 So here we are, we can sort of look back and assess how things have gone.
00:05:41.300 As you look back, do you think you were right? Do you think you were wrong?
00:05:45.720 What is your assessment of how it's played out?
00:05:48.540 I think we got a lot right very early.
00:05:53.420 So we meaning, I mean, it wasn't just me alone.
00:05:56.080 There was a very large number of other infectious disease epidemiologists and other health policy people that had shared my view.
00:06:06.420 So, 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,
00:06:19.280 and then another study with Major League Baseball all around the country.
00:06:23.300 We found in L.A. and in Santa Clara was that there was 3% or 4% prevalence of COVID antibodies.
00:06:32.180 What that means is if you have the antibody, we can argue about immunity, but that certainly means that you've been infected and recovered.
00:06:38.240 So that means that there's a lot more spread than people would realize.
00:06:46.080 There's like 50 times more infections than cases.
00:06:48.440 That meant the lockdown, in April of 2020, meant that the lockdown could not work.
00:06:51.960 Like if you were thinking, okay, we get the lockdown, we get to zero, that was gone.
00:06:57.160 Of course, that turned out to be true.
00:06:59.060 We didn't actually end up getting rid of the disease, unfortunately.
00:07:02.740 The, and there have been like 100 of these similar studies that have been done since that sort of verify the same result we found.
00:07:13.240 Hey, guys, just a quick note here.
00:07:15.740 Dr. Patacharya is about to make a point referencing to COVID antibody studies from 2019.
00:07:23.500 In the interview, he actually says 2020, but it was a mistake on his part.
00:07:27.920 It was confirmed after recording he meant to say 2019.
00:07:31.260 Anyway, on with the show.
00:07:35.160 Jay, so sorry to jump in.
00:07:36.660 So is it fair to say then that lockdowns were just a mistake?
00:07:40.880 Yes.
00:07:42.160 Yeah, I think there were, I think that the disease was seeded around the world sometime in, probably in fall 2020, late fall 2020.
00:07:50.140 Could be November, could be December, could be, I mean, you could persuade me earlier.
00:07:53.500 I don't know the exact date.
00:07:54.560 The 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.
00:08:10.460 How did it get there unless someone, someone from China went there? 0.99
00:08:15.020 You know, of course, you had these massive outbreaks in Italy in February, Iran in February 2020.
00:08:23.000 It was too late.
00:08:23.840 By the time we locked down, this disease spread so easily, so fast.
00:08:28.880 And 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.
00:08:38.940 Now, 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.
00:08:47.960 We 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.
00:09:01.640 But we had this illusion of control over the spread of the disease.
00:09:04.800 We can talk more about why I think lockdowns failed.
00:09:06.660 There's a deep social science reason, I think, why it failed.
00:09:09.160 Mainly, I don't think lockdowns in a society that's as unequal as ours could possibly succeed.
00:09:15.120 And, Jay, why did we lock down then?
00:09:20.500 Why did we follow China's lead? 0.98
00:09:22.500 Because I'm not a great expert on China, but I look at them and I think, yeah, that's not probably the way to do a lot of things, really.
00:09:30.780 What, copy a totalitarian regime which has got a disastrous approach to human rights?
00:09:36.940 It was really shocking, actually.
00:09:40.120 So I'm part of this case where we actually got to depose Anthony Fauci.
00:09:45.120 In 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.
00:09:55.960 They came back from the trip, completely impressed that China had conquered the disease in January 2020.
00:10:01.360 Now, of course, there wasn't a lot of testing going on in January 2020.
00:10:07.300 China, as you say, Francis, has this track record of authoritarian power that's just alien to the West.
00:10:14.980 At least it was alien to the West before March 2020.
00:10:17.580 And so it really – I think it surprised everybody.
00:10:22.460 I 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.
00:10:35.580 He was actually happy about it, but he was very surprised.
00:10:38.820 I think it was fear and panic, Francis, at the end of the day.
00:10:41.700 People looked at the Chinese model and said, oh, gosh, they got rid of it by January 2020. 1.00
00:10:45.740 They looked at Italy, which was a total mess.
00:10:49.340 They looked at New York City, and they were just scared.
00:10:53.600 I 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.
00:11:02.520 Jay, 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.
00:11:14.860 Through centuries, this is the most effective way of dealing with it.
00:11:18.820 This is what we should do.
00:11:20.120 Why did we suddenly throw away hundreds of years of learning how to deal with a pandemic and try this new approach?
00:11:28.620 I mean, I think – I have a couple of things.
00:11:32.280 I just told you the one about fear and panic.
00:11:34.180 I think that that certainly was probably the most important explanation.
00:11:38.180 But, Jay, that would have been the case always.
00:11:39.860 People would always have been scared in a pandemic.
00:11:42.520 But 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.
00:11:54.240 I mean, so we're looking at this going, okay, this is the big one.
00:11:58.040 This is the – we've waited a century for this pandemic.
00:12:01.000 It's finally arrived.
00:12:02.880 But there's some other aspects of this, right?
00:12:04.500 So 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?
00:12:11.940 So 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?
00:12:31.500 And you're a major figure like Tony Fauci or Francis Collins or Jeremy Farrar.
00:12:36.960 I mean, you're going to want to do absolutely everything you possibly can to, like, put the genie back in the bottle.
00:12:43.480 And, you know, they don't really have a lot of social science background.
00:12:46.700 They really don't have a lot of – frankly, they're not even – many of them are just lab scientists, not really epidemiologists.
00:12:51.560 They don't understand the limitations of these kinds of – or the harms from these kinds of interventions.
00:12:58.740 For them, it's just, okay, it's a model.
00:13:01.500 In the model, you make sure newborns don't interact with their moms and all of a sudden the disease goes away or whatever. 0.76
00:13:09.240 I mean, it's just incredibly naive.
00:13:11.660 But their incentive is to, like, let's do everything we possibly can to reduce the damage from this thing that I've supported.
00:13:19.120 Now, again, I don't know for certain this is a lab leak, but imagine the psychology of it.
00:13:23.460 But, Jay, do you also think as well – if we look at our society now,
00:13:29.240 there's this belief amongst a lot of people that science can conquer anything.
00:13:34.660 It can cure any disease.
00:13:36.680 We've, you know, we've conquered infectious disease.
00:13:39.300 We're deeply – a lot of Western civilization is secular.
00:13:43.360 We don't believe in God.
00:13:44.440 We don't believe in religion.
00:13:46.000 So if you put those two things together,
00:13:48.800 why wouldn't you think that you can conquer this disease?
00:13:52.700 Surely we can defeat COVID, can't we?
00:13:54.740 We have science.
00:13:56.300 I mean, science has made a lot of progress on this disease.
00:13:59.680 Like, you know, the vaccines, the treatments, treatment protocols are way better than they were two and a half years ago.
00:14:06.540 Science works.
00:14:08.220 It's an incredible thing for understanding the material world.
00:14:11.320 But it takes its time.
00:14:12.680 It requires debate and discussion.
00:14:15.480 The problem isn't science so much, Francis.
00:14:18.320 The problem really is we elevated some high scientific bureaucrats to the position of the high pope.
00:14:27.980 You get someone like Tony Fauci telling Rand Paul that, you know,
00:14:32.060 if you question me, you're not simply questioning a man.
00:14:34.140 You are questioning science itself.
00:14:36.340 I mean, come on. 0.98
00:14:37.840 That's just ridiculous. 0.73
00:14:39.100 I 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.
00:14:50.440 Science requires people to, like, disagree with each other.
00:14:54.120 I'm going to be wrong.
00:14:55.160 I've been wrong lots of times in my life.
00:14:56.880 And then the wrongness is adjudicated not by, like, some high pope or high priest.
00:15:01.860 It'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.
00:15:14.900 That's the point of the realm in science, not like Tony Fauci on high declaring this is the science.
00:15:21.680 That's just nonsense.
00:15:22.740 And that's what we've had through the pandemic.
00:15:24.160 Martin Kulder wrote about this as, like, the end of the age of enlightenment, the return of the dark age.
00:15:29.160 The dark age, what that means is science facts are determined by authority, not by data, not by reason, discussion, not by discussion and debate.
00:15:42.800 And 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.
00:15:55.860 You know, certainly the public policy measures that I was so strongly against, they kind of stopped.
00:16:03.200 And 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.
00:16:08.360 I promptly then got COVID again, but never mind.
00:16:10.360 But 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.
00:16:18.940 The government's going crazy.
00:16:20.060 They're introducing all these measures that I think are tyrannical, frankly.
00:16:23.180 I don't agree with them.
00:16:24.940 But you and a lot of people feel, I think, quite strongly about particularly Anthony Fauci and some of the actions that he took.
00:16:34.260 So explain to us, why are people so critical?
00:16:37.240 What is the case against Anthony Fauci?
00:16:39.240 Yeah, so first of all, I was entirely jealous of Freedom Day.
00:16:42.580 I was sitting here in the United States going, okay, how on earth you guys get Freedom Day and we get vaccine mandates and nonsense.
00:16:50.920 Right.
00:16:52.000 It could be worse, Joe.
00:16:53.060 You could be in Canada.
00:16:54.200 Yeah, that's true.
00:16:55.100 I 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.
00:17:15.100 And the problem there is not – that itself is not a problem.
00:17:19.440 I mean, I fully support public support of science.
00:17:22.500 But 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.
00:17:38.380 And 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.
00:17:47.060 In order to get tenure, you actually have to – you have to get an NIH grant.
00:17:51.400 You have to earn an NIH grant.
00:17:52.540 It's very, very competitive.
00:17:53.600 And if you don't succeed at that, you're not going to get tenure.
00:17:57.160 Social status in science depends on earning the approval of people like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins.
00:18:04.680 And 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.
00:18:18.280 You know, they don't – they're not directly involved in health policy.
00:18:21.860 They just won't speak up even if they have qualms about the policy.
00:18:25.680 And some people will – you know, it's like, you know, will someone rid me of the troublesome priest kind of thing.
00:18:34.020 Like you'll get like people just, you know, ad hoc attacking because they want to curry favor.
00:18:41.240 It'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,
00:18:53.360 which is exactly, I think, why Tony Fauci has come under such criticism.
00:18:57.840 And 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.
00:19:13.980 I completely agree.
00:19:15.240 And it's been shocking to watch.
00:19:17.780 So I, you know, I do medicine.
00:19:20.060 And I've watched the anti-vax movement with respect to measles and others before the pandemic.
00:19:26.860 And I think it was mostly just – it really was a fringe movement.
00:19:30.260 Mostly people trusted doctors when they told them that vaccines work for these diseases.
00:19:35.520 During the pandemic, I've seen this vast explosion in the anti – this sort of the sentiment.
00:19:42.400 I'm only going to call it anti-vax.
00:19:43.640 It's stemming from that distrust, Francis, of scientists and doctors created by this kind of hubris, by scientists and doctors.
00:19:51.920 It's our own fault.
00:19:54.460 And so to me, it's completely understandable.
00:19:56.860 Now, 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.
00:20:07.800 Many did.
00:20:08.240 It's exploded, the distrust in vaccines generally.
00:20:13.000 And the other thing is that there was over-claiming about the efficacy of this vaccine.
00:20:18.380 And, you know, when scientists get things wrong, they should have some distrust.
00:20:23.800 There should be some distrust.
00:20:24.780 I think what would have gone a long way is just humility by scientists, by doctors.
00:20:29.740 Instead, 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.
00:20:38.240 And 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.
00:20:55.500 No vaccine is 100% safe, right?
00:20:58.380 It might be 99.99% safe, but it's not 100% safe.
00:21:03.480 And anyone who claims otherwise is clearly lying or hiding something.
00:21:07.120 And 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.
00:21:14.820 It 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.
00:21:23.420 Would you agree?
00:21:24.340 I completely agree.
00:21:25.480 I mean, in fact, you can look at how they talk about the vaccine rollout, actually even the lockdowns.
00:21:32.380 Actually, in the UK, they actually had a group inside your SAGE, which is the scientific organization that advises the government, called the Nudge Unit.
00:21:41.200 The 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?
00:21:58.200 So vaccines, it takes a while to understand the full safety profile.
00:22:03.400 You test it on, what, 50,000, 100,000 people in the trials, but then you send it out to billions.
00:22:11.680 You're going to learn things about what the vaccine does, and it's not all going to be all good, right?
00:22:16.060 So the myocarditis in young men from the mRNA vaccines, we didn't really know that from the trials.
00:22:21.720 That came out afterwards.
00:22:23.480 And it just takes time.
00:22:24.340 I 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?
00:22:35.880 I mean, come on.
00:22:36.880 That's just treating people like they're children.
00:22:40.240 And then, like, over-promising, right?
00:22:43.480 This vaccine is 100% effective against getting the disease.
00:22:47.840 I got vaccinated, and I got the disease.
00:22:49.920 Like, four months after I got the second vaccine, I got the disease.
00:22:52.420 You can look at the data, the randomized trials, clear that they didn't even check for that.
00:22:57.400 So what were they saying?
00:22:59.300 Why were they over-claiming?
00:23:01.520 A lot of the public health authorities viewed this as, like, we have to convince, they were, like, essentially pharma salespeople.
00:23:07.460 We have to convince people to get this.
00:23:08.680 And in the back of their heads, they thought about this vaccine the same way they thought about the measles vaccine.
00:23:14.360 You get the measles vaccine, you're pretty much not going to get measles ever again.
00:23:17.740 It's a great vaccine.
00:23:20.260 I'm not saying it has absolutely no side effects, but it's pretty safe.
00:23:24.640 And whereas this vaccine, it just doesn't have that property.
00:23:27.580 It protects you against getting severe disease if you happen to get COVID, which is very likely that you will.
00:23:34.680 But it doesn't stop you from getting COVID.
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00:23:58.900 Do you worry, Jay, that when we have another pandemic, because we're going to have another pandemic, such as life,
00:24:15.720 that actually such has been the distrust that has been sown within the wider population,
00:24:21.220 that you're going to get a pretty sizable majority of people who are going to be like,
00:24:25.860 nah, don't believe you.
00:24:27.300 You betrayed my trust first time.
00:24:28.820 Why am I going to believe you now?
00:24:30.220 I mean, there are still people in Wales that are really quite upset with Neil Ferguson,
00:24:34.220 the modeler, because of the mad cow disease.
00:24:38.640 They killed a very vast number of cows.
00:24:41.700 It turns out it wasn't really necessary.
00:24:43.000 I think you're absolutely right, Francis.
00:24:46.120 That's exactly what's going to happen.
00:24:48.100 There's now a pretty broad movement, and I don't even know what the name to call it,
00:24:52.560 but it's a movement that had as its root deep distrust, a deep earned distrust of public health authorities
00:25:00.280 and of governments acting in the name of public health.
00:25:04.340 I have to say, like, there will be, when there is another pandemic,
00:25:08.020 there's going to be a big fight over whether we re-adopt this kind of authoritarian approach.
00:25:14.420 I'm very afraid that exactly that's what will happen,
00:25:16.900 that the public health message is we just didn't lock down hard enough.
00:25:20.800 We didn't use our police power strongly enough,
00:25:23.780 and we need to absolutely demolish these crazy fringe movements that are opposing us.
00:25:29.580 I think that that kind of, that's exactly the fight will happen in the next pandemic.
00:25:33.800 Should there be authoritarian power applied in the name of public health even more than was applied now?
00:25:42.840 That's the only reason it didn't work.
00:25:44.120 Versus, let's go back to the old approach, which would have worked.
00:25:47.400 Let's treat people in a democratic and liberal society as adult human beings,
00:25:54.180 reason with them, use resources, move heaven and earth to protect vulnerable people.
00:25:58.520 For God's sakes, yes.
00:25:59.560 But also don't disrupt the lives of other people who are less vulnerable in ways that harm them and society irreparably, almost.
00:26:08.920 Yeah.
00:26:09.560 Well, Jay, you hinted earlier that you thought that one of the reasons that these approaches were never going to work in the West,
00:26:16.320 in particular, is the unequal societies that we have.
00:26:20.180 Can you talk to us more about that?
00:26:21.940 Absolutely.
00:26:22.500 So, I mean, it's not just the West that's unequal.
00:26:25.480 Everyone is unequal.
00:26:26.420 Well, my mom was born in a Calcutta slum.
00:26:30.540 My mom grew up in a Calcutta slum, right? 0.77
00:26:33.720 So, a lockdown, if it's going to work, even in any theoretical sense,
00:26:41.160 basically what the purpose is, is to keep people physically apart from each other.
00:26:45.620 Not anywhere in vicinity.
00:26:47.860 If I'm physically apart from you, I can't spread the virus to you.
00:26:50.460 Basic physics, right?
00:26:51.380 The 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.
00:27:02.040 It's inhumane, right?
00:27:03.540 So, we're actually built to be in community with each other, to talk to each other, to be social.
00:27:08.460 And so, even rich people have that need.
00:27:10.960 But poor people, they need to work in order to feed their families.
00:27:15.480 They need to work to, they need to like, they need to be in society in order to have the most basic functions.
00:27:22.060 Many live in, in poor countries, live in crowded living situations.
00:27:26.560 That's just a fact about the way the world is.
00:27:29.080 You can't have a lockdown.
00:27:32.040 That lockdown will end up impoverishing people.
00:27:35.600 That lockdown will end up throwing people into, into food, you know, near starvation.
00:27:41.240 That's actually what happened.
00:27:42.300 A hundred million people is the estimate thrown into poverty worldwide by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown.
00:27:48.180 You know, those supply chains.
00:27:49.700 Well, the pointy end of the supply chains is some guy in Ghana who's barely holding on, losing his job. 0.99
00:27:56.440 And now he's making less than $2 a day of income.
00:27:59.420 He can't feed his kids.
00:28:00.540 Some of his kids starve.
00:28:03.240 There's one estimate from March of 2021 out of the UN that 230,000 children had died in South Asia alone from the lockdown.
00:28:12.920 The economic dislocation caused, causing starvation in, by the lockdowns.
00:28:18.460 That and the stopping of basic immunization.
00:28:22.920 I mean, it's, it's, it was bound to have that effect.
00:28:26.900 It was bound to destroy the lives of the poor, the working class, the, you know, and children. 0.93
00:28:33.040 It's exactly what it did.
00:28:33.940 Because in many ways, what it did is it favored big business.
00:28:40.720 It favored, you know, these huge multinational corporations.
00:28:44.420 And it also favored the laptop class because they were the ones insulated from it because they could still work.
00:28:50.300 They could still do everything they needed to do.
00:28:52.060 And in fact, they could save money because they didn't have to travel anywhere.
00:28:55.840 You know, they could get discounts on their rent.
00:28:57.860 But the working classes, they still had to go and do their job. 1.00
00:29:01.080 You're, you're absolutely, that's exactly right.
00:29:04.000 I mean, I've called it a trickle-down epidemiology.
00:29:06.800 The idea is that, I mean, it's like, if we just protect the laptop class, everyone else would be protected by osmosis or something.
00:29:12.960 It, you know, it worked exactly how you'd expect it to work.
00:29:16.460 I think a lot of the people that made these policies, they, they moralized it, right?
00:29:23.460 They are a class of people that could be protected by a lot.
00:29:29.000 Look, for me, I just, I'm a professor.
00:29:31.680 I didn't have to, I could have worked from home the entire time, would have been fine.
00:29:34.940 Wouldn't have lost my job.
00:29:36.380 I actually couldn't abide that.
00:29:38.180 I went to work.
00:29:39.600 But a lot of the, a lot of this, a lot of the people that were in this, they've moralized it.
00:29:45.120 Stay home, stay safe, right?
00:29:46.480 You had that in the UK.
00:29:48.180 What the heck is that message?
00:29:49.460 Is 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.
00:29:56.460 That'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.
00:30:07.140 So 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.
00:30:18.340 And 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. 0.68
00:30:30.320 I 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.
00:30:42.520 It's like, I just, it's, it's just a reminder that everybody needs to be, needs, needs connection.
00:30:48.300 Jay, 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.
00:31:02.240 But if we hadn't reduced the number of people, the average person came into contact, the disease would have spread faster.
00:31:08.720 It would have spread to more people.
00:31:10.400 We didn't have a vaccine at the time.
00:31:12.440 And the health care services, which were already struggling.
00:31:16.880 I 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.
00:31:28.180 So you take that, you add on top of that, this highly infectious disease that no one really knows.
00:31:34.020 Because 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.
00:31:44.920 You 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?
00:31:50.980 Yeah, no, I do, I do, I do constantly.
00:31:52.760 So like the key thing is there is, and there's some force to that argument.
00:31:56.840 So I don't think the right thing to do is to do nothing.
00:31:58.820 I don't think the argument, the right argument is to let the virus rip, because exactly what you said would happen, would happen.
00:32:05.540 The right thing to do is focus protection on the most high risk people that were likely to go to the hospital, right?
00:32:13.540 So 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.
00:32:25.860 Why did he do that?
00:32:26.680 He was not because he's an evil guy.
00:32:27.920 The 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.
00:32:37.980 That was focus protection on the wrong population.
00:32:42.760 If he had understood that older people were the most likely to be hospitalized, then he would never have done that.
00:32:48.880 He would never have sent older people, put the older people at highest risk.
00:32:53.400 So if you want to protect hospital systems, you protect older people, because that's who that's highest risk. 1.00
00:32:57.920 By doing a focus protection approach, you minimize the risk of the hospitals overcrowding.
00:33:06.340 If instead you do a lockdown, the disease is going to spread anyways, right?
00:33:10.620 Maybe you delay for a short time, but not for that long.
00:33:13.980 Like in Toronto, during the earliest lockdowns, the 30 richest neighborhoods saw no case spread.
00:33:20.280 The 30 poorest neighborhoods had enormous outbreak.
00:33:24.620 That was repeated everywhere you saw a lockdown.
00:33:28.080 The lockdown was focus protection of the laptop class instead of focus protection of the vulnerable old.
00:33:34.920 And that's why hospital systems were under stress, because we've protected the wrong people.
00:33:39.320 Now, that does make a lot of sense to me.
00:33:43.960 And 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.
00:33:57.220 What is your assessment of the safety and efficacy of the vaccines that we currently have at the moment?
00:34:03.260 So, let me start with efficacy, because that's, I think, probably the most important thing.
00:34:09.500 I think, and let me just start.
00:34:12.000 I mean, I'd say safety is quite important.
00:34:13.540 Well, okay, but you're both, you're both important.
00:34:15.620 Actually, can I start with, can I move, start with the conversation with immunity more generally?
00:34:20.240 Because I think this is a key point that a lot of people, when they talk about the vaccine, they miss.
00:34:25.100 If you've had COVID and recovered, you actually have pretty substantial immunity, right?
00:34:30.120 Before 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.
00:34:44.420 It's very substantial immunity against reinfection until there's a new variant.
00:34:48.080 And then the other thing is, if you have infection and you recovered, you actually have pretty substantial immunity against severe disease on reinfection.
00:35:00.300 There's a study out of Israel suggesting that there's 10 times more, 10 times better protection than the vaccine.
00:35:09.360 Now, 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.
00:35:16.300 You know, I think in the United States, it's above 90% of the population, same in the UK.
00:35:23.500 So that changes the landscape about the efficacy of the vaccine.
00:35:28.480 I'm sorry to interrupt.
00:35:30.060 Did you say that over 90% of people have had COVID in the US and the UK?
00:35:34.820 Yeah.
00:35:35.900 Really?
00:35:36.700 Yeah, based on antibiotics.
00:35:38.220 Oh, wow, I didn't know that.
00:35:39.000 Okay, sorry, please carry on.
00:35:40.620 Yeah, I mean, it could be, you could convince me 85%.
00:35:44.100 I mean, we can argue about the exact numbers, but like-
00:35:47.080 Yeah, no, I just hadn't heard that.
00:35:47.980 That's all.
00:35:48.520 Please go ahead.
00:35:49.400 Yeah.
00:35:49.740 So what that means is that it's a very different population than in March of 2020, which was completely immune naive.
00:35:57.080 And in that population that's less immune naive, the efficacy, the marginal efficacy of the vaccine against severe disease is less important.
00:36:04.960 Now, 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.
00:36:13.280 You know, there still may be other populations.
00:36:15.500 So 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.
00:36:22.440 The vaccine itself, it's because it was designed for the old, you know, the Wuhan strain originally.
00:36:32.720 Now we have these bivalent boosters that are designed for a strain that actually is mostly on its way out.
00:36:40.320 So we have a, we're sort of chasing our tail with like exactly the formulation of the vaccine.
00:36:46.600 But 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.
00:36:55.980 Now, what is that risk?
00:36:57.420 It's, it's very high for the old.
00:36:59.100 Maybe 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.
00:37:08.600 This is the rule of thumb.
00:37:09.840 And every seven years of age, it doubles.
00:37:12.240 So I was, I was 54, it'll be 0.3-ish.
00:37:17.040 You know, if you're 57, it'll be 0.4.
00:37:19.260 If you're 64, it'll be 0.8.
00:37:21.480 And 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.
00:37:30.640 The, the, the vaccine then is much more important for older people who face a very high risk.
00:37:35.740 If you're over 80, it's got a very high risk of dying, 3, 4, 5%.
00:37:39.380 So it reduces it by tenfold.
00:37:42.240 Really useful.
00:37:43.360 Doesn't stop you from getting it.
00:37:44.640 So it's efficacious in one way, but less efficacious in another.
00:37:47.780 The, the degree of efficacy, the extent of it matters.
00:37:51.600 It depends on who you are.
00:37:53.140 Old, younger people less so, older people more so. 0.97
00:37:55.800 Now the vaccine side effects.
00:37:58.620 The, the, for young men, the, the mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis at unacceptable rates.
00:38:04.780 One in 2,000, one in 3,000, something like that.
00:38:09.240 That is too high.
00:38:10.920 It does.
00:38:11.300 And sometimes people will say, well, gosh, it protects you against getting COVID, which can also cause myocarditis, which is true.
00:38:16.360 Um, that it also cause myocarditis, but it doesn't protect you against getting COVID.
00:38:20.460 So now you face both risks.
00:38:21.560 You face the risk of the vaccine myocarditis and you face the risk of COVID myocarditis.
00:38:25.960 Um, 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.
00:38:34.960 Um, so, uh, you know, I just don't, I don't understand the push to vaccinate children, for instance.
00:38:41.300 Um, cause the, the cost benefit just doesn't work out.
00:38:44.060 It's one thing if you have a vaccine, you have to vaccinate children in order to have the disease stop spreading.
00:38:49.640 But this vaccine doesn't do that.
00:38:51.240 So what's the argument?
00:38:52.420 And Jay, I suppose the one thing that whenever I hear people talk, they always ignore long COVID.
00:39:02.280 They always ignore the people who get COVID and then become desperately ill as a result of that.
00:39:07.840 So can you enlighten us?
00:39:09.340 What are the portion of people who get COVID who were previously healthy, active, fit adults?
00:39:14.140 And then because for a variety of different reasons are no longer able to work or their, their life is no longer what it used to be.
00:39:21.100 Yeah, no, I, so that's a really good question, uh, for instance, and thank you for asking it.
00:39:24.860 So, so the key, the key thing is, um, uh, in terms of the policy, preventing long COVID means preventing you from getting COVID.
00:39:33.020 Um, I don't know any technology that does that.
00:39:39.200 So what we're talking about is, is, is, is then is just how do we support the people who have this out long-term outcome?
00:39:46.000 Um, now, in terms of like who gets these long-term outcomes, uh, in my view, there's three different categories of people.
00:39:52.540 I don't, I can't give you precise numbers because people are still debating about the, about this.
00:39:55.960 Um, but, but like the three categories are people who had a very severe acute bout with COVID.
00:40:00.980 They ended up in the hospital, in the ICU.
00:40:03.000 If you end up in the ICU, you're going to have a long time recovering.
00:40:06.300 That's just the nature of the thing.
00:40:07.880 Um, and, uh, that's, it's going to be hard.
00:40:11.520 There's no, there's no, there's no sugarcoating.
00:40:13.460 What's best is don't end up in the ICU.
00:40:15.840 How do you do that?
00:40:17.100 Reduce the risk of, of, of exposing older people to COVID before the vaccine, vaccinated older people.
00:40:23.020 Now that we have the vaccine, um, second group are people who, um, uh, have these like lingering symptoms, right?
00:40:34.100 Probably the classic one is, uh, you can't smell.
00:40:36.600 Um, 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.
00:40:45.860 I was, I was absolutely thrilled when I could smell, you know, I could smell mustard again.
00:40:50.600 That was, that was, that was fun.
00:40:51.720 Um, um, but, uh, uh, some people, maybe one, one percent, less than one percent, um, can't, a year later can't smell, right?
00:41:03.420 Um, there, there are some lingering effects like brain fog, things like that.
00:41:08.040 Brain 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.
00:41:15.340 Um, 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.
00:41:26.260 You have to have a control group of people who've never had COVID because many of those symptoms are nonspecific, right?
00:41:33.040 I'm often tired and, you know, I'll, you can call it what I have is brain fog.
00:41:36.180 Maybe I have brain fog.
00:41:37.080 No, you guys, I don't know.
00:41:38.180 Um, 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.
00:41:53.660 Um, 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%.
00:42:09.400 Um, and it varies.
00:42:11.680 So I think there's, there's, there's some legitimate lingering symptoms for COVID in a relatively small group of people.
00:42:18.000 Um, there's also a third group that, um, I mean, I think we've been through a tremendous amount.
00:42:23.660 And 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.
00:42:34.520 And it, I think that there's a somaticization of the symptoms, um, that comes from that.
00:42:40.960 It's why you see people who have not had COVID, uh, you know, in 2020 saying like they felt like they had long COVID.
00:42:47.480 It's a lot of that comes out of depression, fear, anxiety.
00:42:50.560 Um, and those are, those are, those are real things.
00:42:54.300 I don't want to diminish them.
00:42:55.400 And 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.
00:43:01.480 Um, so it's, it's, uh, so I think it's, it's a combination of those three things.
00:43:05.380 It 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.
00:43:14.480 Right. So you don't hear about long COVID in Africa, even though COVID spread all through Africa.
00:43:18.760 Um, uh, so, uh, the, the, I mean, I think we, we have to treat it seriously.
00:43:23.180 We have to think about it, about, about how to manage all of, all three of those groups seriously.
00:43:28.020 Um, but you can't come to the conclusion because there's long COVID, therefore we should do lockdown.
00:43:33.960 The lockdown didn't work to stop COVID.
00:43:35.960 Why would you think it would work to stop long COVID?
00:43:38.220 One of the things that I found very interesting about the illness is how it affected certain groups.
00:43:45.700 So for instance, my, my mother's Latin American and in South America, it, it really affected the population.
00:43:53.820 A lot of people died.
00:43:55.740 Uh, it caused chaos.
00:43:57.460 Whereas if you look at Africa, it was nowhere near as bad.
00:44:01.020 And you look at, you go, well, obviously there's difference between groups of people and et cetera, but they're both third world countries.
00:44:08.040 You know, and so on and so forth.
00:44:10.060 So do, do we know the reasons why it affected certain groups and not others as, as badly?
00:44:14.860 I think we're still learning about that.
00:44:16.440 So like Africa, I think the, probably the most important fact is I think something like 3% are over the age of 65.
00:44:22.380 That's why it didn't really have, it spread everywhere.
00:44:24.780 You can't lock down, but it didn't really affect, um, most of the population because most of the population is young.
00:44:31.020 You know, a very large fraction under the age of 18, excuse me.
00:44:35.020 Uh, Latin America is older, um, for one. 0.89
00:44:37.800 So I think that's probably the primary reason.
00:44:39.900 The other thing is like Latin America, I was, I was looking at the lockdown in Peru and my heart just broke.
00:44:44.240 Like they, they, they, they, they were a massive poor population of poor folks in Peru who were just devastated by the lockdowns.
00:44:53.500 And then, um, at one point they, uh, they reclassified all their deaths, the excess deaths as COVID deaths.
00:45:00.560 And 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.
00:45:07.620 In 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.
00:45:16.720 And 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.
00:45:35.740 I was trying to look at it and go, well, why on earth would you do this?
00:45:39.220 This clearly doesn't make any sense.
00:45:41.040 Why on earth would you do, why would you force people to take a vaccine that doesn't stop the spread?
00:45:45.260 Like all of this stuff.
00:45:46.840 And it has produced, as you alluded to earlier, a lot of people who think there's something deeply nefarious going on here.
00:45:54.240 These 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.
00:46:01.620 But 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.
00:46:15.140 And, you know, we see some new stories out of places like Canada where they do seem to sort of be heading in that direction.
00:46:20.720 I 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.
00:46:30.620 What do you make of all of that?
00:46:33.460 What do you say to those people?
00:46:34.960 Do you agree with them?
00:46:36.080 Do you have an explanation of why they're wrong?
00:46:38.000 Like what's your take on all of it?
00:46:39.400 I mean, I think it's, it's complicated.
00:46:41.040 Like there are, there are definitely people constantly who took advantage of the pandemic and took advantage like they're, and they absolutely did.
00:46:47.840 So like, you know, the pharmaceutical companies pushed, there's a drug called remdesivir put out by Gilead.
00:46:53.900 They, they, they, they was pushed really hard on the basis of really bad evidence.
00:46:58.480 And a lot of patients got it in hospital.
00:47:00.720 The claims is, the claim is that it may actually harm people.
00:47:04.900 I don't know if that's true, but like it's, it's, it's, it certainly didn't help people.
00:47:08.940 It didn't solve, didn't solve you from, from dying in hospital if you took it.
00:47:12.340 Um, so I think, uh, I think that, uh, there are pharma interests that took advantage.
00:47:18.080 There were politicians that took advantage.
00:47:20.080 Um, there were a very large number of, uh, public health, uh, people, especially, I mean, it looks like anyone with an MPH on Twitter.
00:47:28.660 They're just, they, they have this like this, like they, they convey this anxiety.
00:47:33.140 Don't, don't, don't see your family at Christmas.
00:47:35.380 Don't, don't, uh, don't hug your children.
00:47:37.620 Don't, uh, if you, if they, if your kids come in from home from college, put, stick them in the garage.
00:47:41.300 Don't, don't, don't, don't let them anywhere near you. 0.96
00:47:43.960 I 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.
00:47:53.500 Um, 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.
00:48:06.640 I think it was these opportunities presented themselves and, and, and people did what they normally do is they take it.
00:48:12.180 They, they, they, they act in their own interest, um, not for any nefarious reasons, because this, it just is their own interest.
00:48:19.380 I, 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.
00:48:27.660 And 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.
00:48:35.200 And 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.
00:48:52.040 And I, we know, we knew at the time it had side effects.
00:48:55.160 We knew that it would have side effects because all medicine does.
00:48:59.240 Uh, I thought that that was wrong and I can't, I'm not a trained doctor or public health official or anything like that.
00:49:05.640 I just thought the data was aligned.
00:49:08.020 The government shouldn't cross in these kinds of situations.
00:49:11.640 What are the ethics of mandatory vaccinations from your perspective as someone who understands health and understands public health?
00:49:19.040 Should it ever happen?
00:49:20.420 I mean, if somebody said to me in the podcast, I did, what if this had like a 90% mortality right now?
00:49:26.520 My facetious counter argument is if it did, everybody would take the bloody vaccine by themselves.
00:49:31.400 That's not facetious.
00:49:32.520 You're absolutely right.
00:49:34.280 However, you know, what are the ethics?
00:49:37.220 Is, is it as simple as what I'm saying?
00:49:39.560 The government should never do that or are there circumstances where they should?
00:49:43.280 How do we make these decisions as a society?
00:49:46.120 Okay.
00:49:46.240 So first, let me like for vaccine mandates, if you are mandating the vaccine, you have failed as a public health agency.
00:49:53.880 Because what, what the, what that means is there's a substantial number of people who don't trust you.
00:49:59.620 They don't trust you.
00:50:00.740 Right.
00:50:01.280 And so as a general rule, you don't want to tell people to take something that's bad for them on net.
00:50:08.500 Right.
00:50:09.520 So 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.
00:50:20.640 Right.
00:50:21.180 They're, they're, you're going to expose them to something that's bad for them because then it'll benefit the community at large.
00:50:28.540 Otherwise, there's no purpose.
00:50:29.580 And what you said is exactly right.
00:50:31.080 If there's a 90% death rate from some disease and there's a vaccine that gets rid of that risk, everyone will take it with no mandate.
00:50:39.000 If, if, if, as long as the public health agency is trustworthy enough that you, you could, you believe them.
00:50:44.560 Right.
00:50:45.040 Right.
00:50:45.740 Um, so I think, um, so the first observation, if you're requiring a vaccine mandate, the public health agency has failed.
00:50:54.180 It 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.
00:51:04.580 Um, you believe me and take it.
00:51:06.400 Um, 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.
00:51:17.720 Um, okay.
00:51:18.500 Second 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.
00:51:35.520 Um, I've, I've, I've seen good arguments both ways.
00:51:38.600 Uh, and I, frankly, I, I, I'm undecided about that.
00:51:41.440 I think it would matter a lot about exactly the nature of the disease and how it spreads.
00:51:44.980 And it would be, it would be a complicated, difficult argument to have.
00:51:48.800 Right.
00:51:49.360 Um, so kids, I don't think are very high risk from COVID.
00:51:54.440 I don't, I think the vaccine is, is, is not worthwhile to give to children.
00:51:58.140 Um, but you could convince me that if kids are super spreaders and the vaccine stopped the Z spread,
00:52:04.720 maybe we can, we can have it.
00:52:06.840 I probably would come down the other way.
00:52:08.320 Cause I don't think we should ask kids to bear the burden of, of, of, of the disease spread.
00:52:12.620 But like that, that's a, that's, that's, that's, you know, people could differ on that, but we don't have a vaccine like that.
00:52:19.660 We don't have a vaccine that stops disease spread.
00:52:22.120 So why did we create this like second-class citizenship for vaccine, for unvaccinated people?
00:52:28.380 Like these pariahs, it's, it's, it's essentially, it's like, I mean, it's a vaccine discrimination, right?
00:52:34.700 Like in Canada, you couldn't travel internally.
00:52:37.460 You still can't come to the United States if you're just visiting, um, if you're unvaccinated.
00:52:42.700 What, what purpose is served by that COVID is everywhere and unvaccinated person is not unclean.
00:52:47.960 And that's essentially what, like treating them as lepers.
00:52:50.400 I have no idea.
00:52:51.720 And there's no justification for it.
00:52:53.220 It's just, all it serves to do at this point is undermine trust in public health.
00:52:57.280 Jay, uh, this is, uh, this is actually true.
00:53:00.280 And it's something that always used to make me laugh.
00:53:02.160 Apparently Hitler was against vaccine mandates because he thought it was a bit far.
00:53:08.320 He's a vegan too, or something.
00:53:10.020 I don't know.
00:53:10.340 But 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?
00:53:19.580 Because I'm seeing an excess death rate.
00:53:21.620 We've got an excess death rate in this country.
00:53:23.740 Nobody's really talking about it because it's long COVID, mate, all of it.
00:53:29.240 Because it's an unpleasant truth that really nobody wants to talk about.
00:53:33.540 So what has it have actually been the effects of these lockdowns?
00:53:37.960 I mean, it's, it's heartbreaking, right?
00:53:39.660 So, um, uh, in, in Europe, there was a modeling study.
00:53:44.860 It was a really interesting model study.
00:53:45.940 It said, suggests that a hundred million people have skipped cancer screening during the pandemic.
00:53:52.740 A hundred million?
00:53:53.760 One hundred million cancer screenings have been, I shouldn't say people.
00:53:56.920 A hundred million cancer screenings have been skipped.
00:53:59.460 Um, and, uh, that's going to lead to a million people with cancer, later stage cancer that should have been picked up.
00:54:06.300 Then, uh, that, that, that, that, that, that, they're going to, you know, often will kill them that shouldn't have killed them.
00:54:11.500 The 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.
00:54:20.320 Um, that, that's, I mean, that's just one, one thing.
00:54:23.720 Uh, the, the, the, the psychological effects in the U.S., something like one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020.
00:54:32.100 The overhang for, uh, the overhang for, like, anxiety and depression is enormous.
00:54:37.140 I think that's, uh, maybe, maybe it's a little less true in Europe and the U.K.
00:54:40.020 because you guys had Freedom Day earlier.
00:54:41.200 Um, 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.
00:54:53.720 Um, polio has come back.
00:54:55.900 It was on its way out.
00:54:57.220 We were, like, this close to eradicating polio.
00:54:59.680 Um, in poor countries, it's even worse, right?
00:55:03.780 In, 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. 0.83
00:55:21.140 That means it's a generation of, of poor kids in Uganda who will never get an education and will grow up, grow up poor.
00:55:29.380 We, it's just, like, we, we've fueled inequality in a way that, like, it's, it's almost unimaginable.
00:55:34.820 Um, and they will, they will lead shorter lives.
00:55:37.680 Even, 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.
00:55:46.740 Because, you know, they grow up poorer.
00:55:49.540 One 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.
00:56:01.220 Um, 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.
00:56:15.900 It is, it is catastrophic and terrible.
00:56:18.060 I don't know for certain all those excess deaths you talked about, Francis, are due to the, to the lockdowns.
00:56:22.220 But I, I do believe a substantial fraction must be, um, the, the long tail of the lockdown harms.
00:56:29.280 Places that-
00:56:29.700 And do you think-
00:56:30.680 Oh, sorry, carry on, Joe.
00:56:31.740 No, I just, just one, one more data point.
00:56:33.880 Uh, the, uh, the, the lock, the, the, uh, in Scandinavia, the, all-cause excess death rates are actually quite low now.
00:56:42.660 Um, you know, close to zero.
00:56:45.100 I mean, they didn't lock down nearly as, as, as, as much as the UK did or the U, or the US did.
00:56:51.340 I think that that's, I think that the lockdowns will ultimately play some role in, in explaining it.
00:56:56.720 Joe, do you think we've learned our lessons from these mistakes?
00:56:59.640 Or do you, or do you think we're going to, just going to make the same mistakes again?
00:57:03.820 We have not learned our lessons, Francis.
00:57:06.180 Um, 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.
00:57:12.400 And there's still now some fight over exactly what's going to be part of that.
00:57:16.040 Um, I think any honest evaluation of these policies will conclude that they were a failure.
00:57:22.780 And, 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.
00:57:33.180 Any 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.
00:57:43.600 There'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.
00:57:52.580 We, we, we did the best we could under, under, uh, circumstances where it was difficult.
00:57:57.280 But that's not actually right.
00:57:59.160 They suppressed voices that opposed it.
00:58:01.880 Um, they, they, they, they engaged unethical behaviors like stoking fear in the population using behavioral economics techniques to do that.
00:58:09.740 Um, they, they, they made tremendously bad decisions by closing themselves off from criticism.
00:58:16.520 They employed censorship in social media and a whole bunch of other settings so that people couldn't effectively push back.
00:58:22.640 Um, 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.
00:58:32.000 Uh, and I think the ultimate outcome has to be that lockdown has to be a dirty word.
00:58:36.500 We have to look, whenever we think about the word lockdown, whenever we think about the concept of lockdown, we shudder in, in, in fear.
00:58:42.860 We say, we should never do this again.
00:58:44.600 Um, that has to be the outcome of these, but I'm very afraid that that's not going to be.
00:58:48.380 The 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.
00:59:03.500 Um, um, now I think the outcome should also involve some level of forgiveness.
00:59:08.780 I mean, you know, like this was so big a thing.
00:59:11.400 It's like, uh, you know, you, you, you don't, we have to come together.
00:59:15.220 We can't like put half the, you know, indict half the people in the world that made these decisions or very, very high.
00:59:22.020 They, they, they, we have to live with them. 1.00
00:59:23.540 So 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.
00:59:33.960 And Jay, this is perhaps a strange question to ask, but, um, Francis and I were both vocal.
00:59:41.700 About some of what we thought was happening going too far.
00:59:46.060 Uh, 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.
01:00:04.040 But do you think we, as the public did enough to stand up to this?
01:00:08.680 Did we do everything that we could?
01:00:10.100 Or 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.
01:00:19.120 I mean, I think in March of 2020, it was basically impossible.
01:00:22.560 I think that, that the, that the fear was so great that it was very hard for public work.
01:00:27.720 I 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.
01:00:40.140 In 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?
01:00:52.440 You had deployed against the public, these techniques of social control that are very difficult to, to, to push back against, right?
01:01:02.200 If 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.
01:01:15.320 You, 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.
01:01:24.900 It's very difficult for the public without, to, to, to, to speak up.
01:01:30.440 In 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.
01:01:39.060 There are legitimate people who disagree with it.
01:01:41.420 And so they could speak up and say, well, you know, we're not crazy.
01:01:45.220 We're, we're, we're, we're actually engaging in the public fight over, over this deeply important issue.
01:01:51.500 And we should have our voice heard.
01:01:52.620 That 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. 0.94
01:02:03.720 If you speak up, you're insane.
01:02:06.720 So 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.
01:02:15.860 But 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.
01:02:23.840 That makes sense.
01:02:24.740 Well, look, we're coming to the end of the interview.
01:02:26.320 So 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.
01:02:34.760 Let's say we have another pandemic that's exactly like COVID, but not COVID.
01:02:38.540 What do we do?
01:02:39.140 The key principle is focus protection, identify high-risk people, move heaven and earth to protect them.
01:02:45.120 And it might be a different set of high-risk people.
01:02:47.240 Maybe it won't be elderly next time.
01:02:48.480 Maybe it'll be kids.
01:02:49.960 So you'll have to be very creative about how to do that.
01:02:53.020 It's going to require a local effort.
01:02:55.160 It's not going to be one global policy.
01:02:57.000 The living circumstances in London would be different than in LA, than in Billings, Montana.
01:03:01.320 But it's going to require creativity, focus protection of high-risk people, and then develop vaccines, develop treatments as rapidly as you can.
01:03:12.140 That's the right way to deal with it.
01:03:13.340 Never lock down again.
01:03:15.280 Do 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.
01:03:26.860 We have to understand that society really is unequal.
01:03:32.760 And don't trust just epidemiologists.
01:03:34.540 Let's have other people at the table.
01:03:36.080 Let's have, like, you know, it shouldn't just be scientists.
01:03:39.700 These are two complicated decisions that involve values that scientists apparently are incapable of seeing.
01:03:46.000 Jake, 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.
01:03:55.060 Does it worry you that as a disease, that kind of pandemic, where you've got a disease that is so deadly like Ebola?
01:04:03.740 Does that have a chance of becoming a global pandemic?
01:04:07.560 I think it's unlikely.
01:04:09.600 Ebola is a deadly disease, but you get symptoms fairly quickly, and you're very sick.
01:04:15.660 And so you're not going to go around spreading it.
01:04:17.380 It spreads in conditions where it's poor, where people are living in close contact with people, unavoidable contact.
01:04:26.720 I don't think it spreads the way that this disease spreads.
01:04:30.400 The reason why this disease was so highly transmissible is because it's aerosolized.
01:04:34.480 It lives in the air.
01:04:36.400 You breathe it.
01:04:37.660 That's why masks don't work so well.
01:04:39.200 It's because you have these gaps.
01:04:40.440 Your glasses fog up.
01:04:42.080 That's aerosolization events.
01:04:45.060 If you have COVID, it's COVID on your glasses.
01:04:49.120 So, yeah, I'm not so worried about that.
01:04:51.840 I am worried that Ebola get managed well in Africa.
01:04:56.320 You don't want people to die there of that disease.
01:04:58.800 But I think that we actually have pretty good tools to try to reduce the spread of that disease in Africa. 1.00
01:05:05.600 So, yeah, I'm not worried there's going to be a global pandemic.
01:05:08.380 I do think we have to take it seriously there.
01:05:11.480 Well, Jay, thank you so much.
01:05:12.880 It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
01:05:15.700 And this can be completely unrelated, by the way, to COVID and everything we've talked about.
01:05:19.420 But as always, what do you think is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
01:05:26.280 There's an irony in this.
01:05:27.240 I think censorship kills, Constantine.
01:05:28.960 I think censorship is the worst.
01:05:30.960 And maybe we're starting.
01:05:32.320 Maybe it's not the right answer to your question because we are talking about it.
01:05:34.920 It's funny that we're talking about censorship.
01:05:37.000 But we're not talking about it enough.
01:05:40.240 And I am really glad to see Elon Musk trying to bring back some voices that were silenced.
01:05:48.520 But that needs to be a society-wide effort.
01:05:50.520 I thought we had a norm about this in Western democracies that we didn't silence each other.
01:05:56.460 We might yell at each other, but we don't silence each other.
01:05:59.660 Let's bring that norm back.
01:06:01.020 And we're not talking enough about that.
01:06:03.380 I agree completely.
01:06:04.540 Well, we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see on the locals.
01:06:10.280 But Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, it's been an absolute pleasure.
01:06:12.460 Thank you so much for joining us.
01:06:14.200 And thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:06:15.960 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or our show.
01:06:20.580 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.
01:06:22.300 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:06:27.280 Take care and see you soon, guys.
01:06:30.380 I do worry about the side effects of the vaccines for young men, for sure.
01:06:34.640 Hear it.