334. Covid 19 Mandates: Silencing the Opposition | Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

[0] Hello, everyone.

[1] I have the privilege today of talking to Dr. J. Badacharia, who's been a very effective spokesman on the pandemic front during the COVID -19 crisis, both imaginary and real.

[2] Dr. Baticharia has fought in the public domain to bring accurate information about the pandemic and the potential negative consequences.

[3] of lockdowns and other COVID -19 interventions to widespread public attention.

[4] He is a professor and researcher specializing in the economics of health care.

[5] Bataceria received all four of his degrees, an MA, an MD, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University.

[6] He is currently the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

[7] Badaceria came under severe fire during the COVID -19 pandemic, believing as he did and publicly communicating that fact that mask mandates and forced lockdowns were a detriment instead advocating for the development of herd immunity.

[8] He argued to allow the healthy and low -risk individuals, the majority of people, to continue on with everyday life and work while providing protection for those most at risk.

[9] risk.

[10] Only recently, it was revealed through the Twitter files that, among others, Dr. Badacheria, was being purposefully silenced on mainstream media platforms.

[11] Hello, Dr. Badacheria.

[12] I'm looking very much forward to this conversation today.

[13] We met recently at Stanford Conference on Academic Freedom, and that was the first time we'd met in public.

[14] I'd been following what you'd been doing for a long time, but It was good to see you there, and it's good to have this opportunity to talk through what's happened over the last three years, especially, I would say, in light of the, well, the recent Cochran review, for example, that indicated there's no evidence whatsoever that masks were effective in preventing or even delaying the transmission of COVID -19.

[15] And I've watched the usual apologists try to wend their way around that review, but the Cochran reviews are pretty, damn reliable and they're conservative too in their claims and are known for that right i mean the cochrane reviews aren't going to come out and say that masks don't work if the people who wrote the reviews aren't pretty damn convinced that masks don't work and so the fact that that's the case and that there was evidence about that beforehand because in the epidemic planning that predated the outbreak of covid -19 there was there weren't credible people as far as I could tell, that really thought that masks worked even back then.

[16] So anyways, the tide seems to be turning on the COVID narrative front, and that's not in not a small measure attributable to you.

[17] So why don't we go into that?

[18] Sure, well, that's a great honor to talk with you, Jordan.

[19] It was really delight to meet you at the conference.

[20] I've obviously been following you for a very long time.

[21] Admire your courage.

[22] You know, it's interesting because the science on COVID, on the lockdowns, on the mitigation measures, on a whole host of topics.

[23] If the public was listening, they would hear this idea that there was this univocal, sort of univocal conclusion that you had to do lockdowns, you had to wear masks, you had to socially distance, you had to put plastic barriers up, you had to close schools, you had to do all of these things that the vaccines would stop transmission of the disease, that therefore was warranted to force people to lose their jobs over them.

[24] All of these ideas were sold as if there was a scientific consensus in favor of them.

[25] That was a lie.

[26] There was never a scientific consensus on almost any of the topics.

[27] And as you say on mass, in fact, the pre -existing narrative, the pre -existing idea among most scientists before the pandemic was quite the opposite direction.

[28] What happened was a relatively small group, a cartel almost, of very powerful scientific bureaucrats, took over the whole apparatus of science, at least as far as the public eye was concerned, dominated the media, dominated the message to politicians.

[29] And as a result, we had a catastrophic response to COVID.

[30] And, you know, we're going to be paying the cost of that for a very long time.

[31] So let's dig into that because it's so easy in the current political climate for discussion to become conspiratorial, right?

[32] And the idea of a cartel, well, that sounds conspiratorial.

[33] Now, I've been trying to think that through.

[34] And so a system of ideas can act like a conspiracy, even if it doesn't make itself manifest as a direct conspiracy, because a system of ideas has an internal intrinsic ethos and view and implications for actions that unfold across time.

[35] If you read the Gulag Archipelago, for example, Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of indicating how the consequences, the brutal tyrannical actions of Lenin and Stalin, were necessary concomitants to the, or necessary outcomes of the axioms that were embedded in the communist worldview.

[36] They weren't deviations from some properly utopian norm.

[37] they were exactly what you'd expect if you put those principles into operation.

[38] And I see similar things going on around us now, let's say on the politically correct front.

[39] I don't really believe there's a conspiracy of politically correct people who are meeting in secret to direct the world, though if there was the WEF would probably qualify.

[40] But I do think that systems of ideas can act as conspiratorial agents.

[41] Now, in this case, it's more complex, though.

[42] So there's a cartel who's pushing forward this narrative, and the question is, well, or a system of ideas that's generating it, and the question is, well, to what end?

[43] That's one question.

[44] And the other question is, who benefits?

[45] Now, and then the further question is, why would the media, for example, fall into lockstep, shoulder -to -shoulder cooperation with those who benefit.

[46] Now, we know perfectly well that the biggest punitive, civil lawsuits ever levied in the United States were levied successfully against pharmaceutical companies.

[47] And the left has every reason to be entirely skeptical about pharmaceutical companies, like they have been for the last five decades.

[48] But all of a sudden, we saw this massive spin around, where everything the pharmaceutical company said was taken as gospel.

[49] And it's very hard to suppress the suspicions that something like massive lobbying and very narrow profit -seeking were driving this.

[50] What's your sense of the underlying motivation?

[51] So I completely agree with you that this, what I described as a small cartel was operating in the context of a very complex environment.

[52] and in that environment, many people took advantage of the opportunities provided to them by the set of events that unfolded.

[53] But let me just defend the characterization of this as a, at least initiated.

[54] I personally blame public health.

[55] Public health authorities, the top public health authorities in the world and the top public health authorities in the United States and elsewhere for the set of events that transpired in response to the, Let's name some names on that front.

[56] Yeah, so like in the United States, a primary architect of the lockdown strategy was Tony Fauci.

[57] Now, let me just describe why I think this wasn't, it's not a conspiracy in a sense that, you know, there's this small group that has nefarious ideas.

[58] If you look at the decades before the pandemic happened, there was a concerted effort in the United States and elsewhere.

[59] to prepare for the next pandemic.

[60] That preparation involved putting into actuality a whole range of powers that previously we would have said were not consistent with liberal democracy.

[61] Powers to close you into your home, to close your business, to close your schools, powers to basically force you to test and isolate if you're found positive, a whole range of almost dictatorial powers that would have been previously unimaginable.

[62] The idea was that we are biohazards to each other.

[63] And the whole goal is if we can keep each other apart during a time of severe infectious disease threat, it will actually save lives.

[64] That was the premise of this and that there was coming another, a new respiratory virus pandemic threat.

[65] Now, that is actually, was certain to be true.

[66] We've had respiratory virus pandemics time after time, you know, decade after decade in the 20th century, we had respiratory virus pandemics.

[67] 1918, of course, now is the most famous, but we had them in, you know, 1957, 1968, 1976.

[68] You could just keep going on and on.

[69] But most recently, maybe 2009 and the swine flu pandemic.

[70] So there was this infrastructure set up and this sort of ideology among the top scientific bureaucrats in this country and elsewhere that because a respiratory virus pandemic was coming, we needed better tools than we previously had to address it.

[71] And for them, the better tools meant essentially the dictatorial powers, the authoritarian powers that constitute a lockdown.

[72] Now, when COVID arrived, and we can talk about exactly how it arrived, but let's just take that as a given that it arrived, that entire infrastructure sort of powered into existence.

[73] And part of that infrastructure involves making sure that people take the measures that are being proposed seriously, that the threat seriously and the way they did that is by spreading panic and fear about the disease in that environment what happened was that a small group of people at the head like Tony, let's just name names Tony Fauci he dawned on himself the mantle of science itself right we're all looking for a guru he took the name of science in vain He actually did.

[74] And he talks about it as if it's some sort of religious system.

[75] So he took, and what he did is he designed a set of policies, an ethos that said, if you do these things, then I will rescue you from the threat that is going all around you, that's in the air everywhere, where even your children are a biohazard to you, a threat to you.

[76] And in that, so when that, that set of events unfolds, like, you have someone who essentially takes over what truth is in the minds of everybody.

[77] Then all these other actors could come in and start to say, you know, you mentioned the pharmaceutical companies, they jumped in, not, I don't think they're in a nefarious plot.

[78] I think that they jumped in legitimately saying, okay, let's help figure out how to address this threat.

[79] Now, then they took advantage of the power.

[80] How are they had in very abusive ways?

[81] But that's a later development rather than the driving force, I think.

[82] And so how do you understand the practicalities of the relationship between the top public health bureaucrats and the pharmaceutical companies?

[83] Because there's obviously moral hazard there.

[84] One of the things that struck me is really beyond comprehension in some fundamental sense is that the Biden White House, for example, is essentially a shill, is acting as a shill for five.

[85] constantly.

[86] The Biden White House tweets out around Christmas, for example, this became particularly egregious, these constant reminders that if you loved your children, you'd go have them both vaccinated and boosted.

[87] And by that time, it was absolutely clear to me, and I'd be more than happy to be corrected on this front, that the evidence that vaccinating children was a good idea was not only lacking.

[88] It was the best evidence was counter evidence, is that children were basically at zero risk for serious consequences, serious side effects from COVID, and the vaccines in all likelihood posed a greater threat to them than did the virus.

[89] And so I couldn't understand at all why the White House would be supporting the marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical companies.

[90] Now, there are tens of billions of dollars at stake here, and there is a revolving door, and people who are listening and watching, is my understanding is that there's something of a revolving door in Washington, and between powerful companies and the regulators who regulate them, those regulatory bureaucratic positions aren't necessarily particularly well paid and they don't last forever and a lot of the people who occupy those positions are ambitious and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.

[91] But it's pretty damn useful to hire someone to work for you who was once involved in the regulation of your company, let's say.

[92] So there's plenty of moral hazard on that front.

[93] How do you understand the interplay, like the dynamic interplay between the public health officials, quote, who are there to protect us and these entities operating behind the scenes who do make products that are useful, but also have an iron in the fire that isn't necessarily completely aligned with everyone's best interests.

[94] Yeah, so I think the idea is that in war, a lot is possible and ethically permitted that would not be permitted outside of war.

[95] So the same kind of principle attack applies here.

[96] So what you have, for instance, is, again, in the U .S., that a former head of the FDA was actually on the board of Pfizer.

[97] He then is on national TV all the time, essentially pushing a line that benefited Pfizer and the sale of his products.

[98] Sometimes, and often, in fact, without disclosing the fact that he has this conflict.

[99] So they're definitely, but, you know, that's longstanding, right?

[100] You understand that, that those kinds of conflicts exist.

[101] And you're absolutely right.

[102] Like the regulatory agencies, there is this like sort of people work for the regular agencies, and then they go work for the drug companies and come back, right?

[103] That's like the FDA, that's a major problem, the FDA in the U .S. faces.

[104] So now, that's completely understandable.

[105] What has to happen is policymakers, top policymakers, understand that dynamic and act against it.

[106] Instead, what happened was that the top policymakers said, maybe to themselves, certainly acted this way, that that kind of dynamic actually helps the public.

[107] Because what they're doing is putting forward a product that's going to rescue us from the pandemic.

[108] You have a product, this vaccine, and so it's okay.

[109] I mean, it's implicit.

[110] At least that's my interpretation of how people acted.

[111] because otherwise you would have had top policymakers and top public health officials decrying these conflicts of interest, this sort of revolving door, as you say.

[112] Well, the problem is that in the face of an unspecified threat, it's easy to make the argument that the end justifies the means.

[113] And you can understand how we would fall into that, especially given, and this is something else that's very interesting to contemplate, the exaggeration of the severity of the threat.

[114] Now, I've been thinking about this biologically.

[115] You know, I did a lot of work on the extended immune system, the behavioral immune system.

[116] And so we have an immune system that operates within us to protect us from disease.

[117] But we have a behavioral immune system too.

[118] And both disgust and fear are part of that behavioral immune system.

[119] And what I mean by that is, well, we tend to be disgusted by such things as, let's say, rotting food.

[120] And the reason we're disgusted by it is because the rotting food is full of bacteria that produces toxins.

[121] to keep us from eating the bacteria's food and we're sensitive to that so we stay the hell away from it.

[122] And so that's part of what defects us against pathogens.

[123] And disgust is one of the main mechanisms whereby that operates.

[124] And so what we saw happening was the use of fear, definitely, but also the use of disgust, which by the way is much more dangerous.

[125] Because if you're afraid of something, you avoid it.

[126] But if you're disgusted by something, you burn it and destroy it.

[127] So if you start to leverage disgust in the political landscape, you're playing with fire.

[128] It's certainly what the Nazi propagandists were very, very good at using disgust.

[129] And Hitler's anti -Semitic language, for example, is absolutely permeated with disgust metaphors.

[130] You know, purity of the blood, purity of the race, the cockroaches and insects that were conspiring against Germany.

[131] It's all purity language.

[132] And so I kind of think that what happened from a biological perspective might be construed as an overreaction of the behavioral immune system, right?

[133] So, you know, if you get COVID, you can have a cytokine storm, which is an immune system overreaction, and that can kill you, not the virus, but the immune response.

[134] And in this situation, what happened was we faced an uncertain threat.

[135] and then we had, as you pointed out, a pre -prepared response to it that turned out to be far worse on virtually every front than the threat that it was purported to reduce.

[136] But that metaphor of an extended immune system overreaction depoliticizes it to some degree.

[137] We can think about that as more something like an existential threat, which is how do we regulate our responses to unknown threats so that the response itself doesn't become more pathological than the threat.

[138] I think we're facing the same thing on the climate catastrophe front at the moment, by the way.

[139] And, you know, people can differ in their opinions about that.

[140] But certainly systemic overreaction is a constant potential catastrophe.

[141] And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state, too, which was extraordinarily interesting all across the West in a mad, panicked, herd -like response to, well, to what?

[142] That's not what we're learning.

[143] I mean, I completely agree.

[144] I think it's actually quite insightful to point to discuss as a central driving factor in this pandemic.

[145] Right.

[146] So, for instance, if anyone were to get COVID, the first thing you'd ask is, who gave it to you?

[147] Yeah, right.

[148] As if it's some sort of sin.

[149] It's treated not as a disease to be managed and a person who gets it to be cared for.

[150] instead it's a sin that you've committed and as a result and once you have it everyone around you needs to be so far away from you that there's no chance of the contagion spreading to them I mean now it is true there are diseases that are quite deadly you want to have quarantining I mean those are like those are legitimate tools but to deploy at a society -wide level for an extended periods of time essentially destroys the underpinnings of civil society.

[151] When we are in community with each other, we implicitly accept that there's some risk of your spreading some diseases to me. That's just normal part of how civilization works.

[152] It's a deal we've made with each other.

[153] Civilization tempers the inclination that we humans have toward disgust and transforms it into something where it's much more constructive.

[154] And, you know, you can absolutely have pathologies of societies where that disgust is allowed to spread and marginalize people.

[155] So, like, you know, I come from Indian culture.

[156] The Indian society has struggled forever with this distinction of clean and unclean with certain casts of people being.

[157] I mean, I think that is a normal feature of societies.

[158] Yeah, well, there's good ones.

[159] work too on the political front showing that societies where infectious disease prevalence is higher, like genuinely higher, are also substantially more likely to have authoritarian political structures.

[160] And the correlations like 0 .7.

[161] This is not a trivial effect.

[162] It's a walloping effect.

[163] And some of that has to do with, well, exactly what you're describing, which is the distinction, the ritual and even sacred distinction between what's clean and unclean.

[164] And that does tie into bodily and physical purity and then into kind of metaphysical purity.

[165] And it's very difficult to keep those levels of analysis separate.

[166] I mean, the goal of public health has always worked to counteract that.

[167] Right.

[168] We tell people it's not, you shouldn't moralize a disease.

[169] You shouldn't treat a disease as if it's something that's, like, morally wrong about the person that has the disease.

[170] With HIV, we learned that lesson, I thought.

[171] yet during the pandemic, public health authorities leaned into this.

[172] They leaned into the idea that someone who gets COVID has committed a sin.

[173] And, you know, they didn't say it out loud, but they acted that way.

[174] Now, I said that there was a pandemic template.

[175] But, you know, that pandemic template is at odds with every other pandemic that we managed in the respiratory virus pandemic we managed the last century, right?

[176] that whole of the last century, what we did is we identified who was most at risk, developed therapeutics, vaccines, and other methods to try to protect those people as best we could while the pandemic was spreading, but minimized the fear in society at large, minimized the disruption to society at large.

[177] And the reasoning was so compelling.

[178] The idea is that if you disrupt society at large, you will do more harm to people than you would save them from whatever marginal risk from the respiratory virus pandemic can spread it.

[179] Yeah, well, that's basically conservative, so to speak, a classic conservative concern, right, which is twofold.

[180] One is to stress the law of unintended consequences is this is something I really learned as a social scientist and well and as a biological scientist for that matter don't be so sure that your stupid intervention will only do what you think it will do only the good things don't even be sure that it won't be positively counterproductive be certain that it will produce unintended consequences because it will you know one of the most famous studies for example ever done on the prevention of antisocial behavior among kids this was the Somerville study done back in the 1930s one of the first large -scale public health interventions on the psychological front, they grouped kids who were prone to conduct disorder and then criminal behavior, let's say, later in their life, randomly into a treatment group and a control group.

[181] And they hit the treatment group with every positive psychological and sociological intervention you could manage.

[182] Literacy training, parent training, communication training for the kids.

[183] They paired them with mentors.

[184] and they took the kids out of the inner cities and out to camp, summer camp, for two weeks every year while the program ran.

[185] And when they released the results, it showed very clearly that the kids in the treatment group who would be the subject of all this positive attention, which, by the way, the kids love, the parents loved, the teachers loved, the implementers loved.

[186] They did worse on virtually every measure.

[187] And the conclusion was that it was a really bad idea to take antisocial kids out of their environment for two weeks in the summer and group them together because they were basically camps for criminals.

[188] And that was such a powerful effect that had overwhelmed all the other interventions.

[189] Somerville study, very, very famous cautionary tale.

[190] And Joan McCord, who was one of the authors of that study and one of the first female PhDs in criminology, basically spent the rest of her life traveling around to academic conferences telling people, do not have.

[191] assume your idiot intervention is going to work.

[192] Build in careful outcome analysis to any social program that has a behavioral change mandate and have some humility in the face of the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve.

[193] And certainly, well, we just let all that go by the wayside in this.

[194] Now, you said that we had a different strategy in place for pandemics in the past, and that this new strategy emerged, like emerged where and why did it dominate?

[195] I mean, I think in the West it emerged out of the war on terror.

[196] You know, if you can go back to the anthrax threat from, I think it was 2001 or two, and people reacted to that by saying we need a way to deal with biosecurity threats, a new way to deal with biosecurity threats that's much more serious, that takes the threat more seriously.

[197] the whole series of war games and, you know, sort of planning exercises around biosecurity threats, that's not normally what you think of how you deal with respiratory virus pandemics, right?

[198] You would normally deal with them the old way, which was focus protection of vulnerable people, development of therapeutics, reduce, making sure that people don't panic, right?

[199] Those, you know, so society can go on, as best it can.

[200] I think that does.

[201] So when the pandemic hit, in 2020 in the U .S. and the world, what happened was that the World Health Organization organized in the early days of the pandemic a junk, if you will, to China.

[202] The Chinese authorities in January 2020 had declared finally a pandemic, had locked down this major city, Wuhan.

[203] And the U .N. The World Health Organization sent, a junket that included, you know, a deputy of Tony Fauci, prominent officials within, you know, public health officials, the World Health Organization, they came back from that junket saying that what China had done had worked.

[204] Yeah.

[205] These authoritarian measures that China had taken, shutting people into their apartment locking the door, you know, essentially like had worked.

[206] The disease was gone.

[207] Yeah, well, you know, lots of dim -witted Western intellectuals go to communist countries and conclude that it works.

[208] I mean, we do have a long history of that, don't we?

[209] We certainly do.

[210] We certainly do.

[211] And anybody dim enough to go to China under the control of the CCP and assume that their top -down authoritarian policies are working really needs to think along and hard about how they view the long arc of history, let's say.

[212] I mean, your default presumption when dealing with the CCP is 100 % of everything you see is a lie until proven otherwise.

[213] I mean, there's an email from Cliff Lane, who's a deputy of Tony Fauci.

[214] He comes back from this World Health Organization, John Kent, to China.

[215] And in the email, he writes that we have a, what China did work, in fact, what we have a very difficult decision to make.

[216] It will take more than just the people in this room to make that decision.

[217] And he writes, what China did work, albeit at great cost.

[218] Oh, yeah, that, that pesky little, what would you say, consequence.

[219] But, you know, you mentioned this classic social science study.

[220] The expertise of social scientists was denigrated early in the pandemic.

[221] The question was, are you an epidemiologist?

[222] Are you a virologist?

[223] Are you a infectious disease specialist?

[224] Yeah.

[225] And anyone else with any other expertise was not relevant to decision making.

[226] Only the science itself had a say.

[227] Right.

[228] And as you said, the science follow the science.

[229] It's like, well, okay, what do you mean here exactly?

[230] Because there's always a balance of risks if you're a sophisticated thinker.

[231] It's like even if there's a pandemic, well, first of all, we better make sure that there is and that we know the scope.

[232] But there's a hundred other considerations of risk that need to be simultaneously evaluated.

[233] And the way to protect yourself from that cognitive complexity, if you're a narcissistic leader and you want to, you know, forge the moral pathway forward, is just to demonize anybody who adds any complexity into the argument.

[234] So we saw plenty of that.

[235] Exactly what happened.

[236] Yeah.

[237] It's exactly what happened.

[238] And anyone who has the notion of the law of unintended consequences, of tradeoffs, of risk management in their soul or in their training, at least, they were, they were, they were.

[239] excluded from the conversation, right?

[240] So you could say, look, this is going to really hurt the economy.

[241] And then what the response you'd get was, well, you care more about money than lives.

[242] Yeah, yeah.

[243] And therefore, you shouldn't do that.

[244] But, you know, the irony is that the economic harm from the lockdowns, with 100 % certainty, killed more people and is still killing more people Oh, yeah.

[245] Then the lives saved by the lockdowns, which I think are very few.

[246] Yeah, well, we're not done with that yet.

[247] We have no idea how many people the lockdown and the associated panic killed.

[248] That'll unfold over probably...

[249] Decades.

[250] Yeah, well, especially when you factor in things like the decrement and educational attainment that emerged as a consequence of the suppression of schooling.

[251] Because that's a whole lifetime of decreased economic productivity.

[252] I cannot tell you how frustrated I was about this.

[253] So my training is I have an MD and a PhD in economics.

[254] I do health economics for a living.

[255] Following for the last two decades, this literature obsessively documenting the returns to education on the health of children during their entire life.

[256] And, you know, it's pretty convincing.

[257] It's a great investment we make when we educate our children in terms of, you know, fulfilling lies.

[258] And even like small interruptions of the education is what the literature documented have a long lifetime consequences.

[259] Someone, this guy named Dimitri Kostakis, who's an editor of JAMA Pediatrics, did this really interesting paper.

[260] We just extrapolated that existing social science literature and said, well, we closed schools for a short time in spring 2020.

[261] What consequences will that have on the lifespans of children?

[262] And he estimated that we had essentially robbed children in the United States of five and a half million life years just from the short interruption in March of in spring of 2020 well you know schools closed on the on the basis of public health this cartel of public health people all around the world yeah in Uganda in India the schools closed for two years many people who don't have access to internet or electricity or whatever that meant no school and millions of kids it also meant no social interactions.

[263] It meant way more time online.

[264] It meant way more time frustrated.

[265] It, yeah.

[266] Depression.

[267] One in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the U .S. according to a CDC survey in June of 2020.

[268] I mean, the consequences are just, the knock -on consequences were devastating.

[269] The UN World Health World Food Program was yelling as loud as it could that there were going to be millions, tens of millions of people on the brink of starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown.

[270] Supply chain disruptions, absolutely.

[271] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[272] And the point of the supply chain disruption is some guy who makes $5 a day or $10 a day of income selling coconuts to rich Mumbai, you know, laptop class and people, and then he loses his job, he now earns less than $2 a day of income.

[273] His family starts.

[274] That is the, so it wasn't, It was never lives versus money.

[275] Never.

[276] It was always lives versus lives.

[277] And if you talk to any competent social scientists, that's exactly what they would have told you in that early days of the pandemic.

[278] So when did you...

[279] So when did you start to become concerned about the overreach of the pandemic mandates?

[280] And tell me that story.

[281] And how did that unfold?

[282] So the day I...

[283] heard about the lockdowns.

[284] I mean, I was absolutely floored.

[285] I couldn't believe that in medicine and public health, we were recommending this approach that I knew with certainty was going to harm the lives of poor and vulnerable people literally everywhere in the world.

[286] I thought that we had made commitments to protect, you know, almost these Rawlsian commitments to, you, you, you, you structure public policy so that you don't harm the least.

[287] the least capable among us to suffer from that that you protect the most vulnerable right that's what I thought exactly and I thought okay well that's that's that's the profession I thought I was in and then when the lockdowns were announced I mean actually I had an argument with my boss who's like it was in Stanford medicine almost that very day because his wife is the head of Santa Clara County Public Health And we had this argument about whether the lockdowns were a good idea on the eve of the lockdown.

[288] I just came away stunned.

[289] I actually gave an interview to a Reuters reporter who was doing a story on what lockdowns would do to kids, to domestic assault rates.

[290] Right, to alcoholism, depression, opiate misuse.

[291] Yeah.

[292] So I gave an interview in like April of 2020, and I emphasized these knock -on effects.

[293] I thought they were certain to come.

[294] And I actually said in that interview that the lockdowns are very likely the biggest public health mistake we ever made.

[295] Oh, yeah, you think it's a bigger public health mistake than the inverted food pyramid and the injunction to everyone to do nothing but eat carbohydrates until they weigh 350 pounds?

[296] I mean, no, you've got to admit to at least compete for...

[297] There are a lot of sins to weigh, but this is certainly up there.

[298] I mean, just in terms of the catastrophic harm to poor people.

[299] Yeah, and we're not done with that, so everyone listening and watching needs to know that.

[300] The catastrophic consequences of harm done to poor people are still unfolding.

[301] And God only knows what the end result of that's going to be because food is more expensive than it should have been and energy is more expensive than it should have been.

[302] And there are multiple reasons for that, but the bloody supply chain disruptions were one of them.

[303] And we really toyed with bringing our supply chain.

[304] to the brink of bloody disaster.

[305] It's still hard to buy a car in North America.

[306] And, you know, it's really difficult to screw something up like that because we're pretty damn good at making cars.

[307] And so, and distributing them.

[308] And to see that there are shortages on all fronts for rich people.

[309] You just imagine what the shortages are like for poor people.

[310] So, yeah, you know, the other thought I had of early on was that we didn't actually know how deadly disease was.

[311] Right.

[312] So during the swine flu epidemic, been the early estimates by the World Health Organization was that the case fatality rate was four or five percent, just like they said with COVID.

[313] Yeah.

[314] But what happened in the swine flu epidemic in 2009 was a whole bunch of scholars ran studies called zero prevalent studies, studies of measuring antibodies in the blood of populations.

[315] Antibodies were specific to the flu virus that was floating around.

[316] And what they found was there were a hundred times more infections or more.

[317] than cases.

[318] Because the virus had produced a mild reaction in some people, generating an antibody, and they didn't go into the doctor.

[319] No one knew that they had had the flu.

[320] Yeah.

[321] Or had the swine flu.

[322] And so the infection fatality rate turned out to be 0 .01 % for swine flu.

[323] Right, right, right.

[324] Okay, so that had already been established as a scientific precedent.

[325] What do you think the case fatality rate was for COVID?

[326] So I ran a study in April of 2020, a zero prevalent study in Santa Clara County, California.

[327] And now we didn't include nursing homes where the really high case infection fatality rate actually is.

[328] But if you include in the community, it turned out to be about 0 .2%, 99 .8 % survival.

[329] And we ran another separate study in L .A. County the week after and found almost the same identical infection fatality.

[330] rate.

[331] And how does that compare to a standard flu?

[332] Well, you know, that's funny.

[333] Can you ask that?

[334] Because I don't know.

[335] I look at the people say that the flu has a 0 .1 % infection fatality rate.

[336] But I don't know that's true.

[337] It's not backed by careful syrup prevalent studies.

[338] So, for instance, the swine flu, which was thought to be particularly deadly, turned out to be 0 .01%.

[339] Right, right.

[340] You know, one order of magnitude.

[341] So I do think that there's more deadly than the flu.

[342] There's no question in my mind that in fact about that.

[343] And that was no question in my mind from the very moment I heard about this.

[344] This was something to take seriously.

[345] Absolutely.

[346] That 0 .2%, while much less than the 3 or 4%, that the World Health Organization is panicking people with, was still a very high number.

[347] And it's especially high for older people.

[348] If you can think about it, it's like the risk doubles by every seven years of age.

[349] So, you know, I was 51 at the time.

[350] My mom, who was 82 or 81 at the time, what is that like one, two, three, four doublings.

[351] My effective fatality rate was 0 .2%.

[352] Hers was, you know, 0 .4, 0 .8, 1 .6, 3 .2%.

[353] Right, right.

[354] So the proper response would have been to identify the genuine risk factors for serious risk of hospitalization, let's say.

[355] And as far as I can tell, these are what they are.

[356] And I would also appreciate being corrected.

[357] So age is a major one.

[358] Obesity is a huge contributor.

[359] comorbidity, that hardly counts because, of course, the more comorbidities you have, the more likely you're to die of anything, but that still has to be taken into account.

[360] And then I've also concluded that the evidence for increased severity among people who have vitamin D deficiencies also seems to be quite robust.

[361] And so what we should have done was note, this is particularly dangerous to obese, old people who already have multiple illnesses and who are additionally suffering from vitamin D deficiencies.

[362] And they probably had, well, who knows what their case fatality rate was, but they were the ones that were particularly at risk.

[363] Whereas for anybody under 40 who was fundamentally healthy and reasonably well -nourished, it was clearly not worse than the typical run -of -the -mill flu.

[364] Does that seem about right?

[365] Yeah, I mean, I think I might modify the statement about the relative risk of the flu because I just don't know what that is.

[366] Right, right.

[367] Fair enough.

[368] I think it's a very, very low risk for relative, for healthy young people.

[369] And I think, and I agree with you about the risk factors, but the key risk factor is age.

[370] So, for instance, obese versus non -obes, that roughly doubles your infection fatality rate.

[371] Every seven years of age doubles it.

[372] Oh, yeah.

[373] Which compounds, right?

[374] So what you have is a disease, you know, like 80 % of the deaths are people over the age of 65 still.

[375] So what you have is a disease that is a very high risk to identify.

[376] And for the rest of the population, and the vitamin D I agree with, actually, although that's a little bit controversial.

[377] I don't know why it's controversial.

[378] It seems to me that the evidence is pretty clear on this.

[379] In any case, there's no harm in recommending.

[380] Easily accessible and harmless.

[381] How about that?

[382] Impossible to monetize.

[383] That's another problem.

[384] You just tell people to go out and have exercise.

[385] Yeah, in the sun.

[386] You mean, instead of being locked at home and not being able to go to a park, for example.

[387] Exactly.

[388] Exactly.

[389] So having that as a modifiable risk factor would have been healthier, would have produced health in other ways as well.

[390] Right.

[391] So instead we, we in public health, adopted this mantra that we were all equally vulnerable.

[392] Yeah.

[393] So if I remember watching this press conference by this Rudy Gobert, who's a National Basketball Association player, NBA basketball player in the United States.

[394] And he'd contracted COVID early in the pandemic.

[395] And, you know, he's a young man, very healthy, didn't appear to be particularly sick.

[396] But he gave his press conference where he, like, just was joking around.

[397] He licked the microphone.

[398] He was making fun of the clean and unclean trope that was starting to, like, spread.

[399] And the whole world came down on this poor man. It forced him to apologize, you know, and you have to take the virus seriously.

[400] Even young, healthy NBA players who are.

[401] basically zero risk from dying from this disease, have to grovel and apologize because they're acting like young, healthy people.

[402] It looks like discussed demonization, A, that particular response.

[403] It absolutely is.

[404] And the idea was, the ideology was very simple.

[405] If we don't force everyone to take the virus as seriously as an 83 -year -old person living in, you know, with multiple comorbidities does, then they won't comply with the lockdown orders.

[406] What we asked young people to do was immoral.

[407] We essentially said, stop, sacrifice your life, yes, in order to save grandma.

[408] We weaponize the empathy that young people have against themselves.

[409] No, in order to produce a small decrement in risk to grandma.

[410] But, you know, that's the funny thing.

[411] It didn't really even protect grandma.

[412] 80 % of the deaths are still over the age of 65.

[413] You have a disease that spreads very, very easily.

[414] And the lockdown measures, people, can't really comply with them for extended periods of time, except unless you happen to be very well off and have a job that can be replaced with a laptop.

[415] Then, okay, maybe.

[416] But that's a very small fraction of the world population, maybe 20, 30 percent of even of rich countries.

[417] Right, right.

[418] Okay, so you started to become aware of this back in March of 2020, right away, essentially, as soon as the lockdowns occurred.

[419] And so, and you talked about the first conversation you had with one of your colleagues who was involved in local public health.

[420] And you could see this myasma of paranoia and force spreading.

[421] And it was very concerning to you because of your epidemiological and economics training and economists at least are trained to consider, well, multiple trade -offs in terms of value.

[422] If they're good economists, obviously.

[423] They seem to be more reliable public policy formulators, by and large, I would say, than biologists who take a much more unidimensional view of the world, and epidemiologists as well who specialize in a given illness.

[424] So then, as this marched forward, what did you find yourself doing?

[425] Well, I mean, there was a lot of, I published these studies, or wrote these studies on seroprevalence, published them, and there was a tremendous blowback.

[426] My colleagues didn't want to believe the result.

[427] They thought it was a much more deadly disease than we were finding with our scientific studies.

[428] And actually, where we met was the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.

[429] I told a little bit about the story about how Stanford treated me, which is, I think, abysmally.

[430] Yeah, well, let's delve into that a little bit, because that's par for the course at modern universities as well at the moment.

[431] So what happened?

[432] You published these studies.

[433] Now, we should point out to everyone who's watching and listening that Jay is not exactly your fringe researcher, right?

[434] Stanford's a major university.

[435] He has a PhD in economics and an MD.

[436] It's a very, very well -respected researcher and certainly not someone who's prone to grinding political axes.

[437] And that's generally the case for epidemiologists and real scientists is they're not politically minded.

[438] They're trying to, as much as it's possible, to follow the trail of the data.

[439] And I certainly believe that you're in that category.

[440] So you published these papers showing what was good news, essentially.

[441] This isn't as deadly as we thought.

[442] and you produced a counterimmune response from your colleagues.

[443] And so what did that consist of?

[444] I mean, I got accused of not knowing how to divide, essentially not knowing how to divide doing the math wrong, that there was still a possibility that every single positive result we found on these antibody tests were all false positives.

[445] And then I started getting hit pieces against me, against my wife, against, like, you know, my colleagues.

[446] I mean, it was very stressful.

[447] Stanford reacted to those hit pieces in the press by giving them credence even when they knew for a fact they were false.

[448] So, for instance, there was an allegation that somebody, that the head of an airline company had given $5 ,000 to me and somehow I changed the result of the study.

[449] But it was ridiculous.

[450] The $5 ,000 went to Stanford.

[451] In a gift account, we used to offset study expenses.

[452] We ran this study in two weeks or three weeks.

[453] We organized it and ran it.

[454] It was really quite a feat.

[455] Right.

[456] And we ran it very inexpensively.

[457] I would never alter the result of a study based on what funders say.

[458] It's ridiculous.

[459] And what benefit would that be to you anyways?

[460] Like, if you're going to convict someone, accuse someone of a crime, you should at least have a motive in mind.

[461] And if $5 ,000 is a pretty cheap price for your soul, by the way, Jay.

[462] And then, like, what's in it for you exactly?

[463] What was the accusation?

[464] You were falsifying the data for what reason?

[465] Yeah, so Stanford, rather than just dismissing the allegations out of hand, they conducted, first they started to call it an investigation, but then they realized they couldn't call it an investigation because it was so ridiculous.

[466] They called it a fact -finding mission.

[467] Oh, one of those, yeah.

[468] And then, yeah, and like, I spent that summer just incredibly stressed.

[469] Yeah, I bet.

[470] I've never felt, I'd never felt anxiety before.

[471] I mean, I'd never written an op -ed before.

[472] I just was a scientist, Jordan.

[473] I wrote, I published papers for living in peer -reviewed journals.

[474] I was really happy with that life.

[475] Yeah, yeah.

[476] Hey, join the club, man. Yeah, I know.

[477] I thought about you a lot, actually, in those days, Jordan.

[478] And I had to make a decision, you know, after Stanford cleared me, they'd sent this very strong signal.

[479] If I just went back to that whole life, just quietly doing science, they would just let me go.

[480] They'd continue to be a good, you know, good faculty member and good standing.

[481] Right.

[482] So despite the fact that you were innocent, you should shut the hell up and go back to invisibility.

[483] And then we'll let you, what will, so what did the powers that be decide that as long as you were compliant and quiet, like a good faculty member should be, then all the sins you didn't commit would be forgiven.

[484] Yes, exactly.

[485] How lovely of them.

[486] Yeah, that's so impressive.

[487] And it was so stressful, Jordan.

[488] I mean, like I said, I thought about you a lot in those days because I know what you went through.

[489] But, you know, I lost, I generally am very good at dealing with anxiety.

[490] Never in my life have felt anxiety.

[491] I felt it in a deep way.

[492] I lost 30 pounds of weight.

[493] At one point, I was losing weight so quickly I couldn't, I thought I was actually afraid for my life.

[494] Yeah.

[495] I was, I couldn't sleep.

[496] I didn't eat.

[497] I just obsessively worked to trying to, like, address the damage.

[498] And then at some point in, like, summer of 2020, I decided that, you know, what is my career for?

[499] It's not, if it's just to, like, have a, you know, another CV line or a stamp, it's just, I've wasted my life.

[500] Yeah.

[501] And I would speak no matter what the consequences.

[502] And actually, then the anxiety went away.

[503] Like, at that point, that decision, I think, was the right one.

[504] People have two big classes of fear, and they're archetypal.

[505] And one is fear of nature, and the other is fear of culture.

[506] Those are good ways of thinking about it.

[507] And you're afraid of nature because you could die.

[508] You could go insane.

[509] You could lose your mind.

[510] You could die while you're suffering.

[511] That's worth being afraid of.

[512] Second category, you'll get mobbed, excluded, and alienated, and then you'll die.

[513] And so I've watched this with like 200 people now who've been mobbed and betrayed.

[514] by the, well, by the powers that be, let's say.

[515] And every single one of them with tiny exceptions responds exactly the way you did, which is it's as if something traumatic in an unprecedented manner has occurred.

[516] And I've seen colleagues of mine who were, well, you said, for example, yourself, you weren't particularly prone to anxiety, you know, fairly emotionally stable person.

[517] I've seen people, colleagues of mine, who were the most solid people you could possibly imagine, and, like, literally hounded into the asylum by the forces of the mob.

[518] It's appalling.

[519] This demonizing cancel culture driven by narcissistic psychopaths.

[520] It's like it could be the death of us all.

[521] It's really bad.

[522] And so your response is absolutely typical.

[523] It's interesting, though, A, when you make that decision to flip the, what would you say?

[524] to flip the, to invert the reality, to go on the offensive rather than to be defensive and guilty, then while that, especially if you are basing that on a genuine apprehension of your own instance, that does change the playing landscape substantially.

[525] And so that happened to you when, that was in the summer of 2020?

[526] Yeah, sometime in summer.

[527] I talked to my call, a friend of mine, who I've written with many times who said, I told him explicitly, I'm cross -explicitly, the Rubicon.

[528] I don't care about my reputation anymore by whatever academic reputation.

[529] I'm going to use what knowledge and sort of resources I have to say what I believe.

[530] Because I think that were there many, many lives at stake in the mistaken policies we've adopted.

[531] And I have had the background and the life story where I could actually try to make some difference on that.

[532] Right, right.

[533] And after that, it was just transformed.

[534] I mean, you know, I also am religious and, you know, praying actually helped a lot.

[535] But that's...

[536] What were you praying for?

[537] What were you praying for?

[538] Just out of curiosity at that time.

[539] Just, just for, just for clarity for what, relief from the anxiety and then clarity for what I should do with my life.

[540] Yeah.

[541] Well, you know, one of the things that's worth knowing, and obviously you discovered this, is that there is nothing that will save you in a complex situation except the truth.

[542] Now, it might not save you as well, but there is nothing else that you have.

[543] And so when you're backed into a corner, well, first of all, you better scour your soul.

[544] But second, what you've got to defend you, if you have anything, is definitely words of truth, words that you believe to be the case.

[545] And so, and it's useful to notice that that can be on your side.

[546] And you have to, I don't know, the other thing I realize is if I'm living my life just for myself, it's hollow.

[547] if I the purpose of my work before I mean you look back on my work what I wrote when I applied for 10 years was that I was I studied vulnerable populations the health and well -being of vulnerable populations and how government policies and economic economic realities affect the health and well -being I mean if that's true that means what I studied was for other people that my actions and my was not inwardly focused but focused on the people that I studied.

[548] Right.

[549] Well, so that means the crisis also forced you to really prioritize your values, you know?

[550] Because, and it's tricky as a scientist, you know, and you see this when you're training graduate students, is that, well, you have to follow the science properly, and you have to be skeptical of your own results, and you have to be sure you're not publishing merely so that you publish and merely to burnish your reputation.

[551] And the same thing with attending conferences.

[552] On the other hand, you do have to publish and you have to market and communicate.

[553] There is a career development element to every enterprise.

[554] Now, the question then becomes, well, what do you do when those are set at odds with one another?

[555] And the answer is, well, if you're tilting towards pathological narcissism, you sacrifice the mission for the message.

[556] And there's plenty of corruption in science that's merely a consequence of that.

[557] But when you're backed into a corner the way you were, then you have to really start to understand what that means.

[558] It's like, are you in this to do the good that hypothetically motivates the science, or are you going to sacrifice that, apologize, cowtow, and hypothetically protect your reputation?

[559] And that's, you're done as a scientist if you do that.

[560] I think you're done as an ethical actor.

[561] I think you're done as a human being.

[562] You are.

[563] And you don't protect yourself against the mob because all that's happened is they've fundamentally emasculated you and you've been eliminated as a credible threat.

[564] It's a very bad strategy.

[565] So it's a relief to hear that you were able to see your pathway forward in the summer.

[566] I'm sure that was utterly brutal.

[567] It's hard to communicate to people just exactly what it's like, to be a respected scientific practitioner, and then to have all of that inverted and to see your colleagues fail to support you or participate in the inversion.

[568] It's quite the illuminating experience.

[569] Let's put it that way.

[570] Yeah, yeah.

[571] I guess I understood how excommunication worked.

[572] Right, exactly.

[573] That's what it felt like.

[574] Yeah, you bet, because that's betrayal and excommunication, that's exactly what it is.

[575] So then, okay, so you decided to, that you were going to, the devil take the hide most and that you were going to say what you believed to be true.

[576] And so what occurred then?

[577] So fast forward a few months.

[578] There was some, my colleagues, Scott Atlas, was advising the president of the United States.

[579] So I actually got to meet with the president.

[580] But that never went anywhere.

[581] The American president at the time, President Trump, he was, I think his instincts were against the lockdowns, but his, he basically thought that if he left it, if he let Tony Fauci not have the reins, that he would lose the election.

[582] And so that was quite frustrating.

[583] Fast forward a few months, October 2020.

[584] And a colleague of mine from Harvard, Martin Kuldorf, was a fantastic biostatistician.

[585] He helped design the vaccine safety surveillance systems that statistical systems that the FDA and the CDC use in the U .S. With the statistical work, invited me and Sunetra Gupta, who's a great epidemiologist at Oxford University, to a small conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

[586] We arrived basically just to compare notes.

[587] We weren't thinking about issuing a statement or anything, but we realized that we'd arrived at the same place regarding the strategy of how to manage the pandemic.

[588] The summer had seen a decline in cases.

[589] There's some spread in like Arizona and the South and some countries, but the threat of March seemed to have subsided.

[590] But it was really clear from the data that the disease was coming back in the fall, that there was going to be spread of the disease again.

[591] And it was also clear to me, as a social scientist, looking at the pattern of political action, that the lockdowns were also going to come back because the fear was not gone, the disgust was not gone.

[592] All of that was still in place.

[593] All the infrastructure for the lockdowns were there.

[594] And so we wrote this very short document, one page long, called the Great Barrington Declaration.

[595] We wrote it in very simple language because we wanted to reach regular people.

[596] Because I thought to myself and we thought to ourselves that it was really regular people that needed to know that there wasn't a consensus in favor of the lockdown.

[597] That people were being misled.

[598] The idea that all scientists agreed that there was a consensus that the science said let's lock down was not true.

[599] In fact, many, many reputable scientists disagreed with that and yet they stayed silent because of the fear of social ostracism, fear of Tony Fauci controls billions of dollars of federal money for research.

[600] What's not just the money so that you can do your experiments, it controls a social status of scientists.

[601] You don't get tenure at a top university, medical university, unless you get NIH funding in the United States.

[602] So it's the social status as well as even more than the money itself.

[603] Well, it's not just the social status either.

[604] We should be clear about that.

[605] It's also your livelihood itself, right?

[606] because so it isn't merely the fact that you want to elevate yourself up the status hierarchy.

[607] It's that you want to keep your job.

[608] And so this is nuts and bolts.

[609] This is nuts and bolts material here.

[610] Yeah, you know, I was very ill when the Great Barrington Declaration came out.

[611] So I wasn't as, what would you say, aware of everything that was going on as I might have been under different conditions.

[612] But one of the things I do remember, and I've been struck by this continually, is that, well, it was demonized and put off to the side as the work of essentially like scientific outsiders and extremists.

[613] And what's so interesting about that, I found this repeatedly because I've talked to a lot of reprehensible people over the last few years, such as yourself.

[614] And I found that even though I know as well as anyone how easy it is for people to be demonized for their views and how often that's purely an invention of psychopathic narcissists, very often, trying to score points at the expense of someone's reputation.

[615] It's still the case that even the smallest slur in relationship to someone's professional reputation is enough to make even me skeptical about who I'm talking to.

[616] Because you think, it's very hard to think, well, if there's enough smoke, there's probably some fire.

[617] right?

[618] And that's actually a pretty intelligent rule of thumb decision because there's seven billion people out there.

[619] You're not going to listen to all of them.

[620] And so one way you cut through the complexity of figuring out who to listen to is you don't listen to people whose reputations have been savaged.

[621] And you don't have time to sort that out like a legal trial, you know, but what it does mean is that reputation savaging can be weaponized.

[622] And there are people who are absolutely stellar at that.

[623] And the great Barrington Declaration was definitely savage, ignored and savage, both.

[624] And so, okay, so it launched win, and this was in 2020.

[625] Yeah, October 4th, 2020.

[626] I mean, the, you know, people that like tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists signed it, Nobel Prize winner signed it, like almost a million people have signed it to date.

[627] It went viral very rapidly.

[628] Like, we just put it on a web page, and people just found it.

[629] And I started getting messages for people saying, you know, thanking me for, like, saying common sense, protect vulnerable people.

[630] Protect vulnerable people.

[631] Lift the lockdowns.

[632] That was, those are the two ideas of the Great Prenton.

[633] It's the old pandemic plan.

[634] It's the least original thing I've ever written in my entire life.

[635] I mean, there was nothing, nothing new actually in it.

[636] And certainly nothing radical.

[637] I didn't think so.

[638] But four days after we wrote it, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci.

[639] calling the three of us that were the primary co -authors of the Declaration, fringe epidemiologists.

[640] Right, right.

[641] And then he called for a devastating published takedown of the premises.

[642] I started getting hit pieces written against me in the New York Times, again, in the Washington Post, a whole bunch of other...

[643] I mean, the CBC hosted a panel of scientists who savaged this as wanting to let the virus rip and kill Graham.

[644] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[645] Thank God for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, that $1 .4 billion of government subsidy a year and a 1 .9 % market share.

[646] They're quite the stellar bunch, boy.

[647] The level of propaganda is remarkable.

[648] I was calling for focus protection of vulnerable people.

[649] I was calling for a conversation among public health people, how better to protect old people, who are dying in droves as a consequence of not being protected by the lockdowns.

[650] I wanted, you know, how you protect old people is complicated, right?

[651] So it depends on the local living circumstances of each person, of the old people in the community.

[652] The answer in, you know, Alberta, Canada is going to be very different than answer in, you know, in like highly, in like, you know, southern California or something.

[653] It's just going to be very different.

[654] All those pesky complexities.

[655] Yeah.

[656] Well, you need local public health who know the living circumstances to participate in that discussion.

[657] think creatively about how to protect older people when you have this highly infectious respiratory -virus pandemic going on.

[658] Instead, we were demonized.

[659] We were told that it was impossible to protect older people without a lockdown.

[660] The lockdown didn't protect older people.

[661] It hadn't in the spring, and it didn't protect them in the fall, and did continue to not protect them.

[662] So essentially, they closed the, the, the, the, top of the federal public health bureaucracy close the minds of public health against the possibility of focus protection by demonizing us.

[663] And the purpose of the demonization was so that they could tell the public that every reputable scientist, the consensus scientists, agreed with their plan, their plan to lock down.

[664] Well, that, and I suppose the motivation for that was the ability to publicly trumpet the staggering effective and decisiveness of their simple and potent plan to protect, right?

[665] And so for me, again, that's a kind of unbelievably narcissistic virtue signaling, is you want all the credit that would go along with actually dealing with the problem while doing none of the effort whatsoever necessary to actually understand the problem and to implement the complex multidimensional solutions that would be demanded.

[666] Yeah.

[667] I mean, actually, I remember seeing a podcast with you and your daughter, I think, during that time.

[668] I was quite moved, actually, by it, both by the devotion your daughter has to you and also the illness you were going through.

[669] So I don't think you have anything to, I mean, what you went through was tremendous.

[670] Anyway, so we wrote this, started getting, I mean, but the thing is I was emotionally better prepared to deal with the blowback from that.

[671] And it became this thing where it was clear that the purpose was to limit the reach of the declaration.

[672] Many people still have not heard of it.

[673] That probably should have heard of it.

[674] And that partly succeeded.

[675] But it didn't entirely succeed.

[676] The nucleus of this anti -lockdown movement was put in place.

[677] And then as time has gone on, what's happened is that that anti -lockdown movement, as people have seen the reality what the lockdowns really have meant, Well, lockdowns is not just your forced quarantine at home.

[678] Lockdown is the ideology that we must keep people apart from each other, the ideology that we have to treat each other as biohacking.

[679] And that the state has the right to impose that from the top down, right, which is a major part of the ideology, for everyone's good.

[680] You know, one of the things I also knew, and I don't know how much you know about this, and maybe you know a lot about it, you know, the Nazi eradication campaign started out as public health.

[681] initiatives.

[682] Like, the causal pathway is clear.

[683] And so it, the, and that discussed demonization was part of that process.

[684] But it was all put forward initially under the guise of protecting the public and doing the best even for the suffering.

[685] So it was they, the Nazis were extremely good at leveraging a false compassion on the narcissistic front to produce unbelievably pathological outcomes.

[686] And that went along also with the notion, the implicit notion that, well, the state has the right to do whatever's necessary if public health is at risk and it's whatever's necessary that's the, it's like really, whatever's necessary, eh?

[687] Yeah, well, maybe you're, well, here's my new theory, my political theory or part of it.

[688] If your response to an emergency makes you terrified and tyrannical and one of the consequences of that is your claim that the emergency justifies the granting of all due power to you, you are not the right leader.

[689] And there's three levels of evidence.

[690] Number one, you're frightened into paralysis by the emergency.

[691] So you're too small.

[692] Second, you're willing to extend the use of tyrannical power to justify response to your fear.

[693] That's also an indication that you're not just frightened, you're a frightened tyrant.

[694] And third, the claim that you're making that the situation is so dire that you and the people who think like you must be given all the power is a moral hazard of the first order.

[695] And so there's three identifying features so that everyone listening and watching can understand who not to trust in the leadership position is the emergency terrifies them.

[696] They become tyrants, and it's so convenient that they also get all the power.

[697] It's like, no, those are not the leaders you want, not even if the emergency is real, let alone when it's manufactured, you know, for the benefit of people who want all the power and all the unearned credit.

[698] Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.

[699] I think that the people who draw power to themselves, you want, you absolutely need to be skeptical.

[700] At the very least, you want checks and balances.

[701] So, like, imagine if we'd had an honest and open debate about pandemic policy.

[702] like without this demonization, without this cancel culture kind of overlay, we would have won that debate, Jordan, because it was already clear in October 2020, first that the lockdowns had done tremendous harm or continue to do tremendous harm to the poor, the vulnerable to working class people.

[703] It was already clear that they'd fail to stop the disease from spreading.

[704] Yeah.

[705] Like, what success was there?

[706] And then the third, it was already clear who the...

[707] vulnerable people really were, like the highest risk people.

[708] Like, so at that point, if there had been an open debate without this demonization, the authorities would have lost.

[709] The scientific consent, I mean, at the time when I wrote the declaration, I thought we actually were in the minority among scientists.

[710] Yeah.

[711] I'm not sure that's true, actually.

[712] Yeah, no, I suspect it's probably not true.

[713] Is that, but it's also almost impossible.

[714] to overestimate the probability that people will be silenced by intimidation.

[715] And we should be take this very seriously.

[716] Like, look, you said, and this is borne out by the experience of literally the hundreds of people I've talked to to whom this has happened, you experienced the exclusion and mobbing as something akin to a life -threatening illness.

[717] Yeah, so it's no joke.

[718] It's no bloody wonder that people are afraid to speak out.

[719] And could it be the majority?

[720] It's like, yes, absolutely, it could be the majority, because it's a minority of power -mad narcissists who twist the narrative to their liking and to their advantage, and they're perfectly willing to take out anybody who stands in their way.

[721] And so it's certainly probable, I would think, that the more sensible scientists knew that something was amiss on the COVID -lockdown front and we're very hesitant to step forward and speak.

[722] And you can say, well, aren't they cowardly?

[723] It's like, yeah, maybe.

[724] Wait till you find yourself in that position and see how bloody brave you are.

[725] Because my experience is being that that kind of bravery is vanishingly rare.

[726] Maybe 1 % of people can manage it.

[727] And they often have additional resources that aren't available to everybody, like me, to the degree that I was brave, I suppose, I at least wouldn't shut my mouth.

[728] you know, I had three sources of income, right?

[729] So, and I lost two of them, but I didn't lose the third one.

[730] And most people aren't in a position where they have established three independent sources of income.

[731] So like I lost my professorship and I lost my clinical practice, but I didn't lose my business.

[732] And so, and then I also had the support of my family, like full support of my family and extended family and of a very large network of friends.

[733] And so many, many people who are put in a corner have some of them have none of those, what would you say, forces in their corner and on their side.

[734] I mean, I have tenure at Stanford.

[735] I wasn't sure that that tenure would hold.

[736] Yeah.

[737] I mean, it was not clear to me. I don't have, I had that one source of income.

[738] But, you know, Jordan, I just don't believe that my life should.

[739] should be lived simply for that tenure or the money.

[740] I think, and I lost a major source of support in many of my friends that I previously called friends that broke with, broke with me. Yep.

[741] So I lost that, but I didn't lose my family.

[742] I didn't lose my faith.

[743] And what I found in compensation was this tremendous community of people that saw what was happening and that found what I was saying meaningful to them.

[744] I mean, I just, it's hard to convey to people how much that meant.

[745] Yeah, right.

[746] It would, it really, it made me feel like my, that what I was doing was worthwhile, probably for really for the first time.

[747] I mean, it's fine to get CV lines with like, you know, published papers and fancy journals.

[748] But to actually have that move people to take to action, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to.

[749] to give them the ability to speak up when an injustice is being done.

[750] That's, there's something, just you can't replace it.

[751] Yeah, yeah.

[752] Well, I guess that's the reward.

[753] That's the reward you accrue for having undergone the trials of exclusion and mobbing, right?

[754] And that ability to allie yourself to the degree that you're extraordinarily careful and fortunate with what you believe to be true.

[755] Yes, and that's definitely something worth that, well, there isn't anything that's more worth discovering than that, some fundamental sense.

[756] Now, let's talk for a moment about, you said that, you know, the Barrington Declaration was marginalized and demonized, both of those, with some success on both fronts.

[757] And I would say, yes, with some success, but not with entire success.

[758] And, but let's also talk about how your communication on the public front was thwarted.

[759] So I've been watching the Twitter trust and safety, the former trust and safety executive, Joel Roth being roasted over a slow fire or maybe a quick fire in Congress with a certain degree of satisfaction.

[760] And it's clearly the case that social media enterprises and Twitter the most egregious among them, perhaps, although we don't know what happened at Facebook, etc. You are definitely persona non -grata on the social media communication front.

[761] And so what do you make of that?

[762] And how did that unfold?

[763] Yeah.

[764] So I joined Twitter in August 2021.

[765] I mean, I never had a Twitter presence.

[766] In fact, I told my assistant professors and graduate students don't join Twitter just write scientific papers for a decade.

[767] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[768] So there was some irony in my joining Twitter.

[769] What I found was that I felt like it gave me a voice.

[770] I joined almost, I immediately got 100 ,000 followers.

[771] It was actually kind of, you know, it felt like I could act a platform.

[772] But, you know, I would write messages and it would get attention of my followers, but it never went outside of my followers.

[773] And I wondered about that.

[774] When Barry Weiss wrote her Twitter files expose, what she found was that the day I joined Twitter, I was put on a trends blacklist that guaranteed that my tweets, and I joined Twitter for one purpose, essentially to communicate to the public, the ideas of the Great Barrington Declaration, to criticize public health when it was warranted to criticize public health, to propose alternate strategy for managing the pandemic, and to help create a community of people who, of scientists and regular people who would then have some tools to oppose authoritarianism where they were.

[775] You know, public health authoritarianism where they were.

[776] That was the purpose of joining Twitter.

[777] And then also to convince people that didn't necessarily.

[778] agree with me or just didn't know my message that I had something reasonable to say about these topics.

[779] So to be on a trend's blacklist, essentially what it meant was that I could not actually, even though it looked to me like I was accomplishing something with Twitter, and I was with my followers, but I wasn't accomplishing the broader purpose for which I joined Twitter.

[780] The purpose for which Twitter exists, actually, I think, is to allow those kinds, that kind of communication to happen at scale.

[781] Yeah.

[782] Actually, I've said, I have to have mixed emotions about, it is an incredibly powerful tool, Jordan.

[783] As you know, you reach political leaders, you reach, you reach journalists, you reach other scientists, and you reach regular people in a way that it's not possible in any of their platform.

[784] And I think in the right hands, it is a great force for good in society.

[785] Yeah, but it's also a place where, like, what would you call it, penny -ante petty tyrants can run roughshod invisibly behind the scenes.

[786] And we've certainly seen no shortage of that on Twitter, despite the fact that the legacy media, you know, damn their calloused souls, seem to have no interest whatsoever on sharing the revelations that Musk has made public about the unbelievably backbiting maneuvering that went on underground content.

[787] continually on the Twitter landscape.

[788] So it's really pernicious, eh, when you're subject to the authoritarian constraint of your communication in a manner that's actually invisible, as well as lied about.

[789] It's really something pathological.

[790] And so what's your understanding of how your communication was restricted on Twitter?

[791] So I actually got to go visit Elon Musk and see Twitter headquarters, and they showed me there, they have a system called, where, you know, you have your own account, I had my account, and they would have, you know, sort of marks on my account for, like, what the restrictions were.

[792] Literally said the words, trends blacklist.

[793] That trends blacklist, I don't believe Twitter put in place on its own.

[794] I believe that that was the result of the American federal government essentially asking Twitter executives to suppress.

[795] And now, why do I believe?

[796] Would you say trends, T -R -E -N -D -S or trans?

[797] Trends, T -R -E -N -D -S.

[798] Okay, trends, yeah, okay, trends blacklist.

[799] Got it, yeah.

[800] So did that mean you couldn't trend?

[801] Right, got it, got it, got it.

[802] So that meant you couldn't go viral, essentially, anything that you did.

[803] Yeah.

[804] Uh -huh.

[805] That's right.

[806] Right.

[807] How sneaky.

[808] And you think that there was collusion between Twitter and the federal government, and this would be the public health bureaucracy, essentially, designed to stop you from being able to communicate your expertise.

[809] Let's be clear about that.

[810] Your expertise.

[811] So I think a lot of governments did this, but certainly the American government did this.

[812] They adopted this strategy of limiting misinformation in social media settings.

[813] And the way they did that, the way they did that is they co -operate, they garnered the cooperation of social media companies by, essentially by threat, right?

[814] If you don't, if you don't do this, we're going to regulate you out of existence.

[815] Yeah.

[816] That started with this like national security issues around election, election issues and national security issues, but I think it bled over into this pandemic management.

[817] Russia collusion, conspiracy, fraud.

[818] And so, like, it bled over into this, into, like, communication about health risks and COVID.

[819] And so, like, the surgeon general the United States had an initiative where he wanted to root out information.

[820] Tony Fauci has an email with Mark Zuckerberg from the very beginning of the pandemic where Zuckerberg essentially offers him, it's redacted, but from the context, it's pretty clear, some capacity to limit what Facebook actually, what you can post, people can post on Facebook to limit misinformation.

[821] The social media companies were in regular contact with the federal government, receiving instructions about what to suppress.

[822] and in many cases who to suppress regarding specifically, you know, information about COVID.

[823] And I know this because that part of a lawsuit that the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's offices have brought against the Biden administration.

[824] Yeah, right.

[825] And that lawsuit isn't covered.

[826] We deposed Tony Fauci.

[827] We deposed.

[828] I think Jen Socki is going to be deposed.

[829] A whole bunch of like very prominent figures in the When is this going to unfold?

[830] It's been going on for like nine months now.

[831] I mean, hopefully we'll get some decision in this coming year.

[832] I'm actually quite hopeful about this because what we've uncovered it is.

[833] Have they testified?

[834] Have Fauci and Saki testified yet?

[835] Fauci has.

[836] I don't know if you had Saki in yet.

[837] But the judges granted us the ability to depose 10 major figures inside the Biden administration, including the FBI agents and others.

[838] It's revealed a vast censorship enterprise.

[839] Well, we should also define for everybody who's listening and watching what fascism means, technically.

[840] So fascist means to bind together.

[841] And the fascist ethos is something like unity of corporation, government, and media at the highest levels of function.

[842] And so the idea is essentially that the triumvirate acting as a unity at those high levels can be extraordinarily, and if it's benevolent, there's the rub, then it can march forward with unparalleled success.

[843] And you get people like our appalling prime minister admiring the CCP, for example, for its ability to move forward on the environmental front without paying attention to such niceties as, let's say, parliament and public opinion.

[844] And that's that delusion of fascist deficiency.

[845] And the thing about United Systems is they can move very, very quickly when they're need to, and that's well and good if they're moving in the right direction.

[846] But the right direction is hard to determine, and if they're moving in the wrong direction, then God help us all.

[847] And this collusion between the social media companies and the security apparatus and the broader media world, which is still occurring because they won't cover the Twitter files, is fascist in the highest order.

[848] And it's definitely a threat to the integrity of, well, I would say proper governance worldwide, but certainly proper governance within the United States.

[849] It's appalling beyond belief.

[850] I think part of the reason the public hasn't woken up to it is certainly true in Canada.

[851] Canadians would rather believe, for example, that the trucker convoy was run by mega -inspired American Republicans who wanted to destabilize Canadian democracy, which is what our bloody Prime Minister told them.

[852] They would actually...

[853] Jordan, they had bousy houses.

[854] They had bouncy houses for kids.

[855] I mean, they had like, seek Sikh music and, I mean, it was like...

[856] Well, there's a huge coterie of Sikh truckers in Canada.

[857] Yeah, well, Canadians would rather believe that, though, that this was a conspiratorial enterprise, motivated really by, and funded by mega -Americans.

[858] This is the Canadian narrative.

[859] Most Canadians still believe that, 51%.

[860] And the reason they still believe that is because it's easier to believe that than it is to believe that you can't...

[861] that your leaders, Christia Freeland, Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, are compromised entirely by their globalist utopian agenda and lying about absolutely everything and that you can't trust the legacy media anymore.

[862] And Canadians just, they're not capable of swallowing that bitter pill.

[863] And like I can understand why, you know, in our country, and in yours too, to large degree, the fundamental institutions have been reasonably trustworthy for a long time.

[864] And then to understand that, no, you have to now go out and you have to go and ferret out the truth and that there are conspiracy -like actions proceeding on all sorts of domains.

[865] It's like, well, it's no wonder people can't go there with ease.

[866] Yeah, I don't want to believe it either.

[867] Well, right.

[868] Until I see it, I'm going to assume the best of people.

[869] but when you see the federal government acting in this way in direct violation of fundamental commitments to civil rights, like free speech.

[870] And it's there in emails in black and white.

[871] And the way that they convey it, it's as if it's so obvious that they're doing the right thing.

[872] Oh, yeah, we just suppressed this because we didn't want people to be harmed by this bad information.

[873] Well, how do you know this information is bad?

[874] Well, this is the question.

[875] Like, I now virtually instantly distrust anyone who uses the word misinformation or the word disinformation.

[876] It's like, I see, you think there's some gold standard by which factual information can be revealed, that its validity can be revealed.

[877] That's just self -evident.

[878] You can set up some fact -finding committee that can just differentiate between the true facts and the false facts.

[879] It's like, why do we need the scientific enterprise, then, if it's so bloody obvious?

[880] And why is there political discussion?

[881] Well, no, no, there's misinformation, and we need committees to deal with it and to suppress it, which they certainly did at Twitter.

[882] Jordan, it's a new dark age, right?

[883] That was the feature of the old dark age, was that there was a high clarity that could inerringly distinguish truth from falsity and suppress falsities for the benefit of the public at large.

[884] Right?

[885] That is the age we are currently living in.

[886] Yeah, well, it's a degenerate, it's a degenerate theocracy, right?

[887] But what, running itself under the guise of a kind of rampant secularism.

[888] It's really something to see, and it's so interesting.

[889] Maybe we could touch on this in a minute.

[890] I knew 10 years ago that the woke types in the universities would go after the STEM fields.

[891] And everyone thought at that point that I was being conspiratorial and paranoid and I thought, no, no, I know how scientists work.

[892] Most of them are obsessively focused on their narrow specialization.

[893] That's not an insult.

[894] That's their job.

[895] That's their job is to be 80 hours a week focused on that specific issue to understand it deeply and communicate that to the rest of us.

[896] More power to them.

[897] But it means that they don't have a political bone in their body, especially the real scientists, especially in STEM.

[898] And so when the woke political mob of narcissists comes for them, they won't have a hope of resisting.

[899] And, well, obviously, that's exactly what's happening.

[900] In the California system, now U -Cal system, 80 % of applicants to STEM positions are rejected on the basis of inadequate diversity, inclusivity, and equity statements.

[901] You see that Texas yesterday, of Texas, revoked its commitment to requiring DEI