Covid 19： Silencing the Opposition ｜ Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya ｜ EP 334 (pr0LkPMZ-qc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pr0LkPMZ-qc

You should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I’m already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up. Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that’ll be the adventure of your life. 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 and they probably had, well who knows what their case fatality rate was, but they were the ones that were particularly at risk. 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. The key risk factor is age. So for instance, obese versus non-obese, that roughly doubles your infection fatality rate. Every seven years of age doubles it, which compounds, right? So what you have is a disease that is a very high risk to an identifiable population. We in public health adopted this mantra that we were all equally vulnerable. And the idea was, the ideology was very simple. 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. What we asked young people to do was immoral. We essentially said, stop, sacrifice your life in order to save grandma. We weaponize the empathy that young people have against themselves. Hello, everyone. I have the privilege today of talking to Dr. J. Bhattacharya, who’s been a very effective spokesman on the pandemic front during the COVID-19 crisis, both imaginary and real. Dr. Bhattacharya has fought in the public domain to bring accurate information about the pandemic and the potential negative consequences of lockdowns and other COVID-19 interventions to widespread public attention. He is a professor and researcher specializing in the economics of health care. Bhattacharya received all four of his degrees, an MA, an MD, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. He is currently the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Bhattacharya 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. 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. Only recently it was revealed through the Twitter files that, among others, Dr. Bhattacharya was being purposefully silenced on mainstream media platforms. Hello, Dr. Bhattacharya. I’m looking very much forward to this conversation today. We met recently at the Stanford Conference on Academic Freedom, and that was the first time we’d met in public. 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 recent Cochrane review, for example, that indicated there is no evidence whatsoever that masks were effective in preventing or even delaying the transmission of COVID-19. I’ve watched the usual apologists try to wend their way around that review, but the Cochrane reviews are pretty damn reliable, and they’re conservative, too, in their claims, and are known for that, right? 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 weren’t credible people, as far as I could tell, that really thought that masks worked even back then. So anyways, the tide seems to be turning on the COVID narrative front, and that’s not a small measure attributable to you. So why don’t we go into that? Sure. Well, it’s a great honor to talk with you, Jordan. It was really a delight to meet you at the conference. I’ve obviously been following you for a very long time. Admire your courage. You know, it’s interesting, because the science on COVID, on the lockdowns, on the mitigation measures, on a whole host of topics, if the public was listening, they would hear this idea that there was this univocal conclusion that you had to do lockdowns, 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 it was warranted to force people to lose their jobs over them. All of these ideas were sold as if there was a scientific consensus in favor of them. That was a lie. There was never a scientific consensus on almost any of the topics. And as you say en masse, in fact, the pre-existing narrative, the pre-existing idea among most scientists before the pandemic was quite the opposite direction. 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 I was concerned, dominated the media, dominated the message to politicians, and as a result we had a catastrophic response to COVID and we’re going to be paying the cost of that for a very long time. So let’s dig into that because it’s so easy in the current political climate for discussion to become conspiratorial, right? And the idea of a cartel, well that sounds conspiratorial. Now, I’ve been trying to think that through and so a system of ideas can act like a conspiracy even if it doesn’t make itself manifest as a direct conspiracy because the system of ideas has an internal intrinsic ethos and view and implications for actions that unfold across time. 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. They weren’t deviations from some properly utopian norm. They were exactly what you’d expect if you put those principles into operation. I see similar things going on around us now. Let’s say on the politically correct front. 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. But I do think that systems of ideas can act as conspiratorial agents. Now in this case, it’s more complex though. 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? That’s one question. And the other question is, who benefits? And then the further question is, why would the media, for example, fall into lockstep, shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation with those who benefit? Now we know perfectly well that the biggest punitive civil lawsuits ever levied in the United States were levied successfully against pharmaceutical companies. And the left has every reason to be entirely skeptical about pharmaceutical companies, like they have been for the last five decades. But all of a sudden we saw this massive spin around where everything the pharmaceutical And it’s very hard to suppress the suspicions that something like massive lobbying and very narrow profit-seeking were driving this. What’s your sense of the underlying motivation? 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. In that environment, many people took advantage of the opportunities provided to them by the set of events that unfolded. But let me defend the characterization of this as at least initiated. I personally blame public health, 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 that. Just name some names on that front. Yeah, so like in the United States, a primary architect of the lockdown strategy was Tony Fauci. Let me just describe why I think this wasn’t, it’s not a conspiracy in a sense that there’s this like small group that has nefarious ideas. If you look at the decades before the pandemic happened, there was a concerted effort in the United States and elsewhere to prepare for the next pandemic. That preparation involved putting into actuality a whole range of powers that previously we would have said were not consistent with liberal democracy. 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. The idea was that we are biohazards to each other. The whole goal is if we can keep each other apart during a time of severe infectious disease threat, it will actually save lives. That was the premise of this and that there was coming another, a new respiratory virus pandemic threat. Now that is actually was certain to be true. We’ve had respiratory virus pandemics time after time, decade after decade. In the 20th century, we had respiratory virus pandemics. 1918 of course now is the most famous, but we had them in 1957, 1968, 1976. You could just keep going on and on. Most recently maybe 2009 and the swine flu pandemic. 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. For them, the better tools meant essentially the dictatorial powers, the authoritarian powers that constitute a lockdown. Now when COVID arrived, 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. 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, let’s say, let’s just say the same names, Tony Fauci, he dawned on himself the mantle of science itself, right? We’re all looking for a guru. Yes, he took the name of science in vain. He actually did. I mean, he talks about it as if it’s some sort of religious system. So he took, and what he did is he designed a set of policies and 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. And in that, so when that set of events unfolds, you have someone who essentially takes over what truth is in the minds of everybody. Then all these other actors could come in and start to say, you mentioned the pharmaceutical companies, they jumped in, I don’t think they were in a nefarious plot, I think that they jumped in legitimately saying, okay, let’s help figure out how to address this threat. Now then they took advantage of the power they had in very abusive ways, but that’s a later development rather than the driving force, I think. And so how do you understand the practicalities of the relationship between the top public health bureaucrats and the pharmaceutical companies? Because there’s obviously moral hazard there. One of the things that struck me as 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 Pfizer constantly. 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. 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, 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. And so I couldn’t understand at all why the White House would be supporting the marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical companies. Now there are tens of billions of dollars at stake here. And there is a revolving door, and people who are listening and watching, it’s my understanding is that there’s something of a revolving door in Washington 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. But it’s pretty damn useful to have to hire someone to work for you who was once involved in the regulation of your company, let’s say. So there’s plenty of moral hazard on that front. 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, you know, 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? 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Expressvpn.com slash Jordan. 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, right? So that the same kind of principle applies here. So what you have, for instance, is again in the US that a former head of the FDA was actually on the board of Pfizer. He then is on national TV all the time, essentially pushing a line that benefited Pfizer and the sale of its products. Sometimes and often in fact without disclosing the fact that he has this conflict. So they’re definitely, but that’s long standing. You understand that, that those kinds of conflicts exist. And you’re absolutely right, like the regulatory agencies, there is this like sort of people work for the regulatory agencies and then they go work for the drug companies and come back, right? That’s like the FDA, that’s a major problem the FDA in the US faces. So that’s completely understandable. policymakers, top policymakers understand that dynamic and act against it. Instead what happened was that the top policymakers said to maybe to themselves, assume they acted this way, that that kind of dynamic actually helps the public. Because what they’re doing is putting forward a product that’s going to rescue us from the pandemic. You have a product that’s this vaccine and so it’s okay. I mean, it’s implicit, at least that’s my interpretation of how people acted. 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. 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. 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. Now I’ve been thinking about this biologically. I did a lot of work on the extended immune system, the behavioral immune system. And so we have an immune system that operates within us to protect us from disease, but we have a behavioral immune system too. And both disgust and fear are part of that behavioral immune system. What I mean by that is, well we tend to be disgusted by such things as let’s say rotting food. And the reason we’re disgusted by it is because the rotting food is full of bacteria that produces toxins to keep us from eating the bacteria’s food, and we’re sensitive to that so we stay the hell away from it. So that’s part of what protects us against pathogens. And disgust is one of the main mechanisms whereby that operates. 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 because if you’re afraid of something you avoid it, but if you’re disgusted by something you burn it and destroy it. So if you start to leverage disgust in the political landscape, you’re playing with fire. Certainly what the Nazi propagandists were very, very good at using disgust. And Hitler’s anti-Semitic language, for example, is absolutely permeated with disgust metaphors. Purity of the blood, purity of the race, the cockroaches and insects that were conspiring against Germany. It’s all purity language. And so I kind of think that what happened from a biological perspective might be construed as an overreaction of the behavioral immune system. So 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. And in this situation, what happened was we faced an uncertain threat. 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. But that metaphor of an extended immune system overreaction, depoliticizes it to some degree. 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? I think we’re facing the same thing on the climate catastrophe front at the moment, by the way. And people can differ in their opinions about that. But certainly, systemic overreaction is a constant potential catastrophe. 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? That’s not what we’re learning. Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. I think it’s actually quite insightful to point to disgust as a central driving factor in this pandemic. Right? Because if anyone were to get COVID, the first thing you’d ask is, who gave it to you? As if it’s some sort of sin. It’s treated not as a disease to be managed by a person who gets it to be cared for. 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. Now, it is true there are diseases that are quite deadly. You want to have quarantining. I mean, those are legitimate tools. But to deploy it at a society-wide level for extended periods of time essentially destroys the underpinnings of civil society. 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. It’s a deal we’ve made with each other. Civilization tempers the inclination that we humans have toward disgust and transforms it into something where it’s much more constructive. And you can absolutely have pathologies of societies where that disgust is allowed to spread and marginalize people. I come from Indian culture. Indian society has struggled forever with this distinction of clean and unclean with certain cast of people. I think that is a normal feature of societies. Yeah, well, there’s good work too on the political front showing that societies where infectious disease prevalence is higher, like genuinely higher, are also substantially more likely to have authoritarian political structures. And the correlation is like point seven. This is not a trivial effect. It’s a walloping effect. 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. And that does tie into bodily and physical purity and then into a kind of metaphysical purity. And it’s very difficult to keep those levels of analysis separate. I mean, the goal of public health has always worked to counteract that. We tell people, you shouldn’t moralize a disease. You shouldn’t treat a disease as if it’s something that’s morally wrong about the person that has the disease. With HIV, we learned that lesson, I thought. Yet during the pandemic, public health authorities leaned into this. They leaned into the idea that someone who gets COVID has committed a sin. And they didn’t say it out loud, but they acted that way. Now I said that there was a pandemic template. But that pandemic template is at odds with every other pandemic that we managed in the respiratory virus pandemic we managed in the last century. 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. And the reasoning was so compelling. The idea is that if you disrupt society at large, you will do more harm to people than you would save them from the whatever marginal risk from the respiratory virus pandemic that’s spreading. Yeah, well that’s a basically conservative, so to speak, a classic conservative concern, which is twofold. One is to stress the law of unintended consequences. This is something I really learned as a social scientist, 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 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. And they hit the treatment group with every positive psychological and sociological intervention you could manage. Literacy training, parent training, communication training for the kids, they paired them with mentors and they took the kids out of the inner cities and out to camp, summer camp, for two weeks every year while the program ran. 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 loved, the parents loved, the teachers loved, the implementers loved, they did worse on virtually every measure. 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. And that was such a powerful effect that it overwhelmed all the other interventions. Somerville study, very, very famous cautionary tale. And Joan McCord, who was one of the authors of that study and one of the first female PhDs in criminology, basically spent the rest of her life traveling around to academic conferences telling people, do not assume your idiot intervention is going to work. Build in careful outcome analysis to any social program that has a behavioral change mandate and have some humility in the face of the complexity of the problem you’re trying to solve and certainly, well, we just let all that go by the wayside in this. Now you said that we had a different strategy in place for pandemics in the past and that this new strategy emerged, like emerged where and why did it dominate? I mean, I think in the West, it emerged out of the war on terror. You can go back to the anthrax threat from, I think it was 2001 or 2002. 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. There’s a whole series of war games and sort of planning exercises around biosecurity threats. That’s not normally what you think of how you deal with respiratory virus pandemics, right? 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? So society can go on as best it can. So when the pandemic hit in 2020 in the US and the world, what happened was that the World Health Organization organized in the early days of the pandemic a junket, if you will, to China. Chinese authorities in January 2020 had locked and had declared finally a pandemic, had locked down their, you know, this major city, Wuhan. And the UN, the World Health Organization sent a junket that included a deputy of Tony Fauci, prominent officials within, you know, public health officials of the World Health Organization. They came back from that junket saying that what China had done had worked. These authoritarian measures that China had taken, shutting people into their apartment, locking the door, essentially like had worked. The disease was gone. Yeah. Well, you know, lots of dimwitted Western intellectuals go to communist countries and conclude that it works. We do have a long history of that, don’t we? We certainly do. We certainly do. 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. I mean, your default presumption when dealing with the CCP is 100% of everything you see is a lie until proven otherwise. I mean, there’s an email from Cliff Lane, who’s a deputy of Tony Fauci. He comes back from this World Health Organization junket to China. And in the email, he writes that what China did work, in fact, what we have a very difficult decision to make, it will take more than just the people in this room to make that decision. And he writes, what China did work, albeit at great cost. Oh, yeah, that pesky little, what would you say, consequence. You know, you mentioned this classic social science study. The expertise of social scientists was denigrated early in the pandemic. The question was, are you an epidemiologist? Are you a virologist? Are you an infectious disease specialist? And anyone else with any other expertise was not relevant to decision making. Only the science itself had a say. Right. As you said, the science, follow the science. It’s like, well, OK, what do you mean here exactly? Because there’s always a balance of risks if you’re a sophisticated thinker. 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. But there’s a hundred other considerations of risk that need to be simultaneously evaluated. And the way to protect yourself from that cognitive complexity, if you’re a narcissistic leader and you want to forge the moral pathway forward, is just to demonize anybody who adds any complexity into the argument. So we saw plenty of that. That’s exactly what happened. Yeah. That’s exactly what happened. 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 excluded from the conversation. Right. You could say, look, this is going to really hurt the economy. And then what the response you’d get was, well, you care more about money than lives and therefore you shouldn’t do this. But the irony is that the economic harm from the lockdowns, with 100% certainty, killed more people and is still killing more people than the lives saved by the lockdowns, which I think are very few. Yeah. Well, we’re not done with that yet. We have no idea how many people the lockdown and the associated panic killed. That’ll unfold over probably… Decades. Yeah. Well, especially when you factor in things like the decrement in educational attainment that emerged as a consequence of the suppression of schooling, because that’s a whole lifetime of decreased economic productivity. We’ll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus. The Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. Yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was about this. So my training is I have an MD and a PhD in economics. I do health economics for a living. I’ve been following for the last two decades this literature obsessively documenting the returns to education on the health of children during their entire lives. And it’s pretty convincing. It’s a great investment we make when we educate our children in terms of they live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives. And even small interruptions in the education, is what the literature documented, have long lifetime consequences. This guy named Dimitri Kostakis, who’s an editor of JAMA Pediatrics, did this really interesting paper. We just extrapolated that existing social science literature and said, well, we closed schools for a short time in spring 2020. What consequences will that have on the lifespans of children? 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 spring of 2020. Schools closed on the basis of public health, this cartel of public health people, all around the world. In Uganda, in India, the schools closed for two years. Many people don’t have access to internet or electricity or whatever. That meant no school and millions of kids. It also meant no social interactions. It meant way more time online. It meant way more time frustrated. It, yeah. Depression. One in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the US, according to a CDC survey in June of 2020. I mean, the consequences are just, the knock on consequences were devastating. The UN 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. Supply chain disruptions. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the pointy end of the supply chain disruption is some guy who makes $5adayor$10 a day of income selling coconuts to rich Mumbai laptop class people and then he loses his job, he now earns less than $2adayofincome,hisfamilystarves.Thatisthe,soitwas{n}^{\prime }t,itwasneverlivesversusmoney.Never.Itwasalwayslivesversuslives.Andifyoutalktoanycompetentsocialscientist,tha{t}^{\prime }sexactlywhattheywouldhavetoldyouinthatearlydaysofthepandemic.Sowhendidyou,whendidyoustarttobecomeconcernedabouttheoverreachofthepandemicmandates?Andtellmethatstoryandhowdidthatunfold?SothedayIheardaboutthelockdowns,Imean,Ijust,Iwasabsolutelyfloored.Icould{n}^{\prime }tbelievethatinmedicineandpublichealth,wewererecommendingthisapproachthatIknewwithcertaintywasgoingtoharmthelivesofpoorandvulnerablepeopleliterallyeverywhereintheworld.Ithoughtthatwehadmadecommitmentstoprotect,youknow,almosttheseRawlsiancommitmentstoyoustructurepublicpolicysothatyoudo{n}^{\prime }tharmtheleastcapableamongus,tosufferfromthat.AnextensionoftheHippocraticoath,right?Tha{t}^{\prime }swhatIthought.Exactly.AndIthought,okay,well,tha{t}^{\prime }stheprofessionIthoughtIwasin.Andthenwhenthelockdownswereannounced,Imean,actuallyIhadanargumentwithmybosswh{o}^{\prime }slike,itwasatStanfordMedicine,almostthatveryday,becausehiswifeistheheadofSantaClaraCountyPublicHealth.Andwehadthisargumentaboutwhetherlockdownswereagoodideaontheeveofthelockdown.Ijustcameawaystunned.Like,thisca{n}^{\prime }t,IactuallygaveaninterviewtoaReutersreporterwhowasdoingastoryonwhatlockdownswoulddotokids,todomesticassaultrates,todepression.Right,right,toalcoholism,toopiatemisuse.Alcoholism.Yeah.SoIgaveaninterviewinlikeAprilof2020,andIemphasizedtheseknock-oneffects,thattheywerecertaintocome.AndIactuallysaidinthatinterviewthatthelockdownsareverylikelythebiggestpublichealthmistakeweevermade.Ohyeah,youthinki{t}^{\prime }sabiggerpublichealthmistakethantheinvertedfoodpyramidandtheinjunctiontoeveryonetodonothingbuteatcarbohydratestilltheyweigh350pounds?Or,Imean,no,yougottoadmit,thoseatleastcompetefor\dots Therearealotofsinstoweigh,butthisiscertainlyupthere.Yeah.Justintermsofthecatastrophicharmtopoorpeople\dots Yeah,andw{e}^{\prime }renotdonewiththat,soeveryonelisteningandwatchingneedstoknowthat.Thecatastrophicconsequencesofharmdonetopoorpeoplearestillunfolding.AndGodonlyknowswhattheendresultoftha{t}^{\prime }sgoingtobe.Becausefoodismoreexpensivethanitshouldhavebeen,andenergyismoreexpensivethanitshouldhavebeen,andtherearemultiplereasonsforthat,butthebloodysupplychaindisruptionswereoneofthem.Andwereallytoyedwithbringingoursupplychainstothebrinkofbloodydisaster.I{t}^{\prime }sstillhardtobuyacarinNorthAmerica.Andi{t}^{\prime }sreallydifficulttoscrewsomethinguplikethat,becausew{e}^{\prime }reprettydamngoodatmakingcarsanddistributingthem.Andtoseethatthereareshortagesonallfrontsforrichpeople,youjustimaginewhattheshortagesarelikeforpoorpeople.So\dots Yeah,theotherthoughtIhadearlyonwasthatwedid{n}^{\prime }tactuallyknowhowdeadlydiseasewas.Soduringtheswinefluepidemic,theearlyestimatesbytheWorldHealthOrganizationwasthatthecasefatalityratewas4-5$5,000 to me and somehow I changed the result of the study. But it was ridiculous. The $5,000wenttoStanfordinagiftaccountweusedtooffsetstudyexpenses.Weranthisstudyintwoweeksorthreeweeks.Weorganizeditandranit.Itwasreallyquiteafeat.Andweranitforveryinexpensively.Iwouldneveraltertheresultofastudybasedonwhatfunderssay.I{t}^{\prime }sridiculous.Well,andwhatbenefitwouldthatbetoyouanyways?Like,ifyo{u}^{\prime }regoingtoconvictsomeone,accusesomeoneofacrime,youshouldatleasthaveamotiveinmind.If$5,000 is a pretty cheap price for your soul, by the way, Jay. And then what’s in it for you exactly? What was the accusation? You were falsifying the data for what reason? Yeah, so Stanford, rather than just dismissing the allegations out of hand, they conducted what first they started to call an investigation, but then they realized they couldn’t call an investigation because it was so ridiculous. They called it a fact-finding mission. Oh, one of those. And then, yeah, and like, I spent that summer just incredibly stressed. Yeah, I bet. I’d never felt anxiety before. I mean, I’d never been in an off bed before. I just was a scientist, Jordan. I wrote, I published papers for a living in peer-reviewed journals. I was really happy with that life. Yeah, yeah. Hey, join the club, man. Yeah, I know. I thought about you a lot actually in those days, Jordan. And I had to make a decision. After Stanford cleared me, they’d sent this very strong signal. If I just went back to the whole life, just quietly doing science, they would just let me go. They’d continue to be a good faculty member in good standing. Right, so despite the fact that you were innocent, you should shut the hell up and go back to invisibility and then we’ll let you… So what are the powers that be decided? 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. Yes, exactly. How lovely of them. And that’s so impressive. And it was so stressful, Jordan. I mean, like I said, I thought about you a lot in those days because I know what you went through. But I lost… Generally, I’m very good at dealing with anxiety. Never in my life have felt anxiety. I felt it in a deep way. I lost 30 pounds of weight. At one point, I was losing weight so quickly, I thought I was actually afraid for my life. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I just obsessively worked trying to like address the damage. And then at some point in like summer of 2020, I decided that, you know, what is my career for? If it’s just to like have another CV line or a stamp, it’s just I’ve wasted my life. And I would speak no matter what the consequences. And actually then the anxiety went away. Like at that point, that decision I think was the right one. People have two big classes of fear. And they’re archetypal. And one is fear of nature and the other is fear of culture. Those are good ways of thinking about it. And you’re afraid of nature because you could die. You could go insane, you could lose your mind, you could die. You could die while you’re suffering. That’s worth being afraid of. Second category, you’ll get mobbed, excluded and alienated. And then you’ll die. And so when, and I’ve watched this with like 200 people now who’ve been mobbed and betrayed by the, by the, well, by the powers that be, let’s say. 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. 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. I’ve seen people, colleagues of mine who were the most solid people you could possibly imagine, like literally hounded into the asylum by the, by the, by the forces of the mob. It’s appalling. This, this, this, this, this demonizing cancel culture driven by narcissistic psychopaths. It’s like, it could be the death of us all. It’s really bad. And so your response is absolutely typical. It’s interesting though, A, when you, you make that decision to flip the, what would you say? To flip the, the, 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. And so that happened to you when that was in the summer of 2020? Yeah, sometime in some, I talked to my colleague, a friend of mine who I’ve written with many times who said, I told him explicitly, I’m crossing the Rubicon. I don’t, I don’t care about my reputation anymore. I, what I, you know, by whatever academic reputation, I’m going to use what knowledge and, and, you know, sort of resources I have to say what I believe. Because I think that there are many, many lives at stake in the mistaken policies we’ve adopted. And I have the, had the background and the, and the, you know, sort of the, the, the, the life story where I could actually try to make some difference on that. Right, right. After that, it was, it was just transformative. I mean, I, you know, I also am religious and, you know, praying actually helped a lot, but that’s- What were you praying for? What were you praying for? Just out of curiosity at that time. Just, just, just for, just, just for clarity for what relief from the anxiety and then clarity for what I should do with my life. Yeah, 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. Now it might not save you as well, but there is nothing else that you have. And so when you’re backed into a corner, well, first of all, you better scour your soul. 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. And so, and it’s useful to notice that that can be on your side. And you know, you have to, I don’t know, the other thing I realized is if I’m living my life just for myself, it’s hollow. If I, the purpose of my work before, I mean, if you look back on my work, what I wrote when I applied for tenure was that I studied vulnerable populations, the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, and how government policies and economic realities affect the health and well-being. I mean, if that’s true, that means that what I studied was for other people, that my actions and my, was not inwardly focused, but focused on the people that I studied. Right, well, so that means the crisis also forced you to really prioritize your values, you know, because, and it’s tricky as a scientist, you know, and you see this when you’re training graduate students is that, well, you have to follow the science properly, and you have to be skeptical of your own results, and you have to be sure you’re not publishing merely so that you publish, and merely to burnish your reputation, and the same thing with attending conferences. On the other hand, you do have to publish, and you have to market and communicate. There is a career development element to every enterprise. Now, the question then becomes, well, what do you do when those are set at odds with one another? And the answer is, well, if you’re tilting towards pathological narcissism, you sacrifice the mission for the message. And there’s plenty of corruption in science that’s merely a consequence of that, but when you’re backed into a corner the way you were, then you have to really start to understand what that means. It’s like, are you in this to do the good that hypothetically motivates the science, or are you going to sacrifice that, apologize, kowtow, and hypothetically protect your reputation? And that’s, you’re done as a scientist if you do that. I think you’re done as an ethical actor. I think you’re done as a human being. You are. 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. It’s a very bad strategy. Well, so it’s a relief to hear that you were able to see your pathway forward in the summer. I’m sure that was utterly brutal. 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. It’s quite the illuminating experience, let’s put it that way. I guess I understood how excommunication worked. Right, exactly. That’s what it felt like. You bet, because that betrayal and excommunication, that’s exactly what it is. So you decided that the devil take the hide most, and that you were going to say what you believed to be true. And so what occurred then? So fast forward a few months. I mean, my colleague Scott Atlas was advising the President of the United States, so I actually got to meet with the President. But that never went anywhere. The American President at the time, President Trump, I think his instincts were against the lockdowns, but he basically thought that if he let Tony Fauci not have the reins, that he would lose the election. So that was quite frustrating. Fast forward a few months to October 2020. And a colleague of mine from Harvard, Martin Kuhldorf, who’s a fantastic biostatistician, he helped design the vaccine safety surveillance systems that, statistical systems that the FDA and the CDC use in the US 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. Yeah. We arrived basically just to compare notes. 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. The summer had seen a decline in cases. There’s some spread in Arizona and the South and some countries, but the threat of March seemed to have subsided. 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. 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. All of that was still in place. All the infrastructure for the lockdowns were there. And so we wrote this very short document, one page long, called the Great Barrington Declaration. We wrote it in very simple language because we wanted to reach regular people. 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, that people were being misled, that the idea that all scientists agreed that there was a consensus, that the science said, let’s lock down, was not true. In fact, many, many reputable scientists disagreed with that. And yet they stayed silent because of the fear of social ostracism, fear of, you know, Tony Fauci controls billions of dollars of federal money on for research. What’s not just the money so you can do your experiments, it controls the social status of scientists. You know, you don’t get tenure at a top university, medical university, unless you get NIH funding in the United States. So it’s the social status is even more than the money itself. Well, it’s not just the social status either. We should be clear about that. It’s also your livelihood itself, right? Because so it isn’t merely the fact that you want to elevate yourself up the status hierarchy. It’s that you want to keep your job. And so this is nuts and bolts material here. Yeah, you know, I was very ill when the Great Barrington Declaration came out. So I wasn’t as, what would you say, aware of everything that was going on as I might have been under different conditions. But one of the things I do remember, and I’ve been struck by this continually, is that while it was demonized and put off to the side as the work of essentially like scientific outsiders and extremists. 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. 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. 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. Because you think it’s very hard to think, well, if there’s enough smoke, there’s probably some fire. And that’s actually a pretty intelligent rule of thumb decision because there’s seven billion people out there. You’re not going to listen to all of them. 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. And you don’t have time to sort that out like a legal trial. But what it does mean is that reputation savaging can be weaponized. And there are people who are absolutely stellar at that. And the Great Barrington Declaration was definitely savaged, ignored and savaged both. Okay, so it launched when? And this was in 2020? Yeah, October 4, 2020. People that signed like tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists signed it. Nobel Prize winners signed it. Almost a million people have signed it to date. It went viral very rapidly. Like we just put it on a web page and people just found it. And I started getting messages from people saying, you know, thanking me for like saying common sense. Protect vulnerable people. Protect vulnerable people. Lift the lockdowns. Those are the two ideas of the Great Barrington. It’s the old pandemic plan. It’s the least original thing I’ve ever written in my entire life. I mean, there’s nothing new actually in it. And certainly nothing radical. I didn’t think so. But four days after we wrote it, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three of us that were the primary co-authors of the declaration, fringe epidemiologists. Right, right. And then he called for a devastating published take down of the premises. I started getting hit pieces written against me in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, a whole bunch of other… The CBC hosted a panel of scientists who savaged us as wanting to let the virus rip and kill grandma. Yeah, yeah. We should complain to the CBC. Thank God for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And that $1.4 billion of government subsidy a year and a 1.9% market share. They’re quite the stellar bunch, boy. The level of propaganda was remarkable. I was calling for focused protection of vulnerable people. I was calling for a conversation among public health people, how better to protect old people who were dying in droves as a consequence of not being protected by the lockdowns. How you protect old people is complicated, right? So it depends on the local living circumstances of each person, of the old people in the community. The answer in Alberta, Canada is going to be very different than the answer in Southern California or something. It’s just going to be very different. All those pesky complexities. Yeah. Well, you need local public health who know the living circumstances to participate in that discussion. Think creatively about how to protect older people when you have this highly infectious respiratory virus pandemic going on. Instead, we were demonized. We were told that it was impossible to protect older people without a lockdown. The lockdown didn’t protect older people. It hadn’t in the spring and it didn’t protect them in the fall and continued to not protect them. Essentially, the top of the federal public health bureaucracy closed the minds of public health against the possibility of focused protection. Demonizing us. The purpose of the demonization was so that they could tell the public that every reputable scientist, the consensus of scientists agreed with their plan, their plan to lockdown. I suppose the motivation for that was the ability to publicly trumpet the staggering effectiveness and decisiveness of their simple and potent plan to protect. For me, again, that’s a kind of unbelievably narcissistic virtue signaling. 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 multi-dimensional solutions that would be demanded. I remember seeing a podcast with you and your daughter, I think, during that time. I was quite moved actually by it, both by the devotion your daughter has to you and also the illness you were going through. So I don’t think you have anything to… What you went through was tremendous. Anyway, so we wrote this. But the thing is I was emotionally better prepared to deal with the blowback from that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it became this thing where it was clear that the purpose was to limit the reach of the declaration. Many people still have not heard of it. They probably should have heard of it. And that partly succeeded. But it didn’t entirely succeed. The nucleus of this anti-lockdown movement was put in place. 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. Lockdown is the ideology that we must keep people apart from each other. The ideology that we have to treat each other as biohazards. 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. 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, the Nazi eradication campaign started out as public health initiatives. The causal pathway is clear. And so that disgust demonization was part of that process. But it was all put forward initially under the guise of protecting the public and doing the best even for the suffering. So the Nazis were extremely good at leveraging a false compassion on the narcissistic front to produce unbelievably pathological outcomes. 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? Yeah, well, maybe you’re, well, here’s my new theory, my political theory or part of it. 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. And there’s three levels of evidence. Number one, you’re frightened into paralysis by the emergency. So you’re too small. Second, you’re willing to extend the use of tyrannical power to justify response to your fear. That’s also an indication that you’re not just frightened, you’re a frightened tyrant. 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. 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. They become tyrants. And it’s so convenient that they also get all the power. It’s like, no, those are not the leaders you want, not even if the emergency is real, let alone when it’s manufactured for the benefit of people who want all the power and all the unearned credit. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I think that the people who draw power to themselves, you absolutely need to be skeptical. At the very least, you want checks and balances. Right. So imagine if we’d had an honest and open debate about pandemic policy, 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. It was already clear that they’d failed to stop the disease from spreading. What success was there? And then third, it was already clear who the vulnerable people really were, like the highest-risk people. So at that point, if there had been an open debate without this demonization, the authoritarians would have lost. At the time when I wrote the declaration, I thought we actually were in the minority among scientists. I’m not sure that’s true, actually. Yeah, no, I suspect it’s probably not. I suspect it’s probably not true. Is that, but it’s also almost impossible to overestimate the probability that people will be silenced by intimidation. And we should be take this very seriously. 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. Yeah, so it’s no joke. It’s no bloody wonder that people are afraid to speak out. And could it be the majority? 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. 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 were very hesitant to step forward and speak. And you can say, well, aren’t they cowardly? It’s like, yeah, maybe. Wait till you find yourself in that position. See how bloody brave you are. Because my experience has been that that kind of bravery is vanishingly rare. Maybe 1% of people can manage it. 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. I had three sources of income. Right. So I lost two of them, but I didn’t lose the third one. And most people aren’t in a position where they have established three independent sources of income. So I lost my professorship and I lost my clinical practice, but I didn’t lose my business. 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. 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. I mean, I have tenure at Stanford. I wasn’t sure that that tenure would hold. Yeah. I mean, it was not clear to me. I don’t have, I had that one source of income. But you know, Jordan, I just don’t believe that my life should be lived simply for that tenure or the money. I think, and I lost a major source of support in that. And many of my friends that I previously called friends that broke with me. So I lost that, but I didn’t lose my family. I didn’t lose my faith. 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. I mean, it’s hard to convey to people how much that meant. Yeah, right. It made me feel like what I was doing was worthwhile. Probably for the first time. It’s fine to get CV lines with published papers and fancy journals, but to actually have that move people to action, to give them the ability to speak up when injustice is being done, there’s something, you just can’t replace it. Yeah. Well, I guess that’s the reward you accrue for having undergone the trials of exclusion and mobbing, right? And that ability to ally yourself to the degree that you’re extraordinarily careful and fortunate with what you believe to be true. Yes, and that’s definitely something worth, well, there isn’t anything that’s more worth discovering than that in some fundamental sense. Now, let’s talk for a moment about, you said that the Barrington Declaration was marginalized and demonized, both of those, with some success on both fronts. And I would say yes, with some success, but not with entire success. But let’s also talk about how your communication on the public front was thwarted. So I’ve been watching the former trust and safety executive, Ewell Roth, being roasted over a slow fire or maybe a quick fire in Congress with a certain degree of satisfaction. 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. And so what do you make of that? And how did that unfold? Yeah, so I joined Twitter in August 2021. I mean, I never had a Twitter presence. In fact, I told my assistant professors and graduate students, don’t join Twitter, just write scientific papers for a decade. Yep. So there was some irony in my joining Twitter. What I found was that I felt like it gave me a voice. I joined almost immediately got 100,000 followers. It was actually kind of, you know, it felt like I could act as a platform. But, you know, I would write messages and it would get attention of my followers, but it never went outside of my followers. And I wondered about that. When Barry Weiss wrote her Twitter files expose, what she found was that the day I joined Twitter, I was put on a trans 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 I was warranted to criticize public health, to propose alternate strategy for managing a pandemic, and to help create a community of scientists and regular people who would then have some tools to oppose authoritarianism where they were. Yep. You know, public health authoritarianism where they were. That was the purpose of joining Twitter. And then also to convince people that didn’t necessarily agree with me or just didn’t know my message that I had something reasonable to say about these topics. So to be on a trans 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. The purpose for which Twitter exists actually, I think, is to allow those kinds of, that kind of communication to happen at scale. I’ve said I have mixed emotions about Twitter. It is an incredibly powerful tool, Jordan, as you know. You reach political leaders, you reach journalists, you reach other scientists, and you reach regular people in a way that’s not possible with any other platform. I think in the right hands, it is a great force for good in society. Yeah, but it’s also a place where, like, what would you call it? Penny anti-petty tyrants can run roughshod invisibly behind the scenes, and we’ve certainly seen no shortage of that on Twitter, despite the fact that the legacy media, 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 continually on the Twitter landscape. 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. It’s really something pathological. And so what’s your understanding of how your communication was restricted on Twitter? So I actually got to go visit Elon Musk and see Twitter headquarters, and they showed me their, they have a system called JIRA where, you know, you have your own account, or I had my account, and they would have, you know, sort of marks on my account for, like, what the restrictions were. Literally, it said the words, trends blacklist. That trends blacklist, I don’t believe Twitter put in place on its own. I believe that that was the result of the American federal government essentially asking Twitter executives to suppress. Why do I believe? Did you say trends, T-R-E-N-D-S, or trends? Trends, T-R-E-N-D-S. Okay, trends. Yeah, okay, trends blacklist. Got it. So did that mean you couldn’t trend? To prevent my tweets from trending. Right, got it. Correct. So that meant you couldn’t go viral, essentially, anything that you did. Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s right. Right. I was sneaky. 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. Let’s be clear about that. Yeah. Your expertise. So I think a lot of governments did this, but certainly the American government did this. They adopted this strategy of limiting misinformation in social media settings. Uh-huh. Misinformation, yeah. And the way they did that is they garnered the cooperation of social media companies. By, essentially, by threat, right? If you don’t do this, we’re going to regulate you out of existence. Yeah. That started with this national security issues around election issues and national security issues, but I think it bled over into this pandemic management. Russia collusion conspiracy fraud. Yeah. And so it bled over into this, into communication about health risks and COVID. And so the surgeon general of the United States had an initiative where he wanted to root out information. 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. The social media companies were in regular contact with the federal government, receiving instructions about what to suppress and in many cases, who to suppress regarding specifically information about COVID. I know this because I’m part of a lawsuit that the Missouri and Louisiana attorney general’s offices have brought against the Biden administration. Yeah, right. And that lawsuit isn’t covered. We deposed Tony Fauci, we deposed, I think Jen Psaki is going to be deposed, a whole bunch of very prominent figures in the… When is this going to unfold? It’s been going on for like nine months now. Hopefully we’ll get some decision in this coming year. I’m actually quite hopeful about this because what we’ve uncovered… Have they testified? Have Fauci and Psaki testified yet? Fauci has. I don’t know yet if he had Psaki in yet, but there was… The judges granted us the ability to depose 10 major figures inside the Biden administration, including FBI agents and others. It’s revealed a vast censorship enterprise. Well, we should also define for everybody who’s listening and watching what fascism means, technically. So fascist means to bind together. And the fascist ethos is something like unity of corporation, government and media at the highest levels of function. And so the idea is essentially that the triumvirate acting as a unity at those high levels can be extraordinarily efficient. And if it’s benevolent, there’s the rub, then it can march forward with unparalleled success. 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. And that’s that delusion of fascist efficiency. And the thing about United Systems is they can move very, very quickly when they need to. And that’s well and good if they’re moving in the right direction. But the right direction is hard to determine. And if they’re moving in the wrong direction, then God help us all. 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. 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. It’s appalling beyond belief. I think part of the reason the public hasn’t woken up to it, and it’s certainly true in Canada, Canadians would rather believe, for example, that the trucker convoy was run by mega-inspired American Republicans who wanted to destabilize Canadian democracy, which is what our bloody Prime Minister told them. So, Jordan, they had bouncy houses. They had bouncy houses for kids. I mean, they had like Sikh music. Well, there’s a huge coterie of Sikh truckers in Canada. Yeah, well, Canadians would rather believe that, though, that this was a conspiratorial enterprise motivated really by and funded by mega-Americans. This is the Canadian narrative. Most Canadians still believe that, 51%. And the reason they still believe that is because it’s easier to believe that than it is to believe that you can’t, that your leaders, 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. And Canadians just, they’re not capable of swallowing that bitter pill. Like, I can understand why, you know, in our country, and in yours, too, to a large degree, the fundamental institutions have been reasonably trustworthy for a long time. 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. It’s like, well, it’s no wonder people don’t, can’t go there with ease. Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to believe it either. Well, right. Until I see it, I’m going to assume the best of people. But when you see the federal government acting in this way, in direct violation of fundamental commitments to civil rights, like free speech, and, you know, it’s just there in emails in black and white, where, and, you know, and the way that they convey it, it’s as if they, it’s so obvious that they’re doing the right thing. Oh, yeah, we just suppressed this because we didn’t want people to be harmed by this bad information. Well, how do you know this information is bad? Well, that, this is the question. Like, I now virtually instantly distrust anyone who uses the word misinformation or the word disinformation. 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. That’s just self-evident. You can set up some fact-finding committee, committee that can just differentiate between the true facts and the false facts. It’s like, why do we need the scientific enterprise then if it’s so bloody obvious? And why is there political discussion? Well, no, no, there’s misinformation and we need committees to deal with it and to suppress it, which they certainly did at Twitter. Jordan, it’s a new dark age, right? 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. That is the age we are currently living in. Yeah, well, it’s a degenerate, it’s a degenerate theocracy, right? But the, what, running itself under the guise of a kind of rampant secularism. It’s really something to see and it’s so interesting. Maybe we could touch on this in a minute. I knew 10 years ago that the woke types in the universities would go after the STEM fields. And everyone thought at that point that I was being conspiratorial and paranoid. And I thought, no, no, I know how scientists work. Most of them are obsessively focused on their narrow specialization. That’s not an insult. That’s their job. 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. More power to them. But it means that they don’t have a political bone in their body, especially the real scientists, especially in STEM. And so when the woke political mob of narcissists comes for them, they won’t have a hope of resisting. And well, obviously that’s exactly what’s happening 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. You see that Texas yesterday, University of Texas revoked its commitment to requiring DIE statements as a precondition for employment. And then of course denied that they ever had such a policy in place to begin with. I mean, those are, those are, those are the de facto loyalty. Oh, definitely. I mean, that’s essentially what they are. Like you’re, I mean, it’s a statement of faith that you, but you belong to this particular faith tradition, you know, documented by the DEI statements. I mean, I just, I think it’s, it’s one of these things where like, I never imagined that the, that the free countries of the West would come to a situation where the, you know, like the basic civil rights, checks and balances of power, all these like norms of liberal, liberal civilization that I thought everyone agreed with were actually in question. I mean, you saw it earlier than most. I certainly, you know, before the pandemic, I would have thought of them as annoying, but I wouldn’t have thought of them as an existential threat. And now they’ve come around. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s, yeah. Well, the, well, you know, the other thing we can think about too here is that we don’t want to underestimate the pervasive attractiveness of, of this set of ideas. I mean, it devastated Eastern Europe, Russia and China, and that’s still going on in China. It’s still going on in North Korea. These are attractive ideas. They promise universal brotherhood. They promise an egalitarianism that is not only impossible to produce, but would be horrible in its realization, but that looks on the surface, extraordinarily attractive. They appeal to a kind of domestic ethos too. You know, Ben Shapiro said to me one time, he said, well, at home I’m a communist. And what he meant by that was that in his family, yes, children, it’s to each according to his need and from each, according to his ability. And that might work perfectly well in the domestic environment, you know, in a limited manner, but as a scalable political enterprise, it’s a complete bloody disaster. It’s not obvious why it’s just obvious that that’s the case. And, you know, when I grew up, we had the Soviet Union as evil example of this woke pseudo communist ideology. And that kept everybody in check, but that threat diminished substantially in 1989. And it allowed these ideas to hold sway once again in the West, you know, aided and abetted by idiot intellectuals, especially on the literary criticism front. But that’s just pervaded the institutions of higher education like mad, but we need to give the devil his due. I mean, these ideas hold sway over the minds of hundreds of millions of people because they offer attractiveness on the utopian front. That’s not easy for conservatives or classical liberals or scientists to mitigate against with their insistence on individual autonomy and responsibility and the importance of tradition and the necessity of rational inquiry. Even communities, like, I’m a big, I mean, I think communities are incredibly important, like thick communities where people are embedded and they draw support. Like, even people who think like that should be opposed to these ideas because these ideas destroy communities. We need to have checks. I mean, let’s go back to our discussion about lockdowns. What did lockdowns do other than destroy communities? It’s not an individualistic thing to say that lockdowns are a bad idea. They destroy the communities that provide support for the poor. And the poorest communities, most particularly. Well, the other thing too is that look, for all you leftists who are listening, all 15 of you, and this is why I like people like Russell Brand and to some degree, Joe Rogan. It’s like, why do you believe if you’re on the left that fascist collusion at the highest levels of power is going to serve the communities that you might even rightly be attempting to serve? The genuine left, just as I’ve known many in my life, say labor leader types, who are trying to give a real voice to the working class, and that’s a necessary thing to do. And to push back against the gigantism and excess of the corporate world, that’s a valid thing to do. Why in the world would you think that this top-down collusion between government, state, and media is in the interests of the people that you purport to serve? It’s a preposterous notion. I’ve encountered many people on the left, like the honest left, who joined the anti-lockdown movement. Sinatra Gupta, who wrote the Great Banerjee Declaration, for instance, is famously on the left. So I think that there is a tradition within the left that is solidly devoted to basic liberal ideas, just as there is on the right. And I think that’s the coalition that will win. And the lockdowns, the whole strategy we’ve followed to drive the pandemic, at least for me, has just brought me to a realization about how unimportant other kinds of political designations are. Democrat, liberal, Democrat, Republican. Really, the key thing, the key unifying thing, is this commitment to checks and balances, a commitment to sort of enlightenment ideals, a commitment to religious tolerance, to freedom of speech. And freedom of speech and conscience, probably foremost among those. And I think foremost because, as far as I can tell, all the other processes that keep systems of good governance in place are dependent, how could it be otherwise, on freedom of conscience, thought, and speech? Because that’s the mechanism by which complex problems are solved. And so if you give up that mechanism, that’s the mechanism of thought itself. And I mean, what we’re doing today, well, both of us are trying to update our views of the world to some degree, as well as to communicate with other people. But that’s all part of the process of analysis, diagnosis, and repair of systems that have gone astray. And unless you can engage in that freely, then they just go more astray. And the consequences of that, as we saw with the lockdown and are continuing to see with the lockdown, the consequences of that are, well, we’ll see how cataclysmic they are. You know, I thought, for example, that part of the reason we’re in a war with Russia is probably, perhaps, and maybe this is only 10 percent of the problem, or less, world leaders weren’t getting together and talking because of the lockdowns. It’s like, I don’t know how often the president of the United States and the leader of Russia should get together and talk, but never is definitely the wrong answer. And if you think you can do that electronically and do it successfully, you’re naive and careless beyond, what would you call it, beyond forgiveness, beyond the requirement for forgiveness. And I think it extends not just to like great, you know, top leaders of countries, but also just to regular interactions with people. Like a lot of the fracture of communities, you know, like just take my own example, like the friendships that have been broken. If we’d actually been meeting the other faculty members regularly just because we ran into them in the office building, I just find it hard to like, it would have been much more difficult to demonize me. If Francis Collins or Tony Fauci had just called me and spoke and said, here’s what we were thinking, here’s what we’re concerned, let’s change this, could you change it to do this way? I mean, you know, I might have gone along to like try to like figure out how to accommodate their concerns. Rather than demonizing me, we would have found a better way to like manage. I mean, science works by those kinds of personal communications. It’s, you know, yeah, you write papers, but then you go talk to people. Those conferences are actually worthwhile because now you get to know really with who they are, how they think. It’s a human endeavor. And to have this ideology where you have to be a part will replace everything just by Zoom, it just doesn’t work. Yeah, well, the other thing that’s lurking underneath all of this that we’re going to have to contend with is that I think virtualization breeds mistrust. And so what I’ve noticed when I’ve conducted virtualized enterprises is that they go fine when everyone agrees, but they go very badly as soon as disagreement emerges. And I think it’s because if I disagree with you, it’s easy for that to produce a halo. And for me to think, well, we disagree on everything. If we were getting together and having a coffee and bumping into each other in the hallway, we’d see that it’s one minor disagreement in a host of agreements. But that requires personal contact. And so that’s foregone in the virtual world. And then I also think that this is worse, and I don’t know how dangerous a threat it is, but I think it’s a paramount threat. I also think that virtualization enables psychopathy because psychopaths are actually held at bay by the perils of face-to-face communication. And if they can operate behind the scenes, which they can certainly do online, there’s an immense amount of online criminal activity. And exploitation. I mean, the whole pornography industry is nothing but that. And then immense, like swaths of criminals operating online, and then all the troll behavior as well. Like we may be setting up a world in the virtual space where the psychopaths and the predators and the predatory parasites, because that’s what a psychopath is, they can just run roughshod. There’s a counterbalancing. So I know people that speak anonymously, where they legitimately fear their job, and they wouldn’t speak otherwise. So I don’t know how you manage that. I don’t either. Maybe you authorize. It’s a complicated problem, but I hear you. I mean, it is one of the costs of going online, going on Twitter, is you’re subject to tremendous calamity from random people. Oh, it’s unreal. I don’t know. I think that was happening before I went on Twitter, though. I mean, just in the minds of some people or the reputation-destroying mechanisms of some people. So I view it as, at least I’m in a position where I can speak and get my message out. And if they’re going to attack me in these vile ways, at the very least, I can have my own say rather than staying silent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, no. People will say things on Twitter that would instantly get them punched in real life. And they do it all the time. And there are people who do that just for entertainment. And I mean, the clinical literature on that is becoming extraordinarily clear. So the particularly pathological venom-spewing trolls, a small percentage of the anonymous accounts are genuine whistleblowers. Most of them are Machiavellian psychopathic narcissistic sadists. And that’s what the clinical literature shows. And they have full sway on Twitter and disproportionate effect. And that’s warping the entire political landscape. Anyways, that’s grounds for another conversation. We should actually wrap this up. I guess there’s lots of other things we could talk about, but we covered a fair bit of territory today. And so it’s a pleasure to get to sit down and talk with you at some length. We didn’t manage that at Stanford, although we got to know each other at least a trifle there. So what’s next? As far as you’re concerned, what are you attempting to do right now? Maybe we can close with that. Sure. So the main thing is the public health authorities made tremendous mistakes. We can just see at least that, at least mistakes during the pandemic. The public deserves a full accounting of what decisions were made, who made them and why. There needs to be an honest COVID commission on the order of like the 9-11 commission that honestly looks at these and answers these questions. So I’ve been working on a document called the Norfolk Group document. You can go to norfolkgroup.org and find it with a bunch of my colleagues where we’ve set an agenda. It’s just questions that a honest COVID commission would ask. Maybe we should do a podcast with like two or three members of that group. When you guys are far enough along to feel that that would be useful, why don’t we do that? And you could suggest to me who these people should be. Okay, let’s do that. And so any sense about when that might be? So the document is actually done. We’ve been working on it for the last eight months. And now I want to spend time educating willing legislators and others who are going to be conducting these inquiries. So basically in every country. So right now the next step I think is we’re going to try to get it translated into multiple languages and try to contact commissions that are already starting to form. Parallel entry inquiries or commissions are already starting to form so that they have these set of questions in front of them that they can ask. These are reasonable questions like what was the basis for deciding that children should have the vaccine? Yeah, I’d like to know the answer to that question for sure because I just can’t figure that out. So we just lay out the evidence. Yeah. We just lay out the evidence. Why didn’t the randomized trials for children for this vaccine have as a clinical endpoint the prevention of hospitalization or death? Why did it only have antibody production? Yeah, there’s a good one. Like things like this. Yeah. Why weren’t the trials required to produce all-cause mortality as one of the outcomes? An excellent question because that would have helped us understand what better to do with the vaccine. Yes. So I think we have like just it’s you know on 10 different topics. Why were the schools closed? What was done to mitigate the harms of school closure? Things like this. So questions that need to get answered. The public deserves an answer. And the goal is at least my goal is not necessarily indict anybody or anything in terms of like criminally or whatever. My goal is so that we in public health understand the right lessons, reform, repent even. Yeah. And then so we don’t ever do this again. Yeah. We respect civil liberties next time. I think the outcome of any honest process will be that lockdown will be a dirty word. That we will shudder in horror whenever we hear it and anyone that proposes it will be seen as a charlatan. Yeah. And I think that’s the ultimate outcome of any honest inquiry. And I’m going to I’m working toward like making sure those honest inquiries happen. Yeah. Well, amen to that. Okay. So for everyone watching and listening, I’m going to talk to Jay for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I usually walk people through a bit of a biographical discussion about how their career unfolded and how their interests, their meaningful interests made themselves manifest in their life. So that’s on the Daily Wire Plus platform. For all of those of you who are watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, thank you very much for talking to me today. It was a pleasure to walk through all this, I suppose, a strange sort of pleasure to walk through all this dismal material with you. But to see it laid clear in the manner you managed it, that’s extraordinarily helpful. And thanks to the crew here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for helping me out today to make this happen. So good to see you, Jay. And well, we’ll talk again when the Norfolk Group project is ready to accrue some additional public communication. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. A great honor to talk with you. Good. Good to see you. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.