April 22, 2021 - Epoch Times
09:53
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| The collateral damage from the lockdowns, the UN put an estimate out that there were 130 million people at risk of starvation. | |
| One year later, were COVID lockdowns worth it? | |
| We'll see many more women with late-stage breast cancer this year that should have been caught early last year. | |
| And how is it that young people in America are statistically more afraid of COVID than the elderly, who are in fact a thousand times more likely to die from this virus? | |
| It's a failure of public health messaging. | |
| I've had many, many, many scientists write to me, tell me that they agree with me, but they can't speak up. | |
| Today I sit down with leading public health policy expert Dr. | |
| Jay Bhattacharya. | |
| He's a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, and he advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on COVID policy. | |
| They want to create this aura of, you shouldn't hear this idea, as if it's some banned book. | |
| This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. | |
| Dr. | |
| Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. | |
| Well, thank you for having me. | |
| So, of course, we're going to talk about coronavirus, or as we call it at the Epoch Times, CCP virus policy. | |
| You described the lockdowns as, quote, the biggest public health mistake we've ever made. | |
| And that's a very... | |
| Big statement. | |
| Please tell me what you're thinking. | |
| So, a few things. | |
| First, you have to think about the lockdowns as an absolutely extraordinary measure. | |
| The pre-pandemic plans, many of them had considered and rejected lockdowns as a means to control a virus like this, an epidemic like this. | |
| And if you look at what the consequences have been, you have to not just consider the effects on controlling the spread of the virus, which I think have been very limited in many ways, which we can come back and talk about. | |
| But primarily what I was thinking about is the collateral damage from the lockdowns, both domestically and worldwide. | |
| So sometime in April of last year, the UN put an estimate out that there were 130 million people at risk of starvation from the lockdowns worldwide. | |
| Basically, almost every poor person on the face of the earth potentially harmed to the point of starvation by the lockdowns. | |
| And tens of millions of children worldwide thrown into poverty. | |
| Many of those prophecies have come true. | |
| In fact, those predictions have come true. | |
| You see now things in the scientific literature that have documented Again, millions and millions of children thrown into poverty worldwide, food insecurity, potential starvation at a level not seen, I mean, other than before the major wars. | |
| I think what we'll come to understand very shortly, maybe even if we don't understand now, is that the harm from the lockdowns are orders of magnitude from whatever potential benefit you might think they have had in controlling the spread of the disease. | |
| So why don't you outline for me the forms of this collateral damage you're describing here? | |
| Think about what a lockdown actually is. | |
| A lockdown is an attempt to reduce the amount of personal interactions between people to an absolute minimum. | |
| Well, humans are born to live in society with one another. | |
| It's not a normal thing to cut down our interactions. | |
| So, hugging your grandmother, hugging your children, going to coffee with your friends, going to work together. | |
| Every single possible human interaction has been severed. | |
| And so if you want to understand the scope of the effect of the lockdowns, you have to understand that every single aspect of life is going to be affected by them. | |
| So let me just give you some examples that impinge on public health. | |
| So during the epidemic, we had, just in the United States alone, people who skipped their cancer treatments because they're more scared of COVID than cancer. | |
| They skipped cancer screening, so we'll see many more women with late-stage breast cancer this year that should have been caught early last year. | |
| We're already seeing that, for instance, in the UK. That's already been documented in the literature. | |
| You had something on the order of one in four young adults in the U.S. in June of this past year who reported serious thoughts of suicide. | |
| This is according to a study published by the CDC. I mean, this is just the beginning of it, and that's just domestically. | |
| I've already mentioned some of the international harms. | |
| I think we're going to see is that every aspect of human health that can possibly be hurt has been hurt by this. | |
| And I haven't even started to talk about the social damage, the anxiety, the kind of consequences that the kind of panic and fear that's been induced in the population will continue to have. | |
| Once you ring that bell of panic and fear, it is very difficult to undo. | |
| So let me get this straight. | |
| One in four young adults have contemplated suicide. | |
| And what's the number usually? | |
| Something on the order of 4 or 5%. | |
| I mean, it's a shocking increase in a group that normally should be... | |
| Socializing, living their life, learning to become adults, and yet they spent the year isolated, alone, in fear. | |
| One in four seriously contemplated suicide. | |
| Think about the depth of anguish and pain that represents. | |
| Now, of course, it's not just young adults. | |
| Lots of other age groups have also had this kind of similar result, but they're the group that has sort of faced it the worst, at least in the United States. | |
| I know, it's incredible. | |
| And I also heard this other statistic that there's actually more fear of contracting coronavirus among the younger population, which has a much lower risk than the older population. | |
| Is this true? | |
| It's true, yeah. | |
| So basically, the whole body of literature on this, the Risk of dying from COVID infection is a thousand-fold different between the young and the old. | |
| The oldest people who get infected are a thousand times more likely to die from infection than the young. | |
| And in fact, this past year, in 2020, more children died from influenza virus infection than COVID. Which is shocking when people hear it, but it's absolutely true because the children, to a large degree, don't face a large risk of severe outcomes from COVID infection. | |
| So the fact that young people believe, are in more fear, more panic about COVID than older, has two effects. | |
| One is that for the older population, they probably take more risk than they ought. | |
| Because they actually do have some higher risk from COVID. My mom is 80. | |
| She shouldn't be going out to parties or something. | |
| Whereas younger people, they've stopped their lives on the basis of a tiny risk. | |
| And instead have taken on an enormous risk, which is this sort of withdrawal from society, this lack of socialization, this sort of lack of normal living that is healthy for them. | |
| And so it's a failure of public health messaging. | |
| We've created this sense that there's this equal fear, or even worse fear, for equal panic. | |
| And as a result, we've miscommunicated the risk to the population that actually is most vulnerable and the least vulnerable, with consequences for both. | |
| Well, wait, so again, so you're telling me you think that we've underrepresented the risk for the older population and overrepresented the risk for the younger. | |
| It's like almost backwards. | |
| Yeah, it's inverted. | |
| It's inverted, right? | |
| I mean, it's... | |
| It's just a straight failure of public health messaging. | |
| In fact, I saw a New York Times story sometime last year arguing that there wasn't enough panic in the population about COVID and that public health should seek to induce more panic and fear. | |
| But in fact, that's the exact wrong thing to do. | |
| The public health toolkit should not include panic at all because it leads to unreasoned activity. | |
| Instead, it should communicate honestly what the risks are and give people tools to address that risk in their lives in the best way possible. | |
| I mean, it's a deadly disease. | |
| There's no question. | |
| But it's more deadly for some than others. | |
| And the kinds of activities you can take to mitigate them should correspond to the risks that you take. | |
| So you've just watched the first few minutes of my interview with Dr. | |
| Jay Bhattacharya, who's actually one of the leading public health policy experts in the U.S. You probably know that he is an advisor to Governor Ron DeSantis around COVID policy in Florida. | |
| And you might also know that he was actually, him and a whole roundtable with Governor DeSantis and other experts was actually removed from YouTube. | |
| YouTube decided to censor basically his perspective on coronavirus. | |
| This isn't really acceptable to us here at the Epoch Times. | |
| And I don't actually want to be sitting around thinking about what YouTube may or may not want when I'm deciding who to interview or what I'm going to talk about. | |
| Furthermore, YouTube has actually demonetized us. | |
| It's been over two months now since that's been the case. | |
| It's been under review. | |
| We're not being terribly, terribly hopeful about this. | |
| So what are we going to do? | |
| Well, we're launching Epoch TV. Epoch TV is a whole platform where we're going to have multiple programs. | |
| American Thought Leaders, of course. | |
| Crossroads with Joshua Phillip. | |
| The Larry Elder Show. | |
| Awesome stuff. | |
| $4.99 a month. | |
| That's what it's going to open with. | |
| And I invite you to see the rest of the interview here on our platform. |
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