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Nov. 30, 2024 - Epoch Times
48:37
The Catastrophic Failure of Lockdowns: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
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They worked to create an illusion of consensus that didn't exist by working with the press and big tech to suppress the voices of scientists who disagreed with them.
Today I sit down with Stanford University professor of medicine, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
He's a physician, epidemiologist, public health policy expert, and a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for focused protection of the most vulnerable instead of crippling nationwide lockdowns.
Francis Collins wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three of us fringe epidemiologists, which I'm going to put on my business card someday because I think it's such a great term.
In this episode, Dr. Bhattacharya breaks down how lockdown policies over these last two years ultimately protected the well-to-do while sacrificing the poor and the vulnerable in America and around the world.
We reorganize society to protect the well-off, the laptop class.
I think it's the single biggest public health mistake in history.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Ukelec.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Nice to be here.
It happens to be two years to the day of the 15 days to slow the spread announcement by Dr. Birx.
So why don't we start here, your reaction.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
Essentially, public health had decided on this absolutely extraordinary path, made absolutely extraordinary promises.
If you just sacrifice for the next 15 days, stay at home, well, we're not going to get hospitalizations, we're not going to get the deaths.
All we need to do is listen to what they say.
And that promise was not true then.
It's been shown not true over the last two years, and it's destroyed the lives of so many people.
And the trust in public health has, I think, also been destroyed with it.
So it's not necessarily obvious.
I remember watching this too.
It wasn't necessarily obvious that this was You know, going to turn out so bad, I think.
Are you saying at the time you already saw that there was a serious problem?
Well, I think the premise of two weeks to slow the spread were a set of models.
These models are, you can think of them as like little SimCity simulations where they have agents that interact with each other.
If an infected agent interacts with an uninfected agent, they can pass the disease on.
It's just like these complex Models that forecast that there would be millions and millions of deaths if we didn't shut down over a course of a month, two months, a very short period of time.
And these models, in order to make them work, they have to have parameters in them, generally in order to get it right, that are rooted in the real world.
The problem is we didn't have those parameters.
We didn't know how deadly the disease was.
We didn't know exactly how it spread.
It was guesswork.
And when I looked at these models, my reaction was that we just don't have enough data or information to really understand whether the models are producing accurate estimates.
It turned out they weren't.
The other thing is that Society is complicated.
When you have an intervention, like a lockdown, like two weeks to essentially where everyone tries to stay at home except for the essential workers, well, right there, right?
The essential workers still have to work, so you still have to keep society going.
You have to have doctors and nurses working.
You have to have electrical line workers to make sure you get electrical supplies.
You have to have food.
Now all of a sudden, it's not everyone's leaving to stop.
It's You know, some people are.
Some people are staying home to stay safe, or the rest of society's going, because it has to keep going.
If you're giving birth, the newborn and the mom shouldn't be separated.
I mean, there's all kinds of things where as soon as you query what does it mean to lock down, you say, okay, It's going to be complicated.
It's going to be bad.
My first thoughts were actually some of the harms I thought of that could happen as a consequence for the lockdowns.
I thought immediately to what would happen when you close schools, for instance, to what would happen to people, kids, that are abused, that have child abuse.
Well, that child abuse is picked up in schools.
So you close the schools, now all of a sudden child abuse still happens, there's no one to intervene.
Or school breakfasts and school lunches where a lot of kids get their meals, like a very large fraction of American kids get their meals.
Or to people in poor countries.
Those were my thoughts about what was likely to happen, that there were going to be all these collateral harms.
So I thought we didn't have enough data to actually know that it was going to be worthwhile to shut down.
And then I was thinking about the possibility of all these collateral harms to come.
And I was very reluctant to say yes.
You've become, you know, one of the more prominent critics of lockdowns, right?
Let's start here because there's been a lot of, you know, we've been discussing this, a lot of backpedaling people that initially supported lockdowns and are saying, hey, we didn't, we've never really supported lockdowns.
What are lockdowns really?
For starters, let's work on our definitions.
Sure.
Okay, what does that mean?
Or what have we meant by it for the last two years?
So a lockdown could mean a range of things, of course.
The primary goal of a lockdown is to prevent humans from interacting with each other.
That is the main goal because the theory is, the idea is that if you have two individuals not interacting with each other physically, then they can't spread a virus from one to another.
Simple as that.
The physics of it is simply you keep people apart, the virus doesn't spread.
But the way that it actually implemented, there's a whole suite of policies ranging from weld people into their houses if you think they have COVID, which is apparently what some Chinese authorities did, to stay home recommendations, essentially orders to stay home.
Quarantines of the elderly, not particularly, quarantines of the population, even the healthy population, even without physically barring the doors.
Very strong recommendations to stay home.
In Australia, for instance, there were orders that you were allowed to leave the house for an hour by yourself for exercise, and that's it.
You know, it's a prison-style lockdown in your own home.
To social distancing, you know, stay six feet apart when you're in line at the grocery store.
Even the masks, I think, in a way, it's like I'm physically separating my breath from yours, is the idea.
In a sense, to me, is a form of a lockdown.
It's any intervention that's aimed at keeping people physically apart from each other.
Well, how did it work out?
I think it was a catastrophic failure.
So it was catastrophic failure both on its own terms, in terms of protecting people from getting and contracting COVID, and it was a catastrophic failure in terms of all of the collateral harms it has had on societies around the world.
I think it's the single biggest public health mistake in history.
That's a big thing to say.
You're comparing this to what are the other public health mistakes?
We've had so many, right?
I think the handling of HIV crisis was a huge public health disaster.
The handling of research for syphilis, where we intentionally allowed syphilis-infected black men to have syphilis and not be treated for multiple years.
We've had the spread of misinformation about the link between autism and childhood vaccines.
We've had many mistakes in the recent past, in the recent hundred-some years we've made in the public health community.
But I'm hard-pressed to think of a single one on the global scale and scope of the harm that the lockdowns have caused.
You mentioned the HIV crisis.
In this recent FOIA that we did, we found that Dr. Fauci had written an email basically accusing you of some of the other signers of the Great Barrington Declaration of It effectively aids denialism, if I recall.
I find it utterly shocking.
In no way have I or any of the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration denied COVID. COVID is a deadly disease.
It's killed millions.
It, in particular, is a danger to older populations.
The very premise of the Great Barrington Declaration is that COVID is a danger, or else we wouldn't have written it.
We're not arguing that COVID isn't caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, so the analogy makes no sense on its own terms.
And in terms of denying the harms of COVID, I think quite the contrary.
What we're trying to do is take the data about who's most at risk from COVID seriously.
Take data on who's most at risk from the lockdowns seriously.
And then propose a policy that would address the risk that COVID actually poses, as opposed to the failed policy, which Tony Fauci was the primary architect, I believe, where if we just lock down for a short period of time, the disease will go away.
If we just wear masks for a short period of time, the disease will go away.
If we force vaccinate 100% of the population, the disease will go away.
All of these were failed promises based on flawed scientific understanding of the nature of COVID. And to turn around and then say that we were somehow denying COVID, I mean, I think the charge goes more strongly the other direction, where Tony Fauci and others who supported lockdowns denied basic facts about COVID, such as whether COVID-recovered patients have natural immunity, that actually led to many of the mistakes that were made.
Before we go into the lockdowns, there's just been this kind of general approach, it seems, of attacking people that have alternate viewpoints.
Indeed, that's part of the purpose of the event that we're going to be at today.
Of course, you've been on the receiving end of this.
How has your thinking about this evolved since you first encountered these kind of responses to you, voicing your perspective publicly and doing the Santa Clara study?
So, when I first got involved, I thought I was doing science.
I still think I'm doing science, although I think now I'm more involved in the public debate over what the right strategy should be.
Certainly, that was the goal of the Great Barrington Declaration, was to create a public debate, to let the public know that there were scientists that were uncomfortable with the lockdowns.
Because October 2020, when we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, it seemed to me, and I think most people, it seemed like thought that most scientists were in favor of the lockdown-focused strategy.
We keep people apart, the disease will go away.
All of the movement of the virus, the vagaries of it coming up and down, were dependent on human behavior, as opposed to just the way that these viruses happen to spread.
That there was this illusion of control that we had over the virus.
And the idea was another illusion, the illusion that there was a scientific consensus behind that illusion, that sense of control we had over the virus.
So every time a wave went up, it was a failure of the population to comply with the orders.
Every time it went down, finally the population started complying with the orders.
But I knew that there were many scientists that disagreed with that.
That, in fact, there wasn't a consensus.
Now, I, at the time, thought that I was in the minority.
So I wrote this Great Banking Declaration to tell the public that there was actually many scientists that had grave concerns about the strategy.
Now, in retrospect, I look back and I think, actually, I don't think we were in the minority even then among scientists.
I think that Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, another scientist in the UK, Jeremy Farrar, who's head of a funder for a group called the Wellcome Trust that funds many epidemiologists and scientists in the UK. They worked to create an illusion of consensus that didn't exist by marginalizing scientists that disagreed with them,
by working with the press and big tech to suppress the voices of scientists who disagreed with them.
So when we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, me, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, then of Harvard, it posed a big threat because now you have scientists from prominent institutions like Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford saying, no, the lockdown focus strategy is the wrong way to go.
Now you can't automatically say, oh, every reputable scientist agrees with me, you know, if you're Tony Fauci.
So it was a huge threat, and he reacted by...
Acting in ways that I can, in entirely inappropriate ways.
You already asked me this question about AIDS denialism, which is, you know, it's like a cardinal sin.
You're going to get thrown out of the scientific community if you say that, right?
Francis Collins wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three of us fringe epidemiologists, which I'm going to get put on my business card someday because I think it's such a great term.
But we weren't fringe.
The set of people, the epidemiologists who control the public discourse, yeah, they disagreed with us.
But it's not true that all epidemiologists agreed with them, even at the time.
And I think the consensus that they wanted to create, this illusion of consensus they wanted to create was a false one.
And it was false then, and it's false now.
Well, so let's look at the lockdown harms.
When I first came in, when we first met a year ago, a while ago now, I had this idea that there's pros to the lockdowns and cons to the lockdowns, but upon speaking with you, we realized that there don't seem to be as many pros as we had imagined, but a lot of us have been led to believe that, certainly.
But let's explore this.
Maybe we can start with why the lockdowns don't work, because I think that's very important, because the allure of the lockdowns is so simple, so compelling.
If I just keep people apart, surely the disease won't spread to each other.
But the problem is that if it works in the context of a computer model, it does not work in the context of real world.
So let me just give you a data point from India, from Mumbai.
It's a city of great inequality.
They have slums where people live tightly packed together in not very sanitary circumstances, poor people, large numbers of them, and then you have a high-tech They have all kinds of connections to big tech.
It's like a relatively rich part of the city.
In July of 2020, there was a seroprevalence study done in Mumbai.
Seroprevalence is how many people have antibodies in their blood that indicates that they were infected, have a history of infection.
And the slums, residents of the slums of Mumbai had Evidence about 60-70% of the population living there had already been infected with COVID and recovered.
Much more than people had realized.
In the richer parts of Mumbai, something like 20%.
This points to the problem with lockdowns.
Society is not equal in its ability to comply with an order that says, stay home, do nothing, stay safe.
Most people can't.
Most people living on the earth cannot do that.
They have to feed their families.
There are legitimate human needs that require connection with other human beings.
You get together, of course, for recreation, but even for absolutely essential things like making food, caring for patients, making drugs, pharmaceuticals so that people can get treated for other conditions.
Making sure your electrical lines work, I mean, making sure the sewers are running, making sure the energy productions go.
There are a whole range of activities that, and I'd say it's impossible for a government to say, well, these activities are essential, these activities are not.
An essential activity, a non-essential activity, one person, a government bureaucrat, may be quite essential to me.
I've talked with pastors, for instance, who tell me that their congregants, many of them, because they were isolated, had suicidal thoughts and that they needed church, they needed the synagogues, they needed the mosque in order to have the sense of community so that they could live.
Is that essential or non-essential?
How long can you put that off?
I don't think it was the place of government to make that distinction really, to say essential, non-essential.
But the reason is simple.
It's like you can't actually think of society like a video game.
You can't actually think of society where you can just keep people apart from each other and the only thing that will happen is germs won't spread.
And the inequality in society, the fact that there are so many people that couldn't afford to lock down, automatically meant the lockdowns couldn't work.
And that's what happened, right?
So the lockdowns were focused protection of the laptop class.
So the premise of the Great Barrington Declaration was focused protection of the most vulnerable.
Maybe you can just quickly kind of remind us of that, and then how is what we actually did, the focused protection of the laptop class?
You look at a disease like COVID-19 where it discriminates by age.
That's the single most important risk factor.
There are other risk factors, but by far the most important is age.
Thousand-fold difference in the risk of mortality for the oldest to the youngest.
Well, how would you normal person look at that and react to it?
Well, I mean, I look at that and I want to protect the people that are at risk.
The people that face the highest risk of the disease, that's the old.
So focus protection is just the common sense thing where you say, okay, I want to protect the people that are high risk.
Here it's old, some folks with severe chronic conditions that predispose them to have a bad outcome if they were to get sick.
That makes, I think, to me, complete sense.
We could have poured the resources that we poured into COVID response into protecting the old.
We did some, but not nearly enough.
You know, almost 80% of the deaths worldwide, I think, have been people over 65. The world did very poorly, and certainly the United States did very poorly in protecting the old.
Instead, what we did is we reorganized society to protect the well-off, the laptop class.
It is a trickle-down epidemiology policy we followed, a policy aimed at protecting even people that are relatively low risk.
We made it so that Uber drivers deliver food to them.
We made it so that they didn't have to leave their house and they could still keep their job.
But everyone else, well, you have to go work.
You have to go sacrifice for the well-being of this particular class of people.
I'll give you one other data point about public health in a paper I published that didn't get a ton of attention.
In the early days in the United States of the pandemic, public health had to decide where it would place its testing centers.
Remember, the early days of the pandemic, testing was a scarce resource.
And it turns out in many places, there was a preference given to rich neighborhoods over poor neighborhoods.
I mean, that's revealing.
Like, in the time of Great Crisis, where do the resource go?
Well, it went to protecting the relatively well-off, whether they were truly vulnerable or not, instead of looking at the disease, looking at who's most vulnerable and seeking to protect them.
And what is this trickle-down epidemiology that you reference?
What does that mean exactly?
It's a little bit of a play, because economists get accused of being in favor of trickle-down economics, where the idea is that we do a policy that benefits the rich and it'll trickle down and benefit the poor.
That essentially was what the lockdowns were.
We'll adopt a policy that is, I mean, if it was tailor-made to benefit a relatively rich class of people, I couldn't think of a better one.
And somehow that would help the poor avoid the disease, I guess, by some magic.
But in fact, the opposite happened.
The poor actually were exposed.
The working class was exposed.
And so the lockdowns failed.
The lockdowns, at best, what they did in the places where it looked like they were successful for a while, like in New Zealand or Australia, island nations where the disease hit during the summer.
Hong Kong, I think is another example.
Yeah, another example.
Singapore.
The disease hit in their summer, especially in the southern hemisphere, like New Zealand and Australia.
So they locked down.
It looked like they got to zero.
But then they have to keep locking down whenever there was a single case.
And now the cases have exploded.
The lockdowns can't go on forever because society can't live like that.
The people in society have to be able to connect with one another.
It's part of who we are as humans that we connect with each other, physically connect with each other.
And if you think that that's not possible, you just don't understand society very well.
So the epidemiologists, the mathematicians that designed this policy They did not understand human societies at a very deep level.
So one of the things I learned recently interviewing Laura Doddsworth about essentially the use of fear to promote lockdown and other policies in the UK, that's where she focused, she mentioned and she actually found that the pandemic policies, you know, It had been pretty well outlined for the UK. They certainly weren't lockdowns.
But in fact, there were also already in the records or the policy records or so forth, you know, counter indications as to what the harms of lockdowns would actually be and why you would not use that strategy.
But they used it nonetheless.
Right.
And are you aware of this?
Is there something like this on the US side?
So I don't think there was a formal thing like in the U.S., like there was in the U.K. and the U.S., but there was, in the lead-up to the decision to lock down in 2020, a big debate that had been going on for at least two decades within the public health community about how to deal with bioterrorist events.
And some of the plans involved lockdowns, short lockdowns, to try to reduce the spread of some hypothetical bioterrorist agent.
The problem is, but there's also people, people like Don Henderson, the most prominent and best epidemiologist of the 20th century, who was responsible for the eradication of designing the strategy that eradicated smallpox, who was very Reluctant to lockdown.
He thought that lockdowns would disrupt society.
His view was that societies, if you panic them, they stop functioning well and that harms the health of the population.
And that, in fact, even when you have an infectious agent that's traveling around, the way that lockdowns could not possibly be a good way to do this because the disruption would cause more harm than the good from the reduction of the spread of the agent.
So there was a debate in the public health community, but I've looked at the plans, the CDC plans and so on.
I don't see anything that justifies a two-year-long You know, sort of state of emergency to try to deal with a respiratory virus over which we have no technology to stop the spread.
I think what we did was absolutely extraordinary outside of the scope of the plans that we had, far outside of the scope of the plans that we had coming into the pandemic.
So let's talk about this Johns Hopkins study that I mentioned earlier.
Of course, this is something that's been much maligned as well in social media and in the media in general.
They looked at a whole bunch of examples of lockdown policy being impacted and they found there didn't seem to be too much benefit.
I mean, that's my kind of bird's eye view of it.
And of course, there's a lot of criticism of this.
So tell me about this.
So the Hopkins study is a meta-analysis.
Meta-analysis, what that means is it's a study of studies.
So you can probably imagine there's a lot of interest in the question of did the lockdowns work?
Did it actually save lives?
A lot of scholars looked at this.
So the Hopkins study did a search of this scientific literature trying to understand what scholars are saying regarding the evidence on whether lockdowns worked.
So I think they found, I don't remember the exact number, like 1,800 studies, something on that order, that match search terms that have to do with the effectiveness of lockdowns.
And they narrowed it down to studies that looked like they were reasonable studies.
And they found two classes of studies.
One class of studies is a class of studies that uses the modeling As a basis for asking what would have happened had we not locked down.
Very famously, the Imperial College model predicted that if the United States didn't lock down in March of 2020, two million people would die in the United States within a short couple of months, within a very short period of time.
And then with these models, because they're video games essentially, you can run it twice, once with and once without a lockdown, and say, well, here's what would happen if you didn't lockdown.
So there's a prediction of two million.
Well, you compare the prediction of what would have happened without a lockdown versus what actually happened with a lockdown, that we didn't get two million deaths, and they say, oh, well, that means we saved two million lives.
The problem with these kinds of models, with these kinds of studies, is that it assumes that the models that predicted, you know, the...
Mass death and destruction.
Yeah, are correct.
That they're populated with parameters that are right.
That it understands all of the nuances of how people interact with each other in society are right.
It's got the social interactions between people right.
The transmission modes of the virus right.
Everything right.
And that's just not plausible.
So a lot of these studies that conclude that lockdown saves lives are based on that kind of modeling infrastructure, on models that have repeatedly over-predicted the spread of the virus.
And the impact, right?
And the impact, right.
And the other question then is also not just, did the lockdown save lives relative to doing nothing?
The right question is not that.
The right question is, what did the lockdowns do relative to other strategies to protect the population?
The Great Barrington Declaration.
So a study that looks at what if you let the virus rip, Versus doing a lockdown, that's not all that informative, really.
Because if there are other strategies other than letting the virus rip, which there were, focused protection of the vulnerable, the real question is, how would a lockdown do relative to that strategy?
Versus letting the virus rip.
That, by the way, is another thing that Tony Fauci tried to do, is to try to claim that the Great Barrington Declaration was an argument to let the virus rip, which is itself nonsense.
Like, we were aiming at protecting the vulnerable, not letting the virus rip.
On the other hand, okay, so that's one set of studies.
The second set of studies in the literature is a set of studies that look in real-world settings.
You know, one country has a sharp lockdown of stay-at-home order.
Another country doesn't have mandatory stay-at-home orders during a period of viral growth or of cases spreading.
Which country did better?
In terms of case spreading or death.
One country has a mask mandate, one country doesn't have a mask mandate.
One county has a mask mandate, another doesn't.
One county has business closures, another county doesn't.
You can use this variation in the real world to try to say, okay, did the places that locked down, did they do obviously better on COVID? And the outcomes from that literature are much more equivocal.
There's some studies that find that there was some life-saving for lockdown.
Many studies find there was no life-saving for lockdown.
In fact, some studies find negative life-saving for lockdown.
And so that's what the Johns Hopkins study was telling us, that if you look at this modeling literature, you get results that say lockdowns save lives, but you shouldn't believe it.
On the other hand, if you look at this real-world data, it's much more equivocal.
Lockdowns are not like penicillin.
If you give somebody with a bacterial infection an antibiotic to which the bacteria is not resistant, you're going to cure that infection.
Lockdowns are not like that.
It's not obviously true.
You don't need a very large number of patients to see that an antibiotic that works against a bacterial infection works.
You just need a few.
There's a famous thing in medicine about you don't need to run a randomized trial to show that a parachute is useful when you're jumping out of an airplane.
Lockdowns are not like that.
Lockdowns are not parachutes.
Lockdowns need, because they are such an extraordinary intervention, need extraordinary evidence to show that they accomplish extraordinary things.
And what the Hopkins study showed is that we don't have such evidence in the scientific literature.
Right.
But that's not even taking into account the actual harms that That's a separate question.
One question is, does it protect against COVID? The other question is, what other harms do they do?
Think about what lockdowns did.
They separated society.
They stopped society from functioning.
Society is a very complicated thing.
Social interactions are really Sociologists and economists and other social scientists spend decades trying to understand how society functions.
You disrupt it overnight, you're going to cause ripple effects that are going to harm people in ways that you don't anticipate.
And it has.
I'll just take one example that we haven't talked about yet is school closures.
That's the form of lockdown.
Why close schools?
Because you don't want kids close to each other and close to teachers because keeping them apart will stop the virus from spreading, right?
That's the theory.
Let's leave aside whether it was successful.
I actually don't think it was particularly successful in stopping disease spread.
Let's just talk about what consequences there are of school closures.
So there was a large literature in health economics before the pandemic about the importance of schooling for the health of children over their entire lifetime.
So there would be studies where they would look at one state would pass a law requiring kids to stay in school until they were 16, compared to another state that only required until age 15 or something.
And a state with a 16-year-old requirement would have kids stay in school longer, a few months longer, than the states with the 15-year-old requirement.
It turns out that the states that had those 16-year-old requirements, the kids that went through that system, they lived longer, healthier, richer lives than the kids in the 15. Short periods of extension of schooling had enormous consequences on the whole lifetime of these kids.
Over the course of the pandemic, in the United States, especially in blue states, we disrupted the lives of these children so that we replaced regular school with Zoom school.
Kids dropped out at very alarming rates.
Five-year-olds were taught to read by Zoom.
I have no idea how that could possibly work.
You were seeing illiteracy rates go up.
The consequences of this skipped schooling, there's one estimate published in GEM Pediatrics that estimated that this would cost something on the order of five and a half million life years, and that was just for the spring 2020 lockdown for our children.
The consequences are just devastating to think about.
How do you make up essentially a year and a half or more of lost schooling?
The answer is you don't.
Those are years that you just don't ever get back.
Those are vital years in the development of children, and we just threw it away in the hopes of viral control, without understanding that that's a fundamental birthright that we owe our children, this education.
I think that's just one harm.
I just have to add this, and this is in the context of knowing fairly early on that children Strangely even, compared to influenza, don't actually spread it that much.
That's correct, yeah.
So there was early evidence from Iceland, from Sweden, and elsewhere.
In Sweden, they kept their schools open during spring.
The primary schools opened.
Age 1 to 15, no child deaths.
And the teachers...
Actually had lower rates of COVID than people in the population at large because schools were relatively safe places to be.
Schools reflect community spread.
They don't drive community spread.
So we did it for nothing.
We stopped The lives of these children for nothing.
And let me just, one other note to add to this about children.
It's not equally distributed.
Richer children, parents from richer children, they sent their kids to private schools in places, so the private schools that actually met in person.
They had tutoring pods.
They would hire teachers who basically didn't have to do anything because school was out.
So they would hire these tutors and they would come to their home and teach the kids.
Poor parents didn't have that option.
Right?
So your poor family, maybe your single mom, you have to go work.
Your kids stay at home on Zoom school, no one's supervising them.
It was, again, an example of trickle-down epidemiology, right?
So one group, the poor, have to pay the harms for compliance with this lockdown order that, again, didn't do very much.
This is one point that you just mentioned, which seems extremely serious.
Some people call it collateral damage, right?
Yeah, so let's just stay inside developed countries, because I think the damage to developing countries is an order of magnitude even higher, the collateral harm.
But for the ones that actually implemented the policies, because that's not everyone either, right?
The thing is, the developing countries faced harm both because they implemented the policies and also they are dependent on the developed world for trade and They fit into this global economy.
Their own economy and the well-being of the people in poor countries depends on that global economy functioning well.
So the rich countries, when we implemented lockdowns, had enormous negative consequences on the health and well-being of the poor countries.
We can talk about it in a second, but I don't want to leave the developed world yet.
So we talk about schools.
Let's talk about health.
When we shut down during the early days of the pandemic, the hospitals actually emptied.
If you look at the data in the United States, hospital use was actually lower during 2020 and into 2021 than in previous years.
The hospitals, for most of them, were not overflowing with COVID patients.
The waves came.
During those times, yeah, there was a lot of stress on hospitals, but for vast chunks of the last couple of years, hospitals were empty.
People skipped cancer screening.
People skipped diabetes management, diabetes care.
People skipped absolutely fundamental preventive care.
And so as a result, women will show up with breast cancer.
Late-stage breast cancer that should have been picked up earlier, and they will die from late-stage breast cancer as a consequence of the collateral damage of the lockdowns.
The fear associated with COVID caused people to stay home.
People stayed home with heart attacks and died of heart attacks.
Rather than going and getting care that would have saved their lives in developed countries.
The psychological harm is just catastrophic, right?
So one CDC study in July of 2020 found that one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the month of June 2020. The rates of depression and anxiety are through the roof.
Fortunately, suicides haven't gone up yet, but drug overdoses have.
A whole bunch of indicators of mental health have deteriorated.
It's going to have a consequence because these are not things that are simple to address.
It's almost like a society-wide PTSD. And so we harmed the well-being of the working class, the poor, the well-being of kids.
We harmed the health, psychological and physical health, of huge populations in the West.
Actually, let me give you one other incredibly short-sighted thing in the West.
You know, you lock down.
A lot of women actually ended up quitting their jobs in order to take care of the kids.
They called it the she-session, right?
A big decrease in labor force participation, particularly marked among women.
A lot of those women were actually nurses and other hospital staff members.
The hospitals then got short-staffed, made it more difficult to care for their patients as a consequence of the economic effects of the lockdown.
Society is complicated.
It's like interconnected.
To think that we could Lockdown and a lot of these normal interactions that take place and see no consequences that we value was incredibly short-sighted.
Yeah, and so we have these organizations like Collateral Global that are trying to kind of document, right, all sort of the impacts of all of this.
Yeah, I work actually with those folks.
Annette, like a co-editor of Collateral Global.
I mean, I think it's going to be very important to tell that story because our minds have been so focused on COVID that we forgot about the importance of society, forgot about these, essentially, these people harmed by the collateral damage of these lockdowns.
Actually, can we turn to the poor and the developed countries?
Please.
Developing countries?
Because that's devastating.
So, one World Bank estimate Early in the pandemic said that there would be 100 million people thrown into poverty as a consequence of the lockdowns.
Poverty meaning like less than $2 a day of income.
Now, why might that be?
Well, for the last 20 some years, maybe even longer, we've had this globalization of the world economy.
Our economic systems are interconnected with each other.
Poor countries reorganized their economy so they would fit in.
And when overnight those connections were severed or greatly disrupted, supply chains disrupted, what it did is it threw a lot of people who were like headed toward the middle class within the poor countries into poverty, dire poverty.
We'd lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last 20-some years.
A great success, a sort of unheralded success.
The progress on that has been halted over the last two years, and 100 million people are poor that otherwise wouldn't have been absent these lockdowns.
The consequences of that on health have been devastating.
So tens of millions of people are starving.
As a consequence of these lockdowns.
The UN put an estimate out in March of 2021 that in South Asia alone, almost 230,000 children had died from starvation as a consequence of the lockdowns.
The stress that the lockdowns have placed on the poor, living everywhere around the world, have been enormous.
I don't believe that there's a single person, poor person on the face of the earth that has not been harmed by these lockdowns.
I mean...
We have to laugh because it's so sad.
I mean, this is why I believe it's one of the biggest public health...
This is the biggest public health error in history.
Okay, well...
Because it seems to me, okay, the reason I responded the way I did, you know, I'm also aware that apparently the wealth of the sort of, you know, some of the most affluent people in the world increased dramatically, I mean, by trillions, in fact, right?
So that's another piece of the puzzle.
And then you're saying, you know, that The laptop class, so to speak, got this focused protection as a result of the policy, also while kind of feeling like they're kind of more, or even being told that they're kind of morally on the right side of things here, right?
Because we're doing our part to stop the spread and so forth.
It's a direct moral inversion of the truth, right?
So it wasn't immoral for a poor person to go work to feed their families, then get COVID. We created this sense of shame around getting COVID just as a result of people doing normal things that they need to do in order to keep their lives going.
That was wrong.
That was a huge part of the public health disaster, this moralization of COVID. You touched on it, Jan.
What you said is incredibly important.
We made poor people to feel like they were doing bad, illicit things because they weren't staying home, staying safe.
How could they?
They don't have the economic circumstances to do that.
And we made rich people feel like they were good people Just because they have the economic wherewithal to stay home, stay safe, it made no sense.
From a public health point of view, it's a disaster.
From an economic point of view, this is the single biggest driver.
If I can point to this, one health policy or one economic policy that driving inequality, this is the single biggest driver of inequality I've ever seen in my lifetime from a single policy.
And you've been looking at this for some time.
I do research on socioeconomic status and health.
It seems like we're emerging out of this.
I mean, there's all sorts of indicators of this.
This sort of people that were, you know, arguably strong lockdown proponents backpedaling saying, what are lockdowns actually?
You know, these kinds of things.
I'm seeing a lot of that.
I take that in a sense as actually positive because it seems like, you know, I think one of your stated goals at the moment is to make sure that lockdowns, however they manifest, never happen again or that this isn't considered as a possible policy.
I would like lockdowns to become a dirty word.
That's my goal.
When people think about lockdowns, I want them to think of them in horror.
That suite of policies, this aim of keeping society, stopping society functioning as a way to stop infectious disease, we should think of as almost the same way we think of medieval torture instruments.
They were a catastrophic mistake.
That is my goal, to help people understand how catastrophic the mistake they were so that next time When the next disease comes up, when we get an epidemic, we don't jump to lockdowns as the obvious strategy.
We at the very least think 15 times before we launch ourselves into them.
There's this other piece that you've been vocal about.
It's been the loss of trust in public health because of, frankly, the way the public health policy was implemented.
I love public health.
I think public health, when it's functioning well, is incredibly important to the health and well-being of so many people.
At the very minimum, providing the public with Solid scientific information about how to stay healthy, what's important in life to stay healthy, and even more muscular things like making sure that bad drugs don't get put on the market that harm people.
There's a whole host of things that public health does that's absolutely vital, often behind the scenes, that's important for the health of the public.
For public health to function well, it needs the trust of the entire public.
It can't be a partisan thing where half the public trusts it and half the public doesn't.
It can't be a thing where it's a butt of jokes, right?
You know, like Kyrie Irving, this NBA basketball player, by public health orders, is allowed to come sit on courtside without a mask next to his teammates, but he's not allowed by public health to actually play on the court.
Because of the spread of COVID. I mean, it makes no sense.
Or you go sit in a restaurant and you have to have the mask on while you're walking.
But then when you sit down, because apparently the COVID doesn't spread when you're sitting, you can take the mask off.
I mean, it makes public health look like a laughing stock.
And the public notices.
And they stop trusting public health.
And then they get hurt because public health is important to the health of the public.
What has happened during COVID is an utter collapse in the trust that many people in the public have in public health.
And I think we have to work to reverse that.
That's going to mean, acknowledged by public health, that it made incredible mistakes during the pandemic.
And then seeking to reach out to the public and explain reform so that it does better next time.
Well, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.
Thank you, Rian.
Always fun to talk with you.
We live in an age of censorship and disinformation where some of the most prominent voices, most important voices, aren't actually being heard because they're being suppressed.
I invite some of these people onto the show, onto American Thought Leaders.
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