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Dec. 14, 2024 - Epoch Times
23:02
How Universities Embraced Censorship during the Pandemic: Jay Bhattacharya
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Every academic that said a transgressive thing or had a transgressive sign expressed it publicly faced tremendous pressure to not do that, including to the point of losing their jobs, losing their reputation.
I recently had the pleasure of attending a pandemic planning conference at Stanford It was really the first of its kind in that it brought together a wide range of voices on the topic in an academic setting, and it was held under the auspices of the new Stanford president, Jonathan Levin.
And I think it's expanded the range of things that are allowed to be said in polite society, if you will.
I mean, that was the purpose of the conference, was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around the world.
Today I'm sitting down to the lead organizer of the conference, Stanford University Professor of Health Policy Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
The danger of the government presuming that it has sole possession of the truth, when it evidently doesn't, is much worse than somebody in the middle of nowhere posting something on the internet that's wrong.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Nice to see you, Jan.
So, congratulations on winning the Zimmer Medal.
You know, the Academy of American Science and Letters.
I think it's the second award.
Salman Rushdie was the first.
I mean, what are you feeling with this new award?
I mean, it's obviously a great honor.
The award, I think, was given to me for Sticking my neck out during the pandemic at a time when many, many other scientists and intellectuals didn't.
But it's also true that there were many scientists and intellectuals that did that paid a huge price for it.
My friend Martin Kulder, for instance, lost his job at Harvard University as a tenured professor.
Basically, almost everybody In academics who had academic positions that did stick their necks out, had tremendous difficulty from their institutions or outside in pieces.
It was a really difficult time.
What about yourself?
It was hard.
I thought I was going to lose my job in 2020 at Stanford as a tenured professor.
There were death threats for two straight years.
It felt like the entire establishment trying to destroy you.
It's not the easiest thing.
But at the same time, there were a tremendous number of people that I Got to know, that I never would have gotten to know, that I'd become friends with, which I admire tremendously.
For them, and you could see it in the time when it's difficult to speak up, then they spoke up.
It's the people of tremendous integrity, whose values are quite aligned with mine, even if their politics might be quite different.
And just, you know, very briefly, for those that might not be familiar, I mean, it was really the Santa Clara study that kind of started all this, right?
If you could just kind of remind us what that was and why it was significant.
Sure.
In the early days of the pandemic, I had this hypothesis that the disease was more widespread than people realized.
It looked like a kind of disease...
That spread quite easily relative to earlier versions of the 2003 SARS. It looked more like a flu in terms of how it spread from early epidemiological data.
I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in March of 2020 with that hypothesis and calling for a study to measure how many people have antibodies in the population.
That led to me actually running that study in April of 2020, early April of 2020, It was sort of right, the hypothesis was sort of right.
It was 4% of LA County, 3% of Santa Clara County had already had COVID in early April 2020. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it was 50 times more infections than cases.
And that meant that the disease wasn't going to go to zero.
The horse was already out of bound, large numbers of people already had it outside of the Canada Public Health.
And that was a quite controversial result.
I mean, it was the first time I really had a taste of what it meant to be in the crosshairs of a lot of people that just don't like the things you say.
Right.
Well, and of course, this medal, it's an intellectual freedom award, right?
And so you have spent months organizing this conference, which I was very honored to attend as one of the moderators.
The Stanford Pandemic Policy Conference, as I call it.
I don't know if that's the official name.
Let's talk about that and the significance of it.
Sure.
Throughout the pandemic, it's been very difficult to organize Discussions and debates between people who had an alternate view, like people who opposed the lockdowns, for instance, or people who opposed the vaccine mandates, or people who opposed the mask mandates, or all the whole school closures.
It's been very difficult to have those views represented in the public square.
And one of the reasons why is that universities have not hosted discussions and debates.
The idea, I think, of a lot of public health The pull down establishment and then this trickle down into the universities themselves was that opposition, especially opposition from people, establishment people, to these public health These policies was somehow dangerous, that if people knew that there were tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists that opposed the lockdowns, well, they might not think that the lockdown is the right idea.
I mean, that was the reaction to the equation, for instance.
Universities play a tremendously important role in paneling these discussions, especially in difficult times.
The university mission of academic freedom, The inquiry aimed at finding the truth is different from the mission of public health.
And it turns out, for public health, they viewed the university mission as a danger.
And apply tremendous pressure to universities to make sure that those discussions didn't happen.
In 2020, a former president of the universities at Stanford where I teach, John Hennessy actually tried to help me arrange a debate between me and somebody on the medical school who disagreed.
We couldn't find somebody on the medical school to discuss.
We thought that they're cowards.
The issue was that they thought that in paneling me, Platforming me was itself a danger.
That's what the medical school thought.
You're part of the medical school.
I have been teaching there for 25 years.
It was remarkable, absolutely remarkable.
A complete violation of the mission of the university, which is to have those discussions.
I might have been wrong.
The best way to deal with me is to Have a discussion with me and make the points that show me wrong.
That's how we discover true things is in sort of wrestling with each other on ideas.
And so the conference that we just held at Stanford on October 2024, It's four years late, I think.
But still, nevertheless, quite an accomplishment.
I think it was the first major university that's hosted a large conference where people who disagreed about the pandemic policy were sitting in the same room talking to each other in a civil way.
I think one of the most common pieces of criticism that I saw was just that it wasn't really that balanced, that it was mostly people that were sort of against the orthodoxy around COVID policy.
Well, I think that's false.
It's just very false.
It was actually quite balanced.
The problem is that when you're so used to having one-sided discussions at universities, where you only handle people who want lockdowns, who want school closures, who want mask mandates, who want vaccine mandates, who think that censorship is a good idea.
It's stunning and somehow unbalanced when you have the other side represented at all.
Yeah, so I think it's just straight false.
I mean, we had people on every single panel that represented the standard public health point of view.
And we had people on the panel that represented critics of public health.
That's exactly the purpose of the conference.
The idea that you can de-platform an idea like, well, you know, lockdowns are not a good idea, that rape prevention might be the right way, or censorship is harmful.
You can't de-platform those ideas.
Those ideas are powerful.
They have a resonance with the public for good reason.
You know, you can't stick your fingers in your ear and expect that the sound to stop.
Before we continue, I want to talk about this.
You talk about censorship.
I think a lot of the people out there, they may not think about this as censorship.
I think a lot of people think about it as trying to deal with harmful misinformation.
This relationship between science and misinformation, if we could kind of unpack how you view that.
Sure, so as you know I'm involved with this lawsuit, this Missouri versus Biden lawsuit.
The case had at its core exactly this dichotomy that you bring up, Yann.
This distinction between Should the government be able to tell social media companies and other media companies that these views are so dangerous that you shouldn't allow them to be heard by the American people?
Or is there really a First Amendment?
Do we really have freedom of speech, even when it comes to public health?
So, just one sec, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Health Policy at Stanford Medical School.
I was at the oral arguments and I remember this idea of whether encouraging is actually telling.
How much encouraging becomes telling or some sort of pressure or coercion.
The companies rely on the government not to destroy them.
There's regulatory authority the government has that actually could very easily destroy them if the government decides a certain way.
And so it's not an even relationship where the government is just equal partners telling these companies, you ought not publish that, and the company is interested to say, no, no, we want to publish that.
It's a very unequal relationship.
The government can say, if you don't obey us, if you don't listen to our demands, we can destroy you as a company.
The president can go on TV and say that Mark Zuckerberg, you're killing people.
And then they can use the regulatory authority to say that you're now a publisher and you're liable to lawsuits if you publish misinformation.
Right, or regulatory action.
Sure.
And the lower courts agreed with that.
In fact, the Supreme Court didn't disagree with that.
The injunction in that case essentially said the power relationship was so unbalanced that it effectively was a suppression of speech.
The appeals court used the analogy of Al Capone going to Chicago businesses and saying, that's a nice business you have there.
It would be terrible if something were to happen to it in order to extract rents from the companies.
So yes, I think that that's not the key thing.
The key argument, forget about the legal case, the key moral argument is in the time of a crisis, should people be able to say public health is wrong?
And the problem with the idea that people shouldn't be able to criticize public health in the time of crisis is that public health often is wrong in quite damaging ways.
And criticism, if permitted, if allowed, would actually allow public health to course correct earlier and save lives.
I'll just give you an example from the oral arguments in the Supreme Court.
One of the justices, a hypothetical analogy that she made.
Where she said, look, what if you have social media craze where people are jumping out of buildings, kids jumping out of buildings, filling themselves, jumping out of first story, second story buildings or whatever, and potentially calming themselves.
And this is a social media craze that goes like the Tide Pods craze or something like that, right?
Mm-hm.
Shouldn't the government have the right to tell the social media companies to stop publishing that content?
Mm-hm.
I had a couple of reactions to this.
I'll tell you the first reaction I had to this is that during the pandemic, it was the government that was harming children.
The government closed the schools.
The government, on the behest of public health, the government essentially told children and parents to treat their children as if there were biohazards.
They caused a mental health crisis.
They had a tremendous loss in learning that will reverberate through a generation where we essentially left behind a vast number of children, especially minority children, especially poor children.
It was the government, in effect, telling children to jump out of buildings.
And it used its power to suppress critics of this policy that was priming children.
It was exactly inverted, the hypothetical.
There's another argument, which is that if you're a social media company and you have this Tide Pod challenge or whatever, some jumping out of building challenge or whatever, do you really need the government to tell you that that's a bad thing to highlight?
I saw this scene where Mark Zuckerberg came to Congress and a whole bunch of parents of children who committed suicide as a consequence of this social media bubble that Facebook had promoted was there in the back of the room.
And it was almost like this shocking moment where one of the congressmen asked him if he had anything to say to the parents.
He turned around and he apologized.
The pressure on social media companies themselves to not put that kind of content forward is tremendous.
And it doesn't take the government to do it.
Right.
So they will make that decision themselves.
And I guess the question that the justice asked was, well, what if they don't?
Don't we have a right to step in?
Right.
So I think having the government step in when that's happening, the government actually could step in very, very easily.
Without violating free speech rights.
In fact, just by saying to the public that jumping out of buildings is a bad idea.
Parents, tell your kids not to jump out of buildings.
They don't need to violate the free speech rights at large in order to address that.
The way that you deal with that kind of speech is more speech.
They could present another compelling argument, basically.
And the danger of the government presuming that it has sole possession of the truth When it evidently doesn't, it's much worse than somebody in the middle of nowhere posting something on the internet that's wrong.
Let's jump back to the conference.
Just tell me a little bit about the setup of this.
First of all, did you encounter issues with even broaching the topic?
There were some very prominent, important people that were obviously backing what was happening.
It wasn't some sort of fringe effort, from what I could tell, including the new president.
Yeah, so the conference itself, as I said, was four years in the making.
I mean, I've been asking for a very long time.
And it happened because Stanford, I think, has turned from what it was like during the pandemic.
There's a new president who is deeply committed To academic freedom and the mission of the university, a man named John Levin.
And in his inaugural speech, he emphasized the importance of Stanford and the institutions of higher education in the United States being places where these kinds of very difficult policies and discussions can happen.
Where all kinds of points of view are represented, not just the orthodoxy.
And I had been trying to get this conference going.
When I heard that, I thought, okay, this might be the right time.
So I reached out to President Levin and asked him, are you willing to speak?
Just to introduce, not to take a side on any of the issues that were going to be discussed at the conference, but just to emphasize that the mission of the university required us to have conferences like this where we're talking to each other.
People would disagree talking to each other.
And so when he agreed, Essentially, a lot of the people in the university, I think they follow the lead of the leaders, and that's what they did.
So I got several people who I disagreed with pretty fundamentally about pandemic management to appear on panels in the conference.
So the first panel, for instance, was on evidence-based decision-making during the pandemic.
And I thought it was a fantastic discussion, featuring people like Marty Macri and Monica Gandhi, who were more skeptical about school closures and a lot of public health policies.
Anders Tegno, the Swedish state epidemiologist who was the architect and really the face of the Swedish response, which was very much different from much of the rest of the world in terms of the lockdowns and whatnot.
But also Doug Owens, who's my boss actually at Stanford, the head of the Department of Health Policy, who's much more in favor of many of those.
And Josh Salomon, who's a fantastic mathematical modeler in my department, who was also pretty much in favor of those things.
And it was a great discussion about what do you do?
When you have so little information, put yourself back in March 2020, how do you make those decisions when there's such little information?
And you could see the range of ideas about how to manage that uncertainty.
Well, you have to be very, very, very risk averse, and you have to focus solely on the main threat.
This is something that Josh, I thought, did a really good job of saying, the main threat being COVID. Whereas on the other side, you might have someone like Anders Techno saying public health is much broader than that.
There's more to public health than just the prevention of a single infectious disease.
And even in the midst of a pandemic, you have to remember that.
So it was a very rich discussion.
But all of the panels, I think, featured that kind of rich discussion between the two sides.
The people that criticized the conference as being one-sided, none of them attended the conference.
Was there any moment where you thought this might not happen?
Several moments, yeah.
I mean, especially when the L.A. turns right, and this man named Michael Hilsack, who basically, he's a financial columnist or something.
So he wrote a hit piece a couple of months before the conference, and a few of the people that were tentatively agreed to appear at the conference then backed out.
It's interesting to see the power that the legacy media has in the minds of people who support basically the orthodoxy.
It's not so much to convince people that the orthodoxy is right.
It's to essentially demonize criticism of the orthodoxy so that you don't even appear in the company of people who disagree.
It's the very antithesis of what the mission of a university is.
It's to have those disagreements even when they're uncomfortable.
And a panelist, even the people who disagree with the orthodoxy, that's part of the mission of the university.
It's part of the truth-seeking mission of the university.
The pressure was actually tremendous, especially a couple of months before the conference.
It wasn't even a large number of the legacy media people.
It was just a couple, primarily this man named Michael Hilsack and the LA Times.
And what about the aftermath then?
I'm assuming that people have been talking to you.
Subsequently, I think there's been some more things written kind of against it.
I know we did some just sort of neutral reporting about what happened.
What about the aftermath?
It's been, from my point of view, quite positive.
There were people that didn't like something said during the conference.
Of course, that's going to be the case.
If you represent people of many points of view, everyone can find something that was said on a panel.
That's fine.
But generally, around Stanford and around my colleagues at universities all around the world, They were actually quite happy that the discussion happened.
And I think it's expanded the range of things that are allowed to be said in polite society, if you will.
And even more important to me than the academics, I've gotten many messages from people who've watched some of the videos who were Regular people, not scientists, that were happy that their views were finally, at some way, reflected in these academic discussions, that they didn't feel as if their views were marginalized.
And so I think that, in that sense, it was a tremendous success, the conference.
It didn't resolve, I mean, these are very thorny policy issues, and they don't get resolved by a single conference.
But I do think that The fact that we ran this conference has given permission, A, to start talking about these issues in public much more openly on all of these topics, and then also for other universities to host similar events.
I mean, I know that that's in the works for many, many other places, or a few other places at least, and we'll see if they pan out.
It's quite heartening.
I mean, that was the purpose of the conference, was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around the world.
Well, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
Thank you, Jan.
It's still so good to be on.
Thank you all for joining Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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