Dr Jay Bhattacharya ”The Government Censored Me & Other Scientists. We Fought Back—and Won”
Russell chats to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the co-founder 'Illusion of Consensus on Substack, who's just won in court against the Biden administration for coercing social media companies to censor content.Support this channel directly here: https://rb.rumble.com/Follow Dr Jay Bhattacharya: https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
Hello there you awakening wonder wherever you are in this world amidst the omni-crisis that will not yield.
Well done for continuing to transcend fear in a darkening space at a time of deep complexity.
It's more important that we come together now than ever before.
We must transcend this complex time by looking within and finding deep power Deep power that some would regard as holy is present with you now.
Don't be afraid.
We're gonna keep going together.
Joining me now is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, co-founder of Illusion of Consensus on Substack.
He's recently won in the federal court against the Biden administration for coercing social media companies to censor content.
Plainly, as well as a scientist and a doctor, this man is a conspiracy theorist.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, it's a great joy to meet you, sir.
Thank you for coming on Stay Free.
Thank you, Russell.
Thank you for having me.
I wonder, can you tell us, sir, what exactly did you express that was initially subject to censure?
It was the Great Barrington Declaration.
So, it was an article, basically a proposal that I wrote with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard in October 2020.
I'm sure your audience has heard of this.
I've seen you telling your audience this, so they don't need to be told so much.
But basically, the idea was that we knew it was older people that were really vulnerable to COVID.
And that young people, especially children, were not particularly vulnerable.
The argument was to lift the lockdowns and do focused protection of vulnerable older people.
That led to a tremendous propaganda campaign, a campaign that essentially villainized me and Martin and Sunetra as if we wanted to kill vast numbers of people and we were calling for better protection of vulnerable older people.
And it led to censorship.
Like, we were kicked off of Facebook for a week.
Google de-boosted our, you know, if you Googled us, it would be on page five and we have all the hit pieces above us.
You know, that kind of thing.
And then Twitter, of course, made it difficult to share.
People lost their jobs for signing it.
Oh man, can you just remind me, when was that?
When was it chronologically?
So that was October 2020.
So we wrote it because the spring lockdowns had failed.
It was really clear from the epidemiological data that the COVID was coming back in the fall.
It had already come back in several places.
And it was also clear that the establishment was going to push for these lockdowns,
that it had already damaged the well-being of the children, of the working class, of the poor worldwide.
And we thought it was a tragedy that we were essentially throwing away the futures of these vulnerable people
in the name of protecting people against a deadly infectious
disease, which actually didn't end up protecting anybody, these lockdowns, instead of actually just directly
protecting the people that were most vulnerable.
It's likely, of course, based on just what you've explained in the last couple of minutes, that we've yet to fully experience and appreciate the consequences of those actions.
Can you tell me why, Doctor, you feel that what even a few years later seemed like perfectly reasonable proposals, that if they had been followed, many economic problems, sociological, psychological, If problems may have been, if not entirely ameliorated, somewhat assuaged, why was it met with such ferocity?
Why?
I mean, I think part of it is hubris.
So, you had a few people at the very top of these medical and bureaucracies, the social bureaucracies, that had taken on themselves this mantle of almost godlike authority.
You remember Tony Fauci saying to some reporter, or maybe even to Senator Rand Paul, if you question me, you're not simply questioning a man, you are questioning science itself.
I mean, who says that, Russell?
I mean, let's think about the hubris of someone that says, I am science, in effect.
You know, la science c'est moi, if you're like, you know, Louis XIV or something.
And the idea that there would be credentialed people that would oppose them, that would say, look, you're saying that there's a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown when, in fact, just the very existence of the Great Barrington Declaration means there isn't.
It means that you've just created an illusion of consensus to fool people into thinking that we ought to do what you say to do, rather than having a discussion and a debate, which is really what we owed the public.
Claiming to be the physical embodiment of science, which is an ongoing, never-ending process of analysis, collaboration, accumulation of data.
That is hubristic.
You're right.
And in fact, it's more akin to religious demagoguery than even scientific orthodoxy.
The early period, or perhaps the pandemic in its entirety, functioned as a lens that revealed I think already present but concealed institutional behaviours and assumptions, particularly too it could be used to identify where convergent interests met and where a kind of unconscious systemic process unfolded that might not require every step malfeasance, deliberately applied evil, but certainly showed a
Institutionalism that is worryingly unconscious.
But there are points when it seemed quite deliberate.
Now I suppose it's very difficult to prove that there was something nefarious unfolding.
But can you tell me from the Can you tell me where you think you could have identified the most concerning moments and decisions?
Obviously the early attempts to censor, the denial of the existence of the Barrington Declaration.
These are key moments.
Are there other significant moments that start to suggest a tendency, if not a strategy or conspiracy?
I mean, you saw this almost from the beginning of the pandemic, maybe even from the very beginning of the pandemic.
The idea that this virus may have been the outcome of a research enterprise actually aimed at preventing pandemics, ironically, that idea was turned into a conspiracy theory.
Even though it's a viable scientific hypothesis, it's likely even a true hypothesis.
In 2020, anyone who brought that hypothesis up was essentially labeled as a fringe figure, a conspiracy theorist, a racist demon, because you're saying it might have been the Chinese that were involved in this.
Which is a crazy thing.
It's okay to say that because of strange Chinese eating habits in wet markets, that's how the virus emerged.
But it's not okay to say that there was an intentional scientific effort, funded by Americans in part, but also conducted in China, that led to the virus.
The latter is racist, but the former is not.
But yeah, people who said that there might actually have been a virus that was created in the lab
were deemed racist.
That was a conspiracy theorist.
And it was by the same people that suppressed the Great Barrington Declaration using very,
very similar tactics to deploy the press to smear and destroy
the reputations of anyone that disagreed with the central powers that be.
Actually, Marcy, you said one thing I think is really important, this confluence of incentives, right?
So, I don't think it was a conspiracy theory in one sense.
I think, like, for instance, the pharmaceutical companies, they viewed this as a huge opportunity.
I don't think they drove it, but it was like they jumped in, right?
A lot of people who were, you know, in governments gained a lot of power from this.
And again, I don't think it's not a conspiracy theory to say that they jumped in to take advantage of the chaos.
There's a lot that goes into exactly what led to this.
I think a lot of it was opportunistic.
But the central sin was hubris, and the central tactic was smearing and censorship of outside voices that criticized the people that were designing the pandemic response.
If you are interested in centralizing authority and increasing authority particularly beyond national sovereignty in the reach of democracy there is going to be necessary censure because we live in a time where divergent opposing and dissident voices are now at least have the potential to be platformed and to gain incredible traction and it seems to be a pretty prominent evident and plain tactic that to Undermine the credibility of, as you say, dissenting voices.
It's almost a uniform observable strategy.
If you cannot win the argument because it's unwinnable, because what's being claimed is true, let's take simply the case of the Great Barrington Declaration or, you know, the lab leak theory.
then what you of course have to do is undermine where those voices are coming from. And you're
right, this extraordinary array of hypocritical tactics that are deployed suggest a kind of...
it would be on nihilism, kind of beyond amorality, an interview almost, a kind of cynicism that
really scares me, particularly given that I've had recently some experiences of how these
institutions can function.
Did you Note the corroborating component that the media were willing to perform.
Did you note that there was a great willingness in addition to the censor practice and social media spaces?
In legacy media sites to condemn, criticise you and frame you.
Because even when you said that, even though this is stuff I know about already, when I just hear Harvard, Stanford, Oxford in relation to a scientific endeavour and furthering a discourse, I think, oh well this sounds pretty legitimate.
How did they even bypass that?
Well, I mean, they were almost immediately after we wrote the declaration, I started, there was pit pieces about me and Sinatra and Martin essentially accusing us of wanting to let the virus rip.
The argument was that we were somehow being deeply irresponsible by wanting to just ignore the virus.
Again, as I've said, even though we wanted focus protection, you saw story after story in mainstream media saying this, essentially pushing this propaganda campaign.
There was a story in the Washington Post.
There was a story in the New York Times.
Story after story, essentially pushing this lie.
What we wanted was a discussion of how to better protect vulnerable older people.
And in fact, I did a And now, I'd already had experience with this, Russell, before this.
In April of 2020, I'd written a study, which was basically showing that the disease had spread much more broadly than people had realized, even as early as April of 2020, using antibody evidence from blood in the population.
And what we found was that there are 50 cases, you know, for every single person that had been identified as a case, the infection fatality rose much lower.
That led to a tremendous number of personal hit pieces against me.
Allegations that I had taken money to change the study, which was an absolute lie.
Hit pieces against my wife, who had written an email to my kid's middle school listserv, encouraging them to join the studies, because she'd committed the sin of saying that if you have a positive antibody, That might mean you are immune, which has turned out to be true, you know.
And it was for me, personally, as a scientist, I've just written papers and published them in journals all my life.
I never faced that kind of media assault.
I felt helpless to protect my family.
For a month, I lost 30 pounds because I couldn't sleep.
I forgot to eat, you know, in April, May 2020.
And for me, it was a very, very difficult time.
Essentially, the power of these conventional media sources to excommunicate you is tremendous.
And I felt the full brunt of that before I decided I was just going to need to keep doing my job, which was to say what the scientific evidence said and provide health policy advice to the public.
Sorry, go ahead, Russell.
I was thinking about, like, yours is a name that I've heard from the beginning because it was a significant, it was a pivotal moment in spite of how it was handled, the Great Barrington Declaration, and your name, whilst I'm still never entirely confident, Jay Bhattacharya, like, was one of the names that was synonymous with the credible opposition to the dominant narrative, and for me, therefore, legitimized my own concern And an amateur analysis of how the scientific orthodoxy was being mobilized to legitimize authority and it's almost at odds with what science is supposed to be essentially.
It made me realize what dogmatism is and that dogmatism is not alloyed indecipherably or inextricably to a religion or politics.
Dogma means that you're willing to say stuff like, I'm science, if you argue with me, you're arguing with science.
It's a kind of...
It's a sort of a human trait.
And to hear that you actually suffered in the way that you just described, obviously, particularly because of recent experiences that I've encountered, should we say, like it provides a sort of a, you know, you were right.
You were actually right.
What does it mean?
To someone like you, who's a scientist, a career scientist at Harvard, whose previous life has never taken you into these chasms and schisms of controversy, what does it tell you about how science can be industrialized, weaponized, deployed, defied, utilized in order to create conformity, oppression, Isn't, I mean, it must terrify you.
I mean, it really does.
I mean, I, you know, of course I knew the power of science.
I mean, that's the, that's one of the reasons that anyone enters science is because it is a powerful tool to learn about the physical world through this process.
But it's, I always viewed it as a fundamentally humble thing, right?
If I am doing science, I have some idea.
It's always a, it's a provisional idea and it's tempered by data and by other critics.
Who say, look Jay, you've thought of this wrong, this piece of data disagrees with how you think, and then I change my mind on the basis of those data.
It's a fundamentally humbling thing if you're actually going to do science for a living.
To see it turned into dogma, as you say, is a violation of basically every norm that I've lived by in my entire career.
It basically means that I don't really need to know what the data say.
I don't really need to be creative and think about different hypotheses.
All I have to do is I have to just pay attention to what the most powerful people inside the scientific community say, and then I'll know the truth.
As you say, it's not simply, it's not a matter of like a particular, you know, it's not a religious thing, it's not even just even a political thing.
It is just, I think, is a common human thing to have that hubris.
Even scientists themselves often have that hubris.
When you get things right, I mean, it's like you feel like you're on the top of the world.
You make some prediction and it comes out to be true.
But then the next prediction you make is going to be wrong.
I mean, you have to remember all the time in science that every idea may be met with a fact that disproves it, even if you had it, even if you're the brightest person.
Even Einstein was wrong over and over again.
Of course, he was right about some fundamental things.
So, I think that humility, the loss of it during the pandemic, was a real shock to me.
But then to see how that power is used in the world outside of science, right?
Because the ability to tell, to distinguish between true and false,
if you have an entity that can do that, the power is tremendous.
It's far beyond what kings of ancient times had.
It's analogous to what maybe the medieval church had.
You say the distinction between what's true and false.
But you know, even within religious traditions, the best of religious traditions have at their center a fundamental humility.
You know, God is beyond us.
We are not God.
So, it's every human endeavor, I think, faces this.
But during the pandemic, it was deployed at scale to say, look, Jay from Stanford and Martin from Harvard and Sunetra from Oxford are wrong just because Tony Fauci says so.
By the way, we discovered this was not just like an organic reaction.
It was a specific organized campaign.
Four days after he wrote the declaration, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me, Martin Sinatra, fringe epidemiologist, FRI.
I have a card that I made up says fringe epidemiology on it now.
It was one of these things where like the head of the National Institute of Health, and then he called for a devastating takedown in an email to Tony Fauci.
Devastating takedown.
He used those words.
And that led to the propaganda campaign.
They used the control of what the press sees as true and false to smear us and destroy us.
It's one of these things, if it's some random scientist doing it, even a prominent scientist doing it, that's one thing.
But the head of the National Institute of Health controls $45 billion of money that And that amount of money essentially makes and breaks the careers of every biomedical scientist known in the U.S.
and many scientists outside the U.S.
It's very difficult to cross someone like that.
If someone like that says, this guy is a brilliant epidemiologist, let's do a devastating takedown, even a scientist that agrees with us is going to want to stay silent.
It's unfortunate and ridiculous that they use the phrase devastating takedown because that's the sort of thing that people with evil intentions say.
They don't say that.
You look like the baddies.
Let us do a draconian and wicked, I have a plan, a coup.
It's ridiculous.
Were you surprised by how few people were willing to support you?
Were you heartened by the support that you received?
Given that you just said you lost 30 pounds, you didn't sleep and you forgot to eat, which all seems pretty unscientific to me as a matter of fact, you should have been paying attention in the lab of your life.
I wonder, was it interpersonally challenging and did you get a lot of heat from Harvard and stuff?
Well, yeah, I'm actually at Stanford, but I got a lot of grief from friends of mine at Stanford.
But on the other hand, almost a million people signed the declaration.
I hope you signed it, Russell.
There were tens of thousands of scientists and epidemiologists signed it.
It created a community of people that found each other that before that felt isolated
and alone.
As you said, Russell, for you, you heard it and it gave you a sense that you weren't crazy,
that you were there some sense that what you were seeing with your own eyes could be true.
It wasn't just some figment.
That was one of the major goals of the Declaration, to tell people, "Lots of scientists are seeing
what you were seeing."
Lots of scientists are saying, look, look at the devastation we're causing to the poor.
Like, you know, in Uganda, four and a half million children were out of school for two years because of the lockdowns.
I mean, actually 15 million people, kids out of school for two years, four and a half million never came back to school in Uganda.
And it turns out the UN did this report on this around Africa.
It turns out a lot of those kids didn't come back because the little girls were sold into sexual slavery and the little boys were put into child labor.
Because the reason is their families were put on the brink of starvation by the economic dislocations caused by the lockdowns.
We put those poor families in this like devastating bind where they had to like essentially either do this terrible thing to their children or starve them.
That's what those lockdowns were doing.
That's the cruelty of the lockdowns.
A lot of scientists are saying, look, this is not even stopping the disease from spreading.
Why are we doing this?
Let's protect the elderly better.
We weren't protecting them with the lockdowns.
It was the opposite of science and thank you for introducing me to a level of reality that I'd not pondered because I was still somewhat selfishly looking at the lockdown for the personal inconvenience I'd endured and perhaps on occasion I would think of the psychological impact and the educational impact and mental health and suicide and all of those other things that we were told not to think about or worry about when people were speculatively discussing those things and now to introduce to it rafts of almost inconceivable suffering for children in
Uganda. That's a new component to consider. I felt the phrase I found myself using was,
but in this instance, science is a subset of a different ideology, whether that's an
economic ideology or an authoritarian ideology or a sort of an unconscious ideology.
It's a subset.
Science is not freely functioning.
It's science within censorship, so it's no longer worthy of the name, therefore.
Do you see this idea as kind of a subjugated science, a deployed science?
Does that seem right to you, Doctor?
I mean, that's exactly right.
You can't have science without the ability to speak to one another, to be able to freely, without undue influence.
A lot of the distortions in science that we documented before the pandemic come from this.
So, for instance, the role that pharmaceutical money plays in scientific output.
Huge, huge amounts of money poured into doing science that's essentially like aimed at making sure that pharmaceutical companies do well, right?
That's distorted science.
That was known before the pandemic and there's like, you know, mechanisms in place to try to, you know, you don't want to say if you're a pharmaceutical company, you can't do science.
What you want to say is, look, you have to declare that you are a pharmaceutical company funded scientist and now you can use that in your assessment of the scientific result.
Right.
I personally never taken any pharmaceutical company money.
So I never I just because I wanted to stay independent of that.
Wow.
You realize then on some personal and ethical level that to take that money and this is not a judgment of obviously it seems like the majority I presume people were funded in that manner.
But you personally made a choice that that would impede your ability to indeed be a scientist and you were right about that.
It's been proven.
I wonder, Jay, what you think if you'd like to explore further the necessity for discourse, conversation, account and narratives in the pursuit of true objectivity and how that Aligns with your recent experiences in federal court and the attempt to further curtail, legislate against free speech by the Biden administration.
Tell us about that recent, and I understand you were victorious.
The whole experience we've been talking about led me to this suspicion that this suppression of scientific speech wasn't simply an organic thing, that in fact there was a campaign organized by governments to suppress scientific discussion online.
A lot of people suspected with social media is doing it, right?
So YouTube, for instance, banning your video.
I mean, last time I was on, Russell, you told me that you were only going to say approved
things to put on YouTube and then the rest you'll put on Rumble.
That's right.
Right.
Why are there approved things for someone to talk, having a discussion about scientific
matters to be put on YouTube?
Why can't we just have that discussion?
Scientific discussion requires there to be people disagreeing.
One person will be right, one person will be wrong.
It's normal.
If you suppress things you always think are wrong, you're not going to have science.
So the question is, why are these social media companies doing this?
Their interest is to foster free discussion.
These are not illegal ideas.
Are there such a thing as illegal ideas?
Their business interests would normally cut in favor of allowing this kind of speech, and yet they didn't.
It turns out, so there was the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's offices approached me, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Cariotti, another scientist, and asked us if we'd be willing to join any lawsuit against the Biden administration.
That lawsuit in federal court led to discovery where we read the emails of a tremendous number of federal officials in the White House, in the CDC, in the Surgeon General's office, in the FBI, in the State Department.
Basically, what the Biden administration did was that they would contact social media companies, give them a hit list for censorship.
These are the ideas you need to censor.
These are the people you need to censor.
And they would then threaten the social media companies that if you don't censor these people and these ideas, we're going to regulate you out of existence.
Now, often the threat was implied.
So, you know, and a lot of these social media companies, like Stockholm Syndrome, they would just say, oh yeah, what's the next thing we need to censor?
Because they just didn't want to fight.
Some of them fought back sometimes, but it was that whole censorship industrial complex, essentially.
The judge called it a new ministry of truth.
Wow.
Directly quoting Orwell.
And, you know, it was a federal judge that found this.
The Biden administration then appealed it, saying that they needed to be able to censor to keep the public safe.
And then a district court basically said, you can't do that.
That violates the American First Amendment.
I was and this is just this, by the way, all this just came out this year, just in past this summer, actually.
But the judge issued his ruling in July 4, 2023.
So, what we now see is part of the mechanisms by which the scientific discussion during the pandemic was suppressed, the policy discussion was suppressed, was by direct government policy.
Governments decided, and I'm certain it's not just the United States government that did this.
I know the UK government was involved in this as well, based on reports I've seen from organizations like Big Brother Watch.
You know, what you have is essentially a government policy in the West to suppress Dissident voices, because they think that the dissidents are so dangerous to public health.
At least that's the argument that they make when they're pressed on it in court.
But it doesn't seem that the way that they behave generally is motivated by the desire to preserve, protect and improve public health.
Otherwise, you would not have made those decisions relatively early in the pandemic period that caused so much damage and even for children to be sold into sexual slavery.
It seems that these choices were at best misguided and at worst malevolent, that dissidence and opposing the dominating narratives is being Gosh, I sometimes feel it's not even incrementally.
In a way that appears to be coordinated, the possibility for dissent is being shut down.
Legislation in the UK, the new, again, the sort of ludicrously and somewhat ironically named online safety bill in Canada, they've introduced new laws to control information in these type of spaces.
And based on what you've just told us and the kind of relationships between government and social media platforms, this legislation is merely enshrining something that's been
happening less formally and will now happen to a far greater degree. And the dangers that you've
described, the evident, observable, actual danger that has taken place, the lives that have
been lost, the lives that have been ruined, it feels like this is gonna get worse.
Now, I understand that YouTube are using the WHO's medical guidelines now, not just for COVID, but for all diseases.
The WHO is preparing a pandemic treaty that will allow them to further bypass national sovereignty, taking, I think, 5% of the budgets of any nation that's a participant in the treaty.
And people's fears that The censorship is increasing, surveillance is increasing, globalism and by what I mean by globalism is that there are unelected bodies that are not tethered to nations and therefore are not democratically accountable are making decisions transcendent of democracies and so it's like this subject that we're discussing that used to just be about oh like the pandemic which we're already being sort of invited to forget and just move beyond because as I say of the omnicrisis of the
Endless wars, escalating wars, the whole climate of horror and fracture.
It appears to me that this is a significant issue and it's one that is increasing in its power.
These kind of measures are increasing in spite of your recent significant victory.
I mean, I share with you the dread of the future if we allow this kind of infrastructure to stay in place.
You mentioned the WHO.
You know, the second largest funder of the WHO is the Gates Foundation.
That guy!
But doesn't he also invest in vaccines?
Wait a minute!
I mean, and the WHO, it's not as if they got things right all the time.
During the pandemic, a few days after we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, the Great Barrington Declaration is premised on the idea that if you get COVID and recover, you have some immunity, right?
That's what herd immunity is based on, which is true.
You get some immunity after you recover from COVID.
The WHO changed the definition of herd immunity to exclude immunity after recovery from the disease.
Only vaccines produced immunity in the definition of herd immunity and they did that in response to the Great Barrington Declaration.
The WHO put out misinformation over and over, information at odds with the scientific data over and over and over again during the pandemic.
They downplayed the damage to the poorest places of the world.
They recommended the lockdowns because in February 2020, they thought that what China did, it worked.
That the lockdowns would get rid of the disease everywhere if we just did what China did.
The World Health Organization has a lot to answer for.
And to have YouTube then say, okay, we're going to take this organization that failed so fundamentally during the pandemic and take it as our lodestar, the science itself, and we'll suppress everyone that disagrees with them.
Well, you know, why even have science?
I mean, that's one of these things where, like, you essentially are done.
You know, you created this epistemic bubble that cannot be pierced because you say this organization has a monopoly on the truth.
It is really scary.
I do think that the American First Amendment, before the Missouri versus Biden case, I had started to despair.
During the case, and especially with the recent rulings, I'm starting to feel a glimmer of hope, Russell.
I hope you don't talk me out of it, because I think the American First Amendment might be strong enough to shatter this whole regime.
Do you think so?
And I'm not trying to talk you out of hope.
I need hope.
I need your hope, and I certainly need my own.
I'm just looking at the article you wrote, I think, on Substack about your experience, I think, On arriving in America and becoming an American citizen at least and you talk about the First Amendment and that it's not only constitutional but it's almost formative and it's in some ways the crucible of all other American values, rights and even perhaps even human rights.
Can you sort of reprise what you mean?
I got a little emotional when I wrote that piece, Russell.
It was for Barry Weiss's Substack, the free press.
When the July 4th ruling came down from the judge saying that the Biden administration had violated my First Amendment rights, my free speech rights, I thought back to when I first arrived in the United States, I was four years old.
My parents came from India, and they came for economic opportunity.
My dad was an engineer, my mom ran a daycare center, but in India it was much harder to do.
But they also came in part because You know, the instability of political regimes in India is like the mid-70s, early 70s.
Just shortly after we came, Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, declared an emergency, essentially suspended Indian democracy through her opponents in jail, suspended basic civil rights, you know, killed a lot of people actually that opposed her during a state of emergency that she declared.
And I remember in my family, I was young then, very young then, but just the horror that this could happen in their home country, and also the relief that we were in a country that valued free speech, where that kind of suppression of dissident ideas could never happen.
And that for me was a formative value, like a sense of like, you know, the United States can stand as a bulwark against this kind of authoritarian power.
And when the judge ruled in favor of the First Amendment in this case, it cracked open, I think, this entire enterprise.
Because it doesn't take much, Russell.
It just takes a few people telling the truth that are heard widely that then shatters the
power of these authoritarians.
I really very firmly believe that.
It can cost a lot to the people telling the truth, of course.
But that cost is part of how we renew our societies, that we bring these basic fundamental
values back to our societies, fundamental ideas, the scientific ideas like we've been
talking about, ideas of free expression.
I think free expression to me is the fundamental thing that allows even David to overthrow
Goliath.
It seems that we move in our conversations between the importance of the work that you do, because it is empirical, because you're able to say, wait a minute, that's not true.
I can prove it's not true.
This is not conjecture.
This is not modeling.
This is not theology.
This is, look, we can show you.
And to, in a sense, what can be Extrapolated from that and what can be observed when that kind of data is censored, shut down, ignored, attacked.
So It's interesting that the pandemic period had nestled within it so many little crises, sociological, ideological, philosophical, judicial, political, and even within the biological component,
The cover-up of myocarditis and the administering of vaccines.
There's the non-medical interventions, there's the social interventions.
We're now beginning to go, okay, all right, well the lockdowns were wrong, the masks didn't work, social distancing was arbitrary.
That's why people were having parties during it, because they knew it wasn't dangerous.
They were just letting us know it was dangerous.
An area of conjecture, of course, is Oh, now they have recognised that it is possible to impose levels of previously unimagined control on a population as long as they legitimise it.
It is possible to destroy dissenting voices as long as you are able to use information that legitimises the destruction of those voices.
When it comes to myocarditis and the increased rates of myocarditis in people that have taken vaccines and the way that the information was initially framed, can you tell us what we have learned with that particular little lie?
That is a little bit heartbreaking, because when the vaccines were first introduced, they had run honest studies, like large-scale randomized studies.
Tens of thousands of people enrolled in a control arm that included placebo.
But the thing about vaccines, when you go from tens of thousands to billions, you're going to learn things that you didn't know automatically.
They're going to be people that have conditions that are a result of the vaccine sometimes that you learn about.
The way that it's always been handled in the past is an honesty of like, okay, if you see these conditions in this group, you tell people in that group, maybe don't take this vaccine, maybe take a different vaccine, maybe You put it off and tell them to go talk to their doctor, decide what's best for them.
A lot of like, you know, sort of like nuanced discussion based on what you learn after the vaccine has been rolled out.
One of the things we learned very early on in the rollout of this vaccine is that young men taking this vaccine have a higher elevated risk of myocarditis.
Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle.
You know, it can be deadly.
It's not like it's a median thing.
Most people that get it, it goes away, but it's not something you want, and it can last a long time.
It can be debilitating.
It can even be deadly, right?
And so, in young men, you see on elevated risk, there's a fight in the scientific literature about exactly how elevated it is, maybe 1 in 2,000, 1 in 10,000.
I mean, I believe anywhere in between there.
And I think, but that's high enough to say, well, look, I'm going to give it to billions of people, including, you know, hundreds of millions of young men.
I'm going to end up getting a lot of cases of myocarditis.
And we need to, you know, normally with vaccines, you want something to be so safe that no one would question, not just that vaccine, but all vaccines.
If you have a 1 in 5,000 risk of some severe outcome, you would probably be very careful with that vaccine for that group because you don't want to create this skepticism about all vaccines because you're seeing a subgroup of people hurt by this vaccine.
That's what they did, by the way, in the United States with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
When they saw an elevated risk of thrombocytopenia and clotting in older women and middle-aged women, they paused the rollout of the vaccine.
My colleague, Martin Kulldorff, who wrote the Great Parenthood Declaration, disagreed with me about this, but I actually think it was probably the reasonable thing to do.
Again, you could argue with me about this, whether I'm right or wrong, but the point is that's consistent with what we normally do with vaccines.
As soon as there's a signal, we pause, we're careful about it because even relatively rare signals can undermine public confidence in all vaccines.
That's why most of the traditional vaccines that are out there, we have a lot of confidence in it because they pull them every time there's something, just a few, one in a million cases of something and they're very careful about it.
With this vaccine, that caution was thrown to the wind, especially with the mRNA vaccines and the signal for young men.
It should have led to a pause for young men taking the mRNA vaccines and it didn't.
Certainly vaccines have been cancelled on the basis of much statistically lower impact than that.
I understand.
And this sort of crisis of confidence in our institutions and science itself has to be halted at some point.
Because in a way, science is one of the few things that can prevent us becoming hysterical.
Because I wondered, As many people surely must, if you have felt that the kind of certainty that you've had in the institutions to a degree you participate in, if you consider at least science to be an institution, although I recognise there are many, many sectors within that, plainly the funding being a significant point of difference.
I wonder if like, you know, when you say something like, you know, vaccines historically have been like, you know, they're verifiably much safer.
Is there anything that happened in the pandemic period that made you think, hold on a minute, I'm going to have to review the trust that I'd bestowed on either other medical or legislative or regulatory, you know, like, for example, Andy Fauci, most people didn't think about Andy Fauci very much prior to that.
I feel like during the AIDS crisis, some people were like, whoa, this guy's making some crazy decisions and many might argue some crazy dollars as well through some of those royalty arrangements.
But generally speaking, it's not something you think about.
I wonder if you've had the opportunity, chance or inclination to review some areas that you previously would have considered that didn't require further analysis?
I mean, it's funny, Russell, you ask that, because I actually have on my bookshelf somewhere a textbook that Anthony Fauci edited from which I learned internal medicine.
You know, it was, you know, before the pandemic, I had tremendous admiration for him.
I had to revise that admiration considerably.
I've been at Stanford for 37 years, first as a student, then as a professor.
The motto of the university is, the winds of freedom blow, and they didn't blow during the pandemic.
A lot of my colleagues, I'm now deeply disappointed in.
I do think that You have to resist the urge to say, everything I knew before was wrong.
I don't think that's true.
But it is absolutely an opportunity to revisit those things and try to understand some of the things.
Why do I think those things?
Do I still think those things in light of new evidence?
We always have to do this.
In any endeavor, we're going to take a lot of things for granted.
Science has to take, by the way, when you do science, you take a lot of things for granted.
I'm not going to revisit gravity.
You know, so I just it's not like I have to take for granted certain things when I do science.
And you're right.
I mean, it's but I think part of science is genius, is that we can go back and question even those foundational things.
You know, most of the time, those foundational things are foundational for a reason.
There's a lot of evidence behind them, but it's not wrong to go back and to look.
And on vaccines, I actually worked on vaccine safety with the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.
before the pandemic.
That kind of questioning happens all the time with vaccines.
It's a normal part of why vaccines can be recommended at scale, is because as soon as there's a safety signal, you say, okay, well, even if it's not really, even if it turns out to be just a statistical artifact, you still, with an abundance of caution, you pull the vaccine.
Right?
It's frustrating, but you do that because you want to make sure that the public sees vaccines as safe.
It's the process by which you do that that allows the vaccines to be seen as safe.
And I am completely in favor of revisiting.
I mean, I think that's part of what we do.
I suspect many of the vaccines we have that I think are quite essential, like the MMR vaccine, we'll see is essential even if we revisit.
But maybe others won't.
I don't know.
I mean, this is a scientific process.
Personally, I'm confident enough that I would give my kids those traditional childhood vaccines.
But I can understand the desire to revisit, given how poorly our scientific institutions, our regulatory institutions did during the pandemic, to protect the health of the public.
I can completely understand where that impetus is coming from.
Yeah, because you start the question, who's spending money to ensure that non-profitable drugs are promoted, that profitable drugs are rigorously explored?
Where's that appetite coming from and what is this trend and what was revealed during that period?
That's a very sort of open-hearted and open-minded answer.
And I was thinking about like, you know, revisiting foundational principles and it Yeah, epochs are defined by those moments of revision and revelation, whether it's heliocentrism, if I'm saying it right, or in the nature of sub-particular reality, when those revelations are made,
It defines our species, it defines our kind, it defines our time.
That's why the neutrality and objectivity of science has to be protected in the same way that something like free speech has to be protected.
When science is a subset of financial interests and methods of dominion, then it's difficult to see how you're not going to end up in a Some kind of form of tyranny as a result of that because the biases accumulatively will lead to the end of the ability for debate and the ability to undergird dissident voices in so many ways.
in so many ways. Getting to the sort of, not the heart of the matter, but a significant
part of the matter, it seems that here it says Moderna and Pfizer made $1,000 of profit
every second. They charge governments up to 24 times more than the potential cost of generic
production. It seems that there were many systemic problems, plainly, between the kind
of relationships between, let's just say, government and big tech, government and big
pharma.
pharma.
It seems that what's needed is new capacity for regulation and I would say decentralization of power, breaking up of monopolies in all the areas where they appear to be able to reign, to reduce indeed end the ability of companies of this scale to influence government through lobbying and other forms of funding.
And these are the kind of ideas that need to be discussed in independent media and won't be discussed outside of it.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that there's almost a revolving door, it seems like.
I didn't really know this, really.
I mean, I knew that it existed, but I didn't realize the scope of it before the pandemic.
The regulatory agencies that are supposed to oversee and represent the public interest, you know, the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC, a lot of this, a lot of that has, there's this like revolving door with industry.
There's a sense of where the regulators who are supposed to protect the public from the depredations of the pharmaceutical companies are often representing the pharmaceutical companies.
You know, it's like the you have like former FDA chairs now on the board of, you know, big pharmaceutical companies.
It just looks really bad. And it is really bad.
Like you want an independent regulator.
And governments during the pandemic essentially became partners with pharmaceutical companies.
You mentioned Moderna and Pfizer.
Governments around the world, the contracts they wrote with them essentially said, there's no liability if you have a bad product.
What entity ever has that deal?
If you have a bad product, part of the deal of capitalism is that you are responsible for it.
You have to make amends for it.
You have to pay penalties for it.
you have the wrong incentives in place.
If you don't have some possibility, if you do something bad,
something bad will happen to you, right?
And essentially that's what these deals with the pharmaceutical companies did
is they told the pharmaceutical companies, you can have a bad product
and you don't have to pay the price for it.
We the people.
I can't believe it that I'd ever say, we have to get back to capitalism.
So like, I didn't realize that we'd gone so far beyond it in so many areas where subsidized energy companies
are able to profit in energy crises, medical pharmaceutical companies benefit
in health and medical crises, military industrial complex organizations benefit in wars.
Seems that there's some opportunity for real review.
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, thank you so much for Joining us today, thank you for your easy, effortless, or at least it seems effortless, ability to communicate complex ideas gently, and thank you for the plain morality of your position and the lack of hubris and presence of humility that's most heartening for me.
You suggested that somehow I could diminish your hope over the course of this conversation.
Certainly you've lifted an increased line, so thank you.
Thank you, Russell.
It's a real pleasure and honor to talk with you.
There you are.
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