American Thought Leaders - Restoring Free Speech in Academia: Jay Bhattacharya

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

I recently had the pleasure of attending a Pandemic Planning conference at Stanford University. 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.“I think it’s expanded the range of things that are allowed to be said in polite society, if you will,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy and the lead organizer of the conference.“The purpose of the conference was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around the world,” he says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

every academic that said a transgressive thing or had a transgressive thought and expressed it publicly faced tremendous pressure to not do that, including the point of losing their jobs, losing their reputation. I recently had the pleasure of attending a pandemic planning conference at Stanford University. 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.

Today, I'm sitting down with 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. Dave Benetaria, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Nice to see you, Jan. So, congratulations on winning the Zimmer Medal, 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 Kulldorff, 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. Well, what about yourself? I mean, 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. When you have the entire, 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, who 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 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 like the like 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, when it found... It was sort of right, the hypothesis was sort of right. It was 4% of L.A. 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 bounds. Large numbers of people already had it outside of the pen of 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. So let's talk about that and the significance of it. Sure. it's been very difficult to organize discussions and debates between people who had an alternate view like people who people oppose the lockdowns for instance or people oppose the vaccine mandates or people who most uh you know the the mask mandates or all the whole of 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 public health establishment, and then this trickled down into the universities themselves, was that opposition, especially opposition from people, establishment people, to these public health 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 lockdown is the right idea. I mean, that was the reaction to the Great Phantom Declaration, for instance. Universities play a tremendously important role in paneling these discussions, especially in difficult times. The university mission of academic freedom,

inquiry aimed at finding the truth, is different from the mission of public health. And it turns out, for public health, they view the university mission as a danger and applied tremendous pressure to universities to make sure that those discussions didn't happen. In 2020, a former president of the university 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 with me. He couldn't find somebody on the medical school to discuss. We thought that they're cowards. The issue was that they thought that impaneling me, putting me, platforming me, was itself a danger. That's what the medical school thought.

Or some people in the leadership. You're part of the medical school. I had the medical school. I may be teaching there for 25 years almost. It was remarkable, like 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 wrestling with each other on ideas. And then in 2022, I met with the dean of the medical school, Manny Lloyd Minor, and asked him if I could host a pandemic policy conference. This was two years into the pandemic. He told me that it was still too early for a dispassionate academic discussion about pandemic policy, and that many, many doctors who work at Stanford

were still scarred from their experience in March 2020. Now, Stanford actually wasn't overrun in March 2020, but I think the medical profession as a whole, it was. I mean, it was quite a traumatic time to have this new disease, people quite scared about how deadly it is, and of course the doctors are called to treat people traumatic time to give up this new disease. People are quite scared about how deadly it is. And of course, the doctors are called to treat people and potentially face the danger of getting this disease themselves. And for a lot of doctors, it was quite a traumatic time, even if they weren't

overrun like they were in New York or something. But that doesn't absolve the university of its mission to have these kinds of conferences. And so the conference that we just held at Stanford on October 24, 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 a straight false, right? So it was actually there's like a quite balance. 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 to want vaccine mandates, who think that censorship is a good idea. It's 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 rate-bearing declaration 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 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, right? And I, you know, this relationship between science and misinformation, if we could kind of unpack how you view that, right? Sure. So, you know, 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, Yon, 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 a freedom of speech, even when it comes to public health? Well, and there's also, I mean, I was at the oral arguments, and I remember this idea whether encouraging is actually telling, right? Like how much encouraging becomes telling, or some sort of pressure or coercion, right? Yeah, well, I mean, there's, you know, 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, oh, you ought not publish that. And the company's 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. You know, the president go on TV and say, you know, 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 all kinds of lawsuits if you publish misinformation or regulatory action. 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, you know, 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. Right. So 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 a social media craze where people are jumping out of buildings, you know, kids jumping out of buildings, filling themselves,

jumping out of first-story, second-story buildings or whatever, and potentially harming themselves. And this is a social media craze that goes everywhere, like the Tide Pods craze or something like that, right? Shouldn't the government have the right to tell the social media craze that goes out, you know, like the Tide Pods craze or something like that, right? Shouldn't the government have the right to tell the social media companies to stop publishing that content?

And the, okay, 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 they were biohazards. They caused a mental health crisis. They had a tremendous loss of 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. But, and this is interesting, because obviously without that intent, I mean... I mean, intent is not the relevant thing. The question is, what is the impact of the policy? It's in the context of speech where we learn about the actual impacts of the policy.

I don't care if you have the best intentions in the world. If you're harming children, you're harming children. And that is what the government policy did during the pandemic. And it deserved to be criticized. It was exactly the opposite in terms of who was actually doing the harm to children during the pandemic. 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 buildings challenge or whatever, well, do you really want, 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 sort of social media bubble that Facebook had promoted was there in the back of the room. And it was almost like a shocking moment where one of the congressmen asked him, Zuckerberg, 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, I mean, 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, it could step in very, very easily without violating free speech rights. In fact, just by saying to the public, they have a bully, bully, you know, right.

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. It's not the way that you deal with that kind of speech is more speech. They could present another compelling argument, basically, right? And 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. Let's jump back to the conference, right?

And so just tell me a little bit about the setup of this. I mean, 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, right? It wasn't some sort of, you know, fringe effort from what I could tell, right? Including the new president. Yeah, so the conference itself,

as I said, it 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's 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 policy 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 the conference, 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, disagree talking to each other and so when he agreed essentially a lot of the a lot of the

people in the in the university I mean I think they follow the lead of the leaders of the just and that's what they did so they 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 a 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. 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 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's 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 of 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 saying, the main threat being COVID. Whereas on the other side, you might have someone like Anders Tecla saying, you know, 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. Times writer, this man named Michael Hiltzik, 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 had 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 panel is just up, even the people who disagree with the orthodoxy, that's part of the mission of the university. It's the part of the truth-seeking mission of the university. The pressure was actually tremendous, especially a couple of months before the conference when there was these, like, you know, this...

It wasn't even a large number of the legacy media people. It was just a couple, primarily this man named Michael Elstek in the L.A. Times. So why do you think things play out this way? I think if you have power and you can use that to get your point of view through, a policy that you like through,

or whatnot, an illusion that there's a scientific consensus on the topic when there isn't, people will use it. They'll use that power. Is it a tremendously irresponsible use of that power? An example of that might be, for instance, Francis Collins, when I wrote the Great Baritone Declaration,

which argued against lockdowns and in favor of focused protection of vulnerable older people in October of 2020. You know, we're with Martin Kulldorff and Sinatra Gubbado, Harvard and Oxford. The head of the NIH, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci four days after he wrote the declaration calling for a devastating takedown of the premise of the declaration. And that led to hit pieces against me, death threats. But more importantly than that, it essentially demonized the Declaration of the Minds of People. We didn't actually even read it or engage with the ideas. It sent a signal to the scientific community and the policy community at large that you shouldn't engage with this. It's so fringe that you shouldn't even think about it.

That kind of power is always available to authorities, to leaders. And when it's used to suppress discussion and debate, it's an illegitimate use of that power. Is there ever topics that are beyond the pale or people that are beyond the pale to host at a university? I think that it is, that's a touchy thing, because there are, for instance, in Germany, for instance, if you bring up symbols of Nazism, the free speech rights don't extend in Germany to that.

So it's not that, and I have very, very mixed feelings about that. Obviously Nazism is a terrible evil that brought tremendous harm in the 20th century. So I can understand a country that has that kind of history to be wary about extending free speech rights that far. But those kinds of situations have to be very well-delineated exceptions to the general rule of free speech. Because it's not my position or your position or the government's position or Michael Hill's position to say these ideas are so far outside the bounds you're not supposed to say them. Public health, there should not be a public health exception to the First Amendment. It's not true that the public health authorities know the scientific facts so well, have so deeply embedded in them the norms of American society

and the tradeoffs of the values that people have on a whole range of issues, that they can sit above us and say, you are not allowed to say that, right? That itself is so dangerous that it doesn't belong in the class of carve-out exceptions and things you can't. I mean, there are things you shouldn't be able to say, right? I shouldn't be able to issue violent threats

to people online or anywhere, right? I shouldn't be able to defame you and libel you and damage you. I shouldn't be able to defraud you. There are certain kinds of speech that are delineated even in American law that say you're not supposed to extend free speech. And those are legitimate child porn, for instance. These are things that we as a society decide are outside the bounds of speech but there's there but they're very well delineated in the protections to make sure that those those exceptions don't bleed into the general rule which is that almost all of the ideas that one might think we should be able to say do you feel there was something specifically

on one of the panels that panels where an idea was developed beyond where it had been before? I guess this is my question because it absolutely was a first conference of its kind in the sense that there were people with quite dramatically different viewpoints. That in itself is an achievement in itself, but what about the idea is to try to develop something further, right? There were at least a couple of examples. I can think of lots, but let me highlight two examples of ideas that I hadn't heard before and I hadn't seen really expressed. On the misinformation and

censorship panel, there was a really robust discussion about whether the government ought to have the right to go pressure social media companies to tell them, don't publish this. And there's a former New York Times journalist named Gardner Harris who made the argument, which I hadn't really seen made publicly before, that the problem was that the government had become kind of very, very insular. It used to be the case that journalists could go into the CDC, talk to people that were below the director level. Yeah, I remember this. They were allowed to speak with journalists, right? There was this culture of somewhat transparency and so forth.

Right, and so for him, he recast the problem of censorship into a problem of government transparency. Right? So if journalists could come and people could come and talk to people in the bureaucracy

and report what do the scientists in the bureaucracy say, well, all this idea that the government should or shouldn't be able to pressure

social media would go away. Like, in a sense. Like, you'd have this kind of transparency. The government itself would promote the kind of transparency that wouldn't require them to pretend to have a monolithic point of view, in a sense. And I thought that was interesting,

that there's been a transformation in the norms of communication within our government itself, where the idea is like control of the public picture of what the agency believes rather than this reflection of what the people inside the agency actually believe. I thought that was really interesting. I hadn't seen that put out publicly before. On the viral versions panel, that was the panel I had the most difficulty getting people from two sides to come. The panel had several people that were quite prominent in the lab leak debate on the pro-lab leak side, the idea that pro meaning that it was a lab leak that caused the pandemic side, right?

So people like Bryce Nichols, I know you interviewed earlier, Laura Kahn, Simon Wade Hodgson, the man who sequenced the HIV virus in the 1980s, and others who were more on the, it was a lab leak that caused the pandemic. I had trouble getting people from the other side. And my friend, good friend, Sunetra Gupta, who wrote the Great Bear Day Declaration with me, when I told her about the conference, and I told her about that panel, she said she wanted to be on that panel. And I was still taking it back. And she said, it's not a lab leak, Jay. i think a point on which i think you disagree and i but i was absolutely delighted to have her step up and say i'm going to make the argument against the lab leak and i thought that was quite an interesting vigorous discussion because

sinatra made an argument that's different than i think many of the other people who think that it was a natural origin made. Right. Well, in speaking with her, I remember one of the points is that there's been a number of papers that have been published, which, well, let's say, perhaps deserve a lot of criticism would be a nice way of putting it. She hates those papers. Yeah. Well, exactly.

Her thinking isn't... These are papers published in Science and Cell and Nature and all this, essentially trying to say, oh, there's a scientific case that it started at the wet market. And in her view, those papers are deeply flawed scientifically. It's kind of interesting, amazing actually, that she made the natural words argument, even though she's completely intellectually honest about the problems with those papers. Well, and the one thing that came out of, for me, out of that, which was interesting, is when people see those papers and look at them, let's say honestly, they may themselves assume because of their existence that it probably is a lab leak, as opposed to trying to look at the information dispassionately.

Does that make sense? Yeah, so there are several possibilities. It's not a binary. Is it a lab? Did it happen at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Versus did it come from the wet market? That's the way the debate's been framed. But in fact, there are other possibilities.

Maybe it's a lab leak, but not the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There are other labs in Wuhan, actually, that were studying coronaviruses. Maybe it's a natural origin, but it didn't start in the wet market in December 2019. Maybe there are other places it started that we haven't looked at or haven't seen. It's a broader debate than just the binary. I still think from the evidence I've seen, the molecular biological evidence and other pieces of evidence, that it's likely that it was a lab leak, probably sometime in September or October 2019.

But this is a debate that's not settled. It's partly difficult to settle when the parties involved have a very strong incentive to cover up vast parts of the data sets that might allow one to resolve the debate. Right. All right. So I'm very curious. So you said there's other examples.

You mentioned two. But I'm fascinated to hear anything else that comes to mind. Well, I think I already mentioned this. The discussion between Anders Tegnell and Josh Salomon and others on that first panel was very, very interesting to me personally. I'm very interested in how you make decisions under uncertainty, especially in times of stress. And I don't know if this is like unique, but I haven't seen people who had such different points of view in discussion with each other about how to manage this, this, this, this, that kind of uncertainty. Like the idea at the very beginning of the pandemic was this idea of a precautionary principle. Right. What does that mean? of a catastrophic pandemic is so bad that almost any policy measure is worth doing to try to prevent

it from happening. You lock the schools down, you lock businesses down, you violate the basic civil liberties, which are all bad things that I think everyone would admit, but that it's worth it to do that in order to avoid this catastrophic thing from happening. Right. The precautionary principle, though, I think doesn't actually entail what I just said. The precautionary principle, what it entails is if you have a possibility of some catastrophic bad thing happening, and you don't know, it may or may not happen. There's some possibility of it happening or thing happening that you don't know that it's it may or may not happen there's some possibility of it happening or not

happening right you're allowed to assume the worst about that thing like so for instance you're allowed to assume that this is a makeup this this virus in February 2020 you don't know you there's a lot of uncertain about the death rate you're allowed to assume the worst about its death rate. Which some of the modelers seem to do. They're all painted the worst case about its death rate. You're allowed to do that. The precautionary principle allows you to do that.

But what you're not allowed to do is assume that the interventions that you're putting in place will work to prevent those deaths. That's not part of the cautionary principle. You still have to do due diligence and say, well, will closing schools actually stop the virus from spreading? Will preventing church services, will preventing funerals from happening, what impact will that actually have? Will locking, will closing businesses at scale, what impact will that have? Well, then you have to do analysis. You can say, well, look, it's really only the laptop class that will be able to actually buy by the lockdown orders for any extended period of time. Working class people have to work.

People have to feed their families. You're not going to be able to lock down for an extended period of time without having large numbers of people saying, I can't do this, I'm going to need to continue to act. You have to ask yourself, will the intervention work? You don't have to assume it's going to work. Then you also have to ask yourself, what are the harms of the intervention? You're not allowed to assume those stuff are going to be harms. You know closing schools are going to harm children at scale.

You know that locking down all the Western economies of the world for the extended period of time is going to have tremendous impacts on the poorest people of the world. The UN put out a report in April of 2020 estimating that 130 million people would face starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. And so now then you have to ask yourself, do the interventions make sense in the context of the harms they're going to do and the likelihood they're going to

work or fail versus the worst case scenario of how bad the virus is. All the precautionary principle allows you to do is resolve uncertainty about the particular threat, not the efficacy of the intervention to manage the threat or the harms of those interventions. You still have to do essentially a benefit-harm analysis in order to make decisions, even in the context of the precautionary principle. And this is really kind of the first time this has been kind of, I guess, litigated in a sense. Yeah, well, this is the first time litigated with people on stage talking to each other, very, very prominent people talking to each other in a civil way. I didn't hear any epithets. It was actually quite a nice discussion, I thought.

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. I mean, there were people that didn't like something said during the conference versus, I mean, of course, that's going to be the case. If you represent people with 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. We'll see if they pan out. But 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.

You know, there's been a lot of criticism of the academic community over around this. It's interesting that in a way, it's the academic community through this conference that's kind of leading some sort of trying to come to terms with these different, very, very different viewpoints and frankly, and just reality, right? Groupthink was a major problem during the pandemic in academic circles, in public health circles. And the enforcement of this idea that you can't say something outside the orthodoxy

that is somehow transgressive. I mean, that's why that Zimmer medal, I got the Zimmer medal. It's because I was saying transgressive faith. I didn't think they were transgressive. It just seemed like common sense of don't harm kids, like let them go to school. But it was transgressive. And every academic that said a transgressive thing or had a transgressive thought and expressed it publicly, as I said at the beginning of our interview, faced tremendous pressure to not do that,

including to the point of losing their jobs, losing their reputation. It didn't matter. I have a colleague at Stanford named Michael Levitt. He's an absolutely brilliant scientist. He won a Nobel Prize for his early work on protein full-folding and computational biology. He, early in the pandemic, was quite skeptic about the lockdowns. He did modeling from a different point of view and argued that the lockdowns were not the right approach. And he also faced pressure within the universe and within his scientific...

He was uninvited from a scientific meeting in his field because of his ideas on pandemic management. That kind of pressure was so ubiquitous that it made it almost impossible for people who have reservations about the lockdowns to speak up. And it reinforced the groupthink of the public health community that thought, oh, everyone agrees with us. We should close schools. We should close businesses. We should oppose vaccine mandates. We should adopt authoritarianism as a solution to a pandemic. I mean, all of that was orthodox scientific public public health group thing. And it was upheld by this omerta, this crushing of dissent. And the purpose of the conference is, I hope, make sure that that group of things doesn't happen.

But I hope what ultimately happens from it is we return to a tradition, that universities return to. It's their mission, which is to host these discussions so that groupthink cannot ever emerge. The truth doesn't come out of groupthink. The truth comes out of engagement with people with different ideas. Well, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you, Jan. It's so good to be on. Thank you all for joining Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. you you you