American Thought Leaders - Scientists Opened Pandora’s Box, What Now? | Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

“This catastrophic response that we faced during this pandemic will happen again in our lifetimes. The new normal is lockdown until vaccine. That is how we’re going to manage pandemics until there’s an explicit repudiation of the doctrine by public health,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.In this episode, Dr. Bhattacharya shares his theory on what happened these last four years and the link between seemingly disparate events.Dr. Bhattacharya is one of the plaintiffs in a landmark free speech case against the Biden administration, Murthy v. Missouri, and the co-host of the Illusion of Consensus podcast.“The International Health Regulations and the WHO treaty are a way to essentially institutionalize this paradigm of how to manage pandemics going forward. You can’t have a Sweden next time that bucks the agenda,” he says.*Check out American Essence magazine here. Use promo code 24ATL10 for $10 off! Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

I have a grand unifying theory of what has happened during the COVID era. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. This catastrophic response that we face during this pandemic will happen again in our lifetimes. The new normal is lockdown until vaccine, until there's an explicit repudiation of the doctrine by public health. He's also one of the plaintiffs in a landmark free speech

case against the Biden administration and the co-host of the Illusion of Consensus podcast. The fundamental piece of ideology is that we're just biohazards. Human beings ought to treat each other simply as biohazards. And so all of our society should be structured around that idea. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you for having me, Janja. Always good to be back. We're going to talk about all sorts of recent testimonies that we've seen in Congress to the COVID Select Committee. But before we go there, a lot has Congress to the COVID Select Committee. But before we go there, a lot has happened over the last four years. And not all of it necessarily appears related, but we've been discussing that some of it may indeed be related in perhaps unexpected ways. So let's hear it. What do you think? Okay, so I have a grand unifying theory of what has happened during the COVID era. And it's partly based on speculation. So I'm a little hesitant to like lay it fully out because you know, parts of it, details might might be subject

to correction. But I think I think it explains almost the entire history of the last four years. The central theme is hubris. The central theme is that a relatively small number of very powerful scientific bureaucrats decided that they had a formula for eradicating disease from the planet, like removing the possibility of any new disease ever engulfing the globe again. This goes back decades. So, you know, let's say after 2003, the SARS-1 epidemic happens. The thought enters the mind of a few virologists, a very powerful scientific bureaucrats, that they can put a research agenda together to identify every single pathogen on the planet,

even ones that have not come in contact with humans, bring them into human labs, play with them, and identify countermeasures, vaccines and so on, so that they have them on stock just in case one of them makes the leap. So among the players in this are the people that were central during the pandemic in the decision-making over lockdowns, over vaccines and so on. People like Tony Fauci, people like Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health, people like Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust in the UK. They invest a tremendous amount of money and effort with cooperation spanning from the United States to Europe to China

to essentially rid the world of the possibility of pandemics. In their minds. And in the writings that they have. For instance, there's a paper co-authored by Tony Fauci and David Moran, his aide at the NIH, that lays out a vision of a society structured around the avoidance of infectious disease. They have a utopian vision for society.

And the project, if you fast forward a few years, makes a big success in 2012. There was a number of these avian flu virus in 2006. There was a big scare around it. And the research agenda that they support results in essentially taking the avian flu virus in 2012 and mutating it so it's much better infecting humans in a lab. I don't think there was a lab leak then of that. But what happened was that they published that paper,

they meaning Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and a few other co-authors, sponsored in part by the United States government. And when they published this paper essentially saying, here's how you take H5N1 and make it more transmissible to humans, the scientific community said this is very, very dangerous. And wasn't there was a second lab? I mean, we actually on the fallout with Dr. Armalone, we've actually we were talking about this that when they what they published was actually showed

how exactly or close to how exactly they actually made it more transmissible. They essentially it was a blueprint for any somewhat sophisticated person to go and say, I can replicate this. It's a scientific paper, published openly in a scientific journal. It potentially could be used by bad actors. This leads to the gain of function pause. Like there's a major movement within the scientific

community to push back against this agenda, because it's seen as dangerous. There's a history of lab leak going back decades. And especially if you have work being done in relatively unregulated labs, there really is a real danger because a lab leak isn't a nefarious thing. It's just, you know, you're human. You're a lab worker. You're doing a pipetting or whatever.

You get bored. The mask slips. You get a cut or something, and you get sick, you go home not knowing that you've been infected and you spread the disease. That's what a lab leak is. And the gain-of-function pause, Tony Fauci works very hard to reverse the gain-of-function pause that was put in place in 2014 at the behest of the scientific community, which had said this work is so

dangerous. And he succeeds. In 2017, they put a new process in place, this P3CO process, to oversee, essentially really just self-regulate, the conduct of this dangerous work, allowing the NIH, the U.S. NIH, to fund it some more. And then in 2019, there are reports from Wuhan, China, right in the city where the NIH is supporting a lab that does work on bat coronaviruses,

that there's a leak. And implicitly there's a leak. I don't know that for certain. But let's say that that's what they hear. Certainly what they hear is that there's an outbreak in Wuhan, China in 2019. Now put yourself in the shoes of somebody like Tony Fauci, who's been pushing for this agenda for most of his adult life. And he's heard back from the scientific community that there could be leaks. It's a really dangerous agenda.

And all of a sudden, there's an outbreak in the city where you supported a lab that does work with exactly the kind of virus that you supported doing this kind of work on. You've opened Pandora's box. Like, the virus is out in the world, and you're going to get blamed for it. You're going to be remembered as the scientist bureaucrat that supported the agenda that led to this great pandemic. Well, and I just might add, and with the

Chinese Communist Party, this is the part that I find so... I'm working with your theory here, right? But just it's so bizarre in a way. Because you look at some of the exchanges between the Chinese scientists and the NIH scientists, and they seem to be buddies. It's like they're on the same team or something like that. Or they imagine that they are. And this is sort of our failure in understanding dual-use

research in China, how that lab was absolutely a military lab. There's no question. It's usually likely. But anyway, let's continue, please. Right, well, the Chinese role is really interesting, because they initially tried to cover up the leak, or cover up the outbreak, fail, because this virus is very, very easily transmittable from human to human.

There's only so much even an authoritarian government can do to cover up accidents or events like that. And anyway, so Tony Fauci hears the reports of this. The people that supported this agenda hear the reports of this. Now, remember, the promise of this agenda, this utopian agenda, is to have available countermeasures should any natural pathogen make its way into the human population, right? Countermeasures meaning vaccines and treatments.

So one central mystery of the pandemic to me, this is something I got wrong early in the pandemic, was how was it possible that we had a vaccine candidate so quickly? Normally, it would take a decade to develop a candidate vaccine, test it before it's allowed to be used at scale in human populations. And we had no coronavirus vaccines prior to this pandemic. Only within a week or so after the virus sequence is first officially released, we have a vaccine candidate.

It's the same candidate that roughly ends up being exactly the same candidate that ends up being injected into billions of people just a few months later. So the day, almost within the day of the Pandora's box being opened, maybe just a few weeks after the Pandora's box is opened, there's also a great success of the campaign, which is the development of a countermeasure, a potential countermeasure to the pandemic. And if you could just demystify this a little for me, because there's multiple companies that are working on things. We've got AstraZeneca. I think that's being withdrawn

right now. There's Moderna, Pfizer. I mean, there's other non-genetic vaccines, Sinovac. There's all this that's being developed. So when you say, it sounds like you're talking about one candidate that was ready a week in. Yeah, so there's a distinction between the thing that you're targeting. The virus is this big sequence of genetic material. You don't want to expose people to the virus. You want to expose people to parts of the virus that induce an immune response. That's what a vaccine is, right? When I say the target, they had basically agreed on exactly the part of the virus that all of the vaccines in common were going to expose, that people were going to get exposed to. They weren't going to give

the whole virus. All the difference between the vaccines is just the delivery vehicle of that part of the virus. The spike. Right. Part of the spike. Part of the spike. And then they also, somehow, it happens to be the most toxic part. Okay. So now when you have a sequence, you don't necessarily know how your body is going to react to it.

Right? So it's just at that point, January 2020, it's just a sequence that looks like it's immunogenic. Looks like they must have been doing research on it, or else how do they come up with the target? This is part is inference on my part, but I think it's true. At the same time Pandora's box is opened, they also have news of a countermeasure. It's a success and a failure of that research program at the same time, arriving at the same time. The news

of the lab, the potential lab leak and outbreak, and the news that there is a vaccine target arrives almost on top of each other December 2019, January 2020. So again, put yourself in Fauci's shoes. If it's seen as a lab leak, it's an enormous failure of this agenda. If it's seen as a natural origin and you have a vaccine target for something you've studied, it's enormous success. The stakes could not be higher. Even if it's seen as a lab leak, you still have the vaccine target early.

Again, putting yourself in Fauci's shoes. So you're, and I keep saying Fauci, but it's a group of powerful scientific bureaucrats who are involved with this, not just him. And yeah, so you have this almost, like you need Shakespeare to write this up, Jan. You got to, I mean, just think about the psychology of it. You're going to be remembered as one of history's greatest scientific failures, maybe even a Frankenstein kind of, you know, like the creator of the Frankenstein monster, right? You're going to be remembered as that, or you're going to be remembered as Jonas Salk,

who developed a vaccine that solved a pandemic. It's one or the other. And so the question then is, how can you get to the point where people will allow you to use the vaccine at scale in populations. Because you still have to test it, right? The target is not enough. You have to do a little animal testing. You have to do human testing. Large-scale trials are necessary to convince anybody that we should be allowed to use it.

And the problem is this is a very, very infectious virus. You can tell that in the outbreaks in Wuhan, the outbreak in Italy, in New York, but then not just there. Everywhere there's reports of outbreaks in January in Iran, in Sweden, in the U.K., in the United States. The virus is everywhere. If people get the virus and recover from it, you're not going to need the vaccine, right? What's the purpose of a vaccine if most people have already had immunity to it? And of course, it's a deadly virus, so you're going to end up, there's going to be a lot of people dead. So you want to make sure you can do two things at once. You recommend a whole suite of society-destroying kinds of policies. Lockdowns, school closures, business closures, church, mosque, synagogue closures.

Don't go see your family members in nursing homes. Don't visit your dying relatives in hospital. Social distancing, treat your neighbor as a biohazard. All of those are designed to reduce the spread of the virus. That's in the minds of the people that were making the policy, not the actual reality. But the idea is, if we can just postpone the time it takes for the virus to essentially go all the way around the world, we can get to the vaccine.

The lockdown to a vaccine ideology then is a way to make sure that people aren't going to remember just Pandora's box being opened, but that there was a success that came out of this utopian program. And it worked in the sense of that they won their policy fight. They convinced governments everywhere to lock down, to close schools, to create this enormous experiment done on the lives of literally 8 billion people. And it largely fails. In the poorest parts of the world, you see seroprevalence

rates, seroprevalence meaning what fraction of the population have antibodies. So by July 2020, there are seroprevalence studies in Mumbai, for instance, that 70% of the Dharavi slums and other slums in Mumbai had already had the disease and recovered. In the richer parts, it was like 20%. They don't really know social sciences.

They don't really understand the deep inequality of societies. And so they don't deeply understand that most humans cannot abide a lockdown. They should understand, you know, I mean, in multiple scientific papers, 2019 WHO's own guidelines, right, that there's this huge cost to doing these types of policies,

so they should almost never be implemented, if ever, for a very short time. I hope I characterized that accurately. Yeah, that had been considered. There was a very famous 2006 paper by Donald Henderson, a very famous epidemiologist, who was responsible for eradicating smallpox. He was the man most responsible for eradicating smallpox in the 20th century, which recommended against lockdowns for exactly the reason you said. But there were other plans, like bioterror response plans

that countenance lockdown. If you listen to some of the interviews of Tony Fauci talking, when he's asked about the cost of the lockdowns, the harms of the lockdown, he said, well, other people are saying it's not my job. But, of course, no one's listening to those other people. And he's working very hard to make sure that no one listens to those other people. Especially the president of the United States, he's controlling who the president sees.

There's a big fight in the U.K UK over who the prime minister sees. So in September 2020, when Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, who wrote the Great Branch Declaration with me, she gets to go see Boris Johnson. There's a tremendous amount of unhappiness on the part of the scientific advisors like Jeremy Farrar that she got to go see him. So all the people that are saying, look, these policies that you are implementing, these lockdown policies are causing starvation at scale. 100 million people or more in dire food insecurity, according to the UN in 2020. That's causing poverty at scale, dire poverty of $2 or less of income, people staying home dying of heart attacks, none of that matters because none of those are going to get counted in the balance sheet of a man who will open Pandora's box.

Only the harm caused directly by the virus will get counted. So in order to get that policy in place, you have to suppress your opposition. You have to make an illusion that what you believe to be the right policy is the scientific consensus. Because the policy itself is so extraordinary that no one would do it unless basically every scientist agreed. The last thing you can afford is to have opposition that is credentialed, that has reasoned arguments, and really deserves a debate.

You cannot have that debate. And so you get the devastating takedown of the Great Barrington Declaration. You also get an ideology where almost every natural process that you would normally use, that normally would be trivial within science, you have to suppress that too. So imagine how Tony Fauci reacts when he finds out that in April of 2020, that 3 or 4 percent of the population of Northern California and Southern California had already had COVID. That's early in the pandemic. The lockdowns then had already failed. The idea that you get immunity after you recover from COVID is a threat to your whole agenda.

Because if 70 percent of the Taravie slums already have COVID and recovered by July 2020, they're not going to need a vaccine. Unless you can question the idea of immunity in the minds of the scientific community. You make it misinformation to say there's such a thing as immunity, recovered immunity. You also create a sense in the press that if you think that there was a lab leak, that you're a conspiracy theorist. Absolutely important, vital part of the agenda, because you open Pandora's box, you can't have people thinking you opened Pandora's box. They'll stop listening to you. The vaccine arrives, and the data from the vaccine is equivocal in the big trials. The trials didn't check to see if it protects you from dying.

That wasn't the endpoint of the trial. The trials also didn't check to see if it stops you from getting or spreading COVID. But you need the vaccine to have both those properties in order for you to be seen as a savior, for the utopian agenda that you put forward to have both those properties in order for you to be seen as a savior for the utopian agenda that you put forward to have actually worked and so even though the trial itself the only end point was prevention of symptomatic infection all of those vaccine trials not they didn't look at prevention of they didn't have as a primary endpoint the prevention of death, for instance, or the prevention of getting and spreading COVID. You have to convince the population that the vaccine will essentially sterilize you,

sterilize the virus, that you become clean if you take the vaccine, because then you can get everybody to take it, and you're going to be remembered as Jonas Salk. Except it turns out it doesn't work very well. That was the major problem, right? And they can't accept it for almost a year or more. People start very early on, they realize that if you take it, it doesn't stop you from getting the disease.

Like I took the vaccine in April 2021. Four months later, I had COVID. A tremendous number of people around the world have that same exact experience. They see for themselves the data that are coming out, you know, certainly by late spring of 2021, it was very clear that it had failed to stop people from getting and spreading COVID. And despite their best efforts, news of some of the side effects are coming, seeping out into the population. The fact that it causes myocarditis in young men is coming out. They actually freeze the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of blood clots in April of 2021,

right? If you give a vaccine at scale that's been tested in 40,000 people and then you give it to billions or hundreds of millions or tens of millions, whatever, you're going to find things that happened that you didn't see in the trial. And they're starting to happen. Even some of the stuff that you saw in the trial is starting to happen. But the problem for the people that we're talking about, the small number of scientific bureaucrats, for them that is, again, a dagger to the heart of the agenda. If everyone doesn't take this vaccine, they can't get the pandemic stopped. They can't believe with their own eyes what they ought to be seeing,

which is that the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting and spreading COVID. That's the vital thing that needs to happen, right, for their agenda to work. And it's like you so firmly believe that the sun revolves around the earth that you refuse to see the evidence that it doesn't. Right. Well, it's also because, as you've aptly described, every incentive for you and your framework is pointing in that direction. If it was the other way, it's your end. And so this explains all kinds of craziness that happened during the pandemic. Why were dissident scientists, their careers destroyed? Because if you don't have an illusion of consensus,

you can't get your way with this extraordinary agenda. Why were ideas that had almost no scientific backing prior to the pandemic and certainly during the pandemic, the idea of social distancing, for instance, no scientific evidence behind it before the pandemic, and certainly not during, especially given the way that the virus actually transmits, which is aerosols. Why were they pushed forward? Because it didn't matter the efficacy. They just wanted to throw the kitchen sink at it. They needed to close Pandora's box no matter what. They didn't have the technology. So they threw the kitchen sink at it.

Well, except the part of the kitchen sink they didn't throw at it was the part that was actually working really well, which is these repurposed drugs that all sorts of doctors started using very quickly. You have to make sure that no one believes that. Because if you have an effective cheap drug... Or 20. Or 20. However many, and we can argue over the particulars of the evidence. There are complicated literatures for all of them.

But the very existence, well, let's just take one that's completely non-controversial. You have monoclonal antibodies approved by the FDA for use. President Trump takes it when he gets COVID in October 2020. You cannot have drugs that will work in the because that means the demand for the vaccine will be undercut. Especially drugs that are developed outside of your agenda, outside of the sort of like research agenda that led to Pandora's box being opened. So every single aspect that makes no sense without this story makes some sense. You mean like even the monoclonal antibodies

not being rolled out particularly effectively, not at great scale? Yeah. Because they're not a perfect tool. Because if you have a variant, you'll have to do a reformulation of that monoclonal antibody. But you can do that very, very quickly. You can't have that because if people know, especially the most vulnerable people know, that they can just get a monoclonal antibody if they get sick,

and it greatly reduces their likelihood of death, maybe they won't take a vaccine. So the whole agenda is to close Pandora's box, to justify this decades-long research utopia, this utopian research project that Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, and a few other very, very powerful scientific bureaucrats had signed onto. Why and how has this approach become the norm? Well, I think the great political success of the people that pushed this to convince governments around the world that this was the right thing to do has created a constituency class of very

powerful people, politicians, pharmaceutical company folks, public health officials up and down the scale, people who run schools, people who run hospitals, the entire health care system signed onto this agenda. Scientists, many, many scientists signed onto this agenda, universities signed onto this agenda. The great and the good, the powerful, the wise, all signed onto this agenda, which was a tremendous mistake.

It's very difficult when you have that confluence of power that has made an error of such a grand level that caused so much catastrophic harm to back down from it. And so hence why we have the WHO treaty and international health regulations as they are. Presumably that's what you're going to argue next. Yes, indeed. You know me too well, I think. Maybe I'm too predictable nowadays. But I think the

international health regulations and the WHO treaty are a way to essentially institutionalize this paradigm of how to manage pandemics going forward. The premise of them is that there was too much national sovereignty. You can't have a Sweden next time that bucks the agenda. The problem was that we didn't work together as a world fast enough to lock down. So the WHO, early in the pandemic, they sent a delegation to China, I think February 2020. China had locked down Wuhan and the Hubei province in January 2020. And they declared it was a great success. They locked people in their apartments.

They couldn't come out and get food. They killed cats and dogs. They essentially made an entire province unable to function for a month and some, and then declared that it had been an enormous success. They'd eradicated the disease. WHO sent a delegation to China in February 2020, and they came back. Tony Fauci's aide, Cliff Lane, was on this delegation. They came back from this delegation, and there's an email from Cliff Lane to Maria Van Kerkhove, who's the chief

epidemiologist, or one of the main epidemiologists at WHO, where he writes that what China did worked, albeit at great cost. We need to make decisions, but it's going to take more than just the people in this room. We're going to make difficult decisions, but it's going to take more than just the people in this room. The WHO rubber-stamped the Chinese response to the virus. You know, this is something we've discussed as well, that we were looking at, through a whole bunch of different sources early in the pandemic,

there was a lot of various evidence, aside from the official statistics, of course, which are always fraudulent, of actually a lot of death. I think orders of magnitude understates that if you compare it to the official statistics, the official statistics were comically bad. And a lot of American, you know, I can't, Johns Hopkins, I think, just carry those statistics credulously, which I also found to be incredibly bizarre. In the United States, we were counting anybody who'd had a positive COVID test, you know, some weeks before death as if you died of COVID automatically, when in fact you might have had a heart attack while having COVID, right? They may not have been causally linked necessarily,

and yet we were counting those as COVID deaths. In China, they were requiring that you have had ground glass pneumonia, a very stringent set of standards before they would count you as having died of COVID. Well, because the incentives structure, as we've just been discussing here, was to show that someone had it. So maybe actually explain that. Why? Because everything was stacked to count as many cases as possible. How does that fit into your theory? Well, I mean, so if you're going to, if you're going to lock down until the, until vaccine, you better scare the living daylights out of the population. And death counts are a great way to scare the living daylights. I mean, you know, they didn't have to work that hard. COVID really is a deadly disease in older people, right? It's not, there's

not, but at the same time, how do you keep it in the news? Well, you keep it in the news by, by a steadily increasing number of cases, a steadily increasing number of deaths cumulative, maps that look like a video game where red circles pop up. You scare the living daylights out of the population to gain compliance. And what you're describing makes a lot of sense, because if you can show a quote unquote credible success story in lockdowns in China,

that justifies doing it here in the first place. It doesn't matter how preposterous the numbers were in reality. That's very interesting and terrible. Well, I think the idea that the West should copy Chinese health policy, authoritarian health policy. I remember reading a piece where Neil Ferguson, who's the man who famously predicted that two million people would die in the United States within two months of March

2020, 100,000 people would die in Sweden, a half million people would die in the UK, unless they did lockdown. It's one of these math models where you can pretend that you just keep people six feet apart and the disease goes away. So he was interviewed by, I forget which newspaper, where he expressed absolute shock that his idea of a society-wide lockdown actually was embraced by the West. He said the Italian experience really transformed how people thought in Europe and I guess in the United States about how to manage the pandemic.

It's one thing for China to lock down, but for a Western country that has civil rights protections, that has deep traditions and experience of managing pandemics in a much more rational way, where you protect the vulnerable and you don't disrupt society. Such a thing where you could lock down could happen in the West was a real surprise even to Neil Ferguson. And that idea spread pretty rapidly. I think the panic in Wuhan was important, but once the panic spread to Bergamo, once it spread to New York, our fate

was sealed. We were going to lock down. There was going to be an attempt to close Pandora's box no matter what with the most draconian public health policy that has ever implemented at scale in history. And coupled with the most dramatic erosion of civil liberties, I guess at scale. I mean, this has happened in isolated countries, for example. Venezuela comes to mind that vote communists into power.

That happens. But this was completely unprecedented. Yeah. The lockdown for years, school closures for years. You could go back in history and point to occasional school closures, local for limited periods of time. For instance, polio, they used to close schools down sometimes.

But at scale, for years worldwide, this is completely unprecedented. It's the single biggest public health disaster in history. And it's iatrogenic. I use that word a lot, but I usually explain to people what it means. Because not everybody knows. Oh, yeah.

Iatrogenic means that the doctors caused it. If you hear a doctor telling you, oh no, we have iatrogenic disease on our hands, what they mean is they probably made you sick or somebody, some doctor made you sick. Here I mean it in the context of public health. Public health created this public health disaster. Right. There's been a whole bunch of recent testimonies to the COVID Select Committee.

There's been a written testimony from Dr. Francis Collins. There's an astonishing amount of material there, and I know you've been following it quite closely. What is it that jumps out to you? And does it purely support now, of course, you're incentivized to find things that support your theory. I'm wondering if you're seeing anything that doesn't. I haven't seen anything in these FOIA releases of these emails that were happening inside the NIH that contradicts my theory.

In fact, quite a bit, I think, that supports it. So just to give you a couple of the highlights. One, it's very clear that there was a cover-up of the idea of a lab leak from the earliest days of the pandemic. Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, they spent January 2020 and February 2020 very, very concerned that there were scientists, legitimate scientists, who thought that a lab leak was the likely explanation. They convened a group of people, virologists, several who came in saying, look, a lab leak's possible, and within

a day had agreed to write a paper with the rubber stamping of Francis Collins, Tony Fauci, and so on, but not their names so that they could appear independent, and published the paper saying that the lab leak idea was proven false scientifically, that it was known with certainty that this was a wet market jump from a pangolin or something, or bat or something. I remember when I saw that paper that it changed my world, because one of the most prominent journals, medical journals in the world published something that was obviously false with a basic understanding of genetics.

Well, I should confess, so I had friends, molecular geneticists, who were telling me that it was not true, that they couldn't approve that it wasn't a lab leak, that in fact there were aspects of the viral sequence. But I'm not a molecular geneticist, and I was already embroiled in other anti-lockdown fights. I didn't really look too deeply into it in 2020. In retrospect, the idea of a lab leak being a racist theory, a conspiracy theory, those were all ginned up by the set of people that opened Pandora's box.

There's an email that's just come out from a man named David Morans. He was an aide of Tony Fauci or a collaborator of Tony Fauci. And the email says, don't send me any emails on the NIH server because it's subject to FOIA, Freedom Information Act requests. Instead, send it to my Gmail, which is not discoverable. It even uses the word smoking gun. I mean, it's like a parody of a spy ring trying to cover

something up. The only analogy I can think of is like Nixon turns out to be taping his White House conversations with the Watergate burglars or something. And the congressional committee looking over said, wait, there's a tape? That's what this revelation is like. The second revelation is Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health. In 2020, he conducted a devastating takedown of me, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta for the Great Barrington Declaration, essentially calling us pseudoscientists. Fringe epidemiologists is the word he used, right?

He composed and sang a song, put it on the NIH webpage, where he's this folksy man playing his guitar, the head of the NIH, singing about social distancing and keeping kids safe by keeping them home. There was never any good science behind it. In fact, there was good science against it. If you have an aerosolized virus, the idea of six-foot distancing is not going to save you from getting sick. The idea that closing schools is going to stop the spread of the disease

has already been debunked by the Swedish experience in spring of 2020. Sweden, despite not closing schools, had better outcomes than neighboring Finland, which had closed schools. The two public health authorities had come together, evaluated, but in the summer of 2020 issued this amazing report saying the Finnish closure of schools was a mistake, in effect.

And he's there singing this song about six-foot social distancing. In the revelations that just came out, this deposition that he gave just recently, I think, he is asked whether there's any science behind social distancing, any published papers, any reasonable kinds of things that would lead one to recommend this extraordinary public health policy at scale, this policy that led to schools closing. Because how can you have schools open if you can't sit six feet apart? That led to families not being able to say goodbye to their loved ones, right? Funerals that are online. Not being able to visit your parents when they're in a nursing home, right?

Tremendous social costs. People not celebrating graduations with their family members, not getting together for Thanksgiving or Christmas. The end of religious service. And he admits in this deposition, Francis Collins does, that there is not a single piece of scientific evidence behind it. Millions are dead. We've spent trillions of dollars. Public health did not protect the populace from COVID or from the harms of the lockdown. If you lose a war, the generals that lose a war are demoted or new generals are put in place.

Instead, what's happened in public health is that those generals, if you will, not literally, the metaphorical generals who led the public health response are being promoted. They're giving them awards. Essentially, public health has decided they did a good job during the pandemic, at least in its actions and who they're rewarding. And what that means is that this response, this catastrophic response that we face during this pandemic will happen again in our lifetimes. The new normal is lockdown until vaccine. That is how we are going to manage pandemics until there's an explicit repudiation of the doctrine by public health. It's very interesting that you've been describing this as a utopian sort of ideological hubristic position. This approach really treats

human beings kind of as automatons, where it makes sense to manipulate people into behaving in particular ways, to get particular outcomes for their own good, right? It's a kind of totalitarian mindset. I mean, absolutely. The way that, if you can step back and think about what the ideology is of this, the fundamental piece of ideology is that we're just biohazards. Human beings ought to treat each other simply as biohazards. And so all of our society should be structured around that idea.

We've restructured society so we don't have to interact with each other physically, so we don't pose physical threats to one another as biohazards. It's a utopia of separation and isolation. It's gone under the radar screen. Like we all, none of us want to get sick, right? The promise of never getting sick again, essentially living forever is a very attractive thing. Well, I'll just build on this a little bit.

Well, in a society that's become very safetyist, that puts an inordinate value on personal safety. You can kind of imagine what you described as being much more attractive than it would have been in a society that isn't so obsessed, let's say, with personal safety. The idea that we can rid the world of all the pathogenic risks is an insane idea. What it leads to is isolation and dehumanization.

The unfortunate fact about being humans is that we do sometimes pass diseases to each other. But that's not our primary purpose as human beings. Our primary purpose as human beings is we gain from each other. We gain much more than we lose from being in community with each other. And the idea that we should structure communities essentially to promote isolation, to prevent bio-risk, is a fundamentally dehumanizing thing.

It's not actual safety. So on that note, what do we do about it? Let's say the theory is correct, okay. So here we are. So I think it's going to take a political movement to undo it. The fact is that the generation of people that made the decisions politically have an incentive to say that they did the right thing. President Biden is never going to say that they did the right thing. President Biden is never going to say he made any pandemic mistakes. It was all Trump's fault.

Trump is never going to say that the lockdown was a mistake or the vaccine, rapidly pushing the vaccine through testing was a mistake. Those were all great things that he did by his light. Politicians are never going to say that, and if they do say they made a mistake, many of them what they say is that we weren't acting rapidly enough. If we'd only locked down a week earlier, even though the virus was probably abroad in the world in November 2019. If only we locked down a week before March 2020.

So what you have then is you need a new generation of political leaders that are willing to look back and say, we don't want a society based on the idea that we are only biohazards. That the scientific leaders who shut down debate, that pushed censorship at scale in media and social media, those scientific leaders need to be replaced not just with new scientific leaders, but a restructuring of how science is funded so that it's fundamentally decentralized, so that a small number of people never again

has the capacity to accrue to itself the kind of power it had during this pandemic. You know, one of the things that just strikes me about this, it's interesting, you say everyone says it's someone else's fault. Well, we're here in D.C. There's a lot of that that happens here. I think we have to overcome that. Yeah, and I think that that's just the nature of being human, right? So you've got, I don't know, like in the Garden of Eden, you have Eve convinces Adam to eat the apple. And of course Adam makes the decision to eat the apple. And when God comes around, the first thing Adam says is,

well, she made me do it, as if it wasn't his fault. I mean, I think that that is part of being human. There's no way to solve that problem, right? But we need structures that hold people responsible. At the very least, if they make catastrophic errors of this type, then to replace them with different people. And we need structures that create incentives for people to do the right thing, even if their inclinations are not to do the right thing. Well, this is what I'm saying.

Of course, the inclination will be to not get in trouble, not avoid. But this is where morality comes in. And you sort of learn, well, owning up to one's mistakes is a virtue, right? Well, I think maybe I'm too cynical, but I think that the idea that we should depend on the good virtue of our leaders for them to do the right thing is an impossible thing. It will never happen. There will be good leaders who want to do the right thing. They'll sometimes do the right thing. But there always, always, always will be leaders who don't, whose inclinations are different.

What I'd rather have is a structure of power so that if you have somebody in power, they have every incentive to want to do the right thing, even if their inclination is the opposite. Well, Jay, this has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish? Well, you know, Jan, I think the political program we're talking about is going to take a while. But we do have a lot of assets that I think we have

to acknowledge and use. And the main asset being a tremendous number of people have seen the harms of the decisions that were made during the pandemic. The political program is going to have to come out of that experience. A political leader that can use that experience to unify the people will find, I think, tremendous success. And I'm not a politician. I'm not going to be a politician. But it has been interesting to me to watch the development of this, I think, around the opposition to the WHO treaty, for instance,

the opposition to the school closures. It brought together people who were in very different parts of the political coalitions, left and right, if you will, came together on these. And I think that a politician that can take those elements and weave it into a successful program will do great good for the world. Well, and just before we finish, I wanted to highlight that you do have a podcast. You mentioned the exact words earlier in the interview, the illusion of consensus. You do it with Rav Avora, young guy

who's been doing some wonderful work. And the second part is I wanted to congratulate you for winning the Bradley Prize this year. Oh, thank you. Yeah. The illusion of consensus is really, it's a fun podcast because I'm doing this as a young journalist, for winning the Bradley Prize this year. Oh, thank you. Yeah. The Illusion Consensus is really, it's a fun podcast because I'm doing this as a young journalist,

but we basically, the idea is we are going to put ideas up, interview people that were censored, that have very interesting ideas that are not getting enough attention related to pandemics and other elements of medicine. The other thing I've been working on, Jan,

is establishing a new idea of how to do scientific journals. I've been working with the RealClear Foundation on this, where rather than having peer review being a gatekeeper for new scientific ideas, what you do is you have a journal that doesn't have the kind of traditional gatekeeping, but does have the peer review. Review is the most important part of science, not the publication of science, but the review of the ideas.

And what traditional models of publishing do in science is they say, well, if you don't pass peer review, we won't publish. But in fact, what that does is it protects a relatively small number of top scientists, their reputations, sparing them criticism. With this new journal model, you can publish, but you're going to get reviewed.

It'll be a much more raucous and interesting science with much less capacity for illusion of consensus. A bit more old school in a way. Yeah, exactly. Well, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you on again. Thank you, Jan. 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