American Thought Leaders - The New Biosecurity State: Former UN Top Official Ramesh Thakur on How Science Became Dogma

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

“We have seen … the transformation of the quintessential liberal democratic state into the national security state, then the administrative state, then the surveillance state, and now the biosecurity state. At each of these developments, you have an expansion of state power, and the spread of the state tentacles into increasingly intimate areas of public life and individual life,” says Ramesh Thakur.Mr. Thakur is a former United Nations assistant secretary-general and professor emeritus of public policy at The Australian National University. Now he is a Brownstone Institute senior scholar.How has science become dogma? How do we rebuild what was broken these last few years?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

There is a change in values, shift in emphasis from individual rights to collective rights, and overemphasis, in my view, on safety and the demands by people on their governments to keep them safe, to make it impossible for others to hurt your feelings. Feeling hurt is literal violence, microaggression, the whole thing. Today I sit down with Ramesh Thakur, former United Nations Assistant Secretary General and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Now, he's a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar.

It was sacrilege to question it. It was heresy to question it. And the new priesthood enforcing this heresy was the public health authorities. How do we rebuild what was broken? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yannick Kellick. Ramesh Thakur, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's a pleasure to be here.

Let's start with this. Of course, you wrote the book, Our Enemy, the Government, provocatively titled. One of the things that you said, which really caught my attention, is you felt like if 10%—I don't know if it was doctors or medical professionals— rejected what seemed to be obviously wrong directives coming from on high, that the whole structure of compliance would have collapsed. And I don't know if I can accept that easily, but I want you to explain to me why you believe that. Okay, sure. If we step back in time, one of the features of current society is the rise of the professional associations and the regulatory colleges that regulate the practicing people in their professions, accountants, lawyers, doctors. And during

the COVID era, these regulatory bodies were very useful for the state and were instrumentalized to ensure compliance and so any doctor who questioned publicly what was being demanded by the authorities the public health authorities and then through the colleges could be disciplined now in profession, as a rough and ready calculation, I think a 10% threshold of dissent is very critical because once you get to that level, they cannot function by cancelling a full 10% and they cannot get away by saying this is a very tiny minority view. Think of the famous or infamous 97% consensus settled science on climate emergency. If you don't get people speaking up, that illusion can be sustained almost indefinitely.

But if 10% of the scientists start saying, wait a minute, we don't actually agree with that, we have these questions, then the public attention shifts to, well, what is it they're saying they are fully credentialed as well so if the doctors and specialists had been able to speak out and that many of them did they couldn't cancel them all and they couldn't get away by insisting that only the cranks and the nutters and the tin foil headers were the dissidents So that's where I picked that up. Now, it may be not 10%, but 15%, we won't know. But 10% is a pretty significant number. The reason they got away with that, I think, is the censorship and shadow banning and suppression. That's where the censorship industrial complex comes in. Because the doctors who were dissenting didn't know how many others

were speaking out. And that made it much, it required much more courage than for any individual doctor to put his or her head above the parapet. That's the argument. You're speaking right into one of my favorite topics, which is how powerful the vision of perceived consensus, the perception of perceived consensus, that the correct view or the right view or the one that most people really believe is something, and how this censorship or another name for it is the disinformation industrial complex, is really able, that is its true powers, it's able to shape that both through this one side, the censorship, and through the one side, the censorship, and through

the other side, the propaganda. And the reason for that is that throughout this period, they were promulgating and relying on the authority of following the science. And therefore, they needed that illusion of more or less clear consensus amongst the scientists. But in fact, if in fact scientists and some of the leading credential scientists were dissenting, then that makes it more different. Which is why, going back to the Great Barrington Declaration, the description of the three people,

these are senior well-established epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, world leading figures and to describe them as fringe epidemiologists was important in order to destroy their credential and to say you know these are not as they're on the fringe they don't count really we've got all everyone else agreeing with it and silence from everyone else was projected as consent in the profession. But they never actually surveyed that. So that goes back to the same phenomenon. And indeed, I was actually going to ask you, because I felt the Great Barrington Declaration

was one of these things where I don't know if it hit the 10 percent threshold, but it was a significant group of people that signed on and said no. But because of this machine, those voices were not heard. Yes and no. I think they're not allowed to be heard. And the shadow banning was very effective, including with Jay Bhattacharya himself. But it's interesting how many people kept referencing that and saying, but you've got, what was it, 50,000, 60,000 health professionals and doctors who have signed on to that.

They can't all be wrong, surely, as well as the general citizens. I mean, I was an early signatory, but obviously I wasn't in the medical health professional category. So they did succeed in limiting their spread and disseminating their influence, but I think the number of signatories was actually important for validating a lot of criticism and dissent. So it wasn't in vain? It was... Oh, absolutely not. Right, right.

No, I agree with that as well. I would like to do a Google search month by month from when it came out and see just how many times it was actually referenced and of course you can only do that when the stop shadow banning and stop suppressing the search engine right well you know so let's talk about that let's talk about your background because you said you were not a medical professional and indeed that's true but you do have a very very interesting past and a very interesting vantage point on all of this. So tell me about that. And of course you were

a very senior figure at the United Nations. I'll give people a hint. But how did you get there? Well, that's an interesting question. I was involved in this topic tangentially through a series of different contexts. First of all, as a shorthand, my major professional background is as a specialist on global governance. So I co-wrote a book that is a major, the major book I think on global governance with Tom Weiss from the Graduate Centre at the City University of New York, Global Governance and an Unfinished Journey, which was on the role of the United Nations at the hub or centre of global governance. And one of the chapters was actually on health and pandemics including substantial section on the WHO so that is one at the United Nations University where I was the senior vice-rector we operated on a globally

dispersed faculty system so think of a regular University but if the faculties are located in different countries around the world in different continents. And we established and created some new ones. One of those was an institute on global health which we located in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. And so as part of that effort, again, we looked into this topic and where it is that the UN University could come in in terms of connecting the need in terms of capacity building in many developing countries with the expertise that is available mostly in the advanced industrial economies and which subjects we look at. So again, that's the second aspect through which I was interested.

The third one was when I was still in the UN system and more intensely after I left, I was involved in the effort led by a small group of people in Canada under the sponsorship and encouragement of former Prime Minister Paul Martin, who, with Larry Semmers, Treasury Secretary here in the States, had been responsible for creating the Finance Minister's G20 after the financial crisis in 1997. And then he became Prime Minister.

His experience indicated that the intimacy and personal relationship between the Finance Ministers was very important in getting agreement amongst them on what needed to be done and once they were agreed and had a vision and a strategy they could then use their authority and office as minister to try and overcome bureaucratic and institutional resistance within their individual systems so he said what if we could do this at the leaders level? Would it be possible to get together the leaders of some of the most systemically important countries,

put them together for a day or two in an intimate setting, just a small number, and then the number we were looking at was 14 or 15, and then get the agreement amongst them as the most effective, possibly the most effective way to break the deadlocks and impasse within their own systems and get global agreements. And which are the major topics then that we need to look at or the leaders would need to look at? And as part of that, which is a crisis in which area that might trigger the need for such an elevation from finance ministers to heads of government and heads of state? nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, WMD terrorism, financial crisis, which is the one that actually triggered it in 2008 or 2009, whenever it was. And pandemics was another one.

So we actually looked at pandemics as a potential trigger to elevating that grouping to that. So from all these areas, I was familiar with respect to pandemics as a global governance issue. But through that, I became familiar with the national pandemic preparedness plans, because one of the things we kept saying in the UN system, and kept saying it even after I had left, was that it's a matter of when rather than whether. We will have a pandemic sooner or later and when it strikes we will not be able to respond to it unless we have prepared in advance how to identify, how to coordinate and what it is that we need to do. And that was summarized quite succinctly in September 2019, so it's only shortly before we have a pandemic declared,

by the WHO in a report. And one of the striking conclusions in that was what they called NPIs, non-pharmaceutical interventions, which things like lockdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing, all these things, closing businesses and making people stay at home. NPIs are not recommended. It was very clear that they don't work, they cause harms, they are disruptive to society

and to the economy. People may resent it and resist it, And if the resistance is fairly widespread, the authority of the government might collapse. And at best, if you need to enhance your hospital capacity or your ICU capacity, you may consider these measures for a very short limited term, like one week or two weeks. To stop the spread. To stop the spread.

To stop the spread, ramp up your capacity. But the longer you leave it, the more damage you cause through that process and the more you risk a return of the problem later on. So don't do it. So when the pandemic was declared in early 2020 and they went for these measures, I was puzzled. So I wanted to look at why they had done it. Was there a new science? Well, science doesn't advance quite like that.

It takes time to develop and get consensus on that. Was there significant new data that contradicted the earlier advice? Well, we had some data that was important in the way it was used by the medical authorities, but that had come from Wuhan in China. And with all due respect, I think we needed to cross-check some of that data because it was not the most reliable source from where it was coming. To say it nicely. To say it nicely. Well, you know, the UN training. So, I didn't accept that we should have reacted in quite that panic mode with such drastic measures without first seeing was it justified. Now, I had retired from the university position by then.

I had not accepted any other position. And as part of the retirement, I had retired from the university position by then. I had not accepted any other position. And as part of the retirement, I had also refused to accept new assignments, whether it's writing or reviewing manuscripts or whatever. So I had the time and it also meant I had the freedom. They could not cancel me. They could not sack me because I was already retired. And the third element that was important was because of my background, I had some platforms for disseminating my

views and some research skills for matching data and theory to policy. And so I used my access to some publications to start asking questions and essentially saying why are we doing this have we factored in the long-term harm that we can predict is going to be caused by these measures is this crisis really as bad as they're claiming where is the evidence for that and in particular people forget that we actually had as close to an actual experiment as you could get with the Diamond Princess cruise ship because when the pandemic broke out and it arrives from Hong Kong in Yokohama port in Japan you have this

ideal conditions for the spread of an infectious disease. Confined quarters, essentially elderly clientele, existing in closed quarters. One person gets infected. Before you know that you have a crisis, they have interacted with how many others. And yet at the end of that, a small proportion were infected and an even smaller proportion died from it.

And then later on, you also have the American warship, the Eisenhower, and the French warship, the Charles de Gaulle. Now you have the opposite end of the spectrum. You have, by definition, healthy, fit, active-duty, young soldiers. And you can see that the disease is not all that serious for them. So the claims of a once in a century emergency, and this is the worst thing we've had since the Spanish flu

and is comparable to Spanish flu. Well, again, not many people may realize that about one third of the total fatalities from the Spanish flu were amongst Indians. So this is something that I was familiar with from that. And it just didn't make sense. And the third element that was very striking about COVID from the very start was the exceptionally steep age gradient. You look at the Western countries typically the mortality with COVID is either at or even above the average life expectancy and so you look at that and you say and you go back to the Great Barrington Declaration they

made that point that you're looking at a thousand-fold difference between the elderly and the young and then later on we get confirmation that it's not just the age but the existence of comorbidities if you have underlying serious health conditions then you're more vulnerable if you're a healthy person even at age 70 with not a single underlying health condition, you're unlikely, very unlikely to die even if infected. So the gravity did not measure up. Why then these extreme measures? And why not factor in the consequences?

And have you done your quality assessment, the quality-adjusted life years and the harms, cost-benefit analysis? Well, and the intervention of us, of course, blowing up the world economy. It was. Right. So it's a significant intervention, I guess, for what you're describing. Including the interruptions to the childhood immunization programs around the world.

People just overlooked the damage this was going to cause in the developing world, which is the majority of the world community. And that was my major interest. So I found that very shocking, the extent to which we just ignored the damage we were going to cause that could be predicted and was predicted by key parts of the UN system like UNICEF, like the World Food Program, like the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and even the IMF and the World Bank were saying this is going to cause immense damage and the education losses that will, you know, we have a 375 million pandemic generation of children who've had schoolings interrupted for two or three years and that's just in

India, that's not a global figure. So the consequences were there, and they were predicted, and by key parts of the UN system. So it wasn't just fringe bodies saying it. It was authority. You know, you have some absolutely, I think, brilliant thoughts on why this happened, why the compliance. Why wasn't there this 10% really in different fields? How did this all unfold?

So let's jump into that. Well, in June or so of 2020, one of the two main national Argentinian papers, they did a long interview with me, which was a Sunday feature and it was a full page feature. So it was a 3000 word article they wrote. surprised you most with the pandemic so far? And I remember my answer was I've been surprised at how easily the advanced western democracies with universal literacy ended up complying with the most serious assault on civil liberties and political freedoms and human rights in our history. Why is it that people complied so easily? One thing we covered earlier was the censorship and the unawareness of the extent to which

the professionals were actually dissenting but were not allowed to say it and could not share their dissent with each other. But the other element I think is we have seen two parallel developments. One is the transformation of the quintessential liberal democratic state into the national security state, then the administrative state, then the surveillance state, and now the biosecurity state. At each of these developments you have an expansion of state power and the spread of the state tentacles into increasingly intimate areas of public life and individual life. And they

are able to subvert the will of the legislature as the body that makes laws by delegating more and more powers to the experts and to the bureaucrats and the expert class has in a sense combined that old American definition of tyranny and started exercising legislative, executive, and even judicial or semi-judicial. And think of some of the recent court cases in the United States where they have taken on, you know, the court has started to strike back at overreach and abuse by parts of the bureaucracy. So there's that element. But equally, there is a change in values, a shift in emphasis from individual rights to collective rights, and overemphasis, in my view,

on safety and the demands by people on their governments to keep them safe, to make it impossible for others to hurt your feelings. Feeling hurt is literal violence, microaggression, the whole thing. And then you end up with a situation where there are demands that you can change your sex or gender by simply declaring that you feel like a woman and therefore you are a woman and you're not just allowed but you demand that everyone else calls you by your new name and refers to you by the new pronoun and if they're misgendering you, laws will be passed and enforced and you can be punished either financially or even be jailed. So this whole transformation of the very basis of society, the core values and shared ideological frameworks that constitute a community and then the use of state power to enforce that. And this has been done, I think, by a minority, but an active minority that work through the classroom at school and universities to change the nature of education

from education to indoctrination, reduce thought diversity, enforce intellectual conformity and progressively punish and silence and delegitimize dissenting voices. And so the very nature of universities has been subverted, not just changed, because this is where critical inquiry should flourish and questions should be asked and you can have a healthy vigorous debate including among students and between students and professors and instead we go on the other way and that creates an environment that is much more permissive to changing reality by law,

whether it accords with the objective reality or not, to enforcing through law the new normal with regard to beliefs and value systems and social practices, elevating the collective over the individual, which is a fundamental basis for breaching human rights, which in the Western tradition have been individual centric. And saying, we will put you and all of you under house arrest, even though you have committed no crime, and you are healthy, because we fear that what is happening in Wuhan has the potential to kill us all.

And to keep me safe, I will demand that you must be vaccinated. Well, think it through. If the vaccine's work is protecting me, I'm vaccinated. It doesn't matter whether you are or not. But no, no, no, that idea itself I find offensive. And you're being very selfish. And you have no right to bodily integrity to protect me and the rest of us, you must be protected. So it was, I think, a long gestation and spread through the institutions. And now you have in the public sector, in Congress

and parliamentary systems, in the executive, in the corporate sector, in the sporting bodies, in the cultural elite. The professional and managerial class is dominated by people with very similar views. And so the professional perspective, which used to be different, and journalists would be critical of governments and work on the premise that all governments lie. That's how they operate instead you have very shared world views and cooperation without any need for coercion and commercial although that did come obviously but in protect in promoting these values and these beliefs and and de legitimizing anyone who disagrees as

deplorable as the great unwashed whatever you want to call it. And I think without that it would have been much, much more difficult to succeed with the extent of coercion led by governments through the censorship industrial complex and so on. So that is my effort to solve this particular puzzle as to why people who should have been much more critical and professions that should have been much more critical in fact went along with the compliance. It was seen as the right thing to do, as the moral thing to do and therefore if you resisted, you are a nutter, you are a fringe person,

you are evil, you are immoral. And it was right to silence you and to punish you. Well, and reality be damned. Absolutely. Right. And that's very interesting. Of course, you're talking about this ascendant woke. I'll use that. There's different names, right? Critical social justice ideology, woke ideology.

There's this idea that the reality is constructed through language. Absolutely. Right, and it's so central to the, and I think some of this minority that believes it actually believes this, some of them at least, and some are opportunistic, obviously. And they exploited, again, the basic human instinct to be decent, to be tolerant, to accept people for who they are. That, at some stage and through some processes that the behavioral scientists will have to look at,

changed into demands for compulsion and coercion and stuff like that. And that's where the danger came in. And that's, I think, also what happened in this regard too. So this kind of transformation from something being a health question to being a moral question, for example. I think that was very important. The was a, the first major research along those lines that came out was funnily enough from my old university in New Zealand, the University of Otago, where they studied and they established or they found that the strongest

motivation was they were seeing it not as a health issue but as a moral issue. You are a part of society, you are part of this community. It is your moral duty to help the community survive and got translated in short form into don't be a granny killer. But that idea that we must put on a mask because otherwise everyone else feels unsafe and that's not right. It's just a small price to pay. And we saw that argument repeatedly that it's just a minor inconvenience and only for a short time. What's your problem? Don't be so selfish. So these elements I think were very important to that and I actually say in the book that at some

stage in fact the moralization was transformed into a deeper sacralization, which meant you couldn't even question it. It was sacrilege to question it. It was heresy to question it. And the new priesthood enforcing this heresy was the public health authorities. And it does have a kind of religious quality to it. And I suspect, although not being religious myself, I haven't delved deeply into it, but I suspect the decline of faith and practice, religious practice, may be an

important background factor also. Because it does seem to me that as human beings we need that core fundamental belief and value system that constitutes a community of shared beliefs and values. And religion has been the essential underpinning of society and community to get to that stage. So if you start assaulting and dismantling religion, that need can only be satisfied by something equivalent. And certainly you can make the case that something like the climate activism, in many respects, it seems to behave like a cult.

And the same thing happened with this as well. It becomes a set of beliefs that are beyond question, self-evidently true. And if you question it, therefore, it's not because you're trying to find out genuinely, but it's because you're evil. You are not worth listening to. In fact, we will silence you and, if necessary, imprison you.

That becomes the, and it's hard to explain other than in terms of a religious fervor. So yes, I think that there is an argument along those lines. You know, you're just reminding me of something, and this was only a headline I read. I didn't look into the, I didn't look into the article, but you're reminding me, you know, I noticed I recently signed on to the Westminster Declaration, sort of free speech as a virtue, let's say. And I noticed Richard Dawkins, Professor Richard Dawkins is also signatory. I never imagined I would be a co-signatory with him. I always imagined him a brilliant scientist, but what I never liked about him is a very kind of anti-religion posture. I think faith and religion is very important in people's lives. So anyhow, but the headline I saw was he was saying, I think it might

have been by a Christian publication, and they were saying, well, even Richard Dawkins is not as negative to Christianity anymore because it could be replaced by something worse. I mean, that would be his framing, right? And I didn't read the article, but it made me wonder if precisely these sorts of questions that you're just describing, right? Religion has performed incredibly positive roles in binding peoples together in regulating conduct along human dimensions through social mores which have the origins in a lot of religious beliefs as well but at the same time some of our most destructive conflicts have been between different religions as well. So this duality is part of human reality in so

many different dimensions. But I think in our focus on the destructive aspects, we have overlooked the unifying, positive, sustaining values of religion through communities and it forms an important source of work you know now unlike Richard Dawkins that again I'm not I mean I might not be religious myself but I have never had any difficulty accepting other people with strong religious beliefs and value systems and being allowed if they want to to being allowed, if they want to, to practice that the way they want to, and they should be. Most of my, in fact, pretty much all the rest of my family is deeply religious, and I would

certainly never, knowingly or deliberately, do anything to offend the religious sensibilities of any community. That's fine, and I acknowledge the positive role. And an anecdotal observation, and that has been kind of verified by a number of people who have been kind of looking at this, is that people with deep faith seem to be somehow more resilient to this facade of consensus and pressure to conform,

which is interesting. I don't know if you've observed that. No, I think it's true. But in addition, people with deep religious convictions tend to project a greater element of calmness and serenity. Think about it. Think of the Dalai Lama in terms of how he comes across things. And it is important, I think. And when we have times of trouble, we do look to authority figures. If we have a medical problem, we might look to the doctor and the family. One of the great losses is the loss of the family GP idea. And this all become commercialized, even the medical profession.

But we do that. And in terms of troubled soul or conscience or things, we do, as an instinct, want to be able to approach the priest or someone equivalent to wrestle through these difficult questions, all the way to the big questions of meaning of life and death versus other aspects and if that is broken what else can take its place and how do you prevent your young people

your own children or the young people in society generally, how do you prevent them from being seduced by the darker elements as substitutes for religion as a positive element? Well, and many people have argued that, including, I'm thinking, John McWhorter, he wrote his whole book explaining critical race theory as a religion, I believe. But wokeism seems to be this substitute, or one of these substitutes, exactly of what you're talking about. It seems like that, but I'm too much for different generations.

Even though I've lived in the West now for the 2 thirds of my life, it's still very hard for me to get obsessed over essentially first world problems. You know, being confronted by the literal violence of words in a classroom is a bit of a luxury belief when I've studied professionally mass atrocities in so many countries and visited places with our symbols and abiding it now you're from Poland I went to the place where Willy Brandt spontaneously went down on his knees to apologize on behalf of Germany for the Holocaust and what was done to the

Polish Jews and I it's a very touching very simple but very very touching memorial and I happen to go shortly after that to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and I actually wrote an article for the Japan Times saying how much foreign policy and internal soul-cleansing benefit would Japan get if a Japanese Prime Minister were to do something similar go to Nanjing the thing about the Willy Brandt gesture was the authenticity it communicated. You can see that in the images, you could pretty much see it on his face the dawning realization that the enormity of what they had done. If a Japanese Prime Minister could do something similar, it would be important

internally for Japanese society and it will be enormously beneficial in terms of making it possible to repair relations, not just for China, but also with South Korea in terms of what they had done. So I think these are again important elements that go back to the shared humanity, which is an obviously that's a very important underpinning principle for me that I want to be able to make it possible to improve lives and enable

the realization of the full potential of every human being. You should not be denied that opportunity because of your race, because of your gender, because of your gender, because of your nationality, because you are poor. And one of the great things we have done in Western society is the democratization of

access to the full potential of living as a human being. And another episode we could do together is how a whole lot of people seem to be hell bent on stopping that. And of course, arguably, even this whole pandemic response could be a part of that, some people have argued. They take for granted something that is actually quite exceptional in human history, the present position they find themselves in. We have, as a society, never been wealthier, better educated, more prosperous, living longer, et cetera. And a lot of these benefits came through the scientific progress and the invention of different aspects that allowed us, freed us from being tied to the land,

which then freed us from servitude to the landlord and the feudal lord, and so on. And education was a pathway to escape all sorts of problems. The bicycle and the car enabled women to be freed from servitude in the home. So there's been tremendous progress and we tend to overlook the progress made and obsess about we have an evil past and we must keep apologizing for the present and therefore the only future we can look to is one of managed decline rather than continued expansion of stable, prosperous societies as free human beings. And encouraging human flourishing. I love this term. We're going to have to finish fairly soon, but I want to catch a couple of things here.

One, and this theme has come up a few times. You like to use a term I like to use I noticed which is science TM. Yeah. And so what's the difference between science TM and science briefly? Science TM is that cult-like semi-religious elevation of putting something on a pedestal and beyond question, turning it into the equivalent of an altar, if you like, and you're not allowed to question it. And it has its own priesthood and its heretics and heresy is punishable. Science without the capital S and without TM is what has made human progress possible. Obviously again with that duality

it comes with some risks and some dangers. No better example than nuclear energy. If you're worried about intermittency in your energy security and long-term stability. We have sufficient confidence in the safety features of nuclear reactors now that nuclear power is actually a very good solution long term in terms of reliable assured energy and it is used in nuclear medicine. I've had that used in a life-saving situation in my own country many

Thousands if not millions of people have had that as well, but obviously Both on the accidental side and on the weapon side there are risks So science is part of that science and technology can be harnessed To make lives better. They have given us a wonderful connectivity and communications. But there are dangers in that as well. But to elevate that beyond criticism destroys the essence of science.

You must be able and free to question. Any scientific doctrine that cannot be questioned changes from science to dogma so we're back to the religion again and that was happens with the science TM so when dr. Anthony Fauci says by attacking me they're attacking science he's falling into that trap of elevating science with a lowercase s into science with a capital capital capital and tm and that's where i think in his case things started to go wrong as well he he did become too dogmatic i think you mentioned that as human beings we look to authority and one of those

authorities of course is a doctor you know your doctor is supposed to help you with your health and chart your path. And through this pandemic, many of us realized, can we really trust our doctors? How are they making their decisions? Are they really upholding the Hippocratic oath? Do they even understand what the informed consent would be, for example, for these genetic vaccines, you know. And so there's a whole lot of people out there that are just wondering to themselves, who do I trust for my health even? Well, of course, and there's, you know, there's groups that have come out of ethical doctors, there's people relying on their own research, you know. By the way, I'm just remembering the demonization of do your own research, right? I did my own research. Absolutely, yes. But, so what, in this sort of scenario, you said something very pointed, and I want to

get you to bring that back here. Sure. About what, when you're looking for a doctor, what should you do? It's, you know, on the demonization part, if I'm healthy and I have committed no crime why would you why would I agree to you putting me under house arrest you being the government I started with that and then we went on to well the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship the sanctity of the Hippocratic oath, first do no harm. Or make sure you don't do more harm than good

by your intervention. I will stick to Australia because it's a country I know much better than the US. But we have amongst the best medical systems. We train our doctors to a very high standard, which is a world standard I have my GP as a family GP that doctor has the skills and the training and the qualifications that are amongst the best in the world that doctor knows my history my family's case history, knows me individually, I have a certain level of

confidence and trust in my doctor. No other person can substitute for that anywhere near a level of confidence required. It is not the role of the government to insert itself between the doctor and the patient. But that is what we have seen through this. And we have also seen and we have now documented in several countries a fairly substantial decline of public confidence and trust in pretty much all the major institutions, including the scientists, including doctors, including the media, including government. And part of that is because they stopped doctors from giving their best assessment and prescribing the best treatment for their patient. And part of

that loss of trust then is if I have a problem, I go to the doctor and if it's a major emergency like COVID where they are under instructions, I would want my first question to be are you going to be able to give me your individual honest opinion based on your assessment of my symptoms my case history and your knowledge of the treatment options are you in a position where you can actually deal with me as an individual free of interference from your college or the government. If not, I prefer to go to another doctor. Because they were not allowed to say what they wanted to say, and in some cases because some of the patients actually doped them in and said, you know, my doctor said masks don't work

or vaccines don't work and the doctor gets into trouble. So that contributed to the loss of trust and confidence in the system and I think in these conditions it is wise to ask the doctor upfront, are you going to be able to give me an honest opinion or not? Just as if I go to a doctor with a symptom and the doctor reacts with panic oh my god I've never seen something like this I you might be dead in the next hour I think it's time to look for another doctor it's the job of the doctor to reassure you convey the thing it is serious I don't want to

understate it but these are the risks these are the options this is what I would recommend if you have doubts or further questions it might be good if you consulted a second opinion or a third opinion so that has been the norm second opinion has been good and yet on some of the most important issues suddenly under COVID you're not even allowed to go and ask for a second opinion and you're not allowed to express a second opinion. So those long-term have been I think very very damaging to public confidence and trust and without that element of trust in the public institutions again you cannot sustain a viable society. So we need to start rebuilding and that's why I like the theme of the conference this year

you know rebuilding freedoms but also rebuilding trust and confidence in institutions that we now believe serve our interests and not the interests of the professional class or the people with power and money. Well, you know, something that just strikes me, thinking through our whole discussion right now, you know, for someone who has written the book Our Enemy, the Government, you're a lot more pro-government than I expected. Back to the duality, Ian. A government is both the solution and the problem. Think of human rights. The biggest protector of human rights is the government machinery through the legislative framework, through setting up human rights bodies to monitor and check abuses

wherever they might come from. But the institution with the greatest potential to threaten human rights is the government. We've talked about China. Which is the biggest threat to human rights in China? It's the state. It's the government. But in terms of other human rights,

like education and poverty and anti-discrimination, you still need the legislative framework. So there are not that many absolutes in life. And it becomes important to recognize the boundaries and promote the good parts and mute the bad parts. Well, and it goes back to what everything I've been learning about the U.S. Constitution, which I've come to believe was crafted in a very ingenious way to protect people from government. It was.

Which was necessary, which was clearly necessary. And the separation of powers which had been circumvented by the different things of the state. So it's things like law and order, tax as the price for civilization, infrastructure, health system. United States is a country that spends disproportionately more per capita on health, but actually has worse health outcomes than many other comparable countries in the Western world.

So clearly there's some problem there. I think that from what I know, the most efficient health outcomes are some sort of crossover between good basic public health supplemented by access to private health if need be. So we do need to, and that might differ from in one context to another, but I would have been much happier if we had not wasted so much money in our responses to the COVID and contributed so enormously to the problems of inflation and cost of living that has happened. And instead use that money to build up the health systems rather than pay people to do nothing from work. Well, so last question, you know, very short thought.

You know, you have a very unique vantage point, I think, from anyone I've spoken with. Given the challenges and the resistance at all different levels to addressing this, the doubling down that we're seeing on these policies, which you mentioned, in 2019 would have been considered, at least in the literature, crazy. What is one step towards some sort of reform or renewal? I'm not sure there is a short answer to that. But let me go back.

I mentioned my professional interest in mass atrocities. In some ways, you can think of what happened as an example of mass atrocity in terms of taking away people's choices and freedoms and forcing them into things and Throwing them out of the jobs if they refused to comply and so on and so forth and you have a breakdown into victims and perpetrators in atrocities and You need to protect the victims but you also need to apprehend and punish the perpetrators. And that is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, that sense of justice is a very powerful instinct in human beings.

And again, you cannot have any functioning society that is viable if you don't have mechanisms and procedures for identifying people who commit crimes and punishing them appropriately. So that is important to identify people who did things that amount, that in some cases satisfy the threshold of criminality in behaviour and then punish them because otherwise justice is not appeased. Second, it is important in order to bring emotional closure, if not to victims who may be dead, then to their families and loved ones. That closure cannot come until such time as people have admitted to having been wrong, committed acts that they shouldn't have, committed acts that approach the threshold of criminality.

And then you can have that closure. That can take different forms. In atrocities, you have different forms of justice. Restorative justice, transitional justice. And we've seen different examples of that. So that's the second. Punishment, then emotional closure. But the third, which I think is the most important to my mind,

that is the most effective way to avoid and prevent a repetition. If they get away with it and nothing is done and we say, let's move on, it's in the past, they had the best of intentions, they were acting under conditions of imperfect information, it's over, let's move on. The danger in that is there will be no real power to them repeating it next time. It's only if you really punish them. And in atrocities, again, we have this notion of command responsibility.

You don't go after the foot soldiers. But you do charge the general or the dictator with atrocity crime, with crime against humanity, with ethnic cleansing or whatever, and put them in jail. And that sends a message. So in a sense, it's an application of the old Sun Tzu principle, but in a more positive way. You know, his argument of kill one, terrify a thousand, apprehend and jail one, and you terrify a thousand wannabe dictators in the future, I'd better not do that because otherwise I will risk imprisonment. So for these three reasons I think simply saying it's in the past, let's move on, I don't think it's possible

to move on with some confidence without an admission of guilt, identification of the guilty, and appropriate punishment of the guilty, and appropriate punishment of the guilty at the top levels, not necessarily at the foot soldier level. Very powerful words also feels like a tall order. But Ramesh Thakur, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. It's been wonderful having this conversation. And as always, the questions helped me to clarify my own thoughts and thinking on issues as well. So thank you very much.

My sincere pleasure. Thank you all for joining Dr. Ramesh Thakur and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jania Kelek.