Ask Dr. Drew - Did Lockdowns CAUSE Today's Economy Crisis? Dr. Jay Bhattacharya with Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 130

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

Did pandemic lockdowns and mandates directly fuel today's economic crisis? Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – a Stanford professor and an expert on healthcare economics – joins Dr. Kelly Victory to speak on the devastating ways that lockdowns and mandates have affected the economy and especially those living in poverty. 「 LINKS FROM THIS SHOW: https://drdrew.com/9282022 」 Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Follow Dr. Bhattacharya at https://twitter.com/drjbhattacharya 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 SPONSORED BY 」 • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She served as CMO for Whole Health Management, delivering on-site healthcare services for Fortune 500 companies. She holds a BS from Duke University and her MD from the University of North Carolina. Follow her at https://earlycovidcare.org 「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew's iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don't need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue's lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew's Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato's Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew's streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And welcome, everyone. I'm very excited about today's guest. He's one of my very favorites, Jay Bhattacharya. Jay is a academic beyond reproach at Stanford University, where he's taught medical school for many, many years. He is someone that was a close ally of the likes of Anthony Fauci and those at the infrastructure at the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Immunology. And when he dared to step forward and just question whether blanket lockdown was the optimum policy and sort of bringing out really, rather than following the Chinese Communist Party, there were some other options maybe available that would be equally, if not more, efficacious without all the downside.

Again, always in medicine, risk reward is what we're trying to figure out. And very strangely during this pandemic, that seemed to have been at least whoever was contemplating a risk-reward analysis was summarily dismissed. So, of course, Dr. Kelly Victory is here as well. We've got a lot to talk about. We'll talk about the consequences of some of these misadventures. And for me, Dr. Bhattacharya is going to be the poster child for the excesses of this pandemic. I'll tell you what I mean after this. Our laws as it pertain to substances

are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous. I'm a doctor for, where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment

before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. And we used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. You have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help.

I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. You're always taken care of with the sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs.

With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD, ready for you. So I want to get right to my guest, of course, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and as well at the Stanford Freeman Spoli Institute, research focusing on economics of health care. And that's what we're going to get into a little bit today because some of the choices around this pandemic had massive and persistent effects

on not just economics, but well-being of young people and mental health in this country. Jay, welcome back. Nice to be back, Drew. Thank you. So as we, I have been slowly parsing, you know, what happened and putting this thing together and trying to understand how the whole world really seemed to have gone mad for particularly for, for a year. As you look back, explain to people that may not know your position and what happened to you. Maybe you can give them a little thumbnail of what happened and perhaps how you see that all now. Sure. So, I mean, for me personally, I've been writing on infectious disease epidemiology for almost two decades, going back to the HIV days, and on antibiotic resistance, a whole host of topics.

Early in the pandemic, I had this hypothesis that actually the disease was more widespread than we realized. I ran a couple of studies to check for antibody levels in the population. I found in California that was true. Almost 50 times more infections in cases, a death rate, an infection fatality rate that was much lower than the World Health Organization is saying. That sort of put me in the middle of a firestorm. I always, like when you looked at those data, it was really clear older people were dying at really high rates, younger people much less so,

children much lower risk. Lockdown then didn't make any sense to me. And so in October of 2020, I wrote a document with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, she's one of the best epidemiologists in the world, and Martin Kulldorff from Harvard University, another incredible biostatistician epidemiologist. We argued, it's called the Great Barrington Declaration, and we argued to lift the lockdowns because it was harming children. We can talk, I'm sure we'll talk about that in just a bit, about what harms they've done. But the harms have been tremendous. The psychological health and well-being of basically every country on earth, the specific

focus on harming poor people. The lockdowns have been devastating to the lives of the poor and the working class. At the same time, it wasn't really protecting people against the disease. So what you needed was a better approach, an approach that focused protection on older people who were really at high risk from the disease

while lifting the lockdowns. And that put me in the firestorm. I mean, I had the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, write an email to Tony Fauci calling me and my colleagues, fringe epidemiologists, started getting smeared in the press, death threats. It was really nasty. But I think if you look back, can we really say the lockdowns did well in protecting us against disease? Disease spread everywhere really say the lockdowns did well in protecting us against disease? The disease spread everywhere, regardless of the lockdowns. This is not the kind of disease

that we can stop. We actually don't have a technology to stop the spread of the disease. We do have technologies to protect people against the severest outcomes of the disease, you know, the vaccines and so on, and then also some of the treatments. So we should have done that, protected people against the disease who were most vulnerable, lifted the lockdowns. I think if you look back, many, many people that were damaged

wouldn't have been damaged had we followed that strategy, that Great Branch and Declaration strategy. And it's actually funny, it's not an accident actually, because that document, while we wrote it in October 2020, it's not novel, Drew.

This was the same old pandemic plan that we followed for a century of respiratory viral pandemics, you know, fairly successfully. If we'd done that same old plan this time, people would still have died of bad rick and mack disease, but we would have lost many fewer people from the lockdown harms. And we likely would have protected people against COVID better as well. What happened to Fauci and Collins? What do you think, what adulterated their thinking so severely? The psychology of it is super, I think you need Shakespeare to do it justice, frankly. It's likely, it seems likely at this point, that Francis Collins and Tony Fauci, especially Tony Fauci,

while I'm not, I don't know for certain if this started in a wet lab or in a lab or the wet market. I think likely this was the result, this virus was the result of gain-of-function research intentionally funded by the NIH in collaboration with Chinese researchers in Wuhan. I don't know for certain that that's the case. What I do know is that it looked like for all the world that Tony Fauci thought that people would think that was the case. And so he and Francis Collins, in the earliest days of the pandemic, January, February 2020, they spent most of their time not worried about how to stop the spread of the disease, how to protect vulnerable people. They spent most of their time trying to cover up the

possibility that there was even a lab leak to begin with, to make it into a conspiracy theory to say there might be a lab leak. So you have, like, on the one hand, the sense that, like, oh my gosh, maybe I caused this disease. And at the same time, the game of functional work, what it was supposed to do was produce early vaccines in the case of emerging infectious disease. Well, you had an early vaccine candidate from this almost, I think in January, 2020, there was an early vaccine candidate, again, as a result of the gain of functional work. You have both at the same time, you have somebody like Tony Fauci who spent his life with basically failing to get an HIV vaccine. He wanted to be the next Jonas

Salk. Failed at it, pushed for gain-of-function work, which potentially causes massive pandemic in January 2020. He's going to cause this massive pandemic. But at the same time, you have the lifeline in the form of this vaccine. Just get to the point where we test it and get disseminated population, he'll be the savior. He'll be the person that does the next general assault. And so he pushes for lockdowns, uses every ounce of power he has to delegitimize people who oppose him, first on people who thought it might be a lab leak, and then next on people who thought the lockdowns were damaging and useless. And then finally, when the vaccine comes, it doesn't stop disease transmission you're not going to get rid of this disease with this vaccine it just doesn't do that um it's just tragic i mean i

think it is a classic case of hubris in the context of in in in the case of uh of tony fauci and hubris always has a nemesis if i've read my greek mythology right and i and i i have noticed that being hubristic was really the enemy of this pandemic i had a few minutes where i was feeling hubristic and it it was not it was not my prettiest moment and and i i think that it it we should have a humble you know we should be have humility in relation to stuff like this this was an unclear situation things were evolving quickly. People were doing the best they could, but it was pretty clear there were excesses, and then we couldn't back away from these excesses, which was, to me, one of the most astonishing parts about

this. But when it pertains to not being able to even admit that this was a disease that almost exclusively injured the very elderly, and still we seem to have trouble talking about the effects on the young. Somebody was carrying on in Great Britain about how. But there were so many cases of multisystem inflammatory. And I looked up the incidence of the multisystem inflammatory disorder in Great Britain for the year of COVID. It was exactly the same as the incidence of tuberculosis in children. So are we going to shut down because there was tuberculosis

affected dozens of hundreds of children? Are we going to shut everything down? I'd rather have the inflammatory thing than tuberculosis, if I'm a kid, frankly. There are serious conditions. So nobody could contextualize that this has still been a big problem, that nobody contextualized this illness. But why are they still, well, let me ask first about the older versus younger thing. I have a theory why the older versus younger thing happened, why they were unwilling to even admit that young people were not affected. Do you have any theory about that? I do, actually. I think, you know, one of the things that's striking is all of the people that were at

the top of public health bureaucracy in the United States are veterans of the HIV wars. And a lot of their instincts come from their experience with HIV. And it's important what that means. So, for instance, HIV, there is no immunity after your HIV. It is a disease that will kill you eventually, right? In the early days, there was no treatment. Now, of course, there is. There's no vaccine. There's no immunity. And so with COVID, the new disease, they assume, well, what if it's like HIV? What if it doesn't produce immunity? Almost all of the harm from HIV is long HIV.

AIDS is long HIV. It happens years after you get infected initially, right? So what if all of the harm from COVID is long, from SARS-CoV-2 is long COVID, right? What if that's the primary harm? The HIV is stopped by recommendations about masking, I mean, sorry, condom use. You have these recommendations. And the rhetoric around HIV, especially in the early days, was you want everyone to think they're equally at risk, even though that wasn't true then.

And I think the idea is that you don't want to stigmatize gay populations or IV drug abusers. So you try to create this sense that everyone's equally sharing in the harm and the risk. I think that nearly every single dysfunction we've had in COVID policy stems from a sort of mistaken lessons drawn from the HIV pandemic. I think it's a little more, my theory is it's a little more endemic in their training. Particularly, I understand the authority structure is people that are in HIV. And I remember I was deep in the aids epidemic treating patients and i remember you know advocating that that because we kind of expected it to break out of the the gay community uh we saw the same rhetoric with monkey pox all

over again like they learned nothing from covet here we go again that how do you else do you address the risk population and get them properly vaccinated if you don't identify them? But I think the reason for this is that there has been, and Kelly kind of alerted me to this last week, that the entire study of public health has moved away from biology and health, vaccine therapies and all the other things that public health has always been, and become a discipline whose sole priority is equity of outcome of healthcare distribution. Not equity of resource distribution, but equity of outcome. And when you're in a pandemic and you have a 17-year-old with a, you know, maybe gets bad COVID versus an 85-year-old with, you know, a stroke patient with bad COVID and a 35-year-old with diabetes and obesity

and bad COVID, they're going to have different outcomes. They're going to be different no matter what. In the best possible distribution of resources, those are three cases that are going to be different no matter what. In the best possible distribution of resources, those are three cases that are going to have different outcomes because that's medicine. This notion that there had to be equity of outcome. I remember when the vaccine distribution first rolled out. It was all about equity of distribution. I was like, where did that come from? We just got to get as many people vaccinated as possible. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. I got COVID the first time trying to get the vaccine. I couldn't get it because I didn't fit their equity, which was this weird equity model

they had. Am I on to anything with all this? Equity of outcome. Equity of resource distribution, very important. Equity of outcome fools Aaron in a pandemic. First, let me say, Drew, I used to listen to you back then. I learned a lot from you. You probably didn't know you were teaching me. That's one of the things that motivated me to go and talk about it. I really, AIDS put me in the radio. It really did.

And it was Fauci telling us. He was telling young guys, you know, you've got to educate. Because no one was talking to young people particularly about what this thing was. It was crazy to me that no one had heard about it. But anyway, thank you for that. Yeah. You know, I think that that definitely is on to something. This idea, like, let's talk about the vaccine rollout.

The obvious way to use this vaccine is to protect older people. They're the ones that die at high rates from the disease. If you look at the infection fatality rate from the first year of the virus, from a whole bunch of studies, turns out that if you're over the age of 70, it's pretty high. It doubles with every seven years of age. So you can go to, if you're 80, 85 years old, you're looking at mortality mortality rates on the order of infection, mortality rates on the order of five, six, 7%. This is a ridiculously high rate for single disease. On the other hand, for young people is very low, like below the age of 70, it's something like 0.05% or youngsters for children. The survival rate is something like 99.999. I'm going to run out of nines here, Drew. I mean, it's, it's,

it's very low. And so the right thing to do with the vaccine is prioritize old people. That's who's dying from it. Forget about all of the other equity overlays. Use the calculations. How do we use this incredible tool we have to save life? Isn't that what medicine is about? I thought so. I thought so. That concept got challenged all of a sudden. It was really odd to see. But let me ask one last question before we bring Kelly in here. When would it be necessary for there to be a global lockdown? When is that sort of a reasonably good practice? And I want to, after we bring Kelly in, I want to dig into a little bit of the history of lockdown in Asia, because that history is different than in the West. But if you could

answer that question about whether or not there is a reasonable time to do a lockdown. I think that lockdown should be thrown away as a tool in public health. There is never a reasonable time. The key principle is focus protection. Identify as quickly as you can the high-risk groups, move heaven and earth to protect them with the technology you have, work to develop new technologies, be compassionate. For the rest of society, even if there's a risk, if it's their lower risk, the harms from shutting civilization down, even for short periods of time, are devastating, especially to the poor, the vulnerable, the working class. The reason why the lockdowns failed is very simple.

Most people are not in an economic position to handle an extended lockdown, not for a week, not even for a day. And their lives get damaged and hurt. The poor, they suffered COVID at the highest rates. Their kids didn't go to school. They lost opportunities to work in the poorest countries on the earth. What happened is that many of them starved as a consequence of the economic damage caused by the lockdowns.

Lockdowns are a blunt, cruel tool that are not scientific in nature. The scientific idea, the right humane approach to this pandemic and any pandemic is identify high-risk groups, use resources to protect them, the highest risk people, and ask the rest of society to continue as best they can, given that everyone is in common facing this risk. And isn't that the way medicine has practiced in the face of pandemics for literally a thousand years? And we have gotten better at it and more focused at it. We strive to vaccine and we strive to therapeutics in the meantime. And we figure that out knew we would i knew we'd come up with stuff now what we do with the vaccines and all we can kind of talk about that um i had one other comment and that is i asked at the beginning what happened to fauci

and collins what what adulterated them do you think that aside from the motivational distortions they may have had by feeling guilty consciously or otherwise about gain-of-function research, don't you think their Chinese colleagues had a disproportionate, much more significant influence on their decision-making than it should have? I think they really, and the World Health Organization did the exact same thing, as best I can tell. They looked at what was going on in Wuhan and were convinced by the local officials there that not only was it working, but this is something everybody should adopt. And why wouldn't you?

And the fact that it was weird and never been done before and had massive downside didn't seem to occur to anybody. But what are your thoughts? I completely agree with that. In fact, we know that with certainty. There are a whole tranche of boyette emails, again, from the early days of the pandemic, where the NIH, they tried to get somebody from the United States to go on this mission to China. It's early January, mid-January, I think. They came back from this mission.

This guy, Cliff Lane, who's Tony Fauci's deputy, came back from this mission and sent an email out saying, what China did looked like it worked. We have a very difficult decision to make. He says he wrote that it worked, but at high cost. The Chinese example was incredibly influential in the World Health Organization and at the top levels of the US science bureaucracies. In part, maybe they were thinking of SARS-1 and what happened during SARS-1 where the Chinese actually did, I mean, the disease didn't spread very far. I guess it got to Toronto, but it didn't spread very far.

And sort of local restrictions seemed to do the trick. And maybe they thought this is just like that. Local restrictions in China, of course, albeit it was much more draconian local restrictions than in SARS-1, did the trick and they're that maybe they thought this is just like that local restrictions in china of course albedo is much more draconian local restrictions than it starts one did the trick you know in china china they're locking people into their houses and bolting them indoors and throwing separating newborns from moms things like that um much worse than sars one but yeah here you have it it's uh it it worked well maybe if that's true and then look at italy and they see body bags in in cathedrals uh you know it's it was absolutely shocking and italy was there like their conclusion

was italy was too late to lock down and so they thought okay if we compare those two china china worked italy was too late didn't work or their health care systems got overrun it's going to happen here if we don't lock down and that's why they adopted lockdown despite century of pandemic plans that suggested that was would be a mistake and now evidence although i find it bizarre that people still cling to the idea that it worked or that we should be doing more of this kind of thing it's just i can't i feel like i'm missing something i asked uh who would i oh i mark mcdonald i interviewed him the psychiatrist the other day I feel like I'm missing something. I asked Mark McDonald. I interviewed him, the psychiatrist, the other day, and I said, how do I know I'm not missing something or I'm not deluded?

I want to check my judgment very, very carefully because I can't get what's going on in some of these other opinions. It's hard to understand. But let's take a little break. I'm going to bring Kelly Victory in here. We'll be right back. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. You see now perhaps why I say he is going to be the poster child for the excesses of this pandemic.

He was vilified for having a rational idea and just raising his hand and bringing it to the fore and suggesting maybe we do what we've always done and what would work and what clearly in retrospect would have been the right policy. This is the man that is the poster child for the

excesses of this pandemic. Be right back with Kelly Victory. For a long time, I've been talking about the holy grail of skincare, GenuCell, and the amazing results that both Susan and I have seen. I'm a big fan of GenuCell's Silky Smooth XV. It's a moisturizer soaked right into my skin instantly. And with its immediate effects, I saw fine lines and wrinkles visibly disappear within 12 hours. Susan loves GenuCell's vitamin C serum infused with the purest vitamin C, absorbs to the deepest layer of the skin, thanks to GenuCell's proprietary skincare technology. I am a snob when it comes to using products on my face. The dermatologist makes a ton of money for me.

But when I was introduced to Genucel, I was so happy because it's so affordable and it works great. I was introduced to the Ultra Retinol Cream, which I love at night. All the eye creams are amazing. People notice my skin all the time and I'm so excited because it's actually working. And right now, Genucel has bundled my favorite products

and Susan's for you to try today for up to 60% off retail pricing. That's right. Save up to 60% on my favorite GenuCell products today. Just go to GenuCell.com slash Drew to see what's in our bundles and receive an extra 10% off at checkout when you enroll in their personal concierge at checkout.

That again is GenuCell.com slash Drew. G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com slash D-R-E-W. Some platforms have banned the discussion of controversial topics. If this episode ends here, the rest of the show is available at drdrew.tv. There's nothing in medicine that doesn't boil down to a risk benefit calculation it is the mandate public health to consider the impact of any particular mitigation scheme on the entire population this is uncharted territory drew and welcome dr kelly victory and kelly you've heard us talking i'm gonna let you take over or take the wheel for a minute. But do also, as part of this, we need to get into the economic consequences of this

lockdown. You know, how much of what we're all contending with now, I mean, obviously pouring $3 trillion in the economy, I guess that could be inflationary. But anyway, there's a lot more than just that going on. So Kelly, have at it. Terrific. Thanks. And thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Bhattacharya. I'm really happy to have you here. I do want to stick with the lockdown discussion for a few minutes because specifically I want

to get into some of the economic impacts of it. You certainly have command of healthcare economics, and then also the psychosocial ramifications of the lockdown. The one thing we know the lockdowns didn't do was stop the spread of COVID. It did have a lot of other impacts. Before you and Drs. Gupta and Koldorf wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020, great piece of work. And you penned that and put really a humanitarian spin on it to really try to identify what the impact would be and give a suggestion for what was common sense with regard to our response to this public health crisis. But as you point out, it wasn't really a novel idea.

We've known we should always risk stratify. And in June of that year, some months prior to the Great Barrington Declaration, June 9th, I think it was, the CEOs of the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic penned an op-ed to the New York Times predicting that the results of the lockdown would be far more devastating than the results of COVID, the virus itself. They predicted that more people would die from the lockdown than from the pandemic, than from COVID. Do you think that that is what came to fruition? There's no question that the lockdowns killed more people than lives saved from COVID. I mean, COVID itself is a deadly disease. The question isn't, is COVID worse than lockdown? The question is, do the lockdowns actually save any lives at all from COVID?

And the best case you can make is that it pushed COVID out until after the development of a vaccine. So for that, maybe you can point to Australia or New Zealand. They experienced COVID after the development of vaccine. But for the rest of the world, it didn't work. COVID spread regardless of the lockdown, and lockdowns are implied. And in answer to really the heart of your question, it is absolutely yes. The lockdowns were absolutely devastating to the lives of the poor and the vulnerable and the working class and children around the world. I'll just give you a couple of data points on this. In March of 2021, the UN estimated that 238,000 children had died in South Asia alone. That's one year into the lockdowns.

238,000 children had died in South Asia alone as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown. They died from starvation primarily, but also from skipped vaccinations for childhood vaccinations that are absolutely critical to the health of children. We basically thought for a full two years that the only threat to human life was COVID, when in fact there are many, many threats to human life that include economic harm and also medical harm. And by ignoring those priorities, we basically consigned, I think, millions of poor people to death.

Precisely. And so what happened was we took people of all of the errors that were made in the public health response to this pandemic, and that's a long list from which to choose. One of the gravest was acting, as you pointed out, as if we were all at equivalent risk when we knew from the very beginning that that was not the case. We knew that healthy young people under the age of 30 had such a de minimis risk from COVID as to be almost indistinguishable from zero. Yet we consigned those people to hunger, to absolute lack of healthcare. People missed

routine screenings, everything from mammograms to skin cancer screenings. I've told Drew in the past, people came into the ER having had chest pain for days. And when you ask them, why did you wait so long? They'd say, well, I was afraid I would get COVID or I didn't want to go out of my house. So it was really a transfer of illness and disease that was just tragic. Talk a little bit about the economic impact of the lockdown. We know that the physical impact, the health impacts were devastating, but I think not very many people recognize that so much of what we are living today

with regard to quote, supply chain issues, for example, a lot of this is a direct result of what we did with this lockdown. You're absolutely right, Kelly. And as Drew pointed out just a little bit ago, when you print or you borrow $6 trillion in order to pay people to stay at home so that they don't starve during a lockdown, that's going to have consequences. the inflation that we're seeing. Those are not like coincidences. When you disrupt world trade, we globalized our economies. Last 40 years have been actually a big signal success in some ways, a billion people lifted out of poverty around the world. You globalize your economy, poor countries reorganize their economies so that they can fit into the global economy.

And then overnight you break it you say okay our promises we made are gone um supply chains get disrupted what that means is that the people that making those goods lose their jobs people that are making uh you know on the on the you know one two dollars a day of income or less that exploded by almost 100 million people because of the the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. That is going to have tremendous negative consequences. And closer to home, you know, during the lockdown, the states that locked down the hardest had high unemployment rates, 8, 9 percent, whereas the states that locked down less had much less unemployment.

You know, there was going to be economic harm. And whenever you have a disease like this, a pandemic like this, you're going to have some economic harm. The lockdown has made it worse. Another economic harm, although maybe economic isn't the right word for it, we closed our schools. Children who suffered the longest from these closed schools with very inadequate online school replacing it, they will live poorer lives. You know this from decades of social science work. They will have a harder time finding jobs. They will not get as well educated as they ought to have been. And as a consequence of their poorer lives, they will lead shorter lives, less healthy lives. We consigned our kids in the United States, especially our poor kids,

minority kids, to a generation of inequality, a generation of poverty, and a generation of poor health in order to appease people who were very scared about COVID, thinking that it was really kids that were at risk to them, when in fact that was never the case. We did not need to do that in order to protect older people from COVID. And in fact, doing that did not protect older people from COVID. So it's tragic. I think the economic harms, we're seeing them play out and they will be playing out, I think, for decades. We knew very early on, for example, as I say, we knew very early on, for example, that children were not vectors. The idea that children needed to be locked down because otherwise they would bring COVID home to elderly grandparents or their parents and people at home. We knew that children were not good vectors.

They carry very low viral loads even when they get COVID and the places that didn't do lockdowns, places like Sweden that didn't shut their schools, did not see an uptick in kids bringing COVID home from school. I'm sorry, Drew, what were you going to go? Just two quick questions I have. We put up a tweet here where you had said the definitive history of this pandemic will once be, you know, once it's written, we'll particularly look at the devastation of the schools. But I have a more sort of imminent concern about that definitive history, which is why, why aren't we, why isn't priority one of the medical system,

the epidemiological professionals, the journalist to figure out what we got right and what we got wrong? Why isn't that just being a massive—why aren't the universities the source of intellectual sort of inquiry into what we just did? And yet there seems to be absolutely nothing going on. Maybe it is, I just don't see it, but it seems to be a zero. That, to me, is uncanny. Uncanny. I think the problem is, Drew, is that so many people who would be writing this history normally were implicit in the decision-making that led to the lockdowns and the strategy. I mean, so what you're hearing, I think, is a quiet admission of guilt. I mean, nobody can honestly say this policy was a success. But the problem is like that, the people that were harmed by it deserve some kind of honest reckoning around it. Like, you know, we talked, I think at some point in the past about morbidity

and mortality conferences, right? So after a patient dies, you have a conference among all the physicians that were supposed to manage the patient, managing the patient, not with an eye toward pointing fingers, but to just to get an honest assessment of what went wrong so you don't do it again. We owe the patient, we owe the world that, and it will happen. You can try to stay silent. After something really, really bad happens, there's this inclination to try to just try to move on, pretend it never happened. But this is too big an event in the history of the world. It has harmed too many people. By that, I mean both COVID and the lockdowns for there not to be an honest assessment, an M&M conference. And it will happen, Drew.

Okay, good. I think truly, well, I think, yeah, I think as Dr. Bhattacharya is saying that many of the people who are complicit in this don't want to acknowledge their guilt. If we circle back to the statement you were making at the open of the show, Drew, about this issue with the schools of public health, I received the bulk of my public health training at Harvard, where I am currently persona non grata, because they do not want to acknowledge this at all. They are interested in equity. These schools of public health have become essentially factories for social justice warriors. And we must therefore act as if everyone is at equivalent risk. Everyone must suffer the same mandates. Everybody must have the same thing. These are the same schools that are suggesting

that physicians don't point out, for example, that obesity of all of the risk factors for COVID, obesity was clearly the most significant other than age, by the way, and there's nothing you can do, unfortunately, about your age. But obesity is something that they didn't want us to call out. We aren't even supposed to refer to people as being obese anymore. And these schools of public health, I think, are really, really at fault for having done this. We know we've never used lockdowns before. And I think, as Dr. Bhattacharya is saying, we need to answer for why this time, why did we implement mandates for everything from, we know that masks don't stop the spread of respiratory viruses. We know that the lockdowns

would do far more harm than good. We know that social distancing was a completely made up construct with no history in public health or epidemiology and on and on. Why, Dr. J, did this time, why did we implement these things? Yeah, I mean, I was telling Drew earlier, I think part of it was just the instinct for almost all of the leaders in public health were they're trained in HIV and they sort of misapplied the lessons of HIV here. Actually, I think there's another thing that went on here. Once they had adopted this strategy, the lockdown was the strategy, they had to somehow convince the public to go along.

And so they adopted strategies that were otherwise I would thought of as entirely unethical to do that. So for one is fear mongering. I see some of these ads that they did. It was just unbelievable to watch. And they had to get young people to agree to do these things. They weaponized the empathy, the natural good-naturedness of young people against themselves. They said, look, if you don't wear a mask, you're going to kill grandma. You want to kill grandma? If you go visit your dying relative, you're going to spread COVID everywhere. They weaponized people's empathy against each other. They created this sense that every single person that you meet and know is a biohazard. Civilization can't go on like that. You can't actually have a functioning civilization where we believe that every other human alive is

a biohazard to me. They use these tactics to get their way once they decided that lockdown was the only way. They thought that they knew best and that any tactic, no matter how unethical, was okay. Yeah, that to me was just an astonishing reality. And my last question, I'll let Kelly just drive the ship again. If you were to, I really want to understand the other side. And so, you know, I always want to check myself, doubt myself. Let me ask you to do this, Jay, which is what would the case be if you were somebody trying to advocate for locking down? And given the history you've had with lockdown, what is the case to be made? And what would you tell yourself about what happened to make the, you know, sort of trying to look at this from the other side of the table, you know,

you tell yourself, you know, we had to, we didn't know we saved lives. We did, we had to do, we did anything to get to the vaccine. I mean, is that what they would tell themselves? Is there something, is there a more elaborate story that people have to tell themselves? No, I think, I think that's, I think what you just said is exactly the case that people told themselves. They said, okay, this is a very bad disease.

We have a potential tool to solve it, vaccine. We just have to get there. If we get there, we can protect as many lives as possible. And a lot of them, a lot of the people that made these decisions, they don't have a lot of social science training. So they don't see that the harms to the poor in a visceral way from ending economic activity. They just don't think economic activity, they just think economic activity means money when they're actually, it means lives and health and, and, and opportunity. So they look at it and say, okay, well, what's the big deal? Some people will, we'll, we'll, we'll, we locked down. People may lose their jobs and we can pay them. And in the meantime,

and in the meantime, we'll develop this vaccine that'll solve that pandemic. That I think is pretty close to the end of the story. Then when the vaccines come, they think we have to get to 90% people vaccinated or else you won't get herd immunity. Ignoring the data that this vaccine does not stop transmission. So you can't get herd immunity with 90% or whatever. You need 120% of the population vaccinated to get herd immunity. And as best I can tell, that's basically impossible. So what you have is public health people telling themselves stories about how they can be heroes, adopting ideas about success with using impossible plans, pretending that we have

technologies we have, pretending the knowledge that we don't have, rather than just relying on tried and true principles of harm reduction, risk identification, and resource allocation to minimize the harm from an infectious disease, minimize the harm from a disease, rather than to try to play the hero and say we can save everyone when clearly we couldn't. Now, you guys, hang on, Kelly, I'm sorry, but I'm going to do one more thing before I let you go. There was a guy on my Rumble rant sort of chat stream here, and he was saying some really wild, aggressive things about what lockdowns had done.

And I called him out as a Chinese bot. I said, this is the CCP rhetoric. And he got very quiet and then responded with this. The China zero COVID lockdown is the gold standard. The whole world needs to implement indefinitely until SARS-CoV-2 is 100% eradicated from the face of the earth. There's somebody on my Rumble chat stream that said that out loud. I don't imagine anybody in this country saying that. That literally has to be a Chinese bot or operative or something.

And that's what the world was fighting. That's what was happening from all sides. That's where I was going to go when you when you handed it back to me. I was going to say I want to move on and talk about censorship. But my last comment about this lockdown was and I've spent a tremendous amount of time in China. I looking at their health care system back prior to the 2008 Olympics that were in Beijing, I actually did a big analysis to see if we wanted to be the providers of the health care for that Olympic game. And I came back and told the people who had hired me, I said,

run away, be afraid, be very afraid. We don't want to do this. But the reality is that a totalitarian government like China has no problem simply putting people in lockdown. Prior to that Olympics, because air quality was so poor in Beijing, the Chinese government simply decided, we know how to fix the air quality. We will simply move tens of millions of people from Beijing. We will pick them up. We'll pick their factories up and we will move them thousands of miles away into the middle of nowhere and we'll clear up the

air quality. People have no say so there. The Chinese government decides that if they make a decision that this is the way to do it, we'll simply bolt people in their houses and not let them come out and we'll make the decision. That's what they do. The idea that others adopted that concept when we know how dangerous it is is really, really terrifying. I do want to talk to you about censorship, Dr. Bhattacharya, because Drew and I talk about it all the time. I have no question that it had a profound impact on the trajectory of this pandemic. You and I and Drew know that prior to COVID, robust, vigorous debate, respectful, but vigorous debate was the cornerstone of medicine. You just referenced mortality and morbidity, something that is something long established in medicine,

where we get together behind closed doors and we kind of argue it out and say, did you consider this? What about that? What were you thinking? Again, not with an attempt to point fingers, but to have that robust debate that is critical for us to make the best decisions in medicine. I have never seen in my career, 30 plus years in medicine, something like this where I personally was shut down. I know you were calling you a fringe physician when you wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. How preposterous. Talk a little bit about just your thoughts about the censorship thing and the cancel culture and what impact you think ultimately it had on this last two and a half years. Well, I think the most important impact is that it permitted there to be this illusion of consensus about lockdown that never truly existed.

In fact, I think a very large number of doctors, scientists, epidemiologists and others were opposed to lockdown. They never counted this lockdown as the right thing to do. But rather than let that debate go out and happen, there was essentially a propaganda campaign, intimidation campaign by the American government, but I also think by the UK government and others, to essentially order social media companies, many of whom were actually all too willing to go along, to suppress this debate from happening, to smear the people who disagreed with someone like Tony Fauci on almost any aspect of it, and thereby essentially shut that debate down. So many doctors, so many epidemiologists and scientists sil silence themselves looking at the example of what

happened to people who stuck their neck out. And why would they do this? I mean, I think part of the main reason is if you're going to impose something as extraordinary as a lockdown, if you're going to impose something that's going to harm and at least I should say impact the lives of so many people that's going to require them to do so much self-sacrifice, you have to have something pretty close to a unanimous consensus within science. Very, very close to that. If you don't have that, you don't have a moral or ethical basis for asking the public to do that.

So they had to create this illusion of consensus that there was this consensus. Gross. It really is. And so what they, what they ended up doing is it's just, it's just, it's just, they had to, they had to smear me. They had to smear Kelly. They had to smear you, Drew, in order to get us inconvenient fringe characters out of the way so that

they could tell the American public, the world public that lockdown is the only way only legitimate scientists believe that. And it, but it really extended way beyond the lockdown issue, Dr. J. I mean, we had this therapeutic nihilism that they also created the illusion that there was consensus about that, that anybody who suggested that we use the I drug or the H drug or that you were some sort of a conspiracy theorist, tinfoil hat, where, I mean, I received death threats. I was told I was going to be responsible for killing tens of thousands of people because I was suggesting that they get prescriptions for

these medications. The idea that they adopted this idea so quickly. One of my favorites was the social distancing. The idea that people are throwing this term around as if it's this established thing. And I would say to them, I have an entire office full of books on epidemiology, public health, pandemic management. I defy you to find a textbook in which you will find the phrase social distancing in the index. It's made up. It truly, truly scary stuff. Yet they because they shut down so many people, so many of our colleagues. And I have my own issues with that. In the words of John Milton, virtue untested is no virtue at all. I think people had an obligation to stand up and speak out. And I have issue with my colleagues who didn't, but

it really went far beyond the lockdown consensus or the illusion of consensus. It was across the board, everything from masks to therapeutics, vaccine safety, and on and on. I think there's some sense of, you know, there's a saying about power. Power corrupts absolutely. Power corrupts absolutely. What you had is a relatively small group of powerful science bureaucrats with incredible power over what the public perception of the scientific community was. And once they had successfully implemented that power in imposing the lockdowns, how far is it to say, look, now we are so smart that we should be able to impose it over everything else? You have

Tony Fauci going in front of the Senate and telling the American people that if you criticize me, you're not simply criticizing a man, you are criticizing science itself. Just think about the hubris on that statement. I mean, I just- That's where he lost me completely that day. As I said, that's where I said, if you look up hubris in the dictionary, it says, see also Anthony Fauci. I don't know if you can talk about this, Dr. Bhattacharya, but you're sitting in your office at Stanford University, not exactly the mecca of conservatism in a state not known for its conservative views. How is your experience as an academic sitting in a

very liberal institution during this? How has that been? You know, for 34 years, I've been here 36 years. For 34 years, it was amazing. It was a place that let me do my work. I've written controversial things. I don't think public health is inherently left or right. You know, I the wisdom comes from lots and lots of people, unexpected places often. And I would write things that sometimes will get picked up by the left and sometimes will get picked up by the right. And I'm just doing science. I mean, I don't think science is owned by either the right or left. I frankly never thought of it as particularly political. The last two and a half years have been absolutely miserable. Stanford has been a hostile work environment for people

that disagreed with the illusion of consensus. And especially for people on the right, I think it's been very difficult. And I'm not sure what to do about that. I still love this place. I grew up here, frankly, right when I was 18. And I think it still has a lot to do for the world. But there really does need to be a real reckoning on this campus, not just this campus, I think universities around the country failed. They put in vaccine mandates, they suppress the work of people who disagreed with the supposed scientific consensus. People who signed the Great Bank Declaration, some of them got fired. A lot of them had lost grant opportunities. It made it very difficult to do science. And if universities don't make it easy to do science,

what are they for? What purpose do they serve? Our top universities were corrupted during this in terms of their mission to be places, refuges, where controversial ideas can be hashed out and worked and tested without fear of slander, without fear of career destruction. That is not how our universities function. It's certainly not Stanford. I'm really disheartened to hear that. I can only imagine, and that's really the answer that I feared that you would give. If you look at the risk-benefit analysis that was just conducted using Pfizer's own safety data prior to the release. It's only become available by aggressive FOIA requests. But if you look at the risk benefit analysis that was calculated specifically for 18 to 29 year olds with these vaccines, so we're talking about those students who are sitting there on your campus, as well as young military recruits, that analysis came to the conclusion that for every

one hospitalization from COVID that would be avoided, you would have somewhere between 18 and 38 severe adverse events, those being defined as one that caused death, near death, hospitalization, or permanent disability. Scary stuff. So clearly the analysis, the risk benefit analysis does not compute for these vaccines for university students or healthy people. Does Stanford still have a vaccine mandate? Do they have mask mandates? Where are you sitting right now with regard to school as you enter the fall here? I think there's a vaccine mandate for students, but not for faculty. There's a mask mandate only in classrooms.

But you're allowed to take the mask off if you're talking. I just started teaching class this quarter. What I've noticed, like, you know, class I've taught for 25 years, I've noticed that probably two-thirds of students aren't wearing a mask. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not the mask police. I'm not, my job is to teach, not to enforce mask mandates. So I don't plan to enforce that mandate. Students can do what they like as far as I'm concerned. That's interesting. Just one quick thing. Stanford was the source of this famous study about a year and a half ago where they looked at the number of Stanford students riding bikes with a helmet versus a mask. And it was like

80% mask on a bike outside and 20% helmet. So it's good to hear that some of that irrationality, that the students are restored into their rational state, which is nice to hear. But if you take, you know, the mandate, so, you know, we have a vaccine mandate for young people. Your average student is younger than your average professor, yet the mandate for the vaccines is for the people who are at the less risk. I know. And then Berkeley, I understand, has a mask mandate now for anyone who isn't vaccinated for influenza. So we're now apparently going to extend this to the absurdity continues. Where do you see this going?

You're such a thoughtful person, probably more introspective than I am. And I would love to hear where is this going in medicine? How are we going to heal for lack of a better word? How do we, and how does not happen again? It's because it's not over. No, I don't. I think it's going to take a long time. The people that made these decisions, they're still in high positions of power. And I just don't see a way where the public gets the sort of the explanations they need until those people are no longer those

high positions of power. They've made enormous mistakes. In a war, if a general makes enormous mistakes, they're relieved of command. That needs to happen. The political price needs to get paid for these kinds of decisions. So I mean, you're starting already to see that, right? So Boris Johnson steps down, not because of lockdowns nominally, but because he partied during a lockdown, you know, the UK prime minister. Andrew Cuomo has to leave, not because he killed all these people by sending COVID-infected patients to nursing homes. No, that's not the reason. It's some other charge. It has nothing to do with lockdowns, of course. Over and over and over again, you're seeing political leaders, not everywhere. I mean, California is an exception. But many, many places, you're seeing a political price paid for lockdown. I think that, unfortunately, is really, truly the only way forward.

You have to have the leaders that oppose the lockdown be lifted up and the leaders that were in favor of the lockdowns suffer some consequences. Because lockdown turned into such a political thing. The pandemic response turned into a political thing. And unfortunately, I think that the healing won't come from inside the medical profession or the public health profession. The leaders of these professions have sort of circled the wagons and tried to pretend, you know, they give themselves awards and try to pretend they did everything right. I think until the political leadership changes and then as a consequence, the leadership of medicine and the leadership of public health changes, the public will never trust medicine or public health again, and it will make it enormously difficult for doctors and honest public health practitioners to do their job properly.

Well, that's my big concern, and we've done so much damage to people's confidence in public health that God help us when we sound the alarm bell the next time. And there will be a next time. There will be a next crisis when we need not only Americans, but people around the globe to pay heed, to listen to us. And instead, what they're going to say is, you fools let us down a really horrible path last time, and why the heck should we listen to you? So I think that's very scary. at charia myself that we are still under an emerge state of emergency here uh run by determined by a pediatrician with very little no adult experience and seemingly very little judgment around infectious disease probably good vaccine therapy good with vaccine therapy and children but that's

it we are and and no no day in sight where they're saying we're going to take this thing away we are under an emergency act in this state we california is also 48 hours away from gavin newsom signing into law uh this you know 2098 which essentially criminalizes our ability to do what we are doing right now which is give uh alternate views or certainly at least to give those views to our patients. Informed consent, I will remind you, again, is a key, you know, sort reason to believe that he will, then anyone with a California medical license is at risk of sanction or loss of licensure, some type of disciplinary action if they say anything that is contrary to this narrative that's been hacked up by the powers that be. It's very scary stuff. You can see the loss of confidence by the public and public health just by the vaccine uptake for the boosters. I think like the Omicron boosters, it's like three, 4%. And also the

toddler vaccine. I think it's still, there's like 5%, 6% of the American public is uptaking them. The problem is like now you're also seeing a drop in uptake of absolutely necessary vaccines like polio, DPT, MMR. You're seeing polio's return to the US. That means that we're really in bad, bad shape. You have to have a functioning public health. And public health relies on the public trusting them. I mean, the public isn't going to be able to look at every single thing and do policing on public health diktats. They have to say, look, we have a public

health agency that sets people that do care for us, that do want our best interests. When they stop thinking that, they stop listening to public health indiscriminately. It's a complete disaster. And until public health and medicine acknowledge their culpability, especially the leadership in this disaster, that's not going to get fixed. No, you're right. And you're right out there. Marin County has very low vaccination rates for things like polio. And that was a concern, seeing an increase or resurgence of polio, unfortunately, because you've got a group of folks who have vaccine hesitancy combined with age where they are too young to remember that we had a sitting president in a wheelchair as a result of polio. And so there's an age component there that they don't think these things can happen. So I agree with you.

It's going to be devastating. The loss of confidence in public health in general, vaccines specifically, is going to be a real problem. And we talked at length already about the impact on, yeah, and of course, the impact on the lower socioeconomic individuals. And we've sort of glossed past the lack of schooling and the absence from schooling and kids that have still not even been retrieved and reentered the school system. I always like pointing out, for me, when I think back on this pandemic, there's a few little vignettes that jump out. And Kelly's heard me say this before, but I'm going to say this for Dr. Bhattacharya, which is that the fact that the kids were left out of school was deeply disturbing to me. In fact, and the closure of the businesses

and the loss of jobs, I couldn't sleep at night. I didn't understand how the leadership could go to bed. I didn't understand how they could do that. But I just want to point out this one image I have from the Ukrainian invasion. This is going to be a little bit of a stretch, but Ukrainian invasion, Russian invasion of Ukraine. We had a massive exodus of women and children to the Polish border, and the men stayed behind. And there was a lot of press waiting at the Polish border talking to these Ukrainian women as they came across the border and to a person they said yeah it's terrible our husbands are you know back there our brothers are back there we you know this is an awful situation uh but but these kids they've been out of school for two weeks two weeks we have to

get them in school immediately it's been two. And they're pushing them into Polish-speaking schools. And they had to learn Polish because they were not going to stay out of school more than two weeks. And I thought to me that was like, well, of course. They're sane. They're worried about what the kids' needs are. We were insane. Insane. Letting it go for two years.

There's sort of this image that I have in my brain. I don't think I'll ever forget it the rest of my life. It was from the San Jose Mercury News. It was like May 2020, I think was the date. And it was of two young Hispanic kids, maybe six, seven years old. They had their little Google Chromebooks their school had given them, I guess. And their parents had dropped them off in front of a taco bell because they didn't have internet at home so they were sitting on this actively on the in the street trying to do school in front of a taco bell just a brother and sister and it was

it was that image i've never why did we do that how could we have done it shouldn't that have ended the law no it's yeah so it's not only loss of education. And we know now we are just beginning to understand how retarded these kids are. And I mean that in the true sense of that word, how retarded their educations will be because there is no such thing as real remote learning. But then you add on top of that, the percentage of kids for whom school is the only, lunch is the only meal they got regularly or reliably every day. So kids who, as you said, kids from poorer families, not only didn't have internet access, they lost their one reliable meal. We know that there was a significant drop in diagnosis of hearing and vision issues,

not because they went away, but because it's the teacher who recognizes that little Johnny isn't seeing the board. There was a massive increase in incidents of child abuse because kids were locked at home with the abusers without the ability to talk to the PE teacher or the math teacher or whoever it is they normally would be able to confide in. Kids developed this psychosocial anxiety. Many, many kids were suffering from depression, sleeplessness, anxiety, headaches due not only to the masks, but to just the fear of being around people wearing masks, little kids, toddlers. Still going. This is not a temporary thing during the lockdown. This has rolled on where these kids have had ongoing mental health problems.

Early on, Dr. Bhattacharya said clearly this group did not have any training, and I think you said child development or something. But what was clear to me at the very outset, zero consideration for mental health. Zero. It's like it does not exist to them. And I think they still don't acknowledge it at all. One in four young adults in a CDC survey in June of 2020 reported that they had seriously considered suicide the previous month.

And that number should be like 3%, 4%. It should be zero, but like often 3% or 3% or 4%. It was 25% of American young adults seriously considered suicide. That's going to have consequences. It's not a surprise that alcoholism, murder rates, overdoses have just skyrocket, as a sort of sequela of the lockdowns. Yeah. And in mid-2021, the CDC sort of, you know, quietly and unceremoniously changed their childhood milestones with regard to verbal skills. Instead of having to know, you know, 50 words by age 24 months, they changed it to, you know, words by age 24 months.

They changed it to 30 words by 30 months because little kids were not learning to speak. No problem. No developmental delay. Exactly. Took care of the problem, Kelly. They dealt with it. Turns out if you can't see mouth movements, toddlers do not learn to speak if they can't see mouth movements and emulate mouth movements. But rather than acknowledging that impact of mask wearing, they just change the milestones. Kelly, it's so weird.

Like you had the American Academy of Pediatrics come out and say, we know with certainty there's no developmental effects of mask wearing in toddlers. How do they know that? You've never done a study where like, let's randomly assign kids, toddlers to see what developmental effects it has. You know, because you would never do that study. It would be unethical to harm children in that way. Yeah, well, the American Red Cross came out last week and said that they don't differentiate between the blood taken from vaccinated and unvaccinated people because they know that the mRNA doesn't enter the bloodstream. I want to say, how do they propose that it ends up in every major organ system if it doesn't enter the bloodstream? Osmosis, perhaps. I mean, the things that are stated are so outrageous. And to think that you and I have been censored for saying

things that are supposedly misinformation when the academies of our different medical colleges are coming out with this stuff is outrageous. Guys, we got to kind of move towards the exit here and wrap things up. This has been a really interesting conversation. I guess, shall we say, Kelly, your last question and maybe Dr. Bhattacharya, last comments. How about that? Yeah, I would really just throw it back to you to say, what are your last thoughts on this, Dr. Bhattacharya? Where would you like to see this go? You've talked eloquently about the price that needs to be paid by those who are culpable. But, you know, if you had if you were ruling the world, if we put you in charge of all of this and how we get the heck out of this, what would you do? First, I'd resign. I'm entirely unsuited. I think what has to happen next is, first, we have to, like, it's really

tempting to focus on, like, who did what wrong and all this. But I do think M&M conference is necessary and important. But even more vital is to try to, like like start developing policies to redress and remediate the harms of the lockdowns and other policies for people that have been harmed. It's not a set deal that children, you know, seven-year-olds who didn't learn to read the first two, last two and a half years will never learn to read. We need to put in place literacy programs that we, you know, sort of redouble those efforts, make big, deep investments in catching up on cancer screening, on like mental health. I'm not even sure what to do. It's the scope of the problem is so big, but we certainly, it's not a done deal that nothing can

be done. Why not bring in people that really do have constructive ideas? Let's start to address the harms, the people that have been harmed by the lockdowns and develop policies to try to make it so that those lockdown harms that will have a long tail won't have such a long tail. Rehire people that were fired because of vaccine mandates. Start to tell people, your friends, your kids, your colleagues are not biohazards. They're fellow humans, and we gain a lot from being in company with one another. It's actually vitally important, part of good health, that we be in company with one another. Don't think about other people as biohazards. In Belgium, I saw this, I was visiting Belgium this summer, I saw this campaign where they say, look, look at your neighbor and smile without a mask. They literally say that. They have this like public campaign to try to tell people it's good

to smile at people, see people's smiles. We should have some messaging like that, I think. We need to start to reintegrate people into society. And the people that are most scared about COVID try to address their fears as well so that they can integrate. A lot of the harms don't have to happen. And so let's think of policies. It's all a public health problem. Think of policies to try to redress those harms so they don't turn out to be quite as bad as I predicted early. As you say, I think that your point is we need to acknowledge that there were errors made. This goes back to the old adage, you cannot start to come to the conclusion, the solution, unless you are willing to say, this was wrong and here we need to go down the line. Here are the things we need to do to mitigate the damage that was done to each of these

groups of people or by each of these different things. There has to be an acknowledgment that there was an error, that this was misguided, and then try to move forward with mitigation schemes. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Dr. Bhattacharya. There is nothing wrong with admitting mistakes in medicine. In fact, aren't we trained that if something goes wrong in the care of a patient, the way to avoid a lawsuit is to immediately admit what happened and that it was an error and explain why the error was made and move forward and start taking

care of the patient again. But on the other hand, it occurs to me that the fact that we have to encourage people to look at each other and smile is a symptom of how deep down the rabbit hole we are. It's just so pathetic. But there we are. And I hope one day, as you said, the, what did you call it? The definitive history,itive history of this thing is written because only then can we really look at the history books and not repeat it. So, Dr. Bhattacharya, you can follow him on Twitter at Dr. J. Bhattacharya. I think is the Twitter handle. It's not up there right now.

And I noticed Dr. Bhattacharya is getting a little more forthcoming on Twitter. It's lovely to see. And I look forward to his tweets. And they've been a little more, I wouldn't even say provocative. I just, they've been just more, you know, no, no, no. They're just like, it's just like you, I think you're, you're at your liberty to speak the truth. Uh, and the truth is sort of there repeatedly in your tweets. And I'm loving seeing that. Let's keep it going. Yeah. Monica, I joined Twitter a year ago I I did I was really cautious at first just just because I I don't know I didn't know what they could tell it is it is a

place I just wish it wasn't sent the censorship otherwise it's fantastic and Monica Gandhi was telling me that she's so tired of fighting the fight so don't get don't get tired keep Keep pushing the truth out there. People are seeing it and hearing it. And you write nice, clear tweets that every time I go, yep, that's exactly right. So please keep doing so. And of course, Dr. Kelly Victory was here with me every Wednesday,

and she'll be back. You guys know her. Do we have a plan for next week yet, anybody? Is that set up? We're working on it. Okay, I know I've got uh michaela peterson coming by here for one of the monday or tuesday of next week tomorrow tomorrow i've got a really interesting guy who was one of my i don't know if you guys know this but i trained with special ops

forces in the jordanian desert and remy was one of the key figures and all that but he has a really interesting movie coming out about human trafficking. And so I wanted to support that and give him a chance to promote it. So I hope I'll see you both soon. Dr. J, thank you for being here. Kelly, I'll see you next week. And the rest of you, we'll see you tomorrow at three o'clock Pacific time. Thanks. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor,

and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me, call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.