Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Follow Science, Not Scientists: Jay Bhattacharya (#279)

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. He has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals. He holds an MD and PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University. He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19, through "focused protection" of the people most at risk. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya https://gbdeclaration.org/ https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/research/center-demography-and-economics-health-and-aging Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018!  https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If let's say you disagree to me, you'd say why, and if it made sense, we'd like air our differences publicly on the substance of it. Like what happens when Tony Fauci does this is a sense, you're absolutely right, it sends a signal to all the other scientists in biomedicine that if you step out of line, you know, if Tony Fauci says, I am the science. You know, if you disagree with me, you're disagree with science itself. If you step out of line, your career is at stake. You don't want every crank idea, but this was not a crank idea. These were prominent people in respected institutions saying, look, this is. this policy is wrong. Welcome to this week's episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring my friend, Dr. J. Badacharya of Stanford University, a renowned scientist, epidemiologist, economist, MD PhD, polymath,

and really one of the highest quality human beings I've ever had the opportunity to meet and spend time with and now finally interview. He's well known for his contribution to the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which has been signed by over a million people, as of the time I'm recording this. Plus, that includes about 17 to 20,000 medical professionals. And it really presaged the moment we find ourselves now in with COVID, that the lockdowns were counterproductive. And I think that's been proven to be clear. Jay was never against vaccines.

He's a huge vaccine supporter. He's vaccinated, his kids, his parents. But he was really against this notion that we could achieve any end to the pandemic without herd immunity. that's how all viruses, pandemics come to an end. And we're really never going to get rid of COVID-19 per se, just as we've never gotten rid of the flu. And to try to prevent future lockdowns and the scenarios that ensued from the pandemic,

Jay has a lot of cautionary ideas to share, and you hear that in this interview. Also we'll hear how he was horribly mistreated by some of the most powerful human beings on Earth, two men in particular, Francis Collins of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, famous Dr. Anthony Fauci, held as a saint by some, a villain by others. You'll make of it what you will after you hear this episode.

You'll want to watch it too because Jay shared some slides that he shared with me when we were in beautiful location in Florence. We actually got to tour the villa of Galileo Galilei, who was imprisoned, as you know, in the final years of his life by the Inquisition. And this episode is called a scientific Inquisition. But I was originally going to call it, I told you so. But that would be distemperate. not in my normal state of gravitas. So I do hope you'll enjoy this episode and it's brought to you

with minimal commercial interruptions. And I think you will also enjoy subscribing to my YouTube channel where the video of this episode is displayed. Because the visuals that you'll want to really take into heart and just imagine yourself in the same exact position. And I don't think that any of us would want to be in this position. So it takes a lot of courage to do what Jay is done. And that's my mission on the into the Impossible podcast. I know some of you will find some of the political aspects of this podcast offensive or maybe disruptive. But to that, I say, I don't care. You guys can go ahead and unfollow, unsubscribe, un-like, send me a negative review, do whatever you want. It's up to you. I don't care.

I am here bringing truth and speaking, hopefully, truth to power. And it's really by virtue of the guests that I get on this podcast. So I hope you'll enjoy it. If you don't, keep it to yourself. or send me some constructive criticism that I always appreciate. Doesn't always have to be a five-star review, as I always ask for. But for now, no more intro as we go into The Impossible with Dr. Jay Batacharya. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the five-bed doors, please, help. Welcome everybody to a special conversation with someone I've admired for a very long time,

both for his intellect and his perspicacity and all the things that he does, but ever more so since he's taken such a courageous stand in our public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic, creating, co-authoring the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, doing many, many other prescient things that are now, only now being recognized by the wider audience. We'll get into that and some of the controversy that is still swirling around, But this is Dr. Jay Batacharya, who is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. And the director of Stanford Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, you really couldn't design better, you know, Jay, if they had like a lab where they could design things, you know, for gain of function purposes. I mean, I really feel like you're one of the, you know, kind of, well, for lack of a better word of redundancy, most unique.

I hate that phrase, but it really applies here. You've got this incredible blend of raw intellectual horsepower, you know, just ability to ignite, but be, do so with grace, with humility, and with many great qualities. So it was an honor to meet you finally. We were together about a month ago in Italy, and we'll talk a little bit about some of the side trips we got to take. But Dr. Jay Bata-Chair, thank you for joining me into the Impossible podcast. Thank you for that very kind introduction.

I have to say like most of my career, I wondered what the heck I was doing because I didn't know what the particular combination of things I was interested in would really apply to until the pandemic. Then it sort of became a little more clear to me, you know, to cause some some uproar in my life. But thank you for that. Yeah. And I always think, you know, the rarest of all the human qualities is to be courageous and especially so and so much is at risk. And to do so with no expectation going in and no. remuneration thereof, in fact, probably quite potentially ruin us for people. So to take on the courage that you did. And I want to get into, because I am, you know, a practicing Jew, as you know,

and you're a practicing Christian, I wonder, you know, if our worldviews, you know, which are different theologically, but not in terms of our of our practice, I think. Do you think your faith played a role, you know, from the, from the outset in the mission that you undertook? And we're not, you know that my audience is not you know so keen to be we're not going to proselytize don't worry out there in the end to the umpile you know i won't do that but but the point being uh do you think it guided you do you think uh that that it sustained you during the the controversy that we're going to speak about me i take my faith seriously as you know brian i know you do too um and i found common cause with people basically of no matter what religion who take their faith seriously

um and i can't say like in terms of the scientific work it didn't it didn't say you know find some result or this or that result. I mean, science is science and you apply the standards of science to it, I think. And I tried to do that. But in terms of, I mean, I felt like I've had to speak out. And my faith, one of the main core components for me is this desire to speak for the poor, to work if I can to make the lives of the poor better. And especially in health policy, it's a place where, you know, people's fundamental values about what, what happens in their life, their health, their well-being, how that's distributed in society. Those are like absolutely fundamental topics in health policy. And for me, it's my faith is

part of that. I mean, it's part of like why I care about this topic so much because I think that what's happened during the pandemic, the pandemic policy you followed have been absolutely devastating to the lives of the poor, to children, to vulnerable people. And that's, that is definitely has driven me. Yeah. And looking looking at the, at the, you know, kind of mentality of of our fellow citizens and how they react to not just the pandemic, but the lockdown, I think, was the significant contribution. Of course, your medical doctor, you have unique insight into the most vulnerable population, but it was really, you know, people call it, well, because of COVID, we had X, Y, or Z. But really, it was the effects of the pandemic lockdown, not the

pandemic itself, that really drew most of your attention and actually where I think you made tremendous contributions, which may only be recognized, you know, decades from now and in the prevention of similar mistakes. But, you know, you don't have to react to that. But, but I did want to, you know, kind of when I met you and we spent some time together, you know, I was reminded of a, of another, of another prophet with the name, starting with the name J, the letter J, and that's Jeremiah. And, and I wonder, how do you reconcile, you know, some of his famous quotes? I mean, of course there's a famous one that people like to bring out from abortion debates which we're not going to get into here i jay we can get it to abortion gun control with coving however many a controversial

talk about i don't really want to hear right let's let's let's let's let's let's play it a little safe but but of course famous quote before i formed you in the womb i knew you before you were born i set you apart um does any uh the biblical you know versus not not again i don't want to talk about abortion but but but um does it give to you as it does to me perhaps uh a notion that every life is sacred Even our enemies, even those that hate us and do vile things to us, that every life is sacred. And again, we're not talking about abortion right now. I mean, we should talk about that some other time. But does that guide you as a doctor, as a, as, you know, a theologically inclined person?

Or can you divorce, you know, being your scientific attributes from your religious attributes? Well, I think, I mean, I love that quote, not particularly because it has a controversial link to abortion, but because it gives this sense that we are each of us created with a purpose that we have, are given, our gifts for a reason. They're not just for ourselves. And I think that that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that idea that we're all made in God's image. That means I have to treat you like you're made in God's image with respect and with dignity and, and, and help you with your purpose. I mean, I love that. I love that idea. And it has, animated my work, uh, and animated how I try to treat each other. It's been really difficult during pandemic. I've made a lot of enemies, unfortunately, not, not intentionally, but just by my

ideas. And I've had to work very hard to understand to remember that even they are made in God's image of people that are worthy of respect, of worthy of dignity and to work to forgive them even if they've harmed me. I mean, those are like personal attributes. I think in science, we had an obligation to speak what we see as the truth, you know, based on our work to the best of our abilities, to correct ourselves when we get it wrong and to and to treat each other with with dignity and respect, even if we disagree. That quote for Jeremiah, I think, is I love that because I think it underlies a lot of that kind of ethic.

And I've tried to live that as best I can. And his other quote, of course, that I love to trot out at faculty meetings is, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? So, you know, he's famous for these Jeremiahs where we get the name Jeremiah, which is kind of a clarion call, a warning. I've written a little bit about that and completely uncourageous stance compared to you just with regards to. This is Alexander Solisneson question.

Probably my very favorite thing. Favorite quote is this. I think he gave it his speech at Harvard. You know, so since, of course, the Soviet dissident who wrote the Bulag Archipelago, he said, look, the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. There is no purely good and purely evil people. We're all in some sense a mix. and we're trying to like get along with each other in that sense of it with that.

If we understand that, then it's much easier to treat other people with respect if we can. I mean, it's hard sometimes when people are attacking you. But I've tried to remember that. Yeah. Hey, friends, just a quick request while you're enjoying this video to leave a thumbs up. My thumb's a little bit preoccupied with all Carl Sagan over here. But I hope yours is free enough to leave a like. It really helps me with the algorithm.

And for extra credit homework assignment, leave a comment down below what you're enjoying about this video. now back to the show especially as we'll get to you know people that portray themselves as as you know about christians and and then come down with profoundly um not not only on christian but perhaps undignified ways of behaving i want to pivot from you know our theological uh you know discussion at the outset here to uh a notion of you know that which came to sort of replace it we were of course replete with this in in renaissance italy um and and that's science and you know of course science you know the people that write history, the victors, right? So they got to call themselves the Enlightenment. They got to call themselves the Renaissance. They got to call the previous ages,

the dark ages. So, you know, it's kind of, I've heard that the English, as in UK textbooks, don't mention the Revolutionary War too in great detail. But that's besides the point. Is there such a thing as, you know, science? Is there such a thing as the scientific method? Are these just sort of like, you know, hyperlinks that we keep in our mind, but you don't really know what they mean? Do you think there is something that can reasonably be called the science or science or even the scientific method, quote unquote? Well, I do think there's a scientific method. I think that the term that we normally think of as the science is really it's just like a, it's, if you take it very broadly, it's, it's an attempt for humans to try to understand how the material world works, how the physical world works. to try to think of explanations for it.

And the difference between, I think, pre-enlightenment science, which was science, in reality still science, and post-enlightenment science, is an emphasis on material causes for material outcomes. You don't make reference to God when you say, you know, why did this happen in scientific discussion, post-enlightenment? I think it's been quite productive, actually.

I think it's disciplined people to try to look to see, what can be learned just by looking at material, material inputs. Material meaning just very broadly material. You know much more about the way the universe works than I do, Brian, so I'm not going to try to get into that. But I think the idea that we can learn about the way the world works from just from experimenting with it, with our intellects. That's broadly been true forever, even before the Enlightenment.

But the set of explanations that we're allowing ourselves is limited to the material explanations. That's been quite productive, I think, in our advanced and knowledge about the way the material universe works. It doesn't mean there isn't a telos. There doesn't mean that there isn't some purpose beyond it. And I think in our everyday lives,

it's a mix of our material knowledge. The fact that I know that if I hit a hammer to a window, it'll break. It doesn't mean I should hit a hammer to the window. I mean, that's a very different, those are two different questions. There's a, there's a scientific fact that hitting hammers to windows breaks the window.

And then there's the question of whether it's the right or right thing to do to break this window. Might be right if I'm trapped in a car and it's burning and need to get out. It might be very wrong if I'm trying to like, you know, break into somebody's house to steal from them. Right. So I think this very, it's a, the telos is really quite important

for how we live. But for science, especially enlightenment science, focus on the material cause has been really, really a good thing, I think. Yeah. When we look back, you know, before we turn to slides that you're going to show from a presentation that you have.

When we look back in the pandemic, I first became aware of COVID-19 in early January 2020, and I was at a Shabbat dinner on a Friday night with a friend who listens to the podcast, and he's not, you know, he's like a social psychologist. You can think of as a sports psychologist. He helps me get into, you know, fighting shape from my MMA battle.

No, he doesn't do that. But he's a brilliant, you know, kind of social scientist. And, you know, he was just saying, What are you up to this year? What are you looking forward to? I'm supposed to go to China to Tibet to look at this cosmology project that they've asked me to kind of consult on. And it's kind of a, you know, maybe a rival to my project, but it'll be kind of interesting to get complimentary data from another group that has different expertise. And I'm excited about it.

I've never been to China. Certainly not to Tibet. And he's, you might want to hold off. You know, when are you thinking of going? I said, you know, March, April. And he said that, you might want to reconsider that. You hear about, you know, they've got this disease. Yeah, I'd heard about it.

But he's like, you know, they just built this hospital in eight days that doubles as a prison. They can weld people into it, keep people out. That's kind of interesting. But, you know, maybe push it off to April, July. Needless to say, I never went, right? I'm still, China still does not appear in my passport. Russia does, but China doesn't. Anyway, the point being that my friend who's not a member of the NSA, CIA, FBI, DARPA,

you know, any of the multi-letter agencies, he knew about this. you know so like a couple of jewish yenta's you know at a dinner right we knew about it in january um by that time there could have been you know many many more uh precautions uh preventative measures put in place uh maybe even a month earlier and and as an epidemiologically trained individual you know better than i how these things can spread is there anything in retrospect in hindsight before we get to the actual uh incredible story of what you have related and experience uh which which i um just i begged you to share it with my house audience and so we will before we get there could it have been avoided is there any point you know

in the multiple branching forks of the garden of forking paths history could we have debated to minimis like just a sniffle or was it inevitable from the time it was either created or released or or naturally you know spread from from zoonotic origins could it have been prevented by any technology any scientific or technological insight that humanity as a whole or the u.s in particular could have applied i don't i don't think so i think Unfortunately, it was baked in the cake. I don't know if it was natural origin or zoonotic or if it was a lab leak. In either case, the dates of it probably are in the fall of 2019.

And the evidence of that is that there are antibody studies from stored blood in blood banks in places like Italy, Angola, from September 2019, where it shows up positive. And there's some dispute over whether those are false positives. but I think it's really hard to just to like look at the body of evidence to say it's all false positive. I think sometime in fall 2019, this disease was already spreading throughout the world. It was already outside of China. It's a highly infectious disease. It was too late even by then.

Had we known about it to stop it. I do think that the actions of the Chinese government worked to suppress knowledge of it, especially in December, that became clear. You had some heroic doctors in China speaking up and they paid the price of it. for it. But certainly by January 2019, 2020, when China had really started their draconian lockdown, just as you said, it was far too late. Because it wasn't just in China. It had already spread outside the world. You saw in late January 2019, the first case is the U.S. Even before that, there were cases in Italy, in Iran. The disease was seated very widely, especially in the Northern Hemisphere early on. By early on, I mean January 2020, shutting down travel was too late.

I think people thought of this as like the 2003 SARS-1 epidemic where it really did sort of peter itself out. But that doesn't spread as easily. That virus didn't spread as easily as this virus does. This one seems to spread by aerosols. You breathe in the same, you know, I breathe in one room and then you come back into that, you come back into that room an hour later. You might still get my COVID. it that's with that that wasn't true i don't think it was much harder to spread SARS one um i don't think there was any mechanism by which we could have avoided the pandemic uh short of if it was a lab league not doing those kinds of exercises that led to the lab league yeah and of course that has to be you know at least the consideration and any future research or you know kind of precautions put

into place uh in in the future to prevent this from ever happening again do you think that the uh that the american public would would would talk tolerate another round of lockdown let's say COVID 23 God forbid comes around COVID 27 I don't care which in the future have we been so scarred or have we been chastened or do you think it would just immediately happen again just as it did in 2020 and beyond I mean I was stunned that the lockdowns were accepted in 2020 I thought there would be much broader push back against it what I didn't anticipate was how important fear was in the minds of people and driving the behavior in minds of people in 2020. You look back to March of 2020, it was a time of great panic and fear in the

scientific community, not just in the public. And in fact, governments used propaganda to admit to actually induce fear. It made it very difficult to do any kind of reasonable, scientific-minded thinking about what the right policy ought to be. So the answer to your question, I think, is if there is another virus that spreads around and fischeldom panics around it, like they did during COVID, I'm afraid that would, a lockdown would come back, even if it wasn't particularly useful for stopping the spread of that virus, that hypothetical new virus. One of my goals in the post-pandemic time is to try to reform public health systems so they don't knee-jerk react with fear to the, to a threat, but instead try to develop evidence very quickly

and assess what the right response ought to be in a cool mind as opposed to panicking themselves and then spreading that panic to the population at large right we like to think of ourselves as scientists as dispassionate as following the evidence and and of course you know i i have given talks where to speak about political comma scientist but but you know to push back with respect um you know it's often said that well america has one of the lowest numbers of scientists in in public policy and you look at the kind of you know crazy reaction and an illegitimate you know kind of hyperbole surrounding everything not just around covid reaction so wouldn't it be best better if our government were, you know, a Scientocracy or something like that, where you had the

the most brilliant, you know, and you and I would be the leaders of it. I mean, this is going to be great, Jay. Oh, God forbid, Brian and Jay rule the universe. But no, we have brilliant colleagues. You know, these are the I know 14 Nobel Prize winners, you know, some on your campus up there. And, you know, why not just have these brilliant geniuses, men and women of science, not only advising, you know, President Biden. I mean, what is he? He doesn't know much about science. I don't think so why not have that have an elevated role for scientists in the government to enact policies that are fact tested replicable they are peer reviewed all these things why not what's wrong with that Jay well I'm not against

having more scientists advise governments I've found and I've had a lot of opportunities during the pandemic to interact with politicians of some of you actually are quite adept at following scientific arguments and others who just it's hopeless I think I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The question is what's their proper role? Right. So scientists can tell you how to break a window, but the scientists can tell you whether you should break a window. That involves trade-offs, values that people fundamentally have. So you ask about how scientists performed, official scientists performed during the pandemic. I have to say rather poorly. I mean, I think

that there's two things that happen. One is that they, in the midst of panic, that scientists themselves that public health people in themselves induced, they were very bad at reading evidence. And then second, they took on themselves this role that we are really unsuited for. We're not, we're not philosopher kings, Brian. I mean, we have our blind sights and we have our values which may differ with other people's values. It's absolutely possible. The way that's mediated in society and a democratic society is through politics.

Unfortunately, there's no other way, really. I mean, there's no benevolent philosopher king that can decide this is the right to do. You have to have the possibility of people of different values discussing with each other, sometimes, sometimes, you know, in unpleasant ways, but that process results in at least some kind of compromise. Scientists, what we can do is we can say, well, if you do A, B is likely to happen. And then everyone can argue with each other whether B is a good thing or a bad thing. We are not very good at that. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill,

on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove's seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies, price-in-valed May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedipo.com slash price match for details. So to go back to our, you know, kind of origin of our relationship in person, we were treated to a presentation of basically, you know, a hellscape, a life, basically of nightmarish proportions that I really, you know, I was almost brought to tears. I told my wife about this and the shameful treatment that you suffered, both at the hands of local officials. the media the press and then you know your institution at stanford which i called home for a very

brief period of time and then the national government and i wonder if we could uh you know share some of their recollections i know it's painful but but i think the um the world needs to know the story and i want to play as you know even though it'll be a tiny role some some component and some role in sharing what you've experienced with the world as um both a fascinating you know in the same way a horror movie is to me you're gratified to not be in the movie if you're watching this um what jay went through i wouldn't wish on my worst enemies and and i can only i can't really sympathize or empathize with it but i can just say um you know how much it moved me so i wonder if you could share those those uh that presentation now jay i would i'd be delighted um although

it is it is having lived through it wasn't the most fun thing but uh but i think it's cathartic to to just talk about it. Okay. So I'm going to tell two, there's two parts of my story. And it starts basically in March 2020. I had been following COVID, of course, before the pandemic, before March 2020, because just like you, I'd seen those reports out of China and so on.

I'd also had been, I'd done work on infectious disease epidemiology, infectious disease policy for two decades before this. My very first papers were on HIV policy. for instance, and published peer-reviewed literature on this. And I've been paying attention in during the H1N1 pandemic, when what happened was that very early on in 2009 during that pandemic, the World Health Organization put out a report saying that there was going to be a three, four, five percent mortality from swine flu from H1N1.

And what happened after that was really amazing to me. There were a whole bunch of studies in the population at large of antibodies to H1N1. N1, specific antibodies so that you could measure how many people actually had had H1N1, and then what was the, what was the, what was the, what was the, what was the, what was the actual rate, the prevalence of the disease, as opposed to like, you know, if you just rely on people showing up at the hospital, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg, it turns out. Right. The seropovil studies showed a very large number of people in the population during H1N1 having antibodies,

meaning that a lot of people had gotten H1N1 and then recovered from it, never went to the hospital. And so those early death rate estimates, three, four, or five percent turned out to be a hundred times higher than it was actually turned out to be true eventually. Took a year or more about, but that's probably why the H1N1 pandemic sort of fizzled out. People learned that it was much less deadly than they thought that it had spread much more widely than they realized based on these serap prevalent studies. So in March, for those that don't know, the serum, it's a blood sample test, right? Yeah, a blood test. You're speaking to a lot of cosmologists, Jay, so, you know. Yeah, so zero prevalence, zero.

means blood and prevalence means how frequent is it. So you do a population sample of blood. Usually it's just a little finger prick or sometimes a bigger blood draw. And then there are standard tests to see if you have antibody that specifically reacts to H1N1 and not to other viruses or other pathogens. So if you have this antibody that means you've been exposed and recovered. There's sometimes disputes over whether those antibodies actually protect you against getting disease again but there's no dispute that having the antibody means you were exposed and you and you must have recovered because you're not dead anyway so that that was that was the debate during h1n1 and when COVID hit I had the thought that look this is this is a very highly infectious respiratory virus

maybe this is happening again this is happening again the world's health organization just on the screen you can see a world health organization put out a report in March of 2020 saying the death rate is 3.4 percent well my first thought reaction that was this is this can't be right they've don't know this number. They don't know this number because they don't know how many people actually have been exposed. They haven't run the zero prevalent studies that would have allowed them to actually say what the death rate actually was. And so I spent my entire career, Brian, writing peer-reviewed papers. I have never been on TV. I think I was maybe TV one time in the past. I can't remember. It was like a nothing thing in 2000s, like in the 2000s. And I'd never written

an op-ed. All of my work and all my focus have been on writing papers. Right. I saw this and I thought, to myself, I have to say something. And so I wrote an op-ed. You can see that on the screen, in March 24th, 2020, that changed my life. I mean, it utterly was shocking to me how much it changed my life, but it did. The op-ad, if you read it, basically said, tried to try to, like, figure out what the death rate might be based on the very limited evidence we have. And I came to the conclusion that if their very wide range of numbers were possible, too wider range. It could have been very, very low death rate like H1N1 was or could have been as high as the World Health Organization was saying. It was impossible to know until you actually ran a study, a Cero problem study, to measure

what fraction of the population had the virus. So that was the conclusion of this op-ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal in March 24. How could you know just a naive question? I mean, how could you know that it was, I mean, it could also be too low by orders of magnitude. If we have no other things to base it on, if it's truly novel, you know, genotype in the history of planet Earth. I mean, couldn't have also been too low. I mean, how did you know to be confident before there were these studies, in other words, I mean, that it couldn't be equally underestimating and it could be much worse. I mean, so there's two parts to this. It's just, just is way easier than cosmology. So this is very simple. So there's a numerator, the number of deaths and denominator,

a number of infected people, right? And the number of deaths, you have to wait a couple of weeks because it takes a couple weeks between infection and deaths at the time. The question was that my focus was on the denominator, how many people were infected. And that had to have been an underestimate. That could only really be an underestimate. Because we were estimating that based on how many people showed up at the hospital or showed up with positive tests. There weren't enough tests back then. The PCR test had just been developed. And they weren't, and you know, remember there was a shortage of that. And so we were, I think we were very clearly underestimated denominator. It's true, Brian. You could have, we could also have been

underestimating the numerator. There might have been people that died from COVID. that we didn't catch. I think it's a big problem, for instance, in poor countries where the healthcare systems were poor. But in the United States, basically everyone with a respiratory infection severe enough to get into the hospital was being tested for COVID at the time. Yeah. It seemed unlikely to me that the numerator was was vastly underestimated. Now there's some people who thought that, but I think it was unlikely. But my focus wasn't on the numerator. Even if the numerator were doubled, it doesn't really change the fact about the denominator. That you can measure independently using these

seroprevolent studies. That makes sense. Anyways, I wrote this piece, thinking, okay, now that I've put this out, someone's going to want to do a serial problem study, never really thinking it was going to be me. And a few things happened. I started getting, first thing, I started getting like some very positive things. Like I got people from around the world offering me help to run a serial problem study. Former students of mine who were in other universities offered to help. Ben David, who wrote this piece with me, he's a former student in mine who's now a professor here at Stanford, very prominent, well-known infectious disease epidemiologist and doctor.

He offered to help run the study. I got an email from someone in Major League Baseball, Dan Eichner, who runs essentially like cheating, you know, testing for steroids and stuff for Major League Baseball players. He runs his major independent lab. And he had ordered a whole bunch of cerepola, of antibody tests from China. These weren't short supply. It's really hard to get them. But he'd have the foresight to say, look, baseball is going to need them.

I'm going to order them for baseball. And he had a huge stash of them. Huge. I mean, it was like 10,000 tests he had available. And he called me up and he said, look, I don't want to use this for baseball. I want to use this for science. I want to use this for public health. And I want you to use them for running a test, a study, and just offered them up for free.

I mean, it's just, it was a really good feeling. A lot of people were coming together to try to answer this really important question. How big is the denominator? We really needed to know this number in order to understand what the right policy ought to be. The same time, I wrote this piece and I started getting death threats. I got friends of mine from Stanford who defriended me on Facebook. I got, I got like this is some of the vilest emails questioning my motives. My motive, Brian, was actually just to understand how large the denominator was.

It was a hypothesis and I wanted to test it. I mean, that's what that's what it said. The article said that. And it was actually kind of shocking to me that an article like this, which is to me was just like a putting forward a scientific hypothesis would be met with this kind of vile vile attacks it's almost like they wanted you know for better for worse we have all these you know trainings here in san diego i'm sure you have it in stanford too about you know how toxic academia is and and how you know how awful it and undoubtedly i mean we're talking to somebody

who had a toxic experience in academia but i think they mean you know typically more you know the student experience etc universities are racist elitist classist and some of this is is undoubtedly true. I mean, my home university was, you know, was founded in part because of a, you know, need to de-antimitomize, you know, the location where the university is. They wouldn't allow Jews to own real estate in the town where UC San Diego is located. You can sell a house to a black, a Mexican, or a Jew. And that lasts until the 60 until Roger Ravell had the foresight to notice that Jonas Salk couldn't buy a house next to his laboratory. So that fell by the wayside. But so academia has always been rife with with sexism and all these things.

But when you advocate, you know, the opposite point of view and you say, look, we've made a lot of changes. Oftentimes you are met with, and look, I'm a Jew saying that we no longer have rampant antisemitism. Even though we have instances on campus, it doesn't mean the campus is anti-Semitic. So the point is it almost seemed like people wanted it to be a panda. Like we almost willed it. How else can you explain, you know, the vitriol, right? You're basically saying like, let's collect data and be agnostic. and maybe maybe you didn't choose the headline i don't think it's it's it's certainly uh that

should be that controversial it's a scientific question uh for a lay audience so what do you attribute that to the the scientists you know questioning your motives you mentioned that happened in your facebook befriending which which you know might ultimately be a good thing because you filter out who's really your friend i mean it's these these are people i love and respect i've worked hard to forgive them in my own heart i mean you know maybe someday i it's going to be hard to forget that that that uh that they acted this way but i you know it was there was there was many of them were just scared. I think part of it, I mean, we absolutely, I think in science, think of ourselves as, you know, above the fray, but we're not really. Like we're subject to the same kinds of biases in

our thinking and our, in our knee-jerk reactions and even prejudices that everyone is. We're still human, Ryan, right? And I think that's, that that came out really clearly. The other thing around this, the science, the scientists are already spoken up. Some of the, like the primary, you know, Tony Fauci, for instance, had already recommended a lockdown. These lockdowns had already been implemented around the country by March 24th when we wrote this piece. Right. We'd already been sheltered at home.

We started here in California two weeks to slow the spread, right? Yeah. And this was like a week and a half into this. And then there was a sense, I think, of common purpose around the lockdowns. Like at least in the university communities, look, we're doing our best to like work together to get rid of this disease. And here I am saying, well, I don't know. if we have the empirical basis to justify the lockdowns.

That's what that's what I wrote. I said, let's do science to fix it, but it's not popular to do science when we're all in this together and we're all like sacrificing together. Although actually lockdowns, I don't think are actually a common sacrifice. It's really, it benefits the relatively well off

in society really hurts the poor, but that's something that was in the back of my head also. That the lockdowns were gonna be really quite damaging for poor people, for children, for older people, for vulnerable people. So I didn't view these as costless, I think many people thought of because, okay, we just do two weeks, get rid of the disease and then move on with our life. That was the story we were told.

And in the middle of this, I'm saying, no, no, why don't we do a study to see if it's actually right to do what we just did? And a lot of people had put their reputations behind what we had just did. We'd ask the entire world essentially to lock down, to stop. It's an extraordinary thing for scientists to ask to do. And people listen, they did it. We still have things here, you know, in UCSA. have to wear masks and classrooms up until reason I taught this whole spring with the whole classroom

was masked except in the dining halls we didn't have to wear masks and and I and I also noticed many times you know during the pandemic I'd be commuting and I remember being at Stanford and seeing the same behavior so I'm sure it took place there young men and women prime of their lives super fit on their skateboards you know going across the quad here there no helmet but a mask no helmet mask and on their phone Jay incredible And the risk assessment. Yeah. There's something very good about that, actually.

I mean, make fun, but like, honestly, like, there's like a deep empathy underneath that behavior. They're like, they're afraid, not for themselves, but they're like trying to protect their older professors or something or their grandma or something. Right. Like there's some empathy underneath this. Public health weaponized that empathy, unfortunately, I think. They used people's, especially young people's natural desire to do good, not to gain compliance with behaviors that actually didn't have a scientific basis underneath them. So or had a very inadequate scientific basis, I think, underneath them. So I think that's part of the legacy of this.

The other thing I found was like there was some like aspects of professional jealousy. And like, you know, why am I running the zero problem? I do research in health policy for a living. I do, I analyze data. That's my job. But I don't generally go and do zero problem studies. This is the first one ever done. Right?

So why am I the one doing it instead of somebody else who has an experience, who's experienced running these kinds of studies? doing it. I mean, I personally at this point would have been quite happy to like have the CDC run the serial problem study. Right. This is what I was calling for effect in effect in this, you can see that this is the last sentence of the last two sentences of the of the op-bed. Universal quarantine may not be worth the cost imposed on the economy, community, individual, mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate empirical base of the current lockdowns. I thought the CDC would run this study. That would have bleated

away the controversy, I think, because people would have, people view the CDC as a, as a legitimate scientific agency with very serious people it is a legitimate agency with serious people that's just they made tremendous mistakes during the pandemic right at this point though i had no don't doubt about the cdc's capacity to run such a study um but they just didn't do it it fell on me in part because i wrote this op-ed it wasn't something i was seeking right um anyway so um we wrote this and uh we actually did the study yeah in april early april 2020 we collected about 3 000 samples from um since in Santa Clara County, it was really hard to run this during a lockdown because people were afraid to come out

to get their blood collected. We couldn't get an agreement to go into nursing homes. So we only did a community sample. Sampling was even hard, right? So we did this like Facebook sampling, which turned to be very controversial because what it ended up doing is it pulled more people from the richer parts of Santa Clara County,

whereas the poorer parts are less likely to be on Facebook they didn't sign up, so we had to do some re-waiting to try to like get a population level. There was also controversy over the test kit that we used. The test kit actually turned out to be quite good. The FDA eventually approved the test kit for emergency use. It had a false positive rate of 0.5%. It doesn't sound that high, but if you have a very low prevalence, there's

some possibility that you, all false positive, some very small possibility. We corrected for that in statistics, the original version, we put this out as a working paper, you know, like a preprint, which then led to like all these people saying, look, you got all the math wrong, you did everything wrong. When I put this out, it was a whole, the world blew up again. I started getting like, Again, more death threats, more attacks. You know, there's a lot of like media attention, some positive and some quite unfairly negative, which I'll talk about in a second. The ultimately submitted though, Jay.

This was published in 2021. Yeah, so we submitted it to like four different journals. And they, after the, after the media attacks on us, we basically couldn't get a fair hearing. And, you know, we revive, I have to say like the preprint process, I found actually quite good. Like I was really pleased with it in the, in the scientific. make sense. So we got help from world-class statisticians on how to redo the standard is an error in the very first version of it. And we corrected the error in a week, thanks to help from countless scientists around the world. We wanted to measure the false positive

rate of the test kit we were using to look for antibodies, right? It's a very important number. Yeah. The manufacturer had given us a study out of, I think it was like 400 people that they'd taken stored blood from 2018 more or less and then run run the test kit against it. Now, it should be negative because there was no COVID in 2018. So any positives you see are false positives. And in that in that stored blood study, they came out with this 0.5%. It turned out, and we found out after we released the preprint, that there were labs around the world that were trying to check the false positive rate

of this antibody test kit. And they sent us their results for use in our study. And so we went from like 400 samples checking for, for a false body rate to like 3,000 samples in a week. It's just people just shared the results. This was how science ought to be done. We're working together as scientists to help each other understand the physical world.

And the preprint process was really fantastic for that. It also led to like a lot of bad things. Like, you know, there were all these Twitter attacks. There was a, by the way, I think science really needs to be replicated. So this, I really like the study. I think we got the result right. I'll tell you the results in a second.

But we did another serial problem study in LA County the week after that, 10th through 11th of April, with the same test kit, but with a very different sampling scheme. Here we hired a professional firm that had a representative sample of LA County and we sampled them. So we had no fight over whether we had the representation correct. And I'll tell you the results. So the results were, one, there were, do I have it here, 50 times more infections than cases.

50 times more infections for every person that had been identified by public health as being positive. There are 50 people or 40 people walking around LA County or Santa Clara County that had that had antibody positive, meaning that they had been exposed to disease recovered. Many of them, I'm like maybe 30% of them didn't even remember having symptoms. So this disease then produces a very wide range of clinical outcomes. No symptoms at all. You just recover, not even knowing that you were sick to these horrible, severe viral pneumonia that's killing people. Right. But we were focused on the viral pneumonia when in fact there was a big, you know, sort of iceberg underneath of lots of lots of people that had that had this. There's three lessons.

One is that the death rate was 0.2%, 99.8% survival in the community. Now, we didn't sample nursing homes. There's much higher there. Right. The second, the disease was already too far gone in early April to stop it. Three percent or four percent of the population had already had COVID. That means the zero COVID. You may as well forget about zero COVID. This disease is here to stay, and it's likely to infect a very large fraction of the population before it's done. We knew that in early April 2020 from this study.

And then the third thing, it's only 3% of the population that we measured having this. That means the disease still has quite a long way to go. We're in for a long epidemic. Those are three lessons to be learned from this. And I don't think anyone wanted to learn any of those lessons because from the hate me all I got from these studies. This paper was published in the Journal of American Medical Association, the LA county one. We didn't release through a preprint process. And so it didn't get quite the same

notoriety or controversy. But it was the same very similar methodology and went through peer review and published in one of the top medical journals almost immediately with me, me as a senior author. So it's one of these things where like, I thought we were doing good science. I still think we did good science here. Yeah, I mean, what could possibly be political a month after this? I mean, it was advocating against, I mean, this isn't even advocating for against a lockdown. I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a key scientific fact that we need to know it to decide whether a lockdown may be worth it or not. I had Eric Topol on the podcast about a year and a half ago when we were still in the Delta

wave, I think it was. And, you know, I didn't really push on him as hard as I probably should have. I mean, you know, it's hard when you're talking to somebody and you want to establish a rapport and you want them to speak freely and not feel like they're on 60 minutes. But, you know, one of the things I, I'm embarrassed to say, I really didn't push him hard on his political involvement in the. in the release you know choosing effectively to advocate at least I mean he wasn't in control of it but he advocate against releasing the the results of the at least the Pfizer biotech

vaccine results prior to the election and part of it was you know at least it reported in the public I can't you know about for this and maybe you know more about it but there there may have been political ramifications around that and I didn't ask him about that but if I could go back and do the interview again you know I would ask him if if this as in he's a huge proponent of the vaccine as you know he and I did speak about but but given that you know there were people that didn't take the vaccine because it was not released until after the election or results at least the results of the trial study were not released until after November whatever 9th or 8th of 2020 that means people died right Jay I mean people died

that could have been saved you're not an anti-vaxxer you're vaccinated you advocated for the vaccine you advocate for the vaccine so that means people died right because Let's just take Eric out of it. Okay. So let's just say people that didn't want the vaccine and said, I won't take a vaccine, a Trump vaccine, then isn't it safe to say that people died because of, for political, basically purposes? I mean, you can't have it both.

You can't say the vaccine work and say it was a good thing to withhold the vaccine for any period of time during a raging inferno. It's like withholding a fire extinguisher. Am I wrong? Well, just to defend Eric, although I think he's, I mean, he is a good scientist and he's tried tried his best but i do think i do and i do think i agree with you that he politicized um his science and his advocacy in a way that was really quite harmful but just to defend i like you you know when you release um when the fta says look we we have enough information to recommend that

to allow a firm to market some product you have to have some confidence that they've done this testing right and so in principle you could say well look eric's just saying let the fda do its work don't let there be political pressure to release the study early or whatever. That would be my sort of attempt to try to defend Eric. I do think, though, that that wasn't just all of it. Like, I actually worked with the FDA on vaccine safety for almost a decade, helping them with like measuring statistical systems to measure vaccine safety and drug safety. I mean, there's some great scientists there, but the pressure on the FDA on both sides was really, truly something horrible to watch.

I think, like, for instance, now it's been very, they've been very slow to release data on whether the vaccines show safety signals. That undermines confidence in vaccines when you see a political, an agency that's just not supposed to be political, act politically. And it's also the same thing for scientists. For scientists to act politically when, in fact, we're just supposed to be supposed to try to just follow the data no matter what, where it leaves for politics. So I think, like when Eric wrote that letter encouraging the slower release of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the. vaccine data or the FDA approval of it it really struck me as political struck me as like he was more concerned about about Trump winning than he was about whether that's what I'm referring to you know yeah I guess I want to push back on you with love and and respect but say if you could do it

again Jay knowing that the results that you published in the 2021 study that were done in 2020 and then this study is currently on the screen you these have light saving potential they may have been tainted the acceptance of them the hate mail death threats Those may not have happened. Of course, counterfactual history is impossible, but you know, we have a multiverse in cosmology. So let me just ask the question. Do you regret publishing the op-ed in that it may have, you know, biased, ordinary, clear-headed people to reject the work of you as an eminent scientist and your many, many colleagues,

two different studies showing the same thing? Do you regret the op-ed? Do you feel like it was counterproductive in the long sweep of history? Would you do it again? I would do it in a heartbeat. I didn't have a choice. Like I had a hypothesis that I thought was very important from a scientific perspective and also policy perspective, not politics, but policy perspective. That's my job, Brian.

I mean, you know, it's like you having an idea about where to look in the universe to resolve fundamental cosmological questions. You have to do it. It's just part of who you are. Yeah. Right? You have to try to follow through. The same thing with here. This was my job.

Like, this is, this is my, the purpose of my work was to have this hypothesis like this and test them no matter what the, what the costs are. To me, personally, that is. Yeah. So I just, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I mean, the politicization was, you know, by March of 2020, it was already, people were already like, you know, Trump had already screwed up everything. And they were, you know, there was in this environment where, especially in academics, there's a lot of hate for Trump.

Yeah. I think it's sort of colored people's thinking about, about this. And so, like, people saw these studies and what Trump had said things like, well, we don't want the cure to be worse than the disease, right? meaning to lockdowns you don't want to be you don't want to do lockdowns if they hurt people i mean just because trump said it doesn't mean it's wrong right i mean that's absolutely true you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease right um and so we i think there was this like sort of especially in the scientific community this knee-jerk reaction against trump as if he were some

uniquely bad thing right and so therefore anybody who sided with him or aided him became tainted with the taint of trump you know the scarlet letter t um including you i think i mean you again i saw you uh in the public long before i met you advocating common sense you're very sober you have a gravitas you're you know if i had to define you you know i know you're a god-fearing man i know you're a wonderful devout christian family man but i think of you you as scientist and by the way that's a compliment for me because i don't think most physicians are are scientists at least the ones that i teach you know that kind of say like will this be on the test and it used to be that that physicians and physicists there was an actual connection between

the terms but but it really has dissipated but i think you you are you are a scientist at heart and you're a doctor second and I'm not diminishing your role as a doctor but at all I'm just saying I'm primarily a researcher this is that's where my that's where my inclinations are I don't I don't see patients Brian I say what I do for a living is I do research for yeah if I'm not a scientist then I'm not and that's not I don't know what to call myself yeah all right yeah so let's so after the study then yeah so like what happened next was really kind of shocking so I'll get back to this right there was a series of articles May 2020, April 2020, by this, I just picked on this BuzzFeed author who's, I actually, she was

obsessed with me. I called, my friends and I started calling her Javert after the Le Miz, you know, like the inspector in Le Miz or whatever. I mean, she wanted to, she wanted to create a scandal around the study around any, any activities. So involved in the study was this guy, this man named Johnny Anitis, who I believe is the most highly cited author in existence that's still living. I mean, he is an amazing man, truly one of the, probably the smartest man I've ever met. I mean, he had an incredible energy. He had written, for instance, to expose Theranos, you know, the Elizabeth Holmes fraud very early. He wrote a paper in 2005 essentially saying, look, 95% of all published medical studies are wrong.

And you know what? You read the paper and you're like, at the end of it, you're like, yeah, he's right. 95% of all medical studies are wrong. It's like a five-page paper or whatever. And he's just a brilliant man. And he, as a result of his work, there's been this like replicability crisis that's, I think, improved, you know, psychology, economics. Yeah, I spoke with Guido Inbenz at Stanford, Nobel laureate about that very topic. And this is called the credibility revolution that he, in part, won the Nobel Prize for.

He's exactly correct. Yeah. So I think John Yonidis was like the fact that he was in this study, he'd also created a generate a lot of enemies through his career because he just, called out bad science. Yeah. And many of them stuck their heads up to try to get back at him. And he was a senior author in the Santa Clara study. Funny, it's like the Santa Clara study got all this, like, nasty attacks.

The LA County study where he wasn't an author didn't get nearly as many nasty attacks. And there's kind of a clean experiment if you asked me. But anyways, what happened was that this BuzzFeed author, she decided that we were bad guys. Yeah. So, like, you know, one of the things for that Santa Clara study, it was a big community of people that tried to help. Like my wife, for instance, volunteered to help. She negotiated.

We couldn't find any place that would allow us to have this like, we had this like drive through finger prick check of blood, blood draws. People are watching their groceries. I mean, let's not forget this. And people were going totally nuts. And I actually have a theory, Jay. The part of it was because of the movie, was it out, outbreak or? Outbreak, yeah.

But Matt Damon won. Because all that stuff. And you could just see these journalists, you know, watching that movie. Oh, there's fomite and there's this. And it all of a sudden. became in the literature and what were people doing during during the pandemic they were watching Netflix and what was the most popular movie uh contagious and um there's so many things in that from from you know the transmission the zoonotic that all i think got imprinted on a base layer in these

journalists minds and uh as opposed to doing real sound scientific research and into verifying checking sources etc they relied on kind of that pop knowledge but anyway i don't i don't want to derail you where you were no i mean that's exactly what happened right i think i think because and so like people were scared to like sign up for their study yeah they didn't want to to be face to face with someone drawing blood. So what we did is we had this drive-through blood draw. So people like drove up, they stuck their finger out the almost closed window. We did a little prick, got a little blood prick, and then they drove up.

It was hard to organize. We had to get like my church agreed to let our, they use our parking lot as a drive-thru. And my wife helped arrange that. And my wife's a physician. She wrote this email to her, to my kids middle school list serve without asking me. She was doing this because out of her sense that she wanted to like help. but she actually asking people to sign up for the study. Now we had a Facebook sample scheme.

I really didn't want people to randomly sign up. Stanford professors were calling me wanting to sign up for the study because they wanted to know their antibody test level. Antibody levels. And I had to say no, I myself never checked my antibody levels until months later because I felt like we had such a scarce resource in these antibody test kits. Anyway, so Stephanie Lee, this BuzzFeed author, made a scandal out of it. Somebody leaked that email that my wife sent to my mom.

kids middle school lists served and she made my wife into this bad guy a Stanford professor's wife recruited people for his coronavirus study by claiming it would reveal if they could return to work without fear because she made the the claim that if you have an antibody it's likely that you're immune in that now turns out that that having antibodies being exposed to COVID and recovering does provide immunity that's absolutely true but by the way Fauci said he was ignorant on that question and not you know one way or another that's stupid but just he was agnostic they didn't know as of last year I believe in other they had never done a natural immunity study and to my knowledge i don't know if the cdc or n-aid or whatever

the agency is have they ever done a natural immunity study yeah they finally i mean they finally acknowledged it uh relatively recently shockingly because you know by early by eight late april uh when this bus feed author wrote this thing it was still quite controversial whether there was immunity or not after recovery um but by like the middle of the summer it was really clear from reading like cell and nature the studies in cell nature of immunity especially like cellular immunity was pretty strong after you're after you've covered. That question, there was some uncertainty, I think in April, not so much uncertainty by like July of 2020.

I basically decided from reading that literature that there was pretty, pretty solid evidence in favor of, I didn't know how long it was last. That you need long-term epidemiological studies, but now we've had them. It seems to last up until you get a new variant. But even if you get a new variant, the second time you get it,

is likely to be less severe than the first time you get it. Right. Anyway, so she wrote this study, And I gotta tell you, Brian, I was filled with anxiety. Now, all of a sudden, my wife was this national negative story. She's a, she's now brought into this. She's just a civilian in this fight. It's one thing to attack me.

I mean, I wasn't really emotionally prepared for that either at the time. But to attack my family, I felt like my life was out of control. I couldn't protect my own, my own wife. I was worried about my kids because now I have this notoriety. And maybe their teachers or someone will take action against them. Or worse, I'm getting death threats, right? And I lost 30 pounds of anxiety weight. I mean, I could have stood to lose it, actually, Brian.

I have to say, to be honest, but that's not the right way to do it. Within like a month and a half, I'd lost a tremendous amount of weight. I couldn't sleep. It was really, really, it was like it was a dark time for me. Of course. She wrote another piece saying JetBlue's founder helped fund a Stanford study that the coronavirus wasn't that deadly. Now, the study we ran it for about $100,000, which is very cheap for a study of that size.

And it was funded by small dollar donations to Stanford. I didn't take a single penny for the study. And Stanford knew this. That one of the people that donated to the study was this man who found a JetBlue. I had a couple of conversations that he wanted me to run studies in New York City, but I didn't have the infrastructure to run studies anywhere other than just where I happened to have local connections like L.A. and Santa Clara. So that didn't go anywhere. But he was very generous.

He gave $5,000 to Stanford for the study. And somehow that turned into this like weird conflict of interest. It's normally how studies are funded, like this anonymous gift account given to Stanford. Yeah. I'm not going to change the result of my studies because the Jet Blue Founder gave $5,000 for $100,000 study. It's insane. But that was the app, and she wrote it, a Stanford whistleblower complaint alleges. Right.

Stanford then took that and started, first they called it an investigation, but then very quickly they called it a fact-finding thing saying, we didn't do anything wrong. They just wanted to find out what happened. It lasted months. I hired lawyers. It was, I was really, you know, I've never had anything like this happen. I'm a faculty, full professor in good standing. Yeah. To have my university take this kind of slur seriously was really a shock to me.

And during that, during that, they, you know, they questioned basically everything. I, during the summer, I wrote a piece on Australia here on the futility of contact tracing. Because if you have a highly infectious respiratory virus, contract tracing is really useful if you can identify easily who gave it to you. You know, the disease isn't spreading rapidly. I wrote this piece saying, look, if you have a disease like this, this is contact tracing is not going to work to stop the spread of it. It just seemed like a reason, you mean, just a such an easy thing. It turned out to be correct. Now, everyone understands the contact tracing programs didn't do very much in retrospect.

But at the time, this is somewhat a controversial thing. This is published in September, but I wrote it in July. And I gave some public appearances about on this in July and August 2020. This was part of their investigation. Why did I talk about contact tracing in this negative way? Yeah. You know, I'm a faculty member. I thought I had academic freedom.

And yet Stanford treated my professional opinion about the about about the weather contact actions are useful as something that to investigate me over. They investigated the study knowing full well that the study was funded appropriately that we weren't there was no conflict of interest in this in how the study was funded. Yeah. What's the implication that you know, the founder of Jepp Blue is no longer involved in the company and a daily operational budget that somehow this will read down to his benefit and that you knew who funded your research in a pool.

set of donations to what the third wealthiest campus by endowment size in the world i mean it's it was it was truly a shocking thing i mean as i said i hired lawyers it was i was again filled with it it was just it was a very anxious summer actually i have to say like at the end of it um uh even before the end of it i'd come to terms with this i was like okay i'm gonna this is just the way life is going to be i have to just accept that basically everything i say is going to be seen in this like um this conspiracy field feel kind of filled kind of uh way instead of like my the good faith method the good faith in which I meant it like if we found for instance that COVID was 3.4 percent mortality rate I would have reported that I wanted to know the truth

I really desperately wanted to know that number because the the right policy depends on knowing that number uh john you needy organized a group that he wanted to like he wrote to president Trump's and and said look you you I want to offer you the some outside scientific help and he organized a group of scientists to go visit with President Trump, including people who are very much in favor of the lockdowns. That group included both pro and anti-lockdown scientists. He wanted to give President Trump a full view of what the scientific range of opinion was about COVID. Definitely made it into a big deal. Yeah. As if somehow it was like weird that scientists would want to go inform policymakers on this key scientific question, presenting fairly what the range of scientific opinion was.

And I like a lead group of scientists. At least she compliments you, you know. I mean, you know, whatever. I just, the whole thing was just, and then this is after this, she wrote a piece after wrote a Great Barretted Declaration about how we were calling for herd immunity, which is such nonsense. Like, you know, well, let me tell that story in just a bit. Right.

So there was a now, there were a hundred of these serial prevalence studies that were done. They all basically said the same thing. And the key thing is not even the death rate itself, but the spread in age. as a risk factor of the as a death rate right so you have like for for kids the survival rate is like really really really high 99.999 you know just a very large very very high number for you plus to 100 percent for older people it's quite a deadly disease you know especially in nursing homes institutional less of 70 and up 94 5 94.5 survival that's that's a low survival rate for a single infectious disease and and in fact that's come to pass like that's the predictions of these

studies, 80% of the deaths have been people over 65 worldwide. And for kids, it's likely that even before we had the vaccines, it was less damaging than the flu for kids. The lockdowns for the kids is a really bad thing. So I think it's one of these things we're like, I just, I don't know what to say. It was shocking. But scientifically, it was quite nice. We had a replication of our finding in real time.

Within a year, we knew that we were right from 100 other studies. Now let me tell you the story. This is the Great Berencon Declaration. Do you get an apology from Stephen? No. No, she still thinks we're bad guys. I mean, I think it's just really hard to do science in this kind of environment. And you'd think science writers would try to make science easier to do not harder, but that's not what happened during the pandemic. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. So the great-brenton declaration, that was a thing that I wrote in October 2020 with Martin Kuldorf, who's on the left over here, and Sunneter Gupta. We wrote this, worth this thing because what we wanted to do is this was aimed at the public. It wasn't less aimed at scientists. We wanted to tell the public.

At the time, it was like we could see another lockdown is coming. We knew that there was going to be another wave of cases and that people were going to react with as a lockdown. There was a sense there was an illusion of consensus that everyone, all reasonable science was in favor of a lockdown. What we want to do is we want to tell the public, no, there are reasonable scientists that disagreed with a lockdown policy. Reasonable scientists with credentials.

So we wrote this for, it's like a one-page document, tens of thousands of scientists signed on, epidemiologist signed on, almost a million people signed on. And the idea was we set this, the idea of the Great Parenthood Declaration is that we advocated for focus protection of older people. Those are the ones who were at high risk, move heaven and earth to protect them. At the same time, the lockdowns are hurting younger people. I'll show you some evidence on this in a second, but like in poor countries, the lockdowns essentially what we did is we disrupted trade ties. In poor countries

where the poorest people live, it's the point of the end of that policy is that that they lose their jobs, $2 a day or less of income, they go into dire poverty, they starve, their kids starve. And our kids in richer countries, you stop schooling for even short time. That has long-term consequences on their lives. They're less well-educated, so that means they're going to be poorer

their whole lives, they're going to be less healthy, and they're going to live less long. We robbed our kids of life years with the school closure policy that we adopted. And so the lockdowns we thought were quite harmful for less on net harmful for less vulnerable people for all for the for more vulnerable people um you want to move have an earth to protect them focus production that's what the great branch and declaration was and we we wrote this as an alternative to like letting it letting the

virus rip we're not calling for letting the virus go everywhere we wanted to protect older people from this uh from the virus but we also thought the lockdown policy is the mistake it was in october 4th 2020 within days tens of thousands tonight is signed on better protection for older high risk people young adults may live near normal lives as best you can to avoid to minimize the collateral damage from the lockdowns, let kids play with their friends, let them go to school, let them have something close to a normal life. Yeah. Or else we're going to harm them.

Okay. Now, I was much more emotionally prepared for this because I already been through the fire in April and the summer of 2020. So I knew there was going to get attacks. What I didn't know was who was going to attack. Four days after he wrote the Great Parente Declaration, this is Francis Collins. He's the head of the National Institute of Health. Just to give some context to your listeners, someone like Francis Collins,

It plays a pivotal role in the careers of biomedical research scientists. He sits on top of tens of billions of dollars of money that goes to biomedical research in the U.S. and elsewhere. But it's more than that. In order to get tenure at a place like Stanford University of Medicine, you basically need to have an NIH brand. It's a signifier of success. It's like an NSF grant maybe in cosmology or something. I mean, I just don't, you know, the equivalent is hard to say, but it's really quite important in the social status of scientists in biomedicine.

He wrote this email, four days after he wrote the Great Branch Declaration, and let me just read it to you. Hi, Tony and Cliff. Tony is Tony Fauci. Francis Collins is writing to Tony Fauci. See, this is the Great Branch and Declaration site. This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, mind you, with the secretary, secretary of HHS, seems to be getting a lot of attention. Even a co-signition from a Nobel Prize winner, Mike Leavitt, is Stanford. I mean, you know it's fringe because a Nobel Prize winner signed on, if I understand correctly from

There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of his premises. I don't see anything like that online yet. Is it underway? I started getting calls from reporters almost immediately, asking why did I want to let the virus rip? Why did I want to kill grandma? What was wrong with me to suggest this fringe idea? New York Times wrote this basically a hit piece, a really quite unfair hit piece, essentially saying, and the idea was that you couldn't do focus protection.

It's impossible to protect it. You can lock down everyone, keep everyone safe, but you couldn't keep old people safe. But that's crazy. It's actually not true. Sweden had actually followed after a disaster in Stockholm in the pandemic. They followed a policy focused protection that after that disaster actually did manage to keep a lot of their older population safe. Now, you know, Trump wants to try for herd immunity. Without a vaccine, it could kill millions. These are fellow scientists writing this. I mean, it was truly a, because what I wanted was- Tulski is the co-author. Yeah, the CDC director,

the now current CDC director. What I wanted was a conversation of, among public health officials to say, how should we protect vulnerable older people? It's gonna be very different in LA County versus in Billings, Montana or something. You need local public health to weigh in who understand the living circumstances of the older population where they are

and divides local policies that are sort of tailored for the local population. That's what should have happened. A detailed conversation. Instead you had this crazy idea that we're trying for her to, it doesn't make any scientific sense. Herd immunity is the end point

under this pandemic. I mean, that's just how the other coronaviruses are controlled. The other coronavirus you have a sufficient fraction of the population that had it. You can have it again. It doesn't, protection doesn't last forever. But it's, but you get this decoupling of cases from deaths. That's what herd immunity looks like. And isn't lockdown of everybody implicit in that lockdown of elderly people? So why would it be harder to lock down fewer people than to lock down more people? I mean, we weren't even calling for a lockdown. We weren't looking for. I'm not even saying lockdown. I just like, you're absolutely right. It made no logical sense other than to say, other than that just they didn't like us or something.

For in Japanese immunologists, we were trusted colleagues saying, look, there's not a consensus here. We're in Galileo's house, his final house slash imprisonment location. And we both remarked, you know, it wasn't a bad place to do a couple of years stint as a prisoner, you know, compared to that. I think Jeffrey Epstein would have loved to trade places. But while we were there, you know, we couldn't help think about, well, what did Galileo face? You know, when he is facing, you know, a modern day, you know, a latter day version, earlier day version of an inquisition. And I'm actually calling this episode a scientific inquisition because there's so many, I don't think a general, as you say, you're tenured, you know, you have multiple degrees all from Stanford. Your career, you know, and I'm not minimizing because you had huge repercussions to your career.

I mean, you could have been terminated. you have health insurance you have all sorts of things that you depend on your career for and you should and you have every right to but there are younger people on all of these articles and younger people doing good science now they are tainted with this with this scarlet letter ff not for Fauci but for but for fringe and that is devastating and i don't even think the the results can be known i don't even think it's knowable i don't think francis is going through and putting his finger on the scale of every proposal but when you say is there a coordinated you know it's a conspiracy i mean that's a definition of a conspiracy right people breathing together is what it means and breathing here to you know

coordinate with the uh with the you know number one uh person in in the world uh who is the face of this pandemic and leading the marshling of resources uh now his his his uh his quotes are accurate but will not be appreciated by the lighthouse um yeah i mean he's he's calling us fringe epidemiology I mean, it's just such an irresponsible use of his power, Brian. It's such an irresponsible use of his power. If he didn't agree with us, he could say why he didn't agree with us. They used the press to attack us, to smear us, to essentially push us to the French. And why?

Because they wanted to create this illusion that they actually was a scientific consensus when there actually wasn't one. Right. By the way, I don't remember millions not dying, Jay. I remember I think the death, I remember very vividly the front page of the New York Times of the 100,000 names, very powerful, very moving. We're up to 10 times that. I haven't seen any, you know, full issues of the Washington Post with everybody's name on it.

Why is that? I mean, this just got linked up in politics really very quickly, didn't it? And, you know, Tony Fauci, I think, worked to undermine President Trump. There's just no other way to put it. And I just said, unfortunately, he's a scientific advisor. He's not supposed to take political sides. He did. But they're talking about how they're going to manipulate the White House.

They were scared about us because, not because of anything, of like, we were right or wrong they were scared of us because they were afraid the illusion of consensus that they had that they were the science they knew what the scientific thing to do was have been shattered you have Nobel Prize winners you have your doctors and epidemiologists from from Stanford Harvard Oxford saying look no we don't we disagree that should be a call to scientific discussion not a call for devastating takedowns yeah and have it yeah tacitly what you say is absolutely correct I mean it's chilling you know to think about that I want every scientist is watching imagine your research proposal and we have people in my field by the way jay that

claim they're being censored by the big cosmology and nassas there are there are people that propose you know flat earth uh observatories and and so okay so there has to be some level but just every scientist and i have many and many of the Nobel prize winners that have been on the show um and honored me by by coming on there they're watching this right now just imagine you know your next proposed whether it's your university whether it's to your um you know to your funding agency Imagine just forget about the politics. Just that the grant director thinks of you as a fringe, as a nutcase, as a crank that not only, you know, it wasn't that you need to be ignored or, you know, or we need to bring the scientific fact. No, that you're a crackpot and you need to be taken down.

I don't care what branch of science you pursue. I think it's, I think it's really quite chilling. And the fact that they're still in position, even though, you know, let's say they were right. I don't think that they were right. But let's say they were to do this and have it revealed via these. really damning messages, I think that they're, they shouldn't be fit to serve in this capacity. And I'm sure that's controversial to say, but that they're still there and that they're retiring and they're going to get their benefits and so forth. I think scientists should be outraged

about the way you were treated. Well, I think, I think they've abdicated the responsibility they had to treat the power they were honored with, to treat it responsibly. Right. So if you're in that position, Brian, what you would do is you would bring me in a to have a discussion with me. And, you know, let's say you disagree with me. You'd say why. And if it made sense, we'd like air our differences publicly on the substance of it. You're not going to use, like what happens when Tony Fauci does this is a sense, you're

absolutely right, just sends a signal to all the other scientists in biomedicine that if you step out of line, you know, if Tony Fauci says, I am the science. You know, if you disagree with me, you're disagreeing with science itself. If you step out of line, your career is at stake. That is, that's just shocking, right? So yeah, you're right. There needs to be obviously some level of gatekeeping. You don't want every crank idea.

But this was not a crank idea. These were prominent people in respected institutions saying, look, this policy is wrong. And it was wrong. The disease spread everywhere. We still also got the collateral damage from it. I think it's just an irresponsible use of power. And I agree with you.

I don't understand. And frankly, it shocked me because I respected, deeply respected Francis, Collins and Tony Fauci before the pandemic. I still have a textbook from Tony Fauci that I learned internal medicine from. And Francis Collins, you know, he's a very prominent Christian and also a prominent scientist who did amazing work with the Human Genome Project. Yeah. It saddens me to have to say negative things about him. I still respect. I can't help but respect him deeply. Let me ask you a couple of other questions. I know your time is very limited, but there's a couple of, you know, big picture questions I want to ask you if you have five more minutes left, Jay.

Sure, yeah. First one is, you know, revolves around the recent op-eddy-he wrote in Newsweek. Where do you see things going, you know, with President Biden? Do you think there'll be a shift after the midterm elections? You feel like the policy is sort of, we've reached a point where we're coming to, as, you know, people are saying even Joe Biden said that, you know, COVID is, the pandemic is over, but we're still dealing. I don't know. He said something like that.

What do you see that going? and then I want to ask you about this amnesty proposal, and then we'll close out with some existential question. So first, the Newsweek op-ed that you wrote last week. Yeah, so I think whether it's Biden or somebody else, we have a choice to make. There's two ways I think we can deal with future pandemics. One is what we did previously,

which is we did work to try to bring viruses from the while into labs, play with them to see if they have pandemic potential, try to develop vaccines early, and then try to deal with the pandemics as they come up. The idea is to prevent the pandemics, and if they happen, be prepared to deal with them. It's quite likely, or certainly possible at least, that the pandemic, this pandemic may have been caused by that very research. If there's a lab leak, it's because somebody brought a virus that's very close to SARS-CoF-2 into a lab, played with it, gave it the capacity to infect humans, and it leaked accidentally. I'm not saying that's happened for sure, but there's certainly a live hypothesis.

And if that's true, that strategy of dealing with pandemics will have that forever with us. If we keep that, the other path we can just say is not do that. We go back the old ways. And sometimes pandemics happen every 30, 40 years and just have to try to cope with that fact. Right. The other thing, though, once you have this strategy of having this vaccine-ready pandemic, the Biden plan says within 130 days, we'll have the vaccine and we'll send it out to the population as soon as there's a new pandemic happens.

The problem with that is that it takes longer to test a vaccine in 130 days. You need very large samples of people, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, depending on the sample, the statistical power to test it. You want to test it for a longer period than just three months to see if it works. You want to know if it stops transmission, you know, who it protects, side effects and so on. It's going to take longer. During that time where you wait for 130 days for the vaccine, there'll be a tremendous. tremendous pressure to lock down again.

So that's one path. Study vaccines, study these viruses, bring them off in the wild, maybe cause the pandemic, and then lock down every time we have it for the hopes of finding a vaccine that we hope works after 130 days. The other path is a much more restricted set of research to try to prepare for pandemics by general vaccine research, general antiviral research, not specific ones to enhance the capacity of viruses to infect humans and not by promising 130-day, effectively, a vaccine program that undermines the ability to actually test vaccines appropriately, and it potentially undermines the trust in vaccines.

I think those are the policy choices very starkly that we face. Whether it's President Biden or somebody else, those are the choices we're going to have to make in the next few years, I think. Yeah. And then on the last topic before we close out has to do with this recent proposal by, I think, a professor and maybe some other colleagues of hers. And that was, uh, it's, we need a, we need a period of what we call in, uh, in Hebrew, to Shiva, repentance and maybe, uh, forgiveness. And she called it, I think the title is amnesty. We need an amnesty for what we did and said, you know, in Vegas, uh, you know,

shouldn't stay in Vegas. What we didn't said during the, the COVID pandemic. I always love that in Vegas, you know, what, what happened. Like, God doesn't know what's happening there. But anyway, uh, so God knows, uh, you know, what, what should be done. But, What do you make of this call for amnesty? So it's Professor Emily Oster. We're actually friends with before the pandemic, still friends, but I still have a deep respect for her. During the pandemic, she's done some really constructive things.

Like she collected data on the safety of school reopening and then what played a pretty central role in pushing for school reopening in the United States. The same time, he's called for things I disagree with. Like she called for vaccine mandates, which I think were quite harmful because I think it read distrust in vaccines. Now, I think the call for amnesty is hard. I very strongly believe in forgiveness.

I'm called to forgive. I mean, this is one of the things that my religious upbringing says. Like, even people that haven't asked for forgiveness, I'm supposed to love my enemies. And so, like, how do I do that? I think the way I think about this is you have to have forgiveness for people, but not amnesty for assistance. We have to have an honest conversation about what went wrong.

We have to have an honest conversation so that we can do reforms, so that what went wrong doesn't happen again. And that's going to bruise the egos of some people. That's inevitable. But that's how you do system reforms. I personally will work very hard in my own heart and mind to forgive those people that have harmed me. And I call for everybody else to do the same.

That's really we need some kind of reconciliation. A lot of mistakes happened. A lot of it was because of fear. A lot of it was because of uncertainty. And those are all understandable. Let's try to work with each other in that spirit. Even Tony Fauci, I'm willing to forgive. Even Francis Collins, I'm willing to forgive.

But, you know, in Judaism at least, you're called to forgive as well, but only on the supposition, the person identifies what was done wrong, recognizes, admits it's done wrong, and also, you know, reconciles with him or herself to never do it again. And so only it's thought, you know, can someone's honesty really be tested if they're put in the same position? And unfortunately, they're very likely to be put in position. And so you don't have to react to that. But I want to- The thing is I think some people, we really need a new leadership. Like leadership that essentially abuses its responsibilities doesn't deserve to be leaders.

Now, I don't mean that personally. I mean, it's just like you need people in scientific leadership that have the capacity to do the right thing even when it's hard. And unfortunately, I don't think that's true for all of our leaders. That's not the same thing as not not forgiving them. I mean, I think there should be consequences for bad actions. And that may include loss of leadership. Yeah, and just close with the quote from President Eisenhower, of course, did a lot of amazing things, including, you know, starting NASA, but and advocating against, you know, the blind acceptance of a what he called a military industrial complex. And I wonder, you know, he also said the following. He said, yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, we must also be alert to the danger that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific technological elite. and so um i think we do need to pay pay he to good old ike and and respect it even as and as

scientists who have the most to gain under a you know benevolent dictatorship of you know our techno uhocracy uh theocracy replaced with scientific uh uh theologians high priests uh priestesses we need to be careful of the power that we have you know you say science to somebody you're like oh my god you guys are so so smart and you know i always say i have to sing the alphabet song you know to know what comes after cute for god Okay, Jay, let me reach the final four thrilling questions of the into the impossible podcast, kind of semi-rapid fire, but I want to ask you these questions, which all my wonderful guests have had the opportunity to answer. And the first one, they're basically advice to your,

to future generations and past advice to your former self. So the first one I always ask is, what would you put in your ethical will, not material will when you spring forth the age of 120 or now you're so fit? You know, I was like, the gain of function could be good. Like I lost a lot of wait when I had COVID, I put it all back on since I was in Italy with you. You're forcing that carbunero pasta down. I mean, no. But in all seriousness, you know, there could be some good gain of function, just not with pathogens, please.

Anyway, what do you say that you want to leave in what we call in Hebrew, Zava'a, an ethical will that Moses gave, Jacob gave, Jesus gave on the sermon on the Mount. Even Alfred Nobel has an ethical component. What ethical provisions do you, would you like to give to future generations? both biological and ideological of which I count myself as one. I think you've been, each of us have been given gifts, our gifts for a purpose, intellectual gifts, moral gifts, you know, even material gifts. And we need to remember that that purpose is beyond us and to use those gifts responsibly

for that broader purpose. That's beautiful. The next statement comes from the namesake of the institution of which I'm the associate director, Arthur C. Clark, Center for Human Imagination here. And Arthur C. Clark famously said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. You're a very eminent scientist. Thinking scientifically, imagine you make a monolith like that in 2001, a Space Odyssey, the movies, and you can put anything on it that summarizes the greatest discovery, not made by you, although it could be, but the greatest scientific fact imaginable to kind of have a little bit of braggadocio about what human beings are capable of. What's the most astonishing thing in your field and any field about our scientific universe? In my field, we can heal people with the worst diseases that before we never imagined we could do.

You have cancer. There's so many cancers we can treat now. Cure. You have all these conditions that have plagued humanity for generations for millennia. And we can fix it. We just have to remember. that even when we're doing that, we still can't stop you from dying altogether. I mean, it's amazing what we can do. We live so much longer than we once did because of science.

But at the same time, we have to stay humble. We still haven't conquered death. We probably never will. Absolutely. Next question is another quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark. He said the following, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, they are almost certainly right. when they say something is impossible they are very probably wrong i'm not calling you elderly you're you got the gray hair going on is i use a sharpie so it keeps me uh not being as distinguished as you um what have you changed your mind about what if anything have you felt i was wrong about uh in your in your scientific work i think i mean just just on covid there's been a lot of things probably the most consequential thing i got wrong was it in march of 2020 i thought there was no

way to get a vaccine in a year. No chance. Because normally, my understanding was it would take a decade to find the right target for the vaccine and then quite a long time to test it, a year or more to test the vaccine. The fact that we could get the political and well and the scientific capacity to produce a vaccine so rapidly blew my mind. I'm still amazed by it. And so I kind of was pleased to be wrong about that. I do regret how the vaccine was used. I think it could have been used for focus protection of older people. I'm very strongly in favor of that. But it also was used to divide the population, to create shame for people who had some reservations about taking it for whatever reason. And essentially to like discriminate against people. That I think was to be regreted.

But that was a social use of the vaccine, not the amazing technical achievement of getting the vaccine in such a short time. Right. And then the last law by Arthur C. Clark states the following. the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of my podcast. And I ask this in the phrase, a form of advice to your former self. What mysterious aspect of life may be perplexed you as a 20-year-old or 30-year-old? But later, in moments of great clarity through inciting incidents or breakthroughs, led you to become the person that you are, a person of great courage, as well as great intellect.

In other words, what would you tell that 30-year-old, 20-year-old Jay to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? You know, it's really easy for young people. And certainly that was true for me to think that everyone else around you, especially the older people who have distinguished careers, know everything. And that they can tell you, you know, you're onto something or not onto something. I tell that 20-year-old, a 30-year-old that's doing science, you know, no one really has all the answers. It's not – and if they're telling you no, it's not because they know, no, they just. just they just you know that's the knee-jerk reaction almost everything is wrong you need to have some confidence in yourself you might be right and all of all the old guys around you with gray hair might be

wrong that's certainly possible it's almost that's how science advances brian is when by gray hair is like me get proven wrong and i think that's a really good thing yeah well uh dr j badacharya professor stanford school of medicine MD PhD health policy expert so much more uh this has been such a treat for me at Jay. I'm going to have links to your Twitter profile where you can follow at Dr. J letter J, Badacharya, and follow him and tune in. And I do hope you'll share. I mean, this audience is, you know, going to expand your profile, you know, just so exponentially this appearance, Jay, you won't be able to handle it. But you won't lose any weight. Maybe you'll gain some weight from this exposure. But I do hope you'll share it in the form of a memoir because it's such a

remarkable story of courage under extreme file. I mean, basically the worst situation in academic could find him or herself in that you've weathered, hopefully for good. And I wish you blessings and peace. I think that's nothing good can come without the blessings of health and peace. So Jay, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you, Brian. I'm so honored to know you as a friend. Thank you for the podcast. And it's a blessing for me, my friend. Take care. Take care. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. As I said, it might have sounded political at times.

That's not intentional. But fact is, there is a little. lot of politics and science nowadays, and some science getting into politics. And that's potentially a disaster, as you heard me quote from none other than Ike, President Dwight, David Eisenhower, one of the greatest presidents in our history. He warned of both the military industrial complex and the scientific technocracy that would take over our country potentially, ruled by a small band of theologian-like figures in the form of technocrats, scientists, et cetera. So I hope you enjoyed it. If you didn't, again, keep it to yourself. or send me constructive criticism at my website,

Briankeying.com slash list, or you can, as I said, keep it to yourself because I think it's important to do this mission, and I have on people of all political stripes, from Democrats to anarchists to people on the right, and I'll continue to do so when it intersects with my interest, which has to do with the flourishing of humanity, which I hope will take place and continue to take place.

And that includes preventing future disasters, like what happened with the COVID-19 lockdowns. So for now, that's it. I hope you will have, as I always say and always bid you a magical rest of your week. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.