Theology in the Raw - The Politics of Covid19: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. He holds courtesy appointments as Professor in Economics and in Health Research and Policy. He directs the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Dr. Bhattacharya’s peer-reviewed research has been published in economics, statistics, legal, medical, public health, and health policy journals. He holds an MD and PhD in economics from Stanford University. In this podcast conversation, we talk about the intersection between politics and covid, including what we now know about various hot topics related to the Covid19 pandemic: the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccines, natural immunity, and other debated topics.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello friends. Welcome back to another episode of theology in the raw. I'm going to be at life family church in Austin, Texas, September 17th to 18th, hosting a conference on faith, sexuality and gender. If that's a topic that interests you and you're near the Austin area, please register at center for faith.com. You can also live stream the event as well. Also we have our two day exiles in Babylon conference in Denver, Colorado, October 4th to 5th. It's going to be awesome.

You can find out all the information at theology in the raw.com for that one. Make sure you register sooner than later because space is filling up. Okay. My guest today is dr. J Bhattacharya, who is a professor of medicine at Stanford university. He is a research associate at the national bureau of economics research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for economic policy research and a whole bunch of other things he's involved in. He is a renowned, a scientist. He has both an MD and a PhD from Stanford university. Jay was, how do I say it? He had some different viewpoints on the COVID pandemic that were not part of the mainstream narrative. That's where we're going today, folks. I found

I came across Jay's name. I think in the fall of 2020, when he was part of a team that wrote the great Barrington declaration, that was really intriguing to me. In fact, I had dr. Martin, Martin Coldorf on who was another author of the great Barrington declaration. I had him on a few years, maybe 2021, maybe 2020. I forget. It was somewhere around that time. So, yeah. So we're talking all things related to the COVID pandemic. And so pretty much everything we're going to talk about here is controversial. I found Jay to be an absolute delight. He is a Christian, a solid believer in Jesus and also a renowned scientist. So, and, and one who

I've, I've read his stuff and have really come to respect his viewpoint. So very excited about this conversation. I think you will be challenged and yeah, I think it'll be challenged by at the very least. And I think you'll enjoy Jay's wisdom and humility. So please welcome to the show for the first time. Do you want to know me, Jay butter char? Jay, what were your initial thoughts about the COVID pandemic in the very earliest months? I'm talking like January, February, even March. Like what did we know? What didn't we know? How deadly was it? Did we even know? What were the unknowns and what were the knowns in those very earliest months? Well, in the earliest months in January, say, I was tracking, like everybody else, what was happening in China. And it looked like a worse version of that 2003 SARS pandemic to me, which essentially petered

out. So I was, you know, concerned, but I wasn't thinking there was going to span the globe immediately. And then some of the evidence started coming out. You know, remember that cruise ship, that Diamond Princess cruise ship that's floating around? You know, it very much looked like the standard story of a very, very deadly disease that was impacting a few people and causing panic wasn't exactly right.

So first of all, you could see the age gradient in mortality even in that cruise ship. Even actually in the early Chinese data, you could see that this was a disease that was really hurting old people but not posing much of a threat in terms of mortality to young people. And to children, almost not at all. It was really striking in the data, even from the early Chinese data, that was true. I didn't know in the earliest days how deadly disease was.

In fact, I wrote an op-ed in March of 2020 in the Wall Street Journal, first time in my life I ever wrote an op-ed, saying we didn't know how deadly it was saying we didn't know how deadly it was because we didn't know how widespread it was. We didn't even really know how fast it had spread. It was, actually I think it was like February, January, February, I forget, I saw a study,

and you probably remember it, like there was a Chinese restaurant in China, and one guy at one side of the restaurant had COVID, there was a fan blowing or something, and some guy on the other side got it. Oh, wow. And so I thought, okay, this is something that's different than SARS-1.

It'll spread much, much more easily. In fact, that was the hypothesis that I had in late February, mid February, March, 2020. It still seemed to me like there was a lot we didn't know in January and February about the epidemiology of the disease. I thought it was really important that we get on top of that really fast. Okay. I think it was in, I want to say March or April when the first major lockdown started

and it was, I specifically remember it was to flatten the curve. Hospitals are being overrun. This is, you know, there's a lot of unknowns. We just need to like shut everything down for a short period of time. What did you think about those very, the very first lockdown measures to flatten the curve? Do you think that was a wise move or? I thought that was a tremendous mistake. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I argued with my boss, the, the, the chair of the department of health policy here, who I've known for 30 years. I argued with him and I said that as much and he disagreed with me. I had, in addition to the rapid immunological uncertainties, which just started to clear

up I think to some degree, not entirely, but some degree by then, it was mid-March 2020. It was also, the idea of a lockdown to me, so I have a PhD in economics, in addition to my MD, and one of the things I study is the living situations of the poor, especially the poorest people in the world. The kinds of jobs they have, the stressors they face, how all this impacts their health. It was very clear to me that the lockdowns represented essentially a betrayal of trust by the West for the poorest places of the world. And also betrayal of trust by the ruling elite laptop class to the poorest people living in this country, and to the working class and to children.

Just to give you a couple of examples of this, in fact, I gave a interview with Reuters in early April 2020 on this topic. The child abuse is picked up in schools, right? So you have a child is being abused at home, often it's schools that where you first teachers or someone sees the evidence of this and calls in and sort of moves to protect the child. As soon as the lockdown is over, one of my first thoughts was that we're going to see a lot of abused children who don't get the help they need because schools are closed. When the West essentially locked down, I remember all the toilet paper shortages and that was a run on toilet paper, but it's more.

It's like supply chain disruptions and all of the world economy shuts down. The last 40 years, we globalized our economy. Essentially, that was a promise to the non-Western countries, the poor countries said, look, if you reorganize your economy so you fit in better with the trade relations of the West, change what jobs people have and so on, then your countries will get rich. We essentially broke that promise overnight. And so 100 million people were thrown into dire poverty almost overnight. The day the lockdowns hit in India in March of 2020, a half a billion people on the order of the Prime Minister of India, who were migrant workers working in cities, essentially they

live like hand to mouth. Their entire life's wealth is what they sell for the day, a coconut or something on the street. Then they sell the coconuts, they buy food for themselves and their family, and they buy more coconuts for the next day to sell. When the lockdowns hit, half a billion people were forced to go walk, in some case, walk back to their home villages, sometimes a thousand kilometers away. They lost their wealth immediately, their entire life savings immediately, thrown into dire poverty. A thousand died that day the lockdowns were issued in India on the road back because the

transportation systems couldn't fix it. I knew that was coming as someone who studies these things, that every single poor person on the face of the earth was going to be harmed in some material way, and sometimes to death, by these lockdowns. What? So the people in charge of the lockdowns, did they not know about this? Or why wasn't other viewpoints like yours and other issues kind of taken into consideration? Why was there such a uniform passion to lockdown everything?

Was it genuine ignorance? They didn't talk to you. Or was there a suppression of other complexities that follow the wake of the lockdowns. You know, it's interesting, because like the UN issued a report in April of 2020, the World Food Program in the UN saying that there would be 130 million people who are going to starve as a consequence of the economic dislocations

caused by the lockdowns, 130 million people. And there was a, there was, there was a, the World Bank issued a report that 100 million people were thrown into dire poverty, I think it was like July 2020. It wasn't known, unknown. Like the people who, you know, these global decision makers had at their fingertips these data and you don't even need those bodies to issue those reports. Like if you just, if you understand how the global economy functions even at a very superficial level, you knew these harms are going to happen to the poor. In this country,

the harms to the poor were dramatic. You saw food lines in Dallas, Texas, long drive people who couldn't get food. People lost their jobs, single moms were told to like stay home. And so they couldn't feed their kid. They had to make a choice, do they stay home and oversee their kids' Zoom school, or go to work and like feed their family. We basically told the poor to bear the burden of the disease and the economic harm

from the kind of things we did, while sort of the upper class of society protected itself from the harms. In fact, we made it into a virtue that you stay home and stay safe. Well, what if you don't have a home where you can stay home and stay safe? What if you don't have good internet access so your three kids can all of them go to school at the same time? I saw a picture in May 2020 I thought for sure would end the lockdowns. In the San Jose Mercury News, there was two kids, I think it was like seven and eight years old, that were left outside of a Taco Bell all day by their parents

because the parents didn't have internet at home. And they had like a Google Chromebook or whatever their school had given them. And so they're sitting in front of Taco Bell alone. Actually, the picture was nice because like the people inside the Taco Bell, the employees went and like tried to take care of the kids a little bit.

But like that's what we did to the poor while we padded, we in the laptop class the, in the, in the laptop class, pat ourselves on the back saying, okay, yeah, we're, we're the good guys. We can, we can stay home. We're responsible. We're being good people. I remember it was a little sickening. It made me sick to my stomach along these lines.

When I saw like Hollywood actors and all these, you know, what millionaires or whatever, like doing videos of staying at home and everything. And you know, they can sit in their house for weeks and they still have income. You know, they still have money. I'm like, wait a minute. That's not, but that's not the majority. That's how most people live. You know, especially the poorest. I mean, just even lower middle-class or lower middle-class, let alone the people you're talking about where, yeah, that's so, so again, I, what was the, what was the motive? Was it just a woeful ignorance on the part of the elite that they didn't realize that not everybody lives this lives this way? Was

it a fear out of there? Like, I don't want to, I don't want to die. This thing's deadly. So let's just do lockdowns when they're just having, thinking through the whole thing through their particular lens, or was there something a little bit more deliberate or like, when what's the benefit of locking down? Did anything? I always think like, well, people are motivated out of self interest. So what's the, what's the benefit to lock it down? Those who are in charge of, you know, making these decisions? I mean, so the stated benefit is what you said earlier, Preston. So the, um, was to, was to keep hospital systems open and, and, uh, so that they were, that the influx of anticipated influx of COVID patients could be cared for.

That seems legit, right? It is in some sense, but not actually. So there's a couple of things to think about. So first of all, COVID is not the only thing that's a health risk to people that requires hospitalization. Heart attacks, strokes, a whole host of conditions that require hospitalization, you know, heart attacks, strokes, you know, a whole host of conditions that require hospitalization. We essentially told people to stay home and die with heart attacks, and that happened. People stayed at home because they were afraid to come to the hospital in March, April 2020

and died of heart attacks that would have been cared for. They skipped their cancer screening. We told, we essentially decided that we were going to restructure our hospital systems and our health care systems around the treatment of COVID and nothing else, as if there are no other health conditions that afflict people. So in a sense, it's very, very short-sighted.

It was very short-sighted. The other thing about that is that it became very clear very quickly, even by like March 2020 in the United States, that while there were some places where hospital systems were pressured very, very severely, at some points in time, in most places, the hospital systems were just empty. Really? Yeah. And so the thing is, so you saw New York City, of course, that was traumatic, March, April 2020. But then after that, the hospital systems were empty in New York City. You saw, like I was tracking very closely Arizona, the Indian reservations there were really, really overwhelmed.

But then most of the hospitals around there for most of the periods after a few short periods of severe stress were empty. In California where I live, in Northern California, we converted the Santa Clara County Convention Center to an overflow hospital. And I don't think it was used. Even in New York City, the Mercy ship that came, that the president sent to go care for, I think that saw very few patients.

The Javits Center saw very few patients. The right thing to do was to do those overflow centers, like to have COVID places. Instead, what happened? So I think that if the idea was that by locking down, we can slow the spread of the disease, that was a failure. Like places that didn't lock down saw slow the spread of the disease, that was a failure. Places that didn't lock down saw a very similar spread of the disease. The reason is really simple.

Society requires us to be in contact with each other. It is not humanly possible for extended periods of time to stay apart from each other. The ideology of the lockdown is that we treat each other as biohazards, first and foremost. And so I think that that, to me, that was like, I mean, it was very clear that that was not sustainable. And it really wasn't, right? So if you look at the poor, the Google mobility maps, you know, the people's cell phones, you can see the poorest neighborhoods, the poorer neighborhoods, there's a lot of mobility

just within a week or so after the lockdown, whereas the rich neighborhoods, very little mobility. And so you can't have a society, we can't expect people to be able to do inhuman things. They tried in Peru. They had a very, very severe lockdown in Peru, caused tremendous poverty and suffering and COVID spread anyways. The idea that the lockdown actually suppresses the spread of the disease turns out, I think, to be empirically unverifiable and very likely false. And as far as the let's preserve hospital systems, that would have been better done by building overflow hospitals everywhere. You know, just to like put a, like to make a shocking point on this, you remember when

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York then, sent COVID infected patients to nursing, from nursing homes to hospitals, or from hospitals to nursing homes. Hospitals, yeah, yeah. Essentially spreading COVID amongst the most vulnerable people. Why would he do that? Yeah. That's not, that's not. Why would he do that? Yeah. I wanted to know that. Yeah.

It's not because he's evil, right? What he's getting, he's getting from his advisors that the primary goal should be the protection of hospital systems. And so, I mean, if you want to protect hospital systems, you move COVID-infected patients out so that they can recover wherever their primary domicile is, you know, many of them in nursing homes, that makes complete sense, doesn't it, right? If the primary goal is the protection of human life, you would never send COVID-infected patients

to nursing homes, you'd send them to like an overflow hospital or a overflow center or something, or a recovery center where they have protocols in place and vulnerable people aren't there. So I think the ideology of the lockdown drove the fear, it drove the callous disregard for poor people, for working class people and for children. And actually, I think in many ways, it drove this sort of... It had this this self-perpetuating kind of panic. So if you've locked down, well, it's such an extraordinary thing, of course you're going

to be scared. And so then you want more lockdown, which makes you more scared again. You're willing to do just terrible things, or count as terrible things, in the hope that you can protect yourself from this dread disease. When, when really what you ought to be thinking about is how to protect the most vulnerable. Because by doing that actually ironically would have protected yourself better. So would you, would you describe for the, it, for the most part, reasonable negligence meaning it wasn't sinister. Andrew Cuomo didn't want to kill old people. There was just, it

was reasonable. If you're hearing this, hearing that fear steps in, you kind of look at the view view. You look at the world through a kind of a narrow minded, like your world, not thinking like, what about poor people in the inner city or something? You know, I guess what, but if you knew this and I'm sure I'm assuming there's other scientists that kind of were like, Hey, there's other, we need to have a better conversation here. Why didn't that conversation happen? Why was there such a monolithic response to this that was at the very least questionable? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a... I mean, I don't like to sit in judgment with people. That's not my job. But I will say that for the vast majority of the population, what you said is entirely true.

The vast majority of the sort of the upper elite is entirely true. The vast majority of the upper elite. Most people don't have the kind of science background that you'd be able to assess, you know, seroprevalence studies of disease spread or whatever, right? That's not a thing. And I wouldn't expect people to have that capacity. Even politicians, I interacted with many politicians during the pandemic and most of them were totally intellectually unprepared for this. And so they were relying very heavily on scientific advisors.

I mean, it's interesting, I talk with friends of mine who were scientists, friends of mine who are politicians, friends of mine who are journalists, and the journalists blame the journalists, the politicians blame the politicians, and I blame the scientists. You do? Okay. Yeah. I think there's a couple of things that happened. One is that a lot of scientists who should have known better just failed. They failed intellectually. They didn't speak up for economists, for instance. Most prominent people in the economics profession embrace

the lockdown on the idea that while everyone will just voluntarily lock themselves away anyways, so there's no harm to the lockdown. There's no marginal harm to the lockdown. That's just nonsense. Poor people are not going to voluntarily lock themselves away and let their kids starve. So then the other side of it, the other thing is that the scientists, I'll tell you, I felt I was subject to tremendous pressure to stay silent by my university. Really?

And I suspect that that was true in many, many places, right? So that the, my university tried to, they ran, I mean, I ran a study measuring how many people had already had COVID in early April, 2020. I've got a lot of publicity around it because I wanted to like tell people, look, it was look, it already spread beyond our capacity to use lockdowns to stop it. It basically meant that the disease was

going to go everywhere eventually. So the main thing, your main argument against the lockdowns is it's just not going to be effective. It's going to keep spreading given how contagious it was. That's one argument. But I also think the other argument to get the lockdown is even if they were to some degree effective, if they have the devastating impact on the poor that they were entirely predictable that they were going to have, is it moral? Do the ends justify the means? Can we use those kinds of reasoning in making policy decisions?

For instance, if we could rid the world of the bottom 20% of the population and then all of a sudden everyone else is more long lived, is that a reasonable, normal, ethical thing to do? And I'd say no. I think that would be a great evil. So I think that it's both that it can't work and it can't work in primarily because our societies are deeply unequal. And lockdowns are premised on the idea that we can all stay home, stay safe. And we cannot. That's just the reality. It doesn't help to blame people for being poor.

That's why they fail. It was also the case that I think even if it were to be able to succeed to some degree in protecting some part of the population, I think it's immoral to do so in that way if it destroys the well-being and health of the poor. So we knew early on that it was primarily the elderly, people who are immunocompromised, and people that struggle with obesity. I think as far as I recall, those would be the three main categories that are, they're very susceptible to the disease, but like younger people, healthy people, this is not, they're not at high risk. I mean, and anecdotally it's like, yeah, but this 20 year old died. I'm like, well, yeah, I know a 10 year old that died of cancer too. It doesn't mean 10 year olds are at risk of cancer.

Like there's always exceptions. I'm curious. Why was it? Why was that not? And from my vantage point, that didn't seem publicized very thoroughly. I kept seeing arguments. People try to make an argument that kids are just as vulnerable. Nobody really talked about people who struggle with obesity. That was be really sensitive, obviously. I come from a family that struggles with obesity, so I'm sensitive to that. But yeah, why wasn't, why was it kind of given like it seemed like everybody's at equal risk? Cause is the message that I see that seemed to be pretty prevalent. Why was that? Why was that the case? I mean, it's funny cause because the CDC itself had its estimates

of the infection fatality rate by age. And the risk for children was vanishingly small in the official CDC numbers. But if you tried to, so I ran that study in April of 2020, measuring how many people had had COVID already. It was like 4% of LA County, for instance, had already had COVID. There was a lot of media attention around that study. But then there was all this pretty vicious

attacks on me and my family by the media, trying to undermine me as a scientist, undermine me just to slander me in order to reduce the credibility in the public mind about me. Every scientist who spoke up about this faced the same exact thing. The universities that they were at went after them. Some of them lost their jobs for doing so. The media took it as a virtue to stress the risk of the disease, but didn't take it as a virtue to highlight the harms caused by the measures that we took to try to control the disease.

So I think that that signal got very, very clearly sent to other scientists who might have spoken up. Many of them stayed silent. I mean, they would write to me and say, thanks for speaking up, Jay. I can't do it. I don't want to risk my job or whatever it was. It's not to say it's not understandable, but it's one of these things where the entire environment in 2020 essentially made it a virtue to panic monger. And then as a way, people are very clever about this, and the way they do it is if anyone is not panic-mongering is therefore

spreading misinformation and then you get this sort of cycle of like you're going to get hammered in the head of anyone that speaks up, other people are going to look and say, I don't want my head hammered and they won't speak up. It's very, very difficult to get out of that cycle. And in that fear-mongering state, you end up adopting things that are just cruel. We closed schools for a year and a half in Uganda, just to pick a data point. Because of the WHO's recommendations around lockdowns

and so on, and then local authorities and sort of running with it, they closed schools for two years. That meant for many, many kids in Uganda, no school, no Zoom school. If you care about global inequality, we essentially rocket launched it into the stratosphere for the next generation. These two years of school means these kids will not have any capacity for making the kind of investments that would

normally allow them to get out of poverty. And then when the schools opened, four and a half million of those kids never came back. And it turns out, again, according to UN report, many of those kids were sold into sexual slavery or into child labor because their families were starving. And they had the choice between putting their kids into these horrible, horrible situations or starving them. I mean, so we had like, we just, it's, it's, we do terrible, terrible things when we're in this state of fear and we, we tell ourselves, we justify to ourselves that we're doing good when we're actually doing great evil.

So going back to the media, I was just in Uganda a few weeks ago and I saw some of the still aftermath effects of, yeah, the crazy, the response that, yeah, the whole situation is just so, so messy. Going back to the media suppression, what's the, again, I'm trying to, I want to have the best faith interpretation of that. Was it largely misplaced fear. Like we talked about before that they really thought that your perspective, Jay is killing grandma is killing people is, is morally hazardous as misinformation. And you know, uh, once you have that kind of binary, maybe view the world, do you think somebody is, you know, you have the KKK Hitler and

Jay butter char. You know, like just after a kill, just whether you want to, and I don't, I shouldn't take light. I don't want to make light of it. Cause I mean, but is that, is that, I mean, I could see that there's a reasonableness, maybe not reasonable. I could, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a well-intended misplaced fear maybe there, or is there something I always have to ask a question? Is there money involved? Usually we need power and money typically comes up behind most things that these days it seems like. But yeah, why,

why would they say, Hey, let's get a bunch of scientists together. Let's hash this out. Let's get the best kind of view on things. There's some good scientists are kind of disagreeing on things. Let's, let's have a conversation, but that wasn't really happening. That's what should have happened, Preston, but that's not the... I think it's one of these things where sometimes people will tell even a different story where there's some great puppet master that's controlling it all, that's benefiting Bill Gates or whatever. I don't think that that story is true. I do think that what is true is that once you have a situation like this, once you are

in a crisis, you're going to get people who sometimes for just sort of good hearted reasons want to get involved to help things. I saw Elon Musk early on was trying to turn his factory into making ventilators, which actually turned out to actually probably kill people. Right, right. But I don't think I will blame him. I mean, he thought he was doing good. On the other hand, you also have...

And then you also have people... Again, another example of this, you have scientists who say, I want to create a vaccine to protect this. I want to create... Again, that's all very, very good. But then there's also profit motives involved. So as soon as you say, okay, I'm going to do this for the good of others, then you tell yourself stories about like, I don't need to follow this rule.

I don't need to follow that rule because it's all the purpose of the good of others. I think that's even more dangerous than some puppet master. So you have a lot of people thinking that they're doing good, cutting corners, and not always, but sometimes doing, and ending up the effect of what they did is evil. And I think that that's primarily what happened. I don't think that most people were evil, trying to like take advantage, although there again,

there were some, I'm not saying that I'm not naive. I think there were some of that. But I think it's very, very easy to tell yourself you're doing good when you are in the middle of a crisis and everyone's everyone else around you is telling you you're doing good. Okay. Let's, let's move forward. Maybe later. Let's, let's go to the, actually let's go to the development of the vaccine. And I don't know where to start. I, I, this is not my area. This is why you're on the show here. Uh, like what did we know about the vaccine?

Say when it was being developed, when it finally was developed, what did we know about the vaccine? Say when it was being developed, when it finally was developed, what did we know? What didn't we know? Cause I was, you know, I was told that, you know, this will stop the spread that if you have the vaccine, you won't spread it to others. So even if you're not at risk, you're being a good citizen because you will prevent again, you from spreading it to grandma Did we think and now I as far as I know we now know that's just not true Like you can get vaccinated and you can totally spread it Was that like a progression of genuine knowledge was their knowledge suppressed suppression surrounding the vaccine? What did we know about it?

What didn't we know right? So the vaccine was developed very, very rapidly. In fact, this is probably the biggest mistake I made during the pandemic. In March of 2020, I thought it was impossible that we would be able to develop a vaccine within a year. I mean, that just seemed like completely fanciful to me. So I was amazed when that actually happened. We actually tested a vaccine and deployed it by December 2020. An absolutely remarkable achievement.

Now what did we know about the vaccine in December 2020? So because of the rapid timeframe of it, there was going to be things that we normally would know about a vaccine that we didn't know about this one. So first, the randomized trials that were conducted in 2020, most of them had about a two-month timeframe. You randomly assign 20,000 people to the vaccine and 20,000 people to placebo, and you track them for two months. You're not going to know anything about long-term effects from the randomized trials.

That's just by design of the trial, the fact that it's a short timeframe and you're approving it in rapid timeframe, you're not going to know that. We shouldn't have been saying anything about long-term benefits or costs, harms, because we didn't know from the trial in December 2020. Could not possibly, based just on the physical time frame, have known. Second, the trial did not include as an endpoint checking whether it stopped you from spreading COVID. It did not include that as an endpoint checking whether it stopped you from spreading COVID. It did not include that as an endpoint. I read very carefully about that because from a policy point of view, that's a critically

important fact. Does this vaccine stop you from spreading the disease? And the trial did not have that as an endpoint to check. It's actually kind of a scandal that it didn't, because it would have been easy, right? So if to do that. So for instance, if you take the people that are assigned the vaccine randomly and you take the people assigned the placebo randomly, all you have to do is check whether the spouses of the people that got the vaccine and the people who got the placebo, are they more likely or less likely to get COVID? And from that you can ask, do they, because spouses are often spread the disease to each other, that from that you can ask whether,

answer whether the vaccine has any short-term effect on you stopping spreading the disease. So where, where, where did it, where did that, that viewpoint come from? Because that, am I right to say that that was how it was kind of advertised? And that's why there was such a pitch for everybody to get, everybody needs to get vaccinated. And they had stats on which states are doing, I live in Idaho. We weren't doing very well. We're, we're, we're an interesting country over here in Idaho. Um, but, uh, where did the information come from that people were pitching it that way? Based on, it was based on nothing. It wasn't based on the randomized trial.

The randomized trial show that it stopped you from getting symptomatic disease. And that's why it was so interesting. And I think that way? Based on it was based on nothing. It wasn't based on the randomized trial. The randomized trial show that it stopped you from getting symptomatic disease or reduce the probability by a lot 95% for two months. If you'd exclude the first two weeks after vaccination, right? So that at most would allow you to say is that it's going to reduce the probability of getting, getting symptomatic infection. It does, actually they didn't check to see going to reduce the probability of getting symptomatic infection. It doesn't actually, they didn't check to see if it reduced the probability of death

either. You would have needed a very different randomized trial to do that. Because in order to do that, you need a lot more old people in the trial or you need a much larger trial. And in fact, there were more deaths in the vaccine arm than in the treatment arm and then the placebo arm, the vaccine arm than the placebo arm in the trial itself. But it was not statistically significant.

There was basically no detectable difference in deaths. So what it had was a reduction in the probability of symptomatic infection for two months and that's it. That's what we learned from the trial. And so a lot of what the public health authorities were saying was extrapolation and induction based on essentially nothing. I saw an interview of Rochelle Walensky, the former CDC director, where she essentially admitted it was based on hope. They hoped that it would stop the disease from spreading.

But the problem is they premised their policies based on that hope, which turned out to be false. In fact, you can spread the disease if you're vaccinated. In fact, you can get the disease. I was vaccinated in April 2021, and three or four months later, in August of 2021, I got COVID. I mean, it's just the idea that the vaccine stopped you from getting and spreading COVID was central to the policy adopted by countries, especially in the United States in 2021. Again, just the ideology of the lockdown was that our neighbor is a biohazard

and we should treat our neighbor as a biohazard. There's this distinction between clean and unclean inherent in it. If you have COVID, you're unclean. If you don't have COVID, you're clean. If you wear a mask, you're clean. If you're not wearing a mask, you're unclean. The idea that the vaccine stops you from getting and spreading COVID meant it really reinforced this idea that your neighbor is a biohazard, the vaccine is a baptism to clean you. Anyone that's unvaccinated is unclean, anyone who's vaccinated is clean. Once that idea set in, then all kinds of crazy policies, harmful policies got put in.

The vaccine mandates, of course, being primarily among them. But vaccine passports excluding people from public spaces. And it spread out into the community. You had people uninviting their relatives from Thanksgiving if they're unvaccinated. You're not allowed to hug your grandchildren if you're unvaccinated. You're not allowed to go to the public library if you're unvaccinated. We essentially created a two-tier society on the premise of one group because they took the vaccine or clean and the other group because

they didn't know it was unclean. And it was not based on data from the randomized trials. What was it based? Okay. I guess the, okay. So the hope and just misinformation people, did they just say, well, other vaccines do this. So this one will probably do the same thing. I mean, that knowledge is kind of seeped into journalists and politicians and Yep. Exactly.

What happened, right? Again, the scientists failed. The scientists should have been honestly conveying what was known or not known. And instead they conveyed false, uh, certainty about the effects of the vaccine that had not been shown in the randomized trials. So if they should know better, see, this is where I, I do raise the money question. I at least want to say, well, was, was there money involved there? Is that, is that a, I'm not a conspiracy. I'll have a tin foil hat or whatever.

It's just, you see this. I do think I'd like for the vaccine companies themselves, of course they, they, they, they made crazy amounts of money. How much did Pfizer make? I don't know the numbers. I was hundreds, hundreds of hundred million, a hundred billion dollars. I mean, it was a very, it was an insane amount of money.

I don't know the exact numbers, but so absolutely they had an incentive to overstate the case, but drug companies always have an incentive to overstate the case for their products. Normally, you'd have regulators telling them, no, you can't say that. You don't have any data on that. Instead, what you had was regulators reinforcing the overstating of the case. You had government officials, politicians, church leaders overstating the case, again, on the basis of no data. And so it was really shocking to me to watch. I mean, I've worked with the FDA on drug and vaccine safety for many, many years. And normally, they're very conservative in terms of like, they won't say anything unless it's really until they know scientifically it's true.

Here they signed on to things that they could not possibly have known were scientifically true and allowed drug companies to say whatever they liked. I think partly for scientists, in addition to the money for the drug companies, again, I don't actually think that's the primary driver. I think for the scientists and the public health people, if you have... Okay, so put yourself in the shoes of a third year medical student. You know almost nothing about the way the world works and the human body. You've just gone through a whole bunch of school and you're very, very smart.

And you're sitting there in front of a patient and you have a white coat on, and the patient is asking you questions, two of which you don't have the answer. I mean, I've been there, and it's very frustrating. And so the temptation is to pretend you have an answer that you don't actually have because you're wearing the white coat and the white coat makes you look like you should have an answer.

It's the same thing in the ministry. You got a third year seminary student and somebody asked them a theological question and they're always gonna give the right answer even if they don't know what they're talking about. I mean, so you know exactly what I'm talking about. So it's one of those things where like a lot of public health was like that.

They wanted, all the world was looking at them for how do we address this? How do we fix this problem that we're facing? And everyone's scared in part because public health ginned up the fear. And the vaccine to them looked like an answer. Very, very simple answer. Vaccines work in many, many other settings. Why wouldn't it work in this setting? And so they were like, for them, it was a virtue.

They could appear to themselves virtuous because they were promoting the kind of product that worked to help rid the world of smallpox. And so they could essentially make false promises even though they didn't know the answer. What did or didn't we know about, and then we're going to wander into some really controversial stuff here, the negative side effects of the vaccine. We were told they're completely safe.

Any side effect is just so minuscule. You're not, nobody's at anybody can take it. Not at risk. And then, then you start having weird stuff come out about like how it affects women's menstrual cycles. Um, the mile car car diet, myocarditis. Uh, then there's, and as, as, as a, as a image, as, as a, uh, just a lay person sitting back, you know, I'll see one video of like healthy people dropping out dead out of nowhere.

You know, this is the vaccine or a lot of correlation causation stuff that's confused. I'm like, I just, I don't know. I don't know. I don't have enough knowledge to have an opinion. So what do we know now? Maybe looking back on potential negative side effects of the vaccine. I mean, we knew very, very early on that young men, especially had high rates of heart inflammation from it. Myocarditis. We knew that early on. Yeah. There was a report out of Israel, I think February 2021, March 2021, showing the elevated risk. There was a bunch of arguments over how high an elevation of the risk was. I'll accept numbers between one and 2,000 to one and 10,000 of higher rate of myocarditis for young men who got the vaccine.

And then that's for clinically diagnosed myocarditis for young men who got the vaccine. And then, you know, that's for clinically diagnosed myocarditis. There's also subclinical myocarditis. It's not necessarily diagnosed, but it still can cause some problems. The menstrual irregularities, there were anecdotal reports of it early. And I remember there were people like Naomi, my friend, I'm blanking on her name because

I'm senile, but anyways, there were reports of people saying that there was menstrual irregularities that were labeled misinformers and kicked off of Twitter and labeled crazy, hysterical or something. And then a few months later, there were solid reports of elevated rates of menstrual irregularities caused by women who took the vaccine. A friend of mine, Joe Freiman, reanalyzed the randomized trial data along with someone named Peter Doshi, who's an editor at the British Medical Journal. They found in the randomized trial data from 2020,

when analyzed properly, that there was a one in 800 risk of serious adverse events. That doesn't mean you die or go to the hospital. It's just there's a specific definition. That's a pretty high number for a vaccine. One in 800. So now, one in 800 isn't such a large number that everyone around you who got the vaccine is getting a serious adverse event. Like you probably know one or two people. Yeah, I know personal people who had, yeah, just weird stuff. Even like the menstrual cycle thing, like let's just say that doesn't, that's not just a life threatening or whatever.

To me, it's just like, well, that's a pretty, like that's a significant biological thing built into a female system. And like, why, I just said like, why, if it's doing that, like that's just, it's doing something to your body that is a little bit concerning to me. Even if, even if at the end of the day, it doesn't end up having, you know, major harmful side effects that just raises red flags. Well, I mean, it's just like when I saw that, Naomi Wolf, I remember that. Sinility is not a good thing.

The fact that it has menstrual cycle, it causes that. It made me worry when I saw some of those data, why are we recommending to pregnant women or women who want to get pregnant? Right, it very clearly has impacts outside of, you know, just the arm where you injected it. You want to be careful, I would think. Normally for any medication,

you would be very careful about recommending to pregnant women. Yeah, absolutely. And for children, it made no sense to me to recommend the vaccine. So the studies that looked at the vaccine in children, it didn't even check to see whether it reduced the rate of hospitalization. All it checked was did it produce antibodies to some extent, and did it reduce the risk

of getting COVID. But for kids, the vast, vast, vast majority of kids, getting COVID is just a cold. And there were no deaths in the randomized trials with children. And so the benefit to children from getting the vaccine, which is this reduction in the risk of mortality or whatever from it was tiny. So any side effects at all would say, well, we shouldn't be giving it to kids. I feel like I knew that. I'm not'm not a specialist and I saw that early on. I don't know which, you know, you I'm sitting around reading study, reading a

book, this listening to interviews. I don't know where I got that from, but it seemed to be pretty well established that kids, especially unless you're immunocompromised or, you know, um, you're not, you're not at risk. Um, and then once we found out, or once it was made public that you're also not gonna, it's not going to reduce the spread by getting the vaccine. Then I was like, there's no reason why anybody that's healthy and young should be getting this. But I'm not an expert. So I'm like, why, why hit all the experts? Some of the experts know that.

Well, I think it was, again, one of these things where like, I think a lot of the, the scientific community thought that the vaccine probably reduced the risk of spreading COVID. And so they thought basically everyone needed to get it. If everyone got it, then the COVID will just disappear. But there was no technology, not the lockdowns, not the vaccines, to stop COVID from spreading. I mean, we have a new disease that will spread amongst us

for all of eternity. It is not going away anytime. We have no, we're not close to any technology to stop it or get rid of it or eradicate it. Can you tell us about natural immunity versus vaccine say immunity? This is another thing that I again learned early on that I think it's pretty well established that not if you get COVID you recover, you, you, you're

way more protected. I think there was an Israeli study. It was like 17 times more or something. I'll, I'll let you confirm that you got it. You got it exactly right. Did I get it right? Okay. Um, and that seemed to be again, not some fringe point of view, but like, this seems to be pretty well established among immunologists. And I've, I've heard you talk about that. What do we know? What, what does the science say about natural immunity versus vaccine immunity? And why wasn't that factored in? Like, why were you not, why were people kicked out of their jobs or whatever if they wouldn't get the vaccine even though they've had COVID two or three times? Like, to me, that

just doesn't make any scientific sense. So first on the data, when COVID first hit, it was actually, it was deemed misinformation to even suggest the possibility that if you recover from COVID, you'd have immunity. I mean, there were immunologists here at Stanford I talked with very early on that for them, it was an active possibility that there was no immunity after COVID. Now, that would be remarkable because other coronaviruses all produce some immunity.

Not forever. It's not like measles or something, but it produces for a year, two years, three years, you're going to have some protection against reinfection with those same coronaviruses. If this coronavirus produced no immunity, that would have been an absolutely remarkable thing. It struck me as too conservative an assumption, but by July of 2020, there were fantastic immunological studies demonstrating mechanisms by which the immunity was happening, published in Cell, Nature, journals that are normally very trustworthy

on these things. But the idea of immunity, it undercut the ability for public health to tell people to comply with the lockdown orders or with vaccine orders. So in a sense, it was like a threat to public compliance with public health orders, the idea of immunity itself. And so when you saw people talk about it in the press, it was with this like, well, I don't know, this is a conspiracy theory. Who are these crazy people talking about immunity?

Even though the data itself were very, very clear early on that there was substantial immunity. And then after the vaccine came out, there were lots of studies that were trying to look at this. The very best were long-term cohort studies that would track people, vaccinated, unvaccinated, previously immune versus not previously immune, and just track them over time. And these Israeli studies found much higher protection against reinfection and much higher protection against severe disease on reinfection by people who had been previously infected and recovered versus people who had never been previously infected and just got the vaccine.

There's not to say the vaccine... Actually, for older people, the vaccine actually did reduce the risk of death. So I'm not saying that the vaccine shouldn't have been used at all, but it should have been targeted to people. Older people who were just because they're older automatically have higher risk of severe disease on infection. But older people who'd never had the disease before should have been the primary goal of the vaccination campaign.

I'm curious, Jay, all the stuff you're saying, is this now out in the public? Is it more widely known or people kind of admit it? Cause I've been talking about like recently, for some reason I keep turning around and seeing, well, here's a good example, the lab leak theory. You would have gotten, I think you got your account suspended if you suggested that this came from a lab, not from a bat or whatever. And now I feel like I just kind of woke up the other day. I'm like, Oh, everybody believes it's like, that's just, yeah, that's yeah. Lably, you know, like, well, wait a minute. Like, do we have new information now or like why? And a lot of things are like,

like I think I told you offline that like, you know, or maybe I told it on the podcast. I can't remember what was on the record or not, but like Chris Cuomo, you know, a CNN person, you know, I remember like three years ago, he was like mocking or at least like, like, yeah, kind of mocking Joe Rogan for taking Ivermectin, Ivermectin, Horstewormer, you know, this guy's on horse Horstewormer and him and Don Lemon were kind of like, you know, this freak, you know? And then I just heard the other day, like, he's like, yeah, I'm taking Ivermectinin. Yeah. It's, it's, it's really good against COVID. I'm like, what, what, what happened? This is why I wanted to have you on Jake's. I feel like there was a two year span where the everything just kind of drifted off. And then now we're getting a lot of, seems to

be widely spread beliefs now that were fringe three years ago. And now it's like people kind of like, oh yeah, the, the, the, the, the fringe scientists like Jay Bhattacharya turned out to be correct. Like, so what you're saying, is this now widely like accepted and people just kind of say, yeah, we kind of screwed up and we're moving on or? I mean, I think, I think, uh, uh, that I think the public at large, I've got a lab leak. I agree with you. I think most of the public at large, um, is, is moving on as like understood understood that it very likely was a lab leak. Among scientists, there's still a group of scientists who funded the kind of work that likely led to the lab leak that very strongly still maintained it happened in a Wuhan market

or something. There's a fight internally in part to maintain the reputation of people like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins who funded the kind of work that very likely led to the disease itself, where the Democrats sort of pulled themselves in this position where, well, it may be a lab leak, but it probably had nothing to do with us. It had nothing to do with the NIH. It had nothing to do with Tony Fauci. The Republicans are more willing to say, look, this very likely was a lab leak. The fight really isn't over the lab leak origin.

I think that's not the key fight. The key fight is what do we do to reduce the risk of future lab leaks? How do we make it so that the kinds of dangerous research that was conducted, that very likely led to this pandemic, never happen again? What can the NIH do to make sure that never happens again? What kind of reforms do we need? That's where the fight right now is. Some people want to trust the NIH to oversee whether it should be funding dangerous research or not. Other other people like me, we want independent bodies to oversee that.

Say, look, the NIH failed at this kind of self-regulation already. Why should you trust it with more self-regulation? We should have more stringent regulation so that if a scientist wants to conduct a dangerous experiment that might impact and harm every single person on the face of the earth, the public should have some say in that.

Do you find that's, yeah, that seems wise. I wanted to ask you previously, what do we know about the death toll? I know there was debates about, you know, do people die with COVID or of COVID? Who is dying? Would they have died two days later because they already had something, you know?

So I know there was debates about how many people actually died of COVID And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had.

And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest thing that we've had. And I think that's the biggest stuff that we're just misinformation about the vaccine and, and another person was like, it saved millions and millions of people. Like, you know, just too wildly different perspectives. What is there, is there kind of some kind of consensus on how many people were saved from vaccine? How many people died of COVID? How deadly was it? If, if, if there's a consensus, then it left me because I don't, I don't know. I actually, I don't know the answer to that question. I've seen people produce studies that say the vaccine killed millions of people.

And I've seen people produce studies that say that the vaccine saved millions of people. And the methods of both of those sets of studies don't meet my standards for where I believe the number of either study. I'm open to the idea that the vaccine saved a lot of older people. Absolutely open to that. But I want to see careful methods with control groups where they're making reasonable extrapolations. I have not yet seen such a study. And so I don't know what the number actually is as far... And the other thing that you brought up was important is like the case definitions do matter here.

And different countries had different case. China had a very different case definition. You needed to be very severely ill before they counted you as having COVID, especially early on. So I think comparing cross countries where you're looking at COVID numbers is going to be fraught with error. What I rely on is all causecause excess deaths. All-cause excess deaths. So I'm much less interested in did you die of COVID than in the question of did you just

die, right? That seems like that's much easier to measure. It's harder to play games with. And all-cause excess deaths means all cause it means did you die excess means Was the rate of death higher during the kovat period during the kovat era? then it was then you would have expected given the rates of death in your country before the pandemic and There the story that's there is really really interesting Sweden has among the lowest all cause excess deaths in all the countries on earth. They protected human life better than almost all the other countries on earth without a lockdown. That tells you a lesson, like the lockdowns were not necessary to protect people.

And in fact, the lockdowns themselves very likely caused a lot of deaths. You know, Peru being a good example is a tremendously high all-cause excess deaths despite a draconian lockdown. The other thing about those all-cause, like just in the state of the United States, like Florida, which basically opened up by May, October 2020, versus California. Now remember, COVID has this age adjust.

So you've got to age adjust. Florida is an older population. But once you do that age adjustment, it turns out that Florida has lower all-cause access deaths than California did, despite my kids being out of school for a year and a half, despite the sort of very restrictive policies on churches, schools, businesses, and so on that California undertook.

Disneyland reopened in 2021. Disney world reopened in 2020. And so you just, you had this like, I mean, there's just the, the evidence that lockdowns were necessary to protect human life. I think once you look at that metric is just not very good. Is that on the contrary bad for people? Is that something that's much more agreed upon now than it was three years ago, or is that still viewed as a fringe thing that, Hey, if this happens again, we're going to lock down again. Like, I mean, it's, it's, um, that those data have been around for a while. It's still the

case. I still see scientists who don't know these data and they, and they sit there arguing about, uh, about COVID diagnoses where like, just, they're just intractable things. Like how do you, how do, how do people, you know, we had, in the United States until 2025, we have a $10,000 funeral benefit if you had COVID on your death certificate, but not if you have cancer, right? And then in fact, the FEMA page had a whole instruction

of how to get your doctor to put COVID on your death certificate. So you qualify for $10,000 benefit. I mean, a lot of these data are going to be subverted by these incentives when you're talking about COVID. That's why I think the all-cause access data are so nice. It's really hard to subvert those data. And they're a clean measure of how well did the country do?

How well did the region do? How well did the region do? Using a measure that everybody cares about. That's hard to subvert, hard to like corrupt. And so I tend to focus on that. We can argue about to what extent did the vaccines contribute to reducing all-cause excess deaths. We can argue about all those other things. But first, let's start with data that everyone agrees on.

And I think that's why they all agree that it's important and clean. And that's the, the all cause X is death. I think especially all cause death data are really, are really the right starting point. I wanted to ask you, and I don't know how to word this, but like, you know, I went out to your Wikipedia page and I think you were called like a fringe epitomology or something, or there's been a lot of, if you Google your name hard enough, there's like pages devoted to smearing you and everything. Like, how do you, if, if maybe there's some listeners who are like, Hey, but Jay, I heard

Jesus, you know, is doing pseudo science and everything. Or how would you respond to somebody who might have read one of those websites? Like, is there just stuff that's been made up about you or like, why are you called a fringe scientist? I mean, I saw this whole episode kind of shows why someone might think your viewpoints are, you know, in the minority. But well, I think, uh, so first of all, the, the, the, the, first, the answer to your question is yes. A lot of those smearsers are just, just lies, right? Just like they're trying to like make me look, um, you know, me look... Somebody wrote a book with the title, They Want Them Infected, where I play some role as if I want people to be infected by it. I mean,

it's just insane, right? It's people that are not capable of having a good faith discussion. But I think the primary sort of blame on why this happened relies at the feet of the top of the American scientific establishment. So I wrote a document called the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4th, 2020 with Sinatra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kuhldo from Harvard University. No, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford. Fringe. And then four days after I wrote that declaration calling for lifting lockdowns and focus protection of vulnerable older people, you had Francis Collins, a man I long admired, the head of

the NIH. Now, I just wanted to tell listeners about what that means to be head of the NIH, now I just wanted to like just tell listeners about what that means to be head of the NIH, right? So there's 45 billion dollars of money that he sends to scientists that makes their careers. If you get, I mean I'm a pretend professor at Stanford in part because I was successful getting NIH grant money. It's not just the money, it's the social status that's conferred by getting NIH money. The head of the NIH has a responsibility to make sure the science operates properly, biomedical sciences operate properly in this country and in this world.

When he sends, he sent an email to Tony Fauci four days after he wrote the declaration calling me, Martin Sernatter, fringe epidemiologist, and then calling for a devastating take down of the premise after the declaration calling me, Martin, a fringe epidemiologist, and then calling for a devastating takedown of the premise of the declaration. He wrote that in an email that was released by a FOIA a year after he sent it. That is an abuse of power because what it does is it essentially puts like in a western town, like in the old west, you'd have like a wanted picture or something, right? That's essentially what he said, Jay has wanted your free rein to go after him, to scientists,

to the press, to everybody. And Wikipedia is reflecting that. The word fringe comes from that email. Wow. Right? So it's a deep abuse of power by a Christian who should have been acting responsible. If I were in his position, what I would have done if I disagreed with someone like me is I would have brought me in and had either a private or public discussion with me to try to convince me that I'm wrong.

And that never, those attempts never, did you ever reach out to him? Was ever a conversation or a public invitation to some kind of debate or very, very recently had a very private conversation until, but he's never, there's never been any public, public acknowledgement that he shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry to hear that. I've been on a much lower scale. I know, I know how that feels to be misrepresented. My audience is probably laughing right now. Okay. I don't, I, let me, there's a couple. So I'm just looking at my,

so many questions I want to talk to you about. It's not if, but when something like this happens again. Right? That's, that's what I've been learning. Like the, we're going to have more and more of the, you know, outbreaks like this. Like, what do you, what do you hope is going to happen? Well, I could probably guess what you hope would happen. Don't do lockdowns, you know, do, do better science and have discussions, not, you know, a monolithic viewpoint on everything. Um, what, do you anticipate that things would look different if we had another similar outbreak?

No. No? I think I had hoped in 2022, into 2023, that the scientific community and public health would come together and have honest discussions about the mistakes that it made. Kind of like if an airplane crashes, you have the NTLB trying to say, look, let's figure out what happened from the black box and not have this happen again, right? But in fact, what's happened is that much of the scientific community has sort of institutionalized

the kinds of powers that allowed it to have the lockdowns, the school closures, the business closures, the church closures, the end of trade, international trade, the sort of like all these measures that the, and especially the censorship regime that essentially allowed the public to stay misinformed for years. All of those powers effectively are institutionalized now. And if we have another pandemic, your schools will close. If you're listening to this, your kids' schools will close, your businesses will close, your churches will close, and there will be very little you can do

about it. So you're Christian. This is a Christian podcast. What's your encouragement for churches and Christian leaders, how they should respond? I guess, first of all, your thoughts on how they did respond. I know that's a diverse, the very diverse responses. What would have been your recommendation specifically to churches? They're trying to navigate, you know, religious freedom, their own knowledge of what's going on. They're trying to figure out, you know, who's right, who's wrong. Who do we listen to? Then also our place in society. We're trying to be a good neighbor. And if keeping our churches going is not being a good neighbor, we got to navigate that. Yeah.

How do you, what would have been your advice to churches say three years ago? And then what would be, I guess that would be your advice for the future. I mean, I actually worked with a bunch of churches as an expert witness in reopening cases, including one that reached the Supreme Court, which we won. I think, so for one thing, I think we have to stay, as Christians, we have to stay really true to what our fundamental understanding of what God is calling us to, right? That's our most important mission. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor us to, right? That's our most important mission. Love God with all your whole heart, soul, and mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself, right? Those are the two

laws that Jesus emphasized. I think we have to do that. And it's going to work itself out differently depending on the situations of the churches, right? So, let's just take this one, this situation, right? If you have a church with lots and lots of older people, of course, you have to be careful. this situation, right? If you have a church with lots and lots of older people, of course, you have to be careful. Now, you have to meet both their physical needs and their spiritual needs, right? Their physical needs are not the primary thing, of course, although it is important to have that, but also their spiritual needs. And so, for a pastor with a church with lots of older people, it's going to be really difficult decisions have to get made during this pandemic. And I feel for pastors that had to do that. And so, like,

and you have to balance, right? So, we are not meant to be alone. We're meant to be in community with each other. We are not supposed to treat each other as primarily as biohazards. Jesus touches the leper physically. There's a reason he does that, right? He doesn't have to do, He's not doing it from afar, staying away from the leper. He wants to show us as Christians what we're model what we're supposed to do with people that are outsiders, that are other. And so we have to do that too, right? I think the churches have to have that. And if you have secular authorities telling you to do something, that we have to be, you

know, of course, we have to respect the secular authorities. They're placed there by God for real purpose also. But at the same time, when the secular authorities are going beyond the bounds of what really what their call is, then churches need to stand up and say, look, you're asking us to do something that's beyond what your real true authority is. So I think it's going to be a complicated set of things. And the church, how did it function? I think as a whole is very, very mixed.

Many, many, many churches essentially embrace the ideology that our neighbors are biohazards and then told themselves stories that they were acting in love, where the act of love meant stay away from each other. That I think is something the church needs to come to terms with, right, if we're going to be effective in our witness. The other thing I think, but there were churches that I think very reasonably were trying to protect the physical well-being of their older congregations while still maintaining some capacity for connection and spiritual feeding that's really essential to the church mission. And there are other

churches that I think quite effectively fought back against some of the tyrannical measures that were imposed on churches. I'm thinking specifically of the Catholic Church in New York, which had this case that led to the Supreme Court saying that the government saw a lot of closed churches, force close churches. And I think there's... I was actually in this movie put together by John MacArthur's church called The Essential Church where he tells the story of his church, where they tell the story of their church and how the deliberations they made and ultimately what staying open meant.

There's still a church here in Santa Clara County, Calvary Chapel, which was fined $1.2 million by the public health authorities for the crime of staying open and having church. Santa Clara health authorities, they sent spies into Sunday schools and fined them for hugging. I mean, the idea that the church is going to put up with that in a country that has a first amendment that protects church freedoms is just still shocking to me. And they're still under this threat of having to pay, essentially be bankrupted by this tyrannical public health order, $1.2 million.

So I think the church was very mixed in what it did. And I think it would be really, really good for the churches to have an honest introspection about how well did it do, how well did we actually meet Jesus' call during this time when we should have been thinking about the poor, we should have been thinking about how important. We should have been thinking about how important is our spiritual well-being vis-a-vis our physical well-being. What are we actually called to do as a church and as a people? Yeah, that's good. I think the hard thing for churches, if I can speak, I'm just thinking

of the various ones that I was talking through as they were kind of navigating everything. It was hard because everything was so politicized, right? It really depends on what news outlet you're trusting, who you're listening to, who aren't you listening to, what studies you're reading, and you're getting just vastly different perspectives on, you know, are masks effective? Is a vaccine, if you have hyper anti-vax, you know, churches or whatever, then the opposite, you know, where you're not being a good human being, if you're not, you know, triple-vaccine your kids or whatever, you know, like, and, but all that, if you trace their roots, it's just very different sources of information. You know, we're, we're pastors, we're theologians. We're not

epidemiologists. We don't know. We're, we're having to trust people. So when you're getting vastly different kinds of information that is very politicized, that's just frustrating. And I, I like you, I feel for pastors that had to navigate that. I saw so many churches that had to navigate that. That's just frustrating. And I feel for pastors that have to navigate that. I saw so many churches split over a mask mandate. It's like, isn't the blood of Jesus a little bit more powerful than six inch mask? And I get it. There's strong viewpoints or whatever, but that was just, yeah, they're just sad to me. Sad to me to see churches split over things.

I think there could have been a better way forward in this. I mean, I think the hardest part for me is it really felt like many churches abandoned the idea that you have to love your neighbor as yourself. It told, it embraced the idea that there are these clean and unclean people and viewed it as their job is to make the people as clean as possible, physically clean, right? I mean, in a sense, like the idea of the church, the theology of the church is that it's like

it's introducing people to a power that can make us clean, but it's not the church that does it, it's the blood of Christ that does it, that was shed 2,000 years ago, and its effectiveness has to do with that. The churches, I think, are often prone to this distinction between clean and unclean, but really what we're supposed to do is push against that. We're all unclean. We're all unclean. Together. We're all unclean. We're all unclean. Together, we're all unclean.

And the idea that the church needs to be an enforcer of this physical cleanliness dogma, it makes no sense. Again, it's not the church shouldn't serve as helping people figure out how to meet their physical needs. That's an important mission of the church. But it should always stay true to the idea that there is no separation between us, between clean and unclean, that we're not primarily biohazards that were human beings that were meant to love that are meant to love one another meant to be in company with another to support

each other. And I think churches, that's the, that's the central area. I think churches need to do re introspection. How well did they do with that? And how can they do better in future? It's good. Well, Jay, thanks so much for coming on the show. Uh, really, really appreciate, uh, again, I've admired your work from afar and I've seen you take hits. And I was like, man, that's, I know how that feels. And, and, uh, thank you for being courageous really. Um, and, uh, yeah, you've given us a lot to think about. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Preston for having me on really, really delighted to talk with you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hey friends, Rachel Grohl here from the Hearing Jesus Podcast.

Do you ever wonder if you're truly hearing from God? Are you tired of trying to figure it all out on your own? The Hearing Jesus Podcast is here to help you live out your faith every single day, and together we will break down these walls by digging deeply into God's Word in a way that you can really understand it. If this sounds like the kind of journey you want to go on, please join us on the Hearing Jesus podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, I'm Haven.

And as long as I can remember, I have had different curiosities and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore, usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. But then when I had kids, I just didn't have the same time that I did before for the one-on-ones that I crave. So I started Haven the Podcast. It's a safe space for curiosity and conversation. And we talk about everything from relationships to parenting to friendships to even your view of yourself.

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