TRIGGERnometry - "Lockdowns Were a Mistake" - Dr Jay Bhattacharya

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

SPONSORED BY: Ridge Wallet. Get up to 40% off with our link https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER from now until December 22nd! Thanks to Kamikoto for sponsoring this video! Get an additional $50 off on any purchase with code TRIGGERNOMETRY  during their Early Black Friday sale. Go to  https://kamikoto.com/TRIGGERNOMETRY and help support the channel. Jay Bhattachary is a professor of medicine, of Economics, and of Health Research Policy at Stanford University, and the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya was an opponent of lockdowns and mask mandates. With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting the virus spread in lower-risk groups with the aim of herd immunity, with "focused protection" of those most at risk. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​/ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it fair to say then that lockdowns were just a mistake? Yes. I don't think lockdowns in a society that's as unequal as ours could possibly succeed. What has it have actually been the effects of these lockdowns? 100 million cancer screenings had been skipped. And that's going to lead to a million people with later stage cancer that should have been picked up. The psychological effects in the U.S., something like one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020. 100 million people is the estimate thrown into poverty worldwide by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown 230,000 children had died in South Asia alone it was bound to destroy the lives of the poor the working class

and children it's exactly what it did the lockdown was focused protection of the laptop class instead of focus protection of the vulnerable old and that's why hospital systems were under stress because we've protected the wrong people. For vaccine mandates, if you are mandating the vaccine, you have failed as a public health agency. Because what that means is there's a substantial number of people who don't trust you. For young men, the MRNA vaccines cause myocarditis at unacceptable rates. One in 2000, one in three thousand, something like that. That is too high.

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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today among his very many titles is a professional. of Medicine at Stanford University, and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. J. Batachara, welcome to Trigonometry. Just a delight to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Oh, it's a great pleasure to have you on. We've been meaning to have you on for a long time.

However, for those of our audience who are not familiar with you and your role, particularly over the last couple of years, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you here. Sure. So I have a strange background. I have an MD and a P.E. and a PhD in economics of all things. I've been a professor in the medical school at Stanford for 20-some years. I've written on infectious disease policy for a long time. When COVID hit, I sort of came to a different view than many people, I guess,

that the disease was pretty widespread already, that there was a very steep age gradient in risk factors, and so we should follow a very different policy than we did follow. The policy, eventually we labeled it the Great Barrens, Declaration. The idea is focus protection of vulnerable people and then letting, you know, children go back to life, low risk people get back to life because the harms of the lockdowns themselves, maybe we'll talk about this during our podcast, but the harms of the lockdowns themselves are so bad that you don't want, you just want to avoid them. That document, which I wrote

with a couple of people from, with Sinatra Gupta from Oxford and Martin Kulder from Harvard, that went viral. So anyways, I'm sure we'll talk about that, but that's my background. I've done this kind of work for a long time and been teaching the standard for a long time. And you were one of the people together with Seneca, Gupta, and others who were articulating the view during the pandemic itself, the main section of it, that lockdowns were very harmful, that many of the other public health policies that were being pursued were mistaken. and one of the responses was to ignore you and, in fact, a sense of many other things that were being said. So here we are. We can sort of look back and assess how things have gone.

As you look back, do you think you were right? Do you think you were wrong? What is your assessment of how it's played out? I think we got a lot right very early. So we meaning, I mean, I wasn't just me alone. There was a mean, a very large number of other infectious disease epidemiologists and other health policy people that had shared my view. So, for instance, in April of 2020, I ran a study looking at how extensively the disease had already spread in Santa Clara County, California, where I live, in L.A. County. And then another study with Major League Baseball all around the country.

We found in L.A. and in Santa Clara was that there was three or four percent prevalence of COVID antibodies. That means if you have the antibody, you can talk, we can argue about immunity, but that certainly means that you've been infected and recovered. So that means that that means that there's a lot of a lot more spread than people had realized. There's like 50 times more infections than cases. That meant the lockdown, in April of 2020, the lockdown could not work. If you were thinking, okay, we get a lockdown, we get to zero, that was gone. Of course, that turned out really true.

We didn't actually end up getting rid of the disease, unfortunately. The, and there have been like a hundred of these similar studies that have been done since that sort of verify the same result we've found. Hey, guys, just a quick note here. Dr. Patacharya is about to make a point referencing to COVID antibody studies from 2019. In the interview, he actually says 2020, but it was a mistake on his part. It was confirmed after recording he meant to say 2019. Anyway, on with the show. Jay, so sorry to jump in. So is it fair to say then that lockdowns were just a mistake? Yes. Yeah, I think there were, I think that the

disease was seeded around the world sometime in probably in fall 2020, late fall 2020. It could be November, It could be December. I mean, you could persuade me earlier. I don't know the exact date. The evidence for this is that there are antibody studies, again, from stored blood banks in Europe, in Africa, that find COVID antibodies from stored blood in fall of 2020. How did it get there unless someone from China went there? You know, of course, you had these massive outbreaks in Italy, in February, Iran in February, 2020.

It was too late. By the time we locked down, this disease spread so easily, so fast, and it just doesn't take a ton of contact with the air of people, someone's breathing with it, that it was not, it was far too late to, if the idea was to get the disease down to zero. Now, if the idea was to get the disease slow the spread so that we can build hospital capacity, and things like that, well, lockdowns failed at that too. We didn't actually build hospital capacity. We did all kinds of other things that, and there was this sense of we should keep locking down. Like the disease would come and go based on, you know,

it's physics, but we had this illusion of control over the spread of the disease. We can talk more about why I think lockdowns failed. There's a deep social science reason I think why it failed. Mainly, I don't think lockdowns in a society that's as unequal as ours could possibly succeed. lead. And Jay, why did we lock down then? Why did we follow China's lead? Because I'm not a great expert on China, but I look at them and I think, yeah, that's not probably the way to do a lot of

things, really. What copy a totalitarian regime, which has got a disastrous approach to human rights? It was really shocking, actually. So I'm part of this case where we actually got to depose Anthony Fauci. In the early days of the pandemic, he sent one of his trusted aides, a man named Cliff Lane, to China on this, essentially this trip that the World Health Organization organized. They came back from the trip, completely impressed that China had conquered the disease in January 2020. Now, of course, there wasn't a lot of testing going on in January 2020. China, as you say, Francis, has this track record of authoritarian power that's just alien to the West. at least it was alien to the West before March 2020. And so it really, I think it surprised everybody.

I saw this interview of Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist at Imperial College London, talking about the Chinese model and how stunned he was that the West actually adopted. He was actually happy about it, but he was very surprised. I think it was fear and panic, Francis, at the end of the day. People looked at the Chinese models that, oh, gosh, they got rid of it by James. January of 2020, they looked at Italy, which was a total mess. They looked at New York City, and they were just scared. I think fear led us to completely irrational choices, choices that we never would have made, had we not made, had we not panicked in March of 2020. Jay, why didn't we

look at, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but why I understood by the Great Barrington Declaration is you were saying, look, this is a way we've always dealt with pandemics. through centuries. This is the most effective way of dealing with it. This is what we should do. Why did we suddenly throw away hundreds of years of learning how to deal with the pandemic and try this new approach? I mean, I think I have a couple of things. I just told you the one about fear and panic. I think that that certainly was probably the most important explanation. But Jay, that would have been the case always. People would always have been scared in a pandemic. But I think the problem was like this one looked, this one, you know, if you look at the actual infection fatality rate, it's more than those century pandemics. Like maybe 1918. I mean, so we're

looking at this going, okay, this is the big one. This is the, we've waited a century for this pandemic has finally arrived. But there's some other aspects of this, right? So imagine, I don't know for certain this is true, but it may be true that this was a lab leak from a gain of function of work. Right? So from a program of research aimed at increasing the infectivity of a pathogen, what if you're responsible for that research program and you fear that it's like out of your lab or out of a lab that you support it? And you're a major figure like Tony Fauci or Francis Collins or Jeremy Farr. I mean, you're going to want to do absolutely everything you possibly can to like put the genie back in the bottle. And, you know, they don't really have a lot of social science background.

They really don't have a lot of, frankly, they're not even, many of them are just lab scientists, not really epidemiologists. They don't understand the limitations of these kinds of, or the harms from these kinds of interventions. It's for them, it's just, okay, it's a, it's a model. In the model, you make sure newborns don't interact with their moms and all of a sudden the disease goes away or whatever. I mean, it's just incredibly naive. But they, but they, but they, but they, but they're incentive is to like, let's do everything we possibly can to, to reduce the damage from this thing that I've supported.

Now, again, I don't know for certainness so loudly, but imagine psychology of it. But Jay, do you also think as well, and if we look at our society now, we, there's this belief amongst a lot of people that science can conquer anything. It can cure any disease. We've, you know, we've conquered infectious disease. where deeply a lot of Western civilization is secular. We don't believe in God. We don't believe in religion.

So if you put those two things together, why wouldn't you think that you can conquer this disease? Surely we can defeat COVID, can't we? We have science. I mean, science has made a lot of progress on this disease. Like, you know, the vaccines, the treatments, treatment protocols are way better than they were two years, two and a half years ago.

So science works, it's an incredible thing for understanding the material world, but it takes its time. It requires debate and discussion. The problem isn't science so much, Francis. The problem really is we elevated some high scientific bureaucrats to the position of the high pope. You got someone like Tony Fauci telling Rand Paul that, you know, if you question me, you're not simply questioning a man, you are questioning science itself. I mean, come on. That's just ridiculous. I mean, you just, you know, that's, it's like a very antithesis of science that one person puts on the mantle of essentially the high pope of science. Science requires people to, like, disagree with each other. I'm going to be wrong. I've been wrong

lots of times in my life. And then what the, but the wrongness is, is adjudicated not by like some high pope or high priest. It's adjudicated by, you know, you run, you run a study. with some data and a fantastic study, and then it turns out that my theory was wrong, a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. That's the point of the realm in science, not like Tony Fauci on high declaring this is the science. That's just nonsense.

And that's what we've had through the pen. Martin Kuliffe wrote about this as the end of the age of enlightenment, the return of the dark age. The dark age, what that means is science, facts are determined by... authority, not by, not by, you know, not by data, not by reason, discussion, not by discussion and debate.

And you, you've mentioned Anthony Fauci several times. And I'll be honest with you, I haven't followed the details of COVID, particularly since in the UK was kind of over, you might say, you know, certainly the public policy measures that I was so strongly against. They kind of stopped. And I think a lot of people felt the way I did, which is, I just want to forget about this and never have to think about it again. I promptly then got COVID again, but never mind. But anyway, I haven't had to, I haven't, I haven't been forced to think about it in the way that I think I was before where I was going. The government's going crazy.

They're introducing all these measures that I think are tyrannical, frankly. I don't agree with them. But you and a lot of people feel, I think, quite strongly about particularly Anthony Fauci and some of the actions that he took. So explain to us, why are people so critical? What is the case against Anthony Fauci? Yeah, so first of all, I was entirely jealous of Freedom Day. I was sitting here in the United States going, okay, how on earth you guys get Freedom Day and we get vaccine mandates and nonsense. Right.

It could be worse, Joe. You could be in Canada. Yeah, that's true. I think the thing about Tony Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, the reason why they're so important is because they sit on it. top of $45 billion, $50 billion of money that funds every single biomedical scientist of note in the United States, and many in the UK as well, actually. And the problem there is not, that itself is not a problem. I mean, I fully support public support of science.

But the problem is that if that person or that set of people then involves themselves in controversial topics of health policy, a lot of scientists. will keep themselves silent for fear of losing that support. And it's not just money, actually, because many people don't know this. But like, so I have a tenure at a top medical school. The, in order to get tenure, you actually have to, you have to, you have to get an NIH grant. You have to earn an NIH grant. It's very, very competitive.

And if you don't succeed at that, you're not going to get tenure. Social status in science depends on earning the approval of people like Tony's outgy and Francis Collins. And so when they speak up and say, gosh, you know, all these other ideas, the Great Bansansans, Declaritions, nonsense, a lot of scientists are going to take the message, take the hint.

You know, they're not directly involved in health policy. They just won't speak up even if they have qualms about the policy. And some people will, you know, it's like, you know, will someone rid me of the troublesome priest kind of thing? like you'll get like people just to, you know, ad hoc attacking because they want a curry favor. It's, I think, very, very dangerous to have this kind of power over the social status and funding of scientists and then also be so closely involved with health policy decision making in a country, which is exactly, I think, why Tony Fauci has come under such criticism.

And the problem is with this as well, possibly even more serious than that, Jay, is how much it damages the ordinary person's perception of scientists and doctors where they lose their trust in them, which is a really dangerous place to be as a society. I completely agree. It's, and it's been shocking to watch. I've been, so I, you know, I do medicine. I've watched the anti-vax movement with respect to measles and others before the pandemic. And I think it was mostly just, it really was a fringe movement. Mostly people trusted doctors when they told them that vaccines work for these diseases. During the pandemic, I've seen this vast explosion in the anti,

this sort of the sentiment, I'm only one to call anti-vax, stemming from that distrust, Francis, of scientists and doctors, created by this kind of hubris by scientists and doctors. It's our own fault. And so to me, it's completely understandable. Then on top of that, you have these vaccine mandates, which made it, you know, people that distrust, distrusted the vaccine now had to face this decision about whether they were willing to lose their

jobs. Many did. It's exploded, the distrust in vaccines generally. And the other thing is that there was over-claiming about the efficacy of this vaccine. And, you know, when scientists get things wrong, they should have some distrust. There should be some distrust. I think what would have gone a long way is just humility by scientists, by doctors. Instead, maybe it's less so in the UK, but the United States, I mean, humility was probably the very last word I used to characterize the response of our public health officials. And it also seemed like the government and the health authorities, they didn't really treat people like adults in the sense that if, like, for example, if you tell me that a vaccine

is 100% safe, it's safe. I know you're lying. No vaccine is 100% safe, right? They might be 99.99% safe, but it's not 100% safe. And anyone who claims otherwise is clearly lying or hiding something. And likewise, people who pretend vaccines don't have side effects or that they have high levels of efficacy when clearly they don't. It seemed like I think a lot of the undermining that you're talking about happened

because actually the authorities refuse to be honest with us and treat us like adults. Would you agree? I completely agree. I mean, in fact, you can look at how they talk about. about the vaccine rollout, actually even the lockdowns. Actually, in the UK, they actually had a group inside your sage, which is the scientific organization that advises the government, called the Nudge Unit. The idea is to manipulate the people of the UK.

The use of behavioral psychology to try to manipulate people, essentially like a propaganda techniques. And then overstating just exactly like you said, Constantine, about basic things, So vaccines, it takes a while to understand the full safety profile. You tested on, what, 50,000, 100,000 people in the trials. And then, but that's, then you send it out to billions. You're going to learn things about what the vaccine does, and it's not all going to be all good.

Right. So the myocarditis and young men from the mRNA vaccines, we didn't really know that from the trials. That came out afterwards. It just takes time. I work on vaccine safety for a living, and it, you know, it takes. takes decades sometimes to fully understand, certainly years, to promise that you're going to have no side effects? I mean, come on. That's just treating people like their children. And then,

like, overpromising, right? This vaccine is 100% effective against getting the disease. I got the vaccine. I got the disease. Like four months after I got the second vaccine, I got the disease. You can look at the data, the randomized trial, is clear that they didn't even check for that. So what was the vaccine? what were they saying? Why were they over claiming? They, a lot of the public health authorities viewed this as like, we have to convince, they were like essentially pharma salespeople. We have to convince people to get this. And in the back of their heads, they thought about this vaccine the same way they thought about the measles vaccine. You get the measles vaccine. You're pretty much not going

to get measles ever again. It's a great vaccine. I'm not saying it has absolutely no side effects, but it's pretty safe. And whereas this vaccine, it just doesn't have that property. It doesn't stop you. It protects you against getting severe disease if you happen to get COVID, which is very likely that you will. But it doesn't stop you from getting COVID. Do you worry, Jay,

that when we have another pandemic, because we're going to have another pandemic, such as life. That actually, such has been the distrust that has been sown within the wider population, that you're going to get a pretty sizable majority of people are going to be like,

nah, don't believe you. You betrayed my trust first time. What am I going to believe you now? I mean, there are still people in Wales that are really quite upset with Neil Ferguson, the modeler, because of the mad cow disease. They killed, they killed like a very vast number of cows. It turns out it wasn't really necessary. I think you're absolutely right, Francis. That's exactly what's going to happen. There's now a pretty broad movement. And I don't even know what the name to call it, but it's a movement that had as its root, deep distrust of deep earned distrust of public health authorities and of governments acting in the name of public health. I have to say like there will be when there is another pandemic, there's going to be

a big fight over whether we re-adopt this kind of authoritarian approach. I'm very afraid that exactly that's what will happen. That the public health message is we just didn't we didn't lock down hard enough. We didn't use our police power strongly enough. And we need to absolutely demolish these, these crazy fringe movements that are, that are opposing us. I think that that kind of, that's exactly the fight will happen in the next pandemic. Should there be just, authoritarian power applied in the name of public health even more than was applied now, that's the only reason it didn't work, versus let's go back to the old approach, which would have worked. Let's treat people in a, in a, in a, in a, a democratic,

liberal society as adult human beings, reason with them, use resources, move heaven and earth to protect vulnerable people, for God's sakes, yes, but also don't disrupt the lives of other people who are less vulnerable in ways that harm them and society irreparably, almost. Yeah. Well, Jay, you hinted earlier that you thought that one of the reasons that these approaches were never going to work in the West and particularly is the inequality, the unequal, the unequal societies that we have. Can you talk to us more about that? Absolutely.

So, I mean, we, we're not just the West that's unequal. Everyone is unequal. I, I, I, my, my, my, my, my mom was born and grew up in a Calcutta slum, right? So it's, it's, um, it's so, uh, a lockdown, if you're, if it's going to work in any, in any, even in any theoretical sense, you have basically what the purpose is to, is to keep people physically apart from each other. Not, not, not anywhere in vicinity of how I'm physically. apart from you, I can't spread the virus to you.

Basic physics, right? The problem is most people are not in a economic situation that can abide a lockdown, or even a social situation to abide a lockdown. It's inhumane, right? So we're actually built to be in community with each other, to talk to each other, to be so, and so that even rich people have that need. But poor people, they need to work in order to feed their families. They need to work to, they need to be in society in order to have the most basic functions.

Many live in poor countries, live in crowded living situations. That's just a fact about the way the world is. You can't have a lockdown. That lockdown will end up impoverishing people. That lockdown will end up throwing people into food near starvation. That's actually what happened. A hundred million people is the estimate thrown into poverty world. worldwide by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown.

You know, those supply chains, well, the pointy end of the supply chains is some guy in Ghana who's barely holding on losing his job. And now he's making less than $2 a day of income. You can't feed his kids. Some of his kids starve. There's one estimate from March of 2021 out of the UN that 230,000 children had died in South Asia alone from the lockdown. The economic dislocation caused, it.

causing starvation by the lockdowns, that and the stopping of basic immunization. I mean, it was bound to have that effect. It was bound to destroy the lives of the poor, the working class, and children. It's exactly what it did. Because in many ways, what it did is it favored big business. It favored these huge multinational corporations. and it also favored the laptop class because they were the ones insulated from it

because they could still work, they could do everything they needed to do. And in fact, they could save money because they didn't have to travel anywhere. They could get discounts on their rent, but the working classes, they still had to go and do their job. You're absolutely right.

I mean, I've called it trickle-down epidemiology. The idea is that, I mean, it's like if we just protect the laptop class, everyone else would be protected by osmosis or something. It worked exactly how you'd expect it to work. I think a lot of the people that made these policies, they moralized it, right? They are a class of people that could be protected by a lot.

Look, for me, I'm a professor. I didn't have to. I could have worked from home the entire time. It would have been fine. Wouldn't have lost my job. I actually couldn't abide that. I went to work. But a lot of the, a lot of this,

a lot of the people that were in this, they've moralized it. Stay home, stay safe, right? You had that in the UK. What the heck is that message? That message is like, well, if I'm not able to stay home because I have to feed my family, I'm not, I'm like endangering the community. That's a terrible message to send to the, to the vast numbers of people that actually couldn't stay home or stay safe just because of basic, you know, basic economic reasons. So I just, I think it's, it's, it's that deep inequality and then this like valorization of being rich enough or having the resources to be able to comply with the orders and then even there you still have like you know like matt hancock violating them boris shonson violating them like in where i live uh Gavin newsom having this french laundry dinner

um i mean actually frankly whenever i saw that i would celebrate not not because of the hypocrisy of it although there was a little bit of that i have to admit um but but but also because uh you know people being human, it's fine. It's like I just, it's just a reminder that everybody needs to be, needs connection. Jay, let me explore, you know, the devil's advocate counter arguments here because there are a lot of people who supported the lockdowns who would say, well, look, if we hadn't kept people physically apart from each other, to some extent, obviously it wasn't 100%, but if we hadn't reduced the number of people, the average person came into contact, the disease would have spread

faster. It would have spread to more people. We didn't have a vaccine at the time and the health care services, which were already struggling. I mean, the NHS, people don't know this, but like there's newspaper headlines from every year over the last 20 years saying the NHS is about to collapse, winter crisis, the flu, blah, blah, blah. So you take that, you add on top of that, this highly infectious disease that no one really knows. Wasn't it the right decision based on all those inputs, to go let's keep people apart let's reduce the spread let's make sure our health care system is going to cope you know we built some hospitals we didn't have the staff to put in them but we build the hospitals that do you see what i'm saying yeah no i do i do i do constantly so so like the the key

thing is there is um and there's some force to that argument so i don't think the right thing to do is to do nothing i don't think the argument the right argument is to let the virus rip because exactly what you said would happen would happen um the the the right thing to do is focus protection on the most high-risk people that were likely to go to the hospital. Right? So just to give you an example, in New York, Governor Cuomo sent COVID-infected patients to nursing homes, even though their older people were the highest risk of being hospitalized if they get COVID. Why did he do that? He was not because he's an evil guy. The reason he did that is because epidemiologists were telling him that you have to open hospital beds or people will

die from overcrowded hospital beds. that was focused protection on the wrong population. If he had understood that older people were the most likely to be hospitalized, then he would never have done that. He would never have sent older people, put the older people at highest risk. So if you want to protect hospital systems, you protect older people, because that's who that's the highest risk. By doing a focus protection approach,

you minimize the risk of the hospitals overcrowding. If instead you do a lockdown, the Z is going to spread anyways, right? Maybe you delay for short time, but not for that long. Like in Toronto, during the earliest lockdowns, the 30 richest neighborhoods saw no case spread. The 30 poorest neighborhoods had enormous outbreak. That was repeated everywhere you saw a lockdown.

The lockdown was focused protection of the laptop class. Instead of focus protection of the vulnerable old. And that's why hospital systems were under stress, because we've protected the wrong people. Now, that does make a lot of sense to me. And coming to the conversation about the vaccine, you will know, as you alluded to, that there are a lot of people who have got a lot of questions about it,

who are concerned about it. What is your assessment of the safety and efficacy of the vaccines that we currently have at the moment? So let me start with efficacy, because that's, I think, probably the most important thing. I think, and let me just start. I mean, I'd say safety is quite important. Well, okay, but you're both.

You're both important. Actually, can I start with, can I move, start with the conversation with immunity more generally? Because I think this is a key point that a lot of people, when they talk about the vaccine, they miss. If you've had COVID and recovered, you actually have pretty substantial immunity, right? Before Omicron, something like 0.3% who had been infected in, there was a big study, out of Italy, hundreds of thousands of people that are infected were reinfected. 0.3% 3 out of 1,000. It's very substantial immunity against reinfection until there's a new variant.

And then the other thing is, if you have infection and you recovered, you actually have pretty substantial immunity against severe disease on reinfection. There's a study out of Israel suggesting that there are 10 times more. a 10 times better protection than the vaccine. Now, I'm not saying, I'm not arguing you should have gone out and gotten infected intentionally, but the fact is so many people have been infected and recovered. You know, I think in the United States, it's above 90% of the population, same in the UK.

So that changes the landscape about the efficacy of the vaccine. If you already... I'm sorry to interrupt. Did you just, did you say that over 90% of people have had COVID in the US and the UK? Yeah. Really? Yeah, based on antibiotics studies. Oh, wow, I didn't know that.

Okay, sorry, please carry on. Yeah, I mean, it could be, you could convince me 85%. I mean, we can argue about the exact numbers. But like, you know, I just hadn't heard that. That's all. Please go ahead. Yeah. So what that means is that it's a very different population than in March of 2020,

which was completely immune naive. And in that in that population, that's lessly immune naive, the efficacy, the marginal efficacy of the vaccine against severe disease is less important. Now, there's still maybe populations that are for, it's important. Again, focus protection. Older people who have not had the disease that are higher risk. You know, there are still maybe other populations. So I'm not saying it has no use, but it's much more limited than it was in December of 2020 when the vaccine first arrived.

The vaccine itself, it's because it was designed for the old, you know, the Wuhan strain originally. Now we have these bivalent boosts, Bruce, that are designed for a strain that actually is mostly on its way out. So we have a, we're sort of chasing our tail with like exactly the formulation of the vaccine. But all that is actually much less important than the fact of the vaccine itself, if you're immune naive, does protect you against severe disease and death. Now, what is that risk? It's very high for the old.

Maybe just the rule of thumb I had before, before Amacron was every, let's say you have, 50 years old, 0.2% mortality from the disease, just the rule of thumb. And every seven years of age, it doubles. So I was 54, it'll be 0.3-ish. You know, if you're 57, it'll be 0.4. If you're 64, it'll be 0.8. And you go back down the other way, by the time you're, you're both young men, it's going to be pretty low, the mortality risk with the disease. The vaccine then is much more important for older people who face a very high risk. If you're over 80, it's got a very high risk of dying, three, four, five percent. So it reduces it by tenfold. Really useful. It doesn't stop you from getting it. So it's effications in one way, but less effications than another. The degree

of efficacy, the extent of it matters. It depends on who you are. Old younger people less so, older people more so. Now the vaccine side effects. For young men, the MRNA vaccines cause myocarditis at unacceptable rates. One in 2000, one in three thousand, something like that. That is too high. And sometimes people will say, well, gosh, it protects you against getting COVID, which can also cause myocarditis, which is true, that it also caused myocarditis, but it doesn't protect you against getting COVID.

So now you face both risks. You face the risk of the vaccine mycarditis and you face the risk of COVID myocarditis. So, you know, for young men, and you don't get a huge benefit because you already are protected from COVID by dint of being young. So, you know, I just don't, I don't understand the push to vaccinate children, for instance, because the cost-benefit just doesn't work out. It's one thing if you have a vaccine,

you have to vaccinate children in order to have the disease stop spreading. This vaccine doesn't do that. So what's the argument? And, Jay, I suppose a one thing that whenever I hear people talk, they always ignore long COVID. They always ignore the people who get COVID and then become desperately ill as a result of that. So can you enlighten us? What are the portion of people who get COVID who are previously healthy, active, fit adults?

And then because for a variety of different reasons are no longer able to work or their life is no longer what it used to be. Yeah. No, so that's a really good question, Fresno. Thank you for asking you. So the key thing is in terms of the policy, preventing long COVID means preventing you, from getting COVID. I don't know any technology that does that. So what we're talking about is then is just how do we support the people who have this

long-term outcome. Now, in terms of who gets these long-term outcomes, in my view, there's three different categories of people. I can't give you precise numbers because people still debating about this. But the three categories are people who had a very severe, acute bout with COVID. They ended up in the hospital and the ICU. If you end up in the ICU, you're going to have a long time recovering. That's just the nature of the thing.

And it's going to be hard. There's no sugar-coding. What's best is don't end up in the ICU. How do you do that? Reduce the risk of exposing older people to COVID before the vaccine, vaccinated older people now that we have the vaccine. second group are people who have these like lingering symptoms, probably the classic one is you can't smell.

Omokron doesn't seem to produce at the same rate, but like there's some people, so when I got COVID, I lost my sense of smell. And it came back about three weeks later. I was absolutely thrilled when I could smell, you know, I could smell mustard again. That was fun. But some people, maybe 1%, less than 1%, a year later can't smell.

There's some lingering effects like brain fog, things like that. Brain fog meaning like people are fatigued and they have having trouble with regular activities in life. People have done studies of this where in order to quantify the number of answer, question. You can't just look at people who've had COVID and then ask them. You have to have a control group of people who've never had COVID because many of those symptoms are non-specific. Right. I'm often tired and you know, you can call it what I have as brain. Maybe I brain fog. No, you guys. I don't know. But that, so you have to have that control group. In studies that have a control group, they find in children basically no difference between the set of kids who had COVID

versus who didn't, three months later, having one of these, like, non-specific symptoms. Maybe it's like 5% report at least one of the symptoms in big studies, like out of France and elsewhere. In adults, you see higher rates in people who've had COVID versus the control group, but it's like 7% versus 4%. And it varies. So I think there's some legitimate lingering symptoms for COVID in a relatively small group of people. There's also a third group that, I mean, I think we've been through a tremendously stressful time. And it's been, you know, people have been gripped in fear over this,

hopefully not so much anymore, but over the risk of getting this disease. And I think that there's a somaticization of the symptoms that comes from that. It's why you see people who have not had COVID, you know, in 2020, saying like they felt like they had long COVID. it's a lot of that comes out of depression, fear, anxiety. And those are real things. I don't want to diminish them. But you have to treat that very differently than you treat, you know,

I can't smell a year later after I got COVID. So I think it's a combination of those three things. It may be in countries that have had these lockdown policies that fear, you're going to, because of group three, you're going to have a much larger infraction of it, right? So you don't hear about long COVID in Africa, even though COVID spread all through Africa. So, I mean, I think we have to treat it seriously.

We have to think about how to manage all three of those groups seriously. But you can't come to the conclusion because there's long COVID, therefore we should do lockdown. The lockdown didn't work to stop COVID. Why would you think it would work to stop long COVID? One of the things that I found very interesting about the illness is how it affected certain groups. So, for instance, my mother's Latin.

American. And in South America, it really affected the population. A lot of people died. It caused chaos. Whereas if you look at Africa, it was nowhere near as bad. And you look at, you go, well, obviously there's difference between groups of people and et cetera, but they're both third world countries, you know, and so on and so forth. So do we know the reasons why it affected certain groups and not others as badly? I think we're still learning about that. So like Africa, I think, probably the most important fact is I think something like 3% or over the age of 65. That's why it didn't really have, it spread everywhere. You can't lock down, but it didn't really affect most of the population because most of the population is young, a very large fraction under the age of 18.

Excuse me. Latin America is older for one. So I think that's probably the primary reason. The other thing is like Latin America, I was looking at the lockdown in Peru and my heart just broke. Like they, they, they were a massive population of poor folks in Peru who were just devastated by the lockdowns. And then at one point, they, they reclassified all their deaths, the excess deaths as COVID deaths. And so you're like, oh, well, you had the lockdown and then you reclass, and you had all these COVID deaths anyways because of the reclassification. In fact, they were just locked down deaths, deaths because they had this draconian policy that didn't let poor people you know, go earn a living so that they could feed their families.

And Jay, well, I want to ask you a slightly provocative question, because as you know very well, I'm sure, a lot of, because so much of public health policy was so difficult to understand for people who were attempting to think rationally, who were not experts, I was trying to look at it and go, well, why on earth would you do this? This clearly doesn't make any sense. Why on earth would you do, why would you force people to take a vaccine that doesn't stop the spread, like all of this stuff. And it has produced, as you alluded to earlier,

a lot of people who think there's something deeply nefarious going on here. These aren't mistaken people who are trying to, you know, do their best and maybe cover up for the fact that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan and whatever. But actually, this is an attempt by the public health establishment to take more control of people's lives, you know, permanent surveillance, telling you, you know, you can't buy a train ticket if you haven't been vaccinated. And, you know, we see some new stories out of places like Canada where they do seem to sort of be heading in that direction.

I read a story today about how I think somebody in Canada is recommending that unvaccinated people are treated as mental health problems to be solved. What do you make of all of that? What do you say to those people? Do you agree with them? Do you have an explanation of why they're wrong? Like, what's your take on all of it? I mean, I think it's complicated.

Like there are definitely people constantly who took advantage of the pandemic and took advantage like there and they absolutely did. So like, you know, the pharmaceutical companies pushed. There's a drug called Remdesivir put out by Gilead. They, it was pushed really hard on the basis of really bad evidence. And a lot of patients got it in hospital. The claim is that it may actually harm people. I don't know if that's true, but like it's, it's, it certainly didn't help people. It didn't solve you from dying in hospital if you took it.

So I think that there are pharma interests that took advantage. There were politicians that took advantage. There were a very large number of public health people, especially, I mean, it looks like anyone with an MPH on Twitter, they're just, they have this like this, like they convey this anxiety. Don't, don't see your family at Christmas. Don't, don't hug your children. don't, if your kids coming from home from college, stick them in the garage.

Don't let them anywhere near you. I mean, you'll get this sense that the whole profession of public health is filled with these anxiety-ridden people who don't know how to manage risk. So I think there's some aspect of people's foibles and economic interests did play a big role in this, but I don't think it was the center of it. I think it was these opportunities presented themselves and people did what they normally do is they act in their own interests, not for any nefarious reasons, because it just is their own interest. I place the central blame in public health authorities, the top public health authorities

who argued that we had to follow this policy or else. And all of the dominoes that came out of that after that are just, are like, it came out of that first domino being pushed. And Jay, talk to me about something else, because one of the most difficult issues kind of intellectually for me to think about during this whole thing is I felt viscerally that vaccine mandates, the government saying you must inject this thing in your body. We knew at the time it had side effects. We knew that it would have side effects because all medicine does. I thought that that was wrong. And I can't, I'm not a trained doctor or public health official or anything like. like that, I just thought the data was aligned the government shouldn't cross in these kind of

situations. What are the ethics of mandatory vaccinations from your perspective as someone who understands health and understands public health? Should it ever happen? I mean, if somebody said to me in the podcast I did, what if this had like a 90% mortality right now? My facetious counter argument is if it did, everybody would take the bloody vaccine by themselves. That's not facetious. You're absolutely right. However, you know, what are the ethics? Is it as simple as what I'm saying? The government should never do that or are there circumstances where they should?

How do we make these decisions as a society? Okay, so first, let me, like for vaccine mandates, if you are mandating the vaccine, you have failed as a public health agency. Because what that means is there's a substantial number of people who don't trust you. They don't trust you, right? And so as a general rule, you don't want to tell people to take something that's bad for them on net. Right. So the only reason why you would ever want to do a mandate is there's a group of the part of the population who essentially has to take one for the team.

Right. You're going to expose them to something that's bad for them because then it will benefit the community at large. Otherwise, there's no purpose of it. What you said is exactly right. If there's a 90% death rate from some disease and there's a vaccine that gets rid of that risk, everyone will take it with no mandate. As long as the public health agency is trustworthy enough that you believe them, right? So I think, so the first observation, if you're requiring a vaccine mandate, the public health agency has failed. It doesn't have the trust it needs from the population so that when you tell you,

When I tell you, Francis, this vaccine is good for you, you believe me and take it. So, like, you know, Sweden didn't have no vaccine mandate and yet incredible uptake of the vaccine because people trust the Swedish Public Health Agency. Okay, second thing, I think there's a legitimate social debate to be had about whether whether if you have a vaccine that stops disease transmission and you have a group of people who don't want to take it because it's bad for them, whether it's ethical to force them to take it. I've seen good arguments both ways. And frankly, I'm undecided about that. I think it would matter a lot about exactly the nature of the disease and how it spreads. And it would be a complicated,

difficult argument to have. Right. So kids, I don't think, are very high risk from COVID. I don't I think the vaccine is not worthwhile to give to children. But you could convince me that if kids are super spreaders and the vaccine stop the disease spread, maybe we can have it. I probably would come down the other way because I don't think we should ask kids to bear the burden of the disease spread. But people could differ on that. But we don't have a vaccine like that.

We don't have a vaccine that stops a Z spread. So why did we create this like second-class citizenship for vaccinated people? Like these pariahs, it's essentially like, I mean, it's a vaccine discrimination, right? Like in Canada, you couldn't travel internally. You still can't come to the United States if you're just visiting if you're unvaccinated. What purpose is served by that? COVID's everywhere. An unvaccinated person is not unclean.

That's essentially what's like treating them as lepers. I have no idea. There's no justification for it. All it serves to do at this point is undermine trust in public health. Jay, this is actually true. And it's something that always used to make me laugh. Apparently, Hitler was against vaccine mandates because he thought it was a bit far. He can't use a vegan too or something.

I don't know. Well, I think an important question that we should ask at this point in the interview, Jay, is what have been the long-term health effects of the lockdown? Because I'm seeing an excess death rate. we've got an excess death rate in this country. Nobody's really talking about it because... It's long COVID, mate, all of it. Yeah.

Because it's an unpleasant truth that really nobody wants to talk about. So what has it have actually been the effects of these lockdowns? I mean, it's heartbreaking, right? So in Europe, there was a modeling study. It was a really interesting model study. He said it suggests that 100 million people had skipped cancer screening during the pandemic. A hundred million. 100 million cancer screenings have been, I shouldn't say people, 100 million cancer

screenings had been skipped. And that's going to lead to a million people with later stage cancer that should have been picked up that they're going to, you know, often will kill them that shouldn't have killed them. The women will die at breast cancer, stage two, stage three, stage four that should have been picked up at stage one from the ronal screening that didn't happen. I mean, that's just one thing. The psychological effects in the U.S., something like one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020.

The overhang for like anxiety and depression is enormous. I think that's maybe it's a little less true in Europe and the UK because you guys had Freedom Day earlier. But the, in, in, there are like measles cases now outbreaks in the United States because people skipped. basic immunization. Polio has come back. It was on the way out. We were like this close to eradicating polio. In poor countries, it's even worse, right?

In, I think Uganda, the estimate is that four and a half million kids, after two years of Zoom school, which is ridiculous in a country like Uganda, they never came back to school. That means it's a generation of poor kids in Uganda who will never get an education and will grow up for it. We've just, like, we've fueled inequality in a way that, like, it's almost unimaginable. And they will lead shorter lives. Even, it turns out, like, even in rich countries, short interruptions of school

has these, like, long-term negative consequences of the lives of kids. Because, you know, the grow-up poorer, one estimate published in the, JAMA pediatrics early in the pandemic was that just the spring closures alone have led will lead to five and a half million lost life years for American kids. The overhang of these lockdowns in terms of what they've done to our health of our society, the social inequality, the poverty, is almost possible to exaggerate. It is catastrophic and terrible. I don't know for certain all those excess deaths. You talked about Francis or due to the law. the lockdowns, but I do believe there's substantial fraction must be. The long tail of the lockdown

harms. Places that... And do you think... Oh, sorry, carry on, Joe. No, just one more data point. The lock, the, in Scandinavia, the all-cause access death rates are actually quite low now. You know, close to zero. I mean, they didn't lock down nearly as, as much as the UK did or the US did. think that that's, I think that the lockdowns will ultimately play some role in explaining it. Joe, do you think we've learned our lessons from these mistakes? Or do you, or do you think we're going to, just going to make the same mistakes again? We have not learned our lessons, Francis. I do have some hope that we might. The UK, there's a, I think, a parliamentary inquiry that's happening on COVID, and there's still now some fight over exactly what's going to be

part of that. I think any honest evaluation of these policies will conclude that they were failure. And there were a disastrous failure that has harmed the economic well-being, the physical well-being, the psychological well-being of vast populations. Any inquiry like the parliamentary that's happening in the UK that doesn't conclude that lockdowns were a disaster, I think won't have been an honest evaluation. There's a lot of people who made these decisions that have a strong vested interest in making sure that these inquiries end up saying, oh, everything was fine, we did the best we could under circumstances where it's difficult. But that's not actually right. They suppressed voices that opposed it. They engaged unethical

behaviors like stoking fear in the population using behavioral economics techniques to do that. They made tremendously bad decisions by closing themselves off from criticism. They employed censorship in social media and a whole bunch of other settings so that people couldn't affect push back. So I think the ultimate outcome of this needs to be these discussions, needs to involve people who were pushed aside in the debate. And I think the ultimate outcome has to be that lockdown has to be a dirty word. We have to look, whenever we think about the word lockdown, when we think about the concept of lockdown, we shudder in fear. We say, we should never do this again. That has to be the outcome of these. But I'm very afraid that that's not going to be.

the vested interests that pushed these policies that benefited from these policies don't want it to be concluded that way because then my god like it's a world historic bad thing that happened that they did now i think the outcome should also involve some level of forgiveness i mean you know like this was so big a thing it's like uh you know you you don't we have to come together we can't like put half the, you know, indict half the people in the world that made these decisions are very, very high. We have to live with them. So there has to be some kind of forgiveness, but not until we have a solid understanding and

acceptance that what we did was deeply wrong. And Jay, this is perhaps a strange question to ask, but Francis and I were both vocal about some of what we thought was happening going too far. and a lot of other people were. But do you think we as the general public? I know you and your colleagues were very courageous in actually attempting to speak up at a time when it was difficult, and you were demonized and not allowed to speak on these big tech platforms.

We had our issues with that as well. But do you think we as the public did enough to stand up to this? Did we do everything that we could? Or do you think that, you know, it seemed to me like there were a lot of people who actually would have agreed with us, but just preferred to be quiet because that, that that was the direction the government was going. I mean, I think in March of 2020, it was basically impossible.

I think that the fear was so great that it was very hard for public order. I mean, I remember there was someone, some group tried to organize a lockdown protests and local and they were just, I mean, normally protests in, like, you know, hippie-dippy, California are fine, but you can't, you just can't do that in March of 2020. But I think a lot of the, I mean, like the easy answer constant is that the public didn't do enough, but I don't blame the public, right? You had deployed against the public these techniques of social control that are very difficult to push back against, right? If you're censored on YouTube or whatever. Well, now people like, distrust me because, gosh, these smart people in tech think I'm saying,

something crazy enough that they can't even be presented to the public at all. You organize a protest or something against the lockdown, and then all these very smart people say you're doing something deeply irresponsible. It's very difficult for the public to speak up. In fact, one of the reasons we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration was to enable the public to say, look, there isn't a consensus on the lockdown. There are legitimate people who disagree with it. And so they could speak up and say, well, you know, we're not crazy.

We're actually engaging in the public fight over this deeply important issue. And we should have our voice heard. That was one of the purposes was to like enable that to happen. Because before that is like, oh, yeah, the entire scientific cleracy agrees that the lockdowns of the way. If you speak up, you're insane. So I think that it's the answer to your question is yes. the public should have spoken up more, but at the same time,

I don't see how they could have spoken up, given the social pressures that were put in place to make sure that they stayed silent. That makes sense. Well, look, we're coming to the end of the interview, so we'll ask you our usual final question, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to very succinctly tell everybody what we should do next time.

Let's say we have another pandemic that's exactly like COVID, but not COVID. What do we do? The key principle is focus protection. identify high-risk people, move heaven and earth to protect them. And it might be a different set of high-risk people. Maybe it won't be elderly next time. Maybe it'll be kids.

So you'll have to be very creative about how to do that. It's going to require a local effort. It's not going to be one global policy. The living circumstances in London will be different than in LA than in Billings, Montana. But it's going to require creativity, focus protection of high-risk people. And then like develop vaccines, develop treatments as rapidly, you can. That's the right way to deal with it. Never lock down again. Do not disrupt the lives of

people that keep society going, assuming that everyone is capable of the kinds of activities that the laptop class made. We have to understand that society really is unequal. And don't trust just deputy immunologists. Let's have other people at the table. Let's have like, you know, it shouldn't just be scientists. These are too complicated decisions that involve values that scientists apparently are incapable of seeing. Jake, before, there's one last question I wanted to ask because there is now an Ebola outbreak happening in Africa at the moment, which I'm sure you're probably well aware of. Does it worry you that as a disease, that kind of pandemic where you've got a disease that

it's so deadly like Ebola? Does that have a chance of becoming a global pandemic? I think it's unlikely. Ebola is a deadly disease. but you get symptoms fairly quickly and it's, you're very sick. And so you're not gonna go around spreading it. It spreads in conditions where it's poor, people are living in close, close contact with people,

unavoidable contact. I don't think it spreads the way that this disease spreads. The reason why this disease was so highly transmissible is because it's aerosolized. It lives in the air, you breathe it, that's why mass don't work so well, it's because you have these gaps, you have classes,

fog up, that's aerosolization events. If you have COVID, there's COVID on your glasses. So, yeah, I'm not so worried about that. I am worried that Ebola get managed well in Africa. You don't want people to die there of that disease. But I think that we actually have pretty good tools to try to reduce the spread of that disease in Africa. So, yeah, I'm not worried there's going to be a global pandemic. I do think we have to take it seriously there. Well, Jay, thank you so much. It's been an absolutely pleasure speaking with you. And this can be completely unrelated, by the way, to COVID and everything we've talked about. But as always, what do you think is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

There's an irony in this. I think censorship kills Constantine. I think censorship is the worst. And maybe we're starting, maybe it's not the right answer to your question because we are talking about it. It's funny that we're talking about censorship. But we're not talking about it enough. and I am really glad to see Elon Musk trying to bring back some voices that were silenced. But that needs to be a society-wide effort. I thought we had a norm about this in Western democracies that we didn't silence each other. We might yell at each other, but we don't silence each other. Let's bring that norm back, and we're not talking enough about that.

I agree completely. Well, we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see the locals. But Dr. J. Batachar, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Oraw. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. I do worry about the side effects of the vaccines for young men for sure.