Voices of Freedom - Interview with Jay Bhattacharya

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

An Interview with Jay Bhattacharya Four years ago this past March, America followed the direction of public health officials and went into lockdown mode due to the emergence of Covid-19. Yet by the fall of 2020, it became clear to some in the medical community that the soundest approach to the pandemic was to let healthy individuals resume daily life, while protecting the most vulnerable.  Medical experts from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford led the way in promoting this approach by issuing The Great Barrington Declaration.  What happened next is a case study in government overreach and censorship. The Declaration’s authors were cast aside by their peers, shut down by the US government and threatened by the public.  Courageously, they continue to speak up.  Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one of those experts and is our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. A 2024 Bradley Prize winner, he joins us to share his experience and what’s at stake for a free society, and science and research, when free speech is denied. Bhattacharya is Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University, Director of the University’s Center for Economics and Demography of Health and Aging, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Topics Discussed on this Episode What drew Bhattacharya to economics, medicine and health policy and why these fields are complementary The point at which he realized that continued lockdowns were devastating Why scientists felt compelled to self-censor during the pandemic The reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration Key takeaways from oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a landmark free speech case Where Americans can go to learn perspectives that the media doesn’t cover The state of scientific integrity and debate What it means to Bhattacharya to win a Bradley Prize

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. It's been four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and studies continue to show the devastating impact of lockdowns and social distancing. Kids are still struggling academically due to learning loss.

Schools are now grappling with high absenteeism. Mental health among young people, unfortunately, is at an all-time low. It didn't have to be that way. Yet those in the scientific community who argued for a more focused approach to COVID policy were pilloried by their peers, publicly shamed, and suppressed by their own government. And that's not an overstatement. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is an internationally renowned expert in economics, medicine, and health research policy who spoke out and had the courage to speak out against lockdowns. He joins us today to talk about his experience and the significance of free speech. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is professor of health policy

at Stanford University, director of the University Center for Economics and Demography of Health and Aging, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He is also a 2024 Bradley Prize winner. Congratulations and welcome, Jay. It is wonderful to have you. Rick, it's a real honor to talk with you, and I'm delighted for the invitation and the chance to tell my story a little bit. Let's jump right in. Jay, we've got a whole lot to talk about and not enough time to do it, but let's talk a little bit about you to start. You have a remarkable range of knowledge, expertise, formal education, and training. You earned a PhD in economics and a medical degree, both from Stanford. Way back when, what drew you to these fields and to Stanford in the first place?

Well, Stanford, it was an accident. I applied. This is the furthest school I could apply to that my parents would let me go to. They wanted me to stay in state. I was in California. But I came into Stanford wanting to be a doctor. I liked chemistry, okay. found economics was, I mean, it's just my mind just lit up at the idea that you could use math and analytic reasoning to think through, you know, the basic idea of economics is that there's trade-offs. And I thought, you know, look, medicine's filled with trade-offs. That's the heart and soul of medicine, actually. There's no drug that has no side effects. There's information issues. Economics turns out to be a really fundamental tool that doctors could and should use. And so for me, it was a natural to mix the two in my graduate work. Fantastic. And in the category of you never know what's going to happen

in a career, you've also become a free speech warrior, which I would wager to guess was not part of the original plan. Let's discuss that, starting with the onset of COVID. In March of 2020, Americans were told by their government that they needed a lockdown to save lives. Okay. And maybe in March of 2020, you were in the same place. But at what point did you begin to realize that lockdowns were not the scientifically sound approach to dealing with COVID? It was pretty much right in February, March 2020. Yeah. I mean, I think very early on in the pandemic, the main question I had about that was the extent of disease spread.

So the disease very clearly spread very easily. It seemed to me like it spread by aerosols and breath. And so if that's the case, lockdowns are not a tool that are going to stop it. The question in my mind then early was how widespread was it already? And so I ran a study very early in the pandemic looking for antibody levels in the population in Santa Clara County and L.A. County and found that it spread to 3 or 4 percent. It was actually, that's a big number because there was 50 times more people that were being infected than cases. It also meant the lockdowns had failed. We've been in lockdowns for a couple of weeks and already the disease has spread to 3% or 4% of the population.

It also meant that the disease had a long way to go before it was done. It's the kind of thing where either you suppress it at zero when it first comes out or it gets to 100. There's nothing in between. But that's what led me to this free speech thing. I've been publishing papers for my entire career, and there was vicious attacks on me. The medical school, the chair of the medical school told me, the medicine at Stanford told me to stop talking to the press. And there was this sense that, like, me sharing a result, a scientific result, was somehow anathema. You're not allowed to do it. And then I'm close colleagues with my friend Scott Atlas, who faced sort of severe repression from Stanford itself and from the press.

There was this very weird thing where you weren't allowed to talk if you didn't agree with exactly what government health and public was doing. I mean, let's drill down on that a little bit. I mean, it would be normal for people in any profession to disagree. And I mean, you yourself have said scientists disagreed, and in this case was no different than the others. You fight with each other. You try to come to a right answer. Yet it seemed we came to a point where scientists who disagreed with the government view on this were afraid to speak up.

Were you surprised that we had gotten to the point where a number of your colleagues were self-censoring during what was the worst pandemic in a century? I mean, I work in public health and I work in health policy. These are very contentious areas. It is absolutely normal for people to pretty fundamentally disagree with each other. People assigned with expertise. You think that's healthy? Yeah, it's absolutely healthy. A healthy

debate. I mean, I learned things from those disagreements. I'm often wrong. That's just normal. This was not that. What this was, was a suppression of the capacity for people who didn't agree with people like Tony Fauci to say that Tony Fauci was wrong or that the lockdowns were devastating, all those harms that you listed about the lockdown at the beginning of this podcast. I mean, those were things that a lot of me and a lot of my colleagues were talking about. People with expertise in the economics of education, people with expertise in mental health, they were all very worried about these lockdown harms. And the scientific literature that was coming out made it clear that closing schools was a devastating mistake.

I mean, that was true. That scientific literature, in my mind, was solidified by the end of March, April 2020. You know, looking at what Sweden had done, for instance. So it was one of these things where the normal process by which scientists would come to something approaching truth, where essentially it's like this adversarial process. It's funny to say it this way because normally it's lawyers that talk that way, but that's really what it is. That got ended in the early days of the pandemic, which is ironic because you have a novel virus, a new situation, no one knows how to deal with it. That's when you need free speech the most. That's when you need to allow people to think differently and allow them to speak their minds. Instead, what happens if you spoke your mind, you were smeared, you were attacked, you were defamed.

And a lot of scientists looking at this said, I don't want to get involved with this. And they said they stayed silent. I guess the question is why? I mean, it did seem like Dr. Fauci and the medical community and the media all came together and said, this is how we're going to talk about this or not talk about it. Why? Why were they not trying to find the best and right answer? Well, I think part of it is hubris. I think that some of the scientific bureaucrats who were the most influential in policymaking during the pandemic, they thought that they had all the answers. Famously, you can see an interview of Tony Fauci talking to a CNN reporter where he says, if you criticize me, you're not simply criticizing a man, you're criticizing science itself. Like everyone knows I represent science. That kind of hubris has no place in science. And the problem is like he's the head of NIAID, Francis Collins, the head of NIH. They control scientific funding for every biomedical scientist of note in this country.

And in fact, around the world even. And when they say that some view is fringe, people aren't going to say that because they fear for their career. It's a tremendous amount of power, and they abuse their power to essentially silence opposition to them. So I think hubris is probably the most important explanation. The other thing is, I think the government, it turns out, has tools to censor discussion and debate in ways that I didn't understand existed with the toolkit of the federal government. And worldwide, we've seen this like government after government has used that kind of power to set the parameters of online discussion, making it so that it was almost impossible to participate in the discussion without being suppressed or silenced if you didn't agree with what public health thought. retired some some of the players no longer active do you have any confidence that things would be different if we had another pandemic in the not too distant future or have no lessons been learned

well rick i think the problem is that uh although we've been talking about fauci and collins really it's not really them actually it's what it is is, is the power that exists within the federal bureaucracy, the bureaucracies of governments of the West. That power is still there. And that power now, there's a path for anyone in future pandemics to use it again, whoever it is, whether it's Fauci or not. Again, so really it's not about Tony Fauci. Really what it's about is the kinds of checks and balances we usually expect in democratic governance do not exist, it turns out, when it comes to pandemics.

And I think that that really is what has to get changed. That's the fundamental kind of reform we need. Unfortunately, I have to say, I have not seen much movement in trying to reform in that way. I've been trying to advocate for that, and I'll continue to advocate for that, because I think the future of our democracies depend fundamentally on that reform. Let's keep drilling down on this. I mean, you took some big risks. You and your colleagues from Harvard and Oxford issued the Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020, which called for an end to the failed lockdowns and for a policy that really focused on how best

to protect older people who were the people that were most at risk. And, you know, in that process, you risked your reputation, your career, but you did it anyway. Did you ever have second thoughts? No. Good for you. I mean, at that point in the pandemic, it was October, I was so frustrated. I was watching what was happening to children. I was watching what was happening to the poor everywhere. There were reports out of the UN that there'd be 100 million people

on the brink of starvation. The World Bank was issuing reports that 100 million or more people were thrown into dire poverty. There were reports of children missing, at that point, months and months and months of school all around the world. Catastrophic inequality that will last a generation. And of course, as you said, the mental health problems that were coming up in report after report where you'd see anxiety, depression, suicidality in young people. So the lockdowns, I thought, it was so clear to me that they were devastating the people that I spent my career trying to study. So I have a responsibility to them.

I had to speak for them. And the other thing was the focus protection angle. The epidemiology was very clear. The oldest people were the ones that are most at risk of dying if they got COVID. Why not reorient our policy to protect them. Why this futile idea of trying to suppress the spread with technologies that don't work? The lockdowns don't suppress the spread. Even by then, you know, we had 40% of the deaths were in nursing homes. Instead of focusing on protecting the most vulnerable people, we decided we're going to spend all our effort and energy on doing harm

to children, doing harm to poor, doing harm to the working class. So I had to write that. I knew that it was going to cause controversy, and I knew that it potentially could end my career, but I had no choice. Great courage. I mean, the pushback to the Great Barrington Declaration was pretty intense. It was, you know, and this is pushback by your professional colleagues. Again, was it a groupthink mentality or why? Well, I mean, first, it's important to note that a lot of the pushback was organized in part by the head of the NIH. Four days after we wrote the declaration, Francis Collins wrote an email calling me, Martin Kuhldorf of Harvard University, then of Harvard, and then Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. He called the three of us fringe epidemiologists using ad hominem attack, which doesn't have any place in science.

And then called for a devastating takedown. That led to death threats against me, against smearing article after article, smearing me, essentially defaming me, saying I wanted to intentionally infect people, which was the farthest thing from my mind. I wanted to protect the most vulnerable from infection. I wanted to protect poor people from the harms of lockdown. And so it was really shocking when I've learned that people like that, who I admired and respected, were behaving in such an abusive way. And more locally, it was really shocking to see that my colleagues, someone who I've written with over the course of my career, refused to discuss or debate with me openly.

The former president of the university, John Hennessy, actually tried to organize a debate in December 2020 at Stanford, and no one at Stanford would take up the challenge on the other side. I think that the ideas that we were saying, this Great Branch Declaration was so dangerous that you couldn't even talk about them, that's a signal that we really should have been talking about them. You're a human like everyone else. I mean, this has to have taken a toll, at least to some extent. I mean, I lost a lot of friends, Rick.

That's sad. I mean, I lost a lot of friends, Rick. But although I have made a lot of new ones, I mean, especially early in the pandemic, in March, April 2020, when I was doing those studies, it was an utter shock to me to see how little people really wanted to dig in and do normal science. And I lost 30 pounds of anxiety weight. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. But for, I mean, in a month, I lost 30 pounds. It was really, at one point, I was really afraid I was, you know, something was really

wrong with my health. But once I decided that I was going to stake my career and my reputation on this, that I would, that I owed my voice to the people I studied to the poor the children of the working class that uh that uh whether whatever happened to me was what was something that that I still had to stake that because who else is who else um yeah I didn't see very many people sticking their necks up um I just had to do it I had no choice I have no regrets about it actually after I decided that I was at. I gained the weight back. One of the things we focus on at the Bradley Foundation is our civil

society. And in a lot of ways, it seems we've taken some steps backwards in our country in that regard. It's so difficult in almost any walk to have a civil discourse and to debate ideas. And maybe that's particularly true in higher education, where campuses have just become resistant in all ways to a diversity of ideas. I mean, that's been shocking to me. I mean, I've lived at Stanford.

I mean, I've grown up at Stanford. I've been here for almost 40 years, first as a student and then as professor. And I always thought of it as a place where those kinds of civil debates could happen. I think the central mission of our great universities is to have those debates. If they don't serve that function, then what purpose do they serve rather than just to credential the next generation of elite? That's not enough to warrant the kinds of resources and talent that we pour into the universities. We owe it to the public at large to hold these debates, especially when it's least popular to do so, and to do it in a civil way that models rational discourse rather than the kind of suppression that we saw during the pandemic.

I mean, I'm sure that this kind of suppression happened before the pandemic. Like lots of colleagues of mine have come and told me that, Jay, you were blind before. And that's true, I think. But during the pandemic, as far as I was, for me, it was unmistakable. And I think it has become unmistakable for the public at large. The great universities owe the public that kind of forum for those kinds of debates to happen and to include a very, very wide set of voices. And they are not doing a good job at that. Do you think the tide may have started to turn in the aftermath of the leadership issues at Harvard and other elite universities after October 7th? I mean, are you sensing any difference at all at Stanford, for instance, or not?

I am, actually. There are definitely some hopeful signs um and uh you know like in 2020 and 2021 uh i mean i was at one point in 2021 i was afraid to walk around campus uh you know because it was there were like poster campaigns defaming me there were death threats and it felt like university had basically given up on on on free speech uh things have started to turn there's still quite a long way to go rick i think the uh that the the leadership of great universities need to speak. That's really where the change will fundamentally come from. Rather than focusing on things that are peripheral. I mean, it's not that I'm against, you know, diversity of ideas or diversity. I'm not against equity, obviously. Those are all fine goals,

but those are peripheral goals relative to the real mission of the university. The real mission of the university is to put on stage and examine ideas, ideas that are fundamental to the futures of our civilization

and fundamental to how we view ourselves and the world at large. And it's going to have conflict, but we have to lean into that conflict. If universities don't have that as their fundamental mission to keep the flame of civilization alive, then the support that they have enjoyed in the public will dissipate and they will shrink into things that will serve as credentialing shops and no more. There'll be no moral reason to continue to support them. So true.

I mean, let's focus a little bit on this free speech issue. Last year, I know you became a plaintiff in Lawson, Worthy v. Missouri, which is one of the biggest free speech cases probably of our lifetime. And in that, you and other plaintiffs argue that the government coerced social media companies to censor those with whom they disagree on everything from COVID policy to Hunter Biden's laptop. Now, the Louisiana District Court that originally heard that case ruled that the government may actually win based on the oral arguments, which is always difficult and dangerous to make any assumptions. But what's your take on where that lands? Well, I think first, let me just say what the stakes are, right? So what's at stake

is the First Amendment itself, right? So if it is within the Constitution to allow the government to go to social media companies and tell them, you should censor these people and these ideas, and then the social media companies feeling that under threat by the government because the government regulates them and can regulate them out of existence if they would. Essentially, what's happening then is that the government now has a workaround to the First Amendment. They can censor at will just using the social media intermediaries. Now, the nature of the Internet is such that you could get your ideas out. It's not impossible. But that was true of the printing press.

You could have the government regulate the printing press, make it difficult, and you could still print flyers if you had a rogue printing press. In the Soviet Union, they had typewriters that they would use to type up Samistad under the nose of the authoritarian power. The fact that that exists is not really the key point. The key point is that the government using its power to essentially declare a set of ideas out of bounds, if that's constitutional, we no longer have a free republic. So that's the stakes. I think that the particular issue in the case is, does the government itself have First Amendment rights? Someone like President Biden, absolutely,

he can say whatever he likes, right? It's a free country, right? So he can say whatever he likes right it's a free country right uh so uh that he can say look i don't like what jay is saying completely legitimate that's completely within the first amendment but what we're objecting to isn't that what we're objecting to is that the government is going behind uh behind the backs of me and everyone else that they censored and we're talking about millions and millions of people censored and tell social media companies, don't let these people on, don't let these ideas out, where there's no capacity for me to push back. I don't know that the government's doing this to me. Not that I wouldn't, except for the case. And so what we have then is a situation where the government is taking on itself a power

well beyond just their ability to persuade. They're essentially saying we can stop the ideas that we don't want out there from being discussed at large. And that is not the America that I grew up in. And I think that is fundamentally counter to the American First Amendment and to the basic civic religion of America, which is that we should be able to speak. And social media is relatively new in our society and so powerful, more than we ever could have imagined. I mean, let's stay on this topic. Let's talk about the role of the media in the pursuit this government. Major stories are often overlooked or reported inaccurately. We've heard recently of NPR editors admitting that

politics intruded on their coverage of COVID, and they were dismissive of the lab leak origin theory. Based on your experience with the media, and you've had a whole lot of experience with the media in recent years. Where should Americans go to learn what's really happening? Is there anywhere? I mean, I think it's more difficult than it once was. Like the media environment. So first of all, one of the shocking things to me is that so much of the media, sort of the mainstream media, has been entirely supportive of the censorship

powers in the government. Normally, the media services the bulwark against those censorship powers. And I think the reason is that they view social media as a competitor. Actually, a competitor that strikes at the heart of the financial capacity of the mainstream media. If I can get my news on X or on Facebook or elsewhere, why do I need to bother paying a subscription to the New York Times or read the advertisements in the New York Times? So I think that's one one thing that the media is not the friend of the first amendment here weirdly um the the second thing is that that the kind of like close relationship that the media has with inside government sources gives them gives them a a kind of competitive advantage they don't want to let go and so they don't this is this has always been a problem this This is not new, but the, but the fact is that they don't want to lose inside access to what Tony Fauci thought or what

Francis Collins thought. So they're not going to take my side in a debate against them for fear of losing that inside access. The solution to that is to have independent media. The solution to that is to have uncensored social media. That way, that kind of conflict of interest can be called out. There can be independent ways of getting at the truth. At this point, you asked, what's a person to do to get true things? I think you have no choice. You have to be a very, very discerning reader. And you have to avail yourself of a tremendous diversity of sources, including sources that you sense that the government doesn't want you to read. And I think social media actually can play an important role in that, but it takes some

discipline. You have to be willing to read things you are not inclined to agree with. I mean, this country has been fortunate to have the finest scientists in the world. Are you worried about the integrity of science in this kind of atmosphere where debate is shut down? I am. I'm very, very worried about that, Rick. I think that if the kind of pressure and coercion by government scientists and government scientists, bureaucrats um basically every lever of

power to silence scientists that disagreed if that lever that kind of ethos continues then uh science as we know it is dead science requires people to disagree it's the fundamental leader into how science actually works right so if i have hypothesis you have i have to like send it out so that and and and so that hundreds of people disagree, can find holes in my logic and find experiments that contradict the predictions of my hypothesis. That's just that's just how normal science is. If it doesn't if you don't have that kind of speech permitted in certain areas, then science cannot advance. It just becomes another lever of power and nothing else. And I'm really, really deeply worried about that. And I think every scientist ought to be, right? Every scientist has an interest in allowing the kind of speech that we've been talking about to occur

and opposing the kind of censorship that happened in science at the hands of public health bureaucrats and scientific bureaucrats to never happen again. Absolutely. Last question. What does it mean to you to win a Bradley Prize? Oh, Rick, it is. I mean, I was overcome with emotion when I first heard about that, that I was going to be a winner. I told my mom and she was in tears. To me, it's not really even about me in my view. I mean, I've been visible, but there have been a tremendous number of other people who've risked their careers and actually lost their jobs

that have spoken up and I'm representing them. And to me, that's what the importance of this bodily prize is. It's an honor for the people who, during the pandemic, decided that they were going to put the truth ahead of their interests, that they were willing to speak even when we were told not to do so. And so I'm so grateful to the Bradley Foundation for issuing the award to me, but really to recognizing that even in the middle of this difficult time, there were people that were trying to fight back for truth, for basic civil liberties.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, thank you so much for your leadership, for your courage through a very, very difficult time in this country. It's deeply appreciated. We really look forward to celebrating with you and your family in a few weeks. And once again, congratulations on being a 2024 Bradley Prize winner. Thank you, Rick. Thank you for the Bradley Foundation for choosing me. Appreciate it.

And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.