Et Tu, Stanford?! Top Epidemiologist Silenced for Following the Science

welcome to the new civil liberties alliance and this edition of wine and cheese for those of you who have tuned in before you know that this program is all about promoting rational discourse and inviting folks who've been disinvited or faced cancellation elsewhere to participate in a conversation about their unpopular views that intersect with something that's happening in the administrative state today i am thoroughly enthused to be joined by dr jay bhattacharya a leader in promoting reasonable public health and hence public policy approaches to the covet 19 pandemic by way of full disclosure ncla has relied on dr bhattacharya for some of the vaccine mandate lawsuits that we have brought around the country this past year uh but uh but we have uh we've not compensated him for his expert opinion so he is not uh he is not tainted by his association with uh with ncla uh but to dr bhattacharya welcome to ncla it's thrilled to have you here honored by the association actually terrific well for those who don't know dr bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at stanford university he is a research associate at the national bureau of economic research a fellow at the stanford institute for economic policy research and he he holds courtesy appointments as a professor in economics and in health research and policy at stanford he directs the stanford center on the demography of health and aging his research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations dr bhattacharya's peer-reviewed research has been published in economics statistics law medicine public health and health policy journals he holds an md and a phd in economics from stanford university and he was born in calcutta india maybe more importantly for our discussion today dr bhattaracharya was the co-author and signatory of the great barrington declaration along with martin koldorf a professor of medicine at harvard university and sunetra gupta a professor of the theoretical epidemiology at oxford university dr bhattacharya has opposed lockdowns and mass mandates and advocated for letting covet 19 spread in lower risk groups to build herd immunity while focusing public resources and protection on vulnerable older populations and others at high risk from covid19 disease so some of these views have been controversial uh shall we say and we called we call this so show wine and cheese because uh we're frankly cheesed off about people being de-platformed disinvited uh or punished professionally or otherwise for sharing unpopular viewpoints and i don't want to dwell on the reasons that you know that you have been cancelled or otherwise punished but i do want to just to set the stage a little bit ask you to to you know to sort of briefly explain what's happened to you as a result of the view points that you have been trying to share in the in the debate around copenhagen so can we start back with the great barrington declaration sure i can go back 20 months from it's i've faced a quite a journey in the last 20 months but the great bentham question is a good example of of sort of what's gone on in the discourse and how it's kind of been uh twisted in ways that that had made it very difficult to get uh you sort of counter counter cultural views out um so the great barrington decoration actually it's not calling for letting the virus spread at all what is what it's calling for the key element of it so i've been a victim of the uh this is the way that the news media picked it up but yeah oh please no uh the the um the idea is focus protection the vulnerable right so there's a thousand-fold difference in the risk of and harm from covet infection with the oldest being really really quite vulnerable like you know uh the high death rates yeah high death rates hospitalization rates so on whereas younger populations they're much less susceptible to bad outcomes if you get infected with coke this is before the vaccine with the vaccine the vaccine reduces the mortality rate by by tenfold or more um and so it that's really transformed the thing but still you have this like steep age gradient which is the centrally most important thing about this uh this disease at the same time the policies we've used these lock down focus policies i mean sending people back into nursing homes with that well that was that's a violation of one of the things we would argue for the focus protection right so but the the lockdown first was like closing schools uh you know shutting down businesses uh forcing uh if your close closing churches i mean in my county where i live they actually uh prevented people from having private bible studies in their home um so you have a you have this like range of policies that uh that i mean we can argue about exactly how effective they were in slowing the spread i would argue not very effective but but we can no one disputes they had an enormously negative impact on the lives of many many people um and uh so if you put those two things together you have on the one hand a vulnerable population that is absolutely completely reasonable to to do everything we can to protect the focus protection so so the great brainchild creation says focus protection is vulnerable that's the first most important thing and then for the rest of the population letting people live as normal lives as possible given that there's a disease around that's that is not the most important thing in their life necessarily right so i'll give you some statistics we can talk about in a bit but like you know one in four young adults in june of 2020 seriously considered suicide you know women skipped breast cancer screening that are showing up with stage four breast cancer now that should have been picked up last year a whole host of of harms to the poor around the world uh and in particular the the working class and the poor in the united states have have also suffered because of these lockdowns like the lockdown said look you know you you know if i'm if i'm rich i can stay at home and people can deliver groceries to me but if i'm poor i have to go work even after 65 right it doesn't matter that i'm at high risk um so you have this you have this like these two things so the argument isn't let the virus rip the argument is let people live their life the virus may spread i mean it's it's it's in it the point is that there's no we don't have a technology to stop it from spreading so to characterize this like let's try to live our normal life as while we're protecting the vulnerable that's it that's the great branching declaration eventually the the the the epidemic will end and it will end at herd immunity no matter what strategy we follow right so that's just the nature of the epidemiological facts about those viruses yeah so i mean this virus induces immunity after you recover from it that means that when you next encounter somebody with a virus they're much less likely to spread it to you because you're protected by the by dent or the fact that you you have this immunity that that fact alone means there will be herd immunity for this yeah eventually but we don't know exactly how long yeah and you know and that the like with other chronoviruses the immunity declines over time but the reinfections tend to be much milder than the initial infection i mean that's that's just again the nature we're seeing this in data over and over so the end point is is some degree of herd immunity it doesn't mean the disease is gone it means it comes it you'll come back in seasonal waves but that people especially people that have had it and recovered or had the vaccine or protected from the severe consequences of it that's it that's the whole great breakthrough it actually doesn't sound really sort of crazy controversial i wouldn't have thought so right i mean i i thought when we put this out um that uh well i mean i knew would be controversial i can't i can't i'm not even disingenuous i didn't but i i will say like it's it's a hundred years of pandemic planning have emphasized exactly this strategy and it's worked right in 1957 it worked in 1968 it worked 1976 it worked for every protecting the vulnerable piece but i mean you know now the thing is protecting vulnerable is difficult it involves understanding the living circumstances of the vulnerable i'm trying to you know sort of mobilize local public health to you you know to try to you know sort of try to give resources so that the vulnerable can be protected right so like you mentioned nursing at the beginning epidemic that is a failure focused protection why did they do that because they didn't understand that the key resource that was missing the key the key sort of constraint was protection the vulnerable they didn't understand the thousand-fold risk difference they thought the key missing thing was hospital beds we're gonna overwhelm hospital systems well that was a mistake in order to keep hospital systems free of covert patients we sent them back to nursing homes if they had had focus protection at the front forefront of their head they would never have done that maybe could have sent them to the hospital ships that were waiting offshore that no one was using something like that i mean i just heard the job at some of them did but had had you know lots of bads with nothing happening so i mean i think this is one of those things where like just a very simple principle and you end up with a very different outcome and then for other populations other people like you know we could have organized we had like coveted only hour at grocery stores for older people or older um the problem there is like you can still get the disease if you go out so why not like have uber eats for for the old and vulnerable instead of overreach for the rich and and young or young and young and rich right i mean that that we could have we set six trillion dollars there's a lot we could have done we could have offered uh hotel rooms temporarily for uh people for you know uh grandma lives in multi-generational home with with grandson grandson says oh i got grandma i think i i ran into someone coveted grandma calls local public health they arrange for a hotel room for a couple days until grandson's cleared and then comes home i mean it's we could have done a a a a lot of think things and i think it's i thought what would happen when we wrote the great branch operation is that people public health would join us in this because i don't know all that sort of a rethink of available strategies yeah i mean i knew it would board a lot some people who were pushing the lockdowns i mean i knew that would happen that's exactly what happened but i but i also anticipated a response from public health a constructive one um instead what happened was that anthony fauci got on tv got on tv and said that we were arguing for letting the virus rip which would be an utterly irresponsible thing to do and i mean ironically the strategies we adopted this lockdown it's it's kind of like a let it rip let it drip strategy right we basically uh we we stopped we protected a certain class of people right the set of people who could afford to work from home and not lose their job not lose their livelihood uh and you know maybe maybe a third quarter of the american population and then um the rest of the population said okay you've got to go out and work or or we're not going to give you resources we're not going to we're not going to do anything to protect you you just you just have to your so we call them the people who were at home we called them non-essential and the people that that had to go out and work we called essential right and then we turned around and said look uh you know you're an essential worker uh you worked during the epidemic you got coven recovered uh and uh you know you you made up for your own reasons you may not want the vaccine well you were going to fire you right but you have naturally acquired immunity if you have and you so you're actually less of a threat than someone who just got the vaccine as far as like disease spread goes it's it makes the whole policy makes no sense um so that's that's partly that's why i got involved with this um well it seems like the the sort of the working class and and sort of the lower socioeconomic groups sort of got it coming and going like they were told at the beginning no you have to take all the risk then having taken the risk and having developed the naturally acquired immunity they're not allowed to benefit from that because the the sort of the white collar class if you will he's like well that's not good enough for us we we want you to get a vaccine even though you might not need it yeah i mean that's exactly what's happened i think if you had to characterize what uh the goal of policy has been it's been to protect that laptop class right it's the class that makes the policy yes and actually you know places that implemented actually succeeded right so in la county uh the death rate from covid for the uh for people living in richer neighborhoods is one-third the death rate from covered living people living in in uh in poor neighborhoods same thing with like minority neighborhoods experience very very high death rates in in in la county versus uh sort of white white neighborhoods whereas in florida which didn't follow this uh this this policy uh the incidence of covet deaths is roughly equal across all racial categories um i mean it this is a incredibly unequal policy the media hasn't been advertising that uh discrepancy i mean i can't i don't understand why not i mean i wouldn't i actually i seriously don't understand why not like i don't i think this is one of these things where we're going to look back and say this was an incredibly immoral thing that we've done yeah well uh i didn't quite get uh we stepped back and talked about the great barrington declaration but not about some of the grief that you've been put through for for having these uh controversial views and we we talked a little bit about natural immunity but the uh theological treatment of natural immunity is something else you've talked about that has gotten people's dander up but but what's how has this impacted you so let me actually i i think um the work you all do is so important on this front of like uh you know sort of civil civil liberties um i i think uh the the for me personally i've seen uh the the free speech rights have been i personally faced difficulties in in being able to to speak and i i have a i'm in a special situation i'm a professor in a um you know a university right tenure matters at least to a certain extent yeah so i i have not been fired for my for my for my views but uh the the normal protections for academic freedom that would normally apply to someone like me have been uh put in place indifferently i mean let me just say so um so a guy for instance i worked on a study very early in the epidemic called the santa clara sierra prevalence study so that study what we did is we looked at we looked at uh antibodies in the population in santa clara county uh sounds like a very simple thing this is april 2020 we work on the study and what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out how deadly is the disease how widespread is the disease and this was a this was a population that was sort of exposed to it earlier than some of the rest of the country i remember when the kansas state chiefs won the super bowl they were talking about how that might have saved a bunch of lives because the parade happened in kansas city instead of in santa clara and that may have been a it might i mean we didn't know it was really part of the problem so i did a similar study in la county roughly that time like mid april 2020. um the uh the uh the way that stanford regulated that study normally when you do a study like this you have to run it through a human subjects committee and uh the and no end up they actually had quite good cooperation with the human subject they enabled us to organize the study very very rapidly um the the um is that the name that stanford gives to the institutional review board yes the irb okay so i called the human subjects i mean because you know it's completely reasonable that the university regulates the studies that we do to make sure we don't violate uh the rights of the subjects that are participating in this in this case we needed to get uh fingertip blood draws from 3 000 people um and uh so so they we put it through the normal processes they approved it they worked with us in fact we work with santa clara county public health um stanford uh certain folks within stanford didn't like the study they didn't like us and they didn't like us doing the study and they didn't like the answer we got which was that that there were uh maybe three percent of the santa clara population had had coveted antibodies which doesn't sound like a lot but it was 50 times more infections than cases of the time so that showed that community spread was already happening yes community space happening and that means the lockdowns and all of these strategies test trace isolate could not possibly work april 2020. um so so we we did this study uh we uh um but and then stanford started a an investigation of me over the study over allegations that there was like a buzzfeed article that attacked my wife um and uh sort of very strange allegations about so like uh the there was a someone from jetblue the ceo jetblue gave 5000 to stanford for the study and buzzfeed made some allegation that we got money from jeff blue but stanford already knew that and they started a certain investigation of the study of its funding and a whole bunch of things exposed knowing full well that that there was no there's no there there right uh i've never seen the like i've been i've been i've been a professor for 21 years i mean i've never heard of this kind of sort of x post of value i can just give you a contrast i did this similar very similar study in in la county where we ran it through uh uh usc like the primary the lead author was a former student of mines at usc and it was a much more normal process i mean it was like we did we had an irb just we were supposed to have but the ex post there was not this like strange investigation in order to surprise me i spent affect the entire summer of 2020 um large parts of the summer of 2020 essentially dealing with the sort of legal ramifications investigation that they were doing which they all found like there was no conflict of interest regarding funding i mean they knew all of that up front going going in and yet they still did this um and in general stanford has taken a policy quite opposed to what i've been arguing for um and it's it's been frankly a hostile work environment right it's like i i've been um uh uh there was a poster campaign put up uh where like people put up posters of me around campus essentially started threatening me um if you see this man well i mean i called the stanford uh you know i called the stanford uh uh security i told i told them but they but they decided to do anything um well it's free speech right yeah i mean i i'm actually i'm actually fine with how with the posters being up there i just i just think that there should have been like a debate or discussion around what the what the uh the fact i mean for um 20 months i've not had the opportunity to speak at stanford really until i think right a finally one last month i had one one option for a group of students and uh whereas i've had this uh this opportunity speak basically everywhere else um there's gonna be i think next uh this coming thursday i was finally gonna be able to give a speech at stanford about about academic freedom um but i think uh stanford generally although it looks like from the outside it is harvard dissidents people like johnny needs uh or michael levitt who've argued in favor of you know some of some of the ideas i've been talking about it's been really really challenging and stanford has done almost nothing to try to protect that well let's talk about some of the views that uh that you think are maybe underappreciated is there is there a fact that isn't getting through in the debate that you think is particularly important well we talked about natural immunity right that one's very very important and i think the the administration's thrown a lot of mud on national media like that the idea that people are uh who are covert recovered have actually quite good protection against both getting the the disease again and also severe severe outcomes better out better protection than if you just got the vaccine the that doesn't mean you should run out and get yourself infected oh no no no no of course not i mean this is a this is a deadly disease it should i mean that's just you you wouldn't argue but you should live your life and it's a fact that people especially especially are not vulnerable right that then if you're if you're not vaccinated you get vaccinated right um but that's a that's a that's an important fact because a hundred million or more people have got the disease and recovered from it i mean my gag might you say that number again somewhere on the order i i think right now something like 150 million 150 150 million of these people well over half of the u.s population yeah so if that's true and i believe it has to be true for because given what we know about how the disease spreads how deadly it is and uh and a whole host of other factors and how how we uh how many cases we miss right we test a lot we don't get to get every case um that has enormous consequences for the wisdom of vaccine the vaccine mandates uh how we prioritize who gets the vaccine if we for instance said prioritized people who had who didn't have natural immunity uh we could have vaccinated more people that were really vulnerable or faster and actually that we still is still real like in large parts of the world there's still older people that haven't recovered from this that don't have vaccine doses and we're sitting here arguing about vaccinating five-year-olds who benefit very little from the vaccine here in the united states we could ship that vaccine maybe not identical if it's for five-year-olds but we could yeah the constituent components could be used to vaccinate people in in third world countries yeah we should turn the turn the the production toward the vaccines for the old everywhere around the world it's as a so i mean i've got that fact is quite important um that's sort of been skipped i think sure uh the surgeon general just announced that there may be mental health problems resulting from the pandemic are those are those from the pandemic from the government's response to the pandemic maybe both and do you think this announcement justifies the position you took and uh that you've taken against lockdowns yeah i mean i think the the lockdowns were obviously going to cause enormous psychological distress right so the the the cdc in july of 2020 did a survey nationwide survey found that one in four young adults seriously considered suicide one in four um and uh there's been enormous uptick in in um in drug overdose deaths uh great recession we had this phenomenon of deaths of despair right people losing their work people losing their hope uh with high uptick of of drug deaths essentially right um we're seeing that but now these are not the result of the virus these are the result of the of the policies we adopted to to address the virus we took we decided that we were going to separate people from one another we're meant to be in community with each other we're not we're not meant to live for extended periods of time separated from one another and it was inevitable that it was going to cause massive psychological harm and it has um and we're going to be unfortunately i think coping with this for a very long time these sort of harms have a long tail for children especially it has an enormously long tail right so um children not not not allowed to go to school not allowed to be with with other kids have enormous consequences on their development can they develop normal social interaction skills if they're wearing a mask all day i guess we'll find out i mean there's never been any studies on that before i mean i think i i'm actually been astonished by assertions by from places like the american economy theatrics saying confidently there's no harm well how do they know that right uh and it seems like it seems unlikely there could be no harm for this enormous experiment we're doing our children um especially when you really do need to be i think you need to be able to see faces we need to be in in community with each other in order to develop normally um we used to say it takes a village well apparently it just it just takes you know being being alone by yourself to raise a kid what do you say when people construe or describe your position as anti-vaxx we get that at ncla people describe us as anti-vaxx even though almost everybody here is vaccinated we have not taken an anti-vaccination position we've taken a if you have natural immunity you may not need to get vaccinated position and we've taken a uh vaccine mandates may be problematic but that that gets construed as anti-vaccine i assume your position has been construed that way as well yeah i mean it's a very odd uh argument like i i i've been arguing for the vaccine since the moment it came out i wrote a wall street journal piece in december 2020 arguing let's use the vaccine to protect the vulnerable i think the vaccine is the single piece of science that's that's really done the most to address the problems the epidemic i don't i then to argue that professors from stanford or harvard or oxford or anti-vacs i mean that itself is an anti-vaxx position right that's just that's just nonsense um i think the uh i think the problem has been that uh the the people that are pushing the mandates that are pushing this sort of ignoring of natural immunity they've done enormous harm to trust in public health that i think has actually fueled an anti-vaxx movement right the anti-vax movement used to be this fringe position of a few people that were worried about the mmr vaccine the mr of acts is a fantastic vaccine 99 plus percent of of kids in the united states would get it it's taken that group and ex greatly expanded it and that's measles mumps and rubella yes those who don't know yeah so yeah i mean they weren't vaccinating that um um and it's turned it's turned uh it's turned the anti-vax movement into like a mainstream position uh and i think it's instead of of of this kind of of sort of divisive messaging mainly just to silence people who are opposed to the mandates uh they they could have instead worked to give people good information right convince them i think the right way in a free society to for a vaccine like this to persuade people to get is to actually just do persuasion right talk to people where they live be trustworthy instead what happened is vast over-promising about what this vaccine can or cannot do right so this vaccine is quite good at protecting you against getting at the disease i'm sorry getting a severe outcome if you were to get the disease right um but not very good at protecting you against getting the disease it's like i think five six months after you get the second vax it's 20 efficacy against the disease 30 i mean it's something on that order um and that's eight which is not true of something like the mmr vaccine yeah the mr vaccine actually protects you against infection right i mean it's a very different situation um and they over-promised so they said okay i mean dr fatty got on tv and said look if you get this vaccine you won't get the disease that's turned out to be false they should have been saying based on what the evidence they saw at the time the the actual reality of it and not over promising they should have been trustworthy they shouldn't have said the lockdowns were going to stop this disease or solve the epidemic they shouldn't have created social divisions and i think that actually that they've used the anti-vaxx charge as a political tool rather than as in order to in order to like gain politics to say well look uh this class of people republicans are are not taking the vaccine that's not even true right so you have this very strange this situation where like large numbers of minorities are not getting the vaccine uh large numbers of of of people who vote democratic are not getting a vaccine this is a bipartisan thing this distrust of public health that this that sort of maybe for different reasons but yeah i mean i mean there's lots of reasons so the goal of public health even starting live has had fun with this right like are you republican or not and i'll put somebody on there who oh i love you who's you know either has sort of stereotypical uh kind of uh maybe fringe republican positions or stereotypical uh african-american positions and they'll play with this idea that gosh these people both have distrust of some of the same yeah i mean i think i think the thing is like what should public health do if when you politicize public health this way like you weaponize it in order to make political hay i mean it's you're gonna destroy destroy trust in it it should not be political it should absolutely not and the fact that uh that it has become political is a deep source of distress for me like it is this is something where uh once you throw away this trust once you connect to politics in this way you it's very very difficult to get back are we still in the pandemic and i i asked that as a serious question there was a lot of talk even a year ago about a case dimmick because until the delta variant emerged it seemed like things had quieted down a little bit and it seems like when there are deaths the media focuses on deaths when there aren't deaths they'll focus on hospitalizations when there aren't hospitalizations they'll focus on on cases so with all this shifting concern what should be we what should we be tracking what matters and when should we feel safe again the key thing to me is deaths deaths and hospitalizations from uh from covent if those are rising we have not protected the vulnerable and so that is the thing we should be tracking the cases are going to come and go forever we have no technology to just to get rid of this disease right the vaccines will not eradicate the disease the lockdowns will not eradicate the disease this is here to stay forever uh bats get this disease apparently uh so i've heard of uh 80 of white-tailed deer have antibodies to this i saw that yeah you know dogs cats and they don't have a lot of interaction with humans by the way white-tailed deer as far as i think they must they must be getting it from the air not from uh close contact with humans just as i ever came with watching bambi but you know um i i think uh i i think the idea that we could eradicate diseases is uh it's a it's a fantasy it's a dangerous fantasy because it's not possible and we will burn the earth trying to do it uh harm harming poor poor working-less people everywhere um so so the so the disease then is here to stay counting cases what what it currently does is it doesn't tell us how widespread the disease is real i mean that may tell us do that but like but that's not the primary thing it does the primary thing it does is it it sows fear right because we've been conditioned to think about this this disease as the black plague when it's not right and it's not smallpox either right not even i mean smallpox is what is an actual dwarf right so um if you uh so you you every newspaper is like oh the cases are going up we condition opening of school or opening of schools we condition all kinds of things on whether those cases are high or low all these restrictions are conditioned on this um but if that's true if that what i've been saying is true then the case is gonna go up forever we're gonna always have these restrictions permanently we're gonna always live in fear permanently uh in 2009 uh during the h1n1 flu epidemic president obama made a very wise decision at some point during the pandemic he decided he was going to stop county cases we have to decide to do that as well we have to continue to track very carefully the spread of this invulnerable populations we have to make sure vulnerable populations are are are vaccinated um and uh you know as basically no matter where on earth they are um i think those are it's not that this disease is never gonna is gone forever it's not obviously not but the pandemic needs to end and we can reduce the number of deaths that result from the disease with focused strategies right and we have so many good tools now right we have the vaccine of course but we also have monoclonal antibodies which are a fantastic tool if you get the disease uh new new drugs that are coming online the management of patients in hospitals are much better than it was the beginning to pandemic where we overuse ventilators i mean there's lots and lots of good news to report and i mean frankly i think we should just be declaring a bipartisan victory right so the vaccine came about because president trump decided to invest in in this he just took a gamble let's in nine months can we get a vaccine turns out the answer is yes i i thought there was no possibility but he was right well some of his advisors were saying it would be three years or longer before we could get one and there was never a vaccine for hiv which they spent a lot of government dollars and years looking for one that's really challenging because the hiv kills your immune response before which you need the vaccine hey whatever that is there's something complicated about that um uh so here uh so you have like a business and then the is doing a pretty good job vaccinating a large part of the population especially the vulnerable population yeah i mean you could even before mandates yes before mandates the mandate actually mandates a really really it's a very strange policy right so you've marginalized the working class uh you've you've uh and many minorities you have uh you've put them out of work in the national immunity and why it might be the best people to work like in the case of these nurses that have natural immunity isn't that exactly who you want in the hospital taking care of people who have stopped yes yes yes and and but here's the thing there they tend to be younger it's not as high priority from a public health point of view that they be vaccinated because they are at lower risk of bad outcomes if they get covered the focus should be on the remaining you know what ten percent of the population of older population that has not had the vaccine because they don't trust public health the focus should be on other vulnerable people with chronic conditions and in the population have not had the vaccine by focusing on workers and and uh federal contractors and workers who would tend to be younger and not in this broad way overriding their their wishes when when uh you know especially if they had natural immunity it's the entirely wrong focus right they should be they should be focused on the key things about the vaccine right they should be focused on i'm sorry about the disease like the older people who are vulnerable that's who we need to protect other also other people with chronic diseases that's when you need to protect those are the high priority backs of people to vaccinate and and you know there's there's people around the world that still have not been vaccinated older people around the world because there's shortages of vaccine doses there let's use the the moral authority of the united states for that rather than to to essentially discriminate against our working class and poor right by force vaccinating folks i'm going to open it up to questions from from the audience here uh in a minute but uh i wanted to ask you about the omicron variant which has been getting a lot of publicity lately there seems to be some notion that it may be more transmissible but it may also be less virulent or or that if you get it you it may not be as uh the effects on you may not be as bad so it would if that proves to be true and i'm not sure if we know either one of those factors yet but if that proves to be true or if a future uh variant proves to have those characteristics would that operate as almost like a a natural vaccine that that if if people can get a not bad version of it that's a lot better than getting a particularly nasty version of it i would think i mean you know i don't want to go quite that far because you have to be you know the vax a vaccine it has to produce much milder uh sort of a reaction in order to view a vaccine it has to be durable i mean but but at the same time like it's if it is spreading and it is less uh very you know like it produces less of a severe outcome that would be much better news than than having a delta variant spread which does produce you know bad outcomes uh the key question is uh does this virus does this does this variant evade natural immunity does it evade the vaccines and nothing i've seen today suggested because that's those that those are the only questions that matter right um uh like if if and it doesn't it shouldn't the key the thing is if it has to not just evade it in part like so for instance if it just causes a mild illness and you've even if you though you had previous covey before well what's the big deal right um uh if it has to if it evades it in the sense of it gonna give you the high risk of death the high risk of of of severe outcomes long covered whatever whatever it is right so that would be that would matter and i've seen no evidence that that's true um what i have seen is like again this like let's bring the old gang together panic uh around this right we immediately shut down travel to south africa and the southern southern african countries on the basis of even they have pretty good surveillance systems there that's why they picked it up there the diseases i mean the variants everywhere 38 countries have now reported the california report in the united states um yeah and so the we punished the one country that found it and reported that i mean it was just which is just i mean i i just just bad policy right right uh we might make them less likely to report the next variant that they identify exactly uh exactly like why would why would you build a surveillance system if your country's gonna get punished every time you find something um and uh and we we again panicked the population by the stock market drops we said on the basis of almost no evidence it's it's the same pathology that characterized our response the entire epidemic long panicking people on the basis of scanty evidence on these strange idea that if if uh if if we panic people we will somehow control the disease better you have to take it very seriously by panicking um it's a very it's a it's a it's it's it's it's a violation of a basic principle don't do nothing panic yes exactly and that means and then we end up with like really dumb policies like these vaccine mandates uh that that ignore natural immunity instead of a reason policy that understands who's at risk and marshals our resources to protect them sure well uh i thought i'd see if there are any questions uh from the from the audience john are there any um viral diseases where natural immunity doesn't work in other words could the government be saying that well we know these other diseases where there's no such thing as natural immunity this viral input yeah i mean like hiv is a classified classic example right so hiv destroys your immune cells and it doesn't produce an immune response that that allows you to protect you against future diseases you have it basically forever um but many many other diseases do produce long-lasting immunity so in particular this this is a chronovirus right so the other four chronoviruses produce uh a protection that lasts for at least a year or two this would be like the common cold that's one example yeah you probably got it when your baby uh you had a mild reaction to it because you were you were a baby and then the next time you got it a year two three later you had it because you had natural immunity it was mild and then you got it again and again and again probably when you had kids you had it again again [Laughter] kids are petri dishes that's the long run of this disease right the long run this disease is uh everyone gets it as a kid and they'll get it again and again and again uh and it's not scary because you're you've produced a natural reaction immunity to it when you got it when you're a kid and you're you know it doesn't it doesn't hurt you the harm is to someone who's never been exposed to carnavirus until they're 70 and they get that coronavirus when they're 70 or 75 or 80 or something and then you face it i think it's the same with chickenpox right if you get chickenpox says the older you get as a senior for the first time it's not good yeah no exactly i mean in fact the the reactivated chickenpox shingles is i mean it's really painful so it's it's uh it's actually chickenpox is funny because it's it you if you get it it it and you recover from it it lives in your back in the dorsal nerve roots of your back forever that so shingles is a reactivation of the chickenpox you got when you were a kid to look forward to and wise in essence uh shane what lessons can we learn from uh other countries public policy responses to growing virus well i think i think the swedish response by far has been the most sane in the early age epidemic they made very similar mistakes that new york made so in stockholm they sent coven-infected patients back to nursing that was a huge error and they admitted it was an error but then what they did is they adopted something very close to the book contracts for it okay uh from from major new york city publishers i'm just curious i would actually love to read what anders tegnal the sort of the chief public health officer there um i mean i'd love to hear what he was thinking through the epidemic one of the bravest men in the whole epidemic i think um but yeah so so but then after that they adopted the focus protection approach uh and it was voluntary right so they said okay older people it's really important that you don't go out they they i think they had home deliveries of food for for many people they had they they structured their society so that older people participated less again voluntarily not not by force um and for the rest society they tried to like have society go on as as normal as possible so schools is a good example they didn't close their schools for one to fifteen year olds for that for i think for short periods they close to high school older high school um and then um no masks no socialism in schools in in spring of this past of 2020 and there were no child deaths in the spring and the teachers had coveted at rates that were lower than the population other workers in the population because kids don't are not particularly sufficient spreaders of the disease um that idea of focus protection has resulted in lower excess mortality negative excess mortality through the epidemic for sweden why because they didn't have the lockdown arms which resulted in all kinds of like public health on your health arms and they also had but at the same time they they they protected the old after that terrible event in in stockholm they would protect the old as best they could and they use the vaccines very cleverly by prioritizing older people first like rigorously prioritizing older people first were there any other questions just uh i just had one question about about natural immunity and about the certitude with which i keep hearing oh the cdc has has uh has said there are studies that show natural immunity just doesn't cut it do you have any idea what's what's going on there or what do i say to those people when they when they tell me i'm i must be you know let's be insane you can argue the science uh and because the science is absolutely rock solid on natural music but there's there's no doubt i know i know it as as well as i know many most of the things i know in science um that if you are covered recovered you are going to have very strong and robust long-lasting protection against reinfection so that one year the reinfection rates is something like 0.3 to one percent and the reinfections are almost invariably milder um and and that comes from evidence from like from um uh qatar from sweden from a whole whole whole bunch of israelites israel a whole host of places that has found this i mean and on the basis of that evidence and this is probably the most most most convincing to your friends um vaccine you know like you go on planes right uh uh in europe you can you can you can they have vaccine passports for irr airplane rides but they account natural immunity in there right right the vaccine passports in europe account for nationally i'm not and i don't like the vaccine passports but at least they account for natural immunity it's the cdc that is the outlier in the world in denying national need last question uh for you doctor why aren't more doctors speaking up about the disasters public health policies that our country has been pursuing throughout the pandemic you can't be the only one or you and the other doctors we've mentioned can't be the only you know five or ten doctors in the country who recognize that we're doing something very out of the ordinary and strange with the public health response why aren't why aren't more of your colleagues stepping up and speaking out i i think there's two things that have gone on um two more than two so let me just say let me start by like i think the um uh the the community of people that would normally speak up right that so that would have authority to speak up immunologists virologists epidemiologists many of them are funded by the nih and the in particular by tony fauci's group within the nih naid same thing is true in the uk the welcome trust funds a huge number of those folks the gates foundation funds a huge number of folks in both u.s and the uk um and so those those kinds that it's it's a conflict of interest to have someone who is in charge of funding all of these scientists and at the same time in charge of a policy because the people that they fund will be loath to criticize the policy because they don't want to lose their careers they don't lose their lose their funding i think that that um that concept of interest is the heart of why a lot of the funding of the people have not stayed silent about the non-research doctor treating physicians for example surely don't have that fear right so there there what's happened is um the professional organizations have stepped in and and they're what they're trying to do is they're trying to like promote public health uh messaging right so they'll say like uh you're you shouldn't you should uh uh you shouldn't say that uh drug a doesn't work a de brugge works right um now physicians normally have the right to prescribe drugs that are that are passed through pardon me par pass through fda approval um but are not approved directly for their off-label use many many many many drugs are used off-label in this way um it's completely standard um it's the standard of care in many instances to use certain drugs for off-label use right yeah absolutely i mean a lot of what a lot of medicine would just go by the wayside if physicians weren't allowed to use a drug that weren't explicitly approved by the fda for a particular purpose usually a drug company will get a drug through the fda process for one use and then and then many physicians will use it for many other things that's just completely normal standard what's happened in uh in this epidemic is that the the boards have decided that they're going to enforce uh sort of discipline on physicians that decide to use off-label drugs like ivermectin i think the problem there is actually again tony fauci because who it's like we're in this epidemic the the group that has the responsibility to to check whether cheap drugs that look promising work is the nia id the tony fauci's group the nih right um we should have had massive trials to check whether these drugs were instead there was this like politicization around it where like you know i think um president trump says something about hydroxycorkin now everyone's convinced that it's a terrible drug right uh joe rogan takes um ivermectin and now he's doing horse pace or something i mean it's it's just it's such nonsense right right the the nih is actually governor desantis comes out in favor of monoclonal antibiotics which was already approved by the fda i mean um the the uh it's insane like the the ivor met the nih is actually has a trial to check whether ivecton works that's due to be done in 2023 march of 2023 that is a scandal right we should have had large trials just like we had in the vaccine which is an enormous success we should have had large trials with these drugs the therapeutics off exactly for treatment in 2020 and the fact that we did not have those as a failure of the nih we give the nih enormous amounts of money to do this this and they did not succeed in in prioritizing this and as a consequence many many people are dead that would have survived well on that cheery note uh i think we'll we'll leave it there but thank you very much for for continuing to be willing to step up and speak out and help promote some of these issues uh in the debate thanks for being with us today [Applause] you

Channel: New Civil Liberties Alliance

Views: 1,736

Keywords: Civil liberties, Vaccines, Stanford University, Bhattacharya, covid-19, canceled, lockdowns

Id: aK6a5u1W2So

Length: 48min 28sec (2908 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021