"I sued the Biden administration for COVID censorship" | Jay Bhattacharya | The Reason Interview

this is the reason interview with Nick Gillespie my guest today is Jay bachar a co-author of the great barington declaration and one of the plaintiffs in merthy V Missouri that's the Supreme Court case charging that the Biden Administration and other parts of the federal government illegally colluded with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers viewpoints and content a decision in that case is imminent and a victory for bachara side would make it impossible for the government to pressure Twitter Facebook and other platforms to Banner squelch legal speech a professor of medicine and Stanford and a PhD Economist bataria talks with me about his experience being blacklisted online because of his criticisms of lockdowns and other Co policies the ways in which Donald Trump and Joe Biden both fumbled responses to the pandemic and what the public health establishment must do to regain the trust and confidence of the American public here is the Reon interview with Jay [Music] bachara Dr J bachara thanks for talking to rezza thanks for having me Nick nice to be back uh you are uh a plaintiff in a case in front of the Supreme Court that will be decided sometime in the in the near future we're taping this in uh miday uh Murthy V Missouri what is the Crux of of the case so the the Crux is that uh the Biden Administration essentially set up its its uh government so that it would go to social media companies tell the social media companies you must censor these people and these ideas where they would list out the ideas you know ideas like uh the evidence on masking is is not so good uh that there is immunity after Co recovery that that the vaccines don't uh don't stop you from getting and spreading Co right so stuff that's within the realm of science uh there were other stuff to more political stuff and but they would go to social media company say you need to censor people that say these things on social media posts you need to develop algorithms that automatically identify posts that have those ideas in them you need to suppress the reach of them and you need to suppress a list of people you must so that and you were on one of those lists or many of those lists and we're talking primarily not exclusive but primarily about Facebook and uh Twitter yeah so uh the discovery in the case found there were people like Alex baronson um Robert Jr that were explicitly named uh I I wasn't explicitly named in the discovery in the case but in the Twitter files which is the the the back door files that are available that Twitter has for administrative purposes and that came to light when Elon Musk took over and was cleaning out the basement and was like oh here to a bunch of journalists look at all this so Christmas 2022 I got a a Barry Weiss who's a journalist who established the Free Press she called me and said Jay I found your name in this Twitter database and it says you were on a blacklist and then I Elon invited me to go visit him at Twitter headquarters which is a surreal experience uh and I saw my name with the word Blacklist on it uh and it turns out that the that I'd been placed on this Blacklist the day I joined Twitter in 2021 uh the first thing I did was I tweeted a link to the great barington declaration which is a document I wrote arguing for Focus protection of vulnerable older people and lifting lockdowns what did it feel like when you are reading you know something and then you you are on a Black List in the United States of America your adoptive country you became a citizen here at age 19 you moved here originally from India escaping political you know upheaval and of free speech rights what's it feel like it was surreal nick uh I grew up as you said in the United States and uh I mean I went to school in the United States from when I was four uh the American Civic religion is Free Speech blacklists are a thing of the past right they happened in the 50s or something you know it's not it's always a stain on on the country right right and so like of course that could never happen in modern America and then to see my name on a blacklist is just was just I I I didn't know how to process it now you um I mean the the argument of the case and it was originally brought by the Attorney General of Missouri and also Louisiana and then there's a bunch of other plaintiffs including yourself and the two uh one of the signers of the great barington declaration um you know the government says we were not insisting on this um is that just in your mind that's just BS or I mean talk a little bit about the collusion between the social media platforms and the government because one of the things both in the Twitter files and reasons Robie Suave reported on what we called the Facebook files which was a similar cache of documents where there were many many people at these platforms going to the government and saying we're not sure about this what should we do does that count as censorship or Blacklist as well I mean there's there's a line but the government crossed the line M right so you you had uh the the White House the surgeon general's office the CDC uh you know sort of government agency after government agency uh and in the discovery of the case what you find is it's a it's it's a range of things there's things like that which is like you know we're not sure yeah but ranging to you know kick these people off or else and sometimes or else is there a specific instance of that like you better shut down J bachari or else we're going to shoot at porch lights or what so not nothing exactly that said J bachara but like you know you need to censor these the these kinds of ideas that cover the kinds of ideas I was expressing um but sometimes directly people right here's a list of people RFK Jr um the orls was very often uh section 230 section 230 is is a part of the communication decency act and it enables social media companies to exist right they they it's the internet's first Amendment the 26 words that created the internet things like that you know reason everybody online has been a beneficiary of it exactly right so like you can publish something I can I can publish something on Twitter then Twitter can't get sued if I lie about somebody else yeah um that's what section 230 provides and so the the the the implication would be if you don't cooperate with us we're going to go after you using legislative and Regulatory mechanisms to take away some of those Protections in uh the the house did its own investigation of the Facebook uh files and what they found was that uh Facebook uh will have these internal discussions where say well if we don't cooperate we're not going to be able to get some of these legisla priorities that we really need to survive as a company right so for instance the EU has these privacy laws that essentially would put Facebook out of existence in the EU and the the threat was the Biden Administration won't represent American companies in in trade negotiations with the EU if they don't comply with the censorship orders and then to complicate it more Facebook and at least the pre Elon Musk Twitter also participated in this but uh Facebook was running ads saying you know what we uh we've been around for a while and the section 230 is old it needs to be Chang I mean they were ready to play ball with regulation as long as it seemed to protect their market share and things like that yeah I mean it it if you read the discovery in the Missouri versus Biden case and some of the the the other evidence have come out it the the response from the social media companies reads like a like a hostage situation like they're they're trying their best to try to negotiate with people that are that have held themselves well being held hostage um while being held hostage to the the power that the government has over them it's and so and they you you'll see things like well we don't really think this violates our terms of service but we're going to do it anyways because if we don't we don't we don't know real nub right if this is protected speech you know and and Facebook and Twitter are private companies they have a right to do pretty much whatever they want as long as they're not obviously contenting their terms of service but there's something wrong if you're saying we don't like this particular opinion so we want to squel it right no I think that that is a direct violation of the First Amendment what um you know what what is the what's the best outcome well you you went to the Supreme Court to the oral arguments about this um what did you find there and and does that make you think you know prognosticate are is are you going to win this case or is the government going to work so uh the lower courts found on our favor uh over and over and again so the case is actually still under consideration in um Louisiana uh it the uh what what we got in Louisiana was a preliminary injunction against the Biden Administration that told the Biden Administration that it was not allowed to censor to go and really to talk to uh to kind of Jawbone or even really interact with social media yeah and the idea was like that you can't JW own for the purpose of restricting legal speech right uh there's another aspect of the lower court decision which is very interesting which is that uh and it has to do with the mechanisms by which the government enacts this censorship regime uh they they contract essentially or give grants to thirdparty organizations organizations like the Stanford internet Observatory to create algorithms to censor at scale to to suggest terms of service changes for the organizations they use these these organizations to launder the censorship requests and so the the lower court said look you're not allowed to go job own or or or sort of pressure the coer these social media companies directly if you're the government to restrict legal speech and you're also not allowed to use third parties to do the same thing the the appeals court said that third party thing went too far for this is for a preliminary injunction this is before the case has already full been fully heard um but that the that the direct restriction on on coercion that that still stands and so that's what the Supreme Court is currently hearing at the Supreme Court I went to the oral arguments if you read the the Lower Court decisions they are very definitive like they use words like this is an orwellian Ministry of Truth uh that the bid Administration is Eng engaged in essentially something like Al Capone going to uh going to like Chicago businesses and saying that's a nice business you got there it' be a shame if something were to happen to it right that that kind of thing um and uh I mean I've read the discovery in the case and it's just to me it's quite convincing I thought when I went to the Supreme Court that there's no way we could possibly lose that you know it's going to be 90 this is such a clear and blatant violation of the American First Amendment the whole purpose is to suppress legal speech by the government through illicit means it's not saying that the government can't counteract and say oh J is wrong I mean of course anyone the government is allowed to do that too it's that they suppress the reach of my speech they entirely suppressed the without my even knowing it um so I thought this is going to be clearcut but when I went to the oral arguments I actually have to tell you Nick I came out of it quite depressed uh I thought I went from like we're going to win we're going to win 90 to we're probably going to lose 72 or something and I don't I explain that and you you've written about this and and talked about it uh judge uh associate Justice katani Brown uh Jackson Jackson used a particular or she asked a a kind of theoretical question that kind of set you back what was that right so the the government lawyer what they were arguing is that the government needs to have the ability to suppress dangerous speech online or people will get hurt but which sounds like a reasonable argument until you think it through for a minute because what what what actually what they used it for was to suppress speech that that often uh that speech had it been allowed would have would have constrained the government from acting in ways that hurt people right so for instance school closures during the pandemic which hurt so many kids if we'd had a free speech environment then maybe we wouldn't have had them for so long um so Kachi BR Jackson she she uh the hypothetical she asked the law our la was imagine that there's a social media craze where kids are jumping out of Windows filming themselves jumping out of Windows and daring other kids to jump out of higher and higher Windows uh shouldn't the government have the right to to essentially tell the social media companies don't put that online uh I mean I mean my reaction to that was like I I just want to jump out of window myself because it was it seemed like just such a a tendentious argument um so so first of all uh the the the the the companies themselves have an interest in in not promoting suicidal suicide packs just like they have an interest in not promoting uh speech that that of direct violent threats and so on it hurts their you know sort of bottom line like you don't need the government to tell them necessarily to do that um second you you don't um the the the idea that the government the the the whole analogy that that the that this hypothetical draws is based on the premise that the government automatically knows what's good and bad for people right like here you have an example that's such obviously bad for for kids kids should not jump out of Windows well I mean what actually happened during the pandemic was that the government suppressed speech that would have criticized government policy that in effect told kids metaphorically to jump out of Windows right they closed schools harming kids at scale they recommended that kids even kids as young as months old take a vaccine that they probably didn't need you know European countries didn't recommend it for kids that age um nor did most of them didn't shut down schools the way that the US did exactly and so the the suppression of the counter speech to the government is is what's at stake not government and saying to companies you know it's a bad idea for kids to jump out a window what's what's a good outcome I mean let's say not not only that um your side wins this case and that Free Speech or or it's not that free speech is is restored but that the government is told you can't Jawbone or lean on you know organizations and platforms um what about like you know what about Twitter and Facebook and any other platform taking you know perhaps saying you know what we don't want any medical speech on this uh platform we don't want any political speech this is also all happening at the you know at the intersection of fears of electoral misinformation disinformation Mal information you know very weird phrases and terms that are you definitions that are very elastic but what's the best outcome of this I mean I think I think that that what I really want is that the government to get out of the business of regulating speech online I think that the that Free Speech online is a tremendous opportunity for a huge flowering of of scientific discussion of of of of connections that will be made that would never otherwise be made uh and the govern suppressing that is a really really bad idea it's analogous I think to the Gutenberg Press being invented in you know 1450 or something and uh the government trying to say the governments or the churches trying to say you can't print books and we're going to we need to have the right to sensor the books which they you know took advantage of for about 500 years right I mean in America until the 50s 1950s you know censorship of some sort was pretty widespread yeah but at the same time uh it the the O over time the that those kinds of policies became more and more sort of outside the realm I mean like it's just seen as like in fact the entire in my view the enlightenment is the pushing back against the government and the church power to to to set to suppress the spread of ideas via the Free Press right right um uh and you know even even if you had to do it anonymously right both in England during the 17th century and America and its early and it's early Republican phases I mean I should be careful getting into a discussion with historian these things well no I'm saying that this I mean the the idea that free speech is important for politics people kind of take for granted but you're also extending that into medical discoveries and medical discussion so talk a little bit about that I mean it's not simply that medical discourse has been you know has been hampered by the government going after Twitter and Facebook you are you know you've been at Stanford for a long time you've gotten a lot of NIH grants you've gotten a lot of government funding have you seen a similar dimin of of kind of free discussion of alternative hypotheses over the course of your career I I it does seem like medicine anyways uh and research in medicine over the course of my career has become more constrained uh in fact I did some work before the pandemic measuring the spread of novel ideas and the support for novel ideas by the NIH uh in fact I National Institutes of Health National of health and that's kind of like that's the thing if you get a grant there then you'll get a lot of other grants they're kind of like they give you a a Good Housekeeping seale of approval a lot of like Med schools if you're academic Med schools if you get an ni grant that that's like a marker for you you're going to get tenure yeah um a large en Grant um so I I mean what what I've seen over the uh in my research is that over the course of uh say the last three decades or four decades government grants have be become much more conservative right so if you're Define conservative so here's what I mean so uh uh the uh the if you ask how old are the ideas in a grant proposal how old are the ideas in a paper you can actually measure that you can measure it by uh by asking like how like when were the words and ideas that are in the grant first introduced into the literature uh and what what I found in my research again this is before the pandemic is that that the uh the the grants uh that the ni makes tends to support ideas that are older now relative to earlier so like for instance in the 2010s you if you're working on seven or eighty old ideas that's that would be most likely to get funded whereas in the 1980s if you're working on 2-year old ideas it'd be more likely to get fun what what do you think explains that shift does it yeah what I mean what exp I mean I think part of it is just the leadership of the NIH uh it was led by uh Francis Collins in 2010s he he comes out of this this Human Genome Project the bias is toward centralized decision making about what should be the priorities of Science and um if you have that kind of centralized decision- making you're going to end up with fewer sort of rebels on the outside with new ideas so it's if the idea is is good or is going to be proven to be good if it's centralized then it's you you can like power up onto the freeway really quickly right but it also keeps you from pursuing alternative ideas yeah like so the a good example of success story of that kind of centralization be the Manhattan Project right uh but an example of the failure would be uh a research into Alzheimer's disease right so we essentially one Paradigm you know this Paradigm of of of uh of of of U uh uh neuro fibril Tangles and like ameloid that hypothesis the amalo hypothesis essentially took over the field and almost all the Investments the NIH made were based on that hypothesis and led you down a certain line and uh ultimately it has not yet produced the kinds of clinical advances that you would want in part maybe because that maybe the hypothesis is wrong there may be other hypotheses outside you know you uh kind of put the uh the blame on a single person this is a big system but is it is it really that the guy you know the captain of the ship is responsible for the centralization I mean is it Francis Collins who's also you know came after you by name and emails that came out you know shortly after Co started no well I mean it's a it's a as you say it's a big policy decision and and part of it is is based on Collins's success with the Human Genome Project right the central centralized kind of of of a of a of a research direction that resulted in a great Advance right uh and so like we're just trying to repeat what we had before by putting the person who made that success charge but it was you know obviously a big group of people that not just him um so I think that that kind of uh of centralization of power actually is is part of the the problem that we had during the pandemic yeah right and the censorship feeds into that you have a relatively small group of scien bureaucrats that decide that they know what's true and what they know what's false and then they they uh in the in the middle of the pandemic they say during the pandemic they say well anyone that contradicts us must there automatically be dangerous to the public mhm and and so they're going to they use the power of the government to stop people from hearing that there were other outside voices at all um the field of Public Health which you you know discuss a lot and analyze a lot really you know seems to have taken it on the chin during Co because you know both in public uh kind of discussions of things like that you would see people one day saying uh you know a bunch of people protesting on the steps of the mission capital that is a super spreader event and those people are insane then there would be a popular kind of progressive protest with tens of thousands of people in Brooklyn and they would say that's not a super spreader event that's actually good because lobbying for the types of political change they want will save more lives and it's all about cost benefit and you know big picture stuff how does do you is is is it accurate to say that the public health establishment has really lost a lot of trust and Confidence from American people absolutely accurate to say that and I I say even personally I've lost almost all confidence in the American public health establishment uh I've gained a ton of confidence in the Swedish Public Health establishment but that's that's a different different that's because they've succeeded um I I think uh there's a couple of things that are embedded in that that are really important so first the uh the idea that public health has of itself is that it needs essentially unanimity in order to achieve unanimity perceived it to in order to achieve its goals right so if some Stanford professor of medicine comes out and says smoking is good for you I mean that's a that's a huge crime in public health settings right and it would be a crime a moral crime in my view because the tremendous amount of evidence suggests that smoking is really really bad for you right I no no one should be contradicting Public Health certainly not not someone in my position be contradicting Public Health when the scientific basis for something like that is so strong um so but they apply applied that same kind of of what they thought of as deserved unanimity of messaging to a situation where the science was not settled in the same way about the signs of smoking and so this gets to the points of where people like Anthony fouchy who was obviously Central to a lot of policy decisions here you know saying well I lied about the efficacy of uh or you know about wearing a mask uh at various points or the percentage of the population that needed to be infected to achieve H immunity and things like that yeah I mean that's uh the idea of the noble lie the idea that somehow public health is sitting above everybody else and they can tell you falsehoods in order to manipulate you I think that's certainly contributed to the uh undermining the the the sort of like collapse of public trust and public health the second thing that your example brings up is uh the ideological bent of most public health practitioners is on the left uh I don't think there's anything in principle wrong with that but I do think that a public health authority that is supposed to care for the entire population left and right should not take on explicitly political uh sort of color to its decision making what's example of that uh so for instance nature magazine explicitly endorsed Biden in for the first time in the history of its magazine it endorsed a presidential candidate New England Journal did the same thing or some something very similar uh S I mean basically all of the the journals that are normally entirely apolitical make explicit political endorsements uh you gave another example of that of the of the the way that they treated the BLM protest versus the anti-lockdown protest in 2020 um was speaking of politics and you know two guys who were at the beginning of the pandemic are running for president again or shuffling per President um was is Biden worse than Trump or are they similar I mean because Trump trump was the person who called for the you know the the lockdown right yeah no I think uh I think that they're they both failed during the pandemic uh in in different ways they both failed yeah talk a little bit what was Trump's primary failure and what was Biden's I mean I I think for for Trump uh there's a few things one I think that the that the the imposition of the lockdown itself was a failure uh and and I think the the the the problem was that it was a failure in that it didn't make sense didn't stop the spread or I I mean I could let's say say say March 2020 like if I were advising president Trump at the time I would have said the lockdowns are not likely a good idea I would have said it with trapid not with certainty but I would have said that we don't know about uh and I would have listed a various set of things that we probably should do scientific studies about before we can have good advice on this um I was also would have told him that there were that if you lock down you're going to essentially be locking down for a very long time there's no such thing as two weeks of lockdown you create a panic in the population by the act of locking down so this is you lock down you're locking down till the end whenever it is um then then and I would have told him that the harms of lockdown especially on kids there's a tremendous literature before the pandemic that suggested you should never close schools in situations like this because it's going to harm kids without having a tremendous effect on the spread of the disease I would have told him all those things the advice he was getting instead was from Tony fouchy and Deborah Burks he was getting advice that said if you don't lock down if you don't shut down the economy millions of people are going to die immediately within within a month or two two million people would die in the United States and so that's that he the the scientific advisers he was he had at the time were giving a very narrow picture of what the scientific debate was about so he he was very very poorly informed early in the pandemic before we go to Biden do you think operation warp speed was a success I I think it was a um uh I think it was a good idea to to do it at the time uh but I I think that the the the the success uh it was a success in one way and a failure in another way okay explain that um so so a couple things so one um the the and this this is something I got very wrong early in the pandemic I thought it would take a decade to develop a vaccine right just because the history of vaccine development yeah people were talking was going to be it could be 3 to five years before you even really know what's causing right so I thought okay there there's no good reason to like lock down for for years and years and years because we don't know we're going to be able to get a vaccine quickly now of course I was wrong about that and I was actually quite happy that I was wrong about that uh the development of vaccine so quickly is a success absolutely um but it turns out I think that the reason why that success happened is tied to the why the virus why the pandemic may have happened at all right so the the the research agenda that very likely caused the pandemic right the identification uh of Corona viruses in bat caves in China that research program the the whole purpose of it was to develop vaccines quickly and stockpile them so that if those viruses ever led to a human outbreak we'd have those V vaccines available very quickly so I think the jump start in the vaccine development is related to that research program that very likely also caused the pandemic so I mean you think it's most likely that this came out of the Wuhan L yeah I think that's the most likely explain but that it was not being developed as a chemical weapon or anything like that I mean I don't know for certain but it seems it doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that's very good for a bioweapon it's it strikes me as a lab accident do you I mean you you mentioned that the vaccines don't uh prevent transmission um or you know or getting the disease but they do um minimize the effects right yeah they reduce they reduce the likelihood of mortality so in that sense I mean going from you know uh you know early 2020 to the end of 2020 and having vaccines that were starting to be deployed that's pretty Empower that's a success right so like uh the question then is how do you use the vaccines that's where the failure starts to come in okay explain that okay so um so so first of all the the oper operation work speed is a success but it's a it's it's also partly a failure because it's part of the the the research program that developed that may have actually caused the pandemic right so um okay so now you have a vaccine in December of 2020 that uh that very very clearly in the randomized trial it sto STS you from symptomatic infection for 2 months mhm you don't know for certain whether it stops you from getting the disease or spreading it because that was not a clinical endpoint of the randomized trials you also don't know for certain whether it prevents you from dying that also was not a clinical endpoint of the randomized trials so you are put yourself in the shoes of a public health official right so how do you use this vaccine uh so I were off bed in December 20120 with senetra Gupta in the Wall Street Journal what we argued was that since it prevents you from get symptomatic infection it probably also prevents you from dying we don't know that from certain from The Trial I wish we'd had done the trial differently so we can say that with certainty but it probably does in the middle of a pandemic you have a a a group especially older people that have a high risk of dying if they get infected especially for those who are not not previously been infected um you can use the vaccine on that population right to reduce the risk of dying for younger people it's much less important because the absolute risk of dying is Tiny and so the the absolute benefit from vaccination is likely be small and we don't yet know the side effects right even though we have a 40,000 person trial it's difficult to know the side effects when it scales up anything can happen so you're saying that all of the vaccine energy really should have gone to older people because they were higher risk and if there are side effects I mean that sounds harsh but that you know if you're 80 years old and you die of a side effect of a disease that would probably kill you anyway that's a better calculation than making a 20-year-old this is this happens this is unfortunately the thing that because of the uncertainty about science this is what happens to Medicine always every medicine is there's the harms and potential side effects and you have to balance right so so what was what was Biden bad on the uh so the I think the worst thing the there's several things but I think the worst thing was the way that he managed the vaccine roll out right instead of accepting the limitations of the scientific data he and his advisers assumed that the vaccine would stop you from getting and spreading Co and so like for since the herd immunity threshold numbers that that fouchi would throw out were premised on the idea that the vaccine would stop you from getting and spreading Co for a very very long time MH in fact what happened very quickly was that we learned in real practice that the vaccine does not stop you from getting and spreading coover for very long MH uh within months of the vaccine roll out you saw huge number of cases for instance in Israel which had pretty WID spread vaccination uh even before that in the sell islands and jalter they're using different vacc but like the IDE the fact was that these vaccines were not stopping the spread of the disease MH just from a macro point of view right and so uh the the the the consequence of getting that wrong and then essentially was to create this distinction in the minds of of of in the mouths of Public Health people and also President Biden of of a clean population and an unclean population almost a cast system where if you're vaccinated you're clean if you're unvaccinated you're unclean that you're a pariah that you're causing the extension of the pandemic and it was just not true it was not simply inconsistent with what the scientific data was saying and then the vaccine the vaccine mandates then came on not just for for older people older people you didn't need a mandate basically voluntarily people took vast numbers of older people took the vaccine without the Mandate um you you mandated for young people you premise going to college on the basis of it you premise being able to work on the basis of it you premise going to school on the basis of it you discriminate against people so they can't enter you know public libraries on the basis of it even kids um that created a tremendous tension in the minds of people like you have on the one hand you want to believe Public Health but you have the clear evidence in front of you the public health despises you right that they want you to be outside of society unless you abide by their by their their their their edicts and also they're not right like they're saying things that are self-evidently wrong I got the vaccine in April of 2021 and 4 months later I got Co right I'm not the only one I mean a tremendous number of people experien that and and they're hearing on the President Biden say you if you're unvaccinated you're a danger to everyone else that I think vastly undermined American Trust in public health and also in vaccines more generally than just the covid vaccine you you mentioned speaking of vaccines you mentioned you know Alex baronson who is very antiac vacine and RFK Jr who is not just anti-id vaccines but he's he's against the polio vaccine and every basically every vaccine in between um you are not antivaccine are you no yeah so how does it feel to be you know kind of lumped in with antivin well I okay so I I should I should say I really hate that term now and I think it's a term of derision aimed at undermining a conversation that ought to be ought to happen yeah right I think that public health when it's faced with people who disagree with it should treat those people respectfully as best it can and and try to engage yeah right so so for inance Alex Baron is not against other vaccines I know him personally you know him well so he's only against the covid vaccine well he was I mean and I wouldn't even say he's against the covid vaccine he was just calling out very early earlier than most people that the covid vaccine wasn't stopping you from getting spreading covid he turned out to be exactly right on that fact okay right uh and so and yet he was treated he was named specifically by Andy slavit a presidential adviser as a subject of being censored and he actually won a couple of Court battles against the administ and it was tremendously it was a tremendous mistake because he he was right on that on that issue and in any case even if he's wrong you would argue that he should be able to be in error publicly where people would discuss and exactly and he what about what about somebody like RFK Jr though he you know who I have literally engaged you know in conversation he is against every vaccine that has been brought out okay so I I don't I have to say I have to confess I didn't I didn't track his positions very closely on on the vaccines I know he's like associated with Children Health defense um from what I've I have not also interacted with him personally I have interacted with his his vice pres presidential candidate um uh from what I can tell there there it's it's not so much that he's like directly against all these all the vaccines it that it's that he is pointing to holes in the databases that we have about the side effects of some of these vaccines and he's calling for more study on them which is fair enough right I mean like there there are science is science requires qu people to question it um and I think most of the controversy is that is public health saying look no one should question us right rather than saying he's Auto automatically against all the vaccines I don't I don't know for a fact that he is and I don't know I've not I've not heard him say that I mean he you know really made a name in terms of vaccines with a story that was subsequently retracted by Rolling Stone based on a retracted Lancet study about the U effects of MMR vaccines causing autism and things like that mean I don't think the MMR vaccine is likely the likely cause of autism on the basis of this large Dutch study um but I do think that there is a there's a real thing that he's tapping into which is that there is a very large increase in autism diagnoses in this in this country a huge number of kids are involved a lot of parents are very worried about their kids and we don't know why so yeah get to get to this question of you know is there do you at some point say uh you know okay well like science nothing is ever settled but does that mean you always have to be and now let's talk to the senator with the tinfoil hat on who is advancing an argument that seems to be completely nuts um and maybe it's that you allow them to speak you don't necessarily have to engage them but you certainly don't banish them from public discourse yeah I mean I I think um the model is if you have uh if you are a trustworthy public health agency and you are treating people respectfully even people you think are wrong you're going to influence a vastly larger number of people than if you say these people are are parias that belong outside the bounds of normal society I think that uh because sometime every once in a while they're right it's not like public health is infallible obviously not right so so you have to then say I want to treat ideas that I disagree with respectfully because I might be wrong that's going to end up putting you in a position first of telling the the public the truth more right conveying the uncertainty that is really a big value for you right in all of this is transparency especially if you are in Authority whether it's public health or anything else that you're laying your cards on the table and saying this is my this is my thought process this is the data that I'm using and I mean this goes back to the enlightenment here it is you check it out and tell me where I you know I've made mistakes exactly I mean that's how science science actually works right science works by people correcting each other right so like I mean I'm wrong all the time in fact if as a scientist I'm not wrong I'm not being bold enough as a scientist so what what is the biggest thing that you got wrong about Co I mean I think that that the I already mentioned the development of the I thought the vaccine was going to take a decade to develop didn't you also you expected a lower uh infection fatality rate earlier I think I got that right oh yeah so like I did a I did a uh a study in the uh um uh in April of 2020 and uh measuring how many people had had already had had covid based on antibodies in the population in Santa Clair County California and LA County California a week after that and what we found was that there were like 40 cases per per per uh like for every case that had been identified by public health there are 40 people walking around who had already had Co and Rec covered uh same thing in LA county that implied a infection fatality rate of 0.2% mhm uh in California uh it replied that the disease has already spread to 3 or 4% of the population by a early April 2020 and that uh and that the third the third thing is that that it's this is not the kind of disease you stop it at either you stop it at zero or it's going to go to 100 you don't ever stop in there's nothing we don't have technology stop in between so there's still a long pandemic we had so all of those results were implied by our study um it was tremendously controversial because people thought that 0.2% was too low of infection fatality rate and that's like in the flu range right or well the flu is less than that yeah yeah I mean maybe .1% I mean no one really knows for certain exactly what the flu is but I think it's co was on average more deadly than the flu for the world just obviously right um but so uh the um there were a tremend there was many many other studies that came out after that serin studies done by independent teams some of which found lower infection fality rates and others which found higher infection fality rates ours turned out to be pretty close to the middle of the pack of these studies um the ones that found lower infection fality rate tended to be in places with fewer elderly people in it like in Africa for instance almost zero infection fality rate because only 3% of the population is over the age of 65 and this disease really impacts older people uh whereas in New York City it was like higher it was like 8% % or 0.9% um so you had this uh the idea that the infection fality is a single number is is false right it it is a it is it depends on the nature of the population that the disease is infecting and we found a number that was at pretty close to the middle of the range of estimates found by the infection trity rate what um what effect did it have on your broader kind of political or ideological or just philosophical worldview when you were on the you know on the the blunt to end of this kind of um you know just being kind of put in an internal Exile or you know taken off of Twitter being attacked all the time and things like that do you know did that affect how you think about things Beyond medicine I I I mean I um I come I have a PhD in economics and I come from a I mean if if you're going to say like like a political and it's like somewhat Market liking kind of kind of kind of Direction but also recognizing the need for for you know sort of markets can have excesses and you have to like be careful about how to I don't know what you're saying but I'll nod and say I don't know I I don't know what I'm saying either market failure that's a contradiction no okay so I mean you were predisposed towards you know markets are pretty effective at things like that you're a doctor you so but but the same now you're being canceled what yeah and and so like all of a sudden I'm being characterized as this like farri libertarian yeah but I'm I'm espousing a policy embraced by a uh a a a like effectively a socialist Swedish Public Health you know government right and so and I and and I'm in the UK uh I'm opposed to this right-wing uh Boris Johnson Tor kind of kind of uh I'm I'm criticizing a public the public health response by President Trump yeah uh but at the same time I'm advising uh Governor Ronda Sanz in Florida right uh you know and and quite opposed to the Californian lockdown Focus strategy with the leftwing governor I I have no idea what my politics are after this I my closest allies are uh senetra Gupta who's a labor voter uh in the UK at University of Oxford at the University of Oxford right and and then uh Martin Kor who I have no idea what his politics are and he's like a brother to me like I don't what I what I one of the things I I learned is that public health is not really it it fundamentally is not ought not to have this sort of partisan political flavor to it right when you when you add that in it really undermines Public Health it's not that public health can't is not part of politics obviously has a political angle uh but it but it's a it's a completely different game than politics politics you get 50 plus one you've won Public Health you get 50 plus one you've failed right you need 95% in that sense I guess I'm a failure in public health like I not didn't get 9 I hopefully someday I'll get the 95% plus one you uh you know just as a final question you know is is the pandemic you know is the covid pandemic in the rearview mirror and if so you know when something like it comes along again are we going to are we going to learn from our experience and if so what's the main lesson or are we going to be like screw well let's let's do this again so the depressing answer is that I don't think that we've learned much from it uh there have been very few official public inquiries that have asked really the right questions about what we did wrong like the the one like for instance the UK public inquiry seems the premise seems to be why didn't we lock down early enough or hard enough why w we more like China locking down earlier I don't believe would have done anything because I think the disease was here in 2019 like December November 2019 um and so and we didn't know about it so I don't think I think it already been seated all around the world even before so I think that that we have not learned the right lessons from the pandemic um the the the right lessons I think include things like the humility of Public Health in the face of uncertainty uh flexibility of thinking uh the involvement of a wide array of scientific voices uh to advise politicians uh I think those in the early days of a pandemic would have been tremendously actually all through the pandemic would have been a tremendously would have led to tremendously better outcomes do you uh you know as a naturalized citizen uh of America do you think that Americans are a able to make Health choices for themselves fundamentally because part of the noble lie and there's a right-wing version of this and a leftwing version which is like come on you people out there you just you you can't handle the truth um do you think that's fundamentally wrong yeah I think that's fundamentally wrong I think that uh health is a human right and in the sense of I I should fundamentally be able to decide for myself what decision what what things I do with my body um and I think U uh that uh that if I if I believe that I believe in patient autonomy informed consent I think those are fundamental ethical principles that that I think are that serve medicine well uh because if you have a medicine that is paternalistic that says look I know what's good for you Nick I I'm going to stop you from wearing that leather jacket which is horrible I it's not actually I really like it I get that all the time that all the time I about a lot of Blacklist for this so the pro the problem with that is like why would you trust me right why would you believe me right uh because you're the great you're a doctor you have a lot of degrees and you have expertise and knowledge how has that worked out I mean and if I'm if I'm using it to change who you are like things that you care about uh trade-offs you make then um what I'm I'm I'm doing you an injustice I mean I can tell you that smoking is bad for you that it causes lung cancer and then you still go smoke a cigar because you're hanging out with your friends and you enjoy it and it makes makes your life better for that that moment who am I to tell you not to do it right what my job is to tell you that that smoking smoking has these Health consequences to reflect the medical literature as best I can as honestly as I can and help you make the best choices for yourself we're going to leave it there Dr J bachara thanks for talking to re thank you [Music]

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 69,587

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv

Id: BXCTclHFTf0

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024