What Happened: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on 19 Months of COVID

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson dr jayanta bhattacharya arrived at stanford university as a freshman at 18 years old and never left in addition to his undergraduate degree dr bhattacharya earned a doctorate from the stanford economics department and an md from stanford medical school dr bhattacharya is now a professor of health policy at stanford medical school and a research associate at the national bureau of economic research jay welcome nice to you peter what happened and what should have happened what happened december 31 2019 the world health organization announces that it's tracking a cluster of pneumonia cases from an unknown source in wuhan china january 11 2020 the first novel coronavirus death is reported in china january 21st the first american case of kovit is confirmed in washington state march on the advice of the white house coronavirus task force which includes dr anthony fauci states in this country begin to issue stay-at-home orders late march and early april the entire nation has locked down schools are closed economic activity collapses march 24 dr j bhattacharya publishes a piece in the wall street journal quote if it's true that the coronavirus would kill millions of people without shelter in place orders and quarantines then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified but there's little evidence to confirm that premise close quote the whole nation has shut down and jay bhattacharya pipes up and says hey fellas explain yourself jay sure uh so i actually have to go back a few years from that a few years yeah in 2009 i had done some research during the h1n1 flu epidemic uh it also originated in asia it's it's it's i mean it it's unclear exactly but in any case it's it's uh uh it it is an epidemic that's hitting the united states and uh everyone's worried about what the death rate is from it i did some research on the spread of the disease but i've been reading the literature on how deadly it was so the first reports for h1n1 were were really high four percent five percent mortality and i noticed in the literature there were a whole series of sero-prevalence studies studies essentially of antibodies and what they found was that for every case of h1n1 there were a hundred people that had it that didn't that they didn't identify the public catholic okay so let's ju just you know me jay you know i'm very slow and you have to go through this carefully for me to get it all for every case meaning every case that turns up at a hospital every case that's identified and counted because that person gets sick right there are some large number of asymptomatic cases where people have been infected produced antibodies and don't even know it is that correct that's the general idea general idea not necessarily asymptomatic they might have had symptoms they just never showed up they weren't severe they never got counted they don't turn they don't turn themselves in at the doctor's office or the hospital right so h1n1 goes from five percent mortality 4 mortality which is what the world health organization was saying at the time to 0.01 mortality on that order disease once studies had been done to see the actual number of people who'd been infected correct okay so it was on the top of my mind when i saw the world health organization into us in 2020 say that we have a three percent mortality rate they were very cagey about what they meant but i knew what they meant they meant that three out of a hundred people that had been identified with covid died from it they're looking at chinese data they were looking at italian data and the first thought i had was well maybe this is like h1 it's a respiratory disease respiratory virus it spreads very very easily obviously it seems likely that many more people have had it than have been identified our testing resources weren't all that good at the time so that was that was what motivated me in that piece was we don't know the mortality rate because we don't know how many people actually have been infected i wanted to know the denominator and then you at some point in these early weeks you and a couple of colleagues here at stanford as i recall correct me on this because i'm going from memory conducted what was one of the earliest or perhaps the first zero prevalence study in this country is that correct yeah it's very one of the very first yes and you learned so we did two actually we did one in los angeles county and we did one in santa clara county which is where stanford is we learned that in both l.a county and santa clara county there were 40 or 50 infections per case identified 40 or 50 per case so it was h1n1 all over again yeah it's it's more deadly than h1n1 right so instead of something like 0.01.08 percent mortality infection fatality rate it's it's uh the numbers we got were that it was 0.2 so 2 out of 1000 mortality rate but it was parallel to the h1n1 case in the following sense the world health organization said it was maybe maybe a whole order of magnitude more deadly than your study suggested is that correct that's correct all right and your study this is so you first raise your head above the parapet so to speak in that piece in the wall street journal on march 24 and you had done your study by then or you were you were writing on suspicions no we it was a hypothesis that that article was putting forward hypothesis says basically that it might be lower than we're seeing we need to do the study to check actually that that piece led to a very large number of people contacting me and my colleagues offering resources to help us do the study i see and so the study you conduct well we'll come to this in a moment but one of the things that just i find baffling about this j you're going to have to help me through this in the whole conversation is that we have this gigantic heavily funded billions upon billions of dollars public health establishment in this country the centers for disease control the cdc sits right up at the top of it and then of course there's an international organization world health organization and it's my friend jay and a couple of his buds out here in stanford who do what seems the obvious thing to do which is to ask the question and then test just how deadly this thing is so on the basis of your test again i'm a layman correct me you discover one it's not nearly as deadly as the public health authorities are at that point letting on two it's already everywhere yeah it's already well it wasn't quite episode that the problem was again correct it was about uh in la county it was four percent and in santa clara county is about three percent 2.8 percent in santa clara county but still many thousands of people right way too late for trace and tests that's the key point that is exactly the key point so um i mean the mortality rate is important but the key point is the strategy used to control the disease up to that point the strategy the idea was that if we could find all of the cases of it test enough isolate the people that have it so they don't pass these on then we'll suppress the disease down to zero that worked i think with sars one it worked with ebola it works with has worked in the past with other diseases it's not a crazy idea no it's not a crazy idea uh the problem is that if you have a situation in mid-april 2020 where three four percent of of large metro centers have have had evidence of the disease already you know the disease is very very infectious that's a strategy that cannot work it's at that point what what folks should have realized including folks like fauci and the cdc should have realized is that a strategy to stop the disease from spreading down to zero was not possible over a year ago yeah all right i continue this timeline october 4th 2020. dr j bhattacharya a professor of public medicine at stanford i'm repeating your credential for a reason joins dr martin kuldorf an epidemiologist at harvard and dr sunitra gupta an epidemiologist at oxford in issuing the great barrington declaration which you named after the town in massachusetts in which the three of you drafted the document it happens to be called great barrington you weren't saying the declaration is great although there are those who think it probably was quote i'm quoting from the declaration as infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we that is the three of you have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing kovid 19 policies that is to say of shutting down our countries the united states and sunitra guptas in the united kingdom we have grave concerns and recommend an approach we call focused protection close quote the three of you recommend an alternative you call it focused protection explain focused protection sure so um the the main idea behind it there's two main ideas one is that there's a huge gradient in the risk it's not that everyone is equally at risk from this disease if you're older you're much more likely to die upon infection than if you're younger i mean thank god for children are relatively well protected against disease just by the nature of their their immune response to it do we know why is this unusual among such diseases i mean among viruses or was it unique to this virus they're still working out why i mean there's something about it but we know the fact yeah but but we knew that early right so you look at the chinese data the italian data it was older people that were dying from this disease and uh and the serial says exactly so can you quantify so how much more likely is a 75 or 85 year old to die of the disease than a five-year-old so uh it's it's more like a 1 000 2 000 full increase in the risk for the 80 year old than the five-year-old okay huge huge huge difference dramatically just to give you some sense of this uh the there's now a whole bunch of these thorough problem studies that have been done that replicate from around the world what we found the the the typical finding in these serial problems is that for people that are under the age of 70 there's a 0.05 mortality risk so 99.95 survival after infection for people under 70. for people over 70 it's 5 mortality so 95 mortality 95 survival a huge in difference it now and that it's it's it essentially changes smoothly with age so roughly speaking i'm 53 my infection fatality rate from these studies is something like 0.2 ninety nine point eight percent survival if i get infected that's before the vaccine uh every seven years of age below and above you double it i see so all right so the gradient is like this it's very steep very steep all right sorry back to the great barrier back to focus protection right so that's one so the obvious thing is we know who's vulnerable older people people with certain chronic conditions move heaven and earth to protect them right so we outlined a whole bunch of ideas for this we can talk about some of these visas a bit if we want the other thing is that the lockdown harms are devastating a hundred million people have been thrown into poverty worldwide as a consequence of the economic harms caused by lockdown people skipped cancer treatments people skipped heart attack treatments people skipped diabetes management care the psyche psychological harm is is on a scale in june of 2020 one in four young adults reported the cdc that they can seriously considered suicide in the united states uh so the the harm the the public health harm of these lockdowns i i just can't over stress how harmful these lockdowns were to the to the to the to the to the population at large from a public health point of view not forget about the economics just just in terms of health outcomes there was a study that suggested we close schools down right yes uh the study done published in in uh in a gem of pediatrics found that is the journal of the american medical association one of the three or four most prestigious medical journals in this country correct yeah all right for the jam of pediatrics um that that estimated how just closing the schools for a couple of months in may or april and may would would would what effect would it have on the lives of these children because it turns out that closing schools down it you get learning loss that that echoes throughout your a kid's entire life they laid shorter poorer less healthy lives that so the estimate was five and a half million life years lost just from that school five and a half million closed down in the previous spring yeah it already happened all right so focus protection says move heaven and earth to protect the older and do what with everybody else don't get end the lockdown because the lockdown is causing devastating harm for them old people should be protected everybody else should go about their lives yes all right you issue the great barrington declaration again on october 4th 2020 october 13th british secretary of state for health matt hancock speaking in the house of commons the great barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false first it says that if enough people get covert we will reach herd immunity that is not true many infectious diseases never reach herd immunity such as measles malaria aids and flu and with increasing evidence of re-infection he's talking about covid we should have no confidence that we would ever reach herd immunity to covet even if everyone caught it the second central claim is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to hurt immunity that simply is not possible close quote okay he makes two extremely serious charges against you and and you and your colleagues martin koldov of harvard and sunita gupta of oxford responded how well first of all he doesn't understand what herd immunity means right so hurt immunity actually take a moment and really lean into hurt immunity because that is a term that even now is getting used again and again and again and i confess i don't quite know what it seems to be mean different things as different people use it yeah so i think he's using it as a synonym for xerocovid the cove has gone away because enough people are infected the covet is a coronavirus the other coronaviruses that are in common circulation in human populations produce colds and they they're controlled by herd immunity they're not always increasing exponentially so that everyone gets it what happens is they rise and fall with the season enough people get it and what herd immunity means is when one person has the infection they spread it to one or fewer additional people so you don't get an exponential growth right you get you see declining cases for instance all right so when a population achieves herd immunity it is not immune entirely immune to said infection it simply experiences that infection in a relatively minor can i don't want to say control but in in a relatively minor way there is an exponential growth that's all it means is that it just means that there's not a growth in the number of cases a new person gets it and they pass it on to one or fewer additional people so whenever the case counts are coming down we're in herd immunity in some technical sense um the the uh since this is seasonal when it's in season the the number of people that need to have immunity to this needs to be very high because it passes much more easily right when it's out of season you can have a relatively few people with immunity and you won't see it growing so herd immunity is not a synonym for zero cove and i think hancock i think that that's the mistake he made there um the the other thing about about herd immunity with these disease with this disease is it was clear in october of that of that year of 2020 and even more clear now that if you are infected you actually gain substantial protection against reinfection so there was a study that was just just released actually recently but it verifies a whole long line of studies at one year this is out of italy at one year after infection point three percent are re-infected so you're you're infected you recover from covet and within within the context of the full year three out of a thousand get re-infected and almost always it's it's less severe than the first time because your body still remembers how to fight it off and that's true of viruses in general isn't it that subsequent infections tend to be less severe i mean it's true of the coronavirus i mean hiv is a different i mean there's there's some there's the 1918 flu yeah each time it returned it returned with less force is that roughly correct i mean the flu is a little more complicated because yeah i'm sorry i'm sorry that's that's the layman going off because i don't know enough to stay more than the rails here okay so so matt hancock the british secretary of state for health who incidentally was forced to resign because he was caught violating the lockdown rules in britain he's now the former secretary of state for health he says it says that if enough people get coveted we will reach hurt immunity that many infectious diseases never reach hurt immunity so the what's in the back of his mind is it is our job as the government of britain to free our country all together of covid and you as a professional medical man say excuse me secretary hancock that will never happen yeah is that correct that's correct all right now what about his second claim i'll read it again the second central claim of you of the great barrier declaration is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to hurt immunity that is simply not possible close quote you can't protect them he says so this is one of those points that i'm still baffled by the the the public health community that i know does has all kinds of creative ideas of how to help people in a population be protected against disease they're very creative generally in thinking of ways to do focused protection for many many diseases and conditions the reaction of matt hancock is one one example of it of the much many people in the public health community was to just to throw up their hands and say we can't do it now what what what they're saying and what they had in the back of their heads and you can see from the policy was that if we lock down we will protect the old we will protect the vulnerable just by the fact that we've stopped the disease from spreading right that's turned out to be catastrophically false eighty percent of the deaths in the united states are people over seven or over sixty eighty percent of the deaths are people over sixty uh we did not protect the vulnerable because we didn't even attempt to protect the vulnerable that wasn't that one just to give you some some sense of how backward it was we sent people in the early days of the epidemic that were infected with covet back into cove to nursing homes who then infected a large number of vulnerable people instead of realizing who the vulnerable were and and seeking to protect them you know that was the that was a scarce resource we thought hospital beds were a scarce resource most parts of the country in march april 2020 went empty hospital beds right there are other strategies we could use so we could have uh we suggested for instance like one one i was we have older people living alone at home we said okay you can go to grocery stores we'll give you an hour but then they're now in community with a whole bunch of other people even though they're older potentially passing disease on we use doordash to make sure that people in the laptop class could get food you mean under the lockdown yeah right instead we could have just we could have offered free doordash to older people like this would depend on the community in the living circumstances so it could be a local thing right so so matt hancock says oh we can't we can't isolate the vulnerable we really can't isolate the old and then tell me if this layman's correction response is correct i don't know what the lockdown caused in the united kingdom but it was even more severe than most places here and in this country it cost trillions of dollars and the government spent tens of billions printing money and sending it to people who for a fraction of that cost surely it would not have been beyond the ken of man to say everybody 75 and older you should shelter at home we're going to deliver food to you we'll we'll we'll air drop masks or whatever that and they never even tried i mean that's correct that's correct i mean we could have just offered those kinds of so for instance we used hotel rooms to house uh young homeless people right uh we could have offered it to like you know many people in l.a county for instance that i know about uh there's multi-generational homes grandma living with with grandson right grandson goes out says oh i might have been exposed will offer the hotel room temporarily for the grandma until the federal government could have booked every room in every marriott hotel for six months at a fraction of the cost that we imposed on ourselves with this lockdown yeah so so the matt hancock argument is we can't lock down the old exposed vulnerable people but we can lock down the entire society it makes no sense am i missing something no you're not missing anything it was a failure of imagination on the part of public health okay and it would be a local thing right every single local community has different needs for its elderly so you would have to do different different things in different communities so local public health play a role the the public health agencies in developed countries and certainly us and the uk said only lockdown will help okay again the you issue the great barrington declaration on october 4th 2020 matt hancock speaks on october 13 on october 15 dr anthony fauci is asked about the great barrington declaration and a call with reporters i'm quoting his response quote got to get this one word for word dr fauci i'll tell you exactly how i feel about that if you let infections rip as it were and say let everybody get infected that's going to be able to get infected and then we'll have herd immunity quite frankly that is nonsense and anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous close quote okay i will let you address the substance of the argument but this layman cannot avoid observing that dr fauci gave the back of his hand to the three of you who signed the great great barrington declaration it turns out that your own specialty is not epidemiology but martin kuldorf is an epidemiologist at harvard and sunitra gupta is an epidemiologist at oxford they're both published in journal after i mean the it doesn't even make sense i've been published in epidemiology for 20 years oh yeah okay okay okay so all right so so he gives you the back of his hand ask anybody who knows anything about epidemiology and he'll say those three people are crazy stanford harvard oxford you're not crazy yeah and also tens of thousands of other scientists signed on doctors signed on um the the substance of it is is uh is a piece of propaganda by fauci he said in that in that quote you read that we were calling for the virus to rip through society but we've just been talking about what we actually proposed we were arguing for focused protection yes of the vulnerable he wanted to in order to justify the strategy that he's adopted which is lockdowns yes he wanted to contrast this with something he would call a herd immunity strategy a let it rip strategy right the effect of the lockdowns have been essentially to let it drip we've let the virus drip through all of society just extended the time without protecting the vulnerable okay so hold on let me grasp this if i can let me let me make sure i've got this right the difference between the great barrington declaration and fouchy's position aside from the massive cost that fauci's position imposed is simply a matter of speed that is to say the virus is going to spread if we lock down it'll spread a little bit more slowly maybe quite a lot more slowly but that but it will still spread is that correct yeah i don't actually think it spread all that much more slowly what it did is it protected a certain class of people the people who could afford to lock down the people who didn't lose their jobs because they could do their job from home during lockdown it protected them so i'll just give you a statistic from l.a county uh the age-adjusted death rate from covet in l.a county for the the the set of of locations that are in the bottom ten percent of pogba i'll use the layman's term for poor neighborhoods for for for for rich neighborhoods there is one-third the death rate from covet then in the poor neighborhoods in la county one-third the debt so essentially the policy that dr fauci espoused said look if you're if you're and we call it essential workers like weird aurelian term um if you're essential and 60. well go out and work it doesn't matter you have to go out and earn a living if you're 25 and uh non-essential and you can you're not going to lose your job because you can do it from home we're going to protect you hold on i want so the effect of the lockdown again if i'm being melodramatic as i try to grab as i try to understand this in layman's terms the effect of the lockdown here's what we know about los angeles if you lived in beverly hills or bel air or up in pacific palisades you were fine yeah but if you lived in watts or in a barrio somewhere somebody in your family got yeah you were exposed you were exposed yeah because your grandmother got sick because you you had to work the whole epidemic you're essential but that that is the effect of what what he proposed it was it was almost a reverse focused protection right instead of protecting the vulnerable people we know to be vulnerable older populations we expose the vulnerable and then and protected the the relatively well to do young okay the cost of the lockdown um you've still you've gone into the costs a little bit you've mentioned the costs here we are taping this program in october 2021. what do we know if i i'd like if i made to break it down to what we know about the costs that the lockdown has imposed in this country and then elsewhere in the world what do we know about the cost of the lockdown in this country what are the figures that have come in i mean i think this is one of those things where it's difficult to to say in a short number of words because the scope of it is so devastating so like we've already talked about children the lost schooling for children the lost opportunities for children that that will last the effects of that will last their life the entire life we'll be counting those costs for a very long time um the psychological harms that i mentioned there had been a vast increase in opioid deaths a lot remember the during the the 2008 great recession yes there was a there was a deaths of despair yes well those are back but magnified there are alcoholism uh opioid abuse domestic violence yeah let me give you a very small one against on children the reports of child abuse declined during the la the 2020 during the lockdown that wasn't that children weren't being abused that is that child abuse tends to get picked up at school so what we had was a huge increase they're unmeasured in child abuse that was not dealt with properly by the authorities domestic abuse is a very similar kind of kind of thing i mean i think the the scope of the lockdown has touched every every single american everyone understands even if they were in favor of it that that something went deeply wrong the rest of the world here's a presentation i'm going to quote you from a presentation you delivered last spring at an event sponsored by hillsdale college in the last 20 years says dr bhattacharya we've lifted a billion people worldwide out of poverty this year the lockdown year this year we're reversing that progress and an estimated 130 million people will starve another result of the lockdowns is that people have stopped bringing their children in for immunizations against diseases like diphtheria whooping cough and polio 80 million children worldwide are now at risk of these diseases close quote i want you to tell me you were exaggerating for dramatic effect unfortunately it wasn't 100 million 100 million people have been thrown into poverty uh tens of millions of people have been thrown into starvation like you know dire food insecurity as a consequence of the lockdowns worldwide especially in africa so meaning that when the western world which is the rich world contracts its economy when we shut down our economy you're okay if you live in pacific palisades but if you live in somewhere in africa where you're on a subsist that when the world economy shrinks the very poor and the very poor tend to live in on other continents are exposed in a in the in the rudest way their lives themselves become at risk i mean we spent the last two decades or more developing systems of trade and globalization that effectively were promises to poor countries that changed their economies to rely on these systems and overnight we violated those promises so it's not surprising that the the the greatest harmful lockdowns have happened in poor countries around the world i mean i'll just give you another statistic about children it was in march of this past year the un estimated put out reports saying that 250 nearly 250 000 uh children had died of starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation from lockdowns in south asia alone the harm to children is incalculable from this why why why why why the public health establishment got it wrong i will now try to defend them good luck okay well the precautionary principle the broad principle you could almost call it a philosophy that when we're dealing with uncertainty as indeed we were particularly in the first say six or seven months we should always err on the side of caution and public health officials may have gotten it wrong perhaps you're right perhaps we should have pursued focused protection and left the account the rest of the economy open but they did so on reasonable and even admirable grounds locking down was the safest thing to do jay yeah so uh the thing about the precautionary principle is that when you apply it you cannot apply it asymmetrically so let me put what tell you what i mean by that if you have a lockdown if you have you have a disease and you don't know its characteristics you don't know it's death rate you don't know who who it harms the precautionary principle says well assume the worst about it right right right right so so that you then have a sufficient impetus to take action but at the same time the actions you take the precautionary principle doesn't say assume the best about them assume the worst of the disease and the best of your actions that is not what the precautionary principle says all right so it was a catastrophic misapplication of precautionary principle if you're gonna if people are reasoning that way they work utterly blind i think dr fauci is like most of all on this utterly blind to the the harms of the lockdown the in fact i saw there was a there was a back and forth with rand paul and and and fauci senator paul and dr fongchi right senator rand paul of kentucky and he uh it was striking to me it was early relatively early in the epidemic and rand paul senator paul asked dr fauci about well what about these other harms and he said well that's not my job in effect well whose job is it right if you are going to make policy decisions like this you cannot assume that the things you're doing are automatically effective just because there's uncertainty about the effectiveness of it you cannot assume that has no harm that's not part of the precautionary principle that that's that is essentially a public health malpractice to us to assume that the thing you're doing has no harm that the thing that's that the thing you're guarding against has an enormous harm you end up in a situation where you take actions that end up with with the kinds of consequences we're talking about without actually stopping the disease you have catastrophic harm to the population at large from the lockdown okay so let me attempt another defense of the public health officials and the the defense is science precedes by dissent and experimentation and argumentation all should take place openly but there are moments when public health in effect shuts down the scientific process in effect honestly shuts down free speech because lives are at stake if you're if you have decided as the public health officials did decide that a lockdown is necessary to save lives again we impute to them the highest motives then then the only way to affect the lockdown is to affect it and that means anybody who disagrees just has to pipe down for a while and that is why dr fauci felt free perhaps felt even it was his duty to suggest that you and martin koldorf and sunitry gupta were just to give you the back of his hand because you were threatening as he saw it you were threatening a lockdown which was intended to protect lives and for a moment we not only have to suspend our usual activities but we have to suspend our usual freedom of speech we have to suspend our freedom as scientists to dissent to argue to suggest alternatives all that gets locked down too because we're trying to save lives yeah i mean i think there's a little bit of force to your argument but only a little bit all right so uh in public health there is a norm of unanimity of messaging right so right okay right so i if i tell you so i was onto something all right well let's not go too far i mean um if if i tell you smoking is good for you well i'm doing you a huge disservice i'm basically misrepresenting an enormous literature that documents that smoking is terrible for you right and so someone who speaks up in in public health and says oh smoking is good for you has has violated a real norm in public health uh and the unanimity of messaging is important because the the the message shouldn't be confused in public health you actually have limited opportunity to tell the public things right because the attention of the public naturally isn't on public health people it shouldn't be should be on their own lives right um and so if i tell you the that smoking is good for you i've really violated a a like a fundamental norm in public other than something very very irresponsible um that norm was applied to covet now but the ethical basis for that norm is that the scientific process has worked itself through and reached a mature stage so that the nor the thing on which the norm is being enforced there's no serious doubt about it exactly uh in this case we had a new virus we had enormous uncertainty about its you know we talked about it from the beginning about about death rate who's most at risk what how it spreads what interventions work and what don't work enormous fights going on within the scientific community or certainly certainly uncertainty within scientific community around this and before it was resolved people like dr fauci jumped to this public health norm all right all right that also explains why we see him on the air all the time even now he feels it's his responsibility to to convey this message but it's all mistaken yeah i mean i think um and it's actually had very pernicious effects so it in effect shut down the scientific debate all right so one of the things that happened with the great barrington declaration is that after we released it i've lost track of how many scientists have written to me saying they've silenced themselves i'm with you but don't tell anybody yes that kind of thing and some people actually we should know the number of scientists medical scientists and public health professionals physicians and nurses who have now signed the great barrington declaration approaches 60 000 yes all right and in addition to which there's some unknown numbers saying i'm with you but i do not dare putting my name forward i mean people lost their jobs are signing it right okay those are the public health officials how could the economists have got this all wrong from an article that you co-authored with mikko pakeland called the silence of the economist quote i'm quoting you jay economists who study and write about these phenomena that is phenomena such as the cost of lockdown economists had a special responsibility to raise the alarm economists had one job notice the costs the profession failed why i think um i mean you can you can talk about personal reasons right so most economists including me are part of the laptop class we don't lose our jobs when the lockdown happens um and we're human so we might be scared of the disease itself we think okay what's good for me is good for good for everybody else i mean i think there's some personal some some aspects of the personal aspects around this um that are there the reasons that the professional econ some professional economists gave included things like well because people were so scared they would have locked down anyway right you don't have to formally say you can't leave home everyone would just automatically stay at home because they're so scared of getting the disease so by the reasoning of economists that they'd say well the that means the lockdown itself didn't have any effect because people already would have stayed at home and in any case the formal legal mandate had no effect because people would have done the same thing on their own yeah okay to which i say that's insane right i would have sent my kids to school for the last 18 months happily because of the the risk to them from not going to school is so much more than the the risk to them from coving many many people worked during the epidemic the essential essential class of workers worked in the epidemic uh it's not true that people would would have voluntarily stayed at home for 18 months or 19 months or whatever because of the fear of the virus it's just it's just that's just false the the formal lockdowns had enormous consequences uh and to pretend otherwise is is not right the other thing i'd say is that the fear of the disease itself was part of the public health strategy it was essentially a inducement of panic so that if anyone said anything that suggests that well for children maybe the disease is not so harmful you get jumped on the new york times spent all of last summer trying to panic ship the parents over the chill over over sending the children back to school for instance uh the panic was part of that we all experienced this in our own lives if your mask slips down people give you the evil eye or worse the same kind of people can only behave that way toward each other because they're scared right yeah and and and this the fear is part of the public health i mean i don't know how else to say it i'm not going to say polite not i mean i'd try to think of a more polite way to say but it was essentially a propaganda campaign to induce panic in the population okay now may i offer a moment ago i tried to defend public health officials now i would like to launch an entirely new line of attack on economists one that has not occurred to you as far as i know and i'm wondering whether it's because you're naive or whether it's because i'm so cynical but here it goes this will take a moment to set it up march 2020 that's just as the nation is being locked down it's the same month in which you published your piece the new yorker magazine published a review of a new book by two princeton economists and the book was titled the deaths of despair and the future of capitalism the central finding was that unemployment leads to an array of pathologies just as you talked about drug abuse depression alcoholism and so forth cutting short people's lives headline of the review why americans are dying from despair the subhead the unfairness of our economy can be measured not only in dollars but in deaths close quote in other words as the economy is being locked down the new yorker publishes a review of a book that makes it very clear that economists do understand the correlation between and in fact even every single every percentage increase in unemployment suggests an increase in this this much alcoholism this much it's all really well understood and then the lockdown comes and the whole argument about deaths of despair among economists just disappears as long as the argument is useful to attack capitalism and free markets we will trumpet the argument in the new yorker but if the argument could be used to raise questions about the lockdown down the memory hole so i am saying that this little layman looks at that and says there is something really ideological going on here the economist didn't count because they didn't want to know the numbers i suspect now you are entirely free to say that i am full of low suspicions that i should dismiss immediately but how do you respond i mean i do it i don't know in that particular case i mean that book those economies actually a lot of respect for those economists so i just but i will say this that uh the professed ideals that many many people have concern for the poor concern for the working class uh concern for children as best i can tell that concern was lip service as soon as the fear of covet hit all of those ideals that we have professed it's not and it's not just economists i think very very large numbers of people um have have essentially forgotten about those ideals i mean i i don't i'm not a cynical kind of person i tend to i am i'll handle that for both of us i mean i don't want to think that they don't hold those ideas but in my view much of it is the fear of covid essentially gripped i mean i think there's parts of our brain that are almost evolved for this primal panic around infectious disease and you know we've lived in a society for for decades where infectious disease has been conquered and you have this so you're saying we spent the last 18 months living on our reptile brains and it's time for the frontal cortex to reassert itself yeah i think people really do still have those values and they just need to recall themselves that's the last 18 months let me ask you now this is this really is a layman this is me getting to ask a guy who actually knows stuff questions that i have and that friends have where we stand now state by state evidence on whether the lockdowns worked where they worked where they didn't work florida broadly speaking it imposed limited lockdowns and then lifted them as quickly as possible the governor florida ron desantis whom you have advised just did not like lockdowns and was very dubious for as far as i can tell he subscribes to the arguments you've made here that they do more harm than good california which has imposed some of the which imposed and continues in various counties to impose restrictions mandates and so forth where did more people die where was it worse so what do we what do we what we here are two different models which one was better right so uh florida is one of the oldest states in the nation california one of the youngest so you can't directly compare deaths because that as we said they had more old people yeah so you would expect there to be more deaths in florida right simply because there's more old people so but once you adjust for that fact once you say okay well let's look at uh people are over 85 for instance well there's fewer 85 year olds per capita that died in florida than in california well what about 75 to 84. fewer old people 75 to 84 per capita that died in florida than in california what about 65 to 74. well the same thing fewer deaths in florida than in california um the there's a it's a for the young people now florida's been through four different waves in california three but through those those waves is there a fourth wave coming to california probably okay yeah so and in other words it's purely seasonal yeah it seems seasonal all right so slightly more young people have died in florida than old other than in california but it's almost equal and so if you do an age-adjusted death rate for florida through using cdc data through september 21 of this year what i found was that they're almost exactly equal the outcome as far as kova goes florida and california are almost exactly equal so the disease had its way in both states but california tormented its citizens in a way that florida did not california is second to last in the number of days of school for kids last year by the way that's part but i should be i should say that's public school kids public school kids were out of school in california private school kids many of them actually got to go to school right florida 100 open for kids to go to school in person all of last year all right vaccinations you're for them or against them i think vaccines are the probably the most important and effective medical invention ever i think they're great um so what do you say to people so so so this is where there's a kind of there's a subtext that you're sticking up for for liberty you trust individuals but you really don't have any patience you have no more patience than anthony fauci or joe biden for unvaccinated americans is that correct uh you're asking about the coveted vaccines or vaccines in general no no no the coveted vaccines yeah so so covet vaccines in particular are are extremely effective at protecting against severe disease and i think that if you had a public health that was trustworthy that the people in the country trusted the authority or establishment right exactly um you would have much broader uptake of the vaccines and and than we've seen we've seen actually pretty broad uptake of the vaccines especially the older population but not universal and the reason is because significant chunks of the population african americans some poor white communities don't trust public health and for good reason apparently and for good reason i mean i think public health has failed the united states and failed the world all right so briefly what would you say to someone who's still honestly there may be viewers who won't take it from antony fauci but might take it from jay bhattacharya what would you say to someone who still hasn't gotten vaccinated i mean i mean i think that for for someone who's older especially the vaccine is incredibly important covet is a very deadly disease as we talked about for people who's older and the vaccine while they're not we haven't seen it's only been in human use for 10 months right so it's we don't know all of the side effects we've seen enough to know it's pretty safe and we do know so it doesn't prevent the disease you can still get covid but you're much less likely to suffer severely or go to the hospital correct that's correct anybody's experience in particular you care to mention all right peter i i had coveted i you know i i went out after you got the vacation after i so i had the vaccine the pfizer vaccine in april and i got covered in in august and you went to bed for a few days yeah it was it was i mean no hospital no hospital did you go to the dock i didn't die i wasn't you know well you are a doctor so maybe you don't need to all right but yeah i mean i think so the vaccine is quite effective for that uh so i would i would recommend getting it if you're especially if you're older uh if you're if you're worried about it i'd say find a doctor you trust and talk to them about it i think the the coercion that we've used to try to get everyone vaccinated is misguided for several reasons like a couple reasons one is as you said peter it doesn't stop disease spread you can still get infected well that means the vaccine unlike many other vaccines which do stop these spread they protect protect meat but it doesn't protect you right and so many people already have the disease they're recovered from it why force them to get it when they're already pretty well protected against the disease right so here's what joe biden said announcing his mandate here's the federal mandate announced last month still hasn't been put into effect as i understand it but here's the federal mandate announced last month the mandate will require all employers with over 100 employees to force employees either to be vaccinated or to show a negative covit test each week vaccines will be mandated for all federal workers and contractors with no testing option and by the way that includes every major airline in the country which is one reason we saw airline disruptions this past week president biden addressing americans addressing in particular the unvaccinated quote we've been patient but our patience is wearing thin your refusal has cost all of us close quote is that the right way to speak to unvaccinated america it's not the way to speak to americans at all he's not i mean that is terrible public health messaging right you do not talk down to people you treat them like equals you treat them like intelligent people and you give them information and you trust them to make good choices that's how you convince people to do this um this vaccine mandate is it has already created all kinds of disruptions you know we worried about about not having enough beds hospital beds well many many nurses are gonna are essentially quitting work yeah i think it was like 70 000 in new york state alone we're going to have shortages of hospital supplies um there's a there's a part of the mandate is is that every military officer has a military membrane right tens of thousands of military officers are going to quit protect military personnel are going to quit rather than get the vaccine or be fired right we have gonna have just like disruptions on a major scale and it's a failure of public health messaging it's not even necessary right the disease is not going to stop spreading if ninety percent are vaccinated the vaccine does not stop disease you've seen in israel for instance a very highly vaccinated population with a covered vaccine huge increases in cases iceland the vaccine is not the key to ending this disease the vaccine is the key to protecting the vulnerable for sure but not the key to ending the disease let's play a clip i quoted dr i quoted president biden let's play a brief clip from dr fauci indeed you do have personal liberties for yourself and you should be in control of that but you are a member of society and as a member of society reaping all the benefits of being a member of society you have a responsibility to society and i think each of us particularly in the context of a pandemic that's killing millions of people you have got to look at it and say there comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision for the greater good of society so that's the underlying argument in all of this locking down mandating vaccinations what do you make of the argument i think generally coercion is a poor tactic in public health it breeds distrust and ultimately undermines itself in terms of effectiveness i think part of the reason why large chunks of the population there's some chunks of the population that said i'm not going to get the vaccines because they don't trust public health because the lockdowns were promised to stop the disease from spreading it didn't work right this kind of coercion is very tempting in public health and and yet whenever it occurs it you may you may achieve some short-term goal you may get vaccination rates up to some but you you end up with harms in the long run right so i i've had people write to me and tell me that they don't trust this vaccine and now they while they used to trust the childhood vaccines which are really effective they're not going to they're going to start holding individuals and so forth yeah i mean i think the trust in public health is an invaluable resource and it's been squandered by by uh these kinds of that's a school mom not a scientist yeah well certainly not a public health official all right schools in florida governor desantis has imposed a ban on mass mandates for school children meaning school local school boards don't get to require children to wear masks in texas governor abbott issued an executive order banning mask mandates in schools again saying schools don't get to require children to wear masks now it turns out that in both of those there's so many legal challenges that i honestly haven't been able to work out quite what the state of play is now i think that the ban on mask mandates of governor desantis is in effect in florida but for at least the time being governor abbott's has been removed in texas okay that's the state of play as best i can work it out from an open letter by randy weingarten president of the american federation of teachers quote governors trying to score ideological points by banning mass mandates and bullying school leaders for implementing safety protocols are stoking hostile and unsafe climates close quote jay yeah so i think uh so actually just one quick thing um the the uh mask policies are that if you you can there's the the counties or schools can adopt them require them but then they have to allow parents to opt out that's in florida or florida i'm not actually 100 sure about the texas in any case um the point is that that in florida and many other places they want they want to give parents some say in whether children are asked so let me just talk very quickly about about what the state of the scientific evidence is and i'll just i'll give you in a very very simple way in europe the european cdc says that masking kids under 12 is not recommended in the united states this uscdc says that masking kids two and up toddlers and up is is required the the science is not settled on mass and it's very simple we don't have good data on it we do not have randomized evidence why not it's been 18 months the cdc is funded to the extent of billions of dollars why haven't they tested mass it's a really good question i wish i knew the answer we should have had randomized evidence on this already it's divisive because we don't have good evidence on it all right jay last question last question i'm going to quote the journalist and author john tierney just to quote just to indicate that you're not entirely alone john tierney writing in the city journal quote we still have no convincing evidence that the lockdown saved lives but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself close quote jay blatacharia how can we ensure that no such thing ever happens again i mean i think i think the first thing that has to happen is that public health should apologize the the public health establishment in the united states and the world has failed the public uh i think we should acknowledge the the incredibly unequal harms of the lockdown and essentially rich people did fine and poor people were just tossed to the virus isn't that roughly what happened the funny thing about the great barrington declaration is that it's not a new idea this is the same focused protection yes the same plan we used it for a hundred years of of epidemics and pandemics the principles are protect the vulnerable don't disrupt society as little as possible our public health agencies should make a public commitment to adopt those those kinds of principles again even in the face of many many different kinds of challenges those are going to prove as principles going to prove much more effective at protecting the public and the kinds of principles that we've adopted now which essentially is let's eradicate the virus at all costs i said that was the last question i lied here's the last question you'd like a quite a dramatic change in the public health establishment you'd like them to change their minds it wouldn't bother you if there was an apology how does that kind of change happen in this society one presidential election two presidential elections or is it like the old joke about what was it john maynard keynes said that progress is made in economics one death at a time you just have to the the the the fouchies of this world are so bought into what they have done that you have to wait for an entire generational turnover how can what you hope to see happen happen i mean i think ultimately public health is a political science in the following sense right so no public health measure is taken in and of itself by public health it's a political decision whether to allow public health to adopt it or not or implement it or not it what happened during this pandemic is that many many politicians outsourced their responsibility to the public to public health people including donald trump including donald trump and uh the consequence of that is that the the normal checks that would allow you to say well the politician made a good choice or not i've been off offloaded to a set of people who have no checks at all politicians are used to balancing competing interests it's the nature of their work public health officials are not right they're focused on as you saw with dr fauci a single thing which is infection control but society flourishes when it has many goals a plural set of goals not a single goal and so i think the the the idea that our our entire social life can be uh upended by us by essentially a relatively narrow set of scientists and not narrow set of public health people that has to we have to build protections against that clearly in our political systems uh how exactly that would work out i'm not i'm not uh that's a little bit you know that's beyond my expertise frankly but it's very clear that we need something like that in place dr jay bhattacharya thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 1,849,906

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Hoover Institute, Hoover Institution, COVID, Coronavirus, Delta, Jay Bhattacharya, Pandemic, Public Health

Id: zG7XZ2JXZqY

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mr_Truttle]

This should be hotter on the subreddit. It's a very good overview, covering a bit of everything from economic concerns, smearing dissent, human rights issues, and generally why coercion is a seductive but poor public health strategy. Dr. Bhattacharya has offered one of the most sensible and succinct voices on issues pertaining to COVID all along, no exception here.

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