YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Bhattacharya

lines on the record: 142
first: 2022-01-04
most recent: 2022-01-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In the mirror, if I die, I die. I mean, like, I just, it's not, again, I'm Christian, so I don't, death is not the end for me, I believe. And so I don't particularly worried about my own death, but I do. I mean, I think we can't help but we worry about the well-being of our loved ones.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I suspected it was lower than people were saying, but I didn't know. I knew about the age gradient because I'd seen the Chinese data. And my daughter's young, but my wife is my age. And I didn't know the death rate. And I couldn't sleep the night before. Like, what if I'm putting my family, my daughter and my wife at risk because of some activity that I'm doing? It was kind of, I don't know.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've only worried about death once in this pandemic, although I've had two of my, I had a cousin who was 73 and my uncle, who's 74 die in India during the pandemic. And I grieve them, both from COVID. The fear of COVID really has only hit me only once during this. It wasn't for me. And I recognize it's irrational. So on the eve of the Santa Clara County serop prevalence study, it was a really interesting thing. So many people volunteered to help. And my daughter, who's 20, she was, I guess, was 19 at the time, and my wife also volunteered to help with various aspects of the study. And so even the study, they were going to go out in public. And I didn't know what the death rate was because we hadn't done the study.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a rocket scientist, actually Design rocket guidance systems. It died when I was 20, and I still miss them to this day. And I think that experience of seeing him sacrifice himself for his family. Brilliant man, but in many ways frustrated with his opportunities in the world, partly what led him to come to the US in the first place, that's transformed, has had a transformative effect on me. And I wish I could tell him that looking back.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually grew up in a relatively poor environment. I was born in India and I moved when I was four. My dad had eight brothers and sisters and my mom had four brothers and sisters. She grew up in the slam in Calcutta. My dad, his dad died when he was young, and he supported his family, his brothers and sisters with university scholarship money. Came to the US and my dad worked in a McDonald's, even though he was an electrical engineer, couldn't find a job in 1971. And so he worked at McDonald's. We lived in this basically the housing development in Cambridge, this middle building of the 17th floor, this housing development. I mean, I think that was transformative for me. I didn't realize so much at the time how that experience of being essential. Like poor lower middle class, what effect it had on my outlook.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been thinking this is like I told you I'm Christian, right? So God has given me many opportunities to forgive people, learn to practice how to do that.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You come in, remember that example as a negative example. And so that when you join the debate, you'll join it in a spirit of humility, in a spirit of trying to learn, while keeping that love that led you to enter the field in the first place.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it could be, I mean, I don't have any gifts in AI, but it could be your buddy, but in health or in medicine or whatever your gifts lie, develop them, work hard and develop them because it's worth it. It's worth it not just because you get some status, but because the journey is fun. And the result is improvements in the lives of so many. And so I think that that is the encouragement I give. I'd also say if you're looking at this ugliness of this debate that's happened over the pandemic, I'd say to young people, we need you to come in and help transform it. Money, the people you see in this debate that have behave poorly, I ask you forgive them. I've done my best to try because many of them are acting out of their own sense that they need to do good, but the mistake they've made is in this arrogance and this power.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say a few things. One is this is a wonderful profession. You have an opportunity to improve the lives of so many and do it by having fun, the kind of play we're talking about. It's an absolute privilege to be able to work in this kind of area. And to young people looking at that have some gifts or desire for this area, I say go for it.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Level with people when we don't know. I think that is the right adult way to deal with this pandemic from public health point of view. And that is not the policy we have followed. Instead, public health is intentionally stoked the fear in order to gain compliance with its edicts. And I think the consequence of that is people distrust public health. What you're talking about, the distrust of government, I think is partly a consequence of that. That movement, which is much smaller once upon a time, is much larger now because of essentially people look at what public health has done and said they've lied to me a whole bunch of times in a whole bunch of things is the general sense and their consequences of that. We're going to have to work in public health for a long time to try to regain the trust of the public.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the general principle is that should not be a tool of public policy, right? The public policy should attempt, and public health policy in particular should attempt to address that fear. It's not that you should tell people lies. Of course not. Tell people accurately what the risk is. Give people tools that have evidence that they can address their risk with.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happened in this pandemic is that there's been a deliberate policy to stoke the fear, to help make people think that the disease is worse than it actually is. In survey after survey, you see this. And that's been incredibly damaging. So young people have readily given away their willingness to participate in regular life because, A, they fear COVID more than they ought. And B, they feared that they're going to harm the vulnerable. In their lives. Put those two together and you just get this powerful demand for lockdowns. You see this all over the world.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So I think that fear is natural. And it's not something that you have to stoke to get when the facts on the ground suggest it. In fact, the tendency for humans in the face of threats from infectious disease is to exaggerate the fear in their own minds of being contaminated by the environment and by others. That's just natural to humans. And the role of public health is not necessarily to eradicate the fear, like obviously technological advances can help eradicate the fear, but it's really to help manage that fear and help people put the sort of incentives that come out of that to useful things as opposed to harmful things.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess where I come from, I think it's almost entirely counterproductive. I think fear should never be used as a tactic to manipulate human behavior by public health.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the way. I mean, they can help organize things. They play some important role, but they certainly do. But they need to remember what the mission is. The mission is not.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regular college happened, that's a great good. Universities are a wonderful invention and it's contributed so much to society to decide to shut it down. The universities should be fighting tooth and nail to not be shut down, not the other way around.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's here forever. There's a zero survey of whitetail deer in the US. It turns out 80% of whitetailed deer in the US have COVID antibodies. Dogs get it. Cats get it. There's almost certainly human animal transmission of it. I mean, presumably, I've heard bats get it, apparently. So you have a situation where you have this disease that's here to stay. And the vaccines don't stop the spread of it, the lockdowns don't stop the spread of it. We have no technology to stop the spread of it. And so we're burning the earth trying to do something that's impossible rather than Working on what's possible. And so letting”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the central problem is actually related to the central problem of COVID policy more generally. The goal seems to be to stop the disease from spreading. Rather than to reduce the harm from the disease If the goal is to stop the disease from spreading, the sad fact is we have no technology to accomplish that.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you. I completely agree with you. I think we have failed in our mission to educate our students by this decision. And I think just more broadly, I think we failed generally over the course of the last year and a half in living up to our educational mission. In person teaching is vital. Now, I can understand if you have older faculty, the principle of focus protection says provide some alternative teaching arrangements for them. That makes sense to me From the kid's point of view, they're more harmed by not getting the education we promised them than by COVID. So applying this principle of this focus protection, let young professors teach in person. This is before the vaccine, after the vaccine, let everyone teach in person.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To return to focus protection, we still should be following the policy now for COVID, and we're not, right? So the vaccines, there's a great shortage in vaccines. You wouldn't know it in the United States and in the rich parts of the world, but there's a great shortage of vaccines. We're not going to be able to vaccinate most of the entire set of algorithmy at least or larger groups until late 2022. Huge numbers of older people around the world in poor countries that have not COVID recovered yet. So they're still quite vulnerable, have not had the vaccine. And yet we're talking about vaccinating five-year-olds. Who benefit, if at all, from the vaccines of just a very little bit because they face such a low risk of harm from COVID.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Response to a virus. That principle we just said is I completely agree with something I think has been lost and unfortunately lost, right? So the policies themselves, if they have harm, those are real. And we shouldn't pretend like they're not and essentially demonize the people that suffer them or pretend. I mean, like a lot of times the depression that we've been talking about, that's thought of as not so important, but it is important. And especially the harm to the people in poor countries, it's like been out of sight, out of mind in much of the rich parts of the world.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, folks' protection is always going to be complicated, especially for something like this that spreads so easily, it's going to be complicated. And I'm very, I'm the last person to say it would have been perfect. There would have been people that would have gotten sick. But they got sick anyways. The hope was that if we suppress community spread low enough, we can protect the vulnerable. That was the hope by lockdown. The reality was that only a certain class of people were able to benefit from lockdown. The rest of society, we call them essential workers, had to keep working and they got sick. And the Zis kept spreading. It didn't actually have a substantial effect on community spread in non-laptop class populations.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, think about lockdowns, like if we didn't have Zoom, we wouldn't have lockdowns. There's a reason in 2009 we didn't lock down. I mean, we didn't have the technology to replace work with this remote technology.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harmed. There's always going to be some group that's differentially protected. And that may change over time, right? So in this disease, in this epidemic, as people got infected and recovered, we now had a class of people that were pretty well protected against the disease. Instead of ostracizing them because they don't want a vaccine, we should be allowing them to work. I mean, having staffing shortages in hospitals now because we forgot that principle.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't know really at the beginning that it was this fecal oral spread, and so we did all kinds of crazy things, including like spraying DDT in communities, which was how I was supposed to get rid of polio. But the focus was on whenever there was an outbreak, they would close a school down. And that was the right thing to do because that group that needed protection was children and the disease was spread, we thought, in schools. I don't think there's a single formula that works, but there's a single principle that works, right? No matter, it's hard to imagine a disease that's uniformly deadly across every group and every single person, there's always going to be some group that's differentially”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's always going to be focus protection, but the group that needs the focus protection may change depending on the biology of the virus. So the polio epidemic in the 40s and 50s in the US, the great people at most risk were children”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the answer to that I have is that's true. There weren't enough. I wasn't thinking of them as enough. I was thinking that I wanted to involve an enormous number of people in local public health to help think about how to do focus protection in their communities.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For this better cope, if it has an effect on COVID spread, I mean, it's going to be checking to make sure that plexiglass was put up everywhere, which now in retrospect turns out to probably made the disease worse. Masking enforcement, so shaming around mask, I mean, a huge amount of effort on things that Only tangentially related to focus protection. What if we turned our energy, that enormous energy put into that Instead, into focus protection of the vulnerable. That's essentially the conversation I was calling for. And it wasn't, I mean, I didn't think of it as we had every single idea. I mean, we gave some concrete proposals and the criticism we got was that those concrete proposals weren't enough”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think into the summer, I think there was some of that sense. I don't know, it obviously varied among different people. But I think that it's true it would have been challenging. It's also true that it's heterogeneous, exactly the way you said. But what that means is you need a local response. So my vision of a public health officer is someone that understands their community. Not necessarily the nation at large, but their community, and then works within their community to figure out how to deploy the resources that they have available to do the kind of protection policies we're talking about. That's what should have happened. Instead, they spent a huge amount of efforts closing, making sure businesses stayed closed, businesses that, I mean, they're hardware stores that closed. What good did closing hardware store do?”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be true. I mean, I think it's always a risk with policy thing, but I think think back to the moment. But we actually felt like we were in this together to some extent. I think that that empathy that we had that was used to like Tell people to stay and happily, not happily, but stay in to wear a mask or to. Could have been redirected to actually helping the people who most needed to be helped.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was still fear abroad, so there still would be some restrictions people would pose on themselves. They probably would go to parties less. The grandsons probably wouldn't go so many parties, right? There would be less participation in big gatherings. You may even say big gatherings in order to restrict community spread again. I'm not against any of that, but you shouldn't be closing businesses. You shouldn't be closing churches and synagogues. You shouldn't be forcing people to not go to school. You should not be shuttering businesses. You should just allow society to go on. Some disease will spread. But as we've seen, the lockdown didn't stop the disease from spreading anyways.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Identify where the vulnerable people live. It's really challenging in multi-generational homes in LA County, for instance. There's a lot of older people living together with younger people in relatively crowded. It's really quite a challenge. But there, again, you can use resources. So if grandma is worried that grandson has come home, has potentially been exposed, grandson calls grandma and says, I might have been at a party where I might where COVID was, grandma calls public health, public health then says, okay, you can have this hotel room for a couple days until you check turn negative.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why not organized home delivery of groceries to them? We did that for the laptop class, or we can even just do this as a volunteer effort. You know, the older people living next door just call them up and say, can I help you go out and go shopping for you?”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you may have to do that if it's community spread is very high, but generally, I think. It would depend on, again, the living circumstances. So, for instance, if you have a very simple idea that doesn't require a lockdown forced on them, I don't actually generally am not in favor of that kind of forced lockdown because you just won't get cooperation. But what you could do is provide resources to that group of people. So imagine you live next door to somebody, an older couple. And there's high community spread. Well, they have to go grocery shopping. We did some of these, some communities did these senior-only grocery hour, right? But they have to still have to go out and they might get exposed when they're shopping amongst other seniors.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the irony. If we protected the vulnerable, the vulnerable the most likely to be hospitalized, And so by protecting the hospital, by protecting the vulnerable, we would also have addressed the shortage of hospital beds more effectively”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a linear programming problem, you figure out which constraint's binding and you address that one thing and then you go on to the next one. If that one constraint, we said, okay, the constraint is hospital beds. That led to the decision in many of the Northeast States to send COVID infected patients who were on the verge of or looked like they were about to recover back to nursing homes. who then spread the disease all through there because they wanted to preserve the hospital beds.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll depend on all of those things which are all local in nature. So one very, very obvious thing in a country like ours where so many older people live in institutionalized settings and nursing home settings. And that's where older, really vulnerable, chronically ill patients often live. And you know this disease affects that group like most commonly, it is absolutely vital to protect that group. We should have known that in February 2020 from just from the Chinese And we should have thought about that group as the key constraint in our policymaking. Instead, we thought about in February, March 2020, as hospital beds as the key constraint, hospital beds and ventilator shortages. So we ran around trying to address that.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I was saying that there's two scientific bases, right? So one is this steep age gradient, the second is the existence of lockdown arms. Again, I think there's very little disagreement in the scientific community about both of those facts. If you put those facts together, the obvious policy is to protect the people who are at the most severe risk from the disease itself. And that's the idea of focus protection. That's the general principle of it. The actual implementation of it depends on the living circumstances of the people that are at risk, the resources that are available in the community, the technology that's available to do this. And so it's almost always going to be, in fact, it'll always be a local thing.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you remember where you came from and remember who you're doing this for. At the back of your head should always be what's the purpose? Why am I here? What's the purpose of this? If the purpose is simply self-aggrandizement, then you should rethink because it'll just end up being a hollow”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with that narrative is that that money, which we're talking about, is actually lives of poor people. When you throw 100 million people around the world into poverty, you're going to see enormous harm to their health, enormous increases in mortality. It is not immoral to think about that and worry about that in the context of this pandemic response. Our mind focused so much on COVID that it forgot that there are so many other public health priorities as well that need our attention desperately.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I was talking about, well, there's going to be some economic harms and they're going to have health consequences, but the economic harms matter. But he counseled me, and I think he had my best interest at heart. If you were to put that in the story, I would essentially be canceled. Because what the narrative that arose in March of 2020 is if you care about money at all, you're evil and crass. You must only care about lives.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it was actually a very odd, ethical thing at the beginning of the pandemic where if you brought up economic harms at all, you were seen as callous. So I had a reporter calling me up almost at the very beginning of the epidemic asking me about a very particular phenomenon. So he was anticipating a rise in child abuse because children were going to be staying at home. Child abuse is generally picked up at school. That actually happened. So the child that reported child bees dropped, but actual child abuse increased because normally you pick up the child abuse at school and that you have the intervention, right?”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's, again, an economics literature on this, on deaths of despair, it was called. 2009, the Great Recession. It led to an enormous uptick in overdose from drugs, suicidality, depression as a result of the job losses that happened during the Great Recession. Well, that's happening again, like an enormous increase in drug overdoses. That's not an accident. That's a lockdown harm, right? Same thing with the job losses. The job losses, by the way, are like, it's so interesting because the states that stayed open have had much, much lower unemployment than the states that stayed closed. The labor force participation rates declined by 3%. It's women that separated because they stayed home with their kids. We've reversed a generation of women improving women's participation in the labor force.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have these like sort of wide range of medical and psychological harms that were being utterly ignored as a result of the lockdowns.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can talk about the scientific base for that if you'd like. But that was pretty well known, even in October. We closed hospitals in order to keep available to COVID patients. But as a result, women skipped breast cancer screening. And as a result, they are showing up with late-stage breast cancer that should have been picked up last year. Men and women skipped colon cancer screening, again, with later stage disease that should have been picked up last year with earlier stage. For patients with diabetes, Very important to have regular screening for blood sugar levels and sort of counseling for lifestyle improvement. And we skipped that. People stayed home with heart attacks and died at home with heart attacks.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the consequence, actually, you think, okay, we can just make it up, but it's really difficult to make that up. There's a literature in health economics that shows that even relatively small disruptions in schooling can have lifelong consequences, negative consequences for kids. So they end up growing up poorer, they lead shorter lives and less healthy lives. As a consequence, and that's what the literature now shows is likely to happen with the interruptions of schooling that we had in the United States. Many European countries actually managed to avoid this. There were in the early days the epidemic great indications that children first were not very severely at risk from COVID itself, nor are they super spreaders. Schools were not the source of spread the disease to schools, not the other way around.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, and just to get back to that point, we closed schools, especially in blue states. We close schools. Now, richer parents could send their kids to private schools, many of which stayed open even in the blue states. They could get pods. They could get tutors. But that's not true for poorer and middle-class parents. And as a result, what we did is we took away life opportunities for kids. We tried to teach five-year-olds to read via Zoom in kindergarten.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's in the developing world. In the developed world, the health effects of lockdowns were also quite bad, right? So we've talked already about isolation and depression. There was a study done in July of 2020 that found that one in four young adults seriously considered suicide. Now, suicide rates haven't spiked up so much, but the depths of despair that would lead somebody to seriously consider suicide itself should be a source of great concern in public health.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking a train back, a thousand died en route. Overcrowded trains dying essentially on the side of the road. I mean, it was absolutely inhumane policy. And the lockdowns there, it's kind of like what's happened to the West as well, but it was so severe. There was a zero prevalence study done in Mumbai by a friend of mine at the University of Chicago. What he found was that in the slums of Mumbai, there were 70% sero prevalence in July or August of 2020, whereas in the rest of Mumbai it was 20%. So it was incredibly unequal. The lockdown's protected, the relatively well off, and spread the disease among the poor.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of the above. But a lot of those efforts, like especially those vaccination efforts, are funded and run by Western efforts. Like Gavi is a, I think it's a Gates funded thing, actually, that provides vaccines for millions of kids worldwide. And those efforts were scaled back. Malaria prevention efforts. So in the developing world, it was a devastating effect, these lockdowns. There was also direct effects. Like in India, the lockdowns when they first instituted, there was an order that 10 million migrant workers who live in big cities and they live hand to mouth, they buy coconuts, they sell the coconuts with the money, they buy food for themselves and coconuts for the next day to sell, walk back to their villages or go back to their villages overnight. So 10 million people walking back to their villages or”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source