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

“The priorities like the treatment of patients with tuberculosis in poor countries stopped because of lockdowns. Childhood vaccination of measles, mumps rubella, DPT, diphtheria, so on, pertussis, tetanus, all those standard vaccination campaigns stopped. Tens of millions of children skipping these doses for diseases that are actually deadly for them.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second bit of science is that's not controversial, right? Even if you think the IFR is 0.7 or 0.2, no matter what, everyone thinks everyone agrees on this age gradient. The second bit of science is also not controversial. The lockdown focus policies that we followed have absolutely devastating consequences on the health of the population. Me, just give you some examples. And this is known in October of 2020 when we wrote it, right? So the UN was sounding alarms that there would be tens of millions of people who would starve as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. That's come to pass. Hundreds of thousands of children in places like South Asia dead from starvation. A consequence of lockdowns.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's my main contribution, the name Great Barrington Decode. But yeah, so it was kind of so, and the idea is actually. While the title is great, and I think that it was written in a very stylish way, it's less than a page. You can go look online and read it. It's written not for scientists, but for the general public so that people can understand the idea really simply. But it is not actually a radical set of ideas. It actually represents the old pandemic plans that we've used for centuries, dealing with other similar pandemics. And it's twofold. First, let me talk about the science it rests on, and then I'll talk about the plan. The science actually, some of what we already talked about, there's this massive age gradient in the risk of COVID infection. Older people face much higher risk than younger people.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, I jumped at the chance because I knew that Martin and Sinatra were both smarter than me, and it would be fun to talk about what the right strategy would be. On the drive-in, I didn't know what the name of the town was, and I asked, they said it was Great Barrington. I had it in the back of my head. Martin and I arrived a little early, and we were writing an op-ed about some of the ideas. I hope we'll get to talk about very soon about focus protection and the right strategy. And when Sunetra arrived, we realized we actually had come basically to the same place about the right way to deal with the epidemic. And I thought, well, why don't we write something like the Port Huron statement? I had that in the back of my head. Yeah. And I'm like, well, what's the name of this town again? It was Great Barrington.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was because the conference, which is organized by Martin Cool. Designed the safety system, the statistical system that the FDA uses for tracking vaccine safety, he and I had met previously just the summer before, that summer, and he invited me to come to this small conference where he was inviting me and Sunatra Gupta, who is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Harvard at Oxford University.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, like horse paste. I mean, come on. The FDA put a tweet out telling people who are like, they're taking irramectin because they've heard good things about it and they're sick and they're desperate. And to call it horse paste was just, that was terrible.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I mean, I think here, take Ivermectin, right? There's actually a study funded by the NIH, by Tony Faji's NIAID, and the NIH called Active6 that's a randomized trial of irremectin. It's due to be completed in March 2023. So normally when you have private actors like these big drug companies that have no interest in conducting some kind of scientific experiment that would have some public benefit, it's the job of the government, and in this case the NIH to fund that kind of work. The NIH has been incredibly slow. In its evaluations of these repurposed drugs. And it's been left to lots of other private activities of uneven quality. And hence, that's why you have these big fights. Because the data are not solid, you're going to have these big fights.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I share your ambivalence, right? So, on the one hand, you have a fantastic achievement. The manufacturer, the discovery of the vaccine, and then the manufacturing at scale so that billions of people can take the vaccine in a relatively short time. That is a remarkable achievement that could not have happened without companies like Pfizer. On the other hand, there is this sort of corrupting influence of that money. Just to give you one example, there's an enormous controversy over whether relatively inexpensive repurposed drugs can be used to treat the disease. No company like Pfizer has any interest whatsoever in evaluating it. Even Merck, I think, that had the patent on Ivermectin now expired, has no interest at all in checking to see if it works.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My legitimate concerns about whether this vaccine is safe to take. I've heard from women who are thinking about getting pregnant. Should I take the vaccine? I don't know. I mean, there are all kinds of questions, legitimate questions that I think should have good data to answer that we don't necessarily have good data to answer. So what do you do in the face of that? Well, one reaction is to pretend like we know for a fact that it's safe when we don't have the data to know for a fact in that particular group with that particular set of clinical circumstances you know. And that, I think, breeds hesitancy. People can detect that bullshit. Whereas if you just tell people, you know, I don't know.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing I think the hesitancy some politicians viewed it as a political, as sort of like a political opportunity. Sort of demonize people who are hesitant. And that itself fuels hesitancy, right? If you're telling me I'm a rube that just doesn't want the vaccine because I want everyone to die, well, I'm going to react really negatively. And if you're talking down to me about”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really surprised to hear them each doubt whether the FDA would do a reasonable job in assessing vaccine safety, including by people who have long records of working with the FDA. I mean, these are Professionals, great scientists whose main sort of goal in life is to make sure that unsafe vaccines don't get released into the world. And if they are, they get pulled. And they're casting down on the vaccine the ability to track vaccine safety before the elect And then after the election, the rhetoric switched on a dime, right? All of a sudden it's Republicans that are cast as if they're vaccine hesitant. That kind of political shift, the public notices. If all it takes is an election to change how people talk about the safety of the vaccine, well, we're not talking science anymore. Many people think, right? I think that created its hesitancy.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a symptom of the distrust that people have in public health. I think this kind of schism over the vaccine does not happen in places where the public health authorities have been much more trustworthy. So you don't see this vaccine hasn't seen Sweden, for instance. What's happened in the United States is that the vaccine has become, first because of politics, but then also because of the scientific arrogance, this sort of touchstone issue and people line up on both sides of it and the different language you're hearing is structured around that. So before the election, for instance, I did a, I did a testimony in the House on measurement of vaccine safety. And I was invited by the Republicans. There were, I think, four other experts invited by the Democrats or three other experts invited by the Democrats, each of whom had a lot of experience in measuring vaccine safety.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that denial leads to people distrusting the message given by the CDC director, for instance, in favor of the vaccine. Why would you deny a thing that's such an obvious fact? Like you can look at the data and it's just, I mean, it just pops out at you that people that are COVID recovered are not getting affected again at very high rates. Much lower”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you one that's where I think it's greatly undermined vaccinely undermined the demand for the vaccine is this weird denial that if you recover from COVID, you have extremely good Both against infection and accident.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Young men should not be having Linecarditis. Middle aged women should not be having huge blood clots in the brain, right? So when you see that, you can say it's linked. Now, the rates are low. So young men, maybe one in 5,000, 1 in 10,000 of the vaccine vaccine-related myocarditis, pericarditis, young women, middle-aged women, I don't know, I don't know, I'm not sure what the right number might be, but I'd say it's like in the one in hundreds of thousands, something like that. So, these are rare outcomes, but they are vaccine linked outcomes. How do you deal with that as a messaging thing? I think you just tell people. You tell people here are the risks. Transparently tell them and just you're not so they're not getting into something that they don't know”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that, there are other systems, the FDA and CDC have. There's one called VSD, Vaccine Safety Data Link. There's another system called BEST. I forget what the acronym is, to essentially to track cohorts of people vaccinated versus undaccinated with as careful a matching as you can do. It's not randomized and see if you have safety signals that pop up in the vaccinated relative to the control group unvaccinated. And so that's, for instance, how the myocarditis risk was picked up in especially young men. It's also how the higher risk of blood clots in middle-aged and older women with the J&J vaccine was picked up. There, what you have is our situations where the baseline risk of these outcomes are so low that if you see them in the vaccinated arm at all, then it's not hard to understand that the vaccine did this, right?”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have to have some control group. Now, what happened is there's several systems to check this that the CDC uses. One very, very commonly known one now is called VARS, the vaccine adverse event reporting system. There, anyone who has an adverse event, either a regular person or a doctor, can just go report, look, I had the vaccine, and two days later I had a headache or whatever it is. The person died a day after that, the vaccine, right? Now, the vaccine was rolled out to older people first. And older people die sometimes with or without the vaccine. So sometimes you'll see someone's vaccinated a few days later they die. Did the vaccine cause it or something else cause it really difficult to tell? In order to tell, you need a control group.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With before COVID on tracking and identifying and checking whether vaccines actually are safe. And the central challenge is one of causality. So, you no longer have the randomized trial But you want to know is the vaccine when it's deployed at scale causing adverse events? You can't just look at people who are vaccinated and see what adverse events happen. You don't know what would have happened if the person had not been vaccinated.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the idea was that the lockdown harms, this is directly related to the Great Barrington Declaration. The Great Barrington Declaration said the lockdown harms are devastating to the population at large. There's this considerable segment of people that are vulnerable protect them. Well, with the vaccine, we have a perfect tool to protect the vulnerable, which is, I still believe, I mean, is true, right? You vaccinate the vulnerable, the older population, and as you said, there's a tenfold decrease in the mortality risk from getting infected, which is, I mean, amazing. So that was a strategy we outlined. What happened is that the vaccine debate got transformed. So first, so you're asking about vaccine hesitance. I think there's the inherent limitations of how to measure vaccine safety, right? So we talked about a little bit about the trial, but also after the trial, there's a mechanism, and this is the work I've been involved.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I wrote a Wall Street Journal op bed with Sinatra Gupta in December of last year. A very night with a very naive title, which says, We can end the lockdowns in a month. The idea is very simple vaccinate all Vulnerable people And then open up.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shorter, but the infectivity per day is about as high. So you still, it's the point is that the vaccine might reduce some risk of infecting others, but it's not a categorical difference. So it's not safe to be in the presence of just vaccinated people. You can still get infected.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's a little complicated because I think the first two or three months after you're fully vaccinated after the second dose, you have 60, 70% efficacy peak against infection. Which is pretty good, right? But by six, seven, eight months, that drops to 20%. Some places, some studies, like there's a study out of Sweden suggested, might even drop to zero.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me give you, I've told you one thing that I got wrong in the pandemic. Let me tell you the second thing I got wrong for sure in the pandemic. In January of this year, 2021, I thought that the vaccines would stop infection. It would make it so that you were much less likely to be infected at all because the antibodies that were produced by the vaccines looked like they were neutralizing antibodies that would essentially block you from being infected at all. That turned out to be wrong. I think it became clear as data came out from Israel, which vaccinated very early, that they were seeing surges of infection, even in a very highly vaccinated population, that the vaccine does not stop infection.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for older people, it is a godsend, this vaccine. It transforms the problem of focus protection from something that's quite challenging, possible, I believe, but quite challenging to something that's much, much more manageable. Because the vaccine in and of itself, when deployed in older populations, is a form of focus protection.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So good, right? But the problem then was normally it would take a long time, the FDA would tell Pfizer to go back and try it in this subgroup. They'd work more on dosing. They'd do all these kinds of things that kind of didn't, we really didn't have time for in the middle of a pandemic. So you have a basis for approval that it's less full than normally you would have for a population scale vaccine. But the results were good. The result looked really good. And actually, I should say, for the most part, that's been borne out when we've given the vaccine at scale in terms of protection against severe disease So, people who have got the vaccine for a very long time after they've had the full vaccination have had great protection against going being hospitalized and dying if they get COVID.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was really, to me, about as amazing achievement as anything, organize a trial of that scale and running it so quickly.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, the other thing about trials, although there's tens of thousands of people enrolled, that's still not enough to get when you deploy a vaccine to a population scale, you're going to see things that weren't in the trial. Guaranteed. Populations of people that weren't represented well in the trial are going to be given the vaccine and that they're going to have things that happen to them that didn't anticipate. So I wasn't surprised when people were a little bit skeptical when the trial was done about the safety profile. Just the way the nature of the thing was going to make it so that it was going to be hard to get a complete picture from the trials itself. And the trials showed they were pretty safe and quite effective at preventing both you from getting COVID, I think the main endpoint of the trial itself was a simple.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for the vaccine safety data, it's actually challenging to convey to the public how this is normally done. Like normally you would do this in the context of the trial. You'd have a long trial with large numbers, relatively large numbers of people. You'd follow them over a long time. And the trial will give you some indication of the safety of the vaccine. And it did. The trial, the way it was constructed, when it was came out that it was protective against COVID, it was no longer ethical to have a placebo arm. And so that placebo arm was vaccinated a large part of it. And so that meant that from the trial, you were not going to be able to get. Data on the long-term safety profiles of the vaccine.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was wrong, right? I didn't, and I was so happy when I started to see the preliminary numbers in the Pfizer trial that strongly suggested it was going to work. I mean, like very few times in my life, I'm so happy to be wrong.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's what's how science is, right? That's why we found, I think, find it so attractive. I like it when a student shows me I'm thinking incorrectly, right? I'm really grateful to that student because now I have an opportunity to change my mind about it and then start thinking of it more correctly. I mean, that's, and there are moments when this is probably a good time to say what I think I got wrong during the pandemic, right? So like, for instance, you said Francis Collins had a moment when he learned that there was quite possible to get a vaccine going. He must have learned that quite early. I didn't learn that early. I mean, I didn't know in March of 2020. My experience with vaccine development, it would have taken, I thought it would take a decade or more to get a vaccine”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe that everyone that's involved in this debate has good intentions. They're coming at it from their points of view. They have their weaknesses. And if you can paint a picture in your questioning by sympathetic questioning of those strains and weaknesses and their point of view, you've done a service. And that's really all I personally like to see in those kinds of interviews. I don't think a gotcha moment is really the key thing there. The key thing is understanding where they're coming from, understanding their thinking, understanding the constraints they faced and how do they manage them, that's going to provide a much, I mean, to me, that's what I look for when I listen to podcasts like yours, is an understanding of that person and the moment and how they dealt with it.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think I've been now interviewed by many people. I think the style you have really works well, Lex. I don't think you're going to be ever an attack dog trying to go after somebody and force them to admit that they were wrong or whatever about it. I mean, I actually find that form of journalism and podcasting really off-putting. It's hard to watch.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing is, there's a lot that he has to be proud of in his career. I mean, like the Human Genome Project wouldn't have happened without him. And he is a great man and a great scientist. So it is tragic to me that his career has ended in this particular way.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I think that's right. I don't think that he has bad intentions. I think that he was basically put or maybe put himself in a position where This kind of conflict of interest was going to create this kind of a reaction. The kind of humility that you're calling for is almost impossible when you have that dual role, you shouldn't have as funder of science and also setter of scientific policy.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have the CDC And what happened during the pandemic is that people in the NIH were called upon to contribute to public health policymaking. And that created the conflict of interest you see in that email, right? So now you have the head of the NIH in effect saying to all scientists, you must agree with me in the policy that I've recommended. Or else you're That is a deep conflict of interest. It's deep because, first, he's conflicted. He has this dual role as the head of the NIH supporter of scientific funding. And then also inappropriately called to set or help set pandemic policy. That should never have happened. There should be a bright line between those two roles.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, this is an institutional failure, right? So the NIH, so I've had two decades of NIH funding. I've sat on NIH review panels. The purpose of the NIH is what you said earlier, Lex. The purpose of the NIH is to support the work of scientists. To some extent, it's also to help scientists direct scientists to work on things that are very important for public health or for the health of the public. And the way you do that is you say, okay, we're going to put $50 million on the research in Alzheimer's disease this year or $70 million on HIV or whatever it is. And that pot of money then scientists compete with each other for the best idea is to use it to address that problem. So it's essentially an endeavor to support the work of scientists. It is not in and of itself a policy organ. Don't say what public health policy should be.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the only role. It's like it helps understand the constraints we face, but it doesn't tell us what to do in face of those constraints.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what science is at its best. It's this process of using data in discussion. It's a human activity, right? To have the truth unfold itself before us. On the other hand, there's another way that people have used science or thought about science as truth in and of itself, right? This like, if it's science, therefore it's true automatically. And what does the science say to do? Well, the science never says to do anything. The science says, here's what's true, and then we have to apply our human values to say, okay, well, if we do this, well, this is likely to happen. That's what the science says. If we do that, then that is likely to happen. Well, we'd rather have this than that, right? But science doesn't tell us that we'd rather have this than that. Is there human values that tell us that we'd rather have this than that? Science plays a role, but it's not the only thing.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of the problems we've seen in the discussion over COVID, especially in the scientific community, there's two ways to look at science, I think, that have been competing with each other for a while now One way, and this is the way that I view science and why I've always found it so attractive an invitation to a structured discussion where the discussion is tempered by evidence, by data, by reasoning and logic, right? So it's a dialectical process where if I believe A and you believe B, well, we talk about it, we come up with an experiment that distinguishes between the two. And while B turns out to be right, I'm all frustrated, but I buy you dinner and I say, no, no, no, no, C. And then we go on from there, right?”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not let the virus rip where the most vulnerable are protected. The goal was to protect the vulnerable. So why let it rip? Because it was a propaganda term to hit the fear centers of people's brains. Oh, these people are immoral. They just want the let the virus go through society and hurt everybody. That was the idea. It was a way to preclude a discussion and precluded debate about the existing policy.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were met with instead a series of essentially propagandist lies about it. So for instance, I kept hearing from reporters in those days, why do you want to let the virus rip, let it rip, let it rip? The words let it rip does not appear in the Great Barrington Declaration. The goal isn't to let the virus rip. The goal is to protect the vulnerable let society go open schools and do other things that function as best it can in the midst of a terrible pandemic. Yes.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you come from that position, then you write an email like that. You go on TV, you say effectively mois. I mean, that is what happens when you have this sort of unchallengeable arrogance that the policy you're following is correct. I mean, when we wrote the Great Bank Declaration, what I was hoping for was a discussion about how to protect the vulnerable. I mean, that was the key idea to me in the whole thing was better protection of the older population who really had really serious risk if infected with COVID. And we had been doing a very poor job, I thought, to date in many places in protecting the vulnerable. And what I wanted was a discussion by local public health about better methods, better policies to protect the vulnerable.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My position is unchallengeable. Now, to be completely, to be as charitable as I can be to this, I believe they thought that. I believe some of them still think that, that there was only one true policy possible in response to COVID. Every other policy was immoral.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but there's a particular kind of arrogance, right? So here it's of the same kind of arrogance that you see when Tony Fauci gets on TV and says that if you criticize me, you're not simply criticizing a man, you're criticizing science itself That is at the heart also of this email. The certainty that the policies that they were recommending, Collins and Fauci were recommending to the president of the United States were right, not just right, but right so far right that any challenge whatsoever to it is dangerous. And I think that is really the heart of that email. It's this idea that”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I was there attracted me to science. Like, somebody, the lone voice saying, oh no, the moon of Jupiter does move. I mean, you know, but the funny thing is. Galileo was saying something truly revolutionary. We were saying that what we proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration was actually just the old pandemic plan. It wasn't anything really fundamentally novel. In fact, there were plans like this that Lockdown scientists had written in late February, early March of 2020. So we were not saying anything radical. We were just calling for a debate effectively over the existing lockdown policy. And this is a disappointment, a really, truly a big disappointment because by doing this, you were absolutely right, Lex. He sent a signal to so many other scientists to just stay silent, even if you had reservations.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does a democratic government deal with that challenge? So to me, yes, me how I felt. I was actually frankly just, I suspected there had been some email exchanges like that, not necessarily from Francis Collins around the government around this time. I mean, I felt the full brunt of a propaganda campaign. Almost immediately after we published it, where newspapers mischaracterize it in the same way over and over and over again. And sought to characterize me as sort of a marginal fringe figure or whatnot. Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kuhlf, where the tens of thousands of other people that signed it, I felt the brunt of that all year long. So to see this in black and white in the handwriting, essentially of, I mean, the metaphorical handwriting of Francis Collins was actually frankly a disappointment because I've looked up to him for years”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put this out in October 4th, I think, of 2020. And it went viral. I mean, I've never actually been involved with anything like this where I just put the document on the web. And tens of thousands of doctors signed on, hundreds of thousands of regular people signed on. It really struck a chord of people, because I think even by October of 2020, people had this sense that there was something really wrong with the COVID policy that we'd been following. And they were looking for Reasonable people to give an alternative. I mean, we're not arguing that COVID isn't a serious thing. I mean, it is a very serious thing. This is why we had a policy that aimed at addressing it. But we were saying that the policy we were following is not the right one.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was the policy solution that had been put forward by Dr. Collins and by Tony Fauci and a few other scientists. I mean, I think a relatively small number of scientists and epidemiologists in charge of The advice given to governments worldwide. And it was a challenge to that policy that said that, look, there is an alternate path, that the path we've chosen, this path of lockdown with an aim to suppress the virus to zero effectively, even though that was unstated, cannot work and is causing catastrophic harm to large numbers of poor and vulnerable people worldwide.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, he's a Christian and I'm a Christian. I'm supposed to forgive, right? I mean, I think he was looking at this A great Barrington Declaration as a political problem to be solved, as opposed to a serious alternative approach to the epidemic.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you want to the first time you meet it is going to be the most deadly for you. And so the first time you meet it is just wise to be vaccinated. The vaccine reduces severe disease.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source