Scientists Opened Pandora’s Box, What Now? | Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “This catastrophic response that we faced during this pandemic will happen again in our lifetimes. The new normal is lockdown until vaccine. That is how we’re going to manage pandemics until there’s an explicit repudiation of the doctrine by public health,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

In this episode, Dr. Bhattacharya shares his theory on what happened these last four years and the link between seemingly disparate events.

Dr. Bhattacharya is one of the plaintiffs in a landmark free speech case against the Biden administration, Murthy v. Missouri, and the co-host of the Illusion of Consensus podcast.

“The International Health Regulations and the WHO treaty are a way to essentially institutionalize this paradigm of how to manage pandemics going forward. You can’t have a Sweden next time that bucks the agenda,” he says.

*Check out American Essence magazine here. Use promo code 24ATL10 for $10 off! 

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya:
Thank you for having me, Jan. It’s always good to be back.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’re going to talk about the recent testimonies in Congress at the Covid Select Committee. Also, a lot has happened over the last four years. Please give us an update.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
I have a grand unifying theory of what has happened during the Covid era. It’s partly based on speculation, so I’m hesitant to lay it out fully, because the details might be subject to correction. But I think it explains almost the entire history of the last four years.

The central theme is hubris. The central theme is that a relatively small number of very powerful scientific groups and bureaucrats decided that they had a formula for eradicating disease from the planet and removing the possibility of any new disease ever engulfing the globe again. This goes back to 2003, when the SARS-1 epidemic happens.

The thought enters the mind of a few virologists and very powerful scientific bureaucrats that they can put a research agenda together to identify every single pathogen on the planet, even ones that have not come in contact with humans, bring them into research labs, play with them, and identify countermeasures and vaccines, so that they have them on stock just in case one of them makes the leap into the population.

Among the players in this are the people that were central with the decision-making over lockdowns and vaccines during the pandemic. It was people like Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health, and Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust in the UK that presented these ideas in papers. They invested a tremendous amount of money and effort with cooperation spanning from the United States to Europe to China to essentially rid the world of the possibility of pandemics.

For instance, there’s a paper co-authored by Tony Fauci and David Morens, his aide at the NIH, that lays out a vision of a society structured around the avoidance of infectious disease. They have a utopian vision for society. Their project, if you fast forward a few years, has a big success in 2012.

If you remember there was a big scare around this avian flu virus in 2006. The research agenda that they support results in essentially taking the avian flu virus in 2012 and mutating it so that it’s much better at infecting humans, in a lab. I don’t think there was a lab leak then. But what happened was that Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and a few co-authors, sponsored in part by the United States government, published this paper that essentially said, “Here’s how you take H5N1 and make it more transmissible to humans.” The scientific community then said, “This is very, very dangerous.”

Mr. Jekielek:
What they published showed exactly how to make it more transmissible.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes. Essentially, it was a blueprint for any somewhat sophisticated person to go and say, “I can replicate this.” It’s a scientific paper, openly published in a scientific journal, and potentially could be used by bad actors. This leads to the gain-of-function pause. There is a major movement within the scientific community to push back against this agenda because it’s seen as dangerous.

There is a history of lab leaks going for back decades. It is a real danger, especially if you have work being done in relatively unregulated labs. A lab leak isn’t necessarily a nefarious thing. It’s just that you’re human, you’re a lab worker, you’re pipetting, you get bored, the mask slips, or you get a cut. You might get sick and go home, not knowing that you’ve been infected and then you spread the disease. That’s what a lab leak is.

Then Tony Fauci worked very hard to reverse the gain-of-function pause that was put in place in 2014 at the behest of the scientific community, which had said this work was so dangerous. He succeeds, and in 2017, they put in this new P3CO process to really just self-regulate the conduct of this dangerous work, allowing the NIH to fund it some more.

Then in 2019, there were reports from Wuhan, China, right in the city where the NIH is supporting a lab that does work on bat coronaviruses, that implicitly there’s a leak. I don’t know that for certain, but let’s say that’s what they hear. Certainly what they hear is that there’s an outbreak in Wuhan, China, in 2019.

Put yourself in the shoes of somebody like Tony Fauci, who has been pushing for this agenda for most of his adult life. He’s heard back from the scientific community that there could be leaks and that it’s a really dangerous agenda. Then all of a sudden there’s an outbreak in the city where he supports a lab that does this gain-of-function research.

What kind of outbreak? It’s the kind of virus that you’ve supported doing this research on. You have opened Pandora’s box. The virus is out in the world and you’re going to get blamed for it. You’re going to be remembered as the scientist that supported the agenda that led to this great pandemic.

Mr. Jekielek:
If you look at some of the exchanges at the Wuhan between the Chinese scientists and the NIH scientists, they seem to be buddies. It’s like they’re on the same team. This is due to our failure in understanding dual use research in China, and how that lab was absolutely a Chinese military lab.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
That seems really likely, yes. The Chinese role is really interesting because they initially try to cover up the outbreak. They fail, because this virus is very easily transmittable from human to human. There’s only so much even an authoritarian government can do to cover up events like this.

Tony Fauci hears reports of this. The people that supported this agenda hear the reports of this. Now, remember the promise of this utopian agenda is to have available countermeasures should any natural pathogen make its way into the human population. Countermeasures mean vaccines and treatments.

One central mystery of the pandemic to me, and this is something I got wrong early in the pandemic, was how was it possible that we had a vaccine candidate so quickly? Normally it would take a decade to develop a vaccine candidate and test it before it’s allowed to be used at scale in human populations. We had no coronavirus vaccines prior to this pandemic.

Only within a week or so after the virus sequence is first officially released, we have a vaccine candidate. It’s roughly the same candidate that ends up being injected into billions of people just a few months later. Just a few weeks after Pandora’s box is opened, there’s also a great success in the development of a potential countermeasure to the pandemic.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please demystify this for us, because there were multiple companies that were working on things. We’ve got the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is actually being withdrawn right now. There’s Moderna and Pfizer. There are other non-genetic vaccines like Sinovac. It sounds like you’re talking about one candidate that was ready in a week.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
There’s a distinction concerning the thing that you’re targeting. The virus is this big sequence of genetic material and you don’t want to expose people to the virus. You want to expose people to the parts of the virus that induce an immune response. That’s what a vaccine is. When I say target, they had basically agreed on exactly the part of the virus that all of the vaccines in common were going to expose people to. They weren’t going to give the whole virus. All the differences between the vaccines is just the delivery vehicle of that part of the virus.

Mr. Jekielek:
The spike.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Right. It’s part of the spike.

Mr. Jekielek:
Part of the spike. It also happens to be the most toxic part.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
When you have a genetic sequence, you don’t necessarily know how your body is going to react to it. At that point, in January 2020, it’s just a sequence that looks like it’s immunogenic. It looks like they must have been doing research on it or else how did they come up with the target? This is an inference on my part, but I think it’s true.

At the same time Pandora’s box is opened, we also have news of a countermeasure. It’s a success and a failure of that research program arriving at the same time. The news of the potential lab leak and outbreak and the news that there is a vaccine target arrive almost on top of each other December 2019 and January 2020.

Again, put yourself in Fauci’s shoes. If it’s seen as a lab leak, it’s an enormous failure of his agenda. If it’s seen as natural origin and you have a vaccine target for something that you’ve studied, it’s an enormous success. The stakes could not be higher. Even if it’s seen as a lab leak, you still have the vaccine target early. Again, this is putting yourself in Fauci’s shoes. I keep saying Fauci, but it’s also a group of powerful scientific bureaucrats who are involved with this, not just him.

It’s almost like you need Shakespeare to write this up, Jan. Just think about the psychology of it. You’re going to be remembered as one of history’s greatest scientific failures, maybe even like the creator of the Frankenstein monster, or you’re going to be remembered like Jonas Salk who developed a vaccine that solved a pandemic. It’s one or the other.

Then the question then is how can you get to the point where people will allow you to use the vaccine at scale in populations? Because you still have to test it. The target is not enough. You have to do a little animal testing. You have to do human testing. Large scale trials are necessary to convince anybody that you should be allowed to use it.

The problem is that this is a very, very infectious virus. You can tell that from the outbreaks in Wuhan and the outbreaks in Italy and New York, but not just there. In January, there were reports of outbreaks in Iran, in Sweden, in the UK, and in the United States. The virus is everywhere. If people get the virus and recover from it, you’re not going to need the vaccine. What’s the purpose of a vaccine if most people already have immunity to this virus?

It’s a deadly virus so there’s going to be a lot of people who die from it. You want to make sure you can do two things at once. You recommend a whole suite of society-destroying policies like lockdowns, school closures, business closures, and church, mosque, and synagogue closures. Don’t go see your family members in nursing homes. Don’t visit your dying relatives in the hospital. Follow social distancing and treat your neighbor as a biohazard.

All of those things were designed to reduce the spread of the virus, but that was only in the minds of the people that were making the policy. It wasn’t the actual reality. But the idea was, “If we can do this, then we will do it.
If we can just lockdown until the time it takes for the virus to go all the way around the world, then we can get to the vaccine.” This lockdown to a vaccine ideology was a way to make sure that people aren’t going to remember just Pandora’s box being opened, but that there was a success that came out of this utopian program.

It worked in the sense that they won their policy fight. They convinced governments everywhere to lock down and close schools. They created this enormous experiment done on the lives of literally 8 billion people—and it largely fails. In the poorest parts of the world, you can look at the seroprevalence rates, meaning what fraction of the population has antibodies.

In July 2020, there were seroprevalence studies in the Dharavi slums in Mumbai, where 70 percent of the population already had the disease and recovered. In the richer parts, it was like 20 percent. It’s like they don’t really know social sciences. They don’t really understand the deep inequality of societies, so they don’t deeply understand that most humans cannot abide a lockdown.

Mr. Jekielek:
In multiple scientific papers, and in the WHO’s own guidelines in 2019, there is this huge cost to implementing these types of policies.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes. There was a very famous 2006 paper by Donald Henderson, a very famous epidemiologist who was responsible for eradicating smallpox.
He is the man most responsible for eradicating smallpox in the 20th century. This paper recommended against lockdowns, for exactly the reasons you said.

But there were also other plans, like bioterror response plans that countenance lockdown. If you listen to some of the interviews of Tony Fauci, when he’s asked about the cost and harms of the lockdowns, he said, “Other people are saying that’s not my job.” But of course, no one’s listening to those other people, and he’s working very hard to make sure that no one listens to those other people, especially the President of the United States. He’s controlling who the President sees.

There was a big fight in the UK over who the Prime Minister sees. In September 2020, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration with me, got to see Boris Johnson. There was a tremendous amount of unhappiness on the part of the scientific advisors, like Jeremy Farrar, that she got to see him.

People were saying, “Look, these lockdown policies are causing starvation at scale.” A hundred million people or more were in dire food insecurity, according to the UN in 2020. It was causing poverty at scale, dire poverty of $2 or less of income. There were people staying home and dying of heart attacks. None of that mattered because none of those are going to get counted in the balance sheet of a man who opened Pandora’s box.

Only the harm caused directly by the virus will get counted. In order to get that policy in place, you have to suppress your opposition. You have to make an illusion that what you believe to be the right policy is the current scientific consensus. Because the policy itself is so extraordinary that no one would do it unless every scientist agreed. The last thing you can afford is to have an opposition that is credentialed, that has reasoned arguments, and really deserves a debate. You cannot have that debate.

Therefore, you get the devastating takedown of the Great Barrington Declaration. You also get an ideology where almost every natural process that you would normally use would be trivial within science, so you have to suppress that too. Imagine how Tony Fauci reacts when he finds out in April of 2020, that three or four percent of the population of northern California and southern California already had Covid. That’s early in the pandemic. The lockdowns then had already failed.

The idea that you get immunity after you recover from Covid is a threat to your whole agenda. Because if 70 percent of the Dharavi slums already had Covid and recovered by July 2020, they’re not going to need a vaccine, unless you can question the idea of immunity in the minds of the scientific community. You make it misinformation to say there’s such a thing as recovered immunity.

You also create a sense in the press that if you think that there was a lab leak, you’re a conspiracy theorist. It is an absolutely important, vital part of the agenda, because if you opened Pandora’s box, you can’t have people thinking you opened Pandora’s box. They will stop listening to you.

The vaccine arrives and the data from the vaccine is equivocal in the big trials. The trials didn’t check to see if it protects you from dying. That wasn’t the endpoint of the trial. The trials also didn’t check to see if it stops you from getting or spreading Covid. But you need the vaccine to have both those properties in order for you to be seen as a savior, and for the utopian agenda that you put forward to have actually worked.

Even with the trial itself, the only endpoint was prevention of symptomatic infection. All of those vaccine trials didn’t have as a primary endpoint the prevention of death, for instance, or the prevention of getting and spreading Covid. You have to convince the population that the vaccine will essentially sterilize the virus and that you become clean if you take the vaccine. Because then you can get everybody to take it and you will be remembered as Jonas Salk.

Mr. Jekielek:
Except it turns out that the vaccine doesn’t work very well.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
That was the major problem, and they couldn’t accept that for almost a year or more. People started taking the vaccine very early on, and then they realized that if you take it, it doesn’t stop you from getting the disease. I took the vaccine in April, 2021, and four months later, I had Covid. A tremendous number of people around the world have had that same exact experience.

They saw for themselves the data that was coming out by late spring of 2021 and it was very clear that it had failed to stop people from getting and spreading Covid. Despite their best efforts, news of some of the side effects are seeping out into the population. The fact that it causes myocarditis in young men is coming out. They actually freeze the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of blood clots in April, 2021.

If you take a vaccine that’s been tested in 40,000 people and then you give it to tens of millions of people, you’re going to find things that happened that you didn’t see in the trial. That was starting to happen then. Even some of the stuff that you saw in the trial was starting to happen.

But the problem for the small number of scientific bureaucrats is that this is a dagger in the heart of the agenda. If everyone doesn’t take this vaccine, they can’t get the pandemic stopped. They can’t believe with their own eyes what they ought to be seeing, which is that the vaccine doesn’t stop you from getting and spreading Covid. That’s the vital thing that needs to happen for their agenda to work. It’s like you so firmly believe that the sun revolves around the earth that you refuse to see the evidence that it doesn’t.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. As you’ve aptly described, every incentive for them and their framework is pointing in that direction. Otherwise, they are finished.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
This explains all kinds of craziness that happened during the pandemic. Why did dissident scientists have their careers destroyed? Because if you don’t have the illusion of consensus, you can’t get away with this extraordinary agenda. Why was an idea like social distancing pushed forward? They had no scientific evidence for it before the pandemic, and certainly not during, especially given the way that the virus actually transmits, which is by aerosols.

Because the vaccine efficacy didn’t matter. They just wanted to throw the kitchen sink at it. They needed to close Pandora’s box no matter what. They didn’t have the technology, so they threw the kitchen sink at it.

Mr. Jekielek:
The part of the kitchen sink they didn’t throw at it was actually working well—the repurposed drugs that some doctors started using very quickly.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
But you have to make sure that no one believes that. Let’s just take one that is completely noncontroversial. You have the monoclonal antibodies approved for use by the FDA. President Trump takes it when he gets Covid in October 2020. You cannot have drugs that will work because that means the demand for the vaccine will be undercut, especially drugs that are developed outside of the research agenda that led to this Pandora’s box being opened. Every single aspect of this that makes no sense, actually makes some sense when you really understand their story and their agenda.

Mr. Jekielek:
Even the monoclonal antibodies not being rolled out at a larger scale?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes. They’re not a perfect tool because if you have a variant, you’ll have to do a reformulation of that monoclonal antibody, although you can do that very, very quickly. But you can’t have that because if people, especially the most vulnerable people, know that they can just get a monoclonal antibody if they get sick and it greatly reduces their likelihood of death, maybe they won’t take a vaccine.

The whole agenda is to close Pandora’s box, and to justify this decades-long utopian research project that Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, and a few other very, very powerful scientific bureaucrats had signed onto.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why and how has this approach become the norm?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
The great political success of the people that pushed this to convince governments around the world that this was the right thing to do
has created a constituency class of very powerful people; politicians, pharmaceutical company folks, public health officials, people who run schools, and people who run hospitals. The entire healthcare system signed onto this agenda.

Many scientists signed onto this agenda. Universities signed onto this agenda. The great, the good, the powerful, and the wise all signed onto this agenda, which was a tremendous mistake. It’s very difficult for this confluence of power to back down from this enormous error that caused so much catastrophic harm.

Mr. Jekielek:
Therefore, we have the WHO treaty and international health regulations as they are.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes, indeed. The international health regulations and the WHO treaty are a way to essentially institutionalize this paradigm of how to manage pandemics going forward. The premise of them is that there was too much national sovereignty. You can’t have a Sweden next time. That bucks the agenda. The problem was that as a world we didn’t work together fast enough to lock down.

In February, 2020, the WHO sent a delegation to China early in the pandemic. China had locked down Wuhan and the Hubei province in January, 2020. They declared the lockdown was a great success. They locked people in their apartments. They couldn’t come out and get food. They killed cats and dogs.

They essentially made an entire province unable to function for over a month. They then declared that it was an enormous success and that they had eradicated the disease. The WHO sent a delegation to China in February 2020. Tony Fauci’s aide, Cliff Lane, was on this delegation.

The delegation came back from this trip and there’s an email from Cliff Lane to Maria Van Kerkhove who was one of the main epidemiologists at the WHO. He writes, “What China did worked, albeit at great cost. We’re going to make difficult decisions, but it’s going to take more than just the people in this room.” The WHO just rubber stamped the Chinese response to the virus.

Mr. Jekielek:
We were looking at a whole bunch of different sources early in the pandemic. The official statistics were inaccurate, but Johns Hopkins just carried those statistics credulously.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
In the United States, we were counting as a Covid death anybody who had a positive Covid test some weeks before the death. When in fact, you might have died of a heart attack while having Covid at the same time. They may not necessarily have been causally linked, and yet, we were counting those as Covid deaths. In China, they were requiring that you had to have ground-glass pneumonia, which has a very specific diagnosis, before they were counted.

Mr. Jekielek:
The incentives structure was to show that someone had died from it. Everything was stacked to count as many cases as possible. How does that fit into your theory?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
If you’re going to lockdown until the vaccine, you better scare the living daylights out of the population. Death counts are a great way to scare the population. They didn’t have to work that hard. But at the same time, how do you keep it in the news? You keep it in the news by a steadily increasing number of cases, a steadily increasing number of deaths, and the cumulative maps that look like a video game where red circles pop up. You scare the living daylights out of the population to gain compliance.

Mr. Jekielek:
If you can show a “success story” with the lockdowns in China, that justifies doing it here. It doesn’t matter how preposterous the numbers were in reality.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
There was this idea that the West should copy Chinese authoritarian health policy. Neil Ferguson famously predicted that 2 million people would die in the United States, a half-million people would die in the UK, and 100,000 people would die in Sweden within two months of March 2020, unless they did the lockdown. It’s one of these math models where you can pretend that you just keep people six feet apart and the disease will go away.

He was interviewed and he expressed absolute shock that his idea of a society-wide lockdown was actually embraced by the West. He said that the Italian experience really transformed how people in Europe and the United States thought about how to manage the pandemic. It’s one thing for China to lock down, but it’s very different for a Western country that has civil rights protections and that has deep traditions and experience of managing pandemics in a much more rational way where you protect the vulnerable and you don’t disrupt society. That a lockdown could happen in the West was a real surprise even to Neil Ferguson.

That lockdown idea spread pretty rapidly. The panic in Wuhan was important, but once the panic spread to Bergamo and once it spread to New York, our fate was sealed. We were going to lock down. There was going to be an attempt to close Pandora’s box no matter what, with the most draconian public health policy that has ever been implemented at scale in history.

Mr. Jekielek:
This was coupled with the most dramatic erosion of civil liberties. This has happened in isolated countries like Venezuela where they voted communists into power. But this was completely unprecedented.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes. It was the lockdown for years and school closures for years. You could go back in history and point to occasional local school closures for limited periods of time. For instance, with polio, they used to close schools down sometimes. But at scale for years worldwide, this was completely unprecedented. It was the single biggest public health disaster in history and it was iatrogenic.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the definition of iatrogenic?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Iatrogenic means that the doctor has caused the disease. If you hear a doctor telling you, “We have iatrogenic disease on our hands,” what they mean is they probably made you sick or some doctor made you sick. Here, I mean it in the context of public health. Public health created this public health disaster.

Mr. Jekielek:
There have been recent testimonies to the Covid Select Committee and written testimony from Dr. Francis Collins. It’s a large amount of material and you’ve been following it quite closely. What jumps out for you? Are you seeing anything that doesn’t support your theory?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
I haven’t seen anything in these FOIA releases of emails that were happening inside the NIH that contradicts my theory. In fact, there’s quite a lot in there that supports it. Here’s a couple of highlights. One, it’s very clear that there was a cover-up of the idea of a lab leak from the earliest days of the pandemic. In January and February of 2020, Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar were very concerned that there were legitimate scientists who thought that a lab leak was the likely explanation.

They convened a group of virologists, several of whom came in saying, “Look, a lab leak is possible,” but within a day had agreed to write a paper rubber stamped by Francis Collins and Tony Fauci. They published this paper saying that the lab leak idea was proven false scientifically and that it was known with certainty that this was a wet market jump from a pangolin or a bat or something.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the most prominent medical journals in the world published something that was obviously false from a basic understanding of genetics.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
I had friends, molecular geneticists, who were telling me that it was not true and that they couldn’t prove that it wasn’t a lab leak. But I’m not a molecular geneticist, and I was already embroiled in other anti-lockdown fights, so I didn’t really look into it too deeply in 2020.

In retrospect, the idea of a lab leak being a racist or conspiracy theory was all ginned up by this set of people that opened Pandora’s box. There’s an email from David Morens, a collaborator of Tony Fauci, that says, “Don’t send me any emails on the NIH server because it’s subject to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests. Instead, send it to my Gmail, which is not discoverable.” He even uses the word smoking gun. It’s like a parody of a spy ring trying to cover something up.

The only analogy I can think of is President Nixon and the Watergate scandal. It turns out that Nixon was taping his White House conversations with the Watergate burglars. The investigating congressional committee said, “Wait a minute, there’s a tape?” That’s what this revelation is like.

The second revelation is that Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health, in 2020, conducted a devastating takedown of me, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta for the Great Barrington Declaration. Essentially, he called us pseudoscientists and fringe epidemiologists. He composed and sang a song and put it on the NIH webpage. Here was this folksy man, the head of the NIH, playing his guitar and singing about social distancing and keeping kids safe by keeping them at home.

There was never any good science behind this. In fact, there was good science against it. If you have an aerosolized virus, six-foot distancing is not going to prevent you from getting sick. The idea that closing schools was going to stop the spread of the disease had already been debunked by the Swedish experience in the spring of 2020.

Sweden, despite not closing schools, had better outcomes than neighboring Finland, which had closed schools. The public health authorities of these countries came together and evaluated this. In the summer of 2020, they issued this amazing report saying the Finnish closure of schools was a mistake. But Francis Collins is there singing this song about six-foot social distancing.

In this deposition that he gave just recently, he was asked. “Is there any science behind social distancing? Are there any published papers that would lead one to recommend this extraordinary public health policy that led to schools closing?”

Because how can you have schools open if you can’t sit six feet apart? That led to families not being able to say goodbye to their loved ones and funerals that are online. You couldn’t visit your parents in a nursing home. There were tremendous social costs. People could not celebrate graduations with their family members. They couldn’t get together for Thanksgiving or Christmas. There were no religious services. In this deposition, Francis Collins admits that there is not a single piece of scientific evidence supporting six-foot social distancing.

Millions are dead. We spent trillions of dollars. Public health did not protect us. We didn’t protect the populace from Covid or from the harms of the lockdown. If you lose a war, the generals that lose a war are demoted or put, or new generals are put in place.

Instead, what’s happened in public health is that the metaphorical generals who led the public health response are being promoted. They are giving them awards. Essentially, public health has decided they did a good job during the pandemic, at least by their actions and who they are rewarding.

That means this catastrophic response that we faced during this pandemic will happen again in our lifetimes. The new normal is lockdown until vaccine. That is how we are going to manage pandemics until there’s an explicit repudiation of the doctrine by public health.

Mr. Jekielek:
You describe this as a utopian kind of ideological hubris. This approach treats human beings as automatons, where it makes sense to manipulate people into behaving in certain ways to get specific outcomes for their own good. It’s a totalitarian mindset.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Absolutely. The fundamental core of this ideology is that we’re just biohazards. Humans are just biohazards. Human beings ought to simply treat each other as biohazards. All of our society should be structured around that idea. We have restructured society so that we don’t have to interact with each other physically, and so that we don’t pose physical threats to one another as biohazards.

It’s a utopia of separation and isolation. But all this has gone under the radar screen. Of course, none of us want to get sick. This is the promise of never getting sick again. Essentially living forever is a very attractive thing.

Mr. Jekielek:
In a society that puts an inordinate value on personal safety, what you described is much more attractive than it would have been in a society that isn’t so obsessed with personal safety.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
The idea that we can rid the world of all the pathogenic risks is an insane idea. What it leads to is isolation and, and dehumanization. The unfortunate fact about being humans is that we sometimes do pass diseases to each other. But that’s not our primary purpose as human beings.

As human beings, we gain from each other. We gain much more than we lose from being in community with each other. The idea that we should structure communities to promote isolation to prevent population biorisk is a fundamentally dehumanizing thing. It is not actual safety.

Mr. Jekielek:
On that note, here we are. What do we do about this?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
It’s going to take a political movement to undo it. This generation of people that made these decisions have a political incentive to say that they did the right thing. President Biden is never going to say he made any pandemic mistakes. It was all Trump’s fault. Trump is never going to say that the lockdown was a mistake or rapidly pushing the vaccine through testing was a mistake. He believes those were all great things that he did.

Politicians are never going to say they made a mistake. If they do say they made a mistake, many of them will say, “We weren’t acting rapidly enough. We should have locked down a week earlier,” even though the virus was probably already going around the world in November 2019.

You need a new generation of political leaders that are willing to look back and say, “We don’t want a society based on the idea that we are only biohazards. The scientific leaders who shut down debate and pushed censorship at scale in media and social media need to be replaced with new scientific leaders. We need to restructure how science is funded so that it’s fundamentally decentralized, so that a small number of people
can never again have the kind of power it had during this pandemic.”

Mr. Jekielek:
People will often say that it is someone else’s fault. There’s a lot of that here in DC.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
We have to overcome that. That’s just the nature of being human. In the Garden of Eden, Eve convinces Adam to eat the apple and then Adam makes a decision to eat the apple. When God comes around, the first thing Adam says is, “She made me do it,” as if it wasn’t his fault and that there was no other choice.

That is part of being human. But at the very least, we need structures that hold people responsible if they make catastrophic errors of this type, and then be able to replace them with different people. We need structures that create incentives for people to do the right thing, even if their inclinations are not to do the right thing.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is where morality comes in and owning up to one’s mistakes becomes a virtue.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Maybe I’m too cynical, but the idea that we should depend on the good virtue of our leaders to do the right thing is an impossible thing. It will never happen. There will be good leaders, and there will be bad leaders. There will be leaders whose inclinations differ from the populace. I would rather have a structure of power where a leader has every incentive to do the right thing, even if their inclination is to do the opposite.

Mr. Jekielek:
Jay, this has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
The political program we are talking about is going to take a while. But we do have a lot of assets that we have to acknowledge and use. The main asset is that a tremendous number of people have seen the harms of the decisions that were made during the pandemic. The political program is going to have to come out of that experience. A political leader that can use that experience to unify the people will find tremendous success.

I’m not a politician and I’m not going to be a politician. But it has been interesting to watch the opposition to the WHO treaty and the opposition to the school closures. It brought together people who were on very different parts of the political spectrum. Left and Right, if you will, came together on these issues. A politician that can take these elements and weave them into a successful program will do great good for the world.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have a podcast, the Illusion of Consensus, with Rav Avora, a young journalist doing some wonderful work. I also congratulate you for winning the Bradley Prize this year.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Thank you. The Illusion of Consensus is a fun podcast, because I’m doing it with this great young journalist. We are going to interview people that are being censored who have very interesting ideas that are not getting enough attention, related to pandemics and other elements of medicine. I’ve also been working with the RealClear Foundation on establishing a new way to do scientific journals.

Rather than having a peer reviewed journal being the gatekeeper for new scientific ideas, you could have a journal that doesn’t have that kind of traditional gatekeeping, but does have the peer review. Review is the most important part of science. It is not the publication of the science, but the review of the ideas. Traditional models of science publication say, “If you don’t pass peer review, we won’t publish.”

But in fact, what that does is protect a relatively small number of top scientists and spares them criticism. With this new journal model, you can publish, but you’re going to get reviewed. It will be a much more raucous and interesting science with much less capacity for illusion of consensus.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is more old school in a way.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes, exactly.

Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Thank you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.