Restoring Free Speech in Academia: Jay Bhattacharya

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] I recently had the pleasure of attending a Pandemic Planning conference at Stanford University. It was really the first of its kind, in that it brought together a wide range of voices on the topic in an academic setting, and it was held under the auspices of the new Stanford President Jonathan Levin.

“I think it’s expanded the range of things that are allowed to be said in polite society, if you will,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy and the lead organizer of the conference.

“The purpose of the conference was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around the world,” he says.

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

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya:
Nice to see you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
Congratulations on winning the Zimmer Medal from the Academy of American Science and Letters. It’s the second award, and Salman Rushdie was the first. What are you feeling about this new award?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Obviously, it’s a great honor. The award was given to me for sticking my neck out during the pandemic at a time when many, many other scientists and intellectuals didn’t. But it’s also true that there were many scientists and intellectuals that paid a huge price for it. My friend Martin Kulldorff lost his job at Harvard University as a tenured professor. Basically, almost everybody in academics who had academic positions that did stick their necks out had tremendous difficulty from their institutions. It was a really difficult time.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about yourself?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
It was difficult. I thought I was going to lose my job in 2020 at Stanford as a tenured professor. There were death threats for two straight years. When you have what feels like the entire establishment is trying to destroy you, it’s not the easiest thing. But at the same time, there were a tremendous number of people that I got to know that I never would have gotten to know, that I’d become friends with, which I admire tremendously. who, for them, and you could see it in the time when it’s difficult to speak up, then they spoke up, it’s the people of tremendous integrity whose values are quite aligned with mine, even if their politics might be quite different.

Mr. Jekielek:
It was the Santa Clara study that started all this, right? Please remind us about that and why it was significant.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Sure. In the early days of the pandemic, I had this hypothesis that the disease was more widespread than people realized. It looked like a kind of disease that spread quite easily relative to earlier versions of the, like the over 2003 SARS. It looked more like a flu in terms of how it spread from early epidemiological data. I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in March of 2020 with that hypothesis and calling for a study to measure how many people have antibodies in the population.

That led to me actually running that study in April of 2020, early April 2020, when it found that the hypothesis was sort of right. It was 4 percent of LA County and 3 percent of Santa Clara County had already had COVID in early April 2020. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was 50 times more infections than cases.

That meant that the disease wasn’t going to go to zero. The horse was already out of bounds. Large numbers of people already had it outside of the pen of public health and that was a quite controversial result. It was the first time I really had a taste of what it meant to be in the crosshairs of a lot of people that just don’t like the things you say.

Mr. Jekielek:
This medal is an Intellectual Freedom Award, right? You spent months organizing the Stanford Pandemic Policy Conference, which I was very honored to attend as a moderator. Let’s talk about that and its significance.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Sure. Throughout the pandemic, it’s been very difficult to organize discussions and debates between people who had an alternate view, like people who oppose the lockdowns, for instance, or people who oppose the vaccine mandates, the mask mandates, or all the whole school closures. It’s been very difficult to have those views represented in the public square. And one of the reasons why is that universities have not hosted discussions and debates. There was the idea that opposition from establishment people to these public health policies was somehow dangerous.

If people knew that there were tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists that opposed the lockdowns, well, they might not think that lockdown is the right idea. That was the reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration, for instance. Universities play a tremendously important role in paneling these discussions, especially in difficult times. The university mission of academic freedom inquiry aimed at finding the truth, is different from the mission of public health.

And it turns out, for public health, they viewed the university mission as a danger and applied tremendous pressure to universities to make sure that those discussions didn’t happen. In 2020, a former president of the university at Stanford, where I teach, John Hennessey, actually, tried to help me arrange a debate between me and somebody in the medical school who disagreed with me. Couldn’t find somebody in the medical school to discuss. We thought that they’re cowards. The issue was that they thought that empaneling me, putting me, platforming me was itself a danger. That’s what the medical school thought, or some people in the leadership.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re part of the medical school.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes, I had been teaching there for almost 25 years. It was an absolutely remarkable, complete violation of the mission of the university, which is to have those discussions. I might have been wrong, but the best way to deal with me is to have a discussion with me and make the points that show me wrong. That’s how we discover true things, is in sort of wrestling with each other on ideas.

Then in 2022, I met with Lloyd Minor, the dean of the medical school, and asked him if I could host a pandemic policy conference. It was then two years into the pandemic. He told me that it was still too early for a dispassionate academic discussion about pandemic policy and that many doctors who work at Stanford were still scarred from their experience of March 2020.

Now, Stanford actually wasn’t overrun in March 2020, but I think the medical profession as a whole, it was. I mean, it was quite a traumatic time to have this new disease. People were quite scared about how deadly it is, and, of course, the doctors are called to treat people and potentially face the danger of getting this disease themselves. And for a lot of doctors, it was quite a dramatic time even if they weren’t overrun like they were in New York or something.

But that doesn’t absolve the university’s mission to have these kinds of conferences. The conference that we just held at Stanford in October 2024 is four years late I think, but nevertheless, still quite an accomplishment. It was the first major university to host a large conference where people who disagreed about the pandemic policy were sitting in the same room talking to each other in a civil way.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the most common pieces of criticism was that it wasn’t that balanced, that it was mostly people that were sort of against the orthodoxy around COVID policy.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
I think that’s false. It’s just very false. There was actually quite a balance. The problem is that when you’re so used to having one-sided discussions at universities where you only handle people who want lockdowns, who want school closures, who want mask mandates, who want vaccine mandates, who think that censorship is a good idea. It’s stunning and somehow unbalanced when you have the other side represented at all. So I think it’s just plain false.

I mean, we had people on every single panel that represented the standard public health point of view, and we had people on the panel that
represented critics of public health. That’s exactly the purpose of the conference. The idea that you can deplatform an idea like, well, lockdowns are not a good idea, that rate-bearing declaration might be the right way, or censorship is harmful, you can’t deplatform those ideas. Those ideas are powerful. They have a resonance with the public for good reason. You can’t stick your fingers in your ear and expect the sound to stop.

Mr. Jekielek:
You talk about censorship. Many people may not think about this as censorship. Many people actually think about it as trying to deal with harmful misinformation. Let’s unpack how you view that.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Sure. As you know, I’m involved with this Missouri v. Biden lawsuit. The case had at its core the questions, should the government be able to tell social media companies and other media companies that these views are so dangerous that you shouldn’t allow them to be heard by the American people? Is there really a First Amendment? Do we really even have freedom of speech when it comes to public health?

Mr. Jekielek:
I was at the oral arguments and heard this idea of whether encouraging is actually telling, right? Like how much encouraging becomes telling or some sort of pressure or coercion, right?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes, the companies rely on the government not to destroy them. There’s regulatory authority the government has that actually could very easily destroy them if the government decides a certain way. And so it’s not an even relationship where the government is just equal partners telling these companies, oh, you ought not publish that, and the company’s interested to say, no, we want to publish that. It’s a very unequal relationship. The government can say, if you don’t obey us, if you don’t listen to our demands, we can destroy you as a company.

The president can go on TV and say, Mark Zuckerberg, you’re killing people. And then they can use the regulatory authority to say that you’re now a publisher and you’re liable to all kinds of lawsuits if you publish misinformation or regulatory action. And the lower courts agree with that. In fact, the Supreme Court didn’t disagree with that. The injunction in that case essentially said the power relationship was so unbalanced that it effectively was a suppression of speech. The appeals court used the analogy of Al Capone going to Chicago businesses and saying, you know, that’s a nice business you have there. It would be terrible if something were to happen to it in order to extract rents from the companies.

So yes, I think that that’s not the key thing. The key argument, forget about the legal case, the key moral argument is, in the time of a crisis, should people be able to say public health is wrong? And the problem with the idea that people shouldn’t be able to criticize public health in the time of crisis is that public health often is wrong in quite damaging ways. And criticism, if permitted, if allowed, would actually allow public health to course correct earlier and save lives.

So I’ll just give you an example from the world arguments in the Supreme Court. One of the justices, a hypothetical analogy that she made, where she said, look, what if you have social media craze where people are jumping out of buildings, you know, kids jumping out of buildings, filling themselves, jumping out of first story, second story buildings or whatever, and potentially harming themselves. If this is a social media craze that goes on like the Tide Pods craze, shouldn’t the government have the right to tell the social media companies to stop publishing that content?

I had a couple of reactions to this. I’ll tell you the first reaction I had to this is that during the pandemic, it was the government that was harming children. The government closed the schools. The government, on the behest of public health, essentially told children and parents to treat their children as if they were biohazards. They caused a mental health crisis. They had a tremendous loss of learning that will reverberate through a generation where we essentially left behind a vast number of children, especially minority children, especially poor children. It was the government, in effect, telling children to jump out of buildings. And it used its power to suppress critics of this policy that was blaming children. It was exactly inverted, the hypothetical.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is interesting, because obviously without that intent.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Intent is not relevant. The question is, what is the impact of the policy? It’s in the context of speech where we learn about the actual impacts of the policy. I don’t care if you have the best intentions or not. If you’re harming children, you’re harming children. And that is what the government policy did during the pandemic. And it deserved to be criticized. It was exactly the opposite in terms of who was actually doing the harm to children during the pandemic. There’s another argument, which is that if you’re a social media company and you have this jumping out of a building challenge or whatever, well, do you really want, do you really need the government to tell you that that’s a bad thing to highlight?

I saw this scene where Mark Zuckerberg came to Congress and the whole bunch of parents of children who committed suicide as a consequence of this social media bubble that Facebook had promoted was there in the back of the room. There was a shocking moment where one of the congressmen asked him if he had anything to say to the parents. He turned around and he apologized. The pressure on social media companies themselves to not put that kind of content forward is tremendous, and it doesn’t take the government to do it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right, so they will make that decision themselves. The question that the justice asked was, what if they don’t? Don’t we have a right to step in?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Right. The government actually could step in very easily without violating free speech rights just by saying to the public from their bully pulpit that jumping out of buildings is a bad idea. Parents, tell your kids not to jump out of buildings. They don’t need to violate the free speech rights at large in order to address that and that the way that you deal with that kind of speech is more speech.

Mr. Jekielek:
They could present another compelling argument, right?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
And the danger of the government presuming that it has sole possession of the truth when it evidently doesn’t is much worse than some, you know, somebody in the middle of nowhere posting something on the internet that’s wrong.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s jump back to the conference. Tell me about the setup. First of all, did you encounter issues with even broaching the topic? Some very prominent people were obviously backing what was happening. It wasn’t some sort of fringe effort from what I could tell, including the new president.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes. The conference itself, as I said, was four years in the making. I mean, I’ve been asking for a very long time. And it happened because Stanford, I think, has turned from what it was like during the pandemic. There’s a new president who is deeply committed to academic freedom and emphasized the importance of Stanford and the institutions of higher education in the United States being places where these kinds of very difficult policy discussions can happen. Where all kinds of points of view are represented, not just the orthodoxy. And I had been trying to get this conference going. When I heard that, I thought, okay, this might be the right time.

So I reached out to President Levin and asked him, are you willing to introduce the conference, not to take a side on any of the issues that were going to be discussed at the conference, but just to emphasize that the mission of the university required us to have conferences like this where we’re talking to each other, people who disagree talking to each other. When he agreed, essentially a lot of the people in the university followed the leader. That’s what they did.

I got several people who I disagreed with pretty fundamentally about pandemic management to appear on panels in the conference. The first panel was more skeptical about school closures and a lot of public health policies. Anders Tegnell, the Swedish state epidemiologist who was the architect and really the face of the Swedish response, which was very much different from much of the rest of the world in terms of the lockdowns. Doug Owens, who’s my boss at Stanford, the head of the Department of Health Policy, was much more in favor of many of those. Joshua Salomon, who’s a fantastic mathematical modeler in my department, who was also very much in favor of those things. And it was a great discussion about what do you do when you have so little information?

Put yourself back in March of 2020. How do you make those decisions when there’s such little information? You could see the range of ideas about how to manage that uncertainty. One is that you have to be very risk-averse and focus solely on the main threat. This is something that Josh did a really good job saying the main threat being COVID. Whereas, on the other side, you might have someone like Anders Tegnell saying public health is much broader than that. There’s more to public health than just the prevention of a single infectious disease. Even in the midst of a pandemic, you have to remember that. So it was a very rich discussion. But all of the panels featured that kind of rich discussion between the two sides. The people that criticized the conference as being one-sided, none of them attended the conference.

Mr. Jekielek:
Was there any moment where you thought this might not happen?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
There were several moments, yes. Especially when the LA Times writer, Michael Hiltzik, a financial columnist, wrote a hit piece a couple of months before the conference. A few of the people that had tentatively agreed to appear at the conference then backed out. It’s interesting to see the power that the legacy media has in the minds of people who support basically the orthodoxy. It’s not so much to convince people that the orthodoxy is right. It’s to essentially demonize criticism of the orthodoxy. You don’t even appear in the company of people who disagree. It’s the very antithesis of what the mission of a university is.

It is to have those disagreements even when they’re uncomfortable. And a panel is just even the people who disagree with the orthodoxy. That’s part of the mission of the university. It’s part of the truth-seeking mission of the university. The pressure was actually tremendous, especially a couple of months before the conference. It wasn’t even a large number of the legacy media people. It was just a couple, primarily this man named Michael Hiltzik from the LA Times.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why do you think things play out this way?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
If you have power, and you can use that to get your point of view through, a policy that you like through or whatnot, an illusion that there’s a scientific consensus on the topic when there isn’t. People will use it. They’ll use that power. Is it a tremendously irresponsible use of that power? An example of that might be when I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, with Martin Kulldorff from Harvard and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, which argued against lockdowns and in favor of focused protection of vulnerable older people, the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, four days afterwards, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown of the premise of the declaration. That led to hit pieces against me and death threats.

But more importantly than that, it essentially demonized the Declaration in the minds of people who didn’t actually even read it or engage with the ideas. It sent a signal to the scientific community and the policy community at large that you shouldn’t engage with this. It’s so fringe that you shouldn’t even think about it. That kind of power is always available to authorities, to leaders. And when it’s used to suppress discussion and debate, it’s an illegitimate use of that power.

Mr. Jekielek:
Are there ever topics that are beyond the pale or people that are beyond the pale to host at a university?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
That’s a touchy thing. For instance, free speech rights don’t apply if you bring up symbols of Nazism in Germany. I have very mixed feelings about that. Obviously, Nazism is a terrible evil that brought tremendous harm in the 20th century, so I can understand a country that has that kind of history to be wary about extending free speech rights that far. But those kinds of situations have to be very well-delineated exceptions to the general rule of free speech.

Because it’s not my position or your position or the government’s position or Michael Hiltzik’s position to say these ideas are so far outside the bounds you’re not supposed to say. Public health, there should not be a public health exception to the First Amendment. It’s not true that the public health authorities know the scientific facts so well, have so deeply embedded in them the norms of American society and the trade-offs of the values that people have on a whole range of issues, that they can sit above us and say, you are not allowed to say that. That itself is so dangerous that it doesn’t belong in the class of carving out exceptions to things you can’t.

There are things you shouldn’t be able to say. I shouldn’t be able to issue violent threats to people online or anywhere. I shouldn’t be able to defame you, libel you, and damage you. I shouldn’t be able to defraud you. There are certain kinds of speech that are delineated even in American law that say you’re not supposed to extend free speech, and those are legitimate. Child porn, for instance. These are things that we as a society decide are outside the bounds of speech. But they’re very well delineated in the protections to make sure that those exceptions don’t bleed into the general rule, which is that almost all of the ideas that one might think we should be able to set.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you feel there was something specifically on one of the panels where an idea was developed beyond where it had been before? I guess this is my question, because it absolutely was the first conference of its kind in the sense that there were people with quite different, dramatically different viewpoints. I mean, that in itself is an achievement in itself. But what about if the idea is to try to develop something further, right?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
There were at least a couple of examples. I can think of lots, but let me highlight two examples of ideas that I hadn’t heard before and I hadn’t really seen expressed. On the misinformation and censorship panel, there was a really robust discussion about whether the government ought to have the right to pressure social media companies to tell them, don’t publish this. And there’s a former New York Times journalist named Gardiner Harris who made the argument, which I hadn’t really seen made public before, that the problem was that the government had become kind of very, very insular. It used to be the case that the government that journalists could go into the CDC talk to people that were below the director level.

Mr. Jekielek:
They were allowed to speak with journalists. There was this culture of semi- transparency.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
You recast the problem of censorship as a problem of government transparency. So if journalists could come and talk to people in the bureaucracy and report what the scientists do in the bureaucracy, all this idea that the government should or shouldn’t be able to pressure social media would go away, in a sense. You’d have this kind of transparency. The government itself would promote the kind of transparency that wouldn’t require them to pretend to have a monolithic point of view, in a sense.

And I thought that was interesting, that there’s been a transformation in the norms of communication within our government itself, where the idea is control of the public picture of what the agency believes rather than this reflection of what the people inside the agency actually believe. I thought that was really interesting. I hadn’t seen that put out publicly before. On the viral versions panel, that was the panel I had the most difficulty getting people from two sides to come.

The panel had several people that were quite prominent in the lab leak debate on the pro-lab leak side, the idea of pro meaning that it was a lab leak that caused the pandemic side. People like Bryce Nickels, who you interviewed earlier, Laura Kahn, Simon Wain-Hobson, the man who sequenced the HIV virus in the 1980s, and others who proposed that it was a lab link that caused the pandemic.

I had trouble getting people from the other side. My good friend, Sunetra Gupta, who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration with me, when I told her about the conference, and I told her about that panel, she said she wanted to be on that panel. I was a little taken aback when she said, it’s not a lab leak, Jay, a point on which I think you disagree. But I was absolutely delighted to have her step up and say, I’m going to make the argument against the lab leak. I thought that was quite an interesting, vigorous discussion, because Sunetra made an argument that is different from many of the other people who think that it was of natural origin.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. In speaking with her, I remember one of the points is that there’s been a number of papers that have been published, which, well, let’s say, perhaps deserve a lot of criticism, would be a nice way of putting it.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
She hates those papers. These are papers published in Science and Cell and Nature, essentially trying to say that there’s a scientific case that it started at the wet market. And in her view, those papers are deeply flawed scientifically. It’s kind of interesting and amazing, actually, that she made the natural origin argument, even though she’s completely intellectually honest about the problems with those papers.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, and the one thing that came out of, for me, out of that, which was interesting, is when people see those papers and look at them, let’s say, honestly, they may themselves assume because of their existence that it probably is a lab leak, as opposed to trying to look at the information dispassionately. Does that make sense?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
There are several possibilities. It’s not a binary. Is it a lab? Did it happen at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Versus did it come from the wet market? That’s the way the debate’s been framed. But in fact, there are other possibilities. Maybe it’s a lab leak, but not the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
There are other labs in Wuhan, actually, that are studying coronaviruses. Maybe it’s a natural origin, but it didn’t start in the wet market in December 2019. Maybe there are other places it started that we haven’t looked at or haven’t seen, right? It’s a broader debate than just the binary.

I still think from the evidence I’ve seen, the molecular biological evidence and other pieces of evidence, that it’s likely that it was a lab leak, Probably sometime in September, October 2019. But this is a debate that’s not settled. It’s probably difficult to settle when the parties involved have a very strong incentive to cover up vast parts of the data sets that might allow one to resolve the debate.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said there are other examples and you mentioned two. Does anything else come to mind?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
The discussion between Anders Tegnell and Josh Salomon and others on that first panel was very, very interesting to me personally. I’m very interested in how you make decisions under uncertainty, especially in times of stress. I don’t know if this was unique, but I hadn’t seen people who had such different points of view in discussion with each other about how to manage that kind of uncertainty, the idea at the very beginning of the pandemic of a precautionary principle, that almost any policy measure is worth doing to try to prevent it from happening.

You lock the schools down. You lock businesses down. You violate the basic civil liberties so that you can. It was all bad things that I think everyone would admit, but it’s worth it to do that in order to avoid this catastrophic thing from happening. The precautionary principle, though, doesn’t actually entail what I just said. The precautionary principle is that if you have a possibility of some catastrophic bad thing happening, and you don’t know that it may or may not happen, there’s some possibility of it happening or not happening, you’re allowed to assume the worst about that thing. For instance, with this virus in February 2020 where there’s a lot of uncertainty about the death rate, you’re allowed to assume the worst about its death rate.

Mr. Jekielek:
Which some of the models seem to do, right?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes. They all painted the worst case about the death rate. You’re allowed to do that. The precautionary principle allows you to do that. What you’re not allowed to do is assume that the interventions that you’re putting in place will work to prevent those deaths. That’s not part of the precautionary principle. You still have to do due diligence and ask, will closing schools actually stop the virus from spreading? Preventing church services, preventing funeral services from happening, what impact will that actually have? Closing down businesses at scale, what impact will that have?

You have to do analysis. You can say, it’s really only the laptop class that will be able to actually abide by the lockdown orders for any extended period of time. Working class people have to work. People have to feed their families. You’re not going to be able to lock down for an extended period of time without having large numbers of people saying, I can’t do this, I’m going to need to continue to react. You have to ask yourself, will the intervention work? You don’t have to assume it’s going to work.

Then you also have to ask yourself, what are the harms of the intervention? You’re not allowed to assume that stuff is going to be harmful. You know closing schools is going to harm children at scale. right? You know that locking down all the Western economies of the world for extended periods of time is going to have tremendous impacts on the poorest people of
the world, right?

The UN put out a report in April of 2020 estimating that 130 million people would face starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocations caused by lockdowns. Then you have to ask yourself, do the interventions make sense in the context of the harms they’re going to do and the likelihood they’re going to work or fail vs. the worst case scenario of how bad the virus is. All the precautionary principle allows you to do is resolve uncertainty about the particular threat, not the efficacy of the intervention to manage the threat or the harms of those interventions. You still have to do essentially a benefit-harm analysis in order to make decisions, even in the context of the precautionary principle.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is the first time this has been litigated.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Yes, it’s the first time litigated with people on stage talking to each other, with very prominent people talking to each other in a civil way. I didn’t hear any epithets. It was actually quite a nice discussion, I thought.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about the aftermath? I’m assuming that people have been talking to you. There have been some more things written against it. We did some neutral reporting about what happened. What about the aftermath?

Dr. Bhattacharya:
From my point of view, it has been quite positive. There were people that didn’t like something said during the conference. That’s going to be the case. If you represent people with many points of view, everyone can find something that was said on a panel. That’s fine. But generally, around Stanford and around my colleagues at universities all around the world,
they were actually quite happy that the discussion happened. It has expanded the range of things that are allowed to be said in polite society, if you will.

And even more important to me than the academics, I’ve gotten many messages from people who’ve watched some of the videos who were regular people, not scientists, that were happy that their views were finally, in some way, reflected in these academic discussions, that they didn’t feel as if their views were marginalized. And so I think that, in that sense, it was a tremendous success. These are very thorny policy issues, and they don’t get resolved by a single conference.

But I do think that the fact that we ran this conference has given permission, A, to start talking about these issues in public much more openly on all of these topics. And then also for other universities to host similar events. I mean, I know that that’s in the works for many, many other places, or a few other places at least. We’ll see if they pan out. But it’s quite heartening. I mean, that was the purpose of the conference, was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around.

Mr. Jekielek:
There has been a lot of criticism of the academic community about this. But it’s the academic community through this conference that is trying to come to terms with very different viewpoints.

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Groupthink was a major problem during the pandemic in academic circles, in public health circles. The enforcement of this idea that you can’t say something outside the orthodoxy that is somehow transgressive. That’s why I received that Zimmer Medal, because I didn’t think they were transgressive. It just seemed like common sense.

Don’t don’t harm kids. Let them go to school. But it was transgressive if an academic said a transgressive thing and expressed it publicly. As I said at the beginning of our interview, I faced tremendous pressure to not do that. People lost their jobs and lost their reputation, it didn’t matter.

I have a colleague at Stanford named Michael Levitt. He’s an absolutely brilliant scientist. He won a Nobel Prize for his early work on protein folding and computational biology. Early in the pandemic, he was quite skeptical about the lockdowns. He did modeling from a different point of view and argued that the lockdowns were not the right approach.

He also faced pressure within his scientific field. He was uninvited for a scientific meeting in his field because of his ideas on pandemic management. That kind of pressure was so ubiquitous that it made it almost impossible for people who have reservations about the lockdowns to speak up. It reinforced the groupthink of the public health community that thought, oh, everyone agrees with us. We should close schools. We should close businesses. We should impose vaccine mandates. We should adopt authoritarianism as a solution to a pandemic. I mean, all of that was orthodox scientific, public health group thing. And it was upheld by this omerta, this crushing of dissent.

And the purpose of the conference is, I hope, to make sure that that group of things doesn’t happen. But I hope what ultimately happens from it is we return to a tradition, that universities return to their mission, which is to host these discussions so that that group thing cannot ever emerge. The truth doesn’t come out of a group thing. The truth comes out of engagement with people with different ideas.

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

Dr. Bhattacharya:
Thank you, Jan.