- Dr. Aaron Kheriaty
- Dr. Martin Kulldorff
- Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya
- Jim Hoft
- Jill Hines
- The State of Missouri
- The State of Louisiana
On Friday The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft interviewed Jay Bhattacharya, a very popular and brilliant scientist from Stanford who was very outspoken against flawed government COVID policy during the pandemic.
Jay Bhattacharya along with former Harvard Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and renowned Oxford Epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 challenging then conventional and misguided COVID government policy. The declaration was signed by nearly one million health professionals and concerned citizens.
Because of his criticism against government policy, Jay Bhattacharya was investigated by his university and was censured, smeared, and silenced on social media at the behest of the US government.
Jay Bhattacharya told us about his challenges since he first spoke out against the government’s COVID policy.
Jay Bhattacharya: Well, I’m a professor at Stanford University. I have been since 2001, actually, I’ve been at Stanford since 1986. I got my MD and my PhD and my master’s degree, all at Stanford. And so I’ve been here with a couple of years away, more or less continuously since, for almost 40 years. I’m a scientist. I publish scientific papers. I have 100 some plus scientific papers. I lost count. What I do is I analyze data, I ask scientific questions, and I publish in scientific journals. Before the pandemic, before March of 2020, I’d never published an op ed. I think I’d been on TV once, and my mom watched. But when the pandemic hit, I’d been writing on infectious disease policy and on infectious epidemiology for a very long time, almost for the earliest days of my professional career. And when the pandemic hit, I realized that there was a key piece of information we didn’t know. But in March of 2020, people were making decisions without this key piece of knowledge. That knowledge was how many people had already had COVID and recovered how many people already had COVID. That piece of important information was important for a couple of reasons.
One, if you want to know the death rate, it’s not just enough to see okay. Among the people in the hospital who have COVID, how many of them died? That was like 3 or 4%. That’s a catastrophically large number if it applies to the whole population. But you also want to knowhow many people got COVID and had mild disease that never showed up at the doctor and we didn’t have that information. But there’s a technology to do it, which is called a seroprevalence study, where you measure how many people in the population have antibodies. If you have someone antibodies, then that means that they’ve had the disease. I was really surprised that the CDC had not run such a study by March of 2020, in time for the lockdowns. They imposed the lockdowns without knowing this basic key fact. And the second thing that you get is that, you know, we had this lockdown for already, for two weeks when I ran the study in April 2020. – If a lot of people already had the disease and recovered, that strategy is not going to work…
…I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in March 2020, and then a bunch of people reached out to me, offered me resources, including test kits and things to run the study. And two weeks later, we ran this study in Santa Clara county, and then another week later in LA county, and we found the same result. For every person that had been identified as a case having COVID, there were 50 or 40 or 50 people walking around with antibodies that nobody knew about. What that meant was that tens of thousands of people in the United States had already had COVID. It was like 4% of LA county, for instance. It was already out of the barn. It was too late. The lockdowns were not going to do. We’re not going to protect anyone ultimately from getting COVID.
COVID policy and the abuse of children
Jay Bhattacharya: …There was a story in the San Jose Mercury News in May of 2020 of these two children, maybe six, seven, eight years old. I’m not sure exactly. They were very young. They’re Hispanic kids, and their parents lived in this low income area, in the Bay Area. They didn’t have access to good Internet at home, so they brought the kids to a Taco Bell, which had public wifi, and they sat them outside the Taco Bell as they went off to work. And the kids are sitting there with chromebooks given to them by the teachers or something. And the Taco Bell employees are just like. They’re like, being really nice to them. But think about that. We basically consigned poor kids to go study on the street, and that’s in the United States. If you look at what happened in the rest of the world, Jim, it is absolutely, I mean, depressing doesn’t begin to cover it.
Jim Hoft: So let me bounce ahead a little bit. You put an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, and I started seeing you on Fox, I think, Laura Ingram maybe in the first place I saw you. And then, of course, you had the great Barrington declaration, but I think that came a few months later. But you were speaking out on Fox and you were making a lot of sense. And is that when you started to get some pushback?
Jay Bhattacharya: We got pushback almost immediately, Jim. So I published 60 studies in my life. This study that said that 50% of people had antibodies, got a lot of attention, and it also led to pushback inside the university. There was this Buzzfeed hit piece on my wife and on me, attacking me and my family, questioning my integrity. The university started. I don’t know what to call it. They called it a fact finding mission. I mean, it felt like an inquisition to me. And for months I was bogged down in this. Just for my crime was I ran this study with an answer that people didn’t like. And so it was really stressful.
The Great Barrington Declaration.
Jay Bhattacharya: The Great Barrington Declaration, that was the summer of 2020, the declaration came in October of 2020. My colleague Martin Kulldorff organized it… Martin is a plaintiff for our case. And Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, the three of us, he’s a Harvard University professor then. And then Sunetra, she’s from Oxford. She’s the best epidemiologist in the world. Like the most prominent, most interesting, just a great epidemiologist. So the three of us signed the Declaration saying, look, the lockdowns were a tremendous mistake. They’re causing all this catastrophic harm, like we talked about. They’re not actually protecting people from getting the disease. Lots and lots of people get the disease despite the lockdowns in most of the world. So we call for focus, protection, and there’s this major age gradient. It’s really older people that are really at highest risk, whereas children are very low risk from dying, from getting COVID.
And so the right strategy is protect older people, adopt humane strategies to protect older people, while at the same time let kids live their lives normally. It’s ethically evil to disrupt their futures on the vain hope of trying to suppress the disease.
Almost a million people signed it. And it was overnight. I mean, we put it on a web page, and almost a million people signed, tens of thousands of doctors, a Nobel Prize winner, an epidemiologist signed it. It took off. I think the key thing is not the ideas in it, because those were obvious. They were obvious in April 2020. They’re the old pandemic plan. There’s nothing, like really radical in it. I think the reason why it was important is it told people that there was no consensus in favor of lockdown… So I went on TV just to say I figured I had to tell the public what I was seeing. That’s my ethical obligation as a scientist, I think.
The empire strikes back.
Jay Bhattacharya: Four days after we wrote the great Barrington Declaration, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, a man I actually, once upon a time, admired, I believe, an honest to God, excellent scientist and also a believer, he wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown of the great Barrington Declaration. And then he labeled me Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, fringe epidemiologists! F R I N G E. Fringe epidemiologists! I mean, just an ad hominem slur. And then all of a sudden, those words started appearing all over the press.
“Fringe ideas,” in hit piece after hit piece after hit piece, accusing me of eugenics, of wanting to kill people. It was an absolutely unhinged attack organized by the head of the National Institute of Health, instigated by the head of the National Institute of Health. I mean, the thing about that is that it’s such an abuse of power.
I think it was, like, October or November of 2021. When I finally saw this email (published by a reporter), I was stunned. I was absolutely stunned. It made me question a lot about. I’d once upon a time admired Francis Collins, and it turns out that he acts in this deeply unethical way. The NIH has redacted a lot of requests for FOIAs, but they didn’t redact this one.
If I were in his shoes and I had these dissident scientists criticizing my policy is I would have organized a policy conference and let’s have a discussion. That’s how you do science. It’s not a partisan thing. It’s not an ad hominem thing. It’s how you manage. Disagreement in science is you discuss it, you bring evidence to bear, you do experiments. That is the right way to deal with it. His approach to it was this brass knuckle, let’s destroy the livelihoods and careers of anyone that disagrees with them. And he’s a high government official. What I learned during the, I think we’re going to talk about the Missouri versus Biden case.
The government steps in to blacklist Jay.
Jay Bhattacharya: Let me tell you what I found when I got to Twitter headquarters. Okay, Elon buys Twitter. Then he invites some journalists in. He opens up the database. And one of the journalists is this woman who runs the free Press named Barry Weiss, who’s a friend of mine.
She does a search on me and finds a picture of me in the Twitter database. It’s like me with the word “blacklist” written across my face. Okay. All right, so Stanford scientist is blacklisted. I joined Twitter in August of 2021 mainly to advocate about the Great Barrington Declaration. That was the very first tweet I did was first or second tweet I did. It was the Great Barrington Declaration. I got 200,000 followers. Most academics, they get 50 followers and they’re happy, right? So I was like, surprised I got 200,000 followers. Maybe because I was on TV. I’m like, okay. But I went on Twitter to reach people who didn’t agree with me.
Tt turns out I was on this blacklist that this was found in the Twitter files expose. They made sure that my tweets only reached my followers, that it didn’t reach people who disagreed with me. I didn’t know that I was on the blacklist… And then Elon invited me in December of 2022 to go visit Twitter headquarters. And what I found out there was that I was put on the blacklist the day I joined Twitter, August 2021.
And the Missouri versus Biden case, which started in, I think it was like, August, September 2021, the evidence that we have developed in that case is tremendous.
It’s not just Twitter, it’s Facebook. We have emails from the White House ordering Facebook to take people like Alex Baronson off the site.
This was an amazing interview.
Jay Bhattacharya refused to back down to government pressure. Today he is fighting for you and your children and the future of this country.
