Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
speaker
188 appearances
9 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 11 May
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I'll find it to share. If I'm wrong, I'll definitely correct myself, but it'll be, I'll share.
Well, I think the principle I'm trying to get across, maybe I didn't do a good job explaining it, but the principle I'm trying to get across is that if you say that certain drugs are off limits and they're pretty safe, and people want the thing, It's like a harm reduction idea.
Essentially what you're saying is that you're going to make this forbidden, this drug is forbidden, and they'll find ways to get it, and it'll be unsafe because they're getting a version of it that's bad for you. Instead of that normal harm reduction idea, which is at the center of a lot of public health, they decided they were going to say, no, you can't have this drug at all.
In fact, doctors will lose their license if they get the drug. That was a tremendous mistake. And as a result, I think there, I don't know how many cases, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I do remember seeing a paper, Drew, I'll send it to you if I can find it. But that principle of harm reduction was violated by public health when it came to ivermectin. It absolutely was.
Well, I mean, it was Francis Collins who wrote those words, which shocked me when I saw them. It was about a year after he wrote the email. It led to death threats on me and hit pieces and a whole bunch of slander. But I personally... personally, I couldn't forgive him. I think he, as a human being, made a mistake.
From the point of view of NIH director, though, it was an abuse of power on his part. And it's a poor example for our scientific leaders to set that kind of example. When we disagree with each other, we disagree with each other with data and we change our minds when we are wrong. I mean, those are just normal things in science.
And for someone like him, and then of course it had this huge impact on the policy we picked. He got his way. He got the lockdowns he wanted. Schools closed in fall 2020. And I've seen him now essentially on an apology tour I just feel sad for him now.
He goes around, what he says is that, well, I wasn't looking at all of the harm that these COVID lockdowns were doing to the poor, to the vulnerable children, the working class. And that's just, I mean, I don't understand how you, I mean, I like that he's confessing that he wasn't seeing that. That's a good thing for him to confess.
but I don't like that he, he's still justifying saying that the Great Barrington Declaration was somehow wrong or, I mean, the whole purpose of the Great Barrington Declaration was to bring- Because they always go to, they always go to, you just wanted to let it rip, just let it rip.
the solution to it is exactly what Vanessa just said, like have a broad range of viewpoints at the table, right? The idea of one small group of, I mean, he's a geneticist. He's not even an epidemiologist. He's a geneticist. Like why would he have the wisdom or expertise to know exactly how to organize all of society?
The principle, the basic principle that they used was that we should treat each other as biohazards, that all humans are simply biohazards and nothing else, right? And it was a predictable failure.
And I think if they had had the idea of allowing there to be other voices to speak, not devastating takedowns, but just engagement, critical engagement, that would have been, we would have had a much better outcome from the pandemic.
How do you go back from that, Drew? Once you've made that tremendous error, And you know history's going to judge you on that, right? You were in charge of the NIH. You were in charge of the NIAID at the time when this crisis happened, and you made this tremendous mistake. Let's just go further. They may even have caused the pandemic, and that's what Bob Redfield says.
I mean, supported the research that caused the pandemic. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I hope I'm never in that position, but if I am... Yeah, it's horrible. I would want to, I think I could just- It's horrible.
Yeah, I mean, I think that... Oh, go ahead, Vanessa.
I actually did like one book of Foucault's, but maybe we can defend this later. He wrote this book called The Birth of the Clinic, which I read early as a medical student, which is worth… every doctor's, it makes, it's a little humbling actually. Like it makes, it puts the doctor's, he calls it the gaze, the doctor's vision of how they view patients.
He puts it in this like historical context that I think every doctor should see. The broader view, I don't think I can defend, but that book, I think it'd be fun to have a little discussion over.
I mean, I think the idea that we could... essentially lock ourselves away, essentially treat humans as if they were like lab rats. If you want to keep lab rats from infecting each other, you just put them in cages far away from each other, right? That's the premise of the lockdown. It seems so intuitive that would work. The problem is like that intuition is just wrong.
Human societies are not like rat cages, right? Human societies are very complicated things. And the idea of isolation being healthy, you're absolutely right, Dr. Drew. I mean, it's crazy to think that isolation is healthy. It's one of the worst things you can do to human beings is to isolate them. And to have that as the epitome of good health policy for a full two years makes no sense.
The public did not know that there were prominent scientists that disagreed with the lockdown policies.
Showing 161–180 of 188 · page 9 of 10
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