Jay Bhattacharya

Through pressure on social media companies.

Exactly.

But if you focus attention, if you do that kind of suppression, it's not as if you actually suppressed the idea, really.

That idea still is in existence in populations.

There are other people thinking it.

And the very act of suppression actually elevates it in the public eye rather than allowing it to just sort of burble up and have the normal kind of debate that you would expect.

Yeah, so in October 2020, when we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, if you go read it, we actually have vaccines as one of the mechanisms of focus protection.

Again, I had this naive view.

You have this countermeasure, you use it to protect older people, and then you lift lockdowns.

But that wasn't what public health authorities actually said at the time.

I can show you examples, essentially a promising zero COVID, if only we can get the entire population or some version of this to take it.

That was the problem.

It wasn't that they weren't saying what they believed.

It's that what they were saying was false, given what the data actually showed.

They should have known it at the time.

What happened instead was you have the public health authorities doubling down on falsehoods.

If you don't take the vaccine, you are committing a social evil.

You're unclean.

And that message then is met by a whole bunch of people who are like, look, you're just wrong.

I don't want the public health authorities to be discredited permanently.