Jay Bhattacharya

That means the infection fatality rate on average for the whole population was much lower than we thought.

I would have thought that would have changed our approach, but that didn't happen.

Instead, I faced essentially attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious.

What form did those attacks take?

Like, I mean, at the university, there were like an investigation into the study, funding of this, all of which had been cleared up before the study was even done.

So it was entirely spurious.

At the NIH, the former head of the NIH wrote an email to Tony Fauci in October 2020, calling me a fringe epidemiologist.

I love that term, by the way.

It's fantastic.

Hopefully it will be on my grave.

I mean, the whole thing was absolutely extraordinary.

What was needed was an honest scientific debate.

I might have been wrong.

I mean, look, let's have a scientific debate and discussion.

Let's have alternate voices.

But instead, the ethos of public health was that just having the debate at all was a dangerous thing.

That's, if you want to ask me, you started with what went wrong.

That is the fundamental thing that went wrong.

I mean, okay, so...

I think there's two levels to this, all right?