Jay Bhattacharya

There were a whole host of things we put in the Great Parenthood Declaration with the hope that local public health would embrace this challenge.

In my view, we didn't try it at all sufficiently.

In fact, the criticism I got, one of the criticisms I got for the Great Parenthood Declaration was that we were already doing this.

We're doing everything we could already to protect old people.

self-evidently not true, even in October 2020.

I don't think it would have cost more lives.

I think ultimately the lockdowns ended up killing more people than would have been killed had those lockdowns not happened.

Yeah, exactly.

People died at home with heart attacks in 2020 because they didn't go to the hospital.

But also more broadly, the economic dislocations caused by the lockdowns

certainly killed vast numbers of people.

I think the fundamental error is people think that, well, if we'd only—the lockdowns sort of worked.

Yeah, so that's the argument, right?

But I'd say a couple things about that.

So one, we didn't know the lockdown vaccine was going to work.

That was not a certainty.

And the idea that when there's this kind of uncertainty, you must do this extraordinary draconian measure.

You take away basic civil liberties at scale.

for nine months like however long until you get the vaccine that i think is the end of civilization like if that is our paradigm for for managing these kinds of risks we can't have at least a free civilization um because you don't know if your kids are gonna be able to go to school you don't know you can't make basic plans if all of the basic promises that we have about our civil liberties are premised on there not being uncertainty over the spread of infectious disease then you just don't have a free country

Okay, so let me answer the immediate question and then the broader question.