Premium Only Content

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Our COVID Response 4-22-22
The Stanford professor and Great Barrington Declaration coauthor stands up to COVID-19 autocrats and disastrous lockdowns by following the science.
Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
------------------
On October 4, 2020, when COVID-19 was raging, American schools were mostly shuttered, and vaccines were believed to be years away, a team of top researchers at the world's most prestigious universities—including Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford's Sunetra Gupta—published the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter challenging the official U.S. response of lockdowns and government control of ever-larger parts of the economy and everyday life.
Recognizing that COVID overwhelmingly affected elderly Americans and others with specific, identifiable health conditions, they called for a policy of "focused protection," in which the vulnerable would be kept safe and the rest of us, especially children and young adults, would be able to get on with our lives.
The response at the very highest levels of government was quick and draconian. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote a private email to presidential chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, which was later obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, denouncing Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta as "fringe epidemiologists" who deserved to be the subject of a media "takedown."
"Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation,' says Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford who also holds a Ph.D. in economics. "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip,' when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats."
I sat down with Bhattacharya to talk about what it was like to be at the very center of an official effort to suppress heterodox thinking about the pandemic, why he believes he and his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors have been vindicated, and whether the public health establishment can ever recover from ongoing revelations of incompetence, malfeasance, and politically motivated decision-making. He also discusses how the centralization of science funding encourages dangerous groupthink, why he believes in mRNA vaccines but remains staunchly anti-mandate, and why he stopped wearing masks a long time ago.
Interview by Nick Gillespie; edited by Adam Czarnecki.
Photo: CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; gbdeclaration.org; Stefani Reynolds - Pool via CNP/MEGA/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom
License
Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Source: https://youtu.be/MpnbMIOvbjc
-
LIVE
Nikko Ortiz
2 hours agoLIVE STREAM!!!
1,034 watching -
LIVE
The White House
4 hours agoPresident Trump Participates in a Cabinet Meeting, July 08, 2025
3,190 watching -
LIVE
Sean Unpaved
1 hour agoMidseason Mindset, Texas Heroes, & the Hype Surrounding EA's New CFB 26
285 watching -
LIVE
Donut Operator
2 hours agoCRIME/ FLOODS: communityfoundation . net
554 watching -
1:06:46
Timcast
1 hour agoDeep State Plot For "REGIME CHANGE" Against Trump EXPOSED, Democrats DEMAND Violence
111K62 -
LIVE
Rebel News
48 minutes agoConservative funds gender surgery, Carney's secret vacay, Decade of mass migration | Rebel Roundup
214 watching -
31:37
Grant Stinchfield
1 hour agoNano Nightmare: Government Plot to Monitor Your Body from the Inside Out EXPOSED!
1.3K -
1:05:43
The Rubin Report
2 hours agoPress Sec. Struggles to Hide Her Anger as Reporter Implies He Doesn’t Believe Her Epstein Story
110K71 -
DVR
Flyover Conservatives
2 hours agoWhat Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Means for Your Wallet - Dr. Kirk Elliott; 3+ [ N A T U R A L ] Tips to Stay Healthy - Dr. Troy Spurrill | FOC Show
13.9K -
LIVE
LFA TV
16 hours agoLFA TV ALL DAY STREAM - TUESDAY 7/8/25
2,931 watching