Ep 236 | Meet the ‘Fringe Epidemiologist’ Running the NIH | Guest: Jay Bhattacharya

Summary

Kibbe on Liberty – Episode 236: Meet the ‘Fringe Epidemiologist’ Running the NIH with Jay Bhattacharya

Release Date: April 2, 2025 | Host: Matt Kibbe | Guest: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

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1. Introduction and Background

In the opening segment, Matt Kibbe welcomes listeners to a compelling episode featuring Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a notable libertarian economist and the newly appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kibbe highlights Bhattacharya's controversial past, referencing footage from his series "The COVID Up" and the ironic twist of Bhattacharya, once labeled a "fringe epidemiologist" by former NIH head Francis Collins, now occupying the top position at the NIH.

Matt Kibbe [00:00]: "Kibbe on Liberty is a weekly podcast... featuring Dr. Jay Bhattacharya... he was just confirmed as the new director of the National Institutes of Health."

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2. The Great Barrington Declaration and Fringe Label

The conversation delves into the origins and repercussions of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document advocating for focused protection over widespread lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Bhattacharya recounts how Francis Collins, the then-head of the NIH, dismissed him and his colleagues as "fringe epidemiologists" shortly after the Declaration's release.

Jay Bhattacharya [01:31]: "The Great Barrington Declaration... told the world that there was not actually a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown."

Martin Kulldorff [01:06]: "He called the three of us fringe epidemiologists."

This label spurred a significant backlash, leading to a concentrated effort to discredit the Declaration's premises. Despite the criticism, the Declaration amassed support from thousands globally, challenging the prevailing lockdown strategies endorsed by prominent institutions and officials like Tony Fauci.

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3. Decline in COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates and Presidential Response

Adam Creighton introduces a pivotal moment where his analysis of declining COVID-19 case fatality rates gained national attention. He shared a graph in July 2020 demonstrating a significant drop in deaths over time, which President Trump showcased to the nation the following day.

Adam Creighton [05:38]: "President Trump is showing my graph to the entire country... and then when I got to visit with President Trump in the Oval Office..."

This meeting underscored the administration's reliance on specific scientific narratives to justify lockdown measures. Creighton recounts Trump's inquiry about saving lives through lockdowns, to which he had to respond that the projected numbers were exaggerated.

Adam Creighton [07:34]: "He [President Trump] asked me if he'd saved 2 million lives by locking down in March... But 2 million people didn't die."

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4. Government Influence and Censorship During the Pandemic

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the alleged government overreach and censorship during the pandemic. The guests criticize the collaboration between national security agencies and public health institutions in managing information, suggesting a suppression of dissenting scientific voices.

Adam Creighton [18:08]: "The censorship apparatus is almost certainly... Why are they involved in Covid Censorship?"

Scott Atlas [19:33]: "The apparatus includes the FBI... telling social media companies what to censor and who to censor."

This collaboration extended to various government bodies, including the CDC, Surgeon General's office, and the White House, creating an environment where alternative scientific perspectives were marginalized. The guests argue that this suppression was detrimental to public discourse and effective pandemic management.

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5. Call for Accountability and Transparency in Pandemic Response

The panel emphasizes the necessity for a thorough and unbiased investigation into the pandemic response. They advocate for a Covid commission independent of the decision-makers involved, ensuring that diverse scientific opinions are considered in understanding what transpired.

Martin Kulldorff [22:34]: "We are owed a real Covid commission... to invite outside scientists in that were critical of decisions to ask questions."

Jay Bhattacharya [23:41]: "We're owed transparency. We're owed an honest discussion so we can do our own evaluation."

The discussion highlights the failures in governance and the importance of learning from past mistakes to prevent future crises, drawing parallels to how aviation disasters are investigated thoroughly to improve safety.

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6. Speculations on Biosecurity and National Security Implications

Towards the episode's conclusion, the conversation shifts to the theoretical origins of the pandemic response strategies, touching upon controversial topics such as gain-of-function research and biosecurity measures. The guests speculate on the intertwined nature of civilian and military applications in managing biological threats, raising concerns about the ethical and safety implications of such collaborations.

Scott Atlas [21:29]: "Maybe the truth is stranger than fiction... this hubris at the center of it, this idea that we can control nature."

Martin Kulldorff [24:32]: "It's impossible to say unless there's some openness and clarity from the government around this."

These speculations underscore the overarching theme of mistrust in governmental transparency and the critical need for informed public discourse on biosecurity policies.

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Conclusion

The episode of Kibbe on Liberty with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya offers a critical examination of the U.S. pandemic response, highlighting issues of scientific dissent, government censorship, and the imperative for accountability. Through engaging discussions and poignant quotes, the guests advocate for a more transparent and inclusive approach to public health policy, urging listeners to question established narratives and seek comprehensive understanding.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jay Bhattacharya [01:31]: "The Great Barrington Declaration... told the world that there was not actually a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown."

• Adam Creighton [07:34]: "He [President Trump] asked me if he'd saved 2 million lives by locking down in March... But 2 million people didn't die."

• Martin Kulldorff [22:34]: "We are owed a real Covid commission... to invite outside scientists in that were critical of decisions to ask questions."

• Scott Atlas [21:29]: "Maybe the truth is stranger than fiction... this hubris at the center of it, this idea that we can control nature."

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For more insightful conversations and to support Kibbe on Liberty, visit freethepeople.org.

Transcript

[Matt Kibbe]

Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. This week I'm Talking Again with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, featuring a bunch of unseen footage from my series, the COVID Up. It's relevant because he was just confirmed as the new director of the National Institutes of Health. And in this episode, you'll learn the sweet karma of being labeled a fringe epidemiologist by the former head of the nih. Now Jay is in that chair. It's going to be awesome. Check it out. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Four days after we wrote the Declaration.

[Martin Kulldorff]

Wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Me a fringe epidemiologist.

[Martin Kulldorff]

I think I shared a card with you.

[Scott Atlas]

I have your fringe epidemiologist business card here.

[Martin Kulldorff]

A friend of mine made up. I'm going to put that on my grave. It says fringe epidemiology on it. A friend of mine made that up for me. Then he called for a devastating takedown of the premises of the Declaration.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

When we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. This is October of 2020. Four days after he wrote it, the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three primary authors, me, Sinatra Gupta and Martin Koldorff. He called it the three of us fringe epidemiologists. I mean, it's. Well, whatever, I'll just leave that aside, right?

[Scott Atlas]

Stanford, Harvard, Stanford, fringe institutions.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

The thing is, that's why he wrote that email. And then he called for a devastating published takedown of the premises of the Declaration. He wrote that email because the institutions from which we wrote, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, threatened him and his lockdown strategy. It threatened his underling, Tony Fauci's strategy. When we wrote the Declaration, almost hundreds of thousands of regular people signed onto it. People sent in from around the world. They sent us translations of the documents, a page document you can go look at online, see if you find it controversial. And they sent US translations into 30 different languages. Almost immediately, we got tens of thousands of scientists and epidemiologists signing on. What the great branch of Declaration did, the reason why it was important is not actually the ideas in it. The ideas in it are as old as the hills. The reason it was important is because it told the world that there was not actually a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown. And the lockdown strategy we adopted, and that's why Tony Fauci and Francis Collins acted the way they did. That was the threat. It undermined the illusion that there was a consensus around this lockdown and they couldn't abide that this goes back to your point about Hayek and decentral. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine what Hayek would have made of the interchange between Rand Paul and Tony Fauci in the Senate, where very famously Tony Fauci's response to Rand Paul was, look, if you're criticizing me, you're, you're not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing science itself or something very close to that. I mean, in a sense, it's like this la science, c'est moi, like the Louis XIV kind of moment. For a science bureaucrat, the arrogance is almost unbelievable. And the Great Barrington Declaration, what it did is it punctured that arrogance because it said, look, there are a lot of prominent, well known, completely reasonable, not actually fringe scientists who don't like the strategy you've adopted, who think that the strategy of adopters was an enormous mistake. And that's why you saw this smearing campaign. And they're very effective at that. I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus rip. I never said those words. I never even thought those words. It's not in the Great Barrington Declaration. It's a piece of propaganda designed to destroy the credibility of anyone who says it. Because my primary goal is to save life, right? Protect vulnerable populations. The key tenet of the plan of the great brain deduction is focused protection of the old. How is that letting the virus rip? And then there's this sort of demonization of the idea of herd immunity, as if it's some sort of weird conspiracy theory or strategy, when in fact it's just a biological fact. This pandemic ends when there's sufficient immunity in the population. It's not. Now, what we know is that that kind of immunity doesn't protect you from getting the disease over again. What it does, it'll be more like the other coronaviruses, where you can get them over again, but you don't get severely ill, right? So I think that idea that herd immunity is a strategy, they use that as a propaganda tool against in favor of lockdown, as if somehow the endpoint of lockdown strategies also hurt immunity.

[Adam Creighton]

So I haven't really told anyone much about this yet, but like, this is a graph that I made in July of 2020. It's a graph of the case fatality rate from COVID from March to the end of July. And it was just like a little bit of technical challenge because you have to people delay in deaths. That takes a few weeks to report the number of deaths. So I had A little model to adjust for that. And then there's a delay in, like, two weeks. Delay in, like, people dying from getting Covid and dying at least early in the pandemic. So I was, like, really pretty proud of it. I sent it to Scott Atlas, who was then the advisor to President Trump, and just thinking he'd be interested in curious about this. It shows this huge decline in case fatality from early in the pandemic to later in the pandemic. And the next day, President Trump is showing my graph to the entire country. And I was stunned. Like, I've been writing and doing statistical work for a long time, and it's, of course, our ambition as health policy people to have people see our work. Never have I had gone from a little bit of statistical work to everyone seeing him overnight. And then when I got to visit with President Trump in the Oval Office, because Scott arranged this in this meeting where he asked me if he'd saved 2 million lives. Afterwards, I asked him to sign it. And so that is President Trump's signature.

[Scott Atlas]

Is that his signature?

[Adam Creighton]

That is his signature, yeah. Just. It was a little bit of a fanboy thing. I mean, I just. It's a little embarrassing, frankly, but, you know.

[Scott Atlas]

So, Scott. Scott, go ahead. So I was talking to Scott Atlas about this meeting, and he said that Deborah Birx was doing everything possible to try to spike the actual meeting from happening at all. And the compromise position was you get five minutes. But then once you guys got in there, it was very clear that the President wanted to talk to you, he wanted to learn, he wanted to ask questions, and it went on. How long did it go on?

[Adam Creighton]

I mean, well, over an hour. Yeah, he. President Trump was very clear when we met with him that he was just thirsty for information. Like, he was getting information from one source, really, from Debbie Birx, from Tony Fauci and the task force that focused on the lockdowns as a way to manage the pandemic. In fact, he even asked me in the meeting whether he asked me if he'd saved 2 million lives by locking down in March. That was the assertion that's based on, I assume, this Imperial college model that said that if the President didn't lock down the country, 2 million people would die within a couple of months. Of course, 2 million people didn't die. So I had to tell him no. I mean, frankly, it was hard to tell the President that he hadn't saved 2 million lives of that because it was such an important decision that he'd made. But, yeah, he seemed hungry for information. I went into that meeting telling him open schools, that the evidence, the scientific evidence was very, very clear that the closing schools did not do much to protect people. And I told him to protect older people better. It was essentially the substance of the Great Barrington Declaration. And it was really interesting. I think that the information environment that he'd been exposed to was incredibly one sided. That Debbie Birx and Tony Fauci did everything they could to narrow the view of the scientific community's opinions about lockdowns, that the President saw and manipulate him so that he would make the decisions that they wanted. That he hired Scott to come and give him advice suggesting that he was uncomfortable with only getting one view. He was still, you know, the question is, why didn't he let Fauci and Burke's go? I mean, he clearly wanted multiple views, but he was only being exposed to one view.

[Scott Atlas]

He was captured. I mean, the basis of much of what we talked to Scott about yesterday was that Trump's first instinct was, you can't lock down the economy. That would be a disaster. And they somehow changed his mind. Fauci and Berks and, and it's clear to me that I think he regrets that decision. Perhaps to this day. I don't think Trump's capable of ever saying out loud that he made a mistake. But the question is, why did he let those guys win when he knew better?

[Adam Creighton]

Well, that's the question. I don't know that he knew better.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Right.

[Adam Creighton]

He's not a scientist and he's not someone like Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is, is. He called me. Ron DeSantis called me during the pandemic in September 2020. And it was really clear to me. We talked for two hours. He had read papers, not just of mine, but papers like scientific papers, and is capable of it. I don't think Trump is like that. I don't think he's capable of reading scientific literature. But he is a curious man. And so in the sense of like, he wants to know what the right thing to do is. I mean, this is not an ideological thing. It's like you have this disease spreading around what's the right thing to do? And he was owed as the president, a full picture of what the scientific community was actually saying. And instead, what he was offered up until the moment that he hired Scott was a narrow view of what the scientific literature, scientific community was saying. The set of people, the very powerful people who said, we need to lock down or else we're going to kill A lot of people ignoring all the harms on lockdown. That's the scientific view he was provided. And he wanted more. And it was, you know, the scientific community owed him more. And the scientists, bureaucrats that controlled the information he saw did a disservice to the world by not allowing a broader set of scientists in front of him.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

If we had had an actual functioning.

[Adam Creighton]

First Amendment during the pandemic, a lot of the harms that we saw to people, to a lot of people that.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Would have been avoided. Many people that are now dead would be alive.

[Adam Creighton]

The government was the number one source.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Of misinformation during the pandemic. It put forward very destructive ideas like two weeks to slow the spread. The lockdown will save us from COVID.

[Adam Creighton]

The, the infection fatality rate is tremendously high.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

When it's not, there's no real stratification of risk.

[Adam Creighton]

We're all equally at risk.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

There's no immunity after Covid recovery, there's no.

[Adam Creighton]

Lockdowns are not all that harmful to the economy.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

School closures are not that harmful to kids. Mask mandates are gonna save us from COVID Vaccines will stop the spread of COVID vaccine. There are no such things as vaccine injuries. You can go item after item after item.

[Adam Creighton]

And it's the good government that was.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

The primary source of misinformation. People structured their lives around this government misinformation. And had there been a functioning First.

[Adam Creighton]

Amendment, there would have been more effective.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Pushback against these government misinformation. The whole premise of a lot of the questioning by the Supreme Court justices was that the government got it right and they're protecting people from misinformation, when in fact exactly the opposite is true. And of course that's the point of the First Amendment, is to protect the people from the government when it gets.

[Scott Atlas]

It wrong, which they do sometimes.

[Adam Creighton]

Hopefully.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

I got it long, I could go.

[Adam Creighton]

On longer with the list.

[Scott Atlas]

We've had multiple conversations about this, about the arrogance and hypocrisy of the Fauci's of the world that actually think they know better than the entire scientific process itself.

[Martin Kulldorff]

People have a tremendous wide array of values, objectives. Societies are designed to mediate that civilizations are created when we can learn from each other in close connection with each other. The kinds of things that produce advances in human well being, I think promote those kinds of close connections, not separate each other apart. And we certainly don't reorganize society around one idea, one goal. The key insight is that our societies have a vast plural set of goals that sometimes are odd with each other, but we mediate them, we trade with each other, we learn from each other to advance as many of those goals as we can, to reorganize around one goal. It's, as you say, the height of hubris.

[Scott Atlas]

This mantra of money versus lives. That was a talking point that echoed in every critique of any questions asked anywhere. And maybe it's just a vestige of the old debate about the precautionary principle and those of us that understand that economic prosperity and the ability to bring those coconuts to market is a life or death question. But it also just curious to me, like suddenly the talking point was everywhere. There was an echo chamber. And of course we'll get into this, but you know the names they started calling you. This was. This was designed and echo channel chamber thing.

[Adam Creighton]

Yeah. I mean, on the plus side, that Wall Street Journal piece also brought a lot of very constructive people into my orbit. There's a man named Dan Eichner who runs steroid testing and other testing for Major League Baseball, or he's like a contractor with Major League Baseball. He had ordered a whole bunch of antibody test kits from a Chinese company and he was going to use them to see if Major League Baseball players had been infected. But when he read the op ed, his idea was, I want to use these for science. Called me and my colleagues up, offered them for free for us to use. And a whole bunch of people at Stanford actually, they read this and they wanted to help actually do the study we suggested in the op Ed. What I actually expected out of the op Ed was that that the CDC.

[Martin Kulldorff]

Would run this study.

[Adam Creighton]

It's actually their job to run this study, not me. But when these would them taking that.

[Scott Atlas]

Idea and running with it been a more normal response before COVID I mean.

[Adam Creighton]

That'S just the normal scientific response. You have a parameter that's absolutely vital.

[Martin Kulldorff]

For everything you're going to do. Every decision we're going to make, and.

[Adam Creighton]

These are the decisions that are going to. That changed the lives of billions of people. Do we lock down or not lock down? Who is most at risk of this disease? How do we scale the risk of this disease relative to other threats in people's lives? This one study informs all of that. It was the obvious study to do. I was actually very surprised that it hadn't already been conducted by the cdc.

[Martin Kulldorff]

Which is partly why we wrote that op Ed.

[Scott Atlas]

But that's maybe a shift in the government response to this pandemic. You would have naturally just expected them to have done that.

[Adam Creighton]

Yeah. I would have expected the gh.

[Matt Kibbe]

Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with Blaze TV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.

[Scott Atlas]

I just don't think we know exactly what's going on yet.

[Adam Creighton]

Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there's been this interplay between the national security apparatus to manage bioterror events and the public health apparatus to manage, you know, pandemics. And they merged and intertwined in ways that I didn't know was possible before the pandemic. I'm on the civilian side. I've never seen. I've never experienced you, and I have.

[Scott Atlas]

Never seen this before. Yeah, but maybe. And my theory is, if such a thing is happening, it's been going on for a long time. And you have this clash where voices like yours, when you went on Twitter, you immediately garnered a very large audience, and they immediately tried to snuff it out. You know, back in the day, they could just censor or buy off or whatever they would do to hijack the New York Times. And, like, when it was three papers of record, they could control the process. And suddenly it became radically democratized and they couldn't control the process anymore. So they have this overwrought, completely un American, anti First Amendment response where they're sorting through tweets and saying, well, that guy can't say that.

[Adam Creighton]

I mean, the censorship apparatus is almost certainly. There's a military, national defense side of this. There's just no question. Right. So why is cisa? CISA is this Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency. It's part of the State Department. The nominal argument was that we need to figure out a way to manage misinformation or disinformation efforts by foreign actors in the United States. Right, right. Why are they involved in Covid Censorship?

[Scott Atlas]

Right.

[Adam Creighton]

The apparatus includes the FBI, by the way. I know this because the discovery in this Missouri versus Biden lawsuit has revealed vast amounts of evidence about which agencies of the federal government are involved in essentially telling social media companies what to censor and who to censor.

[Scott Atlas]

Yeah, Right.

[Adam Creighton]

So we know the FBI is involved. We know that the State Department's involved. Why are they involved in censoring Americans and of course, there's also like, the public health infrastructure is involved.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Right.

[Adam Creighton]

So there's the CDC is involved, the Surgeon General's office is involved, and the White House itself is involved. So you have this like civilian national security sort of cooperation in censoring Americans, you know, based on scientific issues.

[Scott Atlas]

Right? Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Kibbe]

It's creepy.

[Scott Atlas]

Adam, are you. Are you a fan of Stranger Things?

[Adam Creighton]

I love Stranger Things, yes.

[Scott Atlas]

So my entire paradigm, and you may not know this, but Stranger Things was inspired by an actual government covert operation called MK Ultra, which was all of the psychedelic experimentation, completely immoral, unethical.

[Adam Creighton]

I actually didn't know that.

[Scott Atlas]

Where the national security guys, I think the core was, the CIA was trying to figure out how to get the enemy, the Soviets at the time, to tell the truth. So it's like a kind of a truce serum thing. So they're dosing people against their will to see what will happen. So anyway, that's the inspiration for Stranger Things. And you think about the first season in particular, where the national security of the United States embarks on a very covert, dangerous, mad science experiment that ends up unleashing hell on earth. And I'm like, maybe the truth is stranger than fiction. I don't know.

[Adam Creighton]

Could be.

[Scott Atlas]

I mean, but now I've gone too far. Now you're like, wow.

[Adam Creighton]

Well, I mean, it's hard. Well, I don't know. I mean, the thing is, it's like I try to stick to exactly what I know, and what I know is scary enough. So if it's just I'm going to prevent pandemics by going and finding bat pathogens and bringing them into the large city centers, and then I'm going to augment their function so they can infect humans. I mean, that's bad enough. Even if it's not national security related. It's this, as you said, this hubris at the center of it, this idea that we can control nature just to such a degree that we can plan for, for things that we have really no honest way of looking into unless we're fooling ourselves, at least not in any way that's at all safe or worth the risks that we take relative to what the potential harms could be.

[Scott Atlas]

And that's my ultimate goal is obviously accountability, but accountability that ensures that we stop doing whatever it is we did.

[Martin Kulldorff]

I think that given the scope of.

[Adam Creighton]

The disaster that has happened as a.

[Martin Kulldorff]

Result of this, whatever process led to these decisions, we are owed a honest accounting at the very least of the decision makers of the decisions. And what occurred. We're owed a real Covid commission and not run by the people that made the decisions, but rather that finally invite outside scientists in that were critical of decisions to ask questions. It's just like after a plane crash, you would have the NTSB come and do an evaluation. They'd look at the black box. They still have those on the planes, I guess. And the idea is not primarily to point fingers. For the most part, people don't point fingers in those primarily. It's to figure out what went wrong so that you can adopt reform so that it doesn't happen again. That's what we're erode, I think, and wherever the chips may fall, let them fall. I think it is really important that we know the answers to the questions you're asking.

[Scott Atlas]

Yeah, we have to know so that it doesn't happen again. And this is sort of an offhanded comment, but I have to say, if it was in fact, fact a biosecurity strategy with the best of intentions, sort of wildly arrogant and scientistic in its nature, and running a gain of function prohibition in the United States and going to a shoddy lab in Wuhan in China, presumably one of the countries that we would consider a potential national security threat. That doesn't make any sense to me at all.

[Martin Kulldorff]

Well, it could be if, for instance, okay, you have this dual civilian military kind of, kind of dual use kind of technology. What, what if this was partly a way for the United States to keep their eyes on what was happening in the Chinese biosecurity agents kind of apparatus?

[Scott Atlas]

Right.

[Martin Kulldorff]

I mean, I don't know.

[Adam Creighton]

I mean, it's.

[Martin Kulldorff]

It's impossible to say unless there's some openness and clarity from the government around this. There was some gain potentially happening that people were playing with each other.

[Scott Atlas]

The Chinese government has not been particularly forthcoming.

[Martin Kulldorff]

I think that's true. But honestly, the American government hasn't been particularly forthcoming either. We're in a situation where a lot of the key decision makers that made these decisions have the power to block public scrutiny of their decisions. I don't see how that's consistent with democracy, that you can have a relatively small group of very powerful people make these decisions in government with no oversight possibility at all, or very, very little, very limited. Every single bit of oversight takes a tremendous amount of effort by a small group of policymakers or scientists on the outside, or people asking for FOIA requests that are thwarted, or you have to do the massive lawsuits backed by states in order to get anywhere. What we're owed is transparency. We're owed an honest discussion so we can do our own evaluation. Let the people understand what actually happened. Let the people decide how we actually want to make decisions around the regulation of these scientific and public health processes.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

On this.

[Adam Creighton]

John.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

So there was a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, actually, that the theme was policy contagion, right? One country copied another after another. And there's this element inside policymaking. If you're, if you're a politician, you don't really. You look at the evidence, you're like, this is too complicated. It looks very risky. No matter what I do, it's just easier, less risky. If I just do what everyone else is doing, then if it all goes wrong, I can't be blamed. So you have a politician looking for a guru to tell them what to do. There's a groupthink among the gurus. People look at China and, oh, gosh, it's January 2020, and they've solved the pandemic with a month lockdown. That idea, the mathematical models come out, the idea spreads among a relatively small group of people who then tell the politicians, look, if you don't do this.

[Adam Creighton]

You'Re going to kill 2 million people.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

In the United States, half a million people in the UK Whatever, whatever the models say. And then they say, okay, if I don't do this, I'm going to get blamed for 2 million people dying. It's safer if I just do this. Even if it goes wrong, at least I did the right thing. I mean, I'm not a Trump ally.

[Adam Creighton]

I'm just a scientist. And what happened during the pandemic was that the First Amendment, basically, it was.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Abrogated, it wasn't followed. The government didn't follow it explicitly, so.

[Adam Creighton]

That scientific discussion couldn't happen in order.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

To create an illusion of consensus in.

[Adam Creighton]

Favor of false ideas that the government.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Itself espoused and that it pushed forward as a basis of policy.

[Adam Creighton]

The idea that this could, something like.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

That could happen in the United States is still a shock to me. I never imagined such a thing was possible in the United States of America.

[Adam Creighton]

It scares the living daylights out of me.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

And if the US Supreme Court doesn't.

[Adam Creighton]

Say that it was wrong to have.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Done that, if it doesn't acknowledge that.

[Adam Creighton]

At all, then, I mean, I really.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Fear for our republic.

[Deborah Birx]

I mean, I don't know if there's ever in history been a situation where when you sue the government, you're suing the office. So if you sue Anthony Fauci, you're actually suing, like, whatever his title was at nyad, director of niad. So when he goes, then the new person, you're suing them. So Jay is suing the nih, and now he's gonna be the director of the nih. I don't know. I don't think this has ever happened.

[Scott Atlas]

Will he have to testify against himself?

[Deborah Birx]

My guess is he'll have to. We'll have to make some adjustments to the lawsuit. But people have asked me what's gonna happen. I'm like, I don't know. I don't think ever in history has someone sued an agency and then become the head of that agency. So it's a, it's an interesting question.

[Matt Kibbe]

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