Dr. Jay Bhattacharya | The End of Free Speech is the End of Science | Notre Dame CCCG

Thank you everyone. This is the second time during the pandemic I've had the honor of presenting at Notre Dame. I titled this lecture 'The End of Free Speech is the End of Science' because I believe the biggest mistake was not allowing people to speak to each other. I'll share my scientific journey. Early in the pandemic, I hypothesized that COVID-19 was far more widespread than reported, based on data from China and the Diamond Princess. I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal questioning the official fatality rate. The implication was that lockdowns wouldn't stop a highly transmissible virus and that we were spreading undue fear. That led me to run a seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County with colleagues, finding that 50 times more people had been infected than confirmed cases indicated. The infection fatality rate turned out to be about 0.27%, not the 3-4% being claimed. The single most important epidemiological fact was the steep age gradient: young people face extremely low risk, while the elderly face much higher risk. This cried out for a strategy focused on protecting the elderly without harming the young. Instead, lockdowns caused immense harm: global poverty increased by 100 million people, 150 million children plunged into poverty, 228,000 children in South Asia died from disruptions, and in the U.S., 13.8 million life-years were lost due to school closures. Suicide ideation among young adults reached 25%. Studies later showed that lockdowns had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. For example, Sweden, which kept schools open for under-16s and did not lock down, had no higher excess mortality than neighboring countries after the first wave. In fact, Florida did better than California. The Great Barrington Declaration, which I co-authored with Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, proposed a simple, evidence-based strategy: don't lock down and protect the elderly, while allowing children and young adults to live normally. This is exactly how we managed past pandemics. The failure to adopt this approach caused tremendous and predictable suffering.

The strategy right. So remember in the United States there was a big debate about whether we should wait until we first vaccinate healthcare workers and other frontline workers before we vaccinate old people. Governor DeSantis called me and asked about the strategy, and I recommended very strongly to vaccinate all old people first because I didn't know all the risks of the vaccine — this is a new vaccine — but I did know from the randomized trials that it seemed to reduce the risk of dying, of getting symptomatic infection, and probably the risk of dying. It's the old people that were the highest risk of dying, so recommend older people to get it. For younger populations it didn't matter nearly as much. And we didn't know if the vaccine stopped the disease from spreading; the randomized trials didn't check that. So it made no sense to use the vaccine to eradicate a disease that we didn't know if it worked to do that. Instead, use the vaccine to protect older people, and that's what Sweden did. The top graph shows the winter wave of cases in 2020 and the spring wave of cases in 2021 in Sweden. The red line on the left is when they started the vaccination plan, and they were slow to get it off the ground. By March of 2020 they had vaccinated about 7% of their population, but almost every dose went to an old person. One public health worker in Sweden was 40 years old, he got the vaccine, he jumped the queue, and he was immediately fired. That's how serious they were about making sure only older people got it first. The fruits of that were on the bottom graph: deaths. The deaths from the winter wave, and then you see no deaths here or very few deaths. The reason is they vaccinated their old. The focused protection of the old decoupled cases from deaths. It protected the most vulnerable. The response of the public health establishment to this was an abuse of power. This one hurts me the most to say because this picture is a man I greatly admire, Francis Collins, who is a Christian. As someone who is also Christian in a public health field, I looked up to him. We wrote the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4, 2020. On October 8, 2020, Francis Collins wrote an email to Tony Fauci pointing to the Declaration. I found this email on a FOIA request. He wrote: 'This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists' — I had to look at this a few times before I realized he was talking about me — 'seems to be getting a lot of attention, even a co-signature from a Nobel Prize winner at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of his premises.' The future head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post with the headline 'Trump wants to try for herd immunity without a vaccine — it could kill millions.' We were calling for focused protection. The use of the word 'herd immunity' was essentially a slur. Herd immunity is a biological fact, not a strategy. It's like saying there's a gravity strategy for landing an airplane. It's biologically illiterate. Yet the future head of the CDC wrote an article making a biologically illiterate point to score political points. It led to crazy hit pieces about me. I was getting death threats, and there was a poster campaign around campus. In 2021 I decided to join Twitter. Martin Kulldorff had posted a few dangerous things on Twitter, like if you have COVID you have some immunity after, which got him banned. He said I needed to be on Twitter to talk about the Great Barrington Declaration. The day I joined Twitter, I was put on a blacklist. I learned this when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. He invited me to visit the San Francisco headquarters. The engineer showed me a picture from the Twitter database: my account had 240,000 followers and the word 'blacklist' on it. It turned out that the day I joined, I posted the Great Barrington Declaration and was put on a blacklist that made it so I could send a message to my followers but nobody else would see it. Why would Twitter put a Stanford professor on a blacklist? In a case that started in 2022, I found out the answer. The Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's office reached out to me and asked if I would be a participant in a lawsuit against the Biden Administration. The theory was that the Biden Administration, including the CDC, the Surgeon General's office, the NIH, and the FBI, had gone to social media companies and told them who and what to censor, leaning on them with threats. The depositions of Tony Fauci were quite entertaining — eight hours of 'I don't recall.' The lower court judge wrote: 'The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario during the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.' He ordered the Biden Administration to stop censoring at scale. Unfortunately, in June we lost in the Supreme Court, 6-3. They didn't rule that what the Biden Administration did was constitutional; they explicitly said they didn't rule on that. They found that we did not have standing to sue, even though we showed emails from the government to social media companies saying 'censor the kinds of ideas that Jay is saying.' According to the Supreme Court, you have to show evidence of continuing harm. The First Amendment, with this case as it currently stands, is an unenforceable dead letter. The three dissenting justices pointed out that this is a pathway for the government to censor whatever it wants — all it has to do is leave off the names of the people it wants to censor. There is now a law passing through Congress to try to close this loophole, but it's really important that people understand that the policy was to censor people in order to create an illusion of consensus in favor of destructive COVID policies. The vaccine mandates, school closures — all of those policies were supported by this illusion that all the scientists agreed. The reason they seemed to agree was that those who didn't agree were censored. Let me close with some ideas about the ideology of public health. The most important fact about lockdowns is that we are treated as mere biohazards. It's a perversion of the precautionary principle: if you can conceive of a harm from a threat, then any action is warranted to prevent it, ignoring the harm of the lockdowns themselves. Swiss cheese evidence — any small benefit warrants mandating interventions at scale. This led to the US recommending that toddlers wear masks. In Europe they laugh at us; they recommended no kid under 12 get masked. There is no randomized study showing masking toddlers does any good. I said this to Ron DeSantis at a policy forum in 2021, and that led to a hundred of my colleagues at Stanford writing a secret petition asking the president of the university to silence me. Censorship pressure on social media companies to suppress even true information that contradicts public health authorities. Fearmongering to induce compliance. Beggar-thy-neighbor epidemiology. Trickle-down epidemiology that benefits the laptop class. These are terrible principles, but they are the principles we de facto follow. It's no wonder we have among the worst outcomes in the world for COVID. Thank you very much.

I think that's a very difficult question to manage. I basically dealt with it by ignoring it. I either do my job as a scientist and speak up for what I see, or I let anonymous cowards online or elsewhere censor me into not doing it. I went to the university at one point and asked for help, and they recommended I reduce my online presence. I said I'm not going to do that. The question of long COVID is really important; we need good research. I emphasize mortality here, but even with long COVID, there's an age gradient. The focus should be on protecting vulnerable populations the best you can, but don't fool yourself. Don't recommend cloth masking as a way to protect the population when it doesn't work. That's not the way you protect people from long COVID. Take these threats seriously, but be completely clear-minded and ask for high-quality evidence for the interventions you impose. I've heard lots of people talk about better ventilation for schools; that makes sense, but let's run randomized trials to see if it works. I want the best quality evidence deployed when we decide what interventions to undertake, especially for things that make vulnerable people much sicker. I want great research so we can treat these things better. I don't want to pretend I know things I don't know and thereby fool people into doing things that don't actually protect them.

That makes great sense, a great question. First of all, that 0.27 is a central tendency figure. If you had an older population, the infection fatality rate in New York City, for instance, was three to five times as high because they had an older population. The deaths in that early phase were about two to three weeks delayed between infection and death. So what you were seeing was a pandemic that had happened three weeks ago playing out in deaths. Three weeks before in Toronto, when the lockdown started, it was the poor neighborhoods that got exposed, and three weeks later those older people were dying. Three weeks earlier, the richer neighborhoods had locked down; you look at Google Mobility data, there was almost no walking around in the rich neighborhoods and a lot more in the poor neighborhoods. So lockdowns were effective in the richer neighborhoods for a while. It's the poor neighborhoods of the world that couldn't comply with lockdowns for any extended period. That should have been known in policymaking. You're asking people to do the impossible, so they're not going to do it. You're asking poor people to starve their families; they're not going to do it.

I think the only way for lockdowns to work — to actually prevent the spread of COVID — would have been for them to be perpetual. The thinking was if we can lock down long enough, we can develop a vaccine and then use the vaccine to rescue us from the lockdown. That is the current WHO strategy for these kinds of things: 100 days till vaccine. They won't say lockdown for those 100 days, but what would we do if we're scared again? There's a virus afoot and a promise of a vaccine in 100 days. As a society, we have to make a choice: are we going to lock down every single time with a promise of a vaccine that may or may not come? That's not going to get rid of the disease; it'll just delay it. The lifting of lockdown is premised on a vaccine working.

Vote. Make sure you ask — if you're voting for dog catcher, ask them what their free speech thoughts are. I think the idea that free speech is a dangerous thing was pretty common during the pandemic. I got people writing to me saying 'you're saying dangerous things, stop talking, Jay,' over and over again. It's not just formal free speech protections that matter, although they do — you can see we don't have any — but also the social environment we live in. We should be unafraid to say what we believe. Be brave. Change the culture so that we express our thoughts, and the harm from being wrong isn't so high. There's no cancellation, just disagreement. If we can bring back that kind of culture, we'll be much more resistant to pandemics than we were during this one.

Let me answer the more fun scientific question first. In July 2020, a colleague from the University of Chicago, Milani, measured antibodies in Mumbai. He found in the slums of Mumbai a 70% seroprevalence despite lockdowns, and 20% in the richer parts. I don't think lockdowns help in poor countries with high population density. The problem is how to do focused protection in that setting because lockdowns aren't going to protect anybody. In poor countries, it's terrible to be poor. The only answer is how to make poor countries richer in the long run. In the short run, it's tragic. I had a 70-year-old cousin and a 75-year-old uncle die in India in the spring wave. India did very poorly in prioritizing older people for vaccines. I don't think lockdowns address those problems. As for controlling for density, the most careful study is the Hopkins meta-analysis, which graded the evidence. Norway versus Sweden — very similar societies, Norway did worse despite more closures. California versus Florida are not that different, and Florida didn't close schools in fall 2020 and didn't do worse. At the very least, lockdowns are not sufficient to protect human health. The second question: I think very smart people have huge egos. It's better if we are checked. I'm lucky to have children who check me, a wife who tells me I'm not all that smart, and friends from college who make fun of me. If they had that, maybe they would be less sensitive to being wrong. It's nice to occasionally say 'I was wrong about X, Y, or Z.' I thought there was no way we could develop a vaccine so quickly in March 2020; I thought 7 to 10 years. There are other things I was wrong about. It's healthy for everyone, especially intellectuals with big egos, to say 'I was wrong.'

I shouldn't say anything about him particularly. I have had some conversations with him, so it's likely he will be in the new administration. The general approach rather than specific policies: the priorities are free speech — establish the Missouri versus Biden order throughout the government. That's the most important thing to restore. Second, have checks and balances in place so you don't have corporate capture of regulatory agencies, which characterized the pandemic — NIH, FDA, you name it. I think those are his two main priorities, and they are very healthy. Other specifics about vaccines — I've not had any conversations that indicate he would have the power to get rid of vaccines. I would oppose that if it were the case. I will be in favor of sponsoring good science to evaluate when people ask questions about medical interventions they are asked or forced to take. They deserve good answers. There's nothing wrong with asking for scientific evidence to justify policies. That's not anti-vaccine. If that's his priority, I'm fine with that. But saying something causes side effects without evidence — I'm against that. I just want good science to happen.