Hello, welcome to my Substack. I am here with the great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is a professor of medicine at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and directs the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. That was important recently, and many, many other accolades. Welcome, Dr. Bhattacharya.
Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be with you.
Well, I've been dying to talk to you. Obviously, people who have been following this and the Great Barrington Declaration, you're a huge celebrity. I was having dinner last night with three very smart financial people who had never heard of the Great Barrington Declaration, and I just thought, 'Congratulations, Anthony Fauci. You did your job.' So can you start just by explaining what the Great Barrington Declaration was and what happened, how it was suppressed, and then we'll get to what led you to it.
Sure. So the Great Barrington Declaration is a single-page document. It's written not for scientists, it's written for regular people to understand. In October of 2020, I wrote it with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, who I know you've interviewed, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. They're both incredible scientists. Martin designed the vaccine safety surveillance system the FDA and CDC uses, some of the statistical infrastructure behind it. And Sunetra is a mathematical epidemiologist. She was working on the development of universal flu vaccines, for instance, before the pandemic. She's just a fantastic mathematician and epidemiologist.
So the idea of the Great Barrington Declaration is based on two scientific facts about COVID. One is that there's this very steep age gradient in the mortality risk from the disease. It's older people that are primarily at very high risk of dying if they're infected. Younger people, much less so. We wrote this in October of 2020, by the way. This is before the vaccines. And then the second fact is that the lockdowns themselves are tremendously harmful, especially to children, like with the school closures, to the poor, to working-class people. The lockdowns, and if you look outside the United States, it's really the poor that have suffered from the lockdowns. All these supply chain disruptions, the pointy end of that is some poor guy in Bangladesh or Uganda losing their job and they're, you know, impoverished.
Right. That's what a supply chain disruption really means.
It wasn't a day at the beach in this country either.
Yeah. No, it was terrible in this country, especially, I said, especially for children, right? It's really damaged children's lives in ways that I don't know how we recover from. But anyway, so that's the Great Barrington Declaration. And taking those two facts, if it's the vulnerable, it's the elderly that are primarily vulnerable, the first plank is focused protection of vulnerable elderly people. Right? So the resources should be used that we used to instead of, like, paying, you know, laptop class workers so they can stay home, and, you know, closing businesses and closing schools and all that, instead use those resources to protect elderly people better. Don't send COVID-infected patients back to nursing homes like Andrew Cuomo did. That's the opposite of focused protection. Do focused protection on vulnerable older people. And then the second thing is lift the lockdowns because the lockdowns are causing vastly more harm than good. That should have been... so that was the Great Barrington Declaration. Oh my god. And it was met with like this crazy, just crazy response. I started getting death threats. You know...
It just, it was insane. Like every time I appear in public or, you know, on TV or whatever, I get hate mail. I mean, and I don't know how you deal with it. You must be subject to that. But it was very recent.
Who was the hate mail coming from? Was it the long-haul COVID neurotic liberal women? [laughter]
There was some of those. A lot of men too. I mean, I think a lot of it was purely political, right? It was just like people who think that if I contradict what their favorite politician thinks, that I'm somehow undermining them as a person or something. And then there were people that genuinely thought that the only way to solve the pandemic and get to zero was these lockdowns. And I was a danger because I'm, you know, from Stanford and someone prominent saying this.
It was, I don't know, it was really kind of... I'll tell you, I think part of the problem, and probably maybe most of the problem, is that the scientific community, the leaders of the scientific community, people like Tony Fauci, demonized me, demonized other people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, four days after we wrote the declaration, from FOIA requests we found out, wrote to Tony Fauci saying that, calling me and Martin and Sunetra fringe epidemiologists. I have someone sent me a business card that now has it on my list of accolades, you can read at the beginning, fringe epidemiologist. It was insane though, but they, and then calling for a devastating takedown of the premises of the declaration. And then what followed next was hit pieces in places like the Washington Post, New York Times, essentially saying that I wanted to let the virus rip.
Yes. And also you were all banished from social media. I mean, I happened to be following you and Martin Kulldorff at the time, so I could go to your Twitter feeds, but unless we were already following you, your tweets would be hidden.
Yeah. So, Martin, as a prominent scientist, he was actually active on Twitter in 2020. I was not active on Twitter, and I was, because I had this like crazy, I was still in scientist mode, right? So, I'm like, I'm always going to be in my life as in scientist mode. I thought I would write published papers and that would have an impact because people would read the data and then change their minds based on what the data... I still, please don't try to talk me out of that entirely. I still think it's... [laughter] But it's been disheartening to see how even true facts can get distorted and destroyed. Martin though was active on Twitter and he started getting censored. A faculty at Harvard writing his area of expertise, you know, on masks, the effectiveness of masks or whatnot, he censored on Twitter. Turns out that he was also, he was like me. When I eventually joined Twitter, I was put on a blacklist. Literally, it was like that was what the Twitter database said, put me, you know, blacklist. That Martin was also put on blacklist at various times in 2020, 2021, 2022. It was absolutely shocking. It was essentially a smear campaign designed to make sure your friends at dinner last night wouldn't hear about the Great Barrington Declaration.
They'd hear about it. They'd hear about it as if it was some fringe idea when in fact tens of thousands of scientists signed on to it. It's not even political, really. I mean, it was meant for guidance for policy for a different strategy for every country, not just the United States. And it was aimed at the whole world. You know, we got 40 translations.
People just were like, read it and wanted to translate it to their languages. They sent it to us for free. A million people almost signed it. Tens of thousands of scientists signed it. It should have been the policy we followed. It's the policy we followed for a century of other respiratory virus pandemics successfully.
And it's also the policy that works. That was how I summarized the Great Barrington Declaration to my dinner companions last night, that everything you guys recommended turned out to be true. We have the examples of Sweden and Florida. And it may not be, you know, a test in a laboratory with test tubes, but that's a lot of people following different government mandates, the focused protection or the lockdowns. And I believe we now know that Sweden and Florida did better in the excess deaths than both other states and other countries in Europe.
You're absolutely right. I mean, so like Sweden is a fantastic sort of test case. And you know, during the first year you would see stories about how Sweden was a killing field. Actually, I remember when Georgia tried to open up in summer of 2020, The Atlantic published a piece with an incredibly irresponsible title of 'An Experiment in Human Sacrifice.' Where Florida, I mean, I was an expert witness in this lawsuit in Florida that the teachers unions filed against the governor, where this is August of 2020, Governor DeSantis ordered every county to offer an in-person option for the school kids. And a few of the counties, the more blue counties, the teachers unions there sued the state to make sure the schools were closed. And they had trouble finding an expert witness on the, that is, they meaning the state, to defend school opening. And so I did this pro bono because I was so incensed about, I think school is very important, and I mean you can probably tell from my degrees and stuff. And I just, I was so incensed that like we weren't going to offer, they weren't going to, that you have this governor who's trying to offer school to kids and then the public health people are trying to close that down. It made no sense.
Sweden kept its schools open for kids under 16 the whole pandemic. Not, you know, not like Zoom school, no masks, no social distancing, just school. And they had no learning loss for their kids. And there was a study in, I think, summer 2020 from a Swedish researcher. He found that in fact the teachers got COVID at lower rates than the average of the rest of the other workers in the population. That is amazing.
Yeah. I mean, being around kids was actually somewhat protected. Weird.
Yeah. So that's the short version of the gist of the whole story. I wanted to ask you when you first... I mean, you had that seroprevalence study that I wanted to ask about, and that was very early on in the pandemic. Could you explain that?
Sure. So, when the pandemic hit, one of the thoughts I had was the 2009 swine flu pandemic. In that pandemic, it was really interesting, in some ways it followed the same pattern of this pandemic. In the earliest days of the pandemic, the World Health Organization put out a death rate estimate that was like four, five, six percent. I mean, it's very, very, I forget the exact number, very, very high. And it turned out that there was a whole bunch of studies done to measure how many people in the population had been exposed to and gotten the swine flu and recovered without even really noticing. It was just a minor cold or something. And the way that scientists answer that question is by measuring how many people in the population have antibodies to that particular virus. So when the people, and that gives you the denominator of the death rate, right? You know how many people are exposed. The numerator is how many people die from the virus, right? So that's the death rate. If you only look at the people that are really, really sick and show up at the hospital, the death rate is going to be, you know, very high. But if you have a bigger picture of like how many people actually got infected, that gives you a different picture, right?
So that's what we did. So we looked at how many people were infected. So about in H1N1, the swine flu, the death rate went from three, four, five percent to 0.01%. One in 10,000. [laughter]
Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, three out of 100 versus one in 10,000. You're going to act very differently in response to those threats. And anyways, the...
This was early in the pandemic that you did your study.
Yeah. So, look, March of 2020, I had this idea that look, maybe there's a lot more people infected than we know. I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. First time I'd ever written an op-ed. Before that, I'd only published scientific papers for a living. I mean, I just, I had no idea what power that actually had, op-eds. I write this op-ed and making this point like we don't know how many people are infected. Really need to know, and I was thinking that the CDC would conduct this study. It took them forever, by the way, to conduct an actual version of this study, but like we conducted, so that op-ed led to a gentleman in Major League Baseball reaching out to me with antibody test kits that he had. He said, look, I want to use this for science. I don't want to use this for money. And so with those test kits, we organized a study very quickly in Santa Clara County, California, where I live, LA County, where, and we found in both places, this is early April 2020, 50 times more infections, 40, 50 times more infections than cases. That means for every identified case, there are 40, 50 people walking around that had recovered, that had antibodies. And then we found that the death rate then was something like 0.2%, not the 3% that the World Health Organization was saying. So it's like, you know, 10 times lower, 15 times lower. And then the other thing we found is that the, what, that the three or 3% or 4% of the population already had COVID, the lockdowns, the early lockdowns had already failed by April 2020. Early...
That's amazing. No. And that was very carefully hidden from the public. I've also noticed that you were viciously attacked for that study.
Yeah. No, my wife, they, there was a BuzzFeed News author that like attacked my wife and made her into national news for the crime of writing an email to my kids' middle school list serve encouraging people to sign up for the study. Her crime was that she wrote that you might get immunity after COVID recovery. You know, there's natural immunity. That turned into a national, you know, sort of story for a day. I got, again, there were death threats around this. It was, and my university actually went after me. It was, the whole thing was just...
No, not really. No, actually just, no. I mean, the individuals have, but not the university.
When did you know that COVID discriminated so heavily by age?
That was clear in the Chinese data and the Diamond Princess data. Diamond Princess is that cruise ship that was floating around trying to find a home because they had COVID on it. If you looked at the deaths that happened on the Diamond Princess, actually I think most of the deaths happened after they left the ship. But the deaths were all in people that are over the age of, you know, 75 or 80. I mean, really mostly in an older population. And in the Chinese data that was published early, very few kids died from it. Then you can also see in the Italian data again this very, very steep age gradient from February 2020. Everywhere you looked, Martin Kulldorff wrote a piece documenting this in February 2020, I think...
He couldn't find a place to publish it. You know, Harvard professor writing on the most, probably the most important fact about this virus...
Yes. Could not find a place to, he stuck it finally in his LinkedIn blog so that he just to have a marker to say, look, I knew about this early. [laughter]
Wow. Wow. That is stunning. And that is a large part of what the Great Barrington Declaration was about, that it should be focused protection on the vulnerable. Oh, incidentally, I was looking up what some of the media was saying about COVID early on when you and the other signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration were right and the entire mainstream media was lying to us. And I don't know if you remember this, it was in California. There were huge headlines all over on March 24th about the first teenager who died of COVID. And he was completely otherwise healthy, 17 years old, died of COVID in San Diego. Headlines all over. And then I don't know, a week or two later that luckily the correction is attached in the New York Times article. Actually, we can't say he died of COVID. We're, the jury's out on that. They didn't even test him for COVID until after he had died. And it turns out it wasn't COVID, but those were the headlines we kept getting about all of these children dying when I mean, I remember the Italian data. I don't remember if I looked at the Princess data, but it was pretty clear early on if you cared to know. And that was the point of the Great Barrington Declaration, that you focus the protection on the elderly, which is actually pretty easy. And that then let the rest of society go on and not destroy economies and lives and schooling.
You were accused of, the phrase was 'let the virus rip', and I believe that is not quite how you would describe it.
If you look at the Great Barrington Declaration, search for the words 'let it rip', it doesn't appear in the declaration. In fact, it was the farthest from my mind. Right. So the argument of the Great Barrington Declaration, in fact, that by the way, that phrase I first heard it in the mouth of Tony Fauci in a New York Times article.
So the argument of the Great Barrington Declaration is, as I've said, like you know who's vulnerable. You know that lockdowns are harmful. It also talks about herd immunity, right? Now, herd immunity is a scientific fact. It's not like you can avoid it. It's a law like gravity, right? If you have a virus that induces any immunity, you're going to have herd immunity play a role in the control of the virus whether you want it to or not. So now, so that's what you have to, if you're going to write a document like this, talk about what the end point is. The end point is herd immunity. It means, what herd immunity means is that if you have two people interact with each other, one person has the virus, another person doesn't, the person, if the person already had the virus, who doesn't currently have the virus, already had and recovered, has immunity, that virus isn't going to spread because of immunity. That's essentially what herd immunity is about.
And isn't that also, I mean, this is a dumb question, but when I've heard people arguing against herd immunity, but oh, vaccines, vaccine, I mean, that's essentially what a vaccine is doing. Either you have natural immunity or you have the vaccine. If you don't have natural immunity, suppose that doesn't exist, the vaccine is creating herd immunity.
Yeah. So in fact, in the Great Barrington Declaration we mentioned both vaccine-induced immunity and naturally immunity-mediated herd immunity, herd immunity caused by COVID recovery. Now, the immunity that you get from this virus is not sterilizing permanently. What does that mean? It sounds scary, but what it really means is that you can get the virus a second time. It's not like a measles virus where if you have the vaccine or if you had it and recovered, you're never going to get measles again. That's sterilizing immunity. Here, the next variant you can get it. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't herd immunity, because for the time between you getting it and recovering and the next variant, you're protected against getting it. Now, the new variant, it's not like it's a brand new virus. You still remember how to deal with it. So you get that. So it's likely that the second time you get it, it'll be milder than the first time you get it because your body remembers how to deal with it. This is why...
Yes. So it's not surprising that the vaccine has had this, doesn't stop you from getting it, but probably reduces your likelihood of dying if you get it. The reason why is because that's how our natural immunity also functions. It's mimicking natural immunity, right? So that's all of that is like not at all surprising, but for some reason people thought herd immunity was a synonym for 'let it rip'. That herd immunity was a synonym for the virus is gone. Herd immunity just, it's a, what it means is that the virus is not going to spread so easily because the population, at least for now, has some protection against infection.
Yes. And I was wondering, I assume that is the reason... Well, California and New York were hit hardest early on. And New York City was really, really hit hard for the first, I don't know, month. There were bodies piling up outside hospitals. The cancer wings of hospitals, all the beds were taken by COVID patients. It hit New York City so hard the first, I don't know, three weeks, four weeks. And I've talked to doctors at these hospitals who said, 'Oh my gosh, they thought when this started, we're going to have to have beds out in the middle of Central Park. This is going to be going on and on and on.' And then poof, after a month, it stopped. I mean, still had people getting COVID, but not like that first crush of the first month. And I assume that's because New York is an international city, has the most people coming in and living on top of one another. And that was when the virus hit people with completely naive immune systems. It was the first place the virus was hitting in the US. So that's why it hit the hardest. But after that, everybody had a little bit of natural immunity. Even if you didn't realize it, when I got COVID, I basically had no symptoms. And it's probably because I had a low viral dose all this time by spending time in Florida.
You're young and healthy, so that probably helped, too. So, but I think the, so New York is a really interesting, because you're right, it was seeded there very early, obviously had to have been, seroprevalence studies there indicated like 9%, 8%, I forget the exact number, very early on had already had COVID, recovered March, I think it was April 2020, May 2020. So you had like the virus seeded very early there and spread pretty widely. But there were additional things I think early on in New York that led to the high death rate in addition to the lack of immunity. I think the hospital protocols that were followed early in the pandemic of ventilating patients, even patients that really probably didn't need it, contributed to death rate. The World Health Organization very quickly after they recommended it at first based on Chinese protocols, they very quickly recommended against it and that stopped. The other thing is we, there were like breakthroughs in treatment like there's a drug called dexamethasone which is a steroid, turns out was very useful to reducing death rates in hospitals. And we learned about that from a randomized trial in Britain in summer of 2020. And people were already talking about it before, right? You're right. So, I think that they did, a lot of the patients in New York who got COVID early got the wrong protocols in part because we just didn't know.
The second thing I think that happened in New York, it's interesting because like I think a lot of people did stay home in New York even with severe diseases that had nothing to do with COVID. People died at home, heart attacks. And as far as like the hospital, it's funny because there was that Javits Center that was transformed into a COVID hospital. And then there was that the Mercy ship that was, I think the president sent, they were empty.
They weren't empty. They weren't used. The idea, overwhelmed hospitals, it's not that hospitals weren't stressed. They were definitely stressed. Anyone, if you talk to anyone who worked in New York will tell you how stressful it was to work. People were scared, you know, because they thought it was like a four or five percent death rate disease that they're facing. And so I think people, there was a lot of stress, a lot, and a lot of, obviously a lot of death in New York, but it was not just COVID, it was somehow the panic and the response as well that contributed to that early. And then you're absolutely right in what happened afterwards is that New York, it looked like it was like, had disease was like much less spreading around, right? And Cuomo was on TV saying, getting an Emmy saying we've conquered the disease. We've conquered, we've conquered, this, you remember that big wave thing that he had on TV that was on TV with his brother on CNN.
Bragging about he's like conquered, conquered the disease.
Well, it was the New Yorkers were relatively protected because they'd been through this severe time. Same thing happened in Sweden. If you look at the data from Sweden, 2020 was the worst year for Sweden. 2021, 2022 were much less severe for Sweden. There's...
Yes. Same with China and Australia, right? They totally locked down, shut down. Well, you're going to get it early or are you going to get it late?
Yeah. And Australia, it came in 2022 after. So, Australia is an interesting case because they shut down early, right? So, they shut down in March of 2020. It's their summer. This disease spreads more easily in, I'm sorry, it's their winter, our summer. It spreads more easily in the winter than it does in the summer. And they have, you know, two major international hubs. So, they shut those two down. And they actually did get to zero. But then the disease kept coming back over and over and over again. Every time they had one case, they'd like shut the whole country down or shut down major provinces. Melbourne suffered 270 days of lockdown for two years over and over again. When the vaccines came, they thought they'd conquered COVID. There was very long delays in getting their vaccines out. They didn't start their campaign until September 2021. And when they finally opened up because they had to, they had no choice. The disease spread everywhere. And now Australia has almost identical all-cause excess deaths as Sweden through the pandemic. Just a tad under.
Define excess deaths. This is an important concept.
Sure. So like the question is how many deaths would a country have? How many deaths would you expect Florida to have? How many deaths would you expect California to have? Well, it's going to matter how many people are in Florida, how many people are, how old they are. Those kinds of facts are very important to say how many deaths, because we're all going to die, unfortunately. I have the sad news to tell you. [laughter] The question is like how many can you expect? You're not, you can't, it's not like you should expect ever to get to zero. If a government tells you we're going to get zero deaths, they're lying to you. So what you do is you look in past years and you say, okay, well here are the death rates from past years before COVID. And based on projecting forward for the population, here's how many deaths we would have expected if there had not been any other, if there had not been COVID or lockdowns or anything else, based on expectations based on past years and the size of the population, the age structure of the population. Excess deaths is the difference between the number of expected deaths you would have had based on those past years and the actual deaths you actually had of all causes. All-cause excess deaths. The nice thing about all-cause excess deaths is like a summary measure of how well the policies did. If the policies themselves caused excess deaths, then you would come out on that number. If COVID causes excess deaths, it comes out on the number. It's kind of like a summary measure of how well everything worked in the society.
And the shocking thing is that Sweden, which didn't lock down, didn't close schools for kids under 16, didn't close businesses, didn't say churches were inessential, didn't do all these crazy violations of civil rights, their all-cause excess deaths are lower than almost every single other country in Europe. I think Denmark is the only one that's close, and they had a much more relaxed policy, like more focused protection policy than, you know, than say California did. And compared to zero-COVID Australia, they have almost exactly the same all-cause excess deaths through the pandemic.
