Jay Bhattacharya — Thinking Critically About COVID: Conspiracies vs. Nuance and Facts

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic.

He became famous—or infamous in some circles—for his co-authorship, with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, “while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.” (Wikipedia) In a private email to Anthony Fauci, NIH director Francis Collins called the authors of the declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and said that “(it) seems to be getting a lot of attention — and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

That is when he became known as a “fringe epidemiologist”.

In fact, he has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health among other fields. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University.

Shermer and Bhattacharya discuss:

• loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions (Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins)
• overall assessment of what went right and wrong with the COVID-19 pandemic
• testing, masking, social isolation
• Is the cure worse than the disease?
• closing of schools, restaurants, salons, parks, beaches, hiking trails, etc.
• the cost to the economy of the shut downs
• the cost to the education of children of the shut downs
• Precautionary Principle
• comparative method: which countries and states did better or worse?
• Lab Leak hypothesis vs. Zoonomic hypothesis
• living with SARS-CoV-2 and its variants
• RFK, Jr. and his conspiracy theories
• debating anti-vaxxers (Rogan and elsewhere)
• treatments: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir, Vitamin D, Paxlovid, Tamiflu, retroviral medicines, monoclonal antibodies
• high risk vs. low risk groups; age, sex, race, pregnancy, weight, preconditions, immune compromised
• myocarditis, Robert Malone, mRNA vaccines, Joe Rogan, RFKJ, Peter Hotez
• The Great Barrington Declaration (“focused protection” of the people most at risk)
• Wall Street Journal OpEd: “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”, which argued there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines
• In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” and argued that “The harm to people is catastrophic”. Blacklisted by Twitter.

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