This week's guest on the Empowering Leaders podcast is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford
medical professor who stood up to the narrative of fear that was sweeping the globe at the
very start of the pandemic.
His advocacy for focused protection in opposition to the crippling lockdowns that were imposed
by public health officials was a courageous stance that cost him lifelong friends and
criticism from the US medical establishment.
I found this conversation to be incredibly insightful.
What does trusting the science actually mean?
His powerful collaboration with medical professionals around the world to rebuild trust in science
to allow open debate and dialogue is inspiring.
His courage and leadership is a story you really want to hear.
A conversation I loved and it ties in very closely with the passion that I have for the
work that we're doing at Alita.
If you're motivated to improve or start your leadership journey, we'd love you to check
out our Alita Connect signature.
Alita Connect is a program which brings leaders together from sport, industry, social
venture, education and the arts into bespoke facilitated forums where leaders are coming
together to connect, to learn and to share in what we think is a pretty life-changing
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist,
health economist and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and
vulnerable populations.
In October 2020...
At the height of communities being locked down around the world, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
and his colleagues, Dr. Martin Kuldoff, who's the professor of medicine at Harvard University
with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks, and Dr. Sunetra
Gupta, professor at Oxford University, also an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology
and mathematical modelling of infectious disease, together co-authored the Great Barrington
The declaration received 60,000 signatures.
Support from other doctors, nurses and health professionals, and close to a million signatures
from the wider community.
The Great Barrington Declaration called for focused protection for those most at risk,
identified as the elderly with underlying health issues, while those in the not vulnerable
category should resume life as normal, returning to school, to work, playing sport, etc., with
simple hygiene measures encouraged, like staying at home while sick and washing hands.
Jay, it's an incredible leadership story to stand up.
In what was one of the most unique times in human history in the last 100 years, I really
appreciate you joining me today.
Thank you for having me.
Jay, around 2020, in January, most of us around the world started to hear about this virus,
the coronavirus, COVID-19, that was emanating from China.
As one of the world's leading experts in the space, early on, you conducted a couple of
really specific studies to determine how dangerous COVID-19.
Can you tell us what you did way back then and what you found so early on?
Sure. So the key idea was that, well, let me just, let me step back to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic,
because that's where some of the ideas I had early on came from.
So is that the swine flu, Jay? Is that the H1N1 is a swine flu? Yeah.
Exactly. Swine flu. So there, there were very, early on, there were very, very high death rates
reported. The key catch there was that they would, identifying patients who were very sick with the
swine flu, and then they would like calculate what fraction of them,
recovered. And, you know, it was, the death rate was high. The problem was that, in fact,
there were a lot of people who had gotten the swine flu that never got really sick and never
came to the medical attention. And those were not captured. There were a whole bunch of studies that
were done of antibodies to the swine flu later in the pandemic, in that pandemic, which found that
a hundred times more people had been infected than actually become severe cases. And so the death
rate went from zero to a hundred times more people had been infected than actually become severe cases.
From three, four, five, six percent to something like 0.01 percent, 99.99% survival. So I had very
early on the same thought here. I was like, okay, well, maybe what if this is a highly infectious
respiratory virus? What if it's spread really rapidly, even outside of our knowledge, it's
producing some really, really sick patients, but maybe it's also produced some mild disease that
hasn't come to medical attention. And so early on in the pandemic, I ran two studies of antibodies
looking for evidence that people have been infected. And, and,
and, but never came to medical attention in Santa Clara County, California, where I live,
and in Los Angeles County, just south of where I live. And what we found was that, and that was
true. It was, it was in fact, 50 times more infections than cases. Now it turns out it's
much more deadly than swine flu. So this disease had a death rate in the population at large of
about 0.2%, 99.8%, 20 times more deadly than swine flu. But it also had a very steep age
gradient. Older people had a very high risk of death from this, four, five, 6%, if you're above
80, 80, 80 years old, whereas children have a vanishingly small risk of death from this,
you know, pretty close to zero, you know, on the order of the flu or less. And so that meant that
there was very different risk categories, old people, high risk, young people, much less so.
So that, that was the main study I did early on that. So the death rate was one thing that
came out of it. And so I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
there's two other lessons really important. If I can be really brief. One is that 3% of the
population in April, 2020 in Santa Clara County in California had the disease, had antibodies to
the disease. 3%, doesn't sound like a big number, but it's already too late to go to zero. That
means it's already, the horse is out of the barn. You're not going to be able to stop the disease
from spreading. It's a highly infectious disease. So a policy that aimed at zero was going to fail
just based on that study alone. You knew that.
And the second thing is 3% is not a lot of the populations. There's still like a very large
fraction of the population to go. It was going to be a long epidemic. And we knew that just from
that study. And Jay, there, you know, pretty crucial bits of information you would have
thought in terms of setting public policy on the back of that to say, Hey, this isn't a mortality
rate, you know, 3% because that would be alarming and the modeling would be off the charts. And we
were shown a lot of that modeling early days that predicted extraordinary, you know,
death rates. And then as you said, to really establish pretty quickly that the idea of
actually trying to chase COVID zero was just an impossibility and not something that was ever
going to be achieved. I suppose what happened, Jay, from there was that the public health message
and the fear went into overdrive. And, you know, I'm talking to you from the city of Melbourne. I
know you've been here before and given lectures. You're on your way back to Melbourne, Australia
to give some more lectures on this, but we can't forget some of the language that was
In the cities that we live in, I can remember a public health official talking about this virus
will creep in through your window. It will get you at night when you're asleep. Insidious,
virulent, deadly. We had grim-faced public health officials every day telling us of daily
case numbers and really just that the language became incredibly fear-driven.
As you said, if you flip that potentially and use the evidence, and there were hundreds of
studies done like you did to confirm that your Santa Clara study was accurate. And
you know, in fact, that was very quickly established as being what was going on. You could
have said and stood in front of people as a public health and said 99.98% of you are going to survive
this virus. There was another message to be had. Why did fear win the day in your mind, Jay?
Well, so yes, like they could have, I wouldn't have said 99.8. I would have said if you're old,
there's this high risk. It's a deadly disease. Be careful. If you're young,
live your life. The virus is the least of your problems or not, you know, not the top of your top,
but shouldn't top the list of your problems. But I'll say this, I think the fear-based messaging
in around the world was terrible. It was an unethical breach of public health norms. Normally,
you provide, the goal of public health is to provide people with tools to cope with that fear,
not to stoke it. And I saw in Australia, that was, it was, I mean, it was pretty bad in the U.S.,
I have to say, but it was even worse in Australia. I saw some advertisements of, you know, young
person, like a young,
active woman in an ICU bed who couldn't breathe, you know, the TV ad that was aired all through
Australia from public health. A lot of that, I think, stemmed from this idea that people
weren't going to take the disease seriously enough unless they were scared. That became
an official sort of policy of public health. And it, in part, you really did need something
like that if you were going to impose lockdowns on a population. Essentially,
what public health was asking people to do was to put aside all of the other priorities in their
life, their kids' schooling, if they had cancer, don't go get cancer, don't go get treatment,
if you have, don't get screened for cancer, put aside your medical priorities, put aside,
close your businesses, don't go to church or your synagogue, don't, essentially, to put aside all
the other priorities in your life in order to avoid this single infectious disease. The only
way you can really get compliance with that is if people are really scared for,
especially for an extended period of time. And it's a powerful weapon, fear, isn't it?
Because it's very hard to reverse. Once people have established that in their brain, it becomes,
even then, when you hear educated and world-renowned experts like you speak in a balanced
way about this with proper evidence and produce it, people then don't really want to hear that
message. And I suppose going back to your leadership, to stand up and the Great Barrington
Declaration, can you tell, I suppose, was that your response?
To the public fear? Can you tell us about how it emanated and what it was about?
Sure. So if you, just to take you back, in Australia, the lockdowns you all did actually,
it actually worked in one sense, like in early, the early lockdowns actually did reduce cases to
zero on the island. In the United States, they hadn't worked, but the cases have come down.
And in the summer of 2020, there wasn't the, the fear had started to subside.
And there was a lot of fear. And there was a lot of fear. And there was a lot of fear.
And there was a sense of maybe we weren't going to need to lock down again.
In fact, I remember talking to some colleagues in Australia who were like, look, we've conquered
the disease. Our life is normal. There's no restrictions at all. Although there were still
restrictions over here. In Australia, that was partly because you were in the Southern
Hemisphere. The disease arrived in your summer. It's a seasonal disease, very clearly. It arrived
in the Northern Hemisphere in the winter. It's more easily, more easily spread in the winter.
So it put Australia and much of the rest of the world on different paths.
In the United States, in September, October, there was a lot of concern about kids spreading
the disease in schools. It was really becoming clear to me that the summer sense that the disease
was under control had gone away and that people wanted to have lockdowns again. My kids, for
example, were not in person in school for a year and a half. And the idea of the lockdown as a way
to control the disease, it sort of entrenched itself in public health. But I knew from talking
to some of my colleagues and some of my friends that there was a lot of concern, both about the
harms of the lockdown on young people and also the ability of the lockdowns to actually control
the spread of the disease. It wasn't universal.
Some government officials have tried to create this impression that every credible person thought
the lockdown's the only way. I knew for a fact that wasn't true. In October of 2020, I was invited
to this small conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where, that's why I've got the
Great Barrington name, Martin Kulldorff, who's a Harvard, as you mentioned, a Harvard epidemiologist
and biostatistician, and Sunetra Gupta were both, there was the three of us, and it was a bunch of
people. So I was invited to this small conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I was
invited to this small conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I was invited to this small conference
of other scholars who were there to talk about what the right policy ought to be.
And what we, what Martin, Sunetra, and I came up with was it turns out we arrived basically at the
same place. You have this age gradient and risk. Older people are really high risk, younger people
much less so. The lockdowns are tremendously harmful to young people, especially. So the right
policy is focus protection of the old. That meant a whole series of policies that are local in nature
because people, older people, they're not going to be able to do that. So I was invited to this
people have different living arrangements to impress the world, but with an aim toward
reducing the risk of exposure when there's high community spread for older people.
And then for young people, lift the restrictions.
Because the ability to actually stop the disease from spreading had clearly, there wasn't
The lockdowns had not worked to stop the disease anywhere outside of, say, Australia and New
Zealand, certainly not in the Northern Hemisphere.
And so at the same time, we really damaged the lives of children, of other people with
So the Great Parental Declaration, we wrote a piece in October 4, 2020, released it and
put it on a webpage.
Tens of thousands of doctors signed on, tens of thousands of scientists and epidemiologists
It showed the world that there was not a consensus in favor of lockdown.
In fact, there was deep unhappiness with lockdown.
And the scientific community.
And then almost a million people so far, regular people have signed on.
And it's an amazing leadership position to take and swimming against the tide, as it
And the public health machine came after you, Dr. J, in a big way.
Anthony Fauci, who's the most high-profile public health official in the world, would
be a reasonable term, I think, to assign to him, the Chief Medical Officer Advisor to
the President of the United States.
He's been in his role for five decades.
I have to say, I think it's a good thing.
I have to read this quote back to you, because this is what he said when asked about the Great
Barrington Declaration.
I know you will know it, but he said this.
I'll tell you exactly how I feel about that.
If you let infections rip, as it were, and say, let everybody get infected that's going
to be able to get infected, and then we'll have herd immunity, quite frankly, that is
And anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that is nonsense, and it's very
Now, if you read the one page of the Great Barrington Declaration, you never talked about
You spoke about it.
You spoke about focus protection.
I mean, why was that?
I think you've referred to that as propaganda.
I mean, why was someone in that role so vehemently trying to bring down a logical explanation
that you put forward?
Well, the strategy of lockdown is an absolutely extraordinary strategy.
It requires extraordinary evidence.
And one of the things I think it requires is this sense that no reasonable scientist
That, in fact, there's this overwhelming.
There's this overwhelming consensus in favor of it.
The problem that the Great Barrington Declaration posed to Tony Fauci is that the authors of
the Great Barrington Declaration come from reputable universities, Stanford, Harvard,
I've never in my life cared that I'm a reputable university.
I'd rather you judge me on my ideas.
But here you had three people from reputable universities saying that lockdown was a bad
lockdowns or otherwise um then it's just he's just one voice among many and so he used his power
as the world's most prominent public health figure to essentially mount a propaganda campaign instead
of instead of engaging with the argument we were making in good faith he put a straw man in place
he said oh they just want everyone to force everyone to get infected when in fact what we
were calling for was policies that would actually protect the old and the vulnerable
during the first wave in the united states 80 percent of the deaths more than 80 percent of
the deaths were people over the age of 65 the lockdowns had not worked to protect the vulnerable
we were calling for better policies to protect the older populations not letting the virus rip
in fact the the goal was to protect the people who who would die at a highest rate from the virus
that was that's the idea of folks protection so he was creating the straw man because those
words are powerful in the minds of the regular population of regular people let it rip all you
want the policy is just to expose me to the virus oh you want to kill me I mean that is essentially
the the specter that of he was raising in the minds of regular people in order to dismiss the
idea of that we were putting forward in order to not actually engage with it he was trying to shut
down debate and uh Jay to the context to understand the power of of Tony fat you people may not quite
get a grasp on that and I'm sure I don't as well but
in his role billions and billions and dollars of grants go the way of scientists and he has uh
complete say over funding and if you're a scientist and you don't get funded by the
regulatory authorities that he's been in control of for five decades that can be career-ending for
a scientist I'm assuming so so it takes courage and leadership for you and your colleagues to
stand up and say hey we're going to put that at risk but a lot of your other colleagues behind
the scenes were supportive but really felt as though their hands were tied is that is that an
addiction of of how it plays out I mean it's definitely risky so he he uh he sits on top of
as you say billions of dollars of federal funding uh careers are made based not just on the money
from getting Tony Fauci but but the fact that the National Institute of Health has awarded you a
grant many top medical institutions will get Grant tenure on the basis of winning those kinds of
awards that's true at Stanford University where I teach um and so it's really hard to speak up against
them um because you're essentially putting your career at risk you're saying okay well I'm gonna
I'm gonna oppose someone who may make or break my career um and uh you know it's it's there are other
sources of funding so it's not it's not like he's but in in the areas of infectious disease
epidemiology infectious disease immunology he is essentially you know the the Crown Prince the King
right you're you're essentially going against the King um and it uh it's so yeah I mean it does it
takes some level of, you know, I don't, I should, I have to tell you, I made a decision that I was
not, I didn't care what happened to my career. I just felt like I had to speak up because the
policy was harming so many people that I basically had devoted my career to studying and making their
lives better, vulnerable people, poor people, children. And I couldn't stay silent. And so I
had to make a decision when I signed it that I wasn't doing, even if I had to pay for it with
my career, I was going to still do it. And that is a great story of courage and
leadership, Jane. I'm fascinated by it and we need people in the world and we need to celebrate
people. You know, we had a lot of, you know, there was very little debate, but a lot of it was
trust the science, trust the science. And what you actually were, you know, offering up was that
science is an evolving discussion and it requires debate. And then
Eventually, if it becomes a collaborative enough and you get consensus, then there are times when
people do generally agree, don't they, on certain things. I think people, you know, look at smoking
now and we're pretty universal on what happens if you decide to go down the path of smoking
cigarettes. But on this case, with something as new as that to have debates shut down, you know,
it seems the opposite of science. Is that again, a fair reflection?
It's exactly right. It's exactly right. I mean, science is not an automatic
consensus. It's not an automatic consensus. It's not an automatic consensus. It's not an automatic
consensus. It's not an automatic consensus. It's not an automatic consensus. It's not an automatic
consensus. You have a new situation. It just takes time, right? It takes, it takes a lot of
minds. The world is a complicated place. This disease is a complicated thing. Society is
complicated. It's going to take a lot of trial and error with lots of people talking to each
other in good faith, trying to generate data in order to learn what the right way to deal with
this is. And the idea that it's like somehow minutes after you have this virus in the world
at large, that everyone knows exactly what to do. It happens to coincide with exactly the same thing.
It happens to coincide with exactly the same thing. It happens to coincide with exactly what Tony
Fauci and other public health authorities wanted to do. I was just not true. It was, it was, it was a
lot of debate going on sort of sub Rosa underneath the public's public's, you know, Aegis. They're
not, they're not privy to it because it's scientists just talking to each other and a lot
of uncertainty. And yet the public was painted this picture of consensus. It was, it was, it was
false. It was a, it was a propaganda campaign. I don't know how else to describe it. It was a
propaganda campaign. I don't know how else to describe it. It was, it was a propaganda campaign.
Right. Science needs an open space where people can be, can make hypotheses that turn out wrong
and not be canceled for them. People, they need, they need to have lots of people who disagree
with each other. That's actually part of the fun of science. Frankly, it's one of the reasons I
have always enjoyed being a scientist because I learned from that process of discussing with my
colleagues and I'm all, I'm often wrong. That's part of, that's part of how science works. And
I, and it's, it's, it's the opportunity to change my mind, which makes science fun.
I want to talk to you about, you know, great leadership,
collaboration and moment. I'm going to come back a bit to the city of Melbourne where I live and,
and just tell a bit of that story again. I know you're acutely aware of it, Jay, but it was,
you know, as I said, you know, with pride, we used to call ourselves and we were voted
regularly the most livable city in the world here in Melbourne. And it's where my four kids
were born. We were passionate about it, but what happened in the last two years? I mean,
I think people have to look back with crazy. We had pregnant women being handcuffed and
arrested in their homes in Ballarat, a regional town, because they posted on Facebook, the idea
that maybe we should peacefully protest around the, uh, the merit of lockdowns. We had, you know,
two years of schooling where kids were homeschooled, uh, effectively out of school for that,
that a period of time we had police tape around our playground. So when kids were allowed out for
their hour, they could look at a playground and then literally have the torment of having that.
We had boulders put on skate parks, the amount of effort and resource that was done to stop kids
in their one hour, they were allowed out from home 5k exclusion zones around your neighborhood. You
weren't allowed to go out of that barrier for fear of being arrested. We had elderly people who
were sitting on park benches moved on from police. I think sometimes we need to actually remind
ourselves of what we went through curfews in your house. You weren't allowed out of your house at,
you know, after 8pm at night or 9pm at night. Now what was never debated here in this city
was the damage of lockdown. Now you're one of the most published researchers in scientific
journals all around the world. You were acutely aware of the damage lockdowns were going to do.
Can you give us some of the evidence that now has been produced? Because it's still in my mind,
not something people talk about the pain of lockdown and what it's continued to do. Can
you share with us some of your findings? It's devastating. I mean, it's not just my
findings. This is like the work of many, many people, many scientists. But it was predictable,
right? So just for instance, just take kids, right? So I think Melbourne has had probably the
most number of days of lockdown over the past two and a half years of any city in the world,
actually. And a lot of kids, as you say, they're kids.
The kids' lives were interrupted. If you replace regular school with online school,
you're not actually giving them schooling. It's something else. A lot of the benefit of
schooling comes from ability to interact with other kids. So there's social development that's
lost. And also, there's just learning that's lost. That's going to be true for Melbourne kids,
just as it is for American kids who have been kept out of school. Before the pandemic,
there was a literature on this that looked at
short interruptions in schooling and what consequences it has on the lives of children
the rest of their lives. And so they would do these natural experiments where they compare
some location that has mandated schooling until you're age 17 versus age 16, and then track the
kids for the rest of their life. And it turns out that the children that were required to stay in
school for just a short, one year longer, that led to longer lives, more healthy lives, and
with less unemployment, just more prosperity. In other words, by locking down, we have consigned
our children to shorter lives, less healthy lives. One estimate early in the pandemic from just the
spring lockdowns in the United States alone estimated that we had shortened our children's
lives just in the United States by five and a half million life years from just the spring lockdown.
And this is true all over the world.
Places in poor countries like Bangladesh, Uganda, where kids have never come back.
Millions of children missed two years of school and then never came back to school,
lost forever. It's a catastrophic generational theft of the birthright of our kids,
what we did with lockdowns. And that's just on kids. That's on the educational outcomes,
nevermind the psychological harm we've done to our children and young people.
Right? So in the United States, there was a study done by the U.S. CDC,
in June of 2020, that found that one in four young adults seriously considered suicide the
previous month. Can you imagine the depths of psychological despair people were in,
especially young people? Young people need interactions with other young people. I mean,
I'm an old guy. I can be a hermit. It's fine. But even old people need, like me,
need human connections, right? So like there was a big increase in despair and deaths among
older people with dementia from loneliness. People with dementia died of loneliness,
20, 30% increase in that. Everyone needs connection. And so the levels of anxiety,
the levels of depression shot through the roof. And the consequences of that now are a big
increase in drug overdoses, big increase in deaths from the kinds of things that happen when you have
deep psychological distress at a mass level.
There's also problems with other physical health. People stopped getting cancer screening. People
actually skipped cancer treatment because they were so afraid of COVID. Or they were told that
they shouldn't come in because they want to preserve the healthcare system. Preserve the
healthcare system for what? If you're not using it to treat cancer patients, what's it for?
People stayed home with heart attacks. It's mind-boggling because we made the avoidance of
COVID so far above many, many other deadly diseases in poor countries. I worry about
poor countries for lots of reasons. But one of the things that I think is important to understand,
when rich countries like Australia, like the United States, lock down and cut trade ties,
essentially reduce the connections with the outside world, a lot of poor countries,
they've reorganized their economy to fit into the global economy. And when these kinds of economic
consequences break, when rich countries undertake these kinds of policies, it has
knock-on consequences in poor countries. And a lot of poor countries, there's a lot of people
who live on $2 a day of income or less, very, very poor. Even small perturbations in the economy can
have enormous deleterious consequences on them. And that's exactly what happened. The UN estimated
that somewhere on the order of 80 million people were put on the brink of starvation, dire food
poisoning. Hundreds of thousands of children in March of 2021, a UN report said, died in South
Asia alone from starvation. We have a moral obligation, I think, when we've made promises
to the rest of the world about trade and all the economic ties, to not break them. Because
the consequences are not just that some rich people don't get so rich. It's that the poor
face the consequences of that even more acutely than anyone else, I think. And the poorest of the
poor are the worst of all.
It's an incredible summation that you just gave. And the social divide that you talk about is
horrific. And the consequences are horrific going forward. And coming back a bit micro here in
Melbourne in the, as you said, the most locked down city in the world or close enough to it. In
the final weeks of the final lockdown, a journalist wrote a story. It was very hard to get information
out on this, that there were 800 teenage girls a week being diagnosed with eating disorders in
this city alone. That was the perfect time to get information out on this. And I think that's
And I think that's the key to this. I think that's the key to this. And I think that's the key to this.
I think that's the key to this. And I think that's the key to this. And I think that's the key to this.
And really to get a consultation with a medical health professional, a mental health professional
in Melbourne, there's an 18-month waiting. There's just no possibility. The inundation of the
demand on that service, as you said, we spent the whole narrative around protecting from a virus
where the evidence was there that young people were close statistically enough to no risk at all.
And yet we've created this incredible lifetime of problems on the other side.
It was the fascinating part, Jane, this is why these conversations for me are so important and
your leadership is so important that through that time, I was co-hosting a breakfast radio show here
in Melbourne. We had the premier on regularly. To even ask a respectful question about the merit
of lockdown created a firestorm of response. In some corners, you were considered treacherous
for even what I thought was respectfully asking a question. And so my problem is how do we learn
to view this as being nosey, and how do we move forward without recognizing what we're doing?
Yeah, I think it's not necessarily the problem of the pandemic. It's the problem of what has happened
to our young people, and the problem of how we're able to say, if you don't want to talk about what
you just said, here's the end of this, because we just don't want to hear what you said. And I am
so sorry to hear that. I'm sorry to hear you say that as well. Because it's the same right.
Yeah, I want to see young people say, you know, we're not going to be talking about this. We're
not going to be talking about this. We're just going to be talking about it. Or, you know, I'm not
going to talk about this for the world. We're not going to hear what you just said, because it's too painful to
ourselves in the eye and say, okay, what did we do wrong? In medicine, we do this. There's a
tradition of after a patient has died, and a lot of doctors are involved, to have a conference
called a morbidity and mortality conference, where you, without pointing fingers, discuss what went
wrong, what went right, and so with the aim of essentially instructing everybody and learning
from each other so that we don't make the same mistake again. We need to have a society-wide
morbidity and mortality conference around COVID, because the response was, I think, in many ways,
everyone would agree, a failure. You know, the COVID spread, we had all these lockdown harms.
At the same time, I think it has to be more than just a formal evaluation of it by governments,
although that's necessary. I think there has to be a cultural movement that repudiates lockdown,
so that lockdown becomes a dirty word. The same way we talk about nuclear war or chemical
weapons, we talk about nuclear weapons. We talk about nuclear weapons. We talk about nuclear
weapons. We talk about nuclear weapons. We talk about nuclear weapons. We talk about nuclear weapons. We
think lockdown belongs in the same category, because it is a violation on a mass scale of
basic civil rights, basic promises that we make as a society to the poorest members and most
vulnerable members of society. It's a rupture in civilization, and we undertook it on the basis of
fear and panic. That's what makes it so hard to talk about. It's why you couldn't ask your
premier about it. It's why you couldn't ask your premier about it. It's why you couldn't ask your
premier about it. It's why you couldn't ask your premier about it. It's also why this censorship
regime came up. It's also how Tony Fauci was able to get away with this propaganda campaign,
because of the fear. We have to come to terms with the fact that there may be scary things that go on,
but how do we as a society, and you're asking about leadership, it starts with that. It starts
with a commitment by leadership to never use those tactics again, to never create fear, to think about
in the future when there is fear, how should we respond courageously, intelligently,
compassionately, so that we don't jump to the nearest thing that we think will work,
but forget about the poor, the vulnerable, the working class, and all the harms that are caused
by that resort to a strategy that seems fine when you're in a moral panic, but really isn't.
The other part to your world, Jay, you're an MD and a PhD in economics, both gained at the stand,
and clearly expertise in that. Well, I can't work out where the economists were in all of this as
someone that isn't my sphere either, but to literally print trillions of dollars here in
Australia, we closed down everyone's business and then had to print billions, unprecedented amount
of debt to go into when the opportunity was there, as you said, for focus projection, which would
have fraction of the amount of money to look after the real people who were vulnerable, the elderly,
and we could have done that. But I think it's a great question. I think it's a great question.
Put so many resources into that narrative and then let business continue and let people go back
to school and all of those things. I mean, was there any economists that you looked to and
thought, is someone sounding the alarm on how bad that was? There's a select few. I mean,
there's an excellent one in Australia, this woman named Gigi Foster, who was very brave,
actually spoke up to great credit, although she got, I think, a lot of flack for it in Australia.
There were very few economists who spoke up about these harms early in the pandemic and
throughout, in fact, frankly, throughout the pandemic. Public health economics is not only
about the short term. In fact, policy that's aimed at the short term, if it has long-term costs,
is bad policy. The inflation that we're facing, some of the economic problems, the supply chain
disruptions and so on they're facing, those are lockdown harms, long-term lockdown harms.
Economists should have been sounding the alarm almost from the beginning,
but it was really difficult. I'll tell you, I just kept my medical doctor hat on and my
epidemiologist hat on. I didn't have my economist hat on, in large part because it was really hard
if you're an economist to speak up. It took moral courage to do so, I think, because you were going
to be accused of valuing money over lives, even though what economists,
really care, I mean, like good economists, what we care about is actually lives. We care about
people not starving, people getting good medical care. All of that requires a functioning economy.
It's not dollars that were at stake. It wasn't dollars versus lives. That was always not the
right, that was a false dichotomy. It was always lives versus lives, right? So if we lock down,
certain set of people benefit from it. It's the laptop class, the people who don't actually get
harmed by locking down. But that's only,
in rich countries, maybe 20, 30% of economies, maybe 20% of the economy. The rest of the
people, they have to work. They get exposed to the virus. You can see this enormous rich-poor
divide in who got infected. So you're not protecting all lives. You're only protecting
a certain class of life, laptop class is what I call them. At the same time, you have these
long-term consequences where if you have economic growth hit, if you have inflation,
people are going to die from that. Displacement, economic displacement is going, is, is, is for
especially people on the margin, is the difference between life and death. We already talked about
the 80 million people who starved or had dire food insecurities as a consequence of these lockdowns.
Hundreds of millions of people were thrown into poverty worldwide. Even in rich countries,
inflation means, you know, poor people are going to have trouble feeding their family,
clothing their family. It's, it's not true that we're all so rich that we don't have to worry
about these things. I think, so it was always lives versus lives. It was always lives versus
lives. We should, we should, we should, we as economists should have been brave enough to speak
up even when we were being accused of being callous. When in fact, we're speaking, we're
speaking for the poor, the vulnerable, the working class, when we speak up and say, look, there are
costs to this. Yeah, the term excess deaths was one that was, was floated around the world.
But you couldn't get real information. As you said, it's lives versus lives. If,
if you pull that lever and lock people down, what is the consequence of lives on the other side?
There wasn't a conversation. And I appreciate having, I want to move on very, uh, in a moment
to some questions around leadership. We're, we're, we're fascinated by people like you who take great
courageous leadership stands and have done all your life. But before I move on, I just want to
ask you is, is this may be a, um, you know, uh, a radical question in some ways, but have we
demonized viruses too much? I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
Ted talked the other day, um, Bill Gates is talking about his hope and possibility to eradicate
the flu and to live in a community in a, in a world where we don't have the flu. I mean,
again, no medical background, no scientific background, but to me, is that even a goal
worth chasing? I'm assuming we're carrying hundreds of viruses at a time and that that's
part of how we evolve and grow. Do we need to recalibrate that conversation? And does that
even make sense? The pursuit of not wanting to have a flu season? Well, I mean, I don't think
we, there's not possible. I don't know any way technically to do it because flu is carried by,
uh, humans and, and also other animals. Like we don't have a, uh, there's a very few set of
viruses and pathogens. We have the technology or even the possibility of eradicating smallpox is
one of them, um, that we actually touched the huge success. And that was worth doing because
it was a deadly disease. If you got it, it, it, it, it was, um, it was spread very easily.
It probably in 1492, uh, when it spread,
to the new world, it, it, uh, it, it killed off 95% of the indigenous population living there.
Uh, in, in, uh, so it has this like long history, but it only spread from humans to humans. And we
had a fantastic vaccine and still it took almost a century to eradicate it of concerted effort and
work. Uh, here we have, uh, viruses that are, are spread very easily, have a, have a consequence
that's deadly for some group of people, uh, but not, not for others. It spreads into,
you have to consider the harms and the benefits, not just simply say, okay,
it would be nice to do this. Uh, I think, um, a project like let's eradicate the flu or eradicate
COVID, uh, would decimate civilization if we actually undertook it the way we, that's because
smallpox, uh, it's a very different thing. You have a vaccine that, that actually stops
transmission. We don't have something like that for the flu or for, for COVID. Uh, we,
we don't have the, the, uh, it's present animals. Are you willing to let your pets,
kill your pets if you if you get uh if it gets if one of your pets gets covid i mean that's i mean
that's the decision china has made um are we willing to do that are you i mean are you willing
to to separate newborns from moms you're gonna have to do that if one of them has covid are you
are you willing to uh see vast numbers of poor people starve because of the kinds of lockdowns
you're doing like who's gonna who's gonna keep society going i mean those are the kind of
questions you end up when i i think about when i hear let's try to eradicate the flu and bill
gates but maybe what he thinks about is oh well we have this new technology let's use it but it's
not so simple society is very complicated um and uh i think the uh even um even as a goal
it's a funny goal uh we have a global society we share germs with each other that's just part of
being human in some ways it's bad because you know you get exposed to germs that could kill
you but in other ways that creates a less immune naive population around the world
i can come to australia you can come to the united states and there's no real immunological
danger not not not not truly inherently we can exchange ideas with each other in person
and we're all we all benefit from it um we there's this like uh sunetra gupta has this idea
that like because we have globalization we become more healthy even by by even as we expose each
other to germs we we teach them how to do it and we teach them how to do it and we teach them how to
do it and we teach our each other about our our immune systems about the germs that we saw so
that when we don't when you know when we see it when we're younger and we don't over over over
react to it when we're older we don't have the kind of immunological naive population that is
vulnerable to christopher columbus coming over and decimating 95 of the population of a vast
continent um because of globalization do we really want to go backward on that um it's a complicated
question i mean there are definitely diseases i would rather that that human beings are able to
get the flu and i don't think that's true for the flu and i don't think that's true for covid
uh it's a great answer because as i said that's it plays into that fear narrative doesn't it that
you know a society of germaphobes and and you know not wanting to interact with each other
seems a big consequence for for the annual flu season which we know people lose their lives and
you can't be flipping about that because you always get then accused of being COVID-19 and
cold-hearted but there is a logic to to your conversation if you take that further um we're
seeing great leaders uh jay have um a series of dimensions of leadership we think are common i'd
love to ask you about them so please expand we think all people who make uh great leaders in the
21st century like you have a sense of self-leadership first and foremost before they lead
others what does self-leadership mean to you well i i mean when i chose this profession i i invested
my energy into it for a reason it wasn't for self-agreement i don't i mean it's it's fun to
have a stanford professorship but that's really not the purpose of it even if i was
not very successful in publishing or whatever i would still be honored to be able to be in
this profession it means something to me i chose it for a reason um and uh if i'm not able to do it
to my best of my ability then what's my purpose like i could have during the pandemic it was
it would have been very easy to get grants just to forecast the cases like a lot of a lot of people
did that i could have i could have just stayed silent about the more controversial things
but it would have felt to me like a violation of my own integrity like i didn't get in this
business uh in order just to advance my career i i came i got in this business because i'll tell
you like on my on my medical school application the the i wrote about diarrhea and children
turns out it's one of the most common causes of childhood death and you can prevent it or treat it
with a very simple salt solution cost pennies oral rehydration and i was when i first learned about
this when i was an undergrad i was shocked that there were so many kids dying from want of a three
cent salt solution um i mean so i mean to me that's the purpose of of of any career how do i
make the lives of other people better
and i don't i just couldn't i couldn't i mean i lost a lot of friends over this i wish i wish i
hadn't but it was over over my stance but i and i and i wish i could get them back but or at least
reconcile in some way but i couldn't i couldn't stay silent jade so i can hear your values and
your purpose just emanate in all your words so i mean if i pick up on that for a moment
it was friendship changing for some of your colleagues they couldn't
align or didn't want to have the conversation was that was that a cost of of your stance it was
uh so i have uh it's i teach at stanford um university a hundred of my colleagues
circulated a secret petition in um in uh about a year ago this time uh at where where they asked
the president university to sought to censor me because i had been i'd been in a a public
round table with the governor of florida governor desantis of florida uh and he had asked me whether
it was a wise idea for children to be masked children as young as
two years old to be masked um and i know the literature on this there's no randomized
evidence that that serves any purpose in reducing the spread of the disease
the governor of florida is asking me this i'm a scientific advisor of his
it's it's televised so i and uh just so everyone in florida can see the advice the governor is
getting and so i told him what i had to say which is that even though like all the public
health authorities saying mask mask mask um even children as young as two i knew that that
was not normal first there's no scientific evidence for it in terms of like high quality
randomized studies none um and that the world health organization has said no don't mask
children as uh under the age of six so that's what i that's what i told the governor some of
my colleagues heard this and thought that i was violating some public health norm by telling the
public the fact the scientific fact and they circulated a petition and i looked at the list
of signees of that petition this petition asked the president university to to censor me
and i looked on the list included some some friends of mine really hurt to see uh uh friends
that that uh haven't talked to me in two years i just it's just been it's been heartbreaking
but on the other hand i have to say like i i shouldn't people shouldn't feel too bad for me i
now um have made a tremendous number of really really amazing i've met a lot of amazing people
made some deep friendships because i feel like i've been through a war and you know when you
when you're a war uh the people you're in the trenches with become friends for life and uh
i've made some friends like that through the pandemic uh thanks for sharing that it's uh you
know you can't imagine uh you know what that's that like when you've uh contributed like you
have but as you said the the glass on half full on the other side uh i'm sure there's lots of uh
as you said connections that have happened as a result of it uh we see leaders are really
conscious of how they positively impact others in their environment on a daily basis i mean
the great barrington declaration was doing that on a global scale you can hear in your language
that that's something you're conscious about your sense of purpose
you've got an example you know just day-to-day jay around what you try and do to impact others
on a positive uh in a positive way i uh well this has been hard during the pandemic because
it's been so isolating but i love students i love i love talking to students i love uh
you know actually frankly what i really like is asking them why are they making the decisions
they're making um i like i like to push them to to to like think in that way just because
what it does for them is then then they're making choices that are better informed
uh i love uh and it to me uh i'll tell you during the pandemic i missed that because a lot of there
was there was a lot of disconnection around that but it was replaced by i mean i can't count the
number of people who've sent me kind emails of the great branch declaration when they see me
on a podcast like this or a tv show whatever um people i've never met it's it's a really
unique experience for me because before the pandemic i'd never written an op-ed never
been on tv never done a really done a podcast um and uh most of the time i've never done a podcast
no i've never written a talk show never daschke would say to me hey this is a big idea but
can we actually do an op-ed it sounds good you know with me i've gotten so entscheiden
especially i would interact with my students who i loved and other academics by writing academic
papers uh to have the opportunity to touch people and reach people on such a global scale is
is really an opera is is a is a it's an absolute honor and i've been mindful to try to try to uh
uh to to use that as best i can to uh you know to to tell people what the evidence is uh you know from
what i see and also to convey to people when i don't know what the evidence is when we when we don't know i think a lot of times that often
in a position like this, you get tempted to overstate. And I've tried very hard not to do
that, to tell people, yeah, here's what we know, here's what we don't know.
Brilliant to hear that. We talk about the leaders really conscious of how they
create and share their vision. And again, what you've done in recent times to get a million
people around the world and 60,000 fellow medical professionals. I know that there were a lot that
were scared off as well because of what happened and the threats that were made. I mean, can you
tell us what you went through in trying to get that vision out there and how you've gone about
creating and sharing it? Well, I've had to learn some new skill sets. So I always loved teaching,
but I've never been on TV before. I'd never written an op-ed before. I tended to write
before the pandemic, I would write 5,000 to 10,000 word densely argued with lots of figures.
And then I'd sit there arguing,
with referees who would talk about the details. And I had great fun doing it. It was really
enjoyable. I've learned that you have to, how to take arguments like that, get to the essence of
it and convey it in a way that everybody can understand it. I've had to do it in context of
both writing for very, very large audiences in newspapers and other places, but also in the
context of TV. Like I've never had a three, try to get a professor to,
do a three minute TV hit. So I had to learn by fire. Like the first time I did a three minute hit,
I barely cleared my throat. And the announcer said, oh, your time's up. I'm like, what? Wait,
we just started. So I've gotten better at that. I think, still not great at that, I think,
but it's been interesting. But I found is that reaches people. It reaches people that you
wouldn't otherwise reach. And they're important people to reach, regular people that, so you can
help them make decisions in their own life.
It's a powerful thing to be able to be able to do. I mean, you already know it from your,
your experience firsthand. I had to learn it sort of the hard way during the pandemic. And it's just,
it's been an honor to be able to be able to do that or learn how to do that.
Soundbite world of mainstream media. I'll come back to that. Curiosity is a word that we
see leaders attribute to them a lot. They're curious in their day-to-day world. I mean,
I'm sure that resonates with you. How does curiosity show up for you? And then people
approach that through you.
Learning and development through their curiosity. How does that word resonate with you?
Oh, I mean, I think for me, well, I mean, I, I always thought of it as like a, as a,
as a negative in my career, I can't seem to stay on one topic. And in my career, I was like,
I always got, I got normally like for scientists, if you pick one topic and become an expert or you
put all your worth into that one topic, that's, that tends to lead to the biggest rewards because
you publish in that topic, every, you grow your network in that topic. And then, and then you're
like, you're, you know, the world expert.
And my career, all I, I would, I would very easily get distracted with other like law.
I have an MD in economic, I have an MD and a PhD in economics. It doesn't seem like a
really, it seems like strange. I'm just curious about both of them. Why am I writing my infectious
disease? I've written about infectious disease for 20 years. I just happened to be interested
in it. I, you know, I just, there are like topics through my career and my life where
I just, I just, I just got, I'm like, okay, this is, this sounds like a fascinating topic.
I had some insight into it as I'd write about it.
And then I go to the next topic and I would always wonder like, why is it that I can't stay
on one thing? During the pandemic, what I found was that I could tap into all of those things
that seemed like one-offs to me. Like we're just, you know, little bird walks that I'd had. And it
was like, okay, well, I've learned about, I wrote about HIV in Africa. Wrote a couple of papers in
that. Turned out it was really useful. So I, cause I learned a lot about what life in Africa was
life and do it when I was writing about that. You know,
it's just, they're, they're like parts of my career that where I, I never understood why I
worked on them other than curiosity that turned out during the pandemic to be really, really
important to my thinking. I don't know. I think that's the main thing about curiosity is it allows
you, even when you don't know exactly why it, it enriches you. It makes you, makes you prepared
for things you don't even realize you're preparing for. It's an amazing bit of evidence of how it
showed up for you, isn't it? To have the understanding, so many diverse areas and,
to have studied them at the level that you had to bring that together. It's, it's a great example of,
of how curiosity works and then serves the greater community. Communicating with clarity is a
dimension of leadership. We talk about a lot and you mentioned having to, you know, from 10,000
word pieces and defending them with, with other professors to, to try and get, you know, three
minutes and make an impact on that. I mean, how, how have you gone about sort of your communication
strategy? Uh, it's, it's been a, it's been trial by fire.
Because I, I've, I've been on TV quite a bit, uh, which has been, um, I mean, like I said,
an amazing, amazing privilege. Uh, I think that the key thing is I have to, I, I realized before
it was so easy to get lost in the details. You probably have heard it even in the earlier
answers to this question. Um, uh, but when you're doing this kind of large, wide scale
communication, you have to find the essential argument and make it in a way so that everyone
can understand it while still,
I think holding on to the core bit of it, not being dishonest in any way, not, not being at all
trying to show people up. Like I'm, I know, well, it's something I don't know being absolutely
honest. Um, so finding the core bit, being honest in the delivery of it, and then being clear around
both of those, both of the, like what you know, and don't know. I think that's, that's what I've
learned, uh, has been really important during this. I don't, I don't really, I frankly, I've
kept thinking people are going to stop inviting me for, for, uh,
podcasts and TV and all that, that, that'll, that'll, that'll be proof the pandemic's over.
And I can go back to being, uh, being like a quiet professor again. Um, I don't, I don't,
I'm not in this to, to gain fame. I don't, I think that's part of why I've been able to,
to maintain my balance around this. I I'm happy when someone invites me to do a podcast or to be
on TV or whatever, it's an opportunity to reach an audience. I think it's really important for
me to reach, but it's not about my, you know, making money or I just, I take, I've taken,
no money at all for any of my TV appearances or podcasts or whatever. I just, this is, this is
about my working out my vocation, which for whatever reason happens to coincide with this,
like some expertise about this global pandemic. And it occurred to me that for all of the people
that attacked, uh, you and, and, uh, focus protection, that the idea to debate that,
you know, if you really were so sound in, in your wisdom and that's the thing that's, you know,
someone like Tony Fauci, five decades in the job making really big statements. I mean,
I'm sure you'd love to debate him around a panel. I'm sure you've got colleagues and other experts
that, you know, that to me struck me someone in mainstream media. Why don't you put these people
together and hear the debate? Let's, let's, let's get that out there. I mean, it was that
offer ever made. Did you, would you do that if it was there?
I would jump at the chance. Uh, I've had the opportunity to debate a couple of folks. Uh,
like there was a gentleman from Harvard, uh, Mark Lipsitch and some others, but never Tony Fauci.
Um, it's been hard actually within my own university to get people on the other side
to debate me or discuss, discuss it with me. I think the problem was this propaganda we discussed
earlier. Uh, the idea was that, uh, that I think Tony Fauci had was that there needed to be like
this illusion of consensus. If you allow there to be a debate between reasonable people,
where there's a disagreement between,
reasonable people, you can't maintain this illusion of consensus. So the strategy has
been to de-platform anyone who disagreed. That was the purpose of the propaganda campaign.
Um, and I think that that's why you haven't seen those kinds of reasonable disagreements,
uh, reasonable debates, even, even as you, as you said earlier, when you, you couldn't,
you couldn't even ask your, your, you have a very prominent role in trying to be where you have
access to a prime minister. You, even you got trouble asking that question, right? Because
they couldn't be,
this illusion that there was a legitimate question. Because if that, if the legitimate
question, well, then now you have to, now you have to justify why you're doing these lockdowns.
You have to talk about the harms. What if people don't agree with them all of a sudden? They don't
then comply. What if those protests actually happen anyways? Um, I think, uh, it was a very
illiberal kind of approach to communication by governments during the pandemic, especially
scientific bureaucracies during the pandemic and public health bureaucrats during the pandemic.
The idea was to eliminate,
the possibility of disagreement, uh, because they were so right that they couldn't possibly be anyone
that disagreed with them reasonable. That was, that, that was a problem. We can't never let that
happen again. And Jay, it's a great lead into that. The final dimension I wanted to ask you
about, which we see leaders are really passionate more than ever about collaboration. And what
happened was the reverse of that key decision makers shrunk cabinet. They shrunk their advisors
down to the barest minimum to avoid collaboration or didn't seek out experts like you to,
to collaborate with other public health officials. They, they went the other way. I mean,
how important has collaboration been for you and your work? And can you give me some examples of
how you collaborate? Uh, so, I mean, in science, it's the era of like someone, some lone genius
working alone, producing a revolution is likely over. It's too complicated. There's too many
fields where the technical expertise and demands are too high. Every single project of note that
I've ever worked on every single project, every single scientific advance that I've seen in my
scientific career has involved, uh, uh, deep collaboration with people who had skills that
I didn't have. And I sought them out because they were smarter than me. And I always want to work
with those people who have something to teach me. Um, and that's how science works. That's also how
public health works. The society is too complicated. These diseases are too complicated. You have to
have people who know things that you don't know and be open to the fact that you don't know
them. And you have to have people who know things that you don't know and be open to the fact that
you don't know them in order to learn from them in order to make good decisions. You're absolutely
right. What happened here was a small, relatively small cabal of people, not more than a thousand
people decided that they had the wisdom, the collective wisdom to reorder all of society
in the World Health Organization and some public health bureaucracies around the world.
And they worked very hard to make, to make people think that they had that collective
wisdom when they never did. Uh, it would have been much more productive if they had allowed
a discussion with other people who disagreed with them to happen. That's how science works
best, how public health works best. Um, and that we might've had, we likely would have had a very
different public health response. And I think we would have had much, uh, much more effective
public health response, a more compassionate one, uh, that would have ended up with fewer lives lost.
Joe, we, uh, just veering off on that for a moment, uh, Sweden became a bit of an outlier
in the global community because, you know, you will know better than me, but they seem to go
closer to focus protection than anyone else. And then they got attacked, uh, globally for,
for this day. I mean, if you look back at Sweden's approach, Joe, was it close to what you were,
you were aiming for? I mean, the early days they, they, they did the opposite of folks
protection. Actually, the, the, uh, the, there was a big outbreak of cases in Swedish nursing
homes because they sent a COVID infected patients to Swedish nursing homes, a huge amount of reason.
Here's the reason why, um, Sweden was seen early on as, as a failure was because of that. A lot of
people died in those nursing homes. But, you know, uh, the, the, the amazing thing about the
Swedish response to me was their flexibility. Yeah. Cause what they did after that is they
realized they had to protect older people and they adopted policies to gain the trust of the
population, told the population, look, here's who's at risk. They kept schools open, primary
schools open the entire pandemic. Their kids have no learning loss. And that early loss in life in,
in, in older population,
was offset over time as they had a more, I mean, it's not, they had no restrictions that when the
disease was spreading, they had, they actually had, uh, suggested restrictions in mass gatherings.
For instance, they told people to stay home when they're sick and provided sick leave when that
was the case. Um, they were, uh, very short periods of time. They kept, uh, older people
home from, they, they, uh, older, older, like, uh, like high school kids, I think missed some,
some schooling. Um, so it's not that they had no, no mistakes, uh, but they were adapting.
And they were admitted their mistakes to the population. They didn't try to create this sense
of that there was no debate. Um, and, uh, the population trusted them. And when the vaccines
came, um, they, you know, what the Europe actually was somewhat slow in getting the vaccines out
relative to the United States, although much faster than Australia. Um, and they systematically
use the vaccines to protect their old population first. So there was a big spring wave in 2021,
but they'd already vaccinated their old. And so there are a lot of cases in Sweden in
20 or in April, 2021, but very few deaths per capita. They D because of the vaccine.
Um, and so they use these focus protection ideas to get a much better result. And through
the whole pandemic, they actually have negative excess mortality, negative excess mortality
through the pandemic. Just think, imagine that. I mean, Australia, actually, I was looking
at the statistics, uh, up until, until maybe, uh, let's say, uh, uh, April of 2022, you
had negative excess mortality, but over the last, essentially the, over the last few
months, you've had an enormous weight of cases and huge neck of excess mortality. In 2021,
Australia had positive excess mortality, even though there was no COVID because the lockdowns.
Um, I think if the world had followed Sweden's, um, uh, leadership in this, we would have
all come out much better off, both in terms of COVID and in terms of the harm to we've
to societies as a consequence of the lockdown policies we followed.
So, Jay, to understand just quickly the Australian excess mortality,
what's now coming into play is all the people that didn't seek medical treatment,
all of – so that's all cause mortality, isn't it?
People that are losing their life to mental health-related issues
or cancers that are undetected.
So there is proper data on that now, is it, so you can actually look at –
It's still hard to disentangle.
The data are still being developed.
I have not seen a clean study that nails that issue as yet.
So I don't know with any certainty with that.
But if it's like anywhere else in the world, those kinds of considerations
will have consequences in lives lost in Australia.
But at the same time, like Australia vaccinated a large part of its population.
A lot of the vaccination happened 9, 10, 11 – quite a long time ago.
And so when the virus swept through the population in Australia,
Australia has more cases per capita through the whole pandemic
than the United States has.
So there was a lot of – a lot of people who were exposed to the virus
and their vaccines – you know, so the protection the vaccine provides
against disease spread had already expired.
That's why – that's why you've had such a widespread number of cases.
Even the protection against severe disease, it started to wane
in some of the older people.
So it's both COVID deaths and also deaths from –
from the lockdowns, combining in Australia to produce very high total excess deaths.
There's two final questions to ask you.
But I've got to ask you one before I do that.
And that is – clearly vaccines are something you're passionate about on a world scale.
But the idea of mandating vaccines – where did you sit on that?
I think it was an enormous error.
When a public health authority mandates a vaccine, that is an admission of failure.
It's an admission of failure.
Because public health authorities were not against the vaccine.
public health when it works best it has the trust of the population and so when it has the trust of
the population the public health authorities can say you know this is a really good idea here's
what we know here's what we don't know uh if you're older here's what the risks are but here's
the benefits they're really good you should get vaccinated and then people listen because they
trust the public health authorities when you're doing a mandate not only is a signal of distrust
like i don't trust the public therefore i have to force you to do this it also creates distrust
reciprocally it creates this this resistance movement by people who are like saying well
you know i'm not sure it's good for me why are you being forcing me to do this if you think it's
good for me why just explain to me what's going on it's created this um and so i think that's
what's happened i've seen in the united states and elsewhere a an expansion in the set of people
who distrust public health and now we're distrusting uh good advice from public health a
reduction in um in vaccination of children against really deadly
like polio uh like measles um and we're seeing a resurgence of cases for instance in polio that
actually made quite a bit of progress in in toward eradicating um it's a real problem and i think the
mandates uh it was it was they were premised on the idea that they would it was necessary to
vaccinate 80 90 of the population and then the disease would go away we didn't ever have the
evidence to say that that was going to be true the vaccine does not stop disease spread it's very
clear i mean we're not going to have the evidence to say that that was going to be true the vaccine
does not stop i mean why else would australia for instance which is so heavily vaccinated
have such a large number of cases i mean i got the vaccine in april 2021 and i got covid in 20
august of 2021 which was the opposite of the public health message jay that was told you
you take this to save the lives of those around you so again the evidence that you're telling
you know is is is completely the opposite to the actuality and again that just leads to to further
distrust doesn't and the message was there that if you caught coronavirus naturally recovered from
it naturally that your antibodies weren't effective as well that was another message that for the
first time in history your your own uh you know when nervous system and immune system wasn't
working so it's uh you know again as you said that creates distrust doesn't it it doesn't allow
they could have used the vaccine for focus protection just like sweden did
vaccinate older people who are really at high risk of dying and then
um to be honest with the public that this is the best we can do really um don't try to force people
who have very low benefit of the vaccine to get vaccinated on the false premise that my vaccine
protects you when it doesn't uh and the evidence from the world around the world is clear that
doesn't it was manipulative and wrong it's created distrust that it's going to be hard to repair
i see your story as one of the great leadership stories in in recent times and and you know to
stand up and say i am prepared to give up my working life i'm prepared for the consequences
because my principles and my values suggest that this is greater than uh than the consequences
it takes incredible courage and leadership and in that context i want to ask you who's been the
greatest leader in your life oh there's so many um i mean i i've had i had mentors that uh uh
in academics um uh one of them was like now the the head of uh he's the provost at harvard now
um who was a a big example to me through my career um but i have to say like that in in
um in the context of and of course my parents i mean i i can't i it's just hard it's impossible
to not not not uh not not think of them um but i think during the context of this pandemic the the
two other authors of the great barrington declaration sinatra gupta and martin kuhldorf
have paid enormous price for their leadership even more than me i think in many ways uh martin
um was let go from his job at harvard actually uh uh he's now on leave i think
and he was willing to sacrifice that uh sinatra also faced tremendous like
tremendous threats to her career to her personal life and uh didn't need to speak up but both did
and i've been absolutely inspired by them uh another colleague of mine at stanford is a man
named johnny anitis who is probably the world's most uh famous um science well certainly world's
most cited scientist um who again spoke up uh early and has continued to do amazing work i think
he's probably like 70 papers during the pandemic much more quiet in terms of like public presence
and tremendous work to inform the the to do the science that has informed
a lot of the the thinking or the on on lockdowns on on on a whole range of issues um
i looked at those folks as tremendous leaders all in their own own different ways in in intellectual
leadership in moral leadership um and uh i'm christian too so that that i i think uh those
those commitments have been provided to me a real example of what what uh what what it means
to sacrifice and why that kind of sacrifices i've learned it firsthand i've been more theoretical
before the pandemic why that kind of sacrifice is important yeah thanks for for sharing that again
and we saw lots of medical professionals here in uh in australia that uh were silenced and threatened
to be disbarred for wanting to enter the public debate like you did and so again it's it's a
massive sacrifice of of leadership to do that a final question joe for me in the sense of
collaboration um we're passionate about it and the leadership work that we do if you could collaborate
with anyone in the world and you've done that with your great colleagues and other extraordinary
academic institutions is there someone you think god if i could collaborate with them on any area
there's lots of diverse passions that you've got is there anyone that springs to mind i mean at
this point i i've been now exposed to some incredible scholars uh what i my passion now
is uh in addition to in addition to the post-mortem about the lockdowns and uh and a good
discussion about that uh so that we don't do this again
i want i want to talk about how to reform science and uh science is broken like what what's happened
during the pandemic is it the the normal processes where we can talk to each other scientists and we
learn from each other that's that's really broken like the trust that's needed for scientists to
have good faith conversations in many ways have been broken i want to help restore that the other
thing is a conversation i'd like to have with with uh with many leaders i've met about about uh what
should science play in society right so am i really do i really have the wisdom to order society
so i i think my view is that scientists should be on tap not on top we should be advising
um and so i wanna i wanna work with political leaders i'm like ron desantis i think is an
amazing man actually the governor of florida uh i've been so impressed by him in his leadership
i would love to work together with with political leaders
with faith leaders, so that we can have a conversation about what place should science
have, and with scientists, what place should science have in society? Are we willing to
replace our liberal democracies with a technocracy? I mean, that's essentially what we've had. We've
had a few scientific leaders order society the last two and a half years. Was that a good idea
or a bad idea? I think that's a conversation I'd love to collaborate with many people I've met in
the pandemic, and not just scientists, because that's an all-society conversation.
What a fascinating final answer. And as you said, science is broken, and to be able to have these
discussions and highlight them, and for you to want to bring that back to the table, I can't
help it. There's always a supplementary question to me. There is an old saying, when you look at
something and you sound a bit like a conspiracy, follow the money. Is science broken because of
the money and that people are so incentivized to not want to debate?
Is that something that needs to be overcome, that the institutions that make billions and
billions out of these decisions have got such a stranglehold on science? Or am I being naive?
Is that being a small part? No, it's not that I'm an economist. Of course, I think money is an
important driver of human behavior. So I'm not disagreeing with that, but I don't think that's
the central problem. I think the central problem is one of power. During the pandemic, it became
clear that if you were an epidemiologist, immunologist,
extroverologist, you have tremendous power over the minds of billions and the fates of billions.
And that created a lot of dysfunction within science itself. It created incentives for
climbing the social hierarchy within science. I think it's like, what does the Lord Atkins
said? Power corrupts absolutely, power corrupts absolutely, right? I think that that is the
central problem within science. It's become such a powerful tool to reorder society,
that it has undermined the kinds of mechanisms that would normally allow it to gain that power
to begin with. They gain that power because it produces wisdom. It produces knowledge. And that
knowledge and wisdom comes from openness, from a liberal willingness and a good faith discussion
with other people. But by being so successful, it created this power that then has undermined
the capacity to have that good faith discussion. So there's this like, there's this sort of,
the success that it had in producing vaccines and producing knowledge has itself created the
conditions that have undermined it. So I think it's worse than just money. It's something
deep within science itself that we as scientists need to come to terms with and
develop guardrails around. So we don't have this sort of overarching hubris that you've
seen from scientists, I think, during the pandemic. Science on tap, not on top is a
brilliant message. And your art of condensing your theories is clearly becoming a great skill as well.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, it's been fascinating. I've got a hundred more questions, but in the
interest of time, I appreciate you sharing with us some of your wisdom. And thanks again so much for
an incredible leadership stance and incredible leadership story.
Thank you. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.
Empowering Leaders was presented by me, Luke Darcy, produced by Matt Dwyer with audio
production by Darcy Thompson. To start your leadership journey, I encourage you to go to
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