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"If another pandemic hits, we will lockdown again" - Jay Bhattacharya
2.1k Plays1 year ago
Few people called for sanity as the world lost its collective mind during the COVID pandemic, but Jay Bhattacharya was certainly one of them. Jay is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and one of the three authors of The Great Barrington Declaration.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Will, Jay discusses the litany of institutional failures that marred the pandemic response, and what we must do to avoid making the same mistakes again.
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Transcript
Concerns Over COVID-19 Health Policies
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call focused protection. Coming from both the left and right and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.
00:00:41
Speaker
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results, to name a few, include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health, leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.
00:01:07
Speaker
So begins one of the most important documents written this decade. The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by Dr. Martin Kaldorf, Dr. Seneptra Gupta, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on October 4, 2020, was a rallying cry for sanity in a period where the world seemed to lose its collective mind, with devastating consequences that are only now fully becoming clear. I'm delighted to welcome one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
00:01:36
Speaker
Jay is a professor of health policy at Stanford, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the owner of a plethora of other academic titles and awards that would take the full podcast to list out.
COVID-19 and Societal Issues
00:01:50
Speaker
Jay, welcome to Australia. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad you did not read them out. They bore your audience to death.
00:01:56
Speaker
No, they are incredibly impressive. As I've reflected on the COVID period in preparation for this interview, I keep coming back to just how quickly the story transmogrified from being primarily about a health crisis to something that was much broader. It was a reflection of so many of the problems that I think we now face in society. Erosion of public debate, cultural rot in academia, government authoritarianism, challenges in the media.
00:02:26
Speaker
The coalescence of these issues makes learning the lessons from COVID quite difficult, wouldn't you say?
00:02:32
Speaker
I do. I think it turned from something where we needed to protect ourselves against a new virus, learn how to do that best we could, into something much, much broader, something that I think has fundamentally transformed our societies. And I think the root problem, Will, is that if we think about how we reacted to COVID, if I had to put my finger on the one thing that we did that was
00:02:58
Speaker
fundamentally problematic was that we decided that other human beings were simply bio-hazards to be avoided and shunned. It wasn't equal. It was like the poor, the working class, the people who were more likely to go out and get sick because they had no choice. They were the other. They were almost like a caste system set up.
00:03:19
Speaker
And almost all of the other things that follow, you mentioned free speech, all of the kinds of pathologies that followed have this sort of deep divide created by the COVID crisis where public health leaned into an idea that I thought public health would never embrace, which is that other people are bad for you rather than a source of positive, some growth, love your neighbor turned into shun your neighbor.
00:03:48
Speaker
The way that you explain that is almost a moral dimension.
00:03:53
Speaker
to that analysis, has your view of human nature changed as a result of what you saw during the pandemic? I'm optimistic by my own just inclination, although I am Christian, so I believe that people are sinful. I also believe in the possibility of grace. I saw people act in ways that even people I knew before the pandemic, people I admired, they acted in ways that I never imagined they could act, in ways that was deeply destructive
00:04:21
Speaker
And indicated to me that they were, I mean, I mean, I'm trying to be charitable. Well, and I think you can put your finger on fear, your primal fear of death. I think at least at the beginning motivated some of it. Then also after that, the normal kinds of inclinations that lead to pathological behavior, you know, greed, the desire for, for power, all those things, at least opportunistically were engaged in by people, very powerful people during the pandemic.
00:04:49
Speaker
It's interesting that you mention your Christian faith there. I spoke to Dr Naomi Wolf very recently. She places some currency in the human motivations of greed, in the human failings of things like just incompetence as you do. She goes beyond that though and it's something which I
00:05:09
Speaker
I struggle with when I spoke to her, but I've reflected on when she looks at it almost metaphysically, she puts the dimension of evil on some of the things that you saw in the response to the pandemic. How would you reflect on that element?
Moral Dimensions of Pandemic Response
00:05:22
Speaker
To me, the idea of evil, it's a real thing, but I want to be very careful about applying it to people I disagree with.
00:05:30
Speaker
I mean, I think the idea that I'm good and everyone else is evil is itself an evil idea. So I'm a little bit more hesitant, I guess, to use that idea in itself. I think it more as a human failing that can lead to great evil. And I think that's often what happened during the pandemic, a lot of human failing. I mean, I'm not discounting the possibility of real evil, but I'm saying that the kinds of processes that lead
00:05:57
Speaker
even potentially good people to do evil things are actually I think more socially harmful in the long run than just some evil that engages in evil for its own sake and nothing else.
00:06:08
Speaker
It's a really important observation there that you are careful to label others as evil as a result of you having a disagreement with them. I think it goes to one of the real problems in the public discourse more generally today. And it's the speed at which too many people look at someone else is not just in disagreement with them, as opposed to being a fundamentally bad person. You saw that firsthand. So take me back to when you started to present a view of what governments were doing during the pandemic, which went against the mainstream view.
00:06:38
Speaker
responses to that and how you reflect on public debate as a result of that period? That was a shocking issue. I had already been through some tough times earlier in the pandemic with some of my scientific work. The reaction to it was unhinged with personal attacks on me and my family.
00:06:54
Speaker
So I expected when I wrote the Great Barrier Declaration in October, 2020, that there would be some pushback. But I also expected there to be some constructive engagement. It really was a call for better thinking about how to protect vulnerable older people and other vulnerable people. That was a key idea in the declaration because we could identify older people, for instance, at such high risk. And we'd done such a poor job protecting them up to them. So I fully expected serious people in public health to engage with us and think about better ways to protect the vulnerable.
00:07:24
Speaker
Instead, what we got was the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci four days after he wrote the declaration calling for a devastating takedown of me and my colleagues. It led to hit pieces, it led to mischaracterizations where they were accusing us of wanting to let the virus rip, essentially an assumption that we were this great evil that needed to be expunged from public health. Silence destroyed.
00:07:49
Speaker
He even called us fringe epidemiologists, me, Martin Kudorff, and Sunetra Gupta. I mean, Sunetra Gupta is the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University. I mean, if she's fringe, there's really no one at the center. And, you know, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford. I mean, it's one of those things where I can't fathom how someone in such high leadership would so irresponsibly use the power they had to destroy a rival idea rather than engaging in those ideas and exploring to see what's good in them.
00:08:19
Speaker
You said you can't fathom it. I'll press you there. Try and fathom it. What do you put the behaviours of, say, someone like an Anthony, fout you down to? I think primarily the primary sin is hubris. My model of him, some people talk about his, you know, like getting royalties or payments or whatever, but I don't think that's really what drives him. I think what drives him and people like him is this idea of immortality through fame and accomplishment.
00:08:46
Speaker
And it's particularly bad in science. You think of yourself as things you discover or do will be remembered forever. And so for someone like him, he spent his career trying to get an HIV vaccine that never materialized. He's not going to be remembered like Jonas Salk or someone. So for him, I think the primary thing is hubris.
Media Representation of Scientific Consensus
00:09:09
Speaker
He saw we were proposing a strategy that's different than his.
00:09:14
Speaker
And for him, that is a cardinal sin. You can't oppose somebody who is the science itself unless you are not the science, unless you're a fringe character. And so he reacted in this way because of his pride.
00:09:27
Speaker
That's interesting and it makes me reflect that we maybe made that even worse by lionizing these medical and scientific professionals by putting them on preface conferences every evening on the TV. We turned them into celebrities. No one had really heard of Tony Fauci before this. No one had heard of the equivalent in the UK. His name escapes me and they were on the TV every night for years by the end.
00:09:50
Speaker
I mean, it's reasonable, I think, for the media to put scientists and public health officials in the middle of a crisis like this front and center. I mean, it makes complete sense, right? Of course you would do that, though you turn to the people that have some information that's worth knowing for the public to know. The problem is that they didn't accurately reflect what the scientific community was saying.
00:10:09
Speaker
There were people like Tony Fauci who wanted a lockdown, who wanted school closures. Absolutely. Everyone heard those people because they were put front and center as if they were the avatars of the scientific community. They're all science agreed with them.
00:10:21
Speaker
But in fact, there was a tremendous scientific debate going on. The Great Barrington Declaration is evidence of that. And the media as a whole, not the spectator of course, but a lot of the media essentially misled the public into thinking that there was a consensus in favor of lockdowns and school closures and the like, when in fact there was not any consensus. In fact, there was a lot of scientists that fundamentally disagreed with it, viewed the lockdowns as tremendously harmful and not scientifically justified.
00:10:51
Speaker
How do you think that process occurred? Or what do you think were the forces behind the media, which is traditionally meant to hold governments to account. It's meant to be skeptical by the very nature of the institution. How did they go so quickly from being skeptics to effectively cheerleaders of one side of a very contentious scientific debate?
00:11:12
Speaker
I'm not a reporter, so please correct me. My sense is that some of the most powerful reporters in places like the New York Times, the Washington Post, they get there because they have close to unique access to very powerful sources. There's very few people who were higher up the federal
00:11:33
Speaker
scientific bureaucracy than someone like Tony Fauci. He'd been there for 40 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, about 37 years or whatever at the start of the pandemic. And for him then, that was for a reporter that had access to him, they knew what all the big news coming out of that scientific area was because they could talk to Tony Fauci. I trusted him. He'd been a source for decades. And so the most powerful media sources
00:12:01
Speaker
relied on him for understanding what the scientific debate that was happening. And he misled them. So I think that's part of it. The other part of it is I think that the media, a lot of the media that cover science and really the science of the pandemic, maybe it's more in the United States, but I think it's elsewhere too. They viewed it through a political lens, almost purely political lens, when it was really a public health problem.
00:12:26
Speaker
I mean, public health is different than politics. If a public health official convinces 50% plus one, they have failed in their job. They are a failed public health official. The goal is to convince basically the entire population, 95%, that the advice you're giving them is wise and worth following. It's not like politics. 50 plus one is a winner in politics. And so the media applied a political lens to this.
00:12:51
Speaker
You know, in the United States, lockdowns were seen as a left-wing position, the Democratic position, whereas the anti-lockdown position was seen as a right-wing position. A lot of the media, most of the media, I think, have seen surveys identify with the left.
00:13:06
Speaker
I'm not saying that's bad, it's just a fact. What I do think is bad, there ought to be more equal representation of alternate political views in the media because otherwise you're going to have half the public not trust you. But that's another thing. Actually, that's true in public health as well. But what happened, I think, was that
00:13:25
Speaker
That identification of the anti-lockdown position with the right was really damaging in the way that the media reported it. They were not able to tell the difference between a scientific position, a political position, and they jumped back to their normal way of thinking, which is right-wing, bad, left-wing, good, and just went after us. There's an irony in this because the big control group for this entire lockdown experiment was the Swedish experiment.
00:13:50
Speaker
And of course, it was led by a social democratic government on the left that against lockdown. And you had, you know, in the UK, a right wing government, a Tory government that embraced lockdown. I mean, I think the media's role, they jumped back to their normal tropes. And that was a real problem. Although I have to say, well, when I've talked to my friends in the media, they blame the media. When I talk to my friends in politics, they blame the politicians. I blame the scientists primarily. I blame public health. I think we were the root cause.
00:14:20
Speaker
Well, that's a fascinating insight and I think what it speaks to is I think there was institutional failure across all of society. But let's go to your primary hypothesis then. What is the role of a scientist and then put it in the context of what their role should have been during the pandemic?
Science, Activism, and Political Bias
00:14:37
Speaker
I think primarily the role of a scientist, there's many, it depends on your expertise and your inclinations and all, is to do good science.
00:14:45
Speaker
That's it, period, end of story. That includes thinking carefully and systematically about causes and effects, thinking systematically about the broader political environment is probably outside the realm and competence of most scientists.
00:15:02
Speaker
They mostly should stay out of that. They should be doing good science. There are other scientists who pull together evidence from lots of different areas and try to give advice on broader topics. I mean, health policy people, for instance, or health economics, that tends to be like that.
00:15:17
Speaker
We also should be doing good science, again, keeping politics out of it. It's very hard, of course, but that's the goal. And then we should be communicating the most important ideas. And in particular, one of the things that an idea that I think scientists ought to be communicating that we don't do very well at is
00:15:35
Speaker
when there is fundamental disagreement, we should be conveying that entire scope of disagreement. We shouldn't be pretending like our view is automatically the only view that exists when there actually is a lot of disagreement. And so I think that's the main role of scientists is to do good science. I think a lot of problems with scientific behavior and scientists' behavior during the pandemic is that they decided, many of them, especially the most powerful, that they knew what the truth was
00:16:04
Speaker
that they knew with certainty, simply because of that. Remember Tony Fauci gave an interview where he said something very close to, like something like Louis XIV might have said that. I am the science. And the science was the term that embodied that change in mindset.
00:16:23
Speaker
Think of the hubris of that will. I mean, it's like he's the high pope of science in his own mind. That is what I think is the primary sin. You cannot, as a scientist, when there is disagreement about a scientific topic, convey to the public that only one scientific view is right and I happen to hold it and therefore you should listen to me. And then they jumped into politics. A lot of scientists did this.
00:16:46
Speaker
They colored their science with their political preferences. I'll give you one good example of this. In the summer of 2020, there was actually a lot of movement in the United States
00:17:00
Speaker
within the scientific community, for instance among pediatricians, to push for opening schools in the fall of 2020. Schools had closed in the spring of 2020 and it was tremendously damaging. There was no clear evidence that it had done much of anything to protect anyone from COVID. In fact, there was evidence the opposite because there was evidence out of Sweden suggesting that teachers actually had lower rates of COVID than other workers in the population. So you had good evidence suggesting that we ought to open.
00:17:29
Speaker
the American Academy of Pediatrics put out a statement saying that the schools should open in the fall. A couple of days later, President Trump said schools should open in the fall, and the AAP switched its position, essentially being, we should be very cautious, the kids might be better with the disease. I mean, it was all so depressing and so obviously political. Like you had a set of scientific facts that suggested a policy
00:17:56
Speaker
that would have protected the well-being of children better than possibly actually followed. The AAP, rather than going along with the scientific evidence, instead used it as a way to demonise Trump. I can't say for certain, but I imagine that Murray Curie or Fleming weren't fighting the culture wars. I imagine there wasn't an activist bent to what they were doing. What's changed? Why has the scientific community taken on an activist bent?
00:18:25
Speaker
I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, if you read back that history, they did definitely have political opinions, right? So, you know, Einstein was on the left, like you could see he was on the left and that was his instincts. And yet, when opportunities came to get directly involved in the politics, they mostly stayed out of it. And they didn't pretend that they understood the politics better than a regular person did.
00:18:49
Speaker
They were just a citizen, whereas politics was concerned, not more important simply because your Einstein doesn't make you more important as a citizen, makes you more important as a physicist because you have insight, but that's a very different thing. And the role of science in society then,
00:19:05
Speaker
You could see, just take the making of the nuclear bomb in the United States during World War II. You could see scientists writing in to the president saying, look, this thing is possible. You may not be aware as possible as possible. They're advising political leaders who then have to make
00:19:22
Speaker
tremendous decisions with trade-offs involved about what to do with that. What happened here instead was the scientists took center stage. They essentially usurped the position of our political representatives for a while. I remember seeing Tony Fauci next to Donald Trump early in the pandemic in March of 2020. My thought was like we don't have a president anymore, actually, or that in fact
00:19:46
Speaker
we don't have an elected president anymore. In fact, Tony Fauci was the de facto president of the United States for a while. Saying you can say true in the UK, right? Who was really the president, who really was the prime minister of the UK? Was it really Boris Johnson? Did he have much say? Or was it his scientific advisors? It seemed for a while like Matt Hancock took over. As I reflect on what you're saying, his attitude within the scientific community is self-defeating. It creates a perception amongst
00:20:14
Speaker
everyday people, that the views of scientists are illegitimate because they're just part of this huge blob of elites that have now captured a lot of the institutions. So it can't be a good thing for how science and scientific
00:20:29
Speaker
discovery, which should be respected in society, how that is perceived more broadly. I mean, that is really well put. Well, I mean, I think the thing is that science doesn't really have a liberal or conservative bias, not really. I mean, most scientific results are completely agnostic. They're orthogonal to the political sphere. You know, the fact that gravity pulls down is a fact that gravity pulls down. It doesn't, I don't know what the political consequences of that are. But as far as like
00:20:57
Speaker
The way that scientists acted during the, let me give you another example, it's just egregious. Scientific American, well-respected, put science, communication, journalism kind of outlet. I used to get it when I was little. It was one of the reasons I became a scientist was like just reading about these kinds of ideas. They endorsed a political candidate for the first time in their history in the 2020 campaign.
00:21:21
Speaker
And I was reading this, what are they doing? They basically have turned science into just another arm in the culture war, the political war. It is absolutely self-defeating, as you said, absolutely self-defeating. And it put science in this position where you had no special reason to believe us.
00:21:41
Speaker
The reason you should believe or not believe scientists is because we can point to evidence and say, look, we've done this test and this idea passed this test. It's the competing idea failed this test. And here are a whole bunch of other scientists who would normally disagree with me, that agree with me on this. And they've looked at the data and we all agree this fact.
00:21:59
Speaker
Sometimes the fact supports the left, sometimes it supports the right. Most of the time it supports neither, it's orthogonal. But here's what the fact is that we believe, right? So I think that special position of science as truth teller depends on not being politically connected.
00:22:13
Speaker
How can we fix this? This is something which we're going to need to address because this challenge plays out in other societal policy areas. Climate change is another one, which I would suggest science behind it has become politicized. What are practical ways in which the scientific community can go about improving some of the cultural problems that we've identified?
00:22:34
Speaker
I mean, I would like to say we can go back to our old, like, let's go back to Eden and just keep Pollux out of it, but I don't think that's, I don't think you can quite do that. I think part of the problem is that in the mix of people who are accepted into the scientific community, I mean, I've looked at these like polls and it's incredible. It's how one-sided it is, like the donations at Stanford all go to the Democratic Party, not at all, but like 90,
00:23:03
Speaker
eight sapphire and some very large fraction go to the just the democratic party there's very little representation of the other party among scientists and so like now that you might say to me and reasonably that look jay you just said that we should keep politics out of science why now you're saying let's look at the political leanings of scientists unless we have a representation of
00:23:25
Speaker
doesn't have to be 50-50, but a solid representation of the political diversity of the country among the scientists themselves, it's going to be very difficult, ironically, to keep politics out of science. When you have your
00:23:40
Speaker
your next door neighbor in your office is someone who disagrees with you politically, but you work with them on scientific matters, publications, and so on, you're going to mostly keep politics out of it because it's not relevant to the science. If, on the other hand,
00:23:56
Speaker
Everyone you talk with, every reasonable smart person you talk with is of one political side on the left. You're going to look down on everyone else on the right. They're not in your club. They don't belong. They don't think like you. They're obviously not as smart as you because otherwise they wouldn't be here. Why aren't they here? You have this monoculture
00:24:15
Speaker
that breeds this unthinking political persuasion, which then has a danger of creeping into your scientific view. Or at the very least, it takes a lot to try to keep it out. So that's why I think even though, ironically, I would love to just have everyone be, I shouldn't even know what your politics are, I think it does matter.
00:24:33
Speaker
There needs to be more political representation of the right in scientific and academic circles for science to return to a more politically neutral activity. At the very least, if you want the public to perceive you as politically neutral, you have to have that. It may be easier said than done. Is there any practical ways you can go about increasing political or viewpoint diversity in sciences?
00:24:55
Speaker
If you're thinking about how to make Stanford more politically diverse, that may be impossible. But you don't need just Stanford. I mean, science is more than Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, a lot more than Stanford, Harvard, Oxford. The key thing in science is that the funding sources should aim at funding a very wide diversity of ideas.
00:25:16
Speaker
not just in elite settings, which happen to be left wing, but more broadly. The more people, more minds that are involved in science, the better off science will be, especially minds that are heterodox, that do not necessarily agree with the orthodoxy. That's where scientific progress comes from. In the VC world, for instance, they normally will fund dozens of companies that they know will fail.
00:25:43
Speaker
in the hopes of there being one Google or something in the mix and they can have that as success. Science needs that kind of risk-loving approach to funding and I think that will automatically solve the political problem because what will happen, it will bring in institutions that aren't
00:25:58
Speaker
of the left. New institutions will develop because, as I said, good science can come from the left to right. It's orthogonal. So I think the key thing, the key reform idea is funding agencies need to be more heterodox in how they think about who and what to fund. There shouldn't be this bias toward funding large institutions that were successful in the 20th century. Who knows what the most successful institutions will be in the 21st? Maybe it won't be Stanford, Harvard, Oxford.
00:26:27
Speaker
We spoke with Gigi Foster, your friend in the very first episode of Australiana. I think this is number 47 now, and that was number one. And I recall that her key insight as well was the way that the grant system across universities can compromise viewpoint diversity. So that's interesting.
00:26:48
Speaker
There's a separate but related challenge, and that is around the cultural rot in academia specifically.
Free Speech and Critical Thinking in Universities
00:26:57
Speaker
What did you make, or what were your reflections watching the recent congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard Penn and MIT? I mean, it was depressing, right? How is it that they were unable to say very, very clearly that they are in favor of allowing even
00:27:17
Speaker
horrible ideas to be uttered on campus, but that they themselves are deeply opposed to those horrible ideas. That's a very easy thing to say. Their problem was hypocrisy. If a campus has a policy or as a rule, never takes a position on controversial matters, political matters.
00:27:38
Speaker
then they could very easily have said exactly what I just said, and no one would have looked twice at it. They would have said, oh yeah, that's just the rule. These political institutions and the presidents that lead them are completely neutral on these, and they're allowed to be neutral institutionally, even as they themselves have strong positions on it.
00:27:56
Speaker
That would be normal. But the problem is that for the last, I don't know, decades, you've had these institutions and the presidents take very, very strong positions on politically charged matter after politically charged matter. So when it came to the Gaza-Israel war, when they tried to take the traditional position of neutrality that these institutions normally take, it looked like hypocrisy. And that, I think, is the fundamental problem of their testimony.
00:28:24
Speaker
I mean, they just, they looked like hypocrites. It's not necessarily their fault. I mean, these are like, especially Claudine Gay, I think was new, newly implemented. So was the MIT president. I don't remember exactly when, but they're relatively new. They weren't necessarily the ones, the presidents that were, for decades, were issuing proclamation after proclamation on politically charged topic after politically charged topic.
00:28:49
Speaker
they do fall in that line. And so like my recommendation, if you're a president of a top university anywhere, you should embrace this neutrality principle. And you should embrace free speech as the fundamental sort of substrate for on which universities fail or succeed. If you do those two things, and you won't have any trouble and you go in front of Congress and something like that happens.
00:29:13
Speaker
I agree. That was what really grated with me when I watched that hypocrisy point. If you were a hardcore libertarian, I can see how you could make the argument that they were making that calling for the genocide of Jews is acceptable and may not reach the level of inciting violence. But universities like Harvard have been notorious for limiting free speech for, some would argue, much less serious
00:29:41
Speaker
thought crimes. I remember when I was starting at Sydney University when I was 18, 19, and I was excited to be part of the academic discourse and debate for the first time in my adult life. I remember in the first couple of weeks, there was a, again, the world doesn't change, there was a Middle East protest of some description, a propulsed Indian protester, purple hair and all, straight out of central casting. And I came up and the spirit of debate
00:30:05
Speaker
I kind of was a bit cheeky and started throwing out some arguments. But I remember in the end, I remember being there for about half an hour and it was spirited, but it was a debate and a discussion of ideas. I have a sense that if I went to Sydney University a day or Stanford or Harvard or wherever, and I went to that same Palestinian protestor, there wouldn't be a debate about the Middle East. It would be
00:30:28
Speaker
potentially much more nasty or it would just be shut down very quickly. Have we gone from universities being institutions of debate and the discussion of opposing viewpoints to this instinct to just shut down opposing ideas that potentially are inverted commas dangerous? I mean, I have that same kind of thing happen to me when I was a student as well. One of my most favorite things was like I would have these arguments with my friends about every imaginable thing, you know,
00:30:57
Speaker
like Plato or whatever the latest news was, who should be president. I mean, those were the most fun times of my life in some ways, certainly most formative. I think now I've looked at some statistics at Stanford, 70% or 80% of students are afraid to say what they think in class.
00:31:16
Speaker
because they're afraid that their fellow students will judge them. There's this conflation of your ideas about the way the world works and your morality. The fact that you think that presidential candidate A is good and presidential candidate B is bad is orthogonal to your morality.
00:31:32
Speaker
But a lot of the sort of zeitgeist of universities is, if you're on the political left, you're good. If you're on the political right, you're bad. And so, therefore, anyone who has ideas that someone on the political right believes, a prominent person on the political right believes, if they express them, they are therefore also bad.
00:31:50
Speaker
I don't think it's much more complicated than that. That zeitgeist is created by a monoculture that didn't exist 20 years ago. I mean, the university 20 years ago was on the left, but it was a much more liberal left, and it had a lot of representation of people of different views that weren't necessarily on the left. A lot of it orthogonal to the political system altogether. That's become much less true now. It's much more of a monoculture.
00:32:16
Speaker
My friend Brett Weinstein is a good example of this. He was at a university, an evolutionary biologist, a man of the left, a liberal left, a good man, an excellent scientist, and he's chased out of the university because he expresses
00:32:31
Speaker
I mean, I don't even know what, it was like, what did he say? I have no idea what he said that would lead someone to want to like essentially, he felt violently threatened at a university. And the president of the university didn't defend his academic freedom.
00:32:47
Speaker
So you have, I think, this political monoculture, a collapse in the traditional support for free speech and academic freedom, top universities everywhere. And a lot of universities succumb to this, and it's really depressing. It's made our students think that speaking their minds is a dangerous act.
00:33:06
Speaker
when in fact our job as professors in the universities is to train our students to think and to say what they're thinking and engage in ideas with other people. That's the purpose of universities, to get students to that point. The content of that is matters of course, but the content is less important than the capacity to critically think and to articulate those thoughts cleanly so that other people can benefit from them.
00:33:32
Speaker
Brett Weinstein on a podcast the other day. It may have been with Dave Rubin and he was just fantastic as an aside. I'll ask you the same question that I asked with respect to sciences specifically. What's the practical solution if there is any? Is there any way for us to be able to facilitate more open debate and the pursuit of ideas and viewpoint diversity on university campuses? I think it's going to take leadership.
00:33:58
Speaker
One of the reasons why the universities have gotten to the point where they are is that a lot of the biggest donors and trustees view the universities as another tool in their political battles that they fight. What we're going to need is a generation of donors and other trustees of these universities to embrace again the traditional role of universities as places of research, places of teaching,
00:34:24
Speaker
The goal is much less to transform society in some moral crusade than it is to do research and teaching. Those should be the primary mission, not social justice. Social justice, I think, comes out of those research and teaching missions much more than if you just primarily, ironically, if you just focus on
00:34:43
Speaker
primarily on social justice and less on research and teaching, you end up having less social justice and of course no research and teaching or no good research and teaching. Leaderships of these universities could turn things around very quickly, but they would have to make a deep commitment to the traditional missions of the universities at which most of these universities are now failing.
00:35:02
Speaker
They just have to say, look, a good practical thing would be to adopt something like the University of Chicago's Clavin Principles, which basically say, we're politically neutral. We very firmly want an environment where there's academic freedom and freedom of speech. We do want a safe environment. No physical threats, respect for the other. But at the same time, speech itself is not a threat.
00:35:30
Speaker
I haven't come across those principles before. And from what you've seen, does the University of Chicago manage to live up to those principles?
00:35:36
Speaker
I think that, well, it's always hard to articulate principles. It's always hard to say you do it perfectly. But I think they do do it better than many, many other places do. The key thing is leadership, I think. The leaderships of universities for the last while have dropped their commitment to the basic mission of a university, the basic missions being research and teaching.
00:36:00
Speaker
Those missions have been thrown away so that social justice causes, political causes could more directly be articulated as a primary output of universities. I think that was a big mistake. University leadership should say,
00:36:16
Speaker
I think they set the direction. It would be hard. It would take a leader that would be willing to get metaphorical stones thrown at them. I'm not feeling hopeless, but a decision has to be made by trustees and by the leadership that the universe is not for the purpose of political change.
00:36:35
Speaker
the purpose of the university's research and teaching. And the consolation I tell to them is that that will generate much more effective and moral and important political change than if you just focus on trying to change the politics of the world.
00:36:50
Speaker
by itself without focusing on research teaching as the primary reasons to be. That's very well said. It's potentially a theme that cuts across all the institutions that we mentioned so far and that they all seem to just go away from what their traditional
Government Measures and Decision-Making
00:37:03
Speaker
role was. They went away from what their foundational mission was, whether it was the media, whether it was scientists or academics.
00:37:10
Speaker
one which we've only touched on tangentially, which I want to look at is the traditional role of government and how they didn't live up to that during the pandemic. If I think about one of the core responsibilities of a government, it is trade-off decision-making. That is how you do have to recognise that in your society, when you implement a policy, there will likely be winners and losers. That's unfortunate. That's the way it is the role of government to look at issues holistically.
00:37:37
Speaker
Governments didn't seem to do that. They seemed to look at very blunt measures of policy effectiveness like COVID mortality rates. Why do you think governments went from holistic trade-off decision-making to just, we defer to the scientists in making decisions?
00:37:51
Speaker
Most politicians do not have the scientific expertise to navigate a compartment model, forecasting the spread of a disease. This is not their background. There are exceptions to this that I've encountered. People like Ron DeSantis or Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. A few exceptions who have this weird capacity to read the scientific literature that came de novo out of nothing.
00:38:15
Speaker
or has some biology background, but they're very, very few. And even the ones with biology background, you know, this is a complicated topic. It's not possible for one person, especially a person that's engaged in other activities like politics to fully immerse themselves in the scientific thing. And then you have this scientist telling you that this actually happened, like millions of people are going to die if you don't do what I'm telling you to do.
00:38:39
Speaker
And a whole bunch of very powerful scientist bureaucrats are agreeing with them. So you have Neil Ferguson puts out his model that says two million people will die in the US without a lockdown within a month or two of March 2020. The president of the United States then is told by one of his chief scientific advisors that if you don't shut down, millions of people are going to die. He looks around the world, sees other countries are locking down.
00:39:05
Speaker
doing what these guys are saying, he knows that there's going to be harms from lockdown. He knows that. It's not like it's hard to predict. That's obvious. But to him, the risk of not locking down is greater than the risk of locking down. Because if he locks down and the harms happen as they happen, well, he can just point and say, well, look, I was being told by the scientists, look, everyone else was doing it. Of course, it was reasonable for me to do it. If he doesn't lock down and bad things happen,
00:39:34
Speaker
then he gets blamed for every single death. That, I think, is the dynamic that every top politician of note faced in March 2020, February 2020 in the West. And they all, with very, very few exceptions, did the predictable thing. I have yet to see one formal cost benefit analysis done about the lockdowns that was conducted in real time, not one.
00:40:03
Speaker
Government shows this, although they knew instinctively there were to be costs, they thought that any cost was worth paying in order to save a single person from COVID. Ironically, they didn't end up saving anyone from COVID. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians are now skirting responsibility for that decision making. There's a COVID inquiry that is
00:40:24
Speaker
is about to commence in Australia. The Prime Minister made exempt the decisions of state governments and state leaders. That was where most of the pandemic response, including lockdown policy, was formed
00:40:37
Speaker
We need to have a political accountability to make sure that we get the next pandemic right. But unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's happening. What's your view on what's happening with respect to that in the US? I mean, the US doesn't have a pandemic inquiry at all. So I mean, I was actually I've been paying very close attention to the to the Australian situation. Scott Morrison was the prime minister.
00:40:58
Speaker
made an explicit decision to let the states have a tremendous role in their decision making. So you could have someone like Dan Andrews in Victoria literally lock people into large apartment buildings for weeks. In fact, I think an Australian court found that that was a violation of their basic civil liberties.
00:41:18
Speaker
So you have these state leaders making these tremendously damaging decisions, hundreds of days of lockdown, violations of civil rights at scale, and the inquiry isn't going to look into it. I mean, that makes absolutely no sense. And the current prime minister, Albanese, I think, I know how to pronounce his last name.
00:41:38
Speaker
Albanese, he promised that he would have a review of the policies. That was one of the things that he promised during the election campaign, if I remember correctly. I have to say, though, looking at the UK's inquiry is really depressing. The premise seems to be of the people that are leading the inquiry is that they didn't lock down early enough. If only they had locked down in, what, like January, just like the Chinese, then they would have been fined. There's no evidence of that. The disease was around the world.
00:42:08
Speaker
In fall of 2019, there's antibody evidence from stored blood from 2019 in Italy, in North Africa, in many other places in the United States. In fall of 2019, the disease was already here. There were antibodies specific to COVID in the stored blood in early date. China locks down in January 2020. Did they really get rid of the disease?
00:42:35
Speaker
I mean, the idea that if we'd only locked down a week earlier, everything would have been fine is delusional, and yet that is the premise of the UK inquiry. In the US, there's a congressional committee called the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, I think.
00:42:54
Speaker
And it's had some pretty good, like I got to testify once about about the whether the lockdowns actually did anything, and what what harms they did. And they've done made a lot of progress on the origins of the virus, this particular the support of the US NIH for
00:43:10
Speaker
the kinds of dangerous research that very likely led to the pandemic itself. But we have not had a formal inquiry at all. And we desperately need one. I think it's going to take a shift in political leadership, all the political generation that sort of made these decisions don't want to be held responsible for them. And so it's going to take a new generation of politicians turnover in politics before we actually get one. But until then, we're in bad shape. Well, if another pandemic hits, we will lock down again.
00:43:39
Speaker
There's no question in my mind we will lock down again. Well, what I don't understand is that lockdowns weren't a component, to my knowledge, lockdowns weren't a component of the crack glass in case of emergency pandemic plans that most Western governments had. Why did we not follow the plans?
00:43:58
Speaker
Well, that's a really good question. I think primarily it's China and the World Health Organization, the example of China. So in January 2020, the Chinese government decided they were going to lock down the Hubei province in Wuhan.
00:44:14
Speaker
millions and millions of people unprecedented in modern history of locking down a province at scale for such a long time. And the World Health Organization sent a delegation to China in early February 2020, mid-February 2020, to see what the Chinese did. They came back and wrote a report saying what the Chinese did worked. The lockdown had effectively eliminated the disease from the region. And they recommended that the world lockdown
00:44:41
Speaker
That was the conclusion. So that the Chinese example, amplified by the World Health Organization, led to a transformation of how Western governments and developed countries and developing countries dealt with the pandemic entirely outside our normal plans. That mass quarantine of the healthy at scale was never part of any of those plans for how to manage rest and prioritize pandemics. For a century, we did very, very differently.
00:45:05
Speaker
Actually, we followed the Great Barrington Declaration. In that sense, it was the least original thing I ever wrote. For every single other respiratory virus pandemic for a century, we developed countermeasures as fast as we could. We protected the vulnerable but did not disrupt society.
00:45:21
Speaker
The Chinese example amplified the World Health Organization led Western government after Western government to adopt this extraordinary approach completely out of line with our traditional approach to pandemics and it utterly failed with catastrophic harm to people that we're still paying for.
00:45:39
Speaker
You mentioned that we would unfortunately, definitely lock down if another pandemic was to arise in the near future. It leads me to my final question. What are the key lessons for you or what are the key reflections for you that we need to keep in mind for the next pandemic? I mean, I think the key thing is that we need a diversity of voices at the center of public health advice.
00:46:04
Speaker
you cannot have a very small cadre of powerful scientific bureaucrats decide that they know the science so well that they can exclude outside voices. And actually, there's a conflict at the center of what they were doing, a conflict of interest at the center of what these are the like people take Tony Fauci, he funded much of the research that very likely led to the pandemic in the first place.
00:46:31
Speaker
And then he's also a primary scientific advisor deciding how to respond to it. Well, of course, he's going to want to minimize the damage from the thing that he potentially feels responsible having caused in the first place. There's another conflict, which is that scientific funders should not be the primary sources of scientific policy advice or public health policy advice. Because when they speak, many, many scientists silence themselves
00:47:00
Speaker
because they don't want their funding sources that if you contradict Tony Fauci, you take your career into your own hands. And so that, I think that to me, the primary lesson is, you know, just going back to my idea, the scientists that was responsible, let's have a broader set of voices at the table giving scientific advice to politicians. Let's have
00:47:22
Speaker
scientific funders out of the picture altogether. It should be seen as an unethical conflict of interest for a scientific funder to be sitting at the table about scientific policy decisions or public health policy decisions or health policy decisions at all, tends to lead other scientists to silence themselves. Let's make our orientation in scientific advice toward including a broader, a wider array of voices. And I think that would
00:47:52
Speaker
that would lead to much better protection in the future. It's hard to say very specific things. We can go back and talk about specific things that we did wrong. I think that's useful, but if I had to pick one, that's the primary thing. If you have that, most of the rest will take care of itself.
00:48:10
Speaker
Everything that you've said both today about everything you said during the pandemic period is very pragmatic. It's very logical. It's almost crazy that it required a great deal of moral and intellectual courage to put those views out there, given how sensible it is. But it did take that you showed enormous courage in putting your views out there and showing the leadership.
00:48:28
Speaker
which you and I agree is both sorely lacking from many other leaders of institutions. Thank you for your efforts during that period and your ongoing efforts in the scientific community, and thank you for coming on today. Thank you, Will. It was a real delight to talk with you.
00:48:44
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.