The Catastrophic Failure of Lockdowns: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

they worked to create an illusion of consensus that didn't exist by working with the press and big Tech to suppress the voices of scientists who disagreed with them today I sit down with Stanford University professor of Medicine Dr Jay baceria he's a physician epidemiologist Public Health policy expert and a co-author of the great barington declaration which argued for focused protection of the most vulnerable instead of crippling Nationwide lockdowns Francis Collins wrote a email to Tony fouchy calling the three of us Fringe epidemiologists which I'm going to put on my business card someday cuz I think it's such a great term in this episode Dr bateria breaks down how lockdown policies over these last 2 years ultimately protected the welltoo while sacrificing the poor and the vulnerable in America and around the world we reorganized Society to protect the well-off the laptop class I think it's the single biggest Public Health mistake in history this is American thought leaders and I'm Yan Kell Dr J bateria such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders nice to be here it happens to be two years to the day of the 15 days to slow the spread Announcement by Dr Burks so why don't we start here your reaction I I remember it like it was yesterday essentially Public Health had decided on this absolutely extraordinary path made absolutely extraordinary promises if you just sacrifice for the next 15 days stay at home well we're not going to get hospitalizations we're not going to get the deaths all we need to do is listen to what they say and that promise was not true then it's been shown not true over the last two years and it's destroyed the lives of so many people and and the trust in public health uh is I think also been destroyed with it why so it's not necessarily obvious I remember watching this too it wasn't necessarily obvious that this was you know going to turn out so bad I think but are you saying at the time you already saw that there was a serious problem well I think the the premise of two weeks to slow the spread were a a a a set of models uh now these models are you can think of them as like Little Sim City simulations where they have agents that interact with each other if an infected agent interacts with an uninfected agent they can pass the disease on and it's just like these complex models uh that forecast that there would be millions and millions of deaths if we didn't shut down over a course of you know a month two months very short period of time um and these models in order to make them work they have to have parameters in them generally in order to do to get it right that are rooted in the real world the problem is we didn't have those parameters we didn't know how deadly the disease was uh we didn't know exactly how it spread it was guesswork and when I looked at these models my reaction was that we just don't have enough data or information to really understand whether the models are producing accurate accurate estimates turned out they weren't um the other thing is that Society is complicated when you have an intervention like a lockdown like like two weeks to essentially where everyone tries to stay at home except for the essential workers well right there right the essential workers still have to work so you still have to keep Society going you have to have doctors and nurses working you have to have electrical line workers to make sure you get electrical supplies you know you have to have food you have to I mean now all of a sudden it's not everyone's leaving to to stop it's you know some people are some people are staying home to stay safe while the rest of the society's going because it has to has to keep going you're giving birth uh the newborn and the mom shouldn't be separate I mean there's all kinds of things where as soon as you at like query what does it mean to to lock down you say okay it's going to be complicated it's be bad my first thoughts were actually some of the harms I thought of that could happen as a consequence for the lockdowns right so um I I mean I thought I thought immediately to what would happen when you close schools for instance to what would happen to people um kids that are abused that have ch like child abuse well that child abuse is picked up in schools so so you close the schools now all of a sudden child we just happen still happens is there's no one to intervene or School breakfasts and school lunches where a lot of poor kids get their meals like a like a very large fraction of American kids get their meals or to people in in poor countries I mean those were those were my thoughts about what was likely to happen that we were going to be all these collateral harms so I thought we didn't have enough data to actually know that it was going to be worthwhile to shut down and then I was thinking about the the possibility of all these collateral Harms to come and I was I was very reluctant to say yes you've become you know one of the more prominent critics of lockdowns right let's start here because there's been a lot of you know we've been discussing this a lot of uh backpedaling people that initially supported lockdowns now are saying hey we didn't we've never really supported lockdowns what are lockdowns really for starters let's let's work on our definitions sure okay what does that mean or what have we what have we meant by it for the last two years so a a lockdown could mean a range of things of course um the the primary goal of a lockdown is to prevent humans from interacting with each other it's that that is the the main goal because the theory is the idea is that if you have two individuals not interacting with each other physically then they can't spread a virus from one to another as simple as that it's the physics of it is simply you keep people apart the virus doesn't spread uh the so but the way that it actually implemented there's a whole Suite of policies ranging from weld people into their houses if you think they have covid which is apparently what you know some Chinese authorities did to to uh uh stay home recommendations like essentially orders to stay home quarantines of the elderly not not not particularly quarantines of the of the of the population even the healthy population even without uh even without like physically barring the doors very strong recommendations to stay stay home in Australia for instance they were orders that you weren't even allow you were allowed to leave the house for an hour by yourself for exercise and that's it you know it's a prison style lockdown in your own home um to uh to social distancing you know stay six feet apart when you're in line at the grocery store um even the masks I think are in a way it's like I I'm physically separating my breath from yours is is the is the idea um is is in a sense to me as a form of a lockdown it's it's any intervention that's aimed at keeping people physically apart from each other well how did it work out I think it was a catastrophic failure so it was catastrophic failure both on its own terms in terms of protecting people from getting and Contracting covid and it was a catastrophic failure in terms of all of the collateral harms it has had on societies around the world I think it's the single biggest Public Health mistake in history that's a that's a big thing to say so what are you know what are you're comparing this to to what are the other public health mistakes that we we've had so many right so uh yeah I think the handling of HIV crisis was a was a huge Public Health disaster uh the the handling of research for syphilis where we intentionally exposed allowed uh syphilis infected black men to have syphilis and not be treated for multiple I think uh we've had uh the uh the the spread of this information misinformation about the link between Autism and and childhood vaccines we've had many many mistakes that that in in in the recent past in the recent hundred some years we've made as a in the Public Health Community but I'm hardpressed to think of a single one on the global scale and scope of the harm that the lockdowns have caused so you mention um the the HIV crisis and so you know there's actually in this recent Foya that we did we found that uh and Dr fouchi had written an email basically accusing you of some of the other signers of the great barington Declaration of effectively AIDS denialism if I recall I I I find it utterly shocking uh in no way have I or any of the signers of the great bton declaration denied covid Co is a deadly disease it's killed Millions it if in particular is a danger to older populations the very premise of the great barington declaration is that Co is a danger or else we wouldn't have written it um we're not arguing that covid isn't caused by the SARS Co 2 virus so the analogy makes no sense from its own on its own terms and in terms of denying the harms of covid I think quite the contrary what we are trying to do is take the data about who's most at risk from covid seriously take data on who's most at risk from the lockdowns seriously and then propose a policy that would address the risk that Co actually poses as opposed to the the failed policy which uh Tony fouchy was the primary architect I believe where if we just lock down for a short period of time the disease will go away if we just wear masks for a short period of time the disease will go away if we force vaccinate 100% of the population the disease will go away all of these were failed promises based on flawed scientific understanding of the the nature of covid and um to turn around and then say that we were somehow denying covid I mean I think the charge goes more strongly the other direction where Tony fouchy and others who supported lockdowns denied basic facts about covid um such as whether covid recovered patients have natural immunity um that that that actually led to some of many of the mistakes that were made before we go into the lockdowns there's just been this kind of General uh approach it seems of attacking people that have alternate viewpoints indeed that's part of the purpose of the event that we're going to be at today of course you've been on the receiving end of this how is your thinking about this evolved since you first encountered these kind your kind of responses to your you voicing your perspective publicly and doing you know the Santa Clara study and so um when I first got involved I thought I was doing science and I I still think I'm doing science um although I think now I'm more involved in the public debate over what the right strategy should be and that certainly that was the goal of the of the great barington Declaration was to create a public debate to to to let the public know that there were scientists that were uncomfortable with the lockdowns uh because October 2020 when we wrote The Great bton declaration it seemed to me and I see I think most people it seemed like thought that most scientists were in favor of the lockdown Focus strategy we keep people apart the disease will go away we just have all of the movement of the the the virus the vagaries of it coming up and down were dependent on human behavior as opposed to just the way that these viruses happen to spread um that we that there there was this illusion of control that we had over the virus and the idea was another illusion the illusion that scientif there was a scientific consensus behind that illusion that that that sense of control we had over the virus so every time a wave went up it was a failure of the population to comply with the orders every time it went down is finally the the the population and started complying with the orders but I knew that there were many scientists that disagreed with that that in fact there wasn't a consensus uh now I at the time thought that I was uh I might I was in the minority so I wrote this great Bank deoration to tell the public that there was actually more many scientists that had grave concerns about the strategy now in retrospect I look back and I think actually I don't think we were in the minority even then among scientists I think that uh Tony fouchy Francis Collins uh another scientist in the UK Jeremy Ferrar who's head of the a fun for this a group called The Welcome trust that funds many many epidemiologists and and scientists in the UK they worked to create an illusion of consensus that didn't exist by marginalizing scientists that disagreed with them by working with the press and big Tech to suppress the voices of scientists who disagreed with them so when we wrote The Great barington declaration me me sunetra group of Oxford University and Martin korf of Harvard University um then of Harvard it posed a big threat because now you have scientists from prominent institutions like Stanford Harvard and Oxford saying no the lockdown Focus strategy is the wrong wrong way to go now you can't automatically say oh every every reputable scientist agrees with me you know if you're Tony fouchy so it was a huge threat and he react Ed by acting in ways like can entirely inappropriate ways you already asked me this question about age denialism which is you know it's like a it's like a cardinal sin you're just you're going to get thrown out of the scientific Community if you say that right Francis Collins wrote a email to to Tony fouchy calling the three of us Fringe epidemiologists I which I'm going to get put on my business card someday because I think it's such a great term um but we weren't French epidemiologists the the the set of people the epidem to control the public discourse yeah they disagreed with us but it's not true that all epidemiologists agreed with them even at the time and I think the consensus that they wanted to create this this illusion of consensus they wanted to create was a false one it was false then and it's false now well so let's look at the lockdown harms when I first came in when we first met uh year ago I a while ago now um I had that this idea that there's these Pro those Pros to the lockdowns and con to lockdowns but you know upon speaking with you realize that there don't seem to be as many Pros as we had imagined but a lot of us have been led to believe that certainly now so but but let's explore this so may we can start with why the lockdowns don't work because I think that's very important because the the Allure of the lockdowns is so so simple so I mean so compelling right if I just keep people apart surely the disease won't spread to each other um but the problem is that that if it it works in the context of a computer model it does not work in the context of real world real world right so let me just give you a data point from from India from Mumbai uh it's a city of great inequality they have slums where people live tightly packed together in in not very sanitary circumstances poor people large numbers of them and then you have a you know a high-tech Hub where like they're they're they they have all kinds of connections to Big Tech they they you know just it's like a relatively Rich part of part of the city in July of 2020 there was a Sero prevalence study done in Mumbai Sero prevalence is how many people have antibodies in their blood that indicates that they were infected have history of infection and the slums residents of the slums of Mumbai had evidence of about 60 70% of the population living there had already been infected with Co and Recovery much more than people had realized in the Richer parts of Mumbai something like 20% this this points to the problem with lockdowns Society is not equal in its ability to comply with an order that says stay home do nothing stay safe most people can't most people living on the earth cannot do that they have to feed their families they have to they there are legitimate human needs that require connection with other human beings you get together uh of course for recreation but even for for absolutely essential things like making food caring for other uh caring for PE patients um make making drugs so that you know Pharmaceuticals so that people can get treated for other conditions um making sure your electrical lines work I mean making sure the sewers are are running making sure the energy production is go there are a whole range of activities that um and and I'd say it's impossible for a government to say well these activities are essential these activities are not an essential activity for of a non-essential Activity one person a government bureaucrat may be quite essential to me um I've talk with pastors for instance who tell me that that uh their their uh congregants many of them because they were isolated had suicidal thoughts and that they needed Church they needed the synagogues they needed um the mosque in order to have the sense of community so that they they could live um and uh is that essential or not essential how long can you put that off I don't think it was the place of government to make that distinction really to say essential nonessential um but it but the reason is simple it's like you can't actually think of society like a video game you can't actually think of society where you can just keep people apart from each other and that and the only thing that will happen is germs won't spread uh and that and the inequality in society the fact that there are so many people that couldn't afford to lock down automatically meant the lockdowns couldn't work and that's what happened right so the lockdowns were focused protection of the laptop class so the premise the premise of the great barington Declaration was uh focused protection of the most vulnerable maybe you can just quickly kind of remind us of that and then and then how is how is uh what we actually the focus protection of the laptop class you look at a disease like covid-19 where it discriminates by age that's the single most important R risk factor there are other risk factors but like by far the most important is age thousandfold difference in the risk of mortality for the oldest to the youngest well how would a normal person look at that and react to it well I I mean I look at that and I want to protect the people that are at risk the people that face the highest risk of the disease that's the old so Focus protection is just the common sense thing you say Okay I want to protect the people that are high- risk here it's old some folks with with severe with severe chronic conditions that predispose them to have a bad outcome if they were to get sick um that makes I think to me complete sense we could have we could have poured the resources that we poured into Co or Co response into protecting the old we did some but not nearly enough you know almost 80% of the deaths worldwide I think have been people over 65 uh the world did very poorly and certainly the United States did very poorly in protecting the old um the uh instead what we did is we reorganized Society to protect the well off the the the the the laptop class it's it's a it's a it is a trickle down epidemiology policy we followed a policy aimed at protecting even people that are relatively low risk we made it so that Uber drivers deliver food to them we made it so that they didn't have to leave their house and and they could still keep their job but everyone else well you have to go go work you have to go sacrifice for the well-being of this of this particular class of people um I mean I'll give you one other data point about about public health in a paper I published that didn't get a ton of attention um in the early days in the United States of the pandemic Public Health had to decide where it would Place its testing centers remember the early days the pandemic testing was was a scarce resource and it turns out in many places there was a preference given to rich neighborhoods over poor neighborhoods I mean that's revealing like in the time of great crisis where do the resource go well they it went to protecting the relatively well-off whether they were truly vulnerable or not instead of looking at the the disease looking at who's most vulnerable and seeking to protect them and so and what is this trickle down epidemiology that you that you reference what does that mean exactly uh so it's a little bit of a a a plan because you know economist get accused of trickle of being in favor of trickle down of Economics where that where the idea is that uh that uh we take we do a policy that benefits the rich and it'll trickle down and benefit the poor um that essentially was what the lockdowns were we we'll adopt a policy that that is I mean if it was tailor made to benefit a relatively Rich class of people I couldn't think of a better one and somehow that would Sol help the poor avoid the disease I guess by some magic but in fact the opposite happened the poor actually were exposed the working class was exposed and so the lockdowns failed the Lo the lockdowns at best what they did in the places where it looked like they were successful for a while like in in New Zealand or Australia island nations where the disease hit during the summer Hong Kong I think Hong Kong another one yeah another example uh Singapore the disease hit in their summer especially in the in the in the southern hemisphere like New Zealand and Australia so they locked down they they got it looked like they got to zero but then they have to keep locking down whenever there was a single case and now the cases have exploded right the lockdowns can't go on forever because Society can't live like that the the people in society have to have to be able to connect with one another it's part of who we are as humans um that we connect with each other physically connect with each other um and if you if you think that that's not possible uh you you just don't understand Society very well so the epidemiologists the mathematicians that designed this policy they did not understand human societies at the at the at a very deep level so one of the things I learned recently interviewing Laura dodsworth about uh essentially the use of fear to promote lockdown and other policies in the UK that's where she focused I she mentioned and she actually found that the pandemic policies you know had been pretty well outlined for the UK they certainly weren't lockdowns but in fact there were also already in the records or the policy records or so forth you know counter indications as to what the harms of lockdowns would actually be and why you would not use that strategy but they used it nonetheless right and are you aware of this is there something like this on the US side so I I don't think there was a formal thing like in the US like there was in the UK and the us but there was up in the leadup to the decision to lock down in 2020 um a big debate that had been going on for at least two decades within the Public Health Community about how to deal with biot terrorist events and some of the plans involved lockdowns short lockdowns to try to to reduce the spread of of some some hypothetical biot terrorist agent um the the pro the problem is that but there's also people people like Don Henderson who the most prominent and best epidemiologist of the 20th century who was responsible for the eradication of of Designing the strategy that eradicated small pox who was very reluctant to lockdown he thought that the lockdowns would disrupt Society his view was that societies uh if you if you panic them they stop functioning well and that harms the health of the population and then in fact even when you have an infectious agent that's that's traveling around that you the the way that the lockdowns could not possibly be a good way to do this because the disruption would cause more harm than the good from uh from the the the redu from the reductions of the spread of the agent um so there was a debate in the public health commun but I've looked at this the plans the CDC plans and so on I don't see any anything that justifies a two-year-long you know sort of state of emergency to try to deal with a respiratory virus that over which we have no technology to stop the spread um I think what we did was absolutely extraordinary outside of the scope of the plans that we had far out side of the scope of the plans that we had coming into the pandemic so let's talk about this uh you know John's Hopkins study that I mentioned earlier you know of course this is uh something that's been much maligned as well in in social media and in the media in general they looked at a whole bunch of examples of lockdown policy being impacted and they found there didn't seem to be too much benefit I mean that that's my kind of bird's eye view of it and of course there's a lot of criticism of this so so tell me about this so uh the the Hopkins study is a metaanalysis Meta Meta analysis what that means is it's a study of studies so you can probably imagine there's a lot of interest in the question of did the lockdowns work did it actually save lives a lot of Scholars looked at this uh so the Hopkins study did a search of this of the scientific literature trying to understand what Scholars what St are saying regarding the evidence on whether lockdowns worked so they I think they found I I don't remember the exact number like 1,800 studies something on that order uh that of that that match Search terms that that have to do with the effectiveness of lockdowns um and they narrowed it down to to studies that looked like they were you know reasonable studies uh and they found two classes of studies uh the one class of studies is a class of studies that that uses the modeling as a basis for asking what would have happened had we not locked down right so very famously the Imperial College model um it predicted that if we didn't the United States didn't lock down in March of 2020 two million people would die in the United States within a short couple of months within a short very short period of time um and then uh with these models because they're video games essentially you can run it twice once with and once without a lockdown and say well uh here's what would happen if you didn't lock down so there's prediction of 2 million while you compare the prediction of what would have happened without a lockdown versus what actually happened with a lockdown that we didn't get 2 million deaths and this say well that means we saved 2 million lives the problem with these kinds of models with these kinds of studies is that it assumes that the models that that predicted you know the mass death and destruction yeah are correct that they're populated with parameters that were that are that are right that it understands all of the nuances of how people interact with each other in society are right it's got the social interactions between people right um the the transmission modes of the virus right everything right um and that's just not pla right so a lot of these studies that conclude the lockdown saves lives are based on that kind of modeling infrastructure on models that have that have repeatedly overpredicted the the the the the spread of the virus um well and the impact right and the impact right so um and uh the other question then is also not just are did the lockdown save lives relative to doing nothing the right question is not that the right question is did the lock what could the What did the lockdowns do relative other strategies to protect the population the great barington declaration so a study that looks at uh what if you let the virus rip versus doing doing a lockdown that's not all that informative really because if if there are other strategies other than letting the virus strip which there are were focus protection of the vulnerable the the real question is how would a lockdown do relative to that strategy not vers versus letting the virus rip that by the way is another thing that Tony fouchy tried to do is to try to claim that the Great Bon Declaration was was an argument to let the virus rip which was which is itself nonsense like we were we're aiming at protecting the vulnerable not not letting the virus rip um on the other hand okay so that's one set of studies the second set of studies that in the literature is this is a set of studies that look in real world settings you know one country uh has a uh has has a sharp lockdown a stay-at-home order another country has doesn't have mandatory stay-at-home orders during a period of of of grow growth viral growth or of cases spreading um which country did better right uh in terms of De case spread case spreading or death um which you know one country has a mask mandate one country doesn't have a mask mandate one one county has a Mas mandate another doesn't one one county has business closures another County doesn't you know you can you can use this variation in the real world to try to say okay which PL did did the places that lock down did they do obviously better on covid and the the outcomes from that literature are much more equivocal there's a there's some studies that find that that there was some life saving from Lockdown many studies find there was no life saving from lockdown in fact some studies find negative life saving from Lockdown um and uh so that's what the John's Hopkins study was was telling telling us that uh if you look at this modeling literature you get not results that say lockdowns save lives but you shouldn't believe it on the other hand if you look at this real world data it's much more equivocal it's not lockdowns are not not like penicillin I if you give somebody uh with a bacterial infection a an antibiotic to which the bacteria is is is not resistant you're going to cure that that infection lockdowns are not like that it's not obviously true you don't need a very large number of patients to see that a antibiotic that works against a a a a bacterial infection works right you just you just need a few it's like you know there's a famous thing in in medicine about uh well you don't need to run a randomized trial to show that a parachute is useful when you're jumping out of an airplane um lockdowns are not like that lockdowns are not parachutes uh lockdowns need because they are such an extraordinary intervention need extraordinary evidence to show that they accomplish extraordinary things and what the Hopkins study showed is that that we don't have such evidence in the in the scientific literature right and but that's not even taking into account the actual Harms that happen you know kind of obviously right just by basic logic from this type of policy that's correct yeah so the har the that's separate question so one question is does it does it protect against covid the other question is what other harms they do so like let's think about what lockdowns did they they separated Society they stopped Society from functioning Society is a very complicated thing social interactions are really um you know social sociologists and economists and other so social scientists spend you know decades trying to understand how Society functions you disrupt it overnight you're going to cause Ripple effects that are going to harm people in ways that you don't anticipate um and they it has I'll just take one example uh that we haven't talked about yet is school closures right that's a form of lockdown why close schools because you don't want kids close to each other and close to parent to to to teachers because keeping them part will stop the virus spreading right that's the theory um uh the the qu let's leave aside whether it was successful I actually don't think it was particularly successful in stopping disease spread let's just talk about what consequences there are of school closures right so uh there was a large literature in health economics before the pandemic about the importance of schooling for the health of children in over their entire lifetime um and so there would be studies like uh where they would look at uh one state would pass a law requiring kids to stay in school till they were 16 compared to another state that passed that that that only required till age 15 or something and the uh state with a 16-year-old requirement would have kids stay in school longer few months longer than the states with the 15-year old requirement um turns out that the study that the states that had those 16y requirements the kids that went through that system they lived longer healthier richer lives than the kids in the 15 short periods of extension of schooling had enormous consequences on the whole lifetime of these kids over the course of the pandemic the in the United States and many especially in blue States we disrupted the lives of these children so that we replaced regular school with zoom school kids dropped out at at very alarming rates children like 5-year-olds were taught to read by Zoom I have no idea how that could possibly work I we're seeing illiteracy rates go up um the the uh the consequences of this skip schooling one there's one estimate published in Jam Pediatrics that that estimated that this would cost something on the order of 5 a half million life years and that was just for the spring 2020 lockdown for our children the consequences are just just devastating to think about how do you make up essentially a year and a half or more of law schooling the answer is you don't I mean those are years that you just don't ever get back those are vital years in the development of children and we just threw it away without with in in in the hopes of viral control um without understanding that that's a fundamental Birthright that we owe our children this education um so so the I I mean I think um that's just one that's just one harm right I mean uh we talk I just have to add this and this is in the context of knowing fairly early on that that children strangely even you know know compared to influenza don't actually spread it that much that's correct yeah yeah so there was early evidence from Iceland from Sweden and and elsewhere what that actually you in Sweden they kept their schools open during spring um uh the primary schools open that like age 1 to 15 no child deaths and the teachers actually had lower rates of covid than people in the population at large because schools were relatively safe places to be that's not schools reflect Community spread they don't drive Community spread um that so we did it for nothing we we stopped the lives of these children for nothing and let me just one other note to add to this about children um it's not equally distributed richer children parents with from richer children they they sent their kids to private schools in places so the private schools that actually met in person they had tutoring pods they would hire teacher like teachers who were basically didn't have to do anything because they school's school was out so they would hire these tutors and they would come to their home and teach the kids poor parents didn't have that option right so you're you you're your your your poor family you have uh the maybe your single mom you have to go work your kids stay at home on Zoom school no one's supervising them um it's uh it was again an example of trickle down epidemiology right so one group The the poor have to pay the harms uh with where uh for compliance with this lockdown order that again didn't do very much this is one one point right that you just mentioned which seems you know extremely serious so where where else have do you see these sort of this I mean some people call it collateral damage right yeah so uh let's just stay inside developed countries because I think the the damage to developing countries is is order of magnitude even higher the collateral harms so but let's let's just stay for but for the ones that actually implemented the policies that's not everyone either right well the thing is is like well the developing countries faced harm both because they implemented the policies and also they are dependent on the developed world for trade and uh uh you know they they they fit into this global economy their own economy and the well-being of the people and poor countries depends on that global economy functioning well uh so the the rich countries when we implemented lockdowns had enormous negative consequences on the health and well-being of the poor countries which which we can talk about a second I but I don't want to leave the developed world yet okay uh because so um because so we talk about schools um let's talk about health when we shut down during the during the early days of the pandemic the hospital is actually emptied if you look in the data in the United States Hospital use was actually lower during 2020 and into 20121 than uh than in previous years the hospitals for most of them were not over over flowing with covid patients the waves came during those times yeah there was a lot of stress on hospitals but for vast chunks of of the of the of the last couple of years hospitals were empty people skipped cancer screening people skipped uh diabetes management Diabetes Care uh people skipped absolutely fundamental preventive care and so as a result women will show up with breast cancer late stage breast cancer that should have P been picked up earlier and they will have die from late stage breast cancer that what because as a consequence of the collateral damage of the lockdowns there and many of it it wasn't it was you know like the fear associated with covid caused people to stay home people stayed home with heart attacks and died of heart attacks rather than going getting care that would have saved their lives in developed countries um uh the the the psychological harm is is just catastrophic right so one CDC study in July of 2020 found that one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the month of June 2020 the the rates of depression and anxiety are through the roof I mean fortunately suicides haven't gone up yet but drug overdoses have uh a whole bunch of of indicators of poor of mental health have deteriorated U there are uh uh it's going to take it's going to have a consequence because these are not things that are simple simple to address uh it's almost like a society-wide PTSD right um and uh so so we harmed um the well-being of the working class the poor the well-being of kids we harm the health uh both psychological and physical health of huge populations in the west actually let me give you one other very St like incredibly shortsighted thing in the west you know you lock down a lot of women actually ended up staying quitting their jobs in order to take care of the kids they called it the Sheep session right a big a big decrease in labor force participation particularly marked among women um a lot of a lot of those women were actually nurses and other hospital staff members the STA the hospitals then got short staffed made it more difficult to care for their patients as a consequence of the economic uh economic uh effects of the lockdown uh Society is complicated it's like interconnected to think that we could lockdown and all a lot of these normal interactions that take place and see no consequences that we value was was was incredibly shortsighted yeah and we so we have these organizations like collateral Global um that are trying to kind of document right all sort of the impacts of all of this yeah I work actually with with those folks and I'm an like a a co-editor of one of the of collat global I mean I think um it's going to be very important to tell that story because our minds have been so focused on Co that we forgot forgot about the importance of of society forgot about these these essentially these people harmed by the collateral damage of these lockdowns um actually can we turn to the PO the poor and the developed countries developing countries because that's devastating right so uh One World Bank estimate uh early in the pandemic said that that there would be a 100 million people thrown into poverty as a consequence of the lockdowns uh poverty meaning like less than $2 a day of income now why might that be uh well for the last 20 some years may even longer uh we've had this globalization of the world economy our our economic systems are interconnected with each other poor countries reorganize their economy so they would fit in and when overnight those connections were were severed or greatly disrupted Supply chains disrupted what it did is it threw a lot of people who are like headed toward the middle class within the within the poor countries into into poverty dire poverty uh we lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last 20 some years a great success a sort of unheralded success but the progress on that has been halted the last two years and a 100 million people are poor that otherwise wouldn't have been absent these lock these lockdowns um the consequences of that on health have been devastating so tens of millions of people are starting it as a consequence of these lockdowns uh the the UN put an estimate out in March of 2021 then the south Asia alone almost 230,000 children had died from starvation as a consequence of the lockdowns um the uh the stress that the lockdowns have placed on the poor livering everywhere around the world have been enormous I don't believe that there's a single person poor person on the face of the Earth that has not been harmed by these locked outs I mean it we have to laugh because it's so sad I mean it's it's a it's it's a i this is why I believe it's one of the biggest Public Health this is the biggest Public Health uh error in history okay well because it seems to me okay the reason I I responded the way I did um you know I'm also aware that apparently the wealth of the sort of you know some of the most fluent people uh in the world increased dramatically I mean to the by trillions in fact right so that's another piece of the puzzle and then you're saying you know that the laptop class so to speak got this focused protection as a result of the policy also while kind of feeling like they're kind of more or even being told that they're kind of morally on the right side of things here right because we're doing our part to stop the spread and so forth so just it's a direct moral inversion of the truth right so the it it it wasn't immoral for a poor person to go work to feed their families then get covid we created the sense of Shame around getting covid just as a result of like people doing normal things that they need to do in order to to keep their lives going that was wrong right that that is that was a huge uh huge public part of the public health disaster this moralization of Co and you touched on it Yan it's really what you said is incredibly important um we made poor people to feel like they were doing bad bad illicit things because they weren't staying home staying safe how could they they don't they don't have the economic circumstances to do that um and we made rich people feel like they were good people just because they had the economic well wherewithal to to to to stay home stay safe it made no sense uh from a public health point of view it's a disaster from from an economic point of view it this is the single biggest driver if I can point to one Health one policy one Health policy or one Economic Policy the driving inequality this is the single biggest Drive inequality I've ever seen in my lifetime for from a single policy and and you've been looking at this for some time I do research on social economic status and health you know it seems like we're emerging out of this I mean we're there's all sorts of indicators of this this sort of people that were you know arguably strong lockdown proponents backpedaling saying what are lockdowns actually you know these kinds of things I'm seeing a lot of that um I I I take that in a sense as actually positive because it seems like you know I think one of your stated goals at the moment is to make sure that lockdowns however they manifest never happen again or that this isn't considered as a as a possible policy I would like lockdowns to become a dirty word i i that that's my goal as I want when people think about lockdowns I want them to think of them in horror that sweet of policies this this aim of keeping society stop stoping Society functioning uh as a way to stop infectious disease we should think of as as as like almost the same way we think of like medieval torture in instruments they were a a catastrophic mistake uh and so I would that is my goal is to like help people understand how catastrophic them mistake they were so the next time when it inous disease comes up when we get an epidemic we don't jump to lockdowns as the obvious strategy we at the very least think 15 times before we before we launch ourselves into them well and there's this other piece that that you know you've been vocal about it's been the loss of trust in public health because of well frankly the way the policies Public Health policy was implemented I mean I I love Public Health I and I um I think Public Health when it's functioning well is incredibly important to the health and well-being of so many people right so like at the very minimum providing the public with solid scientific information about how to stay healthy you know what's important in life to stay healthy uh and even even more muscular things like making sure that uh bad drugs don't get put on the market that harm people um there's a whole host of things that public health does that's absolutely vital often behind the scenes that's that's important for the for the health of the public um for public health to function well it needs the trust of the entire public it can't be a partisan thing where half the public trusts it and half the public doesn't uh it can't be a thing where it's a butt of jokes right you know where you know like uh Kyrie Irving this NBA basketball player is by public health orders is allowed to come sit on courts side uh without without a mask next to his next to his uh teammates but he's not allowed by public health to actually play on the court because of the spread of covid I mean it makes no sense or or you go sit in a restaurant and uh you have to have the mask on while you're walking but then when you sit down because apparently the co doesn't spread when you're sitting you can take the mask off I mean it makes Public Health look like a laughing stock and and the Public Notices and they stop trusting public health and then they get hurt because public health is important to the health of the public um what has happened during Co is a utter collapse in the trust that many people in the public have in public health and uh I think we have to work to reverse that uh and that means going to mean acknowledged by public health that it made incred inredible mistakes during the pandemic and then seeking to to reach out to the public and and say and re explain reform so that it does better next time well Dr J bateria it's such a pleasure to have you on again thank you rihan always fun to talk with you we live in an age of censorship and disinformation where some of the most prominent voices most important voices aren't actually being heard because they're being suppressed I invite some of these people onto the show onto America thought leaders so to stay up to date on the most recent episodes in our exclusive content you can actually sign up for our newsletter at theepochtimes.com newsletter just hit the checkbox for American thought leaders [Music]