Transcript: A Conversation with Jay Battacharya

Special guest, Professor Jay Battacharya from Stanford

Yesterday we were joined by our good friend and co-founder of the Great Barrington Declaration on our podcast.

Listen to the podcast here. Transcript below:

Justin:

Jay! Great to have you on the show. Where do you find yourself today?

Jay:

In my office at Stanford

Justin:

The usual now I have to know because it differs every 20 miles here in California depending on where you are our students back in action there in person or what's happening on campus

Justin:

Jay you come to us with quite a bit of accolades there obviously you're at stanford you're the director of demography and economics there for health and agingYou're a full tenure professor I believe there right and you're also involved in a bunch of other projects on that really great campus my only claimI grew up in the bay area I grew up in the east bay there jay and lafayette my parents are still there but I remember I've been on the campus on stanford a couple of timesOne of them is a claim to fame it's the one point where I always win the game two truths and a lie and that is that I sang the national anthem at the 1985 super bowl between the 49 ers and the miami dolphins there at stanford stadium

Jay:

I remember that because it was the year I was applying to colleges justin so I arrived at stanford in 1986

Justin:

I kind of have never left it's a great place now I'll finish that story and saying it was me and 300 other kids in a choir but I was there

Jay:

I only heard you justin

Justin:

I only heard I use some other accolades tell me about jay because I'm a researcher and I do a lot of ancestry research and everything else there tell me about the 1985 junior engineering technologies societyFirst place finish for you and your team

Jay:

How on earth did you find that justin

Justin:

I like to surprise my guess with something unique that I could find about that so you've been doing the science thing for a while there so in high schoolTell me about your experience there

Jay:

So I went to high school in claremont california in southern california it's a college town so a lot of my friends were friends that had parents as college professorsMaybe that's why they got the bug in me to want to be a college professor and it was a very typical 80s kind of geeky childhood a lot of my friends went into techI was in all of the geek clubs I was in the chess club I was in the math club you named the geeky club

Justin:

You'd find me there I saw them all yeah no I got great pictures too that I promise I won't release to the internet

Jay:

How on earth justin

Justin:

Did you find it my secret sauce now here you are okay and you're on campus obviously things shut down early here in california as you and I both knowI'm down here in san diego and the hall of blue was that this novel pathogen this viral respiratory pathogen had made its way across from china and was now infecting the entire worldNow this was your bailwick so you kind of got to work in fact you told me you got special permission to be on campus is that right

Jay:

I did yes in the early days of the pandemic I was working on a study to measure the prevalence of the antibodies to the disease in the population at largeThe santa crusia prevalence study so I supplied basically they told everyone to go home and stay home but except for I think they gave permission to people like me who are doing research on campus on covet

Justin:

Got you now there were a couple of let's walk through some milestones and then we'll come to sort of present day so you mentioned the santa clara studyThat was super interesting because it was finally all these new vocabulary words that we all inserted into our minds whether it was serotology and everything else thereSo tell us about the santa clara story what happened there

Jay:

Sure so in march 2020 middle march I wrote an op ed in the wall street journal where me and a friend of mine ben david who is a professor here at stanfordWe did some calculations with various spotty data sets like the diamond princess the nba just to get a measure of how deadly it really is the diseaseBecause when you have a disease like this and two years plus of experience for sure confirms this it spreads really rapidly and beyond the ken of public healthLike a lot of the cases especially in the early days when there wasn't very much testing you were only seeing the tip of the iceberg it seemed to meAnd so that meant one that the disease had spread very rapidly around the world because it showed up in first china but then iran in italy it was showing up all over the place again outside of the can of public healthSo it was spreading fast and the second thing was clear from these early data was that the death rate was much lower than the 34% that the case fatality rate that the world health organization is reportingSo we wrote this piece on the wall street journal it generated all kinds of controversy including on campus like some of my friends unfriended me on facebookThey like wrote me napping emails but it also brought a lot of interest from people who were looking at this including from someone in major league baseball who does helps major league baseball do testingHe'd ordered a bunch of antibody test kits from china and he's like looking at this thing well I could either use it for baseball or I could use it for scienceSo he called me up and he offered the test kits to use for a study to measure the prevalence of antibodies in the population

Justin:

Now that was interesting the first study of course it brought up a lot of controversy I think it was one of the first big melee that we had most of the analysis that myself and others would do early on in the pandemic was rather brushed aside by all the credentialed folks thereEven though we feel pretty proud of what we accomplished early on there but then yourself and several other colleagues you started putting out some dataOne of those there and it generated a lot of pushback there were some calculation things that people were saying and then there were accusations of thisEven against your wife and everything else about how you recruited for the study it was ridiculous but the results of the study were very affirming that isThat as you said the infection was far greater than anyone anticipated then the mlb study came out and we were kind of holding our breathing this should be interestingBut it kind of came back with mixed results isn't that right

Jay:

Yeah I actually did three crop prevalent studies in the early days one that got recently the most attention is the santa clara seraph study there we found about a 3% prevalence rate in april 42020 in santa clara county california I did another study a week after that with some folks and friends of mine at usc okay yeah so this is in la countyAnd there we found 4% the mortality rate then was something like this now this is a community dwelling population it didn't include anyone in nursing homesSo that means that it's probably an underestimate of the overall infection fatality rate because nursing home mortality was so high but we found in the community about infection fatality99.8% survival with a sharp age gradient mortality no kids died in those early days from either santa clara or la county and a very high rate of mortality among older peopleEven in the community and then the major league baseball study that was a nationwide study of the employees of major league baseball not the athletesAnd they've been spring training got canceled most of the major league baseball employees they were staying at home they were working from home they weren't actually in the publicAnd what we found was a .7% instead of 3% of prevalence nationwide of the disease so much lower than what the other ones were showing yes but there was a lot of variationSo this actually was higher in the bay area in la than it was in minnesota or something so there was a lot of variation across the country in the prevalence of the diseaseVery clearly from the data we found new york had probably the highest not surprisingly it matched the case reports in one sense but it also showed that if you were working from home in those early daysYou were relatively protected

Justin:

It was really the essential workers that were exposed in those early days right well and I think from my perspective what transpired was that the narrative that had kind of been built upThat this really was the worst disease ever that sort of anything that kind of went against the grain there and against that fear mongering was really quashed and jumped on in a significant wayAnd as we later come to find out with of course the other anchor moment that you had here in the pandemic with our friends martin kudorf and sunetra gupta was the great barrington declarationTell us just a little bit about that and how that came about

Jay:

Sure actually can I jump back to the center yeah because you mentioned a couple of things I think I wanted to comment on it was absolutely stunning to me because at that pointI thought I was just a scientist doing science and all of a sudden I found myself in the center of this mailstorm of attacks by press like there was one reporter named stephanie lee at buzzfeed whoLike I think she were five pieces hit pieces on me and the other authors of the study including johnny and edison my wife wrote an email to her friends on some middle school lists of the when my kids go to schoolSomebody leaked that email to buzzfeed and they made her into a national story because she wrote in the email that if you had a positive antibody that might mean you're immuneRight it was really a strange time and then there was some allegation of like I took $5,000 from the jetblue founder actually the jetblue founder gave money to stanford for the studyNot to me it was like instead of like trying to tell the public okay look scientists are trying to understand the disease buzzfeed and some other mainstream outlets attacked scientistsIt made life so much more difficult I mean I was filled with anxiety I lost a bunch of weight it was really an odd time

Justin:

It is when you have those first forays into politics and they've been in politics most of my life and everything else there is that first like I remember when the first big lie that was told about me about something I was involved inAnd I was blown away and I couldn't believe that someone was actually purposely fibbing in that regard and so it's amazing and it really does sort of knock you nowI don't care so I just keep going but yeah I can imagine for someone sort of you didn't have a political bent before this whole thing and probably you keep yourself pretty clean there and all of a sudden

Jay:

Boom there you are front and center yeah I mean I never signed up for political party because I figured in public health we need to be able to speak to everybodySo if you fast forward a few months to october of 2020 the disease seems to come and then sort of slowly went away by may or june of 2020 it looked like the world was starting to open up againBut then in the summer arizona picked up in cases it was clear that these wasn't gone and the talk about lockdown started to come back again martin kudoff was then a professor at harvard universityHe major statistician who if there was like a major league of statistics he'd be in it you'd be on the yankees he invited me to a little conference he was arranging in western massachusetts in this place called great barringtonHe invited me and synetra gupta from oxford university we're probably the world's best epidemiologist when we arrived we sort of come to us from different points of viewBut we arrived basically the same place there's this massive gradient age gradient in the mortality risk of this disease if you're infected with the death rate for someone whose multiple combinations and is much older is muchMuch higher 34567 I mean very very high numbers of death rates depending on your comorbidities and age especially age whereas for younger people especially kidsThe disease is not all that risky relative other risks they face for instance not being forced to not go to school is way more risky for kids than covet the great bench declarationBasically on the other hand you have these lockdowns which were so obviously harming everybody isolating people destroying economies essentially starving people around the literally starving people around the world based on the disruptions in sort of economic well beingStopping people like essentially halting basically like preventive treatments like cancer screening diabetes management it was causing huge mental health problemsIn june of 2020 there was a study by the cdc that said that one in four young adults in the united states had seriously considered suicide that month wowSo you mix these two things low risk to young people from the disease itself and huge hart what did you do what's the humane thing to do the only humane thing to doReally is to lift the lockdowns because you're harming these young people on net and for older people who really do face a high risk of disease wellWe should be devoting all of our energy creativity and resource we can muster to protecting them focus protection of older people that's the great variant in that questionThat combination of focus protection for the older populations and other high risk populations and lifting the lockdowns

Justin:

Which were doing so much damage to the young it's unethical if you thought the pushback was bad on your santa clara stuff the gbd became a bombshellIt was something that we come to later find out made its discussions all the way up to the highest ranks where we have the head of the nih and dr. fauci discussing disparagingly your statusYour colleague status as fringe epidemiologists and basically enlisting the help of some very untoward characters that we continue to fight for this dayTrying to take you down there was an actual like they were calling out a red alarm on you and having your reputation dragged through the mud over the next year on this stuff just out of pure thin air

Jay:

Yeah it was super interesting because I learned about this later at least the confirmation came later that four days after we brought the gbd in october 42024 days later on october 8 francis collins out of the national institute of health wrote to tony fauche calling the three of the main authors of the study of theOf the gbd me martin coldorf and sunetragpto he called us fringe epidemiologists by the way a friend of mine sent me he made up a nice new business card for me that has fringe epidemiologistsI kind of embraced it I mean honestly the central epidemiologists haven't done so well during the pandemic I have to say then he called for devastating published takedown of the premisesAnd what that meant to tony fauche who replied like a day later was essentially to unleash the press against me and my colleagues and I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus ripIt's such nonsense those words don't appear in the gbd we're not advocating for letting the virus rip we're advocating for focused protection of the vulnerableI mean the exact opposite of letting it rip it was a propaganda campaign organized by the nih and the government the science bureaucracy in the united statesTo destroy the reputation of anyone even signed or came anywhere close to endorsing the gbd people who signed the gbd some of them lost their jobs justin lost their jobs at universitiesLost opportunities for grants it was a propaganda campaign a smearing campaign both in the united states and the uk and actually in other countries as wellAnd if you ask why it was to create an illusion that there was a scientific consensus in favor of lockdowns and I say the word illusion intentionally that scientific consensus did not existTens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists prominent ones signed a gbd and I'll tell you a lot of people have told me that they censored themselves because they saw the vicious attacks that me and my friends who signed the declaration received

Justin:

Now jay did this tension and this sort of politicization at the top of things did that exist before this moment were you aware of that sort of undergirding political thing or did just covid clarify this thing and become sort of a wedge issue that brought it to lightI'm assuming that these political things didn't just appear but that all of a sudden was there discussion in the medical community about how bad things were atop

Jay:

I just say like in my personal life as a scientist I never experienced anything like this there's always within science people that disagree with each otherIn fact if science doesn't have that then you're not doing science but I've never seen the deployment of these sort of underhanded tactics to smear and destroy scientists who disagree with you by scientists themselves

Justin:

Yeah it's interesting when you look at dr. fountain's writings over the years he does a lot of co authoring with david moranz and in their last article they published togetherWhich was the sale magazine article in october I think 2020 and they had years before I just talked about how it was disappointing that we were unable to stop these viral episodes from washing over populationsBut this is just what we have to deal with in the modern world to what they said in 2020 which was we wanted to bend modernity to our will right I meanThey literally took the mantra of hey we can do these lockdowns and yeah this should be one of the tools we use in our chest all the time for this thingRight and it just seems like this became a clarifying episode that really brought out the best in some cases and the worst in others

Jay:

Well I saw an article by tony fouch where he basically what he was arguing for is a restructuring society focused around the suppression of the spread of infectious disease

Justin:

Yeah it's incredible that someone who has been there that long would just garner that mantra because it's like look there's science and then there's the application of science into public policyA lot of people gave your colleague our good friend scott atlas a bad time that he wasn't an epidemiologist but he was a darn good policy expert which is what they needed at the white houseAnd from his biography and everything else from his book there you can tell that there really wasn't a lot of science going on it was basically a lot of policy cram downs

Jay:

Yeah I mean I think the idea of this devastating takedown essentially the problem was people like tony fauche his training is actually like in immunologyNot even in epidemiology so it's kind of ironic that they were attacking scott over not being an epidemiologist what was needed was a broader perspectiveRight so yeah it's a good thing to try to reduce the spread of infectious disease generally but on the other hand there are many things that compete with that goal that are important in lifeIncluding for instance feeding the world population there was a study there was a report by the un in march 2021 that 230,000 children had died from starvationAdditionally as a consequence of the covid lockdowns they call it the disruption provided by covet now if you focus just on one thing you will do great damage to other priorities in lifeAs we found out during the lockdown that will have huge negative consequences for the poor the vulnerable and the working class primarily they're the worst because richer people can protect themselves from some of the falloutNot all of it by the way it's tremendous yeah so you needed different voices at the table in the early days of the pandemic it was anyone who didn't have a connection or didn't have a background in epidemiologyImmunology or virology didn't have the relevant expertise but that was nonsense justin we needed a lot more voices at the table we needed economistsWe needed sociologists we needed psychologists and psychiatrists we needed theologians we needed so many different voices to stand in for look here are all these because lockdown affects every aspect of lifeAnd here are all these aspects of life unrepresented at the table in decision making about what to do no wonder we ended up with this monomaniacal policy that had caused so much devastation and harmIt was put in place by people who were blind to these other aspects of life

Justin:

And the difficult thing is that of course it started at the top with the initial lockdowns and then the extended lockdowns and the policies coming from the cdcBut now when you opened up that pandora box you create 3000 unelected health officials across the country who can rule the roost on a local level and you have no idea whether they're going to turn right or left and no way to oust them as this whole thingThere's a real ethical issue with that I see in the san francisco bay area and the absolute devastation that that's going to have on that area in many waysAnd they've been able to live very well with a high class society very high middle class high upper class society there but the people who really suffer are those who were struggling alreadyEspecially children and I think that's something that we're looking very strongly at what do we do to turn this around so here we are the shards of society are all around us

Jay:

How are we putting this thing back together I remember there was a picture I saw in the san jose mourinho as a local newspaper in may of 2020 I think it was of two kidsCouldn't have been seven years old eight years old hispanic kids sitting on the sidewalk near a taco bell in san jose and they were there because their parents had dropped them off with their google chromebooksThey didn't have internet at home and so the parents are doing the best they could to try to take care of their kids left them there alone with their little chromebook laptops to try to get schoolingAnd on the other hand you're seeing stories of like richer people hiring private tutors having educational pods the amount of inequality induced by this response is just mind blowingAnd it just broke my heart to see I couldn't believe that when that picture came up and everyone in the barriers saw it that didn't end at the support for the lockdowns

Justin:

It really should have one of my favorite topics and I know you're a credential expert on demographics I study from a political perspective and I think that's one of the untold stories right nowYou see elon musk touting about it and the situation that we have is exacerbated by the lockdowns which is a lack of children a lack of families and even from a perspective of those on the other side of the political aisle from me or othersThat they want large social programs that are paid for by the government well there's no kids to stick the bill to here in california we saw one of some of the lowest months of childbirths during those locked down monthsOr I should say nine months after those locked down months people thought well maybe people will be bored at home and will have more kids the case was people having fewer and fewer kids and then leaving states that were in major lockdownsWhat's your perspective on sort of that demographic thing we're not quite to the status of where they are in japan but we're definitely not at replacement levelsWe have serious issues right

Jay:

Yeah the us I think it's like 1.5 or 1.6 for a late woman it's below replacement I think during the lockdowns there were high levels of anxiety and stressI'm not surprised that there wasn't a baby boom that came out of that the anxiety and stress don't produce sort of the kind of inputs that you've normally expected for something like a baby boomBut there's a long standing decline in fertility in the west and also actually frankly even in the east the world is depopulating or in the process of like there's an inflection point where the population is growingBut it'll stop growing sometime in the mid century and the consequences of that are going to be enormous I'll tell you the echo effects of the lockdownWe'll make that even worse because what's happened is I saw statistics something like a billion or 1.2 billion children worldwide have missed up to two years of schoolThose kids many of them aren't going to come back to school because they live in poor countries that's also true in the us so what we're going to have is a population that's poorLess well educated and frankly a lot of the consequences of that remain to be seen it was already a bad situation before covet this kind of like depopulation as a result of reductions in fertilityAnd ironically the challenge was how do you deal with a population that lives longer lives is older while you still have a decline in the total number of peopleEspecially young people that challenge is exacerbated by the fallout from covet

Justin:

Wow it's going to be quite the cleanup that we have to do in this next little bit here now let's talk about a subject that's kind of on the borderline of some difficult issuesLet's talk about vaccines and kind of where that stands right now I noticed for example that the israel study that came out I think late march early aprilJust went into full text and they released that there about myocarditis and pericarditis that they were seeing in the hospitals there obviously we're in sort of new territory all aroundAnd I remember in a conversation our friend jen cabrera who was an editor here with rational ground and we had a discussion with some friends who are like minded opinion across seasAnd they don't quite have the stigma that we do here in the united states that goes with what's been known as the antivaccine movement right and they were coming after usAnd this was like 2021 when the vaccines were first coming out and they were really concerned about things that they were seeing and they were pushing usAnd I remember we were very hesitant in fact we didn't publish a lot of pushback on the vaccines on rash round because it's so easy to get swept into thereAnd I think that's a terrible stigma that we have here because it basically has you looking away at the vaccines and whenever I was on tv I made sure I saidHey if you're over a certain age it probably makes sense to get the vaccines at least that's what I read in the data but again now I'm looking at this and I'm goingWow as I always say I didn't get vaccinated jay I know you pressed upon me that I probably should but in the end I'm like man the only thing I think I'm missing out on is a class action lawsuit coming in five yearsThat's just me I'm just saying jay tell us where are your thoughts right now on the vaccine what transpired what do you recognize what do you know and what's going on here

Jay:

Okay so let me do a little bit of the history of this because I think it's really important to understand the set up for this so the vaccine trials had as their end point the prevention of symptomatic infectionSymptomatic infection what that meant was you had some symptoms and then also tested positive for covid they didn't check for whether the vaccine stopped disease transmission or all infectionsIncluding asymptomatic infections they did not check for that they also didn't check to see whether the vaccine prevented severe disease like hospitalizations and deathsBut it did prevent symptomatic infections according to the trial evidence we had in say november december of 2020 sure so basically a lot of the fight or the vaccines has to do with thisWe don't have good randomized evidence where the two major things that we would care about from a vaccine does the vaccine stop transmission what does you have a very different set of goals and policies that are the right thing to doDoes the vaccine not prevent transmission but does prevent severe disease well then you have another set of different policies that you would adopt and we're set in this no man's land where we know it prevents symptomatic infectionBut not one of the two outcomes we actually care about for setting policy and a lot of the brouhaha however the vaccines has to do with that dearth of information from the trials themselvesI really don't understand why the fda didn't force the advisor and modern and others to have as their endpoint one of the two major things that would have driven health policyEpidemiological policy the endpoints like prevention of severe disease or prevention of transmission so what happened was when I looked at the numbersIn december 2020 I wrote a piece with synator gupta wall street journal where we argued that look we know prevent symptomatic infection that means it probably very likely prevents severe diseaseAnd so we should use the vaccine to protect older people anywhere everywhere where they are because the harm from the disease itself is so bad if you're olderRight the humane thing to do then is to prioritize older people and other people with chronic conditions that predispose them to very bad outcomes of disease and give these vaccines thereAnd then once that's done or as you're doing that you lift the lockdowns because again the logic is lockdowns are harming people and if you want later to extend it to younger people as better evidence comes inFine but the key priority should have been let's protect old people with the vaccine so we argued for that what public health authorities did they looked at that same evidence and saidYou know what I bet it stops disease transmission

Justin:

Right they touted such yeah even into the spring

Jay:

They were touting such all of their languages around this they say herd immunity will be achieved by 80% or whatever percent of the population getting the vaccineRight right that only happens if the vaccine stops transmission and they ignore the importance of the fact that once you got covered and recovered you actually had pretty good immunityBetter immunity than the vaccines themselves against transmission and severe disease and so they push these policies that were almost tailorade to destroy confidence in the vaccines and in public healthThese vaccine mandates where people a lot of people on the front lines they've got cove and recovery they're like well what's the benefit of the vaccine to me when I already have this protectionThey got fired justin because they lost their jobs or not want reasonable questions about whether do they really need the vaccine the mandates themselvesThey may have made sense if the vaccine stopped transmission and you're like trying to force people at the very edge to say okay you better get vaccinatedYou're going to put everyone else in danger but that wasn't the case and what's happened to me it's just tragic is that the confidence that people have in public health has collapsed because they think that they've been told lies in any waysThey have the effects of that extend beyond this vaccine to other vaccines which I believe are very important for the health of the population childhood vaccines like the mmr vaccine or dpt vaccineWe're seeing decreases even in the united states and uptake of those vaccines and worldwide we're seeing declines in that as well polio polio which was on the edge of being eradicatedHas made a comeback I don't know how you regain trust once you've lost it in this way as public health but that's something that I want to work towards because I believe very stronglyJustin despite the evidence to the contrary that public health is quite important that it does really can do a lot of good for the public at large but it has to be deployed ethically with an absolute commitment to telling the truth and to never manipulating the public in order to get its way

Justin:

Right now folks can we take a couple of questions from the audience here we got a good audience curling up here let me see they'll sign up if they want to ask somethingBut yeah let me ask you then again because I think I totally agree with you on the mandate issue and loss in public trust obviously they sold us something very different than what it turned out to beYou can blame it on the variance whatever else you have but dr. fouche said himself this was 100% effective against hospitalization and death which didn't turn out to be the case at all and was never the point thereAnd now we see for example in the latest round of approvals the fda where the clinical endpoint for the child study wasn't even clinical it was do they have antibodiesRight and it's a crazy scene it's just basically they want to get everyone there I think it epitomizes the terrible decision that public health health policy and general political policy has come toWhich is no death is acceptable no sickness is acceptable we need to treat everyone the same and we need to make sure that everyone is protected there

Jay:

Is that about right some deaths are acceptable as long as they're out of covet it is nuts justin absolutely nuts the fda for instance should have been requiring pfizer and mederna to provide randomized evidence of meaningful clinical resultsCertainly for shoulder and certainly with the boosters instead we're left in this information void where all you get is like accusations and nonsense and complete lack of collapse in the trust by the public of public health

Justin:

Crazy hang on 1 second I've got callin hereWe know sigh she's coming on si go ahead you're on the rational ground podcast with jay unmute your phone there give a permission I think you're good to goAll right hey jay hey justin

Justin:

Thanks for putting meWhere are you calling from today well I'm in nebraska but I'm based out of colorado got you I think the crux of this is science informs policy but policy is allowed to say no because the value system is different in politicsAnd I think a lot of scientists physicians healthcare people have trouble understanding that they assume that they have this domain knowledge they think they know what should be done about some diseaseAnd they think that it should be a one to one mapping from science to policy and I think that's just a violation of the social contract from the beginning and pushing back on thatAs a scientist it's tough it's difficult to get your colleagues to see that there are different value systems other than medicine and public health and people value things differentlyThey implicitly understand this but it's really hard to push back on this and so I think maybe jay has some input here but I really think we need to have more like liberal arts education and history being taught in the stem fieldsEspecially in medicine

Jay:

I completely agree si 100% with that characterization there's a kind of hubris that comes with this sort of science training like we're now a high priesthoodThat somehow we're the font of all wisdom and knowledge in society and we can structure society correctly I mean that kind of idea has a long and sad history sideAnd I think we're sort of rediscovering the limits of that because you're right there are many values that society has that to conflict with each otherWe build up civilization and structures in our society to mediate that politics being a major one but lots of other sort of local organizations and things that allow people to live out their valuesIt's not true that science has a monopoly on that kind of wisdom but yet many people in certain sciences certainly in medicine infection disease epidemiologyAnd so on they have come to think that they have this monopoly and have acted that way and part of the problem is the failure of politicians like politicians are supposed to mediate those conflicting values and they take positions that command the support of 50% plus oneAnd you're going to be a successful politician right what happened was that many of them were confronted with this new disease and they didn't know what to doIt's a high risk situation the easiest thing for them to do is to point to a scientist dr. fauci or someone and say look this person is telling me what the right thing to do isThis person is the guru that knows and so I was going to follow them and so no matter what happens they're fine if things go terribly wrong well it wasn't their faultThey were told by the scientists to do this we're just following the science we went right well great they've done the right thing I think it was an abdication on the role of so many of politiciansScientists academics to push back on this to tell people about the wisdom of what you just said which is there's so much more I'm not sure I don't know exactly how to fix thatI like your idea of maybe better training in the liberal arts I'm biased because I'm an economist and a doctor but I think some more economic trainings would help because

Justin:

My god it sure seems to me like so many scientists don't understand the basic notion of what trade offs yeah I think the point you made about hubris is spot onI remember in an article I wrote gosh some years ago we talked about how doctors were a little bit perplexed I'm serious like 20 years ago this is like late ninety sAnd they were talking about how doctors were perplexed because people were coming to them with printouts from webmd right and saying I think I have thisAnd have you looked at this and of course doctors having to spend so much time on in their practices dealing with the financial side of things or the logistics or the administrative they're not going out and seeking thisYou and I both know in the circles that we've had over the last two years the number of doctors engaging us on a regular basis openly is very rare and then behind the scenes is another cadre of peopleBut it seems to me that when I go to for example our pediatrician and I say there's no reason why kids should be wearing a mask you've got to give me an exemptionShe says I don't do that right it's really frustrating as someone who's been involved in this and probably forgotten about more about covet than my doctor knows about covetHow do you sort of bring that I don't have the credentials to bring that I could bring all the evidence I can but a lot of them are very hesitant because they can literally lose their license here in california if they go against the grain

Jay:

Yeah I mean I think the way that doctors who didn't agree with some of the consensus have been treated has just been shocking I'm actually frankly shocked by the medical associations which wholeheartedly embraced thisNormally when you have a condition where you don't exactly know what the right thing to do is doctors are permitted to use their clinical judgment in making decisions that's been superseded by this overarching imperative of the public health ordersWhich are not grounded in science a lot of the public health orders had no scientific basis at all remember 6ft or closing parks and you can take your mask off when you sit downBut not when you stand up in the restaurant I mean a lot of like nonsense right and yet in the name of science the science doctors were lost their licenses were shunned to the sideAnd so a lot of them responded by the way you just said justin they responded by being very hesitant to care for their patients as they see them in front of themAnd so now what we're seeing is a lot of patients don't trust their doctors because they think okay well the doctors didn't stand up for me when I needed themEven though they knew what I was going through again I don't know how you fix that but it's something that we absolutely have to fix it's really important that patients trust their doctorsBut it's also equally important that the doctors that the patients have are worthy of that trust

Justin:

Yeah it's a difficult proposition as I mentioned before I think it's going to take sort of a top down leader to really quell things because they opened up pandora's box with the first 40 plus days of lockdownThen basically handed it off to the states and to the county and here for example in san diego county I'd go to the county I'd say this is ridiculousThis policy doesn't make sense here are the numbers on it and they go look my hands are tied it's up to the state you go to the state and the state saysLook the counties have their regulations and they can do what they want you go back to the county and they said to talk to you and the county goes wellThis is the cdc policy right and so it's just a hot potato no one wants to own it they certainly don't produce any data to support a lot of their informationWhat data they do produce is from the stupid cdc mmwrs which you've been critical of as well and it drives me and saying now I agree with you totally on the vaccine mandatesThe endpoint clinical decisions that they made that were probably wrong or at least didn't go far enough for what we probably wanted in these vaccines but tell me what your thoughts areI have to ask on vaccine safety

Jay:

It's very clear that there are some vaccine injuries especially documented ones like myocarditis in younger people who take the mrna vaccines there's this fascinating study by christine stable ben out of denmarkA great epidemiologist in denmark she reanalyzed the data from the mrna vaccine trials and the ad no vector virus vaccines and what she found was that in the ad novector virus vaccines like the astrazeneca and the jnj vaccineThere was actually a reduction in all cause mortality in the time frame of the trial but you couldn't tell one way or the other whether the mrna vaccines reduced or reduced mortalityAgain it wouldn't time frame the trial there's something so what that means is maybe there's like vaccine injuries I don't think the vaccines kill people on thatI don't think that's true I think some people say that I think that's false I think the vaccine benefits are greatest for older people because they're protecting against a much larger harm from covet it'sMuch less for people who've already been covered recovered because covid recovery provides you with a lot of protection already against severe disease and the marginal benefit of the vaccine is lowerI think it's a clinically complicated thing so that you have a conversation with your doctor about it and you can trust your doctor because their doctor is not being suppressed and they can sayOkay well for you it makes sense because here are the clinical conditions that you have that puts you at high risk from covid yeah there's some possibility of risk from the vaccinesBut on the other hand that's offset by the benefit those kinds of conversations are like the warp and wolf of medicine that should have happened at the local level with doctors trusted by their patients rather than thisLike top down you must take this or else in canada you can't fly or take the train or whatever that force basically made it so that you couldn't have those nuanced clinical decisions made by patients and doctors togetherI think at this point I'm not seeing a ton of booster uptake justin I'm not seeing a ton of uptake of the vaccine in children either but even though they've extended itAnd I think that speaks to the level of trust that people have in these bodies like the cdc that are pushing in the fda they're pushing these vaccines for everybody and pretending as if there are no nuanced clinical sort of considerations that go into whether a patient should get a vaccine or not

Justin:

Well the knife that cuts one way cuts the other way as well we know the failings of our media when it came to the policies when it came to the data when it came to the foray and sorties against you and your colleaguesBut I guarantee you it cuts the other way when they do not have traction on the usual stick for lockdowns and masks and everything else there it'll go quite the other wayEven something as simple as something we know the offset of the menses cycle for example I know that johns hopkins is getting a lot of money to look at that and those other issuesOnce those come to bear we have a very litigious society I look at it from a political perspective I think that's going to be a big harbinger it'll make any sort of lawsuit like methylphiliona or some asbestos lawsuit look like child's playOur society is too litigious yes they have protections and everything else there but I guarantee you they'll find a way and we'll just have to sort of separate truth from fiction and everything else thereBut I would put to you one of the hesitancies that people have about taking the vaccine is not just information that they heard on the news but everyone I know has known someone who had a really bad experience with first or second shot of a vaccineAnd I think they'll find that as well it's going to be an interesting next few years to see how this irons out and like I said I think we're going to need some type of top down leadership to basically articulate what this isI think you and I both know who that might be but hopefully we can get over this because it's going to be herding cats 3000 of them across the countryDown to these local municipality and county levels to try to get them back on track and get some semblance of sanity I'm hoping that the elections will shake some life into this and that they won't be coming after usBut I don't know it's here in california it could be november 6 and newsma will put the masks back on all the kids I just don't know

Jay:

I mean I think what needs to happen after the trauma of the last two years is an absolutely honest assessment by a neutral accomplished board that saysOkay here's what went right here's what went wrong in medicine there's a thing called an m and m conference a morbidity and mortality conference after a patient is harmed or diesAnd in that conference you have all the physicians who are involved in the patient's care talking to each other honestly about what mistakes were madeNot with the idea of finger pointing but an idea of like okay how can we do better so we don't make these mistakes we need something like a society wide m and m conferenceWe need a society wide conference that says look here was the area this was the conflict of interest that led to this area and we just have to be honest about a very wide range of decisions that were made that were mistakenI agree with you justin that I don't think that it's going to happen in this current political environment there's too many vested interests that made the mistakesThat don't want to admit error it's going to take some sort of change in the political winds to make that happen the danger to me is like you have a commissionA kofa commissioner m and m conference where there's just a whitewash and that will just further decrease the trust that people have in the institutionsFrankly like you mentioned the courts I've done a lot of expert witness work in the last two years never did any before all of it profono and I don't have a ton of confidence in the courtsHonestly I mean I've seen some wins but a lot of like judges who don't understand science they can't tell the difference between good science and bad scienceA lot of judges who don't seem to appreciate basic constitutional liberties like the right to hold to free worship or the right to speak or the right to I call it a right like the right to have your child educatedI think those kinds of basic protections that I thought courts would provide they haven't during the pandemic I don't know at times it felt to me like they sayDuring world war one after world war one the confidence of europe in every institution collapsed it felt a little like that not quite as bad as world war oneBut it felt a little like that during pandemic to me

Justin:

Jay what are you working on now any exciting projects coming up or things that we should look for in the published wires

Jay:

Yeah I want to help set the intellectual agenda for this sort of m and m conference I want to figure out what sorts of things we ought to be asking what sort of questions we ought to be askingI've worked with martin koldorf and scott atlas we started this thing called the academy of science and freedom with hillsdale college where we're going to be addressing both what went wrong in the public health response to covetAnd also what's the proper place of science in society like how should we met science is very important and has important things to say but as I said earlierIt should not be the central thing it should be advisory not determinative and so like setting up social structures that fix that so I think the academy science and freedomThe other thing I'm mulling is writing some kind of like memoir book about this I still haven't decided I'm going to do that but I'm thinking about that

Justin:

Do it we need it while it's fresh in your brain there and we need more tomes written on this stuff because our children need to know that we fought for themAnd jay we thank you for fighting for us and being the calm collected and really just the friendly face that we could always count on to be on our side there and you went to where reason took you and we're grateful for you

Jay:

Thank you justin I'm grateful for you as well it's been fun to get to know you that's one of the few blessings of the pandemic is the amazing group of people I've got to know and come to respectI never would have but for the

Justin:

Pandemic hang in there in the bay area folks jay love your lots hang in there guys we'll talk to you soon this will be up here shortly on this podcast share it far and wide and we'll have jay on periodically to bring us background tell us what he's working on