Episode 44: Omicron and The Path Forward with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

When vaccinated people like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker, who both said they've recently got the boosted, well they both just got COVID. So what do you need to know about all this? What do you need to know about a macron? What do you need to know about this incredibly transmissible variant? Is it going to get us closer to her immunity? Does the vaccine provide any protection at all? This week, I turned to Dr j Baticharia

for The Truth. He's a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He's also one of the co authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. He is also recently opened the Academy for Science and Freedom with Hillsdale College along with Dr Scott Atlas and Martin Colder. You guys are familiar with them. They both have been on this show. All of these people, including j. Batcharia, They've come, They've given you the truth. They're honest people. There are people we should be turning

to for the truth and all of this. Also want to talk with Dr about a Charia about how Fauci and the ni H have intentionally shut down dissenting voices and the truth and all of this. We're gonna get into how exactly they have done that, how the ni H has done that, and how they control so many of the scientists in the country through grant money and funding. So a lot to get into. It's going to be super interesting. We'll get you the truth on all of

this with Dr J. Baticharia. Stay tuned. I'm so excited for this next episode. As we're saying this, this new variant in the country, the panic, the draconian measures, rinse and repeat, which is something we're all familiar with. So I'm so happy to have Dr J. Batachara on the show, someone who has been a voice of reason throughout all this chaos. Doctor, thanks so much for joining the show. Oh thank you for having me so I'm actually one

of the unlucky recipients of this new variant. I have spent the past week now just getting over COVID, So fortunately I'm on the other side of it almost, but it definitely kicked my butt. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, I mean I think it could. You know, there's there's delta still floating around. So I think the evidence on amicron by itself is that it's it's milder. But COVID

isn't a joke. I mean, obviously, so many people have died from it, so it's something we should take seriously, but it's not something we should destroy our society around, which is unfortunately, I think we've done large in many ways over the last two years. Well, it definitely has. And you know, you're one of the few people out

there really arguing again some of those draconian lockdown. You know what's so interesting is there's recently a Foyer request from the American Institute for Economic Research that undercovered emails were Dr Fauci and Dr Francis Collins were scheming against you and the other individuals who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. What did that feel like to sort of be on the receiving end of you know, the government's propaganda and attacks. Really,

I mean it was really surprised. I mean, I guess and since I'm not surprised that it happened, surprising to see it in black and white. The last year and some have been quite difficult because what's happened over the last year and a half and so is that after we wrote the Great Banking Nequation, which which we was with me Sinetra Gupta from professor at Oxford University, she's fantastic theoretical epidomologists, uh and and actually practical epidomologists, and

then Martin Cooldorf at Harvard University, amazing biostatistician. We wrote this in Octo and the idea was very simple that COVID has an enormously bad effect on people who were older as also thousandfold increase in the risk of death, sense of your disease if you are older versus if you're young. At the same time, the lockdowns are been devastating, just devastatingly harmful. Tens of millions of people thrown into starvation worldwide, missed cancer screenings resulting in breast cancers that

are that should have been cut earlier tolling cancers. Psychological effects on especially on kids, has been enormous. So we called for an end of the lockdowns and focus protection for the elderly, especially for the older and other other vulnerable. What we hope for was an open conversation with the public comp community about how best to protect the old

older population without a lockdown. Because the idea, but up until this one was the only way to protect anybody was was a lockdown to stop this use and spreading that we knew that was not possible because what the lockdowns this does is protects a certain class of rich people who can who can stay from home at work and not lose their jobs, and not not anyone else. So we we put this out hoping that were to

open a conversation. Instead what was we were met with It was just this like vilification campaign is campaign to say that we wanted the virus to rip society, to kill people, as if we were somehow Google that wanted to destroy destroy the lives of people. And I was I wondered what was the source of that? And the Francis Collins emails that were released through a FOIA reveals that the NI h with including the head of the NIH and Tony Faucci, the head of the n A.

I d uh. They spread those lies, they worked to try to get the media to amplify them, and it led to so many interviews with reporters where they're asking me why I wanted to let it rip, why I wanted to hurt immunity strategy, which is which is nonsense? Um. And it made my life much more difficult with me, even with my colleagues who sort of fell for the propaganda. Well, and what's so odd is I mean, science is not supposed to be this consensus, this group think. I mean,

you're supposed to have diverging opinions. And so when did this change? And why do you think it changed? Because we we've really seen this take fold in a way that is so different you know, times of the past. So we're a science today, and how do you think that happened? I mean, I think that it's always been true for science. Science is such a powerful, beautiful thing. It's it's like an engine for producing things that tend

to be true. Right, So learning learning how the material world functions, science is so powerful and so chief, so much, But I think what's what's happened over I don't know exactly the time frame, but certainly, uh, we've seen this in during the pandemic. Science has become a thing where essentially you believe in it just because it's science, rather than understanding the mechanisms by which science tends to produce

truth and so like. You can see this with the almost crazy worship of Tony Faucci, or even the way he talks about science. He says things like, if you disagree with me, you're not simply just disagree with a man, You're just doing with science itself. He's turned science into a god. He's a high priest of science. When he says things like that, that's not the right way to think about science. At least, it's exactly what you said. Science is a process by which truth reveals itself with

open mindedness, tolerance, uh and and openness. The discussion also correction by data. Right, So if you believe A and I believe B, we disagree, Well, we agree on an experiment and it resolves in your it turns out your right, And I'm like, oh donn, I'm you're right. And then I say, well then you know, buy you dinner or something, and then I say see, and we do the next thing right. Then slowly over time, by that just open discussion,

we learn things about the real world. Instead, during the pandemic, what's happened, it's essentially replaced with this attitude you see in this letter and also the Trances columns head of an NH wrote, and also what Tony Fauci has said of science as a dictum as given from on him. The science has said X, Y or z. There is no fighting over it. There's there's no there's no disagreeing over it. There's no recourse to any data that would

would solve it. Instead, you just propagandize, you demonize people to disagree with you, and you push them the outside so that that scientific opinion is outside the bounds of the polite discussion. I mean, that's essentially exactly what Francis Collins and the United did to the Great Parenting Declaration. Well, and they did this at the beginning of COVID as well, at the beginning of the pandemic, of trying to shut down any talk about the virus having escaped from the

Wuhan lab. There. They did it in the lance that you had Peter Dazac and a bunch of scientists wrote that letter basically trying to shut down any alternative thought process of oh no, it had to have come from the wet market, which even China is saying that didn't happen now, you know, so they try to shut down so they're just seems to be this really odd desire by the people in charge, people like Dr Fauci, of just shutting down any alternative viewpoint in a way that

is really dangerous, and to me, I think the reason why everyone should be concerned about this is what information are we not getting? What critical information do we not know that is not being share, that is not being brought to light that could potentially save lives because of this group think, because of the shutting down, because of the labeling anything that is outside of what Dr Fauci deems acceptable as conspiracy. You know, what information are we

not learning right now that we need to know? I mean, that's that's always the problem when you treat science as if it were established out of facts with a high priesthood, right, but what if the high priesthood is wrong? How would you know? There's no there's no fighting with them reasonably with with data and with with reason. Instead, what you have is dictims, some of which may be right, someone

which are may be wrong. It's impossible to tell because it hasn't been subjected to the test that you normally would subject to scientific ideas to Every scientific idea is subject to challenge in that same same exact way. It has to be what do we not know? I and I agree with you? Like a great example is this this idea that he couldn't have possibly been a lab leak? Right? Well, I mean, in fact it was conspiracy here to even

suggested for a long time. Uh. The revision on this is I think going to be healthy, but a lot of the sort of circling of wagons on the lablacate. Frankly, it smacks of like a cover up to me. Um, whether there wasn't lablique or not, I don't. I don't know for certain. It's hard, it's going to be challenging to find out, but certainly we should be allowed to

ask questions around along those lines. The same thing was like, actually I worked on a study in the early days the epidemic called the Santa Clara Seria Prevalence Study and the l A county, Seria prevalence say where What we tried to do is figure out how widespread the disease was in the in the population um. What we found was that in April twenty in Santa Clara and l A County there were forty or fifty times more infections

than cases, which meant a few things. One, the mortality Riffin disease was much lower than people have been saying because the denominator the number of people infect it was much higher, but the deaths were the same, So you just didn't it didn't. But the second, and equally certain probably more important, is that by that meant that it was so widespread by April there was already too late to have a zero COVID kind of policy. We've been following.

The idea for the policy all along has been a, well, we just need to suppress the spread of the virus down to low enough levels so we can open society again. Well, I mean, if you look at the data from April, there was no chance that was going to be true. That successful in most in most places in the world. In fact, that's exactly what's happened. Like we've done so much to try to lock down and get this virus down to zero. That we've been unable to stop the

spread of the disease. We don't have a technology to do that. Tony fact, you wrote a letter an email about that Santa Clara study that was in an earlier email dump from through pain through Foia where he had a five pages of redacted the text that was redacted about the study. Uh. And he at the end of the five pages he said he had a line saying, well, we should contact one of the authors of the study, and it was one of my colleagues who was the

senior author on the study. He never was contacted. I would dearly love to know with those five pages of redacted text said, because what should have happened in response to that study and and a whole bunch of other share problem studies, is a revision of thinking about what the right policy should be. And yet, just like with the lab leak, just like with the Great Parents and declaration, the NIH closed ranks of CDC closed ranks and decided to go full on down the lockdown strategy that's led

to such a disaster the last two years. Well, and so I remember, you know, I was one of the people screaming from the rooftops because I was reading stuff that Dr e and Edys was writing. I was saying the study that you just talked about that you worked out at a Santa Clara, And then we had also, I think closely after that, there was this study at

in New York. There was also Miami Dade County, and all of it was sort of saying the same thing that we were missing cases by, like you know, I think it was something like ten to sixty five fold or something, which means that it's a lot less deadly than we originally thought. And then you had also I think it was New York's own data was saying that the majority of the new hospitalizations were people who are

staying at home. So to your point, we had all this information in front of us that the decisions we were making were the wrong ones. Yet will uh, you know, continue down that road. But you know, here we are again sort of in the same position where we have this new variant out that is seemingly as contagious as the measles. Yet they're still trying to revise the old bag of tricks to stop something that we can't stop. Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, the problem is that

it's exposed to actual discussion and data. The people who have supported the lockdowns really have no argument, right. They'll point to places like Australian New Zealand say well, look they got to zero, but in fact they didn't get to zero. You can see the cases exploding Australia now, um that the the you can see the cases coming back.

They've had more lockdown days than any place on Earth. Um. And yet the disease is still floating around the way that that that the lockdowners have behaved, It's as if they said, well, there was no other possible alternative response to this this virus other than to to do the kind of school closures and church closures and and closing businesses and uh and and sort of ending normal civic life. Well,

that didn't work. Was a complete disaster for the poor the vulnerable, both in the both in devest in the developed world and the developing world. To pretend as if we had no choice, that that that wasn't actually policy

choice is completely disingenuous. And in order to maintain the illusion that we had no choice, they had to shut down the scientific debate about it, and so that the campaign, the propaganda campaign about the Great brand and Declaration, essentially the similar kind of uh shutting down a debate around how widespread the virus actually was with the serial prevalence.

By the way, there's now a hundreds of more of these studies that found basically the same thing, like a huge of a very large fraction of of cases that affection is not identified and disease more widespread than realized. UM and that's been tree is said from the beginning of the epidemic. UH so that they had to shut that debate down in order to get the policy through because if that policy was subject to old reason, no

one would have gone for it. Instead, they relied on panicking the population to generate support for a policy that is utterly destructed. Quit commercial break more with Dr J Baicharia on the other side, where do you think we would be today if we had followed the Great Barrington Declaration and protected the elderly and essentially allowed you know,

the rest of society to go back to life. I think we've had many, many, many fewer deaths from the virus itself because we would have we would have protected better protected the elderly. It's not I don't think there would have been zero desk because this is a terrible virus and it's really hard to stop. But we managed to protect the laptop class. That was the policy we followed.

We shielded the laptop class. We could instead have thought to ours I've thought about how best to protect the actually vulnerable, so we would have many fewer deaths from the virus. We actually might even had less of this viral evolution. And then the other thing that we would have had is we would have had an enormously uh less damage from the lockdown arms. Right, kids would have spent the last year and a half year year and some in school rather than uh quote learning from home,

as if it's really possible to do that. So kids would be leading better lives as a result of it. And by the way, that will have long term impacts that we have. We have kids that can't read, we have kids is going to collapse in in learning. UM that has long term impacts on the lives. Just tragic increase in depression and anxiety and kids and young adults. UM,

we would have avoided all of that. We would have avoided the there's now I mean, there's data that show that tens of millions of people around the world are starving as a consequence of these lockdowns, tens of millions. Um, you know, because you do. You have a country, a poor country, many people on the verge of poverty. They restructure their economies to fit into the global economy over the last twenty years, lifting a billion people out of

poverty over twenty years. Overnight, we we reneged on those promises and as it result, tens of millions of people, their income drops below one to two dollars a day and they start and that's exactly what's happened. Um, those those lives would have been saved. Hundreds of thousands of children in South Asia, corning to report in the by the u N and March this year, have already starved

to death. Right, So you have like all that collateral harm that's going to have consequences for decades avoided if we follow the Great branch and Declaration. You talked about the evolution of the virus or the vaccines to blame for that. I've seen the argument made that we have leaky vaccines that don't provide immunity, don't stop transmission, and therefore or you know, have led to this new variant

of macron. What are your thoughts on that. I mean, the evolution of the virus is hard to predict, but it responds to the environment that it sees, right, So the virus UM when you have a vaccinated population UM, there it creates an ecological niche where a variant to the virus that can infect the vaccinated UH is more

likely to succeed in stead of replicating itself. UM. So it wouldn't be surprising that to me to find a widespread vaccination with a vaccine that doesn't stop dis ease spread could have contributed to this evolutionary process and and moved the viral evolution along a certain line. If we followed the Great par interacoration, the pandemic wad it over earlier because what would have happened is is that through normal activity, younger populations would have had more exposure to

the virus. Is just I mean, that's just a normal way. But because the harm to younger people from being exposed to virus is so much lower than the old they would have died at much lower rates and they wouldn't have been exposed to the lockdown harms, and so thus would have been benefited from from the policy. It's hard to say exactly with any kind of precision, because you have to play this game of like what if, and play the game of what evolution would have looked like

had we gone down a different path. But it is clear that the policy itself, both of the vaccination and also the lockdowns, changed the path of our evolution. Well, and what's interesting is there used to be this game of oh, it's the unvaccinated's fault, you know, these dirty

unvaccinated people. And now that you have vaccinated and even people who are just recently boosted to get it, you know, now it's, oh, it's no one's fault, it's you know, the dynamics and the conversation have completely changed surrounding COVID now that we're saying that the vaccines aren't protecting people from getting COVID at this current moment. Yeah, I mean, it's it's unfortunate. We should never have come to a point where public counsel was promoting the idea that it's

somebody's fault to get sick. We don't make you feel guilty for being sick. That is that is bad medicine, and that's about bad public heuple we do is we treat people who get sick with compassion. That's the right way to message around it. And if we have a messaging strategy, it leads people to believe that anyone who gets sick is somehow lesser or somehow it hasn't been careful or is I mean essentially other. That is bad public health and that's clearly what's happened in the last

two years. And so now to see a reversion to that and say, well, it's not your faults, you've got sick as soon as the laptop class starts getting sick, um, I just it's frustrating. I mean, of course it is true. That is the laptop class is not stop the fault for getting sick. This is a this is a vexious virus that spreads very easily and so it's very hard to hard to protect yourself from it. So it's not

their fault. But it does strike me as as curious that now we're finally getting that message from public health, and we should have been getting that message all along. Really, there's been this illusion of control over the spread of the virus that's said this, we somehow spread the idea around it if we were just we were just good enough, obeyed the rules hard enough, we can protect ourselves and others from the virus. But that that was a lie.

There was no technology we possessed or possessed currently to stop the spread of this virus, and it's not anybody's fault for getting it. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is we we keep hearing this argument of Okay, so we know that the vaccines aren't stopping transmission. That's evident when you have people like Elizabeth Warren Corey Booker who said they were just recently boosted, you know, having

recently gotten COVID. But so we keep hearing this argument that it's still you still need to get it because it's still protecting people, it's keeping people out of hospitals. But what evidence do we have that it's doing that when we're also just seeing the natural evolution of a virus, which my understanding is it tends to lead to where it becomes more transmissible but less lethal as it continues

to evolve. So how do we know it's the vaccines keeping people out of the hospital versus just the virus inevitably taking the course of being more transmissible and less lethal, so it could be both, right, So I think I think, for instance, at least with the delta version of the virus, there were some very good studies out of places like Qatar, out of Sweden, out of out of the UK, even Kaiser in northern California that showed based on matched cohorts

of vaccinated and unvaccinated people where where they carefully followed them over time UM that showed that vaccine efficacy against severe disease actually stayed quite high up to six seven eight months after vaccination. UM. There was a Swedish studies suggested that that at the end of eight months it starts to decline for pretty sharply, but for quite a long time it protects against severe disease, even as the protection against against being infected declines pretty sharply after two

or three months. UM. So I think really on the basis of those studies that the people believe, at least I believe that there's it protects against severe disease, at least against delta. UH. The evidence about a macron, this new variant seems to suggest that it is much milder. The disease itself is much milder and both vaccinated and unvaccinated, that is much less likely to produce hospitalizations, much less

likely to kill you. I mean, I know, I've heard this general dictum that viruses tend to evolve toward milder. That's I don't know that it's always true, but with the case of Aramicron it it certainly has turned out to be true, which is I mean, a great blessing. Well, because I guess I'm just observing in a you know,

more immediate circle. But I know a lot of people who have recently gotten COVID, you know, many vaccinated, small handful not, and it seems like everyone's symptoms have ultimately been the same, regardless of having been vaccinated or not.

So I just I don't know, I just wonder it's, you know, again back to our original conversation of when it's sort of this group think narrative being told, it's really hard to know what is true and what is not, which is why I've been bringing people like you, or doctor Atlas or Dr Martin colder If on the show who have been honest and have been unbiased in your explanation of all this stuff, because it we're really living at this time where it's it's very difficult to discern

between truth and lies. Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is uh actually comes back to this propaganda campaign where we're talking about earlier. If you have at the sort of commanding heights of science, people who do not respect open scientific discussion, the first instinct when they're challenge is to shut that down. You're gonna create this distrust and that is something that we absolutely have to work to to to address. As as I said, I think

science is a beautiful thing. It's wonderful, it's wonderful, has produced so much knowledge, has been useful for humans, for people, But that can only work when you have the scientific process the working way it should. It's not a high priesthood, it's it's a it's a discussion and open structured discussion. The lack of trust that that many, many, many people have in public health and in science is fully earned

by the public health establishment, by the scientific establishment. It's brought brought that distrust on itself by not actually following the principles of public health and in in in lockdowns, by not following the principles of what, how how science actually should operate in in terms of how the ni H and and other other entities that have been funding

sciences operated. It's it's led to this sort of, uh, the situation where um, we see that science can produced so many wonderful things and certainly improve our knowledge about how the way the world works, but at the same time it's created a class of class of people that just there's no reason to trust them, but based on the way they behaved. I sympathize with a lot of folks about the inability to how what's what's true and false because you know, in the middle of a propaganda war,

that's exactly what happends up happening. Uh, we shouldn't have a propaganda war here, we should have as an open scientific discussion. So when and how did this claim that the vaccines would stop transmission begin? Because you can go back to the visor's chairman's comments last December on Dateline he said he wasn't sure the vaccine would stop transmission.

You can also look at maderna chief medical officer told Axios last November that we need to be careful to not over interpret the vaccines because we didn't have sufficient concrete data showing that the vaccines would reduce transmission. But then lo and behold, we had people like Dr Fauci, We had the CDC director, you had Joe Biden saying, hey, look, if you go out, you get vaccinated, you're not going

to get COVID. How did that narrative take fold when you even have the heads of these companies a year ago warning for that to not happen, I mean, I just was like a matter of full confession, I should say, I thought in January this year that the that the vaccines would greatly reduce transmission. UM. On the basis of that was the trials, the randomized trials of the vaccines UM.

The endpoints of those trials were actually symptomatic COVID. And my reasoning was that if in fact the vaccines do reduce the risk of symptomatic COVID, which is the trials did show at least for a few months after the vaccine, well, then symptomatic people are much more likely to pass the disease on than someone who's not as asymptomatic disease. So if you prevent symptomatic disease, it's a factor you're going

to prevent trans or reduce transmission. That's what I thought in January this year, and the data started coming out that that protection against symptomatic disease didn't last very long, maybe two or three months. You know. I started to see like there were countries that were had big outbreaks despite having very highly vaccinated populations, you know, and let's say like March, April, May, um, and it became clear

that the protection against infection was short lived. And I changed my opinion on this based on those data that came out. Um. I don't know why Joe Biden or Dauchi and and and others didn't change their opinion also based on those data. They started that. I think partly they were thinking that in order to induce people to get vaccinated, you can't tell them that you could get the disease anyways, because that would decrease the demand for

the vaccine. But I think I have the opposite idea to tell people the truth based on what the data is showing you. It's if you tell people. Look, I changed my mind when the day appears the data on which I changed my mind. And here's why I thought what I did before, and here was I think. But

now I think people are gonna trust you more. And what actually increased demand for the vaccines, because what it would happen is people say, well, yeah, okay, this person, this person is telling me what the data show that changed their minds based on the data, and that they're also telling me that protects against severe disease, which I

still think it does for at least eight months. Like I think that's how you build trust is by being honest when you get something wrong, uh, follow the data and then tell and then reason with the public like their adults, rather than trying to manipulate the public, which is essentially how I think Joe Biden and advised mainly I think by Tony Facci has done. They like the vaccine passports and vaccine mandates are are are fruit of that, right.

They they want these policies in order to cource people to get the vaccine at risk of losing your job, at risk of being able to go to restaurants, to uh to public libraries, uh, you know too, museums, you name it. You you can't have, you can't participate in civic life. Only you get the vaccine in order to

course people to get it. Rather than reasoning with people about the vaccines, say well, here's here's here's who especially important for Here's what the side effects are for this group, and it's much less for that group, and just and just showing on openly and honestly what the data are. I think that reeds trust and that trust helps people

feel more comfortable doing the right thing for them. Well, and I think you're right in the sense of, like, you know, you just earned my trust more by saying, hey, you know, back in January, this is what I thought, here's why. And I think if they were just honest with people and saying, hey, look that's what we thought at the time, and then Delta came along, and then all of a sudden, we're looking at us studies out of you know, Provincetown, Massachusetts, where you know, an outbreak

took place in the cases were fully vaccinated. Now those dynamics of you know, if if they were just honest. But the problem is and then they just keep pushing forward with these failed strategies. I mean, like, so, for instance, we're we're all saying with their own eyes that the vaccine is not stopping transmission. Right, We're seeing people left and right get O Macron vaccinated. Not it doesn't seem

to matter at all. But yet then you've got new cities like Boston saying you have to be vaccinated to live among society here or Chicago, and it's like why, like what what is it actually doing to protect society when it's not stopping transmission whatsoever? Like what's the point of vaccine mandates right now when it doesn't stop transmission? I just I don't understand it. It makes no sense to me. You're right to know, I don't understand it. There is no point to it other than to create

social division and ostracism. Um. I mean I think I think if you'd ask some a proponent, they probably say, well, we want to coerce people into getting the vaccine, like they're being honest when that policy induces such enormous social division, like people have lost their jobs because they don't want

to get vaccinated for whatever reason. Um. You know, it's at this point the vaccine is very clear is a private decision, like it has private consequence of that person has vaccinated in the sense of protecting against severe disease. That's according to mind you of the data, um, but very little in the way of public public Like, so my vaccine actually doesn't protect you very much. If I don't, if it doesn't stop me from getting affected, Vaccinated people

can and do spread the disease. And in fact, if you're in a group of unvaccinated people and all of them are COVID recovered, well that natural immunity is quite good against reinfection. They're great data from places again like Israel and Qatar, Sweden, Denmark that at one year there's only a point three percent reinfection rate, or as a sub reation, point three and one percent, a very very

low rate of reinfection one year. If you're naturally means it might actually be the case if you're among a group of unvaccinated COVID recovered people, that you have less risk of getting disease if you're in a group of vaccinated people who have the vaccine. You know, several months ago, quick commercial break more Dr j Badtaria. On the other side, so South Africa just recently, you know, they all this macron wave hit first. Now it's subsiding. They've actually stopped

contact tracing, quarantining. They've sort of changed their policy now that of the country has some level of immunity from either prior illness or vaccines. What do you think a macron will do to the United States in terms of reaching endemic status herd immunity in the sense of, you know, it seems like this thing is just so contagious, the incubation period is so short that so many people in the country are ultimately going to get this thing. Yeah,

I think. I think, um, the illusion that you can protect yourself from getting the virus if you just are careful enough, is authority on its way of being shattered. Right, We've seen this enormous seasonal wave and almocron I think is just fueled that throughout the Northeast and through much of the United States. Actually, that is I think inevitable because again we don't have a technology from stopping it.

In South Africa, what it's done is it's actually, I mean interestingly, uh reduced the fear about the virus because the consequences of getting an omicrons all seems to be much lower. Right, There's much lower risk of death, much lower risk of hospitalization, and the end point than is of h I say, decoupling of cases from hospitalizations and death like in the in many previous way, especially whenever cases when possibilizations and death follows, sort of like night

follows day in the vaccine era in mid um. Actually, in many countries there was already this decoupling, like when when the vaccine was used to protect the old, so that even if the old got it, they would they would not go be hospitalized or die. That you'd see a very increase, sharp increase in cases with no con commitment, increase in death or hospitalizations. You saw that in the UK, for instance, You saw that in Sweden for instance, saw

that in Iceland. Actually, uh, in the in the now with a Macron, you're seeing that basically South Africa a huge increase in cases with no no really increase in death, and that's in a population that's not particularly particularly well vaccinated. UM. I think the same is likely to be true. As Omicron's president us, there will be the decoupling of cases and death, and that decoupling really is the end state.

The cases. We can't stop. The cases will continue forever in waves, seasonal or regional waves, but it will no longer produce the death that it once did. Are we in endemic status now as a country or where do you think we are in terms of is this still a pandemic or is an endemic. Now it's hard to say biologically exactly mean so endemic, what it means is in her immunity. What it means is every additional person

infected insects one or fewer people. In that sense, we're not as herd immunity because the number of cases is rising, so each additional person infected. But in a different sense, the pandemic could be over as soon as we decide it's over. The pandemic really is in some sense, is the set of responses we've taken to the biological fact

of the spread of this virus. The herd immunity means that there's sufficiently large faction of the population that uh, that isn't uh it isn't at risk of spreading the disease very very sharply if they were to be exposed, because if they're supposed to it, they don't get it. With a virus like this one, you can move in and out of herd immunity, right, you can get You can be protected against infection for a while, and then your community declines over time against against infection and so

you get it again. The common cold is like this, right, there's herd immunity for common cold, your protection against it declines over time, and then you might be exposed as to like another corner that's the same cornervirus that before, and then you you get it against several times in

your life. But the second, third, fourth time that doesn't produce severe disease because you have immune mechanisms cellular immunity and other mechanisms of immunity that use the harm from being infected reduced it so you don't you don't end up in the hospital, you don't die if you get it's just a cold. That is I think the endpoint

is epidemic herd immunity, endemic equilibrium. What it means. All that means is UM is that the virus isn't spreading sharply because a sufficially number of men people have that for times. But the key thing is not that. The key thing is the protection against severe disease, which I think we are in the midst of getting UM naturally.

I mean, people seem to have a lot of protection against severe reinfections, and I think, uh, you know, I think that that's the direction we're ahead of this, this decoupling of cases and to end ut and severe outcomes. Do you think we should be more careful in our vaccination status in the sense I mean we are seeing myocarditis and heard issues uh, you know, correlated to the vaccines, particularly among younger people who aren't as susceptible to ending

up in the hospital or dying. I mean, should there be a little bit more transparency and honesty around some of those conversations and the potential adverse effects of the vaccines on certain groups of people? Absolutely? Right, I think the vaccination should be a personal medical decision based on the risk of vaccine to the person in that group, UM, and and the benefits of vaccines for that group. Right. So, a young male who is COVID recovered UM, is there

any reason to vaccinate them? They faced the risk of markett it is from the from the vaccine, which just you know, it's not it's enormous, but it's like it's you know, one in five thousand one and something on that order, UM versus where. But the benefit they get is so little because they're already COVID recovered UM. Whereas an older person who's not been exposed to virus previously uh faces a high risk of death or or you know high meaning like four, three, four or five percent

of death if they were to get infected. UM, the vaccine might be quite a good idea. UM. So it really depends on who you are, your your medical circumstances. It should be a personal medical decision you make in consultation with your physician, not something that's forced on you by public health and in the way it has been.

But do you think physicians are up to that task in the sense of I have found in my conversations with a lot of different people that some doctors actually don't seem to have as full of knowledge of like data and the bigger picture of things. Like someone one time was like, well, Trump got the vaccine to me because I made the decision to not get the vaccine.

And the only reason I was vocal with it as I felt like someone like me can take bullets more easily than someone getting fired for making the same decision

that doesn't have the platform that I have. So I decided to go out publicly and try, you know, I wrote that op ed in Newsweek, really trying to articulate the fact that people are making decision aren't rubes, like they've actually really thought through this, and it doesn't make sense for them personally, whether they're young and healthy such as myself, or they have prior you know, immunity, right, And so that's why I went out and and and

and did that. But you know, I had a doctor one time and be like, well, you know, Trump got vaccinated, and I'm like, well, he's like seventy five, and you know, his health condition is entirely different than mine. You know, he probably is a little overweight, he's much older than me, so his risk is severely higher than mine. So like that doesn't even make sense. So I I don't know. I mean, our doctors really up to that task in the sense a lot of them really haven't gone through

the data in the same way that you have. I mean, I think traditionally the way that doctors get educated about these kinds of data is not by reading the papers themselves amazingly, um, but by participating in professional activities where they get essentially like the summaries of this information put to them. Right, these things called continuing medical education credits that every doctor is supposed to get so that they

they're always learning. The way that the discussion about the vaccines and about sort of how to think about natural immunity has been spread through the medical community has been

been really lacking in my view. A lot of the educational activities have emphasized the importance of vaccination without talking through the nuances about who it's really useful for, what the side effect profiles are, and it's been in service of a public health goal to get everyone vaccinated rather than a personal health goal to make sure that the doctor is giving you the best possible advice for your

own personal health circumstance. I think if we shift back to a normal footing where doctors are looking out for the their patients as opposed to playing the part of public health and forces for the population at large, we will have doctors giving good, reasonable advice again, but that has to be a decision made by public health authorities. Places like the NIH play an enormously important role in that.

So when it's led by someone like uh like Francis Collins or Tony Fauci, who have essentially an ideological almost seems commitment to making forcing everyone, no matter what the harm to society, to get the vaccine, regardless of whether they consent to it or not, you're gonna get is distrust. Not just the public competent doctors as well. And what you said is right. I mean, like, I think a lot of people have lost trust with their doctors as

a result. Again that I don't think that's a good thing at least, I think that doctors, it's really necessary that we be able to trust our doctors because doctors are so important for the health of personal health and

for the health of population at large. Um And I think medicine is going to need to do some self reflection trying to get that trust back, because I have been fortunate to you know, I've reached out to a ton of different people involve different walks of life in the medical and science fields to try to get information for them and to try to learn that way, because you know, that's how we all learn the most, is by asking a bunch of questions and then trying to

take that information from people and trying to come to you know, what I think is the correct information or the right decision with all of that, which is how I know concluded to not get the vaccine of also just having questions about you know, most vaccines we've got like five to ten years of data. We don't have that for these and so if I'm not higher risk.

I'd rather just wait it out and see what we you know, learned from it moving forward, you know, versus obviously higher risk people might not be able to make that same decision because they're more at risk. But we're just at this such an odd place in society where it's just, you know, the truth really isn't out there

as much. You know. Dr Scott Atlas had said something when I interviewed him recently that really stood out to me, and he had just talked about sort of the profound impact that even the ni AH has on science and the fact that so much of science is funded by the ni AGE and the United States and some of some of these other agencies, and so therefore it really dictates sort of the broader landscape of science and the

conversations that we're having. Can you just talk about the funding aspect of it and how that is controlled by some of these government agencies and the problem of that. Sure, So I spent my career at a at a medical school, at mc Medical School UM. In order to advance your career in a place like Stanford University in the medical school,

you have to have NIH funding. It's it's almost a requirement, right, It's it's just marker of success as a scientists that you are able to garner funding from competitive funding from the NIH. Like every time I put a granted grant application, and I think it's like, you know, one in one in ten or one in one in fifteen grants actually get funded. So it's a a great success if you managed to do that. Um. Now, the problem is that with that is that it's creates the incentives that you

have to align your research agenda with the NIH. And sometimes that's reasonable. The NIH UH may direct scientists towards studying something like Alzheimer's because such a serious problem for so many and and putting a lot of scientists minds focused on that one problem could be a very productive thing, but can also, as we found through the epidemic, be

a danger. So you get one person, Tony Facci, who has been sitting on top of a huge pile of money funding the careers and making and breaking the careers of account of scientists over forty years based on his priorities for what infects of these reasoners focused on what happening?

Theologists focused on Well, um, you know a lot of scientists stayed silent even though they were uncomfortable with the policies in the lockdown because they didn't want to risk not getting funded by Tony Facci's and I A D. When Francis Collins, the head of the n i H, essentially says these Great Branch and decoration people are are terrible.

We should wage a propaganda war against them. Well, no one, no scientists who's thinking about their career, unless they're very brave or very foolish, is going to speak up and say look, this is this is um these lockdowns are really bad idea. I agree with a great branch of that question. Very very few scientists will will want to do that ever to their career. I mean, I can understand why, right, it's they they're working on things that are remote from from COVID or the Great Branch Decoration.

They just there's no reason for them to speak up, to stick their neck out, and so they won't even if they probably should. UM. So what you have is a situation where a legitimate role and I just to help direct the attention of scientists on important problems. But we've seen the leadership of the NIH, including Collins and Sauci, them use that legitimate power illegitimately to essentially silence scientific discussion.

UM and it's undermined trust in science, it's undermine trust in public health, and as as we just talked about, undermine trust in medicine. Had enormous negative consequences for institutions that I think most Americans before the pandemic had a lot of respect for. Is that self preservation because obviously there's been concerns that the NIH funding went to, you know, the funding of back coronaviruses and that research at the Wuhan Laboratory. I mean, is it self preservation from Dr

Fauci or why has he adopted this approach? Like what's behind it? In your estimation? I don't know whether it was um and lobly, but what I do know is that that ni H, with the the explicit sign off of Fauci and Collins, funded gain a function research that

was incredibly controversial. So in two thousand and fourteen there was actually a pause put on gain a function research because there was a paper where that someone has published in Science funded by the ANI agent part that it had managed to take an avian flu virus and make it able to infect human self people were very very

upset by this. UM. The argument for why they did this was, what, we need to find out how many mutations it would take in order for the this av and flu virus to mutate so that you can affect humans. And it turns out it wasn't that many, and so they're like, oh, well, we have to be prepared for this. But at the same time people were worried what if it could be allably lots of lots of examples of

lab belief that have happened dangerous ones. Uh and so there was a pause put on this where in order to do research that involved all of this gain of function work gain of functioning you take a virus and give it new capabilities that didn't previously have, you needed to get explicit sign off from Tony Fauci and from Frances Collins, and they signed off a whole bunch of grants from fourteen on despite the pause. UM and UM.

So they bear responsibility for the funding, and including by the way, Peter Dazac and the and the Equal Health Alliance which cooperated with the with the Wuhan Lab very closely, so they funded a lot of this work. And I don't know for a fact that that's what's motivating them, because that's that's frankly in the retrospective embarrassing thing that they did. It was a lapse in judgment, wasn't a wise use of of n I H resources of American

tax about paid tax carder dollars? Um and uh. I mean, you wouldn't surprise me to know that that this is partly with motivating them. I don't think it's all. It can't be all of it, because why focus on these destructive lockdowns. I think that partly is just a failure of understand that there were alternate policies that were available that would have reduced the harm for the virus and

also from the lockdowns. Um. But but you know, I do think that that this sort of desire to like make up for this poor judgment that they had must

have played some role. Well. I also just think there's a level of arrogance because someone had mentioned to me earlier on in the pandemic to sort of like explained Dr Fauci to me, is this is a guy who flew that a bowl of patient from Texas I think, to the n I age in Maryland so that he could treat her himself, put on a hazmat suit for the cameras, did a bunch of interviews when she would

have just been fine, like staying in Texas. So it was like basically he like did this whole thing for himself, like, you know, so that he could like basically be in the glory. I agree. I mean there's some element of self promotion in his in his in the way he behaves that it's um so unseemly like frankly, should should we really know the name of the head of the ANI D? Yeah, I think the head of an I is important position, but shouldn't be someone who's so in

the public eye, you know. Do you think that part of the problem is so we see this with like politicians very often. Right, You've got like all these people, like most of our leaders, you know, I mean, you don't have to get any bit like Pelosi, even like all these guys have been in the public office for like decades. So it's like, how do you solve some of the problems that you've literally been a part of

making right? And so do you think some of that is true for these public health bureaucrats in the sense of, you know, they've been in government for so long that they're sort of out of the game or they can't really solve these problems or bring a fresh approach when they've kind of been a part of the problem where they've been a part of the system for too long.

Do we need to kind of take a fresh look at bringing in, you know, different voices and different people who have you been out in the field a little bit fresher and you know, not been bureaucrats for so long? I do? I think I think that that someone like that Dr Fauci, who has been in his position at the head of the nmity for forty years on that way, or something on that order or years I've done an exact number, but something a very very, very long time.

Just by dint of being in such power for so long, you essentially create this insular sense where where like, you know, no one's going to talk back to you, no one's gonna like tell to contradict you, and you you there's this feedback loop where you start to think you're always right because no one's contradicting always everyone is always praising you. Um, it's really dangerous for any leader to be in that position.

Right the Greeks, the Romans, when a when a successful Roman general that have this major parade through Rome, that have someone that that someone whispering in their ear and at the head of the parade, and it was everyone's praising him. Look, you're only mortal, You're not a god,

You're only mortal. Right. So, UM, I think someone in a position like um Tony Faccy for for such a long time, where he's controlled the budgets of careers of countless incredibly bright scientists, all of them are telling essentially a very strong incentives to like to tell him you know that he's doing a good job. Um. It's it's a dangerous kind of mixture of of power and science, um and and it and it creates a kind of corruption that's really hard to undo unless you have essentially

term limits or something. I think no, no one human should ever be in that position for so long. See you've congratulations on the Academy for Science and Freedom with Hillsdale College. You Dr Scott Atlas and Dr Martin colderfans started uh this academy. You know, what do you guys hope to accomplish with it? And what are sort of the goals and the objectives with it. To me, that's

it's twofold. So I think I think we've talked a lot about about what's motivated is through the sole conversation these. I think the the trust in science because of the lock the failures in the lock around the lockdown, is at a low point, and in particular, the ability for scientists to talk to one another freely without fear of canceling is really hard the discussions lockdown. That needs reform.

So one is to restore the ability for scientists to be free within science itself, and that may be involve reforms beyond just the lockdowns themselves, that scientists should be free to talk to one another without this sort of propaganda of more against it. The other thing is, um, what role does science play in a free society? Science is important, but we've had during this pandemic this idea that science ought to completely structure all of our civic life.

But in fact that's not right. Science helps you understand that about the way the physical world works. If I do a B might happen, but that doesn't say that I want BE to happen. Um, maybe I want CE to happen, right, So I'll do D instead, which D produces C. Whether you want B or C. Well, that's not a scientific question. That that's a question of ethics, of morality, of politics, of of a whole bunch of other social values that scientists have no ex special expertise.

Science and free society is not are not the rulers the scientists we study, Your advisors and the people who make decisions should take that into account. But it doesn't determine what's the right thing to do. Is it right to adopt a set of policies that mainly protect the laptop class at the expense of the working class and the poor and the vulnerable. I mean, that's essentially what science said to do. We have to stop the virus and spreading, so we adopt these policies to protect only

a certain class of people. Well, is that right? Well, scientists have no monopoly and you should have no monopoly in that discussion or free society, and so part of the Academy is is to restore the proper place of science and a free society and to restore the ability for scientists to freely discuss with one another. Well, I appreciate you guys doing that, and you know you guys have been so brave and have had so much courage and really bring truth in a time where it's dire

and you know it's dying and it's needed. You know what, before we go, what should the path forward be for the country and how we deal with COVID obviously knowing what we know now and knowing what we don't know in the future, but right now where we are in this what should the path forward look like? I think a few things. So one, we should vow never to to disrupt the lies of children ever again. Should restore

normal life to children literally everywhere in the country. There's no good reason to think about children as particularly particularly super spread as not since the beginning of the the epidemic, and the harm to them is just immorl uh. So we should end. We should restore normal life and children immediately. Next, we should stop a mass asymptomatic testing. Right. We shouldn't be forcing people and I'm I'm in favor of rapid energy and tests and other tests that allow people to

take charge of the risk in their lives. Right, So, before you go visit Grandma, you want to check with your positive if that makes some sense to me. So we should allow that to happen, we should have if we should encourage that. But another hand, forced to testing and forced vaccination and coercion, that should end immediately, um because it's it's not it's produced social division without actually doing much far as a public health benefit. Those two

steps would go a long way. For instance, and and and part of that the ending vaccine mandates and ending vaccine passports. I think we'd go a long way towards starting to restore the trust. Will need to actually address the remaining risk around this virus. Well, hopefully people adopt that. You know, there seems to be some hope when you've got people like Governor Jared Poulis of a Democrat from Colorado basically saying that you know, hey, the medical emergency

phase of all this is over. You know, let's kind of move forward with her alive. So praying more governors take your advice and we can go back to normal. And I just feel like there's been so much harm to society even in just this blame game and you know, turning on our neighbors and it just you know, there's just been so much ugliness to the past couple of years. So praying people heed your your words of advice there. Dr J. Batachara, thank you so much for everything you've done.

So much respect for you and and just appreciate your work, can your voice and all of this, and and thank you so much for your time, sir. It's an honor. Thank you great to talk with you. I want to thank Dr J. Batcharia again for such a great interview and just the honesty. It's so nice to have people like him to turn to during all this chaos, all the noise, all the craziness. I want to thank you guys at home for listening. If you enjoy today's show, please leave us a review. You can rate us five

stars and Apple Podcast It means a lot. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at Lisa Marie Booth. I want to thank or team producer John Castio and Drew Steele who stepped up this week to bring you this podcast. Executive producers Debbie Myers and Speak Renew the English as well, all part of the Gingridge three sixty network and team