Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bear with me here because I'm going to do a
slightly longer introduction than usual for my next guest. Going
through COVID, there were a lot of people who were
either on the medical side, or the policy side, or
the political side, whose reputations either got shredded or deserved
(00:20):
to get shredded.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
There were very.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Few people who came through COVID looking smart and honest.
And my next guest is one of those very very few.
Doctor j Bodacharia got through.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
That, and of course and maintains.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
A level of intellectual honesty about the stuff we're going
to talk about today that I think is unmatched, and
also especially during COVID, was was very courageous. Jay is
Professor of Health Policy at Stanford.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
He's a research.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER. For
econ nerds out there. You know NBER, and I am
an econ nerd. He also directs the Stanford Center for
Demography and Economics of.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Health and Aging. I'll also know one other thing.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
You will hear occasionally of very small, smart people, all
of them smarter than I am, who have both mds
and PhDs. Most of the time those PhDs are in
medical related fields, which might not surprise you for someone
who is a medical doctor. Jay's PhD is in economics,
and that's part of the reason I think he's such
(01:29):
a clear thinker who understands that, as his Stanford colleague
Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade offs.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
So with that long.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Introduction, Jay Boditaria, it's a pleasure to have you.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
On the show.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Thank you for making time for us, Ross, thank you
for inviting me. I'm blushing a little hearing you talked
about me.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So I want to start with a sort of personal
version of you. Questions about the things you said and
wrote and did during COVID, When you were saying what
you were saying, the Great Barrington Declaration, all these, did
you feel like you were taking a risk? Did you
feel like it took courage. I'm not asking you to
(02:09):
praise yourself in that sense.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I'm a brave guy.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
But did you feel like you were taking a risk
or did you just think, Oh, I'm a doctor and
any economist and I'm just saying the truth and not
thinking about risk.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I mean, at first it felt like that it felt
like I was just saying what I saw like in
March of twenty twenty, I wrote off Bad for the
first time in my life. Actually usually just published scientific
papers before that, and it just felt like I had
to say it because that's what I saw.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
I was.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I had this idea that the disease was more widespread
than people realized, and I was calling for a study,
and that was just normal science, it seemed to me.
But almost immediately, there were a tacks on my family.
There were vicious slander in the press against me.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
There was with my own university, there were a tacks
on me.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
At one point, I was afraid to walk around the
university because there were these poster campaigns targeting me, and
the there was a you know, actually coordinated, devastating takedown
of me and my colleagues wrote the Great Panting Decoration
by the Federal government, by members of the federal government,
and so it really did feel like I was doing
something transgressive ross and I don't know, it's just it's not.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
It's very strange to say.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
I thought I had a thick skin before the pandemic,
but I didn't realize what having a thick skin really
meant until the pandemic sort of heated up.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Okay, I imagine with all your answers, there's gonna be
lots of stuff I'm going to want to follow up on.
So I'm going to just try to remember what you
said and come back to certain things.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
For folks who don't know, please describe.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
The Great Barrington Declaration, which I will note to folks
has over nine hundred and forty thousand signatures so far.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
So, the Great Panted Decoration was a very short document
written by me Martin Kudorf of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta
of Oxford University in October twenty twenty. It called for
lifting lockdowns, opening schools, letting younger people and low risk
people more or less go along with their lives as
best they can, while protecting vulnerable older people from the virus.
(04:03):
It was a very different strategy than the lockdowns. The
idea was, let's use our resources to think creatively how
to protect vulnerable older people, and let's not harm children,
working class people, and the poor via these lockdowns that
were devastating them.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Okay, so I think what's so crazy about the Great
Barrington Declaration is that it's so freaking rational. Every part
of that makes sense, right In short, protect the people
who need to be protected, and don't ruin the lives
of people who are at very very little risk. And yet,
(04:41):
I mean, you talk about how it felt transgressive. I
kind of watched from a distance what happened to you
with the Great Barrington Declaration.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Can you describe, because.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You mentioned specifically the federal government came after you with this,
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Sure? So, it is, by the way, the least original
thing I've ever written in my life. Ross it was.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
It's basically old. Endemic plan is complete. It's just the
it's just common sense. Right, there's nothing And you say
I didn't. If I'd written it a year before, they
would have there would have been no controversy.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
Would Yet there were people in Yeah, in.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
February, they were writing people people like you know, we're
basically embracing it. In February twenty twenty uh the four
days after we wrote the declaration, the head of the
National Institut of Health, Francis Collins, were an email to
Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown to the premise
of the declaration, calling me Martin and seceetra fringe epty miology,
(05:37):
essentially declaring open season on us. And what happened next
was just a media storm trying to under my knee
and my reputation, the reputation of Martin Scatter. Anyone who
signed it. People who signed it, some of them lost
their jobs. Many of them lost their opportunities for grants.
And certainly, I mean I was NIH funded and so
I'm just a small degree. Before the pandemic, I was
(05:58):
quite successful with in NH funding for for health economists.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
And I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
I'm ever going to I forget to get another AH grant.
I mean, it's it's not it's it's one of these
things where like the federal government should not be telling
scientists what they should or should not be thinking, right,
And essentially that's what the top of the head of
the NIH this Francis Collins, Antony Fauci. Did they conspire
to make make the idea of the Great brand Declaration
(06:24):
and a focused protection anathema so that no one would
want to even come near it.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Well, we're talking with doctor j Boticharia. If you want
to meet Jay in person, hear him talk in person,
get a chance to ask him a question yourself. You're
gonna want to sign up for the Steamboat Institute's Freedom Conference,
which is coming up actually two weeks from today.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
It's called the.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Steamboat Institute, but they've moved the Freedom Conference for the
last couple of years to Beaver Creek at the Park Hyatt.
If you go to Steamboat Institute dot org click on events,
you'll see the link for the Freedom Conference and you
can register and you can go and hang out with
great people and meet Jay and some other fantastic speakers
(07:09):
this year. So I'll probably come back to something you
mentioned there, but you've been You've been critical about both
President Trump and President Biden in their responses to COVID.
With Trump, you were critical of the lockdowns and some
other things. I want to talk about your specific criticism
you made of Biden regarding his apparent assumption which I
(07:36):
think a lot of people believed at the beginning, that
the COVID vaccine would prevent transmission and not just serious
injury or death. And so I want to ask, how
did you think about that.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
At the beginning.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Did you originally believe believe the hype, if you would,
that the vaccine would prevent transmission, and maybe it did
with the first variant, but not after that, because a
vaccine that prevents transmission, I think, and you're the experts,
you tell me if I'm wrong, poses a very different
public policy question than a vaccine that prevents death but
(08:11):
does not prevent transmission.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
That's absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
So the randomized trials of the vaccines the Code of
Vaccines in twenty twenty did not ask the question whether
it prevented transmission.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
It could have, but they didn't.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
And so when I read those trials, I was actually
in a conundrus, like, Okay, I don't know for certain
that it prevents transmission.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
In fact, I would hope it, but I don't know it.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And to me, you don't make public policy on the
basis of hoping everything goes right. You make robust public
policies that succeed even when the things that you hope
go don't go right. And so I recommended, and I
think it was a December twenty twenty in Wall Street Journal,
I wrote that we should use the vaccines for focused
(08:57):
protection of vulnerable older people, just like the Great Parenting
Declaration suggested, rather than on this hope that would stop transmission,
and you know, the idea that it stops transmission.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Very quickly. I think, let's say, by.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
March April twenty twenty one, it was clear from other
countries that that that wasn't going to work, that you know,
some of the other COVID vaccines that weren't using the
mr Anda technology, that they had failed to protect prevent
transmission in places like the hl Islands and elsewhere, and
then Israel that we should vaccinate this population very rapidly,
(09:34):
very large factions of population saw massive outbreaks in early
twenty twenty one, in twenty twenty one, and so I thought,
so it was very clearly it doesn't stop transmission. And
now it may prevented for a couple of months, but
then it drops off. And for something like what if
you want to use this for to eradicate a disease,
it needs to be basically stop it, and it needs
(09:55):
to be one hundred percent. And so as what you
said to us is exactly right, you have to have
the public policy implications are very very important. Even a
vaccine doesn't stop transmission, it makes no sense to require
people to take the vaccine. It should be a medical
choice that people make on their own, not something that
has consequence that that's seen as if you don't do it,
(10:15):
you're being an irresponsible person, that you're harming other people
because you can take the vaccine, still get the disease,
and still spread the disease.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And I thought, sorry, good, it's sort of a philosophical
or ethical question for you. And I don't know your politics,
and I don't think i've ever really heard you talk
about your politics. You strike me as at least a
little bit libertarian, but I don't know. I am if
you knew to a metaphysical certainty that the vaccine stopped transmission,
(10:49):
would you support a government policy that required the vaccine?
Speaker 4 (10:53):
So first of all, let me do the flip side
of that.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
If a vaccine doesn't stop transmission, then you don't meet
the necessary condition for that mandate. I think that that's necessary,
but not a sufficient condition for to support a mandate. Right,
So in this case, we didn't need to like go
to that ethical question right in the context of COVID.
But let's go let's go to that ethical question. I
(11:17):
think to me, it's a pragmatic question. I do believe
that there are people have medical autonomy rights.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
But I'll tell you, like the Swedish health.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Authorities without mandating the vaccine had much higher uptake of
it than the United States did.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
If you have a trustworthy public health authority says, look,
this is good for you and your children and for
the people you love, and they're trustworthy and they're actually
reflecting on a science. You don't need coercion, you just
need persuasion. And and I think I think that the
fact that American public health jumped to coercions so quickly
it more more indicated how untrustworthy they had become, that
(11:57):
the public didn't believe what they were saying. And I
have to say say, ross they earned that lack of
trust that they currently have.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
They they certainly did. They certainly did.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
We're talking with doctor j Boticharia, MD, PhD UH from
from Stanford. So when these folks came down on you,
did the mandate other kinds of suppression And we're going
to talk about free speech in a minute. I guess
I might ask you to play mind reader a little bit.
But do you think that they came from a position
(12:27):
of saying, do what we say because we're trying to
keep you healthy? Or do you think it was do
what we say because we're smarter and better than you,
and we just insist that you.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
Listen to us.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
I think, you know, it's a mix and with any
with every human there, it's like always a mix of
things like that. People will tell you themselves that they're
doing it because they want they you know, love the
love their neighbor and wanted like good for their neighbor.
But in fact, a lot of times it's it is,
you know, hubris. And I think if you want to
the one single word to characterize American Holocounts responds to COVID,
(13:01):
it is hubris. It is that a relatively small set
of people knew better than all the rest of us
how we should behave, and that they wanted then they
then they were going to make sure that we behave
the way they wanted us to behave, right. Tony Fauci
famously said, uh, you know, in an interview and in
effect that if you criticize me, you're not simply criticizing
the man, you're criticizing science itself. I mean that is
(13:23):
that that's hubris on stilts. I mean, you just and
that is I think the fundamental sin of American public
health during the pandemic. It was unwilling to listen to
outside voices because it thought it knew best. Even as
you know, as children were being harmed, even as poor
people are being harmed, as a working class was being harmed,
it didn't matter. They They only thought was, well, we
(13:44):
need to stop the spread of COVID with tools that
didn't actually stop the spread of COVID. And they had
and they and they refused to listen to outside experts
and on regular people saying this is not working, this
is hurting us.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Anybody could make a mistake in terms of a calculation
or guessing wrong about a particular path of something. And
I'm unaware of any important error that you made during COVID.
I'm wondering, as you look back on your thinking about COVID,
was there anything that you would say about yourself where
(14:18):
you would say I thought about that wrong, Not I
guessed wrong about you know, like who is going to
win the football game?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Not that kind of error.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
But as you look back on something, do you think
you personally ever took the wrong intellectual approach on anything
that you would do differently the next time, if hopefully
there won't be, but if there were a next time.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
I mean I think I probably the biggest mistake I
made was that I thought in March or twenty twenty
that would be impossible to get a vaccine so quickly,
And so I hadn't thought through the implications of what
that meant, that we could get one so quickly, right.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
So, I mean, if.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
I had realized that it was possible, I guess I
would have pushed much harder for the vaccine trials to
be better aligned with the decisions that needed to get
made about the vaccines. Like so, for instance, the vaccine
trials didn't check, as I said earlier, whether there's these stop,
whether they stopped or stopped or prevented you from getting
(15:18):
COVID or spreading COVID, I would have pushed much harder
to make I would have push hard to make sure
that those trials did have that kind of element in it,
because it would have been easy to put in the trials.
That was an essential piece of information that had we
had it, I think would have resolved a lot, would
prevent a lot of really bad decisions in twenty twenty one.
(15:39):
I mean there's lots of I mean, it's not possible
to get everything right out ross in the middle of
the pandemic so I can talk about other things, but
like substantively that I think is the most important one.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
All right, And again I don't know anybody who got
more things and more important things right than you did.
All Right, we got a little over four minutes here.
I want to do two more things with you. You
basically beat the federal government on issues of censorship in
federal court, and then it got to the Supreme Court,
and it seemed to me like the Supreme Court kinda
(16:09):
waved it off and said, well, that was that was naughty,
but we're not going to really punish you or say
you can't do it again. What do you think is
the likelihood of future malign influence of the federal government
on social media companies and and and promoting censorship the
way they did against you.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, So the lower court essentially said that that that
the federal government should not be allowed to go tell
social media companies who want what to censor. But when
it reached Spreme Court, what they ruled is that I
and my fellow plaintiffs did not have standing to sue,
meaning that they didn't they we didn't have an email
from the federal government to the social media companies saying
(16:46):
censor j Now they did. They explicitly didn't rule on
the substance of the case. They didn't say it was
okay for the federal government to do this, which is
which is a good thing. It's not going to go
back down to the lower courts and we're going to
fight on standing. But the thing, the key point I
want to make here is that as things stand, if
this federal government says to the social media companies censor
(17:09):
these ideas and don't name people, no one will ever
have standing. And that means that they that First Amendment
is a dead letter.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
They don't. We don't.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
We no longer actually have an enforceable First Amendment. So
I think what's going to need to happen is either
Spoon Court's going to need to revisit the standing thing,
or that needs to be legislation or both for the
First Amendment or for free speech rights to we are
stored in this country.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
I couldn't agree with you more. I was pretty disappointed
in that ruling. There's been actually there were several big
cases in the recent term that turned on standing, which.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Can be frustrating from time to time.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Even though I understand it all right, let's do let's
do one more thing.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
There has been a long time in uh.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Psychology in particular, a problem of replication where people would
write these scientific papers claiming something causes something else or whatever,
and then they're peer reviewed papers, and then people read
them and say that seems a little weird. I'm gonna
try that same experiment, and then they can't duplicate it.
(18:11):
It's called the replication crisis. But it's been through this
peer review process. And so I've got sort of a
two part question for you. Is there the same problem
in what we would typically call medicine?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
And if so, what good is peer review?
Speaker 3 (18:27):
So the answer to the part A is absolutely yes,
it's the same problem in medicine as in as in
psychology and other sciences.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
And so this is the second part is peer review.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
People often conflate the idea peerview and the fact that
a paper has been previewed as as giving the paper
a premature of truth, when in fact it doesn't deserve that.
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Truth comes from science.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
By replication, by other people looking and trying the same thing,
independent entities trying the same thing, sciences trying the same
thing and finding the same thing.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
It emerges over time.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
It doesn't come from a single peer reviewer at a
process that's often politicized. That doesn't it's it's I mean,
peer is necessary in science, but again it's not sufficient
to establish truth. And I think a lot of non
scientists and certainly the media, conflate the peer reviewing of
a paper or idea with this is a true idea.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Those are not the same thing. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And sometimes there are papers where, even if you were
an expert, unless you tried the experiment yourself, you would
believe it. Every once in a while there are papers
where a careful reader would find an obvious error, and
those get through too. Those are two different different kinds
of mistakes. But I think Jay's main point that folks
(19:49):
need to understand don't assume that just because something.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Is peer reviewed means it's true, because it might not be.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
I'll give you the last seventeen seconds to say anything
you want, Jay Ross.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Thank you so much. I think this was has made
tro era for science for people. But if we learn
the right lessons, things can be better going forward. That's
I think what the spirit in which we need to
approach the post COVID.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Era Doctor j Bodicharia from Stanford. We'll be speaking at
the Steamboat Institute's Freedom Conference, which starts two weeks from today.
It's a two day event August twenty third and twenty fourth.
It's actually going to be in Beaver Creek, even though
it's the Steamboat Institute. Go to Steamboat Institute dot org.
Go over to the events tab and click on the
Freedom Conference and hit register. Now.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to be there.
I might.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
In any case, it's a wonderful event with great people
and great speakers like Jay. Thank you so much for
making time for us. I wanted to talk to you
for quite a long time. It's an honor, and I
hope we get to talk again.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Likewise, Ross, thank you.
Bear with me here because I'm going to do a
slightly longer introduction than usual for my next guest. Going
through COVID, there were a lot of people who were
either on the medical side, or the policy side, or
the political side, whose reputations either got shredded or deserved
(00:20):
to get shredded.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
There were very.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Few people who came through COVID looking smart and honest.
And my next guest is one of those very very few.
Doctor j Bodacharia got through.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
That, and of course and maintains.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
A level of intellectual honesty about the stuff we're going
to talk about today that I think is unmatched, and
also especially during COVID, was was very courageous. Jay is
Professor of Health Policy at Stanford.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
He's a research.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER. For
econ nerds out there. You know NBER, and I am
an econ nerd. He also directs the Stanford Center for
Demography and Economics of.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Health and Aging. I'll also know one other thing.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
You will hear occasionally of very small, smart people, all
of them smarter than I am, who have both mds
and PhDs. Most of the time those PhDs are in
medical related fields, which might not surprise you for someone
who is a medical doctor. Jay's PhD is in economics,
and that's part of the reason I think he's such
(01:29):
a clear thinker who understands that, as his Stanford colleague
Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade offs.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
So with that long.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Introduction, Jay Boditaria, it's a pleasure to have you.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
On the show.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Thank you for making time for us, Ross, thank you
for inviting me. I'm blushing a little hearing you talked
about me.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So I want to start with a sort of personal
version of you. Questions about the things you said and
wrote and did during COVID, When you were saying what
you were saying, the Great Barrington Declaration, all these, did
you feel like you were taking a risk? Did you
feel like it took courage. I'm not asking you to
(02:09):
praise yourself in that sense.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I'm a brave guy.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
But did you feel like you were taking a risk
or did you just think, Oh, I'm a doctor and
any economist and I'm just saying the truth and not
thinking about risk.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I mean, at first it felt like that it felt
like I was just saying what I saw like in
March of twenty twenty, I wrote off Bad for the
first time in my life. Actually usually just published scientific
papers before that, and it just felt like I had
to say it because that's what I saw.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
I was.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I had this idea that the disease was more widespread
than people realized, and I was calling for a study,
and that was just normal science, it seemed to me.
But almost immediately, there were a tacks on my family.
There were vicious slander in the press against me.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
There was with my own university, there were a tacks
on me.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
At one point, I was afraid to walk around the
university because there were these poster campaigns targeting me, and
the there was a you know, actually coordinated, devastating takedown
of me and my colleagues wrote the Great Panting Decoration
by the Federal government, by members of the federal government,
and so it really did feel like I was doing
something transgressive ross and I don't know, it's just it's not.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
It's very strange to say.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
I thought I had a thick skin before the pandemic,
but I didn't realize what having a thick skin really
meant until the pandemic sort of heated up.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Okay, I imagine with all your answers, there's gonna be
lots of stuff I'm going to want to follow up on.
So I'm going to just try to remember what you
said and come back to certain things.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
For folks who don't know, please describe.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
The Great Barrington Declaration, which I will note to folks
has over nine hundred and forty thousand signatures so far.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
So, the Great Panted Decoration was a very short document
written by me Martin Kudorf of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta
of Oxford University in October twenty twenty. It called for
lifting lockdowns, opening schools, letting younger people and low risk
people more or less go along with their lives as
best they can, while protecting vulnerable older people from the virus.
(04:03):
It was a very different strategy than the lockdowns. The
idea was, let's use our resources to think creatively how
to protect vulnerable older people, and let's not harm children,
working class people, and the poor via these lockdowns that
were devastating them.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Okay, so I think what's so crazy about the Great
Barrington Declaration is that it's so freaking rational. Every part
of that makes sense, right In short, protect the people
who need to be protected, and don't ruin the lives
of people who are at very very little risk. And yet,
(04:41):
I mean, you talk about how it felt transgressive. I
kind of watched from a distance what happened to you
with the Great Barrington Declaration.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Can you describe, because.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You mentioned specifically the federal government came after you with this,
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Sure? So, it is, by the way, the least original
thing I've ever written in my life. Ross it was.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
It's basically old. Endemic plan is complete. It's just the
it's just common sense. Right, there's nothing And you say
I didn't. If I'd written it a year before, they
would have there would have been no controversy.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
Would Yet there were people in Yeah, in.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
February, they were writing people people like you know, we're
basically embracing it. In February twenty twenty uh the four
days after we wrote the declaration, the head of the
National Institut of Health, Francis Collins, were an email to
Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown to the premise
of the declaration, calling me Martin and seceetra fringe epty miology,
(05:37):
essentially declaring open season on us. And what happened next
was just a media storm trying to under my knee
and my reputation, the reputation of Martin Scatter. Anyone who
signed it. People who signed it, some of them lost
their jobs. Many of them lost their opportunities for grants.
And certainly, I mean I was NIH funded and so
I'm just a small degree. Before the pandemic, I was
(05:58):
quite successful with in NH funding for for health economists.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
And I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
I'm ever going to I forget to get another AH grant.
I mean, it's it's not it's it's one of these
things where like the federal government should not be telling
scientists what they should or should not be thinking, right,
And essentially that's what the top of the head of
the NIH this Francis Collins, Antony Fauci. Did they conspire
to make make the idea of the Great brand Declaration
(06:24):
and a focused protection anathema so that no one would
want to even come near it.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Well, we're talking with doctor j Boticharia. If you want
to meet Jay in person, hear him talk in person,
get a chance to ask him a question yourself. You're
gonna want to sign up for the Steamboat Institute's Freedom Conference,
which is coming up actually two weeks from today.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
It's called the.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Steamboat Institute, but they've moved the Freedom Conference for the
last couple of years to Beaver Creek at the Park Hyatt.
If you go to Steamboat Institute dot org click on events,
you'll see the link for the Freedom Conference and you
can register and you can go and hang out with
great people and meet Jay and some other fantastic speakers
(07:09):
this year. So I'll probably come back to something you
mentioned there, but you've been You've been critical about both
President Trump and President Biden in their responses to COVID.
With Trump, you were critical of the lockdowns and some
other things. I want to talk about your specific criticism
you made of Biden regarding his apparent assumption which I
(07:36):
think a lot of people believed at the beginning, that
the COVID vaccine would prevent transmission and not just serious
injury or death. And so I want to ask, how
did you think about that.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
At the beginning.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Did you originally believe believe the hype, if you would,
that the vaccine would prevent transmission, and maybe it did
with the first variant, but not after that, because a
vaccine that prevents transmission, I think, and you're the experts,
you tell me if I'm wrong, poses a very different
public policy question than a vaccine that prevents death but
(08:11):
does not prevent transmission.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
That's absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
So the randomized trials of the vaccines the Code of
Vaccines in twenty twenty did not ask the question whether
it prevented transmission.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
It could have, but they didn't.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
And so when I read those trials, I was actually
in a conundrus, like, Okay, I don't know for certain
that it prevents transmission.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
In fact, I would hope it, but I don't know it.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And to me, you don't make public policy on the
basis of hoping everything goes right. You make robust public
policies that succeed even when the things that you hope
go don't go right. And so I recommended, and I
think it was a December twenty twenty in Wall Street Journal,
I wrote that we should use the vaccines for focused
(08:57):
protection of vulnerable older people, just like the Great Parenting
Declaration suggested, rather than on this hope that would stop transmission,
and you know, the idea that it stops transmission.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Very quickly. I think, let's say, by.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
March April twenty twenty one, it was clear from other
countries that that that wasn't going to work, that you know,
some of the other COVID vaccines that weren't using the
mr Anda technology, that they had failed to protect prevent
transmission in places like the hl Islands and elsewhere, and
then Israel that we should vaccinate this population very rapidly,
(09:34):
very large factions of population saw massive outbreaks in early
twenty twenty one, in twenty twenty one, and so I thought,
so it was very clearly it doesn't stop transmission. And
now it may prevented for a couple of months, but
then it drops off. And for something like what if
you want to use this for to eradicate a disease,
it needs to be basically stop it, and it needs
(09:55):
to be one hundred percent. And so as what you
said to us is exactly right, you have to have
the public policy implications are very very important. Even a
vaccine doesn't stop transmission, it makes no sense to require
people to take the vaccine. It should be a medical
choice that people make on their own, not something that
has consequence that that's seen as if you don't do it,
(10:15):
you're being an irresponsible person, that you're harming other people
because you can take the vaccine, still get the disease,
and still spread the disease.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And I thought, sorry, good, it's sort of a philosophical
or ethical question for you. And I don't know your politics,
and I don't think i've ever really heard you talk
about your politics. You strike me as at least a
little bit libertarian, but I don't know. I am if
you knew to a metaphysical certainty that the vaccine stopped transmission,
(10:49):
would you support a government policy that required the vaccine?
Speaker 4 (10:53):
So first of all, let me do the flip side
of that.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
If a vaccine doesn't stop transmission, then you don't meet
the necessary condition for that mandate. I think that that's necessary,
but not a sufficient condition for to support a mandate. Right,
So in this case, we didn't need to like go
to that ethical question right in the context of COVID.
But let's go let's go to that ethical question. I
(11:17):
think to me, it's a pragmatic question. I do believe
that there are people have medical autonomy rights.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
But I'll tell you, like the Swedish health.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Authorities without mandating the vaccine had much higher uptake of
it than the United States did.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
If you have a trustworthy public health authority says, look,
this is good for you and your children and for
the people you love, and they're trustworthy and they're actually
reflecting on a science. You don't need coercion, you just
need persuasion. And and I think I think that the
fact that American public health jumped to coercions so quickly
it more more indicated how untrustworthy they had become, that
(11:57):
the public didn't believe what they were saying. And I
have to say say, ross they earned that lack of
trust that they currently have.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
They they certainly did. They certainly did.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
We're talking with doctor j Boticharia, MD, PhD UH from
from Stanford. So when these folks came down on you,
did the mandate other kinds of suppression And we're going
to talk about free speech in a minute. I guess
I might ask you to play mind reader a little bit.
But do you think that they came from a position
(12:27):
of saying, do what we say because we're trying to
keep you healthy? Or do you think it was do
what we say because we're smarter and better than you,
and we just insist that you.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
Listen to us.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
I think, you know, it's a mix and with any
with every human there, it's like always a mix of
things like that. People will tell you themselves that they're
doing it because they want they you know, love the
love their neighbor and wanted like good for their neighbor.
But in fact, a lot of times it's it is,
you know, hubris. And I think if you want to
the one single word to characterize American Holocounts responds to COVID,
(13:01):
it is hubris. It is that a relatively small set
of people knew better than all the rest of us
how we should behave, and that they wanted then they
then they were going to make sure that we behave
the way they wanted us to behave, right. Tony Fauci
famously said, uh, you know, in an interview and in
effect that if you criticize me, you're not simply criticizing
the man, you're criticizing science itself. I mean that is
(13:23):
that that's hubris on stilts. I mean, you just and
that is I think the fundamental sin of American public
health during the pandemic. It was unwilling to listen to
outside voices because it thought it knew best. Even as
you know, as children were being harmed, even as poor
people are being harmed, as a working class was being harmed,
it didn't matter. They They only thought was, well, we
(13:44):
need to stop the spread of COVID with tools that
didn't actually stop the spread of COVID. And they had
and they and they refused to listen to outside experts
and on regular people saying this is not working, this
is hurting us.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Anybody could make a mistake in terms of a calculation
or guessing wrong about a particular path of something. And
I'm unaware of any important error that you made during COVID.
I'm wondering, as you look back on your thinking about COVID,
was there anything that you would say about yourself where
(14:18):
you would say I thought about that wrong, Not I
guessed wrong about you know, like who is going to
win the football game?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Not that kind of error.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
But as you look back on something, do you think
you personally ever took the wrong intellectual approach on anything
that you would do differently the next time, if hopefully
there won't be, but if there were a next time.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
I mean I think I probably the biggest mistake I
made was that I thought in March or twenty twenty
that would be impossible to get a vaccine so quickly,
And so I hadn't thought through the implications of what
that meant, that we could get one so quickly, right.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
So, I mean, if.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
I had realized that it was possible, I guess I
would have pushed much harder for the vaccine trials to
be better aligned with the decisions that needed to get
made about the vaccines. Like so, for instance, the vaccine
trials didn't check, as I said earlier, whether there's these stop,
whether they stopped or stopped or prevented you from getting
(15:18):
COVID or spreading COVID, I would have pushed much harder
to make I would have push hard to make sure
that those trials did have that kind of element in it,
because it would have been easy to put in the trials.
That was an essential piece of information that had we
had it, I think would have resolved a lot, would
prevent a lot of really bad decisions in twenty twenty one.
(15:39):
I mean there's lots of I mean, it's not possible
to get everything right out ross in the middle of
the pandemic so I can talk about other things, but
like substantively that I think is the most important one.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
All right, And again I don't know anybody who got
more things and more important things right than you did.
All Right, we got a little over four minutes here.
I want to do two more things with you. You
basically beat the federal government on issues of censorship in
federal court, and then it got to the Supreme Court,
and it seemed to me like the Supreme Court kinda
(16:09):
waved it off and said, well, that was that was naughty,
but we're not going to really punish you or say
you can't do it again. What do you think is
the likelihood of future malign influence of the federal government
on social media companies and and and promoting censorship the
way they did against you.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, So the lower court essentially said that that that
the federal government should not be allowed to go tell
social media companies who want what to censor. But when
it reached Spreme Court, what they ruled is that I
and my fellow plaintiffs did not have standing to sue,
meaning that they didn't they we didn't have an email
from the federal government to the social media companies saying
(16:46):
censor j Now they did. They explicitly didn't rule on
the substance of the case. They didn't say it was
okay for the federal government to do this, which is
which is a good thing. It's not going to go
back down to the lower courts and we're going to
fight on standing. But the thing, the key point I
want to make here is that as things stand, if
this federal government says to the social media companies censor
(17:09):
these ideas and don't name people, no one will ever
have standing. And that means that they that First Amendment
is a dead letter.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
They don't. We don't.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
We no longer actually have an enforceable First Amendment. So
I think what's going to need to happen is either
Spoon Court's going to need to revisit the standing thing,
or that needs to be legislation or both for the
First Amendment or for free speech rights to we are
stored in this country.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
I couldn't agree with you more. I was pretty disappointed
in that ruling. There's been actually there were several big
cases in the recent term that turned on standing, which.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Can be frustrating from time to time.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Even though I understand it all right, let's do let's
do one more thing.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
There has been a long time in uh.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Psychology in particular, a problem of replication where people would
write these scientific papers claiming something causes something else or whatever,
and then they're peer reviewed papers, and then people read
them and say that seems a little weird. I'm gonna
try that same experiment, and then they can't duplicate it.
(18:11):
It's called the replication crisis. But it's been through this
peer review process. And so I've got sort of a
two part question for you. Is there the same problem
in what we would typically call medicine?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
And if so, what good is peer review?
Speaker 3 (18:27):
So the answer to the part A is absolutely yes,
it's the same problem in medicine as in as in
psychology and other sciences.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
And so this is the second part is peer review.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
People often conflate the idea peerview and the fact that
a paper has been previewed as as giving the paper
a premature of truth, when in fact it doesn't deserve that.
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Truth comes from science.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
By replication, by other people looking and trying the same thing,
independent entities trying the same thing, sciences trying the same
thing and finding the same thing.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
It emerges over time.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
It doesn't come from a single peer reviewer at a
process that's often politicized. That doesn't it's it's I mean,
peer is necessary in science, but again it's not sufficient
to establish truth. And I think a lot of non
scientists and certainly the media, conflate the peer reviewing of
a paper or idea with this is a true idea.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Those are not the same thing. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And sometimes there are papers where, even if you were
an expert, unless you tried the experiment yourself, you would
believe it. Every once in a while there are papers
where a careful reader would find an obvious error, and
those get through too. Those are two different different kinds
of mistakes. But I think Jay's main point that folks
(19:49):
need to understand don't assume that just because something.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Is peer reviewed means it's true, because it might not be.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
I'll give you the last seventeen seconds to say anything
you want, Jay Ross.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Thank you so much. I think this was has made
tro era for science for people. But if we learn
the right lessons, things can be better going forward. That's
I think what the spirit in which we need to
approach the post COVID.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Era Doctor j Bodicharia from Stanford. We'll be speaking at
the Steamboat Institute's Freedom Conference, which starts two weeks from today.
It's a two day event August twenty third and twenty fourth.
It's actually going to be in Beaver Creek, even though
it's the Steamboat Institute. Go to Steamboat Institute dot org.
Go over to the events tab and click on the
Freedom Conference and hit register. Now.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to be there.
I might.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
In any case, it's a wonderful event with great people
and great speakers like Jay. Thank you so much for
making time for us. I wanted to talk to you
for quite a long time. It's an honor, and I
hope we get to talk again.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Likewise, Ross, thank you.
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