COVID and Corruption of Science - Discussion with Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

The media, government, and corporate interests colluded to silence Dr. Bhattacharya for research into COVID-19 that didn't fit the official narrative.

The other day, I joined Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to discuss free speech issues and the corruption of the scientific profession.

It is a relatively new topic for Bhattacharya, who studies epidemiology and the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. He did not volunteer to join this debate about government and corporate censorship. It was thrust upon him.

The saga started almost immediately after he conducted one of the first comprehensive COVID-19 studies examining how the virus spread and impacted patients. The “Santa Clara Study,” released in April 2020, found that the mortality rate of the disease was close to .2%, or about 2 out of 1,000 people -- orders of magnitude below the World Health Organization's warnings at the time of 3% or 4%. The study showed that the virus had a steep age gradient and generally did not impact children. The elderly and immunocompromised were at high risk. Healthy children and adults faced relatively minimal harm. Many of the people who were infected with the virus showed no symptoms.

The study, followed by research in Los Angeles County and other studies that confirmed its findings, outraged the establishment, which was using radically higher mortality rates to demand draconian restrictions on travel, commerce, education, and all other manners of public life. Bhattacharya publicly criticized economic and school lockdowns, which he called unnecessary and likely to harm the young and the most vulnerable in society. These statements further made him a public enemy.

Mainstream media led the charge to discredit Bhattacharya. The New York Times produced a detailed infographic showing how the discussion of the Santa Clara research represented a dangerous "surge of misinformation." The Nation mocked Bhattacharya’s study for receiving coverage in “right-wing media” and claimed it was “likely to be remembered as a major black mark against Stanford.”

Behind the scenes, social media conspired to silence him. Bhattacharya's statement denouncing lockdown policies was removed from YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook. The “Twitter Files” revealed that engineers went into his Twitter account and placed him on a literal “blacklist” to limit the number of people who could see his tweets. He was shadowbanned at a time when the government restricted public protests, making online debate one of the only forms of permissible dissent.

Government officials were also active in suppressing Bhattacharya. Emails obtained by public records indicate that Anthony Fauci, former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, privately urged media outlets and government officials to disparage Bhattacharya's positions. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down,” Dr. Collins wrote.

More recently, I revealed efforts by Moderna and its NGO partner, the Public Good Project, to cast Bhattacharya as a “high-risk” source of misinformation. The internal Moderna files show that they targeted Bhattacharya last year for simply tweeting a link to a new Food and Drug Administration preprint study that documented "elevated risk of seizures in toddlers and myocarditis in teenagers associated with covid mRNA vaccination."

Rather than dispute the study or its findings, Moderna branded Bhattacharya’s public discussion of it as a threat — as it had done for over a dozen other prominent critics of vaccine policy, a broad effort that clearly blurs the line between corporate public relations and public health communications.

There were many other initiatives within academia and among those in government and drug industry-funded groups to tarnish Bhattacharya and remove his voice from the public debate. Bhattacharya is one of the plaintiffs in the landmark Missouri v. Biden case, which, now before the Supreme Court, charges that the government's "open collusion with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content" violated the First Amendment.

He has subsequently been vindicated on virtually every point of contention. The school lockdowns were a catastrophe that created a crisis of learning loss, particularly among low-income children in public schools. COVID-19 vaccines did not prevent transmission, as the Biden administration claimed. The mortality rate of the virus was much more in line with Bhattacharya’s early findings than with the stated claims of the WHO and the U.S. government public health agencies. The vaccine mandates for young, healthy adults were never remotely supported by scientific evidence.

Dr. Bhattacharya and I recently got together over a webcast to discuss these issues. I talked briefly about my background, interest in this debate, and what I’ve recently uncovered about social media censorship on this Substack. The discussion was recorded for Illusion of Consensus, which Bhattacharya publishes alongside Rav Arora, a very talented young writer, where they explore medical and scientific debates.

Watch below:

If you want to learn more about Syngenta’s efforts to intimidate and smear Dr. Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, whose research found that atrazine, a popular herbicide, feminizes male frogs, see this reporting from 100Reporters.

Here is a link to another investigation I published on the history of neonicotinoids, a popular pesticide. The reporting looks deeply into the ways in which chemical and agricultural interests co-opted mainstream academics and scientists to marginalize any critics of neonic products, which evidence suggests are fueling a mass extinction of non-target species, particularly native bees and a variety of waterborne insects.