Podcasts about sunetra gupta

U.S. think tank says the Chinese Government should be legally liable for covid deaths and costs.The boys chat about a political bombshell in the Covid story that the mainstream press haven't even reported, undates on birdflu and their reaction to the interview with Sunetra Gupta.https://www.heritage.org/china/report/holding-china-accountable-its-role-the-most-catastrophic-pandemic-our-time-covid-19Sunetra Gupta - Interview in full from Why are we here?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNY7qstvNrwThe Great Barrington Declarationhttps://gbdeclaration.org/COMMENT AT:https://substack.com/profile/126815820-david-malonehttps://www.instagram.com/hyperlandpodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/130898253302317Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pandemics of the past highlight the persistent threat of disease throughout human history. It might seem that our repeated encounters with infectious diseases should have better prepared us for such cases. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic was not without its own challenges.  In this episode of Oxpods, Rithika Ravishankar, a third-year Biology undergraduate at Hertford College speaks with Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University to discuss pandemic preparedness in the aftermath of COVID-19, specifically what we learnt and how we can better tackle the ever-present challenge of infectious diseases in the future. Host: Rithika Ravishankar Looking to make the most of Oxford's world-leading professors, we decided to set up a platform to interview these academics on the niche, weird and wonderful from their subjects. We aim to create thought-provoking and easily digestible podcast episodes, made for anyone with an interest in the world around them, and to facilitate university access and outreach for students aspiring to Oxford or Cambridge.   To learn more about OxPods, visit our website ⁠www.oxpods.co.uk⁠⁠, ⁠or follow us on socials ⁠@ox.pods. ⁠ ⁠ If you would like an audio transcription of this episode, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. OxPods is made possible through the support of our generous benefactors. Special thanks to: St Peter's College JCR, Jesus College JCR & Lady Margaret Hall JCR for supporting us in 2024. OxPods © 2023 by OxPods is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

This Week's Guests: Dr. Sunetra Gupta Episode 320 "Rethink Production presents "Live From America Podcast" - a weekly show that combines political commentary with humor. Hosted by the comedy cellar owner Noam Dworman and producer Hatem Gabr, the show features expert guests discussing news, culture, and politics with a blend of knowledge and laughter. Sunetra Gupta is a novelist and Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford with an interest in infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, HIV, influenza and bacterial pneumonia and meningitis. She has been awarded the Scientific Medal by the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific research. Her novels have been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, shortlisted for the Crossword Award, and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Follow Live From America YouTube @livefromamericapodcast Twitter twitter.com/AmericasPodcast www.LiveFromAmericaPodcast.com LiveFromAmericapodcast@gmail.com Follow Hatem Twitter twitter.com/HatemNYC Instagram www.instagram.com/hatemnyc/ Follow Noam Twitter twitter.com/noam_dworman #SunetraGupta #Trustthescience #Covid

Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who practices at NYU-Bellevue and posts frequently on Science Based Medicine.Transcript, unedited, with links to audioEric Topol (00:05):Well, hello, Eric Topol with Ground Truths and I'm really pleased to have the chance to talk with Jonathan Howard today, who is a neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU at Bellevue and has written quite an amazing book published a few months months ago called We Want Them Infected, so welcome Jonathan.Jonathan Howard (00:27):Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.Eric Topol (00:30):Yeah, I mean, there's so much to talk about because we're still in the throes of the pandemic with this current wave at least by wastewater levels and no reason to think it isn't by infections at least the second largest in the pandemic course. I guess I want to start off first with you being into the neuropsychiatric world. How did you become, obviously caring for patients with Covid, but how did you decide to become a Covidologist?Jonathan Howard (00:59):Well, I developed a strong interest in the anti-vaccine movement of all things about a decade ago when a doctor who I trained with here at NYU in Bellevue morphed into one of the country's biggest anti-vaccine doctors a woman by the name of Dr. Kelly Brogan. I knew her well and we were friends; She was smart and after she left NYU in Bellevue, she became one of the country's most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors and really started leaving off the wall things that germ theory didn't exist, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. When Covid struck, she felt that SARS-CoV-2 was not killing people because she doesn't believe any virus kills people and so I became very fascinated about how smart people can believe strange, incorrect things and I dedicated myself to learning everything that I could about the anti-vaccine movement. In 2018, I wrote a book chapter on the anti-vaccine movement with law professor Dorit Reiss.(02:01):And so when the pandemic came around, I was really prepared for all of their arguments, but I got two very important things wrong. I thought the anti-vaccine movement would shrink. I was wrong about that and I was also really caught off guard by the fact that a lot of mainstream physicians started to parrot pandemic anti-vaccine talking points. So all of the stuff that I'd heard about measles and the HPV vaccine, these are benign viruses, the vaccines weren't tested, blah, blah, blah. I started hearing from professors at Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, all about Covid and the Covid vaccine.Eric Topol (02:40):Yeah, we're going to get to some of the leading institutions and individuals within them and how they were part of this, and surprisingly too, of course. Before we do that in the title of your book, We Want Them Infected, it seems to bring in particularly the Great Barrington Declaration that is just protect the vulnerable elderly and don't worry about the rest. Can you restate that declaration and whether that's a core part of what you were writing about?Jonathan Howard (03:21):Yeah, the title of the book is to be taken literally. It comes from a quote by Dr. Paul Alexander, who was an epidemiologist in the Trump administration and he said in July 4th, 2020, before anyone had been vaccinated, infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle age with no conditions, et cetera, have zero to little risk so we want to use them to develop herd, we want them infected. This was formalized in the Great Barrington Declaration, which was written by three doctors, our epidemiologist, none of whom cared for Covid patients, Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, Martin Kulldorf who at the time was at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta who is at Oxford. If I could state their plan in the most generous terms, it would be the following that Covid is much more dangerous for certain people, but we can relatively easily identify older people and people with underlying conditions.(04:19):It's much more benign for a healthy 10-year-old, for example and their idea was that you could separate these two groups, the vulnerable and the not vulnerable. If the not vulnerable people were allowed to catch the virus develop natural immunity that would create herd immunity. They said that this would occur in three to six months and in that time, once herd immunity had been achieved, the vulnerable people who have been in theory sheltering at home are in otherwise safe places could reenter society. So it was really the best of both worlds because lives would be saved and schools would be open, the economy would be open. It sounded very good on paper, kind of like my idea of stopping crime by locking up all the bad guys. What could go wrong? It was a very short document. It took about maybe an hour to write.(05:17):I imagine there were some nefarious forces behind it. One of the main instigators of it was a man by the name of Jeffrey Tucker, who sounds like a cartoon villain and he worked at the, I forget, is the American Enterprise Research Institute. It was some right-wing think tank and he is a literally pro child labor. He wrote an article in 2016 called Let the Kids Work, which suggested that children drop out of school to work at Walmart and Chick-fil-A I'm not making that up and he's overtly pro child smoking. He feels that children, teenagers should smoke because it's cool and then they can quit in their twenties before there are any bad harms from it. Needless to say, the Great Barrington's premises that one infection led to permanent immunity didn't really work out so well, but they were very influential. They had already met with President Trump in August of 2020 and the day after their Great Barrington Declaration was signed, they were invited to the White House. This was October 5th, 2020 to meet with Secretary Human Health and Secretary Services, Alex Azar, and they are advisors to Ron DeSantis. They became mini celebrities over the course of the pandemic and it was a very pro infectious movement. As I said, the title of the book, We Want Them Infected, and they did.Eric Topol (06:42):Right. In fact, I debated Martin Kulldorf, one of the three principals of the Great Barrington Declaration. It was interesting because if you go back to that debate we brought out, at least I tried to highlight the many flaws in this. You've mentioned at least one major flaw, which was to this virus. There's not a long-term immunity built by infections. It's just, as we say with vaccines the immunity for neutralizing antibody production and protection from infections and severe Covid is limited duration for four to six months, and at least for the antibodies and maybe the T-cell immunity is longer, but that doesn't necessarily kick in and quickly. So that was one major flaw, but there are many others, so maybe you could just take that apart further. For example, I like your analogy to lock up all the bad guys, but compartmentalizing people is not so easy in life and I think this is a significant concern of the idea that is, while you indicated there may be some merits if things went as planned, but what else was a flaw of that argument or proposition?Jonathan Howard (08:11):So yeah, this could be a 10-hour conversation and I think importantly, we don't have to speak hypothetically here. A lot of defenders of the Great Barrington Declaration will say, oh, we never tried it, but they promised that herd immunity would arrive in three to six months after lockdowns ended. So we don't have to speak theoretically about what would've happened had we done it. Lockdowns ended a while ago and we don't have herd immunity. They were very clear on this. Dr. Kulldorf tweeted in December 2020 that if we use focus protection, the pandemic will be over in three to six months. So, what could have gone wrong if about 250 million unvaccinated Americans contracted Covid simultaneously in October and November of 2020? A lot of things, as we said, they dichotomized people into vulnerable and not vulnerable, but of course it exists on this. The only bad outcome they recognized was death.(09:11):They felt that either you died or you had the sniffle for a few days and you emerged unscathed. Separating vulnerable people from not vulnerable people is a lot easier than it sounds and I think by way of comparison, look at the mRNA vaccine trials. You can read their protocols and the protocols for these trials were 300-400 pages of dense policies and procedures. The Great Barrington Declaration, if you go to their frequently asked questions section, they made some suggestions, which sound great, like older people should have food delivered at home during times of high transmission, but setting up a national or even statewide food delivery program, that's a lot harder than it sounds. When asked about that later, Dr. Bhattacharya has said they could have used DoorDash, for example. So it was just very clear that no serious thought went into this because it was really an unactionable thing.(10:21):It's not as if public health officials had billions of dollars at their disposal and they weren't many dictators. They couldn't set up home food delivery programs overnight like they suggested and two months after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, vaccines became available so it became obsolete. Not that vaccines have turned out to be the perfect panacea that we had hoped for, unfortunately, but the idea that young people should continue to try to get natural low immunity in favor instead of vaccination became at that point obscene, but they still are anti-vaccine for young people and for children, which I find despicable at this point.Eric Topol (11:07):Right, the data is unequivocal that there's benefit across the board. In fact, just last week in JAMA two senior people at FDA, Peter Marks and Robert Califf published the graphs of how across all ages there was reduction in mortality with the vaccines. That gets us to, as you say now into the vaccine era of Covid and one of the things that the anti-vax community jumped on was when we moved from Delta to Omicron where previous Omicron, there was exceptionally good protection from infections, 95%. It was rare for people to get to have spread with the up-to-date vaccine with the third original strain booster. But with Omicron that fell apart and if infections were breakthroughs were exceedingly common, this led to tremendous fodder for the anti-vax saying the vaccines don't work beyond the false claims that they were, whether they're killing people or gene therapy or microchips or all these other crazy notions. But can you talk to that? Because if you still protect against deaths, Long Covid and hospitalizations, that seems to be pretty important. It's disappointing, and obviously we need ways to prevent infections or otherwise we don't really have an effective exit strategy for the pandemic. This was used and still is used today as a reason that vaccines are worthless if indeed, they're not even dangerous.Jonathan Howard (12:55):The vaccines when they were initially came out, as we all know, were 95% effective, but the vaccines were brand new and the virus was brand new. All of this was less than a year old and what's interesting is, unfortunately, I realized this after I wrote my book, but I published an article about this on Science-Based Medicine where I've been blogging throughout the pandemic. So, if anyone can go there, I wrote an article on October 1st, 2023, called over-hyping vaccines it wasn't pro-vaccine it was pro stop worrying about Covid. So almost all of the doctors that I mentioned in this book vastly overhyped vaccines as soon as they came out saying they were 100% effective against severe disease, that they completely blocked transmission and just really overselling the vaccine saying that they're going to definitely end the pandemic and mocking anyone who disagreed. Now these doctors are saying, oh, there's a lack of trust in the medical community.(13:57):We need to rebuild trust without holding a mirror to their statements. Dr. Bhattacharya, for example, participated in a round table discussion with Governor Ron DeSantis at the very end of July. On August 1st, 2021, Ron DeSantis tweeted out a quote by Dr. Bhattacharya that said, we have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population. We have provided them with enormous protection against severe disease and death. That's why you see, even as the cases have risen in Sweden, blah, blah, blah, we've protected the vulnerable. The number of deaths have not risen proportionally and this was right when the Delta wave was taking off within. This is the one thing that was interesting, this pandemic, because you had people make prediction and within days their predictions were falsified. That was a tragic thing to see, but that's 20,000 Floridians or some number like that died during the Delta wave in Florida. More Floridians died after Dr. Bhattacharya said the vulnerable have been protected than before that. So I think there was a lot of over-hyping in the vaccines, and I get where this came from. We as doctors, we wanted everyone to get the vaccines. We wanted to encourage everyone to get the vaccine. I probably did this myself at some times, but I do think that that was a problem, but the same doctors who are now saying that the vaccines were overhyped and were often guilty of them.Eric Topol (15:35):Right. Well, I mean, I think as you said, we didn't know the virus is going to evolve with this Omicron event with well over 35 new mutations in the spike protein, no less other parts of the virus and then of course, recently we saw another superimposed Omicron event with this BA.2.86 or JN.1 variant. The problem with this of the vaccine takedown, and as you well know because you've been studying this for more than Covid, is that it extended to many other parts of the pandemic, such as masks, such as there's no such thing as Long Covid or it's exceptionally rare and it bleeds through other areas. So could you comment about that? That is the anti-science. It's not just anti-vax.Jonathan Howard (16:30):No, you're absolutely right. I don't talk a lot about Long Covid just because I think a lot of other people do a much better job of that. I have a hard time grasping the numbers myself. You'll read one study, it's one in a thousand, you'll read another study. Oh, 50% of people have Long Covid. My attitude towards Long Covid is I don't know exactly how many people have it, but some people are severely affected by it. We have a lot to learn about it, this is a brand new virus. We are going to be learning about this the rest of our lives, especially the consequences of repeat infections. A baby born today is going to be infected, what? 10 times by the time they go away to college. Who knows what are going to be the consequences of that? What does this mean for autoimmunity?(17:15):So my attitude with Long Covid and the long-term consequences are we just have to be very humble about this and again, all of the doctors who I discussed were very arrogant about this. They were writing in as early as March 2020 that school closures may prevent children from developing herd immunity. They spoke about infections as being beneficial for children, but you're right as well that these doctors cast doubt on all in any measures that were used to stop the virus masks, testing, ventilation, lockdowns. One of their core objections wasn't that they didn't feel that these were ineffective necessarily. They objected to lockdowns precisely because they stopped the spread of the virus, so you can read some articles from Scott Atlas in April 2020. He wrote several articles in the Hill, that publication saying it's time to stop the panic, et cetera. If people were as if panic was a bad reaction to Covid, as morgues were overflowing with dead bodies, panic was the right action. He said that the lockdowns have stopped Covid from spreading and stopped natural immunity from developing, which prevents us from reaching herd immunity. So again, these guys and the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration objected to lockdown saying they just postponed the inevitable, which there may be some truth to that. Probably everyone here has been infected by Covid at least one time, but postponing the inevitable, that's what I go to work every day trying to do.Eric Topol (19:04):And you could say a lot for putting off an infection, of course, as long as possible. And of course, even trying to put it off forever, because as you know very well, as we went on in the pandemic, we learned a lot then there was treatments such as paxlovid and far better treatments that were available for severe Covid, many randomized trials to help prevent deaths for people who were of high risk. The other thing that I guess I can't emphasize enough, and you had a whole chapter in the book, which is about children, kids, they're not so intrinsically protected. They can die, they can be hospitalized and there have been many deaths among them from Covid, even those who don't have coexisting conditions. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, the flaw in that it's only people of advanced age or immunocompromised and that young people are bulletproof. That doesn't seem to be the case in reviewing all the data throughout the pandemic.Jonathan Howard (20:12):I mean, just to reemphasize the point that you made, that someone who gets Covid today, especially if they're vaccinated and boosted is in much better shape than someone who gets Covid, who got Covid in March or April 2020. The same way I hope someone who gets Covid in the year 2030 is going to be in better shape than we are today. But yes, back to pediatric Covid, the risk to any individual child is very small. So my kids have it, my nieces and nephews had it. I wasn't particularly worried and they fortunately had very mild disease, but there's 73 million children in the United States, and when you multiply a rare event by 73 million children, the numbers began to add up. So far around 2,000 children have died of Covid, which is comparable to what measles used to do before. In the pre pandemic days, hundreds of thousands of children have been hospitalized, and depending on the variant, about a third have needed ICU care.(21:15):And five to 10% have been intubated. Some children have had strokes, some children have had amputations. So it's not as bad, it's not as bad as car deaths. It's not as bad as bullets, but we don't have vaccines for those conditions and the vaccine is not a panacea for children. Some vaccinated children have died, but it's like wearing a seatbelt. You can die in a car crash wearing a seatbelt, but your odds are greatly enhanced if you are wearing a seatbelt, but all of these doctors who in 2020 state to their name, to the idea that we could get rid of Covid by spreading Covid be the purposeful infection of children, were unwilling to recognize that the vaccine can help them. They use many different techniques to minimize the benefits of the vaccine. One was to say that it never demonstrated efficacy against hospitalizations and deaths in randomized controlled trials, which is true in as far as it goes because it is very hard to detect rare events in randomized controlled trials unless you do a study of 200 to 300,000 children as was done with the polio vaccine.(22:36):And they suggested that this should have been done, that we should have re-enrolled hundreds of thousands of children in these trials, which would've taken, I don't know, five, ten years. So that's number one. We now have about 30 observational studies, and they all show the same. And by the way, there were six randomized controlled trials of the vaccine in children involving about 25,000 children. So they're not small trial. As I said, there are about 30 trials from around the world showing that the vaccine observational trials, so observational studies, I should say, showing that the vaccine is not perfect, but it's very good at preventing rare but serious side effects or serious harms of Covid. As you know, there was just a large study out of Penn a couple days ago showing that the vaccine during the Delta in the Omicron wave was extremely effective at preventing children from entering the ICU.(23:36):They also treated rare mild vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death and I mean that very literally, the vaccine in young men can cause myocarditis, which is mild in about 90-95% of people with it. I'm unaware of a single American who has been known to have died from vaccine myocarditis. These doctors made dozens of YouTube videos and editorials and commentaries all saying what a catastrophe vaccine myocarditis was. How dare you minimize vaccine myocarditis. When they also wrote editorials saying, young people should not fear death from Covid, and they spoke about death from Covid as milder than vaccine myocarditis when talking about deaths from Covid, they would say, oh, it's less than suicide. More children drown every year. They would just all sorts of crazy double standards.Eric Topol (24:38):Right. One of the things that's extraordinary in the book, Jonathan, is that you have, it isn't like you're just writing text about it. You have all the quotes, you have all the tweets, you have all the articles. I don't know how you did that. I mean, were you keeping an active list of everything that was, I mean, I liken it to remember during in the Trump administration, there was a guy in CNN, I'm trying to remember his name.Jonathan Howard (25:09):Dale something.Eric Topol (25:10):Dale, yeah. And he had a fact check every day, and he kept track of everything. That was his job full time, but it seemed like you were the only one that has this record of every statement written on the topics that we're discussing. How did you do it?Jonathan Howard (25:35):Well, I did it through the blog at Science-Based Medicine is that I'd been collecting these statements starting in May 2021, and it just grew out of that. And so basically, the book is sort of a reorganization, everything that I've been writing on that blog and I will say that the fact that I have so many direct quotes has made it impossible for these doctors to refute me, because if I'm wrong, then they're right. If they're right, then we'll have herd immunity in three to six months once the lockdowns are lifted, reinfections are very rare. Variants are nothing to worry about and so they have to make that case. What they've tried to do is they've tried to do some revisionist history. So, for example, Dr. Jerome Adams, who was Trump's surgeon general, and turned out to be very reasonable guy, recently posted on Twitter, I'll still call it that, that Scott Atlas wanted to, and he was right, wanted to infect people to achieve herd immunity.(26:49):And Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who's a misinformation oncologist at UCSF, we're a gas. They said, oh no, he didn't want to purposely infect children. We just wanted schools open. The harms of school closures were just so great. So they cast themselves as these very benevolent, we were just looking out for the children. We never wanted them infected. I never said that, I never thought that, but all you have to do is just read their own words. The ones who have responded to me have responded just by childish insults, really just calling me names. I'm a schmuck, I'm a grifter, I'm a B-list Covid influencer. None of them have ever tried to engage with any of the content and all that would require them to do is stand up for their own words, which they won't.Eric Topol (27:46):Alright. Now, we touched on it early in our conversation, but what was one of the surprising things on the one hand there are anti-vaxxers, like RFK Jr. and people, as you mentioned, the person that you knew at NYU who went on, but then there were these surprise people who were at top academic medical centers in the country that went into misinformation campaigns, whether it was deliberate because it was associated with all sorts of attention, or whether it was misinterpretation of data. I don't understand, but can you speculate what's going on there and whether or not the universities involved should have been somehow engaging with these individuals?Jonathan Howard (28:39):Yeah, so it's tough for me to understand their motives. I do think that what made them more dangerous than someone like Kelly Brogan or RFK Jr. By the way, these two worlds, which I kind of treated as separate, they're beginning to merge with people like Joseph Ladapo, for example. So they're not as separate as they once were and Dr. Vinay Prasad has praised RFK Jr. saying he would destroy Dr. Peter Hotez, a hero of vaccines in the debate. I mean, it's crazy, crazy stuff up, but I think the guys who I write about were more dangerous in that they mixed good advice with bad advice. So they would say very sensible things like, yes, you have to protect grandma. Grandma has to get vaccinated with bad advice, that the vaccine is more dangerous than Covid for children, for example. They also are very good, eloquent speakers who can speak in scientific jargon and use the language of evidence-based medicine, someone like Kelly Brogan, for example, would say that she uses intuition and higher ways of knowing, and crystals and tarot cards, these guys don't do that.(29:51):If we were to discuss our general approach to medicine, it would be no different than ours, than anyone's. They would say, we try to use science, evidence, data, logic, and reason to reach the best conclusions. So I think that that made them more dangerous. Again, what do I think their motivations were? I think a lot of it is some of these guys are natural born contrarians, which means that they just have to be a little bit different, that when everyone else is saying X, they got to say Y and that served them well in the beginning, in most of their careers and we need people like that In medicine, I would say that Nobel Prize winner, Katalin Kariko, I am probably butchering her name, but the Hungarian woman who developed the mRNA vaccines maybe fits that profile and so we need people like that in medicine.(30:39):I also think they had a hard time admitting air when they drastically underestimated Covid at the start of the pandemic, and all of them did predicting 10,000 people would die predicting that it would be less severe than the flu. They had a hard time saying, oops, I was wrong. Some doctors did that. Famously, Dr. Paul Offit, another vaccine hero, said at the beginning of March, I believe, or early February 2020, that he thought the flu was going to be more dangerous than Covid and when he turned out to be wrong, he said, oops, I was wrong. You might as well make an ass of yourself in front of a million people. But I think these guys couldn't admit air and once they had committed themselves to a policy, the purposeful mass infection of unvaccinated youth, it was hard to backtrack from that. What are you going to say?(31:26):Oops, I was wrong, and young people suffered and died because of what I said. No, I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus so I think it was a lot of that. In terms of what universities should do, they're at a bind because if they speak out against these people, they're experts at weaponizing their delusions of self-persecution. I've been silenced, I've been censored. We need, even though, like I said, they became mini celebrities and met with Trump and DeSantis and advised Governor Glenn Youngkin and they were all over the news. They're huge social media presences. They were everywhere, but where I was in a hospital with Covid patient. So I think that if universities speak out, they run the risk of the Streisand effect. It's called amplifying people inadvertently and allowing them to claim their precious victim status, but if they don't speak out, which they really haven't done, they run the risk of what they're saying is this person carries the aperture. Am I pronouncing that word of our university, that we feel that this person is competent to speak on our behalf which is a problem.Eric Topol (32:38):No, I think we've just seen that, of course, with the three institutions that the presidents were brought in about a whole different matter, and how they didn't necessarily speak out as they could have a totally different matter, of course. This is a real tough one as you've outlined as to whether leaders of university, for example, at Stanford, the faculty did stand up and say, we're not supporting Scott Atlas or this or that. This didn't really happen at other universities that we've touched on at least. So the individuals now going forward here, there's a much bigger story than just Covid, and it's the anti-science, anti-vax movement, which is very dangerous. I think most people who are reasonable reviewing the data would say vaccines are just extraordinary for preserving health, but we're seeing now this movement has gotten legs, it's gotten funding, it's organized, and you're well familiar with Peter Hotez's book who gets through some of that substantiates where this has been with autism and where it's going.(33:59):So one of the problems is that there hasn't been much in the way of any antidote, any aggressive response to basically you have the corrections, the real time, the hall of shame, if you will, of this misinformation to have fact checkers, to get the story straight and perhaps not governmental sponsored because that's also an area of uncertainty of trust in public health, but some type of agency that could take on a corrective effort for the public to know what's fact and what's not. What are your thoughts of how we can get out of this mess?Jonathan Howard (34:46):Oh, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. I think skepticism about the Covid vaccines, we're already seeing this as going to bleed into other vaccines. States are doing everything they can to get rid of what were once considered normal vaccine mandates. So I don't know how we're going to get out of it and I think any government agency designed to combat misinformation would become itself as, first of all, you got to be a little bit careful. We don't know who's going to be running that in 2025, right? I mean, Joseph Ladapo might be in charge of the government industry of misinformation depending on who wins election next. So we got to be careful with handing government that sort of, but I do think that more doctors need to do what I have done, what Dr. Peter Hotez has done, what you've done, what my mentor(35:37):Dr. David Gorski, who runs Science-Based Medicine and Steve Novella have done, which is to just speak out and to call out doctors. When we say, when we hear this misinformation, I think a lot of doctors are what we call shruggy, meaning they sort of shrug it off like, that person's kind of wacky. What are you going to do about it? But I think that we need to not tolerate it. We don't have to give them the victim status by saying, oh, you should be fired, you should be censored, this sort of thing, but just when these doctors make absurd statements by saying that the flu is more dangerous for children than Covid, we need to say no. Over the past three years, Covid has killed 2,000 children. The flu has killed about 300. 2,000 is bigger than 300. If I told you in 2019 virus A kills 2,000 people, virus B kills 300, you would not have a hard time answering that question and if you are trying to tell me now that the virus that killed 200 children is worse than the one that killed 2,000, that's absurd and we just shouldn't tolerate that sort of nonsense. I think that's the attitude that we need to have.Eric Topol (36:51):Yeah, I mean, I think it's very scary where we're headed, and it's ironic because we're seeing vaccine progression to pathogens never seen before, whether it's malaria, obviously, we have RSV vaccines and so many more that are coming. In addition, these same vaccines on the platform, whether it be mRNA and nanoparticles or proteins or whatnot, are being directed now to help amp up the immune response to cancer or to create vaccines that could help achieve tolerance to the immune system, an area that you work in multiple sclerosis and many other neurologic type one diabetes and on and on autoimmune conditions. So if we don't get this right, that if vaccines are trashed, we got some problems going forward.Jonathan Howard (37:46):We shouldn't call those vaccine. That's my suggestion number one. I'm half joking about that. We shouldn't. Sorry to cut you off, but yeah, we do have problems going forward, and like I said, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better and look at the Covid booster vaccination rates. I don't know what they are off the top of my head, but they're in the garbage.Eric Topol (38:08):19% in all Americans and we're one of the few countries that has it widely available for all adults, and only 35% in people 70 years and older, where there's a spike in hospitalizations right now that's comparable to the other waves of BA.2 and BA.5, and it's still rising. So yeah, the booster uptake has been very poor, especially in people at high risk. Absolutely right.Jonathan Howard (38:37):I think people have been influenced by the anti-vaccine movement, even when they don't recognize it. I think it's kind of permeated the culture because people have a very different attitude towards vaccines than they have to almost anything else in their life. I wouldn't say, for example, I don't need to go to the dentist again, because I went in 2020 and 2021 and 2022, I wouldn't say I don't need to go to the gym anymore because I went 10 times last year, for example. We recognize that there are certain things that we have to do for our health that have to be done on a frequent basis, and it's too bad that vaccination doesn't fit that bill. Again, I think one reason for this is that the vaccines were overhyped at the start of the pandemic, or at least in 2021, they were pitched as this panacea. This we're definitely going to solve things, and in retrospect, that was a mistake. We needed to proceed with a little bit more humility just about a brain. This is everyone's first pandemic, right?Eric Topol (39:35):Yeah. I mean, I think the unpredictability of the virus's evolution, which was very slow at first, and then of course it accelerated, was unforeseen and changed the entire profile of the protection forwarded by vaccines. I guess to wrap it up, Jonathan, I want to thank you for all the hard work you did to put this book together and your efforts to try to stand up for the evidence, the science that supports vaccines and the things that we can do to help preserve human health in a pandemic and beyond. I mean, in your practice of medicine that goes well, different and beyond a pathogen in caring for patients with neurologic conditions. I also, I guess would say I'm more hopeful that we will have oral nasal vaccines that do block infections, maybe just for a few months per spray or per inhalation and more durable vaccines that don't only last four to six months if we put our efforts and resources and priorities into it.(40:44):But I'm also worried that, as you say, the V word is a bad word now to many people. So I don't know that we've come up with any solution here outside of your idea of not calling vaccines, but it seems to me we have to be much more direct at dealing with the miss and disinformation movements that have grown so profoundly in the last few years and taking advantage of course of the pandemic fatigue and all the holes in our current tools that obviously there are no things that are fully protected, whether it's a vaccine or N95 mask or you name it. Any last comments about where are you headed? Are you still going to track this or are you had enough of it, or what's your next chapter in your work?Jonathan Howard (41:42):I'm going to still continue to write at Science-Based Medicine on this theme because I think that it's important as doctors that we regulate our own profession and that we hold our public communications to high standards, and I include myself in that. So in my book, I include several really stupid things that I said, and that might be the subject of a future article of dumb things I said, because I did say some dumb things. So I think we have to hold ourselves to a high standard when communicating with the public in a pandemic. So that's what I'm going to continue to do. I'm going to continue to do what I always do at Bellevue psych and NYU treat MS patients around on the inpatient service at Bellevue Hospital wouldn't trade it for the world.Eric Topol (42:29):Well, I want to thank you, and Bellevue is a tough place to work. I know it well, and that in itself says a lot about you. You're a person who I had not met before, only having read your work, but I don't detect one scintilla of hubris. You come across as a genuine person who is really interested in facts and evidence. I want to thank you for all of your work and look forward to future conversation.Jonathan Howard (42:58):Well, thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate it. It means a lot, and I appreciate all you've done on your Twitter feed. Whenever there's a new story. I get it from you first, and so I appreciate it.Eric Topol (43:08):Thanks so much, Jonathan.Commentary on this book's significance by Gregg Gonsalves, Associate Professor, Yale School of Public HealthOne of the untold stories of the COVID pandemic in the US is the role of medical and public health professionals in spreading disinformation, pushing for policies that exacerbate the virus' spread, and drive people away from important interventions, particularly vaccines, which blunt the deadly effects of SARSCOV2. Because of professional courtesy, solidarity or just sheer cowardice, many inside the professions have refused to take on these frauds, egomaniacs, purveyors of sickness and suffering in white coats. Jonathan Howard's book We Want Them Infected, though, names names. In painstaking detail, he builds an indictment of these men and women who have blood on their hands, abusing the trust of millions to peddle lies and falsehoods. This book is one for the ages, making it hard to sweep the complicity of these individuals with the virus under the carpet, leaving a record for the future, a cautionary tale for all of us. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

World-class gymnast, author, filmmaker, and next-in-line to become CEO of Levi Strauss, Jennifer Sey talks pandemic-era school lockdowns and the backlash she received for speaking out against the school shutdowns with Bill Walton. Jennifer was a seven-time member of the U.S. Women's National Gymnastics Team and the 1986 U.S. Women's All-Around National Champion. Her transition from the world of sports to the corporate arena saw her rise to a pivotal leadership role at Levi Strauss, contributing significantly to its resurgence. Along the way, she produced a documentary “Athlete A”  and wrote a book “Chalked up”  exposing the abuse of children and young women gymnasts that spurred radical change in the sport. Sey was ostracized in deep blue San Francisco for publicly opposing the closures of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. She felt compelled to speak out for the children whose development and education were detrimentally affected by the isolation of virtual school. Levi Strauss top management and the board told her to shut up or leave.  So she left. “I think what people failed to predict, which I saw from the beginning, societally, we sent children the message that their education was not a priority, that they were not a priority, and in fact, if they missed things like having friends and an everyday life and key milestones, like graduations and football games, they were selfish, horrible people. Imagine what that does to a child's psyche. So, now, the depression, the anxiety persists, not surprisingly, and we're seeing record high levels of absenteeism,” Sey said. She is now determined to make these effects clear to the American public with a documentary film titled Generation COVID. The documentary will highlight the stories of ten different families and the struggles of their children in the post-pandemic education environment. The damage to be wreaked upon children by school closures was abundantly clear to many of us at the time.  “But the mainstream outlets like the New York Times vilified any dissenters,” reminds Jennifer. “Even renowned doctors, people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford. These are not fringe scientists or fringe epidemiologists, but they were shunned and delegitimized by the mainstream press.” Yet seemingly forgetting the principal role it played in keeping the lockdowns in place, we now read this from the New York Times: “The evidence is now in, and it is startling,” it exclaims. “The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.” There's a lot to be answered for here, starting with the amnesiac NYT. This episode is more than just a conversation; it is a call to arms.

Is our neurobiology at odds with the modern world?Looking for a link we mentioned? Find it here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimesWe see the remarkable evolution of the human brain as one of the driving factors behind our success as a species. Our neurobiology evolved though to solve challenges in a drastically different world than we find ourselves in today. Might our evolved traits, once advantageous, now be our Achilles heel? For human aggression, inventiveness and a determination to overcome enemies, once evolutionarily effective now risk resource, technology, and nuclear crises each with the potential to bring our species to an end. Can we find ways to change our behaviour before it is too late? Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford Sunetra Gupta, research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Anders Sandberg and philosopher of biology Subrena Smith debate whether or not our neurobiology inadequate to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. Güneş Taylor hosts.There are thousands of big ideas to discover at IAI.tv – videos, articles, and courses waiting for you to explore. Find out more: https://iai.tv/podcast-offers?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=ancient-traits-in-a-modern-worldSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Originally released to the public as a burst of audio podcasts over Christmas 2022, COVID Critical is a series of interviews with medical  and legal professionals, government advisers, epidemiologists and  activists, who had opposed elements of the COVID-19 regime. TPS now  releases the unedited video of those interviews from our vaults,  exclusively for our Patreon subscribers: https://www.patreon.com/posts/84070725/ Oxford epidemiologist and Great Barrington Declaration author Sunetra Gupta returns to TPS to discuss the 'immunity debt' hypothesis that the long impact of lockdown is making us sick now, the return of Strep A/Scarlet Fever as a killer in Britain, and whether US cities are right to demand a return to public masking. Sunetra speaks candidly about advising Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and about how COVID could have been different with the principles of Jeremy Corbyn's 2019 manifesto. Help us develop The Popular Show and get extra shows at https://www.patreon.com/thepopularpod More ways to help us continue: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/thepopularshow  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thepopularshow https://cash.app/£ThePopularShow

The  Unlocked PART 4 of our new COVID CRITICAL mini-series! Oxford epidemiologist and Great Barrington Declaration author Sunetra Gupta returns to TPS to discuss the 'immunity debt' hypothesis that the long impact of lockdown is making us sick now, the return of Strep A/Scarlet Fever as a killer in Britain, and whether US cities are right to demand a return to public masking. Sunetra speaks candidly about advising Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and about how COVID could have been different with the principles of Jeremy Corbyn's 2019 manifesto. TPS would like to thank Collateral Global for their support for TPS   COVID CRITICAL. Help us develop The Popular Show and get extra shows at   https://www.patreon.com/thepopularpod More ways to help us continue:   https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/thepopularshow   https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thepopularshow  https://cash.app/£ThePopularShow

NOW WITH PATRONS at Patreon.com/ThePopularPod. The amazing sequel to our Christmas 2021 HARMS OF LOCKDOWN miniseries. TPS would like to thank Collateral Global for their support for TPS COVID CRITICAL. TPS125 WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA DO WE WANT? | Jenin Younes Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance Jenin Younes returns to TPS to discuss the merging of the State and social media companies during COVID. Jenin describes the fallout of her NCLA case against the US government for intervening in the banning of COVID critical Twitter accounts, the deposition of Anthony Fauci, and speculates about Elon Musk's skin is in the game. TPS126 CORPORATE COVIDIANS | Jennifer Sey A view from the corporate offices is provided by Jennifer Sey, Brand President and prospective CEO of Levi's, until her opposition to school closures during COVID cost her her job. Jennifer discusses how Levi's 'woke capitalism' blended seamlessly with its siding with maximalist COVID measures, how the US upper class sees education, and the generational dynamic in the corporate world's attitude to social justice today. TPS127 NHS AFTER COVID | Robert Freudenthal NHS psychiatrist Robert Freudenthal returns to TPS to discuss how misconceptions about the structure of the NHS cause us to misread the dynamics both of the NHS during COVID and the NHS strikes of winter 2022. Robert gives an inside view of how medical practitioners view their work, and how it caused much of their leadership to miss the significance of the relationship between medicine and power that was so expanded during COVID. TPS128 WHY ARE WE SICK? | Sunetra Gupta Oxford epidemiologist and Great Barrington Declaration author Sunetra Gupta returns to TPS to discuss the 'immunity debt' hypothesis that the long impact of lockdown is making us sick now, the return of Strep A/Scarlet Fever as a killer in Britain, and whether US cities are right to demand a return to public masking. Sunetra speaks candidly about advising Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and about how COVID could have been different with the principles of Jeremy Corbyn's 2019 manifesto. TPS129 WHAT HAPPENS NEXT TIME? | Jay Bhattacharya Stanford Professor of Medicine and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya joins TPS for a wide-ranging discussion of the lockdown debate, the mistakes in our vaccine policy, the false lessons being drawn from the COVID-19 pandemic, and how to avoid falling prey to the same top-down approaches in the next one. TPS130 LESSONS FROM THE TRUCKERS | Gord Magill Trucker Gord Magill returns to TPS to reflect on the most novel form of resistance thrown out by the COVID-19 pandemic: the Canada Truckers convoy against vaccine mandates. James and Gord discuss Justin Trudeau's invocation of emergency powers against the truckers, the failure of the left and the unions to respond adequately, and the alternative to 'from above' legalistic approaches to COVID overreach that have come to dominate the COVID critical position in recent months.

SPONSORED BY: Ridge Wallet. Get up to 40% off with our link https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER from now until December 22nd! Thanks to Kamikoto for sponsoring this video! Get an additional $50 off on any purchase with code TRIGGERNOMETRY  during their Early Black Friday sale. Go to  https://kamikoto.com/TRIGGERNOMETRY and help support the channel. Jay Bhattachary is a professor of medicine, of Economics, and of Health Research Policy at Stanford University, and the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya was an opponent of lockdowns and mask mandates. With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting the virus spread in lower-risk groups with the aim of herd immunity, with "focused protection" of those most at risk. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | info@xentricapc.com | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: marketing@triggerpod.co.uk Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​/ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.

Joe Hernandez is the Chairman and CEO of Blue Water Vaccines, a spinoff deploying technology from Oxford University. The original focus was on creating a universal flu vaccine that, with one shot, would provide immunity for all the known variations of influenza throughout an individual's lifetime. While continuing vaccine development with partners such as St. Jude's Children's Hospital, Blue Water has expanded its portfolio by identifying transformative vaccines in academic and research labs that can be preventative and prevent long-term diseases. Joe elaborates, "Where we come in as corporate entities is that we take those technologies and really move them to the next level of development. We find out how we can manufacture them in a way that allows us to create enough material for broad distribution. We design clinical trials, we execute clinical trials, and we deal with the regulatory agencies to get the product approved. Then ultimately, we commercialize with commercial partners. That's kind of the modality that we use here at Blue Water." "The technology that we in-licensed from the U.K. from Oxford was really derived from a mathematical model that was invented by a scientist there named Sunetra Gupta. Sunetra is by training a mathematician, although she focuses on epidemiological trends in different infectious agents, including malaria and COVID, and a number of other infective agents. But what she discovered, what she stumbled upon as it related to influenza, was that, in fact, influenza was not as diverse as we gave it credit for." "What we noticed is that the virus, while elusive, really only has a limited ability to hide from the immune system. It has what we call "jackets" or these external codes that the virus uses, but it tends to use it again after a number of iterations. For example, the virus that was present in 1918, the one that was present in 1934, and the current virus have used some of those original "jackets" in the exterior, so we're able to deduce what those are." @VaccinesInc #BlueWaterVaccines #Flu #Influenza #Vaccines #Vaccinations #FluVaccine #HealthcareInvesting #BigData BlueWaterVaccines.com Download the transcript here

Joe Hernandez is the Chairman and CEO of Blue Water Vaccines, a spinoff deploying technology from Oxford University. The original focus was on creating a universal flu vaccine that, with one shot, would provide immunity for all the known variations of influenza throughout an individual's lifetime. While continuing vaccine development with partners such as St. Jude's Children's Hospital, Blue Water has expanded its portfolio by identifying transformative vaccines in academic and research labs that can be preventative and prevent long-term diseases. Joe elaborates, "Where we come in as corporate entities is that we take those technologies and really move them to the next level of development. We find out how we can manufacture them in a way that allows us to create enough material for broad distribution. We design clinical trials, we execute clinical trials, and we deal with the regulatory agencies to get the product approved. Then ultimately, we commercialize with commercial partners. That's kind of the modality that we use here at Blue Water." "The technology that we in-licensed from the U.K. from Oxford was really derived from a mathematical model that was invented by a scientist there named Sunetra Gupta. Sunetra is by training a mathematician, although she focuses on epidemiological trends in different infectious agents, including malaria and COVID, and a number of other infective agents. But what she discovered, what she stumbled upon as it related to influenza, was that, in fact, influenza was not as diverse as we gave it credit for." "What we noticed is that the virus, while elusive, really only has a limited ability to hide from the immune system. It has what we call "jackets" or these external codes that the virus uses, but it tends to use it again after a number of iterations. For example, the virus that was present in 1918, the one that was present in 1934, and the current virus have used some of those original "jackets" in the exterior, so we're able to deduce what those are." @VaccinesInc #BlueWaterVaccines #Flu #Influenza #Vaccines #Vaccinations #FluVaccine #HealthcareInvesting #BigData BlueWaterVaccines.com Listen to the podcast here

Freddie Sayers discusses Jay Bhattacharya and Jenin Younes' lawsuit against the US federal government.In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was published by three academics - Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff - who appeared on UnHerd to break the story. It marked a watershed moment in the pandemic, but the authors found their criticisms of COVID policy were increasingly censored on social media. Now, Bhattacharya is taking his case to the courts to prove collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech to silence skeptics like the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. Talking to UnHerd's Freddie Sayers, he lays out the evidence that social media companies were instructed to quell scientific views which opposed government lockdown measures. Who was responsible for this infringement? According to the legal case, the conspiracy extends to the highest levels of power in Washington, and primarily at fault is the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Anthony Fauci.Read the Post here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sunetra Gupta was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and discusses here the covid era but also looks to the future and how we can learn from the past.

We learn about the special bond between father and daughter. Sunetra recounts how her father, Dhruba, has been a life-long inspiration. She also discusses how she and her own daughters have embraced the values he espoused. It all began back in India when she would discuss politics and art with her father and his friends. Now she has a fulfilling career in the UK and her father's influence continues to loom large. “your real goals are to achieve happiness, fulfilment, and to be able to care for others and to be able to do something that makes you feel like you've achieved your purpose in life. And that's not something anyone can endorse externally.” ********************* Huge thanks to our sponsor, The https://our-voices.captivate.fm/rya-home (Royal Yachting Association) (RYA) Visit the https://our-voices.captivate.fm/rya (RYA website) to find your local club and get involved ********************* http://ourvoicespodcast.com/ (Check out the Our Voices website for more on this story) http://ourvoicespodcast.com/ (We're also on )https://www.facebook.com/ourvoicesinthenhs (Facebook), https://twitter.com/OurVoices14 (Twitter) and https://www.instagram.com/ourvoicespod/ (Instagram) A https://our-voices.captivate.fm/fascinate-productions (Fascinate) Production

pt.5 of our Christmas 'Harms of Lockdown' miniseries. To listen to this series finale, become a subscriber at Patreon.com/ThePopularPod. The Great Barrington Declaration, calling for an end to lockdowns and a new regime of targeted care was published in October 2020, and immediately tarred as a byword for libertarian callousness and pseudoscience. We spoke to one of its authors, Sunetra Gupta (professor of theoretical epidemiology, University of Oxford) and a prominent signatory, Carl Heneghan (director of the University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine), about their contribution to debates around non-pharmaceutical interventions, where the mainstream consensus on the pandemic has gone wrong, and the misconceptions about their personal politics and funding. Prof Gupta and Prof Heneghan also give THEIR FIRST description of the notorious summit with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, which allegedly resulted in the UK's refusal of a 'circuit breaker' lockdown in Autumn 2020.

Jeffrey Albert Tucker is an American economics writer of the Austrian School, an advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin, a publisher of libertarian books, a conference speaker, and an internet entrepreneur. In 2021, Tucker founded the nonprofit Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a think tank that has published articles opposing various measures against COVID-19, including masking and vaccine mandates. Senior roles were given to Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, two of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which Tucker also helped to organize. The institute has described itself as "the spiritual child" of the Great Barrington Declaration. Writers of Brownstone articles have included Sunetra Gupta, the third co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Paul E. Alexander, a former Trump administration health official, and George Gilder, a senior resident fellow at AIER.

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The patrons-only continuation of our TPS76/Sublation Media chat with renegade journalist Michael Tracey! We discuss the mediatization of President Zelensky and its role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, plus Michael's European tour culminating in his collision with NATO-enthusiast Paul Mason, and the Corbynite case for war! Become a patron now and get weekly exclusive shows, plus access to our archive of patrons-only interviews with Ben Burgis and Peter Hitchens, Laura Smith, Sunetra Gupta, Karie Murphy, Peter Dale Scott, Toby Young, Joe Guinan, and loads more. Join the popular gang and help us grow.

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How can mathematical models help us better understand how we can combat the evolution of diseases? By understanding how the development progresses, we may be able to alleviate the burden of disease on humankind. Press play to learn: How a single vaccine could protect against all strains of influenza Why a universal vaccine could be effective Possible roadblocks in developing a universal vaccine Sunetra Gupta, a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, shares her work developing treatments to keep up with the development of various diseases and illnesses. Developing vaccines for various therapeutic applications has been a standard solution to combat illness in a specific period. However, as viruses and other "bugs" evolve, vaccines can become ineffective over time. However, by identifying commonalities between various strains of a virus, developing a more applicable treatment may be possible. For example, if viruses were viewed as wearing different clothing outfits over evolutions, identifying a common item of clothing throughout iterations can be incredibly valuable. To learn more, visit https://www.bluewatervaccines.com. Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C

In this Episode of The GRID, host Chris Kuhlmann examines the Barrington Declaration, a document published by numerous highly educated, highly experienced doctors and scientists that spells out a public strategy for managing the pandemic and the nation back to recovery from COVID-19; comparing the credentialed leadership offered in the declaration to the leadership and credentials of Dr. Anthony Fauci.   CREDITS Host: Chris Kuhlmann Written by: Chris Kuhlmann Produced by: Shaun Griffin Music composed by JD Kuhlmann Art: Shaun Griffin Sound: Chris Kuhlmann and Shaun Griffin Sponsor: Score and Splice, JD Kuhlmann ScoreandSplice@gmail.com Visit us at www.kingdompatriot.us and check out our Vision Video   SHOW NOTES - Fauci and the Barrington Declaration www.gbdeclaration.org   As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.   Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.   Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.   Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.   As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.   The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.   Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.   Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.   By the way, those are not my thoughts, those are the thoughts of the Great Barrington Declaration. It was signed at American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Authored by 3 physicians and co-signed by 43 individuals worldwide. While many pulling the puppet strings would have you believe that medicine and science are 100% unified in the approach the US has taken, that is far from the truth.   I'm not talking about mere intellectual lightweights either. Here's the quick bios on the 3 authors:   Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.   Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.   Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.   What about the co-signers? Again, 43 cosigners from 9 countries?   Canada 2 England 11 Germany 6 India 1 Israel 5 New Zealand 2 Scotland 4 Sweden 2 US 10   43     What about their expertise, surely these couldn't hold a candle to Dr. Fauci, the Allergy & Immunology expert? Wrong again.   Professor of Genetics 1 Pediatrics 1 Clinical Ethics 1 Vaccine development 1 Hypertension Researcher 1 Mathematician 1 Education & Prevention 1 Hygiene & Environmental Medicine 1 Informatics 1 Biomedical Data Science 1 Malaria Researcher 1 Cellular Biology 1 Biophysicist 1 Structural Biology 1 Human Geography 1 Genomics 1 Medical Statistics 1 Autism Provider 1 Virology 1 Finance 1 Oncologist 2 Statistical Modelling 2 Biomedical Consultant 2 Infectious Disease Expert 3 Biostatistics 3 Microbiology 4 Public Health/Policy 4 Research/Scientist 4 Immunology 5 Medical Psychology/Psychiatry 6 Physician 10 Professor or Assoc. Prof of Medicine 10 Epidemiology 11     It's about time a group of physicians and experts unified to present common sense recommendations.   So what do you think? Does the Great Barrington Declaration deserve consideration given than 43 docs from 9 countries with expertise in 33 different areas have signed onto it?   Do you think it holds merit in the COVID world we live in?   Oh, I just realized, I forgot to read the very last line of the declaration. Silly me.   Here's what it says: On October 4, 2020, this declaration was authored and signed in Great Barrington, United States. You might have guessed this anyway because of the reference to vaccine development.   That's right, this wasn't written last week, it was written in the early fall of 2020, more than 16 months ago. Yet the principles in it are as applicable today as they were then.   Clearly, this group is pro-vaccine and still they are against general universal lockdown policies. These aren't the pundits on CNN or MSNBC or the NY Times, these are disease experts, physicians, professors, scientists, and researchers that have dedicated their lives to this type of work.   Here we are in 2022 and the information we continue to learn through court cases, FOIA requests, emails, etc., is that what has and is going on behind the scenes is more dark and sinister than we would like to believe. That's not really the subject of this podcast. I don't even have time to go into the latest news that it's likely American funds were used in part to create the COVID19 virus.   The reason we are even talking about this is because states, particularly blue states are doubling down on their lockdown policies. California, NY, vaccine passports and the ability to even move around to and fro as an American is being limited. This just cannot be. There's a reason that these states are losing congressional seats as large numbers of families are retreating to Florida, Texas and other states that have a more pro-freedom outlook on current state.   However, I digress. I think it is imperative anytime we do a podcast to also look at the biblical perspective when possible?   What has the Lord called us to do? Well certainly he has called us to seek him with all of our hearts? The challenge is that Leaders who are making public policy are often not like-minded in faith.   Did you know that Fauci just received the Humanist of the Year Award? That's right, the American Humanist Association just awarded him October 2021 with the Humanist of the Year Award for 2021 and I quote “Dr. Fauci embodies humanist values, including his steadfast commitment to science, his demonstrated empathy and compassion for others and his overall direct approach,” AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt told Religion News Service in an interview. “He has demonstrated how powerful science and human values can be in saving lives over the past year. If there was ever an appropriate humanist of the year, he is it.”   In 2003, Dr. Fauci said that “I look upon myself as a humanist. I have faith in the goodness of mankind.”   And that's why we should be worried, because the mankind he speaks of, the leaders in our government, those who pull the strings of policy and regulations have shown to be ever void of a belief in Christ and scripture.   What does the bible say about the goodness of mankind? Jeremiah 17:9 says “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”   This is a major construct of the difference view-points of mankind. One reason that we cannot rely on the “goodness” of mankind is that goodness is defined by the individual, right and wrong have become so morally relative that literally it changes with the election of every new leader.   This is why we need Christ. I'm pro-freedom, pro-democracy, and I'm not pro or anti vaccine. But when the leaders are desperately void of Christ it is impossible for Jeremiah 17:9 to not apply. Our hope is in Christ, we desperately need him because of our wicked hearts.   So our faith has to be in Christ and not the government, not the great Barrington Declaration. I believe in the declaration, subscribe to it's philosophy, but my hope is found in Christ.   Folks, we need Jesus more than ever. I'm not talking about we need Jesus to come and deliver us, that's a given. I'm talking that Fauci, our government, myself, all of us need Jesus because of our wicked hearts.   I'm also going to do something that I've never done before on this podcast. I'm going to pray for our key leaders, specifically, President Biden, VP Harris, and Anthony Fauci.   Lord, we are all desperately wicked because our hearts are inclined to selfishness, sinfulness, and self-preservation. It's not just true of our leaders, it's true of the human condition. Yet today, let us walk humbly as we lift up our leaders. We pray Father, that you would move on the hearts of President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. We ask that you move on their hearts not to deliver us or produce an outcome that we desire, but we ask that you move on their hearts for two reasons 1) That they might become children of God and inherit your kingdom, that they would know your grace, your mercy, and that you would do a mighty work on their hearts to your glory. 2) We pray you would give them the supernatural Christ influenced wisdom to lead this nation in a way that glorifies you. To lead in a way that points to Christ in everything, that they would become ambassadors for you willingly or not. We pray this in the name of Jesus.

Our guest today describes the global response to COVID-19 as one of the biggest public-health fiascos in history. As you would expect, he gained quite a bit of notoriety for this contrarian view. Dr. Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist and biostatistician who has spent the past 30 years researching infectious diseases as well as the efficacy and safety of vaccines. He is internationally known for his statistical and epidemiological methods for the early detection and monitoring of infectious diseases. A former Harvard Medical School professor who today is the Senior Scientific Officer at the Brownstone Institute, Martin worked with the Centers for Disease Control on its current system for monitoring potential vaccine risks. Today, the U.S. and other countries around the world use Martin's detection methods to monitor COVID-19. Martin made national headlines in October of 2020 when he and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford published the Great Barrington Declaration, a paper that questions school closings, lockdowns, travel restrictions and other governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The three authors recommended “focused protection” instead, a policy of protecting senior citizens and others who are most at risk of dying from COVID while allowing young people and others who face minimal risk of death to resume their normal lives. The three authors were immediately skewered for what critics called a radically dangerous approach for pandemic management. At STEM-Talk, however, we appreciate that a curious, open, and even skeptical mind is at the heart of the scientific method. Because of that, we have invited Martin to sit down with us to discuss the Great Barrington Declaration as well as his views about pandemics and the best ways to safeguard the public. We also review with Martin the age-adjusted mortality rates of states like Florida, New York and California which had quite different responses to COVID-19. Ironically, co-host Dawn Kernagis learned on the morning of our interview with Martin that she had contacted COVID. So, she has to skip today's discussion. (Note to listeners: It was just a mild case and Dawn is already back on her feet.) But in today's fascinating episode, Martin and host Ken Ford discuss: -- The safety of vaccines, including the coronavirus vaccines. -- Martin's thoughts about the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children. -- The Great Barrington Declaration and the concerns it raised about the physical, mental-health and economic impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 responses. -- The effectiveness of natural immunity compared to vaccine-induced immunity. -- Whether hospitals should be hiring caregivers with natural immunity rather than firing them. -- Martin's thoughts about Sweden, which was the only Western nation that did not impose lockdowns or close its schools and daycare centers in response to COVID-19. -- What age-adjusted COVID mortality rates for the U.S. have to say about the different approaches states used in response to the pandemic. Show notes: [00:05:20] Ken opens the interview mentioning that Martin was born in Lund in 1962 in southern Sweden, but grew up in Umea, a university town in northeast Sweden. Ken asks what prompted Martin's family to move to Umea when he was two years old. [00:05:47] Ken mentions as an aside that he once spent an enjoyable week at the University of Umea visiting Lars-Erick Janlert.  Ken served as the external expert for a PhD dissertation. [00:07:00] Ken asks Martin what he was like as a child. [00:07:32] Ken asks what drew Martin to math, and if it came naturally to him. [00:08:15] Martin talks about his decision to attend Umea University and major in mathematical statistics. [00:09:09] Ken asks why Martin moved to the United States and to attend Cornell University as a Fullbright Fellow for his postgraduate studies, and why he decided to earn his Ph.D.

In a special return episode, we reprise an earlier episode with Harvard professor, and biostatistician, Martin Kulldorff.  Dr. Kulldorff, along with colleagues, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya authored The Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020 during the onset of the Covid pandemic.  The Great Barrington Declaration advocated letting COVID-19 spread in lower-risk groups to promote herd immunity and concentrating on "focused protection" of older, high-risk groups.  These views in retrospect, appear to have been spot-on, but at the time, were opposed by the World Health Organization and Dr. Kulldorff was kicked off of some social media platforms for his views.Support the show (https://RichardHelppie.com)

How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid Center for Media and Democracy exposedbycmd.org- PRWatch prwatch.org- SourceWatch sourcewatch.o rg  Bio: Alex is an investigative reporter with the Center for Media and Democracy. A campaign finance expert, Alex helped launch money-in-politics website Sludge, and his work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including The American Prospect, The Nation, and Vice.com. David Armiak-608-515-4040David is research director for the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD is a nationally recognized government and corporate watchdog that leads in-depth investigations into the corruption that undermines our democracy, environment, and economic prosperity. CMD's groundbreaking exposés are featured on the blog ExposedbyCMD.org. CMD also publishes SourceWatch, an encyclopedia of corporations, corporate special interest groups and their leaders; and specialized investigative websites, including ALECExposed.org. This story was produced in partnership with The Daily Poster. Earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.” The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release. But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the Covid-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns. Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.  The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting Covid-19 spread largely unchecked. The new academy appears to be the latest effort to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.  This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign succeeded in supplanting public health experts and hijacking governmental response to the pandemic.  The War On Public Health When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.  Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.  One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.  Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.  “We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.  A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.  To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests. Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump's secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies. “Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection” On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.” “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.  The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration's website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.” But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren't verified.  AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration's website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of marketing consulting for AIER. AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network also pocketed nearly $3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.  In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER's trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops. Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch's foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid Center for Media and Democracy exposedbycmd.org- PRWatch prwatch.org- SourceWatch sourcewatch.o rg  Bio: Alex is an investigative reporter with the Center for Media and Democracy. A campaign finance expert, Alex helped launch money-in-politics website Sludge, and his work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including The American Prospect, The Nation, and Vice.com. David Armiak-608-515-4040David is research director for the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD is a nationally recognized government and corporate watchdog that leads in-depth investigations into the corruption that undermines our democracy, environment, and economic prosperity. CMD's groundbreaking exposés are featured on the blog ExposedbyCMD.org. CMD also publishes SourceWatch, an encyclopedia of corporations, corporate special interest groups and their leaders; and specialized investigative websites, including ALECExposed.org. This story was produced in partnership with The Daily Poster. Earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.” The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release. But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the Covid-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns. Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.  The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting Covid-19 spread largely unchecked. The new academy appears to be the latest effort to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.  This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign succeeded in supplanting public health experts and hijacking governmental response to the pandemic.  The War On Public Health When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.  Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.  One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.  Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.  “We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.  A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.  To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests. Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump's secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies. “Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection” On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.” “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.  The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration's website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.” But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren't verified.  AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration's website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of marketing consulting for AIER. AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network also pocketed nearly $3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.  In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER's trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops. Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch's foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sunetra Gupta is an epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. Other than being a distinguished epidemiologist, she is also a well-known novelist who has published several novels.

Jeffrey Tucker discusses the history of the Great Barrington Declaration. Three great scientists Mark Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya spoke out against lockdowns. They suffered much, but became heroes. We still have a long battle against lockdowns and liberty is at risk.

Our guest is Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine and Health Policy at Stanford University. Professor Bhattacharya is also research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and director of the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya gained international prominence during the COVID pandemic for his contributions to determining the infection fatality rate of the virus, and for his criticism on broad coercive lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Along with colleagues Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he wrote the Great Barrington Declaration of focused protection which has garnered 860,000 signatures to date. SHOW NOTES​ Jay Bhattacharya: Twitter and Stanford pageWatch the episode on our YouTube channel

Our guest is Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine and Health Policy at Stanford University. Professor Bhattacharya is also research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and director of the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya gained international prominence during the COVID pandemic for his contributions to determining the infection fatality rate of the virus, and for his criticism on broad coercive lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Along with colleagues Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he wrote the Great Barrington Declaration of focused protection which has garnered 860,000 signatures to date. SHOW NOTES​ Jay Bhattacharya: Twitter and Stanford pageWatch the episode on our YouTube channel

Our guest is Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine and Health Policy at Stanford University. Professor Bhattacharya is also research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and director of the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya gained international prominence during the COVID pandemic for his contributions to determining the infection fatality rate of the virus, and for his criticism on broad coercive lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Along with colleagues Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he wrote the https://gbdeclaration.org/ (Great Barrington Declaration) of focused protection which has garnered 860,000 signatures to date. GUEST: Jay Bhattacharya: https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya (Twitter )and Stanford https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya (page) WATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/tf5BbYcI7-g (Watch the episode) on our YouTube channel Support this podcast

In this episode, I speak with long-time liberty hero and entrepreneur Jeff Tucker, about his launching of the Brownstone Institute in response to the worldwide authoritarian response to Covid-19, and why the Institute's efforts are so needed now.We also talk about one of the primary - but little talked about - driving forces behind racial segregation and the eugenics movement: Fear of infectious disease, and the belief that those of "inferior" races were more likely to be disease vectors than were those of "superior" genetic makeup. You can read Jeff's piece on that here....and his book on the lockdowns is here.The book we discuss in this episode is "The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next", and can be found here.Sunetra Gupta's book is here.I mentioned FreedomCells - you can learn more about them here.You can visit - and support - the Brownstone Institute, here.

Professor Jay Bhattacharya is one of the famous voices to have emerged out of the pandemic. A vocal critic of lockdowns, his name became synonymous with the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an “alternative approach to the pandemic” that would entail no lockdowns. Along with co-signatories Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldforff, the trio argued that public health strategies should instead centre on the ‘focused protection' of at-risk groups while keeping society as open as possible so the healthy parts of the population could build herd immunity.The declaration triggered a huge global debate, with critics arguing that many more lives would have been lost on account of the difficulty of shielding all those who were vulnerable. During this week's interview, Freddie Sayers challenged Prof Bhattacharya on what would have happened if his strategy was adopted, whether he has changed his mind in retrospect, and how his ‘focused protection' have would worked with waning immunity and new variants?For more, read The Post from UnHerd See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I am incredibly grateful for the work Jeffrey A. Tucker has done recently. While many in the liberty movement either justified or worse, ignored the unauthorized mandates, lockdowns, and closures by government officials, he has been steadfast in his liberal principles while humble in seeking the best information about Corona.  Links: Jeffrey Tucker website: https://jeffreytucker.me/ Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts by Sunetra Gupta: https://www.amazon.com/Pandemics-Fears-Facts-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B00CORE364     Jeffrey A. Tucker is an independent editorial consultant who served as Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

England will lift most of its remaining pandemic restrictions on Monday, despite rapidly rising cases. The British Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, has tested positive for Covid and the prime minister is isolating at home. Is the dropping of rules realistic or reckless? We unpick the politics with our reporter Rob Watson and then debate the pros and cons with Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and Walter Ricciardi, an advisor to the Italian and French governments and president of the World Federation of Public Health Associations. Also in the programme: the latest on Germany's devastating floods, and a film about the forgotten 1969 Harlem music festival some are calling 'The Black Woodstock'. (Photo: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Credit: Ian West/PA Wire)

  There has been no shortage of casualties in the last year and half with the COVID pandemic. Schools have been closed, businesses shuttered, and families torn apart with different levels of concern for the virus. But one surprising victim has been science itself. The practice of scientific inquiry, discussion, and debate disappeared. Instead of science - which we can loosely define hypotheses that are then tested and either proven or disproven - is longer present when it comes to COVID. We've talked briefly about this phenomena before on the show with Dr. David Graham and also Dr. Rohin Francis. But 2020 brought about the end of serious discussions in much of the scientific and medical communities as people who chose to take unpopular views or question the mainstream opinions were removed from the public square, harassed, and even fired from their jobs. My guest, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has not only been willing to risk holding opinions and theories against the mainstream consensus, but he is also looking to help science return to open, honest debate. The Great Barrington Declaration One of the most publicized controversial statements on COVID in 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration, was written by three prominent epidemiologists. They were Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Martin Kuldorff of Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of the UK. All of them agreed that a more prudent approach to fighting the pandemic would be to focus the majority of our resources on protecting those most vulnerable to COVID - namely, the elderly. They emphasized that the use of broad sweeping closures or mandates with a focus on disease count was the wrong strategy. Instead of focusing on infections, it would be more important to use a laser focus on protecting residents in nursing homes. This could have bein done fairly cheaply and easily with significantly less disruption to education and business. Why the Wrong Goal Led to the Wrong Policy Dr. Bhattacharya says that the key problem with public health officials' approach to the pandemic was to focus on infections (or cases) in the population rather than on how to protect those at greatest risk. Because they had the wrong objective, it led to ineffective programs like broad lockdowns and school closures which did nothing to help slow the spread the pandemic but left many seniors at greater risk to getting SARS-CoV-2 infections and dying. Also, because the policy focused on controlling all infections, not just in those most at risk, the release of the vaccine was muddled too. Instead of deploying it quickly and efficiently into nursing homes where 40% of the COVID deaths have occurred, public officials were generally aimless in its distribution handing it out to young health care workers or non-clinical personnel within health care organizations. This further put those most at risk in peril unnecessarily. Can Science Heal? Ultimately, the greatest failure in the whole response to the pandemic has been the lack of honest scientific debate and discussion. The robust challenges to dogma have been squelched leading to big policy mistakes (not including the fracturing of society along ideological lines). Public health authorities can  only issue effective decrees and statements once science has had an opportunity to come to a real consensus in which there is honest and open debate. That never happened this time and it has set the public trust towards the abilities of science back. Dr. Bhattacharya hopes to change this situation and bring back real scientific discussions. Questioning, rigorous debate, and testing are pillars of the scientific method and he seeks a way to reactivate science's roots through his organization at Collateral Global. Hopefully, we can perform an honest assessment of what was done correctly and incorrectly throughout the pandemic. The goals would be to better prepare us to handle the next pandemic that will surely happen some time in the future. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. He argues for a return to real scientific debate and inquiry. show notes Episode 134: Today's show Collateral Global: This is the organization that Dr. Bhattacharya is a part of to return science back to its roots of rigorous testing and discussion. Great Barrington Declaration: The statement issued by Dr. Bhattacharya, et al regarding a more focused protection for those most vulnerable to COVID. LinkedIn for Jay Bhattacharya Episode 099: Dr. Francis discusses how most of science around COVID is garbage. Episode 114: Dr. Graham talks about how science is not serving the public well on COVID. Locum Story: Today's sponsor for the show is Locum Story and how they help doctors find locum tenens positions.s Doctor Podcast Network: The home for the Paradocs and a number of other physician based podcasts. Top 20 Physicians Podcasts Made Simply Web Site Creations: This is the great, affordable website service that built my wife's podcast site. I cannot recommend this company more to someone looking for creating a website. Always Andy's Mom: Home of my wife, Marcy's, podcast for parents grieving or those looking to help them. YouTube for Paradocs: Here you can watch the video of my late son singing his solo on the Paradocs YouTube page. Patreon - Become a show supporter today and visit my Patreon page for extra bonus material. Every dollar raised goes towards the production and promotion of the show.    

John briefs us on the Justice Centre's report on the harms caused by the lockdowns in Canada. There are some surprises, including the finding that the number of deaths across the country has not increased compared to other years, despite the pandemic. We also touch briefly at the end on the newly released Justice Centre report focusing on Manitoba's COVID response.Justice Centre News Release, Dec 3, 2020: Government data shows lockdowns more deadly than COVID-19Justice Centre Report, Dec 3, 2020 (PDF): Flying Blind--Governments' hasty decisions to lock down Canadians while damaging public health and the economyPJ Media, Nov. 27, 2020: UPDATED: Johns Hopkins Study Saying COVID-19 Has 'Relatively No Effect on Deaths' in U.S. Spiked After PublicationYanni Gu in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter (via the Internet Archive), Nov 22, 2020: A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19Rex Murphy in The National Post, Nov 27, 2020: The showdown at the Barbecue CorralRebel News, Dec 2, 2020: Full Gospel Outreach Church FINED $14,000 for SINGING without masks in SaskatchewanGlobal News, Nov 29, 2020: Hundreds of Calgarians protest against mandatory COVID-19 restrictionsMartin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta in the Toronto Sun, Nov 29, 2020: Canada's COVID-19 strategy is an assault on the working classJustice Centre Press Release, Nov 30, 2020: Manitoba Government lockdowns violate Charter: legal analysisCBC, Nov 23, 2020: Church minister fined twice for breaking Manitoba's public health orderJustice Centre Press Release, Dec 2, 2020: Justice Centre to seek injunction against Manitoba government to allow drive-in church servicesTheme Music "Carpay Diem" by Dave StevensSupport the show (https://www.jccf.ca/donate/)

Jeremy talks to Professor Sunetra Gupta, a University of Oxford epidemiologist who has been pilloried for daring to suggest that there could be an alternative response to covid than putting the entire country under house arrest.Yes this is meant to be a pub lock in rather than a podcast about the news, but these are extraordinary times we're living through and it's perverse to ignore that fact, so this is one of a handful of 'off-script' episodes we'll be putting out alongside our regular chats. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Back to the home team this week as T.J. and J.A. consider an article written by Bishop of Liverpool Paul Bayes, in which it is asserted, amongst other things, that lockdown sceptics are looking for an easy way out. We discuss the nature of lockdown scepticism and whether the bishop's claim is justified. Is the lockdown sceptic position really an "easy" position to take? Are lockdown sceptics ignoring all the evidence? Or is the position actually counter-cultural and therefore more difficult to maintain in the face of the majority? Is it reasonable to imply that eminent scientists like Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan are not interested in evidence? More broadly we consider what kind of "offence" Christians are supposed to cause and on which issues we are supposed to take a stand.After that, we respond to the news of an apparent breakthrough in the Pfizer vaccine trial. We talk about the ethical and theological implications of mandating or coercing people into taking vaccines and other medical treatments, and we touch on the fact that aborted fetal tissue is often used in the production and testing of vaccines.Finally, we look at on a headline claiming that the SAGE committee are interested in asking people to relocate Christmas to Summer 2021. We ask whether SAGE really has the power to make such profound ecclesiological pronouncementsMany apologies if you struggle to hear any of this episode. We hope it is almost all fine, but there may be one or two points when one of the speaker's volume drops a bit. We are new podcasters and produce the show ourselves. We are still tweaking our microphone and recording techniques and will endeavour to perfect them going forward!As always, please send feedback, comments, questions, criticisms, suggestions to irreverendpod@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter at @irreverendpod. Please rate and review us on iTunes!Links from this episode:Rt Revd Paul Bayes - Uphill Struggles and the Road to PeaceDr Lisa Forsberg et al - Compulsory Vaccination for Covid-19 and human rights lawCatherine Neilan, Telegraph - Give three month freedom pass to people who have recovered from CovidKarina Reiss, Sucharit Bhakdi - Corona, False Alarm? Facts and FiguresLaura O'Callaghan, Express - Now SAGE wants to move Christmas celebrations to SUMMER because of CoronavirusSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/irreverend)

Jim Al-Khalili meets Sunetra Gupta, a scientist and novelist. As a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology she studies infectious diseases such as flu and malaria and explains how a mathematical equation can be as beautiful as a Keats poem.