- Big segments of the public feel like they caught us in something as scientists, and we won't admit it. And they're not just pissed off, they're kind of like done. I hear it all the time. And again, this isn't the health and wellness supplement taking, you know, anti-woke crowd.

This is a big segment of the population that is like, I don't want to hear about it. I don't care if labs get funded. I want to know why we were lied to or the scientific community can't admit fault. I just want to land that message for them because in part, I'm here for them and get your thoughts on what you think about, let's start with lockdowns, masks and vaccines, just to keep it easy.

And what do you think the scientific community needs to say in light of those to restore trust? - So first, let me just say, I don't think I'm the NIH director unless that were true, unless what you said is true. Otherwise, I'm not the NIH director. So I was a very vocal advocate against the lockdowns, against the mask mandates, against the vaccine mandates, and against the sort of anti-scientific bent of public health throughout the pandemic.

I've also argued that the scientific institutions of this country should come clean about our involvement in very dangerous research that potentially caused the pandemic. - The so-called lab leak hypothesis. - Yeah, right. So let's just stay focused on lockdowns. And I want to make the scientific case that they were a tremendous mistake.

And that was known at the time, they were a tremendous mistake. And let me just focus on one aspect of it. We'll get broadened out to other lockdowns, just the school closures, right? So what the public at large now sees is that American kids, especially minority kids, are two years or more behind in their schooling.

We decided during the pandemic that children ought to learn to read as five-year-olds or six-year-olds remotely in Zoom. We decided that in-person schooling didn't matter anymore. My kids in California were kept out of school, public school, for a year and a half. If they saw the inside of a classroom, it was with plexiglass, separated from their friends, eating lunch, isolated alone, right?

The message to American school kids was essentially, your school doesn't matter, your future doesn't matter. American public health embraced that entirely. In Sweden, they didn't close schools for kids under 16 at all. That was not a policy of the Swedish, Anders Tegnell, the head of Swedish public health, explicitly made that a priority.

In the summer of 2020, the Finns and the Swedes compared their results. Now, the Finns had closed schools in the spring of 2020 and the Swedes did not. And they found there was no difference in health outcomes for COVID. The teachers in the schools, in Swedish schools, actually, they had no worse outcomes than other workers in the population.

And on the basis of that evidence and the fact that we know that closing schools harms the future health and well-being of kids, even short interruption in school. We knew that for a fact, based on a vast literature that existed before the pandemic. Many schools around Europe opened up in the fall of 2020.

The scientific evidence was abundant and clear, even by late spring 2020, that the the closure of schools and kids was a tremendous mistake. And yet, when I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University in October 2020, I faced vicious attacks by the scientific community and the medical community for being unscientific about school closures.

Were there threats to your job at Stanford? Yes. And that like real threats or just people saying we're going to take away your job? Okay. In March of 2021, I was part of a round table with Governor DeSantis, a policy round table, where he asked me whether there was any evidence that masking children had any impact on the spread of the disease.

And the answer is there's not a single randomized study that looked at kids. The U.S. was an outlier in recommending that kids as young as two years old get masked. In Europe, like 12 was the age. There were no studies. In response to that, a hundred of our colleagues signed a secret petition essentially effectively asking the president of the university to silence me.

Were you contacted by the university administration? No. I found out about the petition from a couple of my friends who leaked it to me. And then I went to the press and said, look, you should go ask the president about this. And then he had to say that he had this mealy mouth statement about academic freedom, but also essentially that it's really important that we obey public health authorities or something.

So like political, like boilerplate speak. Yeah. And in 2020, I'd been subject to all kinds of sort of attacks on me. I mean, it just, I don't want to relitigate this history, but I'll just say that Stanford failed the academic freedom attempts. It didn't hold a scientific conference on COVID with alternative viewpoints, with viewpoints that were anti-lockdown until 2024 when I organized it.

Even though I asked to have a conference in 2021 and 2022. But your job security wasn't threatened in a direct sense. No, that's not true. Like no one came along and said, hey, like quiet down or else you're going to lose your job. So in that sense, you had academic freedom from the top.

That's not true. So I was asked to stop going on the press in 2020. I was, I was, I was by, by the dean of the university, the dean of the medical school. Right. I was, my, my academic freedom was pretty directly threatened. There were like, I, I, I wrote and published a study on, on measuring antibodies in the population.

A study that now replicated does, was replicated dozens of times in all around the world. And I was, I was essentially ordered to redo that study. They, they interfered even before I had put, sent the paper in for publication. The, the, the, when I say they, I mean the, the, the, the, um, the administration of the medical school.

Uh, I mean, my, my academic freedom was pretty directly attacked. Um, and, and I wrote a piece with, uh, uh, how Stanford failed the academic freedom test. You can go read about, read, read it to folks who want to read about it. I don't, I don't want to relitigate the pastor.

No, I ask, I listen, I'm not trying to dig for dirt. I ask because, um, well, I, I never saw a petition cross my email path. I did see a petition pass my email path about Scott Atlas, who is, um, was in our department of radiology as a physician, as you know, and, um, was appointed Trump's coronavirus task force head of Trump's coronavirus task force.

And then there was a petition basically asking him what to take away his job. I don't know what it was, but that, that passed through, but I see a lot of petitions passed through my email. And as everybody knows, and the press has pointed out, I'm not great at email and communications.

Um, but, but I guess the reason I ask is, um, academic freedom means many things. Um, like, can you tweet what you want to tweet? I guess I don't call them tweets anymore at the time. Could you tweet what you wanted to tweet? Could you, um, continue to do the science that you were doing?

Could you, um, did you continue to collect a salary? It sounds like you were able to keep your job, but there was some pressure to not communicate your ideas. Is that about right? Yeah. I mean, or there's a threat to my job as well. I think that the, the, the issue here is one of like, uh, okay.

Imagine what a universe, there's a sense of like positive and negative academic freedom. A negative academic freedom means, um, there's no active attack on me and my capacity to do work. I think Stanford failed that as well. Like there was an active attack on me. For instance, there was a, a poster campaign all around campus with my face on it.

Like essentially accusing me of killing people in Florida for advising president to say, uh, Governor DeSantis that there was no evidence that masking children benefited anybody. Right. Uh, and essentially as a threat, it's like, I, I, I, at the same time I was getting death threats from people. Uh, the former head of the NIH wrote an email to Frank, Tony Fauci four days after we wrote the Great Branch Declaration, calling for a devastating takedown of the premises of the Declaration.

And, uh, and, uh, and, and then that resulted in essentially press propaganda pieces, the New York Times and elsewhere, uh, essentially, uh, mischaracterizing what the Great Branch Declaration said, which is, was to protect older people better and open schools. Let kids, let kids, let kids, let kids go to school.

Um, essentially mischaracterize, mischaracterizing is in a propagandist way. We're saying we want to let the virus rip and that led to death threats against me. Same time, there's this poster campaign all around campus. I called the, the campus police. I told the department of, uh, uh, the, the, the folks in the department of the medical school that this was happening.

And they result, they, their response was to send me to a counselor to reduce my online presence. Um, so Stanford absolutely failed during the pandemic. It, uh, in 2020, um, the former president, uh, the, um, John Hennessy approached me wanting to look, organize a, a, a, a discussion, like a, some, some sort of like panel where different perspectives on how to manage the pandemic, the lockdowns elsewhere, uh, could, could be had.

And even he couldn't get this organized. Hennessy couldn't? No. Hennessy is one of the most, um, beloved presidents of Stanford. I have tremendous admiration for him, but the, the pressure was absolutely enormous. Like he, the fact that he approached me at all was actually a credit to him. He's the, one of the few officials at Stanford who approached me during the pandemic to try to like get, allow me to have, I mean, you know, I might've been right or wrong.

It turns out I was right, but I, in principle that they, you know, that with Stanford should have had those debates in 2020. We had prominent faculty, people like Johnny and Edie, Scott Atlas, uh, and, and others, Michael Levitt, who were opposed to the lockdowns. And yet we couldn't get a hearing.

Yeah. Yeah. Leavitt reached out to me at one point. I, I, you know, as I've been criticized for, uh, before, you know, with this podcast, I mainly focused at that time on, we launched in 2021 on ways to deal with anxiety, circadian rhythm, sleep, because people were dealing with those issues.

I'm not a, I'm not a virologist, so I couldn't talk about virology or epidemiology, but I. Andrew, it wasn't on you to like, uh, put us, uh, on a platform. There was on the Stanford university, um, uh, administration to organize discussions and debates on the top, on the most important topics of the day.

And that included in 2020 were school closures, the right approach. I read comments enough and, and get calls and emails that I do read enough to know that when people hear this, their minds will go to, um, questions about like, what is the incentive financial or otherwise for Stanford to not allow you to have these discussions or let's broaden the discussion for any university for that matter.

Right. I mean, Stanford's not the only university on the planet, um, for, uh, you know, a panel, a discussion about these issues to, to be, um, to be held. Well, we have a health policy department. What, what's the purpose of it? If not to like, uh, and panel the most important debates about health policy of the day.

So, so what do you think was going on? I mean, the vac, the, the vaccine technology was developed at multiple sites, right? I think Stanford had something to do with the development of the technology. Um, there were other universities that were involved in the development. that were involved in the development of the technology as well.

Right. And I think in the back of this conversation, I know what's buzzing, but let's just be direct here. You and I were, it was, there was a vaccine mandate at everyone that. This is 2020. 2020 a bit, right. But eventually there was a vaccine mandate. If you wanted to keep your job, unless you had a religious or other, what was a medical reason, religious or medical reason, you were told you had to take the vaccine.

People did what they did. Some people did. Some people, I know colleagues that falsified cards. I know, uh, colleagues that got nine vaccines, I, I, everything in between. Right. Um, but there, there was a, there were mandates. So to be clear, you were opposed to the lockdowns. Yes. Um, and you were opposed to vaccine mandates.

Were you also vocal about that? Yes. Cause that's even, I mean, that's even touchier. I was an expert witness in, uh, a number of cases on the vaccine mandates, including one that, uh, reached the Supreme Court and overturned the OSHA vaccine mandate. Um, so yeah, I mean, I was, I was locally opposed to the vaccine mandates.

I was vocally opposed to the mask mandates. On the lockdowns, I am, I was vocally opposed to the school closures. I emphasized the harm that the lockdowns did to the world's poor, right? So in April of 2020, there was a UN report, uh, that's, uh, that calculated that a hundred million people would, would be subject to starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns.

I was opposed to that. Uh, I think the idea, um, idea that, uh, that the lockdowns were the right strategy. Well, they're, they're unique in world history of having lockdowns at the scale. We had, um, and there were no part of previous pandemic plans where these such a lockdown of such a length of such a, uh, you know, at, at, at, of such a scale were no part of any previous pandemic plan or any, any previous pandemic management, uh, experience.

Um, and it was very clear to me with my background in, uh, in, um, health policy that we were going to harm the poor. We were going to harm children and we're going to harm the working class at scale. So the lockdowns were a luxury of the laptop class.

Uh, and that's what I was advocating at the time. Um, the university wasn't just Stanford, you're right. But the, the, uh, in fact, there were almost no universities that, uh, that impaneled these kinds of, uh, discussions into 2022. So what do you think happened? Do you think that, uh, that there was a fear?

I'm not, I'm not ceding the question, leading the witness, whatever, but do you think that there was a fear among the academic and science community that if anyone, if, if it were allowed for people to, uh, to speak out or consider different aspects, uh, positive or negative about lockdowns or vaccine mandates, that somehow their existence would be at risk.

Like that this got to an issue bigger than the lockdowns, um, and bigger than vaccines. Because I do, I think that this whole issue was really a question of whether or not we consider scientists experts. The word expert has become a very touchy thing. Like who gets to be called an expert, um, who, who designates which experts are really the experts.

I mean, it's all, you know, all you have to do is accuse someone of misinformation and suddenly their expert card is taken away, even if they, uh, hold a position in a given area that they've. I've been a tenured faculty member at Stanford School of Medicine for, uh, for decades, right?

I've been a full professor, uh, with a long scientific back, like history of, of published papers in some of the top medical journals, the top, like statistics journals and the health policy journals and so on, economics journals. Um, and that wasn't enough, right? Uh, the, the problem is like you have, okay, let me just say one, one version of this that you can, you can go, uh, there are other, other, other aspects of play for, uh, like for instance, I think people were genuinely scared.

Scientists were genuinely scared for their own mortality, especially in the early days of the pandemic. And that, that clouded the way they thought about. Especially since there are a lot of older scientists. I'm not trying to pick on older, but there are a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah. And older people were dying more, correct?

Yeah. I mean, there's a, I mean, that was actually the most important epidemiological fact about COVID was that it was this very steep age gradient in the mortality profile. Young people, very low, low mortality risk. Older people, much higher mortality risk. What was the rate of mortality among people, like 70 to 85 years old, roughly?

Five to 7%, somewhere in there. Okay. So not a trivial number. No, it's huge. Like one in 20 to one in, you know, one in 18 or whatever, 14. And that was due directly from COVID itself, not, not some, some confounding variable. Yeah. Especially early in the pandemic, right?

Okay. So, so, so, okay. So, um, but I want to leave aside the personal fear, although I do think that played a tremendously important role in the, in the thinking about, of, of scientists, especially since scientists as a class tend to be part of the laptop class, right? People who have the, the economic resources to shield themselves from, for, for, for extended periods of time without any threat to their, their livelihood.

So let's leave that aside and let's just focus on, on the, on the, what I think was, was a core dynamic, right? So, um, there's two norms, two ethical norms in science. It, it, and, and they were, they were, they competed with each other. In science, free speech is an absolute must.

If you have an idea that's different from mine, you should be able to express it. And then we can, you know, we, we can test each other's ideas out. We can maybe devise an experiment to, to, to decide between us and whatever the experiment says, we'll say, okay, you're right and I'm wrong and, you know, I'll buy you dinner or something, right?

Um, that's good. That's, that's, that's how science advances. Like through this kind of like, uh, this process of people talking to each other and having free speech, the ability to like come up with ideas and, and articulate them, uh, defend them is absolutely fundamental to the progress of science.

Public health has a different ethical norm. Public health has an ethical norm of unanimity of messaging. The, the, the, the, the, this, this ethical norm has as its moral basis that the, that the communications that public health puts out are grounded in consensus science, right? So for instance, if I were, as I was a former professor at Stanford, I mean, emeritus professor at Stanford, I go out and say, oh, and the head director of the NIH, I go out and say, smoking is good for you.

Well, I've committed an ethical sin, right? I've done something really deeply wrong. Because the scientific basis for the idea that smoking is a terrible thing for you, it really harms your health in, in, in, in concrete ways. Um, that's, I mean, that's like rock solid in science. So the, the, the idea that I, as a person who works in public health, shouldn't go out and say smoking is good for you, that has a good ethical basis rooted in science.

The idea that, uh, that, uh, that the, the, the, the vaccine will protect you from getting in and spreading COVID forever. None of that was rooted in science. And yet the public health authorities of this country decided that they were going to enforce the same kind of ethical approach.

They have sort of ethical constrictions about that on those topics as they do to smoking. When you say none of it was rooted in science, are you saying the science was mixed or there was literally no evidence? No, there's literally no science. So for instance, the idea that cloth masks prevent you from getting and spreading respiratory diseases.

There were a dozen randomized trials on flu before the pandemic. And none of the, there was a Cochran report looking at the literature, the random, on, on, on masking and influenza. And they, and they concluded that the evidence was weak at best, that these kinds of cloth masking at, at, in population settings actually prevent anyone, the spread of influenza.

I heard a number of people say like, what's the big deal about wearing a mask? There were, there was also that argument. It's not the same thing as a vaccine. It's like, it's a mask. Well, you could argue over inhaling excess carbon dioxide. You're not, you know, you're not getting smiles.

You're not social interaction. Listen, I'm, I'm just opening this up for sake of, of consideration. Like, like, why did the masks become such an issue? Was it because it was a mandate? Is that what it's really about? That mandate mattered. But I'll say there were, there were, there were harms, some of which were recognized, some of which were not.

So like, for instance, I heard from parents of autistic kids that the wear, that the, or I'm sorry, hearing impaired kids, that the, that the mask wearing impaired the ability of the kids to learn to lip read, right? So it seems illogical. Yeah. Um, I heard, um, but he, but it's also true that you adopt, if you adopt and embrace public health messaging, that's self-evidently not rooted in science, you're going to undermine the public trust in science and in public health.

I will say, based on these voices that I hear from a lot, that's what they're asking for. They're asking for the exact message that you're delivering now, which is, um, I, I'll, uh, state it differently. They want to hear the scientific community say, we messed up. Yeah. And we should, we should absolutely say that.

Right. So for instance, uh, you wear a mask while you walk into the restaurant, you sit down to eat and you take your mask off and that protects you, protects you from getting and spreading COVID. How? Like everyone could see that. You don't need to be a scientist to see that.

That was obviously, uh, ridiculous public health messaging. It was a weird time. And, and let's just say, is it, you asked, is, could, could this public health messaging be dangerous? Well, yeah. Imagine someone who's like 80 years old. They're not, they're, they're, they're, they have a lot of chronic conditions.

It's the height of the pandemic at like July, 2020 or something, or June, June, 2020. And they're told if you wear a cloth mask, you're safe. They go out in public and take risks that they otherwise would not have taken on the idea that they're safe wearing a cloth mask and they get COVID.

The recommendation not rooted in science actually could end up killing people and probably did, right? So it's not, none of these things are just basically, well, it's low cost. I mean, it may be low cost to, to, to, to, to, to somebody who's like, you know, uh, uh, who's, who's, who's not particularly, uh, I mean, particularly bothered by mask wearing, but they can still nevertheless end up causing harm.

And I think it kind of did. Thank you.