Finally, One Of The US' Top Public Health Experts Is On The Record Saying COVID Policies Don't Work

Finally. The truth is out there.

After years and years and years of waiting. After all the mandates, the punishments. The gaslighting. The fighting. Watching the media endlessly repeat the same disproven talking points from Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and from the politicians who mindlessly, gleefully followed them.

After putting together books demonstrating what the evidence actually shows. Thoroughly examining, and dismantling studies, shoddy research, debunking misinformation that rapidly spreads between those committed to creating inaccurate narratives to support their ideology.

Finally, we have someone at the very top of the public health leadership pyramid acknowledging the truth: masks and other COVID-era policies don’t work.

Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Health Policy, Stanford University, speaks at the Forbes Healthcare Summit Day 2 at Jazz Lincoln Center, New York, NY, December 5, 2023. (Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Talks Masking, Other Failed COVID Policies

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was one of the few "experts" who didn’t disgrace himself during the pandemic. He contributed valuable research almost immediately that indicated COVID infections were more widespread than previously realized, making widespread panic unnecessary.

He told the truth about lockdowns, that we had little data to support such extreme policies. He helped create the Great Barrington Declaration, a now-legendary document that correctly stressed the importance of opening schools and limiting disruptions to normal life. Saying that those disruptions would have long-lasting, far-reaching impacts that could last far beyond the end of the pandemic.

As we enter yet another year of high inflation, rising cost of living, deteriorating economic conditions that can be directly traced back to pandemic policy decisions, it’s inarguable that Bhattacharya and his co-authors were right.

Thankfully, with a new administration pushing out those appointed by the Biden administration to continue Fauci’s legacy, Bhattacharya is now in a place of importance and influence: running the National Institutes of Health.

For years, that position, formerly occupied by Francis Collins, was a fountain of misinformation, politicized communication, open advocacy for disproven "interventions," and blaming the public for failing to properly listen.

Bhattacharya joined the Andrew Huberman podcast, Huberman Lab to talk about the failures of COVID policies and how to fix the erosion of trust in science and public health.

Huberman asked him about what happened with the scientific community, and if he thought their ever shifting guidance contributed to the public tuning them out.

"But the words were the scientific community did us wrong, the lockdowns were unfair to, in particular, working-class populations," Huberman said. "We were told one thing about masks, then told another.

"We got a kind of loop-de-loop of foggy speak, politico messaging about vaccines and what they did do or wouldn't do. And, basically, I hear from a lot of the general population, not just people on the MAGA, MAHA, whatever you want to call it side, but also a lot of stated Democrats and people who are truly in the center, that they lost trust in science and scientists, and they will not consider restoring that trust until scientists admit that they made some mistakes. And it took me a while to hear that message because I'm like, ‘hey, listen, I have friends trying to cure blindness, cure Alzheimer's, use brain machine interface to cure epilepsy and get paralyzed people to walk.’

"And you're talking to me about something that happened, but I finally had to just stop and listen because they kept saying, we don't care. And so it's almost like 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 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?"

Dr. Bhattacharya immediately agreed, saying he doesn’t think he would be sitting there today as NIH director if that weren’t true. That many people hadn’t completely written off "science" as corruptible and permanently broken.

But when going in detail on the specifics of Huberman’s question, he dropped the hammer on the failure of COVID mandates. While calling out the groupthink and cult-like enforcement of politicized speech around masks in particular.

"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 effect on the spread of the disease," Bhattacharya said. "And the answer is, there's not a single randomized study that looked at kids. The US 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."

Masks don’t work on kids, we never studied it, and for correctly answering the question, his colleagues at Stanford wanted him fired. If that doesn’t sum up the rot at the core of the modern education system, what does?

For saying masks don’t work, Bhattacharya had his academic freedom threatened. He told Huberman that he’d been instructed to stop "going to the press" in 2020 by the Dean of Stanford Medical School. Because he’d told the truth about one of Fauci’s favored policies.

Campus activism attacking Bhattacharya for telling the truth about masks went even further. A posted campaign popped up, accusing him of "killing people in Florida for advising Governor DeSantis that there was no evidence that masking children benefited anybody."

That’s why it’s vital to have someone in his position now, telling the truth about the evidence on masks. Still, he used his credentials to attempt to put an end to the abuses of the Biden administration and their vaccine and mask mandates that impacted millions of people.

"I was an expert witness in a number of cases on the vaccine mandates, including one that reached the Supreme Court and overturned the OSHA vaccine mandate. So yeah, I was vocally opposed to the vaccine mandates. I was vocally opposed to the mask mandates."

Those policies weren’t the only ineffective ones our "experts" demanded. Lockdowns were an unsupported policy intervention that had no basis in pandemic planning or management, as Bhattacharya detailed.

"I think the idea that the lockdowns were the right strategy, well, they're unique in world history of having lockdowns at the scale we had. And there were no part of previous pandemic plans where such a lockdown of such a length of such a scale were no part of any previous pandemic plan or any previous pandemic management experience," he said. "And it was very clear to me with my background in health policy that we were going to harm the poor, we were going to harm children, and we were going to harm the working class at scale, the lockdowns were a luxury of the laptop class."

Mask Mandates Had No Basis In Evidence

Huberman said his belief is that many "experts" thought that imposing mandates was the "ethical" decision, under the assumption that it would save lives. That made criticism of their policy choices and dictates unacceptable and "immoral," similar to how questioning the dangers of smoking is viewed as "immoral." Bhattacharya quickly shot down that idea.

"The idea that closing schools is good for you, the idea that wearing a cloth mask prevents you from getting COVID, the idea that immunity after COVID recovery doesn't exist, the idea that the vaccine will protect you from getting and spreading COVID forever, none of that was rooted in science," he responded. "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 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?" Huberman asked.

"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 there was a Cochrane report looking at the literature on masking and influenza. And they concluded that the evidence was weak at best, that these kinds of cloth masking in population settings actually prevent the spread of influenza."

"So, well, the problem here is that the scientific community embraced an ethical norm about unanimity of messaging, and then it forced it on fellow scientists, and then it cooperated with the Biden administration to put in place a censorship regime that made it impossible for even for legitimate conversations to happen."

It’s like magic, isn’t it? Hearing the actual, real evidence laid out from the highest levels of public health. Imagine how different things would be now if Fauci and the CDC had told the truth about masks, as Bhattachrya does, that they do not work to stop respiratory viruses.

The inaccuracies told by those previously in authority have eradicated trust in the profession and science at large, as Bhattacharya continued.

"..it's also true that 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."

As another example, he brought up how "public health" rules dictated during the pandemic that you must wear a mask to walk into a restaurant, but could "sit down to eat and take your mask off."

"That protects you from getting and spreading COVID. How? Everyone could see that. You don't need to be a scientist to see that. That was obviously ridiculous public health messaging."

It wasn’t just the absurdity of it, "experts" actively caused harm by misleading those at actual risk from the virus into thinking they were protected.

"Let's just say, could this public health messaging be dangerous? Well, yeah. Imagine someone who's like 80 years old. They have a lot of chronic conditions. It's the height of the pandemic, like July 2020 or something or 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?"

Not to mention the harms to children, especially those with learning or physical disabilities.

"So that mandate mattered. But I'll say there were work harms, some of which were recognized, some of which were not. So, like, for instance, I heard from parents of autistic kids, or I'm sorry, hearing-impaired kids, that the mask wearing impaired the ability of the kids to learn to lip read, right?"

How did the profession get this so wrong? Bhattacharya described it as being "group think at scale," a perfect explanation of how the entire scientific community followed bad ideas in lock step fashion.

As yet another example of how the "experts" got COVID wrong, he brought up Sweden having the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe during the entirety of the pandemic, an irrefutable point that thorough discredits lockdowns and other extreme public health policies.

The overarching problem with science and the "experts," to hear him tell it, is that they, despite their obsession with equity and inclusivity, ensured that an entire group of people were demonized and seen as "lesser" by the media, politicians, and public health authorities.

"Yeah, essentially we created a class of unclean people as a matter of public policy," Bhattacharya said. "You can understand why people who went through that would say, given that the vaccine didn't turn out to stop you from getting and spreading COVID, why should I trust you on anything else? That's where we currently are."

Couldn’t have said it better myself.