Renowned Stanford doctor reflects on lessons from pandemic

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and research associate with the National Bureau of Economics Research, gave a lecture at Notre Dame on Friday, November 15. The lecture, co-sponsored by the College of Science and the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government (CCCG), discussed Bhattacharya’s experience as a dissident medical voice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Having earned his bachelors, masters, and medical degrees and later a doctorate in economics from Stanford, Bhattacharya is the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. He is currently a professor of health policy and is a Senior Fellow with Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Bhattacharya became known nationally for his joint authorship of the Great Barrington Declaration that cautioned against lockdowns and mask mandates as methods to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Vincent Muñoz, Tocqueville Professor of Political Science and founding director of the CCCG, began the talk. He commented on the significance of Bhattacharya’s appearance: “We’ve been doing this for a little while, I actually think this is perhaps the most important lecture we have ever hosted.”

Bhattacharya began with data on hospitalization rates during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were spreading fear, undue fear about the disease, among the population by telling them a very misleading number.”

He cited an April 2020 study of 3,328 people in the Santa Clara, California area for “seroprevalence,” meaning that they possessed COVID-19 antibodies. While initial projections had fallen between 10 and 15 percent, the actual results indicated 3 percent of the sample size, and thus Santa Clara County, had recovered from COVID-19. Despite being below their projections, Bhattacharya said, “That three [percent] was an incredible result, that meant 50,000 people walking around Santa Clara County had already had COVID and recovered.” At the time, according to Bhattacharya, the study showed that COVID was both much more widespread and survivable than the medical establishment had led Americans to believe.

Speaking about the inherent spread of COVID-19 as he saw in 2020, Bhattacharya said, “Every single human on the face of the Earth has been exposed to this virus by now, and the implication of this result was that this was going to happen.”

Bhattacharya also cited UN data projecting “that 130 million people would face starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. … The way the lockdowns hit, it was guaranteed to impoverish the poorest people of the world.”

Bhattacharya also highlighted the impacts of the pandemic on education. While most of the West enacted lockdowns and closed schools, Bhattacharya emphasized the effectiveness of Sweden’s response: “The Swedish strategy wasn’t a death trap in that it was in fact possible to keep schools open as long as you protected older people better.”

Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Bhattacharya spoke about his discovery that he had been “blacklisted.” He said, “The day I joined Twitter, I had posted the Great Barrington Declaration, and I was blacklisted. … That made it so that I could send a message out to my followers … but that nobody else could see it.”

Sam Bley, a freshman, told the Rover, “Dr. Bhattacharya had an interesting case, it really changed how I trusted the government and medical authorities.” 

Patrick Boyd, a freshman sociology major, was similarly intrigued by Bhattacharya’s points. “It’s interesting that covid was so similar to the flu in terms of both death rate and its spread.”

A physician who attended the talk was surprised at the government’s behavior, saying, “The level of censorship and groupthink from many of our leaders in government—and in particular those in the fields of science—is truly breathtaking.” 

The physician continued, “Dr. Bhattacharya demonstrated heroic virtue during the COVID pandemic. This lecture should be required viewing for all who are interested in what went wrong with our COVID policy and what we need to learn when something like this happens again.”

“My hope is that there will be justice and vindication for those brave scientists like Dr. Bhattacharya, so that we do not make the same mistakes again in the future,” he concluded. 

Sam Marchand is a sophomore studying political science and finance from Beaumont, Texas. He squanders much of his spare time by reading the Current Events section of Wikipedia preparing arguments for ND Speech & Debate, of which he serves as president. He can be reached at smarcha3@nd.edu.

Christopher Cope is a freshman from Darien, Connecticut. He can be reached at ccope@nd.edu. 

Photo Credit: Washington Post

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