Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

A Model of Courage in a Sea of Confusion and Fear

Introduction

The Greeks had a word of grave importance for which there is no equivalent in English: “thumos”.

Thumos is, first of all, spiritedness.

Secondly, it is the inability to tolerate an injustice without taking action.

Plato believed that “within the ideal city state, every citizen would possess a healthy thumos within their souls. This thumos would allow citizens to uphold their honor and courageously assert their opinion within civic life.”

The fact that there is no English equivalent is interesting:

Whenever an exact translation does not exist, it can be said that that ideal does not exist within a society. And if that is so, could it be said that our culture denies the existence of a thumos, or even worse, attempts to stifle it? 

In this short essay, we shall see that Dr. Jay Bhattyachara, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, endured academic hostility towards the thumos that had inspired him and two other top epidemiologists to propose an anti-lockdown strategy that has now been vindicated.  It is called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Professor Battacharya, Stanford School of Medicine. MD, PhD. Health policy: infectious diseases, Covid, health economics. Scientific freedom.

Their primary concern was the prolonged impact of social isolation on children (kept at home, missing years of school, not learning to read and write), and on the working class poor (many without computers to keep them connected – unlike the laptop class who supported the policies.)

Coordinated Suppression of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)

Dr. Bhattacharya’s pinned tweet briefly explains the Great Barrington Declaration, launched October 4, 2020:

Focused protection: To minimize mortality, older and other high-risk individuals are better protected, while the young live near normal lives to minimize collateral damage from lockdowns.

The GBD was co-authored by Oxford’s infectious disease epidemiologist, Dr. Sunetra Gupta and former Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff. photo It has been translated into 44 languages, and has garnered 936,000 signatures worldwide.

Until Elon Musk bought Twitter, any alternative to the official narrative resulted in suspensions, including Dr. Kulldorff, and myself, a medical librarian, and the black-listing of Dr. Bhattacharya. Dr. Sunetra Gupta was chastised on a BBC interview for mentioning the GBD position.

Worse, a January 4, 2022 news report disclosed that NIH head Dr. Francis Collins and NIAID head Dr. Anthony Fauci had

played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized “a quick and devastating published takedown” of this proposal, which they characterized as by “three fringe epidemiologists” from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

The infection fatality rate (IFR) of this outbreak was 0.23% — 23 in 10,000, or 1 in 434.8, mostly elderly.

Three top epidemiologists had stood up to the pandemic of fear:

·       the media drumbeat of daily cases

·       the political “abundance of caution”

·       the WHO, FDA, CDC abandoning of classic principles with lockdowns

·       the sometimes vicious policing of lockdowns

·       the big pharma money nervously waiting for the vaccine to arrive

·       the big tech guided suppression of free speech, and

·       the academic fear of career loss.

They had stood up to the coordinated, indefensible policies from incurious people who never did their own research – never woke up to the reality of a virus 1,000 times more deadly to the elderly than to children.

Dr. Bhattacharya’s Remarkable Interview, January 24, 2023

If Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter, we would never have seen this interview between Jay Bhattacharya and Bari Weiss, former journalist at WSJ and NYT, and now editor of The Free Press.

Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press

Bari Weiss is one of the researchers that Mr. Musk engaged to review the internal Twitter documents revealing extensive censorship of free speech under direction from the FBI. Correspondence screenshots were released, for all to see, in the Twitter Files – one of the most significant revelations of this century.

Ms. Weiss searched Dr. Bhattacharya in the Twitter Files and discovered that he was on a “Trends Blacklist,” which ensured that his tweets would never make it to the trending topics on Twitter’s front page.

So the public never saw his tweets. The WSJ asked on December 9, 2022, “How many people endured weekslong quarantine because Dr. Bhattacharya’s message was suppressed? How many students would have been spared the education death knell of remote learning had schools heeded his advice, or even known about it?”

At one point Bhattacharya tweeted, “The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt.”

Dr. Bhattacharya Tells of His Ordeal at Stanford

In consultation with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Bhattacharya had stated that he didn’t think there were any randomized trials on child masking.

That led to an episode “I’m never going to forget the rest of my life” – an organized poster campaign on campus picturing him with a wave of cases in Florida, accusing him of killing people – even though there was lower all-cause mortality in open Florida than in locked-down California.

Then 100 faculty members circulated a petition asking the president to silence Bhattacharya about the Declaration. 

“Although Stanford is in favour of academic freedom, there was no open discussion on campus,” Bhattacharya told Weiss, “and I was never invited to present in a seminar…where people can disagree with me and we could have a debate, and the leaders of Stanford did not allow that…I'm not an alien here; I have been here for 36 years, first as a student, now as a professor.”

“I knew that I was going to put my career on the line by writing that declaration…as a result I faced tremendous backlash from both within Stanford and also outside.”

Why did he do it?

“I’ve been studying health policy for most of my professional life; I've written on economics of development in poor countries – I knew what was happening in poor countries as a consequence of lockdowns. I knew what was happening to children in the United States and elsewhere as a consequence of the school closures.  

I knew what was happening to the working class as a consequence of these policies – that only people that are relatively privileged like me could afford it so I couldn't not speak up when I saw these things. This was my life's work, to speak about vulnerable people, to design health policies that would benefit vulnerable people.

If I stayed silent like that, at a time like that, there's no purpose to my career. I don't care about my position fundamentally…I care fundamentally about the people I study and if I stayed silent I was basically deserting them.” (25:44)

There it is:  thumos alive and well in a morally integrated human being.

Vindication

Canada’s National Post carried these words on January 25, 2023:

Now, in January 2023, it is time to fully embrace the hard lessons to be learned from the CDC’s years-long failed pandemic management. Prudence requires that politicians and public health officials consider the harms of policies adopted at least as seriously as their putative benefits. Pandemic strategies should never again privilege the laptop class and other affluent populations over the poor. Public health should eschew wishful thinking, fearmongering, and policies that effectively divide society into clean and unclean. Protection of the vulnerable, whoever that may be in the next pandemic, should be the linchpin of pandemic management. And lockdowns should be consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong.

The Great Barrington Declaration is a blend of spirit, courage, and justice. It is this blend alone that advances a civilization fit for all.   

We need an English word for thumos.

Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya:  Thumos in medicine