Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and one of the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which outlines a focused protection strategy for dealing with COVID-19.
Although many academics disagree with Bhattacharya about the merits of focused protection, you’d hope they would treat him with respect when expressing their disagreement. Unfortunately, in the era of wokeness and safetyism on campus, this is too much to ask for.
Professor Bhattacharya recently became the subject of a censorious petition circulated by his own colleagues at Stanford.
Although the petition does not name him explicitly, it refers to a “Stanford faculty member” who – gasp – “defends the Governor of Florida’s rejection of mask mandates”. It then directly quotes Bhattacharya as saying “there is no high-quality evidence to support the assertion that masks stop the disease from spreading”.
Note how reasonable this supposedly controversial statement is. Bhattacharya didn’t say there is “no evidence”. He said there is “no high-quality evidence”, which strikes me as entirely defensible. Although there has been one RCT of community masking – the Bangladesh mask study – its results were inconclusive at best.
What’s more, Bhattacharya’s statement concerned the effect of children wearing masks, and there haven’t been any RCTs on that. (The Bangladesh mask study – which had not been published at the time his comments were made – only monitored adults.)
According to the petitioners, Bhattacharya “sows mistrust of policies designed to protect the public health and puts young children, their families and their teachers at risk”. Quite a charge to level at one of your own colleagues. And this wasn’t an off-hand remark in a heated conversation; it was written in a letter to the University President.
The petitioners “recognise the right of every member of the scientific community to express their views and opinions”. But “a time comes,” they write, “when skepticism can no longer be seen as anything other than willful disregard of countervailing facts”.
Perhaps the petitioners are aware of another large-scale RCT of community masking, which does show an unambiguous benefit? If so, it was not mentioned in their missive.
They go on to say: “Encouraging others to deviate from nationally-advocated policy during a pandemic jeopardises us all.” Given that the authorities initially advised against mask-wearing, this must mean the first scientists who questioned that advice were also “jeopardising us all”.
Maybe Bhattacharya’s critics can pen a belated letter denouncing those scientists who “encouraged others to deviate from” the U.S. Surgeon General’s advice in February of 2020. He urged people to “STOP BUYING MASKS” because they are “NOT effective” at preventing the general public from catching coronavirus.
The petitioners conclude their missive by asking the University President to “forcefully declare your faith in the measures you are relying upon to bring us back to campus”. And if that doesn’t sound like a religious exhortation, I don’t know what does.
Incidentally, the petition against Bhattacharya isn’t the first example of Stanford academics mobbing one of their own colleagues for questioning the received wisdom on Covid policy.
Last October, 98 faculty members signed a petition criticising Dr Scott Atlas, whom they accused of spreading “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science”. As a matter of fact, a recent study of academic cancel culture found that Stanford had experienced more incidents than any other U.S. university.
Based on this evidence, it looks like Stanford scholars need to spend more time doing teaching and research, and less time denouncing their colleagues.
This post has been updated.
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My thoughts are that while. Bhattacharya has been a superb voice for rationality, even for people as intelligent as him, the wakey wakey time is approaching. It’s not really about masks.
As the article points out, it’s cultural. “Cult-ural”. They just want you out, not on the basis of any real argument, just so they can take over.
No. It’s not even ‘cultural’ – it’s political at the grossest level of belly-crawling propagandizing.
Actually, if I have any criticism of Bhattacharya, it is that he has been too moderate in pulling his punches on naming this as a scam. Similarly, I note that Ioannides has been recently over-reasonable in naming the syndrome.
But you can see why, if they are surrounded by this servile, pre-programmed travesty of academic thought and ability.
This is what proper academics – Gupta another example – are up against in a corrupted environment – another aspect of the floater syndrome, where the balance of power has tipped in favour of the weak and windy. Note the treatment handed out by the crawlers to other well-known names who possess real scientific ability and integrity, as opposed to the narrow technical expertise favoured by their sponsors.
One thing is clear – throttling back on the truth in order to placate the wolves is a pointless exercise.
Amen, brother.
Agree 100%
Spot on – simple truth there has been no pandemic.
The Declaration is well out of date become any pandemic is well and truly over. It look more certain now that it was a Midazolam epidemic.
Are These Findings the Death Blow for Vaccine Passports?
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/09/17/natural-immunity-vaccine-passports.aspx?ui=1fb065e0c4152b58bd4ed94cf29c7cbfad40307fb723460ddabacd55f3c58b0c&sd=20210518&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20210917&mid=DM984914&rid=1266447275
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That’s it.
Lowering entry requirements at even the top universities is the recruitment strategy, they want impressionable young people they can indoctrinate into the cult, and force anybody who doesn’t agree with them, out.
It is not clear whether the academic petitioners have any scientific credentials, but it would seem from their comments that they have not.
Well, I’m sure a ‘degree’ in History or English or Gender Studies will qualify them as (self-styled) ‘experts’…just not in what they’re talking about.
TBH as an engineer, I’ve come across many scientists and especially clinicians (as well as bureaucrats) over the years who have lots of letters after their names but little common sense, but large doses of naivete, left wing ideology and/or huge egos, whereby they keep on making the same mistakes time and again.
Very few of them inhabit the Real World, so have little idea of the lives or concerns of ordinary people.
While doing a phd I attended many presentations of work in progress and nearly always came away with the thought that I’d learn more on the same subject sitting in a pub and talking to some bloke (or blokess) at the bar. It was almost scary how blinkered, bloated and no brainer most ‘arguments’ were – said more about the end of a dying academy – since about 1980.
“Note how reasonable this supposedly controversial statement is. Bhattacharya didn’t say there is “no evidence”. He said there is “no high-quality evidence”, which strikes me as entirely defensible.”
But neither truth nor reasonableness are any defence, in the minds of the modern dogmatic left, if the opinion being expressed is “inherently harmful”. This is only a particular manifestation in the covid panic field of the broader intolerance that is generally identified as “cancel culture”, and is a feature of the now dominant ideological left.
Decades ago this began with battles over “political correctness”. The goal has been to defeat arguments for freedom of speech by claiming that this freedom must be “balanced” against supposed harms caused by particular kinds of speech. What this means in practice is that the powerful can almost always suppress speech they dislike by pointing to some made up “harm” caused by it. Often they have been able to get away with even such feeble nonsense as “offence” for this purpose, and these crimes against liberty have been enshrined in UK and European law for many years now. In the US the First Amendment still stands against the worst abuses of this kind, but it is in the sights of the left for “reform”.
The interesting cultural shift is that which took the left from doggedly resisting elite controls on speech and opinion, in the early-mid-C20th, when they (rightly) saw it as being likely to be used against them and their causes, to the left’s broad approval for elite controls on speech in the late C20th. Antiracism was an early medium for this shift in attitude away from liberty, but it was the growing understanding, conscious or not, that they now wear the jackboots, that shifted the left’s position in favour of kicking dissenters into silence.
“…shrill whining….verbal diarrhoea..…..nasty evil capitalists…...stupidy stupidy stupid…think how disreputable such stuff will appear in the mainstream….77 Brigade…….if only Mark would shut his stupidy mouth and stop saying nasty things…did I mention they are stupid things as well?”
Just saving RickH a few seconds in crafting his standard “response”.
Aleady done. No ‘standard’ response, Mark – As usual, I leave that thought-free alternative propaganda operation to you.
“thought-free“
I think I had that one covered with “stupidy stupidy stupid”, tbh.
As said. Unaltered by finger jerking – the blog equivalent of knee-jerk responses.
WeAreFairCop
@WeAreFairCop
“Insulting someone is as bad as punching them in the face” @NorfolkPolice
https://youtu.be/MqZASkkQbSs via @YouTube
Exchange with the police – CBR Norwichyoutube.com
7:31 AM · Sep 17, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/WeAreFairCop/status/1438752481387945984
The consequences of indoctrination and/or the desire to suck up to authority.
And one of the replies to that:
ripx4nutmeg
@ripx4nutmeg
Replying to @WeAreFairCop
@NorfolkPolice
and @YouTube
“The video is extraordinary. The woman is punched in the face by someone deranged and aggressive, and the policeman appears to say that the victim expressing her democratic right to protest was equivalent to the act of actual violence against her”
https://twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1438772788605640706
People who say things like that have never been punched in the face. I have. It’s a rapid learning experience.
In fairness, in that case the policeman is just repeating his indoctrination lines from whatever leftist dogma class he most recently attended.
It’s not natural stupidity or inexperience, it’s intentionally inculcated dogma.
That’s exactly the problem with society at large, very few people have experienced any real violence and so have no reference point for all the trivial rubbish.
It’s the societal equivalent of autoimmune disorders caused by how overly clean and sanitised our homes, food and water are.
Very good point!
…..caused by how overly clean and sanitised our homes, food and water are.
And vaccines.
The Universities have been in the vanguard of the post-truth train that has now arrived in Western society.
no different from many scientists from history who were vilified for having a non-mainstream opinion and were later proved right
It’s Galileo Galilei all over again.We seem to have regressed into an Age of the Endarkenment.
Ironically we have arrived at this destination courtesy of people who call themselves “progressives”.
I think this is different in kind from the ‘Galileo experience’. It is about an engineered (propagandized) reversal – away from objective evidence and previous knowledge, rather than a resistance to a new (revolutionary) paradigm.
In that sense, its much worse.
That’s a very good point. One of the greatest victories of our enemy, and one of our greatest failings, is that the idea that lockdowns etc are the orthodox response to something like covid is now deeply embedded in most people’s minds.
The failing is not ours. In terms of propaganda, we are totally outgunned and the dumb downed masses are no longer capable of questioning anything, that they are told by government and/or big media.
“Dumbed down masses” – that is a trigger for all kinds of knee jerk responses that RickH is not a fan off (tongue slightly in cheek).
However, what else to be expected? The education system and its delivery in the UK has been dominated – in a wholly malign way imho – for decades by the PC Brigade which is mostly populated by those of a Socialist Faith Dogma in my experience. Just as the BBC is as biased and agenda driven as it is accused by any person with a thinking brain and is becoming more emboldened by virtue of the tide of mendacious op ed pieces masquerading as “Noos” – very often lobby fed fodder and very obviously so, the Education Establishment has engaged in brain washing since the 1960’s. The PC Brigade is the prepubescent state of the adult “Woke” establishment currently expanding like an amoeba – just with less brains.
We have seen our kids
taughtfed KS information instead of teaching them, at the right age, to think for themselves – an anathema to the Socialist Teaching Unions. English Comprehension becomes “Critical thinking” – a sure sign of malign influence when a subject is renamed for no other reason than the agenda setting Teaching Establishment. If you don’t encourage independent thoughts and minds – but why would you if you are fully signed up to delivering the brainwashing – how can you expect folks to suddenly start to think more deeply – they don’t “know how”; one way might be an existential “shock” to them , their families and acquaintances such as this casedemic and it might just cause them to ask themselves using the three most important words in the English language -” which means that…”This might not mean some might change their view, accepted, but until a great many more people experience this “conversion” or such horrific personal events which cause a “reboot” – it is an uphill battle to open non sceptics to information they are not “seeing” atm; I keep fighting.
BTW, I do not tar all teachers with the above brush; we know a good many honourable exceptions as must do others.
Agreed, and I saw it start in the field of diet when high carb low fat diets were championed despite the obvious crash in metabolic health, including obesity. Low carb research was routinely blocked by Ethics Committees and the few studies that were permitted could not get published. See also, Ivermectin. Makes it hard for facts as opposed to agendas.
“Italy has become the first country in Europe to make it compulsory for all workers to have a Covid ‘”green pass”.
From mid-October, about 23 million people will need to prove they’ve been vaccinated or have had a negative test, or that they’ve recovered from the virus.”
time to go and get the virus if you don’t want the vaccine. its harmless anyway (the virus)
He should just accuse them of racism: that would shut them up double-quick!
interestingly he and Sunetra have never taken that line but I imagine their opponents would in a heart beat
Yes, the decent people keep playing fair. I think it is well past time to give the b****rs some of their own medicine!
Off topic but a couple of years ago we went to San Francisco and on the advice of a friend who had lived in SF to stay in Berkley and to get the tube into the city. As we were in Berkley we decided to have a walk around the campus, outside there were a load of white students protesting about ethnic rights or something about black rights, whilst on campus all the ethnics were going to lectures.
The European Caucasian race has lost the plot and needs to be subjugated to realise it’s not as bad as other races.
“The European Caucasian race”
Well – that’s a new invention.
Try looking up races. The indigenous people of Europe are European Caucasian, the indigenous people of Asia are Asian Caucasian, the indigenous people of Africa are Negroid Anthropoid etc.
Burn the heretic! The mask is God!
The symbol of the covid cult is the ‘Mask’. It is the new hammer and sickle / swastika symbol. There is only one way out of this. Resistance. And bl@@dy hard!
Covid restrictions are evidence of doomsday cultism and communism.
This Maoist attempt to silence him speaks volumes.
I guarantee if this was the other way around, those involved would’ve been arrested for ‘harrassment’.
Galileo was threatened with excommunication and being burnt at the stake as a herectic. So we have made some progress at least now that it is mere public denunciation.
It does not matter how many scientists/academics disagree; as Einstein said “If I am wrong, then one is enough”.
Interestingly, the Vatican didn’t take any action against him until they were lobbied by scientists outraged at Galileo’s challenge to their own orthodoxy.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-novel-sars-cov-2-variant-variant-of-concern-20201201
deaths ‘within 28 days etc’ of sequenced delta 29 Aug -> 12 Sept
age vaccinated (post 2 weeks) unvaccinated
<50 ———–11—————————33——–
>50 ————511————————-153——-
These deep fakes are amazing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_aBd8cQ-Ek
This is the chief medical officer of the United States!
When they drop any pretence of telling the truth and lie to your face, contradicting, well, themselves(!!) on video, you know we’re fucked as a society.
At least with letters, like the 1200 scientists who wanted to cancel Freedom Day, the signatories names are a matter of public record, which seems fair if you want to influence public policy and / or impugn your own colleages.
What has happened to the leading scientists who signed the Faucist co-ordinated letter to the Lancet claiming that there was no possibility that Sars2 was a gain of function virus, while concealing their own involvements in the institutions which made gof possible.
Open paltering. Lies in open view. Indeed, clear conspiracy.
Have their university colleagues demanded they be fired, and are publications refusing all their submissions?
Why not?
If Stanford Uni can entertain a multi faculty censorship campaign against Bhattacharya – I think that is duplicated around the world and not just about coping with SARS COV2.
Michael Mann has trotted out palpably dishonest bollox about AGW/CC and was complicit along with hordes of other so called academics in deliberate, knowingly dishonest manipulation of publicly derived data to push his/their agenda, as revealed in the UoEA emails for example – in any other period that would have meant instant dismissal from his post and ostracisation from academia; the fact that he still peddles this patent rubbish, still occupies his post and still has not paid the damages awarded against him to Professor Tim Ball ( how apposite that he was sued for defamation about his alleged “doctoring of data” but “done” by a jUdge for not releasing his source data backing up his fraudulent claims….well and truly hoisted )
I realise that your question might be rhetorical SB, but I feel the “forces of evil” are large and powerful but like Sauron’s armies, eminently deferrable. Where is Gandalf when you need him?
Collectivist ideology, in whatever form, has always tended to be pushed by mobs and tried to crush dissent. It is in the very nature of collectivism.
It happened with communism. It happened with fascism. It happens with most if not all religions. And it’s certainly happening with the new health authoritarianism emerging.
An “era of wokeness and safetyism”…the very words make the hair on the back of the neck stand up! Wokeness and safetyism are just two of the garments in the chest of totalitarianism. The oh so enlightened professors at Stanford (and most other educational institutions) are really just petty, spiteful, willfully ignorant totalitarian creeps.
David Starkey talks about a return to medieval type behaviour and a pre Enlightenment mindset in one of his interviews.
This type of thing at what is allegedly a top University illustrates his point very well.
We live in troubling times.
There has been a large-scale and on-going study on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in slowing or stopping the spread of this virus – in the population and in school children. That “study” is called “real life” in Sweden.
Regarding school-age children and masks, it included almost 2 million study participants and the study has lasted for more than 19 months by now. Scientific studies don’t get any better than this.
From that photo at the top, the Stanford University tower appears to have been modelled on the tower of Imperial College. That seems strangely appropriate here!
How can science move towards best practices when those who challenge hypothesis they are unsupported are liable to virtual lynching? Think about this, it is not immoral to state that a mask, whose porous was is perhaps hundreds of times larger then the virus it seeks to stop, is of limited to zero benefit. Like saying chain link fences cannot stop snow. And he has only said this about children. When Sweden conducted classes for under 16s without masks since 3/2020 and…no children died, and rate of serious illness are essentially 0. When Florida has done so and children are not ending up in hospital with school-acquired Illness.
It is no longer about whether you are pro-mask or anti-mask. It is now about intellectual pursuits and academic honesty. When a thesis is disproved, no matter how popular it may be, it must be re-evaluated. And publishing data and making politics recommendations based off of data must be allowed. Stanford is going down a dark path as is much of academia (I work in it and the things said often make me shudder). Please stand with the Professor, whether you think we should be wearing ten masks or none, for the intellectual openness that can seek truth.
…
Stanford is weird. Its fabulously rich (2’nd to Harvard) and has bought itself some first rate talent in some faculties (almost all the Nobel laureates were bough in, unlike UC Berkeley were they are home grown) but some faculties and endowed institutes on campus are little more the self perpetuating cliques full of total morons. This has always been an open secret on “The Farm”.
The Stanford Hospital is one of the best in the country and the Med School research reflects this. But the person who started the witch hunt, some woman named Bondy, is a Prof at a totally separate privately endowed Cancer Institute on campus that was set up 20 years ago and quite separate from the actual Med School. Looking at her resume she basically does woke’ish research on womens health and spent her whole career before Stanford at a ho hum Public Heath UT faculty in Texas. Not even the main one in Austin. We are not dealing with an academic high flyer here.
So basically an academic nonentity who only seems to have done essentially trivial research on women cancers and after almost 20 years in administration got a very cushy job at a privately endowed Cancer Institute. Very convenient for the Stanford Shopping Center which is just across the street.
So this Bondy woman who started the petition is basically another of the medical administrator / bureaucrat types who knows nothing about the subject which Professor Bhattacharya is an actual real honest to god expert on.
Save Our Rights UK – A Real Democracy
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Do you want the Government to bring in Plan B? Vaccine passports, mandatory masks, working from home etc? Or even worse the secret option Plan C – lockdown?
If not join us with your feet on the street and vote for PLAN FREE
Science is as dead as democracy.
There are times when I think humanity deserves culling. So much deception, sadistic and vitriolic behavior.
There are times when I think humanity deserves culling.
“Isnt that The Plan?”
The Covid narrative supporters really are getting worried about being exposed, methinks.
If only that were true.
This is back to the medieval. It’s almost religious. The lack of real enlightenment and education had now come full circle. Once again those with reasonable intelligence and an ability to ask questions are treated like pariahs. This time its far worse because we know what happened before and we know this time if the cult wins, they will indeed destroy humanity.
It is time people stopped ignoring talking about a non proven virus and started talking about murder and depopulation
Yes Stanford professors, like most universities, appears to have turned out the good the bad and the ugly. All universities in the USA are funded privately, especially the big names. Anyone know who is funding whose next research project? Probably not. The authors of the GBD were brave to speak out when they did. We all know masks don’t work, just wondering what the big deal is. Florida cases etc are falling like a stone right now, so again, taking advice from Drs. Atlas, Battacharya and Kuldorff seems to have been a good decision.
I am still uncomfortable with the fact that the GBD have not spoken out about the massive vaxx failure, the plan for boosters, the plan to vaccinate kids, despite the massive numbers of adverse events, breakthrough cases, and deaths cdc VAERS.
How disgusting that alleged intelligent people could stoop so low. Obviously they are in Deep State Hypnosis so their academic ethics have been flushed away.
What’s the difference between Stanford and the Taliban/