UnHerd has published an interview between Freddie Sayers and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in which the Stanford Professor reveals what he found when Elon Musk invited him to Twitter HQ – that he was shadow banned by the social media company for criticising the lockdown policy, as was Dr. Martin Kulldorff. You can watch the interview in full here and read an edited transcript here. Here is Dr. Bhattacharya on why censorship of this kind causes harm.
Do you think the pandemic response might have gone differently if voices such as yours were not suppressed?
Yes… I do really believe censorship kills, and censorship killed during this pandemic. The policies could have been so much better… The policies that were adopted were incredibly damaging to the lives and livelihoods of so many people. 100million people thrown into poverty worldwide: that’s the estimate from the World Bank. Just the consequences of that itself are going to have tremendous effects on the lives and livelihoods of people going forward. And of course, all these children were robbed of an education for years. Those are absolutely monumental outcomes of the policies we adopted during the pandemic, and they should have been freely discussed. My view of the scientific evidence is that it was so clear, even at the time, that we should not have been closing schools. And if we had been allowed to have a free and fair discussion, I think the schools would not have closed – if there hadn’t been this sort of demerit system for people who spoke up against these kinds of policies.
At the end of the interview, Dr. Bhattacharya is asked whether Elon Musk is harming the cause of free speech by sometimes behaving in a Trump-like manner – and he makes more or less the same point I made in the most recent episode of the Weekly Sceptic, which is that it would be nice if he went about prosecuting this war in a more grown-up way, but on balance he’s a very good thing.
Do you worry that, with Twitter messages like “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”, Elon Musk is going too far and will imperil his project?
It’s not what I would do were I in his position. But on the other hand, I don’t have $44 billion to buy the company. The ideal person for this may not exist… we have to deal with the people we have in front of us. And Elon is, I think, a big step up from the previous ownership, who obviously weren’t that committed to free speech… I agree that it’s not the wisest use of his power. I think it would have been wiser to be more temperate in talking about, for instance, Tony Fauci. I think that Fauci made tremendous mistakes: he abused his power during the pandemic. And it’s led to a lot of problems. But I think the right redress is not to prosecute him, but for history to remember him having made those mistakes, and that in fact, although he may have committed his life to healing, the prescriptions he gave during the pandemic made the lives of so many people worse.
Jay is a copper-bottomed hero and this interview is worth watching in full.
Stop Press: Elon Musk has now restored the Twitter accounts of several journalists whom he suspended because they’d posted links to an account called ElonJet which tracked his comings and goings via private jet in real time. MailOnline has more.
Stop Press 2: Andrew Bridgen MP gave an interview on the Irreverend Podcast following his speech in the House of Commons drawing attention to vaccine harms. Listen here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Yeah, but they didn’t kill Granny!
Because they didn’t meet up in school they couldn’t spread the Plague among themselves and then take it home and kill the rest of their families. Of course, being avidly engaged in Home Learning none of them were out making nuisances of themselves in public or finding other opportunities to meet and spread the Plague. /s
I think the state did a good job of killing off Granny without the help or family members spreading a virus. If this virus exists considering if you amplify the PCR enough you could find anything, maybe even traces of the Black Death!
Granny could have taken Vit.D, Zinc, HCQ, and/or Ivermectin, but they were verboten.
I know enough people have pointed this out but why are people who write these blogs referring to a “pandemic”…..Even if it exists it was the countermeasures that are the cause of the economic, social etc problems. Or at least put it in quote marks, pseudo or ‘plan’ in front of it.
Thanks for saving me the trouble. Language matters.
Scamdemic.
In an otherwise useful article, that jumped out at me also, stop feeding their narrative.
The terrible learning loss was part of the Globalist plan, as American Patriot Charlotte Iserbyt discovered and exposed after working as senior policy advisor for years in the education department of the US government, and later working in the State Department. She wrote about it in her book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”. She said the motto was “Target the Resisters”.
Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
The “New Feudal Order” needs the serfs to be uneducated, as they were in the good old Mediaeval days of Lords & Serfs, without a pesky middle class to interfere.
A terrible situation you can take hold of these children and try and bring them up to scratch but the emotional damage has already been done.
Dumbing down the children is essential if they are to swallow the utter bullshit that is Nut Zero. And Nut Zero is probably going to be the biggest game in town for the next fifty years.
It’s like Inflation, the effects are accumulative.