Scientists Being Pressured Not to Speak Against Lockdowns

I think a lot of the media coverage has focused on a relatively narrow set of doctors who are very vocal and many of whom are very prominently placed. But in fact, I think a large fraction of the doctors, even epidemiologists, are uncomfortable and have been uncomfortable with the lockdown approach. When we put the Great Barrington Declaration out, tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists, scientists signed on despite enormous pressure to to not. I've had lots of people who've signed on write to me and tell me that they have had their jobs threatened because of their support for these ideas. So there's been an enormous amount of pressure, I think, within the medical community and in the scientific community at large to sort of argue for, or to at least tacitly support, or stay silent about the lockdowns, even despite any qualms that someone might have about it.

Who is that pressure coming from?

Often internal.

So it's coming from other doctors.

Yeah, from other doctors. But instead of having an open debate about the wisdom or lack of wisdom about the lockdowns, about what the right policies might be, what's happened is essentially a demonization of people who dissent. It's nothing like I have ever seen in my, you know, I've been working as a professor for 20-some years, and I've been, you know, I mean, training for longer than that. I've never seen an environment anywhere like this ever before on a scientific question, at least that I've put my attention to.

Okay, so I'm sorry to push you, but how do you explain that?

I mean, I think part of it is, you know, this was a new disease that nobody had any experience with. The early experience out of China I think played a big role in how many scientists viewed this. They looked at the evidence coming out of China that this was A, a very deadly disease for a certain set of people, and that B, that a draconian lockdown apparently dissolved the epidemic within just a short number of months. I think that played an outsized role in people's imagination about what sorts of policies would work, how deadly disease was, and a whole range of other things. They landed on a set of policies, they meaning like the NIAID, Dr. Fauci, and I shouldn't just focus on him, the whole range of Western governments, landed on a range of policies that essentially copied that approach, and they decided that was the only approach. They had a misleading sort of take on how deadly the disease actually is. So from the early days of the epidemic, I worked on a set of studies called seroprevalence studies. A seroprevalence study measures the level of antibodies in the population at large, providing evidence of how widespread the disease was. So for instance, I helped conduct a seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County and LA County in April of last year. And what we found was that there were almost 40 or 50 more cases— infections than had been picked up by public health authorities at the time. For every person walking around with the disease that the public health authorities knew about, there were 40 or 50 others they hadn't picked up. And that meant the disease was something on the order of 40, 50 times less deadly than— I mean, so when the World Health Organization put out a number saying that it was 3% mortality, case fatality rate, that was incredibly misleading. In fact, it's something on the order of 0.2%.

[Speaker:DR_REAGAN] Why did they do that?

[Speaker:DR_ZUCKERMAN] Well, I mean, I think part of it was they didn't know the infection fatality rate 'cause they hadn't conducted a study. But that's also a curious question. Like the first instinct that I had when I saw that number was I wanted to know how widespread the disease actually was. When in H1N1 10 years ago, or 10, I guess, 12 years ago, the seroprevalence studies found that the disease was 100 times more prevalent than people knew about, than the public health authorities knew about, and therefore 100 times less deadly. The first hypothesis I had when I saw that was maybe that's true here.

Right, but I'm asking you, why did WHO mislead the world?

And was it deliberate? I mean, I think that the, I think there's been a couple of times where I just wonder what they were thinking. So that 3.4% number, they should have put in context. They should have said, these are the cases that are the most deadly, but we don't know anything about how widespread it is. And they said, they should have argued for studies to check immediately. That's the response I would have expected.

So in light of what you've said, in light of the Great Barrington Declaration and What should an intelligent layperson, I am an intelligent layperson, conclude other than I no longer believe the medical authorities of the United States or the world?

I mean, I guess I wouldn't go quite so far. I mean, I think there's a lot of good people in the establishment. What I would say is that there's a, we have to change our institutions so that they're more open to debate, medical institutions or scientific institutions need to repudiate this very strange, you know, the way, let me try to address this philosophically, right? So there's two kinds of norms I see that I deal with in my work. First, there's a norm in science. And the norm in science is there has to be absolutely free debate. Ideas are evaluated based on their consistency with evidence.

And you have an idea— All right, forgive me, doctor, I want you to finish that sentence.

Thought.

We just have a few minutes. I need your time and I need that answer. Thank you.