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Dr. Scott Atlas' talk at the PECC Plenary meeting, which provides his perspective on how decisions were made in the White House regarding the policy to address COVID-19.

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic. ...

With schools open, Sweden had zero Covid deaths in the one-to-15 age group, while teachers had the same mortality as the average of other professions. Based on those facts, summarized in a July 7, 2020, report by the Swedish Public Health Agency, all U.S. schools should have quickly reopened. Not doing so led to “startling evidence on learning loss” in the United States, especially among lower- and middle-class children, an effect not seen in Sweden.

Sweden was the only major Western country that rejected school closures and other lockdowns in favor of concentrating on the elderly, and the final verdict is now in. Led by an intelligent social democrat prime minister (a welder), Sweden had the lowest excess mortality among major European countries during the pandemic, and less than half that of the United States. Sweden’s Covid deaths were below average, and it avoided collateral mortality caused by lockdowns.

Yet on July 29, 2020, the Harvard-edited New England Journal of Medicine published an article by two Harvard professors on whether primary schools should reopen, without even mentioning Sweden. It was like ignoring the placebo control group when evaluating a new pharmaceutical drug. That’s not the path to truth.

Harvard's response to the pandemic, including the firing of Martin Kulldorff, raises concerns about academic freedom and the need for reform in the scientific community.

There is a lack of randomized trial data on vaccine efficacy for older people, particularly in relation to reducing hospitalizations and deaths.

Vaccine trials have limitations in assessing rare conditions and long-term efficacy and adverse reactions.

Post-approval monitoring of vaccine safety is necessary to identify and address side effects.

The controversy over the CDC's pause on the J&J vaccine rollout had a negative impact on public trust and vaccine uptake.

Vaccine mandates should consider individual risk profiles and the availability of vaccines for vulnerable populations.

In a compelling interview with The New American, Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, delves into the epidemiologically absurd and medically unethical Covid-19 policies and the totalitarian practice of government censorship targeting lawful speech.

The scientist unveils his instant skepticism toward Covid-19 restrictions. He confessed, “I was scared of Covid for 10, maybe 20 minutes,” elucidating how early data suggested that the virus would spread globally and that it posed a miniscule threat to the majority of society. Instead of advocating targeted protection of vulnerable populations while preserving normalcy for the rest and seeking early treatments, the government, disregarding the basics of edipemiology known to humanity for millennia, opted for sweeping lockdowns and school closures, adversely (and often irreversibly) impacting both children and adults and creating collateral public health damage translated into the rise in cancers, cardiovascular diseases, mental health issues, and diabetes, as well as plummeted educational and social development in children. Notably, nations like Sweden, which embraced strategies akin to Dr. Kulldorff’s recommendations, enjoyed drastically better public health outcomes as well as lower Covid mortality rates and no academic setbacks for children.

Furthermore, the scientist raises grave concerns about the government’s suppression of dissenting voices on social media platforms. “The First Amendment is not only a right for me to speak; it’s also the right for every American to listen,” he asserts, denouncing governmental overreach as dangerous and incompatible with American values. Along with Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, activist Jill Hines, the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, and the states of Missouri and Louisiana, Dr. Kulldorff is a plaintiff in the Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) case that is expected to be ruled on by the Supreme Court by June.

Additionally, Dr. Kulldorff, a former member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group, addresses issues related to the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines, citing serious flaws in their clinical trials and talking about the differences in excess mortality between people vaccinated with mRNA and viral-based Covid vaccines.

Nobody understands the dangers of institutionalized censorship than Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya, so he tweeted a compelling point in the wee hours last night, perhaps ruminating over the Vance/Walz debate:



We’re having trouble processing it too, Jay. Believe me.

many of you know that i am a big fan of jay bhattacharya. he’s a friend and a gatopal™. he’s also the right person to try to fix the fetid swamp DBA “the NIH” and here’s why:

the NIH has had lots of smart people, educated people, skillful people, even probably lots of hard working people (and jay is all of those things) but what it has egregiously lacked, at least at the top, are honest, honorable, good people. and jay is all of those things as well.

and NIH needs that.

i know jay fairly well. we met on twitter and became friends sharing trenches in the covidian conflicts. he and his charming wife have been my houseguests in real life. you really get to know people in person, see who they are. jay is not a fief-builder nor power hungry. he really wants what’s best and understands what science and public health are, and what they should (and should not) be.

“science should be an engine for knowledge and freedom, not something that stands on top of society and says you must do this or else.”

“it shouldn’t be pushing covid vaccines.”

in the age of collins and fauci, the NIH was bent and broken. it became a vast, amoral, dishonest money laundry and gold giving grant factory that cemented itself atop america and desperately damaged not only trust in but the very nature of medical science in these united states.

fauci has been haunting american health since AIDS and AZT. he was the bad guy in like 4 consecutive sequels lying and profiting, playing patron and profiteering. collins was no different.

it was held in high esteem, but the whole place is a trainwreck.

and now at least we know.

and that is what makes this new push around “no, really you need to trust the experts” so ridiculous.

boy did THAT old chestnut explode in the fire of the last 5 years…

“the amateurs” mopped the floor with “the experts.”

it was one of the most unfair fights i have ever seen.

even if these people meant well, most of them simply do not know what they are doing. “experts” are often hilariously inexpert and the fields of epidemiology and public health seem especially rife with people who obviously failed math. ...

to really fix this system, we need to shrink it. i’m not sure how politically palatable “getting the government entirely out of the grants game” can really be, but we need to make it more so. we need to end this for good and all.

there is no “safe dose.” it’s feeding an addict. you let the state start to decide what “the science” to settle on by funding its partisans and starving its detractors and you rapidly land in the same place. universities run on this. tenure is gained by it. business suck up to it. every research discipline grows dependent and myopic. the first topic of study is always “what conclusions do i need to have to get money from the state?”

that’s not science. that’s totalitarian dogma with a layer of pretext slap-painted over the rust.

this is how you get 97% of scientists agree. the rest get no money and got crowded out and attacked by grant funded media machines.

ultimately, this needs to go before congress, perhaps the supreme court. people need to challenge the legality, the constitutionality of these grants. let the cases come and then have the agencies concede and settle. make it the case law of the land that the grant grift is over.

I just found out from friends that I actually met Bhattacharya at a party at their house that I went to about a year and a half ago. I suppose I just met him as "Jay" and didn't think anything of it.

Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya as our new NIH Director, and Johns Hopkins Professor and surgeon Marty Makary as FDA Commissioner. You literally could not ask for two better appointments to those positions. Both courageous men took massive professional risks during covid to publicly oppose Biden’s pandemic policies (unlike cowardly Big Law).

I had the great honor of working with Dr. Bhattacharya. He helped me successfully stop the first government vaccine mandate in Florida. We instantly hit it off on both personal and professional levels. Jay is an all-in Christian, like me. He’s thoughtful, if not brilliant, and profoundly ethical. Ironically — deliciously ironically — Jay was individually targeted for destruction by Frances Collins and Tony Fauci— the leaders of the very same agency he was just appointed to run.

Jay holds a healthy distrust of the so-called public health agency. In other words, Jay walks into the NIH not just with a résumé—but with a long memory and unfinished business.

Bhattacharya: I have an MD [US medical doctor’s degree] and a PhD in economics. From the almost the first moment I started doing research I was very interested in infectious disease. My first published paper was on HIV. And because I do economics at the intersection of economics and medicine, a lot of it was about policy. So I published throughout my career a lot of papers on infectious disease.

When this pandemic hit, the World Health Organization… put out a report a estimate in a conference saying that the death rate from this virus is 3.4%.

Interviewer: Devastating if true…

Bhattacharya: Yes, I mean if 3 out of 100 people die from getting this, that is a disaster. Nothing in modern peacetime history has an analog, and it’s going to go everywhere because it’s a virus that spreads very easily. That was really clear from the data early on [that] that was true…

But that number had to be wrong… is what I thought… because I thought back to what happened in the swine flu…

In the swine flu in 2009 the World Health Organization put out an estimate saying… this is a 4% death rate…

The problem was [that] they observed the people that died from the swine flu, but they didn’t observe the total set of people that had been infected. They only saw the people that were really sick… enough to come to the hospital. That meant the death rate was something like 1 in 10,000, not 3 out of 100 or 4 out of 100.

That defanged the swine flu pandemic. It went from this… disastrous thing that's going to kill everybody to… it's another flu.

Interviewer: The uncomfortable implication of this is that public health officials don’t care about what is true. It’s seen as a virtue to overstate the danger… in other words, to lie about it… whatever gets people to take take the virus seriously…

Bhattacharya: At the time, in January 2020, if you said that, “I’m not sure this number is right… maybe it’s less dangerous than people think… maybe it’s not 3.4%... maybe it’s less than that…” that was seen as a sin… a cardinal sin… It was crazy. It was absolutely outside of my experience… I started getting death threats. I didn’t say one word about economics... It was just pure epidemiology.

In March 2020, I wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. The death rate projections based on just simple back-of-the-envelope math could have ranged from 20,000 deaths to millions and millions and millions of deaths.

And we wrote that in the Wall Street Journal piece… we don’t know this… and we called for a seroprevalence study of antibodies in the population

Interviewer: You were just doing what you do, and you had done it before… The scientific process demands that people ask questions, particularly when you see half-baked scare figures that are designed to get people hysterical. But the whole world came down on you because you wrote an op-ed…

Bhattacharya: It was crazy. I would get accusations from friends on campus accusing me of valuing economics over lives. That framing was was so unfair… because if you lock down an economy, which is what we were planning to do… we were talking about doing in March of 2020… you are going to kill people, especially poor people who cannot abide by having their lives disrupted by these kinds of disruptions… their basic economic activities.

You have someone who’s a worker in a market who sells coconuts for a living. And he buys the coconuts… his entire life savings is in the coconuts that he bought. And if he sells… he can then buy more coconuts for the next day and live, and use the rest to feed his family.

You say, “You’re locked down” and that guy’s going to starve. His family is going to starve. You say, “Okay, we’re not going to do trade anymore… we’re going to lock down where all the supply chains are going to get disrupted…” The pointy end of that is some some poor guy in the middle of nowhere whose job depends on this… and now he earns less than $2 a day or something… goes into dire poverty and starves. The decision was always lives versus lives.

@MartinKulldorff
In a great win for academic freedom, NIH director @drjbhattacharya has removed the old rule that research manuscripts by NIH scientists must be approved by their superiors before it could be published.