Rep. Chip Roy and The House Freedom Caucus hosted a COVID-19 accountability hearing Thursday and invited doctors Scott Atlas, Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya to speak.
During that hearing, one of the highlight moments came from Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
During his testimony, he homed in on the “misinformation,” a term that has been popularized since the outset of Covid-19. But what’s been particularly disturbing about that word is that it was weaponized to slander government critics.
Dr. Bhattacharya argues:
“The primary source of the most important problems and misinformation have come from the federal government itself. He repeats. “The primary source of misinformation has been the federal government itself.”
It’s used its power to manage the spread of information in social media. It’s used [what are] effectively propaganda techniques in order to destroy the reputations and careers of people who spoke up to try to correct these ideas and information.
Let’s take a look at some examples of government misinformation.
The Failure to Recognize Natural Immunity
Martin [Kulldorff] mentioned the idea that immunity occurs after you have disease. That is absolutely true! This is a Coronavirus. It was really clear by spring 2020 from elegant studies of mechanism immunity — that [this] was likely to be true. In this case, we didn’t know how long immunity would last. We didn’t know exactly the mechanisms of that, but we knew from very early on in the pandemic that if you get COVID and recover, you’d have pretty strong protection against both reinfection. And then, if you are reinfected, the severity of reinfection.
During the pandemic, especially after the vaccines became available, public health agencies denied that! And in fact, on the basis of denying that put in place very destructive vaccine mandates that led to the loss of jobs and careers for many people — and created a real counter-reaction that has led to the undermining of, I think, the consensus that most of the population had that vaccines were a really good idea.
Promoting Masks as Major Means to Prevent Disease
Bhattacharya cites a consensus, based on a dozen or more randomized studies, that masks aren’t effective in controlling the spread of the flu.
For no apparent scientific reason, that consensus was reversed overnight. And the federal government started emphasizing the use of cloth masks to stop the spread of disease. We knew then, and we know now it was not effective. And that embrace of cloth masks almost certainly led to unnecessary deaths, as many vulnerable people who would not otherwise have gone into public during times of high spread went out in public with cloth masks thinking they were protected because of what the federal government told them.
Improperly Weighing the Risk/Benefit Analysis of School Shutdowns
There’s literature from before the pandemic (showing negative effects of keeping kids out of school). Well, what happens if you stop giving school for a little while? It turns out that that has lifelong consequences for kids. You make kids skip a little bit of school, and they will lead shorter, less healthy lives.
One early estimate in the US from the spring closures alone suggested that we had cost our kids five and a half million life years from the school closures — five and a half million life years. The (faulty) idea that it was necessary to close schools (to stop the spread of disease) has led to tremendous damage that we’re going to be paying for for a good long time.
Embracing the Idea That the Vaccine Can Stop the Spread of Disease
Public health authorities embraced the idea that everyone had to be vaccinated in order to stop disease spread without evidence to suggest that that was true … If you have a vaccine that stops the spread, maybe you can use it to get rid of the disease or suppress the spread to zero. But if you don’t know that it doesn’t stop the spread — and very early on in 2021, it became clear that it didn’t stop the spread. You shouldn’t be using the vaccine that way.
So failure after failure on the government’s end. They got it dead wrong almost every step of the turn.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ends with this statement:
I could go on … but the primary source of misinformation has been the government itself. And that it used its power to suppress scientific dissent so that the public couldn't know — legislators couldn't know that scientists disagreed with what the government scientists were saying.
Thank you, Dr. Bhattacharya, for speaking up about this. Misinformation is a term that simply needs to go away. Because when an entity of authority gets to decide what’s not true, what’s to stop them from abusing that power?
If you enjoyed this piece, please hit the subscribe button. And if you’d like to watch the full Covid-19 hearing, you can do so by following the link below.
Covid-19 Accountability Hearing: Doctors Scott Atlas, Martin Kulldorff & Jay Bhattacharya
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Slams the U.S. Government as Being the Biggest Purveyor of Misinformation