 On October 4, 2020, when COVID-19 was raging, American schools were mostly shuttered, and vaccines were believed to be years away. A team of top researchers at the world's most prestigious universities, including Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard's Martin Kaldorf and Oxford's Sunetra Gupta, published the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open challenging the official U.S. response of lockdowns and government control of ever larger parts of the economy and everyday life. Recognizing that COVID overwhelmingly affected elderly Americans and others with specific identifiable health conditions, they called for a policy of focus protection in which the vulnerable would be kept safe, and the rest of us, especially children and young adults, would be able to get on with our lives. The response at the very highest levels of government was quick and draconian. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote a private email to Anthony Fauci, which was later obtained through a FOIA request, denouncing Bhattacharya, Kaldorf and Gupta as fringe epidemiologists who deserve to be the subject of a media takedown. Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit suppressing our ideas falsely deeming them misinformation, says Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford who also holds a PhD in economics. I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus rip when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats. Reason set down with Bhattacharya to talk about what it was like to be at the very center of an official effort to suppress heterodox thinking about the pandemic, why he believes he and his great Barrington Declaration co-authors have been vindicated, and whether the public health establishment can ever recover from ongoing revelations of incompetence, malfeasance, and politically motivated decision making. He also discusses how the centralization of science funding encourages dangerous group thinking, why he believes in mRNA vaccines, but remains staunchly anti-mandate, and why he stopped wearing masks a long time ago. Jay Bhattacharya, thanks for talking to me. Pleasure to be here, Nick. So at this point in time, how bad have we handled COVID? I think we've made absolutely catastrophic mistakes. The problems have been just manifold, and they've been exacerbated by essentially making it so that you couldn't dissent, that the cost of dissenting against the policy was so high that most people decided not to do so. That was in the Trump administration and the Biden administration. Both, yes. I mean, it's something separate from that. You have talked about the response to COVID as the biggest public health mistake we've ever made. You said the harm to people is catastrophic. Let's unpack that a little bit. You know, when we say the harm to people is catastrophic, obviously there's a million people in America who are dead. That's catastrophic. What would it have been like if we had responded differently? Would we have seen like a tenth of that number? Or how do you calculate? I mean, I think COVID's a bad disease. I don't think it was possible to avoid a lot of deaths from COVID, both here and abroad. The issue is taking advantage of the scientific evidence about who's most vulnerable to COVID and acting on that, instead of acting in the way we did, which was to, in a sense, to assume that all people equally at risk and thereby the only thing we can do is to stop the spread of the disease, to act, to suppress the disease. So would, I mean, is it possible that have we done something different we would have had about the same number of deaths? I mean, I think we would have had fewer deaths. I don't think it would have been, you know, 10% of those. I think if we still would have had a considerable amount of death, I do think less than we had. But the, but that's only if you're looking at COVID alone. If you're looking more broadly at public health, I think we would have actually done better in terms of the total number of deaths, not just from COVID, but from other sources. Can you talk about that? Can you quantify, you know, not the specific COVID deaths, but then the kind of things that attend to it? And, you know, as well as is it even possible to calculate future, whether it's economic harm, psychological harm or health harm? Yeah, I mean, I think these, this is a difficult, it's a difficult task. I mean, but that is what public health is supposed to be about, right? It is about cost benefits of various kinds of reactions. I mean, you weren't even allowed to say cost benefits back in the back in 2020, of course, but I think, but that's exactly right. I mean, public health is supposed to take a holistic view of human well-being, not just simply deaths from one cause, but health from lots of other causes. So just to give you some sense of the numbers, the number of people that have been thrown into poverty worldwide, and this is the World Bank estimate, something on the order of 100 million people, right? So over the last 20, 30 years, a billion people have been lifted out of poverty. 100 million people are now $2 a day or less of income, additional people that would have otherwise. And that has led to starvation. So in 2021, March 2021, the UN estimated that almost 230,000 children have died of starvation as a consequence of essentially the pandemic response, but the poverty, and that wasn't just in South Asia alone. There's tens of millions of people that have starved essentially as a consequence of the economic harm. And we're talking in poor parts of the world. In richer parts of the world, we let go of basic preventative activity, prevention that would have saved lives. So for instance, women showing up with breast cancer, later stage breast cancer should have been caught earlier because they skipped mammograms, or same thing with colonoscopies for both men and women, diabetes management. The psychological harms are also catastrophic. How do you quantify that though? I mean, I think the logic makes sense, but can we even estimate how many women died of breast cancer because they had to delay by three months or by 18 months basic evaluations? There are these like models that people do, but I think some of that has to play out over time to seek. It's not all baked in the cake. We can up our efforts to do screening. Another example of this is schooling. So in California where I was, where I live, for almost 18 months, my kids had very, very irregular school, Zoom school. And I could help supplement that at home, but there's a lot of poor families that can't. There's a literature on the effects of schooling. It's just even short interruptions to schooling have enormous consequences in the lives of children. One estimate in publishing JAMA pediatrics early in the pandemic said that even the short interruption of schooling in the spring of 2020 would lead to five and a half million life years lost for children in the United States. Because if you skip school, you get, you need a shorter, less healthy, poorer life. And I mean, you would argue that particularly with something like K through 12 school, there's no benefit to keeping those kids at home. Yeah, they really listen. I mean, there are, if you look in Europe, most of Europe made extreme efforts to try to keep schools open. They did. They kept schools open. They had much more normal schooling than we had in many parts of the United States. And they didn't have worse COVID outcomes as a result. And there's a good reason, which is that for reasons we still don't fully understand, children are less efficient transmitters of COVID when they're sick than adults are. An early study in Iceland where they did contact tracing and genetic sequencing, the virus found that it's very rare that a child passes the disease on to its parent, but very common to the other way. Now it can happen, of course. It's not zero. And it's not as bad if it goes from an adult to a kid, because the kid isn't going to be harmed in the same way. And you're saying it doesn't really go from a kid to an adult. It can, but it's rare. Yeah. And so, you know, because one of the arguments that comes up in the context of your work is, well, teachers are older people. And like, how would you create a school space where kids are there, but the teachers aren't? Yeah, so there's a couple of things like, so in the early days of the pandemic, there was a study done in Sweden. Sweden, they kept schools open. It was normal school, no masks, no social distancing for eight, I think for like secondary, for primary schools, secondary schools, I think they had some closures. There were no child deaths, and the teachers actually had lower COVID rates than the community at large. The schools were safer places to be than the community at large. What would explain that? Because they're hanging out with kids. But I'd say one of the things, once we understood that the disease was aerosolized, we could have made investments in changing ventilations or things like that. I mean, instead of the sort of the performative nonsense we invested in, we could have actually done things that would have made a difference in public spaces like schools. Right. Why didn't we? Because, I mean, we were throwing a ton of money at this stuff, and like everywhere I go, I live in New York City, and you still, I walked into restaurants where everybody is in like their little Adolf Eichmann kind of trial glass booth or something like that. So, I mean, we spent a lot of money on this. That actually made things worse. Of course. I mean, that kind of seems obvious, but yeah, it's funny when you walk down the street and you just see people in there like individual pods breathing on each other. But why didn't we? I mean, I know some people who do the science of ventilation, and they were screaming from the top of their lungs all through 2020 that this was what we need to invest in. A lot of the conversation that should have happened among scientists did not happen. The conversation about COVID and what right thing to do was controlled by a relatively small number of scientists who created an illusion of consensus on all of the mitigation measures they wanted without letting in other voices. In fact, if you spoke up, you were essentially marginalized. I mean, for me in particular, I can tell you there was a sense of propaganda campaign wage. What does it mean to be marginalized in that context? Because you also, on a certain level, you were a well-respected doctor of public health and medicine, you have an economics degree, you're at Stanford, and now you're extremely well-known. So, what does it mean to that you got marginalized through this process? Yeah. So, maybe I can go back just a little bit about this, about my activities during the pandemic. So, I started doing research in the pandemic in the very earliest days of it. I worked on a study where I was trying to measure the number of people in LA County and in Santa Clara County that had evidence of antibodies against COVID in their bloodstreams like in April of 2020. I thought I was doing science. I thought I was just doing, I thought I would publish a paper. I thought it was an important paper. It would inform policy. But I didn't realize I was going to end up in the public sphere as a consequence of it. As soon as we published a preprint of the paper in Santa Clara, where we found that like 3% of the population in Santa Clara County had, of California, had COVID in April of 2020, there were a series of hit pieces done on me and my family. What was so threatening about that finding? So, 3% sounds like not such a big number. But in April of 2020, that's a huge number because what that means is we can't stop COVID from spreading everywhere. It's already out. There's no, within a respiratory virus like this, it's not possible. Maybe when you're near zero, you can suppress down to zero. But the, you know, if you go back to April of 2020, it was like we just come out of the most severe lockdown. There's still like nervousness about, okay, can we have another one? Schools were closed. There were still businesses, businesses are still closed in California. You can't go back to the office, but people still aren't back in the office. And so, that idea that the things that we're doing will not actually ultimately result in a good result. That's not going to make COVID go away. That was the implication of the study. The other thing that it did is it implied that the death rate was relatively low. Now, the death rate we got in the study, infection fatality rate was 0.2% in the community. It's higher in like nursing homes and stuff, but we just did the community. That number was 10 times lower, more than 10 times lower than had been reported by the World Health Organization. Now, they were reporting the case fatality rate, which is a different epidemiologic quantity, but people thought the case fatality rate is based on the people that you know that have, actually you can say, have the disease and get it. And back then, there was not so much testing available. And so, people were testing people that would come to the hospital with bad symptoms. And while at the same time, it was circulating the community with many people who'd had less bad symptoms. There's a range of outcomes. So, I mean, they were essentially only testing. You only could verify somebody who had a really bad case. So, the fatality rate is going to be higher than the population in general that might have the disease. Right. And the World Health Organization said 3.5%, something like that. In February 2020, there was a paper published in JAMA, General American Medical Association. Saying that, like 3% of the people who get it. Will die. Yeah. I mean, which is catastrophic. I mean, that's just, it's, you know. Where is the infection fatality right now? It's lower with Omicron. So, yeah. So, I haven't seen a recent estimate. The Professor Johnny Neades, who's a very famous epidemiologist at Stanford and a friend of mine, who worked on the study with him. Who also very demonized in the popular press. Yeah, smeared all kinds of hit pieces written about him, even though he's probably the world's most cited living scientist, for good reason. I mean, he's an incredible man. But he did an estimate of 100 of these seroprevalence studies have been done in 2020. And that's where we get the 0.25%, something like that worldwide. It depends on age though. That's the most important thing. Children have a very low infection fatality rate. Whereas older people have a much higher infection fatality, especially if you have many chronic conditions. With Omicron, it seems to be lower. I mean, I think the case fatality rate is about 70% lower with Omicron than it was with Delta. Well, let's talk about the Great Barrington Declaration, because that's that you've published along with two other co-authors in October of 2020. And this kind of really crystallized your thought and a line of dissent. And explain what the Great Barrington Declaration sought to do and what the emphasis on focus protection meant. So there's really two key scientific facts underneath this. We can talk about the third, but really, if you just need these two, first, you need to know that there's a huge age gradient in the risk of bad outcomes if you get COVID. So roughly speaking, for every seven years of age, you double the infection fatality rate. Before Omicron, I'm 53. My infection fatality rate is something on the order 0.2%. So 99.8% survival if I get infected. In fact, I got COVID and I'm still here. That's without the vaccine. With the vaccine that reduces the the risk of severe outcomes by 10-fold. So it's 0.2%, but for every seven years of age, you double it. So if you're 57, it'll be 0.4%. If you're 64, it'll be 0.8%. It just goes up exponentially. And if you're a child, the survival rate is well north of 99.99. So that's the first fact. Big age gradient. It's the single most important risk factor in this disease for bad outcomes. The second thing is that lockdowns are really harmful. They're harmful for everybody. You skip getting your cancer screening. It's just bad for your mental health. I mean, one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020, according to a CDC study. So you have this like multi-dimensional problems caused by the lockdown, including deaths. We talked about the starvation deaths abroad in poor countries. You put those two facts together. It's a simple economic. So if you lift the lockdowns for the younger population, the less at-risk population, you're doing them a favor. You're actually giving them a bet that you avoid those harms. Now, they may get more COVID that's possible, forcing them to expose themselves they don't want to, but that might happen. But the harm from COVID is much less than the lockdown harms for them. Whereas for older people, especially people living in nursing homes, the lockdown harms are much worse. I'm sorry, the COVID harms are much worse potentially. So for them, you should be protecting them. That's where all our policy thinking should be. It should have gone in the first place. So that's the Great Branson Declaration. Focus protection for the older population and lifting the lockdowns. I've read a series of critiques of the document and the ones, some people are like, oh, you're just crazy or you're in the pay of some dark overlord or something like that. I think we can kind of not worry about that too much. Oh, it's also true. I paid zero for it. But a lot of people said just pragmatically or logistically, focus protection is impossible. Is that true? Or what would it look like? Because the document itself kind of makes sense in a manifesto or a short document, you don't go into detail. But didn't we put old people, we took them out of society and put them in nursing homes where then they died in massive numbers? Yeah. So maybe we can divide this conversation into pre-vaccine and post-vaccine because I think post-vaccine, the vaccine ends that conversation. Use the vaccine preferentially on old people and you protect them against severe disease, which is that's a form of focus protection. Right. Before the vaccine, I can highlight how problematic our response was and what caused it by going back to nursing homes in March of 2020. So in March and April of 2020, in New York, in Quebec, in Stockholm, in a whole bunch of places, COVID infected patients were sent back to nursing homes. Now, why do we do that in New York? We did that because we had the idea that we had to protect hospital systems. We looked at Italy, we saw this overburden hospital system, we looked at what happened in China and we said, okay, we have to avoid the overburden hospital systems at all costs. That idea is what led Governor Cuomo to send infected patients, COVID infected patients back to nursing homes. You wanted to clear up the hospital systems. If instead, if you understood what the right constraint was, the right constraint was protection of the vulnerable, you would never have done that. So if we had oriented ourselves toward protection of the vulnerable, rather than all these other goals, suppression of the disease in the community or protection of hospital systems and whatnot, we would have had a much better outcome. Where would the older people who were infected go? Would they stay in the hospital and just be quarantined or isolated? Or would they go to some third space? They probably should stay in the hospital because hospitals have much better systems for making sure that patients don't infect each other. I think if you think about how to do it, how to protect all people before the vaccines, it's a very local problem. So in the Great Britain Declaration FAQ, we had a whole bunch of suggestions. What I was hoping to happen was that this would lead public health people, local public health, to creatively think about how to help protect old people where they live in their own community. So if you're talking about a slum in Mumbai, it's almost impossible. Unfortunately, there's not so many old people there. But if you're talking about Billings, Montana, old people living in, essentially, with their spouse in single-family homes, you have a set of things you could do. You could, for instance, offer to have Uber Eats delivered to old people. Or if you don't want to do Uber Eats, you can just have to tell people if you have an old neighbor offered to go buy groceries for them. Things like that where you can involve the community. In places like downtown LA or LA where there's multi-generational homes, it's a little harder. But even there, you can be creative. So you offer up hotel rooms so that if the grandson comes and says, grandma, I think I might have been exposed, grandma calls the public health official, they offer a hotel room for a couple of days until you make sure that the grandson's not exposed. Why do you think the scientific consensus forms so quickly and so rigidly about this is right and anything that you or other people were saying is just not even worth discussing? So I've actually read through a whole bunch of these FOIA emails that Tony Fauci and Francis Collins and others had in the NIH. I mean, they were the architects of this policy. The early days of the pandemic were like a really mystifying thing. It was unclear exactly how the disease spread. It was unclear exactly what to do. And in fact, if you think back to January and February 2020, they were arguing for the public health establishment was arguing for something like focus protection. They were arguing against extreme measures. The observation that China seemed to control the spread of it had an enormous effect on the minds of public health officials. So for instance, if you look through the FOIA emails, Tony Fauci and the NIH worked very hard to make sure that the NIH official got to go to China and observe. He came back, he wrote an email that said, look, we have a very difficult decision to make. It looks like the Chinese strategy of lockdown worked. At the same time, you're looking at Italy and it's a complete failure. Their hospital systems are overwhelmed. You have coffins of old people lined up in nursing, in cathedrals. It looked like a disaster. And so I think that switched people's minds off. They said, okay, we have to do what China did. We can get suppression. We can get down to zero. Let's just do that. And that was even with those early clips of video enough from China, where people were being nailed into their apartments and things like that. I mean, that was the difficult decision. Can we as a free society adopt that strategy, which looked like it worked? Yeah, and it did not work in China. Or we don't really have any idea. I'm looking at what's coming out of, the images coming out of Shanghai now. And it's clearly there's something going on there. There was something going on there in Wuhan. So it's possible that they suppressed it very almost all of East Asia and a lot of Asia actually had low levels, regardless of the policy. Japan had minor mitigations relative to what, and yet they had very low rates. China, of course, had draconian restrictions and they had low rates. So I think it's possible, like there's something about East Asia that at least until Omicron protected it against the spread of the disease. In the United States, can you point to a particular state? I mean, kind of along that line of like a lot of what we seem to be doing was kind of pseudoscientific or kind of superstitious behavior. We think this will work, so we're just going to try it. Is there a meaningful difference of approach that is evident in the US that shows up in death rates? Yeah, so if you look at age-adjusted death rates, a place like Florida, which actually had relatively minor mitigations, kept schools open, has almost exactly the same age-adjusted COVID death rates as California. Same thing with age-adjusted excess mortality, roughly the same. In fact, roughly the average. So does that suggest that there wasn't that much we could do? I think that the suppression measures that we adopted were not particularly effective. I mean, you can also do comparisons across in Europe in similar situations. Again, there's the correlation between the measures we adopt, like the very severe measures we adopt to stay at home orders, business closures, that doesn't seem to correlate with better outcomes. It's not that it makes it worse. It just doesn't make it better. I think it's important to understand why. Why is there not a correlation? Because it's such an intuitive thing. If you keep people apart from each other, they can't spread the disease to each other, why doesn't that work? I think it has to do with how society actually works, how it actually functions. It doesn't function. It's not like we actually could be apart from each other. We're not all equally able to stay apart from each other. So there was a study done by some economists published in the National Bureau of Economic Research that found that only about 30% of US jobs could be replaced by work from home. So that means if you weren't in that class, you had to work. The option to stay at home and stay safe was actually an opera class thing, a laptop class thing. Yeah. Well, and clearly the people who were writing about all of this were people who could work from home, which I know I'm sure I'm not alone in this. But in the early days, the fierce urgency of whenever among reporters and journalists writing about this, it's like, we should play it safe. This is uncomfortable, but we can do it. But it's like, I don't know, if you're like a grocery store worker, you don't have that option. But you weren't writing the story. I mean, that's the thing. It's like the grocery store worker that's 65 years old, they're essential and they're asked to go get exposed to COVID, even though it's a really high risk for them. I mean, a focus protection policy would say, okay, well, let's give them sabbatical time or something, some leave, help them not have to be exposed while asking younger workers to take their place or something. What, how much, I mean, you have training as a medical doctor and as an economist, does that put you in a different kind of methodological frameworks and a lot of public health people? I think so, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the public health thinking doesn't, at least it seemed to me during the pandemic, seemed blind to the harms, the opportunity costs, if you will. Whereas, I mean, just about my, like it's built in my DNA is I'm going to be looking at and thinking about opportunity costs and harms just no matter how attractive the policy, it's always the question is, relative to another alternate policy, would it be better? Within the public health community, where people or people seem to be taking cues either directly or indirectly from Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, you in these emails that you mentioned, the Foyette emails, you are singled out as by name as a problem that needs to be resolved. How does that make you feel? You know, just as, I mean, you're a successful academic, you're a serious intellectual researcher, and you are emerging on the world stage, and two of the most powerful, influential, revered, respected science bureaucrats are saying this guy is nuts. Yeah, it was, it was really, I think it was just disappointing, right? Because what I had expected from them was serious engagement, because I mean, there's no way one, two or three people could just could actually know how to how to like set all of the details of focus protection policy. It's a too complicated a problem needed the all hands on deck engagement of the public health community. So it was frankly just disappointed to see them react as if it was a challenge to them as it was as I was trying to like show them up rather than trying to actually improve the outcome. And I mean, I think it was, I mean, to see them write that I actually admired Tony Fauci before the pandemic. He wrote a textbook on internal medicine, which I still have on my bookshelf. Francis Collins, I've admired for a long time. And to see them behave in this way, essentially, like, I mean, I don't know about like a better word, like such like mob bosses, like they were they were trying to push us me, Martin Kulldorf, who was a Harvard professor at the time, and Sinatra Gupta, probably the world's best epidemiologist at Oxford University to the fringe, they literally called us fringe epidemiologists. It was a tactic in order to create this illusion of consensus that didn't exist. That they wanted to make people think that their ideas were so rock solid, that their strategy was so rock solid that there was no there no opposition could be reasonable. This you are among the many things you are, you are not a psychologist. But and so this might be a question that you can answer. But why was that? Like, why were they so convinced that they knew they were right? Like this was past the point where we should be talking about this stuff. It's a time for action. And it seems to me it kind of mirrors the way the FDA and the CDC early on, in terms of testing and in terms, you know, both of, you know, who gets to test, but then also who gets to produce tests, like they flexed really quickly and said now we are in charge here. I mean, it's, you know, like kind of fanatical control that turned out to be completely incompetent and disastrous is I mean, is this something about like a scientific bureaucracy? Is it something about personality types where people just freaking out? I mean, I have had a range of ideas about this. I don't know the full answer to that. But I think part of it is that Francis Collins and Tony Fauci have been at the head of this bureaucracy, this enormous NIH bureaucracy for a long time, Tony Fauci for 40 years. I don't think he has very many people telling him no. And people like most most people don't know about this. But like if you want to advance your career in biomedical sciences, you need to get NIH funding. You need to have the imprimatur of that. Right. Because all other grants and etc. are tagged to that. It's kind of like the starter grant. Well, it's sort of more like it's very prestigious. Like at Stanford, for instance, where I worked for a long time, if you wanted to be promoted to full tenure as in the medical school, you needed to have a large NIH grant. It was a marker of success. And so you have somebody who's been in that position for 40 years, people never told him, really told him no. In fact, they want, they essentially suck up to him. And you can see this again in the FOIA emails, even some of my colleagues written like this. And it must get to your, you must think you're right all the time. I think that's part of it. The other part of it is that they had pushed these lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic. Mm-hmm. It wasn't working. And, but they wanted to make sure, they wanted to like keep going. Maybe if they tried more, they could double down more, it would work next time. I mean, there's some element of that going because just the sort of some cost fallacy. Is there a way to identify the moment where, you know, among the many things about this whole experience is the lockdown itself and like the decision to go like we are throwing a kill switch on the economy, we are keeping people at home, we're closing schools, et cetera, basically unprecedented. You know, because even during the 1918 flu epidemic, it wasn't quite that centralized and draconian. Why did we lock down over this? You know, it's, I mean, that is kind of like the $64,000 question. I mean, I think there's, there's some supply and demand kind of things going. So for instance, I think if we didn't have Zoom and we actually didn't have 30% of the more sort of elite workers being able to work from home without losing their job, we wouldn't have locked down. I think that's why we didn't lock down in 2009. That technology didn't exist. So in a sense. I'm sorry, in 2009? Yeah, in 2009 only H1N1 flew up and down there. Or in the earlier, like in the late 60s or late 50s with flu pandemics. This is an unprecedented move. Right. And I think. So it's because we could lock down. Yeah, I think that we had just the technology enough to protect essentially the laptop class. Because of that, we could. The other thing was these models that were put out, like for instance, the Imperial College model in the early days of the pandemic, just like the Chinese example of the lockdown seemingly working, played an enormously important part in the minds of people. And that was the Neil Ferguson team that came out with ultimately kind of debunked estimate of it was going to be millions and millions of people in the U.S. if we didn't do something. It was not just millions of people. It was the millions of people over the next couple of months. And these models, again, they're just, they're like, if you ever played the video game Sims, they're just, they're like, they're called agent-based models. The agents were interacting with each other randomly. They were built on parameters. It's not that they're necessarily bad models of them per se, but they're built on parameters that were not known well at the time. A lot of uncertainty about those parameters. And the other thing is that they're, if they have this feature where automatically, if you keep people apart inside the Sim, they're not going to spread the disease. They don't really reflect what society's like. And of course, I mean, famously, both Neil Ferguson himself, who was kind of going out and circumventing lockdown so that he could engage in an affair and Boris Johnson, who put the lockdown in order, also was caught kind of cheating on this. I have a lot of sympathy. That's like almost two on the nose, right? I just, well, I just have a lot of sympathy for them. They're having like, number 10 is having parties that, you know, so it's just, I have a lot of sympathy. Humans actually have this need to interact with each other. So you have sympathy also for Governor Gavin Newsom? Believe it or not, I do. I mean, I think I might have envy. I don't know if I have to say, but yeah. Well, I mean, I'm pretty angry at him about keeping my kids out of school for a year and a half. But for that, even that, I have some sympathy. I mean, I think we actually have this need for human engagement and human connection. Even though it doesn't show up in our death statistics is quite important. To go back briefly to the focus protection, one of the other critiques was that somewhere, you know, estimates are somewhere between 30 and 50% of the population need focus protection. And then once you start hitting those numbers, you're locking down anyway. Does that hold up for you or how do you? Yeah, so I mean, I wouldn't close schools, right? That's just a straight focus, you know, great Brangton Declaration idea. So I don't think that's right. Like the 30 to 50% number has to do with, I think, a misunderstanding of who's really at risk. So for instance, if you are, like we said earlier, every seven years of age doubles your risk. If you compare obese people to thin people, obesity is a risk factor, that also doubles your risk. It's like aging seven years. Diabetics, right? So severe diabetes. So I think there are some younger people that are high risk, but they're not like the most. And there's some older people who are, I mean, they're at a certain risk, but not at a super heightened risk. Yeah. So I think, again, it's going to be a personalized thing. It's going to be something localized. And I don't think that would have been impossible. I think I'm not making a claim that focus protection would have led to zero deaths. That's ridiculous. It's too difficult a disease to control the spread. The argument I'm making is that the idea that if we control community spread, we automatically protect the old, protect the vulnerable is not true. We've seen that 80% of the deaths have been of people over 65, 40% of the deaths at nursing homes. Our suppression strategy did not actually protect the vulnerable. Mike, the argument I'm making is that if we put more thought and energy into protecting the vulnerable, we would have done a better job doing it. Now, that's all this is before vaccines. One, the Barrington Declaration was signed in October, or published October 5th, 2020. Vaccines, if you knew the vaccines were coming, would you have still talked about the same thing? Or how does that factor out? I would have. I mean, I think the vaccines make the Barrington Declaration much more attractive, I think. But even before, I think there was a track. I mean, I wrote it, so obviously, I think that. I think, for instance, the schools opening in the fall of 2020 and through 2021, that was before vaccines, they should have opened. And they didn't in many places across the US, in fact, many places in the world they didn't open. So ideas like that, if the Great Barrington Declaration adopted, schools would have stayed open. So I think it would have been difficult. It would have taken a little bit of time to figure out what focus protection would look like. I don't think you need to make the transition immediately to focus protection. So I think there still would have been some delay. In October, 2020, I had heard about the vaccine trials, and I was hoping that they would work out. And, of course, they did. But I didn't know. And I think nobody could know. And so I think the question is, we are in a situation where children are being harmed. A lot of poor people around the world are being harmed. Working class people deemed essential, even if they're older, are being harmed. Those ideas were necessary in October 2020, just as they were in December 2020. You're pro-vaccine, right? You believe that the vaccines are real and that they work and they essentially, I mean, again, they don't mitigate anything and they don't keep people from getting the disease, but they keep people from dying or being hospitalized. How much of the kind of failure of the public health establishment to put into place protocols that seem to work and that made sense and they weren't constantly double dealing or talking on both sides of their mouth? How much of that bleeds into vaccine skepticism? Because we are in a world now where large percentages of people are just like, no, I'm never taking a vaccine or I'm not taking an mRNA vaccine, etc. How much did the first few months of the official response to COVID bleed into a bad response once vaccines were available? For the vaccine decision, you need to go to December of 2020 and look carefully at the trials, the mRNA randomized trials that came out. The trials had as an endpoint the prevention of symptomatic disease. There's two other potential on points you could have had for the trials. You could have had the prevention of all infection or you could have had the prevention of severe disease. Now, the reason they didn't use severe disease as an endpoint was because it would have required a much larger trial. Severe disease is rare in order to see a difference in severe disease. You need a very large number of people. That's why they did symptomatic infection. I don't know why they didn't do all infection. But in particular, they only tracked prevention of symptomatic infection for about three or four months. That was roughly the length of the trial. It turns out that shortly after the three or four months, the protection against infection drops very sharply. So you get the vaccine and that protection against infection lasts two or three or four months, not very long. But the protection against severe disease lasts a very long time. The trials didn't tell you that. The trials just told you that it stops in symptomatic infection for three months. So the public health authorities had to make a decision. Can we use this vaccine to get rid of the disease altogether to vaccinate a sufficiently large number of people? We get herd immunity through the vaccine and we're done. In that case, that means we're counting on the vaccine working against infection spread for a long time. Or else you're going to need booster, booster, booster, booster, booster, booster, right? And then you hope that the variant doesn't escape, the escape of the vaccine. Or you say, okay, this works against severe disease. Let's use it for focus protection. The people like Tony Fauci, people like Rochelle Walensky, who was about to become the CDC director, made the wrong bet. They bet that it could be used to stop infection and get the disease from stopping spreading. They continued on the path that they had had, which was a goal was suppression of spread of the disease in the community. And they're going to use the vaccine for that purpose instead of using the vaccine for focus protection. Is there a way that the public health, and to say the public health community or authority, how does it get restored? Because it's clear at every level, and this is somebody like Fauci has admitted that he said, don't use masks because then use masks. And I was doing that because I knew the answer, but I didn't want to tell you. It sounds like with the vaccines, they were talking about both sides of their mouth. I mean, there's a real collapse in trust and confidence in public authority, in public health authority. Is there a way to get that back? Or what has to happen? I mean, ideally, if I were the CDC director, I would apologize for the mistakes made, because they've been catastrophic and so evident to everybody. And then work on a real plan so that these kinds of mistakes don't happen again. Nick, you mentioned something that's really important. So the credibility of public health authorities is critically important. Once you've thrown that away, people aren't going to believe you. So in this dance about masks at the beginning, oh, masks don't work, masks do work, vaccines are 100% effective against, if you have the vaccine, you do not hold the virus, you can't spread the virus. Those are not true. They didn't know those are true at the time. The mask thing, it's interesting, the literature before the pandemic, good randomized studies said that the mask didn't work. So when Fauci said the mask didn't work in February 2020, he was actually telling the truth. And you also need new people in charge. I mean, I don't think that the people, if you keep the same people in charge who told you these lies, that people are going to believe you. But it needs more than that. You need systematic reform so that that credibility is coming back. It's going to take a long time, Nick. And I don't know the full answer there. What's the role of somebody like Donald Trump who has been, it was obviously when he was in office was very schizophrenic to begin with. But he was kind of like, okay, I'm creating operation warp speed. Everything that happens because of that is on me. I get the credit. But then he was always kind of trashing the science. He started trashing Fauci. He was against the vaccines. Now he's for them. How does that play into, and the more broad politicization not necessarily by scientific authorities, but by actual political people? I mean, I think it's easy in the United States just to look at, I mean, Trump is a unique figure. And I think the effect that he has on the minds of most people in public health is just amazing. It's like a people stop thinking when they start thinking about him. But I don't think he's the entire, like if you look, lockdowns were adopted by so many countries with right-wing governments, left-wing governments, it didn't matter. The socialist Swedish government didn't adopt a lockdown, right? Whereas, you know, you have a right-wing Boris Johnson in the UK who are adopting it. It seems to cut across partisan divides in very funny ways and brought coalitions of people together that didn't exist before that would never have spoken to each other, frankly. What, talking about masks, you, in August of 2021, you testified in favor of a mask you testified in favor of a rule by Governor DeSantis in Florida saying that schools could not could not make mask-wearing mandatory. What went into that decision? So I think that mask-wearing in children has no good scientific evidence in favor of it, right? There's not a single randomized study still that demonstrates any efficacy of mask-wearing in children for either them getting the disease or spreading it, right? And, you know, in adults, there's a whole range of randomized trials before the pandemic that looked at the fact efficacy mask-wearing on controlling the flu and both source control and self-protection, which found, you know, very disappointing results. And during the pandemic itself, you've had a couple of randomized trials. One, a Danish mask study that found nothing, no effective surgical masks on self-protection. And the Bangladesh mask study, which found a small protection against using surgical masks and really no protection against using cloth masks. When you testified in favor of that, were you testifying about the mask data? Because then, you know, there's that. And then there's also a public policy question, which from a libertarian point of view, you know, I'm kind of like, well, for the same reason, I don't want a public health authority dictating what somebody can do without any kind of question. I'm not sure I want a governor telling every school in the state or in the country or whatever, you have to do this. So I was testifying on the science, right? So I was testifying that. That plus the other side of that is also the harms, right? So like, there are kids, especially kids with disabilities, autistic kids, hearing impaired kids, who I think are harmed by the mask. I think the questions of, I mean, essentially it's like, what level of government should have a decision-making power over these kinds of things? That's a legitimate question, right? So like in science policy questions, often we look to like essentially federal agencies to make decisions about, you know, like, can a local government decide not to allow cell towers, right? So those are decisions made, actually made by, you know, at the federal level about while cell towers don't correlate with cancer. They seem to cause cancer. And there, I mean, you're testifying that these cell towers don't cause cancer. You're not necessarily saying whether or not a town should adopt them or not. Yeah, but the town can't use the idea that it causes cancer as a reason to not allow the cell tower in place, right? So I mean, this question of like, what level of government ought to have that kind of decision-making authority is an interesting one. I mean, it's important. And in the context of masks, I don't think that it really does a lot in terms of controlling community spread, especially when you do it in kids. And I think there's some harm. For me, economically, I just want, I want what's best for the community, for those kids. And that's why I testify in those cases. So did you go through, did you mask up at various points, you know, not because you had to, but because you thought it made sense? I mean, when I visited my mom in July of 2020, I wore a mask for the first 15 minutes, and then I couldn't, I couldn't, yeah, I just didn't, I mean, I just wanted to give her a hug. It didn't make sense. But so I mean, I think if I'm visiting a nursing home, I would want a high quality N95 mask. I don't think that there's great evidence that is perfect, especially if you're like, we have a beard or whatever. It's, it's, and it's, if you're not trained to wear it, but, but I can understand like, as a tool of focus protection, it can make some sense. I'm not against mask wearing generally. But I think it should correspond to the evidence that should be subject to a cost-benefit test, just like we do with anything else. You are also, you're against vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. You know, and I, you know, when I hear that, I'm like, okay, that's what I think. Walk me through the logic of that. You know, why? And I guess maybe start with the vaccine mandate. If, if we know the vaccines are good and the vaccines are going to reduce the, either the spread or if not the spread, the danger of getting a disease, you know, by 99%. Why shouldn't the government mandate that? Okay. So if, to take your hypothetical about, about, you have something that actually does stop the spread that there you have like a, I take the, I take the vaccine that I, my vaccine protects you. There's a positive externality. There's an economic argument you can make in favor of it, right? Now you, you have to like think about more than just that positive externality. It may be that the, that the vaccine then causes me harm. And so do I really want to ask me to have, I mean, so there's a lot of complications going to that. I'm not against vaccine mandates as a, as a, as a whole. So I suspect we're of a similar age where we have a smallpox vaccine scar somewhere on us. Is that, you know, is that a legitimate kind of policy based on science to say, yeah, you know, I like everybody should get a smallpox vaccine when smallpox was a thing. It's prevalent. Yeah. So I mean, I think, I think it could, it could be an argument, right? I mean, I'm not, again, I'm not ideologically opposed to that. But in this context, Nick, we don't have a vaccine like that. What we have as a vaccine that does not stop disease spread, right? And so all, all after three months, it's the vaccine efficacy against disease spread is something like 20%. So what you have is then is that the disease is going to spread anyways. And so you don't have that positive externality argument. To me, that's sufficient to kill the vaccine mandate, right? But, but it also is an argument I know for me, and this is the way I was thinking about it, like, well, my vaccine protects me. I know if I take the vaccine, I'm less likely to get a serious case of COVID. So that was the right thing to do. And then I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't I do that? It's free, right? Yeah, no, I would, I would, I mean, I've gone on TV and told people that it's a really good idea to take the vaccine for that reason. I mean, I think we give people advice that it will protect you against severe disease and tell them honestly, like, here are the side effects we know about, here's the side effects we don't know about, here's the benefit. And people will take it based on that. And so is that the same logic for a vaccine passport that you showing that you, you know, that you have this vaccine, it's not, it's really an inter, it's a personal decision, not a social one. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's actually, there's a little bit more here. So the passports, it's premised on this idea that if I'm in the room with lots of vaccinated people, I'm safe or much safer, you actually can cause the disease to spread more. Like, you get, you get more, more interactions with people that are vaccinated, thinking they're safe, when they're not actually safe, because the vaccine can spread the disease. The other thing is, is natural immunity, right? So the natural immunity in this context, what I mean is, is if you had COVID and recovered from it, which has a very substantial number of people in the United States have, even if you're not vaccinated, you're pretty well protected against severe disease. And until Omicron, you were protected against reinfection. So that means that meant that, you know, even before Omicron, you could be in a room filled with unvaccinated people and actually be safer from getting the disease, if they had all been COVID recovered, then if then being a room of unvaccinated or vaccinated people. So this irrational segregation of society, and it's caused this, you know, it's uprooted the lives of a lot of people who just for whatever reason, because that maybe they were COVID recovered, or they just don't trust public health, they didn't want the vaccine. It created this two-tier society, this sort of like sense of clean and unclean, which I think public health should never do. Right. Are you vaccinated? I am. Did you get a booster? I didn't. I got COVID and I got, I was vaccinated almost a year ago with the Pfizer vaccine April 2021. Then I got COVID in August of 2021. And so- What about your kids? How old are your kids? So I have three kids, 15, 17 and 21. I don't really want to talk about their vaccination status, if you don't mind that, because- Okay. Yeah. I guess. If they're going to college, is it a good idea for colleges to insist on COVID? I don't think the vaccine mandate is worthwhile for college students. I think especially for young men, the minor credit risk is high enough with the mRNA vaccines that to mandate it for them, it should be a personal trust. I think it could be, it should be something where it depends on their health condition. Right. I don't think- Is there any way we come out of this where, you know, and this is, it gets very confusing, because a lot of people who are anti-vaccine are also anti-abortion, but then they use the, you know, it's my body, my choice argument. Is there any way, in a more consistent way, we come out of this with people saying, it is my body, it is my choice and I can get an abortion if I want, and I can get a vaccine if I want, and I can, you know, I can drink or smoke whatever I want. I mean, these are complicated questions, as you know, I'm sure you know, but the issue is one of externalities to me. That's the key question, right? And I think that's something, the reason I'm attracted to that is because I think a lot of the questions about bodily autonomy are very difficult to resolve. They're like deep value questions about, whereas like, is there, or isn't there an externality? That's just a scientific question I can resolve just by looking at data. Now, the externalities could be a complicated thing, right? So like, we just talked about creating a two-tier society of vaccinated, unvaccinated. That's a negative social consequence that people don't generally think about when they're talking about these things or drinking and driving, right? There's a clear positive external, a negative externality, right? I think what I've done in my work in my life is work on trying to understand those kinds of like clear, like questions of fact. Often those, you clear up those questions of fact and it turns out the values don't matter quite as much as you thought they did, once you've understood those questions of fact. Very interesting. Talk a little bit about your life. You mentioned you're 53, where were you born and where were you raised? So I was born in India. I came to the U.S. when I was four. My dad actually had, he was an engineer and he'd studied in the U.S., applied for the visa lottery, then got married, then had kids and then dragged me and my mom and my double-tracked me. I was actually very happy to come. I remember landing in LaGuardia and my, I don't remember what it was called then, but my uncle, my dad met me and my brother gave us chocolate bars. I think it was Hershey's. I'm like, this is a great country. Where did you grow up in the U.S.? So first in Boston, Cambridge. My dad was an electrical engineer at General Electric and then in Southern California. And you have, I mentioned, you have an MD and PhD in economics from Stanford. How did you end up doing that? That's, I mean, that's a lot of education. And I have many doctors who are interested in economics or many economists who have the desire to become an MD. I mean, I would always want to be a doctor. I love science. I like, I love math. And I, in fact, I love chemistry so much I thought I was going to be a chemistry major, but then I got to, I got, I was an undergraduate at Stanford. I've been at Stanford since I was 18. Yeah. I think you might want to get out and see the rest of the world, I don't know. Maybe someday. I mean, I took an econ class as a general electrical criminal. I just fell in love with it. But I still wanted to be a doctor. You know, and, you know, it's Indian households, you got this, like, you got to be a doctor and then you can be whatever you want. You can be a writer. So this is higher. You're higher. You're like, doctor, engineer, everything else. So I'm like, okay, I got to be a doctor. I told my dad I was majoring in economics. He's like, are you sure? But I showed him, like, there's some math involved. So he was okay with it. Do you have a politics or an ideology? I mean, I've always thought of myself as, I mean, I like markets and economists, not surprising. I'm the center right ish if you have, but I never cared deeply about politics. I just don't, I, I, so many of my colleagues get so upset when, you know, they're mostly on the left. Right. And I just never understood it. I never understood why they get so deeply worked up about politics. I, most of my career has been focused on scientific questions, questions about fact in that intersect with, with policy, with, in fact, disease policy, nutrition policy with, with a whole range of questions where, where I don't know the answer before I go in. And so I've tried very hard to like keep that, that out because I don't, I don't, I really like, I like learning from the data. I like, I like, it makes me happy when I have a result I didn't expect. And when I write a paper, I honestly can't tell who's going to be happy about it or not. I mean, that's, that's what's made me happiest in my life and my career. The politics, you know, it's, it's, it just, it seemed always seemed like entertainment to me, frankly. Like it seemed like, you know, there's two teams that are fighting with each other. I am attracted to, to ideas where, where, where, where they're like, there's markets and decentralized solutions. But I also understand where you sometimes need, you know, like, I think there ought to be an NIH. I just don't think the NIH director should play a big role in health policy because if you have an NIH director that does, they, they control the minds of so many scientists, it's an inherent. And nobody's going to really speak, nobody's going to disagree with them because that's the cash cow, right? So. Yeah. So it's, I think, I just, I think it's dangerous to, but, but, but that's dangerous. But I think, I think, if I have a philosophy, it's, it's, it has to be, there's, there's going to be some, some, some role for regulation, there's going to be some role for, for markets, but those are going to be determined mostly, I hope, by answering factual questions. Do you, what, what are the positive outcomes from, you know, the pandemic? And obviously, we're, we're kind of over it, but we've also been here before. You know, one of the things that seemed to happen early on, I remember, I guess it was Massachusetts waved a bunch of its licensure laws for, you know, nurses and doctors because they needed help. And so they were not going to make people pay a bunch of money and sit through a bunch of meaningless tests in order to practice medicine there. I don't know if they're going to continue that, but I mean, are there good outcomes from the experience that we've had so far? I think, like, I think telehealth is one. I mean, the development of technology is to actually practice medicine. Right. Yeah, which we've been talking about for decades now, but that finally made people, okay, we're going to do this. Yeah. And, you know, the vaccines, as much as I think I deplore the fact that they were used as a, as a, like a way to, like, course people and they'd look really, you know, people have lost their jobs over this. The fact that the scientific community can come together and produce something like that in such a short time is actually quite an achievement. Yeah, it's amazing because it took years to even isolate what was causing AIDS and the coronavirus was sequenced and the vaccine was basically put into place in a few months and it probably could have been quicker, right? I mean, it was really a remarkable achievement. When COVID, the epidemic for start, I didn't think, I thought it would take a long time. Yeah, people were talking three to five years or longer. Yeah. And I guess also, you know, for all of the talk about vaccine hesitancy, the adoption curve of the COVID vaccines is remarkably fast, much quicker than MMR or polio and things like that. I mean, people are panicked over getting COVID. So, I mean, it's not surprising that, but what I've seen though is that the vaccine hesitancy, which you said earlier is completely right. A lot of the movement that hasn't about vaccines has grown very sharply in part and mainly I think because of the lack of the trust now in public health, the activities of public health, the sort of like overclaiming, the noble lies has led to a collapse in trust in public health. People think that public health is hiding things. Right. That has led not just to decreasing vaccine uptake for the COVID vaccines, but other vaccines as well, including MMR. Wow. One of the early fears, and I think I actually articulated this among many other people, but is that, okay, we have this situation here and however this ends, this ends, but this really becomes a kind of demonstration case for the way that the government or governments at various levels can just turn things on and off. Should we be worried about that? And what are the essential lessons to keep in mind? Because we're already forgetting what early 2020 was like in economic terms. Nobody remembers what the Obama administration actually did in response to the financial crisis. We have clearly forgotten all the lessons of dealing with inflation in the late 70s. What are the things that we need to remember so that we are not just stupidly replicating a failed response in the past? Well, I think that there needs to be a lot more oversight. Actually, it's just a classic American thing. You need checks and balances. So what happened is you had a small group of people, scientists, very powerful scientists, who panicked the political class. And the political class then imposed a state of emergency that in many states continues to this day. If you look at this, if you thought, okay, the judiciary could check it, well, it didn't. For a year, the judiciary did nothing in face of gross violations of civil rights. Including things like the CDC's moratorium on evictions and whatnot. Well, I mean, just some of the very basic things. In my county, they closed churches. They actually didn't even allow home Bible studies for four years. We ran a story, I believe it was in Mississippi, where a church service that was done in cars, like a drive-in church service where people were in their own cars was canceled. That's a panic response. That's a panic. So I'm not against working with churches to have the service be done more safe, but to just say, look, you can't even have a home Bible study. That's just a violation of the First Amendment, I think. Same thing with speech rights. I'm not saying like Twitter is obviously it's not a government entity, but there were a lot of interactions between the government and big tech to suppress certain kinds of speech. My philosophy on that is if you think that there's somebody that's saying bad things or wrong things, then come out with a response with data and information to convince people that they're saying wrong bad things. Don't suppress them. It actually creates an underground where those ideas take off more. I just don't understand that, but I mean, that continues to this day. I think checks and balances is the key thing. When you have an emergency like this, you have to have a body that can just say, well, should this be happening? Almost like a team B that puts a break on these things or forces the team A to say, this is not right. This is right. One of the critiques of Trump that was interesting is that he was not actually doing enough. As president, he was hands off. He talked a lot and we had those daily punch and duty shows, but he left it up to the states and the states did different things. Florida acted differently than California and New York and Texas, but was it that the NIH, the CDC, that these groups were too powerful so that we weren't really getting the full benefits of a kind of federalist or decentralized approach? One of my friends, Scott Atlas, was actually advised President Trump in July of 2020. He was hired by Trump to advise him. We spent his time in the White House extremely frustrated. What he observed was that the Deborah Birx that was in charge of the White House task force on the COVID response, so the medical side of it, Tony Fauci, Robert Redfield, who was the former CDC director and the former Surgeon General, they basically had a pact where if one of them was fired, all of them would resign. Essentially, they put Trump in this position where he basically thought he was going to lose the election if he changed policies. Then he brought Scott Atlas in. What Scott told me was that Deborah Birx went to governors around the country showing them COVID statistics about case rises outside of the context of other possible policies and scared them. They responded, many governments, most governors, responded by imposing the desired policy of Tony Fauci. Again, we seem to be coming out of COVID. There are other reports, both from Europe and especially from China, that the next big wave is coming. Can you scenario plan? What do the next six months look like? What does it look like at the start of 2023? COVID is here to stay. It's never going away. It's now, I think, the fifth circulating, commonly circulating coronavirus in human populations. A very large fraction of the population has protection against it, either by dint of being COVID-recovered or vaccinated or both. We're going to see waves over and over again. There's going to be new variants over and over again. Some of those new variants may escape immunity so that you get a big wave of cases. But none of the variants that we've seen to date, and I don't think this is going to change, escape the protection provided against severe disease given both either by the vaccines or by previous infection. I think it's going to become something that's just part of our lives. It's unfortunate that it's here. I wish it weren't. I wish snap our fingers and go back. But then does it become like a seasonal flu type situation? Yeah, I think it's seasonal. I think again, a variant might go over. Intermittent, whatever you get. But I do think that I don't envision us enacting another lockdown again. I think that people now understand that it didn't work. In fact, it caused all this harm. Mm-hmm. I think the next six, nine, I mean, actually, the decade is going to be focused on alleviating the harms caused by the lockdowns for children in health. So the real long COVID is going to be these knock-on effects of the lockdown, less than not the disease itself. Yeah. And I think you're going to still see people who were in favor of the lockdowns. I mean, there are fewer of them now. They're going to come and they're going to point and try to continue to make people scared of COVID. I mean, I think that that is irresponsible at this point. I think essentially it's an anti-vaccine movement, right? Because it's saying, look, you still have to be scared, even though we have this technology that reduces the harm, the severe disease from it. I think increasingly, they're going to be marginalized, and they should be. What do you do next? It's been a crazy two years for me. I don't, there's still some elements of COVID policy that still need to get cleaned up, I think. So I'm going to continue to work on some of those. But I want to work on longer-term projects. So I think science needs to be restored to its proper place. I think the conversation, the free-flowing discussion within science that ought to happen to make science work, was essentially hampered during COVID. It was very difficult. I mean, you have to pay a great cost to speak up. And that shouldn't be the case in science. Science should be that if you have an idea, you say it. And then if you're right, you're right, if you're wrong, you're wrong. It's not like a career-ending event. What happened during COVID was if you were going to speak up, I mean, it was just an exhausting, anxiety-ridden thing. I think that needs to be changed. So science is restored to its proper, has this proper discussion. The other thing, I think science needs to have its proper place in public policy discussion. Tony Fauci, people like me, we should not be setting policy. My job is, I don't view it as a policy. My job is primarily to do research. I can make policy recommendations based on my values and I can make those explicit. But the research tells you, okay, here's what the death rate is. Here's what the trade-offs are for these policies. And then the policy-making apparatus, democracy as messy as it is, then decides how to navigate those trade-offs. Scientists should contribute to that, but should not be put in place of that. And we should not have a technocracy, which is in effect what we've had the last two years. Well, we're going to leave it there. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, thanks for taking a reason. Thank you, Nick.