 There's one particular instance I want to zoom in on in which you appeared in a video with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and several epidemiologists for a round table. And this was in March, 2021. That video was removed by YouTube. We're gonna play a clip from it right now and I want to get your reflections on what happened there. I think the lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history. I think the lockdowns have, as Martin said, have failed to protect the vulnerable. Dr. Gupta mentioned about, you know, not putting masks on kids, it's not effective, not necessary. Martin, Paul, do you agree in school? There's no need for them to be wearing face masks. Children should not wear face masks, no. They don't need it for their own protection and they don't need it for protecting other people either. Okay. I mean, I think schools, how do you teach a child to read with face masks on Zoom? Or, you know, I think the children develop by watching other people. And I think it's developmentally inappropriate and it just doesn't help on the Z spread. I think it's absolutely not the right thing to do. So, I mean, the striking thing looking in the rear view mirror is that this is more or less what I think reasonable people agree with at this point, especially the mask point. I mean, that became policy in Florida shortly after this and there wasn't some sort of explosion of, you know, childhood deaths or deaths in schools. But putting that aside, the reason I included the mask part is that that's what YouTube said was their reason for removing that video from their platform. What was your reaction when that happened back in March of 2021? I mean, I was incensed. I mean, Zach, I had, before I prepared for that event that the governor had invited me to come out by looking at the literature on child masking. And I couldn't find a single randomized study that demonstrated, in fact, there was no evaluation, no randomized evaluation of child masking at all. And the evaluation of masking, the high quality randomized evaluations of masking of adults of preventing, for instance, the spread of the flu had found nothing. Same thing with, for COVID specifically, there was this Danish study, this randomized Danish study that found no ability of the mask in adults for surgical masks versus no mask for stopping you from getting COVID, no significant effect. And so, I mean, I knew that there was no support of high quality data in the literature about this. And I also had heard from so many parents, you know, autistic, with autistic kids of hearing-paired kids telling me that their kids were suffering because of these requirements for masking. So I was pretty confident that I was right scientifically when I made that statement. And of course you're doing it in public, so you have to do it in a way that's accessible to people. And I don't think what I said was wrong there. Certainly it's within the realm of scientific discussion of, you know, to have that. And so when YouTube suppressed that video of a sitting governor talking to his scientific advisors in public so that the public can understand the scientific basis for which he's making decisions, I was stunned. I mean, I thought like good government groups should be fair to that. Even if you disagree with what I said, at least you wanna know what the advice the governor is getting, right? That should be public. It's within the scientific bounds. Like there's, I knew there was scientific disagreement about this, although in retrospect, there shouldn't have been any. Like it was really, really clear that there was no good strong evidence in favor of the mask at all. In fact, not even real, even the weak evidence was not convincing. The weak evidence being like bad correlational studies. So I still am stunned to this, Zach. I can't understand. And, you know, the effect of it wasn't that you couldn't see the video. The effect of it really was to defame me and other scientists who disagreed with the government about these masking studies. The whole purpose was to say, well, look, these guys are fringe scientists so fringe that it's dangerous to have their views even up on YouTube. It is, and, you know, it's looking back. I mean, I blame YouTube at the time. I didn't understand at the time that the government itself had a big push to try to get this kind of message off YouTube because they didn't want their policies to be criticized. Yes, and that's what the heart of this case is, is trying to kind of examine exactly what the government's involvement behind the scenes was and whether they stepped over that line. And where that interaction starts to get revealed is in another example that you were involved with, which is you butting heads with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. Well, I shouldn't even say butting heads because this was all going on in, you know, private emails that were later revealed. But this is a headline from October, 2020 where Dr. Fauci says letting the coronavirus spread to achieve herd immunity is nonsense and dangerous. He said this, a version of this to several media outlets during this time period. And you all, John deposed Dr. Fauci and I've pulled a clip from that deposition where he talks about his reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration, which was a letter that you and several other scientists signed Jay, which basically said that lockdowns aren't working, they're detrimental. A better strategy would be what you call, what you called focus protection where you try to shield the most vulnerable people from the virus as much as possible. Fauci, will you let other people kind of live their lives? Fauci thought that was a dangerous and nonsense idea. And this is what he had to say when questioned in deposition about that time period. Let's roll that clip for a second. As Dr. Fauci says, letting the coronavirus spread to achieve herd immunity is quote nonsense and quote dangerous, correct? That is correct. Do you believe, do you still believe that? Do I believe that the Barrington Declaration premise of letting the virus rip through society and infect people leading to their illness, hospitalization and death is nonsense and dangerous? I still do. Are you an epidemiologist? I'm an infectious disease person with some pretty good experience in epidemiology. Our doctor, is Dr. Bhattacharya an epidemiologist? I don't know, I guess you'll have to look up as credentials. So your statement was made within two days of Dr. Collins' statement to the Washington Post, correct? Right. Did you guys coordinate on making those statements? Did you discuss it with each other that you're gonna make these statements criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration other than the emails you've already seen? I don't believe so, but I'm not one. No, I don't, that's not our style to be coordinating things, but I don't know. It's possible we discussed it, depends on what your definition of coordination is. At the same time frame, did you become aware that the Great Barrington Declaration was being censored in social media? I'm not aware of any censorship of anything. Like I said multiple times and I'll repeat it again for the record. I don't follow what goes on on social media censoring or otherwise, that's not something that I pay attention to. Okay, so two questions out of that. First one for Jay. Just your immediate reaction to what Fauci is saying there in this deposition. It's propaganda, Zach. It's absolute propaganda. So as you said, as you described it, it is an accurate description of what we did, said and wrote in the Great Barrington Declaration. We were not calling for letting the virus rip. And the evidence was very clear that the lockdowns, especially in the spring, had not failed to protect older and vulnerable people from the virus. Many older, vulnerable people had died from the virus despite the lockdowns. There was the counter example of Sweden which had better outcomes in much of the rest of Europe and certainly much of the rest of the United States which had not locked down, they're not close schools. It had adopted more reasonable protection of making it a priority to protect vulnerable older people. The strategies that Dr. Fauci had espoused at the time had failed and it had caused tremendous damage to the poor, the children, the working class. At the time in the summer of 2020, there were estimates that 100 million people would be thrown into poverty worldwide because of the economic dislocation caused by Dr. Fauci's lockdowns. 130 million people coding the World Food Program or the UN were at risk of dire food insecurity meaning starvation. The lockdowns were tremendously damaging to the health of the world. And Dr. Fauci, rather than trying to grapple with the actual critique we had, essentially organized a propaganda campaign. You can see when that CNBC thing, he went around saying that we want, that he set up a straw man and said, oh, let the virus rip. No, that was not, we were not calling for letting the virus rip, we were calling for better protection of vulnerable older people. We were not taking seriously enough and it was dangerous to let the lockdowns continue which unfortunately we did. And that deposition is so interesting. He denies initially talking or coordinating with Collins, even though the language they used was almost identical, nonsense, he says. Then he realizes, I guess that he's under oath and backtracks right in real time. You see that in real time. He says, oh, well, maybe I might have spoken. I don't remember. I think, and then when he's asked about censorship, he's like, oh, I don't read social media as if that's responsive to the question. 179 times in that deposition, he says, I don't recall. On basic scientific matters, on conversations, even when he has emails put in front of him, he doesn't recall. I'm sure he's a very busy man, but it beggars the imagination to think that he who is the architect of the lockdown policies that we followed recalls so few of the details of the key sort of moments around this. I mean, I was stunned watching that deposition and I think anyone that watches it with an open mind can say, look, we were not led well by the government scientists during the pandemic. We got a backdoor look via the Twitter files at kind of how the dials are turned to turn people's engagement up and down based on what they're saying that goes against the approved message. And you were one of the specific examples of someone who was shadow banned. I mean, shadow banning was kind of considered a conspiracy theory, but you actually were suppressed according to the material that Elon Musk turned over. Seeing that, and especially in light of what's been uncovered in discovery for this case, what's your reaction been knowing that there's been a concerted effort from the top down to really target you? I mean, I now know what it felt like for the people accused of being communists in the 1950s. I mean, literally in Facebook, I'm sorry, by Twitter, I was invited by Elon Musk to go see Twitter headquarters and see the database for my account. And it had the words blacklist on there. I was blacklisted. And it turns out I was blacklisted the day I joined Twitter in August, 2021. Well, what would cause Twitter to decide that I was gonna be blacklisted in August, 2020 before I even, I mean, the first day, the first post, I think the first or second post I had was the Great Barrington Declaration and why I was put on a blacklist. I mean, it's absolutely stunning. And I don't think Twitter did it on their own. I mean, their interest is to get as many ideas out there as possible. Their interest isn't to like blacklist scientists. The, what happened here was the government abused its power, essentially forcing these companies to act to spread the propaganda of government scientists to suppress the speech of people who disagreed with them. I mean, I still am stunned that this happened in the United States. I'd never, I mean, I'm an immigrant to this country. I came when I was four. I always thought that this was the one place on earth where free speech was never going to be violated. And yet I find myself as the victim of essentially government action to suppress free speech. Actually, can I say one other thing, Zach, before I let you go back? It was really interesting watching that New York Times clip that taught with President Biden. And then it's seeing what the reporters asked Jen Psaki about these free speech violations. The newspapers have an interest in basically emasculating the social media companies who are essentially their competitors. If the social media companies are not a bastion of free speech, well, that means that you will listen more to the newspapers. That's the only place we can get information from. It's like in the Soviet Union, the government suppressed free speech at such a great extent that people would, you know, they would listen to Providence to see what the government wanted to think. And then there were these samasthop, like people would send out secret messages underneath, essentially trying to like get what the truth out person to person outside of the view of the government. Essentially what the newspapers want, like the New York Times, is to kill a competitor so that these samasthop can't go out, that people will get their official view and then view that as authoritative. So what you're seeing here is like a lot of actors wanting to suppress free speech and the government absolutely using its muscle to try to destroy social media in order to get its message out, in order to suppress the ability of outside critics to criticize it. It's entirely anti-American. I mean, I was put on a blacklist act. The word blacklist was there in the, I thought that was something that went along in American history, not modern day times. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from my conversation with Jay Bhattacharya and John Vecchioni about Missouri v. Biden, a very important legal case about the future of social media and free speech. For another clip from that, click here. For the full conversation, click here.