Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, discusses current public health measures and how the COVID-19 pandemic, now an endemic, has been handled—from the misguided WHO recommendations, to national policy responses, to lockdowns, and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya analyses how the development of the COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020 was politically framed and wrongly assumed by some to be capable of stopping virus transmission noting how countries like Israel had vast case outbreaks even with high vaccination rates. Bhattacharya details how vaccine discrimination grew out of wrong-minded public health policies based on vaccine falsehoods within the US where officials ignored the fact that those who had already recovered from having contracted COVID-19 had pretty good protection against getting sick again, stating: “Essentially they introduced…legalised discrimination against the unvaxed on the basis of a scientific falsehood: the idea that the vaccine could stop transmission.” Observing how the lockdowns were a complete failure in stopping the spread of the virus while there were viable alternatives for protecting the elderly, Bhattacharya vituperates how the lives of the poor, the vulnerable, and the working class worldwide were devastated. He cites a UN report from 2021 that documents how 230,000 children died as a result of the economic dislocation caused by lockdown in South Asia—starvation effectively—something he maintains was utterly predictable. Criticising “policy contagion” on the world stage and the conflicts of interest presented by Anthony Fauci’s roles in virus mitigation and in funding high-profile immunologists and virologists like Jeremy Farrar who are involved in setting COVID policy, Bhattacharya maintains that there is a conflict of interest between those who fund the science and those on the receving end of this funding who set public health policy given that these scientists will be afraid to speak up.

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