How To Restore Free Speech In Academia

By Neenah Payne

Questioning The Destructive COVID Policies discusses the multi-faceted role of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in defending sound medical policies during the COVID era.

Jay Bhattacharya, an NIH critic, emerges as a top candidate to lead the agency showed that Trump was considering selecting Dr. Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health – which would signal a major turning point!

Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who faced censoring and blacklisting for criticising Biden-Fauci lockdown policy, appointed as new NIH director by Trump shows that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is working with the Trump administration to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) said:

“I’m so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine.”

When Dr. Francis Collins was the head of the NIH in 2021, he dismissed Dr. Battacharya and the two other authors of The Great Barrington Declaration as “fringe scientists” – although they were from Standford, Harvard, and Oxford. The Declaration has since been signed by more than 940,000 people including doctors and scientists! Collins refused to meet with these esteemed doctors to discuss their recommendations on how to end the lockdown. Had Collins done so, the nation could have been spared the many devastating consequences of the lockdown and vaccine mandates.

Instead, Dr. Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci who was then head of the NIAID, imposed a false “consensus” which mirrored the position of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who is not a doctor (he didn’t even graduate from college) and was not elected or appointed by anyone. In 2010, Gates announced that he wanted to launch a Decade of Vaccines. The World Health Organization joined that initiative.

Since Gates provides the largest funding for the World Health Organization, the WHO adopted Gates’ views. Social media imposed those and banned anyone (even top doctors and scientists) who disagreed. The corporate media likewise imposed the false “consensus”. Anyone who disagreed was accused of causing “vaccine hesitancy” and “killing people”. They were dismissed as selfish “conspiracy theorists”.

Better late than never: former NIH director Francis Collins admits COVID mistakes

Why Harvard Fired Dr. Martin Kulldorff

Harvard Tramples the Truth 3/11/24

By Dr. Martin Kulldorff

When it came to debating Covid lockdowns, Veritas wasn’t the university’s guiding principle.

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.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns.

Former Harvard Medical Professor Claims He Was Fired for Opposing Covid Lockdowns, Vaccine Mandates 3/18/24

In the video below, Dr. Kulldorff explains that the government and Harvard resorted to censoring and ridiculing people who disagreed with the COVID “consensus” because there was nothing to support their position. So, they were not willing to debate their policies which they could not defend since they were not based on science or logic.

Dr. Kulldorff points out that censoring our God-given Free Speech rights protected by the First Amendment should never be an option. Censorship deprives people of the opportunity of hearing information needed to make information decisions. Dr. Kulldorff says that he used to take freedom of speech for granted, but no longer does. Dr. Kulldorff says there should be a Commission to examine the response to COVID-19. While there is no national investigation, both New Hampshire and Florida have launched inquiries.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who worked for Harvard University as a professor of medicine since 2003, recently announced he was fired for “clinging to the truth” in his public opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician, told National Review he was fired by the Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham hospital system and put on a leave of absence by Harvard Medical School in November 2021 over his stance on Covid. Nearly two years later, in October 2023, his leave of absence was terminated as a matter of policy, marking the end of his time at the university.

Why Did Harvard Fire Martin Kulldorff? 4/11/24

Martin Kulldorff talks about his dismissal from Harvard Medical School, persisting college vaccine mandates, and surviving COVID-era censorship on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. At least 40 U.S. colleges still require a COVID vaccine, according to nocollegemandates.com, an initiative that tracks and opposes the mandates.

Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician who lost his job at Harvard for refusing the vaccine even though he’d already survived a COVID infection, says such mandates are “unscientific” and “unethical.” Harvard has since dropped the mandate, but Kulldorff likely won’t be getting his job there back anytime soon because the Harvard-affiliated hospital that employs medical school faculty still requires a COVID vaccine.

Kulldorff, who created one of the earliest disease outbreak surveillance software systems, was also booted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 vaccine safety commission and regularly de-boosted on Twitter and YouTube for his views. Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins labeled him and his co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and demanded a “quick and devastating…takedown” of their call to end lockdowns in favor of a “focused protection” strategy.

Watch the full conversation on Reason’s YouTube channel .

Harvard’s Double Standard on Free Speech

Harvard’s Double Standard on Free Speech

Harvard’s Unscientific Consensus (with podcast)

Martin Kulldorff joins John Tierney to discuss his firing from Harvard University and the importance of scientific debate.

John Tierney: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is John Tierney, a contributing editor to City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former professor at Harvard Medical School. He’s also a plaintiff in a case that’s being heard by the Supreme Court this month, involving censorship of his ideas about Covid. Today, we’re going to discuss yet another scandal at Harvard, and this one doesn’t involve plagiarism or anti-Semitism. It involves Harvard’s notorious hostility to free speech and scientific inquiry.

Back in October, I wrote in City Journal about Harvard’s double standard on free speech. That it’s fine on campus to support Hamas, but don’t dare say anything that offends progressives. I didn’t mention Martin’s case because at that time he hadn’t gone public, but now he has in the City Journal article revealing how he lost his job at Harvard after he criticized the disastrous and unscientific policies during the Covid pandemic that were being pushed by government officials with a lot of help from Harvard scientists.

Now, when the pandemic began, Martin was recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on vaccines and their side effects. During his career, which began in his native Sweden, he was instrumental in designing systems used by the CDC and other health agencies for monitoring vaccine safety and adverse effects. He was a professor at the Harvard Medical School, and also a member of the CDC’s Covid Vaccine Safety Working Group, but he soon discovered that his expertise would get him in trouble if it contradicted the version of the “science” being enforced by the CDC and Harvard scientists, one of whom became the CDC’s Director.

Stanford University’s Pandemic Policy Conference

Stanford University’s Amazing Pandemic Policy Conference

October 9, 2024 Margaret Song, MD, MPH

On October 4, 2024, I had the privilege of attending a conference at Stanford University titled “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past.” It was notable in that it was the first academic conference held at a major university that attempted to give an honest critique of the United States’ public health agencies’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Organized by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University, the panels featured an impressive assembly of notable epidemiologists, health policy experts, public health officers, attorneys, and journalists. The topics covered by the panels included evidence-based decision-making, censorship and academic freedom, and informing future pandemic policy.

While there was diversity of opinions about the justifications for the interventions that were done during the pandemic, the general tone of the panels was decidedly critical of the actions of the United States government and its agencies. It was the first time that academic experts were able to discuss censorship and other vital matters on a university campus, thanks to Stanford’s new president, Jonathan Levin, who allowed the conference to take place against enormous pressure to close it down.

Restoring Free Speech In Academia

In the video below, Dr. Bhattachrya discusses the extreme dangers of a government-mandated scientific “consensus” that censors top scientists and doctors who have different views. He discusses how to restore free speech in academia now.

Restoring Free Speech in Academia: Jay Bhattacharya (video) 11/14/24

Jan Jekielek: I recently had the pleasure of attending a Pandemic Planning conference at Stanford University. It was really the first of its kind, in that it brought together a wide range of voices on the topic in an academic setting, and it was held under the auspices of the new Stanford President Jonathan Levin.

“I think it’s expanded the range of things that are allowed to be said in polite society, if you will,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy and the lead organizer of the conference. “The purpose of the conference was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around the world,” he says.

Transcript

Mr. Jekielek: Congratulations on winning the Zimmer Medal from the Academy of American Science and Letters. It’s the second award, and Salman Rushdie was the first. What are you feeling about this new award?

Dr. Bhattacharya: Obviously, it’s a great honor. The award was given to me for sticking my neck out during the pandemic at a time when many, many other scientists and intellectuals didn’t. But it’s also true that there were many scientists and intellectuals that paid a huge price for it. My friend Martin Kulldorff lost his job at Harvard University as a tenured professor. Basically, almost everybody in academics who had academic positions that did stick their necks out had tremendous difficulty from their institutions. It was a really difficult time.

Mr. Jekielek: What about yourself?

Dr. Bhattacharya: It was difficult. I thought I was going to lose my job in 2020 at Stanford as a tenured professor. There were death threats for two straight years. When you have what feels like the entire establishment is trying to destroy you, it’s not the easiest thing. But at the same time, there were a tremendous number of people that I got to know that I never would have gotten to know, that I’d become friends with, which I admire tremendously. who, for them, and you could see it in the time when it’s difficult to speak up, then they spoke up, it’s the people of tremendous integrity whose values are quite aligned with mine, even if their politics might be quite different.

Mr. Jekielek: This medal is an Intellectual Freedom Award, right? You spent months organizing the Stanford Pandemic Policy Conference, which I was very honored to attend as a moderator. Let’s talk about that and its significance.

Dr. Bhattacharya: Sure. Throughout the pandemic, it’s been very difficult to organize discussions and debates between people who had an alternate view, like people who oppose the lockdowns, for instance, or people who oppose the vaccine mandates, the mask mandates, or all the whole school closures. It’s been very difficult to have those views represented in the public square. And one of the reasons why is that universities have not hosted discussions and debates. There was the idea that opposition from establishment people to these public health policies was somehow dangerous.

If people knew that there were tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists that opposed the lockdowns, well, they might not think that lockdown is the right idea. That was the reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration, for instance. Universities play a tremendously important role in paneling these discussions, especially in difficult times. The university mission of academic freedom inquiry aimed at finding the truth, is different from the mission of public health.

And it turns out, for public health, they viewed the university mission as a danger and applied tremendous pressure to universities to make sure that those discussions didn’t happen. In 2020, a former president of the university at Stanford, where I teach, John Hennessey, actually, tried to help me arrange a debate between me and somebody in the medical school who disagreed with me. Couldn’t find somebody in the medical school to discuss. We thought that they’re cowards. The issue was that they thought that empaneling me, putting me, platforming me was itself a danger. That’s what the medical school thought, or some people in the leadership.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re part of the medical school.

Dr. Bhattacharya: Yes, I had been teaching there for almost 25 years. It was an absolutely remarkable, complete violation of the mission of the university, which is to have those discussions. I might have been wrong, but the best way to deal with me is to have a discussion with me and make the points that show me wrong. That’s how we discover true things, is in sort of wrestling with each other on ideas…..

The conference that we just held at Stanford in October 2024 is four years late I think, but nevertheless, still quite an accomplishment. It was the first major university to host a large conference where people who disagreed about the pandemic policy were sitting in the same room talking to each other in a civil way….

Mr. Jekielek: You talk about censorship. Many people may not think about this as censorship. Many people actually think about it as trying to deal with harmful misinformation. Let’s unpack how you view that.

Dr. Bhattacharya: Sure. As you know, I’m involved with this Missouri v. Biden lawsuit. The case had at its core the questions, should the government be able to tell social media companies and other media companies that these views are so dangerous that you shouldn’t allow them to be heard by the American people? Is there really a First Amendment? Do we really even have freedom of speech when it comes to public health?….

The key argument, forget about the legal case, the key moral argument is, in the time of a crisis, should people be able to say public health is wrong? And the problem with the idea that people shouldn’t be able to criticize public health in the time of crisis is that public health often is wrong in quite damaging ways. And criticism, if permitted, if allowed, would actually allow public health to course correct earlier and save lives…..

I’ll tell you the first reaction I had to this is that during the pandemic, it was the government that was harming children. The government closed the schools. The government, on the behest of public health, essentially told children and parents to treat their children as if they were biohazards. They caused a mental health crisis. They had a tremendous loss of learning that will reverberate through a generation where we essentially left behind a vast number of children, especially minority children, especially poor children. It was the government, in effect, telling children to jump out of buildings. And it used its power to suppress critics of this policy that was blaming children. It was exactly inverted, the hypothetical.

The conference itself….was four years in the making.… And it happened because Stanford…. has turned from what it was like during the pandemic. There’s a new president who is deeply committed to academic freedom and emphasized the importance of Stanford and the institutions of higher education in the United States being places where these kinds of very difficult policy discussions can happen. Where all kinds of points of view are represented, not just the orthodoxy….

There’s more to public health than just the prevention of a single infectious disease. Even in the midst of a pandemic, you have to remember that….

It’s interesting to see the power that the legacy media has in the minds of people who support basically the orthodoxy. It’s not so much to convince people that the orthodoxy is right. It’s to essentially demonize criticism of the orthodoxy. You don’t even appear in the company of people who disagree. It’s the very antithesis of what the mission of a university is.

It is to have those disagreements even when they’re uncomfortable. And a panel is just even the people who disagree with the orthodoxy. That’s part of the mission of the university. It’s part of the truth-seeking mission of the university. The pressure was actually tremendous, especially a couple of months before the conference. It wasn’t even a large number of the legacy media people. It was just a couple, primarily this man named Michael Hiltzik from the LA Times.

If you have power, and you can use that to get…a policy that you like through…, an illusion that there’s a scientific consensus on the topic when there isn’t. People will use…that power….An example of that might be when I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, with Martin Kulldorff from Harvard and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, which argued against lockdowns and in favor of focused protection of vulnerable older people, the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, four days afterwards, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown of the premise of the Declaration.

That led to hit pieces against me and death threats. But more importantly, it essentially demonized the Declaration in the minds of people who didn’t read it or engage with the ideas. It sent a signal to the scientific community and the policy community that you shouldn’t engage with this. It’s so fringe that you shouldn’t even think about it. That kind of power is always available to authorities. And when it’s used to suppress discussion and debate, it’s an illegitimate use of that power….

There should not be a public health exception to the First Amendment. It’s not true that the public health authorities know the scientific facts so well, have so deeply embedded in them the norms of American society and the trade-offs of the values that people have on a whole range of issues, that they can sit above us and say, you are not allowed to say that. That itself is so dangerous that it doesn’t belong in the class of carving out exceptions to things you can’t.

The Precautionary Principle

The discussion between Anders Tegnell and Josh Salomon and others on that first panel was very, very interesting to me personally. I’m very interested in how you make decisions under uncertainty, especially in times of stress. I don’t know if this was unique, but I hadn’t seen people who had such different points of view in discussion with each other about how to manage that kind of uncertainty, the idea at the very beginning of the pandemic of a precautionary principle, that almost any policy measure is worth doing to try to prevent it from happening….

The precautionary principle is that if you have a possibility of some catastrophic bad thing happening, and you don’t know that it may or may not happen….you’re allowed to assume the worst about that thing. For instance, with this virus in February 2020 where there’s a lot of uncertainty about the death rate, you’re allowed to assume the worst about its death rate….

What you’re not allowed to do is assume that the interventions that you’re putting in place will work to prevent those deaths. That’s not part of the precautionary principle. You still have to do due diligence and ask, will closing schools actually stop the virus from spreading? Preventing church services, preventing funeral services, what impact will that actually have? Closing down businesses at scale, what impact will that have?….

You have to ask yourself, will the intervention work?….. Then you also have to ask yourself, what are the harms of the intervention? …. You know closing schools is going to harm children at scale. right? You know that locking down all the Western economies of the world for extended periods of time is going to have tremendous impacts on the poorest people of the world, right?…Then you have to ask yourself, do the interventions make sense in the context of the harms they’re going to do and the likelihood they’re going to work or fail vs. the worst case scenario of how bad the virus is.

Importance of Benefit-Harm Analysis

All the precautionary principle allows you to do is resolve uncertainty about the particular threat, not the efficacy of the intervention to manage the threat or the harms of those interventions. You still have to do essentially a benefit-harm analysis in order to make decisions, even in the context of the precautionary principle…..

And even more important to me than the academics, I’ve gotten many messages from people who’ve watched some of the videos who were regular people, not scientists, that were happy that their views were finally, in some way, reflected in these academic discussions, that they didn’t feel as if their views were marginalized. And so I think that, in that sense, it was a tremendous success. These are very thorny policy issues, and they don’t get resolved by a single conference.

But I do think that the fact that we ran this conference has given permission, A, to start talking about these issues in public much more openly on all of these topics. And then also for other universities to host similar events. I know that’s in the works for many, many other places, or a few other places at least. We’ll see if they pan out. But it’s quite heartening. The purpose of the conference was to essentially open the floodgates of these kinds of events taking place everywhere around.

Dangers of Groupthink

Groupthink was a major problem during the pandemic in academic circles, in public health circles. The enforcement of this idea that you can’t say something outside the orthodoxy that is somehow transgressive. That’s why I received that Zimmer Medal, because I didn’t think they were transgressive. It just seemed like common sense.

Don’t harm kids. Let them go to school. But it was transgressive if an academic said a transgressive thing and expressed it publicly. As I said at the beginning of our interview, I faced tremendous pressure to not do that. People lost their jobs and lost their reputation, it didn’t matter.

I have a colleague at Stanford named Michael Levitt. He’s an absolutely brilliant scientist. He won a Nobel Prize for his early work on protein folding and computational biology. Early in the pandemic, he was quite skeptical about the lockdowns. He did modeling from a different point of view and argued that the lockdowns were not the right approach.

He also faced pressure within his scientific field. He was uninvited for a scientific meeting in his field because of his ideas on pandemic management. That kind of pressure was so ubiquitous that it made it almost impossible for people who have reservations about the lockdowns to speak up.

It reinforced the groupthink of the public health community that thought, oh, everyone agrees with us. We should close schools. We should close businesses. We should impose vaccine mandates. We should adopt authoritarianism as a solution to a pandemic. I mean, all of that was orthodox scientific, public health group think. And it was upheld by this omerta, this crushing of dissent.

The purpose of the conference is to make sure that that group think doesn’t happen. But I hope what ultimately happens from it is that universities return to their mission which is to host these discussions so that that group think cannot ever emerge. The truth doesn’t come out of a group think. The truth comes out of engagement with people with different ideas.

End Transcript

Neenah Payne writes for Activist Post

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