'A Deplorable and an Elitist Walk into a Bar'
And a debate silenced in 2020 opens up
Francis Collins, right, then director of the National Institutes for Health, headed to a 2018 workshop on global health with Anthony Fauci, left, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Bill Gates, center. National Institutes of Health Photo Gallery.
Had we had an honest conversation—not suppressed—without the smearing, without the ad hominem attacks (you know, the “fringe epidemiology”)—we would have had a very different policy that would have avoided the lockdowns and would have avoided the harm to children, the closing of schools. We would have given voice to the poor of the world who were suffering through starvation and impoverishment.—Jay Bhattacharya, MD
Who doesn’t love lockdowns? If you don’t like them, would you have liked to have known in 2020 how they might have ended before 2021? Would you have liked for the vulnerable to have had better protection during the pandemic? Compared to the management of Covid 19, would you like improvements in the management of future pandemics?
In October 2020, a legion of scientists proposed an alternative to lockdowns, but their voices were suppressed through aggressive censorship. Debates going on now concern how public health decisions should be made and communicated in future pandemics and whether government officials and social media platforms are in violation of the First Amendment when they work together to suppress debate about such matters.
The Great Barrington Declaration
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician, economist, and Stanford professor of health policy, was one of three authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed an alternative to the lockdowns, as well as a way to provide better care for the most vulnerable. Bhattacharya talked about the declaration on November 13, 2023, when he participated in a virtual conversation titled “Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic.” It was hosted by the Braver Angels Tucson Alliance, a local chapter of a national, non-partisan, volunteer-led organization.
Battacharya walked listeners through his process of learning and discovery early in the pandemic. He started with two ideas or insights. First, the disease was much more widespread than originally thought and than some other similar diseases. Second, when lockdowns disrupt people’s lives and global supply chains, the result is “trickle down epidemiology,” meaning the people who suffer the most and experience the greatest losses are the poor. “Poverty causes death,” he said.
In April 2020, Bhattacharya ran studies of antibody levels in Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties, California. Both showed the virus was extremely widespread and the death rate from Covid-19 was far lower than had originally been thought. The number of people who had been in contact with the disease, as shown by the prevalence of antibodies, was high, and the percentage of those dying of Covid was low in comparison.
Bhattacharya said 100 or more research teams later duplicated those studies.
He talked about how the lockdowns had not protected the elderly because the health care bureaucracy was more concerned with protecting hospital systems. That was why it was understandable that Andrew Cuomo, then New York governor, sent infected Covid patients back to nursing homes. If protection of the vulnerable had been the highest priority, then “it would have been unthinkable to send them back to nursing homes because that’s where the most vulnerable older people were,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya explained some of the damage done by the lockdowns. “People were told it was dangerous to go to hospitals,” so some didn’t get needed treatment for early-stage cancer, which turned into late-stage cancer and sometimes death, or for heart attacks.
Bhattacharya also found the effects of the disease were much worse for older people than the young. “For young people, especially children, it showed the risk of dying was miniscule.”
On October 4, 2020, Battacharya got together with Martin Kulldorf of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, who are “among the most accomplished epidemiologists and biostatisticians in the world,” and they wrote The Great Barrington Declaration, proposing focused protection for older people and lifting the lockdowns.
“What we were calling for was a reshuffling of the intellectual infrastructure so that the protection of vulnerable people was the most important goal of public health policy rather than a whole host of other goals that had seemed to have taken hold.”
For those who were not vulnerable, the declaration called for common-sense cautionary measures, like hand-washing and staying home when sick. It advised opening schools and universities for in-person learning and stated, “Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.”
Battacharya said, “When we wrote the declaration, we put it on a website and it went viral. Tens of thousands of epidemiologists, doctors, and scientists signed it almost immediately after we released it and almost a million regular people shortly after we released it.”
Bhattacharya explained:
One of the major reasons why we wrote the declaration was to let the world know that there was not a consensus in favor of the lockdown strategies that the United States and the world had followed. In fact, there were tremendous levels of unease in the scientific community about lockdowns even though if you read the newspapers or listened to the top government scientists you would think that everyone agreed the lockdowns were the right way. I knew that was not true. Many of my fellow scientists that I spoke with knew that the lockdowns were a terrible idea. The Great Barrington Declaration—especially the reaction of the scientific community with tens of thousands of scientists and doctors signing it—made clear that was correct, that there was a huge debate going on that the public didn’t know about regarding the wisdom of the lockdowns.
The problem was the scientific bureaucracy wanted to maintain an illusion of consensus that lockdowns were the only way.
“A Quick and Devastating Published Takedown”
On October 8, just days after the declaration was released, Dr. Francis Collins, a physician who was then director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email to colleagues including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a physician who was then director of the National Institute of Asthma and Infectious Diseases. It stated:
This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary (Alex Azar) seems to be getting a lot of attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet--is it underway?
Among the media that reported on the takedown was the Daily Mail newspaper, which mentioned publications that had carried articles or op-eds critical of the declaration, including The Washington Post, The Nation Magazine, and WIRED Magazine.
Bhattacharya told of the ways Google, Facebook and Twitter (before Elon Musk’s purchase) deamplified the declaration. Scientists lost jobs at universities and independent labs because they signed the declaration.
“Rather than engage with us intellectually to try to think about how to better care for older people, the reaction of the scientific bureaucracies of the world was to try to destroy us,” Bhattacharya said.
“This was spearheaded by the top scientific bureaucrats in the United States, in the U.K., and elsewhere,” he said, calling it an abuse of power.
He spoke about the paralyzing effect an email like the one Collins sent could have on scientific exploration.
“When Francis Collins wrote that email calling us ‘fringe epidemiologists,’ he was sending a signal to other scientists to stay silent and that’s exactly what many scientists did in a consequence of that signal,” Bhattacharya said.
He added, “What should have happened was an honest debate about the wisdom of lockdowns and about the wisdom of focused protection, which is what we were proposing. Instead, what happened was the silencing, censoring, and smearing of scientists.”
The conversation at the bar
“A Deplorable and Elitist Walk Into A Bar” was a conversation that took place at the 2023 Braver Angels national convention, held near the Gettysburg Address Memorial (above). National Park Service photo
A few words from Francis Collins resurrected the aborted debate. A short clip surfaced on Twitter around December 29, 2023, when the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Francis Collins Has Regrets, but Too Few: The former director of the National Institutes of Health and staunch promoter of Covid lockdowns said his view was too ‘narrow.’” Collins said:
If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered. … This is a public-health mindset and I think a lot us involved in trying to make those recommendations have that mindset and that’s really unfortunate. That’s another mistake we made.”
The short clip made me curious. Who was the audience? What was the venue? Did Collins admit to other missteps? Did he admit his role in smearing The Great Barrington Declaration and its authors? Did he issue a public apology?
As I discovered, Collins made the admission at the July 2023 third annual national convention of Braver Angels at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The admission came near the end an hour-long conversation titled “A Deplorable And An Elitist Walk Into A Bar,” just before the half-hour of questions and answers. The 700 registrants at the convention were about equally divided between deplorables and elitists.
The deplorable with whom Collins dialogued was Wilk Wilkinson, a Minnesota trucking manager, host of Derate the Hate podcast, and leader in the Braver Angels organization. Wilkinson, who later introduced Bhattachayera for his November 13 conversation, had gotten to know Collins before the convention as the two were co-leaders of the Braver Angles’ Truth and Trust Project.
Collins explained the reason he is part of Braver Angels is “because I think there’s got to be some other way that the people—we the people—can counter all of these other destructive influences that are continually trying to make something worse than it already is.”
As I had hoped, Collins did make other admissions. Speaking of mistakes he and his team made, he said, “We did not admit our ignorance. And that was a profound mistake. And we lost a lot of credibility along the way. And that one I will not forget.” He said it was nearly impossible to find information on the website of the Centers for Disease Control.
Nearly fifty minutes into their conversation Wilkinson brought up The Great Barrington Declaration. “The whole thing of shutting down the argument instead as opposed to having the argument was another contentious point for the people,” he said. “Don’t shut the conversation; have it on the battlefield of ideas.”
Collins said, “As somebody who was deeply engaged in the federal effort to try to save lives, I saw this and I was deeply troubled. I regret that I used some terminology that I probably shouldn’t have: that somebody should put forward a devastating takedown of the dangers here. And I regret that.”
Collins said that within days after he sent his email numerous public health associations responded with a “scathing takedown” of the declaration.
Collins didn’t apologize for calling Kuldorff, Guptra, and Bhattacharya “fringe epidemiologists.” The only way in which he recognized their expertise and dedication was to call them “distinguished.”
Collins didn’t mention the hit pieces in legacy media, nor did he acknowledge the coordinated censorship by the government and social media. So, naturally, he apologized neither for smearing highly reputable physicians with whom he disagreed nor for suppressing their speech.
I wondered why Braver Angels hadn’t brought some of the physicians Collins maligned into the conversation and then I found the video of the November 13 conversation the Tucson chapter had with Bhattacharya, who was introduced by Wilkinson.
A Polyphonous Duet
Juxtaposing the different ways Collins and Bhattacharya addressed the same topics in their Better Angels conversations sounds like a polyphonous duet in an opera, where the characters sing different words with intertwining melodies. Wilkinson interjects from time to time.
On the playbook at the start of the pandemic:
Collins: “I was not in a position of having a lot to say about the public health measures but I was certainly in that group that met in the West Wing of the White House to try to decide what to recommend at a time where people were dying around us. I mean, turn the clock back to March or April of 2020 when this really began to hit very hard, particularly in big cities like New York and at that time we had no effective way to fight back against this. …
“As a guy living inside the beltway, feeling the sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City.”
Bhattacharya: “Had we followed The Great Barrrington Declaration which, by the way, was the standard for how we managed every respiratory virus pandemic for the century before—protection of the vulnerable, not panicking the rest of the population—had we followed that, we would have had better outcomes for Covid and, of course, we would have avoided the lockdown harm.”
On debate about The Great Barrington Declaration:
Collins: “These three epidemiologists, distinguished by their credentials, were convened in a gathering in Massachusetts by Scott Atlas, who was at that time advising the president … That declaration would have been a great opportunity for a broad scientific discussion about the pros and cons but that’s not how it was presented. On the day it was presented, it was presented to the Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar; it would have been presented the next day to the president if he wasn't in Walter Reed at the time being treated for Covid. This was an effort to take a very fast track on something which would have been a major change in national policy without the opportunity for any debate or discussion.
“In a few days, no less than 14 of the public health associations of the United States all together wrote a scathing take-down of The Great Barrington Declaration, saying this would probably kill tens of thousands of people. And so, ultimately that was the scientific discussion, but the effort was made by the authors—and some help from Dr. Atlas—to try to short-circuit all that and get that into a policy decision without the opportunity for debate. So, I don’t regret saying, ‘This is dangerous.’ It was.”
Bhattacharya “We were hoping that the public health authorities would join us in thinking about how best to protect vulnerable older people from Covid.”
Wilkinson: “I’d would still love to see the conversation happen.”
On pejorative language:
Collins: “This was October of 2020. We had no vaccines. People were dying at high rates, at that point, across the country but particularly in cities … (The Great Barrington Declaration) was sort of a let-her-rip as far as the younger people. Maybe it’s not a great phrase, but it was different from what was currently being proposed.”
Bhattacharya: “Tony Fauci responded to that email with a hit piece in WIRED Magazine accusing (us) … of wanting to let the virus rip when in fact the most important plank in The Great Barrington Declaration was better focused protection of older people. We were not calling to let the virus rip. That was a slur. …
“Had we had an honest conversation—not suppressed—without the smearing, without the ad hominem attacks (you know, the “fringe epidemiology”)—we would have had a very different policy that would have avoided the lockdowns and would have avoided the harm to children, the closing of schools. We would have given voice to the poor of the world who were suffering through starvation and impoverishment.”
Wilkinson: “Biden is constantly using phrases like MAGA Republicans as a pejorative. ... There’s people on the red side, the blue side, all along the spectrum that are using that kind of language. That kind of language closes people’s ears. You cannot change the hearts or minds or even get people to think about who they are when you start off by treating them as some sub-human person unworthy of even hearing.”
On communications during public health emergencies:
Collins: “Some (sources) were frankly intending to distribute misinformation. You could call that misinformation. We should have had a much better plan for how to prepare for that sort of assault on the truth and we were continually just trying to catch up with something that had already gone viral. And sort of the retrospective scope on this is if we ever have another circumstance—I’m sorry, but we probably will—then the communication about science has to be much more nimble than it has been. It has to be ready not just to debunk things that are false but actually prebunk things.”
Bhattacharya: “What happened is that the government took it on itself to suppress legal speech because they think it hurts public health.
“I think that, while it’s true there is misinformation online and that people act on that misinformation, the best counter to that misinformation online isn’t censorship because what that does is it breeds distrust. The best counter to misinformation online is honest communication from a trustworthy public health agency.
“If the public health agency is acting in good faith in honestly trustworthy ways, people will trust—not everyone (that’s not possible)—but more people will trust it instead of what we have now is essentially a discussion going on sub rosa with a pressure cooker lid on top of it. And it’s bred a tremendous amount of distrust in our institutions.”
Wilkinson: “There was not the consensus that some people tried to make people believe there was. … the best way to combat those voices that were coming with bad information was to present it with good information instead of trying to shut down the argument.”
On fear-mongering:
Collins: “Every possible voice—many of them with all kinds of intentions that weren’t noble—were ready to capitalize on a circumstance where there was uncertainty and resentment and anger and fear and whip that up in the biggest way.”
Bhattacharya: “We had a tremendous increase in preventable death as a consequence of the fear-mongering that public health officials put out about Covid rather than looking at this literature more reasonably.”
On the Chinese model:
Collins: “China didn’t have a problem with politicians disagreeing with the leadership. Nor did they have a media problem, but we sure did.”
Bhattacharya: “But even China failed with the lockdowns. The Chinese lockdowns didn’t protect the Chinese population. The estimates, … based on a whole variety of sources, suggest that millions of people died in China, too, from Covid. And, of course, the draconian lockdowns in China had tremendous negative effects.”
On comparisons to Sweden:
Collins: “Sweden kind of took that (focused protection) tack from the beginning. After six months they were doing better, but the first three or four months Sweden was having a higher (death) rate than anywhere else in Europe.”
Bhattacharya: “Sweden—while it had some failures very early in the pandemic to protect older people, especially in nursing homes, it largely followed a policy of focused protection. It structured its society so that it provided opportunities for older people to be shielded through sick leave and a whole list of other policies while letting the rest of society live normally and, as a result, the all-cause excess deaths—the number of deaths over what you would have expected—and given the age structure of the population—the all-cause excess of deaths was either the lowest or the second lowest in all of Europe—much, much lower than the United States, for instance.”
On management of the next pandemic:
Collins: “I think there are some really fundamental things the federal government has to do that otherwise can’t get done like our national defense. … In a certain way, public health is our domestic defense. We have external enemies that have (you know) weapons and guns and then we have potentially an internal enemy that has a spike protein that’s coming for us. Why should we not have just the same kind of resources and intention and coordination for our domestic defense?”
For “national defense against external enemies we don’t have just sort of a generic template of how we’re going to tackle a hot spot in the rest of the world. It’s very specific for what the threats are and what we need to put there as far as resources. Shouldn’t we have that also for domestic defense?”
Bhattacharya: “As things stand now, the establishment figures that pushed the lockdown policy are effectively working to enshrine it as the standard way we manage pandemics into the future. In the U.K., there’s currently a Covid inquiry going on where the established figures are essentially saying that the lockdowns were a great idea and the only problem was they weren’t implemented hard enough—that they weren’t able to have the kind of totalitarian control that China had. …
“We should have followed the Swedish example. We should have allowed there to be scientific and policy debate. And I think had we done so The Great Barrington Declaration would have won the day because it was the standard pandemic plan we followed for a century before successfully.
“Unless in this country and elsewhere, unless we take an honest accounting of the failures of the lockdown and enshrine the old ideas embodied in The Great Barrington Declaration, then all of this will happen again.”
Wilkinson: “Mandates and dictates are not the right way. Don’t make mandates; make better arguments.”
Take a stand and stay tuned
In his role as special advisor to the president on Covid, Scott W. Atlas, M.D., saw that “the president needed to hear from the true experts.” He brought together the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration and, like them, he was the target of hit pieces in the media. Photo by Buffy Gilfoil
Could long lockdowns have been avoided? Should they be highly restricted in the future?
Debates over management of and public communications during public health crises and the extent to which government can legally control speech are by no means limited to the sources highlighted here. The Braver Angels Tucson alliance also interviewed Collins. Bhattacharya hosted Wilkinson on his podcast titled The Illusion of Consensus and vice versa. Dr. Scott W. Atlas, MD, a physician, wrote a book titled A Plague Upon Our House: My fight at the Trump Whilte House to stop Covid from destroying America. Battacharya provided details about the censorship against him in an interview titled “The Man Who Talked Back: Jay Bhattacharya on the fight against Covid lockdowns.” Fauci testified in a closed-door hearing before Congress that “the six-feet rule for social distancing ‘sort of appeared’ without a solid scientific basis,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
At least two presidential candidates have made their opinions known about issues at or near the heart of these debates. Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote a book titled The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. In a short video, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he was one of the first to speak out against “government-tech censorship” in 2021.
The World Economic Forum, meeting in January 2024 in Davos, Switzerland, was all abuzz about the terrifying, imaginary Disease X, which could kill far more people than Covid did. Of course, the response to it would require the World Health Organization and international corporations to take drastic measures to keep the death count as low as possible. Months earlier, in June 2023, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) introduced the Disease X Act of 2023.
The debates will continue online, in books, in Congress, on the lecture circuit, in courts and elsewhere.
Having spent years in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy as a reservist for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I’m fairly certain a hefty manual is at least in draft form, providing detailed guidance for government management of future pandemics. Whether such a document will get close Congressional oversight is less certain.
Doctors and scientists will continue to turn to the National Institutes of Health for funding of their research, well aware of the directors’ power to squash debate and make or break careers.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling by the end of its current session in June on whether “the federal government colluded with social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to suppress the freedom of speech,” as reported by the Missouri Independent. At issue is whether such collusion violated the First Amendment. Fauci is among those who have received subpoenas in the case and plaintiffs include Bhattacharya and Kulldorff.
Enough is known now for participants in and observers of these debates to take at least a tentative stand and possibly take action. Meanwhile, all can stay tuned.