Jay Bhattacharya: 'I Sued the Biden Administration for COVID Censorship'

Reason Podcasts

Today's guest is Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and one of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court case charging that the Biden administration and other parts of the federal government illegally colluded "with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." A decision in that case is imminent, and a victory for Bhattacharya's side would make it impossible for the government to pressure X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other platforms to ban or squelch legal speech. A professor of medicine at Stanford University and a Ph.D. economist, Bhattacharya talks about his experience being blacklisted online because of his criticisms of lockdowns and other COVID policies, the ways in which both Donald Trump and Joe Biden fumbled their responses to the pandemic, and what the public health establishment must do to regain the trust and confidence of the American public. 00:00— Introduction 01:12— Murthy vs. Missouri 17:05— Politicization of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 20:45— Loss of trust in public health 25:45— Biden vs. Trump on COVID 27:49— What Bhattacharya got wrong 29:35— COVID-19 vaccines mistakes 34:53— RFK Jr. and other vaccine skeptics 39:44— What would Bhattacharya revise? 42:17— How Bhattacharya's politics changed 44:20— How do we restore trust in public health? Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast