Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is calling for the creation of a COVID “truth commission” to give “an honest accounting of the mistakes that were made” in fighting the pandemic, leading to a public apology by health leaders for the great harm they did to the nation.
In an interview, Wednesday on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV program, Bhattacharya said an “honest COVID commission” is necessary because all COVID commissions to date have been “fundamentally dishonest.”
“They’re all premised on the idea that somehow we could have stopped the spread [of COVID] if we just tried harder – like China did or something,” he said. “Of course, that’s a dishonest premise.”
“So the first step is to honestly assess what happened,” he said. “Next, I think the leadership of public health in the United States needs to apologize to Americans for the mistakes it made, for dividing people with vaccine mandates that were useless [and] absolutely discriminatory in the case of these vaccine passports; for closing schools; and so much else.”
“We need new leadership in public health to actually start to restore the trust that Americans need to have in public health in order to remain healthy,” he said.
Bhattacharya, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, is a co-author of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which expressed “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” He is among a small group of American doctors who consistently defied and debunked governments’ and liberal narratives surrounding the prevention and treatment of COVID.
They became regulars on conservative programs like the “Laura Ingraham Show,” and their stature only grew in the eyes of millions worldwide as more and more evidence came to light of the health dangers, including the rash of “sudden deaths” of young people, potentially linked to the COVID-19 vaccines and booster shots.
The release of the “Twitter files” made possible by free-speech champion Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter confirms that the social media platform blacklisted Bhattacharya to limit the reach of his contrarian views on lockdowns and vaccinating children, who are at extremely low risk for contracting serious COVID illness.
“The CDC wanted to put into the minds of people that they absolutely had to get vaccinated no matter what the risk-benefit ratio is,” he told Just the News. “I was a big proponent of the vaccine for older people – I think the risk-benefit ratio, especially in 2021, favored it. For younger people, especially young men where myocarditis is a risk, it was much less clear.
“It should have just been something left to the doctors talking with their patients. Instead, the CDC treated it like something that was a matter of we should force you and trick you into getting it, even if we’re going to run roughshod over the science. Essentially, it was a propaganda campaign as opposed to honest public health,” he said.
Bhattacharya said he’s working with a group of epidemiologists and infectious disease experts to produce a “Norfolk Group” document to create “an agenda for what an honest COVID commission would ask.” It will seek answers to questions like these that “Americans deserve an answer to”:
WND’s Art Moore reported on a 2021 Hoover Institution interview with Bhattacharya, who said, among other things:
- “Why did we approve the mask mandates when there’s so little evidence in favor of them?”
- “Why did we close schools? What were the harms done?”
- “Were those harms considered when these decisions were made?”
WND’s Art Moore reported on a 2021 Hoover Institution interview with Bhattacharya, who said, among other things:
- Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization was warning of an infection fatality rate of 3% or 4%, precipitating the lockdowns and other drastic measures. But Bhattacharya, in March 2020, postulated the rate was only about .01%, based on what happened in 2009 with the H1N1 virus. And he turned out to be right. [Dr. Anthony Fauci, in fact, said in a New England Journal of Medicine article published in March 2020 that the rate was probably less than 1% and could turn out to be around .01%.]
- In public health there is a norm of “unanimity of messaging” on subjects such as smoking, where after decades of research and observation, it’s clear that the practice has serious health consequences. But public health officials, particularly Fauci, applied that norm to COVID-19, in effect shutting down scientific debate before certain issues were established, such as how it spreads, the death rate and who is most vulnerable.
- The lockdowns favored the rich, the “laptop class,” who had one-third the death rate of the poor. It was “almost a reversed focus protection; we exposed the vulnerable and protected the well-to-do young.”
- “They were utterly blind – Dr. Fauci most of all on this – utterly blind to the harms of the lockdown.”
via wnd
