The Glenn Show: Jay Bhattacharya – Rewriting the COVID Narrative

My guest this week is Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford and a critic of the US’s COVID policy. Jay first came to public prominence in 2020 as a co-writer of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that the social costs of lockdowns far outweighed whatever protection they offered against the virus, especially for children. For that offense, Jay and his distinguished colleagues were branded as “fringe epidemiologists” by the head of the National Institute of Health and many others.

As you’ll see in this conversation, there’s nothing “fringe” about Jay or his ideas. He opposes the narratives about lockdowns and COVID’s origin that were being pushed by the government and most mainstream media outlets, and he’s got plenty of evidence to back up his argument. We talk about Jay’s opposition to labeling dissenters as crazy or nefarious, and also about the necessity to persuade (rather than strong-arm) those who are skeptical of science writ large. Jay—and many, many others—believe that COVID originated in a lab conducting gain-of-function research. He outlines what he sees as the unacceptable risks of that research, and explains what we can do to prevent lockdown-style overreach in the future.

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