What Jay Bhattacharya Discovered at Twitter HQ

UnHerd has published an interview between Freddie Sayers and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in which the Stanford Professor reveals what he found when Elon Musk invited him to Twitter HQ – that he was shadow banned by the social media company for criticising the lockdown policy, as was Dr. Martin Kulldorff. You can watch the interview in full here and read an edited transcript here. Here is Dr. Bhattacharya on why censorship of this kind causes harm.

Do you think the pandemic response might have gone differently if voices such as yours were not suppressed?

Yes… I do really believe censorship kills, and censorship killed during this pandemic. The policies could have been so much better… The policies that were adopted were incredibly damaging to the lives and livelihoods of so many people. 100million people thrown into poverty worldwide: that’s the estimate from the World Bank. Just the consequences of that itself are going to have tremendous effects on the lives and livelihoods of people going forward. And of course, all these children were robbed of an education for years. Those are absolutely monumental outcomes of the policies we adopted during the pandemic, and they should have been freely discussed. My view of the scientific evidence is that it was so clear, even at the time, that we should not have been closing schools. And if we had been allowed to have a free and fair discussion, I think the schools would not have closed – if there hadn’t been this sort of demerit system for people who spoke up against these kinds of policies.

At the end of the interview, Dr. Bhattacharya is asked whether Elon Musk is harming the cause of free speech by sometimes behaving in a Trump-like manner – and he makes more or less the same point I made in the most recent episode of the Weekly Sceptic, which is that it would be nice if he went about prosecuting this war in a more grown-up way, but on balance he’s a very good thing.

Do you worry that, with Twitter messages like “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”, Elon Musk is going too far and will imperil his project?

It’s not what I would do were I in his position. But on the other hand, I don’t have $44 billion to buy the company. The ideal person for this may not exist… we have to deal with the people we have in front of us. And Elon is, I think, a big step up from the previous ownership, who obviously weren’t that committed to free speech… I agree that it’s not the wisest use of his power. I think it would have been wiser to be more temperate in talking about, for instance, Tony Fauci. I think that Fauci made tremendous mistakes: he abused his power during the pandemic. And it’s led to a lot of problems. But I think the right redress is not to prosecute him, but for history to remember him having made those mistakes, and that in fact, although he may have committed his life to healing, the prescriptions he gave during the pandemic made the lives of so many people worse.

Jay is a copper-bottomed hero and this interview is worth watching in full.

Stop Press: Elon Musk has now restored the Twitter accounts of several journalists whom he suspended because they’d posted links to an account called ElonJet which tracked his comings and goings via private jet in real time. MailOnline has more.

Stop Press 2: Andrew Bridgen MP gave an interview on the Irreverend Podcast following his speech in the House of Commons drawing attention to vaccine harms. Listen here.