“The End of Free Speech is the End of Science.” — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

In a brilliant and powerfully moving speech at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, April 14, 2024, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, currently Director of the National Institutes of Health, described the horrific suffering of the most vulnerable people, and  people throughout the poorest areas of the world, as the result of the Covid-19 lockdown’s shattering of the  methods by which these destitute people survived.

These poorest populations became unable to live, as the result of the draconian destruction of their way of life by the useless coerced lockdown, crippling their lives, and caging them at whatever constituted their “home,” destroying their ability to sustain their subsistence living, condemning them to starvation. 

The following three paragraphs are brief, verbatim passages of this extraordinary speech.

“In the Spring of 2020 you have a situation that is in my view the most classist policy I have ever seen in my life.  I called it a trickle down epidemiology, but the theory is that somehow if we make the poor suffer, we can all (“all” meaning the relatively well off) benefit. Among the first thoughts I had during the early days of the lockdown was this lockdown is going to kill a tremendous number of people in the poorest parts of the world, and it did.  This was the first day of the lockdown in India in March, 2020.  The consequence of the economic devastation caused by the lockdowns:  I could just see it in February, 2020, when I first started hearing about lockdowns, and by March, 2020 when the lockdowns were put in place it was going to lead to the starvation of mass numbers of people, it was going to lead to mass poverty and mass death, and it did.  This was the first day of the lockdown in India in March of 2020, on the advice of people like Antony Fauci.  There were a half billion migrant workers living in the big cities of India:  they make their living by day to day selling coconuts to rich people on the street, and that represents their entire wealth. They take the money from the coconut sales, buy coconuts for the next day and they feed their families with the rest.  So lockdown meant they couldn’t sell their coconuts, and that means their life savings was gone.  The Prime Minister of India said you have to go back to your home Villages;  the Indian infrastructure is not set up to move a half billion people in a single day and so a half billion people found some way, sometimes by train, sometimes by bike, sometimes by walking up to a thousand miles, and on the day the lockdown happened a thousand people died that day from the lockdown order.”

“I think it was February, 2022, Uganda reopened schools after the longest closure in the world due to the lockdown:  for most students it was the first time back in the classroom in nearly two years;  15 million kids out of school means those kids do not have basic human capital to learn how to do jobs that will allow them to lead healthy productive lives, and 4 ½ million of those kids never came back from those closed schools and were just gone, lost to follow up.  This story is not just unique to Uganda.  In the Philippines they had a policy that not only kept the kids out of school, but wouldn’t let kids out of the house for two years, so you had kids born in the Philippines that didn’t see the light of day for two years.  The impact, again, on the global south is almost impossible to exaggerate.  What we’re talking about is a tide of generational inequality, a tide of poverty that we should have cared about.  The most heartbreaking thing, and this is from a UN Office of Drugs and Crime in 2021, is why some of those kids stayed out of school for so long and never came back.  We put families in the place where they had to choose between what I’m about to describe, and starvation; and a lot of families chose this:  the reason why a lot of those kids never came back was that their families sold their children into sexual slavery or to child labor.  The effects of the pandemic lockdown on children have been far reaching, with children trafficked for sexual exploitation, forced marriage, forced begging and forced criminality.  What we have is an utter human rights catastrophe that happened, with the public health authorities of this country  perfectly happy to sign on, and its not like I’m giving you fringe reports:  these are reports of UNICEF…They’re screaming as loud as they can and we’re just ignoring them.”

“This was an incredibly shortsighted policy, but you couldn’t get anybody to listen, and pointing this out was a very difficult thing in 2020:  it’s not just that you couldn’t get anybody to listen, but when you said it you were subject to, and I know this from personal experience, you’re subjected to vicious attacks.  I could go on literally for hours and hours and hours to show you the collateral harm:  there isn’t a single aspect of human well being that was not damaged significantly by the policy of lockdown, especially for the poorest people, especially for the most vulnerable.  UNICEF put out an estimate that 150 million additional children were plunged into poverty due to – again they always say covid-19, but in fact it’s the economic policies adopted to address covid-19 that were the cause of the impoverishment.”

In addition to his MD from Stanford University, Dr. Bhattacharya holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford, and is uniquely qualified to assess the disastrous economic consequences, globally, as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown.  But his dissent from the orthodox policies inflicted, globally, by the de facto dictatorship of Dr. Fauci, and the groveling medical establishment in lockstep with him, and Dr. Bhattacharya’s refusal to opportunistically conform to this dangerous orthodoxy led to his ostracism, and he endured death threats both to himself and his wife.  It is terrifying to learn that dissent from conformity in the United States, which boasts “freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association as inalienable rights,”  in deplorable reality this society demands obedience to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, suffocating thought, as the punishment for dissent is often more deadly than is the so-called Covid-19 virus.

On October 3, 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” together with Professor Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford and Harvard Professor, Dr. Martin Kulldorff.  The hysterical response from the orthodox medical establishment was similar to the hysteria of the Vatican when Galileo committed the heresy of contradicting the Vatican’s false orthodoxy. 

The Declaration was signed by 941,261 expert Medical and Public Health Scientists throughout the world.  The signatories included Dr. Michael Levitt, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  But the force and truth of this Declaration was so great that the orthodox medical establishment, especially Dr. Fauci, regarded by some as the Pope, and Dr. Francis Collins connived to smear, discredit and entirely eviscerate the scientific experts who had promulgated it. The fact that the Declaration had the advantage of providing solid fact, and offered enormous benefit to the public was irrelevant to the fallacious orthodoxy being perpetrated by Fauci and Collins. In collusion, the two engaged in defamatory actions reminiscent of gangster tactics, concealing alarming  facts, especially the numerous serious adverse and sometimes fatal reactions to the vaccine, which the public needed to know to enable them to make “informed consent” to relevant medical treatment.

When the Covid-19 vaccine became available, it was mandated, though inadequately tested, with innumerable adverse reactions to the vaccine denied, or egregiously ignored to the extent that the mandate, which violated the Nuremberg Code, the UNESCO Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Bioethics, bears terrifying similarity to the  forced medical experiments infamously carried out during World War II.  With vaccine manufacturers given liability protection, the public was, in essence, guinea pigs.

Several centuries ago, in Salem Massachusetts, there was a witch hunt, and persons accused of witchcraft were frequently put to death.  Less than a century ago McCarthyism terrorized American citizens, and millions of lives were damaged or destroyed by the mere  accusation, or even the suggestion that they were Communists, or Communist sympathizers.  And, more recently, anyone questioning the “official” Covid-19 policies became “suspect,” shunned, and often socially excommunicated. Where is freedom of speech, or even freedom of thought? Without the right to dissent,  self-censorship becomes a survival tactic, thought processes atrophy, and a nation of docile, unimaginative robots is born. We are alarmingly close to that, and it is only the appointment of bravest persons such as Dr. Jay Battacharya to the Directorship of the National Institute of Health that provides an example that persons of great courage and integrity may prevail.

But, perhaps it is the sincerity of Dr. Bhattacharya’s commitment to the equality of all, the value of each person, and his concern for the needs of the most vulnerable and the poorest lives on our planet, in addition to those financially better off, or the “elites,” that distinguishes him, elevating him to the highest ethical level, worthy of his profession as physician and authority of health policy, and as noble human being.

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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.

Featured image: Dr. Bhattacharya at his confirmation hearing (Public Domain)

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