Free Republic

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently said that COVID-19 lockdowns are the "biggest public health mistake we've ever made...The harm to people is catastrophic." Several U.S. states have started to ease their COVID-19 restrictions over the past few weeks.. Bhattacharya, who made the comments during an interview with the Daily Clout, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that calls for the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, claiming that they are "producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health." As of Monday, the Great Barrington Declaration has received signatures from over 13,000 medical and public...

On Oct. 4, 2020, three preeminent experts — Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist at Stanford University — delivered the following declaration, calling for a different approach to dealing with the novel coronavirus than the lockdown model: As infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted...

For the third time, Peter Robinson interviews Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Medical School for Uncommon Knowledge. Dr. Bhattacharya is cogent and articulate, and this conversation, a little under an hour long, is well worth your time. Among other things, he reports on a study he has just completed of COVID-19 in employees of major league baseball. Dr. Bhattacharya brings bad news: 1) Only a small percentage of Americans, less than one percent in his study, maybe two or three percent nationwide, have had COVID-19. Herd immunity requires something like 70 percent or 80 percent to have antibodies. So the...

Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professors of medicine at Stanford University, published an article in the March 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal, stating the following: “Fear of Covid-19 is based on an estimated mortality rate of 2% to 4% … We believe this estimate is deeply flawed.” Drs. Bendavid and Bhattacharya continue: “The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases. The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited … If the...