Episode Details

Welcome everyone to the Illusion of Consensus podcast.

I'm Professor Jay Bhattacharya. I am delighted to be here with Kevin Bardosh. Kevin is the research director and the director of Collateral Global, which is a charity in the UK. Just full disclosure, I'm a trustee of this charity. The goal of the charity is to document the harms that the lockdowns globally from 2020 and onward. And again, with an emphasis on documenting these harms in a scholarly way with data and with rigorous analysis.

I hope you take away something new from this wide-ranging conversation on the multitude of negative societal shifts causes by lockdowns.

Note to readers: the full podcast transcript is available thanks to Substack’s new functionality. You can access it by clicking on the podcast tab above.

— Jay Bhattacharya

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Note: For some strange reason, Jay’s audio has an intense echo for the first 10 minutes before it goes away. Apologies in advance.

Support Kevin’s organization Collateral Global:

https://collateralglobal.org/article/uk-covid-inquiry-turns-its-focus-to-great-barrington-declaration/

Podcast Transcript Highlights:

Kevin on his background:

I've worked for 15 years in public health, global public health programs, mostly in the global south, so in over 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and that's on infectious disease programs. So I was involved tangentially in the Ebola response. And during the Zika pandemic, I actually led quite a large mosquito control program in Haiti. So that's dealing with community engagement, messaging, mosquito control, and the whole sort of range of scientific questions also about, well, where are microcephaly cases happening, et cetera.

I've also worked a lot on parasitic diseases, neglected tropical diseases, et cetera.And all of that work in the global public health community in general, we have these sort of ethical frameworks around not doing harm, around equity, or, you know, community empowerment, et cetera. And we saw a lot of those sort of guiding principles thrown out the window during the COVID response. And I think a lot of people felt like, or a lot of academics who work in this space, didn't feel like they had a voice, or at least were very confused about where the consensus was going. And so... my sort of work for the last two years has been to try to somewhat speak to that issue, which is obviously a very political issue.

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Kevin’s detailed survey on the literature on lockdowns and their effects on poor countries:

The report is called, How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Response Harm Society? A Global Evaluation and State of Knowledge Review, covering 2020 and 2021. And I think what motivated me on, well, there's a lot of things that did, but on the one hand, the public discourse and public conversation, that there is this sort of scientific consensus. And I've actually called this and I'm covering the UK COVID inquiry for an online newspaper called Unherd. And I've called this the lockdown doctrine. which is the notion that during a respiratory pandemic, you need to lock down society faster and harder as a precondition to get a vaccine and then you reopen, right