by AIER Staff
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday April 12, 2021, hosted a second roundtable discussion with public health experts. The first one was taken down by YouTube. In a rebuke to the censors and in the interest of public knowledge of science, the governor held another with most of the same experts. AIER hosted the last one, and it still survives on our platform, so we are trying again, with full video and transcript.
Ron DeSantis:
Well, good morning. We had a round table last March, or excuse me, last month with some really, really impressive experts discussing the ethicacy of lockdowns, the use of face masks in the general public, the need for in-person schooling, the role of immunity through infection and vaccination, and many other Covid-19-related topics. The panelists on that roundtable were Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging at Stanford University. He holds both an MD and a PhD in economics from Stanford, and he’s published in peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, public health and statistics, cited over 10,000 times in Google Scholar. We also had Professor Sunetra Gupta, who’s a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, awarded the Scientific Medal by the Zoological Society of London, awarded the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for quality of scientific research. Among her work with infectious includes malaria, HIV, influenza and bacterial meningitis.:
She’s also a novelist and a translator. She has a consolidated body of theoretical work on the evolution of pathogen population structure, which establishes a novel pipeline for developing a university flu vaccine. The technology has been licensed by U.S. startup, Blue Water Vaccines. Following a successful preclinical study, she’s been cited over 17,000 times in Google Scholar. We also had Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who’s a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a biostatistician and epidemiologist in the division of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Research centers on developing, applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. Another other major research area is spatial and spatio-temporal disease surveillance for which he’s developed various scan statistics for disease cluster detection and evaluation, and for early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks.
These methods are used by many federal and state agencies and around the world, as well as many local public health departments and hospitals. He has been cited over 25,000 times in Google Scholar. We also have Dr. Scott Atlas, who’s the Robert Wesson senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. He was professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center for 14 years. He has been investigating the impact of government in the private sector on access, quality and pricing and healthcare, innovation and economic issues related to the future of technology-based medical advances. He served as a senior advisor for health care to numerous presidential candidates, counseled members of Congress and was on President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. And so, we had, I think an hour and 45 minute discussion, covered a lot of different issues.
All the different experts were able to weigh in on there’s, obviously many cited research and many people really appreciated being able to have that type of discussion because you don’t really get that in most of what we see day-to-day. You may get a clickbait headline, you may get someone to tweet something, but this was a way to ask questions, have a discussion. And also, a way to inform some of the policy decisions that have been made in different states and to cite that. Now, Google and YouTube have cited that the insights of these experts I just discussed as being misinformation. And, they say it’s misinformation, even though Google and YouTube routinely hosts conspiracy theory videos ranging from the cause of the 911 attacks to the role that 5G networks play in causing Covid-19. You can pretty much find any misinformation under the sun on Google YouTube.
Now, Google YouTube has not been throughout this pandemic repositories of truth in scientific inquiry, but instead have acted as enforcers of a narrative. A big tech council of censors in service of the ruling elite. And so, when they took down the videos that were posted by some of the local news outlets here in the State of Florida, they were really continuing what they’ve been doing for the past year, stifled debate, short-circuited scientific inquiry, made sure that the narrative is not questioned. And, I think that we’ve seen already that, that has had catastrophic consequences for our society. They were the leaders, the big tech were the leaders in censoring criticism of lockdowns in March of 2020. You had these policies that started to be advocated for, and people, some folks were very, very concerned about it. But if you posted something on one of these sites, critical of the lockdown, it would get taken down, it would get marginalized, it would get suppressed in one way or another.
And, I’ll ask the experts, but I certainly believe that lockdowns have caused large amounts of deaths in the United States and across the world. And so perhaps, if we had had a freer exchange of ideas during those critical months, perhaps we would have been able to avoid some of the terrible policies that we’ve seen take such huge tolls in parts of the world and other parts of our country here in the United States. So now, with the March video 2021, that was censored, they say there’s misinformation about…. One of the passages they said was, “Oh, Martin Kulldorff said masks are not recommended for kids.” “And Jay Bhattacharya said, you shouldn’t be doing it, it could potentially be harmful.” And that, that contradicts quote, “Consensus.” Which raises a couple points, one is, even the WHO in December of 2020 said, “If you’re five and under, you should not be wearing a mask.”
“If you’re between six and 11, you can look and balance various factors,” but they did not outright say people ages six and 11 should do that. That’s the WHO that’s saying that and that was just at the end of 2020. But, it also raises the question about whether scientific consensus is something that we want to be governed by in terms of what information is allowed to be out there.
And again, I’ll ask the experts this, but the consensus that we see is somewhat of a synthetic consensus, because there’s scientists who disagree with the consensus, who realize what the data said, but they don’t want to stick their neck out because there is serious consequences that a lot of the folks like the Bhattacharya, like the Kulldorff, Gupta, all these people have had to deal with as a result of following the data.
One other point, I think in this, when the YouTube clip of the roundtable was pulled down, and this is something that’s not new, you had those corporate media outlets, particularly the New York based corporate media, they were very favorably disposed to that censorship. And, some of our biggest media conglomerates who claim to be avatars of the First Amendment and free exchange of ideas, they’ve really become cheerleaders for censorship. If something doesn’t fit the overriding narrative, then in their view, it’s better that it get left on the cutting room floor. It’s best that you edit it out of existence, rather than actually tell people the truth. So, I think what we’re really witnessing is Orwellian, it’s a big tech corporate media collusion. And, the end result is that the narrative is always right. Well, I don’t think that, that’s what the American people want, certainly people here in Florida.
So, we have folks back again to be able to address this and some other issues. And so, Jay Bhattacharya, why don’t we start with you just, what’s your response? You saw this, that this was something that was taken down. You’ve obviously participated in roundtables here in Florida with me, but also have been involved on all of these Covid issues pretty strongly for the past year. And, I know this isn’t the first time we’ve seen censorship of this. So, what’s your response to what YouTube and Google did?
Jay Bhattacharya:
I think from a scientific point of view, it’s absolutely terrible for science. For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas and it should be… If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, “Oh, it’s misinformation,” without actually giving you a reason. And saying, “Look, it disagrees with the CDC is not enough of a reason.” Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide that it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate. And governor, I also agree with your interpretation of the role of the media in this. Censorship is not consistent with American norms. I mean, the American norms involved again, free exchange of ideas.
I think our conversation around Covid had been deeply, deeply enfeebled by the sort of notion that there’s some things you can and cannot say. I mean, I think in the roundtable that we did last March or the end of last March, I mean, I think we did our best to try to evaluate the evidence as it was. You can evaluate arguments, maybe we were right, maybe we were wrong, I mean, that’s how science works. You do the evaluation based on the evidence. And, if someone presents to me better evidence, I’ll change my mind. I mean, that’s what my obligation is as a scientist. I think the censorship is an enormous mistake that has been made throughout this entire year, this idea that you have a narrative that you have to follow has been an errant, which sort of made it more difficult to address the epidemic in a meaningful way.
Ron DeSantis:
Martin Kulldorff, your response to YouTube censoring the roundtable.
Martin Kulldorff:
Yeah. The immediate problem we had to deal with is of course, the pandemic and the damages from the lockdown. But if we see it long-term, I’m very worried about the future of science, because science is dependent on free exchange of ideas and it has been for 300 years now. So, if this continues, this kind of attitude with censoring certain scientific views, then I think we have reached the end of 300 years of enlightenment. And, that would be very, very unfortunate.
Ron DeSantis:
Scott Atlas, censorship, YouTube taking down the clip, your response.
Scott Atlas:…
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