As I get older I become more and more disenchanted with, it's hard to say, what, exactly - America? Performance in the pandemic, refusal to even consider different ideas, rhetoric around elections and so on. Shameful that scientists and doctors are silenced when they disagree with our largely unelected leaders - but much worse and much more shameful is that the people responsible for our terrible COVID response will remain in power - same as the people responsible for foreign policy disasters and so on.
America has been an oligarchy for a long time but it's becoming super apparent because of the pandemic. Also, things like cancel culture, the two party duopoly, and weaponized social justice are not helping anything and leading to a form of progressive fascism that is killing the country by killing productive debates.
Super good quotation from the article:
“The thought was, if you platform me, it’s a dangerous thing,” Bhattacharya said.
“You know what’s dangerous? Is to not platform me. If you have a legitimate scientific view, a legitimate policy view, then not speak of it, then essentially what it does is it sends a message that we do not care about the truth.”
It sounds like he took a controversial opinion during a time of great fear and death, and wasn’t fired or in any way censored by his workplace. He continued to enjoy substantial access to politicians and the press, and someone wrote and stuck up a mean poster about him (which he describes as a physical threat, but doesn’t seem to have actually been according to the description.) Academic freedom means the right to say unpopular things without losing your job. If you want to see what the opposite of that is, take a look at the McCarthy era or some of the professors who lost their jobs for saying unpopular things about US allies.
Specifically a controversial opinion precisely within his academic field at a time when the topic mattered the most. Authoritarian societies will let you freely say non-controversial things too.
He is not just complaining about students but also the administration not acting to defend him. The article directly claims censorship occurred. Perhaps they mean self-censorship due to fear. It does still count, though perhaps some few isolated threats may seem a lot worse to the target than they seem to others (go figure).
Or just take a look at all of the academics who have lost their jobs for saying unpopular things in the last few years. You don't have to go back to McCarthy, it's right here now.
There's no list (comprehensive or otherwise), but FIRE's (www.thefire.org) work relates specifically to freedom of speech-related issues on college campuses that receive any sort of federal funding and are at least theoretically (i.e. by law) required to observe certain related standards.
And I say "in theory," because if you take some time perusing their website, you get a good idea of how out of control academia in the U.S. is these days.
To whet your appetite, here are just two of them:
Mount Holyoke College: Event Hosts Must Recite Mandatory Land Acknowledgement as a Statement of Personal Beliefs (https://www.thefire.org/cases/mount-holyoke-college-event-ho...)
-Quoting from the summary: "As the statement is written in the first person, it forces speakers to recite the land acknowledgement as if it reflects their own personal beliefs."
Survey shows majority of college students feel ‘intimidated’ to share opinion, unlikely to disagree with professor (https://www.thefire.org/news/survey-shows-majority-college-s...)
-Quotes:
-“More students are intimidated from speaking freely and more students are willing to intimidate others from speaking freely than at any time in the history of the survey.”
-Almost half (48%) of students erroneously believe that the First Amendment does not protect hate speech; while 44% believe, correctly, that it does. This is the first time more students said that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and represents a 17% increase over the 31% of students who said this in 2017.
-Disturbingly, almost half of them [students] said that in some circumstances the death penalty is an appropriate form of punishment for offensive expression [!!!].
> which he describes as a physical threat, but doesn’t seem to have actually been according to the description
So he, ah, "didn't feel safe" with others expressing their opinions?
> “I started getting hate mail, I started getting death threats,” he said. “I started getting questions about my funding sources even though most of my money has come from the NIH for most of my life.”
"Death threats" do sound like actual physical threats, but it isn't clear that those were in fact from Stanford students, faculty, or staff or just random lunatics on the internet.
I recommend reading some of the articles he’s written about COVID as well as consider when they were written (like the one in the WSJ from March 2020 entitled “Is the Coronavirus as deadly as they say?”), against the backdrop of uncertainty and medical systems under heavy strain and some cities like NYC unable to cope with the volume of deaths and inability to treat other patients, and then compare that with his proposed strategy of driving towards herd immunity while trying to protect the vulnerable, etc.
From where I sit, his experience isn’t quite one of academic freedom, but rather that he tried to change and influence policy, which backfired.
The WHO published a paper estimating the aggregate IFR to be ~0.2% and suggested social distancing measures targeting the most at risk [1]. Essentially the WHO changed its stance to match what Jay was arguing for.
Are there specific criticisms of methodology you want to make? Or is the simple fact that you disagree with the conclusions enough for you to discount the study?
First of all, the two are both geographically and ideologically closely related — it's like "proving" Marx was right by quoting Engels.
Second, the 0.2% IFR is patent nonsense. To pick only one example, Russia had an excess mortality of 1.22 million people in 2020-2022 [1]. A 0.2% IFR would imply 610 million infections. Russia has a population of 146 million, so every single inhabitant would have had more than 4 infections on average (with zero cross infection immunity).
There were several regions in the world where in September 2000, when this paper appeared and multiple infections were not very common yet, more than 0.2% of the population had died already.
Excess deaths aren't entirely caused by Covid. People ceased getting medical care due to lockdowns, for instance. Furthermore, you're cherry-picking examples. As per your own source, the USA had an excess mortality of 1.2 million, out of a population of 330 million. There's 100 million reported infections, and with 70% or more cases being asymptomatic the actual infection rate is probably 300-400 million. Even if we're assuming every excess death was a Covid death, that's an infection fatality rate of 0.4 to 0.3% - not far off of the paper's estimate.
> People ceased getting medical care due to lockdowns, for instance
Many countries had no lockdowns to speak of, and the vast majority had none after vaccinations became available.
> that's an infection fatality rate of 0.4 to 0.3% - not far off of the paper's estimate
That's still double the rate in the paper. And the whole assumption of the Great Barrington declaration, of which Bhattacharya was an author and Ioannidis a sympathizer, was that the rate would drop considerably on reinfection, because herd immunity would protect the population.
No, it's 1.5x on the lower end. Taking into account the fact that not all excess deaths are necessarily due to covid and the paper is very close. And the paper is still much closer than the 1-3% fatality rates often touted at the time.
But then again, we're just randos on the internet. So let's trust the experts: subsequent research has largely vindicated his conclusions. Later research has put the IFR rate at 0.47% to 0.31%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35219376/ This study only examined infections up until January of 2021, so vaccination is not in play here.
> as that the rate would drop considerably on reinfection, because herd immunity would protect the population.
> And the paper is still much closer than the 1-3% fatality rates often touted at the time.
The paper you're citing shows that at the time (mid-2020) that Ioannidis wrote his paper estimating a 0.2% IFR, there were many regions in the world where a 1% fatality rate was well within the 95% confidence range.
> Later research has put the IFR rate at 0.47% to 0.31%
To be more precise, an IFR dropping from 0.47% in March 2020 to 0.31% in January 2021, mostly due to improved treatments.
> [herd immunity would protect the population] is correct. Reinfections are less likely to result in severe symptoms.
Yes, but this means you cannot claim 400 million infections as a denominator for a constant 0.2% IFR, because many of these are reinfections, so should have a lower IFR than whatever was estimated in mid-2020.
> Yes, but this means you cannot claim 400 million infections as a denominator for a constant 0.2% IFR, because many of these are reinfections, so should have a lower IFR than whatever was estimated in mid-2020.
So you agree with him: as herd immunity builds, the IFR goes down as people get more resistant. In fact you pointed this out yourself in a previous comment.
> And the whole assumption of the Great Barrington declaration, of which Bhattacharya was an author and Ioannidis a sympathizer, was that the rate would drop considerably on reinfection, because herd immunity would protect the population.
And this is exactly what happened. COVID became less serious as the pandemic wore on, and dropped close to his estimate even before the release of the vaccines.
Infection fatality rates were vastly overestimated. I got lots of flak on HN for pointing to the German random testing data estimating an IFR of 0.37%. people were calling me a moron telling me this was an order of magnitude off. Jay's claim was less conservative, but still much closer to reality than the consensus at the time. Heck, even if you use the figure of 0.47%, Jay was still closer than most expert opinions.
About 1% if you take the total number of cases in the US. Of course, this isn't right because lots of people who got it are not included in this count.
About 0.3% if calculated against the entire population of the US.
Not sure what metrics the "as they say" part might include. Not taking sides. Thinking out loud, not sure if 0.2% over three years qualifies as "deadly".
In other words, the dude might be right in raising the question.
By this time it should come as no secret that US universities are engaged in suppressing speech far more so than encouraging free and open conversations across a range of topics. This is a matter of indisputable fact. Just try to book a conference with contrasting though on a range of modern topics and see how far you get. You are lucking if the faculty doesn't turn students into a violent mob and run you off the campus.
Regardless of the topic, this is the problem. Such things are not formulas for advancing society and thought. When you have to worry about actual physical violence you no-longer have freedom.
The controversy was bigger than an academic freedom issue. But the talk was mainly concerned wit Stanford's behavior in reaction to the controversy and academic freedom implications. This is indeed a "policy" guy who brings everything around to the decision-making process and what it should be doing.
Stanford didn't shut Bhattacharya down, but I think he has a point that Stanford probably isn't a great place for public debate or discourse on controversial and/or political topics.
Even something as seemingly appropriate and educational as hosting a prominent former government official (Mike Pence) can be controversial - some students arguing[1] that he should not be invited to the university, lest it be seen as a tacit endorsement of his ideas, policies, and rhetorical tone. Pence's topic ("Save America from the Woke Left") presumably irked them further.
“The main goal of the protest is to demonstrate the fact that we don’t want to tolerate someone who spouts very hateful rhetoric coming on campus,” one of the frosh protesters said [1].
To Stanford's credit, Pence was permitted to speak, with minimal disruptions [2].
As I understand it, most faculty don't seem particularly interested in wading into the morass. Perhaps they think that Stanford's (presumably intelligent) students should be able to figure out the obvious on their own.
23 comments
[ 55.4 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadSuper good quotation from the article:
“The thought was, if you platform me, it’s a dangerous thing,” Bhattacharya said.
“You know what’s dangerous? Is to not platform me. If you have a legitimate scientific view, a legitimate policy view, then not speak of it, then essentially what it does is it sends a message that we do not care about the truth.”
He is not just complaining about students but also the administration not acting to defend him. The article directly claims censorship occurred. Perhaps they mean self-censorship due to fear. It does still count, though perhaps some few isolated threats may seem a lot worse to the target than they seem to others (go figure).
And I say "in theory," because if you take some time perusing their website, you get a good idea of how out of control academia in the U.S. is these days.
To whet your appetite, here are just two of them:
Mount Holyoke College: Event Hosts Must Recite Mandatory Land Acknowledgement as a Statement of Personal Beliefs (https://www.thefire.org/cases/mount-holyoke-college-event-ho...) -Quoting from the summary: "As the statement is written in the first person, it forces speakers to recite the land acknowledgement as if it reflects their own personal beliefs."
Survey shows majority of college students feel ‘intimidated’ to share opinion, unlikely to disagree with professor (https://www.thefire.org/news/survey-shows-majority-college-s...) -Quotes: -“More students are intimidated from speaking freely and more students are willing to intimidate others from speaking freely than at any time in the history of the survey.” -Almost half (48%) of students erroneously believe that the First Amendment does not protect hate speech; while 44% believe, correctly, that it does. This is the first time more students said that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and represents a 17% increase over the 31% of students who said this in 2017. -Disturbingly, almost half of them [students] said that in some circumstances the death penalty is an appropriate form of punishment for offensive expression [!!!].
So he, ah, "didn't feel safe" with others expressing their opinions?
> “I started getting hate mail, I started getting death threats,” he said. “I started getting questions about my funding sources even though most of my money has come from the NIH for most of my life.”
"Death threats" do sound like actual physical threats, but it isn't clear that those were in fact from Stanford students, faculty, or staff or just random lunatics on the internet.
From where I sit, his experience isn’t quite one of academic freedom, but rather that he tried to change and influence policy, which backfired.
I’m open to being wrong though.
1. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/340124/PMC7...
Second, the 0.2% IFR is patent nonsense. To pick only one example, Russia had an excess mortality of 1.22 million people in 2020-2022 [1]. A 0.2% IFR would imply 610 million infections. Russia has a population of 146 million, so every single inhabitant would have had more than 4 infections on average (with zero cross infection immunity).
There were several regions in the world where in September 2000, when this paper appeared and multiple infections were not very common yet, more than 0.2% of the population had died already.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-...
Many countries had no lockdowns to speak of, and the vast majority had none after vaccinations became available.
> that's an infection fatality rate of 0.4 to 0.3% - not far off of the paper's estimate
That's still double the rate in the paper. And the whole assumption of the Great Barrington declaration, of which Bhattacharya was an author and Ioannidis a sympathizer, was that the rate would drop considerably on reinfection, because herd immunity would protect the population.
No, it's 1.5x on the lower end. Taking into account the fact that not all excess deaths are necessarily due to covid and the paper is very close. And the paper is still much closer than the 1-3% fatality rates often touted at the time.
But then again, we're just randos on the internet. So let's trust the experts: subsequent research has largely vindicated his conclusions. Later research has put the IFR rate at 0.47% to 0.31%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35219376/ This study only examined infections up until January of 2021, so vaccination is not in play here.
> as that the rate would drop considerably on reinfection, because herd immunity would protect the population.
Which is correct. Reinfections are less likely to result in severe symptoms. Even the CDC has acknowledged this: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-care/....
The paper you're citing shows that at the time (mid-2020) that Ioannidis wrote his paper estimating a 0.2% IFR, there were many regions in the world where a 1% fatality rate was well within the 95% confidence range.
> Later research has put the IFR rate at 0.47% to 0.31%
To be more precise, an IFR dropping from 0.47% in March 2020 to 0.31% in January 2021, mostly due to improved treatments.
> [herd immunity would protect the population] is correct. Reinfections are less likely to result in severe symptoms.
Yes, but this means you cannot claim 400 million infections as a denominator for a constant 0.2% IFR, because many of these are reinfections, so should have a lower IFR than whatever was estimated in mid-2020.
As an aside, before Ioannidis started engaging in COVID-19 research, he estimated that the US would suffer 3.3 million infections and 10,000 deaths: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
His subsequent research seems to have been designed to justify the policy preference, rather than the other way around.
So you agree with him: as herd immunity builds, the IFR goes down as people get more resistant. In fact you pointed this out yourself in a previous comment.
> And the whole assumption of the Great Barrington declaration, of which Bhattacharya was an author and Ioannidis a sympathizer, was that the rate would drop considerably on reinfection, because herd immunity would protect the population.
And this is exactly what happened. COVID became less serious as the pandemic wore on, and dropped close to his estimate even before the release of the vaccines.
Infection fatality rates were vastly overestimated. I got lots of flak on HN for pointing to the German random testing data estimating an IFR of 0.37%. people were calling me a moron telling me this was an order of magnitude off. Jay's claim was less conservative, but still much closer to reality than the consensus at the time. Heck, even if you use the figure of 0.47%, Jay was still closer than most expert opinions.
https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+deaths+us
About 1% if you take the total number of cases in the US. Of course, this isn't right because lots of people who got it are not included in this count.
About 0.3% if calculated against the entire population of the US.
And then there's this:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/covid-19-was-t...
Not sure what metrics the "as they say" part might include. Not taking sides. Thinking out loud, not sure if 0.2% over three years qualifies as "deadly".
In other words, the dude might be right in raising the question.
By this time it should come as no secret that US universities are engaged in suppressing speech far more so than encouraging free and open conversations across a range of topics. This is a matter of indisputable fact. Just try to book a conference with contrasting though on a range of modern topics and see how far you get. You are lucking if the faculty doesn't turn students into a violent mob and run you off the campus.
Regardless of the topic, this is the problem. Such things are not formulas for advancing society and thought. When you have to worry about actual physical violence you no-longer have freedom.
Even something as seemingly appropriate and educational as hosting a prominent former government official (Mike Pence) can be controversial - some students arguing[1] that he should not be invited to the university, lest it be seen as a tacit endorsement of his ideas, policies, and rhetorical tone. Pence's topic ("Save America from the Woke Left") presumably irked them further.
“The main goal of the protest is to demonstrate the fact that we don’t want to tolerate someone who spouts very hateful rhetoric coming on campus,” one of the frosh protesters said [1].
To Stanford's credit, Pence was permitted to speak, with minimal disruptions [2].
As I understand it, most faculty don't seem particularly interested in wading into the morass. Perhaps they think that Stanford's (presumably intelligent) students should be able to figure out the obvious on their own.
[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2022/02/17/students-plan-protests-...
[2] https://stanforddaily.com/2022/02/18/pence-calls-on-students...