Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford Professor who challenged covid lockdowns says that “academic freedom is dead,” and warns that all those who have stood up to the ‘official’ narrative now face “a deeply hostile work environment.”
Bhattacharya came under fire during the pandemic after co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which was an open letter signed by thousands of doctors and scientists in 2020 denouncing lockdowns as harmful and calling instead for a policy of herd immunity
He said “When you take a position that is at odds with the scientific clerisy, your life becomes a living hell.”
Summit News reports: Speaking at the Academic Freedom Conference at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business recently, Bhattacharya, who previously described lockdowns as the most catastrophically harmful policy in “all of history,” and “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” noted “we have a high clerisy that declares from on high what is true and what is not true.”
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In a further interview with Fox News, Bhattacharya noted “The basic premise is that if you don’t have protection and academic freedom in the hard cases, when a faculty member has an idea that’s unpopular among some of the other faculty – powerful faculty, or even the administration … If they don’t protect it in that case, then you don’t have academic freedom at all.”
Bhattacharya and thousands of other academics and scientists were initially vilified for damning lockdowns, but have since been vindicated as the societal and medical toll of the shutdowns has been revealed.
Bhattacharya said of the declaration, “The purpose of the one-page document was aimed at telling the public that there was not a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown, that in fact many epidemiologists, many doctors, many other people – prominent people – disagreed with the consensus.”
The professor then described how proponents of the declaration were systematically frozen out of discussions and debates.
“If Stanford really truly were committed to academic freedom, they would have… worked to make sure that there were debates and discussions, seminars, where these ideas were discussed among faculty,” he urged, adding that “power replaced the idea of truth as the guiding light.”
“So you have somebody like Tony Fauci who says unironically, that if you question me, you’re not simply questioning a man, you’re questioning science itself,” Bhattacharya further noted, adding “That is an exercise of raw power, where he places himself effectively as the pope of science rather than a genuine desire to learn the truth.”
“They systematically tried to make it seem like everyone agreed with their ideas about COVID policy, when in fact there was deep disagreement among scientists and epidemiologists about the right strategy,” the professor asserted.
Bhattacharya has also called on new Twitter owner Elon Musk to “expose the government censorship regime,”:
Bhattacharya’s comments come as a new analysis of federal and state data revealed that for the first time a majority of Americans dying from COVID were at least partially vaccinated.