Stanford Professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya: ‘Academic freedom is dead’
thecollegefix.com
thecollegefix.com
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.”
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.
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...
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.