A Stanford Professor who challenged the orthodoxy of lockdowns has warned that “academic freedom is dead,” and that all those who have stood up to the regime narrative now face “a deeply hostile work environment.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an author of the Great Barrington Declaration in which thousands of scientists called for a policy of herd immunity over lockdowns, warned that “When you take a position that is at odds with the scientific clerisy, your life becomes a living hell.”
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.”
This weekend, I will be appearing with Prof. John Ioannidis at a conference on academic freedom at Stanford. The conference organizers invited professors who disagreed with us to participate in the session, but they declined.
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— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) November 3, 2022
Some of those pro-lockdown professors have complained that there are people at Stanford talking to each other at Stanford with whom they disagree. At least one pro-lockdown reporter took to Twitter to create some sort of scandal around this fact.
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— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) November 3, 2022
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.”