Jay Bhattacharya on Lockdowns: The End Of The Enlightenment?

Lockdowns Brought Us Back to the Dark Ages, Can We Come Back From It?

Did Lockdowns mark the end of the enlightenment era?

Two years after the Great Barrington Declaration, I sat down with one of it’s eminent authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

We discussed the immense harms and collateral damage of lockdowns, the crushing censorship of scientific debate and scapegoating of perceived opponents, the deification of Science, and the philosophical underpinnings of our societal response.

“If it is today so widely assumed that (an authority made up of suitably chosen experts) will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant. It may be admitted that, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts. What I wish to point out is that, even assuming that this problem can be readily solved, it is only a small part of the wider problem.”

Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society