Episode 427: Jay Bhattacharya
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Lockdowns and Lessons: The Pandemic Retrospective
Discover the untold stories behind pandemic decision-making in COVID-19 responses and their seismic effects on society. Hear how early prevalence studies contradicted widespread measures, challenging the effectiveness of lockdowns and calling into question the ethical boundaries of public health compliance.This conversation is as much about ethics as it is about health policy.
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford Medical School and also in the economics department at Stanford University. He co-wrote an opinion piece entitled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”
Jay and Greg discuss the lab leak theory's influence on global policy and the issues faced by leaders in real-time crisis management. Jay weighs the stark health economics versus public health trade-offs, highlighting the profound yet often ignored consequences that lockdowns had on global poverty and social well-being. Greg points out the unprecedented speed of vaccine development, and they reflect on what seen and unseen effects of that time were really caused by the pandemic response and not the pandemic.
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Episode Quotes:
The real costs of flattening the curve
59:45: People died at home with heart attacks, they would've lived. And, of course, who faced tremendous pressure on hospital systems – in New York and Bergamo, and and during the pandemic, a few other places experienced that. But the modal hospital system in this country did not experience that, right? They were empty. And a lot of people who should have gotten care didn't get care for other conditions. Cancer screenings went down, heart attack treatment went down, diabetes management went down, stroke management went down, basic fundamental care that happened didn't happen. And, the cost of flattening the curve was exactly that, right? This suppression of fundamental care that ought to happened. We decided we were going to refocus all of healthcare just to manage COVID rather than all of the myriad health conditions that people are really subject to.
The longitudinal effect of the vaccine rollout
57:59: The vaccines, I think, were good, but they were not an unmitigated good. And I think the aftermath of that, of the tremendous mistakes public health made in the rollout of the vaccines, and that governments everywhere made in distinguishing clean and unclean on the basis of vaccine status, are going to be with us for a very long time to come.
Did the lockdowns help prevent COVID?
49:51: No matter what you think about how bad long COVID is, it does not justify lockdowns because the lockdowns do not prevent long COVID. I'm not even sure; the evidence is that the vaccines prevent long-term COVID, but it's very equivocal. So, the question of long COVID is not germane to the question of whether lockdowns were the right or wrong thing to do.
How lockdowns hurt the poorest countries
48:15:The poorest countries reorganize their economies to fit in with the West. That's what brought a billion people out of poverty. The lockdowns essentially were a violation of that promise, right? What the West basically said was, "We're going to pull up the drawbridge because we're scared." And all of those trade promises we made to you were gone. The markets that we promised to you are gone, and the people at the lowest rungs of world society, meaning the poorest of the poor, became even poorer, and millions died as a consequence of that. On the first day of the lockdown, Prime Minister Modi of India ordered half a billion people to walk, bike, and find some way to go back from the city centers where they were working, migrant workers, to their home villages. And a thousand died en route that day. The life savings of those half a billion people were crushed overnight.