Science Based Satire: My 2026 Interview with Jay Bhattacharya. It’s Still Lockdowns All the Way Down.
"The worst thing about lockdowns is that they are over, and everyone else moved on long ago."
The post Science Based Satire: My 2026 Interview with Jay Bhattacharya. It’s Still Lockdowns All the Way Down. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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Question: Why is the USA leaving the World Health Organization?
Answer: The WHO issues a warning to countries to keep lockdowns in place until the epidemic is “under control”. Under this faulty guidance, the world should probably still be in lockdown.
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Question: How does leaving the WHO make the USA safer?
Answer: The WHO recommends a set of stringent preconditions for lifting lockdown.
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Question: I’m confused. In September 2021, you said “We should be treating COVID as one of 200 diseases that affect people.” So why are you still relitigating COVID debates from spring 2020?
Answer: According to the WHO, lockdowns are not decisions made by governments, but something that happens to people unless they obey.
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Question: Well, if you want to talk about COVID errors, in April 2021 you said vaccinated people have “zero” risk of transmitting COVID. Later, you said this was a “lie”. Can you explain?
Answer: Lockdowns cause a form of psychological terror that guarantee they could never last just two weeks.
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Question: The Great Barrington Declaration claimed the mass infection of unvaccinated people would lead to herd immunity in 3-6 months. Do we have herd immunity to COVID today?
Answer: What is not understandable is the utter confidence that the WHO and public health leaders expressed in these ideas and lockdown policies to the public as the only way to protect the population, going so far as to call for censorship of contrary voices on social media and elsewhere.
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Question: In May 2021 you said that we “kind of” already had herd immunity to COVID and that it was seasonal. They Delta variant arrived immediately after that. Were you right?
Answer: The stockpiled countermeasures developed under the old pandemic playbook offer a false sense of security and empower those who would impose lockdowns, mandates, and other such strategies.
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Question: Moving on to more current issues, in 2026 children are missing school not because of lockdowns, but because measles is spreading widely. What is your plan to get things under control?
Answer: Is it just me, or are all the WHO high officials and scientists who pushed the world into lockdown in 2020 now swearing up and down that they never recommended lockdown? I, for one, have no confidence that they would not recommend the world lock down again, given the chance.
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Question: Again, back to 2026, whooping cough is also spreading due to low vaccine rates. What is your plan to control this?
Answer: Lockdowns cannot suppress COVID spread or protect the vulnerable for long,
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Question: Let’s talk about recent decisions you’ve made at the NIH. Why did you sign the memorandum, CDC Acts on Presidential Memorandum to Update Childhood Immunization Schedule, which decimated the vaccine schedule?
Answer: I think ultimately lockdowns ended up killing more people than would’ve been killed had those lockdowns not happened.
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Question: I am unclear why should unvaccinated children contract multiple diseases when safe and effective vaccines exist?
Answer: The WHO mission to China in 2020 lauded the Chinese lockdown as a success, in effect endorsing the model for the rest of the world.
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Question: Many states, medical organizations, and individual doctors are completely ignoring your new vaccine guidance. Why did you lose trust and what is your plan to restore it?
Answer: Lockdowns crush the lives and well-being of children, the poor, and the working class, and almost everyone other than the laptop class.
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Question: Why did you end research into mRNA vaccines?
Answer: The economic dislocations caused by the lockdowns certainly killed vast numbers of people.
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Question: How have you made Americans healthy again? Give me concrete examples.
Answer: In the case of the covid crisis, the problems were confounded by a determined unwillingness of scientific and public health leaders to respond to data — in real time — that showed that core assumptions underlying the lockdown strategy were wrong.
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Question: You’ve been on at least 68 podcasts since becoming NIH director, earning the moniker “Podcast Jay”. How do you respond to those who claim you are more concerned with making social media content than running the NIH?
Answer: As covid prevalence rose in the fall, the Great Barrington Declaration strongly recommends against lockdowns.
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Question: You claim to value education. Can you explain why you collaborated with a pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate to write the Great Barrington Declaration?
Answer: But what you’re not allowed to do is assume that the thing you’re doing is going to work. Right? “I’m going to do a lockdown; that’ll solve the problem.” You’re also not allowed to assume that the thing that you’re doing will have no harms.
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Question: How is your search for the cause of autism going?
Answer: If the WHO opposed lockdowns, where was the WHO condemnation of them in 2020 or 2021? Or of China’s lockdowns in 2022?
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Question: Even though you’ve done research into “racial disparities” you are now banning DEI. Can you define DEI and tell us who makes these decisions at the NIH?
Answer: I think the fundamental error is: People think that “well, the lockdowns sort of worked.”
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Question: Citing incompetence and the politicization of science, multiple NIH scientists and administrators have quit in protest over your dismal leadership. What is your response?
Answer: So imagine that you’ve done this. You’ve recommended the lockdowns, you’ve recommended the school closures, you’ve recommended a set of measures that are going to harm the poor, you know are going to harm the children, but you’re doing it because you want to suppress the spread of this deadly disease that, in the back of your mind, maybe you think you might have been responsible for. Maybe you can’t admit that to yourself.
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Question: It’s trivially easy to find articles about your failed leadership at the NIH. Can you direct me to articles saying the NIH is thriving under your competent stewardship?
Answer: A 2024 comprehensive meta-analysis of the econometric literature on the effectiveness of lockdowns to stop disease spread by Danish, Swedish and American authors find little evidence of lockdown efficacy.
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Question: You claim to support free speech, yet from Kevin Hall to Jeanne Marrazzo to Jenna Norton, NIH scientists and employees report being silenced and censored under your leadership. What is your response?
Answer: You’re not going to have another lockdown.
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Question: A recent article reported that the US government lost over 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office. What is your response?
Answer: So in October 2020, when we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, if you go read it, we actually have vaccines as one of the mechanisms of focused protection. Again, I had this naïve view that if you have this countermeasure, you use it to protect older people, and then you lift lockdowns.
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Question: Dr. Walter Koroshetz is a widely admired director of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Why did you decide to get rid of him, and if you didn’t make that decision, then who is running things at the NIH?
Answer: I wouldn’t recommend a lockdown if another pandemic came along.
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Question: You claim to regret how science became politicized. Why did you speak at the TPUSA conference?
Answer: The evidence was really clear. The lockdowns have failed to protect anybody from getting COVID and would cause some tremendous collateral (damage).
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Question: You claim to value scientific debate. Have you invited any of your critics for a debate since becoming head of the NIH?
Answer: They were immune to the folly and harms of lockdown!
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Question: What are your greatest achievements at the NIH thus far?
Answer: Sweden, which never locked down, protected human life better than nearly every country on earth.
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Question: What are your upcoming plans for the NIH this year?
Answer: Lockdowns protected the laptop class and hurt everyone else.
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Question: You are a core member of the Trump administration, and you’ll forever linked with everything he does. Given this, what do you feel about what is going on in Minnesota right now?
Answer: No one will defend the lockdowns anymore.
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Question: It’s 2026. You are director of the NIH. What is your opinion about…
Answer: Sorry to interrupt, but the answer is that lockdowns were the biggest public health disaster in history and it’s true I won’t ever recommend one!
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Question: I can see you still want to talk about lockdowns. What is the absolute worst thing about them?
Answer: The worst thing about lockdowns is that they are over, and everyone else moved on long ago.
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Author
Jonathan Howard
Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."
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