The central problem right now I think is the fear that people still feel about COVID.
During a podcast with Dr. Zubin Damania (ZDoggMD) from April 2021, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said:
I think that the central problem right now I think is the fear that people still feel about COVID…I think that that, that we are so used to this fear that we’ve lived under for a year that we don’t know how to get out of it. There’s still this fear, how do we decondition it?…
I think it’s partly the fear, right? I think that it’s hard to let go of that. You’ve lived your, for a full year under it. It’s hard to let go. I’d say it’s, I mean in some ways you can understand it, right? It’s like we’ve been conditioned to be careful. And when the, when the danger is gone, we’re still careful.
Stop and think about that for moment. The central problem right now I think is the fear that people still feel about COVID. Let’s flashback to spring 2021. Vaccines were being rolled out and cases were dropping. 560,000 Americans had already died of COVID in a year’s time and worse variants loomed. Hundreds of thousands of more would die of COVID in the next few years and many more would be seriously injured. Yet, according to Dr. Bhattacharya, the “central problem” at that time was that too many people still feared the virus.
As he had done since March 2020, when he postulated that COVID had “one-tenth of the flu mortality rate” and would kill 20,000-40,000 Americans, Dr. Bhattacharya used his status as a pandemic celebrity to relentlessly to pacify strangers about COVID’s risks in spring 2021. During a “roundtable” with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis from March 2021, he said:
Although people think about the disease as mainly just this deadly viral pneumonia that results in hospitalization and death. In fact, the vast majority of cases are relatively mild, asymptomatic, or with mild symptoms.
“We should not be particularly concerned about the variants that have arisen to date,” he said in another interview that month.
My writing features literally thousands of quotes like these- we should not be particularly concerned– from doctors, few of whom treated COVID patients, from every stage of the pandemic. Dr. Bhattacharya was just one of many doctors who made it his central mission to convince the public the “central problem” was that anyone still feared the virus. Since COVID had been “defanged”, as Dr. Bhattacharya put it on April 14, 2021, May 3, 2021, July 21, 2021, July 28, 2021, and January 6, 2022, these doctors claimed that only mitigations measures should be feared. They routinely mocked and pathologized anyone they deemed excessively cautious, which was basically anyone who wasn’t a senior citizen who took any precautions at all. Starting as early as April 2020, these “free-thinking” doctors took turns writing identical articles about how the danger was over and now was the time to stop “living in fear”.
Did they ever pause to wonder if everyone who heeded their reckless advice turned out OK? Not that I’ve ever seen.
“Oh no! Strangers are trying to avoid COVID!”
As a society we should appreciate young adults who help generate herd immunity by living normal lives and keeping society afloat. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
An entire chapter of my book (and this by Dr. David Gorksi) is devoted to how doctors shamed and stigmatized anyone who wanted to avoid COVID and how their mockery plagiarized pre-pandemic, anti-vaccine blather about “irrational measles fear“. In that chapter, I wrote the following:
It was never clear exactly why they were so irate that strangers didn’t want to eat in a restaurant or attend a concert without a mask. How did this affect them? They never showed an interest in anxiety disorders before, and today are bothered by only “coronaphobia” and nothing else. Yet when COVID was killing hundreds or even thousands of people every day, they treated it as a catastrophe whenever someone wanted to avoid it. Perhaps every cautious person was a reminder that the pandemic didn’t end in the spring of 2021, as they claimed it would.
This may be true, but it should have been very clear to me why so many of these doctors were so irate that strangers wanted to avoid COVID. The reason was staring me right in the face. From Dr. Bhattacharya’s sheltered vantage point, he was absolutely right that fear of COVID was the “central problem”, and it was vital that he “decondition it”. Remember, his “plan” for controlling the virus was this:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.
Dr. Bhattacharya and other pro-infection doctors wanted hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans to “build up immunity to the virus through natural infection”, and they made no secret of it. Convincing politicians to abandon all mitigation measures outside of nursing homes was just half the battle. Dr. Bhattacharya and like-minded doctors also had to create a moral calm and convince the public to embrace “natural infection.” This, they claimed, was the path to achieving herd immunity in 3-6 months. Except for grandma, they said that widespread COVID avoidance would “directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing“, prolonging the pandemic. They needed to create an alternate reality where people believed “for younger populations under 70, it’s much milder,” as Dr. Bhattacharya put it in October 2020, before anyone was vaccinated.
And so, from the pandemic’s first days, pro-infection doctors with large, public platforms waged a concerted psychological campaign to numb people to COVID’s risk. They became defense attorneys for the virus, shielding it from allegations that it was dangerous or something to be avoided. They spoke about it only in the most tranquil, soothing terms:
- The vast majority of cases are relatively mild, asymptomatic, or with mild symptoms.
- Most of the population has minimal risk, in the range of dying while you’re driving from home to work and back.
- The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.
- That weakness is the near inability of the virus to kill younger people.
- The “vast majority” of people “don’t even realize that they have been infected, they are asymptomatic, they have no symptoms, or they have very mild symptoms that they would not even bother to do anything about.
Doctors inundated the public with this message. There are countless more examples.
As the pandemic progressed, doctors called natural immunity a “triumph“, repeatedly claimed it was over, overhyped vaccines as a perfect panacea, and ceaselessly fear mongered about every measure to limit COVID, even purely theoretical harms. They glorified unvaccinated young adults who eschewed precautions as brave warriors whose infections would end the pandemic. As Dr. Martin Kulldorff put it:
As a society we should appreciate young adults who help generate herd immunity by living normal lives and keeping society afloat. Thank you, thank you, thank you. When people throw misguided complaints at you, falsely claiming that you are endangering others, remember that the opposite is true.
In contrast, they portrayed those who sought to remain healthy as pathetic, disordered weaklings, afflicted by irrational panic, fear, and anxiety.
It only makes sense if you remember one thing, they wanted you infected.