by Arjun Walia, Collective Evolution:

• The Facts:Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University recently gave an interview stating “there is more harm from the lockdown than there is from COVID.” He’s one of many experts who feel this way, and explains why.


• Reflect On:Should the government use force on their citizenry to comply, or should they simply recommend safety measures and explain why they do?

What Happened: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University recently gave an interview explaining why he believes lockdown measures are more harmful than COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, Bhattacharya along with Dr. Eran Bendavid, another Professor of Medicine at Stanford, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?”

They made it quite clear that if the projections given by the World Health Organization are correct, then “the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.” But they also made it clear that “there’s little evidence to confirm that premise – and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”

“Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate – 2% to %4 of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.”–Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

He is not alone in his thoughts. A report published in the British Medical Journal has suggested that quarantine measures in the United Kingdom as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the peak of the virus.

Bhattacharya goes into a great discussion and provides his reasoning in the interview below.

The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford  is one of many organizations who opposed the WHO estimates, they estimated the CFR globally at 0.51% quite early on in the pandemic, and estimates are even lower now.

The CDC also released new infection/fatality estimates that also has many people and experts calling into question the severity of the virus, this was well after John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University has said that the infection fatality rate is close to 0 percent for people under the age of 45 years old. It turns out he was right.

Many scientists and doctors in North America are also expressing the same sentiments. For example, The Physicians For Informed Consent (PIC) recently published a report titled  “Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) Compares COVID-19 to Previous Seasonal and Pandemic Flu Periods.” According to them, the infection/fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.26%. You can read more about that and access their resources and reasoning here.

The point is, many health professionals and experts believe that COVID-19 is not as dangerous as it’s being being made out to be, or has been made out to be. There are thousands of them, and many have experienced censorship and ridicule simply for sharing their research and opinions. Since the beginning of this pandemic, on perspective/perception has constantly been beamed out by mainstream media, and any opposing narrative, no matter how sound and how credible the source, seems to receive a harsh reaction from the citizenry.

A group of Canadian doctors in the province of Ontario have come together and written an open letter to Ontario premier Doug Ford. The letter is signed by 20 doctors and professors of medicine from faculties at the University of Toronto, McMaster University and the University of Ottawa and from hospitals such as Sick Kids. The letter was sent to ford on September 27th, and it argues against a return to lockdown measures as a way to tackle rising COVID-19 cases. You can read more about that here.

Ronald B. Brown, Ph.D., from the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo recently stated that the COVID-19 fatality rate is the “worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.” Brown is currently completing his second doctorate degree, this time in epidemiology at the University of Waterloo. Not long ago, Brown published a paper in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, titled “Public health lessons learned from biases in coronavirus mortality overestimation.”