Covid lockdown analysis: How Silicon Valley tech crafts the “illusion of consensus”

Stanford Medicine professor/researcher and Opp Now contributor Jay Bhattacharya describes how his evidence-backed Great Barrington Declaration — which, in 2020, warned against universal Covid lockdowns — was campaigned against by local tech companies, incl. Twitter. In a Free Press e-mailer, Bhattacharya breaks down SV Big Tech’s inordinate influence to silence opinions they don’t like: widening the Government Power vs. People Power gap.

From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was a vocal critic of lockdowns and school closures that I believed would cause more harm than good. In October 2020, with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed protecting vulnerable people while lifting lockdowns for the majority of the population. In other words, it advocated a return to classic principles of pandemic management that had worked to limit the harm of other respiratory virus pandemics. Tens of thousands of scientists signed on.

Four days after we wrote it, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote to Anthony Fauci, labeling us as “fringe epidemiologists” and calling for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of the declaration. A propaganda campaign quickly ensued, with various media sources falsely accusing me of wanting to let the virus rip. It wasn’t just the press. Recently I learned in these pages that Twitter placed me on a secret blacklist to limit the reach of my tweets.

So what did I learn in 2022? I learned in a very concrete and painful way the effects of Washington and Silicon Valley working together to marginalize unpopular ideas and people to create an illusion of consensus. 

This censorship and smear campaign deprived the world of a needed debate over Covid policy and might have avoided much unnecessary suffering by children, the poor, and the working class harmed by lockdowns.

This email was originally published by the Free Press.

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