by WorldTribune Staff, October 29, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who received death threats and was blacklisted by social media for challenging the feds' narrative on the Covid lockdown, has been awarded the American Academy of Sciences and Letters’ top intellectual freedom award.
The academy presents its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom to a scholar “who displays extraordinary courage in the exercise of intellectual freedom,” according to its website.
After first speaking out in an op-ed which pushed back against the government’s handling of the pandemic, Bhattacharya said he "wasn't prepared" for the response he received.
He “got death threats” and attacks came from Stanford as well.
“The university, which I loved, … investigated me for false allegations … that they knew were false,” he said. “I got sent a very clear signal that I needed to stay quiet. I lost sleep, I couldn’t eat. But I decided that I didn’t care about my career anymore and I needed to say what I saw."
“These policies that we were following were going to harm a lot of poor people … and there were better policies possible,” Bhattacharya said. “The idea that disrupting normal social life is in itself bad for health, I thought was a commonplace in public health.”
While many were sympathetic to his view, Bhattacharya said they “did not feel able to speak up. I think people were very, very scared, both about their own physical safety, but also, they’re scared for their own careers,” a fear that he shared.
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Bhattacharya also touched on his participation in a lawsuit accusing the Biden-Harris administration of secretly telling social media companies to censor speech that ran against its Covid policies.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Bhattacharya discovered he had “been placed on a blacklist the day I joined Twitter” in October 2020 “because I put the Great Barrington Declaration on there. That was not an accident. Twitter didn’t do that on its own. There was a systematic campaign by the federal bureaucracy, including the CDC, the surgeon general’s office.”
“All of these federal agencies essentially pressured Twitter and other social media to silence voices … that were contrary to pandemic policy put forward by the administration,” Bhattacharya said. “The American First Amendment didn’t hold during the pandemic. We did not have free speech.”
“The government going to Twitter or to Facebook and saying ‘Silence Jay or silence people like Jay who are saying these kinds of things,’ where I’m not told I’m being silenced, I don’t get to tell the government to go take a hike … that’s a violation of the First Amendment,” he said.
