Academic debate on COVID-19 policy is finally thriving, according to a new report by Just the News.
Stanford University last month hosted a conference on COVID-19 pandemic policy, to listen and debate diverse perspectives.
“I think this is the first event where people of very different viewpoints about what happened during the pandemic are going to speak to each other in a way that’s constructive,” said Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of health policy at Standford’s School of Medicine, who gave the event’s welcome and introduction.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that criticized COVID-19 lockdowns for the physical and mental health harms they would cause, especially for kids.
Bhattacharya faced public criticism and censorship for his views, prompting him to become a plaintiff in the anti-censorship lawsuit Murthy v. Missouri.
Bhattacharya told the conference audience that the academic world in 2020 wasn’t open to hearing diverse views on COVID-19.
He said:
“In December of 2020, the former president of Stanford John Hennessy invited me to participate in a dialogue with somebody who disagreed with me — but unfortunately, we were unable to find somebody who would agree to talk with me … In that sense, this conference is four years too late — but it’s not too late, I say.”
COVID-19 probably won’t be the only pandemic the world will face, he said — and it’s in the “middle” of dialogue that we learn “what ought to be done … because no nobody has a monopoly on the truth.”
The conference featuring dialogue on COVID-19 policy comes as a stark contrast to a prior Stanford-led initiative, the Virality Project. Journalist Matt Taibbi in March 2023 reported that project leaders at Stanford colluded with the federal government and social media companies to censor COVID-19 “misinformation.”
“Stanford, with the backing of a number of partners and some government agencies, had created a cross-platform single digital ticketing system that was processing censorship requests for all of them: Facebook, Google, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Medium, Twitter.”
Stanford’s recent conference featured discussions about COVID-19’s origin, government policies, censorship and the regulation of virology.
Speakers included academics and journalists whose voices were suppressed during the pandemic by the U.S. government, social media companies and academia.
Among them were Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who now reports on his Unreported Truths Substack, and Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s former state epidemiologist who disfavored lockdowns and masking mandates.
Bhattacharya praised Stanford’s new leadership for making the conference possible.
It’s been “night and day different,” he told Just the News, since former President Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned in July 2023, after falsified data was discovered in his research. The university named Jonathan Levin as Tessier-Lavigne’s replacement.
Levin gave the conference’s opening remarks. “I believe that we need to make every effort to get people who disagree, even sharply, in dialogue with one another,” he said.
According to Just the News, Bhattacharya said he was “hopeful about Stanford’s direction for the first time in a very long time.”
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More universities moving toward academic freedom, diverse views
This fall, Stanford’s Board of Trustees adopted a resolution affirming “academic freedom and the avoidance of institutional orthodoxy.” Levin supported the resolution.
The same week, the University of Pennsylvania and Washington State University also rolled out institutional neutrality policies designed to protect academic freedom and limit political statements.
Bhattacharya told Just the News that an institutional neutrality policy “would have been unimaginable under the previous administration.”
He said, “There is now a clear signal from Stanford leadership in support of academic freedom, which has been missing for years.”
Stanford’s October conference on COVID-19 pandemic policy is the latest in a string of recent academic events organized to foster diverse dialogue.
In February, Heterodox Academy hosted the “COVID and the Academy: What Have We Learned?” symposium at Stanford.
Heterodox Academy is a nonprofit working to ensure that universities are “truth-seeking, knowledge-generating institutions grounded in open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.”
Also in February, the University of West Florida invited Berenson — labeled “the pandemic’s wrongest man” by The Atlantic — to speak for its lecture series.
Just the News reported that the University of South Florida (USF) will host a conference in December with Heterodox Academy on “the vitality of viewing the COVID experience through less constricted lenses,” according to Jay Wolfson, Ph.D., interim dean of public health and senior associate vice president for USF Health.
Wolfson told Just the News, “We expect that while there will be intentionally ‘opposing’ viewpoints on science and policy, it will be exceptionally civil and transparent — with a strong focus on good science, good medicine, good policy and what we have learned.”
The December 2024 conference doesn’t yet have a website.
The Defender reached out to Bhattacharya for comment on Stanford’s October conference but did not receive a response by our deadline.
Watch Bhattacharya and Levin’s opening remarks at Stanford’s pandemic policy conference here:
