The highest award is presented to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a scientist who fought against efforts to politically command his medical work during the COVID-19 crisis, was awarded the American Academy of Sciences and Letters ‘ major academic freedom nomination on Wednesday.
According to its website, the club awards its quarterly Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom to a professor who” shows extraordinary confidence in the practice of intellectual liberty.”
Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, received the recognition during the school’s monthly investiture ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington D. C. Afterward, he joined Princeton University Professor Stephen Macedo for an appointment on level.
Macedo began by enquiring about the first time Bhattacharya had criticized the administration’s handling of the epidemic.
” I was n’t prepared for it”, Bhattacharya said.
” I had never published an op-ed. I had never watched Television. He said,” I had this notion about the pandemic that it was more common than people realized,” despite my quiet academic background.
Finally, after he wrote an op-ed about it, he “got death hazards”. According to Bhattacharya, Stanford also faced strikes.
” The school, which I loved, … investigated me for bogus claims … that they knew were false”, he said. I received a pretty clear message that I needed to remain calm.
” I lost sleep, I could n’t eat”, he said. However, I decided that I needed to express my opinion and that I needed to speak up about my profession.
There were better laws possible, according to Bhattacharya, but these guidelines that we were adopting were going to harm a lot of the poor.
In 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an open notice to state officials and public health authorities challenging necessary lockdowns and other pandemic choices.
Bhattacharya claimed it was” the least initial point he always wrote,” and Macedo noted that his advice had been anticipated in some pandemic plans prior to COVID.
Bhattacharya contrasted the president’s COVID-19 response with that of the Hong Kong fever in 1968, joking that” the United States addressed it by having Woodstock.”
I thought that the notion that disrupting regular social life is bad for health was widespread in public health, he said.
Second, Macedo questioned why governments around the world took harsh actions related to those taken by China to” stop the spread of a lung disease.”
Bhattacharya responded”, I think it’s complicated, but … the key factor is fear. Public health officials, in my opinion, were concerned about this brand-new condition and decided that scaring people was even a wise choice.
Modern technologies also played a role, he said,” that would have previously been unthinkable.”
According to Macedo, Bhattacharya was perceived as a “dissenter from major policy,” but many others “were friendly to his view but did not feel able to speak up.”
Bhattacharya replied,” I think people were really, really scared, both about their own bodily health, but also, they’re scared for their own jobs”, a fear that he shared.
Bhattacharya even touched on his involvement in a lawsuit that claimed the Biden administration had secretly instructed social media companies to censor discourse that violated COVID-19 policies.
Elon Musk bought Online in 2022, and it turns out that I had been put on a list the day I started using it because I added the Great Barrington Declaration that, he said.
” That was not an injury. Twitter did n’t do that on its own. There was a comprehensive plan by the federal government, including the CDC, the doctor general’s office”, he said.
According to Bhattacharya,” all of these national agencies basically put pressure on Twitter and different social media to silence voices that were against the administration’s pandemic policy.” ” The American First Amendment did n’t hold during the pandemic. We did certainly had completely speech”.
The case is pending in a courtroom, and Bhattacharya expressed hope they will get “eventually”.
He claimed that the government’s use of Twitter or Facebook to” Silence Jay” or” Silence people like Jay” to which I am not informed that I am being silenced and that it is in violation of the First Amendment.
Further: Embattled Stanford Professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya: ‘ Academic liberty is deceased’
Macedo questioned the growing “emphasis on paternalism in public health” and the notion that” the public does n’t really understand the science, so they need to be guided rather than told the truth.”
Bhattacharya responded,” If I go around and say smoking is good for you, I’ve done something very harmful to the public,” but the ethical justification is that there is a real scientific consensus that smoking is bad for you.
However, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya said there was no scientific consensus.
There was no ethical justification for the conventional public health perspective to say,” Look, you just need to fall in line and say what everybody else says,” Bhattacharya said.” What we needed was everyone speaking up and saying what they saw.
In the end, Macedo questioned Bhattacharya’s organization of a Stanford conference on COVID policy earlier this fall and whether it would signal” a period of remorse and contrition” for the university.
” I do actually see some reason for optimism”, Bhattacharya said, adding that Stanford’s president did not take sides.
” What he said was,’ We have an obligation to be the kind of place where these kinds of conversations happen,'” he said. As universities, we provide a forum for people of good faith to exchange ideas and exchange ideas. That’s what we’ve forgotten about, and that leads to great things”.
Bhattacharya is the second recipient of the academy’s Zimmer Medal.
Sir Salman Rushdie, an author who criticized the Quran in his 1988 book” The Satanic Verses,” was the inaugural recipient in 2023. He has faced several attempts on his life for it. He was chosen for the award for his adversity and “refusal to be silenced”, according to the academy’s website.
On Wednesday, the academy also honored ten professors with Barry Prizes for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement.
The recipients were Akhil Reed Amar and Nicholas Christakis from Yale, Henry Louis Gates, Karin Öberg, and Jeannie Suk Gersen from Harvard, William Chester Jordan from Princeton, Marianne Bertrand from University of Chicago, Brian Conrad from Stanford, Megan Sykes from Columbia, and Gary Anderson from Notre Dame.
The Barry Prize “honors those whose work has made outstanding contributions to humanity’s knowledge, appreciation, and cultivation of the good, the true, and the beautiful”, according to the academy.  , The winners also received a$ 50, 000 cash prize.
On Wednesday, more than 50 new members were also inducted into the academy.
The Academy of Sciences and Letters, a new inductee and professor of natural sciences at Princeton, Salvatore Torquato, said that such organizations are” sorely needed.”
Along with supporting academic freedom, the academy works to support “intellectual rigor” and” the fundamental and constitutive mission of colleges and universities as truth-seeking, knowledge advancing institutions”, according to its website.
The ceremony included a performance from Howard University’s Gospel Choir.
MORE: renowned academics sign a declaration launching the world free speech movement
IMAGES: James Samuel, Stanford University
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