Transcript: Kevin Bardosh

My interview with Collateral Global's director of research

In March of 2020, much of the world was in lockdown. The unprecedented pandemic response closed schools, shuttered businesses, and paused public events. My guest on this week’s program says it is time to evaluate the measures that were taken and consider whether the harms outweighed the benefits. The UK charity that he leads research for has now launched working groups to examine Covid policies in a number of different countries. Including his own, Canada.

Kevin Bardosh is director and head of research at Collateral Global, and an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: I have invited you back on the show to talk about Collateral Global, and its recently formed Canada Working Group. We'll get to the group's objectives in a moment. But first, let's talk about Collateral Global. You are director and head of research at the new charity, which is dedicated to synthesizing the evidence on the effectiveness and collateral damages of non-pharmaceutical interventions during the pandemic. Tell me how this organization came about, and how it is going about its aims.

KB: CG, Collateral Global, was set up by Sunetra Gupta, the Oxford epidemiologist, and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, a health economist. They signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which was done in October of 2020. This has received a lot of negative attention in the mainstream media, as being this sort of right wing, anti-health position, which I found very surprising throughout the whole pandemic. 

The actual declaration, which is quite short, essentially just says: Lockdowns, school closures, these policies that we are implementing, they have a lot of collateral harms. They disrupt society and we should pursue something called focused protection. We should think about the fact that Covid has a very clear age distribution, in terms of its mortality and morbidity. So, we should protect the elderly and we should not disrupt society. If you go back, prior to Covid, and talked to people in global public health who work in epidemic response, most of them would agree with that as a position. If you basically presented to them Covid as a scenario in 2019 and asked them, “What should we do?” focused protection would be pretty mainstream. So, it tells us a lot about the way that society responded to Covid, that something like the Great Barrington Declaration has received this type of publicity. I'm not just saying in the mainstream media, but also the major science journals. The Lancet, the BMJ and others. 

It has come to light through freedom of information requests that Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci really did concertedly suppress and smear the GBD when it came out, and there's email evidence of that. Anyhow, this is just context. Because people think that somehow, if you're concerned about lockdowns and school closures, you're right wing. And I just find that absolutely preposterous. After the Great Barrington Declaration was signed, Sunetra, Jay and a bunch of other academics, mostly in the UK, said, “Hey, look, we need to do academic research on this. We have these ideas, but we need to back that up with actual data.”

They set up CG as a research charity, and essentially a think tank. I'm creating these working groups in multiple countries — about a dozen plus countries — and you actually have a very similar story of academics who are trying to do good science. And when I say science, I mean social science and hard sciences on questions about epidemiology. They feel very isolated during the pandemic with their views, if they were against or critical of government policy. Very alone in their institutions. Some of them were fired, others were silenced, or felt the group pressure to conform and toe the line. 

Collateral global is seeking to be a home for critical thinking and rational decision-making in health emergencies, which, as we know, quickly veers into very strong emotional responses, and, I would, say panic and politicization. So, that's a little bit about us. 

TH: I think the term about GBD that was used was “fringe epidemiologists.” We do know from The Free Press reporting on the Twitter Files,  Jay Bhattacharya, for example, professor of health medicine at Stanford University was put on a trends blacklist to suppress the reach of his tweets. And we are learning more and more about the censorship of debate that took place during the pandemic. Now, turning our attention to the Canada Working Group of Collateral Global, there’s lots of familiar names on that list from across the country, including Rafael Gomez and Trudo Lemmens from the University of Toronto and Dionne Pohler from the University of Saskatchewan. Walk me through the goals of this working group.

KB: What we're seeing is essentially that the scientists who advised governments, and I mean formally and also sometimes informally, are now being tasked with evaluating the Covid response. In Canada, that includes the public agencies, but then also the academics that supported those policies — either through modelling, research papers and others. These evaluations are problematic in lots of different ways. But one is that they simply do not account for the social harms of Covid policies. 

So, you have these reviews that say, “Okay, I'm going to evaluate the effectiveness of Covid [policies]”, and they pick their models and their assumptions to present the government policies in the most favourable light. And then they ignore the actual collateral harms of those policies. This is a problem we've seen from the very beginning with Covid. There's been a lack of cost/benefit thinking. That's one of our main goals here — to retrospectively look at the costs and benefits of individual policies, but then also collectively the response.

Having gone through a lot of this research myself, I'm quite confident that many of the policies that we implemented had many more harms than benefits. There's a reticence in the scientific community to come to terms with that. Because their careers are on the line. There's also an emotional and cognitive energy that you need to overcome those biases and say, “Actually, I could have been wrong.” It requires a lot of epistemic humility. I just think that there's perverse incentives for that taking place. So, CG is trying to spearhead that in Canada and elsewhere.

Our first task — we launched this working group about two weeks ago — is that we're going to do a systematic review on the social harms in Canada. So, everything from business impacts to mental health impacts, to things like child abuse to school closures, educational impacts.

We're going to just lay out what Canadian academics have been doing in this space. You'd be very surprised by how much research there is that's published on this — and how critical it actually is. If you just pay attention to the mainstream media in Canada, you would think that there isn't this abundance of research really highlighting the harms of Covid policies. The attempt is to really bring that to bear on the public discussion. You're also seeing the Trudeau government, who was in power — and this isn't necessarily just the Trudeau government, I'm just saying this is a political problem. If you have a political party who's in power and they implement things like lockdowns, they're not going to want to then say, “Those policies were wrong.” They're not going to want to have critical evaluations. This is where, foundationally, the scientific method in a democracy is so critical to holding power to account. 

That's another motivation here — for us to unbiasedly look at the set of government policies. I don't think that the government is doing that right now in Canada. I don't think that even the funding agencies in health and in social science, which would be tasked often with program evaluation or economic evaluations, are going to do that as well. So that's what we're spearheading.

TH: I want to talk about where we're at in Canada, in terms of a Covid  inquiry. But first, let's unpack what you were just talking about, the harms. I know you published a paper on this, exploring the social harms of the pandemic response. It spanned many areas: health, the economy, income, food security, education, lifestyle, intimate relationships, community, environment, governance. It synthesizes 600 publications, with a focus on meta-analyses, systemic reviews, global reports, and multi-country studies. Talk about some of the specific harms that you've looked at — and what stood out most from that research.