Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the United States National Institutes of Health, delivered an important plenary address to a conference in Washington on 3 September. His core thesis was that:
science requires free speech. You can’t have science without free speech, and the scientific basis for so much of our lives depends on people being able to argue with each other and with scientists openly and freely, without fearing attacks on our right to talk, as happened during the pandemic.
The scientific debate that Americans and the world deserved to hear in 2020 and 2021, he said, were denied because the free speech guarantees were taken away in the name of the pandemic, effectively rendering the US Constitution’s First Amendment “a dead letter.” Moreover, the First Amendment “still doesn’t apply.” Instead, currently the free speech rights are based primarily on the guarantees by the administration rather than on a firm constitutional basis.
The address, worth watching in full, is available on YouTube.
