Dr. Jay Bhattacharya joins Dave Rubin on “The Rubin Report” to discuss what he believes the gravest mistake of the COVID pandemic was.

And it has nothing to do with masks, vaccines, or quarantine policies.

Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy, agrees with Rubin that a huge problem during COVID was “the censorship machine that was silencing ... virtually anyone that was outside mainstream groupthink.”

“I think the centrally important issue that caused the problems is that we silenced people ... qualified people — from expressing their thinking, and as a result, the decision-making at the top of the country was absolutely abysmal,” he explains.

“Science doesn’t work unless you have freedom,” he continues. “Science can only happen and can only occur when there isn’t that censorship because ... the powerful people [who] control the sensor — control what you can or can’t say — and it doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong; it just matters that they’re powerful. Science needs to have David and Goliath stories.”

The field of science, he explains, “needs to have people at the top being overthrown in their ideas by the young Turk ... the mathematician, who’s like, ‘No, ... you’re wrong,’ and then [they’re] wrong because that’s what the evidence says.”

But “you can’t have that unless you have free speech,” Dr. Bhattacharya laments.

Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologist and theorist, agrees with Dr. Bhattacharya but thinks the road to free speech in the world of science is much easier talked about than walked. Watch their discussion here:

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