Jaya Bhattacharya -

But here is the rub. Sitting in his Stanford office, Bhattacharya is now the establishment. He is the guy with the MD and the PhD. He is the guy the billionaires call.

When I press him on the failures of the "Great Barrington" model—specifically, the logistical impossibility of perfectly isolating the elderly in a multi-generational household—he grows quiet. jaya bhattacharya

He looks out the window at the Palo Alto sun. "I regret that we stopped talking to each other. We built a firewall between 'safe' science and 'dangerous' science. That firewall is still standing. And the next virus is coming." But here is the rub

He wants to tear down the "prestige journals" that acted as gatekeepers, force the FDA to lower the bar for generic drugs, and break the "Faucian" model of a single voice dictating national policy. He is the guy the billionaires call

As we wrap up, I ask him the question that haunts every pandemic policy maker: Do you have any regrets?

It is March 2020, and the world is holding its breath. In a cramped home office cluttered with medical journals, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya stares into a laptop camera. He is not wearing a lab coat. He is wearing a rumpled sweater, the uniform of a man who hasn't slept in 48 hours.