Last week, Google pulled a video of DeSantis on March 18 discussing COVID-19 with medical scientists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas, who all hail from elite institutions — Stanford University, Harvard University, and Oxford University. All but Gupta, who is based in the United Kingdom, also joined DeSantis’s April 12 press conference to respond to Google’s ban.

“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Bhattacharya said Monday. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”

“I’m very worried about the future of science because science is dependent on free exchange of ideas and it has been for 300 years now. So if this continues, this kind of attitude, the censoring of scientific views, then I think we have reached the end of 200 years of Enlightenment,” Kulldorff said Monday. //

“The lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history,” Bhattacharya said on the banned March 18 panel. He said lockdowns are psychologically compelling to rich societies terrified of death, but are not only ineffective at stopping disease and death, they also make both worse. He noted a few minutes later:

The international evidence and the American evidence is clear: The lockdowns have not stopped the spread of the disease in any measurable way. The disease spreads on aerosol by droplets, it’s a respiratory disease. It’s very difficult to stop. The idea of the lockdown is incredibly beguiling… but humans are not like that. What’s happened instead, we’ve exposed working class, we’ve exposed poor people at higher rates. We’ve created this illusion that we can control disease spread when in fact we cannot. //

Lockdowns Are Bad for People, But Good for Google
Keeping people at home indefinitely has also drastically increased people’s screen time, which provides Google more ad revenue and influence over how people think and the information they receive. Screen use is correlated with obesity, and obesity puts people at a dramatically higher risk from COVID-19.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 78 percent of those hospitalized with COVID were obese, and lockdowns have directly contributed to a huge increase in First World obesity, especially among children. Among people who have died while COVID-positive, according to the CDC, 94 percent had other significant medical conditions, including diseases exacerbated by obesity: diabetes, cardiac arrest, and heart failure.

“The laptop class, they have protected themselves through the lockdowns while we have thrown the working class under the bus,” Kulldorff said during the panel discussion Google banned. //

On Monday, DeSantis noted the irony of Google banning professional discussion from doctors whose scientific research has been cited by Google Scholar more than 10,000 times, more than 17,000 times, and more than 25,000 times, respectively. //

Three of the four doctors on the March 18 panel authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement now signed by nearly 14,000 medical scientists and more than 42,000 health practitioners, as well as nearly 800,000 “concerned citizens,” that promotes based on the scientific evidence the policy of focused protection in response to COVID, instead of ineffective mass lockdowns.