From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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Now, at the journal's editorial page, we believe strongly in free expression, and each week on this podcast we explore in depth and candor issues of topical and other general interest. We speak in depth to people who are leading figures in their field. Practitioners, experts, commentators, try to give us a better understanding of the major issues of our times. My guest this week I'm pleased to say is Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University and world-renowned biophysicist. He's held posts at several of the world's most prestigious universities, and in 2013 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But in the last two years, Professor Levitt has been an outspoken critic of many of the measures put in place by governments to tackle the spread of COVID-19. In October 2020, he was one of the more prominent signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to lockdowns and argued instead for more targeted focus protection of vulnerable people. We're going to talk about that and many other things now. Michael, thanks very much for joining me. Jeremy, thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here. It's our pleasure entirely. So let's talk about, we're now a little over two years since the start of the pandemic. We've had more than a million deaths. It's estimated in the United States, many millions of deaths elsewhere. But we're only probably beginning to understand the implications of the damage that was done by many of the measures that were put in place, both in terms of the economic damage, in terms of lockdown,

but also perhaps much more importantly, the kind of long-term damage to people's mental health

and to very other aspects of life. As you look back at the last two years, and again, as I said

in my introduction, you were an outspoken critic of the kind of blanket lockdown approach. As you look back at this combination of a death toll,

serious illness and the economic and psychological and various other social damage that's been done,

what lessons do you think we should be learning?

I think there are a few lessons. One is that a global pandemic is a really, really complicated event.

And science has taught us that the best, best way to solve complicated problems is to discuss them openly

and expect to be wrong. I think that what often isn't appreciated by the general public is

that almost all innovative science starts off as wrong and slowly collects itself. So I think the process, and I can't stress enough that this is a very, very difficult issue.

And the reason it's very difficult is that we have to balance, if you like, very simply,

the disease with the cure. In other words, there's a pandemic. People are

getting sick. People are dying. We're worried about hospital systems. On the other hand,

modern society is a very, very tightly interwoven fabric. And mess with one thing other things are caused and

normally the way you deal with this is you try to have a single cost function that you

optimize and let's say your cost function is minimizing death or minimizing death of

people under a certain age as it's often done by economists or whatever.

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