What happened in California? Missing science and murky emergency laws during Covid

Kevin Bardosh sits down with Rajiv Bhatia, a Stanford primary care physician and former deputy health officer in San Francisco, California. Rajiv discusses his experience challenging the state of emergency in California on ethical and process grounds, including his communication with public health colleagues in the early days of the Covid pandemic. A veteran public health officer, Rajiv also discusses the alarming lack of basic epidemiological analysis in California at the time and the implications of this, as the pandemic evolved, for government policy blindspots and groupthink. We finish by reflecting on the future of pandemic response.