Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Man Who Predicted Covid" with Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding

Transcript

"The Man Who Predicted Covid" with Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Well, the Australian Prime Minister has called an election.
0:05
That means that the chattering classes have begun also a chattering
0:10
and my profession, which I really don't consider to be my profession.
0:16
Because it brings such shame on itself, my profession of journalism
0:20
has done its dandest to dishonor itself, discredit itself,
0:24
and generally muddy the waters of voter information,
0:28
barely a few days into this election campaign.
0:32
In Australia, if you're wondering outside of Australia,
0:35
the Prime Minister has the right to call an election in a particular window of time,
0:39
thereby trying to pick a date that is most advantageous to him or her.
0:44
Domino, why we still do it that way, many states, including my state,
0:49
has abolished that and replaced it with a fixed term,
0:52
as they have in the United States, which makes more sense.
0:56
But both political parties stand more to gain from retaining the ability to call an election
1:01
when they are in power than they stand to lose by having their adversaries call an election
1:06
when they're out of power, so the silly process continues.
1:10
Nonetheless, we've been waiting with baited breath for the Prime Minister to call it
1:13
and it has been called.
1:16
You may recall it some weeks ago, I expressed my frustration at
1:21
the predictable gotcha question that many journalists ask of politicians,
1:27
which goes along the lines of how much is a loaf of bread,
1:31
or how much is a liter of milk.
1:34
I know my American listeners would not know what a liter of milk is,
1:38
so you can replace that with a pint, which you probably also don't know,
1:42
because Imperial measurements make no sense.
1:45
But putting that aside, I railed against a journalist who asked that
1:49
off the Prime Minister some weeks ago.
1:52
And in recent days, the news cycle has been dominated
1:57
by breathless column inches and bloviating from radio and television hacks
2:03
about the fact that the opposition leader, Anthony Albanese,
2:08
made a gaff, a gaff, when he was asked what the unemployment rate is
2:15
and what the Federal Reserve Bank's baseline interest rate is.
2:21
And he took a guess at the unemployment rate.
2:25
He thought it might be 5.4%, turns out it's 4%.
2:28
He yielded to his advisor or a minister who was next to him.
2:33
I don't recall who that was, but obviously one of the people who we employ
2:37
as taxpayers to make sure that the Prime Minister is given the information
2:41
when he needs it, so he doesn't have to retain stupid factoids in his head.
2:46
And she got it correct.
2:48
And he has spent the past two, three, four days embroiled in endless questions
2:57
about why he didn't know what the precise unemployment rate was
3:00
and how he could possibly feel for unemployed Australians
3:03
and the hardship that good Aussie backlers are enduring in this economy of ours.
3:08
If he wasn't able to cite to the precise decimal point what the unemployment figure is.
3:15
This is just continued and continued.
3:18
And today it reached its zenith, its apogee, or perhaps I should say,
3:24
the depths of towardriness that I've come to expect from much of the media.
3:32
As an aside, the headlines in the press are just so silly as to write their own jokes.
3:42
The Greens leader, Adam Bant, the leader of the Green Party,
3:46
he proposed that dental care should be free under Australia's Medicare for All Universal Public Health System
3:56
under which dental is not currently covered.
3:59
So how did the nation's main broadsheet newspaper owned by Rupert Murdock,
4:04
his first and most prized possession as a media mogul,
4:08
report on Adam Bant wanting to include dental in Medicare.
4:13
Their headline reads,
4:17
I'll tax the rich to pay for your teeth.
4:22
End quote says Adam Bant.
4:25
I'll tax the rich to pay for your teeth.
4:30
To which one culture critic on Twitter, Patrick Lenton tweeted,
4:34
did a pirate sing this?
4:36
I'll tax the rich to pay for your teeth.
4:39
Which I thought was rather good.
4:42
But sad that he has such easy fodder to stoop to, to make a joke like that.
4:49
So what happened today was that that Greens leader was getting a speech at the National Press Club
4:57
and taking questions from journalists.
5:00
And some pipsqueak who I didn't know until now,
5:04
now I have the misfortune of knowing him, who happens to be,
5:06
I think the economics editor of probably the most prestigious newspaper in Australia,
5:12
the Australian financial review read by the financial titans
5:17
and in the corridors of power in the capital.
5:21
He thought it would be an opportune time to ask a question of Adam Bant and to append to it.
5:27
I got your question in the same vein as how much does milk cost,
5:31
how much does bread cost, what exactly is the unemployment rate.
5:34
But this time he asked what the wages price index is.
5:41
This is an arcane measure of wage inflation.
5:47
And he thought, I initially, when I heard this, I thought he was joking.
5:50
I thought he was sending up his type of journalist.
5:54
But it seems he wasn't.
5:56
He got on Twitter and he tweeted, not reading Twitter for 24 hours for obvious reasons,
6:01
but my wife tells me some of you think I look youthful.
6:04
You're too kind.
6:05
Also, maybe I'm old fashioned.
6:07
But if you make a claim about poor wages,
6:10
you should probably know the key measure of wages shrug emoji.
6:15
Anyway, see you on the flip side.
6:19
Greg Jericho, another journalist, a financial journalist.
6:26
tweeted, I spent most of my days writing on wages and labor markets.
6:31
And I don't remember what the wages price index currently is.
6:34
Good thing I have access to the internet, which enables me to check
6:37
in about five seconds, crisis averted.
6:41
He says, I would also need to check the average interest rate.
6:45
I would also need to check the under employment rate.
6:47
Guess my articles are all worthless now.
6:49
And he adds, if journalists think memory is important,
6:53
maybe they should all take down the printouts of the cabinet and shadow cabinets
6:56
that most of them have next to their desks,
6:58
because surely they can remember all of them,
7:00
given they write about politics.
7:02
And he says, I thought we all realized
7:04
wrote learning was stupid and pointless for demonstrating intelligence
7:07
in about 1995.
7:09
Apparently not.
7:11
But what gave me heart in all of this,
7:14
as my profession solid itself, so poorly,
7:17
with these stupid gotcha questions that don't tell us anything about anything,
7:21
apart from whether or not a politician has been craven enough
7:25
to memorize as many things as they possibly can,
7:28
what did happen, the silver lining in all this,
7:33
was Adam Bant's response to this guy.
7:37
It wasn't aggressive.
7:39
He didn't put him down overtly,
7:42
but have a listen to a couple of minutes of this exchange.
7:46
Talking about object fact checking exercises,
7:48
you said in the speech that Wage's growth wasn't going particularly well,
7:53
what's the current WPI?
7:55
Well...
7:59
Google it mate.
8:01
I mean, I am sick.
8:04
If you want to know why people are turning off politics,
8:09
it's because what happens when you have an election
8:14
that increasingly becomes this basic fact-checking exercise
8:20
between a government that deserves to be turfed out
8:23
and an opposition that's got no vision,
8:25
this is what happens.
8:27
Elections should be about a contest of ideas.
8:31
Politics should be about reaching for the stars
8:34
and offering a better society.
8:36
And instead, and instead, there's these questions that are asked
8:40
about, can you tell us this particular stat or can you tell us that particular stat?
8:44
And those questions are designed to show that politicians are somehow out of touch
8:50
and not representative of everyday people.
8:53
When we use Flash, most of the people in Canberra are on six-figure salaries
8:57
just passing time until they go out and work for their coal and gas corporations
9:01
and get a six or seven-figure lobbying job.
9:04
Do you know what would be a better way of showing?
9:07
Do you know what would be a better way of showing that politicians are in touch
9:11
with the need of everyday people?
9:13
It would be passing laws that lift the minimum wage.
9:16
It would be making dental and mental intermedicare.
9:19
It would be making sure that we wipe student debt and build affordable houses.
9:24
And when you've got wages growing at about two and a bit percent
9:27
and inflation growing at about three and a half percent, that is part of the problem.
9:31
And I would hope that at this election, we can lift the standard
9:36
and turn it into a genuine contest of ideas.
9:39
You'll probably say it.
9:42
There you have it, Adam Bant, the leader of the Green Party in Australia,
9:47
responding to a question from the Australian financial review about
9:51
whether he had memorized an arcane data figure
9:58
and the insinuation that he didn't know anything about cost of living pressures
10:02
if he couldn't recite the precise number.
10:06
That happened to me.
10:08
And again, this is not a party political thing.
10:11
I'm no rusted-on supporter of the Greens.
10:15
I was critical of the journalists who asked a gotcha of Scott Morrison, a liberal.
10:19
I was critical of the journalists who asked the gotcha of Anthony Albanese, a Labour member.
10:24
This kind of thing has to stop.
10:26
These questions are not uncomfortable questions.
10:28
They're not uncomfortable conversations.
10:30
They're nothing that I seek to be associated with or I seek to champion.
10:33
They don't tell us anything.
10:35
I mean, part of the point of my championing of uncomfortable conversations
10:39
is not just that the actual dialogue is uncomfortable.
10:43
As you will notice if you're a regular listener,
10:46
these conversations are not always uncomfortable between me and the guest.
10:49
They're usually quite amicable.
10:51
The point is that we're having conversations about things that are uncomfortable,
10:55
about things that most people feel awkward about transgressing,
10:59
about things that people feel are uncomfortable,
11:02
about things that most people feel awkward,
11:05
about addressing bluntly and frankly,
11:09
and with no holds barred, no consideration of whether or not it's going to transgress
11:13
a tripwire that has been erected by their tribe or some other.
11:20
And these kinds of gotcha questions do none of that.
11:23
They don't actually hammer down into the things that matter.
11:26
All they do is try to embarrass a politician temporarily
11:29
and dominate the news cycle and idiots in the rest of the media then feed off that
11:33
and keep asking questions like they have the opposition leader
11:36
relentlessly for the past few days,
11:38
such that he has to contort himself into an apology for something
11:42
that he shouldn't really apologise for.
11:44
That's what I found refreshing about Adam Bant's response.
11:47
The refusal to apologise, the refusal to dignify the whole framing of the question
11:52
with any credibility.
11:54
There have been some rays of light.
11:57
Tom Ballard, a comedian who I know and respect and like tweeted.
12:01
If I were running for public office, I would simply know all the answers to all the questions.
12:05
Then everybody would like me and I would win.
12:09
Exactly. Is that the implication?
12:12
Daniel Bleakley, a climate activist said,
12:14
how can Scott Morrison be taken seriously when he doesn't even know the current
12:17
atmospheric carbon dioxide parts per million figure?
12:21
And Cameron Williams, a tech journalist, tweeted,
12:24
did journals who ask gotcha questions realise they are tanking their own profession
12:28
which needs less tanking right now?
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I am a journal. I speak truth to power and ask tough questions
12:35
like what is the price of a paddle pop ice cream?
12:38
Exactly.
12:40
How fatuous.
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Now more than ever.
12:44
We need journalists who don't collaborate in a kabuki dance with politicians.
12:49
We need journalists who ask questions and have conversations that are difficult,
12:54
that push boundaries, that think big, that think beyond the everyday,
12:59
that talk on the kind of terrain that at least Adam Bant had the guts to open up.
13:04
We need journalists and politicians to have conversations that stretch us
13:09
and that are sometimes, yes, I live.
13:13
I'm comfortable.
13:16
Today on the show cast your mind back to mid-January of 2020.
13:30
Oh, such innocent times.
13:32
Oh, such sweetest of babes.
13:35
We were blundering forwards into a world that we thought would resemble the world of the past,
13:41
not knowing that it would become quickly upended completely.
13:46
At that time, there were news reports about this Wuhan flu
13:51
and it was the same as the news reports that we'd heard about the swine flu
13:55
and about the Ebola outbreak in Africa and about the SARS and the this and that.
14:01
There was a lot of sort of eye rolling.
14:04
We've got another big one coming, are we?
14:07
And even people like myself who I think back about the early days of the pandemic
14:14
and remember there being weeks that felt like decades in which I was screaming from the rooftops
14:20
that this was going to be something that was going to change the world
14:23
and people thinking that I was being hysterical.
14:26
I was at the supermarket buying a lot of canned goods before, you know,
14:30
while it was still crazy preppers, crazy gumtoten preppers who were doing the same.
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Not the regular housewives scrambling around that would come two or three weeks later.
14:40
And yet even I and around the time of mid-January was still just looking, you know,
14:46
with sort of calmness and slightly perplexed attitude
14:50
at what was going on in Wuhan thinking it probably wasn't going to
14:54
arrange the entire planet as it has.
14:57
One person who was not in such a mindset, one person whose job it is to raise the alarm about such things
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and who sure did so is Eric Fargolding, who is an epidemiologist,
15:10
who penned an hour famous, now notorious, at the time extremely controversial,
15:16
subsequently less so because he was so prescient, tweet thread.
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He only had about 2,000 Twitter followers.
15:23
Despite his pedigree, he had set up a Facebook page,
15:28
which had five million followers, which was about cancer prevention.
15:32
There was a campaign for cancer prevention.
15:35
He had run for Congress in the 20 teens.
15:40
He's a Harvard educated epidemiologist and nutritionist.
15:46
And he saw the R-naught of this Wuhan coronavirus,
15:51
and he was looking at his data, and he tweeted, now famously,
15:55
all caps, holy mother of God.
15:58
This was on January 20th, I believe.
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I'll read the whole tweet thread just so you can get a sense,
16:06
and try to read it through the perspective of, you know, a jaded and complacent globe.
16:12
We were all focused on Donald Trump, and we were focused on the 2020 election,
16:18
and we were focused on basically the fact that these sorts of viral pandemic
16:25
scares crop up every so often and go nowhere.
16:28
And he wrote, holy mother of God, the new coronavirus is a 3.8,
16:33
meaning the R-naught is a 3.8, meaning that the average person is going to infect
16:38
3.8 other people, going about their normal daily lives.
16:42
In the absence of social distancing, masks, hand washing,
16:45
sanitizing, vaccination, and all of that.
16:48
Remember, there was none of that back then.
16:50
He wrote, how bad is that reproductive R-naught value?
16:53
It is thermonuclear, pandemic level bad.
16:56
Never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career.
17:00
I'm not exaggerating, hashtag Wuhan coronavirus, hashtag coronavirus outbreak.
17:05
He went on to tweet, we estimate the basic reproduction number of the infection to be 3.8,
17:11
indicating that 72 to 75% of transmissions must be prevented by control measures
17:16
for infections to stop increasing.
17:18
We estimate that only 5.1% of infections in Wuhan are identified,
17:22
and by the 21st of January, a total of 11,341 people had been infected in Wuhan since the start of the year.
17:30
Should the epidemic continue unabated in Wuhan,
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we predict the epidemic in Wuhan will be substantially larger by the 4th of February,
17:38
191,529 infections.
17:41
Infection will be established in other Chinese cities and importations to other countries will be more frequent.
17:47
Our model suggests that travel restrictions from and to Wuhan City are unlikely to be effective
17:51
in holding transmission across China.
17:53
With a 99% effective reduction in travel, the size of the epidemic outside of Wuhan may only be reduced by 24.9% on the 4th of February.
18:02
Our findings are critically dependent on the assumptions,
18:05
underpinning our model and the timing and reporting of confirmed cases,
18:08
and there's considerable uncertainty associated with the outbreak at this early stage.
18:12
With these caveats in mind, our work suggests that a basic reproductive number for this 2019 end-cold outbreak is higher,
18:19
compared to other emerging coronaviruses, suggesting that containment or control of this pathogen may be substantially more difficult.
18:28
Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point,
18:31
hash tag Wuhan virus, hash tag coronavirus outbreak, hash tag China coronavirus.
18:36
Summary, he writes.
18:38
So what does this mean for the world?
18:40
Question mark, question mark, question mark.
18:42
We are now faced with the most virulent virus epidemic the world has ever seen.
18:48
An unorder 3.8 means that if it exceeds SARS's modest 0.49 viral attack rate by 7.75 times, almost eightfold,
18:58
a virus that spreads eight times faster than SARS cannot be stopped by containment alone.
19:04
A 99% quarantine lockdown containment of Wuhan will not even reduce the epidemic spread by even one-third in the next two weeks.
19:11
Thus, I really hate to be the epidemiologist who has to admit this,
19:15
but we are potentially faced with possibly an unchecked pandemic that the world has not seen since the 1918 Spanish influenza.
19:24
Let's hope it doesn't reach that level, but we now live in the modern world with faster planes and travel than 19.
19:31
At WHO and at CDCGov needs to declare public health emergency ASAP.
19:40
At the time, he seemed deranged.
19:45
At the time, even his colleagues, even other people at Harvard said,
19:50
you've got to delete this.
19:52
This is scaremongering.
19:53
This is ridiculous.
19:54
The World Health Organization came out and said there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission yet.
19:59
Everyone in Wuhan might just be getting this from gobbling up bats or whatever.
20:05
Fargolding disagreed.
20:06
He continued to shout from the rooftops.
20:08
He was cowed into deleting that Twitter thread.
20:11
I took me a long time to find it in an archive.
20:14
It's not on his Twitter thread anymore.
20:16
And so, again, this rollercoaster that we've all been on.
20:21
In March of 2020, late March, when you cast your mind back to that,
20:26
can you remember what that was like?
20:28
The whole world basically locked down.
20:32
New York City, a sort of remote hellscape where no one was out and about,
20:39
except for ambulance sirens tearing up and down the streets,
20:42
and huge, refrigerated trucks outside hospitals to capture the overflow of bodies
20:48
that had to be taken to the morgue.
20:51
Hospitals completely overwhelmed northern Italy, just devastated.
20:57
And the whole world, essentially in lockdown.
21:00
At that time, David Wallace Wells, the journalist for New York magazine,
21:04
wrote a profile about Eric Fargolding pointing out that if people had listened to him two months earlier,
21:11
the world would be in a very different state because we didn't really start doing anything
21:16
for the subsequent six weeks, seven weeks, in some places eight weeks,
21:21
after that Twitter thread.
21:23
And that was enough time for the virus to run completely unchecked
21:28
and become seeded and all sorts of cities all over the world and to explode.
21:37
David Wallace Wells in his piece said that if Fargolding's warning,
21:41
excuse me, had been widely published, then the high death tolls in Italy, Spain and Iran,
21:45
which were three of the countries that were hit hardest by COVID-19 in the early months,
21:49
could have been avoided.
21:51
I quote from David Wallace Wells's piece, if Eric Fargolding or anyone with his level of alarm
21:56
had been running pandemic response in any of those countries on January 20th,
22:01
talking about Italy, Spain and Iran, every single one of them would be today immeasurably better off,
22:06
having initiated at the very least the same social distancing approaches,
22:09
testing protocols and personal protective equipment and ventilatory production
22:13
we are now hoping for and scrambling to produce.
22:17
We got caught with our pants down at the beginning of this pandemic,
22:20
we didn't have enough of anything, we didn't have enough masks, nurses and doctors
22:23
without protective equipment, no clue, no preparedness really.
22:29
And that was largely because we were coasting along not listening to people like Eric Fargolding.
22:35
I thought it would be interesting to hear his recollections about that experience,
22:41
his interpretation of how the pandemic has unfolded,
22:44
and his predictions about what the next phase of what he has a lone voice in the woods
22:50
initially called a thermonuclear pandemic.
22:54
I hope you enjoy this fairly wonky pandemic conversation with the chicken little
23:02
who was screaming from the rooftop before anyone else was,
23:05
the Harvard scientist, Eric Fargolding.
23:14
We just go back to the beginning of the pandemic because it's a funny trajectory
23:22
that you've taken of having 2,000 Twitter followers before COVID
23:26
and now having nearly 700,000 Twitter followers.
23:30
What are your recollections of January of 2020 and how the sort of metaphorical
23:36
alarm started flashing in your head?
23:38
I think we're in year 3 of the pandemic and January of 2020 is one of those,
23:46
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach the whole time and I have relatives in China
23:53
and I have lots of colleagues who are well known epidemiologists who have lots of ties in China.
23:59
And many ways, China is a very controlled media environment.
24:06
And the fact that the Chinese government didn't even really know what to censor on the Internet.
24:14
It was quite a wild west that showed that this was something that's definitely beyond their control
24:20
that's something that they don't have a handle of.
24:24
And I think that was in many ways a signal in addition to all the anecdotes
24:29
because all we had in early January were anecdotes after anecdotes.
24:33
And I think you have a Wuhan.
24:36
I think I'm a big firm believer of precautionary principles
24:40
due to some things in my early childhood surviving a large tumor.
24:45
We don't have to get into that.
24:47
But I think it's just one of those things where I've seen this before.
24:53
I've done whistle blowing, you know, kind of like early warning things
24:57
whether it's the biox drug, dangerous drug many years ago,
25:01
whether I was concerned about Flint, lead poisoning, whether it's Theranos.
25:08
Many years ago I was working on a lab's startup and I knew there was something wrong with it
25:14
and that Theranos was very suspect.
25:17
So I had that same sinking feeling and each of those times I didn't blow the whistle early enough.
25:24
And so this is like the fourth time I've had it in my life.
25:28
And I knew that this was going to be bad and all the data was anecdotal data was really bad.
25:34
But, you know, as a scientist the problem is you're not supposed to make any declarations
25:39
until you know for sure, right?
25:41
And this is where in certain ways I had beef with the WHO early on.
25:46
Remember in mid-January there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
25:51
Well, it's not that there's no evidence.
25:54
There's no proof there is but there's no more proof that there isn't.
25:59
Right.
26:00
But the absence of evidence is an evidence of absences.
26:03
Exactly, exactly.
26:04
And of course some, you know, I think that was a very big faux pas on their port
26:09
and they didn't declare the public health emergency of international concern
26:14
in the first time they met and I think it was on the 20th or something, 21st.
26:18
And I was extremely upset about that.
26:20
And so, you know, I, in many ways, I've put my time in academia harbor for 16 years.
26:27
It's not where I want to be forever.
26:30
And I didn't have a scientific career to protect, right?
26:36
I wasn't gunning for promotion.
26:39
So I said, you know what?
26:41
I'm going to call a spade a spade because all the data is lining up
26:46
and the early preprints, which today we rely on preprints all the time.
26:51
But back then, oh, how dare you cite a preprint that's not peer-reviewed.
26:56
God forbid.
26:58
But, you know, year three in the pandemic, preprints are everything.
27:01
But back then, it's like, oh, it wasn't peer-reviewed.
27:04
But all the data was lining up.
27:07
It's like a confluence of data.
27:09
It was lining up.
27:10
And in many ways, if it's kind of like sometimes how detectives work.
27:18
Detectives rarely get a smoking gun, fingerprint, DNA match on camera or retinal eye scan, right?
27:25
But they piece it up that the circumstantial evidence, plus all the other evidence,
27:30
if they all line up together in a way that's like very concerning, I think,
27:37
why were you an outlier, Eric?
27:41
Because at this time, mid-January, there were a lot of people still cracking jokes about the Wuhan virus.
27:47
I was at a party.
27:49
I remember when it was because it was around Australia day, which is the 26th of January.
27:53
And someone said, oh, you should try the Wuhan chicken off the buffet.
27:58
This was a punchline.
28:00
There's this thing going on overseas and it's kind of quirky.
28:04
And that was a few weeks before even I as a bit of a data wonk started.
28:08
The heads on the back of my neck started started hadn't quite started raising yet.
28:12
And I was early.
28:14
So the question is, yes, the WHO may have been too cautious in the way that it was communicating with the public by saying,
28:20
well, there's no evidence of this.
28:22
There's no evidence of human-to-human transmission, even as people like you were saying,
28:25
well, of course, there's human-to-human transmission.
28:27
It's a respiratory pattern.
28:29
There was also asymptomatic transmission.
28:32
Remember early on, you don't need a more amassed until you have symptoms.
28:37
And we can get into, in a sec, I want to get into all of the confused contradictory messaging,
28:42
which I think has fueled part of the skepticism in many parts of the population towards official claims about the pandemic.
28:50
But just on this question of alarmism versus sort of slow walking the alarm bell ringing,
28:57
there was a sense before the pandemic that the media always goes crazy about these stupid bugs somewhere in the Middle East or China.
29:08
I remember Bill Ma doing jokes about, here's the latest bullshit that they're getting us all hysterical about during MERS or whatever it was.
29:17
We're all going to die of Ebola.
29:20
We're all going to die of Middle Eastern respiratory.
29:22
We're all going to die of SARS.
29:24
It never bloody happens.
29:25
There's a swine flu.
29:26
There's a Zika.
29:27
Basically, the media has been crying wolf on this sort of thing for a long time.
29:33
So I guess my question is, a stop clock is right twice a day.
29:38
If you're constitutionally hardwired to see alarm everywhere, maybe you just sort of got lucky by maybe you're a chicken little who just happened to get lucky.
29:50
I think there's a lot of other situational things.
29:55
First of all, my first doctorate at Harvard was an epidemiology.
29:59
So this was in my wheelhouse.
30:01
A lot of people say I'm a nutritionist.
30:04
I'm also a nutrition scientist.
30:06
That's my second doctorate.
30:07
But I think as an epidemiologist, you have to look at the tea leaves of data.
30:13
And I used to teach meta-analysis.
30:15
I've taught meta-analysis and research synthesis and systematic review at Harvard for over like 13 years, 14 years.
30:23
And when you do that, you always kind of piece together early data.
30:27
And the piecing together early data is like the hardest thing because you know, with the Merck's drug by ox, which is a billion dollar drug.
30:35
The early data was really a trickle, right?
30:38
It was really like, if you coin flip something, you should see an even distribution of heads or tails.
30:46
But if you coin flip like 10, 15 times and you're getting like 13, 14 heads, right?
30:55
It's not definitive proof.
30:58
But you know, statistically, the odds of that coin flipping always on one side is very low and very unlikely to have just happened by chance.
31:10
And I think that instinct comes from many years of doing epidemiology, big data analysis.
31:17
And systematic reviews, teaching people how to do systematic reviews and how to find early signals, especially when it comes to drug safety.
31:26
And I think it's just, there's an intuitive instinct of when the data becomes uncanny.
31:34
And I think that is, that is the core of the.
31:39
Was the data was the data in January of 2020 in addition to the anecdotal reports out of Wuhan was was the point, the reproductive rate, the.
31:47
Yeah, it was the R and not at first.
31:49
That was like the first definitive thing because I couldn't, you know, anecdotal stuff like bears stuff is anecdotal like you can't always go on anecdotal.
31:58
But if you get anecdotal stuff from many different independent sources and they all kind of like confirm the same directionality that this is a really bad signal.
32:09
And if you know China and if you know how people in China tick and people, you know, people in China, my relatives and my Chinese colleagues, they know when something is governed propaganda, you don't say it, but they know.
32:24
Whenever they see something happening on, you know, we chat with their wayball and social networks and it's popping up in a very unusual way.
32:33
And there's no sensors that systematically clamping down, it's, it's, it's, it's real, right? Those kind of signals like like most American scientists and don't have because they don't have the ear to the ground there.
32:48
They don't, not everyone's trained in epidemiology nor in the signal filtering from you get from meta analysis research.
32:58
And then, of course, you know, I've had many years of, you know, looking at data like, for example, our biox meta analysis, we poured through like over 1000 papers and over 200 trials, trial reports.
33:11
And so we've poured through all these data before. So this is one of those things that, you know, I think there's many other people who are concerned, I'm not the only one who was concerned back then.
33:21
But I think it's the, if a butterfly flaps his wings, but no one was there to hear it, or if you don't make it loud enough, you know, did it really happen.
33:32
And I think the other aspect of the fact that we're talking about this is that a lot of people heard what I said because many years ago, I also, in another life, you know, built a big social network on Facebook.
33:47
For example, I have a five million person Facebook page that I own that I rarely use and I don't usually declare a publisher every, you know, broadcast or leveraging.
33:58
And even for this, you know, in the Holy Mother of God tweet in January, I never actually used it back then.
34:05
Because I, if I know what kind of like messages help reach the masses and I think Twitter was a better platform than Facebook because, you know, journalists, members of Congress, Parliament, they're on Twitter, but they're not on Facebook.
34:19
And why I wanted to reach is a lot of the journalists and get the media to wake up on not just the lay public.
34:26
So I know, and you know, I've, I've had a small 1,000, 2,000 person following for 10, 12 years on Twitter and never bothered me that, you know, you know, it's, I've never.
34:41
Twitter is not your path to world domination.
34:43
It was not the other avenue.
34:45
It did not make, I was not self-actualized or defined by my Twitter.
34:53
First volume, nobody is a self-actualized on Twitter. Twitter is not the, if you go on a Twitter for your spiritual fulfillment, you're looking in the wrong place.
35:00
But let's get to what you alluded to earlier on the WHO's advice about both skepticism towards your alarmism and then skepticism about the utility of masks from the CDC and so on.
35:15
The initial claim that masks weren't going to be useful and then that flipping into a claim that masks were essential, undermine the people's perception of the credibility of authorities.
35:26
And now I find myself in a position where I'm constantly trying to argue for the stupidity and incompetence of institutions as the better option against the malfeasance and evil and like conspiratorial desire to control.
35:44
So interpretation of some of the people and I'm definitely not a conspiracy theorist and I think a lot of the, there's bad actors out there.
35:53
You know, there's, I think there's a spectrum. There's, there is, you know, honest, innocent skeptical people because they don't know how science works.
36:02
They don't know how science gets updated.
36:05
They don't know how we are learning as we go. And if we change something, it doesn't, it's not like trying government trying to exert more control and dominance. It's just oops, they made a mistake.
36:17
Now, as a scientist, there are scientists who have been shouting about airborne and the shouting about you need masks early on shouting about air symptomatic transmission, human-driven transmission, reinfection and all that.
36:29
And then shouting at those other scientists who keep saying, nah, that's overblown. No, that's not true. There's no asymptomatic transmission.
36:37
So you don't need masks until you have symptoms, was these stupid scientists who basically say, ah, prove to me definitively without a shred of doubt left that, you know, this is that there's asymptomatic transmission.
36:52
There's a lot anecdotal, a lot of early, you know, preliminary studies, small studies that show there's asymptomatic. There's some hard ass scientists who basically says, you know, unless you basically show me definitive iron clad proof, it's not real.
37:07
And in the pandemic, though, that kind of attitude is very dangerous. And this is why, I think Mike Ryan was right, he's a director of emergency programs that we show that, you know, being perfect is the enemy of good here.
37:20
And if you want to wait until you're absolutely certain, and before you act, you're going to lose against the pandemic.
37:25
And there's those people who basically were denying airborne and all these other things, because they didn't have, show me a randomized control trial, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
37:35
This is completely true with 10,000 people. No, that's not like that. Vaccines, we do that. And vaccines, we heavily test.
37:43
But with a lot of these airborne asymptomatic stuff, you know, we just have to like go with the flow and said the anecdotes and all the evidence shows that this is likely real, we have to take precautions.
37:53
But they did not. And I think that's, they have blood on their hands, those who denied airborne, denied asymptomatic, denied reinfection. But, but that, but I think this is why, you know, obviously people who attack each other on different size of the spectrum, people can like, yeah, okay, that's politics.
38:10
But when people see scientists attacking each other, I think that's actually more dangerous, because when scientists actually each other, then they're like, oh, I'm throwing my head hand up in the air, scientists, they can't figure it out.
38:22
So I think those who are those denialist scientists actually do more damage, because they undermine the credibility of an undermine the precautionary message. And of course, they downplay everything and downplaying COVID is what part of what got us here.
38:37
So when you say that, you know, some of these people have blood on their hands for for for shaming people like you as having been alarmists and for for not being sufficiently a clear headed in their public communications.
38:50
The counterpoint to that is that there will be a lot of reckoning for people who advocated aggressive policies that ended up doing nothing as well.
39:01
And, you know, one of the one of the things that I try to impress upon people who think that Australia has become a totalitarian fascist dictatorship is that by by closing the borders for almost two years and launching large contact tracing systems and comprehensive sort of isolation requirements.
39:22
It's certainly in New South Wales, the most populated state, the not speaking to Victoria, which relied much more heavily on questionable lockdowns and curfews and things that were much more brutalizing to the population.
39:35
But in where the majority of Australians lived, lived their recreation outdoor recreation was never really curved.
39:42
There was a brief period during the Delta wave when there were some strict requirements for certain suburbs.
39:48
But the in general, my experience of the pandemic was an experience of spending a lot of time at the beach with my toddlers hunting for crabs and walking around.
39:58
And you weren't allowed to light out and sunbathe with friends and contaminate each other, but you were allowed to get out and about.
40:05
In contrast to places like California, where I saw images of bulldozers, you know, bulldozing sand over skate parks so that teenagers couldn't skate.
40:15
Like with no one thinking, well, what are the teenagers going to do if they're not skating outdoors? Are they just going to like stand under a tree six feet away from each other?
40:24
Or are they going to go inside and play video games?
40:29
You know, those kinds of things are, I think, what planted the seed, along with the flip-flopping and the equivocation around masks, the disingenuousness of claiming that masks were not useful.
40:38
When, in fact, the reason for not recommending masks was because they were useful and they didn't want to rush on masks.
40:43
Like all those early days, that kind of chaotic messaging and the seemingly arbitrary overreach to me, so the seeds for now reaping.
40:52
Which is a deluge of bullshit that people are more liable to believe because their trust in institutions has been corroded.
40:59
If you wind the clock back to January 2020, how do you avoid that?
41:03
Well, how do I avoid that? First of all, don't tell people it's just a flu, whenever it's not.
41:13
Don't tell people you don't need a mask when you clearly the evidence says you should.
41:19
But you should also clarify that outdoor is much better than indoor because the nature of indoor air being stagnant.
41:27
But I think this trust of government leaders, oftentimes government leaders, let's just be honest.
41:33
Every government sometimes elects a bad leader and bad leaders sometimes have bad advisors.
41:39
You can elect a good leader but have bad advisors and some of these bad advisors just happens to be some of the airborne deniers.
41:46
Some governments have a really good airborne precautions. Some governments never did contact tracing.
41:53
And I think this is human nature. We sometimes elect bad political leaders.
41:59
They appoint bad political scientific advisors. And this is where they don't take, you know, oftentimes even with Joe Rogan, I don't actually blame him that much.
42:11
I think it's just his circles. Sometimes you sail in, if you're a cruise ship and you sail in the Arctic waters, you're going to see lots of whales and icebergs.
42:20
But if your cruise ship is sails in Caribbean tropical waters, you're going to see a lot of beaches and palm trees.
42:26
But if that's all you ever sailed, you always think that the world is full of beaches and palm trees.
42:31
And I think this is where we need to, governments need to really have a better scientific advisory system that listens to different scientists telling them, hey, you guys are wrong about this.
42:44
Stop listening to them. There's all this other evidence that says there's breakthrough infections. There's all this evidence that you need to wear masks and better masks.
42:53
We need better advisors about all these other precautions. And this is how you can combine things.
43:00
Sometimes it's a haphazard situation of who has the policy leaders ear and who it has, you know, Joe Rogan's ear.
43:11
And oftentimes, you know, if you're surrounded by yes people or obviously politically motivated people, you're not going to give you the best advice.
43:20
For people with a certain, you know, ideology, they're going to give you info from their little corners of the world.
43:27
The world is full of beaches and palm trees. While someone else, if you actually sample the world, we'll say no.
43:32
The world is also full of whales and icebergs and mountains as well.
43:36
And I think that is oftentimes this, who has the political leaders ear is just as important as who we elect.
43:44
And unfortunately, sometimes we have really bad scientific advisors and just unprocautionary advisors or just tone deaf advisors and who are just completely behind the science.
43:56
Don't follow the literature, you know, dismiss any signs of warning.
44:02
And basically it's like everything's fine while their house is burning around them, just like them.
44:07
The question that it raises for me then is let's ignore for a moment official advice and now talk about advice that quote unquote advice that people are getting from social media and podcasts.
44:19
And why it is that there is this kind of self-selecting ecosystem of people who increasingly are only seeing polar bears or are only seeing palm trees.
44:31
Like I mean, I have my theories about this kind of siloing of information and the capture and audience capture and so on.
44:40
But it's really hard to tell a person who only ever sees polar bears that the world isn't full of polar bears and they just think that you're being disingenuous, that you're obfuscating, that, you know, how do you grant them that yes, polar bears do exist.
44:53
You know, some people get myocarditis after getting the vaccine, some masks aren't very effective, some public policy recommendations have been wrong or flawed or even, you know, willfully we even lies.
45:08
But in the aggregate that doesn't mean that we're all living in the Arctic.
45:12
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, people who go out to party and they're healthy, they rarely see anybody really sick.
45:22
And if they are sick, they're home and they're out of sight out of mind and it's not real.
45:28
And people rarely, most people rarely ever visit an emergency room or if they actually, you know, everyone sees that snowing outside or everyone can see there's a traffic on this highway.
45:39
But people can't see that there's a crazy traffic jam in the ER.
45:44
They can't see that there is like we're out of ICU beds, you know, we have body bags.
45:50
All those things are hidden from the public and even someone who's like really sick and has a, you know, 40, 40 degree centigrade fever, they're home cooped away and no one really sees it.
46:01
Because again, this is a selection bias. If you're a restaurant or a very nightclub, you're probably pretty healthy or you're not seeing anyone sick around you, right?
46:09
That's how the world is.
46:11
I think there's people need to be shaken that, you know, there are people who are sick.
46:17
They're incredibly sick. They're overloading hospitals.
46:20
Those things you cannot deny and those things should be blasted to people's psyche that, you know, just like, oh, it's a little warm today.
46:27
It's going to rain. Oh, today hospital beds are 95% full.
46:32
You should not be taking risk. And if you have a heart attack because no one says I'm never going to have a heart attack.
46:38
If you have a heart attack, if you have a car crash because playing people speed on the highway, where, you know, drive dangerously and lift dangerously.
46:45
If you have any of these car accidents, guess what? That 95% of the hospital beds being full is really relevant to you, even if you don't think you're going to get coded.
46:56
I think people need to see it. People, you don't see it. They don't believe it.
47:00
Oftentimes people in the South didn't believe that there was a true COVID emergency in New York City when hundreds and thousands of people were dying in New York City because no one around them had COVID.
47:10
It didn't hit their part of the country yet. And I think also the, of course, media silo.
47:15
It's incredibly dangerous.
47:17
Obviously, you know, the Rupert Murdoch stations of the world, I don't think I need to say which ones and, you know, obviously even more right wing shows.
47:27
And oftentimes many TV streaming shows are even more polarized.
47:32
It creates this, you know, echo chamber of, oh, vaccines don't work.
47:38
Vaccines are dangerous. Vaccines is tyranny whenever, you know, on the other side is, you know, vaccines is about caring about others around you.
47:47
Vaccines do work against hospitalizations. They do lower the risk of infection by a lot.
47:54
And they are safe. They are safer than COVID infection.
47:58
You know, your immune system is not perfect.
48:01
You know, all these things, if you, if there was a conversational conversation that you could cross talk like this.
48:07
If, if, like the Joe Rogan audiences and Fox News audiences listened to the MSNBC and CNN audiences and the mainstream CDC believing audiences.
48:18
And they just like had a conversation and we hashed out this issue like earlier about this, you know, this prevention being lowering your probability of disease by 50%.
48:28
That's prevention. It's, it doesn't, it's not negation, right, but it's prevention.
48:33
Then we could have had like eliminated half this conversation about mass networks or vaccine don't work like instantly.
48:39
Eric doesn't let cut both ways in the sense that, you know, I do feel that there's been a lot of finger wagging dismissiveness of people raising legitimate questions about particular policies.
48:51
So, you know, there'll be certain jurisdictions. I believe still in Victoria, the premier, you know, the second most populated state in Australia.
48:59
The premier has said that unvaccinated people are not going to be able to work at all outside the house until the end of, you know, until 2023 or something.
49:09
And I've gotten emails from people who work in construction in regional Victoria who spend the entire day by themselves on a tractor in the middle of nowhere who are not allowed to do that.
49:20
Because they're not vaccinated. And then someone will say, you know, what real threat of a posing imposing on the rest of society when we're dealing with a variant on the crime that is incredibly contagious, even among vaccinated people.
49:34
And yes, it might be slightly more contagious if you're unvaccinated and maybe that person is imposing an additional burden on the health on the public health system, but so are very fat people and so are smokers and, you know, and on and on and on.
49:45
And to respond to those criticisms by saying, you're an anti-vaxxer has, I think, contributed to part of the inability for all of us to get on the same page about this.
49:55
Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think sometimes policies are too blanket across the board.
50:03
You know, if you're, if you're a lifeguard on a beach, you know, the risk is pretty low, right? Because you're outside here in the sun.
50:11
And I think that's just poor sloppy policymaking. But I think if you're a restaurant worker, that's really dangerous. And there's a reason, you know, many Western countries have banned smoking restaurant because you're right to smoke ends at my nose.
50:27
You know, a restaurant worker or a flight attendant and I don't have that choice. Then you're smoking on an airplane or smoking a restaurant in dangerous my health. And therefore, you should ban smoking.
50:40
I think this, this endangerment of others, like for example, if you eat bacon, it's your own darn choice that you do to yourself, right?
50:49
But it rarely, um, other than, you know, setting bad example for your kid, it rarely, um, you know, spreads to others per se, although I think social network effects are also really important for like smoking and alcohol.
51:02
But I think we should have this, you know, better calibration, you know, like every, you know, everything should be well better calibrated. But then, you know, obviously some say, oh, I don't want big government calibrating everything.
51:16
You know, but I think you should take the minimum, you should take the minimum precautions in certain places. Like if you don't have this, then at least have ventilation or work, you know, if you're working alone and you're not working indoors, then it's not, and you're not in a consumer public facing situation such as restaurants and hospitals, then, you know, you can have more relaxed guidelines.
51:41
I think there should be more of this mix and match, just like we mix and match different vaccines with mix and match different mitigations, we should have, well, at least do, if you don't vaccinate at least test daily, at least wear a mask, then, or at least if you're working indoors, or at least ventilate your building to ensure it has, you know, six air exchanges per hour or install a hebapilter that can, you know, have cleaned this room several times an hour as well.
52:10
Six air exchanges an hour, like if you have all these things together, then, you know, like, okay, fine, if I have all this, you know, ventilation or air disinfection installed and I don't need to, I think in certain ways, that could be a good compromise.
52:26
And in that way, we don't have to fight as crazily as we do about vaccines, I still think we need vaccines because boosters really keep people out of the hospital so that whenever you have a, you have a heart attack, you make sure you get your heart attack treatment and your grandmother has her stroke treatment can be treated.
52:48
I think all these things should be mixed together and we should have at least a combination of things, but there, but there is this care for this others right there, you know, we, we pay taxes, we have programs to help the poor to help the hungry to feed the children, close the children, you know, even though they're not our kids, we're still paying taxes for it because there is this betterment of society thing.
53:15
And I think the other argument people saying like, look, the longer the COVID goes on, the longer this is horrible for all of us, so if you want to shorten it, then let's work together, but this solidarity thing, you know, we've lost it in our, our hyper individualistic society, you know, a lot of Rokens audience or Libertarian, you know, sometimes, you know, I'm a big Elon Musk fan, you know, I've said it on record, I'm not a fan of everything he does, I'm a big Elon Musk fan.
53:44
And you know, sometimes that's why I listen to Rokens sometimes as well, but I think a lot of, there's the Libertarian aspect of a lot of this, this liberty for absolute liberty, sake and everything else be damned, how dare I pay the, the really poisonous and ran attitudes of like, why should I pay for other people, people's children, why should I feed other people, they can starve to death, they can die of.
54:12
And my nutrition is not my damn problem, I think that's really hurtful in society.
54:17
I mean, I would also pick up on the point that you just made about like the longer this goes on, the worse it is for everybody, because even I think you can even get the hardcore and ran Libertarian to concede that having flights constantly cancelled because pilots are sick and having schools constantly disrupted because teachers are, you know, a sick or a close comment.
54:41
Yeah, it's just really annoying. And one of the misconceptions about the countries that have been more aggressive about suppressing the spread is that things have been sort of more disrupted and life has been more, has been less like the pre pandemic era than in places that just got on with it and let it rip. And nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, I constantly hear from people in Western Australia, which is still zero COVID.
55:09
Which is still zero COVID, which is still closed off, even from the rest of Australia, I cannot go to, I cannot go from Sydney to Perth still.
55:18
But the reality is people there are pretty bloody happy, the majority of people are like, I don't want to have lockdowns, I don't want to have to wear masks, I don't want to have to social existence.
55:27
We're all, you know, we've all been eating in our restaurants right up close to each other and not caring about the pandemic at all completely untouched by all of the things that are screwing up life, everybody else all over the place.
55:37
Even just set aside your care for other people, set aside the health risk, set aside the deaths and hospitalizations, set aside the sense of community just from a personally self interested point of view.
55:48
It's actually just better to live in an environment in which there is not a rampaging pathogen, disrupting your certainty.
55:55
Having certainty, having regularity is what people are seeking, right?
55:59
Like people, you know, people are okay adapting to change in some ways. Like for example, if we're more mental ventilation, HEPA filters, you know, I think people are not going to complain.
56:09
Or, you know, we have all this airport security, you know, that we did not have before 9-11.
56:14
People are, people are, airport security is annoying, they patch it down and grow up you.
56:18
But, you know, people are living with it because, you know, it's, it's something that allows them to live, you know, relatively normal and secure again.
56:26
Look, I think, I, you know, obviously, I believe in, you know, the common good and all these things.
56:33
And I, you know, I also, you know, when I, in my teenage years, I had a libertarian streak in tendency.
56:38
And I see what they mean. And I think freedom, of course, but I also have a different version of freedom.
56:45
Like, for example, why should I pay government taxes for health care? Well, you know, you have done, then you have the freedom to quit your job, especially in America.
56:53
You have freedom to still ensure your child gets cancer and diabetes, insulin, drugs, even if you quit your job.
57:00
I think this, and I think this freedom from COVID is something that is not been discussed enough.
57:07
The, the freedom from COVID is freedom from most of the mitigations that we can return to normal.
57:14
But the freedom from COVID requires an act of short term pain for long term gain.
57:21
And those who do not want, even want to pay that, you know, care for our fellow man, our community, our, our kids, our parents, grandparents, because they're just, you know, poisonously, you know, and ran libertarian.
57:35
I think it's dangerous. You know, I think some freedom liberty, libertarian tendencies are often good.
57:42
But people need to see that the common good is also can be their good, especially when something is like a pandemic.
57:50
And that's why I want both sides to come together.
57:54
Joe Rogan has a big platform. I think he needs to, you know, offer the other side more and not just have the ears of some of his viewers will only give him one side or something.
58:06
And I think this could be true for many sides of the media.
58:10
I want to get to this, I want to get to this question of Rogan and like who counts as an expert and so on.
58:16
But just to pick up on what you just said about like, you know, we have to be willing to endure some short term gain, shoot some short term pain for long term gain.
58:24
That sort of invites, it gains as a classic quip about, you know, in the long run world dead.
58:29
So how long is the short term pain that we need to put up with and when does the long term gain pay off?
58:36
Yeah, I think it's sooner. I think, you know, by the way, in the long run, we're all dead. There's a joke and epidemiology.
58:44
You can make, I can prove that smoking doesn't cause mortality by making everyone smoke and then follow them for 200 years.
58:52
At the end of the day, everyone's dead, just like when we didn't smoke.
58:55
But the matter is like when, right? When matters, not just the outcome, but when does the desired outcome, you know, living longer or not dying?
59:06
When does that happen? You know, when does the pandemic end? You know, in the long run, everyone's dead. Yes, but you want quality of life.
59:14
And in public health, there's also, there's not just life years, but there's, you know, quality life years, disability adjusted disability free life years.
59:24
And those, you know, right now in the pandemic, we have based everyone has a societal disability because of this damn pandemic.
59:32
When are we going to free ourselves from this so we can have disability free life years or relatively healthy life years?
59:41
It's, again, it's not just the length of life, it's the depth of life, right?
59:45
And that, my friends, I tell them, you know, your freedom and liberty by fighting for this collectively, and this is something that requires everyone to collectively do, not on an individualistic basics, collectively do as a society, we can end it earlier.
1:00:02
And can you, you know, that collective sacrifice, you know, defending your country, you know, taking, taking the hits, you know, I just think of sometimes in, you know, when the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened.
1:00:18
And a lot of people had to go into the radioactive zones, and it's either going to kill them or make them sterile, right? A lot of the elderly volunteer to do it instead of the 30 year olds and 40 year olds, others who have children.
1:00:33
And they said, you know, it's, I've lived a good life, but I want my grandchildren to have their fathers, so I'm going to go into nuclear reactor.
1:00:44
And that kind of sacrifice is, you know, the elderly 60 year old may not be living that much longer, but he made a sacrifice so that the rest of society can live better.
1:00:56
And I think that kind of sacrifice, and we're not asking you to walk into a nuclear reactor.
1:01:02
We're just asking you to wear that mask.
1:01:07
And I think, you know, I just, it's, it's just so sad, like, look, we want to get out of this sooner. Freedom, the freedom from mask is to collectively work together.
1:01:18
And I think this, this is why this ultra libertarianism is a little dangerous, but if they see the long term, again, it's kind of like quarterly earnings.
1:01:28
Stop focusing just on the quarterly earnings and try to gain, you know, to stop buybacks to just juice your short term profits.
1:01:35
Focus on the long term health of your country, your society. And if you just do that, have the long term goals in mind of everyone, then the stock market rebounds for everyone.
1:01:47
And the other thing that I would just add to put a button on this question about short term versus long term and individual versus collective benefits is that, you know, when people are very opposed to government mandated lockdowns.
1:02:02
I completely empathize with that, but the alternative in the early days of the pandemic was not either lockdown or life continues as normal.
1:02:10
It was either formal short harsh formal lockdown that then yields, at least if you're if you don't have the virus entering from outside, if you're actually a kind of community like many of the country, East Asian countries and Australia and New Zealand were that then yields a return to normality much, much quicker.
1:02:28
Because the reality is that people in London and New York, you know, there's a defacto lockdown, even if there's not a not a not a to do a lockdown. Nobody wants to go out and sit in a crowded cafe with their friends.
1:02:40
If there's a very good chance, they're going to get really sick for two weeks as a result doing so people just have to interminently stay at home by choice.
1:02:47
But let's let's just move to expertise because, you know, part of the whole problem in the in the podcast media verse is that and this is particularly pronounced on social media that who do you who gets to who gets to be sort of considered an expert like there are there are enough PhDs and there are enough people that Ivy League institutions, who are dissenters from the consensus that you will always be able to find a very
1:03:17
very credible sounding person. I mean, you and I could name. Yeah, I know who keep appearing on, you know, pod part on the usual suspects podcasts, delivering misinformation, you know, wrongly into the studies.
1:03:32
Well, yeah, vaccines are much worse than you think masks do nothing. You know, there's a conspiracy between the CDC, the WHO and China.
1:03:42
All this, you know, I've amect and works much better than people thought, but the drug companies are suppressing the data and people will send me stuff on Twitter.
1:03:51
They'll send me, you know, individual studies that they've been hunting around for because they believe that it's their responsibility as a rational person to seek out the information for themselves and come to their own conclusions and have conversations with people who might open their eyes to points of view that are not the dogmatic establishment point of view.
1:04:10
And they think that I'm a naive representative of the blind sheeple for giving credence to what I would regard as being a consensus view.
1:04:20
I try to go to people who represent the mainstream view of the world's leading experts in something. I try not to find the one expert who bucks the trend.
1:04:32
And this isn't just true for the pandemic. It's a climate science and everything. Yeah, where are we?
1:04:37
Absolutely. And this is very true of climate science. This is very true of many political reporting, you know, I think journalism, you know, obviously there's sometimes you have to present both sides.
1:04:49
Sometimes both sides of them can be a little dangerous when it comes to, you know, things like Holocaust denial.
1:04:55
And generally, you know, there's so many studies and not every studies will agree and many studies are poorly done.
1:05:04
And in the meta analysis or systematic review when we sent us all the stuff together, you know, we have a saying junk in junk out, right, you have to have this filter and this filter of what is a good study.
1:05:18
And it becomes some people cherry pick only the studies to show what they want and presented the world.
1:05:24
And some studies only cherry picked that, but this is why, you know, there is consensus building, but that process is not something that lay public can sometimes do, right.
1:05:33
It's it's a little bit technical. Like there's some study that says long COVID isn't real in kids. It's a junk case control study.
1:05:41
You said to assess prevalence, but a layperson will never know that.
1:05:44
And I think that's there's a lot of cherry pickers out there who have they have a pre existing political bias and they cherry pick things that, you know, is favorable to them.
1:05:55
And you see this in politics too, right, you cherry pick one certain narrative and for your political angle and political side to attack the other with.
1:06:05
It's it's incredibly frustrating and this is why usually in a normal setting, you know, we would have a really good review. Does this drug.
1:06:13
Is it effective against cancer?
1:06:15
And normally this process takes years. We filter collect all the data from all these years, do a systematic review, have a panel debate this instead of policy guideline.
1:06:25
And that's how it's done. But in a COVID in era, you can take a lot of things and run with it, you know, preprints are generally okay, but there's dangerous preprints too.
1:06:34
And by the way, the Ivermectin thing, God, Ivermectin, there's been a lot of studies that have been published, but with retracted or this either by the author or the journal has retracted or slapped a warning on it.
1:06:48
But someone before the warning was put on or even after they did a meta analysis of it, including the fraudulent or heavily biased study, but they don't retract it.
1:06:59
So they don't report that the study was attracted or that they don't report that the study included retracted studies.
1:07:06
And to them, you know, naively, Ivermectin works.
1:07:10
Yeah, but the ones that show the benefit or the really biased flawed slash fraudulent ones that were retracted.
1:07:18
And but that never makes it its way to the lay audience, right?
1:07:22
It's also why, I mean, you mentioned earlier, like people don't see the hospitalizations, you know, so people want to run thinking that it's the worst.
1:07:30
Like, you know, on New Year's Eve, I was up in Vermont and was talking to a nurse who's a sibling of a family member of mine, and she'd just come up from North Carolina.
1:07:42
And she was just, I mean, exhausted. It's so exhausted. And she was saying, like, I just wish, you know, we are absolutely full. We are absolutely exhausted.
1:07:52
It's all unvaccinated people and they're getting and getting really crook and people are dying. And like, this is the reality that we are seeing day after day after day.
1:08:01
And it did make me think like I wish that the people who think this is sort of a conversational game, you know, the is my car data is 4.6 out of 100,000 or like 7.2.
1:08:11
And like, what is this? And you know, should I trust this study? Like go to a hospital and talk to the nurses and talk to the ER doctors about what is happening to me on the cron wave and then tell me that it's just a cold.
1:08:21
So anyway, you know, so in terms of the selection of what you're actually looking looking at, if I have a mechden, we're useful.
1:08:28
Just go and talk to hospitals like going, you know, I mean, you would see huge trends like you would absolutely it's ridiculous to imagine out of this world.
1:08:37
And drug come, why would drug companies like every single like hospital, you know, company that owns hospitals is intentionally allowing its patients to die because they're in cooots with drug companies.
1:08:49
By what mechanism are they getting these kickbacks from the drug companies by what making, you know, what evidence is there that they are willfully
1:08:56
depriving their patients of things that work anyway.
1:09:01
There's none. Actually, the US would actually make more money if you're hospitalized longer. So that doesn't make sense.
1:09:07
And, you know, there's, there's actually a protocol that, you know, if you're 10 days post COVID infection, then you're post COVID, but you could still be in your ICU, but that's actually well documented as well.
1:09:19
Look, there's, I want, I want people just realize at the end of the day, if you don't want to talk about, oh, did they die with COVID or from COVID or just look at the excess deaths.
1:09:31
Excess deaths is in many countries that have low testing excess deaths is the best metric because you can average the average deaths from 2015, 2019, and then compare it.
1:09:44
It's for 2020, 2021. You can easily see the excess. US is about to pop over 1 million excess deaths since February 2020. It's going to pop over 1 million next week.
1:09:55
Yeah. And the excess deaths don't lie.
1:09:58
It's such a good, it's such a good point. And this is another thing that I wish I had. Actually, when I walked into the Joe Rogan show what I came armed with was a bunch of graphs of excess deaths.
1:10:09
Not because I knew that we were going to talk about it, but just because I knew that if, for example, Sweden came up as being the example of the country that we should have emulated or, you know,
1:10:18
it was huge. And if you compare it to neighboring countries with similar demographics, like Norway and Denmark, it was, yeah, it was really big. But I mean, you know, if you look at just the total number of body bags, and you superimpose those graphs, you know, from all causes, it's absolutely clear that the UK, the US and Sweden.
1:10:38
Performed way, way, way worse than Australia, Denmark, South Korea, New Zealand, and so on.
1:10:48
If you could talk to yourself, Eric, in back in January of 2020 from the perspective of today, would you say, what would you say? Would you say things have gone better or worse than you had feared when you tweeted out that tweet thread?
1:11:01
I think it's gone worse. I thought that, you know, we would have like a one or two wave pandemic, and then, you know, it will be bad for one or two waves, and then you'll be overt by, you know, by the time we got vaccines, right.
1:11:15
But then this things keeps rolling and rolling.
1:11:18
But in certain ways, it's not surprising that it's so bad because we knew the anti-vax movement was really strong.
1:11:26
We knew that the libertarian, you know, the anti-mask anti-blockdown movement would be really strong because just by pure politics of it in this day and age.
1:11:40
I think the surprising thing is how many variants that this has got, that, you know, it's, and re-infections are really high.
1:11:47
It penetrates both the vaccines and previous immunity. That is just completely crazy.
1:11:53
But, you know, we, I think it's also crazy that the CDC obviously didn't read the tea leaves of all the data from around the world.
1:12:02
They kind of like just relied on their own and plus UK's or Israel's.
1:12:06
If it didn't happen in the US, UK, Israel didn't happen.
1:12:09
It's that kind of like narrow mind in this is just in some of the bad advisors that they had were.
1:12:16
But just thinking about the virus itself, Erica, did we not somewhat dodge a bullet in its lethality?
1:12:21
I mean, in January of 2020, it could have been the case that, you know, it's killing 20% of people more.
1:12:28
Merge has a 30% more case fatality rate, like, you know, Ebola has like 50%.
1:12:35
But once you are sick with Ebola, you are so sick you would never go out to work.
1:12:41
You would never go out to a party, right? You would be like near death and you wouldn't be spreading it.
1:12:48
So a virus that's super lethal, it's like a, it's like a, you know, it can't be too hot, can't be too cold.
1:12:57
It has, there's a Goldilocks amount of lethality.
1:13:00
If it's completely strong, then it wouldn't be the pandemic virus that spreads over the world.
1:13:08
That's what the virus is so successful.
1:13:12
Right, but doesn't that also depend on whether or not there's an incubation period before symptoms arise?
1:13:17
I mean, what if, what if you're walking around for five days, infecting everybody and everything?
1:13:21
Exactly, but this, we have asymptomatic transmission.
1:13:24
We have 50% of all cases are asymptomatic.
1:13:26
And so that even during an incubation period with it, before you have symptoms, you're already spreading the virus.
1:13:32
That's what makes the coronavirus such a perfect weapon and weapons storm.
1:13:35
Right, but what I'm saying, it wouldn't be an even worse, it even worse weapon if it was 10 times more lethal than it currently is.
1:13:41
But you also still have that asymptomatic characteristic.
1:13:46
Yes, it could be worse.
1:13:48
If your question is, can it be worse, yes, the virus can be worse in many ways.
1:13:53
And I think, God, this, this, we have dodged bullets in certain ways, but the virus is not finished.
1:14:01
We have a second Omicron variant that is even potentially has also reinfection as well.
1:14:08
And potentially faster that, you know, again, ballooning the denominator will always kill more people between two viruses that's more lethal and less contagious versus more contagious and less lethal.
1:14:21
It's always the more contagious, less lethal virus that will kill more people.
1:14:25
It's just in future nature of it because what drives them up the numbers and body backs is the number of cases.
1:14:31
Again, you know, just like business by volume, you make more money by driving up the volume and making small percentages on the high volume.
1:14:41
In this case, you have high, high number of deaths because you're driving up the volume of these transmissions.
1:14:48
That is what is so, so dangerous.
1:14:51
And so, yes, we kind of dodged a bullet, but I guess in many ways, a more contagious, more immunity penetrating viruses is ultimately way more dangerous.
1:15:02
And that's actually why, you know, I'm actually, I've been running a trial for the past year in Mexico and rural Mexico on non-vaccine or drug, but a vitamin D trial, a zinc vitamin C and B vitamin trial and omega-3 trial.
1:15:18
There's no profit in it whatsoever, but these vitamins, their penny is a day, I think it could actually help people's immune system.
1:15:28
And this is why I don't talk about it on my Twitter because we're waiting for the trial to finish.
1:15:33
But I think we need, you know, we need to basically increase the world's baseline immunity as much as we can.
1:15:40
And this is why malnutrition is really key because the number one killer on the world is infectious disease in South Africa.
1:15:47
No, it's in sub-Saharan Africa in India is actually malnutrition.
1:15:52
Malnutrition contributes to immunocompromised status that contributes to childhood mortality.
1:15:57
That's the main driver of childhood mortality.
1:15:59
Even though it's infectious diseases, it's actually the malnutrition that contributes to the various malnutrition related diseases.
1:16:09
And I think we need to think about beyond just immediate virus per se.
1:16:17
We need to think about how to prevent more infections and think out of the box.
1:16:23
And again, this is not vaccine only.
1:16:26
The mistake of a lot of policymakers was relying on vaccine only or lockdown only or testing only.
1:16:32
You need to do all of them or most of them plus other mitigations, especially ventilation, air disinfection.
1:16:40
And I personally think nutrition is also really key in boosting people's immune.
1:16:44
But yeah, there's no profit.
1:16:46
There's there's vaccine trials, you know, vaccines.
1:16:49
There's pharma has the money to run them.
1:16:52
Pharma has the money to run these monoclonal antibody trials.
1:16:55
Axeloga drug trials, Ramdesa beer trials, but there's no money in vitamins.
1:17:00
And so I think this is why I really hopeful that we get really good results and we're going to get results in the coming months.
1:17:07
Yeah, I mean, now you're sort of you're sort of sounding a little bit like the, you know, the alternative media podcasters and so on.
1:17:16
Which is fine.
1:17:19
I mean, I'm not using it as a swear.
1:17:21
I like a lot of these guys and I think they make a lot of good, a lot of good points when they do.
1:17:27
For some of them before in the sense, let me just clarify what I'm saying.
1:17:30
So not misunderstood.
1:17:31
Like the, you know, people should be fit and their immune systems should be strong and they should not be obese if they can avoid it.
1:17:38
Like things like that, there's no money in saying that.
1:17:41
There's no money in doing that really.
1:17:43
But if, as you say, we're going to have to continue throwing the kitchen sink at this problem for some time,
1:17:49
then I would just, I would grant to all of the people who are outside the media mainstream, the single principle that we should be able to agree on,
1:17:58
which is let's also give a sort of what I might think I was being a light touch rating to each strategy.
1:18:04
So, you know, always use the minimum possible dose to achieve the thing.
1:18:08
You know, if the alternative is either locking people up in a, you know, quarantine facility for two weeks or installing hyperfilters on public transport,
1:18:16
go for the hyperfilters.
1:18:17
If the alternative is forcing everybody to wear masks that don't work everywhere or requiring people to have, you know, free and 95 masks,
1:18:25
which they wear only in circumstances, which are high risk, then do the latter.
1:18:30
Like let's, if we're going to have to deal with this for a long time, then let's be smart about the things that we require people to do and require them not to do.
1:18:36
So, you know, vaccination is easily the best because it's super easy, super safe and super effective.
1:18:42
And then, as you say, like things like washing hands and whatever else we can do, I just don't, I just want to allow the, allow the disability space to be able to say,
1:18:51
like let's not do everything and turn it all up to 11 forever.
1:18:54
Right, right, right.
1:18:55
You know, I'm not for lockdowns and I want to repeat that.
1:18:59
But I think if you don't want lockdowns, you better do a lot of other things to ward off, right?
1:19:05
So, lockdown should only be the last resort. And I think you need to, and it's not just either or you probably need probably like four or five out of the six seven strategies.
1:19:16
And again, we need compliance and solidarity of doing it together and doing them quick because we're always sandbagging right now whenever the floods are already here.
1:19:24
Sandbagging when the floods are already here doesn't protect a lot of the people already underwater.
1:19:29
That's literally what we're always doing and it's always too little too late.
1:19:33
And then there's lots of finger pointing and, you know, crazy accusation and blame gains and political theater that then arouses.
1:19:41
And you know, since you were, since you were the soothsayer, the fortune teller at the beginning of the pandemic, I'll ask you to prognosticate.
1:19:52
You've just articulated what things should look like if you are an emperor of the world, but let's talk about what things will look like.
1:19:59
In fact, why did you delete the Twitter thread originally back then? Were you copying so much flack for being a chicken little that you felt you needed to get rid of it?
1:20:09
I thought that people already heard it and people, you know, I also got a lot of professional disagreements.
1:20:19
Were there things that you got wrong that you're that you're embarrassed about now?
1:20:23
Um, there was like one comment I quickly deleted within an hour, but, but the main thoughts top post the whole time.
1:20:29
I think that that one was the thing that eventually deleted like weeks later, but that was only because I got a lot of professional flack, but by then it didn't really.
1:20:38
Can you actually like what the substance of that was?
1:20:40
Yeah, I missed one paper. I was I was tweeting this at like, you know, midnight past midnight 1 a.m. So I've been this.
1:20:49
So anyways, I deleted it within hours of me discovering it, but, um, but I think, you know, prognosticating predicting this pandemic is really hard because the whole thing with variance makes it unpredictable, right?
1:21:05
Like no one could have predicted there will be another Omicron 2.0, like literally one month after the first Omicron hit.
1:21:13
People always thought, Oh, give us at least three or four months before the next big one comes at least, but I think they're.
1:21:21
I think we need.
1:21:24
Like multi layer strategies, we need really, really high sea wall of all these things together.
1:21:31
And you know, is it going to be endemic? Yeah, probably, but the thing that people are not capturing is there can be a high endemic, really, really dangerous repeating cycles endemic of all this crazy, crazy high number of hospitalization surges that we don't want.
1:21:49
There could be a low background level pandemic endemic.
1:21:54
And I think the low background level is something what we want to aim for, even if we cannot eliminate all of it.
1:22:02
And I think this is where you have to have all these strategies. It's, I think this is a test of our humanity.
1:22:08
And we get together and do we have the willpower to build a Manhattan project, not just for vaccines or a nuclear bomb, but build a Manhattan project for actually supporting all of these modalities,
1:22:23
filters indoor air, all these together for a short period of time, so we can get over this.
1:22:29
And I think that is the ultimate test of this. If we don't pass, we're going to be living with a very, very dangerous level of COVID for a long time.
1:22:40
I think this is we're at a fork in a road. I can't predict that things will be hunky-dory, fabulously normal again in the near future, given all the current political wrangling and individual, individualistic selfishness that I'm seeing around the world.
1:23:00
I think we're going to be in COVID for a little bit while longer. And there's, that makes me really, really sad. It really pains me.
1:23:11
But this is why I really want your audience, Rogan's audience, and many of these other people to say, hey, you know, let's really come together.
1:23:21
You know, us fighting and bickering, it's only going to spread COVID longer, because you're, you're, we're allowing this Lucy goosey system in which only half the people comply.
1:23:33
Again, it's the transmission that's going to pile up more bodies, ultimately, and cause more variance.
1:23:40
It's really getting the cases down to a low, low level, and then protecting that low, amount of level.
1:23:46
And that will require some short-term pain for long-term gain. You know, where's the, where's our mutual sacrifice for that?
1:23:54
And, you know, this is, again, for long-term earnings, not just quarterly, juicing the quarterly earnings.
1:24:02
And I think people really need to see that and see that on the other side is more freedom, not less freedom.
1:24:09
Yeah, yeah, that's key. On that, on that optimistic note, with a tinge of sadness, but somewhat, somewhat optimistic, no, Eric, thank you so much for all your time and all your work at the talk to you.
1:24:19
Thanks so much.
1:24:24
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1:24:28
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