Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Sixty Three: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Trump Fumbles

Transcript

Episode Sixty Three: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Trump Fumbles · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number sixty three of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:04
  is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's program. The Trump de Santis
• 0:08
  battle over the COVID response gets even more bizarre. A Democratic congressman says the
• 0:14
  quiet part out loud about ending oil and gas use, and a great interview
• 0:20
  with Stanford professor and COVID contrarian doctor j Bardacharia. I'm known as the Dutch
• 0:26
  Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital advertising SEO and EMO marketing specialist that also
• 0:32
  happens to be a big fan of John Ziegler and the Death of Journalism.
• 0:36
  Do you need help preaching your target audience? Let me help you develop the
• 0:41
  right messaging and confaded message and the best channels for your business. Please visit
• 0:46
  my website, the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com and let me help you
• 0:50
  tell your story. The website is the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com.
• 0:56
  If you want to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch
• 1:00
  Digital marketing Man dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show.
• 1:04
  In episode sixty two of this podcast to the Death of Journalism, I talked
• 1:10
  a lot about how Donald Trump had I believe opened the door and provided a
• 1:18
  massive gift to a fledgling Ronda Santis presidential campaign when he put out a video
• 1:25
  where he claimed and this is not the first time that he had done so,
• 1:27
  but to do so in video right after the Santis's announcement, I think
• 1:34
  was a very dramatic mistake by Trump to claim that New York and disgrace Governor
• 1:44
  Andrew Cuomo had done a better job in responding to COVID than Florida did under
• 1:51
  Ronda Santis. Now, in a rational world, that would be game set
• 1:57
  match winning a Republican presidential primary, regardless of who you are, And for
• 2:05
  Trump to do that is not just wrong and stupid and in factually incorrect and
• 2:10
  philosophically corrupt. It makes no sense from a political standpoint, especially when you're
• 2:17
  up by thirty five forty points nationally and you know your opponent. You know,
• 2:24
  while he has a lot of potential advantages that are scaring the crap out
• 2:29
  of you, it just had a campaign announcement that was mocked because of technical
• 2:36
  problems on Twitter. I'm going to stop talking about that because I know it
• 2:39
  irritates you, and it irritates me to even think about it. Although we
• 2:44
  do get into a little bit with our interview with doctor Bardacharia because he was
• 2:46
  part of that Twitter announcement with regard to ron De Santis. But here you
• 2:52
  have Trump, I believe, making a massive misstep, basically fumbling the football
• 3:00
  and the opening kickoff, at least in the terms of the Rhonda Santis campaign
• 3:05
  beginning and at a very key moment, giving the De Santist camp an opportunity
• 3:13
  to take advantage of this, because this should be their number one issue.
• 3:15
  I mean, if they're gonna win, the De Santist campaign has to understand
• 3:22
  that this is their issue. This is the number one way to create distance
• 3:29
  between you and Donald Trump, to contrast yourself with Donald Trump, and to
• 3:34
  do so in a way that should have a very positive impact on the average
• 3:39
  Republican primary voter. Well that was before Trump then doubled down on this claim,
• 3:47
  which is ludicrous from a substantive standpoint, and then Cuomo himself jumped in
• 3:57
  on behalf of Donald Trump. So what began as a fumble and a fantastic
• 4:02
  opportunity for the De Santis campaign, I believe, in the last couple of
• 4:06
  days has gotten to be an even greater opportunity for run de Santis to try
• 4:14
  to get back into the ball game. Here Trump posted on truth Social.
• 4:19
  This is after that video that we'd spent a great deal of time analyzing an
• 4:24
  episode number sixty two. Here was Trump on truth Social under run the sanctimonious.
• 4:31
  At least he's calling him run in this particular post, as opposed to
• 4:34
  Rob under run the sanctimonious. As governor, Florida was the third worst capital
• 4:42
  letters, so it must be true state in deaths by COVID. So why
• 4:47
  do they say that the sanctus did a good job? New York had fewer
• 4:54
  deaths exclamation point. Also, he shut down the state and even it's beaches,
• 5:00
  unlike other Republican governors. Now, the beach issue, I've never been
• 5:04
  able to get to the bottom of. I think he's referring to spring break
• 5:10
  situations because there was some well, there's a lot of controversy because when spring
• 5:16
  break hit, the beaches in Florida were not closed. And so I don't
• 5:20
  know one hundred percent. I never trust what Trump is saying as being factually
• 5:26
  accurate. But it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the Santists
• 5:30
  did in those first couple of months because he was being told to do that
• 5:34
  by Donald Trump. Trump was the one that was leading the national response,
• 5:41
  and he was listening to Trump's experts, specifically doctor Fauci, and he was
• 5:46
  believing the media. And it was only after he saw the data and realized
• 5:50
  reality and was able to reverse course that the Santists did things for which he
• 5:57
  deserves a lot of credit. But Trump and his supporters want to pretend that
• 6:00
  that's where it ended, somehow, that because the Santis trusted Trump at his
• 6:05
  leadership, that that somehows a negative towards the sand has figured it out.
• 6:11
  Trump didn't. But more importantly, this idea that New York did better than
• 6:15
  Florida. I cannot emphasize enough how that should be game, set, match,
• 6:24
  that should be checkmate, That that should be an unacceptable position for the
• 6:29
  Republican candidate for the GOP, the Republican Party in twenty twenty four. That
• 6:35
  should be it. That's a stick of fork in it. I mean,
• 6:39
  that's unacceptable. That's as disqualifying as it gets. It's disqualifying from a philosophical
• 6:45
  standpoint, and it's also disqualifying from a factual perspective, and even his so
• 6:50
  called data is absolutely ludicrous. This is at best first grade math. Donald
• 7:00
  Trump is using here when he claims that Florida was the third worst state in
• 7:05
  the country for death by COVID, He's just flat out wrong, and it's
• 7:11
  wrong just on the basic essence of math. He's not accounting for even population.
• 7:21
  California, by this measure, would be by far the worst because California
• 7:27
  has had the most COVID deaths. Well, of course they have because they
• 7:30
  have the largest population. And I'm obviously one of the biggest critics in the
• 7:36
  world of California's COVID response, but I would never say that they had the
• 7:43
  worst data with regard to deaths because it would be assinine to not control for
• 7:49
  population at the very least. And when it comes to Florida, you not
• 7:55
  just have to control for population, you have to control for the age of
• 8:00
  the population, because obviously age is the biggest factor with regard to whether or
• 8:03
  not you're going to die of COVID. And then there's the issue of taking
• 8:09
  a look at excess deaths in totality and doctor potachari It talks about this in
• 8:15
  our interview where Florida, as I said in the previous episode, is completely
• 8:18
  vindicated when you take a look at all cause mortality and how many excess deaths
• 8:26
  they had in comparison to what was expected in comparison to other states. So
• 8:31
  that's really the number that matters. The number that matters is Okay, how
• 8:37
  did you compare with regard to total deaths and how did you compare when you
• 8:43
  control for age of your population? And Florida did far better than average when
• 8:50
  you consider those two factors. But Trump is looking at this literally like a
• 8:54
  first grader, maybe even a kindergartener. I would like to believe that my
• 8:58
  kindergart Martin daughter Diana, if I explain this to her, even in a
• 9:03
  rudimentary fashion, would understand how ludicrous Trump's math here is. I mean,
• 9:11
  it's just that obvious, and yet he keeps doing it, and the conservative
• 9:16
  media, by and large, for what I have seen, is in no
• 9:20
  way shape or for him mocking him for it. Now, Ben Shapiro,
• 9:24
  we played a clip in the previous episode where he corrects Trump on it,
• 9:28
  very gently and mildly. But Trump should be being mocked for his math on
• 9:35
  this, and he should be being mocked for his conclusion, which is not
• 9:39
  just wrong, it's incredibly dangerous if the Republican presidential nominee is on the record
• 9:48
  in history after what we just went through as saying how New York handled COVID
• 9:54
  is better than how Florida handled COVID than it is all all over for America.
• 10:03
  That is not an exaggeration. That is not something from which we can
• 10:07
  ever come back. And if Trump gets nominated in spite of this massive mistake,
• 10:15
  this fumbling deep in his own end, and so far there's not been
• 10:20
  a touchdown scored by the De Santis side, which I'm going to get to
• 10:24
  momentarily, then I don't know what to tell you. There's nothing that can
• 10:30
  be done, because this is it, This should be the entire campaign right
• 10:33
  now. Trump has just opened the door to the Santis's greatest by far issue
• 10:41
  and his greatest weakness, and he doubled down on it. And he's wrong
• 10:46
  factually, and he's wrong philosophically. And then who jumps in but Andrew Cuomo
• 10:54
  himself. Andrew Cuomo goes to Twitter and the disgrace former governor of New York
• 11:01
  who killed people in nursing homes and shut down his state to know positive effect
• 11:05
  for far too long, and was forced to resign over allegations of sexual misconduct.
• 11:13
  But I believe that without his pathetic COVID response, probably would have been
• 11:18
  able to survive those allegations. He tweeted quote, Donald Trump tells the truth.
• 11:26
  Finally, New York got hit first and worst, but New Yorkers acted
• 11:31
  responsibly. Florida's policy of denial allowed COVID to spread, and that's why they
• 11:39
  had a very large second wave. I gotta tell you, as bad as
• 11:46
  Trump's math is, Andrew Cuomo's logic might be even dumber. I know that's
• 11:54
  a very tough bar. But the idea that we're still talking about in second
• 12:00
  waves in twenty twenty three, at what we now know about COVID and how
• 12:05
  many different waves there were, and how it had nothing to do with behavior.
• 12:11
  We don't even know for sure if it had to do with weather,
• 12:13
  except for the fact that during both winters of the pandemic, including well act
• 12:18
  of the vaccine was widely distributed, we had nationally massive waves and New York's
• 12:28
  wave at the beginning was the worst. And guess what. Guess what?
• 12:31
  It was so bad at the beginning for New York that waves that occurred in
• 12:37
  the future didn't impact them quite as much. Why because all they're vulnerable people
• 12:41
  were already dead, or at least a lot of them were. I mean,
• 12:48
  when you look at this, in the totality of the three years,
• 12:52
  human behavior and government action had very little to do. Restrictions had nothing to
• 13:00
  do with how states or nations ended up doing statistically over a three year period.
• 13:09
  It all basically even down when it came down to it. It was
• 13:13
  basically just a symbol of an equation that included luck with regard to timing.
• 13:20
  It included the demographics of your population, how old they are, how many
• 13:24
  smokers, how many obese people. That's what determined how many people died over
• 13:31
  a three year period of time. And I will say it again because it's
• 13:35
  incredibly important. But if the Republican presidential nominee believes that death by COVID is
• 13:43
  the only metrics, or even the primary metrics by which we determine what was
• 13:48
  a good COVID response versus what was a bad COVID response, then my god,
• 13:54
  stick a fork in all of us, because that is a liberal perspective.
• 14:00
  Even if you accept their premise which I don't. It is a liberal
• 14:05
  idea that that's the only way to evaluate a good COVID response and a bad
• 14:11
  COVID response. There are far more factors than that, and doctor j Bartachari
• 14:16
  and I get into that in our interview later on in this episode, which
• 14:20
  I urge you to listen to, especially given the context of how important what's
• 14:26
  going on here is with regard to Trump claiming New York did better than Florida,
• 14:31
  and Andrew Cuomo now hopping on the Trump bandwagon. So here we have
• 14:35
  Trump accepting this liberal plant premise that somehow deaths are the only real way to
• 14:45
  determine how good or bad a COVID response was using totally factually inaccurate quote unquote
• 14:54
  data. It's even a stretch to call it data because it's just wrong numbers.
• 15:00
  And he has Andrew Cuomo siding with him. And here Andrew Cuomo on
• 15:05
  the left is more than happy to side with the guy that they view as
• 15:11
  the devil incarnate because their self interests are merged on this issue of COVID,
• 15:20
  because the main issue here is protecting the narrative, protecting the idea that we
• 15:26
  didn't all crap to bed that the entire COVID response was not an epic catastrophe
• 15:33
  that was not needed and did no good and had all sorts of massive negative
• 15:37
  consequences that are obvious to anybody with a functioning brain. So now Trump and
• 15:46
  Cuomo are aligned on the biggest thing that has ever oppened in the modern history
• 15:54
  of America. And somehow this is not stating to the Trump campaign, and
• 16:03
  most baffling and most frustratingly, it doesn't seem to be an issue of extraordinary
• 16:08
  urgency for the De Santist campaign. I mean, this is manna from heaven.
• 16:17
  If you're the De Santist campaign, You've got Trump right at the start
• 16:22
  of your and actual campaign. You announce you get an opportunity to move past
• 16:29
  the technical glitch Twitter situation, get into the substance. And you've got Trump
• 16:34
  offering up on a silver platter, an opportunity to attack him in a very
• 16:42
  clear and over and obvious and powerful way on your strongest issue and on his
• 16:49
  weakest issue. And now you've got Andrew Cuomo, of all people, aligning
• 16:55
  himself publicly with Trump. So Trump doubles down, Andrew Cuomo jumps on the
• 17:03
  Trump bandwagon on this and you combine that with past statements not all that long
• 17:11
  in the past, where Trump is praising Gavin Newsom to Tucker Carlson and saying
• 17:15
  he can't hit him because he's been so nice to him, and you all
• 17:19
  these similar statements that Trump has made against the Santists that sound like he's echoing
• 17:25
  Gavin Newsom. So my question is, where the hell is the the Santist
• 17:30
  campaign ad blitz with a commercial mocking Trump and his bromance with Andrew Cuomo and
• 17:40
  Gavin Newsom. This is your opportunity. I mean, you can't get people
• 17:47
  who are less trusted and more despised on the right other than maybe Nancy Pelosi,
• 17:53
  than Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo. You can't ask for this kind of
• 18:00
  opportunity if they're Desantist campaign. The ad writes itself, it can be done
• 18:07
  in a matter of hours and this has got to be the time to do
• 18:12
  it. Why And I have people arguing with me about this on Twitter all
• 18:18
  the time, But John, why would you blow your ad money now?
• 18:22
  And the voting doesn't start for many months now? This lack of urgency by
• 18:29
  the DeSantis supporters and seemingly at least on this issue by the Desantist campaign,
• 18:34
  which I'm learning more and more about on a daily basis, much to my
• 18:40
  great chagrin, is incredibly frustrating to me, because, as I have said
• 18:47
  continually on this podcast, you have to be a borderline imbecile to not understand
• 18:53
  where we're headed with this. There's not gonna be a normal I Mary process
• 19:00
  if Desanders doesn't close the gap in the next few weeks or the least the
• 19:06
  next month or so, because the first thing that's going to happen, and
• 19:08
  Trump's already signaled this is he's gonna bail from the debates, and if he's
• 19:14
  still ahead by thirty five forty points nationally, he's gonna get away with it.
• 19:18
  He might even get applauded by elements of the conservative media, even though
• 19:22
  it's against their personal self interest. Because everyone in the media loves the debates
• 19:26
  and they love the primaries. They're not going to criticize him for it.
• 19:30
  He'll get away with it. If I was advising Trump and he was up
• 19:36
  by thirty five points or so in a couple of weeks, I would be
• 19:40
  telling him, don't you dare do the debates. It's the only thing that
• 19:44
  could get De Sander is back in the race. And what he's gonna do
• 19:48
  is he's going to compare what's happening on the Democratic side where Biden is not
• 19:53
  going to debate RFK Jr. And the polling data is gonna look somewhat similar
• 20:00
  to his race with De Santis and others, and he's going to say,
• 20:03
  well, why the hell am I supposed to debate? Why are we doing
• 20:07
  this? This is stupid, This is helping Joe Biden, and people will
• 20:11
  accept that there will not be massive blowback for Trump if he doesn't do the
• 20:17
  debates. And if he doesn't do the debates and he still has that kind
• 20:21
  of a lead, De Santis is in a no win situation and the whole
• 20:25
  process gets at the very least greatly distorted or truncated, if not completely shut
• 20:33
  down. The whole situation is going to be stunted at best. And people
• 20:40
  don't seem to understand this urgency. And it wouldn't bother me that much if
• 20:44
  it was only you know, De Santis supporters on Twitter that didn't understand the
• 20:48
  urgency. It's very clear to me, both from what I'm seeing publicly,
• 20:52
  is what I'm hearing as well as what I'm hearing privately, that even the
• 20:56
  campaign itself doesn't understand the urgency, and they particularly don't seem to understand the
• 21:00
  urgency or the opportunity that this particular issue is offering them, which is baffling
• 21:08
  to me. It's stupefying to me. I am getting indications that there is
• 21:15
  a struggle within Team to Stantis as to whether or not COVID is really even
• 21:21
  their main issue or even one of their main issues. And if that really
• 21:27
  is the case, and it seems to be, all indications I'm getting are
• 21:32
  that there is not unanimity within Team to Santis that this is our issue,
• 21:37
  then what the fuck are they doing in the race to begin with? Because
• 21:41
  there is no argument to be made none, There is no argument to be
• 21:48
  made for Rhoda Santis. If you're not going to raise COVID as an issue,
• 21:52
  If you accept that it's just a minor policy disagreement that Trump believes New
• 21:59
  York did better than Florida did on COVID, that I can't help you,
• 22:04
  because that's the whole ball game. That's not just the whole ball game for
• 22:10
  your campaign. If you're a team to Sanders, that's the whole ball game
• 22:14
  if you're the Republican Party, or even if you're the United States of America,
• 22:18
  because as I cannot say this enough, if that is set in stone
• 22:23
  quote unquote conservative Republican policy, that New York did better than Florida, that
• 22:30
  I'm not a Republican anymore, and there's no need for the Republican Party because
• 22:36
  there's no bigger issue that separates Democrats and Republicans. Then how we responded to
• 22:42
  COVID and New York was among the worst in every way, and Florida was
• 22:48
  probably the best in most ways, certainly among the big states. And so
• 22:55
  how Trump can get away with this without even a massive backlash from the decantist
• 23:00
  campaign is completely baffling to me, beyond frustrating and gets me almost to the
• 23:07
  point where I'm like, this is laughable. What's the what is why are
• 23:11
  we even bothering with this? This is an absolute joke because you cannot ask
• 23:18
  you could not ask for a better situation. If you're to de Santis people
• 23:22
  right now, the timing of this is perfect because, by the way,
• 23:26
  one of the problems with the COVID issue, and I'm i am one of
• 23:30
  those people who understands that. You know what, I've said this numerous times
• 23:33
  on the podcast. COVID may not be that potent issue that would be depressing
• 23:38
  as hell and very very problematic on a number of levels. I am open
• 23:44
  to that possibility. But if that is the case, you're not going to
• 23:49
  win anyway, unless literally Trump dies. I'm not even sure him being physically
• 23:59
  in prison because it would happen too late, would would allow you to win.
• 24:04
  If COVID is that much of a non issue. I mean, it's
• 24:10
  it is literally the Santis is identity, it's it's his number one qualification.
• 24:18
  And if the DeSantis people don't understand that, and if they really think that
• 24:22
  COVID doesn't resonate, then why the hell did they get in the race to
• 24:26
  begin with. And it is quite possible that they're right. I have said,
• 24:33
  and I will repeat again. I think part of what has happened with
• 24:37
  the polling data over the last several months is that the midterms and COVID de
• 24:44
  santis is two strongest issues and Trump's two weakest issues have somehow bizarrely, aggravatingly
• 24:52
  frustratingly faded from most people's memories. Well, yeah, it faded from memory,
• 25:00
  which makes it more difficult to make it an issue without it looking like
• 25:04
  you're dredging up the past, which I can't stand that. I mean,
• 25:08
  it just doesn't get bigger than how we responded to COVID, and it only
• 25:11
  happened a couple of years ago, so it's not like you're dredging up irrelevant
• 25:15
  elements of the past. But okay, fine, well now it's not the
• 25:19
  past. Trump just made it a news story. You're not gonna get this
• 25:25
  kind of a news hawk very often, if ever again. And you know,
• 25:30
  to waiting for these debates which may or may never happen to attack Trump
• 25:36
  on this is ridiculous. You may never get that opportunity unless you close the
• 25:41
  gap and reduce Trump's leverage now, because Trump is a master at using leverage.
• 25:49
  His whole life is about this, and if he has the leverage to
• 25:53
  skip the debates, he will use it and it will work for him.
• 25:59
  You only you have a very short window to take away that leverage. You've
• 26:03
  got to close the polling gap. This is why the polls matter now,
• 26:08
  It's not about predicting what the actual vote will be. Once these primaries and
• 26:15
  caucuses actually begin. It's about how we're gonna get there and what the process
• 26:21
  is going to be, and what the narrative is going to be. And
• 26:25
  yes, there's the one benefit. There's one benefit the Trump taking this massive
• 26:29
  lead, which is if you close the gap and that becomes the narrative.
• 26:33
  Now, all of a sudden, Trump has to deal with this idea that
• 26:37
  his campaign is imploding, that he's a paper tiger, he's never been hit
• 26:41
  before. There's blood in the water. The Santa says momentum, that is
• 26:47
  a real possibility. That's the only path where this actually works. And this
• 26:53
  is a way to make that at least start to happen at the perfect juncture.
• 27:02
  And I'm seeing very little sign, if any, that this is gonna
• 27:07
  happen. I keep being told be patient, be patient, No, this
• 27:11
  is it, this is it. You must strike now. Andrew Cuomo just
• 27:17
  supported Donald Trump. The ads with the Cuomo Newsome Trump bromance right themselves.
• 27:27
  You cannot ask for anything better. And it's on a topic that has impacted
• 27:32
  every single American and every single Republican or almost every single Republican in a way
• 27:37
  that will resonate. Now, maybe the focus groups have shown that they don't
• 27:42
  think that this is the issue that can work for them. Again, if
• 27:47
  that's the case, then why bother? Why bother? Because there's new polling
• 27:53
  out from Mammoth that indicates that there's no topic on which Republicans favor the Santis
• 28:02
  over Trump. In fact, Trump dominates every single topic the economy, immigration,
• 28:10
  foreign policy, social issues. They didn't even ask about COVID. It's
• 28:15
  Trump dominating the Santis is who they favor on any particular issue. So this
• 28:22
  is it. And if it's not this, I don't I don't know what
• 28:26
  is. I don't know what your strategy is. So this is incredibly infuriating,
• 28:32
  both from the standpoint of history and what it means about the future response
• 28:37
  to similar situations. But it's also absolutely exasperating when it comes to the topic
• 28:45
  of how the de Santist campaign is responding to this. And you know,
• 28:52
  I am I'm about to toss up my hands and go, okay, you
• 28:56
  know, what the hell are you going to do here? This is this
• 29:00
  is almost laughable. This is laughable. The lack of urgency is just astonishing
• 29:07
  to me. And I get so criticized an attack by all sorts. Oh
• 29:11
  you're panicking, John, Relax, calm down. You know, why are
• 29:17
  you being such a such a whoosy. I'm not being a whoosy. I'm
• 29:21
  telling you what the situation is. I'm telling you that there is a need
• 29:27
  for urgency because if we if the gap doesn't get closed, then there's no
• 29:33
  way to close it in the future because Trump is going to use this and
• 29:38
  the debates are going to be He's already signaled this that he's not going to
• 29:42
  do the debates. When I say this, the sendens people on Twitter.
• 29:47
  They think I'm insane. I'm like, have you not been paying attention for
• 29:51
  the last seven years? And it's just incredibly frustrating. And so I hope
• 29:59
  I'm wrong. I hope that information I'm getting both publicly and privately is wrong.
• 30:03
  But as of this point, it certainly seems as if that as Santa's
• 30:07
  camp looks at this as yeah, we should defend our record, but we're
• 30:11
  not going to make this the be all end all of our Trump response.
• 30:17
  And it's also consistent with this idea that they're not hitting Trump all that hard
• 30:22
  or all that directly. I mean, they're doing so more than anybody else
• 30:26
  has, but it's not as if this is you know, all out warfare
• 30:32
  and a blood bath and we're really attacking Donald Trump where it hurts the most.
• 30:37
  None of that that has not happened as of yet. And you know,
• 30:42
  look, when need be, I am as patient a person as exists
• 30:48
  on the planet. But there needs to be urgency here. This needs to
• 30:53
  happen, and it needs to happen in some way, shape or form now,
• 30:57
  otherwise what happens in the future is likely to not matter at all.
• 31:03
  And you know, it's fascinating to me from a psychological standpoint, this idea
• 31:08
  that the Trump supporters are so invested in Trump and that when it comes to
• 31:14
  even COVID, they will believe anything he says. He can revise history in
• 31:18
  whatever way he wants. He can claim that the Santis was bad on COVID
• 31:22
  and the Andrew Cuomo was good, and there's zero blowback. And there's a
• 31:30
  very common thread that connects the Trump cultist and the covidiots. The covidiots,
• 31:40
  the people who believe everything we did on COVID was correct. They still believe
• 31:44
  in mandates. They don't believe we panicked. They believe we should do exactly
• 31:48
  the same thing again, the covidiots mentality and the Trump couldest mentality are incredibly
• 31:55
  similar, not just because they're basically religious cult members, but it's because was
• 32:00
  neither of those groups is willing to admit that they were wrong. And in
• 32:06
  a weird way, for the strong Trump supporter to abandon Trump now, they
• 32:15
  would have to admit that they were wrong about him at some level. And
• 32:21
  it's a lot like the covidiots with vaccine or mask mandates. They are too
• 32:25
  invested to ever admit that they were wrong, so they would rather just continue
• 32:30
  to live under this delusion that they were right. And so it's a very
• 32:37
  similar dynamic, and it's basically a hopeless cause in a lot of ways to
• 32:44
  try to ever convince these people that they were wrong. And as long as
• 32:50
  now that Trump is the leader and the front runner and winning in the polls,
• 32:53
  it becomes even more difficult because that view is being substantial by all this
• 33:00
  news that they're getting. Well, everybody else in the Republican Party is still
• 33:06
  with Trump. Why would I abandon him now? I don't want to contemplate
• 33:09
  the idea that he was the wrong guy all along, or that there's someone
• 33:14
  else who's better than him. This guy Rohnda Santis, who Trump is telling
• 33:17
  me is horrible. That doesn't compute. So the intellectual and psychological dynamic is
• 33:25
  remarkably similar between the Trump cultist and the covidiots. They are too invested in
• 33:34
  a fairy tale to ever be convinced or persuaded otherwise. And I still believe
• 33:42
  that the biggest issue with regard to Trump siding with Andrew Cuomo and New York's
• 33:49
  response to covid is what it says about what we're going to do in the
• 33:52
  future here, because the left is telegraphing that they will not only respond the
• 33:59
  same way the next time we have a pandemic that they're going to do so
• 34:02
  with regard to the issue of climate changing, global warming, it is as
• 34:08
  clear as day that that's what they're gonna do. I said that in the
• 34:13
  previous podcast. There's been evidence of it just in the last couple of days.
• 34:19
  I mean to take New York State for instance. Here they are they're
• 34:23
  banning new gas stoves in New York, even after we were told by the
• 34:28
  media that that's a conspiracy theory, that's a crazy right wing conspiracy theory that
• 34:32
  gas stoves are vulnerable to being banned. Well, New York, they're doing
• 34:37
  everything they can to do it in the not too distant future. And then
• 34:42
  a New York Congressman, Jamal Bowman, went on C and N this week
• 34:47
  in an interview with Wolf Blitzer and flat out declared, flat out declared that
• 34:54
  we need to end the use of oil and gas because our use of oil
• 35:00
  and gas is causing all sorts of weather extremes. And well, if Blitz
• 35:07
  are just sat there as if what was being said was not completely insane,
• 35:13
  and here's what that sounded like. Number one, we need to stop drilling
• 35:16
  for fossil fuels completely. But number two, we need an expedite a way
• 35:22
  to get us a clean, renewable energy or we will continue to have these
• 35:27
  severe weather events that we have been having for quite some time and because of
• 35:31
  the warming of the planet. I don't even really know how to respond to
• 35:36
  that. But this is what happens when people buy into fairy tales, which
• 35:38
  the media promote and then never push back on, no matter how insane the
• 35:45
  conclusions are that people make based upon the fairy tales they've been fed. This
• 35:52
  whole thing began with this idea that you know what, over the next hundred
• 35:57
  years or so, we might have a slight increase in temperature and we should
• 36:00
  be prepared for that, I mean, which I never bought. But okay,
• 36:04
  fine, And now this has gotten to the point where we've got congressmen
• 36:09
  on live cable news channels saying unequivocally we need to ban oil and gas because
• 36:19
  because of what extreme weather, extreme weather which there's no evidence that's even happening.
• 36:25
  But see, this is why this is such a powerful narrative to stupid
• 36:31
  people. Because we live in a very large and diverse globe, and on
• 36:37
  a large and diverse globe, there's gonna be extreme weather at any particular moment.
• 36:43
  And so if you have now been trained to believe that extreme weather never
• 36:47
  happened previously and that it is now happening because of man made influences, specifically
• 36:55
  fossil fuels, you connect in your little brain the use of oil and gas
• 37:02
  to things that are perfectly natural but which now seemed to you because you're seeing
• 37:07
  it through this prism of this focus narrative as being correlated and caused by man,
• 37:15
  and oil and gas is now suddenly causing what I don't even understand what
• 37:21
  these extreme weather events supposedly are. Hurricane activity is actually down in the last
• 37:27
  decade or so. We've already I've talked many times about how wildfires have absolutely
• 37:32
  nothing to do with climate change, global warming. By the way, we're
• 37:37
  now in like eighteen months since we've had major wildfire here in California, which
• 37:42
  is supposed to be the epicenter of the whole wildfire phenomenon due to alleged global
• 37:47
  warming and climate change. I mean, I don't even know what they're talking
• 37:52
  about. It's so But yet here's a congressman who truly believe this like a
• 38:00
  child, and it's now coming to the conclusions and unabashedly saying it on national
• 38:07
  television to ban oil and gas period. To do what to do? What
• 38:14
  We're suddenly going to all go to electric cars, which is impossible. This
• 38:21
  idea that electric cars are magic is just beyond insane. And I mean,
• 38:28
  first of all, the electrical grid can't handle it. There's not nearly enough
• 38:32
  charging stations, There's there's no nowhere near enough minerals to make this happen right
• 38:39
  now. If we all went to electric cars immediately, the unintended costs and
• 38:45
  consequences of electric cars are astronomical and have been largely censored by the news media.
• 38:54
  This is partially why I don't trust Elon Musk, because obviously he's at
• 38:58
  the forefront of this entire movement, and they really want to get rid of
• 39:02
  oil and gas. They want to change our lives, which is exactly what
• 39:07
  they did with COVID. They want to stop the way we get around,
• 39:12
  they want to stop the way we eat. You know, in Ireland,
• 39:16
  this is astonishing. They're gonna spend a gazillion dollars killing two hundred thousand cows.
• 39:23
  They're gonna slaughter two hundred thousand cows in Ireland. Why because they think
• 39:28
  it's gonna help stop global warming and climate change by cutting down on cow emissions.
• 39:36
  You cannot make this crap up. Well, that's what's that gonna do.
• 39:40
  They're gonna take away meat. This is what they're gonna do, folks.
• 39:45
  They're gonna take away the way you cook, the way you drive,
• 39:50
  what you're allowed to eat. And they're all doing it on a fairytale,
• 39:54
  a fairytale that is largely media created, that is almost exactly I think it's
• 40:00
  way worse than the COVID thing. At least COVID was a real virus that
• 40:05
  killed people. There's no evidence at all that man is killing anybody with regard
• 40:09
  to climate change and global warming, but don't tell that to the media.
• 40:13
  How just this morning, as I was getting ready to do the podcast,
• 40:17
  The Guardian put out a headline climate change to blame for up to seventeen deaths
• 40:23
  on Mount Everests Wait for it. Experts say, oh my god, I
• 40:30
  thought I had gotten away from that phrase when COVID was over. I mean,
• 40:35
  how many hundreds of times bullshit headlines ended with the phrase. Experts say,
• 40:43
  well, we now know those experts are full of crap, and they're
• 40:45
  even more full of crap here. There's no there's no rationale at all that
• 40:50
  somehow these deaths on Mount Everest were caused by climate change. The Paul's head
• 40:55
  of Tourism. This is the subheadline. The Paul's Head of Tourisms says variable
• 41:00
  weather on the mountain has led to one of the deadliest years on record.
• 41:06
  This whole article is bullshit. The reason people are dying is because too many
• 41:10
  tourists are going up to Mount Everest. That the specific deaths they refer to
• 41:16
  are almost all related to stupidity and have nothing to do with climate change.
• 41:21
  And then the part they really won't tell you is this variable weather. Here's
• 41:25
  what happened. This month has been extremely cold, colder than normal at Mount
• 41:34
  Everest, and that people weren't prepared for that, and that helped cause some
• 41:38
  of these deaths. So even when it's too cold, that's why they changed
• 41:43
  into climate change. Global warming was too specific, too easily refuted. So
• 41:47
  now it's climate change because it's cold on Mount Everest. Somehow that's climate change
• 41:52
  killing people. No, it's human stupidity and no evidence whatsoever of global warming
• 42:00
  or climate change. It's all bullshit. But this is all, This is
• 42:05
  all what's gonna happen, folks, And Trump doesn't get it. Now.
• 42:09
  Sandis doesn't talk a lot about climate change, but he talks about it enough
• 42:13
  for me to know he gets it, and he's gonna connect it or I'm
• 42:15
  sure already does to what happened with COVID. But we're gonna go through this
• 42:20
  exact same thing. This is not an issue that is theoretical. One of
• 42:23
  the life problems with the way the Sandus's campaign is responding to Trump's alliance with
• 42:29
  Andrew Cuomo is that they're saying, well, this proves that Trump will double
• 42:35
  down on his COVID response and do it again in the future. That's okay,
• 42:39
  But to most people, they're not gonna think we're gonna need to worry
• 42:44
  about another COVID response. They're wrong about that, because if they get any
• 42:50
  excuse at all, the left is gonna use it to shut us down again.
• 42:53
  But we already know what the next virus is. It's here already.
• 42:59
  It's global warming, climate change, and Trump doesn't get any better on that
• 43:04
  issue than he did on COVID, and De Santis does, and De Santis
• 43:07
  has shown he'll stand up and stop the madness, or at least curtail the
• 43:12
  madness, because this might even be more devastating than COVID, because at least
• 43:17
  COVID people understood was going to end eventually. Climate change global warming will never
• 43:25
  end, never ever, ever, ever end. It's the universal pandemic that
• 43:32
  has no end date. So this is not a theoretical issue about what's going
• 43:37
  to happen in the future. This is happening now. The Left is making
• 43:40
  it as obvious as it possibly could be, and Trump is not going to
• 43:46
  get this. The Santis will and this is going to be far more devastating
• 43:52
  in the longer run than COVID ever was, because there's no way to stop
• 43:57
  it, there's no end date, there's no doubt to be able to disprove
• 44:01
  that it's that it's real, or to say that we're coming out of the
• 44:06
  woods because and by the way, even if by chance temperature increased stops,
• 44:13
  they're gonna say, well, it's because of our response, So we need
• 44:15
  to keep doing it. We need to continue to not use fossil fuels,
• 44:20
  or eat cow meat, or do any other number of things that for some
• 44:24
  reason liberals don't like. This is huge and people don't seem to be getting
• 44:30
  it now. Now there are a lot of people do understand it, but
• 44:34
  I don't think similar to the Santa's campaign on Trump, I don't think people
• 44:37
  get the urgency. And this is to me, the issue of our time.
• 44:45
  And Trump ain't the guy. He's proven that already. The Santis is
• 44:50
  as good as it's going to get on issues like this. By the way,
• 44:53
  when it comes to Trump and his missteps, he also stepped in it
• 45:00
  with regard to his attack. He was trying to attack to Santis and try
• 45:02
  to tout his own poll numbers. But what he really did was he attacked
• 45:07
  his former press secretary. And I'm referring here to Kaylee mcinaney. You may
• 45:15
  recall that Kaylee mcinaney is a very attractive woman, well educated, very good
• 45:22
  press secretary. She did a great job for Trump while he was in the
• 45:25
  White House for an extended period of time, and she was commenting on some
• 45:31
  polling data where in Trump's mind, she didn't give Trump as much credit at
• 45:36
  a season as he deserved for how much he was winning in the polls.
• 45:42
  And so he posted on truth Social the following content, Kaylee quote unquote milk
• 45:51
  toast mcinaney. Now, first of all, she's not milk toast. She's
• 45:57
  rather dynamic and very attractive, as of already implied. But he misspelled milktoast.
• 46:02
  Milktoast was actually trending on Twitter because Trump mixmisspelled milktoast. You don't spell
• 46:09
  it with M I lk milktoast. So he doesn't even understand what he's saying.
• 46:15
  Typical of Trump, but he wrote, Kaylee milktoast mcinate. He just
• 46:20
  gave out the wrong poll numbers on Fox News. I'm up thirty four points
• 46:24
  on the sanctimonious, not twenty five. While twenty five is great, it's
• 46:28
  not thirty four. She knew the number was corrected upwards by the group that
• 46:31
  did the poll. The rhinos and globalists can have her. Fox News should
• 46:37
  only use real stars. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Now,
• 46:42
  this is a woman who was loyal to Trump, did a great job
• 46:45
  for him while he was in the White House as his press secretary, and
• 46:50
  he has the audacity to attack her, calling her milktoast, misspelling it,
• 46:55
  saying she's not a real star, calling her a rhino and a globalist,
• 46:59
  or at least that she should be with the rhinos and the globalists, all
• 47:02
  because he didn't like how much praise she heaped on him for him winning in
• 47:09
  the polls, by the way, polls that Trump shouldn't even be trusting,
• 47:15
  Right, this guy doesn't even believe at election day poles. Now, all
• 47:17
  of a sudden, these theoretical polls in May, many many months before the
• 47:23
  primaries even technically begin, or somehow so sancrosanct and so credible that he's willing
• 47:31
  to throw one of his most loyal supporters in the past under the bus simply
• 47:37
  because she didn't bow down enough for his liking when it came to reporting on
• 47:44
  poll numbers. Again, what a freaking hypocrite. This guy doesn't even believe
• 47:49
  in poles. He believes all poles are rigged, except those that somehow say
• 47:52
  what he wants. And this is really upset a lot of people. Now,
• 47:55
  I don't think it's a game changer. I think it's an indication of
• 47:59
  who Trump is. And I think it's also a reminder of one of the
• 48:04
  issues that I've been trying to harp on, which is who the hell's going
• 48:07
  to work for Trump if he wins. I would really like that to be
• 48:12
  another issue that the Santist campaign tries to get an answer on. Tell us
• 48:16
  who's gonna work for you, Donald Trump? Because I would love to see
• 48:21
  some names. I would love to see the names of the people who are
• 48:25
  willing and able and remotely qualified to work in a Donald Trump administration, whether
• 48:30
  that's as press secretary or that Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense or other
• 48:36
  positions in the cabinet, or who's going to be as Vice president, which
• 48:38
  will obviously be a critical position given his age. So I can't even imagine
• 48:45
  who these people are going to be. It's going to be the D List
• 48:47
  team. And for Trump to even try to answer that question would be comical,
• 48:54
  especially since he's thrown everybody under the bus, even Kaylee mcintie, who's
• 49:00
  about as a competent as you get when it comes to Trump supporters. Now,
• 49:05
  since Trump mentioned these polls, I do want to take a couple of
• 49:07
  moments to illustrate the polling reality. And again, this poll came out before
• 49:14
  De santiss or was done before De Santis's announcement, so keep that in mind.
• 49:19
  But there was a mammoth national poll. Mammoth meaning the outlet that did
• 49:24
  the poll wasn't that particularly large of a pole, but the results were I
• 49:30
  think interesting and give some insight as to how bad the situation is nationally when
• 49:37
  it comes to the gap between Trump and DeSantis, because there are some De
• 49:42
  Santis people who actually thought that this poll was positive for De Santis because they
• 49:47
  measured net favorability of all the major candidates, and De Santas leads. He
• 49:55
  has a net favorability of sixty one percent. Trump is next at six percent.
• 50:00
  No one else is even close. By the way, Chris Christie,
• 50:02
  who bizarrely hilariously is going to announce he's running as well. He's going to
• 50:08
  add his name to the list of those who are running for the Republican nomination
• 50:13
  in twenty twenty four. Chris Christie is at minus twenty six percent net approval
• 50:19
  among Republicans in this Mammoth poll minus twenty six percent, and he thinks he
• 50:23
  can run for president minus twenty six percent. No one's even close to that
• 50:29
  bad even Asa Hutchinson is plus three percent, but no one's close to the
• 50:35
  Santist or Trump. Well that seems like good news, right, I mean,
• 50:38
  De Santis is weather the storm. This is before he has even announced.
• 50:43
  He's got, you know, one point better net approval than Trump.
• 50:46
  Well, here's the problem. Number one is that since the last time Mammoth
• 50:52
  did this favorability of polling, De Santis has lost seven points on his net
• 50:59
  favorability and that can only be because of the attacks by Donald Trump. So
• 51:04
  that's concerning. But even more troubling is the fact that since March Trump has
• 51:12
  gained ten points in his net favorability among Republicans, which they again goes to
• 51:19
  this whole concept of what that indictment in New York did, among other things,
• 51:24
  for Donald Trump. So Trump has gained ten points and the Santis has
• 51:29
  lost seven. And you know, obviously now the campaign changes because de Santis
• 51:35
  is an official candidate. But that is a very, very troubling trend.
• 51:39
  But those aren't even the worst numbers because in March, Trump was up by
• 51:44
  fourteen points when it came to preference. Now he's up by twenty four points,
• 51:49
  which, by the way, happens the match exactly with Trump's increase in
• 51:53
  his net favorability. He gains ten points in net favorability, and he gains
• 51:59
  ten points when it comes to his margin over Rhonda Santis. But that's not
• 52:04
  even the worst news. The worst news is because you know, there're been
• 52:07
  to Santa's people, and I'm among them who say, well, this is
• 52:12
  all about the fact that there's too many candidates in the race. There needs
• 52:15
  to be a head to head matchup. And once all these other candidates finally
• 52:19
  leave, whether it's after Iowa or after New Hampshire or heading into South Carolina
• 52:23
  and it's just the Santis versus Trump, then all will be solved. Because
• 52:29
  Trump, while in some polls he's hitting over fifty percent in many national polls,
• 52:34
  he's still in the forties. And if he's in the forties and you're
• 52:37
  not for Trump, now the thinking goes that, you know, De Santis
• 52:42
  will get all those other votes and because Trump is under fifty percent, to
• 52:45
  Santis will be over fifty percent, and he'll come back and he'll win the
• 52:50
  nomination. I've never bought into that level of optimism, but this result in
• 52:54
  the Mammoth poll completely torpedoes that. Because even though Trump is in the forties
• 53:00
  currently, when it comes to preference in the multi candidate race, when they
• 53:06
  narrow it down to Trump versus decand not even Trump versus De Santis, they
• 53:12
  when they narrow it down between Trump and DeSantis in a two way race,
• 53:17
  it's fifty six thirty five Trump. So Trump goes from forty three percent current
• 53:27
  support among all the candidates in a multi candidate race, Trump gets forty three
• 53:30
  percent. De Santis gets eighteen I'm sorry, nineteen percent, So more than
• 53:36
  twice as many people support Trump as De Santis. So that's a significant margin
• 53:40
  there, twenty four percent lead for Trump in a multi candidate race. But
• 53:45
  when you go to a two rave race, it's fifty six thirty five Trump,
• 53:52
  So he's still winning by twenty one points and he's over fifty percent.
• 53:59
  Obviously, things can happen and perceptions change. But even if you eliminate right
• 54:05
  now all the other people in the race, Trump is still beating the Santis
• 54:08
  in this national poll by twenty one points. And then there's the final nail.
• 54:15
  And I'm not gonna say it's the coffin because I'm not ready to completely
• 54:17
  declare the Santi is dead at this point, especially since again this poll was
• 54:22
  done before the official announcement by Ron de Santis. But they asked which Republican
• 54:28
  has the best chance to beat Joe Biden, and sixty three percent said Donald
• 54:34
  Trump, thirty two percent said someone else. So they could have chosen to
• 54:39
  Sandis or Nicky Haley, or Tim Scott or Mike penns or Ravage Ramaswamy or
• 54:47
  no one would have said Chris Christy. I can assure you that. But
• 54:50
  they could have picked anybody they wanted. And on that issue, the key
• 54:53
  issue who's gonna beat Biden, it was Donald Trump sixty three percent, someone
• 54:59
  else, anybody else thirty two percent. That's a thirty one point margin on
• 55:05
  the biggest question that there is. And this is the same Paul. I've
• 55:07
  already referenced that as Trump blowing the doors off of the Santis when it comes
• 55:13
  to who they favor on any particular issue, and I would say that this
• 55:15
  is one of those issues that's maybe the most key to the whole race who's
• 55:22
  going to beat Biden, and right now Trump is dominating. So these numbers
• 55:27
  are terrible even in a situation where when it comes to net favorability, who
• 55:32
  you like, in other words, how many people have a positive opinion of
• 55:37
  you minus those that have a negative opinion of you. Just Santis does very
• 55:40
  very well. He beats Trump even by one point. But the trend line
• 55:45
  there is terrible. And so I continue to be very much in the pessimistic
• 55:52
  camp when it comes to how this is all going to turn out, And
• 55:55
  I continue to believe that the next couple of weeks are absolutely lootely, positively,
• 56:01
  incredibly important for that gap to at least be closed in some substantial way.
• 56:09
  Doesn't have to be all of it or even half of it, It's
• 56:13
  just got to be significant. There has to be a change in the trend
• 56:16
  line. Otherwise Trump is going to use this leverage to shut down the entire
• 56:21
  process. Now, I have not mentioned anything about the debt ceiling deal,
• 56:27
  mainly because I really only like talking about things that I know a lot about
• 56:30
  and have an opinion that is different or unique, or I bring something to
• 56:36
  the table that maybe no one else is, and so I don't have anything
• 56:39
  that I would consider to be an expertise or a unique perspective on the debt
• 56:45
  ceiling deal. I'm kind of given up on this entire issue because we lost
• 56:51
  the argument. We lost the argument on spending. Republicans gave up the argument
• 56:55
  on spending. Now it's just a matter of how much, and it's is
• 57:00
  the media to find, you know, cutting spending as you know, somehow
• 57:05
  inherently negative that you're cutting back on programs and oh my god, you're putting
• 57:09
  people in the streets and you're harming old people or veterans or whatever. No
• 57:14
  matter what you do, you're not allowed to cut spending. Once that rule
• 57:19
  has been accepted, even by Republicans and wave the white flag on this,
• 57:23
  all you're really just doing is kicking the can down the road, and the
• 57:29
  best you can do is have as little damage as possible. Given the current
• 57:32
  circumstances. And while Kevin McCarthy is getting crushed in conservative circles for the deal
• 57:38
  he made with Joe Biden, I look at this and they go, Okay,
• 57:42
  I'm sure the deal sucks. I mean, I don't even have to
• 57:45
  look at the deal. I know what's going to suck. Because Republicans have
• 57:47
  no leverage. They have an incredibly tiny majority in the House. Obviously,
• 57:54
  Democrats control the Senate, Democrats control the White House, they control the media.
• 58:00
  The media is going to carry their water on whatever narrative comes out of
• 58:02
  this whole thing. So the best Republicans can hope for is there not to
• 58:07
  be a disaster. And while I don't trust anybody in plusitally Thomas Massey,
• 58:14
  libertarian congressman from Kentucky, who I really like, he has actually voted this
• 58:19
  out as of this taping out of committee in a key vote. I don't
• 58:23
  know what's gonna end up happening, whether it ends up passing ultimately or not,
• 58:29
  but it certainly sounds to me as if it's a crappy deal, but
• 58:34
  it probably could have been worse. And interestingly, Ronda Santis has come out
• 58:37
  against it, which is interesting because Thomas Massey is clearly a the Santis supporter.
• 58:43
  He voted for it. The Santist I think politically and understandably thinks that
• 58:49
  there's benefit to him in deciding that it's something that he should be against,
• 58:53
  especially since obviously McCarthy is Trump's guy, and you know, he doesn't want
• 58:59
  to be part of any situation where McCarthy is being attacked from the right and
• 59:04
  he's not part of that. And so I think they probably think that this
• 59:07
  puts Trump in a little bit of a bind, but his people will never
• 59:09
  see it that way. That's one of the many, many benefits of being
• 59:13
  Donald Trump and why I'm so pessimistic about this whole situation. So anyway,
• 59:20
  that's the ceiling circumstance, and you know, I'll update you in future podcasts
• 59:25
  as that situation goes along. The highlight of today's podcast is an interview that
• 59:32
  we just taped with Stanford professor and COVID contrarian doctor j Batacharya, who has
• 59:42
  made a lot of news over the last couple of years because as a disease
• 59:47
  expert, he has really been courageous and speaking out against what he saw as
• 59:54
  the overreach when it came to the governmental COVID response, and he and I
• 1:00:00
  spoke for a little bit over an hour, and we hit on an awful
• 1:00:05
  lot of topics that I think you're gonna find very interesting, including his participation
• 1:00:10
  in the RHN de Santis twitter announcement, as well as the battle between Donald
• 1:00:16
  Trump and Rhonda Santis over our COVID response and how New York did in comparison
• 1:00:22
  with Florida. So I think you're going to find that his comments on that
• 1:00:27
  are very, very relevant and very much on point. So make sure you
• 1:00:31
  listen to this interview again, it's about an hour long. It's me and
• 1:00:37
  Stanford professor doctor j. Bodacharia, Doctor j. Bardacharia. Welcome to the
• 1:00:42
  Death of Journalism podcast. Thank you for having me on, John, pleasure
• 1:00:45
  to be with you. Well, this is really something I'm very interested in
• 1:00:50
  doing an interview with you for a lot of different reasons. But I want
• 1:00:52
  to begin because you played a role in the recent Rohn de Santis, a
• 1:01:00
  campaign announcement that was done over Twitter and created a bit of controversy because of
• 1:01:05
  the technical glitches. I'm curious as to the behind the scenes on that.
• 1:01:10
  Were you officially part of that announcement. Did you know you were going to
• 1:01:15
  be asked to speak when you were part of that? And what was it
• 1:01:17
  like actually participating? And it did it feel as glitchy to you as it
• 1:01:23
  did to the public and to the media. So yeah, I was asked
• 1:01:28
  that to ask a question, but the question wasn't scripted, and I actually
• 1:01:32
  I stole a second question that wasn't you know, I wasn't supposed to ask
• 1:01:38
  and so and I thought he did a really good job answering. So I
• 1:01:42
  asked him about censorship and the government efforts to sense or scientific discussion, and
• 1:01:46
  uh, you know, I thought, I thought the governor did a fantastic
• 1:01:49
  job answering it. I so in one it So it was I was asked
• 1:01:52
  to do this, but I was very happy to do this because I did
• 1:01:55
  actually work with Governor of Santis during the pandemic on a wide range of issues
• 1:02:01
  regarding COVID policy, and we were actually censored. So it was I thought
• 1:02:06
  good for the public to see some of that, because I think it's important
• 1:02:08
  to know how he deals with important, difficult scientific issues, how he interacts
• 1:02:13
  with his scientific advisors, as far as like the glitchiness, you know,
• 1:02:16
  that was a little annoying. I have to say, uh, you know,
• 1:02:20
  it turns out that that elon just has too many followers, I guess
• 1:02:23
  is what could cause the glitch. But just a more broader perspective, the
• 1:02:28
  whole thing felt momentous, Like it felt like we were, uh, you
• 1:02:31
  know, talking to the public in a very direct way outside the filter of
• 1:02:37
  of you know, traditional media. And in that sense, it felt like
• 1:02:39
  it was something, something different, something new. I got the idea in
• 1:02:45
  concept, it seemed like a really cool idea, but because of the nature
• 1:02:51
  of this campaign, and particularly because Trump is the opponent, and because DESANDUS
• 1:02:55
  is going to be held to such a high standard and everything, I was
• 1:02:59
  frustra rated that the glitches became a huge part of the narrative and that Trump
• 1:03:05
  was able to take advantage of it. Did it feel as you were going
• 1:03:08
  through it that oh my gosh, what's happening here? Did it? How
• 1:03:12
  did it feel when you were participating? Annoying if just for a couple of
• 1:03:15
  minutes until they figured out how to you know, how to how to make
• 1:03:19
  it work. Um, but it was just you know, it's like it's
• 1:03:22
  these kinds of glitches happen all the time in my experience with media and with
• 1:03:27
  actually just I teach classes right for at Stanford, and sometimes people are laid,
• 1:03:30
  sometimes guest speakers don't show up on time, and you know, things
• 1:03:34
  don't go exactly the way you plan. To me, the more important thing
• 1:03:37
  is a substance. And I thought the substance. I mean, I'm curious
• 1:03:39
  with you thought job, But I thought the substance was quite good. Certainly
• 1:03:42
  the answers to my questions. I thought we were excellent. I mean,
• 1:03:45
  I think Governor of Santist has quite a bit to brag about in his COVID
• 1:03:49
  response. Um, you know, in particular, like Florida children didn't miss
• 1:03:53
  school in twenty twenty, you know, in follow twenty twenty, unlike many
• 1:03:59
  other places, on the basis of good scientific reasoning. That's something really important
• 1:04:04
  for the elector to know that he's going to follow good scientific reasoning even when
• 1:04:10
  it's unpopular. Well, look, I no one wishes we lived in a
• 1:04:15
  world where substance really mattered and won the day more than me. But I'm
• 1:04:18
  more of a realist, and I'm unfortunately I understand that perception often becomes reality,
• 1:04:25
  especially when it comes to politics. One last thing on that episode and
• 1:04:30
  that event. Are you do you have some official role former role with the
• 1:04:35
  de Santis campaign or are you a supporter? Where does? Where do the
• 1:04:39
  things stand on that front? No, I do not have a formal role
• 1:04:42
  in the campaign. I do like the governor quite a bit. I don't
• 1:04:45
  as I'm a public health guy. I do a professor, I don't have
• 1:04:49
  any I've never endorsed the presidential can of my life, and I don't.
• 1:04:53
  I don't see why anyone would care who I endorse or don't endorse. And
• 1:04:57
  actually, I think in public health it's important to be able to speak to
• 1:04:59
  everybody. So for instance, of a Democratic candidate were to ask me to
• 1:05:01
  speak, I would happily say yes, because I think I owe the public
• 1:05:06
  my honest thoughts to anybody who, no matter the politics regarding public health matters.
• 1:05:12
  All right, Now, let's go back to COVID specifically, and in
• 1:05:16
  your role in this as what I would call a COVID contrarian, that that
• 1:05:21
  would be a fair assessment of your You know, John, I may have
• 1:05:26
  said that in October twenty twenty. Now I'm not so sure. I think
• 1:05:29
  I think we kind of have most people on our side nowadays? Well,
• 1:05:33
  that's an interesting question. Maybe we'll get to after we lay the foundation here.
• 1:05:39
  But take me back to March of twenty twenty and here and here you
• 1:05:43
  are an expert in the field, a Stanford professor, and the world seems
• 1:05:46
  to be panicking over COVID. What was your assessment at the time and when
• 1:05:53
  was the first moment if you remember that you started to think, wait a
• 1:05:58
  minute, what is going on here? So take us back to that time
• 1:06:00
  period. Yeah, so, I actually I think Bloomberg asked me to be
• 1:06:04
  on TV, first time I'd been on TV in like ten years or something,
• 1:06:09
  in February twenty twenty, asking about the economic consequences of this possible pandemic
• 1:06:15
  it was, and you know that I didn't know what to say because we
• 1:06:18
  knew I didn't know a lot about whether the pandemic was going to spread really
• 1:06:23
  widely or is it was going to be something like stars one. I said.
• 1:06:26
  What I emphasized was there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty in February twenty twenty
• 1:06:30
  about the nature's pandemic and specifically on the consequences on scott stock markets, and
• 1:06:34
  so on, it's really very speculate as what I said. Of course,
• 1:06:39
  I said we had to take the pandemic seriously and do scientific work. And
• 1:06:43
  I had this idea in early March twenty twenty looking at the data out out
• 1:06:46
  of it, out of Italy and out of China and the Diamond Princess Cruise
• 1:06:51
  that you know, the disease was probably much more widespread than we realized.
• 1:06:55
  It looked like a hiary highly infectsus. These much more infects US than STARS
• 1:06:59
  one. And I remembered also back to the H one N one pandemic and
• 1:07:03
  not two thousand and nine, this wine flu pandemic. And there there were
• 1:07:08
  a whole bunch of studies very early on that found that they were for every
• 1:07:12
  person that was identified as a case, you know, that showed up in
• 1:07:15
  the hospital or something, um, there were two hundred or two hundred people
• 1:07:17
  that had antibodies floating around the population that never showed up into medical care because
• 1:07:24
  it was wells clearly mild. So I thought, well, this is a
• 1:07:26
  highly infected disease. It looks it's a coronavirus, which has this very wide
• 1:07:30
  range of clinical manifestations. We're seeing the worst of it in the hospitals of
• 1:07:35
  course, like people dying in hospitals, but maybe there's a lot more people
• 1:07:39
  out there that have been infected in recovery. So I just had that hypothesis
• 1:07:43
  wrote or not bed in Wall Street Journal in March or twenty twenty, middle
• 1:07:45
  of March twenty twenty, essentially saying this hypothesis and calling for a study to
• 1:07:50
  resolve it. Um, you know, And and it was like changed my
• 1:07:56
  life, John, I mean like I went from like a quiet scientist who
• 1:07:59
  was very happy arguing with two other scientists about each paper to to like a
• 1:08:03
  public figure. It's just it's been a it's been a striking thing. Well
• 1:08:08
  you said a lot there, but before I want to get further into your
• 1:08:13
  experience and how you became part of this whole issue and the censorship that you
• 1:08:18
  endured and how we handled it. You mentioned something that I've always felt is
• 1:08:24
  incredibly underrated. There's so many elements of this whole situation that have been ignored,
• 1:08:29
  but you mentioned the cruise ship situation. And you know, I'm not
• 1:08:32
  unlike you. I'm I'm no expert. I'm just somebody who looks at data
• 1:08:38
  with an open mind and tries to figure out what the heck's going on.
• 1:08:41
  And when I looked at the cruise ship data, I thought, my gosh,
• 1:08:45
  here we have a nearly perfect situation to you know, where these these
• 1:08:48
  ships were full. They had no warning, they had no precautions, they
• 1:08:53
  had no restrictions. It was almost a perfect Petrie dish for determining just how
• 1:08:58
  dangerous as virus was. And while it was clearly dangerous, it was not
• 1:09:03
  as dangerous as it was being portrayed. And frankly, and this is much
• 1:09:08
  more in your area of expertise than mind. But when I look at the
• 1:09:11
  data, I go, it's not even as infectious as we're being told.
• 1:09:15
  Because percentage wise, you would think that almost everybody would have gotten COVID on
• 1:09:19
  those cruise ships, and nothing close to happen to that ended up happening.
• 1:09:25
  So can you tell us a little bit about how how significant you think that
• 1:09:30
  data was and why it was ignored for all intents and purposes. Yeah,
• 1:09:33
  so that those data for sure documented very important facts about COVID's lethality. Almost
• 1:09:42
  all of the deaths I think all of the deaths on that cruise ship were
• 1:09:44
  in the oldest population, and uh, and the mortality rate depends, of
• 1:09:47
  course on the denominator also how many people are infected. But my estimates and
• 1:09:54
  the letality rate of it from the cruise ship data was there was actually you
• 1:09:57
  know, like one or two or three or four in a thousand, maybe
• 1:10:02
  five in a thousand. Again, it depends on the denominator. Now,
• 1:10:06
  that cruise ship, it had a lot of old people on it. We
• 1:10:10
  knew from from the from China and also from the cruise ship data that it
• 1:10:14
  kills old people at much higher rates than young people. I mean it could
• 1:10:17
  you could you could convince me that the cruise ship death rate was high,
• 1:10:19
  as high as as three or four percent, but it was for the old
• 1:10:24
  people. The young people is near zero on the cruise ship. The other
• 1:10:28
  thing from the cruise ship, I'm not sure I agree with you, John,
• 1:10:30
  from the cruise ship that it didn't infect everybody. So I ran a
• 1:10:33
  study very early on in Santa Clara County, California, where we measured antibodies
• 1:10:38
  in the population, and at the same thing we're in another sister study in
• 1:10:43
  La County. We found almost the same result. It turns out that about
• 1:10:46
  forty or fifty percent of the people that were infected, had antibodies, could
• 1:10:51
  not recall ever being sick in the last three or four months at all,
• 1:10:56
  not one symptom. This disease produces a very wide range of clinical manifestations.
• 1:11:01
  So you're saying, you're saying that just because not that many people percentage wise
• 1:11:06
  tested positive from the two cruise ships that were kind of caught off guard by
• 1:11:13
  COVID, that doesn't mean that other people weren't infected and during the same time
• 1:11:18
  periods that French stand they did. I don't. I didn't see any antibody
• 1:11:21
  data, so we didn't know if they'd been infected and recovered. So,
• 1:11:26
  you know, you couldn't tell simply from the active PCR test that was available
• 1:11:30
  at the time that we that we captured everybody that was actually had been infected.
• 1:11:34
  We just a PCR test picked people that were, you know, sort
• 1:11:39
  of had the virus or some viral fragments in them at the time. So
• 1:11:42
  I don't, I just don't. I think it's it's it's why I called
• 1:11:45
  for the SERA problem study in that March twenty twenty op ed in the Wall
• 1:11:47
  Street Journal, because I was looking at those time. Princess stated just like
• 1:11:49
  you were, John, I was looking at other data and I didn't know
• 1:11:53
  for certain what the death rate was. It was not possible to tell.
• 1:11:57
  There was so much uncertainty around who was in effected that it was. I
• 1:12:01
  didn't know what the def you know, a death rate as a numerator and
• 1:12:04
  a denominator. I didn't know what the denominator was, right. But you're
• 1:12:08
  trying to look at it from a scientific standpoint, and it's clear, you
• 1:12:13
  know from the way you're talking, that politics had nothing to do with how
• 1:12:16
  you were evaluating the situation. You're trying to figure out how bad is it
• 1:12:19
  and what's the best way for us to react to it. It was very
• 1:12:24
  clear to me, very early on that science was not driving the bus on
• 1:12:30
  this, even among people who claimed to be scientists, that it was much
• 1:12:35
  more political. At what point did you start to realize, Holy cow,
• 1:12:41
  this is really not about science. This is about politics. I mean,
• 1:12:45
  my natural inclinations just think like a science That's what I've done my entire life.
• 1:12:48
  I'm a professor at Stanford because I'm a scientist, not because I know
• 1:12:51
  anything about politics. But I wrote that oup ed in the Wall Street Journal
• 1:12:58
  in March twenty twenty and started getting death threat I started getting accusations from colleagues
• 1:13:01
  in mind that I cared more about economics because I have a PhD in economics
• 1:13:05
  as well as my MD, that I care more about economics than about about
• 1:13:09
  human life, even though I didn't say one word about economics in that in
• 1:13:12
  that op ed um, I started getting you know, like somebody defriended me
• 1:13:16
  on Facebook, a friend of them. I mean, it was just it
• 1:13:17
  was it was just I think this is just crazy. And then with that
• 1:13:21
  Santa Clara study, and they were like hit pieces and BuzzFeed against on my
• 1:13:27
  wife. They were they were like scurleosus attacks on my on like you know,
• 1:13:31
  so the part of the funding for the study, most of the it
• 1:13:34
  was like a very cheap study, that Santa Clara's study, but we got
• 1:13:38
  funding from like small dollar donations from a lot of people. Almost all almost
• 1:13:43
  all of it went to Stanford to offset the cost of the study, including
• 1:13:46
  the founder of jet Blue put five thousand dollars in study. And the BuzzFeed
• 1:13:50
  wrote a hit piece saying basically implying that I changed the study results or something
• 1:13:56
  because of five thousand dollars to Stanford offset. The whole thing was just the
• 1:14:00
  ridiculous. I mean it was just and you know, I just had never
• 1:14:02
  experienced anything like that in my life. I published one hundred, you know,
• 1:14:05
  scores and scores of papers, I think one hundred and sixty at the
• 1:14:09
  time, and I've written a couple of books. I mean, none of
• 1:14:12
  that, all of that was met with scientific reasoning. You know. I
• 1:14:15
  sometimes people read that, sometimes disagreed that we'd have like conversations and I changed
• 1:14:20
  the paper in response. This was nothing like that, John. It felt
• 1:14:25
  like a like an excommunication, like a like a like I'd done something deeply
• 1:14:30
  wrong by just asking this scientific question. So this was worse than politics.
• 1:14:34
  This was some semblance of religion that was driving the thinking here. And by
• 1:14:41
  the way, for people who may not remember, have not heard your Santa
• 1:14:44
  Clara's study, if I recall correctly, basically was arguing that this has been
• 1:14:48
  around for longer than we are pretending, and that people have antibodies, and
• 1:14:55
  that while it's dangerous and we need to take precautions, that things may not
• 1:14:59
  be quite as bad as they appear. Is that a fairer recollect I think
• 1:15:02
  that that's a pretty good characterization of the implications of the state. So with
• 1:15:06
  the result. The actual result was that we found three percent prevalence of antibodies
• 1:15:11
  in Santa Clara County four percent prevalence in LA County. Now that doesn't sound
• 1:15:15
  like a lot, but that is a very big number for something supposedly very
• 1:15:19
  early in a pandemic like it was early April twenty twenty, the lockdowns had
• 1:15:24
  happened for about three weeks. Supposedly, it had been in country for about
• 1:15:27
  since late January, right, so in what like one or two months,
• 1:15:30
  two or two or two two months, we basically had four percent of the
• 1:15:33
  population of LA already infected and recovered. Um, that's a big number.
• 1:15:39
  So that had some implications. One, as as you said, it probably
• 1:15:42
  arrived much earlier than the start the official start date certainly December might have been
• 1:15:46
  November twenty nineteen m and I started getting emails from people telling me about,
• 1:15:51
  you know, I was really sick in November after Thanksgiving. I was really
• 1:15:56
  you know, And I was like looking at it, going, yeah,
• 1:15:57
  that's probably COVID, but I can't tell you for sure because there was no
• 1:16:00
  tests available. Um. And then the second implication is that that the pandemic
• 1:16:05
  really still had quite a long way to go, right, two or three
• 1:16:09
  percent, that's still very far from from uh you know, um. And
• 1:16:15
  in fact, it's the pandemics like this, Whether you have highly effects diseases,
• 1:16:18
  it's one of two things happens. Either you find it very very early,
• 1:16:23
  as soon as it leaks in the lab you could you suppress it and
• 1:16:25
  you have zero, or you have pretty close to one hundred eventually, and
• 1:16:30
  if you're three percent, it's going to go to one hundred. Right.
• 1:16:33
  Well, but I think that's even I'm sure you've thought about this, But
• 1:16:36
  to me, there's so many implications of what you guys did with that study
• 1:16:42
  that the media completely ignored. Number one is it has been here already for
• 1:16:46
  an extended period of time. And why that was so significant, especially in
• 1:16:51
  California where we both live, is that February before the panic began, was
• 1:16:59
  an increase probably busy time period for public gatherings in California. In Santa Clara
• 1:17:05
  County, the San Francisco forty nine ers were playing playoff football games with no
• 1:17:11
  one having any concerns at all about COVID. You know, we had the
• 1:17:15
  Academy Awards in Los Angeles. We had the Los Angeles Marathon in Los Angeles.
• 1:17:18
  All these things are happening normally, and no one is noticing anything that's
• 1:17:24
  happening. And if, in fact, you know, which I believe is
• 1:17:28
  true, that your study is indicating that hold on people. This has been
• 1:17:32
  here for quite a while, a lot of people have already gotten this and
• 1:17:35
  we didn't even notice it. The implications of that are extraordinary. And was
• 1:17:42
  that what was going through your mind? Jay, That's exactly what was going
• 1:17:45
  through online. I mean, that's exactly what the implication study was. It's
• 1:17:46
  been open here a while. It was very I mean in the study it
• 1:17:50
  was it was deadly. You know, we had a point two percent infection
• 1:17:54
  retality rate, but it was much higher for old people, you know,
• 1:17:57
  four or five percent for people over the age of eighty. Um, so
• 1:18:00
  it and yeah, it had been here without us panic. And I remember
• 1:18:03
  there was like a like a New Year's a Chinese New Year's celebration, and
• 1:18:08
  Nancy Pelosi made a specific uh, like your show of like making sure that
• 1:18:12
  to show up there because he didn't want anti Chinese bias. Because of this,
• 1:18:16
  this virus had come out of China um. And you know, President
• 1:18:18
  Trump, I didn't help think help matters by by by emphasizing the Chinese,
• 1:18:25
  like calling it the Chinese. I think what that led to like a counter
• 1:18:28
  counter reaction among scientists to somehow deny the fact that it actually did come out
• 1:18:32
  of China. And very likely it's probably a lab league supported by by American
• 1:18:40
  research funds in collaborations. So it's it's so in a sense, it was
• 1:18:44
  like the whole the whole thing was just you. You. You are much
• 1:18:46
  more perceptive about the SNY was at the time. John. I didn't see
• 1:18:49
  the politics. For me, it was a scientific question at the time,
• 1:18:53
  but I very quickly became engulfed in the politics, and I didn't know how
• 1:18:56
  to. I mean, I just I wanted to still do science. I
• 1:18:59
  also do health, Paul, I do health policy that might might have a
• 1:19:00
  health economics textbook. I also saw what was happening in the poor countries of
• 1:19:05
  the world when we started locking down. I was born in a very poor
• 1:19:10
  country. My mom was born was born and grew up in a Calcutta slum.
• 1:19:15
  And I knew from with one hundred percent certainty that the lockdown policies we
• 1:19:19
  were following, We're going to have tremendous damage to the poor people of the
• 1:19:23
  world. In the last forty years, a billion people had been lifted out
• 1:19:29
  of poverty because we globalized our economies. What that meant was all these poor
• 1:19:32
  countries reorganized their economies to fit into the West. And so when the West
• 1:19:38
  lockdown, what that meant was that those economies, those poor countries are going
• 1:19:42
  to suffer, and it was going to be the poorest in those poor countries
• 1:19:45
  are going to suffer. And so in the World Bank was saying one hundred
• 1:19:48
  million people would be thrown into poverty. The UN World Food Program was saying
• 1:19:53
  that the one hundred and thirty million additional people would starve, would would face
• 1:19:59
  severe food and security as a consequence of the economic dislocations to the lockdowns.
• 1:20:04
  This is like like, this is like they're saying this in April twenty twenty.
• 1:20:09
  I mean I saw that coming in March, so I knew that the
• 1:20:12
  policies had to we couldn't follow these policies. It was gonna be tremendously damaged
• 1:20:15
  to do the poor. The school closures, I knew We're gonna hurt hurt
• 1:20:18
  children, and it wasna wasn't gonna equal. It's gonna be like it was
• 1:20:20
  gonna be portial, and they're gonna hurt the most. And that's exactly what
• 1:20:25
  came to pass. I saw. I saw that very clearly. I gave
• 1:20:29
  an interview to Routers in late March early April twenty twenty saying things like this,
• 1:20:33
  domestic violence would go up. I knew because you stay at home and
• 1:20:38
  there's no one to like help, or a child abuse would go up.
• 1:20:42
  It because he's called schools. Child abuse often picked up in schools, Depression,
• 1:20:46
  anxiety. I mean, all of these things were entirely predictable. In
• 1:20:49
  fact, I predicted them in early April twenty twenty in that interview there in
• 1:20:55
  Rooters at early April twenty twenty, I thought the lockdowns were just a catastrophe.
• 1:20:59
  Then well, I couldn't agree with you more. But I also want
• 1:21:02
  to talk to you specifically about your experience with the media. This is the
• 1:21:05
  Death of Journalism podcast, and it is my very strong belief that the media
• 1:21:12
  was one of the main institutions that failed catastrophically when the panic struck because there
• 1:21:18
  was no debate, there was no contemplation, there was only narrative, and
• 1:21:25
  it was one sided narrative that was being driven I believe far more by politics
• 1:21:30
  and agenda than by science. What was so you write this piece in the
• 1:21:35
  Wall Street Journal and you do some interviews. What was the reaction to you
• 1:21:41
  in with regard to media and censorship and how did that compare to what you
• 1:21:45
  expected it would be. Well, the Wall Street Journal piece produced I think
• 1:21:50
  a mixed set of reactions. On the one side, there were people that
• 1:21:55
  were just vilifying me thing I was minimizing the disease. I was d dangering
• 1:21:58
  people's lives by questioning whether we knew the death rate, and I was what
• 1:22:02
  I was calling for is a new study. Right That struck me as hyperbolicum
• 1:22:06
  And there were also other reactions to it which were actually quite positive, like
• 1:22:10
  in fact, the Santa Clara study came out of that Wall Street Journal piece
• 1:22:14
  because there was a guy, Dan Eichner, major League Baseball, who runs
• 1:22:17
  who helps runs testing for Major League Baseball. He had ordered a whole bunch
• 1:22:20
  of antibody test kits and he phoned up me and my colleagues up and said,
• 1:22:26
  look, I'd like to use these for science instead of for money.
• 1:22:29
  Of our commercial purposes, and so he offered them up. The Santa Clarair
• 1:22:32
  study wouldn't have happened without without that help. Um, And that was in
• 1:22:36
  part I mean I saw at firsthand the power of the media. I mean
• 1:22:40
  I had no idea though in the old ways of getting funding or or like
• 1:22:45
  help for these things would be like to write a grant proposal to the NIH
• 1:22:47
  and then wait for three years and hope that someone liked it. They hear
• 1:22:51
  you write a piece in a Wall Street journal and people offer you help to
• 1:22:55
  do this important study. That was remarkable. I mean I still like I
• 1:22:58
  still this day, and let me by the power of the media to make
• 1:23:02
  things like that happen. Sorry no, but I but also I'm sure with
• 1:23:08
  regard to the criticism of you got I mean people like you, and you
• 1:23:11
  weren't alone. You were you were partable of a lot of different people in
• 1:23:15
  the in the realm of science who tried to speak out, but whose voices
• 1:23:18
  were at best muted and if not directly censored because you didn't did not fit
• 1:23:26
  with the accepted, approved narrative. So tell us about that experience. But
• 1:23:30
  that was that was remarkable, right, So there are nine versions of this.
• 1:23:34
  So and I talked to that reiter's reporter, who I really like.
• 1:23:36
  Actually he was doing that story on on like collateral harms potential potentially from the
• 1:23:43
  from the lockdowns, like the child abuse and so on. Um. I
• 1:23:45
  told him as a quote, I said, look, I think this is
• 1:23:48
  the single worst public health, peacetime public health mistake in history, the lockdowns.
• 1:23:55
  And he didn't put that quote in the piece. And I've talked to
• 1:23:59
  Matthew, So I talked to my editor and they said, if I put
• 1:24:01
  that in there, your career is going to be destroyed. I was gonna
• 1:24:04
  I was. I left it out to protect you j which I think was
• 1:24:09
  was kind of him, actually because because my career did get when I started
• 1:24:13
  saying that in other settings, it really it really blew up. Um the
• 1:24:16
  I saw. I remember there was a there was an interview not not of
• 1:24:20
  me, but of this this scientist at Yale, David Katz on CNN,
• 1:24:26
  and he was saying very reasonable things in like March late March twenty twenty,
• 1:24:30
  saying, um, look up, we see Basically he was saying something close
• 1:24:32
  to the Great Barrington Decoration. Let's do focused protection of vulnerable people. We
• 1:24:36
  can see that's really older people that are at risk. Let's not lock down.
• 1:24:41
  And there was this New York Times science writer Don O'Neill who just absolutely
• 1:24:47
  scoriated him, like essentially accused him of wanting to kill grandma. He donald
• 1:24:51
  neil had written this piece in the New York Times saying, which you'd get
• 1:24:54
  medieval on the virus um and uh it was. It was really remarkable.
• 1:24:59
  Like any one that said anything a little bit skeptical about the lockdowns, they
• 1:25:03
  were absolutely vilified and destroyed. I wrote that Santa Clair piece, and you
• 1:25:08
  had to You had pieces in like uh, you know, basically hit pieces
• 1:25:12
  in the New York Times, Uh, accusing accusing us of like you know,
• 1:25:16
  misusing science like saw some opted calling for like control over the public messaging
• 1:25:23
  about science and the media and using the Santa Clair study as an example of
• 1:25:27
  that. Um. Ye had you had like uh, you know, like
• 1:25:30
  there are these opinion journals on the left, like The Nation essentially accused all
• 1:25:33
  of Stanford of being this corrupt organization because we published the study. Um.
• 1:25:39
  And of course Scott Atlas started speaking up and that really politicized things. When
• 1:25:43
  when Scott was you mentioned you met by President Trump as his advisor. That
• 1:25:48
  really ramped up. Well, you you mentioned you yourself have experienced career harm.
• 1:25:59
  Talk to me about that. Well, how has your career been damaged
• 1:26:01
  by this? Well? I mean, I think, I think, um
• 1:26:06
  from I mean, I've wrote several and H proposals during the pandemic, and
• 1:26:12
  you know none of them were funded. Uh, I don't, I don't,
• 1:26:14
  I don't. I don't know for certain that's re linked. Um,
• 1:26:15
  it's hard to get an H funding in any case. Um. But the
• 1:26:19
  kind of vilification I received, both in academic and in non academic circles,
• 1:26:24
  essentially like smearing and and attacks, I don't know that my my scientific work
• 1:26:31
  will be will receive the same kind of of like fair minded scrutinied at once
• 1:26:35
  did before before I was so before I was a public figure. I mean,
• 1:26:39
  I don't, I don't see how that's possible. Um. And And
• 1:26:42
  there have been people I'll give you one direct thing that happened that that's just
• 1:26:45
  sort of hard to still hard to fathom. Um. When I wrote the
• 1:26:48
  Great Barrington Neckorition in October twenty twenty, it was October fourth, twenty twenty,
• 1:26:54
  that great parenton decoction was a call written for focused protection of vulnerable people
• 1:27:00
  and lifting of lockdowns. And it was written with Sunetro Gupta of Oxford University
• 1:27:04
  in Martin Couldo from Harvard University. So as you know, Stanford, Harvard,
• 1:27:09
  Oxford. Tens of thousands of scientists signed it, including Nobel Prize winners.
• 1:27:13
  There was there was a there was a there was a you know,
• 1:27:15
  almost a million people assigned it to signed it. Almost a one viral,
• 1:27:18
  very rapidly. It's a one page document, very short, very easy to
• 1:27:21
  understand. We wrote it for the general public. Forty you know, we
• 1:27:25
  got people sending us translations from forty different countries. Um, I mean,
• 1:27:29
  it's it was just it was like a it was a phenomenon, right.
• 1:27:31
  So four days after we wrote it and put it on the web, the
• 1:27:36
  head of the NIH, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Faucci,
• 1:27:41
  calling me Martin at Sunetra, the primary author of Stanford, Harvard, Oxford,
• 1:27:45
  a fringe epidemiologist, and then calling for a devastating takedown of the premises
• 1:27:49
  of the declaration. Tony Facci then responded with an email a couple days later
• 1:27:54
  to a Wired magazine article essentially smearing us, accusing us at wanting to let
• 1:28:00
  the buyers rip, when what we were calling for was was a was focused
• 1:28:03
  protection of vulnerable elderly people. Um Tony Fauci and Francis Collins used their connections
• 1:28:09
  with the media to destroy our reputations in order to get to create this illusion
• 1:28:14
  of consensus that that that that their lockdown policies. We were supported by all
• 1:28:19
  scientists our our declaration because it was written and so prominent and with with people
• 1:28:26
  that were actually at you know, some somewhat I don't know if I call
• 1:28:29
  them reasonable anymore, but somewhat reasonable places at the time. Um uh,
• 1:28:31
  that would they They they viewed that as a threat to their authority and they
• 1:28:36
  abuse their power as the head of these massive scientific agencies funded by the American
• 1:28:43
  taxpayers to destroy anyone who's who's who's who who dared to sign the thing.
• 1:28:48
  People lost their jobs because they signed it. People lost their their ability to
• 1:28:54
  work with colleagues. That it was. It was like an active courage to
• 1:28:58
  sign that great parenting decloration for an academic And what is obviously most outrageous about
• 1:29:03
  this is I think you would agree with this assessment you guys were not just
• 1:29:09
  vindicated a little bit by reality, you were completely vindicated by reality. And
• 1:29:15
  yet there's no sense at all that there's any correction of the damage that was
• 1:29:21
  done to careers. And you yourself seemed to think that you have a scarlet
• 1:29:26
  letter next to your name now for eternity within academia because you dared to be
• 1:29:31
  a contrarian when it mattered. Is do you agree with that assessment that?
• 1:29:35
  I just think it's I mean, I don't know, I don't know if
• 1:29:38
  it's permanent, but it's it seems feels though. I mean, I consciously
• 1:29:42
  decided to not take on graduate students after I started to get become a public
• 1:29:46
  figure because I didn't want my notoriety to impact the career of the graduate students
• 1:29:53
  that I trained. Um, So I just yeah, I don't I don't
• 1:29:56
  know if that'll ever go back to normal, but it was, it was,
• 1:29:59
  it was VISI and the media played a pretty bad role in this,
• 1:30:01
  John, I have to say, unfortunately, I mean it they amplified.
• 1:30:05
  So after we wrote that great Branch decoration, you start to see all these
• 1:30:09
  pieces where like every single time, every single time, it's like Fauci says,
• 1:30:13
  this is nonsense. They want to let the virus rip. It's going
• 1:30:15
  to kill people with no response for me, because they didn't come and ask
• 1:30:18
  me. They Faucci used his connections with the media to amplify his message,
• 1:30:26
  and it was a false message. You're absolutely right, John, he Fauci
• 1:30:29
  was wrong. The lockdowns didn't protect people. In fact, they killed people,
• 1:30:32
  and a focused protection alternative would have been better. And you can tell
• 1:30:36
  because you can look at what happened in Sweden in the fall of twenty twenty.
• 1:30:41
  They didn't follow these lockdowns. They didn't lockdown, and in fact they
• 1:30:45
  have lower all caused excess death rates than almost all of Europe, much much
• 1:30:50
  lower than the United States. Florida, which follows something closer to focused protection,
• 1:30:57
  has lower all caused death rates, just all caused death races in California
• 1:31:00
  through the pandemic lower. It is my belief, Jay, that the media
• 1:31:09
  not vindicating Sweden is not just an act of massive media malpractice after having destroyed
• 1:31:16
  Sweden at the beginning. I think it has a massive impact on, for
• 1:31:23
  instance, the Republican presidential race, because if Sweden had been vindicated by the
• 1:31:29
  media and by connection Florida would be vindicated by the media. Ron de Sandus
• 1:31:36
  would be able to make a much better argument against Donald Trump. And instead
• 1:31:41
  we have this bizarre specter where this campaign begins after the Sandus's announcement and Donald
• 1:31:47
  Trump makes the claim that New York did a better job than Florida, which
• 1:31:54
  he could never possibly get away with in a world where facts irrationality mattered,
• 1:31:59
  or where the media had done their job and vindicating Sweden and Florida. What
• 1:32:02
  is your take on on that subject. It's ridiculous to say New York did
• 1:32:08
  better. I mean I saw that claim and I just like looking at it,
• 1:32:10
  going what what kind of mathematics produced such a such a claim. I
• 1:32:16
  mean, the all cause excess death rates in Florida are lower than New York,
• 1:32:23
  the lower than California. Um, New York kids didn't go to school
• 1:32:28
  for extended periods of time, Tremendous numbers of people lost their jobs because of
• 1:32:32
  force vaccine mandates. I mean, I went to New York. It was
• 1:32:34
  during the pandemic. It was miserable. It was like this, like you
• 1:32:39
  know this, this lockdown is the right word. Um. Whereas if you
• 1:32:44
  went to Florida, it was joyous during the pandemic. I don't know if
• 1:32:46
  you ever got to visit. I mean it was it was people were people
• 1:32:50
  were behaving like they like, you know, like at somewhat close to normal
• 1:32:56
  in Florida, whereas like in New York it was it was miserable. Now,
• 1:33:00
  why did Florida have a good response a good result? In part because
• 1:33:04
  the governor systematically deployed resources to protect vulnerable older people. I just give you
• 1:33:11
  one example. In the summer of twenty twenty one, when there was this
• 1:33:15
  massive wave of cases in Florida. There's there's a therapy called monocole antibodies.
• 1:33:20
  Monocle antibodies had been shown in clinical trials to be very very effective if given
• 1:33:26
  relatively early via it's been given by IV infusion. So you got to generally
• 1:33:30
  have to go to a hospital to get it. Governor to scientists put in
• 1:33:34
  a hotline and then if you had got COVID, the older people could call
• 1:33:39
  and they would have people visit them and infuse the end of the monocle antibodies
• 1:33:45
  at the home. So like, he used this resource that saves lives and
• 1:33:51
  made it more available to the people who were most likely to die if they
• 1:33:55
  get infected. That's exactly the right response. That's focused protection, right.
• 1:34:00
  Um. I was actually shocked. John. I don't if you know about
• 1:34:02
  this incident, but like in like a couple of months after that delt wave
• 1:34:06
  started, there was all these deaths from COVID in Florida and the South.
• 1:34:11
  Um, yet descantists using these antibodies, the ze monocle antibodies to try to
• 1:34:15
  treat the disease. The Biden administration reduced the allocation of these monocle antibodies to
• 1:34:20
  the South and particular Florida pretty sharply, claiming that they wanted to save the
• 1:34:27
  antibodies for later. They called it temporal equity. That probably killed a lot
• 1:34:31
  of people in Florida. Um, I mean, And in the irony is
• 1:34:34
  that when the when when the waves started hitting the rest of the country,
• 1:34:39
  it was a different variant and those monocle antibodies that were saved were no longer
• 1:34:43
  effective against that variants. That I was unfamiliar with that story, And that's
• 1:34:47
  that's remarkable now. So, um, do you agree, by the way,
• 1:34:53
  with my political analysis, not that you're a politician, but the impact
• 1:34:57
  of the media's lack of vindication of Sweden in Florida and how it favors Trump
• 1:35:03
  in the Republican race from a narrative perspective, do you agree with that?
• 1:35:08
  I mean, the funny thing about I agree with you that that that that
• 1:35:11
  the media failed in not in not like telling people that the sex success story
• 1:35:16
  of Sweden success story of Florida. That is absolutely a failure. And it
• 1:35:20
  seems to me obviously political because it's not as if the epidemiological data are all
• 1:35:25
  that ambiguous about this um so. And in terms of political implications, I
• 1:35:30
  have to actually I wonder about Trump, like why is he why does he
• 1:35:34
  have to go after de santists on on COVID, Like couldn't he couldn't he
• 1:35:41
  just claim success like he was the president he enabled to Santist to like do
• 1:35:45
  this thing. It was a joint success. I mean, that's what I
• 1:35:48
  would recommend it. It just seems really weird to like defend Andrew Cuomo's completely
• 1:35:54
  failed response to COVID in a Republican primary. Now, I don't I know
• 1:35:58
  nothing, as you said, John, I don't know anything of the politics.
• 1:36:00
  I've missed. I've missed forecast ten of the last ten presidential elections at
• 1:36:05
  this point. So you know, take everything I say about polities of a
• 1:36:09
  grain of salt. I'm just I'm just a fringe eupit to me, all
• 1:36:12
  just you know, well, all right, but let's go back to the
• 1:36:16
  beginning of COVID because I want to get your take on my theory about what
• 1:36:20
  actually happened, because I think figuring out how this happened is important to stopping
• 1:36:28
  it again in the future. And some of this I was not surprised by,
• 1:36:31
  and some of it, I have to say even I was why was
• 1:36:34
  stunned by at least by the level to which it occurred. See. I
• 1:36:39
  think that when COVID hit that the media and the quote unquote scientific elites saw
• 1:36:46
  all this through the prism of two things. Their political agenda, which was
• 1:36:53
  to stop Donald Trump's reelection, not necessarily consciously, but at least subconsciously.
• 1:36:59
  Everybody knew. Everybody knew that shutting down the world was going to be bad
• 1:37:02
  for Donald Trump's reelection. Everybody knew that. And number two, since almost
• 1:37:10
  all these people are very liberal, in the media elite and the scientific elite,
• 1:37:15
  they saw this as fantastic for the agenda of government controlling people's lives of
• 1:37:23
  them having more power. I mean, the media was never more powerful than
• 1:37:27
  when the world was shut down and everyone was watching television all of a sudden,
• 1:37:30
  and all of a sudden, you know, their ratings increased and their
• 1:37:33
  influence increased. But I have to say, doctor Boicharia, the part of
• 1:37:39
  this that really scared me to death, especially here in California, was learning
• 1:37:44
  who these countywide or statewide health directors were. And these people are not just
• 1:37:53
  Marxists, They're insane. These are people who have almost a a spiritual and
• 1:38:00
  sexual orgasmic reaction to be able to determine what you're going to do with your
• 1:38:08
  life. And I don't say that in an exaggerated fashion. I have dealt
• 1:38:12
  with these people. I've been to meetings, I've watched them carefully. These
• 1:38:15
  are h show A directors on steroids. These people, they really want to
• 1:38:20
  run your life, and they don't have a they don't have a clue about
• 1:38:27
  the actual science of this, and so it was in their personal self interests.
• 1:38:32
  They've never been more important in their entire existence. They have waited their
• 1:38:36
  entire lives for the opportunity to be this important, and that this all created
• 1:38:42
  a perfect storm of politics and media and an out of control scientific elite and
• 1:38:48
  a panicked public that had never been through this before that was willing to go
• 1:38:54
  along with it. And once the narrative is created, there's no going back
• 1:38:59
  because then people like you are criticized and destroyed as being pro virus or pro
• 1:39:04
  death, and there's no way to get around with that, around that situation.
• 1:39:09
  What do you make of my analysis on what really happened here? Doctors?
• 1:39:12
  So I agree with it in part, but I want to add another
• 1:39:15
  element. Okay, So I think that the international elements really important here,
• 1:39:18
  John, because so many countries lockdown. Basically it was an international thing,
• 1:39:24
  and it was both left wing governments like there were some like the Swedish governments.
• 1:39:27
  A left wing government it was like a social democratic you know, essentially
• 1:39:30
  socialist party, a government that decided to abase public health advice and not lockdown.
• 1:39:38
  You had a right wing government like in the UK, which did lockdown,
• 1:39:43
  and of course in Italy we got a very famously left wing government that
• 1:39:45
  lockdown very early, and the Chinese left wing government lockdown. So you have
• 1:39:49
  this mix of left and right. So I think the way I think about
• 1:39:55
  this is you're you're absolutely right about about the politicization of it. But I
• 1:39:58
  think of that as an opportunity, mystic thing that happened on top of the
• 1:40:00
  panic first created by public health, first created, I think by a campaign
• 1:40:08
  it by Chinese public heal authorities to to sort of project that their lockdowns in
• 1:40:13
  January had been successful. In February twenty twenty, there was a World Health
• 1:40:18
  Organization mission to China where they came back, including one of Tony Facci's deputies,
• 1:40:26
  came back and wrote a report saying what the Chinese had done had worked,
• 1:40:30
  that they'd locked down at great cost, they'd stopped the virus from spreading,
• 1:40:33
  and you know, gosh, we should do this too, the whole
• 1:40:35
  world to do this too. There's a World Health Organization wrote this that plus
• 1:40:41
  some really bad modeling by some some epidemiologists, led the world. And then
• 1:40:46
  and then looking at Italy and all the horror that had happened there in February
• 1:40:49
  twenty twenty when their healthcare system was overwhelmed, that that contrast, led the
• 1:40:56
  world a lockdown. And then a lot of political interests, a lot of
• 1:41:00
  a lot of like moneyed interest took advantage of the panic around that absolutely took
• 1:41:04
  advantage of the panic. I mean that I think there's something more to what
• 1:41:09
  you said than what I've said, because like that politicization was happening even before,
• 1:41:12
  right Remember in February, I think Trump shut down travel from China,
• 1:41:18
  and that got politicized. You got accused of being a racist or something because
• 1:41:23
  he shut travel down from China. I think that was an epidemiological mistake.
• 1:41:28
  It was already too late, because the disease was already in country that did
• 1:41:30
  nothing. But the problem wasn't that he was a racist, but and that
• 1:41:33
  politicization just carried all the way through the pandemic. I think political interest,
• 1:41:38
  like you said, absolutely took advantage of the sort of the hapless response to
• 1:41:43
  the uncertainty around the pandemic. And I think a lot of the a lot
• 1:41:47
  of the narrative that built up around that has been tremendously damaging. Exactly the
• 1:41:51
  way you said, John, I just want to address your issue of the
• 1:41:55
  international element clearly in the timeline. You know, what what happened in Italy
• 1:42:01
  was incredibly influential and scared the crap out of a lot of Americans. But
• 1:42:06
  as someone who has grown up believing in American exceptionalism and that we were supposed
• 1:42:13
  to be different. It was incredibly offensive and will always be incredibly offensive to
• 1:42:17
  me that because Italy did something, or if France did something, or if
• 1:42:24
  even Great Britain did something, that meant I mean, this is where the
• 1:42:28
  statue of liberty is for a reason. I mean, we were supposed to
• 1:42:31
  be different. And in the part of that argument, Doctor, and I
• 1:42:34
  think you'll agree with me on this. It really bugs me because I get
• 1:42:38
  this all the time. But John, you know almost everybody, first of
• 1:42:41
  all, not almost everybody did it. We've mentioned Sweden many times, a
• 1:42:45
  left wing government. They decided not to go along with the crowd here.
• 1:42:48
  But if United States of America had stood up and said, no, we're
• 1:42:57
  not going to give up civil liberties, We're not going to lose our minds,
• 1:43:00
  We're going to be sensible about this, I gotta believe a lot of
• 1:43:03
  other nations in the world would have followed our lead. Do you not agree
• 1:43:08
  with that? I think I think it depends on the way we did it.
• 1:43:12
  Like if we'd done it very early on and said, look, the
• 1:43:15
  lockdowns are not the right way to manage this kind of thing. Here's what
• 1:43:17
  the risks are, and then we've done made a good argument. Right,
• 1:43:20
  here's this if we just said that the great something like the Great Barrington Declaration
• 1:43:26
  I think would have had a lot of tremendous effect at the world if the
• 1:43:28
  US it stood up. The UK tried to do that very early on.
• 1:43:32
  Boris Shawnson tried to do that and then he got swamped m and switched magic.
• 1:43:36
  If the UK it stood its ground or or as you said, if
• 1:43:41
  the US has stood its ground. Um, now with with Trump, I
• 1:43:45
  don't know if you've read a Debbie Burks's book. Burks was his was the
• 1:43:48
  advisor to President of Trump and the head of the US the datask Force.
• 1:43:54
  It's like she writes it as if she's like her job is to like is
• 1:43:59
  to trick Trump into lockdown. Well, it wasn't that difficult, apparently,
• 1:44:04
  Yeah, I mean she just scared him, right, And I talked to
• 1:44:08
  I've talked to like governors. She essentially Pence and the White House Task Force
• 1:44:13
  center around the country scaring the living daylights out of governor saying you can better
• 1:44:17
  lockdown here, or a whole bunch of people in your state are going to
• 1:44:19
  die, and they locked a listened to her and then you know, like
• 1:44:24
  she gets the two weeks of lockdown, she's like, she's writes in the
• 1:44:26
  book, it's like this triumphant thing. It's like it's I mean, you
• 1:44:29
  use terms I probably wouldn't use in public, but that's that's what it reads
• 1:44:31
  like like she was. She was like really, you know, exultant that
• 1:44:34
  she'd gotten the two weeks of lockdown, and then immediately she's like a hot
• 1:44:39
  The job was to try to make sure that Trump saw data that would make
• 1:44:42
  sure to make him want to lockdown longer. So as a disaster when he
• 1:44:46
  says, oh, we're going to open up by easter, that's a terrible,
• 1:44:50
  terrible disaster for him. Well, my view, Trump was all over
• 1:44:56
  the map on almost a dailier weekly basis because he he was enduring this battle
• 1:45:01
  between his instincts and what people were telling him. And I think he bought
• 1:45:06
  into Fauci and Burgs, and I think it was a massive mistake and then
• 1:45:12
  he couldn't we couldn't correct course, unlike the Santists, because Trump's ego is
• 1:45:17
  too large, and Desantist was able to look at the data and he had
• 1:45:21
  apparently a very interesting conversation with Burgs, which was something that led him into
• 1:45:27
  realizing, wait a minute, these people don't know what the hell they're doing,
• 1:45:30
  and he went in a completely different direction. Trump doesn't have that kind
• 1:45:33
  of makeup, which is why one of the many reasons why I'm a desantist
• 1:45:36
  supporter in the Republican nominating process. There's so many different elements to what we
• 1:45:42
  just talked about there, doctor, But I'm struck by as you, as
• 1:45:47
  a scientist and a doctor and a Stanford professor, I wonder what your thoughts
• 1:45:53
  are on this issue of the lack and loss of trust in the so called
• 1:45:58
  expert class. Because not that I'm anybody important, but I think I'm an
• 1:46:03
  interesting case study here because I'm a conservative, but I have I've grown up
• 1:46:09
  within the establishment. I went to school at Georgetown. I have a lot
• 1:46:13
  of very elite friends, liberal friends, you know, Democrats and Congress I
• 1:46:19
  mean, so I'm somebody who I am not in the bubble. Before COVID,
• 1:46:25
  I accepted the idea of experts. I expected accepted the idea that the
• 1:46:30
  establishment is not always wrong. And I gotta tell you, doctor, after
• 1:46:33
  COVID, I will never ever, ever, kever believe anything these people say
• 1:46:42
  unless it is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. And I don't think
• 1:46:46
  I'm I'm wrong about that. How devastating do you think COVID has been to
• 1:46:53
  trust in the so called expert class, the elites and the establishment. Let's
• 1:46:59
  just stick with public health. I think I've never seen in my career such
• 1:47:02
  low confidence in the in public health by the public like public trust for public
• 1:47:09
  health has shattered, and its shattered in a partisan way too. It's I
• 1:47:12
  mean both about Republics and Democrats. I think have much less trust to public
• 1:47:15
  health than they did before the pandemic. But for Republicans it is gone.
• 1:47:19
  It is utterly gone. And I have to say, John, it's deservedly
• 1:47:23
  gone. That public health made tremendous scientific and policy mistakes through the pandemic.
• 1:47:28
  It maybe I'll give you one example, Like you remember the Black Lives Matter
• 1:47:32
  of protests public health. A thousand public health of people signed a letter saying
• 1:47:39
  it was good for public health in June of twenty twenty, that they're they
• 1:47:41
  be these protests right after they've gone through, saying that that that people who
• 1:47:45
  were doing these anti lockdown protests were were irresponsible and bad for public health.
• 1:47:50
  You know, I think that public health needs to respect the the the deep
• 1:47:58
  seated uh passions or desires of people like you. If you have something that
• 1:48:05
  moves you to go out in the street and protest because you don't, you
• 1:48:09
  think it's it's a deep injustice. It is good for public health to allow
• 1:48:13
  that to happen. But that's true whether it's Black Lives Matter, or it's
• 1:48:15
  true if it's if it's anti lockdown protests. Those people were anti lockdown protesting.
• 1:48:20
  We're saying, look, I'm losing my jobs, I can't send my
• 1:48:23
  kids to school. It's you're hurting our families. And what they're not allowed
• 1:48:28
  to protest, whereas the injustice around around the Black Lives Matter, that that
• 1:48:33
  that they are allowed to protest, Why that part doesn't divide um. And
• 1:48:38
  so I think that kind of behavior by American public health has led to this
• 1:48:42
  complete collapse and trust. And I think in what in some ways it's it's
• 1:48:46
  let me just say one particularly where I think it's terrible that trust in public
• 1:48:50
  is important for certain things that public health where there is good data and good
• 1:48:55
  evidence, right so childhood vaccinations, is really really important, like specifically,
• 1:49:00
  like you know, the measles vaccines and so on, those are very important.
• 1:49:02
  When public trust collapses, people stop doing that, and that's bad for
• 1:49:08
  kids. So it's in that sense it's bad. Um. In another sense,
• 1:49:13
  it's good, like American Public Health active as if they were kings and
• 1:49:16
  queens. They they they imposed all these kinds of crazy, non anti scientific
• 1:49:25
  positions on us, closing schools, plastic barriers everywhere that six you know,
• 1:49:29
  little circles to make us stand six feet apart from each other, to make
• 1:49:32
  each other think like we're biohazards to each other. Um. That's a that's
• 1:49:36
  a violation of trust. Um. And until American Public Health acknowledges that they
• 1:49:42
  did wrong and reforms you, I don't see why you would trust them again.
• 1:49:46
  And and it's it's really tragic because there are some negative consequences the health
• 1:49:50
  of the public that flow down from that lack of trust. Well, there's
• 1:49:57
  no question doctor that the Black Lives Matter sit you. For a lot of
• 1:50:00
  people was eye opening, Like the hypocrisy was too obvious to get past many
• 1:50:05
  people in the general public, and the media played right into that. But
• 1:50:09
  for me, for me, the moment that I was like, Okay,
• 1:50:14
  this is bullcrap. Was Fauci's flip on masks. And I mean that that,
• 1:50:20
  to me was so transparent, so obvious. The media just pretended that
• 1:50:27
  he hadn't mocked masks as the pandemic was beginning, and he clearly flipped out
• 1:50:33
  of total politics. And it's my view, doctor that what happened on masks
• 1:50:38
  is that in Fauci wasn't alone, he was just the most prominent. That
• 1:50:42
  the so called expert class always knew that masks would be useless in a situation
• 1:50:46
  like this. They always knew that. And they also thought that they knew
• 1:50:50
  that Americans would never go along with mask mandates because we're the country of freedom
• 1:50:57
  and liberty, and that it would be preposterous to even proposed this. You
• 1:51:00
  would get crushed if you proposed mask mandates in America. But then, because
• 1:51:06
  of the panic, and because I believe in this gets a little more controversial.
• 1:51:11
  I believe that we have this intellectual insecurity about Asia, and because Asia
• 1:51:16
  was masking, that we somehow think that they're the smart people. So therefore
• 1:51:20
  we're doing we're not doing the right thing because we're not masking and because the
• 1:51:25
  so called health experts felt like they need to do something dramatic, and the
• 1:51:30
  mask became this symbol that we're in this unprecedented situation. By the way,
• 1:51:33
  I think it also became a virtue signal for liberals and an anti Trump virtue
• 1:51:39
  signal at that. So it becomes you have this political perfect storm where all
• 1:51:43
  of a sudden on the left, masks become very popular. Fauci sees the
• 1:51:47
  left as his fan base, and he completely flips and now all of a
• 1:51:51
  sudden, masks go from being mocked to being mandated in schools with little kids,
• 1:51:58
  and America largely was along with it, and the media completely goes along
• 1:52:01
  with it. What do you make of my analysis there? The doctor so
• 1:52:05
  that, I mean, there's there's a lot to that. At just said
• 1:52:08
  at a couple of data points. So first, the US was really an
• 1:52:11
  outlier on mass We recommended two year olds massed the World Health Organization that even
• 1:52:16
  they said no one under six should be masked, and the European CDC said
• 1:52:20
  no one under twelve. So we went we really went much further. I
• 1:52:26
  completely agree with you, but that the pre existing uh sort of consensus among
• 1:52:30
  scientists was that mass mandates do not do very much, do not work because
• 1:52:33
  and this was based on solid evidence a dozen randomized studies with the flu,
• 1:52:39
  including including things like where they randomize people doing going on the Muslim Hodge pilgrimage.
• 1:52:45
  They randomized tents. One tent got mass, another tent got no mass,
• 1:52:49
  and the FLU rates were similar even though in the mask update wasn't great
• 1:52:51
  because that both lessons were learned in that. Um, so you had like
• 1:52:58
  pre existing knowledge that FACTI was telling the truth when he first said mass don't
• 1:53:00
  work, absolutely telling the truth. Now then he says, he flips and
• 1:53:06
  says mass work, and then he admits to lying. He says, I
• 1:53:10
  lied to you because I wanted to use the mask to save them for the
• 1:53:14
  for well, like, once you have a public health authority that says that
• 1:53:18
  they've lied to you, why should you trust them again on anything? Right?
• 1:53:21
  But the irony is that he was in a sense there was like two
• 1:53:26
  lies embedded in that one lie. Right, he says he admits to lying.
• 1:53:30
  He says mass now work. Well, that's a lie. He has
• 1:53:32
  no new evidence of mass work. Um, there's another another thing. The
• 1:53:36
  thing that I think is really interesting about the psychology. Let me stop you,
• 1:53:40
  doctor, Let me stop you right there, because it's there's there's even
• 1:53:43
  one more level of insanity because in the PBS documentary about doctor Fauci, it's
• 1:53:48
  the only subject on which he is admitted he was wrong, which was when
• 1:53:54
  he said masks don't work, which was the only time he was actually right.
• 1:54:00
  And this is the only time he's ever acknowledged he was wrong. I
• 1:54:02
  mean, you just can't make this up anyway. I'm sorry, So continue
• 1:54:09
  with you where you ran it after that. I mean, I'm trying to
• 1:54:11
  like count the things he was wrong on. It's truly shocking. Um.
• 1:54:15
  I mean, he was like he had so much experience. It's it's anyways,
• 1:54:17
  that's um he So let me let me, let me go back to
• 1:54:21
  the mask because I think there's one other really interesting thing about the psychology of
• 1:54:25
  the masks. Uh. They do two things. Actually, they first,
• 1:54:30
  they remind everybody that they're in a pandemic, right, right, If everyone's
• 1:54:33
  wearing a mask, you think you're like in you're you're in a movie like
• 1:54:36
  contage in some movie, or you're a dramatist range movie, and so you're
• 1:54:42
  scared, right. It induces fear, that induced fear was part of the
• 1:54:46
  public health strategy. Right, It's why I was viciously attacked like I do
• 1:54:50
  a Santa Clair side. He says, the death rate two out of a
• 1:54:53
  thousand, not you know, three out of one hundred, and all of
• 1:54:56
  a sudden, I'm the bad guy because I'm I'm counteracting the fee or fear
• 1:55:00
  was part of the strategy. And the masks augment the fear. It reminds
• 1:55:04
  everybody there in the middle of a pandemic. But at the same time,
• 1:55:11
  and this is like this paradoxical thing they give Some people give people this thing
• 1:55:16
  that they have some sense of control over that fear. It addresses the fear.
• 1:55:23
  Right, So if I wear the mask, I'm no longer risk to
• 1:55:26
  you or others. And so you were you take this like fear, and
• 1:55:31
  you change it in a way where like now I have control over it and
• 1:55:35
  I can moralize it, right I I if I now, if I'm wearing
• 1:55:40
  it, now I'm a good person. My mask protects you, your mass
• 1:55:42
  protects me. Even though there's no scientific eviance that either either is happening,
• 1:55:47
  That disease is spread by aerosols, is not spread by droplets mass don't drop
• 1:55:51
  it or don't protect it against aerosols very effectively. So so you have this
• 1:55:57
  like weird psychological effect of this policy embraced by public health both to cause fear,
• 1:56:03
  make people take the disease seriously, and also to sort of reduce reduce
• 1:56:08
  the panic around it and the opportunities for a political The politicization of it's just
• 1:56:14
  tremendous because you have this thing that is now a moral thing. You're a
• 1:56:16
  good person. If you're a mask, you're a bad person. If you
• 1:56:18
  don't. Politicians are going to make hay with that. Well, I'll take
• 1:56:23
  that one step further, doctor, And I don't know if you've ever thought
• 1:56:26
  about this, and I would put the vaccines in this category. But masks
• 1:56:31
  and vaccines were the two most overt things that politicians and specifically on the left,
• 1:56:40
  used to pretend that this is now the reason we can get back to
• 1:56:45
  normal. See in the big picture, what I think happened here is everyone
• 1:56:49
  panicked and they were wrong, and this was not the level of emergency that
• 1:56:57
  we were told that it was. Gavinue some shutdown California, claiming that over
• 1:57:01
  twenty five million people would get COVID in eight weeks and nothing remotely even close
• 1:57:05
  to that happened. So they were wrong. But they can't then say,
• 1:57:10
  oops, we were wrong. They need excuses for why we will eventually get
• 1:57:15
  back to normal. After Trump is taken care of and after we win the
• 1:57:20
  twenty twenty elections, then we can get back to normal because the masks and
• 1:57:25
  the vaccines allow us to get back to normal without having to admit that we
• 1:57:30
  crapped the bed in a panic. And if you look at the data,
• 1:57:33
  and I know you have, it is one of the more astonishing realities that
• 1:57:41
  we had more infections and more death in America by far in January of the
• 1:57:48
  year after the vaccines came out. So it's not as if suddenly everything was
• 1:57:55
  wonderful and we could go back to normal. This was, in my view,
• 1:57:59
  a psychologic go crutch to be able to get around the fact that the
• 1:58:02
  experts have been wrong at the beginning and that we needed an explanation for why
• 1:58:08
  we were finally going to get back to normal, and masks combined with the
• 1:58:11
  vaccines were it. What do you make of that take? I think there's
• 1:58:14
  a lot to that analysis. So like and I think the vaccines are interesting
• 1:58:17
  because unlike masks, they're not visible. Right, So you remember this very
• 1:58:23
  weird thing where like Tony Facci gets up and says, I think it's like
• 1:58:28
  February twenty twenty one, well we think you should wear a mask even though
• 1:58:31
  you're vaccinated. And I was listening to that going and because I actually was
• 1:58:35
  thinking all lines you were thinking, it was like, okay, we get
• 1:58:38
  the vaccines in place that will essentially allow everybody to like lift the fear and
• 1:58:44
  go back to go back to you lift the lockdown. I wrote an OpEd
• 1:58:47
  and again in the Walls Re Journal in December twenty twenty saying, look,
• 1:58:50
  once you've vaccinated the vulnerable older people, what justification is there for a lockdown,
• 1:58:57
  and then encouraged vaccination of old people as a result. The problem with
• 1:59:00
  the vaccines, though, is it's not visible. You don't go around with
• 1:59:04
  this visible symbol that you're clean and so so then Fauci says, oh,
• 1:59:11
  well no, no, you've had the vaccine where you still still shouldn't mask
• 1:59:14
  because you have to like still tell people you're clean. The thing that you
• 1:59:17
  said that I also thought might happen, which is like, okay, this
• 1:59:20
  is just going to end now because the politics are over, the we have
• 1:59:25
  the vaccines, vaccines or the fear can be over. The weird thing is
• 1:59:29
  that that the fear mongery continued for a full year or more afterwards. The
• 1:59:33
  stand of emergency only just ended. John, How is that possible? So
• 1:59:40
  you, instead of like reaping the rewards of having ended the pandemic, Biden
• 1:59:45
  actually continued the pandemic. No, it's just it's well my view, my
• 1:59:50
  view on that doctor was they thought at first, the reason why the left
• 1:59:58
  became so invested in the vaccines is they thought the timing of this was going
• 2:00:01
  to be so perfect that they would take office and immediately the virus would go
• 2:00:08
  away and they would be able to say, see, we did it.
• 2:00:11
  Trump didn't do it, and you know, we're the people that understand science
• 2:00:15
  and and and you know that that's why you should be voting for us in
• 2:00:20
  the future. But that didn't happen. The vaccines worked for a couple of
• 2:00:25
  months, and then all of a sudden, the transmission rate and the death
• 2:00:28
  rate went skyrocketing from there, and so they couldn't So then they had to
• 2:00:32
  reverse course and go back into a war footing and then eventually, once people
• 2:00:39
  got tired and once Florida proved to the rest of the world that all this
• 2:00:43
  was nonsense, they couldn't get along get away with it any longer. And
• 2:00:45
  then they had the mid terms coming up. So the mid terms are what
• 2:00:49
  I think really ended the so called emergency, even though technically it just ended.
• 2:00:55
  But from from an actual real life perspective, it was the mid term
• 2:01:00
  elections of twenty twenty two that ended the pandemic, not the vaccines. And
• 2:01:04
  on the vaccines, doctor, I'm very curious because I am really on the
• 2:01:10
  fence here. I got vaccinated, but I didn't get the m on ourn
• 2:01:14
  A, I got the Johnson and Johnson, I didn't bother with any of
• 2:01:16
  the booster shots. I've never gotten sick since I got COVID towards the beginning
• 2:01:23
  of this whole thing. In my life, my wife and I and our
• 2:01:26
  family have lived normal lives and we've had no issues. I have looked very
• 2:01:30
  closely at the excess death data, and at the end of last year it
• 2:01:35
  was very confusing to me as to why we were still having excess deaths that
• 2:01:40
  were way above the COVID death rate. And I wondered, Okay, is
• 2:01:45
  this because of the vaccines? I mean, after all the lockdowns are over
• 2:01:49
  with, you can't argue that this is you know, drug overdoses or lack
• 2:01:54
  of medical care or suicides. And then that excess death rate at the beginning
• 2:01:59
  of this year seem to fade away and go back to just simply the normal
• 2:02:03
  death rate plus COVID and so I have never taken a strong position on what
• 2:02:10
  the impact of the vaccines are, say, with regard to the death rate
• 2:02:15
  or adverse effects. I don't know the answer. Do you have an assessment
• 2:02:18
  of what impact the vaccines had both in a positive and a negative direction?
• 2:02:25
  Yeah, I think when the data shake out and that people are still looking
• 2:02:29
  into this. But this is my casult from what I've read scene of the
• 2:02:33
  data in my own data data analysis. I think the vaccines very likely save
• 2:02:38
  the lives of older people in twenty twenty one. And the reason I say
• 2:02:42
  that is careful eptimological studies from places like Qatar, Denmark and elsewhere where.
• 2:02:47
  They take people who are vaccinated, track people who are unvaccinated, and then
• 2:02:51
  just see over time what happens to them, and you see the efficacy against
• 2:02:56
  infection drop very sharply, just as you said after two or three or four
• 2:02:59
  months. I mean I got vaccinated in April of twenty twenty one and got
• 2:03:01
  COVID in August of twenty twenty one, So that's actually a pretty common occurrence.
• 2:03:08
  Like nine the American population that there was an estimate out of Harvard in
• 2:03:13
  November of twenty twenty two had COVID. Vaccine obviously didn't stop people from getting
• 2:03:17
  COVID. On the other hand, I do think that it reduced the death
• 2:03:20
  rate. Now why did I stay focused on older people? I think the
• 2:03:24
  death rate for younger people from this virus is very, very very low,
• 2:03:27
  So the absolute reduction mortality risk is capped from above by that low death rate.
• 2:03:33
  So the vaccine, I think, is that very little benefit in terms
• 2:03:36
  of saving the lives of younger people, whereas it may have had some benefit
• 2:03:41
  and saving lives of older people. The all cause excess death rates are very
• 2:03:45
  interesting. They've continued into twenty twenty three, John, And there's three possible
• 2:03:51
  reasons I can think of. One is COVID, But you would have expected
• 2:03:57
  the vaccines, given how widely vaccinatee we are, have had had some effect
• 2:04:01
  on that two is the is the is the vaccines themselves. Excess death as
• 2:04:08
  a cause of the vaccine caused by the vaccine. I'm a little skeptical about
• 2:04:12
  that because the all cause excess death rates in Sweden are so low and they're
• 2:04:15
  very heavily vaccinated population. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but I just
• 2:04:19
  don't believe that that's likely to end up to be the most important explanation.
• 2:04:24
  Might it might even be that they say, you know, I think it's
• 2:04:26
  likely they'll save save some lives, especially for older people. So the third,
• 2:04:31
  I think is the only is the one that makes the most sense to
• 2:04:34
  me, because it's the lockdown harms. And the reason I'll tell you why,
• 2:04:39
  John, is it's lockdowns are not one of these things where like the
• 2:04:43
  harms play out immediately and then you're done, they have a long tail.
• 2:04:47
  Just to give you a sense of the time scale of this, you quote
• 2:04:50
  we close schools. In spring of twenty twenty, there was there was a
• 2:04:55
  paper written by the editor of Jamma Pediatrics where he estimated how many life years
• 2:05:00
  were lost for American school at school kids as a consequence of that school closure,
• 2:05:05
  and he estimated that we had cost our children five and a half million
• 2:05:09
  life years. It's based on the social science literature that the reason is simple.
• 2:05:13
  It's like, you know, if you don't, if you skip short
• 2:05:15
  even short prades of school in your in your childhood, it has long term
• 2:05:19
  consequences. You end up being poorer, you end up being unhealthier, you
• 2:05:24
  end up living less long. That's true for it was like fantastic literature looking
• 2:05:29
  at like what happened when we made school mandatory update sixteen compared to states they
• 2:05:32
  had only at fifteen, and the men like that extra year of schooling made
• 2:05:36
  a huge difference in the health of people of kids over the lifetime. So
• 2:05:40
  those those lockdown harmes will play out over a lifetime of these kids five and
• 2:05:44
  a half million life years. We skipped cancer screening. Somehow cancer was more
• 2:05:49
  dangerous, less dangerous than COVID. Right now people showing up with late days
• 2:05:55
  cancer they should have been picked up earlier. We skipped diabetes management, We
• 2:05:59
  skipped heart disease care. We told people stay inside and like hide instead of
• 2:06:02
  exercise and get sun. You know, and so are The health of our
• 2:06:08
  population is worse than it was, much worse. Thanks to the lockdown.
• 2:06:12
  That has consequences that will play itself out over a long time, and I
• 2:06:14
  think it plays is about now and suicide. I agree. I'm sorry interrupt
• 2:06:17
  you. I agree with what you said there, but I still don't think
• 2:06:20
  the numbers make sense. I mean, there were some months at the end
• 2:06:24
  of last year in the beginning of this year where the excess death numbers so
• 2:06:29
  dramatically exceeded the COVID death number that it really demanded an explanation. And I
• 2:06:34
  just don't know that people not getting cancer screenings from two years prior explains all
• 2:06:41
  that I mean. And I guess my biggest concern here is this goes back
• 2:06:45
  to the trust issue. I have zero trust and in the health establishment in
• 2:06:49
  the media to get to the bottom of it. Esupposedly, when they're trying
• 2:06:53
  to tell us that Damore Hamlin had a heart attack on an NFL football field
• 2:06:57
  because of Commodio Cortes, which is there's absolutely no chance it was commodioc cords,
• 2:07:01
  but they would never even question that, and so so I guess you
• 2:07:05
  can understand why someone like myself would be questioning what the heck's going on here?
• 2:07:12
  Right? Yeah? I mean, I I don't want to speak about
• 2:07:14
  a specific person, but I can please share your lack of trust. I've
• 2:07:16
  said, I've not seen a convincing data analysis that that decomposes the pauses.
• 2:07:21
  Um Like, if you look at the that who's dying, it's a lot
• 2:07:26
  of young people are dying, and sometimes the cause of deaths are like you
• 2:07:29
  know, fentanyl overdoses that have skyrocketed all of that. I mean, you
• 2:07:33
  know, one in four young adults seriously considered suicide according to a CDC study
• 2:07:38
  in July of twenty twenty. That kind of depression leads to uh, you
• 2:07:43
  know, leads to people up taking fentanyl and abusing themselves with drugs. And
• 2:07:47
  I think there's a lot of like I mean, the lockdowns that were such
• 2:07:51
  a catastrophic thing for our society. I mean I almost thought of it like
• 2:07:56
  the way you know, in World War one, word, the whole war
• 2:08:00
  felt felt to the people that were in it like civilizational suicide, but they
• 2:08:05
  just decided to give up as a civilis The lockdown has had a little bit
• 2:08:07
  of that flavor, all of the all of the loss and trust in basic
• 2:08:11
  institutions. There's a lot of like echo of what happened during World War One,
• 2:08:16
  in the lockdown and the things that we faced the last three years.
• 2:08:20
  All right, doctor, you've been very generous with your time. I want
• 2:08:22
  I want to finish with something that you said at the beginning of this interview,
• 2:08:26
  which was I called you a COVID contrarian, and you said you now
• 2:08:30
  think that maybe we're in the majority. I wish that was the case.
• 2:08:33
  I don't believe that that's the case. I think that if that was the
• 2:08:37
  case, Rond de Santis would be, you know, doing much better in
• 2:08:41
  the Republican race for the presidential nomination against Donald Trump right now. But where
• 2:08:48
  do we go in the future, Because to me, as depressing as the
• 2:08:52
  lockdowns and everything that went along with it were, I'm actually more depressed by
• 2:08:56
  the lack of backlash that there's not been anybody who has been punished, no
• 2:09:01
  one who's been held accountable. The governors that were the worst got essentially rewarded.
• 2:09:09
  You know, I can't It's hard to even pinpoint anywhere in America,
• 2:09:13
  at least other than Ron de Sand's winning by twenty points, where someone was
• 2:09:18
  rewarded for taking your position and someone was punished for being wrong and that means
• 2:09:24
  it's going to happen again, because human beings respond to stimuli in that fashion.
• 2:09:28
  If you're rewarded for doing something, more humans are going to do it.
• 2:09:31
  If you're punished for doing something, fewer humans are going to do it.
• 2:09:35
  And I am terrified that this is going to happen again, whether it's
• 2:09:39
  another viral pandemic or with regard to climate change, global warming, whatever excuse
• 2:09:45
  they can come up with to restrict our freedoms and to run our lives.
• 2:09:50
  Where do you stand on my pessimism with regard to where we're going next on
• 2:09:54
  it? Well, let me agree with you about one part of the pessimism.
• 2:09:58
  I think as things currently stand, the way that the leaders of the
• 2:10:01
  scientific community that push just into lockdown think that we will absolutely have another lockdown
• 2:10:07
  if there's another pandemic again, we absolutely will adopt the same playbook that is
• 2:10:13
  now the standard playbook is I think a very clear danger to civilization as we
• 2:10:18
  know it, because, uh, you know, you think you can send
• 2:10:22
  your kids to school, well that you know it's very likely that that will
• 2:10:24
  be interrupted because we're gonna have a lockdown. You think your business is going
• 2:10:28
  to be able to run no plan for another lockdown. It was that that
• 2:10:33
  is part of the standard now public health playbook. That power is there,
• 2:10:37
  and unless there is pushback by by governments against it, specifically restricting the power
• 2:10:43
  of public health to put these emergency into place without much better information and data,
• 2:10:48
  much better oversight checks and balances, it will absolutely happen again. So
• 2:10:50
  I share your pessimism about that. Let me let me counter with a tiny
• 2:10:54
  bit of optimism if I can. I don't think most of the scientific community
• 2:11:01
  things that we did right. Basically everyone agrees that we did it was a
• 2:11:05
  terrible failure. There are differences of opinion about what the sources of the failure
• 2:11:09
  are, and usually that leads to like honest conversations among scientists when it's out
• 2:11:18
  of the limelight that lead to like actual consensus. What we have now is
• 2:11:22
  a scientific leadership that utterly failed, that's patting itself on the back, giving
• 2:11:28
  itself awards. But it's just unseemly right. The public sees it as like
• 2:11:33
  ridiculous. They've lost trust in those scientific leaders. It's an equaliterating they can't
• 2:11:37
  last. So either the scientific community and the public health community reforms conducts an
• 2:11:41
  honest evaluation of what went wrong, kind of like after you do after a
• 2:11:46
  plane crash, right, or the public stops supporting it. The widespread support
• 2:11:54
  for the NIH funding, for instance, in the American public, that's going
• 2:11:58
  to collapse. The widespread support the old for for for for for public health
• 2:12:03
  generally is going to collapse. And I don't understand. I don't think that
• 2:12:07
  the scientific leaders that are currently in power, if they see it, they
• 2:12:09
  don't care because they think they'll like be able to last long enough to to
• 2:12:13
  get get through the other side of it without having to, you know,
• 2:12:16
  without their reputations being harmed. But I just don't see that that's possible.
• 2:12:20
  What they did was so catastrophically wrong. What what and the policies we followed
• 2:12:24
  on their recommendations led to so much harm it cries out for some kind of
• 2:12:28
  political response. One one political note in Canada yesterday or a couple of days
• 2:12:35
  ago, there was a vote in Alberta and the conservative part the UCP,
• 2:12:39
  which had been led by this man named Jason Kenney, that pushed lockdowns.
• 2:12:45
  Well, he'd been essentially deposed by this woman named Danielle Smith, who was
• 2:12:48
  deeply anti lockdown and there was a very hotly contested election with the UCP against
• 2:12:56
  the socialist NDP party led by Rachel Notley where and they were like Pauls were
• 2:13:01
  saying that they were like even even though Albert is generally very conservative, while
• 2:13:05
  Daniel Smith's just wanted a great victory. And it's I think largely in part
• 2:13:09
  because of her opposition to lockdowns. So I think, I don't know.
• 2:13:13
  I think that there's some there's some like rumblings. We'll see, it's going
• 2:13:18
  to have to have. You're the Paul you know a much more about politics,
• 2:13:22
  Chyle, never than I'll ever know. But I don't see how like
• 2:13:24
  when you have such a catastrophic thing, it doesn't have some really important political
• 2:13:31
  ramifications. Maybe eventually, Well, doctor, I sure hope you're right.
• 2:13:35
  I I you know, I wish I could share your optimism. But I
• 2:13:39
  do want to thank you very much, not just for your time in this
• 2:13:41
  interview, but for having the courage and the intellect to stand up for what
• 2:13:46
  was right when it mattered. And I'm very appreciative for your work on that,
• 2:13:50
  and thanks so much for doing this interview. Thank you, John,
• 2:13:54
  great, great fun to talk with you. Thanks again to doctor Baricharia.
• 2:13:58
  I hope you enjoyed listening to that as much as I did doing the interview
• 2:14:01
  itself. That'll do it for this episode of the Death of Journalism podcast,
• 2:14:05
  episode number sixty three. Please remember to subscribe, share rate, and review
• 2:14:09
  the podcast. If you share it on social media, tag me and I'll
• 2:14:13
  be happy to share it with my Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Until next
• 2:14:18
  time, thanks so much for listening. My name is John Ziegler.