Welcome to making cents podcast. This is Sam Harris.
Okay, we were well into December here. The end of the year is upon us.
I'm sure this is put you all in a reflective mood as it has me.
Where did 2021 go? That really felt like it was six months long at best?
It was amazing.
It has also been 10 years since Christopher Hitchens died. That anniversary has arrived the 15th of this month.
Which depending on when I release this is either tomorrow or today?
And that remains a loss.
The truth is Hitch, was really just hitting his stride. When I came to know him. I believe his book God Is Not Great. Was his first best seller. He was famous in journalistic circles, but was really just connecting with a wider audience. And then his Memoir was the last book that he actually wrote.
His amazing short book, mortality was a collection of his Vanity Fair essays that came out after he died. Well worth reading. Anyway, he is sorely missed in this post institutional time.
We're at journalism and media and the Ivory Tower or really the whole class of professional. Commentariat has heaped shame upon itself with both hands and then in part, will he had again? Be the topic of today's podcast? It is amazing to think of how good it would have been.
Aiming his intelligence at the twin horrors of trumpism and woke is mmm.
Man, the pyrotechnics, we would have seen on both sides of the political Spectrum would have been amazing. Hopefully, in some universe. That is happening. Anyway, I will endeavor to do my best with the tools at hand. However, as you know, one of the things that lures my attention away from matters journalistic and political is what I'm doing over at waking up.
Where there has been a development that has made me very happy of late on January 1st, 2022, mirror two weeks away. We will be releasing the collected talks of Alan Watts.
W was an extraordinarily, Lucid thinker and writer. And one of the most gifted speakers we've ever had.
I could be describing hitch there as well. But as many of you know, W did as much as anyone and probably more than anyone to bring Eastern wisdom to the west and the counterculture of the 1950s and the 1960s would be hard to imagine without him. I never met W. He died in 1973 at the age of 58. I believe in his library on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County.
But in my 20s, I had nearly 100 cassette tapes of his recorded talks. All of, which got lost in transit when I moved back to California, but now all these hours of good company have been restored to me in the digital archive that has been curated by, Alan's son, Marc watts, and it makes me very happy to present these collected talks on waking up. So look for that on January 1st.
That'll be a great way to start the new year.
And that is it by way of housekeeping.
Today, I'm speaking with Nicholas christakis. Nicholas has been on the podcast a few times before he probably needs no introduction. He is a physician and sociologist and expert on network Theory. A professor at Yale and a wonderful Guide to the covid. Pandemic about which he has written a book just out in paperback, titled Apollo's Arrow.
The profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live.
And in this episode, we discussed the lessons. We have learned or struggle to learn or should have learned from the pandemic. This point we discuss our failure is to coordinate, an effective response and almost every level.
The politics surrounding the rollout of the vaccines vaccine efficacy vaccine safety, how to think about scientific controversies, the epidemiology of excess deaths, transmission among the vaccinated natural immunity selection pressures and new variants. The failure of Institutions, the lab leak, hypothesis, the efficacy of lockdowns vaccine mandates boosters, what would happen in a war?
Hammock, and other topics, anyway, the purpose of the conversation is to try to say something. Reasonable to those who are as yet unvaccinated, as you'll hear. I am quite consciously, providing a counter message too much of what is heard out here in podcast. A stand. And over there in sub stack of Stan. I'm increasingly worried.
About the appetite. I have detected outside. The gates of the mainstream media for contrarian takes on more or less everything, a generic word of caution to everyone within earshot of this broadcast. The non-standard explanation is not always the correct one, even when our institutions have repeatedly disappointed us.
In fact, the non-standard explanation is still I would say generically rarely the correct one. So keep that in mind. As you listen to my fellow podcasters discuss what they think is true or likely to be true in this universe of ours. And as this is yet another PSA on this topic, there will be no pay wall. But if you value the work we're doing here, you can support the podcast by going to Sam Harris dot org And subscribe.
Dying.
Okay, without further delay. I bring you Nicholas. Christakis.
I am here with Nicholas. Christakis. Nicholas. Thanks for joining me. Again,
Sam. Thanks so much for having me back.
So I you might be the record holder. At this point, on the podcast. I've lost count. I think maybe Paul Bloom might be ahead of you. But it's you and Bloom for most frequent guests.
It's our third conversation on. That's being recorded at
least, right? All right. Well, anyway, you're in good company. So there's a lot to talk about here first. Your book Apollo's Arrow, the
An enduring impact of coronavirus on the way. We live just came out in paperback about six weeks ago or so. We're going to cover some of the themes in that book because it has among other things. I want to talk to you about the state of our understanding and the state of our public conversation around all things covid, vaccines vaccine, hesitancy, lockdowns, school closures, everything that that has happened. Any missteps, that we may think we have made in the last
Last 18 months coming up on two years and I want to get some of the public service aspects of this conversation, sort of loaded to the front for us here. But before we jump in briefly, remind people who you are, how is it that? You know, anything about what we're about to talk about.
Okay. So yeah, I'm first off. It's getting really nice to talk to you again. Not, I'm a physician and a sociologist, and I've spent 20 years studying social networks. So I study
Processes and networks, you know how ideas spread how emotion spread and of course, how germs spread which is, it's a, you know, very profound metaphor for how other things spread but it's not just a metaphor, it germs spread and so understanding how germs spread is very important. And so I have some training in public health and epidemiology as well. And and actually, when the pandemic was coming on about a year and a half ago, now, in January of 2020, I
I became very alarmed about what was coming down the pike and decided to redirect. A lot of my efforts to study it.
Yeah, and you've been you're really have been on the short list of people who have been worth listening to Lo these many months that we have been in this pandemic experience. And I must say, I remain fairly mystified about the the sociological problem. We Face here, you just figuring out how
To communicate about these issues in a way that doesn't just obviously fail to solve some basic problems of coordination and cooperation, and persuasion. I mean, we just apart from the speed with which we developed vaccines. We have failed on so many other fronts that it's really a. It is fairly bewildering and depressing. I don't know if you
Share that out. Look at this point.
It's almost a quintessentially. American success on the technological front, you know that we did the vaccines and we'll talk about that. I'm sure. But it's also depressingly. American in some ways our failures. I mean, one of things that I think it's interesting to step back for a moment and understand is that we are a rich and plural society in the 21st century. And we are a capitalist economy and we exchange goods and services.
Of all kinds. And in our society, you can find any expertise that is humanly available. So when you need a cabinet made or your car repaired, or you need surgery or or you need, you know, detectives or military activities or basically, any kind of domain of musicians, artists. You Name It, We have people who've devoted their lives to those different sorts of activities and we we pay for those, right? We when you have a plumbing problem.
Lemieux, you don't know how to fix the problem where you have a mature understanding. So you hire an expert plumber and there's a famous saying, in sociology that one man's occupation is composed of another man's emergencies. So for for you, the plumbing thing happens, rarely and is a disaster. The, you know, the your basement is flooding, but for the plumber, this is his or her, you know, usual course of business. Oh, and and then you gladly give money to that person in a classic, you know, you know,
Adam Smith, kind of, you know, everyone has their own expertise and we exchanged our expertise and we're all better off as a result. But here's my point in our society and after hundreds of years since the Enlightenment with, you know, advances in science, we have experts on every scientific topic, including respiratory pandemics. And what is happening to us? Is not novel. There is an enormous wealth of knowledge about what is happening to us and about how
Optimally to respond and about the epidemiology of respiratory, pathogens, and the biology of coronavirus, and the development of vaccines, and an understanding of the human body, the physiology and the treatment of people with these conditions and the organization of our hospitals and our Public Health Systems, and we have thousands of people who have devoted their lives to acquiring this expertise. And so it's a mystery to me that we don't happily. Hmm, deploy them? Like we would with any other activity in our in our capitalist.
Ian Woods, especially odd to me, is that different societies have different strengths. So, for example, the Chinese, you know, are authoritarian country with a collectivist culture. And when, when coronavirus the pandemic began, they deployed those attributes and did things that would have been impossible in our society and frankly things. I wouldn't have wanted
either think which included welding people into their apartments at that point. Yes. I don't know.
Maybe, I mean, I've heard the same stories. I don't know for sure, they're too but but functionally, yes. That's what they did. They they ordered 930 million people to stay at home for months and they enforce this and they tightly control the messaging and so on. Now we thankfully are not like that. We have more freedom. We have a free and open Society. We have a free press but we didn't bring our best game, you know, we didn't bring our strengths to the battle.
We, we have World leading scientist world-leading epidemiologist. We have a media environment which would have allowed for the, you know, rapid diffusion of information and we kind of bungled it from the beginning. Now part, A lot of that in my view is the fault of the previous administration, but it's not just the fault of previous administration. We the citizenry also have some responsibility for this Fiasco. So and I think it's worth pausing for your listeners to understand just to frame, what has happened to us. Because I don't think people
People really get it yet. Honestly is over 750,000 Americans. Nearly 1 million, will probably die from this. In the end when this when the dust settles, the excess deaths will be a million of our fellow citizens will have died. Probably five times as many. We should talk about this won't die but will be disabled by the infection other words. They'll it's not long or short covid. They'll have survived the acute infection, but their bodies will be marked. They'll have pulmonary fibrosis or renal insufficiency or
Or neurologic or psychiatric problems or so, on these individuals are fellow citizens. Will need our care. So, so a million will have died. Five million will probably be disabled. We Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary and David Cutler a health Economist at Harvard have called this the 16 trillion-dollar virus. They estimate that the loss to our society is 16 trillion dollars, eight trillion due to economic damage and a trillion due to loss of life and disability and and
illness death, disability and illness. This is a catastrophe that far exceeds the Great Depression in its economic impact. And and then we have millions of children that have missed school, who will have been harmed by by the this. And and millions of other people who are entering the job market during the pandemic and faced extra difficulties. Millions of firms. That went bankrupt. So I don't think people get it yet. Like this is a one channel.
Entry event and part of the reason. I think they don't get it is. First of all economically, we are borrowing trillions of dollars from the future to soften the blow right now. And because this virus while it's bad is not it's not smallpox. It's not bubonic played. So even though million Americans will die, probably only 10 million will have known those people intimately. And maybe 100 million will have known of someone who died, which still means the majority of Americans will.
Get through this pandemic. Neither having died nor having a loved one die nor having known someone. Personally who died. Hmm. So that's why in part. I think we aren't having taken this as seriously as we as we should any other kind of Calamity like this. I can't imagine we, you know, if we if the if the Russians had invaded and killed a million Americans and decimated our economy this way. Yeah, I think people would be standing up and paying attention. So
yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean if you had told me that we would
More or less be totally sanguine about a million people dying from a disease. A disease that we had very quickly developed vaccines for and that in that context, nearly half the country would decline to get these vaccines and more or less. Ignore the fact that nearly a million people had died and even dispute whether anything like that number had actually died and then fall into various conspiracy theories.
He's about the number of deaths being exaggerated. I don't think I would have believed that we would have arrived here. But it seems to me, that's where we are. And, you know, that there's
no, we haven't just a correct one statistic. I don't think we have 50% refusing, vaccines. I think it's closer to 20% or something like
that. Well, it's 23 percent of healthcare workers, still refuse to get vaccinated last. I
was that's true. Still like that. I'm surprised by that but I believe you I mean I there a lot it's approximately the numbers are
In the general public higher than we would want. But there, you know, we should look it up. If that if the precise number is important. We should look it up.
So 60% of been fully vaccinated 40% have not in that 40 percent probably also includes children who For Whom the vaccine is not yet been fully indicated. But anyway, regardless of the precise percentages and you know, it'll large fraction of our population. Still is not been vaccinated, which is someone like me very surprising.
So there's an opinion that has solidified on the right politically and it's it appears at other points on the political Spectrum, but it's mostly on the right. I would say and it
Also taken hold out in the alternative media Wilderness among podcasters and sub stack newsletter writers, that much of what has been communicated about covid by the government. And by the, the mainstream media has amounted to really a hoax, right? And then much of what we've done and demanded that others do in response to covid, has been there for unnecessary and even unethical.
And so everything from lockdowns to school closures, to mask mandates, to the vaccination, campaign itself, to downplaying the efficacy of ivermectin, right? All of this has been done for sinister political motives and based on corporate greed. Right? So what we have now is something, I mean, the tens of millions of people at least believe that aren't I
Response to covid and basically everything we've done for the last 18 months or so has had the ulterior purpose of increasing social control. Right? And it'll basically we've got people, this is the explicit claim. One here is from from all these quarters. Now that the whole purpose of this has been to soften us up for some kind of orwellian acquiescence to state power. And then with respect to the vaccines in
Particular. It's also being driven by just the sheer profiteering motive of pharmaceutical companies. Now, there are many specific
which is odd because, of course the vaccines are free to the citizenry. But anyway, go
on. Right, right. Oh, yeah, so we should just untick all of this. But I mean there are specific policies that one could debate. Obviously. I mean II guess I'm at the moment. I think I'm currently uncertain about why kids in schools where?
The kids have been vaccinated are still wearing masks. I think you could wonder about the wisdom or necessity of that. And I'd like to talk about that kind of stuff, but it seems to me that this basic idea which has again. It's infected. These are not just uneducated Rubes, who are, who believe this and is the I'm not talking about, you know, the Q and on calls, although it. Obviously this includes the queue and on called, I'm talking about many people who are quite smart. Who you many several friends and colleagues.
Is who have prominent podcasts, right? Have fallen into this paranoid, picture of what's going on? And, you know, they're extreme end points of this paranoia. There's the idea that Bill Gates is putting tracking devices into us with the vaccines. Right man. So there's there's, there's the crazy end of crazy, but it seems to me that this basic picture even without the craziest flourishes on. It is more, or less insane. I mean, the idea that we are
Dealing with something akin to the Chinese Communist party here. And that all covid related policies have been implemented merely to abridge. Our freedom politically that does strike me as Payton Leigh insane. Hm. So I'm just warning you I, what do you think accounts for this kind of? I mean, it's, you know, it's still a fringe view but it's a fringe view that I think something like a quarter of the country has been taken in by. What do you think accounts for its popularity?
30. Well, I think part of the answer has to do with the what happens during times of plague and a typical human response. I mean one of the things again that's helpful is if is to look at how humans have responded to plagues for thousands of years and denial and lies have been a constant companion to plagues. If you look at a accounts going back, a very long time, you find them. One of my favorite stories. I forgot which ancient plague. It was I want to say that.
Like of Justinian, which was about 1,500 years ago. There was an account by an observer that said that the plague was decimating the city and you could there was fear in the streets, of course and that he observes that a rumor went out amongst housewives that if they threw clay pots from the second stories of their houses onto the streets, below that this would ward off the plague. And so, this Observer says, mocking the Superstition. He says it became more dangerous to walk down the street from here.
Being hit by pots then for being infected, you know, being getting the plague. And I mean, that's exactly what we have now would, you know, people with crazy ideas about bleach or, or frankly ivermectin, for which, in my view there's not anywhere near enough evidence to support its use or hydroxychloroquine, which also was the previous Ivermectin. Let's not forget that. So, we did lots of randomized, Trials, to show. It was not useful. So people don't want to believe that this Calamity of this kind has happened that they're ordinary.
Lives have been disrupted. Nobody wants to believe this. It's a little bit like it's like the Jews at beginning that when Hitler was rising to power. Many did not want there
were more and more and
more anti-Semitism was rising and more acts of violence. And these people, they lived in these communities. They had businesses. They had families. They had connections, they languages and religious connections. They spend their whole lives heard. They didn't want to believe it. Right? And so it is it's difficult to accept that your your life is
Aging and and that this this this there, and there has been a change, you know, in our environment this this new deadly germ is introduced into our midst. It's circulating. It's doing its what it, what germs do know, and so, so part of me understands the American response from the great sweep of history, but part of me is also like you baffled and if not enraged by it, because it is so immature. And it,
So unscientific and it is so unnecessary. We could have had a much better response that would have saved lives and I think have spared our economy even more.
So, you know, you mentioned the top the role that you believe that the previous administration played here. And I must say even the politics of that seemed fairly confounding to me because there was this moment where Trump seemed
desperate to take credit for operation warp speed, right? And to have us all think of the vaccines as the essentially, the Trump
vaccine. I don't know why he didn't do that happen.
Theory. Why did he walk away from that? And I think he didn't even acknowledge getting the vaccine himself in the enemy. Certainly didn't turn it into a photo op and recommend that others do.
Well, I think he wasn't sure the vaccine would arrive in time to make a difference in the election. So I think from Trump's point of view, the emergence of the pandemic, he
Correctly. Deduced, that it would be a threat to his re-election and I think his strategy and this man that Trump is not a very honest individual and I also don't think he took his duties to the American people. Sufficiently. Seriously. I think he was more selfish and more interested in his own. I think, you know, I think he's very narcissistic. So it was a threat, he took it as a personal threat and was interested in what was good for him, not what was good for the country and what was good for him. He thought was to pretend like it, wasn't there and the and and there's detailed.
Count of this, that I actually given the books. I won't necessarily rehearse it here. But, but his, he Trump was ignoring and saying, it'll go away. It will go away. We'll go away. He said, when there were 50 cases in the USA said, it will go away when they were 500 cases. It will go away when they were 5,000 cases. It will go away. When there were 50,000 cases. It will go away. He kept saying, oh, go away. There was no evidence, it was going to go away. And we now know that he was briefed unsurprisingly where the United States for the love of God. We have Elite intelligence agency.
Is and scientists working for the government briefing. The president. He was briefed on what was going to happen, and he chose to ignore it. And in fact, this is one of the things that got me into uninterested. I was interested in this topic more things that motivated me to direct the attentions of my lab to this pandemic and also, to up my public profile a little bit and write the book and so on. What's that? So, my interactions with covid actually began in January of 2020. So I had this long-standing collaboration with some Chinese scientists and we were
Studying using phone data, looking at the mobility, that the networks of people in China, ascertain because of their phone calls and studying things. Like, well what happens when you build a high-speed rail line, you know, how does that reshape? If at all social interactions or economic interactions, or what happens when there's an earthquake, for example, in China? And so I had, I had been had this collaboration and we had data on people, moving through Wuhan in January of 2020. And
And my collaborators and I thought, well, we could use these data to understand this nascent pandemic. And so as a result of this, I was working day and night beginning middle of January to study, what might be happening in China. And therefore I was aware on January the 24th of 2020. That the Chinese government had basically shut the country down and and I was also aware of some of the papers that Chinese scientists were putting online. Describing the basic properties of this pathogen. And
January, and by February, let's not forget. We had Italian scientist doing the same thing. When Lombardi collapses, and I did some basic calculations that every competent epidemiologist could do and we can discuss those if you want. And it was clear as day. It was going to be a serious respiratory, pandemic like a once-in-a-century event and you and I spoke, I think our second ever conversation but our first about the pandemic, I can't remember exactly in March maybe or something of early. Yeah, something like that. I can't remember exactly. And I think I said, you know,
My desk, this looks bad. And what surprised me was that that the pronouncements from the White House were so Anodyne and they and they stayed Anodyne and I was getting really, really concerned and I thought to myself how is it possible that I Nicholas christakis, you know, Yale Professor sitting at my desk appear to know more about this situation than the president of the United States. This is alarming, you know, Mike and of course, we now know that that, that was
Not truth. In fact, the president was briefed and chose to ignore it. And I think this is a grave dereliction of Duty because I think that the central function of the government is to keep the citizenry safe. And and the fact that there was a super spreading event in the White House itself, which is a national security threat. Let's not forget like, if the whole apparatus had been decimated that would have been, you know, grave problem shows the kind of lackadaisical attitude that they had not only to the safety of the country, but to their own,
A safety. So, you know, I know that other governments also did poorly, and this is an argument that's often used. And, and to be clear. This is not just a were, there were Democratic Governors who are also incompetent. For example, Governor Cuomo in March was saying, absurd things about the pandemic and I was me, and other epidemiologists were writing letters to try to stop the st. Patrick's Day parade, and so on, which would have been nuts. Mayor de Blasio, is a Democrat. And, and so on this, but we're talking here about the
White House, we're talking here about the president of the United States, and so yes, maybe other countries did poorly as well. Maybe governors of various States Republican and Democrat did poorly, okay, but that doesn't excuse the utter collapse. Insane public policy in the White House in our sophisticated. I hope Rich Nation. So yes, I think a lot of blame can be laid now just to be clear and I think Trump perceive this he must have been told look,
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die and that was clear and you and I talked about that from the beginning and and that, you know, nobody, that's not a, that's not a winning electoral position to be in and he probably thought, well, maybe I can just use smoke and mirrors until the election. And so the vaccine, he probably at that time. Remember, the vaccines arrive, much faster than anyone including me expected. They arrive by November, we of 2020, which is just miraculous. We had clues that the vaccine.
As Woodwork and they people started getting vaccinated by December. So it was after the election year and you're too late for him to frame the politics that way. But I think if he had, I think he might have won the election.
Honestly. Well, the politics were awful here because, you know, there was a think, a valid concern that given Trump's political selfishness given that everything was being motivated based on what was politically expedient for him and you'll one didn't really
Understand how much he could bend the apparatus of the vaccine approval process to his will? There was this period where it seemed like the vaccines were coming soon, perhaps in time for the election and he was going to try to rush them out in time for the election. And now we have, you know, video of all of these prominent Democrats saying the, you know, that they would be reluctant to take the vaccine and this includes Joe, Biden and Kamala Harris. And you know that if you get them on a microphone,
Phone in 2020 before the election you have them saying? Yeah, I wouldn't take I'm not sure I would trust a vaccine that came out that fast right. Whereas, you know, just
well know what my memory and you might be right, you know that this is not
it's all been spread on social media of late as a, you know, basically a campaign ad for more trumpism. And I remember thinking about, I think I may have even talked about on the podcast. It's just if you thought that Trump could possibly get vaccines out sooner.
To serve his political ends and thereby, we would be cutting Corners with respect to safety above all. That was something that people were openly worrying about at that point. Yes, and then when, you know, then when the vaccines came out after the election, the whole thing flipped and you have Democrats by and large saying, oh these have been totally well, vetted and then you've got Trump. Not taking credit for the thing. He was desperate to take credit for a few months before.
Yeah, but I think that's a bit of a coincidence.
In a misreading of the sequence of events. So nobody was saying we shouldn't rush to get back scenes into the arms of people. At least, I wasn't saying that, but I and others were saying we don't want to cut corners and I still agree with that. Now, it turns out these vaccines have been miraculously effective and miraculously safe, but there is a long history of bad. Things happening. When you cut Corners with drug approval and we have a conservative drug approval process in this country. Now, we can debate and there is a rational argument.
To be had. How where do you want to set a cop conservative? You want to be when you approve drugs for public circulation? And there is a scientific debate about this and a political debate. You know, you have Libertarians will say what business is it of at the government to decide what I can and can't put in my body and you'll have others that say, no, that's not true. Especially with communicable diseases. But
anyway, and there's also a way to go faster man. We could have had challenged trials, right? I mean, that's the yes and they when
people working correct. And I discussed that in the book and people people talked about that and that would have been
When I think a legitimate in the for National Security kind of strategy, although it was not the pace was so fast that those were not deployed. Although they could have been deployed. But anyway, my point is to my memory and I won't speak for the politicians. The scientists that I know, we're not saying we shouldn't rush to get a vaccine. They were saying we shouldn't Implement a process for Speedy development of vaccine that is unsafe now and and if we can do it fast and remain safe, then of course we should do that now as it turns,
That we did do that. And it happened that the approval happened right after the election. I don't think there was a conspiracy. They're just that, you know, it actually. It was even sooner than we expected. You know, the trial results. The trials were shut down early because the vaccine was, so, obviously effective in November whenever the precise timing was, so that's just the way it happened to to come out. But Trump could have, you know, the phase 2 trials were already out. We had a lot of clues that the vaccines would be work. Would be.
Good. Well, even before the election, and there was a scenario in, which it could have been handled that way, but maybe Trump decided, that that would have been enough to modify the American people like the promise of a vaccine at some point. And remember at the time we didn't know that it would be quite so good and quite so fast, right? It's not just now in retrospect. We know that and this is, you know, an astonishing accomplishment to have these types of vaccines this save this
fast. So, let's, let's talk about this. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a few questions. I just want to dispatch up front.
Certainly before I pay Wall comes crashing down. So we can get the PSA component out into the into the world. So what do we know about the vaccines at this point? I had basic question how much does vaccination reduce a person's risk of hospitalization and death and maybe maybe we can break this down by age cohort, or maybe we just we can take the general case. I mean, obviously this is more important. The older you are and less important. The Younger You Are
But what do we know about the efficacy of the vaccines? Let's leave safety aside. That's it. That's my next question.
Well, there's a huge. We know a huge amount and I think it's important to distinguish the Pfizer and moderna so called mRNA vaccines from some of the others. So that the AstraZeneca and the change a vaccines are based on so called adenovirus vectors and we have a Nova vax. A protein-based vaccine, which is also very good. We have a and these don't even include the foreign, you know, the Chinese and the Russians vaccines and other.
Seems developed around the world. So we have many vaccines right now, but the but the the main ones we have in this country the Pfizer in the moderna vaccines are so called mRNA vaccines there. They're based on 30 years of Science. And what you have to understand is that if the virus infects you, it's the whole virus with some proteins on the surface and a 30 kilo, bases of RNA, and RNA has quite a few genes in it. And one of those genes is for the spike protein that the virus has
As on its surface and then the virus inserts, all of this RNA into your cells of your body and takes over your cellular machinery and then you start producing all the constituent elements of another virus. That's how the virus reproduces which are then assembled in your body and your body tries to fight them off. And so on what the vaccine does is it takes just a small part of that process it in other words, instead of being exposed to the whole virus. You're just exposed to the RNA. What the RNA vaccines do, exposed to the RNA.
Of just the spike protein, which can't harm you the spike protein itself, alone can't harm you. And so, you fool the body into thinking, it's been infected with a whole virus. When you haven't been, you've only been affected by a small part of it, and then you mount an immune response, your body says, warning warning. There's an Invader and you develop antibodies, and, and memory immunity against the spike protein, which is a part of the virus. So that if you then are ever exposed to the real virus, you eradicate the real virus because you're prepared.
Now, these vaccines that we have the MRNA, vaccines are about 95% effective. What does that mean? It's kind of like a air bag in your car, having an air bag in your car. Doesn't mean that if you get into a head-on collision, you won't die. But if you are get into a head-on collision, the airbag greatly reduces your chances of death. How much let's say 95 percent reduction in your chance of death. That's how you can think about the vaccine. It's like an airbag. If you're exposed to the virus, if you're infected with a virus, it will reduce.
A chance of serious illness by 95% not 100%. You still could die. Even if you're vaccinated. But it is a really strong line of defense. It's like a seatbelt or an airbag and and and we now know this not only from the original trials, which involve tens of thousands of people. Some got the vaccine, some did not. And then we waited to see how many people in the placebo arm got infected or seriously ill. And we waited to see how many people in the
Treatment arm who got the vaccine got infected or got seriously ill me compare those numbers. And the vaccinated group had a much smaller number by an amount that yields and efficacy of 95%. But now that hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated. We also have other kinds of quantitative data that confirms those findings that confirms that the vaccine efficacy is about 95% for the MRNA vaccines, which is amazing. That is a higher efficacy than many, many other vaccines that have been developed that. People have been routinely taking for decades.
For diphtheria for tetanus, for months, for measles, for all of these other scourges for which we are blessed. That modern science has given us these vaccines and prevent hundreds of millions of deaths. I mean, two or three hundred years ago, tens of millions of people died every year from these contagious diseases and they don't anymore. Listen the rich countries in the world because we have vaccines. So we have this amazingly effective vaccine in coronavirus
actually Grand historical comparison.
It's kind of interesting to the polio vaccine because and I had forgotten this if I ever knew it. But I recently encountered this
fact online that I think you spent a lot of time online doing right now,
but I'm not alone there, you know that there are other people
there,
but something like 95% of polio cases were quite mild, right? Like you think a polio is just as this, you know, spectacularly awful. Yes, which it is.
Something like 95% of cases or virtually asymptomatic and the Salk vaccine was around 80 to 90% effective. You know, many people have alleged that, you know in the time of polio when the Salk vaccine came out, it would have been unimaginable to meet this kind of politicized vaccine resistance, what explains that just the fact that when polio is bad. It's so graphically bad
that
and I think that's part of it. I think that we have to remember, you're exactly right. The polio is looms, large and all of our memories is being a complete Scourge and it was a nasty piece of work, but it only killed a few thousand people every year, paralyzed some some more, some greater number, but it was nothing like the toll of death that coronavirus is taking it the entire nation mobilized and the people who invented the Sabin and Salk who invented, the two vaccines were widely hailed as Heroes. They were on the cover of magazines. They were. This was seen as a Triumph of
And
science and engineering and technology and the public lined up to get vaccinated. They were afraid of polio of course, but they also saw it as a normal Civic thing to do and the entire nation was vaccinated. Don't remember the precise amount of time. Someone listening will probably know but within weeks or months or something, I mean it was very rapid there was there was also some some glitches. It was a so-called famous, the cutter incident where there was a defective batch of vaccine that was released due to bad.
Factory procedures in in one manufacturer that resulted in the vaccine not being, sufficiently inactivated such that it actually gave a few people, polio. This cannot happen. It's just biologically. Impossible with the MRNA vaccines to be completely clear because you're not giving your not being given the virus, but the way the polio vaccine worked is there was inactivated virus. So what we did is we made the virus weakened it so that you would mount an immune response and that way if you ever encountered the live version of the virus,
You would be prepared but you didn't run any risk from the weakened version anyway, and that of course, that happened to In fairness during the polio, but the country tolerated that I mean, I think about 10 or few kids died and they also spread it to a few other people who got sick, but it was in the low tens of people that had this adverse event from that. And the country moved on and all of us got vaccinated for polio and we had to be their rules. You can't go to school if you're not vaccinated for polio. Yeah, as well. You should be able to, you know, you
I need to be vaccinated, that's part of being a 21st century citizen of a country like
ours. Okay. So back to the this first question about the efficacy of the vaccine. So it in recent reading about this, I encounter a range of of numbers around this mitigation of risk of hospitalization and death. And again, it's, you know, this is undoubtedly different. As you asked the question about each age cohort, but generally speaking, it's
Like a 10 fold reduction in risk of death, for those who get vaccinated versus those who don't get vaccinated. So is that your understanding in terms of what the, what the efficacy is of? Yeah, that's Nation.
Yes, and you had asked her a little bit earlier and we didn't quite nail it as in the follow-up conversation. We just had now about by age and and the studies that I've seen show that the vaccine is equally effective.
At Young ages and old age. Has there been a couple of papers that the CDC has released looking at, you know, cohort studies or studies of cohorts of people that are, you know, 12 to 18 versus greater than 65 and so on. And the way to think about it, is that go back to the airbag example. So if you have a 65 year old that's in an accident and they can either have an airbag or not have an airbag. They are the airbag is going to reduce their risk of death. And if you can have a 20 year old, that's in an accident and they can have
Airbag, or not have an airbag, the airbag will reduce the risk of death. Now. It's also the case, that a young fit body of a twenty-year-old, may be less likely to die. If in a collision than in an elderly person, it is true. Young people are better bodies than old people, but both bodies benefit from the airbag roughly equally. In other words. There's a reduction in the risk of death by the airbag. It it for both The Young and the old, if you're in a head-on collision, and it's the same with the vaccines, it is the case that the
The intrinsic probability of death is lower. If you're young if you get covid, but it is reduced by a proportionate amount. If you get the vaccine, one of the things that's a big misconception about this and one of the figures that I use in in Apollo's, arrow is the following. So illness and death are problems of the Aged. Right? Young people face a low risk of death in the next year. You and I might have a risk of death in the coming year of, I don't know, one out of a hundred one out of two hundred and twenty year old might have a risk of death in the
Following year of one in five thousand or 1 in 10,000. So most 20 year olds that are alive today. The great majority will be alive a year from now,
but the thing about, I'm tempted to use a few 20 year olds as human Shields now, well, because that's where were the 20 year olds in my life.
Yes. Yes, or I mean, I could use a 20 year old body. But but the point is, is that but the coronavirus will increase your risk of death at any age by about 30%. So, in other words, you're unlikely to die. If you're a young person.
When you get coronavirus, it's true. But you're low probability will be opted by about 30%. Should you get infected with coronavirus? And that is a nasty thing to happen. It's not necessary for you to needlessly face, this increased risk of death in the you, in the new year. It is absolutely low. Your risk of death in absolute terms, but whether you get coronavirus or not, but if you can't coronavirus, It's relatively higher. So, another way to think about this is that if you would be concerned about having a heart attack.
If you're 20, or 40 or 60 or 80 and being hospitalized with a heart attack, if you're hospitalized with coronavirus, if you're 20, or 40 or 60 or 80, your risk of death is higher than if you had a heart attack, in other words, whatever age you are being hospitalized for Coronavirus is significantly more deadly than being hospitalized for heart attack. So, so yes, 20 and 40 year olds are not commonly Afflicted with heart attacks. But if it crosses your mind, you say, gee, you know, got it would be bad to have a heart attack. It's worse to get coronavirus. So
So
that important and to have an outcome bad enough to hospitalize you. Yes.
Yes. Yes. I'm not talking about is correct. But this is conditional on being hospitalized with it. That's right. So let's be clear about what comparisons were making here. But it's just a way of benchmarking, people's expectations of risk in a way that helps them sort of see
it. Yeah. And and the stratification by age sets up some equivalence here. I, you know, I we would have to research the details, but it's something like if you're a 75 year old who gets
Vaccinated that gives you the equivalent risk of hospitalization or death of a, you know, an unvaccinated 45 year old or some. There's some, there's some equivalence there,
right? I haven't seen that calculated but it could be calculated pretty trivially, that's correct. Yes, something like that. That's
right. So that's that's on the question of efficacy. Now, let's talk about vaccine safety because this really is the sticking point and we we're living in a world where millions and millions of people.
Whatever, they think about the danger of the coronavirus and whatever they think about the risk of getting covid, not having been vaccinated, you know, some people think that's trivial some people think that is perhaps as dangerous as we think it is but on the other side of the balance, they think the vaccines themselves in particular that the MRNA vaccines are terrifying, right? And therefore the the
To get vaccinated is more or less. Unthinkable is it's just rude, whatever you, whatever story you paint about the risks of getting covid unvaccinated. It's not scary enough to motivate them to get vaccinated given how they feel about these vaccines. And I must say, I personally know people who have been spreading this fear to no exaggeration, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people and it's, you know, it has the predictable result of
convincing millions of people that they shouldn't get vaccinated. So what it, what do we know about vaccine safety at this point? Well,
first of all, there's a lot going on. There's there's some people who people who are saying vaccines or dangerous, don't get vaccinated are also preaching a little bit to a willing audience other words. People want to think there's a there's a there's a desire that humans have to be the person that so, on the one hand. We follow the crowd. We copy our neighbors. We don't wish to stick out.
You know, we, this is how fashion works. This is how all of our norms and work in our society. I mean, people, you know, copy their neighbors. And this is something actually, which I spent a lot of time studying and it's actually a little bit odd in a way that that we are that way. Like, when we're free to do anything we want. What do we do? We do what our friends are doing. Hmm, but there's also strain of people that want to seem like smart. Like they've outsmarted the crowd like everyone else want to do something, but I knew I pulled my money from the stock market just before
Crashed. Look at me, you know, or you know, everyone else was doing going left and I decided to go, right? And look, I was right about that. So I think there is a strain of that, which telling people people will do. They'll be people who want to have gone against a crowd and been proven, right? And that's a kind of an appealing fantasy for many people. No doubt. So some of the people that are pitching that are capturing a little bit of that, that that psychology. But and then of course, there are people, like we said earlier, who wanted to
I the seriousness of what's happening, but I think that the claim that the vaccine is and there are some people and I think these people need to be met head-on who rightly say wait a minute. This vaccine was developed very fast. I'm a little worried about that or this technology is very new. We haven't used the MRNA vaccines. We haven't used that before. Although if they say that you could say, well why don't you take the Chinese Sino vaccine which uses which uses old?
Balaji, you know, it inactivates the coronavirus and then your injected with inactivated coronavirus or or live attenuated coronavirus, which is another technique. In other words, you take the live version of the virus and you basically, you mutate it till it's still elicits an antibody response from you, but it's not sufficiently severe. So as to, in fact, you, this is actually analogous to what happened with the invention of vaccines, with a cow pox, being used by General, instead of smallpox, you know, 200 years ago more. So if you don't want, if you're you really
Read about the novel technology. Okay, get the Chinese vaccine, which is based on older. Technology has been around a long, long time. That's better than nothing to get. The Chinese vaccines. There are several actually Chinese vaccines. Anyway, the point is that people who say I'm a little worried about the speed, or I'm a little worried about the Novelties of technology. I understand that on an intellectual level and that's a topic, you can then engage you can say to such people. But let's let's talk about what happened. Why this vaccine was developed. So swiftly, you know, the billions of dollars that were spent the mobilization of
Of the nation's doctors and pharmaceutical companies, that tens of thousands of people that rapidly signed up to be in the trial. So that we were able to discern the good luck that the vaccine candidates actually happened to work all the biology that informed, our design of these vaccines and can I reassure you there by the
seed? And also at this late date, the fact that we have a cohort has literally hundreds of millions of people around a globally. Billions of people who have correct receive these vaccines.
Correct. So now you can even add that to it, to the argument in answering such a person and then such be some subset of them in turn will say, well, you know, we don't have enough follow up. You know, what, if in 10 years, it proves that this vaccine and then the honest answer that is, we can't know for sure without the passage of time but there's no reason to believe no, rational reason that anyone can discern, you know, that that would be the case. And so it conversely, we know for a fact that if you get coronavirus, you know, you face a 1% risk.
Ask of death, not depends by on a by age. But on average getting infected with a coronavirus, you you give a one percent chance of dying approximately. So and then, there are other people who say, well, it's not the speed. It's the novelty of the technology to those. You could say. Well we have other vaccines that use older technology. Would you like those instead? And so on. So
that's one footnote. I like to add here because there is a brilliant piece of incoherence here because these same people who For Whom the
You know the emergency use authorization was a more or less a declaration of the the unfitness for human consumption of these vaccines. These are precisely the people who have no problem with monoclonal antibodies or any of the treatments. That one that one gets after getting covid. And in in I think in every case, these treatments have been less validated and less safety tested than the vaccines themselves at this.
Point.
Well, I'm not sure I would be prepared to say that they're less validate unless safety tested, but I am prepared to say that they are less safe. Right? Because because, you know, most of these with a few exceptions. So so there is the, the, the the dexamethasone, which is a very safe steroid that early on. We knew was the randomized control Trials of shows, effect of a lot of these antiviral drugs, you know, have known toxicities. And now, of course, they're still worth it because your alternative is to run the risk of death from the virus, but they're not benign.
These treatments, whereas the vaccines are, you know truly benign and you asked me about like the safety profile. There was a paper that was published in September with this year, in the Journal called vaccines in an issue. Nine. The first, the last, the first authors last name is fan fa n. It's a meta-analysis of safety trials. And just that was using the safety of the trials themselves. And for example, if you look at 100,000 people,
People that were in the MRNA trials, across all the vaccines and trials, but 51,000 were in vaccine group and 51,000 were in the control group and there was no statistical difference in an adverse events occurring in those two groups. In other words. If you want to claim that vaccines are causing Strokes or heart attacks or whatever you want to claim those rates were roughly the same in both, the people who got the vaccine, the people who didn't get it. And then, if you look across,
Body system by body system in this, in this meta-analysis. The rates of the Adverse Events are almost without exception exceedingly low, you know, less than point one. Other words less than one out of a thousand people. And now we have follow-up studies that show that, for example, the a lot of people talking about this risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. These are inflammation of the either the heart muscle itself myocarditis or the or the casing of the heart muscle pericarditis,
Titus just to be clear. The viruses can also cause those conditions. The question is, we see some of those in vaccines, but those are also exceedingly rare. Let's say on the order of one in a million people who get vaccinated. And also relatively self-limited myocarditis and pericarditis are serious conditions, but to date, most of the people who got that, as a result of the vaccine have been fine. So the point is that the rate of death due to the vaccine or serious events. Do the vaccine is
Lilo less than a one in a million. And one of the things that we need to understand is that when we're dealing with public health threats. We have to engage in a kind of cold utilitarian calculus. Just like when we send men and women to the battlefield to the Battlefront, we decide that the sacrifice of those lives is for the greater good. That it saves more lives than are lost and the same thing happens here. If you if you the way I would think about it. Is this way unless you're a given the new
Stations the Delta variant and perhaps the Omicron variant as well. Unless you're a Hermit that lives in a Mountaintop or unless you're exceedingly, lucky everybody on the planet will either be infected by the virus or will be vaccinated. Those are your choices. If you're infected with a virus you face a 1 out of 100 risk of death from the virus. If you are given the vaccine, you face a one-in-a-million or less chance of death from the vaccine at, this is a no-brainer as
As I'm concerned about which of those two choices to make and and the vaccines. We're lucky are exceedingly safe and far safer than any, you know, the usual standard that's used for vaccines. Is that are serious, Adverse Events or death are less than 1 in 100,000 or 1. In 200,000 other words, there are vaccines out there which we administer, which we say, okay, one and two hundred thousand people, we give this vaccine to will die because we give them the vaccine but will save thousands of lives.
So that's what we're going to do this. These mRNA vaccines are even safer than that, which is a prior standard. We
had. Okay. This is, this point is so important that I think I want to just cycle on it again to so that there can be no question about it will want to. So, with respect to the inevitability of some Adverse Events and even fatalities for any intervention. I do. This is how I made this point previously. If peanut
Our were the perfect prevention of covid. And we gave peanut butter to hundreds of millions of people. We would have some number of people dying out right from peanut butter, right? We know this, right? You can just given the nature of PL, allergies to peanut butter. We would kill many more people with peanut butter than we've killed with these vaccines,
correct. I'm not that's about right
and yet it would be a miracle if we could solve the covid problem, with peanut butter to the tune of 95%.
Went with peanut butter. Yes, and we'd count ourselves, very lucky in that case. So, and none of this would minimize the tragedy of being the, you know, the parents, whose kids were killed by peanut butter, right? Yes, you know, so that's the world we're living in. We're talking about an intervention that rolls out to hundreds of millions and globally, billions of people, and then your you do these statistics on those population. Level outcomes may be that this is such.
A simple case to make that me. You you we have we have this head-to-head comparison. You can everyone's going to be eventually going to be exposed to covid personally. Have a choice about whether you should be exposed having been vaccinated or not vaccinated. And we know that you're running a 10x or more greater risk of death or serious complication, if your unvaccinated and yet many people are making this choice and
Everything everything they're worried about with respect to vaccines, you know, the myocarditis or any other very low probability side effect is much worse with covid when your unvaccinated, right? Yes. So I mean it,
so let me just say, in addition, in addition not getting you can also make the argument quite apart from the fact that it's in your self-interest to get vaccinated. It's also a civic duty, you
know, you know, I want to get to that. Let's table that because I that's a, that's a further.
Should I have the? I just want the choice Point here. That mean there's a to Branch tree of yes, where our utility function should be pretty damn easy to calculate. Write down one branch. You've got, you know, a one percent probability of death or, you know, worse, if you're older and yes, last, if you're younger, but if you're 50 and above this is really a no-brainer, you know, it's probably a no-brainer. If you're 20 and above, I guess I mean, I guess we could talk about kids. Yes. In particular harder.
So it is true. So the here's some you know, I think is true to say that when you're talking about mortality, the flu poses, a greater risk of death hospitalization and death to a three-year-old than covid. Does that do? I don't know if that's if we still
believe that. That's I don't know if that's true. I would have to double check that to report that I know that
flu flu is bad but flu is also non trivial for three-year-olds, right? I mean, it's
Yes, that's correct. So, I'm sorry. Which way did you say it? Was that flu was intrinsically, deadlier 23 year olds and coronavirus? That's huge. That was my
belief, but that's circus L months ago. I don't know if
it's. Yeah, I mean, flu has a so called u-shaped mortality functions that kills the very old and the very young and Spares. Middle-aged, whereas coronavirus is so called backward l-shape mortality function. So it repels the elderly but spares a middle-aged and the young now that I don't know, the scale of the y-axis on those curves off hand. I'd have to double-check but but yes, flu is.
Is worrisome. Two young kids. Absolutely, that is the case
but we have people who are saying to themselves, you know, I have not taken these crazy precautions, you know, masking and testing facts, vaccination and boosting and watching the news in fear, etc, for flu for my kids. Right? And now we're looking at the complete derangement of our education system and Society in order to protect kids from covid.
Yeah, here I
I see this argument a bit more honestly. Yeah, so just very narrowly and quickly on the issue of vaccination. I would still despite anything. We might discuss, I still believe it's appropriate and smart to vaccinate your children. Certainly those For Whom the results show already older than 5. There's a benefit. And my brother who's well-known pediatrician, you know? As publicly argued for this position and I have a ten-year-old at home and 11 year old and we vaccinated him or her very relieved and happy to vaccinate him there lots of
Reasons to vaccinate your kids, including the fact that it reduces their probability of spreading the virus to others, including you. By the way, your death, as a parent would be really a bad thing for your child. So if your child if vaccinating your child, reduces your own risk of dying, it's good for the child that that happened. So there are lots of reasons to and also, the more we vaccinate children, the less we run the risk of outbreaks at schools that might require us to close schools, which is harmful. So the bottom line for me is that I still believe the benefits of vaccination. Outweigh any putative risks.
Down to the age of 54 which we have good data. So far. The masking is harder for me and and here. And I also think here when we talk about schools and masking is very important to draw distinctions between elementary school, and middle school and high school, as the kids, get older and more adult-like and they face, more adult-like risks and it's easier for them to wear masks and then less harm comes to them from wearing masks. I think we can expect high school kids to wear masks, but we're talking about four and five and six-year-olds.
Especially the way the masking is implemented in our country, which is it's very hard to get these kids to obediently wear masks there, you know, rarely on their faces. These kids need to see that the faces of their teachers and of each other, to read their emotions. To learn language to learn to read and so on the benefits of the mask, while there may not outweigh the educational costs. And I for me here, I have no political agenda. I would just like to see some really good cost-effectiveness analyses that
On the benefit side. Say okay, if we if we have kids wear masks. We reduce the certain number of infections. We reduce the likelihood that kid'll have to stay home because they're sick and that, you know, missing school is not good for the kid. We reduce the transmission in the community, when we mask our children and save some adult lives, and those are all the benefits, the downside. We have some educational loss. We have some Financial cost. We have some inconvenience. We have all of these things. Let's just do the calculations. And then decide like we said earlier.
Earlier public health is a cold utilitarian calculus. And for me, I'm happy to be led wherever the such an analysis would lead. And at the end of it. We might conclude know, it's inconvenient to wear masks, but it's worth it or we might conclude it's beneficial to wear masks, but it's not worth it. And either outcome would be fine with me. It just a method. Just a scientific question, as far as I'm
concerned. Yeah, I think once you're talking about it a school population, you know, for kids above 5, where everyone has been vaccinated, then the logic of wearing
For me, truly evaporates, then it just seems like a silly and position. But
well when bit I'd be I think we could we could either like you I mean, I think that's quite possible that you're exactly right about that. But I guess all I'm saying is that I would like us to just do these in a very sober minded, way to do these calculations and and see what happens. And see, here's the thing. The other thing I wanted to communicate at. Some point is earlier, when we were talking about paranoia and people who hold crazy beliefs and it makes little sense to
Us, I think another approach to such individuals is to ask them, what kind of evidence could I bring to the table? That would make you change your mind and invite them to say? Okay. If you did this study or you showed me this thing, then I would change my mind then, at least we're dealing in the realm of science. But if you know, the classic kind of Parian, falsifiability issue, in other words, if you cannot think of an experiment that would disprove your hypothesis. Then that's theology is what science
part of it. As I can tell you on the vaccine arm.
They're saying that, you know, we can't possibly know what the long-term consequences of these novel. Vaccines are. And, and I would just say that you need another branch in this decision tree, and the other branches. You can't possibly know what the long-term consequences are of catching covid, unvaccinated or less. And there's every reason to believe they're worse in this
case. That's correct. But it, but many people won't even give you that response. They'll say, well, I don't think we should mask for this or that reason. I don't think we should engage in.
Lockdowns for this or that reason or vaccine for this or that reason. And I think the point I'm trying to make this a very narrow point is is that if the person, if the person says to you, there's nothing you could tell me that would change my mind. Then you are dealing with someone who has an ideological or religious conviction. We're not dealing the realm of science. So I would ask everyone who has strongly held beliefs about what is, or is not the right thing to do. In this case. For example, masking children to say, well, what evidence would make you change your mind? And if you're a person who thinks the kids should be masked, what evidence?
Could I bring to the table that would persuade, you know, actually, they shouldn't and conversely if you're the person who thinks that kids should not be masked. Well, what evidence did I bring to the table? That would persuade you? Otherwise, then we're in the realm of Science and we just do the science. We just conduct the experiments or do the studies and then maybe we can then you're at least thinking rationally for my point of view. Now. I also need to say something else, which is often, misunderstood. It is normal for scientists to disagree. It is normal for scientists to revise their opinions, as especially as new data, and studies come in.
It is normal for studies to be confusing and conflicting. And this is why, you know, and if you if you want to hold a belief and then you're going to cherry-pick the data to go and find well, which one study for example of masking showed that masking didn't work. You'll find a study or more. We're masking did not work and conversely. If you are pro masking you you know, you could reject the studies that show, that masking didn't work. But what you really want to do is to look at the totality of the evidence.
And judging weigh the evidence as a scientist who's trying to discern, does masking help or not. What is the scientific evidence in support of his claim? Just like when you're trying to figure out, you know, does the Earth rotate around the sun or not, which is it. Is it the heliocentric or geocentric theory of our solar system? Well, what is the evidence on either side of this debate? As you know, Galileo's discourse, you know, famously gauged and so so I think that's the way I would approach this.
And I would not, I would not be afraid of the fact that some scientists disagree. And also just one more thing just to hammer this home. People have said, well the scientists used to tell us this now, they're telling us that. Well, that's that's not a bug. That's a feature. That's how science progresses, as we get more knowledge. We change our mind as the famous British forgot who it was. You may know who said this, you know, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? Yeah, you know, like what? I stick to my guns, you know, I ignore the facts that the new facts. No, so I think
We as a society, one of the things that has happened and the virus has relentlessly exploited this it. Struck us at a particular moment of vulnerability in our Civic discourse. We had Century high levels of economic inequality and therefore sort of Suspicion and polarization on that grounds. We have decades high level of political polarization and we have lost the capacity for nuance in our in our Civic discourse. People think you're
With me or you're against me, you're right? Or you're wrong, not like that. Their Shades of Grey. We have this kind of anti elitism where people are very suspicious of larger forces that are governing their lives. Because I think we are at a particular historical juncture looking across the sweep of centuries where there is a lot of confusion about what forms of governance are optimal and so on and can we believe our leaders are not? And are they trustworthy and so on all of which preceded the pandemic and this anti elitism has has bled into a kind of
Anti science as well. Who are scientists are seen as just another Elite? That's telling me how to live my life. And what do they know? Anyway, which is again kind of stupid if you think about it, because, you know, surgeons and expert car mechanics are also Elite and X have expertise in that regard. And yet, we don't seem to be suspicious of them necessarily as trying to exploit us. So all of these things predated the virus and the virus. You see has relentlessly exploited this and and we have a kind of a thinned out intellectual Life as a nation right now where we are not
Aging in public policy debates in the most rational, and self-protective way. And, and we're dying. As a result of it. I think many hundreds of thousands of Americans will have died needlessly because we politicized it because we were unable to just approach this in a quintessentially American technocratic way just like we approached the vaccine was an amazing. We invented these vaccines. Yeah. I wouldn't we have done that with other aspects
on this point. I would add a few more nefarious pieces.
That have been in play me, one is the fragmentation of our. Our information ecosystem is social media being the prime offender here, but also just alternative media, you know podcasts like this one and and newsletters and they failing business model of mainstream journalism leading to a kind of wild-west effect around providing information and this interacts unhelpfully with political polarization and you know siloing
And people can curate their own Echo chamber. Such that they really never have to deal with information that they don't like, or they get the deal with the, the sort of the strawman version of it. But there's also just this fact, which has been true forever, but it's nefarious effects are Amplified. Here is that you can always find a PhD or an MD or half a dozen phds or MDS to take any crazy position about on any topic.
Could within or outside or of their wheelhouse, you know, for psychodynamic reasons that are as yet not fully understood and you can find phds who are willing to testify that, you know, cigarette smoking is non-harmful and non-addictive and climate change is not a thing. And in this case, we have, there have been several MDS in particular. Some of whom have just five minutes of digging exposed there.
Our long-standing anti-vaxxers Roots, but in other cases it's a little more mysterious who have jumped on the you know, the most popular podcasts in existence and in other forums said it just absolutely crazy things about the vaccines and about Ivermectin and about, you know, just muddied the waters powerfully for millions of people here and you know, without dealing with it with the specifics of any of that. It's just it will always be the case.
If you want to, you can find someone who apparently has the right credentials to have a strong opinion, give you a very crazy opinion about more or less anything, but there's always that contrarian. Yes to be found and to be Amplified. I'm not sure what we do with that. It's a very high leverage environment now where you can you can get, you know, the weaponization of that.
Yeah. I mean, I think again, this is a this is a bug not a feature of. So I'm so this is a feature, not a bug of science. We actually want
Scientist to be skeptical. We want there to be people who are saying, wait a minute. I don't believe you. There's a force of very famous story about ulcers. You know, when I was in medical school, we were taught that ulcers were due to stress. I was taught this, I went to Harvard Medical School in the 1980s and people were aware of the alternative theories, but we were still kind of taught. This was a possibility and, of course, you know, there was this crank guy and in Australia that said, wait a minute. I think it's caused by the bacterium helicobacter pylori, and he was writing, he won the Nobel Prize and so
And scientist eldest, these stork types of stories to each other all the time. And it's a way of checking our ego and checking our beliefs. This is what we want scientist to do. We want them to be skeptical. We want them to consider alternatives. We want them to consider crazy far-fetched ideas that were previously rejected by everyone. And so on, nevertheless, nevertheless, I don't think that when we are going to address a question I'd say as a consumer of information we should go about seeking the person who has the opinion we want, we shouldn't
Instead try to say, okay. What is the opinion of scientists on this topic? In general, you know, in other words, I don't think you should sort of say, well, I don't want to believe about climate change or I don't want to think humans do it. Can I find a scientist that held separately file? Here is one therefore. I'm right. That's not a search for truth. This is a search for confirmation. Right? But this is a very
interesting point of scientific epistemology. Because yes, in science, the status of scientific Authority must remain forever.
Us because we want, we just know that significant progress in science, entails again, and again, the usurpation of scientific Authority and scientific consensus, right? Like everyone, everyone was wrong yesterday about topic X and, you know, the new Einstein has shown us. Why? So there's that process that is, as you say, it's a feature, not a bug and yet scientific consensus on any given topic. If you're just going to reason probably
Probabilistically, right, you know is is climate change a thing or
does the Earth rotate around the sun or not? You
know, you're you are virtually always wise to be guided by do, unless we're in some zone of truly perverse incentives and confirmation bias. You're always wise to be guided by scientific consensus as a consumer of information, especially when lives are hanging in the balance. And I mean we're going to talk about
Ways in which we have just obviously failed in our and our main institutions of obviously failed to provide an accurate picture of good information during this pandemic. But still, there is this apparent Paradox to reconcile because we don't rely on Authority in science. I mean, you really are as you. You really only have as much Authority as your last sentence in science, right? You can be a Nobel Laureate who's completely unhorsed by a freshman.
You know who asks you a pointed question at the end of a lecture and that's the way scientific debate precedes,
but it's because I mean what we should be committed to is not scientists, but the scientific process, right? So this is so if you're if you're if you're trying to understand, you know, do vaccines help control epidemics. Well, let's engage in a process to see if what the answer to that question is and that's what we should be doing, not trying to pick which scientists, you know, we want to hear on whatever particular topic and
Means looking at the totality of the evidence and that means forming our own opinions. Now, the other thing that's important here is that if you're outside your expertise, it's probably not wise to do this yourself. So for example, if I'm, you know, if it's a question well outside my scientific expertise, a topic in geophysics or quantum mechanics or something like that. I do. I'm not the right person to decide what is or is not the truth. Same, by the way, with more humdrum topics, you know, if I have if I differing opinion, I had my car is broken.
Ian and I take it to three different mechanics and each expert gives me a different opinion. Well, then do I conclude that the car mechanics are all idiots, then none of them know what's going on or more likely. I find a friend of mine who I trust who is a more expert car mechanic and I have him take my car and to these three guys and then decide who to do. So we have to at some point, you know, Repose our confidence in someone else and so here's where I think something like you're the man on the street and you don't know, there's you believe that there's some conflicting ideas.
About something you could, or should have some confidence in some authorities, who those be the CDC? Tony fauci. I don't know. But you know, you must you should be humble and recognize that you are actually not a fit judge of the scientific consensus. On this topic. You might be a fit judge of other topics that you have expertise in but not in this
regard, except. I think that in this case, I mean this case the CDC, the FDA, The Who certainly Tony fauci from time to time. Yes.
I slipped up and truly impressive, and calling ways,
they have slipped up because they because they're human also. And because science is not infallible. That's true. But that doesn't mean that. If someone slips up, you then moved to astrology, you know, you say well, what are the scientists know? What are the astronomers know? Let's just go with the astrologers. That's not a rational response. There was a very famous experiment about background radiation and the or and the Big Bang Theory called the bicep2 experiment. That was published. I don't know five or ten years ago.
One of the most elite journals of science, think was in the journal science, actually, and it turns out that the scientist screwed up. They, they, they thought they had detected this, and they had to withdraw their results. They made a mistake. Yes, they made a mistake, but that doesn't mean that because these Elite astronomers screwed up and that occasion that now, the alternative is just to go with the astrologers. No,
right? Or or just the backyard astronomers, right? It's like even if a backyard astronomer occasionally.
Does point out the flaws in the new professional astronomers paper? There's two things there. What that is science actually working. The cure for bad science is more science and better size but it also doesn't melt. It shouldn't completely reset our bias for professional astronomers over backyard astronomers. Yes, because that's exactly right. Yeah,
and we can listen to that. We should also not close off the backyard astronomers from the discourse. No one is proposing that they be silenced or unable to speak but
You know, we're also not proposing that they somehow be seen as having special virtue or special wisdom. Well, there was this famous case recently a couple years ago about this housewife, that there's this, a geometric problem called tessellations, whether you can create overload it with a with a set of geometric shapes. Can you tile a floor with them? Can you arrange them in a fashion where there are? No gaps between them. And there's like this repeated pattern like complex tiling, like, hexagons on your bathroom floor. You can tessellate a hexagon, but there are other non.
Gan shapes. You can test late as well. And there's a lot of interesting mathematics about
this Roger Penrose in this area.
Yes. Yes. It was theorized remember the precise details, but it's theorize that they were like only four ways to tessellate a floor with a quadrilateral or something and some housewife who had some mathematical training but had never been a professional mathematician was saying, we'll wait a minute, you know, I think I should be able to figure this out and she started noodling around and developed her own notation and and she found unexpectedly to other ways that no one had known.
For disproving the claim that there were only four or whatever it is. I'm garbling, the story a little bit. But the point is, she was right. And here's the proof. We know she's right, because we can evaluate her claims using the scientific method we can test and see, is she, right? Or is she not? And so, here's the thing, when some when some backyard astronomer says Ivermectin Works, we're like, okay, let's evaluate this claim. Let's do a randomized, controlled trial of ivermectin and see if it works. Oh my goodness. We've done the trial. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. So
You know, this is an in fact, we've done so many Trials of ivermectin. Now. Yes, there's some that hint that it may have some effect Etc and there's some biological reasons suppose. But not at the doses we would give people and so on the body of the evidence shows that Ivermectin is not useful. I'd be delighted if it worked. I have no political agenda here, but it's like hydroxychloroquine, you know, we put that one to bed. And now we have Ivermectin re-release of the incidentally. I don't understand why people are so obsessed with believing that Ivermectin is useful, like what's that to do with? Like, you know, you don't have to take a political.
Stand on this like either the drug works or it doesn't. Maybe there's some other drug that works. Maybe they're no drugs at work and you should get vaccinated. I think this may be what people are are afraid
of. Well, there is this diabolical notion that the profit motives are completely skewed here where you know that no one stands to make any money off of ivermectin. But people stand to make billions of dollars off of the vaccines and therefore a legion of mustache twirling.
Oh Executives have rigged the whole conversation to foreclose the compassionate use of a but essentially free generic drug unit and Bill knowing that are at expense of Our Lives for
vaccine. Well, no, I mean you're more you take more risk taking Ivermectin than you do by getting the vaccine. No, I mean, you have to ask yourself. Why would someone like me? Who's, I'm not profiting? I don't own stock in Pfizer Moderne. Why would I recommend the use of this or or your doctor? Who says you should get vaccinated? They're
In paid for offering this advice over one thing or another thing. I mean II understand people's suspicions of the profit motive. Just like if my mechanic recommends that I, you know, there's a little knocking sound
that exactly a few can currently see you, but you don't have Pfizer and moderna merch, all over your office, their coffee cups and fleece, at least
jacket. No, I do not. And, and the same and the same goes for, you know, but the the yes, that's right. And then there's the person, you know, the yes your karma.
Panic may be lying to you and tell you that if fifty dollar thing as a thousand lot of repair and so on. And so, you know, rapidly such a car mechanic loses credibility or loses business or or what are we get sued or whatever. So I just don't think it's credible Theory to imagine that. There's some vast conspiracy among your doctor and the expert on TV or someone like me, you know, like, what's in it. Some people I guess I was accused on Twitter somewhere, being a forgot. What the accuse ation was that. I was like a, not a covid whore. Exactly. But that I was that like somehow some word like horror, I
What it was were where I was like, somehow jonesing. I think was the word. Someone said I was jonesing on covid or something. And I was like, really you think that it's just, you know, the way I would actually, to be honest. Here's what I'll tell you for years and years. I've been teaching public health and I there's a very famous graph in public health, where on the x-axis is years since, like, 1990 y-axis is mortality. And there's this decline in mortality, over the last hundred years, which is just miraculous it.
Achievement of modern society primarily and The Story Goes that this is for three reasons. First of all, we got richer and as we got richer, we died less second. We had Public Health interventions, like clean water and and hygiene and, you know, cotton underwear and so on. And that's why we died less and and that's about a third of it. So third of it is, we got richer third of the decline in mortality. As we got Public Health interventions, and only about a third is because of medicine, you know, modern medicine. Anyway, I've been teaching this topic for years and in this graph, however, there's
Huge Spike like that just dominates the graph in 1918. And for 30 years. I've been teaching public health and I teach this this graph and I put it up on the table up and I showed the students and I asked the students who knows what this spike is invariably. Someone knows it's the 1918 Spanish, influenza pandemic. And I say, isn't it amazing? Except for that pandemic? You have the steady decline in mortality decade, after decade, because of what, we, as a society are doing, you know, isn't that as a Triumph of human Ingenuity? And
I honestly Sam, I've been teaching this for all these years, it never occurred to me. If this was like I taught this as like as a historical Oddity, why it didn't occur to me that it could happen again while I was alive. I don't know, you know, I just never occurred to me that I would be alive while there was a major respiratory pandemic. And so, when it started bearing down on us the covid into in 2020, in January 2020 is were talking about earlier on the one hand. I was prepared because I know about these things and I have been thinking about this thing on the other hand.
It took me a while to sort of register. Oh, my goodness. Why was I not even more prepared? Like, why was I? So surprised that this thing was happening it. I you've been teaching about this for decades Nicholas.
So I don't know why I went off on this tangent. Well, honestly, my expectations have been reset here. Now. I'm surprised that it's not always happening. Yes,
Pro respiratory pandemics. Come every 10 or 20 years and serious ones every 50 or 100 years. And there's some evidence that the serious ones are coming more frequently. We can talk about that.
If you're
interested, well, I just want to put a few more numbers to to what you just described her. Because there there's what we know about covid deaths directly, but then there's this other analysis of excess death. Yes, tax that, that people have done it. Actually, The Economist just did an analysis, it was published a few days ago and globally, they estimate that. It's more like 17 million, people who have died so far and it's just and it's not
Us from covid, but it is because of covid. I mean, for instance, you know, there are people who didn't get treatment for cancer because they couldn't get into the hospital because the hospital was full of covid patients, right? So, they're knock-on effects of the pandemic. And I think we at the, for The Economist, that was a, there was a 95% confidence interval between 11 million and 20 million for excess deaths globally. Now, and in North America, they put it. It officially were around 800,000 deaths. This analysis would adjust that upward.
By about 20% to something close to a million at this point.
So this by the ways is the range that I had forecast. The last time I see on our call. I had thought several hundred thousand but in the book that I released in August of 2020, I put the range of Destiny. I say screen half a million in a million. Yeah. I'm not saying this to Pat myself on the back and say, I'm so smart or something. I'm just saying, this is standard. Epidemiology. If you can just do the calculations and look at exponential growth and the transit properties of pathogen and fork.
Ask the impact on our society. So I'm not at all surprised and I've been long saying in fact, at the beginning of this conversation. I said that probably in the end when the dust settles a million Americans will have died from this condition. That's exactly, right. Maybe more. Yeah, but let's talk about excess deaths. The technique was invented actually by a demographer called the founder of epidemiology called William Farr in England in the 19th century, in the middle of the 19th century. He did a lot of very cool things. And the reason they invented this technique was that the state of knowledge about
About nosology about diseases and what causes illnesses and deaths was so weak, 200 years ago, that it was not often possible to know what someone died of. So what far said is, you know, we don't actually need to know what every, you know, some people died without having a doctor, there were no death certificates. They were buried, but we don't know what they died of, or we said, they died of a, but in fact, they died of be. And so we were ignorant and far said, you know, we can dispense with all of that. Let's just count. How many people died and that was a number. That was
Known and we're going to compare that to the number that we expected to die. And we're going to compute that expected number by looking at the last five years and seeing okay. In England, you know, we had 100,000 people died every year and during the plague year, 200,000 people died. And so we're going to say that the plague caused a hundred thousand deaths. This is the method of excess deaths. Now turns out that that method is also useful even to scientist today for a number of reasons. One is it's useful when you're looking at very ancient plagues and there are
No death certificates or records so you don't know but you can calculate like you know, how many bodies how many people died in a particular year looking at graveyard or other evidence compare that to other years and conclude that. Oh my goodness, this plague killed so many people now. Can also be used even not looking historically looking at the present day in part, for the reasons that you mentioned during times of plague. Some people are killed directly by The Germ. Infecting them others are killed in.
For example, like you said in the situation which a person with cancer dies because they were unable to get hospital care or they're killed in directly. In other ways. For example, the plague forces people to stay at home and you have domestic violence goes up. So more more people are killed by their spouses. For example, during the plague. Let's say, but also, there are people whose lives are saved by the plague, for example, car, accidents might decline because we're not out on the road. So, 10,000 Americans who would have died from car accidents, didn't die. Because, you know, we were
Or let's say lockdown at home or something. Not that, that's why we I would lock us down. But but In fairness, you have to put all of those together, all of the direct and indirect deaths caused by the plague and all of the lives saved, because of the plague for whatever reason, for example in India because of the lockdowns, the air quality got so much better a year and a half ago, people for the first time could see the Himalayas at some distance. And because the air pollution is so bad, in India, Ditto in China, by the way. Millions.
The Indians and Chinese die every year because of bad air quality. And when all the factories stopped and all the people stop driving their cars are quality improved. So fewer kids died of asthma. Fewer, adults, died of emphysema and so on or pneumonias because exacerbated by the air pollution, so you got to put all of that together and that's how you ultimately, we will ultimately calculate the impact of covid-19. And when that calculus is done in two or three years, we will see that the impact of this epidemic has been enormous on our
Society, as you say probably in excess of a million people, at least a million, I think will will have been judged to have died. And let me just say I'll shut up in a second that we're not through this yet. Okay, then we should not be spiking the football, not only the because of the Omicron variant which we haven't talked about yet. But also because respiratory, pandemics, it's in their nature to come in waves, especially in the winter. So we're having a winter wave right now. Thousand Americans are still dying every day of this condition right now, and we will have another winter wave a year.
By the way, when you and I spoke over a year ago, I'm pretty sure. I said, I don't know for sure but I would have said Sam be aware of the fact that next winter, we'll have another wave. And here we are having that wave and a year from now. We will have another wave it. The amplitude of the wave will be lower. That's what happens. The ways Tamp down as time goes by but these respiratory pandemics typically take four or five years before the mortality that the plague is causing falls into the kind of background Welter of General causes of
death. So some of the people who think well this will be just like influenza are right? It will eventually be like influenza, but that doesn't mean like Lemmings. We have to run for the cliff and die needlessly. There are things we can do to reduce the toll of
death. Right, right. Okay. So, um, I can see this entire conversation is turning into a PSA because we're still working through my questions that I imagine you would answer that first 10 minutes our podcast. So I'm so what we've hit, you know, vaccine efficacy and safety.
I think there's one other point to make about efficacy because there's a kind of confused notion traveling around. Now that the vaccines to actually don't work very well because there still is some transmission with respect to these in vaccinated populations. Right? So people are imagining it that the goal of the vaccine was to stop transmission entirely. And if you're, if you can still get breakthrough cases and you can still pass the virus to others.
In a vaccinated population, will then these vaccines don't work. There's a related issue here where people think, well, if you need to get boosted, how many just just, how many boosters are we going to have to get? We're going to get one booster a year for the rest of our lives. All these vaccines don't work. So there's the in the, in the anti-vaccine world. There's just an endless amount of chatter about how these vaccines really haven't panned out. You know, we
should you really are spending too much time
online. So we wish we should
address we
should
These concerns.
Okay. Well, and also you didn't put on the table. This ridiculous statement that natural immunity. I mean there's you know, like why don't not ridiculous statement. There's there's some interesting science about natural immunity versus artificial immunity through vaccination like which is better. And we can talk about that too. So on the issue of the vaccine, so when we say a vaccine is effective, we have to specify. What is the effective against, what does it prevent you from becoming infected? Does it prevent you from being able to infect others?
H, does it prevent you from becoming seriously ill or does it prevent you from dying? Those are four different outcomes and believe it or not? The vaccine doesn't have to be equally effective against all of those outcomes. For example, only some vaccines provide, what's known as sterilizing immunity. In other words, you prevents you from even being able to be infected. That's not what the coronavirus vaccine does. Yes. It does reduce your probability of being infected if exposed but what it really does is it reduces your probability of getting seriously ill if infected and infectious Ness is
Topic because even if the vaccine prevents you from becoming seriously ill if I'm vaccinated and I'm exposed to the virus as the virus multiplies in my body and my body starts ramping up because it's been vaccinated to fight off the virus. There is a window of time when I could potentially spread it to others, but that window is greatly narrowed. If I have been vaccinated. In fact, the vaccine does benefit does reduce my infectiousness and does benefit others. We had deferred still the topic of whether
Whether it is a civic duty to be vaccinated, I think it is. You should be vaccinated, not just to protect yourself, but also to protect others. And there are many many examples in our society, where we, we have state power that prevents you from being a risk to others. The reason we regulate speeding on the highway is not so much because of our solicitous interest in your well-being but because you don't have the right to crash in and kill someone
else. Yeah. Well, I would also add here though that even if we knew the effect was only born by you directly you
Till you getting sick and dying has a very likely a terrible effect on other people. I mean, so there these cases where they're literally have been cases, where to anti-vaccine parents get killed by covid and their kids are. They got, you know, how fluent four-year-old orphans now, right. I mean, it's just,
yes, believable.
What is what is out there if you, when you go looking for details, and I mean, the idea that there was just that, you know,
An expression of the personal autonomy of these two parents, not to get back stated. Because you know, no one's putting a needle in their bodies as though there were no implications for anyone else. You know, now, they've got these two orphaned kids that Society has to figure out somehow to just to raise.
And, and that's, and that's really sad. And I also think it's sad for those people, you know, that they became that they politicize something, which could have been seen. Look. I like the fact that we live in a plural democracy, you know, we don't live in in North Korea.
You know, or some kind of autocracy, we have people with across the political Spectrum, with different political beliefs. We, I like this fact. We live in a plural democracy and we resolve. How do we resolve our disputes? We do not resolve them by Force of Arms. We vote and we get to vote repeatedly. So if we don't like the people, we vote for, we get another bite at the Apple, in two years or four years or in six years. This is fantastic about our society. So when people are wanting to communicate their Divergent political beliefs, I think the right way for them to do that is to have a
bumper sticker or a lawn sign. It is not by whether they get vaccinated or not. In other words. You do not need to link your political beliefs or your political identity to whether you get a vaccine or not. You can signal where you are in the political Spectrum in all kinds of other ways. And so this the hypothetical case, you described of the to anti-vaxxer parents
who had not hypothetical. I mean I can do
no real case. I know, but exactly the
let's take the generic version of
that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there are real cases.
Actually sent out a Twitter thread that assembled some of these cases months. And months ago, when there were some of them were hitting the news, they were heartbreaking, but the point is just as you're suggesting that those individuals they could have had their political beliefs in the political ideology about the government or whatever it is, they want. But they don't need to signal that by whether they get vaccinated or not that they have other reasons not to get vaccinated, they may, you know, not want to, but it's a kind of its kind of wrongheaded admixture of belief systems
so well, so anyway, there's just this
This fact which I know we almost certainly mentioned last time. There are some people who can't get vaccinated right? I mean also true we have a duty to do whatever they can to get their risk. Yeah, that's correct. So
so the fact that there's some breakthrough infections, the fact that there's still some Transmissions, this is normal. There's nothing surprising. This does not mean the vaccines on it work. It's just again, going back to the airbag example, the fact that someone was in a collision and died despite an airbag doesn't mean that airbags don't work means they work pretty good, but not 100%. And that's
Exactly the same thing with the with the vaccines and on the natural immunity thing was a very complicated and interesting topic. So it is it is usually the case, not always but usually the case that people who survived and an infection with a natural pathogen have better immunity than those who are vaccinated. And the reason the intuitive reason for this is that when you're infected with a natural pathogen, you're exposed to all the so-called epitopes, you're exposed, to all the antigens, all the all of the proteins in the pathogen. So your body.
The amounts are very broad attack on the pathogen with antibodies and and memory. T cells that attack many parts of the pathogen. Whereas if you're vaccinated you typically get a reduced set of those, for example, in the MRNA vaccines. You're just exposed to the spike protein, not the other proteins in the
Throne of ours. So I just got to say, is a, as an aside here that the name Spike protein has done some terrible PR for these vaccines, people, find the name. So scary, the idea that just mRNA vaccines are proliferating this.
Bike protein throughout your body. It's something that the spike protein, certainly sounds like it's going to harm you in all kinds of ways and there. Yes who are alleging that it that it almost certainly will. It's just, it really. I mean, addition to people's, you know, ambient fear of needles. Yes, a fear of the spike protein is I'm convinced doing some, at least subliminal worker.
I hadn't thought of that, but I think you're right. If, if scientists by chance, have been calling it, The Rainbow protein and and we're going to inject you with rainbow
project. Yeah.
If it were called the rainbow protein and we can deliver these vaccines with a nasal inhaler or a bit better better yet a pill, we would be living in a different world. I'm
convinced I got a sugar cube like the polio vaccine. Yes. So yeah, take, let's have some rainbow protein on a sugar cube and you'll be better.
That's all right, dear derail views. You're talking about natural immunity.
Yeah, so no, so naturally. So so it is generally the case that but having said that, let me say a couple of other things. This is not always the case. There are previous.
Examples where the vaccines provide superhuman immunity, for example with human papillomavirus or tetanus the it is known that those vaccines provide, a kind of immunity that's superior to the immunity acquired for natural reasons and we can discuss a little bit about why that is the case. But in addition to that, in order to acquire the natural immunity, let's not forget, you have to survive, you have to run the risk of death and this isn't my opinion just stupid. In other words. There's no polite way to put this. It is not a rational strategy to say.
Say, even if you believe that the natural immunity acquired quite a natural immunity superior to the vaccine immunity. It is not wise to seek to acquire it by natural infection because you have to survive. You you run the risk of death in order to be in that state. Incidentally for any listeners who had covid the their Munden studies right? Now that show that you should still be vaccinated and actually the people who have both been vaccinated and have had covid in either order. Those are the ones that are actually in the best position right to
Door even mutants like Omicron and other mutants that are on the horizon. So variants that are on the horizon because they have a mix of intense immunity. Let's say from the vaccine and Broad immunity from the natural infection. So it is it is it is not, it is not a rational approach to say we are going to reach herd immunity as a society or we are going to as an individual that's going to be my strategy. It is far superior from an individual and a collective point of view to get
vaccinated. Oh, man.
I asked you here on this point. Many people have expressed the grievance that in all this push to get people vaccinated natural immunity of those, you know, many millions of people at this point who have caught covid and recovered. Their natural immunity is not being dignified as akin to, or even better than normal vaccinations and they should be given credit for actually, it's essentially they are vaccinated, you know, the yes, I were back.
By the virus. Yes, I think there's some validity to that point of view. Yeah,
even though as you did, you would just recommend that they also get a dose of the vaccine. It does seem crazy that if when this comes down to just the Colossal failure of our testing regime, but it does seem crazy that we have not figured out a way to credit people for having recovered from covid. So that they then can, you know, in a world where you know, you can't get
Into a restaurant unless you prove that you've been vaccinated you should be able to get it into a restaurant proving that you you had covid
survived the infection. Yes. I think that would be from an individual's point of view. That's not crazy. Although as I've just said, if I were such an individual, I would still be vaccinated because you're actually not as protected. And it's a very wise course of action to where
you're not as protected as you might be, but you're correct, but I still think it's, I still button think it's true or whether we currently believe that natural.
Unity is superior to a a two-dose mRNA.
Well, I don't think that's true. That's not true. That's not true. No, no, no. No, that's not true. That's what I'm saying. The in factories is,
you're saying that the code, the MRNA vaccines are analogous to a tetanus vaccine.
Yes. Yes. Yes, they provide superhuman immunity. That's exactly
right. I'm not well, that sure
there's a coincidence.
There's a lot of ice. So I don't know where, I don't know where we're going to find the ground. Truth for that information because I've heard I've heard it both ways.
Ways. But more recently. I've heard it the way I'm saying it which is natural immunity is actually better than vax. No Community, although, although the combination of a vaccine, a natural immunity is the best.
That's the last thing is true, but it is not true that, that natural immunity is superior. That's what I was saying before that. There are cases and, and the MRNA vaccines are in that category. I'm quite confident about this, that the immunity conferred by two doses of mRNA vaccine is superior to the immunity conferred.
By having survived a natural infection. That's what I was saying that there are two reasons to be
vaccinated. Obviously, the audience can fact check us here. But whatever is the case, there there seems to be a current consensus that even if you've recovered from covid you're better off getting a boost of the vaccine and then then you are the the superhero you want to be.
So like we're talking about. The question is which immunity is superior. Is it? Is it the if you survive, assuming you survive, let's
Again, constantly remind ourselves of this important
feature. We have here is a Survivor bias in this game.
Yeah, absolutely. So to acquire this natural immunity have to run the risk of death, but let's say you acquire. It. Is it better than having been vaccinated or not? So there was actually a study that was released by the CDC on November the 5th about a month ago. That looked at this question and concluded as have several other Studies, by the way that no, in fact, it's Superior to be the immunity conferred by vaccination is to
Carrier and here. I'm looking at the adjusted odds ratio. It's about it's about five times, your odds of being hospitalized with serious illness are five times worse. If you have natural immunity compared to immunity from vaccination and this the last author of this paper is bosio Bo Z IO and it was published in the mmwr on November the 5th 2021. So that's one of many studies that have come to this conclusion. So no, I reject the claim that immunity.
As of now, I mean I'm a river. I reserve the right to change my mind if the facts change or we see more studies. But as of now, my summary of the literature is that in most people on average vaccination with two doses of the MMR vaccine provides Superior immunity than than having acquired it naturally.
Yeah. Well, there's a, I think I want to spend more time on the sociological problem here just to account for how this got so politicized and so crazy, but I just have one more question.
Around vaccines and their efficacy. It's widely claimed now among people not disposed to get the vaccines that vaccines are creating a because we do not have a sterilizing vaccine here. That's 100% effective. Vaccines are there for creating a selection pressure. That is spawning new variants that will, but, you know, perforce, evade the vaccines.
And so we're basically Our Own Worst Enemy here. And we you know, vaccinate an imperfectly what these people tend not to notice is that also natural immunity would be doing the same thing. It would be exerting a selection pressure that would then cause variance to emerge that escaped natural immunity. But, you know, among the fans of vaccination. There's this rival claim which is that it's better to have a vaccinated population that an unvaccinated one for all the reasons. We've. We've
But for the additional reason that in an unvaccinated population, when you have a reservoir of tens of millions, hundreds of millions globally billion to people who have not been vaccinated, you have the condition of greatest spread and greatest virulence and greatest opportunity to manufacture fresh variants. That keep this game of chicken with with Evolution running in the worst possible way. And so I guess my question is
To what degree does does vaccination, mitigate the problem of variance? Compared to lack of vaccination? How do you think about this selection pressure? Yeah. That the, the vaccinate in the unvaccinated together are creating for? Yeah, the arising of new variants.
I think people are right to be concerned about that. And let me try to see if I can provide an analogy, as most people will have an understanding, you know, the there's a herd of antelope.
And there's a lion that's going to protect them. And everyone knows from having watched nature videos that the lion kills the slowest Antelope, the week one, the old one, whatever it is, but if you can run fast, you outrun the line and you don't get eaten as a lion kills, a few Antelope. Each generation the antelopes evolved to run faster and faster in Escape The Lion. Now, of course, the lion also evolves to run faster and faster and you have predator-prey coevolution and there are experts in our society who have studied this in many.
Any predator-prey relationships and many relationships between pathogens and the animals. They in fact, which is a similar kind of thing or parasite, host interactions. For example, this is a well-understood topic, but you should also have the intuition, that if there is no lion, what happens to the speed of the antelope, does it change? No, there's no selection pressure on speed. And so the average speed of the antelope Remains the Same and conversely if the lion is indifferent to speed, if the lion
Those all the antelope also the antelope don't evolve, right? They're all dead. So you don't get faster and faster
Antelope, but you get hurt. You get a really good Netflix video narrated by David Attenborough.
Yes, you'll like this. It's like a fox in a chicken coop, you know, just kill them all. Okay, but the point is that, from this little toy example, that we realize that partial selection pressure is the thing that will be most likely to induce evolution of speed in the Antelope. And it's a little that's the argument.
That people are making in terms of partial vaccination in The crucial thing here is partial. So if you partially vaccine the population, for example, in South Africa, where they have twenty four percent, or something vaccination rate, and they have a lot of immunocompromised individuals, which is another interesting important detail in the emergence of the Omicron variant. Is that on it. What happens is you create almost a perfect circumstances for vaccine evading strains, right? So what we're talking about here is not new strains that cause us trouble. We're
We focus on causing us trouble in a particular way, which is that they can evade the vaccines if we vaccinate some of the population but not the rest, those strains that are circulating that can move despite the parcel vaccination come to predominate and so it's just like the the partial predation by the lion example, and so, partial vaccination will enhance or pick up the speed of the virus or make give them down the virus with more of the property, that allows it to avoid the Pradesh.
One or in this case, the elimination because of vaccination. So but the crucial thing there is partial. So basically what we want is a world in which either no one is vaccinated or everyone is
vaccinated. Well, if no one is back to just to escape confusion here, there are two forms of partiality here. There's partial vaccination, you know, not everyone has received a vaccine in any given population, but then there's the partial efficacy, the incomplete efficacy of the vaccine itself, right?
So yes, it's yes. Yes. I'm talking sterilizing. Yes, correct. And I'm clean. Bowl
Knowles are contributing to this
problem. Well, the latter, the fact that the vaccine is not 100% perfect. I have to think for another moment or two before I can put that into the story. But the part of the story that I'm emphasizing right now is the fact that not everyone is vaccinated. This is by the way, the reason that I and many others have been arguing that the United States should vaccinate the whole world. It would cost us 50 billion dollars to vaccinate the world. And we should do it. We should do it. First of all, because
Cuz we profess, we had some moral obligation. We profess to have the right morals and be a leading nation. And I think it's something we should do for moral reasons. We should do it for economic reasons. Where a rich country. We everyone is experiencing supply chain problems. Now, they have trouble buying Christmas, presents or products are missing at the grocery store and, you know, they'll bake orders and for furniture. And they're told they won't arrive for months, and this is not a typical experience of late, American capitalism, but everyone is having this experience now, because of supply chain problems, and we need training partner.
We have economic reasons to vaccinate the world. But most importantly, I would argue, we have epidemiological reasons because to the extent, there are parts of the world that are not vaccinated or partially vaccinated. Those are Petri dishes for the emergence of new worries, some strains of the virus and those strains will inevitably come to our Shores just like we've seen with Omicron. They will come to our Shores and they will cause us. Whoa, so we need to vaccinate the whole world, not just our country. Now you made a second point which is really important and I just alluded to it a moment ago, which is
To the extent that there are partially vaccinator unvaccinated. The reason, holy unvaccinated parts of the world are also. A problem is a numbers game because if you have 100 people who are infected with a virus or 10 million people who are infected, you should have the intuition that with many, more people Afflicted with a virus. You have many more opportunities for the virus to have a mutation that makes it worse. And this is why rip-roaring infection is also not good.
In other words, why the so-called, you know, the point you made earlier, which is that large numbers of people who are infected with the virus don't necessarily benefit us because it provides more terrain more opportunity for the virus to explore. What's known as the darwinian fitness landscape where the virus by chance, because there's so many millions of people are infected by chance. It will stumble on a variant. That's really bad for us. It's like it's a little bit like, you know, if you want to roll a heads, are you more likely to roll?
A heads. If you get 10, 10 coin, flips or 1000 coin flips. Well, everyone has the understanding that, you know, however, however unlikely it is, however, likely it is to roll a heads. When you flip a coin 10 times. It's a certainty, you're going to get a heads, if you flip a coin, a thousand times. And it's a little bit like that with this with a coronavirus. If you have millions of people who are infected with the virus, has more opportunities to have a worrisome strains mutate and emerge. So for both of these reasons, the wisest strategy is if you have three options, no,
Action partial immunization or complete immunization from the point of view of us. Combating the virus, the wisest strategy is complete immunization.
Yeah, you mentioned in passing the implications of having a large population of immunocompromised people in Africa. What, what is that? What's it go? Why? I assume you're talking about the spread of HIV or the
there. Yes. Well, there's a lot of theories. For example, let's take the Omicron variant, the Omicron variant. It's
It's most recent relative in the virus. Family tree is about a year ago. So it's not a descendant of Delta. For example, the only current variant. It seems to be a descendant. From some other ancestral, strain, about a year ago. This is work, the Trevor, Bedford and others have done. And so the question is, well what happened? Well, one possibility is that the Omicron variant was spreading in parts of the world where we had low genetic surveillance. And therefore we just didn't detect it.
We just finally stumbled on it when it got to South Africa. Let's say it was in Botswana or somewhere else nearby. And there wasn't a lot of genetic surveillance. But in South Africa, they have decent genetic surveillance, then it comes to South Africa up, we detect it. And so it seems like it had been around for a year. But actually it had been that's one possibility for the emergence of such a strain sudden emergence of a new string. Another possibility is that it wasn't circulating in a population. Rather it was
Enduring in a specific individual. So for example, imagine you're an immuno compromised, individual, you're infected with a virus. You can't fight it off and that virus lives in your body and keeps mutating and mutating and mutating virus, has chance, mutations occur. I forgot the rate of mutation in this virus. I think it's once a week or every two weeks or so. And and so over a year in your body the virus accumulates a lot of mutations. So one theory is that the Omicron variant kind of was
Incubated in an immunocompromised individual. We're finally enough, mutations occurred in the virus and then it left from this person to others and then began spreading. That's the second theory of and therefore in a place where there are a lot of immunocompromised people and I think in South Africa something like 20% of the population is HIV positive. I don't know the precise number but I think that's about right. You have a lot of people there that we really should be vaccinating because they can those poor individuals.
Can serve as incubators for new words, some strains of the virus, a third possibility. And this is one of the reasons we will never eradicate coronavirus is that unlike smallpox, which can only infect humans, coronavirus can infect animals, and and, and everyone has been reading about this. You know, there are the gorillas leopard at the zoo. Yeah. Yeah. And the Tigers in the zoo and dear like something, like some studies show that a significant fraction of North American, deer are infected.
Got it from humans. Apparently, feeding deer is a thing and then the deer spread it among themselves. And mink. There was an outbreak in I think in Denmark, where they had to slaughter thousands of mink and outbreaks in China in fur farms and and, and we know our pets are dogs and cats can get it. So the point is that the coronavirus can even if we vaccinated everybody will never eradicate this virus because it can live in animals who we live with, so it their animal reservoirs possible. So a third possibility is at Omicron was
Incubated in some kind of animal Reservoir and then return to humans. It wasn't humans. It went to animals. It started first and bats. It came to humans and then from humans who went to some other animals and I was coming back to us. That coronavirus is a feature of the natural world. Our world has changed. There's a new pathogen in our midst that was not there before. And so, we have to accept this reality. That's the third possibility. And then, of course, there's some since you're in the dark reaches of the internet, Sam, there's some people who speculate that this is still a Chinese plot like,
They softened us up with the original strain and now they're releasing, you know, another strain suddenly, which I think we can exclude that possibility. I think the most likely thing of the three I've just mentioned is is the second possibility that it was in a immunocompromised human. And and that's where Omicron was incubated and now has has left us
interesting. Interesting. Okay? Well, let's pivot to the topic of why this all became so confusing and so difficult to talk about it.
We've touched on it some here, but I want to at least acknowledge, but just try to put yourself in the position of someone who has listened to us. Now for two hours and is still unconvinced because they still can't shake the feeling that the incentives are such. The corruption of our institutions is such that we just can't trust the information. We've gotten, we've got a whole segment of our society.
ID that is declaring epistemological bankruptcy on some level and then turning to non-standard sources of information for their facts, you know, and as I said, I think the alternative media Wilderness is especially culpable for giving energy to this, but the truth is our institutions have failed to a remarkable degree. I mean, they have proven hypocritical or and
Capturable bye-bye crazy ideology to a degree that I would not have thought possible and I'll just give you a couple of examples here to react to know what imagine the these are in your memory, but it was at one point during the pandemic where we had something like 1,000 public health professionals who signed an open letter attesting to the the necessity of demonstrating for black lives matter protests, and how that was epidemiologically.
Find thing to do because racism is such a problem in our society. But of course, it was a terrible thing to demonstrate against lockdowns or any other sort of mass gathering on the right side of the political spectrum, that was totally irresponsible and dangerous, and guaranteed to get people killed. But lo and behold, it's safe to get out there after the killing of George, Floyd and demonstrate on mass for the right political cause. I mean, that was such a distortion.
Of Public Health messaging that. I think anyone right-of-center politically took one. Look at that and said, all right, we're done here. I don't need to hear from the Anthony fauci is of the world. If this is how they bend their scientific advice in response to woke identity politics.
Well, I don't know if Anthony fauci himself was saying it was fine. And I don't think he
was I'd I don't know if he I don't know. He signed that letter and I put that that fauci like people were
well. Yeah, but I didn't say I was publicly opposed.
Just to be very clear. So I in real time. I was saying this is insanity. The virus does not care, you know, about the Justice or non justice of your cause
it just for what are you or whether you have pink hair?
Yes, it doesn't care. And therefore I did I could not see how we had denied people. The right to visit loved ones who were dying in a hospital or funerals. Let's not forget funerals were deemed too risky at that time and that but somehow turn on a dime and say, well, you were going to sort of give a pass to or
At that time in New York. I think the governor of New York City was cracking down on Jewish weddings. Amongst the Orthodox Jews but turned around and the very same week or something. I may have bungled these facts a little bit but the saying oh, well BLM protests are. Okay. This is not rational and I was strongly opposed. Now we can talk about whether what is the actual risk from outdoor interactions? And now we have a lot more evidence. Now, a year later about the extent to which it is or is not risky to be outside, and we now know a lot more about the aerosol.
Of this pathogen, but at the time, it was inconsistent and I think deeply injurious to credibility. But this is why would tell listeners who are skeptical, try to find a voice that you trust. Try to find someone who you know, you trust about these matters and and try also to ask yourself again. I repeat what I said earlier. What evidence would just proved my beliefs, you know, if I believe that Ivermectin works or that masks are useless. What evidence could I find from? Perhaps ideally someone you trust that would make you change your mind.
Again, I think that's a crucial heuristic. But on your point on the crisis and institutions. I mean you and I have talked about some of our past conversations, for example, the collapse of higher institutions of Higher Learning in our society. Yeah. I think we're at an interesting moment in the history of our nation where the pendulum swings back and forth and I think you're right to talk about a crisis of our institutions. I think the media people are worried about, you know, the Legacy Publishers, you know, there was a time when you could have confidence in the New York Times.
Times and CBS and the evening news with Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite or whatever. And and you you had a kind of notion about the Supreme Court. Yes. Maybe they didn't rule your way but you didn't think of them as venal or is somehow being driven by their politics, perhaps and and our universities, you thought of them as perhaps is as institutions that were devoted to free expression scientific inquiry and no idea wasn't, you know, nothing was unsayable. No idea, was Unthinkable and so on and and
And and to our Public Health institutions and so on, and I think there is a moment right now. Again, the virus has struck us when we're vulnerable in this regard because I think there is a crisis for other reasons. There's a crisis of institutions in our
society. I'm just just to give you another example. Here is, I think this is more recent, but the American Medical Association has changed its guidance for doctors about how to talk to patients. And, and one point they recommend instead of referring to low income people.
I recommend that you say and this is a quote people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies. Real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods and corporations weakening the power of Labor movements among others have the highest level of heart disease, right? Yeah. So saying poor
people have high levels of heart disease specialist, sell that. Well, I mean, that's, you could even do a little, like you said an onion headline or
not. And this isn't, this is an SNL sketch.
Yeah, exactly. Maybe SNL will do it. Who knows? Yes, that's
Ridiculous. Yeah, I mean I was like shooting fish in a
barrel. There are other
examples of efforts by the way, just to be clear. I have studied the influence of those forces for decades. Like Howard is that poverty kills you and the mechanisms by which being poor is harmful to your health? And many of those things that were identified. I have looked at, for example, how for profit hospice has. I did a lot of work in the 1990s, on how for profit, hospice has had different incentives to care for the dying. The not for profit. Hospice has so I'm completely sympathetic to the workings of such.
Forces and their relevance. But to manipulate our language in that fashion is and to politicize it, 2x 2x, Auntie politicize it to like, prejudge the outcome through the manipulation of language, I think is
nuts. Yeah, and then there was a example of this included fauci in the beginning when so many people in the medical establishment. Told what was really I think considered a noble lie, but was in fact. So, you know, that was a fiasco. I mean just
You know, so it was so transparent was so ill logical. I mean, they, they basically claimed that masks don't work because they were worried about all the peepee, the run on PPE. And it would be no no and 95 masks left for doctors and healthcare workers. But, you know, if Mass don't work, why do you care that? There's going to be a run on the on the on the masks. It made no sense and it's just that alone was so damaging. That yes, it was made some people just never recovered there.
Caring about, you know, what was it? What's a valid source of information coming from the government or from CDC? That was
absolutely awful and in early April? And I was again, not in that category. I was talking about the utility of masks and home making homemade masks and and using n95 masks. I released a paper with some colleagues at Yale in April of 2020. So again, I was thankfully not in that category either. And I think that was a slip up by by fauci and and and I don't know, the reasons they did that, it may have been as you.
Suggest this sort of noble, I idea. But for those individuals who are pissed about that, I would encourage those individuals, especially if they have a political reason for being pissed to ask themselves, why are wealthy great nation didn't have PPE. Why did the president United States when warned, you know actually back in November of 2019, certainly by January certainly by February when Italy was collapsing. Why were we not manufacturing PPE? Why were we? Why did hundreds of doctors and nurses and EMTs? And
Is die from infection that they acquired in hospitals caring for the rest of us because they did not have adequate PBE, this boils my blood when I was a curly. I was I'm a hospice doctor. I was I don't see patients anymore. But in the 1990s I used to take care of people who had HIV and about a third of our patients in hospice had HIV and of course in the hospital's many had HIV. These are typically young gay men who were dying awful deaths until the invention of Highly active antiretroviral therapy in the late 90s.
We had to take risks to care for these people. We were worried that if we were drawing blood from them, we would have a needle stick injury. Some of my colleagues. Did have needle stick injuries and we would worry that you would get HIV. If they vomited on you these patients or urine or spit body. Fluids got on you you would, you would get a deadly disease and you would be infected with HIV, but we was our duty to care for these patients and we did. And we took some risk in so doing as was expected of us just like a soldier going into battle, but we
Equipment. We had masks, we had gloves, we had gowns, we had special rooms. We had two special ways of disposing for the needles to Middle minimize needle. Stick risk. And so on. So we were expected by the society to take a risk, but we were equipped by the society. To minimize that risk. This was not what happened as coronavirus crashed into our society in March of 2019 2020. We expected our doctors and nurses to take risks, but did not provide them with equipment and this was an enormous.
Normos dereliction of Duty by the Pharaoh federal government. Now, what they should. And so people who are saying why was fauci lying. They should then ask the next question. Why was Trump lying? Why did Trump not order or otherwise engineer? This wealthy Nation to produce the PPE? That we needed. In fact, I'll tell you an anecdote, because as I said earlier, I was worried about this pandemic back in February of January, and February of 2020, or I can remember precisely when but roughly in February, I decided that I should buy.
Some equipment. And I went, I live in Vermont and I went to the Home Depot in West, Lebanon, New Hampshire across the border, to buy some in 95 masks and which, you know, are often available in such places to minimize when you're dusting or sanding stuff, you know, you need this type of mask and I went there to buy it and the, I got one of these guys and one of these orange aprons and I asked him, you know, where the Mast were and he looked at me. He said, you know, we don't have any more and I said, what do you mean we don't have?
Anymore. And he said, in this West Lebanon, Home Depot that there that many Chinese people that live in this area had purchased the masks and sent them back to China. So why why was our country not able, why were other people aware of the need for this equipment and being acquiring it? And yet our country was not, you know, on the ball and Manufacturing adequate amounts of. By the way, I'm saying this, not the
Eyes, those particular individuals or demonize the Chinese. That's not my point of my story. The point of my story is that other people in other countries were aware of the utility of this equipment, but we seemingly were not. And so this was a major collapse of the federal government in my opinion that we expected healthcare workers to run these enormous risks and did not properly equip them. Incidentally, one more Point, many loved ones is a hospice doctor, we would struggle mightily so that people would not die alone having a patient. I alone was
Considered a really bad outcome. Yeah, and I have held the hand of countless people who are, otherwise, would have died alone when they died, you know, just as a doctor like sitting in their room watching and helping this person transition to death, and we had tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans during this pandemic, just like in times of Bubonic plague. I mean, literally a thousand years ago. We seemingly had not progressed in a thousand years. People dying alone because the hospitals could not spare the people.
He for their family. Yeah, so it's not just that the healthcare workers are doing the decedent died alone. What an awful thing to happen. The loved ones weren't present. These are all derelictions of Duty that can be traced back in my view to the lack of our preparedness which again can be traced back to our politicians and others. Mmm.
Yeah. There's actually reminds me of another strike against fauci. That is also not said to disparage, the Chinese people
just to be clear. I don't think so.
Thought you was responsible at all for the
lack of people. No, no. No. I just, I was coming back to, I'm just, I'm just trying to get into the heads of the people who haven't believed a word of what we just said, right for two hours. I mean, there are those people if they're still listening, they have a long list
of things. Sir. Why are we so concerned with those people
say this, some of this, some of these people have bigger podcasts than I do. I mean, it's it's incredible. Wow. I didn't know that. Okay, it's incredible. What's happened in podcast in the podcast landscape. I mean, it's okay. And some of those. Some of these people have small.
Podcast and I do, but still large podcasts that reach millions of people and they have a list of things. We have neglected. They have these, you know, articles from the preprints from some Journal that we haven't heard of that has something that we have no scandalously neglected in this conversation or there's just so many details that either look nefarious, or it within their purview are nefarious, but for the don't actually have the implications that people would want to draw from.
Them, I mean that like, I mean, what was going on a few weeks ago when it was disclosed that I think it was Pfizer, wanted their data on the kids trials, kept out of public View for the next 50 years, or sometimes. I mean what? Yeah, I so, do you tell me if you know anything about that, but all I can tell you, is that in the minds of tens of millions of Native Americans that factoid detonates, like a twenty Megaton bomb,
Right. Yes, that is just. That's all you need to hear to know, which end is up.
Yes. I understand that. And I'm actually sympathetic to that and I'm very you. And I talked about some of these topics before. I'm very high on the open expression, and full transparency. Like, I think I really believe that the cure for ignorance is light and you need to throw bright light into dark. Recesses and that includes releasing pertinent data of this kind, what I read. Was that a conglomerate or not a conglomerate large?
Up of interested parties had filed, Freedom of Information Act request with the FDA for some of these data. And the FDA said, look, we only have 10 employees to provide, all the data that's being requested and clear it in the way that has been asked would take us 50 years. So we can't do it. I hadn't heard that Pfizer itself had said no to me, that strikes me as as bad business in addition to being
maybe. Maybe I haven't, maybe I have that wrong. Maybe it was the FDA, basically saying at this rate we're not going to get into this for 50
years. Yes, and but then, I think then Pfizer could step up and say no will release it ourselves.
Why where they, you know, the think it's in their interest for people to be vaccinated in and I can see why people would say we want. Now I also think this can be a kind of turtles all the way down an infinite regress, you know, like as soon as this data are released and the conspiracy theorist, you know, there's no satisfying conspiracy theorists. So let's say they were Pfizer released the data they requested they would say, well actually, now we want to see the original Xerox copies of the original clinical charts of the 20,000 people in the, we want their names and addresses. If you don't leave the names addresses, we think you made them up like that guy. That was hockey.
In the Sandy Hook. Conspiracy that the Notions. Yeah. What an awful human being? What a disgusting, a disgusting human being profiting off the murder of other people's children. I mean, you know that this is ridiculous. But you know, like, even if you showed this guy video and you showed him death certificates, he said no, I still don't believe it. I mean, it's some point you say well, you know, excuse my language, but fuck off, you know, there's this no, you know, there's no way to, you know, to satisfy such individuals, but I do agree that some accommodation for people's curiosity and inquisitiveness.
Suspicion needs to be made in a society such as ours.
Yes. Yeah, so so, but in this vein again, back to foul cheese, besmirched reputation,
the I hold fauci in high regard. I have to say, I mean, Tony, I don't know him personally. I've never met him. I've read a lot of his papers. I actually had read his papers before covid. He was fouled. She was writing about respiratory pandemics. When I was in in high school and I followed some of his work on HIV, you know, as a as a politician is a leader of as the leader of the
Well Institute of allergy and infectious diseases, I was aware of some of his work with HIV, you know, in the 1990s and there's a lot of history that's been written about his response to the HIV. The AIDS activists and and how they came to be friends and so on. And I think he was a little slow in responding to them, but ultimately did the right thing. And, you know, I generally, I generally think highly of him, right? But what if I recognize some of the recognize, some of the slip-ups non-trivial slip-ups that you're discussing the yeah, to table this for
the
There. I think the biggest Mark against him at the moment is the lab leak hypothesis and what, and the sort of stonewalling he'd
led the Senators are. No, I don't agree with that. That I think is unfair. I think that from what I've seen these far-right Senators that are trying to suggest that fauci wanted to give American dollars to Chinese scientists to deliberately weaponize coronavirus. That's
ridiculous. Well, yeah. Well, I'm not sure that's the shape of the
claim, but it was just the claim that we had given money to weave, the William lab that that was used for gain-of-function research. And then he was in that in that exchange with Rand Paul. He was lawyer in the language and he had a very clintonian, you know, it depends. What the meaning of is is approach no language around, gain of function, which drove a lot of people crazy. I mean, that all the whole whole left-of-center commentariat, ruled, Rand, Paul to be adjusted, an embarrassing ignoramus there. But in most
Of America versus are certainly much of America. It seemed obvious that that foul. She was just not acknowledging the plain meaning of gain-of-function.
Well, okay. So first of all, I followed this a little but I mean, I've not seen every video clip. I've not seen every statement. I have not, I have seen some of Ron Johnson and I have seen some of Rand Paul. I've seen some clips and I honestly don't think those guys are I think they're being completely disingenuous, and it's also implausible on its face that the, that an American in his 80s, the
The leader of the Nationalist of allergy and infectious diseases is happily providing money to the Chinese to do gain-of-function research. That's the wrong framing of
what you know, that I think the Reid gave a real allegation would be that he's that it was done. However, advertently or inadvertently and he's just
covering we had put
this in
Partnership. We had Partnerships with Chinese Laboratories, which by the way, if we hadn't blown those up, we'd be in a better position right now to know where the virus came from.
Now I'm not, I don't know, all these facts. Exactly right. But my understanding is that the federal government gave some grants to the Eco Health Alliance. This entity in New York, which had been partnering with Chinese scientists to collect coronavirus has in caves in China. I think roughly, that's what was happening, but it's to our advantage. Imagine if we had had a big Archive of bat coronavirus has somewhere in the United States right now and to end. And the way Trump defunded that on the looking for like, some kind of a
Whipping Boy is actually was injury as I understand. The fact pattern was injury as to our country because we pulled the rug out from a partnership with Chinese scientists at the precise moment. When that partnership would have been most useful to us to actually lay our hands on virus that would have allowed us to figure out where this covid-19 were SARS. Kobe to came from. So it is to our nation's credit that we have a commitment to science and scientific inquiry and that we we think that science.
Can be a political and that we have Partnerships with Scientists around the world, who are even during the day, even during our competition, with Russia during the nuclear arms race, the American government, and the Russian government, encouraged physicist, to talk to each other. So that there would be these back-channel communications that were a political between scientists. So I added to suddenly take this and make it into something. Nefarious, is I think just I just
for me, I think so. I think that with respect to the lab leak iPod.
Offices. I mean my view of it has always been. It was always plausible just because of the nature of the case. I mean, you've got the coronavirus lat. You've got the bat coronavirus lab right next to the, the epicenter of this outbreak, but it was, it never seemed important to figure out at the beginning because we had that the genome sequence of the virus. We know what we have to vaccinate against and, but we obviously, we need to figure this out eventually because we don't want any more lab leaks.
So the thing that seemed truly crazy making and obnoxious at a minimum was the political pressure coming from the other side to say that to rule out the lab leak hypothesis as a racist thought crime against the
Chinese. Yeah. That's also BS. I think I think if I had to guess I of the of the of the two possibilities, we're discussing here. The so-called zoonotic leap that it was a natural move from from animals, too.
To humans or The Accidental lab leak Theory. I still think there's oh, not asleep is more likely, but I absolutely do not exclude the lab League Theory and the Chinese have done themselves. No credit by their secrecy and their lack of transparency. Now again, however, In fairness to the Chinese, if the Chinese government was demanding that they come to Fort Detrick to inspect our Labs. We also would be quite unhappy with that possibility. Yeah. I think if it was a lab leak, the Chinese have a lot to answer for not only for the
But instead of that resulted in the league, but also the cover up your which, you know, is not ideally the way our nation would function. There was a another famous example of this, I think in the 70s of an Anthrax leak in Russia, which actually was a lab leak and it was covered up. Actually, I think by American scientists as well and then I don't know the story. Exactly. There's a couple of books written about this, but I'm used to know the story. I just don't remember it right now, at the level of accuracy. I want to be heard by however, many hundreds of thousands of people are hearing us right now.
This far into our conversation, but I want to say, they're all very angry. They're all faculty. Yeah, what's right? Exactly, but I but but, but I, but I, but on the on the lab leak, I do want to say a couple things. My lab has done, my own lab has done a little work on this topic earlier. I talked to you, about how we had this phone data about movement of people. 11 million people transiting through Han in January and we published a paper in the journal Nature. In April of 2020, very quickly into the pandemic that showed that we could forecast.
Timing intensity and location of the epidemic in China simply based on human Mobility patterns alone. And a few months ago, it occurred to me. And I, actually, I have this in the paperback version of my book. I put in this analysis, in the afterward. It occurred to me that we could use these data to reason backwards, not just for words and Trace back. When would be the likeliest time that the first patient that was infected with coronavirus could have left Wuhan. And I date that we call this, I call this
Patient, zero Prime. So, this is not the first person to be infected. This is the first person who left Wuhan and that date is November 1st. So already by November first, the virus was at certain was circulating. And then if you make some further assumptions, based on what's known about the epidemiology of the virus, it suggests that patient zero. The first person to be infected, probably occurred closer to October 1st. So this, you know, I am interested in the origins of the virus in my own laboratory, has done some work on this. I
I think if I had to guess eventually we will We may know, you know, there's increasing evidence, very good scientists on both sides of this. I don't want to say both sides because that makes it like a political debate. It's not a debate. There's evidence accruing and support of both hypotheses. The lab leak hypothesis and the zoonotic leap, and eventually, I think we will have a corpus of evidence that allows us to make an educated guess as to the most likely thing. I should say. One thing. We left hanging from part of our conversation, maybe an hour ago. Now, is this issue of the
The inter pandemic interval. We earlier we talked about how serious pandemics may be coming more frequently. What's the evidence for that? Well most listeners will be aware of the fact that even in our own lifetimes. There have been many zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic means a disease circulating and animals that comes to humans. HIV is a simian immunodeficiency. Virus was in monkeys. Came to us Ebola we hear about Ebola outbreaks. Zika virus hantavirus SARS one in 2003 these happen and there is evidence.
Is
that there was a nice paper published in nature about 10 years ago. Now, approximately or approximately that that showed that if you look at zoonotic diseases by decade,
we're getting more and more and more
of them as Each decade goes by. And part of the reason for that actually, believe it or not, connects This Global threat of pandemics, do the other great Global threat of our time, which is climate change that with climate change. We're seeing increasing motion of people encroaching on the territory of animals, and also animals their territories being destroyed by climate change.
If they come in contact with us, so we have more and more contact between humans and wild animals and therefore more and more of these zoonotic, you know leaves that are happening. First point, second point, if you look at the inter pandemic interval the time interval and this is stochastic. I mean, there's no it's not like these new respiratory pandemics occur, like clockwork. They just occur roughly every 10 or 20 years, but it could be every year could be every 30 years or some variation. The serious ones used to occur every 50 to 100 years, but
Is some evidence that that's narrowing, so it's possible that we could have another pandemic not in 50 or 100 years, but in let's say 5 or 10 or 20 years. And here's the thing that I think people need to understand that is Coronavirus is it's actually pandemic. Light it only feels about 1% of the people that infects. Just imagine. Just imagine if this Vienna and in The lethality of the virus is an intrinsic property of the virus. It kills one percent of the people in effect, but
Imagine if this virus had killed 10 or 30 percent. There are other coronavirus is, like, MERS Middle Eastern, respiratory syndrome. That kills 30% of the people that infected if that had happened, we would have been facing a Bubonic plague like Black Death, type situation in the 21st century in the richest nation, the world has ever known. And it would be like, in the movie Contagion, for example, which is a fantastic movie. A one out of three people dying. And so, and, and I don't think people fully understand how we've kind of
Almost bad as it has been with kind of dodged a bullet. And this is why Republican and Democratic administrations for decades. Have rightly seen respiratory pandemics as a national security threat and why we need to take them, seriously, why we should have taken this one even more seriously than we did. And why we need to continue to take this seriously and prepare for for the future. So it's not to have to suffer like this again.
Yeah. Well, that's that brings up a point that I want to talk about. We are in this Wormhole of time dilation.
Where what I thought was going to take 15 minutes. It's taken two and a half hours. So now we're now we're on to the topic. I wanted to address with you at minute 16, which is to the point. You just raised If This Were a way, this is a dress rehearsal, for a worst pandemic, which is, you know, more or less inevitable. At some point. I'm very worried that we have learned some of the wrong lessons here. And I think one lesson, we learned at least in the United States about which there seems to
You know, almost a consensus is that lockdowns don't work. No, I don't agree with that. I mean, that's it. Like you'd be amazed at. Yeah, if you if you if you ever turn on your computer and get on the internet and I
do I just don't appear to spend. I don't appear to be in the dark
reaches is ready to.
I mean sometimes a dark reaches find me Sam, as I know they find you but but I don't go looking
for I am surrounded by people who think lockdowns don't work and I mean,
So there's two ways to make this claim
true. There's huge amount of
scientific evidence of his quotes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's what I want to get to but there's two things that could be claimed here. You could be claiming that for some truly mysterious and magical reason, lockdowns don't work like you you successfully locked down and still the virus spreads. Well if it's
spread through the water, if it's if it rained down from the heavens, that could be the case or was spread by an insect Vector, for example, exactly from household to household.
But in this case in here,
Respiratory virus. We know that's not the case. If you have. People actually are not commingling. If you actually managed to lock down for a month or six weeks at the outside for a virus like this. Yes. That your, you can quash it. But so the second claim which is apparently
true in the I don't think that's I don't think that's true. Either. If you're saying that there are people who argue that. If we had just all gone home for six weeks at the beginning, we would have killed this thing. I don't think that's true. I think it would have the virus would
Have escaped our Dragnet and we'd still be look, what's happening in China or even in New
Zealand was well, you know, so the here's the second claim, which I think is the more accurate one, which is, given just the nature of people and the, and the, the imperfect nature of any lock down, no matter how Draconian you can't fully lock down and people are just not going to comply. And and the United States we seem to have 300 million people who really were not going to comply.
And therefore, what you're calling a lockdown is never really a lockdown. But well, the Counterpoint to that is when you look at Australia and when you look at New Zealand, their level of excess mortality during covid is nothing like our own trivial it. They simply didn't have excess more correct, during cold.
That's right. That is right. And what they, if they now vaccinate their entire population, 50 years from now, those countries will be seen as models. Now, In fairness, New Zealand is a rich Island. Yeah, and Iceland and
The United Kingdom, you know, they weren't as able to implement this strategy. But yes, you know, I, that's right. It would be seen as an incredible Victory. They kept our population, secure. They waited till the vaccine was available. They vaccinate everyone and they had a minimal loss of life, and they are having minimal loss of life and that is admirable. But another point of confusion on this lockdown thing is people, the word is used very sloppily for me. Lockdown, is stay-at-home orders or business closure orders, but there are many other steps short of that.
That are effective for examples closing schools or Banning Gatherings or or minimizing the size of gatherings or or core or curfews, where we say? Okay, you can only be out from you know, 92 a.m. To 10 p.m. Or whatever. They're, they're all kinds of procedures. The Government Can Implement to reduce social mixing. By the way, sometimes those procedures have paradoxical effects, which make things worse, like, like curfews, for example, as I just mentioned, can actually sometimes make things worse by making buying
increasing the density and stores. So so these are all complicated things that need to be thought through and worked out and modeled and experimented with in so on. But
and also you don't do any other things like close the beaches. When you're, when you're talking about a total Erica, we know where outdoor transmission is is greatly reduced. You force people into their boxes and you tell them they can't go to beaches or part. Yes.
Yes, that was dumb. And in fact, we had a paper on on on that on that we published. I forgot where I think on the Atlantic. We just had a little kind of cute little study.
About why every time it was they were talking about about lockdowns that or mass Gatherings. They showed photographs of beaches which was just stupid. That's the least risky place. But anyway, so the thing is when people talk about lockdowns, what they don't understand is they say lot, some people say lockdowns are ineffective, but what they mean by that is that the studies show that after you have closed the schools and close to stores then ordering people to stay. Home is no longer additionally effective. But basically you've functionally implemented a lockdown.
Way, you know, you thinned out the movement of people dramatically, short, of ordering, everyone home. And also, those same people who decry lockdowns are. Also the people who say, well, they don't want to wear masks, and this is not sensible. Like, if you really want to avoid lockdowns. Okay, then do your part, you know where your mass get
vaccinated. These are people don't want vaccinations either. So well, they don't want anything, but that's
immature. I mean, that is that is like, saying, you know, I wish it is. I wish, you know, it's like that scene in Lord of the Rings. When, when when Gandalf is talking to
Forgot its Frodo or somebody. He says, you know, we all wish that did we did live in such awful times, but what can we do? Yes, I wish I wasn't having to cope with a respiratory pandemic. That's a once-in-a-century event. And I imagine the young men that fought on the beaches of Normandy, wish that the world war hadn't taken place when they were young men either. But that's when they happen to be alive. And so it's just immature to pretend, like, nothing is happening, know, the world has changed. There's a new pathogen in our midst. It's like radioactive fallout. It's just there. And so we have to take
Some action to respond to it. You we can debate, how to take the least. De least in Juris action, we can debate, which actions do or do not work, which are effective. Are they worth the cost? All of those are legitimate questions but to somehow want to pretend like we don't have to do anything, you know, we can have our cake and eat it too. Is not in my view, befitting a great nation. It's not befitting an educated citizenry or the kind of civilization that I think we
have. All right. So so on that point in terms of what we should be doing.
In and or not doing at the moment. Where do you come out on vaccine mandates? Various flavors?
I think, I mean, I think it's totally fine to have vaccine mandates. In fact, I think I would say I'm in favor of them. Now. I also recognize that we live in a plural democracy and they're people who will disagree with me. And, you know, for example, I don't think there should I, if I could, I would ban the private ownership of weapons, but I realized that I'm in the minority.
Rarity here and that many Americans want to bear arms and they use those arms responsibly and that we have at least some kind of constitutional right to bear arms. And you know that I live in a plural democracy and I live with others, fellow citizens who have different beliefs about different things. And so we kind of have to compromise and tolerate each other. So, on the one hand, I would be in favor of mandates. On the other hand. I realize that there are people who will refuse to get vaccinated. I do not think such people should be put in prison. Okay. I don't think that that we should send the Army to their door.
Work and say well there's a law that you have to be vaccinated. And now we're going to arrest you. Okay, that's not what I'm saying. But I do think we can say, you know, you are non vaccination is in fact posing a risk to the rest of us just like we can can script you in time of War which we the state reserves the right to do that. The state reserves the right to commandeer factories to manufacture stuff in time of War. We reserved a lot of rights as a collective. We are going to mandate vaccinations and if you refuse well, it'll be harder for you. You know, you maybe you can't fly or
You can't go to restaurants or whatever, you know, it's more difficult for you, we're, but again to be. So I would say that I think that requiring people to be vaccinated as we have, by the way, for four decades, for all kinds of childhood immunizations. We provide for some exceptions for people, of course, who have medical exceptions, we provide for, and we should with coronavirus. We have some religious exceptions if there was I haven't seen a legitimate religious objection to coronavirus vaccinations, but maybe there is one. Maybe we should all tolerate such individuals but
Very few in number. I would not get personal belief exemptions for vaccine mandates. I don't think that's a credible way to run a society. That's something. Which would you
have an exemption,
which I have an aggressive belief exemption to pay my taxes. I mean, that's not a saw, how we run a society.
Would you give an exemption for natural immunity? If someone can prove that
they, yes, I would go there. I think I would now we touched on earlier. I think I in some, from an individual perspective. Yes, but from a public of Public Health perspective. We might not wish to do that for, at least two reasons. First of all, we've already established.
Established that being vaccinated in addition to being naturally exposed to Superior and for transmission. And for the person being infected and second, the difficulty in ascertaining, whether someone truly had had the infection May mean that it's easier for us to, you know, just mandate vaccination for everyone. Mmm. Just like we have other public policies that were we say, you know, we can't sort out who he is or is not supposed to do such a thing, you know, some teenagers may be able to drink responsibly and some not, but we don't Implement a policy of saying, okay.
If you're a straight-A student, you can buy alcohol. And if you're not, you can't buy alcohol. No, we just say, if your teenager you can't buy alcohol. So so, you know, we may not want to have Complex public policies. So while I would certainly talk about and it's not unreasonable to imagine that people who've survived, the infection should not have to get vaccinated. I think that would not be a crazy thing to discuss or even to implement generally speaking. I would be in favor of mandated vaccinations and again with the idea, not being, we will arrest people or something but
Well, I don't think healthcare workers should be able to perform their duties without being vaccinated. When you go to the doctor, you don't expect the doctor to infect you with his disease. That was that's that's the opposite of what you expect. When you go to a doctor. I think that Hospital systems that mandate that their employees be vaccinated are well within their rights and and they should do
that. Yeah. Yeah. I have not understood. Wow. How we can't have hospitals and other places where Healthcare is dispensed. Just made that the the idea that we have 23
Healthcare workers currently
I have accept that I've seen a lot of cases recently where there was some resistance and various Hospital systems, but in the end only 100 or 200 people simply refuse to get vaccinated and you know, we're let go most of the time. What I've seen is that when the when those things have been implemented, they have been effective. The same with a military, by the way, I never understood the argument in the military because you know, if you can order people to battle and they run run the risk of being shot and dying. Why you?
Can't order them to be vaccinated
and well, the subtext of, you know, if
the and that in fact, the military now that the vaccines have been approved Army, Chief said you're in the Army. Now you're getting vaccinated, you know, it's not, it's not battle-ready. You can't have outbreaks on ships or an air fields or in the front lines of disease when you're trying to fight a war. So no we vaccinate you. That's what we do,
but the subtext to all of the controversy here, the fact that people think it's an extreme imposition.
To mandate a vaccine in this case is the belief that there's something extraordinarily concerning about these vaccines. Right? Like the you really are and supposedly the
objection. Is that really what people are saying? They're saying, you are trying to give me something dangerous or though you are there saying you are trying to give me something against my will.
Well, there's that. And then there's this bodily, autonomy argument, but it does seem anchored to a belief here.
What you get in this. Again? This is Wild West
space but
no crazy, crazy and dangerous blow vation that you'll get people saying. Listen. I am not anti-vaxxers. I have had all of my standard vaccines and my kids got vaccinated. I'm not one of these. We do, huh? Yoga pant wearing wackos who is against vaccines but because because anti-vaxxers used to be
primarily on the left, right? That's right. Wing at the factors kind of a new phenomena.
God. Yeah, but for these vaccines in particular, the MRNA vaccines, that's where I draw the
line. Well, then get the get the Chinese. Get the sign of a course. I know Farm vaccine which are inactivated virus, vaccines old technology, like many other vaccines. You got get
three or even Johnson & Johnson, right? It's
well, Johnson Johnson said is a new identity virus Vector. What they do is they took the the AstraZeneca. I think took a chimpanzee cold virus, which sounds really weird. But actually
doesn't sound good. Yeah,
it doesn't sound good.
But it's actually smart because we're not really affected by chimpanzee. Virus is like your dog can be sick in your house, right? You don't get the, you don't get the sickness that your dog has because that virus is optimized to infect dogs, not humans. So giving you a chimpanzee virus is just a way of Trends transmitting that has been genetically modified to express the spike protein on its surface. You mount an immune response against the spike protein, and you just use the so-called adenovirus vector or the Johnson & Johnson uses a human in a mild human cold virus. That's been weakened even more.
And then they add the spike protein to it and then you that's how they deliver it. Those are relatively new technologies. The the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca identifiers. Although we have more of more precedent for those and we did for the MRNA vaccines. But like I said, the Sputnik vaccine, the Russian vaccine, the Chinese axioms. Those are based on older technology, if you want those. Get those right? What's right? What's your answer to
that? If you're opposed to, well, I can only imagine that would be hard to do if one were willing, but I'm sure in this case. They're not not willing. Yes.
So to bring this home because now we're hitting the three hour mark and, you know, we're now talking 25 people who already but it was and it's whizzed. It's with
him. Hi, Sam. Three hours of whispah. At least for me. I won't say, for
you or the listeners. Know it's, it's been great. What? So given all the way said, and given just the experience, we've had over the last. Now, coming up on up to two years. Almost, what would you expect in the case?
Of a much more dangerous and lethal virus. And let's say, we had the tentative or worse version hit us. Two years from now what we have demonstrated that we can produce vaccines very quickly. I've come to think that we're sort of, in The Uncanny Valley here, with respect to pandemics, where it's just, not, as you said, it's not dangerous enough to really a nullify all political controversy. I got a think that if 10% of people or
20% of people were dying from covid. We wouldn't be having this conversation. I
think that's right.
People would just be getting
vaccinated. Yes. I think that's exactly right. And I think, like I said, this virus was deadly enough to cause us harm but not deadly enough for for us to take it. Sufficiently. Seriously. I think that if the next respiratory pandemic happens within our lifetimes or within 30 or 40 or 50 years, we will do better. But if it happens more than that, it'll be like people will forget and this is
By the way, plagues have been a part of the human experience and our ancestors. Try to warn us. They plagues are in the Bible there in Shakespeare there. In The Iliad the the beginning of the beginning of the Iliad, the oldest work of Western literature begins with a plague. Its Apollo Paulo's Arrow brings down the plague upon the Greeks laying Siege to Troy. So our ancestors tried to warn us about this Human Experience. This awful thing known as a plague. They put it in our religious traditions.
Since they put in our literary traditions and yet we didn't heed the warning of our ancestors and partly. This is the did I contrast this with the example with hurricanes? So the residents of districts of parsley and states that are afflicted by hurricanes? When the meteorologist forecast, a hurricane that people get watch the TV. They see the radar images. They know what to do when they take it. Seriously. Because hurricanes come every year or two or three years, bad ones, every 10 or 20 years people remember, and they take it seriously, but something that happens at a time, interval of every 50 to 100 years out of human memory.
A tends to be forgotten. This is part of the whole denial problem. We discussed earlier. So if the next pandemic occurs within the next 10 or 20 or 30 years, I think we will do better. We'll take it more. Seriously, they'll be lot of people that remember, this covid-19 and pay attention. And furthermore. As you mentioned. The world has changed in another way. I rarely am triumphal list about medicine there. I can count on one or or two hands the number of medical advances. I think have radically improved human. Wellbeing, you know, penicillin.
Is in that category, insulin is in that category. Cat-scans are in that category. Aspirin is in that category, but also in this category are mRNA vaccines. I think this is a radical new technology that our descendants when faced with plagues will have at their disposal a tool such that they can effectively and in real-time build a defense. So I think a future present, United States. Might say we have detected a new pathogen. It's serious. We're going to lock.
On for four months, while our pharmaceutical companies make a vaccine and mint and make hundreds of millions of Doses. And then we're going to efficiently distribute it to you all and we're going to minimal loss of life. That is a realistic potential future. And I think people might be more willing to tolerate such a response in such a Civic, a common Civic purpose, given this new technology that's
available. Hmm. And finally, what are you expecting over the next year or two or three? And
When do we get out of pandemic mode with respect to covid and get into the The New Normal of endemic illness? Because I got to assume the the possibility of getting rid of covid. Isn't isn't exactly. No one's mind.
No, we're not going to get rid of covid for the reasons we discussed earlier. I, you know, I discussed this a little in the book like the phases of a respiratory pandemic. The immediate phase the intermediate phase in the post. Pandemic phase. We're going to enter the intermediate phase as I had forecast.
In 2022, when we're going to reach herd immunity pretty much everyone in our country will either be vaccinated or infected and will have acquired immunity that way and then then coronavirus will become endemic. It will circulate it won't be eradicated will still kill people, but the numbers will drop and it'll sort of become like, another flu. That'll be bad. But it'd be kind of in the background. This is what happens with respiratory pandemics. And then we're gonna have a period of time in which we're coping with the aftershocks, where all the kids that
Miss school, all the workers that lost their jobs, that kind of the great resignation, all the rejiggering of our economy. The the debts that we were gonna have to start to figure out how to repay our debts, or maybe inflation because of the money, the government borrowed and so on those aftershocks. And then I think that will last for a couple of years until 2024 or so. And then, I think we'll enter a kind of post pandemic period. A kind of Roaring 20s of the 21st century similar to The Roaring Twenties of the 20th century where finally, we will put the plague behind us where we
You know, people will feel like we survived, you know, we, let's party. So I think, I think that's sort of what's going to happen. We're going to have, as I said earlier, another wave next winter. And eventually, this will Tamp down the the clinical impact will Tamp down soon within a year, and the epidemiological impact will Tamp down, but then we're going to have to deal with the psychological and social and economic aftershocks. And then those will eventually recede. And we'll see the other side of this as our ancestors did. Who also
So confronted serious
plagues, and I think they're expecting to need a booster every year indefinitely Or do you think? So you get a whole class of coronavirus nullifying
vaccine? Yeah. So I think I think that I think that the forecast I just made depends sensitively on whether we see the emergence of new vaccine evading strains of the virus. The worst thing that could happen to us. Now would be that the virus we would have mutants of the virus which were much more deadly. Let's say kill ten percent of the people said of
Percent or fully evaded the vaccine if that were to happen. We would be back at square one. Yeah, I think the probability of that happening, a kind of tail risk event is between one and ten percent. I think it's unlikely to happen, but it's possible and that would be awful really calamitous if that were to happen where if we had a fully vaccine evading strain, which Omicron does not appear to be or if we had a much more lethal strain of the virus, which only corn is not. So now Des will rise from Omicron not because each
In if infected with Omicron is more likely to die than if infected with Delta. No deaths will rise because the number of people infected who's going to be much larger because Omicron is so much more spreadable and has some capacity for immune Escape. So we are going to see a bump. The United States is going to lag Europe by about three or four or five weeks. So we should watch what's happening in Europe in terms of deaths and their response because that's going to come to this country. So so the general overarching forecast I gave I think is
It's going to be what happens unless we have the emergence of something. That's not on me. Grunts something that's fully vaccine evading, which I don't think Omicron is but we don't know for sure yet or much deadlier, which I don't think Omicron is but we don't know for sure yet. If that happens. Then we're back at square one and so on, on the boosters, I think if you've had two shots, you should get a booster. I got my booster. I think that's quite sensible. There's evidence that it will be helpful, including against Army Grand. And I think that there's a good possibility that we will
I'll have to get coronavirus shots in some time interval between every year like we do for flu and every 10 years that we do for tetanus. So I can imagine a future in which every three to five years you get go to your doctor and you get a coronavirus shot that you know is updated for the latest strains of the virus.
Right? Right. Well, I can't help but notice that with a last name like christakis. You're well positioned to pronounce the name of each Newberry Omicron.
I choked when they first when they first said they were using the Greek alphabet, which only has 24 letters. I was like, this is not enough. You know, we're going to we should have used the Cambodia now for the Khmer. Alphabet. I think says seventy four letters because we're going to run out of letters. And then there was also this whole political thing where they skipped from they skipped the Greek letter c.
Yeah, right. Because it because yeah. Yeah. She x
i which looks like the Chinese weirdest. Yeah. Yeah. What a
Cupid thing, you know, like we're gonna offend the Chinese leader because we happen to use a Greek letter. You know, me just oh, and they also skip new and you because it would be the new strain. It was sound like people would confuse it with any W. I think they should have just stuck with, then. It wouldn't be called, only going to be called something else. Anyway,
thank you. Sam has been great talking to you likewise. Thanks again for all your time. And again, your book is Apollo's Arrow, which is out in paperback and audio, Etc. Always great to talk to you necklace.
Until next time. Yeah, exactly.
Thanks, man. I'll talk to you
later.
