Ask Dr. Drew - Are COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates & Lockdowns Unethical? Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Speaks – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 65

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya believes it's unethical to mandate COVID-19 vaccines and that lockdowns were a “devastating public health mistake.” [This episode originally aired on November 24, 2021] Dr. Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Follow him at https://twitter.com/DrJbhattacharya  Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). SPONSORS • BLUE MICS – After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew’s iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don’t need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue’s lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew’s Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue  • HYDRALYTE – “In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market.” Dr. Drew recommends Hydralyte’s easy-to-use packets of fast-absorbing electrolytes. Learn more about Hydralyte and use DRDREW25 at checkout for a special discount at https://drdrew.com/hydralyte  • ELGATO – Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato’s Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew’s streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato’s lights transformed Dr. Drew’s set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/  THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, we are delighted to have Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in here, professor of medicine at Stanford University. He is a physician, but he is known for research where he's a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spoli Institute. His research typically is focused on economics of healthcare, but he's had some important things to say about our approach to this pandemic. And I had the opportunity to interview him once before, and I'm so fascinated to hear how his point of view has changed and progressed. And I look very forward to this conversation.

Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f***'s sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals.

Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Anyone who's watched me over the years knows that I'm obsessed with Hydrolyte. In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market. I literally use it every day.

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make a great-tasting drink, has 75% less sugar than your typical sports drink, uses all-natural flavors, gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free, non-GMO, and even vegan. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity is also now available in ready-to-drink bottles at the Walmart next to the pharmacy, or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolite.com slash drdrew. Again, that is h-y-d-r-a-l-y-t-e dot com slash d-r-d-r-e-w. Be sure to use the code drdrew25 for a special discount. Dr. Bhattacharya, thank you for joining me. Thanks, Dr. Rook. Nice to be here. So let's start out with that. Last time I talked to you, there was a lot of head shaking.

Like, how did we get here? What's going on? Why did we make the choices we made? Concerns about some of the choices. And again, some of the positions have been sort of extreme, even coming up to the present moment. And there's a lot of continued head shaking. I've had people, I've interviewed people like Arthur Kaplan, who was very actively involved in advising some of the policy positions. Arthur's a medical ethicist at Hopkins or NYU. And he said, I said, you know, why did they make these

decisions? He said, oh, oh, it was panic. It was panic. I thought, wow, that is the worst possible answer. If we're making medical decisions based on panic, I am gravely, gravely concerned. And I continue to be concerned that that panic has become a guiding principle in the public health decision making uh where where do you see things today let's start with for instance wherever you like we can do lockdowns you know mandates of vaccines masking and children pick your poison why don't we start with lockdowns because uh they're starting to come back uh in places all through Europe, actually. The lockdowns did not work. We should start with that.

If you, what you want to think about is, did they slow, stop the spread of the disease? Obviously, it's failed. It's failed basically everywhere. It's, you know, even places where there was supposed to be success, like Australia and New Zealand, the disease is there.

What they have done is cause absolutely catastrophic damage to the health of the population everywhere they've been tried. So there was a story just the other last week that there were 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses in the United States. That's a lockdown death. That is a lockdown death. That is a lockdown death. How dare you say that? Yeah, at least the acceleration of overdose deaths. We've gone from, what, 70 to 100 over the course of the pandemic, I'd say. Yeah, I agree. And by the way, the slope is quite, it's asymptotic. It's actually asymptotic. It's not just a stable slope. It's accelerating. If you look at the data, it's like it coincides with the institution of the lockdown in March or March of last year.

I mean, it starts that steep slope. You know, people got depression plays an important role in those kinds of overdoses and the acceleration of it, as you say. And, you know, the last time around in 2008 during the financial collapse, we had these deaths of despair. Well, what are these? I mean, the lockdowns, the panic that the lockdowns caused are leading to these deaths of despair. Women are now coming in with breast cancer at later stages that should have been picked up last year because we skipped mammograms. That's true for men and women for colon cancer. We're seeing catastrophic learning

loss for children, especially poor children. That's where I'm concerned. That's the bigger issue, I think, on the long durée, so to speak, because we are particularly the underserved and particularly people who are typically underserved are being grotesquely underserved. And I would call it a racist policy because clearly there's a systemic racist component to this. Why people who are concerned about these things don't call that out, I don't understand. But okay. But it's going to create poverty. It's going to create, you know, also when I look, by the way,

so there's one thing that was the educational disparities and the poverty that's going to create but the second thing when you look at the data of 8 to 15 year olds and their anxiety depression scales it's going crazy it's off the chain and so we also so we have mental health crisis on top of developmental educational crises i'll let you comment i mean it's the biggest contributors to to inequality since i mean you can pick your segregation i mean it's it is devastating right in fact it's the biggest contributors to inequality since, I mean, you can pick your segregation. I mean, it is devastating, right? In fact, that's the dirty secret of lockdowns, right? So how do lockdowns actually work in real practice? In theory, it's like, oh, we all stay apart and we stop the disease.

In practice, what it is is a certain class of people, they get protected. I can work from home, but someone's making my food. Someone's delivering it to me. Someone's delivering the Amazon boxes. Someone's keeping society going. Well, that's like 70% of the population, the working class, where the lockdown just exposes them, right? And harms them. And for schools, it was public schools that closed preferentially in California. Private schools, many of them stayed open. Richer parents got tutors to replace. They got pods to replace. Poor kids basically had to suffer. And you're absolutely right. The long-term consequences are terrible, right? So you don't

just have schooling loss and you have nothing comes out of it. The kid doesn't learn how to read. Well, that has a knock-on effect that lasts a very long time. They're not so resilient that we can catch up very easily. And this, this, this will lead to shorter lives for these kids poor because there'll be poor. I think these are, these are the kind of like second order effects that you would think about as if you weren't panicked and yet we we keep panicking whenever we see cases go up right yes so so what is wrong with our public health professionals or their training and by the way the astonishing thing to me is it's not just the united states it seems to be public health you know practitioners all over the globe at least on Western globe, that they seem unable to make a risk-reward

analysis. Unable. So I guess my big question is, what's wrong with them? And why did they go back to lockdowns? I mean, I think part of this is policy hysteresis, by which I mean, like, once you've stuck yourself into a path, it's really hard to get off of the path, right? So Arthur Kaplan's right. We panicked in March of 2020. And then the panic resulted in lockdowns, which didn't solve the problem. And there are people with big egos, lots of power that say, well, you know, I can't admit I was wrong. And, you know, they also have, they're blind to the second order effects. That's pretty clear. They're blind to the harms, these collateral harms of the lockdowns. And so they just keep doing it. They're in power and they won't let go. And that's true.

All through Europe, we're seeing Austria has had this lockdown. We're seeing lockdowns reimposed everywhere in response to the case rises, even though last year they did very little to actually stop very much of the spread of the disease. And there's a sort of a pragmatic piece of this, I think, that might change the direction of these people that can't change direction or admit they're wrong, which is that when they really see what Abraham Lincoln used to call the public mind, when the public mind really turns against them, then they start worrying about their job. Then maybe they'll change directions. Well, I think there is some hope around that front. So like the election in Virginia, I believe, centered,

I mean, everyone talked about CRT. I actually think it was school closures was the fundamental thing. Because regular people, not involved with politics, their kids skipped, I think Virginia had the seventh most missed school days in 2020 2021 seventh most in the country um so it's not surprised that parents in Virginia said what the heck these people that have made a commitment to to educating my kids failed in that commitment. I mean, and you look around, you see, you know, Florida had all its kids in school all year with basically the, you know, the same results as far as COVID is concerned,

but much better results for the kids. So I can, I completely. Why can't we look at that? Why can't anybody admit that? Wait, wait, you said something publicly just now that is, is anathema. It's's it's a sad it's uh uh what what should we call that uh you're a sinner what's what do we call it when you're when people get off the uh the uh that we oh crap i can't think of the language for this but it's religious language really why can't you't you talk? What is it? I'm a heretic. Apostate. You're an apostate. That's the word I was looking for. You're an apostate. How dare you say that about Florida? That's impossible. How dare you? I mean, it's actually stunning, right? You look at the data. Florida's been through four big

COVID waves. California's been through three big COVID waves. The age-adjusted death rate from Florida and California are almost identical from COVID deaths. The excess death rates, by excess deaths, I mean, you look at how many deaths there were from 2015 to 2019, and that's your baseline. How many deaths above and beyond that were there in 2020, 2021 in Florida versus California? It's almost identical. Florida and California have had the same number of excess deaths. So what have we gained from this 18 months of panic in California, whereas Florida has been free.

Their unemployment rate's 4%, ours is seven. Their kids were in school 100%. Our kids skipped more or less a full, almost a full 180 days. I mean, like maybe they went in for 10 days. We have got, our businesses are crushed. Our health services on other health priorities have been skipped. What did we gain from this?

I mean, honestly, what did we gain? I'm actually, I think you're right. It's going to be the people that pull us out of this not the elite are you is somebody doing research to post post-mortem this to really publish data and in peer-reviewed settings to to really address these questions yeah that's that's starting to happen so i i'm working with a group in the uk it's a charity actually called the called collateral global.org and we're commissioning research to document so one of the things for instance we did we commissioned was childhood vaccinations turns out childhood vaccinations like mmr dpt vaccines that are absolutely vital for public health that's collapsed around and developed both in developed countries and developing countries

less so in developed countries but certainly in developing countries a huge deficit in kids getting basic vaccines again because the lockdowns but we we closed down our access to health care so that kids wouldn't get vaccines um it's so short-sighted drew i can't even begin to i i but yeah but there is there's research starting to happen and it's gonna the story's gonna come out it's starting to come out already. And the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic came down hard against lockdowns and then shut up. I found that bizarre. They were like, absolutely, just contributes to poverty. Don't do it.

And then they started, I don't know what their position was. But let me ask you this. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say that was interesting. I wrote a piece called The Great Barrington Declaration in October of last year, October 2020. And it called essentially for an end to lockdowns, focus protection for the vulnerable, end to lockdowns, vulnerable meaning older people who actually are at high risk from COVID. And it's in response to that, that some people in the WHO said, no, no, we don't actually support lockdowns. We shouldn't do a lockdown. It hurts the poor. It's not a good idea. Then they changed their mind. They shifted their strategy. They

changed the definition of herd immunity to say, oh, natural infections doesn't induce immunity, which is, I mean, like anti-science doesn't begin to describe it. Like, you know, a hundred years of like immunology thrown out the window. And they went back essentially to a tacit policy arguing for lockdowns, or at least not strongly pushing up against them. Yeah. And the consequences are tragic. Look at what's happened in Peru. They've had one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. They have the highest death rate from COVID in the world, and they've devastated the poor. It is absolutely mind-boggling what we've done. Public health needs to get on his knees and apologize for what we've done to the world.

Well, I agree. I saw that from the beginning. Now, I misjudged some of the elements of the virus, but I could see what public health was doing. And by the way, the other thing that Art Kaplan said was that if Wuhan didn't do what they did, we wouldn't have done what we did. So literally, the Chinese Communist Party, which looked to me like they were activating something they had rehearsed. Like this was a rehearsed procedure should something get out of a lab. Trucks going down the streets with chlorine. I mean, it looked highly orchestrated. Now, they could do that from the ground up, I guess, very quickly the way they're constituted.

But it looked rehearsed. It looked like we have this all on hand should an emergency arrive from that lab. And that becomes our public health policy? That's like, it's too much to be believed almost. I mean, it looked like a propaganda campaign to me. I've said not quite at the time, but like in retrospect. But at the same time you saw

i'd like in i think it was like february we saw these images out of italy which were shocking right you saw we saw coffins lined up in cathedrals we saw overwhelmed hospital systems and so people i think the world health organization you can see it in fauci's trevor treasure trove of emails that were released to BuzzFeed. They panicked around. They looked at China. They looked at Italy. And they said, oh, gosh, we don't want to be like Italy. We want to be like China. And China locked down. And in what world, let's just, let's just, you and I both have been raised in this healthcare system, trained in this healthcare system. In what world are we ever going to be like Italy? And not just Italy, a little local

district of Italy, too. We have never been and will never be like that. You agree? Yeah. I mean, the Italian system is overwhelmed at sort of at baseline almost. At baseline, yes. Yeah. I mean, the U.S. system is so different, right, than the Italian system.

But we looked at them. I knew we would flex. I knew we would respond. I knew we would flex. I knew we would respond. I knew we would flex. I knew we would respond. When the Oxford University data started coming out, you know, 2 million deaths in the first year, I was like, no, that will not happen.

We'll respond in some way. We'll find ways to deal with this. We'll improvise. We'll do stuff. Now, I was shocked to see the degree to which we didn't do that at the beginning. That was very stunning to me. And I know that was part stunning to me uh and i

know that was part of the great barrington declaration but but even so we did have go ahead oh i'm sorry yeah um yeah i mean like this is there's a little delay here so so if i if i start talking just please barrel through i'll stop no worries uh i i uh so you know the thing what happened is we had that 2 million, forecast of 2 million deaths by the Imperial College people, right? The Trump and Trump brought in Fauci and Birx. They told him about the 2 million. He said, OK, well, let's lock down everything. And Fauci and Birx advised him to lock down everything because what was what people thought was going to be scarce was hospital beds.

We need to preserve hospital beds. And that's actually the reason why, you know, you wonder why did Governor Cuomo send COVID-infected patients back to nursing homes? It's because he thought, at least in part of it, is that the scarce thing is hospital beds. We have to keep hospital beds open. In fact, what was scarce was protection of the old and vulnerable. That was the key thing. Most of the country actually in March 2020 weren't even close to overwhelmed. Most hospital systems actually were empty in March 2020. We passed this massive bill, this CARES Act bill to bail hospitals out that were going bankrupt

because they saw their census drop by like 30, 40, 50% in some cases. And so you had a situation where we were optimizing against the wrong thing. You could look at the data from China. So many deaths were older people. That should have told us what to do. Protect old people, leave society alone, let it move on as best as it can. And in April of 2020, I did this study where we measured the prevalence in the population of COVID in Santa Clara County and in L.A. County. In L.A. County, we found 4%. 4%, right? So that doesn't sound like a big number. I mean, that tells you that we were early in the disease. So a seroprevalence study for listeners, it means it's how many people in the population have antibodies to COVID,

to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It turned out to be 4%. That tells you two things, or three things. One is that we're still early in the course of the disease. That turned out to be true. The second thing it tells you is we cannot get to zero. Four percent was 50 times or 40 times more infections than the public health authorities knew about at the time in April 2020. If you can't identify the infections, and there was no hope of identifying, you're not going to get to zero. It's already too, the cat's out of the bag. We're not in a place in this world where zero COVID is ever going to happen. We knew that in April 2020. And and then third the death rate's lower than you think and i remember in california when they had that red orange green yellow system and i just i was on a news broadcast man i kept saying we're we're this is these first of all

made up numbers completely made up just but i just picked them out of the sky and we're never getting to green never it's never going to happen I could see this could be an endemic virus. No way. Well, now, guess what? Endemic virus. How about apologies from some of these people? I mean, they just, you know what I mean? It's too much.

In the meantime, you know, down here, they were punishing people. Can't lay down on the beach. Can't eat outdoors. I mean, things that were, and then saying't lay down on the beach, can't eat outdoors. I mean, things that were, and then saying follow the science in the same breath, which is, again, it makes me choke on the fact that they did that. I remember there was like some image out of, in the early days of the epidemic, of like police on the beach chasing down a surfer in like Santa Monica, right? santa santa monica right it was it was it was just insane it's like we're outdoors there's no evidence of the disease spreading outdoors it's it's healthy to be out we just we did every single thing we could do wrong we did wrong right it was and to me the beach business and the you know you can't lie down or you can go to the

beach you can't lie down at all that that is the level of incompetence that we were dealing with i just i just it's just grotesque incompetence. I see it for what it is. Incompetence. Admit it, people. Incompetent. Come on. And so let me ask this. We should. Yeah, wait a minute. I mean, I agree with you. We should get down on our knees and apologize for what we did. I mean, our classes. Yeah, agreed. So early on, you put out the Great Barrington Declaration, and that was immediately seen as sort of a Trump-esque sort of a document. How did it get politicized? You were just trying to bring some reason, it seemed to me, into the conversation, and it was immediately sort of called out as all kinds of things that it wasn't. And so my question is, what do you think happened there? And did that impair your ability to to be

heard as a rational representative of the research community? Yeah, I mean, I think so. We wrote it in October 2020. It was intended as an international document. You know, hundreds of thousands of people around the world signed literally from around the world signed it. The UK was having its debate about whether there should be a fall lockdown. We wanted to enter that debate.

Countries all through Europe and the developing world were also. At the same time, it's October 2020, and there's about to be this election, the small election that happened in the next month in the U.S. I don't do politics for a living i i do public health research for a living but i had no idea the political firestorm i was entering when uh when i wrote the great bank so what happened was like it it caught on it it sort of went viral uh you know tens of tens of thousands of doctors signed it, and 15,000 scientists signed it. And so it made it clear that the idea that there's a consensus in favor of lockdown was not true. In fact, that is itself still a lie.

It is not true that most of the science says you should do lockdowns. That is a falsehood. Now, for Dr. Fauci, it was a political problem to be solved. And the way he solved it was through propaganda. He called it nonsense. He characterized a strategy which the key feature of that strategy is focus protection of the vulnerable. Focus protection of the vulnerable, right? So protect the nursing homes.

As we have always done in a pandemic. Exactly. As we have always done in a pandemic. As we've always done in a pandemic. Isolate, isolate, and restrict in the sick or vulnerable. Exactly. But for the rest of society, don't panic people. Try to keep things going as best as you can. I mean, people are going to be scared, but you want to reassure them and give them resources to deal with the fear, not stoke it.

He characterized that proposal, which is the same policy we follow for 100 years of pandemics, he characterized as a let-it-rip strategy. He effectively called the authors of it and the co-signers of it evil. Because they're responsible for wanting to let their kids go to school. irresponsible. And by the way, his pandemic policies, if you roll back, say, five years or 10 years and look at their actual pandemic policies, it would look like the Great Barrington Declaration, wouldn't it? Absolutely. 2009, we followed effectively the Great Barrington Declaration, although it wasn't called that at the time, during the H1N1 epidemic. I mean, I think the, it's funny, actually, your comment raises a thought. You know, if we didn't have Zoom, I actually think we wouldn't have had a lockdown, right? In 2009, there was no Zoom. And so a lockdown would have affected the jobs of people like you and me where everybody would have really would have been a different thing that's true yeah 30 people have jobs in place yeah and is is the great barrington declaration coming back

and being looked at again and is it part of the post postmortem of people going, why didn't we look at this? And why are we doing things like this going forward? I mean, I think if you look at what's the end state of COVID, country after country is adopting something like the Great Barrington Declaration. Reasonable countries have said, OK, it's not going away. COVID is not going away. It's endemic, just like you say, right? And if it's not going away, well, what's the alternative? But there really isn't one other than protection

of the vulnerable through vaccines now, right? Because those are fantastically effective against severe disease and death. And let's stop disrupting society. So the UK, for instance, has adopted a policy like this. Half the United States has adopted a policy like this, I think, just not California. And I think their country after country is looking at what actually is possible, realizing lockdowns are devastating. They're not getting you to zero COVID. The

disease isn't going away because we panic. And course not. And they're adopting this idea. It's, I mean, in a way, it's kind of a trick, right? It's an old idea. We relabeled it. And so it's not an old, it's an old idea for a good reason because it's worked so many times in the past and it'll work again.

Right. That's right. Exactly right. And, you know, they're just not saying it out loud that eventually most all of us are going to have some sort of hybrid immunity of vaccine and natural immunity. And that's probably the most robust thing we could have. I'm looking at the restream comments here. And Andrew Ashkazvili, I'm not quite sure you're

asking me, please restate that question. I will ask it of Dr. Bhattacharya, because I'm not quite sure what you're getting at there. So it also brings up the question now of, well, what other things to be done to mitigate? And what about masks? What do we do with that data? And people are behaving as though masking, not masking, is like firing bullets around with your saliva or something, when in fact masks are maybe 20% effective, something like that. And I'm sure you're aware, this is back to why people are doing things they're doing uh did you see you must have seen the study at Stanford where somebody looked at the number of Stanford students riding a bike with helmet versus a mask it was 60 mask 20 helmet that tells you all

you need to know in terms of follow the science I mean mean, I think we're headed into a winter wave. I mean, California still is low, but it seems likely like it's going to follow much of the rest of the country into its delta wave. There are still older people that are unprotected with the vaccine. It's very important to try to convince them, especially because they face such high risk to COVID, to get the vaccine. I don't think you need the vaccine to stop the disease. The vaccine doesn't stop disease transmission. That is very clear. Highly vaccinated countries have seen the disease spread widely. Israel, Iceland, the UK, the US have seen it. So the vaccine is not the key to stopping the disease. Nothing we have stops the disease from spreading.

So we have to do focus protection. Older people are still going to need to be a little more careful especially if they're not having it. And I would argue mitigate the effect of the illness with monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccine therapies. Just make it a less serious illness like we do with every illness. Like we do with everything. And now we have those things. It's a really, really good reminder. We're in a much better position to deal with this.

If you get the disease, we actually have effective treatments. Let's tell people that. That should be like cause for celebration. Let's trump that up widely, right? Although I'm a little mystified why they're not rushing those things out. I mean, some countries are getting them already, the molnupiravir and I think the Pfizer drug too, because they were part of the research protocol where they saw the proof of the pudding. They saw what happened and they're like, get me this stuff now.

Let's put an end to this thing. Somebody asked a question. I want to make sure I get it right here. Apparently, you predicted a herd immunity for alpha by April 2021. Do you have a similar prediction for Delta? So I don't remember predicting any timing for herd immunity. I think herd immunity here, what it means is something, sometimes people think of that as zero COVID, right? Like if we have herd immunity, the disease is gone. This is like other coronaviruses.

Like you have immunity. The population immune may decline over time. It's seasonal. So the level of you needed for immune in order to protect against disease spread, epidemic disease spread, it will be higher in season than in out of season. And so what you'll do is you'll get, you'll get like waves of this. The key thing to remember though, is that the second time you get this disease, or if you get the disease after you've had the vaccine, you're going to have a much milder course of the disease. Eventually everyone on earth will face this disease, will face the virus. And by the way, if you, yeah. And if you have moldypyrrovir in your pocket or the,

or the, uh, I'm forgetting the name of the Pfizer drug. It's, uh, hold on. I'm going to get it for you. The, uh, Paclavid, uh, then, then it's, it's, what are we worried about? What's the big, if you're an 85, you got a little something to worry about, but if you're 65 or you're 40, you got nothing to worry about. Yeah i completely agree with that uh and i think i mean you know like it's if you're worried as a 45 year old carry the drug around anyways right i mean and there's monoclonal antibodies the key thing is that over time at a like a few years you'll have faced it multiple times you'll find that it's going to be look it's going to be milder the second time you get it milder the third time you get it eventually the next time you get it the end time you get it'll be a cold because your body remembers

how to fight it off right uh and i mean just think just think about i mean think about how coronaviruses affect uh like nursery school age kids and things they get these upper ester infections like crazy and then by the time they're adults guess what they're not getting them so much same virus is sort of taken care of. But let's talk for a minute about masks. I'll take a break in a few minutes, but I want to do the mask talk here. Finish that mask. I brought it up.

What do we do with that? I mean, certainly under age six seems insane to me. And World Health Organization agrees with me on that. Again, in terms of the unintended consequences, it seems to me we are inculcating oppositional defiance disorder in children because, you know, fighting children to wear something over their face. I mean, I can't imagine a more distinct way to create a personality problem than that. that we're not allowing them the opportunity to spend face-to-face time sharing emotion with adults which is how they build their emotion that helps how they build their fully sense of self we're not giving them that opportunity because our faces are covered so what what about masks certainly under age six i'm gonna i'm gonna take you on that one if you think we should go be going

under age six but generally i mean mask mandates yeah mask mandates, yeah, mask mandates, though, just seem, I mean, the fact that people wear them outside tells me everything I need to know. It just seems, I don't know, what would a rational mask policy look like? So I think masks have some use. So, for instance, in nursing homes where you're around vulnerable people, in hospitals where, you know, obviously people and people are trained to use them effectively. Absolutely. I think masks are a useful tool in the settings where they're most likely to be useful. They are useless out of doors because the disease does not spread very efficiently out of doors in any case. For toddlers, we're the only foolish country on earth that masks toddlers. The European CDC does not recommend masking toddlers, we're the only foolish country on earth that masks toddlers. The European CDC does not recommend masking toddlers.

The World Health Organization does not recommend masking toddlers. It is mind-boggling to me that anyone thinks that masking a toddler will have any effect on disease spread. There's never been demonstrated and is unlikely to ever be demonstrated that that is the case. And you bring up something very important, and this has shocked me. The idea that masking toddlers and children has no effect on their development at all, the AAP, the American Association of Pediatrics, actually said something like that. How can they think that? Like, it is, I want them, you know, it's one of these things where, like, you know, prove it to me. You have to prove to me that there is no harm. The default position, you know, it's one of these things where like, you know, prove it to me. You have to prove to me that there is no harm. The default position, you would never be able to organize a

study aimed at showing, oh, there is, does masking harm, does masking stop development? Because it would be unethical to run such a study. The default position is do no harm show me that it does no harm first yeah it's again very strange times as the american academy of pediatrics come come down in favor of under six-year-olds i can't believe that yes yeah they did oh they did it came out why well i'm based on what panic again i i don't know yeah i don't i don't i i'm at a loss to explain it because uh this is this it violates every evidence-based medicine standard i've ever you know i grew up with like we have to look at the evidence and deal with what the actually evidence actually says and there is no there's no good evidence that doesn't harm people harm kids and the default i think is they're going

to be kids like you know developmentally disabledally disabled kids and others that have difficulty with language acquisition. They're going to have trouble as a result of these masks on toddlers. It makes no sense. When our peers take you on, when they disagree with you, what is the sort of grounds on which they wish to disagree? Or what's the data that they'll point at? Or does no one push back on you that has a sufficient standing to be considered a peer? Well, I mean, I guess Dr. Fauci is pushing back on me. I mean, I think part of the problem is that it's really like an epistemological problem. Like, what's the

standard of evidence, the standard of knowing, right? So almost all through the epidemic, the idea has been we should follow the precautionary principle. Precautionary principle in this case means, well, we don't know. This is a new thing. We don't know how bad it is. So we should do everything we can to stop it, even if we don't know for a fact. This is like epitomized by this idea of the Swiss cheese model. I don't know if you've heard of that, I'm sure, right? So we have layer after layer after layer. There are all kinds of

holes in them. But if you put in enough layers together, eventually you stop the disease from spreading. The key thing about that is you don't have to have any evidence, any good evidence for any particular layer. And any piece of evidence that says, oh, this layer doesn't work, the response is, well, it's okay, it's leaky, but it's one more layer. What's the problem? The big, big problem with that, though, is that each layer causes harms. And you can't just pretend, like, even in the precautionary principle, the thing you're doing is benign. Lockdowns are fantastic examples. There's no way on earth that anyone can now look at these things and say they're benign. You have to, if you're responsible, consider both possible benefits and the harms. And I think a lot of my peers that try to push

back on me will tell me, well, there's possible benefits. They'll try to point to what, to my mind, looks like weak evidence of benefits. But they will very rarely squarely look at the harms and say, oh, yeah, we own that. Yeah, never. And you call it the precautionary principle. And it's interesting to me that I think that's still prevalent way of thinking in terms of the vaccine, which is, yeah, vaccine does some bad stuff, but we're not going to, nobody's allowed to talk about that because, you know, it's still the best of options here. And I don't necessarily disagree with that because you know extraordinary times call for extraordinary things but lack of transparency is how you create 80 year olds not taking the vaccine frankly because that's that's the problem here completely agree with that i mean i think like this you know the smallpox vaccine they all they

all you know the disease we eradicated but it was a vaccine that was actually, it would kill one in a million people that took it. It would put thousands and thousands of people into the hospital every year. The vaccine would. And people took it knowing that because they knew that smallpox itself was so deadly. And you get high uptake by being honest about these things, not by hiding. So, for instance, this vaccine for young men, the mRNA vaccines cause somewhere between 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000 men to get myocarditis. That is pretty solidly known. Telling young men that is a very important part of convincing young men to take the vaccine. Telling young men, everyone that, is a very important part of convincing everyone because then people won't think that you're snowing them over.

They'll realize you're giving them honestly, here's the benefits, here's the risks, and you can make a decision based on your values. I think what's happened is we've sort of confused the public and the private benefit of the vaccine. The vaccine protects me. When I get the vaccine, I will have a less severe disease course when I get COVID than if I didn't have the vaccine on board. That's great, fantastic news.

It is much less good at protecting you because I will get COVID. I had COVID, actually. I got the vaccine in at protecting you because I will get COVID. I had COVID actually. I got the vaccine in April. I got COVID in August. It just happens. I mean, the vaccine is not. Now you have good, nice hybrid immunity. Good timing. I got the tiger blood. I'm all good. So yeah, I think, but if that's true, then why are we thinking about this vaccine as we have to force everyone to get it? The right way to think about this vaccine is let's convince people to get it, especially those who are vulnerable. We've also abandoned the basic ethics of vaccine therapeutics, which is the vaccine must benefit the individual, must be a clear benefit to the individual. If they also would like to take on the benefit to everybody else, I encourage them to do so. But the actual

ethic is it must be worth the risk reward for the individual. And I find it bizarre that we're not helping physicians talk to 15-year-old males about, you know, in certain countries, if they space it out by 12 weeks, as opposed to four weeks, they're seeing less myocarditis. Maybe we do that. And oh, by the way, you're running back on the football field. I kind of want to watch you for two weeks after you, you know, after you take the vaccine. And maybe we want to take the vaccine during basketball season. You're off season there because bad things can happen with exertion and myocarditis in a 15-year-old. and we're going to see it.

It's inevitable. We're going to see it. And if it's in the setting of a mandate, that's when people are going to go crazy, and it's going to be impossible to get vaccine uptake. That's what worries me. That's my nightmare. Oh, but, you know, that's happening drew's like what you get we're seeing a collapse in the demand for the other other dpt mmr of childhood vaccines um it's really it's really disheartening

um and i think you're absolutely right there are countries that have banned the the moderna vaccine for the under 30. you know major european countries have been because of the myocarditis risk. And for children, you know, children die from COVID at very, very, very, very, very low rates, vanishingly low. Let's be clear. Let's be clear. The data is, I just looked it up a couple days ago, 700 children have died of covid across the pandemic 700 and of those 680 had severe pre-existing conditions so 20 healthy children have died of covid in the entire pandemic yeah i mean thank god right that is not not thank god for those kids that's really sad but yeah but thank god that it's such a low rate. We have millions and millions of kids who've got

COVID and only a few of them have died. The same thing with the flu, right? The flu kills a few kids every year and it's a sad thing, but thank God it's not higher rates. So what you have is a situation where the risk of severe harm from COVID in children is very low. Any risk of side effects whatsoever may cut against giving the vaccine to the kids. And it should be an individual choice. Let the parents talk about it with their pediatricians and make a decision, informed decision based on the health of the kid and so on. Not a mandate.

Certainly don't say you can't go to school if you don't get the vaccine. That is because that harms kids, not being allowed to go to school. How do you reconcile that and the being against, worried about that mandate versus a mandate for measles vaccine, say? Yeah, so there, let's use your principle because I think that's really useful. Measles, if it is an epidemic measles and you're likely to get measles, if a kid gets measles, that's really useful. Measles, if it is an epidemic measles and you're likely to get measles, if a kid gets measles, that's a deadly disease for the kid. You're protecting them against a very deadly condition. Now, measles is low rates in the population because of herd immunity. And so you're unlikely to face measles. So the rate of death for measles in the U.S. is low. So even if you're not vaccinated,

it's going to be low because you're depending on others to be vaccinated to protect you, right? Measles vaccine does protect the spread of the measles because it protects you against infection, unlike COVID, where the COVID vaccine, which doesn't do that. So you have two things that are very different. One is you're protecting the kid against a disease that's harmful to them, really harmful to them by the measles vaccine. And you also have the public benefit of protecting others. Both push in favor of mandatory vaccinations for measles, but not for the COVID vaccine. Right.

So let's just say it again. The measles is – people don't appreciate how deadly measles can be to kids. And measles and cephalitis, it's awful. Number one. Number two, you can get herd immunity with the measles vaccine. You can get it. And the R-naught on measles is way higher than COVID. And so it's a situation that the decision-making, the risk-reward is completely, completely

different. Now, could we get to a point where the risk-reward starts to look different for COVID? Sure, it can look different as this thing evolves. But right now, it's a very different consideration. Let me take a little break here. And we're going to take some calls when we get back, see what kind of questions people have. And I want to pick your brain a little bit about moving forward. What's next? How do we get out of this thing? What are your thoughts? What are your concerns? We're with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University. You can follow him at drjbhattacharya. I suggest you look at my screen here to understand how to spell his name because I will spell it out.

I hope I get it right. B-H-A-T-T-A-C-H-A-R-Y-A. I get it? Yep, you got it. Yeah, I got it. All right. It's on Twitter, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. And we'll be back in just a moment.

I want to give a shout out to our good friends at Blue Mics. If you've heard my voice on this show any time over the past year, including right now, you've been listening to Blue Microphones. And let me tell you, after more than 30 years in broadcasting, I don't think I've ever sounded better. But you don't need to be a pro or have a fancy studio to benefit from a quality mic. You may not realize it, but if you've been working from home or using Zoom to chat with friends, you probably spent a lot of time in front of a microphone. So why not sound your best? Whether you're doing video conferencing, podcasting, recording music, or hosting a talk show, Blue has you covered. From the USB series that plugs right into your computer to XLR professional mics like the mouse or the blueberry we use in the studio right now.

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I'm going to go to some questions from the Clubhouse audience. Again, raise your hand if you'd like to ask Dr. Bhattacharya a question. Before we go to the calls, though, what do you see going forward? What's your crystal ball tell you? Like when are we going to sort of get – in other words, what frightens me is the people that have been making these decisions, have been making them in such arbitrary, bizarre, panic-stricken ways. What's to prevent them from keeping going with that, even when we have this thing in hand? I mean, I expect by January to have really good antivirals, to have much more vaccine penetration,

to have a lot of hybrid immunities circulating around. And let's just stop. Let's call it over. Let's call it a game and learn to live with this thing the way we do with so many other illnesses i mean i see one of two paths forward uh and i it's i i mean i tell you which one i want i see one path where we continue to organize a society around the suppression of a single infectious disease um that i think is true for half the and not true for the other half of the country.

It's true in many other places on earth. And it is hard to understand how the folks who put us in this situation will by themselves take us out, take themselves out of it. Their egos and power are built around that. On the other hand, we have a path, which you just described, which I think could happen, right? You get these antivirals that are developed. We tell people about, you know, we vaccinate a very large fraction of the population already. They're protected. A large fraction of the population already got the disease

and recovered and are protected. We start sort of scaling back and move toward normal life. That's true, again, for half the country already. And we essentially get this rebirth of freedom where we can go back to arguing about budget deficits or something. I mean, I think that is going to be, you know, that's likely, that's the path i hope to have um i do i do think that it's a close call in some places the people that are in power that have that have had a very good pandemic will continue to want to be it but i think you know the fear is really the crux of it if we as a medical profession start to address the fear of covid a lot of the power that people have to create to impose these policies will sap away

right i i i was going to bring up that you you talk about the precautionary principle but i'm afraid the precautionary principle which is actually not a not not a principle i would take issue with it's just that it got morphed into safety uber alice and and that is that is that's insanity that's insanity i mean you then have to not drive cars you have to not ride bikes you have i mean safety is your ultimate virtue i i we got we got problems i mean it's it's not actually safe to keep yourself so safe like you can sit in a bubble in your own home and you know what that's not actually a safe thing to do you got to live your life um and i think well remind people of that. People know that. We just were so scared of COVID that we forgot it. It certainly isn't a good life. That's the thing that people have forgotten, that there is a difference between a long life,

a safe life, and a good life. And I would hope it would help get us a chance to refocus on what a good life entails. And it's not, you know, sitting, it's just not what we've been doing. And, you know, so much of the rhetoric, Rannick, was just disgusting. You know, it's like, oh, you're only, people are only interested in money. They just want to be working and making money.

No, no, no, no. We want to be engaged in life. We want to be building things and helping other people. And that's economy. That's what economics is. That's why we can feed each other. You know, I want to go visit my mom and I want to hug her. I want to like see my nephews and nieces. I want to like hang out with my friends. I mean, those are not unreasonable demands. And if it increases the risk of COVID a little bit, you know what? I'm okay with that.

Right, right. And by the way, I mean, are we going to put tuberculosis on this list of safety? And what about the hantavirus? And what are you doing with, we had an outbreak. Look, we have massive, massive rodent bloom here. What are you going to do with typhus? And what about when bubonic plague gets here? It's coming west.

It was in Tahoe. It's coming. It's coming. Are you going to freak out? And I, you know, hide in a, you know, I mean, I don't know. That's, this is too much. 200 viruses and pathogens.

200 of them we live with as humans. I mean, we just, we live with them. We don't destroy our lives around them. We deal with them if we have it and then move on with our life. Yeah, 200 dangerous pathogens you're talking about. You're talking about things that really are very, very dangerous. And herpes. You have to throw that in there. Yeah, let's get back to getting a vaccine for that.

Yeah, we need to cure that. Bibi, what's going on? Well, these antivirals have, listen, a lot of stuff has moved forward because of COVID, a lot of stuff. And so I'm grateful for some of that stuff. Bibi, I'm trying to get you up to the microphone here. So do come up to the podium if you don't mind. Because, you know, it's not just been mRNA vaccines that have been the advancement. There's been a lot of stuff that's moving rather quickly, and it's been nice to see. Well, it looks like BBMCC. Hey, Bibi, what's going on?

Oh, Dr. Drew, I'm so excited. I am your number one fan. And Dr. Botticario, this is so awesome. Thank you for doing this. Oh, I like it. Hyperventilate with excitement. And Susan, you're awesome the way you support him. I listen to everything.

Adam Carolla has gotten me through the pandemic without taking an anti-anxiety medication. Wow. Fantastic. You guys are great. You guys are great. I love your message. I listen to everything. Okay.

So my husband and I are both over 50. So we decided we got vaccinated. Okay. We have a very healthy 17-year-old daughter who is a senior in high school. Oh, my gosh. I'm starting to hyperventilate. She will start college in the fall. Initially, we thought we're going to wait until she starts college to get her vaccinated.

We live in the state of Pennsylvania, and it's crazy the push to vaccinate kids under the age of 18. I do listen to everything you say. I understand about the hybrid immunity. Yes, thank you very much. Well done. But it's still, I have this daughter in a gray zone. She's healthy. She's active. Her BMI is great. She has no medical problems. I tend towards thinking of waiting till the fall before she starts college to vaccinate her. But I fall prey to the media messaging and, you know, I'm not doing my part. I'm not suppressing the viral replication. I was totally okay with the risk reward for myself in taking it because I thought it's the right thing to do. But what about these young,

healthy female adolescents and the vaccinations that are low risk? Yeah. I'm so excited. Thank you for taking my- Well, Bebe, stay with us. We're so excited to have you. We're equally excited. So where she, you don't have to tell me the name of the school, but as you go up the scholastic food change, the restrictions get worse and worse and the demands become worse and worse, strangely enough. Is she going to a place that is highly restrictive and very anxious and will not let her move about or even come on campus if she's not vaccinated? She actually got an academic and athletic scholarship to Michigan State. So she's going to have to get it to go to college.

But my question is, she's only a senior in high school, and the vast majority of the kids in her high school are vaccinated. We just decided the whole risk-reward way too good to come. I hear you. We hear you. I hear you. But let's get Dr. Bhattacharya. I'm not going to adulterate this with my opinion yet.

And by the way, good for you for thinking it through. And before we ask Dr. Bhattacharya, let me ask this. Have you talked to her pediatrician or internist or family practitioner? I did. I took her for her child. Hold on. Hold on. I don't want to know what he or she said. I want to get Dr. Bhattacharya's opinion first. You know, this is one of these things where it could go either way, and I think it would be a perfectly reasonable choice. For young girls and young women, the mRNA vaccines have a much lower rate of myocarditis, unlike for young men. Much lower. Much lower. So it's a safer vaccine for young women than it is for young men.

But at the same time, the risk of COVID, the harm from COVID is actually quite low in a lot of the risk profiles that people look at this, they say, okay, well, what's the myocarditis risk from the vaccine? Again, it's probably really low for young women. Then they compare that against the risk of myocarditis from COVID, which actually is a little higher. I think actually that's the wrong calculation. The question is, if you get the vaccine and then subsequently get COVID,

what's the myocarditis risk from both together? And, you know, I think it is, I can understand where you're coming from. It is a very, you could make a reasonable decision in either direction. What would push me over to the other side is if your daughter isn't going to be denied opportunities in her life because of mandates, then I would argue you do it. I mean, it's just that. It's funny. You and I have the same emotional sensibility on this because I like the idea, and Bibi's already brought this up, that we're helping each other by suppressing replication and all that stuff that sort of goes without saying. But I have this, what pushed me to get the vaccine is it was worth the risk for my freedom. Bottom line.

And it's the reality we are dealing with. You can't move about. It's highly restrictive and a major hassle if you're not vaccinated. All right, I'll put down that risk. Now, maybe that's what everyone's intentions were to make the decision making fall down so massively in favor of vaccinating just so you can move about in the world. That's kind of an astonishing public health policy if that's really what they were doing. But I kind of have that same sensibility you have that one. Yeah, and I think the problem is like if that is the real i mean i think that's as an individual you react that way and i completely understand as a as a policy matter it undermines confidence

in public health you feel coerced instead of reason and i think that that is that was a new mistake it's not necessary to stop the virus from spreading because it won't stop the virus from spreading. The vaccine doesn't do that. So, B.B., I want to make sure we're getting your question. Is it should you vaccinate now versus just before college? Correct. Correct. That is the question.

It's kind of a toss-up. You have some discomfort about now? I have an argument for later okay go ahead let's hear it the argument for later is better better coverage she's better covered she'll be better covered for the first six months of school there may also be advances in our understanding the vaccine there could be new versions of the vaccine tested over time there could be new vaccines available with better safety profiles um waiting a year that's what i think okay okay so i agree with that so susan and jay are saying did you get with that that reasoning bb oh absolutely and you are such a voice of

reason and thank you for doing these podcasts our pleasure thank you for working i listen to all of them i tell everybody to listen to them to for yourself, and just thank you for doing this. And thank you for taking my question. Thanks, baby. Make it Susan. I want to come visit you. I could tell. I could feel Susan.

I could feel Susan. Can I say one more thing? Didn't we just have that conversation? Yeah. Didn't we just have that conversation last week about the kids getting vaccinations when they were 12? Susan is the wait and see mom. Her thing is like the longer we can wait. She said, if I had kids, I'd wait as long as possible to get as much data as possible to see where this yeah they're gonna get if they

caught it and they just had a sniffling nose for a week like so what why would i give them a vaccine if they don't really need it if they had reasons to get it i'd get it for him you know but but jay go ahead till it's more advanced in time i mean i think I think that reasoning is, I completely agree with it for kids. For older people, for whom COVID is a very deadly disease, if you're not vaccinated, please get it. Yeah, please, please, please get it. And let's be, I think it's such a, almost an inspiring thing, right? Which is that we, you are advocating for a risk analysis, you analysis, that you treat a 17-year-old different than a 9-year-old, different than a 75-year-old. I was telling my 75-year-olds to get boosters

before the boosters were approved because I could see the writing on the wall. I knew what was happening here, and I didn't want anybody getting sick because I got my people vaccinated early too, so they were waning immunity rapidly. And, you know, there's these are very vastly different risk reward diathesis in the balance here. And that's what we're supposed to do in medicine.

I've spent the last three days emphasizing you people, you go see a doctor for our judgment, not for our knowledge base. The knowledge base goes without saying. The judgment to make the right call for the right patient, the right circumstance, that's what medicine is. And that's all been just abandoned. It makes me sick when I think about it. So it's heartbreaking. It's my profession. Yeah. 100% on that. I mean, I think telling people to go see their doctor and have a reasoned discussion with the doctor, that is the right thing to do. Not this, go get the vaccine or else you lose your life that's just a mistake or you're killing other people well you know if you're not you're not getting a vaccine this is that is a bizarre way of thinking about things you know i it's just it's it's you know and it quickly by the way goes to you know unvaccinated people shouldn't be

getting health care you know people that make then it becomes people that make bad choices shouldn't be getting health care i only treat people that make bad choices that's that's my specialty is treating people that have made lots of bad choices go to a emergency room that's that's all who that's that's all that's there people making bad choices if it's a stanford student wearing a face mask without a helmet or it it's a, one of my parents, my patients shooting heroin, all bad choices. They all deserve good healthcare.

I mean, medicine would be very easy if you only treated people and make good choices, Drew. Yeah. We wouldn't have much to do. We'd be dealing with aging only. It's about all we'd be dealing with.

And, and the unlucky. Okay. Let me go back to the calls here. We're almost through here,ay by the way i'm thank you for your time hey josh what do you got um i just wanted to talk about the mental health aspects of the pandemic and i was wondering if you guys could talk about how let's say you have past trauma and it's, you know, maybe not fully dealt with in therapy and the pandemic comes and you're asked to, you know, shelter in place. You're not able. Is there is a reverberation back to that early trauma?

And how really is our mental health being affected by? Yeah. So I'll let you answer that. But Josh, I'm so you actually made me shudder when you brought up shelter in place. That to me was one of the most, that's like a nuclear, you shelter in place during a nuclear holocaust. Where did they get off using that language?

It was just that when that came up, I was like, what? What are you talking? Go ahead and tell us not to move around, but don't use shelter in place. Then when there really is something serious, what language are we going to use? Anyway, I'll let you answer his question about the mental health. I've got some ideas.

It reminded me about like duck and cover. You protect yourself from nuclear blast by hiding under the debt. But to answer Josh's question, I mean, I think it is absolutely normal for the kinds of isolation that these policies have caused to make you feel alone, to make you feel hurt and to remember past trauma. There was a CDC study that was done in June that found that one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020. One in four. It is absolutely normal. So don't feel alone is what I'd say.

Go get help. Find your family if they can help you. Find your friends if they can help you. Find whatever resources you need so that you can get that feeling of loneliness, that feeling of depression, that feeling of anxiety addressed. Try and find ways to get your life back so that those things are addressed as much as you possibly can. It's hard. Yeah. Brains heal other brains. And the skill of the treating brain actually needs to be pretty substantial to deal with trauma. But it's the treating person's brain that heals the other brain.

And when you've disconnected from all that, all you're doing is re-traumatizing. Are you re-traumatizing the way you would somebody who – if you've had severe childhood trauma, you're prone to re-traumatization. Obviously, things like this can be highly anxiety-provoking and have lots of adverse effect. But the effect of this was way, way beyond retraumatizing trauma survivors. Again, the depression, anxiety scales, what we've done to 8 to 15-year-olds, it's just unconscionable. I mean, just look at the data on them. Just the fact that we handed them all screens had deleterious effects. The exposure to pornography dropped down to like age eight or something. The amount of sexting, felony level sexting went off the chart. I mean, there's a thing called Gaggle, I believe I did a speech for, gaggle.com, and they have all that data posted there. It's astonishing when you see it, and it really jumps out in that 8 to 15 year old category, which of course, of course, that's the age of development when peer involvement is where the

self-development is happening. And if you disconnect that, it's profound. Or if you interfere with it or adulterate it in weird ways, of course, it will have consequences. The only bit of data that was a piece of good news in all of this, gaggle.net, I'm sorry, thank you, Caleb, gaggle, G-A-G-G-L-E.net. The only piece of good news in all this was even though there was a lot of suicidal ideation, completed suicides did not go up. Personally, I believe that happened because we were all on top of each other. We were all in our homes together, and there was no opportunity to sneak away and commit suicide. You might be thinking about it, feeling it, but

the opportunity did not present itself. So that's good news. But that's the only piece of good news I saw in all the data. Yeah, ditto. I mean, that is actually a huge cause for celebration if there's any. Well, I'm fearful on the other side of it we're going to see a tick up that that's the problem so that's what i'm scared of too actually because the trauma is not it has consequences it's not like we can just okay turn the light switch off and then back on again it's going to have and so we're going to need to pour resources into the to address that problem especially in young people going forward. Yeah. We, we literally became hysterical as a country,

at least the Western society has became, I, I, and I'm, I've, you know, I've seen the narcissistic turn in our personality constructs. And I think now we've moved towards histrionic because the level of panic and the level of the thinking has been very nearly delusional. And that's a new thing. I don't know how we were so prone to that and why the press was allowed to do that to us and why the politicization made it all worse. People going to one side of the boat or the other, which is both sides bad.

So again, I urge everybody, I restore it. Let's rational recovery, rational revolution, we call this. And we have a rational revolution, bring back rationality and bring back thought without cognitive distortion

to the extent that we're capable of that. Consult your Stoics, your Stoicism. I think Stoics go a long way to sort of a check on cognitive distortion. If you like philosophy, stoics help us check our, we have glitches in our system and try not to, don't get engaged and don't get swept into the vortex. That's my, the summation of my advice. It's very simple, but that's it. Jay, I appreciate you being here so much. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, are you going to come up with any other sort of manifesto going forward? Are we

going to see a Great Barrington 2 or anything, something to guide us that people are ready to listen to, by the way? They might be a more receptive audience now, that's for sure. I would love, I intend to continue to be involved in what I'm calling the reformation. I mean, we have to reform public health. We have to reform science. But I think in my life, I have one declaration in me. And so I don't know if I can have another declaration. All right.

Well, I think what burned you out was the response. And we're in a different time a little bit. People are slowly waking up. I see it. I see it. For a year, I was going, when is this going to end? I was asking, when do you think this is going to end? Where's the bottom? Where are we going? And I feel like there's at least a coalescing of people in the middle

starting to look rationally at things and stop getting swept into stuff. And if it is just because the stakes are are less because we have multiple treatments and vaccines and we're doing a good job with the virus now okay that's fine if that's it that's good too um but you should also take a good look at the policies we brought in place during the darker days of this pandemic that were not just ineffective, destructive. And let's not do that again. We have to have an honest evaluation of it. You need to put in place procedures, checklists, whatever it is. I think lockdown should be a dirty word.

It should be anathema. It should have the same kind of resonance as nuclear war or chemical weapons or biological weapons. I agree. That's a great – I like that. That's your declaration going forward, that we turn lockdown into a dirty word. I like that. It's turn it into the new N-word or something, but that's fine with me.

But that, you know, this virus could, you know, give us some more fits going forward, right? I mean, illnesses have a way of getting, you know, the viruses develop resistances and new patterns and whatever. And the important thing is that we don't make the mistakes of the past in response to whatever the virus presents to us. We just keep pushing forward with what we know works. All right. Well, listen, a pleasure. Finish up. Finish your thought well, listen, a pleasure. Finish up. Finish your thought.

This is a... Yeah, this is here forever, right? And it will have its twists and turns. But let's deal with it like the way we deal with other things, irrational, without fear, with trying to develop resources, get and protect people. Don't panic people. Don't lock them up.

Yeah, yeah. Panic never makes things better. Never. And his histrionic, delusional thinking never makes things better. So let's brush aside the things that have made things worse and let's stay focused on what works. And, again, focus on leading a good life. Like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, thank you so much for joining me. It's interesting.

What's interesting to me is to, you know, I've talked to you in the darker days and I've talked to you. Your thinking has evolved. Your perspective on what has happened here is clearer. You know, the rearview mirror sort of seems to be putting things into focus for you a bit. And I hope you will continue to share your thoughts because they are accurate and they need to be listened to so we don't make the mistakes of the past. Drew, it's a delight to talk with you.

Thank you for having me. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, everybody. And I will wrap everything else up now. Thank you, guys. I had trouble watching you guys on the restream because I was so involved with Dr. Bhattacharya. Iggy Pomp says,

Reformation of U.S. government dominated healthcare sounds good, if soon followed by a counter-reformation. Well, reform sounds good, if soon followed by a counter-reformation. Well, reformations do tend to be followed by a counter-reformation, so good for you. Thank you for those of you who are saying a great job with, well, it says Iggy Pop. Yeah, it says Iggy Pop. It's not the Iggy Pop, but it says Iggy Pop. And thank you for those of you who've been active here. I've seen Tom's cigars literally on fire, but I'm not sure what he was responding to.

And he was upset that we didn't do any striking back, Susan. He wanted to see some strike backs up there. That's because I wasn't here. There was a call. There were some opportunities in there. But I thought it was better to keep it. So you lit a fire under him today. I missed the first half.

Yeah. Well, somebody got Tom's going. You blocked a lot of people. No, I meant the doctor. Dr. Bhattacharya, yeah. So thank you on Clubhouse. I hope that was an interesting conversation for you all. We're going to end this room.

And for everybody else, we have Alex Berenson on Monday. And we have – I hope. Uh-oh, is he flaking us? No, I don't know. I think Caleb was going to reach out to Michelle and have her I hope. Uh-oh, is he flaking us? No, I don't know. I think Caleb was going to reach out to Michelle and have her double-check. Okay.

And Vinay Prasad on Tuesday. Look, if it's just Vinay Prasad, I'm very happy. Alex is a shit-stirrer, and it'd be interesting to hear what his positions are. Again, I like... Yeah, we just have to make sure. I'll tell you what, if you can't get Alex in here, bring Kelly Victory. She will do the same thing. So we can get our YouTube channel revoked?

Or we can just be over on Rumble. We're due for a strike now. Get a strike. Caleb feels like we're not in the right zone. We've been talking to doctors about it. So, Susan, anything else for you? Want to say goodbye to Bebe? I just want to say I had a horrible day trying to find a vet to look at my dog.

Really bad. So weird. But some people that have been on, the vet people had been on this show, right? Or they were on a podcast with us. Well, I called AirVet. That's the company we had on, we interviewed. Because I've been calling them. I called them a couple times during COVID.

But I don't know what happened to my vet. It used to be like a little, you could just walk in with your vet, your dog or whatever, but maybe they're just understaffed now. And then I, they gave me a list of other emergency vet places, but you have to wait in your car for six hours. It's like a hospital. No, forget it. And I guess if your dog was just hit by a truck, they'll let you go in the front of

the line or something. I don't know. What did AirVet say? Pepto-Bismol. So they were very helpful, right? Yeah, he was helpful. All right, so there you go in the front of the line or something i don't know what did air vet say uh pepto bismol so they were very helpful right yeah he was helpful so there you go he i but it's weird because like i don't i guess i need to have a regular vet for the dogs now because i kind of put it off for a couple years they've been so healthy but um i don't think it would make any difference but he didn't throw up in the car once so i figured he was okay i don't think it'd make any difference on the day before Thanksgiving. I just, when you Google it, it says if your dog is vomiting blood or it has foamy, gooey, blah, blah, blah.

Yes. You got to take them to a vet and have them seen right away. So I said, okay, I'll do it. Couldn't get in anywhere. It's the weirdest thing. It's like socialized medicine now it's really really weird and and you know there's people with their animals are dying i don't i don't want to cut in front of them obviously but he's fine just really like and then he went out to sniff all the dog

pee you know of course he won't pee in public but um and they saw him running around he has certain standards susan they saw him running around all He has certain standards, Susan. They saw him running around all healthy and everything. I'm like, he's not an emergency. I'm like, I know he's not, but I can't get into my regular vet. Like, I don't even know if they exist anymore. Well, Caleb, happy Thanksgiving. It's the baby's first Thanksgiving. You got any special plans for that?

He's going to see the family. Everyone's just going to love him and everything, the usual. No doubt. No doubt. Well, thank you for everything. I'm grateful for both of you guys. I'm grateful for those of you that join us on these streams. We're grateful for Bebe and her enthusiasm.

We appreciate that very much. Yeah, happy Thanksgiving to everybody. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Keep a gratitude list in your head. Nothing can be more important than that at times like this. It'll keep you sane. It'll keep you kind of keep your oar in the water and keep your rudder direct in the right direction. And keep the Pepto-Bismol on hand. And for the dogs, keep the Pepto-Bismol. And yourself.

More Gaviscon for the humans. I don't know why the Pepto-Bismol for the dog, but I would say Gaviscon. He's a vet. I'm not a vet so and rex will eat all that stuff we don't have to worry about him uh and uh some of you uh we're going to try to get robert paul champagne in here so let me know if you have any luck getting rpc i i mean well apparently he wants to but when are we going to do that well i'm saying maybe the week after next i will interview him for this show so he doesn't have to do a long interview just kind of come say hi check in with him see how he's doing so if casey anybody else if you have any any. And then I think Aaron Carter wants in too now. Yeah.

Aaron Carter just had a baby and he's. But I think we're going to do a pre-tape on that. I can't do the trolls for hours. Aaron, I'm not Aaron's doctor. I don't want to treat Aaron. I'm happy to be a resource for him and help him. But I'm interested in hearing about him. I was on his Instagram live.

I woke up at 530 in the morning and I saw him with his baby on Instagram live and I took a picture of it. And I said, oh, congratulations, you know, and he goes, oh, is that Drew's wife? And I think so. And then he goes, oh, it is. And he pinned me, but I was just like, it's so cute. He had a baby, but you don't want to piss him off. He'll block you. He's like me.

We have a lot in common. So look, the guy's living his life. It's good for him. Well, and it's hard because when you say something on Instagram or tweet or whatever, your voice may not really be coming through. It might sound like you're being sarcastic or mean. Well, you don't do that to that guy. He just goes, you're blocked. And he blocks you. But he's tired of it. He's tired of being a famous person. It's pretty funny. I mean,

it was a really sincere, cute moment. And he did talk, say nice things about Drew. He said that you tried to help him when he was 21 and come on celebrity rehab and i wasn't look happy to just he liked what you said about him and he was he he got very thoughtful about it and i know he has a new baby so maybe now's the time to really think seriously about his sobriety you know and that's up to him that is entirely up to him and maybe he's already thinking seriously about it i i imagine he is here We all do that when we have new babies. Matthew 7, 1 through 3, King James Version. Matthew 7, 1 through 3, everybody. I want this to be our new mantra in this country.

Judge not that ye be not judged. That simple. It's true. Judge not, everybody. I mean, I'm not perfect, you know. I had three kids. I had to change my life. This world of judging, stop it.

It's in the scriptures. Matthew 7, 1 through 3, King James Version. Judge not that ye be not judged. And get a fucking life. Well, who amongst us was Jesus' version of that? I know. Who amongst us? I know. Who amongst us?

Well, that's my version. All right. So off we go, everybody. Have a great Thanksgiving. Caleb, we're going to wrap this up. And we thank you so much. And we will see you on Monday. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment.

This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated

since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me, call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.