Ask Dr. Drew - Muzzled Kids & Pandemic Psychosis: Justin Hart on How COVID-19 Drove the World Insane – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 145

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Data consultant & statistical sage Justin Hart catalogs the folly and psychosis produced by the pandemic and diagnoses the societal destruction that the over-response to the COVID virus has wreaked, as well as what can be done to stop the madness. • Buy Justin Hart’s book “Gone Viral: How Covid Drove the World Insane” on Amazon • Follow Justin at twitter.com/justin_hart Justin Hart is an executive consultant with more than twenty-five years of experience with Fortune 500 companies and presidential campaigns. He’s also chief data analyst and founder of RationalGround.com, which helps companies, public officials, and even parents gauge the impact of COVID-19 across the country. In that capacity, he has worked with everyone from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to Dr. Scott Atlas to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Previously, Hart directed special projects on the Mitt Romney campaign. He has appeared on Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, has a raucous social media following, and hosts the lively and controversial Substack Rational Ground. Hart is the father of eight and lives in San Diego with his wife, Jennifer. 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

and welcome everybody today the guest is justin hart uh justin has a new book i want to get the title right on that we'll be talking to him in just a second it has gone viral how covid drove the world insane he's an executive consultant with more than 25 years of experience in fortune 500 companies and i want to see he's a chief data analysis and founder of rationalground.com i want to see how he got into all this and we've've talked to him before, but a lot has changed since the last time we spoke. We spoke to him once on the Twitter spaces as well, when he kindly jumped in there. As many of you might today. Dose of Dr. Drew. Remember those days? Yes, it was a dose of Dr. Drew when he was last on. But I want to apologize to our Twitter spaces listeners today. I don't know how many calls

I'm going to take. I said on, what was it, Friday, our last show, or Thursday, that I would be taking calls on Monday, but Justin very kindly jumped in here, and I thought better that we have a chance to talk to him. And tomorrow, we have a follow-up with Edward Dow to see if any of his data has changed at all. We'll get a look at that. Of course, Dr. Kelly Victor will be in here, but give me a second. It will be on with Justin Hart after this. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. A 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*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying. You go to treatment before you kill people. I am going ridiculous. I'm a doctor for. 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.

And we used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. You have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. And I was just thinking how Susan and I are leaving the country in the middle of the voting tomorrow, so we will not be paying any attention to what's going on politically. And I feel greatly relieved to be doing that. Well, actually, our flight takes off at 8.50, so we'll be able to see what's going on in the airport. The White House just said that it's going to be many, many days before they know what the actual votes are.

So whatever. But should we talk about where we're going? Is that anybody's business? Go ahead. No, you. I'm drinking coffee. We are going to Portugal and then Gibraltar and North Africa and Marrakesh and all kinds of crazy stuff. Spain.

Spain. And Susan set this all up. Thank stuff. In Spain. In Spain. And Susan set this all up. Thank you for doing that as always. She's a travel master, like some sort of weird wizard when it comes to travel. I'm not kidding. I'm a wizard. I was a travel agent for 15 years.

I know how to book a trip. And I just kind of let it happen. And wherever I'm pointed, I go. And that's where I go. But it's funny because you said, I said, I want to go to Lisbon. And you go, well, we should take a cruise with the kids because it's their 30th birthday. And I said, I don't know if there's any cruises in November in Lisbon. And I looked it up. And my favorite cruise line, the week of their birthday started in Lisbon.

I was like, okay, well, I guess we have to go. So if they don't like it, too bad. So probably the last family trip of all time. started in lisbon i was like okay well i guess we have to go so if they don't like it too bad so probably the last family trip of all time next time they take they take us yeah well i figure they might have kids or note yeah take us next time uh tom cigars once a dr drew mug these are these are vintage mugs this is an old hln mug if you you see this. Let me get this straight. If you see the HLN insignia here from back in my days at CNN, HLN. Still, it hasn't broken yet.

We also have an Anderson Cooper and we have a CNN. People don't realize I was on CNN almost every night for a long, long time. We don't have a Gutfeld mug. We should get one of those. You know, I didn't think about that. I use it when I'm there, but they don't really offer them to you. So, all right, enough of that, uh, enough of the silliness. Uh, let's, uh, and, uh, Susan, you, I noticed on the rumble, you, uh, shouted out good morning, Julia, which, uh, for everybody from your mom's house, you'll know

exactly what that means. And we appreciate you all that have spent time with us over here. Let's get to my guest. It is Justin Hart. He's a friend of the show. He's, I have spent time with us over here. Let's get to my guest. It is Justin Hart. He's a friend of the show. He's, I said, been with us as a guest back in the days before we sort of crystallize what this show is, which we're still moving all the time in different directions. He has worked with everyone from Ron DeSantis to Scott Atlas to Jay Bhattacharya. He directed special projects, Mitt Romney campaign. He's been on multiple news outlets

and he has a new book called Gone Viral, How COVID Drove the World Insane. Justin, welcome to the program. You know, I think Gutfeld only has shot glasses. I don't think he has mugs. That's kind of his report. No, he now has these deep blue, if you look at a picture of me,

I was on there like a week and a half ago and he has these big blue chalices now they're big they put water in for you and you have to kind of hold it with two hands to get it up get it up to your mouth and i i noticed it and i thought wow i should get one of these and then i you know i don't follow through on stuff very well so great to be with you thanks for having me on yeah thank you for being here today. Tell us about the book. I started, you talk about vacation spaces. When I was with the Romney campaign, I came in very late to the campaign to save its butt on a couple things. When the next four years didn't quite work out for my future boss, I was in politics at the time.

I hightailed it out here to just south of you in San Diego. I was in Los Angeles and I had a whole slate of leisure clients. So here are my clients going into 2020. One was golf excursions for baby boomers. And the next one was a platform for parents to help them decide where to send their kids to college. And then the third one was a high-end vacation club for families. So you can imagine by April, all of my clients were dead. Dead as a doornail, right? That leisure space was gone. And I had some time on my hands. My background is as a data analyst, as I say up front, I'm not a healthcare expert. And normally I wouldn't insert myself into someone else's domain, Dr. Drew, but they seem to have no problem inserting themselves into my domain, my kids' education, my coffee shop, my gym, my business, my church. And I started looking at

these things and having a sort of analytic mind and a group of people that I trusted. We all looked at the numbers and we said, they're off. They've got so much wrong here. I think they're barking up the wrong tree. And so we started a lay group called Rational Ground, a bunch of great activists, analysts, experts, moms and dads, who basically were COVID contrarians. We said, we think this is the wrong approach. We definitely think they have the wrong data here. And we've been proven right again and again. We became the key backbone for Scott Atlas when he was at the White House. We basically, we called it Project Alpha. Anything he needed, we jumped on.

We got him charts and data completely pro bono because he had very little support there at the White House or anywhere else. So he tried to right the ship, but the election went the other way. And we've been fighting this ever since. I think you and I spoke probably over a year, maybe a year and a half ago or more. And since that time, I can't believe we're still talking about this, but it seems to me the book, what it's about is basically busting all the myths that we've logged over the years. And it's built for people of your audience who have known that something was not quite right,

but also those many, many Americans who are coming back from that dark, fearful place that they used as their main tool and bludgeon against us to say, hey, I think something was wrong. How do I articulate that? So the book is built for a whole swath of the audience here, and I think they'll find it very interesting. Yeah, I can't wait to read it. It reminds me of the book that Mark Woolhouse wrote,

The Year the World Went Mad. Have you read that book? He's a British MP. Yes, right, right. And now he writes it from the perspective of, I'm sure, the exact same stuff he was watching happen. And it's really interesting to read his book because he takes the perspective of like every good clinician. He goes, I must have had some weakness in the way I approach these people. I must have made a mistake to not be persuasive enough to stop the madness. And I thought that was so humbling and interesting to hear him take that approach because he kept saying they were it was clear they were wrong. I had the data I presented with them and they just couldn't hear it.

And I just I wonder how Scott Atlas talks about that same period of time when he was exposed to sort of similar representatives in a similar government on this on this continent. Yeah, very similar situation. Scott goes in there. He's got all this data, these studies. We had the oncologists coming to us with major reports of how many cancers they were missing, the flip side of what was happening with a third of students never showing up for Zoom classes in LA, all those things. And I said to Scott, I said,

well, why aren't they turning this thing around? Why aren't they changing course? And I thought to myself, I asked him, I said, well, maybe my kindest interpretation was they're having trouble saving face. And Scott looked at me and he said, no, Justin, these people are dumb. They're not very smart. And I said, oh, no. I mean, half of it I think is intentional, and half of it I think is imbecility, and that's unfortunate. Well, unfortunately, so through talking to a lot of people and certainly hearing from people that have been canceled particularly, I have learned that there are about four elements, and you hit two of them. So I'm going to write them down right. One was incompetence, which was striking, strikingly incompetent. Nowhere more on display than in California.

And I will just point you towards the police, the Coast Guard, pulling a guy off his paddleboard. I think it was in Santa Monica or Huntington Beach. Emergency, because he was out to sea by himself violating wasn't wearing a mask i guess that was the problem or the sand in the skate pits or the andrew ashkazvili is with us over on the restream i was he was asking me about whether or not they built the basketball rims back after they soldered them shot and the most incompetent thing of all you can go to the beach i don't know if you guys had this in san diego county you can go to the beach. I don't know if you guys had this in San Diego County. You can go to the beach, but you can't put a towel down.

If you lie down, you're in violation. And these poor 22-year-old lifeguards had to run around threatening people with arrest for putting a towel down. So anyway, incompetence, number one. Dumb, number two. Number three, I'm going to just put under hysteria or fear we'll talk about that in more detail number four negative negativity bias a cognitive bias called just negative bias i noticed people with a positive bias did not have the same reaction to this thing as people with sort of you know there are two fundamental cognitive biases, positive, negative. Those are the two basic biases. And people with a negative bias, you know,

sort of a high anxiety bias, they were going crazy over this. Stereo fear, dumb, negative bias. What was the other thing I had in my mind that, I guess those are the main four. I'll probably think of another one. And then within that, the intention to use fear as a public health technique, I really didn't believe that could be what they were doing. But now the evidence is quite clear. They consciously were using fear, and there's now FOIA documents and other showing Dr. Fauci saying hey do we really want to scare these people yeah you want to scare them you want to scare them more keep going now they should be scared and I when I saw that I thought oh my god oh my god so

I'll let you react yeah you know it's it's really unfortunate I got a text message this was the summer of 2020 from a friend of mine up in LA. He said, both my parents now, Justin, are dead. They were elderly. One died of an undiagnosed blood disorder, one from a cancer they couldn't catch. And they were too scared to get treatment. And that fear trickled down through the entire stratosphere of every industry, every strata, every school. And it became the leading sort of suspect. I know down here in San Diego County, we had our health director, Wilma Wooten, who was only a grade above

where your health director was in Los Angeles County. And she said at one point over the pulpit, you should just suspect and expect that everyone has COVID. And I thought, you're just going to drive people insane. And I remember leaning over a friend. His daughter was sitting there at a table. She had a Target catalog that you get in the mail. And she was dutifully taking her crayon, and she was coloring a mask over every single face that she could find because that's what she thought was normal.

She's only like four or five. And I have some young kids. I have eight kids, Drew, and I have a five-year-old and a four-year-old and a one-year-old. And the five and four-year-old were there in preschool at the time here in San Diego. And that was a difficult time. It was really challenging. The health director did everything she could to keep the masks off of our kids. But the teacher would come up to us, and I relate this in the book, and she'd just say, I'm so sorry. It's going to be a difficult

time in kindergarten. Try teaching these kids how to pronounce the letter H through a mask. And our group was one of the first ones to actually take the masks off of kids. And we took them to, we sent them with these moms. They sent them to a lab in Florida. We wanted to know what's on these things, right? And they came back with a list of things that were outrageous. It didn't have COVID, but it had pneumonia, strep cacophis, it had Lyme disease, cow herpes, right, from meat eating.

And what a nasty situation to put your kids in. So that's where we're at. You know, so many people were driven to these abnormal pathological states by the press primarily and by the government sort of pushing out the fear policy, I literally had somebody walk up to me, a reporter, a seasoned television professional in a newsroom. He pulls me aside. This was probably the fall of 2020. So it was a year into this thing, essentially. And he pulls me aside and he goes, this is an extinction event, right? They're not telling us we're the human species is going to go extinct because of this and i thought oh my god oh my god no nothing like that is happening i mean this is you got to you have this is like so far from that

i can't even tell you and i thought wow think what we have done. You have seemingly intelligent people with life experiences being brought to a delusion by the press and by the government. That to me was one of the most onerous parts of this whole experience. Yeah. I mean, look at this scenario. I thought my next thing shouldn't be a book, but it should be like a script. Consider like two star-crossed lovers. They're in San Francisco, okay? After an evening of drinking, turned into a one-night stand, right? They're slightly embarrassed. They wake up to find a couple of health inspectors at their door, and the health inspectors tell them, I'm sorry, you cannot leave this apartment. You have to, because of city guidelines, stay together for 14 days. And that sounds funny,

but that was an actual edict on the books, right? I mean, just rom-com Trump in the making. And we had those over and over again. And that's the light part. There's one stat I always cite, and this is in the book, and it kind of cuts across political boundaries. People understand it. It's hard to refute. And no one took it into account. We think that we missed in the spring, just the spring of 2020 across the country, about 200,000 cases of potential child abuse. Why? Because it's typically sharp-eyed teachers and administrators who catch those things

and kids weren't in school. People have to ask themselves, how many bruises on mom's face did you miss because she had to wear a mask at drop-off right even now yeah yeah yeah so i have to say something yes please so i was looking at apple stock today and there's a cute little story in there about how the 14 is not coming to the united states as fast as they'd like the 14 the 14 iphone oh everybody's waiting right as they'd like. The 14? The 14 iPhone. Everybody's waiting, right? If you try to get a 14 iPhone, you can't get it really. They're making them in Hong Kong.

Anyways, the factory had COVID outbreaks, and they locked the workers inside, and they're not allowed to leave the building, and they have to keep working. Yeah, you just heard about that. No, I read about it this morning i was just like that about 10 days ago okay so so it's this is where it's rooted from is this it's rooted in the ccp that is exactly right so maybe let justin talk speak to that we had a we had a public health we have public health authorities that were persuaded

by their chinese colleagues who lied to us and who told them that they had achieved full control of this thing. And why is Zhengzhou quarantined right now? Why is it completely locked down? Because they have a huge outbreak. You can't control a viral respiratory virus. You can't do it. Lock them inside?

So smart. So it goes without saying. It's the CCP did this. And we fell for it. And our officials should take an apology lap for that, but okay. But here's my question, because I'm always trying to figure out

what am I missing? I got to be missing something because like I've tweeted today three different articles. I think two yesterday and one today. One was an article from the UK that showed that there is no myocarditis, pericarditis after COVID.

It was a good study. I've tweeted another article that showed that there was myocarditis at a fairly significant clip, not commonplace, but enough to catch your attention from the vaccine. And then I tweeted another article showing that there was myocarditis after COVID, right? So it's unsettled data yet. We don't know what we're doing here yet. My question is, why isn't there a rush to understand this?

What I get back instead is, hey, there are 1 million deaths. I can't believe we're still talking about this after a million people died. It's like, I can't, that to me is the most astonishing thing for someone to say, because it's a million people died and It's like, I can't, that to me is the most astonishing thing for someone to say, because it's a million people died and we're going to die no matter what we did. That's the fact. You can delude yourself all you want that it had an impact. I don't think so. Maybe a few thousand cases. I don't think so. I think respiratory viruses do what they do and it did what it did and it killed a million people and it's horrible. And we got a vaccine rolled out early and quick, and we took risks with it. Okay. But now we have some questions we got to answer. Why can't we rush to answer them?

What's the problem? I think it's a natural human reaction, especially for just that sort of general 60% of the population which said, hey, I'm just going to go along with this. I really don't want to get in a fight on a plane or at a park or at my kid's school. That's understandable. But when you lose your rights, you're like, okay, you're going to have to stand up next time. But I think right now we're in that phase where people are like, it's really tough for me to stomach that the plexiglass, the masks, the social distancing, the quarantine at home from the slightest exposure for my kids, the vaccine mandates, they were all for nothing, right? I read a little clip, this was from Des Moines newspaper,

and it said, the American people are perfectly willing to do whatever it takes, but they greatly dislike afterwards learning that it was all for nothing. And that drew, was it a newspaper in 1919 talking about the failed interventions that they had of mask mandates and quarantines and everything else 100 years ago. Please send me that article. I love it. I love the history.

And I've been looking back at that pandemic repeatedly for sort of guidance and trying to understand what we're doing. And it was not a successful, it was not a successful set of interventions and by the way the reason they didn't have universal masking because it would be such an incredible and out of line intrusion into personal freedoms and forget shelter in place and close your business and we're gonna you know, you know, we're going to ruin your family, your life and all these crazy things we did. And now, uh, I, I don't know.

It's still confusing. I hope I'm not missing something. I worry that I'm missing something. I really do. I, I, I let's, let's go to the vaccine for a second. Do you have any, do you have any thoughts about that? Because I, I, I'm worried about it for young males. I'm worried. I'm not saying it's definitely a problem. I'm worried about it. And because I'm worried about it, then I'm confused why the rush to vaccinate kids. I watched an interview on MSNBC today where a physician was on there saying there were 600 kids that died of COVID. It's like, yeah, but zero of them were healthy. Zero. 600 kids with underlying. 100 kids died of flu this same year on a year when flu was outcompeted by COVID. And this year, there will be 1,000 flu deaths or something of kids that have underlying severe medical problems.

We have to vaccinate all the healthy kids for those 600 kids with chronic illness? Are we doing the right thing? Look, this is a tough subject. I know when we talked to our counterparts who are also kind of the COVID contrarians in Europe, they kept pushing us, and this was right around when the vaccines first came out. They said, why aren't you talking about the safety issues?

Why aren't you talking about these concerns? And we conveyed to them, this is a difficult subject. This is like the third rail of healthcare politics, right? You touch it and you're immediately branded off or kicked off of platforms. And now it's becoming undeniable. I'll tell you, after having gone through and seeing how the sausage is made, there are a lot of people that are stepping back and looking at this and saying, all right, what else don't I know, right? And you see how they're stepping up to approve into the schedule a vaccine that's been around

for two years. And I fax all my kids with the regular stuff because it's, you know, those have been out for a decade and a half before they were even considered to be put onto the schedule.

And now we're rushing so quickly to this. And there's some serious issues that they take into account. I think if you look, what's really interesting, what people are, I think, in the government

don't face up to, you look at the numbers of the uptake, right? It's less than 20% for the bivalent, for the child-infant-toddler vaccine of six months to five years. The uptake is less than 10%. And I think what they quickly realize, even the boosters are low, people know other people who have had adverse reactions reactions or they had some of themselves. That could be a very, very strong factor for people not taking this up. I think it's kind of a cry wolf moment where they say, you've got to get this. You've got to get this. The next variant is around the corner.

They're like, yeah, I know. Yeah, there's a logical, in addition to that point, which I agree with you, there is a logical fallacy in this. Take the vaccine so you don't become one of the 600 children that die. The vaccine doesn't prevent infection. It doesn't prevent transmission. And after three months, it doesn't seem to impact severity either. So what the hell? What is your rutting? Unless I'm missing something, I must be missing

something. I feel like some sort of weird Alice in Wonderland. Like, what is going on? What am I missing? I think it comes back to the point where it's difficult for them to save face now. They made this bed. They have to lay in it, as the old 19th century saying goes. And they're not about to get out. If they do, you can see Dr. Fauci on these presentations.

He says, I don't want to say mistake because it'll be taken out of context. And when he says, he goes up with a straight face and says, I didn't shut down anything. We put together a compilation of 25 ways he said shut down the country. I mean, stop gaslighting us, just be honest and open. They can't do it because they know that it's a tough road back. They went so far deep into this thing. That's my kindest interpretation is that they're having trouble saving face. A lot of my readers will come to me and say, I think it's nefarious. I think they're doing it on purpose. And I'm like, well, it's hard for me to dispute anything these days. I have a lawsuit, as you know, against Twitter, against Facebook, against the government, because my accounts were taken down right around the time that Jen Psaki came over the pulpit and said,

we're working with Twitter and Facebook to take down accounts, right? And so we sued them and we got the accounts back and restored. But all the FOIAs that are coming out are really interesting because what would happen is they'd have these weekly BOLO meetings, these beyond the lookout meetings, where they talk about which accounts, what type of posts should be taken down. There's one, they said, take this one down. It's talking about a menstrual cycle being thrown off. Well, we now know that's true, right? And so here they are taking down valid information, saying it's misinformation. And it's like, how many people could have been warned about that, right? It's devastating for these institutions.

They're going to have to be built from the ground up again. So you called yourself COVID contrarian. Is that what you said? What was the term you used? Yeah, COVID contrarian. I am not. I am interestingly not a COVID contrarian. I'm a COVID realist, moderate, just want to get to the facts, ma'am. I just want to, I feel like Joe Friday, just the facts, ma'am. It's all I want. I really don't want a political position on this.

I don't want anything. I just want to understand what happened. I don't want to make the same mistakes again. Clearly mistakes were made and I am completely prepared to accept that I may have missed something. That's why I keep asking if I'm missing something because it feels like I'm missing something or that there's some data that if I'm missing something because it feels like I'm missing something or that there is some data that if I was exposed to, I would feel a little differently. Help me here, Justin. Is there something that some trove of data

that would somehow persuade me that there should have been lockdowns, three-year-olds should be masked in spite of the whole world not doing that, that vaccines for 11-year-olds are a brilliant idea. I can't get there. I don't know how we get there. It's impossible. They don't present any data with it, right? When Dr. Fauci gets up there and says, he shields himself by saying, if you're criticizing me, you're criticizing science. He doesn't bring with him, hey, here are the five studies, RCTs, that show

that masking kids is not going to harm them. It actually could be beneficial. There's none of that. Instead, we've got all the data on our side. We have multiple studies. And the thing is, we had this really unique, interesting issue that came up this last week with someone who's a very good data analyst and academic, Emily Oster out of Brown University, she put out this article on The Atlantic talking about how she was calling for amnesty. And she said, well, we just didn't know until now. And we said, that's not the case. We went through and produced, I think we're up to like 70 different studies from just March and April of 2020, almost every issue from plexiglass down to kid masking, down to quarantines, down to age stratification, it was all there. I remember feeling, Dr. Drew, when I put my neck out there in early March, and my first article was, the coronavirus dashboards will kill us all long before the virus ever will.

And I really believed that. I thought it was really a data mess, right? And I woke up one night in sweat saying, what if I'm wrong? What if this is the apocalypse? Next morning, John Ioannidis, you know, most cited living doctor, academic in literature right now. And he put out a clarion call and said, this is a once in a lifetime data fiasco and we're making terrible, terrible decisions on it.

Yeah, I think that is true. I think that is true. Again, I'm prepared to be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But so far, nothing has persuaded me otherwise. And you certainly aren't changing my opinion today. And I hate that. It's hard. It's hard, particularly

when you've looked to the CDC and Dr. Fauci your entire career. As I've said repeatedly on this stream, it's why I got involved in radio. I was very deep in taking care of AIDS patients, and Dr. Fauci was a major figure for me in all that and encouraged us to go teach and get out. Now, I remember back then some of the beginnings of what you're seeing now were already present. He would react very harshly to anybody that was not towing the line. And he instructed us to use fear, to use fear. He kept saying, you know, tell them they're going to be 2 million deaths if you don't do something. And so, and that was- Do you think that was right now, now that you've seen this?

Do I think that was right then? I mean, it's hard to stop people from having sex, but- I, interestingly, I don't remember using fear. I remember using the data and saying, hey, we got to pay attention here. Remember, that was an illness with a 100% fatality rate, 100% fatal in all cases, no exceptions. And that was it at the time. Did you think fear was going to work for that?

No. In fact, we developed this whole strategy because we knew fear wouldn't work. You know, this was early in the pandemic. I kept saying this, why did we throw away what we learned in, in, in AIDS? What we learned in AIDS was that you needed to use humor and narrative, relatable characters, music. And if you told a little story, you know, like, so Loveline was about telling cases. We'd have cases and then we had a comedian lighting it up. That was the original model. That was what we used. And they actually had a field of study in public health on how to, because doctors in the windows weren't changing behavior, but the stories were. It's why

I got involved with Teen Mom. I knew those stories would impact teen pregnancy. Because you tell the stories, kids aren't dumb. They get it. But an authority figure in a white coat telling you what to do, they learn it. They don't change their behavior. And there was a whole field of discipline that developed around this. And they just trashed it during this particular pandemic. I'm seeing some of the ads start to pop up now for vaccination that are using some of those techniques. So it's kind of coming back a little bit, you know,

I'm fine. It's not fear. Fear is destructive in all cases. Yeah. I think the stories are the key thing. In fact, the way we organized the book, the first way,

the first submission I had in the manuscript, the editor said, this is fantastic and completely unpublishable. What's going on? He's like, you got all the charts data here. He moved them all to the back. So all the, I call up some of the data points, but the thing is really chock full of these really interesting stories. Some of them are humorous. Like, you know, one of the reasons I dug into it was what happened with like the TP shortage, right? Well, it's, it's a humorous thing, which is to say half the reason why we ran out of TP at home is that people Well, it's a humorous thing, which is to say,

the reason why we ran out of TP at home is that people do, if you'll excuse the term, half of their business at their businesses, right? And so the type of toilet paper, how it's delivered, the supply chain to get it to a school or a business park or a stadium where they mount these big toilet paper rolls into a stall. That's a very different process than getting you the soft Charmin that you like at home. And so they had to completely revamp the way that they did things, which is why we all ran out of toilet paper for a while there. And so they had to redo the manufacturing process, delivery process. It's really funny though. This is always a humorous one. Go Google the phrase, Charmin forever. And you'll see that the Charmin marketers are keen at work. They've got all of this backup now, these large toilet paper rolls. You know, the ones I'm talking about where they

install them and they just never run out into an airport or something like that. And so Charmin forever will send you a metal mount and it lasts for a month. They say you put it right next to your toilet and there you go. So we try to lighten things up there and then we topple it with, you know, some of the cancer stuff that's really devastating out there. Or just think about, for example, in Las Vegas, we did some interviews with people that were engineers there in Vegas and they spent most of their spring 2020 walking the halls like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and flushing toilets and running showers because it's designed for a certain amount of people staying there on a regular basis.

They shut down for two months. You're going to have Legionnaire's disease and worse things come up. So crazy impacts on industry as we go through all that. Aspergillus. Oh my God, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, that's brilliant. We have that problem in our place in New York if we're not there very long. Again, it's the law of unintended consequences and the risk-reward analysis that was not done.

That was the first thing I saw. They are not taking risk-reward into account here. So I have to take a little break. But what I want you to do when you get back and think about this across the break, I'm really interested in the experiences of people who were sort of in these various White Houses and public health communities. When they were making these decisions, I learned a great deal from Paul Alexander, who was there when they were having the debate about what social distancing even was, and they just made it up out of whole cloth. But he was there, and that fascinates me, and they just made it up out of whole cloth. But he was there, and that fascinates me, and that fits with my understanding. I'd never heard of six feet

social distancing before this pandemic. It didn't exist anywhere. Dr. Alexander, right? Paul Alexander, yeah. But I'm wondering if you can give us any insight into what that all looked like. I had another friend of mine who was there in the white house and he said he raised his hand he was on the sort of ondcp side the drug drug czar side and he was in i think he said he was in the oval office one day and there was a guy setting this policy and he goes i i think you should this doesn't sound right to me maybe you ought to kind of go he said the guy turned beet red and started screaming at him just listen to me you're gonna do it my way it's gonna people are gonna die it's like that is that that'd be like me in medicine screaming at them, just listen to me. You're going to do it my way. People are going to die. And it's like, that'd be like me in medicine screaming at a patient because they elected not to take some medication I was suggesting.

There's no place for anything like that anywhere in health or public health. And that kind of, again, that phenomenon of fear and negativity and negative bias and then hubris around what they were doing, that created some strange policies, strange bedfellows. And so I'm not going to have you respond yet because I've got to take a break. When we get back, if Dr. Atlas had any insight having been there on the ground when this all went down, we'll be right back with Justin Hart. Consumer price index yet again going up, stock market in turmoil. What's our government doing to quell the surge of inflation that is gutting American families? Oh yeah, they're spending more money and adding to the burden. Don't bury your head in the sand while your savings get decimated. It's time to do something

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And just a reminder that if you do, if you are brought up, you'll be streaming out on multiple platforms. What's DMSO? DMSO is a organic kind of solvent that drags things through your tissue into the soft tissue. Somebody asked if GenuCell uses DSMO. DMSO. I don't believe there's any DMSO. No, it's very organic.

I worry about DMSO wherever it's used because it drags a lot of things into your soft tissue in addition to what you want dragged in. And I remember when I was in organic chemistry, we were warned against dmso dragging in heavy metals and things and just don't don't get near the dmso this is sort of all natural and and just has it isn't uber chemical oriented no there's some retinoids and retinoic acids right things that really work for your skin yeah things that we know helps build ecology right. So, Justin, any thoughts

about what it looked like from the standpoint of Scott Atlas? Because he was pretty spot on most of the... I was looking at my wrinkles now. You want some Genyacil? It works good. It works great. So, he to me was

somebody who was kind of on, you know, seemed to be sort of on target most of the pandemic. He's made sense. He was rational. He was not inflammatory. He was not hubristic. What did it look like from his vantage point? Yeah, I think it was a lot of frustration.

They had gone, by that time when he arrived in July, several months into this same sort of offset of interventions and lockdowns. And then they start basically giving these tools to the governors and to local leaders like mask mandates, right? I mean, the masks really weren't for stopping the spread. They were basically seen as sort of gears that governors could use, scapegoats, if you will. Cases are going up. Why aren't you masking hard enough? Cases are going down. Thank you for masking. I remember your accounts to me, I think your accounts in the book too, how he's in front of President Trump and he's there with Dr. Birx and it's after the summer wave of 2020. And she says of 2020. And, uh, she says, well, they've been masking so hard there in Arizona.

And Scott just says blatantly had nothing to do with masks. I mean, it's just gone for its curve, right? We, we see it again and again, we would show this, this sort of,

uh, you know, it's been known for 50 years that these seasonal patterns go up and down. When we map 2020 to 2021, in some areas, almost to a date, the thing would peak and come back down. And no one else was calling that out. I think this is because it's difficult for them

to disrupt the narrative that they've already built. And I think that's kind of what I came across with is that they were just trying to see whatever they could that would work. And they're very message prone. I mean, you have the Surgeon General Adams, who's just, I just don't think he's the brightest guy. And he's sitting there on camera.

He's showing you how to take a t-shirt and wrap it into a mask. And what's crazy is I'm sure that every single OSHA certified person on planet Earth looked at that and just screamed inside their heart. Right. But they knew they couldn't say anything because, you know, it was kind of out the door. Everyone knew that there's no, for example, N95s that have ever been approved for kids. And yet they still stayed silent. I think that's the main thing with the gal we were talking about before, Professor Oster.

She had the data early on with masking interventions in schools. She was the only person gathering it. She was gathering it very astutely too, across New York, across Florida. And so we came out with the data. We looked at her data. We said, hey, look, it looks like for schools that mask up, they have case rates that are 21% higher than schools that don't. And she published a paper that wasn't so blatant about it, but basically came to the same conclusions that these interventions didn't do squat to stop cases with staff or with students and everything else there. Well, that's fantastic.

It stayed in peer review. It's still in peer review. She failed to push it to publish it because she was fearful. And you compare that to someone like Tracy Haug, who risked her entire reputation, great academic, studying another intervention, this time myocarditis in young men. And she risked her entire career. A year and a half ago, she was publishing stuff on this and people wouldn't listen. They tried to blacklist her. They couldn't get it published. She stuck with it. We gave her a few of our data guys who helped out. She got it going. She backed

up her team. I think my main thing is it takes a lot of courage to go against the grain, especially when they've already laid out the whole narrative. And when they start codifying that like they have here in California, I can't imagine being a physician in this scenario. It's very, very difficult and they're making it worse. Right. Right. You're absolutely right. It certainly makes you doubt yourself. I mean, you hear me saying, I must be missing something. And I'm prepared. We're sort of trained to doubt ourselves and to double check and to recheck and have a backup plan. And I made a mistake early on of being too hubristic because I could see the panic that the press was driving. And the press, the particular people in the press that were creating the panic, had no business at the table, had no business having an opinion on these things.

That's the thing that got me. It's like, why are these people even having an opinion? And at the time, I was saying, just listen to Fauci, listen to the CDC, and shut up. Let them have the opinion, and you report it. That's it. But no, you have the New York Times editorial board demanding a lockdown, a procedure that had never been contemplated

in infectious disease, a so-called mitigation method that they now had an opinion on. Who cares? Why did they have a place at the table? They should not have been listened to by anybody. But it became the driving force

that I guess scared some of the government officials or helped sweep up the panic. But again, I blame the officials for allowing it to go on. By the way, I'm thinking about Emily Oster, who we're talking about here, who wrote that article in The Atlantic about amnesty for, you know, we didn't know, we didn't know. Yeah, we did know. A lot of us knew. And the reason you didn't know is you were blocked from hearing the people who knew better. You couldn't hear the voices. You couldn't hear the dissent. You were blocked from it.

And why you didn't seek it out, this is, again, back to amnesty. I don't know if you can see this cartoon alongside of you. It's a fantastic cartoon. For those of you that are listening and not watching, it's showing two women being burned at the stakes. And the caption, these two pilgrims are standing there saying it turns out they weren't rich witches after all and then they completely go up in flames and the other the other pilgrim goes mistakes were made on both sides we all made some mistakes in the meantime people were this is very much the issue meantime people's lives were destroyed and this whole idea that they weren't, there's a place called

Tin Horn Flats out here. It's been a family restaurant for like three generations. And they closed it down because they literally padlocked it because they dared to have outdoor dining before outdoor dining was specifically endorsed by our

public health official who is a sociologist, no clinical experience. Okay, whatever. And these people's lives were destroyed. It's crazy. Now, look, there's nothing new under the sun, as the good book says. And if you go back not just 100 years to where they had major problems with interventions and very bad results in the 1918 pandemic, you can go back 400 years. In the book, I talk about the plague in Milan, Italy. And there's an author named Alexander Mazzoni who looked at a bunch of journals and wrote a piece that was basically like love in a time of the plague. And it was the plague, right?

One out of three people dying. And it was thought at one point that there were foreign elements that were coming into the city to whitewash the walls and as they called it, anoint the pews with infected water to spread the disease further, right? And this got the whole town in an uproar. And a gentleman is at the front of a church. He's brushing off his pew before he sits down. A couple people in the back see him, accuse him of anointing the bench. The journal entry says they took him outside, and I do not think he could have survived many moments longer. And then you see he talks about

all of the monati, that is the people that were put in stations above all of the populace, and they were exempt from all the type of interventions and all the laws, and they could do what they want. They would bribe people and build people. We saw the same exact things happening here. I heard from some of the retailers up in L.A. and they said, hey, if I could throw down three grand or four grand or five grand, I know a guy who can basically get me cleared with the county health supervisor. I mean, it's just the worst.

And everything went through that. Well, a third of all restaurants here in California closed down at one point or another altogether. Yeah, California was an outlier. Germany is still doing the same shit. I noticed when I was a journey a year and a half ago, I thought, oh, we have a new California. It's called Germany. But those are the two environments where I've seen it the most draconian, the most ridiculous, the most insane.

I had to go get an N95. I was in the airport in Munich. There is a restaurant. We were. Yeah. In the middle of a thoroughfare, like a giant sort of passageway for people going from terminal to terminal. It's not outdoors. It's indoors, but it's a huge space. And there's a little restaurant sort of marked off by a kind of a planter. And you'd wait in line next to right next to people but once you got to the front of the line they insisted you have an n95 mask to walk these seven feet to your table to take the mask off to germany though yeah i know they had rules it's no longer

florida or germany it's germany or california she was so pissed we had to go buy it we did it we did that twice in that airport, I think. Didn't we do it again? Yeah, the second time we brought her in. They made you wear it in the club lounge too, anyway, so we had to go get it. But I want to go back to Emily Oster. I feel bad for her because she was a driving force in getting the schools open. She was the early adopter of talking about this. And I think she deserves a pass because a, she was an important force in the right direction and be sort of admitting her mistakes.

Like I didn't know I didn't make the mistakes. I I'm fine with it. Leanna, when who's somebody who scared the shit out of people for two years on CNN also flipped over and say, ah, you know, come on,

we got to reconsider. I people, my thing is I, you're all welcome on board. You're all working on the, on the, the boat, the sand,

the boat titled sanity, the rational boat, you all welcome on board. You're all working on the boat, the boat titled sanity, the rational boat. You're welcome on board. And people that admit their errors and take some responsibility, please come on, come all. But to say, hey, let's just forget about it. No, no, don't forget about it. But I think there has to be another caveat there. For people like Leanna Nguyen, who would go on and basically create this great division between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Yeah, she came around on face masks. In fact, it was her comments saying that face masks were no better than facial decorations that really got the ball moving. And Emily Oster,

yeah, she made comments about safely opening schools, but we all, I won't go into that, but here's the deal. You're welcome back on Team Reality. Great. We welcome all comers there. You should never have an influence on public policy again. And that's at least for Dr. Fauci and crew, right? I mean, look, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, who just retired, were on the boards that decided all the grants for NIH and setting the policy. What were the chances of your study getting grant money if it somehow might run counter to their narrative on policy, right? That's something that needs to be cut off straight away, right? So those are things where it's like, you're welcome in team reality. May you never have an ounce of influence

going forward again. We just can't afford it, right? I mean, my kids have to go through speech therapy. It's just like, it's devastating. Yeah. Let me ask you a political question. It seems to me, and I'm going to get some calls in just seconds. My kids went through speech therapy and they didn't even have COVID. So don't imagine trying to do with a mask on the, on the therapist and the patient. Can you imagine that? It is important to speak, let them see your mouth. Oh my God. It's part of the whole process. But anyway, it seems to me, correct me if I am wrong, that one of the lessons that I have learned is that the Constitution has a wrinkle in it as it pertains to public health and to limit somehow this out-of-control authority in the hands of public health in an emergency. At the very minimum, some sort of provision for show your work, let us hear the data, don't use fear and terror, tell us the risk-reward analysis and convince us what you're recommending is good. And then by the way, you as the non-elected public health official should have no voice per se, but then to explain

your thing and hand off to the elected officials who should have the authority. Is that not true? A, is that not what we need to do? And B, can we do it? I think so. I mean, you look at, for example, what Governor DeSantis did, a county can declare a health emergency, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time before they have to bring it up and demonstrate its efficacy and why they're doing what they're doing, right? We need those makers in place.

And then you need kind of the top-down stuff, which is like, no, we're not going to do this thing where you don't get to visit your loved one who's dying, right? We had a chance, yeah, we're not going to do this thing where you don't get to visit your loved one who's dying, right? No. We had a chance. Yeah, we had a chance, our group in 2020 in the summer, Governor DeSantis allowed team members of ours to actually look at 700 redacted death certificates, okay?

Didn't have personal information, but we had all the causes, one, two, and everything else there. And we looked at these and it was like, 86-year-old female, fall from height, diabetes, COVID, COVID death, right? And we see about 30% were like that, another 20% were really lazy. And so we have no idea on all these numbers here. And I think the data thing is something we need to figure out real quickly. And it's going to be, well, I have it on good authority that if there is a changing of the guard here tomorrow, that there will be hearings next year. And I hope that's the case because you need some real transparency on this thing to fix a lot of things that go on. Because we basically opened up Pandora's box.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we did. And we looked at, I mean, or we're China. We're going to be China. And if that's what we want to be, at least in an emergency, I don't think that's what we want to be. I don't believe that.

Although, I've been confused about a lot of things. So, maybe I'm wrong on that one too. I put this as a pressing question to my side here, which is, what if this pandemic did have the mortality profile of the Spanish flu, right? And it was millennials and kids dying by the tens of thousands.

You and I have been having a very different conversation with a median age of death of 29. And so if something like that happens again, I mean, a lot of us are going to cry wolf and say, I really don't want to hear it, right? But I don't know what to do in that case. We have to sort of have that conversation and say, okay, when do you usurp our rights and we can't go practice our religion or gather in a group unless we're with the right cause, right? It's a crazy mess and a lot needs to be ironed out. valid piece of data. The average duration of life for a male, if he is so far gone that he needs an institution, meaning two or more people to turn him, shit him, wipe him, feed him, and he's admitted to a nursing home in that condition, his average median life expectancy is six months. Six months. So people that were killed by COVID were one, six months to 12 months,

maybe 18 months from the end of life, no matter what, as opposed to. And died alone. Exactly. Thank you. And as opposed to, like you say, if a younger person is being killed by an illness, it's 60 to 80 years of life lost. That's a much different thing. And by the way, if it were that situation and we did crazy things, I would say, you know, we were in a panic. We were in absolute panic there. What do you, what could we do? We, we really lost our minds for a minute. Turns out it didn't work, but okay. You lost your mind. I get it, but nothing like that was going on. Yeah. I think we need to instill some type of citizen courage too. I think the ground baseline is, look, the basic pillar of our founding

documents is this is here for your pursuit of happiness. A lot of us were kind of holed up in our home for months, looking at our plow, rusting in the field. They say, you can't go plow your field or go to work, right? It's like, well, what's going on here, right? I think that's sort of our constitutional rights, the Bill of Rights. Stick with that, defend them to the death, and you won't go wrong, right? And I think that's kind of where we need to stand up and say, we're not going to take this sort of infringement anymore. I'm going to make my life, you make yours, and we'll work out the rest on fisticuffs or we'll come to some agreement on it. Yeah. We are not China. We think we have a special document. Let's let it do its thing. The other astonishing thing though, as we sort of focus in

on the American experience is that this was a worldwide phenomenon. That to me is just as weird as anything. Maybe it wasn't as bad in certain parts of the world as we had it in California, but it was a worldwide thing. And that's, you know, I know how narcissistic we are here. I see what happened here. I don't, and I've, you know, read Dr. Woolhouse's book about UK. I get what happened there, but it happened everywhere. Isn't that kind of weird to you? It is. And I think, look, there is some conspiracy-minded theme out there that somehow this was all organized and it played off. I'd rather think it was more ineptitude, especially when it comes to the origin of the virus, the wet market being 900 feet from the lab or whatever else there. But the idea is, look, along those lines, there definitely are forces out there that are saying, hey, look, a gap. Let's fill it. And they say that out loud. The World Economic

Forum and otherwise, they just come out and say, we're going to take advantage of this moment and reset the world. And they really do mean those intentionally there. So I think those are things you need to look out for because these same tactics, again, whether it's going to be the next pandemic, the next wave of COVID, or whatever other boogeyman they come up for, they're going to do it again. The press, Dr. Fauci, they would gladly weld you inside your apartment if they thought it saved a single life, right?

That is before they burn off their hands because I don't think they could actually use a welding torch to save their life. But the idea is these things really have an impact and we need to just be prepared to say, okay, what are you willing to counter? Because I think it's an understandable feeling that most people had. I think it was like 20% of us that were sticking our necks off and they were going to get cut off

or not. There were another 20% on the other side, as we call them, team apocalypse, who were just shooting the sky for every sort of restriction. And then there's like the 60% of the population in between, which is like, I really don't want to get into the fight. And I think this book is really built towards that population a lot, which is, hey, I know you're having a tough time coming back from this. I know you're still double masking in your car. Read these stories, make sure you know the crazy. And I think that's where a lot of your you know a lot of your listeners are going to take it and go oh yeah i know this oh i forgot

that story oh look at this thing right and it'll help you sort of i'm going to what's going on there i'm going to be i get it i'm going to be at the airport tomorrow can i pick it will it be at airport bookstores because i don't have time to get it before i leave and i want to read it on the supply chains are all messed up who knows you know i i know it's come on two months earlier is it made in hong kong i can't susan maybe we've tried for an overnight delivery of his book we get it by tomorrow night i don't know you might try amazon's kind of tie it on a tooth it's good stuff but uh yeah look uh kindle you get on kindle if you like to read those things but uh oh that's a good idea it's uh it's got it's, too. You can get it there on audiobook.

But I think in the end... What's that? No, not me. Are you the reading? Okay. No, no. We got some professional guy to do it. I would love to read it, but I got eight kids.

I would get interrupted. I'm surprised I haven't gotten interrupted. I know. Susan, did you hear how many... You have eight kids? I knew you missed that. I knew you missed it when he said it in the first place.

He's got a three, five, eight-year-old and five more. Oh, my gosh. And when he said that, I... Oh, my gosh. It's a Brady Bunch, right? It's like we have three with her wife, Jenny. Yeah. Yeah, we had a child in the pandemic.

Was it you that tweeted? You were the one that tweeted the Saturday Night Live... Video? ...spoof, right? Yeah. You know how that feels right to me yeah oh yes have the freedom from your family if you have covid they did a fake commercial about covid and it was funny but not funny it was it was funny it was funny and again another astonishing

things to me people like i don't see what's funny about this. What is not funny about it? What is wrong with you people? Anyway, Betsy, I called up here for some speaking. We're going to get people up to the podium. Yeah, it's funny if you were getting Omicron. It's funny given the sweep of what we've been through. It's funny. Humor has been used through adversity throughout human history. That's when it's most appropriate and most useful and most effective. And by the way, most funny. But Justin can relate to that. He's got eight kids.

Yeah, exactly. Betsy, I see you there. What's going on? Or, yeah, Betsy. Oh, for some reason we don't hear you, but you're not muted, so that's good. Betsy, come on the phone. You also go by Betty Content. Content Betty.

Oh, did she leave? Yeah, I think I lost her. Okay, let's try. This is Catherine. They're on the toilet. Catherine, we'll give her a chance. Catherine Van Kay. Hello.

There you are. What's going on there? I just wanted to speak to what Justin said about not wanting to resort to conspiracy theories. I think the more you listen, for example, to Harvey Rich, wholoroquine months prior to the outbreak of the pandemic off the over-the-counter list of medicines. I think the aggregate of very strange things, I don't want to go there, but I think, I don't know, I'd just be interested to hear what you guys have to think, to say about that, because these are no longer coincidences.

These are just hard facts. Let me, let me just say, uh, I, I am, I'm steadfastly refusing to go there. I am,

I am like a stalwart anti, uh, uh, conspiracist. However, I am persuaded that the cozy relationship between the big pharma boards and executive structure and the government agency where people are going back and forth between these positions and the private sector and then back to service and then the money that exchanges hands, it is at least biased. At least biased, if not so cozy as to create horrible motivations. Justin, what do you say?

Absolutely. And that extends to big tech too. In the FOIA documents I got back from Vivek Murthy and his office of the Surgeon General, Facebook gave the CDC and the FDA $15 million of free ads to use on their platform. And the FDA and the CDC came back with specific requirements on this. Look, I mean, like I've said, private companies like Twitter and Facebook are private companies.

I don't have a lot of recourse to sue them to keep my voice there, right? One would hope they might adhere to the basic tenets of there. But when the government does that, right? When the government uses them as proxy, now you have a problem. But I think definitely what we're seeing is there's is a there's a lot of buddy buddy stuff that happens

like i want to know right what is the story behind remdesivir because i talk to nurses right and my nurses would tell me my insiders they say yeah when we see that we we call it run death is near and uh i said oh gosh but because and we have the studies now that it really did very, very little and may have some adverse reactions, right? And so what's the story? Who made that call of remdesivir? Because it was a massive inflow for that drug that had been failed before. And so these things are really challenging when you look at what really happened. Was it a purposeful?

And I would argue. So let's look at that. So I would argue of course there's obviously financial motivations there but we didn't have anything else approved to use it does have side effects but it might have done something good and I believe I saw some cases where I think it did do some good it's hard to tell it's not like paxlovid where it just stops the illness just stops and then rebounds but that's a different that's a different medicine. And so I kind of am sympathetic to it. And if you think about it in the context of, again,

that cozy relationship where it's like, hey, Bob, I used to sit on the CDC board. Now you're over there at Pfizer. They have personal relationships, and it's so cozy that it makes sense to me that things would be greased to go in directions. So, Catherine, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to think of me. I'm going to give you this discipline.

Ready? I don't want you to think about some dude twirling his mustache, showing up with a bag of cash. That does not happen. That does not happen. That does not happen. But what does happen is a bunch of biases and cozy relationships. And, you know, it just, just, there's things of a foot that, that, that feel problematic because they are problematic, but it's not as, as ridiculous as snidely whiplash showing up with a bag of cash.

You know what I mean, Catherine? Does that make sense to you? And I don't think that's what it is. I thought when he said this happened prior to the outbreak, months prior, it wasn't even the protocol of treatment. It was that they did it. I understand what you're saying. That's odd to me.

It is odd, but association is not causation. So use good scientific technique until we have some evidence that there's a causational link there. Be careful because it does suggest mustache twirling. And as soon as you get through mustache twirling, yeah, then I'm like, no, it can't be that. So go ahead, Justin. Here's a perfect example. If you Google any number between one and let's say a thousand, and you put the word COVID cases next to it, you will come up with that number and COVID cases. And I remember there was like three days where people on my side were thinking,

that's a conspiracy theory. I said, no, no, do the numbers. There are 3,200 counties, three or four papers in each county. There are so many days that you could have had any number of cases that come up. And it's absolutely, absolutely, positively, statistically probable that you come up with any number between one and a thousand that's been published with 968 cases found in Sussex County, right? So those are things you need to do. It's interesting. I think it's something you have to pursue just to get out of your brain, but you're right. You can't get down too far. I went down the rabbit hole the other day on some of this stuff I was looking at, and I'm telling you, oh boy, I'm glad someone pulled me out of that. I tell you, but that's the whole thing. I used to trust this particular vein of

authority, and I don't trust anything now. I'm looking back at all the studies to say what's going on. And that's unfortunate because there's something about having a trust in an institution and even in your doctor that helps you through the efficiency of life, right? I don't want to have to stop and say, my doctor's prescribing X to me

and go look up all the studies, right? Because I don't trust them. Yeah, it worries me. Now you're triggering my Steve Kirsch gene. It worries me when people that are not used to how the medical system works and how doctors think, when they get really upset about this the way Steve does, and I'm starting to hear language from you now, Justin, that reminds me of that. It's like, you got to temper it a little bit. It is a system of science. It is trying to do the best it can. It is always a risk reward thing.

We do bad things inadvertently. We do good things before we know we've done them. All kinds of craziness that goes on in clinical science. It's the nature of medicine. But what has been missing the entire time has been context. And the context is something that we as clinicians understand. And that context of all of this is what's been, again, that's where the risk-reward analyses are done. And that context has been completely missed, which is why public health officials made such horrible decisions that harm people so severely without doing much good. They did not consider the context of their decisions and the context of the illnesses we were fighting, which was terrible. It was a terrible thing. It just was, I get it. Let me see if I can get Betsy back here. She's now asked to come up again. Betsy, just there you are.

Go ahead and unmute yourself. There you are. Hi, sorry about that. I don't know what happened there. No problem. What's happening? Okay. So, um, this is something that I haven't heard you talk. Hi, sorry about that. I don't know what happened there. No problem. What's happening? Okay, so this is something that I haven't heard you talk about before, but there is an increase in homicides in a bunch of different cities in the United States right now.

I was wondering if you think that there's any sort of relationship between the COVID lockdowns and criminal behavior that we're now seeing the, like, um, after the fact, this could just be like a crazy theory that I have, but I think that it did. Well, I felt like, well, I'll tell you this much, Betsy. I felt is Betsy actually your name. I see it as a sort of a, okay. You never know what people's actual names are. When I was watching the riots here in Los Angeles, the thought bubble over my head was,

God, I bet a lot of this is just frustration at the lockdown. I really had that feeling. And to the extent that that opened some floodgates for all kinds of things, it might have been, let's put it this way, it makes sense to me that you can draw a line back to the lockdowns. I mean, I'm sure, let's ask Justin, there must be examples of this in history of people trying to lock down and then some sort of explosive behavior develops in response to it. Yeah, typically these sort of pandemic episodes are followed on close on the heels by war in many instances.

But in our case, especially, you look at, by one study, there was an estimate from surveys that 55% of kids experienced some type of parental abuse or what they interpreted as parental abuse during the lockdowns. And heaven knows if you're- Okay, so that was- Your family for so long. Right. And then you then you look at i think one out of every five uh uh high schoolers and on to college age had ideations of suicide which is above the board there too so there's a lot of things that you can definitely point to which were just fraying apart uh you know the the mental psych psychosis of americans there i mean i mean it makes sense.

So we have a mass formation and we have a lockdown. It would be weird if we didn't have some sort of crazy reaction, right? I totally agree. And as we always say, it's the most vulnerable that get hit. Yeah, people that have mental illness and things, those are the ones that are going to fly off first. And they can be violent. It happens.

It's not, you know, I understand they're more likely to be the object of violence, but they can also be violent. And we're creating a recipe for that, it seems to me. And just even the average person, what I hear all the time is people can't find meaning and purpose and why bother is sort of the, the credo of the day. And if you really don't care about anything and you, and you get into kind of a delusional thought process. Yeah, definitely. And like I saw a few, some Pew research just came out about how violent crime actually isn't increasing. And that, but it didn't include homicides. This just came out like last week.

And I'm like, okay, interesting thing to put out right before the election is happening when there's a lot of progressive prosecution going on in the country and a lot of more holistic approaches. Betsy, it's another situation where I think to myself, am I deluded? I can't walk down the street in downtown Los Angeles. I haven't been able to walk down the street there in a year and a half. Is that just my own personal fear or is it actually the people coming up to me aggressively with the machetes and stuff i i don't know which i one seems to be happening that's i see it with my eyes what am i again it's this this strange feeling i have what am i missing the data isn't reflecting and how could that be yeah i mean it is reflecting i work in crime statistics actually at the philadelphia district attorney's office and there's like

philadelphia is experiencing like the highest increase in violent crime, specifically homicides, that they've ever seen since the 60s. And it's like I don't see another explanation. And nobody that I work with would ever entertain the idea that, you know, masking or just any lockdown measure could have had an impact on people's behavior. Human behavior on the margins, when you do anything to large numbers of people, shit happens. It's hard to predict what that shit's going to be, but people react and it doesn't have to just remain on the margins. Frankly, if you stress a human population, guess what?

This shit happens. So, yeah, I think you're onto something, Betsy. Please collect the data. Please keep us posted, okay? Oh, I'm trying. And by the way, how else do you address it? How do you address these things unless you look at the root cause and get honest about it?

What's supposed to happen in medicine? We're to pretend that oh i don't understand what the biology is let's consult the stars i i you know you gotta you gotta look at it you gotta figure it out call a psychic yep anyway betsy thanks for the call appreciate it yeah i love the show all right thank you very interesting um well justin Justin, we've put in a big chunk of time here. I don't want to keep you much longer. That was an interesting way to kind of wrap things up. I don't have time to get to other callers. I appreciate those of you that did ask.

There's the book, Gone Viral, How COVID Drove the World Insane. I'm going to be so pissed if I can't get it by the plane tomorrow. So I'm going to work hard at it. All right. Do that. I don't know that I'm going to work hard at it. All right, do that. I don't know that I'm going to find it in London when I get there or Portugal or wherever we're going. Yeah, they don't have Amazon.

It'll get there in three years. Yes. Is there anything else, Justin, before we need to wrap this up? Did I miss anything? Is there any other points you wanted to make? Yeah, I think when you go into the voting booth tomorrow you know just keep these things in mind uh what you what you experienced you experienced right that that was actually that actually happened don't let people gaslight gaslight you out of that because it will have

an impact on your life your kids and hopefully you can do this so your kids kids don't have to go through it again 100 years from now and my thing is pretty simple. I'm an independent, so I get to see the extremes on both sides. I don't have a horse in the race. I don't want more of the same. Whatever you do, please, not more of the same. More of the same is terrible. It's terrible. Have we not had enough? Whatever that means to change direction, please, dear God, everybody, let's not have more of the same. I don't care who, what color, blue. I don't care. Something different.

We got to do something different here. Justin Hart, everybody get the book. They had great jokes 100 years ago, too. I'll just give you one. This is from Kansas. This is to the Des Moines Tribune. They put in there, one badger Benedict wants to know why they don't extend the wearing of flu masks to the home so

he won't know whether his wife greets him with a smile or a frown when he arrives late for dinner. There you go. Comedy is the best medicine for this stuff, okay? A hundred percent. Watch that. Look for that. Did I just hear a hi-hat?

And good. Search out that look for that uh did i just hear a hi-hat and uh and and uh good search out that uh saturday night live uh fake commercial about covid see if you don't think that was funny it was it feels better when you watch that commercial it's like okay yeah it's making fun of a serious thing you set me up you said people are talking about this i wish you hadn't done that you should have just seen my reaction to you're right you're right i i have a weird problem with with i do i have a weird problem with when i once is exposed somebody i like tell them the whole story before i show it to them it's a weird impulse and i have a great trip guys christmas gifts he tells you the day before what it is all right enough that's me thanks justin we'll talk to you soon uh all right see you when we go kiss those babies and i will

for the rest of you it reminds me it reminds me i remind myself of that christian ridge that wig character that when she has to surprise somebody she goes you can't do it she just puts a pillow in her mouth i thought yeah that's pretty much me and i just blurred it out so it's true uh that you know which character i'm talking about right yes okay i know how good is caleb can he pull up a clip i can't get it up that quickly i was gonna try to find it but it's it's actually tag us if we put it up i found it very refreshing how snl has actually made some really funny skits about the pandemic like right around the time of the masking everyone was you know it was so it was definitely

over by then they made a whole skit about the masks did we ever really need the masks correct they did that one and the other one i thought was actually more brilliant even was they had a uh it was a neighborhood social event and there was a black family and a couple of white families and they were going on about the vaccine and they got to get the vaccine and the kids vaccinated and the mom and dad uh the two the two black parents in the room were like oh yeah you got to get vaccinated oh well you that vaccine is important and and they turn to the parents these two black parents and go are you getting it anytime soon they oh no not no no no we're not the vaccine i don't want anything to do with that but you it's a great idea go ahead they were the smart ones now so so i thought that was a really

clever um yeah that's right uh greg is reminding us we'll get a copyright strike it also felt like that's true to me that in my, the official end of the pandemic was whenever they turned the cameras on SNL and you could see the whole audience and no one in the audience was wearing a mask. Whereas before every shot, even the musicians were wearing masks behind glass.

You feel so much happier. But even with COVID tests, people got weird. So I don't know. So anyway, good discussion, interesting ideas. Tomorrow, we're going to do a full update with Edward Dowd. We'll see if it's the same, different, what his ideas are, more stats, Kelly Victory in here. And then we'll be gone for about three weeks. When we come back, we have some very special guests on the books, possibly, which have not been confirmed.

But you all will love these guests. Pierre Corey is coming on with Kelly when we're out of town people have been begging me for pierre cory and i've been telling him when we were here but he couldn't do it we have a major major politician maybe uh gonna be here who's uh i'll just i'll just say a moderate i don't know i don't even know well we'll see i don't want to promise anything yet i don't even know which party that person is part of anyway um but so we have pierre cory coming up when next wednesday we have kelly and tomorrow with edward dow you have kelly next wednesday yes with um pierre cory and then correct and then we're here back we're back the day after thanksgiving all right so it's going to be kind of kind of uh sketchy or spotty until then i can't believe thanksgiving's almost here i know and we will continue to do good shows for you guys but we're flying in on thanksgiving

so we won't be doing a show that wednesday and you guys can all go make your turkey dinner and not worry about it until friday let me say something here to the audience uh thank you uh thank you for this audience that we have cultivated i was thinking about all the trolls we used to have. Well, some of the trolls I would argue are now on board with what we're trying to do. Yeah. Some of them came over to our side. Yeah. And so we're just trying to question, we're just trying to look at things. We're just trying to understand things. We're not, again, remember super moderate. And it looks like we're right-leaning because a lot of the people we have interviewed like Justin

are right-leaning and I always get uncomfortable. I haven i haven't had to kick anybody i always get uncomfortable when it's somebody who's partisan one way or the other because i don't want this to be a partisan thing i want this to be a fact-finding mission of you know what went down we all went through this thing don't we all want to understand what it was i appreciate you all on twitter spaces i appreciate the call to come in i'm glad that that's working out those of you on rumble where you know we're watching you guys carefully and we appreciate you guys being there and the Rumble audience. Rumble has been a great refuge for us

when we've gotten in trouble with YouTube for no reason. But anyway, what are you going to do? And I look forward to the day when Twitter becomes part of this sort of media platform. Caleb, do you have any thoughts about that? I get the feeling that Elon wants to make it like a little mini YouTube type set.

I'm excited to see what happens. He's already talked about long form video and all of these extra new features. So let's inject some life into it. He wants to give us money. I'll be into it. Maybe tomorrow I'll bring this up. I don't understand all the freak out. Again, I don't understand most freak outs.

Well, he's he's changing a business and it's his business he owns it he can do whatever he wants always there's always 50 of the people that are going to be against whatever you do so you just have to deal with it it's his business the eight dollar charge to have a verification you know is you know whatever i mean who cares yeah and and if they'll if they'll monetize it, if people like us can make the $8 back, we'll be fine. I think that's how they're going to work it out. Yeah. Well, we'll see. People are all upset about it. I agree that they seem to be making good faith efforts to make it a platform that protects everybody. I don't like that he kicked

off Kathy Griffin and Ethan Klein. I think that was a bad thing. But it's not my business. It's not my call. Yeah, but I mean, you're not supposed to pretend you're somebody. Yeah, but I think he should have warned them that, hey, correct that right now

or be permanently out. I don't like that he just did it. I don't like that. But it's his business. He can do what he wants. So there you go. Yeah. I'm surprised we were never censored on Twitter ever.

Oh, I had all kinds of weird shadow banning and stuff going on. And well, yeah. And then weird things and weird things with the algorithm to make things worse. I mean, dealing with with people. Look at the compare the number of views that that the live shows get on Twitter versus what it was. I think it was about a year or two years ago when it was it was enormous it was a spike so there's there's definitely some suppression there which i'm thinking is going to be adjusted everything's up in the air right well it was yeah but it was periscope and our chats we could see our chats

we can't see our chats same thing happened with facebook that we were there's a kind of a weird shadow banning thing and i don't know why. There's no human to talk to. YouTube is very kind in actually giving us human beings to talk to and tell us their policies. When we had Robert Kennedy Jr., we had like 40,000 views that day on the Twitter show. Like, literally. And I think it's just the topic for that audience. Speaking of business, you and I have a bunch of things. But I wish, I wish that was over on YouTube because I would have made $1.50.

So there we go. There we go, everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Caleb. And we will be back with you tomorrow at three o'clock with the update on Edward Dowd with Kelly Victory.

See you then. Ta-ta. 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 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

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