Morning Wire - A Look Back at Pandemic Response | 9.4.22

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

As Dr. Anthony Fauci gets ready to retire, We take a look back at where the U.S. went wrong in regards to pandemic response, and what officials say they’re doing to regain public confidence. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his departure from the federal government last month after 55 years of public service. His departure follows a declaration from the CDC that the agency will undergo an internal overhaul. In this episode of Morning Wire, we look back on America's response to the pandemic, where we went wrong, and what the CDC says it's going to do to shore up public confidence. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's September 4th. And this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire. If you like this podcast, subscribe to our Morning Wire newsletter available exclusively to DailyWire members. Get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at DailyWire.com slash subscribe.

Use code MorningWire to try Reader's Pass membership and get your first month for only 99 cents. Here to discuss is Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty McCarrie. Dr. McCarrie, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be with you, Georgia. Now, last month, we learned that Dr. Fauci is stepping down from his role in government. Then a few days later, you put out a pretty powerful piece for common sense news about the lessons we learned from Fauci's tenure that hopefully will help us navigate the next pandemic more effectively. What's one major takeaway that you'd like the medical community to learn from the Fauci years? I think a lot of physicians wish there was more of an open dialogue where we could have had different opinions.

in a civil fashion represented. It's how we've been doing science for centuries. And it's very productive and it's part of the scientific method. I think people felt a little bit like Dr. Fauci, with all of his positive traits and characteristics, was really dominating the dialogue. And the policy was really shaped around his opinion, which is not necessarily always wrong or bad or malintended.

It's just not one that many of us agreed with, especially when it came to school closures, recognizing natural immunity, and warning of the pandemic before it actually hit this country. Now, you have been a strong proponent of natural immunity. Now that we have more than two years worth of data, what do we know about natural immunity and its effectiveness as compared to the vaccine? Well, it's interesting because the data are now in. We've had ample time to study it, and natural immunity is clearly more powerful, more effective, better, and more durable than vaccinated immunity. The reason many public health officials have been afraid to talk about it is that they were worried that people would take the risk and try to acquire COVID in order to get

natural immunity. We didn't want anyone to do that, especially when we had a very effective vaccine in the first year of the vaccines for that strain that was circulating. And so the data are now in natural immunity is superior, but public health officials have defaulted to, well, might as well get both anyway. Now, you've also written about the approach that we took in this country with children. How did the United States differ from, say, Europe in our approach with kids? And what can we learn going forward? There was really an incredible myopic focus by public health officials to block all virus transmission among children at any cost.

And so it was very clear at some point that not only was shutting kids out of school, having a mental health epidemic ignited as a part of that closure. But also, it just didn't seem right. There's a lifelong learning loss now that we're dealing with with many children. Your schools in Europe were open free and clear beyond the initial few weeks or months. They were open free and clear and without masks. And so now there's been ample time to study schools that were open with masks and without in the United States and overseas. And all of the data from numerous studies shows no difference in transmission. So I think that's one of the big lessons that we've learned.

Now, not to pick on Dr. Fauci. You've said you know him to be a remarkably kind person, but in your piece, you described his approach as being monomaniically focused on vanquishing a single virus. At what point was it apparent that the zero spread approach was not productive? Well, initially, we were so concerned about the virus that we all believed we needed to take all measures to stop the virus transmission. watching what was happening in Wuhan and then in northern Italy and then on the doorsteps of hospitals in New York where they were basically on the brink of rationing medical care. At that point, though, we started to see data that there was a 10,000-fold difference in the

risk between an older person with a comorbid condition and a younger, healthier person. And that difference in risk was never really incorporated into COVID policy, even to this state. There's a sense that every is at equal risk when the risk is radically different. And I think Dr. Fauci and the other doctors who have a career with HIV brought in a bias that they have with HIV, and we all bring biases to our understanding of COVID as scientists. But the bias of the HIV community, which, by the way, is almost all of them. It was Redfield, Fauci, Berks, Rochelle Walensky, they all come from HIV background. In HIV, there is a lot of, is no natural immunity because the HIV virus is infecting your immune cells. And in HIV, they made

a point to say it's not just gay people. It's everybody that's at risk. Those biases, I think, translated to some serious flaws with COVID policy. So you also discussed in your piece that we weren't strategic with our priorities when it came to research. You wrote that the vast amount of funding allocated to fighting COVID went towards the development and deployment of the vaccine, and that some other very basic areas of research were short-changed. What are some examples of that? Well, remember we were telling everyone, wash your hands like crazy, scrub for 20 seconds,

get in every corner of your fingers. Well, it turns out that was bad guidance because Dr. Fauci and the leadership at the time believed it was spread through surfaces. They adopted the influenza model. Many of us, on the other hand, had a different opinion. We said, no, look, it's not through surfaces. It's airborne.

Just look at the only other two coronaviruses in history that cause severe illness in humans. SARS-1, MERS, and COVID. SARS-1 and MERS spread by airborne spread. So we wanted to change. We had these debates, and it was tragic because all we needed to do is have research that could have been done in one day, in 24 hours. The NIH, with Dr. Valenci's leadership, heading up infectious diseases, could have commissioned with their $45 billion budget, the end-all study to conclude that it was airborne and not spread

through surfaces. But that research was not done. So many of these questions were linger as open questions in the forum, both medical and public forum. And so what filled the void where there was no research was opinions. And unfortunately, that's how COVID became the most politicized. sized pandemic in world history. Now, probably the most concerning error that you discuss in your piece was the stifling of open scientific dialogue that occurred during the COVID era.

You brought up the Great Barrington Declaration. What was that? So a group of scientists over the initial months of the pandemic saw what was happening to young healthy people. I myself was concerned that we were treating people who already had COVID and recovered as if they were still at risk. And we were not seeing reinfections with that original strain over the first year, year and a half. So we wanted to liberate these people. We thought there's importance in people living their lives and avoiding weight gain and deferred medical care and being shut out of their

livelihood, avoiding substance abuse and children being back in school. So there was an effort to say, look, let's have focused protection on those who are vulnerable at risk with comorbid conditions and older, and let's liberate the rest of society or have a semi-compatible way of living with the virus. And so public health officials shut out this idea. They hated it. Dr. Burks famously said that basically these are fringe people. She doesn't want to have anything to do with them. She won't meet with them. And Dr. Collins, who was head of the NIH, email found she back and forth and said, these are fringe people, even though there's a Nobel Lurie who signed on, along with tens of thousands of other doctors that signed this declaration.

And they said, Dr. Collins said, we need a quick and devastating takedown of these people. And that, I think, was very chilling to see the head of the NIH call for a devastating takedown, which happened in the media and through censorship soon after his email. In your piece, you also highlighted a comparison between Sweden and Michigan. You stated that Sweden and Michigan are very comparable in terms of things like population, climate, demographics, but they took very different approaches to the pandemic. So it's instructive to compare their outcomes. What can we learn from that comparison?

Sure. Sweden essentially adopted many of the principles, the Great Barrington Declaration. Matter of fact, they didn't even do some focus protection. They kind of were late to do it, and they didn't even take a lot of precautions to protect nursing homes early on, even though they didn't do that. Despite their mistakes, they had half of the deaths of the state of Michigan, even though both have the same population and same proportion of elderly in both Sweden and Michigan. You know, when people compared New York and Florida or California and Kansas, they're really not like comparisons because medical treatment advanced over time. and there was a seasonality where the virus staggered and then cropped up late. But Michigan and Sweden are perhaps the ideal comparisons of COVID restrictions versus no restrictions. Michigan closed parks and had some of the most severe restrictions.

Sweden, with the same population, same proportion of elderly, had half of the deaths of Michigan in the end. Now, in light of some of these missteps, what can the public health establishment do to restore some of that public trust. Look, I think people are frustrated and a lot of Americans want closure. This has been a very raw two and a half years, both in terms of the mortality, misinformation from public health officials. I think a lot of people would love to see a genuine apology, not just in word, but a change in policy, a recognition that specific policies like school closures were a horrific mistake where the cure was worse than the disease for young people. I think people would love to see some huge. humility among public health officials, because many times when we were told you must do this,

the real answer was, we don't know. Well, the CDC has recently announced that they plan to do an overhaul to address some of the public trust issues and hopefully increase efficiency and transparency. What is that overhaul expected to look like? It's not clear that they are making changes to the transparency problems the agency had. And I think the CDC has been unfairly. characterized as having a messaging problem. In my opinion, they've just made bad decisions. Well, many of us that have been following the CDC are curious whether or not this apology and so-called planned overhaul is real or just a publicity statement. They have a new director of communications who used to work at Planned Parenthood. They've announced some changes at the CDC,

but they don't seem like real changes, certainly not policy changes or specific apologies. they announced that they're going to have a new office of health equity at the CDC. They're going to change the way by which CDC doctors get promoted, and they're going to set up a new office for federal communications with other federal offices. Sounds like an increase of the bureaucracy. Remember, they've got 21,000 employees. They couldn't even come up with a website to track COVID. It was one Johns Hopkins engineering graduate student that created the Johns Hopkins'

COVID tracker at the beginning of COVID that the world used. Pretty pathetic when you have one Johns Hopkins grad student doing what 21,000 people at the CDC were not able to do. They talk about the problems they've had with data collection, but there's really no plan to change it except to create an executive committee within the CDC that will report directly to the director. But I'm not really sure these changes are meaningful. I think there's a false assumption that we can let the CDC fix itself.

If you look at the person they've brought in to oversee the overhaul of the CDC, it's a career bureaucrat Mary Wakefield. She was a former Clinton appointee. She's been in the government forever. And many people are saying maybe it would be better to have someone with a business record rather than someone who's had a lifelong of service within the bureaucracy, oversee the transition. And look, it's okay to change your position in science. I've always defended the CDC and Dr. Fauci and other. when they've made a policy change based on new data. But the reality is they had bad hypotheses and school closures is sort of the ultimate of that.

If they would have sent a CDC investigator to any of the schools in Europe and notice that the schools were open, free and clear with no differences in transmission or infection. Or if the New York Times would have sent one reporter to Europe to look at the schools open, free and clear, or to Sweden, where they recommend a game. against vaccinating any child under 12. And notice there's no difference in the outcomes among children. Then I think we could have learned a lot. Instead, there was a lot of fear mongering without that sort of balanced approach. All right. Well, Dr. McCarrie, as always, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks so much, Georgia. That was Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty McCarrie. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. From all of us here at Morning Wire, we hope you're enjoying the show. Did you know that if you subscribe to Daily Wire Plus, you can get access to all Daily Wire has to offer? That means news, commentary, documentaries, movies, and so much more. Become a subscriber today. Download the Daily Wire Plus app and take us with you wherever you go.