The Chris Cuomo Project - Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. William Li (Cuomo Extra)

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

In this special extra from NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Chris Cuomo speaks with Dr. Anthony Fauci, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about his extensive career in government service, whether he would change anything about the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.  Chris also speaks with Dr. William Li, M.D., author, scientist, and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, about the effects of and ongoing research into Long COVID.  Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you so much for being part of the project. Look at how nicely dressed I am for you. If you're just listening, trust it. Now, I hope that you subscribe. I hope that you follow. Thank you so much for the organic growth. And don't forget about the free agent merch.

I know the website's been a little tricky. That's because there's been too much volume, but I busted open the bank. We're fixing it. It'll be there. The free agent merch, the money is going to go to a kitty that we're going to use to give to good people and good causes. It's a good idea, right? And I buy the merch too. So it's not like I'm asking you to do something that I'm not doing. Now, I have two key interviews for you if you care about COVID. First, Dr. Anthony Fauci. He is going to be here. He's getting ready to leave at the end of the year. What did he think about what worked and what didn't work? And, and the big ticket for me, the unspoken pain and challenge of COVID is not what we've seen. It's what we're just starting to understand. Long COVID. All right. We used to call it long haul. I don't care what we call it. All I know is I have it. So many of you are coming to me and saying, I have it. And I didn't know. And then this doctor said, or my doctor never told me. That's what I hear the most. You know why?

Because they don't know. Nobody's really researching. Nobody's really messaging. But I have one of the foremost experts who's actually looking into long COVID who at least can answer the most basic question, which is, is it real? And what is it? And that is Dr. William Lee. So here are interviews with both of them in this special of the Chris Cuomo Project. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from PrizePix. I got to tell you, there's a reason PrizePix is America's number one fantasy sports app. Three million members. Why? Easy, plenty of action if you're into DFS, and it's just you against the numbers.

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I've been using AG1 for over five years. Why? It works, it's easier, and it's less expensive. That's why. Since 2010, they've been getting their formulations right and tweaking their formulas. Why? Because the science changes, okay? It's not like politics where people decide to believe one thing and no matter what happens with the facts, they never shift.

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Now, first, a question that you're not going to like to answer, but that's okay. You're getting ready to leave. You have spent half a lifetime in public health, working on so many huge challenges. I'm sure you thought that HIV would be the worst thing you ever had to deal with, and then you had a pandemic to deal with. What do you want your legacy to be? Well, Chris, I'd like it to be for people to realize that I have spent my entire professional career as a physician, as a scientist, and as a public health official with the sole purpose of preserving and protecting the health of the American people, both by my scientific accomplishments, by my administrative work that I did running the

largest infectious disease institution in the world, but also for some of the things that I was able to do from a policy standpoint in being the advisor to seven presidents. And some very important things occurred to that. One of them particular that I'm particularly proud of is that President George W. Bush allowed me to be the architect of the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief, which has already resulted in saving of about 18 to 20 million lives, mostly in the developing world. So this is what I devoted my life to, and hopefully I'll be remembered for that. So let's talk about COVID and things that went well and didn't go well. I want to start at the beginning, which is the decision during the previous administration to have you do the talking

for the administration about COVID. If you could go back, do you think that that was a mistake, administration about COVID. If you could go back, do you think that that was a mistake, that they should have had a political person taking the questions about what would ultimately become a very political situation instead of you, that you should have been there as an advisor, as you always had been, but not answering all the questions about what was happening and why? Well, what happened is that the political and the medical got mixed. So as you know, from the now, if you want to call it infamous, I'm not sure that's the right word, press conferences in which you had a mixture of the president trying to answer medical questions and my standing there and being put in the uncomfortable position, Chris, of when he said something that absolutely was not correct to have to have publicly correct him, which I did not relish that because

I have a great deal of respect for the office of the presidency. But some of the things that were said were just not true about claiming the efficacy of certain drugs that had no efficacy or claiming that the virus was going to disappear like magic. Right. But if you put Trump's nonsense aside, OK, and he clearly said things that he shouldn't have said, that he said out of convenience, whatever, that's politics. OK, move it to the side. But you wound up getting into a situation where you would have to justify decisions that you couldn't have stood back for, to use your word, immutably. Masks, no masks. You know, when to be in, when not to be in. And then, of course, it got continued into the vaccine. These were things that you not just you, but nobody in the government, Birx, no matter who it was, had solid 100% information about whether anything was right or wrong.

But then you got into the business of selling it as the right answer. Was that the right move? Well, the only thing I sold was things that I found and felt were scientifically correct. I never tried to nor defended anything that I didn't feel was based on the evidence that we had at that time. One of the really confusing and confounding issues with regard to the emergence

and evolution of an outbreak that was from the very beginning evolving in front of our very eyes is that things will change, Chris, from day to day. What we know now about this virus, we did not know in January, February, and March of 2020. We did not know about the fact that things like aerosol transmission or the fact that people who had no symptoms were the main spreaders of the virus. But if you had treated people more as adults, Tony, sorry to interrupt, but if you treated people more as adults, I mean, like, look, we don't know 100%. I think it's better if you have a mask. It's better if you keep some distance, but I don't really know. If we had treated people like adults and given them the information as qualified, like you guys do about everything else in our medical lives, nobody gives you 100 percent of anything.

Everything's percentages. Don't you think maybe we would have avoided the lockdowns, that we would have avoided some of the more extreme measures because people would have been told all along, listen, this is a dicey proposition. We don't really know about these things. I have to disagree with you, Chris. I love you, but I got to disagree with you. Go ahead. The fact is that by saying you don't know doesn't really change whether or not you're going to lock down. Lockdown's got a bad reputation.

But remember, when we put a pause on things for 15 days and then an additional 30 days, it was at a time when the hospital system in New York was being overrun. And the only way you stop that is by essentially stopping the virus in its tracks. You can do that by locking down, but lockdown has to be the last resort and it can never be permanent. It should be as short a period of time as it takes to regroup, get your PPE, get your ventilators, get your vaccine distributed. That's the reason why you essentially shut things down, not for the sake of just shutting them down. Understood. Shutting down saved lives. Now, if you just shut down willy nilly, and you don't do anything while you are in a shutdown period, then you're

wasting time because there are negative consequences of shutting down. And what you have to do is balance what the life saving aspect of shutting down against what the negative collateral consequences are. Do you think that with the benefit of hindsight, we didn't have to be locked down as long as we were? Schools could have reopened sooner, especially with what we learned. And I know hindsight's 20-20. But the criticism would be you erred on the side of hyper-caution. Not you, but the policies wound up being hyper protective to the point of stifling the economy and schools beyond where we needed to. Because now we're in a reality where people keep getting sick, there are new variants, people die. It is true. But,

you know, our country is not live and let live. It's live and let die. People die of the flu, they die of all kinds of things. But life goes on. We didn't have to do it the way we did it. It's very different now than it was back then because we did not have vaccines then. That's the big game changer and the positive wildcard that we have. Of course, you try to balance the positive effect of a move like shutting things down, the schools, etc. But you remember, Chris, because I discussed this with you many times. I always said that we've got to do everything we can to keep the kids in school, but to protect them while they're in school by surrounding them with people who are vaccinated, getting good

ventilation in the schools. That's what we were talking about. Now, that was before children were allowed to get vaccinated. So we know one wants to keep the children out of school. We're totally aware of the real and potential negative consequences on the children. But you make a serious decision like that in order to save lives, Chris. And that's why people come out and say, well, why did you shut down? By the way, Chris, if you look at the degree to which we shut down, it wasn't a profound shutting down. Because remember, literally within days of when Debbie Birx and I said, let's go for first of 15 days, and then the 30 days, the president got up and said, liberate Michigan, liberate Virginia. Essentially, it was an inherently contradictory situation. Not all the states

were shutting down. No, I understood. It was definitely the Trump administration was certainly very reluctant to do anything on, you know, one broad scale wound up being state by state. No question. One last beat on this. And then I want to move on to something else, which is with the benefit of hindsight and for the next time, God forbid, what should have been done differently? Well, you know, it's very difficult to say Well, you know, it's very difficult to say what should have been done differently if we knew in the early part of the outbreak what we learned as the weeks and the months went by. A lot of things would have been done differently. For example, not realizing that this virus can spread predominantly 50 to 60 percent of the transmissions were from people who had no symptoms at all. Right. We would have been much more strict in demanding mask wearing, in demanding

lack of indoor congregate settings, getting better ventilation, things like that. We would have done that very differently. One more thing. Long haul. This is what I've been teasing all along in the show, by the way. Every doctor that I go to now, no matter what's going on with me, they ask me, you had a bad case of COVID, right? I say, yeah, I actually had, I got it again. I may have gotten it a third time. I'm not even sure. But why aren't I sure? Because I tested, if I tested positive once and I tested negative three times, I still think there's a chance I had it because I know that false positives are much more rare than false negatives. But whatever. They say, well, you had COVID, so maybe that's why. And

then, Tony, it's fill in the blank. That's why your resting oxygenation rate is down. That's why your cholesterol may be like this. That's why this joint thing is like this. I feel like long haul is the big secret that everybody who had a real case of COVID now has what you guys call sequelae, the Latin word for things that follow, that are just being called long COVID, but it's like we're not doing anything about it. Is this something that's at all an urgency at any level? It is. It's a profound urgency, Chris. The problem is we don't know or understand what the underlying pathogenic mechanisms of it is. Is it a reality?

You bet. You know, anywhere from 5% to 20% plus of people, even those who don't necessarily have a very severe cost, who could have a moderate degree of severity of their COVID, when they recover from the acute phase, often you would have the prolonged symptomatology that's not explained by any recognizable pathogenic event. In other words, the laboratory data appear to be normal. Right. Yet someone is profoundly fatigued.

Yes. They have tingling in their hands and their feet. They have an inability to get good sleep. They have brain fog where they can't concentrate. We're struggling by collecting data from thousands of people to try and find out if there's some common denominator, some pathogenic process that we haven't identified yet. That's good to hear, Tony. I appreciate it because, look, I'm going to be covering it here. I'm actually doing a segment on it tomorrow with one of the few guys who's getting grants to research this and find out about it. But I do believe it's going to be a blind spot, not to put it on you or the administration, but society.

We have to pay attention. Dr. Tony Fauci, you've been a friend. I'm very appreciative for what you've done for me and for the interviews and the access. And I wish you good luck. And I hope to speak to you again before you leave. But I appreciate you. Thank you. Anytime, Chris.

Good to be with you. All right. Dr. Tony Fauci. We don't fake the funk here. And here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52 percent of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment, and it's all online. HIMS is changing men's health care.

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subscription. It's required. Plus, the price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. 30 million adults in the United States currently have long COVID. And that number has to be wrong because most people aren't getting any advice about what to look for or what could be long COVID. But of the people who figure it out or someone figures it out for them, 80% of them are having trouble just doing everyday things. So it's not like there's some subtle distinction before and after they had COVID. And I know this because I'm living it. So we got to do something about it. And it begins with at least addressing its existence. What is it? How long will it last? How bad can it be? Who's doing anything about it? That brings us to our guest, doctor, scientist and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, Dr. William Lee.

Now, full transparency, I burn up Will Lee's phone all the time. We have been talking for a long time about this. time. We have been talking for a long time about this. And that's why I have such confidence in his credibility, because I know he's been studying this and paying attention to it in a way few are. So, Doc, thank you for being with me on the new show. Thank you for inviting me. And congratulations on the new show. Appreciate you. Now, first, the simple reality. Is there any chance that long COVID is just some mushy excuse for people wanting to say that they have bad things and phantom illnesses? Absolutely not. I mean, COVID is a new human disease. We are so far from where we were in the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, but it's not over. And the actual part of

the pandemic that is worthy of looking at is the long-term effects of infection, which is called long COVID. This is a mysterious condition that is up to more than 100 different symptoms. We don't even have a good definition of it. However, it qualifies you if you have it for the American Disabilities Act. So it is disabling. So what worries you most? The lack of understanding of this, number one. Number two, the fact that the message that's being sent out is largely the pandemic is over, which is what

people want to hear. And yet it's not. And what we have to do is not focus on the acute infection, which for the vaccinated, the boosted, and the cautious people is not going to be very severe for most people. But one out of three people, anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of people could get long COVID. And we don't know who. That's the problem. Now, one of the things that you believe you've isolated is huge increases in diabetes in adolescents,% to 70% more at risk for heart issues, and that you have seen brain shrinkage. Explain. Right. So we are actually really trying to lean in and understand this other dimension of the pandemic, which is if you're infected, if you haven't been able to quite get over it, or you have these unusual symptoms,

what is actually going on? We know that COVID infects your respiratory tree, but it also affects your circulation. We know it causes autoimmunity and chronic inflammation, and we know it can affect your nerves as well. What is the outcome? The outcome of this, and we're now going into almost three years of this, we're seeing in young people, a increased incidence of diabetes, type one and type two new onset. Number two, we're seeing in people who are middle aged, having a higher risk of developing serious, including fatal cardiovascular disease, rhythm problems, heart attacks, blood clots, and strokes. And then finally, in the over 65,

the new onset of Alzheimer's disease is actually strikingly high, about 50% higher than what we'd expect new onset, not worsening. A lot of people, and I'm sure you're hearing this, and again, I am unique, right? I had kind of created myself as a beacon for people in the COVID community. I have them reach out to me on social media all the time. And one of the common things is, you know, my doctor says not to worry about it. My doctor says, you know, there's really no proof of this. My doctor says it's probably not related. Is part of this problem that doctors don't know what they're talking about? Yeah, I think the medical community is still playing catch up when it comes to COVID.

You got to remember at the very beginning of the pandemic, when it was, you know, really a crisis, the doctors were all gathered in the emergency room of the pandemic, when it was, you know, really a crisis, the doctors were all gathered in the emergency room and the intensive care unit, and everyone else like stopped seeing patients for or to tell a video visits for patients. What's happening now is that doctors are getting back into the game. And we now have to confront the fact that there are a certain percentage, less than half, but certainly not rare, people that have a spectrum of conditions. And I actually take care of some people that are seriously debilitated. Their lives, they say that their lives are actually ruined. And so for me,

as a researcher, I'm interested in finding out what is going underneath. How can we predict who's actually at risk for developing it? And of course, what do we do to try to help people overcome the suffering? You've told me you could be asymptomatic, still have long COVID. You could have been vaccinated, still have long COVID. And the idea, the president may say the pandemic's over, but the idea that COVID is gone, we'll keep seeing variants. We'll see what's happening this winter. Who knows where it goes? But I do know this. You'll be working on it. And you are always welcome here to talk about the latest. Dr. William Lee, thank you. Appreciate you.

Thank you, Chris. All right. Take care. Long COVID is real. I don't love the name, but it doesn't matter what we call it. We have to deal with it. You got people like me who have one set of symptoms. Other people are just learning to discover things.

We have to push for more information. And I will do that because I do the project with you and I do the project for you. So once again, thank you for watching, for listening. Please subscribe. Please follow. Please spread the word. Don't forget the free agent merch, and I will see you next time.