The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic by Nina Burleigh

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic by Nina Burleigh Ninaburleigh.com The only close analysis of our pandemic year revealing how the confluence of key government missteps, behind-the-scenes deal brokering, staggering dismissal of decades of scientific progress, conspiracy theories, and further malfeasance were behind hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. “A fast-paced narrative that captures the spirit of our dystopian times.”—Craig Unger, author of American Kompromat A few months before the virus slammed the world, global public health experts declared the United States the most prepared for a possible pandemic. Instead, we watched as the disease killed half a million Americans. A stunned nation has been too busy grieving and doing damage control to ask why, or to comprehend just how much of the blundering and chaos of the pandemic response was either deliberate or entirely predictable. New York Times bestselling author Nina Burleigh weaves together the key narrative strands to create an uncompromising and highly informed expose about our shared global pandemic experience and what it means for our future. Here readers will learn: • How the Trump administration packed public health agencies with right wing Christians and their political allies who cared more about gender norms and policing morality than a possible pandemic. • How another branch of the Trump administration, the anti-government ideologues, were so enamored of extreme free market principles that they treated the pandemic as a business opportunity. • How America’s anti-expertise culture, long nurtured by right wing media and conservative politicians, and now at its apogee, has left countless millions of Americans doubting the efficacy and safety of vaccines. • How the phenomenal success of childhood vaccines on extending average lifespan since the early 20th century has left many Americans so ignorant about how much vaccines have already improved their lives that they’re willing to reject them. • How our metastasizing national security state and the “bad science” of the Cold War from the A-bomb to bioweapons and beyond explains the credulity of vast numbers of Americans who subscribe to wild conspiracy theories about Covid. • How a growing number of mainstream scientists now actually accept the “lab leak hypothesis” about the origins of the virus. About Nina Burleigh Nina Burleigh is a New York Times best-selling author of seven lively, acclaimed works of creative nonfiction. Her latest book, VIRUS, five essays on the pandemic, will be published in May 2021. She has written hundreds of works of journalism, essays and book reviews, on a wide array of topics including culture, politics, gender issues, science, and the environment. Her books share a theme of examining the tension between belief and science, religion and rationality in post-Enlightenment life, including 1830s American politics, among post-revolutionary French scientists in Egypt, Cold War era CIA conspiracy theories, fake Biblical archaeology in Jerusalem today, and the role of faith versus science in an Italian courtroom. Two books explore the relationship between art, nature, history, and science. In Mirage, she told the story of the scientists and artists behind the first great study of modern Islam and ancient Egypt, Description de l'Egypte, a landmark work of art and publishing produced by the scientists who went to Egypt with Napoleon in 1800. Her book Unholy Business is a Maltese Falcon style crime caper about a gang of forgers accused of applying new technology to alter and sell archaeological relics. A fellow of the Explorers Club, she has covered stories on six continents. She has published works about the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Amazon, where she wrote an essay about women, nature, and the human culture along the Amazon River in Peru and ayahuasca culture in Iquitos,

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get them involved. Get them to Google it. You just go to the iTunes there and you hit the link or you can go to chrisfoss.club and do that as well. You can see the video version of this at youtube.com forward slash chrisfoss.

And also you can go to goodreads.com forward slash chrisfoss. You can also see us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, tons of groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. Just go follow them all and you'll really enjoy everything you find over there. Today, we have an amazing returning author. She is the author of the newest book that just came out May 18th, 2021. The book is called Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic. This is going to be pretty interesting. She's been on the show before, Nina Burley. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com,

and their Micro-iDSD Signature. It's a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-B Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise,

distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. And Nina is the best-selling author and journalist and lecturer. Her latest book is a brisk real-life thriller that delves into the malfeasance behind the American pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in the area of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts. So welcome to the show, Nina. How are you? Thank you, Chris. I'm doing pretty well. It's the merry month of May here in upstate New York. Everything's green and I'm sitting outside. So if you could, should hear a dog bark, birds tweeting or sound of a hay truck going by. That's why. There you go. We, it'll give us ambience. People will feel

like they're in nature. That's right. Everyone's enjoying outside with the thing. So we had you on your, do you want to plug your last book and then a website for when we had you on last and the website where people can look you up on the web? Yeah, my website is www.ninaberley.com, N-I-N-A-B-U-R-L-E-I-G-H.com. And the last time we talked, Chris, I was promoting the paperback version of my book about the Trump women called the Trump women part of the deal. And it's a look into the women who are around the former guy, and who make their living off the former guy and what they get in return and how his attitudes towards women were shaped by his father, grandmother, and mother. So it's a book that I think is easily satirized. It could be satire

at some points. And I had hoped that we wouldn't have to talk about it ever again, but it sounds like the former guy is still around and certainly his women will outlive him. And one of them could predict possibly run for office. Actually, we know one of the daughters-in-law is going to run for office. I'm not going to name any of them, but you can, anyway, that's the last time you and I talked. And since then, I've been up here, I left New York City for the pandemic, for the lockdown, came up to the country here, and spent the winter working on a short book about the pandemic, trying to cut through all the fog, panic, and chaos that we experienced where we were in March, April, and May, well, January, February, March, April and May of last year and into the summer, really not able to understand what was going on because we were being pelted daily with

more astonishing, unbelievable behavior at the top and absence of leadership and profiteering. And meanwhile, people were dying left and right. And we were watching scenes that we would never have expected in America, including forklifts, moving bodies to refrigerated trucks, large machinery, digging trenches for bodies outside of our greatest city, arguably the greatest city in the world, an absolutely unbelievable series of events that I have tried to distill and explain. Explain what looked like chaos actually was probably deliberate. Much of what looked chaotic was deliberate or deliberate negligence. And that book is called Virus. And it's very short. And it's a short, brisk read. I've been told that it reads like a novel. It's not a novel. It's actual fact. And then it has to I also go into the science in it. So I look forward to talking to you about it. Let's do it. Let's do it. You've written a lot of books, actually, haven't you? How many books have you written total? Yeah,

this is my seventh. There you go. I'm not as prolific as some, but I'm more prolific than others. And yeah, I've been doing this for quite a while. There you go. So you've written the book and you talk about it in five different parts. Let's get into some of the details and I guess start at the beginning or where you started at the beginning of the book. Sure. A little bit of backstory on why the book, why I wrote the book. I had, I was not sitting through the pandemic thinking I'm going to write a book about this. A little bit of backstory on why the book, why I wrote the book. I had, I was not

sitting through the pandemic thinking I'm going to write a book about this. I was writing a bit of journalism here or there, and mostly just, I was lucky to be out in the country. I was biking when the snow came, I was doing a lot of Nordic skiing, but I got a call in an otherwise idling. And I got a call in around Thanksgiving from the publisher of Seven Stories Press, which is the publisher that brought the book out. And he said, I want somebody to write a book about the race to the vaccines and what's going to happen with these vaccines. It was before they had really been, I think they were beginning to be approved for emergency approval, but nobody had actually had one. And I said, I'm interested in that. I'm interested in science

and science. And I do sometimes write about some scientific articles. But I'm also interested in the politics and the sociology of what just happened to us. And I will do this for you if you let me write about what the government did in terms of bastardizing the science and trying to politicize everything and other things. What happened with this last administration and how they handled it? And then I said, and I would also like to write about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation that came along with this. So he said, yes, let's do it. So that's the backstory.

So I started with, the book starts, opens literally with Donald. So he said, yes, let's do it. So that's the backstory. So I started with, the book starts, opens literally with Donald, the former guy on March 6th in the CDC in Atlanta. If you remember, he stopped there on his way to, I don't know what he was doing, some rally or something down in Florida. And he took a pit, made a pit stop in Atlanta and he stood in front of the media. And this is in the very beginning when we knew it was starting to infect people in Washington State. We were not all wearing masks yet. There were shortages already of hand sanitizer.

You were starting to get that sense of, oh, like early March. Remember, we were all, whoa, OK, now this is real. But whoa, what's going on should we start people were beginning to prep her up and here he shows up with his mega hat big red hat big guy standing in this lab and that's where he said when they were asking him about the cruise ship that was infested and and they weren't letting the Americans off in California. That's when he said, I like the numbers low. And of course, that seems to have been one of the, in some ways, the primary goal throughout the administration's response. The other thing that was being discussed

there was the test issue. And if you remember again, and that was at the press conference where he and Alex Azar said, anybody can get a test. They want a test, go get one. And if you remember, again, that was at the press conference where he and Alex Azar said, anybody can get a test. They want a test, go get one. And Alex Azar actually said, use the number 4 million. And anybody in New York City at that time, or I don't know where you are, but anywhere where it was starting to dawn on everyone that, yikes, we better be starting to get tested because it's starting to come in. You you couldn't get a test you didn't even know where to go doctors didn't have it nobody knew what to do and they knew that they were bald-facedly lying and in fact the epidemiologist in this of the cdc cdc cdc's epidemiologist not redfield the woman that they that Naomi Wolf, sorry, not Naomi Wolf, Watts was it who

played her or Kidman, Nicole Kidman played her in a movie. She's a virus hunter. She had already testified that week on the Hill that only 3,000 people had been tested in this country of 300 million people. And so they were splattering out these lies. And that's where I opened the book. And then I back up and I say, look, so, you know, what was going on here? What was the goal? What we thought was chaos and mishandling, I always thought from the beginning that it wasn't. And the reason I thought that, Chris, is that I've been, I've covered American politics off and on for a very long time. I've, as I've been in, I'm from Illinois, I started covering state politics. I've covered Washington. I've covered the Trump administration for the last five years,

up until a year ago. And I really understand the pillars of power that were behind this administration. The misconception is that the rabble was his pillar of power, right? The people who showed up at the rallies, the guy with the horns at 1-6, like the goofballs, the doofuses with guns. And that's part of it, but that's not where the poles of power were for him. The poles were twofold. The evangelical white Christians, the religious zealots who came out to vote and put him in office, he owed them a payback always. And he kept that in mind. And the other poll were really the foundation of what the hard right Republican was up to with him in office, which is smash the state, extreme free market,

vulture capital libertarians, heritage foundation people. They wanted to destroy the ACA. They wanted to absolutely no shred of socialism left in our government. No more, you know, untax everybody. So those are the two poles of power. And so with the CDC, what was going on there is they paid back the Christian right by giving them, sorry, there goes a truck, by giving them the public health agencies. Why do they give them the HHS? Because the Christian right cares more about policing morality than just about anything else, and you can do that through public health agencies, and that's what they were doing with the HHS. The first thing they did was take abortion out of all the conversations, put the gag order back on. They put a button on the you could see it up until Biden came in on the front page of the HHS website. There was a button, religious liberty button. And if you clicked it, you could be you would click it if you were the person who was, let's say, a pharmacist who didn't want to sell contraceptives to women or a doctor or a nurse who didn't want to treat gays or transgenders.

That's the religious liberty that they were promoting. So their eye was always on the ball of let's not talk about teen pregnancy in terms of sex education. Let's like regress everything back to Victorian Mars or even before. And was their eye on a virus coming from abroad? Heck no. They had no pandemic preparedness going on. The pandemic preparedness community, which is a terrific community in this country, all of these experts didn't even know who to call in the federal government when they were witnessing what was happening in February and March. And they knew what was coming down the pike and they knew they had a plan. They couldn't get into this organ, these organizations,

these agencies were closed off to them because they didn't have any need for them because they were scorning that kind of expertise because they were all about something else. So that's the health side of it. And that's the right wing religious part of it. And that's why he puts, what does he put in charge of COVID the COVID response, the most zealous religious zealot of them all, Mike Pence. Remember that? Mike Pence, whose record in Indiana was anti-science from day one. He said smoking was good or something like that.

Smoking was good. They jailed a woman who had a miscarriage for two years. It's unbelievable. So they put him in charge. So I just reminded people of this in my book, because people forget it was too many things were happening at once. The other pillar of power within the administration is, of course, the free marketeers, the hardcore MBAs, the Jared Kushner, I'll trade information with Saudi Arabia if you give me, help me pay for my 666 fifth building. Anything goes. That's the type of capitalism that they practice and want. So what happened is they looked at, as this starts to unfold, instead of putting the government apparatus in gear, instead of saying, FEMA, DOD, get out there, get those tests out there. Both make some

tests. Let's take the test that the WHO said we could have and put them on every street corner. And let's lock down and let's have contact tracing and let's get a cadre of health workers door to door. We can do this, people. We're the best, biggest, richest country in the world. And we have this apparatus of agencies that we've been putting taxpayer money into. Now's the time to put it to use. Instead of doing that, they didn't activate the federal government. They said to the states when, you know, Cuomo needs, they needed PPE and ventilators. He literally said to the governors on a group call shortly after that CDC, you know,

announcement, I like the numbers low while they went into lockdown on March 11th. And then things started to roll fast. At some point after that, he gets on a group call with the governors and they're like, aren't you going to be the sole purchaser for this stuff? The federal government should be the sole purchaser. No, because a sole purchaser means that they can negotiate the price down. That's the whole concept, right? FEMA should be buying it. Now, we need you to, you can compete with each other for this. We believe in competition. And he literally said, price is always an issue or always a factor. Like he wanted them to be the highest bidder for the cronies who were going to get the business. This is business stepping in and what they needed to do, they wanted to show that private enterprise could do a better job than government of running something like this.

So those are the two things that were behind what we were watching day in and day out in those months of horror going where's the leadership what's going on here what's the federal government what they're giving it to the states have to fight for it like a video game they have to and he's even he would even say things like they have to be grateful to me he was joking all that and he was getting up on these at these press conferences and you remember always talking about his ratings, which he did talk about at that CDC press conference. So that's the first chapter. And it ends with, I don't want to give it all away, but it ends with the concept of since nothing was being done, the government wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. There was only one hope really. And that was to vaccinate everybody. And then I go into

the, I learned a lot of, I did a lot of reading. It was a long winter. I did a lot of reading about history, about vaccinations and where they were invented and who, how they've been used over time and the history of the human science or medic medicine, beginning to understand what these little tiny things are that cause illness. It's absolutely fascinating to think about, Chris, that only 200 or 250 years ago, and for every human being before that point in time, so millennia of human species life, we are utterly unprotected against these infectious diseases. Up until about 250 years ago where they realized, oh, the cowpox, a weaker version of smallpox, actually keeps you from getting the smallpox. So let's make everybody get the cowpox.

That was the beginning. It took another hundred and some years before they understood even what was in there because they didn't have the microscopes. They didn't have the eyes on. And then finally, Louis Pasteur and those guys in the late 19th century, mid to late 19th century, start to see, oh, there are these little things. And there was all sorts of controversy about there were deniers. No, it's not that. Once at one European conference at that period when they were just understanding, these young researchers came into a conference and said, we have in this vial, like we know what cholera is now. We figured out it's these little things. We see it and the there was an old professor and he was in the room and he said impossible all illness is caused by human constitutions or miasmas or whatever it has nothing to do with these little creatures what is this stuff and he drank the vial before their horrified eyes and they were like oh and he's gonna die and miraculously he survived wow he didn't even get sick so in a way he showed like yeah well maybe some people's constitutions

do not get sick from this stuff but in any case there were all these bumps along the way for understanding what made people sick and how to vaccinate people. Oh, and of course, the word vaccine comes from the word cow, vaca. Oh, wow. I did not know that. Because cowpox, vaccinia, it goes all the way back to Latin and even before that. So I think vaca is the word, vache is the word for cow in French. So in the 20th century, we then have these leaps and bounds of vaccine creation. And now, of course, babies are vaccinated like 15 times with different things. In the beginning of the 20th century, in 1900, our great grandparents were born into a world where the average American lifespan was 48 and 49. Now, if you're born in 2019, your average lifespan is going to be 80. So it's doubled, right?

Why did it double? Why did this number double? One reason is that around the turn of the century, they didn't have antibiotics. So that's one thing. Infections were much more deadly. But children, you would have never gotten it. If you were born in 1900, you would never have gotten to like the age of 20 without knowing someone or having yourself been afflicted with some horrendous infectious sickness that would come in waves among children and that no longer we even know how to pronounce.

Can you still see me? Because I'm now losing power. Okay. I might have to go juice this phone up in a bit. So they didn't survive. And now, of course, we don't even know what these things are called. The vaccines have so changed our society and so changed our attitude towards medicine that we're completely spoiled. We are the most spoiled medically protected generations in human history. So that's one reason why I argue that these vaccine hesitancy is so prevalent because people no longer know what was it that we're protected by. So they can say, oh, I'll DIY it. Let me see what it says about the mRNA vaccine on Reddit. Oh, oh, it might make me sterile. Oh, okay. I better not take it then.

I wish it would make some of those people sterile. We don't need them breeding. Yeah, so that's where we're at with that. And then the mRNA, the messenger RNA vaccine itself, that's my dog, sorry. The mRNA vaccine itself is a complete medical milestone. It's unlike any of the vaccines before it. We, up until this thing, this platform, everything we were being injected with was based on this platform that they invented in the 18th century, which was, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, which is if you weaken

the thing that's the virus or this infectious element, if you weaken it enough and inject it, the body will recognize it. It won't kill you. And then the real thing comes and you won't be able to catch it because you'll have antibodies or a response. The mRNA vaccine is completely different. It's a man-made little tiny miracle. that because we have now electron computers and we can see DNA and RNA and have the protein strands that make up that a virus is made out of, they are able to create this tiny little strand of proteins that they, it's called messenger mRNA because it's transient. It's not changing your DNA. It's not going in there and altering your body it's only in there for a reason to tell yourselves make when you see this shape make a defense to it and so the spiked protein is the

d that they've it shows the cells what the spiked protein looks like and then it goes away and then the cells make their own medicine they make their own antibodies to this thing. Completely synthetic stuff has been injected to tell it and tell the cells what to do. And the body responds. This is going to change a lot of things. They had already been working on it for 15 or 20 years, and they were applying it to expensive cancer drugs and other drugs for other very intractable diseases and ailments. They had never tried to make a vaccine out of it, partly because vaccines are not moneymakers. And big pharma is a big part of what's going on here.

And big pharma was not interested in vaccines because you only use them once and then you're done and because so many people are being vaccinated there's a litigation class action litigation possibility if there's any mistakes so it's the downside and the upside they do the math and so they weren't making a lot of facts there were only like seven companies really making vaccines. So the mRNA platform now is going to be used for a lot of things. They will be able to do it when another virus comes along and another virus and another virus. They'll be able to do this very quickly. They had this thing, Chris, they had this design three days after the genome was sent over here from China. Yeah. Three days after the Chinese said, here's what this thing is that's killing everybody in Wuhan. They had a design for its response.

Three days. And this 11-month period of from knowing that to having it in people's arms is a land speed record. It's never happened before. Yeah. It's like a blueprint, isn't it? Where it gives the body a blueprint. It's a blueprint. isn't it where it gives the body a blueprint it's a blueprint exactly what it is here's the m messenger rna is just a tiny strand of of proteins that show

it's like three different things proteins it's very small and it tells the it tells the cell when it gets into the cell it tells the cell and the cell makes a response to it. And that's why. Yeah. And then the second one is to boost the T cells, which is a whole other thing, which is an extra layer of antibody protection. And that's why it's 95 percent. It's a man-made miracle. Ninety five percent.

We're walking around without masks now. My little local grocery store just stuck a sign up. I couldn't believe it yesterday saying CDC guidelines says you don't need a mask in this store if you were vaccinated. And it's weird because you're like, since a lot of people didn't want to wear masks in the first place, how do we know they're vaccinated? Exactly. Yeah. I'm still wearing a mask. I'm not, I'm not getting that stuff in me at all. I get vaccinated. I got my 5G right here. Oh, yeah. I call him. Hey, Bill, how's the divorce going? Yeah, modernity.

But yeah, it's really interesting. Ma'am, what was the question I had for you? Oh, I'm hoping they can come out with one of these vaccines for stupidity. Like just stupid people. Maybe we can fix that. I'm afraid we're some centuries away from that. Probably. If ever.

If ever. So the next portion of your book, conspiracy theories, you get into why we're conspiracy theories and other things like that. Yeah. Why are we willing to believe? believe that Bill Gates, the philanthropist behind I don't know how many millions of vaccinations given and lives made better in developing countries, is now the villain of this show. I first heard, I first encountered this on a reporting trip last summer where I met somebody, a scientist actually, who shared this theory that the elites are behind this virus. They're behind the virus because they understand that earth can't support the number of human beings on the planet right now. So 80% of us must die. And therefore, they're going to let 80% of the population die in the 20%. And I like who are those elites, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Hillary

Clinton, the usual suspects, right? It's Yeah. And and so I'm in the club. Yeah, me too. So I heard this. And I thought, wow, that's interesting. And I'm out here And I came to the conclusion that one reason, one theory that I personally believe in is that our generation, my, okay, I'm at the very end of the baby boom. I like to say that I'm Gen X because I'm right on the cusp and I mentally am more Gen X. I'm not a Beatles. I'm i'm clash just for the record but the baby boom and the cia are born at the same time right post-war national security state metastasizes security clearances lots of secret science starts going on right around that period of time you get fourth detrick and the micro uh the uh bioweapons stuff starts in World War II, and then they keep going into the 50s.

Above-ground nuclear weapons tests. Radiation. All the movies when I was a little kid were about, like, radiation accidents. Godzilla was a radiation accident. Of course, it was Japan, but the blob. And then we're haunted. We are haunted. And then Area 51, which, okay, I don't believe that there are aliens in there. Maybe there are, but I, a big part of this.

I think it's a big part of the vaccine hesitancy, the attitudes towards expertise, and the willingness to believe that, yeah, there's some secret cabals doing secret things and nothing makes sense. We live in a Thomas Pynchon novel or something. Like it doesn't, nothing makes sense anymore. You can't, you can see clues everywhere. It's just about decoding. That's what QAnon is. And it comes, I think, out of this cultural moment that we are in of 60 years of post-war, post-World War II, national security state metastasizing. Yeah. My two Siberian Huskies are running a cabal in the back of my house.

I know. You know what they call it? They send messages to me sometimes. Are they? Yeah. Rocky, knock it off. Damn it. Anyway, sorry, they're Siberians.

They got their minds on their own. But I got another theory. I got a couple of theories. One is the crushing of the middle class that's been going on for the last 20, 40 years. I saw the future of this when I turned 20. Yes. And it was starting to bleed out. It was starting to fail. The trickle down economics did not work, clearly, twice.

Right. And when people reach a point where they're so desperate and they're so broke and nothing's working. And all the promises that they thought they were going to have going back to when you and I grew up and you worked for one company for 40 years and you got the gold watch. Then came the Wall Street destroying everything, the Ivan Bioski attitude. Just this whole compression and destruction of the middle class where people are just so fucking desperate. They'll believe anything and they'll hold on to any fascist sort of hero like Donald Trump. And then we talked earlier about Strongman, the book by Ruth Bungate, who this is this how it goes. They crush the society. The society becomes

depressed financially and then they go nutso. And then you can also blend in that with how we've been funding trillions of dollars to stupid wars and, and, and the education system has gone to shit. My mom was a teacher for 25 years, 20 years. She would tell me, she goes, we are, these people are getting dumber. We are not educating them. Her class size were doubling and tripling the republican legislature was constantly taking away money yep yep she would call me and she'd be like i i just spent 250 bucks at the craft store for my education and i'm like so you get that reimbursed and she's like no i have to do that myself like what the hell she's we are building a dumber society than ever before. And so I think some of that is that. I also wonder as a separate theory, and you maybe will answer this.

It's almost like the God people, the right wing who got in control of all these, the HSS stuff and all that. Like you said, they were changing the lingo and the websites and the education stuff. It's almost like they wanted to prove that God could save us. And they're like the Betsy DeVos, the centers for national policy, is it their whole thing is to try and turn us in back into a Bible, a theocracy. There you go. Thank you. And so it's almost like they were like, Hey, fuck it. We're going to show you guys how God can save all of you. And then you'll convert. I don't know. Yes. I think

there's some of that. I think that for those people, yeah, I think those people do get their kids vaccinated though. They're not all that far. There are of course, cults and sects that don't, but I think the run of the mill white evangelical Christian is not necessarily anti-medicine medicine really but i what you're getting at is and i write about this i think that this these people and i'm not talking about the not so much the white evangelical christians but the the other side with the bob mercers the vulture capital the liberal hardcore libertarian profit orient profit over people folks they're one step away from eugen from supporting eugenics yeah they just don't say it but they will everything that they support indicates that's what they believe in for example they really do think that and mercer has been like, he wants the government shrunk down to a size of a pinhead.

And any kind of support, health care, free education for the poor is not good because it lifts up the weak and the weak will weaken the herd. This is the mentality. It's Aryan. It's Nazi. And it's Hitlerian in its essence. It's the weakening of the herd, the brown, the poor. So it was okay that this was killing the brown and the poor. And I think they did cynically at some point in that administration, some kind of actuarial. They looked at it and they're like, yeah, we can probably absorb 500,000 dead brown people or mostly brown or poor people.

That's actually not so bad. I think they really think that way. You probably remember, and it's probably in your book, when Trump just came out and cavalierly went, well, yeah, 100,000, 200,000 dead. We can live with that. I don't remember that. Thank you for reminding me.

There are certain outrages that didn't make it in if i had to list them all out you'd have a lot longer five books and i really wanted to keep it short and sweet and to the point but yeah yeah very much so what do you see looking ahead it's interesting i i don't know if you've seen this graph but somebody's put out like a little chart thing and you can see all the states that voted for biden are all getting vaccinated the people are getting vaccinated the disease is dying and then all these dumb ass red states are that didn't vote for biden they're not the ones getting vaccinated and so we have a real problem with this thing going with some sort of viral spin out or like even here in utah they're saying that we can't achieve herd immunity because so many idiots don't want the thing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's true all over. It's true here in New York City. And in New York City, it's not the yahoos, really. It's the poor blacks or the brown people who are turning it down. I think one in ten or two in ten New York African-Americans are getting the vaccine. There's just, there's just layers and layers of people who are not getting the information about what this is and

how good it is or believing it. They're resisting it. So there are lots of different points that they have to come at this from. But I think going forward, look, are we capable of the kind of transformational change where we would say, let's see if this happens again, we'll make billions and billions, no more IP, and we'll just make billions and billions of doses of this and everybody will get it? Probably not. We're not there as a species. But I do think that, and maybe I'm naive, but I do think that the other thing about this that is unprecedented in human history is that we were able to see, thanks to these little devices that I'm looking at you in right now, we were able to see in real time that every other human on the planet was experiencing exactly the same thing at the same time. So it's that type of event like climate change. It's a global species-wide situation or an asteroid coming in

where you have to decide what are we going to do? Are aliens landed? Are we going to be coming together here? Are we going to be in little tribes and we're just all going to live or die on our own. And I think just in some ways that might make people more aware of our shared vulnerabilities and then maybe make it more likely that if when another one comes along, the WHO last week said, we recommend X, Y, Z, ABCD, all these things about what we should do next time. And so this doesn't happen the way it played out here. And the WHO was saying, we need more authority to

declare a pandemic right away, to make travel restrictions right away, to lockdown. We need the authority, like this world body needs to be allowed to say and order these things to happen. Of course, you have in part of the right wing support system that Trump was paying back was the anti-world government group. They're so paranoid about Brussels. I actually heard Ingram, what's her name? Lauren. I never watched Fox in a hotel the other night. I literally heard her go, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels are telling us what to do. And I'm like, I think that just, he us what to do and i'm like i think that just he just likes to say brussels because that like provokes what is she talking about who in brussels is

telling us what to do in america ever does the federalist society and the heritage society just write all her scripts for her shows that's why i've always wondered they have to i don't or you know what they probably don't even have to write them anymore. She's like a bot. If you just spew out certain things over and over, you're hitting those points, the people, the pressure points. But anyway, the who, there should be a world body that everybody agrees upon is going to make some, at least some kinds of recommendations that the countries would follow. We're fractious, but I don't know. Maybe because I'm a Midwesterner and I'm like, must be like the Pollyanna-ish internal radar is like on hope. But I do think that maybe we can learn something from this and that we will learn our shared vulnerability is real.

And we're reminded of it. We're reminded of it. And we're also, we're reminded of our vulnerability in general. And that makes us more appreciative of science and the experts who we've been scorning or DIY instead of trusting. There you go. Yeah. Hopefully so. I have a saying that I always say that people like, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. So once again, it goes around and it was interesting, the pandemic a hundred years ago, we learned nothing from it. It's still the same thing with masks and everything we still aren't getting. So anything more, Nina, that you want to touch on before we go out? I don't know. I think we've covered a lot, Chris. I really appreciate you letting me come on

and rant and rave about this. I do hope that everybody goes out and buys my book because it's a good, I think, reminder of some things that people don't know about in terms of vaccines and the history of medicine that is absolutely fascinating. And we really shouldn't forget, like we forgot the 1919. We really shouldn't forget what happened here. And 1-6 probably took the gas out of, I'm actually writing about this right now. 1-6, I think, took the gas out of the inclination to investigate all of this pandemic profiteering and the other things that they did. The outrageous stuff that you and I have just skimmed the surface of,

that there would have been an investigation into it had 1-6 not happened. And now it's just going to go, whoever pocketed the millions on those no-bid contracts, see you later. Yeah. Jerry Kushner was doing all sorts of things with his little Harvard buddies or whatever. And they were trying to, they were trying to figure out a profit and they're actually stalling the government's response because they were trying to figure out how to make some money off of it. This is insane. This is insane. And then it just makes

me insane is their voters just have no idea how much they're getting played by billionaires. And they're just like, oh yeah, we don't need unions and we don't need wage increases we're fine we've got plenty of nothing so there's the ghost so nina it's been wonderful to have you on the show thank you very much for coming on again and sharing this wonderful stuff with us thank you uh guys check out the book virus vaccinations the cdc and the hijacking of america's response to the pandemic you definitely want to read it and make sure that we don't ever do this again commit to memory if you will just out may 18th 2021 pick up the book at your local booksellers or wherever you buy your fine books go to youtube.com for chest chris foss hit the bell notification button go to goodreads.com

for chest chris foss go to facebookreads.com, Borchess, Chris Voss, go to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places that we publish all of our different things that we do. Thanks for tuning in. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.