The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Donald G. McNeil - Surviving COVID, Pandemics, and Working at the New York Times.

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Donald G. McNeil, author of the new book, "The Wisdom of Plagues," discusses where we went wrong on COVID policies, as well as his outrageous termination at the NY Times. Here is folder with PDFs of all the docs: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wfTdozvW-vpuot2XXkwnQT9GG717txf3?usp=sharing https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220112073517/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/types-of-masks.html https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/2021-01-26/some-european-countries-move-to-require-medical-grade-masks-in-public https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-11688-7 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/health/cloth-masks-covid-cdc.html https://reason.com/volokh/2023/01/10/no-lockdown-sweden-seemingly-tied-for-lowest-all-causes-mortality-in-oecd-since-covid-arrived/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31441-x https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/17/king-sweden-failed-covid-strategy-rare-royal-rebuke-lockdown-hospitals-cases https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903717 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/24/sweden-wrong-not-to-shut-down-says-former-state-epidemiologist https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-covid-policy-was-a-disaster https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8783302/ https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/228/12/1720/7103191

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller, coming at you on SiriusXM 99 Raw Comedy, formerly known as Raw Dog. A change for the better, in my estimation. Also available as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dan Natterman, here with Noam Dorman, owner of the world-famous comedy seller, said to be the greatest comedy club in the world. I don't know, uh. It may well be. I'm also here with Periel Ashenbrand, who is our producer and is becoming more and more, shall we say, at home on the mic. And we have with us Mr. Donald McNeil Jr., American journalist, science and health reporter for The New York Times, where he reported on epidemics including HIV, AIDS and COVID-19.

Thank you for coming, Donald McNeil Jr. He has a new book out called The Wisdom of Play, where he reported on epidemics including HIV, AIDS, and COVID-19. Thank you for coming, Donald McNeil Jr. He has a new book out called The Wisdom of Plagues, which is, I read, I don't know, I read about 40% of it. Forgive me for not being able to read the whole thing, but I have three kids. You got through the first 40% of it. I appreciate it.

I'm going to read the whole thing. Talk closer to the mic. Oh, okay. And so, you, the book is fantastic. Thank you. And you are very hard-nosed about how you would handle public health. I lean in your direction on a lot of things. There's some things I don't agree with you on, and I'd like to discuss them with you. But before we get to that, can we talk, I also want to tell you, we don't have to talk about it, that you've been kind of a cause of mine because, I mean, it's well known, you wrote

about it, the way you were fired from the New York Times for... Forced to resign from. Forced to resign from the New York Times for quoting in a conversation, the N-word in a conversation where someone had brought it up to you and you merely repeated it back was so outrageous to me and such a time capsule of a particular short era. I don't even think it would happen today, but there was like a moral panic for a couple of years there that you had the misfortune to get caught up in the vortex of. I don't know if you want to comment about it at all. I'd like to think the vortex is over. I don't know.

At the time I said the word, you know, George Floyd was still alive. The Times was still fairly often using the word in context. It was 2019. The 1619 Project had not been printed. I was in, you know, in lunch in Peru along the way. It was a private conversation.

And it was the same year that the editor-in-chief of the Times had called somebody asshole during a Facebook conversation. And another one of my colleagues had gotten into a Twitter fight with somebody and said, blow me, to a female post reporter. And she said, do you want to think about that again? He said, no, that's pretty much what I mean. they want is because you kind of have to understand the background of my time as a union activist and union negotiator and how many times I'd gotten myself in trouble already with the Sulzberger family and the people who run HR and the anti-union. I mean, the people

who investigated me and disciplined me were the same people that I'd been getting into fights with across the negotiating table for almost 10 years. And I would say each time, you have a conflict of interest in investigating me. There was one time before that where I had written a rude reply to a Yale medical student who had written me a snotty email saying, let me explain to you the difference between HIV and AIDS. And I had written a reply which said essentially, really, are you this pedantic and priggish, you know, at medical school? I feel sorry for your students. Now I didn't call him an asshole. I didn't say anything, but he wrote a letter to, to, uh, Arthur Sulzberger and, uh, saying that he thought I was beneath human contempt and, uh, he didn't want an apology. And then I ought to be, and he made fun

of my degree, which was in rhetoric. And, uh And I was asked if I wanted to apologize and he said he didn't want to apologize. So I said, no. And I was called in for an investigation. And the guy who was in charge of the investigation, who was somebody I was fighting with over the negotiating table, told the president of the union, I'm going to fire him before the investigation began. And that's kind of the way things worked in human resources inside the New York Times. I hope they've gotten better about that. I hope some of this panic that's happened has made them grow up a little, but we'll see. You know, it hasn't been a big scandal for at least a couple of years now. To me, the separation of intent from how we react to things.

It's just madness. I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just, it was effing crazy talk. I said the word to say, did she say the word? Yeah. Did she call that, did she call somebody else a N? Or was she like quoting a rap song or a book title or something? And the answer was,

she was Jewish, her friend was black, and they were 12 years old, and they were sitting around joshing each other on video. Well, if you're going to call me a cheap, you know, Jew or whatever she called her, then I'm going to call you a lazy this. And they were floating around. And I was asked, did I think she ought to be suspended for that? And my reaction, I said, first, I wanted to find out exactly what was said. And then, okay, yes, it was an insult. But this was between two 12-year-olds who were friends. I mean, had somebody sort of talked to her and said, we don't talk like that.

We don't use this kind of language. And for God's sake, don't do it on video. But she'd been suspended for it two years later at her school. And I said, I think that's out of line. I thought that's ridiculous. We're similar in age. When we were, until very recently, it was perfectly okay to quote the word as reporting it or reporting it back. I have many black employees. There was many times if somebody used the word, a customer used the word or something like that, I would say the word in the conversation and nobody even blinked an eye. Randy Newman used the word in songs. John Lennon used the word in the conversation and nobody even blinked an eye. Randy Newman used the word

in songs. John Lennon used the word in songs. William F. Buckley would use the word in debates. I mean, it was not, if you do a restricted Google search for the word, you'll find multiple uses of it in Rolling Stone magazine. And in the New York Times. And in the New York Times. I mean, in the New York Times, we didn't talk baby talk in those days. You wouldn't say the N word for another word that you meant. The same way when I wrote articles about AIDS, I didn't talk baby talk in those days. You wouldn't say the N word for another word that you meant. The same way when I wrote articles about AIDS, I didn't say the P word for penis or the V word for vagina. I just used the words.

You know, the New York Times was run by grownups, and we understood the difference between intent and insult, between reference and insult. Run by grownups is something that interests me, and I've thought about it for many years now. I think I heard you somewhere say that when you started out, your bosses had been in World War II, had been in the Korean War.

They were hard-scrabbled people who understood the world. They were not fragile. Or they'd been foreign correspondents. Or they'd been foreign correspondents. I always picture, like, Jimmy Breslin as emblematic of a kind of a certain generation of journalists. These were tough, worldly people.

There were a lot of guys like that. More of them were Jewish rather than Irish, where Breslin was, but that was the main difference. Yeah, it was a lot of tough older guys. And it was a newsroom where it was incredibly fun. There was a lot of teasing. There was a lot of joshing. There weren't any actual fistfights, but there was a lot of belly bumping and yelling and stuff like that now i see journalists and i think there's a picture of the new editor of the times and he's laid out in his in on his uh persian carpet and he's got this like

the brandy or something very effete and it just seems like i can see that i'll find a picture it it really it really seems like the grandchildren who've never—have soft hands, who've really— The current editor of the New York Times actually is quite a tough guy and a very good foreign correspondent. Is he? Yes. I mean, he was a very good foreign correspondent. I don't know him really personally, but if you mean the guy who's editor-in-chief now, I don't know what he did in that picture. But he's actually a guy whose judgment in general I trust. But in general.

The panic, I think, was above that level. The bosses, they come from a different sensibility. They come from a much more privileged, much—they've experienced much less of the world. And the things that they get offended at are things that people who came before them would just not get offended at these types of things. Yeah. I mean, you know, the current publisher's grandfather was a Marine. He dropped out of school to join the Marines during World War II, and he was a Marine in Korea. And the whole notion of having to police the personalities of your employees was just kind of foreign to the Times. It was kind of understood that journalists are fairly rough and tumble people uh... i remember being told you know because you've been rude you violated

the core principles of the times and i thought wait a minute at the core principles of times to give the news without fear or favor regardless of you know party sector anybody involved not to be the most polite person i could possibly do is just being you know i didn't go to finishing school when you hired me is the current uh... usage of the Times for that word in an article? If you were quoting something, just the letter N? No, it would depend on context.

I mean, the word is still used. Not context again. Absolutely. Regardless of intent. Intent matters a great deal. And it has been used by both black writers and white writers inside the New York Times usually. But I mean, you know, it's not going to get just dropped in without anybody saying anything. It's going to it's definitely going to go up to the news desk

and somebody is going to clear it. But and as has always been the case, you know, when you do something controversial, say something controversial, it's checked with the news desk. If you if you swore in the New York Times, you know, Houston, if you published a picture of a dead body in the New York times, it used to never, never happen. Now, if something happens, um, you know, I took pictures of, uh, of dead chopped up gorillas when I was working on AIDS and bushmeat and those didn't run in the times because they looked too human, I was told. And then starting with the Iraq war, we started publishing, uh, you know, dead children with, with bullet wounds in them and stuff. So things, standards change at the times over the years, but there is a sort of way of checking on things.

And then what happened in my case was panic because they knew what had happened in Peru in 2019. I'm trying to find that picture for you. And they knew that, and they didn't want to admit that what had happened in 2019 is they'd looked into everything and then they'd essentially given me a slap on the wrist. They'd put a letter letter in my file as saying, you know, you, you use bad judgment, um, about using the word particularly in front of, um, you know, high school students. And I didn't disagree with that. And, uh, and from now on, you're not going to go any more of these student trips. And I thought, okay, you know, that's fair. Don't throw me into that prior patch, uh, Firefox. Um, uh, and, uh, and that was it.

But they, you know, they wanted to say to the public when the, when the article came out, the daily beast, well, we punished him, but they didn't want to say what it was because they didn't want to admit

that it was a slap on the wrist. And then, then they said, don't worry, we're going to punish him as we, soon as, as soon as we finished the investigation. This is the picture I'm referring to.

Oh, you know what? Never, ever, ever let anybody buzz you. You know, Russell Baker wrote a very funny article back in the era saying People magazine got me to sit on the roof in a washtub. And, you know, he ends up making it look silly. I'm sure he regrets having buzzed. Can you imagine? I mean, look, and even the coffee cup is obviously staged. And I mean this is what is that very good foreign correspondent

for years in china and i think other places uh that that's an unfortunate you know that i could be totally really bad picture we are on an audio show can you say what that is it's a picture i'll do okay so let's talk about the book okay the wisdom of plagues is the name of the book. The Wisdom of Plagues. You believe that we lost how many more people in COVID than we could have? Should have. You know, I mean, who should die in a plague? I think had we had better leadership, had we done about as well as Germany or Canada, which are fairly close peers to us, did, we would have lost in the neighborhood of 650,000 people instead of 1.1 million people. So that other 550,000 is kind of like the people who didn't have to die, in my estimation.

And I did this through, there are a number of different studies, but none of them looked at the same period of time. I did just a simple comparison. What was the, you know, deaths per million from COVID in this country versus what was the deaths per million in Canada and Germany? Germany got hit a little earlier than we did, had a little less warning, a little less time to prepare. Canada got hit a little later than we did. They're both roughly the equivalent of us in education levels and similar in age, obesity, things like that, healthcare and access to vaccines. The difference was leadership. They were told to take it seriously. You also use excess mortality, right? You have some studies in your book for excess mortality. Well, yeah. Overall excess mortality, by the time I wrote the book, it hadn't been tabulated. It was estimated to be about 1.7 million. So that's 1.1 million COVID deaths, 1.7 million total excess deaths at the time. The later studies since the book was finished made it to come out more like 1.4 million.

But that's, you know, that's always a really, it's an easy statistic to get, but it's a very fuzzy statistic to try to come up with the reasons for, because it includes everything from drug overdoses to auto accidents to cancer deaths because people, you know, there's all of that sex mortality during pandemic because people don't go to the hospital because they're afraid and they die at home. And drug overdose. We have a lot of drug overdoses in this country. So I see the pandemic in three chapters. The first chapter, in my mind, is before we had the vaccine, which required certain—

Okay. I probably would have divided that whole section into five or six different chapters. But go on. I'll listen to your— This was as a business owner and as a citizen and as a parent. These were the three chapters I found myself—like, three different stages that I really found myself reacting to. One was before there was a vaccine and that whole period when we were just trying lockdown and waiting for something to change. Then there was when the vaccine first came out, when we thought this was the end of COVID, 95 percent effective rate, that this was going to be on the order like a polio vaccine

and COVID would be eradicated. And at that point, I was very, very pro-mandate and I was the first business, I think, to require every customer to be vaccinated, even when it wasn't legal, because at that time, if everybody was vaccinated, that meant there was no COVID in the place. And then kids come in it meant that people wouldn't die if it's a difference no if if it was it was it was it was sorry it was a misnomer to think that covid would completely disappear the same way flu shots don't make flu completely disappear what it means is if you've had the shot you're extremely unlikely to

die if you may still get the disease but you're and that's where we are well they were still talking at that time about herd immunity. Fauci was talking about herd immunity. Herd immunity exists, but there's many ways to get to it. One of the ways, you know, I mean, we got herd immunity to black death eventually back in the 1300s. But not with the flu. There's no herd immunity to the flu.

Yeah, there is. It's, the flu virus changes so much, and there's four different flu viruses, so different ones come each year. So, um, you do have immunity, uh, to the virus that came through last year, or, uh,

I mean, eventually there was herd immunity to the 1918 flu because everybody had had it. Um, what you don't have is this idea that it, that it's permanent and it disappears. Right. So that brings me,

that's kind of the third chapter was when we realized, Oh, the vaccine isn't really indicative of the fact that somebody doesn't have COVID. In fact, everybody I know who had COVID had it after they had the vaccine. Me included. So it became more as kind of a drug or a therapy that you take prior to getting it, in a sense. You take it, and then you don't get as sick. But you don't take it thinking you're not going to catch it anymore.

You take it, it'll prevent you from dying once you get it. We know that now. We know that now. So that's the third chapter. And when that happened— But that's a good outcome, you understand. I'm all for that outcome. It's like flu.

I mean, flu shots in any year—before there was every COVID, we always had, you know, all the flu shots. It doesn't really stop people from getting flu. It's only about 50% that everybody—no, flu shots in any year, before there was every COVID, we always had, you know, all the flu shots. It doesn't really stop people from getting flu. It's only about 50 percent. Everybody – no, flu shots were always about 80 percent effective at keeping you out of the hospital, which is the on-ramp to the morgue. And so I would say every year, get your flu shot. You might get the flu. Don't worry about it.

You probably won't die of it. So once the third chapter happened, then I didn't really care anymore about the mandates and stuff like that. Just like I don't care who has a flu shot or – like I have my shot and I'm not – it's only like what you do becomes your business. I'm protected and whether you've had it or the shot or not, you're still going to probably – I have to assume you have it. There were other things. Yeah, I've had – I think it's seven shots by now, my COVID shots. And I get my flu shot every year and I had my rsv shot this year too yeah i was like a pin cushion and back in october um you have to remember that there was there was a long period there where

only some people had had the shots the shots had not been approved for kids the shots had not been approved for pregnant women the shots not been approved for a lot of other people and we went back to school at a time when virtually no kids had had any shots. And a lot of adults had resisted having shots, including a lot of school teachers and school janitors and school. And so you had, I mean, the whole school lockdown thing is a mess. And if we want to talk about that, we can. But it's not like we went from the whole country's had the shot to nobody's in the country had the shot to the whole country's had the shot to it so nobody's in the country had the shot to the whole countries had the shot in it and what we found out is that as the virus changed the shots weren't as good as they had been before the first shot now the first two shots you had are virtually worthless against the current circulating variant but if you've had the if you've had all the shots all the boosters

to come along you've got pretty good protection against the variant the virus changed because it's new in the pandemic the flu changes changes every year. This virus was changing faster, so we were getting more variants. Eventually, it'll settle down the way flu has. Some viruses don't change. I mean, you know, measles, the same shot that they made in the 1960s is still good, whereas we've never had a vaccine for HIV because the HIV virus changes as much in one day as flu does in a year. Let's go through a few of the hot issues of COVID. Clearly, one of the most significant reasons we've had so much death in this country is because we had insufficient vaccine uptake. I think the study that you have in your book says that if you just take the 10 states that

have the highest vaccine usage in our country, they're completely comparable with Germany and Canada. I think that's what... I don't remember quoting that study, but... Yeah, this is the study. I have it here. I printed it out from... Okay, okay. I mean, that sounds right.

I mean, vaccine uptake made a lot of difference. Yeah. What do you mean by vaccine uptake? Percentage of people... I don't know if that's the right term. Percentage of people who took the vaccine. Yeah. So...

And getting a booster shot made a difference. And getting a booster shot. And right now, people aren't getting their booster shots. I have to confess, I didn't get it. Because I had good, I got it, I had like six shots ready. But I had COVID, it was very, very, very mild. Okay. And then I took Paxlovid, and it was almost like, I've never had such a mild.

If I didn't test positive for COVID, I would never even missed a minute of work or anything. Yep. So, and I, to be honest, I am a little bugged out about taking all these shots but uh but you took paxlovid yeah i took the fact you weren't bugged out about taking that yeah well i was listen i was sneaking shots at first i was like yeah that's true he was like going to sneak like extra shots i was gonna drive i mean i i had a friend who drove four hours to Plattsburgh, New York. I had an appointment in Plattsburgh too. I wrote a computer program to get appointments for people going on the website. I mean, I was all in on this COVID stuff. But, okay, a couple of things that you wrote I want to ask you about.

So early in the book, you say in January 30th, you clearly got an inkling that something big was happening. You said the pandemic, Spanish flu, had lasted two years, infected most of the world's population, killed over 50 million. I came into work the next day very jittery. This is it, I told my editor. This is the big one. This is going to be 1918 all over again. She balked.

You have to talk to a lot of scientists before we can say that in the New York Times. I called a dozen of my regular sources, doctor who had played major roles in fighting smallpox, AIDS, Ebola. They were divided. Eight said yes, two said no, two were undecided. But one of the eight yeses was Dr. Anthony Fauci. Now, this was January 30th. Now, explain to me why in February, he already told you this is the big one. He was still going on television saying that the risk was minuscule because I'm not a Fauci hater, but this is, I think a lot of these things enter into why that part of the country became so skeptical of things. Why did he do that? He was actually, I caught him on his cell phone as he was on his way into the White House to talk about this pandemic.

You have to understand the pandemic was then in China, not here. And the question he was asked when people were saying, Dr. Fauci, they say this is no worse than the flu. You know, is it true? You know, is it really not worse than the flu? He said, right now, your worse than the flu he said right now your risk from the flu is greater but don't worry or don't but don't be reassured you know we think this is coming you know unless we can stop no he said he said i might be wrong but it could change dr fauci coronavirus of course has been in the news so much

people are worried should Should they be worried? Are they worried unnecessarily? And what should they be doing? I don't think people should be frightened. I mean, the risk right now, today, currently, is really relatively low for the American public. But that could change because what's going on outside of the United States, particularly, particularly obviously in China and in other countries in which there are travel-related cases, that this could evolve, and I think it would be unrealistic to deny that, this could evolve into a global pandemic, which would then have significant implications for us.

So although we don't want people to be worried now, I think we need to realize that this could change. So right now, don't worry about it. Be more concerned about influenza. I watched so many interviews with Fauci and I have heard his words distorted so many times. It's always like, oh, Fauci says masks don't work. Fauci says, you know, the flu is more dangerous. Anybody who's ever interviewed Tony Fauci knows that he never answers anything with one word or five words. He talks, it's 200 words. There's caveats, there's subordinate clauses, there's everything. And he warns you of what he knows and what he doesn't know. And I've been interviewing him on and off

for 20 years. So he always gives me the background to say, you know, this is what we think is happening right now, but this is the limits of what I can know right now. Right. But I get what you're saying. And I know you're not going to believe me that I'm not a Fauci basher. Can I give you an analogy? This is the way I am. You know, when they said there were 40 Israeli, 40 decapitated babies in Israel, and then it turned out not to be, and people started questioning that it wasn't true. And then Jewish people, pro- be. And people started questioning that it wasn't true. And then Jewish people, pro-Israeli people, got very offended that people would be questioning it and saying, what, is 20 okay? So if they weren't decapitated, and my attitude has always been, don't do that.

If it's true, it's true. If it's not true, it's not true. Get out in front of it. If you said 40 baby heads for whatever reason, and it turns out not to be, then your side should be the one to correct it, rather than look silly. So this is the way I'm about. My feeling about that is always, show me the pictures. What's that? My feeling about that is always, show me the pictures. Show me the pictures. So

this is the way I feel about this thing with Fauci. I don't want to bash it. It really stuck out to me. You say this is the big one. And Fauci was one of the people who was a yes to this is the big one. And then I really searched not to distort it. Now, by the big one, I meant this is a—I don't necessarily mean that this is going to kill as many people as died in 1918. I knew that wasn't going to happen because in 1918, we didn't have bottled oxygen.

We didn't have antibiotics for secondary infections. We didn't have—you know, what we had was prayer and chicken soup in 1918, and that wasn't very effective. Had all we had this time was prayer and chicken soup, this would have been worse than 1918. But I knew we were going to be able to make a vaccine eventually, and I knew we had oxygen and things like that. So the question was, what I meant by this is the big one is, like, I thought some years before, I thought H5N1, the avian flu, was going to be the big one. When SARS first came out, we thought it was more, you know, when swine flu came out, I thought, wow, this sounds really bad. What's going on in Mexico? Each time, it turned out not to be the big one.

It turned out to be either not as transmissible or not as lethal as we thought. But this time, the minute I heard the figure 10,000 cases, 200 dead, and that had sprung up from two weeks before, you know, 500 cases, no dead. I thought, holy shit, that's what happened in 1918. Fast-moving virus, 2% lethality. 2% doesn't sound like much, but if it infects everybody in the world, that's a lot of millions of dead. All right. But, I mean, it seems to me he didn't share with the country the urgency that he shared

with you. Similarly, you similarly i quoted him i went on you know they put me in the paper now be it said they put it on page 12 they didn't put on page one uh i i i listened to like four fauci interviews and everybody says there's no the risk is very small now minuscule he always said it could change but there was nothing if i heard those interviews it would have been a shock to me to know that he had told you, yes, write it. You're on to something. He doesn't tell me what to write.

But he said, I am very worried. I am on my way into the White House right now to talk about this. And we both knew that this was something that was happening in China. And that was a question. But we were also in the middle of a bad flu season. In fact, one of the reasons I didn't react to this in the beginning was I was so busy

covering the bad flu season that year. It wasn't as bad as 2017, 2018, but it was shaping up to be a bad flu season, which can mean 50,000 dead in this country. So I was busy, but I understood, okay, your risk from the flu is worse right now, but if this thing gets here, it's going to be worse than the flu.

And that turned out to be right. All right. And then I'm going to ask you about masks. Now, I found my old emails. By the way, just so you know, I canceled a business deal at the end of January because I was worried about the thing. I bought masks the first weeks in February. I bought an extra refrigerator. I was totally with you on this stuff. But very early on, it became clear to us that not only would masks work, and I'm going to, I would like to know your take on why he said that we shouldn't wear masks and then pretended to say that it was because he was trying to save PPE, but then also emailed to his friends, you know, a private email that we don't need masks. But more, even really more important than that. And again, this all goes to

why the right of the country is skeptical. Why did they continue to recommend cloth masks? Now, Fauci very early on said cloth masks are not protective. To this day, the CDC on the website refers to cloth masks. Germany, that you point to, they had a fine for cloth masks. Yeah, okay. And what kind of false sense of security did it give people? I think, oh, I can actually get close to you now

because I'm wearing this cloth mask, which actually is the opposite of what you want to accomplish. Why did the government dig in for so long and not say what we all knew was true? Only an N95 mask is, if you're not wearing

an N95 mask, stay home. Okay. Just the fact that you know what an N95 mask is versus a cloth mask versus a surgical mask shows that you have come an enormous way,

as have we all in this nation since December of 2019. I remember going out looking for an N95 mask and having to tell the people in the pharmacy what I was looking for because they had no idea, and they were all sold out. And I noticed, and they didn't notice. Did somebody know? And N95 masks before that were the things you used when you had a sanding job or you were going to do painting. This is my receipt. February 24th.

N95. I bought mine in January. I went out looking for them in January. So, I mean, look, in the beginning, there were very few mask studies. I had written about the mask studies before because I'd written about, you know, I was in Taiwan when SARS came in. I was sent to Taiwan and there went from no masks and the head of the CDC of the Taiwan CDC saying there's no point in anybody wearing masks unless they're sick or unless they're health care workers to the mayor realizing once they decided that they were going to stop the virus to saying that nobody can get into the subways in Taiwan unless they are wearing a mask. Because he knew that the only way you're going to get people to wear masks is to make everybody wear masks. If everyone wears a mask, masks work. The countries in Asia where there was no controversy over wearing masks, where there were plenty of masks, everybody was used to them, those countries had tiny numbers

of infections compared to us. And by the end of the pandemic, they had tiny death rates compared to us down in the, you know, 600 per per million rather than like us, 3000 something, 3500 per million. The whole battle over N95s versus surgical masks versus cloth masks versus gaiters versus masks with ventilation shafts versus that, to me, is sort of silly. I mean, the point is a mask works much better, whatever mask it is, if you put it on the person who's sick. The masks are better at keeping particles in when somebody's coughing or sneezing than they are keeping particles out

because particles can snake around the edge of a mask if it doesn't fit very closely on your face. But the only way to get one person who's sick to wear a mask is to make sure that everybody's wearing a mask. And how long can you get everybody to wear a mask? You can either do it the way China did, which is having people chased down the street by police drones saying put on a mask, or you have a situation where it's early in the pandemic and people are scared. So now Fauci and the others were opposed to masks because there was very little mask science in the beginning. There were like no studies.

They were done at McMaster University. They were done on flu and SARS. Why did the doctors wear them? Because instinctively they knew if they could get the mask that they were protecting themselves. Because you do that during flu season, like in the hospital where my girlfriend works. So if the doctors were protected,

why would they protect anybody? Because they were assuming that the doctors were coming face-to-face with people who had COVID, one right after the other that the doctors were coming face-to-face with people who had COVID, one right after the other. We all were coming face-to-face. Well, we didn't know that at the time. We didn't realize how. But months later, when we did know, they were still recommending cloth masks. And where there were masks. Yeah, eventually they realized that cloth masks

didn't work. And they kept recommending them. Well, eventually they stopped. I wrote some of those stories. Like years later. It wasn't years. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's taken as faith now. People say, oh, Fauci was against mass in the beginning. If you actually go back and look at what he said. I was screaming about it

on this podcast. There was a limit to what was known at the time. As the knowledge changed, not just Fauci, but all the other people who were on TV all the time, Bill Schaffner, Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Peter Gottlieb, all the others, they, you know, they changed their guidance and they tried to adjust their guidance as the science changed.

And I did, too. I changed what I wore, you know, depending on what I learned in the beginning. You know, I had figured out how to take a T-shirt and wrap it around my face. And then later figured out that's not very protective. I feared that one of the reasons they didn't go all in with N95 masks as a requirement, as they did in Europe, was because they're costly and because the whole notion of equity and health equity was such a hot issue at that time. They didn't want the—and you did see some articles about saying they didn't want the attack, that this was masks of the privileged. That was my feeling about it. I did a lot of interviews at that time. I never of the privileged that that was my feeling about it that i mean i did a lot of interviews at that time i never heard anybody making that there's some art but there's got to be some explanation why in the beginning people had to pay for their own masks

and then eventually cnn was doing articles if you're wearing a cloth mask it's just a costume and to this day i looked it up before it came the cdc still has cloth masks on it doesn't say on the cdc website cloth masks are useless wearing n95 how many layers of cloth and single glare okay so that would be ridiculous but uh max can you bring up that graphic about uh asian neighborhoods or whatever it is so there's something in your in your thing here now i now this could be wrong i had thought all along that cultural behavior cultural habits had a lot to do with why people got COVID. And you're right here. By the pandemics and the per capita death rates of East Asian countries were a mere fraction of those in Western Europe and North America. This was true not just in China, even after its January 23 wave of deaths,

but in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and more. Compared to them, we never had a chance. I'm not going to speculate about the, quote, national characters of Asian countries versus Western ones. That quickly degenerates into racist nonsense. Now, let me, I'm being very frank.

When I read that, I hear, eh, eh, eh, in my head, because that reads to me as something that's, that might actually be true, because you should, you should prove that it's not true rather than say it. So let me show you, so this was something I did in 2021. This is a map. On the left is the census of neighborhoods. In the pink are the Asian neighborhoods of New York City. And on the right, there's a COVID frequency map. And the white shapes there are basically zero COVID. And as you can see, it's amazing.

You could literally take them as puzzle pieces and fit them, the census, into the no COVID things. I did this myself and sent it to everybody years ago as I had nothing to do during lockdown. Meaning that Asian neighborhoods had virtually no COVID and they're surrounded by high COVID neighborhoods.

Now, how do we get a handle on that? How does this data? Well, you know, it's not like there's any neighborhood in New York City that only Asian people walk through and nobody of any other race walks through. And some of these neighborhoods are contiguous with Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, which had high rates of COVID. What is that little tiny neighborhood down there? Okay. Okay. I mean, there's no neighborhood in New York City that is as purely Asian as Taiwan is or as South Korea is. It's often in the New York Times.

On the left it says, New York Times labels it Asian, not me. And then I found a completely unrelated article that had a COVID heat map. And it's just, it's amazing how. And this was at some point during the pandemic. Because the, I don't know what point, but the. So let me add to that. The picture of the pandemic in the city changed enormously over the course of the first two years. Bring up the next graphic, Max, the other of JPEG.

So these are also from New York Times. Flushing, Queens, had 100% mask use. Harlem, 66%. Park Slope, 97%. They didn't have the Hasidic neighborhood, but in the middle of a plague on a biblical scale, Hasidic families hit hard by virus. So let's just start with the easy case. We know that cultural reasons, I mean, you can descend it to anti-Semitism all you want. We know the Hasidic didn't want to wear masks. We know that I'm, as a Jewish person, I'm perfectly fine with it. It was also because there was a gigantic spread of COVID during the Purim celebrations very on the pandemic.

But they don't wear masks. We know that. No, no, no. This is even before masks were a thing. What you had was an explosion of, I mean, first of all, some of the first cases in this country that we knew about in New York were in a synagogue up in Westchester County. But the big explosion in New York City was initially inside the Hasidic neighborhoods because everybody got together for Purim right at the very height. All the more reason for them to wear masks.

The St. Patrick's Day parade and whether or not we were going to cancel Comic-Con. You remember that time of year. But you think they would mask. That's when I would mask up. You see the headline there. Nobody was wearing masks then. We're talking about March. 15% of virus tests are positive and few wear masks in one orthodox suburb this is often the new york times right that was in the second wave

right so that was so so many people said we're not going to wear masks many people in the hasidic neighborhood said we're not going to wear masks now because we've all had it and then let me add one other thing from the book because i'm convinced that in some way cultural attitudes matter so you said this because this is a racist nonsense but then, you say, vis-a-vis tuberculosis in Vietnam, you say Vietnam did not rely on enthusiasm or on lotteries. Its government is used to giving orders and its people are used to taking them, which to me was your, which was, you were actually admitting that, yeah, they're used. This was part of the story.

They're used to taking them. And I believe, I believe about my Asian brothers and sisters, both because they had experienced in some way with these diseases. And because as you say, they're used to following rules. Well, okay. Cuba and Puerto Rico have roughly similar ethnic populations, but wouldn't you say there's a different attitude about taking orders from the government

between Puerto Rico and Cuba? I don't know about Cuba. I was civil. I don't know. I mean, I literally don't know. You kind of have to follow orders on some things in Cuba. And we also know that the cultural attitudes

of the Trump supporters are... Oh, absolutely. We'll talk about them, but we won't talk about Asians. I don't like to separate it by race because, you know, I mean, I find that. I don't want to separate it by race either. I separate it by what makes sense. Every country I ever work in, there's a wide range of opinions and a wide range of attitude about government and things like that. But in countries where the government has a lot of control and particularly in Asia, what you had there was masks were never controversial. Masks have been the norm during flu season. If you, you know, it was, I remember the first time I saw a non-Asian person wearing a mask on the New York City subways, and it struck me as so unusual that I took a picture of the guy.

Because for several months before that, I had occasionally seen people wearing masks on the cellways because it was flu season. And this is the first time I'd ever seen somebody who was clearly so worried about this new virus that they weren't Asian, but they were wearing a mask anyway. But that's because masks have been the norm in Asia ever since SARS. SARS hit Asia much harder than any other part of the world. It's touched Toronto a little bit, but other than that, it didn't spread anywhere. And so it became the norm to wear masks, particularly during respiratory virus season. And also, you know, for air pollution and things like that. So it's not controversial to have worn a mask for any time in the last 10 years. Are they wearing masks during flu season because,

which you said, to prevent sick people from giving it to others or to prevent themselves from getting? Both. If everybody masks up, there's a lot less. It's just the norm that if you wear a mask, you're better protected. And you're also, you know, it's polite if you have a cold in much of Asia. If you have a slight cold and you're going to the office, you're considered rude if you're not wearing a mask.

If you're coughing and sneezing and you're in the office, you better be wearing a mask. Otherwise, you're considered to be rude to your fellows. Now, given, and this I don't even know about, but given what I think are the way different populations behave and handle these situations, and America is very disjointed and has no central leadership. Sweden, in the end, I sent you the article because it was so crazy.

Sweden, and you're actually the study that you cite also has very similar data, had the lowest excess death rate. And Sweden, actually, your chart here has Sweden right below New Zealand. This is from your study, the study in your book. And the one I sent you today from Reason Magazine, I think, had Sweden at the lowest. No, no, no, no, that's completely wrong. Sweden, this is an article of faith among the anti-lockdown anti-maskers you know i don't want to say conservatives or trumpers or anything it's because it's but sweden sweden had a very

high death rate compared to other nordic countries in the beginning of the pandemic yes it's because they didn't have lockdowns and the main reason they had a high death rate for the same reason Belgium did, the virus got into the nursing homes and it had killed large numbers of people. And the king said, we've done it wrong. The guy who was in charge, the state's chief epidemiologist said, we did it wrong. And his predecessor also said, we did it wrong. And I sent you guys those articles earlier today saying, you know, they realized. And then things normalized. And ultimately, by the end, by the time the pandemic was over, their death rates from COVID were quite a bit higher than any other Nordic countries, a little higher than Germany's, but otherwise kind of within the same ballpark as Western

Europe. They were around the death rate of France and Spain and a few other countries. They're in the range of what you said that we ought to be. But they didn't follow any of the suggestions. They're not as high as we are. You have to understand that the lockdowns in the beginning were just one part of the whole equation. I mean, lockdowns in and of themselves didn't stop the virus. And the reason lockdowns were effective in Asia is because they not only locked it down,

they had to lock down China because they had a raging epidemic on there and they had to cut down the death rates in the hospitals. But the lockdowns in China only lasted until April. Their lockdowns were incredibly short, much shorter than ours were, because they did them effectively. They opened up those cities once they had no more COVID cases at all in that county for two weeks. We never had less than 30,000 cases a day because we always had lockdown-like, these garden party kind of lockdowns. Our lockdowns weren't even as tough as Italy's were. People drove all over the place. People I know went on, OK, Cupid dates and stuff, even supposedly during lockdown. People went and moved to their vacation houses and stuff. The virus kept spreading all through our supposed lockdowns.

So our lockdowns were a joke. They were economically crippling. But as far as stopping a virus is concerned, they were a joke. What happened in Sweden is they had a really bad initial burst of cases. They realized they'd done it wrong. And then they adjusted and they started doing more social distancing. And then they had pretty high vaccine acceptance rates. And the vaccine acceptance rates made a big difference to the deaths once you get

through the whole pandemic so because i sort of misspoke this data actually starts um june of 2021 i'm sorry june 27th of 2021. so it this data starts 2021 is like six months after the vaccines are coming out yeah so but that that changed the death rates enormously by then so this would get so the the so the again the huge difference in this final chapter or the second two chapters that i talk about in our performance and the rest of the world performance is vaccine uptake and yeah question that's the major factor. The question is, why were people so hesitant about the vaccine? And I spent the whole last two days reading about it. And so let me— I mean, because they were being told it was going to give them swollen testicles or it was going to magnetize them.

I could use a swollen testicle. Okay. It was going to make Bill Gates. I could use a swollen testicle. Okay. It was going to make Bill Gates possible to track you everywhere you want. The president, you know, and his wife went off and got vaccinated as soon as they could in January of 2021, but they didn't admit it. He not only didn't get vaccinated on television like everybody else did, he hid the fact and then he blurted it out in March or April at CPAC. Was that CPAC?

He kept the big conservative political action committee convention. And then, of course, later, when he endorsed boosters, he got booed by his own fans. So what happened was— That's the one thing in your book that actually bothered me more than anything, was that I thought that's such a bum rap on Trump. And I— That he didn't admit he got vaccinated? Yeah. Well, let me let me. So right prior to the election, Trump was talking to debates about we're going to have a vaccine any

day. He was fact checked as if not lying, as exaggerating and probably not correct. And now we're weeks away from a vaccine. We're doing therapeutics already. Fewer people are dying when they get sick. Far fewer people are dying. We've done a great job. The only thing I haven't done a good job, and that's because of the fake news. No matter what you say to them, they give you a bad press on. It's just fake news. You have repeatedly either contradicted or been at odds with some of your government's own top scientists. The week before last, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Redfield, said it would be summer before the vaccine would become generally available to the public. You said that he was

confused and mistaken. Those were your two words. But Dr. Slaoui, the head of your Operation Warp Speed, has said exactly the same thing. Are they both wrong? Well, I've spoken to the companies, and we can have it a lot sooner. It's a very political thing, because people like this would rather make it political than save lives. It is a very political thing. I've spoken to Pfizer.

I've spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to. We have great Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others. They can go faster than that by a lot. Become very political because the left or I don't know if I call them left, I don't know what I call them. So you're suggesting that the head of your operation, Warp Speed, Dr. Sali? I disagree with him. Yeah, no, I disagree with both of them. And he didn't say that. He said it could be there, but it could also be much sooner. So here's the deal. This man is talking about a vaccine. Every serious company is talking about maybe having a vaccine done by the end of the year, but the distribution of that vaccine

will not occur until sometime beginning or the middle of next year to get it out, if we get the vaccine. You also said a vaccine will be coming within weeks. Yes. Is that a guarantee? No, it's not a guarantee, but it will be by the end of the year. But I think it has a good chance. There are two companies, I think, within a matter of weeks, and it will be distributed very quickly. We're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan and there's no prospect that there's going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American

people before the middle of next year um there was an article that came out in mit technology review that accused eric topol of um being behind extending having the fda change their rules so that the vaccine wouldn't come out during trump's uh before the election and uh you know people like tyler cowan actually believe that that's true. We had Eric Topol on the show, and after interviewing him, I came to believe it was true, too. But why Eric Topol?

Why not the guy who was in charge of Pfizer, whose name has gone out of my mind? Because Topol is the guy who wrote the open letter that put it. Yeah, but he had no control over it. The question was, you want to do efficacy tests on the vaccine he you want you want to do efficacy tests on the vaccine and you also want to do safety tests on the vaccine because you want to know whether let me just get it all out there okay okay okay so this is from the new york times biden seizing on worries of a rushed vaccine warns trump can't be trusted thrusting the issue coronavirus vaccine joe biden has said he trusted vaccines but not a politicized development uh uh there now, you know, this woman, Lori Garrett.

Yes. She wrote an article in Foreign Policy Magazine. Trump's vaccine can't be trusted. If a vaccine comes out before the election, there are good reasons not to take it. And she and this was it was very, very politicized. If Trump had won, you could have seen it. The ground was set for the vaccine. I'm almost done to go in the other direction.

So there was, she wrote, on April 3rd, Trump scoffed at CDC recommendations that Americans wear masks. By rushing vaccine approval to meet a pre-election deadline, the president is setting immunization up for political polarity. Those lines, but she's creating political, those lines of America, two days before election,

acute immunization may well be Trump's most ardent followers wearing MAGA hats and no mask, fully confident that their leader has found a way to protect them from the 21st century plague but then trump got covid right during the right at the second second debate uh he got covid in december right yeah so trump got covid right no it couldn't be december had to be before the election so it had to be uh oct. He had second debate was canceled because Trump had. Boy, OK, I don't remember the date. Yeah. All right. So and then. There was an article in The New York Times. The headline is Trump rescinds plan for White House staff to be quickly vaccinated. After months during which Mr. Trump and his senior advisers played down the virus, hosting campaign rallies and holiday parties, blah, blah, blah.

The news of White House officials suddenly taking the virus seriously, enough to claim early doses of the vaccine, had been greeted by outrage from Democrats, as well as President's longtime critics. George Conway criticized the Republicans for wanting to take the vaccine early. Tim Hogan, a Democratic consultant and former top aide to Senator Amy Klobuchar's campaign, said that a White House that downplayed the virus and held a half year nationwide super spreader tour gets to cut the line. So this was already Trump's taking the vaccine.

The White House taking the vaccine was already being criticized as them cutting the line by his enemies. And he had just had covid. So it's the reason he didn't need the vaccine. So he didn't tell people he took the vaccine, but I made a video to play the video. And these are dated. And then you tell, and this is why,

I mean, I blame Tucker Carlson. I just don't blame Trump. Go ahead. Play the, make sure the sound is right. Go ahead. We have the best medicines in the world.

October 6th. It all happened very shortly and they're all getting approved, and the vaccines are coming momentarily. But this will vanquish the- December 8th. The problem, this horrible scourge. I think you'll be seeing that over the next few months. The numbers should skyrocket downward. Today, we're on the verge of another American medical miracle. Together, we will defeat the virus and we will soon end the pandemic and we will save millions and millions of lives, both in our country and all over the world. That was a signing ceremony.

Have developed treatments and vaccines. We are delivering millions of doses of a safe and effective vaccine. December. That will soon end this terrible pandemic and save millions and millions of lives. It is truly a Christmas miracle. It works incredibly well. Ninety five percent. Fox News. Even more than that.

It works incredibly well. And I would recommend it to a lot of people that don't want to get it. But it's a great vaccine. It's a safe vaccine. and it's something that works. But people that do get it get better much quicker. It's a very important thing to know. They don't get nearly as sick and they get it. Do they get better?

Lindsey Graham's an example. He said, if I didn't have this vaccine, I would have died. And you know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. I do. You got to do what you have to do. But I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good. Take the vaccines. But you in your freedoms. I do. You got to do what you have to do. But I recommend take the vaccines. I did it.

It's good. Take the vaccines. But you got your freedoms. But I happen to take the vaccine. I think I saved many. I don't think I know. I saved millions and millions of lives throughout the world. We could have had another Spanish flu.

We could have had, you know, in 1917, close to 100 million people died, they say. But it was really bad. And now other countries are using our vaccines and, you know, tremendous. They're tremendously successful. You're playing right into their hands when you sort of like, oh, the vaccine. If you don't want to take it, you shouldn't be forced to take it. No mandates. But take credit because we saved tens of millions of lives.

Take credit. Don't let them take that away from you. Okay, so the president made news. Do you agree with that? Ooh, they hate him for it. Both the president and I are vaxxed. Did you get the booster? Yes.

I got it, too. He thought about life. Okay, so. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. All right, so I think he got got a begrudge and said the guy was wrapping himself in the vaccine he was trying to take credit for operation wars but he couldn't control his crazy followers because people like tucker carlson right and the rest okay is there a question at all where am i wrong how's that oh okay yeah what was happening in January and February and before he finally admitted in March that he had taken the vaccine during that time, which was the crucial moment when the vaccines were finally trying to prevent me from getting reelected by demanding a longer

safety period testing than they need in order to get the vaccines approved. So they're holding the vaccine, they're delaying or slow walking the approval of the vaccine until after the election. And he started pushing that line in November, and he okay i never had one week i mean before the election yeah but what what happened you know that crucial period when the vaccines actually were rolling out january february march he never got the vaccine he didn't talk up the vaccine and he didn't get on tv and have the vaccine chapped into his arm on tv like like every other public health leader did at the time. It would have made a huge, huge difference if he'd gotten in front of his followers and said, Melania and I got the vaccine. Here you can see us getting the vaccine.

Do what I say. You know, it'll save your lives. And he didn't. He just backed off for about three months. And it was only after, is it CPAC? I'm sorry, I can't remember that conference. CPAC, yeah. Yeah. But he finally, somebody asked him and he finally said, yeah, I got it. I got it back in January. And then there was this kind of, well, wait a sorry, I can't remember that conference. CPAC, yeah. Yeah, that he finally, somebody asked him, and he finally said, yeah, I got it. I got it back in January. And then there was this kind of, well, wait a minute. Why didn't you tell us?

Well, funny thing is, I don't remember that. I mean, I understand what you're saying. Of course, I wish he had gotten it on television, but I am mindful of the fact that in the New York Times, there was articles about Democrats blasting Republicans for getting in front of the line. Look, I mean- They get obsessed with the politics of all this stuff.

I'm not interested in the politics of this stuff as much as I am in the science. But I don't know if you were aware of the crazy stuff being said on Tucker Carlson, Dr. Malone, Brett Weinstein, these... I'm sorry, despicable people. Who was that, the guy we had on the show? Alex Berenson. My former colleague. I'm sorry, despicable people. Who was that other guy we had on the show? Alex Berenson. Former colleague.

But these people have tremendous influence. And my theory is that... And these were his biggest fans, too. I mean, it was Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson. I don't know if I include Sean Hannity in that or not. I know he's a huge fan. I don't know if he was anti-vax or not. But Tucker Carlson was out there every night with half-assed bullshit data about the vaccines. I mean, that would spook me, and then I would go look into it or something.

And then, again, Dr. Malone. I mean, it was one after another. the fertile ground for mistrust was so created that it just became natural not to trust the vaccine. Like Biden and Harris and your friend Garrett were already saying

don't trust the vaccine if it's Trump's vaccine. Now the other side... I read your article. No, no. The way you characterize Lori, it's fine. It's fine. I'm sorry.

I like Laurie. I don't agree with everything she says. To be honest, I saw that you did some shows together. I don't believe you. I didn't mean to be snide. That's not my style and that's not what I meant. She's a very good reporter. There are times when she says things that I completely disagree with,

and I'm sure that there are many things I say. And add into this mix the Fau Fauci with the mass, the semantic games he seemed to play about gain-of-function research. I'm not against gain-of-function research. I understand we might need it, but I was, it is very clear to me that to, he could have answered those questions.

Listen, I know what you're referring to is not technically gain-of-function research, but if you're asking me, did we, you know, did we fund blah, blah, blah. If he and Randul have been able to have a grown-up discussion with each other both having calmed down they might have sorted that out instead it was like two guys shouting at each other yeah yeah that was not one of the high points calling lab leak racist which the guy the woman who replaced you at the times that the the and in a weird way, the mentality that had people saying that you made them feel unsafe, like all of it is just an ugly thing in the country that has brought tribalism to such a boiling point, in my opinion, that people latched into this vaccine. I really don't think I blame Trump for a lot of things a free michigan he did outrageous things during the uh during covid especially

especially as i said uh undermining the lockdowns while he was claiming to be for them this was despicable but on the vaccine i really think it's a bum rap okay yeah all right i i don't agree but i'll accept the criticism yeah um by the way you reminded me another thing that caused distrust and I might even edit this in different is that we were told for so long to lock down, not go out, wear masks. People on the left were outraged. I remember some college kids were on a spring break in a lake or something without a cap. And then George Floyd was died, killed. And then all the BLM riots started, and you had major journals, Johns Hopkins, saying, well, you know, racism is a public health crisis also. And they were rationalizing, I actually had some of the quotes here, rationalizing this kind of ridiculous ending of everything they'd been telling us because they agreed with the cause. I'm not going to defend any of that. I know.

Disease spreading is disease spreading. It's not, the politics are the reason you go out and... I know you won't defend it, but I know, but what I'm saying is that for the right wing of this country, they're like...

I can totally agree that that was enraging. They're enraged, and they know, like if there were abortion demonstrations, you know, pro-life demonstrations, they would never say such things. And they just don't believe, it came to a point, they don't believe anything the other side is telling them. Both sides.

I know. And this is why I despair of, if another pandemic comes along, I think we are less prepared to deal with it than we were in 2020. Oh, great. Because we are now so polarized. We're going to have to go through an entire generation. Basically, everybody who's alive now is going to have to die off before we're ready to handle another pandemic.

Listen to this one. We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. Jennifer Nuzzo of Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on Tuesday, in this moment, the public health risk of not protesting to demand an anti-systemic racism greatly exceed the harm of the virus.

Another one, the injustice that's evident to everyone now needs to be addressed. Abrar Karan, a Brigham and Women's Hospital physician who exhorted coronavirus experts to amplify the protest

anti-racist message. Well, and as you know, one after another, I think even Scientific American had this stuff. You remember this time. This was so crazy. And so it made fools of them. And it all added together into this soup of mistrust although I'm not one of them, because I know that many of the things they say are correct, and I also know how much the elites like me

hate them. And they pick up on that loud and clear. And whatever. So now let's talk about, finally, Cuba and China. So you seemed, you're a hardliner. You would, you've been

described almost as a fascist. I describe myself as a fascist, but I qualified it. I mean, I said the longer I cover disease, the more of a fascist I become about public health, not about anything else. You know, I mean, it's

people ought to be allowed to do as far as i'm concerned virtually anything they want to do you want to you want to drive a car off a cliff and practice base jumping out of it that's just fine go ahead and do it unless there's a village at the bottom of the cliff you know which the car is landing on then no well what about a government subsidized health care or people that show up in emergency rooms and they legally have to be treated uh what's that well i'm saying do you allow for self-destructive behavior in in in a in an environment where the taxpayer might have to um you know pay for your treatment well i'm not

sure what we're talking about here i mean do we do we make people wear seatbelts so that we don't have to pay for their, you know, for them lying as, you know, on life support for the rest of their lives? Yes, we did pass, after a long debate, we passed seatbelt laws in this country and we passed motorcycle helmet laws in this country, partially because of the whole thing of people. But I don't see that as part of this. This is, of course, a question we're talking about here is, should people be made to do things like take vaccines? And I argue, and this is the core of it, is you may think that it's just your decision about yourself, whether you want a vaccine or a treatment or not. Well, if you've got cancer and you don't want treatment, Zyga Zun, have fun. Are you Jewish? Mit dizapunim?

But I worked at the New York Times for 40 years. Where do you think I'm at? So, yes. I had to go out. When I first started as a copy boy at the New York Times, I had to go out and buy a copy of Leo Rostan's The Droids of Yiddish so I could understand the jokes that the guys I was working for said.

And when I was invited to Passover for the first time by one of the editors, I said, oh, are we going to have suras? And he said, it's simis, Donald. I said, I thought it was suras. He said, I tell you what, Donald, while the rest of us are having simis, you can have suras. Yeah, no,

I mean, look, if you want to drink yourself to death, if you want to, you know, but you can't drink yourself to death and go drive a car on the highway, you know, at 90 miles an hour. And if you've got a disease that only you is going to die of, fine, go ahead and die. I don't care. I feel sorry for you, but I don't care. But if you've got a lethal transmissible disease, then I think part of the reason we have governments is to protect ourselves against lethal threats. And the Supreme Court agreed with this back in 1905. The famous case was a Lutheran pastor who didn't want the smallpox vaccine. And the Commonwealth of

Massachusetts had a thing saying that if you don't take the smallpox vaccine, we're going to fine you $5. And he refused. And the Supreme Court basically said, no, you don't have the right to refuse. The government has the power to compel you. They don't have the power to throw you down on the ground and jab you with a smallpox, but they have the power to punish you for not taking it, not because of your freedom of religion, even though you're a president, but because of the police power of the state. The state has the right if you are doing something dangerous.

The same way you have a perfect right to own a gun, but if you walk down the street shooting people with that gun, the police have an absolute right to take that gun away from you. And lethal diseases are like that. And this is what my arguing is, we have to do what we can

to minimize the number of deaths from disease. And if you are upset about it and your nose has been out of shape and you think you want to do your own research and you don't want anybody telling you what to do too bad. If we can prevent you from killing a bunch of other people, I am not happy that 600,000 gay men died of AIDS. So as we talk about,

I am not happy that 1.1 million Americans died of COVID. I think we could have had a death rate that was practically half that if we had been tougher. Two things. I don't think we ever will. I don't think anything I say in the book is going to ever be passed by Congress. I think this country is far more polarized. Three things. First of all, I agree with you about vaccine mandates, although I no longer agree because

as I said, the vaccine no longer stops the spread of the disease. It's more like the flu shot, and nobody requires a flu shot. But it keeps people from dying. But that's up to them. Well, no. That's not because you're spreading it. But they're spreading it if they take the vaccine. Remember, there wasn't a day when

suddenly everybody in the country was vaccinated. It was a more than a year-long period. So if everybody in the country was vaccinated now... Wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter. I mean, nobody would die. I mean, some people die anyway. The disease would still be endemic.

But the second thing, I forgot this in our previous conversation. Another thing that led to skepticism was that the vaccine was approved emergency use. The FDA didn't give it final approval, I think, until the following August. And they were trying to pass the mandates. FDA didn't give it final approval, I think, until the following August. And they were they were trying to pass the mandates. And people were rationally saying, how can you mandate me to take a vaccine that the FDA feels it doesn't yet have the data to give conventional approval to? Now, you as a very expert person might just, and you might be right to say that's a silly argument. They don't understand this is just bureaucratic blah, blah, blah. But it led

like I'm aware of right-wing arguments and stuff. This led to tremendous skepticism and this was an argument I had no answer to. It's like, yeah, if they're going to make it require you to take the vaccine, the FDA can't say they're not ready to approve it.

All vaccines go through a multi-step process of approval. I mean, phase one, phase two, phase three is when you actually put it out into a large number of people. You know what I'm referring to, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I do. And they called it emergency use because, yeah, if they'd had a chance to give it to 10,000 people and then wait a year, you know, and see what happened, or 100, 100,000 people to see if there were any very, very rare side effects that would have done that. But they couldn't.

They had a pandemic. But sir, this is really interesting. And that's why I think we've got to give the other side more credit. And believe me, I'm not on the other side. This is a unique disease in that it has 20,000 times difference between the highest risk population and the lowest risk population, something like that. I think that's actually the number. There are a lot of younger people who say, why would I take a vaccine to protect me from a disease that I have literally no chance of dying from when the FDA's policies are, we need to wait a full eight months or a year before we're ready to actually rubber stamp. It's an emergency, and emergency use makes perfect sense for people who are high risk.

But I'm not high risk, and I prefer to wait. I'm going to wait until the full time passes. Not just about me, but I don't want to risk my life. People have one excuse after another for saying, I don't want to do this. I believe these are rational arguments. But you have a grandmother. I took the vaccine. Yeah, I know. I to do this. I don't want this. I believe these are rational arguments. But you have a grandmother. I took the vaccine. Yeah, I know.

I risked it. You're the young person with the hypothetical person. And I gave it to my kids. I lied about how old my kids were and I got them the vaccine. So just so you know, I'm really... Okay, but, you know, it's not just about you protecting yourself. The same way masks aren't just about you protecting yourself. They're about protecting the whole community against the spread of the disease.

But it kind of is now. Well, I know. Now this disease is unimportant. Now this disease is like another flu. If you got it, you would get the sniffles. A certain number of people still get hospitalized and still get very sick, but very few. We're down to, at the height of this winter, I think we had 1,600 deaths per week from COVID. We were looking at 23,000 deaths per week of COVID back at the height of the 2020-2021 winter.

So we're down to like 1 20th or so of the death level. It's a different discussion. Was the transmissibility affected by the vaccine? I'm a little not clear on that. Well, the main reason the deaths have dropped now is because everybody has either been vaccinated or has had the disease. So the disease is still extremely transmissible, but almost everybody has some immunity to it. Like 98, 99% of people in this country have had either the vaccines or the disease or both. So the outcome is not bad. I mean, you know, in the beginning of the disease, nobody got the sniffles. A runny nose was not part of COVID. It was basically, you got an extremely high fever,

and then a few days later, you couldn't breathe, or you lost your sense of smell, was one of the characteristic things. You didn't have the sniffles. Now, if you get COVID, the first thing you get is a sore throat and the sniffles. And that's not really classic COVID. That's the immune reaction kicking in. And so you get a little sick the same way you get a little sick or quite sick when you get flu. But now it's basically, it's somewhere between a bad cold season and a bad flu season. So we're discussing it in completely different terms,

but we're forgetting what it was like in the early days. And all this Monday morning quarterbacking is forgetting that it really was a dangerous disease back in the beginning for a lot of people. So not for young, healthy people, it's true, and they weren't getting vaccinated in the beginning. Let's go to, before you go. But it was still transmissible and deadly for of people. So not for young, healthy people. It's true. And they weren't getting vaccinated in the beginning. Let's go to, before you go. But it was still transmissible and deadly for some people. If a young person got a vaccine,

would he protect his grandmother by getting a vaccine? Yes, because he was less likely to get sick. And hopefully the grandmother got the vaccine too. The grandmother should have gotten the vaccine before the young person. He's less likely to get sick for a certain number of months. And he would also have a lower viral load, right? If he did get sick?

In theory, yeah. I mean, you know, everybody's different. So, this is the, you write about AIDS in Cuba. And I, and you, this is a cautionary tale, or, you know, somehow this is supposed to inform us about how you would have us treat diseases here. So let me read a little bit of it, and then you tell me how, what we could learn from this and how this could transplant to Celsius. So when AIDS began, it says, everyone testing positive in Cuba was required to name all their sexual contacts who would be tested in turn.

Although Cuban law could not jail anyone who refused, heavy pressure was brought to bear. Now, this is a kind of brutal dictatorship. So the heavy pressure, anyone who balked at telling a nurse had to see a doctor. If they refused again, they saw the district psychologist. If they still held back, a committee from Cubans living with HIV would drop by their home and ask them to cooperate for the sake of the nation's health.

As a last resort, the local committee for the defense of the revolution, neighbors who acted as government spies and enforcers would come over to remind the uncooperative that their housing and their food coupons, you'll lose your house and your food, were granted at the pleasure of the state. He writes, the pressure worked. Dr. Castro, no relation to Harvard doctor working Cuba, told me she knew of only one woman, one woman all of Cuba, who refused the request, which says to me that this was not pressure. They made him an offer you can't refuse. I mean, I can't get my kids to admit it.

And then they took them and they put them in kind of concentration camps, which you just, the camps were gilded prisons, but despite rumors spread by anti-castro forces were not hell holes. The nicer one had bungalows, some desperate homeless youths in Havana and actually injected themselves with blood from the other patient in order to get in. Now, I just want to say that if you were offering, trying to induce me to give up my liberty and my ability to see my family and put me into a kind of forced camp, the fact that there was air conditioning or a bungalow would – You weren't a street kid in Cuba in those days. People were starving. So essentially Cuba rounded up their gays.

Cuba had a history, by the way, rounding up gays earlier in concentration. Actually, the first ones who were mostly incarcerated in the camps were not gays. They were soldiers because the people who got AIDS were the people who had been on the military missions in Africa. Are you sure that's true? The first big breakout from the camps was actually a bunch of sailors who – I'm skeptical of that. – tied bedsheets together and climbed down the – I'm skeptical of that because I don't trust anything that comes out of a country like Cuba,

and it just seems to me that it had to... I mean, some soldiers might have come back with AIDS, but it really began to spread through the gay community very quickly, and that... But whatever. Eventually, you know, when I visited the camps in 2012, there were relatively... There were very few people left in them.

So what can we learn from this? Well, okay. So my argument was this is an extreme example. And I gave that as an example of something that I – and I talked about how I was attacked for citing that as an example. But I'm bringing it up to say you have to make tough decisions. Where do you draw the line when you say – and the point is that the death rate from AIDS in Cuba is a tiny fraction of ours. Like one-fifth or something? Much less than that. I mean, their levels are down with Finland and Singapore and things like that.

And yet they had the virus probably earlier than we did, and they had more different strains of the virus than we did. All of ours is a Zairean strain. They had virus in different parts of Africa. They crashed down on it. And so the question is, do you want to use incredibly harsh methods in order to keep people from having sex and spreading the disease? Or do you want to not even ask people to have tests, do absolutely no contact tracing, let everybody live the lives they want, and see 700,000 Americans die, most of them gay men? See one quarter of the hemophiliacs, no, more than that, 40% of the hemophiliacs in this country die? These are possible questions.

Yeah, well, that's why I wrote that chapter. Would you have supported this policy in America? You know, that policy would never have happened in America. That happened at the time as the whole revolution of gay rights was taking place. There would have been battles. How about William Buckley's suggestion of tattooing everybody who tested positive for AIDS? Oh, my God. Where would we put the tattoos?

Wherever you say. On the swollen testicles. No, on the back of the shoulder. I don't know. That's insane. I've got a tattoo I regret, so I'm not sure. I'm not going to fall for that one. Compared to this, it's quite mild, the tattoo. Compared to that, that's mild.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if I would qualify that as mild. I know. Compared to being put in a forced camp? Anyway, so I guess what I'm saying is that I agree. When you're right, I agree with you, but how does it actually translate to policy? So when monkeypox

came around, I did write an article that said, why don't we offer housing to men with monkeypox? And what I was saying was, we've got a fast moving sexually transmitted epidemic going on here right now.

We know that there are a fair number of people who get it. They feel lonely, scared. It's more shameful. Many doctors don't have a clue as to how to treat it. They've never seen a case before. We don't have tests. Why don't we offer them housing? Just say, hey, come stay in a place that is nice, where we will take care of you. You only

have to stay here for a month. We basically want you to wait here until your symptoms disappear. There will be doctors, there will be teapots and the other treatments, you know, and maybe we'll even pay you for your time. Find some way of cutting down the transmission, because we knew that by August or September by august or september we'd have enough vaccine to be able to treat enough people but in the beginning of the pandemic may june july beginning of august we did not have enough vaccine we had turns out only 2400 doses at the beginning of the pandemic why not buy some time so i also advocated how about taking the summer of pride and delaying it a little bit and making it the fall of pride, you know, and, and, and, and just, you know, and the guys who are holding gigantic,

you know, pride parties that, that, you know, the, the, the danger was never the parades. The danger was always the parties afterwards. And every one of those parties became super spreader events. Provincetown Bear Week became a super spreader event. The Electoral Lux Pride Party in San Francisco became a super spreader event. All these things happened. I was saying, look, just delay it for three or four months. There will be vaccines, and there will probably be a test that you can give somebody at the door to find out whether or not they infected, and then you could slow down the effects of the vaccine. So would I have, you know, if anybody had accepted that idea,

would they have offered housing to men who had monkeypox? Just come in and live for a month. We'll take care of you, and you won't spread it to anybody else. I think that would have been a good idea. But not involuntarily. No. The question is, would I have done it involuntarily? If I were emperor of the world, yeah, I probably would.

You would. Yeah. By the way— Because I think it's—now, almost nobody died of monkeypox, but people were plenty miserable and some of them had permanent scarring. I think that's a good thing to try to prevent. And if it had been a more lethal disease than it was, or if the somewhat more lethal version that's circulating in the DRC right now happens to transmit the way this one did, we might want to think about that.

Yeah, that'll save lives, and that's my argument. I'm not hating on you, and of course, that's part of the thing with COVID again, is that because it was not uniformly lethal, people reacted to it differently. So, all right, so that's basically everything I wanted to cover. You wouldn't lock up people against the world. But, oh, this is the final question. He said he would if he were out there in the world. If he could get away with it.

But, you know, it's not. If I could get away with it and I thought it would save enough lives, yeah, I would lock people up. Now, we have something like 100,000 fentanyl overdoses in this country a year. Fentanyl is not transmissible. Right. But it might be, it's a hundred thousand deaths and it might be responsive to harsh police measures.

We might do something like a war on drugs. Well, at the border, at the border, which border? I believe the Southern one or the Northern one. I mean, I only know what I hear on the

news. I don't know if it's true. But if it were the case that, well, I mean, do you see analogies to the idea of taking harsh measures because lives are at stake, to being tougher on crime, being tougher on fentanyl, to being tougher on other things that lives are at stake? I mean, it's been clear to me. You follow my question. Yeah, I do. But it's been clear to me for 50 years that the war on drugs has been a gigantic failure.

And large numbers of people have been dying since I was old enough to read my grandmother's Reader's Digest about the opioid epidemic. I mean, the heroin epidemic in New York and stuff like that. So this is not my topic. This is not my field. Yeah I was like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, this is not my topic. This is not my, my field.

Yeah. I mean, the war on drugs is, and, and, and, and keeping people from, from killing themselves with drugs is to me is totally different from keeping people from

killing others with transmissible disease. I know they're kids and, you know, I'd, I'd like to protect kids. I'd like to protect people from a lot of things, but I don't necessarily think, you know,

I mean, I don't think the locking people up is going to stop, is going to stop. So the war on drugs is, is 50, 50 years of, necessarily think, you know, I mean, I don't think the locking people up is going to stop. It's going to stop. So the war on drugs is 50 years of data to show that that's not going to happen. The war on drugs, in my mind, is very expansive. It included the unjust war on marijuana, locking up black people. There's a lot of things that were outrageous about the war on drugs. I don't know if that means that, you know, cracking down on fentanyl, which seems to be trackable, come from very discreet places on the world.

You know, I raise my kids, I think, pretty well. I'm so petrified that somehow one of these kids is going to take a pill and die, God forbid. I want my government to protect me from it. It's not marijuana. I don't know what they can do, but I don't want them to give up just by saying, well, the war on drugs didn't work, so we're going to let it rip. I don't want them to let it rip when it comes to drugs this dangerous. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's futile.

This is not my field. Yeah, okay. I just have a question. I've seen the war on drugs my entire life, and it hasn futile. This is not my field. Yeah, okay. I just have a question. I've seen the war on drugs my entire life, and it hasn't worked. And I, you know, they're all terrifying. I just have a question. I don't know if this is exactly what you were asking, but I also got like 400 vaccines and didn't leave the house for like a year and a half.

But I felt pretty strongly that if people were refusing to get vaccinated and got infected with covid that they should not have the right to walk into a hospital or expose a doctor she wanted to let them die i i i have some very close friends who are doctors who have little kids and were you know i i really really felt like if you have an option to get vaccinated and to not have put enough like put a doctor's life at risk that if you chose not to do that why should these people that put their lives at risk to treat you well so is that reasonable? Giving somebody a political test, I mean, giving a dying person coming into a hospital a political test before you decide whether or not to treat them is going to bring us back to the days when people were allowed to bleed to death outside of hospitals. But why is that a political test? Well, you're saying that, you know, if you're sick, you can't come in here. If you're dying, you can't come in here because you refuse the vaccine. I'm not willing to just leave the dying out in the street to die, regardless of their behavior.

Perry, this is crazy talk. I don't think it's crazy at all. First of all, it leads to a totally corrosive view of respect for human life. People make mistakes in life. Would you not house somebody who lost everything gambling? Maybe. No, I'm just kidding. Gambling is a disease. That's a completely different... It's not analogous. If you had a choice to take a vaccine... Not everybody who gambles has the disease.

Some people just gambled. I mean, if you gamble to the point that you've lost everything you own, you probably have a disease. It's not analogous. If you had a choice to take... Do you know how ugly it is to say, tough shit, we're going to let you die? Do you know how ugly it is to potentially kill a doctor and then leave all their children without a parent?

Well, doctors who work in emergency rooms take on a certain amount of risk. A certain amount. They know what they're getting into. It's like... It seems really selfish. If you're a journalist, you can't claim something makes you unsafe.

You can't claim that you – taking on a certain amount of risk is part of a journalist's job. Taking on a certain amount of risk is part of a doctor's job. I mean not if you're a dermatologist maybe. But if you're going to work in an emergency room, you have to know that you're always working with the possibility of somebody's going to come in with something transmissible, like multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis or something like that, that might potentially kill you. And, you know, doctors are trained, you know, like don't inhale when you're going in close on checking somebody's face and things like that to try to avoid this. There are cousins of this. I don't think you can start doing this. Well, look, it's ugly to let people die.

It's ugly to put people in camps. But we're discussing what one might do in an extreme enough situation. I wasn't even thinking about an emergency. Well, here's a cousin of that, is that if you have some sort of risk pool for health insurance, and somebody chooses to smoke and get lung cancer,

do you want them to be able to get health insurance that you're partly paying for? I mean, that's... I don't know, but I think... but don't you can't isn't it more over eats and is it isn't it more difficult to get life insurance if you do smoke i mean i recall that that's one of the questions that they ask life insurance i was talking about a risk pool that you would in other words your premiums would become higher because the people in your risk pool smoke and you say well i don't i don't want to let them go without insurance, whatever.

These are. Isn't that one of the, one of the things we got rid of with Obamacare? I hope so. Pre-existing conditions. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a humane thing. Including, including smoking and obesity and, and a number of other things.

Yeah. I'm, I'm very left wing about such things. I, I don't, I. I'm usually very left wing too. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know about smoking and i'm a former smoker so i i don't know i don't know anyway sir your book is excellent thank you and um you've only

finished 40 so yeah but the first 40 percent well okay this is why i think it's excellent someone like me because it sucked me into a deep thought about issues. I found myself, even stuff that I disagree with you about, like checking it out. How do I feel about this? Thinking about exactly what you're talking about. Like how far do we go to protect human life? It's not a dry book. It provokes a lot of deep thought and um what do you get to

the part about religious exemptions that's in the back oh if you want to say i don't i don't want to keep you but if you want to talk about you're against religious i'm against them too but if you want to say yeah well i mean my argument is basically i feel like they're bullshit anyway well so you know when people say how can you be against religious exemptions when there are vaccines? And my response is like, what is religious about a vaccine? Is a root canal a religious act? If you need to get your hernia fixed, do you consult with your rabbi or your priest before you do it? No.

There's nothing religious about vaccines. And vaccines exist for one reason, to preserve life. Every religion in this, you know, holds the preservation of life to be sacred. And that's why every major religion, and this question has been given to the top scholars in Jerusalem, the top Muslim scholars, to the Vatican, literally as far back as 200 years ago when the smallpox vaccine came out. They all are inevitably in favor and strongly in favor of vaccines. Even the vaccines that were made, that are made with cells that were the result of abortions that took place in the 1960s. The Vatican has said, you know, if there were an alternative vaccine, you should take it.

But the value of saving the lives that this measles vaccine saves or rubella vaccine saves makes it. And then people say, well, you can't, you know, people can determine what their religions are and you can't uh you can't uh do anything to stop anybody's religious beliefs and i go wait a minute wait a minute every religion in this in this world was founded at one time um you know was a practice of human sacrifice even the abramic religions judaism christianity and islam are founded on the sacrifice of abraham his willingness to kill his son, Isaac, in order to prove to God that he was a faithful person. And yet, there is no country in this world that allows human sacrifice right now. You cannot tell me, listen, my religion requires that I throw this virgin into this volcano, or this religion requires that I, you know, pour the blood of this prisoner that I've

just captured on the altar. You will be arrested for murder. Well, there are honor killings, but go ahead. Yeah, there are honor killings. Not in the United States, but that's not a religious act. That's a family, that's about family honor and preserving the, you know, preserving the good name of the family. But no, you're not allowed to murder. We don't even allow people to engage in polygamy in this country. Polygamy is the norm in the Old Testament. Polygamy used to be one of the central tenets of Mormonism. So there are all sorts of things that are restrictions on the absolute freedom of religion. The First Amendment does not protect your right to commit murder in

the practice of religion. So my feeling is, no, we ought to get rid of religious exemptions. They were only invented. There's nothing about religious exemption in the Constitution of the Bill of Rights. They were invented basically in order to placate Christian scientists back at a time in the early part of the century when they were a more powerful force than they are now. Don't Jehovah's Witnesses actually have beliefs about taking medicine and stuff like that? Jehovah's Witnesses have beliefs about blood transfusions.

Blood transfusions, that's all? But they don't have beliefs about, they're not anti-vaccine. But the law will intervene and save their children even against their will with a blood transfusion, I believe. Correct. You cannot let your children die, no matter what religion you are. You can let yourself die, but you can't impose your religious beliefs on somebody else so that they die.

They also have a thing against celebrating birthdays. Oh, and also, yes. But, listen. I'm pretty sure that's not protected under the Constitution. How pervasive are these people trying to use religious exemption? Oh, quite. I mean, any time you see a big surge in a community that's likely to have measles, most of the outbreaks of disease in this country have taken place in Orthodox Jewish communities, Amish communities.

The last outbreak of polio in this country uh was was in an amish community and and then sort of small splinter religions you know like you know sects in philadelphia where everybody has you know belongs to the cult of of what what is this nonsense what what are these excuses like based on what i think a lot of them use it to avoid taking the vaccine they don't otherwise want to take. And, you know, I describe how back when I first started covering this topic back in the early 2000s, I joined a church in New Jersey. Hilarious. The Church of Universal Wisdom. And for $75, they gave me a certificate saying that I was not, you know, I was allowed, I was a member of the church and I could not any vaccines, and I could not have any instruments cutting my body. And it was run by a chiropractor, but he was a practicer of straight chiropractic, which believes nothing to do with just adjusting the spine.

It believed that all diseases—chiropractic goes back to the 1800s, and they believe that all diseases are caused by misalignment of the spine. Dr. Sarnow believes some of this stuff, too. Dr. Sarnow. No, that was a little different. No, he believes it's subluxation of the spine or responsible for polio and cancer and all sorts of other diseases. Yeah. I'm not sure Sarno believes that.

But that's the origin of straight chiropractic. What was the name of the church? Sorry? What was the name of the church? Congregation of Universal Wisdom, I think. It's in the book. Sorry, I'd forgotten. I've got this at home somewhere. Framed, I hope. Yeah.

But yeah, they believe that Western religion was essentially a descendant of the worship of Hermes, the Roman god, who carried a caduceus, which is the staff with the wings and the snakes wrapped around it, which is what a lot of doctors actually wear in their coats. But, I mean, this mythology has gotten mixed up over the years, but they see it as a pagan religion. Is that the equivalent of Mercury in the Roman? Yeah, yeah, exactly the same guy. Hermes, Mercury.

Very nice, man. It's like Celsius and Fahrenheit. I had one other last question that totally slipped my mind. It was a really quick one, and I can't remember now. But, we got something? No, no, man. It's like Celsius and Fahrenheit. I had one other last question that totally slipped my mind. It was a really quick one, and I can't remember now. No, no, no. I'm just going to reiterate the wisdom of plagues. Available where books are sold. Yes.

Well, thank you very much, sir. Thank you. This was a lot of fun. By the way, I hope maybe offline, this article about the all-cause mortality in Sweden. I'm just curious what your, your one that I sent you today. He wrote back. Oh, I didn't see. I wrote you a very long email about it. Oh, I'll read it. He's not into it.

Not into it. No. All right. Good day. Thank you. Thanks.