The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - In COVID’s Wake: Prof. Stephen Macedo Debates COVID Lockdowns, Liberty, and the Data.

Episode Date: June 14, 2025

The pandemic playbook was ripped up in 2020—but did the replacements work? Was Great Barrington/Sweden the better way? In this deep-dive conversation, Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman goes head-to-head with Princeton political philosopher Stephen Macedo over the empirical record and moral calculus of COVID-19 policies. Here is the Israeli study Noam refers to: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8144835/

Good evening and welcome to Live from the Table. I'm going to do a little straight-to-camera introduction. This is about my interview with Stephen Macedo, co-author of the great book In COVID's Wake, a book about how America lost its mind during COVID politically, judicially, scientifically, lost our respect for free speech, lost our ability to, was so deranged by our hatred of Donald Trump that even when he was right, we couldn't listen to it. So this is a great book.

You might not realize how much I like this book by all the arguing I did with Macedo during this interview, but I like this book very, very much. The argument I had with him revolves around Jay Bhattacharya, our current director of the National Institute of Health. Bhattacharya, our current director of the National Institute of Health.

Bhattacharya was the guy who was the main writer behind the Great Barrington Declaration, which advised us during the pandemic that we didn't need to lock down at all, that we could somehow just protect the most vulnerable among us, the old, the people with comorbidities. And without lockdowns, only 20,000 to 40,000 people would likely die.

The pandemic would go away after three to six months. We all had herd immunity. And now, for some reason, despite all the issues, which you'll see that I'll raise in the interview, Bhattacharya has become lionized by MAGA and more as having gotten everything right. And this overlaps, of course, with the issue of Sweden, the country that didn't lock down, that people now like to say had an outcome which was just as good, if not better, than similar countries. I don't actually believe that. I think the results of Sweden are quite ambiguous. You'll see that in the interview. Macedo is not a flake. He's not a vaccine denier. But it should be said that many of the people who do lionize Jay Bhattacharya are vaccine deniers or vaccine hesitant. And, you know, they did have a logical argument, which was, how are you going to tell me

that a brand new vaccine that's only been around for six months since it started testing, six months to testing to release, that was authorized by emergency use, how can you tell me that you know it's safe and how can you tell me there's no long-term health consequences and yes there's a logical point there especially if you're the type of person that doesn't trust uh scientists biologists virologists um the corrupt process of approval all of it and there's some grain of truth to all those things but where these people obviously always went too far and continue to go too far is that they don't ever take that same argument and that same skepticism

and apply it to that virus which presumably they're ready to catch if they're not going to take the vaccine. That's a virus which was especially they believe this, which was developed in a lab in China as a result of gain-of-function research

designed probably to kill people or make them sick, a virus which was killing millions of people all over the world, which was wreaking havoc with our bodily organs, visible to scientific testing, had clear neurological consequences, had effects that lingered on past the time that we were testing negative for the disease,

why in the world would they not take these same arguments that you can't be sure about the long-term consequences of a novel vaccine and then be ready, willing, and eager to contract a novel virus, which they know was developed by the Chinese in gain-of-function research. So that's where I think they show how their paranoia overtook their logic, how they're kind of crazy. And much of what Macedo says is perfectly reasonable. He is not one of these people I'm describing. But what he says is music

to their ears. So I was trying to disabuse people, or at least to bring out what I think are the flaws in that whole line of thought. So once again, I think this book is fantastic. I'm a fan, but that's why I harped on these things things so here's my interview with the co-author with francis lee of the book in covid's wake mr steven mesito hit it this is live from the table the official podcast of the world famous comedy seller available wherever you get your podcasts available on youtube which is the i think, preferred way of consuming our podcast because you've got the video and the audio. And sometimes we play videos. And anyway, I think that's the best way to enjoy the podcast.

And we're also available on demand on SiriusXM. Are we still available on demand on SiriusXM? Yes. If she's giving them the videos like she's supposed to, then we are. This is Dan Natterman. I work at the Comedy Cellar and other places as well. Noam Dorman is here. He's the owner of the Comedy Cellar.

Hello, Daniel. And we took a peekaboo at the new room around the corner last night. It's coming along and should be up and running by uh later in this year perry alashan brand joins us as always and she's our producer but uh she also often uh chimes in with her uh with her uh chiming and we have stephen massito he's the uh lawrence s rockefeller professor of politics at the university center of Human Values at Princeton. And he's written several books, among them In COVID's Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us, which is probably what no one wants to discuss. But some of these other books sound very interesting as well.

Just Married, Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy and the Future of Marriage. And here's one that could could get us into trouble. Diversity and distrust, civic education in a multicultural democracy, and liberal virtue, citizenship, virtue, and community in liberal constitutionalism and numerous other books. Welcome, Stephen. Great. Thank you. When did you write the same-sex marriage book? Before it became illegal? Just before, but just before the Supreme Court decision. They moved a little faster than I expected, but it came out in 2015, just before the...

And did it all pan out the way you thought it would? Pretty much. I mean, I think the arguments against were so weak, and public opinion has continued to shift. I mean, I think it's about 66% in favor. There are evangelicals and so on who are trying to reverse it. I think there was a vote just down in Texas, maybe. But the support is overwhelming at this point. And the arguments on the other side were that, you know, it would be very bad for marriage and for children and the world would collapse and so on and so forth. I don't see that there have been any negative consequences.

No, it's been only positive consequences. That's as far as I can tell. The reason I ask is because I got this one slightly wrong wrong not that i was never worried about any of these things like uh children any of that nonsense i was um you know i actually grew up in a very gay like pro-gay uh household you know rammed down my throat from from a child but i was i was more in favor of civil unions at the time because i felt just out of the mouths the way it was coming out that there was something seemingly spiteful about using the word marriage towards religious people. And I felt at the time that I would go even further in a certain sense that I didn't think it was the government's business who you defined as your family, meaning like a gay marriage implies a sexual relationship. But I felt like I should just be able to, well, it's a marriage. And I felt like

I should be able to say, well, I don't even have to pretend that. I said, well, Dan is my, I want to have a union with Dan so that these injustices of not being able to take the apartment and visit in the hospital and all these really heartbreaking things. But anyway, so that was my position. It was a lightly held position. I didn't really care. But afterwards, like almost immediately, when I saw the euphoria reaction and when Obama lit up the White House in the rainbow, immediately I realized I had missed what was going to happen. The emotional resonance of the institution.

I didn't see it. Yeah. Marriage has a distinctive public meaning. That was part of the basis of my argument. Civil marriage, you know, as a lifelong commitment, an aspiration to lifelong commitment. Maybe it won't be long lasting, but it allows people to communicate that in public, that that's the kind of commitment they want to make. And so civil union doesn't communicate much of anything publicly.

So people wanted to be married. I did get one thing right. I don't know if it was three years ago, I wouldn't even dare saying this. I remember saying, these gay guys are not going to be faithful to each other. Are you kidding me? And sure enough, I was right. But actually, there's a different culture, they tell me, that's risen up around gay marriage, where they just don't go by exactly precisely the same rules.

And it's fine, right? As long as like, you know, it works, it works. Probably varies from case to case. But yes, there's some evidence. Well, no one was saying that every gay couple is like, I'm kidding. It's just a slightly different culture around the marriage, but it's fine. There were swingers before gays came into the picture. Yeah, whoever said that marriage, I guess, has to be fake. I guess forsaking all others is one of the things in the marriage vow. But, you know, throughout history, I would imagine.

But that's part of the word, you know, part of the word marriage. But it ushered in an acceptance towards gayness, like almost overnight. Andrew Sullivan seemed to understand this was all going to happen. He did. No, I knew him when he was a graduate student. I was on his dissertation committee. And, no, he was terrific, you know, probably from the beginning. We talked about this quite a lot.

Well, the arguments in favor of gay marriage are certainly abundant, but there's a separate argument as to whether the Supreme Court is the one that should be making that decision. Yes. Whether they're, you know. No, I don't have any problem with that. I mean, I know the argument. I thought the court decision was pretty solid. We'll be interested to see what happens with respect to that question after the reversal Roe versus Wade. No, they're never going to. Of course they're never going to. I don't think so either, but it's an open, you know, it's a reasonable question to ask. I don't even think it's a reasonable question. I understand

why people ask it, but I think if you look at it more closely, Roe versus Wade is, I mean, abortion is an issue where the people on one side of it believe, with some scientific evidence, that you're killing a human life. Yes. It's a harder issue, I think. there is a party involved here who is not spoken for and it's not it's not uh it's not live and let live it's not a matter of live and let live from the way the pro-life no it's a harder issue i think you're right gay thing nobody's even if they'd agree you're not going to revisit that undue marriages for you you do that for murder right you're not going to do that for right a lot of reliance interests as they say uh for uh many of the marriages that have been undertaken and so on yeah i agree with you yeah i mean you have tenancies and properties. I mean, you can't unwind that. You just can't

unwind it. And even if the Supreme Court did try to unwind it, I don't see how the states could have to give full faith and credit to all this. That issue would arise. It's a morass. Yeah. Okay. So COVID. Yep. So this is interesting because I'm generally on the side of skeptics in every aspect. But I don't agree with you on this book. And-

Did you read the book? I read a lot of the book, but I'm quite aware also- Let's make sure we mention the book. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. In COVID's Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen- How do you pronounce your last name? Macedo.

Macedo and Frances Lee. I heard her do it with Frances. She has a beautiful Southern drawl. She should be sipping a mint julep while she's doing that. I do declare it's COVID. She'll be pleased to hear that. She's also incredibly smart. That's your bigotry.

I didn't mean it wasn't smart. I didn't say, I just said also. Speaking of the South, you haven't touched your bourbon whiskey. No, that's okay. I'll leave it for later. Yeah. All right. So let's take it step by step.

Let's start here. And then I have to go to specifics. Yeah. As COVID unraveled, based only on what we knew at the time the decisions were made, what is the first time that you can say, what's that noise?

Is that my phone? What is that music? That's Rodeo by Aaron Copland. That's me playing the mandolin. So, going step by step, what is the first time,

the first decision that was made by the government that you think was clearly not warranted by the evidence they knew at the time? It's a good question. Let's just back up a little bit, because one of the things that I was astonished by when I started doing the research on this book, and at the time, I wasn't objecting. I was going along with the closures. I was, you know, bleaching my groceries or leaving them outside in the garage for two days, and social distancing

and doing all the rest of it. I had, you know, other things to do. I was working full time, and my partner was very, very concerned about respiratory issues and so on. So it was only during the research that I started to become questioning. Let's put it that way. So, you know, starting in 2005, 2006, George W. Bush read the book about the 1918-1919 pandemic, started this pandemic planning process. And there's been a whole bunch of planning documents about future pandemics since then. Those plans that look at these measures, all the non-pharmaceutical interventions, because that was what was controversial, imposing these social distancing measures, school closures, border closures, contact tracing,

testing asymptomatic individuals who had been made contacts and so on and so forth. The evidence base for them is very weak, number one. Number two, I can ask my question. Number two, the evidence, the emphatic that the costs will be substantial. So look, I think in the panic of the moment, I can see the case. I don't think it was supported by a lot of evidence, but I can see the case for the closures early on. But there was a lot of evidence that school closures would be extremely costly at the time. One book you might look at, besides ours. But let's be precise, because I lived through this. And at the time, we were, we, the, this is the thing about evidence. It's kind of in some way analogous to a legal

prosecution where the burden of proof is always on the prosecution and you have to prove by reasonable doubt. When people are dying and we don't feel that we have full understanding of the mechanism and the risks, the burden of proof, in my opinion, is on the people who want to keep the schools open. Because the natural thing to say is, listen, there's a lot of people dying here. We see what's going on in Lombardy, Italy. Let's keep these kids home right now until we can figure out what's going on here. Right. March.

That's March. Yeah. And that seems to me to be incontrovertible. That's obviously the right thing to do. Fair enough. By late April, Europeans were opening their schools. The schools were opening. Iceland never closed its schools.

So we had evidence coming from countries that did not close their schools about the lack of COVID transmission in schools. And we had that evidence by late April. The CDC put out a report on this on April 8th, pointing out the very low morbidity rates in children. And the news media reported two negative facts, that men were more likely to die than women, and that African-Americans were more likely to die than non-African-Americans, which is fine. But they did not report, the news media did not report the positive evidence that children were at extremely low risk. Well, I remember, I remember, and I don't

know if you spoke imprecisely or I'm just, or I didn't realize, but I do remember very well that we knew pretty early on that kids were not dying from COVID. I don't remember knowing early on that they weren't spreading it if they got it. I don't remember that. But here's, here's was my argument at the time. And she knows i made this argument early on people were losing uh their sense of taste and their sense of smell yeah and i remember saying oh well this is that's interesting this is neurological and something that's neurological you know you you may not notice if you don't get your sense of smell back a hundred percent or your sense of taste back a hundred percent, but you know, but what if it's IQ?

Like what you're hearing, you're hearing brain fog, like, like again, I'm saying to err on the side of caution, like, okay, I, I, I care about my kids so much. It's not just enough to tell me they're not going to drop dead. You have to tell me nothing is going to happen to them. They're not gonna, this brain fog is gonna be temporary. There's, you know, all these, that you understand what's going on in these brains that are experiencing neurological symptoms.

I was making this argument at the time. I was like, you know what? I prefer to keep my kids home until they know what's going on here. Now, why was that not a good argument? I think very early on, it was. Maybe Europe was wrong. But we also, well, we could tell that they were not spreading the disease, not getting the disease. And we also knew that.

They weren't getting them. All my kids got it. We also knew that these school closures would have long-term effects for children's well-being and life prospects, and not small ones. It's now the case that chronic absenteeism from school is much higher than it was before. One-third of children are chronically absent. Yeah, but we didn't know that at the time. strikes and climate issues, that long-term school closures because of snow issues and so on, that there would be long-term detriments to children. Is the snow day... Let me skip ahead here and show you something, because this is really where my thinking is. And at least we should have learned over the summer of 2020. Again, I can understand early

on, you know, the hypercaution and so on. But Europeans were opening their schools before the end of the spring, early summer 2020 school year. There was plenty to be learned by then. There was plenty to learn over the summer. And Republican states opened almost uniformly in the fall of 2020. And yet California kept its schools closed almost through the end. many of the schools closed through the end of the 2021 school year. Let me make the contrary argument even today. Tiana, there's a video on that list called spike protein spreading inpatient. You see that? So, you know, Eric Topol, the, he's not a crank, right? Yeah. I don't, I don't know, know much of him, but yeah, he was involved in the development of vaccine, I believe. Is that right? Yeah. He might've been involved in holding back the vaccine until Trump.

He sort of claimed that, didn't he? Yeah. But he's a credible, he's a doctor. So I'll tell you when to play it. So he tweeted, this is just November 29th, not that long ago, six months ago, whatever it is. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can persist in the brain,, bone, marrow, and meninges to induce neurological damage. And this is from a study just published in Cell Host Microbe. And then there's a companion tweet here where he retweets another doctor, I guess, is from this study.

Our new study shows that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein accumulates and persists in the body for years after infection, especially in the skull, brain access, potentially driving long COVID. mRNA vaccines help, but cannot stop it. Now, play this video. This is actual video from a guy, I don't know if it's a guy, from a person who died. Just play a little bit of it, Tiana. There's no sound, I don't think. Tiana? Yeah. And, you know, we didn't see this at the time, but even at this late stage of the game, when I see what's going on in the brain here, I say to myself, you know,

I'm sorry my kids even got COVID post-vaccine. This was certainly not something I want. So you can see for people who are listening on the audio podcast, it's just showing red stuff just creeping out through a brain, just like a horror movie. That's good, Tiana. Look, viruses, novel viruses have sequelae, as it's called. What's it called? Sequelies, sequels, you know, things, you know, longer term symptoms and so on.

And my understanding is that the sequelae from COVID is no greater than from other novel viruses. What's a novel virus exactly? Well, new viruses that cause or lead to pandemics or significant variation. And that could be a new flu. Yeah, there are many new flus. And this is the sixth, I think, coronavirus in circulation. First one developed in a lab, apparently. Well, I don't think the first one, because that was quite a long time ago. But there certainly is an argument to be made about this one. Not being developed, but being manipulated in the lab. I don't know if that's true or not. You're saying that other viruses, flu, for example, might have those effects that we just saw on the screen?

Yes, yes. They're not unusual at all. And there's no evidence, I believe, having looked at that the rates are higher with COVID than with some of these others. I think long COVID is very poorly understood. The symptoms are very similar to other issues involving brain fog and very similar to depression-related symptoms. And the segments of the population that report the highest rates of symptoms related to long COVID are not in general vulnerable to other kinds of diseases. So it's very poorly understood. We have a bit of a section in the book on long COVID, but it's very poorly understood. I read between the lines, and you're a little, I have it here,

I don't know if I read the whole thing about long COVID, is that you don't believe in long COVID. No, no, we were just quoting other doctors. We talked, Dr. Paul Offit is one of the leading epidemiologists. He was on the vaccine advisory committees. I think we quote him multiple times there. He was told, I think we say in that section, he was told by a mentor in grad school, he's in the mid-70s now at the University of Pennsylvania, very eminent, that if you want to study a pathogen that'll occupy you for the rest of your life with mysteries, study the flu. A lot of these things are very poorly understood and remain very poorly understood. Right, but the poorly understood is the reason I think the people were cautious.

Fair enough. But you say here long COVID, we have no doubt that there are many people suffering from serious and extended symptoms in the wake of their encounters with COVID. Paul Offit, a long-time pediatrician, describes the children he saw in the COVID wars. And then you go on to list like 10 reasons why we should be skeptical of long COVID. Because we know that our target reader are people like you.

Yeah. I'm not saying long COVID is real, by the way. People who educated, and frankly, we know we're contrarians with respect to our colleagues and, you know, progressive elites who are sitting around the table here as well. So, yes, we have a certain kind of point of view in that we're not just trying to repeat, you know, we don't spend a lot of time criticizing Donald Trump's public messaging and so on because we take it for granted. Right. But obviously, if you believe long COVID is real, if one were to believe it or just unsure, then it makes perfect sense to want to keep your kids home. I don't give a shit what those Europeans are doing. And you can say, yes. Focus on both sides. Now, there is a problem here. And I know you guys are sensitive to this, which is that us middle-class and better people,

we're not worried about our kids being chronically absent from school. We're also not worried about- I think you meant middle-class and richer. Yeah. We're not even worried about our kids falling behind because we're home with them, we're gonna teach them. Right, right.

And the poor kids, minority kids, white kids, whoever, you are worrying about those kids. But I would say to you, that's fine. You can worry about them. Don't send my kid to school because you're worried about those kids. I'm worried about my kid getting brain fog until they can tell me, no, Mr. Roman,

he won't get brain fog. And it made sense to me. Was anybody making your argument at the time? Was anybody saying, look, this is neurological. We don't know. I don't think that's the argument. They were making the argument that these kids could be vectors and give grandma.

Well, yeah, I'm sure many parents are worried about their kids own health as well, as well as the kids being vectors. And look, I think early on, it's fair enough. But we had ample opportunity to learn more over the summer. We could have learned more. European countries opened up and Republican states opened up and they did not have terrible results. And then maybe why don't we talk about the fall of 2020? But maybe they just lucked out. Maybe.

Yeah. Anything's possible. But what's the positive evidence for the lockdowns having made a difference with respect to COVID mortality? I'm going to give you the positive. That's what we like. I'm going to give you the positive. I'm going to give you the case.

This is obviously retrospective. We know that under the fog of COVID and so on, war. But I'm going to give you the case as to why you shouldn't dismiss it just to be polite that they lucked out. And I'm going to give you front and center the great Barrington Declaration and Jay Bhattacharya, who you guys, I think, are. We thought they should have been given a respectful hearing. Well, we thought that their suggestions were consistent with pre-COVID pandemic planning and warnings. And what many people were saying in March. Tell the listener what it is, the Great Barrington Declaration. that school closures and other lockdown measures were having long-term harm to children, that children were at low risk, that schools should be reopened, and that we should pursue an alternative

strategy to widespread lockdowns called focus protection. Focus protection on the vulnerable, allow the vast majority of the population, which is not at significant risk from COVID, to go about its business. It's controversial. We don't argue that they were correct, but we argue that it was a proposal that deserved discussion and debate. It was closer to the European model. It's closer to what Sweden was doing. But to be fair, I think you do believe it was correct only because I saw your partner, wasn't it? Frances Lee. Frances Lee. She did an interview and they asked her, what do you think would be the best policy and she said well i thought sweden well and sweden is pretty close to to the barrington thing so yes but there was a lot of voluntary a lot of voluntary social distancing going on there i think though um people to go to restaurants and so on uh but but some voluntary measures for sure some restrictions on

on large gatherings of 50 or more and colleges were closed yeah but uh kids schools were never closed for kids under 16. So let me tell you why I think lucked out is something that shouldn't be dismissed. So let's take Bhattacharya. I'm going to state my case here. This guy was wrong about every single thing, which he used as the basis, as the keystones, as the undergirding of his arguments.

I'm going to go through them because it's a terrible record. So let's just start with... I may have one of the things to say in return. Go ahead. I have something you might not even know about. Okay. So first of all, obviously, when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, this is the one that's best known.

He says, a fear of COVID-19 is based on a high estimated case fatality rate, two to four percent. The latter rate is misleading. Then he goes on, this does not make COVID-19 a non-issue. The daily reports from Italy and across U.S. reveal show real struggles and overwhelmed health system. But 20,000 or 40,000 death epidemic is far less severe a problem than one that kills 2 million.

That was his low estimate. Yeah, that was his lowest. Well, that was a lot. He argued that it was a possibility because other viruses have disappeared once they started. Like, you know, swine flu. Let's let's let's let's let's be a possibility. No, but let's not be too like kissing the guys. OK, I know he says that was a low estimate,

but it's the only estimate he really gave. He says people estimate between 20 million, 20,000 and 20 million, right? But then he says, if we are right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. If we are right about the limited scale, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. If we're

right about the limited scale, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. And one could say from that, well, if you're wrong about the scale, then maybe they're not sensible. Let me get through it. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. And then he goes on again to mention the 20,000 number. Universal quarantine may not be worth the cost as imposed on the economy. OK, that's so that's where. So he got to just talk about the Wall Street Journal thing for a minute. Let me let the let me get the whole record out. Well, I'd rather just talk about that one, because the point he's making there is we don't know the number of people in the population who have been infected and have not gotten seriously ill.

Therefore, we don't know the infection fatality rate. We only know the case fatality rate. And we need to do studies of the population to see who has evidence of having had the virus. The government wasn't doing that. He tried to do it. His main argument there is that we just don't know the underlying rate of people that have gotten the virus and not gotten seriously ill, and we should be getting that information. That's fine. That's the point of that of that to op-ed basically well no because then he he if you stop there i'd say yeah of course that's he's being a scientist yeah but what he says was basically but what from what i'm seeing right now it looks more like 20 000 to me

okay and and 20 000 to 40 000 and but let's but let's continue. He predicted, this guy is like a poster child for motivated reasoning. So 20,000 to 40,000. Now we know that there was 1.2 million, right? But he also didn't believe we were going to have a vaccine. So I'll play this video. Where's the one that says, you see what says Bhattacharya vaccine?

Oh yeah. See that Bhattacharya admits thought vaccine? See that? Play that. So add this to this guy because it was 1.2 million, but we were headed to 3 million without the vaccine.

The infection fatality rate wound up being 0.27. Right, but how many people would have died? Much lower than the 3.4% that the World Health Organization Nobody gives a shit about the fatality rate. We care about 20,000, 40,000, 2 million, 3 million. That's the difference. But people were predicting much more. The March 16th report from Imperial College said we'd have 2 million dead by August. Okay. But he said we'd have 20,000 to 40,000 or most likely. He also didn't think we'd have a vaccine. So the

1.2 million we got is also much less than we would have had if he was right about the vaccine. Tiana, are you going to play it? What'd she say again? She was waiting for you to stop. I don't see it on the video, on the screen. Okay, yeah. Started from the beginning. So this is by the trial where he just to make it clear.

Yes, I'm not aware. Come on, kid. The vaccines. We're not vaccine skeptics, I should say. There's no vaccine skeptics. So the first part of the question, what do I think of Operation Warp Speed? I have to say that it's like as a full confession, one of the things I got the most wrong during the pandemic is that in February and March 2020, I thought it was not possible to develop a vaccine within months.

I thought it would take years. There were other people who thought that too. And the reason for that was that we didn't have a coronavirus vaccine. And there was a history going back at least two decades of at least two decades of attempts that were, you know, didn't seem to me were going anywhere. Okay. That's good to hear. So, so I'm going to lay this all, I'll try to lay it out quickly. So, so he said 20 to 40,000 without a vaccine.

He also said that, um, that was a possibility 20 to 40 play the mass starvation one. And he also predicted this was all in his kind of making the case as to why we should be opting for these worries about the other side of the ledger. Yeah, the costs of the interventions, the costs of the lockdown. So it's only been 20, 40,000 people. Well, he said that was a possible low estimate. That was possible. But he's making the case.

He doesn't say... His main argument was that we don't know, and we need to do the zero prevalence studies of the population. I don't know why you're digging in on him, because I think it's very clear. I don't think I'm being unfair to him. He didn't say 20,000 to 40,000 to 2 million. It could be anywhere in between.

I have no preconceived notion of it. I just think we should study it so we can kind of get to the bottom of it. He's like, if we're right. When somebody says, blah, blah, blah, if I'm right, just saying, that's what I think. That was a projection based on the studies that he had tried to do in California himself,

going to supermarkets with a couple of grad students and another colleague to get people to test it, to see how many people had been exposed to the virus, the population and not gotten sick. Perrielle. But there was very little evidence. There's a good chance. There's a good chance you stole it.

You might not have stolen it. But if I'm right that you stole it, I didn't say she stole it. I said it. Maybe she didn't. So I just said, if I'm right that, obviously. OK, now play this. Play this. This is him.

Bhattacharya. This is what this is. This is how he's laying it on thick as to why we should go with him go ahead play it tiana well he said he was wrong about the vaccine it's good for him turn it up mr biden is i would say look uh you've mischaracterized the other side right are you in favor of 75 000 people killing themselves extra as a result of the lockdown are you in favor of starving tens of millions of children across the earth? I don't think- None of this happened.

An accusation of callousness. I mean, there's morality on both sides of this argument is what I'm trying to say. And it's extremely misleading to say that only the people who want to lift lockdowns are people who are greedy, focused on money. That's just not right. So he's laying on his head.

If you don't care about 75,000 people killing themselves, which didn't happen, your suicide rate didn't go up. If you don't care about tens of millions of children starving, which did not happen, there's no evidence of it. Then he went on, wrote that um the scientific evidence is overwhelming that natural immunity attained after recovery from covid infection yes is effective and long lasting they won't he i'm not even that's true he was sure there wouldn't be another uh wave the immune system responds to infection by various mechanisms including

production of specific antibodies t cells and bs, and B-cells, particularly every recovered COVID patient from reinfection. After almost a year of pandemic, globally, only 34 cases and two deaths have been identified as reinfections as of the time of this writing. Now, we know everybody's getting reinfected all the time. That same claim was made on behalf of the vaccine. Yes. That if you got vaccinated, you'd be a dead end to the virus.

And that was false. Yes, yes. So many people were wrong about those kinds of things, including be a dead end to the virus. And that was false. Yes, yes. So many people were wrong about those kinds of things, including the claim was made about the vaccine. And he certainly wasn't wrong that getting the virus and recovering from it contributes to natural immunity. And that was denied by much of the medical establishment. Cue up the Asian one now. I would have brought my own clips. My point about this guy is.

He was wrong about a lot of things. So was everybody else he's wrong in the same direction about every single thing which he used to base his great barrington declaration on every single one of the arguments that he made in that declaration was based on some fact which turned out to be wildly false and yet he lucked out in a certain way because some of it turned out maybe it would have been right to do some of those policies. And that's what my point was about how, you know, when my kid goes to school, he's infuriated that he has to show his work. I'm like, Manny, you might get the right answer. It's meaningless if you didn't have a methodology that brought you

to that answer. If you base your conclusion on six different things that weren't even close to being right, I'm sorry, I'm not impressed with the thing. And Europe could have been no different. Like it turned out Europe got it right. You think everybody got it. Everybody was lucky except for California and some other states in the United States that stayed closed so long. And there were other countries in South America and so on. European countries all had their schools open in the fall. The declaration was October 4th. European schools had been open for months by then. Catholic schools were open.

Private schools had been open across the country. There's plenty of evidence to be found about this. We'll get to that. I got to play the last one because it's my favorite one. Because one of the problems he was facing was that in Asia, they were having wildly less COVID. You know, they're just way, way lower numbers. The Japanese never imposed mandatory lockdown measures. Right.

So why? Well, we don't know why. There's a lot of uncertainty around this. Well, yeah. Iceland had very low rates and they didn't impose lockdown measures. Sweden had very low. Well, imposing lockdowns is not the same thing as saying that people are acting as they always did. Japan is a very elderly society. It's very closely packed. OK, we don't really understand why some of these countries did worse. But this is his theory. This is Bhattacharya's theory. This is my favorite. And this is totally conjecture.

He just almost just made this up is my favorite. And this is totally conjecture. I looked at it. He just almost just made this up. Go ahead, play this. Yeah, so I think that that was a thinking mistake, that the virus wasn't so widespread. We could use this strategy that seems like it was working in Asian countries. But even in the Asian countries,

I think there's some evidence that we talk about cross-reactive immunity. Like there were other coronavirus like infections that they've had. They may have had some more extensive cross-reactive immunity than, or more prevalent cross-reactive immunity than other than the European countries and the US had.

So that could, I mean, I don't know. SARS-ish, yeah. Who knows, right? Who knows, right? So I think we don't know fully why it didn't hit the Asian countries as hard. But I think it's important to think about. Oh, yeah, this is funny.

This is SARS-ish. Because the Asian neighborhoods in New York City had drastically lower numbers of COVID. Drastically lower numbers. It's a cultural, to me, it seems- Cultural thing? I have no idea. But look, you'd have to come up with evidence for this.

He has a theory, you have a theory. I don't know what the basis is for judging your theory. It... A cultural thing? I have no idea. But look, you'd have to come up with evidence for this. He has a theory. You have a theory. I don't have... I don't know what the basis is for judging your theory. It's a cultural thing. No, but I'm not asking anybody to take risks with our lives based on my theory. Nobody was going to... Nobody would have forced your kids to go to school if you didn't want them to go to schools.

The issues were imposed closures. Catholic schools were open through all this whole thing. Many well-off people, by the way, sent their kids to Catholic schools. Catholic school enrollments went up. Public schools have lost a lot of support on account of this. There's no question that the teachers' unions were very strongly opposed to reopening schools throughout the 2021 school year. Why don't we talk about March 2021 and what we could have known by then? Okay.

Can I show you one of the- Sure. Your show. It's a comedy show, so show what you want. Bring up the Asian neighborhoods JPEG, the top one, because this is fascinating to me. And then we can talk about this stuff. So can you make it bigger?

Okay. This is a graphic that I did when I had nothing to do during COVID. For those of you at home can't see this, on the left is a New York Times graphic of the various ethnic groups in New York City and where they congregate, which neighborhoods they dominate.

And if you can see it on YouTube, those bright like magenta, pink polygons, whatever you want to call them. Those are the Asian neighborhoods. On the right was from the New York Times COVID tracker. And the white means the lowest amount of COVID. And if you see, it's like puzzle pieces. You can take those Asian neighborhoods from the left and literally fit them into the Asian neighborhoods on the right and have no COVID. And they abut the darkest colored neighborhoods. They abut directly the neighborhoods that had the most COVID. And there were articles written about a Latino neighborhood, Corona, right next to

Flushing. Corona had very, very high COVID. So what's your argument? That they wore the masks more conscientiously or what? My argument is that they did everything more conscientiously. That may be true. There's evidence that social capital- And they don't need to be told. You may be exactly right about that. They may have voluntarily engaged in what, but I don't know where the evidence is for that.

Well, that's evidence, what I'm showing you. Well, it's kind of evidence, I guess, but it's sheer conjecture what the causes of those differences were. A sheer conjecture. Look, there are studies of 29 countries in Europe which had more variation in the stringency of their COVID measures than the 50 United States, which were very disparate in

the length of closures and the stringency of closures. There was no evidence that the longer and more stringent lockdown measures that were imposed have any relationship to morbidity outcomes. There just is no relationship. There's an absence of evidence. The word morbidity confuses me. It doesn't mean death. Yes, death. Because that we can measure. Other things are hard to measure.

When they say comorbidities, they mean like... Yeah, factors that contribute to someone's dying, having very serious heart ailments or diabetes, serious diabetes. Those are comorbidities. They increase your likelihood of dying. But was Botticelli's argument that Asians had been infected by other similar viruses? Yes.

Could that play a role if these Asians are immigrants in these neighborhoods? Yes. Very good. It could. A true social scientist. But it's, of course, but he wants us, he wanted us to bet the store on it. The guy, when you tell us, look, why don't we just say, should we have discussed it more rather than call them names, fringe up and shut them down on social media? The Biden administration was sending messages to social media companies, telling them to deboost messaging at odds with government policy secretly and telling them to boost messages that supported government policy because they didn't want to have a debate about these measures.

And among the false messaging that came out of the establishment was the message that getting the virus and recovering from it would not contribute to immunity. The World Health Organization changed the definition of herd immunity on its website. Herd immunity, yeah. Herd immunity was what it was like to say. It comes from either vaccination or getting the virus and recovering. Spring of 2020.

Over the summer of 2020, they changed it. It comes from vaccination only because they were trying to discourage people from getting the virus and to get immunity. Fine. Maybe that would have been good messaging. But to lie about something so fundamental. I agree. And they denied people that had recovered from the virus the knowledge, the comforting knowledge that they had immunity. Those people could have volunteered in hospitals i'm not they could have they could

have helped their elderly relatives i'm not they had i'm not here to defend uh fauci and he's talking at both sides of his mouth well you just want to focus on the problems of one side it sounds like i'm here to say that i that the the the pendulum swing towards revisionist reinterpretations of everything i think is going too far. Too far, okay. I think by and large, we got COVID pretty right based on what we knew at the time. And as a matter of fact, I'm not even sure knowing everything we know now, with the exception of schools.

Well, let me ask about lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions. As of January 20th, 2021, you know what that date is, Perry Yall? What's that? January 20, 2021. It's a civics test. You know what happens on January 20th? The election?

The president is in. Oh, the inauguration, I mean? Yeah. So as of January 20th, 2021, Sweden, which didn't lock down, 1037 deaths per million and then comparing it to its its uh fellow nordic countries denmark was 314 per million and then it went down to 96 per million and uh uh in norway so you're talking about 11 times the... This is... Norway had had a severe flu season the year before.

Sweden had had a mild flu season the year before. Therefore, there were a number of vulnerable people who had not passed away in Sweden. They knew they would... They believed they would front load some deaths because the best you could do for these very costly measures is to postpone them. And the advisor to the Swedish Health Authority said, who was in his 70s, I'm willing to bear some greater risk so my kids, my grandchildren, rather, are not kept out of school. But within a year, they had lower morbidity.

I want to ask you about that. And they have the best outcome in Europe, according to the excess morbidity tables, which is the best way of looking at it. No, no, that's not true years that's not true yes it is the excess mortality from 2020 to 2023 i'll show you the whole three years there is there is one article that says that but then the our world uh data and the economists that say otherwise but let's but let's just hold take out. We're not there yet. Okay.

As of January 20th, 2021, we had the vaccine. Available for a small number of people, yeah. And if Bhattacharya had been correct and there was not another wave and we didn't have Omicron and we did not have Delta, which you couldn't know one way or another, that would have been the end of COVID right then. And then we wouldn't be arguing about whether lockdowns were effective or not because we would say, oh my God, Sweden made a huge mistake because look at them. They had 10 times the death of Finland. Now COVID's gone. These other countries locked down. What I'm saying, like, it's all a

lot of chance, but it turned out, I don't even, by the way, I can't even really understand this. I actually called some people today to try to explain it to me. Somehow, now you say that Sweden actually was overtaken by these other countries. I'm going to show you otherwise. But even the fact that it began to converge quickly, it doesn't make sense to me because we had a vaccine which would imply in some way, well, let's say you're

right. Let's say Sweden was overtaken by these other countries. So you're saying that with a vaccine that we both think works, the entire thing turned around and these other countries had so much death with a vaccine that they overtook Sweden, that it had all that death without a vaccine? They did. They did. Doesn't that mean the vaccine doesn't work? No, it meant that it worked, but there are vulnerable people. Vulnerable people did get the virus eventually.

The vaccine may have helped. Of course, it helped to some degree, but it wasn't enough to protect them. It wasn't enough to protect very elderly people or very vulnerable people. But they already died. Right. But all the vulnerable people died in Sweden. No, that's not true. No, they didn't all die because there were more deaths in Norway and Denmark in 2022 and 2023. And later on in 2021.

The pandemic stretched over three years. And if you look at the three years of the pandemic, and frankly, by June of 2021, those countries had caught up to Sweden. Right. How did they catch up to Sweden in deaths while they had a vaccine? Because there were elderly people who had gotten vaccinated, but wasn't perfect they still had greater vulnerabilities uh elderly people people in their 80s or 90s even though they'd had the vaccine they still had greater vulnerability but what you're telling me is that even though one pot you're talking about you're talking about similar populations sweden and and um denmark or these other countries. Similar kind of percentages of elderly, similar everything. The studies control for all of that.

Age differentials, comorbidities and so on. There are some differences among those countries. Slight differences, but pretty comparable. And yet, the only difference is the time. And Sweden front-loaded all its... They seem to have. To early on when there was no vaccine. And then these other countries

pushed that off until after we had the vaccine, but yet somehow managed to equal the death or exceed the death of the country that had it before the vaccine, which would imply to me that the vaccine...

Well, I guess the only other thing it implies that Denmark would have been three times worse without the vaccine. Some people after getting vaccinated got COVID and still got seriously sick. You follow my logical? I'm really struggling with this. There were people that got seriously sick from COVID after getting the vaccine. Fewer people died, but there certainly were people that got seriously ill. I know, but enough to turn the tables. What do you attribute that to?

I don't, well, what I attribute to is I don't think it's true. Well, okay. Look at the Pizzato at Ardolco. They express surprise at the outcome. We cite it in our book. It's the most comprehensive study, and it's based on comparing the deaths

over the three years of the pandemic with the previous 10 years, patrolling for things like uh age structures even changes in age structure in the population from year to year uh comorbidities and various other uh uh well here's the economist our world in data which was kind of the gold standard that that um what's the date on that um june 17 2024. it's from january 1st you know that's where it stopped they stopped keeping it up after that And it says, Sweden estimated cumulative excess deaths per 100,000 people during COVID. I think that's the right measure. Estimated.

Yeah. Because the Pizzato article I'm referring to is based on actual numbers, not estimates. Okay, but... But actual deaths. Even if it's... Okay, fair enough. So the Economist has it like 250 per 100,000 for Sweden, is the excess, and Denmark at around 150. Well, it's not consistent with the actual numbers that are in the article, which is in The Lancet. It's in Lancet Regional Europe, and it's...

And there's another source here. It's July 2024. There's another source here. It's called The World uh the world in numbers or something like that yeah no that's the same one the world no there's another one i that also the human mortality database yeah i don't know what that is which has uh again sweden at five percent deaths and denmark at 2.49 percent deaths i guess this is a different way of measuring the same thing so let me let me mention a couple of other points, which is that-

But the common sense given the vaccine would imply that these numbers make more sense. No matter how you slice it, it doesn't make sense that with a vaccine- People got sick from COVID after getting vaccinated. Some people died from getting sick from COVID after getting vaccinated. Let's take it logic. If there had been no vaccine, wouldn't we have expected that eventually Sweden and Denmark would have evened out? No vaccine. I suppose.

That's the whole point of Great Barrington. You can't put it off indefinitely. Of course, people died from other things because of lockdowns and so on. There may have been more. Let's just take COVID. Let's just take COVID. Let's just take COVID. Yeah. So if there had been no vaccines.

Or you could say, if there had been no vaccines, we would expect these similar countries, that the virus would eventually work its way through both of them, and you'd have similar numbers of deaths. If there's nothing to distinguish the countries, then if they're equivalent populations, then you would expect equivalent outcomes. Right. We have pretty equivalent countries here. So the question is, but the real question is, what difference do the lockdowns make?

But there was a vaccine. So how do we get the same result with the vaccine that we would have expected without the vaccine? This is a puzzle. I'm really struggling with this. That's why I think these numbers— What does ChatGPT have to say about it? ChatGPT? No, I actually called a statistician who could give me an answer. Well, look, again, I think people continue statistician who couldn't give me an answer. Well, look, again, I think people continue to get sick from COVID after getting vaccinated. I got COVID.

There were people that got, you know, for people our age and younger and so on, getting sick from COVID wasn't getting that sick. But people, you know, have missed work even recently from feeling very poorly from having gotten COVID. Now, after getting COVID. They play it up to the hilt when they get COVID. So what's surprising about extremely elderly people with comorbidities to continuing to die from it? Nothing surprising, but it's surprising when they die at the same numbers when they get it after the vaccine, as they did,

as the other country was getting dying before the vaccine. I see what you're saying that, that it doesn't look like waiting for, waiting for the vaccines made much difference they want it was saying well that's that's why i don't believe the number that's an okay but that's an argument from my side which is to say that the non-pharmaceutical interventions which are extremely costly in those other countries but not in sweden didn't have any great effect that but that's the whole point of the argument let's talk about not but no i'm saying he didn't numbers he doesn't he doesn't believe it believe it. Okay, fine. Don't believe it. Whatever.

If I had to choose between conflicting numbers, that none of these are flaky outfits, then just common sense says to me that these numbers make sense because that's what I'd expect if the vaccine works. I'm just telling you that the Posado et al. of University of Milan, Lancet, has the most comprehensive. And they're not estimates, they're actual numbers. Now, the Gaza Ministry of Health has different numbers. The people that have pushed back, by the way, so our critics have pushed back in various places, including the Boston Review has an essay coming out, and they lined up four people highly critical of our

argument, and they're all epidemiologists and so well, a couple of philosophers of science. But they push back and argue that they think we're wrong about... Look, we are only arguing that there's a lack of evidence that the non-pharmaceutical interventions significantly reduce mortality. There's an absence of evidence for that, and we know those measures are extremely costly. And that's what the pre-COVID pandemic plan said. But there's evidence that it reduced transmission. Yes, there's some evidence that transmission was somewhat reduced by these non-pharmaceutical measures. There's no corresponding evidence that it reduced mortality. So what's the point? I mean, you can sort of slow down transmission.

Explain that. How does transmission not reduce mortality? Because people are going to get it. It may slow things down a little bit, but it may make a difference of a few weeks or a few months. But also the highly vulnerable parts of the population have more contact with other people. You know, they have nursing facilities to be taken care of and so on and so forth. So it may be harder to protect them, but there's no evidence from anywhere in the world,

29 countries in Europe, 50 states in the United States, highly differential in positions of stringent measures. There's just no difference that those extremely costly measures, which were predicted to be extremely costly measures, helped reduce the deaths. That's our only point, lack of deaths. I think there is evidence. That's our only point.

Lack of evidence. I think there is evidence. I'll tell you what I think. By the way, is this guy Martin Kulldorff, is he one of the authors of Great Barrington? Yes. He wrote in December of 2020, if the young live normal lives, someone will be infected, but their risk is less than from lockdown collateral damage. Pandemic will then be naturally over in three to six months. Okay, this is excessive. But look, there were a lot of

mistakes made. By the way, you know, why are we talking about masks? Anthony Fauci was asked about wearing masks in 2019. What should we do? He immediately interrupts, no, avoid the paranoid stuff. You know, don't wear a mask. Just keep yourself healthy. Don't drink too much. Get a good night's sleep. And then he's not recommending it. So let me give you the evidence. Lots of people made lots of mistakes on all sides. But let me give you the evidence.

But before I give you the evidence, let's just read the evidence that is in relief in the shadows. We see drastic differences in COVID numbers among nations. Yes, yes, yes. And since there was no pharmaceuticals responsible for that, by definition, non-pharmaceutical interventions are the reason. No, in the 50 states, there was vaccine hesitancy in the Republican states. Well, let's start with the 50 states,

because there may have been vaccine hesitancy in some of these other countries too. Pre-vaccine. Oh, pre-vaccine. Yeah, pre-vaccine, fair enough. There's no, right, once you correct for age and so on and so forth, there's no difference in the Republican and Democrat states pre-vaccine. The differences only emerge post-vaccine.

I don't know about the 50 states. I know Vermont had way less than Jersey. There are countries that have high levels of comorbidities. But that can't be right because Jersey had that huge wave. Some states have old age homes. Even if there were big differences, it wouldn't mean non-pharmaceutical interventions were... Correct for those things. I'm correcting for those kinds of things. There's just no evidence that the non-pharmaceutical interventions reduce the number of deaths. But when you have Norway or Finland having one-tenth the death that America has pre-vaccine, therefore non-pharmaceutical interventions are responsible. Unless Americans are more obese.

Yes, definitely. They are much more obese. Much higher rates of diabetes. I don't think... Exactly. I don't think... are responsible unless americans are more obese yes definitely they are much you know yes much higher rates of diabetes i don't i don't exactly i don't think and you know the health care systems are also worse it's true those kinds of things but there's no evidence that the non-pharmaceutical interventions made the difference but but i say he's exactly right about levels of obesity and control for this but different states have different you can control yes you control for those things and there's no difference uh made by the non-pharmaceutical intervention. Sorry, well, but I'm trying to make a logical point, which is that prior to the vaccine, every policy in some way or other was a non-pharmaceutical intervention.

And if they don't work, then what you're saying is every country would be exactly the same but they weren't no no well sorry you're but you're talking about correcting for obesity for uh controlling for obesity every country for the quality of the health care system uh other kinds of behavioral contributors maybe alcoholism behavior so forth okay so correct for all of that is it your impression that every country on earth was the same if you control for those things? I don't think so. I don't have a study. The study of the 29 countries of Europe finds that once you control for those things, and age.

Age was the number one factor. There was a high age gradient. Age is huge. And serious comorbidities, yeah. We can't show that the non-pharmaceutical measures made a discernible difference in morbidity rates. Or at least a difference that would outweigh the negative aspects of...

Well, we know that there were negative aspects. We don't actually have evidence of anything on the other side of the scales. So I've had a study here. There's absence of evidence that there was any positive benefit. I have a study here, and I have a few of these studies. I cheated.

I got chat GPT to give me studies about. Sure. Look, there were a lot of studies out there. Let me tell you what the study is about healthcare workers. Okay. They did a study in 29 hospitals where they mandated PPE. And after whatever, 14 days or something, the daily new health care worker infections fell by 88 percent. And within 14 days, the workplace risk of health care workers shifted below community baseline. PPE in hospital settings is generally accepted.

I've not heard anyone argue against that in hospital settings. But hospital workers do. Well, they wear masks. Yeah, but that's in a hospital setting. And I don't know that particular study. Actually, there's lack of evidence that surgical masks. No, not surgical masks. They wear a 90-pound mask.

They have 90. Oh, that's right. And they wear surgical masks. They wear a 90-50. The M90. Oh, that's right. And they wear them properly. They're form-fitted. They finish the day and their faces are malformed because they've been wearing such tightly fitted masks and only breathing through them. Professionals are capable of doing that. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Ordinary people are not. Dude, this is my point. So I, as a nascent world leader, when I see that you say non-pharmaceutical interventions don't work like masks, I'm like, wait a second. They do work because- If people wear them properly. If people wear N95- Now, I remember they were telling us to wash our hands. A, B, C, D.

There was a whole public campaign to teach us how to wash our hands. Not once. Not once did our government say, listen, if you need to wear masks, you need to wear the 3M cup masks or the duck bill. Oh, right. Yes. There was a cloth mask. And this, and this is how you wear it and give the same attention to teaching us how to wear masks as they gave us the teaching us to wash our hands. That would be what I would say if you told me the non-pharmaceutical interventions were not working when I know that masks work. So therefore I know the problem is

people are not wearing them right, they're not getting the right masks or whatever it is. You don't throw that baby out with the bathwater and say, okay, since you don't wear them right, don't wear them. Teach us to wear them right. We don't, fair enough, but we don't say that at the individual level, a tight-fitting N95 mask or a respirator with a HEPA filter, which could have a pipe coming out the top and so on,

I mean, like a very fine vacuum cleaner or something with a HEPA filter, that sort of thing properly worn by individuals, it may make a difference, but there's no evidence that mask mandates worked, and there's very little evidence. There's no evidence that at the population level, people are prepared to endure that kind of masking. When you say mask mandates didn't work, you have no baseline to compare it to. Yeah, we have places that impose mask mandates for much longer this has been studied for decades by the way and uh there's no discernible difference uh in rates of uh of morbidity or even that's even transmission i think in many cases well let's just be careful when you say the mask like if i say there were major studies that were done right but but there's

but there's a there's a there's a logical point here i just want to be clear about. If you make the argument, listen, we've learned that condom education and distribution doesn't reduce teen pregnancy. That is not telling me condoms don't work. It's telling me that these policies fall on deaf ears. Fair enough. And this is what, that's what I hear. The masks don't work. No, masks work work you don't want to wear your condom yes but don't but don't let that bleed don't let that bleed into the notion

mask mask is too vague now you want to say and you have to wear the 95 n95 mask that was not what the measures were during covid it was cloth masks they're not n95 or surgical masks which are not made for that at all. I was on whole shows about this. Well, you're quite right about that. I think that was equity. But are you saying that that kind of mandate would just be too

unworkable to make people wear the N95s? Why? Well, look, it's not something we've tried. I don't know of any society that has mandated the wearing of N95s. We should have. Maybe so, but there would have been costs, and I think people would have rebelled.

We spent trillions. People put the surgical masks under their noses. Yes, that's about the Japanese. That's the thing. Tell me if anybody saw this. We saw all types of people with a mask around their chin. I never saw an Asian woman with a mask around her frigging chin. The surgical mask?

I don't think they, I don't think the Asians were in 95. I never saw Miss Chin with her mask around her chin. Okay, you can go there. Oh, come on. That's not exactly. Okay. Anyway, the mask stuff has been studied for decades. They were warring op-eds in New York Times by by Brett Stevens and Zeynep Tufekci.

I was surprised at Brett Stevens on that one, yeah. He was correct. He didn't say that masks don't work. He said that there's no evidence that these mask mandates that we had worked, and they were not involving N95s or respirators properly worn. I mean, how would you enforce that? Have people going around uh you know uh i mean we had things at princeton like you know okay make sure that if you wear a surgical mask you know you put it back up after taking a couple of sips of your coffee we actually at a certain point had had had sip you

know guidances about how much time you had to sip your coffee and surgical mass a colleague said to us you know we're working why are you going down this rabbit hole and he said i want brett stevens to tell his surgeon next time he has surgery not to borrow the wearing a mask. I'm going to make an argument to you. Surgical masks are not designed to prevent virus spreads, to prevent the surgeon from sneezing into the wound or blood from splattering into the surgeon's mouth. It has nothing to do with viruses. I'll ask you a question. Do speed limits work?

Yes, of course. They reduce. They have costs and they have benefits. They do reduce deaths. Everybody's speeding. Well, the general thing is, I they have costs and they have benefits. They do reduce deaths. Everybody's speeding. Well, the general thing is, I've talked to police officers about this. They figured that people are going to stay within 10 miles. Most people stay within 10 miles of the speed limit.

And so there's a kind of predictive effect to it. My general point is that the mandate didn't, you know, it didn't get everybody to wear a mask. But that doesn't mean that there was no difference between what there would have been. And if, if we, if we hadn't had the mandate and having the mandate, and I think that,

but we have, we have comparisons. We have States that had very stringent mandates. We had States that had less stringent mandates, but still behavioral changes that people are going to gauge a behavioral changes voluntary for sure. So, so we do,

we can compare places that had mandates. The study of the 29 countries of Europe compares countries that had more or less stringent mandates of a whole variety of sources. There were still voluntary measures going on. Right, so you have to take the mandate and then you have no mandate, but then you have to... Guidances and recommendations. But the voluntary behavior can be more significant, as I believe it is with a lot of the Asian communities, than the mandate. Maybe so. That would be a good matter to study. People's objections were to the mandates, not to the voluntary behavioral changes.

No one's going to force anyone to go out in public or to not wear a mask. Nobody ever said, well, with some of the demonstrations going on and so on for different reasons, but no one was ever going to force anyone to not socially distance if they wanted to. The mandates were the controversial thing. Right, but when you have... And we know that open table reservations fell off a cliff before the restaurant closures. Right, and in Sweden, people were distancing, you know, on their own. In southern states, I mean, you know, southern states were open over the summer, started open over the summer, much, much less social distancing going on. And there's just no way.

Florida did as well as California. Ron DeSantis mandated that the public schools should be open in Florida in the fall. California, many of the schools were closed throughout the entire 2020-21 school year. There's no difference in the outcomes so far as we can see. Yeah, they're pretty close. Can I? Yeah. I mean, when you control for the public. Yeah, control for risk, absolutely. Yeah. So your book is about how politics, our politics failed us. Yes, in COVID's wake,

you know, how our politics failed us. Well, did they fail us because they were well-meaning, but incompetent? Or is there a malevolent? No, no, no. We actually don't engage in a lot of assessment of motives, you know, also. We just look at what was said about these non-pharmaceutical interventions before COVID and find a lot of skepticism there about their efficacy. We look at the performance of states having implemented these things, their outcomes, and we find very little evidence of their efficacy. And we look at the cost and so on. But no, I think people were basically doing what they thought was the right thing. But there was a lot of censoriousness. There was moralized intolerance of disagreement, especially in the United States.

It was worse than elsewhere, many other places, worse than European countries, because dissent was associated with the other political party. And Donald Trump, of course, was running for re-election. That was part of it. Once he lost, it didn't really make much difference. So a big part of the book is really about not the matters we've been talking about, but the degraded state of public debate and the lack of humility around the want of evidence for none of these things could be settled. Follow the science, which was the great motto of vaccine and by the way you know they fact check trump as lying when he said he thought we'd have a vaccine by the beginning of the year this is how crazy it was i know and and we know now you said something about eric topol a minute ago yeah we know that there's an mit policy whatever that article i i

i forget the guy's name i think it's a latino last name i've communicated with him yeah yeah he's very credible guy yeah and uh and and tyler cowan is also on board thinking that they held up the vaccine to uh so that trump wouldn't be able to have it as a feather cap. But we got a vaccine in 13 months. Very successful. And the next time it'll be six months. And to think that we would now, we're not going to have lockdown. Don't you, they didn't work the last time.

I'd be like, no, the next time I think, now that we know that Bhattacharya is 100% wrong, that it's not going to take years to get a vaccine. But now, actually, we know they actually had the vaccine on the drawing board within days, right? We could have actually had it much sooner if the Chinese had been more open. I mean, the cases actually began in China,

it seems, in the fall of 2020. They were removing databases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere. They started deleting the files in September 2020. That's insane. Just disappeared. We haven't talked about the origins issue. That itself is a deadline.

You have something? Just a moment. Let me wrap up the point. Go ahead. Which is just that I think that the next time it would be smart to learn about the masks, learn about whatever was apparently or what was clearly not efficient about the lockdowns, but locked down and hunkered down because now we know we can wait this thing out

or likely be able to wait it out until we get a vaccine. We didn't know that. And that was a very powerful argument against the lockdowns at the time. But do you mean keep kids out of school for months? Are you including that? Well, there's another element here, which is that this is such a weird pandemic

that spared kids. Like the 1918 flu, I believe, actually kids were more vulnerable. The median age of death in 1918 was 27. Yeah. Very young kids. A lot of soldiers. Yes.

And in all our experience with sicknesses, we usually worry more about young kids. This is an odd thing, right? So, yeah, I would say keep them out again because there's no reason to think that what was true this time will be true at that time. But there are going to be lifelong detriments for many kids from this experience. Oh, there's ample evidence for it. If you want another person to talk to, David Zweig, who has a terrific book. We've had him on the show.

Okay. His book is out. His book came out after ours in April, and it's a terrific book. And Jonathan Haidt, Haidt have anything to say about lockdown? I think Haidt would probably agree with me, but Zweig doesn't.

He did an event at the Comedy Cellar two weeks ago. Okay. So tell me about the origin, because that's a... Well, the origin. I agree on that. It was called a conspiracy theory by scientists that might have originated from the Wuhan lab. Let me just say, in 2017, there was a conference

in the UK on future pandemics, and the lab that was identified as the most likely source of a future pandemic was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It turns out that the scientists who suspected a lab leak in January 2020 and then talked to Drs. Fauci and Collins in these phone calls they had and then reversed their position and wrote an article called Proximal Origins that said, no, definitely a natural origin, not a lab origin, while sending each other Slack messages and emails, which we have access to now. It's a disgrace. It's so frigging likely it came from the lab. I hate it

when science is politicized, but you just have to in this case. Imagine the shit show if anyone accused China. And then Dr. Christian Anderson, the scientist, got a $1.6 million grant from Fauci's AIID. And so it's very likely that the virus came from the lab, was manipulated in the lab. It may have been just a virus that they stored there because they had thousands of bat coronaviruses and other kinds of viruses stored there. But it does show evidence of having been manipulated. And there's a grant proposal called DRASTIC that was available before that was put in that looks like a blueprint to manipulate this virus. So it's extremely likely. Francis Collins has been asked about this actually in Andrew Sullivan's podcast. He says we're sloppy in the book in our discussion of this because he suggests that if it doesn't qualify for some

bureaucratic regulations called P3CO, which only apply to viruses that are predicted to be highly transmissible and highly morbid, that it shouldn't be called gain-of-function. But by any normal definition, including the World Health Organization's and the National Institutes of Health, we were funding gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab. I don't think that we... There's no evidence that we subsidized the creation of this particular virus. Well, there's no evidence that we subsidized the creation of this particular virus. Well, money's fungible. It's fungible.

And the research still goes on. That's the thing. It's been controversial for decades. Fauci and Collins have been supporters of it for decades. There are many scientists who have been vehemently opposed to it. There's no evidence of benefits having come from this. But this is not the first virus to leak from a lab. And the next one could be worse.

So it's not just a matter of historical reckoning. It's a matter of present danger that this, and it's appalling that the major media is not reporting on this. And let me just conclude with this. Nature, the magazine, that's the public looking face of the journal Nature, which is highly respected along with the Lancet and Scientific American, did an article in February 2025 saying more and more evidence points to a natural origin of COVID. And they have a picture of a raccoon dog in the article. They only quote six scientists. Two of them are the ones that were on this January phone call who sent each other the Slack messages saying, so frigging likely. Four of the others are their co-authors. They don't quote anybody on the other side. And two weeks later, the French National Academy of Sciences

voted 97% to 3%. They believe that it's a lab origin of the virus. So it's appalling that the scientific establishment has drawn the wagons around this issue. I was just going to say this circle, just the fact that they're circling the wagons. A kind of omerta. Yes. They won't point the finger at their colleagues. Some of this, I think, is that public health is such a hierarchical field. Scientists will not engage in exposure of their colleagues' research misconduct. It's that way in every priest. No. Like that. My employees are like that. Political scientists are not like that. We've had we've had scandals involving research, misconduct, manipulation of data to preferred outcomes. And it's been it's been there's been accountability. So I don't think every field is as worse. Your analogies that you just mentioned are

reasonable ones. But this is really bad. And doctors are like that. We've seen doctors cover for horrible malpractice among their peers. And police officers. Yeah, it is a bad part of human nature. Well, comedians are also hesitant to condemn other comedians. And we expect more from people who've kind of dedicated themselves

to the public good. Yes. Or like priests. But, you know... People who are protected by tenure you know by the privilege of tenure at uh i don't want to pick on the catholics you know they're certainly uh the the lord knows what they're up to at the sat mars over in brooklyn of course actually there was just a big scandal about the child abuse sexual abuse in the you remember that professor that we had on that woman woman who had worked with abused children in the schools, and she was quite left wing. And she had said that, oh, yeah, maybe we shouldn't close the schools because, remember, she came on via Zoom and she got totally ostracized.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's no question that it seems as though child abuse went up during the pandemic. Yeah, we know that. We know that. I mean, there's been ample evidence for that. Yes. Who do you think was more, what's the word I'm looking for, more unwilling to engage in discourse? The people that, you know, the people that were in favor of lockdowns and

vaccines are the people that were anti-lockdown. That's fair enough. I mean, look, there were there was a lot of moralized intolerance on both sides. And again, I think that I would agree that Bhattacharya and so on was was wrong about a number of things. So were lots of other people. We just talked about some, including on the origins. But he's being lionized now by the Trump. I don't want to take that. You have a point. You have a point. You know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we shouldn't overdo it with anyone. We kind of did, I think, with Dr. Fauci and we shouldn't do it on the, you know, we shouldn't do it with respect to the other side. We know, and we're in the book trying to be just clear and frank based on the evidence we have that the uncertainty around these very costly measures was underestimated.

It was predicted that the efficacy was uncertain and that the cost would be considerable. And the record still indicates that we have no evidence of the effectiveness of these very costly measures, and that the costs are profound and wide-ranging. And that's where we are at the moment. There are various other, you know, the Scottish government did a very good assessment of theirs, and they conclude exactly the same thing. We had very little evidence for the effectiveness of these non-pharmaceutical interventions at the beginning of the pandemic. And unfortunately, we still have very little evidence for their effectiveness. But you're conflating the two things i just think it's imprecise there's no evidence that the intervention

works like that wearing a mask works or that the policy of mandating them or it that the policy bore fruit because if my kid if i take care of my infant kid and they have covid i'm going to put a mask on before i go in the room. It's not because I'm a crazy person. And you would too. Yeah, no, it's fair enough. I mean, I don't think the evidence, I mean, even in surgical settings, I'm not 100%. It's definitely the case that this applies. The big study that was done in Bangladesh included giving out masks, urging people to use them, trying to observe how many people were actually using them. Yeah, but they don't know what kind of mask it was

when they're wearing it right. Well, it's a good point. I don't think they were N95s. I could be wrong about that, but that's a good point. But I don't know of any good studies of masks wearing of N95s. Look, I also haven't had anyone deny that at the individual level,

if you wear a tight-fitting N95, wear it properly, wear it consciously, change it frequently. And the other person's wearing one also. Fair enough. I don't know anyone that's denied that that may well be effective at the individual level. Right.

So when you say non-pharmaceutical interventions don't work, people will be also surprised to hear you say that at the same time. I'm talking about the ones that we had. Yes. Not imaginary ones or at least proposed ones. You were saying that for months and months and months that these cloth masks don't work. But with a lot of these things, I know you want to go and I don't want to keep you, but we had a lot of people die of other medical complications that went unattended to during lockdowns. Yes, yes, yes.

And so one argument is, so we shouldn't have lockdowns. And another argument is, well, let's make sure next time we have lockdowns to have procedures that people can still get their heart checked. Fair enough. Let's set up- And that might involve wearing a 95 mask. Whatever it is. But the general thing when I see that the countries that had harsh lockdowns pushed the virus back in time.

We don't have evidence of that. Well, it seems to be. We don't have evidence of that. Sweden and China. Well, China. We don't have a lot of good evidence. You trust the evidence that's coming out of the Chinese government? I mean, they claim they've had like zero cases.

I mean, it's, look at the, it's a straight flat line for several years. No, I trust you circumstantially because they took down all those temporary hospitals and stuff. Well, I mean, we took down a lot of temporary hospitals and so on too. When we didn't need them. Right.

Yeah, so that's why I trust you because of the behavior. We don't have evidence that the non-pharmaceutical interventions made a difference to morbidity. We just don't. Well, we need to get better non-pharmaceutical. Fair enough. We could have done much better randomized trials during a lot of this.

That's for sure. Well, the CDC was recommending, was still including cloth masks in their recommendations literally at the end of 2021 and i was convinced it was an equity issue because they're 95 masks cost money i i just felt that was the reason they didn't they didn't want to get hit because by the way this is just a really interesting topic you have you have a second that you'll probably be interested in this i took this

grail test you know what a grail test is it's this new test that can test you for like 50 or 60 different types of cancer. Oh, yes, yes. I've heard of it. Yeah. A few drops of blood. Yeah, yeah. And I asked my doctor, why don't I take this two times a year? Like, why am I taking it every few years?

It costs $1,000, you know, which is real money. But I could afford it. I could afford to pay $20,000 a year, 20 tests a year for this grill test. And he gave me some gobbledygook answer about why false positive and blah, blah, blah. And I began to think that what we're heading for a lot of these things is just a very ugly disparity

between the boutique healthcare that wealthier people can buy, preventative, weekly tests, and what people who rely on insurance and Obamacare and Medicare and Medicaid will ever have access to. And everybody kind of knows it, doesn't really want to talk about it, and it can get worse and worse and worse. And by the way, it is a real problem. But I don't find it as an argument that I shouldn't be able to get the test I want, but I understand that the social fabric can come might be limited capacity i i i also had that test and i also asked the next year well can i get it again and they said no you can't

because you had it a year ago it's it's all they recommended every how it's limited limited capacity i'm imagining no it's just ugly what do you want to take this thing like every week well i'd like to know why I shouldn't. Meaning like, if it's going to catch, if the whole point of catching cancer is to catch it early, then, I mean, some people test their blood every day when they have diabetes. Why can't I test my blood every day

to see if I have cancer, if I can afford it? See if there's an indicator of having cancer, not a foolproof. But that's the way the world is going, right? And at some point it means that people who have less money will live do you think unless we're prepared to pay for everybody to get it do you think you'd be better off if you were reminded of worrying about having cancer every day i mean really wasn't it better just to forget about it you know get tested

once in a while and forget about it this is my theory you know every time somebody dies of something that could have been detected or even like lung cancer from smoking, I say to myself, there was a moment in time. It was one cigarette. There was a time when if you had gotten the test results on a Monday, they would have caught it earlier enough. But they get the test results on Wednesday. It's too late. It has to cross that threshold, right? And I'm like, I don't want to be on the wrong side of that threshold.

And this is what this is. There are so many thresholds to worry about, though. This is crazy, though. It's not crazy. It's not crazy at all. No, but it may not be crazy, but is it healthy? What do you mean, psychologically? Well, I mean, is this anxiety-inducing?

It depends how burdensome. No, the anxiety is not healthy. I have the anxiety from not having a test. How burdensome would the test be? Think about something else. I'm just saying like- Well, as a practical matter, how burdensome would a test be?

You'd have to go into the- I'm supposed to get a colonoscopy. I forgot. I thought my colonoscopy was like three years ago, four years ago. I want to hear another ridiculous story. I went to get, the end of the story is I had to get an appointment

with a colonoscopy. They'd send me back to come back in five years. It's been a little bit more than five years. I call i went to get the end of the story is i had to get an appointment with colonoscopy they'd send me back to come back in five years it's been a little bit more than five years i call up nyu to get as well when we last year five years ago oh i'm sorry after three years uh you're no longer the doctor no longer considers you his patient and he's not taking any new patients i said but he but he told me to come back in five years i'm sorry no they're gonna give me special dispensation, but just the fact, but anyway. But they take it

to come back in five years, that means they found something? They usually say 10 years. Yeah, I had a polyp, the first time I had a polyp, the second time. That's why it's five years. So now I realize

I'm a few months, literally a few months beyond when I was supposed to do it. I'm fucking sweating bullets. I want that colonoscopy tomorrow. That's going to give you cancer. Well, it's certainly an unpleasant uh procedure i don't know not bad that colonoscopy she likes it it's just the prep is the prep but uh i mean the procedure itself is no no but the prep the

press not even that bad either but i probably probably, I eat generally better than you, I think. All right, sir. Let's not, let's forget. We're in COVID's wake. And by the way, I, you know, I want to be fair. As much as I zoomed in on a few like pet peeves, these were my pet peeves before you even wrote this book.

What the book says about the way our society doesn't allow debate, the way scientists have basically violated their oath, the way people were reacting to Trump because they hated Trump so much, even to the point of craziness, you know, and putting their heads in the ground like ostriches. This is all, I agree with everything in the book, and it's all very well written,

and I recommend it highly. Okay, let's make sure we keep this part in i'm not just saying that to be nice and you and you also believe the basic premise is that they did fail us on a number of levels even if absolutely i just but he prefers to argue it's no it's okay look nothing wrong with debate no no and uh no i appreciate your engagement and uh these you made a lot of thoughtful points. Thank you very much. It burns me up that this guy, Bhattacharya, who I just regard basically as one notch above a crank

or just, like I said, a poster child for motivated reasoning. You don't get everything wrong in the same direction if you are operating in a proper objective way. And he just laid, oh, 75,000 people. I can use that one. Tens of millions of people are going to starve to death. Yeah, I can use that one. Well, look, have you seen studies?

Toby Green, a very good book on the impact of COVID lockdowns around the world on supply chains and developing countries. No. Well, you have to have a look at it. The COVID consensus. He's an Africa scholar, very well respected at King's College London. No one paid any attention to closing down the global economy. What effect was that going to have on developing countries, countries that manufacture things and so on? No one paid any attention to that.

So it is worth it. It's every man for himself. There's much here that we don't understand that we've not gotten to the bottom of yet. So I'm glad to have the conversation and no problem with the challenges and so on and lots more to be understood here. Okay, Mr. Messina, very, very nice to meet you. Likewise. You're in New York. You should come down to the club and hang out. Thank you. Good night, everybody. Thank you very much.