The Daily Beast Podcast - Biden’s Ex-COVID Czar: Ron DeSantis Wants You to Drown in COVID

Episode Date: August 15, 2021

We’re enduring our current crush of COVID-19 cases in large part thanks to Republican governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has instituted statewide bans on vaccine and mask mandates as the state’s healthcare system is being crushed under a new surge of cases, according to Andy Slavitt, the former head of coronavirus response in Joe Biden’s White House. Slavitt said of DeSantis, “He’s saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to throw you in the water. I’m going to tell you, Hey, feel free to swim. You have the freedom to swim, but I’m going to bind your hands or put a gag in your mouth. I’m going to cover your eyes. I’m going to tie your ankles, but go ahead and swim.’” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Andy Slavitt, the former Biden White House Senior Advisor for COVID Response, and past head of Medicare Medicaid for the Obama Biden presidency, an author of Preventable, the inside story of how leadership failures, politics, and selfishness doomed the U.S. coronavirus response. Welcome back to the new abnormal Andy Slavitt. Well, your show title has never been more appropriate sounding that it's. right now. What's going on? Well, I've answered that at a few

levels, I mean, but I think it's useful to always start with kind of where the ground hasn't shifted from underneath us because of so many places it has. I mean, the things that are most important to do are still the most important things to do. Vaccinate this country as quickly as possible, particularly the pockets where there's a lot of

unvaccinated people, vaccinate the globe. And then probably there's sort of two others that are going to be important in game changers. One of them is to develop an antiviral. and the other is that we should be really focusing on solutions to people with long-term symptoms from COVID-19. Those things are the same no matter what, but the landscape is so changed over the last few months.

The globe is really on fire with COVID. The countries that have had the good fortune of not having a lot of COVID in 2020, and particularly those that don't have enough vaccine, are really hurting in 2021. I mean, we're not seeing overrun hospitals, forcing, collapsing health care systems in places like Bangladesh, India, and all directions in Indonesia. And then here in the U.S., we are seeing a rise in this wave that hasn't yet stopped. And I think we all are kind of getting the feeling that this isn't going to be the last wave. So welcome to the new abnormal.

One of the things I want to talk about first, and this is a little bit niche, but I think it's important, is that Ron DeSantis has decided that he's going to offer monocomoles, as opposed to pushing vaccines. Can you explain why that's so incredibly deranged? Did you ever have a kid in your class who, like, was incredibly disruptive and, like, late, and the teacher was yelling, and they finally, finally, finally got them to come down and talk, and you were like, man, you were better off. We were all better off when you were disruptive.

Just shut up, because the stuff you're saying is, like, insane. And you kind of knew it would be insane. Is he being contrary? The reality is that there's four things that are illegal in Florida. You can't require someone to be vaccinated. You can't require someone to wear a mask. You can't even, you're not even allowed to ask someone if they're being vaccinated. And you can't require someone to submit to a test to show that they're not infectious.

And so effectively, effectively, he's saying, hey, I'm going to throw you in the water. I'm going to tell you, hey, feel free to swim. You have the freedom to swim. But I'm going to bind your hands. I'm going to put a gag in your mouth. I'm going to cover your eyes. I'm going to tie your ankles. But go ahead and swim. Right. It seems as if a lot of these Republicans, we've had COVID now for more than a year, almost a year and a half, more. And these Republicans seem to have learned zero lessons. I think it's particularly the case with Abbott and Costello in Florida and Texas. But I think, you know, if you look at Aza Hutchinson, for example, in Arkansas, who basically said, I was wrong. The hardest three words to say in politics. I'm probably probably the hardest few words to say in any household, too, by the way.

But, you know, I was wrong. We made a mistake. We thought this thing was going away. We've got to fix it. You know, even Governor Ivy in Alabama, you know, Governor Justice in West Virginia. So look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. My God, love that man. You're hearing essentially people say, wow, I can't watch all this death without doing something.

And yet you have these two governors who I think say, look, hey, look, I don't. got a 30% of the country niche by just saying everything the government does and suggests is tyrannical. So I'm just saying that because by definition of the government's doing it, it's tyranny. Right. I mean, it just strikes me as completely insane. And also, like, what is the end goal here? Well, it's like that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. I mean, they're going to wave the freedom banner until there's nothing left for that freedom to hold. It's freedom from responsibility. It's freedom from obligation. It's freedom from commitment. It's freedom from society. It's not how societies are built. It's how hunter-gatherer societies functioned. Yeah. So talk to me about where we are with Delta now.

We had, we had Eric Topol on the podcast. He talked about, you know, that the breakthrough infections are probably a little bit higher than what we're thinking they may. be. He also talked about how the vaccine still provides very good protection against severe illness and death, which is really the end game and the goal. One of the great things about these mRNA vaccines is that they're really made for boosters, right? So you can scale up and go for the variants and address them very quickly. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing these companies working on boosters? Yeah. Look, let's maybe it's too useful to start with. And I, I thought Topel did a great job and you did a great job talking to him.

He's wonderful. But like, we didn't do a good enough job explaining to people how the vaccines work and don't work. Right. So the vaccine doesn't sit outside your body like sunscreen and prevent the virus from coming in, right? The vaccine you take it. It's inside your body. It does not keep the virus away. It does not keep the virus from coming in and infecting yourselves.

What it does. is it teaches your immune system to recognize the bad guy when it enters and to fight. And with the original COVID-19, it could fight and win almost all the time. With Delta, it can still fight and win, although sometimes it shows some wear and tear. And that wear and tear shows up with, you know, some symptoms from the disease. But to be clear, you could come in and test positive for COVID-19 while your immune systems just do doing its job. The idea behind a booster is to say, well, what we've observed is that we need a more powerful response, both because the first two responses don't last long enough,

and because Delta is just a more fearsome enemy. And in doing that, we need to amp up the amount of titers or antibodies that come into our system. And we know for sure that if you are, if you're immune system isn't working great anyway because you're either older or you're immunosuppressed, then a third booster is on its way to you. There's no way you should get through the fall and get into the winter without having a booster. Next question becomes, well, what if I'm not those things that I'm not 85 and I don't have, never had none of cancer, but. What if I'm just a hypochondriac? Yeah, what if I'm 60 or 50? Or 43. And, you know, there's both an individual, answer to that and a population answer. The good news is the country has procured enough vaccines for

anybody who wants them. The other good news is that the vaccine booster looks exactly like the first two shots. So it won't be hard to do. There's two challenges. One is for most of the world, outside of the wealthy nations, we've only vaccinated one to two percent. So at some level, if all the wealthy countries, which have taken about three quarters of the vaccines, of the four billion vaccines being made, continue to hoard the vaccines for boosters, we will see next things after Delta emerging very, very quickly. So, you know, we have to get on a plan to vaccinate the globe in the next nine months, period, end of story. Every single doctor that I have talked to in this whole COVID adventure has said from the beginning, if you don't vaccinate the world, the virus will

continue to mutate and eventually you will have a strain that the vaccines can't work on. And look, and we should talk about when that happens because, you know, we are preparing for that scenario, too. But the best way to prepare for that scenario is to prevent that scenario. And the best way to prevent that scenario is to vaccinate the globe. So the first question is, if you have, you know, should we be vaccinating the first world countries again before we vaccinate the developing world? And then the second question is at an individual level, if I'm either 65 or 55 or I'm a 45-year-old hyperchondriac. 42, but yes, yes, yes, not talking about anyone I know. How about 38?

Yes, exactly. 35, yes, that's right. Let's go with 42, 55. But, you know, to be, it's not clear where the cutoff is, but it is clear that at some age level, the vaccines run off faster on you. And it is some part time, six months, et cetera. but at some part, you know, age and the quality of your immune system. And so in Israel, they've just allowed for people who are 50 and older to get a third boost. And my sense is

that there were probably going to do it in steps here, where we just did immunocompromise, we're undoubtedly going to do the elderly people next, you know, perhaps and we'll see how far that drops down. The hypochondriacs, they'll go get their boosts anyway. We should probably wait until the fall. I would say so. I mean, I'm giving you a population-based answer, but I will also tell you this. I'll relay a conversation I had with Rochelle Walenski yesterday.

She has had of the CDC. She has told her parents, who I believe are in their 80s, because she's about my age or a couple years younger. She's told her parents that they do not yet need a boost. Interesting. How come? Because she, look, she says I wouldn't dine indoors. I'd wear masks.

But, you know, the data shows you don't yet need a boost. So she's not just, she's walking her talk, right? Because you know, you can imagine a situation where you'd go, okay, but what are you doing? And she is not concerned about her parents enough to tell them they get a boost. Yeah, I'll say. That's interesting. So talk to me about what you're seeing with COVID now. Give advice to our listeners here on how to be COVID safe with Delta because I think people have had a hard time,

even though, you know, what, I mean, the virus. has mutated, and so we have to behave differently than we did a few months ago. Just like before that, we had to behave differently than we did a few months ago. So what would your advice be to people who want to stay safe and don't want to get Delta, even though they're vaccinated and probably they'll be fine if they get it? I'll keep it very, very simple, okay? If it's raining out and you want to go outside, you don't want to get wet, the first thing you do is you grab an umbrella, and that's the vaccine. And if it's raining kind of mildly or modestly, or you can stay dry most of the time.

Maybe you get tiny, tiny bit wet, but nothing too bad, nothing too often. That's the umbrella. That's the job the vaccine does. Now, when it starts to rain harder or the wind starts to blow, so you get that kind of nasty slanty rain, you say, you know what, if I really want to stay dry, I'm also going to put on a rain jacket. That's a mask, right?

So people say, well, why do I need a mask if I already have an umbrella? Well, the reality is that when the rain is really bad, even with just an umbrella, you're going to get wet some of the time. And that's kind of what's happening with Delta with people who've taken the vaccine and they're fighting themselves getting modest infections. Now, they're not getting soaked because they have the umbrella. So then I go to the hospital and they're not dying often, unless they're very old or they're sick. But I think my advice to people is, look, it's stormy out. Delta is stormy. As with all storms, it'll pass. And there will be new storms down the road, but put that out of your head for now. And when the

rain slows down, meaning you look around your community and go, oh, the community transmission is really low again. And I got my umbrella. And I'm not worried about getting wet because there's only a few drops of rain. And that's how I think people need to think about this. Pay attention to the weather. And right now the weather is bad. And so protect yourself against getting wet if you don't want to be wet, which I think is the case of most everybody. Do you think that there's anything that we can do to talk to the people. I mean, it strikes me that like a good third of this country has been really brainwashed by Facebook memes and Fox News and Alex Barenson and all the people out there who are like using weird vaxor self-reported data that isn't quite right or manipulating it in a

certain way. I mean, can we get those people back to earth? Can we get them to get vaccinated? Or do we just give up on them? I mean, what can we, what do we do with that situation? Because that's a real problem. It is a problem, but under normal circumstances, it's their problem, not our problem, so we don't much care, right? But it's a infectious disease. So here's how I think about it. I think there's three groups of people, right? There's people who have been vaccinated and they who basically decided I want to protect myself, my family, my community, the country I want this pandemic to be over. That's group one. Group two, a bunch of people who, for whatever reason,

have decided not to get vaccinated. Maybe it's a personal reason. Maybe it's a good reason. Maybe it's a bad reason. Maybe they fell prey to misinformation. We know that two-thirds of people who aren't vaccinated believe something untrue about the facts. Yeah, so it's a lot.

Yeah, exactly. So, but then there's the third group of people. And the third group of people are people who are, for whatever reason, unable to get protected from the vaccine. They are people who are under 12. They are people who are immunocompromised. And those are people who we have to think about two. They don't really have a choice in the matter.

What they depend on is all the rest of us being vaccinated and keeping the spread lower. So if you're making a decision as a business owner, as a mayor, as a school district, as a governor, and saying, how do I decide how aggressively to require people to be vaccinated, it all comes down to do I value that third group of people enough to, say that while I respect your rights, the second group, I don't respect them enough that they should transport the costs onto this third group of people. And what that means is if you want to get into this ball game and watch this game live, if you want to get into this concert, if you want to attend this university, if you want to show up at work, show me you're vaccinated,

or continue to show me that you got a negative test result on a regular basis. But otherwise, you don't need to come in here because you have a choice. And there's a bunch of other people don't have a choice. Are you heartened by the Supreme Court decision that says that colleges can have mandatory vaccines? Well, I'm heartened that they would. This is the case that Barrett wouldn't hear. Yes. Yes. I mean, it's complicated to be heartened by, you know, the handmaid's tale justice, but I thought that was a good decision. Look, I mean, there are absolutely times when judges are going to be political, but boy, you know, it would be nice to think that there are a number of things where the justices are just going to look at the law and also look at common sense and say,

I'm going to not make a political decision. I'm encouraged, of course, that they didn't take the case. I don't know how to interpret that. I don't know whether that means that they just don't want to be taking these cases or that she believes that this is not even controversial enough to be heard. If it had gone the other way, I think it would have been a tragic sign. But we have to do. But we have to And I look, I just got off of a call before doing this recording with Ben of O'Rourke and Judge Jenkins and people down in Texas where, you know, there are school districts and mayors and others who, businesses who basically have to defy state law in order to protect people. And so we are raring for a very uncertain legal outcome in those situations. Is there anything that the Biden government can do to help these people in Texas? You know, look, I happen to think everything should be on the table.

I think everything is on the table. I mean, I think there are limits to what you can do, both there's limits in law, but there's also a limit as to what actually works. I mean, so let's say you had the legal authority to mandate everybody in America to get vaccinated. Yes, let's do that. You don't have that authority, but let's say you did. Damn it. Go on. But even if you did, Molly, through what force of law, right, is that going to get implemented?

And so, you know, you can't do things that are going to be in effect. unless they're prepared to throw people in jail or give them fines, which people wouldn't pay. So there are limits to that ability. And that's where I think it's not so much the Biden administration, as much as it is, businesses, colleges, universities, venues, all the places where people like to go. And remember that it's not just anti-vackers and people falling prey to nonsense that we have to talk to here. It's people who are under 25 and who just don't care very much. They're just nonplussed by COVID. They're nonplussed by the vaccine.

They have other other shots. They don't really care. But only 37% of people under 25, between 18 to 25 are vaccinated. If you're over 25, 70% likelihood that you're vaccinated. We've got to also speak to the indifference, not just the resistance. And I think the way to get to the indifference to say, great, you want to go to this club, bar, restaurant, school, job, just get vaccinated. And I think many of those people, I think as many as 25 billion people on surveys,

say they'll get vaccinated if that's a requirement. It's fascinating and I'm so glad to have you on and thank you so much and I hope you'll come back when we can discuss what post-COVID life looks like. Probably not. Hopefully you'll come back way before then, but. It'll be called the new abnormal. Yes, exactly. Thank you, Andy. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science.

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