The Daily Beast Podcast - Jared Kushner Really Did Make the Pandemic Worse

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

Washington Post reporters Yasmine Abutaleb and Damien Paletta join to discuss all the juicy and terrifying details from their book, Nightmare Scenario, which recounts how the Trump administration responded during COVID. Plus! Dr. Peter Hotez goes over the effectiveness of the vaccines against the variants and Reason’s Editor at Large Nick Gillespie tries to explain why Trump is the right’s God and Biden is the enemy of drug lovers, including himself. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up day down. On The New Abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kenan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

Today we have a super interesting show with Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist who combats anti-science, and he's going to update us on where we're at with vaccinations and the Delta variant. Then Yasmin Abutu-Leb and Damien Poleta are going to talk to us about their new book, Nightmare Scenario Scenario that chronicles the pandemic response. But first, we have editor-at-large of Reason, as well as the host of The Reason interview, Nick Gillespie. Welcome to the new abnormal Nick Gillespie. Thanks for having me, Molly.

I'm glad that you're acknowledging that you know me in public now. I felt like we were on the down lower or something. I don't know why. I've been a finalist for National Magazine Awards twice, Molly John fast. Nick and I are very good friends, but politically we disagree about something, like everything.

No, that's not true. We agree about free speech, don't we? Or maybe not. And a wealth tax. I think that wealth over whatever I'm making in a given year should be expropriated 100%. I know you're with me on that. Can we talk about John McAfee, the sort of patron saint of libertarianism is gone? I think he's the patron saint of antivirus software.

But that is also just to talk about that for a second. There was a moment in the 80s, or, you know, and actually in the 90s, as email became, you know, what was called the killer app in digital, you know, cyberculture, cyberspace terms. And people were like, what are we going to do about spam email? And McAfee helped to come up with a non-state, non-governmental solution, which is like, we're going to make sure you don't get virus and we're going to block spam in various ways. So in that way, he made the world a fundamentally better place, despite his, you know, kind of bizarre and eclectic

personal life, which also, you know, he was never, I don't think he was guilty of murder, which is the big charge against him. Well, there are two different murders. Alleged. Alleged murders, right? I like to think of John McAfee and this, you know, he is

the type of American original that I hope we have not stopped making. I mean, he was a bizarre, wonderful person who lived his life in full view and, you know, He did drugs. He did guns.

He created a great company, which he sold pretty quickly. He went through his money. He was an ideologue. In the 2016, I guess it was, he ran for the, or 2012, he ran briefly for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. And in a debate that was televised on John Stossel's Fox Business show, he was talking about we need to talk about love. I mean, he was like Martin Luther King, you know, in the early 60s.

I think that's a stretch. He was facing extradition for tax evasion. Yeah. And I, you know, just for the record, I think he committed suicide, just like I think Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. You know, the only thing that links McAfee and Epstein is suicide in a jail cell, because Epstein was a child molester. He was a rapist.

He's a creep. McAfee might have been kind of a creep, but he, you know, he was in favor of legalized prostitution. He was in favor of legalized drugs. He didn't coerce people. And again, I believe that he was not guilty of murders. There was a 2019 finding against him in a civil case

for the Belize thing. So there is that to consider. But McAfee... Yeah, no, and it's not to make light of that. He did not pay his taxes. Is not paying your taxes a libertarian? Oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah. Is it a libertarian virtue?

Yes. I don't think so. So, I mean, a lot of people in the Libertary movement, and I think this is a failing of the movement, that they are, they toggle back and forth between anarchism, limited government. Libertarianism, as far as I see it, is really, it is, you know, it's on the far end of the American experiment in liberal governance, and which means that we have a limited government. Government is not expected, nor is it allowed to control all aspects of our lives. but rather only fundamentally those things that have to be solved through politics, you know, where 50% plus one vote get to tell the other ones how to live. We want to minimize that as

much as possible. To me, that's what libertarianism about. So it's just, it's a limited government. It's a government that incentive spending $6 or $8 trillion a year might be spending $2 trillion on things that are actual public goods. To that end, I have actually argued in the past, we should have higher taxes because part of the problem with America now, and this is certainly true under Joe Biden. It was really true under Donald Trump, under Barack Obama, and especially George W. Bush, we are borrowing, you know, upwards of 50 cents on the dollar that the government spends. And as a result, it's like government by Groupon, you know, where you, you know, you give me $5 and I'll give you $10 in government services. If we were paying full freight

on what we're getting from the government, you know, this is basic economics. If the price went up, you know, people would demand less of it. And in a way, I think we should, you know, we should be paying higher tax. Wait, what? Because like right now, you know, over the past year, about 50 cents out of every dollar was borrowed, you know, that the government spent. So like, imagine if you actually had to pay, you know, taxes are not the price we pay for civilization, as some idiot Supreme Court justices a century ago would say taxes are the costs we pay for government services. And if we actually had to pay what the government was spending, I think we would want less government. What's interesting to me is as modern monetary theory is getting more popular, and there's

a sense in which why do we ever have to cap spending at all if money is really just a social contract. Right. And I mean, you are already. You don't believe that, right? I mean, that's a good after-the-fact justification for, oh, my God, you know, that's like coming home after a weekend in Vegas, and you've maxed out all of your credit cards and your husband is like, what the fuck? And then you're like, oh, you know, it's, you know, here's a theory

to explain why we don't really have to pay that off, you know? And those strippers, those strippers were eunuchs. I mean, they weren't really, you know, Chippendale's. You do have to see that, that the world is moving in it, or at least the American government is moving a different direction to libertarianism. Oh, I mean, well, it's, it is, no, well, two things. One is in terms of government spending and taxes and debt, we are definitely running screaming from the idea that was popular. Even, you know, Bill Clinton ran on this, a lot of Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, when the Democrats took over the House in 2006, she said, we are the party of fiscal responsibility, and we are going to balance the budgets, we're going to reduce the debt. That Nancy Pelosi,

that was, you know, kind of stripped clear and thrown in the garbage can a couple of, you know, a couple of years ago, nobody, and certainly not Republicans, they don't even talk about actually paying for the size scope and spending of government now. So you're right in that sense. That to me is the least interesting part of libertarianism, because for me, what libertarianism is about is simply, you know, politically there's that limited government thing where government should be doing fewer things, we should pay for it fully, and they should be good and effective at what they do. You know, that's the political application of it. But more broadly, it's a kind of, life philosophy where we should be celebrating individualism and the voluntary kind of businesses,

communities, cultural associations that people do. And let's let's let everybody be as kind of freaky and as weird as they want. And as long as you are not the bad John McAfee, you know, where you're threatening your neighbors with guns, like let's have it all out, you know, and let's run a million experiments in living. And, you know, and we'll all be better off. It'll be more fun. It'll be more fair, it'll be more innovative. That to me is the core of libertarianism. And I guess back to your main point, maybe we are also running from that in America right now. Oh, interesting. What do you mean by that? What I mean is that we're like, you know, and I realize I am older than the two of you put together, but we live in, oh, yeah, no, but we live in the old bewitchers, which we're on in the, you know, after, rainy afternoons of my youth in the 70s.

Yeah, we know. We've seen it. So there. So there. was, well, there was the, you know, the next door neighbor. Oh, well, Tabith is just super hot, as was, you know, bewitched herself. But, no, the next door neighbor was Gladys Cravitz, who was always like, you know, she was like Dr. Bellows on A Dream of Jeannie where, like, they're always going to, you know, something fishy is going on and they're going to be able to catch, you know, the witch and finally out her. We are a nation of Gladys Cravitz's now, both on the right and the left. All we, we are consumed with what other people are doing. You know, it's like H.L. Mankin's stuff. of Puritanism, the idea that somebody somewhere is having a good time. Like, we want to

police and regulate and restrict what other people are doing. What a boring, dull country we will become, if that's the case. As someone who grew up with a mother who was constantly railing against a puritanical nature of American culture and how Americans were boring and Europeans were much, you know, more European, I don't know that I agree. I actually think that the sort of reaction towards canculture is worse than the actual cancelling. I guess that depends on if you're the cancelee or not, right? But I mean, and for me, this is, you know, when you think of something like George Carlin in the early 70s, you know, talking about the seven words you can never say on TV, it's like

the words are different now, but there's probably 21 words that you're, you know, people will piss on you for talking about or saying. And again, I'm not, this isn't for anything in particular. I agree with you, Molly, that like Ted Cruz, you know, who's railing against cancel culture is not some apostle of free speech or free thought or free living. This is why I think it's important. He does love the rats. Oh, yeah. But, you know, what we need to do is to, you know, the political part of our lives, which have to be governed, you know, by laws and by the majority with, you know, carveouts for minority rights that are really important to live however you want unless you're actively hurting other people. We were focused so much now on politics, the politicization of everything.

And this is, you know, it's a long-term project, but it's especially gotten bad over the past, say, 20 years. That's the problem. Because then it gets harder and harder just to have kind of freewheeling conversations and creating new businesses and creating new communities. So here's my theory, and I think that I'm curious to know what you think of this. Is it possible that part of what's happened is that, politics has taken over religion. And so politics is no longer politics, right? The reason that people are obsessed with Trump and that he's just, he's, you know, he's often called a cult leader is because they have no religion. And so all they have is Trump or all they have is, you know,

this sort of culture wars. What do you think about that? That is a really plausible hypothesis for a lot of what's going on. One of the things, so I was born in 1963. My parents were the children. of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, and they grew up poor. I mean, they were born in the 1920s in New York and Waterbury, Connecticut. And ultimately, like, the one thing they had was their religion. Like, they would be proud of being Catholic at a time when that was not particularly, you know, a big thing. But it was like the only source of cultural pride they had. And I can remember watching Gone with the Wind with them.

It was on TV, I guess, in the 70s. And their take away from Gone with the Wind, if you can imagine this, was there's a scene where a priest comes to Tara and says mass for the O'Hara family. And they're like, look at that. You know, she's a Catholic. And it's like, what the fuck? Like, is that what this book is really about? But to get to the point. So I was raised Catholic, you know, culturally Catholic, theologically Catholic, one of the biggest changes in American society over the past 50 years, which goes widely unremarked on is that we are a fully secular country now. Even the religious right is much smaller, etc. And I think you're right. On the right, it takes on the form of kind of like, and can you imagine

Trump being your God? You know, like, it's like terrifying. But on the left, I think you see this moving into things like environmentalism, where, you know, let's say there's a fixed amount of religious intentionality in human life. If religion isn't providing that, people are going to start projecting it into other areas. And I do think you're right that that's part of what's wrong with politics now is that it is a face and it is a fundamental, you know, identity form, you know, thing. And that's, that's just not good in a liberal, you know, in a truly liberal society, where it's like, okay, there is a political realm and it's really important and we can't scant, you know, I mean, up through the mid-60s, you know, I mean, whole swaths of Americans,

particularly blacks, were just not allowed to fully participate in politics and hence life. But If we politicize everything, man, it's just, it's a horrible country. If, you know, the twin stars are Robin DiAngelo, you know, of white fragility on the one hand and tent crews on the other. That's like Canada is starting to look better all the time. Except that, except that is politics worse than religion? Like, I think I'd rather live in a country where people are identified by political beliefs. Can I say something that maybe would be seen as anti-Semitic? It's because you come from a religion. religious background, a cultural background, where religion doesn't offer salvation. If you know, this is, if you're Catholic, if you're Protestant, and Catholics and Protestants, you know, used to hate each other. There's something wrong when, like, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants are all on the same side, and they're, you know, railing against secularism or something. But, you know,

religion at least has the possibility of salvation in a way that I think politics is really that Orwell kind of image of the boot on your neck, you know, stomping forever and ever. Well, we're talking about the boot of government on the deck. Molly and I were both very curious to see your view of what the Biden administration, how you think it's been doing as a libertarian? First, let me say as like a just a reader of polls and things like that. So Joe Biden has a 53% approval rating kind of in the aggregate now, according to like Real Clear Politics and 538 and stuff like that.

And I was looking at that up and it's better than any recent president except for Obama. And then you have to go back to Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, and George H.W. Bush for people who are higher than him this time. And of course, you know, it's amazing that, like, you know, so Biden is very popular relative to other presidents and certainly somebody like Trump. As a libertarian, I do not like Joe, I didn't like Joe Biden in the, you know, in the campaign for presidents. I didn't like him in the 500 years. You know, it's like when Columbus, when Columbus discovered America, it was like Joe Biden was like, hey, how you doing? You know, he was already lifeguarding at that pool with corn pop in Delaware when Columbus showed up.

But what I don't like about Biden, you know, and this goes back to like, you know, but so I didn't like Biden. You know, his political career is that of a kind of centrist Democrat who absolutely was devoted to maximizing the police state. He's always been anti-drug. And like, you know, I do a lot of drugs. I don't drink anymore, but I do other drugs. And the reason I do that is not because I just want to get fucked up, but I'm in favor of drug legalization because I think, you know, we have a right to control our own minds. And it's clear Joe Biden is fundamentally against that. And he remains this way.

Donald Trump was better on the drug war than Joe Biden is. What's your example of that? I'm curious. In 2016, Donald Trump said, I will sign any piece of legislation that comes across my desk, putting the decision to make marijuana legal back to the states. Hillary Clinton wouldn't say that. Bernie Sanders said that. But he didn't do it. No, but that's because Congress didn't deliver anything.

But is it this a case of Trump always paying lip service to something that his actions were totally different? He had Jefferson Beauregard sessions prosecuting marijuana super aggressively. Yeah, yeah. And all I'm saying is that Biden is, you know, Biden is no good guy on the drug war. And one of the things, let's not make the mistake of constantly saying, saying, okay, well, like, he's not as bad as Trump on this, or Trump was also bad. Like, don't, I don't believe in what aboutism in general, but like in this case, it's like, Joe Biden is one of the architects of the prison industrial state.

He is a drug prohibitionist. He still waffles on whether or not, you know, medical marijuana should be legal in states that have made it legal. He's awful on that. What bothers me, and this is a long-term trend in American politics, and is that, you know, everything now has to be a universal benefit. Yeah. Right. You know, and that ultimately there's an arbitrage going on here where it's like upper

middle class people like myself are suddenly, oh, you know, well, we need a universal basic income. We need a child care credit. We need this. We need that. And it's like you can't pay for all of that stuff. And people like, I'm doing really well. I work hard and I've got a good career and I've been lucky and I've been ambitious, all of that. Don't pay for my kids college. I'm responsible for that. Don't pay for my health care. I'm responsible for that. Don't pay for my retirement. I'm responsible for that. And if the government was focused on helping a fewer, like a narrower band of people who really need help, they would be able to do a better job and a more effective job. And Biden, I guess in a supra, you know, kind of indictment, he is the

harbinger of saying, no, you know what, the government is going to provide everything for everybody at every level. And it's like, we know how this plays out. It's like upper middle class people, people who are politically connected, who have a lot of cultural and economic capital will win in that system. And it's, it just, that bugs me as much as anything about Joe Biden. I actually very much agree with you about that, like, the left and where I stand politically most of the time, the biggest thing with UBI that we don't like is that it's almost a conceit to the right that it's like, well, the right will never give in to anything except for allowing everybody to have a benefit so UBI is the only compromise

and a lot of people don't like that and it does seem like with when Trump distributed the PPP the way it was done is it was all yeah and it was any of his friends right and the my pillow guy yeah as someone very far at the left I would like to see government function well and not get and give benefits in a proper fashion and not just give them to the government's friends yeah I agree and you know that's not going to happen It didn't happen under Trump and it won't happen under Biden where, you know, when you start to look at, you know, whether it's infrastructure or tax rebates and stuff like that and, you know, payroll protection, it always goes to politically connected people. And I think if we're doing less of it, we can track it more carefully. And also, we can build a consensus to say, you know what, like, I mean, like, for fuck's sake, like, if you're, you know, at or near the poverty level, you have a greater claim on society's resources via taxation.

and then if you're in the top income quintile. I think that's for sure true. So nice, we can all agree on something. Hey, folks, if you haven't heard every single week, we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media,

like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner. And sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast inside member where you'll support the Beast fearless journalism

as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to New Abnormal. Dot the Daily Beast.com. That's New Abnormal.com. Dr. Peter Hotes is a vaccine scientist and pediatrician who combats anti-science as well as the author of Vaccines didn't cause Rachel's autism. Welcome back to the New Abnorma.

I'm all, Dr. Peter Hottes. It's great to be back and speaking with you again, Molly. One of my penances for having a successful podcast is that Jesse makes me watch Bill Marr every week. And on Bill Maher, they were talking about this idea that pandemics, like with the 1918 flu pandemic, they actually come back and forth. So that there are these sort of waves of pandemic. And I got worried with all the news of the Delta.

And you and I were talking a little bit. Talk to me where we are. Well, I don't know that we'll necessarily see, you know, become a regular occurrence like as frequent as in seasonal influenza. But we have to recognize that this is our third major coronavirus epidemics slash pandemic in the last 20 years. So it is a new, unfortunately abnormal that we're going to have pretty regular epidemics. I can't tell you whether it's every decade or more frequently than that. So we do need to build an infrastructure. Sure.

Theoretically, though, if you have a coronavirus vaccine that covers all the coronaviruses, then won't you not, won't, and if you get enough people vaccinated for it, won't coronavirus go the way of smallpox? Potentially, it could. Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of the reasons why this is such an important thing to do. And I think, you know, there's, I have some optimism that it's doable also looking at the sequences.

I think, you know, the other thing about the. the delta variant, everyone gets kind of spooked by all the different variants and says, oh my God, are we going to be chasing our tail now forever? And my answer is, I don't think so, although I'm not sure if that's helpful. And by that, and the reason I say that is because when you look at all of the variants, it's not like they're mutating willy-nilly all over the place. There seems to be some convergence around certain amino acid substitutions in the 501 position, the 484 position, the 417 position, the 452 position. And that says to me that this will not evolve into just anything at random.

And maybe that our current vaccines might be insufficient if we get high enough levels of virus-neutralizing antibody to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic. I don't want to be so overly optimistic, but I tend to be on the optimistic side. So what I read today in the Times supports what you're saying, right? I just read this. I'm sure you've read this too. No, I didn't see it this morning. Okay, so the results suggest a vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term from the M RNA vaccines.

Yeah, and I think that has, and it's not just the M RNA, it's a matter. What I've seen is, and it's not purely this, but it seems that if you really rev up your levels of virus-neutralizing antibody and you need other things like T-cells and B-cell memory, but if you get really high levels of virus neutralizing antibody, that seems to make you more resilient to the variance. And that seems to be looking like our vaccine as well. So as long as you're fully vaccinated, you'll probably be in good shape. There's some discussion about whether we'll need a third immunization as a booster, just to rev your virus neutralizing antibodies even more. And I've been on Zoom calls as of other of my colleagues and kind of going back and

forth about the need for that. So sometime, I think, later this summer, the CDC and FDA may make some recommendations about that. I mean, you definitely are going to need it for the J&J. That seems likely, right? I think so. We haven't seen any data from J&J on the single dose immunization against the Delta variant. And I have to tell you, that's probably the most common question I'm asked right now. And the answer then becomes, well, if that's the case, if it has modest levels of protection. And we don't know that yet. What do you do? Do you give a second dose of the J&J? When you looked at the original phase one, phase two trials of the J&J, it looked really good as a two-dose vaccine. I actually was surprised when they put it out as a single-dose vaccine. I always thought

it should be a two-dose vaccine. And we'll see if that happens. The other is whether you would then just, or you re-vaccinate with the mRNA vaccines if it's necessary to. do that, hopefully. Because it's different kind of vaccine. Right. And the problem is we don't have a lot of data mixing and matching doses. So what happens if you give a dose of J&J and then a dose of the MRNA? We don't have that data in hand. So what do you do? Do you then just say, okay, well, just re-vaccinate entirely and given both doses? I mean, I think all of these things are in discussion right now. And hopefully soon, because a lot of people are quite worried about the Delta variant right now. And it's, and it's accelerating. right? It went from 10% of the virus variants to now 20%. And we're now in Missouri, it's 29% getting up to a third of the

variance. And you're seeing the virus take off now. In the red states. In the Ozark states, as I call it. I'm working on an article about this. It's southern Missouri, Arkansas, even parts of Oklahoma, even East Texas. That's where if the virus is coming back, that looks like where it's coming back first. And that's because it's got lower vaccination rates? It's the perfect storm of two things, I think, or two or three things. One, that's where you're seeing the Delta variant at the highest percentage, number one, number two. Vaccination rates are ridiculously low in the south, including those states, Arkansas, six from the bottom, for instance, and, you know, this defiance around masks and social distancing. So I think that's where you're, that's where you could start to see outbreaks this summer,

or even a surge this summer. And again, I know you don't have all the data on this, but do you feel like vaccinated people are still protected from the Delta? Clearly, I think if you're fully vaccinated from with either the two MRNA vaccines of Pfizer-Biontech or Moderna, I think you'll do fine. And I'm going on that premise and I'm fully vaccinated and more or less doing my activities very much resemble pre-pandemic life right now. Yeah.

Do you think that, I mean, there was some sort of. scary. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last week that was saying, you know, the majority of people who are dying of COVID now in America are unvaccinated. Yeah, that's, that looks like the case. And I think Dr. Wollenski from CDC made that statement as well. So that is the case. And the number of people who are dying, who are vaccinated is infinitesimally small. And I think I would love you just to sort of walk us through that for a minute because I think people are having a little trouble with the math here. And I would love you just to explain. it's like one one hundredth, right?

That's right. I mean, it's very rare, very, very rare for anyone who's been fully vaccinated right now to lose their lives from COVID-19. All, just about all of the deaths are among unvaccinated individuals. And the message is now is the time to get vaccinated because this delta variant is so transmissible that it's pretty much going to infect anyone who's not vaccinated or who's not been infected. and recovered. And even if you're infected and recovered, the antibody protection is not as robust as being vaccinated. So get vaccinated even if you've been infected and recovered. Now, the irony,

of course, Rand Paul, everyone's favorite Senate doctor, wah, wah, wah, says that if you've had the virus, it's the same as being vaccinated. He is obviously, as always wrong. Can you just? Yeah, he's wrong. And there's a very interesting study that a colleague of mine, Michelle Nusson Swig, who's this brilliant immunologist at Rockefeller University. And what his group has shown, if you're infected and recovered and then get vaccinated, they may be the most resilient of all because there seems to be this broad neutralizing ability against lots of different variants. So those are the groups you especially want to get vaccinated as those who are infected

and have recovered. And don't listen to people who don't understand things coming out of the U.S. Congress. It's amazing. I have to say that, right? I mean. You've got that senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, who is doing a hearing today on people having adverse effects to vaccines. Yeah, this is one of the most self-defeating things I've ever seen in my, you know, I got my MD PhD in the 1980s. And over the last 40 years, I think the most self-defeating thing I've ever seen is the political right, you know, and this far right extremism, adopt anti-science, anti-vaccine views.

I've never seen anything quite like it. And you know what? And it's not fun for someone like me to talk about, right? Because scientists, you know, we're not supposed to talk about Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, and liberals. We're supposed to be above all that. But I don't know how else to talk about it other than to talk about it. But that is the reality that this abrupt rise in anti-science and aggression against scientists

is coming out of defined groups. And I think to save lives, that's been one of the hardest things I've ever had to do is call it out. So the Wright has been very invested in this idea of a lab leak, which we are now seeing more and more evidence that it's not a lab leak. And we had the scientist who, the one English-speaking scientist from the Wuhan Institute came out and said she doesn't think it's a lab leak and that it's from the wet markets. But can we just unpack this for a second? why is the idea of a lab leak so much more damning to China than the idea of the wet markets? It seems to me that China has a problem with the wet markets and they need to close them and that both are bad. Well, you know, the problem was what's happening is people are confusing deliberate gain of function with lab leaks.

It's quite clear, you know, as I said, you know, the fact that we were working on coronavirus vaccines before COVID-19, the reason was. is because we knew there was probably going to be another major coronavirus emerge out of China, right? It's not like we didn't know this was coming. It's this perfect mix of bats and other live animal reservoir hosts, and we knew this was coming. And so, and that's why I started working on coronavirus vaccines, and we learned how to show that the spike protein was the soft underbelly of the virus, how you deliver the spike protein, how you induce virus neutralizing antibodies. All of that fed into the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Development Program. why we could move so quickly on our vaccine as well. So we knew this was likely to happen,

and it did, and it happened right on Q. That's point one. So there's no reason to invoke things like gain of function and all this other nonsense. In fact, there's no evidence for it at all. So that's point one. Second, I don't know why you have to postulate a lab leak because we, just for the same reasons. It's not impossible, but I've seen no evidence for that as well. I've said is what we really need to do is we need to conduct a scientific investigation in China to know in granular detail what's what happened with with in terms of bat ecology and second animal hosts and because this is the only way we're going to ever figure out how to stop future pandemics and this is why I get so upset you know when people go after the eco

health alliance I mean these these are the these are the groups we need in there helping us figure this out. And instead, what's happened is mostly coming out of the far right, although now I'm seeing it become, among other people as well, this obsession with gain of function and lab leaks and conspiracy theories. It's all, it's all crap. You know, this is, we know this is about to happen. And, you know, and again, it's part of this greater assault on science and scientists. And we have to put a stop to it. Yeah, I mean, this is, and it just strikes me as, like, completely irrelevant, right? There needs to be an investigation in how these pandemics start so we can stop them. Right. But the point is, you know, all you hear about is, well, we're going to, you know, even the Biden administration says we're going to, you know, put U.S.

intelligence on this. Well, heck, U.S. intelligence agencies have been all over this for the last, since the beginning, over the last year. You can put through all the intelligence you want at it. It's not going to figure this out. What we need is a scientific investigation with virologists and epidemiologists in central China, collecting virus samples from bats and other animals and blood and doing an outbreak investigation. We know how to do this. And likely, it's got to be jointly between international and U.S. and Chinese scientists. that's only logical now.

Then people say, well, if that's all true, Dr. Hottes, why are the Chinese being so non-transparent and why are they, you know, blocking this? And the answer is, who knows? I mean, this is what they do. It's what they did in Tiananmen Square. It's what they did in so, I mean, you know. Right. I mean, it's the culture.

I mean, I don't know if it's the culture. It's the culture of the government there. It's the communist government. Right. I mean, I've worked in China since the 1990s. on our parasitic disease vaccines, and the scientists are fantastic. It's been great scientific collaboration, but there is a very heavy hand of the Chinese government, no question about it.

Right. Here's a question for you. What, because it seems to me like the number one goal now has to be preventing pandemics, right? Like stopping them before they start. Like this whole thing, if the WHO had been more on it and hadn't gotten so sort of steamrollered by China, I mean, I definitely think there's culpability there. And again, I know that they're not a well-funded, you know, that this is an organization that doesn't have the kind of funding that the CDC does. And there clearly is that we could have stopped this pandemic way before it went everywhere.

So don't you think that America needs to set up a sort of Department of Public Health and viruses that is focused on this? Well, I think first of all right now, the priority is, you know, trying to limit that damage from the variance and what we're doing. not doing. I'm not ignoring your question. I'm going to get back to it. But first, I want to make this point that the number one priority is vaccinating the world against the variance. And that's what's not happening. For all practical purposes, the African continent's not vaccinated, Latin America, barely southeast Asia is barely weak. And the problem is what the Biden administration is not done is take ownership in helping to fix this. What they've done are kind of one-off things, which the optics look good, but are really not very.

impactful, like donating 500 million doses over a two-year period. It's not, you know, that's not what we need. I mean, yeah, that's a drop of the bucket. I mean, what we need is, you know, when you do the math, there's a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, there's 650 million people in Latin America, half a billion people in the smaller low-income countries of Asia. You know, that's two, three billion people. We need six billion doses of vaccines and now, and that's when we need it, not two years from now. And the problem is the newer technologies are new technologies, and it's hard to scale them rapidly. So we need the Biden administration to do the following. They need to support the production of some old school recombin protein vaccines like ours and make a few billion

doses to vaccinate the world now. And unfortunately, I've not been able to make that case to them. So that's what needs to be, that's what needs to be done. Now in terms of the failures, remember, you know, you have to remember how quickly this virus spread globally. Now, you remember all this talk about the travel bans from China and all this kind of stuff early on in the pandemic in the U.S. And, you know, by the time people thought about the travel bans from China, this virus had already entered into New York from southern Europe. And nothing to do with China at that point. This was already a global thing. And, I mean, it clearly went into Southern Europe very quickly following China.

I don't know. I mean, even if the WHO had been more proactive with China, remember, China didn't alert the world to this until December 31st. That's when I found out, that's when it became, it was on, you know, on New Year's Eve. And by then, that virus was probably already in southern Europe. And certainly in America. And everywhere else. So I don't know, I know, who knows how much more the WHO could have really done at that point. Thank you so much, Dr. Hottes. I hope you'll come back soon. Oh, thanks so much for having me. Yasmine Abutuleb is a health policy reporter at the Washington Post, and Damien Poletta is the economics editor at the Washington Post, and they're both the author of Nightmare Scenario. I'm so excited to have you guys here today to talk about nightmare scenario, which is, by the way, probably the most aptly titled book ever.

Thank you. Thank you. How did you guys get to this? I mean, it obviously needed to happen. and but I'm just curious how you guys decided to do it. So I was approached by an agent last year when our coverage of the pandemic was really picking up and we were trying to do these kind of TikToks every weekend, documenting the chaos of the week before.

Actual TikToks or pieces about it? Sorry, no, like reporting TikToks. Okay, I was going to say, it was like, wait, what? Where you try to document, you know, day by day as much as you can, minute by minute how events unfolded. I'm not, I'm not that tech savvy. I've never done a TikTok. We didn't really know at that point how this was going to take hold. It was March or April, so we weren't sure if by the summer things were going to quiet down and no one would really care about this a few months from now. But Damian and I partnered up together to do this book. And I think we both recognized that this was a really historic

moment we were living in already at that point, even though we were still in the first wave, not fully understanding how things were going to unfold. There were still a couple thousand people a day dying at that point. We knew this was going to be such an important part of U.S. history. And I have a health policy background. Damien has an economic policy background. So we felt like we could bring this unique vantage point to the story and hopefully tell the first kind of comprehensive account of how all these forces came together.

So what I read that I thought was interesting, it was an excerpt, I think, was about how much the sort of Pence world was culpable in all of this. And I was sort of surprised. Can you explain that? Yeah, I think that was something that we really found fascinating too. You know, obviously he was the head of the task force. And he played this weird role where Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci would go to Vice President Pence with requests or demands. And he would kind of play the intermediary where he would make them feel like they were listened to, but often their requests would sort of disappear after he left the meeting. And, you know, one of the most powerful moments in the book is actually in the final pages

when, you know, Dr. Berks had been kind of put out, cast off to an island in the second half of the year. Everyone was ignoring her inside the White House. And, you know, because the White House really wanted to focus on the election, they didn't want any bad news about the campaign. And finally, on November 9th, six days after the election and two days after the networks called the election for Trump, right? But before Trump obviously acknowledged that he lost, Berks confronts Pence in the situation room and says, you know, you have to finally go out and tell people to wear masks. We are at a tipping point right now. This is November 9th. And Pence is a little bit startled, but says, okay, sure, you know, I'll talk to the president. And Berks just

won't let it go. She's like, no, you have to do this. Those people do not listen to me. And when she said those people, she was referring to Trump's supporters and Pence's supporters. And her point was, you had let the country kind of get split in half. And now no one knows who to listen to, no one knows who to believe. And she was kind of aiming all her fire at Pence, kind of blaming him for allowing things to get this out of control. I mean, I think her point was, you know, everyone figured the president was going to be the president. And they knew what kind of caricature he was going to be of himself as the year went on. but she kind of really felt let down by Pence as things got really chaotic in the second half of the year.

Because she thought and she had believed that he and his team were going to try to do something to help. Right. And then they didn't. Exactly. Right. And they had all these opportunities to do something. And they always, you know, whether it was masks or something else, they always kind of got moved in the direction of not intervening. And time after time, you know, we saw the consequences of that. And you really see here that Pence's chief of staff, who has worked really hard to sort of cleanse himself of this Mark Short, is also really implicated here. I think you see that Pence and his team play a big role in the response. One of the things that the book documents is all the competing power centers and forces. So two of the competing power centers become Pence and his chief of staff, Mark Short.

and then the Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows. They're often not on the same page, and that's documented. But I think you see there are points where the decisions that Mark Short and others on Pence's team make are pretty consequential to the course of the outbreak. So this early initiative from HHS to send masks to every American household that had been manufactured by Jockey and Haynes and a number of underwear manufacturers, when they present this to the task force, Alex Azar, then the Health and Human Services Secretary models the masks, saying that they're going to produce 650 million of them, enough for every American to have about two. And he's ridiculed. Someone says it looks like you have underwear on your face. Someone else says it looks like a training bra. And Mark Short goes to the vice president and says, this isn't ready and gangs it off the agenda and made sure it didn't come back up. And when we talked to people, that was one of those moments where they thought how different would things have been if the White House had just signed off on this. and they had been the ones to send every American a mask. It really wouldn't have been this politically divisive thing.

So you see through the course of the book, there are different people who bear responsibility for certain decisions that did or did not get made. But that's an example of where Mark Short was very influential. And a lot of people do wonder how things could have been different if that initiative had gotten off the ground. One of the things I see is that a lot of people kind of think of Deborah Burke's as sort of the villain.

And Fauci as the hero. Did you're reporting bear that out? That's such a great question. We found Deborah Birx to be an incredibly complicated person. You know, people who have known her for 40 years don't quite get what makes her tick. And, you know, we spent so much time, Yasmin and I, as we were working on this book, trying to come down on one side or the other about her. And we just, I think what we tried to do for readers was just give them all the information we had

and let them come to their own conclusions. There were moments at the beginning where she did say things that could be interpreted as quite flattering to President Trump. That helped her get in, that helped her retain influence. And maybe that was the kind of deal with the devil that she decided she had to make.

And yes, it was Deborah Birx on a Saturday night in the White House with Tony Fauci, who convinced President Trump in late March to extend the 15-day to slow the spread thing for 30 days. You know, that might have saved a lot of lives. The fact that they got him, he was on the ropes, he was nervous because all his friends in New York were like seeing the hospitals get overrun. And she did have an enormous influence in that.

But then a few weeks later, the president decides, you know, he doesn't need her anymore. And he just starts kind of destroying her reputation, her character. And then all those things she said about the president start to look kind of silly. And, you know, her, it's really hard for her to kind of repair herself. And then, of course, Dr. Scott Atlas comes in behind her and just kind of like mows her down. So I think history is going to look at her in a much different way. Obviously, you know, Tony Fachi, there was bobbleheads and everyone, you know, lionized the guy. And, you know, he became this kind of media sensation, his willingness to challenge the president in public.

You know, he made some mistakes too, of course. You know, he was kind of slow to acknowledge what masks really did. I think the virus snuck up on him like it did a lot of. of other people initially. And our sense is that while Fauci and Berks did stay close throughout the whole thing, there was definitely some tension between the two of them, in part because Fauci was made into this superhero. And that's kind of where we came down to.

But she was a very, Berks is a very complicated character. Did Jared save many lives? There's a chapter in the book all about Jared's role in the response. And he comes in, in mid-March, this is right after Trump gives a speech, the Europe travel ban that of course gets bungled. So that's kind of Jared's introduction into the response. And then he forms a shadow task force. He decides that the White House task force led by Pence is not efficient, that he can do it better. So he forms his own team. And he, you know, I think in the way we saw Jared do many times throughout the course of the administration, kind of take on some of the

most vexing and challenging problems decides he's going to tackle testing and the supply chain, getting at 95 masks and gowns and gloves, all this personal protective equipment that was in short, that there were shortages of early in the response. And what we see is, you know, he comes in, he wants to launch this CBS, Walgreens, drive-through testing sites. I remember it. Yes. And what we found in reporting for the book that we were reporting everything we knew in real time. When we reported the book, we got to talk to a lot of people, especially after the election, who weren't willing to share before then. That when he came in and

wanted to launch that initiative, he actually caused a two-week shortage on testing because all the swabs and a lot of the personal protective equipment had been diverted to this drive-through site. So they had kind of talked with the private sector. The idea wasn't fully formed because even when it was announced, the private sector was like, we're not entirely sure what we're supposed to do. But they hadn't thought through all the, it's complicated to launch something like that. And they hadn't thought through the supply chain issues. So what happened was all the swabs got diverted to this initiative. And then health agencies are hearing from the testing manufacturers that they can't get swabs to run their tests. And an HHS official has to authorize a DOD plane to take off and go to Italy and ship back a bunch of swap so that they can try to resolve this as quickly as they can. Right. So basically, Jared made everything worse. Well, here's one of the big issues with Jared is that he was like kind of in charge until he wasn't. And that was one of the issues with the whole response is that, you know, Brooks is in charge for a few weeks, then Pence is in charge, and then Fauci's on TV and then Jared's

in the scene. And then he goes, you know, he's dealing all of the stuff in the Middle East. No one wanted to own, like this was such a mess that no one wanted to own it. And so there were times when Jared did get people to focus and he kind of like broke down some barriers and got, you know, some equipment faster than maybe they would have otherwise. Then he, like, disappeared. And, you know, and I think then the president's like, obviously can't stay focused and he's like storming Lafayette Square and trying to change his subject and all this stuff. And so no one, like, owns the response. I mean, you would never go to war without a general in charge of what's going on. And so here we go. The vice president writes this op-ed in June in the Wall Street Journal.

the will be no second wave of the virus. Yeah, that was amazing. Yeah, they've got like this closet with all this stuff stuffed in it, and you can't open the closet because there's all this bad news. And then, you know, all hell kind of breaks loose in the second half of June. There's the Tulsa rally. That's a disaster. And it kills what's his name, right?

Yeah, Herman Cain, exactly. And then the virus begins the second wave, and there's like no one in charge. You know, Birx has been, you know, kicked off. She's doing this road show, and Fauci's kind of throwing bombs from the sidelines. lines, you know, in the media. And so Jared kind of disappears. When he came in, all eyes were on him and he was kind of getting some things done. But when he disappeared, there was this huge vacuum and they never really recovered from that. Talk to me about how sick Trump was. So I think a number of people have seen our excerpt in the post now. But the biggest takeaway is that he was much sicker

than the White House acknowledged at the time. There were fear. When he got moved to Walter Reed, at the time they kind of framed it as a precautionary measure. But when we talked to sources who were familiar with his condition and his vitals, they said, do not take for granted the fact that he was sent to Walter Reed. He did not want to go. But his team basically told him, you can walk out there on your own right now.

And if you wait, you might need to be taken in a wheelchair or on a gurney. You might not be able to get out to the helicopter on your own, essentially. And that's how they convinced him to go. And his oxygen had dropped so much that they feared that they were going to have to move him to a ventilator. later. I think one of the most important things about the weekend Trump was sick was that he got access to this monoclonal antibody from regeneron, which at the time was not authorized for use.

And one of our sources said they are almost certain that was what was responsible for his rapid turnaround. So this drug that's not available to the public yet, and even when it was authorized, the administration didn't do a great job of making it known and making sure people had access to it. He had every drug that had any kind of proven efficacy against COVID given to him. So while some of them were authorized for use like Remdesivir, they were in short supply. The care he got almost no other person could have gotten that combination of drugs combined with that kind of health care. Except his friend. Right. Yeah. They tried to get it for Hope Hicks. And I think Chris Christie was also, they also got the drug for him. I mean, I think one of the things to take away, obviously all of us, there were

iconic moments during last year that I think we'll always remember like the man walking. on the moon. One of them, for me, is when Fauci threw out the opening day pitch, I think we're all kind of watching to see is can baseball restart, can we get back to life? And the other one was that almost death march the president made on the South Lawn to the helicopter. We didn't know if he would ever see him again. I mean, he's 74 years old, obese, and he couldn't breathe, right? And he had coronavirus. I mean, he was like, you know, the exact kind of person you would think who could get really hammered by this thing. He was deteriorating so fast. He acted so bizarre. at the debate a few days before.

And he did get this miracle drug, but then he was so jacked up on steroids that he thought he was invincible. And then he did the drive-by. Exactly. And put all those secret service agents at risk. Exactly. So in a way, his recovery made him, you know,

tripled down on his decision that, like, if I can beat this, I'm Superman, and we don't need to, like, make any changes in policy. It's interesting to me that he then, the message he takes from it that this was him and not the monocomals. Do you think that Trump really fully recovered if he was that sick? He seems fine now. I guess we don't know for sure. I think some of the more alarming moments of his return to the White House is, you know, we report that his doctors did not think he was ready to

be discharged from the hospital. And Robert Redfield, the CDC director, talked to Trump's doctor, Sean Conley, and said, he can't leave the hospital yet. What if he has a backslide? What if he has some kind of organ failure? Because Trump ticks off so many of the high-risk categories. And Conley agrees with Redfield and says, but I can't convince him to say anymore. He wants to go. So if it were his doctor's choices, he would have stayed in the hospital a little bit longer. And he was very likely still infectious when he returned to the White House.

And if you remember that moment where he rips his mask off on the balcony and then turns around and he passes a number of staffers. I mean, he's exposing all of those staffers to the virus. He had only been diagnosed five days before, so he was likely still in that infectious period. Also, his doctors lied about his condition. Yes, they did. Yes, absolutely. They made it sound like he was doing much better than he was, and then they gave this kind of weird explanation that they didn't want to give a downbeat response of how he was doing

because that would make him somehow deteriorate. It really didn't make sense. I would just say, though, that he did snap back quickly. He mounted the steps and took off his mask. But just imagine, and we might never know the answer to this question, how many Americans saw that and thought, oh, this virus is no big deal? You know, this is early October. And so they went out and did whatever they were going to do and didn't wear masks and, you know, kind of lived cavalierly. And then, remember, the virus was just in late October, it was just on the war path.

And, you know, picked up in November, December, and then January, we were having three or four thousand deaths a day. I mean, that just was such a turning point in the response. Yes, he recovered. Yes, it was kind of a miracle that he was able to get back on his two feet so quickly. But it really sent a message to a lot of people that this wasn't that big of a deal. And it was a big deal. Talk to me about the vaccine. A lot of Trump supporters want Trump to get credit for the vaccine.

Trump was, it seemed to me from the outside. And again, I don't have the kind of access you guys do to really know what's going on. but my sense was that they had gotten this vaccine, but they had no plan to roll it out. The interesting thing about the vaccine is Trump, of course, deserves credit. It happened under his administration, and he signed off on Operation Warp Speed and all the money that they threw into it. That was a bright spot in the response. Developing the vaccine was a huge success and exceeded everyone's expectations. But the other piece of that story is that Trump kind of undermined and some of his aides undermined success every step of the way by the public bullying of

the FDA, which was even worse in private, which we document, threatening Steve Hahn, then the FDA commissioner over his job over and over and over to the point that the FDA feels it has to put out even more information about the safety standards that's going to enforce to try to assure people they're not going to cut corners. And, you know, just just the constant promises that it would come before the election and then getting angry when the Pfizer vaccine results came after the election. All of that undermined trust in the vaccine for a while. You could see in the polls, the trust plummeted over a few months. And then, of course, the rollout was disastrous. There wasn't zero planned, but it wasn't thought through. And, you know, they had promised to vaccinate

20 million people by the end of December. I think they had gotten to about 4 million, which is no small feat, but it was the repeated theme was overpromising and under-delivering. Yes. What was the the thing that surprised you guys the most? I think the biggest takeaway for me, you know, we talked to more than 180 people as we tried to recreate what happened during this terrible year. Not a single person involved in the response defended the response. I mean, every single person we talked to inside the White House, inside the health agencies elsewhere in government, said it was a failure. Some people, you know, did own up that they made mistakes that they wish they could do over. A lot of people pointed the finger at someone else, you know,

blame someone else for making a mistake, but no one defended their actions. And I think, you know, in a moment like this when so much was at stake and the American people needed their government the most, the fact that it was such a failure or something that'll be really hard for people to understand. And I'll just add, there are a few of these crazy anecdotes that have come out, right? Like Trump wanting to send people to Guantanamo so that the case count didn't go up here. And those are in there. But I think the book, what we really wanted to do was provide the first truly comprehensive narrative of what happened because even though both Damien and I were covering this every day last year trying to piece things together, it was hard to because so much was happening

at once and it was so chaotic. And then when we had more access to people and could really understand what happened, I think we were pretty shocked by the level of failure here. And if you look at the whole narrative and how everything fits together, it's way more devastating than any single anecdote or outburst that people might take away from this. Thank you so much. You guys were amazing. I really hope you'll come back. Thank you much.

We'd love to. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from the Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer. Checking in on the movement of the radical right.

Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, Jesse Cannon. Poor Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly Jong Fast. I hear that it's pouring assholes today. I'm going to do both fuck that guys today. Because you're just filled with hostility.

And I got a few complaints about you people. It's Festivus here on the new abnormal. Who you got? So today I have two different people who have raised my ire. Number one is Mr. Bilbar, who has already started his rehabilitation tour. Some would think since December when he wrote that incredibly sycophantic resignation. letter that he might take a little break, but no, he's back and trying to rehabilitate himself in hopes of sort of winning back the kind of federalist crowd. Maybe it'll work. I don't know.

It's funny because it seems to be happening in tandem with Vice President Pence's. I was up for everything but the insurrection tour where he continues on, right? He gave a speech at the Reagan Library that said, to the effect of, like, I love all the fascism, but the act. actual trying to overturn the vote. So for that, I say, Bill Bar go fuck yourself. Don't, do not let these people use you. Do not. They, you know, they had their chance to do the right thing and they didn't do it.

So. Do you think it's kind of funny that new reporting that said that Trump had hopes that Pence would overturned the election, but all the AIDS said that there was no way it was happening? It's kind of sad. His little buddy wasn't his little buddy. I mean, I think that what we've learned from the last four years. of Trumpism is that the Republican Party is filled with cowards who will put power over anything and will do anything to get power, but they often behave in the most cowardly way. So the idea that Pence was going to do something that wasn't the most cowardly, you know,

where he was going to go in and overturn the election in the name of Donald Trump. I mean, the guy, I don't think he would have done that. Not, I mean, I guess he was scared of Trump, but I think he was more scared of the kind of. the kind of hell that would rain down on him if he overturned the election. Yeah. And then my, so I took this segment away from you, Jesse. Yes, you did. But Jesse will be back in two days.

But the other one is a special resentment of mine. Sarah Ingers, Flores, she's now just Sarah Igers. She appears on ABC News as a sort of pundit, but she, in fact, worked very intimately for Jefferson Beauregard. She started in his office when he was a senator. She worked separating the children. She's also famous for having leaked the famous struck page text messages. She was on TV on Sunday, as she often is, saying that the Mueller report exonerated Trump.

Everyone knows the Mueller report did no such thing. And so for that, I say, do not let these people into the mainstream media. They are bad actors. and Sarah Flores has a lot, she's trying to, Sarah Iger, she's Iger now, Sarah Iger has a lot she's trying to cover up. Do not let them launder themselves or their big bosses. Democracy dies in these rehabilitation tours. So don't let it happen.

Stay alert. 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. who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

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