The Megyn Kelly Show - COVID Child Abuse, Vaccine Truth and Lebron James Backlash with Karol Markowicz, Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Martin Kulldorff | Ep. 171

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by New York Post columnist, Karol Markowicz, to discuss the insane COVID regulations being forced on children, what we can learn from the UK’s approach to protecting kids against the virus, why parents aren’t taking more of a stand against local and state protocols, the Ron DeSantis attack ad that ironically turned into a positive message for the governor, and how we can speak up for our kids against mandates that aren’t based in science. Megyn is also joined by professors of medicine, Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, to discuss the difference between pandemics and endemics, the best way to minimize COVID death, natural COVID immunity’s strength, the benefits of micro-dosing, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. My first guest today is somebody I've been wanting to talk to forever. So happy she's finally with us, Carol Markowitz. She's a columnist for the New York Post and she spares no one. She's been probably the most sensible person when it comes to COVID these past two years. And that's a challenge, right? Because there's so much pressure to say the right things. But Carol doesn't listen. She writes what's true and she cuts through all the BS fearlessly and has from the start. She's also written for Fox News, USA Today, Daily Beast, several other publications.

But when it comes to covering and calling out all the COVID insanity, there is no one better than Carol. And there's a lot to discuss today. NBA superstar LeBron James shocking the left by refusing to become their vaccines for all poster boy. The drop in COVID cases in Florida that the media won't be telling you about, and how one mother's fight against sexually explicit books in her school's library just upended the Virginia's governor's race. So there is a lot to discuss. Carol, so happy to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. Okay, so let's talk about first, I don't even know where to begin. Let's talk about masking, I don't even know where to begin. Let's talk about masking New York state and other States, New York. I saw you had a post recently about the insanity of now masking two-year-olds, Abby, my assistant, she's with me every day. She's in Connecticut. She has a three-year-old daughter. She has to have a mask across her face all day long, three years old on and on it goes. And you were calling attention to this sad video of this little two-year-old boy who had asthma, had special needs on a plane, getting booted off

the plane. And you were making the point, if you see this, you know you were dealing with America because we're the only country doing the madness of hurting our little ones. I think we have the video by making them do this nonsense. Stand by. Let's watch a piece of it. oh it's maddening it's cruel it's really cruel no other country is doing this and we continue to do things like this and i don't understand why more americans aren't outraged it's is it that they're not seeing it? You know, I think about Pete Buttigieg. I'm sure he's sitting in his nice apartment, his nice house with his husband. You know, they just adopted a new child.

Are they thinking about the torture that little kids like that little boy are going through, who has asthma, who cannot deal with a mask over his face on an airplane? Or is it just rules are rules? Yeah. You know, I wonder if they all just think they're being safe, which again, no other country believes that masking two year olds is important. So it's not about safety. And I said this to my kids recently, my kids, I have 11, eight and five. They know how I feel about masking. They know that they

have to mask in schools. And I think that that's crazy. But I said to them, if I thought that masking would really protect you, and I thought that COVID-19 was dangerous for you, I would make you mask. I would make you wear a really serious medical mask. I wouldn't have you in a little Batman mask, which is what my boys wear to school. I would make you really do it. And it's only because I looked at the data. I've looked at what the other countries are doing. I've looked at how COVID-19 affects kids, that I don't believe that masking kids is necessary. And I think that we're doing something really crazy and really unique in this country with the masking small children like this.

Right. We don't care. The people who want to lecture us about science don't care at all what the science is when it comes to children and masking in particular at the primary school level. So can you talk to us for a minute about, because I follow your Twitter feed for information about this all the time, you link to such good articles about other countries and what specifically they're doing differently. So in a lot of places in Europe, in the UK, in Ireland, in Denmark, in Sweden, in Holland, they never masked kids under 12. That was just not something that they did. Some countries are 11. Iceland, I was recently in Iceland, it was amazing to see a universe of sanity where there's no kids being masked. You're in a supermarket and they have an

indoor mask mandate right now, Iceland, because they had a small spike in the summer. And I think that tourism is really important to them. And they felt that American tourists wouldn't come if they didn't implement that mask mandate. So you're in a supermarket and all the adults are masked, but all the kids are just walking around maskless, which I think is the same thing to do. So you have these other countries and you can look at the numbers, and they don't have a worse outcome for kids. It isn't something that like, if they were having poor outcomes, we'd hear a lot of stories about it. We'd hear like, oh, this London school, you know, had this many kids die because they weren't masking, but we don't see that. And it's, you know, a lot of

times people will say, oh, it's really different there. It's rural or Iceland, for example. They'll say, oh, well, that's why they're not masking kids, because there's only so very few people in Iceland, whatever. But London is London and London is very comparable to New York. And yet London is doing the same thing for kids. And they never mask kids under 12 in schools or anywhere. And yet we continue to do that. We continue to push these masks.

And the way that we mask children is also completely different than the way the grownups mask. At this point, everybody understands that wearing masks outside is completely pointless. I mean, Dr. Fauci had a really famous moment where he said, as we've been saying all along, the risk outdoors is very small. Now, of course, they had not been saying that all along, but at least we finally faced the reality that masking outdoors is needless. Kids in New York City, for example, still have to mask during recess. So they have lunch, they put on their mask to go play, they have to stay apart from their friends, so they can't play tag or any game where you get close to each other and their mask at the same time. Grownups are not doing this. Medical doctors are not doing this. Medical doctors are not going out on their lunch break and pulling up their mask in between bites. They're not wearing a mask after they're done eating.

It just isn't something that we're doing. We're doing this uniquely to children. Only kids have to mask like this. It's like we're taking advantage of the reality that they have to listen. You know, they have to listen to their teachers. It is cruel. My sons are going through this, too. My daughter as well, where they play outside at recess and, you know, they play Gaga or

these other games where you're really not close to the other kids and they get screamed at. Get your get your mask over your nose and over your mouth. And if they don't listen, like if they get caught with the mask below their nose, they get kicked out. You're out of the game. You're done. You're you're over by yourself. It's like, this is absurd. You're trying to scare my kid or my husband and I have done our level best for the past 18 months to make sure his level of fear and anxiety stays exactly where it ought to be, which is next to non-existent when

it comes to COVID. And you really can't escape it is the other thing. So I, you know, I'm pretty open about the fact that I'm a conservative. And so I would always say local, you know, we should make local decisions, which for me, I live in a very left area in a very left city, in a very left state. I understand that it would, that my area would probably still choose to mask. But what happens is you have local decisions where it only works. They only let us make local decisions when the left would win it. So, for example, in Florida, you know, Governor DeSantis mandated that schools cannot implement mask mandates. Parents can decide for themselves. And these local school districts, a few of them, decided, no, we're going to implement a mask mandate anyway. And they have this ongoing battle

with the governor. But so people will say, well, look, you wanted local control. Here it is, you know, but in New York, we don't have local control. There are school districts in Long Island that wanted to not have masking. And the governor and the new governor Hochul said, absolutely not. And private schools cannot choose for themselves. Local school districts cannot choose for themselves. It's a statewide statewide mandate. So it's interesting that we can no longer support local rules because it never, ever works in the direction of sanity. It only works when the left wants it. They don't want local control. What they want is control, period. They want control over your kid and my kid. And that's part of what's so infuriating, especially when it comes to the vaccine. I mean, that's a medicine being put into my child's body. And I get, you know, we have the MMR vaccines for all three of our kids. Those have been around for a long time. It's just not the same as COVID. And that's

another area in which our friends across the pond are having a much different approach than we are. And when parents over here say, well, kind of want to do it the way they're doing it, we're shamed as science deniers or terrible parents or anti-vaxxers. It's like, well, that's not true at all. Look at how these very sane people who are very cosmopolitan, just like we are across the pond are doing it. Can you speak to that? Yeah. So once again, if I thought that my kids were at risk from COVID-19, if I thought that this was something that really could affect them, I would absolutely want the vaccine for them. It's not like I'm opposed to vaccines. It's not even that I'm opposed to the COVID vaccine. I got vaccinated. My husband got vaccinated. I just don't see it for children. I don't see the numbers really pointing to them needing to get vaccinated. I it's, you know, and then people will point to other viruses or diseases that we've combated with vaccines in the past. Great. Those vaccines,

those vaccines were important because kids were targeted by those viruses. They were targeted by those diseases. COVID-19, thankfully, does not target children in the same way. And I don't understand why other countries can see that reality while we refuse to. And we've gotten to the point where like, oh, but even one death would be too many. Well, yeah, I mean, it would, but you know, we still drive cars, we still have pools. We still do plenty of things which result in many deaths for children. And we don't say, OK, well, one death, it's too much vaccine that is available for parents of young children who would like it. That does not speak to everyone must do it. That's a very different situation. I think that you've got parents like you and me, both of whom have been vaccinated. My husband's been vaccinated, who are going to push back considerably when we're told we have to get it

in our five to 11 year olds, which is where we're going. They're going to approve that for Pfizer. They said as early as October, potentially on an emergency use basis. And then they're going to do the same thing they did with the 12 and up or 16 year olds and up, which is once it gets the real approval, it's going to be mandated and your kids get expelled if they don't get it. I hope you're right that parents will be outraged by their children being forced to take a vaccine that they don't need. But I keep waiting for parents to be outraged about all kinds of things and it never happens. And I've been really disappointed in my city, in my state, in my

country for the last 19 months where I don't see parents really speaking out on behalf of kids. I really think that kids have been sort of pushed by the wayside here. And I don't see a lot of outrage. I mean, we see pockets of it, absolutely. You know, but I thought, for example, when New York City public schools didn't open last year, but private schools did, I thought, well, this is when this is the moment, right? This is the moment where parents will take to the streets. Nothing happened. Nobody cared. It was like, well, public schools are closed. What are you going to do? Private schools get to stay open. You know, I do think that the left has done a very good job of shaming people who speak up.

You know, I mean, I think we have a mutual friend who I've mentioned her before, but she went to an open the schools rally so that her kids could go to school. She got called a white supremacist. So, you know, liberals and, you know, we've both been living in Manhattan for 17 years now. I just moved to Connecticut. But I don't know how long you've been there, but I've been there nearly 20 years. It's when 87 percent for Biden, Manhattan did there. They don't want to be called a white supremacist. And they're not yet at the point like you, a conservative who writes for The Post or me, a right leaning independent

who worked for Fox News are like, this is what they do. You don't bother me. Right. Well, you can't cancel us either. Right. You can't call our bosses and say, oh, you know, she wants teachers to die. So I get it. I had a lot of parents last year talk to me anonymously when I was writing about opening schools. And they were really afraid of somebody calling their boss and saying, you know, Brenda wants teachers to die. And it's scary. I get it. But it's your kids. That's it. We've hit the part where like, you must you must stand up now. This is the, you know, they've taken away school from your children, you don't think that's important. They're masking them unnecessarily. They're taking away so many things from kids that we just are ignoring. I think like so many, you know, you were saying about a 12 year old being

being vaccinated. If your 12 year old is not vaccinated in New York City, they can't participate in a wide array of sports. They're just not allowed to. So you must you're being forced to. It's so absurd, which is like, oh, you want to hurt 12 year olds? Tell them they can't do sports because we're also also having an obesity problem, an anxiety and depression problem, all of which are partially addressed by exercise and socialization that comes with it for children. Absolutely. And it just, there's no sanity around it. If I thought that we were heading in a direction where people would wake up, I think I'd

feel better about it. But I don't know. I think places like New York are really in trouble because of stuff like this. Yeah. Okay. UK, it initially said no vaccines for 12 to 15 year olds because of the myocarditis risk. Now they say, okay, 12 to 15 year olds can get one dose only and only if their doctor recommends it and not the second dose. You cannot get that. They're saying right now we think that's too dangerous. OK, so they're saying you can't get the second dose for 12 to 15 if you want it in the UK. Here we're saying you must. You have to get it or your kid is kicked out of school. That's what that's the mandate right now in Los Angeles. Twelve year olds and up have to get it or they're expelled. Same rule in Norway, in Ontario, Canada, they're saying you could take Pfizer, but not Moderna

for these like late teens, 18 to 25, 24 year old men. But they're saying 12 to 17, only one dose. That's it. And so now we're in a position where we're being forced to give two doses to our kids and not just two doses, but has to be the three weeks apart, which is controversial. Right. In some of these other countries that have allowed the second dose for these, you know, mid teens, they say space it out considerably because it lowers the chance of side effects. So it's like, I don't know, do people not know this information here or is it just like they're terrified, like our fellow New Yorkers who live in this sort of COVID fear, porn, panic, utopia? I really do think it's both. I think there are a lot of people are afraid. They think, well, okay, yeah, COVID is not that much of a risk

for kids. But what about my kid? What if something happens to my kid? I won't be able to like deal. I won't be able to live with myself if I don't take all the protections that I can take. But the other part of it is absolutely that our news is so limited and so myopic and just so America-centric. I've been waiting for somebody to ask, say, Dr. Fauci, like, hey, how come Britain never masked kids under 12 at all? And they don't have any worse outcome than we did. Like, what's going on here? I would love- Is it something about driving on the left side of the street that makes you more immune to COVID? Right, exactly. Or Rochelle Walensky to be asked, how come you were afraid to send your kids to camp,

yet kids all over the world were going on about their lives as if nothing was going on? What's happening here? But they never get asked these kinds of questions. People who have access to them always end up asking them really fluff questions that really don't matter. And the thing is, they mess up anyway. Walensky and Fauci are constantly contradicting themselves are constantly making errors in what they're saying. It's unbelievable to me that 19 months in this is still the best we could do on our television screens because they're awful at their jobs.

I'd love to talk to Rochelle Walensky. Fauci would be my number one, but I'd love to ask Rochelle Walensky, are you embarrassed you didn be my number one, but I'd love to ask Rochelle Walensky. Are you embarrassed? You didn't send your child. You made such a fool out of yourself and out of him. He missed an entire summer of fun and was stuck with you. I mean, I think he's a real fair job. You know, I do. I would, I would, I actually would. And, and they'll never come on. They're afraid. Can we talk about Florida and Ron DeSantis? So I saw a tweet about this and I have the same reaction. Some no name group. I mean, I hate to give them too much play because there's not a big group, but they put out this ad against Ron DeSantis trying to rip on him for having. He's against mandated vaccines and mandated masks. He's fine if you want to do it for your kid or yourself.

But he doesn't like mandating everybody do it. They put out this ad and your response was this looks like an ad for desantis and even my my executive producer canadian debbie was like this makes me want to move to florida right now she's in poor canada where they have no freedoms right now okay so watch watch this ad or listen to it if you're listening to us right now on sirius xm ladies gentlemen, on behalf of your cabin crew, we'd like to inform you that we have officially entered Florida airspace. Now that we're making our final descent, please watch this short message from Governor Ron DeSantis on COVID-19. Thereafter, everyone on board will be required to comply with the state's forever purge. We are not doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida. We trust people to make

their own decisions in this state. We are not going to be bludgeoning people with restrictions and mandates and lockdowns or any of that stuff. As Governor DeSantis stated, while you're within state lines, you do not have to wear a mask. You do not have to get a vaccine. It is against the law for private businesses or schools to mandate masks or vaccines. And you have the absolute right to infect whoever you want, whenever and wherever with COVID-19. Thank you for traveling with us and please enjoy your floor ever purge. Okay. Who wants to go with me to Palm Beach?

I know. I'm in. Let's go. It sounds like a magical place where they don't force people to do what they don't want to do. And, you know, they get to live freely. I said earlier today on Twitter, Governor DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Pichas, shared it on Twitter. And I said, I used to be in PR. And when your opponent's press secretary shares your attack ad, you have not done a good job with that ad. So yeah, we lived in Florida last year for almost five months, we found it to be a magical wonderland of freedom and normalcy, especially during a time of real abnormalcy in New York. And I loved it. I thought Governor DeSantis did an amazing job. I was there when the vaccine rollout happened. So I saw him on TV every day pushing those vaccines. The idea that he is not sufficiently encouraging of people getting vaccinated is

ridiculous. I thought that everything in Florida made sense to me in a way that things in New York had stopped making sense. Meanwhile, Florida has the 41st highest COVID rate in the United States. So that's good. You don't want to be number one. You'd like to be number 50 highest COVID rate in the United States. So that's good. You don't want to be number one. You'd like to be number 50 highest COVID rate. He's 41st. The cases there are down 57% in the past two weeks. That's without a mask mandate, without vaccine mandates in the schools or elsewhere. Something you will not hear from the mainstream media because they're too fixated on calling him governor death santas no yeah i mean well yeah also in that ad they say that uh you're a private business is not allowed to mandate masks of course they are that's ridiculous a private business in florida can absolutely ask every person who comes in to wear a mask that's just wrong florida's

looking pretty good but but let me ask you the same thing I get asked, which is, well, why don't you move there? Right. Like you were down there. Why didn't you stay there? A lot of people will ask questions like that. Yeah. Well, the truth is where we're moving towards that. I'm not, uh, I've been pretty open about the fact that our family is moving towards a potential Florida move. We've thought about it a lot. It's really hard. Look, it's not that easy to just lift up your life and move. I have three kids in schools. We had just moved into like our dream home, March, 2020. It's really hard to leave it. We have our family. I grew up in Brooklyn. My husband grew up in Queens. We're lifelong New

Yorkers. We're not like people who moved here, you know, five years ago and now can just go somewhere else. We have ties, but we absolutely are considering a move to Florida in, you know, the near future or in the not so near future. But I think our future is in Florida. We, we didn't want to move to Florida, even though I love it because all our family and all our friends are in the Northeast. You know, it's like, it's, it's hard to just say, well, I'm leaving everybody. It's like, well, I, but I don't want to do that. I just want sanity in the place where I grew up. I'm, I'm used to the Northeast. I'm used to the climate. I want to be with my mom. Doug wants to be with his mom. They're getting older. They need us. And so on. And the other question I'll get asked, Carol is, well, why do you complain about schools when you have enough money to just

put to homeschool your kids? You know, you could homeschool your kids. And it's like, okay, I don't want to do that for so many reasons. First of all, I would be a nightmare to them if I were homeschooling. None of us would fare well in that situation. I am not the kind of mother who should be with her children all day long trying to teach them math. We would drive each other nuts, nor am I capable of doing it. By the way, I'm already at the point where they're homework or I'm like, ask your father, right? But you know, there's all sorts of reasons that some of us choose to send them to school, which is, you know, the socialization and the homecoming parade and the big bonfire and the, you know, the football games. All of it is fun. Those are my own memories. I

want them for my kids, too. I know you can find it. You can cobble it together if you decide to homeschool. It's not the same. Everybody makes a different choice, but like, just because you have money and you object to what the schools are doing, doesn't mean you're prepared to homeschool your children. Right. I've thought about homeschooling so much in the last 19 months. I really have. I know you and I have talked about this before also look, it's not just COVID regulations in schools. It's a problem. Uh, the wokeness, the, the just absolute indoctrination in these schools is an issue for me as well. Yeah. You know, I get that a lot that, oh, you have the money to just pull them out and do it yourself. But look, I have a career. My husband has a career.

It's not quite so simple. Once again, plus my kids love their schools before, you know, two years ago, I would have never even considered leaving New York. I would have never considered pulling them out of school, I think things were very different. And I think a lot of things got exposed during this COVID time, that, yeah, it's hard to unsee. But in general, I used to like their schools, I used to like their school experiences, it is absolutely difficult to say, look, let's just pull them out of school. I also don't want to leave behind the parents who are like me. I feel like a lot of the time I'm fighting for a lot of New York parents. I get emails all the time thanking me for various articles that I write exposing things that are going on in New York City schools. This is my city. Why should I be pushed out of the school

system? Because the wokesters have decided that they're in charge. I want to stay and fight for as long as I can. And again, I might end up in Governor DeSantis' Florida sooner rather than later. I'm not pretending that's not a possibility. But while I'm here, I'm going to fight. I'm going to fight for my kids. I'm going to fight for other kids, too. I love it.

You've been doing it. I mean, I'll tell you that we didn't leave New York because of the COVID restrictions on our kids. We left because of the crazy far- left woke indoctrination of the children, which just got to the point where it was like, oh my God, this is actual child abuse happening by the moment. And we raised it with the school and they didn't care. There was absolutely no willingness to push back on it. And then we talked to a lot of other parents, including very, very rich parents, you know, who had way, way more money than we do, who had made tens of millions of dollars of

donations to these private schools. And what they made clear to us was it's not a fight you can win. You can't win it with money donations. No one cared when these parents who had built the library at the schools went in and said, don't do not offer this divisive rhetoric. You're creating racists. You're creating divisions that didn't exist. And the schools were like, nope, we are all Ibram X. Kendi, you know, accolades now. So, you know, it's sort of the rules of war. Like if you're if outmatched, it's not smart to fight. You got to sort of make that decision on a case by case basis, because parents ask me all the time, what should I do? What should I do? And if you can fight and there's any chance of prevailing, you should fight.

We left because we realized this was not a win-or-lose battle where we were. Okay. My guest right now is New York Post columnist Carol Markowitz. Coming up, we're going to discuss LeBron James pushing back against these vaccine mandates for everybody. Plus, next hour, our doctors are here. Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr.

Martin Kulldorff will discuss whether COVID will become an endemic as opposed to a pandemic and what that means for society. And when, and they say this is sort of when you can go back to quote normal. Well, when's that happening? And they're going to take your questions. Call us 833-44-MEGYN.

That's 833-446-3496. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. My guest right now is New York Post columnist Carol Markowitz. In just a bit, we're going to be joined by two very smart doctors to talk about COVID and where we are with that as well. Carol can cover everything, which is one of the many things we love about her. Let's talk about LeBron James. So he was asked about whether he's been vaccinated and whether he's in favor of essentially vaccine mandates.

And here is what he said. Have you been vaccinated and do you feel compelled to send a message to the rest of the country about the importance of vaccinations? I think when it comes down for me, I can speak about myself. compelled to send a message to the rest of the country about the importance of vaccinations? I think when it comes down for me, I can speak about myself. I think everyone has their own choice to do what they feel is right for themselves and their family and things of that nature. I know that I was very skeptic about it all, but after doing my research and things of that nature, I felt like it was best suited for not only me, but for my family and for my friends. And, you know, and that's why I decided to do it. So but as far as I don't you guys should know me or anything that I talk about, I don't talk about other people and what they should do.

I speak for me and for my family. And, you know, that's what it's about. But you don't think the issue is important enough for someone with your stature to speak out on it? You know, we're talking about individuals' bodies. You know, we're not talking about something that's, you know, political or racism or police brutality and things of that nature. We're talking about people's bodies and well-beings. You know, so I don't feel like for me personally that I should get involved in and what people should do for their body. I mean, meanwhile, I just have to point out he was fine with defunding the police and all that. Like that also affects people's bodies. That also affects people's safety on a day to day basis.

But he's fine commenting on that. Ted Cruz, of all people, tweets out. I've never said this before, but I agree with at King James's Twitter handle. And so all the alignments are exactly opposite on this. He's getting attacked by the left and he's getting praised by the right for it's for the second piece. I mean, getting vaccinated. I don't think anybody opposes

you getting vaccinated, except for the hardcore anti-vaxxers. But the fact that he won't get behind saying everyone should do it. Your thoughts on what this cultural moment means? Well, it's very interesting because meanwhile, your pizza guy in New York City has to tell you to do it or he can't let you stay and eat your slice of pizza in his pizzeria.

But LeBron James gets to not say anything, right? It's sort of interesting that we've put the onus on small business owners to enforce vaccination at their restaurants, at their art galleries, at their, you know, any other kind of business that they have where people come indoors in New York City with the vaccine mandate, the business owner has to ask for vaccination. I think what LeBron James is saying is absolutely right. I would just hope that it could apply to more people than just LeBron James. I don't think it's anybody's business who else gets vaccinated. Again, I got vaccinated. I feel secure in my vaccination. I don't care what other people do. I don't care if other people are unvaccinated because it really

does not affect me. I am vaccinated. And if you believe in the vaccine, if you trust in the science of vaccine, why do you care if other people are vaccinated or not? Well, he's he's not pro mandate. That's very obvious. And one of the things that you hear in the past. And there's also a significant holdout population within the black community when it comes to these vaccines. A fact the media and the Democrats just will not acknowledge. They want it to be all Trump, MAGA, you know, patriot America hat wearing folks in, you know, Louisiana and Mississippi. It's not true. It's not just personal experience. The people that I know that are not vaccinated in New York are not very few of them would be considered Republicans at all, much less Trump supporters. It really runs the

gamut. People are afraid they maybe think that they're in good enough shape that they don't need the vaccine. I know a lot of young people in their 20s and 30s who are like, I don't feel like I need to be vaccinated for something that's not a risk to me. And then the real cohort that I know that is not getting vaccinated are people who have had the virus before. And once again, other countries accept previous infection as evidence of, you know, of having antibodies. But in the U.S., we largely don't, except our State Department does. When you come in from another country, you can either show vaccination or proof of infection. But for some reason, that's the only place that that is permitted.

I didn't know that. Yeah, you can't. If you want to fly back into the U. US, you can show proof of prior infection, because it makes sense. It means you beat the virus, you have the antibodies, you're in the same place, maybe even better than a vaccinated person. Why not? So but we don't, but in New York, for example, you can't show evidence of prior infection to go to a restaurant or to go into some, you know, into a museum or something. And what you're seeing is all these healthcare workers who are

now forced to get vaccinated. The reason that they don't want to get vaccinated, they're not anti-vax. They're all saying, I've had this already. I've been infected. Why do I need to be vaccinated now? And the truth is they don't. No, it's crazy. I was just reading about this online. Hold on. I want to pull it up because the guy. OK, so this was written in to a publication that I think it was retweeted by one of our guests coming up the next hour, Martin Kulldorff. And it says this is somebody writing in to complain about this mandatory vaccines, even if you've had covid. He writes, My wife is a triple board certified doctor in the Bronx. She worked at the hospital that had the highest COVID death rate in all of New York City. She went down hard with COVID in April 2020 and missed two months of work. She recovered and went back. For 15 years, she served the poor, underprivileged patients on welfare in the Bronx.

None of them had private insurance. She resigned on Friday, and I could not be more proud of her. She's not bowing to this tyranny. She tested her antibodies several times and they remain high. Please keep up the fight and goes on to say that many of these nurses took the vax against their will because they could not afford to miss a paycheck. The mandates must fail. Yeah, I hear stories like this all the time. I really think that once again, we're in the grips of mania and we're refusing to do the same thing. I think that we will eventually get to this same path. I think we will eventually say, well, previous infection does count. I think eventually we'll say, well, masking small children is bad for them. I think we will get to the place where we have, you know,

what we all know to be true will be accepted by everybody. But it might take a while. And it's really unfortunate because we're heading down, again, this bad path where we're not accepting reality. And that really destabilizes places when you don't when you don't accept your reality, when people can't agree on what reality is. I think it's very destabilizing for us. Well, you have all these all these health care workers in New York State and elsewhere, for that matter, who are about to get laid off. Thanks. And here it starts because of our governor's mandate.

But of course, we've got the presidential mandate looming. Right. But they're about to get laid off, even if they have natural immunity, even though they were on the front lines of fighting covid. That's how they got it. A lot of them. And now we're going to punish them because they won't also get the vaccine. And the plan is to bring in the National Guard to backfill them. And with all due respect to our National Guard, you know, somebody online was writing, what kind of scabs are they going to be like, basically for scab workers, you know, like when the unions go on strike, and you bring in their fourth, I don't know what their medical background is, who which National Guard,

are they all as qualified as nurses are to take care of New Yorkers? I'm really not sure. And it's also amazing, like for the same exact people who are really worried about militarization of like a police force or other parts of society are totally fine with like militarization of like our hospitals. It's amazing to me how quickly we can turn these hospital heroes who we, you know, plotted them out of our windows every night at 7pm. Yes, we had the frying pans. Firing them. Yes, I was one of them. I had the pots and pans out at seven o every night at 7 p.m. We had the frying pans firing them. Yes, I was one of them.

I had the pots and pans out at seven o'clock night after night. And I meant it. And I still mean it. Unlike these other people who now want them to get fired without unemployment benefits. That's what's insane. Thanks to our governor. They're going to get fired even if they've had COVID and have natural immunity, which is better, they say, than the vaccine immunity.

They're going to get fired. They're not going to get their paychecks. It is such BS. Cruelty is the point here. Nobody thinks that this is going to make us safer. They all just want to punish the people who will not obey. And you know what's crazy? It's like I I love modern medicine. You know, I'm I'm pro-vax. I get them all. But I know people like my friend, she won't even take a Tylenol when she has a headache. She's very anti just anything foreign in her body. I don't recommend this at all, but she doesn't even get an annual mammogram, even though she's 50 something. She doesn't want the exposure of the radiation. I get an annual mammogram and I recommend everybody do that.

Saved a lot of lives. But I'm just saying this is how she's built. And those are her own medical decisions for her body herself. So you take somebody like that and you say you have to inject this new vaccine into your arm. And by the way, she had she's had covid. She's had it right. So and she's not going to do it. She's not going to do it. And she needs her job. She needs her paycheck. But it's like all of that's being taken away. And so this is genuinely scary for a lot of people who are anti mandated medicine or even sort of mild medicine. And scary for society. I think forcing people to do things like this is bad for us. I really don't think that we come out of this in a happy, good place. I you know, it's funny because I do envision a world in a happy, good place. I, you know, it's funny, because I do

envision a world, you know, past this, I hope we get there someday. And, you know, the world also didn't start with COVID. We had relationships and, and ideas of how things should work before. I think what we're suspending now all the things that we knew in the past, I think it's a real problem. And I think we're not going to get over it for a very long time. All right. So I have a few more things I want to get to with Carol, including her her recent article saying as bad as things may be, we can't break up. It's not we there's no secession. There's no two to Americas. It's not going to work. And she's got thoughts on why. And a bit later in the show, we're going to be joined by Drs. Monica Gandhi and Martin Kulldorff.

They will discuss the possible end game of COVID and answer your questions. Call us at 833-44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. My guest right now, New York Post columnist Carol Markowitz. And if you don't follow her on Twitter and read her columns, no matter where you are, you're missing out. Carol, I want to ask you about Virginia and this gubernatorial race down there where Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton disciple, is now running again for governor there. He was he was the governor and he's not. Now he's running.

And over the Republican Gregory Youngkin and McAuliffe, the Democrat had like a six and a half point lead. Now we're told it's down to about a three and a half point lead. They had a debate the other night that's making national news. Now, I want to warn our audience. We're going to play a soundbite from my mom in Fairfax, Virginia. Very nice. Very nice county. Affluent county. Who is I mean, I'll just say she's ripped shit over the books that she found in the high school. It's not middle school. Uh, very graphic. We, I debated on whether to play it cause it's really graphic. And I will say, if you have children with you, you want to turn on the radio cause it talks about pedophilia. It gets specific. Um,

it's graphic, but I decided to play it because you should know what's in these districts available to your child. Most of us just go about our jobs and we don't think about, you know, going to school library and figure out all the books that are available to your kids. But this stuff is damaging. So better you hear a bit of it here and do something about it than your kids stumble across it without you having done anything. That's why we're going to play it, but turn it down if you've got a kid in the car. Okay, here we go. I decided to check the titles at my child's school, Fairfax High School. The books were available and we checked them out. Both of these books include pedophilia, sex between men and boys. Both books describe different acts. One book

describes a fourth grade boy performing oral sex on an adult male. The other book has detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy. The illustrations include fellatio, sex toys, masturbation, and violent nudity. Pedophilia here. From the author, Maya Kobabe, quote, I can't wait to have your cock in my mouth. I am going to give you the blowjob of your life. And then I want you inside me. End quote. From the author Jonathan Evason. What if I told you I touched another guy's dick?

What if I told you I sucked it? I was 10 years old, but it's true. I sucked Doug Goebel's dick, the real estate guy, and he sucked mine too. This is not an oversight at fairfax high school there are children in the audience do not interrupt my time do not interrupt my time there are children in the audience who shouldn't be hearing that exactly exactly ma'am that's that's my point as the mom right that's what she should said. But she was she was on a roll. OK, so this comes up shortly thereafter in the Virginia gubernatorial debate between, again, Gregory Youngkin, the Republican and Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat. And here is what they said. we've seen over the course of the last 20 months is our school systems refusing to engage with parents. In fact, in Fairfax County this past week, we watched parents so upset because there was such sexually explicit material in the library they had never seen. It was shocking.

And in fact, you vetoed the bill that would have informed parents that they were there. You believe school systems should tell children what to do. I believe parents should be in charge of their kids' education. Mr. McCullough, 30 seconds. So, first of all, this shows how clueless Glenn Youngkin is. He doesn't understand what the laws were because he's never been involved here in helping Virginia. But it was not. The parents had the right to veto bills, veto books, Glenn, not to be knowledge about it,

also take them off the shelves. And I'm not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision. So yeah, I stopped the bill that I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. Well, How would you feel about that if they were teaching your kid that stuff? Yeah. I think that if I had to point to something positive that happened over this COVID time, it would be that parents really have a much sharper view of what their kids are learning and what's going on in their kids' schools.

I think that soundbite should be terrifying to everybody. I mean, they're talking about child porn and McAuliffe is saying, well, I don't think parents should tell schools what they should be teaching. Well, I'm sorry. I think parents should tell the school that they shouldn't be teaching about child porn,

that the kids shouldn't be able to access a book on that in the school library. It's abuse they're talking about, child rape. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, it's real. It's not, you know, and she's not exaggerating. She's reading from this book where you want to like close your ears and not hear it. And yet your child would take this out in the library. It's also, I think we're at such a pivotal moment right now. You know, I was thinking about this, like if I was on your show, say two years ago, like what would we be talking about? You know, pre-COVID because I think thinking about this. If I was on your show, say, two years ago, what would we be talking about pre-COVID? Because I think that I used to write about

all kinds of different things. I used to write about foreign policy or immigration or sex or any relationships or any other number of things. But in the last 19 months, I think that what we're doing to children has become so pivotal and so important in our conversations that I can't focus on anything else. When you hear stories like this about a book like this in the school library, like what else matters? What else matters except how damaging what we're doing to kids across the country is right now. And I think that's why it's become, you know, sort of the top thing that I write about, the thing that I write about week after week. I wasn't a children's, you know, issues person before this, but we all have to be now we have to listen to this mother, we have to listen to people like her. And we what they're doing to our kids and ignoring it. I mean, as I said, I wrestle with whether we play that thing, but not playing it, not calling attention to it is worse. And me just trying to describe, oh, it's really graphic and it's awful,

doesn't have the same effect. I mean, now I guarantee you there's going to be lots of parents trying to find out whether those books are in their kids' schools and making a push to find out exactly what else is in the schools. I mean, you can't trust these schools any longer. Coming of age books, introduction to sexuality, all that stuff. Of course, yes, of course. Who didn't sit there with an underlined copy of the book forever back in the 70s? That's where I learned all my stuff. This is not the same, not by a long shot.

Okay, can we talk about why we can't break up? Because you're hearing more and more talk of some sort of, is secession the answer? How do I send my kids to school with parents who want those books in the library, with parents who want mandated masks forever? How do we get along? How do we, is there a real solution where we could go into our own camps and still remain Americans? And your conclusion is no. So I understand the impulse of the national divorce. I really do. In a way that I never really did before. I'm like an uber patriotic American. I was born in the Soviet Union. I came to the US when I was a kid. I have a brother named after Ronald Reagan. I mean, I come from a family where

I think about it every single day, how lucky I was to end up here. So it's completely unnatural for me to even entertain the idea of an America that splits up. But I do think we've gotten to such a state and we're so divided that I really don't know how we move forward from this. But so I really thought about the idea of a national divorce. And I thought about how would it work? I mean, some of the people that are into the idea, Jesse Kelly is a prominent person who talks about this, you know, say divide the states and sort of go by red and blue. But the truth is, we have so many purple states and things change all the time. I mentioned in the column, if you move to deep red Colorado in the late 90s, because you

wanted to be around other conservatives, you'd be surprised to find they haven't voted for a Republican for president since 2004 and George W. Bush. And things change. Conservatism changes, liberalism changes. I think a Democrat from 25 years ago to now would be completely different. I think a Republican from 25 years ago to now are completely different. So we really can't divide up like that and hope that it lasts. It might be short term, it might work where we have red states and blue states, and we stay in our lanes. But conservatives will have liberal children, liberals will have conservative children. And it happens, it absolutely happens. And ideologies change. Unless we plan to give an ideological test to anybody entering any state, it's really impossible to keep it ideologically

pure. But really what made me think about all of this is I live in Brooklyn. Again, I grew up in Brooklyn. I was in deeper in Brooklyn, the part of Brooklyn you really don't hear about. It's not hipsters. It's not coffee shops. It's not coffee shops. It's not, you know, pickle stores. It's deep in Brooklyn where ethnic minorities live, and they tend to vote Republican, Russian Jews, got 30 seconds left, just FYI, Orthodox, etc. And you can't really you can't forget about them. You can't forget about the people that we can't just leave in these blue states. We had 3.2 million Trump voters in New York, that's more than the population of many red states. So the division is really unlikely and impossible, much as you know, it might make sense.

We're gonna have to find a way to live together. Okay, good luck. Such a pleasure. Carol Markowitz, thank you. Up next, our doctors are here and we'll be taking your questions. 833-44-MEGYN. Don't go away. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show. I am joined this hour by Monica Gandhi. She's a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and has been a leading voice within the COVID hysteria. Really, she displeases both sides, which means she's probably right. She says not everyone needs the booster shot and that it could very well be that

we are seeing finally the end game with COVID. Could it be? Also joining us is Martin Kulldorff. He's a professor of medicine at Harvard University and author, one of them, of the Great Barrington Declaration. He's another outspoken voice tackling everything from masking our kids to vaccine passports. And we're going to be discussing all of this and all the updates with COVID over our next hour. And we're going to be answering your questions on COVID with our doctors. So you can call us now. We're going to start taking your calls early today. Call in.

Let us know what's on your mind, what you want to know. It's 833-44-MEGAN, M-E-G-Y-N, excuse me, 833-446-3496. Okay. So let's get right to it, docs. Thank you so much for being here. All right. Let's start with whether we really might be at the end game of COVID from where we go from pandemic to endemic. Dr. Gandhi, can you just explain what that means? Because I've heard that term endemic many times. I don't totally understand what it means, what it looks like, and how we'll know when we're there. Yes, so these are very traditional

infectious disease definitions, but essentially an epidemic means you have an undue burden of disease, more than expected. Well, what would we know that's more than expected with COVID? More than expected is people in the hospital, a lot of hospitals being flooded, people being really sick. And then a pandemic means that it's extended to multiple continents. And then what an endemic means is that it's gone down to a level where you live with it. And it's at such a level that it doesn't cause an undue burden.

Everyone's going to have to decide what undue burden means for themselves as a country of hospitalizations or disease. But I will tell you, and I'm sorry to say this because I think some people don't think this, but we're not going to eradicate COVID because of some very key pathogen properties about it. It's very transmissible. It looks like another bunch of other respiratory viruses. You can spread it even when you don't feel sick. And it also has some animal hosts that it sticks in. So all of those infectious disease reasons means we can't get rid of it, we can't eradicate it. That means getting rid of. But luckily, once it's endemic, it's kind of one of our other respiratory illnesses that we live with, and life should go back to normal. And I think we're getting there in many places. So how do we know when we're there? Because I'm just looking

at the COVID cases, et cetera, as of September 29th, this is over a two-week period. The number of cases is down 26%. This is nationally. The number of hospitalizations, down 16%. But the death numbers, which tend to, I guess, lag, I don't know that they're, I'm not exactly sure, but for the past, I don't know, several weeks, every time I look at the death number, it's on the plus side. It's gone up 7% over the past two weeks. So what does that tell you? So we're not quite there in the United States yet. And everyone has to define, again, what works for their country.

There's about 100 deaths a day from influenza. So some people have said, OK, once you get to 100 deaths a day, you know, averaged out over the year, some, everyone's going to decide where we're about 2000. Yeah, so there's still very high deaths and hospitalizations in some regions. I live in a state, California, that we have very low hospitalizations and deaths, you could argue that we're endemic here in California, but we're still masking and have restrictions. Denmark decided at a 74% vaccination rate to open up society. Norway decided a 67% vaccination rate. Portugal decided at a 80% vaccination rate. And then finally, Ireland on October 22nd will open at around an 80%. So every

country's deciding for themselves. We have to come up with a definition in the United States so that we're not in endless restrictions, endless acts, and make that decision that shouldn't be political, like the blue state says this, the red state says this. We should come up with some definitions that make sense. What about that? So I'm going to get to Dr. Kaldor for one second, but aren't we over 70% vaccination rate here in the country? And that's not even including the 42 million people who have had COVID and, you know, have natural immunity and they may also be part of the vaccinated number. So yeah, you're right. There's a lot of overlap. If people have been sick, they could have gotten vaccinated. We don't know what our real seroprevalence rate is. Um, it could be as high, it could be very high. I'll tell you one thing about, you know, how do we decide or how do we know? You know, places like California, I could say we know

because our hospitalizations are low, absolutely manageable. I work in a hospital. I see people across the street, and we have very low numbers. And we have about we have a higher vaccination rate than the national, which is actually 64.4% one dose. It depends on if you're dividing it in over 12, over 18, and over 65. The CDC provides different definitions. We have to decide as a country when we feel like the burden of disease is not high. And the problem is we're looking at cases. We're looking at, like, there's been numbers flown around around, like when we're less than 10,000 cases,

that doesn't make sense to me, because cases, the reason we detected cases, when we call them cases, they're actually you can feel totally well, you're asymptomatic was because you didn't want it to spread to someone else. But those aren't traditional infectious disease definitions of disease. Disease means you feel unwell. So I think we have to look at hospitalizations because we don't know how many people have colds with COVID. We're not tracking that. Let's look at hospitalizations, decide when it's a number that we can all live with.

Like we live with influenza in the hospital, we live with RSV, and then we have to lift restrictions. And when do I, I know that we're there in California, but I'm not a policymaker. And when you say restrictions, what do you mean? Well, right now we're still masking in California and San Francisco inside. And many people are masking outside.

I went to a outside theater. I was so excited to go to the theater and then I had to wear a mask outside. And just two days ago, and I actually said to the person, I'm an infectious disease doctor. And I don't think we have spread outside. And then they said, wish everyone was an infectious disease doctor. And then they said, you hate, you want to kill grandma.

And you were like, what? Wait, what? My nuanced views and on relifting masking has gotten me in the trouble. I know. I've seen that. I've seen it, but I've seen you also be brave. And as I said in the intro, you'll push back against either side. You won't be totally beloved by the people who hate mandates, but you won't be totally beloved by the people who love them either, which I get it from both sides. So yeah, that's where I am

right now. But I appreciate that. So Dr. Kaldorff, what are your thoughts on when we'll know it's time, you know, that we've gotten to endemic instead of pandemic or epidemic? And it's time, indisputably, really, to take off masks and get back to what we used to know as normal. Well, Dr. Gandhi is correct that we cannot eradicate COVID. It will be with us forever as an endemic disease. What happens is that we are, almost all of us, are going to get infected sooner or later. And as long as there are susceptible people who can get the disease, then we have a problem that we have to deal with. And there's also a seasonal pattern, which is different in different parts of the world,

including different states. So we have, for example, seen a summer wave in the south, which we had last summer as well. So I think we can expect a winter wave in the northern parts of the US. We don't know exactly the magnitude of it, but there are some states that have had very few cases, for example. So the time we reach the endemic state will vary geographically.

I think the key thing now is that as we're approaching the winter season, it's very important that the older people who have neither had COVID, because if you had COVID, you have good natural immunity, it's better immunity than from the vaccine. So if you've had COVID, or if you're vaccinated, that's good. But there are still people, older people out there who have not yet been vaccinated and have not had COVID. And as we now approach the winter wave, they are at high risk. So the most important thing to do at this point to minimize death is to convince older people, somebody who's 77, somebody who's 67 or 87 or even 97, to get vaccinated if they haven't already had COVID and they haven't already been vaccinated. That's the most important thing we can do in terms of the public health right now. And it's not enough just to say that these vaccines are freely available.

We have to really help educate people about the importance for these people to get the vaccines. And even though, as with any medical intervention, drug or vaccine, there are some risks with vaccines. We know about those. Well, at least some about them. There are things we don't necessarily know yet because that takes two or three years.

But if you are in this age bracket, the benefit of the vaccines greatly outweigh any small risk with it. So the benefit cost or the benefit risk ratio is very favorable. So it's a no brainer, I think, for people in these ages to take the vaccine. So I think that is the most important thing we can do now. Unfortunately, the vaccine debate has sort of deteriorated. And that has led to enormous distrust in public health. So there are some people who do not trust public health for very good reason, because a lot of nonsense that has been going on.

So that makes it much more difficult to convince these people that vaccines is a good thing for them. So for example, to have vaccine mandates that you, I talked to a nurse at my hospital, women's hospital, she was a nurse in the taking care of COVID patients. Obviously, she got infected, not surprised. She recovered. And now she has better immunity than her colleagues who have only been vaccinated. But she is now going to be fired by work from home administrators,

hospital administrators, who have less immunity than she does, even though she really stood up and did what she had to do to take care of these COVID patients. And now, yes, because she has superior immunity from disease than those who have it from

vaccines, they're going to fire her. So this is completely nonsense in terms of science to do this. So this is completely nonsense in terms of science to do this. And that leads to distrust in public health and vaccine messages by doing these kinds of nonsense. Let me ask you a follow-up on that. So is it accepted within the medical community that you do, I mean, I realize there have been studies and so on, but is it an accepted fact that you have better immunity if you've had COVID than if you've had just the vaccine? Yeah, so that has, there's a clear,

the best study is the study from Israel. And for some reason we haven't done very, there has been a few studies from the US, but we haven't done the really excellent study that we should have done. But there's a very good study from Israel and it shows that adjusting for the timing of vaccine or disease, as well as for age, which is important to adjust for in this analysis, it found that the risk for having people who are vaccinated, they had 27 times higher risk for symptomatic COVID disease than those who had recovered from COVID,

with a 95% confidence of between 13 and 57. So this is a very, very big difference. So it's very strong evidence that immunity is better from the disease than from vaccines. Now, we don't know. Does that assume that the vaccine was administered in patient A at the same time that patient B had just gotten over COVID, right? Because the timing matters. Yeah, so correct. So that 27-fold is adjusted for the timing of it. Now, in that study, most of the people who had disease had it before the vaccines, but they still had a better protection. So those who have had the disease earlier had better protection than those who had the vaccine later. Oh, is that right? Right. Because I think a lot of people are looking at the healthcare

workers who were on the front lines, as you point out, during that peak of when everything was happening, which I don't even know when the peak was. And it began in the spring, God, two years ago. It's hard to keep track. Was it spring of 2020 or spring of 2019? Right. I'm losing my ears. I know. Right. It's been so long, never ending. So the, the healthcare workers who are out there in the spring, right after quarantine, and then through the following winter, they said was the peak. So let's take the winter. If you had COVID during that winter, and then you had a vaccine, let's say, four months after that, would those two people, still that person who had COVID would be better protected, even though they had COVID longer in time away from where we are today? Yeah, so based on the Israel study, that was the case. Those who had COVID earlier had better

protection for symptomatic disease than those who had vaccine later. Now, it's interesting also that if you look at, instead of asymptomatic disease, if you look at death, then the efficacy was great in both groups because there was zero death in either group. So both the vaccine, as well as having had national immunity, protects very well against serious disease and death. But in terms of symptomatic disease, having had COVID gives you better protection on the vaccine. So there's no reason... Dr. Vandy, do you agree with that? Is that a controversial statement to say you have better immunity from having had the disease versus getting vaccinated? So I have also thought about this a lot and try to look at all the studies. And I actually think there's so much mixed data and it depends on two things. It depends on how severe your initial infection was. So you're going to have, I always think immunologically, because this is how I was trained as someone

who does HIV. So I'm always thinking about the immune system and where memory cells go. So if you've had severe disease, it's more likely you set up what's called memory cells, and that you have very durable protection. If you had mild disease, you may not set up those memory cells. And then a vaccine boost, like one vaccine, at least in the immunologic research helps you, it helps differentiate your T cells, and it helps you deepen your memory banks. So this mixed data for me, and maybe you're just going to call me too much of a compromiser, but I am actually a compromiser. I'm a compromiser

with masks, saying that we shouldn't mask forever. Even if you want to, you can. Absolutely, you will not get a flu and you won't get colds if you mask. But please don't make the rest of the population not mask for colds and flus because that is a personal decision. But the same thing with vaccines that might compromise, and I really mean this based on immunology research, is one dose after natural infection to me makes sense. But Dr. Kulldorff is totally right that the data is very mixed. The Kentucky study in the United States was not a well-done study. Case control studies are not the best way to look at this. This Israeli study was powerful, though.

I really, they do, but they really do need to break it out with severe and mild disease. Why did you have to begin with? And it's not, can I just jump in and ask you a quick question there? Is it knowable irrespective of severe versus mild disease? Is it knowable based on your antibodies? You know, could you give a blood test if you're the nurse and say, just check my antibodies? See, this is the problem. Yes. Like if you still have antibodies, then you definitely got enough of a immune reaction from it. But the problem is your antibodies could go down those people who got

infected, like you said, in spring of 2020, 2020, that's when it started, believe it or not, versus winter, their antibodies may have come down. But what we're not going to do is grab their lymph node biopsies and to see if they have memory B cells in their lymph nodes. And so it's harder to tell from an antibody test if you've been exposed because antibodies coming down, that's totally natural. That's what the immune system does. So it's hard. There's so much variability, two pieces of variability, the severity of your original disease.

That's the variability of the disease. The variability is also in the vaccines. Moderna is better than Pfizer. Sorry, because we gave it four weeks apart. You're not supposed to give vaccines three weeks apart. I don't know any vaccine in the world that we give them such a short period of time. Israel only has three weeks apart because they only had Pfizer. So giving it in longer duration, and also Moderna happens to have a higher dose, those are stronger vaccines. We've seen that with reinfection being lower with

Moderna recipients than Pfizer. So Israel is the worst example in a way because we don't know anyone who's mild or severe and they gave the vaccine in the wrong way. So do we in the US, by the way, you don't give it three weeks apart. So many vaccinologists said, please let us extend the duration between doses. And we said no, in the United States, but Canada, UK, so many Europe, all of Europe did that. So it depends on the vaccine, how you give it and the severity of initial disease. It's not a one size fits all answer. I thought it was interesting just in reading prior articles of yours, Dr. Gandhi, how you said we don't keep antibodies in our blood forever, based on prior infection. Because otherwise, you said our blood would be

really thick, like a shake, you couldn't move. I had a cold when I was one, but I don't have those antibodies in my bloodstream. I don't. I think I had a cold. Right, right. All right. So I want to bring in some of our callers here because we're getting really good questions. And I'm going to start with caller number four, Paul from Pennsylvania, who has a question about long haul COVID. Paul, what's on your mind? Yeah, I was just having a question. They just did a study about the long-haul symptoms, and it's a real thing. And what I've been trying to figure out is, does the long-haul symptoms occur both when you have the COVID naturally and maybe when you get the vaccine? Or is it just when you have it normally?

You get the COVID, you get sick, and the long-haul comes from that. Or, like I said, could it be a byproduct of the vaccine? But I don't see any information on it. So can you get long haul COVID from the vaccine? Either one of you can take that. I would say I don't see how that could happen pathophysiologically happens, pathophysiology, what happens in the body when people have more prolonged symptoms is two things. One is that the virus can go everywhere. It'll never stay in your body like a retrovirus like HIV because it can't go into your DNA.

Eventually it'll go away. But when it goes everywhere, it'll take you a while for you to feel better. The second reason is you have what's called an innate inflammatory response, not adaptive immunity, where you make immune cells calmly against the virus that you see, you have this something called innate immunity, where you make a very massive response, because you're trying to fight everything in sight, it's not specific. And that's why we give steroids in the hospital for calming down really severe COVID. We're trying to fight the immune response that's hurting our lungs. So I think it happens with severe COVID. And I think it happens with natural infection. But I can't see biologically why it

would happen with producing adaptive immunity from a vaccine. Okay. I want to get this quick call in first before we go to break, because I think this is a good one. This is number one, Carol in Michigan, who's got a quick question about Moderna versus J&J. Go ahead, Carol. Yeah, I was not going to get a vaccination, but family pressure made me get one. So I agreed to one and I got the Moderna. And even the pharmacist told me I was 80 to 85% coverage. You know, Johnson Johnson is 66%. But now everyone's saying I need a second one. And I'm saying I don't. So where am I on that? Thoughts on that, Docs? I don't think you need a third one.

Did you just get one? No, she just she just had one Moderna. And she doesn't know she thinks she's better covered right now than she would have been if she just had the one J&J, which wouldn't require a second shot. She wants to know why should she get the second Moderna? This is such an excellent question. I would say, Marta, I don't think we have data on this because I will tell you that the Moderna, the data that we have, and it was just two weeks ago from the CDC MMWR comparing the three vaccines, looked at, you had a 93%

protection from hospitalization with Moderna, 88% with Pfizer, and 71% with one dose of the Johnson & Johnson, but it was two doses with Moderna. So I do think it, the data we have is for two doses. I think you need the two doses, but that's the data we have. What about that though? Because I had Pfizer, which now I'm regretting. I feel like I should have gotten Moderna. So should I remember after I got my first dose, I was like, I think I'm just about the same as people who got J and J right now. So I really, I'm all for upping my, you know, my immunity. So I had my second dose, but you know, she doesn't have a terrible point of like, if you're kind of hesitant, like, why don't we have more of like, okay, at least get one jab

here in the United States. It's like two jabs or you suck. I have an explanation for that though. If we had gotten our transmission down, um, by like other places did with getting, um, vaccinated better, in my opinion, um, we wouldn't have all the circulating virus. It's like really clear, we have a lot of circulating virus. So even after two doses of Pfizer, I'm more susceptible, if I go to a place with lots of virus to a breakthrough infection, but I don't think I'm susceptible to severe disease, then if it was calm, and it was low rates of transmission. So if we had gotten it all down, one dose would have been enough, but it's like, it's like this happened with polio. You, you, you got to keep

the rates down and we have high rates in this country still, not everywhere, not in California, but some places. Okay. That makes sense. So since it's still everywhere, um, we're just, we're, we're going to be more susceptible to it. And the double dose is still a better deal, though. I'll ask you about that when it comes to kids and one dose in just a bit. Okay. I'm going to squeeze in a quick break today. I'm joined by Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the university of California, San Francisco, and Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard university. Up next, we're going to discuss what to expect when the FDA gives the emergency authorization for the vaccine and kids as young as five,

give us a call with your questions. The board's lighting up. You could still get in. 833-44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, joined today by Monica Gandhi, Professor of Medicine at the University of California at San Fran, and Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard. We're taking your calls during the rest of this show on COVID. If you've got questions or comments, call us on that topic, 833-44-MEGYN, 833-446-3496. So let's just talk about vaccines for five to 11-year-olds

because Pfizer has just released its, it's just released an update saying that it tested that group, 2,000 plus kids, and they found the response to be robust of the antibodies. And they've now submitted to the FDA for an emergency use authorization for that age group. So for parents who really want it for that age group, they're very happy. For parents like me who are a little less excited about the vaccine for my littles, unlike for myself, which I got it. I don't know. I'm worried they're going to force it on me as soon as they as soon as they move past

emergency authorization to the permanent. I don't want anybody forced me to do anything with my kid. I want to be between me and my pediatrician. Let me ask you about that, because we just talked about in our earlier hour how the L.A. public schools now are mandating that the 12 year olds and older get the vaccine or they're expelled. They're expelled. And Dr. Vinay Prasad, who's been on the show, he has a powerful op out out in U.S. News and World Report saying that's insane, saying that this is just there are still some questions around giving adolescents two doses versus one. There's the rare but real risk of myocarditis in some small portion and saying there are such terrible consequences in forcing kids out of school. They've got to be factored into this lunacy of you take two doses or you're expelled.

Let me start with you on that one, Dr. Koldorf, your thoughts. Dr. Prasad, for older people, it's a no-brainer to get the vaccine. But whenever we have a new vaccine, we don't know about adverse reactions until about two or three years after it comes on the market. And of course, children can be very different and more sensitive to vaccines than an adult. So what's key here is that while anybody can get the disease, including children, anybody can get infected, the risk of mortality, there's more than a thousand-fold difference

between the old and the young. So for older people, COVID is more serious, more fatal than the annual influenza. But for children, it's the opposite. It's less dangerous for them than the annual influenza, but for children it's the opposite. It's less dangerous for them than the annual influenza. So we have here a disease that for children has minuscule risks. And we have a vaccine where the risk can also be very small, but we don't know the exact magnitude. So it's not at all clear that there is a benefit to risk

ratio that's above one here for children. So I think we should not vaccinate children. If we look at it from the longer term perspective, when this is endemic, the reason that we have so much problem is because we have so many people that are susceptible because it's a new virus. And then it's very deadly to older people. So that's why we have this problem. If we look five, 10 years down the road, the adults always have been exposed to some point. So that susceptible population will not be there. Of course, when you're born, a newborn, you will not have the immunity because you haven't been exposed yet. But most children, most people are going to be exposed at a very young age where this is not

a serious disease. So it would be very natural to have COVID-19 sort of take the same path endemically as the previous four coronaviruses that we live with on a daily basis that causes a cold in some people now and then. When you say children shouldn't be vaccinated, what age group are you talking about? Zero to 18. Wow. I mean, you're in the minority on that. I would say, unfortunately, because I don't want to vaccinate my young ones. I really don't, for the very reasons you stated. But I know he's, that's not where we're going, Dr. Gandhi. I mean, already Dr. Fauci said he thinks it should be mandatory, even for the littles. And once we get this approval from Pfizer, if it becomes permanent,

you tell me whether you think this is going to be a mandated thing for even five-year-olds at some point in the next 12 months. I think this is a really difficult one, actually. I really do. I agree with Dr. Kulldorff. There's no question that children are less at risk. No question. And in fact, we have really hurt them in this country by keeping them out of school. And I'm so grateful that we're back in school now in fall 2021. It is something we'll have to look back and have a national reconciliation with ourselves that we restricted in-person learning, especially in blue states. So I'll never get over it, actually.

And you spoke up against it at the time, just so the audience knows. You wrote a very public comment. Yeah, I'll never deviate from that position, even though people yell at me a lot on that, too. We kept children out of school, and that was the most important thing for them, to protect others. Now, okay, so then going back to that question of protecting others, you're right. The real reason for children to get vaccinated is actually to protect others. And the reason that it's important to protect others is there is multigenerational households. They are around older people. And I will just explain to you that there are many vaccines that

we give children that are not for because children are severely at risk. It's to protect others. So pertussis, mumps, measles, rubella, and diphtheria all are childhood diseases that children can get very sick. Pneumococcus and anaphylous influenza, children actually are really taking it to protect others. So there really is a longstanding practice of this across the And, but you have to make sure it's safe. So I agree that the safety is paramount for because the safety concerns for children have to be very high, if you're asking them to do something to protect others. And I will tell you that I have a 13, 11 year old, I'll be very like handed on the air. I'm a 13 and 11 year old. So right in between the 13 year old only qualified for the 30 microgram dose. And he I delayed his time between doses. I said that publicly because I

was worried about the myocarditis. And, and I gave it seven to eight weeks because there's so much less myocarditis in places that spaced out the dosing. The 11 year old there was no way I was going to give a 30 microgram dose because he's teeny. And because of that, I will wait for the 10-microgram dose. And I'm really feeling better that it's a smaller dose. And then I'll watch for the safety too. But please know that we've done this before in society, and we really do want to protect everyone that is older too by our own immunity. That's fascinating to know. But I confess I hadn't really paid attention to the microgram dosage. I just kind of thought it was the same. OK, I want to get a couple of listener questions in. OK, you know what? Let's go here, because I hear this from a lot of women. This is Tammy in Texas, caller number seven, who's got a 21-year-old daughter. Tammy, tell us your question. Yes, I have a 21-year-old daughter. Of course, she's around all the young girls now.

Some are getting the vaccine, some are not. All of them are still concerned about getting pregnant in the future. Yeah, I hear this from so many women. They're worried it's going to affect fertility. I hear from men too, from young men. What's the truth? Is there any evidence that the vaccine does something to the ovaries or something that could affect fertility in the short or long term? thing about that fertility question. So there is no evidence of it. But I will say that this is how I think of vaccine safety. Actually, a lot of your side effects will reoccur early on, or very, very late. And what occurs very, very late is, for example, you have a live vaccine, which this is not. And live vaccines like measles can very rarely seroconvert. And then like very, in the future, 60 years later, you can get some severe side effects. So the things that happen later, usually from live vaccines, this is not a live vaccine. This is a vaccine where you produce, you get a little bit of genetic material

that makes you produce the protein, the spike protein of the virus. And then you raise an immune response against it. And both the genetic material and the spike protein go away. They don't go and like hang out in your ovaries or hurt them or spike them. I know that word spike, but they really don't because they get degraded very quickly. So I don't think there's a biological reason why you could have infertility.

And truly, this is one of the reasons why you really should not consult Dr. Google for possible risks on, you know, the vaccines and so on. And I know people don't trust the mainstream media and I get you. I trust me. I get you. But when it comes to health, yeah, yeah. We've actually very problematic to public health has been very problematic. They have a lot of lockdowns. They put up people's businesses at stake, their livelihoods at stake, mass mandates when they should be lifted. I mean, of course, we have a concern with public health. I completely agree why people are upset. That's another thing we're going to have to take a long,

hard look at after this is over. Michael in Texas, number six, has got a good question. We'll give this one to you, Dr. Kaldorf. Go ahead, Michael. Yes, thanks, Megan. You talked, you talked about it and everybody was talking about it this spring. Herd immunity, herd immunity. When we get to herd immunity, we'll have a handle on this thing. I haven't heard a peep about herd immunity in months. When are we there? Or is that concept no longer valid because this thing is taking on a political life and science is no longer valid in the reasoning and coming to decisions on how we move forward good question martin yeah so first of all herd immunity is not a strategy it's just a established scientific

phenomenon yes like gravity and herd immunity is the end of this pandemic. So once we reach herd immunity, that's when we are in the endemic states. So when will we reach herd immunity? Well, when a large part of the population has already had the disease, that's when we reach herd immunity. Now, there was a hope with the vaccines that the vaccines could contribute to that. But what we have found now, and there was a study of the Qatar that was very good to see how long does the protection last. So that showed that for severe disease and death, the vaccine had very good protection, at least six months, up in the 90s, percent protection, which is good. So it's not 100%, but it's very good. On the other hand,

the protection against symptomatic disease wanes rather quickly, within three months or so, sort of goes gradually down. So we now know that, and that's sort of disappointing, that while the vaccines are very good at preventing death and serious disease, it's not doing a great job at preventing symptomatic disease or transmission. And we saw also that from Iceland, because it's already unique countries in the small island in the middle of the Atlantic, and they have managed to keep COVID out quite successfully for a long time before they got vaccinated. They have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, but still after having so many people vaccinated, the COVID was still circulating among the population, even though most are vaccinated. Even if you are vaccinated, you're still going to get COVID

and then you will have natural immunity, which is stronger, but you will still get COVID and you might get it very mildly or you might feel bad for a week. But the key thing is with the vaccines, you are less likely to die. We're not thinking about it in terms of herd immunity really anymore. Delta, it seems like kind of changed that. What about, that leads us to the discussion of boosters and Bill in New York, caller number eight, has got a question about that. Go ahead, Bill. Oh, thanks, Megan. My question is this, and speaking with my doctor, he recommends, I had the Moderna, but he recommends getting the booster as soon as that's approved, of getting the booster.

How old are you? Oh, I should have said that. Yeah, I'm in my mid-70s, and I do have pre-existing conditions. Okay. So, yeah, that's important. You're right. And, but he recommends that and he also recommends the flu shot. But he said I should wait at least three weeks in between the flu shot and the booster shot. effects are coming from? Or do these doctors that you have as a guest think that you shouldn't get the flu shot along with the booster shot? Okay. Dr. Gandhi, can you speak to quickly the flu versus COVID, but also generally boosters? Because, you know, somebody like me, 50 years old,

I don't think I need a booster. But somebody, you know, like our like our friend Bill here in his mid 70s, I can see a very different answer. Yeah, I completely agree with you on that latter point that, you know, where do we give boosters and third shots or even higher doses for older people? It goes back to those immunology concepts and immunocompromised people, because you really want to deepen the ability for your cells to go into memory and stay there for the rest of your life. So I do think that you definitely should get a booster. And I said everyone over 65 or who's immunocompromised, I really believe in it. Harder for me to justify it for a young, healthy 50 year old, including myself. And, you know, healthcare workers, if they're around a lot of people, it may be helpful if they, because again, you're going to get more of a breakthrough infection if you're around a lot of people

have COVID. So if you're in a high incidence area, you're intubating people with COVID, that's a good time to get a booster. But I actually, infectious disease doctors just write long notes in a row. So going back to the question of flu and COVID, you can get them together. There was a study that showed you can get them both at once. Oh, you can get both vaccines together. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I was going to say, that sounds like a nightmare. Yeah, but both vaccines at once. But I also advise my parents to do what you just said. And your doctor said I got, I asked them, they're 87 and 80. I asked them to get the flu shot first and a COVID shot three weeks later, because I'm

more worried about flu right now than I am about COVID, even for them, because they're in a low circling area. Okay, that's helpful. All right, we're going to squeeze in a quick break and be right back with our two doctors, Monica Gandhi and Martin Kaldorf. Don't go away. We're still taking your calls at 833-44-MEGYN,

833-446-3496. Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, joined now by Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Martin Kaldorf. Dr. Gandhi, let me ask you about just a follow up. I talked to my producer in the break and we were both into this micro dosing situation for our kids and the 10 milligrams. How do we get that? How do you get that? I mean, I just thought it was sort of like, okay, I got to go to Pfizer and get a shot in the arm. I didn't know I had any say over the milligrams. The 30 microgram dose is what was authorized and approved for adults.

And then they use that same dose for 12 to 15 year olds. I think they took a shortcut. And so that's why I spaced out my child's doses at 13. And then the FDA and enough people got mad at them, frankly, and said, Hey, you, you don't, we don't get the same dose of like Tylenol for someone who's little and someone who's bigger. So they actually deliberately, it was kind of without fanfare, brought down their dosing. They were going to test a 10 and a 20 microgram dose in 5 to 11-year-olds, and they brought it down to 10 micrograms. So that gives me more comfort that for 5 to 11, it's going to be safer.

And even when my, because I think by the time it comes out, my child's going to be 12, I'm still going to do the 10 microgram dose because he's tiny. He's so tiny. Oh, so we can weigh in on that. I mean, I guess you probably can't do that at the CVS. Can you probably got to go to the pediatrician and I know enough about medicine to say, you know, um, there we do weight-based dosing and we never did this. So I'm going to use a little dose for a little person and, and my So I'm going to use a little dose for a little person. And my personal is bigger. So bigger dose for a bigger person. It just makes sense. And the rest of us can just play this segment. You just bring a little copy of this on your phone. Yes, play this segment. Go talk to your pediatrician. And yes, I agree.

Exactly. Okay. I want to go to caller number two. And I understand your concerns exactly, Eric, from New York. Can you i understand your concerns exactly eric from new york can you voice what your concerns are yeah i was i went to uh oregon to a wedding over the weekend and came back my wife was diagnosed with um covid yesterday morning i she got, she's a teacher. We got back Wednesday night. She went in yesterday morning and sure enough, she had the virus. And the problem that I have here is we go through these things in the airport where they say, oh, stay six feet apart, wear your mask all over the place. Then they cram you into an airplane where they put you in like sardines. And then when we came back, she gets the thing about contact tracing.

And she's like, well, who knows all the people that you came into contact with in Oregon and Washington. But just cutting to the chase, your concern is you don't know if all these restrictions even work. And that's a question you get from both sides, Dr. Kaldorf. Like, right, the people who want the restrictions gone say they don't work anyway. The people who want COVID gone say

they're not tight enough and they're not working. So what's your thought on whether the restrictions work? Well, first of all, vaccines for older people are very important. So that saves life. The other thing that saves lives are monoclonal antibodies for people who have become sick if you get it early enough. So those are two things that are very important that saves lives. When it comes to masks, for example, there has been no studies showing that it has any efficacy for children. And if we look, for example, at Sweden, during the first wave in the spring of 2020, there were 1.8 million children ages 1 to 15 who were in school that whole time without social distancing,

without masks, without any testing, and exactly zero of them died from COVID. There were only a few hospitalizations. So there's no evidence that the mask works, and there's evidence that if you don't wear a mask, children are not at risk. And the teachers were not at higher risk than the average of other professions.

For adults, there are two studies, two randomized studies on masks. One was from Denmark, which showed that masks had either no or very minimal efficacy. It was not statistically significant. The other one was a study from Bangladesh, which also showed that the mask had between no to very limited efficacy.

The point estimate was 9% reduction with a confidence interval of 95% confidence between 0 and 18. So that means that at worst, the MAST do nothing. And at best, they provide some very minimal protection. At the same time, if you have a 9% reduction, I mean, you would never approve a vaccine with a 9% reduction. And if you have a 9% reduction, it basically means that you might delay the time a little bit when you get the disease, but it's not really going to happen.

Well, that's why it may make sense if you're in the elderly population, but it's so infuriating to see it nonstop on our kids. Can I just ask you realistically, Dr. Gandhi, and I know that you advocated for no masks before Delta on the kids, but like realistically, you tell me in a state like mine, Connecticut, which is blue, and they're very, very hardcore, all the restrictions. When are when are these kids going to be able to take off these masks? Yeah, I mean, this is a great question. So, you know, the, the evidence for masks is more on like the physical properties of masks and physical science, as opposed to these studies, I agree, these RCTs, that may not be the best way to study masks. And it's true that before Delta, I thought we were getting into very low cases and I was wrong and Delta brought it up. So, um, so I think right now masks are fine on children. I really do. And my children are in masks, but we need an end point because if you don't do an end point, what you've just said to someone is their life will never go back to normal.

We're just not agreeing to that. We're not, we're just not agreeing to that. So what is it though? Cause they won't say it. They won't say it what it is. So I have a very clear, like put it out there metric. When the hospitalizations come down, that means there's very low circulating virus. I wouldn't go on cases because it depends on how much you test. And if we come down to five to 10 over a hundred thousand, you're there in Connecticut, I'm there in California, we're in New York, there in New York. Then you take the mask and come off children because you're no longer protecting adults. Can you say it again? What were the numbers again? I have a rate, which is five to 10 over a hundred thousand hospitalizations for COVID. Why? Because,

and I wrote this with Ashish Jha in April, but because the flu hospitalizations are 20 to 40 over 100,000, but COVID is much more deadly than the flu for adults. So that's where we brought it down to 5 to 10, a much lower rate where life gets to go back to normal, even for children. I'm going to leave it there because we're up against a hard break, but this is so fascinating. Thank you both for your expertise and all of your information. And thanks to our listeners for calling in with such good questions. Tomorrow on the program, Glenn Beck. Don't forget to download the show on Apple, Pandora, Stitcher, also YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly if you want to watch it.

Thanks so much. See you tomorrow. you