The Megyn Kelly Show - COVID Truth and Propaganda, and a Trans Swimmer Update, with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Cynthia Millen, and Nancy Hogshead-Makar | Ep. 232

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University, Cynthia Millen, former USA Swimming official, Nancy Hogshead-Makar, CEO of Champion Women and Olympic Gold medalist in swimming, and Andrew Branca, self-defense law expert, to talk about the COVID truth starting to come out now on masks, lockdowns, and importance of cases, the "propaganda campaign" against Bhattacharya led by Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, COVID testing pros and cons, masks and hypocrisy and AOC in Florida, gender discrimination amid trans inclusion in collegiate swimming and the latest on the story of Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer breaking records, as well as the verdict in the Kim Potter trial and "reckless manslaughter," 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, Happy New Year! I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. And welcome back! It was a great vacation for yours truly, my family as well. We went out to Montana, we did a bunch of skiing, posted some fun shots on social media if you have any desire to see those, and just spent some great time with family. And I hope you did the same. It's always so heartening, right? Just hanging out with the family, my kids, my husband, friends too that we've gotten to know now over the years in Montana. And you come back feeling renewed and just sort of ready to go. I missed doing the show

though. I have to be honest. You know, there've been shows I've done like, well, you know, let's not get specific, but there've been some shows I've done where I've been like, ah, back to work. And this one I really missed. And so while it's not fun getting up super early to get the kids off to school, it is fun coming in and sitting behind the microphone and speaking to all of you. So let's get to it. We're going to start today with the latest in COVID mania, what it has revealed about our society and why I believe it should make us feel good about the future. First off, it has been fascinating to watch as many hysterical people come to the grips with the realities of COVID. Like you can catch and spread it even if you're vaccinated. The vaccines help prevent severe and deadly outcomes.

And that is all. COVID hits red states no harder than it hits blue states. Most masks do zero to prevent COVID. Yes, all of these are becoming clear now, even to the leftists. Lockdowns are an unnecessary disaster. School closures, same. Hospitalizations of children are being grossly overstated. They are including children hospitalized with COVID instead of just children hospitalized because of COVID. And finally, relying on the number of COVID

cases as proof of COVID severity is pointless. The relevant metrics are hospitalizations and deaths. COVID is here to stay. We need to live with it, not live cautiously biding our time until it's gone. If you've been consuming independent or more conservative press, you have known all of this. If you have been relying on leftist corporate media for your information these past two years, this may be news to you. Take, for example, Nicole Wallace. This is an educated person who once called herself a Republican and worked for the Bush administration. Now she's in lockstep with the Joy Reads of the world. Take a listen to this person. I'm a Fauci groupie. I'm a thrice vaccinated mask adherent. I buy KN95 masks by the, you know, caseload. They're in every pocket. I wear them everywhere except when I sit down. And I am certain that this is not a variant I can outrun. First of all, the stomach turning, embarrassing virtue signaling. That's a good girl, Nicole. Good girl. You worship a government bureaucrat who has lied about COVID

repeatedly. And you got all your shots and you wear your N95 mask and you never leave home without them. And you muzzle your children all day long. What a good girl you are. Let me rub your belly. But what's really happening here is she is starting to see the truth. And by the way, that truth existed before Omicron, when you could still get COVID despite the vaccine and despite the mask, Nicole, even if you are a Democrat. The dirty little COVID veil is starting to fall away from her eyes. And certain truths that have been obvious to the rest of us for months are dawning on her. And it's not just Nicole Wallace. Joe Biden, who eviscerated President Trump for COVID deaths on his watch and ran for office on the promise that he would shut down the virus, finally

admitted there are limits to what the federal government can do. There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level. State level. There's no federal solution. This is the same person who said Donald Trump should be booted from office because some 200,000 Americans had died of COVID at the point he made the argument. Far fewer than would die on Joe Biden's watch, which, by the way, was all post-vaccine. 220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else,

I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who's responsible for not taking control, in fact, not saying I take no responsibility initially, anyone who's responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America. And this president, if he's reelected, you know what will happen. Cases and deaths will remain far too high. Now we're over 800,000 deaths in America and the cases are as rampant as they have ever been here. Now that that's the case, it's, well, no president can solve this. As Rich Lowry of National Review asked this week, and where does Trump go for his apology? The rise in Omicron, a relatively mild virus, thankfully for the vast majority of people who get it, has forced even the prophet Fauci to admit that the obsession

with case numbers as a metric for community response is off base. As you get further on and the infections become less severe, it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases. More shockingly, he is finally, finally, almost two years into this pandemic, admitted the need to balance the goal of minimizing covid with the need to live our lives as Americans, a free people. The CDC last week, with Fauci's blessing, shortened the quarantine time for people with COVID and those in close contact with them down to five days from 10. I mean, obviously, if you have symptoms, you should not be out. But if you are asymptomatic and you are infected, we want to get people back to the jobs, particularly those with essential jobs, to keep our society running smoothly. So I think that was a very prudent

and good choice on the part of the CDC. You see, he's saying there are other things to consider beside this obsession with zero covid. We have to keep society rolling. We have to keep business open. We can't just hover shelter in place and live in fear. That's essentially what he's saying, that there is a need for balance. Believe me, from Fauci, that's huge. Now, some leftists told for months by Fauci and others that the virus remains contagious for at least 10 days. You've got to quarantine for at least 10 days And now they're saying, well, we might moderate it. Maybe we're going to say five days and then you can come back to the workforce if you get a positive test. Well, why didn't they say that to begin with? Because there aren't any tests because they know they didn't create tests. They didn't encourage the creation of tests and they can't really require tests of people because nobody can get them. That's their own creation. That's their own problem that they created. So we'll see if they if they change that or not. But the truth

is that that 10 days was a made up standard from the beginning, as was the six feet distancing rule, as was the cloth mask rule, as was the 70% for herd immunity rule. I could go on. The point is, we have been lied to. We have been actively misled. We have been led around like mules on a tether by government bureaucrats like Fauci who want to shut down your job while he makes north of $400 around mass lists at dinners and the Met Gala and so on. They want to scare parents into sticking an experimental vaccine into their kids arms over and over and over. Not one, but two shots and then a mandatory third or no sports or school or indoor fun of any kind, despite the data that unvaccinated young people face a risk far less severe than that of fully vaccinated adults. By the way, the Justice Department just admitted in a filing in support of its vaccine mandate that people between the ages of 18 and 30 have about the same risk of, you know, from COVID

as those who are 50 plus who are fully vaccinated. So the unvaccinated 30 year old has about the same risk as the fully vaccinated 50 year old. And yes, and yet we're firing people. We're firing 18 to 30 year olds for not getting the vaccine. They had to admit it in court. You see, just like Trump and his election story, when they get into court, they start to tell the truth. And the Biden administration is telling the truth about the real risk young people face. And it's minuscule and does not justify vaccine mandates or any of this nonsense. And their lies are starting to be exposed. So while we continue to see outrages, I mean, not everyone's listening

to reason. They're just starting to. We continue to see outrages like schools closing right now, despite the harm we know this causes the children. Thanks a lot, unions. Or letters like the one from our own boys school proclaiming that, oh, of course, that's a quote, of course, the boys will remain masked for the foreseeable future. Or the notice in my friend's New York City building mandating that all contractors, delivery personnel and employees servicing residents in the building must now be fully vaccinated. OK, so now you're a cleaning lady, you're a plumber, you're a pizza delivery guy.

They got to get vaxxed to do their jobs. Despite all of that, the house of cards is coming down. The realities of covid are becoming undeniable. When even the leftists start to realize that covid comes for all, even Democrats in New York City, even members of the media. The politics will moderate. Voters will make sure of it. There are enough conservatives and independent and center leftists out there that voters will make sure of it. And for that reason, we should be hopeful that this madness will soon be over. Joining me now is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University. Doc, it's great to have you here. One of the headlines I want to get to with you is not just the latest in COVID, but the revelation that you specifically were targeted

by Fauci and others at his level, including Francis Collins, for your position with the other doctors in the Great Barrington recommendation. And so you know personally what it's like to have the world look at Fauci as a god. And when he comes against you, there's fallout. I want to get to that in a minute. But let's just start with the latest on Omicron and people's realization, I think, slowly but surely, that COVID is ubiquitous. There's no outrunning it. There's only learning to live with it, which you and the other great Barrington docs saw very early on. So the thing about COVID is that we knew even from April of 2020 that a very substantial number of people had already been infected outside of the ken of public health. There were so many people in, for instance, I did a study in the early days of the epidemic in Santa Clara County where we found 2.5% of the

population had already been infected. And in LA County, 4% of the population had already been infected by April of 2020. 50 times more cases, 40 times more cases than public health authorities knew about. If that's the case, that it's so easy to spread, the lesson should have been right then, there's no chance of stopping the disease from spreading down to zero. Instead, we have pursued for two years this very foolish path where we thought with this illusion of control that we had some technology to stop the spread of the disease and bring it down to zero. Well, we don't. And instead of pursuing normal, reasonable things like protecting the vulnerable, especially the older population, we decided we were going to shut society down in order to end the virus. Well, in retrospect, that's turned out to be

an enormous mistake. Absolutely. You've been proven right. And despite that, you're not going to get an apology, even though we now know, I was stunned when I saw this, just because it's rare you actually find the proof in writing. But you you came under severe attack from Francis Collins, now retiring director of the NIH you and the other doctors behind the Great Barrington piece who said, you know, let's do focus protection. Let's focus on protecting the most vulnerable, but the rest of society should remain open, which is basically where they've landed. Okay, so it's been revealed now, thanks to, this is the American Institute for Economic Research published emails from some of these scientists revealing that they want to discredit you. And they had a conference in October, early October, 2nd through the 4th, 2020. This is four days after the conference. fringe epidemiologists and sent a directive to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff to publish.

He wanted a quick and devastating published takedown of the Great Barrington Declaration's premises. He stayed on it. Fauci was on board. He wrote the same night to let Collins know that there was already a devastating takedown of the declaration in Wired by some science reporter, not a doctor, not a doctor at Stanford named Matt Reynolds. And then by mid-October 2020, Collins emailed again to boast about calling the three scientists, you and your two colleagues, fringe in the Washington Post, told Fauci the ongoing campaign to take down the Great Barrington Declaration won't be appreciated in the Trump White House. But Fauci assured, don't worry, the Trump White House is too busy dealing with other things to worry about Great Barrington, and went on to make sure that pieces were being published,

trying to diminish you and smear you as a doctor and the theory behind the Great Barrington piece. So your feeling upon learning that there was a coordinated campaign against you? You know, I kind of sensed, even from the last year, that there was some very strange things happening. Reporters started calling me very shortly after we wrote the Great Pantheon Declaration, asking me why I wanted to let the virus rip through society. The Great Pantheon Declaration doesn't say that we want to let the virus rip society. Quite the contrary. We said we wanted to take action to protect the vulnerable. We had a lot of discussion

about that. And what I actually hoped out of that was a broader conversation with public health officials who know the living circumstances of the elderly in their communities and are perfectly capable of devising creative ways to protect the vulnerable. Instead, we got a propaganda campaign. We had people accusing me of wanting to expose people to the virus, wanting to let the virus rip through society. And it was, what we learned, it was a propaganda campaign initiated and directed by the top levels of scientific leadership within the federal government, including Francis Collins and Tony Fauci. That is absolutely shocking to me.

What it essentially did is it sent a signal to all other people, scientists and others, who were having qualms with this lockdown-focused policy and told them, you know, it's a nice career you got there. If you were to speak up, you know, that nice NIH grant you have, well, I mean, I don't know, like it would be nasty if something were to happen to it. In effect, they had created a conflict of interest where you have these people who are charged with tens of billions of dollars of scientific funding. The careers of scientists are made or broken on whether they can get funding from the NIH.

And so now you have the head of the NIH essentially saying, this is a fringe view to someone, like, okay, you can ignore me, but you had Martin Kulldorff at Harvard University and Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University signing on, and tens of thousands of others, epidemiologists and scientists signing on, essentially to call all of that opposition fringe. What was at play here? What they wanted to do was to create a false sense that there was a scientific consensus when there wasn't a scientific consensus. They effectively lied and created a propaganda campaign in order to get their policy. And unfortunately, they got their way. It's stunning to see how political they are. I mean, we've sort of seen it over the past two

years, but it's stunning to see it in writing. And to talk about, as you point out, you and your two colleagues who came on this show, right when you published it in October of 2020, we had you guys on. We talked about it. These are not fringe epidemics. I mean, we've got Harvard, Oxford, Stanford. Last I looked, it wasn't. These aren't fringe organizations. Realize you don't speak for your entire institution. But you came out with a thoughtful alternative to the devastating lockdowns that we've seen. And when you came on my show, you highlighted the devastation that the lockdowns were causing. That was one of your great concerns that, yes, we're only looking at harm from COVID, but we need to look at

the hunger, for example, that's going to happen in foreign countries as a result of this and so on, and the deaths that we're going to see as a result. That's not fringe. That's a legitimate concern that they just chose to disregard. And now when you see it in writing that they wanted to, I mean, they wanted to ruin you guys. And I'm sure you still will deal with some of the fallouts, I think, in large part, negative. He has silenced scientific discussion around his policies. He has pushed forward policies like lockdowns that are blind to the harms they have caused, as if they were the only responsible thing to do when they were not. There were alternatives available, like focus protection. And, you know, the fact that he is the head of the NIH where he controls, or they have the NIAID,

where he controls the budgets of epidemiologists and virologists and others who have been, you know, put elevated to the top of, like, their ability to comment on COVID policy, that itself has created this enormous conflict of interest. He should never have been in charge of COVID policy. I mean, in effect, he's been the de facto president of the United States for the last two years, setting the most important policy followed by the United States and actually around the world. It's far past time for him to step down. Have you heard from him or from Francis Collins in the wake of this revelation? No. In fact, I was really surprised to see Francis Collins go on TV shortly after the

FOIA email documents come out and double down. He called us fringe again. He defended himself saying that this was an irresponsible, let it rip strategy. He continued the propaganda campaign instead of forthrightly apologizing, which is what he should have done. It's one of these things where I have to say, I've long admired Francis Collins. I even at once upon a time admired Tony Fauci, especially Francis Collins as a giant in his field. He was a genealogist that he was a he was a geneticist that's responsible for the human genome project. But I think in the context of COVID policy, he was far out of his league. He does not know public health. It's very clear that he did not understand the lockdown, the harms, the devastating harms of lockdown to the poor and vulnerable around the world was blind to it. And then he acted in this irresponsible way, silencing debate when instead he should have been embracing it. And the irony, the irony of now Fauci on TV saying, well, the reason we're shortening the

quarantine period from 10 days to five is because people need to get back out there to work. You can't have a society run like this where this many people who are infected are sitting out for 10 days. Finally admitted admitting some balance is required. Zero covid is not possible. You can't design every policy around how do we minimize the disease's spread. You have to be realistic about the fact that society must go on. But you made that recognition in October of 2020 and were called fringe and publicly attacked by Fauci and Collins and others doing their bidding because of it. There's a lot to go over

with Dr. J Bhattacharya on COVID, on the latest, on Omicron, and what we're seeing now with the responsive public policy. And we'll get to this as well. Remember how AOC loved to attack Ted Cruz when he left Texas during the crisis down there? Wait until you hear how she's responding to her critics who just accused her of doing the exact same thing. You saw the pictures of her in Florida on vacay. Plus, later today, we're going to get you up to speed with my own reaction and Andrew Branca's to the Kim Potter verdict. And we'll have the latest in the saga of the transgender swimmer breaking collegiate records at UPenn as two top swimming executives speak out right here. Stay with us. is indeed far more mild version of this virus than Delta, that you are very, very unlikely to

be hospitalized or to die from Omicron unless you are among the very elderly or very immunocompromised and haven't been vaccinated. Those are the people who need to worry, who have one or two of those three factors. For the rest of us, if you get Omicron, it's probably going to be basically like a cold. Do I have my facts right? I mean, Omicron, thank God, it appears much milder. The mechanism seems to be that, unlike the previous variants, it doesn't seem to be very efficient at infecting your lungs. It affects your upper mucosa, but not your lungs. So in that sense, it's a really, I mean, we should be thankful. I mean, of course, it's not never thankful for getting a disease, but you know,

like if you had to choose between Delta and Omicron, I think I'd pick Omicron. I think the, as you said, Megan, and you're right, there still are vulnerable people and there's still Delta floating around. So it's not that we have to let down our guard entirely. And if you are unvaccinated, especially if you've not got COVID before, I really strongly recommend it, not in order to prevent you from getting Omicron or any other variant,

because the vaccines don't do that. They don't stop you from getting the disease. But what they do do is they protect you against severe outcomes should you get the disease. So that's just a prudent thing to do, especially if you're in a vulnerable group. And so I think that that's completely reasonable. Now, what do we do with that? Well, for one, these absolutely ridiculous, coercive, anti-scientific vaccine mandates just have to end. There's no good argument for a

vaccine mandate even before Omicron because the vaccines don't stop disease spread. Now, with Omicron, given that the disease is mild and we have such a large fraction of the population either vaccinated or recovered from COVID, and you have a relatively mild version of the variant going around, I don't see any good argument to fire people on the basis of the fact that they didn't take the vaccine, which is what we've been doing. The staff shortages, by the way, you mentioned earlier about we're finally taking into account other harms from the policies. You know, the staff shortages caused in hospitals systems in part because of these vaccine mandates.

It's a lot of these sort of short sighted policies I think should absolutely end, especially in light of Omicron. Yeah, they're saying some of the so-called flight mare problems that we saw over the holiday season with the flights not taking off are due in part to staff shortages. They don't have enough pilots. They don't have enough flight attendants to actually staff the flights. So we have to get more realistic because everyone's getting Omicron. I mean, it's you can be double vaxxed and boosted and Omicron is likely to come your way and there's not much you can do about it. The vaccine isn't very effective at preventing Omicron. You can spread, unlike with the very first variant of this virus, where we didn't know it looked like the vaccines might provide some measure of protection against transmission of that version of COVID. That's no longer the case. You can still spread Delta. You can absolutely spread Omicron if you've been vaccinated,

if you've been boosted. That's just a reality. But thankfully, it's not as severe a disease as you point out, Delta. But now here's what I hear. Tell me if this is true. That so far, I heard this actually on The Daily, the New York Times podcast today, that if you've had Delta, it doesn't necessarily give you great odds of staving off Omicron. But if you've had Omicron, you have better odds of staving off Delta.

I mean, there's still, the studies on that need to be done more carefully still. I don't, I'm not convinced one way or the other on this. I think that previous infection, no matter what variant, provides protection against future variants in terms of severe disease. That seems very clear. When reinfection happens, it tends to be milder. And it's relatively rare. The literature before Omicron suggested that at one year, only somewhere between 0.3% and 1% of people were reinfected. So you get infected, recover, and then a full year later, only 1% of people get the infection again, and the infections tended to be milder.

That was the literature before Omicron. It looks like from the preliminary literature, Omicron does evade the protection you got from Delta and from the other variants in terms of infection. It seems to me, at least as my gestalt, not yet based on, I don't think any solid studies as yet, but I think based on what I've seen thus far, it seems like there's a higher reinfection rate with Omicron, even if you had Delta before. Whether it goes the other way around, Megan, I just haven't seen any literature to suggest one way or the other. This is what they were reporting today in the New York Times reporting that if you get Omicron, you have a lesser chance of then getting Delta than if it went the other way around, which of course will lead a lot of people to say, well, great, if I have to get one variant, I'll get Omicron and I'll prevent the double, you know, I'll prevent another Omicron and I'll prevent a Delta because there are a lot of people who

either can't get vaccinated or have just chosen not to get vaccinated. And, you know, they're not afraid of COVID, you know, for whatever reason, maybe it's the 18 to 30 year old said that they don't need to be afraid of COVID unless they're immunocompromised in some way. So, I mean, you can understand it um the the rate of spread however is at an all-time high in the country that's why fauci's saying stop looking at case numbers and now it so happens most of us agree with him and have been saying don't look at case numbers as the metric all along that's that hasn't been the right metric from the very beginning um but now even he's saying it because what? You tell me, how bad will it get? And

should we be basing any policy, school closures or otherwise, on number of cases at this point? Absolutely not. It makes no sense to base the school closures or any other kind of policy on case spread alone. I think the thinking was that you look at case spread because you want to get a sense of how well we're doing with our masking or lockdown policies to try to stop the disease from spreading around, right? In New York, in the early days, every day there would be a press conference bragging about how we were getting the virus under control. And for a long time, every time the cases went down, it was a success of the governor that was running the state, as long as it was a sort of blue state governor. And if the cases went up, then obviously it was a failure of the governor or the policies, usually in a red state. I think that kind of politicization based around a scientific fallacy that we have some possibility of controlling the spread of

this virus at all has been completely destructive to the confidence that people have in public health. Public health should not be politicized in the way it has been. It should not be used for political purposes the way it has been. And I think, so from a scientific point of view, from an epidemiologic point of view, tracking cases by themselves may be interesting. It's something epidemiologists can talk to each other about. But to use it to drive policy and especially to use it to drive panic and fear in the population has been completely irresponsible. And I'm really glad to see that you know, tracking back from that. Now, I am seeing that when you look at rates of hospitalization and death,

the numbers are promising. I mean, nobody wants to see people still dying or being severely hurt by COVID. But it's a reality, especially if you're very old or very sick, and haven't been vaccinated that, you know, it poses a real threat. So if you're in those groups, for sure, you should be getting vaccinated, and you should be looking into one of the therapeutics. God forbid you contract COVID because especially this Pfizer drug can really, really prevent you from dying. However, if you look at the numbers out of South Africa, and they're the ones who first alerted us to Omicron, they're encouraging. A South African study just found that the hospitalized patients during the Omicron surge were far less likely, far less to have severe illness or to die. 74% of hospitalized patients required oxygen therapy during Delta, during that wave.

The number in South Africa dropped to 17.6% amid Omicron. That's huge, from 74 to 17. The median length of stay in the hospital prior to Omicron was seven to eight days. Now it's three. The death rate of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in South Africa during Delta was 29.1% during Omicron. It's 2.7. And on it goes. So that's all very, very encouraging. I don't know, you tell me whether we should be fearing severe disease or death from Omicron in this country? I mean, I think a typical person No, I mean, we shouldn't be we shouldn't be fearing this disease in that sense at all. Like we it's a disease that we need to manage. You know, there may be groups immunocompromised people and older people that still face some

threat. And of course, for them, I think vaccination is absolutely the most important thing they can do. But Megan, I think you said something really, really important there. We now have in our toolkit, a lot of things that we didn't previously have to help treat the disease, even after you should get it. You mentioned the Pfizer drug that was, I don't actually, I'm not sure, I don't know if it's yet been approved in u.s but i think it's sort of headed in that direction and i think uh there are other countries that have approved it i never know if it's an official uh approval or not but yes you can get it now as of as of late december you can get that drug in the united states if you get sick oh good i mean so that's that's quite good news um the other thing is is there are other drugs

as well so like for instance it looks like the evidence on a drug called fluvoxamine, a cheap drug that's been available for a long time, it seems like it's effective against severe disease, if you were to get sick. We know that vitamin D, for instance, it sort of improves outcomes with COVID, if you're especially vitamin D deficient. So we're seeing a lot of like developments that help people if they were to get sick, right? So vaccine doesn't stop you from getting sick. So these are important even for the vaccinated population. And of course, there's monoclonal antibodies, which Governor DeSantis sort of rolled out very, very sharply in the summer. For reasons I don't understand, the Biden administration has pulled back on this. And I think they finally relented and put some of that out again. This is one of

these things where it's so short-sighted, I can't wrap my mind around it. This is a drug, this monoclonal antibodies, it actually has been shown to reduce severe disease and death if you were to get sick. It maybe has some diminished capacity against Omicron, but Delta is still floating around. And yet the Biden administration pulled back supplies. The federal government took over control of purchasing of it and distribution of it. And they pulled back supplies of it. They should have been stocking up all summer long for this very predictable winter surge that's come along. It really does make you think it's all about politics. You know, it's like, well, it was a DeSantis thing, a death Santas thing.

And so we can't be associated with that, you know, because he has to be demonized. The whole Florida policy, just like you three guys and gal, I should say two guys and a gal at Great Barrington Declaration, you need to be demonized. Anything once they've decided it's anti what they're saying for the moment has to be demonized rather than considered, tested, kicked around, you know, the normal scientific process. And it's really to the detriment, A, sadness that has become politicized in this way, because I think that kind of politicization has made it difficult to actually consider alternate ideas that actually might work better than the ones we've adopted. the attacks on me personally and on the Great Banking Declaration generally, and on early treatment, even on the vaccines themselves, have been fueled by this politicization of the discussion of public health. And frankly, I don't even blame politicians. It's public health itself that has been responsible for this. Does anyone looking at the actions of Dr. Fauci doubt what political party he favors?

Is there anyone who looks at the actions of public health generally and how they treated Dr. Scott Atlas last year, for instance, just for the crime of advising a president, have any doubt about the sympathies of public health and their politics, that kind of political leaning in a profession that should ostensibly be politically neutral fuels distrust, fuels the kind of bad outcomes that we've seen. And that's something that I think public health needs to look itself very carefully in the mirror and deal with going forward, because public health needs to be trusted by everybody. It should be for the public at large, not for just a part of the public with whom public health agrees with politically. The point is underscored by the fact that AOC,

who has spent the past two years ripping on DeSantis and any Republicans who push back on the Fauci narratives, decided to take her vacation. She's, of course, from New York State, from the Bronx. Well, really from Yorktown Heights, which is a Tony area of Westchester. She decided to take her vacation down in Florida. Where did she go? Not the great state of New York, my home state, but down to Florida. And DeSantis' office sent out a tweet saying something like, welcome to Florida where we're free. And she decided to respond. This is not for you, Jay, but basically for our audience. She decided to respond by saying those who were attacking her were Republicans mad that they can't date her and that they are projecting their sexual frustrations onto her. OK, so it doesn't have anything to do with sexual frustrations

or desire to date you. It has to do with your hypocrisy. People are allowed to call that out without being called perverts, which is basically what she did. And you look down at Florida and I'll tell you now I'm in the state of Connecticut and I feel envious. I wish I I wish I didn't have so much family and so many friends up here because I, too, would like to live free.

I, too, would like to take off the mask and live free the way they do in Florida. But you know, my mom's here. My husband's mom is here. We stay in the Northeast and I'm so sick, Jay, of the masking. You know, like, like I said in the, in the intro, our school sends out this letter like, oh, of course, of course these boys are going to stay masked indefinitely. I just don't know what to do to make them see reason. I don't know what it's going to take. I mean, I think, you know what, I applaud anyone who wants to live their life. I mean, I think that is in our lives, we have to decide what's important to us. And if a politician wants to go to Florida and have a, you know, have a vacation, I'm not going to, I'm in no role to criticize. But you know, my wife would love to go,

like move to Florida as well. California has been in many ways, much more miserable than I, I mean, I've lived here for many, many years and it has been a kind of a miserable time the last two years with so many of the policies focused on control of one virus, as opposed to thinking more broadly about public health generally, I think it creates a living situation that doesn't feel free. And so it's not surprising to me that people want, find attractive a place like Florida where public health is taken much more holistically. I have a friend who's out in LA right now on a vacation and she was hiking outside. It's beautiful there, you know, if you want to hike outside. And she said most of the people were wearing masks outside while they're hiking. It's like, hello, you don't need my even my brother in law, who I love. We saw him over the holiday and he was offering us these little things that you can put under your mask that make it easier to breathe. I don't know, it's like these little plastic things. And I said, Ken, I don't want to make the mask more user-friendly. I want the mask off. That's

my goal. I refuse to submit to fashion or comfort or anything else with these masks in the meantime. I want it off my face and I want it off my kids' faces. And I just don't think short of moving or politics, I'm going to be able to convince these heads of school out here that it's the right thing to do. What do you make of the epidemic, there were dozens of randomized studies with the flu. Randomized studies conducted in community settings, even in hospital settings, where they showed very little efficacy against control of viral spread. Back then, it was the flu, right, that they'd done these randomized studies, dozens of them. Since COVID, there have been two randomized studies, and both have found either small or no effect in terms of the efficacy of masking and protecting against disease spread, both protecting you and protecting others.

Very, very low efficacy. intervention, universally adopted, pushing it for universally adopted with such low levels of efficacy, it's going to breed distrust, especially when you're told, well, it's not that problematic to wear. It's like, you know, there's no cost to wearing it. There's no harm. Well, anyone, I mean, truly, is there anyone that can honestly say that they prefer wearing a mask? I mean, it's okay in terms of like, there's no discomfort, no difficulty breathing

at all. I just don't believe that that's true. I mean, I've worn masks lots and I don't like it. I mean, I don't think most people wearing it actually honestly can say they like it. It would be reasonable in some settings to wear a mask, like if you're a surgeon and you're managing a patient with a surgical field in front of you, you don't want to put bacteria into the field or something, that makes sense to wear a mask in those kind of settings. But at the population level, two-year-olds, toddlers wearing masks, the United States is unique in this, by the way. Only the CDC says two to five-year-olds should wear masks. Even the World Health Organization doesn't say that. Yeah. And now they're talking about out in LA mandating the N95 masks. I mean,

the ones that really suck your face. I mean, that's the complete coverage that we get through with sort of the cloth masks, which are as loose and as comfortable as possible with my kids. But N95, you got to be kidding, man, on all the children. And Fauci's saying we're never going to be able to take the masks off on air travel.'s like you're you will not be in charge forever Fauci you will retire with your 300 and okay so right now he makes 434,312 dollars a year unbelievable and he'll be retiring with at least 350,000 per year in retirement but go you enjoy that Dr. Fauci and you realize that at some point you will not be running public health policy and you will not, you and Pete Buttigieg, will not be able to keep your hands over our mouths for every domestic flight. There will

be a return to order and reason at some point because the public has the final say. All right, Dr. J, we've got, we're going to talk about testing because now this is becoming the new holy grail I've noticed on the left. Now it like testing oh we fell down we needed more testing but i i mean i'm more in the camp of wait this is not the holy grail this is not the solution but i'd love to get your take and i'll do that right after this quick break and remember folks you can find the megan kelly show live on sirius xm triumph channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips when you subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, just subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever

you get your podcasts for free. And there you will find our full archives with more than 230 shows, including Jay's first time on our show way back, I guess it was December, so it was a couple months after he released The Great Barrington Declaration, December 2020. It was episode 34, and it's well worth your time. So, Dr. Bhattacharya, let's talk about testing, because now it's like, okay, here's the real failure. We didn't produce enough tests. I mean, I think that's obvious, right? People want tests and they can't get them. And there are situations where you really need to know if you have COVID. And it's hard to get a test and it's hard to stand. And if you like in New York City, if you've got to get it right away, it costs an arm and a leg. Right. I've got to pay for the rapid thing. Anyway, they've fallen down on the job when it comes to the testing. But there are some on the left who seem to see this as the answer. Like if we could just get all the testing now with Omicron, then our troubles will be over because people can test all the time and they're always going to know. And I'm sitting here thinking, you got a variant that is rising

that's going to be the dominant variant. I realize Delta's very much still out there that barely does anything to the vast majority of people. And we don't have to test before we go on an airplane or into a sports arena or into school for flu or even pneumonia or stomach viruses, which can make you very ill. And I see this as going to a dark place where it's like, did you test? Did you take your test this morning? Let me see your test. Did you test within the last four hours? Why not? It's only as good, you know, like that's going to take over in a way I think is going to be pernicious. I think you're right. I mean, I think the problem is you have to think about testing, like what's it for, right? So if you're

using a test to manage a patient, that's a good use of a test, right? Do you want to understand does the patient have COVID or does the patient have some other disease so that you can decide what treatment to give? That makes complete sense. That's when you need a test. You can also imagine using the test at home settings before you go visit a vulnerable family member, right? So before you visit grandma, you check to make sure you're COVID negative so that you're not unintentionally exposing her. That makes sense. But to use tests at a population scale to stop the disease from spreading, it's the

same mistake we've been making over and over again. It's not possible to do that. The tests have errors. They might have false positives and false negatives. As a general matter, the wide-scale mass testing tied to particular decisions like quarantines, school closures have been enormously harmful because the harms from those decisions end up harming more people than helping. So, I think the key thing is you use these tests in appropriate settings, understanding their limitations and their strengths, and then they're worthwhile. I mean, I do lament the fact that the Biden administration did not

anticipate the winter surge, and they didn't order enough tests so that people could have these at their disposal. Actually, can I bring up one other thing about these tests that's really important, I think, and sort of gotten less play than it should have. I think part of the reason why these at-home tests have been underplayed that compared to the PCR tests, the ones that you go get and you send to a lab, is that the PCR tests are automatically publicly reported. And because they're publicly reported, they're tied to like quarantining, they have like these test and tracing kinds of things that happen. This whole apparatus to try to stop

the disease from spreading. And in essence, as a result, harming people from like participating society has been central to public health thinking. Public health has not gone behind these at-home tests because it puts power in the hands of regular people. It's not automatically publicly reported. central to public health thinking. Public health has not gone behind these at-home tests because it puts power in the hands of regular people. It's not automatically publicly reported. You get to look at the result and then decide, okay, I can take a responsible action. I won't go visit

grandma because I got a positive test. This idea that people should have the power to make decisions for themselves, I think, is actually really important. It puts trust where it belongs, as opposed to the sort of like centralized control paradigm that I think, which is what's led to this shortage of tests, actually. We didn't get behind these tests because we thought we needed public control rather than putting the power in the hands of people. That is so interesting and makes tons of sense. All right, I got to ask you about boosters. Now, booster, booster, booster. And okay, it's one thing for you, for me. You know, I mean, I'm old enough. It's fine. But I'm worried about boosters for teenagers now becoming mandatory in more and more places, more and more schools. And I saw you tweeted about this as well. What are your concerns about boosters for teenagers? the results on side effects for these vaccines in younger people is that there are actually higher risk of things like myocarditis. I mean, it's not extreme. It's like one in 5,000,

something on that order. But it gets worse after even the second dose. And I haven't seen a ton of data on the boosters, but it would not surprise me to see if it got worse after the booster in terms of the myocarditis risk for young people taking the vaccine. Given that, the fact that the virus itself produces a relatively mild illness in young men, young women, and you have this side effect, well, on balance, I just don't think it's wise. Maybe one dose, but at the very least, I think this should be something to be left to a conversation between a doctor and a patient, right? Not mandated. I think mandating it is just a mistake. I'll give you another one, the dosage. I've said before, my 12-year-old is skinny and my 10-year-old is already in puberty, right? So she's taller than he is, like a lot of

girls that are taller than the boys and so on. She weighs more. So why should my 12 year old who, if you put him on a scale, you might think he's nine or 10. Why should he get the same dose as my 180 pound husband? It makes no sense, but our school won't consider him fully vaccinated unless he gets the double dose of the full, which so far we've managed to avoid. Dr. Jag Bhattacharya, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. And consider us on your team, not on Team Fauci Collins. Thank you. See you soon. Coming up, the latest on the transgender swimmer Leah Thomas, with a former USA swimming official who quit her job in protest and an Olympic gold medalist swimmer. Speaking out now. Over the holiday break, there were several developments in the controversy surrounding the University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Leah Thomas.

To recap, after swimming for the school's men's team for some three years, Leah is now a member of the women's team, shattering records once held by biological females. Several of Leah's teammates are apparently considering boycotting their next meet this coming weekend, looking for any way to voice their frustration. My guests now know what is at stake for these young women. Cynthia Millen is now a former USA swimming official. She just quit her job in protest over this controversy, saying this is just not fair. And Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who represented the United States at the 1984 Olympic Games.

And boy, did she represent. She won three gold medals and a silver in women's swimming, are my guests now. Thank you both so much for being here. Thank you, Megan. Yeah, thank you for having us. Okay, so I think we're all on the same page because I've read a lot about both of you. This isn't about being anti-trans in any way. This is about being about fairness, fairness to the women who are swimming and trying to compete their hardest, their fastest, their best, and are basically being told you have no chance. Now, your best you can possibly achieve is probably second place.

And no one's standing up for them. No one's standing. I'll just start with this because it's the thing that outraged me most before I went to break. The parents of the women at the UPenn team finally wrote a letter to the University of Pennsylvania saying, this isn't fair. Where is the NCAA? Where are you folks in terms of standing up for them? They shouldn't be in the position of having to speak out against Leah. That's an impossible position for these young women. And they were told by the University of Pennsylvania to go to mental health services, that the young women who objected should go get counseling to deal

with their upset, which really made me want to punch somebody in the face. OK, speaking of testosterone. So I was really heartened to see both of you speaking out about it because I know it's hard and I know, you know, you get from J.K. Rowling on down, you get called names if you say anything about it. So let me start with you, Cynthia. You you quit your job because you were going off to judge a Paralympics swimming meet, at which my understanding is men swim against women, you know, it's basically you have to sort of fall within a certain group

in terms of your, your physical challenges. But what, what was it about this thing happening at University of Pennsylvania that made you quit? Well, thank you, Megan. I've been a USA Swimming official for over 30 years. Paralympics comes under USA Swimming as well. The thing that I've always loved about swimming, as Nancy will tell you, from the time you start swimming, you're divided by age group and by sex. And even in Paralympics, they're divided by sex and then disability. The idea is that like swims against like. And in swimming, as in any other sport, bodies swim against bodies. And no matter how much testosterone suppression drugs Leah may take, Leah will always be swimming in a man's body. And this is just blatantly unfair. Men will always swim eight to 12%

faster than women. They have larger lung capacity. They have larger skeleton, more fast twitch muscles. This is the whole reason why swimming has always been divided between male and female from the youngest age. So it's wrong. And by the way, just to note, all volunteers are official, or excuse me, are volunteers. And so I just felt very sad to quit a great group of people. But there's just no way that I can lend any support to this at all. Wow. And did USA Swimming respond at all to your letter resigning and raising these concerns? No. They've said nothing. They've nothing ncaa has said nothing again university of pennsylvania refers the girls for therapy to get over their upset this is this is

par for the course is it not nancy like it's somebody else's problem no one has the courage to speak out as if we're we're going to pretend there's no way of speaking out without being sensitive yes someone is going to get a little upset. But right now, they've just settled on, well, it's going to be the girls and too bad. Yeah, first of all, Megan, thank you so much for having me on here today to be able to talk about this. I think it speaks to the sex discrimination that you see throughout sport. And the lazy way to go about transgender inclusion in sport is just to say, look, you know, transgender women can just participate in here if they, and not really go with the science, not really go where the science is. Now I'm a lawyer,

I'm not a scientist, but so it's hard for me to speak about exactly what happens when somebody does go on gender affirming hormones. But what I can speak to is what is the percentage difference of between men and women? Like, like what, what, what does male puberty get somebody? And that typically is as Cynthia was just saying, somewhere between eight and twelve percent usually right around you know eleven and a half percent we've done a whole bunch of different numbers and leah has only reduced her times by um a little over two percent a little over five percent in the 200 and the 500 um uh yards respectively so that is not mitigation that is not mitigation. That is not fair. She still retains a huge advantage over her other competitors. And, you know, at the same time, we are not thinking about

how it is that we're going to include transgender men to be able to participate. So I competed at the height of when the East German women were taking steroids. So they were shaving their faces and they, you know, were taking as, as many steroids as one can take. And a lot of them did transition after their, after their competitive days. And in no way were they close to the men's times. So they were not competitive in the men's category. So on the one hand, you're taking trans women and having it be unfair, but there's no unfairness in the other direction. And we're not thinking about like, well, okay, so if that's not fair, well, how do we change sport? How do we adapt sport so that trans athletes can participate, but just not head to head competition? Yeah, so far, it's been the the women,

the biological women need to shut up and take it. That's it, shut up and take it or you're, or you're a bigot. And it does take courage to say, hold on. That's not true. We can find a sensitive alternative. And no, not everyone's going to be perfectly happy in the end. But what's happened right now is all women on every team have been told you will be the unhappy ones, period, without any debate or even any weighing in from the NCAA or USA Swimming. And you tell me, Cynthia, because what I hear now is the NCAA, they've been saying, you know what? We're also just going to change it so that every sport can determine what it's going to do. Like in the Olympics, now it's the Olympics, every sport's going to determine, do you really need somebody to take cross-gender hormones for a year? Maybe that's not necessary. Maybe it could be shorter than a year.

Like what? Because that's only going to lead people to want to be more and more accommodating of the trans swimmer or trans athlete and less and less of the biological, you know, girls. It's always women. Yeah, I'm going to leap on what Nancy just said. It's the women who are suffering. And there's two points to be made here. When Nancy started swimming, as a young girl, there was no Title Nine. And when I was playing lacrosse in college, there was no Title Nine. And women really got the shaft. Women got so, were treated so unequally. Finally, women are being treated equally. Finally, women are allowed to shine as athletes. And so as Nancy adequately, so well pointed out, this is never going to affect men's sports. It's only going to affect women's sports.

And second, Megan, what does this do to all those little girl swimmers, those eight and unders, those nine tens? They looked up to people like Nancy. You think of Janet Evans, you think of Jenny Thompson, you think of all those great swimmers and those little girls look up to them. And now basically USA Swimming and the NCAA is throwing them all under the bus. You don't matter. You don't matter. And that's what really is so it's such a travesty, in my opinion. I know you've both pointed out, you know, years, you look at the difference between male and female swimmers, especially post puberty,ty, which of course Leah is well past puberty. You know, men, men get taller, men get bigger hands

and feet. Men get sort of that sort of broad shouldered, more narrow waisted look and women kind of go the opposite. We grow breasts, our bottoms get bigger, our hips get bigger. We're awesome. We look totally gorgeous as a result. However, it's not the most conducive thing to being a fast swimmer, Nancy. Yeah, but even when you take sort of like, like, when you look at Missy Franklin, who's an icon in swimming and Ryan Lochte, another, okay, so they both have the same size hands. They have the same wingspan. They weigh the same. They're about the same height. And guess what? There's about 11 or 12% difference in their times. If Missy Franklin had to compete

against Ryan Lochte and in the men's category, we would never know her name. We need to be able to draw some boundaries around the girls and women's category in the same way that we draw boundaries around a weight class, the same way we draw boundaries, what Cynthia does when it comes to para sports on what somebody's level of ability is. What that designation determines is whether or not they get to win or not. And, you know, I've been a Title IX advocate for a very long time in my career. And starting, it used to be that what we were fighting for was to make sure that you could have sex segregation in sport, right? We almost have no racial segregation throughout society. We have almost no religious segregation throughout society. But we

do when it comes to sport, we have sex segregation. We have separate but equal over here. So to preserve that, what I've been saying, literally, I'm not exaggerating for the last 30 years is in order for girls and women to have an equal opportunity to participate in sports, they need to have their own team. And here I am, it's a different situation, but it's the same principle. Girls and women need to be able to have their own team in order to be able to participate, to win, to break the records, to, and have role models

for other people to look up to, all those little girls that Cynthia was just talking about. And I want to get to what the options are in a minute. But let me start with this, Nancy, because what or Cynthia, because what would you do like, as a swimming official, if you if you saw a transgender swimmer like Leah, what would you do? How would you have handled that? Well, as Leah, if Leah came on my deck, I would welcome Leah to swim, but we have a couple options. Leah could time trial or Leah could swim exhibition because the underlying focus of USA Swimming Rules is fairness. We make sure that every lane is fair for every kid to the point that we make sure the lane lines are straight. We make sure that the flags are straight. We make sure that the blocks are solid. We want to make sure that

every swimmer is treated fairly. And by Leah swimming, that is not fair competition to the other women in the pool. So I would say, Leah, swim against Leah, keep swimming. But your times could either be time trial or they could be exhibition times. And I would make that clear to the coach as well as a referee. That's what I would do. What they're saying now is that this coach at UPenn, the girls I've spoken out anonymously to outkick.com. They're saying he, he likes to win, you know, and Leah's times are very good for the UPenn team. I mean, it's like, well, that's really really not that's not supposed to be the end goal. Yes, winning is great, but you want to win fairly.

I mean, I'm sure they'd win more if all the girls took steroids, too. But it's not fair. You know, they're not allowed to. And what we heard, Nancy, from I want to get the name of the organization correct, but it was an LGBT, you know, sort of advocacy group. Okay, Transgender Law Center actually weighed in on this and said that really what we need to do is about is sports through the lens of what's good for society as opposed to who's going to win. Instead of striving for equality in sports, certain politicians are distracting us, they say, from the real issue by blaming transgender women instead of helping make sports a better place for all women. So they're trying to sort of co-opt the narrative of feminism and equality and Title IX by just sort of folding in transgender women into that. Whereas when it comes to this particular issue, there is a division that has to be acknowledged. Yeah, so a couple of things. Number one is I run an organization called Champion Women. We provide legal advocacy for girls and women in sports. And we've documented that women are being denied right now in the United States 183,000 opportunities, a billion of women's organizations that are speaking out as loudly as they should about basic just, you know, how women are not being treated the same.

I think most college women, I've never talked to a college woman who is not acutely aware of all the ways that they're not getting what their male peers are getting. They're not being treated the same way, scholarship dollars, et cetera. And then the second thing is that in sport, you can value different things, right? So you can value inclusion, you can value fairness or safety. Now, safety doesn't really apply in the sport of swimming because we're not coming in contact with each other. It's not like a contact sport or rugby or one of those. But when it comes to either fairness or inclusion, you know, you really come up against these two different values. To ask only women's sports to bear the brunt of this holistic change that you were just talking about, about to have sport not be about competition. You know, I can't imagine working any harder than I did. I can't imagine, you know, and for

somebody to say, well, if you really want to win, then you should just work harder. It's very offensive. And men are, again, men are not being told any of this. Well, why did just the women have to give up on competition and be about what's good for the world? And how is that? If we're going to go for the collective good, how is demoralizing millions of girls across this country good for the collective. It's not. You know, they just get forgotten. They just get written off. And as you point out, legitimately, they're already at a competitive disadvantage versus men in terms of funding, opportunity, athletic scholarships, and so on. So that's a problem we already need to deal with.

We don't need further demoralization. Yeah. need to deal with. We don't need further demoralization. Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree with that, that women's sports, we need to have a major push. If sex discrimination was evenly distributed, it's not. But if it was, every single college, junior college, NCAA, NAIA would need to add 3.5 new teams. That's a lot. That's a lot of sex discrimination that's going on out there. And again, what they're asking in pursuit of inclusion is for women to step aside. I would argue that that's not doing their goal of inclusion any favors because everybody can see what the difference is. So if you want inclusion in society when it comes to things like employment or the classroom or banking or family law or any of these other areas, absolutely, there should be fairness. There should be inclusion.

Inclusion, there's no difference but sport is this very unique area that we do have sex segregation and so to preserve that sex segregation that is based on sex that is based on science not based on gender identity well and the the transgender law center recognized this in this piece released December 29, 2021, where they say, right now, our opposition wins the debate on trans youth in sports against any and all arguments we have tried for our side. They recognize that people see the difference in athletics when they may be generally supportive of trans rights. But this is an area in which it makes the situation less fair for whole groups of competitive athletes. And they go on to

argue that we should be connecting attacks on trans women athletes to the long legacy of discrimination against all women athletes. Again, like you tell me, Cynthia, that makes me angry. You know, as somebody I played sports when I was in school. Bullshit, you know, like bullshit. They're two separate things. I'm sorry, but no. That's my that's for you, Cynthia, because you've seen it, too. You've been standing at the at the lines watching these women leave nothing in the lane. And girls have had it tough. And now to be told that if you speak up like somebody like you speaks up against it, what you're essentially doing is attacking womankind. You know, it used to be that only girls could be cheerleaders and all they could do is stand by and

cheer the boys. When I was in school, I'm 66 years old, much older than you guys. And it's disgusting to say that women, again, need to just go back and be the nice, quiet cheerleaders. Let's, you know, rah, rah for everybody else. No, I you said it best, but I won't repeat that. It is it is, I, you know, I'll believe them when I see the Green Bay Packers welcome trans men on their team, right? For inclusion. That's not going to happen. Well, of course, we have exactly the opposite problem, right? We have exactly the opposite problem going the other way, because we don't have the musculature and the bone structure and all that to do it. So but there's something there's something more. Yes, women, darn it, have the right to compete. We have the right to

win. We have the right to do our best and get that gold medal. Don't throw that malarkey that, oh, we should just be inclusive and be nice. No, no. I like that. You're right. They're tapping into something that women have been told for a long time. Be a nice girl and be quiet and don't complain. Don't make waves. And that's how the upenn swimmers are feeling right now so their parents are speaking out they're getting blown off the ncaa is doing nothing the u.s the international olympic committee is going the wrong way not just in swimming but in all sports basically saying it'll be a sport by sport thing so that they don't have to get their hands dirty with policies that may upset people and um you tell me because i look at the numbers nancy and you're the one who

actually won all the gold medals and the silvers but it doesn't seem like these women on the upenn team have much of a chance and it actually seems like leah thomas may be well on her way to olympic gold too um if you win at like these amazing times, how does it work? Do you automatically qualify for the Olympic team? So I'm just reading a piece by John Lawn, editor in chief of Swimming World magazine. And he says, last spring, Virginia's Paige Madden, who represented Team USA at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, won the NCAA title in the 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4 minutes, 33.61. Leah Thomas owns a best time of sub 420. Okay, so that would be 13 seconds faster

than Paige Madden, and recently went 434, which is not even a half second slower during just a mid-season invitational. And he writes, even if Leah Thomas does not get near her best time, she seems likely to go faster later in this season and easily win the NCAA title in the 500 free. So what do you agree with that? And what was that? What will that mean for possible Olympic prospects? Yeah, I don't agree with this. I'm really hoping that, you know, every sport has got an international federation, that the International Federation will take this on and will recognize how important it is to draw boundaries around the girls and women's category. But again, right now, the organization GLAAD says that it's roughly 11% of this young generation identifies as either trans or non-binary. And if that's true, then we as sport need to make sure that we have places for transgender athletes to be able to compete. I don't think that the answer is come on into the

women's category, but there are lots of different ways. One of the ways Cynthia just said is for Leah to be able to compete as an exhibition so that people can really celebrate her, who she is, and the fact that she's transitioned and what her good times are. And people would be able to do that if she was only doing an exhibition. But so there are all different kinds of ways to be able to include, but not direct head to head competition. And then the argument as well, that that that is separate, but equal, that she wouldn't ever get the joy of competing against other women in the lanes, you know, to her left and her right, knowing the glorious feeling of, you know, being the first to finish. And I imagine somebody like you would say, having done it, Nancy, well, the other women aren't

having that now either, thanks to Leah. So it's like, someone's going to suffer a little. Yeah, the women's team is not the B team. This is for half the world's population to be able to have an opportunity to, I mean, I would say like, you know, to win, to get the records and the acknowledgement and everything else. But for me, the main thing was being able to experience flow from having my 10,000 hours working in it. I mean, there is just nothing like, you know, when you're going for sort of an impossible goal to sort of lose yourself as part of it, and you just forget sort of who you are. And to be able to get that, I mean, I would want Leah to be able to get that, just not as part of the, again, the women's category. We've done this before with para sports,

as Cynthia was just saying, we've done it before when it comes to Special Olympics, we've done it before in looking at how it is that we include people, para athletes who want to compete against non para athletes. And kind of the guiding principle has always been fairness and inclusion. So you got to figure out which one of those is more important, given that it's half the world's population. I would say fairness for those half the population is what should be the primary motivator here. Yeah. When you start to see Leah Thomas shatter records like Katie Ledecky's record, you know, or what if Leah goes to the Olympics and gets five golds instead of the three that

you got? I really think people are going to start to speak up because, you know, it's like that the Biden administration official who lived her entire life as a man and then in, I think, her 60s transitioned to a female and then said, I am the first woman five star admiral. Well, no, because the reason you can say first woman who did this or the only woman to ever get X medals is it baked into that equation is the struggles, especially if you're in your 60s or 70s, that you've had to overcome as a woman in America. You can't just co-opt all of that and say first woman to or first. Like there are real reasons for women who have had to climb the mountain without the chairlift taking them up to speak up and say some of these things are worth arguing over. And if you want to call us names, go right ahead. Go right ahead.

Cynthia, Nancy, thank you both so much. And again, I always love talking to our Olympic athletes who have brought home gold. So I want to say thank you for that, too. Many years after the fact, but good for you, Nancy, and all the best to you both. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. Appreciate it. Coming up, we're going to talk with Andrew Branca.

He is here to discuss the Kim Potter verdict from last week. I'm sure you were away or enjoying the holiday when this broke, and I really wanted to talk about it. I do have some thoughts. Now to another major story that happened over the Christmas week, the guilty verdicts against Minnesota police officer, now former, Kim Potter. Potter is now facing the possibility of 15 years in prison when she is sentenced next month. Joining me now with reaction, Andrew Branca, the founder of Law of Self-Defense. From start to finish, he followed the trial. Andrew, welcome.

What did you make of it? Well, thanks very much for having me back, Megan. I have to say it's humbling as a small-town lawyer from Colorado to follow two Olympic champions, but always happy to be on the show. Pretty cool. I think this conviction of Kim Potter on these charges was simply unjust, a miscarriage of justice on every level. And I know many people emotionally feel like, look, a bad outcome happened here. Dante Wright died. He ought not have died. So someone ought to be held accountable. But as a society, and Kim Potter certainly made a mistake. There's no question about that

and should be held accountable for a mistake. But our society distinguishes between negligence, civil liability for mistake and recklessness, criminal liability for having a criminal mental state for which there was zero evidence in this trial that Kim Potter ever had a criminal mental state. It came down to, and we'll get to possible sentences in a minute so the audience has an understanding of what Kim Potter is likely facing here, but it came down to, and one of the jurors spoke out out so this is how we know it um with lou raguse i'm not familiar with lou my apologies maybe that's not how you pronounce it um but it was a male juror not on camera and spoke out asking to remain anonymous given you know the

animosity towards jurors in cases like this and said um they were divided they were pretty much against kim from the beginning but there were some holdouts they were divided. They were pretty much against Kim from the beginning, but there were some holdouts. They were leaning toward guilty on the second degree manslaughter, but on the first degree manslaughter, at one point they were divided four, four, and four. Four guilty a conscious or intentional disregard of risk. And I don't see the intentionality, and I a weapon, which she thought was her taser, in doing that, understanding the risk of weapon confusion, which she testified she understood was a thing for police officers, in doing that, in understanding that the circumstances did not justify the use of deadly force, which apparently Kim Potter admitted on the stand, which her lawyers had been trying to argue earlier, this would have been a situation in which you could use deadly force. So that's how they got the jury there. Your take then on the jury saying, maybe not conscious disregard, but an intentional disregard that led to recklessness.

Well, this conscious disregard of risk is required for both those criminal charges, first and second degree manslaughter. It did not exist in this case, so she ought not have been convicted on either. Indeed, these charges should have been dismissed before trial. She ought not have been tried on these charges. What the prosecution effectively did was they removed from the law this requirement that she consciously disregarded a risk of death to Dante Wright. That is what manslaughter requires, reckless manslaughter in Minnesota and every other state. And the prosecution effectively told the jury on closing and rebuttal, no, that's not what's required. All that's required is that she made a mistake,

that she should have known that she was making a mistake, that theoretically there was some risk. But reckless manslaughter requires that you knew there was a specific risk of the outcome that happened, the death of Dante Wright, and you consciously disregarded that risk. There wasn't even evidence that she consciously disregarded weapons confusion. There was no evidence that she consciously disregarded that. So what they were really arguing is, well, she should have known that she could confuse her weapons. She should have known that she might have come out with her gun instead of her taser. But should have known is the standard for negligence, not the standard for recklessness. Recklessness is not only should you have known, but you did know, in fact, in the moment and decided to do it anyway. You had apparently what he said, the jury, they listened to the expert. You know, I think it was the expert, you know, the paid expert from the prosecution who tried to say she just didn't really have self-defense available to her.

She didn't have no mistake would have been authorized, according to the prosecution expert. Right. This is a hired paid gun who made, what, 10,000 bucks for giving this testimony. It's amazing to me. Also testified in the Derek Chauvin trial, by the expert. Right. This is a hired, paid gun who made, what, $10,000 for giving this testimony? It's amazing to me when the jury speaks out. Also testified in the Derek Chauvin trial, by the way. Exactly.

And this is a guy who, by the way, hasn't had much of a police career behind him. No. Briefly, mostly behind the desk 15 years ago. Okay.

So he's going to speak as, you know, an expert on what an officer in the moment is supposed to do as a guy who's trying to drive away with another cop hanging half out of the car and the risk to him. So the jury buys it and they disregarded why you tell me why did they disregard the argument that you and I last spoke about last

time you were on talking about this case. We're talking about how the defense seemed to be trying to make the case and the fellow officers were backing it up that she could have fired her service weapon at him. She could could have fired her service weapon at him. She could have intentionally fired her service weapon at him. And this could have been a justified shooting given that he was almost killing a cop and driving away during an act of arrest. Yeah, it's not a bad emotional argument, but it's not a very strong legal argument because the use of deadly force in defense of yourself or of others can't be an unintentional act. It has to be an intentional

act. You're intentionally using deadly force to neutralize some unlawful deadly force threat to innocent people. And she did not do that. She did not use deadly force intentionally. So that fundamentally undermines that legal argument. The key legal argument here, and there's really only one, is that Kim Potter did not consciously disregard a risk of death. She made an error. She made a mistake. And frankly, she ought to be held civilly liable for that error. There's no question in my mind, she committed an act of negligence. And in the civil court, she should be held liable for that. But she did not commit a criminal act on the facts of this case. I think this is the fault of Keith Ellison. I really do. I think I

don't blame the jury. I think they went with what they were presented. The law presentation was a mess. The jury instructions were a mess. I think the judge showed absolutely no courage in presenting a very clear, concise, absolute failure by Judge Chu. Right. Was it capable? The prosecution explicitly misstated the law to the jury in their rebuttal and the rebuttal, folks, by the way, there's no opportunity for the defense to correct at that point. The last words the jury are going to hear are the words from the prosecution rebuttal. And the prosecution simply misstated the law. So either they misled the jury into that guilty verdict or they simply provided the jury with an excuse. The jury might have been looking forward to return a guilty verdict. I don't know. I don't feel like the jury was looking for an excuse to find her guilty.

In reading this guy's interview, it seems like they were genuinely searching for the right result. He talks about how the entire time they were debating the law, the jury instructions, that there really was no factual dispute about what happened here. And therefore, the obligation on the lawyers and on the judge to give them crystal clear jury instructions was higher than ever, right? And I don and on the judge to give them crystal clear jury instructions was higher than ever. Right. And I don't think this judge did that. And but I also think Keith Ellison never should have brought this case. He's an activist. He is a partisan hack.

I'm sorry, but he is. And he made clear he wanted to go after her to make right sins of other people. This is in the wake of George Floyd. He's an activist guy. She's a white police officer. Daunte Wright was a black man. And he decided to make an example out of this woman, who in 26 years as a cop, never had a smidge of misconduct on her record or even alleged against her. He decided to make an example of her for other people's sins. That's my take on it. What do you make of it? Yeah, I agree.

Absolutely. And frankly, much like the George Zimmerman case, if Trayvon Martin had not been killed by George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin would have been facing felony charges after that event. In this case, had Dante Wright not been killed in this encounter, he would have been facing very serious charges for his attempts to flee the police, fight the police, resist lawful arrest. But it became a political persecution the moment he died. And therefore, there was political capital to be made by people

like Keith Ellison in bringing this prosecution. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And then you have, this is crazy. It's Keith Ellison, speaking of him. So he's AG in Minnesota. So he was the one in charge of making sure this case got filed and now has said he's going to he's going to push for a departure from the sentencing guidelines. He wants it to go higher. He wants the judge to sentence her to more than the law requires or allows, because that's how egregious he thinks this is. But before I get to sentencing, he's talking about Dante Wright like he like I mean, he was a Boy Scout. And look, I'm not saying Dante Wright deserved to die. He didn't. It was a mistake. It was a hideous accident and we all saw it happen. But let's be real. He was not the perfect man with the bright, bright future ahead of him that Keith Ellison suggested in the soundbite. Listen, I think

this is number 13 on our list. I ask us all to reflect upon the life of Dante Wright and who he could have been had he had a chance to grow up. At 20, Dante could have done anything. Maybe he could have gone into the building trades. He had his whole life in front of him. And he could have become anyone. All of us miss out on who dante could have been i mean it's al sharpton of course he spoke at dante wright's funeral and talked about him as the prince he's the prince of minnesota and you know his bright future the truth is dante wright

had lived his life as basically a career criminal and has been accused in death through civil lawsuits in at least two or three cases of having shot somebody in the head, paralyzed another guy. He allegedly hurt a lot of people in his 20 years. Yeah, I mean, it's never, ever good when someone dies unnecessarily. None of us want that. And of course, the loss to his parents and his family is completely genuine. I mean, they lost a loved one. Nobody wanted this outcome, least of all Kim Potter, assuredly. And Dante Wright might have turned into anything. Who knows? But on the day he died, this was a person with a track record of a very, very bad, endangered dude. And that's the reason why people were saying, look, they didn't know that whole history when they pulled him over, but they did know that there was a warrant out for his arrest, if I'm not mistaken, on a gun charge, Andrew. Well, after they pulled him over, they ran his name through the database and they came back with the warrant for the gun charge, the

protection order for a woman who, for all I knew, was the woman in the car with him. So there was no way he was leaving that scene. I mean, he had to be arrested on those facts. But they didn't acknowledge that. And so now she's been found guilty on the most serious charges. And this one juror who spoke out said, I want to go and sit there for the sentencing. Okay, well, he says, you know, I don't think it should be too high, but I don't think it should just be a slap on the wrist either. Well, what should it be? Because if you look at the law, existing law for somebody like Kim Potter, who has no priors, unlike Dante Wright, she had not been in trouble with the law ever. It should be maybe at worst six years, seven years, you tell me

what it would likely be. Yeah, Megan. So if we look at a comparable, like you might do in real estate, for example, we just had this truck driver in Colorado where I live convicted, sentenced to 110 years for recklessly driving his truck with bad brakes through the mountains. He killed four people, maimed many other people. And the governor here just commuted his sentence to 10 years, and he's eligible for parole in five. And he reckless manslaughtered four people. So by that measure, Kim Potter should be eligible for parole in, what, 14 months? But that's not the sentence she's going to get. I expect the judge would give her the full 15 years, plus Minnesota has what they call Blakely factors, which are an

upward departure from sentencing. If someone, for example, is a uniformed cop while they commit the crime, which was clearly the case here, if they endangered other people while committing the crime, which also occurred here, Derek Chauvin was essentially convicted of the same reckless killing charge. And he's looking at, well, he was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison. It wouldn't surprise me if Potter received a similar sentence. Oh my God. I mean, that will be a true travesty if they put this mother, decent cop, decent person, good cop, according to everybody who testified other than this one incident in jail for 20 years. She shouldn't go to jail. I don't think she should spend any time in jail. I really don't. I think this, as you think, this is a negligence case. You don't go to jail for negligence.

And even if it was reckless manslaughter, clearly it's an aberrant event. She's not a danger to the public, especially no longer a police officer. There's no reason to actually put her in a cage at all. Right. Well, the judge already rejected that, didn't she? Because Kim Potter's lawyers made that argument in asking that she could remain free pending sentencing, and the judge was not sympathetic to not a danger to the community. Nope, she was not. So what do we know about this judge and her sentencing? Do we expect her to listen to the Keith Ellison lunacy of upward departure? You know, I don't know her reputation.

I can only judge by the trial itself, of which I watched every minute. So I saw her performance through that. And especially when the prosecution blatantly misrepresented the law of manslaughter to the jury in rebuttal, and she did nothing to correct that. Despite the defense objecting, asking for correction, asking for a mistrial, She did nothing to correct that misstatement of law to the jury. That tells me she's, from my perception, she's fully in with the state on this case. And I would expect the most severe sentence that she's lawfully able to deliver to Kim Potter. Boy. So can you just expand on that? Say specifically what they said, what the prosecution said in the rebuttal that was wrong. And tell me whether you think it actually will be grounds for appeal for a legitimate appeal. Sure. So

reckless manslaughter requires the creation of a risk, an unjustified risk and the reckless disregard, the conscious disregard of that risk. What that means in this context is that for Kim Potter's conduct have been reckless disregard. She needed to have known she had the gun in her hand. Like maybe she thought she was reaching have known she had the gun in her hand. Like maybe she thought she was reaching for a taser, but when her hand came out in front of her, she saw it was a gun and she decided to use it anyway, even though she didn't believe there was a justification for deadly force. That's not what happened here. She never knew she had a gun in her hand. So she never knew she was creating a risk of death. So she never consciously

disregarded the risk of death. So unless you can prove she knew she had the gun in her hand, there can't be reckless manslaughter here. Prosecutor Matthew Frank told the jury in rebuttal, the state does not need to prove that she knew she had a gun in her hand. That completely strips out the conscious disregard element for manslaughter. It makes manslaughter based on mere civil negligence. Right. That makes perfect sense that the jury then got confused and came to the conclusion

that it did. But what about the performance of the defense attorney? Because Earl Gray, which is his actual name, really took a beating from lawyers I really respect. It's not a partisan thing. He just got panned for not being more aggressive, in particular in his closing. Your thoughts? So I think Earl Gray is a fantastic lawyer. He's been practicing law forever. He's quite famous in the Minnesota legal circles and surrounding states. He's an outstanding criminal defense attorney. I would not hesitate to retain him if I were facing criminal charges. He did a great job throughout that trial, especially on cross-examination of state's witnesses.

But that closing was far below his normal standard of work. It was kind of disconnected. He spent inordinate time arguing legal issues I thought were weak or really incredible to a jury. For example, that Dante Wright's cause of death was his flight from the shooting scene as opposed to the bullet that went through his heart. I don't think he can sell that to a jury. And he didn't spend enough time on the core, what I perceive to be the core issue in this case, and that is the lack of evidence of conscious disregard of risk, which is

the core requirement for reckless manslaughter. Yeah, right. Because we don't criminalize negligence. People make mistakes, even egregious ones in this country, and we don't throw had a second mugshot. And Cardi B tweets out saying, it's funny to me how her cries seem so fake, but her smile so genuine, seems so genuine. Hashtag, it was never a mistake. She goes on, she's smiling because she only got manslaughter. Also because she don't have to fake it. And she can live in her truth. Her truth is, yeah, I killed him. And what? That's the truth she's been wanting to say, but had to act like she was sorry. Like, I'm sorry. There's why do these morons feel the need to comment at all on these verdicts? They're never

right. They're never helpful. You know, I hate to quote Laura Ingraham, but to paraphrase, just shut up and sing because you just like you don't know what you're talking about well i think she's just a professional mean girl that's what she does for a living so i wouldn't expect anything more of her i don't know it's one of those things where wasn't she the one who was talking about her cousin's testicle was that or was that it or no but it was that that it was Nicki Minaj actually was another big singer. So in any event, I think Cardi B should educate herself a little bit more on what actually happened in this case, because nobody argued, nobody argued that Kim Potter shot Dante Wright

intentionally or wanted him to die. All right. Andrew Branca, such a pleasure as always. Thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Make it anytime. And to our audience, do you want to learn about self-defense? Andrew's got, such a pleasure as always. Thank you so much for being here. My pleasure, Megan, anytime. And to our audience, do you want to learn about self-defense? Andrew's got a very cool offering for you. He's teaching his Law of Self-Defense advanced class on Saturday,

January 8th. So you can learn more about it. You can learn the law yourself by going to lawofselfdefense.com. And it's very clear how you register and how you participate, and you can ask him questions and all this fun stuff. So highly recommend that. We're going to do some written questions for right now, asked and answered. This is where listeners submit questions via email to questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. My executive producer, Steve Krakauer joins me now. Hey, Steve, what are they, what are folks wanting to know? Yeah. Hey, Megan, happy new year. Lots of questions have come in. Actually, a lot of emails to that questions at devilmaycaremedia.com email

address to keep them coming. Also on Instagram, where people can follow us at Megan Kelly show. This one is from Melissa Frost. She wants to know what will you do if the vaccine is mandated at your boys' school? Melissa, thank you for that. Well, it has been. It has been for 16 and up. And thankfully, my boys are only 12 and 8. So it's not mandatory yet. But it's strongly recommended for the young ones. And I have not gotten my kids vaccinated yet. And I don't know what I will do because I'm not anti-vaccine. And I'm not even anti-vaccine for children. I just I don't know what I will do because I, I'm not anti-vaccine and I'm not even anti-vaccine for children. I just, I don't want my kids to go first. And all these people were super pro vaccine. Let your kid go first. Great. Go. No problem. We'll sit back and we'll wait and we'll see. And if it goes okay, then, you know, I'll probably do it. Um, so, cause I'm not anti-vax,

but I don't like being told I have to when I might not want to. It's like this is a very personal decision and it's ridiculous because it only prevents serious risk of injury or death, which children are generally not at risk of at all, unless they've got some immunocompromised situation or whatever, which thank God my kids don't have.

So it's just the whole thing is absurd. It's theater. I'll tell you what, if I had already had them vaccinated, I would give serious thought before I gave them a booster. Read the Wall Street Journal article that came out, I think, December 21st on that before you do that. Anyway, I think hopefully things are going the other way now that we realize everybody's getting COVID and the vaccines are not going to stop it. So that's sort of where my hopes are. And my daughter's school has not yet mandated it, but it's getting mandated by sports teams. Right. So even the schools that aren't mandating it are getting sucked in. The kids are because of the sports. So hopefully people are going to see reason soon. Maybe that'll be one upshot of Omicron. I end today as I began.

I want to tell you that tomorrow, Zuby will be here. Fascinating author, host, and rapper. A lot to talk to him about. In the meantime, download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, or Stitcher. Also, go to youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly and subscribe. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.