The Megyn Kelly Show - COVID Truth, on the Wuhan Lab, Herd Immunity, Vaccines and Variants, with Josh Rogin and Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 89

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Josh Rogin, Washington post columnist and author of "Chaos Under Heaven," and Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins and author of "The Price We Pay," to talk about the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan lab, the media bias in discussing the origins of COVID, the amount of American money that is going into the program that was being run at the Wuhan lab, when the U.S. could reach "herd immunity," Dr. Fauci's biggest pandemic mistakes and his connection to the Wuhan lab, vaccines and the one-dose strategy, vaccinating kids, the variants rising in America today and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, the latest in COVID truths. Where did it come from? Because we've got some new information you're going to want to hear. And are we at herd immunity? The doctor who predicted we would be there in April is with us to explain just how far along we've come and what the summer is going to look like. And I think you're going to want to hear this. So first up, we're going to be talking to a guy named Josh Rogan, not to be confused with Josh Groban. They have very different skills, equally valuable. Josh Rogan

is a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of a new book called Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, She, and the Battle for the 21st Century. And this is a very hard, fair, and balanced look at how the COVID crisis actually began, where it actually came from. Was it a lab in Wuhan? Was it created intentionally? Was it an accident? Or did it come from one of the so-called wet markets or something akin to a popsicle? He's going to get into all of that and has a very clear conclusion on his thoughts. And after Josh, we're going to talk to a professor, you may have seen it on Fox, a doctor named Dr. Marty McCary. And he's the guy who predicted that we would be at herd immunity in April. And he's got a very interesting update for us on whether or not that's true. He's a

professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. He went to Harvard. He's got a master's in public health degree. He serves on the Harvard Alumni Board Surgical Residency at Georgetown. He's been a visiting professor at over 30 universities and his credentials, I could go on and on. He knows what he's talking about. He was beloved by many of the mainstream media when he was saying things like, we got to get ahead of this. We got to take this seriously. Got to shut down some travel. We're going to have to put in some restrictions. And he was all over New York Times and elsewhere. And then he started saying, we're going to get herd immunity in April. We're good. We got to be more reasonable. And they were like, crickets, banned, banned for misinformation. Anyway, he's the real deal. And so he's going

to tell us which vaccine you should get. What does he think about the people who won't get the vaccines? That's actually really interesting, too. Here's a preview. He doesn't judge them. He would like you to get the vaccine, but he doesn't judge those who won't. And actually has some thoughts on how it's going to play. Oh, and before we get to Dr. McCary, Marty McCary, I want to tell you that this show was taped before we got the news that the United States is recommending a pause for the Johnson and Johnson shots that happened on Tuesday, that they've recommended a pause in the single dose

J&J COVID vaccine, reading now from the AP, to investigate reports of rare but potentially dangerous blood clots, setting off a chain reaction worldwide and dealing a setback to the global vaccination campaign. The CDC announced it's investigating unusual clots in six women between the ages of 18 and 48 out of, and by the way, one person died, they said, although we don't know the details of that, out of almost 7 million doses that have been given in the United States. All right, so the vast, vast majority had zero or mild side effects. And so they'll figure out and have been totally fine for those who took them. Right. So you've got to understand the risks here and sort of the calculation. It's unfortunate, right, because it's a slowdown and we need more people vaccinated, not fewer. But you can bet that some people are going to take this as a validation of choice, not to get the vaccine or not to be in the first wave of those getting the vaccines. Um, and you know, listen, we still have Pfizer and we have Madera now we're lucky here in the United States that we have those and that you can keep going with those. And you, and you're

going to hear Dr. McCary talk about how he thinks one dose of either of those is very, very effective. It's not as good as two doses, but extremely effective. So if you really are committed to just one dose, you should listen to what he has to say. Anyway, we did call him and asked him his reaction to that breaking news. And what he said was that if he were advising a woman, he would say, if you're between, if you, if you're of childbearing age, or if you have a history of blood clots, you might want to hold off the J&J vaccine. You might want to go for a different vaccine. But he thinks the pause went too far, right? Those numbers are too small to justify stopping the vaccination program with Johnson

and Johnson. So anyway, that's a breaking story. It'll continue to unfold. No bad news, at least for now on Pfizer and Moderna. And I think you're going to love his thoughts on where we are with herd immunity. And here we go. Josh, how are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a real thrill for me. Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Congrats on the publication of your book. Thank you. Thank you. Who knew that China would be in the news? Who knew? I guess I did. I knew. You know, can I tell you, I probably shouldn't say where I heard this because I was there by invitation and it was all off the record. But I will tell you that I was at a sort of muckety

muck, who's who brain trust type gathering in the summer of 2020. All right, so not even a year ago. No, it would have been 2019. It was it was right before Corona, we hadn't yet had Corona. And there was a debate between the liberals and the conservatives there amongst the brain trust about our relationship with China. This is Trump was still president. And some more right leaning people had sort of said, we don't trust anything China says China's spying on us. China's not exactly our friend. They're more like a frenemy at best, and maybe a declared enemy. And there was a Chinese scholar, a Chinese American scholar who stood up liberal and just lambasted the first speaker saying, you know, the United States and China have amazing areas of cooperation

and attitudes like that really set us back. And they're racist, frankly, and xenophobic and blah, blah, blah. And it was sort of an interesting thing to see, let's say six months before the outbreak of coronavirus and before Trump really going after China in so many different ways. And I wonder, you know, let's just start there with the perspective you've had on this and all the all the hiding that the Chinese government has done about the outbreak of this and so on. How do you see that relationship? What is the truth? The bottom line here is that, you know, ever since 2013, Chinese President General Secretary Xi Jinping has been taking China in a different direction, in a direction towards more nationalism, more external aggression, more internal repression

and more interference in free and open societies in all sorts of ways. And it took a while for Washington to wake up to that fact. And then it took even longer for different parts of the American society to wake up to that fact, academia, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. And because these institutions in our country protect their independence from the government fiercely and rightly, when the national security people came a-knocking to say, hey, we've got a problem here. It doesn't look like China is going to liberalize. It doesn't look like they're going to become a productive, constructive member of our global world order that has preserved peace

and security for the last 80 years, more or less. You know, it didn't go well. And the sort of clash inside of our own system, both political and policy wise, prevented us from mounting a new strategic response. And one of the biggest successes, ironically, of the Trump administration is that Trump changed the conversation about China in a way that can't be undone. And he brought to the fore a lot of these problems and forced a lot of these conversations. And it didn't always go well. There were fights inside the administration, as my book details. But the bottom line is that he dragged America into this conversation of what do we do about a rising China that's becoming a problem in our lives? Forget about for a second their lives, in our lives. And then when the pandemic hit, that removed all doubt. And suddenly every citizen of the country and really every citizen of the world knew in their hearts, right, in their bones, as they're sitting in their basements and they can't see their grandparents, that we've got a problem here. And what happens in Beijing no longer stays

in Beijing and that the character and actions and strategy of the Chinese Communist Party affect us in our public health, in our lives. And we've got to do something about it. Now, the problem is that we don't really know what we're going to do about it. So that's the next step is to figure out what are we going to do about it? It just seems like we were willfully blind toward what China was doing for far too long. And then Trump, just because, you know, he is who he is. And he did run on taking on the Chinese. It was one of the things he said he was going to do economically. And then it sort of morphed. But it almost felt to me like somebody who wants to believe this country is a friend. They just want it to be so, despite all the evidence to the contrary of subterfuge of spying. And now, of course,

of the human rights abuses have been, you know, we know more about that than everything. So these satellite images we're getting from what they're doing to the Chinese Muslims, the Uyghurs. Anyway, the evidence is right there now. And thanks to all the things you just mentioned, it's now undeniable that this is not a friend. This is some this is a country we need to be extremely worried about and watching and protecting ourselves from. Well, that's absolutely right. And we have to make a clear distinction here between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people. Right. The Chinese people are not our enemy. They, in some ways, are victims of their own government as well. And the Chinese

diaspora, millions and millions of people around the world who feel an affinity and a common shared history and ethnicity with their family and friends in China, they're not our enemies either. They contribute greatly to our society. But the Chinese Communist Party is clearly, and all you have to do is sort of read what they say and read what they write and listen to what they say, has a clear strategy. And that strategy is to advance a Chinese-led global world order that's at direct expense of our values and our interests and those of our friends and partners and allies in lots of other countries around the world. Now, you could forgive people 40 years ago for having this idea that, hey, if we just, you know, engage China as much as possible and give them a bunch of money, take a bunch of their money and integrate them into our systems as much as possible, that doesn't make any sense. And, you know, the people who are still saying that are either on one hand, people who are, you know, really dug into that idea because their careers are based on it. We're talking about like the China experts in D.C.,

you know who they are and they need the access and they need the grants and they can't go to China if they don't say the right things and write the right things. So they're compromised. They're essentially corrupted. Right. And then you have a huge amount of Chinese Communist Party propaganda. And it's in English and it's worldwide and it's their media and their bots. And then what they do is they just throw billions and billions, literally billions of dollars at our institutions to corrupt them from the inside. And we're talking about our markets and our Silicon Valley tech companies and our Hollywood studios. And yes, our campuses. That's the biggest one. And our sports. And our sports. Absolutely. And, you know, when people sort of realize what that NBA is,

the perfect example here, because when people sort of realize, oh, wait, the NBA, you can't tweet something about Hong Kong without the NBA being punished for 400 million dollars. That's not OK. Regular people all over the country, doesn't matter if you're pro-Trump or anti-Trump or Democrat or Republican, you don't like that. And when you find out that the clothes that you're getting from your Nike or H&M shop were made with cotton picked by slave labor or that the hair that you buy at your beauty shop was shaven off of the heads of Uyghur women in a concentration camp, that bothers people, Americans, everybody. And they don't want to put that hair on their head and they don't want to put those shoes on their feet. And that causes us to speak up about these atrocities. And that causes the Chinese Communist Party to become defensive and insecure and aggressive. But that's what was so nuts about the MLB moving its all-star game out of Atlanta, Georgia, because, you know, human rights, they don't like the voting rights law, but they're doing business with China.

It's like, well... Right. Well, look at LeBron James, right? And you and I may even disagree on whether or not these sports leagues should take political positions in America, but at least we can agree that they should be consistent, right? If you're going to stand up for social justice in America, how about standing up against atrocities

and genocide going on in China? And how can the NBA have like a farm team coming out of Xinjiang when we know what's going on there? It's insane. And how can, you know, H&M take the cotton that's picked by slaves and put it into their shops, right?

We have to have a national conversation devoid of politics that realizes that these are things we can't tolerate. And then we have to go to the Chinese Communist Party as a united country, hopefully, ideally, if we can, and say to them that this will not stand. You know, it's funny because I've seen some of this in Hollywood as these Hollywood starlets try to lecture us on how we're supposed to be living our life as if they know anything about anything other than to memorize the script. Okay. But anyway, they'll get up there. But you see it turning too. If you see South Park, right, they're very good on this.

And then, you know, they, they, they identify the corruption, the way that it works and the way that it works is through self-censorship. And that's why you can't see a movie about Tibet in the last 15 years, because these companies need their access to the Chinese markets. But in the end, I'm here to tell you that their business is not actually in China. The core business is in America. And the more that Americans wake up to these problems, the more that they'll side with the thing that's right, which is the basic dignity of all men. Well, I see it's even wider than China. They'll get up there and tell us how we have to support the Me Too movement or Time's Up or whatever. And then you get to one of the producers that they like, Harvey or Woody and something. It's like, oh, it's a family matter.

Well, wait a minute. Are you going to lecture us and be the moral spokesperson for the world? Or you're going to have to do that universally and not just stop when it comes to your pocketbook? Okay, so let's talk about this because I will make a confession to you, Josh. I haven't been following this piece of it as closely as i should have because i've just sort of been trying to stay rational about covid and not let every single iteration of the covid reporting obsess you know take over my life right like sure try to be as normal as possible try to keep this thing as arm at arm's length and keep your sanity and p.s it worked it's actually worked brilliantly in my case in the case of my family we have not become obsessed keep this thing at arm's length and keep your sanity. And P.S., it worked. It's actually

worked brilliantly in my case, in the case of my family. We have not become obsessed over this thing. But knowing how it started is important. And I think there are still there's sort of three categories of people. One one that believes it came from an animal, a wet market over in China where they serve. You can walk through and see live animals people like to eat. Number two is from a lab in Wuhan, China, where people were creating intentionally some sort of virus, the coronavirus, COVID-19, to hurt people, potentially as a military weapon. And number three, it was in a Wuhan lab being studied and accidentally got released, right? Do I basically have the three possible sources outlined? And your belief after all your reporting is what?

So basically, what I lay out in the book is that there's plenty of evidence to support the still unproven theory that COVID-19 originated as from an accidental leak from one of the labs in Wuhan that was doing what we call gain of function research. That's where they collect all the bad coronaviruses they can find, take them a thousand miles from where the bats live to where to Wuhan, which is a thousand miles away from the bats, by the way. And then they experiment on them to make them more virulence, make them more dangerous. Why do they do that? Well, they're trying to predict the next pandemic. Right. And this is a program supported by $200 million of U.S. taxpayer-funded research, okay? And what it was was hundreds of scientists,

American scientists and Chinese scientists, going around, scooping up all the most dangerous viruses that you could find and bringing them to this very lab that happened to be 10 miles where the outbreak broke out and playing around with them in ways that, you know, we understand are risky and dangerous and have very little to no oversight. OK. And if you came to this story, if you were an alien, you dropped down on Earth not knowing how this issue of the origin had become hyper politicpoliticized for a couple of important reasons I'm about to get to. And you just looked at that set of facts, okay? You've got bats a thousand miles away. You've got the number one bat coronavirus research lab, which was doing research on how to make these viruses more infectious on humans. And that's where the

outbreak broke out. Well, Occam's razor would tell you that we should probably check out that lab, okay? And that's not to say so obvious. It seems so obvious. Like that, like, oh, my God, wait a minute. This is the number one lab in the world researching bat coronaviruses. And that's what the outbreak was. And it gets worse because two years before the outbreak, a U.S. diplomat traveled to that very lab and and took a look at three trips and said they were they didn't have enough safety procedures. They didn't have enough staff.

And they warned about the very studies that they were doing because they were publishing some but not all of their studies about making these viruses more susceptible to infect humans in a very specific way. That is an S protein with an ACE2 inceptor. What they would do is they would take these mice and they would give them like human-like lungs. And then they'd run the virus through them a few hundred times and see what happens. Now, the virus that caused the pandemic infects the ACE2 inceptor with the S-protein. It's the exact same thing that the diplomats warned about in these cables that I wrote. But OK, so now I'm going to tell you how the story got all screwed up. And this is also in the book.

Basically, what happened is that when the virus broke out, it became a battle in the media between, on the one hand, Trump and Pompeo, who, you know, as you know, most of the media didn't like and wanted to discredit or, you know, there were some reasons that they had lost credibility, to be honest. And then you had these scientists and these scientists were the friends of the Wuhan lab. And they were led by this guy named Peter Daszak, who works at the EcoHealth Alliance. But basically, there's a whole group of them whose life work was invested in this. This is what they had spent their So they immediately tell everybody there's no way it could be from. And we know this because we know everything that happened in the lab, which, by the way, is not true. And we talked to the lab people, our best friend, the bat woman, Dr. Shenzhong Li, and she said we didn't do it. Case closed. It must be the market. OK. And because of the if you just remember, you know, we were all going through this crazy time in April, May 2020. It was very disruptive and very dystopian. I remember it. And it was hard to know really what was going on. And there was a campaign going on. People were getting sick. Everyone said, don't worry about the origins. By the way, the reason we need to know about the origins is not because we're trying to blame China, because you can blame them for a number of things either way that's what people don't get it's like they there's plenty of blame on China without the origin thing even being involved we

need to know because we need to know how to prevent the next pandemic because if we don't know how it started then we can't prevent the next one which is pretty important so listen to this so these scientists again Peter Daszak EcoHealth Alliance that they they go they go everywhere 60 minutes you name it uh there's no way the lab could be involved. And then Trump and Pompeo were like, well, we're pretty sure it was the lab, which may have been going beyond the evidence, but that's kind of their style. So the media, most of the media were like, oh, yeah, I'm going to believe the scientists over Trump and Pompeo. And they wrote that that way and they called Tom Cotton a conspiracy theorist. And then, you know, that was it.

And now we're here a year later and there's a ton more information and there's a ton more we know about it. And, you know, there's a lot more evidence now pointing to the lab. I'm not saying we know the lab did it. We don't know. I'm just saying we should investigate it. And all of a sudden, these journalists can't they can't think again. They can't, you know, resist the they have they must resist the idea that they might have been wrong a year

ago, which I say, if I'm wrong, and then tell me I'm wrong and I'll change my mind. If I get new information, I think new things. That's just how I think the honest journalism should work. But for a lot of people, it's just like, no, Pompeo is not credible. The scientists said this. And then we get to the WHO report, which I know you want to talk about, but I'll just, I'll intro it here by saying this, the guy that the WHO gets to do the investigation is Peter Daszak, who has a clear conflict of interest as I've ever seen in my entire life. They rejected the people that the US government wanted them to put on the, on the, then they had a investigation that was, you know,. The scope was determined by the Chinese government.

The investigation was overseen by the Chinese government. Tony Blinken said the report was written by the Chinese government. And then you have the same scientists who've been denying this the whole time, who have declared conflict of interest, say, oh, no, it couldn't have been the lab. We don't need to investigate the lab. Forget about the lab. We went to the lab. It's ridiculous. This is Peter Daszak.

We have the soundbite. This is just from March just from march 28th so it's very recent it really is crazy it's like so the chinese got to pick who was going to write the report who was going to come over they chaperoned their chosen investigators the entire time they were there never let them alone it wasn't an independent thing and um not surprisingly, okay, yeah, then maybe they didn't do the report. Yeah. And then not surprisingly, the lab theory was dismissed. And in a report that's 123 pages, they spent two lines, you know, saying, oh, it wasn't a lab. Like they didn't look into it at all. It's a total whitewash and a service to CCP propaganda, unlike I've ever seen. China Communist Party. Okay. So here's that guy you've been referring to, Peter Daszak, who was one of the, quote, investigators that's supposed to get to

the bottom of all this for all of us, 2.7 million people dead. He's over there trying to figure out how it got started on our behalf and the world's behalf. And here he is talking to Leslie Stahl on 60. Something like 75% of emerging diseases come from animals into people. We've seen it before. We've seen it in China with SARS. Is the lab leak theory any more or less speculative than your pathway? For an accidental leak that then led to COVID to happen, the virus that causes COVID would need to be in the lab. They never had any evidence of a virus like COVID in the lab.

They never had the COVID-19 virus in that lab? Not prior to the outbreak, no. Absolutely. No evidence of that. Were there Chinese government minders in the room every time you were asking questions? There were Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff in the room throughout our stay. Absolutely. They were there to make sure everything went smoothly from the China side. Or to make sure they weren't telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You sit in a room with people who are scientists and you know what a scientific statement is and you know what a political statement is. We had no problem distinguishing

between the two. Oh my God. Okay. So there's a lot of things to unpack there. Let me just go through the top ones. Okay. So, and you didn't even play the part where she asked him to her credit, don't you have a clear conflict of interest? And his answer was something like, well, don't you want the people who know the lab best to investigate the lab? Which is like absurd when you think about it. It's like having Robert Kardashian investigate OJ. It's like, I know OJ, I'll do the investigation. You know what I mean? It's crazy. But anyway, the other things that he said that were wrong is like, they didn't have it in the lab. They didn't have it in the lab. Well, they wouldn't be able to admit it or they would get killed,

right? This is the thing about the Chinese system that people need to understand is that those scientists may be very nice people. They may be trying to solve the pandemic. They may be mortified that they might have actually sparked the pandemic while trying to solve the pandemic, but they don't get to make these decisions. They've got a general sitting up behind their shoulder who's got a party guy sitting behind his shoulder who's got Xi Jinping sitting behind his shoulder. OK, and if they had a smoking gun, they would destroy

it and bury it and we would never find it, which is a separate problem. And the whole idea that we shouldn't investigate the lab, by the way, was refuted during that exact day by Peter Daszak's boss, Dr. Tedros, the head of the WHO, who I don't think anyone would call like an anti-China pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. Quite the contrary, right? This is the head of the WHO who said, you know what? They didn't really investigate the lab. We're going to have to investigate the lab. And you have to think to yourself, why would Dr. Tedros say that?

Why would he take a big, you know, crap on his own report as they're releasing the report? It's unprecedented. And the only reason that makes sense is because he's trying to salvage the credibility of this organization that Peter Daszak is trampling on. OK, and he knows that the United States is about to release the statement saying this is not going to be all of the investigation. We don't think it was a real investigation, which is exactly what Blinken, to his credit, said. He said, well, because if you think about it, the Biden administration, they're not they weren't there. Right. They're not married to this one theory or another theory. They don't care which way it turns out. They're not like, you know, unlike a lot of the, unlike 60 Minutes, they don't, they didn't get it wrong the first

time, right? And, you know, the media is now trying to like tiptoe into this idea of, oh, well, maybe it could be the, oh no, oh, how dare you say, oh, that's racist. And then here comes Robert Redfield, right? Who's the head of the CDC at the time of the outbreak. Now, not a perfect person, not didn't go through the pandemic, making zero mistakes. I'm not here to say he's a saint, but he's a virologist. He's seen the intelligence. And he says on CNN, he says, yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the lab. It was this gain of function research. He's saying that based on how the virus acted. That's evidence. He's saying that I saw how the virus acted. I saw the intelligence. By the way, the intelligence is also evidence. The Trump administration put out a lot of facts about

secret work at the lab. In other words, the Trump administration, confirmed by the Biden administration, called Peter Daszak a liar. OK, they can't both be telling the truth. Now, Peter Daszak is calling the Biden administration a liar. They're all liars, according to Peter. Peter's like, everybody's a liar except for me. Oh, and by the way, the Chinese people who are my chaperones, they were just there to make things go smoothly, go smoothly. And we all know what that means.

Come out the way we wanted to. Right. So that's why, you know, it's actually in a way good that you weren't following this at the time because you had an open mind when this all happened a month ago. And common sense and Oculus Razor point you towards, oh, we should probably take a look at the lab. And again, I create a fourth category of people. These are people who just want to figure it out. You don't believe that any... That's me. Okay. I'm that category. I don't care how it started. But I do care that we figure it out because you know what the plan

is to respond to this virus? This is going to blow your mind. The plan is to take that research, that Peter Daszak research, and spend $1.2 billion expanding it sixfold. Okay. What? The Global Virome Project, that is the response. That is the plan response. $200 million, which failed to, under the PREDICT program, it's called PREDICT, which failed to predict, much less preempt the pandemic. They're now going to times it by six and throw $1.2 billion into it. And I swear to God, dig up 500,000 new viruses that are transmissible to humans in the wild and take them to labs and play around. That's the plan. No. Wait, whose plan? Whose plan? The world's plan. Global Virome Project is an international project, heavily supported by, you guessed it, Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci and all the rest of them, all the people who have made their careers

in virology based on this idea that the best way to stop pandemics is to dig up a bunch of viruses in the wild. But you know what? Maybe that's not the best way. Maybe we should spend that money on monitoring and surveillance that when outbreaks happen, we can squash them easily and on placing medical resources and things in the places where the bats are rather than dragging the viruses to a lab. And then there's an outbreak next to the lab and everyone's like, oh, it must have been the market or something like that, by the way. That's what so I want to own. There's a lot to unpack and what you just said, too. So by the way, so you said earlier that we put American money into this lab in China,

which we believe. All right. So how much American money is going into this fake solution, which is actually probably another cause of yet another pandemic to come? Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to expand the program that, again, we don't know, but may have caused the current pandemic, as opposed to where you could spend that money. And just to back up, so let's just back up

and make it super simple for people to understand. Crazy, right? What we're being told by people like DASIC, the World Health Organization, is now that after all the study and thought and investigation, quote unquote, in China, we think the virus came from bats in a cave, was a thousand miles from the lab. Is that what you said? That's right. Okay.

Researchers, you know, that yes, they were in Wuhan researching bat coronaviruses. They were doing that. But a thousand miles away, what we had was bats in a cave. And we think maybe the bats somehow infected, it's called a pangolin, it looks like a ferret, right? Or a rabbit that wound up in a Wuhan wet market. It's just like, for those of us who don't totally understand, what exactly is a wet market? My understanding of it is live animals that people want to eat, but do they eat them? Like how do – I don't get it. No. You know, again, I think this is like a trope because, you know, I've been to China.

I've been to a lot of these Southeast Asian countries. They're markets. They got all – you know, you go to the market. You can buy anything you want. You can buy some fish. You can buy some meat. Some of the animals are alive when they're in the market. They're not alive when they sell them to you.

These are how markets work, okay? And so this whole – and again, if you think about it, it's kind of crazy because people like, oh, well, unfortunately, people have associated this lab accident theory with like a rise in Asian-American hate. But if you think about it, isn't it more racist to say that like, oh, Chinese people eat weird stuff and that caused the virus, especially if it's not true. OK, but it is weird to eat bats. There's no bats in the market. That's what I'm saying. That's why they had to come up with it.

I know, but it's on YouTube. So that's got to be true. But maybe it didn't cause the pandemic, so maybe we shouldn't, you know what I mean? Well, it doesn't look like it does. That's what you're saying. So okay, so just to keep going down our line of thought. Their claim is that the bat in the cave bit some ferret pangolin whatever rabbit winds up in a chinese in a wuhan wet market then that's

how it transmits to a human and the evidence on i i'm gonna say your side but i realize you're just saying this is this is what you think is the most logical conclusion is no the the woman they call the bat woman who is the chinese virologist or researcher in the in the wuhan lab which is level four lab it's it's the largest collection of bat viruses in the world being held there she's looking at it and trying to figure out ways to make it more dangerous so and ultimately try to protect us against it but the the, and by the way, the same place where our government had determined that it was, that there were laxities at the lab, that it wasn't as well protected as it needed to be.

And the same place at which our intel sources are saying the coronavirus was coming out of there, or people had coronavirus-like symptoms as early as fall of 19, fall of 19. Your theory is, no, that's where it came from. Those people went and got the bat. They brought the bat to the lab. Yeah. To be clear, I'm not saying that's where it came from. I'm saying that's a lot of circumstantial evidence. OK. And that's why people like Daszak who say there's no evidence are lying because that's what you just laid out. That is

that's in a court. I'm not a lawyer in a court. That's circumstantial evidence. OK, and that's enough to look into. I'm saying we need to investigate the lab full stop. OK. And, you know, if Peter Daszak and his friends want to go for look at like, you know, pangolins and palm civets and raccoon dogs all over China for the next 10 years, I say let them. I say go for it. And if they find the palm civet or pangolin in some part of Southeast Asia that caused the coronavirus, I'll eat my hat. I will lead the parade to celebrate the fact that he was right. But here's the thing. We also have to investigate the lab. So anyone who tells you we don't have to investigate the lab, that's the tell. That's how you know they're putting their finger on the scale. I'm not trying to put my finger on the scale.

I'm trying to say let's investigate it all. And here's the craziest one, is the one you didn't even mention, which we call the popsicle theory, right? And this is the Chinese Communist Party's latest crazy idea, which is that it came on a frozen food package to Wuhan from another country.

In other words, they want to go through, and by the way, now a year into this, we know about how the virus actually lives on surfaces. It's not exactly what we originally thought. But anyway, they're pushing this in their propaganda. So they want to go to every factory that that that sent frozen fish sticks to Wuhan that year, whether it's in Italy or Kabul or East Egyptip and check for viruses there. And that's how they want to spend the investigation because that'll never get back to the lab that's at the site of the outbreak that had all the bad coronaviruses. And this is so ridiculous that it's almost,

you know, in a way it's too big for a lot of people to sort of change their mind on because let's just, I mean, this is what I wrote about in the post last week. Let's just say for a second, and again, I don't know, you don't know, you know, Dasik doesn't know, but let's just say it was the lab, right? That means all of that research, all of that gain of function research that's going on in America and North Carolina and Texas, you name it. We have to look at all of it.

Okay. Because all of it, even if it didn't cause the pandemic could cause a pandemic and we have to, you know, we have to figure it out and we can't leave that to the scientists because they're clearly what do we think that that i mean under this theory an accident happened because well i see the video or at least the pictures that have been allowed to be released and they're dressed you know like they're like they're at chernobyl i mean they really are like covered head to toe so and that doesn't mean it's foolproof as we know but right what the theory is that there was somebody slipped and somebody got exposed and somebody walked home as patient zero with

the virus and that's yeah that's what happened or you know or the the animals went out the garbage in the back door and infected somebody or some other these kinds of things as robert redfield said on tv happen all the time now peter dash Daz can say 75%. It doesn't matter. It's not a statistic. This is one event, right? This happened. 100% of this event happened for one reason. And that's all that matters. So, yes, it's true that there are viruses that have spilled over, like SARS, right? The original SARS. That spilled over in the wild. But, you know, it spilled over where the bats were, you know, like not a thousand miles away. You would think that if it traveled a thousand miles on the back of a palm civet or a pangolin, that over the course of that thousand miles, you would see like little outbreaks. But you never saw that. Right. And somehow it got all the way to a thousand miles as if carried by a lab worker. You know what I mean? Anyway, the popsicle theory is. Do we know who patient zero is, by the way? No, no, no. We have no idea. But we do know that patient zero

didn't come from the market. And we know that because the Chinese scientists put that out before they got the clamp down. And so that means the market can't be the outbreak. In other words, what a lot of people don't even realize is that in May 2020, the Chinese government disavowed the market theory.

They said it didn't come from the market. That's the Chinese CDC. And everyone was just like, because they didn't want to change their thinking. They didn't want to. People don't want to admit that like, oh, wait, wait, can you hold two ideas in your head? I don't like Trump, but he might have accidentally through no fault of his own been right on this one thing. And wait a minute. So if they change their theory, where were they? Where did they change it to? So we don't know. We have no idea. But we know it was in the market.

But we know it was in the lab and we know it was in the market. And that's why this popsicle theory came up. And, you know, Peter's like, oh, I guess we got to check all the frozen food packages coming from Norway now. You know what? What's that going to cost? How many? You know, that's another year of investigation. And just think of the time they wasted.

Okay. We're a year later, OK, three million people dead. You know, God knows how many millions of people sick, billions of people suffering. Right. Even if you never got coronavirus and you're in some third world country and your economy is devastated and you can't get the vaccine and you know, your family is screwed. And there's some you know, there's a reason for that. And those people deserve to have an answer. And they spent a year on this whitewash and came up with a report that even the WHO director had to distance himself from immediately. And we're back to zero. And all that does is give the Chinese government more time to obfuscate and hide and come up with crackpot theories and push propaganda, which is what they want. OK, but that's one thing. That's the Chinese government, which we know, at least now I think we know to be suspicious of. But you've got some kind of shocking, I don't know if I can be shocked anymore by the media, but media complicity

here in the United States. I know you took issue, can you explain it, with the New York Times reporting on this, saying their reporting was the worst case of confirmation bias you had ever seen? What did they say that got you upset? Yeah. You know, and I'm not a media critic. I don't profess to be one. But like this was so egregious that I felt the need to comment on it. And, you know, when Robert Redfield came out and said, hey, listen, I think it was the lab. It was that he was stating his opinion for a good reason. He can't declassify classified intelligence as a former official.

He's not allowed to do that. He would be breaking the law. But everyone knows that he's seen everything and he's not. And he's a virologist and he was there. So his opinion is not just some Joe Schmo off the street. Hey, I think the lab did it. He's trying to say that he believes this for a reason. It's important. He's taking a risk. And the New York Times headline was like Redfield pushes debunked theory. i was like wait a second who debunked it when was it debunked i did i miss that because i just wrote a book about it i never saw anybody debunk it and then they changed the headline to robert fit i'm paraphrasing he pushes speculation with no evidence i'm like okay well why are they bending over backwards to crap on his comments as he's making them why can't they just i mean i mean i'm an opinion columnist that's why i can say all this stuff because i'm allowed to tell you what i really

think which is like by the way i think the more honest form of journalism at this point right but the but you know so i'm i i have the freedom but if you're going to profess to be objective if that's your job and i did that job for 15 years before i became an opinion columnist, you can't put your finger on the scale that blatantly, especially in the paper record. You expect nobody to notice that nobody says anything. And, you know, again, I don't think that they're complicit. I don't think that they're complicit with this, that they're pro CCP. I don't think that's what's going on. I don't I just don't believe that.

I just think that they're they they have this idea in their head. Trump bad, Trump wrong, scientists good. And then a year later, when new information comes out, they can't change it. They can't admit that maybe the thing that they wrote a year ago, it might be informed by some new information when it comes in, evaluate it on its face and have an honest discussion about how we got into this mess that way. Not for the sake of our politics, for the sake of our public health. Right. And that's that's that's the problem here is that when you have the majority of scientists who are experts on this, who are telling you the thing that is actually pointing away from a real investigation. Well, that's a tough problem for the media to wrap their head around. I get that. Oh, we know we would love an investigation, just not that's a tough problem for the media to wrap their head around. I get that. Oh, we know we would love an investigation, just not of what they're about to investigate. We can't have Robert Kardashian investigate O.J. It's not going to work. OK, we can't do it. We

have to find somebody who O.J. wasn't best friends. No Kato Kaelin, nobody. So speaking of Robert Kardashian, let's talk about Fauci. Here we go. I'm just making up that transition. Yeah, it was smooth. What do you make of him? Because you mentioned him in your list of names that are a little too connected to, I mean, is it the WHO or is it China? Or what is he too connected to for us to put our full trust in him?

So what you have to understand is that this body of research, this gain of function research, the whole world of virologists, and I came to learn a lot about how this operates over the last year and a half of writing this book, it's very insular. And I often talk to scientists who say the same thing. They say, listen, we really want to speak out about this, but we can't do it. Why can't we do it? Well, we get all of our funding from NIH or NIAID, which is the National Association for Infectious Diseases, which is run by Dr. Fauci for years and years and years. And so we can't say anything like, oh, gain of function research might be dangerous or it might've come from the lab because we're going to lose our careers.

We're going to lose our funding. We're not going to be able to do the work. So there's this, you know, people like to say, oh, the scientists all think this, but there's a whole bunch of science. More and more are coming out, actually. And you see them every day. And Redfield's sort of signal was like, this is okay to do. You can say this, you know, but still they get attacked for being racist or whatever, or they might lose their funding. And the head of that pyramid, the head of the funding, the head of the entire field really is Anthony Fauci. He's the godfather of gain of function research as we know it. Now, that, again, just what I said there is like too hot for TV because people don't want to think about the fact that our hero of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, might also have been connected to this research, which might also have been connected to the outbreaks. Again, I'm not alleging he did anything wrong. This was totally legal, right? He was issuing government grants through the regular process.

The problem is not that they were doing something wrong or illegal. The problem is that nobody knows what this legal stuff was going on. And now all of a sudden we have to take a look at it. So can you, again, keep in your mind two things that Dr. Fauci, the hero of the pandemic, might also have had a role in the research that may have caused the pandemic. That's a big, you know, kerplach. That's what we call like a big matzo ball to think about. You know, people can't get it through their heads, but that's the reality.

Kerplach. I said that wrong. It's not kerplach. My grandmother is somewhere in is staring down at me disapprovingly. But the point is that, you know, we we're not we don't have a media environment where we can have that kind of discussion, where we can say, OK, listen, you know, scientists are good people. They were trying to prevent the pandemic. Maybe their research got out of hand. Maybe in this Chinese lab, we there was a bunch of other stuff going on as the Biden administration, the Trump administration said. And maybe we got to get to the bottom of it. Is that too much to ask that we ask? Can I tell you something? So this is really reminding me it was I actually just looked it up.

The date was March 4th, March 11th, 2020. And Trump had just given a press conference in which he said a bunch of things that turned out to be wrong and he had to dial them back, like said he banned travel from Europe. And then later that night, the White House was like, no, we didn't. No, we didn't. Okay. And I tweeted out, it's 11.03 p.m. on March 11th, 2020. I'm so frustrated right now that we can't trust the media to tell us the truth without inflaming it to hurt Trump. That Trump has misled so many times we no longer know when to trust his word. That even I, as a journalist, am not sure where to turn for real info on COVID. And sort of the blue check Twitter journalists were like, oh, for shame, Megan, for shame. You need to be more responsible than that.

You with your power, you have to be careful with your words. And I stood by everything I said. I stand by it still. And I'll just give you one example. I have to preface this with I really like Ann Curry. She's one of the few people I really liked who's a former NBCer. But she did. This is what she tweeted to me.

Got all sorts of likes. It got written up a bunch of times. It's like she put me in my place. Hello, Megan. Suggest going to the source at WHO, at CDC, hashtag Dr. Fauci. We've all got to work together, share verifiable information, and help each other. Politics and misinformation need to take a backseat. I mean, look how poorly that response has aged. Yeah, I went to all those people, and all of them have misled me about the value of masks and whether I need to wear them, about the origins of the virus to begin with, of when we're going to achieve herd immunity,

it can let our guard down, I could go on, Right. It's so aggravating how we were misled, how there wasn't anybody to trust. And now the truth is coming out, Josh. The truth is coming out about it. Everyone here has an agenda. Yes, it always does. And here's the message I want to leave your listeners with. You know, I'm not a pro-Trump guy. I'm not an anti-Trump guy. If you read my book, Chaos Under Heaven, you'll see there's stuff about Trump that is not favorable to him. And if you love Trump, then you're going to have to reckon with that. But the bottom line is that the origin of the coronavirus is not a political question. It's a forensic question. It's a public health question. And here's the good news. We don't have to argue about Trump anymore because he's not president

anymore. So now we can just sort of take another look and think again and have a reasoned discussion. Yes, as it turns out, scientists can be biased and even corrupted. And as it turns out, multilateral organizations like the WHO aren't functioning well and doesn't mean we should scrap them, but it does mean that we have to be clear eyed about their flaws. And as it turns out, the Chinese Communist Party has campaigned for a year to stop us from looking into this lab for a reason. And that the only way we'll ever have any confidence that we gave it the best try we had to figure out this pandemic is to actually look into this theory once and for all. And that's what's going to have to happen. And that's not going to be easy. Something that I think, you know, Republicans and Democrats and leftists and rightists and the media and should all sort of take a step back from whatever it was that they were arguing about in April 2020 and say in April 2021, let's just look at all the theories. Let's figure this out. This is a chance for all of us to come together and realize that, yes, there is a truth out there and we don't have to live in two separate realities. And when it comes to this thing that affects us all, it's too important to get caught up in our partisan BS.

Let me ask you one other thing. I know you're short on time, but I want to ask you one other thing because the book does get into one other then controversial thing. And it actually came up in the presidential debates and so on. And it was Trump's order to shut down travel from China. Right. And you've got you've got a very compelling section on how that happened. And I have to say, because Trump's taken a lot of barbs, a lot of lot of arrows. This was this was a good moment for him. This was where his like unwillingness, unwillingness to just go along with the crowd actually did come back to help us. Right. What's what I lay out in the book is that the national security officials led by

Matt Pottinger and Robert O'Brien and eventually the health officials, although they came around to it later, urged Trump to shut down travel from China in late January. And they were they were fighting against Mick Mulvaney and Steve Mnuchin and the political people around Trump who thought that it would tank the economy and tank the election. And of course, the national security and health officials were right. But by the time Trump did it, he was very concerned about his election. And then he talked to a guy named Xi Jinping. And Xi Jinping plied Trump with lots of lies about the coronavirus. The Chinese president, in two calls, as detailed in my book, told the president the coronavirus would go away in warm weather, that herbal medicine could treat it, that they had it under control. And all of these lies caused Trump to factor in misinformation, some would say disinformation, that led to bad policy responses after the fact. So he did the good thing by shutting down travel from China, but that wasn't sufficient. And in the weeks that followed,

he continued to get lies and bad advice from the Chinese president, which led him to avoid doing other things that would have stopped or at least mitigated the suffering of Americans. Yeah, this was not a good source of information, although just for the record, I will say I know an amazing, an amazing doctor here in New York and that doctor who's this is a specialty infectious disease. We've spoken about him before on the show. He believed the same thing back then.

There were a lot of doctors who believed, as Trump said, and as Xi Jinping said, that the warm weather was going to get rid of this virus the same way it gets rid of flu. It wasn't. I don't know that it was pure disinformation because there were a lot of straight doctors with no connection to any of these organizations. That was only one one piece of the disinformation that she gave to Trump. And, you know, sure, sure. I'm just saying that's one that Trump gets hit for a lot. I have to say there were legitimate doctors, not just the Chinese president, saying exactly that

who had no reason to defend anything Trump was saying. Right. I think what we're agreeing on here is that Trump was getting a lot of conflicting information from a lot of different sources. And sometimes he made the right decision and sometimes he didn't. But it wasn't because he didn't care. It was because he was getting really crazy, conflicting information from lots of different places. And the old garbage in, garbage out. Like you as the president need to be really careful about who you let get in your ear. And if you're going to let somebody like that get in your ear on something this important, you got to have to have an extra healthy dose of skepticism and then surround yourself by true experts. But I will say like, exactly the case of Pottinger, as you pointed out, national security advisor,

Robert O'Brien and Pottinger, his deputy, they were in there saying that this, this is 1918. This is going to be 1918. This is bad. And you got to shut down travel. And his political team was all saying, don't do anything of the kind. Don't do to shut down travel and his political team was all saying don't do anything of the kind don't do not shut down travelers from china it's it's a terrible move for you politically and trump did it and he was called xenophobic including by joe biden right um and it was an important thing he did it was one indisputably good thing trump did in the whole crisis and there's a long list on the other side, too, I realize. But I think just imagine that your book is not afraid to go both places. If it's good for him, it's in there. If it's factual, it's bad for him. It's in there. If

it's factual. That's right. And, you know, there's a lot of blame to go around. And the bottom line is that, you know, if Trump had followed the advice of his national security health officials throughout instead of the political officials, he might be reelected. And as it turns out, that the best political decision was to follow the national security health officials and realize what we're dealing with in the CCP, which is a government that is secretive, that is covering up what happened at the beginning of this virus, not just the origin, but what happened in the first few months and continues to withhold scientific, important information from the international community. To this day, that's the problem. OK, and Trump did realize that, albeit a little bit late, he eventually did come around to that awakening. And I hope that this

book will prompt that such an awakening for the rest of the people as well. It's a fascinating read and gets into, you know, far more than just this, just where we are with China and how should we be thinking about them and what is Trump's legacy when it comes to shining a light on them? The book is called Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. And its author is Josh Rogin. Happy to say an objective journalist still, even if you are an opinion columnist, I agree with you. Isn't that ironic?

No, I totally agree with the way you phrased it. That's sort of where we are right now. You've got to be open about where you stand. And I think that's really the only way. But like just being open about your opinions or your leanings or your conclusions doesn't mean you're incapable of fair reporting. That's where I think most of the journalists today are falling down. Piece two. And you're not. You got to tell people what you know and what you don't know and why you think what you think. And you have to be honest with your readers and your viewers or they won't trust you. And that's what's important in journalism is not what you write about or how you write about

it, but you have to be authentic and you can't play games with the readers because they're too smart. They're going to figure it out. Exactly. Nobody's and it works for governments, too. Nobody's buying fish pop. Nobody. Josh, thank you. Thank you so much. Up next, Dr. Marty Makary with everything you need to know about the vaccines, herd immunity, and what your summer's going to look like. Hey, Doc, how you doing? I'm doing great. Great to have you here you here all right so let's talk about i

just want people to understand that you have been all over the news you're incredibly respected as a doctor until you wrote on february 18th 2021 that covet 19 would be mostly gone by april based on a bunch of factors and predicted we'd be at herd immunity. And then they were like, Marty, who? What? Johns Hopkins where? Huh? I never heard of him. It's just so funny. The media is so predictable how like you start to step out of line with the lockstep opinions that are quote acceptable with a capital A and you're banished. So before we get to that, I do want to say now here we are in April. It doesn't seem like we're at herd immunity. So what of that prediction?

Well, it's regional. The pandemic is regional. It's entirely different. It's almost as if there's different countries in different parts of the United States. They're basically there in certain states. Alaska has had no deaths in three weeks. What do you call that? North Dakota and South Dakota,

one death cumulatively last week. Arizona just hit single digit deaths. And case numbers are now around 100 a day in New Mexico, which is leading the way. They've got about 54% of their adult population vaccinated. Michigan is a different story. So parts of the country are going to hit it in late April. And remember, April's got 30 days. They're going to hit it in late April. And remember, April's got 30 days. They're going to hit it in late April and other parts of the country are going to be there in May. You can still get there. No, don't get me wrong. I'm 100% hoping you're right. I would love to see it happen. And I mean, even though the numbers are still not great here in New York and in New Jersey, they're better than they were. Why do you think Michigan is so bad?

The papers are loving to point to Michigan, but where they've got a sevenfold increase in cases from late February. Illinois is not doing so well either. But why do you think that is? Well, yeah, Michigan is throwing off the numbers for the whole country. Michigan and four other states are collectively about half of all the new cases right now in the United States. And what's happening is you're seeing the seasonal variation. You're seeing an outbreak among young people. Michigan, in particular, instituted mandatory testing for sports. And when you have both an outbreak and mandatory testing where you're capturing a lot of cases, that's a lot of infection circulating out there. So people have to remember the pandemic is not

over. And in Michigan, they've got the B.1.1.7 dominating. It's actually a lot of the parts of the Great Lakes region. So that's going to be the part that lags behind the rest of the country. Also, there's been a lot of missteps in the vaccine rollout there. And I would blame both Michigan and our national medical leadership, which has failed us on some of these things. Just to back up, what's B.1.1117? Oh, that's the UK variant, which is dominant now. It's more contagious and it's dominant now in certain parts of the country with Michigan being one of those. As far as we know, there was reporting about how there's a South African variant, the South African variant may evade protection from the Pfizer vaccine, according to this Israeli study. And do you buy that? Because former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is saying,

no, don't trust that. But he's on the Pfizer board too. So just what do you think of that? Well, I agree with him. So we're missing the headline and misinterpreting the research paper that just came out two days ago. And I read it. And it shows that in a country of about 7 million, they found eight people with infection from testing after they were immunized, but not fully optimized on their immunity. So, you know, we believe that two weeks after your second dose is when you're optimized. All eight of those cases were before that. And they were mostly mild or asymptomatic. And the authors didn't say that anybody got sick. So the headline, the take-home message is, sure, in the rare times somebody will develop an

infection, usually asymptomatic after vaccination, it's going to be more likely to be one of the variants. Okay? No surprise there. But the vaccines are still 100% effective in serious illness and death, preventing death and hospitalization. That should be our outcome. And we need to move beyond the efficacy numbers and look at we're saving lives with these vaccines. And it's still basically 100% effective in doing that. The fear porn continues.

I mean, the news loves to play up anything that's going to scare the you know what out of you. They just do. That's their business. The double mutant. Remember the double mutant, like some alien with two heads in California? I mean, it's just out of control. I mean, let's praise the Lord that the vaccines are 100% effective in killing this virus, you know? Right, right. Okay. So, so what about nationally? Because I do think people, you know, we're, we all want to get to the point where we can take off our damn mask living in New York, which is a blue state where the numbers are still not great. I'm so sick of the mask. I'm so sick of living like this. I can see the overreactions going on and on. Like they're just so paranoid here. And, and like And you've got some news personalities who are based in this area saying, I've been fully vaccinated, fully vaccinated, and I'm still going to wear double masks everywhere and not go out into groups of large people.

I'm like, for the love of God, what incentive do I have to get the vaccine? That's how I'm going to have to live. We've got to give people a reason to get the vaccine. And as you know, I wrote the Wall Street Journal that you get your vaccine, wait a month for it to kick in and live your normal life. Now we're telling people to keep wearing a mask in an indoor public gathering because business owners say it's just too hard to enforce a partial mask policy in their grocery store. And that's reasonable for a little longer. It's not that far off. The South in the

United States is doing great. And they're going to probably see those mask requests to wear a mask get lifted very soon. But I don't know if I should be offended because I'm a surgeon. I've been wearing a mask my whole life. You mean you don't want to wear a mask every day like I do? That's by choice, sir. By choice. I'm a journalist. We don't want to mask it up. Please. We're sort of freewheeling. We're risk takers. Although sadly, it's not true. I mean, because the person I was referring to is Joy Reid. I mean, she's a journalist too. Jonathan Capehart just came out. Now, I realize I understand that African-Americans have done less well with the disease than other people. So I'm sympathetic to that. But double vaccinated,

double masks seems crazy to me. And you see these pictures of Joe Biden in the Oval Office with our Vice President Kamala Harris, and they're both, they've both been vaccinated. They both wearing the mask. I'm like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? Yeah, let's give people a reason to get the vaccine. Let's liberate them after the immunity kicks in. And let's give some positive messaging out there. You know, one of the reasons I wrote about herd immunity coming this spring is that I feel people need hope. You know, I mean, the effects of profound isolation, that affects your mental and your physiologic reserve. And tell me next time you hear, if you ever hear any of our medical leadership, Fauci, Walensky, you name them, talk about harm of kids getting shut out,

the downsides of profound isolation on human health, on natural immunity, on hope, on being liberated after. This is the messaging that we need, not the impending doom. I mean, good stuff is happening. And even in the cases in the north, we talked about Michigan, those local outbreaks are rolling over right now. We're seeing really good signs there. And I think we're going to be in a good place in May. All right. So Fauci, as usual, is going a different way. Fauci's messages over the past week or two have been kids are going to need to be vaccinated, too too for us to get herd immunity, period. I'm still not taking a trip.

I'm not taking any fun trips. I won't, even though he's vaccinated. And I'm not going inside anywhere where not everybody's wearing a mask. And on top of all that, he seems to be moving the goalposts yet again on herd immunity, saying, OK, first he said we need to vaccinate 70 to 85 percent of the population to reach herd immunity, which he keeps hiking the number. He's ignoring natural immunity like it doesn't make any difference. You know, if you had covid and you and you survived. And now he's saying people are just too focused on herd immunity.

We just we really don't even know what that is. So just embrace the mask and the vaccines. And, you know, I'll get back to you when you can have your freedom. I mean, this guy's like he's such a bummer and I don't trust him. And he's been wrong so many times. And he's the one he really keeps moving. It's like the dog with the bumper. You just won't let us catch the damn bumper. And pretty soon we're just going to stop running after his stupid car and go down a different lane, take off our own masks and see what life brings us. But we're certainly not waiting around until Fauci tells us it's safe, because I do think

he's one of those guys who's just he keeps saying I'm just about public health. But he's about one little area of public health. One, he doesn't care about all the things you just mentioned. Our fight is not just against viral replication. It's about valuing human life. And it's about restoring that human connection. And I fear that in trying to extinguish this virus at all cost, he's not seeing that. And I wish, you know, when you watch financial networks and people say, buy a stock, sell

a stock, I wish that they could have their annual returns for the last three years in the corner of the screen. OK, if Fauci had that right now, it's not a very good track record. He missed the pandemic. Scott Ghalib and I and others were out there sounding the alarm in late February and early March, calling Mardi Gras, South by Southwest, the NCAA. It was scary. I mean, we didn't know if we were going to lose 1% of our nation's kids, right? I mean, we learned the case fatality rate came in lower, and we learned it was skewed towards those with chronic conditions.

But it was scary at that time. We were watching rationing in Italy and even on the brink of our hospitals in New York. So where was he up until March 6th? Never said a single thing about a pandemic that would sweep across the U.S. The most warning he gave us was he said, quote, older people should avoid taking a cruise. That was in the first week of March. And there's, quote, there's a chance we could look back and say, boy, that was really bad. That was the most, you know, we're like, hey, we need PPE. We need, you know, stop non-essential travel in the U.S. We need to do all this stuff, start contingency plans.

And then how did he not know that this was an airborne transmission? He was the quote-unquote nation's top infectious diseases doctor, which is a title the media granted him. I can tell you that it's not a title I believe is true, but he was crowned this title. Well, he was there at NIADA back in 2003 with SARS. Okay, SARS and COVID-19, Megan, spread the exact same way. It's aerosolized virus. They're both novel coronaviruses there's only three novel coronaviruses in the history of the world that cause serious illness that was aerosolized droplet and masks work to stop it in asia this is the exact same mode of transmission and you know why was it up to me to write the first article in the new york times saying it last spring that we need universal masking where was he and that's what I keep thinking. I

don't disagree with anything he says. It's just what's absent from what he's saying. And right now, he's, you know, where is he speaking up about the harm of kids? Is he speaking up about the first dose strategy that the UK adopted that many of us proposed for the United States and still do for Michigan. Yeah. So, look, if you have two life preservers, think of each vaccine dose as a life preserver. And if you give the second dose, you increase the rate of efficacy, if you will, of the life preserver from 92%, which is the efficacy of one dose of the vaccine at four weeks, to 95%. You're adding about three percentage points more of efficacy. And so if you are rationing, which is something the virologists don't think of, this is not part of their science. If you're rationing a

life-saving resource, how do you do it effectively? Well, you maximize people getting the first dose. Many of us have been saying that. Ashish Jha, even Osterholm, who before he kind of got tossed from the Biden COVID task force, Atul Gawande, myself, so many of us have been saying this. And the UK did it. And guess what? With the same number of vaccines per capita, they're at herd immunity now. They've got 62%. Yeah, they're there.

They had like 10 deaths this weekend. They've got cases are way down. They're now down 98% over the last 11 weeks. I mean, they're reopening. They're there. And the reason is because we know from the data, we know from Israel that when you get about 50% of the adult population vaccinated, you wait about two weeks for that vaccine to kick in, and you see numbers plummet. And that's the road we're on right now. But to get more people vaccinated, focus on first doses. Michigan could double their vaccine supply overnight if they postpone those second doses by two months. Why aren't we doing that? Why would we not do that? I don't. It's so frustrating, Megan. I can't speak until I'm blue in the face on Fox and everywhere I can and write in articles and in the Wall Street Journal. And I'm not alone. It's a lot

of people saying this. But Dr. Fauci laid out his arguments and he has some far-reaching hypothesis that maybe the immunity could drop off after four weeks of the first dose if you don't get the second dose. It's absurd. We haven't seen that in the UK at all. The data is in. The studies are here. 2,000 people in the Moderna trial didn't get their second dose, and they did great. This is how you think creatively when you're rationing the life-saving resources. And it's not how the old guard medical establishment thinks. We've got an old guard at the FDA and in the medical establishment, and they're friends with each other and they affirm one another and they are totally dismissive of this. And so it's been very frustrating.

Why don't, if you only get your first dose, you know, if they said, okay, first dose is only just to try to get to her immunity in every state as fast as possible, would, and that happened, and then three months went by and now we have more vaccine, would you then have those people go back

and get a second dose? Yes, I do believe in second doses because it increases the durability of long-term immunity. So it's not that any of us who are recommending focusing on first doses are saying blow off the second dose. We're just saying delay it to 12 months or 12 weeks because you save more lives, right? You give more people one life preserver instead of giving two life preservers to a group of people swimming in the ocean, right?

Makes sense, right? And this is what the old guard cannot get over. It's very disruptive to the way that they think about these things. And they come up with these far-reaching hypotheses that just have been now disproven in the UK experience. So it's- What about Fauci saying kids are going to need to be vaccinated? Like that's going to have to, I mean, he didn't say the word mandate, but that's, that's what I think a lot of people are worried about. Sure. By the way, I, I, I reached out to Dr. Fauci because I've been so critical of him and a private correspondence over Easter.

You know, I came back from church, felt bad. And I told him, look, I respect you. He served this country well in HIV. I just have professional disagreements. It's nothing personal. But we used to have an open dialogue. Now it's all cancel and surround yourself with people that agree. And so I do

like him. He's a real gentleman. Everybody says that, but it's been frustrating that he has not acknowledged the role of natural immunity in contributing to herd immunity. Now he says he did. He changed his tune with Neil Cavuto a few weeks ago, but he's never talked about it. And matter of fact, there's all kinds of quotes. You just read one where he says, quote, we have to vaccinate whatever the number is 70 to 85% in order to reach herd immunity as a prerequisite. It's not true. A third to a half half the country, I think it's 55% of the country has circulating antibodies from prior infection. Study in California, two months ago found that it was 38% of Californians had it. Other seroprevalence studies out there say we've only been picking up one in four and a half

cases that are out there because testing has been tough. So a lot of people have circulating antibodies. And gosh, CBS, I think it was CBS this morning I was watching this weekend said, Republicans are less likely to get the vaccine and we're going to wherever in the Midwest to figure out why. And some guy says, look, I had the infection. I was pretty sick. And I think I've got natural immunity. So I'm just going to hold off. And I'm thinking that is totally reasonable. That is reasonable, right? I mean, I would still get probably one dose once we're not supply constrained anymore, if I were him. But I mean, that's totally reasonable. You got antibodies, the body doesn't care where they came from a vaccine or prior infection. So this is the debate that I've had

with Dr. Fauci is please consider natural immunity, because it changes the timeline, right? If you believe half the country has it, then you're less worried about the remaining fragment that's not vaccinated because half of those have natural immunity. And so I don't think... Well, I think this is one of the reasons why, yeah, why we're worried about vaccinating our kids. And I've said many times on the show, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I will 100% get the COVID vaccine. And I've gotten my kids all the vaccines that, you know, they're supposed to get, the MMR, all that stuff. But this one one I don't like because for my kids who are little have absolutely zero chance. I mean, as close to zero as you can get of being seriously affected by COVID. And yet it hasn't been tested

on kids as young as mine, seven, nine and 11. I don't want to do it. And I certainly don't want their travel to be made contingent or their schooling to be made contingent on them getting this vaccine. But what do you think? You're somebody who I trust because you've been sort of, forgive me for putting it this way, but that's kind of how it's gone on both sides. You've been somebody who's been like, lock it down, COVID restrictions, we need more, not less. And then you've been somebody who said, hey, let's be realistic on herd immunity. We can't stay in lockdown forever. We've got to evolve our strategy as the data comes in. And that's the humility that's required of any good public health official.

And we've not seen it. We've seen policies instituted, and then they dig in and defend it like it's politics. And you've got to constantly evolve your position. I think with kids, we can look at, I don't think we're going to even have to make this decision, Megan, because if you look at Israel, and again, people love throwing their predictions out.

I've been watching some of these networks and all these doctors are guessing like they're horse betting. You don't have to guess. You look at the preview of Israel and the UK. Once you get two weeks after 50% of the adult population vaccinated, cases plummet among kids, even though the kids are not vaccinated, because there's less circulating risk out there. So I don't think we're going to be there. But physiologically, a 12, 14-year-old is similar to a 16-year-old. And I think if they want to

get vaccinated, I think that's fine. Do you think it should be mandatory? No, I don't. And the reason is people have good reasons to say that they don't want to do it. They may have had the infection in the past. You know, some people generally have a distrust of the medical establishment. I don't blame them sometimes. I will say, though, initially, my thought process was that healthy kids don't die of COVID. There's probably been less than five cases in the United States. Healthy kids under 18 have died of COVID. We did this study at Johns Hopkins. All the 233 deaths among kids under 18 from COVID in the U.S. are kids with chronic conditions, we believe. Now, there's probably a couple. That's why I'm saying less than five. So I thought, look, if healthy kids don't die, why are we vaccinating healthy kids? Let's just vaccinate those with chronic conditions. And so that was my initial thought, a targeted vaccine policy if the studies show it's safe. Well, some pediatricians at Hopkins pointed out to me that there's probably been, we estimate, 10,000 kids of this systemic inflammatory syndrome. And even though it has a 99% survival, it is painful. And these kids are hurting and sometimes they're in the ICU.

So it may be reasonable if the vaccine is safe in younger kids to do it for everybody. But we have to make sure there's a COVID risk out there. If there's hardly any COVID around, what are we protecting them from? Coming up next, we're going to talk with a good doctor about vaccine passports and whether these things should be required and make sense for those of us going forward. But before we get to that, we're going to bring you something that's kind of related, and that's today's Asked and Answered. It's one of the features we offer here on the program where our listeners write in and we try to, we do our best to answer the question. So it's all going to fold into the same subject matter today as Steve Krakauer, our executive

producer, joins us with what I know today's question is from somebody named Hannah. Lay it on us, Steve. That's right, Megan. Yeah, this came to us from questions at devilmaycaremedia.com, where you can send your question in also and get it answered here on the show. Hannah Antal asks, what do you think about the legality of private businesses requiring vaccines in order to be a customer? She says she can see the government leaving it up to private businesses to decide who can be inside their facilities and wants to know

your thoughts. Yes. Well, thank you for that, Hannah. My instinct, sadly, is that it's probably going to be allowed. I think people will try to fight it, but I don't think you would succeed in saying it's unconstitutional or unlawful for them to require it of are all, you know, for public health reasons. And they're going administration realizes this is politically fraught and that Americans are really sensitive right now to the overreaching into this. There's civil liberties on, you know, after a year of all this. So, so far, the good news is I think, because I don't want to see these mandates, the government doesn't seem inclined to want to do it. But private businesses, I don't know. And state to state, it's already turning out to be a different story. In New York, we've got something called the Excelsior Pass that's already being rolled out in case like reopening of sports and other places are going to be dependent on your vaccine status. So New York, of course, because

we're so blue, we're totally open minded to mandating everything. I don't know. You've seen other states like Texas, I know. I think Mississippi's in Florida. Their governors have issued executive orders saying, no, you can't do this. You cannot require a vaccine passport for people to enter your private businesses. And, you know, that's probably more promising and how this is going to shake out. The New York Times had a good article on all of this recently, just sort of laying out where everybody stands. We've seen places like Israel. They're already doing it. They have something called the Green Pass that will allow vaccinated citizens to go to restaurants and other places. So it's happening and it kind of is coming down to whether you're in a red state, a blue state or Israel.

I think this is yet another thing that's going to divide us, right? Like we've seen so much, so many people leave New York, leave California because they don't like in part the way they've dealt with COVID and school closures and all that and flock to places like Florida and Texas. And if you're somebody who's worried about those cases becoming more and more purple, this is yet another reason to worry because I think it's going to boil down to red state, blue state. But at a federal Supreme Court level, I think that these sort of passports will be upheld. We'll see. We'll see what states and the feds decide

to do. But anyway, thank you for the question, Hannah. We appreciate it. And if you guys want to write in with your own questions, you can do it at any of our social media, Instagram or Twitter, or you can email questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. And in one second, we're going to get back to our good doctor, but first this. One of our listeners wrote in asking, you know, how about these mandatory COVID vaccine passports that some businesses, the Biden administration says that they're not going to do that at the federal level, but some businesses are already saying no vaccine, no entry. I mean, I realize this is more of a policy question, but what would you advise

businesses when it comes to that? Would you make it mandatory that people have the vaccine to enter? So I see the flip side of it. Rather than a mandatory requirement, I see it as if a business has restrictions on capacity and they want to lift those restrictions with immunized people, they should be allowed to. And showing proof of vaccination, I think, is reasonable if you're going to go visit a nursing home next fall. I think, unfortunately, the entire discussion has been swept up in privacy concerns and in the government overreaching and using this information to really limit who can go to school for kids and other things. And I think, unfortunately, there's a lot of fear that these passports are going to be required for a lot of things. And I'm not sure we're really headed that way. I think businesses that want to, nursing homes that want to open up their facilities to people immune

should be allowed to say, hey, we're happy to admit you if you can show some immunity. And by the way, it's not just vaccinated. How about having circulating antibodies that should count as immunity? I think the whole thing has been, you know, we're still in this Fauci shadow of vaccinated immunity is basically kind of between the lines, the only real immunity, and it's just not true. It's not true. So I, you know, another incentive could be 10% discount if you have the vaccine. Maybe that's a way of getting, that's more American, right? Like it's up to you, but I'm going to make it worth your while. Yeah. Let the private sector work. You know, walking around Baltimore,

there's all these restaurants that are shuttered and limited capacity. And most of us that work at the hospital aren't immunized. And it's like, if we could just let them know, hey, we're immune, they should be able to get more business and, you know, allow more people in. Yeah. And it would help with the employment rate and so on the economy. What about there is, they say, between 25 and 30 percent of the American population, they say around 64 million Americans who say they're not going to do it. They do not want to be vaccinated. They may or may not be anti-vax in general, but they don't trust this vaccine. It's too early, blah, blah, blah. I think a lot of them are thinking, I'm just going to wait for the others to do it until

we have herd immunity and then I'll be fine. And I don't have to worry about my role in society because if enough other people do it, my objection to getting the vaccine won't be a problem. What do you think? Look, I think everybody should get the vaccine, but whatever happened to respecting each other? If somebody chooses not to get the vaccine, you know what, Megan, I respect that decision.

I don't agree with it, but that number is shrinking the more and more we can have a civil dialogue and show people that you can be liberated once you have the vaccine. And I'm not that worried about that group. It's a shrinking group. It shrinks every few weeks as more and more people find vaccination relatable when their friends get it and they see them liberated. Because remember, half those people or more have natural immunity

and it doesn't, natural immunity and vaccinated immunity doesn't have the overlap that people think. The sort of person that's untrusting of the vaccine is also the sort of person who's been out there with the kind of the let it rip, I don't care about COVID denialism, and probably had the infection. That's interesting. Now, what about the question of which vaccine? My doctor said, get whatever vaccine you can get. It doesn't matter. But I am curious, what are your thoughts on which vaccine? I agree with your doctor. I mean, the risk of waiting is the risk of getting infected. And you don't want to get the infection on the one yard line of the pandemic here. We're almost done.

10 to 15% of young, healthy people like ourselves can get these long haul symptoms that can be disabling. So between the vaccine and getting the infection, definitely get the vaccine and between the different vaccines, get the first one you can. By the way, probably all vaccines, you know, this is unauthorized now, if we can just talk through that, probably all the vaccines work well after one dose, right? And probably any vaccine, if you give it a second time, boosts it more. And if you give it a third time, even more. So I think it's reasonable. And if you had the infection, you can get just one dose. And on that front, do you think we are going to be looking at annual booster shots on this vaccine? I used to think so, but now I don't think so anymore. Talking to the immunologists that I respect, and you know who these people

are, right? They kind of live in the corners of the labs in the hospital. They're not TV savvy and getting called on to CNN and giving the suave explanations, but they're the geniuses. And they tell me now that they think it's very likely and maybe even probable that you have lifelong immunity. I mean, that's pretty darn amazing. And maybe even from natural immunity too. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty impressive. So we're talking about the Fauci mistakes. And one of the things that people were doing at the beginning of this pandemic was taking out the Clorox wipes and wiping down their groceries. Now I will say for the record, I never, ever did that. I've never, I have Clorox wipes. My

housekeeper bought them. She's like, you need these. I'm like, I don't, I've literally never opened them up. I just, I have my limits. I will wear the mask in the places I have to wear the mask to take care of other people's fear, but I'm not going to do more than I'm required to. I'm just one of those. Anyway, it's, it was all BS. Now the CDC is saying there's virtually no risk from touching contaminated surfaces. And the reason this is still relevant is because at least 50% of our schools are still closed either full-time or at least part-time to in-person instruction. And one of the things, the ones that are open, including ours, would have to do is disinfect all the desks every day. Even my kids who they're lucky enough to be in school, they have to put every single book they have, every single like material, every pencil, every sharpener in their backpacks and

take them up 12 floors to go learn because you can't leave anything in a desk because there might be germs on it. Take it out of the school and then bring it back in the school. I don't know, even understand the whole theory, but can we just admit that now that you can't get it from touching a contaminated? It seems like you have to somebody with COVID has to lick the counter and then you have to come right after and lick it next. Why are we still pretending this is even remotely a threat? Well, look, where's the humility in our medical leadership to say we got it wrong? How many times have you heard that?

We got a lot of stuff wrong, you know, from the national guidance. The CDC got a lot of stuff late or wrong. Actually, most things they were late or wrong on. Where's the humility? And I think right now, if you're a look back, they adopted an influenza transmission model and they should have known that SARS-CoV-1 or regular SARS was aerosolized virus. It was in the air, wasn't on the surfaces. So we had the whole world do these deep cleanings and pour 50 gallons of alcohol on everything,

right? And it's got a certain percent alcohol and all this stuff. And you're taking like, basically like disinfecting showers, like a hazmat, you know, team would in the trauma bay. And it's like, you know what? It's aerosolized. It's in the air. And that's why New York got hammered, right? They got small spaces, poor ventilation, elevators. Some people live in sardine cans there. And so you had all of this aerosolized virus and we got it so wrong. And so where was the humility to say, look, we got it wrong. You need to do that because businesses are still out there. You see them. Businesses are still out there scrubbing the heck out of these tables. And it's like it's not the influenza model. And by the way, Megan, when I called in to the White House, and I had relationships there from my work on price

transparency and this new book I have coming out. So I worked with them on price transparency. And I had relationships with the White House when the pandemic started. So I called in and said, you know, this is going to be bad. What's happening in Italy is not contained, and it's going to happen here. And you know what I was told? I was told, well, we talked to Dr. Fauci, and he thinks we're going to be okay. And so he was using this influenza illness surveillance network to look at influenza-like illness admissions to a hospital. Well, we now know that there's asymptomatic transmission for several cycles before you see a real blip in hospitalizations. And so that's why he didn't really appreciate community transmission at large at the end of February. And so that was the

fundamental mistake in appreciating the asymptomatic transmission of this virus. And you know what's crazy is despite all of the Fauci mistakes, I never see a warning label slapped on anything he says or writes. Never. Nothing. He still has total trust of the media gods who decide who has credibility and who does not. And I have to say, this is one of the reasons why it was so irritating when your Wall Street Journal op-ed from February caused such a such a do. controversial and it may be misinformation. How come we don't get anything like that with Fauci? And how come it's only the stuff that may bear some good news about this whole pandemic that gets labeled? And by the way, like I said, you used to be, I think, a liberal darling because you were saying stuff like, let's get ahead of this. This is serious. We've got to take it seriously. But Fauci may be too much the opposite way. Now, when you're saying, OK, let's admit we made progress, you get warning labels. I mean, when you're saying, okay, let's admit we've made

progress, you get warning labels. I mean, did you feel that at all? Did you know that was happening? I liked being banned from Facebook. It's kind of cool. It's a cool status and people read the article. They're like, oh, what is this? And not only did it push the field, but it's at least half true. I mean, we're seeing herd immunity take place now in April in parts of the country. And the other parts of the country will be there in May. And so we didn't anticipate, my model said at the current trajectory, we'll see herd immunity by sometime in April. But guess what? We had an outbreak among young people with B.1.1.7, the contagious UK variant. So look, you know what? Okay, an outbreak among young people with B.1.1.7, the contagious UK variant.

So look, you know what? OK, parts of the country will get there in May. Either way, we're going to have a great summer. And people needed that. I don't know about your question about Fauci. I can tell you that when I listen to him, I don't get anything out of what he's saying. I never have, because he talks in such general terms, right? Like, perhaps if there's a change in the behavior, we might see an increase in risk to a considerable level.

That's how he talks. And I'm like, what are you saying for the love of humanity? Like, he's saying nothing. He's afraid to be right and afraid to be wrong. And you listen to this and it's just like, what is this? I don't know what to make of it. I like, so your, your bio is going to be updated in the way Howard Stern used to have his like ban from terrestrial radio ban from Facebook. You're totally right. But I have to ask you,

what you just said, do you think we're going to have a great summer? Like, what does that look like? I think we're going to have a great summer. Megan. We're going to be out there. We're going to have large barbecues on the 4th of July. Natural immunity is contributing to herd immunity, and we're starting to see it. We've got a preview now of Israel and the UK. And what we're seeing there, which is a wonderful suppression of the virus and the circulation of the infection, is going to happen here. People should go out there, do their part by getting their vaccine. I'm going to wait 12 weeks for my second dose. People may want to consider doing that as well,

if they can fight with the schedulers. And so I think we're in store for a wonderful, wonderful summer. And when the kids go back to school in the fall, when they go back to school, hello unions, do you think they're going to be in masks? And how long are the rest of us going to be in masks? Well, this is where the media is going to have a big role. Because if they keep running fear stories of the double mutant variant in California, like some alien off a spaceship, and this misinterpretation of the Israeli study that somehow the South African variant pierces vaccinated immunity, you saw that just came out, right? And it's just like, give me a break. It's eight cases in a country of 7 million, and they're not even symptomatic

that we can tell from the study. And they weren't even fully vaccinated. They weren't at that point. So it's like, if we keep running these fear about the summer, guess what? Consumer demand is going to be timid. We're not going to see conferences, conventions, other gatherings plan because they're planning based on consumer expectations. And if consumer expectations are influenced by the media, then we're going to see groups like I speak at a lot of conferences. And right now they're saying we don't know if anyone will sign up if we schedule in September. So a lot of it's going to depend on public perception. So I would encourage the media to put things in perspective and stop putting Dr. Fauci on every single day. Let him do his job. He's an interviewee 14 hours a day. No wonder

he can't keep up with the latest. Shame on Meet the Press. Every single week, I got to listen to the generic talk. Let's hear from some other real infectious disease experts besides one person. He puts his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us, and he just happened to be wrong on a lot of stuff. All right. So here's my other, you're good. By the way, you're going to have to go back to church this Sunday and read and redo all that. I'm going to have to confess the latest to your priest.

I need forgiveness. I do. Don't we all? Amen. Okay. Let me ask you, because you have, you've actually, you have some interesting thoughts outside of just COVID as well. And you mentioned your new book.

It's called The Price We Pay, What Broke American Healthcare and How to Fix It. And I think one of the things that jumped out at me in sort of the list of things that you talk about in here was what you call the revolution, pointing out that Western medicine has adopted a reflex of medication to everything, right, to everything. And that there are alternatives and you're not like, let's do Eastern medicine and we'll just meditate away all of our problems. But you are, you are talking about how there are alternatives to surgery and pills to some of the major things that ail us. Can you talk about that for a minute? Yeah. One of the best parts of working on this book,

The Price We Pay, which comes out in paperback in a couple of weeks here, is that there's a revolution in medicine and it's exciting and it's driven by young people. And if you know that mindset, it's a social justice minded generation. And they don't want to be a part of this visit where you see someone for 10 minutes. They come into med school and they watch us see somebody for eight to 10 minutes, tell them exercise more, eat better, and then take these meds. You come back in six months and we say, you bad, bad, noncompliant patient. And it's just like, what are we doing? The patients hate this. We hate it. So they're designing relationship-based medicine with a new payment model that's kind of an

annual capitation from the insurer or Medicare or the individual. And they're starting to talk about treating more patients with diabetes with cooking classes instead of just throwing insulin at them and treating back pain with ice and physical therapy instead of just surgery and opioids. And they're treating high blood pressure with better sleep and talking about things that affect their stress instead of just throwing antihypertensives at them. And they're addressing loneliness. Look, that's one of the greatest epidemics that predated COVID, and it was magnified during COVID. But look at the ChenMed clinic, growing all over the country now. They've got 60 clinics and they tell people, look, come in frequently. We just want to see you. We have a community and they connect people and they're addressing loneliness.

So it's awesome watching young people talk about predatory billing and price gouging as a violation of our sacred public trust. They're speaking up and it's just beautiful. And I was privileged to describe this movement. Hmm. I didn't realize it was driven by young people. What about the one that you, one of your items was we should invest in research on environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just chemo drugs. Like what specifically would you like to see? Because that's something I personally try to block out of my mind because I just feel like it's so impossible to stay away from all chemicals, all smokestacks, all phone towers. It's like you'd never leave your house.

That's right. Well, the cool thing, so my clinical background is that of a gastrointestinal and cancer surgeon, pancreatic cancer. I spend most of my time now, 90% in public health research and have for most of my career, the last 10 years of my career at Johns Hopkins. But people are saying, look, do we just need to be studying new chemo drugs? Or maybe we can study the environmental exposures that cause cancer. My dad practiced cancer medicine as a hematologist at Geisinger in central Pennsylvania in the coal mine region. And guess what? All kinds of leukemia and lymphoma was coming in the door that you don't see in other parts of the country. But there was no money to

make this connection. And we know it's out there. And if you've seen this movie called The Devil We Know, or the drama version with Mark Ruffalo, is Dark Waters. It describes the largest public health study we've ever done of a synthetic toxin. And they found, you know, they did it over many years, tons of money, largest public health study. It causes everything. It causes neurological problems, all different forms of cancer, all these bad medical problems. It's not one thing. And that was one out of the 200 synthetic molecules that circulates in the human body of every American for life. These are forever molecules. You'll never excrete them. You'll never metabolize them. And so that one happened to come from the byproduct of Teflon. But that's what

young people are saying right now. They're saying, look, let's not just talk about laboratory research. And by the way, it relates to COVID. And I make this connection in the book is that we immediately reacted by putting all of our money into laboratory science when COVID hit. We didn't fund basic clinical research, like answering the questions, when are you most contagious? How does it spread? How many people are asymptomatic? Do masks work? And so you didn't have anyone, not a single dime of the $40 billion at the NIH answering those questions. Instead, it was just a race to the vaccine, which was good, by the way, but it was unbalanced. And so you had no answers on the basic studies that could have been done immediately. And as a result, you had a vacuum of information and opinions filled that and began

this sort of political arguing about how this thing spreads and you stop it. All right. So we have to back up because are you saying I have to get rid of my nonstick pan? Is that my takeaway? Because I love it. It's so great to cook an egg in. I hate the other kind. Well, I use the stainless steel or the regular steel ones. It doesn't work as well. It doesn't matter how much Pam you put on there, it sticks. Well, instead of Pam, I'd recommend avocado oil or peanut oil or something like that because I don't think you want to use spam. But that's a separate topic. But you don't want Teflon. Don't use the Teflon.

Don't use, and Teflon is, that's what we're talking about, that nonstick pan that's so easy to fry an egg in, right? That's right. And there's some other nonstick surfaces now that you can buy that are not Teflon. So just make sure there's no Teflon. Teflon's not supposed to be in anything now. But it turns out it was in a lot of fabric. It was, you know, the 3M Scotchgard and the so-called fireproofing your couch. That was all wrong.

It doesn't fireproof, and it just exposes you to the C8 molecule. Oh, my Lord. All right. I got to go look at that. See, I got to talk to my housekeeper about this. She could be checking the tags instead of giving me more Clorox wipes. She's my buddy. She helps me.

Okay, wait, I got to ask you about what was it that you were just saying? Oh, yeah, your pancreatic cancer history. So one of the things I talked to with my doctor, which I thought was really interesting was, I asked him the same question about vaccines I asked you. And he said, as I said, get whichever one you can. It's all good. And he said, some people don't like the mRNA technology behind the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines, but he doesn't find those concerns valid at all. And he said, and we're just talking casually, but you're a true expert in this. He said, one day, I think the mRNA technology will deliver a vaccine for pancreatic cancer. Would you take that? You know, so don't be afraid of this technology was his point, but do you think it's possible?

You think it's that revolutionary, this mRNA technology? And do you think it could lead to vaccines for things as dangerous and deadly as pancreatic cancer? I think we're gonna see an AIDS vaccine with mRNA technology that's gonna be effective. I think we're gonna see some other vaccines for infectious diseases. Yeah, I think for malaria.

Malaria is a fragile infection, though, so it does mutate frequently. So we're not going to see mRNA vaccines for influenza, for example. They mutate too frequently. By the way, some say this pandemic parallels that of malaria. There's 400,000, almost half a million kids die of malaria each year. We're seeing an antimicrobial resistance epidemic take foot. That's right in front of our eyes. That's going to happen. It's not a guess what our next pandemic is going to be. It's going to be these resistant bugs. But I don't think, I don't see it for cancer. I mean, cancer has been with us forever.

And every time you hear about it, that's something that's going to cure it. Turns out it doesn't account for the fact that cancer evolves. And so the proteins on cancer cells change. So you can have a chemo and over time, it'll be less effective. So that's disappointing. Sorry. What are you saying about the next pandemic?

It will be what? A different form of malaria? Is that what you're saying? What are you predicting? It's going to be superbugs. It is already charted out. The WHO has formal numbers on this. It already kills about 100,000 Americans a year. And it's resistant bacteria resistant to the antibiotics. These bugs are mutating faster than we can develop antibiotics to treat them. And we do have situations now where patients come in to see me at Johns Hopkins.

We cannot treat their infection with antibiotics because the bug is now resistant to the antibiotics from all the overuse that's out there. Yeah, okay. This is from overuse. Keep going. And agriculture. Yeah, and agriculture. You know, almost half of the antibiotics are used in

agriculture for no reason, no good reason. So it's breeding a lot of resistance. And so what's happening is there's situations, and we do this a couple of times a year where we have to surgically remove the infected organ because none of the antibiotics work. It's C. diff colitis as a results in the colon removal. So this is happening in front of our eyes. I just did a TED talk on this. It's going to account for millions of deaths within 20 years per year. And we've got to get ahead of it. And the way to do it is stop taking antibiotics for every little sniffle that's viral. Eat antibiotic-free foods. That moves the markets. And some businesses have

now committed to that, including Chipotle and even McDonald's. And we've got to stop the overuse problem. It's a huge problem. It's breeding resistance. But you can't solve it. You're not talking about an individual basis. So let's say I say I'm never going to take another antibiotic unless it's deadly necessary. It's incredibly necessary. And all doctors agree, you're going to die unless you take it. That's not going to do much for me if the rest of the people don't go along with the same policy, right? 80% of antibiotics people take, they don't need. There's no indication. That study that came out of the CDC. So I should make it clear. Antibiotics save lives.

I've seen that as a surgeon. But the unnecessary use of antibiotics, and we all know what that is, right? You come in demanding your pediatrician at gunpoint prescribes you an antibiotic. So we've got to stop that. And the food, the agriculture overuse is a real problem, and it's driving resistance. So on a population level, we all have to do our part to address this. But can you save yourself from this problem by personally not taking a lot of antibiotics or not overusing them? So the microbiome is the next giant frontier of medicine. And you can't, but yeah, the microbiome, we could talk about that for hours. So here's the thing. If you take an antibiotic, it's like TNT in your gut, and it's blowing up all kinds of species of bacteria.

And guess what happens afterwards? The other bacteria overgrow, and you get more inflammation. And so there's clear studies now in kids that don't get breast milk, so that changes their microbiome, where they take antibiotics as a kid. They're more likely to have inflammatory bowel disease, IBD, Crohn's, irritable bowel, and this stuff is all well documented. So we're trying now to promote a lot of good practices by getting a healthy microbiome. Like when you have a baby, hold that baby. You don't have to wash the baby off instantly.

That's normal bacteria that colonizes the GI tract and the skin to skin time reduces the stress hormones in the baby. And they have more controlled blood pressure and heart rate and their, their stress hormones are lower. So we're encouraging moms to hold that baby as long as they safely can do it instead of rip the baby away and the stress hormones go higher. And when you do that and you delay the cord clamping to get the baby more blood flow at delivery when they're premature, there's a direct benefit there. So we can learn a lot from getting back to the basics in healthcare. And sometimes we have to just recognize that we've been doing too much. You know, I had this woman on my show at NBC and she had written the microbiome solution. Forgive me, her name is Robin. I can't pronounce her last name. But she's amazing. She wrote a great book on all of this. And I

use recipes from it all the time. And it made a lot of sense. And she was basically saying, let your kids get dirty. When you take a shower, you don't need you basically need to soap up your underarms and two other places on your body. And that's it. And she was saying, you don't need, you basically need to soap up your underarms and two other places on your body. And that's it. And then she was saying, you don't have to use shampoo. She doesn't use shampoo. She was saying, um, oh, she talked about using coconut oil, but she was saying only if you see dirt or just know that something has gotten actually dirty, do you need soap in, in the shower at all? And I remember saying to her, so when my, I don't know, I think it was like three or four year old son licked the

scaffolding on the street in New York City, you know, he's languishing behind me. I'm like, hey, where's Thatcher? And he's licking it. So that was a good thing. That was good mothering on my part. And she kind of agreed, you know, we were joking, but she was saying dirt is a good thing. Get dirty, dispense with the constant hand sanitizing as pre-COVID. But still, she was saying dirt in one's life is a good thing and we shouldn't be hand sanitizing away every single thing that might get into the microbiome and make us more resistant to infections and disease. Yeah, Dr. Chutkin, I like her. I think her stuff is good. We're learning more and more, and I'm constantly reviewing these studies. I'm fascinated by them. You know, if you withhold peanuts from kids, remember that whole thing, like don't give them any peanuts, guess what? Then they're sensitized to it. Then they can have allergic reactions later in life. So we don't want to pull them away from everything and put them in sterile, air-conditioned,

ventilated, HEPA filtration rooms the whole time. It's good for them to be out there. And when they studied people from the Philippines, these are fascinating studies, Megan. They'd look at immigrants. And when they come over, their microbiome changes in the diversity of bacteria in their gut when they adopt the Western diet. And the biggest ways to ruin your microbiome is not just unnecessary antibiotics.

It's sugar, added sugar specifically, not the sugar bound to fiber and natural fruit, but the added sugar. And it's the processed food. That stuff just feeds the bad bacteria. And then parents come in saying, you know, how could my kid have ulcerative colitis? This is, it's so random. It's like, yeah, you've been feeding your kid shit, you know, their whole life along with the rest of the society. Right. It's actually not that random at all. Right. Now, before I let you go, because it's a privilege to be across from such education and information. What else in my house

do I need to get rid of immediately? I got to get rid of my damn Teflon tan or pan, whatever it is. I'll go make sure. Is there anything else that needs to go right now? I think it's good to cook with healthy oils. That's one of the things that I think the biggest bang for the buck. I eat out a lot, so I always try to ask them what oils they cook with. I mean, I'm one of those guys where I don't have a pain in the butt, but you want to cook with coconut oil and the avocado oil and the oils that don't denature at high temperatures. I don't think there's anything you really need to get rid of. You don't see Teflon in the modern day ingredients. So unless you're buying a pan from a garage sale from 20 years ago, you're probably okay. Okay. Not olive oil? No. Well, olive oil is good when it's natural as it's good to eat it, like when you eat it with bread. But at high temperatures, it denatures and it turns to a

different type of fat that's not healthy. So olive oil is healthy, but when you cook it at high temperatures, and you can look up every oil has this sort of temperature denaturing depending on the temperature you cook at, but most of them are going to denature. And so it's not that healthy to cook with it. Not as bad as vegetable oil and all that palm olive. You want to cook with coconut or avocado or grape seed oil. Actual oil, or is there like a spray form of that? Like, do you care? Yeah, they've got all different versions, spray and the actual oil. Oh, that's okay. Yeah, look, I love coconut oil.

I put it on my body when I'm at the beach. I drink it. I put it on the food that I cook. So coconut oil is a great, anything with coconut is great. Doesn't it make you fat? That's what they say. I know people,

some people put coconut oil in their coffee. I'm like, okay, that has to be a man recommending that because we women, I mean, now that I hit 50, I can't eat anything. I can't eat at all anymore. Coconut oil in my coffee, for God's sake. That's a little much, but I'll give you the advice one of my 100-year-old patients told me, Megan. The first 50 is the hardest. You know, it's funny. And just for some perspective, I thank goodness also had a long living Nana. She died at 101. And I will say now she had the first she was born in 1915.

So the vast majority of her life, she lived a life of eating only natural ingredients that you get from the corner store that would go bad after a couple of days on the counter. And that's the way we're all supposed to be eating now. But I will say, from what I saw, the last 40 at least were processed foods. She wasn't a big drinker. She didn't do drugs or anything like that. Processed foods, she never hit the gym a day in her life. She was pretty crotchety. So it was like all the things that we're told now. Never meditated. It brings me a little bit of hope, I have to say, on my bad days. Brings me hope. Yeah, good genes.

Yeah, that's right. Anyway, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Doc. And I hope you'll come back. Thanks. Good to be with you, Megan. Thanks so much. Our thanks to Josh Rogan and also to Dr. Marty McCary for their insights on today. And then we're going to go tomorrow or not tomorrow,

but the next show with two people you may or may not know. Their names are Jesse Single and Katie Herzog. And they host a very popular podcast called Blocked and Reported. They are what I would call nonconforming liberals. They're like Glenn Greenwald liberals who are, who push back on some of the crazy orthodoxy that's getting shoved down the throats of liberal Americans and have pushed back on some of the crazy orthodoxy that's getting shoved down the throats of liberal Americans and have pushed back on everything from like the ridiculous messaging we're seeing in schools

about how if you could just have good self-esteem, you know, you're going to make it through life. And, you know, it's all about just building little Junior up into being a winner and taking home a trophy as opposed to just building up some resilience. That's probably not the best way of describing Jesse's book, but you'll hear directly from him when he comes on. And pushing back on some of the anti-science messages we've heard about trans people and so on. Anyway, you'll like them. You'll find them interesting. They're very funny.

And they're up next. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.