The Megyn Kelly Show - Fauci's "Noble Lie," Natural Immunity, and China's Latest Crackdown, with Sen. Rand Paul, Josh Rogin, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty | Ep. 234

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Sen. Rand Paul, Josh Rogin of The Washington Post, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a bioethicist fired over vaccine mandates, to talk about Dr. Fauci's "noble lie," tech censorship and how Americans can fight back, the shameful American response to China, the threat of China to American business, what may happen with the Beijing Olympics, China's newest totalitarian COVID crackdown, vaccines vs. natural immunity, the legality of vaccine mandates, the pressure to disallow medical exemptions, the outrageous American COVID response, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow 

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Well, another big win for Chicago's teachers unions, not notably for the students. No school today for students in our nation's third largest school district. At 11 p.m. last night, the teachers union finally got around to announcing their members voted overwhelmingly to go back to online school, which any parent who has seen that knows that's no school at all. It's arguably even worse than no school at all. If there were no school, the parent would understand that there was a void to be filled.

This is like fake, some sort of fake protection that does far more harm than good. But these Chicago teachers don't want to work. And we've seen that throughout this pandemic. They don't want to go to the office. Too bad. Find another job. More than 90 percent of Chicago public school employees are fully vaccinated. 90 percent. 90% of Chicago public school employees are fully vaccinated. 90%. In response, Mayor Lori Lightfoot

canceled school altogether, calling online school unacceptable because she understands what I just said. She's right. Right on this. We don't really agree with her when it comes to criminal policing. But when it comes to this, she's right. She's tried to stand up to these guys, but they're bullies. The Chicago teachers are going to try to bully her and bully the families of Chicago. At the same the surgical mask, nine times out of 10, does not fit your face any better than the COVID mask. All the breath is coming out the side and the top. And I get that the N95s probably work better, but nobody wants to wear those. They're uncomfortable.

They squeeze your face. Good luck getting that on all the children, as LA is now saying they must do. I mean, that is a hill a lot of parents will die on when they try to stick those on our kids all day long. So that's where we are, right? That's where we are right now. But let me ask you this. Why isn't big tech censoring people like former FDA commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, when he finally admits on camera that cloth masks do not work or CNN's vaunted Dr. Leanna Nguyen? They're allowed to say that stuff on the air. They just have. But YouTube and other big tech companies censored my first guest for saying

exactly the same thing. Joining me now is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senator, great to have you here. So now we've got it on camera. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, Leanna Nguyen, who the mainstream press loves. She's a COVID hysteric on most things. Now they're on camera. I could play you the soundbites, but I don't want to waste your time saying, yeah, the cloth masks, they really don't work that well. Gottlieb said explicitly on Face the Nation, they're not going to provide a lot of protection. That's the bottom line. This is an airborne illness. We understand that. Cloth masks isn't going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission. No problem for him to say that and face the nation or Leanna when to say it on CNN.

She said it's a little more than facial decoration. Don't wear it. Don't wear a cloth. But what did YouTube do to you when you said that? It sounds like maybe there's selective censorship. It might be a little different if you're a Republican versus if you're not a Republican. But the bottom line is we need to have a debate in our country over whether debate is good or bad. I think disputation, the idea of presenting both sides of an issue and hearing from people is absolutely necessary to try to figure out the truth. And it's like any viewer, whether you're a viewer of politics or trying to make decisions on religion or philosophy or science. It is really about hearing both sides. And it's often really fierce battles.

I've been to many science conventions where papers are produced and public and presented. But then they get attacked from all sides saying your sample size was too small. You had negative selection. You had your conclusions don't meet your data. You should have done this. That's the way science works. It's very, very spirited in its discussion. And this is the first time in history where we've decided, well, we don't really want to hear from you because your opinion doesn't fit the government narrative or the group think. But that's dangerous, I think, for innovation and also for trying to come to the truth. And really, in a free society, each individual figures out the truth by listening to the facts.

It isn't sort of one set of facts becomes the truth, and then the government tells you the truth, and that's the only truth. It's difficult sometimes to get things. People say, well, who do I listen to? Well, you've got to listen to multiple venues, and you have to hear multiple ideas to get to the truth. You pointed out in an op-ed you wrote earlier this week that it's not, basically, they just want to shut down speech, as you're saying now. They don't want debate. I was saying yesterday on the show, we do COVID shows all the time and YouTube will slap that little warning on there saying, well, for information on COVID-19, go to the following website, CDC. I guarantee you not a single one of my watchers or listeners has ever clicked on that button. But if it makes YouTube

feel better, so be it. Okay, fine. But that's not what they're doing to you, to Brett Weinstein, to Joe Rogan, to Dr. Malone, who was on Joe Rogan. It's complete censorship. And here's the thing is, when you actually look at and examine the science of these things, it may be that what you're being told is the opposite of the truth and may be endangering you. They say, oh, the right wing is giving misinformation that could endanger you. Well, think about it. If you're 80 years old and your spouse has COVID and you're going to take care of them and you listen to Dr. Fauci and you put up a cut up piece of a t-shirt over your face and you go take care of your spouse, you're inevitably going to get COVID. But if you

really are going to take care of your spouse, wouldn't you want good advice? And this isn't advice to universally wear a mask. It's to wear a mask when you're in close contact with somebody you know has COVID. And this is the way it works in the hospital. In the hospital, the doctors and nurses that go into a room with COVID, they do not wear cloth masks. They only wear the N95 mask because it's the only mask that works. But you're right, it has to have a perfect seal. They also throw it away when they come out of the room and wash their hands and take their gloves off and do all of these things, shed their bodysuit. That kind of stuff can work. It's very hard to work in the general public, but it still should be told to the public what actually works. But Dr. Fauci for a long time has sort of given us this idea that the noble lie is his job, that he's going to lie to you about what masks work because he's trying to keep you from buying the more quality masks so we have enough of them for doctors. He actually admitted that, that he lied to us about the masks because he didn't want you to buy too many of the masks that works. And now he parades around with a cloth mask,

but he's actually endangering people. And he, sorry, I was going to say he, unlike Scott Gottlieb and Leanna Wen is not, he continues to maintain this falsehood. We know the cloth masks don't work. Listen, I have them on my kids when they go off to school every day because the surgical masks don't work either on these kids. They're loose. They're like whatever. If we're going to have to engage in theater, I choose to engage in the least uncomfortable theater for myself and for my kids. But here's Fauci. We all do. When I'm forced to wear a mask, I wear the least uncomfortable mask and none of them really are going to work in the public setting. So I work one that has the most aeration around the mask that I can wear, the loosest fitting mask, because I'm only doing it because I'm being forced to do something,

but it's not for my health. It is really something that is just given to me because the government edict is telling me I have to do it. Yeah. Oh yeah. We're at schools now where the teachers are literally in the wake of Omicron, like, get that mask above your nostrils to the children. Like, get it above your nose. Like, who are you kidding? The mask. There's so much air coming out of these kids mouths and nose out the side, the mask out the bottom, out up the top, above the nostril, below the nostril. This is all a joke. Most of this advice is sort of equivalent to the 14th century when the Pope would burn candles to burn out the evil spirits that were causing the plague. There's no science behind burning out evil spirits. There's also no science behind putting plexiglass up. Even the ridiculousness of having these students six feet apart with these shields and that plexiglass around their desk. MIT scientists looked at this and they said, actually, your best friend when you're in an enclosed area and the virus is spreading by air is actually ventilation. And they actually did some studies of airflow.

And they say that the plexiglass actually disrupts the exchange of the airflow more and has more of the air, you know, going up against the glass and staying in the room than it would without. And it's probably the opposite of what we should actually be doing. So masks don't necessarily work. Plexiglass doesn't work. The whole idea of six feet probably makes no sense either. Even Gottlieb has admitted if you stay in the same room with somebody, whether you're six feet or 30 feet away from them, it's really your length of time in the room. But now we get to the disease. We have this new variant. The discussion is, do we need any of this anymore?

Do we need boosters for a disease that now looks like is 75% less deadly than it was a year ago? And it evades the vaccines. I mean, how many people do you know right now with COVID? It seems like everyone's got it or knows somebody who has it. And these are all vaccinated people. vaccinated, but only because I've had the disease and I've looked at all the studies and people have had the disease, do not get sick, go to the hospitals. There's almost no fatalities from people who've had the disease. So it works as well as a vaccine or maybe even better, but I'm not against taking the vaccine, but the vaccine probably reduces your

hospitalization and death. And I think those studies are pretty good on that, but the vaccine probably reduces your hospitalization and death. And I think those studies are pretty good on that, but it's no longer stopping transmission. So this whole idea that we're going to vilify people who are unvaccinated, they're the ones spreading the disease. Guess what? Everyone's spreading the disease, but fortunately the disease, while very transmissible, has become much less deadly. The message doesn't penetrate in these circles in which they've decided to lean into their COVID fear. You know, I still all of my friends are in New York City, and there are there are crazy stories, Senator. I mean, crazy stories of what parents there are

doing to try to avoid COVID in a particular Omicron. It's like, you know, there are stories about like plastic wrap outside of children's bedroom doors. I could go on, but they really are still treating it like it's the bubonic plague. And that to me is that that scares me, because while the wheels are starting to come off the public health messaging, you can see Fauci starting to waver on some things and some Democrats and some members of the media in these blue, blue cities. People are hardcore. But this is why the truth has to continue to come forward and we have to continue. The longer I've said and the more I've said that cloth masks don't work, even someone on CNN finally said it. So the truth does matter if we

say it long enough and loud enough. For kids and for schools and for masks, large whole countries don't wear masks. Sweden, 1.8 million kids, they don't wear masks. Not one kid died. This is not a deadly disease for children, and the masks are not necessary. In Florida, about half the counties mandated masks, and the other half of the counties sided with Governor DeSantis and did not mandate masks. It's a large comparison. The incidence of the disease was the same in the schools that didn't have masks as the schools that did have masks. It's a large comparison. The incidence of the disease was the same in the schools that didn't have masks as the schools that did have masks. Let's pay attention to the evidence and get beyond the hysteria because you know what? These people will never take their foot

off our throat if we don't push back. They'll be mandating masks 10 years from now if people like Fauci are in charge. So we have to, we have to, these people have to be removed from office and sent into retirement because they're destroying our country. The same we had David Zweig of he writes for New York Magazine, he writes for The Atlantic, we had him on he had done a piece on the CDC's favorite study on masks out of Arizona. And Rochelle Walensky's touted it repeatedly saying it shows a 3.5 increase in Coronavirus at schools where they weren't wearing masks. Well, it turns out it was all a lie. He took a hard look at the actual schools.

They had studied schools where they didn't have masks on for, in some cases, double the time that they looked at the schools where they did have mask mandates. So of course, you're going to have a higher rate of COVID if you take a school on the one hand and look at it for six weeks versus the school where they have the masks on for just two weeks. Right. It was just absurd. And they wouldn't answer his follow up questions. Most of the scientists who have looked at this and there are some really good scientists that are looking at these things. Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, an epidemiologist, has looked at these studies and debunked them. Marty McCary, a scientist and physician from Johns Hopkins, has looked at these. Many of them are remarking that the studies the CDC are pointing to would not pass the

grade for like a seventh grade science contest. They're that bad. But when you look at things that are in more controlled studies, we're not finding it. There's hundreds and hundreds of studies on masks. There's only a few that are actually randomized with control studies with placebos that you can compare, and they didn't show any real difference. If you look at the mask mandates, government policy, and you look at before and after, typically the incidence of the disease continued to rise when you had mask mandates. Even when 80% of the people were wearing or 90% of the people were

wearing it, you found that most people who were getting sick would say, oh yeah, I wear my mask all the time. The mask didn't work. So why wouldn't we emphasize things that work? I think the vaccine helps reduce your risk of dying, but there are therapeutics out there. Have you ever heard Fauci talk about the things you can take? And guess what? There's a window of time. If you don't take the therapeutics in time, you might not survive if you're getting very sick and you're at high risk. He doesn't want to discuss it. So the monoclonal antibodies are the number one out there. You have to get them in a certain period of time. If you wait too long, they don't work very well.

He doesn't want to discuss it because he wants all the focus to be on the vaccines, even though as we see, they don't prevent contagion. And what we thought was sort of a miracle drug initially is still amazing, but not exactly a miracle. It will help you prevent severe illness or death, which is something, but it's not the miracle cure. So now you're advocating to walk away from platforms like YouTube that censor these points of view, even when you see the mainstream press and these very popular mainstream news doctors coming around to positions that you've been banned for. So you want to walk away from YouTube. I know

you're going to rumble and you're saying other people should do the same. I like rumble. But why? Because there's so many people on YouTube. It's a huge platform, right? So wouldn't you want more people to hear your arguments? I get plenty of attention. I don't need necessarily to be on YouTube. The other thing is, is I want to support people who are open-minded. It's sort of be like if someone invited me to a dinner party, do I want to go to a dinner party where the head of Twitter is there who believes that the small-minded people and the people with other opinions than his shouldn't be heard. And he disdainfully looks at those of us who have different opinions. I don't want to associate it with closed minded people.

I want to I have friends who are liberal. I have friends who are conservative. I have friends who are libertarian. But I want to associate with people who want to have an exchange of ideas who don't want to say, well, my way or the highway. And so I don't want my content to be given for free to people. YouTube makes money. They make money off of people like me who have millions of followers. Why should I give them my content? Why shouldn't I take my content to people who respect ideas? Rumble says they're neutral. They're not going to censor the left or the right. You're welcome to come over to Rumble and it's going to be what you want to say. And so I just don't want to support entities and outlets that are closed-minded or simple-minded

or authoritarian in their impulses. I'd rather take my content. And eventually, I'm going to leave them all. I just, everybody pushes back at me and says, oh, you got to stay. You got to stay. No, I don't have to stay. I can go other places. I do want to go other places. We've set up our own website, libertytree.com. We want it to be a news aggregator site. Look, Drudge got so big that half a million people were looking at

him a day or a million people were looking at Drudge every hour. I want to be part of something new where people can go and find the content of libertarians or liberty people with a website. So with Liberty Tree, I control that and the access is open. There can be competition and competition will make these people finally behave. They'll quit censoring us when they leave them, but we shouldn't go over there and beg and say, oh, please be nice to us and please let us back on and you shouldn't ban us. It's like, just tell them all to take a hike. Let's go someplace where we're better received, where people want to associate with us. Right. I mean, I love it because I have to say, I doubt you or I are changing minds on Twitter,

right? It's like those people have already made up their minds. It's like, why not just go have a discussion where you can have it full-throatedly and both sides is not a problem, right? Like they enjoy hearing from both sides. Well, I always joke. I got 3.4 million people following me on Twitter, of which about 3.3 million of them hate me. And so, you know, it's kind of fun to go there sometime and exchange things. I like the form, and I think the form can be duplicated. That is short, pithy comments with links to longer articles. And it becomes a news aggregator in the sense that you're not putting all the articles you read, but say, I read this great article that talks about natural immunity and you link to it. But that can be done in other forums. But I promise you, they will not pay attention. And I'm not a big fan of government telling them what to do. Frankly, the guy from Twitter, the CEO, that arrogant, whatever you want to call him, who says, we're private and we can do

whatever we want. We can censor you. He is right. The First Amendment allows you, if you own Twitter, to do what you want. He can censor all of us off and he can kick us off, but that doesn't make him an admirable person. It makes him a small, closed-minded person who I want nothing to do with. He has every right to kick me off of Twitter if he owns it, but I've got every right not to give him any of my content. I don't want the government to regulate him. I just want nothing to do with people like that. I feel like I have a strong libertarian streak in me.

And I know this is what you're all about. Your dad is all about this. Living in these times, watching these overreaches from big tech to big government, schools and so on, it must be driving you crazy. I feel like it's driving me crazy. I'll give you the last word. Well, it is. And we do have to push back because like they always say on the left, every crisis is not to be wasted. They've taken this crisis, they destroyed our electoral system by making it less valid and all through the mail. And they want to do more to it right now with this crisis.

They're taking away our personal liberties. So we have to push back. Our country is great because we're largely left alone. And that's what I'm all about. Let's keep government out of our lives. And if we can do that, I'll be happy. But I promise you, it doesn't happen without a fight. And we're in it. Senator Rand Paul, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Coming up, we're going to be joined by Josh Rogin of The Washington Post. He's always an amazing guest. You know, he wrote the book on COVID, how it got started, challenging the narrative that had been fed to us by the Chinese. He's here to talk China and COVID and much,

much more. Don't go away. There's a lot to go over when it comes to what's happening in China. The Beijing Olympics are weeks away and millions of people are currently locked down under insane life-threatening conditions because of China's zero COVID policy. It's worked over there about as well as it's worked over here.

Here to discuss it with me is Washington Post columnist and author of Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century, Josh Rogin. Welcome back, Josh. Great to have you. Great to be here. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. Okay, so can we talk about, I mean, you know, we look at like Australia, putting people in camps, they try to escape, they get tracked down by security guards if they're unvaccinated or if they believe that they have COVID. Of course, China outdoes them all. There's this Northwestern city, is it Xi'an? I'm not sure how you pronounce it. Xi'an. Xi'an. Okay, thank you. And why don't you tell us what's happening there and what they are doing

to the Chinese in that city? Yeah, well, to be sure, having ridiculously overbearing and over-controlling anti-COVID policies is not the sole domain of autocracies. As you just pointed out, there are a lot of countries in the Western world that are doing things that don't make any sense, either politically or scientifically, including in this country, to be sure. But in China, the fact that this is being done by the Chinese Communist Party, which is just the most shining example of nationalist, socialist, repressive, oppressive criminal gang that's operating a police state and that is systematically surveilling and monitoring everyone's actions and thoughts in order to ding them with a social credit score every time they get out of line or say anything

that doesn't redound to the party's benefit. When you add that to the mix, it becomes incredibly cruel and incredibly horrifying. And what's going on in Xi'an now is because, you know, in China, they have the zero COVID policy, which is ridiculous, especially at this stage, you know, when you think about it. So every time they have a case or a bunch of cases, they subject millions of people to horrendous conditions. And, you know, and of course, these people are in a panic, but there's nothing they can do about it. And, you know, we had that like one story here, you remember, where like, oh, can people get into the hospitals and the gunshot wounds, and it turned out to be a bad story. And everyone got, you know, got mad on

Twitter for two days. But think about in China where actually it's true that people are locked down to the point where they don't have food and women are having miscarriages because they can't be admitted to the hospital unless they have a negative COVID test. And that's not to say, again, that we've done everything right, but it's to say that when you add that kind of system, that kind of oppression to this kind of authoritarian behavior that we're seeing here, it's really, really ugly. And that just shows you the extreme, extreme example of some of the things that we're seeing in our own societies. There was an article, it was from CNN talking about exactly what's happening there, where they

have, this lockdown in Cheyenne is of 13 million residents, strictest and largest since Wuhan, which sealed off 11 million people in early 2020. So they originally told folks that don't worry, you're going to be able to get food supplies. The food supplies are abundant. No need for panic. The first few days of the lockdown, each household was allowed to send one designated person out to buy groceries every two days. But as the cases continue to rise, they further tightened the lockdown measures requiring all residents to stay at home unless permitted to go outside for mass testing. Well, how are you supposed to get food?

Mass testing doesn't give you food. On Friday, footage emerged on Weibo, which is like their big social search engine, of a man being beaten by covid prevention workers at the gates of a residential compound when he tried to enter with a bag of steamed buns the video which immediately went viral immediately went viral showed the buns scattered on the ground as the man fumbled people traveling 60 plus miles to try to get food. And so like, this is nuts. And what are we doing? We're like, yay, Olympics, so much fun. Don't worry, we won't send any diplomatic officials,

but yay, China. Right, right. And just think about that's the part of the story that got out. You know, Weibo is heavily censored. Everything is heavily censored. You know, I read one firsthand account of a Westerner reporting from Xi'an, who's credible, who wrote that what's actually happening is that if anyone gets tested positive in your whole building, they take everyone in the middle of all of this horrendous repression, and that what the repression is meant to do, what the Olympics is meant to do is to legitimize this regime while they commit a genocide against Muslims, while they commit horrendous atrocities against students and protesters in Hong Kong and crush the free press there. And if this is what's getting out of Xi'an, God knows what's actually going on on the ground. And when you apply that to the Olympics, you've got a situation in Beijing where we really can't trust anything that they say about what's going on with the

health situation there because they're lying about this stuff all the time. Meanwhile, it's like once you've decided to overlook genocide, you know, who cares about a little starvation? It's like, right, we get desensitized to it's but it's horrendous um and not to mention what's happening with uh the tennis player right uh like forgive me pen i was getting pung shui okay i never want to mispronounce pung shui but she's been effectively disappeared and even though they're giving us these propaganda videos of her saying i'm i'm here and i didn't nothing no one did anything untoward to me There are real questions about whether we're ever going to see her again or whether she free interview with Peng Shui, where she's clearly under duress. And then they trot this out to tell us that everything's fine and we should just shut up about it. And the Women's

Tennis Association, to its credit, said absolutely not. And they canceled all of their events in China, giving up a lot of money. And that wasn't an easy decision, but it was the right thing to do. It was the greatest thing to do. And, you know, that's because a lot of big stars like Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams decided to come out and back this woman, their friend who, you know, claimed sexual assault and about suppressing political opposition. It's really there. They don't even like it when you accuse CCP officials of sexual assault. That's enough to lose your life, to lose your career, to attack an entire league of people. And then the news today was that the IOC was asked, hey, you know, all that merch that you're passing out of the Olympics was that made in what was made in China? We know was that was there slave labor involved in all of that? Are you giving athletes from all over the world slave labor produced goods to put on their backs? And they refuse to answer.

They refuse. They never answer. They might be the worst. They might be worse than the UN Human Rights Council. I mean, honestly, this is a corrupt, pathetic organization that always takes the wrong position. It's horrendous. There's no dictator or despot that they won't rush to defend. And, you know, so, you know, the Biden administration, OK, well, they did this diplomatic boycott. I

guess that's better than nothing. It sends a symbol, but it doesn't really stop the genocide. And now you have all of these groups all over the country, all over the world really saying, OK, well, we need to do more. And I think what you're going to see is a broad based campaign first to divest from atrocity linked goods in university endowments. And I think what you're going to see is a broad-based campaign first to divest from atrocity-linked goods in university endowments. And I know you know this, Megan. These college kids, they're the only non-corrupt people left in our system. They're the only ones who aren't beholden to Nike or their Disney movie contract or some sort of Apple product that requires them to shut up about the atrocities. And so they're organizing a nationwide school by school divestment campaign. And I think that

that's something. And then you have, you know, all of these corporations and these media organizations, what are they going to do? Are they going to all, you know, sponsor these Olympics, which is essentially giving money to the party?'ll tell you so for on your first point uh we just read a letter from a yale uh student saying we need to divest our yale endowment from this country we know where where is pung where what are they doing with respect to human rights and by the way the ioc i should also mention they were supposed to meet with a group that wanted to ask about forced labor in china they were like don't really want to but i guess guess we will. And then they said, no, we're not meeting with you. First, they said, we'll sit there for an active listening session only. We won't be sharing any

information with you about whether we are relying on slave labor for some of these clothes and goods. And then as they got closer to the meeting, according to the New York Times, the IOC pulled out entirely from meeting with them saying, we're not engaged. We're not able to engage in a dialogue at this time as a result of our differences in approach. We have differences in approach and therefore there will be no listening by us to you. Okay. Right. Like that we're not surprised, but I do have an answer for you on what American corporations are going to do about the problems in China when it comes to covering the Olympics. which they cover and host in terms of its broadcasting on American television. It's got Beijing written as big as like, well, any normal human might need a little microscope to find it. I can't even see it from where I'm sitting on my desk. It's just the Winter Olympics in big letters with Feb 3rd in even bigger letters and

tiny over on the right. It's almost like one of those trademark signs. Beijing. Say it loud. Say it proud. You know, what's so ridiculous about that is that, you know, when the foreign journalists petitioned for the Beijing Olympic Committee for basic access, right, there's an Olympics happening. There's hundreds of journalists in China, all the US journalists, Washington Post journalists were kicked out, but they were trying to cover the thing, trying to figure out if it's safe, what the rules are, you know, what's going to happen. And, you know, the Chinese government told them all to pound sand. So even as they take the money from the international media organizations, they're treating them like crap.

They're not even upholding basic press freedoms surrounding this games, which the media and the U.S. corporations are partially funding. So we're giving them the money and taking the abuse. It's insult to injury. And of course, they do it because they can get away with it because no one stands up. But some people have stood up. There's a guy named Enes Kanter Freedom who plays for the Celtics. Came on the show. You know, yes, he's great on this.

I went to L.A. and interviewed him. And, you know, there's a guy who understands what it is to live under a horrendous dictatorship because his family was imprisoned by Turkish President Erdogan for nothing, for no good reason at all. And so he doesn't care. You know, he's willing to sacrifice and, you know, he's willing to put his morals above his pocketbook. And the opposite of that, of course, is LeBron James, who would never, ever, ever say anything

about who actually goes out of his way to defend the ccp and criticize daryl mori for tweeting about hong kong criticized ns canner and accused ns canner of trying to quote quote steal his energy because you know lebron james can't understand that somebody might do something for someone that's not them that's not in their own interest for the benefit of another group of people you know that and actually sacrifice uh he assumes it must be in Enschede's self-interest, which of course it's not. Enschede could lose his career over this, and he's come to terms with that. And I think, you know, more and more people are stepping up, and, you know, Congress passed a bill to prevent slave labor protests from coming to our shores. You know, the Biden administration

tried to fight against it. They actually, they opposed it secretly until I exposed them. And then they turned around and they're like, OK, fine, we support it. And you could be sure that they're going to try to play games when they implement it, because this is what happens when people are trying to make excuses for a genocide or look away. But, you know, the other thing is that there's all of these survivors and all of these people who are making it out and their stories are real and their stories are crazy because they're they're much more worried at the Biden administration about making sure we refer to women who give birth as birthing peoples than they are about the Uyghurs

with forced sterilizations, pang shui, what happened in what's happening, you know, in these forced labor camps. They don't care. And never mind what happened in Afghanistan to young women and girls over there and what's still happening. A crisis we're ignoring because, you know, we're so focused on domestic politics and zero COVID here too, right? We're so focused on our own zero, ridiculous goals of zero COVID. But this same organization wants to lecture us on human rights while they happily look the other way and care if if American businesses buy from or sell to companies that use slave labor. They don't care. Yeah, I mean, the Biden administration is split.

There are some people who do care and there are some people who don't care. And the problem is that, you know, they see human rights advocacy as a complicating factor in U.S.-China relations rather than what they should see it as which is that the advantage that we have in other words if you just think about it you know the thing that the chinese government hates the most is when you point out their genocide and the reason they spend billions of dollars to propagandize everyone engages in genocide really hates that just like yes most genocidal regimes don't like it when you focus on it you know and they should not like it because it should be embarrassing because it's one of the worst human rights crimes of our time. on climate change or Iran or whatever else it is that we think we need them to cooperate on, which they're probably not going to cooperate on anyway, because they don't care about that stuff because, you know, they're building coal plants and they're not trying with slave labor. So they're

not going to be a climate change champion either way. OK. And once the Biden people realize that that and some of them do and some of them don't, to be fair, they'll realize that actually the best thing you can do to fight, you know fight the threat of the Chinese Communist Party is to rally people who don't want to live in a world where genocide is the norm. And that kind of unites everybody, unites Democrats and Republicans, actually, unites Americans and Europeans, like nothing really does anymore. And I also think about the people in the region who see that and all people who live under dictatorships are like, okay, are we just going to have genocides for the 21st century is that just what's gonna happen or is someone gonna stand in the way so i think you know and this kind of goes

back to the covid thing too because you know there's a lot that china still hasn't done in terms of telling us what's going on with the coronavirus origins. And, you know, the Biden administration claims to want to know, but they haven't lifted a finger. They've buried the investigation. They never bring it up anymore, even internally or with the Chinese. And here's another thing. You can think, oh, well, wow, that's going to really make U.S.-China relations tense. Well, that's completely the wrong way to think about it. The right way to think about it is that, no, no, this is, first of all, something that's really important for our natural security. And same thing with genocide. We can't live in a world where genocides are okay, because eventually that will come back to haunt us. Eventually,

that will pose a threat to us where we are, once the world is full of genocidal regimes that don't care about what we say or what we do. And so all of these sort of contentious relationships, issues in the US-China relationship, we could use them to protect ourselves and to rally countries to our side and to help these suffering people if we had a little more strategery. But I think the Biden people are they're just, you know, they're just not willing. They're not courageous enough to go there. No, they're they're too busy not solving things like the supply crisis and the inflation crisis. And, you know, not being able to get... Well, that's another thing. Think about the supply chain crisis.

9.95, 14-hour pileups resolved. Right. But the supply chain crisis, think about that. A lot of it is because we're so dependent on the supply chains running through China, you know, and a lot of it is because they play games with those supply chains in order to mess with us and all the other countries, too. So, you know, maybe instead of, you know, of just cursing the darkness, maybe we should light a candle. Maybe we should realize that actually we're going to have to have some decoupling that's going to have to run some of this stuff that we need, especially in a pandemic, around China. That's the technology, that's the medicine, that's the chemicals, that's the rare

earth materials, silicon, all that stuff. Unless we want to be dependent on Chinese slave labor forever, we should probably do something about that now. Yeah. This has become, as the kids say, a toxic relationship for the United States, and we need to walk away for the good of our own collective mental health. And by the way, the health of those Uyghurs and everybody else, because no one's standing up for them at the moment. We have more with Josh Rogin coming up. I'm going to ask him, speaking of Ennis Cantor, you know, he came on the show. He's been doing some press talking about the stance he's taken against what's happening in China and the NBA's subservience to China. He may be about to lose his job. We'll pick it up there right after this break.

And don't forget, folks, that you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel, 111, every weekday at noon east. And the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. Go check it out. Our opening monologue for Monday is still in fuego right there. You can be one of the people to check out that 10 minutes of goodness. If you prefer an audio podcast, just subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And there you will find our full archives with more than 230 shows, including the first time Josh was on, which was episode 89, which is well worth your time. We got into it in depth based on his book about whether this virus started in a lab or was, you know, came from an animal naturally in a market. It's fascinating. And he truly is the expert. Don't go away.

Josh, so the news is and I confess I don't follow the NBA very closely, but the news today is that Enes Kanter may be about to get booted from the Celtics. They say he could become a free agent as early as this week. Do we do we have reason to believe that has anything to do with the very open and, you know, by NBCA standards, aggressive stance he's taken on their cozy relationship with China? Yeah, it's probably not a coincidence, Megan. You know, like I spent a lot of time with Enes Kanter Freedom. And, you know, what he told me was that when he first wore his free to bet shoes, two NBA officials came up to him in the locker room and begged him not to do it. And they said, Enes, please just don't do this. You know, you're going to create big problems for us. And then his agent told him, you're going to lose your career

over this. And so, you know, he went into this eyes wide open. But yeah, this is You know, you're going to create big problems for us. And then his agent told him, you're going to lose your career over this. And so, you know, he went into this eyes wide open, but yeah, this is exactly what, you know, his agent and the, his, the NBA officials warned him about, which is that, you know, you want to speak up against Turkey, no problem. You want to speak up against social issues in the United States, no problem. But once you hit that third rail, once you talk about Chinese government atrocities, all of a sudden, everything changes. All of a sudden, you've risked out your entire career, your whole life, and that of the whole league. And we know the backstory. It's in my book. It's about how the NBA punished the... I'm sorry,

the Chinese Communist Party punished the NBA to the tune of $400 million over one tweet. That was only two years ago, you know, and at that time, didn't they remove Boston Celtics games from their Chinese state TV? Yes, they've already punished the Celtics. They've already cost them money out of their pocket more money than apparently they're they're willing to lose to keep an escantor freedom on their roster. And, you know, what team is going to be like, oh, I'm going to sign up for an attack by the Chinese Communist Party, you know. And, you know, part of that is because the NBA and these teams are don't have any are hypocrites, essentially. They they they'll support your right to free speech until it impacts their bottom line.

And part of it is because we don't have like a system here in the United States where, you know, when the Chinese Communist Party threatens to ruin your business or your industry or your career over crap, over nonsense, much less over speaking up for human rights, there should be a whole country, a whole society responds. We should say, no, absolutely not. And that's not going to fly because then we'll all be living in a world that's essentially self-censored in the favor of the Chinese Communist Party and its atrocities. And that's not just in the NBA. That's in our Hollywood films. When's the last time you saw a Hollywood film about Tibet? It's been about 20 years. We see that all the time in our schools, on our campuses. We see that all the time in our schools, on our campuses. You know, we see that all the time in our tech companies. We see that all the time in our Wall Street firms. And we see it in our politics, too. And, you know, they'll use money. And if that doesn't work, they'll use threats and they'll try to ruin you for exercising your right of free speech on our own soil, in our own lives. And that's crazy. And that's can't be tolerated. But, you know, the problem is that once you have people like Ennis Cantor freedom who say, I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway.

Well, then that tactic goes away. And the only real way to fight that. It should be up to him. That's what's crazy. Like, he should be allowed to just play basketball. He shouldn't have to be, you to be the one touting all this. But the NBA owners, I mean, I had Mark Cuban on the show on one of my very first episodes in what's now an infamous exchange. You can go back and check it in our archives. He wouldn't speak up against them.

You know, Daryl Moret, right? You saw him. He got shitstorm rained down on him for one single tweet about Hong Kong. um adam silver the commissioner he's shown absolutely zero appetite for it so it's like and it's just sitting there like yeah you know there's a whole thing it's like genocide remember the whole you go to dachau or you go to one of the concentration camps out of um you know hitler's nazi germany uh or the surrounding regions and all you see is that never again never again never again never again right people are supposed to speak up they're supposed to stand up when they see something like this. And the NBA is like, oh my God, my sneakers are so nice. You should buy some too. These are amazing. Silence favors the oppressor, right? Neutrality

in the face of atrocities favor the oppressor. That's Elie Wiesel. I'm paraphrasing Elie Wiesel. And people like Enes Kanter, who are immigrants to this country, you know, he's a Turkish Muslim immigrant who became a citizen and changed his name to Freedom because he believes in what America stands for around the world. He thinks it makes a difference around the world. He knows it because his father was imprisoned for running afoul of the dictator Erdogan. And, you know, eventually he was freed. But the point is that that can happen in Turkey if it can happen in China. Well, it's coming to a neighborhood to you pretty soon. And, you know, the NBA, Adam Silver, when he got into the soup, he went to for advice to Joe Tsai, the owner of the Brooklyn Nets, who is like the co-founder of Alibaba. You know, who's not. Well, it was totally in the wrong on the wrong side of the genocide issue, you know, and it you know so all of these american companies and schools and they they have to listen you know when people

like ennis canter freedom say we understand what evil looks like and we have to stand on the other side of it and everyone has to do that in order for it to work and so yeah and ennis canter is paying uh uh ennis canter freedom is paying a big price, but he's doing it for a reason. It's because he knows what happens when we remain silent. It's worse. Yeah, but unlike somebody like Colin Kaepernick, who stood up, I will give him this, he stood up for something he purported to believe in, and then landed on his feet with hundreds of millions of dollars from Nike, right?

Enes Kanter Freedom will not be getting a Nike deal, in particular, will not be getting a Nike deal, right? So once he gets booted, if he gets booted off the Celtics, phase two for him is a lot less clear. Exactly. It's economic coercion, and it's political coercion, and it's being done on our soil, and it's anti-free speech. And yes, if you're going to support the free speech of Colin Kaepernick, then you have to support the free speech of Enes Kanter Freedom. If you're going to support Enes Kanter Freedom talking about Turkey, then you have to support him talking about China. No ifs, ifs, ands, or buts about it. What do you make of, you had an article recently talking about how the Chinese are becoming more emboldened. They're testing us. They're testing us. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently talking about it in

a different way, too, saying they are becoming more emboldened. They're doing some sketchy things over there. Real huge government reaches into, you know, the way you refer to whatever. It's basically trying to crack down on kids and technology use. But you say they're testing us and we better stand up to that test. How so? Right. This is really important. I'm really glad you brought this up, Megan, because, you know, we're one year into this Biden administration. And, you know, for a lot of China hawks like me, you know, there's some things to like and there's some things to criticize, to be sure. But overall, you know, it seems like the people in control of the Biden policy know that, you know, we have a problem here. But the question is whether or not they think that solving the problem is working with China or working with all the other countries

around the world that are trying to stand up to China, but also defend ourselves together, because that's what it's going to take, because it's the biggest, richest country in the world, and it's run by a mafia organization that's committing a genocide. And so I'm in that latter camp. I think that we focus way too much in Washington, and we're like, oh, are US-China relations good or bad? Are they warm or cold? Are we moving upward or downward? Is it too tense? Do we need to cool it off? Is it too cool? Should we heat it up? And all of those things are nonsense because, first of all, none of them can be measured. And second of all, they all place the success of the policy, of the strategy in the hands of our adversary. And the Chinese know that and they can turn up that dial of, oh, things are too

hot. Now you got to back down. Things are too cold. Right. And so, you know, what they've what they've been doing recently is every time we do something, it doesn't matter what it is. Uyghur sanctions, tariffs, trade restrictions, technology restrictions, call it a genocide. They overreact. They throw a huge tantrum. And this usually, in many cases, includes sending a lot of planes and bombers into the air and doing a lot of other ridiculous things like that and yelling and screaming and wolf warrior diplomacy. And, you know, you guys are the real genociders because of the American Indians or whatever, you know, cutting somebody's mic in the middle of a live interview. But anybody who's the parent

knows that if you respond to the toddler's tantrum with, you know, by acceding to his demands, what you get is more tantrums. Josh, thank you so much, as always, for your insights. Love talking to you. Thanks for being here. Up next, turning to a doctor who says nearly everyone was a fan of him until he spoke out about vaccine mandates. Now he's out of a job. Throughout the COVID pandemic pandemic my next guest helped countless patients and patients and frontline workers and eventually contracted the virus himself but when it came time to get the vaccine dr aaron cariotti couldn't do it he didn't think he needed to he argued that his natural immunity is far better than any vaccine and believes people who have already had COVID should also have a choice about whether or not to get vaccinated.

His employer did not agree. He took his fights to the courts and he lost. Now he's appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But in the meantime, it has cost him his nearly 15-year career at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Aaron Cariotti, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Megan. It's great to be with you. That's horrifying. So that's horrifying. As I understand it, you were there at the height of the pandemic, in there with doctors and nurses and patients and sick people, and working night and day and not getting compensated necessarily for all these extra hours without complaint.

That's right. You're lauded as a hero one year, and then the following year, you're seen as a threat to the health and safety of the community and summarily fired. So I've spent my entire career at the University of California, did my residency training there, and then joined the faculty right afterwards. And I've taught for 15 years in the School of Medicine. I think I was the only faculty member that directed courses through all four years of the medical students training. So I was deeply involved with our medical students. I ran a residency training program at the Department of Psychiatry for several years before I took over as the medical ethics program director. only in treating COVID patients in the emergency room in the main hospital with either psychiatric consults or ethics consults dealing with end-of-life cases, dealing with families who couldn't visit their loved ones who were in the hospital with COVID, having to have actually

several anguishing conversations with family members telling them that their loved one was irretrievably dying of COVID. And so I was on the front lines. I saw the worst that this illness could do. I have no doubt that elderly and other people with comorbidities who are vulnerable to this illness are at significant risk of bad outcomes if they contract it. But at the same time, I started to see that our pandemic response in many, many ways was not making sense from a public health perspective, certainly from an ethics perspective. We began taking a kind of all or nothing approach to almost all of our pandemic response measures. And vaccines are a good example of that. So again, I was eagerly waiting

for a safe and effective vaccine back in 2020. In 2021, I served on the Orange County Vaccine Task Force. I helped the University of California develop our vaccine allocation policy. You might remember earlier last year, when the vaccines first came out, there were more people that wanted them than we had a vaccine supply for, at least in the first couple of months. So there were ethics questions at that time around who ought to be first in line to get the vaccine. Do we vaccinate the people who are most at risk of bad outcomes from COVID, the elderly or people with co-occurring conditions? Or do we prioritize healthcare workers to make sure that we have enough of them to be able to treat people with COVID. So there were important questions to work through there, which I helped both our county and the university as a whole contend with. I advocated very publicly in the Los Angeles Times that the poor and underserved

not be deprioritized for vaccine access early in the pandemic if they were at high risk of bad outcomes from COVID. So I sort of lived and breathed this pandemic for two years straight. Well, let me just jump in here and ask you a question. When you were treating patients back at the height of, you know, when things were unfolding, the quarantine, spring of 2020, clearly you weren't vaccinated. We didn't have a vaccine, but, and I know you didn't contract COVID until later. I think it was January of 2021. No, I, I contracted COVID back in July of 2020. And it was actually a community acquired. Yeah. Here's my question. So after you had COVID in July of 2020, and other doctors and nurses around you presumably were getting it back

then too. Did anybody say you shouldn't either either before or after I should say, you're you contracting the virus? Did anybody say you shouldn't have access to patients? No, absolutely not. Of course not. I mean, after I had COVID, the science clearly showed that I was the safest person to be around. Was there any acknowledgement of that at the university, like at the hospital? Do people say like, oh, well, you know, Cariotti's had it, so let's send him in there. A few of the residents would acknowledge that, but none of the policies acknowledge that. So this was one of the very, very strange and inexplicable kind of policy developments during the pandemic that right out of the gate,

we should have recognized that people who have recovered from COVID are a real asset in terms of dealing with the pandemic. So, I mean, one proposal that could have offered better focus protection for very high-risk individuals, like let's say people in nursing homes, would be to try to hire individuals as caretakers who had recovered from COVID that would create a kind of buffer around that high risk population that that could help impede transmission to those elderly individuals. But our public health officials never had any interest in either acknowledging natural immunity or factoring it into our pandemic response. They're solely focused on that vaccine and remain so. So you being a doctor, you get

COVID, you recover from COVID, and you don't think you need a vaccine. And when we kicked off the show today with Senator Rand Paul, he's also a doctor. He's in the exact same boat. He didn't think that he needed a vaccine because he already had COVID. He's refused to get one. You were in the same boat as a doctor saying, I didn't need it in July or August or September to go see patients and I don't need it now. And the university said what? The university said our policy is that everyone needs the vaccine without exception, I guess, with the exception of a very, very small number of people who were trying to get medical exemptions. So for reasons that we can get into, if you're interested, it became almost impossible to get a medical exemption in the state of California because- Oh, they're taking licenses away from doctors who do that.

Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of pressure from the medical board not to write any exemptions for masks or vaccines. So with that pressure on physicians, it became very difficult. Nevertheless, my physician did write me a medical exemption on the basis of natural immunity. We included 15 pages of documentation

on the science of natural immunity and We included 15 pages of documentation on the science of natural immunity, and the university rejected that request for a medical exemption to their vaccine policy. So it was really sort of all or nothing policy that didn't acknowledge that some ages, some populations were at very different risks of COVID than others. So the risk to a college age student from this virus is about a thousand fold different than the risk to an 85 year old. And yet the policy that we created was a one size fits all, no exceptions admitted, no acknowledgement of natural immunity type policy. And what I argued was, if you look at the science on natural immunity, and this is kind of the crux of my legal argument in the case that I still have going in the federal courts, is that the science

on natural immunity, very conservative estimates would suggest that it's 95 to 99% effective. And most studies suggest it's greater than 99% effective at preventing reinfection. It offers what's called sterilizing immunity, which means not only do I not get reinfected to any significant degree. But in those very rare cases of reinfections, there have not, there's not been a single documented case of someone getting reinfected and transmitting the virus to others. So natural immunity actually impedes transmission. We made that claim in our legal case, and the university's experts were not able to refute it. In a separate legal action that I have against the CDC, we made the same case,

and the CDC was not able to produce any documentation showing that there had been a single case of infection and transmission. Well, let me jump in and ask you something. As I read the summary of their argument, it's not really maybe a little bit. It's, oh, vaccines are better. But it's definitely that natural immunity plus vaccines are better than just natural immunity. And therefore, since there's this supersonic level of immunity we could get you to, you who have had COVID, by jabbing you, and you may say you don't want that extra protection, but too bad, because basically our policy is you must be as protected as you can possibly be, short of making those who haven't had COVID go out and

get COVID? Yeah. Well, there's two problems with that notion that is now known as hybrid immunity. So you're right, Megan, that once it became impossible to ignore the efficacy and durability of natural immunity, then the narrative shifted to, well, okay, but you should still get the jab because then you have hybrid immunity. But science on hybrid immunity is very poor. It's based entirely on the fact that you get an antibody bump if you have natural immunity and you get the vaccine. There's actually no clinical evidence that it improves outcomes like infection, hospitalization, or death. The one study that tried to look at that on a large scale was out of Israel. So they actually did a comparison of people with natural immunity who didn't get an additional vaccine

versus those with natural immunity who got one more dose of the Pfizer vaccine. And between the two, they went from 99.7 to 99.8% efficacy against reinfection, which was not clinically meaningful. There was no difference in terms of symptomatic illness. There was no difference in terms of hospitalization. There was no difference in terms of death. So because the immunity is already so good, it's really hard to improve it. In addition, there's some studies that suggest that if you give a vaccine to someone that already has natural immunity, first of all, they have higher risks of side effects. There's about half a dozen studies now that suggest that problem because it's almost like getting a fourth or fifth dose of a vaccine if you've already got natural immunity. And there's

some studies, and this has not been proven yet, it's still a working hypothesis, but there's at least some suggestion that it might actually impair your immunity by focusing your immunity, taking a very broad immunity that should be effective against new variants and focusing it just on the spike protein from the original wild type strain, which the viruses evolved beyond that now. So there are plenty of reasons to think that people with natural immunity shouldn't get vaccinated. Now they can if they want to. I don't have any problem with someone looking at the information, looking at the data and deciding that they already had COVID, but they still want the vaccine. Great. I've always been in favor of informed consent and informed decision-making.

I've never advised anyone that they'd not get the vaccine. What I've advocated for is for the right of informed consent, for the right of competent adults to make that decision for themselves. a vaccine, you should be told exactly what's real about your odds of getting it again or spreading it or dying of severe disease if you get it again, right? Like that's, this is all part of informed consent. I know this is your point. But let me ask you, because I asked my team, you know, I know the Israel study that's that this is the famous where Sanjay Gupta asked Fauci, he never gets asked about natural immunity. Well, why don't we just play it so that we can refresh the audience's memory on this. This is where he asked him about this study showing that you're more protected against COVID if you've had natural immunity than if you've had the vaccine. Do you guys have it, my team? Okay, listen.

I get calls all the time. People say, I've already had COVID. I'm protected. And now the study says maybe even more protected than the vaccine alone. Should they also get the vaccine? How do you make the case to them? You know, that's a really good point, Sanjay. I don't have a really firm answer for you on that. That's something that we're going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response. The one thing the paper from Israel didn't tell you is whether or not as high as the protection is with natural infection, what's the durability compared to the durability of a vaccine. So it is conceivable that you got infected, you're protected, but you may not be protected for an indefinite period of time. So I think that is something

that we need to sit down and discuss seriously. I mean, first of all, that's so absurd because we know that the vaccines have a limited shelf life. That's why we have to get boosters now and all that. I mean, he talks about natural immunity like that's a deficiency of it that the vaccines don't have. And that's dishonest. I mean, that's a dishonest suggestion. But the thing I want to ask you about is there was a Johns Hopkins study, November 23rd, 2021. By the way, that was Fauci in September claiming, oh, we don't know. Why don't you know in September of 2021? Why don't you know about natural immunity. And what it claimed to show is that antibody levels against COVID-19 stay higher for a longer time in people who were infected by the virus and then were fully vaccinated. It says the study also suggested a longer interval between infection and first vaccine dose may enhance the antibody response. But they're saying, Johns Hopkins is basically saying, it will significantly enhance your immune protection if you have natural immunity to go get the vaccine. So, Megan, it's very important to recognize

that what that study was looking at was a lab value, antibody levels. And there's this assumption built in there that the level of my antibodies automatically correlates with my level of immunity. And that assumption turns out not to be true, as anyone who has studied immunology understands. Antibody levels rise and fall with exposure to vaccines, with exposure to the virus, with re-exposure to the virus. And long-term immunity is not conferred by circulating antibodies. It's impossible for us to maintain circulating antibodies to every pathogen that we've ever encountered. If we did that, the energy requirements would be far too high and our blood would be as thick as sludge because there would be too much protein in it, basically.

So that's not how the immune system actually works. Once the antibodies, antibody levels rise, they gradually diminish, whether it's from the vaccine or exposure to the virus or whatever. And long-term immunity is conferred by cells in your bone marrow, B cells, that ramp up antibody production the next time they see the virus. And also by a different branch of the immune system involving T cells, which kill cells that are infected by the virus. So it's long-term so-called memory T cells and B cells that confer long-term immunity. So this whole notion that we can measure immunity by showing that you get an antibody spike when you get the vaccine is just false. That's why it's important. That's why I look to the Israel data because the Israel data doesn't just look at antibody levels. It says, does that actually play out into a clinically meaningful outcome, clinically

meaningful differences in infection, hospitalization, death? That's my next question. So we're now what, you know, almost two years into this thing. They have actual humans who they can ask. That's right. You had COVID. How many times did you get it again? Did you get a, quote, breakthrough? That's what we call it when you get it again? Did you get a, quote, breakthrough?

That's what we call it when you've been vaccinated. Did you get a breakthrough infection? And I know the answer is yes for some people, but just anecdotally in my own life, it seems like far fewer had COVID twice, you know, actually had COVID twice, then got a vaccine and then got COVID. Yeah, that's correct. And that squares with all of the data. I don't think anyone would deny that so-called breakthrough infections with the

vaccines are far, far more common than reinfection with natural immunity. And the rare cases of reinfection, the second case is always milder than the first, far fewer hospitalizations, no recorded deaths from reinfections after, you know, two years into the pandemic. So we haven't seen natural immunity decline two years into the pandemic, as opposed to the vaccines, which unfortunately, the vaccine efficacy starts to decline after about four months. And by six months, efficacy against infection is below 50 percent, below the threshold that we set for FDA authorization after only half a year. We have several studies. Just to jump in on that, just to jump in on that. Also, it doesn't appear that they do much, if anything, to prevent Omicron. I mean, right from the beginning.

Yeah. Omicron has been, I think, a little bit of a wake-up call for people to understand that with or without the vaccine, natural immunity is our way out of this pandemic. Now, the vaccines still have some efficacy. I don't want to denigrate the vaccines. I don't think there's any reason to do that. They still have some efficacy at preventing more severe symptoms and hospitalization. So people that are at risk, that's a good thing boosted are nonetheless getting infected with Omicron. Fortunately, most of those infections in the vaccinated and unvaccinated are mild. that exposure to the virus in that way will create durable immunity. And it will help you to move forward with some degree of hope that I don't need to continue living my life in fear. I don't need to continue fearing every person that I encounter as a potential threat to my health and well-being because our immune systems are designed to deal with pathogens. The closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, is the original SARS virus. And that virus was, the outbreak from that virus was now 17 years ago, almost 18 years ago. One of the interesting

findings is that the natural immunity of people who got the original SARS virus is still good 17 years later. And in fact, there's some cross immunity against COVID. So the closest viral cousin to this particular pathogen shows long-term durable natural immunity. We have studies that go up to 10 to 12 months for natural immunity, but there's also this evidence from that prior virus that strongly suggests that natural immunity is going to last potentially indefinitely. Now, could you get a mild infection down the road, a mild reinfection down the road? Sure. But actually, every time you do that, you strengthen and broaden your immunity once again singularly focused on the vaccine, even in the wake, you know, so far of Omicron, which they know is not prevented by the vaccine. It's not. So, you know, why? Right. But why are they so obsessed with the vaccine? been a little wobbling on even that. I actually, for the first time with my own ears, heard the prophet Fauci acknowledge natural immunity counts. I'm going to play you that soundbite.

When we come back, I'll squeeze in a break, play that soundbite and ask you if you think this is the beginning of the end of the natural immunity denialism. So, Doc, one of the reasons why you got demonized by your institution was this just single, like, tunnel vision when it comes to the vaccines, but the vaccines, but the vaccines over everything. And what we've been told for the better part of two years, but even since Omicron, even since Omicron, the White House just actually came out and doubled down on this story yesterday, that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, right? And they don't care that a lot of the unvaccinated have natural immunity. They just ignore that strain of the unvaccinated, never mind the young who are really not going to be effective spreaders of it

or face much, much danger from it. So listen to this. This is Biden. I want you guys to listen, not just to him yesterday. It starts with him yesterday. But there's a soundbite in here where he actually promises, I had forgotten about this, in July, you will not get COVID if you get this vaccine. Listen to this. There used to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The pandemic of the unvaccinated is a tragedy that is preventable. You're okay. You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. How about that? You will not get COVID if you have these vaccinations. It's not true. It's just not true. It's just not true. It's absolutely not true. It's very dangerous rhetoric as well, not just because it's false

from a public health standpoint and gives people a false notion that they're not going to get infected if they have been vaccinated. The CDC has acknowledged, obviously, that that is not true. At this point, I think everyone in the United States knows someone or has personally gotten a COVID infection, even if they have been vaccinated. So there's just far too many cases of this to continue denying it publicly like that. Just last week, I posted on Twitter, Megan, some data from Ontario. For weeks, Ontario had shown far more cases among the vaccinated than unvaccinated in total. But the response to that was always, yeah, but most of their population has been vaccinated. So proportionately, if there are some cases, they're going to affect the vaccinated. But just last week, if you look at cases per 100,000, so rates of infection, the vaccinated and unvaccinated lines crossed. And so there are now more cases, not just in total, but cases per 100,000 in Ontario, Canada, among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated.

So it's just become impossible to maintain that claim anymore. And it's also, I think, very divisive and irresponsible, this sort of rhetoric of scapegoating, of othering, our patience is wearing thin, and we're not going to tolerate you people anymore. We've heard this kind of rhetoric before from leaders and we know where it goes. It never ends well. Well, and no exceptions at all for well-meaning people who have a religious objection or who have something wrong with them that doesn't allow them to take the vaccine. We had a doctor on the show who had a medical treatment that she was undergoing that her doctor said, you cannot take the vaccine while you're

doing this. Why should she be vilified, right? Why should you be vilified? You had COVID. You served the country. You took care of sick patients. Why are we doing that to our doctors and nurses? So there's never any allowance in particular for natural immunity, but a crack in the egg, because maybe it's just me. This is the first time I've heard Fauci, other than that moment with Sanjay Gupta, give any sort of a nod to the fact that getting COVID will provide you with natural immunity, that even in the eyes of the prophet Fauci will count. Here is Fauci. This is soundbite 10. This is from December 22nd. We are not going to be in a situation of this degree of intensity indefinitely, for sure. And what we're hoping that when we get through this

Omicron wave, that we will have enough people vaccinated and or having been infected and recovered well, that there will be a degree of immunity in the community such that you don't have a situation where it's dominating your life. I feel like he slipped. I feel like that should be an exhibit to your appellate brief to the Ninth Circuit. The mask came off temporarily, if you'll excuse the metaphor. I feel like that's big.

He hasn't been acknowledging it. That's the first time, and I think it's just because Omicron is so rampant. Even he's got to acknowledge what's going to happen on the opposite side of this. And it clearly is that millions of people will be immune even if they didn't get the vaccine. Yeah, the virus is becoming endemic, which means it's going to be a seasonal virus that all of us are exposed to again and again. There's no way at this point to avoid exposure to COVID. Trying to live

your life and not get exposed to this virus is a physical impossibility. It will happen sooner or later. And with or without the vaccine, most people are going to respond to this and do just fine. The challenge right now, since people were not exposed to this endemic virus when they were, older people were not exposed to it when they were younger, is that we need to try to protect those folks. And we need to make sure that early treatment and excellent treatment and better, newer treatments are made available to individuals who may have bad outcomes from COVID. But this idea of the virus becoming endemic and circulating every year shouldn't terrify people. Because once your body

gets exposed to it and builds up natural immunity, if you know, in a few years or down the road, you get another infection, it's going to be mild. It's going to, once again, broaden and deepen your immunity against new variants of this virus. So this will be something like influenza that the human race learns to live with. And I mean, sad to say there are elderly people or people with pulmonary conditions that die every year of influenza. And again, we should do whatever we can to treat those folks and to protect them and to prevent bad outcomes if they get infected. But the idea of turning everyone's lives upside down and putting in place measures of surveillance and control in order to prevent that.

Firing people like you who won't get the vaccine when you've had natural immunity, are we going to fire people who are obese, which is a major comorbidity when it comes to your outcome if you get COVID? I mean, that's absurd. We would never even consider such a thing. But it's equally absurd to fire people who have had COVID and even before they had COVID and before there was a vaccine and before there were therapeutics worked up to his neck in sick patients night and day to try to save lives. It's grossly unfair and wrong. And I do wonder whether you think, I mean, your lawyers have said, now that your case

is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which we know is the most liberal court of appeals in the nation. So that doesn't exactly bode well. But now that we are in the midst of an Omicron surge, which is clearly more contagious than Delta. I mean, in defense of the people who are taking the other position before the vaccines, they seem to be no measure against getting Omicron. And they seem to maybe protect a little against Delta. And that seemed to be what the doctors were saying. So now vaccine mandates make less sense than ever, because you could go, you could fold, you could get the vaccine tomorrow, and you could literally get Omicron that week and give it to somebody. So do you think it changes your litigation and potentially the litigation that a lot of Americans have pending right now against employers who want to do to them what yours did to you? with each passing month, my case, the case against mandates, the case in favor of recognizing natural immunity only becomes stronger. On the flip side, though, Megan, I've been astonished at

the ability of elites, public health officials, leaders to continue doubling down on a particular narrative, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So in terms of reading the tea leaves and what the court is going to do in my case, I don't know. What happened at the district court level was the judge didn't agree with my claim that there was a constitutional right at stake. So I was making a claim under the 14th Amendment that my equal protection was being denied because somebody who got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which according to the company's own data, right out of the gate was 67% effective against infection, was allowed back on campus, was allowed to go to work. Whereas I,

that had 95 to 99% protection, was not allowed to go back, that this violated my equal protection rights. The courts disagree, the district court disagreed that there was a constitutional claim at stake. And so they applied a lower level of scrutiny to the university's policy, which means they just said, we're not going to opine or get into any of the fact finding on the science, right? Once a court decides that a constitutional claim is going to be judged under whether there is a rational basis for the policy being challenged, you're dead. That's it. As soon as they decide rational basis is the test they're going to apply, you've lost your constitutional claim and that's what happened to you. You needed them to require either intermediate, it's called intermediate scrutiny or strict scrutiny. The opposite is true on strict scrutiny. They can almost never uphold the policies if that's the framework the court loses.

So you lost on the standard they chose to apply. That's absolutely correct. You're sounding like a lawyer now, Megan. You're clearly versed in this. In another life, I was. Rational basis review, they said the university's policy actually doesn't have to achieve the aim that it says it's going to achieve. It just has to have a sort of plausible public health goal.

It doesn't have to be narrowly tailored so it could capture cases that it need not capture like yours. And so, yeah, at that point, basically, the court is entirely deferring to the university to make any policy that it wants. And so I think it is important for the courts to weigh in here, and the Supreme Court is going to weigh in soon, at least on some of the mandate cases, to weigh in and say, what are the limits to the measures that can be taken by these various institutions, elected and unelected, during a public health emergency? And most of what's been rolled out during COVID has relied on the 1905 case precedent called Jacobson v. Massachusetts. And this was a case in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of the city of Boston to levy a $5 fine against anyone who didn't want the smallpox vaccine during a smallpox epidemic.

Now, keep in mind a couple of things about this precedent. Smallpox is far more deadly than COVID. It affects both the young and the old. And $5, I did the calculation, adjusted for inflation is $155 fine today. So that's the precedent that all of these mandates are relying on. I think losing one's job is not quite in the same ballpark as having to pay a $155 fine for declining a vaccine. because these tiered levels of scrutiny that you described and legal doctrines around bodily autonomy have developed a lot in the last hundred years since that 1905 case. And yet, so far, we've seen all kinds of policies being rolled out under the umbrella of the Jacobson precedent that I think there's several problems here. One is that the notion of

what counts as a public health emergency is never defined, right? So I think in the initial weeks of the pandemic, everyone agreed that some sort of emergency measures needed to be taken. But once we get a handle on the illness, we know who it affects, we have to establish some meaningful definition of emergency, how many cases, how many hospitalizations, you know, so that we know when the emergency is over. The fact that that has been left open-ended, I think, is not by accident. Correct. None of these officials will give us off-ramps criteria by which they judge when there's an emergency, when there's not, when the masks can come off. No one will say. It's one of the most frustrating parts of this, is the people in charge owe us some sort of metrics, objective metrics. Even if they set them at ridiculous levels, at least we'd have something we could hold them to. But they just keep moving the goalposts. And then there's a woman, Bethany Mandel,

who came on our show. She's a journalist. She's a commentator. And she was just on Twitter yesterday. There was a video of her arguing in her Maryland home county. They want to make indoor masking permanent. This is happening in more and more places. She was saying, you're not even moving the goalposts anymore. Now you're just removing them from the field. There are no more goalposts. Well, this actually is not new. I mean, this gets at some of the larger social and cultural transformations in play during this pandemic. And Megan, I think this is really important to talk about because many of our leads, I think, want this state of emergency to become a new standard paradigm of governance. You might remember very early in the first weeks of the pandemic, there was this phrase, this meme that people started repeating about the new normal. And I think the fact that that phrase emerged almost immediately

in the first weeks of our pandemic response was very concerning. It suggested that our ruling class saw the pandemic both as an urgent issue to be dealt with appropriately, but also as a pretext for transforming certain paradigms of governance. I mean, there was a huge power shift. There was, there were large shifts of wealth from the middle class to, to the ruling class and to particularly tech sectors and tech elites who benefit a lot from the lockdowns and benefit a

lot from the particular response that we instituted for the pandemic. And so I think there's a broader social context behind the way in which our pandemic response unfolded, that there were institutional powers that in the last several decades probably had been suffering from a kind of loss of legitimacy. And they saw that they could mitigate this by constantly evoking a state of exception or a state of emergency and a perceived need for strong measures in place for security and stability. And when people were afraid, they looked to leaders for that. And so it became this kind of feedback loop, where more and more extreme measures were instituted and called for. And now, we're at the point where people are saying

that we should never take off our masks. But I mean, I remember early in the pandemic, Fauci saying that the new normal will involve never shaking hands again, like indefinitely, we should just do away with that social custom, which is a very bizarre thing for, I think, anyone to say much less. I hear this more and more. There's a woman I know in New York who was like, I'll never go to the theater again without this mask on. I mean, would you ever? I'm like, are you kidding me?

I never wear my mask. I only wear it when I actually physically have to in order to get my shopping done or whatever. And I always wear it under protest. I mean, I want, you know how people put like vote on theirs. I want to sort of write F you mask. I don't know something to communicate how much I hate having this thing on my face. But I'm certainly not going to decorate it. I'm not going to make it look good. And I'm not going to wear it in circumstances where I don't absolutely have

to in order to attend. And that's my choice. It should be my choice. We're going to bring in our callers. They're calling in right now, so I don't want to keep them waiting. We'll squeeze in a quick break. And then we're back with the good doctor who was treated very wrongly by UC Irvine right after this. aaron is staying with us for your calls and you can find more um from dr carriardi by by uh checking out his blog human flourishing on substack and let me ask you doc is that what you're doing now because i mean before we get to the callers did you find another job because you need a job yeah i'm uh starting a private practice doc Doc One Health in Southern California, a practice run by doctors for patients where you actually have access to your position directly.

I joined the Unity Project, which is organizing opposition to vaccine mandates for healthy children. We've got a march that we're co-sponsoring in D.C. Defeat the mandates on January 23rd. We're going to have Robert Malone, Peter McCullough. Laura Logan's going to be there, Brett Weinstein. It's a terrific lineup, and we're hoping to get a lot of folks out for that as well. So I'm involved. Get to the child mandates, which is just they're nuts, but coming down. And now it's boosters. Now boosters are being mandated for your 12-year-old in more and more cities. And there's

so many questions about whether you should do that. All right, let me bring in some of my listeners because I know that they've got comments or questions for you. Robin in Kentucky has got a question for you that I actually would like to know more on too. Hey, Robin, go ahead. All right. Well, it's wonderful to be with you both. I've really enjoyed the conversation so far. And as a psychiatrist and an ethicist, two areas which I find fascinating, can you speak to a theory or a hypothesis, twofold, why our leadership class is doing this and how they've done it. And then as a nation and as a people, why are we so easily manipulated and so into fear that we are willing to accept this? I'm not that old, but I do remember when we believed that the government worked for us

and not the other way around. That's a good question. Why are they doing it and why are we allowing it, Doc? So, Robin, thank you. That's a really great question. I think we could spend another hour answering that question, but I'll give you a few quick thoughts just to sketch what I think is going on. So I think some people are doing it for reasons of power and control, and some people are motivated by financial interests. So one way to gain power over people is to isolate them. And that happened during the lockdowns. There was a kind of new model of social relationships, where digital connection was supposed to replace physical presence.

This was strongly enforced during the lockdowns. And when people are separated one from another, it makes them easier to control. You can control the flow of information to them. You can control and monitor their movements. And there are no doubts. This is not a conspiracy theory. There are people that have great wealth and great financial and other forms of power that have been clear about a desire for transforming the way in which people engage and interact with

one another. And this was an opportunity, I think, to do that. So a lot of what's happening is that an infrastructure is being put in place, what I've called on my Substack newsletter, a biosecurity surveillance regime, of which vaccine passports are kind of an important piece. So getting people used to the idea that in order to do things like get on a plane, get on a train, go to a restaurant, I need to show some form of credential, the QR code, or the proof of vaccination that says I have done what I have been told to do by those in authority. Some people get off on requiring that of you, and some people get off on proving that they, as I said the other day with Nicole Wallace, are a good, good girl, and they've done all that they're required to do, and now they want their head pat.

Let me get another caller in. Martha in Virginia has a good one. Martha, hi, go ahead. Yes. How do they determine what's like your at-home testing and the testing they're doing around the country between Delta and Omicron? How are they saying that one is, you know? What's what? That's a great question. So the ordinary tests that most people are getting cannot distinguish which type of variant you have. That requires more specialized testing where the

sequence of RNA in the virus is actually sort of spelled out by the test. So most people, when they get a test, they're not going to be able to find out whether they have Delta or Omicron. The public health authorities can test a population and see that, okay, 70% of the cases now, let's say in Southern California are Omicron and 30% are Delta. But in terms of a case-by-case individual, which of those strains do you have? Most people are not going to know whether they have the Omicron variant or the Delta variant. That requires more specialized testing than the stuff that you're getting at the lab or the at-home testing kits that you can buy. I mean, we're in the midst of Omicron right now, but Delta is still out there.

Doc, thank you so much for telling us your story. Good luck with the Substack and with the private practice. Really appreciate you taking a stand and being so honest about it. Thanks, Megan. Well, don't miss the show tomorrow. We got the Ruthless Guys back and there's so much to go over. The January 6th hysteria that's going on. So much more.

Check it out tomorrow. Download the show and check out YouTube in the meantime. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.