The Megyn Kelly Show - Real COVID Risk to Kids and Biden's Lagging Leadership, with Charles C.W. Cooke and David Wallace-Wells | Ep. 221

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Charles C.W. Cooke, senior writer for National Review, and David Wallace-Wells, editor-at-large for New York Magazine and author of "The Uninhabitable Earth," to talk about the real risk kids face when it comes to COVID, fear-mongering and messaging problems about the pandemic, the politicization of COVID from both sides, how best to assess risk, the status of therapeutics, whether masks really work, what happens with the Build Back Better bill and Sen. Joe Manchin's next move, President Biden's lagging leadership and strategic mistakes, media trying to cover for Biden, Hillary Clinton's embarrassing reading of her unused victory speech, the transgender swimmer breaking collegiate records, women being culturally pushed out of society, the state of vaccine mandates, 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. We are diving into COVID reality today with David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine. Later this show, how worried should we be about Omicron? And what's the path out of the fear and toward a life of living with the pandemic? The left needs a plan, needs to get on board with a plan. And he can speak to that. But first, our good friend Charles C.W. Cook of National Review is here on the latest Supreme Court vaccine mandate ruling, Biden's tough Build Back Better sell, the transgender swimmer making waves in collegiate athletics, and much, much more.

Charles, welcome back. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Okay, so where to begin? Let's start with Build Back Better, which I know is one of your favorite topics. And the last time you were on, the last thing I said to you was I love your love-hate relationship with Joe Manchin, depending on the day, depending on how the tea leaves read on whether he's going to vote for this thing or not. The administration's saying they want it done by Christmas. It's pretty late. I mean, that's pretty soon to get this thing passed. And Joe Manchin has been turning on them on a couple of other pieces of their agenda. So how are you reading said tea leaves right now? Well, I think that the conditions have led Joe Manchin to become more skeptical

than he was, and that at the very least, that's going to push this past Christmas. Two things have happened since we last spoke. One, inflation has got worse and it's been confirmed in the numbers. I think there are very few people now who are denying that this is here, maybe not permanently, but on more than a transitory basis. That worries Joe Manchin. And the other thing is that the CBO has scored the bill on the assumption that its provisions will be made permanent. Now, Democrats are complaining about that. Basically, that's not what the bill does. But, you know, we know that Republicans, too, when political parties make big changes, they don't want them for a couple of years. They want them forever. And it's not unreasonable

for Republicans to say, what would this bill do if they got their wish? Well, what this bill would do if the Democrats got their wish is add $3 trillion to the deficit. And Joe Manchin has been quite clear that he opposes any bill of that size that is unpaid for and that will eventually increase America's indebtedness. So it's looking better for the bill's opponents. The bill is also fairly unpopular now. But you never know when parties have an incentive to pass something to avoid media headlines saying that the president's tenure and momentum is over, they often find the votes.

True, but Biden's approval rating in West Virginia is dreadful. And so Joe Manchin has other things to worry about. It's not like this is an incredibly powerful, popular president who he'll get credit for supporting. I mean, it feels like his voters might give him credit for tanking this bill, this huge spending bill at a time we have record inflation. And I wonder because what he said earlier this week was he's repeating his calls for a political pause, echoing something he first said in September. He wants a pause on this. And that's at the time when the CBO is saying it's going to add $3 trillion. The number's even bigger depending on who you ask. The Penn Wharton budget model, according to the Wall Street Journal, has scored

the 10-year cost around $4.6 trillion. And people are feeling the already staggering inflation in their pocketbooks. So I do wonder if you're sitting in West Virginia and you're paying more for your eggs, for your used car, for your milk, for your electronics, and you see your guy as pretty much the last stalwart between more spending, which you know will come back to haunt you, and a pause. Don't you want him? Aren't you calling his office saying, don't do this? I think so. And I've been arguing for a while that in one sense, Joe Manchin has played this perfectly for West Virginia and for Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is not a Republican. I know he's a thorn in the side of the Democrats, but he is a Democrat. He's a moderate one. And West Virginia, although once Joe Man manchin retires it will be a republican state for a while still has a slightly different character than a state such as say texas and you can see this in that the uh buildback better bill we're discussing is extremely unpopular it has 26

support in west virginia percent support but the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed last month is extremely popular. That in turn has 74% support. In other words, West Virginia is saying to Joe Manchin, we don't like the president. We like the bipartisan bill you did, which the Republican senator from West Virginia, Shelley Moore Capito, also voted for. We don't like this monstrous Build Back Better bill. Well, that's actually where Joe Manchin is politically. So he doesn't have to do very much to keep on the right side

of his voters. Whether he will do it, though, is hard to predict, because doing what West Virginians want and what I think he thinks is right, would, it's undeniable, exact a real cost from his party and the president of that party. Meanwhile, you've got Bernie Sanders doing what Bernie Sanders does. I mean, we've talked about him before, about how he thinks there's some obligation for Manchin and others to vote the way he wants them to vote. And he sent out a tweet that reads as follows. While the majority of the American people have expressed overwhelming support for the Build Back Better Act and delivering for working Americans. Republicans continue to oppose it. Maybe, just maybe, that's why they have to resort to voter suppression.

What? Wait, what? Look, so everything in there is wrong. This is of a piece with, and you mentioned this, Bernie's argument that what really matters is whether there is a majority for this bill within the Democrats caucus, not within the Senate. Bernie keeps saying that two senators are holding up this bill. He's referring to Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. But actually 52 out of 100 senators are holding up this bill. It is true that Manchin and Sinema are out of step with their party, but that's irrelevant. I am strongly in favor of the filibuster, and I like the structure of the Senate. But irrespective of one's view on that, there is no theory of the Senate in which major bills can be passed by 48 out of 100 voters. Bernie doesn't grasp that. And then on the bill itself, what he's

doing here is something you hear a lot from progressives and democratic socialists, and that's taking one side of the ledger only. If you remember back with Obamacare, Democrats would insist during the Obamacare debates that the individual discrete provisions within the bill were popular, but the bill itself wasn't. And therefore, there must be something sinister going on. The media must be running interference for Republicans. Republicans must be lying. Americans must be ignorant and so forth. But, of course, that's not what happens when you get a bill. When you get a bill, people have to combine what they

think of the proposal, be that gun control or spending or reforms to the healthcare system, with the cost which is put in the bill. They also have to consider the circumstances, the context within which the bill is being proposed. But it's really quite silly to do what Bernie is doing, both implicitly and explicitly, to say, well, if you ask people, do you think we should give seniors prescription glasses at no cost? Do you want to do that? They'll say yes. Fine, until they're told about the tax increases and increases in debt and inflationary consequences of doing so. This bill exists as it exists.

It has a set of provisions in it that if passed would go into law. And according to NPR, that wild-eyed right-wing outlet, it has 41% support. And I think for Bernie Sanders to keep saying this has overwhelming support or that it has majority support is flat out dishonest. And the theory on which he's basing that is silly. It's it's it's one side of the ledger accounting. Meanwhile, it has overwhelming majority support in his backyard, maybe in his house, but across the country, not so much and less as the economy gets worse and worse. The numbers for Joe Biden continue to go down. When you look at it state by state, it's very bad.

In West Virginia, Biden's approval rating, 19 percent. And you had a piece recently talking about how the Democrats just keep saying he's just got to do more to lead. That's what we need. We need we just need Biden to do more to lead. And what we need is to get together, get like this BBB pushed through so we can show everybody how amazing our agenda is. Meanwhile, all the bad things that are happening, like with the economy, they say isn't happening. Same way they said to us about CRT. It's just not happening. Don't believe your lying eyes. Notwithstanding all the testimonials, notwithstanding what people see at the grocery store and so on. So he's got a 19% approval rating in West Virginia, in Arizona, 35, Montana, 31, New

Hampshire, 43, Colorado, 40, in Virginia, 38, Kansas, Michigan, 27 and 39. I mean, on and on it goes down below 40%. He has no mandate. He does not have a groundswell of support. And you tell me in what way the Democrats expect him to, quote, lead at this point to turn around their electoral fortunes as we have, I don't know, 11 months now until the midterm elections. I don't think he can. And the reason I mentioned the states that you just read off was that those are states whose U.S. senators or Democratic governors have started to defy him. The last week was particularly bad for Joe Biden, Joe Manchin and John Tester.

So that's West Virginia and Montana got together to vote with all Republicans to reverse the federal vaccine mandate. That probably won't become law because Biden will veto it. But the gesture is interesting. Nevertheless, five Democrats without Joe Manchin. So you have Virginia, Colorado, two in Arizona, one in Montana, got together to to end the nomination of Saul Omarova, who he wanted as controller of the currency. And you have Joe Manchin continuing to oppose key parts of Biden's agenda and trashing parts of that agenda in the press. And I think it's a little unfair of people to say, well, Biden needs to lead.

Biden is the last thing that is going to change this equation because as you said, he's unpopular. He can't go into those states over the heads of the representatives who are more popular and say these guys are doing the wrong thing. Firstly, it would be counterproductive.

But secondly, that's actually what they must want. If you're Joe Manchin, what you want right now is for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or anyone else, frankly, to come into your state and say you're the problem. It makes you look independent, makes you look probably stronger than you are. So there's really no chance for Joe Biden to turn this around. What he needs is a lot of good news. But I will say, I think he's making a big strategic mistake. And this is perhaps a mistake that Democrats and progressives make inevitably because of their worldview. You may remember this. Two weeks ago, the DCCC put out one of the silliest tweets I think any of us had ever seen. And it showed gas prices going down about one and a half cents over two weeks. And the caption said, thank you, Joe Biden. argument that Biden should be making, and when I say correct, I mean true, not just politically efficacious, is that he's not in control of gas prices. The high gas prices are by and large,

not Biden's fault. Now he is in some ways making them worse and he's doing not that much to make them better, but they're not his fault. But if you go on Twitter and your party starts taking ownership of negligible marginal drops in prices, what do you think people are going to conclude when they go up? As of course, they did immediately. They're going to think, well, if the tiny decrease was Joe Biden's doing, then this 10 cent increase must be Joe Biden's doing as well. It was really silly and it did the president no favors whatsoever.

And now the White House watching the press coverage, even the left wing press has to be somewhat honest about these inflationary numbers. I mean, the latest is highest levels, highest levels in nearly 40 years, the strongest inflationary burst in a generation. And they say, okay, so it's basically a 6.8% pace on a year-over-year basis. That's the fastest rate of growth in inflation since June 1982. Energy prices up 33.3% since November of 2020. Gasoline up 58.1%. Food prices jumped 6.1%. And up and up they go.

And so what does the White House do? They gather the reporters, their favorite reporters together, to say what we really need is better coverage because we swear the story is better than it looks right there. And that's what leads us to people like Don Lemon, who in seeing gas prices go down a few cents, did the following on CNN. Listen to this. Big economic relief for millions of Americans who have been dealing with soaring energy prices. Cost of the pump finally easing up with the national average for a gallon of regular falling to $3.35, the lowest since October. Just look at that. OMG, Charlie. Yeah, the Biden's response, Biden team's response to this has just baffled me. I mean, the first thing they should be doing is completely reorienting his presidency to meet this challenge. It is not largely his fault that we are seeing these inflationary pressures although i will say

spending trillions of dollars the party did again uh in march two trillion dollars of unnecessary spending has not improved things but it's not mostly his fault and yet he's not reoriented himself to fighting it and i think that's what people want. What they don't want is for him to carry on pursuing a bill that the party would have tried to pass in 2018 or 2016 or 2014, as if nothing is happening. So there is a real disconnect here between what we're seeing on the ground, which again, it's not really Biden's fault, and what he's talking about, to the point at which he and his party are saying some incredibly silly things. Like, well, if you're worried about inflation, then you really should get behind the Build Back Better bill. That's what will nix inflation. No, it won't.

It won't. And it will probably make it worse because flooding the economy with trillions more dollars, printing more money is not how you get rid of inflation. In terms of the media, I think this is where Democrats suffer from their domination of the media, the academy, the entertainment industry, and so on. Most of the time, they benefit. They can run interference for the party through the press. They can use push polls. They can change perceptions. What they can't do here is convince people that what they're seeing with their own eyes isn't real. You might be able to alter the perception of a candidate using the newspapers. You might be able to bury inconvenient stories just by the process of

picking and choosing what you print and what you air. But telling people that inflation is actually not bad, telling people that the economy is healthier than it's ever been, telling people that the labor market is fine. And as David Leonhardt pointed out in the New York Times, telling people that this is normal America, an America with messed up schools and empty airports and supply chain problems. It's just bizarre because people can see it. People know whether their wages are in line with their outgoings and they know whether it's easy to find a job and they know whether they can travel in the way that they used to and they know how their children's schools are operating. And you can make as many calls to Don

Lemon or Dana Milbank or Jennifer Rubin as you like and implore them to tell people that actually on paper it's fine, but come on. Yeah, that doesn't work. And they might have benefited from somebody who could push back on them and say, that's a bad strategy. The people know they have wallets, they have bills to pay, it's Christmas season. They feel all of it on an intimate level. But instead, he's got sycophants, and I refer to the press here around him, who are as desperate as he is to make the narrative about Biden be better. I mean, you have reporters like Milbank openly suggesting, you know, this is a battle of good versus evil. And so we need to be on the side of good. That would be Joe Biden to defeat the Republicans or Trump, which who embodies evil. And therefore, you better shape up that coverage

and get on board in trying to shove down the throats of the American people this lie, because, you know, it's it's an existential crisis for the United States. It's crazy to hear reporters openly talking like this and taking the marching orders in this way. And then, of course, Charlie, they turn around when you see an event like January 6th, right, or like covid, where they'd really like to have the attention and trust of the American people. And they're baffled as to why they don't have it. Why are people down the Internet rabbit holes? Why won't they believe Dr. Fauci and us when we tell them the quote truth capital T about COVID? Right. These little death by a thousand cuts moments are why. Yeah, I've written about this recently in two contexts. One was the Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post in which he said that some artificial intelligence algorithm had determined that the press is as mean to Biden as it was to Trump. I mean, this is silly. It's not just silly on its face, but it's silly because that AI technology isn't particularly good. It's quite difficult to

judge sentiment and tone and scope, sarcasm, irony, and so forth. And the other was in response to David Frum, who essentially said that if you are critical of President Trump, then you have to remain on board with all of the Russiagate conspiracy theories that we spent two years obsessing over. And in both cases, I made the same point. And that is that if you want to limit the number of lies in our politics, then you just need to tell the truth more. And it is entirely possible both to think that President Trump lied relentlessly about the 2020 election and that Joe Biden's economy, or at least the economy that Joe Biden is president for, is bad. And the idea that you're beginning to see in certain quarters, sometimes explicitly, there was a piece yesterday making this case explicitly in

the New Republic, that the press should be bolstering Biden, even when it knows either that he's lying or that his policies are harmful, is counter to everything that we should expect from journalism, but also from each other as citizens. That's not how you vanquish people who cheat or tell falsehoods. That's how you get more of them, as you say. That's how you prompt people to conclude that no one is trustworthy, that all of politics

is one great staged battle between partisan interests and that the truth doesn't factor in, and eventually to go down those rabbit holes and find themselves under the sway of people who are far, far less responsible than, you know, Kevin McCarthy or your median right-of-center journalists. I think this is a terrible idea that in some ways indicates just how out of touch many people in the press are with those they ostensibly serve. Well, and you know what else? It's indicative of why so many Republicans in particular believe that the election was stolen. It's not that they believe in the Kraken or the Sidney Powell thing. It's that they think the system is rigged against the Republican. And now you have the press openly acknowledging that, though that's not their goal. But that find it all that hard to believe that Democratic poll workers were up to some funny business on the night of the election. Right. Because the ends would justify the means Trump had to be disposed of. They had to do what they had to do. You know, this is sort of because the press paints the Republicans as a bunch of lunatics for holding on to their doubts about the election. That's my own take on it. It's not about cracking. It's about stuff like this. I think one of the difficult things in

recent years has been that many of the criticisms that the press leveled at President Trump were true. They were also the same things that they'd said about every Republican president. And as a result, it was quite hard to convince people that no, this time it's true. Because people would say, well, yeah, but they said that about Reagan, or they said that about George W. Bush. And I said that about Mitt Romney. And you would have to say, yes, I know. But in this case, Trump actually did do it. He actually is lying. And I think that there's obviously a lesson in there for anyone who defends Trump to the hilt. This is not a guy who is trustworthy. There's also a lesson in there about crying wolf. It's an old fable for a reason.

You do not want to create reflexive distrust in people such that if there is the very threat that they've been warned about, they dismiss it. And we're already beginning to see the same people get up on the top of the mountain and shout about Ron DeSantis. We're already seeing pieces saying, well, Trump was one thing, but that Ron DeSantis is another. No, he's not. And if you do that, you will drive people into the hands of irresponsible politicians and make it much harder for them to police their own side. Hmm.

Okay. Up next, we're going to get into time picking its person of the year, transgender swimmer crushing all the women's records at University of Pennsylvania and the latest on COVID vaccine mandates at the US Supreme Court. Right after this more with Charles CW Cook in two minutes. Don't go away. So, Charles, speaking of the lamentations about 2016 on the right and the left, Hillary Clinton weighed in recently. I've been dying to ask you about this and decided for some reason it might be a good idea for her to read what would have been her victory speech on camera. I actually hadn't even seen it until my team played it for me last week. And I was stunned at the shaking, crying version of Hillary. I'm not sure what was going on here, but I'm more interested in your take. Here's a clip.

I dream of going up to her and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms and saying, look at me, listen to me. You will survive. You will have a good family of your own and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the President of the United States. I am as sure of this as anything I have ever known. America is the greatest country in the world, and from tonight going forward, together, we will make America even greater than it has ever been for each and every one of us. Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless America. Your thoughts? your thoughts well i think that it demonstrates a lack of judgment and self-control i understand how difficult it must be to lose a presidential race and if you had wanted to be president for

your entire life it must be crushing to lose a race that you believed throughout you were destined to win as Hillary did in 2016. So on a human level, I comprehend her grief. But there are a lot of people in American history who have been in her position and who have borne their failure with distinction, who have declined to do what we just saw. One of them just died, Bob Dole, who lost badly to Hillary Clinton's husband in 1996, who I think coped with his own loss by joking about it. He was a funny man. Others are of the stalwart type. I find that embarrassing. I think perhaps I find that slightly more embarrassing than even you do because I'm originally English.

That's number one on the list of things you don't do as an adult. Stiff upper lip. Right. Well, you know, can I tell you, watching it again, I actually question the emotion in, I don't question that it was difficult for her to lose and that she felt all of that acutely in 16. But in my experience, when somebody is crying or holding back tears because they're reading something difficult or going through a difficult memory, that's not how it looks and sounds. You don't constantly have the voice like that. You have

bouts of it breaks. You try to recover. It breaks again. You try to recover. To me, it seemed affected. And it also seemed affected to me because Hillary Clinton is whatever your criticisms of her, a very tough woman. And I feel like this was intentional. She was trying to show a softer side of herself. She thought that that would somehow connect with people, just proving once again that she just doesn't get it. Authenticity is what connects you with other people, not fake tears if you're not that person. And it did lead me to wonder, is she getting ready to, you know, with Joe Biden so weak and Kamala Harris so unpopular and Pete Buttigieg just a far left dream that's never going to materialize? Is she getting ready to throw her hat back in this ring?

I think about it. I think it would be insane for her to do so. The story of Hillary Clinton, I'm afraid, is the story of a politician that the public doesn't like and who, in her various incarnations, has had to be pushed over any finish line she managed to traverse. She should have blown out the Senate race she ran in 2000. She did. She won, but she didn't do as well as you would have expected in New York, which was a reliably democratic state, with her husband as president for the race. She lost to Barack Obama in 2008, which shocked everyone. Barack Obama, obviously very, very talented

politician, but he came from nowhere and managed to beat her. And then she lost in 2016 to Donald Trump, which was also unexpected. The idea that the Democratic Party would look to Hillary Clinton assets, salvation. I think it's a strange one. That said, it is in dire straits. Joe Biden is a mess. We've talked about that. Kamala Harris is even worse.

She's less liked than Joe Biden. And she seems to be exposing herself for what she is, which is an authoritarian who believes in nothing. So I can understand why Hillary Clinton might look at the race and say, aha, there's my opening. But I think it would be a profound mistake for her and for the party of it. I mean, at this rate, Charles, we could get a 2024 campaign. That's once again, Clinton v. Trump. I mean, it's possible. It's possible. Trump would win that. And I think if you don't want Donald Trump to be president again,

as I don't, I would like the Republican Party to move on and nominate one of its talented, forward-looking, younger candidates. You should hope that the Democratic Party isn't unless they can get Oprah or The Rock or George Clooney to run. They're in a lot of trouble. And sadly, the grip of celebrity in our society remains. So those actually would be potential threats. All right. On the subject of women, powerful women, I've been paying attention to this University of Pennsylvania story with this swimmer. And at first it was like, wait, what's happening? And now the more I read about it, the more I find it deeply disturbing. And I think it's the future. And I really think people have an obligation to jump up and down and say, no, no, it isn What doesn't these days? But there is a swimmer named Leah Thomas now, and she has been identifying as a woman, as far as I can tell, for about a year. And she was swimming as a male last year.

Okay, last year. And actually, I looked it up. She actually was doing pretty well as a male on the swim team, but decided to transition and was allowed after the very next season to swim as a woman and now is crushing it on the UPenn women's team. And a couple of the female teammates have under the cloak of anonymity because they are worried, as they said to OutKick. They've spoken to OutKick. What they've said is, I would like to get a job when I finish college, so I cannot give you my name on the record because if I say, as an accomplished swimmer at an Ivy League school, that I don't want this, I will be unhirable. Okay, that's a whole other

problem. But they are not in support of this. what they told outkick was that while they feel like they have no choice but to say to leah as she's swimming you go good for you yay that they are actually very angry that they are not in support of this and that they don't think it's fair um there was they were talking about how this one race she leah raced they said usually everyone claps everyone yells and cheers when someone's someone wins a race leah touched the wall and it was just silent in there in the arena when the upenn swimmer anna kellen dead something like that finished second then the crowd erupted in applause understanding that that woman anna should have been the rightful winner if Leah had been swimming

in the properly gendered race. Here is a clip. I'm going to play. I'm going to keep my mic up so that the listening audience can understand what's happening. But this was Leah Thomas swimming at a recent meet. And I mean, crushing, crushing everyone else by a mile let's watch it okay so so there's no sound but you can see one swimmer miles ahead of the others here you can see a little arrow that's going to show where she is and i mean it's not even close charles she's just no one's even no one's even in it now she's done and the other swimmers are you know still trying to catch up and i mean it's not even close and indeed not only is she breaking records right now, but she broke some records even as a man. So you tell me whether these other women have any choice. They're saying she's going to take

over soon. Katie Ledecky's records, our top US swimmers records, and all of this is happening at the same time the International Olympic Committee is saying we're changing our rule that would have required at least one year of testosterone suppression for all athletes who are transitioning. We're now going to leave it up to each individual sport. And I predict most of those sports are going to feel the same as these UPenn swimmers and say, I don't want to be the one to say that they can't do it. And basically, you can transition into women's sports just by declaring yourself a woman. You can be a gold medalist. You can get all the scholarships. You can get the prize money. And if any of these women speak up, they'll be labeled bigoted and lose jobs. To me, it's outright misogyny. Your thoughts? I'm happy to say it. I understand why they weren't. This person is an imposter. And funnily enough, I don't think that that is a controversial view. I think the success of this movement has been to take over certain institutions such that those who are the closest to it feel unable to object. But I would be shocked if 80, 90% of Americans didn't look at this and instinctively understand the problem and oppose this practice. There is a reason that we, as a matter of habit, separate out men and women in sport. It's not bigotry. It's biology. Men, on average,

are stronger and taller than women are. And because we like to see competition in our sports, We don't have a great deal of interest in watching mixed competitions where one person with different immutable characteristics than the other is bound to dominate, is predicted to dominate, is in this case guaranteed to dominate. I suspect that over the long run, this will change because there are millions of people out there whose daughters have made great sacrifices, parents who've made great sacrifices too, in all sorts of sports to get them up to a collegiate or a professional level. And no one wants to arrive at an event and understand from the get-go that they're competing for second place, which is what we're watching in that video. We're watching a group of well-trained and disciplined women competing for second place. And I think there is a big difference between the initial claim of the transgender rights movement and the sort of radicalism that has led to this. The initial claim is some people, and put it however you want, believe they

are or metaphysically are, I'm more in the believe camp, but that's a separate debate, of the opposite sex. And it is polite to treat them as such, to refer to them as such, not to mock them if they dress as such, to, for all intents and purposes, believe their claims. The second part of the case is you have to restructure your society around the idea that they are in a concrete sense, what they say they are, change the birth certificate and the passport and so on, and be treated in all cultural contexts as a woman or a man. And I'm afraid that bit gets crazy at the bleeding edge. It is crazy here. A man saying he's a woman still has the athletic prowess of a man. And I don't think there's a lot of craziness in our society, but I don't think that Americans are going to tolerate that in the long run because it biological women, which is a lie, you now need to change

the way you refer to yourself as a woman. You're not allowed to say that you breastfeed. It's now chest feed, right? It's people who get pregnant as opposed to women, thus taking away something that's really special and incredible about women and has been from time immemorial and has been something that we've dealt with when used against us as somehow a weakness. But now now it gets co-opted now that it can be something that's wonderful. But a biological man cannot do it and not nor can a trans woman. And and in the case of Leah Thomas, she one of the teammates who spoke to Outkick made a good point, which is, of course, she's going to be number one in the country because she's at a clear physical advantage after having gone through male puberty. We had experts on the show who talked about that. If you take two nine-year-old kids, a boy and a girl, they'd

be evenly matched up because before puberty, the boy has no natural advantage over the girl physically. After years of testosterone, which you get during puberty as a boy, it's a different story. That's why my husband, who's 6'2", has very long femurs and big muscles, and I at 5'7", do not. And if he took a year of testosterone suppression therapy, he would still have those advantages, perhaps not to the extent he did before he started it. But there's no getting rid of the natural advantage that inures to a man in having gone through puberty. And her other point was that Leah Thomas essentially got to train with testosterone for years, which the women are not allowed to do.

But can I just play for you, Charles, what Leah Thomas sounds like in talking about her many victories? Because there's absolutely no sensitivity, as far as I can tell, for what this is doing to the other women. Listen. You did break Penn school records on the women's side. What can you describe what that sensation was like for you? Um, you know, especially after

officially being on the women's team and I'm guessing, you know know just feeling in a good place with your transition um I'm very proud of my times and um my ability to keep swimming and continue competing and you know they're suited up times and i'm happy with them my coaches are happy with them and that's what matters to me i'm sure i'm sure she is very proud of herself and her new nonstop record-breaking performances. That's not really the issue. Don't you feel a bit crazy just watching that? Yes.

That's a man. Right. That's a man with a man's voice and a man's physique talking about competing in swimming in a female competition. And whenever you read a piece defending it, it has to abstract out to such a degree all of the things that we can see with our own eyes in order to overcome them. And as I say, I just don't think in the long run that can fly. I also think that the people who are advancing this theory are going to have to, at some point, pick a lane. It was very interesting listening to the oral arguments in the Dobbs case at the Supreme Court, which is the abortion case that could plausibly overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey and hearing about women relentlessly, women giving birth, women's place in society,

gender gaps, equality under the law as it relates to sex. When we've been told simultaneously by many of the same people that men can give birth and to you know, to the point at which the ACLU is actually scrubbing Ruth Bader Ginsburg speeches. Right. Of their explicit and deliberate references to women and women's place in society and the 19th Amendment and equality under the law. And I don't know how you can really reconcile these two things, but I think they will have to be reconciled. Yeah. Well, I recommend that commentary podcast of John Podoritz. Was it today? I'm losing track of the days, maybe yesterday. But John Podoritz was making a good point too, which is look at how

sort of the left and their advocates rain down on people like Rachel Dolezal, right? A white woman who darkened her skin and tried to pose as a person about a Hispanic person because that's appropriation. You can't possibly understand the Hispanic experience without having lived it such that you could profit off of a novel about it. But this, you can completely co-opt the experience of being a woman just by declaring it's so you can you can cross right over. And not only that, you will then be able to change the way biological women think about themselves, refer to themselves's been incredibly brave. It could happen to you. It could happen to me. OK, you know, that's fine, because I think they're exploiting people's natural and admirable instinct for tolerance to to take advantage of it to a dark and dangerous place and we don't have to sit back and take it. All right, I stole the final word on that. More with Charles coming after this quick break. And don't forget that you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. The full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Check it out. YouTube.com slash Megan Kelly. There you'll find an interesting monologue from Friday on Jussie Smollett.

If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast for free. And there you can find our full archives, including,

well, more than 220 shows, but also including our great transgender athletes debate with the runners in Connecticut who'd been losing to a transgender athlete and a transgender athlete herself who argued the other side. Love that. That's episode 101 if you want to check it out. We'll be right back. Charles, I know that you're living a very busy life and you don't get to listen to the show every day, but my audience knows what a huge fan I am of yours because I'm quoting you all the time, even when you're not here. The other day, Abby and I were laughing, my assistant, because we realized that you and she are the same age. And you think, I mean, I feel so old. I'm like, how am I ever going to come close to acquiring the amount of wisdom Charles C.W. Cook has when I've already missed the first 35 years of intense reading and education he's had?

I'm lost. But then I get the happy news that I may not be entirely lost because you're willing to share it, not just as you do at National Review Every Day and on the Editor's Podcast and on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen Podcast. But through something called the Chapter app, where you are going to start with the Second Amendment, I gather, and teach us what you know. What is this thing? Yeah, so this is a startup. They approached me and some other writers, most of whom are on the left, and asked if I would teach a four-week course on something. The chapter describes its system as like a book club but more fun, and that's how the website is set up. The topic I chose was the history of the Second Amendment,

which is something I've written about a great deal since I moved to the U.S., but also I wrote my thesis on this when I was at Oxford. And I thought it'd be a good topic. So I'm going to do that starting next year on January 24. The course will be four weeks. It will go from the colonial era, all the way through the revolution, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and then to modern jurisprudence, tracking the right to bear arms that existed in England, was brought to the New World and was then codified into American law. And this will all be done online.

It will be done what they call asynchronously, and that means there won't be a set time where I'll give lectures or anything like that. It's all done through the website, And so I'll give out reading and videos and the podcast and original source material with notes, instructions. And then there'll be a community forum and a Q&A with me that you can dip into at any time. So I mean, if you're busy during the day, you can do it in the evening or at the weekend. As I say, it starts on January 24th. I'm pretty excited about it. And you can sign up over at chapter. Probably the best thing to do is go to

my website, which is charlescwcook.com. And there's a link on there if you're interested in that. And hopefully I'll see you next year. So this is a great way to become a university professor without actually having to deal directly with the students and the nonsense on campus. Or leave the house even. I think I can do it all through, through my computer. I mean, just say, I will be dealing with, with people cause I'll be answering questions on, on the website. And also I think by video, but it's not, as you say,

it's not that I'm going to be called into the Dean's office and told that I said something outrageous in class and I've been reported for it. At least I hope not. That will be a unique experience in dealing with quote unquote college students. I love the idea. I hope you take on many more subjects after this one. I love learning from you on this show and on yours,

Charles, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Coming up, David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine joins me to talk about some COVID reality, including the ruling we just got from the U.S. Supreme Court on mandates. Don't go away. David Wallace-Wells is editor-at-large for New York Magazine and author of The Uninhabitable Earth. And he joins me now. David, such a pleasure. Thank you for coming on. No, really, the pleasure is mine. Great to talk to you.

So you have been somebody who, I just said this to David Leonhardt, but it's true of you too, you're sort of of the left. You've been speaking, you've been a voice of reason when it comes to COVID policy, I think. And therefore I see you as very powerful. You know, like I think people on the left, I really hope they listen to you because you've been like a beacon of light in the darkness saying, wait a minute, what are we doing? Like, wait, why are we doing this to children? And in particular, the children thing drives me nuts. It was an article that you had in July that really got my attention called The Kids Are All Right. That was how it was titled. Why now is the time to rethink COVID safety protocols for children and talked about how the kids are not at risk themselves and never were. But it is one of the lies we continue to tell as we keep them

masked all day and now require vaccines of all of them, including five-year-olds, because we can't get back to normal until we do these things. Do you feel the same as you did in July? Well, the age skew of the disease hasn't changed. And that's not to say that kids are at absolutely no risk. It's just that compared to the population as a whole, they face a vanishingly small chance of severe illness and really mortality. So, you know, we know all of us following the news, even casually, that old people are more at risk and young people are less at risk. But I think very few Americans, even now, almost two years into the pandemic, really appreciate just how dramatic that age skew is, which is, you know, someone in their 80s faces a mortality risk from COVID 10,000 times the size of someone who's age 10. And even people who are vaccinated, you know, vaccination is the equivalent of maybe 25 years of your age.

So people who are, you know, vaccinated 40 year olds are still considerably more at risk than unvaccinated 10 year olds. Personally, I actually, I do think the vaccinating case is a good idea. I think we need to do what we can to sort of slow the spread. And I think the risks are quite small. But I think that when we think about the sorts of risks that our children are facing, we should really understand that almost all of it is in our heads. And in total, in the American pandemic, we've got something like 800 children, which is to say people under the age of 18 and not true children, 800 people under the age of 18 who've died from COVID. That's not nothing. Each of those deaths is a tragedy. But as a country, we're facing 800,000 deaths. And I think

that gives you just a sense of the relatively small risk faced by all the kids in our lives. Man, now we, of course, some of those people, as with the grownups, are, I think grownups is a term only parents use. I don't know. But some of those kids died with COVID as opposed to from COVID. It's been one of the frustrations in the reporting to try to discern those two things. David Zweig has been making that point, you know, like it's on local transmission rates, about 900 cases of COVID. There were, as it turned out, only 32, again, quoting from your article. In another study you write, among 20,000 Nebraska students attending school all year, there were in total two cases. So what does that tell us? Well, there are other cases showing

some higher risk of transmission in school than those. But in general, I think that our policies have been excessive here. That, you know, especially the very beginning of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, when we knew not all that much about spread dynamics, when we knew not all that much about the sort of mortality risks at play and that risk for severe illness, I think it was perfectly sensible to be quite cautious and to operate from the precautionary principle, at least until we really got a handle on the disease and how it was moving through the population. I think at that point, it was not a bad idea. It was not crazy to close schools or to lock down in general. But especially as we got to the fall of that year, 2020, which is now more than a year ago, I think by that point, we knew well that kids were not just much less at risk of severe illness, but also much less likely to transmit. That risk was not zero. They could still transmit, they could still get infected, but the risk was much lower. And probably if we had been operating

sensibly and really thinking clear-headedly about the issues, we would have done much more to make sure that all schools were open for in-person learning by last fall and um you know without getting caught up in all of the quarantining and you know um classroom closures that have um sort of afflicted even those schools that have tried that did try to be open last year they've done so much damage we've imposed a real cost on a generation of kids um we don't know exactly what that will look like or what its impact will be ultimately on their lives but most of the social science suggests it will be meaningful and it'll be especially dramatic in the kids with least advantage, you know, poor kids, minority kids who are, you know, less advantaged in their home lives. Well, you know, I was just making this point the other day.

I'm curious what you think. Normally, you know, people on the political left would be jumping up and down if you saw that kind of a disparity between rich kids, kids of privilege who are able to work around these restrictions and lockdowns and quarantines, and poor kids who tend to be minority kids, black kids, Hispanic kids in the inner city, they're not getting anywhere near the exposure to information and education that those with means are. Normally, that would be a big thing highlighted by the left. But I was saying the other day, it almost seems like the COVID fear trumps everything. It trumps worries about race, socioeconomics, even politics. I don't know, though. Maybe politics will change it. David

Leonhard was saying he does think if Democrats start losing elections, that'll get their attention on covid policy. But what do you think? Because it is surprising to see them not paying more attention to those disparities. Well, yes, it's been a fascinating saga to watch unfold. Generally, I think our our tribal partisan nature has colored a huge amount of the way that all Americans see this pandemic. And, you know, I think that's really unfortunate. It's meant some really bad policy in the end. The way I see it is that actually among the sort of professional class left, you know, the well educated, well off sort of caricature, you know, bankers, lawyers, that sort of person has actually been quite eager to see schools reopen for about a year now. It's actually the parents who are much less well off, who last year were much less open to that and much more scared. Now, that may be a fault of the public health messaging. It may be because we haven't been clear enough in signaling

the relative low risk faced by children. And so it's only those people who are really, really paying attention to the news who understand that well. But I think there are a lot of other dynamics as well. It's, of course, also the less well-off, the less well-educated who have been so resistant to vaccination. And I think that there's, you know, there's a sort of a similar dynamic there. In general, you know, I think the fact that Donald Trump was president when this pandemic started meant that much of our understanding of public policy was filtered through how we felt about him. And that meant that many liberals in 2020 felt that we had to do more at all costs because he was doing so little. And I do think that he sort of really failed there. But I also think that the failure is much larger than Donald Trump. When you look at

all of our peer countries around the world, the U.S. did probably less well than we would have expected. But we're not in a category worse than most of the rich countries of Europe. In fact, we're right in the ballpark of them. And I think that tells you that this is a really hard challenge. It's really hard to govern through all of this. It's not always just a matter of doing more or doing less. It's not just a matter of believing in science or hitting the science button. And I think the experience of the Biden year so far shows us exactly that. I think by the end of this year, almost certainly, there will be more American deaths on Joe Biden's first year as president than there were under

Donald Trump's last year. Now, that's not to say that Biden is more at fault than Trump was. He was handed a worse hand by the time he took office. The disease was already, you know, all spread through the population. There was very little chance of truly suppressing it. You also had the vaccines. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly how much to credit or discredit him for our sort of, you know, not not totally successful vaccine rollout. But I think, again, that's just a sign that many of these things are beyond direct political control and that we've sort of failed. I think he's paying a price for having said he would shut down the virus. He didn't need to say that. He didn't need to guarantee that, you know, when he was running. And now people are looking at yet another variant and more possible lockdowns and renewal of his approval ratings. In other words, inflation,

he has a 28% approval on dealing with that. Gun violence, 32%. Crime, 36%. COVID response, he gets a 53% approval, but that's down from 72% in March because I think just people have had it and they're going to blame whoever's in power and given his promise. But you used a term just a second ago that I really wanted to ask you about, because you raised such a good point that we haven't been talking about, fear-mongering. Okay, the fear-mongering that we see from the media and some of those in charge, it has genuinely negative effects, in particular on kids, for the reasons you just pointed out, but also we're forgetting the elderly and how they really do get scared when you talk about Omicron as the next devil incarnate and everything's got to shut

down because Omicron, they really are at risk. They have very high death numbers, alarmingly high. And I can speak to this personally, just from my mom, who's 80, and my husband Doug's mom, who's 85. They live alone. They get scared and they're already isolated. It is irresponsible to treat every variant or every new tweak in the COVID narrative as devastation awaiting? Well, I think that, as you suggested, I think that people in your parents' and your in-laws' situation have good reason to be scared still. The disease is still circulating. It's still quite deadly. And while vaccination and other social behaviors

can protect the elderly, they can't protect them perfectly. We're still seeing some relatively large number of deaths among the elderly, they can't protect them perfectly. We're still seeing some relatively large number of deaths among the vaccinated, most of whom are old, because as I mentioned earlier, vaccination, while it can reduce your risk of mortality by a factor of 10 or 12, that's really the equivalent of just taking a couple of decades off your life. So if your father-in-law is 85 and he's vaccinated, fully vaccinated, he's still at risk as at risk as an unvaccinated 60 year old was. And we know a year ago, an unvaccinated 60 year

old was quite scared of the disease. I think there's good reason for those people to be worried and to take precaution. The question is, why aren't we doing more targeted protection of them? Why did we, why have we throughout the pandemic talked about this issue and this challenge as a universal and even sort of uniform challenge that we needed to do? We needed to protect the society as a whole in order to protect our most vulnerable rather than taking action and interventions that are much more targeted than those who may actually suffer. I think that's especially glaring now when we have a large, you know, a large chunk of the population, it's not perfect, but about 60% of the population is quote unquote fully vaccinated.

We have an opportunity to really, you know, focus on the people who are most at risk with a variety of interventions and now heading into facing down Omicron with a really short timeline to do so. I would like to see public policy focus more on those who are really likeliest to suffer most, but we've taken this sort of, we're all in this together approach all year. And as I mentioned earlier about school closures, I do think that there was some wisdom in being so cautious right at the start of the pandemic. Yeah, we didn't know what we were dealing with. To understand that, you know, there's, you know, a 25 year old simply does not need the same kind of public policy as an 85 year old. And an approach that treats them as

equivalent is going to alienate the young people and also exhaust us without actually offering nearly as much protection to the truly vulnerable as we could have. And there seems to be a head in the sand mentality when it comes to new information that we've learned since March of, my God, I can't even, it's 2020, March of 2020. It's like you lose time when it comes to this pandemic. And the New York Times had a piece on this on December 11th. The editorial board came out with a piece saying we can live better lives while being smart about COVID. One of the things they pointed out was this is from their piece. Do away with COVID theater. The coronavirus is airborne and any money spent on deep cleaning would be better put toward improved building ventilation. They say these plastic barriers can actually impede airflow and exacerbate viral spread. There was a report just this week about the teachers in Michigan who were saying, or maybe it was last week, saying they needed Fridays off because they're burnout. And it's like most of us parents are like, get to work. The kids are the ones who

we have to worry about, not the teachers. But I understand it can be real. And part of the problem, we looked into it in Michigan, is they have to still clean all of the classrooms as if COVID is still super easy. You know, we believed at one point to pick up from a desktop. They do have these plexiglass barriers. We have that in our school. Our sons can't speak to their little buddies at school during lunch because they're all separated by plexiglass. How much did those cost? Those resources could have been directed someplace where it matters.

So all of that plus, and I know you've been talking about this, the push to vaccinate, you know, AOC was like, I got my vaccination. She's like a 31-year-old, very healthy woman. Fine. It's fine for her to get boosted. But what about, you know, people in Africa where we have a 10% vaccination rate from which Omicron came and we just put our heads in the sand? Didn't didn't hear the news about plexiglass, didn't hear the news about the services, didn't hear the news

about Africa. Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of these cases, we just have an incredibly slow moving policy bureaucracy. And so the things that we thought we knew in March or April of 2020, essentially governed our approach for a period of six or nine months. And by the time we had the opportunity to sort of, you know, rethink a lot of those policies, a lot of people were just sort of exhausted and were comfortable just sticking with the status quo, which is a terrible recipe for response. And as a result, we've seen, you know, a really dramatic, bad, especially experience with the Delta wave. And I do think as we talk about where, you know, we're heading, we're heading

into an Omicron phase, I do think it's worth doing just some level setting about how bad the Delta wave really has been. Most people in my life in, you know, relatively liberal, relatively well off New York, have been essentially acting as though the pandemic is not totally gone, but more or less behind us over the last few months. But we've had basically 1000 or more Americans dying every single day now for a period of several months. And that's an annualized rate of about 400,000 Americans, which is more people than died in 2020. September and October of this year were the peak delta wave months. They were, aside from the winter surge, the worst two-month period in the entire pandemic

in terms of deaths. And that's with 60% of the population vaccinated. On top of all that, even though we have 60% of the population vaccinated and probably something like 80% of seniors fully vaccinated, although the CDC numbers are not so reliable, so it's a little hard to tell, even though we have that many people vaccinated, even though we know those vaccines are effective, nevertheless, the relationship of cases to hospitalizations and deaths across the country is unchanged from before vaccinations, which is to say the same number of cases now as we would have had last January or February has been producing the same number of hospitalizations and deaths. And that's, I think, in part because Delta has

been a bit more severe. It's also because we just happen to have so many vulnerable people. But I think it's really a sort of a mind-bending fact for most people who are following this closely, even to know that at the national level, we have not reduced mortality risk from the disease. A single case has the same mathematical relationship now to a hospitalization and a death as it did before mass vaccination. And that means that there is still quite a lot of suffering and dying going on today that many Americans are just turning away from out of exhaustion, which is an understandable reaction. But it's also a tragedy and a sort of a moral indictment of us that we prefer to ignore

a thousand Americans dying a day rather than treating it like we did a year or so ago when it was considered really the front and center, you know, fact of our lives. I would say, you know, the part of the problem is this refusal to acknowledge new realities. And and like for me, I'm so sick of sending my eight year old off to school wearing a mask all day. I would do anything to get the masks off my kids. I really would. I would do anything.

I will vaccinate them tomorrow. I will do whatever you, but I can't because the CDC and my schools are both saying, go ahead and vaccinate your children and they'll have to wear the mask and there's no off ramp. They may have to wear them forever. And it's like, you know, it's just so frustrating. And then the other thing that's very frustrating is natural immunity and the refusal to acknowledge, you know, that it does have preventative effects of getting COVID again. And we understood that during the height of the pandemic when we let nurses and doctors who had had COVID have access to very vulnerable patients, understanding that they were not

going to get it. You know, the nurses and doctors weren't going to get it again. But I mean, we're in a situation now in New York City, thanks to de Blasio's new order, which I'm sure you saw as a New Yorker, where like the kids can't come into New York, they can't they can't go to the restaurants or the arenas or so on, unless they've been vaccinated if you're five to 11. Well, what if your five year old has just had COVID? What if your five year old had COVID in November? Why on earth would you say he can't go into a restaurant in New York City? right? Like, it makes no sense. And even for adults who have had COVID, especially more recently, there's no acknowledgement like there is in Europe, that that does provide you with immunity. And the Israel study says 27 times

better immunity than the vaccine. So it makes people resistant to some of these other pushes on vaccines and so on. Yeah, you know, I think the data on the relative strength of the protection is sort of all over the map. The Israel study you mentioned is the one that suggested the strongest protection, but there are other ones that suggest that vaccines are a little stronger. In any event, we know that prior infection provides some amounts of protection. It's not, you know, it's probably roughly in the ballpark of vaccination. But, you know, as I say, the data is a little bit messy on that. I think it's, you know, especially as we're looking at new data on Omicron, it's sort of, you know, what that's telling us is that neither two-dose vaccine protection or immunity from prior exposure is sufficient to protect against infection, against Omicron, and probably we want to have at least a three-dose vaccination program or a combination of prior

infection and vaccination to really protect us against this new variant. Now, in the past, I think you're right that we've been sort of reluctant. I think essentially for bureaucratic reasons, it's just sort of easier. I think essentially for bureaucratic reasons, it's just sort of easier to track vaccinations and ask for people's vaccination cards than it is to ask for their positive COVID test from a few months ago or their antibody test or however you'd want to check it.

It's just sort of easier. And it also helps in the effort to promote vaccination, which I think is at the forefront of most public health officials' minds at the moment. But heading into Omicron, I think it is actually useful to say, as well protected as you may have felt from your two doses or your prior infection two months ago, probably you want to do a little bit more, get a booster shot, get vaccinated if you aren't already, and ideally accumulate as much protection as you can possibly muster against this new variant because it is so infectious, so transmissible. There does seem to be some significant amount of immune escape.

There are also indications that it's less severe, although that's sort of tentative. But that's a big point. That's a big point. That's why a lot of people who are vaccine hesitant, right, for whatever reason, they don't want to get a booster and they don't want to get the vaccine in response to Omicron because they're like, if I'm going to get this anyway, which we're all going to wind up getting it, so it's so contagious. Why don't I just get this version? Because this one seems less deadly. That is what their authorities are saying. This one seems less deadly than Delta, for example. And it's incredibly contagious, even to people who have been vaxxed and boosted,

even boosted. So I can see the calculation of, all right, if I got to get one, I'll get this one. Well, we don't know what protection it will offer against future variants. So that's a little bit of a wild card. If Omicron can reinfect you, if you just had Delta, then possibly the next variant will be able to reinfect you, even if you had Omicron, and it might be deadlier. But beyond that, at the population level, these dynamics play out in sort of counterintuitive ways, which is to say, if Omicron is, you know, three, four, five times as infectious as Delta, which is what a lot of the early data is suggesting, and it's 30% less severe, or even 80% less severe, as some people have suggested,

those are sort of the range that I've seen, you're still talking at the population level of much more death and severe illness than you would have seen with Delta because the disease is going to reach, let's say in the same amount of time, six times as many people, four times as many people, even if it's 30% less severe, you're still seeing a huge accumulating toll of death and suffering. And in a context

when, because we're expecting the wave to be quite compressed, because the transmission rates are so high, there really is a risk of hospital systems being overrun. I think there is an argument for just trying to, you know, what we used to say a year and a half ago um flatten the curve and try to slow it stop it right now i could that everyone's like and bye like we're so over two weeks to stop the spread i mean that i realize that the thing has changed and we've had new variants and all that but you know that's part of the problem is in setting expectations that you cannot meet is people wind up getting a boy who cried wolf reaction of like, uh-huh, right? And anyway, listen, there's so much more to go over. I really want to talk about what the Supreme Court just did. And we'll talk about

the role of therapeutics, right? Why aren't we focused more directly and ubiquitously on a cure, right? On a cure. Plus, I'll show you New York City's guilt-ridden new ad pushing vaccines. Vaccines for teens. We'll pick it up there in two minutes. Don't go away. So, David, the U.S. Supreme Court refusing to hear a challenge to New York State's mandatory vaccination program for health workers. The rule covers workers in hospitals and nursing homes, home health agencies, adult centers, as well as hospices. Three nurses and a group called We the Patriots USA, Inc. challenged the mandate, arguing it allowed exemptions for those with medical objections, but not for people with religious objections. And the justices are basically siding, as they have in general so far, on the side of the state mandates. They've upheld them or refused to

get involved in Indiana, Maine, now New York, suggesting a tolerance for these types of things. Gorsuch, interestingly, Amy Coney Bar and brett kavanaugh sided with the liberals on this uh alito gorsuch and clarence thomas were in the dissent gorsuch saying he would have granted the request to take a look at this case noting that doctors and nurses have gone to great lengths to serve their patients during the pandemic and saying um we should know the costs that come when this court stands silent as majorities invade the constitutional rights of the unpopular and unorthodox. But these vaccine mandates, for the most part, are being upheld, including at the very highest level. I know you're pro-vaccine. I'm pro-vaccine too, though I have to confess I've been a little disappointed with the number of breakthrough infections and how severe they are in cases like Colin Powell. It's like, oh, my God.

So they're less exciting. I just thought they were a complete miracle when they first came out. I feel a little differently about them now. However, I'm definitely against vaccine mandates. And I know in some corners that makes you an anti-vaxxer. I don't agree with that at all. I think it should be up to parents with their pediatrician when it comes to the kids and grownups, adults with their doctor when it comes to themselves. But what do you make of it? Because legally, these things are being upheld. Well, you know, I wish more people in the country were vaccinated rather than less. And it seems like most of the sort of soft tools that we have to encourage that we've sort of maxed out on that. And we've maxed out at a relatively low level, which means that the U.S. is much less protected than most of its peer countries who are not themselves perfectly protected. It's not like all the countries of Europe are not seeing, you know, a Delta wave

followed by a nomocron wave. They're all going through the same thing we are. We're a much bigger country with many, many more unprotected people. And that means that we're much more at risk. The thing that I think I agree with about your perspective about vaccine mandates, although in general, I'm supportive of them, is that we talk about these dynamics as though the primary obligation of individuals is to the society as a whole. And I think that there's wisdom in that, in that pro-social perspective. But I think it's also worth keeping in mind that every individual who chooses to become unvaccinated is assuming a much larger risk to him or herself than they are imposing on those around them. Now, vaccination does reduce your risk of infection and transmission. And so there is some social cost that's imposed. But if you're putting

yourself out there as essentially, you know, being comfortable, vulnerable to death from COVID, you are assuming the lion's share of the sort of hardship there, or the risk there. And to some degree, I think I understand why we might want to be deferential to that calculus. Like I said, I think we'd be in a much better position if the country as a whole was better vaccinated. Personally, I'd like to see 100% of the country vaccinated.

You're right that there have been, there are a lot of breakthroughs. There are some serious breakthrough cases, but even among the elderly, vaccination reduces mortality risk by at least tenfold. And while that's not perfect- And I feel like most of the elderly are getting it. I mean, as you cited in your numbers earlier,

the vast majority of people over 65 are the ones at highest risk and are getting it. Not all, though. But to me, when I look at the teenagers, I think, oh my God, their lives have been ruined. These poor kids, they're never going to get these years back of their lost proms and their lost graduations. And in a world that's already isolated for them, thanks to the damn iPhones and social media, it's progressively so, right? We just get the report from the Surgeon General saying teenage anxiety and depression and stress and suicidal ideations are at all-time highs. And then I see, because I hear it from my friends who are still in the city talking about how their kids can't do anything unless they've been vaccinated. And some parents have legit

worries about things like myocarditis, depending on their family history. Then you see this New York City commercial. Can I just show you this? Because I'm like, oh my, oh my Lord. To me, it seems a little tone deaf to what parents' legit concerns are, but I'll ask you your opinion. Watch. Ready for your teenagers to be teenagers again? Then get them vaccinated for COVID-19 today. Without the vaccine, when your child's teammates take to the field, they'll miss out. Or when their friends go off to the movies, a concert, or get a bite to eat, your team will miss out. Because in NYC, kids 12 and up must be vaccinated to participate in many school sports, extracurricular activities, and indoor events. See, that infuriates me. Like showing the kids celebrating in their masks.

Yay. And anybody who doesn't have the vaccine has to sit on the sidelines just to do something that they've been doing since the beginning of time, you know, play in a sport outside PS on a field. I just like, to me, it's galling. It's galling that they would celebrate something like that. But what do you think? Well, to me, the striking thing is that it's not focused on the disease risk to teenagers. It's not saying you can breathe easy. Your kids are going to be safe. It's saying you can breathe easy because your kids will be able to participate in the social activities that they're otherwise barred from. So it's setting up the challenge, the difficulty, not as the disease itself, but the public health policies that have been put in place to limit its

spread. That's a really interesting play. In my experience, you know, parents who are really worried about their, a lot of parents are really worried about their kids. I think it's, you know, to some degree irrational, but it's also understandable in the sense that we are all worried about the vulnerable people in our lives. And it's hard not to think of our children as vulnerable, even whatever the data say. But that's not a commercial that's aimed at addressing that anxiety at all. It's aimed at, you know, addressing the sense of burden or exhaustion that we have with sort of pandemic living. Yes, right. Burden and exhaustion. And I just hate seeing like all the pictures of the kids in the masks as if they're having a great time. They're really happy. The kids don't want

to be wearing these masks. They don't want to be dealing with this at all. They want to go back to their normal lives. They want to be safe, I'm sure. But I mean, this normalization of nonstop covering your face in a way that's really damaging to these kids socially and their well-being psychologically, that we need to stand up against that. That's not normal. Normal is a bare face. That's normal. Yeah, I mean, you've touched on masks a few times. I think it's maybe worth spending just a minute on it. You know, personally, I think that the costs of mask wearing are a bit smaller than you do. You know, if I could snap my fingers and make it policy, I wouldn't have my three-year-old wearing a mask in her nursery school. But I also don't think that the cost has been enormous to her. The thing I think most pro-mask people

don't understand is that the benefits of mask wearing are relatively small as well. The big celebrated Bangladesh randomized control trial study from a few months ago, which was really celebrated as proof that masks worked, found that in those areas where pro-mask messaging increased mask wearing by something like 300%, the spread of the disease was reduced by something like 11%. So you had a full-on tripling of mask usage, which only had a pretty trivial effect on the spread of the disease. They only found it was effective at all among those people who are wearing surgical masks. And almost no kid I know wears surgical masks. They all wear cloth masks.

And the effect was, again, concentrated in the elderly, which is, again, a sign that, you know, this is perhaps a policy that should be better targeted towards those who are really vulnerable and who could really benefit rather than being imposed universally on the population as a whole. So I'm a little less worried about the downsides of masks than you are, but I also think that the upsides, the benefits are considerably smaller than we've been led to believe. What do you make of Governor Hochul's order now? It was on Friday and it took effect on Monday, that workers at companies sitting at their desks, if you're at a company that doesn't have a vax mandate and you are unvaxed, while sitting at your desk inside all day, you have to wear a mask. I can't imagine how frustrating that is

for the workers of New York. What if you have natural immunity? You're sitting there now, thanks to Governor Hochul, who, you know, she's never got her mask on. I've yet to see a picture of her with her mask on. I just think they're going to overplay. They are overplaying their hand to where even my leftist friends in New York are getting sick of this. And I'll give you one other line. My one friend, he's hilarious. He's a diehard liberal guy. And he said to us the other night at dinner, he was like, I don't get it. He's like, I look at my side and I'm like, wasn't this all just to get rid of Trump? Like, against local counties who choose not to enforce it, which means that it's really it is a theatrical gesture more than a directed policy one. in sort of ousting Trump, but it was formed in a political era in which liberals were, you know, processing all of their feelings about the world through their animus for Donald Trump. And that meant that because he was callous and indifferent to the disease in general,

not all that interested in doing anything beyond helping develop the vaccines, which was really significant, not really interested in doing much more than that. Liberals developed in response an idea that doing more was always going to be better and preferable. And being more vigilant was always better than being less vigilant. And I don't think that that was like, we need to get Trump out. I think it was because Trump is doing X, we believe in Y. And I think it's a really ugly dynamic, although I would say the same thing is playing out now with vaccines, where all through 2020, whatever we saw about red state behavior with masks and social distancing, we heard a lot through the media that there was really irresponsible behavior going on all through red America. In fact,

the data show that there was not much difference at all between the behaviors of red States and blue States. There was just about exactly as much social distancing going on in red States mask wearing at the peak of the winter surge was, um, above 90% in the whole country. I mean, it was, it was quite uniform, um, whatever we heard from the media. Um, but in 2021 with the vaccine rollout, we've seen this huge partisan divide opening up, I think in part, because the vaccine rollout, we've seen this huge partisan divide opening up, I think, in part because conservatives are quite skeptical of, you know, public health bureaucracy that's led by Democrats and Joe Biden. And that is, you know, it's the same dynamic that led liberals to rail against Donald Trump for his indifference last year. Both phenomena are really terrible and catastrophic, both politically, socially, and also in terms of public health.

I would like to believe that we could engineer a sort of a, you know, a public health consensus on a lot of this stuff. But when I look around the world, I also don't see all that many countries doing all that much better than we are, which means we may not even be dealing with sort of provincial American political problems, we may be dealing with sort of much deeper social and political issues, which, you know, the pandemic has raised and almost no one around the world has engineered a solution to. Yeah, well, that's the that's the most profound point of all. Right. What if the truth is there's very little we can do? There's there's very little that we can do to stop this this disease, this virus from changing our lives and and that if that's true then to me it comes down to your level of risk tolerance because you can't live in a society like america right where we have

freedom in our blood um and just keep the thumb of big government on people's behavior forever it's just not going to work we're not built that way it's been two years and already you're seeing the patients wane even amongst some on the left so So that's the real rub. What if there's really not much we can do? And as we all age and get closer to the most vulnerable, you know, sort of phase of our lives, you got to be more and more scared, right? It's not just a problem for the elderly. If your life goes the way you hope it will, you will be elderly at one point. You probably have elderly people you love. So we do need to pay attention to it. And that's why I'd love to see more therapeutics. It's like we spent so much time worried about the vaccines and not nearly enough worried about the cure. Right? I mean, do you think the Merck pill, is that the cure? The other pill? I can't remember who's making the other one. Are those the answer? Yeah, vaccinated, it will change your risk calculus profoundly. And the country as a whole, if it was fully vaccinated, the same would apply. But I think that therapeutics are really underappreciated and underemphasized tool in our toolkit. And I'm really disappointed to see, I mean, there are many points of disappointment I've had with the FDA, along with the CDC throughout the pandemic, and how slowly their bureaucracy has been moving. But on therapeutics, it's especially distressing. So actually, so there are these two drugs that are being talked about right now. One has been approved by Merck.

One is pending approval by Pfizer. It's actually the Pfizer drug, I think, that is much, much more powerful and enticing and exciting. And as a result, I'm really disappointed that the FDA approved the Merck drug first. So the Merck drug, their initial data suggested it reduced severe illness by about 50%, which was exciting, although not a total game-changing number. Their second round of data suggested it had fallen to 30%, which starts to get into the zone of the therapeutics we already have. It's not that much better than the tools we've been using already. On top of which, it has what's called, this is going to be a little technical, but it has what's called a positive aims test, which means that there is some

risk, at least measured by this one test in the laboratory, that it can change your genetic material, putting you at higher risk of cancer. Now, I think that Merck has done relatively good due diligence showing that there is not meaningful risk of cancer for those who take this drug. They've studied it. They've also put in some aspects of the drug to prevent that. But all across the world, in all of the OECD countries, there's only one drug that's been approved in one country that has a positive aims test. And so this is a drug that has a relatively small efficacy, measured efficacy, and some, if not true medical risk, it is at least has, you know, the things about it that are going to make people uncomfortable about taking it. The Pfizer drug has an 89% measured efficacy. So it's three times as effective as the Merck drug.

And it doesn't have this issue with a positive aims test, which means there's considerably less, there will be considerably less reluctance for patients to take it. I also think that the window in which you have to take it after a positive test or after symptoms show up is a little longer, which makes it a little easier to roll out. So for all these reasons, it seems really, really clear to me that of the therapeutics sort of that we're looking at considering right now, the Pfizer drug Paxlovid is a much, much, much, much, much more preferable one, which the FDA should be approving rapidly and which the government should be purchasing en masse and rolling out to hospitals and doctors throughout the country, rather than going just through the standard protocol where they happen to get the Merck application first. So they approve Merck first. So now we're in this, whatever it's going to be,

maybe six or eight or 12 week period, maybe even longer, where we're, we're only allowed to give a drug that we know is considerably less effective than another one that's available. And has some, you know, you're not crazy to think that there may be some risks associated with it. This is just another sign, if we needed one, that the FDA has really, really bungled this pandemic from the start, from the first days when they insisted that they had to approve the diagnostic tests that were being used in the U.S., which cost the U.S. a period of about a month when we really, that was the one window of time we really could have conceivably, you know, prevented, you know, prevented a true, true catastrophic nationwide outbreak. And the drug,

the FDA basically got in the way, introduced a test that didn't work and told us we couldn't use any other tests until they figured it out, which meant that we were flying blind for that first period of six or eight weeks in the pandemic, which proved, you know, truly catastrophic, especially in New York where the wave was, that first wave was hardest. But there have been failures throughout of the FDA, you know, the approval process on the vaccines was accelerated, and that's valuable. But the truth was, we knew that they were safe, they demonstrated their safety through clinical trials, all the way back in May of 2020. Now, we didn't know the efficacy exactly, but we waited all the way until December to start rolling out the drug,

which meant that we missed the opportunity to use vaccines to blunt the winter surge last winter. And as a result, probably, you know, an additional 100 or 200,000 Americans may have died than if it would have been the case if we had approved the drugs in, say, September and started rolling out right at the beginning of fall. You know, I know you're saying the left is very critical of how Trump handled all of this. And now the right with respect to Biden, same. I mean, from where I stand, both these guys had a very hard job on their hands, especially I will say, especially Trump, because he was there at the beginning when we didn't know what we were dealing with. The Chinese weren't being totally honest with us about their situation and showing us the data when we needed it. And he did get the vaccine done. So, I mean, credit to Trump for all of that.

Did he handle it perfectly? No. Did Biden? No. But sadly, this is a mean virus, and it's hard to predict what it's going to do next. And politicians should be making promises about things like that, because it's going to be hard to live up to it. I will say, though, neither administration has prioritized sort of the world vaccination problem. You know, that's how we got Omicron.

What about Africa, right? I know you've been pointing this out. The reason I was thinking about it is, you know, time came out with this person of the year yesterday, and it was Elon Musk. And, you know, you've made the point, I think it was you, that you took sort of what Elon Musk made in a year

or Jeff Bezos made in a year or whatever. They could easily, easily have funded the $ billion dollars that you say it would have cost or the International Monetary Fund estimated it would cost to fully vaccinate the whole world. And we haven't done it. So why not? Like, I see the White House saying, oh, here's another 100 million vaccines for this country. There's that. But like, I didn't realize 50 billion was the number that to me seems very doable. And yet it's not getting done. Yeah, I mean, that particular report is, I think, really, really clarifying. So it's not just the cost, which is so low, 50 billion, which for a government like the U.S. even going at single handedly, it's nothing. I mean, that's a rounding error in our budget.

It's that the returns on that investment would be so large. So the IMF estimated that a $50 billion investment starting in 2021 would pay off by 2025, just four years down the road, to the tune of $9 trillion, which is 180 fold return on investment. Now, that's globally. The benefits would be felt globally. But even if the U.S. decided to fund this project entirely on its own, enough of that money would come back to the U.S. economy that we would be considering a major economic victory, not to mention the obvious humanitarian benefits, not to mention the huge diplomatic opportunity that there would be for the U.S. to be a true global leader here. China, throughout the vaccination phase of the pandemic, has tried to use vaccine diplomacy, distributing their vaccines around the world, but their vaccines aren't nearly as good as ours,

which means that we have a natural advantage here and could really, really use it to our geopolitical benefit. I think we haven't done it for a number of reasons, but I think it's basically because we're not all that interested at the political level, but also at the sort of level of the individual citizen, the level of the individual voter in the lives of people living in sub-Saharan Africa. I think we see this, you know, I write a lot about climate. I think we see this dynamic play out very clearly in climate where there's just very little attention paid to the suffering of people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, whose lives we define as essentially naturally full of suffering rather than being opportunities for humanitarian interventions. Well, I mean, not to diminish the value of those lives, but I think in terms of the sales pitch,

you don't even necessarily need to go there. You know, you need to talk about how, look at Omicron, you know, look at how everyone's going to have to get another booster now, another shutdown, a new mask mandate. Like, if we could manage to get the rest of the world vaccinated, we would like to believe if we if there's reason exercised by the politicians and so on in control, we we can get a handle on this thing. Finally. We won't keep having variant after variant, or at least we'll have fewer. Yeah, no, I think it's, I think even the most cynical calculation says that we should absolutely be rushing ahead with this kind of thing immediately. And instead, we've done this very gestural, theatrical, you know, donating a few million doses here and there kind of thing, which I think, you know, it's an indictment of

not just the US, but all the wealthy nations of the world. Because, you know, as we were saying just a minute ago, that the ultimate cost of such a project is, is really trivial compared to, I mean, you know, some estimates are that the US has spent $10 trillion on pandemic relief so far. So we're talking about, you know, 200 times, one, one, one 200th or one half of 1% of the amount of money that the US has spent on pandemic relief. And as you point out, it's an investment, it's an investment that will return somebody like Elon. Which is the logic that we've used with the pandemic relief, that this is not just to, you know, that it will keep the economy running, it will, you know, it will pay us back. And we just are unable to extend that same logic internationally.

All right. So I, at another point, I would love to have you back on to talk about your thoughts on climate change. You've literally written the book on it. And there's a movie being made of your book. I'd love to go there another time. And I also, at that time, would love to talk to you about your marriage, because I love this. My team always finds like personal details about the folks coming on. Okay. Just a parting thought for our audiences, our audience. David used to do New York Magazine's Sex Lives podcast. He is married to Risa, founder of an art gallery.

They started dating at 19 when they were studying abroad in Paris. He says they are obsessed with each other. I love that and I want to know more. There's a tease for our next segment with David Wallace-Wells. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Great to talk to you. And I want to tell the audience up next by popular demand, we're bringing back Asked and Answered. Remember I told you that if you go to Apple Podcasts, you subscribe to the show and download and you leave a thought there or a question or a comment, I read them all. And

most recently, there was somebody saying, where's Asked and Answered? I missed that segment where the listeners submit written questions via email or on social media. And some of you have some personal questions for me, which I will address next. Now it's time for our feature called Asked and Answered. This is where our listeners or viewers submit questions, usually via email, if that's the easiest way for us to get them, to questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. Questions at DevilMayCareMedia.com. As I stated, you can also post them in comment or question form on the Apple Podcasts link when you download and subscribe to the show. That also helps us with the downloads and the subscribers because unlike Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, we get no love from Apple. They're constantly pushing those podcasts,

but not ours. Okay. I'm going to read the questions myself. Usually Steve Krakauer does it, but he's in a different studio today, so he can't. Here's number one. This is from, they didn't put their real name, Right Turn to Hell. Is their moniker. What do you do to maintain a successful relationship with your husband? That is a good question because 50 you know, 50% of marriages end in divorce. It's tough during the pandemic times, you know, you're all over each other in terms of time together and so on. Even still, you know, there's a lot more time together. And I will say, I've said this before, but it's true. The number one most important thing to a good relationship

is using your most generous lens on your partner. And that's really more than half the battle. You just put those sort of rose colored glasses on and they will inure to your benefit too. Interpret every piece of behavior through the most generous lens instead of the least generous lens and it winds up coming back to you. And when your least generous instincts kick in,

remind yourself rose colored glasses are not bad. Try it again. Here's another one. How do you maintain, this is from Emma, how do you maintain your peace of mind when you're being attacked? Similar from Shara, who wrote, what's something you do to feel supported amid all the hostility? I try not to take that stuff in. I try to avoid it. And if it comes my way, to then sort of go seek out some love. I mean, there's way more love out there than there is hate for me and for you. It's actually one of the things I love about the comments over on Apple. They're so lovely and uplifting. That's, you know, you go there if you need a little ego boost, it's nice.

And you have to remember the people who are writing the nasty things. There's a saying, haters hate up. They wouldn't be taking those shots at you if they didn't feel threatened or powerless in response to you. There's some satisfaction in that. Don't forget to watch the show tomorrow. Download the show via podcast and watch us on YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly. And tomorrow, Dave Ramsey is here. Don't miss that. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

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