The Munk Debates Podcast - Be It Resolved: America’s Pandemic Response Can And Will Only Improve When Biden Is President

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Flouting mask wearing as means to help control the pandemic. Forcing states to secure critical medical supplies and bootstrap their own testing capacity. Touting hydroxychloroquine as a key COVID therapy. These are some of the more memorable features of the national pandemic response of the United States to date. A response that has led the US to have the largest number of COVID deaths globally – 200,000 and counting. But millions of Americans believe that President Trump's approach to the pandemic has been realistic, if not visionary. They say that stabilizing COVID cases and a declining death rate prove that President Trump was right not to panic, that the virus is not an existential threat. Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, believes otherwise. He supports nation-wide mask wearing, targeted lockdowns, and a go-slow approach that privileges public health over the economy. In this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, Andy Slavitt, former Obama Chief of Medicare and Medicaid, and New York University law professor, Richard Epstein,  debate the essence of these two competing arguments. Sources: ABC News, Washington Post, CNN, The Telegraph, BBC, The Sun, Fox Business, NBC NewsBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation.

To arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, America's pandemic response can and will only improve when Biden is president. Good afternoon. We come on the air because President Trump is about to speak on the coronavirus outbreak. At this moment, we have 22 patients in the United States currently. Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight. Since the early stages of the foreign outbreak, my administration has taken the most aggressive action in modern history to confront the spread of this disease.

It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle it will disappear. here. And from our shores, you know, it could get worse before it gets better. Could baby go away? We'll see what happens. They wanted me to come out and scream. People are dying. We'd die? No, no. We did it just the right way. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Well, that was Donald Trump and some of his more memorable proclamations over the last eight months, summarizing his administration's take on COVID-19 and its pandemic response. Well, that response has led the United States. States to have the largest number of COVID-19 deaths globally, some 200,000 in counting.

Deaths aside, millions of Americans believe that President Trump's approach to the pandemic has been realistic, if not visionary. They argue that stabilizing COVID-19 cases and a declining death rate proved that President Trump was right not to panic back in March and April of 2020 and that the virus is not an existential threat. Trump has done what he can do. If you do the math, is a 99.9% survival rate. What are we freaking out about? Okay? I don't understand.

Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, believes otherwise. He supports nationwide mask wearing, targeted lockdowns if necessary, and a go-slow approach to combating the virus that privileges public health over the economy. The idea that you're going to not tell people, What you've been told that this virus is incredibly contagious, seven times more contagious than the flu. All the way back in March, I was calling for the need for us to have masks, have the president's

stand and tell us what's going on. But he knew it. He knew it and did nothing. It's close to criminal. The November 3 vote in America is as much a referendum on the future course of the pandemic in the United States as it is a vote for either candidate. Who wins will determine the trajectory of the virus? the economic recovery, and the fate of tens of thousands of lives.

On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion. Be it resolved, America's pandemic response can and will only improve when Joe Biden is president. Arguing for the motion is Andy Slavitt, former Obama chief of Medicare and Medicaid, currently the host of the great new podcast in the bubble. He's also the author of Preventable and Insider's account of the United States failed response to the coronavirus pandemic. Arguing against the motion is Richard Epstein, New York University Law Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Andy, Richard, welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm really looking forward to this debate. I know our listeners are too. I think of all of the issues that American voters are going to have to struggle with when they think about how to cast their vote on November 3rd. The respective pandemic policies of both of these candidates, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, are really going to be top of mind. So I think the opportunity for us to benefit from your experience, your insights, your kind of considered views on what is a very complicated and hugely important public policy issue in.

debate today is a great privilege indeed. We have our resolution before us, be it resolved. America's pandemic response can and will only improve when Joe Biden is president. Andy, you're arguing in favor of the motion, so I'm going to put two minutes on the clock, and please take us away with your opening statement. Here's the good news. We've seen both Joe Biden and Donald Trump manage a pandemic. Biden with Ebola, Trump with COVID. We can decide who did a better job. Who brought the core ingredients of competence, compassion, and results? Easy. Biden.

Who did none of those things? Trump. A couple of premises about COVID. First, 200,000 Americans dead, hundreds of thousands ill, with continued communities spread and the damaged economy is a shameful record. It reflects a president who didn't care, didn't prepare, and hid the truth. Second, we don't get our country back and people don't get their lives back until we quiet the pandemic and people feel safe.

The country with the fewest deaths, Vietnam, is not surprisingly growing its GDP while the U.S. GDP declined to 32%. Third, this is not the bug of the century. Yes, it is twice as contagious as the flu. And between six and ten times more deadly. But with any competency, this was a layup compared to more contagious and more deadly bugs. It's almost all countries with reasonable amounts of competence have shown. Africa, a continent with 1.3 billion people, has had fewer than 30,000. deaths. To be blunt, with 200 deaths here in the U.S., Trump wiffed on a slow pitch. Fourth premise, the answers have been clear to us for some time on how to fight this. Like most things, it's not high-tech. Don't breathe near other people. This was a moment to call

the country together to sacrifice for a short period of time. But unless it has magic or miracle, Trump has no time for it. He wasn't willing to do any of the work to stop the bug, to get schools open or tests ready. He could have crushed this several times in several ways. Fifth, and most shocking, he knew the virus would kill a lot of people as early as the first week in February. He went to bed every night for five weeks, denying its existence until his hand was forced. He can't be president for that reason alone. Andy, thank you for that opening statement. We're now going to go to Richard for his take on our resolution, be it resolved. America's pandemic response can and will only improve when Joe Biden is president.

Richard, you're speaking against the motion. Two minutes on the clock for you. Yes. I am not speaking here as a defender of Trump and everything he said. I'm speaking here as a critique of what has happened. I think the first thing to notice is that most of the dislocations that have taken place have taken place at the state level by governors like Governor and Andrew Cuomo of New York State. Many of the deaths that are referred to by Andy are a direct consequence. of major mistakes that were made. The single most important one of these was made when Governor Cuomo and other governors

ordered COVID-positive patients to be taken out of hospitals and to put into nursing facilities. We still do not know exactly the number of unnecessary deaths that were taken out of this particular situation, but probably of the 200,000 deaths that one's referring to at least 15% our response from that particular situation. President Trump has made ships available to people

when they were needed, and it turns out that they weren't needed because the systematic overestimation of the seriousness of the coronavirus led to some disastrous decisions. When you actually look at the 200,000 deaths, the number itself is extremely squishy. The only cases that we have,

which are pure coronavirus cases, without comorbidities and other complications, is probably under 10% of that total. So one of the reasons why we've had such trouble with this is we do not have an accurate account of what's going on. If it is the way in which I'm, I say less serious. Then the radical programs of quarantine that are proposed by Biden, the insistence that you use masks under the false claim that it will create 60,000 or more lives saved,

none of this is true. We should try to quarantine those people are at high risk, very small percentage of the population with a very large percentage of the deaths, and try to return life to normal. In New York State, restaurants now are just roiling under the charge that when winter comes, 25% capacity will be all that they're allowed. They will go. bankrupt. We do not need Mr. Biden to continue this particular program. We certainly need Mr. Crump to correct some of his mistakes. But at this particular point, it seems to me that the program of Biden, which I've examined in some care, is by and large completely erroneous. Thank you, Richard. Well, look, we clearly have two sharply different points of view from both of you

on our resolution. And now it's time for some rebuttals, an opportunity for you to kind of dig into each other's opening arguments. So Andy, to you first, what do you want to draw out of Richard's opening there that you take exception with? Well, let me tell you what is actually in Biden's plan, so we don't have to guess. Free testing, doubling drive-through testing capacity. Trump has refused to take responsibility for testing and has closed drive-through testing capacity sites, contact tracing and isolation capabilities, priority PPE for medical workers, none of which Trump has done, emergency pay leave for anyone with COVID so that we stop the investigation. infection, and the vaccine distribution manufacturing, and asking every American to wear a mask

for a short period of time. As President of the United States, I'd lay out the broad strokes of what has to be done to make people safe in their workplace and safe in school. And that requires us to have rapid testing, protective gear available from the very beginning, like this president hasn't done, making sure we provide for the ability for workplaces to have the wherewithal to provide. for the safety. That requires some federal funding, particularly kids going back to school. That's not a radical plan. That's a plan that's been successful all over the world. We can't look at what we've done here and say we're in any way

connecting to the results that people are having around the world. How do we explain Africa having only 30,000 deaths when we have 200,000 deaths? Now, as for these sort of assumptions of, you know, what really happened and where there are comorbidities, I'd suggest we have a little bit more humility based on everything we know. We do know that people who are more susceptible who have immunocompromise situations. 35 million Americans who are under 65 have immunocompromised situations. People who have had cancer like someone in my immediate family. People with malnourishment aren't getting enough food. People with HIV and transplants.

There's 130 million Americans with preexisting conditions. I don't think just having diabetes or high blood pressure is caused for them to die. the COVID-19 is what pushes them over the edge. Finally, on the economy, you have to ask yourself, what drives the economy? It's big purchases, it's cars, it's leases, it's traveling, it's not going to restaurants. So I know we all want a bad guy. We want to say that it's a shutdown that caused a problem. But the truth is there is a bad guy.

The bad guy is the bug. The fact is, sometimes bad things happen and you just have to respond. We didn't respond. Well, we did respond in many cases. and I think what we did is we over-responded. One could talk a great deal about testing, and then when you get the results, the question is, what do you do with it?

So at one point, it was thought, you know, test one and done. Now it becomes very clear that when testing is required, it's required every week, every two weeks, the marginal return of additional testing on people who are in the general population will be extraordinarily low. The dominant strategy should be for those people who are in serious condition to be quarantined,

in some cases they should self-quarantine themselves, they already know how to do this. It's perfectly sensible for people to take tests to see whether or not they want to visit their infirm grandmother. It is not perfectly sensible to require every college student who wants to come back to a university who's in good health to take these tests and then to remain in quarantine. It's not just the question that the big ticket items are there, but there are thousands upon thousands of small merchants.

And every time you decide that these people are not going to be able to open their business, you manage to introduce a terrible kind of struggle in which tenants can not afford to pay their rent, at which point landlords cannot afford to pay their mortgages, and the entire situation goes down. Can we stop this problem with vaccines? The answer to that question is surely no. A vaccine will take months to prepare. Once you prepare it, you have to persuade people to take it. We've had very serious situations before. The 1918 pandemic is the leading example. No vaccine stopped that. It burnt out and ran its course in a little bit more than two months. Right now what happens is we are nursing the current situation along so that we're

over six months into this thing and there's no sign at the end. The system of excessive intervention on this situation, which doesn't allow for the arise of herd immunity, which most likely is created by non-syntimatic passage of the situation is the bigger cause. If you want to look at masks, take any of the Scandinavian countries, they all have extremely low mask usage and they have very low rates of infection. So Biden's program will achieve absolutely nothing but greater expenses on the public and further economic dislocation. Thanks, Richard. Okay, now's an opportunity for us to kind of get into the meaty middle of this debate and have a three-way conversation that explores, I think, a lot of the key worries, concerns, ideas that are on the minds of our listeners. And maybe, Andy,

let's center this debate a bit back on our resolution. We're debating Biden's pandemic, response here. And we're asserting in our resolution that the pandemic will only get better if he is president. I think what I've heard in your opening statements and rebuttals between you and Richard is this interesting tension between how much we privilege the economy and individual liberties and personal choice versus public health and a concerted organized public health response. Let's hear a little bit more from you. Why is Biden, right to put more emphasis on the public policy response, the public health response to this crisis, as opposed to prioritizing the economic recovery. With all due respect, that's a strong

man argument. Biden hasn't called for small businesses to be closed. His plan is to keep the economy open as much as possible as much as President Trump does. The difference is that Biden is willing to actually do something to reduce the virus. With all due respect to Richard's argument, I heard him say the word, we hope, we think it should be. We don't know. The reality is we don't know. I hope too. But I don't want a president whose strategy is to come into office and not do any work,

not put in place the pieces and just hope. You can't improve things unless you have the data which tells you how the virus is progressing and where it's progressing. Fortunately, Biden has experience. He's about experienced people who have managed the Ebola crisis. And so managing this down so Americans feel safe again will allow us to open up the economy more broadly again. There's no choice in his plan between, I'm going to do something to hurt the economy. There is perhaps with individual liberties. He is in fact saying that he expects

people to wear masks. He expects that to be a sacrifice that we make for one another because it will indeed save lives. And I think that's very reasonable and very smart. Most Americans are on board with that. Look, the stuff about the question of how you control this is a very difficult tension here. If you want to control local hotspots, you're going to do a better job of dealing with that with getting governors and mayors in the right place to do it. The tragedy has been they have asserted all the power and then they have misused it in a great many kinds of cases, shutting things down much more than it's appropriate. The other thing is the single most proven effective device against the virus that has been used by many physicians with a great deal of success, which is used constantly in Africa

today where the rates are much lower, which is the hydroxychloroquine, zycin, and zinc connection. A lot of good things have come out about the hydroxychyxylchloroquine. a lot of good things have come out. The frontline workers, many, many are taking it. I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it. One of the things that Biden has not said is whether he's a favor of this

or whether it turns out he's against it. President Trump has been pilloried for his decision with respect to HCQ. So unless I hear something from Biden about his willingness to deal with HCQ, as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing about this program which is going to achieve what it wants.

We can have a different debate about HGQ if you want. But I think the important point is we have tried that strategy. We've tried this silver bullet strategy to lurch from thing to thing and say, this thing's going to save us. It's going to end in April. HCQ is going to save us all. All of those things basically tell Americans, let your guard down, don't worry about it, and the contagion of the spread rate goes up. That's not a responsible way to manage this virus. There are responsible ways to manage the virus without impacting businesses. And the president's not been willing to do those things. If anybody wants to make their decision and who to vote for president based on hydroxychloroquine, feel free.

But ask yourself what is actually going to reduce the spread, and there is a lot of math you can do. The best therapy in the world, even if hydroxychloroquine is mildly effective, it just isn't enough. And it's been available at hospitals, and those areas have shown no levels of reductions. I agree with Richard's point. There's going to be limited amounts of data that we ought to try to understand and use and see if they work and continue to test. but the point is it takes actual additional work even behind picking one silver bullet and saying magically somehow that's going to fix things.

People said this in March that there were going to be only hundreds of people dead, that it was going to go away, that it was thousands of people, that it was tens of thousands of people. Why don't we just put a comprehensive plan together instead of going one week at a time with the magic bullet solution

that we think is going to help? You have to know exactly what the plan is that you want to put together and most of the things on the Biden plan of banalities. There is no strong evidence, by the way, that even six feet separation is optimal. The WHO recommends about one meter. Vast difference in terms of your ability to run classes, restaurants, and so forth. There is no science whatsoever that has been put forward.

The key question to ask is, why did it last as long as it has? And I think the answer is that this constant quarantine effort has prevented transmission between asymptomatic people to asymptomatic people. asymptomatic transition is essentially like a vaccine. What we've done is we've, quote, flatten the curve in the wrong way. But what happens is it turns out that as you prolong these particular kinds of interactions, you give the virus a chance to mutate again and to become stronger, this will not stop. The more we try to give this slow kind of control situation,

instead of isolating a few people and letting it run, I think it's wrong. There are many epidemiologists who agree with what I said, John, our United is Sinatra Gupta. Normally, such pathogens are controlled by some form of collective resistance, collective immunity. I'm avoiding calling it herd immunity for obvious reasons, that builds up in the population. And one can rely on vaccination, but that's something that would require us to wait. I think this really does get at a core kind of difference between the Biden versus. is the Trump approach to the future of this pandemic. What Richard is portraying here is that Trump's policy, more laissez-faire approach to the spread

of the virus, is actually in our collective public health interest. And Biden's preference, as you said it, Andy, to kind of suppress the spread, to control levels down, really just prolongs all of the deleterious effects from the economy to public health to the secondary effects that are mental health, child abuse. I mean, you go through that long list. Let's hear your response to that, Andy. With respect, Richard, literally everything you said was speculation and opinion. And some of it may be right, but we don't know.

The more people know, the more people are expert, the more they say, I don't know, we're not sure, we believe, we're testing. And the people who are instantly jumping into conclusions are folks that are saying with quite confidence in the middle of March, as you did, that only a few hundred people are going to die. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does in the human body. So a little bit of caution, a little bit of humility is smart, particularly when there's hundreds of thousands of people that have died. And when hundreds of thousands of people die, the answer is not to question the number. The answer is to fly the flags at half staff,

study it, figure out what's happened. And that point fingers at one another. I don't think this is a particularly Democratic or a Republican response. There's good responses and bad responses. In my view, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, all Republicans would have handled this very, very responsibly, very similar to the way Biden's plans coming together. And Biden's seeking out, I think, some of the best opinions that Biden has experience managing and containing diseases. And nobody's going to get it all right. I'm not suggesting that Trump had any shot of getting it at all right. He didn't invent the bug. It wasn't on him.

And sure, people are going to have to do trial and error. But at the end of the day, I think what the American people want is, they want us to do what was done around the world. In Germany, they crushed this early, and they've had a third of the deaths per capita that we did. Africa has had far fewer because they've done very, very simple things. And guess what? Those economies are opening. Vietnam has had 35 deaths, not per capita, 35 deaths, and their economy is growing. They share a border with China. They are not wealthier than we are. But, Andy, just to jump in on that point, because it's an important amount of maybe richer can weigh on this, too. Isn't that partly

due to the age structure of those societies, Africa, Vietnam versus, you know, the United States and the developed West, you know, we know this virus has far greater lethality for people over the age of 65. And some would argue that, you know, Trump's policies, either they're formally or informally, are acknowledging this profound difference of the impact of the virus by age. You know, his encouragement of schools to reopen, his encouragement of universities to return to classes, all of this suggests, maybe a nuance and understanding of the important factor that age plays in engaging risk and shaping public policy. You have to be careful of confirmation bias. If you believe something in this day and age, you can go on the Internet and find anything to support it. If you believe that children are active spreaders of the virus, I guarantee you, you can go find articles that say that.

If you believe the children don't spread the virus, I guarantee you can go on the Internet and find things to support that as well. We had a very simple solutions. All we're suggesting here is more testing and better data collection, helping people who are infected to stay home and to have people wear masks for several months. That's a proven set of solutions. So all of our biases aside, I admit I'm a Democrat, that has nothing to do with this response. I am not a Republican. Based on how actually things work in the real world, not academically in the real world. Look, there's a deep contradiction in what Andy just said. He began by saying how little we know and how humble we must be. The general rule when you invoke first do no harm is that the presumption is on those who wish to impose some kind of restriction. So if you don't know whether masks are or not effective, then the answer is that you don't use them. When it comes to something like HCQ, nobody says it's the only thing that you want to do. But the question is, why is it not going to be actively promoted when it is being used in all the places surrounding

the world which have had greatest success. And so I don't see anything whatsoever and what Andy says about data collection that's going to tell us what it is that we want to do. I'm saying the burden is upon those who think that there is something that could be done by massive forms of public intervention to

explain why it works. There is no really strong systematic evidence which says that a nationwide lockdown is going to be cost-effective. So Joe Biden is not argued for a nationwide lockdown. Then what is he going to do that Trump hasn't done? Half of his proposals are kind of banal because we want to rely on science. Gee, I think that I'm against that.

No, I don't know anything he says here, which is of the slightest bit of use. But Andy, just on the point of lockdowns, because I think, I want us to talk about lot, James, because this is. Hang on. What do you have about 80% of people wearing a mask, forget outdoors, indoors and in close settings, would have enormous difference in and of itself. It's not an enormous cost. And, well, you don't have any respiratory difficulty.

as I do. It's very uncomfortable to wear a mask. I have to assure you it has genuine consequences to some people. I count myself as one of them. So I don't think of that. By the way, if you don't require it, there's going to be voluntary sorting anyhow. You'll get in dangerous places where you're indoors and you have to be, you will wear a mask as would I. The question is not whether you have to mandate. When you look on the signs in New York, what they say, wear a mask to show your respect for other people. You don't wear masks to show respect. You wear masks if you think there's some reason why it is that they're going to improve the situation. If you keep some degree of social distancing, the mask is redundant.

99% of the time when you wear the mask, it does no good whatsoever. What you did is you interrupted me. Those aren't the rules of this conversation. I was in the middle of explaining, and you went out on a long tangent. I don't think it's a tangent, but you may speak. You either want to hear, you either want to have this debate according to the rules, Richard. which I'm more than willing to listen to you or you don't. Talk.

Okay, go ahead, Andy. Your point to weigh in on masks. Yeah, my point is we can turn everything into a controversy if we want to. We can, and the truth of the matter is that high quality masks, like, say, the Living Guard mask, which is highly breathable, works. Yes, of course, that there are issues on the corner cases. So I don't want to, we're not going to make this decision based upon people who can't wear masks for very legitimate reasons. We're going to make the decision because as a whole, it reduces the spread of the virus. It's not about any one individual.

It's about the virus having no place to go. The way viruses work is in they're not living. They're dead. And unless they have a place to travel and they travel through the air, through the respiratory system, they will not have a place to go. And if they don't have a place to go, they start to die very, very quickly. So the reason to wear a mask is as a preventive benefit for ourselves, but as a society, is it is the equivalent of a vaccine. It's a low-tech equivalent of a vaccine.

So why the president wouldn't, at the very least, stand up and say, you know what, guys, we may not like it. I don't love them, but I'm going to wear one. And if you would have done that in April or May, we would have been able to open schools. We would have had much lower case count. It would have been just a responsible thing to do. Instead, I think he tried to play a populist game

and say there's leverage here in getting people riled up. What would people gain from wearing a mask? and why are you opposed to wearing one yourself? Well, I just don't want to wear one myself. It's a recommendation. They recommend it. I don't know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful resolute desk.

I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens. I don't know. Somehow I don't see it for myself. I just, maybe I'll change my mind. I think that's just irresponsible. It's not irresponsible. marginal benefit by way of a mandate relative to the marginal benefits by voluntary use are

completely unestablished. And so to force people to wear them outside in public when the wind is blowing seems to me to be counterproductive. Fresh air is more important. There are health risks associated with wearing masks. If you wear a dirty mask, it turns out that it could create other kinds of difficulties. You have to change and to wash these things. It's also the case, by the way, that there are two strategies for trying to get herd immunity. These viruses come in varying degrees of strength. If what you do is you have a situation where non-symptomatic people are allowed to move freely and spread the virus from one to one, it's like a vaccine. And so as those numbers start to grow, the rate of transmission is going to go down. Why it is that the better strategy is to hold everything

off until you get a vaccine and have this massive kind of interim loss is unclear to me. Gentlemen, I'm conscious of our time here, but I want to just touch on a few quick things before we move to closing statements. And the first has to be vaccines. And Andy, we've seen from this president, the so-called Operation Warp Speed, a commitment here to bring out a vaccine quickly, possibly as early as next month or into November, whereas Joe Biden is communicating seemingly a very different message, talking about a vaccine as being really something that will have an impact, not until later in 2021. And I'm just wondering, in terms of how these two candidates are thinking about this pandemic,

why Biden is seemingly less enthusiastic, less optimistic about the effects of a vaccine, both on the pandemic and maybe more importantly, on public confidence. Roger, I don't think you understand what they said, just to be blunt. What they said actually isn't in conflict with one another. What Trump said is, if you parse through his statements, we will have a first vaccine. in October, but it could be November or December.

He's not saying that we will have vaccines widely distributed throughout the country and taken by enough people that will have made a difference. We remain on track to deliver a vaccine before the end of the year and maybe even before November 1st. We think we could probably have it sometime during the month of October. He's sort of forward-selling a little bit, and he's being hopeful, as he's wanted to do. Andy, his senior staff have come out and said there will be millions of vaccines available by the end of the year. No, the senior staff has not said that.

His senior staff has said that they will be available in 2021. They said that their goal is to have it available, have millions of doses available by the end of the year. As part of Operation Warp Speed, my administration's manufacturing all of the most promising vaccines in advance will have manufactured at least 100 million vaccines. doses before the end of the year, and likely much more than that. Hundreds of millions of doses will be available every month, and we expect to have enough vaccines for every American by April. Just step back a second. Instead of turning this into an argument, you've got 30,000 people.

You need to have enough exposure to the virus and half the group to be able to have enough results, and you have to have enough time with the drug to be able to evaluate, safety. No one knows how long that takes. That's not time bound. That's event bound. If they happen to be in Kansas City, and Kansas City has a hotspot, then you could end up with a vaccine in October. If they happen to be in St. Louis and St. Louis doesn't have a hot spot, it could take longer. So this is not a matter of two very different visions. A, B, this is a function of once the vaccine is produced and ready, it requires cold storage of negative 70 degrees. It requires, massive amounts of distribution. It requires an electronic system to monitor its use.

Those things take a little time. And I know it feels like a long time to say next year. But it's actually incredible. If they do get a vaccine done over the course of the next 12 months and distributed, that'll be an incredible feat. Don't try to create differences where there aren't any. If you recall the swine flu fiasco, what they did is they created a vaccine. They gave insufficient warnings with respect to the vaccine. They had large numbers of Guillaume A-citrum cases, and it costs the federal government about $4 billion or more dollars to settle that thing under a vaccine program. I have very little confidence in the vaccines because I think everything that Andy said about them is not only right, but it's even worse than that. We have to figure out what we're supposed to do this coming October in November.

One of the great nightmare scenarios that I have is we will have an ordinary flu season on top of the particular situation with the coronavirus, find it impossible to disentangle the two of them. And I can see all sorts of situations where we're going to start to think much more dramatically about various kinds of quarantines again, which will only perpetuate the cycle. If we are going to basically take the position that we have now, we will be in perpetual lockdown. We will be a Zoom economy. We will have no live arts, no live theaters, no professional sports, no amateur sports. What you try to do is to optimize on the basis of the information that you have today. And vaccines are going to be a very small part of the sport. solution. Hi, I'm Redier Griffiths, moderator of the Monk Debates. Thank you for listening to the

Monk Debates podcast. If you enjoy the civil and substantive debates we convene week in and week out on this pod, please consider becoming a Monk Debates member. As a member, you get unlimited access to our 10-year-plus video and audio online library of world-class debates. You'll also get three complimentary memberships you can use to share the art of great debate, with friends and family. Still not convinced? Well, order one of over a dozen Monk Debate book publications for free if you become a member now. Monk debate memberships are 30% off this month for new enrollees. Visit monkdebates.com forward slash membership for more details. Thank you for helping us restore the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. Now back to our regular weekly

debate. One final question for both you before we get to closing statements. And it's about the very nature of this debate. And Andy, to you first, I mean, why do you think almost a bit like climate change, this is a debate that seems to have broken down onto ideological lines with, quote, conservatives lining up around one set of argument and one set of facts and liberals, again, in quotation, arguing for a different set of policy, responses organized around a different set of facts. It's a shame because, you know, it used to be that if we faced a common enemy, we would put petty differences aside, and I really hope we still can.

But look, let's allow for a couple things. First of all, this is very hard on people. You know, we haven't lived through something like this before in the U.S. We have a very kind of first world mentality that we should be protected from all of these sorts of things by technology, by our government, et cetera. and we haven't sacrificed as a nation in generation. So the fact that we're having an argument over someone wearing a piece of cotton over their face for several weeks, when my grandmother, you know, lived through a depression that lasted 10 years and a World War that lasted six years,

you know, I would be embarrassed to tell her that to save a handful of lives, even if that's even all I could save, I would be unwilling to wear a mask. It requires change, and change requires leadership. And I think to be honest, you know, you could, as a leader, I don't think anybody can manage it perfectly. But rather than stoking the passions, you could simmer down the passions. I don't think this is Democrat versus Republican. If Mitt Romney were president, he would be managing this very competently. I think Democrats and Republicans would trust in him.

I think this is very specific in many respects to the nature of the president. He's not known for his humility. He's not known for his patience. He trusts his gut, which is not all. always right in these types of situations, but they've never been in before. And that inflames things. But even without Trump, I take your point that we've all become too divisive. Thanks, Andy. So, Richard, what's your take on this question about how this debate seems to have become so quickly politicized and polarized? Well, I think the root difference is one between

the progressives on the one hand who believe in strong centralized government control. and the conservatives, or in my case, the classical liberals, who believe generally in a limited government thinking that market solutions with decentralized information will, on average, work better than the centralized control. Folks like myself are deeply suspicious of what the government starts to do and then starts to figure out whether or not voluntary responses can get us there and try to use government as a residual. The progressives do in exactly the opposite direction. What they do is they start with the assumption that markets are in.

ignorant, they're exploitive, they're racist, they have a whole variety of bad characteristics. A telltale sign about this is that if you listen to many of the debates about the way in which you deal with the coronavirus, there are constant charges that what the coronavirus does is it shows and lays bare the fundamental inequalities of American society and so forth. And so what happens is you now combine the scientific issues with the political issues, and that tends to really push up the stakes. Thank you, Richard. Well, let's go to closing statements.

Could I come to you for your two-minute closing statement? Look, I think the first statement that we want to do is to go back to some version of the Hippocratic oath, which says, first, do no harm. And the presumption, therefore, is that government intervention should be regarded as a mistake, unless that government intervention can be shown to do good in some kind of a particular case. When you have to choose between a more intrusive and a less intrusive device, the presumption is that you choose a less intrusive device unless you can show that the more intrusive device is going to give you some particular kinds of gains. This means that you do not engage in the fatal kinds of mistakes

of forcing COVID-positive people into nursing homes where they will commit many deaths, which is one of the things that drove the increase in deaths. It also means that you have to have a very accurate account as to what the severity is. If you correct for comorbidities and the severity starts to go down, then your willingness to put on really heavy precautions should go down with it. So the correct strategy in my view is to try to isolate the most vulnerable populations and to have them either protected by law or in many cases self-quarantine. Testing, of course, is a very important part of that. But in terms of the general population that we have, of people whose chances of getting the disease may be, you know, significant but not wildly hot, but for whom the death rates are sort of under one-tenth of one percent, if that, then what you want to do is to figure.

out how it is that you could open things up more. The Biden program, as far as I can see, is not wildly crazy, but it has much too much confidence in the ability of the government to spend money on vaccines, on masks, on separation, on testing. It does not do the thing which I think is probably most viable, which is to encourage the use of a medical intervention to deal with this, the HCQ problem left on silent. So that I don't think it's going to improve over the Trump situation. I am not in the position of trying to protect Trump. I think he's often much too glib, but I do think it was a real tragedy that the real attack on HCQ came only after he announced it. It was basically made.

And the problem, I think, with the Biden campaign is the politics is going to be much too much intermingled with the science. And I think that it's going to prolong but not improve the overall situation with respect to the coronavirus. Thank you, Richard, for that closing statement. Okay, Andy, two minutes on the clock. We're going to give you the last word in this debate. So, look, in some respects, a debate is the exact wrong way to consider this topic. The American values of kindness, sacrifice, bravery, looking out for one another is what's needed. You know, we need to unify and not divide.

With a little sacrifice, a little bit of perspective, and a little bit of humility, we can dramatically improve the toll. These aren't challenging moments in history. No one's ever promised us that you can come out of a pandemic. with everything you want. You have to make tough choices. But sticking your head in the sand during these moments will not deliver great outcomes. I mean, so far, we've tried Richard's argument,

and we have the results. So you can judge that for itself. It's not an academic or a political theory. As an example, you can't cocoon elderly people and people who've been sick. It doesn't work. People work in those institutions. People mix in the community.

Donald Trump has destroyed our health, our economy, jobs, our standing in the world. His strategy was not to have a strategy. It was to hope for the best, to trust his gut, not to follow a plan, and to do nothing about it. There's no right or left response. There is a good response and a bad response. More people die in a bad response. So Trump is surrounded himself by people with fantasies, hallucinations, quick fixes, silver bullets, magic thinking. He's hoped for this magical outcome, but he was unwilling to do anything to obtain. it. I know yes, he's lied to us the entire time. These are not easy decisions. These are challenging times and tough times require leadership. Biden has that. They require experience. He has that.

They require an effort to unite the country. He will make that effort. They require we be leveled with and not lied to. He will do that. The checklist is pretty simple. Surround yourself with great dispassionate experts, people with experience, not theories, show our nation to be both a smart, and a humble nation, but also a compassionate one. And this will be our time for our country to shine, and we can defeat this. We have work to do, but I know we can do it. Andy, thank you for those closing remarks. And let me just thank you both on behalf of our audience.

You know, this is clear in this debate. This is an issue that impacts all of us. So it draws big emotions and a lot is at stake here. But you've both approached this conversation with grace, substance, civility, a willingness to listen to each. other's ideas. You obviously profoundly disagree, but I think it's only through the contestation of ideas that better thinking emerges for all of us. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, Andy Richard, thank you for coming on the program today. I just want to say, Richard, thank you.

If it got testy, nothing personal that was all in the nature of trying to make their point. This is one of the mildest debates I've been in alone. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Andy and Richard, for a great conversation. It certainly gave me a lot to think about, and I hope you've similarly left this debate, educated, informed, and able to make up your own mind about this vital issue. The Monk Debates podcast is that special place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from the latest developments on COVID-19 to the major issues that will decide the outcome of the U.S. election in November, visit our website, triple-w.

monk debates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antiquot Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths, Marilyn Missouri, and Christina Campbell are the producers. Abbey Rojasia is the associate producer. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antiquet Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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