Speaker 1: Pop next The Truth with Lisa bof A The So,
Speaker 1: the omicron variant is sweeping the nation, and with it
Speaker 1: has come fear and new draconian government measures. Cities like
Speaker 1: Boston and Chicago are now implementing vaccine mandates. You've got
Speaker 1: to be vaccinated to go out to dinner, to go
Speaker 1: to museums, basically just to live your life. But what's
Speaker 1: the point of it when the vaccines don't stop transmission?
Speaker 1: When vaccinated people like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker,
Speaker 1: who both said they've recently got the boosted, well they
Speaker 1: both just got COVID. So what do you need to
Speaker 1: know about all this? What do you need to know
Speaker 1: about a macron? What do you need to know about
Speaker 1: this incredibly transmissible variant? Is it going to get us
Speaker 1: closer to her immunity? Does the vaccine provide any protection
Speaker 1: at all? This week, I turned to Dr j Baticharia
Speaker 1: for The Truth. He's a professor of medicine at Stanford University.
Speaker 1: He's also one of the co authors of the Great
Speaker 1: Barrington Declaration. He is also recently opened the Academy for
Speaker 1: Science and Freedom with Hillsdale College along with Dr Scott
Speaker 1: Atlas and Martin Colder. You guys are familiar with them.
Speaker 1: They both have been on this show. All of these people,
Speaker 1: including j. Batcharia, They've come, They've given you the truth.
Speaker 1: They're honest people. There are people we should be turning
Speaker 1: to for the truth and all of this. Also want
Speaker 1: to talk with Dr about a Charia about how Fauci
Speaker 1: and the ni H have intentionally shut down dissenting voices
Speaker 1: and the truth and all of this. We're gonna get
Speaker 1: into how exactly they have done that, how the ni
Speaker 1: H has done that, and how they control so many
Speaker 1: of the scientists in the country through grant money and funding.
Speaker 1: So a lot to get into. It's going to be
Speaker 1: super interesting. We'll get you the truth on all of
Speaker 1: this with Dr J. Baticharia. Stay tuned. I'm so excited
Speaker 1: for this next episode. As we're saying this, this new
Speaker 1: variant in the country, the panic, the draconian measures, rinse
Speaker 1: and repeat, which is something we're all familiar with. So
Speaker 1: I'm so happy to have Dr J. Batachara on the show,
Speaker 1: someone who has been a voice of reason throughout all
Speaker 1: this chaos. Doctor, thanks so much for joining the show.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you for having me so I'm actually one
Speaker 1: of the unlucky recipients of this new variant. I have
Speaker 1: spent the past week now just getting over COVID, So
Speaker 1: fortunately I'm on the other side of it almost, but
Speaker 1: it definitely kicked my butt. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think it could. You know, there's there's
Speaker 1: delta still floating around. So I think the evidence on
Speaker 1: amicron by itself is that it's it's milder. But COVID
Speaker 1: isn't a joke. I mean, obviously, so many people have
Speaker 1: died from it, so it's something we should take seriously,
Speaker 1: but it's not something we should destroy our society around,
Speaker 1: which is unfortunately, I think we've done large in many
Speaker 1: ways over the last two years. Well, it definitely has.
Speaker 1: And you know, you're one of the few people out
Speaker 1: there really arguing again some of those draconian lockdown. You
Speaker 1: know what's so interesting is there's recently a Foyer request
Speaker 1: from the American Institute for Economic Research that undercovered emails
Speaker 1: were Dr Fauci and Dr Francis Collins were scheming against
Speaker 1: you and the other individuals who signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
Speaker 1: What did that feel like to sort of be on
Speaker 1: the receiving end of you know, the government's propaganda and attacks. Really,
Speaker 1: I mean it was really surprised. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: and since I'm not surprised that it happened, surprising to
Speaker 1: see it in black and white. The last year and
Speaker 1: some have been quite difficult because what's happened over the
Speaker 1: last year and a half and so is that after
Speaker 1: we wrote the Great Banking Nequation, which which we was
Speaker 1: with me Sinetra Gupta from professor at Oxford University, she's
Speaker 1: fantastic theoretical epidomologists, uh and and actually practical epidomologists, and
Speaker 1: then Martin Cooldorf at Harvard University, amazing biostatistician. We wrote
Speaker 1: this in Octo and the idea was very simple that
Speaker 1: COVID has an enormously bad effect on people who were
Speaker 1: older as also thousandfold increase in the risk of death,
Speaker 1: sense of your disease if you are older versus if
Speaker 1: you're young. At the same time, the lockdowns are been devastating,
Speaker 1: just devastatingly harmful. Tens of millions of people thrown into
Speaker 1: starvation worldwide, missed cancer screenings resulting in breast cancers that
Speaker 1: are that should have been cut earlier tolling cancers. Psychological
Speaker 1: effects on especially on kids, has been enormous. So we
Speaker 1: called for an end of the lockdowns and focus protection
Speaker 1: for the elderly, especially for the older and other other vulnerable.
Speaker 1: What we hope for was an open conversation with the
Speaker 1: public comp community about how best to protect the old
Speaker 1: older population without a lockdown. Because the idea, but up
Speaker 1: until this one was the only way to protect anybody
Speaker 1: was was a lockdown to stop this use and spreading
Speaker 1: that we knew that was not possible because what the
Speaker 1: lockdowns this does is protects a certain class of rich
Speaker 1: people who can who can stay from home at work
Speaker 1: and not lose their jobs, and not not anyone else.
Speaker 1: So we we put this out hoping that were to
Speaker 1: open a conversation. Instead what was we were met with
Speaker 1: It was just this like vilification campaign is campaign to
Speaker 1: say that we wanted the virus to rip society, to
Speaker 1: kill people, as if we were somehow Google that wanted
Speaker 1: to destroy destroy the lives of people. And I was
Speaker 1: I wondered what was the source of that? And the
Speaker 1: Francis Collins emails that were released through a FOIA reveals
Speaker 1: that the NI h with including the head of the
Speaker 1: NIH and Tony Faucci, the head of the n A.
Speaker 1: I d uh. They spread those lies, they worked to
Speaker 1: try to get the media to amplify them, and it
Speaker 1: led to so many interviews with reporters where they're asking
Speaker 1: me why I wanted to let it rip, why I
Speaker 1: wanted to hurt immunity strategy, which is which is nonsense? Um.
Speaker 1: And it made my life much more difficult with me,
Speaker 1: even with my colleagues who sort of fell for the propaganda. Well,
Speaker 1: and what's so odd is I mean, science is not
Speaker 1: supposed to be this consensus, this group think. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to have diverging opinions. And so when did
Speaker 1: this change? And why do you think it changed? Because
Speaker 1: we we've really seen this take fold in a way
Speaker 1: that is so different you know, times of the past.
Speaker 1: So we're a science today, and how do you think
Speaker 1: that happened? I mean, I think that it's always been
Speaker 1: true for science. Science is such a powerful, beautiful thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's like an engine for producing things that tend
Speaker 1: to be true. Right, So learning learning how the material
Speaker 1: world functions, science is so powerful and so chief, so much,
Speaker 1: But I think what's what's happened over I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly the time frame, but certainly, uh, we've seen this
Speaker 1: in during the pandemic. Science has become a thing where
Speaker 1: essentially you believe in it just because it's science, rather
Speaker 1: than understanding the mechanisms by which science tends to produce
Speaker 1: truth and so like. You can see this with the
Speaker 1: almost crazy worship of Tony Faucci, or even the way
Speaker 1: he talks about science. He says things like, if you
Speaker 1: disagree with me, you're not simply just disagree with a man,
Speaker 1: You're just doing with science itself. He's turned science into
Speaker 1: a god. He's a high priest of science. When he
Speaker 1: says things like that, that's not the right way to
Speaker 1: think about science. At least, it's exactly what you said.
Speaker 1: Science is a process by which truth reveals itself with
Speaker 1: open mindedness, tolerance, uh and and openness. The discussion also
Speaker 1: correction by data. Right, So if you believe A and
Speaker 1: I believe B, we disagree, Well, we agree on an
Speaker 1: experiment and it resolves in your it turns out your right,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, oh donn, I'm you're right. And then
Speaker 1: I say, well then you know, buy you dinner or something,
Speaker 1: and then I say see, and we do the next
Speaker 1: thing right. Then slowly over time, by that just open discussion,
Speaker 1: we learn things about the real world. Instead, during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: what's happened, it's essentially replaced with this attitude you see
Speaker 1: in this letter and also the Trances columns head of
Speaker 1: an NH wrote, and also what Tony Fauci has said
Speaker 1: of science as a dictum as given from on him.
Speaker 1: The science has said X, Y or z. There is
Speaker 1: no fighting over it. There's there's no there's no disagreeing
Speaker 1: over it. There's no recourse to any data that would
Speaker 1: would solve it. Instead, you just propagandize, you demonize people
Speaker 1: to disagree with you, and you push them the outside
Speaker 1: so that that scientific opinion is outside the bounds of
Speaker 1: the polite discussion. I mean, that's essentially exactly what Francis
Speaker 1: Collins and the United did to the Great Parenting Declaration. Well,
Speaker 1: and they did this at the beginning of COVID as well,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the pandemic, of trying to shut
Speaker 1: down any talk about the virus having escaped from the
Speaker 1: Wuhan lab. There. They did it in the lance that
Speaker 1: you had Peter Dazac and a bunch of scientists wrote
Speaker 1: that letter basically trying to shut down any alternative thought
Speaker 1: process of oh no, it had to have come from
Speaker 1: the wet market, which even China is saying that didn't
Speaker 1: happen now, you know, so they try to shut down
Speaker 1: so they're just seems to be this really odd desire
Speaker 1: by the people in charge, people like Dr Fauci, of
Speaker 1: just shutting down any alternative viewpoint in a way that
Speaker 1: is really dangerous, and to me, I think the reason
Speaker 1: why everyone should be concerned about this is what information
Speaker 1: are we not getting? What critical information do we not
Speaker 1: know that is not being share, that is not being
Speaker 1: brought to light that could potentially save lives because of
Speaker 1: this group think, because of the shutting down, because of
Speaker 1: the labeling anything that is outside of what Dr Fauci
Speaker 1: deems acceptable as conspiracy. You know, what information are we
Speaker 1: not learning right now that we need to know? I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's always the problem when you treat science as
Speaker 1: if it were established out of facts with a high priesthood, right,
Speaker 1: but what if the high priesthood is wrong? How would
Speaker 1: you know? There's no there's no fighting with them reasonably
Speaker 1: with with data and with with reason. Instead, what you
Speaker 1: have is dictims, some of which may be right, someone
Speaker 1: which are may be wrong. It's impossible to tell because
Speaker 1: it hasn't been subjected to the test that you normally
Speaker 1: would subject to scientific ideas to Every scientific idea is
Speaker 1: subject to challenge in that same same exact way. It
Speaker 1: has to be what do we not know? I and
Speaker 1: I agree with you? Like a great example is this
Speaker 1: this idea that he couldn't have possibly been a lab leak? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, in fact it was conspiracy here to even
Speaker 1: suggested for a long time. Uh. The revision on this
Speaker 1: is I think going to be healthy, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the sort of circling of wagons on the lablacate. Frankly,
Speaker 1: it smacks of like a cover up to me. Um,
Speaker 1: whether there wasn't lablique or not, I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: know for certain. It's hard, it's going to be challenging
Speaker 1: to find out, but certainly we should be allowed to
Speaker 1: ask questions around along those lines. The same thing was like,
Speaker 1: actually I worked on a study in the early days
Speaker 1: the epidemic called the Santa Clara Seria Prevalence Study and
Speaker 1: the l A county, Seria prevalence say where What we
Speaker 1: tried to do is figure out how widespread the disease
Speaker 1: was in the in the population um. What we found
Speaker 1: was that in April twenty in Santa Clara and l
Speaker 1: A County there were forty or fifty times more infections
Speaker 1: than cases, which meant a few things. One, the mortality
Speaker 1: Riffin disease was much lower than people have been saying
Speaker 1: because the denominator the number of people infect it was
Speaker 1: much higher, but the deaths were the same, So you
Speaker 1: just didn't it didn't. But the second, and equally certain
Speaker 1: probably more important, is that by that meant that it
Speaker 1: was so widespread by April there was already too late
Speaker 1: to have a zero COVID kind of policy. We've been following.
Speaker 1: The idea for the policy all along has been a, well,
Speaker 1: we just need to suppress the spread of the virus
Speaker 1: down to low enough levels so we can open society again. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you look at the data from April,
Speaker 1: there was no chance that was going to be true.
Speaker 1: That successful in most in most places in the world.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's exactly what's happened. Like we've done so
Speaker 1: much to try to lock down and get this virus
Speaker 1: down to zero. That we've been unable to stop the
Speaker 1: spread of the disease. We don't have a technology to
Speaker 1: do that. Tony fact, you wrote a letter an email
Speaker 1: about that Santa Clara study that was in an earlier
Speaker 1: email dump from through pain through Foia where he had
Speaker 1: a five pages of redacted the text that was redacted
Speaker 1: about the study. Uh. And he at the end of
Speaker 1: the five pages he said he had a line saying, well,
Speaker 1: we should contact one of the authors of the study,
Speaker 1: and it was one of my colleagues who was the
Speaker 1: senior author on the study. He never was contacted. I
Speaker 1: would dearly love to know with those five pages of
Speaker 1: redacted text said, because what should have happened in response
Speaker 1: to that study and and a whole bunch of other
Speaker 1: share problem studies, is a revision of thinking about what
Speaker 1: the right policy should be. And yet, just like with
Speaker 1: the lab leak, just like with the Great Parents and declaration,
Speaker 1: the NIH closed ranks of CDC closed ranks and decided
Speaker 1: to go full on down the lockdown strategy that's led
Speaker 1: to such a disaster the last two years. Well, and
Speaker 1: so I remember, you know, I was one of the
Speaker 1: people screaming from the rooftops because I was reading stuff
Speaker 1: that Dr e and Edys was writing. I was saying
Speaker 1: the study that you just talked about that you worked
Speaker 1: out at a Santa Clara, And then we had also,
Speaker 1: I think closely after that, there was this study at
Speaker 1: in New York. There was also Miami Dade County, and
Speaker 1: all of it was sort of saying the same thing
Speaker 1: that we were missing cases by, like you know, I
Speaker 1: think it was something like ten to sixty five fold
Speaker 1: or something, which means that it's a lot less deadly
Speaker 1: than we originally thought. And then you had also I
Speaker 1: think it was New York's own data was saying that
Speaker 1: the majority of the new hospitalizations were people who are
Speaker 1: staying at home. So to your point, we had all
Speaker 1: this information in front of us that the decisions we
Speaker 1: were making were the wrong ones. Yet will uh, you know,
Speaker 1: continue down that road. But you know, here we are
Speaker 1: again sort of in the same position where we have
Speaker 1: this new variant out that is seemingly as contagious as
Speaker 1: the measles. Yet they're still trying to revise the old
Speaker 1: bag of tricks to stop something that we can't stop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I mean, the problem is that
Speaker 1: it's exposed to actual discussion and data. The people who
Speaker 1: have supported the lockdowns really have no argument, right. They'll
Speaker 1: point to places like Australian New Zealand say well, look
Speaker 1: they got to zero, but in fact they didn't get
Speaker 1: to zero. You can see the cases exploding Australia now,
Speaker 1: um that the the you can see the cases coming back.
Speaker 1: They've had more lockdown days than any place on Earth. Um.
Speaker 1: And yet the disease is still floating around the way
Speaker 1: that that that the lockdowners have behaved, It's as if
Speaker 1: they said, well, there was no other possible alternative response
Speaker 1: to this this virus other than to to do the
Speaker 1: kind of school closures and church closures and and closing
Speaker 1: businesses and uh and and sort of ending normal civic life. Well,
Speaker 1: that didn't work. Was a complete disaster for the poor
Speaker 1: the vulnerable, both in the both in devest in the
Speaker 1: developed world and the developing world. To pretend as if
Speaker 1: we had no choice, that that that wasn't actually policy
Speaker 1: choice is completely disingenuous. And in order to maintain the
Speaker 1: illusion that we had no choice, they had to shut
Speaker 1: down the scientific debate about it, and so that the campaign,
Speaker 1: the propaganda campaign about the Great brand and Declaration, essentially
Speaker 1: the similar kind of uh shutting down a debate around
Speaker 1: how widespread the virus actually was with the serial prevalence.
Speaker 1: By the way, there's now a hundreds of more of
Speaker 1: these studies that found basically the same thing, like a
Speaker 1: huge of a very large fraction of of cases that
Speaker 1: affection is not identified and disease more widespread than realized.
Speaker 1: UM and that's been tree is said from the beginning
Speaker 1: of the epidemic. UH so that they had to shut
Speaker 1: that debate down in order to get the policy through
Speaker 1: because if that policy was subject to old reason, no
Speaker 1: one would have gone for it. Instead, they relied on
Speaker 1: panicking the population to generate support for a policy that
Speaker 1: is utterly destructed. Quit commercial break more with Dr J
Speaker 1: Baicharia on the other side, where do you think we
Speaker 1: would be today if we had followed the Great Barrington
Speaker 1: Declaration and protected the elderly and essentially allowed you know,
Speaker 1: the rest of society to go back to life. I
Speaker 1: think we've had many, many, many fewer deaths from the
Speaker 1: virus itself because we would have we would have protected
Speaker 1: better protected the elderly. It's not I don't think there
Speaker 1: would have been zero desk because this is a terrible
Speaker 1: virus and it's really hard to stop. But we managed
Speaker 1: to protect the laptop class. That was the policy we followed.
Speaker 1: We shielded the laptop class. We could instead have thought
Speaker 1: to ours I've thought about how best to protect the
Speaker 1: actually vulnerable, so we would have many fewer deaths from
Speaker 1: the virus. We actually might even had less of this
Speaker 1: viral evolution. And then the other thing that we would
Speaker 1: have had is we would have had an enormously uh
Speaker 1: less damage from the lockdown arms. Right, kids would have
Speaker 1: spent the last year and a half year year and
Speaker 1: some in school rather than uh quote learning from home,
Speaker 1: as if it's really possible to do that. So kids
Speaker 1: would be leading better lives as a result of it.
Speaker 1: And by the way, that will have long term impacts
Speaker 1: that we have. We have kids that can't read, we
Speaker 1: have kids is going to collapse in in learning. UM
Speaker 1: that has long term impacts on the lives. Just tragic
Speaker 1: increase in depression and anxiety and kids and young adults. UM,
Speaker 1: we would have avoided all of that. We would have
Speaker 1: avoided the there's now I mean, there's data that show
Speaker 1: that tens of millions of people around the world are
Speaker 1: starving as a consequence of these lockdowns, tens of millions. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, because you do. You have a country, a
Speaker 1: poor country, many people on the verge of poverty. They
Speaker 1: restructure their economies to fit into the global economy over
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, lifting a billion people out of
Speaker 1: poverty over twenty years. Overnight, we we reneged on those
Speaker 1: promises and as it result, tens of millions of people,
Speaker 1: their income drops below one to two dollars a day
Speaker 1: and they start and that's exactly what's happened. Um, those
Speaker 1: those lives would have been saved. Hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: children in South Asia, corning to report in the by
Speaker 1: the u N and March this year, have already starved
Speaker 1: to death. Right, So you have like all that collateral
Speaker 1: harm that's going to have consequences for decades avoided if
Speaker 1: we follow the Great branch and Declaration. You talked about
Speaker 1: the evolution of the virus or the vaccines to blame
Speaker 1: for that. I've seen the argument made that we have
Speaker 1: leaky vaccines that don't provide immunity, don't stop transmission, and
Speaker 1: therefore or you know, have led to this new variant
Speaker 1: of macron. What are your thoughts on that. I mean,
Speaker 1: the evolution of the virus is hard to predict, but
Speaker 1: it responds to the environment that it sees, right, So
Speaker 1: the virus UM when you have a vaccinated population UM,
Speaker 1: there it creates an ecological niche where a variant to
Speaker 1: the virus that can infect the vaccinated UH is more
Speaker 1: likely to succeed in stead of replicating itself. UM. So
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be surprising that to me to find a
Speaker 1: widespread vaccination with a vaccine that doesn't stop dis ease
Speaker 1: spread could have contributed to this evolutionary process and and
Speaker 1: moved the viral evolution along a certain line. If we
Speaker 1: followed the Great par interacoration, the pandemic wad it over
Speaker 1: earlier because what would have happened is is that through
Speaker 1: normal activity, younger populations would have had more exposure to
Speaker 1: the virus. Is just I mean, that's just a normal way.
Speaker 1: But because the harm to younger people from being exposed
Speaker 1: to virus is so much lower than the old they
Speaker 1: would have died at much lower rates and they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been exposed to the lockdown harms, and so thus
Speaker 1: would have been benefited from from the policy. It's hard
Speaker 1: to say exactly with any kind of precision, because you
Speaker 1: have to play this game of like what if, and
Speaker 1: play the game of what evolution would have looked like
Speaker 1: had we gone down a different path. But it is
Speaker 1: clear that the policy itself, both of the vaccination and
Speaker 1: also the lockdowns, changed the path of our evolution. Well,
Speaker 1: and what's interesting is there used to be this game
Speaker 1: of oh, it's the unvaccinated's fault, you know, these dirty
Speaker 1: unvaccinated people. And now that you have vaccinated and even
Speaker 1: people who are just recently boosted to get it, you know,
Speaker 1: now it's, oh, it's no one's fault, it's you know,
Speaker 1: the dynamics and the conversation have completely changed surrounding COVID
Speaker 1: now that we're saying that the vaccines aren't protecting people
Speaker 1: from getting COVID at this current moment. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's unfortunate. We should never have come to a
Speaker 1: point where public counsel was promoting the idea that it's
Speaker 1: somebody's fault to get sick. We don't make you feel
Speaker 1: guilty for being sick. That is that is bad medicine,
Speaker 1: and that's about bad public heuple we do is we
Speaker 1: treat people who get sick with compassion. That's the right
Speaker 1: way to message around it. And if we have a
Speaker 1: messaging strategy, it leads people to believe that anyone who
Speaker 1: gets sick is somehow lesser or somehow it hasn't been
Speaker 1: careful or is I mean essentially other. That is bad
Speaker 1: public health and that's clearly what's happened in the last
Speaker 1: two years. And so now to see a reversion to
Speaker 1: that and say, well, it's not your faults, you've got
Speaker 1: sick as soon as the laptop class starts getting sick, um,
Speaker 1: I just it's frustrating. I mean, of course it is true.
Speaker 1: That is the laptop class is not stop the fault
Speaker 1: for getting sick. This is a this is a vexious
Speaker 1: virus that spreads very easily and so it's very hard
Speaker 1: to hard to protect yourself from it. So it's not
Speaker 1: their fault. But it does strike me as as curious
Speaker 1: that now we're finally getting that message from public health,
Speaker 1: and we should have been getting that message all along. Really,
Speaker 1: there's been this illusion of control over the spread of
Speaker 1: the virus that's said this, we somehow spread the idea
Speaker 1: around it if we were just we were just good enough,
Speaker 1: obeyed the rules hard enough, we can protect ourselves and
Speaker 1: others from the virus. But that that was a lie.
Speaker 1: There was no technology we possessed or possessed currently to
Speaker 1: stop the spread of this virus, and it's not anybody's
Speaker 1: fault for getting it. I guess what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: figure out is we we keep hearing this argument of Okay,
Speaker 1: so we know that the vaccines aren't stopping transmission. That's
Speaker 1: evident when you have people like Elizabeth Warren Corey Booker
Speaker 1: who said they were just recently boosted, you know, having
Speaker 1: recently gotten COVID. But so we keep hearing this argument
Speaker 1: that it's still you still need to get it because
Speaker 1: it's still protecting people, it's keeping people out of hospitals.
Speaker 1: But what evidence do we have that it's doing that
Speaker 1: when we're also just seeing the natural evolution of a virus,
Speaker 1: which my understanding is it tends to lead to where
Speaker 1: it becomes more transmissible but less lethal as it continues
Speaker 1: to evolve. So how do we know it's the vaccines
Speaker 1: keeping people out of the hospital versus just the virus
Speaker 1: inevitably taking the course of being more transmissible and less lethal,
Speaker 1: so it could be both, right, So I think I think,
Speaker 1: for instance, at least with the delta version of the virus,
Speaker 1: there were some very good studies out of places like Qatar,
Speaker 1: out of Sweden, out of out of the UK, even
Speaker 1: Kaiser in northern California that showed based on matched cohorts
Speaker 1: of vaccinated and unvaccinated people where where they carefully followed
Speaker 1: them over time UM that showed that vaccine efficacy against
Speaker 1: severe disease actually stayed quite high up to six seven
Speaker 1: eight months after vaccination. UM. There was a Swedish studies
Speaker 1: suggested that that at the end of eight months it
Speaker 1: starts to decline for pretty sharply, but for quite a
Speaker 1: long time it protects against severe disease, even as the
Speaker 1: protection against against being infected declines pretty sharply after two
Speaker 1: or three months. UM. So I think really on the
Speaker 1: basis of those studies that the people believe, at least
Speaker 1: I believe that there's it protects against severe disease, at
Speaker 1: least against delta. UH. The evidence about a macron, this
Speaker 1: new variant seems to suggest that it is much milder.
Speaker 1: The disease itself is much milder and both vaccinated and unvaccinated,
Speaker 1: that is much less likely to produce hospitalizations, much less
Speaker 1: likely to kill you. I mean, I know, I've heard
Speaker 1: this general dictum that viruses tend to evolve toward milder.
Speaker 1: That's I don't know that it's always true, but with
Speaker 1: the case of Aramicron it it certainly has turned out
Speaker 1: to be true, which is I mean, a great blessing. Well,
Speaker 1: because I guess I'm just observing in a you know,
Speaker 1: more immediate circle. But I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: who have recently gotten COVID, you know, many vaccinated, small
Speaker 1: handful not, and it seems like everyone's symptoms have ultimately
Speaker 1: been the same, regardless of having been vaccinated or not.
Speaker 1: So I just I don't know, I just wonder it's,
Speaker 1: you know, again back to our original conversation of when
Speaker 1: it's sort of this group think narrative being told, it's
Speaker 1: really hard to know what is true and what is not,
Speaker 1: which is why I've been bringing people like you, or
Speaker 1: doctor Atlas or Dr Martin colder If on the show
Speaker 1: who have been honest and have been unbiased in your
Speaker 1: explanation of all this stuff, because it we're really living
Speaker 1: at this time where it's it's very difficult to discern
Speaker 1: between truth and lies. Yeah, I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: problem is uh actually comes back to this propaganda campaign
Speaker 1: where we're talking about earlier. If you have at the
Speaker 1: sort of commanding heights of science, people who do not
Speaker 1: respect open scientific discussion, the first instinct when they're challenge
Speaker 1: is to shut that down. You're gonna create this distrust
Speaker 1: and that is something that we absolutely have to work
Speaker 1: to to to address. As as I said, I think
Speaker 1: science is a beautiful thing. It's wonderful, it's wonderful, has
Speaker 1: produced so much knowledge, has been useful for humans, for people,
Speaker 1: But that can only work when you have the scientific
Speaker 1: process the working way it should. It's not a high priesthood,
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a discussion and open structured discussion.
Speaker 1: The lack of trust that that many, many, many people
Speaker 1: have in public health and in science is fully earned
Speaker 1: by the public health establishment, by the scientific establishment. It's
Speaker 1: brought brought that distrust on itself by not actually following
Speaker 1: the principles of public health and in in in lockdowns,
Speaker 1: by not following the principles of what, how how science
Speaker 1: actually should operate in in terms of how the ni
Speaker 1: H and and other other entities that have been funding
Speaker 1: sciences operated. It's it's led to this sort of, uh,
Speaker 1: the situation where um, we see that science can produced
Speaker 1: so many wonderful things and certainly improve our knowledge about
Speaker 1: how the way the world works, but at the same
Speaker 1: time it's created a class of class of people that
Speaker 1: just there's no reason to trust them, but based on
Speaker 1: the way they behaved. I sympathize with a lot of
Speaker 1: folks about the inability to how what's what's true and
Speaker 1: false because you know, in the middle of a propaganda war,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what happends up happening. Uh, we shouldn't have
Speaker 1: a propaganda war here, we should have as an open
Speaker 1: scientific discussion. So when and how did this claim that
Speaker 1: the vaccines would stop transmission begin? Because you can go
Speaker 1: back to the visor's chairman's comments last December on Dateline
Speaker 1: he said he wasn't sure the vaccine would stop transmission.
Speaker 1: You can also look at maderna chief medical officer told
Speaker 1: Axios last November that we need to be careful to
Speaker 1: not over interpret the vaccines because we didn't have sufficient
Speaker 1: concrete data showing that the vaccines would reduce transmission. But
Speaker 1: then lo and behold, we had people like Dr Fauci,
Speaker 1: We had the CDC director, you had Joe Biden saying, hey, look,
Speaker 1: if you go out, you get vaccinated, you're not going
Speaker 1: to get COVID. How did that narrative take fold when
Speaker 1: you even have the heads of these companies a year
Speaker 1: ago warning for that to not happen, I mean, I
Speaker 1: just was like a matter of full confession, I should say,
Speaker 1: I thought in January this year that the that the
Speaker 1: vaccines would greatly reduce transmission. UM. On the basis of
Speaker 1: that was the trials, the randomized trials of the vaccines UM.
Speaker 1: The endpoints of those trials were actually symptomatic COVID. And
Speaker 1: my reasoning was that if in fact the vaccines do
Speaker 1: reduce the risk of symptomatic COVID, which is the trials
Speaker 1: did show at least for a few months after the vaccine, well,
Speaker 1: then symptomatic people are much more likely to pass the
Speaker 1: disease on than someone who's not as asymptomatic disease. So
Speaker 1: if you prevent symptomatic disease, it's a factor you're going
Speaker 1: to prevent trans or reduce transmission. That's what I thought
Speaker 1: in January this year, and the data started coming out
Speaker 1: that that protection against symptomatic disease didn't last very long,
Speaker 1: maybe two or three months. You know. I started to
Speaker 1: see like there were countries that were had big outbreaks
Speaker 1: despite having very highly vaccinated populations, you know, and let's
Speaker 1: say like March, April, May, um, and it became clear
Speaker 1: that the protection against infection was short lived. And I
Speaker 1: changed my opinion on this based on those data that
Speaker 1: came out. Um. I don't know why Joe Biden or
Speaker 1: Dauchi and and and others didn't change their opinion also
Speaker 1: based on those data. They started that. I think partly
Speaker 1: they were thinking that in order to induce people to
Speaker 1: get vaccinated, you can't tell them that you could get
Speaker 1: the disease anyways, because that would decrease the demand for
Speaker 1: the vaccine. But I think I have the opposite idea
Speaker 1: to tell people the truth based on what the data
Speaker 1: is showing you. It's if you tell people. Look, I
Speaker 1: changed my mind when the day appears the data on
Speaker 1: which I changed my mind. And here's why I thought
Speaker 1: what I did before, and here was I think. But
Speaker 1: now I think people are gonna trust you more. And
Speaker 1: what actually increased demand for the vaccines, because what it
Speaker 1: would happen is people say, well, yeah, okay, this person,
Speaker 1: this person is telling me what the data show that
Speaker 1: changed their minds based on the data, and that they're
Speaker 1: also telling me that protects against severe disease, which I
Speaker 1: still think it does for at least eight months. Like
Speaker 1: I think that's how you build trust is by being
Speaker 1: honest when you get something wrong, uh, follow the data
Speaker 1: and then tell and then reason with the public like
Speaker 1: their adults, rather than trying to manipulate the public, which
Speaker 1: is essentially how I think Joe Biden and advised mainly
Speaker 1: I think by Tony Facci has done. They like the
Speaker 1: vaccine passports and vaccine mandates are are are fruit of that, right.
Speaker 1: They they want these policies in order to cource people
Speaker 1: to get the vaccine at risk of losing your job,
Speaker 1: at risk of being able to go to restaurants, to
Speaker 1: uh to public libraries, uh, you know too, museums, you
Speaker 1: name it. You you can't have, you can't participate in
Speaker 1: civic life. Only you get the vaccine in order to
Speaker 1: course people to get it. Rather than reasoning with people
Speaker 1: about the vaccines, say well, here's here's here's who especially
Speaker 1: important for Here's what the side effects are for this group,
Speaker 1: and it's much less for that group, and just and
Speaker 1: just showing on openly and honestly what the data are.
Speaker 1: I think that reeds trust and that trust helps people
Speaker 1: feel more comfortable doing the right thing for them. Well,
Speaker 1: and I think you're right in the sense of, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you just earned my trust more by saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, back in January, this is what I thought,
Speaker 1: here's why. And I think if they were just honest
Speaker 1: with people and saying, hey, look that's what we thought
Speaker 1: at the time, and then Delta came along, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, we're looking at us studies out
Speaker 1: of you know, Provincetown, Massachusetts, where you know, an outbreak
Speaker 1: took place in the cases were fully vaccinated. Now those
Speaker 1: dynamics of you know, if if they were just honest.
Speaker 1: But the problem is and then they just keep pushing
Speaker 1: forward with these failed strategies. I mean, like, so, for instance,
Speaker 1: we're we're all saying with their own eyes that the
Speaker 1: vaccine is not stopping transmission. Right, We're seeing people left
Speaker 1: and right get O Macron vaccinated. Not it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to matter at all. But yet then you've got new
Speaker 1: cities like Boston saying you have to be vaccinated to
Speaker 1: live among society here or Chicago, and it's like why,
Speaker 1: like what what is it actually doing to protect society
Speaker 1: when it's not stopping transmission whatsoever? Like what's the point
Speaker 1: of vaccine mandates right now when it doesn't stop transmission?
Speaker 1: I just I don't understand it. It makes no sense
Speaker 1: to me. You're right to know, I don't understand it.
Speaker 1: There is no point to it other than to create
Speaker 1: social division and ostracism. Um. I mean I think I
Speaker 1: think if you'd ask some a proponent, they probably say, well,
Speaker 1: we want to coerce people into getting the vaccine, like
Speaker 1: they're being honest when that policy induces such enormous social division,
Speaker 1: like people have lost their jobs because they don't want
Speaker 1: to get vaccinated for whatever reason. Um. You know, it's
Speaker 1: at this point the vaccine is very clear is a
Speaker 1: private decision, like it has private consequence of that person
Speaker 1: has vaccinated in the sense of protecting against severe disease.
Speaker 1: That's according to mind you of the data, um, but
Speaker 1: very little in the way of public public Like, so
Speaker 1: my vaccine actually doesn't protect you very much. If I don't,
Speaker 1: if it doesn't stop me from getting affected, Vaccinated people
Speaker 1: can and do spread the disease. And in fact, if
Speaker 1: you're in a group of unvaccinated people and all of
Speaker 1: them are COVID recovered, well that natural immunity is quite
Speaker 1: good against reinfection. They're great data from places again like
Speaker 1: Israel and Qatar, Sweden, Denmark that at one year there's
Speaker 1: only a point three percent reinfection rate, or as a
Speaker 1: sub reation, point three and one percent, a very very
Speaker 1: low rate of reinfection one year. If you're naturally means
Speaker 1: it might actually be the case if you're among a
Speaker 1: group of unvaccinated COVID recovered people, that you have less
Speaker 1: risk of getting disease if you're in a group of
Speaker 1: vaccinated people who have the vaccine. You know, several months ago,
Speaker 1: quick commercial break more Dr j Badtaria. On the other side,
Speaker 1: so South Africa just recently, you know, they all this
Speaker 1: macron wave hit first. Now it's subsiding. They've actually stopped
Speaker 1: contact tracing, quarantining. They've sort of changed their policy now
Speaker 1: that of the country has some level of immunity from
Speaker 1: either prior illness or vaccines. What do you think a
Speaker 1: macron will do to the United States in terms of
Speaker 1: reaching endemic status herd immunity in the sense of, you know,
Speaker 1: it seems like this thing is just so contagious, the
Speaker 1: incubation period is so short that so many people in
Speaker 1: the country are ultimately going to get this thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think. I think, um, the illusion that you can
Speaker 1: protect yourself from getting the virus if you just are
Speaker 1: careful enough, is authority on its way of being shattered. Right,
Speaker 1: We've seen this enormous seasonal wave and almocron I think
Speaker 1: is just fueled that throughout the Northeast and through much
Speaker 1: of the United States. Actually, that is I think inevitable
Speaker 1: because again we don't have a technology from stopping it.
Speaker 1: In South Africa, what it's done is it's actually, I
Speaker 1: mean interestingly, uh reduced the fear about the virus because
Speaker 1: the consequences of getting an omicrons all seems to be
Speaker 1: much lower. Right, There's much lower risk of death, much
Speaker 1: lower risk of hospitalization, and the end point than is
Speaker 1: of h I say, decoupling of cases from hospitalizations and
Speaker 1: death like in the in many previous way, especially whenever
Speaker 1: cases when possibilizations and death follows, sort of like night
Speaker 1: follows day in the vaccine era in mid um. Actually,
Speaker 1: in many countries there was already this decoupling, like when
Speaker 1: when the vaccine was used to protect the old, so
Speaker 1: that even if the old got it, they would they
Speaker 1: would not go be hospitalized or die. That you'd see
Speaker 1: a very increase, sharp increase in cases with no con commitment,
Speaker 1: increase in death or hospitalizations. You saw that in the UK,
Speaker 1: for instance, You saw that in Sweden for instance, saw
Speaker 1: that in Iceland. Actually, uh, in the in the now
Speaker 1: with a Macron, you're seeing that basically South Africa a
Speaker 1: huge increase in cases with no no really increase in death,
Speaker 1: and that's in a population that's not particularly particularly well vaccinated. UM.
Speaker 1: I think the same is likely to be true. As
Speaker 1: Omicron's president us, there will be the decoupling of cases
Speaker 1: and death, and that decoupling really is the end state.
Speaker 1: The cases. We can't stop. The cases will continue forever
Speaker 1: in waves, seasonal or regional waves, but it will no
Speaker 1: longer produce the death that it once did. Are we
Speaker 1: in endemic status now as a country or where do
Speaker 1: you think we are in terms of is this still
Speaker 1: a pandemic or is an endemic. Now it's hard to
Speaker 1: say biologically exactly mean so endemic, what it means is
Speaker 1: in her immunity. What it means is every additional person
Speaker 1: infected insects one or fewer people. In that sense, we're
Speaker 1: not as herd immunity because the number of cases is rising,
Speaker 1: so each additional person infected. But in a different sense,
Speaker 1: the pandemic could be over as soon as we decide
Speaker 1: it's over. The pandemic really is in some sense, is
Speaker 1: the set of responses we've taken to the biological fact
Speaker 1: of the spread of this virus. The herd immunity means
Speaker 1: that there's sufficiently large faction of the population that uh,
Speaker 1: that isn't uh it isn't at risk of spreading the
Speaker 1: disease very very sharply if they were to be exposed,
Speaker 1: because if they're supposed to it, they don't get it.
Speaker 1: With a virus like this one, you can move in
Speaker 1: and out of herd immunity, right, you can get You
Speaker 1: can be protected against infection for a while, and then
Speaker 1: your community declines over time against against infection and so
Speaker 1: you get it again. The common cold is like this, right,
Speaker 1: there's herd immunity for common cold, your protection against it
Speaker 1: declines over time, and then you might be exposed as
Speaker 1: to like another corner that's the same cornervirus that before,
Speaker 1: and then you you get it against several times in
Speaker 1: your life. But the second, third, fourth time that doesn't
Speaker 1: produce severe disease because you have immune mechanisms cellular immunity
Speaker 1: and other mechanisms of immunity that use the harm from
Speaker 1: being infected reduced it so you don't you don't end
Speaker 1: up in the hospital, you don't die if you get
Speaker 1: it's just a cold. That is I think the endpoint
Speaker 1: is epidemic herd immunity, endemic equilibrium. What it means. All
Speaker 1: that means is UM is that the virus isn't spreading
Speaker 1: sharply because a sufficially number of men people have that
Speaker 1: for times. But the key thing is not that. The
Speaker 1: key thing is the protection against severe disease, which I
Speaker 1: think we are in the midst of getting UM naturally.
Speaker 1: I mean, people seem to have a lot of protection
Speaker 1: against severe reinfections, and I think, uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that that's the direction we're ahead of this, this
Speaker 1: decoupling of cases and to end ut and severe outcomes.
Speaker 1: Do you think we should be more careful in our
Speaker 1: vaccination status in the sense I mean we are seeing
Speaker 1: myocarditis and heard issues uh, you know, correlated to the vaccines,
Speaker 1: particularly among younger people who aren't as susceptible to ending
Speaker 1: up in the hospital or dying. I mean, should there
Speaker 1: be a little bit more transparency and honesty around some
Speaker 1: of those conversations and the potential adverse effects of the
Speaker 1: vaccines on certain groups of people? Absolutely? Right, I think
Speaker 1: the vaccination should be a personal medical decision based on
Speaker 1: the risk of vaccine to the person in that group, UM,
Speaker 1: and and the benefits of vaccines for that group. Right. So,
Speaker 1: a young male who is COVID recovered UM, is there
Speaker 1: any reason to vaccinate them? They faced the risk of
Speaker 1: markett it is from the from the vaccine, which just
Speaker 1: you know, it's not it's enormous, but it's like it's
Speaker 1: you know, one in five thousand one and something on
Speaker 1: that order, UM versus where. But the benefit they get
Speaker 1: is so little because they're already COVID recovered UM. Whereas
Speaker 1: an older person who's not been exposed to virus previously
Speaker 1: uh faces a high risk of death or or you
Speaker 1: know high meaning like four, three, four or five percent
Speaker 1: of death if they were to get infected. UM, the
Speaker 1: vaccine might be quite a good idea. UM. So it
Speaker 1: really depends on who you are, your your medical circumstances.
Speaker 1: It should be a personal medical decision you make in
Speaker 1: consultation with your physician, not something that's forced on you
Speaker 1: by public health and in the way it has been.
Speaker 1: But do you think physicians are up to that task
Speaker 1: in the sense of I have found in my conversations
Speaker 1: with a lot of different people that some doctors actually
Speaker 1: don't seem to have as full of knowledge of like
Speaker 1: data and the bigger picture of things. Like someone one
Speaker 1: time was like, well, Trump got the vaccine to me
Speaker 1: because I made the decision to not get the vaccine.
Speaker 1: And the only reason I was vocal with it as
Speaker 1: I felt like someone like me can take bullets more
Speaker 1: easily than someone getting fired for making the same decision
Speaker 1: that doesn't have the platform that I have. So I
Speaker 1: decided to go out publicly and try, you know, I
Speaker 1: wrote that op ed in Newsweek, really trying to articulate
Speaker 1: the fact that people are making decision aren't rubes, like
Speaker 1: they've actually really thought through this, and it doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense for them personally, whether they're young and healthy such
Speaker 1: as myself, or they have prior you know, immunity, right,
Speaker 1: And so that's why I went out and and and
Speaker 1: and did that. But you know, I had a doctor
Speaker 1: one time and be like, well, you know, Trump got vaccinated,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, well, he's like seventy five, and you know,
Speaker 1: his health condition is entirely different than mine. You know,
Speaker 1: he probably is a little overweight, he's much older than me,
Speaker 1: so his risk is severely higher than mine. So like
Speaker 1: that doesn't even make sense. So I I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, our doctors really up to that task in
Speaker 1: the sense a lot of them really haven't gone through
Speaker 1: the data in the same way that you have. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think traditionally the way that doctors get educated about
Speaker 1: these kinds of data is not by reading the papers
Speaker 1: themselves amazingly, um, but by participating in professional activities where
Speaker 1: they get essentially like the summaries of this information put
Speaker 1: to them. Right, these things called continuing medical education credits
Speaker 1: that every doctor is supposed to get so that they
Speaker 1: they're always learning. The way that the discussion about the
Speaker 1: vaccines and about sort of how to think about natural
Speaker 1: immunity has been spread through the medical community has been
Speaker 1: been really lacking in my view. A lot of the
Speaker 1: educational activities have emphasized the importance of vaccination without talking
Speaker 1: through the nuances about who it's really useful for, what
Speaker 1: the side effect profiles are, and it's been in service
Speaker 1: of a public health goal to get everyone vaccinated rather
Speaker 1: than a personal health goal to make sure that the
Speaker 1: doctor is giving you the best possible advice for your
Speaker 1: own personal health circumstance. I think if we shift back
Speaker 1: to a normal footing where doctors are looking out for
Speaker 1: the their patients as opposed to playing the part of
Speaker 1: public health and forces for the population at large, we
Speaker 1: will have doctors giving good, reasonable advice again, but that
Speaker 1: has to be a decision made by public health authorities.
Speaker 1: Places like the NIH play an enormously important role in that.
Speaker 1: So when it's led by someone like uh like Francis
Speaker 1: Collins or Tony Fauci, who have essentially an ideological almost
Speaker 1: seems commitment to making forcing everyone, no matter what the
Speaker 1: harm to society, to get the vaccine, regardless of whether
Speaker 1: they consent to it or not, you're gonna get is distrust.
Speaker 1: Not just the public competent doctors as well. And what
Speaker 1: you said is right. I mean, like, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people have lost trust with their doctors as
Speaker 1: a result. Again that I don't think that's a good
Speaker 1: thing at least, I think that doctors, it's really necessary
Speaker 1: that we be able to trust our doctors because doctors
Speaker 1: are so important for the health of personal health and
Speaker 1: for the health of population at large. Um And I
Speaker 1: think medicine is going to need to do some self
Speaker 1: reflection trying to get that trust back, because I have
Speaker 1: been fortunate to you know, I've reached out to a
Speaker 1: ton of different people involve different walks of life in
Speaker 1: the medical and science fields to try to get information
Speaker 1: for them and to try to learn that way, because
Speaker 1: you know, that's how we all learn the most, is
Speaker 1: by asking a bunch of questions and then trying to
Speaker 1: take that information from people and trying to come to
Speaker 1: you know, what I think is the correct information or
Speaker 1: the right decision with all of that, which is how
Speaker 1: I know concluded to not get the vaccine of also
Speaker 1: just having questions about you know, most vaccines we've got
Speaker 1: like five to ten years of data. We don't have
Speaker 1: that for these and so if I'm not higher risk.
Speaker 1: I'd rather just wait it out and see what we
Speaker 1: you know, learned from it moving forward, you know, versus
Speaker 1: obviously higher risk people might not be able to make
Speaker 1: that same decision because they're more at risk. But we're
Speaker 1: just at this such an odd place in society where
Speaker 1: it's just, you know, the truth really isn't out there
Speaker 1: as much. You know. Dr Scott Atlas had said something
Speaker 1: when I interviewed him recently that really stood out to me,
Speaker 1: and he had just talked about sort of the profound
Speaker 1: impact that even the ni AH has on science and
Speaker 1: the fact that so much of science is funded by
Speaker 1: the ni AGE and the United States and some of
Speaker 1: some of these other agencies, and so therefore it really
Speaker 1: dictates sort of the broader landscape of science and the
Speaker 1: conversations that we're having. Can you just talk about the
Speaker 1: funding aspect of it and how that is controlled by
Speaker 1: some of these government agencies and the problem of that. Sure,
Speaker 1: So I spent my career at a at a medical school,
Speaker 1: at mc Medical School UM. In order to advance your
Speaker 1: career in a place like Stanford University in the medical school,
Speaker 1: you have to have NIH funding. It's it's almost a requirement, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's just marker of success as a scientists that
Speaker 1: you are able to garner funding from competitive funding from
Speaker 1: the NIH. Like every time I put a granted grant application,
Speaker 1: and I think it's like, you know, one in one
Speaker 1: in ten or one in one in fifteen grants actually
Speaker 1: get funded. So it's a a great success if you
Speaker 1: managed to do that. Um. Now, the problem is that
Speaker 1: with that is that it's creates the incentives that you
Speaker 1: have to align your research agenda with the NIH. And
Speaker 1: sometimes that's reasonable. The NIH UH may direct scientists towards
Speaker 1: studying something like Alzheimer's because such a serious problem for
Speaker 1: so many and and putting a lot of scientists minds
Speaker 1: focused on that one problem could be a very productive thing,
Speaker 1: but can also, as we found through the epidemic, be
Speaker 1: a danger. So you get one person, Tony Facci, who
Speaker 1: has been sitting on top of a huge pile of
Speaker 1: money funding the careers and making and breaking the careers
Speaker 1: of account of scientists over forty years based on his
Speaker 1: priorities for what infects of these reasoners focused on what happening?
Speaker 1: Theologists focused on Well, um, you know a lot of
Speaker 1: scientists stayed silent even though they were uncomfortable with the
Speaker 1: policies in the lockdown because they didn't want to risk
Speaker 1: not getting funded by Tony Facci's and I A D.
Speaker 1: When Francis Collins, the head of the n i H,
Speaker 1: essentially says these Great Branch and decoration people are are terrible.
Speaker 1: We should wage a propaganda war against them. Well, no one,
Speaker 1: no scientists who's thinking about their career, unless they're very
Speaker 1: brave or very foolish, is going to speak up and
Speaker 1: say look, this is this is um these lockdowns are
Speaker 1: really bad idea. I agree with a great branch of
Speaker 1: that question. Very very few scientists will will want to
Speaker 1: do that ever to their career. I mean, I can
Speaker 1: understand why, right, it's they they're working on things that
Speaker 1: are remote from from COVID or the Great Branch Decoration.
Speaker 1: They just there's no reason for them to speak up,
Speaker 1: to stick their neck out, and so they won't even
Speaker 1: if they probably should. UM. So what you have is
Speaker 1: a situation where a legitimate role and I just to
Speaker 1: help direct the attention of scientists on important problems. But
Speaker 1: we've seen the leadership of the NIH, including Collins and Sauci,
Speaker 1: them use that legitimate power illegitimately to essentially silence scientific discussion.
Speaker 1: UM and it's undermined trust in science, it's undermine trust
Speaker 1: in public health, and as as we just talked about,
Speaker 1: undermine trust in medicine. Had enormous negative consequences for institutions
Speaker 1: that I think most Americans before the pandemic had a
Speaker 1: lot of respect for. Is that self preservation because obviously
Speaker 1: there's been concerns that the NIH funding went to, you know,
Speaker 1: the funding of back coronaviruses and that research at the
Speaker 1: Wuhan Laboratory. I mean, is it self preservation from Dr
Speaker 1: Fauci or why has he adopted this approach? Like what's
Speaker 1: behind it? In your estimation? I don't know whether it
Speaker 1: was um and lobly, but what I do know is
Speaker 1: that that ni H, with the the explicit sign off
Speaker 1: of Fauci and Collins, funded gain a function research that
Speaker 1: was incredibly controversial. So in two thousand and fourteen there
Speaker 1: was actually a pause put on gain a function research
Speaker 1: because there was a paper where that someone has published
Speaker 1: in Science funded by the ANI agent part that it
Speaker 1: had managed to take an avian flu virus and make
Speaker 1: it able to infect human self people were very very
Speaker 1: upset by this. UM. The argument for why they did
Speaker 1: this was, what, we need to find out how many
Speaker 1: mutations it would take in order for the this av
Speaker 1: and flu virus to mutate so that you can affect humans.
Speaker 1: And it turns out it wasn't that many, and so
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, well, we have to be prepared for this.
Speaker 1: But at the same time people were worried what if
Speaker 1: it could be allably lots of lots of examples of
Speaker 1: lab belief that have happened dangerous ones. Uh and so
Speaker 1: there was a pause put on this where in order
Speaker 1: to do research that involved all of this gain of
Speaker 1: function work gain of functioning you take a virus and
Speaker 1: give it new capabilities that didn't previously have, you needed
Speaker 1: to get explicit sign off from Tony Fauci and from
Speaker 1: Frances Collins, and they signed off a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: grants from fourteen on despite the pause. UM and UM.
Speaker 1: So they bear responsibility for the funding, and including by
Speaker 1: the way, Peter Dazac and the and the Equal Health
Speaker 1: Alliance which cooperated with the with the Wuhan Lab very closely,
Speaker 1: so they funded a lot of this work. And I
Speaker 1: don't know for a fact that that's what's motivating them,
Speaker 1: because that's that's frankly in the retrospective embarrassing thing that
Speaker 1: they did. It was a lapse in judgment, wasn't a
Speaker 1: wise use of of n I H resources of American
Speaker 1: tax about paid tax carder dollars? Um and uh. I mean,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't surprise me to know that that this is
Speaker 1: partly with motivating them. I don't think it's all. It
Speaker 1: can't be all of it, because why focus on these
Speaker 1: destructive lockdowns. I think that partly is just a failure
Speaker 1: of understand that there were alternate policies that were available
Speaker 1: that would have reduced the harm for the virus and
Speaker 1: also from the lockdowns. Um. But but you know, I
Speaker 1: do think that that this sort of desire to like
Speaker 1: make up for this poor judgment that they had must
Speaker 1: have played some role. Well. I also just think there's
Speaker 1: a level of arrogance because someone had mentioned to me
Speaker 1: earlier on in the pandemic to sort of like explained
Speaker 1: Dr Fauci to me, is this is a guy who
Speaker 1: flew that a bowl of patient from Texas I think,
Speaker 1: to the n I age in Maryland so that he
Speaker 1: could treat her himself, put on a hazmat suit for
Speaker 1: the cameras, did a bunch of interviews when she would
Speaker 1: have just been fine, like staying in Texas. So it
Speaker 1: was like basically he like did this whole thing for himself, like,
Speaker 1: you know, so that he could like basically be in
Speaker 1: the glory. I agree. I mean there's some element of
Speaker 1: self promotion in his in his in the way he
Speaker 1: behaves that it's um so unseemly like frankly, should should
Speaker 1: we really know the name of the head of the
Speaker 1: ANI D? Yeah, I think the head of an I
Speaker 1: is important position, but shouldn't be someone who's so in
Speaker 1: the public eye, you know. Do you think that part
Speaker 1: of the problem is so we see this with like
Speaker 1: politicians very often. Right, You've got like all these people,
Speaker 1: like most of our leaders, you know, I mean, you
Speaker 1: don't have to get any bit like Pelosi, even like
Speaker 1: all these guys have been in the public office for
Speaker 1: like decades. So it's like, how do you solve some
Speaker 1: of the problems that you've literally been a part of
Speaker 1: making right? And so do you think some of that
Speaker 1: is true for these public health bureaucrats in the sense of,
Speaker 1: you know, they've been in government for so long that
Speaker 1: they're sort of out of the game or they can't
Speaker 1: really solve these problems or bring a fresh approach when
Speaker 1: they've kind of been a part of the problem where
Speaker 1: they've been a part of the system for too long.
Speaker 1: Do we need to kind of take a fresh look
Speaker 1: at bringing in, you know, different voices and different people
Speaker 1: who have you been out in the field a little
Speaker 1: bit fresher and you know, not been bureaucrats for so long?
Speaker 1: I do? I think I think that that someone like
Speaker 1: that Dr Fauci, who has been in his position at
Speaker 1: the head of the nmity for forty years on that way,
Speaker 1: or something on that order or years I've done an
Speaker 1: exact number, but something a very very, very long time.
Speaker 1: Just by dint of being in such power for so long,
Speaker 1: you essentially create this insular sense where where like, you know,
Speaker 1: no one's going to talk back to you, no one's
Speaker 1: gonna like tell to contradict you, and you you there's
Speaker 1: this feedback loop where you start to think you're always
Speaker 1: right because no one's contradicting always everyone is always praising you. Um,
Speaker 1: it's really dangerous for any leader to be in that position.
Speaker 1: Right the Greeks, the Romans, when a when a successful
Speaker 1: Roman general that have this major parade through Rome, that
Speaker 1: have someone that that someone whispering in their ear and
Speaker 1: at the head of the parade, and it was everyone's
Speaker 1: praising him. Look, you're only mortal, You're not a god,
Speaker 1: You're only mortal. Right. So, UM, I think someone in
Speaker 1: a position like um Tony Faccy for for such a
Speaker 1: long time, where he's controlled the budgets of careers of
Speaker 1: countless incredibly bright scientists, all of them are telling essentially
Speaker 1: a very strong incentives to like to tell him you
Speaker 1: know that he's doing a good job. Um. It's it's
Speaker 1: a dangerous kind of mixture of of power and science,
Speaker 1: um and and it and it creates a kind of
Speaker 1: corruption that's really hard to undo unless you have essentially
Speaker 1: term limits or something. I think no, no one human
Speaker 1: should ever be in that position for so long. See
Speaker 1: you've congratulations on the Academy for Science and Freedom with
Speaker 1: Hillsdale College. You Dr Scott Atlas and Dr Martin colderfans
Speaker 1: started uh this academy. You know, what do you guys
Speaker 1: hope to accomplish with it? And what are sort of
Speaker 1: the goals and the objectives with it. To me, that's
Speaker 1: it's twofold. So I think I think we've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about about what's motivated is through the sole conversation these.
Speaker 1: I think the the trust in science because of the
Speaker 1: lock the failures in the lock around the lockdown, is
Speaker 1: at a low point, and in particular, the ability for
Speaker 1: scientists to talk to one another freely without fear of
Speaker 1: canceling is really hard the discussions lockdown. That needs reform.
Speaker 1: So one is to restore the ability for scientists to
Speaker 1: be free within science itself, and that may be involve
Speaker 1: reforms beyond just the lockdowns themselves, that scientists should be
Speaker 1: free to talk to one another without this sort of
Speaker 1: propaganda of more against it. The other thing is, um,
Speaker 1: what role does science play in a free society? Science
Speaker 1: is important, but we've had during this pandemic this idea
Speaker 1: that science ought to completely structure all of our civic life.
Speaker 1: But in fact that's not right. Science helps you understand
Speaker 1: that about the way the physical world works. If I
Speaker 1: do a B might happen, but that doesn't say that
Speaker 1: I want BE to happen. Um, maybe I want CE
Speaker 1: to happen, right, So I'll do D instead, which D
Speaker 1: produces C. Whether you want B or C. Well, that's
Speaker 1: not a scientific question. That that's a question of ethics,
Speaker 1: of morality, of politics, of of a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: other social values that scientists have no ex special expertise.
Speaker 1: Science and free society is not are not the rulers
Speaker 1: the scientists we study, Your advisors and the people who
Speaker 1: make decisions should take that into account. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: determine what's the right thing to do. Is it right
Speaker 1: to adopt a set of policies that mainly protect the
Speaker 1: laptop class at the expense of the working class and
Speaker 1: the poor and the vulnerable. I mean, that's essentially what
Speaker 1: science said to do. We have to stop the virus
Speaker 1: and spreading, so we adopt these policies to protect only
Speaker 1: a certain class of people. Well, is that right? Well,
Speaker 1: scientists have no monopoly and you should have no monopoly
Speaker 1: in that discussion or free society, and so part of
Speaker 1: the Academy is is to restore the proper place of
Speaker 1: science and a free society and to restore the ability
Speaker 1: for scientists to freely discuss with one another. Well, I
Speaker 1: appreciate you guys doing that, and you know you guys
Speaker 1: have been so brave and have had so much courage
Speaker 1: and really bring truth in a time where it's dire
Speaker 1: and you know it's dying and it's needed. You know what,
Speaker 1: before we go, what should the path forward be for
Speaker 1: the country and how we deal with COVID obviously knowing
Speaker 1: what we know now and knowing what we don't know
Speaker 1: in the future, but right now where we are in
Speaker 1: this what should the path forward look like? I think
Speaker 1: a few things. So one, we should vow never to
Speaker 1: to disrupt the lies of children ever again. Should restore
Speaker 1: normal life to children literally everywhere in the country. There's
Speaker 1: no good reason to think about children as particularly particularly
Speaker 1: super spread as not since the beginning of the the epidemic,
Speaker 1: and the harm to them is just immorl uh. So
Speaker 1: we should end. We should restore normal life and children immediately. Next,
Speaker 1: we should stop a mass asymptomatic testing. Right. We shouldn't
Speaker 1: be forcing people and I'm I'm in favor of rapid
Speaker 1: energy and tests and other tests that allow people to
Speaker 1: take charge of the risk in their lives. Right, So,
Speaker 1: before you go visit Grandma, you want to check with
Speaker 1: your positive if that makes some sense to me. So
Speaker 1: we should allow that to happen, we should have if
Speaker 1: we should encourage that. But another hand, forced to testing
Speaker 1: and forced vaccination and coercion, that should end immediately, um
Speaker 1: because it's it's not it's produced social division without actually
Speaker 1: doing much far as a public health benefit. Those two
Speaker 1: steps would go a long way. For instance, and and
Speaker 1: and part of that the ending vaccine mandates and ending
Speaker 1: vaccine passports. I think we'd go a long way towards
Speaker 1: starting to restore the trust. Will need to actually address
Speaker 1: the remaining risk around this virus. Well, hopefully people adopt that.
Speaker 1: You know, there seems to be some hope when you've
Speaker 1: got people like Governor Jared Poulis of a Democrat from
Speaker 1: Colorado basically saying that you know, hey, the medical emergency
Speaker 1: phase of all this is over. You know, let's kind
Speaker 1: of move forward with her alive. So praying more governors
Speaker 1: take your advice and we can go back to normal.
Speaker 1: And I just feel like there's been so much harm
Speaker 1: to society even in just this blame game and you know,
Speaker 1: turning on our neighbors and it just you know, there's
Speaker 1: just been so much ugliness to the past couple of years.
Speaker 1: So praying people heed your your words of advice there.
Speaker 1: Dr J. Batachara, thank you so much for everything you've done.
Speaker 1: So much respect for you and and just appreciate your work,
Speaker 1: can your voice and all of this, and and thank
Speaker 1: you so much for your time, sir. It's an honor.
Speaker 1: Thank you great to talk with you. I want to
Speaker 1: thank Dr J. Batcharia again for such a great interview
Speaker 1: and just the honesty. It's so nice to have people
Speaker 1: like him to turn to during all this chaos, all
Speaker 1: the noise, all the craziness. I want to thank you
Speaker 1: guys at home for listening. If you enjoy today's show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review. You can rate us five
Speaker 1: stars and Apple Podcast It means a lot. You can
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at Lisa Marie Booth.
Speaker 1: I want to thank or team producer John Castio and
Speaker 1: Drew Steele who stepped up this week to bring you
Speaker 1: this podcast. Executive producers Debbie Myers and Speak Renew the
Speaker 1: English as well, all part of the Gingridge three sixty
Speaker 1: network and team