Speaker 1: Pushkin. Well, I'm going to take you back to two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, the winter November December of two thousand
Speaker 1: and five. In two thousand and five, the team was
Speaker 1: just assembled to begin writing the National Plan. This is
Speaker 1: a doctor named Carter Metscher. The team he's talking about
Speaker 1: was in the Bush White House, and the national plan
Speaker 1: was for what to do in a pandemic. Back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, the White House asked Carter to
Speaker 1: help answer a big question, how do you minimize disease
Speaker 1: and death between the time a new virus starts to
Speaker 1: spread and the time we might have a vaccine for it.
Speaker 1: You know, an analogy we use is fire and thinking
Speaker 1: of the exponential growth in a fire. Just like an
Speaker 1: epidemic grows exponentially, a fire, grow exponentially. Slow a fire
Speaker 1: and you give yourself a chance to put it out.
Speaker 1: Slow a pathogen, and you buy time to save lives
Speaker 1: because you can stock up on medical supplies, learn about
Speaker 1: the new disease and how to treat it before lots
Speaker 1: of people get sick. Carter Metcher really wasn't a political guy.
Speaker 1: He was just an ICU doctor with a reputation for
Speaker 1: thinking about problems in unusual ways. The White House had
Speaker 1: called him up totally out of the blue, and at
Speaker 1: that moment it was not at all obvious how to
Speaker 1: slow a new virus, especially a virus that can spread
Speaker 1: through people without symptoms. Public health experts still had the
Speaker 1: year nineteen eighteen in mind. Back in nineteen eighteen, different
Speaker 1: American cities that tried various ways to slow down the
Speaker 1: Spanish flu. They close saloons and churches and ban large gatherings.
Speaker 1: None of it seemed to make any difference. Carter teamed
Speaker 1: up with another doctor brought in by the White House,
Speaker 1: an oncologist named Richard Hatchett. Together, Carter and Richard went
Speaker 1: back and looked more closely at what had actually happened
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighteen. And so what we began doing
Speaker 1: was pulling daily newspaper accounts from a number of cities
Speaker 1: to be able to identify when they were reporting their
Speaker 1: first cases, when interventions were being implemented. The two doctors
Speaker 1: were looking for what they called NPIs, or non pharmaceutical interventions,
Speaker 1: the various things that cities had done to distance people.
Speaker 1: They were also looking for death tolls. Back in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: Philadelphia had been an outlier in this regard. People died
Speaker 1: at a greater rate in Philadelphia than in almost any
Speaker 1: American city. And as we looked at Philadelphia closer, what
Speaker 1: we realized is that they did eventually implement you know,
Speaker 1: the the NPIs trying to slow transmission, but they implemented
Speaker 1: those measures awfully late in the course of the disease outbreak.
Speaker 1: After looking at Philadelphia, the doctors moved on to other
Speaker 1: cities and found some really weird stuff. In Saint Louis,
Speaker 1: for example, the death rate there was less than half
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia's. What we found was that the cities that
Speaker 1: implemented these interventions earlier had a lower mortality rate than
Speaker 1: the cities that implemented these measures later. And no one
Speaker 1: had done this before. You know, I don't, and I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not aware of anyone doing this before. Back when
Speaker 1: I first heard about these White House doctors, I got
Speaker 1: so interested that I set out to write a whole
Speaker 1: book about them, called The Premonition. I just thought the
Speaker 1: whole situation was wild. You had these two doctors, both
Speaker 1: sort of shocked to find themselves in the White House,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to save lives during a pandemic.
Speaker 1: Then they earn themselves into amateur historians and find things
Speaker 1: that no historian has ever really noticed. They also know
Speaker 1: that their way out of their depth, so they recruit
Speaker 1: a proper professor, a world class Harvard epidemiologist named Mark Lipsitch. Lipsitch,
Speaker 1: Carter Mesher, and Richard Hatchett publish a paper that will
Speaker 1: one day become famous because it shows in a rigorous,
Speaker 1: academically respectable way that the death rates in the United
Speaker 1: States back in nineteen eighteen had actually been very different
Speaker 1: from city to city how many people died depending on
Speaker 1: how quickly each city had done its social distancing. The
Speaker 1: trick was to intervene before it was obvious that the
Speaker 1: disease was present. Once you see the disease killing people,
Speaker 1: it's too late. There's a lag after people get infected,
Speaker 1: before they get sick, and another lag between the time
Speaker 1: they get sick and the time they die. So MPIs
Speaker 1: were sort of like a fire extinguisher, less useful after
Speaker 1: the fire has reached the roof. If you're trying to
Speaker 1: put out a fire or control a fire, it's much
Speaker 1: easier to do that when the fire is contained to
Speaker 1: for example, your stove you've got a pan with oil
Speaker 1: in it that starts on fire, It's much easier to
Speaker 1: contain or to suppress that fire if you act. Then
Speaker 1: then if you wait for the entire kitchen to be
Speaker 1: engulfed or half the house to be engulfed by the
Speaker 1: time your kitchen's fully ablaze or half your house is ablaze,
Speaker 1: that fire extinguisher is not going to be very effective.
Speaker 1: Carter Metscher and Richard Hatchett wrote the Pandemic Plan for
Speaker 1: the United States back in two thousand and six. Actually,
Speaker 1: this part of the plan was officially written by the CDC,
Speaker 1: but Carter and Richard basically created it with the help
Speaker 1: of a mid level CDC employee named Lisa Coonin the
Speaker 1: plan stress the importance of distancing people at the very
Speaker 1: start of the pandemic to slow a virus down. And
Speaker 1: so when a pandemic actually happened in two t Carter
Speaker 1: Metcher was more shocked than just about anyone that the
Speaker 1: United States ended up playing the role of Philadelphia and
Speaker 1: all these other countries wound up playing the role of
Speaker 1: Saint Louis because a lot of those countries had learned
Speaker 1: pandemic strategy from US. I'm Michael Lewis and This is
Speaker 1: Against the Rules, a show that explores unfairness in American
Speaker 1: life by looking at what's happening to various characters in
Speaker 1: American life. This season has been all about experts. Mostly,
Speaker 1: it's been about how it's all our fault that we
Speaker 1: don't use expertise better than we do. But this episode
Speaker 1: is a bit different. It's about how much trouble experts
Speaker 1: can cause when they exploit our desire for them to
Speaker 1: tell us what we want to hear. I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, but I feel as if I spent the
Speaker 1: last two years living inside a casino. I've lost all
Speaker 1: sense of time. March of twenty twenty feels to me
Speaker 1: like about ten years ago. Back in March of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: only a handful of Americans had died of COVID, but
Speaker 1: a surprising number of the early cases occurred in California's
Speaker 1: Santa Clara County. On March the sixteenth, that county's health officer,
Speaker 1: Sarah Cody, issued the country's first shelter in place order.
Speaker 1: She closed schools and banned gatherings of more than fifty
Speaker 1: people and so on. These new orders direct all individuals
Speaker 1: to shelter at their place of residence and maintained social
Speaker 1: distancing of at least six feet from any other person
Speaker 1: when outside their residence. Doctor Cody was basically just following
Speaker 1: the plan that the doctors had conceived in the Bush
Speaker 1: White House, but she found herself way out on a limb.
Speaker 1: At that moment, only two people in Santa Clara County
Speaker 1: had died, and no one knew anything for sure, not
Speaker 1: how many Americans were likely to get COVID, not how
Speaker 1: many of those were likely to die. In March, I
Speaker 1: heard about a study that was happening at Stanford where
Speaker 1: we were going to try to measure the amount of
Speaker 1: antibodies in our community. Malory Harris was a twenty three
Speaker 1: year old first year graduate student in biology at Stanford University,
Speaker 1: which happens to be in Santa Clara County. This study
Speaker 1: that Stanford was about to do was going to try
Speaker 1: to learn the most important thing to learn about COVID.
Speaker 1: Malory jumped into help, and this would allow us to
Speaker 1: figure out these important quantities about how the disease was spreading.
Speaker 1: You need to know how transmissible and how lethal it is.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, the Stanford study would wind up having seventeen authors.
Speaker 1: A few of the names were known in the medical
Speaker 1: research world, especially Jay Baticharia and Johnny Unidis. Eunidas was
Speaker 1: a really big deal. His name. The study instant credibility.
Speaker 1: So I had like this tiny volunteer thing that I did.
Speaker 1: I like handed people their Amazon gift cards after they
Speaker 1: got tested. And at the time, like everyone I knew
Speaker 1: was volunteering on this study, like because it was that important, right,
Speaker 1: Like we all wanted this information. And specifically the information
Speaker 1: is how many people in Santa Clara County have been
Speaker 1: infected with COVID, right exactly, because if you know that,
Speaker 1: then you know how many people have died, so you
Speaker 1: can start to guess what the fatality rate is of
Speaker 1: this disease. Right, So there's that question. There are also
Speaker 1: questions about, like how many people who get sick are
Speaker 1: actually going to have symptoms at all and get detected
Speaker 1: as cases. You know, that number would be helpful for
Speaker 1: us in figuring out how transmissible is this virus? So
Speaker 1: you were excited. I said that this was probably one
Speaker 1: of the most important studies that I would ever be
Speaker 1: a part of. The Stanford students had gathered blood samples
Speaker 1: from thirty three hundred Santa Clara County residents. The Stanford
Speaker 1: professors then tested the samples for COVID antibodies. The results
Speaker 1: were sensational. Between fifty and eighty five times more people
Speaker 1: in Santa Clara County than previously thought had been infected
Speaker 1: with COVID. Thousands of people had apparently survived COVID without
Speaker 1: ever knowing they had it, yet only two had died,
Speaker 1: which suggested that the virus wasn't all that lethal. Welcome
Speaker 1: back America. We have a tremendous guest, doctor John Ionidas.
Speaker 1: At that moment, it really did feel possible that anyone
Speaker 1: reacting to COVID was overreacting. Welcome You are a co
Speaker 1: director the Meta Research Innovation Center at Stanford University. It's
Speaker 1: now April nineteenth, two and twenty. Doctor Unidas is a
Speaker 1: guest of Mark Levine, host of Life, Liberty and Levine
Speaker 1: on Fox News. Tell me what was in your mind
Speaker 1: when you wrote this piece and tell me why you
Speaker 1: were right. I'm a person who's working with data, and
Speaker 1: I'm also trained in infection diseases, so it was natural
Speaker 1: that when the COVID nineteen pandemic evolved, it became a
Speaker 1: top priority for me to understand what was going on.
Speaker 1: Unidus is wearing a white sports jacket. He has the
Speaker 1: air of a man who's descended onto TV. He's a doctor,
Speaker 1: though he doesn't see patients. He's made his name exposing
Speaker 1: the shoddiness of a lot of medical research. It became
Speaker 1: very obvious to me that the evidence that we had
Speaker 1: in the early phases of the pandemic was utterly unreliable.
Speaker 1: Up until now, Unidas's published work has been kind of fun,
Speaker 1: almost crowd pleasing. He once wrote a paper where he
Speaker 1: took the first fifty ingredients in a cookbook and investigated
Speaker 1: with medical researchers that about them. Half of the ingredients
Speaker 1: supposedly cured cancer, half of them supposedly cause cancer, and
Speaker 1: a bunch supposedly did both. I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: him for this episode, but he didn't return our email anyway.
Speaker 1: In early April twenty twenty, Johnny Unidis might be the
Speaker 1: most dangerous scientist alive to any medical researcher who uses
Speaker 1: weak data to make some sensational claim, but he himself
Speaker 1: is about to make a sensational claim that the world's
Speaker 1: experts in communicable disease, have no idea what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: It is just an astronomical error. And over the last
Speaker 1: several weeks, we have started accumulating data that show that
Speaker 1: there's far more people who are infected with this virus.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of them don't even realize that they
Speaker 1: have been infected. They are asymptomatic, they have no symptoms,
Speaker 1: or they have very mild symptoms that they would not
Speaker 1: even bother to do anything about. This was such an
Speaker 1: important moment. No one could be totally certain about COVID,
Speaker 1: how many Americans would get it or how many of
Speaker 1: those might die. But Professor Johnny Unidas of Stanford University
Speaker 1: sounded certain in the big picture, the risk is much
Speaker 1: much much lower compared to what we thought before. I
Speaker 1: think you and your team have developed a growing consensus.
Speaker 1: I think among experts and certainly among the people. Take
Speaker 1: care of the vulnerable, but let the rest of us
Speaker 1: go free, that we have lives to live. No more
Speaker 1: than ten thousand Americans will ever die of COVID. That's
Speaker 1: the claim unit is put in print. He became a
Speaker 1: regular on Fox News, a go to expert for other
Speaker 1: media outlets. He and his co author Ja Bodicharia offered
Speaker 1: their views to the Trump White House, and the Trump
Speaker 1: White House listened to them. Scott Atlas, who ran Trump's
Speaker 1: COVID response, wound up talking to Johnny Unidis and Jay
Speaker 1: Bodicharia nearly every day for a year. America had a
Speaker 1: pandemic plan, much of the rest of the world was
Speaker 1: effectively using it, but we hesitated. And here was a
Speaker 1: big reason why this Stanford study and these important experts
Speaker 1: shouting to anyone who would listen that we didn't need
Speaker 1: a plan. Why socially distance anyone? We were looking at
Speaker 1: ten thousand American deaths max And just then in mid
Speaker 1: April twenty twenty, that statement felt plausible. I remember talking
Speaker 1: to a scientist friend of mine about it, who was
Speaker 1: also sure that this Stanford professor had proven that COVID
Speaker 1: was just way overblown and we were all way overreacting.
Speaker 1: We were both totally pissed off that our kids schools
Speaker 1: had closed. What neither of us knew was what other
Speaker 1: people were making of the Stanford study. Here it is.
Speaker 1: Here's my original posts from April nineteenth, twenty twenty. Someone
Speaker 1: emailed me Andrew Gellman's a professor at Columbia University and
Speaker 1: one of the country's leading statisticians. What I focused on
Speaker 1: in that my first analysis was accounting for uncertainty in
Speaker 1: the false positive and false negative rates of the test itself,
Speaker 1: and there I concluded that their data are consistent with
Speaker 1: a zero rate, in which everything is false. In plainer English,
Speaker 1: the antibody test used by the Stanford professors was unreliable.
Speaker 1: So unreliable that you could have just as easily concluded
Speaker 1: that zero people tested by Stanford had actually had COVID. Therefore,
Speaker 1: all the confirmed cases of COVID were in dead people.
Speaker 1: You could take the same study and argue that COVID
Speaker 1: was actually extremely lethal. Basically, Andrew Gellman showed that there
Speaker 1: was no useful new evidence in anything in the Stanford
Speaker 1: study was total garbage. I said that they owe an apology,
Speaker 1: not just to us, but to Stamford. Stamford has a
Speaker 1: world leading statistics department, and they could have easily got
Speaker 1: on the phone with these people. They also have some
Speaker 1: great epidemiologists at Stamford. Everyone makes mistakes. I don't think
Speaker 1: they should apologize just because they screwed up. I think
Speaker 1: they need to apologize because these were avoidable screwups. These
Speaker 1: are the kind of screwups that happen if you want
Speaker 1: to leap out with an exciting finding and you don't
Speaker 1: look too carefully at what you might have done wrong.
Speaker 1: But the authors of the Stanford study didn't apologize, at
Speaker 1: least not the famous ones. They did the opposite. They
Speaker 1: just kept doing these media appearances, going on podcast, etc.
Speaker 1: Even though scientists were just so vehemently a gas at
Speaker 1: what they've done. That's definitely science. Reporter at BuzzFeed she
Speaker 1: covered the expert reaction to the Stanford study, which just
Speaker 1: got louder and louder. It was the response that you
Speaker 1: were detecting on Twitter really unusual for an academic paper.
Speaker 1: It was unusual in that it was it was so heated,
Speaker 1: and it came from just so many people all at once.
Speaker 1: Help me understand. Is it unusual for a paper that
Speaker 1: has seventeen authors to have these kind of problems? People
Speaker 1: were struck by. Yes, the big number of co authors
Speaker 1: on it, the sort of like caliber of the people
Speaker 1: on its Johnny need is his name, you know, being
Speaker 1: on there definitely made people take a second look. Does
Speaker 1: it not strike you as strange that this person then
Speaker 1: proceeds to produce a paper that's statistically shoddy and amplifies
Speaker 1: its message in spite of criticism about its findings. I mean,
Speaker 1: he seems like he's just done in this paper. Would
Speaker 1: he's accused everybody else of doing for the previous fifteen years.
Speaker 1: That is the APPS salute they on the head. Tragic
Speaker 1: irony of this whole situation is this person who became
Speaker 1: famous for calling out problems of scientific research is now
Speaker 1: seemingly perpetuating those very same problems and not realizing the
Speaker 1: disconnect between those two things. If I sound fixated on
Speaker 1: this one person and on this one moment in time,
Speaker 1: it's because I am right. Then the country had the
Speaker 1: chance to agree on something important, exactly how dangerous COVID was,
Speaker 1: and the answer was about to be available, thanks in
Speaker 1: part to the work of two Australian PhD students, Leah
Speaker 1: Moroney and Gideon Meyerwitz cats I saw all these people
Speaker 1: saying wildly different things about the fatality rate of COVID.
Speaker 1: That's Gideon. He and a colleague got the bright idea
Speaker 1: of taking the dozens of studies made of COVID's lethality
Speaker 1: all over the world and analyzing them to get as
Speaker 1: a group. These studies suggested that COVID's death rate was
Speaker 1: somewhere between half a percent and one percent. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if half the American population caught COVID, somewhere between eight
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy five thousand and one and a half
Speaker 1: million people would die. They released the preprint of their
Speaker 1: study May six, two twenty. We were cited by the
Speaker 1: CDC mid last year in their planning scenarios. We've been
Speaker 1: cited by the WHO and the EU, I think as well.
Speaker 1: Lots of people looked at their work and said, yip,
Speaker 1: looks about right, and it was about right. But right
Speaker 1: away they came under attack from this Stanford professor named
Speaker 1: Johnny Unidis who said that our paper had I think
Speaker 1: the precise words were it was overtly wrong, and that
Speaker 1: perhaps this was because we were PhD students. Right. How
Speaker 1: common is the argument that you shouldn't listen to those
Speaker 1: book because they're still working on their PhDs. I've never
Speaker 1: heard it before. I guess people do PhDs at all
Speaker 1: points in their life. Sometimes they have had very long
Speaker 1: careers before their PhDs. So to say that someone is
Speaker 1: only a student is a bit reductive. I don't want
Speaker 1: to be reductive either, and I have found instances of
Speaker 1: Unitas being gracious online with his critics. For example, in
Speaker 1: a comment on the science blog Absolutely Maybe, he wrote,
Speaker 1: and I quote, we need nuance and some distance to
Speaker 1: understand the strong and weak points of the science that
Speaker 1: we and our colleagues produce. This takes time, patience, and goodwill.
Speaker 1: In the meanwhile, I consider my critics to be my
Speaker 1: greatest benefactors. I am always grateful to them end quote.
Speaker 1: Which is nice and all, but it was still weird
Speaker 1: to Gideon. The unit is set out and attacked PhDs
Speaker 1: in general. They are literally the leading experts in a
Speaker 1: certain thing, and they're doing their PhD to uncovenue evidence
Speaker 1: in that specific thing. These important Stanford professors were clinging
Speaker 1: to the meaningless results of their screwed up study. Instead
Speaker 1: of admitting they've been wrong, they tried to discredit those
Speaker 1: who were right by comparing their academic degrees. You might
Speaker 1: think that these Stanford guys would write about now be
Speaker 1: laughed at by every respectable human being on the planet
Speaker 1: and slink away in shame, But you'd be wrong. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's pretend it's still early April twenty, and no one's
Speaker 1: totally sure how lethal COVID will be. And for a
Speaker 1: very brief period at the start of the pandemic, that
Speaker 1: crucial moment when we needed to act, we were hobbled
Speaker 1: by arguments and doubt. But one thing was becoming clear.
Speaker 1: Lots of Americans were suddenly dying all at once, most
Speaker 1: obviously in New York City. It was kind of an
Speaker 1: eerie place. There were two people in rooms meant for
Speaker 1: one person, and they were just motionless in debated bodies.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychologist at Bellevue Hospital
Speaker 1: in New York City, but because he was a medical
Speaker 1: doctor living in New York in late April twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: he felt he had no choice but to try to
Speaker 1: save these COVID patients. So you had a kind of
Speaker 1: a ringside seat to the first kind of wave of carnage.
Speaker 1: You saw how serious it was. Absolutely, I mean it
Speaker 1: was you know, everyone in New York did. The sirens
Speaker 1: were wailing throughout empty streets all of the time. You know,
Speaker 1: most people didn't see it. To look at a hospital,
Speaker 1: there was nothing special going on, but the entire hospital
Speaker 1: was COVID and the turnover was massive. I would leave,
Speaker 1: you know, at five or six in the evening. I'd
Speaker 1: come back at you know, seven in the morning, and
Speaker 1: half of my patients had been transferred to the ICU overnight,
Speaker 1: and half of them, you know, were replaced, replaced because
Speaker 1: they were dead. Had you ever seen anything like it?
Speaker 1: There was nothing like it. Every five you know, the
Speaker 1: sounds are going to stick with me as much as anything.
Speaker 1: Every five minutes, you know, cold blue Airway team to
Speaker 1: this bed. Five minutes later, airway team to this bed.
Speaker 1: Inside of a month, more than ten thousand New Yorkers
Speaker 1: had died. They hadn't just caught COVID. They caught COVID
Speaker 1: early before doctors had a chance to learn how to
Speaker 1: treat it. Here's a shocking fact. If you went into
Speaker 1: an American hospital with severe COVID symptoms in March of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, you had a twenty five percent chance of dying.
Speaker 1: Three months later, that number had fallen to five percent.
Speaker 1: In the course of three months, your chance of surviving
Speaker 1: severe COVID had gone way up because medicine had figured
Speaker 1: stuff out. But in March of twenty twenty, medicine still
Speaker 1: needed time to figure stuff out. Jonathan Howard wasn't watching
Speaker 1: Fox News. He was watching Americans die of COVID. But
Speaker 1: if it had more time on his hands, he could
Speaker 1: have watched Johnny Unidas staying on message even though the
Speaker 1: American death toll was already twice what he had forecasted
Speaker 1: it would, ever be. The totality of the evidence points
Speaker 1: to an infection that is very common, that typically is
Speaker 1: very mild. Most people have no symptoms, they don't recognize
Speaker 1: that they have the infection. I really respected him prior
Speaker 1: to the pandemic. He is a big proponent of avidence
Speaker 1: space medicine. Jonathan Howard had once considered Johnny unitas something
Speaker 1: of a hero. They shared an interest in the weirdly
Speaker 1: unscientific things that doctors didn't said. Jonathan had actually written
Speaker 1: a book on medical misinformation, cognitive era and diagnostic mistakes.
Speaker 1: It's called which sounds boring, but it grew out of
Speaker 1: stuff that Jonathan saw doctors. So there's a doctor who
Speaker 1: I trained with and knew pretty well and was very
Speaker 1: friendly with who has since gone onto infamy as one
Speaker 1: of the disinformation doesn't These are the twelve people most
Speaker 1: responsible for spreading vaccine misinformation on Facebook. This is someone
Speaker 1: you studied with. Yes, yes, we were professional colleagues and friendly,
Speaker 1: and shortly after she graduated our residency programmed together. You
Speaker 1: know again, she started posting this sort of stuff to Facebook,
Speaker 1: and I became very fascinated after that point, as many
Speaker 1: other people are, about why smart people can believe such
Speaker 1: weird and wrong things. Because she's not stupid. She went
Speaker 1: to Cornell, she went to mt she went to NYU residency.
Speaker 1: She's smart. But how is it that she believes viruses
Speaker 1: don't cause disease? Our coffee enemas. I'm not making that
Speaker 1: up cure mental illness? Jonathan thought of the disinformation doesn't
Speaker 1: as a type people inside medicine who basically rejected science.
Speaker 1: Science could protect itself from them. These Stanford professors, though,
Speaker 1: they were a totally different beast. They can speak in
Speaker 1: great scientific jargons. And there's something about this, like there's
Speaker 1: something that I find and I have to sort of
Speaker 1: talk to my psychiatrists about this. But but personally offensive
Speaker 1: about doctors who I feel spread misinformation and you think
Speaker 1: they've had real effect. Oh? Absolutely. They are on the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, they are on Fox News. They have
Speaker 1: testified in courts they have massive platforms. Ironically, whenever anyone
Speaker 1: criticizes them, they say they have been silenced. After the
Speaker 1: first wave of deaths in New York, Johnny Unidas raised
Speaker 1: his loose forecast for American deaths from ten thousand to
Speaker 1: forty thousand. But he never said he'd been wrong, and
Speaker 1: at no point did he grapple with the new evidence.
Speaker 1: When the evidence started to make him look like a fool,
Speaker 1: he just began to attack the evidence. Same things, like
Speaker 1: people didn't die of COVID, died with COVID. It sounds
Speaker 1: incomprehensible as those words are coming out of my mouth.
Speaker 1: But this idea that death certificates can't be trusted, and
Speaker 1: even he implied in one article that doctors have a
Speaker 1: financial incentive to put COVID on death certificates. I can
Speaker 1: remember hearing too that people weren't really dying of COVID.
Speaker 1: The people who were dying were going to die anyway.
Speaker 1: That's a claim that still exists today. Most people I
Speaker 1: saw who died were older and unhealthy, but they were
Speaker 1: sixty year olds with diabetes. Sixty year olds with diabetes. Sure,
Speaker 1: it's not unheard of that they die of a heart attack,
Speaker 1: but they don't die in mass in large numbers. At
Speaker 1: the same time, I saw thirty year olds diet. The
Speaker 1: youngest eyes personally saw die at that time was a
Speaker 1: twenty three year old, So it was very clear that
Speaker 1: something different was happening. We were at the start of
Speaker 1: an ugly new war, not just on COVID, on reality
Speaker 1: and in this war, Doctor John you needus acted like
Speaker 1: the general of one of the armies. He's aimed frontline
Speaker 1: doctors for killing their patients. On a podcast, he said
Speaker 1: a lot of lives were lost at the very beginning
Speaker 1: because of doctors not knowing how to use mechanical ventilation,
Speaker 1: just going crazy and relating people who too early did
Speaker 1: not have to be intubated. So probably we lost a
Speaker 1: lot of lives, if you know, we were sort of
Speaker 1: too aggressive early on, so be it. Let the statistics
Speaker 1: say that. But the multiple studies have shown that that's
Speaker 1: not to be the case. So rather than sort of say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I underestimated COVID, I got it wrong.
Speaker 1: Let me try to do better from here out, he
Speaker 1: kind of threw frontline doctors under the bus. In a
Speaker 1: previous episode this season, we heard about a COVID patient
Speaker 1: whose family tried to refuse to allow him to be
Speaker 1: treated because they all knew that doctors were killing patients
Speaker 1: by intubating them. Those people didn't just pluck that bit
Speaker 1: of misinformation from some conspiracy theorists. It had the endorsement
Speaker 1: of a professor or of medicine at Stanford University. You
Speaker 1: know this paper, very ironically entitled Forecasting for COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: has failed, in which he spoke about empty hospital wards,
Speaker 1: that most hospital awards were empty, expecting a tsunami of
Speaker 1: disease that never came, writing as if the pandemic was
Speaker 1: over at that point. Essentially, we begin tonight with that
Speaker 1: grim new milestone, as the nation tries to stop the
Speaker 1: spread of the coronavirus. Total US cases have now topped
Speaker 1: five million since this pandemic began, a grueling eight months ago,
Speaker 1: in which nearly one hundred and sixty three thousand Americans
Speaker 1: have died and our way of life has been altered.
Speaker 1: By August twenty twenty, the picture of COVID was a
Speaker 1: lot clearer, and it obviously didn't look anything like the
Speaker 1: picture painted by the experts who claimed to know more
Speaker 1: than what we could see right under our noses. There's
Speaker 1: now this dreadful league table for COVID. It just came
Speaker 1: out in the Lancet as I was reporting this episode
Speaker 1: Pandemic Preparedness and COVID nineteen. The studies authors ranked countries
Speaker 1: by their ability to prevent COVID infections. In the rich
Speaker 1: country division. The United States ranked second to last, just
Speaker 1: above Argentina. In the lower weight class division. Here are
Speaker 1: some of the countries that have outperformed the United States. Yemen,
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe. The deaths are bad enough, but they
Speaker 1: speak to a bigger problem. I once had this realization
Speaker 1: because I was riding in a taxi to the airport
Speaker 1: and the taxi driver is listening to one of those
Speaker 1: holy radio stations. That's Andrew Gelman, again, professor of Statistics
Speaker 1: and political science at Columbia. The voice on the Holy
Speaker 1: roller radio station started telling him how we're all sinners
Speaker 1: and we have to accept that added the human rights,
Speaker 1: and it really resonated with me that we are all
Speaker 1: sinners in that sense that we make mistakes and accepting
Speaker 1: that you are as sinner, and like, that's kind of
Speaker 1: the first step. And then the next step is is
Speaker 1: that you say, like how can I learn from my mistakes?
Speaker 1: I find it very frustrating at all levels when people
Speaker 1: don't admit their mistakes. It just makes me want to scream.
Speaker 1: I have a hard time imagine you screaming, but I
Speaker 1: believe you the ice cream. I've been known to scream.
Speaker 1: That's what's its steak, our ability to learn so we
Speaker 1: don't wind up going through this all over again. And
Speaker 1: there's one very obvious thing that we might have learned
Speaker 1: from a pandemic. It's now killed one million Americans. It's
Speaker 1: what they didn't learn back in nineteen eighteen, and with
Speaker 1: card measure helped to figure out what saved people and
Speaker 1: what killed them. Right now, the city of Miami has
Speaker 1: more than triple the death rate of San Francisco. Why
Speaker 1: the red counties in California that followed the lead of
Speaker 1: the Stanford professors and revolted against public health rules early
Speaker 1: in the pandemic, Well now they have double and triple
Speaker 1: the death rates of the blue counties that more or
Speaker 1: less complied with the rules. The United States had a
Speaker 1: pandemic plan that advised city and county health officials to
Speaker 1: intervene early and distance people when a new pathogen started
Speaker 1: to move through the population. Did the cities and counties
Speaker 1: that more or less did this actually save lives? I mean,
Speaker 1: it looks to me like they did, But what do
Speaker 1: I know? The trouble is that no one seems to know.
Speaker 1: Do you think we've learned in this country how to
Speaker 1: better respond to the next one? I think, if anything,
Speaker 1: you know, we probably have regressed. Carter Mesher again, who
Speaker 1: created the pandemic strategy, We didn't really use that. People
Speaker 1: haven't looked at what's happening and said, oh, that worked
Speaker 1: and that didn't and in a sensible way that enables
Speaker 1: us to move forward more intelligently. They haven't done that. No,
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't think. I don't think we have.
Speaker 1: It's not just an opinion this. There's data to support
Speaker 1: the point. For it turns out that not only did
Speaker 1: the United States do a worse job than other countries
Speaker 1: at preventing disease at the start of the pandemic compared
Speaker 1: with other countries, we're actually doing even worse now despite
Speaker 1: having better access to vaccines than just about everyone else.
Speaker 1: So you look from July first, twenty twenty one to
Speaker 1: today and what happened in those countries, Well, in the
Speaker 1: United States, we've seen twelve hundred dusts per million. If
Speaker 1: you take a look at the UK, they're at about
Speaker 1: six hundred deaths per million. They're half the death rate
Speaker 1: in the UK during that period of time across those
Speaker 1: waves is half the death rate of the US. If
Speaker 1: we look at Canada, Canada had a death rate of
Speaker 1: about three hundred deaths per million, so about a quarter
Speaker 1: of what the United States has. If we take a
Speaker 1: look at Japan, they had about one hundred deaths per
Speaker 1: million over that same period of time that the United
Speaker 1: States had twelve hundred deaths per million. By now, it
Speaker 1: just sounds like numbers. So let's do something to make
Speaker 1: it sound like something else. Think of one person you
Speaker 1: loved who's died, a single person, take a moment. I'll
Speaker 1: do the same. Now, multiply that feeling by hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1: Our society is still failing its people in ways that
Speaker 1: other societies are not, and there's a reason for that failure.
Speaker 1: These other societies or learning we're not. When you all
Speaker 1: were looking back at nineteen eighteen, it seems kind of, oh,
Speaker 1: it's quaint that they didn't understand. They didn't understand what happened,
Speaker 1: and now you can come in and you can understand
Speaker 1: for them what they didn't understand at the time. And
Speaker 1: we would never do such a thing. And we're exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, we're exactly where they were that we don't
Speaker 1: This stuff is happening and no one's learned anything. And
Speaker 1: I just don't, you know, I can understand what their
Speaker 1: excuse was. I don't know what our excuse is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't don't. I don't either. I don't either, I
Speaker 1: don't know. One of my takeaways from Carter Mesher and
Speaker 1: this entire season is the importance of I don't know,
Speaker 1: and how it's a sign of true expertise, but how
Speaker 1: hard for an expert it is to say, especially as
Speaker 1: they age and grow used to being viewed as the
Speaker 1: person who knows. Which brings us back to Malory Harris,
Speaker 1: who had come to Stanford as a twenty three year
Speaker 1: old graduate student. She'd arrived thinking she understood the rules
Speaker 1: of expertise. Her job, she thought, was to accumulate evidence,
Speaker 1: to ask questions of it, but to let the answers
Speaker 1: fall where they may. In March of twenty twenty, I
Speaker 1: started to see that that's not actually how this works.
Speaker 1: She watched her superiors, John Unidas and Jay Batachario and
Speaker 1: a handful of other Stanford scientists how they went on
Speaker 1: TV and sounded certain about things that they either could
Speaker 1: not know or were entirely wrong about. So I had
Speaker 1: it explained to me by a more senior academic that
Speaker 1: at the beginning of COVID, journalists were looking for people
Speaker 1: who would say either that this is the flu or
Speaker 1: that it's ebola, and those were the only scientists who
Speaker 1: you would hear from, even though the majority of the
Speaker 1: scientific community was like, it's somewhere in this range and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of uncertainty here. But the people who
Speaker 1: would get platformed were the people who were making kind
Speaker 1: of the most sensational and the most certain claims. Malory
Speaker 1: was meant to be studying biology with these guys. Now
Speaker 1: she was just studying these guys. And I read about,
Speaker 1: you know, what happened with tobacco, and who were the
Speaker 1: scientists who were attacking the link between smoking and cancer
Speaker 1: and what happened with climate change? And why, like, even
Speaker 1: though we knew for decades before I was even born,
Speaker 1: that this was going to be a problem, why weren't
Speaker 1: we seeing action, and who were the scientists who were
Speaker 1: helping to delay that right? And like what happened with
Speaker 1: AIDS denialism. Why did you have the small group of
Speaker 1: people who were saying that HIV doesn't cause AIDS who
Speaker 1: kept getting platformed even when they didn't really have solid
Speaker 1: evidence for that. Did you see any patterns? Oh? Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing that had happened a lot was scientists claiming
Speaker 1: they were experts when in fact they'd wandered pretty far
Speaker 1: from their area of genuine expertise. And how hard it
Speaker 1: was for the general public to see the difference. For example,
Speaker 1: you might have made your name debunking bad medical research,
Speaker 1: but it didn't mean you had the first clue about
Speaker 1: virology or disease control. Another pattern was the way people
Speaker 1: seemingly devoted to reason became wedded to positions, That is,
Speaker 1: they didn't change their minds with the evidence. One day,
Speaker 1: Malory looked up and saw that her Stanford professors were
Speaker 1: advising a governor to do things like keep schools from
Speaker 1: enforcing mass mandates. We're talking about Florida now seeing record
Speaker 1: numbers of new cases. Despite that the governor, Rhonda Santacis,
Speaker 1: is fighting to ban mass in schools, and that fight
Speaker 1: is escalating very dramatically today. Malory's family lived in Florida,
Speaker 1: and her own professors were now threatening their lives. She
Speaker 1: finally broke and wrote an open letter in the Stanford
Speaker 1: School newspaper in which she called out her superiors. For
Speaker 1: the past year and a half, I have carefully followed
Speaker 1: public health recommendations and university guidelines to protect those around me,
Speaker 1: including the people mentioned here, even as they work to
Speaker 1: undo these protections for others. That's what bravery sounds like.
Speaker 1: I'm like a shy person actually, so you know, being
Speaker 1: public is really like intimidating for me. I didn't know
Speaker 1: if it could harm me professionally. I just really felt
Speaker 1: like I needed to say something. There's a question hidden
Speaker 1: in her words, why me let me take a moment here,
Speaker 1: because this is our final episode and it echoes a
Speaker 1: lot of our previous episodes. The experts who happened to
Speaker 1: have been quickest to see just how deadly COVID was
Speaker 1: had no talent for self promotion. They didn't go on
Speaker 1: TV like the Stanford professors. We sort of got to
Speaker 1: this problem in episode two. The Stanford professors were actually
Speaker 1: a lot like the old baseball people that Bill James
Speaker 1: talked about in episode three. They stopped thinking because they
Speaker 1: thought they knew something that they didn't. But this episode
Speaker 1: is also returned to the first episode of the series,
Speaker 1: our episode about the L six These PhD students are
Speaker 1: the L sixes of academic life. We've arrived at the
Speaker 1: point where we need them so badly that they're stepping
Speaker 1: up and putting their careers on the line to save
Speaker 1: us from ourselves. But why, where the hell are the
Speaker 1: l ones? Why do we now require that our young
Speaker 1: PhD students be brave? What forces are you worried about
Speaker 1: being corrupted by? When you get to be an old,
Speaker 1: established academic, Being a scientist isn't a glamorous job. I
Speaker 1: think that getting public attention can be really exciting to scientists,
Speaker 1: and you know, making compromises in how you communicate so
Speaker 1: that you can get that public attention. We all carry
Speaker 1: with us our own values, our own ways let we
Speaker 1: think that the world should work. The sticking point would
Speaker 1: be if those values were to impact the quality of
Speaker 1: my science and the ricor with which I approach my science.
Speaker 1: Your willingness to actually live in the world of evidence, right,
Speaker 1: I don't have some grand point on which to end
Speaker 1: this season, just a small one. Life eventually humbles us all.
Speaker 1: What I love about experts, the best of them anyway,
Speaker 1: is that they get to their humility early. They have to.
Speaker 1: It's part of who they are, it's necessary for what
Speaker 1: they're doing. They set out to get to the bottom
Speaker 1: of something that has no bottom, and so they're reminded
Speaker 1: constantly of what they don't know. They move through the
Speaker 1: world focused not on what they know, but on what
Speaker 1: they might find out. Against the Rules is written and
Speaker 1: hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Katherine Girardeau
Speaker 1: and Lydia Jean Cott. Julia Barton is our editor, with
Speaker 1: additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our fact checker,
Speaker 1: and mil o'bell executive produces. Our music is created by
Speaker 1: John Evans and Matthias Bossi, a stellwagen steinfanette. We record
Speaker 1: our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly helmed by
Speaker 1: Cofa Ruth, Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John
Speaker 1: SNAr Is, Carly mcglory, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Morgan Rattner, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Daniella Lakhan, Mary Beth Smith,
Speaker 1: and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing the Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is
Speaker 1: a podcast subscribe that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening
Speaker 1: for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Look
Speaker 1: for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Keep in touch,
Speaker 1: sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot Fm, or
Speaker 1: follow at pushkin pots Define more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You really want people to go away with that. It's
Speaker 1: like start trusting people who say they don't know. That's
Speaker 1: the main takeaway if they don't take anything else. So
Speaker 1: where from the season, hopefully they'll take that away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna there's gonna be spring up in the wake
Speaker 1: of our podcast, a new cable news channel where every
Speaker 1: day nobody knows anything. Everybody's you might be right, that'll
Speaker 1: be every show will be that I might be wrong.
Speaker 1: We could get a bunch of women, right. I know,
Speaker 1: I know I'm probably wrong. I'm really not sure, but
Speaker 1: I mean you might be right, probably wrong. I mean
Speaker 1: I don't want to step on any toils. I can't, yeh,
Speaker 1: followed by our new show, Am I an impostor?