Speaker 1: Good morning peeps in Welcome to Okay f Daily with
Speaker 1: Meet your Girl Danielle Moody recording pre recording from my
Speaker 1: Brooklyn Silarium. Folks, you know Omnicron is here in the
Speaker 1: United States, and as of this recording, it is in
Speaker 1: multiple states. And yet we've heard nothing so far of
Speaker 1: the ban being lifted on South Africa or the seven
Speaker 1: other African nations that this country, as well as many
Speaker 1: others around the world, decided, in their knee jerk political
Speaker 1: reactions to put together a travel ban. When asked by
Speaker 1: doctors scientists whether or not a travel ban is actually
Speaker 1: a preventative medical measure right if it is effective in
Speaker 1: containing COVID nineteen, their responses. Know what actually is effective
Speaker 1: outside of a racist and politically engineered travel ban is
Speaker 1: instead putting together quarantine protocols for all people that are
Speaker 1: coming into the United States, not just those that are
Speaker 1: foreign travelers. But if you are a fucking American citizen
Speaker 1: and have been abroad and are coming back to the
Speaker 1: United States, then you either need to show your proof
Speaker 1: of vaccination, a recent negative COVID test, your booster information,
Speaker 1: and in fact fucking quarantine because what has been proven
Speaker 1: to work is taking the measures that the CDC had
Speaker 1: outlined back in twenty twenty that actually do work. Right.
Speaker 1: What we have learned is that we are in fact
Speaker 1: a global community, whether or not we want to function
Speaker 1: like one at all. And the reality is this is
Speaker 1: that before these bands and restrictions go into place, covid
Speaker 1: omicron has already done laps around the fucking globe. So
Speaker 1: maybe you would think that we would learn something from
Speaker 1: our past transgressions because of the Trump administration and actually
Speaker 1: be informed by science and by medicine in the way
Speaker 1: that this administration said that it would be. Except that's not.
Speaker 1: What's happening is that again we are having very tepid responses.
Speaker 1: We had a very botched rollout vaccination program. And look,
Speaker 1: you have roughly close to sixty percent of the country
Speaker 1: right being vaccinated, but we also know that it's twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of the country that is never going to
Speaker 1: get vaccinated, and we also know that, yes, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: is to blame for that. One of the questions that
Speaker 1: I had asked of Glenn Kirshner earlier this week was
Speaker 1: if in Mark Meadow's book, right that we learned that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump knew days before he was around then candidate
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, and around reporters on Air Force one and
Speaker 1: just knowingly in the Rose Garden spreading, spewing COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: How come he is not being held criminally liable or
Speaker 1: civilly liable right for doing so. Where we are right
Speaker 1: now is in a nightmare of what I believe to
Speaker 1: be our own creation. And why do I say that,
Speaker 1: because there were opportunities, there were even opportunities post Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: for us to do better, for us to come together
Speaker 1: as a globe battling this health pandemic and recognizing that,
Speaker 1: you know what, pharmaceutical companies making billions upon billions of
Speaker 1: dollars while millions upon millions of people are dying. Maybe
Speaker 1: isn't where we need to put our energy resources. That
Speaker 1: maybe instead, as soon as we were able to have
Speaker 1: the properties, the intellectual properties that would make the RNA,
Speaker 1: that would make the vaccines that we are readily using
Speaker 1: in high income countries, that we would decide as a
Speaker 1: global community that no one pharmaceutical company should have a
Speaker 1: monopoly on making money when we have a virus that
Speaker 1: is ravaging the fucking globe that literally had us as
Speaker 1: a world shutter our doors for months and months on end,
Speaker 1: thinking that we didn't even know. We're washing fucking cardboard,
Speaker 1: We're putting on plastic gloves and double masking and being
Speaker 1: afraid to cross the street and cross somebody's path. Do
Speaker 1: you remember all of the ways that we were acting
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty because we didn't know what the fuck
Speaker 1: was going on? But now, given all the information and
Speaker 1: research that we have been provided with, we are still
Speaker 1: acting in ways that are very knee jerk and as
Speaker 1: if we have had no experience. Over the last almost
Speaker 1: two goddamn years. South Africa and their scientists did their
Speaker 1: due diligence because they have very advanced genome projects right
Speaker 1: to be able to detect this new variant, and instead
Speaker 1: of being celebrated for their transparency, right for their initial
Speaker 1: documentation of how this virus is working in people in
Speaker 1: those that are infected in these nations, we shut o
Speaker 1: our doors and then we turn around and we continue
Speaker 1: on with bullshit policy that was created to protect corporations
Speaker 1: and not protect people. And this is again where I'm
Speaker 1: talking about trips, right, I'm talking about the international property
Speaker 1: decision that was made that says that you can't share
Speaker 1: right that we can't avoid out because the intellectual property
Speaker 1: that was created via Faiza and Maderna is theirs and
Speaker 1: theirs alone. But these are government funded, fucking pharmaceutical companies.
Speaker 1: And we're in a global health pandemic. So when India
Speaker 1: and South Africa request, right eight months into the pandemic,
Speaker 1: for there to be a waiver to this policy program
Speaker 1: so that they can receive all the information that is
Speaker 1: necessary to begin to manufacture a vaccine to say their country,
Speaker 1: But instead we're waiting on the philanthropic desires and the
Speaker 1: charities of higher wealth nations who are responsible for the economic, spiritual,
Speaker 1: emotional damage that has been done to these nations through
Speaker 1: their greed and extraction. And now they can't be bothered
Speaker 1: to do the right thing, and there's no way to
Speaker 1: legally compel them to do so because they're the ones
Speaker 1: that are writing the rules, that are telling other dictating
Speaker 1: how other people are going other countries are going to
Speaker 1: live by them. How does that make sense? And how
Speaker 1: does that not piss us all off? Because we see
Speaker 1: exactly how the fucking ultrawealthy get away with so much
Speaker 1: goddamn shit in America, and it's the same thing that
Speaker 1: high wealth nations do to the lower wealth nations around
Speaker 1: the globe. Greed is what is driving all of this.
Speaker 1: It is not the sanctity of fucking life that the
Speaker 1: GOP had the audacity to tweet out last week as
Speaker 1: it pertained to Rob Wade, because it's sure as fuck
Speaker 1: wasn't about caring about the sanctity of life of the
Speaker 1: four teenagers that were gunned down in Oxford, Michigan. It's
Speaker 1: sure as fuck wasn't caring about the sanctity of life
Speaker 1: when celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucking murderer. It's sure as
Speaker 1: fuck is not caring about the sanctity of life when
Speaker 1: you are advocating for people to put themselves in harm's
Speaker 1: way when you yourself are covered and protected. It is vicious,
Speaker 1: it is cruel, it is criminal, and yet no one
Speaker 1: is being held accountable. You know, I mentioned a couple
Speaker 1: of days ago, once again the president of Brazil, Bulsonado,
Speaker 1: whose Senate was investigating him criminally. It will most likely
Speaker 1: not go anywhere because their government is so corrupt, but
Speaker 1: so the fuck is ours. Where is the investigation into
Speaker 1: who should be responsible? This was not an act of
Speaker 1: fucking God This was an act of negligence, of gross
Speaker 1: negligence on the part of the former twice impeach disgrace
Speaker 1: president of the United States, who him himself became a
Speaker 1: vector for this virus and once again is just able
Speaker 1: to get away with whatever the fuck he wants. And
Speaker 1: you want to tell me to continue to have hope
Speaker 1: and feel like we are moving in what direction exactly?
Speaker 1: We are just gobbling up the Greek alphabet in the
Speaker 1: way that pac Man gobbled up those little beads, right,
Speaker 1: just going around, munch, munch, munch. Here we go until
Speaker 1: Amikron turns into whatever the next fucking disastrous outcome will be.
Speaker 1: And what kills me and what our guests coming up,
Speaker 1: doctor Abduel el Sayed will say, is we could have
Speaker 1: been done with this, like we didn't have to have
Speaker 1: Alpha and then Delta and now Amikron, right, because we
Speaker 1: could have I just the other day, I was laying
Speaker 1: in bed and I can't stop my mind from moving,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking to myself, what would have happened? Where
Speaker 1: would we be right now if Hillary Clinton had been president,
Speaker 1: if the response of what we could do in this
Speaker 1: country was to come together as patriots, right if we
Speaker 1: were told from the jump, we will get through this,
Speaker 1: and we will do so together as one nation. Right,
Speaker 1: if we had started fucking, you know, tying ribbons around
Speaker 1: trees and shit, right like they used to do for
Speaker 1: the soldiers, and we did that in recognition, right and
Speaker 1: showing a force of empathy. And then finally, if the
Speaker 1: vaccines then had come and been rolled out, that we
Speaker 1: collectively as a nation would be celebrating, right, our ability
Speaker 1: to overcome That's what I imagine would have happened in
Speaker 1: my head. But you know, maybe I'm just creating a fantasy,
Speaker 1: because it's not as if Mitch McConnell would have died.
Speaker 1: It is not as if, you know, death santists wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been around. So I'm assuming that they would have
Speaker 1: found some way, But at least they would not have
Speaker 1: had a leader in the White House that was champion
Speaker 1: inning death right. So without that leader, without that megaphone
Speaker 1: cajoling his cult, maybe Republicans would not have decided that
Speaker 1: their response to a global health pandemic would be to
Speaker 1: tell their constituents to literally go play in traffic. I remain,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of days beside myself where I
Speaker 1: just get caught up, and I think about how things
Speaker 1: could have been so drastically different if fifty three percent
Speaker 1: of white women didn't vote against one of their own.
Speaker 1: I think about, you know, Ethan Crumbing, the high school
Speaker 1: shooter that murdered four of his classmates. And I think
Speaker 1: about the letter that his deranged mother wrote to Donald
Speaker 1: Trump saying that she would rather be grabbed by the
Speaker 1: pussy than fucked up the ass by the federal government.
Speaker 1: And thank god Donald Trump for giving me my guns,
Speaker 1: because I guess he was in the room where it happened,
Speaker 1: where the Constitution was being written. This is American extremism.
Speaker 1: And you know, folks want to tweet and want to say, oh,
Speaker 1: this is going to be Christian Sharia law. Leave the
Speaker 1: fucking Islam culture and out of all of this. This
Speaker 1: has nothing to do. You don't need to make comparisons
Speaker 1: to other places, right, this is what America has always done.
Speaker 1: But you see, when you keep people ignorant of their
Speaker 1: fucking history purposefully so, just in the same way you
Speaker 1: don't teach enslaved Africans how to read, right, because then
Speaker 1: they become educated and you really realize that education is power.
Speaker 1: And the more that they learn about the constitution and
Speaker 1: the rights of this country, the more that they're going
Speaker 1: to ask, well, am I am I a man too?
Speaker 1: Am I a woman too? Am I a citizen too?
Speaker 1: Where the fuck are my rights? So we always love
Speaker 1: to compare what is happening to America to the worst
Speaker 1: that has happened in other nations, when we can just
Speaker 1: compare it to the founding of America, where we can
Speaker 1: take any fucking generation and pull out and see where
Speaker 1: we have always run on the space of violence, of ignorance,
Speaker 1: being bliss. Over seven hundred thousand Americans are dead, and
Speaker 1: you have Republicans in this country still calling this a hoax.
Speaker 1: Over seven hundred thousand Americans are dead. And as we
Speaker 1: move through the holiday season, seven hundred thousand families and
Speaker 1: friends have missing people at their dinner tables, in their
Speaker 1: living rooms, Gifts that won't be put under the tree
Speaker 1: because of virus ravage them. But we have Republicans who
Speaker 1: believe that the world is suffering right now as a
Speaker 1: way to unseat them from power. That's how self serving
Speaker 1: and egotistical and disgusting these people are. Like I said yesterday,
Speaker 1: this does not end well, folks, because I there is
Speaker 1: no nothing to point to in our history that tells
Speaker 1: us that, oh, we can have peace, peaceful transition. America
Speaker 1: doesn't know peace. America only knows bloodshed, war violence. It's
Speaker 1: what is celebrated. You know, every time that I see
Speaker 1: somebody with the sticker on their card talking about go
Speaker 1: ahead and take it, and it being a picture of
Speaker 1: an ar fifteen. Everything about America is based on some
Speaker 1: fucking stupid cowboy John Wayne bullshit, right, And really what
Speaker 1: it is about, if we really want to unpack, it
Speaker 1: is about white male fragility, right, toxic masculinity masquerading as patriotism.
Speaker 1: But we've all bought into the lie. We've all been
Speaker 1: force fed that story. And so you see these fragile
Speaker 1: white men boys arming themselves because that is the only
Speaker 1: way that they feel a sense of power. And one
Speaker 1: must ask themselves a question that Tony Morrison asked so
Speaker 1: many moons ago. If you have to stand on somebody
Speaker 1: else's neck in order to feel taller, what does that
Speaker 1: say about you? But you see, so long as they
Speaker 1: have an active political party that is giving them their targets,
Speaker 1: revving them up in the same way that Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and Rudy Giuliani and Moe Brooks and others at the
Speaker 1: stop the Steel Rally revved up that crowd and then
Speaker 1: pointed them in the direction of the Capitol Building and said,
Speaker 1: go take your country back. These people, every single fucking
Speaker 1: one of them, are responsible. Our murderers have blood on
Speaker 1: their goddamn hands. We are in a place of despair.
Speaker 1: We are witnessing the fracturing of a nation state, the
Speaker 1: anxiety that you feel, the uneasiness, the grief, because we
Speaker 1: are all vacillating through those It is how you process death,
Speaker 1: the stages of grief. And we're still at avoidance where
Speaker 1: we want to pretend that this shit isn't happening. But
Speaker 1: regardless of whether or not we pay attention or not,
Speaker 1: it is and how it ends, I still believe is
Speaker 1: up to us. But in action is not an option.
Speaker 1: Burying our heads in the sand is not an option.
Speaker 1: Pretending that something is a hoax when it is killing
Speaker 1: your neighbors, your friends, and your colleagues. It's not an option.
Speaker 1: Who do we want to be? What's the legacy we
Speaker 1: want to leave behind? Because I sure as hell know
Speaker 1: that I'm not going down without a fight, and I
Speaker 1: don't think any of you who listen to wok af
Speaker 1: on a regular basis are either. But what about the
Speaker 1: people around us? We bear a responsibility to spread the
Speaker 1: word and to wake people the fuck up. That's the
Speaker 1: burden of being woke. That's a burden of being conscious,
Speaker 1: is to then find the ways in which you can
Speaker 1: spread that word, because without that collective action, without that
Speaker 1: low level lift, we're gonna be swimming in a sea
Speaker 1: of the debris of our democracy and I don't want
Speaker 1: to see that. Coming up next is my conversation with
Speaker 1: our friend returning guests, doctor Abdul el Sayed. Folks, I
Speaker 1: am so excited to welcome back to wok A. It
Speaker 1: has been a little bit of time. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: doctor Abdul el Sayed, who is the host for at
Speaker 1: Crooked Media's America Dissected pod and is our public health
Speaker 1: the doctor. If you are not following him on Twitter
Speaker 1: railing against our public health system, railing against what is
Speaker 1: happening to our democracy, then you are missing out on
Speaker 1: really great content. I feel like there is not a
Speaker 1: day that has gone by when we haven't had bad news.
Speaker 1: But I will tell you that the day after Thanksgiving,
Speaker 1: when my phone my parents phone because I was home
Speaker 1: for the holiday alert. Alert Alert, we have a new variant.
Speaker 1: I just want to get what your reactions were, because
Speaker 1: mine was I wanted to throw the phone out the window.
Speaker 1: I was just like, dear God, right like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're struggling. We've been we've been stuck at a certain
Speaker 1: number of vaccinations in this country we have given to
Speaker 1: the world. But I will go into my feelings about
Speaker 1: what it is that that should have a look like
Speaker 1: a versus where we are right now. But what was
Speaker 1: your reaction to that breaking news? Now? It was DAYJAVU
Speaker 1: all over again. I remember back in back in the
Speaker 1: summer when we'd heard about Delta, and the reality of
Speaker 1: this is that these these variants, they are a natural
Speaker 1: course of a virus if and when we don't do
Speaker 1: what we can to address it. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: the knowledge of a new variant that you know could
Speaker 1: potentially be and circumstantial evidence suggests is more transmissible, could
Speaker 1: potentially escape some of our immune mechanisms, that that really
Speaker 1: is super frustrating. And then when I heard about the
Speaker 1: response that the administration had had gone forward with, it
Speaker 1: just seemed to be the same kind of knee jerk
Speaker 1: reflex response that that fails to make up for the
Speaker 1: fact that we in this country have not been able
Speaker 1: to mount a real public health response to this virus
Speaker 1: from the get whether it was anything as simple as
Speaker 1: contact tracing or mass scale antigen testing, or the ability
Speaker 1: to upgrade our genomics or valance, or to have a
Speaker 1: logical approach to screening and quarantining people who come from
Speaker 1: outside this country. Don't just blanket banned people. What you
Speaker 1: do is you make sure that if they're coming in
Speaker 1: that they're quarantine for a certain period of time, which
Speaker 1: of course is what other countries who've had a far
Speaker 1: better response I've done, And so it is just deeply
Speaker 1: frustrating to see our country making the same mistakes over
Speaker 1: and over again, even as the consequences of our failure
Speaker 1: to get our vaccines abroad in a meaningful way, to
Speaker 1: invest in manufacturing capacities abroad so that people can make
Speaker 1: their own vaccine have rendered a yet again a new
Speaker 1: variant that we're now contending with. And of course it's
Speaker 1: a global pandemic. So what happens across the world, it's
Speaker 1: going to come back to hit us. And this is
Speaker 1: happening again. You know, I feel a duel like this
Speaker 1: is it is just to me that we haven't learned
Speaker 1: anything over the past year. That's how I felt about
Speaker 1: the the knee jerk reaction because I said, when we
Speaker 1: have doctors and scientists in South Africa that are doing
Speaker 1: their due diligence and being transparent right about this is
Speaker 1: what this is what we have found. This is what
Speaker 1: we are seeing. And we knew that when that announcement
Speaker 1: came out that yes, omicron had already been in seven
Speaker 1: nations in Africa, but it had also already traveled to Europe.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's it's we continue to make decisions
Speaker 1: that are based around politics, right, and who in fact
Speaker 1: is expendable, but who is our ally that we want
Speaker 1: to be buddy buddy with. And I'm like, to me,
Speaker 1: how do they continue to justify right? Like it isn't
Speaker 1: just public sentiment. Oh, we see this because we know
Speaker 1: that once it we we know that once something is discovered,
Speaker 1: wherever it is, if it is in Wuhan, China, if
Speaker 1: it is in Italy, if it's in South Africa, if
Speaker 1: it's going to get here, right, So why is it
Speaker 1: that you think that they continue to make these decisions
Speaker 1: and then are not made to be accountable or responsible
Speaker 1: for giving us the public the why. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: really important point, Danielle. I mean, the reality of this
Speaker 1: is that they wanted to look like they were doing
Speaker 1: something to make it for the fact that we have not,
Speaker 1: through the course of this pandemic, been doing the very
Speaker 1: thing that we should have been doing from from the
Speaker 1: get and these kinds of basic public health infrastructure pieces,
Speaker 1: whether it was ramping up our genomic surveillance early, whether
Speaker 1: it was putting in place a thoughtful quarantining approach that
Speaker 1: would apply to anybody coming over because of course, the
Speaker 1: thing about these travel bans just just to take a
Speaker 1: little bit of a bye way here, the thing about
Speaker 1: these travel bans is they only applied to non citizens.
Speaker 1: But it's not like citizens. Somehow we're potentially being infected
Speaker 1: with amicron. And here's the thing about it, is not
Speaker 1: like whatever capacities Omicron has, one of them is not
Speaker 1: reading your passport. And so if you create a policy
Speaker 1: that then incentivizes people who could be infected to hurry
Speaker 1: on home because they could be next, all you're doing
Speaker 1: is activating the potential for that to happen, and unfortunately,
Speaker 1: right we have not been able to do the very
Speaker 1: basic things well from the jump when it came to
Speaker 1: this pandemic. Now, look, a lot of that is because
Speaker 1: of who was president when this pandemic first occurred, and
Speaker 1: a lot of that is, you know, set the pathway forward.
Speaker 1: And you know, I talked to my public health colleagues
Speaker 1: all the time, and they tell me just how overworked
Speaker 1: and under supported they really are. And so it's very
Speaker 1: hard once we started this pandemic on the back foot,
Speaker 1: to catch up and really to move beyond where we
Speaker 1: were at the very beginning, because people are leaving the
Speaker 1: public health profession in groves and yet and yet we
Speaker 1: are trying to make up for our failure to do
Speaker 1: the very basic public health things well by putting in
Speaker 1: effect pr over it and looking like we've done the
Speaker 1: thing that we're supposed to do. Travel ban was not
Speaker 1: a thoughtful policy in the beginning, especially in the context
Speaker 1: of an ongoing debate about whether or not US taxpayer
Speaker 1: funded companies should be required to give their intellectual intellectual
Speaker 1: property out to other countries to allow them to manufacture
Speaker 1: a life saving vaccine. In the context of a pandemic. Now, look,
Speaker 1: you know, you could argue, well, look it's a company,
Speaker 1: they don't have to give their private intellectual property out
Speaker 1: to anybody. Well that's not entirely the case. When this
Speaker 1: company was founded by the US government intended to protect us,
Speaker 1: and our failure to do that thing, our failure to
Speaker 1: manufacture enough of our of our vaccines abroad, has left
Speaker 1: people without the vaccines they need and left them not
Speaker 1: trusting what they have that's coming from our country. And
Speaker 1: that's an important point here, don't forget right, there is
Speaker 1: context for this. South Africa is one of the hardest
Speaker 1: hit countries by the HIV pandemic. And yes, it is
Speaker 1: a pandemic. We don't call it that simply because we
Speaker 1: devalue the lives of the people who were infected by it,
Speaker 1: whether there were they were LGBTQ people at home or
Speaker 1: black people abroad. But it was a pandemic and it
Speaker 1: was There was a long history of the US denying
Speaker 1: our antiretrovirals to people living abroad, until, of course, there
Speaker 1: was a negotiated agreement to allow South African corporate companies
Speaker 1: to manufacture their own antiretrovirals, which is when the population
Speaker 1: there started to trust them. And so you know, folks
Speaker 1: are pointing to well, South Africa has enough vaccine and
Speaker 1: it is really just vaccine hesitancy. Well that's not entirely
Speaker 1: the case. There's a path dependency to vaccine hesitancy. People
Speaker 1: don't just become hesitant. They become hesitant because of long
Speaker 1: histories of medical chauvinism and denial of basic human rights
Speaker 1: when it comes to medications in a pandemic. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that may keep them from trusting you the next time around.
Speaker 1: And here we are the next time around. You know.
Speaker 1: It was it was you know last week when I
Speaker 1: was for the first time talking mentioned trips right, because
Speaker 1: I kept saying to myself and for folks with a reminder,
Speaker 1: it is trade related aspects of intellectual property rights trips.
Speaker 1: And I kept saying to myself, there is no way
Speaker 1: that in these G seven meetings, in these you know
Speaker 1: what I now are referring to as global publicity stunts,
Speaker 1: right to make us all believe that our world leaders
Speaker 1: are actually working together that both India and South Africa.
Speaker 1: In October of twenty twenty, petitioned right the global community
Speaker 1: like the High Wealth Nations to say we need you
Speaker 1: to void trips so that we can have the capacity.
Speaker 1: And we're not sitting around waiting on your charity and
Speaker 1: your philanthrop be of good heart for you to do
Speaker 1: what it is that you're telling the world. You'll say
Speaker 1: that you'll do the EU said for for months, Oh,
Speaker 1: we're going to provide x amount of hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of doses. We're going to provide this, that and the
Speaker 1: other thing. And every time I see Biden on the news,
Speaker 1: he talks about how the US has done more than
Speaker 1: everybody else, but nobody else has actually shown up. So
Speaker 1: how is it that they can continue to not have
Speaker 1: a voked a conversation on something that is necessary? And
Speaker 1: all I say, and what you've been saying on social media,
Speaker 1: it's just great. This is this is capitalism. This is
Speaker 1: the world being run by the Wall Street Gordon Geckos
Speaker 1: of the world that are going to just continue to
Speaker 1: make money off of death. You know, the point that
Speaker 1: you're making is spot on. Look, you know, we know
Speaker 1: for a long time, if you give a man of
Speaker 1: fish eats for a day, if you teach a man
Speaker 1: of fish eats forever. This is not about giving vaccine
Speaker 1: to other people. This is about doing what we should
Speaker 1: have done from the very beginning and empowering them to
Speaker 1: make their own vaccine in the first place. And the
Speaker 1: only reason we are not doing that is because of
Speaker 1: these international patent agreements, which there is precedent to break
Speaker 1: in the context of a global pandemic. We've done it before,
Speaker 1: and the only reason we're not doing it is because
Speaker 1: of the lobbying of major pharmaceutical corporations, both of the
Speaker 1: United States government and of European governments abroad, who tell
Speaker 1: us that somehow the innovation that we've come to expect
Speaker 1: won't happen if we violate these agreements. But here's the
Speaker 1: problem is that that innovation occurred in government funded laboratories. Maderna.
Speaker 1: Maderna was a government funded project, and when they applied
Speaker 1: for their patent, you know what they did. They excluded
Speaker 1: folks like doctor Kismikia Corbett, right, the NIH government scientist
Speaker 1: who were so critical in that discovery, because they knew
Speaker 1: that if that pattern was under the titles of government scientists,
Speaker 1: that it may complicate their ability to operate as a
Speaker 1: private corporation. And what we're seeing here is the problem
Speaker 1: of that handoff, and it happens all the time here
Speaker 1: at home as well. This is not is not something
Speaker 1: that we don't we don't face here at home. Sure,
Speaker 1: vaccines are free, and look, if you are not vaccinated
Speaker 1: and not boosted yet, you better go on and make
Speaker 1: sure you can do that thing. Okay, You know nobody
Speaker 1: tells you that the will will say miss an opportunity
Speaker 1: to tell you vaccinate. Please please get your vaccine. That
Speaker 1: being set right, how many medications are mission critical for
Speaker 1: people's lives that people go it out simply because some
Speaker 1: corporation has put an absurd dollar value on it. You know, insulin.
Speaker 1: The patent for insulin was sold for a dollar by
Speaker 1: the folks who discovered it in in Toronto. They sold
Speaker 1: it for a dollar and their reasoning was that insulin
Speaker 1: belongs to everybody. Right, this is a human discovery that
Speaker 1: can empower diabetics to live a long, healthy life. How
Speaker 1: could we put it behind our own greed? And now
Speaker 1: you routinely see corporations spike the price on insulin simply
Speaker 1: because they can because people need it, right. That's what
Speaker 1: economists call an inelastic demand, meaning they know that people
Speaker 1: are going to pay what you ask them to pay
Speaker 1: because they have to, and so they just exploit that
Speaker 1: day in and day out, and that affects people at home,
Speaker 1: and right now, it's affecting people abroad, and it's affecting
Speaker 1: their trust in the very vaccine simply because they say, well, look,
Speaker 1: you have a long history of Nicolin diming me for
Speaker 1: the things that I need to live in my life.
Speaker 1: Why do I trust what you're sending over? And if
Speaker 1: we were just to allow these the South African or
Speaker 1: Indian base manufacturers, who, by the way, everybody tells you
Speaker 1: that they don't have the capacity to do this, they
Speaker 1: make a lot of the generics that we take here
Speaker 1: at home. They have fantastic capacity. And frankly, if you
Speaker 1: walked into a laboratory in the United States, most of
Speaker 1: the folks who are going to see are going to
Speaker 1: be coming from abroad. Right They're folks whomibert here in
Speaker 1: the first place. So I'll tell me that they're not
Speaker 1: smart enough for capable enough to do it, right, we're
Speaker 1: just denying them the capacity to do it, simply because
Speaker 1: Maderna wants to continue to make billions in profit. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what they've made already. And I'm perfectly okay
Speaker 1: with that, just don't do that at the cost of
Speaker 1: people getting their medications in the first place, and don't
Speaker 1: allow it then to take that money that you've made
Speaker 1: to the lobby the very government that created you, right
Speaker 1: for policies that that that ultimately harm people and keep
Speaker 1: this this mission critical medication out of their hands. And
Speaker 1: so we've really got to rethink the way that we
Speaker 1: regulate corporations that that that that make money off of
Speaker 1: government funded research projects that that wind up becoming pharmaceuticals
Speaker 1: that people need. You know, I just find you know,
Speaker 1: it just is I'm so disgusted, right and there are
Speaker 1: sometimes when I'm just at a loss for words, and
Speaker 1: you know, when I recognize that everything that is playing
Speaker 1: out on the world stage right now with high income
Speaker 1: nations versus low income nations, it is the same shit
Speaker 1: that plays out every day in America right where you
Speaker 1: have the wealthy one percent that are able to make
Speaker 1: decisions to withhold, to grind to a halt like anything
Speaker 1: that they want, right because they have the resources to
Speaker 1: do it, and we the rest of us are just
Speaker 1: at their whim, at their mercy, right you have. You know,
Speaker 1: I said this the other day on social media said,
Speaker 1: you know, you have how much would it take, you know,
Speaker 1: how much money would it require in order to vaccinate
Speaker 1: the world right in order to get you know, all
Speaker 1: of these shots. And I asked that question as we
Speaker 1: had wall to wall coverage of the billionaires of the
Speaker 1: world in a space race. Meanwhile, people are dying, right,
Speaker 1: over seven hundred thousand people in the United States have died,
Speaker 1: millions have died worldwide, right, and we're continuing to wring
Speaker 1: our hands and pretend like we haven't learned, like we
Speaker 1: haven't learned anything, Like we don't get what is at
Speaker 1: the core of this. And I said, the travel ban,
Speaker 1: what is at the core racism? It is it is
Speaker 1: the colonizer's mindset, right, and it is and we are
Speaker 1: looking again at these nations who have been extracting for generations,
Speaker 1: extracting from these places, and then when they are in need,
Speaker 1: and it's not just their need, it's a global need.
Speaker 1: There's there's no acknowledgment of that, you know, Danielle. I
Speaker 1: was when I said that I'm okay with them making billions,
Speaker 1: I actually take that back, Like this was a government
Speaker 1: funded research project. We the American taxpayers invested in the
Speaker 1: time and the effort and the money that it took
Speaker 1: to employ really capable scientists to devise a way to
Speaker 1: leverage MR and a technology to create vaccines for emergent pathogens.
Speaker 1: The federal government should be in the business of taking
Speaker 1: this the next step and making sure that everybody has
Speaker 1: it here and abroad. Because here's the thing about it, right,
Speaker 1: here's the thing about right that we should care about
Speaker 1: other people in other countries simply because they're people. We
Speaker 1: should we should care that a child in India or
Speaker 1: an elder in South Africa has their vaccine against a
Speaker 1: pandemic disease that has killed millions of people. We should
Speaker 1: care about those people because they're people. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: You don't even have to care about those people. You
Speaker 1: just have to care about yourself. Because here's the right.
Speaker 1: Our failure to invest in getting those vaccines out there,
Speaker 1: the vaccines that we bought and pay for as taxpayers,
Speaker 1: means that the virus, the virus variants that are ever
Speaker 1: evolving in unvaccinated bodies abroad, are going to come back
Speaker 1: and take lives at home. Right. That was the whole
Speaker 1: point of the investment, was that that didn't happen. And
Speaker 1: we're failing that simply because now we're saying that, you
Speaker 1: know what, we can give it to some corporation to
Speaker 1: manufacture it, make billions and billions of dollars off of it.
Speaker 1: So maybe there's some someday they're CEO can figure out
Speaker 1: how to devise a rocket to take a nine year
Speaker 1: old man of space. And uh and and meanwhile, we're
Speaker 1: not even a compli the end that we set out for,
Speaker 1: which is to protect people from deadly pathogens that evolve
Speaker 1: and uh and so we're failing. And this system where
Speaker 1: we assent to the idea that some major pharmaceutical corporation
Speaker 1: has to control the intellectual property that we all invested
Speaker 1: in as failing us. It's failing us here, it's failing
Speaker 1: people abroad, and all of that is coming back and
Speaker 1: redounding to the detriment of all of us. You know,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you to you know, with regard
Speaker 1: we're being told by doctor Fauci, by Rachelle Wilenski, by
Speaker 1: others that we won't really know the machinations of Amicron
Speaker 1: for about a month, right a month to six weeks,
Speaker 1: that is how long it will take to do the
Speaker 1: research to understand the data and then to make that
Speaker 1: and share it with the public. But there are some real,
Speaker 1: real fears, and I want to get you know, from
Speaker 1: your colleagues that you're talking to on a regular basis,
Speaker 1: what are some of the fears that we need again,
Speaker 1: because I want to shake the shit out of people.
Speaker 1: I want people to recognize that it matters what is
Speaker 1: happening across the pond, around the world, because we are
Speaker 1: a global community. And if twenty twenty didn't show that
Speaker 1: to you, then twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: and all the years that we continue to be in
Speaker 1: this right, it will keep hitting you on the head
Speaker 1: and until you get it. So just tell folks, you know,
Speaker 1: what are some of the things that you are hearing
Speaker 1: from your colleagues. Well, I want to stick to the
Speaker 1: facts on this here. You know. The hard part about
Speaker 1: science is that it is a process. It's not a
Speaker 1: body of knowledge. Nobody can pull out the coronavirus book
Speaker 1: and be like, we turn to page three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty two and be like, all right, here's the omicron variant.
Speaker 1: Here's what's happening with it. This is new. We are
Speaker 1: dealing with it, and so science is a process by
Speaker 1: which we understand the world by asking questions and testing hypotheses,
Speaker 1: and so I do think it's important for us to
Speaker 1: be prudent about what the science is tell us. That
Speaker 1: being said, a lot of the circumstantial evidence that we
Speaker 1: are getting from just a very simple biochemical analysis of
Speaker 1: this variant suggest to us that it's taken all of
Speaker 1: the greatest hits of COVID nineteen, all of the worst
Speaker 1: aspects of beta and delta, and added some on top,
Speaker 1: so that this variant has the potential to be both
Speaker 1: more transmissible and also more likely to escape our immune response.
Speaker 1: I want to be clear about something, though it's not
Speaker 1: likely to fully escape our vaccines. I don't want folks
Speaker 1: leaving this interview saying, ah, well, this variant is gonna
Speaker 1: render our vaccines ineffective. No, that's not true. It's it's
Speaker 1: just possible that it might render them less effective. And
Speaker 1: it's not a good thing, simply because most folks now
Speaker 1: right are in the process of having been either doubly
Speaker 1: vaccinated or on their way to getting a third vaccination, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, let me just say it again, if
Speaker 1: you haven't gotten your booster please do get your booster.
Speaker 1: But but if that's the case, then it has the
Speaker 1: compac to really create yet another surge in our country.
Speaker 1: Now here's the other side of it. We don't know
Speaker 1: how severe this variant is going to be. And if
Speaker 1: you look at if you permit me to personify a
Speaker 1: non living virus for a second, if you're a virus,
Speaker 1: your goal is to spread as many people as possible.
Speaker 1: You don't really care if you make them really sick.
Speaker 1: You just care that you infect as many people as
Speaker 1: possible so you can replicate yourself as many times as
Speaker 1: possible as the goal. Right, And so it makes sense
Speaker 1: that a virus would evolve toward transmissibility. That just makes
Speaker 1: you better at being able to affect more people. But
Speaker 1: it also makes sense that the virus would evolve for
Speaker 1: reducing severity, because after all, if you're too severe, you
Speaker 1: kill too many hosts and then you don't spread. And
Speaker 1: if you're also too severe, then you change the host
Speaker 1: behavior because they get really sick and they tend to
Speaker 1: be bedridden and not want to go and spread the virus.
Speaker 1: So what a virus tries to do, in effect, is
Speaker 1: to evolve away from severity and toward transmissibility. And so
Speaker 1: we've got some early circumstantial evidence that suggests that cases
Speaker 1: of amicron are relatively mild, which is something to hang
Speaker 1: your hat on. But again, none of this is rigorous.
Speaker 1: We've got to wait for the science because science is
Speaker 1: the process, is not a body of knowledge, and circumstantial
Speaker 1: evidence is just that, it's just circumstantial. Here's the thing, though,
Speaker 1: we should be over with this pandemic. We could have
Speaker 1: been over with this pandemic if we were willing. The
Speaker 1: way to think about a vaccine is like putting a
Speaker 1: blanket on a fire. Right. You can't just slowly feed
Speaker 1: the blanket of the fire, because then the blanket just
Speaker 1: becomes something that the fire eats, versus right throwing the
Speaker 1: blanket on the fire all at once. That's what we
Speaker 1: should have done when it came to COVID nineteen. That's
Speaker 1: what we could have done when it came to COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: We just did not do that thing. We did not
Speaker 1: do that thing because we were unwilling to put the
Speaker 1: well being of people abroad ahead of the profits of
Speaker 1: major corporations. And we did not do that thing because
Speaker 1: we have, unfortunately a strain of pseudo fascism in this
Speaker 1: country that says that if Deer Leader didn't say it,
Speaker 1: it's not true. And so it's made itself opposed to
Speaker 1: everything from science to journalism and anything in between. And
Speaker 1: and so you have a large swath of our country
Speaker 1: that just denies that the pandemic is even a real thing,
Speaker 1: even though they want to blame I don't know, doctor
Speaker 1: Faucune whomever else for its emergence in Wuhan, But it's
Speaker 1: not a real thing, and you shouldn't take it a
Speaker 1: safe and effect of vaccine to treat it. This is
Speaker 1: the logic. So we're being unfortunately prolonged in our experience
Speaker 1: of this pandemic because of the failure to get this
Speaker 1: vaccine abroad and the failure to take on the strain
Speaker 1: of anti science in anti logic in our own country
Speaker 1: at home. You know, it's just it truly is depressing.
Speaker 1: But I have to say, you know, once again, I'm
Speaker 1: always so appreciative when you make the time to join
Speaker 1: us on woke f to just bring some you know,
Speaker 1: clarity to where we are, because I feel like a
Speaker 1: lot of people feel crazy. I know that I did
Speaker 1: when I saw the breaking news, and so to really
Speaker 1: contextualize how we got to this place. It's not enough
Speaker 1: to just for me to just figure out these differ
Speaker 1: frent tactics that are mostly pomp and circumstance in pr
Speaker 1: but to really honestly understand how we got here right
Speaker 1: and that it isn't just like Donald Trump being negligent
Speaker 1: or Bolsonato being negligent and not caring about their people,
Speaker 1: but it's an entire ecosystem that is based around capitalism
Speaker 1: and greed that has gotten us here as well. Doctor
Speaker 1: abduel El sayed, thank you so much for making the
Speaker 1: time to join Woke f and we hope to have
Speaker 1: you back again soon. Hey, it's always a privilege, and
Speaker 1: I hope that's sometime I get to come on and
Speaker 1: I don't have to talk about, you know, bad things
Speaker 1: that kill people like I want to talk about some
Speaker 1: China lollipop. Some day. Maybe we'll get there, maybe in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, just kidding. Oh goodness. On that note,
Speaker 1: I appreciate you, folks. That is it for me today
Speaker 1: on Woke F as always power to the people and
Speaker 1: to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke
Speaker 1: as fuck.