The Truth with Lisa BootheThe Truth with Lisa Boothe: An Interview with the new Head of the NIH, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
In this episode, Lisa and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, discuss the implications of the Omicron variant and government responses, including vaccine mandates. Dr. Bhattacharya advocates for focused protection of vulnerable populations rather than broad lockdowns and criticizes mass asymptomatic testing and forced vaccination. The Truth with Lisa Boothe is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
Just want to take a moment to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. I hope they were able to take some time off, spend it with your family, with your friends, with your loved ones, and just enjoy the moment and enjoy the day. I know that I'm so grateful for my family. I'm so grateful for my friends. I'm thankful and grateful for a job that I love doing, being able to share this with you and hopefully bring on some great guests that you find interesting and have conversations that are important. I'm also so thankful for the directional change in the country, the outcome of this election. We're on a terrible track, and I'm just so thankful that the country as a whole made a decision to change and we're able to vote our way out of the direction that we're heading in. And in that I want to reshare an episode I did with doctor j Batcharia. He, of course, was announced recently by Donald Trump to be his Director of National Institutes of Health. This is someone who in October twenty twenty author the Great Barrington Declaration, where he was called for an end to the COVID lockdowns. We know that the COVID lockdowns did tremendous harm to the country financially. Businesses were shut down as a result. You know, churches were shut down. You have kids still far behind in school because of the COVID lockdowns. We know that there were sewer sides, there was overdoses, depression as well.
So did tremendous harm to the country. And he was right.
But because he called it up, because he stood strong. You had doctor Fauci and then the then NIH director, Francis Collins. They emailed each other and tried to They plotted to try to take down people like doctor Daboutchara. He was faced with slander with you know, professional repercussions. He was banned on Twitter. The list goes on, you know. So there's always a price for standing tall, and he went through it. But fortunately now he was named as the NIH director and so you know what poetic justice to now be in charge and to help her country just be on a better trage victory health wise, and maybe restore some trust into some of these institutions into public health, because Lord knows they need it, because we don't trust them for good reason. A lot to get into it's going to be super interesting. We'll get you the truth on all of this with doctor j. Baticharia. Stay tuned.
I'm so excited for this next episode.
As we're saying this, this new variant in the country, the panic, the draconian measures, rins and repeat, which is something we're all familiar with.
So I'm so happy to have doctor J.
Batichara on the show, someone who has been a voice of reason throughout all this chaos.
Doctor thanks so much for joining the show.
Oh thank you for having me.
So I'm actually one.
Of the unlucky recipients of this new variant. I have spent the past week now just getting over COVID, so fortunately I'm on the other side of it almost, but it definitely kicked my butt.
I'm not gonna lie.
Yeah, I mean I think it could be, you know, the delta still floating around, So I think the evidence on omicron by itself is that it's milder. But COVID isn't a joke. I mean, obviously, so many people have died from it, so it's something we should take seriously, but it's not something we should destroy our society around, which is unfortunately I think we've done in a large in many ways over the last two years.
Well, it definitely has, and you know, you were one of the few people out there really arguing against some of those draconian lockdowns. You know what's so interesting is there's recently a Foyer request from the American Institute for Economic Research that undercovered emails where doctor Fauci and doctor Francis Collins were scheming against you and the other individuals who sign the Great Barrington Declaration. What did that feel like to sort of be on the receiving end of you know, the government's propaganda and attacks.
Really, I mean, it was really surprised. I mean, I guess in a sense, I'm not surprised that it happened surprising to see you in black and white the last year and some have been quite difficult because what's happened over the coast of year and a half and so is after we wrote the Great Mansion Decoration, which which we it was with me sun Neetragupta from professor at Oxford University. She's a fantastic theoretical epidemiologists and like say, practical epidemiologists, and then Martin Kuldorf at Harvard University, amazing biostatistician. We wrote this in October twenty twenty, and the idea was very simple. The COVID has an enormously bad effect on people who were older. It's a also a thousandfold increase in the risk of death and severe disease if you are older versus if you're young. At the same time, the lockdowns have been devastating, just devastatingly harmful. Tens of millions of people thrown into starvation worldwide, missed cancer screenings, resulting in breast cancers that are that should have been cut earlier, tolling cancers, psychological effects, especially on kids, has been enormous. So we called for an end to the lockdowns and focused protection for the elderly, especially for the old and other other vulnerable. What we hoped for was an open conversation with the public health community about how best to protect the old older population without a lockdown, because the idea, but up until its one, was the only way to protect anybody was a lockdown to stop this isase from spreading. That we knew that was not possible because what the lockdowns do is does is it protects a certain class of rich people who can who can stay home at work and not lose their jobs and not anyone else. So we put this out hoping that we're to open a conversation. Instead, what was we were met with was just this like realification campaign, this campaign to say that we wanted the virus to rip society, to kill people, as if we were somehow ghouls that wanted to destroy people, to destroy the lives of people. And I was I wondered what was the source of that? And the Francis Collins emails that were released through FOYA reveals that the NIH, with the including the head of the NIH and Tony Fauci, the head of the Nai D, they spread those lives. They worked to try to get the media to amplify them, and it led to so many interviews with reporters where they're asking me why I wanted to let it rip, why I wanted to herd immunity strategy, which is which is nonsense. And it made my life much more difficult, even with my colleagues who sort of fell for the propaganda.
Well, and what's so odd is, I mean, science is not supposed to be this consensus, this group think. I mean, you're supposed to have diverging opinions. And so when did this change. And why do you think it changed? Because we've really seen this take fold in a way that is so different than you know, times of the past. So where is science today and how do you think that happened?
I mean, I think it's always been true for science. Science is such a powerful, beautiful thing. It's like an engine for producing things that tend to be true, right, so learning how the material world functions. Science is so powerful. It's achieved so much. But I think what's happened over the I don't know exactly the timeframe, but certainly we've seen this and during the pandemic, science has become a thing where essentially you believe in it just because it's science, rather than understanding the mechanisms by which science tends to produce truth and so like you can see this with the almost crazy worship of Tony fauci Or and even the way he talks about science. He says things like, if you disagree with me, you're not simply just disagreeing with a man, you were disagreeing with science itself. He's turned science into a god. He is a high priest of science. When he says things like that that's not the right way to think about science. We say's exactly what you said. Science is a process by which truth reveals itself with open mindedness, tolerance, and openness to discussion, also correction by data. Right, So if you believe A and I believe B, we disagree, well, we agree on an experiment and it resolves and it turns out you're right, and I'm like, oh darn, I'm you're right. And then they say, well, then buy dinner or something, and then I say see, and we do the next thing right. Then, slowly, over time, by that open discussion, we learn things about the real world. During the pandemic, what's happened, It's essentially replaced with this attitude you've see in this letter, and also the Francis Collins, head of a NIH wrote, and also what Tony Fauci has said of science as a dictum as given from on high. The science has said, X, Y or Z. There is no fighting over it, there's no disagreeing over it, there's no recourse to any data that would solve it. Instead, you just propagandaize, you demonize people who disagree with you, and you push them the outside so that that scientific opinion is outside the bounds of the polite discussion. I mean, that's essentially exactly what Francis Collins and the NIH did to the Great Parenton declaration.
Well, and they did this at the beginning of COVID as well, at the beginning of the pandemic, of trying to shut down any talk about the virus having escaped from the Wuhan lab. There they did it in the lance that you had. Peter Dazak and a bunch of scientists wrote that letter, basically trying to shut down any alternative thought process of oh, it had to have come from the wet market, which even China is saying that didn't happen, now, you know.
So they try to shut down.
So there just seems to be this really odd desire by the people in charge, people like doctor Fauci, of just shutting down any alternative viewpoint in a way that is really dangerous and to me, I think the reason why everyone should be concerned about this is what information are we not getting? What critical information do we not know that is not being shared, that is not being brought to light that could potentially save lives because of this group think, because of the shutting down, because of the labeling, anything that is outside of what doctor Fauci deems acceptable as conspiracy. You know, what information are we not learning right now that we need to know?
I mean that's always the problem when you treat science as if it were established out of facts with the high priesthood right, What if the high priesthood is wrong? How would you know? There's no there's no fighting with them reasonably, with data and with reason. Instead would you have is dictims someone which may be right, someone which may be wrong. It's impossible to tell because it hasn't been subjected to the test that you normally would subject to scientific ideas to every scientific idea is subject to challenge in that same exact way. It has to be what do we not know? And I agree with you, like a great example, is this this idea that it couldn't have possibly been a lab leakue? Right? Well, I mean in fact it was conspiracy the or even suggested for a long time. The revision on this is.
Is I think going to be healthy.
But a lot of the sort of circling of wagons are on a lablique. Frankly, it's smacks of like a cover up to me, whether there was a lab leak or not.
I don't.
I don't know for certain, it's hard, it's going to be challenging to find out, but certainly we should be allowed to ask questions around along those lines. Same thing was like, actually I worked on a study in the early days of the epidemic called the Santa Clair Serra Prevalence Study and the La County Syerra Prevalence where what we tried to do is figure out how widespread the disease was in the in the population. What we found was that in April twenty twenty in Santa Clara and La County there were forty or fifty times more infections than cases, which meant a few things. One, the mortality rifts and disease was much lower than people have been saying because the denominator the number of people infected was much higher, but the deaths were the same, so you just didn't didn't. But the second, and equally probably more important, is that by that meant that it was so widespread by April or twenty twenty, there was already too late to have a zero COVID.
Kind of policy that we've been following.
The idea for the policy all along is being oh, well, we just need to suppress the spread of the virus down to low enough levels so we can open society again. Well, I mean, if you look at the data from April twenty twenty, there was no chance that was going to be true.
That's successful in most places in the world.
In fact, that's exactly what's happened. We've done so much to try to lock down and get those virus down to zero that we've been unable to stop the spread of the disease. We don't have the technology to do that. Tony Fauci wrote a letter an email about that Santa.
Clara study that was in an earlier.
Email from paying through Foya, where he had a five pages of redacted the text that was redacted about the study, and he at at the end of the five pages he said he had a line saying, well, we should contact one of.
The authors of the study.
It was one of my colleagues who was their senior author on the study. He never was contacted. I would dearly love to know what those five pages of redacted tech said, because what should have happened in response to that study and a whole bunch of other share prevalent studies, is a revision of thinking about what the right policy should be. And yet, just like with the LAB leak, just like with the Great Parentine Declaration, the NIH closed ranks, the CDC closed ranks, and decided to go full on down the lockdown strategy that led to such disaster the last two years.
Well, and so I remember, you know, I was one of the people screaming from the rooftops because I was reading stuff that doctor ian Edes was writing. I was saying the study that you just talked about that you worked out at a Santa Clara. And then we had also, I think closely after that, there was this study out of New York. There was also Miami Dade County, and all of it was sort of saying the same thing that we were missing cases by like you know, I think it was something like ten to sixty five fold or something, which means that it's a lot less deadly than we originally thought. And then you had also, I think it was New York's own data was saying that the majority of the new hospitalizations were people who were staying at home. So to your point, we had all this information in front of us that the decisions we were making were the wrong ones. Yet people, you know, continue down that road. But you know, here we are again sort of in the same position where we have this new variant out that is seemingly as contagious as the measles. Yet they're still trying to, you know, revise the old bag of tricks to stop something that we can't stop.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean the problem is that it's exposed to actual discussion and data. The people who supported the lockdowns really have no argument, right. They'll point to places like Australia and New Zealand say well, look they got to zero, but in fact they didn't get to zero. You can see the cases it'sploding Australia now, the you can see the cases of sort of coming back. They've had more lockdown days than any place on Earth, and yet the disease is still floating around. The way that that the lockdowners have behaved, it's as if they said, well, there was no other possible alternative response to this this virus other than to to do the kind of you know, school closures and uh, church closures and and closing businesses and uh and sort of ending normal civic life. Well, that didn't work. Was a complete disaster for the poor, the vulnerable, builth in the both in devestment in the developed world and the developing world. Pretend it is if we had no choice, that that wasn't actually a policy choice is completely disingenuous, and in order to maintain the illusion that we had no choice, they had to shut down the scientific debate about it, and so that the campaign, the propaganda campaign about the Great Banton Declaration essentially the similar kind of uh shutting down a debate around how widespread.
The virus actually was with the seral prevalence.
By the way, there's now one hundred of more of these studies that found basically the same thing, like a huge, a very large fraction of cases that infections not identified and the disease more widespread than realized. And that's been TRIA said from the beginning of the epidemic. So they had to shut that debate down in order to get the policy through, because if that policy was subject to cold reason, no one would have gone for it. Instead, they relied on panicking the population to generate support for a policy that has been utterly destructive.
Quick commercial break more with doctor j Baticharia on the other side, where do you think we would be today if we had followed the Great Barrington Declaration and protected the elderly and essentially allowed the rest of society to go back to life.
I think we've had many, many, many fewer deaths from the virus itself because we would have we would have protected it better, protected the elderly. I don't think there would have been zero desk because this is a terrible virus and it's really hard to stop. But we managed to protect the laptop class. That was the policy followed. We shielded the laptop class. We could instead have thought to ours, have thought about how best to protect the actually vulnerable, so we would have had many fewer deaths from the virus. We actually might have even had less of this viral evolution. And then the other thing that we would have had is we would have had an enormously uh less damage from the lockdown arms. Right, kids would have spent the last year and a half year year and some in school rather than quote learning from home, as if it's really possible to do that. So kids would be leading better lives as a result of it, and by the way, that will have long term impacts that we have kids that can't read. We have kids that's going to collapse in in learning that had long term.
Impacts of the lives.
It took just tragic increase in depression and anxiety and kids and young adults.
We would have avoided all of that.
We would have avoided that. There's now, I mean, there's data that show that tens of millions of people around the world are starving as a consequence of these lockdowns, tens of millions.
You know, because you do.
You have a country, a poor country, many people on the verge of poverty. They restructured their economies to fit into the global economy over the last twenty years, lifting a billion people have of poverty over twenty years. Overnight. We were nag on those promises, and as a result, tens of millions of people their income drops below one two to two dollars a day and they starve. And that's exactly what's happened. Those those lives would have been saved. Hundreds of thousands children in South Asia, according to report and by the UN and Marshes this year, have already starved to death. Right, So you have all that collateral harm that's going to have consequences for a decade avoided if we follow the Great Brandon decoration.
You talked about the evolution of the virus or the vaccines to blame for that. I've seen the argument made that we have leaky vaccines that don't provide immunity, don't stop transmission, and therefore or you know, have led to this new variant of omicron.
What are your thoughts on that.
I mean, the evolution of the virus is hard to predict, but it responds to the environment that it sees, right, So, the virus when you have a vaccinated population there it creates an ecological niche where a varying to the virus that can infect the vaccinated is more likely to succeed in sort of replicating itself. So it wouldn't be surprising that to me to find a widespread vaccination with a vaccine that doesn't stop disease spread could have contributed to this evolutionary process and moved the viral evolution along a certain line. If we followed the Great Printed equation, the pandemic would it over earlier because what would happen is is that through normal activity, younger populations would have had more exposure to the virus. Is just I mean, that's just a normal way. But because the harm to younger people from being exposed to the virus is so much lower than the old they would have died at much lower rates and they wouldn't have been exposed to the lockdown harms, and so that's would have been benefited from from the policy. It's hard to say exactly with any kind of precision, because you have to play this game of like what if, and play the game of what evolution would have looked like had we.
Gone down a different path.
But it is clear that the policy itself, both of the vaccination and also the lockdowns, changed the path of viral evolution.
Well, and what's interesting is there used to be this game of oh, it's the unvaccinated's fault, you know, these dirty, unvaccinated people. And now that you have vaccinated and even people who are just recently boosted to get it, you know, now it's, oh, it's no one's fault, it's you know, the dynamics and the conversation have completely changed surrounding COVID now that we're saying that the vaccines aren't protecting people from getting COVID at this current moment.
Yeah, I mean it's unfortunate. We should never have come to a point where public health who is promoting the idea that it's somebody's fault to get sick. We don't make you feel guilty for being sick. That is bad medicine, and that's about bad public help. What we do is we treat people who get sick with compassion. That's the right way to message around it. And if we have a messaging strategy, it leads people to believe that anyone who gets sick is somehow lesser or somehow that hasn't been careful or is I mean especially other That is bad public health. And that's clearly what's happened in the last two years. And so now to see a reversion to that and say, well, it's not your fault you got sick as soon as the laptop class starts getting sick, I just it's frustrating. I mean, of course it is true. That is the laptop class is not stop their fault for getting sick. This is a vexious virus that spreads very easily and so it's very hard to hard to protect yourself from it. So it's not their fault, but it does strike me is curious that now we're finally getting that message from public health, and we should have been getting that message all along. Really, there's been this illusion of control over the spread of the virus that's said this. We somehow spread the idea around that if we were we were just good enough, obeyed the rules hard enough, we can protect ourselves.
And others from the virus. But that was a lie.
There was no technology we possessed or possessed currently to stop the spread of this virus, and it's not anybody's fault forgetting it.
I guess what I'm trying to figure out is we keep hearing this argument of Okay, so we know that the vaccines aren't stopping transmission. That's evident when you have people like Elizabeth Warren Corey Booker who said they were just recently boosted, you know, having recently gotten COVID. But so we keep hearing this argument that it's still you still need to get it because it's still protecting people, it's keeping people out of hospitals. But what evidence do we have that it's doing that when we're also just seeing the natural evolution of a virus, which my understanding is it tends to lead to where it becomes more dismissible but less lethal as it continues to evolve. So how do we know it's the vaccines keeping people out of the hospital versus just the virus inevitably taking the course of being more transmissible and less lethal.
So it could be both, right, so think I think, for instance, at least with the delta version of the virus, there were some very good studies out of places like katar out of Sweden, out of the UK, even out of Kaiser in northern California that showed based on matched cohorts.
Of vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Where they carefully follow them over time, that showed that vaccine efficacy against severe disease actually stayed quite high up to six seven eight months after vaccination. There was a Swedish study suggested that at the end of eight months it starts to decline pretty sharply, but for quite a long time it protects against severe disease, even as the protection against against being infected declines pretty sharply after two three months. So I think really on the basis of those studies that people believe, at least I believe that there's it protects against severe disease, at least against delta. The evidence about omicron, this new variant seems to suggest that it is much milder. The disease itself is much milder, and both vaccinated and unvaccinated, that is much less likely to produce hospitalizations, much less likely to kill you. I mean, I know, I've heard this general dictum that virus attended to go all toward milder, that I don't know that that's always true, but with the case of omicron, it certainly has turned out to be true.
Which is I mean, a great blessing.
Well, I mean, because I guess I'm just observing in a more immediate circle. But I know a lot of people who have recently gotten COVID, you know, many vaccinated, small handful not, and it seems like everyone's symptoms have ultimately been the same, regardless of having been vaccinated or not. So I just I don't know, I just wonder it's you know, again back to our original conversation of when it's sort of this group think narrative being told, it's really hard to know what is true and what is not, which is why I've been bringing people like you or doctor Atlas or doctor Martin Kolder, if on the show, who have been honest and have been unbiased in your explanation of all this stuff, because we're really living at this time where it's very difficult to discern between truth and lies.
Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is actually comes back to this propaganda campaign where we're talking about earlier.
If you have at the.
Commanding heights of science people who do not respect open scientific discussion, the first instinct when they're challenged is to shut that down. You're going to create this distrust and that is something that we absolutely have to work to address. As as I said, I think science is a beautiful thing. It's wonderful. It's wonderful as produced. So much knowledge has been useful for human for people. But that can only work when you have the scientific process, the working way should It's not a high priesthood. It's a discussion, an open, structured discussion. The lack of trust that many, many, many people have in public health and in science is fully earned by the public health establishment, by the scientific establishment. It's brought brought that distrust on itself by not actually following the principles of public health and in in lockdowns, by not following the principles of how science actually should operate.
In terms of how the NIH and and others other entities that have seen them.
Funding sciences operated, It's led to this sort of uh uh, the situation where we see that science can produce so many wonderful things and certainly improve our knowledge about how the way the world works. But at the same time, it's it's created a class of class of people that just there's no reason to trust them, but based on the way they behaved. I sympathize with a lot of folks about the inability to tell what's what's true and false, because you know, in the middle of a propaganda war, that's exactly what ends up happening. Uh, it's we should have a propaganda warrior. We should have as an open scientific discussion.
So when and.
How did this claim that the vaccines would stop transmission begin? Because you can go back to the Pfizer's chairman's comments last December on Dateline he said he wasn't sure the vaccine would stop transmission. You can also look at maderna chief medical officer told Axio's last November that we need to be careful to not overinterpret the vaccines because we didn't have sufficient concrete data showing that the vaccines would reduce transmission. But then lo and behold, we had people like doctor Fauci, we had the CDC director, you had Joe Biden saying, hey, look, if you go out, you get vaccinated, you're not going to get COVID. How did that narrative take fold when you even have the heads of these companies a year ago warning for that to not happen.
I mean, I was like a matter of full confession, I should say I thought in January this year that the vaccines would greatly reduce transmission. On the basis of that was the trials that the demand andized trials of the vaccines. The points of those trials were actually symptomatic COVID. And my reasoning was that if in fact the vaccines do reduce the risk of symptomatic COVID, which is what the trials did show, at least for a few months after the vaccine, well, then symptomatic people are much more likely to pass the disease on than someone who's not asymptomatic disease. So if you prevent symptomatic disease, it's a factor. Are you're going to prevent trends or reduce transmission. That's what I thought in January this year. Then the data started coming out that that protection against symptomatic disease didn't last very long, maybe two three months, you know. I started to see like there were countries that we had big outbreaks despite having very highly vaccinated populations, you know, in let's say, like March April May, and it became clear that the protection against infection was short lived. And I changed my opinion on this based on those data that came out. I don't know why Joe Biden or Fausci and others didn't change their opinion also based on those data. They stop. I think partly they were thinking that in order to induce people to get vaccinated, you can't tell them that you could get the disease anyways, because that would decrease the demand for the vaccine. But I think I have the opposite idea. You tell people the truth based on what the data are showing you, and you tell people, Look, I changed my mind when the data. Here's the data on which I changed my mind, And here's why I thought what I did before, and here's why I think what I did. Now, I think people are going to trust you more, and what actually increase demand for the vaccines, because what it would happen is people say, well, yeah, okay, this person is telling me, well, the data show they've changed their minds based on the data, and they're also telling me that protects against severe disease, which I still think it does for at least eight months. Like I think that's how you build trust is by being honest when you get something wrong, follow the data, and then tell and then reason with the public like their adults, rather than trying to manipulate the public, which is essentially how I think Joe Biden and Viz mainly I think by Tony Fauchi has done. They like the vaccine passports and vaccine mandates are a fruit of.
That, right.
They they want these policies in order to course people to get the vaccine. At risk of losing your job, at risk of being able to go to restaurants, to public libraries, you know, to museums, you name it, you can't have, you can't participate in civic life unless you get the vaccine in order to coerce people to get it, rather than reasoning with people about the vaccine, say well, here's here's here's who is specially important for. Here's what the side effects are for this group, and it's much less for that group. And just and just showing openly and honestly what the data are. I think that breeds trust, and that trust helps people feel more comfortable doing the right thing for them.
Well, and I figure right in the sense of like, you know, you just earned my trust more by saying, hey, you know back in January, this is what I thought, here's why. And I think if they were just honest with people and saying, hey, look that's what we thought at the time, and then Delta came along, and then all of a sudden, we're looking at us studies out of you know, Provincetown, Massachusetts, where you know, an outbreak took place in seventy five percent of the cases we're fully vaccinated. Now those dynamics have, you know, if they were just honest. But the problem is, and then they just keep pushing forward with these failed strategies. I mean, like, so, for instance, we're all staying with our own eyes that the vaccine is not stopping transmission. Right, We're seeing people left and right get omicron vaccinated or not, it doesn't seem to matter at all. But yet then you've got new cities like Boston saying you have to be vaccinated to live among society here, or Chicago, and it's like why, like what what is it actually doing to protect society when it's not stopping transmission whatsoever? Like what's the point of vaccine mandates right now when it doesn't stop transmission?
I just I don't understand it. It makes no sense to me, You're.
Right, can I don't understand that there is no point to it other than to create social division and ostracism. I mean, I think I think if you'd ask some a proponent that probably says, well, we want to coerce people into getting the vaccine, like they're being honest, when that policy induces such enormous social division, like people have lost their jobs because they don't want to get vaccinated for whatever reason. You know, it's at this point the vaccine is very clear is a private decision, like it has private consequence of that person that's vaccinated in the sense of protecting against severe disease.
That's according to my view of the data.
But very little in the way of public public like so my vaccine actually doesn't protect you very much if I don't, if it doesn't stop me from getting effected. Vaccinated people can and do spread the disease. And in fact, if you're in a group of unvaccinated people and all of them are COVID recovered, well that natural immunity is quite good against reinfection. They're great data from places again like Israel and catarisuitede in Denmark that at one year there's only a point three percent reinfection rate or the summer two point three one percent, a very very low rate of reinfection in one year if you're nationally means it might actually be the case if you're among a group of unvaccinated COVID or covered people, that you have less risk of getting disease issued in a group of vaccinated people who had the vaccine, you know several months ago.
Quick commercial break morebrit doctor Jay Baticharia on the other side. But first I want to tell you a little bit about Saber, because every twenty five seconds a break in occurs. Now, are you ready to protect your home and your family. You've heard us talk about Sabers home defense launchers, the ultimate choice for protecting what matters most. But this week you can secure the Saber Mega Bundle for twenty five percent off a two hundred and forty dollars value for only one hundred and seventy nine dollars ninety nine cents. Saber's Best Bundle equips you with life saving stopping power to defend your family, including a Saber launcher, two seven round magazines, fourteen pepper rounds, twenty eight practice rounds, a practice target c you, two car mearchridges, and a carry case. So why choose Saber Because their projectiles pack a serious punch, causing intense pain with direct contact, and even if you miss, Saber creates a seven foot pepper cloud upon impact, causing intense censory irritation for anyone within its reach. And Saber is the only sixty eight caliber launcher with a seven projectile capacity, delivering up to forty percent more stopping power than the other brands. So at now protect yourself and your family and save twenty five percent. Visit saberradio dot com. That's Sabre radio dot com or call eight four four eight two four Safe Today. Offer ends December second. So South Africa just recently, you know they saw this amicron wave hit first. Now it's subsiding. They've actually stopped contact tracing quarantining. They've sort of changed their policy now that eighty percent of the country has some level of the immunity from either prior illness or vaccines. What do you think omicron will do to the United States in terms of reaching endemic status heard immunity in the sense of, you know, it seems like this thing is just so contagious, the incubation period is so short that so many people in the country are ultimately going to get this thing.
Yeah, I think the illusion that you can protect yourself from getting the virus if you just are careful enough, that's already on its way of being shattered. Right, We've seen this enormous seasonal wave and omicron I think is just fueled that throughout the Northeast and throughout much of the United States.
Actually, that is I.
Think inevitable because again we don't have a technology from stopping it. In South Africa, what it's done is it's actually, I mean interestingly reduced the fear about the virus because the consequences of getting at omicron and it seems to be much lower, right, much lower risk of death, much lower risk in hospitalization. And the end point then is of i say, decoupling of cases from hospitalizations and death, like in many previous ways, especially in twenty twenty, whenever cases went out, hospitalizations and death followed sort of like night follows day in the vaccine era in mid twenty twenty one, actually in many countries there was already this decoupling, like when the vaccine was used to protect the old, so that even if the old got it, they would not go be hospitalized or die. You'd see a very increase, sharp increase in cases with no concommitment increase in death or hospitalizations. You saw that in the UK, for instance, you saw that in Sweden for instance, saw that in Iceland. Actually now with Omicron you're seeing that basically South Africa a huge increase in cases with no real increase in death, and that's in the population that's not particularly well vaccinated. I think the same as like be true as omicrons president of the US, they'll be decoupling of cases and deaths, and that decoupling really is the end state. The cases. We can't stop. The cases will continue forever in waves, seasonal or regional waves, but it will no longer produce the deaths that it once did.
Are we an endemic status now as a country or where do you think we are in terms of is it still a pandemic or is an endemic now?
It's hard to stay biologically exactly. I mean, so endemic what it means is heard immunity. What it means is every additional person infected infects one or fewer people. In that sense, we're not in hurt immunity because the number of cases is rising, so each additional person infected. But in a different sense, the pandemic could be over as soon as we decide it's over. The pandemic really is in some sense is the set of responses we've taken to the biological fact of the spread of the virus. The herd immunity means that they're sufficiently large factions of the population that that isn't it isn't at risk of spreading the disease very very sharply if they were to be exposed, because if they're supposed to it, they.
Don't get it.
With a virus like this one, you can move in and out of herd immunity, right, you can get you can be protected against infection for a while, and then your immunity declines over time against against infection, and so you get it again. The common cold is like this, right, there's herd immunity for common cold. Your protection against the declines over time, and then you might be exposed to us to like another corner that's the same coronavirus that before, and then you get it again several times in your life. But the second, third, fourth time that doesn't produce severe disease because you have immune mechanisms cellular immunity and other mechanisms of immunity that reduce the harm from being infected, reduced it so you don't you don't end up in the hospital. You don't die if you get it. It's just a cold, that is I think. I think the endpoint is epidemic herd immunity and demic equlibrium.
What it means.
All that means is is that the virus isn't spreading sharply because it's officially a number of mune. People have that for times. But the key thing is not that. The key thing is the protection against severe disease, which who I think we are in the midst of getting naturally immune people seem to have a lot of protection against severe reinfections, and I think, you know, I think that that's the direction we're head of, this, this decoupling of cases and severe outcomes.
Do you think we.
Should be more careful in our vaccination status in the sense I mean, we are seeing myocarditis and heart issues, you know, correlated to the vaccines, particularly among younger people who aren't as susceptible to ending up in the hospital or dying. I mean, should there be a little bit more transparency in honesty around some of those conversations and the potential adverse effects of the vaccines on certain groups of people.
Absolutely? Right, I think the vaccination should be a personal medical decision based on the the risks of the vaccine to the person in that group and the benefits.
Of vaccines for that group. Right.
So, a young male who is COVID recovered, is there any reason to vaccinate them? They face the risk of minocrat it is from the vaccine, which is, you know, it's not it's enormous, but it's like it's you know, one in five thousand and one something on that order versus where but the benefit they get is so little because they're already COVID recovered, where as an older person who's not been exposed to the virus previously faces a high risk of death or or or you know high meaning like three, four or five percent of death that they were to get affected, the vaccine might be quite a good idea. So it really depends on who you are, your medical circumstances. It should be a personal medical decision you make in consultation with your physician, not something that's forced on you by public health and in the way it has been.
But do you think physicians are up to that task in the sense of I have found in conversations with a lot of different people that some doctors actually don't seem to have as full of knowledge of like data and the bigger picture of things.
Like someone one time.
Was like, well, Trump got the vaccine to me because I made the decision to not get the vaccine, and the only reason I was vocal with it as I felt like someone like me can take bullets more easily than someone getting fired for making the same decision that doesn't have the platform that I have. So I decided to go out publicly and try, you know, I wrote that op ed and Newsweek really trying to articulate the fact that people are making the decision aren't rubes, like they've actually really thought through this, and it doesn't make sense for them personally, whether they're young and healthy such as myself, or they have prior you know, immunity, right, And so that's why I went out and did that. But you know, I had a doctor one time and be like, well, you know, Trump got vaccinated, and I'm like, well, he's like seventy five, and you know, his health condition is entirely different than mine.
You know, he probably is a little.
Overweight, he's much older than me, so his risk is severely higher than mine.
So that doesn't even make sense. So I don't know.
I mean, our doctors really up to that task in the sense a lot of them really haven't gone through the data in the same way.
That you have.
I mean, I think traditionally the way that doctors get educated about these kinds of data is not by reading the papers themselves amazingly, but by participating in professional activities where they get essentially like the summaries of this information put to them. Right, these things called continuing medical education credits that every doctor is supposed to get so that they are always learning. The way that the discussion about the vaccines and about sort of how to think about national immunity has been spread through the medical community has been really lacking in my view. A lot of the educational activities have emphasized the importance of the vaccination without talking through the nuances about who it's really useful for, what the side effect profiles are, and it's been in service a public health gould who get everyone vaccinated rather than a personal health goal to make sure that the doctor is getting you the best possible advice for your own personal health circumstance. I think if we shift back to a normal footing where doctors are looking out for their patients as opposed to playing the part of public health enforces for the population at large, we will have doctors giving good, reasonable advice again, but it has to be a decision made by public health authorities. Places like the ANIH play an enormously important role in that. So when it's led by someone like Francis Collins or Tony Fauci, who have essentially an ideological almost seems commitment to making forcing everyone, no matter what the harm to society, to get the vaccine, regardless of whether they consent to it or not. You're going to get this distrust not just the public health, but in doctors as well. And what you said is right.
I mean, I think a lot of people.
Have lost trust with their doctors as a result. Again, I don't think that's a good thing least I think that doctors. It's really necessary that we be able to trust our doctors because doctors are so important for the health of personal health.
And for the health of population at large.
And I think medicine is going to need to do some self reflection to try to get that trust back.
Me because I've been fortunate to you know, I've reached out to a ton of different people involve different walks of life in the medical and science fields to try to get information for them and to try to learn that way, because you know, that's how we all learn the most, is by asking a bunch of questions and then trying to take that information from people and trying to come to, you know, what I think is the correct information or the right decision with all of that, which is how I, you know, concluded to not get the vaccine of also just having questions about you know, most vaccines we've got like five to ten years of data. We don't have that for these and so if I'm not higher risk, I'd rather just wait it out and see what we, you know, learn from it moving forward, you know, versus obviously higher risk people might not be able to make that same decision because they're.
More at risk.
But we're just at this such an odd place in society where it's just, you know, the truth really isn't out there as much.
You know.
Doctor Scott Atlas had said something when I interviewed him recently that really stood out to me, and he had just talked about sort of the profound impact that even the NIH has on science and the fact that so much of science is funded by the NIH and the United States and some of these other agencies, and so therefore it really dictates sort of the broader landscape of science and the conversations that we're having. Can you just talk about the funding aspect of it and how that is controlled by some of these government agencies and the problem of that.
Sure, So I've spent my career at a medical school, at academic medical school in order to advance your career in a place like Stanford, university, in the medical school, you have to have NIH funding. It's almost a requirement, right. It's just a marker of success as a scientist that you are able to garner funding from competitive funding from the IH.
Like every time I.
Put a grand and band application and I think it's like, you know, in one in ten or one in one in fifteen grants actually get funded. So it's a great success.
If you managed to do that.
Now, the problem is that with that is that it's creates these incentives that you have to align your research agenda with the NIH. And sometimes that's reasonable. The NIH may direct scientists toward studying something like Alzheimer's because it's such a serious problem for so many and putting a lot of scientists minds focused on that one problem could be a very productive thing, but can also, as we found through the epidemic, be a danger. So you get one person, Tony Fauci, who's been sitting on top of a huge pile of money, funding the careers and making and breaking the careers of countless scientists over forty years based on his priorities for what effects of these research focus on? What epidemiologists focus on, Well, you know, a lot of scientists stayed silent even though they were uncomfortable with the policies in the lockdown, because they didn't want to risk not getting funded by Tony fauchiz an IAID. When Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, essentially says these great brand and decoration people really are terrible. We should wager propaganda war against them. Well, no one know scientists who's thinking about their career, unless they're very brave or very foolish, is going to speak up and say, look, this is these lockdowns a really bad idea. I agree with the Great Branching equation, Very very few scientists will want to do that at risk of their career. I mean, I can understand why, right it's they're working on things that are remote from COVID or the Great Branding Equation. They just there's no reason for them to speak up, to stick their neck out, and so they won't even if they probably should. So what you have is a situation where a legitimate rule for NIH is to help direct the attention of scientists on important problems. But we've seen the leadership of the NIH, including Collins and Fauci, then use that legitimate power illegitimately to essentially silence scientific discussion, and it's undermined trust in science, it's undermine trust in public health, and as you just talked about, it undermine trust in medicine. Had enormous negative consequences for institutions that I think most Americans before the pandemic had a lot of respect for.
Is that self preservation because obviously there's been concerns that the NIH funding went to, you know, the funding of back coronaviruses and that research at the Wuhan Laboratory. I mean, is it self preservation from doctor Fauci or why has he adopted this approach?
Like what's behind it? In your estimation, I.
Don't know whether it was lovely, But what I do know is that the NIH, with the explicit sign off of Fauci and Collins, funded gain of function research that was incredibly controversial. So in twenty fourteen there was actually a pause put on gain of function research because there was a paper where someone had published in Science funded by the aniagent part that had managed to take an av and flu virus and make it able to infect human self.
People were very very upset by this.
The argument for why they did this was, well, we need to find out how many mutations it would take in order for this av and flu virus to mutate so that it could affect humans. It turns out it wasn't that many.
So they're like, oh, well, we have to be prepared for this.
But at the same time people were worried what if it could be a lab leak. Lots and lots of examples of labliks that have happened dangerous ones, and so there was a pause put on this where in order to do research that involved this gain of function work. Gain of function meaning you take a virus and give it new capabilities that didn't previously have, you needed to get explicit sign off from Tony Fauci and from Francis Collins, and they signed off a whole bunch of grants from twenty fifty to fourteen on despite the pause, and so they bear responsibility for the funding, and including by the way, Peter Dazac and the Equal Health Alliance, which cooperated with the Wuhan Lab very closely, so they funded a lot of this work. And I don't know for a fact that that's what's motivating them, because that's frankly retrospect an embarrassing thing that they did. It was a lapse in judgment, wasn't a wise use of NIH resources of American tax paid tax cary dollars. And I mean, it wouldn't surprise me to know that that this is partly worth motivating them. I don't think it's all. It can't be all of it, because why focus on these destructive lockdowns. I think that partly is just a failure to understand that there were alternative policies that were available that would have reduced the harm for the virus and also from the lockdowns. But you know, I do think that that this sort of desire to like make up for this poor judgment that they had must have played some role. Well.
I also just think there's a level of arrogance because someone had mentioned to me earlier on in the pandemic to sort of like explained doctor Fauci to me, is this is a guy who flew that a bowl of patient from Texas, I think, to the NIH in Maryland so that he could treat her himself, put on a hazmat suit for the cameras, did a bunch of interviews when she would have just been fine, like staying in Texas. So it was like basically he like did this whole thing for himself, like you know, so that he could like basically be in the glory.
I agree. I mean there's some element of self promotion in his his in the way he behaves that it's unseemly like, frankly, we should we really know the name.
Of the head of the Nai D.
I think the head of AID is important position, but it shouldn't be someone who's so in the public eye, you know.
Do you think that part of the problem is so we see this with like politicians very often. Right, You've got like all these people, like most of our leaders, you know, I mean you don't have to get any like Pelo see even mccon. Like all these guys have been in the public office for like decades, So it's like, how do you solve some of the problems that you've literally been a part of making right? And so do you think some of that is true for these public health bureaucrats in the sense of, you know, they've been in government for so long that they're sort of out of the game or they can't really solve these problems or bring a fresh approach when they've kind of been a part of the problem, or they've been a part of the system for too long. Do we need to kind of take a fresh look at bringing in, you know, different voices and different people who have been out in the field a little bit fresher and you know, not been bureaucrats.
For so long.
I do.
I think I think that that someone like doctor Fauci, who's been in his position at the head of the ANID for forty years on that order, something on that order, or a thirty thirty five years, I don't know the exact number, but some a very very, very long time. Just by dint of being in such power for so long, you essentially create this insular sense where where like, you know, no one's going to talk back to you, no one's going to like tell to contradict you, and you you there's this feedback loop where you start to think you're always right because no one's contradicting always, everyone's always praising you. It's really dangerous for any leader to be in that position, right the Greeks, the Romans, when a when a successful Roman general that have this major parade through Rome, that have someone that someone whispering in their ear and at the head of the parade, everyone's praising him. Look, you're only mortal. You're not a god, You're only mortal.
Right.
So, I think someone in a position like Tony Fauchi for you for such a long time, where he's controlled the budgets of and careers of countless incredibly bright scientists, all of them are telling especially very strong incentives to like to tell him you know.
That he's doing a good job.
It's it's a dangerous kind of mixture of power and uh science and and and it creates a kind of corruption that's really hard to under unless you have essentially term limits or something. I think no one human should ever be in that position for so long.
So you've congratulations on the Academy for Science and Freedom with Hillsdale College. You doctor Scott Atlist and doctor Martin Coldorf had started this academy. You know, what do you guys hope to accomplish with it? And what are sort of the goals and the objectives with it?
To me, it's twofold. So I think we've talked a lot about it about what's motivated is through this whole conversation. So I think the trust in science because of the lock the failures in the around the lockdown is at a low point, and in particular, the ability for scientists to talk to one another freely without fear of canceling is really harm to discussion in lockdown. That needs reform. So one is to restore the ability for scientists to be free within science itself, and that may involve reforms beyond just the lockdowns themselves, that scientists should be free to talk to one another without this sort of propaganda of war. Again, the other thing is what role does science play in a free society? Science is important, but we've had during this pandemic this idea that science ought to completely structure all of our civic life. But in fact that's not right. Science helps you understand that about the way the physical world works.
If I do a, D might happen, but.
That doesn't say that I want B to happen. Maybe I want C to happen, right, so I'll do D instead, which D produces C. Whether you want B or C, Well, that's not a scientific question. That that's a question of ethics, of morality, of politics, of a whole bunch of other social values that scientists have no special expertise. Science and free society is not are not the rulers, the scientists, free stud of your advisors and the people who make decisions should take that into account. But it doesn't determine what's the right thing to do. Is it right to adopt a setup policies that mainly protect the laptop class at the expense of the working class and the poor and the vulnerable. I mean, that's essentially what science said to do. We have to stop the virus and spreading, so we adopt.
These policies to protect only a certain class of people.
Well, is that right? Well, scientists have no monopoly and you should have no monopoly in that discussion in free society. And so part of the Academy is to restore the proper place of science and a free society and to restore the ability for scientists to freely discuss with one another.
Well, I appreciate you guys doing that, And you know, you guys have been so brave and have had so much courage and really bring truth in a time where it's dire, and you know it's dying and it's needed. You know what, before we go, what should the path forward be for the country and how we deal with COVID obviously knowing what we know now and knowing what we don't know in the future. But right now where we are in this, what should the path forward look like?
I think a few things. So one, we should vow never to disrupt the lives of children ever. Again, we should restore normal life to children literally everywhere in the country. There's no good reason to think about children as particularly particularly super spreaders, not since the beginning of the epidemic, and the harm to them is just immoral. So we should end. We should restore normal life to children immediately. Next, we should stop a mass asymptomatic testing. Right, we shouldn't be forcing people again. I'm in favor of rapid energen tests and other tests that allow people to take charge of the risk in their lives. Right, So before you go visit Grandma, you want to check you you're positive, if that makes some sense to me, So we should allow that to happen, or we should have this, you should encourage that. But on the other hand, forced to testing and forced vaccination and coercion, that should end immediately because it's not It's produced social division without actually doing much. As far as public health benefit. Those two steps would go a long way restore for instance, and part of that be ending vaccine mandates and ending vaccine passports I think would go a long way towards starting to restore the trust. Will need to actually address the remaining with around this virus.
Well, hopefully people adopt that's you know, there seems to be some hope when you've got people like Governor Jared Poulis of a Democrat from Colorado basically saying that you know, hey, the medical emergency phase of all this is over.
You know, let's kind of move forward with our lives.
So praying more governors take your advice and we can go back to normal. And I just feel like there's been so much harm to society even in just this blame game and you know, turning on our neighbors and it just you know, there's just been so much ugliness to the past couple of years. So praying people heed your your words of advice. There, Doctor j Batichara, thank you so much for everything you've done. So much respect for you and just appreciate your work and your voice and all this, and thank you so much for your time, sir.
It's an honor.
Thank you so it's great to talk with you.
I want to thank doctor j Baticharia again for such a great interview and just the honesty. It's so nice to have people like him to turn to during all this chaos, all the noise, all the craziness. I want to thank you guys at home for listening. If you enjoy today's show, please leave us a review. You can rate us five stars on Apple Podcast.
It means a lot.
You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at Lisa Rebooth
