The Charlie Kirk Show - How COVID Killed Science with Statistician Aaron Ginn
Aired: 2020-10-01
Duration: 43:39


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[00:00:00]  Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
[00:00:02]  Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
[00:00:08]  Hey, everybody, what is going on with the lockdowns in our country?
[00:00:12]  Statistician and expert on the Chinese coronavirus, Aaron Ginn, is here.
[00:00:16]  He's a friend of mine.
[00:00:18]  He's very smart, very fair, very reasoned, and you're going to love the analysis that he gives about the corruption of science and the Chinese coronavirus.
[00:00:27]  Please consider supporting our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:31]  CharlieKirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:33]  If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest organization fighting for freedom on campuses across the country, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com, and email us at freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:48]  Aaron Ginn is here, everybody, with the answers to your questions about the Chinese coronavirus.
[00:00:53]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:54]  Here we go.
[00:00:55]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:57]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:59]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:03]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:06]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:07]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:08]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:15]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:16]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:25]  That's why we are here.
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[00:02:45]  Hey, everybody.
[00:02:46]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

=== New York Lockdown Truths (13:04) ===

[00:02:48]  Joining us again with special analysis on the Chinese coronavirus is Aaron Ginn, friend of mine and statistician Galore.
[00:02:58]  Hey, Aaron, how are you doing?
[00:03:00]  Hey, Charlie.
[00:03:02]  I'm doing pretty well.
[00:03:04]  I'm going to read a headline to you, and I need you to tell me what's really going on.
[00:03:08]  Coronavirus is spreading quickly in 31 states.
[00:03:13]  What is the latest going on with the Chinese coronavirus, hospitalization, death rates?
[00:03:19]  Tell us the facts outside of any sort of activist media bias.
[00:03:24]  I wouldn't really know how to measure quickly.
[00:03:27]  That would be, it's not a very scientific word.
[00:03:32]  Such a good point.
[00:03:34]  Yeah, people, Americans understand that the original social contract that was given to us about the lockdown and COVID and coronavirus was that we would do a short-term pain to have long-term rewards of managing hospital capacity.
[00:03:48]  As that crisis came really to only unfold in really two places in the country, we have now moved the goalpost again to the case dimming.
[00:03:58]  And as we're sort of extrapolating that as well, we now are learning that actually, as even the New York Times was reporting, that the quote unquote false positive rate of a lot of these tests is much higher than we ever thought possible, mainly due to the number of times we're actually cycling through these RNA experiments or RNA testing.
[00:04:16]  So to say that it's like spreading quickly, it's kind of hard to understand exactly, especially when you know that a high number of the tests are actually false positives or false cases because they're not really infectious.
[00:04:27]  But if you actually, let's just assume that all the cases that we're finding are true asymptomatics or symptomatic cases.
[00:04:35]  The overall prevalence is much lower than we thought in terms of during the March pandemic.
[00:04:42]  Because you can't take, if you remember back in March, we didn't have a lot as much testing.
[00:04:47]  We were focusing testing on symptomatics and people in acute care.
[00:04:50]  So you have to extrapolate the number of fatalities to the total infection.
[00:04:55]  And based on that, it is way higher in March and April than we are today.
[00:04:58]  Today, what we are, as most pandemics go, actually, is like it goes as we see the pandemic as it appears in the highly susceptible aka high-risk population as they pass away.
[00:05:08]  We now see it.
[00:05:09]  Because if you and I got it in December, we wouldn't have noticed it, right?
[00:05:13]  We would have just been, oh, I just have a cold today, right?
[00:05:15]  Or, or I just feel a little bit like weird.
[00:05:18]  So now we're in this phase of the pandemic as it has passed through the high-risk susceptible population.
[00:05:23]  It's now reaching these other groups of people like college kids, younger adults, and just people that were previously in lockdown mode.
[00:05:31]  So in some respects, like we are still seeing cases because we have a high test sensitivity that's detecting people that are not really infectious.
[00:05:41]  And the second part is that as people have left the lockdown, as you would know, as you would assume, more people are getting it, but hospital rates are much, much lower.
[00:05:51]  I mean, like incredibly lower.
[00:05:52]  I mean, ICU capacity now is stabilized almost across the entire nation.
[00:05:57]  And we are now seeing the fact that the way we're measuring this virus needs to change because we have learned more than we know.
[00:06:04]  We learned more.
[00:06:05]  We know way more back in March.
[00:06:06]  Well, I think people, to an untrained eye, people believe that, oh, cases mustn't necessarily correlate to hospitalizations and deaths.
[00:06:14]  But hospitalization rates and ICUs and deaths are going down for a variety of different reasons.
[00:06:20]  And you articulated that very well.
[00:06:22]  I just have to compliment you.
[00:06:24]  Quickly is not a scientific term.
[00:06:26]  It's such a media term that rises quickly.
[00:06:28]  How do you measure that?
[00:06:29]  Quickly according to what scale?
[00:06:30]  What axis are you measuring that on?
[00:06:32]  It's perfect.
[00:06:33]  Exactly.
[00:06:34]  And you mentioned a really good philosophical point here, the social contract, which, again, that's usually robbed more by the left.
[00:06:41]  You know, there's three types of social contract theory.
[00:06:44]  The three people, of course, that talked about the most was Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke.
[00:06:48]  All of them had a very different perspective of the type of social contract that we should have in our society.
[00:06:54]  Thomas Hobbes obviously thought human beings were awful to each other, nasty, brutish, and short.
[00:06:58]  Therefore, we need an authoritarian, almost a dictator-type government.
[00:07:02]  He wrote that in the Leviathan.
[00:07:03]  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, human beings thought were awesome, and he thought that the state should basically allow us to be in a permanent state of infancy.
[00:07:10]  John Locke, I think, got it the best.
[00:07:12]  I think his observation of human nature was a little bit flawed, but he thought that government should protect natural rights, that at all costs, we must have a pursuit of liberty.
[00:07:22]  I think you make a great point that there is almost this self-sacrificial promise given to us by the ruling class and the experts saying, it's okay if your business shuts down because long term, you're actually going to be better because of it.
[00:07:34]  The social contract actual promise in the last six months post the initial two weeks to slow the spread has changed, which is now we must inevitably, we just must wait this out perpetually because if we don't, then everything is going to be bad in perpetuity.
[00:07:50]  Can you talk more about, Aaron, about how they have been changing?
[00:07:53]  You call this movie the gold post.
[00:07:54]  I call this the moving of the Overton window.
[00:07:56]  I think this is also another way to kind of mention this is just they are continuously just trying to justify their own power.
[00:08:03]  Can you talk about how they are using different sets of data interchangeably while they're talking about allegedly the same thing?
[00:08:10]  Yeah, no, you're right that there is this moving constantly of like, what is the success metric?
[00:08:18]  And Europe has actually been, yeah, Europe has actually been far more, I think, honest with their people about what's going on and like what's what sacrifices we're making, what trade-offs we're making.
[00:08:29]  I mean, it's actually the Anglo countries that have been quite embarrassing in terms of how they've been treating their citizens and how public health has responded to the situation.
[00:08:39]  You know, both Sweden in the sense of like being the control for the entire world, but also other Nordic countries have been far more transparent, like Norway and Denmark, with their people about like, hey, with every policy decision, there are trade-offs.
[00:08:52]  And we're going to be adults about this and we're going to be honest with you about what the risks are, but we have to move on with civilization.
[00:08:59]  So you see Europe is, even though they're suffering from a true second wave because the Tumbleton number cases is now basically in some countries surpassing the sort of first wave that happened in early part of this year.
[00:09:11]  What happened with Arizona and Florida, we never reached that point in terms of the severity of illness with cases.
[00:09:17]  It was far lower in terms of what was going in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
[00:09:22]  But what we are seeing in terms of both the UK and Spain and France is that as cases have drastically increased, we're seeing a little bit increase, as you would assume, because the prevalence is just way higher now.
[00:09:33]  So undoubtedly there's going to be some increased hospitalizations and fatalities, but they're being transparent with their people.
[00:09:39]  I mean, like Macron has said openly several times, we're not going back to lockdown.
[00:09:44]  Like that was basically a mistake.
[00:09:46]  And he's actually called out the health minister saying, if you think you need to lock down as part of my cabinet, you basically need to get better at your job.
[00:09:55]  Like he said in a cabinet.
[00:09:56]  This is the French.
[00:09:57]  So yeah, this is the French, right?
[00:09:59]  So, you know, supposedly white flag French, right?
[00:10:01]  So I think that they, they, like Europe has been able to balance the trade-offs more versus I think our country, the UK and Australia, New Zealand, haven't been able to come to terms with the fact that everything has trade-offs.
[00:10:16]  And public health used to understand that, a lot of public health experts.
[00:10:19]  But the good thing is like, you know, where we are today is that we understand much more about how to treat this virus.
[00:10:26]  We understand what not to do, basically what New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Michigan did, don't do those things.
[00:10:33]  Do much more of the things what happened in Florida and in South Dakota, basically how to like manage severe patients, how to also continue on with civilization, how to prevent rioting, violence in the streets because people don't have jobs and they feel very frustrated and scared.
[00:10:50]  And eventually we will get passes as a nation because I believe so much in Western civilization, Western ideas, and the scientific method.
[00:10:58]  But we're in this sort of haze because of the two weeks of slow to spread, the massive amount of fear the media was generating, and the inability to understand that I think Americans were shocked to understand actually how many people die a week before COVID.
[00:11:15]  Still, there's no context on that whatsoever.
[00:11:17]  They say 200,000 people, but we, unfortunately, it's just life.
[00:11:21]  A couple million people die a year in our country.
[00:11:23]  Like that's unfortunately the cycle of life.
[00:11:25]  So Aaron, I'm going to read you a headline here.
[00:11:28]  And to be honest, I have just lost total faith in the expert class in the Western world because you and I were talking about this loudly and repeatedly back in March, April, and May.
[00:11:39]  I remember the phone calls between each other.
[00:11:42]  New York Times vilified early over lax virus strategy.
[00:11:46]  Sweden seems to have scourge controlled.
[00:11:49]  This is the New York Times.
[00:11:50]  I don't know if you saw the story or not.
[00:11:53]  After having weathered high death rates, when it's resisted a lockdown in the spring, Sweden now has one of Europe's lowest rates of daily new cases.
[00:12:00]  Whether that is an aberration remains to be seen.
[00:12:04]  Have the Swedes and the socialist Swedes, were they onto something this whole time?
[00:12:09]  I would actually say no, because what they did was basically what public health people would have advised, you know, if we didn't have TDS and Trump Ferris syndrome, like if they, or if we didn't have the politicalization of science, or we didn't have the, you know, a lot of the xenophobia that would sort of been spreading around our nation or around the world.
[00:12:27]  Sweden basically did what all public health people would have done, you know, three years ago, first year.
[00:12:33]  I mean, Technel and Koseki say openly that what they did was actually not unique.
[00:12:38]  It was actually what they always prescribe, which is what public health people generally prescribe what they're taught in school, is give people information, trust them that they will actually do the right thing, do sort of smaller mitigation stuff on the edges that doesn't interfere with society drastically because you don't want to create unknown secondary effects.
[00:12:58]  And one of the very key principles that's taught in public health policy is do not blame people that get infected.
[00:13:06]  Do not treat them as if they're the scourge of society as we currently do today, as if it's like their fault, as if like we somehow have chosen like as if the virus has some agency behind it and some moral authority behind it.
[00:13:19]  And because what that does is a secondary side effect is like, yeah, it's like it's like people won't get treated.
[00:13:23]  People won't come forward.
[00:13:24]  People won't like, you know, actually choose to self-isolate.
[00:13:29]  Instead, we have this whole moral connotation where people will just hide it and like, you know, run away.
[00:13:33]  So the Sweden basically chose a path that was sort of typical public health policy that we traditionally have done in the past, you know, especially for coronaviruses.
[00:13:46]  But even in the sense of like what New York Times described, which is they said, I believe you said that they had high death rates.
[00:13:53]  That's not even accurate.
[00:13:54]  Like Belgium, like Spain, Peru, UK, like these are all places that are higher, even us, right?
[00:14:02]  So to say that it has a higher death rate is not accurate because like at what time frame do you measure?
[00:14:07]  At the end of this year, we'll be able to look back on the various policies and be able to judge.
[00:14:13]  And I think that what you'll find is that countries that did lockdowns had an enormous number of excess deaths, not COVID necessarily, but excess deaths and the total fatality rates within the country.
[00:14:24]  You cannot compare specifically COVID deaths necessarily between countries because every country does something different.
[00:14:32]  Belgium has a very generous definition of what is a COVID death and a time range behind that.
[00:14:36]  So the UK has a different measure.
[00:14:38]  Even in America, we have states do different things in terms of what is a COVID death.
[00:14:43]  The better way to measure it is excess deaths with a combination of looking at total COVID deaths and then be able to also balance out what other people could have died of as well.
[00:14:53]  And I think what you'll see is that countries that chose lockdowns that continue to sort of torture their civilization will find a higher number of excess deaths due to the policy decisions.
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[00:16:08]  So, Aaron, I want you to build out more something that you and I have talked about previously, which is the corruption of sciences.
[00:16:14]  The left says that they're for science.
[00:16:15]  They accuse the right of being anti-science.
[00:16:18]  You and I both know that the scientific method is rooted in challenging, you know, pre-existing premises.
[00:16:24]  It's about having unafraid dialogue about what is true and what is not true.
[00:16:31]  The postmodern belief, and this is in critical race theory and critical theory, that the sciences, and this, you could see this on newdiscourses.com by two true liberals, not leftists, James Lindsay and Peter Bogogian.
[00:16:46]  They have said this completely, that the sciences are under attack by the postmodernists because they think that science is actually just a tool and an instrument of white supremacy.
[00:16:55]  Now, that might be a little bit too far to accuse every single doctor out there right now of being in that kind of vein, but I do think that that sort of existing framework definitely played a role in some of these scientists and doctors being so vocal and being so committed to dogma, not to actual science.
[00:17:17]  For example, Dr. Fauci has come out and he has said that it is a catastrophic mistake that Florida is opening its restaurants.
[00:17:24]  He has said that school openings are a mistake.
[00:17:27]  I will read you another quote here.
[00:17:29]  This is from Dr. Robert Redfield, who says, quote, Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data about the Chinese coronavirus.
[00:17:38]  Center for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a colleague Friday.
[00:17:43]  So he's from the Center for Disease Control.
[00:17:46]  Dr. Atlas said this, quote, science is about openly challenging and discussing different ideas, and it is critically important that we start doing that.
[00:17:53]  No real scientist would disagree, and any confident scientists would welcome a debate with colleagues holding different views, Scott Atlas.
[00:17:59]  So what happens now, Aaron, when you have two doctors that disagree?
[00:18:03]  The Biden Democrats think that one of those is a heretic, and one of those is a pope.
[00:18:10]  You and I believe that, well, maybe one might be right about something, one or the other.
[00:18:14]  It is the death of empiricism and almost the birth of this very dangerous descent into thousand-year-old dogma.
[00:18:22]  A lot of scientists are really bad at philosophy, right?
[00:18:25]  This is why the whole sort of philosophy of science, like John Lennox practice has sort of developed, because scientists, when they're focused on the sort of empirical part, can actually be quite good and can actually give us data and evidence.
[00:18:37]  But you have to realize that the conclusions that are drawn from the data and evidence is not necessarily based on data and evidence because based on wisdom and experience, you know, presuppositions.
[00:18:48]  And this is when Dr. Fauci says that it's a catastrophe.
[00:18:53]  I'm like, that's the one.
[00:18:54]  It's not a scientific word.
[00:18:55]  So what do you mean by that?
[00:18:56]  And the second is like you are enacting a public policy, which is not in the realm of science.
[00:19:03]  Science can inform policy, but policy is a decision between humans to create social structures, philosophical arguments of what's important, ROI.
[00:19:12]  ROI is not a scientific question.
[00:19:15]  ROI is a judgment call that I believe elected officials should execute, not non-elected bureaucrats.
[00:19:21]  But if Dr. Fauci disagrees with the approach of Governor DeSantis, please be specific about what those things are and what is your evidence based on that.
[00:19:29]  And we can have a debate.
[00:19:30]  But saying things like catastrophe or saying things like it's too soon or I'm concerned, I don't know what I'm concerned means.
[00:19:36]  Like when a public health person says, I'm concerned about something, what?
[00:19:40]  Right?
[00:19:40]  Like, do you, are you, you need to like provide me a data.
[00:19:43]  So Dr. Atlas is 100% correct.
[00:19:45]  It's not just him.
[00:19:45]  They're like, you know, Dr. Kuloff at Harvard, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology has said there's something Ioannidis.
[00:19:53]  There's a huge list of these guys.
[00:19:54]  Yeah, like Dr. Below and Dr. Gupta, Dr. Hinnigan in the UK.
[00:20:00]  But for some reason, in the Anglo countries, because the same problems also happen in Australia and New Zealand, that we have not accepted open debate and dialogue about this thing.
[00:20:09]  For as I give you two examples, so the Danish Public Health Authority and the Norwegian Public Health Authority both actually have had public debates with their politicians saying you advocate for things that are not what we say.
[00:20:23]  Basically, we give you data, it's up to you to make the call.
[00:20:26]  So it's your responsibility.
[00:20:27]  They've actually clearly drawn a line that the Norwegian public health authority said several times publicly, we did not advise you to close schools because we had no data to support that.
[00:20:36]  Denmark has said the same thing, that you, politician, took that.
[00:20:40]  So in some respects, as you know, that's their call, right?
[00:20:44]  It's your decision to take, you know, what data I give you of responsibility.
[00:20:48]  Don't throw it back on me.
[00:20:50]  As a scientist, I think at the end of the day, what will happen is ultimately, as you know, because you're much more involved in politics than I am, that politicians don't like taking responsibility.
[00:21:01]  So who's going to be the scapegoat?
[00:21:03]  It's going to be scientists.
[00:21:04]  And scientists right now are long for the ride because they get attention, they have power.
[00:21:09]  Scientists are humans.
[00:21:10]  They have biases and pathologies just like everybody.
[00:21:12]  And at the end of the day, when things come to a head, when we see the damage of the lockdowns, when we see the cancer deaths rise, when we see the suicides, we see alcohol abuse, we see kids don't return to school, when we see poverty, we see hunger, when we see war, countries imploding, bonds going bankrupt because you don't have an economy.
[00:21:30]  Who are they going to blame?
[00:21:31]  The politicians are going to say, hey, that was my bad.
[00:21:33]  They're going to be like, it was that scientist's fault, right?
[00:21:35]  And they're going to be scapegoated and it's going to be very damaging to science.
[00:21:39]  So we need to celebrate people as the professors and doctors that you have listed.
[00:21:44]  Celebrate them because they are pushing forward the actual true scientific method of heterodox thinking.
[00:21:49]  The president, you know, Dr. Ellis is the head of the Kronot Task Force now, should embrace heterodox thinking.
[00:21:55]  Homogenous thinking, group think leads to dangerous ideas.
[00:21:59]  Yes, that religious ideas about something, which again, if you believe that as a public policy matter, that is totally your prerogative, but you do not take the banner of science as if it is your banner to carry and only you carry as if you are the only person that holds it, right?
[00:22:14]  As the CDC and I think NIH have totally biased themselves, I think, thinking that they're put in the limelight.
[00:22:21]  I think there's way too much public policy that's coming out of there that they claim is based on the particular scientific method.

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[00:22:26]  When Ali, it's just their opinion about something.
[00:22:29]  Again, which is okay, but you need to clarify that this is my view of what this data says.
[00:22:35]  You're looking at this so correctly and clearly, where you have a group of people that are almost the untouchables.
[00:22:41]  They are the class of the enlightened, which because they have a doctor in front of their name and they have a very specific policy prescription, not a scientific observation, not involved in empiricism at all whatsoever.
[00:22:56]  But now they're in the philosophical, they're in the political realm where for some good reason, I challenge this a little bit.
[00:23:05]  The American people think very highly of anyone that has a doctor in front of their name.
[00:23:10]  Now, mind you, for whatever reason, dissenting doctors are suffocated and attacked.
[00:23:15]  And we just went through that entire list.
[00:23:17]  So it's only a certain amount, it's only certain doctors, right?
[00:23:21]  It's only certain people that we're supposed to trust.
[00:23:24]  And what I'm very worried about, Aaron, I think you'll agree with this, is that this in no way is good for Western society because for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
[00:23:34]  And that's true in physics and it's true in politics.
[00:23:37]  And it's also true in culture because people are going to realize that we were hoodwinked by these power-hungry, self-righteous, foolish political doctors that were putting forth a very specific agenda for whatever reason we can conjecture.
[00:23:55]  And Dr. Fauci being the chief among it.
[00:23:58]  And the president was correct in the debate.
[00:24:00]  I actually think it was the best part of the debate for him.
[00:24:03]  And I wish he would have leaned in on this even more when he said, wait a second, look at the alcoholism, divorce, depression, and all of this.
[00:24:09]  And Joe Biden just completely said, no, none of that stuff matters.
[00:24:12]  It was actually the strongest part of the debate.
[00:24:15]  And this idea that lockdowns are a victimless action has been so disproven.
[00:24:21]  And you and I know this is true through the data.
[00:24:23]  We know this is true experientially.
[00:24:28]  You're listening to the Charlie Kirk show right now, or else you wouldn't hear me say this.
[00:24:31]  And you might have earbuds in.
[00:24:33]  And the best way to listen is actually premium wireless earbuds.
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[00:25:25]  And so, Aaron, can you just talk more broadly about how is the outrage among the other tens of thousands of scientists across the planet?
[00:25:38]  It seems as if there's just kind of this almost sit-down and shut up hierarchy now in the epidemiological community.
[00:25:45]  Like, I'm an epidemiologist.
[00:25:46]  I know what's better.
[00:25:47]  You've been wrong about everything.
[00:25:48]  I mean, they were wrong about the models, they were wrong about death rates, they were wrong about hospitalization rates, they were wrong about treatments, they were wrong about everything.
[00:25:55]  And so, and then you also have the Democrats, and I hate to overly politicize this, but they're involved in this virus revisionism.
[00:26:02]  So, Aaron, I'm afraid that this is going to clash into this could be something that none of us want to go.

=== Skeptics vs Majority Opinion (15:54) ===

[00:26:10]  This could be a couple hundred-year regression where we reject the principles that help build the West, which is the blend of reason and revelation.
[00:26:20]  The politicization of science, which is, you know, you alluded to some other areas which science has abandoned enlightenment principles and abandoned sort of broader, you know, sort of evidence-based Western civilization values, like the thing of like, you know, being able to be empathetic and data-driven and like being open-handed about debates, open to heterodoxy ideas, uh, and being a skeptic.
[00:26:42]  Like, I would identify heavily with skepticism.
[00:26:45]  Um, and even though like I'm balanced out with being a religious Christian, uh, like there, there when we get to the point in society where objectivity, which is really what the question is in front of us, is that science is losing its ability to be objective because it's being so politicized.
[00:27:03]  Because objectivity is fundamentally what I would say a lot of Western countries are suffering from.
[00:27:09]  Uh, that you know, if you go just go through the line of debate topics in our culture, and fundamentally, kind of at its core is this a rejection that something can be absolutely true.
[00:27:20]  Instead, they're rather embraced subjectivity.
[00:27:23]  And so, science comes in providing evidence and data.
[00:27:26]  Yeah, and then now we're trying as the sort of postmodern revolution eats away at the sort of scientific culture.
[00:27:33]  That is like what happened with COVID.
[00:27:35]  Like, so COVID is a novel virus, and we're going to debate how novel it truly is.
[00:27:41]  But in terms of sort of the broader scope of other coronaviruses and other pandemics, I mean, this is like Hong Kong flu.
[00:27:48]  This is like, you know, 1957, 1958 flu.
[00:27:51]  So, aka, it's serious, but not the end of the world.
[00:27:56]  So, what explains the other behaviors, right?
[00:27:59]  What explains the other end of the world?
[00:28:02]  Like, we must stop everything.
[00:28:03]  We must have no balance.
[00:28:04]  We must have no moderation.
[00:28:06]  And it's these other broader cultural things that, you know, your show covers and other shows, like, you know, like Tucker and Dennis Prager, like that all of this came to head at this one moment, right?
[00:28:15]  So, this is why, like, when I first, when I first got, you know, into COVID in early January and started descending this, it's like, there were all these other cultural things that were going on that scientists were latching into and didn't realize their own presuppositions.
[00:28:28]  They could not see clearly that, hey, that there are significant costs to lockdown.
[00:28:32]  Hey, like, we have to balance this or, hey, like, what is the data?
[00:28:36]  What does it even mean?
[00:28:36]  Like, in the debate last night, like Trump mentioned the other countries and data tracking, you know, in whatever, how he ever described it, you know, we can debate about the accuracy of those specific things.
[00:28:48]  But his orientation was accurate, which is that we are the only nation in the world doing it this way.
[00:28:54]  So the fact to say that we have, you know, 22% of the deaths or whatever, again, that's not even control.
[00:28:59]  You have to control for age.
[00:29:00]  You have to control for when time that pandemic happened.
[00:29:03]  There are a lot of things to control for.
[00:29:04]  But we are the only ones having the sensitivity of the tests as high as it do.
[00:29:10]  Like in Europe, they're about, you know, it's not a, it's actually exponential.
[00:29:14]  As you increase the number of cycle times, it exponentially increases the sensitivity.
[00:29:17]  But the number of cycle times they're running is almost 50% less than us.
[00:29:21]  And some countries like Spain are now requiring both a scan of the chest and symptoms to be counted as like a basically COVID admission versus, you know, we, we're just like testing everyone and everything.
[00:29:35]  And it's like, oh, you know, if I come in for, and I know this for sure, and I can confirm this from doctors.
[00:29:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:29:42]  I, there are a lot of doctors that messaged me saying that like everyone that comes in as a COVID patient is here for some other reason.
[00:29:49]  And we don't treat them for COVID.
[00:29:51]  And so there is a majority, a silent majority.
[00:29:55]  I believe it's a majority.
[00:29:55]  Of course, we don't have polling on this, but that is my experience is that the majority of scientists and doctors think that what is publicly discussed, who people are cited as experts, they do not agree with.
[00:30:09]  They think that they're hysterical, that they're not based in reason and rationale.
[00:30:13]  Like they're concerned about COVID.
[00:30:14]  And as we always, as you, and I actually think our public response was anything but treating it seriously.
[00:30:20]  So I don't understand when people say our public response or public policy response was not serious.
[00:30:25]  I mean, we literally shut down the nation.
[00:30:28]  And we have, we still have, yeah, we have, we have cities that still don't have indoor dining.
[00:30:33]  We have, like, I don't get how it's like we did take it seriously.
[00:30:36]  We banned travel from countries.
[00:30:37]  Countries that did take it seriously would be like going to Belarus or Sweden maybe or Japan.
[00:30:43]  You could say that they didn't take it seriously because they did less than us, right?
[00:30:47]  But we totally took it seriously.
[00:30:49]  And I believe our policy response will be, at least some states are fine.
[00:30:55]  Other states took it way too far, mainly the Democratic states in the Northeast.
[00:31:00]  Because you can see in the excess deaths, it's just like you could totally see that they took it too far.
[00:31:04]  That at the end of the day, lockdowns will be one of the greatest mistakes in public policy and modern public policy that we've ever done.
[00:31:14]  What's really interesting is that a lot of the same people that have been peddling the Chinese coronavirus hysteria, they are skeptics.
[00:31:23]  They're David Hume skeptics when it comes to religion.
[00:31:26]  And they don't like theocracy.
[00:31:28]  They don't like theology.
[00:31:30]  They don't like dogma.
[00:31:31]  And yet when it came to this period of six months, they became more religiously fundamentalist than an evangelical Christian to this stuff.
[00:31:41]  Where all of a sudden it was all of the David Hume is ought problem.
[00:31:45]  It's reducto ad absurdium.
[00:31:47]  You eventually lead to the absurd if you're overly skeptical.
[00:31:49]  Of course.
[00:31:49]  Like he goes too far.
[00:31:50]  Yeah.
[00:31:51]  Precisely.
[00:31:51]  But I think it's actually very helpful to not to not forget that and not use it.
[00:31:56]  And I think that you need to be a skeptic in life.
[00:31:59]  However, the point I'm making, though, is that these people that have made a career out of criticizing those of us of faith, you and I, and they, the Bill Mars of the world, for example, right?
[00:32:09]  His whole life is trying to bring David Hume to the 21st century.
[00:32:14]  He had the film Religilists or whatever it was called, right?
[00:32:17]  He basically was asking the same pointed questions that Hume would ask.
[00:32:21]  It was all about trying to deconstruct religious dogma, right?
[00:32:24]  Same for most of the activist media.
[00:32:26]  And yet when it came to a moment where the professional medical class started to act with religious fervor and almost like zealots, all of that skepticism disappeared, Aaron, right?
[00:32:39]  It was as if they're skeptics against people of faith, but they're zealots when it comes to the medical community.
[00:32:46]  Why is that?
[00:32:48]  Because the so skepticism is, I mean, he's trying to bring David Hume.
[00:32:52]  I mean, I know, like, in terms of broader skeptic community and broader intellectual community, I mean, Hume is widely read.
[00:32:59]  So, I mean, I don't think you need to bring Hume to the world.
[00:33:01]  Plus, bringing a specific person to the world is quite religious, not very skeptical.
[00:33:07]  You know, everyone has mistakes in their philosophy.
[00:33:10]  Like, you know, Rousseau, I would say it's like he had, you know, 10% of his ideas were great and then 90% were bad.
[00:33:15]  Right.
[00:33:16]  So like, you know, everyone has a hit and misses and you can't just pick one guy and say like he is the figure, right?
[00:33:23]  Because that's quite religious.
[00:33:25]  But no, you're, you're, you're, I think this goes back to the sort of philosophy of science question when it comes to COVID in our culture is that if you if you understand more philosophical frameworks about how people think and behave, you would, you would, you would realize that humans are fundamentally hierarchical.
[00:33:44]  They have an orientation that something they constantly defer to to make judgments against.
[00:33:49]  And for Christians, it's, it's the Bible and Jesus, but for atheists, it's something else.
[00:33:54]  You can't escape that behavior which humans have.
[00:33:58]  Every single human has, whether it could be, it could be, if you're, if you're, even if you're Christian, it could be family, it could be country, it could be, you know, science, it could be, you know, politics, it could be environment, like all of the, all of the, like humans naturally create a godlike order and in whatever thing they think is like most important.
[00:34:18]  So when it came to COVID, that became a very sort of zealous appeal, constant appeals if like that was the only thing that mattered.
[00:34:28]  And the unfortunate thing is that the secondary consequences of that zealotry has led to basically we've lost all of our gains in extreme poverty.
[00:34:38]  Like we're basically back to the early 90s now.
[00:34:41]  Like we're going to have million, probably a million more TB, malaria, AIDS deaths in Africa.
[00:34:47]  Like there's not really any way to measure this pandemic, COVID specifically, in a way that's like actually appreciable in terms of we actually creatively save lives.
[00:34:56]  The lockdown deaths will, in terms of all the actuarial analysis, in terms of how like people now they're looking at things we actually know and measure very well, like malaria, for example, how many times we retreat that or how many times we get TB vaccines.
[00:35:09]  Those things we actually know and have very good data on outcomes, hard data, not like COVID, which is a complete mess and chaotic in terms of how we measure that.
[00:35:17]  We know fairly certain what's going to happen because so many people have not come to doctor to receive vaccines or so many kids are not in school or not being fed, for example, in Africa or lowering income communities in America.
[00:35:29]  So The zealotry of willing to ignore that is quite profound, which is why the scientists you see like lockdown skeptics is remarkably a bipartisan issue.
[00:35:41]  It's made up of lots of liberals who see the zealotry, who see the sort of insanity, centrists, libertarians, skeptics who have no place, independents, because they can look at the data and be like, wait a minute, this is not the way we should approach this issue because it is serious, but it's serious for a very known select group of people that you can look and see and you can tell that they're actually high risk.
[00:36:07]  The age-stratified risk between you, you and me, and an elder person nursing home is a thousand times different.
[00:36:15]  So that's pretty significant, right?
[00:36:17]  Like you and I are more likely to have a severe outcome of COVID about as much as if we have an accidental fall and die.
[00:36:24]  Like it's basically about this similar amount of risk versus someone that is in a nursing home.
[00:36:29]  Again, you could say sheltered in place already.
[00:36:32]  Someone who's in a nursing home is a much more controlled environment that you can implement anything.
[00:36:37]  So like DeSantis, going back to Fauci's criticism and Dr. Berks' criticism, I don't even think they understand what DeSantis is even doing.
[00:36:44]  Like because they say things as if it's like they don't even read his actual policy.
[00:36:47]  But if you read everything he's doing in nursing homes, do you read how he's actually trying to protect the vulnerable, implementing widespread testing, having COVID recovery wards, which again, actually Berks and Fauci, as far as I know, never actually recommended, but actually saved a lot of lives because if you're recovering from COVID, you could potentially still have infectious viral loads.
[00:37:09]  So putting you elsewhere from a highly susceptible population is way more wise.
[00:37:15]  And so instead, it's like COVID only.
[00:37:19]  So I give you another example about how some people are seeing the light.
[00:37:23]  So, you know, Bill Gates was very much on the pro lockdown, direct as severe as possible.
[00:37:30]  Since his Millennium Report, which measures poverty and other pathologies, was so depressing, he has changed his tune because he now sees the data and he goes, wow, this policy was a disaster.
[00:37:42]  He has not said that publicly, but if you read, watch his interviews, it's very clear that he has changed his mind.
[00:37:48]  Yeah, it's very clear he has changed his mind.
[00:37:51]  He's more committed to dogma as a scientist because he doesn't want to go back on his friends.
[00:37:56]  But if Bill Gates came out and said, wow, this was an awful mistake, he would change public opinion by 20 points overnight.
[00:38:02]  But he actually hates Donald Trump so much because he's a religious zealot.
[00:38:06]  His religion is different than you're and I. His religious is defeated, his religion is defeating Trump and conservatives.
[00:38:12]  Because that's because Gates, despite seeing the data, he will not speak out.
[00:38:15]  Please continue.
[00:38:17]  Yes, the ironic thing is like, you know, so much of our culture is like this weird kabuki theater that like everyone knows the elephant in the room, but no one wants to talk about it.
[00:38:25]  And so, you know, my personality is to poke at it and see what happens.
[00:38:29]  So, so like not believing that like lockdowns were basically kind of a BS policy and didn't work and like had a lot of these extra costs.
[00:38:39]  I think widespread people actually believe that.
[00:38:41]  But no one actually wants to say it.
[00:38:43]  Versus if apologies came out and said, hey, sorry, like, you know, I did the best I could.
[00:38:49]  You know, we had bad data at first.
[00:38:51]  I have better data now.
[00:38:52]  Here's what we're going to do to fix the situation.
[00:38:54]  I think the poor rating of that person would skyrocket because Americans are very forgiving as people.
[00:39:00]  What they don't like is being lied to.
[00:39:02]  They don't like being told that something is true and not true.
[00:39:06]  And that's the thing is like, I'm just waiting for somebody to say, I think closest person is DeSantis.
[00:39:10]  I think eventually DeSantis is going to say, okay, yeah, that was a big mistake.
[00:39:13]  Like the media and everything was pushing it.
[00:39:18]  He already said we're never going to do it again.
[00:39:19]  But by that admission, you're also subtly saying that the lockdown was not a good idea.
[00:39:25]  But I'm just waiting for a Public official to finally say it so that we can just sort of move past this like weird acceptance of something like an alternate reality.
[00:39:35]  It's like we're in the matrix, right?
[00:39:36]  And but but COVID is lockdowns are not the only thing.
[00:39:41]  There are a lot of other things going on in society where it feels like we're in the matrix.
[00:39:44]  We're like, what is going on?
[00:39:45]  We're like, like, you know, like criminalization now or like crime is political.
[00:39:49]  Like that, if you have a certain identity, it's not a crime now.
[00:39:51]  Like, it's just, it's just, it's crazy.
[00:39:53]  It's just like, like, what world are we in?
[00:39:55]  Like, what pill did you take?
[00:39:57]  Well, Aaron, what is the website where people can find out more information about what you're doing and the data that you're tracking?
[00:40:03]  You can just follow me on Twitter, A-G-I-N-N-T, Twitter, or you can go to rationalground.com.
[00:40:10]  That's a site that I contribute to.
[00:40:12]  That's you could say the first lockdown skeptics blog in America.
[00:40:18]  So devoted to reason and balance.
[00:40:21]  It's actually a lot of humanitarians.
[00:40:25]  Yes.
[00:40:26]  Well, Aaron, you're doing amazing work.
[00:40:27]  Thank you for joining us.
[00:40:28]  And closing, last question.
[00:40:30]  Is it time to fully reopen our country?
[00:40:32]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:40:33]  Yeah, with reasonable mitigation, high-risk populations, but we also should not tell people things that are not true that supposedly mitigates the risk, like masks.
[00:40:44]  There is not a lot of evidence.
[00:40:46]  It does things.
[00:40:47]  So do not tell people that if you are high risk and you wear a mask, somehow you're safe.
[00:40:52]  It doesn't work that way.
[00:40:53]  Like that's not the way that studies have been done about that.
[00:40:55]  We have no idea.
[00:40:56]  We have good physics evidence, but that's not the same thing as the practical application of a mask in public spaces among people who are untrained to use it.
[00:41:08]  So we need to be honest and fair with people and treat them like adults.
[00:41:13]  Do not treat them like your children.
[00:41:15]  Like, you know, these magical beans will work, right?
[00:41:18]  Like that's not that pseudoscience, it's witchcraft.
[00:41:21]  Like shake my broom and the virus disappears.
[00:41:24]  So we have to be realistic with people and tell them things that actually work, like washing your hands, distancing.
[00:41:31]  If you wear a mask in a crowded space, what?
[00:41:33]  I mean, I would say the evidence shows that that may do something, but it's not the same thing as other public health people saying good as a vaccine.
[00:41:40]  That is profoundly irresponsible because that is not true.
[00:41:45]  I mean, vaccine science is way more, has significantly more evidence behind it.
[00:41:52]  And it goes through rigorous testing than like what masks have been done.
[00:41:57]  And this is why the Nordic countries, other European countries have been much more balanced about masks because they look at the data like it's just not there.

=== Real Public Health Facts (01:35) ===

[00:42:04]  So not also recognizing the fact that the second year consultants is that.
[00:42:08]  But in terms of schools, in terms of businesses, in terms of like free society, absolutely.
[00:42:14]  Human rights don't stop because there's a new novel, coronavirus, that actually has a fairly low mortality rate compared to the Spanish flu or something like that.
[00:42:24]  Human rights do not stop.
[00:42:26]  It didn't stop during wartime.
[00:42:30]  It is something that is universal and good.
[00:42:33]  So we as a society have to accept that there are going to be different downsides as with all various decisions that we make in public policy.
[00:42:41]  And the downsides of continuing the pattern of locking people in and out, scaring them to death, will fundamentally lead to much more significant pathologies than anything that COVID will bring to our nation.
[00:42:59]  Well, Aaron, thank you so much for joining our program.
[00:43:01]  You're doing amazing work.
[00:43:02]  Keep being skeptical.
[00:43:04]  We love it.
[00:43:05]  Thanks for fighting for truth.
[00:43:06]  Thanks, Charlie.
[00:43:07]  Thanks.
[00:43:07]  See you soon.
[00:43:11]  What a great conversation that was at Aaron Ginn.
[00:43:13]  If you guys want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
[00:43:17]  Please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support, charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:43:23]  And if you want to win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, hit subscribe and a five-star review, screenshot it, email it to us at freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:43:34]  Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
[00:43:35]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:43:37]  Talk to you soon.
[00:43:39]  God bless.