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March 3, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
08:50
Michael Fumento on the Corona Virus
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He's batting a thousand.
There's an epidemic, or pseudo-epidemic, or reported epidemic, and I call Michael Fomento.
Michael Fomento writes on Science.
He's an investigative reporter, and because he's batting a thousand, I think he's worthy of hearing.
He had a piece in the New York Post last week, correct?
Where was it, Michael Fomento?
Where was your piece that we read?
It's the New York Post.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
And you're writing another piece I saw an early draft of.
So, Michael, the latest news is that the Western world is closing down.
They're stopping conventions.
International meetings are coming to a halt.
So, how do you react to all this?
Well, you know, the progress of the disease hasn't surprised me a bit.
But even I have been stunned by the progress of the hysteria.
It is absolutely stunning.
I mean, even here, I'm in the Philippines right now.
We have had a grand total of zero transmissions here.
I'm not saying zero deaths.
I'm saying zero transmission from Filipino to Filipino.
But you see, you walk to the malls and people have these masks on.
You go to the bars.
I went to the bar section this weekend.
Yeah, first time in months.
But anyway, there's nobody in the bars!
Oh my God.
Oh, so the panic has hit the Philippines.
And you point out in the piece that you will be publishing, these things die in hot climates.
As a rule, in fact, remember that SARS was going to kill us all, right?
It ultimately killed about 800 people.
And SARS itself...
Died in July of that year.
It simply, it ceased to exist.
And a lot of that had to do with the fact that these respiratory viruses, by these I mean SARS, I mean influenza, I mean cold, they simply don't thrive in hot and moist weather.
So every single year, flu in the United States is gone.
By April or May.
I know sometimes you hear people talk about, I couldn't come to work on August 1st because I had the flu.
No!
No Americans have the flu in the summer months.
Zero.
And we're going to see that same thing with COVID. So by the way, it argues for a healthier world if it gets warmer.
I thought about that.
A case for global warming.
Yes, exactly.
The benefits of global warming.
By the way, there are huge benefits of global warming.
There's more agriculture as possible.
Yes.
No, you're right about that.
Definitely, CO2 in the atmosphere is great for agriculture.
No doubt about it.
It would seem that way.
So, I am shocked to learn that even in the Philippines, people are not congregating.
It shows the power of media, which, of course, I've talked about all of my life, and it's a very scary power.
Are there any voices?
I don't watch.
Are there any voices?
I'm asking you, Michael, and I'm asking my producer.
Are there any voices in the American media, or, for that matter, Filipino media?
That are saying, hold on, folks, maybe this is panic?
Well, actually, one day after my piece appeared in the New York Post, which was January 22nd, there was a piece in the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle paper saying, you know, something along the same lines, don't panic.
But I'm guessing probably both of those papers...
I've since walked back on it because, you know, nobody likes to stand out.
Nobody likes to be outside the herd, as it were, because the animals outside the herd, they perform a very valuable function.
They find the food, they find the water, but they're the ones who also get picked up by the predators.
And, you know, I dream like over 30 years of writing about these things.
I have lost jobs.
I have lost, you know, I've really, really been battered for being outside the herd.
And, you know, it hasn't done my career any good.
But you've been right.
The irony is you have been right.
That's what's so painful.
It doesn't matter.
That's right.
It doesn't matter.
The people who are wrong each and every single epidemic are still the ones who appear on CNN and Anderson Cooper and MSNBC and all of them.
It doesn't matter that they're wrong and it doesn't matter that I was wrong.
So why do you regard this as being?
Is this a variation on a flu?
What do you think it is?
Genetically, it's more of a variation.
It's actually closer to cold, strangely enough.
And it's definitely closer to SARS and the coronavirus.
But what we really care about is not the genetics.
It's really two things.
It's how contagious is it, and the fatality rate.
Now the fatality rate we really don't know because we don't know how many true cases there are out there.
With both flu and with COVID-19, the vast majority of people have symptoms so slight that they don't ever go to a doctor.
That's right.
This is so important for people to understand.
There are many people right now walking around with the coronavirus who don't know it and will be fine.
And they're not counted in the data.
What's the flu virus?
What's the flu virus?
Both of them.
So we don't have a denominator.
At best, we have a numerator.
But you have to have a numerator and a denominator to come up with a percentage.
So I've heard figures like 2% of people with COVID-19.
I know.
That's the...
Nonsense.
And it includes all the China deaths where the health care is awful.
Right.
You simply can't equate China to the United States or Canada or France.
You can't equate China to, you know, maybe to North Korea.
I suspect it's worse in North Korea, you know, on a personal level than in China.
I'm sure it is.
You know, North Korea is being shocked.
Well, anyway, in North Korea, so many people die prematurely that one wouldn't even know if it was the virus or simple North Korean starvation.
Right, you wouldn't even know.
But here's some really interesting facts.
I like to stick with the flu.
Let's use the flu as a comparison.
So far this year, according to CDC, A minimum of 18,000 Americans have died from the flu.
That's this season.
A minimum of 18,000, a maximum of around 60,000.
How many Americans have died of COVID-19 so far?
Two.
Now, there's going to be more.
More Americans are going to die.
It's not going to be the ticket, too.
But more Americans are going to die of flu.
In fact, two years ago...
The CDC says 80,000 Americans died of flu.
That was just two years ago.
80,000!
And we're up against two COVID-19 deaths.
Yeah.
It's painful, the panic.
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