Dennis Prager Show - Michael Fumento on the Corona Virus
Aired: 2020-03-03
Duration: 08:50


=== Zero Media Voices Outside Herd (05:25) ===

[00:00:00]  He's batting a thousand.
[00:00:02]  There's an epidemic, or pseudo-epidemic, or reported epidemic, and I call Michael Fomento.
[00:00:11]  Michael Fomento writes on Science.
[00:00:13]  He's an investigative reporter, and because he's batting a thousand, I think he's worthy of hearing.
[00:00:21]  He had a piece in the New York Post last week, correct?
[00:00:25]  Where was it, Michael Fomento?
[00:00:27]  Where was your piece that we read?
[00:00:30]  It's the New York Post.
[00:00:32]  Yeah, that's what I thought.
[00:00:33]  And you're writing another piece I saw an early draft of.
[00:00:38]  So, Michael, the latest news is that the Western world is closing down.
[00:00:49]  They're stopping conventions.
[00:00:53]  International meetings are coming to a halt.
[00:00:56]  So, how do you react to all this?
[00:01:00]  Well, you know, the progress of the disease hasn't surprised me a bit.
[00:01:06]  But even I have been stunned by the progress of the hysteria.
[00:01:12]  It is absolutely stunning.
[00:01:16]  I mean, even here, I'm in the Philippines right now.
[00:01:21]  We have had a grand total of zero transmissions here.
[00:01:26]  I'm not saying zero deaths.
[00:01:28]  I'm saying zero transmission from Filipino to Filipino.
[00:01:34]  But you see, you walk to the malls and people have these masks on.
[00:01:39]  You go to the bars.
[00:01:40]  I went to the bar section this weekend.
[00:01:43]  Yeah, first time in months.
[00:01:45]  But anyway, there's nobody in the bars!
[00:01:48]  Oh my God.
[00:01:50]  Oh, so the panic has hit the Philippines.
[00:01:54]  And you point out in the piece that you will be publishing, these things die in hot climates.
[00:02:04]  As a rule, in fact, remember that SARS was going to kill us all, right?
[00:02:11]  It ultimately killed about 800 people.
[00:02:15]  And SARS itself...
[00:02:18]  Died in July of that year.
[00:02:21]  It simply, it ceased to exist.
[00:02:24]  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.
[00:02:40]  So every single year, flu in the United States is gone.
[00:02:45]  By April or May.
[00:02:47]  I know sometimes you hear people talk about, I couldn't come to work on August 1st because I had the flu.
[00:02:56]  No!
[00:02:57]  No Americans have the flu in the summer months.
[00:03:01]  Zero.
[00:03:02]  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.
[00:03:14]  I thought about that.
[00:03:16]  A case for global warming.
[00:03:18]  Yes, exactly.
[00:03:19]  The benefits of global warming.
[00:03:21]  By the way, there are huge benefits of global warming.
[00:03:25]  There's more agriculture as possible.
[00:03:29]  Yes.
[00:03:30]  No, you're right about that.
[00:03:32]  Definitely, CO2 in the atmosphere is great for agriculture.
[00:03:35]  No doubt about it.
[00:03:36]  It would seem that way.
[00:03:39]  So, I am shocked to learn that even in the Philippines, people are not congregating.
[00:03:45]  It shows the power of media, which, of course, I've talked about all of my life, and it's a very scary power.
[00:03:53]  Are there any voices?
[00:03:54]  I don't watch.
[00:03:56]  Are there any voices?
[00:03:57]  I'm asking you, Michael, and I'm asking my producer.
[00:04:00]  Are there any voices in the American media, or, for that matter, Filipino media?
[00:04:06]  That are saying, hold on, folks, maybe this is panic?
[00:04:11]  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.
[00:04:31]  But I'm guessing probably both of those papers...
[00:04:35]  I've since walked back on it because, you know, nobody likes to stand out.
[00:04:41]  Nobody likes to be outside the herd, as it were, because the animals outside the herd, they perform a very valuable function.
[00:04:51]  They find the food, they find the water, but they're the ones who also get picked up by the predators.
[00:04:59]  And, you know, I dream like over 30 years of writing about these things.
[00:05:03]  I have lost jobs.
[00:05:05]  I have lost, you know, I've really, really been battered for being outside the herd.

=== Closer To A Cold (03:39) ===

[00:05:13]  And, you know, it hasn't done my career any good.
[00:05:17]  But you've been right.
[00:05:18]  The irony is you have been right.
[00:05:21]  That's what's so painful.
[00:05:22]  It doesn't matter.
[00:05:24]  That's right.
[00:05:24]  It doesn't matter.
[00:05:27]  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.
[00:05:39]  It doesn't matter that they're wrong and it doesn't matter that I was wrong.
[00:05:43]  So why do you regard this as being?
[00:05:46]  Is this a variation on a flu?
[00:05:49]  What do you think it is?
[00:05:53]  Genetically, it's more of a variation.
[00:05:56]  It's actually closer to cold, strangely enough.
[00:06:00]  And it's definitely closer to SARS and the coronavirus.
[00:06:05]  But what we really care about is not the genetics.
[00:06:10]  It's really two things.
[00:06:12]  It's how contagious is it, and the fatality rate.
[00:06:18]  Now the fatality rate we really don't know because we don't know how many true cases there are out there.
[00:06:25]  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.
[00:06:37]  That's right.
[00:06:38]  This is so important for people to understand.
[00:06:41]  There are many people right now walking around with the coronavirus who don't know it and will be fine.
[00:06:50]  And they're not counted in the data.
[00:06:52]  What's the flu virus?
[00:06:54]  What's the flu virus?
[00:06:55]  Both of them.
[00:06:56]  So we don't have a denominator.
[00:06:59]  At best, we have a numerator.
[00:07:01]  But you have to have a numerator and a denominator to come up with a percentage.
[00:07:05]  So I've heard figures like 2% of people with COVID-19.
[00:07:10]  I know.
[00:07:10]  That's the...
[00:07:12]  Nonsense.
[00:07:13]  And it includes all the China deaths where the health care is awful.
[00:07:19]  Right.
[00:07:20]  You simply can't equate China to the United States or Canada or France.
[00:07:27]  You can't equate China to, you know, maybe to North Korea.
[00:07:31]  I suspect it's worse in North Korea, you know, on a personal level than in China.
[00:07:36]  I'm sure it is.
[00:07:38]  You know, North Korea is being shocked.
[00:07:42]  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.
[00:07:54]  Right, you wouldn't even know.
[00:07:56]  But here's some really interesting facts.
[00:08:00]  I like to stick with the flu.
[00:08:02]  Let's use the flu as a comparison.
[00:08:05]  So far this year, according to CDC, A minimum of 18,000 Americans have died from the flu.
[00:08:14]  That's this season.
[00:08:15]  A minimum of 18,000, a maximum of around 60,000.
[00:08:20]  How many Americans have died of COVID-19 so far?
[00:08:25]  Two.
[00:08:26]  Now, there's going to be more.
[00:08:28]  More Americans are going to die.
[00:08:29]  It's not going to be the ticket, too.
[00:08:31]  But more Americans are going to die of flu.
[00:08:33]  In fact, two years ago...
[00:08:35]  The CDC says 80,000 Americans died of flu.
[00:08:41]  That was just two years ago.
[00:08:42]  80,000!
[00:08:43]  And we're up against two COVID-19 deaths.
[00:08:46]  Yeah.
[00:08:48]  It's painful, the panic.