April 30, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
07:33
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Dr. Robert Steele is a cardiologist in Michigan, southeast Michigan. | |
| And his piece, you know, you sent me the piece, and it's a terrific piece, and I've been quoting from it. | |
| Have you tried to have it published? | |
| Well, you know, you were asking why they don't, you know, react more strongly to the data, and I think you're just starting to hit on that a little bit. | |
| I've submitted it to many places and offered many local radio shows, you know, to go on and discuss this with them, and, you know, I haven't had much takers locally. | |
| Obviously, what I think is a little long for the traditional, but I think... | |
| You know, we do have a goalpost moving problem here. | |
| We've heard that referred to, and we just have to remember that the whole point of the shutdown and stay at home was to protect the healthcare system and flatten the curve. | |
| And, you know, not going through all the data again, in Michigan, we have done that in spades. | |
| We have, you know, 60% occupancy rate. | |
| We have hospitals furloughing employees, doctors and regular employees being furloughed. | |
| We now have... | |
| We have ICUs sitting empty. | |
| We have 2,000 ventilators sitting around unused. | |
| There's just all sorts of resources available. | |
| And so in the geographic locations and in the industries that have kind of appropriate social distancing, so to speak, to start with, they should begin to resume without question their activities. | |
| Same for schools. | |
| There's lots of information for schools that... | |
| The young are extremely protected and don't transmit easily to other people, and there are many other countries that are already opening their schools. | |
| So I think the key thing is we just can't use blanket treatments for a whole state, especially one like Michigan, which is geographically very diverse, and it's a large state. | |
| A lot of it's empty. | |
| You know, we have one congressional district that has only 15 COVID patients in the hospital and three on ventilators, a whole congressional district. | |
| And to act like they're southeast Detroit in the midst of this hot spot is just not the case. | |
| And in Detroit, there are four hospital systems with over 100 patients in the intensive care unit, COVID patients. | |
| So it's a real disease. | |
| It's not to make light in any way of the fact that it's real and requires treatment. | |
| I haven't heard anybody say that we should abandon all, that we should quit washing our hands and we should, you know, start hugging and kissing strangers on the streets. | |
| But we need to use some common sense. | |
| I mean, my goodness gracious, it's just, you know, if you're going to do real science, you've got to look at the data and then interpret it and use it. | |
| Have you sent this to the Detroit Free Press? | |
| Not the free press, no. | |
| Not yet. | |
| It's a little long, you know, what I sent you, and I'm pretty busy, so it's hard. | |
| You know how it is. | |
| Making something shorter is very difficult. | |
| I'm well aware. | |
| Yeah, I know. | |
| You're an expert at that. | |
| I understand. | |
| You've got those five-minute videos. | |
| It's insane what you guys do to that. | |
| I can't imagine the editing. | |
| Well, it's very sweet. | |
| Yes, we're good at that. | |
| The therapy of shelter-in-place now offers significantly more risk than benefit. | |
| I'm reading again his conclusion. | |
| In some locations, not every location. | |
| Right, exactly. | |
| Okay, so I understand. | |
| But I did not know what you would answer when I asked, would you enter a restaurant now? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And people got to remember, I mean, you know, I wear a mask if somebody knows I'm a doctor and I'm out because they think, well, he's a doctor and he's not wearing a mask. | |
| The mask is to protect the other people from you. | |
| Right, correct. | |
| And so, you know, this whole idea of masks business is... | |
| You know, fair, you know, because there's a lot of asymptomatic people, and if you're high risk, and that's the point. | |
| If you're high risk, you shouldn't be out running around in the midst of restaurants or theaters or subways. | |
| If you're high risk, you should be taking care of yourself exactly like you take care of yourself in a high flu season. | |
| Right. | |
| So, why do you think of JetBlue's announcement that all passengers will have to wear masks? | |
| Well... | |
| If they fill the seats and start flying regular, you know, it may not make any sense medically, but, you know, we do know that it depends who's on the plane. | |
| You know, if they're all low-risk people on the plane, it's not going to help anything. | |
| You know, if you've got a couple of high-risk people coming in on oxygen, maybe it does help. | |
| But this disease is here. | |
| You know, all this talk about testing. | |
| We need antibody testing. | |
| We need to know who's exposed. | |
| We need the health care workers and the first responders tested. | |
| But this whole idea of saying that opening depends strictly on testing just makes no sense whatsoever. | |
| Yeah, I never understood. | |
| It's not going away. | |
| Right. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But, okay. | |
| So, the issue is no longer science guiding us. | |
| It's philosophy of life guiding us. | |
| Well, in large part, I mean, the media is killing us. | |
| Because the media, I mean, most people don't know that, you know, the Netherlands and the Swiss and the Australians, and some of these studies going back over a week ago, published in their big press in Australia and so forth, that, hey, kids, we're sending them back to school. | |
| They're not risky. | |
| They don't transmit the disease very easily. | |
| And the Netherlands and Switzerland have come to the same conclusion. | |
| You don't read about that in our popular press. | |
| They're more interested in headlines and death counts and that sort of thing. | |
| But, you know, 45,000 people die every month from heart disease. | |
| 40,000 people die every month from cancer. | |
| And you don't hear them talking about that all the time. | |
| Yeah, no kidding. | |
| All right, I got a final question. | |
| I have no idea. | |
| None, because you didn't even hint anything about it. | |
| I have no idea what you'll answer, but obviously I'm curious. | |
| Hydroxychloroquine. | |
| I think we used it at the beginning in patients who were sick in the hospital. | |
| We've cut way back. | |
| I don't think probably there's much data that helps when you're really sick. | |
| There are great studies going on right now to answer the question in a scientific manner, whether it helps or not. | |
| But I think one of the key things about all the excitement at the beginning about all these patients getting better, that's why you need a placebo, because now we find out that most people are asymptomatic or get better anyway. | |
| So something that looks really good and a disease that isn't dangerous may not be as good as you think it is. | |
| But it's a very low-risk drug. | |
| I mean, that's one thing that's been blown out of proportion is how risky it is. | |
| You know, there were 5 million prescriptions written for hydroxychloroquine two years ago in the United States, and it's been around since 1935, and hundreds of millions of people have taken it. | |
| I've never once seen a patient taken off it for long QT, and I'm not aware of any of the rheumatologists I work with doing EKGs before they put them on it. | |
| By the way, to be fair, I had one of the most advocative of the physicians, Dr. Zelenko, on last week, and his claim is hydroxychloroquine is not the healing agent. | |
| The healing agent is zinc, and hydroxychloroquine makes it possible for the zinc to attack the virus. | |
| And that could very well. | |
| We were giving hydroxychloroquine, zinc, vitamin C, and then sometimes steroids, depending on how sick they were. | |
| But I think, you know, once they're sick and on a ventilator or very sick... | |
| No, it's too late then. | |
| You're dealing with a different... | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| He acknowledges that. | |
| It should be in the beginning. | |
| But your point is the key one anyway. |
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