May 5, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
02:57
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Stanford Nobel Prize winner in chemistry is actually on the line. | |
| Professor Michael Levitt, thank you, sir, for coming on the show. | |
| Great. | |
| I'm here. | |
| Okay, great. | |
| Glad to have you. | |
| So, you have taken positions that I 100% share. | |
| When you write, there is no doubt in my mind that, or you say, I don't know if you wrote it, that there is no doubt in my mind that when we come... | |
| To look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor. | |
| So, since I completely agree and have warned this from the beginning, I have a question. | |
| Given the number of your colleagues in the entire world of academic science who got it wrong, what is the public supposed to conclude? | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's hard for me to comment on what public concludes and also what my colleagues got wrong. | |
| I think there was a great deal of widespread confusion, panic, both in the normal world and the academic world. | |
| You know, you probably need to ask a sociologist. | |
| Or psychologists or economists to comment on this. | |
| I very much play by the numbers. | |
| I looked at these numbers coming out of China more than 100 days ago. | |
| And the more I looked at them, the more they indicated that this virus was not as serious as people were making out. | |
| I think it's difficult. | |
| If you look at the role that epidemiologists play, often they play the role of sounding a warning signal to society. | |
| It's a bit like, say, a fireman or somebody in a high tower saying there's smoke to do something about it. | |
| And the trouble is that what they need to happen is for society to act often in a very drastic way. | |
| So I think... | |
| From my experience, and I've been a bit surprised by this, that in this particular field, it's okay to exaggerate very much on the high side, but completely not okay to underestimate. | |
| So let's just say I think there's going to be 1,000 deaths, and somebody else says there's going to be a million deaths. | |
| Well, if there's 2,000 deaths, people will be very angry with me for getting it wrong. | |
| And they'll probably say, oh, well, you know. |
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