Dennis Prager Show - Why Were the Coronavirus Predictions SO WRONG?⎜The Dennis Prager Radio Show
Aired: 2020-05-05
Duration: 02:57


=== Numbers Speak Louder (02:57) ===

[00:00:00]  Stanford Nobel Prize winner in chemistry is actually on the line.
[00:00:04]  Professor Michael Levitt, thank you, sir, for coming on the show.
[00:00:11]  Great.
[00:00:11]  I'm here.
[00:00:12]  Okay, great.
[00:00:13]  Glad to have you.
[00:00:15]  So, you have taken positions that I 100% share.
[00:00:21]  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...
[00:00:28]  To look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.
[00:00:35]  So, since I completely agree and have warned this from the beginning, I have a question.
[00:00:43]  Given the number of your colleagues in the entire world of academic science who got it wrong, what is the public supposed to conclude?
[00:00:58]  I don't know.
[00:01:04]  It's hard for me to comment on what public concludes and also what my colleagues got wrong.
[00:01:11]  I think there was a great deal of widespread confusion, panic, both in the normal world and the academic world.
[00:01:23]  You know, you probably need to ask a sociologist.
[00:01:27]  Or psychologists or economists to comment on this.
[00:01:32]  I very much play by the numbers.
[00:01:36]  I looked at these numbers coming out of China more than 100 days ago.
[00:01:41]  And the more I looked at them, the more they indicated that this virus was not as serious as people were making out.
[00:01:52]  I think it's difficult.
[00:01:58]  If you look at the role that epidemiologists play, often they play the role of sounding a warning signal to society.
[00:02:11]  It's a bit like, say, a fireman or somebody in a high tower saying there's smoke to do something about it.
[00:02:18]  And the trouble is that what they need to happen is for society to act often in a very drastic way.
[00:02:27]  So I think...
[00:02:28]  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.
[00:02:42]  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.
[00:02:49]  Well, if there's 2,000 deaths, people will be very angry with me for getting it wrong.
[00:02:55]  And they'll probably say, oh, well, you know.