May 13, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
04:59
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| He's a professor of pathology and a former consultant to the National Health Service in the UK. And he has been writing moral clarity and medical clarity throughout this lockdown. | |
| He writes, among other places, for The Spectator, which I have a paid subscription to because I want to support The Spectator. | |
| The latest is 10 reasons to end the lockdown now. | |
| Dr. Lee, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Good morning. | |
| Oh, that was very thoughtful of you to wish me a good morning because it's good evening where you are. | |
| I'm on the ball. | |
| You're on the ball, exactly. | |
| Where were you a professor of pathology? | |
| I was a professor at the Hull York Medical School, which is a medical school in the UK based between the city of Hull and the city of York. | |
| Yes, I know a bit about the area. | |
| For one year, I studied at the University of Leeds. | |
| Oh, right. | |
| Yeah, so not so far away. | |
| Right, exactly. | |
| Anyway, thank you for your work. | |
| Are you getting a lot of pushback because you obviously don't represent the medical community's views? | |
| I'm not sure that's true, to be honest with you. | |
| I mean, I think the... | |
| The views that we're seeing on the mainstream media are not necessarily the views that are bubbling around below the surface. | |
| And obviously the medical community that are most visible, I guess, here and in the United States are the official advisers to the government. | |
| And, of course, official advisers to government tend to have the views that they tend to have, which are often cautious and committee-driven and, as we know from, I guess, past experience of lots of things, not necessarily. | |
| Were you, from the beginning, skeptical of the lockdown? | |
| To be honest, I was. | |
| The reason being that when you have a new disease, a new epidemic coming, there's a thing called ascertainment bias. | |
| And it means you always spot the worst cases first. | |
| So, you know, the people who have a new disease who are pretty well, they don't turn up in the statistics, whereas the people who get a new disease and they're really ill go to ITU where it's spotted. | |
| So because the testing is then developed on the hoof in hospital settings, it seems to suggest that a new disease is a very serious, awful thing. | |
| And the numbers that were coming out of Wuhan in China did suggest that. | |
| But as time has gone by, we can see that, in fact, this is a much... | |
| It's still a nasty disease. | |
| Don't get me wrong. | |
| It's still a nasty disease. | |
| But it's a much less... | |
| So, had you been the decider in the UK from the beginning, what would you have said to Boris Johnson? | |
| I think all our politicians had a difficult job to do. | |
| Obviously, they have a difficult job to do. | |
| Who would want to do their job? | |
| But the thing is, when the pictures were coming out of China and then Italy and Spain and New York City of crowded ITUs and lots of people getting this disease simultaneously, you can see that there was a great pressure on politicians to do something. | |
| And at that stage, based on pretty imperfect data, but at that stage, There was a great worry that this was a very serious disease. | |
| I think one could understand why lockdown was, you know, why we did lockdown to start with. | |
| But, you know, now weeks have gone by, and I think we have a clearer view of what this virus really is and what it's doing. | |
| And it seems to me that in the same way that we changed the policy to go into lockdown, we should now be changing it to come out. | |
| But, of course, once people have convinced themselves that the sky is falling, it's actually quite hard to then reverse it. | |
| But I think that's where we are now. | |
| What are the plans in Britain to open up? | |
| Well, they're very limited at the moment. | |
| We have a strange situation here where the four different countries in Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, are all doing slightly different things. | |
| But in England, where I live, we're going to be allowed to go out and do a bit more exercise. | |
| But they're still very keen for us to stay socially distanced and not meet up with more than one other person from your household. | |
| And you can't do team sports, and the restaurants are all closed, and the cinemas are closed. | |
| And, you know, a lot of the things that make people's life worth living, for example, seeing their grandchildren, you know, these are still difficult. | |
| So, you know, there's a very slight easing, but personally I'd like to see it go further faster, because I think we could. | |
| Okay, we're going to continue in a moment. | |
| What makes radio possible in America is commercials, so forgive me. |
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