Oct. 14, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
04:19
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So I was just talking to you about, there's a truly significant book just out, The Price of Panic. | |
| Three terrific authors. | |
| I have one of them on. | |
| Jay Richards is, along with Douglas Axe and William Briggs, wrote this book. | |
| It's very rare you get a book written by three people. | |
| I'm going to ask you about that in a moment. | |
| How the Tyranny of Experts Turned the Pandemic into a Catastrophe. | |
| I'm a little annoyed with you because I'm going to have to read it. | |
| No, no, I'm not joking. | |
| You have no idea. | |
| It's such an important book, and I just have no choice. | |
| So you are a fellow at the Discovery Institute, which is one of my favorite places in America. | |
| And just out of curiosity, how do three people write a book? | |
| Not easily. | |
| I mean, on the one hand, I think we probably could have done it as quickly as we had otherwise. | |
| But it's not easy. | |
| One of us, William Briggs, is a professional statistician. | |
| Doug Axe is a biologist. | |
| I'm a philosopher that teaches business and economics at Catholic University. | |
| I'm also at Discovery Institute. | |
| But it really took, actually, all that expertise. | |
| Oh, I believe you. | |
| A lot of this has to do with, you know, statistics and computer modeling. | |
| And then you've got, of course, biology. | |
| And then just the weighing of the genuine cost, which is the task of economics. | |
| Not just the economic, but the human cost. | |
| Of not the COVID-19 itself, but of the lockdowns themselves. | |
| We realize, you know, that not only do they probably not have any obvious effect, there's no signal in the noise of the curves, the different death and case curves for government lockdowns. | |
| You wouldn't even know when the lockdowns happened if you sort of map this out as we do in the book. | |
| So that's the really bad news, is there probably was no benefit. | |
| Then you look at the cost, and the costs are absolutely astronomical. | |
| I don't know if you heard, and it's quite alright if you didn't, but right before you, I was reading from the Jerusalem Post the staggering statistics in Israel of increased child abuse, suicide, drug addiction, etc. | |
| because of the lockdown. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Israel is one of the countries that has just gone all in on the lockdowns, unfortunately. | |
| Same in New Zealand. | |
| And so basically, Israel and the Anglosphere have gone all in on this. | |
| We have some countries in East Asia, like Taiwan. | |
| William Briggs was there, by the way, the entire time we were writing the book, in Vietnam, which actually had very few deaths. | |
| And fortunately, in the United States, we have a federal system, and so different states did different things. | |
| That's terrible if you're in California. | |
| That's great if you're in Oklahoma or Florida. | |
| But for us, it was helpful because it allows us to actually test the hypothesis about the effects of the lockdown because we can compare different states. | |
| And what we discover is that, no, the lockdowns just didn't make any difference at all so far as we can tell on the spread of the virus. | |
| The subtitle is as important as your title. | |
| The title is The Price of Panic. | |
| It's up, folks, at DennisPrager.com. | |
| You'll want to read it as I do. | |
| How the tyranny of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe. | |
| I want you to know that as soon as I see the word expert, this is now mentoring the realm of emotion. | |
| I just want my listeners to understand this, and obviously you. | |
| My emotional reaction, but partially intellectual, is I assume they're fools. | |
| I think that's actually the right emotion at this point. | |
| Now, of course, people can have an expert who has a very narrow specialty, and within that specialty, if you're wondering some specific question about epidemiology, ask an epidemiologist. | |
| The problem is, in the case of the pandemic, we had these very narrow technocratic experts, people like Dr. Anthony Fauci or Dr. Tedros, who's the head of the World Health Organization, who know absolutely nothing about the sort of prudence of... | |
| Yes, hold on there, hold on. | |
| This is critical stuff. |
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