Dec. 4, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
09:51
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The Yale School of Public Health, Harvey Risch. | |
| That's R-I-S-C-H. Again, professor of epidemiology, a discipline that I have increasingly not respected. | |
| I will talk to him about that. | |
| The Yale School of Public Health. | |
| Just this past week, he testified at the U.S. Senate. | |
| And then there was a big attack on... | |
| His testimony, though not him by name, in the New York Times by another epidemiologist. | |
| Dr. Risch, Professor Risch, welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Nice to be with you. | |
| Let me begin with my provocative opening. | |
| When I hear the name epidemiologist, at this time in my life, and it's a statement about public policy. | |
| I assume that I'm going to hear something foolish. | |
| Okay, well, I had no idea how you would react, since it is your field. | |
| So please react. | |
| Well, unfortunately today, everybody lays claim to being an epidemiologist. | |
| And there is a lot of nonsense out there of people posing. | |
| As epidemiologists or giving epidemiologic advice. | |
| And I can understand that it's hard for laypeople to know what the difference is. | |
| And this happened in our Senate hearing where epidemiologic testimony and the opposing witness gave testimony that had no relevance to epidemiology and is not an epidemiologist. | |
| He has a Master's of Public Health degree, but that alone is not sufficient to qualify one as an epidemiologist. | |
| And so, you know, I think that regardless of titles and regardless of labeling people as epidemiologists, what matters more is the validity of the science that they quote and the support of the scientific evidence. | |
| And that's the bottom line here, ultimately. | |
| To make things worse, when I hear public health, then the person is guilty before I assume they're guilty. | |
| I'll give you an example. | |
| I live in Los Angeles County. | |
| You live in Connecticut? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| So in Los Angeles County, as of today, you cannot dine in a restaurant, even outdoors. | |
| So more restaurants and more workers. | |
| More restaurants will go out of business. | |
| More workers in restaurants will be unemployed and lose their savings. | |
| And this is done because the case amount, not even hospitalization, the case amount has reached a certain number that the head of public health, Barbara Ferrer, in Los Angeles County has deemed sufficient to ruin the lives. | |
| Of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. | |
| She's a public health person. | |
| I don't even believe she's a medical doctor. | |
| So just let me finish for a moment because I want you to speak more. | |
| But five miles away from where I am broadcasting, I am in L.A. County. | |
| Five, ten miles away is Pasadena, California. | |
| Pasadena has its own health department. | |
| They are allowing restaurants to stay open. | |
| So it's so obvious that it's not science that is determinative of these measures. | |
| So I'll ask you, what is? | |
| Well, the problem is that there's a big lack of quality data on all of these particular intangibles. | |
| And one of the problems is that it's not even possible. | |
| with whatever public health technologies we have to study some of the questions and it takes too long to do the studies and so it's not possible to know with any precision how to proceed and that leads to a range of decisions based on we have to suppress everything in order to reduce the risk maximally to one is that well if some infections do occur That's in the context of hundreds | |
| of thousands of people who are otherwise trying to carry on as best they can with their daily lives. | |
| This is a risk balance equation. | |
| That's a value judgment. | |
| It is not a scientific judgment because there's no data or the data are inadequate. | |
| And so the problem is that people are being pressed, public health people are being pressed, to make these decisions without adequate data. | |
| And it leads to value judgments posing as scientific decisions. | |
| And that's a big problem. | |
| The science has to be done as best as possible, recognizing that there really isn't so much science for some of these considerations. | |
| And all of this then arises in the context of panic. | |
| And that's a problem because the motivation for panic is not the actual risks that people face. | |
| It's one that's been pushed onto the public by media who obtained benefit by exaggerating claims in order to, as journalism has done for its entire history, obtaining readership. | |
| And that exaggeration has led to the fear and panic in the general population. | |
| And to a maladaptive behavior, and maladaptive meaning not just of people's personal decisions, but of public health decisions, societal decisions, political decisions, and so on. | |
| So basically, you have to evaluate this on a cost-benefit analysis as the health person in Pasadena did and the one in Los Angeles did and came to different conclusions for what are essentially the same considerations. | |
| If you were the czar of health in America, what would you call for? | |
| I would call for availability of immediate treatment medications for people outside the hospital as soon as they get sick, so they have access to early and beneficial and safe treatments, which we know exist and which have been highly suppressed so they have access to early and beneficial and safe treatments, which we know exist and which have been highly suppressed in So you would not lock down the society? | |
| Not at all. | |
| In fact, the only motivation for locking down the society at the beginning was because we didn't know anything about the pandemic. | |
| But even at that point, what we know now is even at that point, the infection was endemic. | |
| That means it was in the population to such a degree. | |
| That there is no way to trace every last case, to wait for every last case to have occurred and gone away. | |
| It's not like the influenza or common cold. | |
| In the population, it comes and goes, it changes, but it cannot be eradicated completely. | |
| And once that realization is obtained, then no amount of lockdown will do anything other than postpone. | |
| And so lockdowns that do have an immediate benefit of reducing cases, we've seen this in lockdowns in other countries, that the caseloads go down pretty dramatically. | |
| But what happens is you wait a few weeks or a month and they start to come back up again because the cases are in the population. | |
| And the only benefit of a lockdown is temporary. | |
| And the cost of a lockdown... | |
| It's everything that cannot be done during the time of the lockdown, which is socially and economically destructive. | |
| So the temporary benefit is a very low level of benefit in the long term. | |
| And what has to be realized is another mechanism has to be obtained for solving the problem, and that mechanism is early treatment. | |
| Right, which I want to talk to you about right now. | |
| I want to remind everybody, I'm speaking to Professor Harvey Risch, Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. | |
| And when you speak of early intervention, I assume we're talking about something like hydroxychloroquine and zinc? | |
| Or ivermectin, or bromexine, which may be available here. | |
| Or steroids, corticosteroids, like budafonide or prednisone. | |
| We have a whole regimen of different medications that play various overlapping and helpful roles, and doctors know how to treat them. | |
| The doctors who are on the ground treating thousands of patients know how to manage this and to treat it very effectively. | |
| All right, we'll be back in a moment, Dr. Risch. | |
| Was accused of selling snake oil to the U.S. Senate in the New York Times. |
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