May 11, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:12
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I think a lot of the media coverage has focused on a relatively narrow set of doctors who are very vocal and not many of whom are very prominently placed. | |
| But in fact, I think a large fraction of doctors, even epidemiologists, are uncomfortable and have been uncomfortable with the lockdown approach. | |
| When we put the Great Pension Declaration out, tens of thousands of doctors... | |
| Epidemiologist scientists signed on, despite enormous pressure to not. | |
| I've had lots of people who've signed on write to me and tell me that they have had their jobs threatened because of their support for these ideas. | |
| So there's been an enormous amount of pressure, I think, within the medical community and in the scientific community at large to sort of argue for or to at least tacitly support or stay silent about the lockdowns even despite any qualms that someone might have about within the medical community and in the scientific community at large Who is that pressure coming from? | |
| Often internal. | |
| Right, so it's coming from other doctors. | |
| Yeah, from other doctors. | |
| But instead of having an open debate about the wisdom or lack of wisdom about the lockdowns, about what the right policies might be, What's happened is essentially a demonization of people who dissent. | |
| It's nothing like I've ever seen in my... | |
| I've been working as a professor for 20-some years, and I've been training for longer than that. | |
| I've never seen an environment anywhere like this ever before on a scientific question, at least that I've put my attention to. | |
| Okay, so I'm sorry to push you, but how do you explain that? | |
| I mean, I think part of it is, you know, this was a new disease that nobody had any experience with. | |
| The early experience out of China, I think, played a big role in how many scientists viewed this. | |
| Evidence coming out of China that this was, A, a very deadly disease for a certain set of people, and B, that a draconian lockdown, apparently, dissolved the epidemic within a short number of months. | |
| I think that played an outsized role in people's imagination about what sorts of policies at work, how deadly disease was, and a whole range of other things. | |
| They landed on a set of policies, they meaning like the NIAID, Dr. Fauci, and I shouldn't just focus on him, a whole range of Western governments landed on a range of policies that essentially copied that approach, and they decided that was the only approach. | |
| They had a misleading sort of take on how deadly the disease actually is. | |
| So from the early days of the epidemic, I worked on a set of studies called seroprevalence studies. | |
| A seroprevalence study measures the level of antibodies in the population at large, providing evidence of how widespread the disease was. | |
| So, for instance, I helped conduct a seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County and LA County in April of last year. | |
| And what we found was that there were almost 40 or 50 more infections than had been picked up by Why did they | |
| do that? | |
| Well, I mean, I think part of it was they didn't know the infection fatality rate because they hadn't conducted a study. | |
| But that's also a curious question. | |
| Like, the first instinct that I had when I saw that number was I wanted to know how widespread the disease actually was. | |
| In H1N1, 10 years ago, I guess 12 years ago, the seroprevalent studies found that the disease was 100 times more prevalent than people knew about, than the public health authorities knew about, and therefore 100 times less deadly. | |
| The first hypothesis I had when I saw that was maybe that's true here. | |
| Right, but I'm asking you, why did WHO mislead the world? | |
| And was it deliberate? | |
| I mean, I think there's been a couple of times where I just wonder what they were thinking. | |
| So that 3.4% number, they should have put in context. | |
| They should have said these are the cases that are the most deadly, but we don't know. | |
| Anything about how widespread it is. | |
| And they said they should have argued for studies to check immediately. | |
| So in light of what you said, in light of the great Barrington Declaration, what should an intelligent layperson, I am an intelligent layperson, conclude other than I no longer believe the medical authorities of the United States or the world? | |
| I mean, I guess I wouldn't go quite so far. | |
| I mean, I think there's a lot of good people in the establishment. | |
| What I would say is that we have to change our institutions so that they're more open to debate. | |
| Our medical institutions, our scientific institutions need to repudiate. | |
| This very strange... | |
| Let me try to address this philosophically. | |
| There's two kinds of norms I see that I deal with in my work. | |
| First, there's a norm in science. | |
| The norm in science is there has to be absolutely free debate. | |
| Ideas are evaluated based on their consistency with evidence. | |
| Forgive me, Doctor. | |
| I want you to finish that thought. | |
| We just have a few minutes. | |
| I need your time, and I need that answer. |
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