June 23, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
56:38
Participants
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, Brett, before we get into any of the meat of the week, people have not seen you on the Rubin Report. | ||
| I had to double check this. | ||
| I cannot believe it. | ||
| Since November of 2018, that's like six lifetimes ago for me. | ||
| So I don't know how that happened. | ||
| I'm glad to have you back. | ||
| Jay's been on many times, especially since COVID. | ||
| Can you just get people caught up on what has been going on in the world of Brett Weinstein in these last couple of years real quick, and then we'll dive into everything else? | ||
| Yeah, pretty much everything has been going on. | ||
| I'm glad to be back on The Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to see you, Dave. | ||
| And congratulations, of course, on the major transition in your life. | ||
| Wait, that's the California to Florida transition. | ||
| That's what you're talking about, right? | ||
| You have to be careful when you say transition these days. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, no, I didn't mean to cast any aspersions. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Maybe we should do pronouns just to be certain. | ||
| But in any case, yeah, I don't know exactly how to catch your audience up. | ||
| I will say, I think if I was last on in 2018, then your audience might remember me as a, well, either a famous non-racist or a famous racist, depending upon whether they're on the blue team or the red team. | ||
| But it's been quite a ride. | ||
| Obviously, 2018 is before the so-called COVID pandemic, and the COVID pandemic turned my life upside down once again. | ||
| Heather and I took on an entirely new role as terrible people who have come to believe unforgivable things. | ||
| And anyway, that's been awful. | ||
| But, you know, there's now been a lot of water under the bridge. | ||
| I guess we are now in the post-pandemic times, headed towards an election that will no doubt be a... the polite word would be catastrophe. | ||
| That's what I'm expecting. | ||
| All right, Brett, you're kicking us off with a certain set of energy here. | ||
| Let me set up why I wanted to have you guys on together. | ||
| Because actually, Brett, last time I saw you, I have seen you privately since 2018. | ||
| The last time was with Jay. | ||
| It was at Ron DeSantis' COVID panel. | ||
| This is probably about four or five months ago, so we finally got to reconnect there. | ||
| And Governor DeSantis basically put together a panel to discuss vaccine injuries, talk about mandates, what are your rights, what Floridians can do to fight back against Big Pharma and all of that. | ||
| Now the reason that I wanted to have the two of you on together this particular week was obviously the hot story was this brouhaha on Twitter between Dr. Peter Hotez and Joe Rogan. | ||
| So for everybody that didn't fully pay attention to all the minutia of the details, let's start where this whole thing started, which was when RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was on Joe Rogan last week, and then that will set up everything else, so let's take a look. | ||
| 22,000 people got the vaccine, 22,000 have done it, and they have six months of data. | ||
| Some of that is unblinded, but it's six months. | ||
| And during that six-month period, in the vaccine group, one person died of COVID. | ||
| And in the placebo group, two people died from COVID. | ||
| So that allows Pfizer to tell the public and, you know, FDA to tell the public, oh, this vaccine is 100% effective. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So obviously there was a two plus hour conversation going on between Rogan and RFK. | ||
| And then Dr. Peter Hotez, who has been a big proponent of vaccines throughout the years, often changing his feelings on vaccines and their efficacy along the way, as many people did. | ||
| He tweeted this out and he's a multiple He has had multiple appearances on Rogan, which made this so interesting. | ||
| He tweeted out this. | ||
| Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. | ||
| It's really true, Anna Merlin. | ||
| Just awful. | ||
| And from the online attacks I'm receiving after this absurd podcast, it's clear many actually believe this nonsense. | ||
| To which Joe Rogan replied, Peter, if you claim what RFK Jr. | ||
| is saying is misinformation, I am offering you $100,000 to the charity of your choice if you're willing to debate him on my show with no time limit. | ||
| So Jay, I want to start with you because most of the people who have seen you on my show and from the things that I talk about here, | ||
| are vaccine skeptical, certainly against mandates. | ||
| And I'm proud to say that I did not get vaccinated and I never certainly wanted to force anyone | ||
| to do anything with their bodies that I wasn't gonna force myself to do. | ||
| You've been very outspoken about all of this. | ||
| But the reason I wanted to have you guys on together was because I wanted to talk about the nature of debate | ||
| when it comes to science and what academics and scientists and doctors should be doing and who they should be debating | ||
| and talking to and talking about. | ||
| So actually I'm just going to give it to you right there and you can just take it in any direction you want to just start from right there and then we'll get into the specifics. | ||
| So very quick, if I were in the room with RFK Jr. | ||
| in that moment, I would have had a conversation with him about that study because I know that study. | ||
| So there's a word in statistics, statistically powered, meaning that does it have a large enough sample size so that you can meaningfully answer a question? | ||
| And that study was not designed, wasn't statistically powered to answer the question of, does the vaccine prevent you from dying? | ||
| Just wasn't. | ||
| It wasn't aimed at that. | ||
| Now, that's a problem, because if you want a vaccine, you kind of want to know, does it prevent you from dying? | ||
| That's kind of probably the most important thing a vaccine could do. | ||
| So it wasn't designed for that. | ||
| And so I would say, look, you can say that, but it's a small sample. | ||
| You really can't learn much about that. | ||
| And I think maybe that was RFK's point. | ||
| You shouldn't be saying that it prevents you from dying. | ||
| So in that sense, I'd agree with him. | ||
| But I would say that it did have an endpoint, which it was statistically powerful, which was meaningful, right? | ||
| So it was prevention of symptomatic infection, two months, and they found 95% prevention of symptomatic infection. | ||
| I looked at those data in December 2020, and I said to myself, okay, well, it's not designed to see if it stops you from getting infected. | ||
| That's different than symptomatic infection. | ||
| You can get asymptomatic infection. | ||
| It's not designed to deceive. | ||
| It prevents you from dying. | ||
| And so I said, OK, well, how can we use this vaccine? | ||
| I reasoned that if it prevents you from getting symptomatic infection for two months, it probably will prevent you from dying for that period. | ||
| And I was very concerned. | ||
| I still was concerned about the vulnerable elderly people who do have a relatively high infection fatality rate. | ||
| So I recommended using the vaccine for older people. | ||
| For younger people, I didn't think it was really all that necessary. | ||
| I mean, unless you have some particular condition that your doctor says you're vulnerable for. | ||
| And so I didn't recommend that. | ||
| Tony Fauci looked at the same data, I think, and somehow concluded that it would stop you from getting infected altogether. | ||
| And that's what led to the mandates. | ||
| Because, you know, there's a difference between a vaccine that protects me versus a vaccine that protects you. | ||
| My vaccine protects you, right? | ||
| And so I was opposed to the mandates in part because it wasn't clear at the time that they would have this external benefit, like my vaccine will protect you. | ||
| And so why have a vaccine mandate? | ||
| It just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| There may be other reasons against a vaccine mandate, but certainly that's a sufficient argument against a vaccine mandate. | ||
| Brett, to that point, I remember in June of 21, when Joe Biden went on stage and said, if you get this vaccine, you will not get nor transmit COVID. | ||
| I think I almost did that verbatim. | ||
| I am not a scientist. | ||
| I don't have the pedigree that either one of you have, but I just remember thinking, how could he possibly know that? | ||
| Having rushed this thing out, there's just simply no way you could have enough data on this. | ||
| Am I a clairvoyant or a genius or what's going on here, Brett? | ||
| I don't think we know what's going on, and actually, I would gently push back on what Jay just said. | ||
| It suffers. | ||
| Oh my god, are we about to have a debate, Brett? | ||
| A debate on a podcast? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm gonna make a lot of money right now! | |
| But, you know, Jay, you are one of the nicest and most decent people that I have ever met. | ||
| And I think that decency is leading you to do something in error here, which is you're looking at Anthony Fauci and imagining that he concluded that there was a reason to mandate these vaccines based on some reading of the data that neither you nor I could understand. | ||
| And I think we have to be agnostic about why Anthony Fauci would have leaned towards mandates and, you know, just as the opposition sometimes tries to read our minds, we ought not read too much goodness into the minds of public health authorities who did so much harm. | ||
| Now, as for your question, Dave, of course, there was no evidence, and we now know that Pfizer in particular was well aware that there was no evidence that it was going to block transmission, and therefore the justification for mandates is out the window completely. | ||
| And I would also point out I have become ever more focused on the obvious violation of the Nuremberg Code that these vaccines represented and the coercion of the public into taking them. | ||
| And it has placed me firmly in the camp that actually this was not a question of To whom they should be given. | ||
| These vaccines were not ready to be injected into people. | ||
| People who had them injected were injected under false pretenses and they really should never have made it to market. | ||
| The excuse of the pandemic allowed pharma to bring a prototype into the world that simply was not ready for human consumption. | ||
| I think now people know what you've been up to for the last five years. | ||
| Now you answered the question. | ||
| It was coming to those conclusions. | ||
| Jay, what would you say about what Brett just said on that gentle pushback? | ||
| I mean, basically he's saying that Fauci's... I don't want to put words in your mouth, Brett, but in essence you're saying, well, maybe Fauci's intentions actually weren't that good. | ||
| You know, so in some ways you guys are sort of splitting the hairs. | ||
| I don't even know that it matters in some sense. | ||
| I mean, Brett is right in one sense. | ||
| I mean, I do tend to assume the best about the intentions of other people, and often that's not right. | ||
| I mean, I do that partly just by inclination to do it. | ||
| I just can't help it. | ||
| But also, I think that it allows me to build bridges with people that, I don't know, maybe it's impossible to build a bridge with Fauci. | ||
| I do think, Brett, that question is really important, right? | ||
| Because he was a primary architect of these policies. | ||
| And if we're going to do an assessment of what happened, we have to try to understand his state of mind, along with some of the other leaders like Rochelle Walensky. | ||
| Primarily, I don't You bring up Nuremberg, but I don't really primarily care about prosecuting them or whatever. | ||
| I mean, that's not what you're saying, but what I primarily care about is reform. | ||
| We have to make our public health structures such that when something like this happens again, no matter who's in power, the structures prevent them from doing these kinds of things without considerable pushback or checks and balances or something. | ||
| That's primarily what I care about. | ||
| And I think the model I have in my head is what happened after the Challenger disaster | ||
| in 1986, you know, the space shuttle blew up. | ||
| And there was like an open commission with this very famous moment where you had Richard | ||
| Feynman, the very famous physicist, come into the room, says, "You see, I'm going to be | ||
| He'd already obviously done this experiment before, but he walks in, has the O-ring that was in the shuttle, dips it in the ice water, shatters it, and says, well, that's probably what happened. | ||
| And that led to huge reforms in NASA. | ||
| That's the vision that I have for what can and should go forward. | ||
| But I've been I've got a lot of people push back on me on this in Twitter and elsewhere saying look I'm Jay you're naive and I you know, I maybe I am so I Want to be clear I am NOT arguing that we should take the most cynical view of dr. Fauci either I don't think we should assume the best or worst intentions. | ||
| I think all possibilities are on the table from Fauci being an absolutely diabolical | ||
| figure to him being the most confused person who's ever walked the face of the earth. | ||
| But one way or the other, we got to policies that were extremely harmful to the public | ||
| and violated the Nuremberg Code. | ||
| Now, in saying that they violated the Nuremberg Code, I am not arguing and I have been very | ||
| careful to say this is not about the punishment of those people. | ||
| That's a question for others. | ||
| And I agree with you. | ||
| I would trade all punishment in order for us to have a complete understanding of what took place during COVID, how we made these massive errors. | ||
| Because as much as I do think that people who did wrong should be punished, that that's part of how we discourage it in the future, we are in danger of never understanding what happened in this phase of our history. | ||
| And if we don't understand it, we cannot prevent it from happening again. | ||
| Well, it's clear to me that that's why Governor DeSantis brought you both in for this panel. | ||
| You guys all weren't sitting on this panel going, we have to put these people on trial and everything else. | ||
| It was in essence, how do we make sure this doesn't happen again? | ||
| But now before we get to, I wanna show you some clips of Hotez and sort of unfurl a little bit of the drama around this, but I just wanna ask you guys broadly, you're both men of science, you're both academics, you're at universities, or Brett, you're not at a university at the moment, No, exile. | ||
| You've been at a university, your exile university. | ||
| Exile from the academy. | ||
| But Jay, you're still at Stanford. | ||
| What do you think general policy should be in terms of scientists debating academics, going on podcasts, debating guys like RFK who are lawyers, who obviously know a lot about these things, but maybe are not specific experts? | ||
| Because that seems to be what lit this thing on fire. | ||
| Like what is the nature of debate In 2023 online. | ||
| Jay, I'll start with you. | ||
| Well, okay, so I should say the vast majority of scientists, they're just doing their work, and they're not really... I mean, I have to tell you, when I was a graduate student, I just liked to write papers because I would learn things. | ||
| I'd do some math. | ||
| I'd do some statistics. | ||
| I'd learn stuff. | ||
| I'd write papers. | ||
| And I would write the papers, and I wouldn't care what would happen to it. | ||
| If it got published, fine. | ||
| And if two people read it, it made me happy. | ||
| Those scientists, people like that, are like the warp and wolf of science, and there's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| But at the same time, it absolutely is important for scientists as a whole to engage with the public, especially when the products of science transform the lives of the public in the way that it has during the pandemic. | ||
| And then so for science as an institution to say, oh, we are so far above you all plebes that we're not going to even engage with you. | ||
| Even a presidential candidate, a major presidential candidate, you're beneath us to talk to. | ||
| Well, what purpose is science then? | ||
| Exactly when the products of our work change society, we're not going to reason with you? | ||
| We're not going to talk to you? | ||
| That is absolutely beyond my understanding. | ||
| And I think it's actually quite dangerous to science. | ||
| Apparently a lot of scientists don't understand is that our work is supported by the public. | ||
| It's primarily supported, and it's for the public. | ||
| We make jokes about ivory towers. | ||
| Why do we make those jokes? | ||
| Because we're not supposed to be up and above. | ||
| We're supposed to be engaged with. | ||
| And if you don't have that engagement of high level science with the public, the public's going to stop supporting science. | ||
| We're funded by taxpayer money. | ||
| A lot of us are. | ||
| So yeah, I just don't understand it. | ||
| And interestingly, you know, Jay, you were one of the first people that I had on when COVID started, because I was trying to find people that were a little more skeptical, because I felt I was a little more skeptical. | ||
| It was obviously very easy to find unskeptical people. | ||
| So I was like, all right, let me see if I can find someone in that discipline. | ||
| I'm happy to say that it clearly bored out to be At least in the right direction. | ||
| But I'm not a scientist, so when I bring guys like you guys on, I can hear what you say, but I can't fact check you in real time, which is why debate is important. | ||
| Brett, you've been involved in many public debates over the years, sometimes on Twitter, sometimes in real life. | ||
| I suspect you basically agree with Jay there, right? | ||
| I disagree with Jay a little bit and, you know, I have to disagree with Jay. | ||
| Alright, let's do it. | ||
| Gosh, another debate. | ||
| Jay represents the better angels of our nature and he does so beautifully, but I don't think we're in that era. | ||
| You know, Jay is one of the few people who has managed the incredible feat of maintaining his intellectual independence and keeping his job in the academy, right? | ||
| Now, The fact that the Academy has been throwing out people who were independent-minded means that you have institutions which, at best, are so riddled with conformity that they cannot be trusted to engage in these debates themselves. | ||
| So the question isn't really whether or not Debates should be happening in public on podcasts. | ||
| No, that's not the ideal place for scientific debates. | ||
| It's not the ideal place to hash out public health policy. | ||
| However, in an era when all of the institutions have demonstrated that they cannot do their job, the fact that we have retreated to podcasts, that they are effectively functioning like speakeasies where we can still have those discussions where we can't have them in the faculty lounge or in the lecture hall. | ||
| You know, of course it's the right place to do it if there's no other place to do it. | ||
| And I would say you need no better defense than just to simply look at Joe Rogan's podcast and see how many of the things that we have finally come to accept about COVID were aired there. | ||
| The fact is, you can belittle him and you can say he's a comedian and he's out of his depth, but how is it that he's had so much foresight to bring on people whose perspectives are now increasingly mainstream? | ||
| Truth is a time-release pill, as I keep saying over and over again. | ||
| Hotez, by the way, Dr. Hotez, did not have a problem going on Joe Rogan's show repeatedly when he was not challenged in that Joe was interviewing him, similarly to the way I would interview either one of you guys. | ||
| Here's one clip that went viral after all this. | ||
| Do you take care of your immune system in other ways? | ||
| Do you take probiotics? | ||
| Are you cautious about your diet? | ||
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unidentified
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I'm not as cautious about my diet as I should be. | |
| I'm a junk foodaholic, actually. | ||
| Well, that seems like a terrible thing for your health. | ||
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unidentified
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It is a terrible thing for my health and something my wife is working on. | |
| But that seems ridiculous for someone who works with health. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| What's going on with you, man? | ||
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unidentified
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Sometimes, man, I just don't get it right. | |
| Do you take vitamins? | ||
| I don't take vitamins. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't think they're needed. | ||
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unidentified
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What? | |
| Hold up, hold up, hold up. | ||
| You don't think they're needed while you're eating junk food? | ||
| Well, hopefully I'm not only eating junk food, right? | ||
| Yeah, but you know there's a large body of clinical research on the efficacy of vitamins, especially vitamins D, vitamins E. I have taken vitamin D for periods at the recommendation of my internist, yeah. | ||
| What about essential fatty acids, which are great for your brain, fish oil, all these different things that are fantastic for inflammation. | ||
| I'm not going to argue with you. | ||
| What is going on with you, doctor? | ||
| You got it over me. | ||
| Listen, but you would have a much better argument. | ||
| You're making my wife stay here. | ||
| You're taking care of yourself 100% instead of just concentrating. | ||
| But you still need your vaccines. | ||
| I'm sure you do, but vaccines aren't going to prevent cancer. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| Right, and there's a lot of diseases. | ||
| Or diabetes or cardiovascular disease. | ||
| A lot of these diseases are connected directly to diet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Brett, I think people might think it's sort of like superfluous or something to show that clip, but I thought it elucidated two points. | ||
| One being why people like Rogan in general, right? | ||
| He's just telling you kind of the average guy's stuff, like vitamins, diet, exercise. | ||
| I don't know, those seem kind of important. | ||
| But also, I think the underlying part of that is that Nobody in the medical profession, maybe you guys on the academic side, were pushing those things during COVID. | ||
| Everybody was saying, stay inside, don't get vitamin D, don't go outside, closing gyms, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And here you have a guy pushing vaccines who clearly wasn't doing the things for himself that might've pushed him in a way to not need the vaccine the way he at least thought he needed it. | ||
| Well, you know, I don't know what to make of what happened during the COVID era. | ||
| At some point, it became clear that we were not only getting bad advice, but we were getting the inverse of the correct advice. | ||
| And the things that struck me most profoundly was the advice to stay inside, because it was very clear very early on that this This pathogen did not transmit outdoors and one does create vitamin D in the sun which has a profound effect not only on this disease but on many diseases. | ||
| So to be advised to stay inside exactly the place that the pathogen transmits itself When, in fact, the right advice was go outside, spend time at the beach, socialize at the beach, right? | ||
| If the intent had been to keep us healthy, psychologically healthy, then the advice would have been, look, figure out how to do the normal stuff of life in places where the virus doesn't transmit, and only worry about the virus when you're inside in a place where air concentrates and you're dealing with small volumes, and then figure out how to address it. | ||
| Open the window. | ||
| If you're in a car, open all of the windows, even if it's winter. | ||
| Turn on the heat. | ||
| and open the windows. | ||
| We weren't getting that kind of advice. | ||
| So, yes, I mean at some level Hotez is beside the point, right? | ||
| He is a wonderful caricature of the insanity that we were being told for three straight years, right? | ||
| And the reason that you're seeing this incredible pushback on Hotez is because he effectively lived unchallenged because of this incredible architecture that feeds us propaganda and protects those who are spreading it. | ||
| And the fact is, there are very few exceptions that are capable of breaking through that. | ||
| Joe Rogan being one of them, right? | ||
| Joe Rogan both has the size of audience, and frankly, he has accumulated enough wealth that in one fell swoop, he could neutralize all of the objections to Hotez confronting those who would challenge his perspective. | ||
| And that, you know, it was a pulling back the curtain moment, right? | ||
| We saw the man behind the curtain, plain as day, and he was wearing a bow tie. | ||
| Jay, how worried are you that because of moments like this, if something real comes one day, 10 times worse than COVID, whatever it is, that most people, and I think myself partly included, I am not gonna listen to anybody at this point because so much of the institutional, what we thought was the institutional sanity turned out to be, as Brett's pointing out, just basically crazy or bad intentions or bad motives or certainly bad outcomes. | ||
| I mean, the primary currency of public health is trust. | ||
| That trust is absolutely vital because as soon as you've resorted to mandates, essentially you've failed, right? | ||
| You're trying to force people to do something that you think is good for them. | ||
| People are going to resist. | ||
| You're just not going to get people to want to do that, really, for public health to work. | ||
| You know, leaving aside sanitation and all the other stuff that's like, you know, but like on personal health, they have to trust you. | ||
| And if they don't trust you, they're not going to listen to you. | ||
| I mean, actually, that Hotez podcast, I actually watched it. | ||
| I mean, what Hotez was arguing for, which is that parents should inoculate their kids against measles. | ||
| And some of these essential childhood vaccines, I'm in favor of that. | ||
| I think it's actually quite important. | ||
| And the reason I'm in favor of that is because I've read a lot of the evidence, I've read these debates, and I've come away from it thinking that it's better than the alternative, where you have measles, actually, which really does harm children, floating around. | ||
| Now, we can have a debate about that, but that's my conclusion from the literature. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It seems to me that maybe there's a bigger debate around scheduling when it comes to vaccinations for children. | ||
| That's a different topic altogether, but I think there's something there. | ||
| I want to use this to illustrate. | ||
| So the thing is, if I'm going to convince the public, which is not going to read this literature about this, they have to trust me. | ||
| That I've done my homework, and that if I'm convinced by the literature in the opposite direction, I will tell them that I'm convinced. | ||
| There's a new study that comes out. | ||
| And that trust is absolutely fundamental, because as soon as you've lost it, why believe me? | ||
| I'm just a guy on the internet to them, right? | ||
| Or maybe somebody publishing papers and some ivory tower to them. | ||
| So I think what you saw during the pandemic was a violation of that trust from the very top people, right? | ||
| So you had people like Like Tony Fauci, I'm sorry to pick on him over and over, but he's perfect. | ||
| Like he, very early on he says masks work, or masks don't work, right? | ||
| He's actually reflecting in February 2020 what the consensus of the literature was. | ||
| A fantastic randomized trial said masks don't work. | ||
| A month later he says masks work, the evidence has changed. | ||
| Ha ha, I tricked you because I wanted to save it for the hospital workers. | ||
| I mean, at that point, why trust him? | ||
| He's already admitted that he's going to lie to you. | ||
| He's already lied. | ||
| He's certainly lied to you. | ||
| And then once you've lost that, it's gone. | ||
| I mean, so I think that's the state we find ourselves in. | ||
| American public health has lost the trust of a vast chunk of the American public, and it is going to be almost impossible for it to do its work in coming years. | ||
| And I actually think that's a bad thing. | ||
| Although, again, I've gotten pushback from lots of people who distrust public health. | ||
| I mean, I do think it is healthy to have some skepticism. | ||
| So maybe there's some silver lining in that. | ||
| But there's a lot of complicated things to talk about. | ||
| And if you lose that trust as public health, it's gone. | ||
| It's going to be very difficult for it to work. | ||
| I really mean what I said. | ||
| I mean, the next big thing could come, and it could be 10 times bigger or 100 times bigger, and I don't know what would convince me that it is real because of the destructive nature of what they have done. | ||
| I'll get you guys on the phone, and we can talk about it on the show, but that is going to be a problem for an awful lot of people. | ||
| Speaking of Fauci, let's go back to March of 2021. | ||
| So this is, you know, sort of roughly a year into COVID. | ||
| This is Fauci and vice president, potentially next president, Kamala Harris. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dr. Fauci, thank you for everything you are, everything you do. | |
| Tell America why they need to get vaccinated when it is their time and turn. | ||
| Well, we need to get vaccinated because we're dealing with a serious disease. | ||
| We have a vaccine that's highly effective and it's safe. | ||
| And that's the thing that's going to stop this outbreak. | ||
| The information to show that it's safe and effective is determined by large trials and it's been determined by people who are independent Brett, I mean, I'm literally laughing as it's playing because it reads as propaganda. | ||
| These people have no vested interest in anything. | ||
| It's vetted. | ||
| They have no interest. | ||
| They're just good people. | ||
| I know clearly Jay has the better angels of people. | ||
| Brett, I suspect you don't. | ||
| They made a lot of money, David. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm also an economist. | |
| First of all, I would remind people, okay, we have now finally, after years of demonizing those of us like myself who said that the evidence all pointed towards a laboratory leak, we have finally come around to the moment at which they have just simply tried to revive the idea of a zoonotic outbreak too many times and people now see through it. | ||
| But Anthony Fauci, is the guy who sent the work from the US to China, right? | ||
| He offshored this work to China to escape a ban designed to prevent an outbreak, right? | ||
| A lab leak. | ||
| So, To just the simple fact, if there was one person on earth who should not be in charge of public health policy surrounding COVID, it's that guy. | ||
| And for him to be the public face of public health at that moment tells you everything you need to know. | ||
| Something has gone desperately awry that a guy whose judgment could be so terrible as to put us in this predicament in the first place is also the guy who is supposed to be telling us what to do to get out of it and then downstream a couple of years we know everything he told us was wrong not just wrong but upside down it was the wrong advice from one end to the other so that is that is a conspicuous pattern now again as to why i don't know but i do know that um the the question you raised jay about | ||
| The trust of public health. | ||
| There is no trust left in public health. | ||
| And worse, people are not used to thinking these terms. | ||
| Public health is not the only way to have viewed this pandemic, right? | ||
| You have medicine and you have public health. | ||
| Public health is the population level analysis. | ||
| Medicine is the individual patient level analysis. | ||
| In this case, public health staged a coup on medicine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It forced all doctors to sing from the same hymnal. | ||
| And the fact is what those doctors ended up doing on behalf of this deeply confused, at best, public health authority was harm patients. | ||
| So now not only is the trust in public health at an all time low, but the trust in medicine is at an all time low. | ||
| Which leaves us no meaningful way out. | ||
| As you say, Dave, next pandemic, you're not going to want to listen to anybody. | ||
| And your instinct is right. | ||
| Go to the people who didn't get this one wrong. | ||
| And by the way, as you guys know, they had to make sure that all of the other therapeutics and anything else that you could do, they had to discredit it, otherwise they couldn't get emergency authorization to push this all through. | ||
| Jay, were you sort of following Fauci the entire time and going, boy, here are the moments that he kind of failed? | ||
| Because even that, again, that was a year into COVID. | ||
| And I just remember thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor, but I know that this thing from everyone saying, | ||
| there was nobody saying, "Oh, 50% of the people are gonna die." | ||
| They're basically saying 99.97 or something percent of people survive. | ||
| So I remember thinking, "Well, I'm just gonna wait this out." | ||
| I just thought, "I will wait this out. | ||
| I'm relatively young, relatively healthy. | ||
| I eat right, I lived in LA, got plenty of sunshine." | ||
| That was my policy. | ||
| But were you tracking the moments where, he flipped on the masks as you said, | ||
| and was emailing friends saying, "Oh, don't mask when you're on vacation, | ||
| don't worry about it." | ||
| Meanwhile, he's double masking at a baseball game for optics and all that. | ||
| Let me talk about a moment that came very close to that clip you played, right? | ||
| You remember he was talking about what fraction of the population needed to be vaccinated to get herd immunity. | ||
| First he said 60, then he said 70, then he said 80, then he said 90. | ||
| And then at one point he said, well, the reason I said 60 is because I didn't think you, the American public, were ready for it. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. | ||
| Which, to me, that's fireable. | ||
| Is that not a fireable offense as a public... It is gross malpractice as a spokesperson for public health, right? | ||
| First, you can't get herd immunity with a vaccine that doesn't prevent infection for a very long time. | ||
| I mean, if you get herd immunity, it's a very, very short-lived herd immunity. | ||
| So he got that wrong. | ||
| He got the science wrong. | ||
| And then he again admitted to the American public of making numbers up just to manipulate them. | ||
| I mean, he did that over and over and over again. | ||
| I mean, okay, Brett, can you forgive me? | ||
| I'm going to engage in some Shakespearean kind of like amateur psychoanalysis of him. | ||
| All right, because it's inspired by what you just said. | ||
| So the guy funds gain-of-function work. | ||
| He's a proponent of it. | ||
| There's a major debate in 2012 about whether it should happen. | ||
| He's on the side of funding it. | ||
| There's a pause that happens, 2014, and he's like signing off on – he and Francis Collins, his boss, have to sign off on gain-of-function work. | ||
| He signs off on a bunch of stuff. | ||
| 2017 comes and he basically maneuvers a reversal of that pause so that gain-of-function work | ||
| can go on. | ||
| Why does he do it? | ||
| He's not a bad guy, right? | ||
| The reason he does it is because he thinks we can predict the next pandemic and stop | ||
| it by having a vaccine early. | ||
| And he spent his entire career trying to get a vaccine for HIV and failed. | ||
| He wants to be Jonas Salk, and at the end of his career, he's not Jonas Salk. | ||
| The virus arrives, and then all of a sudden, what thought must go in the back of his head? | ||
| What if I'm responsible in part for this thing? | ||
| And then he's like, I need to do absolutely everything I possibly can to put the virus back in the box, in Pandora's box, just to reverse time if we possibly can. | ||
| Even the crazy things that end up harming things. | ||
| It's like, well, if there's any chance of stopping the virus, we have to do it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| He's like this, you know, there's a Disney cartoon, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. | ||
| He set off the mops and Mickey is trying to make it stop and everything's flooding. | ||
| Making it worse, right? | ||
| And that is my vision of him, of him during the pandemic. | ||
| It's like you can see the history judging him in this harsh way, in a well-deserved harsh way, because he made this very, very bad call about the gain-of-function work and then about the lockdowns. | ||
| Brett, before I let you chime in, can I just give an even more cynical version, perhaps, which is just that as a government bureaucrat who was drunk on power and having literally the entire world turn to him for answers, he was kind of just making it up along the way. | ||
| I actually think it might even be a bit more cynical than what Jay is offering. | ||
| Well, again, I think the entire range of possibilities is on the table. | ||
| I mean, including the one that Jay just spelled out. | ||
| I have also concluded that at some level he wanted immortality, and he was willing to gamble the health of the globe on it, both in terms of funding gain-of-function research and advancing a Vaccines to the exclusion of every other treatment policy. | ||
| That's one possibility was that it was the selfish desire to be remembered. | ||
| And then there's also every other possibility, which is that this was some form of corruption and that, you know, he's personally diabolical. | ||
| But frankly, I don't really care what I care. | ||
| I mean, I care, but I don't really care because, as Jay pointed out earlier, the real question is about I mean, reform is probably too mild a word. | ||
| The system needs a full reboot. | ||
| And frankly, we don't have the people. | ||
| It's not like the people know how to do the job and the system is bad. | ||
| There aren't enough people who know how to do the job of science, the job of medicine, the job of public health to reboot the system. | ||
| So we are now in dire straits, right? | ||
| We just simply don't have the materials to do it. | ||
| And worse, and unfortunately, Jay, you point to the evidence on other vaccines, for example. | ||
| And the problem is, I think what we learned during COVID is that we now don't know what any of the so-called evidence means. | ||
| because when you look, for example, at the work on repurposed drugs, right, to test whether | ||
| or not they were effective treatments for COVID, what you find, if you just peek under | ||
| the hood, is an absolutely systematic attempt to discredit these things. | ||
| So does that mean that they do work? | ||
| No. | ||
| But it means that the evidence that they don't work isn't evidence of anything at all. | ||
| The trials were literally built to fail. | ||
| And on the flip side, we see things like Norman Fenton's brilliant analysis of the two-week | ||
| pause before counting people as vaccinated for the purpose of determining what the effect | ||
| on the disease was. | ||
| And the fact is, if you had a perfectly inert vaccine, that is to say, Just saline and you injected people with it as was done in the trials and you assumed that anybody who got the disease in the first two weeks was Unvaccinated for the purpose of your study you create the impression that you've got an 83% Effective vaccine when all you're doing is injecting salt water So the point is these are very basic errors that were simply not caught either at the academic level they weren't caught at the public health level and so | ||
| The problem for me as a scientist who has spent a long time figuring out how to think about complex systems is you now have a complex system that where you look at its capacity to reason through an issue systematically is completely broken. | ||
| Jay, how worried are you about that, right? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people are sort of maybe not consciously thinking about it, but I think somewhere in the recess of people's mind, they're like, wait a minute, if this whole thing was nonsense, why should I trust that these studies that they did in 1950s and the vaccine schedules then, and why would any of it make sense? | ||
| Not only are we without evidence, but what was done in the absence of proper evidence was absolutely ghastly. | ||
| If they had injected us with saline and pretended that it was useful, that would have been far less risky. | ||
| than injecting people with an untried platform based on mRNA that takes over your cells and turns them into a vaccine factory. | ||
| That was a radical response to COVID. | ||
| It was not safe, even in principle, and it should have been a surprise to nobody that it had a wide range of unpredicted adverse effects. | ||
| Well, actually, so then let's go on that. | ||
| Jay, what do you think of that? | ||
| I mean, do you think that that's a fair statement, that mRNA is not safe just in and of itself, the idea of gaining a function to eradicate a virus? | ||
| Okay, so let me answer that before. | ||
| I want to first address Brett's first point. | ||
| I guess, true to form, I'm going to be slightly less cynical. | ||
| I think the issue here is trust, right? | ||
| So science requires some level of trust. | ||
| But let me just point out something that Brett said, which I think is really important, that there were scientists that looked at the evidence and concluded correctly about a whole range of things. | ||
| Skeptical about certain studies. | ||
| That's normal in science, right? | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| My friend John Ioannidis wrote this amazing paper in the early 2000s with the title that most scientific research is wrong. | ||
| I remember reading that paper. | ||
| At first, I looked at the title, and I'm like, there's no way he's right. | ||
| And then at the end of the paper, which is like five pages long, I'm like, oh my God, he's right. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the thing is, it's based on trust, right? | ||
| But it's also based on lots of skeptical people looking at your work and saying, you know, I'm not sure you did this right. | ||
| I'm not sure you did that right. | ||
| And it's in that conversation that the truth emerges. | ||
| The scary thing about what Brett said, and I think he's right, is that the system as we currently have it, it's placed vested interests of a certain group of scientists, a relatively small group of scientists, above everybody else so that that That conversation among scientists, that skeptical conversation about, okay, Jay, you did this study and I think you made this assumption here that's not right. | ||
| If you make this a different assumption, you get a different result. | ||
| That conversation, which is absolutely essential to science, was much harder during the pandemic if you reach the wrong conclusion. | ||
| Okay, so, I mean, I think you and I share that concern. | ||
| The question is, how far away are we from something like what science ought to look like? | ||
| I mean, because if you look back in scientific history, we've been through periods like this. | ||
| We've been through periods where a small group of people say, well, you basically have control over scientific discourse. | ||
| I'm not convinced that there's nothing to be—I mean, I'm not convinced that we're that far away. | ||
| I think the key idea is competition. | ||
| I think, for instance, I think the Enlightenment works because there's multiple sources of funding for competing groups of scientists who fight with each other. | ||
| And they're uncancellable. | ||
| What we have now is a huge concentration of scientific power in the hands of a relatively small group of scientific funders, you know, Bill Gates, the National Institute of Health. | ||
| As a policy matter, if you diversify the set of funding or built into it the competition within the funding structure so that the centers themselves compete with each other rather than scientists competing for the favor of the high pope of science. | ||
| then I think you could...now, maybe, Brad, you'd say that's a major restructuring. I mean, | ||
| I don't know that, but I think that has to be the aim of the direction of fixing. | ||
| Real fast on the MMR vaccines, I mean, I've read a lot of that literature, not all of it, | ||
| but a lot of that literature from the '50s. | ||
| A lot of those people that were running those studies in the 50s and 60s were serious people. | ||
| As best I can tell, they were doing the absolute best they could to try to get it true. | ||
| Remember the polio trial in 1954? | ||
| Like remember the polio trial in 1954, they enrolled 1.8 million children in a randomized | ||
| trial before they said the polio vaccine should be used at scale. | ||
| They were serious scientists working then and they wanted a real answer. | ||
| We can have that again. | ||
| I think we can have that again, but we just have to be honest with ourselves. | ||
| We are worse scientists than they were. | ||
| We have fancier technology, but we actually don't have the right spirit of science the way that they did. | ||
| Whatever the answer was, they were going to say it, even if it was inconvenient. | ||
| I don't think we have that spirit in science anymore. | ||
| Well, speaking of that spirit in science, that's why I was so glad to see both of you at this panel that Governor DeSantis convened a couple months ago. | ||
| Brett, I want to play a clip. | ||
| This is a portion of you on that panel. | ||
| The message that was given to us by public health authorities was not just inept. | ||
| It actually went well beyond that. | ||
| It was really the inverse of everything we should have done. | ||
| And because it was forced on us with this strong form of coercion, It was widely accepted because people didn't have a choice. | ||
| But what we don't talk about is the question of what would have happened if we had taken a different path. | ||
| So, Brett, what would have happened if we had taken another path? | ||
| I could probably be convinced that if we had done absolutely nothing, things would have been much better. | ||
| Now, when we see all the psychological problems that young people are having, having all of the depression, the collapse in the education system, you know, literally five-year-olds who are having delayed speech now because of masks. | ||
| I mean, the litany and the list goes on and on. | ||
| Well, in my mind, there's no question that if we had done nothing, we would have ended up being better off. | ||
| Because what doing nothing would involve is clinicians figuring out what worked in their offices and talking over the internet and at the water cooler, and we would have developed protocols for dealing with COVID. | ||
| And the fact is, it's actually a very tractable disease. | ||
| If we'd really done nothing, including not doing the gain-of-function research, we probably wouldn't have had a pandemic in the first place, almost certainly. | ||
| So, there's no question that doing nothing was superior to the massive self-inflicted wounds that we created with our beyond-inept response. | ||
| As to Jay's point, I don't disagree with you, Jay, about the fact that we can get back to a proper scientific culture, but where you and I might disagree is I can't see us doing it in less than a generation. | ||
| Because, you know, first of all, we've trained all of the people who staff our medical institutes and The academy and the journals and the governmental regulatory apparatus, we've trained all of these people in conformity. | ||
| We've punished them for standing up. | ||
| We've fired them for doing it. | ||
| And you can't just simply say to them, oh, those days are over. | ||
| Now be honest. | ||
| They don't remember how. | ||
| They don't know how to do the job. | ||
| And so if you were going to fix the system, you have to train a new generation that hasn't learned that lesson. | ||
| And then the bitter pill is this. | ||
| Who's going to train them? | ||
| What do you think about that, Jay? | ||
| I think it might work at the state level, right? | ||
| I mean, that's why DeSantis convened you guys, right? | ||
| How do we as Floridians, you know, he was saying, how do I, as the governor, make sure that the federal government is not gonna do this again? | ||
| I mean, do you think it just has to be sort of a bottom-up micro level that will work, something like that? | ||
| I mean, I think I hear you, Brett. | ||
| I mean, I hear the frustration. | ||
| But I mean, I've met so many excellent young people as scientists. | ||
| I mean, I'm biased about the ones I've trained, but even the ones I haven't trained. | ||
| And I think that that spirit's there. | ||
| It's innate. | ||
| It's just suppressed by structures that make it so that you move forward by not being an excellent scientist necessarily, but by playing the bureaucratic game better. | ||
| I think, and maybe this is just the economist in me, if you change the structures and the incentives, I really strongly believe that it won't be the same people. | ||
| The people that are good at bureaucratic infighting, Tony Fauci is a good example of this, won't necessarily rise anymore. | ||
| It'll be very different, but I think a lot of people enter science, especially a lot of young people enter science because they want to know, this is an incredible, beautiful process for learning true things about the way the universe works, right? | ||
| That's why we enter science, because it's just beautiful. | ||
| And a lot of people are still in science like that, Brett, I think. | ||
| And I don't believe that we have to retrain them. | ||
| I think we just have to give them the right incentives and then they'll do the right thing. | ||
| At least some of them. | ||
| Yes, I don't know. | ||
| This is like totally true to form. | ||
| I'm playing the more naive, idealistic person. | ||
| I mean, you know, I am an economist. | ||
| People always accuse me of being cynical just for that reason. | ||
| I mean, so it's, you know, fringe epidemiologist and economist. | ||
| Well, on that note... | ||
| Jay, let me play a clip from you, from the panel, because you brought up the other major issue that we haven't talked about too much here, which is that the censorship machine that was silencing guys like you, or virtually anyone that was outside of mainstream groupthink on this, kind of went all the way up to the top. | ||
| Big tech, government, etc, etc. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| I think the centrally important issue that caused the problems is that we silenced people from expressing their thinking Jay, I suspect you agree with that guy. | ||
| Well, first of all, I should have combed my hair. | ||
| My mom commented. | ||
| But that's another thing. | ||
| Jay, I suspect you agree with that guy. | ||
| Well, first of all, I should have combed my hair. | ||
| My mom combed it. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| Yeah, I think that science, you know, it doesn't work unless you have freedom. | ||
| You know, you have scientific cultures that try to sort of mimic science. | ||
| Like, I think of what happened to science in the Soviet Union. | ||
| You had one man, Trofim Lysenko, who decided that Mendelian genetics was wrong. | ||
| Now I'm like contributing in your area, Brett. | ||
| And then, like, he throws all of the Mendelian geneticists into Siberia, and a huge generation of Russians starve because of the stupid science that they're doing, right? | ||
| But it wasn't science. | ||
| He was playing at science. | ||
| Science can only happen and can only occur when there isn't that censorship. | ||
| Because who controls it? | ||
| It's going to be the powerful people that control what you can or can't say. | ||
| And it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. | ||
| It just matters that they're powerful. | ||
| Science needs to have David and Goliath stories all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Like, it needs to have people at the top being overthrown in their ideas by the young Turk, you know, mathematician who's like, no, Jay, you're wrong, and then I'm wrong, because that's just what the evidence says. | ||
| And you can't have that unless you have free speech. | ||
| Brett, bring us home. | ||
| Well, you know, I hear what you're saying, Jay. | ||
| You fixed the incentives, you fixed the system, and I agree with that, but it's a long-term proposition. | ||
| And the reason is akin to what happens if you have a, let's say you have a neurotic cat who's afraid of strangers, and it hides under the bed when strangers come over, right? | ||
| How do you teach the lesson that the strangers aren't actually a problem? | ||
| Because the cat's always under the bed. | ||
| When the strangers are there and if you drag the cat out from under the bed you increase its terror so it thinks it's really hiding from something real. | ||
| You've got an entire system populated by people who have now actually survived because they did conform and say things that actually hurt other people. | ||
| So training them that this is the moment to reverse that instinct is not going to work over a short period of time. | ||
| They're going to have to be replaced and again The problem is there aren't enough people left in the system who understand how science is supposed to work to teach a new generation. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That is a critical problem, and it's not one I hear discussed very frequently. | ||
| I guess my final question to both of you is, since what sparked this entire thing was, you know, Hotez basically said, well in essence he has now said it, that he obviously will not debate RFK on Joe Rogan's show or anywhere else. | ||
| Would either one of you be willing to debate Hotez on this show, on Rogan's show, or anywhere else? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I'm happy to have a conversation with him. | ||
| I guess so, but I'm not really sure what the point is. | ||
| Again, I think the reason that HOTEZ has been the focus of this is that the system has protected everybody who was spouting this nonsense and that we have, you know, we've been trying to get that debate. | ||
| Right, so I don't even mean to make it about him, actually, but in general, you'd be willing to debate other scientists that take the opposite position of you on this, which you both did, by the way, throughout the pandemic. | ||
| I also do not think that a commitment to debate all comers is a wise idea, right? | ||
| There are debates worth having, and there are cynical attempts to simulate debate that are not worth having. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do think you need to have a serious-minded person on the other side, right? | ||
| If you're debating someone whose main job is to slander you and to engage in ad hominem, then yeah, that's a very, very different thing. | ||
| Or even to play games based on the fact that the evidence is full of nonsense. | ||
| The literature says many things that aren't true, and so the point is somebody can bury you in bad studies all day long, and it doesn't get you anywhere, right? | ||
| But I suspect you both agree that Hotez's position that somehow RFK is not worthy of a debate is probably not correct, right? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Because, for one thing, he has attacked RFK's position rather directly. | ||
| And so the point is, okay, let's put the two head-to-head, and then we can decide who's more persuasive. | ||
| I mean, I think you can solve that debate problem partly by, you know, if I'm going to debate somebody, show me the evidence in advance so I can assess your evidence. | ||
| I'll show you my evidence, and we're only limited to citing the evidences that we've shown each other. | ||
| I think they kind of do that in like legal circles or something like that. | ||
| I mean, I think you could have rules that would make that for a constructive debate. | ||
| I mean, I did high school debate. | ||
| I really liked winning. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| But the purpose of the debate isn't to win here. | ||
| The purpose of the debate is to learn from each other. | ||
| Like if Brett says something that, you know, was this a debate, Brett? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it was a debate. | ||
| What it was was like a really important, a friendly conversation where I learned from you. | ||
| Like that should be the goal is like what have we gained from each other rather than winning because there's no like winning means winning. | ||
| Well, I would agree that the ground rules, and in fact the word debate is the wrong word, right? | ||
| Debate is an attempt to win. | ||
| And from my perspective, I've sworn off debates permanently, right? | ||
| The correct term is dialectic. | ||
| What that means is that you engage in it to figure out what's true, right? | ||
| Jay, if you're right and I'm wrong, I want you to win, right? | ||
| I want to be persuaded because I want to stop being wrong. | ||
| And the problem is we have way too much debate where people are interested in scoring points and they don't give a damn what's right, right? | ||
| So, you know, in some sense, I probably shouldn't be using the term debate because it's the incorrect one. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| I like the word debate. | ||
| I don't know why I like it. | ||
| It helped me when I was a geeky teenager to learn to talk to other people more cleanly and try to engage with them on their terms better. | ||
| It doesn't have to be a win-win-lose thing, but I completely agree with the spirit | ||
| of what you're saying, Brett. | ||
| I think the key thing is, if you convinced me of something where I was wrong | ||
| and you've convinced me about that I'm wrong and now I adopt your opinion, | ||
| you've done me an enormous favor. | ||
| I think that's the spirit. | ||
| Well, my commitment to you two is that when the zombies come | ||
| or the aliens are on their way or whatever's next, I will be very skeptical of the entire thing, | ||
| but I will invite you two on first. | ||
| Fair enough? | ||
|
unidentified
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Beautiful. | |
| Okay. | ||
| We're going to link to all your stuff down below. | ||
| Brett, it's been way too long. | ||
| We will continue this in real life, and Jay, you're both welcome back anytime. | ||
| Jay, we've been doing this for a while now, so it was a pleasure, guys. | ||
| Thank you so much. |
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