Dr. Drew Pinsky and Jeffrey Tucker dissect Dr. Anthony Fauci's financial surge from $7.6 million to over $11 million while serving as the highest-paid federal employee, linking his wealth to sudden policy reversals on lockdowns and vaccines. They critique the mandate for healthy populations despite evidence that shots fail to stop transmission, contrasting this with Lori Lightfoot's new Harvard role after enforcing strict mandates. The discussion further refutes Janet Yellen's claims of a robust labor market by citing Census data on declining incomes and inflation driven by Federal Reserve stimulus, while mocking the U.S. military's opaque handling of an F-35 loss. Ultimately, the episode exposes perceived government incompetence across health, economic, and defense sectors. [Automatically generated summary]
I thought right before we started that you guys had been on together.
I've wanted to have the two of you together, but apparently not.
But Jeffrey, you do go on Drew's show often.
So we're gonna talk some COVID stuff.
We're gonna talk some economy stuff.
Oh, and then we lost an F-35 plane for a couple of days.
So a whole bunch for you.
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All right, before we jump into the show, Jeffrey, every time you are on this show for the rest of eternity, I will always give you credit as the guy, more than anybody else that was in my circle, that you were against lockdowns, you were against all of the craziness two weeks To stop the spread, all of it from day one, and that kind of sets us up for the first story today because some info came out about Fauci's finances the other day.
We've got a quote from the Daily Mail.
A Freedom of Information Act request filed at the end of his tenure revealed Fauci and his wife, Dr. Christine Grady, had a net worth that exceeded $11 million.
So you can see he had a nice bump during the COVID years.
He also was the highest paid employee in the federal government, about 400 grand a year.
Jeffrey, I will start with you.
I know you don't love the policies of Fauci, but what do you make of a guy like him basically getting super rich and, you know, half of his wealth basically came in these last three years?
One wonders if this has any relationship to why he changed his mind about lockdowns and even about vaccines in February.
So, you know, he was against lockdowns.
He thought that COVID was going to be just a kind of a serious flu, probably.
He wrote the Washington Post at the time, a letter that said, we don't need vaccines to get out of this pandemic.
It's going to go away on its own.
And then come, you know, about February 26th or something like that, he flipped in the other direction.
Why exactly that happened?
I don't know, but I've always assumed it had something to do with the Wuhan lab gain-of-function research and the possibility that NIH was itself responsible to some extent for a lab leak that might have led to the pathogen.
And he was led to panic, but I cannot fill in the details.
This is a lot of what my own research team is doing all the time is trying to figure this out.
But there's a lot of money sloshing around.
You know, the fact that he ends on the other side of this much richer than he was before.
We don't have clarity really on the relationship between his personal finances and other NIH employees and royalties from vaccine companies, for example.
It's very difficult to get that information.
It takes, you know, a lot of investigation.
There's just a lot more to know, and I would like to know.
Drew, I'm not saying, actually, that there's anything nefarious here, but the optics on this kind of thing, where the guy goes from seven mil, again, as a government employee, you know, a humble, everyone said he was a humble government employee, and da-da-da-da-do, it gets to about 12 million now, like, just optics-wise, and I know you have a bit of a, is it fair to say, complex relationship with him?
Because, you know, I was a deep admirer since the AIDS pandemic.
In fact, why I got involved in radio was, when I was a young physician working on AIDS patients hand over fist, he was out there saying, you've got to get out and educate.
It's interesting, a lot of his fear techniques were precisely what he applied in the COVID
pandemic, just wasn't appropriate at all.
We actually congratulated ourselves for scaring an entire generation of high school and college
students that they were going to get AIDS, and they didn't, and we congratulated ourselves.
With COVID, it ended up being a catastrophe. But I actually, when I saw 11 million, I was actually
relieved because the rumors I was hearing about his participation and possibly in some of these
extraordinary sums of money that were flying around during COVID, now needs to be explained
why it went from 7 to 12. That's the bad optics here. But if he's saved his and his wife's salary
over many, many, he's 80 something years old, I mean, it's possibly going to save $7 million.
That's possible.
But this sudden bump is what needs to be explained.
We need to see what's going on in there.
But again, there were lots of more serious allegations flying around.
Right, and by the way, the amount of money he's made in this is kind of insignificant to, I would argue, a lot of the confusions that he pushed on the American people, and he's still out there, even though he's out of the job right now, he's still out there on TV every single day, every big news show, saying things that I think are actually very confusing, if not outright lies.
Drew, I asked you right before we started the show, because I wanted to make sure I was getting it right.
I could not find anything that said that what he just said there is true, that the risk of getting myocarditis from COVID in young men is higher than if you were to be vaxed.
So we couldn't find that.
And just on a personal note, I know a guy who's in his early 20s, college age, who has myocarditis now.
who had no health problems before COVID, and he was forced to get vax to go to college.
Fauci is reporting a study that did show a little higher incidence of myocarditis from COVID across all ages.
And myocarditis from COVID is, in terms of persistent myocarditis, Very rare in young people.
In older people, there often is a component of myocarditis that resolves when the COVID goes away.
The problem here is exactly what Dave, you're pointing out.
You're taking a healthy person, forcing them to put something in their body and making them sick.
And Fauci said something accurate.
It's a safe vaccine for the most part, rare risk of myocarditis, True.
Even rarer risk of severe COVID in that age group.
So the risk reward, this is the part they have left out since the beginning of COVID, which is that the risk of COVID is nil.
The risk of myocarditis is somewhat above nil.
Therefore, the risk reward doesn't really balance out, especially if you're going to mandate.
And this is at the core of what Aaron Cariotti has been saying, a psychiatrist who was drummed out of his position as the head of bioethics, for raising this very issue.
You don't have justification for mandates given the actual risk reward.
By the way, I think he was also kicked off YouTube.
He is on Rumble, just FYI.
Jeffrey, when you hear Fauci on the news now, do you think everyone will fall for it all over again?
You know, it seemed like a few weeks ago at the beginning of September, they were really on this push to kind of bring COVID back.
Dr. Jill Biden got it, Whoopi got it, like schools are starting, you better watch out.
It seems like it didn't quite take, but I'm always looking for that moment Where suddenly they're like, okay, new variant, let's roll, and you know that a whole bunch of people are just gonna fall for it all over again.
Yeah, a lot of people will, but there's a passionate minority that will not, and they're very well informed, they're super active, they're very attentive to the news.
I don't know what percentage of the population, is it 20%, 25% that are just going to say, no lockdowns, no more boosters.
We're gonna know more, by the way, We get the data on the uptake of the new vaccine that just came out.
Isn't that though incredible that even now they're on TV pushing new vaccines?
I think it was Kathy Hochul in New York pushing a new vaccine for six-month-olds.
I mean, Drew, there's simply no way they've been, I mean, first off, I think it would be criminally insane to be testing this on six-month-olds, but that they get out there and say it again.
Jeffrey, as one of the guys that didn't fall for it, and again, I will always give you credit.
I should have had you on every day at the beginning of this thing.
What would you say to the people that are on the fence now, that really they still, you know, they kind of have woken up a little bit, but they just listen to the people that are supposedly in charge?
Well, I find it remarkable what Dr. Drew said is correct.
I mean, after three and a half years, we're still not getting honesty from the top about the age gradient of the medically significant risk from this pathogen.
Even considering wild type, or Delta, or Omicron, or this latest whatever it is, it's just not a risky pathogen for healthy working age people to say nothing of children where it's at zero.
So the vaccine issue here is very strange, because usually you evaluate drugs on whether they're safe and effective, and that's an important criterion.
But in this one, the very first question is, is it necessary?
And for the overwhelming number of people out there, it's just simply not necessary.
It doesn't even pass that test.
And that's always been the case.
I mean, we knew the age gradient of risk from this pathogen from February of 2020.
And yet here we are, barreling ahead, With the vaccine, with the mandates, with these universal recommendations.
And Biden, you know, was arguing for what, 70, 80, 90 percent?
I think even Fauci at some point said we wanted 90 percent of the population vaccinated.
Why?
It's just, I'm sorry, but you're going to get sick.
You're going to develop, your immune system is going to scale up to adapt to it.
That's how we've gotten out of every pandemic in the past.
This vaccine was never necessary for healthy working-age people.
My response would be a little darker, I suppose, which is that when they realized that the vaxes weren't quite working the way that they wanted them to, or that they had planned or whatever, they really started pushing it on kids because they knew once they had parents, Doing it to their own children?
Once you have injected your child with something that you don't know why you did it or what it was going to do to them, you sort of have to be in on that forever.
Because the come-to-Jesus moment of, oh my God, I listened to some government bureaucrat and I did something that now may have given my kid a heart problem or a litany of other things, I think it just forced more people to sort of be for it forever because to confront the reality that you might've had something to do with harming your own child is just so crazy.
I don't even think that's much of a conspiracy theory, but speaking of the people that sort of lied all the way, this is just like the perfect storm of stupidity.
Lori Lightfoot, who was of course, was the basically communist mayor of Chicago and destroyed that city.
What happens when you're a communist, As a politician, you get fired or kicked out, and then you end up at Harvard.
That's where she's lecturing now, and check this out from the Chicago Sun-Times.
Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is officially a college lecturer, at least for a semester, as her graduate-level class on health policy and leadership at Harvard University got underway last week.
Stay tuned, guys.
Lightfoot said she will use a mock press conference, a simulated community meeting, and guest speakers to teach in part about the dangers of politicizing a pandemic and how to interact with the media, drawing on lessons learned from running a city amid COVID-19.
I just want to get that right again, because we're going to show you a clip right now.
She is running a graduate-level class on health policy and leadership.
And now I would like to show you a little bit of that health policy and leadership, Lightfoot style, Chicago, middle of COVID, go.
unidentified
We're not playing games.
We mean business.
And we are going to shut this down one way or the other.
The time for educating people into compliance is over.
We will shut you down.
We will cite you.
And if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.
Well, she's got a nice colleague over there with Jacinda Ardern, who's enjoying two fellowships at Harvard.
So Harvard's become this sort of sanctuary for the lockdowns.
Today in Epoch Times, ironically, I wrote a column called The Valorization of the Tyrants.
And it's all about Ardern's appointment at Harvard with these two fellowships, the Kennedy School of Government and Yul Roth, who was the trust and safety czar at Twitter 1.0.
Just got hired by the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for the big fancy scholarship.
Yeah, so maybe Trump's favorite Mario Cuomo will be next, you know, full professorship.
You know, it's very strange because it's a small junta of people out there that engage in these unprecedented policies.
We've never pursued lockdowns like this.
Business closures, school closures, Church closures, keeping the big box stores open, shutting down all the small business, ruining everybody's lives, inflating the money supply by 6.5 trillion dollars and causing rampant inflation, worse, getting to the point it's just as bad as it was in 1979.
We've never done anything like this for, you know, a basic spread of a new virus.
Nothing like this in the whole history of modern life.
And we see the results.
The results are terrible demoralization, loss of education, loss of health.
They've obtained the opposite, and yet they're being rewarded for it.
There's something broken about the world, or something broken about academia, that this kind of thing would be happening.
Drew, can you just bring us home on this COVID thing?
In terms of something broken, as someone that has spent, you know, three, four decades in public life at this point, trying to communicate science, to try to take complex ideas and bring them to common people, is your faith just completely busted?
Not only on the COVID front, but also the political front.
I mean, you hear someone like Lightfoot, she had no idea what she was talking about.
I really want to know what did she learn during this?
Because my suspicion is nothing because there's an irrational certainty.
That has gripped people that have no understanding of the topic of health and particularly infectious diseases.
It's exactly, when they closed the schools here in Los Angeles, I was on a nightly program here at Channel 11, and the school board came in and said, we're closing the schools.
I said, who told, what doctor, what professional who works in this area, who has some degree of judgment with this, told you to do that?
No one.
We think it's the right thing to do.
We're certain it's the right thing to do.
In my world, we have rational uncertainty.
We're trying to arrive at an approximation of the truth.
Irrational certainty lays to untoward harm, and that harm is always perpetrated by people who have no knowledge in a subject matter.
They are bureaucrats and have no health experience whatsoever and are making risk-reward judgments.
Really, they're not making risk-reward judgments.
They are making these bizarre, sweeping fiats that have profound adverse effect without understanding what they are doing.
And this irrational certainty is the thing that has gripped us.
Now, as far as health communication goes, That's one of the things I was gobsmacked by during the pandemic because we learned during HIV and AIDS how to change behavior.
It was through narrative and through delivering stories about people like the people you want to change the behavior of using humor and music and letting people see the consequences of choices.
There was a discipline for years involved in changing health behavior.
All of that was tossed out the window in the name of authoritarian Authoritarian kinds of weird centralization of decision-making that was like nothing in human history.
You know, there are other features of this thing we still don't understand.
How did it happen that all the hospitals at the same time all over the country shut down to everything except emergency surgeries and COVID?
I mean, how did that happen?
So, you know, all the cancer screens were gone and we're seeing a huge increase in cancer, partially as a result of that, but elective surgeries were gone, the hospitals were starved of revenue, we got dancing nurses and other things.
Who made that decision?
I asked an expert about this, about the hospital protocol, which were very often deadly during this period.
You know, who made this decision, the decision to shut all the hospitals in the whole country, whether COVID was there or not, to shut them all down for everything but COVID?
And do you know that we still don't have an answer to who precisely made that decision?
It's so strange.
And the division of the workforce between essential and unessential, you know, just one day, it was March 18th, 2020, this organization called CISA, Cyber Infrastructure Security Infrastructure, I don't know, agency, Uh, not the Department of Labor, but CISA sent out a PDF and you had to read the PDF to find out if you were essential or not.
Jeffrey, I'm kind of two minds on this one because, you know, first on a ground, like just my life, like I'm here in Florida, South Florida especially, but Florida is just flourishing.
So many people are moving here.
There's construction everywhere.
We're building roads, infrastructure, new businesses, like, so I get that that's a very micro version of this.
On the other hand, is she saying there's no signs of a problem, but interest rates, if you were trying to buy a house right now, you're basically paying about 9%.
Wouldn't that alone be some indicator of a bit of a problem?
Florida and Texas seem to be, you know, among all the states doing pretty well.
But, you know, I'm over here in the Northeast, I can tell you it's not looking so good.
But even if you look at the data, just consider labor, for example.
She says, oh, labor markets are fine.
She's talking about the unemployment rate, you know, which has no relevance whatsoever.
these times. Labor market participation has still not recovered from the pandemic,
and I'm starting to get really incredulous about the BLS's labor releases. The last one
was claiming all these glorious job creation. When I looked at the numbers, and they said that
part-time jobs for economic reasons were unchanged.
When I went and looked at the actual tables that they published, it said the opposite.
There was a 5.4% increase in part-time jobs for economic reasons and a reduction in full-time jobs.
I'm looking at this thinking, okay, so people are losing full-time jobs and picking up part-time jobs even though they want a full-time job and they can't get it, and that's up 5.4% in one month?
And you call that a healthy labor market?
This is not a healthy labor market.
Yeah, and everything else she said is completely wrong.
And of course, they never want to talk about inflation, which, by the way, is coming back again.
Contrary to my predictions, I thought it would be down to 3% by now.
No!
It's at 3.4%.
And actually, if you annualize last month's increase in inflation, it comes to 7.8%.
And in energy services, we're in double digits, 10.4%.
Right, so isn't that the part, Drew, that I think most people can see where, so the average person obviously isn't going to dive into the economic charts the way Jeffrey is, but the average person can see when you go to the store, things do seem to be more expensive and your dollar is not going as far.
Like, isn't that really kind of the simplest way to look at this?
Let me throw to one more clip of Janet Yellen, because interestingly, she's talking about, she's sort of saying the reverse of what we're saying right now, that there is a disc, well, it's not quite the reverse, but she's basically saying there's a disconnect with what she claims the reality is, Jeffrey doesn't agree with that, versus what the public perception is.
unidentified
I'm not asking you to play therapist with the American voter, but there seems to be a disconnect between the numbers we're seeing and the way people are feeling about the economy, and how do you account for it?
I agree with you that there's a disconnect, and I don't have a simple and convincing answer, but Americans have been through a lot.
The pandemic really took a toll on American families, on children, on households.
We are enjoying a remarkable recovery, but also with high inflation, much of it reflecting supply bottlenecks that developed During the pandemic and then with Russia's brutal attack on Ukraine, we saw a surge in gas prices, in food prices.
Americans have been reeling from high inflation.
They do realize in polls that it's coming down.
And Americans' financial situation actually improved during the pandemic.
The way, though, that she combines all of these things, right?
So, and like, I was just shocked it didn't get to climate change also, right?
Like, of course, that'll be, we probably cut the clip too early.
But this combination of things that sort of have nothing to do with each other but are the talking points of the day, she did it very seamlessly there.
Right, so it's funny, because she's kind of saying it's an optics problem, and in a weird way, you're saying, well, yeah, you guys have lied about everything, so there's a grand optics problem, maybe not the one she's talking about.
This idea, though, Drew, of stimulus, where they give us back money, isn't that sort of the problem in the first place?
Like, why is it that nobody is ever like, oh, how about we take less of your money in the first place, you figure out what to do with your own money, instead of us just giving you crumbs back that we took from you?
I remember, it reminds me of when I was interviewing one of the heads of the budget director, the chairman of the budget committee here in California, and she was talking about these shortfalls, and I said, yeah, what are you going to do?
She goes, We don't have the money.
So I go, yeah, so what?
She goes, well, you know, the federal government needs to just give us that.
I was like, what?
It's the head of the budget committee.
Where do you think money comes from?
I'm also thinking about, you know, the richest man in the world in the history of humanity was a Mali king named Mansa Musa.
And he went on a grand European tour.
This is like thousands of years ago.
And he had so much gold, he handed out wherever he went.
And by doing that, he crashed the economy of everybody he visited.
And he had to go back in and buy the gold back to stabilize their economies on his way home.
And now he's upset as to what happens when you just allow 10,000 people a month in.
And his answer was, well, we don't have the money anymore.
We put two billion towards it.
We need more money from the federal government.
And it's like, guys, the federal government let all these people in in the first place.
Never ends, but sorry, let's finish up with the ridiculous story of the week, because the government, which clearly none of us are loving these days, it also lost an F-35 for a couple days in South Carolina.
This is absolutely wild from the hill.
The U.S.
military is hunting for an $80 million F-35 fighter jet after a pilot ejected from the military aircraft near Charleston, South Carolina on Sunday.
Officials at Joint Base Charleston said they were working with a local Marine base to locate an F-35 that was involved in a mishap Sunday afternoon.
The pilot ejected safely from the jet and is receiving medical care.
If you have any information that may help our recovery teams locate the F-35, please call the base defense operations at blah, blah, blah.
They wrote on Twitter and ladies and gentlemen, in case you haven't seen it, Somebody did find the jet, fear not.
I love this guy.
This is Randolph White in South Carolina.
This guy is a national hero as far as I'm concerned.
unidentified
Normally it's pretty quiet, but on Sunday afternoon... I was in the bathroom taking a shave, and I heard a screeching, sort of between a screech and a whistle.
Pilots I talk to keep saying the same thing, which is an aircraft that is still flying you don't eject from.
And so this mishap, that's such a carefully chosen word, They will glide the plane, they will do all kinds of things with the plane to kind of get it towards something like a landing or a safety, unless it's rapidly changing altitude, which they did not say that.
They did not say a mechanical error.
They did not say a major malfunction.
They said some sort of mishap, and that is a bizarre choice of words.
It's a bizarre response.
They couldn't track an F-35 and where it was going?
Was it hacked?
Was it taken over?
Did the pilot do something egregious?
I mean, there's lots of possibilities here other than something routine, which is a major mechanical malfunction.
They did not say that, and the plane did not lose altitude before the pilot took out.
Here is John Kirby, who has become sort of the most, you know, Corrine Jean-Pierre is like the obvious clown of the administration, but he is running a really tight second right now and just making up nonsense.
Watch this.
unidentified
Let me ask you about the F-35.
How does the U.S.
military lose a $100 million plane?
That will be something that they will investigate.
Believe me, after every aviation mishap, the Pentagon does what the Pentagon does.
They'll investigate it to try to get the answers on what happened.
And they'll also, I'm sure, look at their own search and recovery efforts of the aircraft itself to see whether that was conducted in all the appropriate ways.
They'll investigate this, and as the Defense Department always does, they'll be transparent about it when they find the answer.
Like, if my guys lost a piece of equipment, a camera, if a camera was missing from my studio, all hell would be breaking loose until it would be found, okay?
I hope you both, well, I was gonna say I hope you both get home, but I think you both are at home without losing your car or your plane or your helicopter or anything else.
We'll link to all your stuff down below.
For everybody else, we've got a post-game show coming up in about 30 seconds at reubenreport.locals.com.