Go test 1-2, testing 1-2, finally have a little show here, I hope this sound is all
coming through.
If you're in the chat it would be great for a little help on the audio visual.
You can also check this, if you don't mind, see if we're all kind of in sync on the live
stream, that would be really handy, perfect says Pamela, good to see you, good to see you.
I'm going to do this without headphones today too, so if you can give me any feedback on
my volume that would be great, or Jay's volume for that matter.
In case you're unaware, and Jay is definitely unaware, I was a patch plant physiologist
who was raised to make slices of animals brains, and I had Vivo, I scored them for
a few hours, and while I did that I would record pairs or groups of neurons under the
microscope, and also use transfection to control surrounding neurons with optogenetics.
So I'm pretty familiar with how transfection can be used in academic medicine, academic
investigation, how you can manipulate individual neurons, drive it by genes, you can look
me up on the internet, Jonathan, who you are, PubMed.
So today we have a special guest, Jay Bhattacharya.
The bifurcation of Earth is, he's a very special guy with regard to that.
Remember that if you're not familiar with him, he is a professor of health policy at
Stanford University, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.
He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
His research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular
emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.
Recent research also focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19, as well as an evaluation of policy
responses to the epidemic.
His broader research interests encompass the implications of population aging for future
population health, which I have listed as a must-ask question.
The medical spending in developed countries, the measurement of physician performance tied
to physician payment by insurers, that's a crazy one.
The role played by biomedical innovation on health, he has published 135 articles, and
top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, oh, I can be over here, can I, yes, I can.
He published that, yes, scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology,
statistics, law, and public health, among other fields, he holds an MD and a PhD in economics
and book.
MD and a PhD in economics, I almost thought it was an MD in economics for a minute there,
and both earned at Stanford University, so let me see if I can cut this out like that.
Oh, there you are, hello, sir.
Thank you very much for joining me.
I hope that introduction wasn't too, that's like 2-2-2-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-2-2.
You left a community, which is I'm a fringe epidemiologist, that's what I thought.
That's right.
Fringe epidemiologist, he says.
So, let's talk about being a fringe epidemiologist.
That first question kind of peels right into that, so how did this great Barrington declaration
inform was it from a poker group or are you guys all aficionados of the same dog breed or how did
that happen? So it's a it's it's it's a little bit of a random thing like I got to know Martin
Koldorf in the summer of 2020 because my friend Scott Atlas who was also at Stanford had been
invited by by President Trump to be his COVID advisor. Scott tried to like organize a meeting
inside the White House with me Martin and a few other scientists to try to talk to Trump about
lockdowns, school closures, Debbie Birx and and Tony Fauci tried to block that. It took for and
it took a like basically finally at the end of August, middle of August, I think,
we he got permissioned for us to go visit the White House and that's why I met Martin Koldorf
at the at the footsteps of the White House. Wow. Martin had been a guy known about him because
he is an amazing statistician. I work on I've been working on vaccine safety actually with the FDA
and he Martin had developed the statistical infrastructure for how to track vaccine
vaccine injuries in with with a real time surveillance. Anyway, so I met Martin, we hit it off
immediately at the foot first up the White House and I mean we started writing we wrote a couple
op-eds together. One day in late September, Martin calls me up and says, Jay, do you want to come
to have a little conference? What we'll do is we'll we'll invite some journalists and we'll invite
Sinatra Gupta from Oxford who I I mean I've been mired her forever and I never met her before
we'll invite the three of us will go meet with some journalists and try to tell them about the
epidemiology of of lockdowns the harms of lockdowns. In fact, that's exactly what we told President
Trump. We told that the President Trump that closing schools was a really bad idea was hurting
children that the evidence from Sweden was that it wasn't particularly effective at stopping this
rather than whatever the disease was and so like that there was a really bad idea to close schools
and that you needed to protect older people better like the basically the idea of a great
branch decoration and so we met in western Massachusetts very close to where Martin lives
and it's a town I never heard of before so when we when I arrived I it was like you know actually
this was like in the middle of a crazy lockdown in New York and and it felt it felt really illicit
like I got to fly across country and and on the drive-in I asked the the the the driver was
driving you what the name of the town was never heard of it before because it said Great Barrington
and so when we met we just we weren't like actually thinking about writing we were going to write
like a declaration we were just going to talk to people talk to journalists that have invited
there that when we met we really cleared that we derived basically at the same place I mean
I thought it was like particularly novel idea like the idea that you protect vulnerable older people
and you don't lock down that's the way we managed every other viral pandemic last
respiratory viral pandemic of the last century we arrived at the same place we thought okay well
why don't we put out a little short statement about what we think and I came up with the name
Jay I've stabbed quite proud of myself because I remembered the word Great Barrington I'm like
that would be a great title for the declaration you know I was thinking like port here in statement
you know from the like the 60s or whatever I see yes and so and you know you can't tell if the
word Great applies to the the city or to the or to the declaration which is that I'm being
really fantastic and so I yeah anyways it got a lot of attention I mean almost immediately
it was it got a tremendous amount of attention almost a million people signed it tens of thousands
of doctors and scientists signed it and you know what I think the reason why it got that
attention was that at that point oh sorry Jake no I signed it I just wanted to say oh thank
I'm really grateful you are grateful to do that I mean I think that the reason why it got
attention is because people understood like most people really understood deep in their heart that
there was that what we were doing was absolute nonsense it was hurting kids it was hurting poor
people it was hurting vast numbers if you all these lockdowns were and it wasn't like you know
if the promise was it was gonna get rid of the disease well how come it was coming back in
October 2020 right it wasn't working and it was hurting people and it was violated civil
rights at scale and it was and especially the harm to kids was was pretty close to the top of my
mind and I have three kids and all three of them you know basically they didn't see my two of them
didn't see the inside of a classroom for a year and a half and the third one was in college it
took a long time I mean basically it felt to me like we were robbing our kids of their childhood
for no real purpose well imagine quite frankly this is the one thing that really scared me is
that imagine not having you as a father instead having somebody who can't grasp it or understand
the limitations or the you know explain anything and just has to go from what they get on television
it could bend much much what scares me the most is the idea that the children seem to watch the
parents lose control and that's a real dangerous sort of blanket effect of what they did with the
lockdown I mean you were still seeing the aftermath of that and that you're seeing like levels of
anxiety and depression and kids like you scare the living daylight out of them tell them that
they are going to kill if they just lead normal childhoods they're going to kill mom and dad or
grandpa grandma and so they better treat everybody as biohazard or else I mean that's going to have
consequences and it just has had consequences really negative ones it's just heartbreaking to go
watch it anyway so that's how would the great grandpa question happen we we put this out and I
think people were just ready to hear that that wasn't needed like I I call it the least original
thing I've erode j I mean I it's not like I I mean it was we were saying obvious things right
and and yet if people were interested because it shattered the idea that there was a consensus
around the lockdowns I mean that's how you impose a lockdown or or or the kinds of like
policies you have to like get the population to agree to be scared and to have this sense that
all the scientists all the wise people agree that you have to do this or else and what the great
branch of decoration is it shattered that consensus shattered the idea that there was a consensus
it because you know the consensus wasn't there right you know this right I mean I from from from
the beginning of the pandemic you've been you've been saying counter counter consensus things
and scientists if you talk to scientists you know you get a hundred opinions if you have 100
scientists you get 150 opinions sometimes right and so you just it was it was it was really clear
that to me talking to other scientists that that there wasn't a consensus and so when we put the
the Declaration out I think that's why it got so much attention both from the public but also from
scientific authorities you know scientific bureaucrats like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins
or Jeremy Farron in the UK they were they were for them it was a threat to their power
it was a threat to the idea that they that they knew best what to do and everyone better
listen to them or else everyone's gonna die I mean that was essentially I mean like they you know
they didn't say it that way but that's essentially what they were they were implying
and the great branch and declaration said no look other scientists have a different view or
proposed or thinking of different policies is better and it was a call for a conversation
like we were calling for focus protection it's called for conversation how best to do that
how do you how really do you protect older people because the idea up to then was like the
lockdowns were going to protect them but it didn't protect them you know lots and the older people
have died on the basis of the idea that lockdowns can protect them we've done really stupid things
right like why do we send covid why did why did New York send covid infected patients back to
nursing homes this happened lots of places by the way not just New York it's because the the
premise was that keeping hospital beds empty was more important than protecting vulnerable people
why did we close schools like because somehow kids were even even despite the fact that
Sweden you had evidence from Sweden for the spring that not closing schools didn't result
in a worse epidemic really I just for the especially for the teachers the the rates of death for
teachers was was lower than the average of the rest of the population yeah it was it was really
shocking oh what is this what that's ridiculous now I get they're saying my zoom meeting is going
to end well we can we can you know I'm signed in under the wrong account then dog on it
I'm gonna have to sign in different than I guess okay well we can we start though we we've recorded
this right so we can yeah yeah I mean it's it's this is uh it's it's fine I just him in a little
annoyed that I could have seen that coming I guess I thought I had longer in this don't worry
um I'll send you a link in like 30 seconds okay see shortly okay
dumb d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum
dumb d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum
this one is the one I paid for open zoom
um
um-d-dum d-dum d-dum d-dum
sorry guys I'm gonna fix this right now and then it'll be dumb
save and now that we've got him he said I've got a lot of time so I'm actually gonna probably
have to cut him short and then uh what will happen is uh
I'll have to switch right away for Peter McCullough which is crazy but there it goes
hopefully he'll be up very shortly I'm gonna start this meeting and then uh hopefully he'll be here
at least all the settings are right now I hope the sound is all right are we good sound is all right
I think this is gonna be a fun conversation um I might have to keep him here all the way till
six o'clock but uh I think it's gonna be a good conversation here he comes he's already back
see how quick we are now we're back Jedi master level stuff there thank you sir for tolerating my
IT uh sure better rather than I am Jay so just uh no worries um so where were we we were I was
about to ask you I sort of pair up a general question that kind of segway's well in in what we
were talking about about the Great Bearing Declaration and where it evolved from and where it got you
um oh Jay can you can you can you allow me to or of course I can yes there we can
and so if you if that helps you at all to pick up where you left off or recording in progress
gotcha otherwise um so we were just talking about the Great Bearington Declaration you were
finishing kind of saying um how it evolved and and why it was important because because it gave
people first time this this clear uh message that there isn't a consensus that something is
isn't right so it's a pretty incongruent message relative to the television
um what was the in that time what was the the most common way of them trying to dismiss you
was it just that they don't know what they're talking about even though that was part of the
reason why you chose you three right as you you realize that you're let's say professional
standing should bring some weight so that people would be less likely to be able to dismiss you
well how did you how did that come out in reality versus what you expected
well so uh the four days after we wrote the declaration we learned this uh from foyer
request four days after we wrote the declaration the head of the NIH Francis Collins wrote to Tony
Fauci an email where he called me Martin and Sinatra of Martin Coldoff of Harvard University
Sinatra Gupta of Oxford University the three of us fringe epidemiologists uh that's that's
I got a book I got a little uh i'll see if i have like card that has the fringe epidemiologists
i can't find it it's a fringe epidemiologists somewhat friend of mine made a fringe epidemiology
card i i think i will go to my grade with that title well don't give them all the way i want one
of those i definitely will the next time we'll next time we meet you i will give you what i promise
um but yeah so so uh he called us fringe epidemiology then he called for devastating takedown literally
in an email devastating takedown the premises of the the declaration and then what started
happening was hit pieces hit pieces by the washing and post uh in fact Francis uh Tony Fauci shared
it and a hit piece almost immediately by wired magazine where Fauci showed up accusing us of
wanting to let the virus rip when we were calling for focus protection of vulnerable people um i
mean it was basically a propaganda campaign um in in in the uk parliament a conservative
member parliament denounced uh cenetra uh there was a website that came up uh all of a sudden
accusing us of like saying all being you know all kinds of nasty attacks and in the British
medical journal the British medical journal published a false attack on us claiming that we
had financial conflicts of interest it was insane i paid my own way to great parenthood mass
uses for the flight i didn't accept any money in fact jay i've taken zero dollars for any of my
covid work to date i've lost money on covid um because i just don't feel right taking money in the
middle for when people are suffering in this way so i just i the whole thing was just they
and the British medical journal published it claiming that somehow that we were coke funded
when in fact that it was the it was like the imperial college model that led to the panic in
march of 2020 that was coke funded um the whole thing was just it was it was it was an absolutely
disgusting ad hominem attack based on lies because the problem was they couldn't actually engage with
us honestly in a discussion it's not like that is if we had all the the ideas i mean i i i you know
it's just where if you're a scientist you know you make a mistake let me you you're wrong a lot
of the time and it's the it's the process of like uh seeing what other people think looking at data
doing experiments that's how you learn as scientists right they didn't treat us that way they treated
us as if we were heretics to be expelled and excommunicated um i'd say this this wasn't it wasn't
even the first time like in the pandemic um in april of 2020 i had done a study in Santa Clara
county california um i don't know if you've seen it maybe you've seen it was it was it was a
study measuring antibody levels in the population a seroprevalence study and it was we done one in
Santa Clara county and another one in LA county shortly after that and uh you know we we used this
uh this test kit that we'd gotten from a a guy who runs uh made testing in major league baseball
he had ordered it um we did a lot of work to try to figure out what the false laws and
false negative rates were uh we were we put out a paper which i thought was a pretty careful paper
that there was some uh some some comments that folks folks had on twitter and elsewhere that
made it then we released an updated version of it in a in a in in the pre-print ultimately the
paper was published in the international level of epidemiology right so it's like we got the math
right um the hunch line for the paper from the beginning was that the disease had had spread to
about three percent of the population in LA county for in LA county four percent three percent
in in Santa Clara county um it was uh it was something like it was April early April 2020 and
that meant that you know there were a thousand official cases then in in in Santa Clara county
but our estimates implied 50,000 people had already been infected or at least had antibodies to the
to the there were specific to the SARS-CoV-2 um that meant that infections how do you rate was
not you know the the you know was the World Health Organization said 3.4 percent case fatality
rate our estimate was that that implied something like 0.2 percent infection fatality rate um for
people especially for and there was this massive age gradient with older people having much higher
risk um that led to hit pieces on me and on my wife and my family it led to i wasn't ready for
that my face skin wasn't this i thought my skin was thick after you know two decades in academics
but it turns out what i wasn't used to uh attacks on me death threats constantly for two straight
years jay every time i appear in public every time i'd write something they there was just like
uh assumptions of bad faith accusations of false accusations of conflicts of money complex of
interest um essentially everything but actually engage with the scientific results right i i i
can only imagine i mean i i remember this paper um and i remember i might have even still been
on my bike when that paper came out so there might even be a later bike ride on my youtube
channel where i did it um but the the what my narrative would be on that or what my question
would be on that is um just taking notes on it so we that whole study would be on a testing kit that
at that time um part of the illusion of consensus i would say was that these testing kits were
very high fidelity with almost no false positives and appropriate to apply to anybody that was
suspicious of having a test or i mean having an infection and at the same time overlapping with
this i think biologically incorrect concept of asymptomatic spread being a very widespread
phenomenon and i know that at that time i couldn't iron it out i couldn't figure it out but i know
that there was a very concerted effort to establish the idea that you can't know if you're infected
and even if you test negative on a test you could still be positive and just not know it and this
goes back to the you know testing before you leave campus to make sure you don't infect your
grandparents it was really uh a wicked web they wove um and so i think this was really important
evidence that again even if you don't interpret the evidence the way that i would
its evidence for this illusion of consensus about well there's a new virus and it's just got here
and we're accurately tracking it when it that clearly brought that into question yeah i mean i
think um so just a couple of things like at the time there were those test kits um these were
for antibody test kits not the PCR test kits um and uh like on the on the PCR absolutely grew
with you that the PCR was was vastly like misinterpreted and misused i don't even know what the right
word is um they they they tuned the PCR test so that it was hypersensitive right so even if you had
uh like just fragments of dead dead virus in you it would turn positive because they they did
you know 40 doublings or whatever but a lot of 40 doublings for you a lot positive and then
they tied that to quarantining uh to contact tracing it was it was a it was guaranteed to create
this the idea that the virus is is everywhere and that you are at risk of spreading it from to
everyone and um and you better you know and and essentially create panic and fear i wrote a piece
in uh in the summer of 2020 arguing against contact tracing on basically with that as the main premise
the premise being that the contact tracing um was identifying many people who are not really at
risk of spreading the disease causing untold harm to the especially the children um and uh the
that and that it was an inappropriate tool for trying to control the spread of a of a of a
respiratory virus i mean a contact tracing maybe could work for HIV because you know who you had
sex with but you don't you're really hard to tell who you breathe next to breathe near or
breathe in the same room as um and so the idea that you could you could like get uh you could stop
the spread of the disease this way with this testing was insane but i just a quick thing
about the antibody test at the time in april 2020 it's basically impossible to get the antibody
test um it was kind of a unique thing that we were wondering about that actually you said major
league baseball so you had some kind of hookup otherwise you wouldn't have been i mean it was
it was actually just completely serendipitous jay so like what happened was that i wrote an
op-ed in march of 2020 in the waltz v journal saying that we didn't know how deadly the disease
was we didn't know how widespread it was and effectively calling for a sera prevalent study i
figured the cdc would run it um the cdc didn't run it so much later uh what happened instead
was that there was a man who runs uh testing for for uh you know steroid testing for major league
baseball he had had the foresight to order a bunch of antibody tests from this chinese company
and uh he when he saw that op-ed he called me up or called me and my colleagues up and said look
i i don't want to use this to make money i'd rather use it for science and so he offered up those
tests which i never would i would have access to to run this study we we organized that study
within the matter of a couple of weeks um it was it was it was it would normally it would take
a year to organize a study like right just getting everything in place it was it was really just it
was it was quite something to get uh like quite a feat of of like logistics to like get everything
together um and the results were right like a hundred other groups then replicated the result
that we got uh that as far as the false positive rate for that test the way we measured it was first
that the the manufacturer had done some rest asked him as the false positive but they've
done is they've taken blood stored blood from 2018 or something and run the the blood the blood on
the uh run the run the test on that stored blood from 2018 and they found a false positive rate of
like point oh five percent very very small false false positive rate um we of course we didn't
believe them because it's the manufacturer so you have to like get it independent so we got when we
went and found some some colleagues to run some independent studies here at Stanford
for a small group then when we released the study it turned out there were like dozen
laboratories around the on the world that were also playing with the same antibody test kit
and they basically got the point oh five percent same the same we we gotten um it was actually a
major scandal around those antibody test kits right around then Jay um a lot of the test kits
turned out to be fraudulent the UK for instance had bought a bunch of like test kits from Chinese
companies that had been which is terrible test yes um like you know with like lots of cross
positivity to other SARS-CoV-2 viruses and so on um uh I'm sorry SARS-CoV-2 to other coronaviruses
and so on um and so like it was it was it was but there are like fortuitously our test kit
turned out to be good the one of the few good ones it was actually approved by the FDA for uh
for EUA later that summer um and uh yeah so I think we actually got the number right and I said a
hundred other uh independent uh groups confirmed uh pretty widespread uh antibody levels uh use
you're using different test kits basically all around the world that summer and into that fall
there was um the best paper that I've been using to teach was a cell article actually
and uh I don't know if I can flash this up there and show it to you but um the the paper actually
looks at um in this column in the dark blue is actually uh people that were just blood donors um
in 2020 and even there they can find uh T cells that are specific for the S protein the M protein
and the N protein of SARS-CoV-2 already in 2019 in blood donors um and they also confirmed the B
cells um and they showed that actually more people converted T cells than converted B cells which
also makes sense from the sorry I don't have you on the screen um making uh makes sense from the
the perspective of how the immunology activates itself and sequence like that so there were some
really giant confirmations of there being a signal before the pandemic started I mean I think um
it's quite likely that the the disease was here in 2019 there's no there's I mean it's just it's
inconceivable to get from like the official start day of the pandemic is what like late January 2020
2020 in the US and by early April that's like a month and a half and you know three weeks of
lockdown it had already spread to three percent like you already antibodies in three percent of
the poverty that the antibodies of course fade right so as you as you as you well know um so the
idea that uh three percent of the population have antibodies there's no way if the start date is
January late January 2020 to get to April 20 early April 2020 and say oh well three it's spread to
three percent um you know in the middle of a lockdown it had to have been here earlier um there
was a couple of studies really interesting ones from September 2019 like looking at stored blood in
and goal in Angola I think was the and then another one in northern Italy looking at stored blood
in um uh in from blood banks from September 2019 October 2019 that found positive antibodies um
and I think some of those T cells results that you're you're pointing to Jay I think that also
says something really important about cross immunity right you you might have had immunity
because you were exposed to other coronaviruses um and there were some really interesting uh
studies that I remember reading in 2020 of of like preschool teachers and what happens when they
got infected like they they basically had different like a different disease course in part because
they've been exposed to you know you have small kids I know I've had small kids you get sick all
the time with presumably the other coronaviruses um and so they had some cross immunity uh so just
it's uh so what I got a I got a really sharp question for this part of the discussion if
if we agree that this seroprevalence data is real um and we look at at what was happening
in 2019 we don't even we don't see any peaks in all cause mortality we don't see any peaks
in pneumonia we don't see any peaks in some kind of signal that would indicate that something
especially deadly was spreading in the background and then suddenly in in certain places at certain
times we have these giant spikes which which they sold to us as evidence of instantaneous spread
but your data suggests that's not the case but there's no signal before that so how do I
reconcile those two things? Well I think um you know you could you could like so I talked to
Synetra Gupta for instance about this you know she's she's a theoretical epidemiographer professor
of theoretical epidemiology um what she tells me is that these are consistent with s these are
consistent with sIR models with particular sIR models are these compartment models I'm sure
your audience knows uh that they're used to forecast forecast and track uh like the the
spread of diseases um that there are formulations of sIR model consistent with the patterns that
we've seen um so like for instance imagine it's it starts in september august 2019 or something
like there's a it's the path of these sIR models there's flat flat flat flat and then a big
spread because it's like there's this like early it's not exponential but like it's exponential
like growth um very very early because you just you know one two four it's very small until you
get to you know two to the 15th or something and then you get then you have to get big numbers um and
the how how fast that spreads uh you know it's it's possible that that that it's it's that uh
let me give you one other data point that I that I've seen that most people don't know about um
there was a paper by two uh two economists at the ohio state who she had done and uh
blanking on the uh the second author's name and what they found was that there was
cremation data from china from muhan in october 2020 a big spike in cremation
in muhan china uh so it's not that there was no signal earlier it's that the signals were kind of
hidden um suppressed uh and you can you can look and see some they they apparently got uh they
they got these data leaked to them uh and they actually couldn't they they tried to get the paper
published and uh they even the pre-print servers wouldn't put it they finally I think they got
SSR on or some pre-print server to put it up so you can go find the paper um who she had done
so there there is there may be uh the other thing it's a curious it's a curious observation
because um are you aware of andrew huff do you know that that guy is from eco-health alliance
actually he in his uh story about the pandemic also mentions that he was searching data on the
internet and found uh some signal that was related to crematoriums in china I don't know if it was a
signal from a satellite or some other information he had uh which is interesting you said the last
name was done on that paper d-u-n-n-l-u-c-i-a-d-u-n-n um cool but yeah so it was uh I'll send you the
paper afterwards I don't have the technology you have of like bringing papers up which is
very very cool I'd say um uh but yeah I think um I think I think that that it's I mean there
are still quite a lot we don't know there are also people there are interests of great powers that we
keep some of this you know like I mean like you know some of this uh like if the full story gets
out uh about exactly how it I mean I I mean just one of these things were like there's lots of
people having interest in not having the full story completely get out um as you know as you
can tell from the the the cover up around uh the support of the NIH for getting to function research
that's there's a lot of like people who just their reputations will get harmed um uh so anyway
so like the the point is that uh that it's it's possible that it's not possible likely that it was
he it was spreading before 2019 I don't see how you can and what you said I agree with uh I don't
see how you can explain it as it arrives in late January 2020 and then all of a sudden pops up
everywhere Iran, Italy, UK, Sweden, New York uh all of a sudden pops up everywhere
without it either uh yeah I mean I think the most likely explanation is it was here earlier it was
here in 2019 and then you had like exponential spread flat flat flat and then you notice the
oh I remember what I was gonna say this is one other thing if you're not if you don't you don't
have a test to look for it before what like January 2020 and in the US we don't really have a test
a PCR test to look for it until really available to like March 2020 um that is true there was a paper
by Alex Washburn um early in the pandemic looking at ILI spikes uh it uh influenza like illness spikes
that it would show up something like that right like an ILI spike um he also was arguing for
an early spread based on the ILI spikes um so I think I think it's it's going to be a complicated
story partly because it it matters what you can see in what you don't see oh sorry Jacob no no I
was just I'm trying to find another piece here but um there's a interesting uh theory on the
internet that circulates around that flu actually disappeared at the start of the pandemic but then
people say they stop testing and that's why it disappeared so it's interesting that's that
actually if you look it did it did actually disappear there was no there was almost no flu
for for two years so then how did so what signal did he see an ILI then what's he looking for if
he's not looking so see he was looking for like ILI is not like flu testing data so this ILI is
like you it's clinical uh your admissions for uh but they weren't giving any money for ILI cases
so there was no impetus for anybody to record any ILI when they could get 35 000 for calling
the same thing so um the flu disappearing is like uh there's a what's the name of the group I think
I'll biofire that the tests um test for like and there's the sentinel labs that the CDC has to test
for flu and the flu did disappear I mean just it absolutely disappeared for two years like you
could find almost none of it but either in the southern hemisphere or the northern hemisphere
almost in any country um it was gone um the okay so what could explain that uh there's two theories
that I've seen that that's might work I'm not I'm not sure I convinced by either theory but I'll
tell you what the theories are um one is that the flu and the and the and the covid virus
I compete in the same evolutionary space in the same niche and so and it just the
covid just outcompeted the flu in the in our in our noses I've seen a couple of papers that
suggest that that's not true that in fact that you can have both so I don't I'm not I once for a
long time I believe that was true but once I saw those papers I was not sure that's true
um the other theory that I've seen that's possible imagine you have a disease like the flu that is
in endemic equilibrium right so you you're it's a it's it's hovering around the herd immunity
threshold uh in the population at large right uh so so you you're you're you're if you whenever
the immunity level goes above it the flu rates go low whenever it goes below it you see a little
up you see some uptick like in the in the winter season or whatever um versus a disease that's
like relatively new in the population you have some cross immunity like we talked about but not
but but it's not in endemic equilibrium covid is not in endemic equilibrium and then imagine that
you have a panic or fear or even lockdowns or something uh that what what that will do is it
will raise the herd it will lower the herd immunity threshold of both the flu and the and for covid
and that will now if the flu already has immunity in the population that is near the endemic
threshold right hovering around the herd immunity threshold then the lowering the herd immunity
threshold by again by panic by panic or by uh lockdown will will cause the flu to disappear
because you'll have a lot more people that are above that herd immunity threshold but for covid
it won't because uh the relative fraction of the population that's immune is still well below the
herd immunity threshold i'm just talking like april 2020 or whatever it's generated whatever
2020 um and so you could have policies have different effects on different viruses depending on how
close they are to their own herd immunity thresholds i'd see um that's a theory i i've not that's a
theory that uh cenetra told me actually i've not seen a paper that's documented whether it's or
you're tested whether this is this works or doesn't work but the fact is about the sentinel labs in
the cdc looking for the flu it what they went away like they found nothing for two years
i'm going to make this over here for a second so i can put you
up on top so this is this is the one issue that i keep bringing up on my slide stream all the time
is that if you look at the data from oh what oh that's right i can't do that shoot that doesn't
work i gotta leave you up where you were um so how do i get that off if i do this sorry i'm trying
to get too fancy um so if i just show it like this if you take the cdc data and this graph
unfortunately stops in somewhere in 22 so i don't i haven't updated it in a while but the point
still gets well made is that if we start at 2000 if we start at 2014 over here and we follow the
seasonal variation between you know 68,000 and 55,000 deaths per week there's no real signal until
right there smack dab in february or or march of 2020 and then this this is not anything that a
normal model fits and then in new york and many other places it goes right back down to baseline
and that's not what that's still it's still about baseline but um but yeah okay yeah yeah okay but
but in this case we have a signal in the form of uh pneumonia we have a drop in the signal due to
flu that you can't see here in yellow and so i'm still stuck on the idea that pneumonia went up to
two or three times normal death that we used to be able to handle pneumonia pretty well and
it's a pretty consistent number across the last let's say eight years and then suddenly we we lost
the plot and we couldn't care for pneumonia anymore um i mean i i think uh what what this
points to and i i think this is the point you're making at which i agree with this is a complicated
situation it's not just that covid came in and killed people although i do think that covid
came and killed people but i i also think that it let the the the policy response
distorted how we managed respiratory disease generally and actually just disease more generally
i mean there are incredible reports of people dying at home with heart attacks yes and then
reported as covid and then reported on the news as covid i mean you know that we uh i think it was
CARES Act uh that that put in the uh the ten thousand dollar funeral benefit or
nine thousand dollar funeral benefit if you have covid on your death certificate
um it doesn't have to be the primary cause just to be on our death certificate in fact if you go
to the FEMA page it'll tell you how to request that they make sure the check for covid
so that it shows up on the death certificate that's correct so you can get the benefit
if you die of cancer without covid on the death certificate you get zero dollars from federal
funeral benefit so there are definitely incentives to oh i i did a study
in uh well actually since i didn't publish it i'm not going to talk about that let me just
talk about that uh something that is published a study done by the Santa Clara county public health
authorities in 2020 looking at autopsy reports and then going back and do and do like checking
to see what fraction of the patients that were diagnosed sort of designated as dead from covid
actually actually had covid as the primary cause of death and it's like you know it's
not i mean i think like at least 25 over counting in in summer of 2020 at least for older people
in that autopsy studies with what they found alameda county in california also had a similar
finding there's definitely over counting um in that sense uh john e and medius has a really
interesting sort of modeling study looking at trying to find or trying to figure out how much
over counting there was and he finds i mean something on that order for in in western countries
of 25 to could be higher uh percent uh over counting probably under counting in in poor countries
um and so it's it's it's so there's that the the lockdowns themselves cause a lot of death
there's also iatrogenic harm right so we used a protocol for managing patients in a hospital
with ventilators that the wall tout organization promulgated based on the chinese authorities
that uh that was dropped i think sometime in early summer 2020 after people started to
realize we were killing patients on that we using that ventilator protocol right uh we
so and and so you and and you're you're a lot of a lot of the uh the rhetoric around the time
is that you know you if you and actually still uh to for a long time was if you get covid stay at
home until you're so sick then come to the hospital what if you had pneumonia then right
pneumonia still is still is a deadly killer um you probably should have gone to the hospital earlier
to get uh to get an antibiotic treatment um a lot of the a lot of that spike that you showed
it's got to be complicated it's got to be partly covid partly by atrogenic harm partly just
disruptions in basic services for for basic things that otherwise could be treatable
a lot it could be i mean essentially general panic i haven't seen a great decomposition of
that and i think we really need one like we need to understand uh what what you know each of these
items are important i've seen people say that it's not consistent with epidemic spread of a disease
and that i'm not sure about i mean like i said i talked with sineptor Gupta and she says that
it's consistent with um with sIR models uh with the right parameterization and there are very
flexible models so it's it's it's still possible but so flexible model makes it weaker in a way
right because flexible model means you can make the model say whatever you wanted to say including
what they made it say at the beginning of the pandemic so i always would take that with a grain
of salt well i think i think the the question is like if you want to say it's not consistent with
epidemic spread uh the way that you understand what epidemic spread is is these sIR models
and they are flexible that is that in a sense that you're right i agree with and that is that
it when you have a very flexible model essentially what you have is uh it's not falsifiable or much
a very difficult to falsify um i'm not sure that's true for the sIR models i think it is falsifiable
but but it does encompass a very wide range of viral spread uh patterns uh depending on the
the parameterization of it so i don't i i guess i'd say i don't
like the the pattern that you showed i've seen other folks put that up and say look that's not
consistent with epidemic spread i don't i don't know that's true but i also i also think that the
general point which is that there was a lot of panic and that that panic itself caused a lot
of harm deaths even that is that's indisputably true uh are you familiar with denny rancor's work
this guy uh in canada yeah i think one of the main observations that he makes that's very compelling
to me is that even in counties in america you can see the lack of spread like an event and then
it's over and then another event and it's over and it doesn't cross borders for example germany has
no signal in the first uh first year of the pandemic almost a year and a half um which can't be
attributed to lockdowns because that's of course one of those things that we've been arguing from
the beginning that lockdowns can't do that so it's tricky i think it's i mean it's there's a
there's a study i don't know i'm sure you've seen it uh from um mumbai a colleague of mine at the
university of chicago a nuke malani conducted a sera prevalence study in in mumbai in uh july
of twenty twenty i think i think it was the date um and we found it was then the slum areas of
mumbai the sera prevalence was seventy percent and then the richer areas is twenty percent
so i think i think like i've done i did a study look trying to measure the effect of lockdowns
uh comparing sweden and south korea versus other countries um that that did lock down
the close schools and close businesses and found very little average effect of lockdowns on disease
spread and i think the key i don't know i mean i didn't like this is how i'm thinking about now
the main hypothesis i have now right is that is that um is that lockdowns worked for a certain
class of people right a class of people who didn't lose their jobs essentially was like the laptop
class right so lockdowns are lockdowns are luxury of the laptop class um and for the rest of the
population it didn't work and so you could have populated places that have a larger fraction
of the population that that isolate themselves for whom it works even as the disease spreads in
among among people who can't isolate themselves for economic reasons or other reasons um so you're
gonna have heterogeneous spread and just looking at the average spread is not the key thing um
germany was like pretty i mean germany was really interesting right that like they they had they
they basically declared victory over the virus before before like to spread everywhere uh
china did the same thing country after country uh so it's possible then that lockdowns temporarily
protected certain groups of certain classes of the population
um you know you know another great example for this is like peru i don't know if you ever
looked at the peruvian data j um the per in peru they had like they had one of the worst lockdowns
in the world like the most raponium and of course there's vast numbers of poor people in peru
and there was huge numbers of deaths during the lockdown um the at one point in the pandemic
per the peruvian authorities reclassified all of those deaths as covid deaths when they were like
you know people starving um people like and so and the disease i mean of course disease
probably also spread to those folks too um despite the lockdowns i think that
it's such a complicated thing like if you have unequal societies you're going to have different
impacts of lockdowns on different parts of those those societies um a lot of those disease spread
models are pretty bad and though it's going as associated with socioeconomic realities um
and so yeah i think there's a lot to learn um i guess i'm not ready to like uh discard the disease
spread hypothesis based on it's still quite possible that's that's part of the story
yeah in fact it's like i mean i say it go further i say it's likely that's a part of the story
but the panic is really a major part of it as well yeah i think um the the three-year
odyssey that i've been on has led me to conclude that that there might have been
let's say for example you had this plan and you knew that when you executed the plan that
trillions of dollars would shift and power would shift um and so the question is would
a national security state leave that up to chance or would they kind of tip the scales to be ready
and and and control that thing and so for me that's what that's how it adds up if we go back to this
atrogenic harm uh comments that you were making earlier about the ventilators actually being a
bad idea do you find it spooky then how it was such a illusion of consensus about the fact that
we would run out of ventilators the elon musk had to shift his production to ventilators because
this was thought to be the cure it's almost impossible for that to have been organic um
i think i uh so like the ventilators are really curious thing right so first of all i remember
seeing the earlier reports out of china like case reports out of china from early january 2020
suggesting ventilators as a way to and and uh it was almost like it wasn't just for the patient
it was for the doctors like the idea was that if you put a patient on a ventilator uh it was not
yeah yeah like you reduce the risk to the to doctors and so um you could very easily
imagine an organic phenomenon wouldn't have to be a plan it would just be
doctors don't want to expose themselves to risk they have this technology that think would help
patients and help them and they just adopt it and the WHO basically endorses it um and so it's like
it just spread like i i guess my model uh is a little different than yours in that sense like i
think a lot of the a lot of the the like just take the the pharmaceutical companies making
gadsillions of dollars a lot of it is a lot of this opportunistic like once you start to see
the panic happening you have got you have like uh media organizations that all of a sudden are
seeing up increases in in their huge increases in the interest in their publications and their money
and so they they want to keep augmenting the panic because that's that's what their bottom line is
that they as soon as the governments some governments see that they can take control over over like
you you know impose things that they've never otherwise would be able to do uh run run uh early
elections like in in um in like what happened in uh for instance in uh in Canada so uh work
or uh to to like establish that uh a long-term uh you know long-term staying power in the you
know like i remember after 9-11 there was huge huge support for the for the bush administration
like unprecedented levels like it's kind of a rally around the flag thing and so like if
governments of course uh you know it'd be almost malpractice political malpractice not to like take
advantage of it i think a lot my model for a lot of this jay is that um you once you've caused
panic in the population at large once that has happened for through whatever process uh we can
talk about that i do think that there was some deliberate uh desire to spread panic uh uh but
once that started once that it's it's it creates all kinds of opportunities for act for various
actors many of whom thinking that they're doing good but they're actually ended up doing harm
to try to take advantage that is definitely close to how i have interpreted this and now it's just
in in pessimism or an optimism looking at it as uh how much of it was nefarious and i i definitely
agree that that there is this uh potential for it i just am frightened because um i i was so moved
by this uh there was a chatham house talk in 2011 that was given by the by a guy by the name of
mark von ronst um he's a a belgian guy who oversaw the flu in uh 2009 the flu epidemic the swine flu
epidemic and in that presentation he i don't know the exact quote but he he is lamenting
that in 2009 they didn't have the capability that they do now with twitter and facebook and with
with media messaging um they could have never achieved um what they really needed to achieve
back then but he knows how they could do it now and that was with with you know he could see
that facebook and these things would be really useful and one of the things that he's saying in
that in that talk is that they publicized seven people dying of the flu and then extrapolated
what the uk had said and said that we can expect so many hundred people to die in belgian this
month and it was the exact expectation of every year but they made it sound like because they
accentuated this seven people had died of the new flu that somehow a new phenomenon was occurring
and there are other videos where these flu virologists will lament that nobody takes the flu
seriously anymore and so there's all this anecdotal evidence that their public health
apparatus has been grasping at straws to try and get something to catch um and you know and it
Ralph barracks original sort of plan with using coronaviruses was to use them as a vaccine platform
because they're so innocuous so it's really strange if you go back to barracks originally
they were trying to blame it all on him now but his overarching motivation for investigating
coronaviruses was that was that they were innocuous and therefore could be a potential platform for
genetic technologies and that kind of thing i don't know where i was going with that question
uh so actually let me just to say i think i've seen that van rans video um i think i think he
laments if i remember if it's the same video i'm remembering he's he's like lamenting that there
there are people that might they like to contradict the public health uh fear mongering um that was
the problem yes but we that that you know if you just needed better control um and you know in the
uk there's this uh this group that advised the government called spy b spi b behavior or behavioral
they they embrace this idea of nudges nudges in order to create panic that was like that was like
that was essentially like uh seen as like a a responsible thing to do to cut to create panic
in the population during this pandemic um and uh the control of information to the public at large
was a central i uh central fix uh fixation of of of of of many public health authorities there are
foyer documents from mark zuckerberg and uh to tatoni fauci from the earliest days of the pandemic
about how to manage the the perception of the fear or perception of the risk in the public at large
and uh you know frankly it it was it worked it worked like there are still people who think
that the if you get covid the like i mean i mean i mean i mean this is i don't know maybe there's
not still people i hope they're not still people but like they were up until 2022 there are people
who thought that if you got covid there's one chance and two of of being hospitalized and one chance
in you know three of dying or something when in fact the truth was orders of magnitude less than that
um and so the the and the and the what the stories that they told themselves was that you needed
people to be appropriately scared so a that they complied with the the orders of public health and
be that so that they didn't they they acted in ways in their private lives that reduced the
risk of spreading the disease to to to vulnerable people um what the problem with that is that like
as soon as you unleash fear in the population like that it takes on a life of its own it it creates
all kinds of harm um that have long standing i mean i think i don't for instance i don't think
schools close in the united states for as long as they did if you don't have that fear and panic
like who wants to harm their children by like not letting them have basic a basic childhood
right no one no one really wants to do that it's only and when you're in the grips of fear that
you're abnormal that's not it's it's only it's only that that can lead to to some of the crazy
things we've seen um i think i think i don't think you don't think it's inverted that the fact that
we couldn't lock down is what frightened everybody that that all these people took it so seriously i
mean i wasn't afraid of being at home with my kids i hated it but i was and i lamented that
they were not able to hang out but it never occurred to me that the way it did to my neighbors that
wow it must be serious if they're closing the schools for the rest of the year oh my gosh
they're not gonna they might not open schools in the fall can you believe how serious this is
that's the question you ask if you're skillfully watching television at that time
no you absolutely right jay i agree with that i think it's it's uh it's it's kind of a feedback loop
right you lock down that causes fear and then that causes uh support for lock further lockdowns
and other restrictions and so you just have this like this feedback loop that lit plate and i
remember the first time i saw uh a uh a poll of how popular the lockdowns were i think it was like
april or may 2020 and i was like 80 percent of the population was fully on board i was like i
was shocked yep and i thought there would be widespread protests there were some protests but
but those protests were seen as like a counter cultural act a heretical act um and uh they were
like they were suppressed and uh you know like that was that so it was really funny actually to see
the george floyd protests happen in uh early late spring early summer 2020 and the public health
authorities sign a letter saying oh yeah we those that's that's good public health
actually i kind of interpret that as young people needed some outlet to like
express their frustration i mean i so i was like yeah fine like people people should people
should be allowed to i think everyone should have been allowed to protest the the fear was used to
control people it's going to have consequences they're really hard to like predict up front
um it just it plays itself out in in in ways that are just uh damaging to people
um and so i think i think i i agree with you that the lockdowns induce the fear but also the other
direction um it's a good feedback loop i mean the masks also i mean that was a really outward
selling yeah it's it looked that you're in a pandemic you're wearing you see everyone wearing
like you know full body suits that you're it's like you're in a movie uh that was part of it and i
think part of actually master really interesting in that sense because it it did induce fear
like it reminded people to be scared but it was also like i think a lot of public health people
thought of it as a way to like give uh uh give people a sense of control false sense of control
over their disease risk right so we've caused this fear we want to manage it even though there's
no good uh no good randomized evidence suggests masks could could do what we say or they do but
let's tell people that so that uh so that it that that they feel like they have some autonomy
over the risk they're taking wow it's just crazy what they've done to us i really what i lament
the most is that they've they've specifically misled these college age kids who really had to
conform in a way that no one else really in america had to conform um and and so i remember jay like
there was a the close the air force academy to for uh for like they sent home the freshman
sophomores and juniors uh and then they kept they kept the seniors in spring of 2020 and they kept
the seniors and they put them in like solitary confinement they were not allowed to leave their
dorm rooms they basically brought food to them they didn't have any human contact for months
two kids killed themselves two air force cadets killed themselves in spring i remember seeing that
going this is this is just cruel it's inhumane um and these are kids that are very very low risk
of getting hurt if they get covid and actually even just the clothing of colleges like if you
know this disease is risky for old people why would you send young people back home to create
multi-generational homes that didn't need to exist for for for several months why not keep them at
college um you know i just i it was it was um i mean i i tend to be the kind of person that
that like will attribute that to like just intellectual errors um and maybe that's what it was but
i think a lot of those intellectual errors come out of panic right the idea that young people are
somehow like the the the vector of the disease vector of disease other human beings are simply
just bio hazards to be avoided um i mean i'm sure this happened to you like you walked down
the street and if you're not wearing a mask uh the a masked person will jump out into the
off the sidewalk to get away from you uh i mean that happened how do you how do you get to that
point well you get to that point because public health authorities and and uh governments are
telling people to treat people like bio hazards yeah the the the only people that are wearing masks
in the Pittsburgh area now are between the ages of like 18 and 23 and they'll wear it all day long
at work um you have to sometimes depending on the hospital you go to they have a sign that says
please wear a mask but not everybody's wearing one um but it they're still very much sustaining
this idea that that something about mother nature has changed drastically in the last three years
and uh it's a permanent change and it's terrifying because we're really if if the adults don't wake
up soon then the the kids will be permanently brainwashed like this i think it's i mean i think
those like masks are seen as like we're we're sold as if they were a costless or harmless
intervention um you know like there are these there's this psychological syndrome like people
were the kids young people wear the mask in order to hide because of their insecurities um that the
the masks if they don't work or like the cloth masks certainly don't do anything you tell people
to wear it yeah older people will wear cloth masks go into situations that they probably should
have stayed away from or during times of high disease spread and take risks that they wouldn't
otherwise have taken except for the fact they were wearing a mask um and and you know like i got i
got all these heartbreaking emails through the whole pandemic from people but probably among the
most heartbreaking we're we're like parents of autistic kids telling me what what the masking was
doing to their to their to their kids or hearing impaired kids uh your parents of hearing impaired
kids um i just it's the idea that like you could have any intervention with with no good
evidence behind it and assume that it's going to have no harm at all because these are medical
interventions you have to treat them seriously like you have to have great evidence before you
recommend them at scale um and it's just for public health is to act the way it did in the absence
of evidence um it was such it i mean i have to say what i was uh we keep talking about the illusion
consensus it was such an inversion for me from my expectations after 20 years of working in
in academics and public health um to see how people behave they they behave so irresponsibly
like that that like fear mongering i thought was like anathema in public health like we we were
supposed to uh exclude calmness like to talk to calm pop people down not to treat fear mongering
as if it were a virtue right yeah i i i can speak much to that um i had uh i had a lot of uh
a lot of run-ins with people trying to calmly objectively in private messaging just say well
maybe you can temper this this position a little bit um and and people were willing to go the full
distance of saying that you know if you're not going to follow the rules then you shouldn't be
in society which is uh that's a pretty extraordinary stance to take
yeah well i mean as in academic i said i was like i was let me just talk to about scott atlas because
since since the theme is like less like sort of what sort of the mechanisms of control and
in the illusions consensus uh like my colleague scott atlas he uh for 20 for for decades he was
the head of neuro radiology at stanford a very accomplished doctor wrote uh wrote a textbook
and for the last decade or so he's been advising um you know republican president presidential
candidate and other politicians about public health and so it wasn't a surprise when um when
president trump asked him to be to be his advisor he and i had been talking uh throughout the pandemic
talking about paper legal it's like an accident in many ways i'm sure you felt this a pretty exciting
time to be a scientist like how many times you get to learn about new brand new things where
everyone's learning together i mean that's a real interesting thing right um and uh uh he's
said he's come to the view that i i'd come to which is you know we should not be uh we should not be
like panic mongering we should not be harming the lives of children we should not be locking down
we should be better protecting vulnerable older people that's that's the view he's
talking in the he's like uh he's on fox uh trump finds him my colleagues at stanford uh viewed that
as a betrayal uh there was a letter written by uh the former dean of the medical school at stanford
phil piezo man and phil piezo who then spread that uh sent that letter all around stanford
uh young people junior professors without tenure several of them told me that they felt
essentially social pressure to sign it because if what if they don't sign it
well are they going to get tenured will that be held against them who knows
right you and it essentially accused scott of of pseudoscience for the crime of not fully
embracing the mask religion right uh he actually accused him weirdly of like i mean it implied that
he wasn't in favor of hand washing i mean i defy you to show me anywhere where he said it
wasn't favor hand washing and then the faculty sent it at stanford they voted i mean i don't know
what to call it other than an excommunication right it was like expel the heretic from the flock
right it was a it was a it was a it was a it was a and it was a mechanism of social control
of of a of a qualified scientist who didn't agree with with what they were saying rather than have
a debate or discussion at a place like stanford with that's our obligation right that's
that's what it means to be a university is to allow those debates and discussions to happen
platform them uh and keep away from the ad homin and they said they they excommunicated him
um i i i think that that happened to so i mean people who signed the great bank directors they're
people who told me that they lost their jobs because they signed it i mean i don't know i
frankly for a while i felt so bad i mean because i felt like i couldn't protect anybody i mean i
felt helpless i i don't know but i i don't know i i i don't know what else to do like it you have
to our job is to say what we see as scientists we now always be right and we may disagree but we
just to have productive conversations with each other and hopefully learn from each other uh and
sometimes it's you know brass knuckles but it's not it's not brass knuckles at the people it's brass
knuckles at the ideas um that's what science is supposed to be it it was a complete inversion of that
that's a really nice way of explaining it the it's brass knuckles with the ideas and that that's
really really important um do you think that the pandemic has made this phenomenon of group think
worse or better for us if they driven us more to our corners or i guess i i guess i'm kind of
an optimist uh in that in that sense i think um it's exposed the group the propensity to group
think that was already there inside science i didn't see it before the pandemic i have to be
honest i did not see it before the pandemic i didn't i felt it to sound a little bit i mean in very
serious like oh yo i i don't want to work on that because i don't want to you know step on people's
toes or whatever i but i didn't think it was like at the heart of of of biomedical sciences
and i think a lot of people now in the biomedical sciences have started to see that it's there
and now only question is how can we structure the the institutions of biomedical sciences
so that uh people will will feel free to to speak people will i think most scientists now
understand that that's not there and most scientists want that and so we have an opportunity for reform
like a unprecedented once in a generation opportunity reform if we can just figure out how to get the
the the sort of the right levers in place to do that um that's what i've been focused on try to
work on uh like i think the key thing for me my role has been to try to uh come up with reforms
that are very broad number of scientists and and other the populace that large can agree on
would be would be and try to build a coalition around that because it's you know science we think
of is like this like thing that's separate from the society it's not it's part of society as
everyone now knows that every like it's science itself that has been part of the uh the very fabric
of how we run our society the last three and a half years right and everyone sees that it's power
and that means now everyone has an interest in reforming it so that it it can function the way
it's supposed to function not the way it did as a as a tool for authoritarian power
um what about just the the legal aspect of the pandemic we talked you talked a little bit about
these people making all kinds of money um some lawyers would argue i think a lot of lawyers would
argue that the only reason why that money can be made is because there's no strict liability for
many of these classes of pharmaceutical products and be that as it may that's compounded by
this ability for them to declare an emergency and then basically apparently a lot of these people
are more or less acting with without consequence um so it's hard to ask these people to reflect on
what they did and then change their behavior where as it almost demands that we have to
take these people out of the driver's seats that they're sitting in and put other people
there i mean how do we solve this problem i mean the the power of pharma um on our social
structures is almost unimaginably great and i think the united states in particular
where you have direct consumer advertising there's that's legal and possible um what that means is
that pharma controls the uh the purse strings of our media companies the largest media companies
they have as you said pharma they have a liability shield for especially for vaccines
um that was put in place with the argument for it being put in place was you don't want frivolous
suits against the pharmaceutical companies that then send a signal to people that did not be vaccinated
but the the flip side of that is a is a is a commitment to responsible behavior by pharma
which we didn't have during the pandemic and so so you have like essentially like social
contracts have been broken all over the place regarding these things and that's why i think
it is a moment for reform you talk about legal action actually i've been one one major legal
action i've been involved with is this Missouri versus Biden case which is the case aimed at the
Biden administration's uh why call up the ministry of truth there their censorship
industrial complex that case which is now sitting in front of the Supreme Court uh it's revealed
essentially a vast enterprise by federal government bureaucrats that will go to social media companies
and why i say bureaucrats i mean like fbi uh the the the cdc the assertion general's office
uh the nih will go to the social and the white house itself will go to social media companies
and say here are the people i want censored here are the people here are the ideas i want censored
this is probably why you're on twitch i mean if you probably i'm sure i think i saw you on youtube
once upon a time it was probably impossible you're on youtube yeah yeah probably a part of list you
can't you can't do you can't do this on youtube at least maybe not not definitely not back then i
had to move yeah i mean i think you were you were on the i know i was on the list i was put on twitter
blacklist the day i joined twitter that is not consistent with the american first amendment
like that is a and it's an even more important is a violation of the of our basic civil civil civil
rights uh and for science it is anathema you cannot have science without free discussion of ideas
we're going to have ideas that we disagree with happen in science it's just part and sometimes
those ideas will be uh will be misattributed by others the way that you deal with that is by
free speech um so i so i think legal action is very very important uh if you'd ask me before
the pandemic whether legal action and political action was important for science i said well
those are important maybe but they're secondary now i think um they're actually many they're pretty
much at the center like if you really want to reform things you're going to need political action
for reform we're going to need legal action to constrain the the excesses of yes pharmaceutical
companies but also governments uh and and and other entities that have been that have uh
i mean i i just take one um that i just i still can't wrap my mind around um universities mandated
vaccines for young people at scale even after credible evidence came out that young men especially
had faced i call unacceptably high rates of myocarditis from the vaccine and yet they mandated it in
order to go to school uh the the idea that there's no liability shield that applies to
pharmaceutical companies doesn't apply to universities um and many of them did it without uh you know
they they weren't mandated to mandate it they just did it um i think that there's going to be legal
action at scale wow that's exciting in a way i mean it's dark but um i think there's a lot of
peripheral malfeasance that went on in universities that could also catch into this like the
selling of the remnants of tests and this kind of thing um if this kind of of suit were to catch
momentum it would also be a really wonderful opening for us to readdress this age group because i
do think that there's a purposefully they're purposefully disconnected from us i don't want
to make any parallels to to too many other historical times when these these things happened but
it does feel as though these college kids were really challenged um to stand up for themselves
and they were really beat down pretty hard um by these universities in a coercive manner i mean
in a coordinated manner um i mean i i i i i i have a like uh i i my views we basically robbed the
young younger generation it with with the idea that we're going to protect older older generation
middle-aged people so it's a generational theft and i don't think that the young people are going
to treat us very kindly in there in how they think about us and you know we just we deserve it
yeah it's uh well if we can we still have time to write the ship i feel like um
i still feel like we have time to uh to i mean but people are all going to have to take their
responsibility for what they did and how long it took them to to realize that we were being
herded and rushed and uh and coerced i mean i i i i i i i i i i'm like i'm by nature optimistic
day but i have to say like i've been watching the uk covid inquiry i don't know if you've been watching
it at all not directly no it's a whitewash it's a whitewash and you have like these people who who
basically were the architects of the lockdowns giving themselves awards you know tony thought
she's a professor at georgetown now you've got uh you have all these like people who were who were
basically created a an unprecedented uh authoritarian approach to the pandemic
and uh caused harm at such scale and they're they're essentially trying to pretend like like the
the the basic idea of the of the basic economic premise of the uk uh covid inquiry that's far seems
to be that well we just didn't lock if we'd only locked down harder and earlier it all would have
been fine see china did it in january 2020 we could have done it um that i think is rapidly becoming
the the the the standard playbook for managing pandemics and so that means that the next time
anything like this happens we will do this again and we will lock down the by demonstration has a
plan in place that says in the next pandemic we will have a vaccine it available at scale within
130 days how do you test a vaccine for long-term consequences within 130 days and they've already
done it right they've already tested it in five billion people so all all future vaccines using
mr and a are safe by their rationale i mean i just saw uh al experience and highlighted this uh a
report that there was a uh what was the vaccine the mr and a platform vaccine for ebv
Epstein bar virus that caused myocarditis in this in a in a in an early trial in a young man
um and they stopped the trial this is Moderna I think um i think the the so i think that the
idea that we the plan is for future pandemics we uh we have a rapid vaccine the consequence of
that then is is like just if you take it back one step is what will we do for those 130 days
while we're waiting for the test of the vaccine lock down of course we'll lock down essentially
that's the plan that is the current template so i think we need a political movement we need a
legal movement to undo that and of course this is what the world health organization is creating
this like uh this this new uh new new uh pandemic treaty it's an opportunity actually in early in
2024 to put put that front and center in the in the presidential debate do we want that if the
united states has no to it it'll have it'll send a powerful signal around the world do we want that
let's make that into a political issue interesting i'm gonna shift back to data for a second but i'm
not gonna i just drew some data and i want to ask you a question um because i've been trying
to figure this out and whether it means anything or not but maybe you can help me um so if i
reverse this over here and put myself down here this is my really bad drawing can you see that
of an age pyramid so um doesn't look like that anymore about nowadays on the on the the x axis
going up is age and then this is males and females and so you hear you see a population where there's
fewer old people than there are babies and it kind of goes up with a uh a more or less
pyramidal distribution what role do you think if any a distribution different than that whatever it
would be but with a top heavy distribution could have been seen coming and used as part of the way
to create the panic that would you know exaggerate any exercise like this do you do you see that as
a possibility i've never seen anybody really look into this and because that could really
explain an age vulnerability or it could explain a vulnerability to protocols or or or any number
of things this could be used against us that couldn't necessarily wouldn't be present in a
country like Peru or a country like or maybe it is in Peru i don't know they're off the top of my
head what they look like but uh i think you understand the question i'm asking everyone about
so that's a really great question uh i i don't think i've heard anyone no one's asked me
this in that way and so it's it's a really interesting question so like i think so first of all um that
pen that pyramid you had on the left the age pyramid you had on the left that is the traditional
age pyramid that we had through much of the 20th century yeah right right exactly um it's
it's not a surprise that we didn't lock down for century respiratory virus pandemics given that
age pyramid right we essentially like during in 1968 there was a massive flu pandemic in the
united states and we had we had a woodstock happen during it right uh 1968 1957 1976 even
2009 we uh the idea was develop uh uh treatments try to repurpose drugs that they're they're already
they're focus protection on the most vulnerable people which were that little tiny group at the
top um and and for the rest of the population don't you know the idea of a lockdown would be
unthinkable um of course also the other thing that played in that is like like zoom and this
kind of technology actually allowed uh a certain class of people to think that they could escape
the harms of the lockdown so now let's go to the pyramid on the right uh it doesn't quite look
like that but like in the united states but it looks a little bit like that um uh where
where it's top heavy you have a large a group of people uh in the older population um and uh
actually a much smaller younger population the the political power of that population is enormous
the the orientation of public health toward that that that that that group up at top is it is
enormous um it's then i guess that particularly surprising that you would see public health make
decisions with aiming at trying to protect that population at the expense of the population
because it's small this is just smaller and less powerful um i i do think that it's i mean the
irony is that it ended up they ended up harming old people too like that like there's data that
came out uh in 2020 suggesting that there was a like a huge increase in deaths from dementia
because you isolate old people you cause all kinds of harm to them i think the irony is like
by by by trying to protect older people via a lockdown via these draconian measures you ended
up harming them and also alienating and harming the the that uh huge numbers of young people um
that population pyramid that you're absolutely right i i hadn't like uh i hadn't thought about
bringing that together but i think that played a big big role in especially when you connect
it with political power or the various generations um big role in in the the strategies that we
follow the and the policies that we follow during during during during covid and potentially the
the the outcome right if we if we could see that pyramid accurately and could expect a
a two or three year brief increase in all cause mortality because these old people are getting
past expected age of death then that could have been empowering or or how's what's the right
word it could have facilitated this in in terms of their ability to exaggerate it as much as possible
um i want to try and formulate this right but is there any
combination of data and testimony or or a specific data set that you would need
to see where you would start to consider the possibility that that that there was no more
significant spread in 2020 than there was back in 2002 where 10,000 people were supposedly
infected and 700 people died and so if we had the data to show that actually just by scaring
everybody which we've already acknowledged has a huge effect um and also adding that up right
because you in my mind uh one has to factor in not just that we were misled about ventilators
and not just that they went crazy on our on our constitutional rights but that that all occurred
at the same they decided that all of these things were a good idea at the same time including the
line and so the question becomes then at what point are we obligated to take their word or
or how do we verify that and in a real bona fide pandemic occurred as opposed to
a flash in the pan that they knew already would only be a flash in the pan or a
a background signal that they knew they could take advantage of maybe even they put it there
i mean that's obviously crazy but it in light of what we know about how we're governed on all
other aspects of our reality how often they will lie about political things uh and and funding for
for highways and and and whatever else um it just seems to me very difficult to dismiss the
possibility that as i said before that that we are not doing an accurate accounting and if we did
an accurate accounting especially from the epidemiological perspective we might find
that none of these models will fit if you had the real data i mean i question for example we go
back to that that the model you know as you extend the variables and change it to fit things um
one has to do that in every separate geography then in order to fit an sir model to every outbreak
that occurred so you can do that in an isolated place but if you take into account all the timing
of those isolated fits then there's no spread between them and there's no additive effect
and there there are none of these things that would be expected from again what is supposed to
be a relatively uniform pathogen that started at a point and those are the kinds of things that
it seems to me aren't accurately reflected on anymore with the idea of just saying well it happened
obviously it happened and obviously something happened but i wonder if we're we're giving them
too much benefit of the doubt with regard to did they get it right or not i mean i i guess so a
couple there's a few elements of that so like first uh the scientific element right so you're
asking um if i if i if i can rephrase it a little bit if you're asking what would uh lead to a
rejection of uh an sir kind of framework what data set would one need to reject an sir
kind of framework i mean i do think that's possible i don't think i don't think that the sir model
has zero empirical content like you can you can see uh phenomena like you know just take take
the spread of uh take take uh the rise of obesity in a population right it's really hard to fit that
in sir framework it just doesn't like the the model it doesn't look like a infectious idea
so it's not that that sir framework is devoid of empirical content it's it's but it is a very
broad model so that you can get very large very very diverse phenomena that fit under some
parameterization of an sir model now of course that's different from saying it's true it just
just means it's survived uh of a an attack on it based on a falsification test right so i mean
that's i don't i don't know i i think um you know like social science phenomena are funny in this
way right it's not like physics they're often multiple stories that explain something that's
happening in a social science setting and uh i mean i guess as uh with my background i kind of
become very comfortable with the the existence of multiple stories and it's uh but i also become
i understand like how challenging it is to try to decompose the phenomena that you see as you
said we saw what we saw what we saw it happened um what how much each explanation for the various
things that led to that thing that we saw happen are responsible like we're still arguing over the
great depression you know uh 80 years later as to the particular like the the various things
that we think caused it i think the one it's the one trying to come up with some analogy and the
one that keeps coming back to me which is falling short always but it's the best one i got is
can you imagine a scenario and where they convinced us that before the pandemic there were no cars
and then they told us but there's a real easy test we can sell you a test um and when you
swab your garage and you find rubber and it's in the around shape you've got a car
and not everybody's going to have you know not everybody's going to smell like gasoline not
everybody's going to be driving in a car some people can have a car and be asymptomatic and
they take their bike to work all the time but you've got a car in your garage and they could
convince us that this is spreading around the world when in fact it was in the background all
the time all they have to do is never have any data about cars before this and they don't have
any data about SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses before this in a from a global perspective they
have it from a few hundred bats in a and a few other places um and it's wherever they look they
kind of find a signal um and so i'm really and i'm not trying to beat a dead horse or or push you
in a direction you don't want to discuss no no this is i think it's really interesting i feel
i feel that there's also this extra portion which we talked about before we turned on the
the stream that that um they are especially out on a limb when they imply that this phenomenon
is being driven by an RNA molecule um i would actually have a lot harder time biologically
uh discussing this if somehow or another there was a high fidelity DNA molecule at the center of
this with a whole host of enzymes that we've never seen before and other attributes which could
explain how something that was released at a point could then result in a high fidelity spread that
you know that if you do some of the funny calculations like how many viruses would be in the wet market
and then how many are there now and there's this many cases um it's an extraordinary biological
phenomenon that they claim happened um and with no precedence in in previous biology there's no
evidence of an RNA molecule that's capable of copying itself to this degree we've never seen
a background signal with this degree of fidelity before so it it begs the question of whether
that was always there um so a couple of notes um made while you're talking like what for
for which you said so one is um it it's not without precedent that there would be uh a
test dentic if you will it that has happened and even even in the recent past it was like 2008
in Dartmouth there was a there was a huge number of people that were diagnosed with pertussis
which should be pretty rare and especially since so many people have had the DPT vaccine
at scale that it should if you shouldn't have seen such a massive outbreak of pertussis in a
place like Dartmouth New Hampshire um I think it was 2008 I'm trying to blank the blanking on the date
if you type in pertussis Dartmouth New York Times you'll find the New York Times story about this
um the uh it turned out that it was based on a faulty test that in fact the pertussis uh diagnosis
was was which was made on the base of the test and then just some you know coughing symptoms um
was actually a false diagnosis the test itself was picking up pertussis that didn't exist that
there wasn't there there was a false positive pure false positive and that that that the outbreak
then was not actually pertussis but people had panicked around this you know sort of dangerous
disease spreading around because of the test so I'm not saying that that's not possible that
certainly is possible there what happened was that people found out that the test was faulty uh that
and so faulty that it uh that then then they go back into a core correlation it's like okay
yeah we were we were misdiagnosing this um so at the end of 2020 just to put a put a uh an anecdotal
data point on the field at the end of 2020 the FDA had approved 226 different EUA test products
so it wasn't one faulty test there was a possibly over 200 tests with various faulty properties
now it all had to be false I think that so like I I mean you're the expert on the biology of this
I don't know how to speak to the uh the RNA fidelity um but I will say like I think there's
I don't think we've ever tested the uh a virus spreading or a disease spreading at scale the way
we've tested this thing huge just I mean unimaginable numbers of tests and not just tests but like
genetic sequencing of of of the viruses and I wonder if we if we did this to every single virus
what we would find we probably haven't we've not probably we haven't looked like our systems
even for flu for instance are these like sentinel labs very little sequencing there's some sequencing
but not as much not not nearly as much I want to I want to throw one thing in there just because
I feel like it's something you might not be aware of given the discussion we're having now um prior
to 2020 if you go back to all these papers where they're looking at coronaviruses um the main
strategy using PCR was to target a 350 base pair amplicon of the RNA dependent RNA polymerase the
most conserved region of the most vital protein in the viral genome and indeed depending on the
country and depending on the the test you're looking at there was an RNA dependent polymerase
amplicon there was also an N protein or an E protein amplicon the interesting thing about N and E are
also these are proteins that are relatively homologous across coronaviruses so one of the things that I
think we have to somehow or another get all the way to the finish line is to resolve this idea that
the PCR was specific enough to be used in the way it was used and that's also part of this
conflated background signal if you were searching for RNA noise and there's always RNA noise there
so you're going to get a certain percentage um of a positive signal this is also why I believe
it's dangerous to focus exclusively on the overcycling of the PCR because that dismisses and it limits
the debate to where this where this malfeasance could occur and it doesn't have to be with overcycling
it could be that there is a conflated background signal and all of these people unwittingly or
unwittingly took advantage of that um it's it's confusion frustration and doubt but it's it is
something that the precedence of the biology of coronaviruses before the pandemic is that they
lamented that there wasn't a pan coronavirus primer set so that they could just find them
easier that mark von Ronsky has a paper from 2008 or nine where he is specifically trying to
develop a pan coronavirus vaccine and makes the argument that it's easy because there's so many
homologous proteins so there's a lot of precedence for the possibility and a lot of biological
possibility there with regard to how much is homologous and if they just pull the bait and switch
sometimes it could be really specific and other times it might not be and I'm afraid we've lost
this huge history of of all of these EUA products many of which are not even available
anymore they're totally gone just like I mean a lot of these sequencing labs are totally gone
and so it becomes very very tricky now because we I feel like we have a lot of assumptions that we
need to re-question and I think that's what this you know lack of spread also has spurred me on
to do I'm sorry there's no question there no worries actually it's interesting because I
remember when Amacron came the way that they originally diagnosed Amacron at scale versus Delta
was that you know there's my now you please correct me Jake because you're the biologist not me but
there was three primers that are used and you needed to have matching of all three primers to diagnose
COVID diagnosed the SARS-CoV-2 virus when Amacron came the problem was only two of the three primers
need matched Amacron and so they inferred Amacron from matching just two of the three primers
which strikes me as funny right because but it's so I and I and I hear your point about the the
existence of so many PCS I should say like for me the the cycling problem is that is it's such a
huge problem I take your point that there's it does it's not sufficient for what you want but
for is what for me it was sufficient to make me wonder about the use of the the the test testing
the way they had it if if you have like I remember there was a there's a center for evidence-based
medicine report by Carl Huntington and Tom Jefferson on the cycling problem and what they what they
did was like a literature review pretty high quality literature review looking at
the correlation between the number of cycles you needed to get a positive signal and whether the
original sample was infectious in in the in vitro and you know what you see is this like just this
like you know 20 20 cycles it's 100 percent in fact 100 percent of the samples are infectious
by like 27 cycles it's like 50 percent and by 30 cycles it's like you know pretty low by 40
cycles at zero right um that has huge implications for the epidemiological policy and clinical use
which is my my uh bailiway that should have it should have told people you don't you don't quarantine
people if it takes 40 40 cycles to like find a positive in fact you couldn't even have done
like like I didn't understand why people weren't doing this like they could have done if they
were really serious they said they said they said they want to say okay is the virus replicating in
the human well you could do a PCR test one day and let's say it takes 30 cycles to be positive and
the next day it takes 26 cycles to be positive well I mean that now you have some evidence that
you have two to the fourth uh doublings that have happened right um in the in the person so you
could have like used serial PCR's again leaving aside the the false positives which you know you
can talk about uh but you know more about than me um but like the serial false positive like the
serial test to like see with just the cyclings whether someone is actually becoming infectious
or not and use that information epidemiologically from with recommendations to quarantine or not
whereas someone who's like 30 cycles 30 cycles 30 cycles left them out of quarantine there are
students at Stanford that were putting that were like like athletes that were tested over and over
again that were just positive all the time are you sure that there's not a time lapse
acute PCR paper because if there isn't that's an actually a really huge insight that you just made
there i haven't seen one i mean i i've made a case i've made a case like this in a port document
in for a couple of places where i was an expert witness suggesting that this was this would be
a reasonable use of the PCR test um but uh but the but the but the lab folks on the other side were
just very dismissive of me um my chat is correcting you you're actually a biologist because you're
also a professor of medicine sorry well i mean i my my backgrounds at fringe epidemiology and
economic stress hey so i want to do one more PCR thing just so that you have it on your radar um
so in talking to the the head of the PCR testing in Canada um i don't remember his name off the
top of my head so he happens to listen i very much apologize um they did not use nested primers in
Canada across the entire country um which which i and i i just want to give you this for from the
perspective of cocktail parties or anytime you get to talk to another academic biologist who
insists that PCR is highly accurate like insanely accurate um it is very much my understanding that
academic biologists are making this assumption that like they do there are positive and negative
controls both of which use nested primers and in reality none of the e-way products use nested
primers and none of the products that were approved in Canada were using nested primers which
is makes it orders of magnitude easier um to have a false positive because remember they're
reading fluorescence so with qPCR i i'm just gonna say it in case you are not aware of it but i'm
assuming my my readers or my listeners aren't qPCR is a reaction that occurs with some kind of
understood reaction uh reaction dynamics and those reaction dynamics can tell you a little bit about
how well the PCR primers match because the better that they match the more complete each cycle will
be in doubling if they don't match as well then the doubling will not fit the exponential growth
curve in it will be more linear and that linear signal in any of these products that just goes
on the on the fluorescence won't be visible to anybody that's reading them and so a lot of these
products almost have this built-in possibility that if you're not really trying to use them for
accuracy but you're trying to use them for mass measurement it will go really terribly wrong
and so i i've had a lot of conversations with my former academic colleagues where they're very
surprised and actually completely incredulous that of course they use nested primers and i i'm sorry
to disappoint you but they didn't i mean i i think um
from a policy point of view i mean actually it's just from a clinical point of view let's say
uh like what i learned in medical school was that you should never treat a number or test
you treat a patient like you want to have a full clinical picture before you make real decisions
about about what uh what the right thing to do is um the the um the epidemiologists that were that
were like the architects of the policy i think the way they were reasoning was well it doesn't
matter if you get a false positive what matters is a false negative that's actually true they
probably did convince a lot of people with that argument yes yeah and i think that that's i mean
that's my best reading of what happened like they just said there was a virtue to minimize
the false negatives to zero and and we've had false positive at a scale it doesn't matter
what nothing that we're doing as far as they were concerned none of the policies they were
implementing were costly or harmful in any way that was worth taking into account
and so if you impose it on somebody on the on a false basis of a false positive that's that's not
a big deal it doesn't matter whereas if you have false negative well that person might spread the
disease to grandma uh and uh thinking that they're positive that they're that they're actually
negative when they're actually positive um so so i i think that that's really the underlying
dynamic we saw here with all of the decisions because every single one of these decisions
about testing is a is a is a is a there's a lot of technical language but the key thing is
what does it do to make the sensitivity and specificity of the test how should we interpret
the test what's the prevalence of the disease these are like basic epidemiological ideas that
were just essentially tuned to to create panic tuned to create uh you may you see each of these
decisions dismissing the possibility of false positive is like because the idea is like well
it's it's just a virtue to have almost no false negatives yeah that really makes a lot of sense
and it's a frightening um clarity that it sets to that too because um i always make this argument
on my stream that so much can be done in a closed meeting um to convince people to behave in
concert um if you make them feel important that this is a national security question and we don't
know what's going to happen and we need your help um there's lots of ways where i think people
could have been influenced to kind of at least keep their head down for a while um and again if
you put your head up and you you encountered what you encountered or what i encountered then you
probably kept your head down too um we have been talking for one hour and forty six
we've been talking for one hour and forty six minutes i don't want to take too much more of your
time i i just i want to say thank you i want to give a shout out to um Greg Glassman and Emily
Kaplan of the broken science initiative that serendipitous serendipitously brought us together
at their gatherings um i have them to thank you for your friendship and i can't thank you enough
for taking the time to argue with me and discuss this stuff with me it was been great
yeah i've learned a lot from you not just from this podcast but from over the whole
whole last three years and grateful for you as well my friend that's really uh way too much
praise for me thank you very much though um you're welcome to come back i have a whole four
more pages of questions i didn't get to because we discussed everything in too much depth so
when you have a spare board moment you can always let me know
take care jay okay bye bye
wow that was uh that was pretty great i'm not going to belabor it too much because at six o'clock
i have uh peter makala again so thank you very much for joining me i will see you guys again soon
um and that soon is in like 50 minutes so i'm uh
i've been doing it for a long time
so i'm going to change the password to my zoom
but i'm going to send it to you um so i will see you guys again very soon
thank you for having me back in the flash
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