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I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. Hello, Barry and crew. Hey, Barry. Hi, Barry. Hello, Honestly team. I'm calling today because I've got a question. So my question for you is... So I've been wondering about something for quite a while. Today I'm calling because I have a question. I have a question. I have a question for you. I have questions. I have questions.
And today we're debuting a new format called Quick Question, where, as the title suggests, I take a burning question, sometimes from listeners like you, that seems really hard to get a straight answer on. And I bring it to someone who actually knows what they're talking about. And today, that's Dr. Marty McCary. Marty, thank you so much for doing this. Good to be with you, Barry. Okay.
Okay, so we're about to celebrate Thanksgiving. And of the many family traditions that we Americans love, arguing around the dinner table about politics and risking a family blow up before the pie is served, at least for my family, is pretty high up there. And I cannot think of something more divisive right now than COVID.
Do we still need to mask? Do we need to eat the meal outside with our families? Do we need to get a PCR test before we gather? Can we meet the newborn niece or nephew? Do we need to maybe bundle her in saran wrap and keep her in the other room? Where are we? All of these questions remain deeply polarizing.
And so, Marty, I turn to you. You served as a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for nearly 20 years. You have a master's in public health from Harvard. You've published over 250 scientific articles. You're a member of the National Academy of Medicine. You've been a visiting professor at over 20 medical schools, and you've served in leadership roles at multiple public health organizations. Marty, in my mind, you are as close to a shared authority on this as we are likely to find. So,
Let's start with what I think is on everyone's mind these days. Marty, quick question. Is COVID actually over? And can we just not get over it? Well, COVID is definitely moving to the endemic phase. That is the phase where we're going to have to just learn to live with it. That official transition is probably going to be when we get these new therapeutics as soon as a couple weeks from now. They're pretty remarkable. Cut COVID deaths to zero.
But to answer your question about Thanksgiving,
The only Thanksgiving I would approve of is if it's at the International Space Station after people have 10 boosters and are tested every hour. OK, well, that takes me exactly to where I want to go next, because if COVID is not quite over, it seems to me that we have very uneven ideas that feel very confusing and very conflicting about the kind of measures we should be taking to avoid getting it.
So short of going to the space station and getting 10 booster shots, let's start with something more simple and cheaper. When and where should we still be wearing masks? So something we've never really done with COVID from the beginning right up until now is really figure out the risk stratification. That is, who is really affected by COVID? We've never had good data on that early on in the spring of the outbreak in New York. We've never had good data on that early on in the spring of the outbreak in New York.
We couldn't find it. We begged everyone, the New York Health Authority, the CDC. No one was collecting it. And so it took us a long time to realize that it's very hard for this virus to hurt somebody young and healthy. And that the people who are dying, and there are people dying today in high numbers, the vast majority are adults with a comorbid condition, particularly older.
who do not have vaccinated immunity and have not had COVID in the past. That is a very surgically precise group. And those are the people at risk right now. And I don't think it's fair to hold the entire society hostage because they've made a personal choice, which is not a wise choice, in my opinion, to put themselves at risk.
So let me give you an example. This past week, I had a little procedure done. I had to go under for the first time ever. And I'm someone who's had both vaccines. I had just gotten my temperature taken and they roll me into the OR and they say to me that I need to keep my cloth mask on underneath the oxygen mask that I'm wearing. And Marty, I ask you why? Why? Why?
It's the same logic that says you must wear a mask in a restaurant for the nine steps until you get to your table. And then you can take off the mask for two hours and yap and yell and talk and spit and do it. Yeah, it's that we have two pandemics. We had the COVID-19 pandemic and now we have an accompanying second pandemic, which is a pandemic of lunacy.
And it has to do with the survey that shows that the public perception among a large fraction of the United States believes that the risk of hospitalization with COVID is over 50 percent. A large segment of the population believes that. And guess what? We got a small group of people making all the decisions on COVID policy, and their risk tolerance is going to be different from my risk tolerance and that of an everyday American.
And Marty, what is the actual risk of ending up in the hospital with COVID if it's not 50%?
You know, I love it that you're asking this. No one is asking this question. We've got to quantify the risk and present the data to people. We have such a paternal attitude right now in public health. By the way, there's a long history of this in public health. We wouldn't allow women to have home pregnancy tests because they couldn't interpret the meaning and significance of a positive result. It had to be done with a doctor or...
you know, particularly a male doctor, you know, HIV tests. For 10 years, many of us were saying, let's get home HIV testing in the old guard medical establishment, the same people that are, you know, in charge right now.
Are you? No, this needs to be done by in a doctor's office. Well, here we are with covid and we have this paternalistic approach. Let's quantify the risk. If you're fully vaccinated, all Americans, the risk of being hospitalized is one in twenty thousand on a weekly basis. When covid levels are high, when they're low, it's much lower. And that's heavily skewed. The one in twenty thousand, that one person is older.
overweight. I know we can't use, we can't talk about that. We're not allowed to, it's not politically correct, but obese. Those are the people that get into trouble. So if you're fully vaccinated, you have a one in 20,000 chance of ending up in the hospital with COVID. Per week. And that's all people older, high risk, immunosuppressed and the young healthy. So the young healthy folks, it's almost one in infinitesimally small.
And the 80-year-old with immunosuppression, that's the person who shows up. So no state will tell us who is showing up in the hospital of the fully vaccinated, okay? Except for one, North Dakota. They've made transparent their data, and here's what it shows. And I just spent a lot of time with the North Dakota Public Health Department. Here's what it is. The average age of a fully vaccinated person going to the hospital, that is a breakthrough hospitalization rate.
is 73. The average age of a breakthrough death is 80. So what's that tell you? Well, what it tells me is that I should be even more enraged that we are expected nearly two years into this pandemic to continue to wear a mask. I'm in LA, right? So wear a mask in a grocery store. Is it really doing anything at all? Or is it just...
the illusion of safety. Like, is there any benefit at this point to someone like me who, yeah, okay, a little overweight post COVID, definitely need to shed some pounds, but are there benefits to a person like me, generally healthy person, you know, under the age of 40, vaccinated, continuing to wear a mask in a group setting? So look, let me tell you,
First of all, we probably recommended the wrong mask. We said any mask. Most people are wearing a cloth mask with their nose hanging out like a beaker. Guess what? Almost zero, zero impact. That's most schools in America. That's 52 million kids we've subjected to covering their faces. The cluster randomized controlled trial.
done by Stanford in Bangladesh, found absolutely no significant signal in the data of a cloth mask. That was a large cluster randomized control trial. Surgical masks did help. It reduced transmission by 11% and KN95 by more. And if you wear a surgical astronaut spacesuit,
It'll reduce it to almost zero. The question is, are we going to look at these other consequences of losing the human connection? Because they're real. Substance abuse deaths.
Up 20 to 30 percent. Opioid deaths, the number just came out. It's up by about 20,000 to 100,000 people last year. Deferred cancer care, we see that in the hospital all the time. People are miserable, depressed. What are we doing? You can wear an astronaut suit every day for the rest of your life, and it will reduce the risk of influenza, of Coxsackie virus, of the four common cold viruses that are coronavirus subtypes and have been around for decades.
The question is, at what point do you let people ride a bike and drive a car and participate in sports and go on a golf course? Because there is a risk that a golf ball can hit you or lightning could strike. But at some point, we're robbing people of their livelihoods. And where I come down on this is let them make the choice, not us in public health.
I'm going to ask you a lot more about loneliness, isolation, the sort of unseen downsides of what we've been doing for the past two years and a bit. But just to close the loop on masks, I want to ask you point blank. If you're a vaccinated person who is not high risk because you lack the comorbidities that you outlined before, are the days of masks rightly in a sane world over?
I don't wear a mask in public or with friends unless I'm in a bingo night at the local geriatric gathering where there's a lot of people that have organ transplants. I'll do it. I'll wear a mask out of courtesy. But look at the farce of what's happening. Not only do you have to wear a mask for the nine steps to walk to your table at a restaurant, but when you go to a gathering...
The workers are wearing a mask and no one else is wearing a mask. Look at what we're doing to poor communities in the United States. We're imposing a new form of an oligarchy that is it's exercising a power imbalance that would in any other setting would be seen as disgusting. Just look, just open your eyes and look and see who is wearing a mask and
These are people from minority communities, low-income, poor people who are working. They have to work during the pandemic. And those of us that are enjoying cocktails, we're told, you know, for you, you are dignified enough. You are noble enough where your transmission is somehow sanctioned. It's okay. And for other people, it's not. Yes.
We have seen social inequality magnified during this pandemic through an oligarchy that has been telling this other group in the United States, let them eat cake. And we saw it, for example, last year, we had a very healthy conversation in the United States about racial equality in the wake of George Floyd.
Fast forward just a couple months down the road and the vaccine comes out. And guess what? People with power and influence insert themselves in the vaccine line. Board members, private jets flying to Florida because they could get it there instead of New York. Board members of medical centers, 22-year-old estheticians in a dermatology clinic, basically saying in a societal way,
Our life matters more than those who are vulnerable and at risk. And then we have school closures, which if you live in the Hamptons and have a private tutor and a $10,000 Zoom suite for your kids, yeah, it's not that bad to keep the schools closed. Come to East Baltimore. These kids are barely hanging in school without COVID.
You're going to give them an iPad and tell them we're going to do school remotely? It's a complete disconnect in society. And like the root of many problems, it stems from a lack of proximity to the problem. You just brought up kids and school. So let's transition here to the question of masks for kids. Marty.
Should kids be wearing masks, especially kids in schools? Well, first of all, I don't think masks is a binary thing. It's not mask or don't mask. It's universal masking versus selective masking. And we should use selective masking in perpetuity. That is, if you have symptoms or if you're high risk or you want to, go ahead and wear a mask. If you use universal masking as a heavy hand beyond its utility, you alienate
the authority of public health and you discredit the ability of those of us in medicine to say, hey, we need you to run because there's a fire in the future. You can only cry wolf so many times. And we have to remove restrictions as aggressively as we put them on or else we lose credibility altogether. Now, do the masks work?
Again, cloth masks barely work, probably not at all. The cluster randomized trial was in adults, and we know kids are less efficient transmitters. So we're fooling ourselves. Also, kids with learning disabilities are now showing up to speech pathologists because they can't speak well because they're not visualizing the phonation of words. We're hearing guidance counselors talk about an influx of kids with all kinds of disconnect problems.
Some kids do very well with masks. They wear them for six, eight hours, and then they come home, they take them off, and they're with a loving family. But that's not all of America. We've got to remember, half of America has less than $400 of cash on hand. Life is a struggle. They live paycheck to
paycheck, and they may not be able to provide a great, wonderful environment for their kid when they come back home from school. School is their livelihood. So shutting them out is, in my opinion, having significant implications, and the mask wearing is losing that human connection.
If there's an active outbreak, sure, maybe a surgical mask makes sense during an active outbreak or something high quality. But what we're doing now is using an indiscriminate mask policy at times when it may not even be working. We don't have any data that it's working.
I want to give you an example that I heard recently. One of my friends recently went to her daughter's preschool to be the surprise reader for the class during story time. And even though they were outside and even though she was well over six feet away from the kids and she was vaccinated and all of the kids are wearing masks, she was also asked to put on her mask before reading the book out loud.
And reading a story out loud to kids six feet away in a noisy environment outside can be a little challenging. So she was surprised. She obviously complied because who wants to be that person? And the teacher in this situation sort of apologized and said something like, sorry, it's that we're going to be taking pictures and we don't want any of the other parents getting upset if they see you without a mask. So why?
What the hell is going on here? Would it be reasonable for a parent to be upset about a vaccinated, unmasked parent reading a story to kids outside? People have lost their minds.
Because no one would ever act like this when there was influenza circulating in the community, ever, even though the case fatality rate is comparable. They would never act like this with Coxsackie virus. Do you know there were as many kids with RSV in the hospital this year as there were with COVID? It didn't get any attention. It's not
you know, getting headlines. They don't give a rip that 400,000 kids died of malaria the year before COVID. Where's the outrage? It's such selective outrage. Now, if masks work and we have zero data on masks and kids,
If they work, they would rank as number six in mitigation strategies. Yet the entire culture wars are around masking kids. The number one factor that drives childhood transmission is adult immunity rates, followed by distancing, hygiene, good ventilation in the classroom, whether or not the kids are potting together. So people have focused so intensely on the masks in kids, but
But again, let's be honest. There's a power imbalance going on, right? Say more. Schools were closed when bowling alleys were open. You look at the reopening plan back when we were planning to reopen last spring before Delta threw out a whack, the herd immunity calculations. The absolute last group to reopen was going to be schools. Absolute last in line. Why? Because kids don't vote. So let's be honest about the power imbalance here. Kids don't vote and also teachers unions have a lot of power.
So final mask question, Marty, what will it take for this era of masking to end? What has to happen for us to finally take off our face diapers?
Well, I think that people are dying for a human connection. And if you look at the oligarchy of the United States, they're already taking off their masks. When they get together, their masks are off. The question is, is there going to be an uprising or is there going to be some sort of stand that the masses are going to take where they see the hypocrisy here and they just don't want to live with their face covered? I mean, think of people that work in a hot environment. Think of, you know, an
an engineer that's working on a physical plant, you know, the masks are getting really old, especially when they're outdoors and we have these, they see the absurdity of it. So I had always interpreted the Glenn Young election in part to be a vote for some form of more reasonable approach to restrictions and mandates. The FDA just approved Pfizer for emergency use for kids as young as five.
Should kids be getting the vaccine, given how low the risk is? Okay, I'm going to be very honest with you. And by the way, a lot of pediatricians have shared this sentiment with me, and they're afraid to say it publicly.
It's not a one-size-fits-all strategy. It's not a binary categorization that you're either pro-child vaccinations or anti-vaccinations. I don't think kids should be getting the anthrax vaccine. That doesn't make me an anti-vaxxer. The risk-benefit analysis is unique, and it changes by whether or not the kids had COVID. If they had COVID, there's no scientific evidence
for a medical argument that they are required or would benefit from the vaccine. The data does not exist. Matter of fact, in that trial of kids five through 11 that was used to authorize Pfizer's vaccine for that group, no one in the trial was hospitalized or got severe illness, not in the vaccine arm or in the placebo arm. If the kid had COVID, which is half of kids in that age group,
They don't need a vaccine. They can get one dose, and some pediatricians may recommend that. We can't use the term have to. It's dishonest.
If the kid has a comorbidity, we think that's the composition of the 94 kids who have died of COVID in that age group out of 28 million. Kids with comorbidities, I would recommend it. Let me give you a scenario. There's a bunch of schools that I know of in the New York City area that either have required or are about to require that parents vaccinate their children. And I know a bunch of parents who themselves are vaccinated, but they're saying, I'm not sure I want to vaccinate my kid.
But not vaccinating their kid will mean that they have to pull their kid out of the school. Is that a compelling reason for a parent to just say, screw it, let's just get the vaccine?
It's almost like the government is the arsenic and the firefighter. They've created the problem that they are there to solve with their own vaccine solution. You know, they're the boogeyman and the savior. So they're creating this art manufactured problem or a barrier to going to school if you're unvaccinated. And then we have the solution for you right here. So it's if that's a political argument to say, should I get it just to get them in school? It's not a medical argument.
If they do universal vaccine requirements, they will hurt kids that do not benefit from the vaccine. There will be unintended harm. Let me be very clear, because the rate of myocarditis in adolescents was one in 7000 boys. Doesn't sound very pretty. Talking about heart inflammation.
Now, in the group of kids, when I say kids, it's really up to age 22. In the group of folks 15 to 22, one of those out of 100 plus died. OK, you talk about an indiscriminate vaccine policy for 72 million kids in America. And by the way, Israel is...
They had a 22-year-old death, clearly from the vaccine published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That's the death that we know of. Probably a couple more out there. Israel is one-thirty-eighth the size of the United States. Are we prepared to extrapolate their deaths to our population of young people? I don't think so. So these indiscriminate vaccine policies in people already immune, especially,
will result in unintended harm. And I think parents are right to oppose them. Only 27% of parents in surveys say they are eager to vaccinate their 5 through 11-year-old, and that's for some good reasons, I think.
When I was young, chickenpox was something, maybe this has changed, that parents sort of allowed their kids to get because it was assumed that natural immunity to it was better than getting the vaccine. Should we be letting kids get COVID kind of like we used to do with chickenpox? I don't think that's a good idea. But remember, the risks of both are exceedingly low, the risk of the vaccine in kids and the risk of COVID in kids. Now, remember,
The 94 kids who have died to date, and that includes when we were doing a terrible job treating it and back when the infection rates were much higher, they probably, nearly all of them had a comorbidity. So if a kid has a comorbidity, it's a different risk profile. And I'd say get the vaccine. If the kid is healthy,
You're talking about a very close call in terms of risk benefits of getting the vaccine. So, you know, I think everyone's going to have a different risk tolerance as a parent, and they should have that conversation. If they had the infection in the past, to me, there's no scientific argument. So leaving kids behind for a moment, vaccine mandates for adults, yay or nay? We don't do mandates well when we do them as a society. I don't have a problem with hospitals saying,
saying if you're going to interface with the vulnerable,
that we need to require that you're immune. And we've done that with influenza year to year. But these nurses that are saying, I already got COVID. I jumped on the grenade when COVID hit this country. I sacrificed my life. We didn't know what the case fatality rate was. I've got circulating antibodies. Why are we not accepting those circulating antibodies? They're circulating antibodies that are effective against COVID, but they're antibodies that have not been approved by Dr. Fauci.
That is absurd. You've got antibodies that work, but they're not approved by the government. I mean, the complete insanity that we're going to require you to be immunized against a virus for which you're already immune to. I mean, if you go on the CDC's website and look at their guidance on the varicella chickenpox vaccine, it says we do not recommend the chickenpox vaccine if you have had chickenpox because you have long-term immunity.
Again, this is a highly stigmatized political virus where we got a mandate from on high that said vaccinate every human being with two feet, regardless, regardless if they're ultra extreme low risk, like Olympic athletes or professional athletes. I don't know any professional athlete that's ever died of COVID anywhere in the world. And I've been saying that for a while now. And somebody sent me, they think they found one, an amateur weightlifting athlete in Pakistan.
So we get these very low risk people to say you have to. How about we quantify the risk to them? The lunacy and the media just falls for this government line that natural immunity doesn't work. They have not seen something they love this much since weapons of mass destruction coming out of the government.
On January 4th, this controversial mandate from the Biden administration is set to sink in. And as you'll know, the mandate states that private employees of companies with more than 100 workers need to ensure that all of their employees are vaccinated or provide a weekly negative COVID test. And there's all of these states, including Texas, that are suing the Biden administration over these mandates having to do with private businesses.
Are they right to sue, and do they have a good case? I think they do have a good case, and it's tragic it came to this because we were doing a good job encouraging people to get vaccinated. I was talking to people who were very hesitant and unvaccinated. They were at risk. That is, they were adults with a comorbidity, and I would strongly encourage—I would take time out of my schedule to have so many conversations with individuals because these are people who are sitting ducks, as Delta was saying.
surging. We were making progress. And then this government mandate came about and people saw the excessive reach of government and being told what to do against their volition. And they hardened and dug into their positions. Now they will never get vaccinated. And now we're stuck. And guess what? If the vaccines wear off in six months or a year, as they look like they're doing in older people, we might need to get them a booster. Good luck. They're not going to do it. We have hardened them so much.
So we made a terrible mistake. All of these problems we're dealing with, including low staffing rates in hospitals, as many as one in five people in health care have left in the last two years. They're leaving in droves and they're about to leave in another mass exodus with the next dates that come around unless this court keeps the stay on.
And so the supply chain crises that are affecting medications coming to the U.S., food, all of these problems were all avoidable. Trucking, something like a third of American truckers are at risk of leaving their jobs because of this mandate. Forty percent of TSA age screeners have been fully or not fully vaccinated as of just a few weeks ago.
And that deadline is coming. What's going to happen? Are we going to freeze up as a country? Twenty two fire stations in New York have closed. Police officers all over the place are leaving with crime surging in Baltimore and other. We have lost our sense of the forest from the trees here. It is so aggravating to see what is going on right now. These mandates are.
froze everybody in their position when we were making progress. All of these problems were avoidable with a little bit of flexibility with the policy. We would have been in a much better place in public health. After the break, the COVID oligarchy, boosters for pregnant women and saline spray. We'll be right back.
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Marty, we're living in a country right now where populism on the left and the right is on the rise and people are angry at big corporations. They're angry at government even more so than any other time in my life. You've referred a lot to the oligarchy. I'd love for you to define what you mean by that and to what extent you see the COVID policies as fueling rage at that oligarchy.
Well, there's a very small group of non-age diverse, non-ethnically diverse individuals making all the decisions on COVID. And we've always had different opinions in medicine, and we'd have an open and honest civil dialogue until now. Now, doctors from around the country are routinely reaching out to me saying,
Thank you for saying something. I tried to say something at my hospital and they threatened me. I said something on the local radio station. The communications department gave me a hard time. All of these doctors now are suppressed. I have doctors in California who are so scared because California is some of the most extreme excessive policies. They're basically saying,
I totally agree with you, Marty. Keep talking about natural immunity. I'm not, I can't say anything here. I will get destroyed. I mean, they've basically made it clear, some medical boards now, that if you even talk about things with randomized controlled trial data, they're going to potentially evaluate that to do a licensure action. I mean, right now it's McCarthyism. If you support a lot of the things that
are very reasonable. There's a modern day witch hunt. It's not healthy for science. So this oligarchy has chosen to do a lot of things wrong. Now, I like Dr. Fauci. He's a nice man. I've disagreed with him on almost every aspect of the pandemic, warning of the pandemic, the initial recommendation on masks, the lab leak.
The surface transmission argument he was putting out, the lack of really any NIH funding to answer basic questions early on, creating a vacuum that political opinions filled, not disclosing data on comorbidity, school closures, the FDA moving too slow, vaccine allocation, spacing the doses, natural immunity. Beyond that, I agree with everything he's done. Well, Marty, what's in it for the oligarchy?
Well, I think they got a taste of what it's like to be king and they don't want to turn the keys back over. I do think they are well intended. I do believe they love this country and want the best for people. I just think that they've recognized that they don't need to listen to these other outside opinions. And as you may have heard in this recent book that just came out, there was sort of a pact internally that a bunch of the folks making decisions on the initial COVID situation
committee, the work group formed by the White House last year, they basically decided we're going to stay in sync. We're going to stay on message. That's not good. That's not how science is done. Science is an evolving discipline based on incoming data and different opinions that are heard and then debated. So we haven't had that. And I think that's been our problem. They are very like-minded. And by the way, they've got their biases. When HIV hit this country, Dr. Fauci immediately started talking incessantly about a vaccine.
that would bail us out of the HIV epidemic. Guess what? We never got a vaccine. It was therapeutics. And it wasn't one, it was a cocktail. And that allowed us to manage this infection. Same thing here, an intense focus on vaccines, which we needed to work on vaccines. But do you know, there are so many therapeutics now, aside from the controversial ones of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which I personally do not believe have any activity against the virus based on the data that's out there. That's my review of that literature.
Fluvoxamine, which is Prozac, reduced hospitalizations by 91%. A German study just came out found that almost
No one died with a high level of vitamin D in a meta-analysis. Hypertonic saline, a nasal spray of saline you can buy for $4 over the counter and could the entire pandemic reduce your hospitalization risk from 10% down to 1.2%, an eightfold reduction. Steroid nebulizers actively included in standard of care for COVID in the UK, not even acknowledged here.
In any other industry, if you're this wrong, you would no longer hold your job.
It's just, it's sad. When I read the studies, you're like, oh my God, this has been around. Even Pfizer's new drug, the pill, the oral pill, the five-day pill, cut COVID deaths to zero. One of the main components is retinavir. That's been around for decades. Retinavir has been around. Why weren't we doing those trials last year? The NIH last year, we just did this study at Johns Hopkins, spent 5% of its budget last year on COVID research.
They spent twice as much money last year on aging research than they did on COVID research. $42 billion at the NIH. The country, the world needed the NIH to quickly do the trials in a matter of weeks. And they insisted on funding their research on Mexican hairless dogs and whatever other stuff is going on in the lab. That's a real animal model used in science, by the way. And they would not pivot the money.
The average time for them to give money for COVID for the 5% of their money they spent on COVID research, it took them five months.
And guess what? They created a massive vacuum when the world was asking the most reasonable questions. How does it spread? Do masks work? When are you most contagious? How long do I need to quarantine for? We had no answers. We had no data. The entire medical establishment sat there with no answers to these questions. And guess what filled that vacuum? Political opinions. Look at what we've done to doctors.
We put them on this singular mission to do everything humanly possible to block viral replication and transmission at any cost. And guess what? When people say, hey, if I play track and field and I do the pole vault, which people compete one person at a time, could I get COVID? And they think of some theoretical construct where one aerosolized virus could. And they would say, yes, absolutely.
Okay, we put them on this crazy mission because we stopped talking about the whole person and we completely ignored the fact that the reason we have one of the highest death rates per capita in the world is we have one of the most obese populations in the world. We've ignored comorbidity and data. That's how I think we got into this problem. Thinking about...
what you describe as McCarthyism inside the medical establishment and also the sort of forced groupthink that's happening, I wanted to share this anecdote with you. One of my producers is pregnant. She was vaccinated before she got pregnant. And she's been debating about whether or not she should get the booster. And she was asking a friend who's a resident at one of the most celebrated medical universities in the country. And she asked, you know, I'm pregnant. Should I get the booster? And the friend said to her this...
Do you want to know what I really think or do you want to know what I'm supposed to say? And you can imagine what the difference here is, right? Of course, she's supposed to say, yes, get it 100%. But what she really thinks is, well, it's more complicated. And she went on to explain to my producer, you know, why she would be hesitant to get a booster if she was pregnant and why she herself hesitated.
hasn't gotten a booster yet. And she said, you know, I can't really talk about this stuff with people in my program because there's a fear of being branded as a crazy anti-vaxxer. And there's a fear that questioning any aspect of the vaccines or of the mandates or of the most orthodox sort of strictures around this will out you as, you know, as a QAnon type person. I'm wondering in your experience,
At Hopkins or otherwise, you know, you're involved in lots of different institutions. How common is the story that I just told you? Extremely common. Doctors have a tough time speaking their honest stories.
because of this anti-vax label that can come around. And we've even seen it with, say, natural immunity. That threatens the message that we need to vaccinate every human being with two feet. And then if you talk about it, you're seen as, hey, how dare you do that? People might go out there and choose to get natural immunity, that is, choose to get the infection instead of choosing to get vaccinated. And
And we cannot allow that to happen. You're saying we can't be honest with people. We can both be honest about natural immunity and its effectiveness and encourage people to get vaccinated at the same time. But I've never seen this level of incredible skewed paternalism in medicine like we see now. And I will talk to doctors who are supposed experts. And that term is a very loose term because it's usually a term crowned by the media.
Okay. But I will talk to infectious diseases doctors. They haven't read the studies. Why? I don't know. I think they're busy taking care of patients. It's easier to go along with the sort of the group think. The American Academy of Pediatrics is so heavily political now. It's out of control. The FDA...
And the kids five through 11 trial wanted more kids studied. They didn't feel comfortable with only 1,500 kids getting the vaccine and us making sweeping recommendations for the 28 million kids in that age group. They wanted an additional 1,000 kids. Not a big ask, especially when the myocarditis happens in one in 7,000 adolescent boys, but
And so they asked for another 1,000 patients to be enrolled, and the American Academy of Pediatrics publicly and vigorously came out in opposition of the FDA wanting to see some more data on patients. And then it was, you know what, if you don't agree, then you're opposing the American Academy of Pediatrics. That's the expert, the consensus. And then the media just go to their go-to people, and so they have latched on to a small group of people that are generally...
And I'm going to say this as a nonpartisan. I am politically independent, as independent as they get. I don't let a political party tell me how to think. I think for myself. But invariably, 99 percent of the so-called experts are Democrat political appointees. You cannot have political allegiances if you're going to be honest. And the media has latched on to this message from Fauci on high down that.
that natural immunity is unreliable. They've latched right onto it. You can't trust it. There's a commercial I just saw. Will natural immunity protect you against COVID? True or false? False. In all these fact checkers, it's complete lunacy because the government put it- Will natural immunity protect you against COVID? It protects you better than vaccinated immunity. It's not perfect. But where are the cases of those who had COVID in the past and recovered?
and now come back and they're intubated in the ICU or died. Where are those patients? They're exceptionally rare. And when they occur, they're immunosuppressed for patients with unique medical conditions.
So we're almost two years into this. We don't see people getting into trouble after previously recovering from COVID. Natural immunity works for other diseases. It works for the other hot coronaviruses of SARS and MERS. There's only three coronaviruses that cause severe illness. With both of those, they've been studied long term. The natural immunity is effective and durable.
Sixteen studies show that in the largest study worldwide in the Israeli study, it was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity. But the only two studies to the contrary are from the CDC. They were sham, jerry-rigged studies that were so embarrassing they would not get accepted in the Journal of. It would get disqualified in a seventh grade science fair project. That's how horrible these studies were. Marty, do you trust the CDC? Yes.
I sometimes think we would have done better in the pandemic if we didn't have a CDC.
Because the CDC has consistently put out unreliable recommendations, and we can't have a group of disconnected people adjudicating on every aspect of American life. And when they try to do it, they get it wrong a lot. When they shut out kids from school for over a year, I was very upset with the CDC. And remember, the original sin of the entire U.S. COVID response was the CDC blocked any lab from doing COVID testing.
Testing is the absolute foundation of dealing with any pandemic. And so they told the country, they told the White House, we don't have evidence of community transmission. They were using these terrible sampling systems that were non-representative. I mean, think about it. You're a lab tech at a large university in the lab testing.
And it's quiet because with the COVID pandemic exploding, no one's coming to the hospital. So now you have a lot of time. There's not much going on. You're looking at a shiny, beautiful, new PCR machine that can tell you if somebody has COVID in 20 minutes. And you're not allowed to run the tests because the CDC for months basically said you can't do it. That was the original sin of the pandemic.
Just going back to my producer who's pregnant and vaccinated. Should she get the booster?
No. During pregnancy, no. I would not recommend it. I would not recommend it. Now, I technically shouldn't be giving medical advice, so I'm going to say if I were pregnant and had been fully vaccinated, I would not get the booster in pregnancy. Look, some women are reporting menstrual irregularities with the vaccine. We can't blow that off. So when people say, hey, I've got menstrual irregularity, there's something going on. There's something hormonal involving the inflammation. There may be cross-reactivity of the antibodies.
I would say, what are we trying to save you from if you're already fully vaccinated? And if you're pregnant, you're going to be younger. And, you know, assume that friend is healthy. It doesn't make sense. There's a bandwagon right now. And it's this train to get every single human being a booster.
Even though the FDA and CDC's own technical experts voted down boosters for everybody just a matter of weeks ago, now the FDA is re-bringing up the issue, and they're going to decide on it, and they've chosen to not convene their external experts in making the decision on the second round. Why? They don't want to hear what they have to say. I mean, let's call a spade a spade, and that is academically dishonest.
My aunt just wrote a group text to everyone coming to her Thanksgiving table that said that everyone needs to be vaccinated. And I'm aware of at least one family member who isn't. How should we be handling Nick's vaxxed family and friends gathering at Thanksgiving and beyond? Look, I think we're all God's children and I love everybody. And I think people should be able to make their own decisions. And if they've chosen not to get vaccinated, they have done so at their own individual risk.
They pose no risk to those who have immunity. We have just lost our bearings on this issue. So, Marty, just to be clear, if there's 30 people sitting around a Thanksgiving table and 29 of them are vaccinated and one isn't, those 29 people are protected from that one person. That's right.
Well, I mean, they have a risk of, you know, let's say they're under age 50 and no comorbidity of being hospitalized at a rate of, say, one in 100,000. Now, is that a risk that's acceptable? I would think so, because if you drive to get a vaccine, you have a greater risk of dying on the ride to get vaccinated.
So, I mean, it doesn't end. There's no sense of an end to this. Let's be very honest. There's a strong vitriol to people who have chosen not to get vaccinated that comes from on high. Senior advisors to the White House have said people who are unvaccinated should get tested twice a day at their own individual expense in perpetuity. I mean, that's not medicine. That's
vindictiveness, right? But Marty, I think you would agree it's not just from on high. It's also from doctors who put out tweets saying that if an unvaccinated person comes into their hospital with COVID, that we really shouldn't treat that person or we certainly shouldn't prioritize treating them. I mean, that's become...
a normal feature of the public conversation about this virus and the unvaccinated. Yeah, it's sad. It's very sad. And honestly, you know, when we talked about those survey results where up to half of America thinks that
the risk of hospitalization from COVID is over 20%. 70% of people in this half of America, they belong to a political party. I won't say which one because I stay out of politics. But 70% of them believe that the risk of hospitalization from COVID is over 20%. 41% thought the risk of hospitalization if you get COVID is over 50%. It's 1%. Okay, it was then. And now it's one in 20,000. Now that people are vaccinated.
So people have a distorted perception of risk. I mean, there's a doctor that I follow on Twitter who tweeted today, I would like to go into a grocery store with my three-year-old and not have it feel like I'm risking her life. Is that too much to ask? That is an MD. It's pathetic, to be honest with you, because let's assume COVID is eradicated. Will that doctor have the same
feeling about influenza guaranteed that doctor has never vaccinated their kid for influenza, even though the kid was vaccine eligible in previous years. But Dr. Marty, we've used the word, you know, insane, lost their minds, sad, a lot of this in this conversation.
I want to try and get in the head of the person doing that who is a doctor. I imagine had to be smart to get through medical school, even to pass high school biology, which I barely did. Is there almost like something that happens to us once we go into the cave, right?
you know, out of fear of this threat that's almost evolutionary and deeply wired within, I know I'm not using these words correctly, our lizard brains. Like, is there something happening to us that is almost beyond our control here?
There's a distorted perception of risk among public health officials and everyday doctors. And when I talk to them, I ask them this question. Has any healthy kid in the United States ever died? They can't tell you. They can't tell you what fraction of that. Because the CDC director was asked that question point blank. Many of us have asked her, but she was asked in the Senate hearing, and she says, I don't know. We don't know if every single child death was in a kid with...
a comorbid condition. So we actually have zero data on the risk to healthy kids. Zero. But yet they have very strong convictions on something where we have no data. So there's a mood. There's a group think right now in medicine and it's led
you know, from on high. I mean, Dr. Fauci is very influential among physicians because he's such a nice guy and he's contributed a lot to medicine over the years. He's one of the authors of the big Harrison's textbook of medicine. He's done a lot of great things in his career. So when he says things, and especially when it's in retaliation,
of, you know, another political view, people fall in line even not understanding the data. I cannot believe the number of doctors I talk to on any of these topics and say, okay, I understand you're frustrated about this idea that I don't think kids should wear masks when there's less than 10 cases per 100,000 in the community. Where's the data? What's the data on masks? Well, you know, and we see this with so many different aspects of COVID and it
People are seeing through this kind of lack of data-driven decision-making right now. Okay. Part of me wonders, as you're talking, if in a way this is just...
an aspect of a much bigger issue, which is if publishing an op-ed, let's say, in the New York Times by Senator Tom Cotton is literally a danger to people's lives. If Dave Chappelle's jokes in his latest stand-up special literally leads to the death of trans people, like,
Aren't we just living in an age of hyperbole about danger and a sense that if words are violence, well, then certainly one in 20,000, you know, is a risk that we can't take. Yeah, I think you're on to something really big there, and it's much larger than COVID. I think this is a much larger issue. You know, COVID has become so stigmatized.
that doctors have actually refused to do transplant operations if somebody, say, has natural immunity, but they haven't gotten vaccinated. Okay, so are we going to stop taking care of people who eat too many potato chips or people who have HIV or people who...
broke a bone in the past from being a BMX bike racer and they come back with another broken bone? Are we going to say there were risks out there and you failed to listen to our guidance and therefore we're not going to take care of it? People have lost their minds. And they're not being consistent. If you're going to be consistent, do it all the way around.
One more break, and then Marty and I get to the question that we've all been waiting for. When does this end? Like, for real this time? He's got an answer. Stay with us.
Marty, you've been outspoken in this conversation, but also in your writing about the collateral damage that these hyper stringent COVID policies have had on us, that they've led to unprecedented levels of isolation and loneliness. One thing I've seen you talk about is the record setting number of overdoses that we've had in this country over the last year. Did we get the risk reward calculus of this virus completely wrong?
I think we did. I think we're going to learn more about it. Now, when the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico recently, Hurricane Maria hit, there were initial reports that 17 people had died from the hurricane. A follow-up study was done and published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the real number, looking at the secondary outcomes that affected health,
was 5,000 people died from that hurricane. People couldn't get food. People couldn't get water. People died of bacterial-borne illness. People died because their dialysis treatments had to abruptly end. And so we're going to learn a lot more. We just got the report on opioid deaths, 100,000. We've seen the substance abuse.
Well, the letters and emails I get, parents calling, telling me their kid is on the brink of suicide. My cousin in Florida said one of his good buddies, his senior year of high school, committed suicide. Otherwise, life was going great. It was a year into COVID. I mean, something is going on here, and we're not capturing this in our national vital statistics. Deferred cancer care, that takes a couple years to compile that data. Now, it doesn't mean that we...
should have blown off COVID. Not by all. I mean, look, I called for the lockdowns. It was scary. We didn't know what we were dealing with. And then pretty soon it was pretty clear that it was very hard for this to hurt someone young and healthy. No one's talking about Sweden right now. Sweden is doing the best in the world. So there's some value to recognizing that we used an indiscriminate policy to lock everyone down when we should have done it selectively.
We told everyone to stay at home and guess what? They gained 17 pounds. And the number one risk factor for COVID that's common in the population is the metabolic syndrome from obesity, right? And so we've created these self-inflicted wounds on the way. And mental illness was one of them. When we told people indoors is better than outside, we got it backwards. We told people vaccinated immunity is better than natural immunity. They got it backwards. We told people to wash your hands like crazy for 20 seconds, right?
You stop at 15 seconds, you feel guilty. Maybe I'm going to give someone COVID. You have to wash your hands for 20 seconds. It was aerosolized. We should have known that from SARS-CoV-1. So we made so many mistakes. And the thing that still kills me
We still tell people who are getting vaccinated for the first time to get their doses three and four weeks apart. Insane. The research has come out showing now that if you get the second dose at three months or longer, you get more durable immunity, lower side effect profile, and you probably don't need a booster. That's what I did for myself. So we continue to make so many of these mistakes. No one should be dying of COVID right now in America. Between all these therapeutics and Molnupiravir will come out in about three weeks, we're
No one should be dying of COVID. So when you're asking about, say, the vaccine mandates, does it make a difference? If you tell someone you're required to wear a parachute when you jump out of a plane, maybe that makes sense. But now we're going to tell you you're only jumping out of the plane 15 feet and you're jumping onto a inflatable cushion.
Totally changes the game. No one should be dying of COVID with these therapeutics, and that changes the calculus. But our old guard establishment is unable to pivot, and they've been unable to look at the collateral damage. There's been a lot of stories that I've heard from college kids, right? And a college campus in America is one where you have to be vaccinated to be on campus. And yet there are still these
insanely draconian rules, like more than four kids can't be in a dorm room together and staged eating and so on. Have you been following those stories? Yeah. This is the pandemic of lunacy that's accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. And Amherst, Bryn Mawr College, I better stop there because I'm going to get lots of people reaching out to me. Georgetown University had a student where
So everyone's got to be fully vaccinated. You wear your mask. Every single environment is de-densified and a lot of social activities are just canceled. At least that was the case at the other university I mentioned. But at Georgetown, they get tested frequently, even though they're low risk, maybe the lowest risk people on Earth.
They're fully vaccinated. They're wearing masks all the time. And then they get tested nonstop. OK, so they're extremely low risk doing all these restrictions. They get tested. If you test positive with no symptoms. And by the way, we can pick up one dead virus particle in your nose now with the modern PCR test.
You basically go to jail for 10 days. They tell you to report to campus police immediately and you're escorted to a hotel room and you're told you will be, you know, have food dropped off in the morning like and that'll be the enough food for the day. And you're not allowed to leave the room for 10 days without
I mean, basically solitary confinement of a college in an campus of all low risk, fully vaccinated, masked people. And you have no symptoms. This is this is what people need to take a stand on because there's no end in sight. They have the same risk of with influenza and influenza is going to come around next year. Are we going to do the same thing? Talk to these kids all the time. It's they they they've called me and they're like, Marty, we know you're speaking out on covid right now.
You know, I've already had COVID and I got an asymptomatic positive test result. Say something, get out, do something. And so I'm going to speak up on this issue. It's driving me crazy and they have no voice. It's an abuse of power.
I know it's not an easy question, but talk to me about how the pandemic ends. You know, we've heard a lot recently about how pandemics become endemic and then we're kind of in a good place. And then we start to treat COVID like the flu, which you've mentioned a bunch of times. When will we know that we're there?
So the emergency use authorization of Molnupiravir will mark the end of the pandemic phase of this virus, and it will move to the endemic, a very low level, because that drug cut COVID deaths to zero, and that will have a significant impact on these daily deaths. And is that the pill, Marty? That's also a pill. Both Merck's drug, Molnupiravir, and Pfizer's drug are both synonyms.
Simple outpatient pills. You pick them up at the pharmacy. We've got a ton that are in storage right now. We should be using it, honestly, on a compassionate use basis right now. But the FDA and the pharma companies don't want to collaborate to make it available on a compassionate use basis. But no one's died in any of the trials who've gotten those drugs. So that'll mark the end of the pandemic phase officially. It'll be in December.
And then in the next year, you're going to see a lot of pushback on these restrictions because historically our government is very slow to remove restrictions. But you just saw...
D.C. mayor announced no longer are masks going to be required. Now, no one would accuse her of being a conservative or light on COVID, but she's up for a reelection. And people are angry right now because they see very low risk individuals forced to wear masks and do things and they are ready to live their lives. So I do think we're going to see a major turn in sentiment and in policy right around the corner.
But Marty, when I'm flying home for Thanksgiving in a few days, you are not recommending that I should rip off my mask on Delta or whatever airline I'm flying on, cause a scene, tell them about how ridiculous and draconian this is. You would basically say, just go along with it.
I'm a peaceful man. Yeah, I don't believe in violence or confrontation. So you will get probably arrested when the plane arrives in its destination. So now we got to abide by the rules where the rules exist. But we do need people to question what's happening because we don't see that right now. We have groupthink and it's not healthy for science and it's not good for future pandemics because I'll tell you what.
We are going to have major pandemics in our lifetime where we're going to need people to mask and be careful and do things that are not part of the routines. And they're not going to like it. And we're going to need to be tough with them as doctors. And we're losing so much credibility right now. When I say we're going to have future pandemics, that's not a prediction. Look at the pandemics we've had already.
We've had H1N1, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, polio in 1955. I mean, we are definitely going to have more pandemics. And right now, our credibility is going down the toilet with these excessive restrictions and the pandemic of lunacy that's accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
Well, Marty, happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. And thank you so much for taking the time. You too, Barry. Happy Thanksgiving to you and enjoy talking with you. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening. If you've got a question you're having a hard time getting a straight, honest answer to, send it our way by going to honestlypod.com. And in the meantime, have a really happy Thanksgiving and try not to fight with your families too much about COVID.