Episode 993 Scott Adams: CDC Blunders, Biden DNA Test App
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
152.69487
Summary
In this episode, I give you the most optimistic view of the future and give you a list of the things that are going right and the things we can do to reduce the risk of getting sick in the future.
Transcript
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pom pom pom hey everybody come on in here tonight nothing but optimism nothing but optimism
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it's going to be optimism all over the place once you all get in here we're going to have some
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interesting updates and while I'm waiting for everybody I don't know if you've seen the new
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uh joe biden dna app is everybody seen that there's a new app uh i guess joe biden's campaign
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made it and it's it's like a 23andme competitor kind of thing so it'll test your dna and i was
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just going to finish the inputs here so we can get a result while you're waiting
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let's see it's uh it's just got one question it says do you plan to vote for joe biden
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um no enter and then you get the joe biden dna result uh that says um it says you ain't black
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well that's sort of racist kind of creepy well that's the joe biden dna app no it's not a real
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thing but if it were wouldn't it be funny so um let me talk about some of the things that are going
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right i'm going to give you uh you're way ahead of me in the comments i'm going to give you the most
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optimistic view of the future and then in a few minutes i'm going to bring on a special guest
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to talk about convalescent plasma slash blood uh serum therapy and that's going to be uh ian
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hilgart martesis who's probably queuing up right now to be brought on but before we do that let me show
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you all the good news now i'm not saying that anything on this list is true this is just pure
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optimism but some of it's true look at all the ways we've cut the risk so these are the ways we
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know and the ways we suspect we might get lucky but we know the masks seem to cut the risk by 75
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percent and i was just out at lowe's home supply 100 of the people have masks because of course they
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can't get in without them so at least where i am the um the the the actual compliance is a hundred
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percent distance of course is going to work how can distance not work there's lots of stuff we're
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going to be doing to make sure we maintain distance of course it'll work i'm just going to say it'll
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reduce risk by 50 percent compared to not doing distance um what about convalescent blood serum
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therapy we're going to hear a little bit more about that in a bit but do we know yet how well
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it works we don't so i'm just going to put my optimistic um and maybe it's even better but i'm
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going to put an optimistic middle ground and say there's a 50 reduction of risk once we get this
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cooking uh and then of course we know what to do with the rest homes now we we knew the wrong thing
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to do and now we know the right thing to do so i don't think we'll be repeating those mistakes
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so that probably takes a good 20 right off the top of risk because we finally i think i think we
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finally figured out how to how to do the old people care facilities right but we got some other wild
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cards so the things on the left are things that we were pretty sure about at least in the general sense
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but the things on the right could be good too there's something about summer that seems to make
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viruses you know lessen is it the humidity is it the sun is it the heat is it the vitamin d we don't
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know but there does seem to be something about summer i'm going to give summer a 50 percent reduction
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these are just my guesses i'm just being optimistic if you're just joining us
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i called out vitamin d already maybe that's the only reason this summer makes a difference but
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probably not they're probably the other factors matter too so i'll call this out by itself what
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if vitamin d is everything that people say it's cut out to be we don't know that because there's a
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strong correlation it seems but we don't know about the causation but let's say it is we'll just be
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optimistic let's say good vitamin d levels cut your risk by 20 percent and let's say that the country
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especially because it's summer is going to go out and get their vitamin d because now they know it
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matters cut risk by 20 percent what happens if we get really lucky and the hydroxychloroquine and or
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in combination with zinc or azithromycin or something else what if it works i don't think it's going to
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be a magic kill shot because if it were that good we'd already know by now it would just be so obvious
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if it if it just eliminated the virus we'd know that by now but it might work i mean it might make
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a difference and if it's not these these male maybe there's something right behind it so i'm going to
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give that a 20 percent reduction of risk what about herd immunity well it's worth something i don't think
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we're going to get to 60 or 70 percent but if you've got let's say 10 percent of your public
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maybe 20 percent at some point have it well that certainly makes a difference it's not enough to
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stop it but these things are going to all add up and then what about the ventilator
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situation we know that uh well there's i i think we can say we know it at this point
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you know it's short of being confirmed i just whistled again uh it's short of being confirmed
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but it does seem that we were over ventilating and killing people with ventilators right it seems
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like we know that now that's not guessing anymore and now we know so there's a gigantic gain just from
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learning what to do and what not to do and when to do it and when not to do it but the thing i'm most
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excited about in the short term uh besides masks and distance is this convalescent um and i don't
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know yet i'm gonna i'm gonna ask ian when i bring him on whether i should call it blood or plasma
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we'll uh we'll get the the skinny on that if ian is ready to join me uh there he is
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all right if our technology works this is going to be really interesting ian can hear me
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i'm doing great terrific so make sure that i that i pronounce your name right ian
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hilgard martisus close martisus did we lose you
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oh um so so did i say your name right ian hilgard martisus
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am i losing the i lost the connection well um i know he's going to come right back so let me
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keep an eye on him that and we hope he will go find a place where his cell phone works a little
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bit better i think there he is ian come back to us come back to us ian
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oh wow this isn't going to work at all is it all right well it looks like we are going to have to
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try to do this some other time huh yeah it's funny when i have lots of guests most of them work
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but when you have one special guest the technology sneaks up on you um i'm going to see if
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my guess is that he will be looking for a place for a better connection so i'm going to keep an eye
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on that and if he finds it we'll go with it let me talk about speaking of rest homes while i'm waiting
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for to try that again let's try it one more time if this doesn't work then we'll probably just need
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and it looks like it's not going to work hmm i wonder why anyway let's talk about rest homes and
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new york so ian i don't know if you can hear me but it looks like this isn't going to work for today
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i'm not not quite sure why but we will definitely do this again
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um so here is a really interesting development in the uh in the cuomo new york did he put people in
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rest homes and then they all died um turns out that the cdc recommended that
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so even fox news was uh reporting of that today that apparently the cdc guidelines
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were that you should put them back in the the homes that they came from
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when when it's safe now of course the one is safe part is a is a wild card i guess nobody knows
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uh so i i'm watching your uh i'm watching your comments somebody says that is bs
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he blames the cdc well the cdc gave the guideline so apparently there were a dozen states that did
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the same thing that cuomo did and the reason that a dozen states did the same thing he did is that
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they all had the same guidelines from the federal government now how did we not know that right
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why why why is it why is it today we learned that the cdc recommended exactly what he did
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now i know you still want him to be a terrible person people are saying it's not true it's not true
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well i i read it in the news minutes ago if it's not true maybe the news needs to fix itself but
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did you see that coming that kind of came out of nowhere didn't it now part of the question is
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why did other governors do it differently that's a good question right there were other governors
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who did not do what cuomo did and yet they all had the same guidelines so would you say that the ones
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who played it correctly were the smart ones and the ones who followed the guidelines from the cdc were the
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bad ones i think at at worst the worst case scenario is if the governors were actually following the cdc
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guidelines worst case scenario is the cdc's fault best case scenario there were some governors
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who for whatever reason played it a different way but here's what i suspect would be true this is just
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based on this is not based on any information this is based on living in the real world for a long
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time if you live in the real world for a long time there's just certain patterns you see one of those
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patterns is well if you're looking at the uh specifically the nursing home situation probably
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there were different situations in each state and i'll just give you an example and i'm not saying that
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this is what happened but it's an example of how you could be missing the bigger picture
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one possibility is that the the rest home situation is just different in different places it could be
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for example i'm just giving you a you know a for example imagine if you will that a lot of rest homes
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in one state were centrally uh run and organized if you had one entity that ran a whole bunch of rest
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homes you could say to that entity hey can you you know move stuff around so that one of them is
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completely emptied and you'll you'll just move them in to the other places and then you'll have one that
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you can use just for the covid patients now that would be kind of easy to do if you had one owner
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who owned a chain of rest homes and they were geographically not too far apart because you could
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always drive grandma to the other one now imagine you're in a state where that's not the case
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imagine every rest home rest rest home has an individual owner and what you want to do
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is empty one of them and use it just for coronavirus patients it's harder right now suddenly you've got to
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get somebody who gives up their entire rest home and just turns it into a coronavirus place it's not
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a chain that's just moving everything around and nobody feels too much pain it's just one person
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that's just going to go out of business basically for a while you know i don't know how the money would
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work but the point is it's a lot to ask of one operator it could be that the individual operators
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were smaller in one state maybe there's some states such as florida where they have so many old
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people they have massive infrastructure far more professional management because it's more of an
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industry in florida to keep old people safe so the point is you can imagine a whole bunch of things
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that are sort of the the details of what's different about the rest home situation where it would be
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easy to imagine that only in a few states it was easy to make the change that was the smart change
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which is to use one facility just for coronavirus patients and keep everybody else safe
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i would not assume you're saying i'm going to block you for say for for this saying i sound like a
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cuomo apologist if something's true you're not an apologist in fact if you call anybody an apologist
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well i'll just i'll just speak for myself if you call me an apologist you're not paying attention
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all right you're missing the whole show if that's what you're getting out of it why would i be an
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apologist for cuomo why really can you think of any reason i would go out of my way to be biased
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in favor of a governor of a state i don't live in there's no reason i'm just telling you what i see
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if you don't like it if you don't like it i can't do much about that i'm just explaining what i see
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uh because you fell for the folksy brother routine
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so i i generally block people for when they tell me my opinion
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i'm happy when you tell me your opinion you never get blocked for telling me your opinion
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but if you tell me my opinion you have to get blocked there's nothing productive that i can do
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with you uh all right somebody now somebody's saying it's not the cdc it's the cms the uh
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and i believe that they also had guidelines but if you are the governor of new york and there's a
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um and there's a crisis and it's a virology crisis and there are two entities telling you what to do
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and one of them is the cdc it doesn't matter what the other one was
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right i'm hearing you when you say there were two entities because i saw that as well
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what is it medicare blah blah blah i don't know it doesn't matter
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because one of them was the cdc it just doesn't matter what the other one said
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it's a it's a it's a virus crisis people are going to do what the cdc tells them to do
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ian may be back and let's see if he has a different phone or different technology
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all right all right uh do you have different technology or are we going to cut out again what
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and he's gone okay all right that technology isn't going to work ian
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we will have to find a new technology and try it again all right um i swear that we will make that
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work one of these times uh but i think it's just his cell phone didn't have didn't have a signal where
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it is so anyway just to finish up on the the cdc stuff whoever saw that the story would go there
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that the cdc would be uh now of course there's going to be questions whether he interpreted them right
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whether he reacted soon enough whether he he adjusted quickly enough and by the way if
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if uh if you would like me to say something bad about cuomo
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and it turns out because i don't know the details yet if it turns out that he knew there was a problem
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for a long time and he didn't adjust then i would blame him for not adjusting
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but getting it wrong in the first place if the cdc had a guideline about that
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i can't hold that against him but absolutely i would hold it against him
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if if they quickly knew there was a problem and it took him a long time to adjust
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and it looks like it took him a long time to adjust but i'd need to know the details in there
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but if you want a criticism hell yeah if it took too long to adjust
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why why would i ever defend that who could defend that
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but i don't know the details there so i can't make that claim yet
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all right it's okay not to blame uh and he ordered uh yeah he ordered a lot of
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hydroxychloroquine so let me finish up with the cdc
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let me let us look at their records so the cdc said
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don't close the airport they're wrong about that they said
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it wouldn't transmit between humans but you know of course they heard that from china
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but they got that wrong i think correct me if i'm wrong on any of this
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and now they might be wrong about uh no something else was wrong they're wrong about
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uh they're wrong about how likely it transmits on physical surfaces
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they were wrong about and now probably this you know this rest on thing
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so uh yeah and the cdc was wrong about the uh the tests the test kit that was the test kit
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was the biggest the test kit was the biggest mess up well i don't know maybe these were all
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big mess ups right so there was the didn't want to close the airport wasn't transmittable
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people to people uh mask will kill you uh rest homes basically every major problem
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was the cdc wasn't it if you think about it it looks like the cdc
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probably is responsible for i don't know 50 000 deaths i would guess
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um explain my retweet on the ivermectin study i didn't understand i don't remember that retweet
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what was ivermectin ivermectin i don't know what that is
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there there's so many uh new little uh studies that are coming out
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the world health organization or the cdc i mean even even the the poor uh surgeon general
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i mean he was saying don't wear masks you know he was taking advice from from the other experts but
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somebody says what is more toxic hydroxychloroquine or the cdc
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um yeah i don't i don't think we can get ian back on he's going to need a different phone or a
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different location i think uh one one of those two things so
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yeah all right well i don't have anything else to say so um let me check one more time
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see if ian came back he looks like he's back we'll see if he's got a new phone or he's
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ian ian hey let's see if we can keep you on for more than five seconds this time
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i'm doing my best and are you in the same place with the same phone
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sounds like he's in the same place with the same phone all right well no matter how many times we
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try exactly the same thing it's not going to work um but we'll make this work some other time
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um but for tonight i will thank you all for coming and i will see you in the morning