In this episode of the Glenn Beck Show, Glenn and Stu debate the idea that the government should be allowed to negotiate for drug prices. Glenn argues that the Constitution doesn't allow for the government to do that. Also, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya talks about the latest lab leak at Fort Detrick, and more.
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00:05:21.640The GLP-1s are a great recent example of this, all the weight loss injection drugs.
00:05:27.020These are, you know, corporations made them.
00:05:29.440In fact, not even just American corporations.
00:05:31.500Novo Nordisk is not an American corporation.
00:05:34.000They're the ones that do Ozempic and that.
00:05:37.940And when they went into shortage, which they did when they came out because everybody wanted them, we were like the only country getting them.
00:06:28.940You know, if you make all of the system actually do what it will do eventually, which is destroy people's lives and become the VA for everybody, where everybody is like, I think I'd rather kill myself than go through this anymore.
00:06:45.800Um, then maybe you have a chance of ending it because as long as they're not negotiating for the part of the market that is semi-free, soldness is not free because of all the government restrictions on, you know, healthcare and, uh, uh, and, uh, insurance.
00:07:04.260But if insurance, you know, maybe we can get that free and then that system would work and we'd be able to have the drugs.
00:07:10.020But right now, I don't know why we have to have this broken system and not negotiate and look at the front, not, not, not, not with, you know, supervision, not with 2010 vision, but with a 2020 vision and look ahead and go, oh, I see that.
00:07:30.880All of the bridges are out right in front of the car because we're collapsing because we can't afford everything.
00:07:38.680And so nobody's willing to argue that we shouldn't have all of these socialized programs.
00:07:44.320We've got to get people off these programs.
00:07:49.380So if, if this move actually saves a lot of money and saves us from the abyss, even for a couple of weeks, isn't it worth doing?
00:08:04.740Especially if it makes things worse for those who are for socialized medicine and makes the free market a little more attractive.
00:08:16.240Well, I mean, you know, there's a very long litany of reasons as to why, uh, you know, as you mentioned, it's not really something the government in the United States is supposed to have a role in.
00:08:36.140And I guess like it's part of it is just like going back to tracing why we opposed it when, you know, Bernie Sanders, uh, you know, would propose something like this.
00:08:43.880Why did we oppose it when they tried to do it with Medicaid initially?
00:08:47.580Um, you know, there's a lot of reasons why one of the reasons why is when you have a big, you know, giant, uh, 5,000 pound gorilla, like the U S government and all the money that they spend on this, you wind up with major market, uh, uh, manipulation and distortion.
00:09:04.660Of course, one of the reasons why our medical system is good.
00:09:08.440If you believe it's good, by the way, we should also note that like, it's, it's an interesting kind of confluence of events when we're sort of embracing the idea.
00:09:16.320I know you've talked about it a lot with RFK junior, for example, that one of the reason why we have so much sickness is because of pharmaceuticals.
00:09:25.100Now that's not my belief, but that is a belief of a lot of people in the movement currently.
00:09:29.300And if that is true, why would we want to lower prices on these pharmaceuticals that we all say are causing all of our, uh, you know, long-term disease?
00:09:38.180I, I don't, I don't, I don't have an answer to that part.
00:09:40.700That's something that I think if you're in that wing of the movement.
00:09:43.140I think this is why so many people who have had really strong values for so long are waking up every day and going, I don't know how to feel about this.
00:10:27.080You know, and it's, it's, you come to that.
00:10:28.320I was thinking about this a little bit because one of the way we've talked about these policies, this is not a new policy.
00:10:33.940Now, it is new through an executive order, which is another layer on top of this.
00:10:39.140Because obviously, if these policies could be done legally through an executive order, my belief is both Barack Obama and Joe Biden would have done them.
00:10:48.880They didn't even have, they didn't seem to even care whether they were legal and they still didn't attempt this.
00:10:53.760We will see what the courts say, of course, about that.
00:19:51.640You know, we were just talking about the prescription drug thing that Trump just is signing in now.
00:19:56.100And, you know, part of that is, well, it's going to hurt innovation.
00:20:00.840Well, is it, I mean, it could, but we are looking about three years from now, uh, AI and AGI and ASI being able to go, oh, you want to solve that?
00:20:29.580Now there is a red line here, kind of really, you know, when AI stops being a tool and starts becoming the substitute for any kind of human thought, you know, or relationships, AI like government, just like fire, it can light your way.
00:20:48.100It can warm your home or it will burn everything in your life down to the ground.
00:20:52.200So when I saw the Pope's message this weekend, I of course went on to AI and I said, what do you think of this?
00:21:04.220Look out because there is, there are going to be a few things that are going to happen that you can watch for to see how close you are to having humans being eaten.
00:25:56.560For moral law, for human dignity, divine order, those things are really important.
00:26:02.300Learn the Declaration and the Constitution.
00:26:04.120Know your rights and responsibilities.
00:26:05.880Know Adam Smith, the Tocqueville, C.S. Lewis.
00:26:12.940See the patterns and predict the collapse before it happens and know where you should be standing if that collapse happens.
00:26:21.480Because if you know what's true, you will see what's false before anyone else.
00:26:29.320And then that allows you to teach others and lead quietly.
00:26:34.140Because when confusion is the word of the day, when everything and everybody is confused, clarity is going to look an awful lot like leadership.
00:26:43.740You know, 15 years ago, I launched something.
00:28:50.000But I believe in the end, this is going to be the one thing, this is going to be the thing that is most, the most important thing I've ever done.
00:31:21.040In hearts that I don't see, you don't see stories, you don't hear, movements that are just beginning, and like candidates who get shot in the middle of a field and should be dead.
00:35:36.700And now what we'll have to see is what your Europeans do and what the drug companies do in response.
00:35:42.240But to me, I've been hearing about this problem for decades.
00:35:45.740It's the first time I've seen a President really take a big step forward to try to address it.
00:35:49.780I mean, as somebody who is in, you know, research for a very long time, let me, doesn't the promise of AI, AGI, ASI lessen this whole thing of we need gobs of money to be able to do R&D?
00:36:06.020Because that should, you know, maybe five years from now, begin to cut those costs dramatically to take that chair away from the table or put that chair back into the table, if you will.
00:36:19.780Yeah, no, that is actually a quite promising thing.
00:36:22.440So, I mean, just to give one example, there's this technology called AlphaFold that allows scientists to much more easily understand how proteins will fold on each fold.
00:36:35.480And as a result, hopefully, anyway, dramatically reduce drug development expenditures.
00:36:42.080Drug development is always going to be expensive.
00:36:43.440You still have to run randomized, large-scale clinical trials, and those are going to be expensive.
00:36:48.880But the initial steps of drug development with AI and as well the clinical trials are going to be much more efficiently run over time.
00:36:57.460The idea that you need to have, you know, trillions of dollars, you know, tens of billions of dollars to develop a single drug, we hope, will become a thing of the past.
00:37:07.360In any case, there's no reason why Americans should be shouldering the burden for the whole rest of the world, though the developed world should be bearing this burden together.
00:37:15.740You know, I originally reached out to you because I wanted to talk to you about the HHS halting work at high-risk infectious disease labs around the world.
00:37:26.360And I can't believe this is true, but you tell me.
00:37:31.640So there was an incident at a biolab that apparently what happened is there was a, I don't know, a personal squabble between people and a contractor actually punched a hole in the other person's biolab suit.
00:37:53.200I don't know, I don't know, to get them sick or whatever, but it was, I mean, is that what happened at that biolab?
00:38:05.860Yeah, it was, I haven't been scared about anything in this job except for that one thing.
00:38:11.440So I learned about this about three weeks in the job.
00:38:14.500I've been in the job since the beginning of April.
00:38:16.800It turns out that there had been an incident a few weeks before, in fact, right before I joined as the NIH director, at Fort Detrick, a lab run, and a part of the lab is run by the National Institute of Health.
00:38:32.080And it's a BSL-4 lab, which is the highest biosecurity level lab.
00:38:35.860I mean, the lab, the experiments done there are on some really nasty bugs.
00:38:42.880I mean, you know, Ebola, a whole bunch of, like, viruses and pathogens that if it gets out in the population or if it infects lab workers, it's just really quite deadly.
00:38:53.760And what I'd learned was that there had been this incident just a couple weeks before I joined as the director of the NIH where a lab worker had cut a hole in a biocontainment suit of a fellow worker with the express intention of getting that worker infected.
00:39:14.920And apparently it was over some lover's staff, or I'm not sure exactly the full details.
00:39:21.060There's an ongoing investigation of that.
00:39:24.400What I learned was that not just that this incident had happened, which actually has a threat not just to the worker, but also if that disease gets out.
00:39:35.960I mean, I was actually, I mean, I was absolutely livid.
00:39:40.280And so what I did is I ordered the lab on an operational shutdown, secured all of the vials of the nasty bugs in a safe environment, made sure that the animals were cared for, that they're in the lab.
00:39:57.120And we're not going to open that up until the safety environment on the lab is absolutely solid.
00:40:02.740The contractor that was overseeing this, I think, did a very lax job.
00:40:08.160What I learned is that this goes back to the Biden administration, that the safety environment in the lab essentially downplayed these kind of security problems.
00:40:18.640If you're going to run experiments on these bugs, and I'm not, personally, I'm not sold that all of these experiments are worth doing.
00:40:26.960But in any case, if you're going to run them, you have an absolute responsibility to have zero tolerance for safety problems.
00:40:34.360I mean, the issue here wasn't just a one-off thing.
00:40:38.780It was something that was problematic in the safety culture of this lab, where I cannot guarantee that if we reopen the lab right now, that it would be a safe environment.
00:40:49.480I won't reopen the lab until that's the case.
00:40:53.960I mean, shouldn't that person be punished?
00:40:56.420I mean, that really is attempted murder, and maybe even on a mass scale.
00:41:01.320I mean, there's an ongoing investigation, so I probably shouldn't say much more about this, but it's one of those things where I was actually actively scared when I first heard it.
00:41:37.440I mean, you know, pandemics happen, and they've happened all throughout history.
00:41:43.260The key thing to me, though, Glenn, is we don't want to cause one.
00:41:47.320We don't want to increase the risk of them.
00:41:51.960The irony of this past pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, is that it was very likely caused by actions aimed at stopping pandemics from happening.
00:42:02.360There was almost this hubris – I mean, it is hubris – there was this idea that we could somehow, if we go into the bat capes of China and all the wild places, bring all of those viruses that we find there and pathogens that we find there into the labs, catalog them.
00:42:20.880We can somehow prevent all pandemics from happening, make them more transmissible, more dangerous to humans.
00:42:26.400We can somehow, as a result of that exercise, make it less likely to have pandemics happening.
00:42:32.360But, of course, what we found out is the opposite is true, that you can't do this kind of work entirely safely.
00:42:37.520And actually, even if you fully accomplish what was the aim of that research program, which is to go out in the wild places and find the pathogens, you wouldn't protect anybody against the pathogen.
00:42:48.740Because what would happen is, when and if the outbreak happens, whatever countermeasures you designed for them would already be out of date, because the evolutionary biology of these viruses is they mutate very rapidly.
00:43:01.240And so, when they got out of the population, the countermeasures you prepared for, which you never tested any humans, very likely would not work.
00:43:11.400Have we stopped all of the gain-of-function stuff now? Are you convinced it's done?
00:43:16.240Yeah. So, last week, President Trump signed an absolutely historic executive order that said it puts a pause, a full pause, on all gain-of-function work throughout the government.
00:43:29.940And we implemented that pause at the NIH, and I'm sure the rest of the government has done the same.
00:43:36.180Over the next 90 days, we're going to develop a framework, and here's how the framework's going to work, right?
00:43:42.000So, you have to be a little careful here. So, a gain-of-function can mean many things.
00:43:45.980So, for instance, insulin is produced via a gain-of-function exercise.
00:43:51.640There's no risk of a pandemic being caused by it, but you take a bacteria, E. coli, you change so they can produce insulin, and that's how you produce human insulin.
00:44:00.460So, there's a completely safe thing to do. On the other hand, you take a virus, like a bat virus, a virus that has these, like, sort of coronavirus-like properties, add a fur and cleavage site, and manipulate it so that it can infect human cells more easily.
00:44:19.020Well, now you have the potential to cause a pandemic.
00:44:22.240If you're going to do an experiment like that, you, the scientist alone, or scientists alone, should not get to decide whether that risk is worth taking.
00:44:29.580The public should have a set. The public should be able to say, no, that, well, there's no, no matter what knowledge you think you're going to gain from that, it's not worth the risk of causing a worldwide pandemic that's going to kill 20 million people and cost $25 trillion or something.
00:44:44.540And that's exactly what the framework's going to do. It's going to say, if your scientist or want to, if I, the scientist, wants to run this project, the public will have a veto over that, say, no, you're not allowed to do it because it's not worth, most science won't be affected by this.
00:44:57.440No science has no chance of causing a pandemic. But any science that does is going to be subject to this very, very strict regulatory framework.
00:45:04.440We're on with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is a hero in my book, now the director of the National Institutes of Health.
00:45:11.720Is an apology good enough for the National Institute of Health? I mean, should anybody go to jail for what has happened?
00:45:18.480And what is that like to walk into that building when you were, you know, enemy number one to many in that building, you know, during the pandemic?
00:45:28.620You know, it's been interesting. It's certainly a big turn of fate where I was sort of the, I mean, subject of devastating takedowns and called all kinds of names by folks who were in the, in this building where I now lead.
00:45:41.420But at the same time, I found many, many excellent scientists, many people devoted to, to, to the advancing human knowledge for, for benefiting, for the benefit of all people.
00:45:53.180I mean, I, most scientists are like that. They're not, they're not trying to like create havoc.
00:45:57.700And so I've been trying to find allies and I found a lot of allies in the building.
00:46:01.160You asked what, what should happen, you know, regarding apologies. I mean, to me, apologies, I, I mean, I, I think the key thing, I'm, I personally, I'm very, very happy to apologize on behalf of American public health to the American people for their failures during COVID.
00:46:16.820But the key thing going forward is a reform.
00:46:18.940How do we change the institution so that it is focused on the health needs of the American people rather than these utopian schemes to like end all pandemics that, that, that, that, that, that without any heed whatsoever to the risk that they take.
00:46:32.300Science is very, very powerful kind of idea and institution, but it needs to be focused on real human needs, real health, and in particular for the NIH, real human health needs.
00:46:45.140Um, and, uh, there have to be guardrails so that scientists understand that they operate in the context of, uh, public support.
00:46:53.160We, we will function on taxpayer money. We have to answer to taxpayers. Um, and so that's been the challenge is trying to, uh, keep the light of science alive while still, uh, reminding scientists that we are not acting just as, uh, as, as if we were like independent actors like God.
00:47:11.940We are, uh, are actually beholden to the American people.
00:47:15.420Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Um, um, unfortunately I have to take a network break. I would love to have you back for a, uh, a longer podcast. Um, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you did during the, the COVID nightmare.
00:47:27.580And thank you for standing up so strongly now and congratulations on being our director of the NIH.