The Megyn Kelly Show - Getting Real About How COVID Started and COVID Vaccines, with Josh Rogin and Scott Gottlieb

00:00:00.540 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.420 Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.560 We have a great show for you today.

00:00:17.300 In today's episode, we're getting real about COVID-19.

00:00:20.020 Some stunning, stunning reports breaking in the past day or so about its origins and the vaccines.

00:00:30.000 We've got the former FDA commissioner and now actually the author of the New York Times bestseller, Uncontrolled Spread, Scott Gottlieb today.

00:00:39.080 Really looking forward to that discussion. He'll be here in just a bit.

00:00:41.740 We'll talk about natural immunity. He's on the Pfizer board.

00:00:45.240 What does he think about natural immunity?

00:00:47.060 We're going to get into that. The increasing politicization of the vaccines.

00:00:52.440 Politicization. It's hard to say that word.

00:00:54.440 And also the top mistakes that the U.S. made when it came to the pandemic.

00:00:57.140 Did the lockdowns help? He's still defending them, I think.

00:01:00.660 Do masks really work? We'll get into that.

00:01:02.820 And we'll get into the truth on all of that.

00:01:04.840 Plus, he's going to take your calls. How about that? That's exciting.

00:01:07.420 But first, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogan is here.

00:01:11.300 He joins us again to talk about how science is closing in on COVID's origins.

00:01:16.000 And the signs, of course, point to the lab leak theory, but some are still denying it.

00:01:21.760 And what's going on with the U.S. Agency for International Development and their new project

00:01:26.260 to dig up more viruses around the world?

00:01:29.100 That was an announcement that just came out.

00:01:30.580 Didn't we just get through a pandemic or still in the midst of one as a result of folks doing that,

00:01:37.040 trying to say, oh, let's take the virus, see how we can make it more dangerous,

00:01:40.540 all in the name of keeping us more safe?

00:01:42.440 Yeah. How'd that work out?

00:01:43.400 Josh, thank you so much for being here.

00:01:44.940 Thanks for having me. Congrats on the new show.

00:01:46.320 Thank you, sir. OK, so by the way, your episode where we talked about the origins of COVID and all

00:01:52.700 the COVID stuff, the first time you came on is still just killing it in our archives. So I

00:01:57.040 recommend it to everybody and read Josh's book too.

00:01:59.420 Apparently, people want to know how we got into this mess so that we don't have to do this every

00:02:02.900 two years, as it turns out, even though the Biden administration doesn't seem to want to know,

00:02:06.680 the Chinese definitely don't want to know, WHO doesn't seem to want to know. But Americans want

00:02:10.720 to know, how did we get into this nightmare, this pandemic? Because unless we figure that

00:02:16.300 out, we can't figure out how to keep our country safe. That's as simple as that.

00:02:19.840 What's the point? And it's been such a lackluster effort on our part to actually get to the origins.

00:02:25.680 Let me just spend one minute with you on that, since you've been following it so closely.

00:02:29.380 The Biden administration took another look at this after the WHO fell down on the job. That guy,

00:02:34.340 Peter Daszak, was on the committee. They went over to China. They didn't see anything. They didn't

00:02:38.820 push back. They were followed around by Chinese miners the whole time. Minders, not miners. That would be

00:02:44.500 weird. And they so then they came back with this baloney conclusion. And then the Biden administration

00:02:50.980 said, all right, we're going to take a closer look. You said it was a waste of time what they did.

00:02:56.540 Our own intel communities came out and said, inconclusive. It's inconclusive whether it was

00:03:02.620 a lab leak or his natural origins. And you said the whole review was doomed to fail. So do we put any

00:03:07.920 stock whatsoever in what the Biden administration told us inconclusive about how it started?

00:03:13.120 You know, tragically, it seems that the Biden administration has decided to throw its hands

00:03:17.180 up, that they don't have any real plan that I can tell to try to figure out how he got into this

00:03:21.960 mess. They won't release any of the intelligence that they're sitting on. They won't press the

00:03:26.040 Chinese government to open up any of its books or open up the labs for any real investigation.

00:03:30.920 They have this like, if you think about it, horrendously and obviously weak alibi that they

00:03:35.520 want China to cooperate with the World Health Organization when they know and they'll tell you

00:03:40.080 when the cameras are off, that that's never going to happen. And, you know, we wasted a year

00:03:44.520 not looking for the coronavirus origins because people thought the lab leak was a Trump idea and

00:03:50.420 they didn't want to get behind a Trump idea. So all the scientists who were the closest friends

00:03:54.320 of the lab, like Peter Daszak, you just mentioned, called it a conspiracy theory. And we went through a

00:03:59.280 year of that. And then finally, the Biden administration came in and they said, no, it's not a conspiracy.

00:04:03.660 Actually, some in our own intelligence community think it was the lab and we're going to look into

00:04:08.780 it. And they promised to look into it. And all of a sudden you couldn't call it a conspiracy theory

00:04:12.700 because that would mean that Joe Biden would have to be on the conspiracy. It doesn't make any sense.

00:04:16.440 Right. So now there was some hope. And now after they did it, what we found out is that they didn't

00:04:21.600 really look. OK. And, you know, it's like that the drunk person searching for their keys under the

00:04:26.660 streetlight. And the cop says, why are you searching for your keys on the streetlight? Oh, the light's much

00:04:30.200 better here. You know what the intelligence community did, essentially, was they looked

00:04:33.980 inside their own files and they didn't look anywhere else. They didn't look at the EcoHealth

00:04:38.040 Alliance. They didn't interview anybody. They didn't talk to Robert Redfield, who was the head

00:04:42.100 of the CDC and a virologist who said it probably came from the lab. And then they put him in like

00:04:47.480 the witness protection program or something. I haven't seen that guy in months. And they didn't

00:04:51.180 talk to Matthew Pottinger, who was leading the investigation at the time for the Trump. They

00:04:54.960 didn't care. So they looked at their own files. And then the funniest thing, I mean,

00:04:58.280 saddest thing, but kind of funny, was that they determined they couldn't even read their

00:05:01.380 own files. Our vaulted, faunted $80 billion intelligence agency couldn't understand the

00:05:07.820 they didn't have any Chinese speaking scientists who could sort through the data. So they just

00:05:12.780 said, oh, we're never going to figure out. And the Biden team was like, OK, I guess we'll

00:05:15.720 never figure it out. And that's an abdication of their fiduciary responsibility to keep us

00:05:20.700 safe, to protect us. You know, and what you know, just what you what you mentioned today,

00:05:25.860 we can get into this a little bit more. This USAID predict program. Basically, what they

00:05:30.140 announced is our own government announced that they're going to pour another 125 million dollars

00:05:35.200 of U.S. taxpayer money into hunting viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 related viruses all over

00:05:41.780 the world for the next 10 years with no additional safeguards, no additional scrutiny, no accountability,

00:05:48.340 no oversight and no idea how we got into this mess. In other words, we don't know.

00:05:52.580 Right. For all your listeners out there who are about to tweet at me, we don't know how

00:05:56.240 the virus originated. We don't know if it was a lab. We don't know if it was natural spillover.

00:06:00.360 But we got to check out both theories, though. All I'm saying is we can't rule out the labs.

00:06:04.140 We need to check it out. And we should probably do that before we spend another 125 million

00:06:08.600 dollars on expanding this research, because that's crazy.

00:06:11.820 Mm hmm. It is crazy. And this this organization, I mean, what what's going to who's going to be

00:06:17.000 watching them to make sure that there isn't a leak or that it isn't mishandled or

00:06:20.860 I don't know that you don't have a guy like Peter Daszak in there doing stuff and then misleading us,

00:06:25.760 because that's the other thing that's happened today is that guy, Peter Daszak, who runs EcoHealth

00:06:30.200 Alliance, which is a taxpayer funded organization. You and I are paying for them, who seems to be

00:06:34.760 behind every corner in this entire story. He's the guy who went over to China and he was like,

00:06:39.100 there's nothing to see here. It's definitely not a lab leak. The Chinese are great. Meanwhile,

00:06:43.000 we know from all the reporting we've seen over the past year or so that his organization

00:06:47.560 was getting tons of taxpayer money, including approved by Fauci's organization that to perform

00:06:53.040 what very much looks like gain of function research. He's denying it. But research that

00:06:57.100 takes viruses back, coronaviruses and makes them more effective toward humans. And that now there's

00:07:03.440 a push to get him out of that organization for having misled us over and over and continues to

00:07:09.700 mislead us. It's really important what you're talking about, Megan, just for all your listeners

00:07:12.840 out there who aren't immediately familiar with who Peter Daszak is. He's this guy

00:07:17.220 who runs this thing called the EcoHealth Alliance. It's a nonprofit. They take money from the US

00:07:21.500 government. They take money from the Chinese government, actually. And they work to collect

00:07:25.100 viruses all over the wild and bring them back to a bunch of labs and play around with them and see

00:07:28.800 what's what. And when they find a really dangerous one, they're like, oh, let's study that one.

00:07:32.520 And they were doing this in Wuhan. OK, and we don't know if that led to the virus outbreak in

00:07:37.940 Wuhan. But they were doing bat coronavirus research that made it more infectious to humans

00:07:42.880 in the same city where the bat coronavirus pandemic broke out. So it seems it stands to

00:07:47.940 reason we should probably check it out. And Peter Daszak has been at the forefront of telling us not

00:07:52.000 to check it out for a year and a half. Now, a couple of things changed recently, really importantly,

00:07:56.260 since the last time we spoke, Megan. One was that, you know, The Intercept published these documents

00:08:00.760 from Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, which said that they asked the US government, a part of the

00:08:06.100 US government called DARPA, for money to do bat coronavirus research. That was very specific.

00:08:11.600 And this is a little technical, but it's really important. They asked DARPA to fund them to put

00:08:16.440 a furin cleavage site on the protein of the SARS coronavirus. Can you say that one more time?

00:08:21.240 Say furin cleavage, explain it because most people don't know. Furin cleavage site means that they took

00:08:26.520 the bat coronavirus and they added a part of it that made it more infectious to humans. And that's what

00:08:31.040 they wanted to do. And now we have a bat coronavirus that's more infectious to humans because it has

00:08:36.020 what? Guess what? A furin cleavage site. Anyway, it's the same exact thing. And if that's not as

00:08:41.880 if that's not a smoking gun, it's about as close as we're going to get. OK, in other words,

00:08:46.280 break that down, though, because because, look, speaking of The Intercept, they reported a couple

00:08:49.900 months ago or maybe a month ago that that Peter Daszak's group, EcoHealth Alliance, had applied to

00:08:56.020 Fauci's group and the oversight group for a grant to do this. What looks like gain of function

00:09:02.540 research? Fauci denies it. But all these scientists have come out and said that that was gain of

00:09:07.000 function research that Peter Daszak wanted to do and that they did get the money that they that they

00:09:11.560 did get the money. And and now today there's another report saying Daszak went to effectively

00:09:17.780 the Pentagon and said, I would like a grant from you to do gain of function research. And it was denied.

00:09:24.680 I think it was. That's the DARPA one. That was. OK, so there's two separate ones. That was in

00:09:29.320 2018. But so he he did get money from Fauci and Fauci's organization to do this dicey coronavirus

00:09:36.920 research. And then he also went to the Pentagon and made very explicit. I want to do gain of

00:09:43.160 function research on back coronaviruses. But the Pentagon said, dude, no, that's way too dangerous.

00:09:49.020 Right. Right. And, you know, when the Pentagon says the research is too dangerous,

00:09:52.820 you might want to think about it. But the reason that they were doing all this research in China,

00:09:57.840 as you remember, is that the Obama administration banned this type of research. And then

00:10:02.340 in the early part of the Trump administration, a team led by people, including Anthony Fauci,

00:10:06.980 turned it back on. OK. And they built an oversight mechanism for gain of function research. And then

00:10:11.460 they classified all the risky research as not gain of function. In other words, they built an oversight

00:10:16.140 system and then they built a loophole and then they drove through the loophole and bragged about it to

00:10:20.320 the world. And so you can get caught up in this semantic debate over what's gain of function

00:10:24.840 research or what's not gain of function research. But the point is, they knew they were doing risky

00:10:28.480 research and they knew they were doing them in Chinese labs that had bad safety standards.

00:10:32.680 And then when the fat coronavirus popped up next to the labs, they said, how dare you look at the

00:10:37.660 labs? Don't you dare look at the labs? We can't even talk about the labs.

00:10:40.220 But why do you think that the report, again, that just broke about DASIC's group seeking to do

00:10:47.140 gain of function research and getting funding from our Pentagon to the tune of 14 million dollars

00:10:51.240 in March of 2018? And then he was denied. Why do we care so much about that when we we already know

00:10:57.340 he got money from Fauci's group to do what appeared to be gain of function research in connection with

00:11:02.760 the Wuhan lab separate and apart from that Pentagon grant?

00:11:06.460 Yeah, no, it's a great question. Two reasons. One is because this particular proposal was so specific

00:11:11.420 that if it had been funded, it would have created a virus that has the same exact weird

00:11:16.100 characteristic that the SARS coronavirus has. In other words, they were proposing to build something

00:11:20.220 that looks almost exactly like what the SARS coronavirus ended up being. And if that has

00:11:25.820 no if that's a total coincidence, that's the craziest coincidence in the history of the world

00:11:29.720 that they were proposing a specific change to bat coronaviruses and then were denied. And then

00:11:34.340 somehow a bat coronavirus pops up in Wuhan where they're collaborating with that exact

00:11:39.280 characteristic that is the same exact. Yes. Can you just make that point again? So Peter

00:11:43.100 Daszak, just because he said the Pentagon said no to him, he was getting funding from our government

00:11:48.020 and he was doing bat coronavirus research and he was doing it in connection with the Wuhan lab.

00:11:54.200 It wasn't like he was sitting by himself in North Carolina. He was over there. He was dealing with

00:11:59.000 the so-called bat lady. Right. This guy's up to his neck in the bat coronavirus research.

00:12:04.260 And then him and Anthony Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins have the gall,

00:12:07.980 the audacity to go on national television and go before Congress and say there's no evidence that

00:12:12.900 it's related to the lab. All of that is circumstantial evidence. Everything we just

00:12:15.980 talked about constitutes what I think is very compelling circumstantial evidence. It's not proof,

00:12:20.760 but it's enough that we can't just say, oh, well, we just can't look at the lab. So,

00:12:24.640 you know, how dare these guys go before the American public, especially the ones that are employed by

00:12:28.780 the U.S. taxpayer like Fauci and Collins and say there's no evidence that it came from the lab? Well,

00:12:33.520 the reason there's no proof is because the Chinese government has covered up everything at the lab.

00:12:37.460 They silenced the scientists. They jailed the journalists. They won't let us into the lab

00:12:41.140 that we funded. Right. We funded a lab. They won't even let us in when the pandemic breaks out

00:12:44.920 next door. And now the proposal is to what, you know, double that research. Does that make any sense?

00:12:49.960 And, you know, the scheme that Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance had going,

00:12:53.960 they had so many streams of income. They were getting money from the Department of Homeland Security.

00:12:57.580 Check this out. To do coronavirus pandemic disinformation fights. In other words,

00:13:03.520 they were hired by the U.S. government to fight pandemic disinformation.

00:13:06.380 He was the architect of pandemic disinformation. And they spread pandemic disinformation. Exactly.

00:13:11.440 Using our money to do it. And that's through the looking glass. That's some really sinister stuff

00:13:16.780 when you just think about it for two seconds. And, you know, even Anthony Fauci to this day will say,

00:13:21.720 well, OK, well, listen, if you want to go hunt for the origin in China, feel free because he knows

00:13:27.340 that the Chinese government is never going to do it. But it would be very easy for Peter Daszak

00:13:31.120 and Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins to open their books. And that's the second point that I want to

00:13:35.640 make here is the reason that that contract was so shocking is we didn't know about it, you know,

00:13:39.800 and it's been two years. OK. And how dare the EcoHealth Alliance not tell us about that?

00:13:46.160 And what else are they hiding? If two years later, the document could come out that

00:13:49.820 constitutes a pretty good hint, a pretty good clue of how this may have happened. And that's not to say

00:13:55.600 that Fauci funded the virus. I don't think I think that's too simple. I think what happened is

00:13:59.280 we built them a lab. We taught them how to play around with viruses. And then they built another

00:14:03.200 side of the lab, the side that they didn't tell us about, the side with the Chinese military where

00:14:07.400 they did stuff that was really dangerous that we didn't have any insight onto. And what the

00:14:11.560 Defense Department was paying Peter Daszak to do was to keep an eye on all of that. Right.

00:14:15.120 The Defense Department, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency is about reducing the threats. And

00:14:19.340 he did the opposite. He increased the threats. It looks like even if the lab leak theory isn't true,

00:14:25.140 there's a huge vulnerability there. There's a huge risk there that we can't deny. And

00:14:29.280 how can we do business with all these Chinese labs that tell us to go pound sand when the pandemic

00:14:32.720 breaks out? It's it's really nuts. And then, you know, the politics of this are so screwed up that,

00:14:37.520 you know, progressive Democrats are just sworn allegiance to the idea that the lab leak theory

00:14:41.680 couldn't be true. But that is not scientific. It has nothing to do with reality. It's just their

00:14:46.220 confirmation bias and kind of like their kind of ideological authoritarianism. And, you know,

00:14:51.500 that pervaded for so long that, you know, we can't untangle the story. That's why

00:14:55.700 conversations like the one we're having right now make it so important because people actually do

00:15:00.420 want to know they actually do want to figure it out. And even if the Chinese don't cooperate,

00:15:03.900 even if they don't like it, we have to figure it out. And that means forcing our our own government

00:15:08.540 agencies to be more honest with Congress and with the American people. And it means the Biden

00:15:12.680 administration has got to get up off of this tushy and do something. OK, not just sit there and

00:15:18.220 punt to the WHO, because that is a terrible, terrible alibi.

00:15:22.460 OK, so can you just say it one more time, the fancy term you just used, the whatnot fusion? What

00:15:28.700 was it that was spliced in that he wanted to splice into that to make the bat coronaviruses

00:15:34.200 more dangerous to humans? Right. So what they were doing is you have these bat coronaviruses

00:15:38.500 and they link to human lung cells in something called the ACE2 receptor. And the part that binds

00:15:44.560 with the human lung cells is called the spike protein or the S protein. And what the coronavirus

00:15:49.880 that's plaguing the world has that no other SARS beta coronavirus has ever had in history

00:15:54.960 is an added piece that makes it bind to human lung cells even better than before, even more

00:16:01.940 than before. And that piece is called a furin cleavage site. And that's been written about

00:16:07.560 before. A lot of science writers have noticed that. And some say, oh, well, it's just possible

00:16:11.060 that it evolved in nature. Sure. It could have been a random mutation that for the first time

00:16:14.920 ever this popped up in a SARS-related coronavirus. Or it could have been part of the experiments that

00:16:21.100 they were doing in one of these Wuhan labs. And the fact that Peter Daszak and the Equal Health

00:16:25.380 Alliance submitted a grant application to do exactly that should tell us something. It should tell us

00:16:31.360 that there was a lot of interest in making these bat coronaviruses more infectious to humans. And

00:16:36.440 there's a reason that SARS in 2002, 2003 only killed, what, 8,000 people? That's a lot of people. I

00:16:41.780 shouldn't say only. That's a lot of people. But we're up to 4.5 million, right? 700,000 Americans

00:16:47.320 dead, right? That's a super virus. That's what Robert Redfield said, that the way the virus acts,

00:16:53.420 and if you look at this thing called the furin cleavage site, the unique characteristic that makes

00:16:58.360 it so dangerous are very, very suspicious. And because the Wuhan labs were doing this type of

00:17:04.280 research, and now we know that Peter Daszak was proposing to do exactly this type of research.

00:17:09.000 Well, yeah, he's got a bunch of tough questions to answer that he refuses to answer that he won't

00:17:13.900 even answer, that he won't even respond to Congress. Can we talk about Richard Muller for a second?

00:17:17.800 Because he and Stephen Quay had a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, great piece in the Wall

00:17:22.360 Street Journal on June 6, 2021. And now they just dropped another one yesterday, and I had Muller on

00:17:28.140 my show. He's Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, also former

00:17:32.740 senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He knows what he's doing. And he wrote

00:17:39.000 originally, he wrote a piece saying, I've looked as a scientist at the data that was published

00:17:44.140 advertently or inadvertently by the so-called bat lady out of the Wuhan lab. And the fingerprint is

00:17:49.300 right there. It's the genetic fingerprint of COVID-19 shows you that it's got this thing. I think he's

00:17:55.340 talking about furin cleavage site, but in his original piece, he refers to it as something else.

00:17:58.900 But he says it basically is the thing that tells you a human has been here. He said it can happen in

00:18:06.960 nature, but it's extremely rare. And it's much more, much more common when a scientist has been

00:18:13.660 there. He says it's the exact sequence that appears in COVID-19. And he says, okay, hold on a

00:18:20.860 second. I just want to make sure I have the right quotes. Could have happened naturally through

00:18:26.380 mutations, but it's incredibly rare. It says much more likely that it was lab escape. And he says,

00:18:31.780 uh, let's see, this is what he points to. He says, when you look at the other coronaviruses,

00:18:37.300 that were the ones that were responsible for SARS and MERS, he says, um, they took a long time to

00:18:43.540 get powerful, to get good, to get good at what they did, um, just to sort of rapidly spread amongst

00:18:49.900 the human population and get to their most contagious selves. Not true with COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2,

00:18:56.100 whatever. Um, not true. COVID-19 didn't work that way. It appeared in humans. This is quoting

00:19:00.440 from his piece. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version.

00:19:05.500 No serious viral viral improvement took place until a minor minor variation occurred many months

00:19:10.760 later in England. Such early optimization is unprecedented and it suggests a long period of

00:19:16.760 adaptation that predated its public spread. Uh, science knows of only one way that that could

00:19:22.180 be achieved. He says, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. This is what's

00:19:28.540 done during game gain of function research. They use quote humanized mice. They're repeatedly exposed

00:19:35.180 to the virus to encourage the virus to adapt, get better, get stronger, figure it out. And his latest

00:19:42.300 piece says, okay, you look at the previous, like the background before SARS and MERS outbreaks,

00:19:47.600 they found the animals. You think it's a natural origin? They found the animals that hosted the

00:19:52.200 viruses there before they made the jump to human. More than 80% of the animals in affected markets

00:19:56.600 were infected with a coronavirus when they, when they looked at those. Not so here. The WHO team

00:20:02.180 searched for a host in early 2020. They tested more than 80,000 animals from 209 species. Not a single

00:20:08.700 one was infected with SARS COVID with COVID-19 basically. Um, and so he, and he goes on to make

00:20:14.700 the point. We can only wonder if the results would have been different if the animals tested had

00:20:17.940 included those humanized mice kept where at the Wuhan lab. Right, right. Well, it seems like he read my

00:20:24.140 book, Chaos Under Heaven, which had a lot of this information in it. Uh, but what he's pointing

00:20:28.900 out, thank you, thank you. Uh, but what he's pointing out is that, you know, there, again,

00:20:33.060 circumstantial evidence, there's a ton of it. And he's pointing out something else that should be

00:20:37.160 shocking to people. We've spent a lot of time looking for the natural origin. Sure. It might

00:20:40.480 take a long time, but that's where 99.99% of the resources have gone. And the WHO report, which is

00:20:46.860 like 450 pages, only spent three pages on the lab just to tell us not to look at the lab. And

00:20:51.600 why is that? You have to come to the inescapable conclusion that, uh, it was rigged. The, the,

00:20:56.940 the, the WHO study was rigged and the scientists who are telling us not to look at the lab have a

00:21:03.340 conflict of interest amongst them, uh, Peter, uh, Dashak and Anthony Fauci. And, you know,

00:21:08.760 scientists can disagree. Like, listen, Megan, I've talked to scientists who say, oh no, I definitely

00:21:12.860 think it came from nature. And I've talked to scientists who say, no, I definitely think it

00:21:16.080 came from the lab. Uh, but we have to discount those who have a financial conflict of interest. And then

00:21:21.560 all of a sudden the table flips this way, right? It's, it's all, it's 70, 30 natural origin.

00:21:26.720 And, but when you take out the conflicted guys who've been misleading us for two years,

00:21:30.300 all of a sudden it's 70, 30, the other way. And that should tell you something that the

00:21:34.920 discourse has been corrupted by these guys who failed to acknowledge and admit their conflict

00:21:39.640 of interest while doing everything they could to bolster the Chinese communist party's propaganda,

00:21:43.680 by the way, not to say that they were agents, just to say that they're helping the Chinese

00:21:47.560 communist party propaganda. Remember the Chinese government has its own lab theory.

00:21:50.940 Their theories that came from our lab, right? It's not like, they're not saying it came from

00:21:54.460 nature. They're saying, oh, it came from a lab, but the lab was in Maryland. Right now,

00:21:57.580 of course that doesn't make any sense because the outbreak didn't happen in Maryland. It happened

00:22:00.560 in Wuhan. But if you just think about that, they must know that eventually we're going to

00:22:04.480 find out what you just found out, what you just read, which is that if you look at the virus,

00:22:07.960 there's a lot of evidence that might've been evolved in some way in a lab. You know,

00:22:12.080 it just, it seems pretty clear. There's a, it seems pretty obvious that we should check that out.

00:22:16.140 So the Chinese have a lab theory and, you know, and, and you have these scientists are super

00:22:20.740 conflicted and Peter Dajak was so caught up in this conflict of interest that he had to resign

00:22:25.620 from the Lancet commission, right? That was the, he was the head of the commission to look into the

00:22:30.520 origins for Lancet. And then they had to shut down the whole commission. I mean, this is a,

00:22:34.600 and they put out in the Lancet, it's not a lab, it's not a lab. And then they, they wound up

00:22:38.720 embarrassed because I think we'd never find any of the evidence. Right. And we have found the evidence.

00:22:43.660 Let me say this, this, so Muller, Richard Muller ends his most recent piece. This is,

00:22:48.560 this just dropped yesterday, I think. Yeah. And he ends it with the following,

00:22:53.480 let China keep its firewall of secrecy. A suspect who refuses to testify can still be convicted.

00:22:58.520 We have an eyewitness, a whistleblower who escaped from Wuhan and carry details of the pandemic's origin

00:23:04.520 that the Chinese communist party can't hide. The whistleblower's name is SARS-CoV-2. He's saying the

00:23:11.100 fingerprint, the smoking gun is right there in the virus. Just look at it. All of the characteristics

00:23:15.880 of it are telling us where it came from. If only we would open our eyes and still just to round back

00:23:20.860 to what we talked about at the top, Josh. Now this USAID, you know, the, the, the agency for

00:23:27.660 international development that we talked about, that's already been up to this and its neck and,

00:23:30.760 and dealing with all this. They, they're announcing a new $125 million project, as we mentioned,

00:23:37.240 to detect unknown viruses with pandemic potential and see how they can make them more dangerous for

00:23:41.260 us. And in their press release, this is what they say. Um, the COVID-19 pandemic is a strong

00:23:48.820 reminder of the connection between animals, humans, and the environment and, and the effect that an

00:23:53.800 emerging pathogen spilling over into humans can have on people's health and global economies.

00:23:57.420 No, it isn't. No, it isn't. At best. Or at least we don't know that. How can they say that? At best

00:24:02.060 it's unproven. Right. But like this, we're about to give them $125 million to take viruses and make

00:24:07.080 them more dangerous while they're still looking right at us and telling us not to believe our

00:24:10.440 lion eyes. Well, listen, Megan, I hope sincerely that Congress will intervene and prevent that

00:24:14.780 program from moving forward until or unless new safeguards are put into place until or unless we're

00:24:19.820 ensured that none of these problematic Chinese labs will be included until or unless the definition of

00:24:25.580 gain of function research is not used as a, uh, alibi to fund gain of function research without

00:24:30.280 stating as much. And, you know, that's our only chance here. It does seems like the Biden administration

00:24:34.880 has, has abdicated its responsibility. I know people in Congress care. The question is, are they

00:24:39.600 going to do something about it? And by the way, the one part I disagree with is no, we can't let,

00:24:43.980 let China off the hook. Uh, no, we have to use our power and influence to press them for access to

00:24:48.800 those labs. And what happened to the database they took down that had all their, the public database that

00:24:53.320 had all the virus information in it. We need to see that. And if not, there should be diplomatic

00:24:57.840 and scientific consequences because this is not just about public health. This is also about

00:25:01.860 how to deal with the communist party of China that is now having a grave, grave, uh, effect

00:25:08.200 negatively on our national security and our public health. Okay. And so now there's really interesting

00:25:13.580 evidence coming out about when China knew it had an outbreak on its hands. And Josh actually tweeted

00:25:21.460 this out and said, you guys should watch this documentary by Sherry Markson. Uh, it's sky

00:25:25.980 Australia, sky news, Australia. And we've got a couple of really good clips queued up. The

00:25:31.240 documentary is called what happened in Wuhan. And I'm going to play those clips and ask you to put

00:25:37.160 them in perspective for us and tell you, ask you to tell us like what we learned from this. Cause

00:25:42.420 there is a lot of good information in this documentary. And I think, um, I would love to

00:25:46.600 use your expertise for you to explain it to us. So we're going to do that right after this break

00:25:49.500 when Josh Rogan columnist for the New York, for the Washington post, um, continues with us.

00:25:54.420 He's brilliant. You can tell that yourselves. Don't miss that. We're going to be back in 90 seconds.

00:26:04.840 Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show with me today is Josh Rogan columnist for the Washington

00:26:08.960 post and author of chaos under heaven, Trump, she, and the battle for the 21st century. Well worth

00:26:15.340 your time by that book. You will not be sorry. You'll learn more there than you learn in any

00:26:18.920 newspaper on the origin of COVID-19. Um, okay, Josh. So Sherry Markson of Sky News Australia does

00:26:25.200 a great piece. It's, it's only like an hour long. What happened in Wuhan and you tweeted out. It's

00:26:30.640 got a, it's got a ton of good info, which coming from you is the ultimate compliment for anybody

00:26:34.420 reporting on this. The first soundbite we have is her Sherry speaking to a Chinese defector named

00:26:41.580 Wei Jin Shang, um, talking to him about, cause he's here in the United States, but he still can

00:26:48.140 very, very well connected to top people in the Chinese communist party and elsewhere. And she's

00:26:53.240 trying to ask him, when did they know that there was an outbreak underway? You'll hear a reference to

00:26:58.760 the 2019 military games in China that happened in October, 2019. Let's listen.

00:27:05.200 When did you first hear that there was a virus in Wuhan? Was it during the time of the military games?

00:27:13.600 Yes. I learned there was an unusual exercise by the Chinese government during the military games.

00:27:21.340 And so I told diamond about the possibility of the Chinese government using some strange weapons,

00:27:29.840 including biological weapons, because I knew they were doing experiments of that sort.

00:27:38.500 Wow. Okay. I'm going to get your comment on that, but just to add a little context to it,

00:27:43.380 uh, the military games again happened in October of 19 in, in Wuhan, there were reports of athletes

00:27:49.920 becoming sick, uh, afterward, 9,000 athletes were there. They went home to some 100 plus countries.

00:27:56.940 Um, so what, you know, biological weapons that's different from, that's not exactly the same as lab

00:28:02.520 leak. I realized it was a part of the Wuhan lab. We don't know what's going on in the Chinese military

00:28:06.480 was reportedly in there, but what do you make of what he just said? Sure. Well, first of all,

00:28:10.960 everybody go watch Shari's documentary. She interviewed president Trump, John Radcliffe,

00:28:15.100 Mike Pompeo, Miles, you, a bunch of other people who had a first, a front row seat to this

00:28:19.900 whole thing. Radcliffe is the former director of national intelligence. Yes. And a top Trump

00:28:25.060 administration, but also people who had, who were inside the system, many of whom who I talked to

00:28:29.860 from my book wall came to the conclusion that, Hey, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence

00:28:33.580 pointing to these labs. We should check out these labs. And what, you know, I also know way he was,

00:28:37.980 uh, uh, leading democracy, pro-democracy advocate back when China had a pro-democracy movement. Now he

00:28:43.440 lives in exile, uh, around here, around Washington DC, and he's credible, but you don't have to believe

00:28:48.340 him. Uh, there's a ton of, uh, public information put out by the Chinese government about their

00:28:53.700 bio-warfare strategy. And again, this is something that you could get canceled for talking about a

00:28:58.400 year ago, but now it's kind of obvious. We have a bio-warfare program. They have a bio-warfare program.

00:29:03.340 Guess where theirs is located? Uh, where all the viruses are. Okay. Where all the, at the Wuhan

00:29:08.280 Institute of Virology and other places also in Beijing, they have a network of, of now. Was this part

00:29:13.460 of that? We don't know. Okay. Are we pretty sure that they have a bio-warfare program that

00:29:18.100 involved viruses? Yeah, absolutely. Is it a coincidence that the PLA took over the Wuhan

00:29:23.620 Institute of Virology after the pandemic broke out? No, probably not. Okay. So we don't know

00:29:27.920 the details of how, how the, yeah, sorry, the Chinese military. So we don't know the details of

00:29:32.700 how their bio-warfare program is connected to this, but we can't rule it out. And that's not a

00:29:36.680 conspiracy theory. That's just an obvious, I think, well-established fact. Now,

00:29:40.560 the thing that you talked about next, which is like, when did this thing start? Well,

00:29:45.380 that's a real mind blowing kind of idea because most of us assumed that it started in December.

00:29:50.420 Then we found out maybe November. Then Robert Redfield said maybe September or October.

00:29:55.460 And that changes everything because that means that if it's true that it came out in September

00:29:59.980 or October, which is when the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its database offline, coincidentally,

00:30:05.660 I guess. Right. Uh, you know, if that was the truth, then that means they covered it up

00:30:09.680 for four more months that even then we thought we knew they covered it up some, but it should be

00:30:13.940 another four months. And, you know, I got contacted by several, uh, athletes who were at those Wuhan

00:30:19.260 military games in October of 2019. And this is not, you know, they, they had their own experiences and

00:30:25.840 many of them said they got deathly ill with what they later realized to be COVID. There was no COVID

00:30:30.040 tests at that time. Many of them still haven't been tested, but one of my, uh, uh, sources said that

00:30:35.280 in his team of 15 athletes, five of them got so deathly ill, they had to put them to the back of

00:30:39.560 the plane on the way home to keep them away from everybody. And they also said that when they were

00:30:43.320 in Wuhan, it was eerily quiet and the government was doing all sorts of weird things like making

00:30:47.160 everybody wash their hands all the time. And, and that the public was into, I mean, there's a,

00:30:52.060 then if you look at the sort of history of procurement of the labs, there's more evidence

00:30:56.340 that something happened there in September ish. Wait, I want to get into that. I want to,

00:30:59.960 I want to get into that. Um, so, so this is soundbite number two, but I'll let you finish

00:31:04.220 your point. You, you finish your point and then I'll do, and then I'll get into the PCR machines.

00:31:08.040 Yeah. There's a mounting pile of evidence that says we have to rethink the whole timeline of

00:31:11.640 this pandemic and account for the fact that China must, must have been, uh, covering it up far longer

00:31:16.160 than we previously believed. When, when did we believe they knew that they had a virus on their

00:31:23.100 hands? Well, originally the, the, the Chinese government and their scientists said their first case was in

00:31:28.260 early December. That's what we thought for a while. And then later, uh, we found out that,

00:31:33.500 Oh, through our own intelligence, that there had been some cases in November. And then it started

00:31:38.000 popping up in other countries in their blood samples from like November, December. And they're

00:31:42.140 like, Oh, how did it get to Italy in November, December? And that was one clue. And then we started

00:31:47.620 to learn more about what was going on in the labs. When did the researchers get sick? It turns out they

00:31:51.480 got sick in October. That was another clue. Then there was the Wuhan military games thing. That was another

00:31:55.400 clue. And sooner or later, everyone in the know started to realize, Oh wait, this thing must have

00:32:00.400 been circulating much earlier than we previously knew, which means they let it out earlier, which

00:32:05.520 means they sent it through the military games to a hundred different countries, which means that's

00:32:10.540 what's going to happen when they have the Olympics in Beijing in four months from right now. So how can

00:32:15.340 we have an Olympics in China when the last time they had an international military event, they hit the

00:32:19.620 virus probably. And it may have been a super spread of it. The very first super spread of it. Now we're going to

00:32:24.540 trust them again by sending our athletes there again. How does that make any sense?

00:32:28.400 The most generous interpretation is that they hit it while they knew it was out. I mean,

00:32:32.340 there's not, you know, we listen to the Weijin-Shing and it's like, well, maybe they did not hide

00:32:37.320 anything. Maybe it was intentionally set out. Who the hell knows? All right, wait, soundbite number

00:32:40.460 two. I realize you don't think that's what happened. I don't think that. Soundbite number two is where

00:32:44.680 this is Sherry Markson talking to former DNI, John Ratcliffe, our United States former DNI under Trump,

00:32:51.200 about the Chinese buying up PCR machines. Now you guys know PCR tests, right? We've all had to have

00:32:58.240 one of those. They test for COVID. They suddenly started buying them up like crazy, like they were

00:33:04.820 candy in 2019. Listen here. There was a buyup of PCR equipment used to test for coronaviruses

00:33:12.840 in Wuhan in 2019. The next month, one of those machines went to the Wuhan Institute.

00:33:26.900 Is this something you're aware of, that they bought a PCR machine in November 2019?

00:33:32.820 I wouldn't be able to comment on that.

00:33:35.900 How significant would this purchase be?

00:33:39.040 Would be significant.

00:33:40.260 Is it a smoking gun?

00:33:44.120 Ultimately, I don't think there's ever going to be one specific smoking gun. I think there's

00:33:49.780 more than just smoke here. I think there's fire from a whole bunch of different sources.

00:33:55.440 I think that would be another compelling piece of evidence if you need more. I don't need more.

00:34:01.340 I don't need more either, John. Okay, so Josh Rogan, then on top of her reporting there,

00:34:07.660 you've got the Telegraph with a report out yesterday saying, and they're citing a study

00:34:14.400 done by Internet 2.0, a cybersecurity consultancy that specializes in examining data from China.

00:34:19.820 I don't know if that's Sherry Martin's source. Okay, same source.

00:34:23.160 Yeah, that's the same.

00:34:23.580 So they put a little bit more meat on the bones, saying that Internet 2.0 concluded that spending

00:34:30.160 on PCR equipment in Hubei province, that's where Wuhan is, where the lab is, increased to 13.4 million

00:34:36.020 in 2019 from 6.9 million the year before and 5.7 million the year before that. The Internet 2.0,

00:34:44.060 that company concluded, quote, the virus was highly likely to be spreading virulently in Wuhan, China,

00:34:55.360 as early as the summer of 2019, definitely by autumn.

00:35:02.240 Right. So there's a lot there. So this PCR test thing, I think of that as like one data point, okay?

00:35:07.540 And it doesn't tell us anything really by itself. But when you put it into the larger puzzle,

00:35:11.640 it bolsters the case that something was amiss in Wuhan around this period.

00:35:15.620 Another thing is that the Wuhan Institute of Viral, you started buying like a new air conditioning

00:35:19.280 system in September. That was part of the report by the House of Foreign Affairs Minority Committee.

00:35:24.140 Corox wipes.

00:35:25.060 Yes. There was another. Right. There's also the reporting that the Chinese government started to

00:35:29.640 buy up all the masks. And why were they buying up all the masks and PPE again in October,

00:35:34.720 not in January? And then we sent them all the masks. And then when we got hit, they wouldn't

00:35:39.860 even send us the masks from our own factories, from the ones we had in China that we thought

00:35:43.080 were ours. But it turns out aren't ours at all. So again, I would put this into a tap. I wouldn't

00:35:47.720 put too much focus on PCR tests or this or, you know, cell phone data or was the parking lot full

00:35:53.220 on this day or on that day. All it shows us is that there's so much about these Wuhan labs that we

00:35:58.060 don't know. And what Radcliffe said that was really important in that clip was that he can't talk about

00:36:02.340 the intelligence that we have. And, you know, the Biden administration could snap his fingers

00:36:05.480 right now and release a bunch of information that would help us understand what's going on and how

00:36:10.200 we got into this mess. And they don't want to do that. It seems like they don't want to do that

00:36:12.920 because they don't want the issue, the problem of dealing with it politically and diplomatically.

00:36:18.180 They don't want to throw progressives under the bus. They don't want to complicate U.S.-China

00:36:21.420 relations. And they're doing that at the cost of our national security and our public health. So,

00:36:25.520 you know, all Radcliffe has to say is, hey, Biden, why don't you just release the stuff that

00:36:30.400 I've already seen? That would get us somewhere. That would be better than what we've got now,

00:36:33.900 which is a total vacuum of information and effort. Trump was asked, too, in this in this

00:36:38.680 documentary, what do you think? And he was limited in what he could say. And he understood that he had

00:36:44.540 some obligations in terms of classified information. But but put it over 95 percent that this came from

00:36:49.680 a lab, having seen whatever it is he's seen. And it matters. It does matter. All right. We have got

00:36:55.420 more to do with Josh, including a third clip. We're going to do it right after a quick break.

00:36:58.800 Josh Rogan of The Washington Post is with us today. Very excited to have him.

00:37:07.020 So we actually the third soundbite we have is, again, of our former national intelligence or

00:37:11.400 director of national intelligence, John Radcliffe, speaking to the issue you just raised, Josh,

00:37:15.580 about what does Biden have that he could release that would help us all understand? Here he is.

00:37:20.060 Listen, is there still major intelligence that goes to proving the virus came out of the Wuhan

00:37:26.900 Institute of Virology that's still not in the public domain?

00:37:31.220 Yes, there's compelling intelligence that hasn't been declassified. When you declassify intelligence,

00:37:37.120 you risked, you know, the potential human sources or signals intelligence where your where your eyes

00:37:43.760 and ears into the to their actions are coming from. And so we put out as much as we felt we could safely do

00:37:49.680 at the time. But I think the time has come for the Biden administration to declassify additional

00:37:56.360 information that would, again, more evidence if you need it, that the Chinese Communist Party

00:38:04.020 officials acted badly, bullied international officials, covered up intelligence and reporting

00:38:12.000 on this. There is more intelligence out there. And I'd like to see it declassified because it'll create

00:38:18.180 additional pressure, not just on Chinese Communist Party officials, but others that still continue to

00:38:23.000 deny that China is a bad actor here. But that's not going to happen, right? There's not even a whiff

00:38:28.140 that Biden's going to declassify anything. And he doesn't want to. Why? You touched on it before the

00:38:33.120 break. Right. So some of the things that we the known unknowns, as Rumsfeld used to say, are that we

00:38:39.200 know that there were sick researchers at the lab in October and November of 2019. We don't know what they

00:38:43.680 were working on. I'm told that it's back coronaviruses. That would seem relevant. Right.

00:38:48.440 What were their names? Where are they now? Can we talk to them? You know, we know that the

00:38:52.580 EcoHealth Alliance and the NIH were doing business with the Wuhan labs. We haven't seen the documents.

00:38:57.980 We haven't seen the the files. You know, we don't. So there's there's lots of obvious stuff that they

00:39:03.460 could release. Now, why they don't do it? You know, it's it's because they don't see a political

00:39:08.780 upside in finding out how we got into this mess. And that's the crazy thing is that in Congress,

00:39:13.620 it's really only Republicans who are looking into this. Democrats who hold all the subpoena power

00:39:18.220 refuse to use it to compel people like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, who's resigning, by the way,

00:39:23.260 after decades of service, you know, or Peter Daszak or any of these guys to to put their hand on a

00:39:30.240 Bible and tell us what they know and then to show us the records. And, you know, I get it. I understand

00:39:35.060 why they're in a bind. They're trying to set up a summit between Joe. But that's what they're doing

00:39:39.080 right now. Jake Sullivan is in Zurich meeting with the Chinese leadership to set up a summit

00:39:43.720 between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. And the Chinese are flying planes over Taiwan every single day.

00:39:49.840 And it's a tense situation. I get it. This is an inconvenient thing to bring up. OK, but it's

00:39:55.160 700000 dead Americans. So we're going to need some answers. And there's no statute of limitation on

00:40:00.620 700000 deaths. And it informs how we move forward and how we do science and how we protect ourselves

00:40:07.480 from the next pandemic. So, yeah, it's all political downside for the Biden team. But you know what?

00:40:11.540 Tough. You know, what about the rest of the world? I mean, are they as dependent on China as we are?

00:40:17.060 I mean, isn't there somebody more? So there's some other brave actor anywhere who can get to the

00:40:21.160 bottom of this since we don't have the spine for it? You know, it's as it turns out, every time a

00:40:25.720 country raised this issue, the Chinese government punished them horrendously when Australia called for an

00:40:30.460 independent investigation, the Chinese government decimated their beef and wine industries with a

00:40:36.180 snap of the finger in the middle of a pandemic, crushing their farmers just for suggesting it.

00:40:39.980 OK, and that's because, you know, that's how much the Chinese Communist Party is devoted, not to finding

00:40:45.440 the answer, but just to making sure that nobody else does. That's all they want for them. Not knowing

00:40:50.220 is enough. And, you know, and as it turns out, the U.S. government is the only organization in the

00:40:55.000 world that's left that's powerful enough to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party. And all we really need

00:40:59.900 is the will to do so. Let me ask you about Daszak in one other way. This letter that was written,

00:41:06.520 I think it was a couple of days ago, October 1st, from top scientists to the HHS secretary

00:41:11.780 demanding that he be booted. They say he has concealed several extreme situations of conflict

00:41:19.640 of interest, withheld critical information, misled public opinion by expressing falsehoods,

00:41:24.300 and they want to push him out of this nonprofit eco health alliance, nearly the entire budget of which

00:41:29.240 comes from us U.S. taxpayers. They say the board has a moral and a legal obligation to investigate

00:41:33.780 his behavior. And some of the things they cite him as having done and having done, they accuse him

00:41:38.380 of having lied when he said the Wuhan lab doesn't keep didn't keep live bats on premises when recently

00:41:44.500 uncovered footage from 2017 shows bats in cages there. Whoops. That he made unfounded claims about

00:41:50.160 why virus samples and sequences held by the Wuhan lab were taken offline, making them, oh, weirdly

00:41:55.660 inaccessible to outside researchers. He failed to publicly disclose that EcoHealth Alliance had

00:42:01.100 applied in 2019 to the Pentagon for that gain of function research grant you just mentioned.

00:42:05.860 And they mentioned Fauci and Collins repeatedly denying that federal funds went to support

00:42:10.060 that kind of research at the Wuhan lab. But, you know, there's real questions about whether,

00:42:15.320 in fact, we did. But here's what I want to ask you. Why wouldn't the board investigate him? I mean,

00:42:23.360 the obvious answer is because they were in on it because they knew because they can't fire Peter

00:42:27.800 Daszak because they'll go down with him. So who's going to investigate the board? I don't think they

00:42:33.140 will get rid of him. Right. If their hands are dirty, they're not going to get rid of him.

00:42:36.040 So what are our options? Because this guy clearly should not be staying in this post.

00:42:39.720 Right. I mean, we again, we can't have the scientists policing the scientists. It doesn't work.

00:42:43.760 That's what we should have learned from this pandemic. We can't have Anthony Fauci overseeing

00:42:47.600 Anthony Fauci. We can't have Francis Collins overseeing Francis Collins. We can't have the

00:42:51.520 EcoHealth Alliance overseeing Peter Daszak because it doesn't work. OK, none of these organizations

00:42:56.540 are self-correcting. Now, the fact that it's U.S. taxpayer money means that we actually do have an

00:43:01.400 out here, which is to get Congress and the administration involved, because that's your

00:43:05.480 taxpayer money, my taxpayer money. And there's no accountability. There's no transparency,

00:43:09.480 even in the biggest crisis in the world. And, you know, the thing that I was going to add to your

00:43:12.820 list is that he actually, you know, coordinated the effort to call the lab leak theory conspiracy

00:43:17.680 theory, as we now know, by coordinating all those letters from the scientists and put a chilling

00:43:22.740 effect on the scientific community that's only falling right now, two years later. And, you know,

00:43:27.940 that's really what's going on. It's not just that's why the lab leak theory is is so explosive,

00:43:33.420 not because it implicates China, because it implicates us, because we funded that research,

00:43:38.200 because it implicates our labs and our scientists and our heroes of the pandemic, including Anthony

00:43:43.360 Fauci, who I'm sure was trying to prevent pandemics, but is now helping to obscure the

00:43:48.900 investigation into how we got into this pandemic. And you're right. We never let the boards of the

00:43:54.040 companies police their own companies. It's it's it's foolish. We have to have Congress and the

00:43:58.440 Biden administration do it. And if the Biden administration won't do it, then we have to

00:44:01.960 have Congress push them to do it. And again, that's kind of happening. But I mean, geez, it's

00:44:06.840 slow. And every year that goes by, we get farther and farther away from the truth.

00:44:12.160 You know, it's it's easy to talk about this in the abstract as a policy matter and throw the

00:44:15.620 numbers out there. But it's like, you know, I think of just just last week, there was a funeral

00:44:20.160 for Don Sorrell, who is my son's teacher. And, you know, he was his music teacher. And my son was

00:44:26.980 devastated when he died from COVID. He had gone into the ICU during the quarantine. And then things

00:44:31.420 look like they were getting better and they weren't. And it took a turn. He died.

00:44:35.260 And they had to wait, of course, to hear the memorial. But, you know, so many people have

00:44:38.240 lost loved ones. Janice Dean, my pal, I suppose both of her in-laws and so on. Kids have died.

00:44:43.680 Like, forgive me, but these fuckers have lied to us for long enough. And we need to know the truth.

00:44:49.080 I mean, just to put too fine a point on it. But we need to know this. People die. Millions of people

00:44:54.980 are dead. And Peter Daszak is allowed to get away with his lies. The Biden administration looks the

00:45:00.700 other way. The information's there. If only we will push for it and demand it. And we have no

00:45:06.280 assurances this won't happen again. It's infuriating to me. Infuriating. There's just

00:45:11.380 nothing we can do. And I don't even know if we get another president in there, Josh, whether he or

00:45:15.600 she would handle it differently, because China's got us so, you know, by the you know what.

00:45:21.240 Well, listen, there's a lot we can do. There's a lot we must do. There's a lot we can do here. But

00:45:25.580 there's also a lot we can do with China, because in the end, really, it's not right. All those tragic

00:45:29.620 stories. I'm so sorry to hear about your friend's losses. And we all have stories like that.

00:45:33.260 But, you know, think about all the countries where they don't have vaccines, where they don't have

00:45:37.440 food, where they don't have shelter, where they don't have water and they don't have medical care

00:45:40.740 or ventilators. And that's most of the countries in the world who are still suffering very, very

00:45:44.680 greatly and will continue for years and years and years. And, you know, if the Chinese Communist

00:45:49.120 Party is allowed to avoid responsibility, accountability for that, what will that teach them?

00:45:54.200 You know, yes, we have to we have to clean up our own shop. We have to realize that science is a

00:45:59.520 national security issue, that viruses are dual use technologies. And we have. And if the Chinese

00:46:04.540 government thinks they're dual use technologies, then we have to think of them that way.

00:46:07.600 Yeah, I got to leave it to that because we're up against a hard break. So apologies for the mid

00:46:10.960 sentence. But thank you. You're brilliant. Love. Love your book. Thanks for being here.

00:46:15.540 We're going to pick it up with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who used to run the FDA

00:46:18.440 right after this break. Don't miss that. Love, Josh Rogan.

00:46:26.040 Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, everyone. Joining me now, Dr. Scott Gottlieb,

00:46:29.660 former FDA commissioner and author of the book Uncontrolled Spread, why COVID-19 crushed us

00:46:36.000 and how we can defeat the next pandemic. Scott also serves on the board of directors of the

00:46:41.140 pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Scott, thank you very much for being with us. We appreciate it.

00:46:46.140 Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

00:46:47.480 Let me just pick it up where I left it with my last guest, Josh Rogan, who's been doing great

00:46:51.020 reporting on the origins of COVID-19 and says, look, everything needs to be investigated and

00:46:56.160 you've got to keep some space open for the possibility that it was natural origin, but

00:46:59.920 that the evidence is pretty overwhelming that this thing came from a Wuhan lab. And President

00:47:04.880 Trump said as much in a soundbite that was in a documentary that we just discussed. So did

00:47:09.240 our former director of national intelligence who said he requires no further proof. So I read

00:47:15.900 recently that you were still hedging on it saying you still think it's of natural origin. Do you

00:47:20.480 still feel that way?

00:47:21.440 Well, I wasn't hedging on it. You know, what I've said publicly is that I think it's 50-50. I think

00:47:27.340 it's hard to make a call either way based on the evidence that we have. And this is going to be

00:47:31.520 probably a battle of competing narratives for a period of time, if not in perpetuity, unless we have

00:47:36.740 one of two things. Either we can definitively find the natural host, the zoonotic source, or we have a

00:47:42.780 whistleblower in China who comes forward with information that's more definitive that this

00:47:46.880 came out of the lab.

00:47:47.600 Why haven't we been able to find the host so far? I mean, we're not going to find it now. We already

00:47:51.620 went over there. We tested 18,000 animals. We didn't find it.

00:47:54.000 Right. So as I was saying, I think the side of the ledger that points towards the lab

00:47:58.200 has certainly grown over time. And the case for this being a lab origin, I think, has gotten

00:48:03.780 stronger over time. And the case that this came out of a zoonotic source has been at best stagnant

00:48:09.120 over time and probably weakened. Because you're right, we've looked exhaustively for the zoonotic

00:48:13.560 source. We haven't found it. We've fully disproven the lab, the wet market as a place of the origin

00:48:20.760 of this virus. Even the Chinese government now concedes that the wet market wasn't the origin

00:48:25.340 of the virus. It was just a stop along the way. And I think you have to start factoring in the

00:48:30.000 Chinese government's own behavior where they withheld key information. You can certainly draw

00:48:34.540 inferences from their behavior that this points towards a more potentially sinister source coming

00:48:40.080 out of a lab. So I think that the lab side of the ledger, and Josh does a good job in his book

00:48:44.660 and in the articles he's written, recounting some of the recent evidence that there was an outbreak

00:48:48.880 of infection in the lab right around the proximity when we think that this virus first made its jump

00:48:53.220 into humans, that the Chinese government had coronaviruses, novel coronaviruses in that facility

00:48:58.100 that they were experimenting with. I've never been disclosed that they were infecting transgenic

00:49:02.560 animals with fully human immune systems, which makes it more likely that the virus could have

00:49:07.820 become human adapted. And of course, the humanized mice. Yes, but all of that's true, what you're

00:49:12.880 saying. But that's why we all believe that it was a lab leak. I mean, at this point, you've got to

00:49:17.300 place your bets. And you look at the gene splicing that was done, that now I talked about this report

00:49:23.340 in the Wall Street Journal by these two guys, and they've just followed it up. It's Richard Mueller and

00:49:28.180 Dr. Quay, who talk about specifically how there is a gene splicing, there's strong evidence of gene

00:49:35.640 splicing into the COVID-19 virus, and it's all there black and white. They call it the furin cleavage

00:49:40.820 site, which would not be in the COVID-19 genome if this thing were from a natural source. It would be

00:49:47.280 extremely unusual. I have a whole chapter in my book about the case, why this could have come out of

00:49:53.760 the lab. So, you know, you're talking to someone who believes- Well, what's the evidence that it's

00:49:56.620 natural? I mean, maybe that's what I should be asking you. Well, like at this point, I'm upset

00:50:00.560 because we need to know, and we seem to be giving the Chinese a total pass on this. And it's like,

00:50:06.460 I don't, I don't, I'm open-minded. When this thing started, I'm totally open-minded. Just tell me

00:50:10.900 what it is. But we have just sort of phoned it in on the intel investigation. We don't, all the signs

00:50:16.940 seem to be pointing to Wuhan lab, and we're not demanding that they release their information,

00:50:20.820 the Chinese, which they still could. And, and, you know, you were in a position of power. Why

00:50:25.500 don't you, don't we care? We need the information. Right. As I say in my book, the reason why it's

00:50:30.420 important to get to the bottom of this question definitively and to find that smoking gun that

00:50:35.600 can definitively prove whether or not this came out of a lab is because if we do assess that there's a

00:50:40.040 high probability of this came out of a lab and we have definitive evidence of that, it's going to

00:50:44.020 change how we govern research around the world and how much we trust countries to be forthcoming,

00:50:47.920 not only about the research they're doing, but about outbreaks that they have. And we're

00:50:50.760 going to have to get out foreign intelligence agencies, more engaged in the mission of

00:50:53.720 assessing and surveilling labs. And so there's a policy.

00:50:56.720 How are we not there? Explain to me. I, I, with respect, I just don't want to go into talking

00:51:01.260 points because I, I, we're there like the, the smoking gun. You don't have videotape of the murder,

00:51:07.720 but you've got a lot of circumstantial evidence around the murder. You can see the gun on the scene.

00:51:12.740 It's still smoking. You can see the gunshot residue on the person you think is the main suspect.

00:51:16.840 You can, you have an eyewitness saying he did it. This is, that's how circumstantial cases are made

00:51:21.520 beyond reasonable doubts in courts of law. This is, that's the genome right here. The splicing

00:51:25.440 of the genome. I'm not the right guest to be arguing that, uh, this, you know, I'm not the one

00:51:30.200 coming on arguing this came out of a zoonotic source. I have not been arguing that. I I've said

00:51:34.800 50, 50 is not probably this came out of a lab. So yeah, 50, 50 is not it. So you're coming over.

00:51:41.440 You're going to give me, it's more than more likely. I'm not coming over. I've been there.

00:51:44.880 I've been, I've been out front on this and I've been criticized by people who are on the opposite

00:51:49.540 side of this issue, um, for having a high index of suspicion that this could have come out of a lab.

00:51:54.360 What I'm just saying is, you know, if we want to sort of galvanize global action,

00:51:58.740 it's going to take more than the inference and the circumstantial evidence that we have right now.

00:52:02.320 It's going to have more inside China. That's insane. Scott, we have so much. Look, we have so

00:52:09.000 much. And we, we did this Intel review, which was completely phoned in and effortless. I mean,

00:52:15.080 it really wasn't sincere. And now you see like the former DNI saying Biden's got documentation that he

00:52:20.800 could release Joe by president Joe Biden and he won't do it. So look, you're not going to, unless

00:52:25.460 you've got the murder on videotape, you can never convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a

00:52:30.400 hundred percent. They've got it right, but you can get them to the point based on circumstantial

00:52:34.100 evidence. They, they, they have figured it out. And I just think we're there. I look,

00:52:38.760 what do you make of the evidence that would still be obtainable potentially, um, that I think could

00:52:43.680 be, uh, really important here. The world could put pressure on China to release the source strains.

00:52:48.080 They still haven't done that. That could, if we have access to those original strains,

00:52:52.080 that can get us closer to the natural origin of this virus. Um, you know, there's probably

00:52:57.120 more information that could be gleaned from what that lab, we don't know what was in the

00:53:00.980 inventory of the lab. They've never, they've never revealed the sequences of the viruses that

00:53:05.560 they had on hand. There was an outbreak of an unusual strain of coronavirus and pangolins in

00:53:10.040 proximity to when SARS-CoV-2 first started to spread March of 2019. We still don't have access to those

00:53:16.740 samples. So if we start putting pressure on China for those discrete pieces of evidence, I think that

00:53:21.800 they can provide a stronger case on whether or not this came out of a lab origin or it came out of a

00:53:27.100 a zoonotic source. We don't have those pieces of evidence. How? What specifically should we do?

00:53:31.480 Well, I think the world health organizations fail to put pressure on China. They, they,

00:53:35.060 one thing that they've refused to do is call on China to release those source strains under a

00:53:39.920 premise that China is not obligated to do it under the health regulations, which isn't true.

00:53:44.920 What can we do? I think we can work through international bodies to put more pressure on

00:53:48.360 China for, uh, to release. The international bodies have done nothing for us. The WHO is in on it.

00:53:54.120 They went over there and did an investigation that was absolutely useless. It wasn't worth the paper.

00:53:58.380 It was printed on. Even they recognize that they had embarrassed themselves. Watch the 60 minutes

00:54:02.220 report on it. What can the United States do? What should we do this week to get real answers?

00:54:08.920 Yeah, look, I, one of the things I argue in the book is that we need to get out for our

00:54:12.460 intelligence agencies, agencies more engaged in doing surveillance around the public health mission.

00:54:17.500 I suspect they're much more engaged now than they were before SARS-CoV-2, but I think there needs to be a

00:54:22.560 much more explicit role for the CIA and the NSA in these kinds of endeavors. Historically,

00:54:27.140 surveillance around, um, foreign labs and emerging outbreaks has been left to public health authorities

00:54:33.220 and largely the CDC. And we've seen these sort of multilateral commitments and agreements that we

00:54:37.660 had in place didn't work at surfacing the information that we needed.

00:54:41.080 Well, what about, what about sanctions? I mean, a, we don't really need spies because we've got Peter

00:54:45.660 Daszak and I'm sure he's either spoken or could be forced to speak about what exactly was going on

00:54:50.060 there. He may not be speaking to us, but he's speaking to somebody, meaning the media, but he's

00:54:53.560 speaking to somebody. Uh, and B, what about sanctions? Why don't we cause some pain for the

00:54:58.540 Chinese so that they fork over the information? Are you in support of that?

00:55:01.880 Look, I'm in support of putting pressure on the Chinese government to be more forthcoming with

00:55:05.840 some key pieces of information that we know could help, um, get to the bottom of this case that we

00:55:11.080 don't have right now. I, what the right diplomatic tools are, I'd leave that to Josh Rogan and others to,

00:55:16.780 uh, to figure out, but I can tell you what we're missing. We're missing the source strains. We're

00:55:21.280 missing an inventory of what was in the wave. We're missing, um, some of the coronaviruses we

00:55:26.580 know were circulating in China preceding this outbreak that could be helpful in determining

00:55:31.740 whether they could have been the original, uh, strain, particularly that outbreak in pangolins in

00:55:36.240 March of 2019. So there's some key information that if we had access, we're missing, um, the blood

00:55:42.300 samples drawn on the workers in the web. If we had access to those blood samples, we'd be able to

00:55:46.760 test them to see if they had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. That information was never made available.

00:55:51.740 The Chinese told us that they didn't, but we never actually had access to the underlying data.

00:55:55.820 Do you know whether we've ever tested those 9,000 athletes who got it at those Chinese military

00:55:59.680 games? Have we tested them or did we early on for the antibodies? Cause that, that would be telling

00:56:05.320 too. Yeah, I don't know. Uh, I doubt it. I don't know how we would get access to those blood

00:56:10.740 samples. Hmm. Let's switch gears. Um, there's so much to talk about vaccinations of children.

00:56:15.640 And I know you have three children. How old are your kids? Um, 11, 11 and eight. So two of them

00:56:21.780 will soon be vaccinated. Okay. So I've got my, my 11 year old just turned 12 last weekend. Um,

00:56:27.720 I have a 10 year old and I have an eight year old, so we're kind of in the same boat. Um,

00:56:31.360 and I knew you're very pro vaccination of children and I don't want to just break. I don't,

00:56:35.180 and I am very pro vaccination for adult. I just want to say that up front. I got vaccinated. I have Pfizer.

00:56:39.840 I got your vaccine. Um, but I, I'm more hesitant. I'm not vaccine resistant. I'm vaccine hesitant

00:56:48.720 when it comes to my children. Maybe I'd feel differently if they were teenagers, like older

00:56:53.340 teen, 18, 19, but I'm not sure. Um, so I'd love to, um, I don't want to get into it with you on like

00:57:00.680 why you love them and why you think that we should do them and all that. But I want to give you the

00:57:04.360 chance to explain first why you'd give it to your own child. Cause to me, that's the best

00:57:09.540 evidence. It's, it's not, you know, you don't, you don't believe it's harmful. You work for Pfizer.

00:57:14.800 I mean, well, you have a relationship with them and I know a woman who works for Pfizer and she

00:57:18.960 loves the vaccine and she said she's going to give it to all of her kids. And that honestly made me

00:57:23.680 feel better about it. So make the case for why we, I shouldn't be vaccine hesitant on my children.

00:57:29.680 Well, look, I understand the hesitation any parent has about putting, um, a medical product in an

00:57:34.820 otherwise healthy child. And that's where a lot of the uncertainty and unease about vaccines derive

00:57:40.580 from. Generally, you're taking a healthy child and you're using a medical product on them and there's

00:57:44.840 risks associated with any medical product. And the bottom line is that SARS-CoV-2, as much as we've

00:57:51.000 talked about the fact that thankfully it's not nearly, um, as dangerous in children as it is in older

00:57:56.980 adults, it's still a dangerous virus. I mean, this is a virus that certainly is more dangerous than,

00:58:02.020 you know, enterovirus or echo virus or other viruses, Coxsackie virus that cause bad outcomes

00:58:07.160 in kids. When you see epidemics sweep through populations, um, people always point to the fact

00:58:12.300 that only 500 kids, a little over 500 kids have died of SARS-CoV-2, which in and of itself is a

00:58:18.140 tragic number, um, and makes it more deadly than a seasonal flu typically is, but, um, but not this

00:58:24.540 past year, but that's not, but that shouldn't be reassuring because we see a lot of long-term

00:58:28.660 term sequelae from this virus. And it's a virus we don't fully understand. So it's a virus. I don't

00:58:33.380 think we should want kids to get, we should be taking measures to try to prevent this from becoming

00:58:37.600 epidemic in children. Um, so on, on that side of the ledger, I have concerns about allowing my kids

00:58:43.860 to be continually vulnerable to this virus. And what we've seen in the literature so far is people

00:58:48.420 who've been vaccinated against the virus, even if they get infected with it, they're less at risk for

00:58:54.000 some of the long-term complications that we've seen with SARS-CoV-2. And on the other side of the

00:58:58.100 ledger, there was concern that this is a new vaccine and that it wasn't put through, um, as

00:59:02.920 deliberate of a development process. I would say on both those points, number one, these were the

00:59:06.640 largest clinical trials ever run with any medical product in modern times. Fully 90,000 patients were

00:59:11.620 enrolled in trials for the mRNA vaccines. The only, the only vaccine I remember the trial that I

00:59:16.320 remember being on par with that was the rotavirus vaccine, which was about 60,000 patients.

00:59:20.860 There weren't 90,000 children. We now have data on, um, more than 300 million doses administered

00:59:27.680 in the U S. So it's a substantial, um, database of, of safety. I know, but you're trying to, you're

00:59:32.220 trying to talk me out of my vaccine hesitancy on my children. I got the vaccine. You got me. Um,

00:59:37.060 right. But, but my children, you only did testing on 2000 children. That's, that's not the same.

00:59:41.580 And the, you know, the presumption is that the, the data from the adult population is transferable to

00:59:47.080 the experience in children. I mean, if you look at any medical product,

00:59:49.860 like children, aren't many adults. If you look at any other medical product, um, you look at the

00:59:55.360 data from 16 to 25, the side effect profile, and that's, you do separate trials and children.

01:00:00.420 You're right. We were looking specifically at this vaccine and children, but the data set that's

01:00:05.880 available for adults is informative. You don't just take that and throw it out. You use it to help

01:00:10.140 inform the overall perception and pictures, the safety of the vaccine. That's, what's been done here.

01:00:15.020 Mm-hmm. Um, the, I want to, I want to ask you, cause I, you go on, um, CNBC, I've seen you on

01:00:22.320 Squawk Box and also, um, I think face the nation. And one of the things you said, I really wanted to

01:00:28.740 follow up on it. Cause you said there are different ways to approach vaccination. You said, it's not a

01:00:33.080 binary decision. Do I vaccinate my kid or not? Well, sadly it kind of is for a lot of parents out

01:00:39.860 there. And let's just talk about places like the Los Angeles school district where it is a binary

01:00:44.400 choice. They don't get to do any of the things you were saying on face the nation. You said you

01:00:48.840 could potentially wait for the lower dose vaccine to be available. No, they can't. They've got to do

01:00:52.420 it. You said, um, if your child has already had COVID one dose may be sufficient. That's not true.

01:00:58.220 They're, they're not allowed to do just one dose. They have to do two doses. That's what's been

01:01:01.800 required of them. And I, I think I love like your push for flexibility, but it's not what's

01:01:09.680 happening. It's parents are being mandated to get two doses, the full doses that are available right

01:01:14.700 now, not a lower dose, the 30 micrograms for the kids right now, or they cannot go to school.

01:01:19.740 That's not fair. Is it? Well, look, I've come out and said that I'm highly skeptical of federal

01:01:25.240 mandates. I think that, you know, decisions around vaccination to the extent that they're collective

01:01:30.560 choices and they are collective choices because your decision to get vaccinated or not does affect

01:01:34.520 your community, your workplace, to the extent that these are collective choices, I think they should

01:01:38.340 be made at, as, as local a level as possible. So I think local school districts, states, mayors,

01:01:44.000 um, are well within their discretion to establish mandates for their local communities. I think that's

01:01:49.080 where these decisions should ultimately be made. So I wouldn't second guess any, any state or mayor

01:01:53.880 or employer who feels that the only way to protect their local population, their workplace

01:01:58.820 is through mandated vaccination because of the unique circumstances, the environment, which

01:02:03.240 they operate. I think at a macro level, um, there are different approaches you can take

01:02:08.780 to vaccine a child for parents who have concerns, whether those concerns are grounded in clear

01:02:13.540 science or not. People just have general apprehensions. You can make a choice to extend between the

01:02:19.240 two doses. You can make a choice in a child who's already had COVID perhaps to give one dose

01:02:23.880 that may be appropriate. There'll be a lower dose vaccine on the market. Hopefully at some point

01:02:28.460 soon the FDA is meeting on October 26th to discuss that vaccine that could potentially

01:02:32.880 be used in children, um, who are smaller in size, who, who might be, you know, above the

01:02:39.060 age of 12, but biologically, um, you know, not as progressed or smaller. So there's different

01:02:45.820 approaches that you can take in consultation with your pediatrician to try to address whatever

01:02:50.520 concern they have. I love, I, I look, I appreciate you talking. It is too, because those parents

01:02:55.240 in LA do not have that choice. They've got a stick of vaccine in their 70 pound, 12 year old. That's

01:02:59.960 the same as they put in their 200 pound husband. Right. You're talking about one city in one part

01:03:04.380 of the country. Well, I, I'm living it myself. I'll be honest with you. I have my kids in private

01:03:08.980 school here in Connecticut. They don't yet have to do it because as I said, my oldest is 12,

01:03:13.640 but that's only because the Pfizer vaccine, your vaccine hasn't yet, it hasn't yet been permanently

01:03:20.180 approved. So I'm just saying I'm about to face this because if I don't get my kid vaccinated by

01:03:24.300 the time he's 16, he's expelled. So why don't you give me the answers instead of the questions

01:03:28.720 because do you want me to defend the city of Los Angeles or criticize them? Because I'm not involved

01:03:34.580 in making policy in Los Angeles or California. Well, I'm wondering how you feel because what you

01:03:38.200 said is we shouldn't involve, we shouldn't second guess like a mayor, but this isn't, we're talking

01:03:43.120 about not talking about a mayor mandating it for children or for adults. We're talking about a

01:03:46.920 school district mandating it for children or they're expelled. And you and I both know that

01:03:50.800 the damage of expelling a kid, forcing him not to attend school or, you know, even better scenario

01:03:55.560 would be via remote, but that's not even offered. That's not okay. Right. So it's like, so this is the

01:04:03.600 broader question. Those who are skeptical of federal mandates may gather you're skeptical of federal

01:04:08.380 mandates. I'm skeptical of federal mandates. And I've been critical of, you know, the Biden

01:04:12.680 administration's decision to mandate this on, on private businesses down to a hundred employees.

01:04:17.940 Are you also skeptical of local businesses, um, local towns making decisions for their community?

01:04:28.640 And that's what it sounds like. So yeah, that's where I draw the line.

01:04:31.620 I think if we're going to, um, first of all, we mandate vaccine as part of the, uh, as part of

01:04:40.320 going to school, but they're new, this one's new. Well, by the time that this one is actually

01:04:47.300 incorporated into the vaccine schedule, it's going to be a long way off. You know, California

01:04:51.160 moved quickly here. I wouldn't expect many other parts of the country to mandate vaccination.

01:04:55.640 It's happening right now. I'm telling you right now it's happening in private schools and across the

01:04:59.020 country. It's happening in my own private school right now. And by the way, you mentioned the flu.

01:05:02.620 We don't, they don't mandate the flu vaccine. And that did kill more kids last year than COVID.

01:05:06.760 Oh, a lot of school districts do mandate the flu vaccine. Actually.

01:05:10.380 It's not a nationwide thing and it's not a school district wide thing. And the flu vaccine's been

01:05:14.720 around for a lot longer. So what's your point? I mean, you know, this is, we know more about the

01:05:19.140 flu vaccine, not causing long-term problems with children. It's not as experimental. I don't know

01:05:23.240 what the reports are, but I certainly haven't heard anything about myocarditis caused heart

01:05:26.780 inflammation in children from the flu vaccine. But the flu vaccine in most school districts is

01:05:32.200 not mandated. It's not. Yeah. And this won't be either, Megan, you're talking about select school

01:05:37.920 districts. This is by the time that this is incorporated into childhood immunization

01:05:42.200 schedule. And I believe it eventually will be. It's going to be down the road when you have multiple

01:05:46.820 vaccines on the market, fully approved by the FDA. Right now we do not have that. So I wouldn't,

01:05:52.020 I think the districts that you're talking about are the outliers. I'm not responsible for making

01:05:56.540 their policies. And I didn't come on your show to defend their policies. I don't run

01:06:00.020 the city of Los Angeles. I'm going to ask you what you think, whether you like these mandates

01:06:03.200 or you don't. I'm telling you what I think. What I think is that the federal government

01:06:07.000 should give discretion to states, local businesses, mayors to make these decisions on behalf of their

01:06:13.900 communities. That's where I think public health decision-making should be made. That should be the

01:06:18.060 locust of the decision-making whenever possible. And to the extent that some districts are making

01:06:22.800 decisions that you may not agree with, what do you want the federal government to come in and block

01:06:27.300 them? What are you for? The federal government doing this or not doing this? I'm for the federal

01:06:30.740 government leaving discretion to private communities to do this. When the private communities

01:06:34.820 step in to do it, even if they make a decision that you might not agree with, I don't want to take

01:06:39.080 away their discretion to do that. That's where we traditionally left these decisions.

01:06:43.320 I get it. I get that. But I, as a parent, am upset that the principal of the school is sticking

01:06:50.480 his nose in between me and my child. That should be a decision for me and my pediatrician. And,

01:06:56.120 you know, and that's what gets me upset, right? Like I subjected myself to the federal government.

01:07:01.500 So there's a more fundamental question. I mean, is the decision to get vaccinated a collective

01:07:06.100 decision or is it an individual choice? These are not just individual choices. The reason why we

01:07:11.380 mandate vaccines in the first place and have a child immunization schedule is because decisions

01:07:15.580 that people make affect the community. So communities set standards about these kinds

01:07:20.540 of actions. And that's why we have a childhood immunization schedule. Have some schools moved ahead

01:07:27.480 of where the CDC is in terms of mandating this? Yeah, a couple, a handful have, and you're citing

01:07:32.480 them right here. Most, I don't believe. You don't think it's coming at a CDC level? You don't think so?

01:07:36.580 Because Dr. Fauci is already saying he's in favor of school mandates for the vaccine.

01:07:41.060 Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't expect to see the CDC incorporating this into the childhood

01:07:45.920 immunization schedule. Like I said, until there's multiple approved vaccines on the market,

01:07:50.860 that's a ways off at this point. I hope you're right. It's certainly not what we're hearing from

01:07:55.420 Dr. Fauci. He's switched on it. He used to say it wasn't in favor of mandating the vaccine at all.

01:08:01.200 And then certainly with respect to children, and now he's reversed himself on both of those things.

01:08:05.860 And, you know, it's like our kids who are going to have to take the risk. And it, with only 2,000

01:08:11.120 children tested, just over, I feel like... Yeah, go ahead.

01:08:15.820 Yeah, you cite the 2,000 in the clinical trial, which was a trial looking at antibody response. It

01:08:22.240 was an immunological trial. There's been thousands of doses administered, more than that, tens of

01:08:29.000 thousands. You have a pretty large data set on children age 12 to 16. And that data is being used

01:08:34.780 to inform the FDA's decision. And I mean, how long has that been in existence? In other words,

01:08:42.060 have we had any long-term time to reassess that? In other words, I'm trying to, I'm inarticulately

01:08:50.180 trying to say there's been no long-term testing because we just came up with the vaccine. And I

01:08:54.080 love the vaccine. I think it was miraculous. And I think we should be really proud of the guys at

01:08:57.340 Pfizer and Moderna and J&J who did this. But there's no long-term testing. And while I might take

01:09:03.440 the risk for me knowing that, I've had my kids, I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. And

01:09:07.820 I realize there's no evidence it hurts fertility. I want to say that out loud. But I understand,

01:09:12.280 I talk to a lot of young women who are hesitant for that reason. I look at my own kids and I have

01:09:16.220 a different responsibility for them, right? There has been no long-term testing. And my littlest guy

01:09:21.440 is eight. I understand that. Look, there's long-term data available now in adults, obviously. The

01:09:27.520 vaccine's been on the market for well more than a year and a half. You go back to the original

01:09:30.960 trials. The first patients were dosed probably almost two years ago at this point. There's

01:09:34.980 been 300 million doses administered in the U.S., almost 6 billion doses of vaccine delivered

01:09:39.180 globally. This is the largest database of information that we have. A year and a half

01:09:44.520 of data is a long time in terms of a vaccine safety database. Usually side effects become

01:09:51.520 manifest in three months. If you're postulating that there's some latent risk associated with

01:09:56.860 the vaccine that's manifest after a prolonged period of time, what is it? It wouldn't be

01:10:01.860 anything necessarily. Well, but if you have a theoretical concern, it's worth articulating

01:10:08.980 what it is. Most vaccine-related side effects are much more immediate within the first two months.

01:10:15.020 If there is some kind of latent issue associated with vaccination, it's probably going to be from

01:10:19.600 exposure to the spike protein, which you also get exposed to in the context of the virus. And so it's

01:10:24.720 hard to postulate what that would be, what a latent side effect that would be that would only become

01:10:29.680 manifest after a very prolonged period of time, which is why most vaccine-related side effects are

01:10:34.020 seen within the first several months. That's important to know. That's important to know.

01:10:38.600 Most vaccine side effects are seen within the first couple of months, and that's true for

01:10:43.260 children and adults? It's true for vaccines generally. Usually within two to three months,

01:10:48.900 you see most vaccine-related side effects, which is why the FDA wanted at least two months of follow-up

01:10:53.560 data on at least half the patients in the clinical trial when they initially authorized this vaccine,

01:10:58.740 because most of them are actually manifest within the first two months. There are cases where you

01:11:02.620 see certain things that are unmasked after about three months, like Guillain-Barre is typically

01:11:07.500 something that's a little bit more delayed.

01:11:10.620 Well, I mean, that does make me feel better. And I'll be honest with you and say, as kids start

01:11:15.480 getting vaccinated, you know, we're not the first to do it, right? The kids have been getting

01:11:19.000 vaccinated now for a while. I start to feel better about it, right? You look around,

01:11:22.680 it's like you're not seeing too many terrible reports. And it's like, and I realize there are

01:11:26.000 some, there's always some, and you never know causation. But my own hesitancy gets a little

01:11:31.540 weaker as time goes by and more kids. And I think the parents who are way into this should go first.

01:11:37.500 You know, the people who are dying to have that kid injected with a Pfizer vaccine, go for it.

01:11:42.060 I would love it if you went first. And I'll sit back and I'm willing to take the risk of my kid

01:11:47.500 getting COVID in the meantime. But my own hesitancy is waning a little as I see lots of kids get it

01:11:53.180 and seem okay. Though I still have, you know, sort of the big question of long-term. And then I do

01:11:58.500 worry about myocarditis because we have a history of heart problems in our family. All right, we're

01:12:02.340 going to pick it up on the opposite side of this break. Let me just pay the bills for one minute,

01:12:06.140 and then we'll pick back up with some more on vaccines and masks and all the rest of it.

01:12:09.160 Can I ask you one other question, Scott? One of the things that's in my craw is the fact that over

01:12:17.760 in the UK, they recommend just one jab for 12 to 15-year-olds, right? Just one jab. And they say

01:12:24.920 that's what they think is safe. So it's driving me nuts that back here, if you just want one jab,

01:12:29.040 which you say could make sense too, it's deemed not good enough by the people who want you to

01:12:35.420 vaccinate your child. Like, shouldn't people allow you to get just one jab for your kid if

01:12:40.420 that's what you and your doctor think is right? Well, again, no one's preventing it. I mean,

01:12:43.880 you're talking about a single school district that put in place a mandate that requires,

01:12:48.820 I guess, the full, I don't, I'm not even familiar with what Los Angeles has done. I

01:12:52.040 I said two doses. I presume from what you're saying that they require two doses to be fully vaccinated to

01:12:56.300 attend school. In most parts of the country, you know, those are decisions that parents can make in

01:13:01.580 consultation with their pediatrician. As best I know, it's not being mandated

01:13:05.120 anywhere else or in the country, or maybe you're suggesting in some private schools that you have

01:13:09.080 to have the full course of the vaccination. We'll see where we end up on this. There are

01:13:13.420 studies underway looking at different dosing schedules, both extending the interval between

01:13:17.540 the two doses, as well as looking at one dose, particularly in people who we know who've already

01:13:22.100 had COVID, where one dose could be sufficient and inducing a long-term immunity, as well as lower

01:13:27.660 dose formulations in children. So all those experiments are still underway. We're going to have much more

01:13:32.500 data over the next six months on some of these questions. Let me ask you quickly, when you think

01:13:37.420 that, because I know Pfizer has submitted some data to the FDA on five to 11-year-olds and its vaccine,

01:13:45.180 it hasn't yet applied for the emergency use authorization, has it?

01:13:49.060 It's going to imminently. So that meeting is October 26th, where the FDA is going to evaluate

01:13:54.220 that application for kids ages five to 11. And remember, that's the 10-microgram dose. That's a dose

01:14:00.400 that's one-third the dose that's being used in adults. Same formulation, same exact vaccine,

01:14:05.500 but in a lower dose.

01:14:07.120 Right. I mean, to me, if you're going to get the vaccine, it makes sense that your little guy

01:14:11.940 doesn't require as much of it in his or her body as your husband or yourself, which is one of the

01:14:18.400 things like, you know, if you've got a thin 12-year-old or, you know, a smaller 12-year-old,

01:14:23.300 you should be allowed to talk about that. You should be allowed to give him the 10-microgram

01:14:27.880 as opposed to the 30, don't you think?

01:14:30.340 And I suspect, look, I suspect there's going to be parents and pediatricians that

01:14:34.780 discuss those kinds of decisions. And, you know, my point about this not being a binary choice was

01:14:40.320 just that. I think you have discretion to talk to your doctor about what this best strategy is for

01:14:45.020 your particular child.

01:14:46.880 Well, you should. I mean, look, I'm experiencing it firsthand myself, as I mentioned, and I feel for

01:14:52.020 those parents in LA, you know, public school is a lot trickier than private school. I can pull my kids

01:14:57.400 and put them in another school tomorrow. But public school, you know, you're stuck there.

01:15:00.900 You live there. You pay taxes. They got to take your kid. It's just a lot more complicated.

01:15:05.060 Let me talk to you about natural immunity, because you keep saying you could get one dose if your kid

01:15:08.540 had COVID. And it's not just about kids. Don't want to talk about natural immunity with kids and

01:15:13.140 adults. Because Marty McCary, who we've had on the show, he's a doctor at Johns Hopkins,

01:15:17.680 well-respected doctor. He's made the point that natural immunity should count. And if you look at what

01:15:24.080 they're doing in some places in Europe, like Italy and other places, they're recognizing that

01:15:28.860 natural immunity from COVID should count to get you on the airplane, to get you to so you can keep

01:15:34.380 your job in a place that's requiring, you know, a vaccine passport, if you will. On August 21st,

01:15:41.180 Israel published the most powerful and scientifically rigorous study. He writes in the Wall Street Journal

01:15:45.960 on the subject to date, they sampled more than 700,000 people, found that natural immunity was 27

01:15:52.240 times more effective than vaccinated immunity. So why should anyone who's got natural immunity

01:16:00.920 have to have a vaccine? Well, look, I think we should recognize that people who've had infection,

01:16:06.420 particularly people who've had recent infection with the Delta variant, have immunity that's

01:16:10.660 probably going to persist for a period of time. I don't think it's going to persist forever. I think

01:16:14.080 at some point they'll need to get vaccinated in order to make sure that they secure that immunity

01:16:18.000 in the long run. But there is a durable immunity that people acquire from, from infection. And we

01:16:23.800 don't see a lot of people getting reinfected after prior infection. I wouldn't argue that natural

01:16:29.300 immunity is better than vaccination. I frankly wouldn't argue that vaccination is better than

01:16:33.400 natural immunity. The data right now is mixed. You can find studies on both sides of this equation.

01:16:37.860 What I would say is that natural immunity does confer protection for a sustained period of time,

01:16:42.300 not forever, but for sustained period of time. Now getting to the policy question of whether or not

01:16:47.320 we're going to allow natural immunity to substitute for vaccination. You know, one of the reasons why

01:16:51.700 we require vaccination as a policy matter, as a demonstration of immunity is because we can

01:16:56.720 verify vaccination. It's hard to verify prior infection if the people who are previously infected

01:17:01.900 are unwilling to, you know, bring a positive PCR test or, or embrace things like immunity passports

01:17:08.840 in Israel, where they actually recognize natural immunity as a, as being protective and as a substitute

01:17:14.440 for vaccination for entry into public venues. For example, they have the green card system where

01:17:18.960 you can demonstrate that either were recently vaccinated or recently infected. I suspect that

01:17:23.980 if we adopted such a practice here in the U S there'd be a lot of people, um, particularly folks who want to

01:17:30.280 rely on natural immunity who wouldn't want to succumb, wouldn't want to embrace such a system. They

01:17:35.740 wouldn't want to have a passport type system. Can I ask you something? If you, if you, if you have the

01:17:41.060 antibodies, if you had COVID, does it necessarily show up in your blood? I mean, would your blood test

01:17:46.380 absolutely show that you had had it? You could use the antibody tests, um, in a binary way to say

01:17:52.500 whether or not you've been exposed to the virus or not. They're not reliable in terms of giving a

01:17:57.220 quantitative measure of what your level of immunity is probably the most reliable way. If we wanted to

01:18:01.980 rely on natural infection, uh, as a demonstration that you have immunity, that's going to be durable.

01:18:07.460 The most reliable way to do it would be a proof that you actually had the infection. So proof that

01:18:12.240 you were PCR positive. Okay. So let me jump in and ask you a follow-up. Yeah. So let me ask you a

01:18:17.320 follow-up. Cause I know that, you know, the subjects or the, the studies are showing that all these

01:18:21.240 vaccines wane over time, but especially Pfizer, it must be said more so than Moderna, as it turns out,

01:18:25.840 uh, the effectiveness in keeping you out of the hospital, it wanes over time. There was a study just

01:18:30.240 out today by you guys that hit the presses today or yesterday saying, uh, the Pfizer vaccine is only

01:18:36.140 47% effective at present preventing hospitalization six months after your second dose. So if there's a

01:18:45.820 way of telling that, right, is that, do you test somebody's blood to see how effective the Pfizer

01:18:51.440 vaccine is six months after your second dose, or are you just looking at the number of hospitalizations?

01:18:57.240 Yeah. I'm not familiar with the 47% figure that you're citing, but the data that, that we're looking

01:19:02.400 at, that people are looking at as mostly data coming out of Israel that shows declining vaccine

01:19:06.800 effectiveness from infection and a rising instances of breakthrough infections that are causing more

01:19:12.240 symptomatic and severe disease, particularly in older individuals vaccine a long time ago. Now,

01:19:16.620 you know, the challenge in drawing conclusions about one vaccine being more effective than the other,

01:19:20.960 and I've been very careful not to do that. Even when data came out suggesting that perhaps Pfizer was

01:19:25.080 more effective than other vaccines, I've always said the same thing, which is that I think these

01:19:28.140 vaccines are largely comparable, is that the Pfizer vaccine was, was authorized first, it was used

01:19:33.800 first, particularly in an older population. So you, so there is a possibility that you're going to see

01:19:39.360 the decline in efficacy first with the Pfizer vaccine, because it was deployed earlier and deployed

01:19:44.020 in the population that's more at risk from COVID. So you might unmask the side of the, the declining

01:19:50.180 immunity first in this vaccine. I wouldn't be, I'd be careful not to conclude from the data,

01:19:56.200 because the data that comes out hasn't been corrected for a time. And if you remember the

01:20:01.660 Pfizer vaccine was authorized here in the U S in mid December and was largely deployed initially to

01:20:07.440 nursing homes, healthcare providers, and distributed through hospitals because of the requirements

01:20:12.460 around the cold chain storage. And so it went into a population that was either more likely to have

01:20:17.920 a bad outcome from COVID people in nursing homes, for example, or more likely to come into, come into

01:20:23.140 contact with COVID healthcare workers, for example. So I think it's hard to draw comparative conclusions

01:20:28.160 based on what we're seeing right now. We'll have a better handle on this when we start seeing long

01:20:32.120 term data on all the vaccines. Okay. But I mean, I have it in front of me, but I just write, this is

01:20:37.060 your study. This is, I don't, you may not be familiar with it, but this is a Pfizer study showing that

01:20:40.800 after six months after the second dose, it only has a 47% effective rate. It says, hold on a second,

01:20:47.820 effectiveness of Pfizer and biotech's COVID-19 vaccine against infection tumbles over several

01:20:53.060 months, falling from a peak of 88% a month after receiving the two shot series to 47% six months

01:20:59.980 later, according to an observational study published Monday in the peer reviewed journal,

01:21:04.520 The Lancet. So my point is not to rip on the Pfizer vaccine.

01:21:07.840 There's a lot of data. Yeah, I don't, I'm not disputing.

01:21:10.580 No, I understand. This isn't, I don't, I don't have stock in Moderna. I'm not trying to get people

01:21:14.660 to get that vaccine. No, I know. I'm just, I'm not familiar with every, every article that comes

01:21:19.060 out. I, I've said that there's declining vaccine. I got it. I got it. But, but let me get to my real

01:21:23.760 point. My real point is the natural immunity wanes over time. So does Pfizer's immunity. Like they

01:21:29.780 both go down over time. So, I mean, why, why should I be looking at natural immunity as somehow

01:21:35.460 less effective? Even if I don't buy the Israel study that shows that studied 700,000 patients,

01:21:41.640 you don't have, you can't show me a study here. That's, that's come to an opposite conclusion about

01:21:45.180 the vaccine. So they both went. Right. So the best, the best argument would be that a vaccine,

01:21:54.320 if it has declining efficacy over time, and we don't know what, what the efficacy of the vaccine

01:21:58.360 is going to look like after you get a third booster, you may get a more durable response,

01:22:01.760 but a vaccine can be redosed. The immunity offered by a vaccine can be redosed. The immunity offered by

01:22:07.000 natural infection. I presume it could be redosed if you want to go out and get reinfected, but that's

01:22:11.860 not really a good way to sustain long-term immunity. You know, obviously you're, you have a period of

01:22:17.060 immunity from, from your initial infection, but if you want to sustain that immunity at some point,

01:22:21.780 you're either going to need to get infected. I get that. I get that. You're going to need to get

01:22:24.620 vaccinated. So on that front, is it, do you think those of us who have been vaccinated are going to

01:22:28.620 be looking at a situation when we have to get an annual, we have to get an annual vaccine?

01:22:33.280 It's unclear. I think for a portion of the population that's more vulnerable to COVID,

01:22:37.580 this might become an annual vaccine. And we may end up shifting the vaccines to be using a Delta

01:22:42.420 backbone for the vaccines. If more of the mutations that happen over time are within that Delta lineage,

01:22:47.560 the infection that's more prevalent right now, which a lot of people believe is going to be the

01:22:50.960 case, you could well see a situation where the future vaccines are based on a Delta backbone to give

01:22:56.140 you better protection against that Delta variant. What about, can I ask, we only have a few minutes

01:23:01.240 left, but I got to ask you about masks because I haven't, I haven't picked enough scabs. Let's talk

01:23:05.840 about masks because that I'm so over them. I think, I think most Americans are so over them. And, you

01:23:11.760 know, we talked with this journalist, really smart guy, did a long piece for New York magazine,

01:23:15.780 David Zweig on how the CDC's own study of 90,000 kids in Atlanta showed that masks were not effective

01:23:23.760 in preventing COVID. Um, there was no statistically significant difference in schools that required

01:23:29.500 students to wear masks compared to schools where they were optional. And indeed they don't require

01:23:35.100 them for the younger age kids in the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy,

01:23:41.000 and there is no greater incident of school outbreaks in those countries relative to the schools in the

01:23:48.160 United States. So can we finally take the mass off of our kids?

01:23:53.820 Well, look for every article you cite that shows that there may not be an impact of masks as other

01:23:58.800 literature that points in the opposite direction. No, I think, did you read the David Zweig reporting

01:24:03.100 in New York magazine? He looked at every single one, not one.

01:24:06.900 Every single one. I think, I think on balance, the masks probably provide an incremental benefit,

01:24:11.360 but you know, the consequence of going into the school year without any mitigation in place,

01:24:15.780 any tactics or, or keeping kids in defined social pods, um, geographic pods, or implementing testing

01:24:22.920 in schools. We've seen, we've seen states that have taken that approach, um, in the South, Florida

01:24:27.680 took that approach. They didn't have any mitigation in place in a lot of those school districts.

01:24:31.360 And we saw the virus become epidemic in the schools. Now, of course it's way through.

01:24:36.360 What schools did it become epidemic in amongst children in school spread? That's not true.

01:24:41.480 That's true. If you look at the, if you look at the level of infection among kids in Florida and

01:24:48.660 some of the other Southern States, which didn't implement a lot of medication early in school

01:24:51.960 year, you saw very dense outbreaks. There's a proof. There's a study showing they got it in school.

01:24:57.540 Well, when 27% of new infections are among kids, you're, you're going to argue they all got it at

01:25:02.220 home after the infection levels had started to decline rapidly among adults. The only, the only

01:25:06.580 category of growth in infections, if you look at the last two months or six weeks in some of these

01:25:12.920 states was among children under the age of 18. So it was school age kids. And you, but you strong

01:25:18.400 presumption is you tell me because all the children to actually, did I sequence them to trace the origin

01:25:23.940 of their, of their infection? No. Um, you know, I, I, you're right. I do not have, but you're setting

01:25:28.520 up a straw, man. You went to write to, Oh, we shouldn't, you know, I'm not in favor of a school

01:25:32.960 doing no mitigation. Me neither. Me neither. But the masks are not effective and there aren't

01:25:38.600 studies proving that they are the CDC's own study. Deal with that. 90,000 students in the Atlanta

01:25:44.860 school district prove that they do not have any effect. Why isn't that valid? Why isn't the CDC

01:25:50.680 relying on its own study to allow us to unmask our children? Yeah. My policy prescription would be

01:25:55.840 that in the setting of a very contagious variant that we, we don't know how hard or easy it's going to

01:26:00.280 be to control in a school setting where the imperative is to keep kids in the classroom

01:26:03.620 and also keep them safe. We should go into the school year adopting all the reasonable measures

01:26:08.540 that we can take and peel them away. As we masking has negative effects, masking has negative effects

01:26:13.740 on children. That's been proven as well. This is not a harmless measure and it's not helping. So why

01:26:20.840 wouldn't we be honest about the CDC's own information? Well, that's, we're going to agree to disagree.

01:26:26.880 I think that there's a, the balance of the evidence, I think points to the fact that the

01:26:30.700 masks have worn properly and used properly, use high quality masks on the margin. They're

01:26:35.420 beneficial and that's, they're not, kids aren't wearing N95s, you know that. And why, why would

01:26:40.160 it be, why would the kids in the UK and Ireland and Scandinavia and France and Netherlands and

01:26:44.680 Switzerland, Italy be fine, not masking, but our kids somehow are in a different situation?

01:26:51.120 Look, we have, we have different circumstances in our schools. We have schools that are more crowded,

01:26:55.280 schools that are older, have poor ventilation. There's different situations in, in school

01:26:59.880 districts. And I, this is again, where you've been to Italy should have districts. I haven't

01:27:04.500 district. They have more room than we do to try to implement the measures that they think are going

01:27:09.720 to protect that schoolhouse. I would have gone in my, my advice to policymakers would be to go into

01:27:14.420 the school year with as many measures, reasonable measures as you can take to try to protect that

01:27:18.620 environment and withdraw them. If you see that you're being successful, you look, a lot of schools

01:27:23.460 aren't doing a routine testing in the schools. They're not keeping kids in defined geographic

01:27:28.580 pods. They're letting whole classes intermingle. And I don't want to see this become epidemic

01:27:33.200 in a school setting. I've seen large outbreaks in the schools, including in my local community.

01:27:37.660 And I don't think that this is a benign virus in children. I don't want to see the entire American

01:27:41.500 population show that when the kids are getting it, they're getting it from teachers, not from other

01:27:46.180 kids. And that the kids are not effective vectors of this virus. Do you dispute that?

01:27:50.420 Yeah, that's not, that's not true with Delta. You know, you that's, you're talking about data

01:27:54.580 that comes out of studies with the old Wuhan variant. Delta is such a contagious variant.

01:27:58.580 The kids mount very high viral loads that we do think that the kids are transferring this

01:28:01.780 infection. It's different. And the CDC has been very slow to do evaluations of that. So you can't,

01:28:07.260 you can't base assumptions on this variant.

01:28:09.540 They don't, they do no studies. They let Israel do it all. I mean, they've let Israel and the UK do it

01:28:14.580 all.

01:28:14.660 That's, that's, that's a good 300 pages of my book are about, you know, the shortcomings of CDC,

01:28:19.000 which we didn't talk about today. So thank you.

01:28:21.340 Well, I kind of, it's, it's implied in all these mandates that we're getting left and right from

01:28:26.500 the CDC. At least I'd love to talk about Rochelle Walensky because we could spend all day on her

01:28:31.080 too. Listen, not everybody would come on and take my tough questions. And now you're going to get the

01:28:35.580 really tough questions because my audience is going to call in. Scott Gottlieb next after the break,

01:28:39.720 taking your questions, only the kind ones, or I'm hanging up on you. 833-44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496.

01:28:51.120 Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner is sticking

01:28:55.480 around to answer some of your questions. Want to start with Pat in Illinois. What's your question

01:29:00.320 for the doctor?

01:29:01.380 Hi, a couple of times during the discussion, you referenced the fact that this was a community,

01:29:08.640 this was a decision that impacted the community. And so it couldn't be an individual decision about

01:29:13.760 whether or not to get vaccinated. But my understanding is recent studies, and most recently one that was

01:29:19.360 released by the CDC, showed that the viral load and the viral spread happened regardless of whether

01:29:27.300 a person was vaccinated, that they had the same viral load and spread the virus just as effectively as

01:29:32.600 those who were not vaccinated. So given that, why, in what way does this impact the community,

01:29:38.200 whether an individual decides to get vaccinated or not?

01:29:41.040 Go ahead, Doc.

01:29:42.180 Well, look, I mean, if the community is vaccinated, you're going to dramatically reduce the odds that

01:29:46.840 this virus is going to replicate and spread at the kinds of levels we're seeing right now. As far as

01:29:51.000 the specific question is concerned on whether or not someone, I think the question is whether or not

01:29:54.700 someone who's vaccinated has the same propensity to spread the virus. The answer is that they're at

01:29:59.380 much less risk of spreading the virus based on the data that we see coming out of Israel.

01:30:03.040 So the study you referenced looked at blood levels of virus and people who are vaccinated and then

01:30:08.080 had breakthrough infections and also looked at virus levels in their nasal swabs and showed that

01:30:13.660 they had high viral titers on par with what people who are unvaccinated had. But what it also showed

01:30:18.660 was that their viral levels declined very rapidly because they probably cleared the infection more

01:30:22.520 quickly. And what it wasn't measuring was the amount of virus that they actually had in their lower

01:30:27.040 airways, which is a more operative question or measure for gauging how infectious they are.

01:30:33.280 What we've seen in the data out of Israel, and again, the data is coming out of Israel because

01:30:36.500 our CDC isn't doing a good job of collecting this, but what we've seen out of that data set

01:30:40.480 is that people who are vaccinated who have breakthrough infections are far less likely to spread the

01:30:45.240 infection in the community. And when they do spread the infection, it's mostly within the household.

01:30:49.760 And that's probably because they're only infectious for a brief period of time.

01:30:53.140 And if you're only infectious for a brief period of time, where are you most likely to spread the

01:30:57.800 infection? Probably within your home. All right. I want to get to number four,

01:31:01.220 Bob from Massachusetts. Hey, Bob, what's your question? Hi there. Thanks for doing this

01:31:06.800 discussion. It's very useful. Sure. I have a two-part question. It has to do with- Just cut to one

01:31:12.420 because we don't have a lot of time. You get 10 seconds. Well, okay. As far as the VAERS site is

01:31:19.160 reporting a lot of adverse effects and even death, that doesn't seem to be systematically studied or

01:31:26.220 understood. Certainly many of them could be written off as probably, you know, other underlying

01:31:31.700 problems, but there could be a strong percentage of that that is realistic. I hear reports about

01:31:39.000 people who have died from the vaccine within 24, 48 hours. Okay. You want them to speak to the side

01:31:44.740 effects. My apologies, Dr. Gottlieb, but we literally have 30, 40 seconds for you to address

01:31:49.680 that. Go for it. Yeah. Look, the VAERS data set is a challenging data set to work with because what

01:31:54.800 you're collecting is just reports of events that are associated with administration of the vaccine.

01:32:01.000 So things that happen in proximity to someone getting a vaccine, just because something happens

01:32:05.440 when you're delivering a vaccine, you're delivering 300 million doses of vaccine. Things happen every day to

01:32:10.120 people. What you want to be able to do is see on a systematic basis, whether there's a causal

01:32:15.640 relationship between the vaccine and the event that you're trying to observe. That's much harder

01:32:20.360 to tease out from something like the VAERS database. You need clinical trials to look at that. And what

01:32:24.700 you're looking for is whether or not there's a higher incidence of some event that otherwise occurs.

01:32:28.980 I gotta leave it at that. Well, I apologize. Hard break. I'll do better the next time, doctor. Thank

01:32:34.080 you very much. We appreciate it. Tomorrow we got the president of the National Border Patrol. See you then.

01:32:40.120 Bye.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 06, 2021

Getting Real About How COVID Started and COVID Vaccines, with Josh Rogin and Scott Gottlieb ｜ Ep. 175

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