Valuetainment - Great Influenza of 1918 vs COVID19 - Which Affected US More？

00:00:00.160 All influenza viruses are actually bird viruses.

00:00:03.520 The 1918 virus infected about a third of the world's population.

00:00:07.440 That would be equivalent to 225 to 450 million people dead today.

00:00:12.400 Huge typeface in the newspaper is saying wear a mask and save your life.

00:00:16.880 This is in 1918.

00:00:18.320 Wear a mask and save a life.

00:00:20.160 What could have been done even at that time out of 1918 to have prevented

00:00:23.920 something like this from happening?

00:00:25.280 The most important lesson from 1918 is to tell the truth.

00:00:28.800 If you don't tell them the truth, sooner or later they're going to find out.

00:00:31.760 We did masks, social distancing.

00:00:33.760 What did we learn to prepare for the next one?

00:00:36.960 You know, the cities that closed down earlier in the epidemic

00:00:40.960 not only had better results in terms of how many people get sick and die,

00:00:45.040 but their economies actually recovered faster and more strongly.

00:00:49.200 We were not told the truth by Trump.

00:00:51.360 Hundreds of thousands of Americans should be alive who are dead.

00:00:54.640 And the reason is bad leadership.

00:00:57.280 How are you processing this for yourself when you see the madness in DC?

00:01:00.640 Desecration of American democracy.

00:01:03.600 Do you think things are just going to escalate and get worse?

00:01:06.240 Well, you keep thinking things are hit bottom and then they keep getting worse.

00:01:09.920 Now you have people who are so committed to Trump, they believe anything that he says.

00:01:14.320 Outright lies.

00:01:15.280 And then Fauci and Trump are going back and forth.

00:01:18.000 So we're kind of like, who do we listen to?

00:01:19.520 Do you listen to Trump?

00:01:20.480 Do you listen to Fauci?

00:01:21.920 If you do it right, you can contain even a disease as transmissible as this one.

00:01:26.640 And countries have to tell the truth.

00:01:31.840 My guest today is John M. Berry, who in the past, he's written many different books.

00:01:36.480 He's an author and a historian.

00:01:38.240 But he wrote a book that came out in 2004 called The Great Influenza, which in 2004, the National

00:01:46.400 Academy of Sciences named it the Outstanding Book of the Year on Science and Medicine.

00:01:51.840 And in 2020, it came back up the charts.

00:01:54.400 Just to kind of give you an idea who's called them for counsel before in the past on the topic

00:01:58.240 of Influenza.

00:01:59.360 It's both the Bush and the Obama administration.

00:02:02.800 And Bill Gates once said, Berry will teach you almost everything you need to know about

00:02:07.920 one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.

00:02:11.200 With that being said, John, thank you so much for being a guest today on Valuetainment.

00:02:16.000 Thanks for having me on.

00:02:18.240 Happy New Year.

00:02:19.440 Yes, Happy New Year to you as well.

00:02:20.720 And I know while we're doing this interview together, it's madness in D.C.

00:02:25.200 And I know you used to work over there in D.C. before for quite some time.

00:02:28.080 So how are you processing this for yourself when you see the madness in D.C.?

00:02:33.120 With great displeasure.

00:02:36.720 It's an under considerable understatement.

00:02:39.040 You know, I know that building well.

00:02:40.640 I practically lived in the Capitol for a decade.

00:02:44.160 My wife worked in the Senate for more than 20 years, a little bit in the House. 0.98

00:02:49.680 You know, every nook and cranny of that building, I know.

00:02:53.040 And to see it desiccated, you know,

00:02:55.520 I'm, you know, it's desecration of American democracy.

00:03:02.080 To see that happen here is just off the scale.

00:03:06.160 You ever seen it like this before for all the years you've been?

00:03:08.400 Oh, God, no.

00:03:09.280 I mean, you can go back to the anti-war protests in the 60s.

00:03:13.760 I'm old enough to live through that.

00:03:17.520 I was in college then and, you know, nobody did anything like that.

00:03:23.200 You know, there were hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the 60s.

00:03:28.640 But nothing like this disrespect for voting, disrespect for democracy, disrespect for the American way of life.

00:03:40.320 I think those congressmen and senators are traitors to America who are violating their oaths of office.

00:03:49.360 And it's awful.

00:03:54.080 How do you think this is going to end up?

00:03:55.360 Because at this point, you know, everyone's using the name, the title president elect.

00:04:01.360 Obviously, if it goes the way it's going, President Biden and Kamala Harris.

00:04:05.200 Now it's House.

00:04:06.000 Now it's Senate.

00:04:07.760 Well, I mean, you know, he's going to be president and she'll be vice president.

00:04:11.680 There's no question about it, as they should be.

00:04:15.760 They won the election.

00:04:18.000 You know, over 60 court cases, you've got to present evidence in court.

00:04:24.480 You can't just make a speech and a claim.

00:04:28.080 60 court cases, lose every one of them.

00:04:30.880 Republican leader of the state legislature in Pennsylvania, just Trump's lying.

00:04:37.200 Republican U.S. Senator.

00:04:40.080 Trump's lying in Pennsylvania.

00:04:42.560 Republican secretary of state in Georgia.

00:04:45.440 Republican governor of Georgia. 0.98

00:04:48.240 They're lies. 0.94

00:04:49.360 Trump's lying.

00:04:50.880 Republican governor, Republican secretary of state in Arizona. 0.92

00:04:55.440 They're all lies.

00:04:57.360 The person the Republican Trump hired to oversee election security says it's the safest,

00:05:06.880 most secure election in American history.

00:05:09.760 So Trump fires them.

00:05:11.840 The, you know, Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, authorizes every U.S.

00:05:17.120 attorney to look for voter fraud.

00:05:19.360 Zero.

00:05:20.320 You know, and Barr was was hated by Democrats.

00:05:26.560 I think for good reason.

00:05:27.760 I think he played the role not of representing the United States, but of representing

00:05:33.920 Trump, but even he says there's nothing wrong with the election.

00:05:39.120 So he goes.

00:05:40.880 Everything that they're saying is a lie.

00:05:43.840 And, you know, I don't understand how it got as far as it has in the Capitol.

00:05:49.680 I just turned the TV on a little while ago.

00:05:52.800 I would have thought they would have prevented those the breach.

00:05:57.840 I guess they don't want to use force to prevent them from going forward for fear that it would

00:06:05.360 just incite much more.

00:06:07.680 Yeah.

00:06:09.440 But I think, frankly, I think the point is they're just about at the point where I would

00:06:15.040 hate to see that tear gas in the U.S. Capitol or anything like that, that.

00:06:21.200 That would just be beyond awful.

00:06:26.080 You know, John, I'm a guy that came here from Iran.

00:06:28.960 I lived there 10 years, two years in Germany at a refugee camp.

00:06:31.440 And I've come into the States and I'm watching what's going on with politics in America.

00:06:35.120 I'm noticing the Republicans are divided.

00:06:38.240 Democrats seem to be divided on the Democratic side.

00:06:40.800 You got the AOC, Warren, Sanders camp.

00:06:44.000 And then you have the Biden, you know, the rest of the camp.

00:06:47.280 And they're a little bit divided.

00:06:48.560 Socialism.

00:06:49.200 No, let's just stay Democrat.

00:06:50.400 We don't need to go socialism.

00:06:51.840 We can't stay where we're at.

00:06:52.800 And then on the Republican side, there's guys that are mega and there's guys that are Republican.

00:06:57.440 And, you know, on both ends, you almost see a little bit of turmoil.

00:07:02.080 What do you think needs to happen for us to be a little bit more civil?

00:07:06.640 Or do you think things are just going to escalate and get worse?

00:07:10.080 Well, you keep thinking things are hit bottom and then they keep getting worse.

00:07:14.160 I say I don't believe you can equate the divisions on the Democratic side with the Republican side.

00:07:20.960 And we were talking before we started the show, you know, that I actually covered politics for 10 years.

00:07:28.560 My first book was on politics.

00:07:30.880 You know, I'm pretty liberal, but, you know, Newt Gingrich and I had a relationship.

00:07:36.240 He was the first congressman I ever had lunch with in the 80s.

00:07:40.480 You know, he called my first book one of the three.

00:07:42.400 I'm not trying to promote it.

00:07:43.440 I'll never see a penny in royalties from it.

00:07:45.840 Never pay.

00:07:48.160 But he did call my first book one of the three best books ever at non-Washington.

00:07:52.720 You know, back in the 80s, it was like two lawyers fighting in a courtroom.

00:08:01.680 Tooth and nail.

00:08:02.480 Then they go out and have dinner.

00:08:04.080 There were close friendships, close friendships between people in both parties.

00:08:10.960 We were talking earlier, you know, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan got along real well.

00:08:15.760 Danny Roszankowski, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

00:08:19.520 And Bob Michael, the House Republican leader, were very, very close friends.

00:08:26.960 You know, and that has dissipated.

00:08:31.040 There's there's essentially none of that anymore.

00:08:35.920 The divisions on the on the Democratic side are, you know, fairly standard.

00:08:44.080 You know, they don't hate each other inside the party.

00:08:48.480 They disagree over the issues.

00:08:51.680 They have always been like that.

00:08:54.480 The Republican side has gotten a lot more extreme.

00:08:57.200 You know, there aren't any moderates or very, very few people who would be considered moderate left in the Republican Party who were the classic fiscal conservative.

00:09:11.440 They may claim to be, but, you know, they give away the taxes and so forth and so on.

00:09:16.000 And now you have people on, you know, who are so committed to Trump, they believe anything that he says, you know, outright lies that have been disproved by every Republican.

00:09:33.440 And yet people are just committed to Trump.

00:09:39.840 That's never happened in recent, you know, I did drop out of grad school, almost got a Ph.D. in American history.

00:09:48.080 I would say is it never happened ever in American history.

00:09:51.680 I look back and I'm trying to think, go back, certainly not through the 20th century.

00:10:00.400 I'm scrolling through in my head the 19th century.

00:10:05.920 You know, there were people committed to Andrew Jackson, but not like this.

00:10:10.880 John Adams, you know, when when Jefferson was elected president, Adams wouldn't go to the inauguration.

00:10:16.880 He left Washington in advance, but there was no question over handing over power.

00:10:26.080 Now, it's never been anything like this.

00:10:28.160 And we've never had a leader in either party who incited followers the way Trump has done.

00:10:37.520 You know, it's again, we didn't you didn't have me on to talk about this stuff, but.

00:10:46.720 You know, it's happening in front of our eyes and I was watching Fox, which I don't usually watch,

00:10:54.080 but they were saying all the right things that this is a desecration of American democracy.

00:11:00.320 This is not who we are. And yet it's happening here and it needs to stop.

00:11:08.000 What do you think the 74, 75 million folks who voted for him are most upset about?

00:11:13.680 Well, you know, they've been lied to ever since the election, so.

00:11:20.800 I don't blame them for believing some of the things that they've been told.

00:11:27.520 You know, Tucker Carlson, for example, just to give you a single anecdote, you know, had this

00:11:36.480 thing on about somebody dead who was voting, whatever the name was, John Doe, I don't remember.

00:11:43.040 Well, a reporter went out and tracked that down and discovered it was a 95 year old woman 1.00

00:11:49.760 who used her as some women do. They went by her husband's name, Mrs. John Doe. 0.54

00:11:57.120 So it wasn't John Doe who voted. She signed in as Mrs. John Doe. 0.86

00:12:01.600 And it was misreported as her deceased husband voting. Well, Tucker Carlson, in other words,

00:12:06.560 there was no dead person voting. So Tucker Carlson makes a big deal out of claiming the dead person.

00:12:12.080 But he never corrected himself. He never issued a correction explaining, no, it turns out it was

00:12:18.080 actually the widow signing Mrs. John Doe. So if that's what you see all the time, I'm not surprised 0.97

00:12:28.080 that some people believe it. You know, for me, I'm a registered independent. I was a former Democrat.

00:12:33.680 Then I went and became a Republican. Then I became an independent. Eight, nine years ago,

00:12:38.480 I became an independent myself. OK, and I can see from the outside myself. I think Clinton was a

00:12:46.240 good president. I think it was good for economy. And him and Newt were good. I mean,

00:12:49.920 it worked very good for America. I know Republicans probably didn't like Clinton and I know Democrats

00:12:54.960 didn't like Newt, but they worked good together. You know, the whole conversation you and I were

00:12:59.360 having with Tip and the Gipper, you know, the book written by Chris Matthews,

00:13:02.880 how they worked together years ago where they would fight both Irishmen and then they would 0.61

00:13:06.320 have a beer together. You know, I sit there and I wonder to myself, you know, when you say,

00:13:12.960 you know, Tucker Carlson comes out and he says that he doesn't go back and apologize and say that.

00:13:19.360 I mean, that's being done by both sides where the Russia story you heard for three years and

00:13:25.280 nobody ever came out and said that wasn't a true story. And then that came out and was an inaccurate

00:13:30.160 story. I think both sides of the aisle got to take some responsibility. I don't put it on the

00:13:34.480 politicians. I think media has divided America at the highest level and we're getting caught

00:13:39.840 in a middle fighting each other over them enticing more eyeballs to want to watch Fox and CNN to get

00:13:44.880 more advertising dollars. What do you think about the role MSM's played, mainstream media's played in

00:13:50.880 dividing many of us? Well, first, I wouldn't say there was nothing to the Russian deal. There was

00:13:58.240 something there. Now, you know, maybe it didn't rise to the level of a felony, although, you know,

00:14:06.400 that's questionable if you actually read the report. But, you know, we don't want to talk about that.

00:14:10.720 I mean, Adam Schiff said, for sure, there is something, you know, the way he made it seem

00:14:16.240 like it's guaranteed. I mean, you got to realize to use words like he used, I mean, all of us sat

00:14:21.840 there and said there was some scandals with Russia. So again, I just want to make sure.

00:14:25.840 Well, even if you recall, Lamar Alexander, who did not run for reelection, but voted against hearing

00:14:34.480 witnesses at the Senate trial, he said, well, the reason he voted against witnesses was the

00:14:40.240 Democrats approved the case. Now, whether you want to say it rose, the wrongdoing rose to the level

00:14:47.600 of impeachment, you know, that's, that's arguable and a reasonable position to take. But, you know,

00:14:56.720 again, we don't want to talk about that. I would agree with you that, you know, Fox, MSNBC, CNN,

00:15:10.000 they, you know, like to cite because it does get clicks and, or, you know, clicks being, you know,

00:15:21.840 obviously print media, you know, you know what I'm getting at. And I would like to see a little

00:15:28.000 bit more reporting on that. I mean, just, there's a lot of news that happens all the time

00:15:36.400 that never gets reported because it's not exciting to get enough, but it's real,

00:15:43.680 has real impact on people's lives. And it's ignored because the latest,

00:15:48.000 you know, outrage by one side or another is all they talk about on all three of those shows

00:15:57.280 or networks. You know, I would agree with, with you there for a proper, might not go as far as you go,

00:16:06.080 but essentially in agreement. Yeah. I'd be curious to know what happens with that because I think

00:16:13.440 on one end, you know, you, most of us are emotional creatures, you know, so, so let's just say on both

00:16:19.200 sides out of a 78 million, 74 million that voted, what percentage really did a lot of due diligence

00:16:25.440 before voting? Let's just say 80% just voted emotionally, 20% research a little bit more

00:16:32.080 out of the 20% that research a little bit more, say 10% of them extensively went into it to look at it.

00:16:38.320 So media ends up controlling the majority of us because we're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe

00:16:42.880 what's going on. So I think, I think there's gotta be something about that because it's,

00:16:47.280 unfortunately we are looking like fools to the world. Forget about us fighting each other. 0.94

00:16:50.960 We're looking like fools too. If other countries are watching them right now, they're laughing, 0.98

00:16:54.640 saying, look at what's going on to supposedly the greatest country in the world. Look how divided they

00:16:58.880 are, you know, and anytime they're divided, you know, it's a very easy thing to come in,

00:17:02.800 infiltrate, but you know, let's, let's talk about your book because I think that's a,

00:17:06.560 that's the one thing I do want to spend some time talking with you about specifically

00:17:10.000 the great Influenza, which, you know, Newt Gingrich said it's the third best book,

00:17:17.360 you know, he's ever read. And for him to say something like that.

00:17:20.160 Well, he didn't quite see, I know I, you know, want to correct that. What he said was my first book,

00:17:26.720 which was not the Influenza. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're right. The book on, yes.

00:17:31.040 That was a book on America, on the Congress really, uh, in the Reagan administration.

00:17:35.760 You're talking about the ambition and the power is correct. Yes. So that's cool for him to say

00:17:40.320 that about a book that you wrote, but let's talk about the great influence of 2004. So for some

00:17:44.800 folks that haven't seen an interview of yours, I think you did some stuff with the folks at library

00:17:48.560 Congress and other interviews you've done. What happened in, uh, with the great influence,

00:17:52.960 if you want to kind of walk us through with the story and some of the stats,

00:17:55.600 so the audience can come up to date. Oh, you know, uh, uh, an animal virus,

00:18:00.960 all influenza viruses are actually bird viruses. They all start in birds. So in a sense,

00:18:06.960 they're all bird flu, but obviously they circulated mammals, uh, and a new bird virus

00:18:13.920 jumped species to humans. Uh, we hadn't seen it before, or at least most hadn't seen before.

00:18:21.280 There are, there are eight gene segments in influenza. Seven of them came directly from

00:18:25.680 birds. One may, it may have passed through another mammal before it got to humans on the eighth. It

00:18:30.960 spread worldwide, very rapidly. You don't need airplanes to have a pandemic. There were pandemics

00:18:36.800 that made it from Africa to Asia, to Europe, even to the Americas going back into the 1600s.

00:18:43.920 Uh, it infected about the 1918 virus infected about a third of the world's population. It was much, 0.96

00:18:53.040 much deadlier than COVID-19 and it killed between 15 and according to a Nobel laureate, uh, made this

00:19:02.000 estimate in the 1940s and it's been confirmed by modern epidemiologists. Probably between 50 and 100

00:19:10.240 million people died. Obviously that's a big range. If you adjust for population, the world back then was

00:19:15.760 less than a quarter of the size of today's world. So that would be equivalent to 225 to 450 million

00:19:22.080 people dead today. Uh, so the worst, worst case scenarios for COVID-19, nothing like that. Uh, thank God.

00:19:31.120 Uh, and you know, so that virus was much more virulent. It, it also killed these people in an

00:19:40.560 incredibly compressed period of time. Probably two thirds of the dead died in the fall of 1918. Uh,

00:19:47.520 the pandemic stretched over a couple of years and in a particular city, it was even faster than that.

00:19:55.440 It would probably be six to 10 weeks. Most of the people who died were, uh, adults between the ages of 18

00:20:04.000 and 45 or 50, probably about two thirds of the dead. So that's very different from COVID-19 and very

00:20:09.280 different from ordinary influenza. Uh, possibly as many as 8% of the world's population. This would be on the

00:20:19.200 worst case, uh, of people in the age group of that age group died in a matter of weeks. So it was pretty

00:20:29.440 violent and the Western world was at war and because of the war, uh, every government that was fighting

00:20:39.520 was focused entirely on the war. And for that reason, uh, governments tended to

00:20:49.520 minimize the pandemic and the United States, Wilson, the president at the time never made a single

00:20:58.320 public statement of any kind about this pandemic. Uh, and in an effort to, there was a concern that any

00:21:11.280 that Wilson didn't want any bad news about anything period. We didn't want any news

00:21:19.040 that might hurt morale. This had nothing to do with the pandemic. They created an infrastructure

00:21:24.960 in advance of the pandemic. Again, nothing to do with the pandemic, something called the committee

00:21:30.160 for public information, a propaganda arm. The architect of that committee said nothing

00:21:35.280 and experience tells us that truth is superior to falsehood. The only thing that matters is its

00:21:41.520 impact on what you say. So the government created this entity that was geared toward telling lies

00:21:51.040 to keep morale up for the war. Uh, the government also passed a law that made it punishable by 20 years

00:21:58.160 in prison to quote utter right printer, publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language

00:22:04.400 about the government of the United States. That law was upheld by the Supreme Court, by Oliver Wendell

00:22:11.040 Holmes, and an opinion from two phrases from that opinion, uh, survive. One is you don't shout

00:22:17.520 a crowd, fire in a crowded theater and, uh, clear and present danger. And, and they, and the government

00:22:24.800 enforced that law vigorously. They sent a congressman sentenced to prison for 10 years, a congressman.

00:22:31.360 You're kidding me. Uh, so this is the 1980s. So that's, yeah, so that's the context. On the one hand,

00:22:39.360 and again, prior to the pandemic, only because of the war, the government created an institution

00:22:46.720 designed to lie to keep morale up and at the same time, punish people for criticizing any action

00:22:52.800 by the government. So there, that's the context that influenza arrived in. As a result, you have,

00:22:59.440 there was no Tony Fauci in 1918. You had national public health leaders associated with the government

00:23:07.360 saying things like, this is ordinary influenza by another name. It was called Spanish influenza,

00:23:12.800 although it didn't start in Spain. Uh, and they are, you have nothing to fear if proper precautions

00:23:20.000 are taken. And yet people could die less than 24 hours after the first symptoms. And they could die

00:23:28.960 with horrific symptoms. Uh, to probably the scariest would be they could bleed not only from their nose and

00:23:36.960 mouth, but from their eyes and ears. That's a pretty frightening symptom. Uh, so people are, are dying

00:23:46.720 in some cases with these horrible symptoms and in some cases very rapidly. And a lot of people are dying

00:23:54.240 and the government is telling you, this is ordinary influenza by another name. You have nothing to worry

00:23:58.800 about. I could, you know, go into greater detail, but we're going to be talking for a long time.

00:24:03.520 So I'll let you ask some questions. So John, what, how was the media at that time

00:24:08.000 covering this? I mean, obviously we don't have the, the Fox, CNN, CBS, ABC, any, we don't have

00:24:13.840 the kind of media that we have today. Who's writing about it, opposing, um, uh, President Wilson

00:24:20.800 while he's saying everything's fine. Don't worry about it. Who's opposing and telling stories about

00:24:24.640 what's really going on? Pretty much nobody in 1918. Uh, uh, you know, the, the newspapers in the country,

00:24:32.240 uh, number one, they were patriotic and wanted to support the war effort. Number two, they had that

00:24:38.880 law that I told you about a minute ago that if you criticize the government, you could go to jail

00:24:44.160 and a congressman was sentenced to prison. Uh, so in most cases, in most cities, the, uh, newspapers

00:24:54.800 simply went along with the program and printed lies. I'll give you a couple of examples. Uh,

00:25:04.560 in Philadelphia, which was one of the hardest hit cities in the United States, hundreds are dying

00:25:09.680 every day in Philadelphia, probably about 15,000 total. When they finally, and they're using steam

00:25:17.120 shovels to dig mass graves, you literally have priests in Philadelphia driving horse-drawn carts

00:25:24.160 down the street, calling upon people to bring out their debt. So when they finally, in Philadelphia,

00:25:32.640 closed saloons, closed theaters, closed schools, and so forth and so on, one of the newspapers actually

00:25:40.000 said, a direct quote, this is not a public health measure. You have no cause for a panic or alarm,

00:25:48.320 unquote. And yet people, you know, their neighbors are dropping dead. You know, their mass graves being

00:25:57.760 dug. They are using, reusing coffins because they didn't have any coffins. And the newspaper is saying,

00:26:08.880 this is not a public health measure. So, I mean, how stupid did they think their readers were? 1.00

00:26:15.760 The readers knew what was going on. Uh, another example in, in Little Rock, you know, I, I quoted, 1.00

00:26:23.760 uh, a doctor in, in, uh, an army camp, uh, a couple of miles out, actually, I guess seven or eight miles

00:26:31.040 outside of Little Rock, uh, talking about thousands in the, in the base hospital, you know, card is

00:26:39.360 overflowing with, with beds, beds outside the hospital. Uh, and he writes, there is nothing

00:26:46.800 here but death and destruction. Just a few miles away in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Arkansas Gazette,

00:26:53.840 princess, big headline, Spanish influenza, same old chills and grip. And, and, you know,

00:27:02.160 it's just total dismissive, just like it was ordinary influenza. Uh, you know, there are a couple of

00:27:09.600 exceptions. Uh, there's a small city in Wisconsin where the, uh, newspaper started to print the truth

00:27:16.080 and the army started to institute prosecution against them, uh, under that law I mentioned a little while

00:27:24.240 ago. Uh, although the prosecution was dropped as the pandemic proceeded, uh, San Francisco is, is, uh,

00:27:35.280 uh, was pretty exceptional and San Francisco, uh, which got hit pretty late, actually, the, uh, in, you know,

00:27:45.360 most cities say they're saying things like this is ordinary influence by another name, San Francisco,

00:27:50.720 the mayor, the business leaders, trade union leaders, and the medical community all got together,

00:27:57.120 signed a joint statement, huge typeface in the newspaper saying, wear a mask and save your life.

00:28:04.080 Uh, whether the mask was in 18, this is in 1918, wear a mask and save a life. So you save your life.

00:28:11.120 Uh, so that is a very different message than saying this is ordinary influenza by another name, which was

00:28:21.280 the most common treatment of it in the press. Or a third example in Phoenix, they wrote a little bit

00:28:29.600 about it when the disease erupted in Boston, which was the first place in the United States to get hit

00:28:35.280 by the disease came in waves. And the second wave was the deadly wave. Um, so when it's in Boston,

00:28:43.680 they write a little bit about it in Phoenix. When it's in New Orleans, they write less about it in Phoenix.

00:28:50.320 When it's actually in Phoenix, it disappears from the newspapers, not a word initially, uh, because again,

00:28:57.760 they didn't want any bad news out there that might hurt the war effort. Now, eventually when it was

00:29:04.000 impossible to ignore, uh, the Phoenix paper did start writing about it. But again, initially

00:29:12.400 to keep morale up and so forth and so on, uh, they ignored it, you know, and other newspapers,

00:29:18.960 they simply, they didn't even print names of the people who died. Uh, and you know, all of this had a

00:29:28.560 impact on the public and it wasn't what they wanted. Instead of keeping morale up, it hurt morale more than

00:29:36.720 the truth would have, uh, because people knew, again, their neighbors are dying. In some cases,

00:29:45.040 the bodies are lying in the house for days because there's no one to get, take it out. And they can,

00:29:51.120 and people knew this was happening all around them. They knew that they were being lied to by the,

00:29:56.400 by the media and by the public officials. And all that did was alienate them and cause them to feel

00:30:04.800 that they had no one they could rely on except for themselves. Uh, and you know, it's sort of split

00:30:12.640 society apart. John, uh, John, for you, did you ever sit down and have a conversation about this

00:30:19.840 with your grandparents? Uh, I'm assuming your parents are probably born in the twenties

00:30:24.800 or, or late teens. Actually, my mother just died at 102 and she was born in 1918.

00:30:31.520 Oh, you gotta be kidding me. Wow. But when I first started working on the book,

00:30:37.280 you know, my grandparents were dead. Uh, but I had an aunt who was considerably older than my mother.

00:30:46.080 Uh, and when I told her that I was working on the book, I mean, she sort of like grabbed her,

00:30:51.520 to her chest and said, oh my God, that, you know, that's the only time she ever saw her father

00:30:57.680 to cry. That was because a couple directly across the street who had a couple of kids,

00:31:02.880 you know, both of them died, uh, leaving several orphans, uh, which was not uncommon. Because as I

00:31:10.960 said earlier, the 18 to 45 is like the peak age at which people were dying. So there were a lot of

00:31:20.400 orphans created. Well, that I was asking to, but by the way, sorry for your loss. I mean, it's, it's so

00:31:25.440 interesting. You write this book, uh, uh, uh, you know, the great influence in 1918 and your mom's born that

00:31:31.440 you're, uh, but you know, it's always interesting when you talk to your parents and your grandparents,

00:31:36.640 you know, when I talked to my dad and I said, dad, what was it like with the Shah's father versus the 1.00

00:31:41.840 Shah when he was in charge or what was Mossadegh like? And you're always curious, you know, to,

00:31:46.880 to see what it was like during that season. But you know, when you look back now, I'm sure,

00:31:51.200 I mean, this is your topic. This is what you've written about. This is what you research.

00:31:54.240 One, how was Woodrow Wilson judged his legacy based on this? Did it at all impact his legacy?

00:32:01.520 Because at that time, maybe we didn't have the media. And number two, looking back now,

00:32:06.720 based on more experience that we have today and having gone through a few other epidemics, pandemics

00:32:14.160 in the recent decades, what could have been done even at that time out of 1918 to have prevented

00:32:20.000 something like this from happening? Well, first, thanks for your comment about my mother.

00:32:27.760 You know, historians haven't written much about this. And it's hard to say exactly how

00:32:35.920 Wilson was viewed because of the pandemic response. At the time, there was essentially no

00:32:41.200 federal infrastructure for, there was a public health service. There was no national institutes

00:32:47.280 of health, which was actually created partly, in fact, primarily because of the pandemic,

00:32:52.640 although not for a few years. Everything was handled locally anyway. And it's hard to say, you know,

00:33:04.240 the war was so much more dominant in the news. It's hard to say how Wilson was evaluated or because of

00:33:11.600 this. Also, we didn't have the notice that we had this time around. You know, there was a first wave in

00:33:20.880 the spring. But at the time, it was almost not noticed at all in the United, for one thing,

00:33:30.080 the virus changed and the first wave was very mild. I'll tell you how mild there were over 10,000

00:33:36.960 soldiers in the British Grand Fleet, which patrolled the coast of Europe, which missed duty in the

00:33:45.280 middle of a war to report for sick day with the first wave. Only four out of 10,000 died. That's

00:33:53.200 pretty mild. That's how mild the first wave was. So that first spring wave, nobody paid any attention to.

00:34:00.000 They were hit by surprise with the second wave, the virus became much more very much deadlier.

00:34:07.520 And the whole thing was over so fast, it wasn't really an opportunity to evaluate plus medicine

00:34:14.320 was much more primitive. The only thing that they did have in 1918 was the same thing

00:34:22.240 that we have today. Social distancing, you know, hand washing, business closures,

00:34:31.920 so forth and so on. But those were decided on a city by city basis, not even by governors. It was

00:34:40.400 always up to the mayor and local. You know, there were very few statewide closures.

00:34:46.480 And I'm assuming that's documented, right? Meaning that it's easy for anybody to be able to research

00:34:52.240 to see that it was city by city, not state by city. Right. Yeah, you can read in pretty much any

00:34:58.000 local paper. It's always in 1918, it was always up to the mayor who made decisions. Very few states.

00:35:07.200 So, you know, Wilson really wasn't judged on the performance of the federal government. And again,

00:35:19.360 it was so fast. One of the biggest differences between COVID-19 and 1918 is the speed. The two

00:35:27.360 biggest differences are the virulence of the virus and the other is the speed of movement. Influenza is

00:35:32.960 a much faster moving disease. So as I said earlier, in any particular city, the second wave was usually

00:35:42.880 gone. You know, the whole cycle was six to 10 weeks. So it was quite different in terms of evaluating the

00:35:51.680 actions of the government. One of the reasons I got involved in pandemic preparedness was because

00:36:00.000 what they call non-pharmaceutical interventions, what do you do when you don't have any drugs,

00:36:06.240 was based on studies of what happened in 1918. And we did discover that, you know, the cities that closed

00:36:15.440 down earlier in the epidemic before the virus was widely disseminated in their populations,

00:36:24.560 and stayed closed longer, not only had better results in terms of how many people get sick and died,

00:36:31.440 but their economies actually recovered faster and more strong and more strongly than cities that that did

00:36:41.040 not do that. Interesting. So, you know, looking there, looking now, what we experience, you're

00:36:47.920 talking about here's a virus that is more of the are not score. It's more, you know, it can spread

00:36:54.400 faster and people are dying within 24 hours. And some instances, it's pretty ugly where it's not just

00:37:00.720 bleeding, bleeding from the eyes and ears. And it's a scary sight to go within 24 hours. And the ages you're

00:37:06.560 talking about, it's 18 to 45, which is not necessarily the ages we're looking at right now.

00:37:12.000 And then we look at COVID-19 with what we experienced the last, say, 12 months. That's

00:37:17.120 what, first week of January, December 27th is the first one they find out and comes here,

00:37:21.760 it gets pretty bad in March, and then it takes off. How do you think we handled it? Do we

00:37:27.520 overreact? Do you think it was done the right way? Do you think we could have,

00:37:30.800 you know, comparable with numbers to what happened with the influenza? It's nowhere near the numbers.

00:37:38.080 We obviously, any loss of a loved one to anybody who loves them, that's more than anyone ever wants

00:37:43.440 to have. But statistically speaking, it's nowhere near that. How do you think it was handled with COVID-19

00:37:50.560 and what we did the last nine, 10, 11 months? Well, of course, it varies country to country. So if you

00:37:56.880 want to look worldwide, there's a tremendous range. Iran is not done very well. One of the reasons is 1.00

00:38:07.840 the Iranian government lied to the public. I'm sure you probably know more about what's going on there

00:38:14.960 than I do. And the United States, in terms of the developed world, I think we've done just about the

00:38:21.520 worst. Again, because we were not told the truth by, you know, chiefly by Trump, you know, why he made

00:38:32.080 a decision to politicize masks. I mean, how is something as simple as that? How does that become

00:38:40.160 a political statement? If you look at the countries around the world that have done well, it's not just,

00:38:48.640 you know, you could say that Japan and Taiwan and Thailand and so forth, that those,

00:38:59.120 their cultures are different. So maybe it's easier for them to do things as a community than it is

00:39:08.000 for the United States. But look at Australia.

00:39:11.040 Australia's culture is probably in the sense of individualism and things like that,

00:39:19.040 probably as close to the United States as any country in the world, maybe even including Canada.

00:39:27.280 Australia has 25 million people and they have just over 900 deaths.

00:39:35.920 So if you adjust for population, that would be the equivalent of 13,000 deaths in the United States.

00:39:45.040 Instead, we have over 350,000 deaths.

00:39:51.120 So you look at what Australia did and you look at our death toll 0.89

00:39:57.360 and you can judge for yourself whether or not, you know, it's the same virus. We have the same tools to

00:40:07.040 fight the virus. What's the difference? The difference is leadership and the way

00:40:12.080 it's been handled, you know, the, and the economic impact has been much greater in the United States

00:40:20.480 than it has been in Australia because, you know, they,

00:40:27.760 I mean, like airplane, the airplanes are flying overhead. I mean, they're flight or jets, but not

00:40:32.560 passengers. There's no government restrictions keeping people off airplanes. People aren't getting on an

00:40:39.120 airplane because they don't want to be in an enclosed space, even though actually the circulation in an

00:40:44.160 airplane is very good. And it's, it's shouldn't be that scary, but that's why the airplanes, nobody's

00:40:51.520 traveling. It's not because of government regulation. Uh, so I would say we've done a very, very, very

00:40:59.600 poor job, uh, areas like, because when you talk about masks, like I remember when Fauci first came out

00:41:06.480 on 60 minutes in March, he said, masks are not effective, you know, and if you wear them,

00:41:12.000 it's not going to be that effective. And you know, you know, and then, uh, uh, when Trump's about to

00:41:16.720 shut down China, Pelosi goes to China say, it's not fair. It's racist. Why are you shutting down

00:41:22.160 China? It's not, you know, we're, it's not a big deal. We should stay open. And then Biden comes back

00:41:26.640 and says, it's, you know, we shouldn't be doing this. And then he turns around and says, was the right

00:41:30.000 decision made. And then, and then Fauci and Trump are going back and forth. So we're kind of like,

00:41:35.040 who do we listen to? Do you listen to Trump? Do you listen to Fauci? Do you listen to Michael

00:41:40.240 Osterholm? Who do you listen to? And then do you, and everybody starts reading your book. Let's find

00:41:44.160 out what can we learn from 1918. So what I'm curious about is it, you know, it seemed like from the

00:41:50.320 beginning Fauci and Trump were not on the same page. So which part of the area, because I don't think

00:41:56.560 this is the last time that we're going to have another, uh, uh, epidemic pandemic. I think you agree

00:42:01.200 with that. Absolutely. So my biggest concern is I'm 42 and I run multiple businesses. I got three

00:42:08.320 kids, one on the way, and these are young kids, eight, seven, and four. And so if in the next time

00:42:14.380 a pandemic happens, what set of standards do we hold that president? Is that president automatically

00:42:18.640 going to panic whether he's a Democrat or she's a Democrat or a Republican? And they're going to say,

00:42:23.060 shut it down. Don't shut it down. You should shut it down. What if this, well, no one's died yet.

00:42:26.920 Why are we going to shut it down? So I'm worried the way we handle this one is going to put the

00:42:31.400 other president in such a corner where they almost have to make certain decisions that could impact

00:42:37.240 the economy again. So I'm looking for more since this is something you're not, I'm not an expert

00:42:42.600 in this area. You are. Well, let me see. Okay. You know, first, let me talk specifically about masks

00:42:50.520 and I'll talk more generally. Uh, initially I, you know, was on, you know, I was on all the networks,

00:42:58.440 even including Fox. Uh, and I was saying, no, masks aren't any good. And that was based on influenza

00:43:05.740 and it was based on 1918. Now, even in 1918, they actually ran very good experiments that hold up

00:43:13.000 today and they could tell you how far respiratory droplets travel and so forth.

00:43:20.520 And they found in 1918, they knew that putting a mask on someone who was sick was very helpful

00:43:28.540 in protecting people around that person. But they did not find that putting a mask on healthy people

00:43:36.560 was for the general public was useful based on that data, which I was very familiar with.

00:43:44.380 And I don't know how familiar Fauci actually knows a lot of history, whether he was familiar with that

00:43:51.020 specific data. I'm not sure, but at least my own position was based on data that changed because

00:44:00.000 influenza has essentially no asymptomatic transmission. It does have transmission before you get symptoms.

00:44:08.760 You can, uh, transmit the disease, but it's for a relatively short period of time.

00:44:14.720 Then we discovered that this disease has a lot of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission

00:44:21.860 that changes the equation on the masks. So you get new information, you change your position

00:44:29.060 if you've got a brain. Uh, so specifically on masks, there's that on the more general point,

00:44:38.060 you know, the reason I was asked to get involved in the pandemic preparedness stuff under the, uh,

00:44:46.500 Bush administration was again, because of my knowledge in 1918. And my message in many meetings

00:44:55.680 was always the same. The most important lesson from 1918 is to tell the truth.

00:45:02.540 When the only weapons that you have to fight the disease are going to be public health measures,

00:45:09.060 they're not going to work if the public is not going to listen to your advice.

00:45:14.940 Unless the public believes what you're telling them, they're not going to listen. If you tell them the

00:45:22.680 truth, if you don't tell them the truth, sooner or later, they're going to find out. And you,

00:45:27.680 once you lose your credibility, it's gone. Uh, you tell them the truth and you hope they comply.

00:45:34.960 In those early meetings, you know, going back to 2006, 2005, maybe even

00:45:44.120 we were unanimous in those meetings that no politician, not the president, not the secretary

00:45:54.200 of health and human services, no politician should be the spokesperson. We were unanimous in those meetings

00:46:02.500 that to retain your credibility, you wanted to have a scientist or, you know, a physician and the

00:46:10.120 perfect guy, this is before your time. Uh, but going, we were talking about the Reagan administration

00:46:15.200 earlier, Everett Koop, who was a surgeon general in the Reagan administration, he would have been the

00:46:21.420 perfect person as a spokesperson. Uh, I don't know if you remember anything about him at all,

00:46:27.380 or how many of your viewers remembers a long time ago, it was 40 years ago. But since we didn't have

00:46:33.240 Everett Koop, that if a pandemic happened then, when we were in these meetings, we figured Tony

00:46:40.200 Fauci would be the best guy. And Tony was not a member, you know, I know, I know I'm not well,

00:46:45.660 but I know him, we have a lot of mutual friends. Uh, Tony was not in those meetings. Uh, we weren't

00:46:55.060 scientists. We, we were public health people and so forth and so on who were, who were not lab

00:47:01.080 scientists, which he is primarily, but we all felt that he was the guy. Uh, so, you know, CDC, you know,

00:47:14.420 somebody should be the spokesperson who comes out of the scientific community and can retain the

00:47:20.900 credibility because no matter how popular any president is and no matter how much truth he's

00:47:29.820 committed to telling in a best case, 30% of the American public are not going to believe anything

00:47:36.400 he says. Sure. And in a worst case, 55% aren't going to believe him. So that's why you don't want

00:47:43.440 a political figure. So that's the number one lesson, which was violated by this administration

00:47:50.320 and worse, you know, the, as we know now, he told Bob Woodward on February 7th, he knew

00:47:58.960 that this was a deadly virus and he knew that it was airborne and all this stuff. And he just

00:48:05.720 didn't tell the public the truth. He politicized the irony is that I think if he had handled the

00:48:15.200 pandemic half decently, he'd have been reelected. You know, you lived in Germany, Merkel's approval

00:48:23.120 ratings went through the roof, the highest she ever got. She's in her approval ratings because she was 0.98

00:48:30.300 very forthright. She's a scientist, you know, a physicist, as you know, is her background. She was

00:48:35.720 telling the German public the straight dope from day one and her popularity went through the roof. 0.95

00:48:44.280 The only time in Trump's presidency that he cracked 50% in the approval rating was back in March when he

00:48:56.360 said, we're at war with the virus. People want to rally around a leader in a crisis. And if he had

00:49:04.880 maintained that tone, instead of trying to minimize it, I think, and if he had done a better job, you

00:49:15.300 know, number one, I think it would be a lot fewer Americans dead. And number two, it would have been

00:49:23.180 better for the economy. And number three, it probably would have reelected him. But he chose not to go

00:49:29.380 that route. Very short sighted. He likes to win the day without looking at the month, much less the year.

00:49:39.980 So on any given day, maybe it was better to tell somebody the equivalent of this is ordinary

00:49:45.700 influenza by another name, which is essentially what he said.

00:49:53.200 Over a period of time, as the death toll mounts up, you know, that came back to honor.

00:49:59.800 John, question with you regarding when I was going to the future, my concern is the next one.

00:50:05.280 We're going to have. OK, so let's talk about now with the next one before we wrap up is

00:50:09.540 what did we learn now what to do with the next one? We'd like I tell you me as an amateur. OK,

00:50:15.660 we thought it took even Fauci said it takes at least 18 months to come out with a vaccine. Well,

00:50:20.600 we were able to do it faster than that. Right. So that was impressive. We came out with it. I don't

00:50:24.840 know, nine months, which I didn't think it was going to come out in nine months. Pretty impressive.

00:50:29.560 A week after election. Boom. Pfizer says we have a 94 and a half efficacy. Moderna comes at 95 percent

00:50:35.040 efficacy. And then you got the Pfizer says we're 95.5, whatever. But anyways, we have a vaccine

00:50:40.020 that comes up. Right. OK. We did masks, social distancing. What did we learn to prepare for

00:50:47.980 the next one? Airports, travel. You said something early about influenza that you don't need airplanes

00:50:53.560 to have a virus. You can do it through birth. So just maybe talk from your standpoint of preparing

00:50:58.440 for the next one. Well, again, I think the same lessons that came out of 19

00:51:02.620 are confirmed by this one. Number one, tell the truth to get your public, the public on your side.

00:51:10.660 Certainly don't divide the public. Tell the truth. Keep a consistent message.

00:51:16.660 Have a credible spokesperson. That's all sort of the same thing. Number two, these so-called

00:51:24.640 non-pharmaceutical interventions work. They work better than any of us ever imagined. You know,

00:51:31.220 I supported them. But based on the 1918 experience, I was kind of skeptical about how well they would

00:51:39.120 work. But we have learned, much to the amazement of the public health community, that if you do it

00:51:49.060 right, you can contain even a disease as transmissible as this one. And this is more transmissible than

00:51:54.960 influenza. You know, I cited, you know, Australia a few minutes ago. They have fewer than a thousand

00:52:02.900 deaths out of 25 million people. That would be the equivalent to 13,000 deaths in the United States.

00:52:09.700 Taiwan hasn't had a case of influenza since COVID-19 since April 13th. You can do it right.

00:52:18.260 So we didn't. It's that simple. But those are the lessons that it is controllable. The other thing

00:52:26.020 is the technology we, you know, because the Bush administration really started this massive

00:52:32.820 program to prepare for a pandemic. They expected it to be influenza, but it applied to any respiratory

00:52:40.180 disease. Part of that was creating, putting money into basic scientific research on vaccines.

00:52:50.900 And as a result, that's why we were able to get the vaccine so quickly. There was an infrastructure,

00:52:56.320 there was a platform of how to make a vaccine that could be applied to basically any virus.

00:53:03.860 Uh, and they just plugged in the genetic code for the spike protein into this platform that already

00:53:12.740 existed, that had been developed. You know, hopefully in the future, we'd be able to do it again,

00:53:21.060 but not every virus is as susceptible to a vaccine. You know, we've been working on a vaccine for HIV for,

00:53:27.940 you know, 35 years, and we haven't gotten there yet. Same thing for influenza. We've been looking,

00:53:33.540 working on a vaccine for influenza. We have vaccines, but they're not nearly as effective as the one

00:53:38.260 against COVID-19. Uh, so improving the basic science, getting, uh, investing in basic science,

00:53:48.500 investing in the public health infrastructure. That's one of the reasons why the vaccine rollout

00:53:54.500 is so screwed up is because there is essentially no public health infrastructure. Again, another basic

00:54:00.900 scientific investment and broad spectrum antiviral drugs, uh, we originally thought that we would

00:54:08.500 have drugs that worked against COVID-19 before we got a vaccine. We really don't have any effective

00:54:16.020 drugs yet, except for dexamethasone, which, which helps significantly, but that's a long way from a

00:54:23.220 magic bullet. Investing in that area of research, you know, further investments, vaccine and public health

00:54:29.620 infrastructure and telling the truth. I think those are the main lessons that, and maybe throw in one

00:54:38.260 other thing and that's surveillance for new viruses. Uh, you know, the biggest concern had always been an

00:54:45.540 influenza pandemic late 1918. The world health organization did create a worldwide surveillance system

00:54:59.460 looking for new influenza viruses. Uh, so the alert alerted very early in the process. Uh,

00:55:07.700 you know, that needs to be expanded. And again, countries have to tell the truth. China did not

00:55:17.060 tell the truth in SARS. They improved a lot when we were concerned about bird flu. They did not tell the

00:55:25.060 truth in COVID-19 and they're still hiding it. You know, just, I think it was yesterday, they're still

00:55:32.180 negotiating. They earlier, they had agreed to allow WHO investigating team into the country to try to

00:55:39.620 track down the source of COVID-19. And yesterday turns out they're not letting that team in. Yeah,

00:55:47.540 quote, negotiating, unquote, over what they're going to do. So they're still not willing to tell the

00:55:53.460 truth in China. That's very helpful, by the way. I mean, what you said was very helpful. Uh, you know,

00:55:58.900 how much of this, from your point of view, I think you're in this area, you know, you're holding

00:56:03.620 Chinese, China's foot to the fire and Trump's foot to the fire. Wilson's foot to the fire. Wilson was 0.55

00:56:09.380 a Democrat. Trump's a Republican. China is somebody that's a very controversial country right now,

00:56:14.820 because both on the left and the right. And I guess my question for you, and this will be because

00:56:20.180 when you said the influenza wasn't the decided by the governor or Wilson, it was the social distancing

00:56:27.380 and a mask was left alone to the mayors. And you said a lot of that is documented that you can find

00:56:31.620 it. How, how much of what we experienced the last nine, 10, 11 months would you say is the

00:56:39.060 responsibility of China? How much is Trump? How much is the governors of states for states like

00:56:44.740 California? And I'm originally from, I lived in California, 24 years. I came to Texas. How much of

00:56:49.380 it is China? How much of it is Trump and Fauci and his administration? How much is, uh, uh,

00:56:55.140 the state's governors on how they handled it themselves? I'm curious because

00:56:59.460 as somebody you're starting to notice, I was in Florida last week looking at homes

00:57:03.460 and Florida, my realtor said something very interesting to me.

00:57:08.020 He says, Patrick, I know you're coming. You're looking at homes. I just want you to know this

00:57:11.700 is the wrong time to negotiate. I said, what do you mean? He says, it's not on your side right now.

00:57:16.660 Don't negotiate with the seller. I don't understand what you mean by that. That's what buyers and sellers

00:57:21.140 do. He says, you're right. Except he's got 50 offers because so many people from New York are

00:57:26.180 moving to Florida. The leverage is not on you. The same with Texas. I put my house on the market

00:57:31.220 two years ago, John, when I put on the market two years ago for one year, I got nothing, zero offers.

00:57:37.300 I put the house on the market three weeks ago with the plans of selling it in six months,

00:57:41.460 24 hours. I got two cash full price prices. I wasn't planned. I wasn't ready for that. We have to move

00:57:46.180 out of our house. I'm saying this to you because, again, I think what we learned as well by states is

00:57:52.020 you got to also look at how your state handles it. I want to hear your thoughts. Is the blame

00:57:55.700 more on China? Should they go through the tribunal and be held at the courts to see how they're going

00:58:01.140 to be held accountable? Is it President Fauci or is it governors? What would you say?

00:58:04.420 Well, in terms of China, I don't want to allocate percentages, but this is not a virus that was

00:58:17.060 put together in a laboratory. That's crystal clear. There's not a scientist in the world

00:58:23.060 worth of salt who believes that, I don't think. In terms of could it have been an accidental release?

00:58:30.340 Well, it's almost impossible to prove a negative, but there's no evidence whatsoever that that is

00:58:36.340 the case. But you can't really prove that that's not the case. You know, it's theoretically possible,

00:58:42.980 but highly unlikely. That's a skilled laboratory in Wuhan. They know what they're doing.

00:58:51.140 Very, very, and no evidence that they were working on this virus. You know, could China have contained

00:58:57.860 the virus and prevented it from getting out? Well, that would have involved, you know, that's also

00:59:07.300 theoretically possible. If everything worked perfectly and China came down on it with the

00:59:13.620 same hammer that they did on, I guess, January 23rd or 24th when they closed Wuhan, it's theoretically

00:59:21.860 possible. Might not have been possible because that virus, you know, it takes a while. It starts,

00:59:30.180 it crosses the species barrier. It starts to circulate in humans. It's not recognized immediately.

00:59:38.500 People have to get sick and go to the hospital before it's recognized at all. You know, and particularly

00:59:45.300 with a relatively long incubation period, as long as 14 days, people, Wuhan's 11 million people,

00:59:55.060 they're traveling all over the world without knowing that they're sick, without, you know,

01:00:00.740 so I don't think it could have been contained. So, you know, the blame for China, you know,

01:00:06.980 the H1N1 turned out to be a very mild virus, but when it first started, the so-called swine flu from 10 years

01:00:13.700 ago, you know, the initial reports were 10% case mortality. So that looked pretty scary. You know,

01:00:22.500 was that Mexico's fault? No, it wasn't Mexico's fault. It could have happened anywhere in the world.

01:00:28.340 There's evidence that the 1918 virus started in the United States, and I put that in my book, although

01:00:35.140 since my book was published, I actually think it started somewhere else. So, you know,

01:00:41.140 China's hard to figure out. Certainly, they have not been forthright, but the people who suffered

01:00:49.220 most from that were their own people, you know, and the doctors that they put in, and, you know,

01:00:56.020 there were four of them, one of whom died, who were trying to get the truth out.

01:01:00.980 You know, so let's move from there to Fauci. You know, he's not perfect. None of us are perfect.

01:01:14.900 You know, I said the same thing he said about masks. We talked about that earlier. The data changed.

01:01:20.900 The information changed. So you change your opinion. I think the CDC's failure on testing,

01:01:33.300 which is a huge failure, that was not Trump's fault. You may get the blame for it because it's

01:01:41.700 his administration. But that didn't rise to the level of, you know, the White House when they were

01:01:49.060 in the first weeks of tracking the virus in the United States. You know, clearly it was circulating

01:01:56.660 before we realized it was circulating. In terms of acting on closing borders and things like that,

01:02:05.540 you know, closing borders can slow the spread of a virus if you get it very, very, very early,

01:02:14.980 but it depends on the virus. If it were influenza because the incubation period is so much shorter,

01:02:24.500 it wouldn't have made much difference. There were studies that, models that showed this is prior to

01:02:31.460 this pandemic. If you were 99% successful in closing a border against an influenza virus,

01:02:38.260 it would delay the spread of the virus and its arrival in your country by three weeks.

01:02:46.420 That's not worth doing because of the economic disruption. But this virus moves much more slowly.

01:02:52.980 Again, one of the biggest differences between COVID-19 and influenza is the incubation period and then

01:02:59.220 the serial infection after one person gets sick and the next person gets sick and the next person.

01:03:07.380 You know, so whether it makes any sense to close your borders depends on the virus.

01:03:15.700 In influenza, I don't think it would. As it turned out, but we didn't know it at the time,

01:03:20.820 it would have helped initially with this virus. But once the virus gets going inside

01:03:28.500 your country, it doesn't make any difference. In terms of the 357,000 deaths at the latest count,

01:03:37.220 as we're taping this, you know, how much of that is Trump's fault? And I'm not going to

01:03:43.940 give a percentage. But I would, as I said earlier, you know, you look at Canada on a per capita basis, much lower death toll.

01:03:56.820 You look at Australia, as I said earlier, an infinitely lower death toll.

01:04:05.540 Yeah, that's on Trump. We could have and should have done much, much better. Before this pandemic,

01:04:13.460 the World Health Organization raided pretty much all the countries in the world on their pandemic preparedness.

01:04:20.500 The United States came out number one. Supposedly, we were the most prepared country in the world.

01:04:26.020 But we didn't use it. You know, the idea, you were talking about governors and mayors and so forth.

01:04:36.740 You know, the failure to use the Defense Production Act, the idea that states were bidding against each

01:04:42.100 other for, you know, the PPEs. That's crazy. That should have been done by the federal government and

01:04:49.780 then allocating based on need. You know, in terms of closing individual cities down versus the governor,

01:04:57.140 you know, you had in Georgia, you know, the mayor of Atlanta wants to close the city down.

01:05:07.780 Georgia is forbidding that from happening. Similarly, there were tensions between mayors

01:05:14.820 and the governor and in Florida and probably elsewhere. I know in Louisiana, there wasn't

01:05:22.660 attention, but the governor of Louisiana, the state of Louisiana was much less aggressive

01:05:29.460 than the city of New Orleans. New Orleans, at one point where I'm sitting, at one point we had the

01:05:34.580 highest growth rate of cases in the world in the spring. And the mayor shut down or I live in the

01:05:41.620 French Quarter. You know, the bars never closed here and the bars were closed. I think New Orleans

01:05:46.500 has done a lot better than most places in the South because we had aggressive leadership from the mayor.

01:05:53.540 There's credit. I would rather have credit go around than blame go around.

01:05:59.540 But I don't think there's any way

01:06:03.380 of getting out of this without saying at a minimum tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of

01:06:10.740 Americans should be alive who are dead. And the reason is bad leadership. 0.99

01:06:17.220 One of the things I struggle with, I had nude on a couple months ago, maybe, maybe six weeks ago,

01:06:22.500 I had nude on. I think I just spoke to Dr. Cyril Wecht, which you would probably know who he is. He's the

01:06:28.900 pathologist, you know, award winning pathologist, you know, 21,000 autopsies. He's the one that came out

01:06:36.500 of 1972, first one to hold John F. Kennedy's brain, a civilian to do that, a doctor. And many times when

01:06:42.580 I sit down and I talk to folks, obviously, you know where they're at politically. If I talk to

01:06:48.980 Gloria Allred, which we've had her on, you know which way she leans. If I talk to Newt, you know which 0.99

01:06:54.660 way he leans. If I speak with President Bush, you know which way he leans. If I speak to you, you know

01:06:59.860 which way you lean. If I speak to anybody where politics are involved, you know which way they

01:07:05.620 lean. One of the things that, you know, I struggle with is things that we're not on the same page

01:07:14.500 with. I'm confused why the left and the right is not on the same page when it comes down to China.

01:07:20.340 That confuses the hell out of me because, you know, I get it if you say, well, it's Trump's fault. Okay,

01:07:25.460 I get it if the right says it's Fauci's fault. He kept flip-flopping and changing. Okay, no, it's

01:07:30.260 Trump's fault. At the end of the day, everything rises and falls on leadership. You can't dispute

01:07:34.100 that. That is exactly what the, you can't say it's not my fault. You're the president. Everything

01:07:38.260 falls on you. Fine. Yeah. Okay. Where you brought up the gentleman's name who worked with Reagan.

01:07:44.420 I think he was the one that was in, he was the one that was leading the AIDS pandemic, right? 0.98

01:07:52.420 That's what he was doing. Okay, yeah. I mean, that's great. That's a good playbook that we have

01:07:55.700 on what to do. But, you know, the one part is, on one end, you're saying they're trying to negotiate

01:08:03.380 to have people come on outside and go and look at to see what happened with the pandemic. 0.96

01:08:06.260 That's ridiculous. 0.99

01:08:07.460 Yeah, it's ridiculous. And then at the one time, one of the journalists, kind of like you, 0.99

01:08:11.780 a lady comes on and says, look, this virus is deadly. And she's now getting jailed for four years 0.94

01:08:15.860 just because she told the story and the truth. And now she's going to prison for that. 1.00

01:08:19.060 I don't know. That's the one part that concerns me. I get we have differences on policies,

01:08:23.540 pro-life, pro-choice. Fine. I get that we say, NRA, guns, we need more background checks. Sure,

01:08:30.260 I'm military. I get it. We do need to have, more people need to be trained when they have guns.

01:08:34.580 But there are certain things we've got to be on the same page with. Our enemies,

01:08:38.580 it doesn't care if you're left, right, or the middle. You know, they want to take control of

01:08:42.740 U.S. if they can. And China and Russia are both enemies. So my challenge becomes how they're going

01:08:48.900 to be held responsible for this more than anything else. I don't think that's a political message.

01:08:54.180 I think that's a left, right, middle. I think that's a red, white and blue message of us

01:08:58.100 being on the same page with us. So anyways, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. If you

01:09:02.340 have a rebuttal for that, I'd love to hear it. Well, it's more an agreement. Well,

01:09:06.580 you know, I mean, they didn't create the virus. They didn't try to infect the world with it.

01:09:16.980 They mishandled it. There was no, but so did a lot of other countries. So when you talk about liability

01:09:24.180 for what is a natural event, that's pretty tricky. For their political actions, yeah. I mean,

01:09:33.940 what they're doing in Hong Kong. No, what I'm saying is we haven't even been able to go out

01:09:42.260 there and do our own research and due diligence on it. It's kind of like, well, now you're not

01:09:45.860 welcome here and there's no free press. We don't have a CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC over there to find

01:09:50.980 out what's going on. We don't even have a social media. It's a secret what's going on over there.

01:09:54.340 So that's why I don't, I don't know if we're ever going to get to the bottom of it to find out

01:09:57.780 really what they did and what their involvement was. I think both sides are assuming the sides that say

01:10:02.340 it's their fault and the sides that are saying, we don't know if it's their fault or not. I think

01:10:05.860 we need to investigate and I don't think they're going to let that happen with us.

01:10:09.700 Well, again, what do you mean by fault?

01:10:13.700 You know, I don't, the idea that they, you know, what would have been the difference? Let's say

01:10:21.540 on January 8th, instead of January 10th, the world got the genetic information on this virus.

01:10:30.340 Or let's say they got a, you know, there's some indication that it was even earlier than that,

01:10:34.820 that they had the genetic code. By earlier, we're talking about a few days earlier.

01:10:40.180 What difference would that have made in terms of the world developing the vaccine? It wouldn't

01:10:47.140 have made any difference. Are you kidding me? I mean, everything is about momentum. Everything

01:10:51.540 is- Well, you're talking about, we're talking about four or five days earlier.

01:10:55.380 I might have released a genetic code. If I'm an ally with you and you're making $550 billion of

01:11:02.900 tax revenue off of me every year because of import export, I would expect you to tell me the second

01:11:07.940 you find out anything. A day is too long for me. We're allies. I'm making you a half a trillion

01:11:14.100 dollars a year. I'm not saying they were right to withhold it. But when you're talking about

01:11:19.140 holding them, making them liable, what are the damages that resulted from a delay of four

01:11:28.340 or five days in releasing the genetic code?

01:11:30.340 The damages are the 50 million people that were working in the restaurant business that are

01:11:35.060 unemployed right now and the jobs of a beer, alcohol, all the regular people that have regular-

01:11:40.340 But the same thing, it wouldn't have stopped the virus from spreading around the world.

01:11:45.060 If I'm an ally to you, if you and I are married to each other, husband and wife married to each

01:11:50.340 other, hey, when something happens, tell me about it. We're an ally. We are in bed. When you become

01:11:55.860 business partners with somebody and you have any kind of material information that's going to affect

01:12:01.060 the company that we own together, you've got to tell me about it.

01:12:03.300 I agree with that. I'm just asking you, if they had, for example, release the genetic information

01:12:13.300 four or five days sooner, would there have been any difference in what happened?

01:12:23.060 Now, I don't really, I actually, you know, you could argue maybe Pfizer would have ended up

01:12:31.380 releasing, you know, announcing that they had a vaccine results before the election instead

01:12:37.380 after the election that could have affected the outcome of the election. So from Trump's perspective,

01:12:47.060 the four or five days may have made a difference. In terms of the death toll

01:12:50.900 or the efficacy of the vaccine, it wouldn't have made any difference.

01:12:55.380 That's not at all what I'm asking. Just so you know, I'm not at all asking about the election.

01:12:58.500 That's not, that's not like the lie.

01:12:59.940 Yeah, I hear what you, you know, do I think China handled this right? No, I think they lied.

01:13:05.220 And they're still hiding stuff. You know, we thought they had learned their lesson after SARS.

01:13:13.140 They didn't. You know, they were very cooperative on bird flu. And this thing comes along

01:13:20.500 and they go back to the way that they were with SARS. You know, my biggest thing is why are we,

01:13:26.260 why are we making, giving them a pass here? I don't understand why we're giving them a pass.

01:13:30.980 That's the part that deeply concerns me when we're giving them a pass, knowing they're celebrating

01:13:37.940 New Year's in Wuhan, doing backflips with tens of thousands of people outside. And the most incredible

01:13:43.540 place to be on New Year's Eve, which is New York watching a ball drop. If you've ever been there,

01:13:47.940 it's magical. And our folks are not out there. We're all home afraid going to sleep at 1145,

01:13:54.020 which is pathetic. That's not the American way. You know, and I'm not, I'm not even an, 0.91

01:13:58.180 I'm an immigrant. I wasn't even born here. I'm talking about the American way. So what I will say

01:14:02.020 about you, John, I, I became smart in the last 84 minutes because of you. And I appreciate that.

01:14:08.340 And I'm grateful for your time. And, you know, I don't know why you said earlier,

01:14:12.820 I will never see a penny of it. If people buy the book, why did you say that? I, you said that

01:14:17.380 quickly and I didn't always say, well, no, I'm depends on the book. We were talking about my first

01:14:23.300 book, which is out of print. So the only way you can get it is used from a used bookstore.

01:14:29.460 So I will never see that. I got it. Okay. Fair enough. But the great influence that you are

01:14:37.060 going to see. That's in print. Yeah. Okay. If the audience is watching this and you've never

01:14:44.100 bought the book, if you haven't, many have, we're going to put the link below for people to order the

01:14:48.820 book. John, do you want to give us a 30 second, your thoughts on the future? How do you, how do you

01:14:54.260 think the future looks? Are you optimistic about the future? I'm very optimistic. I think in terms

01:15:02.180 of the vaccine, there is, as I'm sure, you know, a mutation in the virus, which makes it more

01:15:11.220 transmissible. And that's a little bit scary right now. And it looks like the vaccine will still be

01:15:19.140 very effective against that virus. So we're in a race between getting the vaccine distributed

01:15:27.300 and the spread of that virus. I think the polling has improved in terms of people who are willing to

01:15:35.060 take the vaccine. And I think that will continue. I got vaccinated a couple of days ago, actually.

01:15:41.780 I didn't jump any lines. I'm old enough that in Louisiana, if you're over 70, you got it. And I just

01:15:49.780 happened to get lucky in terms of signing up on a website before it crashed, crashed right after I signed

01:15:57.620 up. So, you know, the vaccine works. We also, in terms of the longer term future for the next pandemic,

01:16:10.660 and as you said, you expect more. And, you know, I mean, there's a virtual guarantee there will be

01:16:18.020 future viruses jumping species from animals to humans. You know, we do know two things. We've

01:16:26.900 improved our scientific infrastructure so that we can get a vaccine faster than anybody ever imagined.

01:16:34.740 And it still took nine, 10 months, and it's going to take more months before you distribute it.

01:16:42.660 So you're still in a best case.

01:16:44.580 You're going to take at least, you know, a year or 18 months after a virus enters a human population

01:16:54.580 before you get a widely distributed vaccine. That is the best case because the production

01:17:00.500 and distribution, you can't really accelerate beyond what we've already done.

01:17:07.380 So the other thing that we learned from this is how to handle it properly.

01:17:12.580 The question remains whether or not whoever is in leadership will make the right decisions.

01:17:24.500 For 15 years, I went around giving talks and I ended up pretty much the same way that we know what to do.

01:17:35.380 But the person making a decision is going to be above the pay grade of some public health commissioner.

01:17:43.460 And will that person listen to the scientific advice?

01:17:47.780 Or will they be making a short term political calculation?

01:17:52.340 And that is going to remain the question into the future because that's the human equation is always going to factor into it.

01:18:03.860 And I'm not dissing the impact on the economy.

01:18:08.820 You know, that is part of what you weigh when you make these decisions.

01:18:13.460 But they should be made for the benefit of the society and not a short term political calculation.

01:18:24.980 And again, that's going to be up to the individual who's in a position of power and that's unpredictable.

01:18:32.900 I hope the right people are doing so much research and reading books like yours to be prepared for the next one,

01:18:38.100 because if we don't learn our lessons from this one and repeat it again,

01:18:43.700 that just shows a lack of leadership and lack of research and lack of preparation.

01:18:47.940 And that's not OK.

01:18:50.420 You know, in business, we say you can make mistakes and that's OK.

01:18:54.680 New mistakes are fine. 0.94

01:18:56.340 Repeating the same old mistakes is ludicrous.

01:18:59.480 And I hope we don't make that both as a society, as a country, as a leadership at the top.

01:19:04.120 And obviously, the people that are involved who are making the decisions with help as far as the folks in the Fauci community and CDC.

01:19:12.140 So, John, with that being said, thank you again for your time.

01:19:14.900 Really enjoyed it.

01:19:15.560 Thank you.

01:19:16.480 Yeah, I enjoyed it, too.

01:19:17.760 Thank you.

01:19:18.740 You're very welcome.

01:19:19.620 So what do you think about the discourse, the back and forth, the China, the story of what's going on in D.C.

01:19:25.020 with Republicans, Democrats, Fauci?

01:19:27.720 There was a lot of things that we covered.

01:19:28.840 I'm curious to know what you took away from that part.

01:19:30.440 And if you enjoyed this interview, if you watched the whole thing and you enjoyed this interview,

01:19:34.200 I think you're going to also enjoy the interview I did with Stephen Gundry, top cardiologist in the world.

01:19:38.980 And if you've not watched that, click over here to watch that.

01:19:40.940 Take care, everybody.

01:19:41.620 Bye-bye.

Valuetainment - January 13, 2021

Great Influenza of 1918 vs COVID19 - Which Affected US More？

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