Verdict with Ted Cruz - September 07, 2020


False Positive ft. Steve Deace


Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

179.34221

Word count

4,853

Sentence count

253

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is joined by Steve Dacey (The Steve Dace Show, The Blaze) to discuss the coronavirus pandemic and the impact of the government shutdown on the fight against it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.240 It has been 170 days since 15 days to slow the spread.
00:00:09.300 So it seems like good a time as any to take stock where we are now,
00:00:13.220 how the coronavirus pandemic stands,
00:00:15.360 and most importantly, when we will be able to reopen our country.
00:00:20.140 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:00:27.740 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:00:29.600 I'm Michael Knowles, joined as ever by the senator and a very special guest,
00:00:35.080 Steve Dace of the Steve Dace Show over at The Blaze.
00:00:39.240 I'm sure you've seen him everywhere.
00:00:41.480 And he's a longtime friend, not just of the show, but of Senator Cruz as well.
00:00:46.120 Steve, welcome.
00:00:46.920 It's good to have you.
00:00:48.040 You know, Steve and I have spent thousands of hours together on the road traveling.
00:00:54.100 I got to tell you, Steve is brilliant.
00:00:56.520 He is a passionate conservative.
00:01:00.400 But I got to tell you also, there may be no one in the country who has lit my phone up with more texts
00:01:06.420 during this whole pandemic than Steve at every stage because he has been diving in,
00:01:14.800 from the beginning of this pandemic, to the numbers, to what the numbers mean,
00:01:19.200 to what the testing tells us, to what the antibody numbers tell us,
00:01:24.280 to what the impacts of the shutdown tell us.
00:01:27.300 And so Steve and I have talked about many, many issues at great length.
00:01:31.500 But I think that this pod in particular, it's valuable to get in to what's going on with the pandemic
00:01:39.880 and the country right now.
00:01:41.860 So I know that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
00:01:46.120 And everybody seems to have their own statistics on this pandemic.
00:01:49.720 And even I, I try to keep my head into it.
00:01:51.920 I can't really make heads or tails of it.
00:01:53.820 I don't know what to believe.
00:01:54.900 So Steve, where do we stand on the coronavirus?
00:01:57.860 I think if I could choose one point for us to center the conversation on,
00:02:02.900 it would really come down to what we've learned about our testing metric, guys,
00:02:07.760 because it goes to the heart of why we, you know, none of us are epidemiologists.
00:02:12.200 We're all fairly intelligent guys, but it's not our field of expertise.
00:02:15.900 And so I like to keep the conversation where it impacts public policy as much as possible,
00:02:21.580 because that is each of our areas of expertise.
00:02:23.760 And if you look at the number one concern for why we did these shutdowns across the country,
00:02:28.640 it's because we were concerned about masses of asymptomatic spread,
00:02:32.480 that all kinds of people who were otherwise healthy would get the virus,
00:02:36.700 go home, infect grandma, grandpa, or have these mass spreader events,
00:02:41.600 and then go home, and then we get to an R2, R3 situation.
00:02:45.180 All right, now let me stop you right there and just ask for folks listening,
00:02:49.720 what is an R2, R3?
00:02:51.480 What does that mean?
00:02:52.420 It means the rate of who's infected or how many people you infect based on who's infected, right?
00:02:58.660 So does two people get infected for every person that's infected, three people, et cetera?
00:03:03.300 The goal in a pandemic is to get to R1 and then hopefully to R0, okay?
00:03:07.820 And so if you go way back to March 26th,
00:03:10.820 there's a guy that we used to think was brilliant named Didier Realt.
00:03:14.760 He was considered the leading infectious disease expert in the world until March 12th.
00:03:20.140 And that's when he had the unfortunate circumstance of having President Trump cite positively and
00:03:25.820 affirmatively his research on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
00:03:30.960 So all over the world, yes, it was for him at the time.
00:03:34.820 All over the world, we were beginning to use hydroxychloroquine until it was Orange Man bad, 1.00
00:03:39.540 and now suddenly we could not, right?
00:03:41.120 Well, on March 26th, he issued a piece on PCR testing for COVID-19.
00:03:48.160 And if you go back to the first SARS, the World Health Organization was very concerned about the
00:03:52.380 amount of false positives with PCR testing because of how sensitive they were.
00:03:56.880 And they wanted two positives before they would report.
00:03:59.780 And so a PCR test is the test that's used most frequently.
00:04:06.740 It's the one where they stick the thing way up your nose, and it feels like it's in the back of
00:04:10.680 your brain, and it takes often a couple of days or even a week or two in some circumstances to get
00:04:18.280 the result back.
00:04:19.360 Correct.
00:04:20.020 It's a great testing module.
00:04:22.040 They're very sensitive.
00:04:23.300 They're very accurate.
00:04:24.560 But like any other algorithm, it comes down to what do you program it for the setting that you want.
00:04:29.020 And so back on March 26th, Rayal put out a paper in France saying, hey, what we're finding is when
00:04:36.800 we get beyond 30 CTs, all right, which is cycle thresholds, all right, meaning how many times they
00:04:43.480 have to zero in on a sample before they detect a virus, like when you're zooming in on something
00:04:48.000 on your phone or your computer, okay?
00:04:50.900 When we have to zoom beyond 30 times, these people are not contagious.
00:04:56.980 They're probably not infected.
00:04:57.980 He even in his paper, he refers to them as, quote, viral artifacts.
00:05:01.460 And we all know what an artifact is.
00:05:02.820 It's something that's long since gone.
00:05:04.880 It's a remnant of something that's long since dead, right?
00:05:07.920 And so he recommended that no one set their PCR tests above a cycle threshold or a CT of 33
00:05:13.980 and recommended 30.
00:05:15.960 For whatever reasons, and we don't know the answer to this, and Ted, this is probably where it becomes
00:05:19.460 your job as a senator to help us find out.
00:05:21.400 Our CDC and CDC, like institutions across the world, decided to set their sensitivity levels
00:05:29.160 anywhere from 35 to 40.
00:05:31.680 In our country, it's 37 to 40.
00:05:34.760 And so what the New York Times found when they did this survey across the country is that if
00:05:38.780 your state is at a 37 or at a 40, anywhere from 40 to 90% of our positive tests are false positives
00:05:47.420 because these people are either asymptomatic to the point they're not contagious, they're not
00:05:52.000 contagious at all, or it's a viral artifact.
00:05:54.640 We're picking up a remnant of an exposure that just is no longer any kind of a live culture.
00:06:00.120 Well, I can't begin to express what that means for a public policy.
00:06:03.220 Steve, Steve, let me stop you for a second because I want to underscore something that
00:06:08.580 you mentioned there but that a lot of folks listening and watching may not know.
00:06:14.020 It would be easy for some skeptics perhaps to dismiss the three of us as crazy right-wingers.
00:06:21.500 But you mentioned the New York Times, which I think it's fair to say whether or not we're
00:06:26.980 crazy right-wingers, the New York Times is not a crazy right-wing institution.
00:06:31.200 I don't think that's going too far out on a limb to say that.
00:06:35.160 And the New York Times wrote a stunning article just a few days ago that lays out exactly what
00:06:42.760 you're saying.
00:06:43.500 So if you're skeptical of what you're hearing right now, I'm going to say something I have
00:06:48.920 never said before and probably will never say again.
00:06:51.460 Go look up the New York Times.
00:06:52.880 Go read the article from the New York Times.
00:06:55.720 And by the way, if the New York Times and Steve Dace and Cruz and Knowles are all agreeing,
00:07:04.220 that may actually be in the book of Revelations a sign of the end times.
00:07:10.060 I think so.
00:07:11.600 And by the way, the way it was reported in the New York Times seemed to be this kind of
00:07:16.060 stunning revelation that you could have up to 90 percent of people who are not contagious.
00:07:20.360 And I think that's how a lot of people took it.
00:07:21.640 That's how I took it.
00:07:22.360 But, Steve, it seems to me what you're saying is this was built into the testing from the
00:07:26.620 beginning, that by making the tests so hypersensitive beyond what would be the usual convention,
00:07:32.800 that you were setting yourself up for this kind of scenario.
00:07:35.860 Now, this is where, from a public policy standpoint, we have to get into what was the motivation
00:07:40.480 for this.
00:07:41.500 And if you want to give everyone the maximum benefit of the doubt back in March, it is a
00:07:44.980 novel coronavirus.
00:07:46.540 Now, it's not a novel virus.
00:07:48.020 We have been studying coronaviruses for 70 years.
00:07:51.180 The common cold is one of the coronaviruses, for example.
00:07:54.080 But it was the first time we had seen one of these mutate from animal to animal to animal
00:07:57.940 to human and behave like this.
00:07:59.820 And we also understood that we couldn't trust China's data.
00:08:02.840 So if we all went into this saying, let's be hyper cautious.
00:08:06.120 We're still in the cold flu season anyway.
00:08:08.540 There's not a lot going on in this country in March anyway, except for spring breakers.
00:08:13.360 So let's be hypersensitive about this, fine.
00:08:16.440 But why we have continued to do this now for five, for six months?
00:08:20.980 You know, there was an interesting, there's an interesting situation happening at the University
00:08:23.960 of Alabama as we speak.
00:08:25.420 Last I heard, they have reported 1,200 positive cases since the students returned.
00:08:30.800 But Newsweek went and did a survey of these cases and found almost all of them were asymptomatic
00:08:35.560 and there were zero hospitalizations.
00:08:37.420 LSU and Clemson, the top two teams in college football last year, when they brought the student
00:08:42.320 athletes back to campus in June and started testing, they had 54 combined positives, almost
00:08:48.880 all asymptomatic, zero hospitalizations.
00:08:52.260 So that actually dovetails with the New York Times report, meaning that because we have this
00:08:57.920 case-demic going on right now, in which we're creating so many cases, it's not we're doing
00:09:03.160 too much testing.
00:09:03.940 I love the fact we're doing too much testing because it shows that the virus is actually
00:09:08.560 not as strong or as lethal as we originally feared back in March.
00:09:12.300 But there's a difference between too much testing and too many cases.
00:09:16.420 We had 16 million cases of H1N1, guys, when the Obama administration finally decided to
00:09:22.120 cut off the testing because it wasn't going anywhere.
00:09:25.680 This is what we're doing now.
00:09:27.360 And we've got to realize, what is our ultimate metric to reopen the country?
00:09:31.440 When deaths plummeted around Memorial Day weekend, we were told, yeah, but then the cases were
00:09:35.760 too high.
00:09:36.560 Well, now we've had six straight weeks of cases going down and we're being told, well,
00:09:40.460 now it's about deaths.
00:09:41.880 We need a defined metric of what it is that actually says we're beating this thing.
00:09:47.600 And I'll leave one more point.
00:09:48.580 Go ahead.
00:09:48.820 Well, Steve, you know, I'm here in Los Angeles and in California, the new metric for reopening
00:09:55.060 to be almost fully reopened is that you've got to get down to a 2% rate of positive tests.
00:10:01.660 So if we have this issue of the tests that you're describing and that the New York Times
00:10:05.740 is describing, then you're in a situation where it looks like we're never going to reopen.
00:10:09.800 Well, last week, Los Angeles County was at its lowest rate for hospitalizations since
00:10:14.400 April 2nd.
00:10:16.560 Nationwide, for COVID symptoms, we are at the lowest rate of hospitalization since March
00:10:21.000 21st.
00:10:22.680 Nationwide, we are below 2% of ER visits are for COVID-like symptoms.
00:10:27.020 Now, guys, I ask you, without a, not a therapeutic, a meaningful vaccine, without a meaningful vaccine,
00:10:33.520 and since we, since now, apparently the natural herd immunity that saved human civilization from
00:10:38.580 plagues for 6,000 years is now suddenly voodoo. 1.00
00:10:41.400 So without, without herd immunity and without a meaningful vaccine in a nation of 331 million,
00:10:47.300 how do we do better than less than 2% of ER visits for COVID?
00:10:51.140 When, when are the numbers low enough?
00:10:52.820 I think that's the question that needs to be asked.
00:10:54.580 Let me drill down a little bit in, in the testing information you're talking about and
00:10:59.220 what's in this New York Times article, which is, we're not saying that, that COVID isn't
00:11:06.720 real, that it isn't serious.
00:11:08.260 And, and, and if you're very elderly, if you've got serious other health conditions, COVID can
00:11:15.080 be, can be lethal.
00:11:17.300 Um, but for a great many people who are not elderly, a great many people who don't have other
00:11:24.300 serious health ailments, uh, the fatality rate for COVID is much, much, much lower.
00:11:31.040 And, and the point you're emphasizing here, and, and, and it's actually something as you
00:11:35.240 read the New York Times article that was really stunning is the testing is producing a massive
00:11:41.300 number of false positives over 90%.
00:11:43.680 And these false positives are people, um, you know, it's worth drilling down a little bit
00:11:50.480 at what it means if the test is set at 37 or at 40, that's, and I like the analogy of
00:11:56.680 sort of zooming in, zooming in, zooming in.
00:11:58.420 So that's super zoomed in.
00:12:00.560 So it detects a little bit of virus in you, but not much, not enough virus typically to
00:12:07.500 make you sick. 0.67
00:12:09.300 And, and interestingly, and really importantly, not enough virus, probably, although we're still
00:12:16.400 learning how this operates, but not enough virus very possibly, let me put it that way,
00:12:21.040 not enough virus very possibly to be contagious.
00:12:24.640 And, and, and this insight is important because if you want to stop a pandemic, what you want
00:12:29.740 to focus on is people who are contagious.
00:12:32.360 You want to stop someone, even if they're healthy from giving it to someone else who's
00:12:36.680 very vulnerable.
00:12:38.180 And if the vast majority of these false positives are not having symptoms and not contagious,
00:12:44.020 it means we're focusing our energy, the wrong place rather than directly on the people that
00:12:50.260 actually have a significant amount of virus, a significant viral load in their body where,
00:12:57.380 where they, they could well be, be symptomatic and getting sick and they could well be contagious.
00:13:02.660 Is that, am I characterizing that fairly, Steve?
00:13:06.960 You nailed it.
00:13:08.240 You nailed it, Senator.
00:13:09.400 And then this goes back to the beginning of the lockdowns where we didn't secure America's
00:13:14.280 nursing homes up until about the end of July, something like 45% of all COVID deaths in America
00:13:20.180 had taken place in a long-term care facility.
00:13:23.440 Gentlemen, only 0.6% of Americans live in a long-term healthcare facility.
00:13:28.380 So we didn't lock down the vulnerable because we put in this incredible effort to lock everybody
00:13:34.620 else down.
00:13:35.620 And it was over the sphere of asymptomatic spread.
00:13:38.120 The largest contact tracing study that was done in this world so far was about two weeks
00:13:42.500 ago, over 3,500 cases, 8% of them, they could trace back to some form of asymptomatic spread,
00:13:50.140 8% out of over 3,000 cases.
00:13:53.600 So we made this huge investment.
00:13:56.160 We went, essentially, we went out, we're like, we went hunting with mice with an elephant
00:13:59.940 gun.
00:14:00.280 We made this huge investment in locking everyone down over the canard of asymptomatic spread 0.98
00:14:06.120 and didn't protect the most vulnerable among us.
00:14:08.600 If I'm elderly in Alabama, why are we testing all these students at Alabama?
00:14:13.200 What are we, why are we protecting?
00:14:14.500 Well, and Steve, you know, you know, it's interesting that, that I can tell you firsthand, I've seen
00:14:20.640 how the understanding of doctors and scientists and epidemiologists about this disease have, has
00:14:27.440 changed and been uncertain, which is Michael and I were observing earlier today, that, that
00:14:32.720 it was back in March, actually on the verdict podcast, where we did a podcast from the stage
00:14:38.740 at CPAC, uh, with Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC.
00:14:42.360 And we did it live.
00:14:43.820 It was a fun episode at CPAC.
00:14:46.260 And, and you'll recall at CPAC, uh, Michael and I both encountered an individual who subsequently
00:14:52.780 tested positive and was symptomatic.
00:14:54.700 He, he, he got, he got ill.
00:14:56.800 Um, and, and in the wake of that, that, that that's when I decided initially to self quarantine.
00:15:03.480 And this is right at the beginning of, of when COVID was starting to become a meaningful issue
00:15:10.060 in the U S and the physicians all told me, if you're asymptomatic and if the person was not
00:15:18.040 actively sick, when you encountered him, you don't have a concern, you don't need to quarantine,
00:15:23.160 you're fine.
00:15:24.460 And I ended up deciding I'm going to stay home to protect everyone else around.
00:15:30.040 But what's interesting is having seen the months that have gone on, I have seen the experts at
00:15:35.660 CDC say categorically asymptomatic people cannot transmit it, which is what they told me in March
00:15:42.380 categorically to there was a period of time where they were focused on, okay, the whole worry
00:15:47.520 is asymptomatic.
00:15:48.420 And I have to admit that felt a little weird, a weird focus.
00:15:52.880 And then we seem to be moving back into an area of, of a greater common sense that, that
00:15:59.760 we need to focus on who's actually seriously contagious.
00:16:03.700 And, and, you know, as, as you were talking about nursing homes, here's a question for you,
00:16:09.580 Steve, can you think of a more catastrophically damaging public health decision than the public
00:16:17.500 policy of the New York state government and governor Cuomo, who was just lionized at the
00:16:23.320 DNC, then, then his policies of sending people into nursing homes, uh, who, who were, who were
00:16:31.400 sick with COVID and were contagious and, and the incredible death toll that, that, that resulted
00:16:36.180 from that.
00:16:37.020 I cannot.
00:16:38.540 And Ted, I gotta tell you, I'm pretty cynical as you well know, this is the worst gas lighting
00:16:43.600 I've ever seen.
00:16:44.840 I mean, this is what the, the retconning of, of Cuomo's record where this is concerned.
00:16:50.080 I mean, we're sitting here the early September.
00:16:52.600 And right now, if New York was its own country, it would still be the sixth worst country in
00:16:57.900 the world for COVID-19 death, like the seventh worst country in the world for COVID cases
00:17:03.520 per 1 million, still about one out of every five deaths in America from COVID occurred in
00:17:09.180 New York or New Jersey.
00:17:11.700 Um, and, and, and so the, the way that this has been retconned and we've been gaslighted
00:17:15.880 that he's some kind of hero.
00:17:17.240 And you look at a guy like Ron DeSantis in Florida, for example, where he's got a larger
00:17:20.960 population, he's got a larger elderly population and his CFR is lower than the country's, a
00:17:28.160 case fatality rate, which is easy to divide, which is just simply the amount of cases divided
00:17:32.920 by the amount of people who, who sadly died.
00:17:35.740 And it's 1.9% in Florida below the national average.
00:17:39.840 And the one in New York is 7.1%.
00:17:43.060 So he's almost seven times lower than the one in New York with the second largest elderly
00:17:47.660 population per capita in the country.
00:17:50.140 And he gets ripped as some kind of a grim raper and Cuomo gets elevated.
00:17:54.280 So what did New York do wrong?
00:17:56.500 And what did New Jersey do wrong?
00:17:58.500 What New York did wrong is there, and there, there is a debate about whether this came from
00:18:02.420 the feds.
00:18:03.100 There is a bureau that did recommend that nursing homes, because they were concerned coming
00:18:09.000 off the Imperial college and especially the IHME surveys that we were going to overload
00:18:13.380 of the hospitals.
00:18:14.140 There was a memo that, that suggested that states could take a look, some minor bureaucracy
00:18:20.100 you've probably never heard of, did put out a memo suggesting that states take a look at
00:18:24.200 the possibility of reinserting COVID infected patients back into nursing homes if they weren't
00:18:29.940 immediately in danger of perishing because they were concerned about ICU overload.
00:18:36.240 All right.
00:18:36.460 And so six states took the lead on this.
00:18:38.640 Five of them were governed by Democrats.
00:18:40.440 And then there was Massachusetts, which has a Republican governor who's basically a Democrat.
00:18:45.440 All right.
00:18:45.700 New York was the one that took the lead out of these six states.
00:18:49.040 And if you look at the death rate in these six states that made this, made this decision
00:18:52.920 compared to the rest of the country, it's, it's really just not even close.
00:18:57.400 And what they did is they brought a bomb into their nursing homes.
00:19:01.580 And if nursing homes are anything, they are, they are pockets of autoimmune deficiencies.
00:19:06.640 You're talking about the elderly, obviously.
00:19:09.040 And so they brought them in and re-exposed them to COVID with these reinsertions of these 0.86
00:19:13.500 COVID patients.
00:19:14.840 And there are some estimates, Phil Kirpin's a phenomenal researcher out there.
00:19:18.520 He estimates that it could be 20,000 people in New York died in New York nursing homes.
00:19:23.280 The AP has been pointed out on numerous occasions that the numbers that Cuomo and his state are
00:19:28.380 putting out are false and inaccurate.
00:19:30.660 And the other day, Cuomo said, well, you know, it's probably going to take until around November
00:19:33.960 5th or so for us to get an accurate count.
00:19:36.620 Gee, I wonder why we might take until November 5th.
00:19:39.600 Anybody know why that's a magic date?
00:19:41.220 What's going on on November 3rd?
00:19:42.520 It's just a coincidence, I would say, Steve.
00:19:44.940 Well, I think this is the point.
00:19:46.480 You put it so well.
00:19:48.000 It's this gaslighting.
00:19:49.700 It's some of the greatest gaslighting we've ever seen.
00:19:52.500 And that isn't even coming from, you know, the scientists or people looking at the data.
00:19:56.640 That is coming from the politicians.
00:19:59.180 Actually, Mike, I want to ask him two questions.
00:20:01.720 Number one, for people listening, if you want to understand more about the numbers, if you
00:20:06.580 want to dig down more deeply, are there names, are there people, are there scientists, are
00:20:12.440 there researchers that folks ought to look for and read what they're saying?
00:20:17.320 I would urge people to go back to John Ianides at Stanford University.
00:20:21.020 His very first white paper on March 17th, which all he did, he's the head of their public
00:20:26.760 health department at Stanford, which is a top five medical school in the country.
00:20:30.880 All he did was break down the IFR and the CFR from our original guinea pig, the Diamond
00:20:35.380 Princess cruise ship, and project out what that would be for our American population. 0.99
00:20:39.760 And he nailed those numbers back on March 17th exactly.
00:20:44.020 He was considered a quack, but he's turned out to be exactly right. 1.00
00:20:47.900 Oxford University, the number one university in the world, numerous epidemiologists at
00:20:52.220 Oxford have been calling BS on this all along.
00:20:55.660 So, I mean, I would look at a Dr. Tony Katz at Yale University is another one.
00:21:00.180 I mean, there's a long list.
00:21:01.660 That's what's been fascinating about this, guys, from the very beginning.
00:21:04.340 When I started poking at the Imperial College model and realized that their math did not
00:21:08.980 add up, I was like, you know, this is going to be like a climate change debate.
00:21:12.820 It's going to be Steve Dase, Breitbart, Michael Knowles against academia, right?
00:21:17.380 What blew me away is how much of academia all over the world has been pushing back on the
00:21:23.680 life.
00:21:24.180 Steve, let me ask you.
00:21:25.700 I mean, look, the institutions you mentioned, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, I mean, those are not
00:21:31.940 fly-by-night institutions.
00:21:33.680 OK, Yale is, but the other two are not.
00:21:36.500 I knew that was coming.
00:21:38.240 You can't give me a hanging curveball like that and not expect me to swing.
00:21:42.360 But like how do you get researchers and physicians and doctors at the most esteemed academic institutions
00:21:51.660 on the face of the planet, how do you get them dismissed over and over again as quacks? 1.00
00:21:56.620 That seems an odd dynamic.
00:21:59.560 What's going on?
00:22:00.720 I wish I knew.
00:22:01.940 Now, I will tell you this.
00:22:03.240 You mentioned the whole thing that you were told at CPAC about asymptomatic spread.
00:22:06.880 Guys, when somebody in your offices come in and says, you know, my kid at home, I think,
00:22:11.260 has the flu.
00:22:12.320 If they have no fever, no cough, no symptoms, do you make them go home?
00:22:15.920 No, nobody does that, right?
00:22:17.440 OK, so why did we do that with this?
00:22:20.100 You know, Dr. Scott Atlas was on my show on April 27th, and he said something very interesting,
00:22:25.320 which is we have suspended the natural laws of biology, immunology and virology.
00:22:30.780 We've acted like we don't have hundreds of years and decades of established science on
00:22:35.180 this, and I can't figure out why.
00:22:37.440 Thankfully, he was brought into the White House Coronavirus Task Force about a month ago,
00:22:41.180 and I think you'll notice the difference in messaging from the White House since he was
00:22:46.080 brought in.
00:22:46.640 He gave a fantastic press conference a couple of days ago with Governor DeSantis down in Florida
00:22:52.240 because I don't think this is about science, the question that you asked, Ted.
00:22:55.880 I think that we've gotten into the politics of this, and I think that's what's really sad
00:23:01.200 is it's made it so that, you know, suddenly a drug that's been FDA approved for 60 years
00:23:05.880 is not healthy, despite all the studies around the world that show that it has at least some
00:23:10.920 marked success early on as a treatment.
00:23:13.520 The level of politicization of this is just, frankly, despicable given the human lives that
00:23:19.740 are at stake.
00:23:21.100 College football.
00:23:22.460 You have strong thoughts on this.
00:23:24.720 Share your thoughts on college football.
00:23:27.760 Well, according to CDC, those 15 to 24, right in the age of playing high school and college
00:23:32.840 football, are 12.9 percent of the population.
00:23:35.660 And yet there's 0.2 percent of people who have died with COVID.
00:23:40.360 Only 1.5 percent of deaths since March of those in that age group have been with COVID.
00:23:47.240 There's not a single recorded case that we can point to around the world of a student giving
00:23:52.160 a teacher COVID.
00:23:53.740 Why we're not playing football when comorbidities are the number one cause of death with COVID.
00:23:59.320 94 percent of the deaths have been with comorbidities because the number one thing this virus
00:24:03.340 does is weaken your immune system.
00:24:05.980 Well, Steve, I have to ask, because I noticed you're using very specific language.
00:24:09.280 You're saying dying with COVID, which I think ties into this 94 percent, 6 percent number
00:24:14.460 that has been going around.
00:24:15.680 What does that mean?
00:24:16.460 I mean, what's the distinction here?
00:24:17.620 And what are we talking about with the comorbidities?
00:24:19.220 Through August 15, CDC says 6 percent of deaths were people who walked in who were otherwise
00:24:24.180 healthy, got COVID-19 and died.
00:24:27.140 The other 94 percent were people who had an average of 2.1 comorbidities, meaning that this
00:24:33.340 virus weakened their already weakened immune systems.
00:24:36.960 It does not mean that 94 percent of deaths are fake news.
00:24:40.700 That's not what it means.
00:24:42.080 What it means, though, is the way that this virus attacks the human body is it specifically
00:24:46.480 targets those who already have an immune deficiency.
00:24:49.480 So somebody you guys well know that I work with, Glenn Beckett, the Blaze.
00:24:53.360 He has autoimmune disease.
00:24:55.260 He would not normally have to self-quarantine during a typical flu season.
00:24:59.160 Right.
00:24:59.520 But because this virus specifically goes after weakened immune systems, Glenn did self-quarantine
00:25:05.620 from our studios for about two to three months.
00:25:08.260 And so it is a very vicious virus.
00:25:10.640 I don't want to understate that whatsoever.
00:25:12.240 But there's a very targeted demo that it goes after.
00:25:16.160 And that's why this policy that we have done of attacking mice with elephant guns.
00:25:20.980 Guys, I'll leave you with this.
00:25:22.540 I mean, look at Hawaii.
00:25:24.020 Hawaii has had some form of a mask mandate since April 24th.
00:25:27.860 They're 2,000 miles away from the next closest civilization.
00:25:31.700 They've seen a 700 percent increase in cases there.
00:25:35.780 Hong Kong, where they've been masking up since they're on their third wave of lockdowns in Hong
00:25:40.000 Kong now, the Philippines on their second wave of lockdowns, where, again, these are isolated
00:25:45.120 places, the Philippines, Hawaii, high mask use.
00:25:48.640 And yet, in the end, the virus makes its way through.
00:25:52.180 So we're not going to stop it from getting through.
00:25:54.360 The question is, can we stop it from getting to the people that it's most going to hurt?
00:25:59.340 That is the question.
00:26:01.020 And, Steve, to be clear, I'm not sure you can refer to California as civilization.
00:26:08.140 Also a very true point.
00:26:09.760 You might even say that's a scientific point.
00:26:11.920 Gentlemen, that's all the time we have.
00:26:13.560 Steve, thank you so much for being here.
00:26:14.720 You can always go.
00:26:15.600 And I would highly recommend you go check out the Steve Dace show over at The Blaze.
00:26:21.280 And Senator Cruz, I will see you in just a little while for our next episode.
00:26:25.640 In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
00:26:27.420 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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