False Positive ft. Steve Deace
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Summary
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
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It has been 170 days since 15 days to slow the spread.
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So it seems like good a time as any to take stock where we are now,
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and most importantly, when we will be able to reopen our country.
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I'm Michael Knowles, joined as ever by the senator and a very special guest,
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Steve Dace of the Steve Dace Show over at The Blaze.
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And he's a longtime friend, not just of the show, but of Senator Cruz as well.
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You know, Steve and I have spent thousands of hours together on the road traveling.
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But I got to tell you also, there may be no one in the country who has lit my phone up with more texts
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during this whole pandemic than Steve at every stage because he has been diving in,
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from the beginning of this pandemic, to the numbers, to what the numbers mean,
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to what the testing tells us, to what the antibody numbers tell us,
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And so Steve and I have talked about many, many issues at great length.
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But I think that this pod in particular, it's valuable to get in to what's going on with the pandemic
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So I know that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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And everybody seems to have their own statistics on this pandemic.
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So Steve, where do we stand on the coronavirus?
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I think if I could choose one point for us to center the conversation on,
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it would really come down to what we've learned about our testing metric, guys,
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because it goes to the heart of why we, you know, none of us are epidemiologists.
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We're all fairly intelligent guys, but it's not our field of expertise.
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And so I like to keep the conversation where it impacts public policy as much as possible,
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because that is each of our areas of expertise.
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And if you look at the number one concern for why we did these shutdowns across the country,
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it's because we were concerned about masses of asymptomatic spread,
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that all kinds of people who were otherwise healthy would get the virus,
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go home, infect grandma, grandpa, or have these mass spreader events,
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and then go home, and then we get to an R2, R3 situation.
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All right, now let me stop you right there and just ask for folks listening,
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It means the rate of who's infected or how many people you infect based on who's infected, right?
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So does two people get infected for every person that's infected, three people, et cetera?
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The goal in a pandemic is to get to R1 and then hopefully to R0, okay?
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there's a guy that we used to think was brilliant named Didier Realt.
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He was considered the leading infectious disease expert in the world until March 12th.
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And that's when he had the unfortunate circumstance of having President Trump cite positively and
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affirmatively his research on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
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So all over the world, yes, it was for him at the time.
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All over the world, we were beginning to use hydroxychloroquine until it was Orange Man bad,
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Well, on March 26th, he issued a piece on PCR testing for COVID-19.
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And if you go back to the first SARS, the World Health Organization was very concerned about the
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amount of false positives with PCR testing because of how sensitive they were.
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And they wanted two positives before they would report.
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And so a PCR test is the test that's used most frequently.
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It's the one where they stick the thing way up your nose, and it feels like it's in the back of
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your brain, and it takes often a couple of days or even a week or two in some circumstances to get
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But like any other algorithm, it comes down to what do you program it for the setting that you want.
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And so back on March 26th, Rayal put out a paper in France saying, hey, what we're finding is when
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we get beyond 30 CTs, all right, which is cycle thresholds, all right, meaning how many times they
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have to zero in on a sample before they detect a virus, like when you're zooming in on something
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When we have to zoom beyond 30 times, these people are not contagious.
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He even in his paper, he refers to them as, quote, viral artifacts.
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It's a remnant of something that's long since dead, right?
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And so he recommended that no one set their PCR tests above a cycle threshold or a CT of 33
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For whatever reasons, and we don't know the answer to this, and Ted, this is probably where it becomes
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Our CDC and CDC, like institutions across the world, decided to set their sensitivity levels
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And so what the New York Times found when they did this survey across the country is that if
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your state is at a 37 or at a 40, anywhere from 40 to 90% of our positive tests are false positives
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because these people are either asymptomatic to the point they're not contagious, they're not
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We're picking up a remnant of an exposure that just is no longer any kind of a live culture.
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Well, I can't begin to express what that means for a public policy.
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Steve, Steve, let me stop you for a second because I want to underscore something that
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you mentioned there but that a lot of folks listening and watching may not know.
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It would be easy for some skeptics perhaps to dismiss the three of us as crazy right-wingers.
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But you mentioned the New York Times, which I think it's fair to say whether or not we're
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crazy right-wingers, the New York Times is not a crazy right-wing institution.
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I don't think that's going too far out on a limb to say that.
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And the New York Times wrote a stunning article just a few days ago that lays out exactly what
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So if you're skeptical of what you're hearing right now, I'm going to say something I have
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never said before and probably will never say again.
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And by the way, if the New York Times and Steve Dace and Cruz and Knowles are all agreeing,
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that may actually be in the book of Revelations a sign of the end times.
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And by the way, the way it was reported in the New York Times seemed to be this kind of
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stunning revelation that you could have up to 90 percent of people who are not contagious.
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And I think that's how a lot of people took it.
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But, Steve, it seems to me what you're saying is this was built into the testing from the
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beginning, that by making the tests so hypersensitive beyond what would be the usual convention,
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that you were setting yourself up for this kind of scenario.
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Now, this is where, from a public policy standpoint, we have to get into what was the motivation
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And if you want to give everyone the maximum benefit of the doubt back in March, it is a
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We have been studying coronaviruses for 70 years.
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The common cold is one of the coronaviruses, for example.
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But it was the first time we had seen one of these mutate from animal to animal to animal
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And we also understood that we couldn't trust China's data.
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So if we all went into this saying, let's be hyper cautious.
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There's not a lot going on in this country in March anyway, except for spring breakers.
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But why we have continued to do this now for five, for six months?
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You know, there was an interesting, there's an interesting situation happening at the University
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Last I heard, they have reported 1,200 positive cases since the students returned.
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But Newsweek went and did a survey of these cases and found almost all of them were asymptomatic
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LSU and Clemson, the top two teams in college football last year, when they brought the student
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athletes back to campus in June and started testing, they had 54 combined positives, almost
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So that actually dovetails with the New York Times report, meaning that because we have this
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case-demic going on right now, in which we're creating so many cases, it's not we're doing
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I love the fact we're doing too much testing because it shows that the virus is actually
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not as strong or as lethal as we originally feared back in March.
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But there's a difference between too much testing and too many cases.
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We had 16 million cases of H1N1, guys, when the Obama administration finally decided to
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cut off the testing because it wasn't going anywhere.
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And we've got to realize, what is our ultimate metric to reopen the country?
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When deaths plummeted around Memorial Day weekend, we were told, yeah, but then the cases were
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Well, now we've had six straight weeks of cases going down and we're being told, well,
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We need a defined metric of what it is that actually says we're beating this thing.
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Well, Steve, you know, I'm here in Los Angeles and in California, the new metric for reopening
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to be almost fully reopened is that you've got to get down to a 2% rate of positive tests.
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So if we have this issue of the tests that you're describing and that the New York Times
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is describing, then you're in a situation where it looks like we're never going to reopen.
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Well, last week, Los Angeles County was at its lowest rate for hospitalizations since
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Nationwide, for COVID symptoms, we are at the lowest rate of hospitalization since March
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Nationwide, we are below 2% of ER visits are for COVID-like symptoms.
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Now, guys, I ask you, without a, not a therapeutic, a meaningful vaccine, without a meaningful vaccine,
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and since we, since now, apparently the natural herd immunity that saved human civilization from
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plagues for 6,000 years is now suddenly voodoo.
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So without, without herd immunity and without a meaningful vaccine in a nation of 331 million,
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how do we do better than less than 2% of ER visits for COVID?
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I think that's the question that needs to be asked.
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Let me drill down a little bit in, in the testing information you're talking about and
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what's in this New York Times article, which is, we're not saying that, that COVID isn't
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And, and, and if you're very elderly, if you've got serious other health conditions, COVID can
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Um, but for a great many people who are not elderly, a great many people who don't have other
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serious health ailments, uh, the fatality rate for COVID is much, much, much lower.
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And, and the point you're emphasizing here, and, and, and it's actually something as you
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read the New York Times article that was really stunning is the testing is producing a massive
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And these false positives are people, um, you know, it's worth drilling down a little bit
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at what it means if the test is set at 37 or at 40, that's, and I like the analogy of
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So it detects a little bit of virus in you, but not much, not enough virus typically to
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And, and interestingly, and really importantly, not enough virus, probably, although we're still
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learning how this operates, but not enough virus very possibly, let me put it that way,
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not enough virus very possibly to be contagious.
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And, and, and this insight is important because if you want to stop a pandemic, what you want
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You want to stop someone, even if they're healthy from giving it to someone else who's
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And if the vast majority of these false positives are not having symptoms and not contagious,
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it means we're focusing our energy, the wrong place rather than directly on the people that
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actually have a significant amount of virus, a significant viral load in their body where,
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where they, they could well be, be symptomatic and getting sick and they could well be contagious.
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Is that, am I characterizing that fairly, Steve?
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And then this goes back to the beginning of the lockdowns where we didn't secure America's
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nursing homes up until about the end of July, something like 45% of all COVID deaths in America
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Gentlemen, only 0.6% of Americans live in a long-term healthcare facility.
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So we didn't lock down the vulnerable because we put in this incredible effort to lock everybody
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And it was over the sphere of asymptomatic spread.
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The largest contact tracing study that was done in this world so far was about two weeks
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ago, over 3,500 cases, 8% of them, they could trace back to some form of asymptomatic spread,
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We went, essentially, we went out, we're like, we went hunting with mice with an elephant
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We made this huge investment in locking everyone down over the canard of asymptomatic spread
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and didn't protect the most vulnerable among us.
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If I'm elderly in Alabama, why are we testing all these students at Alabama?
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Well, and Steve, you know, you know, it's interesting that, that I can tell you firsthand, I've seen
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how the understanding of doctors and scientists and epidemiologists about this disease have, has
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changed and been uncertain, which is Michael and I were observing earlier today, that, that
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it was back in March, actually on the verdict podcast, where we did a podcast from the stage
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at CPAC, uh, with Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC.
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And, and you'll recall at CPAC, uh, Michael and I both encountered an individual who subsequently
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Um, and, and in the wake of that, that, that that's when I decided initially to self quarantine.
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And this is right at the beginning of, of when COVID was starting to become a meaningful issue
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in the U S and the physicians all told me, if you're asymptomatic and if the person was not
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actively sick, when you encountered him, you don't have a concern, you don't need to quarantine,
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And I ended up deciding I'm going to stay home to protect everyone else around.
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But what's interesting is having seen the months that have gone on, I have seen the experts at
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CDC say categorically asymptomatic people cannot transmit it, which is what they told me in March
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categorically to there was a period of time where they were focused on, okay, the whole worry
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And I have to admit that felt a little weird, a weird focus.
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And then we seem to be moving back into an area of, of a greater common sense that, that
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we need to focus on who's actually seriously contagious.
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And, and, you know, as, as you were talking about nursing homes, here's a question for you,
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Steve, can you think of a more catastrophically damaging public health decision than the public
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policy of the New York state government and governor Cuomo, who was just lionized at the
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DNC, then, then his policies of sending people into nursing homes, uh, who, who were, who were
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sick with COVID and were contagious and, and the incredible death toll that, that, that resulted
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And Ted, I gotta tell you, I'm pretty cynical as you well know, this is the worst gas lighting
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I mean, this is what the, the retconning of, of Cuomo's record where this is concerned.
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I mean, we're sitting here the early September.
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And right now, if New York was its own country, it would still be the sixth worst country in
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the world for COVID-19 death, like the seventh worst country in the world for COVID cases
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per 1 million, still about one out of every five deaths in America from COVID occurred in
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Um, and, and, and so the, the way that this has been retconned and we've been gaslighted
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And you look at a guy like Ron DeSantis in Florida, for example, where he's got a larger
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population, he's got a larger elderly population and his CFR is lower than the country's, a
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case fatality rate, which is easy to divide, which is just simply the amount of cases divided
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And it's 1.9% in Florida below the national average.
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So he's almost seven times lower than the one in New York with the second largest elderly
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And he gets ripped as some kind of a grim raper and Cuomo gets elevated.
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What New York did wrong is there, and there, there is a debate about whether this came from
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There is a bureau that did recommend that nursing homes, because they were concerned coming
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off the Imperial college and especially the IHME surveys that we were going to overload
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There was a memo that, that suggested that states could take a look, some minor bureaucracy
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you've probably never heard of, did put out a memo suggesting that states take a look at
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the possibility of reinserting COVID infected patients back into nursing homes if they weren't
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immediately in danger of perishing because they were concerned about ICU overload.
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And then there was Massachusetts, which has a Republican governor who's basically a Democrat.
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New York was the one that took the lead out of these six states.
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And if you look at the death rate in these six states that made this, made this decision
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compared to the rest of the country, it's, it's really just not even close.
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And what they did is they brought a bomb into their nursing homes.
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And if nursing homes are anything, they are, they are pockets of autoimmune deficiencies.
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And so they brought them in and re-exposed them to COVID with these reinsertions of these
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And there are some estimates, Phil Kirpin's a phenomenal researcher out there.
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He estimates that it could be 20,000 people in New York died in New York nursing homes.
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The AP has been pointed out on numerous occasions that the numbers that Cuomo and his state are
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And the other day, Cuomo said, well, you know, it's probably going to take until around November
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Gee, I wonder why we might take until November 5th.
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It's some of the greatest gaslighting we've ever seen.
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And that isn't even coming from, you know, the scientists or people looking at the data.
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Actually, Mike, I want to ask him two questions.
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Number one, for people listening, if you want to understand more about the numbers, if you
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want to dig down more deeply, are there names, are there people, are there scientists, are
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there researchers that folks ought to look for and read what they're saying?
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I would urge people to go back to John Ianides at Stanford University.
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His very first white paper on March 17th, which all he did, he's the head of their public
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health department at Stanford, which is a top five medical school in the country.
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All he did was break down the IFR and the CFR from our original guinea pig, the Diamond
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Princess cruise ship, and project out what that would be for our American population.
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And he nailed those numbers back on March 17th exactly.
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He was considered a quack, but he's turned out to be exactly right.
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Oxford University, the number one university in the world, numerous epidemiologists at
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So, I mean, I would look at a Dr. Tony Katz at Yale University is another one.
00:21:01.660
That's what's been fascinating about this, guys, from the very beginning.
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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.
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It's going to be Steve Dase, Breitbart, Michael Knowles against academia, right?
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What blew me away is how much of academia all over the world has been pushing back on the
00:21:25.700
I mean, look, the institutions you mentioned, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, I mean, those are not
00:21:38.240
You can't give me a hanging curveball like that and not expect me to swing.
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But like how do you get researchers and physicians and doctors at the most esteemed academic institutions
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on the face of the planet, how do you get them dismissed over and over again as quacks?
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,
00:22:12.320
If they have no fever, no cough, no symptoms, do you make them go home?
00:22:20.100
You know, Dr. Scott Atlas was on my show on April 27th, and he said something very interesting,
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which is we have suspended the natural laws of biology, immunology and virology.
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We've acted like we don't have hundreds of years and decades of established science on
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
00:22:46.640
He gave a fantastic press conference a couple of days ago with Governor DeSantis down in Florida
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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
00:23:13.520
The level of politicization of this is just, frankly, despicable given the human lives that
00:23:27.760
Well, according to CDC, those 15 to 24, right in the age of playing high school and college
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
00:23:53.740
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
00:24:05.980
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
00:24:17.620
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
00:24:27.140
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.
00:24:42.080
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.
00:24:55.260
He would not normally have to self-quarantine during a typical flu season.
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.
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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.
00:25:24.020
Hawaii has had some form of a mask mandate since April 24th.
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They're 2,000 miles away from the next closest civilization.
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They've seen a 700 percent increase in cases there.
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Hong Kong, where they've been masking up since they're on their third wave of lockdowns in Hong
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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.
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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.
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The question is, can we stop it from getting to the people that it's most going to hurt?
00:26:01.020
And, Steve, to be clear, I'm not sure you can refer to California as civilization.
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.
00:26:29.040
This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs Freedom and Security
00:26:43.220
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