If Books Could Kill - ＂In Covid's Wake＂ Part 2： Wrong About The Right

00:00:00.000 Do you have a zinger?

00:00:00.880 How could I possibly have a zinger for this?

00:00:03.640 What do you know about June of 2020 to January 2024?

00:00:08.500 What do you know about that period, Peter?

00:00:09.840 Look, you can't keep trying to pull zingers out of me for the same book.

00:00:13.960 It's outrageous.

00:00:15.200 Oh, what's your zinger for nudge part two? 0.99

00:00:17.440 I don't fucking know, man. 0.97

00:00:18.440 I'm not just an endless font of zingers. 0.98

00:00:22.180 I mean, you kind of are, though, Peter, to be fair.

00:00:24.360 It's like one of my favorite things about you.

00:00:25.580 unfortunately the um the inherent corniness of our zingers it i know it makes it so that coming

00:00:32.580 up with two of them is humiliating like if you come up with one corny joke it's like okay that's

00:00:37.260 a corny joke about the book or whatever coming up with two back to back it's just like ugh

00:00:42.180 it's degrading so are we giving up on them again i might just have the music kick in

00:00:46.600 randomly at some point you keep putting me in a situation where we have to give up on them

00:00:50.180 okay so this is episode two of our dissection of in covid's wake how our politics failed us

00:01:09.760 by steven macedo and francis lee two academics at princeton what kind of academics

00:01:14.820 why don't you why don't you lead us through a little recap peter what did we learn

00:01:20.300 last episode a couple of political scientists have decided to wade in to the covid retrospective

00:01:29.340 industry shall we say industrial complex we spent part one essentially discussing

00:01:35.860 their take on the first few months of the pandemic which revolved in large part around their belief

00:01:44.360 that a lot of the mitigation efforts that we took, masks, distancing, etc., were not actually

00:01:50.700 grounded in any sort of scientific reality. Now, they were wrong about that. And they're very

00:01:58.380 stupid. And now we're moving on to part two, where we're, I believe, going to discuss basically 1.00

00:02:05.440 what you might call the rest of the pandemic. There's like the pandemic uppercase, and that's

00:02:11.200 like March, April, little bit of May 2020. And then there's the pandemic lowercase,

00:02:18.080 which is the rest of human civilization. What's kind of amazing is that the pandemic does at this

00:02:23.000 point become kind of more of a political science question. The early outbreaks were mostly a

00:02:28.760 function of how early the virus arrived. So a lot of the cases and deaths of the first two months

00:02:34.120 of the pandemic were kind of locked in by how much community spread there had been. Once we come out

00:02:40.500 of those initial lockdowns, however, we have a much lower background rate of COVID infection

00:02:45.980 and cities and states have much more ability to balance how severe is the pandemic versus

00:02:51.960 how much do we want to reopen our economies.

00:02:54.980 Right.

00:02:55.160 And so if you want to think about it thematically, it's like last episode was how

00:02:58.680 they're bad at epidemiology, but this episode is how they're also bad at political science.

00:03:03.040 Well, to be clear, this is slightly deeper lore than we need, but I have a political

00:03:07.640 science degree, so I can say this stuff.

00:03:09.540 Yeah, this is why you're this is why you're very phobic.

00:03:12.160 These are my words.

00:03:13.140 These are our words.

00:03:14.360 I have to like cut this and put it into the previous episode because it seems like you're

00:03:18.120 like against political science as a field, which you kind of are, to be fair.

00:03:22.360 People don't understand that I know that this is a blow off major. 0.98

00:03:26.520 You can't fucking dick around with me and act like this is a real science. 0.99

00:03:30.600 This is like you're like, well, it would be embarrassing to just get a psychology degree. 1.00

00:03:35.580 So I'll get a political science degree.

00:03:37.420 So to get us back into the timeline, we talked about the initial lockdowns. We are now in sort of April, May of the lockdowns. Everyone has been at home for a while. People are starting to get a little antsy. And so pretty soon, April and May of 2020, you start getting these think tank reports coming out of like, OK, here's a plan for reopening.

00:03:56.960 Like different think tanks have different ideological orientations, different steps that they're proposing.

00:04:01.360 But there is actually like a fairly broad consensus at this point that like, yeah, there needs to be a path toward reopening.

00:04:07.420 And so in their chapter on this kind of reopening period, they quote people on various points at the political spectrum basically saying like, we can't do nothing and we can't stay locked down forever.

00:04:17.720 So we need to come up with some sort of medium plan that meets everybody's goals without completely destroying society.

00:04:22.880 And I had like almost completely forgotten about this.

00:04:26.080 But at this time, the sort of consensus view was that we needed some sort of regimen of

00:04:30.760 a test trace isolate that we can start to reopen the economy, but we need a testing

00:04:36.960 apparatus.

00:04:37.400 Everybody's getting tested all the time.

00:04:39.260 We have contact tracers so that when you test positive, you then stay home and people will

00:04:44.140 get in touch with people you've been in contact with and say, hey, somebody tested positive.

00:04:47.460 You need to test or you need to stay home, et cetera.

00:04:49.460 something that kind of allows people to begin going about their daily business,

00:04:54.020 but also like manages the pandemic. Like this is kind of the medium way that people were talking

00:04:59.980 about. So after quoting a bunch of other people talking about this test trace isolate system,

00:05:04.180 they then quote a post from Ezra Klein in April of 2020. So they say the most remarkable point

00:05:13.480 in Klein's analysis is that despite the almost unimaginable intrusiveness and severity of the

00:05:18.780 measures. He saw no alternative. And then they quote Ezra Klein at length. So here's their

00:05:27.020 excerpt from the Ezra Klein piece. All these plans say the same thing. There is no normal for the

00:05:32.020 foreseeable future. Until there's a vaccine, the United States either needs economically ruinous

00:05:37.120 levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing

00:05:42.100 apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness. This surveillance state thing he's

00:05:46.580 referring to there were plans at the time to launch an app, like a contact tracing app that

00:05:51.900 would monitor your location and would let you know things like, oh, hey, you were in a cafe

00:05:55.340 yesterday where somebody tested positive. So there's a lot of privacy concerns about the use

00:05:59.820 of this kind of digital surveillance technology to do contact tracing. You have visited the village

00:06:04.260 homosexual who's a known transmitter. In fact, that was the worst place you could have gone. 1.00

00:06:10.320 I want you to keep doing this, Peter, because that was a bonus episode. And so most people have no

00:06:14.300 idea like that was a shockingly homophobic thing of peter to say there's an extended bit about the

00:06:19.640 village homosexual in our bonus content explaining it pay up pay up if you want to hear it

00:06:24.720 peter's best homophobia the real artisanal homophobia you want to hear about a guy 0.99

00:06:31.360 fucking horses you want to hear about the village homosexual four dollars a month folks anytime you 0.99

00:06:36.480 hear peter say something problematic assume that it's an inside joke that's actually yeah fine if 1.00

00:06:40.720 you pay $4. You have to pay $4 for Peter not to be problematic. All right. Continuing. This is

00:06:45.060 Ezra Klein. Yeah. I don't want anyone to mistake my questions as an argument for surrendering to

00:06:48.980 the disease. As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do nothing argument is even less

00:06:54.020 plausible. It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans,

00:06:59.300 hospitalized tens of millions more and crush the health system while the rest of us go about our

00:07:03.700 daily economic and social business. That is, in my view, far less likely than the construction

00:07:08.440 of a huge digital surveillance state.

00:07:10.940 I care about my privacy,

00:07:12.160 but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.

00:07:14.800 So this was, I mean, there were lots of columns

00:07:16.440 similar to this coming out at the time 0.75

00:07:18.780 that were sort of like, yeah, this is going to suck, 0.89

00:07:21.480 but also like lockdowns suck.

00:07:23.460 Reopening would cause mass debt.

00:07:25.580 It's sort of like, there's no good option available to us.

00:07:27.860 Pretty reasonable way to look at the trade-offs, right?

00:07:29.880 Like either you have this like highly managed

00:07:32.720 sort of intrusive way of monitoring the spread,

00:07:36.380 or we let it rip and a lot of people die right this is basically somebody being an adult you

00:07:42.060 know there there are like little uh middle grounds you can find but like that's the basic dilemma 0.80

00:07:46.300 that we faced and that's why i fucking hate this debate because a lot of the a lot of the people

00:07:51.720 that want to retcon our mitigation efforts act again like there wasn't mass death on the other 0.81

00:07:58.800 side of it what's so weird about this chapter is that if you ignore their conclusions what it

00:08:04.520 actually is, is a chronicle of like all of the debate that was going on in the country about

00:08:09.260 this. Like, again, there's think tank reports coming out. Different governors have different

00:08:12.420 plans. The country was talking about the best way to do this. But then after they quote Ezra Klein,

00:08:19.260 they say, it's surprising that so few raised questions about the feasibility of the massive

00:08:24.360 regimes of nationwide testing and contact tracing that were being contemplated, let alone their

00:08:28.940 effectiveness in a free, diverse and individualistic country such as the United States.

00:08:33.640 So this is literally a prominent commentator talking about the feasibility and the cost

00:08:40.260 and the trade-offs of these plans.

00:08:41.920 Like you're literally quoting someone doing something and then you're like, no one was

00:08:44.800 doing this.

00:08:45.560 Right.

00:08:45.720 No one was talking about this.

00:08:47.180 This is a weird like reactionary centrist tendency we've talked about a lot recently,

00:08:52.720 which is a tendency to act as though debate that they disagree with is actually shutting

00:08:59.500 down debate, shutting out their side of the story.

00:09:02.000 And then they then specifically criticize Ezra Klein.

00:09:06.400 Klein, like most other commentators discussing the issues at the time,

00:09:10.080 was prepared to contemplate constructing and living in a dystopia

00:09:13.280 if it would extend the life of his mother and yours. 0.85

00:09:21.380 They're like, this worm values the life of his mother. 0.64

00:09:26.140 All this to protect human life? Disgusting. 1.00

00:09:29.340 What's next? 0.94

00:09:30.180 Are you going to cap the speed at which I can drive?

00:09:34.680 In the frenzied panic of March and April 2020, anything less smacked of surrender.

00:09:40.300 Klein recognized the plans would be mind-bogglingly difficult to implement and indeed might not

00:09:44.320 be workable at all.

00:09:45.560 But he accepted that the policies themselves were necessary and did not dwell on their

00:09:49.080 costs or likelihood of failure.

00:09:50.800 Again, they literally quoted him dwelling on the costs. 0.99

00:09:53.340 Holy shit. 0.97

00:09:53.860 Again, it's just like he didn't – because he didn't land in the place that I wanted him to land. 0.99

00:10:00.360 Exactly.

00:10:00.880 What he's doing is just like insufficient consideration.

00:10:04.880 Right.

00:10:05.100 Right.

00:10:05.440 If he had thought about it harder, he would have realized that I'm correct.

00:10:08.360 The other thing I really want to stress here is that they're saying he's fine with living in a dystopia if it would mean saving the life of his mother, which like most of us – it depends on the dystopia, right?

00:10:16.860 But also the dystopia that they're constructing here.

00:10:19.120 It's like an app.

00:10:19.780 Yeah. It's like a test, trace, isolate system, which like honestly would not have been that onerous. Like I get that there are privacy concerns. Those are real. But it's like, yeah, go about your business. Test yourself a couple times a week. If you test positive, stay home. That's not a dystopia.

00:10:34.680 The idea that the costs of like a tracing app, for example, that would give the government a lot of data about our location were sort of insufficiently considered feels a little bit ridiculous considering that never happened.

00:10:49.200 Yeah, we didn't do them.

00:10:50.520 Like, obviously, the powers that be decided that those costs were more significant than

00:10:56.820 the benefits.

00:10:58.240 Yeah.

00:10:58.560 And so they didn't do it.

00:10:59.840 So like you won this argument.

00:11:01.440 Yeah, exactly.

00:11:01.900 And here's your book complaining about how people weren't giving your side enough

00:11:07.300 consideration while the argument happened. 0.99

00:11:09.860 What are you fucking talking about? 0.99

00:11:11.100 Also, we know the reason for this. 1.00

00:11:12.340 Donald Trump put Jared Kushner in charge of building a testing apparatus in the United

00:11:17.140 States.

00:11:17.700 And like that never happened.

00:11:18.800 They were supposed to have like thousands of locations where you could like kind of drive through and get tested because there weren't like home tests available yet.

00:11:24.960 And only 78 of those ever opened.

00:11:27.480 Again, there are real failures in the pandemic.

00:11:29.820 But this book is not interested in actual failures.

00:11:32.080 With the exception of the masking and social distancing stuff, which I guess was too Orwellian for them.

00:11:37.700 Dystopia where you wear a mask at the grocery store.

00:11:40.100 Right.

00:11:40.760 Just like, OK, whatever.

00:11:42.780 From like summer 2020 onward, the anti-mitigation people won almost every debate.

00:11:49.440 Well, it depends on the state.

00:11:51.380 So this is actually what we're getting to.

00:11:52.520 I mean, America kind of did have a national experiment on like which measures work, right?

00:11:57.700 Because different states had very different approaches.

00:12:00.200 And so the next kind of phase of the pandemic that we're going to talk about is this period

00:12:04.340 from kind of June 2020 until roughly until the rollout of the vaccines, this kind of

00:12:08.980 post-lockdown pre-vaccine period where states had really different approaches. And I remember this

00:12:14.900 cycle where it was like, we would lock down for a while and then cases would go down and they'd be

00:12:18.640 like, it's safe to reopen. And then we'd reopen and then cases would go up and then we'd lock down

00:12:21.980 again. There was this kind of like zigzag approach throughout the rest of 2020. As I moved my hand

00:12:27.460 away from the stove, it's gotten a lot cooler. I will now begin to bring it back. That was

00:12:32.460 objectively one of the funniest parts of the pandemic that we just were like, before there

00:12:36.440 of vaccines, we were like, what if we tried it again? So we are going to listen to a clip of

00:12:40.920 the authors on The Daily, which is a podcast by The New York Times.

00:12:46.340 Where we began to see policy divergence is in the reopening process. Democratic-leaning states

00:12:53.060 maintained these stay-at-home orders two and a half times longer than Republican-leaning states.

00:13:00.140 Democratic-leaning states were slower to reopen schools, dramatically slower to reopen schools.

00:13:07.260 They maintained more stringent restrictions in terms of, you know, business closures and which businesses could reopen and when and on what timeline and whether you'd have to have outdoor dining or whether restaurants would be closed again in the winter of 2020.

00:13:22.000 So there were substantial policy differences between red states and blue states over the course of the pandemic.

00:13:28.600 And at the time that the vaccine rollout began, there was no difference between red states and blue states in their cumulative COVID mortality over the course of the crisis.

00:13:40.100 Can I ask you to linger on this period before the vaccines? Because from what you're saying, Frances, before the vaccines were introduced, states that had more and longer restrictive measures had the same more or less number of deaths as states that had less and shorter restrictive measures.

00:14:03.040 That's correct. This is what we can see as we look back.

00:14:06.260 We can see that there was a great deal of variation in how states responded,

00:14:09.940 but that variation doesn't correlate with variation in COVID outcomes as measured by mortality from the disease.

00:14:20.020 She's saying that the lockdown efforts, the additional extended lockdown efforts in blue states did not affect COVID mortality.

00:14:29.300 And in fact, the gap between red states and blue states is entirely, it seems she's implying, due to vaccine uptake.

00:14:36.360 This is the core of their argument that non-pharmaceutical interventions for COVID didn't work.

00:14:41.700 You basically have all of these blue states that did a ton of public health measures, things like closing schools, closing businesses, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates.

00:14:51.760 And you have these red states that didn't do any of that stuff or did it much more seldom than the blue states.

00:14:56.980 And yet at the end of the first year of the pandemic, states that did a lot of these things and states that did none of these things had the same number of deaths. 0.53

00:15:06.420 So what was the point of all that?

00:15:08.280 That's their argument.

00:15:09.360 Does that sound right to you, Peter?

00:15:10.960 What do you think?

00:15:11.740 I think that they're right and that you're just trying to give them credit where it's due.

00:15:16.640 And that this is finally the episode where you admit to our audience that you are a Republican who's been faking it.

00:15:23.180 The episode's actually over now.

00:15:24.520 It is true that if you look at broad overall cumulative death rates, roughly at the end of 2020, early 2021, when vaccines start rolling out, there isn't a difference between red states and blue states.

00:15:36.680 That is roughly correct.

00:15:38.800 However, what they do not get into is the specifics of the deaths and especially the timing of the deaths.

00:15:46.580 So, Peter, I am going to send you a graphic of your home state, New Jersey.

00:15:54.440 We're going to look at New Jersey's performance on mortality rates in the pandemic.

00:15:59.960 Uh-huh. Okay.

00:16:00.680 What are you saying? These are deaths in New Jersey.

00:16:02.220 A number of daily deaths in New Jersey with a giant spike in early 2020 and a smaller spike

00:16:12.160 in January 2021, smaller spike in January 2022.

00:16:19.280 So what is really remarkable, if you look at most of these blue states that they're comparing

00:16:22.960 to red states, especially in the Northeast, America had an early wave of COVID in March,

00:16:29.060 April of 2020, where around 50% of the deaths were in and around New York City. So if you look

00:16:36.100 at New Jersey, New Jersey as of 2024 has 26,000 deaths from COVID total. 13,000 of those, half,

00:16:44.880 were in the first two months of the pandemic. So if you're looking at cumulative death rates when

00:16:50.280 vaccines start to roll out in 2021, you are ignoring the fact that the virus arrived earlier

00:16:56.320 in the Northeast Corridor, so places like Boston, New York, got hit really hard in the first two

00:17:01.740 months of the pandemic and then managed the pandemic significantly better than red states.

00:17:06.760 What they're saying is basically like the pre-vaccine death rates were even. But what

00:17:12.460 they should be doing is at least in part looking at maybe just the latter portion of 2020 before

00:17:19.120 the vaccines across the states, right? They're essentially using this as an argument against

00:17:23.260 lockdown measures. However, we know that the reason why deaths were so high in the northeastern

00:17:28.460 corridor in the first two months of the pandemic was because they waited too long to lock down.

00:17:32.300 Right. That's not the failure of lockdowns. That's the fact that they didn't do lockdowns

00:17:36.920 until the virus was already everywhere. You know, the fundamental problem here is that you can't

00:17:41.660 compare death rates across places where there wasn't the same amount of spread, right? It was

00:17:48.480 spreading in New York City. The death rate was highest in New York City. It wasn't the result of

00:17:54.040 pre-existing policy in New York City. That's just where it spread. Maybe it was density or whatever,

00:18:00.040 but you then can't compare that to middle of nowhere in Nebraska.

00:18:04.020 Also, the policies in Nebraska were effective, and that's why Nebraska didn't have a big outbreak

00:18:08.320 in early 2020. At one point, they compare Idaho and Connecticut and say, well, at the start of

00:18:14.940 the rollout of the vaccines, they have roughly the same amount of COVID. But Idaho did not have

00:18:19.400 a meaningfully large number of people with COVID in March and April of 2020. The virus just arrived

00:18:25.280 later there and they had already locked down. Right. Their lockdown policies were effective

00:18:30.500 in Idaho. And once they stopped their lockdowns, they then had big waves of cases. The conclusion

00:18:36.460 that they're drawing is exactly the opposite of what the data indicates. You really can't compare

00:18:41.860 the first two months of the pandemic to the rest of the pandemic. 1.00

00:18:44.560 And you can't just do this broad red state, blue state shit. 0.97

00:18:46.720 Similar to the excess death data from Sweden, it's just a very inaccurate, sloppy data point 0.99

00:18:56.160 to be like, oh, red states and blue states, right?

00:18:58.800 What about the same state before and after lockdowns, right?

00:19:02.740 What about isolating different parts of the year, right?

00:19:06.260 Where there was different levels of spread that you just, you need to look at more data

00:19:10.600 points to be confident that lockdowns don't work, especially again, when like scientists who

00:19:16.180 understand the spread of disease say that mechanistically lockdowns should work.

00:19:21.180 It's also, again, a political science failure because we also know what happened during this

00:19:26.520 period. So as I mentioned, most states locked down in March. These were like pretty strict.

00:19:30.920 There wasn't a lot of partisan split. However, as early as March 24th, this is five days after

00:19:36.100 the first lockdown in California, Trump already starts saying, oh, we need to be open by Easter.

00:19:41.140 Easter was April 12th of that year. On April 17th, he starts publicly criticizing Gretchen

00:19:46.180 Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for having lockdown orders. And like there were already

00:19:50.900 starting to be protests against the lockdown orders. So on April 17th, he tweets all caps,

00:19:56.900 liberate Michigan. And this is an excerpt from Lawrence Wright's book, The Plague Year.

00:20:03.660 The whole political reality on the ground changed when Trump singled me out, Whitmer said.

00:20:08.100 Up until that point, I had pretty good support out of my legislature, which is totally Republican

00:20:12.140 controlled. And when that happened, they stopped extending the state of emergency. They started

00:20:15.780 suing me. They threatened to impeach me. Protesters not only continued to besiege the Capitol,

00:20:20.900 they showed up at the governor's mansion with assault weapons wearing tactical gear.

00:20:24.560 I called the leader of the Michigan Senate, Whitmer said. She left a message on his cell

00:20:28.120 phone. We need to bring the heat down, she said. I need your help. She told him that there had been

00:20:32.580 death threats against her and her family. He didn't even return my phone call, she said.

00:20:36.180 Researchers have looked into this. There's a huge spike in kind of medical freedom protests

00:20:40.740 and anti-lockdown movements almost immediately after Trump's tweet on April 17th. Like this is

00:20:46.560 when the kind of on-ramp to politicization begins. So here is another excerpt from Lawrence Wright's

00:20:54.180 book. On April 30th, thousands of protesters spurred on by Trump's tweets and Fox News

00:20:58.000 commentators, participated in Operation Gridlock surrounding the state capitol in Lansing and

00:21:02.860 demanding that restrictions be lifted. They carried Trump 2020 campaign signs and chanted

00:21:07.340 lock her up, meaning Whitmer, not Hillary Clinton. It's like lock her up. I'm afraid you'll have to 1.00

00:21:12.060 be more specific. We're a country that chants lock her up about female politicians frequently. 1.00

00:21:17.080 They had a Trump float and they were waving the Confederate flag, which in the state of Michigan 0.99

00:21:20.720 is not something you see very often, Whitmer said. She was called Hitler and hanged in effigy.

00:21:25.960 A number of the protesters armed with assault weapons stormed into the Capitol building, menacing state police who barred them from entering legislative chambers.

00:21:34.060 This went on week after week.

00:21:35.600 These moments, to be fair, were relatively fringe at the time.

00:21:38.780 Yeah.

00:21:38.940 Not very many people were on board with this.

00:21:40.780 But as often happens in American politics, things that start on the far right sort of start to trickle into more polite discourse.

00:21:49.160 And so by June, June of 2020, super early in the pandemic, you have 40 percent of Republicans saying that they're concerned about getting coronavirus compared to 80 percent of Democrats.

00:22:00.680 I remember seeing footage of protests where there are people being like, cough on me.

00:22:05.680 I want you to.

00:22:06.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:22:06.620 COVID parties.

00:22:07.380 That was like a real thing.

00:22:08.480 Yeah.

00:22:08.980 There's a super interesting article called Partisan Pandemic, How Partisanship and Public Health Concerns Affect Individual Social Mobility During COVID-19.

00:22:15.580 that tracks these surveys where they ask people, how many social events did you attend last week?

00:22:20.360 And as early as June of 2020, Republicans are attending three social events a week and Democrats

00:22:26.900 are attending 1.7. So very early, Republicans become less likely to wear masks. They become

00:22:33.060 less likely to restrict their mobility. There's also studies of like cell phones where they look

00:22:37.300 in red counties versus blue counties. Republicans are just like doing more stuff, even when there's

00:22:42.120 lockdowns. And this article notes that pretty early, as early as the summer, the best predictor

00:22:47.560 of the amount of activity that somebody is carrying out isn't how many cases are there in

00:22:51.380 their county. It's their partisan affiliation. So basically Republicans are moving around

00:22:54.920 regardless of how many cases there are. And Democrats are mostly locked down regardless

00:22:58.140 of how many cases there are. If you do not let me go to Chili's, I am going to suicide bomb the 0.93

00:23:02.700 governor. I mean, like literally. That was basically the median position of American 0.98

00:23:07.840 Republicans. And I found this fascinating article in New York Times from I believe it was July of

00:23:11.860 2020, where all these Republican states start like reopening their economies essentially

00:23:16.700 because they're like sick of being indoors, but like there's, they don't have control

00:23:21.080 of the virus.

00:23:21.740 So there's one where Arizona reopens and like in this article, they have graphs of cases

00:23:27.540 and Arizona is like a vertical line.

00:23:30.180 It's just like an explosion.

00:23:31.400 As soon as bars and restaurants are open, people go to bars and restaurants.

00:23:34.260 Would you rather die or not be able to get the triple dipper for two months?

00:23:38.120 so here is an excerpt from that new york times article when the government of harris county texas

00:23:45.360 which includes houston the country's fourth largest city mandated that residents wear masks

00:23:50.040 in public or risk a thousand dollar fine the state government blocked the rule texas lieutenant

00:23:54.340 governor dan patrick called the face mask mandate the ultimate government overreach

00:23:58.060 sure and representative dan cranshaw said it would lead to unjust tyranny eventually governor

00:24:04.360 Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona went even further, blocking cities and

00:24:09.140 counties from implementing any pandemic-related restriction more stringent than that required by

00:24:13.200 the state. This meant that when a video emerged of packed nightclubs in Phoenix full of people who

00:24:18.140 are not wearing masks, the mayor was unable to close or sanction the clubs or even require them

00:24:23.140 to force patrons to wear masks. Basically, very quickly, red state governors start calling all

00:24:28.240 these basic public health measures a form of government tyranny. They're banning cities from

00:24:33.020 taking their own measures. Again, political science. This was the political dynamic pretty

00:24:37.920 quickly. And so in an article called COVID-19 Mortality in the United States, it's been two

00:24:43.440 Americas from the start. They note that before May 30th of 2020, 56% of deaths were in the

00:24:50.700 Northeast. After that, 48% of deaths are in the South. And it says, since May 31st, 2020,

00:24:58.140 the South experienced COVID-19 mortality 26% higher than the national rate,

00:25:03.440 whereas the Northeast rate was 42% lower. So almost immediately, basically June 1st,

00:25:09.160 Northeastern states, blue states, start managing the pandemic much more effectively than red states.

00:25:14.540 And red states take a more lax approach, and they have death rates to match. It says 63%

00:25:20.860 of avoidable deaths occurred between June 2020 and February 2021, and 60% were in the South.

00:25:27.220 I feel like this is like an underappreciated aspect of the pandemic. 0.97

00:25:31.100 Red states did a much worse job. 0.94

00:25:34.160 The incredible part of this is that like New York City got its rates way, way, way, way

00:25:38.320 down to the point where it was below many rural areas, despite the fact that it's incredibly

00:25:44.900 densely populated.

00:25:46.340 I mean, like it just speaks to how obviously effective some of these basic mitigation efforts

00:25:51.660 are.

00:25:51.960 And like not only having a local and state government that is interested in mitigation,

00:25:56.840 but having people who are interested in mitigation completely changes the game.

00:26:01.260 Also, even looking at states can make you think that the divide is less big than it is. So I

00:26:06.220 looked up like by population, different states and different cities. So San Francisco has roughly

00:26:11.340 the same population as North Dakota, 800,000 people. San Francisco throughout the entire

00:26:15.840 pandemic, San Francisco had 1300 COVID deaths. North Dakota has 2400. So not quite double,

00:26:21.620 but pretty close. And the population of San Francisco is slightly older than North Dakota.

00:26:26.240 I also looked at King County, where I live, which is basically the greater Seattle area.

00:26:30.440 We have like 2.2 million people.

00:26:32.140 We have roughly the same number of people as Mississippi.

00:26:34.600 So Seattle area versus Mississippi.

00:26:36.700 We had 3,900 deaths.

00:26:38.880 They had 13,400 deaths.

00:26:41.080 So they're 30% bigger than us as far as population, and they have 300% more deaths.

00:26:45.460 That's wild.

00:26:45.920 This divide is really stark.

00:26:47.800 And we're not allowed to make fun of them because it comes across as cosmopolitan elitism.

00:26:52.480 I know.

00:26:52.700 Half of American politics is just making fun of coastal cities as like out of touch. 1.00

00:26:58.200 But if we do the same, we're immediately clocked as elite pieces of shit. 1.00

00:27:02.760 Right wingers understand punching up when they're talking shit about New York City. 1.00

00:27:06.120 When they say New York City is like depraved value, they get it. 0.99

00:27:09.260 Oh, you're punching down.

00:27:10.280 We have to talk about why the death rates diverge so much.

00:27:15.280 Here is in COVID's wake.

00:27:18.540 Despite a proliferation of studies, there remains a dearth of settled science about

00:27:22.800 whether and how the restrictions employed by governments in the United States and around

00:27:26.000 the world affected pandemic outcomes. So here's their review of the evidence.

00:27:30.840 Much of the existing scholarship was produced while the pandemic was still ongoing before

00:27:34.320 it was possible to ascertain how well the measures worked over the full course of the

00:27:37.720 pandemic. But there is simply no sign at present that scholarship is tending toward a consensus

00:27:42.360 assessment. A systematic review of the accumulated literature available through March 2023 conducted

00:27:48.340 by the UK's Health Security Agency,

00:27:51.500 concludes unsatisfyingly, quote,

00:27:53.880 despite the high number of primary studies,

00:27:56.320 reviews, and opinion pieces published on this topic,

00:27:58.760 there are still many uncertainties and unknowns

00:28:00.740 about the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions,

00:28:04.280 and it remains critical to develop a robust evidence base

00:28:07.360 to inform pandemic preparedness and future response.

00:28:10.420 Many uncertainties and unknowns.

00:28:12.400 Yeah, that doesn't really, okay.

00:28:13.760 Yeah, the quote doesn't actually make the argument.

00:28:16.540 Yeah, not at all.

00:28:17.980 Not at all.

00:28:18.340 This reminds me of their interpretation of the WHO data, the WHO stuff, where it's just sort of like, yeah, this is like basic uncertainty in science stuff.

00:28:31.480 And you're taking it as like nothing's been proven.

00:28:33.760 No one could know either way.

00:28:35.140 Yeah, like, oh, you admit it.

00:28:36.240 They're just not used to the language that you frequently see in scientific papers.

00:28:40.820 Yeah.

00:28:41.020 The July 2023 report produced by Scotland's official COVID inquiry concluded similarly, quote,

00:28:47.160 there is insufficient evidence in 2020, or alternatively, no evidence, unquote, to support

00:28:51.960 most pandemic measures, including face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings, lockdowns,

00:28:57.280 social distancing, and test trace and isolate measures. And quote, the evidence base has not

00:29:02.740 yet changed materially in the intervening three years. In other words, we did not know in 2020

00:29:08.700 what policies would work to manage the pandemic. And years later, we still do not know what benefits

00:29:13.780 these policies achieved. So there's no consensus about whether all this masking, lockdown, garbage

00:29:19.080 had any effect on the pandemic. That's the argument. Yeah. Again, this just at just at a

00:29:24.940 glance feels like they are taking some like pretty basic scientific caveats and trying to drive a

00:29:30.740 truck through them. My first reaction to this was like, this is a book by American scholars. They

00:29:35.600 almost exclusively have talked about the American context. Why are they citing a UK government

00:29:40.780 report and a random inquiry from Scotland. Do the fat bastard voice, but make them talk about 0.99

00:29:45.840 COVID. So first of all, this document in the UK is not relevant to the point that they're making 0.98

00:29:51.880 here because it is a rapid mapping review. This is in the title. It is simply a list of every study

00:29:59.800 that has been carried out on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the UK.

00:30:04.760 Nice. And the reason it says there is much uncertainty

00:30:07.940 is because not that many studies have been done on the UK.

00:30:11.760 The second reason why it's irrelevant is because it's a rapid mapping.

00:30:14.840 It's literally just a list of sources.

00:30:17.260 It's like a step in the process.

00:30:18.980 They're like, first, we're going to identify all of the studies that have been done.

00:30:22.860 Later, we will look at all of their conclusions and synthesize them.

00:30:26.540 That never happened.

00:30:27.680 This is literally just the part of the process

00:30:30.100 where they identify all of the studies and do like a little typology.

00:30:33.580 So this is literally just a list of sources that does not include anything international

00:30:39.140 and does not include the United States.

00:30:40.940 It's so fucking weird to cite this in your book.

00:30:44.220 And it's just like boilerplate thing of like, there's many uncertainties on this topic. 0.99

00:30:47.740 You can read about like nuclear physics and they'll say the same fucking thing. 0.78

00:30:50.500 Like there's much we don't know. 0.98

00:30:52.260 This is just how academics talk.

00:30:54.100 Right.

00:30:54.340 Well, depends on your field.

00:30:57.120 If you're in political science, perhaps not.

00:30:59.140 Every political science, every. 0.99

00:31:00.420 i love giving you more opportunities to dunk on political scientists look i i read i read a shit

00:31:06.540 load of political science literature and i it's hard to make comparisons across fields that i

00:31:11.900 don't read a lot of but there is a decent chunk of the literature in political science where like

00:31:18.020 they just draw these like really really overwrought conclusions like yeah where you're just like

00:31:22.980 they are clearly interested in telling a story with their with their research whereas like in

00:31:29.940 a lot of the harder sciences, you'll see the caveats, like all over the place to the point

00:31:36.420 where you're like, what is even the point of this research? They're not even willing to say

00:31:39.900 anything about it. So the second thing they cite here is this document from the Scottish

00:31:44.640 COVID inquiry. And I was like, okay, I should probably look this up. Like, why are they

00:31:48.420 citing this? What was the deal with like the Scottish COVID inquiry? I type in the name of

00:31:51.860 this author, and then Scotland, COVID, something, something in Google. The first thing I get back

00:31:56.740 is a BBC article called Scottish COVID Inquiry, Families Condemn Shameful First Day. So this

00:32:03.180 document is produced by a guy named Ashley Croft, who is kind of an infamous like anti-vax adjacent

00:32:09.140 person. Hell yeah. He wrote an article in 2019 saying that it wasn't proven that MMR vaccines

00:32:14.300 don't cause autism. And then in this document, he says it remains unclear as to whether or not

00:32:20.460 COVID-19 vaccination has resulted in fewer deaths from COVID-19. And so then I ended up doing a

00:32:28.160 couple weeks of research on the most effective interventions for COVID. This is actually

00:32:32.360 something that I've been interested in. What matters for handling the pandemic? And they're

00:32:37.840 right that it was quite murky in 2020 and 2021. It's still somewhat murky now simply because

00:32:42.940 countries did so many non-pharmaceutical interventions at once. And countries have

00:32:46.660 different kind of political structures and different like age and comorbidity structures.

00:32:50.600 It's relatively difficult. But on the other hand, there's a vast literature on what worked to handle

00:32:56.780 the pandemic. Like they construct this weird uncertainty in the book as if like they are the

00:33:02.020 only ones who are interested. Like, hey, what explains different outcomes for a global once

00:33:08.460 in a century pandemic? We finally asked the question. It's like, dude, there's so many

00:33:12.920 studies on this, you can really only scratch the surface. I also think there's some challenges in

00:33:17.820 establishing beyond a reasonable doubt precisely what worked for the pandemic. There's a really

00:33:22.480 interesting article by Ed Yong at the end of 2020, where he's talking about this scientific

00:33:27.640 uncertainty of like, do we know what works? And he says, the countries that fared better against

00:33:32.620 COVID-19 didn't follow a universal playbook. Many used masks widely. New Zealand didn't.

00:33:37.580 Many tested extensively. Japan didn't. Many had science-minded leaders who acted early.

00:33:41.880 Hong Kong didn't. Many were small islands. Some were large and continental like Germany.

00:33:46.540 Each nation succeeded because it did enough things right. And this is something you find 0.98

00:33:50.520 in the reviews too, that like all of these non-pharmaceutical interventions weren't perfect,

00:33:55.280 right? Masks don't prevent 100% of infections. Lockdowns don't prevent it. Vaccines don't even

00:33:59.500 prevent 100% of infections or deaths, right? All of these things have holes in them and different

00:34:04.140 countries use different mixes. I really liked this metaphor of like Swiss cheese, where every

00:34:09.420 slice of Swiss cheese has a hole in it. But if you stack four or five or six Swiss cheese slices

00:34:14.720 up against each other, it will provide an impenetrable barrier.

00:34:17.940 Thank you. Thank you for a sandwich-based metaphor.

00:34:21.480 Now you're going to be distracted. So I tried to look at as many meta-analyses as I could,

00:34:25.780 including meta-analyses of the US experience. And the academic consensus is that lockdown orders

00:34:32.100 were like one of the most effective interventions. So one of the meta-analyses said social distancing

00:34:37.840 measures play an important role in COVID-19 prevention. A study of 340 cities in China

00:34:42.820 predicted that a three-week earlier intervention of travel restrictions and isolations could have

00:34:47.540 reduced COVID-19 cases by 99%, while the cases would have been 67 times higher without

00:34:52.860 interventions. Similar results have been estimated in the US. One study found that imposing stay-at-home

00:34:57.660 orders one week earlier could have prevented 61% of infections and 55% of deaths by 3rd of May

00:35:03.980 2020. It's just not true that like there's all this scientific debate and uncertainty about

00:35:10.200 whether stay-at-home orders work. The thing that is interesting about stay-at-home orders and kind

00:35:15.080 of most of the measures writ large is that it is true that they became much less effective over

00:35:19.880 time. And some studies, I found this really interesting meta-analyses where it's like

00:35:24.100 three studies found that lockdowns were the most effective measure and three studies found that

00:35:28.220 lockdowns were the least effective measure. And the reason for that is basically compliance.

00:35:32.320 that over time, like in March of 2020, a lot of us were scared. We didn't know what was going on.

00:35:37.080 People really did stay home in March of 2020. But as partisanship took over, there was pandemic

00:35:41.820 fatigue. Some version of this took place in every country. And right-wing agitators were able to

00:35:46.800 ride this to a lot of pandemic skepticism. But people got really sick of lockdowns. And so over

00:35:53.580 time, lockdowns became less effective. It is true that lockdowns were not universally effective

00:35:59.600 every single place that they were tried. But that's not necessarily evidence about the

00:36:04.320 effectiveness of lockdowns. It's evidence about compliance with lockdowns. Mechanically,

00:36:09.120 reducing the contacts between people prevents the spread of food disease. It's like, yes.

00:36:14.300 This is what drives me nuts about this is like, you do believe in germ theory, right?

00:36:18.880 Right.

00:36:19.200 Because staying away from other people, it's basically foolproof. I mean, like,

00:36:24.860 I understand that there's a little more nuance than this, where it's sort of like,

00:36:28.160 there must be some contact with other people. And, you know, it reaches a threshold where maybe

00:36:35.360 lockdowns start losing efficacy. But there's something running through this analysis when

00:36:41.300 it comes to like, do masks work? Does social distancing work? Oh, do lockdowns work? There's

00:36:46.200 no, there's just no evidence either way. It's just like, we understand how disease spreads

00:36:51.960 and have for well over a century.

00:36:55.100 So are you advocating for the rejection of germ theory 1.00

00:37:00.520 or are you just fucking jerking yourself off 1.00

00:37:03.700 with this contrarian bullshit? 1.00

00:37:05.420 And this is also the failure 0.99

00:37:06.860 of the actual political science analysis in the book

00:37:09.140 because at numerous points in the book,

00:37:10.600 when they're talking about how lockdowns don't work,

00:37:12.880 they're like, people don't wanna be stuck inside.

00:37:15.100 And it's like, oh, so we're talking about compliance.

00:37:17.480 And we agree that we're talking about compliance

00:37:19.260 and there are factors which reduce compliance

00:37:21.660 which are political. Right. Like being a Republican. Yeah. There's not like biological

00:37:25.600 reasons why it's lockdown stopped working. Right. And part of the reason, maybe not a big part in

00:37:32.200 this particular case, but like part of the reason that compliance is such an issue is because you 0.98

00:37:39.020 have people in the political center hemming and hawing, talking out of their ass about topics 0.94

00:37:45.700 they don't really understand, like this. 0.96

00:37:48.360 And like that lends credence to the people who are like,

00:37:52.380 well, maybe we should just reopen, right?

00:37:54.560 Don't really know whether this stuff works.

00:37:57.200 I think the clearest example of this is masks,

00:37:59.400 where we know that at the individual level,

00:38:01.540 masks work to prevent like viruses

00:38:03.820 from coming into and out of your mouth and nose.

00:38:06.280 Like that's not really up for debate.

00:38:08.100 Yeah.

00:38:08.440 Like this is why healthcare workers,

00:38:10.880 like some healthcare workers got COVID

00:38:11.980 and died during that period,

00:38:12.780 but far fewer than you'd think, right?

00:38:14.160 And if masks didn't work, we would have had like half the healthcare workers in America 0.98

00:38:17.880 would have fucking died, right? 0.95

00:38:19.140 But like on an individual level, masks work, right? 0.99

00:38:22.260 And 95s work better than the surgical masks, which work better than cloths.

00:38:24.820 Basically, any covering that prevents like things from coming out of your mouth and nose

00:38:28.740 does work.

00:38:30.340 The question was not whether masks work.

00:38:31.840 The question was whether mask mandates work.

00:38:34.260 And the effectiveness of mask mandates is almost entirely about compliance.

00:38:38.060 This is the thing where I can't get past this.

00:38:40.480 Like part of the reason that compliance starts to erode is people like this who publicly undermine the case for the efficacy of masks.

00:38:51.220 Right. Part of it is like, yeah, they're uncomfortable or whatever.

00:38:53.120 But part of it is like people are saying masks don't fucking work. 0.95

00:38:55.380 People believe what they are told. 0.96

00:38:57.160 And I don't like I don't I don't want to overstate it because I don't think that like reactionary centrists were a big part of the anti lockdown blowback in 2020.

00:39:06.600 Yeah, I think it was mostly the far right.

00:39:07.880 For sure. But it's interesting, the conversations that we have and the conversations that we don't have. Right. Yeah. The idea that masks were like a step too far is something that gets widespread play. Yeah. Throughout the government, despite the fact that it's fucking ridiculous. Right. And also Fauci downplaying masks in March of 2020, which I think is a genuine blunder. But also like within two weeks, the CDC and Fauci had corrected that and recommended masks and continued to recommend masks for the rest of the

00:39:37.860 pandemic, whereas Trump openly questioned masks constantly, didn't wear a mask in public,

00:39:43.180 told people he at one point told a reporter to take off a mask before asking a question in a

00:39:47.460 press conference. Trump denigrated the effectiveness of masks throughout the pandemic. I get why

00:39:52.660 Fauci deserves criticism for that two-week period, but where were the forces of mask

00:39:58.460 questioning coming from? Those forces were overwhelmingly on the right.

00:40:02.300 And from people who aren't fucking scientists. 0.98

00:40:05.780 This is the thing is like I am not interested in a debate between Anthony Fauci and a guy who eats dead animals that he finds on the street. 0.99

00:40:21.920 The other measure that we need to talk about is school closures.

00:40:26.460 We're going to spend a little bit more time on this just because it's become like such a big political thing now.

00:40:32.060 And I want to sort of put some basic facts on the table.

00:40:35.780 So this is not an excerpt from the book, but this is an excerpt from an interview with Stephen Macedo in a magazine called Public Discourse.

00:40:45.840 And he's talking about public health experts, the kind of people that were advising lockdowns in 2020.

00:40:49.980 They saw closing schools as the most important thing to do for younger children in particular because they saw children as people that couldn't possibly socially distance.

00:40:57.920 You can't socially distance a seven-year-old or eight-year-old.

00:41:00.420 So you're going to have to keep them isolated at home because they can't play with their friends outside.

00:41:04.080 They're going to spread disease.

00:41:05.780 So in these mathematical models, children are treated entirely as vectors of disease.

00:41:10.340 There's no attention given to the cost of imposing these isolation measures on children.

00:41:14.320 The interests of young people were systematically discounted.

00:41:16.800 And the suggestion has been made, which we basically agree with in the book, that COVID policy was made by and for older members of the laptop class.

00:41:24.840 People who could work from home on their computers and have food delivered to them while essential workers processed their food, made their food, delivered their food, and so on.

00:41:32.420 I'm skipping it, but they have a whole thing about how, like, Democrats' approach was unfair to essential workers because, like, essential workers had to work and they were given no protections.

00:41:43.600 It's like, oh, so you do want mask mandates.

00:41:45.280 Exactly.

00:41:45.900 Wait.

00:41:46.840 I'm like, I'm not covering because it's, like, unfair to even talk about it. 0.99

00:41:49.580 It's like you don't even know what your own fucking argument is. 0.53

00:41:51.340 There's an element of that I agree with in the general sense that, like, A, the definition of essential worker was too broad, right? 0.98

00:41:58.320 It's a third of the population.

00:41:59.440 Yeah.

00:41:59.580 And then B, we were knowingly putting that population at risk.

00:42:03.920 Yeah.

00:42:04.120 I agree that like our exploitation as a society of the working classes was laid bare during

00:42:12.220 COVID.

00:42:13.120 But this argument is like, one, no one knows if masks work.

00:42:18.580 Yeah.

00:42:18.940 And two, these poor essential workers were put at risk because they had to work.

00:42:22.620 It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:42:23.700 You just told me that lockdowns don't matter.

00:42:25.400 Yeah, exactly.

00:42:25.840 you were the one saying that we should have just had way more infection and death among essential

00:42:29.680 workers. What are we doing here? These people were living free. Yeah, they're living the dream.

00:42:33.880 Yeah, they didn't have to do lockdowns. They're blessed. It was us. It was actually the laptop

00:42:38.780 class who was so oppressed. We weren't allowed to go anywhere. According to your analysis,

00:42:42.940 this is nonsense. And like we're about to talk about this, so I don't want to get too far into

00:42:48.240 it. But the idea that no one thought about the cost of lockdowns on children is insane.

00:42:54.840 There were reports from like UNICEF and shit. 0.98

00:42:57.500 It was like so, there was so much societal concern about this. 0.96

00:43:01.160 As someone who didn't have kids at the time and doesn't have kids, I thought it was exhausting.

00:43:05.540 I was like, who cares about these guys?

00:43:07.420 I'm not a kid anymore.

00:43:08.620 Let's talk about me.

00:43:09.680 What about the impact on 30 something yuppies who live in New York City?

00:43:14.060 That's the, those are the people we should be focusing on.

00:43:16.660 Older members of the laptop class.

00:43:18.520 You're an older member of the laptop class.

00:43:20.640 You're like, no one is managing me.

00:43:22.020 Yeah, no.

00:43:22.380 I mean, you kind of are an older member of the laptop class. 1.00

00:43:24.360 Shut the fuck up. 0.99

00:43:25.880 I will also cop to this too. 1.00

00:43:27.560 No, I'm not.

00:43:28.160 We all are.

00:43:28.580 No, we're like the youngest members of the laptop class.

00:43:31.240 Anyone younger than us doesn't use a laptop at all.

00:43:33.800 They're just on their phones.

00:43:36.120 It keeps happening.

00:43:37.460 People talk about these things and instead of just being like, I think that X side should

00:43:42.700 have won this debate and they didn't, they're like, discussion was shut down.

00:43:47.780 There's also this, I mean, there's this sort of metastasizing argument now that like Democrats 0.99

00:43:53.380 fucked up. Schools were closed for too long in blue states and blue cities. And as a result, 0.98

00:43:58.200 we have this like egregious learning loss. And this is because our entire media apparatus is

00:44:03.140 governed by like the right and far right interests. This is now seen as like one of the signal

00:44:08.800 failures of the pandemic response was like, we kept schools closed too long. So just to get the

00:44:14.420 sort of timeline and sequence of events on the record, basically school closures started in

00:44:19.320 mid-March. We then have this massive wave of death in March, April, and May of 2020. Schools then go

00:44:27.500 on summer break in June of 2020. Even people who are pushing this like school should have reopened

00:44:32.660 earlier argument, even they don't really argue that schools should have reopened in spring of

00:44:36.660 2020. I think everyone kind of accepts that like, yeah, they were going to have to close for that

00:44:39.780 period. Over the course of the summer, this is when a lot of the debate took place, like should

00:44:44.040 schools reopen in the fall? Should they not? Some states did reopen in 2020. So Florida famously

00:44:49.120 reopened all of its schools in 2020. As of November of 2020, 36% of schools were in-person.

00:44:55.740 Those were overwhelmingly in red states. 45% of schools were using hybrid models and 19%

00:45:00.980 of schools were remote. It isn't the case that no schools reopened. It was only one in five schools

00:45:06.840 were fully remote at that time. Despite what he says here about essential workers weren't taken

00:45:11.220 care of, the people who were pushing against school reopening, a lot of it was teachers and

00:45:17.320 teachers unions like of course the great villain of conservatives like i have teachers unions but

00:45:21.020 like a lot of teachers did not want to get infected with covid at work i don't know i don't know that

00:45:26.300 i think that's like that unreasonable as far as that's part of the job all right i don't want to

00:45:32.240 get i don't want to get sick there was no vaccine available there was like oh you like you like 0.96

00:45:36.880 teaching kids get ready get ready to risk your fucking life so a lot of these school reopenings 0.98

00:45:41.300 were actually even at the time considered fairly experimental we didn't really know 0.99

00:45:45.620 how much COVID could spread through schools. We knew that children were at low risk of severe

00:45:51.040 outcomes, but we didn't know how much kids going back to school would end up spreading it through

00:45:55.740 the community. So there were, you know, schools did different mitigation measures. Most schools

00:45:58.880 at that time had masking when they were in person. Many of them only had like half the class

00:46:02.780 attending. A lot of parents actually voluntarily kept their kids home even when schools were open

00:46:08.000 because like they had an older relative, right? Or they had an essential worker. People were sort

00:46:12.000 of figuring it out in the fall of 2020. And another thing to know about fall of 2020 is that

00:46:17.220 very quickly cases started to rise again. So I don't think that's because of the school openings

00:46:23.960 necessarily. It's mostly because people traveled for Thanksgiving. People thought like the pandemic

00:46:28.760 is over. Like we survived the first wave. But then that winter, we had the worst wave of death

00:46:33.500 of the entire pandemic. That's peaked at 26,000 a week in December, January of 2020, 2021.

00:46:40.140 That huge wave of death is also when the biggest disparity between red and blue states was happening.

00:46:47.960 So in blue states, 21% of schools were open.

00:46:51.240 And in red states, 66% of schools were open in January of 2021.

00:46:55.760 After that wave, it's then sort of March 2021 by the time that subsides.

00:47:00.700 By May of 2021, 53% of schools are open and 46% are hybrid and only 1% are fully remote.

00:47:08.600 So by May of 2021, most schools are in some way in person.

00:47:13.180 But then we start getting the Delta wave.

00:47:15.940 The Delta wave comes in July of 2021 and it lasts into the school year.

00:47:20.740 So deaths were still really elevated in September of 2021 when kids were going back.

00:47:25.900 So a lot of people were really nervous about sending kids back to school because we knew

00:47:29.060 caseloads were extremely high.

00:47:31.060 Healthcare systems were swamped.

00:47:32.180 It was like, I don't know that this is like all that responsible.

00:47:35.200 I remember this.

00:47:35.820 I remember that there was a really big debate about going back in the fall of 2021.

00:47:40.780 In September of 2021, we were still having 15,000 deaths a week.

00:47:45.100 But we were also post-vaccine, right?

00:47:47.240 That's another thing to know is that kids could not get vaccinated until November of

00:47:51.120 2021, kind of like all kids.

00:47:53.080 But most of the teachers were vaccinated by that point.

00:47:56.120 And then as soon as kids went back to school, we never really got a lull between the Delta

00:48:00.880 and Omicron waves.

00:48:02.640 Deaths went down to 8,000 a week.

00:48:04.120 That's as low as they went between those two waves.

00:48:06.240 And then they spiked to 21,000 a week that January.

00:48:09.460 By the time the Omicron wave is done is when deaths for the first time go below 3,000 per

00:48:15.080 week and they've stayed lower since and they've kind of been trending downward ever since.

00:48:18.800 I think there's a real debate here and we'll get more into the data.

00:48:21.160 But like, I think if you think schools should have reopened, I do think that you should

00:48:25.740 specify exactly when.

00:48:28.100 Because schools were reopening in the context of huge waves of cases and deaths.

00:48:32.880 Yeah. And that's the thing about the schools should have reopened argument. The deadliest wave was in the winter of 2020. It wasn't long after that, that the vast majority of schools in this country were open.

00:48:49.380 Yeah. So if you're arguing for earlier school openings, what you're arguing for is essentially for schools to have ignored the pandemic entirely. Right. Right. It seems to me like what happened, largely speaking, across the country, if you could like map it, map a really broad trend was red state schools were opening in the fall of 2020.

00:49:12.280 2020 as the vaccine rollout hit teachers, blue states gave way. And by the end of that school

00:49:19.540 year, almost every school in the country was open to some degree.

00:49:22.580 I do think it's important to sort of talk about the cost of keeping schools closed.

00:49:27.200 They're like all this stuff about learning loss is like totally true. Like kids really got fucked 0.99

00:49:31.300 over in the pandemic. And as I've mentioned before, like one of my closest friends in Seattle, 0.98

00:49:35.840 the guy who named our show, Peter, my little pun machine friend, is a high school teacher at a

00:49:40.340 public district in seattle so i got like an up-close view of what it was like to be a teacher 0.87

00:49:45.360 at that time and like it sucked shit it was really hard they were not given any support 0.97

00:49:49.540 the way that he puts it is always i pretended to teach and they pretended to learn yeah right 0.97

00:49:54.020 for a lot especially for younger kids like distance learning was a total joke and that's

00:49:57.640 a shame because you go into teaching because it's an easy job because the pay is great hours are

00:50:05.860 great. Everybody loves you. Let's lean into just getting canceled for this one. Just being

00:50:11.080 extremely dismissive about teachers and parents. People who are highlighting the costs of keeping

00:50:16.020 school closed are totally correct. The learning losses were really profound. There's also been

00:50:21.060 a doubling of chronic absenteeism, which appears to still be getting worse. It used to be around

00:50:26.540 15% of kids were missing more than one in 10 school days, and now it's about 30%. It's not

00:50:32.140 totally clear what's driving that, but it's really bad. Maybe that's because everyone who is powerful

00:50:37.220 and rich now is the dumbest motherfucker I've ever seen. And so kids are like, what am I doing? 1.00

00:50:41.580 Why am I, if I'm eight years old, if I'm eight years old right now, I'm like, I'm not doing this.

00:50:46.320 Are you kidding me? This is a waste of my time. It would be ridiculous to deny that there are

00:50:49.420 costs of keeping schools closed for two years. Like obviously you need to acknowledge that like

00:50:53.200 there are real costs of this. On the other hand, as you said, there are huge costs of reopening

00:50:57.440 schools. So one thing I was not expecting when I started looking into this was if you read a lot

00:51:02.760 of the national and international meta-analyses of the most effective non-pharmaceutical interventions,

00:51:08.640 a lot of them find that school closing was the most effective. There's one in the US that says

00:51:13.500 each additional day from a county's first case until the state-ordered school closure

00:51:17.280 is related to a 1.5 to 2.4% higher cumulative death per capita. Another one says school closure

00:51:23.860 is the most significant intervention in reducing the reproduction number closely followed by stay

00:51:28.160 at home orders. You know, I could keep going like a lot of reviews have found this and it has become

00:51:33.680 an article of faith among people who talk about school closures all the time that like we don't

00:51:37.920 even know if it was preventing cases. But like the evidence appears to indicate that school closures

00:51:42.900 do matter for spreading coronavirus. It seems pretty obvious that this is just the conflation

00:51:47.200 of two things one is that kids very rarely die from covid which is true and two kids don't spread

00:51:54.820 covid which is false right they're just wildly false kids spread covid more because they are

00:52:00.820 disgusting yeah because they're little petri dishes have you ever just looked at a five-year-old just

00:52:05.540 snot all over their face and it's just like yeah that's that's what five-year-olds look like dude 0.99

00:52:09.000 when i lived in copenhagen i got fucking head lice from a colleague whose kid got it at daycare and 0.96

00:52:14.300 then we shared a chair and there was like a blanket over the chair. And then I leaned my 0.98

00:52:18.100 head back on it and I had fucking head lice. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this. When I was in 0.99

00:52:21.760 Copenhagen a few years ago, I stayed in an Airbnb that was directly across from an elementary school.

00:52:28.900 And at 7.30 a.m., the sound of a thousand screaming six-year-olds woke me up. And so

00:52:38.840 what I'm saying to you is fuck kids in Copenhagen. Are you literally railing? It's like the sound of 1.00

00:52:45.940 the delight of children. You're like, shut up. I would rather see one 34 year old sleep an hour 0.99

00:52:52.820 than a thousand children enjoy themselves. But then if we're also, if we're talking about the

00:52:59.720 cost of reopening, it's not just that it spreads COVID like through schools. There's also, I mean,

00:53:05.080 kids do die. There were more than a hundred thousand kids were also hospitalized with COVID

00:53:08.140 during the pandemic getting hospitalized with covid fucking sucks it's awful yeah and also 0.98

00:53:12.120 like we also know that like long covid exists for kids it's hard to get the prevalence rates 0.98

00:53:16.060 because they seem to differ quite a bit with different symptoms but like many children have

00:53:20.100 long covid from getting infected numerous times and then we also have 1300 teachers that died of

00:53:25.980 covid during the pandemic it's also like it's not like not in the interest of teachers to be like

00:53:32.160 hey i don't want to get this illness it's just weird that like teachers unions are like now cast

00:53:36.780 as this big villain when like yeah i also did not want to get covid during fucking covid no we've

00:53:41.380 joked about it but it's so funny that teachers were basically treated as if they had taken a job 0.98

00:53:47.120 where they implicitly offered up their lives yeah what the fuck oh you wanted to teach well then 0.98

00:53:54.080 get ready to die so that my kid doesn't lose six months of in-person learning it's it's it's just 0.99

00:54:00.780 ridiculous and that was one of the most frustrating parts of the pandemic is like all of these 0.68

00:54:05.980 contexts where people are like, well, we should reopen this, we should reopen that. And like built 0.85

00:54:09.700 into that is someone who gets thrown into the wood chipper, right? Someone whose risk is way

00:54:14.940 higher than everyone else's. Like if I say, hey, I want to go to Target, that's an hour of my time

00:54:21.900 where like maybe I wear a mask and keep my distance and don't do anything too risky. But

00:54:26.500 there's 50 people working there all day and then the next day and the next day, right? And like

00:54:32.080 those people are put in extremely high risk situations. And that's the trade off, right?

00:54:37.820 So like when I'm just like, I want things to reopen so that I can go fucking shopping or 0.97

00:54:41.800 whatever. What I'm actually saying is like, I want thousands and thousands and thousands of 0.86

00:54:46.400 people put at high risk so that I can do a little bit of low risk shopping.

00:54:50.500 The other like kind of chilling thing about this and disqualifying thing about this bizarre

00:54:54.580 argument is that if you look now, right, the entire discourse is based around like, well,

00:54:59.240 red states reopened schools and blue states didn't. And that was a mistake. But if you look

00:55:03.520 now, red state schools do not have less learning loss than blue states. Blue states and red states

00:55:09.200 both experienced huge learning loss. I've seen some like attempts from these kind of center

00:55:14.600 right blogs to be like, well, if you look at the NAEP results, the scores are higher in red states

00:55:20.160 than blue states because they didn't close. But for fourth grade math, red states have an average

00:55:26.060 score of 236 and blue states have an average score of 234. Eighth grade math, red states,

00:55:32.220 it's 271, blue states, it's 270. These are minuscule differences.

00:55:37.860 Was there a notable change, though, that blue states go down further than red states?

00:55:41.200 Blue states are typically at a higher baseline. So they experienced slightly more learning loss.

00:55:46.660 So the learning loss in blue states was so severe that their kids are now as dumb 1.00

00:55:51.520 as the median red state child. 0.99

00:55:54.860 It just, I mean,

00:55:56.280 if we're supposed to see this

00:55:58.100 as like this obvious blunder

00:56:00.320 by blue state Democrats, right? 0.99

00:56:02.180 This obvious huge fuck up. 0.98

00:56:04.580 Sorry, shouldn't there just be results 0.99

00:56:06.320 that clearly show that red states

00:56:07.960 are doing better?

00:56:09.060 We don't actually have any evidence of this.

00:56:12.240 There was an interesting article

00:56:13.200 comparing Florida and California

00:56:15.440 and, you know, Florida famously reopened schools.

00:56:17.820 California famously didn't.

00:56:19.560 Yeah.

00:56:19.640 It says, neither Florida nor California saw a statistically significant change in fourth grade reading performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2019 and 2022.

00:56:29.060 Florida's eighth graders performed worse on the reading exam in 2022 than in 2019, while California's eighth graders' performance was unchanged.

00:56:35.760 Both states performed worse on the fourth and eighth grade math assessments.

00:56:38.720 So it's sort of like it's kind of a wash.

00:56:40.940 Like it just isn't obvious looking at places that closed schools and places that didn't, that one policy approach was better.

00:56:47.300 Right. 0.53

00:56:47.460 And also keep in mind, there are far more deaths in red states.

00:56:51.520 They had 60% of their schools open during the worst wave of mass death of the entire pandemic.

00:56:56.980 So they paid for those one or two extra points on their NAEP scores, right?

00:57:05.480 Even if you think that was the correct decision for these tiny results, yeah, they paid for it in teacher deaths, in long COVID for kids, in outbreaks.

00:57:14.820 Like they made that trade off.

00:57:16.920 And it's it's weird to act like that isn't a trade off.

00:57:19.440 I will say this about this argument, the school closure argument, at least the sacrifice on the closure side is real so that you can have a debate like, is this very real learning loss worth X number of deaths or whatever?

00:57:34.620 Right.

00:57:34.900 Yeah.

00:57:35.180 Whatever you think about that debate, at least you can have it.

00:57:37.980 Whereas like the mask stuff is like, I don't want to wear it.

00:57:40.980 I don't want to wear it.

00:57:42.660 OK, so final chapter of this of this story is we now have to talk about vaccination.

00:57:51.860 OK.

00:57:52.140 So, I mean, as you heard in that clip from The Daily, like they do admit that death rates are significantly higher in red states than blue states post vaccine.

00:57:59.840 Right. That's when you see this like much more noticeable divergence.

00:58:02.980 Right. Right. Right. So they believe in the efficacy of vaccines, these reactionary centrists.

00:58:07.100 Although, you know, this is a 400 page book.

00:58:09.440 this entire issue of like the divergence of death rates is handled in six paragraphs at the end of

00:58:16.040 the book which we which we know for a fact that no one reads no one reads the ends of books and

00:58:21.420 please authors anyone listening to this you don't understand how crazy the ends of books are

00:58:26.400 the ends of a non-fiction book could contain anything in the world and no one will notice 0.51

00:58:32.920 like yeah this is where malcolm gladwell is just like by the way i don't think koreans are good at 0.77

00:58:36.920 flying. That was going to be my example. That's the Koreans can't fly planes section of the book. 1.00

00:58:42.240 For all anyone knows, the end of every single nonfiction book is a chapter about Koreans

00:58:47.340 not being able to fly planes. So in this six paragraph treatment of post-vaccination death

00:58:54.240 rates, they say states varied widely in COVID mortality over the course of the pandemic from

00:58:58.900 a low of 124 COVID deaths per 100,000 population in Hawaii to a high of 450 per 100,000 in Arizona.

00:59:06.780 Figure 5.8 displays the relationship between COVID mortality and vaccination rates,

00:59:10.780 revealing just what one would expect.

00:59:12.240 The least vaccinated state experienced fully 1.6 times as much COVID mortality as the most

00:59:17.300 vaccinated state.

00:59:18.480 Basic facts, right?

00:59:19.820 They then get to their interpretation of these basic facts.

00:59:24.320 Peter?

00:59:25.040 This is where political science majors really struggle.

00:59:26.680 This is where it's all, in the politics part, in explaining the politics.

00:59:32.300 Given the market differences between Republicans and Democrats' level of vaccine hesitancy,

00:59:36.220 evident in public opinion polls, the state-level differences between red and blue states in their

00:59:40.220 vaccine uptake stem in large part from their residents' personal beliefs and attitudes.

00:59:44.480 Their personal beliefs and attitudes. And then they go into that in like slightly more detail,

00:59:49.060 and then a bit later they say this. The bottom line is that variation in COVID vaccine uptake

00:59:53.620 probably accounts for much of the difference in COVID mortality between Republican and Democratic

00:59:57.400 states. However, state policy played only a modest role in driving that variation. The preferences

01:00:02.460 and voluntary actions of state residents, which themselves strongly correlate with partisanship,

01:00:06.780 largely explain the differences in vaccination rates across red and blue states.

01:00:10.160 So Republicans are just anti-vaxxers.

01:00:12.140 What are you going to do?

01:00:13.000 Policy had nothing to do with it.

01:00:13.960 I understand what they're saying.

01:00:14.900 They're saying that like, even if these red states had made vaccines widely available, 0.60

01:00:19.920 and I'm sure some did. 0.83

01:00:21.520 That is true that their vaccine rollouts were roughly as effective as the vaccine rollouts

01:00:24.940 in people's states.

01:00:25.880 But here's like, here's the thing is publicly stating that everything should reopen or

01:00:32.160 that vaccines might be the product of an evil international conspiracy, that is policy.

01:00:38.620 It's not legislation.

01:00:40.000 It's not regulation, but it's policy.

01:00:41.840 And also, like, to just have two paragraphs here where you're like, Republicans hate vaccines,

01:00:46.960 and then you move on.

01:00:48.220 It's like, sorry, did politicians play any role in that?

01:00:51.220 Like, what are the factors?

01:00:52.240 It's the output of a massive propaganda campaign that the entire Republican Party participated

01:00:58.820 in.

01:00:59.260 You can't just be like, yeah, they made their choices.

01:01:01.880 Why? Why did they make those choices? Why did everyone in the Republican Party do a fucking

01:01:06.540 180 on vaccines in the span of a couple years? Can you explain that? Like, wouldn't that be 0.99

01:01:12.260 maybe helpful to dive into? Whatever. You know, Plandemic, that insane documentary that me and

01:01:17.140 Aubrey watched for maintenance phase came out in like May of 2020. Misinformation was spreading

01:01:22.500 extremely early in the pandemic. And if you read actual accounts of the drivers of anti-vax beliefs,

01:01:28.440 A really foundational belief was this idea that like the fatality rates are really low

01:01:33.420 and it's basically just a flu and all this stuff about, you know, you died with COVID

01:01:37.560 versus you died of COVID and the deaths are inflated.

01:01:40.240 This belief that essentially COVID is a nothing burger that we don't need to worry about.

01:01:45.480 And public health is essentially a conspiracy against conservatives.

01:01:49.720 All of this was an excuse to shut down debate, an excuse to do lockdowns.

01:01:53.780 This was fundamentally illegitimate.

01:01:55.360 These things started floating around very early in the pandemic.

01:01:59.540 And again, they sort of slowly gained steam.

01:02:02.760 And, you know, Donald Trump was retweeting like QAnon influencers. 0.99

01:02:06.640 He repeated that deranged shit about doctors getting more money for saying it's a COVID 0.99

01:02:11.960 death and inflating COVID deaths. 0.99

01:02:13.520 Like Trump was spreading these conspiracy theories.

01:02:16.180 My favorite part about Trump then and now is that he tweets like he's not the president.

01:02:20.560 Yeah.

01:02:21.080 He's like, there's a conspiracy to do X, Y, and Z.

01:02:24.060 It's like, you are in charge of the federal government, dude.

01:02:26.620 What are you talking about?

01:02:27.300 And so, I mean, as early as December of 2020, 25% of Republicans said that they were definitely

01:02:33.780 not getting the vaccine versus 5% of Democrats.

01:02:37.220 Republicans were five times more likely to be anti-vaxxers, even before we really had

01:02:41.240 the meaningful rollout of the vaccine.

01:02:43.700 By kind of the end of the vaccine rollout, October 2021, 90% of Democrats had gotten

01:02:48.820 vaccinated versus 61% of Republicans.

01:02:51.600 This was really, like, decisive in death rates. 0.97

01:02:54.940 Like, it really matters.

01:02:56.380 The other really decisive thing was the inauguration of Joe Biden, right?

01:03:00.720 It's kind of easy to forget now, but, like, 2020 was also an election year.

01:03:04.020 And we have, you know, January 6th, 2021, we have all that psychosis.

01:03:07.940 And then Biden takes over.

01:03:09.580 And there's a really interesting New York Times article about how the sort of stop the

01:03:13.520 steal organizers, all this, like, election fraud, these psychos.

01:03:16.720 Yeah, they pivoted.

01:03:17.540 Yeah, they all pivoted to doing, quote unquote, medical freedom, anti-vax stuff.

01:03:22.060 You start getting anti-vax protests as early as March of 2021.

01:03:25.680 And then it's just like galloping under its own initiative.

01:03:27.920 So by the time it's available to the general public in most states, these people have been

01:03:32.600 awash in anti-vax propaganda for like months to years.

01:03:36.360 Right.

01:03:36.480 You can quibble about whether that counts as policy.

01:03:38.700 But like there's an article in May of 2021 that reports that only 45 percent of House

01:03:45.440 Republicans were vaccinated versus 100% of House Democrats. Like this was coming from the top.

01:03:50.420 There were internal meetings within the Republican Party where they decided that

01:03:56.040 they were going to message a certain way about this. And the propaganda that you saw emanating

01:04:01.080 from them during the early pandemic was the result of those discussions. If you don't want

01:04:07.780 to consider that policy, if you're doing this like fine line where policies are either legislation or

01:04:14.100 regulations, right? Fine. But you're still not confronting the fundamental problem,

01:04:20.700 the fundamental issue here. And in fact, you're getting it backwards because the whole point of

01:04:25.180 a book like this is that like the left, generally speaking, should have taken the arguments coming

01:04:31.260 from the right more seriously. And in fact, those arguments had some credence to them.

01:04:35.600 But the opposite is true. The actual reality is that the arguments coming from the right

01:04:41.500 were conspiratorial nonsense and should have been not just ignored, but shamed even more

01:04:49.800 aggressively than they were. And anyone associated with them should be considered unserious. And we

01:04:56.780 should be thinking in the future, not about how to take the right more seriously on this stuff,

01:05:03.380 but how to box them out of public policymaking because they are unhinged, because they are

01:05:09.640 all unwell right because they reject science out of hand that is like what we should be taking

01:05:16.120 into like the next public crisis or whatever not some sort of like wishy-washy we should uh we 0.99

01:05:23.380 should be you know partnering with them a little more sort of bullshit that's the fucking opposite 0.99

01:05:28.200 of what you should be taking away from this era we had a hyper incompetent republican president 0.99

01:05:33.680 who didn't really do anything to manage the virus we then have all this political propaganda

01:05:38.300 starting this rolling snowball throughout 2020, and then it peaks when they become an opposition

01:05:43.580 party. They have to be against whatever the president is doing, and so they seize on vaccine

01:05:48.340 mandates, vaccine passports. All this stuff is like government tyranny. I know that's a boring

01:05:52.600 explanation, but it's also really fucking obvious if you remember what was going on. 0.96

01:05:55.960 That basic pitch, the American right, lost their minds. That is the definitive story of American 0.63

01:06:02.940 politics over the span of the last 20 years. And it was vastly accelerated by COVID, right?

01:06:11.040 And if you're going to write a book about COVID along these lines, that's probably what should

01:06:16.640 be your central focus. But for whatever reason, these folks understand, I guess, that they're

01:06:24.160 pitching to a liberal audience, right? Like right-wingers aren't really reading this book.

01:06:28.240 They're reading books about how Anthony Fauci did all of this by hand from a secret lair

01:06:34.900 somewhere, right?

01:06:36.200 So you're pitching your book to libs that like edge toward the center, maybe are a little

01:06:43.020 bit right leaning even.

01:06:44.720 That feels more transgressive among the audience that it's being pitched to.

01:06:49.720 But it's not just that you're missing the forest for the trees. 0.99

01:06:52.640 It's that you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. 0.98

01:06:55.140 You're taking the wrong lesson, like the exact wrong lesson from the pandemic. 0.99

01:06:59.100 Right. 0.99

01:06:59.300 And also in a way that fucking harms people. 0.98

01:07:01.720 Like if you look at the pandemic as a whole, counties that voted for Trump have three times 0.98

01:07:06.600 the death rate of counties that voted for Biden in 2020.

01:07:09.880 Brookings estimates the number of preventable deaths as 800,000. 0.98

01:07:14.680 Some of that's also like blue states also fucked up too. 0.90

01:07:16.540 Like that isn't just red states, but those deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated in 0.96

01:07:20.300 red states.

01:07:21.220 And also this is only going to get worse.

01:07:22.660 One of the most chilling things I found doing the research for this was a Kaiser Family Foundation survey from January 2025 that found that 40% of Republicans now say it's probably or definitely true that more people have died from the COVID vaccine than the COVID virus.

01:07:37.720 That's 40% of Republicans.

01:07:39.020 That's up from 25% two years ago. 0.99

01:07:41.660 The idea that now is the time to start thinking about, like, the ways in which we should concede to the right on this shit. 0.99

01:07:50.880 It's nuts from a policy perspective, incorrect from a political perspective, just batshit fucking insane. 1.00

01:07:58.820 Yeah. And again, like, look, congrats. 0.96

01:08:01.420 OK, the head of HHS eats roadkill and has a fucking word worm in his brain. 1.00

01:08:07.160 It's like, congrats. Congrats on all your success, guys. 1.00

01:08:09.420 Great. Yeah. You guys won.

01:08:10.660 If a pandemic hits now, they're not going to do fucking anything. 0.99

01:08:13.980 They're going to let it rip. 0.99

01:08:16.360 So I imagine you think that's fine.

01:08:19.520 And in fact, maybe even better in ways that liberals won't concede. 0.98

01:08:23.980 There won't be school closures next time, so don't fucking worry about it. 0.96

01:08:26.400 You know what I mean? 0.95

01:08:26.940 And also, I mean, keep in mind, this was published by University of Princeton Press.

01:08:31.200 These people are academics at an elite institution.

01:08:34.880 They were featured on The Daily and PBS.

01:08:37.140 Yes, there is an elite consensus that the need to question, quote unquote, liberal groupthink

01:08:43.020 is so powerful that it outweighs any consideration of the actual reality, right?

01:08:48.480 The entire premise of this book is wrong.

01:08:51.420 None of the producers of The Daily, nobody like thought to check.

01:08:54.740 Hey, can we maybe talk to an epidemiologist?

01:08:56.520 Is it true that everyone in the field doesn't know if lockdowns and masks work?

01:09:01.100 Is that true? 0.84

01:09:02.220 Nobody thought to fucking check because all you have to do is say the magic words. 0.99

01:09:06.320 oh, both sides have extremists. Both sides made mistakes. You then get invited onto prestigious 0.98

01:09:12.020 shows. You then get credibility. It's really important to have a conversation about this

01:09:17.080 right now. But that conversation, as usual, is being led by dipshits who don't know what they're 0.99

01:09:22.180 talking about and who are just fundamentally fucking wrong. It's exhausting. I'll say it 1.00

01:09:27.780 again. You have political scientists writing books about what's basically virology and telling us

01:09:36.060 that we took the recommendations of public health officials who are in fact experts in this stuff

01:09:41.580 a little too seriously i like how you say political scientists as a slur no it's like

01:09:45.760 these political scientists unless someone calls you one

01:09:49.620 then i can reflect it back that's what you told me about the f slur at which point i

01:09:58.000 happily told you that i've been called should we call it the ps slur

01:10:03.000 I'll see you next time.

If Books Could Kill - June 19, 2025

＂In Covid's Wake＂ Part 2： Wrong About The Right

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