The Empirical Lens and Covid

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Hi there.

Welcome to all of our listeners.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

He is a scholar, columnist, essayist on politics and culture, and I must say, a little bit of an unwitting provocateur of the left.

This is our weekend edition, and this weekend we're going to look at in depth at COVID.

So this is our COVID special and hoping maybe to ask a few questions about the ancients and medical information in our ancient Greek culture, maybe Romans.

But first, let's take a break for a few messages.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, you know, I have a question before we start.

I mean, I've heard people say you have a photographic memory, but I think what's most striking

about what you do is your skills at argument.

And I was wondering if you're not.

A letterician rather than an orator, you're accusing me of being.

Yeah, and I was wondering if you could explain your skills.

A rator is somebody who's paid to make the bad argument, or sophistes is a make the bad argument good and vice versa.

Yeah, but I was wondering if you had a little bit of discussion or get us to understand your skills at argument, because they're certainly well-honed.

Well, if you read Longinus on style or you read Cicero de Oratore on the orator or any of these things, there's certain tropes that you should master.

And one is to anticipate criticism.

So the difference between a rator and an orator is the following.

The rator uses rhetorical fallacies.

So praetoretrio.

So I'm debating you right now, Sammy.

And I'm going to quote almost directly from Demosthenes.

De Corona.

So Sammy, I'm going to debate you, and you're wrong, but I'm not going to mention the fact that your mother committed prostitution in an outhouse in a cemetery.

That's of no relevance.

That's pretty raiding.

Or, you know what I'm saying?

But anticipation of criticism is, let's see, I know that here's my argument.

And I know that if I were that person,

they would try to attack me here.

So, if I'm trying to justify that the raid was improper to the Trump, right?

Yeah.

Then they were going to say, nuclear secrets.

And I said, as for the argument that it's nuclear secrets,

then why wasn't it raided earlier on?

If it was such immediacy, after all, if Trump had the nuclear codes.

or hypersonic missile delivery systems sitting in an unsecured basement, of course you'd want it out.

But it wasn't, was it?

So you anticipate criticism of your opponent.

Do you put that first in your speech?

No, you don't.

You got to do that first.

You make your argumentation,

your peroration, your pro-oration.

You start out with, you always try to go from the general, and you can get into the particular.

You always want to use laitotes

or self-deprecation or deliberate understatement.

So you don't say,

I'm here to speak to you as a gifted orator.

You say, I'm here to speak to you with some skill in oratory.

Or

you try to downplay, as Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address.

He said, we cannot consecrate, we cannot dedicate.

Or you say, Pericles, it would not be fair to the noble dead of Athens that their legacy or their estimation in your eyes should hinge upon my ability or inability to speak well.

So you try to downplay.

Your own skills.

expectations.

That's very important.

When I give a talk, and I have to give a lot of them, but I'm going to kind kind of retire from it, I think,

after all of my self-introspection from this long COVID layoff.

One thing you try to do is you say to yourself, I'm speaking to 500 people.

What would be my attitude if I was in the audience listening to me?

Because I am a critical, kind of an unfair listener sometimes.

And my answer would be:

I will feel cheated if you speak less than 25 minutes, And I will feel bored silly if you speak more than 45.

I will feel cheated if you read off a list.

If you're just going to read it off, I could get it on the internet.

Why don't you just stay home and read it?

So I want you to speak as if you're speaking to me in your living room.

That's hard to do because you have to memorize it.

And then you have to, as you get older, it's harder to remember.

You have to have reference in your mind.

I'm going to go from this point and this point instantaneously.

And you can't be distracted by people in the audience that say is snoring next to you or checking his email right in front of your face as you speak to people.

So it's, it takes a long, long time and you can't get nervous.

So I used to be in my 20s and 30s and 40s when I did it very nervous.

And then you have to get an attitude that you just tune everything out.

And you were to just pick a particular person in the audience that you're speaking directly to.

And you don't worry about anybody else.

Yeah.

Okay.

If anybody hears this background noise as if there's an impending nuclear explosion, it's because I'm sitting on my barn in the mid an almond orchard and they have shaken the trees

and they've swept them into a row and now they've got this monstrous pickup machine.

And you would know it that the moment I start, because we have irregular rows around the barn, that is shorter ones and ones that are hard to turn because of buildings, they did the entire grove.

And as soon as I came in here, they're trying to do the ones right around where I'm speaking.

So we're going to have a little background noise for five or ten minutes.

There's a cardinal rule in farming.

You never, never,

never

go out to a man on a tractor and say, pretty please, I'm...

broadcasting in my nice little studio.

Can you get out of your filthy, dirty tractor at at 100 degrees and just make a little detour for my benefit?

Can't do that.

You're not going to do that.

No.

Okay.

So

I would like to ask you.

So I'm innocent of the charge of being a retor.

Okay.

Yeah.

You're an orator, then.

I'm an orator somewhat.

Our excellence.

All right.

So I thought before we got into COVID, you might say a few words about where our medical knowledge, understanding, method actually comes from.

Well,

it comes from where everything comes from, and that is the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries in classical Greece when you have the first enlightenment.

What do we mean by that fancy word enlightenment?

We just meant that people began to explain natural phenomenon according to a system of reason rather than Zeus or the gods.

In other words, when they saw lightning,

they didn't say Zeus is thunderbolt anymore.

They said there must be a natural phenomenon that does that.

Or when they saw, to quote Lucretius, when you walked by and a statue that you touched, everybody touched his hand, pretty soon the hand got worn and it was smaller and smaller.

There must have been molecules that were rubbed off rather than the god being angry at you or you being angry at the god.

So

that system, then the Hippocratic system,

and it's evident in Thucydides' classical description of the Athenian plague in book two of his history of the Peloponnesian War.

And what is it?

It's empiricism.

So when you are confronted with a medical challenge as a doctor, you don't just put them in the temple of Asclepius and pray, you know, have them fast or take a narcotic or hallucinic and then maybe the snake comes in or et cetera, et cetera, the god.

You do the opposite.

You say, I want to look at the symptoms and I want to catalog the symptoms and see if they are similar, identical, not at all like prior symptoms that have led to certain maladies.

Once you've got the symptoms, then you offer a

diagnosis, G-N-O from Nosco in Greek.

You

try to add the symptoms together based on your knowledge of prior patients and you come up and say, this is tuberculosis, per tussis in Latin.

This is malaria.

Okay.

And then once you have a diagnosis, then you offer a therapy.

And your therapy is based on your own skill as a physician and what has worked in the past, or what in theory would work in the present based on knowledge of past

medicines and maladies.

And then once you've given that, then you can offer a prognosis.

That is,

this is what's going to likely happen to the patient if they follow the therapy, i.e., if there's a big tumor and it's sticking out of their forehead, they are going to die no matter what I do.

If it's a stomach complaint from eating something bad, then maybe I can find an anecdote and the person will live.

But it's based on prior accumulated knowledge that the doctor, the Yatros,

has.

And so

that was a breakthrough and it it applied to everything from astronomy versus astrology to biology to everything aristotle really in his natural science works um

and the metaphysics etc really mastered that scientific method yeah

that was stunning because once you can do that then the whole world opens up to you and you can do almost anything because you're not you're not blinded by superstition.

Yeah,

go ahead.

Oh, did the Romans add anything to what the Greeks knew?

Absolutely.

Galen's medical treatises are more sophisticated than the Hippocratic corpus.

And I'm just taking one example because

I live on a farm, but if you look at Columella

or the Elder Cato,

or the whole corpus of Latin

Vero,

agronomy, it's so sophisticated about how to farm trees and vines.

I mean, it's not much different than 1890 before the industrial, it's like pre-industrial revolution, about as sophisticated as you could get.

And we know from

ancient records that the production of wheat and barley per acre was not that much different in antiquity than it was, say, in 1820 or 30.

It wasn't till the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and machines that that we really got in mass irrigation that we got great production.

So they were very sophisticated.

The Romans were, you know, that's kind of a truism, but they were much more

practical.

So they gave us

three-layered roads that are in existence today.

Or they were engineering aqueducts that were much more sophisticated than the Greeks.

Or the Legion is much more complex and versatile and lethal than the phalanx, as we know from Livian Polybius' description at Sinicepali and other battles like Pydna, where the two collided.

So they, but they based their entire

expansion and complexity of science based on the Greeks' discovery.

That's why they worship the Greeks.

I mean, it's sort of...

It's sort of like the Japanese, the Romans were sort of like the Japanese.

They were very confident people who were not at all bothered when they found cultures that had more advanced particular fields of inquiry or science or accomplishment.

And then they just block, stock, and barrel, absorbed them, and tried to improve them.

And so when the West opened up Japan in the 19th century, the Japanese said, oh my gosh, we are so backward.

And they will be able to come in here anytime I want.

So we're going to send a quarter million people in the end of the 19th century to Britain to learn nautical engineering, 100,000 to France and Germany to learn sophisticated land warfare.

And by 1904, 1905, they destroyed the Russian fleet.

And in World War I, they were patrolling the Mediterranean with sophisticated.

And by 1939, the Japanese were making the best torpedo and the best destroyer in the world.

And if you said to them, well, wait a minute, the torpedo wasn't your idea, nor was the destroyer.

And they'd say, sorry, we don't care whose idea it was.

We stole it and we made it better.

And we don't have any apologies.

And we'll steal all we want from you.

And maybe we'll even steal the scientific methods.

So

today, when you look at a Honda or a Lexus or, you know, a Toyota, there are innovations in it that may exceed those in Europe, the United States.

It's a very admirable culture.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we better turn to COVID and talk about, I know that you've been applying that that empirical method because you're suffering from long COVID.

Yes, I'm my own.

And you've been reading, yeah, you've been reading excessively scientific papers on COVID.

So what are, let's just go with your reflections.

I'll just tell you the three questions I have.

What do we know about the causes now?

What do we know about the cure?

And what do we know about policy would be the obvious questions.

Yes, well, we know, I think it's beyond dispute.

We had our interview with Stephen Quay, and we know that the duplicit, there's a reason why Anthony Fauci is retiring at the end of the year.

And the Senate now has the unredacted messages.

They know what Peter Dasek, they know the phony lancet, they know what the Chinese are doing.

It was an engineered virus.

And it apparently had an ability to mutate and to be infectious, maybe even to disrupt the immune system that was unusual in nature.

And Stephen Kway went into detail about that.

I think he's absolutely convincing.

And we know that

it was originally a respiratory virus or an upper respiratory virus.

Everybody understands that, but it had an ability,

even more so than the flu or other viral illnesses, the cold, to invoke a hyperimmune response.

That is a

cycotine storm.

It causes excessive inflammation.

So that's all

in the proper domain now of medical knowledge.

And we know that there are off-label drugs that have an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant properties.

And some of them are very steroids and everything from singular

to antihistamines to some cancer drugs that in trial and error and some blind studies have some efficiency.

The problem is

that Our artificial intelligence computer searches says this is what the COVID does empirically.

So let's search every single drug known to man on a computer and find out at the very intricate, detailed scientific level what would counteract these abnormal immune essays that we're finding.

And they come up with maybe 50 to 60 drugs.

And then the problem is in vivo and in vitro, it works.

in the laboratory, but does it kill a person to take it at the dose necessary?

So that's what they're trying to do.

Now,

there's a great divide.

I'm just, I want to remind the audience, I'm not a doctor.

I'm not advocating any therapy.

My diagnosis may be, it's just as an observer, I'm not a scientist.

So what I'm suggesting is as an observer, there's a divide now.

And the divide is on the following.

The scientific establishment says, we don't know yet.

We're researching what caused the COVID phenomenon to find an effective therapy and one for the minority of patients that have a long COVID

sequential disease that follows it.

And

we are going to give you therapy in the university.

So if you come to a long COVID center, we're going to send you to an immunologist.

We're going to send you to a cardiologist.

We're going to send you to a rheumatologist.

We're going to send you to an immunologist.

And this cluster of experts then will treat the symptoms because

we don't have the knowledge of what's causing all of it.

We don't know exactly why this particular virus or the remnants of this virus are provoking

this storm.

And

they're going to do a lot of very extensive tests, and they're going to maybe once in a while give you an experimental off-label drug.

The other side says we're frontline doctors.

And if we know that a drug is not toxic at at a particular dose and can be used safely with another drug,

or we know that a supplement, quercetin or French pine bark or PEA, whatever the anti-inflammatory supplement is, even though it's quite weak compared to

a pharmaceutical, then we're going to do our best to mitigate the inflammation.

And that's, but we're not going to have

double blind study.

We don't have time.

We We don't have the money.

So you have thousands of freelancing doctors that are trying to treat COVID.

And you can come up with ivermedsin and hydroxychloroquine that tend to be discredited in the eyes of the scientific community.

Or you can come in with, say,

taking Zyrtec and Singulair.

And the scientific community says, yes, that has.

So that's the tension.

Where there's an agreement is that

it's a hyperimmune response or a hyperimmune condition, and there's disagreement.

One school says the problem is that the immune system is weakened by its inability to eradicate COVID quickly, and what reappears are EBV, Epstein-Barr virus, to take one example.

So there's a remergence of a virus that causes people to have problems getting over it, and therefore they might want to try old antivirals that clear their system when their immune system needs help.

Or, second,

there are people who say, No, no, no, no, no, it's people that have a prior trigger immune system.

Maybe it's not even diagnosed, they have a histamine problem, they have mastocytosis, they have hyperallergies, they have terrible asthma, but they're hyperimmune.

And what this weird disease does is it triggers it, and then their prior inflammatory state goes crazy.

Or there's another group that says, no, maybe they didn't clear the original virus, or maybe there's spikes out there.

It's not a

reactivated virus.

It's not a hyper, just idiosyncratic hyperimmune.

It's that this virus spike protein or elements of it are not eradicated.

And that's very important to know the cause, because if you don't know the cause, you don't know the therapy.

So for the latter third exegesis, if you think

there is an there are remnants that are causing the inflammation, then you have to decide: are they infectious remnants or just particles?

If they're just particles, they don't do any damage and calm down the immune system.

I guess it was a steroid or an anti-inflammatory.

If you think that they're actual viral particles that are infectious, then you have to use the acute phase COVID methodology to kill it.

Same thing with if you think it's a reactivated virus, then you have to kill the virus.

And if you think it's just, you know, autoimmune and

your immune system does this with the flu or with vaccinations in general, then you want to slowly, you know, calm it down when you don't have a fear of reinfection because it's not being the infectious material is gone.

And so that's what the big argument is.

And then there's this, I think we

go

just one last observation in this segment.

I think as an observer and an amateur and a citizen that we erred by putting such great emphasis on the vaccinations when viruses are very hard to vaccinate against permanently.

And we were sold this idea that once you got a Moderna or once you got a Pfizer, then you were home free, 94%.

But the problem was that we neglected therapeutics therapeutics and we had a whole arsenal of prior off-label and old drugs and new drugs coming out.

That if we had just had a Marshall plan, I think we could have saved a lot more people.

But that's an independent judgment without medical expertise.

But I wish we had erred as a citizen on the side of treating people very quickly.

Yeah, let's, Victor, let's go ahead and, oh, sorry.

Yeah, to stop the inflammation.

That probably,

I mean, that sounds like a good course to pursue.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come right back.

And then we'll talk some more about COVID and especially long COVID, I think we want to turn to.

We'll be right back.

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We're back.

And Victor, I know I'm sorry I cut you off there.

You were on to the cures for it and that our policy kind of mistakenly went on a heavy emphasis of vaccinations rather than a whole panoply of

not just vaccination, but also, you know, palliatives to

keep the virus from going stronger and stronger once you did catch it.

But go ahead and finish.

I think that the point is that

once you trigger the

inflammatory process, it can do damage.

Your own body can start to disrupt your heart rhythm or swelling around the heart sac, or you can have permanent scarring of the pulmonary system, or you can have inflammation in the brain that can damage your hearing or your sight even.

So you want to stop the inflammation as quickly as possible.

I think the old idea that for some people who have problems with an overactive immune system or they're not clearing the virus quickly enough, the idea was let it run its course.

But I think now people, the consensus as I understand it, is

you've got to stop it.

Then the big controversy comes in is it there are people who have no symptoms or people have a day or two symptoms.

I had Delta.

I think I got it on September 10th of last year on a Friday.

I'd had my two Moderna vaccinations, had 101 temperature.

I said to myself, I'm in big trouble.

I'm teaching intensive classes at Hillsdale.

I'm in bed on a Saturday morning.

I tested weekly.

I had one of those antigen tests that shows the weak line that you have COVID.

And I took a lot of stuff that a friendly doctor had suggested might be.

of value.

I won't tell you anybody because I don't want to advocate things.

It was not

hydroxytoric when arriving medicine, put it that way.

And by Monday morning, I had no fever and I was teaching and I had tested that morning negative and I tested negative the next two days.

So I thought, you know, my immune system, I have a prior immune problem.

I've had it for 10 years.

So I thought it doesn't matter.

So when I got COVID,

same, I had very ill.

high temperature, just like I did with the second Moderna shot.

I said, it's no problem.

It's just your immune system.

I said to myself, calm down.

Who cares if you have a fever, you have a headache?

And then I had to go back east.

I had to go to Israel.

So for 30 days, more or less, I was on the road.

And each day, something weird happened.

I don't know what it was.

I got less and less energy.

I could not sleep.

I lost my taste.

I lost my smell.

I lost some of my hearing.

My feet became on fire.

I had pins and needles in my leg.

It's kind of like a whiner, but it was obviously

a hyperimmune response.

And I think it had something to do with a condition I've had that's an inability to deal with histamine.

And I didn't know that until I ended up in the ER twice, and they did some tests and put me on a diet and a drug that stops it.

But I think the argument now with long COVID is

there is a percentage of people who have had acute COVID, and they don't know who ends up with long COVID.

It can be people who are very sick in the hospital.

It can be people who got cleared in five days.

It can people have no symptom

or it can be somebody innately frail or very robust.

One of the weird things about long COVID is it seems to have a lot of people who are marathon runners, triathletes, great shape.

or pre-existing allergies.

I think there are a lot of theories out there, and one of them is that people

that had some hyperimmune indications before they get COVID, that is they have terrible asthma, they have terrible allergies, they have mastocytosis, they have mast cell intolerance, they have rheumatoid arthritis, they have loop, whatever that condition is, that this immune response necessary to clear the

virus from their systems, which would be minor for most people, for them, it intensifies that autoimmune response and makes it very, very dangerous or uncomfortable for them for a long time.

And so now

we have these people.

I think I'm one, I've had it for, I'm coming up to over four months, but I'm not nearly as bad as people who are bedridden.

I've met people who are bedridden, and people, they get very frustrated because people say to them, you look normal.

I got over COVID in two days and I'm 90.

That kind of remark.

So what's wrong with you?

And that adds to their frustration that they have zero energy.

I mean, it's a very bizarre system that when you ride 24 miles on a bike with no sweat and no

nothing, and then just three weeks later, if you got on a bike, you could not ride literally 10 feet without falling over in exhaustion.

That's how it was.

And then you keep going and going and going because somebody says, you got to do this, you got to write this deadline, you got to do that.

And then you get worse and worse.

But I do think that it's self-limiting.

In other words, the way I look at it is for people who have active immune systems, I should say, excuse me, hyperactive.

It's like a locomotive that's just,

when they get this COVID, it jumps the tracks and it is spinning and spinning and spinning and depriving your...

muscles at the cellular level and the mitochondria.

It's robbing it of fuel and oxygen and causing this inflammation.

And somehow you have to get that back on the track.

And how do you shock the system into suggesting to it, calm down?

You're either reacting as you always did before, but in an intensive manner, or you're going after these broken spike proteins that are just vestigial.

You don't have to worry about them.

I'm now being kind of facetious as if.

your body is a human mind talking to the you know the virus or yourself or you've got to get you're not able to get some viruses out.

And so then the question is, how do you do that?

And the question, there's a lot of disagreement.

Some people say you have aggressive rest.

You just sleep and you rest.

And then the body will heal itself.

Others say, no, you'll lose muscle mass.

You're just, you're going to be flabby.

You're going to be depressed.

You've got to exercise.

There's others that say as quickly as you can get back into a social routine, you can meet people and get your mind off it.

And maybe you can, and they'll say, no, no, you're very vulnerable for reinfection.

Do not go out there.

So there's no consensus about what you do to it.

And there's no consensus to how many people have it.

If you are a person that thinks that it's everywhere, then you think 201 in five,

well, we probably have 200 million people.

Do you really believe that, I don't know, 10 million people have long COVID?

They think 4 million people are out of the workforce.

So if that is true, then it's one of the greatest economic challenges to the United States right now.

If you're losing 10 million people, especially if they have hyperimmune systems that are somewhat connected with, I don't know, hyper personalities or overworkers, that they're, you know, that they're very busy people and suddenly they're completely out of the workforce.

And every once in a while, I meet these people or they call me or they've come by and they look like kind of like you're a leper and they're a leper.

It's like, did you get over COVID?

Kind of, but I get dizzy or I have vertigo or I still can't smell or I only sleep three hours and you have kind of a natural affinity.

You know what they're going through.

But my attitude for what it's worth, and I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to list any supplement or prescription drug I'm taking, but my attitude is,

and I think it's based on some

amateur's digestion or absorption of the scientific literature, is it is prudent and advisable to take medications to stop inflammation

and

swelling and maybe even micro clots in your leg, whatever it is, if

those medications have a good safety record and if

preferably in double-blind studies, they show some efficacy.

And try to avoid taking things

that have a high risk factor and they are the

product of just idiosyncratic suggestions that have no record of testing them on people.

So if Victor's a doctor and he says, I gave this drug to 10 of my friends and they all got over it versus

I gave this drug to 10 of my friends and then I had an outside party look what happened to 10 people who didn't get it.

And then they had a scientific

method of describing the symptomology after two months.

And this was effective.

So that's where we are.

I don't know how many people have it, but I don't think

if anybody's listening and has had trouble getting over COVID, I tend to be optimistic that

it's going to alleviate.

In my case, the first month, I thought I was going to die.

The second month, I thought

I've never seen such such bizarre symptoms.

Where did my hearing go?

Why is my tongue on fire?

Why is my tongue bright yellow every day?

Why are my feet feel like I can't feel them?

And then you say to yourself, calm down.

That's a symptom of a hyperactive immune system.

Lay down, take a five-minute meditation, and get back up and do this every day.

And you kind of work, I guess they call it neuroplasticity, the ability of your mind to cope with a hyperactive

immune system.

So you don't just say, oh my God, I got to get into the ER or my, I can't feel my legs, or oh my gosh, suddenly I've got floaters in one eye and I can hardly see.

I've got to get into the.

And when you get that flight or fright, you know what I'm saying?

That anxiety, I think that adds to the

fusion of antibody, you know, psychotones or leucatrines or histamine or whatever we use to kill invaders.

So there is some ability, I think, of the patient,

not the ability to get rid of it, but the ability to ameliorate some of the symptoms if you're careful.

Yeah, Victor,

let's go ahead and take another break and then come back and maybe we can talk a little bit about policy.

And,

you know, because I'm thinking, well, this is might happen again, probably will happen again.

And what have we learned from our, you know, this experience about what sane government policy is?

So, let's go to these messages and we'll come right back to talk about that.

Welcome back.

And I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is also available on his website, victorhanson.com.

And you can become a subscriber for the ultra material or become a subscriber for free and get the newsletter.

So at least you know what is being placed on the website.

And you will, there's also a lot of free stuff, free podcasts, obviously, and so too, and are the American Greatness articles.

So please come join us at victorhanson.com.

Victor,

so you were talking about the potential cures

or, you know, I don't know what to call them cures, but things that might treat symptoms that might help in the long run.

And then long run.

I think the word is remission.

Most people, if you just told them that have acute or long COVID, if you just said,

we're going to be able to give you 90% of your energy and to stop the acute symptoms for a while, they would be delighted.

Yeah.

Where do we go with policy from here?

Well, I think we've learned foreign and domestic.

Let's start with domestic.

The idea that you're going to have a czar, a particular scientist without any merocratic basis.

So you're going to have an Anthony Fauci and Deborah Burks and they're going to be your point man or Francis Collins at the CDC and they're not going to be completely transparent is deadly.

And you end up at the end of that trajectory with Anthony Fauci, you basically say, I'm the science.

So, what I mean is, you have a monolithic federal health authority that do not allow dissent.

And the beauty and the strength of this country is that we are a free-thinking, liberty-loving, idiosyncratic, individualistic country.

So, what you want to do next time is say,

here is the official apparatus of the United States government.

We're suffering a pandemic.

Here are what

is the consensus about lockdowns, quarantines, medications, therapies, vaccinations.

Here where we are, but we're not God.

And we welcome dissident voices.

We want you to publish, and we're going to digest this daily,

daily, rather than just say, oh, we're not going to have masks.

You got to wear a mask.

Oh, well, why not wear two?

Or once you got the vaccination, you don't worry.

If a guy didn't want to get vaccinated, that's his problem.

But you have a shield.

He can't hurt.

Uh-oh,

he's culpable because that shield's

not too good.

And you need now a booster.

Oh, but you got it with a booster.

You need two boosters.

You need Paxable.

That's the Faucian method.

And it was a disaster.

And you ended up...

It was so ironic because you look at Stanford University, and I've said this before, but you had, I don't know, four people at the university who I think had been proven right by history.

Start with Scott Atlas, health policy person, who said, you know, there are alternatives to a complete lockdown.

And he listed them.

And it's pretty much where we are now.

And he advised vaccinations, but he warned that they wouldn't be foolproof.

And he said that there would be natural immunity.

He didn't know whether it was superior to vaccinations, but it was something that would be very valuable.

And Jay Bacharia then

weighed in with the great Barrington.

We had John Yennanese, the famous immunologist, had been so valuable in exposing the fraud of the Theranos blood testing, Silicon Valley Ponzi scheme.

And then we had Michael Levette, the Nobel Prize winner.

So we had at Stanford four of the best people.

And they were giving wonderful advice on what was the reaction.

They were demonized.

And they were prophets that were ridiculed and demonized by their own colleagues who were trying.

And why is that?

I don't know, but I will say this, that when you're sitting on $50 billion of grants and you're in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases or the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute of Health.

And you've got that money and a guy has a lab and he needs $5 million to pay for all the rats and

the bunnies and everything in there.

And he's got all these assistance and he needs that grant.

And he goes to convention, he's not going to cross you.

And you know, he's not going to cross you.

So if you say, you know what?

We did give some money to the Wuhan, but it's just a bright and shiny object.

Forget about it.

Well, then everybody's going to forget about it because he'll turn on you.

And that's what happened, partly.

So we don't want to do that anymore.

We don't want a top-down, this is, I'm the science, you're going to do this.

We want an open discussion among certain parameters.

So, if some guy says hydroxychloroquine, just because Trump says try it, what do you have to lose?

Then you don't demonize it.

You say the following.

This is an interesting thesis.

Hydroxychloroquine has a pretty good safety record.

It's a malarial drug that's much more, much safer than chloroquine.

I use chloroquine and survived it in 1974.

And it's very valuable for lupus.

You've got to be a little bit careful about eye pressure and glaucoma,

some side effects.

And we'll see in a double blind to the effect, if any,

on early COVID, serious COVID, long COVID, et cetera.

And then you can do that.

If hydroxychloroquine is lethal or it's deadly, or you am it's sort of like some of these antifungal drugs, it can be very dangerous.

Then you say, wait, wait, wait, hold on.

We didn't do that.

It was Trump said ivermedicine, therefore it is is deadly and it has no value.

I don't know whether it has value or not, but I know it's not deadly.

And so we didn't do that.

We politicized the regimen and we did, you know, and I mean that very sincerely, Sammy.

If you think about the Pfizer vaccination was all ready to go in late October, as Pfizer predicted and promised.

And then the pressure came on them.

Don't announce it before the election, because if you were to say Operation Warp Speed is ready to go, given Donald Trump, he was going going to wave his hands at a rally and say, I got Operation Warp Speed, and this is the thing.

Now you're all going to be safe.

True.

But that would be deleterious to the consensus that he's dangerous, therefore we can't give him credit.

So then wait till he loses or he wins, either one, and announce it out.

That's pretty well, that's a pretty good thesis theory.

And that is deadly when you weaponize things like that.

So we don't want to do that.

Foreign policy, we got a real problem.

So if you're in China and you are a general assigned to oversight or control, or you're running the Wuhan Level 4 biology lab, you're thinking the following.

Hmm.

Well, we were engineering this stuff and they knew we were engineering it.

And we found gain of function stuff that they were not allowed to

investigate, but they wanted to know.

And we shared 90% of the stuff with them, but we didn't share the last 10%.

And they are a rival and we shut that, we ruined a presidency that was likely to be reelected and very anti-Chinese, communist.

We destroyed an entire economy, which was the world's strongest.

We created a massive quarantine and lockdown that went into national hysteria and gave us everything from, I think,

the George Floyd 120 days of rioting to January 6th.

We went into an election they had where only 30% of the people voted on election day, et cetera, et cetera.

And the Chinese communists would think this was pretty good.

We didn't plan it.

It escaped.

That's what they're going to say.

I tend to believe that it escaped rather than they deliberately unleashed it.

But nonetheless, there are people who are looking at this, and the Iranians are looking at it.

And a lot of people are saying, why get a bomb?

You could just get this virus and hire five virologists, have them engineer one, and then make the vaccination in advance and then unleash it and then deny, have deniability of culpability.

And you could do a lot of damage to your enemy.

So that's what we're worried about.

And then how do you stop that?

Do we have a national registry of vaccinations?

So right now we look at all the possible bioweapons and we try to have a rapid response force.

We should.

We should have 100 biologists that are on 24-7 call to do something with therapies or vaccinations should this happen again.

Or do you say the following?

Because the rules of war don't change if this is a strife or not just war, but rivalries.

Are you always reactive?

Or does some president call up President Chi and say, I'm not saying anything.

But if this ever happens again, we're going to assume that it was deliberate.

And this is what we're going to do to you.

You understand that?

So don't let it happen.

And you tell the Iranians and the North Koreans, the Venezuelans, if you have any idea, we're going to respond in kind.

Don't do it.

And you create deterrence.

And so that's where we are now.

And I'm not advocating any particular policy.

I'm just suggesting to you that those are the avenues that we're going to have to consider now.

Because this is the most, this is much, this was more destructive.

We had a million point one Americans have died of it.

And it destroyed

a $21 trillion economy.

And it created,

I think it created the entire, it accelerated, let me put that way, the whole woke insanity.

And I think when you deprive that many people of schools and social action and human-to-human contact, and they cannot, it spiked the crime.

It made people who were prone to go crazy really crazy.

And I'm afraid somebody is going to learn from that and try it again.

So we've got to be very, very ready.

Well, Victor, we're right here at the time.

So we're going to have to call it a day today.

Thank you so much for all of your observations on COVID, long COVID, and policy.

And I especially like the beginning discussing the

advent of this scientific method, especially in

the medical sciences at the beginning.

So thank you very much for me and our listeners, I'm sure.

Okay, and we'll thank again, everybody, for listening in.

All right, we'll see everybody next time.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.