Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone, and welcome to the 208th episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. Everyone calls me Jag. I am the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun, creative ways, including graphic novels, animated videos, even musical collaborations. Today, we are joined by immunologist Stephen Templeton. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you who are watching us on Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, use the comment section to type in your questions. No, there's always a race to who will be first from our likely candidates, and I'm going to try to get to as many of those questions as we can. So our guest, Steven Templeton, is an immunologist. He's author of the Substack and new book Fear of a Microbial Planet, how a germaphobic culture makes us less safe, which takes on the all germs or bad notion, as well as emphasizing that, quote, anything that can be done can also be overdone. And how panic and politics drove us to an overzealous pandemic response in many ways with tragic collateral damage. A senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute and an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine at Tarahout, Steven served on Governor Ron DeSantis Public Health Integrity Committee and was co author of questions for a Covid-19 commission, a document provided to members of a pandemic response focused congressional committee. And Stephen, thank you for joining us all the way from London.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Jennifer, it's great to be with you.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: So let's start from the beginning where you grew up. Any early experiences that influenced your desire to pursue immunology as a career?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So I grew up in the St. Louis area and was kind of interested in biology for a long time, but didn't exactly know much about research science. My parents, neither of them went to college, so even going to college was kind of something I didn't have a whole lot of introduction to before it actually happened.
I declared biology as a major, but wasn't really interested in things like ecology and wildlife biology, which is what a lot of people at my university were doing, which is Missouri state and southwest Missouri. Southwest Missouri. And until I got to the immunology, I was kind of lost and didn't really know, really couldn't find an interest.
But then I signed up for the immunology class. I had micro and thought, okay, this is getting a little bit better. But then I took immunology. And the first day, professors started talking about how you could take what are called scid mice, which don't have an immune system, and transplant a human immune system into those animals that would then reconstitute those animals, and they essentially have a human immune system. They'd be a chimeric animal. And once I heard the professor talking about that, I thought, okay, this is what I want to do. That's pretty much how I got into it. After that, I worked at Washington university for a little while as a tech. Then I went to Iowa for graduate school, worked in a lab that used coronavirus as a model for immunology. This is before anybody cared about coronavirus immunology until SARS one happened, which actually was while I was a grad student.
After that, I decided I wanted a little break from academic science, and I went to the government. I work for CDC NIOSH, which is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, for about four years, including the group of people who did some of the math studies that you saw during COVID And so I was there about four years, and then came to Indiana in about 2011 and been there for about 13 years.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Fabulous.
So let's get to your book, which I think was really fantastic.
Fear of a microbial planet, how a germophobic culture makes us less safe. I'm going to lay out three things that I enjoyed most about your book, and perhaps we can tackle them in turn. Number one, for all of its emphasis on science and policy, it's also a personal account of your young family's journey through the pandemic and the pandemic response. Number two, it is extremely balanced. You take on Covid minimizers and maximizers alike. And number three, the historical context. It isn't limited to the past few years, but goes back millennia to examine past responses to pandemics and infection. So let's start with the personal.
What was the canary in the coal mine for you when you first became concerned with the lack of an evidence based response to the pandemic?
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Well, things started shutting down in that second week of March and 2020, and I figured pretty early on that I didn't think that that was going to happen.
And so I was really surprised by it.
We had local things happening that I thought might actually buck the trend. Like the local superintendent of the schools said, we're going to leave schools open.
He didn't have a choice. A few days later, the whole state closed down.
But I wanted to have sort of a local input for the superintendent and on the news channels, they were really sort of interested in having some local person give their opinion. And I wanted to be reassuring because I could really feel this sense of panic that was, you know, ready to kind of explode, even. Even in our neck of the woods and in Indiana. So I wanted to support the superintendent for not closing the school, and I wanted that to be, I wanted to be public about it. And so that kind of got some attention, and a local news station came, and I basically said these things that are shutting down, I don't think that's going to stop the spread. And, you know, that I wanted people just to not panic, that I knew that even at that point that it affected mostly older individuals who were, who had health issues.
That was the most severe, most targeted group and affecting children, I knew could have some collateral damage or a lot of potential for collateral damage. And I wanted to reassure people. So there was an article, you know, the next day, right as things were shutting down with that advice.
And so that was kind of my way of dealing with this sort of brewing panic that I could sense was coming.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: So. But it was with the schools, with the school lockdown was kind of where you started in terms of saying, uh oh, we're going off course here.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it all happened at once, you know, I mean, all the sports leagues shut down, the NCAA tournament, the NBA, the NHL, you know, everything was shutting down. And I really did not expect that at all. I was really surprised by that, that it would go to that level and that people would not. Not enough people would ask, what's the evidence?
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Well, and when do we.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: When do we stop? You shut everything down. You can successfully do that, but there's. Where's the end game for that?
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And of course, the economic impact. I remember another one of the brownstone authors wrote, there is no on and off switch for the economy. And people said, well, just talking about not damaging the economy. Well, when you damage the economy, you also damage public health. So you and your wife took the COVID vaccines, and from your account, you weren't advocating a disregard of the virus. You were really trying to encourage people to avoid panic by only focusing on worst case scenarios.
And yours is the first book on the response that I have read, and I have read quite a few that took to task, not just Covid maximizers, people that got wildly wrong in terms of what the mortality risk would be, and the modeling that showed that many multiples of the people that actually have died would die. But you also took on the COVID minimizers. So what are some examples of both.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Maximizers were the most influential, in my opinion. The Imperial College model, which was cited by Deborah Birx in her book as being very influential, was predicting about 2 million deaths within three months. So very, very quickly.
So that was hugely important in sort of pushing the COVID response in the direction that it went.
There were a lot of people who, because they didn't want to see the panic, wanted to look on the bright side and say, look, this could be much less serious as it's being put in the media and elsewhere. I can consider myself basically a minimizer for that reason.
There were estimates that there would just be less than 100,000 deaths.
Clearly there were more than that. There were not 2 million in three months, not anywhere near that. But there were more than people thought. So I think pretty much everybody was wrong about the number of deaths. And even now, to this day, we don't really know the full extent and what the number actually is because reporting was questionable and incentives to inflate numbers did exist. So we don't actually know for sure until there's a full audit what that number is. But it's certainly higher than I thought it was going to be initially and a lot of people predicted.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Do you think we'll ever get that audit?
[00:11:41] Speaker B: I don't know. I think it's doable.
I don't think there's an appetite for it right now. I don't think you're going to have an administration.
I don't think it's possible at all to have an administration that will have that sort of reckoning or an audit. But it is possible to look through medical records and determine how those deaths were categorized in each area. It's doable.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Maybe with AI could simplify the process. All right, so back to the historical context, and then I am going to start diving into some of our audience questions. But what did the ancients know about infection? And what are some examples of past pandemics that also inspired some of the same panic blaming, even the quasi religious rituals that we saw during Covid-19 you talk in particular about the flagellants.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Yeah, right. So the flagellants were kind of the original virtue signalers of the plague era. They roamed around Europe and had, you know, flagellating themselves to show their sacrifice. And. And since they traveled from town to town, they also may have contributed to actually spreading the disease as well.
But they definitely did not have a positive effect.
Sorry, I've got some.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Yes, well, you're there in London, so maybe somebody misgendered somebody on social media. So they're coming to lock them up?
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Could be. Hopefully not in my neighborhood, but, yeah. Um, yeah, so that's real interesting how people reacted to pandemics in the past and how ineffective some of the strategies and collateral damage heavy some of the strategies were.
Another example is how the British handled the plague in India, where they basically pushed off the burden of disease out of their own protected enclaves into the poorer areas.
And when they finally decided to have a reckoning and look at their effects, they had the indian plague Commission in 1898 and showed that their effects were their policies were actually harmful. And that's something that we need here with this pandemic. But again, the appetite for it is pretty low right now. And with either administration, potential administration, I don't think it's going to happen. So we may have to.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Why do you think the appetite is so low?
I feel like I have to ask this question. Oh, is it because of the politics that everything has become politicized? And so.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a bipartisan failure. I mean, you know, this is the Trump administration that started this and shut everything down. And the mandates for the vaccine and without that, went way beyond anything that was called for, were put into hyperdrive by the Biden administration. So you really have two culpable administrations and really no route for accountability at this point, because it has to, it's going to have to have some sort of bipartisan, bipartisan energy to it in order to have any sort of success. And I don't see any efforts that are even coming close at this point.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: All right, I'm going to dive into a few of these because I know we're going to get many, and I don't want to get backlogged. So first to the gate, as often is my modern gaunt on Instagram asking Professor Templeton, what do you think is the biggest misconception about virology? Do you think the pandemic made more people aware about its importance or not?
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a very good question. I mean, I think if you look at the sort of Hollywood version of this sort of doomsday pandemic, I think that's very, very unlikely, because with pathogens, you, you can either have a pathogen that's very pathogenic, that's very virulent, that's very deadly, or you can have one that's easily transmissible. And it's very difficult to have both of those things at the same time. They sort of are mutually.
They're not reinforcing so the sort of Hollywood version is you have. You have both at the same time. It spreads very quickly and kills everyone.
That's just very unlikely. I don't see that happening, because viruses and other pathogens, the ideal environment for them is to be able to transmit easily and not actually harm their hosts.
You can always find some counter examples, but in general, I think that that's. That holds and doesn't really fit the reality that we're subjected to in Hollywood.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: In terms of the counter examples, would the spanish influenza be kind of a counterexample, something that was both very infectious, spread easily, but also high mortality?
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Right. So, at the time, we had. That was a unique. A unique point in time where there was a tremendous amount of moving around the globe that hadn't been done before, and you were able to have this perfect storm that I think we're unlikely to have again, because at this point, we have this globalized environment where viruses get on planes very easily.
That means we develop sort of herd immunity, and we're exposed to things that other countries are exposed to very easily so that you don't have this sort of situation where something is new to a large population and is just now all of a sudden having a route to expose everyone to it.
That might have been, in my opinion, sort of the last gasp of.
Of naive immunity in large populations. We just share too many viruses now, so I think it's unlikely. Yeah, I think that's a good thing.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: All right, boom. Liberty on Instagram. This is a name I'm not familiar with, but maybe you are. Steve, Alex Zeck is supposed to come out with an episode that debunked virology today. Are you familiar with that?
[00:18:49] Speaker B: I am not familiar with that.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Okay. All right, well, boom. Maybe give us a little bit more background or share a link. All right, this is a great question on Instagram from Talos nine.
Have people become more germophobic, or do you think the pushback to the lockdowns has made people less germaphobic? Which ties into a question that I had had when you were talking about a germaphobic culture. Maybe we can just start with a definition of germaphobia, its technical term.
I understand from the book you have a germaphobe in your family. So that was, again, part of the weaving of personal anecdotes. But, yes. Do you think that, like, people, it's like when you get an injury and, you know, your. Your system seizes up. Do you think people got seized into that kind of germophobic fear? Or do you think people said, hey, you know what? I survived it. I lived through it. I can see that there were excesses and have decided to become more objective and rational about their actual risks.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Right. So I will update you on my sister. She claims she is in the latter category and has, you know, seen the light and is not nearly as obsessive about things as.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: And it's not an ultraviolet light, the light of truth.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Right, right. Not a sterile light.
Yeah. So, I mean, germophobia is kind of a subset of OCD. So people who have OCD are more susceptible to developing germophobia. And I think that the people that were susceptible to it were driven to it during the pandemic. I think you always also have a subset of people who obviously are resistant and questioners and people like me who go the other direction and become even more feeling more. It's even more necessary to emphasize that we already live in this sort of microbial soup, and we're exposed to things. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, not only were you exposed to these things constantly, but the fact that we have become less exposed to it has been problematic in some ways. And so I had to delve into psychology, which I thought was fascinating, and I tried to balance that out with immunology and other things, even though not all of those areas are strengths in line.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: So do you think, getting back to the question, do you think that people have become more germophobic through this experience or maybe fall into your sister's category? Because I see it both in my life. I mean, I have a relative who probably still has never left her apartment since March of 2020. But then people, other family members that I think may, if not explicitly, but at least on some level, recognize that this was a bit extremely.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: We're moving in that direction before the pandemic, and it put it into overdrive for a while. And obviously, some people have come back and seen the error of those ways, but I think there's probably some lingering germophobia. And that's one of the reasons I say the book was needed, was to sort of put some therapy out there for people and to remind them that it's okay. You know, you drop food on your floor, you're not going to die if it's on there more than 5 seconds or something like that.
Things that used to be common sense. There's a lot of books out there now that are basically around that, driving those sort of messages home, things that we used to think of 2030 years ago as common sense now have to be a book.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Right. Okay. Candice Morena on Facebook asks, is the use of mass sanitation increasing the risk of new viral strains being hyper resistant? So let's talk about some of the obviously massive advances in public health with sanitation, but also where we find the trade offs.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Right? So I don't think masks necessarily are making viruses stronger. I think their masks are weak.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: She wasn't saying masks, mask, sanitation. Right. So.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Oh, mass sanitation. Okay.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Okay. Gotcha.
Yes.
I think it's, you know, I mean, heavy, heavy use of things like antibiotics. And in my field, I study fungal immunology is what I do. It's kind of a day job. And we see large amounts of agricultural chemicals used that are from the same family of the antifungal drugs that we use in the hospital.
Obviously, environmental fungi are being exposed to this, and more of them are being selected in an evolutionary sense to be resistant to the same drugs that we use in the hospital because of this sort of mass agricultural usage. And you can see this even in hospitals and agricultural heavy areas where they have more resistant fungi in those areas.
That's just an example with fungi. But you can do this with bacteria as well. You have more resistant strains of bacteria in a hospital. It's place you're going to find the most resistant microbes is where these things are being used. So, you know, sanitation was obviously something that was hugely progressive in human public health. So, you know, nobody wants to really go back to that. But I think, you know, there are certain aspects of being exposed as a baby to a lot of microbes were definitely beneficial, and it's something that we're missing at this point and are seeing some of those health effects from that lack of exposure. Another good example would be polio.
Obviously, polio is a bad thing and can cause paralysis and some severe disease in a small number of people who contract it, but it's much worse when people contract it later in life.
It wasn't as big of a problem when babies were getting it when they were weeks old and they were protected from their mother's milk. And it was only when the sanitation improved that polio required a vaccine, because it was really necessary to prevent severe disease in older children and young adults who didn't have that early exposure and had more severe disease. So there's a trade off to pretty much everything. And that's a big challenge for science as we get cleaner and have a cleaner environment with less microbial exposure and less infections.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: You talked about asthma. And I think you shared the results of one study which compared the incidence among the amish community and children of the Amish.
Talk a little bit about that and what might be driving higher incidences of asthma than we may have seen in many decades past.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Right. I mean, there was two religious communities, the amish community, which foregoes a lot of modern conveniences, and then the other community was the hutterite community, which I believe is much more modernized.
Two religious communities in similar geographical areas, I believe in Ohio, Pennsylvania. And. But they had completely different immune responses, and the Amish were much more tolerant of, had much more of a tolerant immune response. And so the.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: What does that mean?
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Well, it means that they were less likely to develop allergies, autoimmune diseases.
And you can see this throughout that population. They're more exposed to microbes from birth and more exposed to infections in their community because they don't have the same sanitation and they have large families and they work on farms. And so their level of bacterial, viral, microbial exposure is much like ours was back in, you know, the 18 hundreds. And so they do benefit in some ways from that.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: All right. From Instagram, Colleen sirs asks, if there is another pandemic, do you think people will accept lockdowns or will there be more pushback?
[00:28:12] Speaker B: Yeah, if they want happened right now, I think there'd be a lot of pushback.
I think people, even though they don't want to admit that we kind of went crazy if it happened again, I think they'd be more willing to stand up and put an end to things if they started to get the way that they did in 2020.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: And then, plus, we have evidence. We have some data which people can argue about, but we have the history and we have what Sweden did and other nordic countries, we have comparisons between the states, those that never imposed lockdowns or ended them almost immediately, and then those like California and New York, that were more severe so that data exists and can be looked at. And so I think it would at least be harder for people to justify this.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: I think it would be harder. I think authorities did love the attention and the power that they got. So I think it would, there would be some initial moves that I think would mirror the pandemic moves, because I think people, the local authorities, public health authorities, really enjoyed having that kind of power and being able to control business and shut things down.
But I think they're going to have enough limitations in large parts of the country that even in the places where the population would be more friendly to those sorts of policies and restrictions.
It's going to still be harder to implement at this time. But that doesn't mean that there aren't plans to sort of codify the, and make laws and try to extend the powers that the federal government can have more control over pandemic responses instead of the sort of decentralized recommendations that they made, that although many places followed it like it was on a stone tablet delivered by a prophet, it wasn't something that people were forced to do. There had to be some sort of implicit threats by other ways.
But we were very willing to do these things on many levels. And I think that's kind of the larger problem, is the sort of cultural drive towards safety and as almost a religion and the sort of elimination of risk to the point of harming ourselves in other ways.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: So you mentioned the overuse of antibiotics. One of the more interesting links that you explored in the book was that between antibiotics and the disruption of our natural biome and rising obesity levels. So maybe talk about that, but also set the stage for those who haven't yet read the book about what our biome is.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: There's some estimates that have shown you have ten times more bacterial cells inside your body than you do actual cells for your body. So order of magnitude.
I've seen some estimates that dispute that, but that's been generally accepted for a while. So you have a very large microflora that's very diverse, and it tends to be different in developed countries than it is in developing countries. It tends to be different in people who grow up on farms and people who did not grow up on farms. People who have had heavy antibiotic use, their differences.
Babies whose mothers have had heavy bio antibiotic use during their pregnancy, babies who are delivered by c section. Now, some of these things recover over time, but it's really interesting to think about, and research is focusing a lot on how, what's the key window there for microbial exposure in babies to sort of have their immune system be tolerant towards things that they would be exposed to later. Another example I give in the book is the, you know, peanut allergies. For the longest time, the American Pediatric association was saying, don't expose your children to peanuts at all because they might develop allergies. And it turns out that was the exact opposite of advice that they should be giving.
Babies should be exposed to these things early and often because that's how they develop tolerance when they're developing their immune system. If they don't see it, they can't develop tolerance for it.
Now it's gone completely the other way. But I think it's worth pointing out the fact that it was so wrong for so long that, I mean, these are experts that are telling people something that is just completely turns out to be incorrect. And obviously, there are many examples of this with COVID but people need to understand that science is not the sort of static thing that's either.
Our understanding of it does change, and there needs to be an open debate about science, especially when it's affecting policy, when it's affecting, you know, millions and billions of people.
And that's something that we did not have in the COVID response, and it was a huge detriment to public health overall.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Are you. Are you saying then, that an overuse of antibiotics makes people that obesity is somehow almost an allergic response to having one's biome disrupted?
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Well, it's not entirely clear what the role of the microbiome is in obesity. I mean, there's been some really fascinating studies where in animals, like in mice in particular, where they can transfer the microbiome from an obese person to a mouse, and that mouse will take on some of those properties. They will have metabolic issues, they will gain weight, they will have insulin resistance and symptoms like that.
But it's unclear whether that is something that is reflective of what's actually happening in people.
It's not necessarily that your microbiome is getting messed up, and this is why you're obese. Could be also that you're obese and that your microbiome is then getting messed up as a result, or dysfunctional, and then that still becomes transferable at some point to other individuals in kind of a limited sense. So it's not entirely sure what's causing what there, but it is sort of. Those are sort of fascinating studies to think about and to build on that there is an association. It's just what's causing it and what the real role is. I think it's not completely clear how.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: Has increased incidence of c sections impacted both maternal health and children's health.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's another really interesting, really interesting area.
It's clear that babies don't have the same microbiome when they're delivered by c section for six months to a year after they're born. And that can be a crucial time. I mean, it does recover over time because they're still exposed to those microbes from their mother, even after a c section birth. It just takes a different time window to change their microbiome and how important is that window, I think, is something that's really interesting to. To study. But, I mean, it's shown that, you know, allergies, asthma and allergies are higher in children that were delivered by c sections. And I think it's worthy to, for that reason and other reasons, to try to cut down on the c section rate, which is just crazy high in some places.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I think Louisiana and New Jersey were the highest that you found.
Interesting.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: Yeah. I believe there was one county in Louisiana, like 70%, something like that. And that's c sections.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah, we have. We often have medical students that rotate with ob gyns and don't see a vaginal birth the entire time with their rotation. They're all c sections.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: All right, another question here from Zach Carter on Instagram asking what is the biggest pushback that you have seen against your book and more generally against the work at the Brownstone Institute?
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I can't say I've experienced anything like some of the people I've worked with, like Jay Bhattacharya. I mean, he was in a unique situation at Stanford, and, you know, they were putting up signs with death toll from Florida since he was advising Ron DeSantis very early in the. In the pandemic.
You know, I wrote a few articles before I got into my substack for the local paper, and my boss did get some angry phone calls. One of my favorites I wrote was called the price of being human. And that was basically pushing back against the governor of our own state, who basically blamed people in Indiana for spread of the disease. He said that people were misbehaving and if they would just be nice and not naughty, that they could stop the spread of the disease. And my article basically said that it's not true and we shouldn't shame people. And being human means you're going to get respiratory infections, you know, something that would have been completely non controversial even six months before that. And I got some angry phone calls about. About that, and my boss got some angry phone calls he had to deal with. But for the most part, I haven't had any kind of pushback that other people like Jay or Martin Koldo.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: Well, professionally, yeah. But, you know, you also share, again, this intertwining of your personal experience with the arguments and the research you present in the book of what happened to you and your family at church. So maybe share a little bit about that.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: Right. So that's true.
We did, you know, although we did voluntarily leave that church, we were, I think, going to be probably kicked out at some point.
But, you know, I mean, they were. They were very convinced. I mean, the early study in Washington about the choir, where numerous people had come down from the choir practice, had come down with COVID and one or two of them had died.
It was very misleading in terms of just general applicability to. To a church setting. I mean, this is a choir practice room. Most people in this choir were actually quite old. A number of them had comorbidities, and so they practiced for like, three or 4 hours or something like that. I mean, it was not even something that was completely applicable to a church service. But yet here we were being told that we couldn't. No one could even sing.
And, you know, everybody had to wear masks and couldn't even talk. We couldn't even talk responsively.
And this is in a large room, not like a choir room, but a sanctuary, which is actually quite large.
And so I tried to point many of these things out, and I tried to point out the fact that science did not have this consensus before everything became political. You just go back and look at what the science was saying before that massive wave of fear and panic gripped everyone. And really, people just were not having it. They were not going to listen to it at all. And it was very, very frustrating. So I tried some various things and ultimately said, okay, now the vaccine is out. It either works or it doesn't, and we need to just go back to normal and allow people to make decisions for themselves. If somebody is. Is afraid to go to church and be within a group of people in that way, they can stay home. But other people who maybe don't want to make that decision should be allowed to decide for themselves. And again, that was something that was just. I was treated as it was way outside of the mainstream. And unfortunately, that was correct. I mean, it was still way out of the mainstream. And despite the fact that both my wife and myself were the ones with the most scientific background about viruses and public health combined, our views were not welcome.
I experienced pushback there in the church, and then I was also part of the local advisory group for the school corporation. And that was interesting as well, because we had to. It was me in a lot of cautious positions in school, the superintendent, who I think was a little bit more open to it. But the other parts of the school corporation, these were all very cautious people.
And, you know, it was basically me, the lone voice.
[00:43:03] Speaker A: Well, you know, speaking of that lone voice of reason, you have read the fountainhead, of course, in which Ayn Rand talks about the hatred and the fear of the independent man, the man who stands alone.
You've read Atlas Shrugged, which talks about the dangers manifest, the dangers of government overreach, central planning and calling for sacrifice. So maybe anything that might have inspired in you to have the courage to stand up and not just kind of go along with the herd.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So the example, and I believe this is an atlas shrugged. I didn't remember what she calls it, but it's the National Health Institute or National Science Institute or something. There's a very concrete example. And I had just been either at the time I was reading and I was maybe working for CDC NIOSH because that's where I was before I was in Indiana. And sort of the way this sort of health institute was described and the sort of influence that they had hit a little bit close to home for me as I read that. So I think that was the one thing that stood out was the sort of institutionalized science that was targeted by her.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: In Atlas Shrugged, there was this character at the science institute, Doctor Floyd Ferris. And the quote I'll never forget is him saying, quote, do you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. So, you know, when you make breathing air unobstructed, going to church, going, surfing outside on a beach by yourself, when you make all of those normal activities criminal, then it really speaks to a government's increased control in terms of having an objective, almost objectivist perspective on these things and not maximizing the fear, maximizing the risk.
You point out some similarities between the early coverage and messaging on the AIDS epidemic, particularly with, you know, who is at risk with reporting and messaging about COVID risks. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it was fascinating when I started to look into it. I mean, you had several of these players in our Covid response that had sort of cut their teeth during HIV. I mean, the three main characters, Robert Redfield, Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, were all came into our consciousness and got into their positions as a result of the HIV pandemic. And really over time, the research, I called it basically the HIV industrial complex. Any immunologist knows that large parts of the funding mechanism are still reserved for HIV, and it's not even close to being the most prescient or pressing threat to our public health. But because of that sort of success of the lobbying and once this sort of industry got put in place, it's something that's hard to cut.
But a lot of that came because.
And when you look back into the eighties and nineties, there was this large sort of push to make it seem as it was going to be looming disaster for heterosexuals and that it would sort of no longer stay as this sort of disease of promiscuous gay men, which is how it was first identified and how it was first characterized.
I mean, there are examples of Oprah in 1990 said, you know, one in five, or she said one in five heterosexuals would die, or at least contract HIV by 1990, I believe. And obviously, none of that happened. But that fear was there, and it was really taken advantage of by people who wanted to get the attention, who wanted to get the power. And.
And it worked. I mean, people were really, really terrified and sort of confused about where that pandemic was going to go.
But even in hindsight, it pretty much stayed mostly a disease of promiscuous men who were a lot of sexual partners and people who were, you know, iv drug users and never made huge inroads into the heterosexual community. And. But that fear really drove a lot of people to build this sort of, like I said, industry of HIV research and philanthropy, which kind of drowns out a lot of other fairly pressing threats to public health.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: So a previous guest on this show was Johan Anderberg. He's the author of the Herd how Sweden chose its own path through the worst pandemic in 100 years.
But to the best of my recollection, he didn't delve so much into the differences between nordic countries, both in terms of their responses, as well as demographics, which had more elderly populations, which had younger populations, also their geography in terms of naturally isolating possible outbreaks. So maybe talk a little bit about Sweden and how some of the criticism with regards to Sweden was unfair. I mean, not just because it was not shown, it was kind of saying all these other nordic countries did better. Well, I think you made the case that responses were not quite as different, not quite as stark, let's say, as a difference between Sweden and Peru or something like that, but also that the countries themselves were different.
[00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, they all had pretty light responses.
When you compare them to many other western countries that had much worse outcomes. But there are obvious differences between those countries. I mean, Norway has a lot of geographical isolation. They have a lot of mountains and smaller population, younger population, more of a less multicultural diversity.
Sweden had the unfortunate timing of having a holiday right at the time of massive spread in Italy, and lots of Swedes like to go skiing in the italian Alps.
And they happened to do that in January, February, whereas in Norway, beautiful skiing right there. You don't have to, have to go anywhere.
So right at that time, they had a national week off. People were going and getting infected and bringing it back to Stockholm.
So in the short run, they did not do as well. But if you look at their excess deaths over the. Over three years, they actually have probably the lowest in Europe. So it's a true control group. Even though the other nordic countries didn't have a severe response, it was definitely more severe.
They were definitely more strict than Sweden.
None of them wore masks religiously, or there may have been some transit mandates, but in general, the mandates were nothing like they were in other european countries or even in the United States.
But Sweden is a good control group. They're a good example of never closing their schools, especially their primary schools.
Here in Europe, schools tend to be open until, like I just found out here, they're open until July 14. So they're open much later in Europe than they are in the states. And so this much after the beginning of the pandemic, there was opportunity to keep those schools open and see the result. And the result was pretty clear by the time the summer rolled around, when Sweden had, I think, 1.8 million kids in school that had never been closed, they were not required to wear masks and they had zero fatalities. And their that was among students. The risk for teachers was actually not any higher than average. And this is completely opposite than what we were being told. At the exact same time, in the United States, articles were coming up constantly about how schools were going to become a death trap and teachers were going to be at super high risk. They're going to be exposed to all sorts of german kids, but the data does not support that at all. And it was completely ignored. And, I mean, these are the kind of things that there cannot be enough reckoning and cannot be enough accountability over, in my opinion.
[00:53:33] Speaker A: Agreed. Agreed.
So what are in terms of reckoning, accountability, but policy changes. Right. What are some of the changes that you would advocate so that we avoid the mistakes made with the pandemic response? Specifically, what changes would you like to see at the CDC?
[00:53:55] Speaker B: Well, you don't want to have a more centralized Covid response. You want it to be less centralized.
The efforts to sort of have more of a centralized response. I don't support those based on how the CDC behaved and the FDA and some people at the NIH. But the other thing is this sort of emergence of public private partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.
It's been to the point where a large number of, a large amount of funding of drugs is being funded by the actual companies that are trying to get these drugs approved. And that sort of connection, I think, has to be broken because it's introduced a whole bunch of incentives that are not conducive to public health. I mean, I understand that the alternative seemed to be, for a while, would be drugs would not be approved for very long periods of time, and they wanted to cut that process down, so they have. But now you're getting things like what happened with the COVID vaccine, where it was mandated even for children with very small risk, almost nonexistent, so that there would be no reason why the benefits would outweigh the cost or potential risk. And so you did not have that sort of dynamic in every country. Again, in nordic countries, you don't have this sort of public private partnership. Denmark's a good example.
And so you don't have, you didn't have those ridiculous mandates that were completely against, you know, real following any sort of evidence.
So it is possible to do. And I would start there.
Then, obviously, just the idea of having a career bureaucrat run an agency for 35 years is probably something that shouldn't happen again as well.
[00:56:10] Speaker A: Needs to be reset.
Yes. Well, I mean, I think in some ways, the nordic countries have a better policy with regards to that. Of course, they also have socialized medicine, which means price controls for pharmaceuticals, which is why virtually all of the european pharmaceutical companies have come to the United States. And the more that we move along that path, we will also have price controls, which will mean that fewer life saving pharmaceutical breakthroughs will happen.
But I think a good place to close with just the minute or two that we have left is with a tweet that you shared from Neil degrasse Tyson.
Earth needs a virtual country hash rationalia with a one line constitution. All policy must be based on the weight of evidence, end quote. Obviously, at the Atlas Society, we're promoting the philosophy of objectivism, the idea that reality exists, that reason is our only means of discovering it. So what, in your opinion, is needed for a rediscovery of reason and a resurrection of unbiased, objective science? Of course, the first recommendation is to buy your book, fear of a microbial planet, how a germophobic safety culture makes us all less safe. And so we're going to put the links to buy that book throughout our different platforms.
But, yeah, are you more optimistic? And how can we continue to welcome people and encourage them to return to their senses.
[00:58:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think it's going to take a long time. I think people are just unwilling to, and there's still some trauma there. People are still unwilling to admit that huge mistakes were made, that people gave into panic and mass hysteria.
And I think that's going to take some time for people to realize, especially the principal players, that they still have this fear of accountability. And unfortunately, threatening accountability isn't going to make it happen any sooner, especially with the administrations that we have here. But I think really return to the sort of enlightenment values that have come out of that and the bill of rights and free speech and open debate. And this is sort of an ideal world that we want to live in. And maybe we never really had it at some point, but we're definitely further from it now than I think we've been in recent years. And I really think we should return to that and sort of fight all of the censorship that's happening on social media and in other places. And the fact that the government has a role in this, I think is really something that really should be resisted at pretty much every level. But I think if we can return to some, some willingness to debate openly, we're never going to get fully objective and sort of the ideal way because we're humans and we're biased and we have emotions, and even scientists fall into this. And I wrote a section in my book about how scientists are not high priests of truth. They're biased just like everyone else. But the process of science itself is not flawed. Science is perfect. The problem is scientists. The problem is that humans have to apply these things in our sort of flawed a bias way.
And so, but I think if we, if we follow the values that we say are important to us as Americans and sort of western values of free speech and economic freedom and all that, we'll at least get closer to that ideal, or at least back in that direction.
[01:00:18] Speaker A: Amen to that. Well, thank you, professor. Thank you, Steven. And thanks to all of you who joined us today. Thanks for your great questions. If you enjoyed this video or any of our other content and programming at the Atlas Society, please consider making a tax deductible donation at atlas society.org donate and be sure to join us next week. I will be off, but Atlas society senior scholar Stephen Hicks will host a webinar talking about argentinian President Javier Malay, analyzing his first six months in office. So we'll see you there.
