BUCK: Now, he also said most deaths are happening in people who are not up to date on their vaccines. Why is it that the data…? I remember we had last summer, let’s say, we had numbers. New York Times, CNN, a running tracker of vaccinations, of deaths every day, deaths by month, vaccination status, all of this. Shouldn’t we know what percentage of the people who are dying from covid in the last six months were vaccinated? Do they know this? Do they just not want to tell us this?
DR. MAKARY: The CDC stopped reporting it several months ago in terms of —
BUCK: That’s unbelievable.
DR. MAKARY: So, I mean they don’t want you to know, in other words, just listen to what we say and trust us. I don’t know how they could know. I don’t know how he can make that statement, Dr. Jha, because we have no compass. There’s no information about how many of the deaths are from covid versus with an incidental covid. You may have seen L.A. County had a report that only about 10% of the covid deaths were actually from covid. So, I think they’re just making up numbers as they go, which is tragic.
BUCK: Are we likely to get to a whole new series of vaccines and vaccination requirements this fall? I mean, I see these stories, Dr. Makary, about there’s a new — a new-new — variant, right? There’s always something. There’s the BA.5 subset, something or other. Are we gonna have a whole new series of shots and boosters? Like, what is…? You mentioned Big Pharma. What’s the plan?
DR. MAKARY: Well, there is going to be a push to vaccinate everybody, again, this fall in the next few months with a new vaccine that the big companies have come out with that has a vaccine against Omicron and the original Wuhan strain. I’m not sure why the original Wuhan strain vaccine is still in there, but it’ll be good for sales, for the shareholders. And I’d love to see the data. I don’t know how they can push it so hard without seeing the data.
Now, it may be that there’s gonna be a new variant. We’ll have to see. Maybe it will be phased immunity. But how do they have the certainty now to push it so hard? How about showing a little humility and saying “we don’t know” when they really don’t know? That’s probably what’s been missing for a long time. And, by the way, there’s never been data to support vaccinating those who already have immunity from natural immunity.
Dr. Jha has made the rounds behind the scenes — and I can tell you this; I know it firsthand — asking researchers to write op-eds showing that natural immunity doesn’t work, arguing that he can get it published in some of these big newspapers. That’s the guy running our public health policy right now.
BUCK: So, he’s a health propaganda czar. That’s good to know. We’re speaking to Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. Dr. Makary, another thing that I just find remarkable and really quite depressing is the durability, it seems, of Big Medicine’s willing to go along with this. There’s like Big Pharma, there’s Big Tobacco, there’s Big Government.
I think Big Medicine is now increasingly a thing that we have to all start thinking about, meaning the hospital systems, the hospital administrators, the people that are doing more bureaucracy management in the medical system than actual patient care. And, you know, everywhere requires masks now. I went to a hospital recently in New York City to visit somebody, had to put the mask on.
They’re going along with all this stuff. Meanwhile, Fauci — we played the audio. In the last 24 hours, Fauci says he never told anybody to lock down anything. And in October of 2020 he was saying he wanted the whole country locked down and that he told the president to do that. Do they realize, does the medical community realize that the tiny emperor Fauci has no clothes?
DR. MAKARY: Well, there’s a survey that showed that 40% of parents say, in rural areas, their pediatricians did not recommend vaccinating their healthy child. So, I do think there’s a lot of doctors — I certainly get hundreds of doctors that reach out to me saying, keep going, keep speaking up. They’re afraid to because they’re getting grants from Fauci’s center at the NIH or their department head or their hospital is gonna, you know, treat them differently.
Look at the groupthink on hospital visitation. A year and a half, some places two years we wouldn’t let people say good-bye to their loved ones. You couldn’t hold the hand of your dying loved one because, you know, that was somehow gonna put you at risk of covid. The groupthink has been bad, but I think there’s a fair amount of doctors out there who are thinking independently and standing up against this.
BUCK: Is it possible and do you ever maybe confer with some of your colleagues in medicine about this? Can we set up some real gold standard level experiments to put some of this stuff to bed once and for all, whether it’s on mask mandates or, you know, Fauci’s now saying that schools should basically have masks for all the kids. I mean, is it possible to design an experiment that would finally break through the stubbornness of this mentality, or do you think that this is just too far gone for people and we’re just gonna have to wait years and years?
DR. MAKARY: It’s tough when you have one spokesperson for the entire medical and public health profession and that was Dr. Fauci who called for mitigation with children and said that school closures was that mitigation. So, he was calling for schools to close. He was cheering them on when schools were closing for no good reason. And the public schools, not the private schools he didn’t say a word.
So, now we have the research that looks at schools that were masked the entirely with a mandate versus schools that were not. Three big studies have come out recently, this summer and late spring, that have done the final scientific analysis; and they all showed no benefit. But we’re ignoring that. Culver City, California, just announced going back to mask mandates.
You heard San Diego is doing the same. Boston, 130 schools in their district in Boston, they never removed mask mandates. They’ve had every kid K through 12 masked the entire year. So, they’re gonna do it. It doesn’t matter how much data you can prove scientifically. Some people have made up their minds politically, and that’s what we’ve seen with so many of these issues.
BUCK: Do you think that covid has created a specific anxiety disorder of some kind for people? I walk around in New York City, Doc, you know, every day and I’m walking through Times Square, and I live right in the thick of it. And I see a lot of people walking around with masks on, particularly these days I’m seeing a lot of N95 masks outside.
I was at the grocery store this morning in line, and there must have been — there were a couple of little lines open — seven or eight people all wearing N95 masks all around me, looking at me, of course, like I’m some kind of spreader of the plague. What is it gonna take? I mean, you know, why can’t we have public health officials come forward and tell everybody, you know, you can finally stop, guys. You can free your face?
DR. MAKARY: Well, it’s disappointing to hear that, Buck. You know, I used to enjoy going to New York about once a month. And I would go out to eat, meet friends, do some business. I haven’t been there I would say more than once in the last two years ’cause I don’t want to live like that. And the dirty secret is that when you wear a mask all the time, if you’re a child or an adult, you’re more sad. And one thing that the public health officials missed is that when you cover everybody’s faces, you also silence them, you have no expression. And had helped ignite the mental health crisis that we have now in children.
BUCK: I mean, there’s been huge damage done to children, to their development, to their academic and emotional stability during all of this. And it just feels like there’s no accountability. I mean, where do you think we’re heading with all this? Are we gonna go into another phase of these arguments in the fall? Are we gonna, or do you think that there will be enough people that have had enough that we’re gonna head toward normal lives?
DR. MAKARY: I think it depends where you live. I think people have gotten wise now. They’re not blindly following everything they hear like blind sheep. Look, for example, at Biden. He has covid. He’s recovered. He’s doing fine. He was always gonna be fine. But they’re not really concerned about contact tracing. The White House was asked — first of all, they’re muzzling his doctor.
His doctor can only speak by statements. It’s the first time since President Garfield was shot, we actually have not heard directly from the doctor. And they don’t care. They actually said regarding contact tracing, I don’t think it matters, right, remember that, I don’t think it matters when he got it. Meanwhile, school districts are subjecting kids to quarantining and isolating for possible exposures, and I think people are starting to see the ludicrousy of all this stuff.
BUCK: Yeah, I hope so. Dr. Makary, where can folks go to follow your work?
DR. MAKARY: So, I try to post my pieces on LinkedIn and Twitter, and thanks so much, Buck, I appreciate you saying what you do every day.
BUCK: Thank you. Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins Medical Center, everybody. Dr. Makary, thanks so much.
DR. MAKARY: Thanks.
BUCK: Oh, man. It’s gonna be a fight, folks, gonna be a fight. But on to something else here.