Booster Coercion, Vax 4 Toddlers, Canceling Rogan (w/Dr. Vinay Prasad)

– [Zubin] Hey, everybody, welcome to a delayed episode of “The VPZD Show.” I’m one of your hosts, Dr. Zubin Damania. I’m a UCSF, Stanford-trained hospital physician, and host of “The ZDoggMD Show,” and this is Dr. Vinay Prasad. VP, what’s up?

– [Vinay] It’s good to be back, and I know people were clamoring for it. I actually got emails saying, “Where’s the episode? “Where’s the episode?” That, I don’t get that too often, certainly not for my own show.

– [Zubin] Well, certainly not for me. I could go silent for like a year, and nobody would care, but if “The VPZD Show” goes silent, then we get emails, right? I think it’s almost like it’s like a dopamine addiction. People just wanna hear us kind of talk and talk. I don’t get it. I hate me so much, you know?

– [Vinay] You know, it’s always hard to listen to yourself talk, but I think they like it because it’s a lively dialogue about topical issues, and it is a news show, as I keep telling you. Someday, you’re gonna believe me-

– [Zubin] Yes, I believe you now. In fact, just the week, I was like, “You know what, this is a news show.” We gotta go through the news, ’cause it’s been a couple weeks now-

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] We should catch up. So much stuff has happened, brother.

– [Vinay] Yeah, so much stuff. So where to start? So the things on the docket we gotta talk about, we gotta talk about what’s going on with kids six months to four years old. We gotta talk a little bit about Paul Offit. He’s on your show recently. I haven’t finished it, but everyone has highlighted quotes to me that I think are super salient. I got boosted. It was in, it was a boost against my will, because I didn’t really, I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the boost. I didn’t think it was in my best interest, but I would’ve been terminated if I didn’t get boosted, so we can, I wanna talk to you about that experience.

– [Zubin] Yes, please.

– [Vinay] I wanna talk about Rogan. Rogan’s back in the news. You know, they wanna cancel Rogan. They’re coming for him, so we can talk about that. And I don’t know, I mean, I think schools and Urgency of Normal, which is a petition that I’ve joined many other colleagues on about returning normalcy to kids, I think that’s important to talk about, and you know, anything else on your plate?

– [Zubin] Oh, man, I think we got enough to talk about for like a seven-hour show, but we’re gonna try to keep it concise. Dude, kick it off, man. Kids six months to five, this-

– [Vinay] You wanna start that? How about, why don’t we start with the boosting, because I wanna tell you my ordeal.

– [Zubin] Tell me, dude, so I boosted myself, just for clarity. I got boosted purely because back in December, not because anyone was compelling me, because I employ myself, but rather because I was gonna see my elderly parents, and Omicron was just kicking in, we didn’t know much about it, and I wanted to be able to report it back to my Z-Pac what were the symptoms like when I got that booster, and they were much milder than the second dose. So that’s why I got boosted, but otherwise, I would’ve probably forgone it, because, you know, who cares? I’m protected against severe disease, which is what I care about.

– [Vinay] You know, you’re really hitting the nail on the head in the sense that you made a personal healthcare choice for yourself, and it was very logical, because you’re about to meet people who are in their 70s and 80s, and you know, insofar as you can give them a little bit of additional protection by you boosting, maybe it makes sense for your situation. And so, I like that, you know? I think that’s what medicine is always about, somebody making a choice that’s well-informed that fits their situation. They’re not compelled to do it, or coerced to do it. I like that story. My story, I work for the man, you know? I work for the University of California System, and from the powers on high, they doth said that you all ought to be boosted by January 31st, and the good folks at the FDA, they resigned. And so, the folks that were remaining at the FDA said, “Sure, go for it. “Go for it, go for it, go for it, boost yourself.” So here I am, an adequately vaxxed, I’ll call myself an adequately vaxxed, young, healthy man. You know me, I’m the pristine health. Let’s just say pristine health.

– [Zubin] Yes.

– [Vinay] And then the thing that really struck me is, you know, I’m being compelled to make a medical decision, and you know, I generally don’t like that for people, obviously, and I think there’s only special circumstances that you ought to do that, and I don’t think we meet those circumstances anymore, because Omicron pierces vaccine so much, and even after booster, and even after a delay, it will pierce eventually, so much so that I don’t think you have an ethical and scientific case for mandating the vaccine, end of story. I think Omicron is enough of an escape mutant that you just don’t have that prerequisite, which is benefit to other people. But put that aside, I am somebody who is in epidemiology. I’m somebody who thinks about data for a living. This isn’t something that’s peripheral to me. This is like the core of who I am, which is thinking about these kinds of medical decisions, you know, and to me, it felt like such a violation that this huge part of my identity, which is thinking through these decisions, is something that basically gets no respect, and that, you know, is completely trampled over, and it’s something that, you know, I felt, you know, I felt like I was wronged in some deep way, if that makes sense to you.

– [Zubin] Dude, not only does it make sense, but what you’ve basically put your finger on, listen, you’re a smart guy, who does this for a living-

– [Vinay] Right.

– [Zubin] Imagine you’re a less educated person who doesn’t do this for a living, who is a-

– [Vinay] That’s the person who made the mandate. That’s the person who made the mandate.

– [Zubin] Oh my God, yes, yes, it is. And as we’ve said in a previous show, these are the people we wanna hold accountable, the people who should know better, but they don’t effing know better, but who, okay, who doesn’t really necessarily know better? Somebody young, who’s going to college, who spent 50,000, $70,000 on tuition, and is being told they cannot matriculate, they can’t show up, unless they are forced to get a booster shot, which will do them personally minimal good, and may even, may even potentially cause, very rarely, some harm in the form of myocarditis, and they’re told you need to do this, or you can’t matriculate, even though you were-

– [Vinay] Or we’ll cancel your degree. We’ll cancel everything you’ve worked for.

– [Zubin] Absolutely-

– [Vinay] Ridiculous.

– [Zubin] How are they gonna feel? Now, what is that gonna trickle down into any other public health mandates in the future that are actually necessary, say, like childhood vaccines, or something like that? How is that gonna affect perception, public perception, of this? Now, it becomes a sociological crisis, because there is a hardcore, you know, 20%, or whatever, of the population that are never gonna listen to this now, and they’ve entrenched. They’ve gotten psychologically reactive to it, which I get. I totally understand it. So you feel like you were violated, and you’re, this is literally what you do for a living. Think about people who are much more emotional and less rational based, which is normal humans. They are gonna lose their minds over this, and what have we done is we’ve, and this is what Paul says, we’ve damaged public health for like a generation-

– [Vinay] Of course.

– [Zubin] It’s gonna take forever if we ever recover from it.

– [Vinay] Paul is spot on, and these are the kinds of decisions, the misuse of power. You know, we’ve always been in that office. Many years ago, I had sort of a, it wasn’t a DMV, but it was something like that, a bureaucratic organization I went in, and they just gave me a hard time just because they could. You know, that kind of abuse of power, and that’s, I think, to some degree what irritates people about, you know, the minor being pulled over by the police kind of incidents is that you feel like, you know, they’re just getting, they’re just enjoying the power they have over you in that moment, or somebody who stops you, you know, to ask you questions, you know, these kinds of things.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] You can just sense that. And here, it is an abuse of power. I mean, yes, they can compel me to get vaccinated, or they’re gonna fire me. And actually, I really don’t have much ability to fight it, because the more I fight it, they have fired a few people even, like you know, longtime career faculty have been fired. The other thing is you don’t wanna give somebody an excuse to fire you, you know? They may not like what you’re doing in other domains, and you don’t wanna wanna really give somebody an excuse to fire you, so I’m very cautious about that. But the policy makes no sense. The policy is written by people who I don’t think are thinking clearly about the issue. I don’t think they’re competent to think about this issue. In fact, the proof they’re not competent to me is that they’ve made this stupid policy. They’re making the 20-year-old in IT get boosted to serve the mothership University of California. How does that help anybody? It doesn’t help the 20-year-old who’s healthy in IT. It doesn’t, this person may be working remote anyway. It doesn’t help the university system. There’s not epidemic spread amongst the university ranks in the office, because the offices are largely closed. They’ve been closed for two years, Z. They’ve been closed, no one’s going to the office. So you know, the hospital is running, but the offices, you know, the research side of it is largely work-from-home. So it’s not helping that. It’s virtue signaling to a certain audience, a certain audience that likes more vaccines is better, and they happen to be in a geographic location, where they have a lot of those audience. But it’s not scientific, it’s not rational, it is an affront to people, and to do it for people who spend their living studying this type of decision I think is just so terrible. You know, one more thing to add, I was, somebody sent me something from Princeton, and Princeton, it says, and many colleges are saying this, that you are mandated to get the booster unless you have medical exemption, but here’s a medical exemption we’re not allowing. The doctor writes, “The person had two doses, “and just had Omicron, medical exemption.” That doesn’t count. Just having Omicron doesn’t count. Who the hell are you, Princeton, to decide?

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Who the hell are you? You’re a bunch of empty suit bureaucrats, don’t know anything about biomedicine. You’re not following this in real time, like Marty is, like I am, like you are, like many others are. Who are you, Princeton, to dare say such a thing? You are using your power in an abusive way, and I only wish bad things upon the people who have misused it, you know? I figure, I think you’re due for a comeuppance, I’ll tell you.

– [Zubin] Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Now, first of all, this is gonna get me to start shouting, which is bad, because I’m at home in my home office using a crappy mic, there’s echo in this room. All the audio quality is shitty as it is, and now you’re getting me mad, and it’s gonna start clipping the microphone, but I’m gonna say this. This is the administrative technocracy that is breaking human civilization, period.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] It is this left brain, reductionist, parts instead of whole, non-holistic, irrational, unreasonable thinking that is why so many Americans and people around the world are so pissed off during the pandemic, they’re so reactive, and they’re so emotional, because they have common sense, whereas the Princeton bureaucrats, the people who are making University of California booster policy don’t have common sense, or uncommon sense, like the actual expertise to say, “Oh, yeah, boosters are absolutely necessary “for this population.” They’re not from any evidence that we’ve seen. And if that changes, hey, you and I will be the first to be like, “Okay, that’s different now.” Like okay-

– [Vinay] And if it was really so certain, since we’re all so smart and educated, do you need to coerce us, you know?

– [Zubin] Yeah, come on-

– [Vinay] You’re coercing us because you know it’s garbage, I think.

– [Zubin] You know it’s garbage, and you get off on it, probably-

– [Vinay] I suspect-

– [Zubin] It is a power thing.

– [Vinay] I suspect there is a faction of people in this debate, who, I’ll tell you the truth, you know, people on the left don’t like people on the right. We loathe them in a way we never have, and vice versa. People on the right, they loathe people on the left, and this is a nice opportunity the people on the left have had for the last year, which is that they can, in the sake of public health, they can compel people on the right to get vaccinated, or they’ll lose their job, and they, I think many of them enjoy it. They enjoy punishing in this way, and also, the mask issue. They, it’s not, you know, now that you can wear one-way N95s, which protects you, there’s no argument there. You put, maybe other people are at risk, but you’re protected. But they still want someone else to wear the cloth mask. That is another way they’re exerting their abusive power, and you know, here’s what I think the comeuppance is. Let me tell you about that. What is the comeuppance? These people are playing with fire, and they have already burned themselves. They just don’t know it yet. You know what’s gonna happen in the next 10 years, 15 years? I promise you this is gonna happen, Z. A number of states are gonna sign laws that actually make it harder to compel anything. Private companies are not allowed to compel their employees to get vaccinated, to do many other things that private companies might have been doing in good, for earnest reason. They’re gonna be a big pushback. It’s probably gonna be more in red states than blue states, but it’s going to limit the power of the employer to compel the employees to do things to their own body. Those are gonna come. I also think you’re gonna see a huge, a huge pushback on routine vaccination. You have been fighting the good fight, Z, for many years, pushing for important vaccines, like MMR, like tetanus, diptheria. You are going to find that the people on the other side of that table, they’re not gonna be 15% anymore, 10%, or 5%. They’re gonna be 45%. They’re gonna be a juggernaut. They’re gonna be unstoppable. You know, I think that they’re going to change laws in a lot of states. We’re gonna backslide on all the routine vaccinations. We already have, due to COVID delays, but we’re gonna go back on policy. And so, the people who are playing fast and loose with the mandates this year, who think it’s fun and games to compel healthy young men, I put my self in that category, Z, I’m still under 40.

– [Zubin] You, shut your hole!

– [Vinay] Shut my mouth. Healthy young men, like myself, to compelling us to get unnecessary unproven boosters, and you know what? Let me just talk about the data for a second. Is a boost, a booster will certainly reduce my transient short-term risk of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2, but it’s unlikely to be durable. It’s unlikely to be a great extent, and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 after two doses is not on the top of list of my worries. I got bigger things to worry about. Is it going to further lower my hospitalization risk if I get SARS-CoV-2? That’s hard to further lower, because it’s already in the floor. It’s a floored risk. It’s as low as it comes. I have bigger risks to worry about. I ride my bicycle around town. That’s a higher risk activity. I have bigger risks than the SARS-CoV-2 after two vaccines. You know, is it going to benefit me? No, is it gonna benefit community spread, or pandemic dynamics? No, there’s an IHME model that shows Omicron, it spreads like wildfire. You can shut a whole society down and weld the doors shut. You’re barely gonna put a dent in Omicron spread in this model from the University of Washington people. So certainly, boosting a few 20-year-olds on the margin as a condition of their employment’s not gonna change much there. And finally, what’s the downside to me? As far as I know, I had a tickle, a tickle in my chest, but I don’t think I had myocarditis. Maybe I’m not as young as I think. Maybe I’m not as young as I think, but I did, and it’s a rare event, but I didn’t have myocarditis. So, but I could have. I certainly took my risk, and I certainly didn’t feel good, Z. I felt like someone kicked me a few times in the chest and the arm, and maybe once in the face. You know, I didn’t feel good about it, and I think if somebody were to ask me down the road do I support, if you asked me five years ago do I support restrictions on hospitals in terms of what kind of health conditions they can demand of their employees, I would’ve said, “No, I don’t support that.” Hospitals are wise, they’re prudent. They’re gonna use that power with grace. I don’t support that. If you ask me now going forward in the next five years do I support restrictions on what hospitals and universities can subject their employees, and students, and faculty to, I would say, “Yes, I support state level legislation “to curtail their power,” ’cause we can’t have some bureaucrat in some office who doesn’t know shit about medicine making medical decisions, telling students that Omicron doesn’t count, you have to get a booster within 30 days anyway, even though they’re 20, and healthy. You know, we can’t have these people making decisions. They’re not qualified. They’re not capable. Their brains clearly don’t work. Sorry, I’ve been rambling.

– [Zubin] Oh, man! Dude, people need to rewind everything you just said from when you started talking, and just play it on repeat in every facility around the country, because, okay, so, okay, I’m just gonna keep it very brief, because you said everything I wanna say. First of all, we’ve damaged vaccine sentiment for a generation. There was just an article on how the anti-vaccine sort of cult organizations, like Del Bigtree, and these, you know, Children’s Health Defense, and all these, you know, anti-vaccine organizations that have been pre-COVID horrible actors in the world are getting windfalls of donations, because people are exactly fed up by bureaucrats trying to control their own health in a way that doesn’t even make rational sense. The idea that it’s a political cudgel of the left is absolutely felt reality for many on the right, and that, you think they’re gonna sit down for that? There’s no way. There will be legislation, like you said. It will absolutely come back to bite them in the ass, and the other thing I just wanna put a real key point on here is morons are setting policy-

– [Vinay] That’s what I wanna say, yes, yes, yes. That’s the core. That’s the core problem-

– [Zubin] Total morons.

– [Vinay] That’s the core problem, yes-

– [Zubin] It’s the core problem. We’ve-

– [Vinay] Core problem.

– [Zubin] We’ve ceded the bureaucracy of leadership to idiots, and so, not very smart people, and if you talk to smart people, they’ll tell you, “Man, I can’t even open my mouth about this, “because it’s like a witch hunt. “I’ll end up, you know, getting shut down.” It’s crazy, dude. So I agree with you. I’m sorry you had to get subjected to that non-scientific bullshit, and you know, you gotta do it voluntarily, like me. I’m not a young man anymore, I’m 48. I could go down at any second from a massive MI, a stroke, or gout, heaven forbid, gout. I could die from gout.

– [Vinay] I shouldn’t have bought you that port wine. I’m sorry, Z.

– [Zubin] You know, ever since you put me on that high tyramine diet-

– [Vinay] You know, I always wondered why do you only eat drumsticks from turkeys and drink port wine, but you know, you’re headed for, you’re headed, cruising for gout. You know, okay, and I also wanna point out of all the suffering I’ve had to endure to get to the spot I’m in now, which is, you know, finish medicine, and you know, be a faculty member, a professor of medicine, the boost wasn’t the worst of it, you know?

– [Zubin] Right, right.

– [Vinay] I’ve taken worse.

– [Zubin] First world problems-

– [Vinay] Yeah, right, no, I’ve taken worse certainly. You know, when you and I trained, it wasn’t this age where, you know, people set work hours for medical students, or medical students could complain about, you know, how they perceived someone’s tone to be when they spoke to them. You know, when we were students, you had to, you took their real tone, and it’s not even a tone. It’s what they actually said, you know? So it was a different time, it was a different time. But anyway-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Medicine is nothing more than jumping through stupid hoops, lots of stupid hoops for many years. You know, this is just another one, so I’m happy to bear it, and live to fight another day. But I don’t like it. And now they’ve made a powerful enemy, and that person is me. No, obviously, because I’m-

– [Zubin] Retribution.

– [Vinay] Yeah, no, and my retribution is that I’m going to think of ways in which we need a system where you, as you say, you cannot have a bureaucrat making these decisions. They can’t be made in this way. You know, there needs to be some checks and balances on this system. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I know that COVID-19 has exposed the problems with middle management, which is that they’re-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] They’re drunk on their power. And then the other things we need to talk about, they’re being cheered on by a very tiny peanut gallery of people who were once well-intentioned, but now, have lost the plot, and you know who I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the anti-vaxxers. I’m talking about the anti-anti-vaxxers. The anti-anti-vaxxers, Z, the anti-anti-vaxxers, Z, are, they’re just as bad as the anti-vaxxers. They don’t use science, either. They treat it like a religion. They’re emotional.

– [Zubin] Yup, yup.

– [Vinay] But their religion is the opposite, which is anti-vaxxers are dumb, so anti-anti-vaxxers are smart, and we’re so smart, we know that if a little vax is good for you, a lot is better-

– [Zubin] A whole lot is better.

– [Vinay] A whole lot is better, more is better, more is better, and the anti-anti-vaxxers are cheering on the FDA’s imminent authorization of six to four. So should we go to the next topic?

– [Zubin] Oh, great, great segue, bro. You’re just a natural at this, man. I’m just gonna sit back. I thought I was the medical communicator. Wrong, wrong.

– [Vinay] No, I’ve learned everything from you. I’m gonna, I-

– [Zubin] That’s like, sorry, it’s like that old drug commercial, I don’t know if you remember this one, like, “Where’d you get this weed, Timmy? “Where’d you get this weed?” Like, “I learned it from watching you, dad! “I learned it from watching you!”

– [Vinay] I remember that, I remember that!

– [Zubin] Remember that?

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] “Where’d you learn this? “Where’d you learn to do this?”

– [Vinay] And then the dad was like, “But I have glaucoma! “I have glaucoma!”

– [Zubin] That’s my favorite excuse. Now, you don’t even need that. Now, it’s pretty much just legal everywhere.

– [Vinay] Yeah-

– [Zubin] And yeah, I don’t-

– [Vinay] Realize that alcohol is more dangerous. They finally, they finally realized-

– [Zubin] They finally woke up to that, exactly-

– [Vinay] And by the way, that’s another good example. You know, you and I grew up in the 19, well, we grew up a little bit apart, but you know, we grew up in a time where marijuana, what was that? That was awful, you know? It was considered so-

– [Zubin] Oh, it was the-

– [Vinay] So bad for you.

– [Zubin] “Just say no.”

– [Vinay] Yeah, and now, it’s like, “Eh, alcohol’s worse for you,” and what was the data? The data was always supportive of the claim that alcohol is worse. Some of us read the data, others of us didn’t.

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] Similarly, similarly, if I may, I think masking two-year-olds is not gonna look so hot in five years. I think so, I think it’s not gonna look hot, and I think, I think it’s gonna look pretty stupid. I think it’s gonna look stupid. I think somebody might even notice that many of them don’t really wear it properly, and even some of them chew the mask. You know, they might notice things like that-

– [Zubin] Yup, yup, and I’ll even go a step further and say, you know, I’ve been hearing from a lot of teachers around the country by email, and what they tell me is, you know, first of all, Zoom made it so that kids could enter this very passive way of learning, where they just turn their cameras off, and they just sit there. The masks do the same thing. In a way, the kids hide behind the mask. Their expressions are hidden. They’re in a different world in a way, and people don’t really talk, or think about that. I’ve had speech therapists reach out saying, “I’m seeing these problems in kids.” Now, again, this is not scientific, this is anecdote. But the truth is as much as you can say, “Well, there’s all this anecdote that the masks may work,” well, what about the anecdotes that they don’t, that they’re causing harm, right? So it’s a complete crap show.

– [Vinay] You know, I wanna just push on that point a little bit, ’cause I think you’re making a great point, which is a couple things. One, people say, you know, that evidence of harm is only anecdotal. Yeah, sure, I concede that that’s true to a large degree.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] There are some studies, though. However, you know, the burden of an intervention done on children for many years is not to prove harm rigorously. It’s to prove efficacy rigorously. Harms are the thing you’re trying to avoid, and even putative harm should take larger weight in your mind. For instance, what if somebody said, “We’re just gonna cut two eye holes in a garbage, “in a paper bag, and make every child wear that “for the next 10 years”? How long do you, no, how long do you think it would take to show harms? They don’t see any part of the face. They just see eyes behind a mask, or they have to wear a mask, like a Halloween mask. You know, you can imagine that’s the policy. What I might say is, “Well, what’s the goal of the policy?” Aw, just ’cause, just ’cause we just want ’em to wear the mask, wear a garbage bag, or a paper, a paper, a grocery bag over their head with holes cut out for the eyes. And then you’ll say, “Well, you know, “there might be a downside, “like they’re using their face to express emotion “to their colleagues.” Oh, you gotta prove that to me, buddy. Do a randomized trial, prove that. You know, I see these brainiacs, you know, I have been a proponent for randomized controlled trials to establish the efficacy of masking, and they fire back at me that I have a, quote, “double standard,” because I don’t call for randomized trials to demonstrate the harms of masking. And I say, “These are people who must not have been “paying attention for, I don’t know, “20 years of biomedicine.” We do randomized controlled trials powered and designed for interventions thought to be putatively efficacious, to show efficacy, and harms are gathered only as an ancillary product of the randomized controlled trial, and often with larger observational data sets. But if you don’t have efficacy, you do not pass go. You don’t even implement your foolish idea. The burden is never to show harms from some stupid idea you dreamt up in your garage. It’s to show that it actually works. Where have you been? I mean-

– [Zubin] But Vinay, masks for kids are like a parachute-

– [Vinay] Oh, yeah-

– [Zubin] You don’t do a randomized controlled trial-

– [Vinay] That’s what they said.

– [Zubin] You don’t do a randomized. It just makes sense that it works. You don’t question a parachute.

– [Vinay] They recently published their garbage study about how daycares that masked were less likely to be closed even once than daycares that didn’t mask, and I have a nice little takedown of it in my Substack, by the way. Listeners should subscribe-

– [Zubin] Nice.

– [Vinay] To my Substack. Thanks, yeah, the-

– [Zubin] Definitely do.

– [Vinay] But the point I wanna make there is even in this very flawed study, the effect size was 40% if you masked of daycares were closed once, and 46% of daycares that didn’t mask were closed once, or more. So it’s a 6%, so is that a parachute? A parachute only, you survive, 40% of the time you die with your parachute, or you die without a parachute, and, sorry, 40% of the time you die with the parachute, but it goes up to 46% of the time without? No, a parachute is 99.999. So even their flawed observational study should clue them in that they don’t got a parachute on their hands, and common sense, and an ounce of brain power would’ve told them that, but you know-

– [Zubin] And the experience in other countries, dude, where they don’t do this to children, they’re doing fine.

– [Vinay] They’re doing fine. I just saw somebody, you know, they were telling some story. In Sweden, they’ve decided not to vaccinate healthy kids five to 11. They’re not masking kids. They’re doing fine. Swedes are not dropping like flies. There’s not a runaway epidemic spread in children in Sweden. In fact, Sweden is doing better now. You know, the moment people stop talking about Sweden is when you know they’re doing better.

– [Zubin] You know they’re doing better, yeah, and that’s exactly what’s happened. You know, it, oh my God. So the bottom line is, like you said, the anti-anti-vaxxers are, they’re a religion. The anti-vaxxers are a religion. None of these people are using actual science in any meaningful way in a chronic way that’s stable, and I don’t know. Then it puts you and me in this awkward position where everyone hates us, which is fine. I’m actually down to clown with that. But it’s frustrating. It seems like more people should be looking at these things in a nuanced way, but I’m just wishful thinking now. I’m wishful thinking-

– [Vinay] Yeah, well, I-

– [Zubin] Or as Ingrid Andress says, “Wishful Drinking.”

– [Vinay] “Wishful Drinking”?

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] I think most people are where we are. I actually think that the poles are, you know, they appear large, because they talk a lot, but they’re not as large as they think they are.

– [Zubin] Yeah, you’re right.

– [Vinay] I think they’re really extreme, yeah.

– [Zubin] And maybe that’s why they’re acting out of so much fear, because they know they’re actually not the majority.

– [Vinay] Oh, which is like a classic military technique if you’re, you know, you pretend that your army is bigger than it is.

– [Zubin] Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s, you know, I believe male lobsters do this with their claws. It’s all a show-

– [Vinay] Puff out your chest, it’s all show, yeah. Okay, let’s talk about this vaccine. So you know, I mean, I haven’t seen, I mean, nobody has seen all the data. I saw the FDA say, like, “You haven’t seen the private data.” I was like, “Shut the,” I was like, “Show us the data then, shut up”-

– [Zubin] Show us the data then.

– [Vinay] Just show us the data, you, what are you doing-

– [Zubin] You want us to vaccinate our six-month-old?

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Show us the effing data-

– [Vinay] Yeah, show us the data. What are you doing?

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] What are you doing? And also, like, oh, here, like where did we leave off? December 10th-ish, 15th-ish, Pfizer announces that two doses of the Pfizer BioNTech three micrograms failed, failed to generate sufficient antibody titers in that age group. It failed to meet the, and by the way, the bar is already in the toilet, which is we’re just saying, like, “Hey, hey”-

– [Zubin] Antibody levels, yeah.

– [Vinay] And non-inferior. It can actually be worse, you know? It just has to fall within the margin. So we’re like saying, “Hey, Pfizer. “Pfizer, I know, I know times are tough for you. “You only made 30 billion this year on your vax. “Hey, do you mind running just a super small, “like let’s keep it super small, “let’s not call it, a super small randomized trial “in these little kids, by the way, who mostly do fine? “But just super small, we don’t wanna bother you “with any safety signals that might creep in, “but super small trial, and look for antibody titers, “and just show it’s roughly the same. “We’ll take roughly the same.” And Pfizer comes back, and they say, “Hey, you know, we ran that super small trial, “and you know, we didn’t power it for severe disease, “we didn’t power it for symptomatic COVID. “We just powered it for antibody titers, “and you know what? “We’re sorry, we couldn’t get there,” and then they say, “Oh, you know, oh, boy. “You probably should go back to the drawing board.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, let’s not go crazy. “Let’s just add a third dose. “Third dose”-

– [Zubin] Oh my God.

– [Vinay] And then they said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that. “Let’s just add a third dose, yeah.” You know, in normal times, we would’ve gone back to the drawing board, and tried two doses with a slightly higher dose, but okay, go back to the, you know, add a third dose. And then along the way, and by the way, I don’t know this to be true, but I suspect they’re looking at the data, looking, and looking, and looking, and looking, and every day, they look, and say, “Ah, today’s not,” it’s like the stock market. Should I buy today? Eh, it’s not a good day, it’s not a good day. Oh, oh, it’s a good day! And then they say, “Oh, there’s a difference “in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2, “and it’s looking good.” And then somebody at the FDA, per reporting, they invite Pfizer to submit the application. I’ve never heard the, you, the FDA, they’re inviting the drug company to take money from us? What is this? But that’s how it happens. And so, they invite the application, then they start trickling out data. “Oh, well, you know, if you get two doses now, “it’ll speed it up to the third dose if that’s successful. “Oh, actually, there is a difference in symptomatic COVID, “and some of it is Omicron, some of it is Delta.” This is a mess.

– [Zubin] Oh my God, and you know what though, but the worst part of it is we’ve created a generation of frightened parents who are panicked about their kids. Like, “Oh my God, no, no, no, we need this thing “in our six-month-old, you know, infant, “because the child could die of COVID.” They’re so infected by the fear contagion that mainstream media and everything has created that they’re clamoring for this thing, so there isn’t this big public outcry like, “Why is FDA doing this? “What kind of surrogate marker?” This is a surrogate marker of a surrogate marker of a surrogate marker, and exactly where’s the safety signal in these young kids? Like none of it is there.

– [Vinay] It’s like, you know, I feel bad for the parents, and I think you’re absolutely right. If you have a four-year-old who’s unvaccinated now who’s otherwise healthy, you know what you should be worried about? Everything you used to be worried about in 2019 for a four-year-old, you know-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah, drowning, motor vehicle accident.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Violence-

– [Zubin] Abuse, violence.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] And if they’re getting along, and being, and happy, and all these things, you know? But certainly not COVID. But you know what it’s like, Z? It’s like imagine if I strapped you to a chair, and I made you watch 1,000 hours of “Dateline.”

– [Zubin] Oh my God!

– [Vinay] You know, “Dateline.” It’s like, “Tonight on ‘Dateline,’ “even though you live in a posh suburb of San Francisco, “home intruders have been making rounds. “Home intruders can come in, and murder you in your sleep, “tonight on ‘Dateline.'” And then they say, you know, “The story goes back to 1987,” you know, when the last time it happened, right?

– [Zubin] Yeah, “When a large public profile case of a intruder”-

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] “Who killed a family of four,” it’s like, okay, this is exactly, and you know, it goes back to this idea of boosting, this culture that we’ve generated of safetyism, this idea that, oh, if you can keep people safe, you have to. If there’s anything you can do, you just keep creep, the mission creep just keep happening. It’s like, oh, you know, kids at playgrounds, it used to be they’d fall, and they’d occasionally hurt their head. Okay, so we mandated that we have soft, you know, ground at playgrounds. Okay, cool, but you know what?

– [Vinay] You’re not using helmets? You’re not using helmets?

– [Zubin] You’re not using a helmet, exactly! Like how about a helmet? Put a helmet on these kids. And pretty soon, the kid is in a frickin’ astronaut suit, and is doing nothing. And that’s what we’re seeing with boosting, that’s what we’re seeing with masking-

– [Vinay] A real parachute-

– [Zubin] And a, oh, the parachute, which you don’t need to do a randomized controlled trial for. We’ve established that parachutes on the ground, you don’t need to study that. They still keep you safer than not having a parachute on the ground. It’s insanity, dude. But this is what it is, and people are, good people get victimized by it, because we’re normal humans, and we’re infected by a social contagion. So these poor parents are worried about their four-year-old. I get the emails, like you know, they’ll say, “Z, you know, I get what you’re saying about all this stuff, “but you don’t understand that people “who can’t be vaccinated, how do we protect them?” I’m like, “They protect themselves by being children.”

– [Vinay] There are a few that are, you know, severely immunocompromised that we really need to strategize, but you need to do that with your doctor. But the average, healthy kid, they are good, and you know, also vaccination in five to 11 is only 20% uptake, because 80% of parents are naturally reluctant, and cautious, like Swedish government. And then the other thing I say is, you know, what if you watched all these “Datelines”? I mean, ’cause this is what these parents have been, they’ve been bombarded with propaganda. The media have been hyping this like, you know, it’s like that Malaysian airliner for two years. They’ve never been so happy, you know? They love to talk about this. They got you so scared of COVID, so scared of long COVID in kids, even though all the objective data suggests it’s fleetingly rare, and is certainly not the thing you should be worried about. They got you so worried about long COVID. What about long COVID in kids? I was like, “What about it?” I was like, “We’re all gonna be infected “many, many times over with COVID in our lives, “and as long as that’s true, insofar as long COVID exists, “we all gotta deal with it.” But I suspect we might realize that, you know, it’s overblown a bit, so-

– [Zubin] Well, so let me, here, I’ll push back the way they push back on us. So what about Omicron? Omicron is filling the hospitals with children. It’s infecting everybody, and yeah.

– [Vinay] Well, I mean, okay, so now go, but there, what about Omicron? It’s infecting everyone. Yes, and the virus will eventually infect every single person on this planet whether you’ve, as long as you use this mRNA construct, you’re not gonna get enough neutralizing antibodies to keep this at bay. We’re all gonna get infected, but I’m not a, I think it is factually untrue that the hospitals are running at high capacity from pediatric hospitalizations. Omicron is now plummeting. And Omicron, I think, by every piece of data I’ve seen is milder.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] And MIS-C-

– [Zubin] And you know, talking-

– [Vinay] Well, one last, and MIS-C has been decoupled from the original ancestral strain to Delta. MIS-C is much less common, too. So you know, go on. I mean, I don’t know what to say-

– [Zubin] Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, and when I talk to doctors who are actually working in these hospitals, that’s basically what they say, and what it really is is just the sheer number of infections. It’s kind of like having a bad RSV season, or a bad flu season. You get vulnerable kids that end up in the hospital, and as Paul often says, you know, 30% of them have no comorbidities. That’s just bad luck, right? So you’re gonna have that, but so how do you respond to that? Are you gonna force vaccinate a bunch of young, young, young kids? That reduces that risk by, what, some small percentage? Or are you just gonna go on, and live like you do during flu, RSV in these kind of seasons, and shore up hospitals if there is surge, and all that kind of thing, and focus on that? It seems like that’s a more rational response. Instead, we’ve lost our minds. I mean, so it’s really just a question of like you don’t belittle people who’ve suffered, people who’ve gotten sick, and yes, that happens, and you know frontline healthcare workers are burned out, and they’re tired, and they’re dealing with a lot of unvaccinated adults in ICU, which again, you and I, I don’t understand why people keep saying we’re anti-vaxxers. We keep saying, “Get your ass vaccinated.”

– [Vinay] Of course!

– [Zubin] If you’re an adult, especially if you’re at risk from anything. Get a booster if you’re at risk, right? Like come on, if you’re over 65-

– [Vinay] Among 65-year-olds in this country, I think 16% are unvaccinated, and I think 47% are un-boosted. That’s playing Russian roulette. In the UK, in the same age groups, I think it’s four and 9%. Look at the UK-

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] They actually-

– [Zubin] They’re opening up.

– [Vinay] Yeah, and they vaccinated the right people. We are so aggressively vaccinating children to make up for 65-year-olds. You’re never gonna get far doing that, you know? They’re easy on the kids and hard on the elderly. That’s how it ought to be, you know?

– [Zubin] Yeah, that’s how it ought to be, to beat up the elderly, man. They can take it. And let the kids be kids. Dude, I believe the children are our future, VP. Let them free, and let them show the way.

– [Vinay] That reminds me of a song, yeah.

– [Zubin] Doesn’t it though? By a woman who was not in the best of health herself-

– [Vinay] Who, who was that?

– [Zubin] Was it Whitney Houston? Whitney Houston. Hey, crack is whack, VP, crack is whack. Speaking of that, though, you said it in a tweet somewhere, dude, it’s the American way. Like everything, you gotta do everything big, you gotta do it in excess. If a little is good, a lot is better, and that’s how we felt about vaccinating children, masking, all this other stuff. In Europe, they’re looking at us like we’re insane, and I think we are insane. I think we’ve kind of lost our minds a little bit.

– [Vinay] You know, it’s interesting to me, because we talked about how the bureaucrats are. I mean, let’s just put this, put a pin on this last thing about this Pfizer kids vaccine is let’s see what the data they have shows, and let’s see what they decide to do.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] But already they’ve bungled it, because if you wanted to get buy-in from the public, you wouldn’t say, “Hey, the last thing you heard about this “was it failed, and we’re ongoing, “and the thing you hear is that even though “we don’t have results from that part we added on “we’re gonna do it anyway.” If you say that, you come across like you are being quite flippant with safety and efficacy of vaccines, which is probably not how you should be. So you’ve already bungled the messaging. You’ve screwed it up, and you’ve revealed yourself to be grossly incompetent that you would do it such a way. I mean, I think only a truly incompetent person would’ve done this. That’s the one point, okay. Let’s see what they find. But the other point I wanna make is I believe, and I hate to say this, and I’ve been thinking about it more and I haven’t said it, but I really think we really have to start asking ourselves who has bungled COVID-19 more, Trump, or Biden? I mean, I really think we have to ask ourselves, because, because one, in the Biden administration, who is even in charge of these decisions? I don’t think it’s the CDC director. I don’t think it’s the FDA, well, who is the FDA commissioner? It’s Bob Califf, he just got pushed in. But I mean, who was, it was nobody for a long time. I don’t even know who’s making these decisions. I know the vaccine people at FDA have resigned, Gruber, Krause. I know Paul Offit is not happy. I mean, you lost Offit, man. You lost the Offit, what the hell are you doing? You lost Offit-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Who, I don’t, well, one, I think they should actually put forth the person who has the power to make decisions. I certainly don’t think it’s Biden. Let’s agree on that. It’s not-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] It’s not this guy. It’s somebody. Somebody’s got the power behind these decisions. I’m not sure it’s Fauci, either. I don’t know who it is. But whoever it is, I don’t think they’re good at their job. I really think they’ve screwed up, and I think the reason they’re not good at their job fundamentally is they’re putting all their energy on the youth. Kids, man, I mean, what do we hear about all the time? Kids masking, off-ramps for kid masking. No, we don’t wanna off-ramp. We want vaccine available, teachers unions that wanna mandate vaccine in kids, the bill in California to mandate elementary school kids get vaccinated, you know, all these things. We hear about the youth, the youth, the youth, colleges, what rules the college kids are under. What do I don’t hear about? I don’t hear about the fact that nursing homes are un-boosted. I don’t hear about 65-year-olds unvaccinated, un-boosted. I don’t hear about the fact that you can be sick and working a nursing home with COVID actively having COVID. I was like no one’s talking about why aren’t you giving them $500 million to hire some people who aren’t actively sick with COVID? What the fuck are you doing?

– [Zubin] Yup, yup, and you know, I’ll even say something that I don’t really believe, but I’ll say this because it’s an interesting thought experiment. If you wanna coerce people to do something and actually have an outcome that’s gonna be good, the way you do it is you say, “Hey, everyone over 65, “unless you get vaccinated, “you will not be covered by Medicare “for any admission relating to COVID, period,” or even not relating to COVID. I’m not saying you should do this. I’m saying that this is very unethical. But if you did that, people would then line up to get vaccinated, you’d save a ton of lives. So that’s a coercion that would save lives. I don’t think we should ever do it, but coercing fucking college students to, you know, get a booster, or they’re gonna lose their degree?

– [Vinay] I see your point. Your point is saying this, like you’re against coercion, but if you were to use coercion, the coercion you need to use is on the older people, right?

– [Zubin] Yes, yes-

– [Vinay] But you know why, Z, they don’t wanna coerce the old people? The old people gonna vote against them. The young people, they don’t vote. These kids don’t vote.

– [Zubin] They don’t vote.

– [Vinay] And as long as these kids don’t vote, you’re gonna get whatever we tell you to get. I mean, I think that’s how they abuse their power, these politicians-

– [Zubin] Yeah. It’s a real generational war, too. The whole COVID thing has been the old people versus the young.

– [Vinay] No, but the problem, I’ll tell you-

– [Zubin] Yeah?

– [Vinay] No, I totally agree with you that it should’ve been a generational war, but here’s why it wasn’t, because the political left is more popular among the youth, like young people are liberal and idealist, and the political left-

– [Zubin] Ah!

– [Vinay] Has become-

– [Zubin] I see what you’re saying.

– [Vinay] They hijacked the propaganda machine. These kids are-

– [Zubin] Yes.

– [Vinay] You know, they are, they’ve-

– [Zubin] They’re brainwashed-

– [Vinay] Yeah, they’re brainwashed. I think they’re, yeah, they’re brainwashed, the youth-

– [Zubin] Absolutely.

– [Vinay] And so, now, you’ve got the young people saying, “We need to just wear N95s a little longer.” I was like, “Dude, you’re 20 years old. “Shouldn’t you be living it up?” “I wouldn’t wanna take any risks.” I was like, “Are you a teenager? “What the hell is wrong with you? “Take some risks, buddy!”

– [Zubin] “I’m a high schooler. “I’m gonna go protest that my high school “doesn’t feel safe from COVID!”

– [Vinay] I was like-

– [Zubin] It’s like, are you-

– [Vinay] When I was in high school, people just leaned over, and said, “Hey, smoke this.” I say, “What is that?”

– [Zubin] Smoke this, exactly!

– [Vinay] Smoke this, what is it?

– [Zubin] “Maybe it’s laced with PCP. “I don’t know, my dealer just gave it to me,” exactly. Like this idea of safety, yeah, we know we’ve brainwashed these kids, and the truth is if you sit down with a kid, and you start talking to them, they’ll tell you, like, “Well, you know, we wanna be safe,” and this and that, and in five minutes, you can convince them that they’ve been lied to. Like it takes a second. You just go, “Hey, but have you thought about it this way, “or this way, or this way?” Because you know what, kids are actually really smart, and they’re good bullshit detectors. Once you show them, they’re like, “Wait, what? “Hey, this makes no sense. “Why am I, why are we even masking in class right now? “Why is my teacher opening all the windows “in the middle of the winter “because they’re afraid of COVID for these kids?”

– [Vinay] You know, when we were teenagers, there was a big campaign in public health to be like, “You know what, use a condom.”

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] And now for teenagers, there’s a big campaign in public health to be like, “You know what, when you’re outside here “in the sea breeze, it’s okay to lower your N95.” What happened to teenagers? What happened-

– [Zubin] Gone crazy, man. You know, and you know this is not, this has been a, this is actually an exacerbation of a trend that’s already been happening that Jonathan Haidt has written about in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” that, you know, kids are already in this sort of bubble of safety, and they can’t see out of it, and these are smart, you know, these are really, they’re the future, right? We have to save them, VP. We gotta go on a crusade, brother. Now, see, now that I’ve, now that I’ve said that, people are gonna attack me for like, “Oh, they wanna brainwash the kids back “into some kind of libertarian utopia.” It’s like no, I just want them to think.

– [Vinay] Yeah, I mean-

– [Zubin] For themselves.

– [Vinay] And I just want them to be numerate, and think about risk proportionally, and if they want to be this hard on COVID given the risk, then I wanna see them that hard on auto accidents, I wanna see them that hard on suicidality. In fact, and ironically-

– [Zubin] Or on Instagram. I wanna see them be that hard on Instagram’s poisonous influence on children-

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Oh, it lets us-

– [Zubin] But they’re not.

– [Vinay] That’s a nice segue to the Rogan, because I was just thinking, I was like, everyone’s like, “We wanna cancel Spotify. “Spotify, dangerous misinformation, Spotify, Spotify.” I’m like, “Shut up.”

– [Zubin] And Neil Young and Joni Mitchell like ♪ Keep on rockin’ in the free world ♪ Like these two assholes were probably the heart of the anti-vaccine movement prior to COVID, because they were in that like hippie, liberal, like Marin, like, “Yeah, we don’t really believe “in toxins in our body. “Did you know there’s mercury in MMR? “That’s what it stands for, “Mercury, Mercury, and Retardation from Mercury.” It’s like come on, dude, so now-

– [Vinay] You know, I wanna say, full disclosure, full disclosure, I think Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” is probably one of the greatest albums of the 20th century, so I do-

– [Zubin] Listen, I love, I love both of ’em, I love both of ’em.

– [Vinay] You love both-

– [Zubin] Yeah, I really do. I like Neil Young a lot. I like “Alabama,” what was his, “Southern Man”? Dude, that’s good stuff, man.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] That was liberalism when liberalism was cool, man.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Now, you know-

– [Vinay] No, they’re good musicians, but I mean, who are these musicians? I was like first of all, are you even, do you even listen to this? Are you, how are you even equipped to process what was true and false on that show? You’re an old musician. What do you know about, and why are you, I mean, I almost wonder if it’s like a publicity stunt. Somebody’s like, “How do you get your name out there?” You’re like, “You know what, you go hard, “you go hard against Rogan, you get out there,” you know? I was like-

– [Zubin] Punch up, punch up.

– [Vinay] Punch up.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] I was like if I was a starting singer/songwriter, I would take the bold stance on Twitter of saying, “You’re not allowed to put my music on Spotify!” And I was like, and it was like, “Anyone listen to your music, buddy?” I was like, “Shut up.” ♪ Keep on rockin’ in the free world ♪

– [Zubin] Yeah, exactly.

– [Vinay] You are a musician. You could pull your stuff.

– [Zubin] You know, I’ll pull, it’s true. I have a ton of stuff on Spotify. All my albums are on Spotify, all my parody music. I could make a stand and be like, “You know what, “I disagree with with Spotify hosting Sanjay Gupta. “I feel that it’s a,” but anyway, so hit me with Rogan, ’cause I have some thoughts on this too, ’cause this is-

– [Vinay] So I guess the first thing to say is, you know, yes, there are things on the show that I don’t agree with, and I’m sure they’re things that you don’t agree with, and I’m sure they’re-

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] Okay, and we probably are largely aligned. There are also some things that those guys said that are not wrong, and you know, that’s the thing about people. You know, if somebody says something wrong and somebody says something not wrong, you know, it’s very difficult to parse. Like you know, what do you just wanna silence them forever? I mean, some of the things they’re saying are in fact true. Okay, that’s one. Two, this boycotting, this is the new cult. I mean, this is a pathetic culture. It’s just a culture where, you know, nobody wants to, like somebody was complaining to me about something somebody said, and then I said, “Well, what did they say?” And they said, “Well, it was gross,” and they called it gross. I say, “But what was the thing itself?” “Oh, you know, it was something like this, “but it was gross, I’m pretty sure.” And then I was like the more you realize is you don’t even know what they said!

– [Zubin] You don’t even know what they said-

– [Vinay] What is wrong with you? I was like, “Is your education so bad “you think you can characterize someone’s position “without actually knowing what happened?” I was like, “What happened to these kids?” So I think that’s part of the problem here. I also think it’s ironic that they go hard on Spotify, and not on Facebook, and Instagram, as you point out.

– [Zubin] Yeah, which are poisonous. Yeah, Spotify’s like frickin’ like going to college compared to that.

– [Vinay] It’s like, yeah, it’s like good for you. Yeah, Spotify’s like fruits, it’s like protesting fruits and vegetables compared to soda, compared to the fucking soda-

– [Zubin] Broccoli-

– [Vinay] Yeah, “Bro, wanna take “a hard stance against carrots. “It’s got too much natural sugars in those carrots.”

– [Zubin] You can get carotenemia and turn orange! Yeah.

– [Vinay] Yeah, compared to the other shit out there, and then I think the other thing is, I think, you can’t cancel Rogan. It’s like trying to cancel the sun. Are you crazy? He’s already got another couple million subscribers, ’cause you keep talking about him. And two, there’s an empirical study that shows his influence has actually shrunk ’cause of Spotify, like pre-Spotify-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Did we talk about this before? Pre-Spotify, if you went on the show, you would gain on average, I forget, like 4,000 followers on your social media in a week. But on Spotify, it’s gone down to 2,000, suggesting that about 50% of the audience doesn’t like the Spotify app is what I think it is.

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] So you know, if they cancel him, if they find a way to push him out of Spotify, which I’m not sure they’re gonna do-

– [Zubin] He’s gonna win.

– [Vinay] He’s gonna win. He’s gonna, yeah, he’s gonna get all the Spotify severance pay, and then he’s gonna be more popular. He’ll have 20 million followers. And then the last thing I would say is, I mean, I think it’s intellectually weak. I think most people don’t even know what was said on the episodes that they are so angry about that is, quote, “misinformation.” And I think Spotify are proving themselves to be pathetic. When you’re faced with the mob calling for the cancellation, the answer is zero capitulation.

– [Zubin] Yeah, nothing.

– [Vinay] Zero capitulation.

– [Zubin] Don’t give a inch, yeah.

– [Vinay] Don’t give an inch, and they already gave an inch. “We’re gonna put a warning on the front of the episode “that says, ‘The content you’re about to hear is “‘on a controversial issue. “‘If you want reliable information,'” this is what they’re gonna say, “‘go visit the CDC website.'” I said, “No way!”

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah. Did you see, did you see, I clicked through on that thing. It is appalling. They had like Esther Choo’s blog on there. They had, you know, which is all fine. These are all wonderful people, but how the hell are they authorities on this stuff? Like it had CNN, it had NPR-

– [Vinay] I haven’t clicked it, I thought they linked to like the CDC, no?

– [Zubin] Oh, they, no, they do that, too, but they link to a bunch of other sources that they’ve determined are vetted sources, and they’re all mainstream media outlets, like NPR, and then it says the doctors. It has it broken down by category, and in the doctors, it’s like Esther Choo, and it’s like, you know, these very left-leaning physicians, like again, mainstream stuff, which that’s all fine. But the truth is, but then you’re saying so how is that, who’s vetting this? Are you, Spotify, vetting these vetters?

– [Vinay] I like Esther, so I’ll put that aside, but let’s-

– [Zubin] No, I like Esther, too, she’s a friend. But the point is how did she get on that list?

– [Vinay] Where do you find the Spotify, like how did you find that? I wanna see this.

– [Zubin] So yeah, if you go to a Rogan episode, or something, I forget how it is, then you click on, you know, the little disclaimer, and I forget exactly how to do it. I forget how I did it, but then it, on the Spotify app, it’ll give you like rows, and it’ll say media outlets, like government resources. It’ll say the doctors, and-

– [Vinay] Ah, I found it, okay, learn about COVID-19, COVID-19 guide. First of all, where the hell is VPZD? It should be number one.

– [Zubin] Hello? Maybe that’s why we’re so pissed, because we’re just, we’re like Robert Malone. We’re mad we got spurned, like no one’s giving us credit for-

– [Vinay] I invented COVID information! I invented it, Z!

– [Zubin] How dare Esther Choo who’s smarter and better looking than me get that spot!

– [Vinay] Why is she getting what she deserves in life? Why not me?

– [Zubin] Why not me?

– [Vinay] Wait, hold on, let me look. Oh, wow. Stay in the know, oh, first of all, it links to the Spotify Original a 15-minute episode on Fauci, just, oh, okay, just what I wanted to listen to, sure. Coronavirus explained, from the doctors, this is really interesting.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] It’s a problem. They’re making a big mistake. I mean, it doesn’t really matter what they’re putting. The point is that the moment you insert people curating what is truth and fiction, you’re taking a bold stance as a platform. And then in addition to that, why doesn’t anyone want to acknowledge the core truth, which is that COVID came and hit, we shut down the world. Last I checked, you know, in the 1980s, how many times you shut down the world? Five times a year? No, it never shut down. We never shut it down in the ’90s. We never shut it down in the 2000s. Now, we finally, when Zoom is strong, we shut it down. When you do something you’ve never done before, you’re gonna get massive disagreement, and you can’t try to silence that disagreement. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

– [Zubin] Yeah, it’s dumb.

– [Vinay] It’s so dumb.

– [Zubin] Now, what Rogan said actually in his, you know, quote, unquote “apology”-

– [Vinay] I watched that.

– [Zubin] Yeah, which I actually, you know, listen, here, he kind of doubles down a little on, you know, these are smart guys with credentials who are saying this, that’s fine, and then what he did say though was, “Look, and the best I can do is I can get people “who disagree with those viewpoints on the show,” and he cited a few, which aren’t, that wasn’t really valid, like Peter Hotez pre-COVID, and I think he, who else did he cite, Sanjay Gupta?

– [Vinay] He had a Hotez in the middle of the pandemic via Zoom. It was terrible.

– [Zubin] Oh did he? Okay, I didn’t see that, I didn’t see it.

– [Vinay] It was terrible.

– [Zubin] Yeah, okay, okay. But well, so the thing about Rogan is at least, you know, if he says like, “Well, maybe I’ll get VP on “to talk about a nuanced heterodox position on this, “or Paul Offit,” like Paul Offit would be great on Rogan. Like could you imagine Offit sitting in front of Rogan? It’d be insane, ’cause Offit is like the straightest shooter you’ll ever get, and Rogan will probably get really curious with Paul, like most people do when you talk to Paul. So you know, I think that’s correct. That’s what you do, right? And the other thing is like who, so, okay, so who is gatekeeping the sort of information that goes out on Rogan’s show? Rogan is, so Rogan makes decisions every day, just like you and I. Like I’m not gonna go and interview, you know, Ashish Jha on my show. I’m not, because he has a huge platform in mainstream media. His voice has been generally quite mainstream, and we hear plenty of it. So who do I choose to platform? To platform, like that’s some fuckin’ verb.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] I choose to interview people that I’m genuinely curious about their position-

– [Vinay] Of course!

– [Zubin] Right, and so, and Rogan does the same thing. He tends to lean conspiratorial. He tends to lean in that space. That’s fine, that’s Rogan. But if he can kind of say, “Okay, okay, I see that now “I have this, people are listening to me, “all right, I’ll get some other people on,” fine, that’s great. That’s a guy who’s actually self-aware. That’s what you want. So, but Spotify putting a stupid label on it, just like Facebook, and all this, like you think the people who believe Rogan are gonna believe those other sources? No!

– [Vinay] It’ so bad-

– [Zubin] They’re listening to Rogan for a reason-

– [Vinay] Spotify is, they no longer stand for free speech. They wanna put this label. They think they can placate this angry mob. The angry mob only wants one thing. They want Rogan’s head on a platter. They won’t be happy-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Even when he’s, the only reason they can do this is because he’s in Spotify, which by the way, I thought was a mistake that he went there. My understanding was Rogan was netting like 10 mil a year, and he went to Spotify for 100 mil, and I was like, you know what, if you have, if you’re netting 10 mil a year, and you have total freedom, just live there-

– [Zubin] Dude, keep going.

– [Vinay] Keep going.

– [Zubin] Keep going.

– [Vinay] You don’t need 100 mil. What are you gonna even spend? What can you even spend that much on? I mean, you’re not living in the Bay Area. There’s no, that’s the only place you can spend that much-

– [Zubin] Yeah, that’s for sure. He’s in Austin now.

– [Vinay] Austin, yes. Much lower cost of living, okay. But you can’t spend that much money. You don’t need that much money and freedom is invaluable, but Spotify, they’re not gonna sate this mob. The mob, what they want, first of all, half of what they’re mad at him about is not this stuff. They just see an opportunity. You know how they are.

– [Zubin] Yeah, exactly.

– [Vinay] And there’s few more of them than they think, and there’s more Rogan fans than they expect, and a lot of people listen to Rogan, and he’s in, and Rogan is not promising, he is not CNN. He has no obligation to present you the news. He’s one guy talking to people he likes to talk to. It’s none of anyone’s, if you don’t like who he talks to, you listen to something else. There’s 1 million podcasts you can choose from, you know? And we’re just two people, we talk, we like to talk to some people, a lot of people I don’t like to talk to.

– [Zubin] Yeah, me too. In fact, I will say this publicly right now. The people who message me saying, “I’d like to be on your show” are never gonna fucking come on my show, because if you have to message me to tell me, you know, how interesting you are, I’m sorry. If I’m not interested in you de novo, right, I just don’t wanna talk to you. Its gotta be an authentic conversation, which is the same with Rogan. I’m pretty sure Rogan doesn’t just have people on the show because he’s pressured into it. He has people on the show. He got on the phone with Sanjay Gupta. They had a good conversation, and then they did a show that I actually thought was pretty interesting, right? So that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s how you do it.

– [Vinay] I hate to say, one of the things that irritates me is I’m like, you know, I wanna have some guest on, and that I’m like, you know, okay, so question number one, you know, “What do you think about the safety signal of myocarditis?” Or you know, “What do you think about masking kids?” And they say, they say, “Oh, thank you for the question. “I wanna start by saying SARS-CoV-2 is a real virus, “and I believe in it,” you know? “I believe in shots,” you know, and they start giving this whole disclaimer, and I’m like, “Jesus Christ, just answer the question.” You know?

– [Zubin] Dude.

– [Vinay] They say I-

– [Zubin] You know what it is?

– [Vinay] They’re worried. No, they’re like, “I voted for Bill Clinton. “I voted for Hillary.” I’m like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t”-

– [Zubin] They have to put out their liberal bona fides, yeah. Yeah, no, no, no, and you know what though, I’m gonna say this in their defense. Most people in medicine especially have no clue how to do what we’re doing in the sense that they’re not ready for blowback, they’re not ready for troll comments, they’re not ready for hate. They’re not ready for it at all, and they’re worried it’s gonna affect their, you know, career, or whatever. And so, they’re super cautious, and that’s why I effing hate talking to most doctors. Like I just won’t do it anymore, unless I know in advance from a call that they are gonna be themselves, and if they screw it up, yeah.

– [Vinay] Can I give like a, I don’t know, I wanna give a pep talk to those person, that doctor out there-

– [Zubin] Yeah, do it, do it, do it, they need it, man.

– [Vinay] The pep talk I would say is like, I don’t know, step number one is do you know what you believe? And I do think a lot of people the problem is they don’t really know what they believe, and I think if you don’t know what you believe, like do you believe a 20-year-old who got two doses of vax, Moderna, and just had Omicron should be boosted within 31 days? Do you believe that is a good thing? And if you don’t know the answer, which I think a lot of people don’t know, then go read about it, and think about it, and maybe don’t talk about it. I mean, that’s fine. But if you know what you believe, you really know, like, “Mm, it’s probably not a good idea. “I don’t see much of upside, and I see a lot of downside,” which is what I believe, and what Marty believes, and what Paul believes, which is what he told his own son, right? You know, if you believe something, then I think the question you face is, you know, do you really wanna live your life, I don’t know, silent about things you believe in, that you spend all this time to train on? Do you think it makes society better that so many people who believe these things are silent? I think it makes society worse. It lets the most irrational people dominate the dialogue, ’cause they have not thing to lose, ’cause they’re crazy people with, you know, out of, they’re not in academics, they don’t, you know, they’re not in anything, you know? They’re just totally crazy people. They don’t have a, they don’t run a profitable business like you. They don’t do, they don’t do anything. They’re just totally, you know, like nobodies on the outskirts of society. Do you want them to dominate the dialogue? And then you know, I always find interesting doctors are like, “My research is working on, you know, “vulnerable populations,” and I’m like, I applaud you for that. I think that’s one of the most interesting things, and I actually think that I hope a lot of the work that my lab does is helping vulnerable groups. That’s why we’re doing it. We are living at a moment in history where we have a perturbation to vulnerable populations that has never been happened hitherto, and will never happen, hopefully, will never happen again in our lifetime. It’s the greatest perturbation to poor minority children that has ever happened, you know, ever happened in our lives. And you’re on the sidelines on this? This is your, you say this is your life’s goal. You’re on the sidelines on the biggest game. You’re on the sidelines of the Super Bowl. This is your life’s work, to play football. I was like get in the game, get in the game. Get off the bench, stop being scared. Don’t be a coward, get in the game. They need you in that game. If you don’t have an opinion, sit on the sidelines, read more. But if you do have an opinion, you have a moral, spiritual, intellectual, scientific obligation to push that opinion out there. And if you don’t, and you’re doing it to preserve some, you know, some meager, meager job, and you know, some meager job security that you think is so wonderful, what do you, what job security do you have if you can never say what you think, you know? What’s the great job you have? What are you, do you really defend vulnerable populations? You won’t speak out on the single greatest crisis they’ve ever faced in human history in our life? I mean, not human history, in our life. So that’s my pep talk, what’d you think?

– [Zubin] Man, that’s a pretty frickin’ good pep talk. I mean, it comes down to this, Vinay. It comes down to authenticity. Are you effing you, are you you? Are you able to be you? You have one life, you have this present moment. Can you channel a hole in the universe where you come out through it, which is the universe speaking? Like if you put filters on what you do, what you say every single day, because you’re worried, because you’re afraid, because you live in fear, that is not, for many people, that’s not a way to live. It may be the way that you wanna live. That’s fine, if you’ve made a conscious choice to live in fear, that’s fine. But I determined over years, it took me years to break out of that matrix, years. Even five years ago, I was scared to say certain things on my show, ’cause oh, what about if I don’t get a sponsor, what will happen? Well, fuck the sponsors then. I won’t have sponsors, so now I don’t. Well, what if I say this, and then I get canceled? Okay, then cancel me. It doesn’t matter. I have to say what I believe, and listen, again, and people will say, “Well, you’re in a position to do that.” Okay, how do you think that happened? I put myself in this position-

– [Vinay] Thank you-

– [Zubin] It’s not like I wasn’t sitting at Stanford slogging away for the man in an organization that force tests people every week-

– [Vinay] Remember when your father handed you your YouTube channel, Z? Oh, I know, it didn’t happen! It didn’t happen-

– [Zubin] Oh, totally, yeah. Yeah, it was a total primogenitor type of thing. It went to the oldest man in the family, the YouTube channel, the ZDoggMD chalice. Yeah, no. I mean, “No, you had all the privilege in the world.” Uh-huh, I had a lot of privilege, and you know what? I turned it into something that I care about that I think is helping people, so do the same thing with what privilege you do have, right? Go and do it-

– [Vinay] And what talents you have, which may not be-

– [Zubin] What talent, yeah.

– [Vinay] Speaking extemporaneously.

– [Zubin] Yes, yes-

– [Vinay] But you know, Z, people don’t appreciate that your talent of speaking extemporaneously is a pretty good talent.

– [Zubin] As is yours, dog. In fact, I look at you, and I’m like you speak at triple my speed. You know, I get so many interesting messages about “VPZD Show,” where they go, “You know what, “I run it at 2X when you’re talking, ZDogg, “and then I run it at .5 when VP talks. “Can you guys just figure out “how to get your cadence right?” I’m like, “No, we’re different, man.” I’m slow, I’m a little bit demented-

– [Vinay] Fast talker, and also I drank a lot of coffee before we started-

– [Zubin] Good for you, man. Man, I’m on like three cups, and I can’t even approach the asymptote of Vinay’s speed. This is like a T1 Ethernet cable, and I’m still at like 2200 baud. I’m just like . I sound like AOL.

– [Vinay] Maybe I talk too fast, but-

– [Zubin] No, no, no, no.

– [Vinay] Well, you know, I don’t know. Some of these things that the listeners give feedback on, it’s like, you know, you can’t control. It’s like trying to tell someone, “I don’t like the sound of your voice.” It’s like, “I don’t like how speedy fast you talk.” It’s like, yeah, I’ve talked like this for 39 years, and I’m probably gonna talk like this for many, many more to come.

– [Zubin] And I was gonna say, people are like, “I don’t like your bald head.” I’m like, listen, I’ve been bald for 48 years, all right? Even when I had hair, I was a bald man living with hair. That’s really all it was. You know, and that gets, I think, to that last thing, right, that Urgency of Normal that you were talking about, right? Yeah, so-

– [Vinay] And listeners should go on this, and you know, I’m not the creator of this Urgency of Normal, but I read it, and they asked me to, what do I think, and I said, “Yeah, sign me up,” because it’s right. I mean, it is, it’s a website, Urgency of Normal, and it’s directed at parents, students, mentors, teachers, anyone caring, you know, involved in the kids’ process, and these people, of which I guess me too, but they did the work, these people have put together like slide deck on, you know, stuff you need to know when you go to talk to your school board about what they’re doing to kids, and it’s called a toolkit, and if you click on it, you get a PDF, and it’s good stuff, man. I mean, of course, there’s, you know, there’s always the, there’s the people wearing N95s under their bed beside being triple vaccinated that then they don’t like it. But here’s what it says. Let me read you some of the cool things. I mean-

– [Zubin] Oh, yeah. I’m on here, it’s beautiful.

– [Vinay] It has a nice-

– [Zubin] Nice website.

– [Vinay] Yeah, yeah, I don’t know how they did it, but it’s good. So they have this nice thing that says, you know, how does COVID-19 deaths in kids compare to the flu, and they don’t compare COVID to flu in the one year that there was no flu, because we disrupted global travel and everything about kids. They compare it to all the other flu seasons, and they show that, you know, it’s in the same ballpark. It’s, there are flu seasons like the 2013 flu season, the ’15 season, the ’18 season that were worse than COVID, and there are flu seasons like the ’16 season that were less bad. They also show you the risk gradient by age, vaccinated, unvaccinated, and so, you see that an unvaccinated like 18-year-old often has a lower risk than a vaccinated 40-year-old, you know, which is, so if a vaccinated 40-year-old is gonna go to a dive bar, why does an unvaccinated high schooler have to eat lunch outside on the concrete like a zoo animal?

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] It shows you the efficacy of vaccination, recommends vaccination. It shows you what’s going on with kids’ mental health, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicide attempts in girls. It shows you that school closures are harmful. Kids are falling behind. I mean, it’s just like facts. It’s just like raw data that leads to an incontrovertible conclusion, which is accepted by all of Western Europe, but somehow is not accepted in this country, which is that it is on aggregate better for millions of children to live a normal childhood and life even acknowledging the risks of COVID than it is to try to restrict their lives, creating all sorts of mental and other problems in the hopes that you’re avoiding COVID, which you’re not avoiding, because it’s gonna come get you anyway.

– [Zubin] Yeah, this is, and again, look, dude, I’m looking at it right now. By the way, Ram Duriseti’s on here, nice! He’s a friend from Stanford.

– [Vinay] Oh, this guy is awesome. This guy is, I’m on some email chain with him. I love this guy. Who is this guy?

– [Zubin] Okay, so Ram, he was an ER attending when I was there, and he’s reached out since then. He is one of the smartest, first of all, he’s a beautiful, bald Indian man, and that I gotta give respect to, right? And-

– [Vinay] No bias, #nobias-

– [Zubin] No bias at all, no bias at all. And but, yeah, no, no, super smart guy. You know what, you know what? Let’s get him on the show. Let’s the two of us talk to him-

– [Vinay] That is the best, that’s a good idea!

– [Zubin] Yeah, he’s great-

– [Vinay] Maybe I should come down to your studios, and we do it face-to-face.

– [Zubin] We’ll do like what we did with Marty, where we team up on one side.

– [Vinay] Yes.

– [Zubin] It was great, yeah. Let’s do that, ’cause Ram, Ram is smart, he’s an entrepreneur. Yeah, he’s a, yeah, PhD in computational decision model-

– [Vinay] Well, I’ll tell you what, every day on this email chain he’s given a PhD in common fuckin’ sense. He is, he’s dropping truth bombs like crazy. I’m like this guy, he’s, I’m like this guy knows what he’s talking about, yeah-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Obvious to me. PhD in common sense-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah, that’s who he is, that’s who he is, yeah, which is unusual for an emergency doc. Sometimes, you’re just like, “Dude, do you really have “to scan every inch of this guy’s, you know, penis “for no reason just to rule out penis clot, you know?” No, he’s, he is definitely the man, so yeah-

– [Vinay] You love emergency docs. You know it, you just-

– [Zubin] I know, you know what, I love to josh ’em. They are my favorite people.

– [Vinay] There is a very few emergency docs who have anchored on their individual experience, and are not looking at the forest of society, and they’re making bad policy proclamations online, yes, but most emergency docs are really good.

– [Zubin] Yeah-

– [Vinay] And Ram-

– [Zubin] They’re really-

– [Vinay] Is like my friend, Jeanne Noble, two emergency docs who are in the Bay Area rockin’ it on the right side of all the issues

– [Zubin] Yeah, you know, and I gotta say this. When I hear from emergency docs, they’re usually on the quote, unquote, I’m biased, they’re on the right side of this, you know? They really are, they see what’s up. And so, it’s great. Yeah, and so, looking at this whole thing, my take is this. This is a, it’s like, you know, early on, when we were talking about, say, Jay Bhattacharya, you said this very clearly. You’re like, “Jay has a different intuition “on the same data set than the mainstream does, “and we don’t know what’s right yet, “but it’s okay to have a different intuition on this, “and this intuition is that the damage from our response “to kids is worse than COVID itself’s damage “to kids on aggregate.” And that doesn’t mean that some kids will suffer with COVID. They will, but on aggregate, we wanna do the least harm for the most people, the most good, and that’s why I like this Urgency of Normal, because it is, and we need to get back to a normal state. Otherwise, we’re gonna further backslide into this sort of backward culture of safetyism with kids, and the kids themselves will move forward into the world thinking this is okay.

– [Vinay] You know, and I-

– [Zubin] And it’s not okay.

– [Vinay] Yeah, and they don’t even, like some of these people don’t even have off-ramps. We wrote that article in “UnHerd” magazine this week about, you know, I think we’ve forgotten that if a child gets rhinovirus, or RSV, and overcomes that, you know, that’s part of like growing up. You need that antigen exposure. You need to overcome it in your youth-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Before you become old, haggard people, like you and I, you know?

– [Zubin] Yes, mostly I-

– [Vinay] Imagine we’d reached our age, and we had never experienced the-

– [Zubin] Chickenpox.

– [Vinay] Yeah, imagine, we get to our age, it’s gonna, or even like if you never had a cold, Z. We kept you in a bubble-

– [Zubin] Oh, dude, you’d die.

– [Vinay] Yeah, you get, your old man body can’t take a cold!

– [Zubin] Dude, well, why do you think these kids got so sick with this wave of RSV? I mean-

– [Vinay] Because they’ve-

– [Zubin] You know, it’s like they’ve been hiding away. Now, again, I wanna clarify something here, because people will misinterpret what we’re saying. “Oh, so you’re saying that masking kids “is making them sicker? “Like you’re making,” no, that’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is you cannot protect children from all pathogens forever. It’s not actually good for them. It’s a bad idea-

– [Vinay] Right, and similarly there was once a movement led by the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under the age of three should not be exposed to peanuts, and did it make them healthier? No, it made ’em weaker, and made ’em more likely to have-

– [Zubin] More allergic.

– [Vinay] More allergic! And then the Israelis, who had a snack that was coated in peanut dust, they had the very lowest rates, and that’s how we learned, and did the randomized trials-

– [Zubin] Halva-

– [Vinay] You know, and so the idea that, you know, yes, kids need to go outside and play in dirt, yes, kids are gonna get respiratory viruses. No, nobody wants a kid to get sick. Nobody wants that, but if we’re gonna get sick in our lives, which we all are, we want to have some exposure in our youth to protect us when we’re older, when you get to our age, and we’re old and frail, and if we meet a new pathogen, you know, we can’t handle it. Proof is SARS-CoV-2. It’s a new pathogen, look what it did to older people. But look what it does to kids. They’re pretty resilient.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] It’s interesting.

– [Zubin] Yup, and in fact, that’s the hope, right? So now, we’re in a state, where we can make individual decisions to protect older and vulnerable people. We can make decisions to vaccinate, or wear a N95. We don’t need the state to coerce any of this anymore, and honestly, if you probably just let it go with Omicron, what will happen is kids will get exposed when they’re young, they’ll develop immunity against severe disease. As they grow up, you won’t need vaccinations, and all of that, and it’ll just become an endemic thing. That’s the hope, right? It may not work out that way, but Omicron sure is pushing us into that world where everyone gets exposed, and it’s a great equalizer. And you know, it’s like in your site here, in the site here that they did, the second slide is former CDC Director Tom Frieden, and he says, “18 months ago it was irresponsible “and wrong to say COVID is similar to flu. “Many people hospitalized, or dying “just have positive tests. “They’re not sick from COVID, “and it’s important to protect the vulnerable,” and I agree. I think that was, I think it, actually, except for it’s important to protect the vulnerable, I think the first two things were irresponsible, or just wrong. They’re not irresponsible. You can say it, it’s just wrong. But now he says, “Omicron is different.” Now what is above said is basically correct. COVID is adapting to us. We need to adapt, and I think that’s absolutely right. That was from January 7th.

– [Vinay] You know, I wanna, it’s the last thing I wanna say before we’re done, is that I felt something in the zeitgeist maybe towards the second half of January. I just felt it.

– [Zubin] Yes, yes.

– [Vinay] And-

– [Zubin] Tremor in the force.

– [Vinay] Yeah, I felt, you know, you just felt it, and I felt like, “Ah, now it’s coming,” because you know, Marty had written that piece in “The Wall Street Journal” with Cody Meissner. I had written a piece in “Atlantic,” and MedPage about masking kids. It was just a few of us, you know? We’re out there, and we’re getting hammered, and then all of a sudden, “Boston Globe,” “WaPo”-

– [Zubin] NPR.

– [Vinay] NPR, “New York Times,” and then “Atlantic,” again, with a beautiful piece. And then I had that thing that came out in “Tablet” magazine and then again, and again, and again, and you get like 12 op-eds-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah-

– [Vinay] Okay, so and then of course the usual factions not so happy, but you can feel the momentum swinging, and then the booster discussion, the David Zweig piece blew in Bari Weiss’ Substack. You know, there’s more dialogue on that. Today, we’re having some ACIP slides for the meeting tomorrow with myocarditis and long-term MRI abnormalities. I feel movement there. Europe, you know, Sweden comes out with a more nuanced policy on kids five to 11. You know, I feel a lot of progress now. And by progress, I mean, you know, you want a sensible response to SARS-CoV-2 that’s proportionate, has proportionality, and that means doing more for older people, and less for younger people. This peds zero, six months to four years, that doesn’t fit the broader movement, but it’s also getting, we’ll see what happens to it. We’ll see what happens to it-

– [Zubin] Yeah, we’ll see what actually, how many parents actually go and vaccinate their six-month-old.

– [Vinay] Yeah, and I think that the proof is in the pudding. You only have 20%, you only have 20% of five to 11-year-olds. You only have, let’s not forget, that’s 80% of people you don’t have, okay?

– [Zubin] They’re not going, yeah-

– [Vinay] But you have 95% of Twitter.

– [Zubin] Oh, by the way, I gotta tell you this last thing. So my life has been so much happier since I deleted my Twitter app, and all I do on Twitter is dump and run away, and maybe I’ll peek in every now and again, like voyeuristically, to see what kind of shitstorm I’ve set off, and then I run back away. It’s been really nice for me, man. I highly, I don’t recommend it for you, because you’re much better on Twitter in terms of how you create content. But for me, it’s just been game-changing for sanity-

– [Vinay] Well, it’s interesting you say that. I saw Emily Oster today has said that she’s done with Twitter, it’s too caustic, and that’s sad, because she’s a very thoughtful person.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] I will say that I also feel, like you, emotionally, my life’s a lot better, but I’ll tell you why. I think Twitter’s a great place for me to look and see what smart people think, so-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] I’ve un-followed, no, so it’s like you can un-follow some people-

– [Zubin] You’ve un-followed everybody, yeah.

– [Vinay] Yeah, un-follow a lot of people. So that’s one, smart people think, and it’s a great place to push your message, but I do think unfortunately it’s not a forum for dialogue, or debate. And so, I actually just don’t read anything that comes back at me, you know? So I’ve set it up in a way-

– [Zubin] That’s right.

– [Vinay] It doesn’t even show me. I don’t read it, I don’t care, and it’s, you know, at this point, I think people have set up their camps. And so, you know, it’s not surprising that the people who have always disagreed and are gonna be on the wrong side of history are still on the wrong side of history. They haven’t yet relinquished their view. But I do think they will relinquish in a few, few weeks, or years, or months, they’re gonna relinquish, because I do think there is a parallel with the Iraq War that I keep saying, which is like, you know, the Iraq War was like two things. One, obviously it was a huge policy blunder, which is like school closure, but also five years after the Iraq War, you walk around, everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, I was always opposed to it.” I was like, “You weren’t,” I was like, “Were you, were you?” You were always-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] I was like, “I thought most of y’all were for it “at the time.”

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] No, y’all opposed to it? And that’s what we’re gonna see here on all these issues.

– [Zubin] I think you’re right. There will be a zeitgeist shift. It’s already happening with the kids masking thing. When NPR writes a piece that’s really critical of kids masking, gives four reasons that masks might cause harm-

– [Vinay] They stopped mailing tote bags. They mail kids masks in size two. They stopped mailing their, the two-year-old mask is the new tote bag.

– [Zubin] You know, I gotta say, so when I lived in Vegas, I just, I loved KNPR there, and I used to, they used to invite me to the studio all the time-

– [Vinay] That’s an oasis in the Vegas desert. It really is. It really is, it’s like, “Wow, “an oasis of reason and logic.” But I would sit in the NPR studio, and I would do their telethons, and they’d be like, “Oh, we have ZDoggMD here,” and I’d be like, “Hey guys, do you believe in public radio?” Like I would do the whole thing, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had. And now, I come back to the Bay Area, I don’t listen to NPR at all, because all I hear is the bias in it-

– [Vinay] You know-

– [Zubin] It’s during COVID-

– [Vinay] I gotta say the same thing, which is for me “The New York Times” was the paper of record. I always get the paper Sunday. NPR, I loved it, you know, and then COVID comes, and I see a bunch of very well-educated liberal elite reporters living in cities where they can live their whole lives on remote work basically ignoring 85% of the country, ignoring all of Western Europe, and continuing the most narrative that’s hell-bent on ruining children’s lives for what goal? To marginally reduce the probability that they ordering Uber Eats will get sick. And then, because, I mean, isn’t that the structural bias? These are people who went to top universities. They live in liberal elite cities. They are-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Mostly remote workers. So of course, for them, for those of us who’ve been showing up to work every day this whole pandemic, like myself, you know, they’re terrified at that idea, and they’re putting out, basically at this point, I think they’re just total failures. I don’t even know what to say.

– [Zubin] Yeah, no, I mean, we’ve said our piece, man. I think people will, you know, people who listen to the show, they either are kind of aligned with that, or they disagree, and they’re listening for arguments to make back, which that’s great. That’s what you want. If you disagree, go, like you said, go research it, tell us what you think, you know, have your own channel, because that that’s the other thing, man. Like we were saying earlier, people are so scared to say what they think, but they’re perfectly willing to criticize. They’re perfectly willing to sit in comments, and go, “This guy wants to murder babies,” and it’s like, well, no, no, how about this? You feel so strongly, go create a YouTube channel, and then they’re, you know, and go and communicate what you’re saying, because you know what, people will listen. You can grow it. I know I have experience in this. It’s not rocket science. You don’t have to be smart to do this. You just have to be passionate.

– [Vinay] I can promise you, I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends. I’m gonna have so many op-eds and stuff coming out in the next few weeks. It’s gonna be-

– [Zubin] Nice.

– [Vinay] Merciless.

– [Zubin] Nice, nice.

– [Vinay] But I really think, I really think the reason people snipe is those who can’t do tweet, you know-

– [Zubin] Snipe, yeah, they tweet.

– [Vinay] Those who can’t do tweet, you know? They can’t, yes, they can have a single barb. They can’t string together those barbs into a coherent op-ed. They can’t go on YouTube, they can have a YouTube channel. I encourage them to. I’m gonna enjoy watching you stagnate on 100 followers. I love it, I love it!

– [Zubin] Dude, it’s so true. I’ll say this last thing. Do you have a second? Because this is the last thing I wanna say, okay. So while we were doing this whole show, I was thinking about this paradigm that I was listening to Iain McGilchrist, who’s a Scottish guy, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist. He wrote a book called “Master and His Emissary” about the right hemisphere, and its emissary, the left hemisphere. Now, it used to be that people thought the right hemisphere was the silent hemisphere. It’s not responsible for speech. It’s all emotion, and you know, it’s kind of squishy. It’s a little feminine, because people are sexist, and you know, the left is what grasps the world with the right hand, is what does math, and science, and is about language, and all of this. Well, it turns out none of that is true. What’s really true is the right is actually the contextual holistic engine of intuition that brings, that works relationally, and that the left actually is more of what we use as a tool of the right to break things down and kind of grasp at them and reduce things to its parts. So when you have a lesion, when you destroy the right hemisphere, the person tries to create wholes out of parts. It tries to make sound bites into reality. It tries to use bureaucracy to rule, and the right is the opposite. The right sees things only in context. It only listens to the three-hour Rogan. It only listens to the hour and a half VPZD to hear the two actors in their context as part of a larger whole. And what McGilchrist argues, and I agree, is that societies, as they head towards ruin, and the end of individual civilizations, the left brain be comes more and more dominant. It forgets that it was the emissary, and it tries to become the master, and you get technological bureaucracies that reduce things to parts, and that’s where you get people tweeting these little sound bites, but they can’t string together an hour conversation in context that doesn’t make them look idiotic. And honestly, the more you talk about like, well, what’s going on with these bureaucrats at Princeton, it’s their left brain, the ascendancy of the left brain. And I really would say watch any interview Iain McGilchrist has done about this. It will convince you that we need to be much more aware of the right brain and behave like right brain creatures.

– [Vinay] I love it, let’s end with that. I gotta jump to another Zoom.

– [Zubin] All right, brother, a joy. Guys, you know what to do. Sign up, check out VP’s stuff, I’ll put links. I love you, we are out.

– [Zubin] Hey, everybody, welcome to a delayed episode of “The VPZD Show.” I’m one of your hosts, Dr. Zubin Damania. I’m a UCSF, Stanford-trained hospital physician, and host of “The ZDoggMD Show,” and this is Dr. Vinay Prasad. VP, what’s up?

– [Vinay] It’s good to be back, and I know people were clamoring for it. I actually got emails saying, “Where’s the episode? “Where’s the episode?” That, I don’t get that too often, certainly not for my own show.

– [Zubin] Well, certainly not for me. I could go silent for like a year, and nobody would care, but if “The VPZD Show” goes silent, then we get emails, right? I think it’s almost like it’s like a dopamine addiction. People just wanna hear us kind of talk and talk. I don’t get it. I hate me so much, you know?

– [Vinay] You know, it’s always hard to listen to yourself talk, but I think they like it because it’s a lively dialogue about topical issues, and it is a news show, as I keep telling you. Someday, you’re gonna believe me-

– [Zubin] Yes, I believe you now. In fact, just the week, I was like, “You know what, this is a news show.” We gotta go through the news, ’cause it’s been a couple weeks now-

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] We should catch up. So much stuff has happened, brother.

– [Vinay] Yeah, so much stuff. So where to start? So the things on the docket we gotta talk about, we gotta talk about what’s going on with kids six months to four years old. We gotta talk a little bit about Paul Offit. He’s on your show recently. I haven’t finished it, but everyone has highlighted quotes to me that I think are super salient. I got boosted. It was in, it was a boost against my will, because I didn’t really, I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the boost. I didn’t think it was in my best interest, but I would’ve been terminated if I didn’t get boosted, so we can, I wanna talk to you about that experience.

– [Zubin] Yes, please.

– [Vinay] I wanna talk about Rogan. Rogan’s back in the news. You know, they wanna cancel Rogan. They’re coming for him, so we can talk about that. And I don’t know, I mean, I think schools and Urgency of Normal, which is a petition that I’ve joined many other colleagues on about returning normalcy to kids, I think that’s important to talk about, and you know, anything else on your plate?

– [Zubin] Oh, man, I think we got enough to talk about for like a seven-hour show, but we’re gonna try to keep it concise. Dude, kick it off, man. Kids six months to five, this-

– [Vinay] You wanna start that? How about, why don’t we start with the boosting, because I wanna tell you my ordeal.

– [Zubin] Tell me, dude, so I boosted myself, just for clarity. I got boosted purely because back in December, not because anyone was compelling me, because I employ myself, but rather because I was gonna see my elderly parents, and Omicron was just kicking in, we didn’t know much about it, and I wanted to be able to report it back to my Z-Pac what were the symptoms like when I got that booster, and they were much milder than the second dose. So that’s why I got boosted, but otherwise, I would’ve probably forgone it, because, you know, who cares? I’m protected against severe disease, which is what I care about.

– [Vinay] You know, you’re really hitting the nail on the head in the sense that you made a personal healthcare choice for yourself, and it was very logical, because you’re about to meet people who are in their 70s and 80s, and you know, insofar as you can give them a little bit of additional protection by you boosting, maybe it makes sense for your situation. And so, I like that, you know? I think that’s what medicine is always about, somebody making a choice that’s well-informed that fits their situation. They’re not compelled to do it, or coerced to do it. I like that story. My story, I work for the man, you know? I work for the University of California System, and from the powers on high, they doth said that you all ought to be boosted by January 31st, and the good folks at the FDA, they resigned. And so, the folks that were remaining at the FDA said, “Sure, go for it. “Go for it, go for it, go for it, boost yourself.” So here I am, an adequately vaxxed, I’ll call myself an adequately vaxxed, young, healthy man. You know me, I’m the pristine health. Let’s just say pristine health.

– [Zubin] Yes.

– [Vinay] And then the thing that really struck me is, you know, I’m being compelled to make a medical decision, and you know, I generally don’t like that for people, obviously, and I think there’s only special circumstances that you ought to do that, and I don’t think we meet those circumstances anymore, because Omicron pierces vaccine so much, and even after booster, and even after a delay, it will pierce eventually, so much so that I don’t think you have an ethical and scientific case for mandating the vaccine, end of story. I think Omicron is enough of an escape mutant that you just don’t have that prerequisite, which is benefit to other people. But put that aside, I am somebody who is in epidemiology. I’m somebody who thinks about data for a living. This isn’t something that’s peripheral to me. This is like the core of who I am, which is thinking about these kinds of medical decisions, you know, and to me, it felt like such a violation that this huge part of my identity, which is thinking through these decisions, is something that basically gets no respect, and that, you know, is completely trampled over, and it’s something that, you know, I felt, you know, I felt like I was wronged in some deep way, if that makes sense to you.

– [Zubin] Dude, not only does it make sense, but what you’ve basically put your finger on, listen, you’re a smart guy, who does this for a living-

– [Vinay] Right.

– [Zubin] Imagine you’re a less educated person who doesn’t do this for a living, who is a-

– [Vinay] That’s the person who made the mandate. That’s the person who made the mandate.

– [Zubin] Oh my God, yes, yes, it is. And as we’ve said in a previous show, these are the people we wanna hold accountable, the people who should know better, but they don’t effing know better, but who, okay, who doesn’t really necessarily know better? Somebody young, who’s going to college, who spent 50,000, $70,000 on tuition, and is being told they cannot matriculate, they can’t show up, unless they are forced to get a booster shot, which will do them personally minimal good, and may even, may even potentially cause, very rarely, some harm in the form of myocarditis, and they’re told you need to do this, or you can’t matriculate, even though you were-

– [Vinay] Or we’ll cancel your degree. We’ll cancel everything you’ve worked for.

– [Zubin] Absolutely-

– [Vinay] Ridiculous.

– [Zubin] How are they gonna feel? Now, what is that gonna trickle down into any other public health mandates in the future that are actually necessary, say, like childhood vaccines, or something like that? How is that gonna affect perception, public perception, of this? Now, it becomes a sociological crisis, because there is a hardcore, you know, 20%, or whatever, of the population that are never gonna listen to this now, and they’ve entrenched. They’ve gotten psychologically reactive to it, which I get. I totally understand it. So you feel like you were violated, and you’re, this is literally what you do for a living. Think about people who are much more emotional and less rational based, which is normal humans. They are gonna lose their minds over this, and what have we done is we’ve, and this is what Paul says, we’ve damaged public health for like a generation-

– [Vinay] Of course.

– [Zubin] It’s gonna take forever if we ever recover from it.

– [Vinay] Paul is spot on, and these are the kinds of decisions, the misuse of power. You know, we’ve always been in that office. Many years ago, I had sort of a, it wasn’t a DMV, but it was something like that, a bureaucratic organization I went in, and they just gave me a hard time just because they could. You know, that kind of abuse of power, and that’s, I think, to some degree what irritates people about, you know, the minor being pulled over by the police kind of incidents is that you feel like, you know, they’re just getting, they’re just enjoying the power they have over you in that moment, or somebody who stops you, you know, to ask you questions, you know, these kinds of things.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] You can just sense that. And here, it is an abuse of power. I mean, yes, they can compel me to get vaccinated, or they’re gonna fire me. And actually, I really don’t have much ability to fight it, because the more I fight it, they have fired a few people even, like you know, longtime career faculty have been fired. The other thing is you don’t wanna give somebody an excuse to fire you, you know? They may not like what you’re doing in other domains, and you don’t wanna wanna really give somebody an excuse to fire you, so I’m very cautious about that. But the policy makes no sense. The policy is written by people who I don’t think are thinking clearly about the issue. I don’t think they’re competent to think about this issue. In fact, the proof they’re not competent to me is that they’ve made this stupid policy. They’re making the 20-year-old in IT get boosted to serve the mothership University of California. How does that help anybody? It doesn’t help the 20-year-old who’s healthy in IT. It doesn’t, this person may be working remote anyway. It doesn’t help the university system. There’s not epidemic spread amongst the university ranks in the office, because the offices are largely closed. They’ve been closed for two years, Z. They’ve been closed, no one’s going to the office. So you know, the hospital is running, but the offices, you know, the research side of it is largely work-from-home. So it’s not helping that. It’s virtue signaling to a certain audience, a certain audience that likes more vaccines is better, and they happen to be in a geographic location, where they have a lot of those audience. But it’s not scientific, it’s not rational, it is an affront to people, and to do it for people who spend their living studying this type of decision I think is just so terrible. You know, one more thing to add, I was, somebody sent me something from Princeton, and Princeton, it says, and many colleges are saying this, that you are mandated to get the booster unless you have medical exemption, but here’s a medical exemption we’re not allowing. The doctor writes, “The person had two doses, “and just had Omicron, medical exemption.” That doesn’t count. Just having Omicron doesn’t count. Who the hell are you, Princeton, to decide?

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Who the hell are you? You’re a bunch of empty suit bureaucrats, don’t know anything about biomedicine. You’re not following this in real time, like Marty is, like I am, like you are, like many others are. Who are you, Princeton, to dare say such a thing? You are using your power in an abusive way, and I only wish bad things upon the people who have misused it, you know? I figure, I think you’re due for a comeuppance, I’ll tell you.

– [Zubin] Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Now, first of all, this is gonna get me to start shouting, which is bad, because I’m at home in my home office using a crappy mic, there’s echo in this room. All the audio quality is shitty as it is, and now you’re getting me mad, and it’s gonna start clipping the microphone, but I’m gonna say this. This is the administrative technocracy that is breaking human civilization, period.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] It is this left brain, reductionist, parts instead of whole, non-holistic, irrational, unreasonable thinking that is why so many Americans and people around the world are so pissed off during the pandemic, they’re so reactive, and they’re so emotional, because they have common sense, whereas the Princeton bureaucrats, the people who are making University of California booster policy don’t have common sense, or uncommon sense, like the actual expertise to say, “Oh, yeah, boosters are absolutely necessary “for this population.” They’re not from any evidence that we’ve seen. And if that changes, hey, you and I will be the first to be like, “Okay, that’s different now.” Like okay-

– [Vinay] And if it was really so certain, since we’re all so smart and educated, do you need to coerce us, you know?

– [Zubin] Yeah, come on-

– [Vinay] You’re coercing us because you know it’s garbage, I think.

– [Zubin] You know it’s garbage, and you get off on it, probably-

– [Vinay] I suspect-

– [Zubin] It is a power thing.

– [Vinay] I suspect there is a faction of people in this debate, who, I’ll tell you the truth, you know, people on the left don’t like people on the right. We loathe them in a way we never have, and vice versa. People on the right, they loathe people on the left, and this is a nice opportunity the people on the left have had for the last year, which is that they can, in the sake of public health, they can compel people on the right to get vaccinated, or they’ll lose their job, and they, I think many of them enjoy it. They enjoy punishing in this way, and also, the mask issue. They, it’s not, you know, now that you can wear one-way N95s, which protects you, there’s no argument there. You put, maybe other people are at risk, but you’re protected. But they still want someone else to wear the cloth mask. That is another way they’re exerting their abusive power, and you know, here’s what I think the comeuppance is. Let me tell you about that. What is the comeuppance? These people are playing with fire, and they have already burned themselves. They just don’t know it yet. You know what’s gonna happen in the next 10 years, 15 years? I promise you this is gonna happen, Z. A number of states are gonna sign laws that actually make it harder to compel anything. Private companies are not allowed to compel their employees to get vaccinated, to do many other things that private companies might have been doing in good, for earnest reason. They’re gonna be a big pushback. It’s probably gonna be more in red states than blue states, but it’s going to limit the power of the employer to compel the employees to do things to their own body. Those are gonna come. I also think you’re gonna see a huge, a huge pushback on routine vaccination. You have been fighting the good fight, Z, for many years, pushing for important vaccines, like MMR, like tetanus, diptheria. You are going to find that the people on the other side of that table, they’re not gonna be 15% anymore, 10%, or 5%. They’re gonna be 45%. They’re gonna be a juggernaut. They’re gonna be unstoppable. You know, I think that they’re going to change laws in a lot of states. We’re gonna backslide on all the routine vaccinations. We already have, due to COVID delays, but we’re gonna go back on policy. And so, the people who are playing fast and loose with the mandates this year, who think it’s fun and games to compel healthy young men, I put my self in that category, Z, I’m still under 40.

– [Zubin] You, shut your hole!

– [Vinay] Shut my mouth. Healthy young men, like myself, to compelling us to get unnecessary unproven boosters, and you know what? Let me just talk about the data for a second. Is a boost, a booster will certainly reduce my transient short-term risk of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2, but it’s unlikely to be durable. It’s unlikely to be a great extent, and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 after two doses is not on the top of list of my worries. I got bigger things to worry about. Is it going to further lower my hospitalization risk if I get SARS-CoV-2? That’s hard to further lower, because it’s already in the floor. It’s a floored risk. It’s as low as it comes. I have bigger risks to worry about. I ride my bicycle around town. That’s a higher risk activity. I have bigger risks than the SARS-CoV-2 after two vaccines. You know, is it going to benefit me? No, is it gonna benefit community spread, or pandemic dynamics? No, there’s an IHME model that shows Omicron, it spreads like wildfire. You can shut a whole society down and weld the doors shut. You’re barely gonna put a dent in Omicron spread in this model from the University of Washington people. So certainly, boosting a few 20-year-olds on the margin as a condition of their employment’s not gonna change much there. And finally, what’s the downside to me? As far as I know, I had a tickle, a tickle in my chest, but I don’t think I had myocarditis. Maybe I’m not as young as I think. Maybe I’m not as young as I think, but I did, and it’s a rare event, but I didn’t have myocarditis. So, but I could have. I certainly took my risk, and I certainly didn’t feel good, Z. I felt like someone kicked me a few times in the chest and the arm, and maybe once in the face. You know, I didn’t feel good about it, and I think if somebody were to ask me down the road do I support, if you asked me five years ago do I support restrictions on hospitals in terms of what kind of health conditions they can demand of their employees, I would’ve said, “No, I don’t support that.” Hospitals are wise, they’re prudent. They’re gonna use that power with grace. I don’t support that. If you ask me now going forward in the next five years do I support restrictions on what hospitals and universities can subject their employees, and students, and faculty to, I would say, “Yes, I support state level legislation “to curtail their power,” ’cause we can’t have some bureaucrat in some office who doesn’t know shit about medicine making medical decisions, telling students that Omicron doesn’t count, you have to get a booster within 30 days anyway, even though they’re 20, and healthy. You know, we can’t have these people making decisions. They’re not qualified. They’re not capable. Their brains clearly don’t work. Sorry, I’ve been rambling.

– [Zubin] Oh, man! Dude, people need to rewind everything you just said from when you started talking, and just play it on repeat in every facility around the country, because, okay, so, okay, I’m just gonna keep it very brief, because you said everything I wanna say. First of all, we’ve damaged vaccine sentiment for a generation. There was just an article on how the anti-vaccine sort of cult organizations, like Del Bigtree, and these, you know, Children’s Health Defense, and all these, you know, anti-vaccine organizations that have been pre-COVID horrible actors in the world are getting windfalls of donations, because people are exactly fed up by bureaucrats trying to control their own health in a way that doesn’t even make rational sense. The idea that it’s a political cudgel of the left is absolutely felt reality for many on the right, and that, you think they’re gonna sit down for that? There’s no way. There will be legislation, like you said. It will absolutely come back to bite them in the ass, and the other thing I just wanna put a real key point on here is morons are setting policy-

– [Vinay] That’s what I wanna say, yes, yes, yes. That’s the core. That’s the core problem-

– [Zubin] Total morons.

– [Vinay] That’s the core problem, yes-

– [Zubin] It’s the core problem. We’ve-

– [Vinay] Core problem.

– [Zubin] We’ve ceded the bureaucracy of leadership to idiots, and so, not very smart people, and if you talk to smart people, they’ll tell you, “Man, I can’t even open my mouth about this, “because it’s like a witch hunt. “I’ll end up, you know, getting shut down.” It’s crazy, dude. So I agree with you. I’m sorry you had to get subjected to that non-scientific bullshit, and you know, you gotta do it voluntarily, like me. I’m not a young man anymore, I’m 48. I could go down at any second from a massive MI, a stroke, or gout, heaven forbid, gout. I could die from gout.

– [Vinay] I shouldn’t have bought you that port wine. I’m sorry, Z.

– [Zubin] You know, ever since you put me on that high tyramine diet-

– [Vinay] You know, I always wondered why do you only eat drumsticks from turkeys and drink port wine, but you know, you’re headed for, you’re headed, cruising for gout. You know, okay, and I also wanna point out of all the suffering I’ve had to endure to get to the spot I’m in now, which is, you know, finish medicine, and you know, be a faculty member, a professor of medicine, the boost wasn’t the worst of it, you know?

– [Zubin] Right, right.

– [Vinay] I’ve taken worse.

– [Zubin] First world problems-

– [Vinay] Yeah, right, no, I’ve taken worse certainly. You know, when you and I trained, it wasn’t this age where, you know, people set work hours for medical students, or medical students could complain about, you know, how they perceived someone’s tone to be when they spoke to them. You know, when we were students, you had to, you took their real tone, and it’s not even a tone. It’s what they actually said, you know? So it was a different time, it was a different time. But anyway-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Medicine is nothing more than jumping through stupid hoops, lots of stupid hoops for many years. You know, this is just another one, so I’m happy to bear it, and live to fight another day. But I don’t like it. And now they’ve made a powerful enemy, and that person is me. No, obviously, because I’m-

– [Zubin] Retribution.

– [Vinay] Yeah, no, and my retribution is that I’m going to think of ways in which we need a system where you, as you say, you cannot have a bureaucrat making these decisions. They can’t be made in this way. You know, there needs to be some checks and balances on this system. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I know that COVID-19 has exposed the problems with middle management, which is that they’re-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] They’re drunk on their power. And then the other things we need to talk about, they’re being cheered on by a very tiny peanut gallery of people who were once well-intentioned, but now, have lost the plot, and you know who I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the anti-vaxxers. I’m talking about the anti-anti-vaxxers. The anti-anti-vaxxers, Z, the anti-anti-vaxxers, Z, are, they’re just as bad as the anti-vaxxers. They don’t use science, either. They treat it like a religion. They’re emotional.

– [Zubin] Yup, yup.

– [Vinay] But their religion is the opposite, which is anti-vaxxers are dumb, so anti-anti-vaxxers are smart, and we’re so smart, we know that if a little vax is good for you, a lot is better-

– [Zubin] A whole lot is better.

– [Vinay] A whole lot is better, more is better, more is better, and the anti-anti-vaxxers are cheering on the FDA’s imminent authorization of six to four. So should we go to the next topic?

– [Zubin] Oh, great, great segue, bro. You’re just a natural at this, man. I’m just gonna sit back. I thought I was the medical communicator. Wrong, wrong.

– [Vinay] No, I’ve learned everything from you. I’m gonna, I-

– [Zubin] That’s like, sorry, it’s like that old drug commercial, I don’t know if you remember this one, like, “Where’d you get this weed, Timmy? “Where’d you get this weed?” Like, “I learned it from watching you, dad! “I learned it from watching you!”

– [Vinay] I remember that, I remember that!

– [Zubin] Remember that?

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] “Where’d you learn this? “Where’d you learn to do this?”

– [Vinay] And then the dad was like, “But I have glaucoma! “I have glaucoma!”

– [Zubin] That’s my favorite excuse. Now, you don’t even need that. Now, it’s pretty much just legal everywhere.

– [Vinay] Yeah-

– [Zubin] And yeah, I don’t-

– [Vinay] Realize that alcohol is more dangerous. They finally, they finally realized-

– [Zubin] They finally woke up to that, exactly-

– [Vinay] And by the way, that’s another good example. You know, you and I grew up in the 19, well, we grew up a little bit apart, but you know, we grew up in a time where marijuana, what was that? That was awful, you know? It was considered so-

– [Zubin] Oh, it was the-

– [Vinay] So bad for you.

– [Zubin] “Just say no.”

– [Vinay] Yeah, and now, it’s like, “Eh, alcohol’s worse for you,” and what was the data? The data was always supportive of the claim that alcohol is worse. Some of us read the data, others of us didn’t.

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] Similarly, similarly, if I may, I think masking two-year-olds is not gonna look so hot in five years. I think so, I think it’s not gonna look hot, and I think, I think it’s gonna look pretty stupid. I think it’s gonna look stupid. I think somebody might even notice that many of them don’t really wear it properly, and even some of them chew the mask. You know, they might notice things like that-

– [Zubin] Yup, yup, and I’ll even go a step further and say, you know, I’ve been hearing from a lot of teachers around the country by email, and what they tell me is, you know, first of all, Zoom made it so that kids could enter this very passive way of learning, where they just turn their cameras off, and they just sit there. The masks do the same thing. In a way, the kids hide behind the mask. Their expressions are hidden. They’re in a different world in a way, and people don’t really talk, or think about that. I’ve had speech therapists reach out saying, “I’m seeing these problems in kids.” Now, again, this is not scientific, this is anecdote. But the truth is as much as you can say, “Well, there’s all this anecdote that the masks may work,” well, what about the anecdotes that they don’t, that they’re causing harm, right? So it’s a complete crap show.

– [Vinay] You know, I wanna just push on that point a little bit, ’cause I think you’re making a great point, which is a couple things. One, people say, you know, that evidence of harm is only anecdotal. Yeah, sure, I concede that that’s true to a large degree.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] There are some studies, though. However, you know, the burden of an intervention done on children for many years is not to prove harm rigorously. It’s to prove efficacy rigorously. Harms are the thing you’re trying to avoid, and even putative harm should take larger weight in your mind. For instance, what if somebody said, “We’re just gonna cut two eye holes in a garbage, “in a paper bag, and make every child wear that “for the next 10 years”? How long do you, no, how long do you think it would take to show harms? They don’t see any part of the face. They just see eyes behind a mask, or they have to wear a mask, like a Halloween mask. You know, you can imagine that’s the policy. What I might say is, “Well, what’s the goal of the policy?” Aw, just ’cause, just ’cause we just want ’em to wear the mask, wear a garbage bag, or a paper, a paper, a grocery bag over their head with holes cut out for the eyes. And then you’ll say, “Well, you know, “there might be a downside, “like they’re using their face to express emotion “to their colleagues.” Oh, you gotta prove that to me, buddy. Do a randomized trial, prove that. You know, I see these brainiacs, you know, I have been a proponent for randomized controlled trials to establish the efficacy of masking, and they fire back at me that I have a, quote, “double standard,” because I don’t call for randomized trials to demonstrate the harms of masking. And I say, “These are people who must not have been “paying attention for, I don’t know, “20 years of biomedicine.” We do randomized controlled trials powered and designed for interventions thought to be putatively efficacious, to show efficacy, and harms are gathered only as an ancillary product of the randomized controlled trial, and often with larger observational data sets. But if you don’t have efficacy, you do not pass go. You don’t even implement your foolish idea. The burden is never to show harms from some stupid idea you dreamt up in your garage. It’s to show that it actually works. Where have you been? I mean-

– [Zubin] But Vinay, masks for kids are like a parachute-

– [Vinay] Oh, yeah-

– [Zubin] You don’t do a randomized controlled trial-

– [Vinay] That’s what they said.

– [Zubin] You don’t do a randomized. It just makes sense that it works. You don’t question a parachute.

– [Vinay] They recently published their garbage study about how daycares that masked were less likely to be closed even once than daycares that didn’t mask, and I have a nice little takedown of it in my Substack, by the way. Listeners should subscribe-

– [Zubin] Nice.

– [Vinay] To my Substack. Thanks, yeah, the-

– [Zubin] Definitely do.

– [Vinay] But the point I wanna make there is even in this very flawed study, the effect size was 40% if you masked of daycares were closed once, and 46% of daycares that didn’t mask were closed once, or more. So it’s a 6%, so is that a parachute? A parachute only, you survive, 40% of the time you die with your parachute, or you die without a parachute, and, sorry, 40% of the time you die with the parachute, but it goes up to 46% of the time without? No, a parachute is 99.999. So even their flawed observational study should clue them in that they don’t got a parachute on their hands, and common sense, and an ounce of brain power would’ve told them that, but you know-

– [Zubin] And the experience in other countries, dude, where they don’t do this to children, they’re doing fine.

– [Vinay] They’re doing fine. I just saw somebody, you know, they were telling some story. In Sweden, they’ve decided not to vaccinate healthy kids five to 11. They’re not masking kids. They’re doing fine. Swedes are not dropping like flies. There’s not a runaway epidemic spread in children in Sweden. In fact, Sweden is doing better now. You know, the moment people stop talking about Sweden is when you know they’re doing better.

– [Zubin] You know they’re doing better, yeah, and that’s exactly what’s happened. You know, it, oh my God. So the bottom line is, like you said, the anti-anti-vaxxers are, they’re a religion. The anti-vaxxers are a religion. None of these people are using actual science in any meaningful way in a chronic way that’s stable, and I don’t know. Then it puts you and me in this awkward position where everyone hates us, which is fine. I’m actually down to clown with that. But it’s frustrating. It seems like more people should be looking at these things in a nuanced way, but I’m just wishful thinking now. I’m wishful thinking-

– [Vinay] Yeah, well, I-

– [Zubin] Or as Ingrid Andress says, “Wishful Drinking.”

– [Vinay] “Wishful Drinking”?

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] I think most people are where we are. I actually think that the poles are, you know, they appear large, because they talk a lot, but they’re not as large as they think they are.

– [Zubin] Yeah, you’re right.

– [Vinay] I think they’re really extreme, yeah.

– [Zubin] And maybe that’s why they’re acting out of so much fear, because they know they’re actually not the majority.

– [Vinay] Oh, which is like a classic military technique if you’re, you know, you pretend that your army is bigger than it is.

– [Zubin] Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s, you know, I believe male lobsters do this with their claws. It’s all a show-

– [Vinay] Puff out your chest, it’s all show, yeah. Okay, let’s talk about this vaccine. So you know, I mean, I haven’t seen, I mean, nobody has seen all the data. I saw the FDA say, like, “You haven’t seen the private data.” I was like, “Shut the,” I was like, “Show us the data then, shut up”-

– [Zubin] Show us the data then.

– [Vinay] Just show us the data, you, what are you doing-

– [Zubin] You want us to vaccinate our six-month-old?

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Show us the effing data-

– [Vinay] Yeah, show us the data. What are you doing?

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] What are you doing? And also, like, oh, here, like where did we leave off? December 10th-ish, 15th-ish, Pfizer announces that two doses of the Pfizer BioNTech three micrograms failed, failed to generate sufficient antibody titers in that age group. It failed to meet the, and by the way, the bar is already in the toilet, which is we’re just saying, like, “Hey, hey”-

– [Zubin] Antibody levels, yeah.

– [Vinay] And non-inferior. It can actually be worse, you know? It just has to fall within the margin. So we’re like saying, “Hey, Pfizer. “Pfizer, I know, I know times are tough for you. “You only made 30 billion this year on your vax. “Hey, do you mind running just a super small, “like let’s keep it super small, “let’s not call it, a super small randomized trial “in these little kids, by the way, who mostly do fine? “But just super small, we don’t wanna bother you “with any safety signals that might creep in, “but super small trial, and look for antibody titers, “and just show it’s roughly the same. “We’ll take roughly the same.” And Pfizer comes back, and they say, “Hey, you know, we ran that super small trial, “and you know, we didn’t power it for severe disease, “we didn’t power it for symptomatic COVID. “We just powered it for antibody titers, “and you know what? “We’re sorry, we couldn’t get there,” and then they say, “Oh, you know, oh, boy. “You probably should go back to the drawing board.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, let’s not go crazy. “Let’s just add a third dose. “Third dose”-

– [Zubin] Oh my God.

– [Vinay] And then they said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that. “Let’s just add a third dose, yeah.” You know, in normal times, we would’ve gone back to the drawing board, and tried two doses with a slightly higher dose, but okay, go back to the, you know, add a third dose. And then along the way, and by the way, I don’t know this to be true, but I suspect they’re looking at the data, looking, and looking, and looking, and looking, and every day, they look, and say, “Ah, today’s not,” it’s like the stock market. Should I buy today? Eh, it’s not a good day, it’s not a good day. Oh, oh, it’s a good day! And then they say, “Oh, there’s a difference “in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2, “and it’s looking good.” And then somebody at the FDA, per reporting, they invite Pfizer to submit the application. I’ve never heard the, you, the FDA, they’re inviting the drug company to take money from us? What is this? But that’s how it happens. And so, they invite the application, then they start trickling out data. “Oh, well, you know, if you get two doses now, “it’ll speed it up to the third dose if that’s successful. “Oh, actually, there is a difference in symptomatic COVID, “and some of it is Omicron, some of it is Delta.” This is a mess.

– [Zubin] Oh my God, and you know what though, but the worst part of it is we’ve created a generation of frightened parents who are panicked about their kids. Like, “Oh my God, no, no, no, we need this thing “in our six-month-old, you know, infant, “because the child could die of COVID.” They’re so infected by the fear contagion that mainstream media and everything has created that they’re clamoring for this thing, so there isn’t this big public outcry like, “Why is FDA doing this? “What kind of surrogate marker?” This is a surrogate marker of a surrogate marker of a surrogate marker, and exactly where’s the safety signal in these young kids? Like none of it is there.

– [Vinay] It’s like, you know, I feel bad for the parents, and I think you’re absolutely right. If you have a four-year-old who’s unvaccinated now who’s otherwise healthy, you know what you should be worried about? Everything you used to be worried about in 2019 for a four-year-old, you know-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah, drowning, motor vehicle accident.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Violence-

– [Zubin] Abuse, violence.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] And if they’re getting along, and being, and happy, and all these things, you know? But certainly not COVID. But you know what it’s like, Z? It’s like imagine if I strapped you to a chair, and I made you watch 1,000 hours of “Dateline.”

– [Zubin] Oh my God!

– [Vinay] You know, “Dateline.” It’s like, “Tonight on ‘Dateline,’ “even though you live in a posh suburb of San Francisco, “home intruders have been making rounds. “Home intruders can come in, and murder you in your sleep, “tonight on ‘Dateline.'” And then they say, you know, “The story goes back to 1987,” you know, when the last time it happened, right?

– [Zubin] Yeah, “When a large public profile case of a intruder”-

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] “Who killed a family of four,” it’s like, okay, this is exactly, and you know, it goes back to this idea of boosting, this culture that we’ve generated of safetyism, this idea that, oh, if you can keep people safe, you have to. If there’s anything you can do, you just keep creep, the mission creep just keep happening. It’s like, oh, you know, kids at playgrounds, it used to be they’d fall, and they’d occasionally hurt their head. Okay, so we mandated that we have soft, you know, ground at playgrounds. Okay, cool, but you know what?

– [Vinay] You’re not using helmets? You’re not using helmets?

– [Zubin] You’re not using a helmet, exactly! Like how about a helmet? Put a helmet on these kids. And pretty soon, the kid is in a frickin’ astronaut suit, and is doing nothing. And that’s what we’re seeing with boosting, that’s what we’re seeing with masking-

– [Vinay] A real parachute-

– [Zubin] And a, oh, the parachute, which you don’t need to do a randomized controlled trial for. We’ve established that parachutes on the ground, you don’t need to study that. They still keep you safer than not having a parachute on the ground. It’s insanity, dude. But this is what it is, and people are, good people get victimized by it, because we’re normal humans, and we’re infected by a social contagion. So these poor parents are worried about their four-year-old. I get the emails, like you know, they’ll say, “Z, you know, I get what you’re saying about all this stuff, “but you don’t understand that people “who can’t be vaccinated, how do we protect them?” I’m like, “They protect themselves by being children.”

– [Vinay] There are a few that are, you know, severely immunocompromised that we really need to strategize, but you need to do that with your doctor. But the average, healthy kid, they are good, and you know, also vaccination in five to 11 is only 20% uptake, because 80% of parents are naturally reluctant, and cautious, like Swedish government. And then the other thing I say is, you know, what if you watched all these “Datelines”? I mean, ’cause this is what these parents have been, they’ve been bombarded with propaganda. The media have been hyping this like, you know, it’s like that Malaysian airliner for two years. They’ve never been so happy, you know? They love to talk about this. They got you so scared of COVID, so scared of long COVID in kids, even though all the objective data suggests it’s fleetingly rare, and is certainly not the thing you should be worried about. They got you so worried about long COVID. What about long COVID in kids? I was like, “What about it?” I was like, “We’re all gonna be infected “many, many times over with COVID in our lives, “and as long as that’s true, insofar as long COVID exists, “we all gotta deal with it.” But I suspect we might realize that, you know, it’s overblown a bit, so-

– [Zubin] Well, so let me, here, I’ll push back the way they push back on us. So what about Omicron? Omicron is filling the hospitals with children. It’s infecting everybody, and yeah.

– [Vinay] Well, I mean, okay, so now go, but there, what about Omicron? It’s infecting everyone. Yes, and the virus will eventually infect every single person on this planet whether you’ve, as long as you use this mRNA construct, you’re not gonna get enough neutralizing antibodies to keep this at bay. We’re all gonna get infected, but I’m not a, I think it is factually untrue that the hospitals are running at high capacity from pediatric hospitalizations. Omicron is now plummeting. And Omicron, I think, by every piece of data I’ve seen is milder.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] And MIS-C-

– [Zubin] And you know, talking-

– [Vinay] Well, one last, and MIS-C has been decoupled from the original ancestral strain to Delta. MIS-C is much less common, too. So you know, go on. I mean, I don’t know what to say-

– [Zubin] Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, and when I talk to doctors who are actually working in these hospitals, that’s basically what they say, and what it really is is just the sheer number of infections. It’s kind of like having a bad RSV season, or a bad flu season. You get vulnerable kids that end up in the hospital, and as Paul often says, you know, 30% of them have no comorbidities. That’s just bad luck, right? So you’re gonna have that, but so how do you respond to that? Are you gonna force vaccinate a bunch of young, young, young kids? That reduces that risk by, what, some small percentage? Or are you just gonna go on, and live like you do during flu, RSV in these kind of seasons, and shore up hospitals if there is surge, and all that kind of thing, and focus on that? It seems like that’s a more rational response. Instead, we’ve lost our minds. I mean, so it’s really just a question of like you don’t belittle people who’ve suffered, people who’ve gotten sick, and yes, that happens, and you know frontline healthcare workers are burned out, and they’re tired, and they’re dealing with a lot of unvaccinated adults in ICU, which again, you and I, I don’t understand why people keep saying we’re anti-vaxxers. We keep saying, “Get your ass vaccinated.”

– [Vinay] Of course!

– [Zubin] If you’re an adult, especially if you’re at risk from anything. Get a booster if you’re at risk, right? Like come on, if you’re over 65-

– [Vinay] Among 65-year-olds in this country, I think 16% are unvaccinated, and I think 47% are un-boosted. That’s playing Russian roulette. In the UK, in the same age groups, I think it’s four and 9%. Look at the UK-

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] They actually-

– [Zubin] They’re opening up.

– [Vinay] Yeah, and they vaccinated the right people. We are so aggressively vaccinating children to make up for 65-year-olds. You’re never gonna get far doing that, you know? They’re easy on the kids and hard on the elderly. That’s how it ought to be, you know?

– [Zubin] Yeah, that’s how it ought to be, to beat up the elderly, man. They can take it. And let the kids be kids. Dude, I believe the children are our future, VP. Let them free, and let them show the way.

– [Vinay] That reminds me of a song, yeah.

– [Zubin] Doesn’t it though? By a woman who was not in the best of health herself-

– [Vinay] Who, who was that?

– [Zubin] Was it Whitney Houston? Whitney Houston. Hey, crack is whack, VP, crack is whack. Speaking of that, though, you said it in a tweet somewhere, dude, it’s the American way. Like everything, you gotta do everything big, you gotta do it in excess. If a little is good, a lot is better, and that’s how we felt about vaccinating children, masking, all this other stuff. In Europe, they’re looking at us like we’re insane, and I think we are insane. I think we’ve kind of lost our minds a little bit.

– [Vinay] You know, it’s interesting to me, because we talked about how the bureaucrats are. I mean, let’s just put this, put a pin on this last thing about this Pfizer kids vaccine is let’s see what the data they have shows, and let’s see what they decide to do.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] But already they’ve bungled it, because if you wanted to get buy-in from the public, you wouldn’t say, “Hey, the last thing you heard about this “was it failed, and we’re ongoing, “and the thing you hear is that even though “we don’t have results from that part we added on “we’re gonna do it anyway.” If you say that, you come across like you are being quite flippant with safety and efficacy of vaccines, which is probably not how you should be. So you’ve already bungled the messaging. You’ve screwed it up, and you’ve revealed yourself to be grossly incompetent that you would do it such a way. I mean, I think only a truly incompetent person would’ve done this. That’s the one point, okay. Let’s see what they find. But the other point I wanna make is I believe, and I hate to say this, and I’ve been thinking about it more and I haven’t said it, but I really think we really have to start asking ourselves who has bungled COVID-19 more, Trump, or Biden? I mean, I really think we have to ask ourselves, because, because one, in the Biden administration, who is even in charge of these decisions? I don’t think it’s the CDC director. I don’t think it’s the FDA, well, who is the FDA commissioner? It’s Bob Califf, he just got pushed in. But I mean, who was, it was nobody for a long time. I don’t even know who’s making these decisions. I know the vaccine people at FDA have resigned, Gruber, Krause. I know Paul Offit is not happy. I mean, you lost Offit, man. You lost the Offit, what the hell are you doing? You lost Offit-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Who, I don’t, well, one, I think they should actually put forth the person who has the power to make decisions. I certainly don’t think it’s Biden. Let’s agree on that. It’s not-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] It’s not this guy. It’s somebody. Somebody’s got the power behind these decisions. I’m not sure it’s Fauci, either. I don’t know who it is. But whoever it is, I don’t think they’re good at their job. I really think they’ve screwed up, and I think the reason they’re not good at their job fundamentally is they’re putting all their energy on the youth. Kids, man, I mean, what do we hear about all the time? Kids masking, off-ramps for kid masking. No, we don’t wanna off-ramp. We want vaccine available, teachers unions that wanna mandate vaccine in kids, the bill in California to mandate elementary school kids get vaccinated, you know, all these things. We hear about the youth, the youth, the youth, colleges, what rules the college kids are under. What do I don’t hear about? I don’t hear about the fact that nursing homes are un-boosted. I don’t hear about 65-year-olds unvaccinated, un-boosted. I don’t hear about the fact that you can be sick and working a nursing home with COVID actively having COVID. I was like no one’s talking about why aren’t you giving them $500 million to hire some people who aren’t actively sick with COVID? What the fuck are you doing?

– [Zubin] Yup, yup, and you know, I’ll even say something that I don’t really believe, but I’ll say this because it’s an interesting thought experiment. If you wanna coerce people to do something and actually have an outcome that’s gonna be good, the way you do it is you say, “Hey, everyone over 65, “unless you get vaccinated, “you will not be covered by Medicare “for any admission relating to COVID, period,” or even not relating to COVID. I’m not saying you should do this. I’m saying that this is very unethical. But if you did that, people would then line up to get vaccinated, you’d save a ton of lives. So that’s a coercion that would save lives. I don’t think we should ever do it, but coercing fucking college students to, you know, get a booster, or they’re gonna lose their degree?

– [Vinay] I see your point. Your point is saying this, like you’re against coercion, but if you were to use coercion, the coercion you need to use is on the older people, right?

– [Zubin] Yes, yes-

– [Vinay] But you know why, Z, they don’t wanna coerce the old people? The old people gonna vote against them. The young people, they don’t vote. These kids don’t vote.

– [Zubin] They don’t vote.

– [Vinay] And as long as these kids don’t vote, you’re gonna get whatever we tell you to get. I mean, I think that’s how they abuse their power, these politicians-

– [Zubin] Yeah. It’s a real generational war, too. The whole COVID thing has been the old people versus the young.

– [Vinay] No, but the problem, I’ll tell you-

– [Zubin] Yeah?

– [Vinay] No, I totally agree with you that it should’ve been a generational war, but here’s why it wasn’t, because the political left is more popular among the youth, like young people are liberal and idealist, and the political left-

– [Zubin] Ah!

– [Vinay] Has become-

– [Zubin] I see what you’re saying.

– [Vinay] They hijacked the propaganda machine. These kids are-

– [Zubin] Yes.

– [Vinay] You know, they are, they’ve-

– [Zubin] They’re brainwashed-

– [Vinay] Yeah, they’re brainwashed. I think they’re, yeah, they’re brainwashed, the youth-

– [Zubin] Absolutely.

– [Vinay] And so, now, you’ve got the young people saying, “We need to just wear N95s a little longer.” I was like, “Dude, you’re 20 years old. “Shouldn’t you be living it up?” “I wouldn’t wanna take any risks.” I was like, “Are you a teenager? “What the hell is wrong with you? “Take some risks, buddy!”

– [Zubin] “I’m a high schooler. “I’m gonna go protest that my high school “doesn’t feel safe from COVID!”

– [Vinay] I was like-

– [Zubin] It’s like, are you-

– [Vinay] When I was in high school, people just leaned over, and said, “Hey, smoke this.” I say, “What is that?”

– [Zubin] Smoke this, exactly!

– [Vinay] Smoke this, what is it?

– [Zubin] “Maybe it’s laced with PCP. “I don’t know, my dealer just gave it to me,” exactly. Like this idea of safety, yeah, we know we’ve brainwashed these kids, and the truth is if you sit down with a kid, and you start talking to them, they’ll tell you, like, “Well, you know, we wanna be safe,” and this and that, and in five minutes, you can convince them that they’ve been lied to. Like it takes a second. You just go, “Hey, but have you thought about it this way, “or this way, or this way?” Because you know what, kids are actually really smart, and they’re good bullshit detectors. Once you show them, they’re like, “Wait, what? “Hey, this makes no sense. “Why am I, why are we even masking in class right now? “Why is my teacher opening all the windows “in the middle of the winter “because they’re afraid of COVID for these kids?”

– [Vinay] You know, when we were teenagers, there was a big campaign in public health to be like, “You know what, use a condom.”

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] And now for teenagers, there’s a big campaign in public health to be like, “You know what, when you’re outside here “in the sea breeze, it’s okay to lower your N95.” What happened to teenagers? What happened-

– [Zubin] Gone crazy, man. You know, and you know this is not, this has been a, this is actually an exacerbation of a trend that’s already been happening that Jonathan Haidt has written about in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” that, you know, kids are already in this sort of bubble of safety, and they can’t see out of it, and these are smart, you know, these are really, they’re the future, right? We have to save them, VP. We gotta go on a crusade, brother. Now, see, now that I’ve, now that I’ve said that, people are gonna attack me for like, “Oh, they wanna brainwash the kids back “into some kind of libertarian utopia.” It’s like no, I just want them to think.

– [Vinay] Yeah, I mean-

– [Zubin] For themselves.

– [Vinay] And I just want them to be numerate, and think about risk proportionally, and if they want to be this hard on COVID given the risk, then I wanna see them that hard on auto accidents, I wanna see them that hard on suicidality. In fact, and ironically-

– [Zubin] Or on Instagram. I wanna see them be that hard on Instagram’s poisonous influence on children-

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Oh, it lets us-

– [Zubin] But they’re not.

– [Vinay] That’s a nice segue to the Rogan, because I was just thinking, I was like, everyone’s like, “We wanna cancel Spotify. “Spotify, dangerous misinformation, Spotify, Spotify.” I’m like, “Shut up.”

– [Zubin] And Neil Young and Joni Mitchell like ♪ Keep on rockin’ in the free world ♪ Like these two assholes were probably the heart of the anti-vaccine movement prior to COVID, because they were in that like hippie, liberal, like Marin, like, “Yeah, we don’t really believe “in toxins in our body. “Did you know there’s mercury in MMR? “That’s what it stands for, “Mercury, Mercury, and Retardation from Mercury.” It’s like come on, dude, so now-

– [Vinay] You know, I wanna say, full disclosure, full disclosure, I think Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” is probably one of the greatest albums of the 20th century, so I do-

– [Zubin] Listen, I love, I love both of ’em, I love both of ’em.

– [Vinay] You love both-

– [Zubin] Yeah, I really do. I like Neil Young a lot. I like “Alabama,” what was his, “Southern Man”? Dude, that’s good stuff, man.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] That was liberalism when liberalism was cool, man.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] Now, you know-

– [Vinay] No, they’re good musicians, but I mean, who are these musicians? I was like first of all, are you even, do you even listen to this? Are you, how are you even equipped to process what was true and false on that show? You’re an old musician. What do you know about, and why are you, I mean, I almost wonder if it’s like a publicity stunt. Somebody’s like, “How do you get your name out there?” You’re like, “You know what, you go hard, “you go hard against Rogan, you get out there,” you know? I was like-

– [Zubin] Punch up, punch up.

– [Vinay] Punch up.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] I was like if I was a starting singer/songwriter, I would take the bold stance on Twitter of saying, “You’re not allowed to put my music on Spotify!” And I was like, and it was like, “Anyone listen to your music, buddy?” I was like, “Shut up.” ♪ Keep on rockin’ in the free world ♪

– [Zubin] Yeah, exactly.

– [Vinay] You are a musician. You could pull your stuff.

– [Zubin] You know, I’ll pull, it’s true. I have a ton of stuff on Spotify. All my albums are on Spotify, all my parody music. I could make a stand and be like, “You know what, “I disagree with with Spotify hosting Sanjay Gupta. “I feel that it’s a,” but anyway, so hit me with Rogan, ’cause I have some thoughts on this too, ’cause this is-

– [Vinay] So I guess the first thing to say is, you know, yes, there are things on the show that I don’t agree with, and I’m sure they’re things that you don’t agree with, and I’m sure they’re-

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] Okay, and we probably are largely aligned. There are also some things that those guys said that are not wrong, and you know, that’s the thing about people. You know, if somebody says something wrong and somebody says something not wrong, you know, it’s very difficult to parse. Like you know, what do you just wanna silence them forever? I mean, some of the things they’re saying are in fact true. Okay, that’s one. Two, this boycotting, this is the new cult. I mean, this is a pathetic culture. It’s just a culture where, you know, nobody wants to, like somebody was complaining to me about something somebody said, and then I said, “Well, what did they say?” And they said, “Well, it was gross,” and they called it gross. I say, “But what was the thing itself?” “Oh, you know, it was something like this, “but it was gross, I’m pretty sure.” And then I was like the more you realize is you don’t even know what they said!

– [Zubin] You don’t even know what they said-

– [Vinay] What is wrong with you? I was like, “Is your education so bad “you think you can characterize someone’s position “without actually knowing what happened?” I was like, “What happened to these kids?” So I think that’s part of the problem here. I also think it’s ironic that they go hard on Spotify, and not on Facebook, and Instagram, as you point out.

– [Zubin] Yeah, which are poisonous. Yeah, Spotify’s like frickin’ like going to college compared to that.

– [Vinay] It’s like, yeah, it’s like good for you. Yeah, Spotify’s like fruits, it’s like protesting fruits and vegetables compared to soda, compared to the fucking soda-

– [Zubin] Broccoli-

– [Vinay] Yeah, “Bro, wanna take “a hard stance against carrots. “It’s got too much natural sugars in those carrots.”

– [Zubin] You can get carotenemia and turn orange! Yeah.

– [Vinay] Yeah, compared to the other shit out there, and then I think the other thing is, I think, you can’t cancel Rogan. It’s like trying to cancel the sun. Are you crazy? He’s already got another couple million subscribers, ’cause you keep talking about him. And two, there’s an empirical study that shows his influence has actually shrunk ’cause of Spotify, like pre-Spotify-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Did we talk about this before? Pre-Spotify, if you went on the show, you would gain on average, I forget, like 4,000 followers on your social media in a week. But on Spotify, it’s gone down to 2,000, suggesting that about 50% of the audience doesn’t like the Spotify app is what I think it is.

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] So you know, if they cancel him, if they find a way to push him out of Spotify, which I’m not sure they’re gonna do-

– [Zubin] He’s gonna win.

– [Vinay] He’s gonna win. He’s gonna, yeah, he’s gonna get all the Spotify severance pay, and then he’s gonna be more popular. He’ll have 20 million followers. And then the last thing I would say is, I mean, I think it’s intellectually weak. I think most people don’t even know what was said on the episodes that they are so angry about that is, quote, “misinformation.” And I think Spotify are proving themselves to be pathetic. When you’re faced with the mob calling for the cancellation, the answer is zero capitulation.

– [Zubin] Yeah, nothing.

– [Vinay] Zero capitulation.

– [Zubin] Don’t give a inch, yeah.

– [Vinay] Don’t give an inch, and they already gave an inch. “We’re gonna put a warning on the front of the episode “that says, ‘The content you’re about to hear is “‘on a controversial issue. “‘If you want reliable information,'” this is what they’re gonna say, “‘go visit the CDC website.'” I said, “No way!”

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah. Did you see, did you see, I clicked through on that thing. It is appalling. They had like Esther Choo’s blog on there. They had, you know, which is all fine. These are all wonderful people, but how the hell are they authorities on this stuff? Like it had CNN, it had NPR-

– [Vinay] I haven’t clicked it, I thought they linked to like the CDC, no?

– [Zubin] Oh, they, no, they do that, too, but they link to a bunch of other sources that they’ve determined are vetted sources, and they’re all mainstream media outlets, like NPR, and then it says the doctors. It has it broken down by category, and in the doctors, it’s like Esther Choo, and it’s like, you know, these very left-leaning physicians, like again, mainstream stuff, which that’s all fine. But the truth is, but then you’re saying so how is that, who’s vetting this? Are you, Spotify, vetting these vetters?

– [Vinay] I like Esther, so I’ll put that aside, but let’s-

– [Zubin] No, I like Esther, too, she’s a friend. But the point is how did she get on that list?

– [Vinay] Where do you find the Spotify, like how did you find that? I wanna see this.

– [Zubin] So yeah, if you go to a Rogan episode, or something, I forget how it is, then you click on, you know, the little disclaimer, and I forget exactly how to do it. I forget how I did it, but then it, on the Spotify app, it’ll give you like rows, and it’ll say media outlets, like government resources. It’ll say the doctors, and-

– [Vinay] Ah, I found it, okay, learn about COVID-19, COVID-19 guide. First of all, where the hell is VPZD? It should be number one.

– [Zubin] Hello? Maybe that’s why we’re so pissed, because we’re just, we’re like Robert Malone. We’re mad we got spurned, like no one’s giving us credit for-

– [Vinay] I invented COVID information! I invented it, Z!

– [Zubin] How dare Esther Choo who’s smarter and better looking than me get that spot!

– [Vinay] Why is she getting what she deserves in life? Why not me?

– [Zubin] Why not me?

– [Vinay] Wait, hold on, let me look. Oh, wow. Stay in the know, oh, first of all, it links to the Spotify Original a 15-minute episode on Fauci, just, oh, okay, just what I wanted to listen to, sure. Coronavirus explained, from the doctors, this is really interesting.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] It’s a problem. They’re making a big mistake. I mean, it doesn’t really matter what they’re putting. The point is that the moment you insert people curating what is truth and fiction, you’re taking a bold stance as a platform. And then in addition to that, why doesn’t anyone want to acknowledge the core truth, which is that COVID came and hit, we shut down the world. Last I checked, you know, in the 1980s, how many times you shut down the world? Five times a year? No, it never shut down. We never shut it down in the ’90s. We never shut it down in the 2000s. Now, we finally, when Zoom is strong, we shut it down. When you do something you’ve never done before, you’re gonna get massive disagreement, and you can’t try to silence that disagreement. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

– [Zubin] Yeah, it’s dumb.

– [Vinay] It’s so dumb.

– [Zubin] Now, what Rogan said actually in his, you know, quote, unquote “apology”-

– [Vinay] I watched that.

– [Zubin] Yeah, which I actually, you know, listen, here, he kind of doubles down a little on, you know, these are smart guys with credentials who are saying this, that’s fine, and then what he did say though was, “Look, and the best I can do is I can get people “who disagree with those viewpoints on the show,” and he cited a few, which aren’t, that wasn’t really valid, like Peter Hotez pre-COVID, and I think he, who else did he cite, Sanjay Gupta?

– [Vinay] He had a Hotez in the middle of the pandemic via Zoom. It was terrible.

– [Zubin] Oh did he? Okay, I didn’t see that, I didn’t see it.

– [Vinay] It was terrible.

– [Zubin] Yeah, okay, okay. But well, so the thing about Rogan is at least, you know, if he says like, “Well, maybe I’ll get VP on “to talk about a nuanced heterodox position on this, “or Paul Offit,” like Paul Offit would be great on Rogan. Like could you imagine Offit sitting in front of Rogan? It’d be insane, ’cause Offit is like the straightest shooter you’ll ever get, and Rogan will probably get really curious with Paul, like most people do when you talk to Paul. So you know, I think that’s correct. That’s what you do, right? And the other thing is like who, so, okay, so who is gatekeeping the sort of information that goes out on Rogan’s show? Rogan is, so Rogan makes decisions every day, just like you and I. Like I’m not gonna go and interview, you know, Ashish Jha on my show. I’m not, because he has a huge platform in mainstream media. His voice has been generally quite mainstream, and we hear plenty of it. So who do I choose to platform? To platform, like that’s some fuckin’ verb.

– [Vinay] Yeah.

– [Zubin] I choose to interview people that I’m genuinely curious about their position-

– [Vinay] Of course!

– [Zubin] Right, and so, and Rogan does the same thing. He tends to lean conspiratorial. He tends to lean in that space. That’s fine, that’s Rogan. But if he can kind of say, “Okay, okay, I see that now “I have this, people are listening to me, “all right, I’ll get some other people on,” fine, that’s great. That’s a guy who’s actually self-aware. That’s what you want. So, but Spotify putting a stupid label on it, just like Facebook, and all this, like you think the people who believe Rogan are gonna believe those other sources? No!

– [Vinay] It’ so bad-

– [Zubin] They’re listening to Rogan for a reason-

– [Vinay] Spotify is, they no longer stand for free speech. They wanna put this label. They think they can placate this angry mob. The angry mob only wants one thing. They want Rogan’s head on a platter. They won’t be happy-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Even when he’s, the only reason they can do this is because he’s in Spotify, which by the way, I thought was a mistake that he went there. My understanding was Rogan was netting like 10 mil a year, and he went to Spotify for 100 mil, and I was like, you know what, if you have, if you’re netting 10 mil a year, and you have total freedom, just live there-

– [Zubin] Dude, keep going.

– [Vinay] Keep going.

– [Zubin] Keep going.

– [Vinay] You don’t need 100 mil. What are you gonna even spend? What can you even spend that much on? I mean, you’re not living in the Bay Area. There’s no, that’s the only place you can spend that much-

– [Zubin] Yeah, that’s for sure. He’s in Austin now.

– [Vinay] Austin, yes. Much lower cost of living, okay. But you can’t spend that much money. You don’t need that much money and freedom is invaluable, but Spotify, they’re not gonna sate this mob. The mob, what they want, first of all, half of what they’re mad at him about is not this stuff. They just see an opportunity. You know how they are.

– [Zubin] Yeah, exactly.

– [Vinay] And there’s few more of them than they think, and there’s more Rogan fans than they expect, and a lot of people listen to Rogan, and he’s in, and Rogan is not promising, he is not CNN. He has no obligation to present you the news. He’s one guy talking to people he likes to talk to. It’s none of anyone’s, if you don’t like who he talks to, you listen to something else. There’s 1 million podcasts you can choose from, you know? And we’re just two people, we talk, we like to talk to some people, a lot of people I don’t like to talk to.

– [Zubin] Yeah, me too. In fact, I will say this publicly right now. The people who message me saying, “I’d like to be on your show” are never gonna fucking come on my show, because if you have to message me to tell me, you know, how interesting you are, I’m sorry. If I’m not interested in you de novo, right, I just don’t wanna talk to you. Its gotta be an authentic conversation, which is the same with Rogan. I’m pretty sure Rogan doesn’t just have people on the show because he’s pressured into it. He has people on the show. He got on the phone with Sanjay Gupta. They had a good conversation, and then they did a show that I actually thought was pretty interesting, right? So that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s how you do it.

– [Vinay] I hate to say, one of the things that irritates me is I’m like, you know, I wanna have some guest on, and that I’m like, you know, okay, so question number one, you know, “What do you think about the safety signal of myocarditis?” Or you know, “What do you think about masking kids?” And they say, they say, “Oh, thank you for the question. “I wanna start by saying SARS-CoV-2 is a real virus, “and I believe in it,” you know? “I believe in shots,” you know, and they start giving this whole disclaimer, and I’m like, “Jesus Christ, just answer the question.” You know?

– [Zubin] Dude.

– [Vinay] They say I-

– [Zubin] You know what it is?

– [Vinay] They’re worried. No, they’re like, “I voted for Bill Clinton. “I voted for Hillary.” I’m like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t”-

– [Zubin] They have to put out their liberal bona fides, yeah. Yeah, no, no, no, and you know what though, I’m gonna say this in their defense. Most people in medicine especially have no clue how to do what we’re doing in the sense that they’re not ready for blowback, they’re not ready for troll comments, they’re not ready for hate. They’re not ready for it at all, and they’re worried it’s gonna affect their, you know, career, or whatever. And so, they’re super cautious, and that’s why I effing hate talking to most doctors. Like I just won’t do it anymore, unless I know in advance from a call that they are gonna be themselves, and if they screw it up, yeah.

– [Vinay] Can I give like a, I don’t know, I wanna give a pep talk to those person, that doctor out there-

– [Zubin] Yeah, do it, do it, do it, they need it, man.

– [Vinay] The pep talk I would say is like, I don’t know, step number one is do you know what you believe? And I do think a lot of people the problem is they don’t really know what they believe, and I think if you don’t know what you believe, like do you believe a 20-year-old who got two doses of vax, Moderna, and just had Omicron should be boosted within 31 days? Do you believe that is a good thing? And if you don’t know the answer, which I think a lot of people don’t know, then go read about it, and think about it, and maybe don’t talk about it. I mean, that’s fine. But if you know what you believe, you really know, like, “Mm, it’s probably not a good idea. “I don’t see much of upside, and I see a lot of downside,” which is what I believe, and what Marty believes, and what Paul believes, which is what he told his own son, right? You know, if you believe something, then I think the question you face is, you know, do you really wanna live your life, I don’t know, silent about things you believe in, that you spend all this time to train on? Do you think it makes society better that so many people who believe these things are silent? I think it makes society worse. It lets the most irrational people dominate the dialogue, ’cause they have not thing to lose, ’cause they’re crazy people with, you know, out of, they’re not in academics, they don’t, you know, they’re not in anything, you know? They’re just totally crazy people. They don’t have a, they don’t run a profitable business like you. They don’t do, they don’t do anything. They’re just totally, you know, like nobodies on the outskirts of society. Do you want them to dominate the dialogue? And then you know, I always find interesting doctors are like, “My research is working on, you know, “vulnerable populations,” and I’m like, I applaud you for that. I think that’s one of the most interesting things, and I actually think that I hope a lot of the work that my lab does is helping vulnerable groups. That’s why we’re doing it. We are living at a moment in history where we have a perturbation to vulnerable populations that has never been happened hitherto, and will never happen, hopefully, will never happen again in our lifetime. It’s the greatest perturbation to poor minority children that has ever happened, you know, ever happened in our lives. And you’re on the sidelines on this? This is your, you say this is your life’s goal. You’re on the sidelines on the biggest game. You’re on the sidelines of the Super Bowl. This is your life’s work, to play football. I was like get in the game, get in the game. Get off the bench, stop being scared. Don’t be a coward, get in the game. They need you in that game. If you don’t have an opinion, sit on the sidelines, read more. But if you do have an opinion, you have a moral, spiritual, intellectual, scientific obligation to push that opinion out there. And if you don’t, and you’re doing it to preserve some, you know, some meager, meager job, and you know, some meager job security that you think is so wonderful, what do you, what job security do you have if you can never say what you think, you know? What’s the great job you have? What are you, do you really defend vulnerable populations? You won’t speak out on the single greatest crisis they’ve ever faced in human history in our life? I mean, not human history, in our life. So that’s my pep talk, what’d you think?

– [Zubin] Man, that’s a pretty frickin’ good pep talk. I mean, it comes down to this, Vinay. It comes down to authenticity. Are you effing you, are you you? Are you able to be you? You have one life, you have this present moment. Can you channel a hole in the universe where you come out through it, which is the universe speaking? Like if you put filters on what you do, what you say every single day, because you’re worried, because you’re afraid, because you live in fear, that is not, for many people, that’s not a way to live. It may be the way that you wanna live. That’s fine, if you’ve made a conscious choice to live in fear, that’s fine. But I determined over years, it took me years to break out of that matrix, years. Even five years ago, I was scared to say certain things on my show, ’cause oh, what about if I don’t get a sponsor, what will happen? Well, fuck the sponsors then. I won’t have sponsors, so now I don’t. Well, what if I say this, and then I get canceled? Okay, then cancel me. It doesn’t matter. I have to say what I believe, and listen, again, and people will say, “Well, you’re in a position to do that.” Okay, how do you think that happened? I put myself in this position-

– [Vinay] Thank you-

– [Zubin] It’s not like I wasn’t sitting at Stanford slogging away for the man in an organization that force tests people every week-

– [Vinay] Remember when your father handed you your YouTube channel, Z? Oh, I know, it didn’t happen! It didn’t happen-

– [Zubin] Oh, totally, yeah. Yeah, it was a total primogenitor type of thing. It went to the oldest man in the family, the YouTube channel, the ZDoggMD chalice. Yeah, no. I mean, “No, you had all the privilege in the world.” Uh-huh, I had a lot of privilege, and you know what? I turned it into something that I care about that I think is helping people, so do the same thing with what privilege you do have, right? Go and do it-

– [Vinay] And what talents you have, which may not be-

– [Zubin] What talent, yeah.

– [Vinay] Speaking extemporaneously.

– [Zubin] Yes, yes-

– [Vinay] But you know, Z, people don’t appreciate that your talent of speaking extemporaneously is a pretty good talent.

– [Zubin] As is yours, dog. In fact, I look at you, and I’m like you speak at triple my speed. You know, I get so many interesting messages about “VPZD Show,” where they go, “You know what, “I run it at 2X when you’re talking, ZDogg, “and then I run it at .5 when VP talks. “Can you guys just figure out “how to get your cadence right?” I’m like, “No, we’re different, man.” I’m slow, I’m a little bit demented-

– [Vinay] Fast talker, and also I drank a lot of coffee before we started-

– [Zubin] Good for you, man. Man, I’m on like three cups, and I can’t even approach the asymptote of Vinay’s speed. This is like a T1 Ethernet cable, and I’m still at like 2200 baud. I’m just like . I sound like AOL.

– [Vinay] Maybe I talk too fast, but-

– [Zubin] No, no, no, no.

– [Vinay] Well, you know, I don’t know. Some of these things that the listeners give feedback on, it’s like, you know, you can’t control. It’s like trying to tell someone, “I don’t like the sound of your voice.” It’s like, “I don’t like how speedy fast you talk.” It’s like, yeah, I’ve talked like this for 39 years, and I’m probably gonna talk like this for many, many more to come.

– [Zubin] And I was gonna say, people are like, “I don’t like your bald head.” I’m like, listen, I’ve been bald for 48 years, all right? Even when I had hair, I was a bald man living with hair. That’s really all it was. You know, and that gets, I think, to that last thing, right, that Urgency of Normal that you were talking about, right? Yeah, so-

– [Vinay] And listeners should go on this, and you know, I’m not the creator of this Urgency of Normal, but I read it, and they asked me to, what do I think, and I said, “Yeah, sign me up,” because it’s right. I mean, it is, it’s a website, Urgency of Normal, and it’s directed at parents, students, mentors, teachers, anyone caring, you know, involved in the kids’ process, and these people, of which I guess me too, but they did the work, these people have put together like slide deck on, you know, stuff you need to know when you go to talk to your school board about what they’re doing to kids, and it’s called a toolkit, and if you click on it, you get a PDF, and it’s good stuff, man. I mean, of course, there’s, you know, there’s always the, there’s the people wearing N95s under their bed beside being triple vaccinated that then they don’t like it. But here’s what it says. Let me read you some of the cool things. I mean-

– [Zubin] Oh, yeah. I’m on here, it’s beautiful.

– [Vinay] It has a nice-

– [Zubin] Nice website.

– [Vinay] Yeah, yeah, I don’t know how they did it, but it’s good. So they have this nice thing that says, you know, how does COVID-19 deaths in kids compare to the flu, and they don’t compare COVID to flu in the one year that there was no flu, because we disrupted global travel and everything about kids. They compare it to all the other flu seasons, and they show that, you know, it’s in the same ballpark. It’s, there are flu seasons like the 2013 flu season, the ’15 season, the ’18 season that were worse than COVID, and there are flu seasons like the ’16 season that were less bad. They also show you the risk gradient by age, vaccinated, unvaccinated, and so, you see that an unvaccinated like 18-year-old often has a lower risk than a vaccinated 40-year-old, you know, which is, so if a vaccinated 40-year-old is gonna go to a dive bar, why does an unvaccinated high schooler have to eat lunch outside on the concrete like a zoo animal?

– [Zubin] Yup.

– [Vinay] It shows you the efficacy of vaccination, recommends vaccination. It shows you what’s going on with kids’ mental health, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicide attempts in girls. It shows you that school closures are harmful. Kids are falling behind. I mean, it’s just like facts. It’s just like raw data that leads to an incontrovertible conclusion, which is accepted by all of Western Europe, but somehow is not accepted in this country, which is that it is on aggregate better for millions of children to live a normal childhood and life even acknowledging the risks of COVID than it is to try to restrict their lives, creating all sorts of mental and other problems in the hopes that you’re avoiding COVID, which you’re not avoiding, because it’s gonna come get you anyway.

– [Zubin] Yeah, this is, and again, look, dude, I’m looking at it right now. By the way, Ram Duriseti’s on here, nice! He’s a friend from Stanford.

– [Vinay] Oh, this guy is awesome. This guy is, I’m on some email chain with him. I love this guy. Who is this guy?

– [Zubin] Okay, so Ram, he was an ER attending when I was there, and he’s reached out since then. He is one of the smartest, first of all, he’s a beautiful, bald Indian man, and that I gotta give respect to, right? And-

– [Vinay] No bias, #nobias-

– [Zubin] No bias at all, no bias at all. And but, yeah, no, no, super smart guy. You know what, you know what? Let’s get him on the show. Let’s the two of us talk to him-

– [Vinay] That is the best, that’s a good idea!

– [Zubin] Yeah, he’s great-

– [Vinay] Maybe I should come down to your studios, and we do it face-to-face.

– [Zubin] We’ll do like what we did with Marty, where we team up on one side.

– [Vinay] Yes.

– [Zubin] It was great, yeah. Let’s do that, ’cause Ram, Ram is smart, he’s an entrepreneur. Yeah, he’s a, yeah, PhD in computational decision model-

– [Vinay] Well, I’ll tell you what, every day on this email chain he’s given a PhD in common fuckin’ sense. He is, he’s dropping truth bombs like crazy. I’m like this guy, he’s, I’m like this guy knows what he’s talking about, yeah-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Obvious to me. PhD in common sense-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah, that’s who he is, that’s who he is, yeah, which is unusual for an emergency doc. Sometimes, you’re just like, “Dude, do you really have “to scan every inch of this guy’s, you know, penis “for no reason just to rule out penis clot, you know?” No, he’s, he is definitely the man, so yeah-

– [Vinay] You love emergency docs. You know it, you just-

– [Zubin] I know, you know what, I love to josh ’em. They are my favorite people.

– [Vinay] There is a very few emergency docs who have anchored on their individual experience, and are not looking at the forest of society, and they’re making bad policy proclamations online, yes, but most emergency docs are really good.

– [Zubin] Yeah-

– [Vinay] And Ram-

– [Zubin] They’re really-

– [Vinay] Is like my friend, Jeanne Noble, two emergency docs who are in the Bay Area rockin’ it on the right side of all the issues

– [Zubin] Yeah, you know, and I gotta say this. When I hear from emergency docs, they’re usually on the quote, unquote, I’m biased, they’re on the right side of this, you know? They really are, they see what’s up. And so, it’s great. Yeah, and so, looking at this whole thing, my take is this. This is a, it’s like, you know, early on, when we were talking about, say, Jay Bhattacharya, you said this very clearly. You’re like, “Jay has a different intuition “on the same data set than the mainstream does, “and we don’t know what’s right yet, “but it’s okay to have a different intuition on this, “and this intuition is that the damage from our response “to kids is worse than COVID itself’s damage “to kids on aggregate.” And that doesn’t mean that some kids will suffer with COVID. They will, but on aggregate, we wanna do the least harm for the most people, the most good, and that’s why I like this Urgency of Normal, because it is, and we need to get back to a normal state. Otherwise, we’re gonna further backslide into this sort of backward culture of safetyism with kids, and the kids themselves will move forward into the world thinking this is okay.

– [Vinay] You know, and I-

– [Zubin] And it’s not okay.

– [Vinay] Yeah, and they don’t even, like some of these people don’t even have off-ramps. We wrote that article in “UnHerd” magazine this week about, you know, I think we’ve forgotten that if a child gets rhinovirus, or RSV, and overcomes that, you know, that’s part of like growing up. You need that antigen exposure. You need to overcome it in your youth-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Before you become old, haggard people, like you and I, you know?

– [Zubin] Yes, mostly I-

– [Vinay] Imagine we’d reached our age, and we had never experienced the-

– [Zubin] Chickenpox.

– [Vinay] Yeah, imagine, we get to our age, it’s gonna, or even like if you never had a cold, Z. We kept you in a bubble-

– [Zubin] Oh, dude, you’d die.

– [Vinay] Yeah, you get, your old man body can’t take a cold!

– [Zubin] Dude, well, why do you think these kids got so sick with this wave of RSV? I mean-

– [Vinay] Because they’ve-

– [Zubin] You know, it’s like they’ve been hiding away. Now, again, I wanna clarify something here, because people will misinterpret what we’re saying. “Oh, so you’re saying that masking kids “is making them sicker? “Like you’re making,” no, that’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is you cannot protect children from all pathogens forever. It’s not actually good for them. It’s a bad idea-

– [Vinay] Right, and similarly there was once a movement led by the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under the age of three should not be exposed to peanuts, and did it make them healthier? No, it made ’em weaker, and made ’em more likely to have-

– [Zubin] More allergic.

– [Vinay] More allergic! And then the Israelis, who had a snack that was coated in peanut dust, they had the very lowest rates, and that’s how we learned, and did the randomized trials-

– [Zubin] Halva-

– [Vinay] You know, and so the idea that, you know, yes, kids need to go outside and play in dirt, yes, kids are gonna get respiratory viruses. No, nobody wants a kid to get sick. Nobody wants that, but if we’re gonna get sick in our lives, which we all are, we want to have some exposure in our youth to protect us when we’re older, when you get to our age, and we’re old and frail, and if we meet a new pathogen, you know, we can’t handle it. Proof is SARS-CoV-2. It’s a new pathogen, look what it did to older people. But look what it does to kids. They’re pretty resilient.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] It’s interesting.

– [Zubin] Yup, and in fact, that’s the hope, right? So now, we’re in a state, where we can make individual decisions to protect older and vulnerable people. We can make decisions to vaccinate, or wear a N95. We don’t need the state to coerce any of this anymore, and honestly, if you probably just let it go with Omicron, what will happen is kids will get exposed when they’re young, they’ll develop immunity against severe disease. As they grow up, you won’t need vaccinations, and all of that, and it’ll just become an endemic thing. That’s the hope, right? It may not work out that way, but Omicron sure is pushing us into that world where everyone gets exposed, and it’s a great equalizer. And you know, it’s like in your site here, in the site here that they did, the second slide is former CDC Director Tom Frieden, and he says, “18 months ago it was irresponsible “and wrong to say COVID is similar to flu. “Many people hospitalized, or dying “just have positive tests. “They’re not sick from COVID, “and it’s important to protect the vulnerable,” and I agree. I think that was, I think it, actually, except for it’s important to protect the vulnerable, I think the first two things were irresponsible, or just wrong. They’re not irresponsible. You can say it, it’s just wrong. But now he says, “Omicron is different.” Now what is above said is basically correct. COVID is adapting to us. We need to adapt, and I think that’s absolutely right. That was from January 7th.

– [Vinay] You know, I wanna, it’s the last thing I wanna say before we’re done, is that I felt something in the zeitgeist maybe towards the second half of January. I just felt it.

– [Zubin] Yes, yes.

– [Vinay] And-

– [Zubin] Tremor in the force.

– [Vinay] Yeah, I felt, you know, you just felt it, and I felt like, “Ah, now it’s coming,” because you know, Marty had written that piece in “The Wall Street Journal” with Cody Meissner. I had written a piece in “Atlantic,” and MedPage about masking kids. It was just a few of us, you know? We’re out there, and we’re getting hammered, and then all of a sudden, “Boston Globe,” “WaPo”-

– [Zubin] NPR.

– [Vinay] NPR, “New York Times,” and then “Atlantic,” again, with a beautiful piece. And then I had that thing that came out in “Tablet” magazine and then again, and again, and again, and you get like 12 op-eds-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah-

– [Vinay] Okay, so and then of course the usual factions not so happy, but you can feel the momentum swinging, and then the booster discussion, the David Zweig piece blew in Bari Weiss’ Substack. You know, there’s more dialogue on that. Today, we’re having some ACIP slides for the meeting tomorrow with myocarditis and long-term MRI abnormalities. I feel movement there. Europe, you know, Sweden comes out with a more nuanced policy on kids five to 11. You know, I feel a lot of progress now. And by progress, I mean, you know, you want a sensible response to SARS-CoV-2 that’s proportionate, has proportionality, and that means doing more for older people, and less for younger people. This peds zero, six months to four years, that doesn’t fit the broader movement, but it’s also getting, we’ll see what happens to it. We’ll see what happens to it-

– [Zubin] Yeah, we’ll see what actually, how many parents actually go and vaccinate their six-month-old.

– [Vinay] Yeah, and I think that the proof is in the pudding. You only have 20%, you only have 20% of five to 11-year-olds. You only have, let’s not forget, that’s 80% of people you don’t have, okay?

– [Zubin] They’re not going, yeah-

– [Vinay] But you have 95% of Twitter.

– [Zubin] Oh, by the way, I gotta tell you this last thing. So my life has been so much happier since I deleted my Twitter app, and all I do on Twitter is dump and run away, and maybe I’ll peek in every now and again, like voyeuristically, to see what kind of shitstorm I’ve set off, and then I run back away. It’s been really nice for me, man. I highly, I don’t recommend it for you, because you’re much better on Twitter in terms of how you create content. But for me, it’s just been game-changing for sanity-

– [Vinay] Well, it’s interesting you say that. I saw Emily Oster today has said that she’s done with Twitter, it’s too caustic, and that’s sad, because she’s a very thoughtful person.

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] I will say that I also feel, like you, emotionally, my life’s a lot better, but I’ll tell you why. I think Twitter’s a great place for me to look and see what smart people think, so-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] I’ve un-followed, no, so it’s like you can un-follow some people-

– [Zubin] You’ve un-followed everybody, yeah.

– [Vinay] Yeah, un-follow a lot of people. So that’s one, smart people think, and it’s a great place to push your message, but I do think unfortunately it’s not a forum for dialogue, or debate. And so, I actually just don’t read anything that comes back at me, you know? So I’ve set it up in a way-

– [Zubin] That’s right.

– [Vinay] It doesn’t even show me. I don’t read it, I don’t care, and it’s, you know, at this point, I think people have set up their camps. And so, you know, it’s not surprising that the people who have always disagreed and are gonna be on the wrong side of history are still on the wrong side of history. They haven’t yet relinquished their view. But I do think they will relinquish in a few, few weeks, or years, or months, they’re gonna relinquish, because I do think there is a parallel with the Iraq War that I keep saying, which is like, you know, the Iraq War was like two things. One, obviously it was a huge policy blunder, which is like school closure, but also five years after the Iraq War, you walk around, everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, I was always opposed to it.” I was like, “You weren’t,” I was like, “Were you, were you?” You were always-

– [Zubin] Yeah, yeah.

– [Vinay] I was like, “I thought most of y’all were for it “at the time.”

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] No, y’all opposed to it? And that’s what we’re gonna see here on all these issues.

– [Zubin] I think you’re right. There will be a zeitgeist shift. It’s already happening with the kids masking thing. When NPR writes a piece that’s really critical of kids masking, gives four reasons that masks might cause harm-

– [Vinay] They stopped mailing tote bags. They mail kids masks in size two. They stopped mailing their, the two-year-old mask is the new tote bag.

– [Zubin] You know, I gotta say, so when I lived in Vegas, I just, I loved KNPR there, and I used to, they used to invite me to the studio all the time-

– [Vinay] That’s an oasis in the Vegas desert. It really is. It really is, it’s like, “Wow, “an oasis of reason and logic.” But I would sit in the NPR studio, and I would do their telethons, and they’d be like, “Oh, we have ZDoggMD here,” and I’d be like, “Hey guys, do you believe in public radio?” Like I would do the whole thing, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had. And now, I come back to the Bay Area, I don’t listen to NPR at all, because all I hear is the bias in it-

– [Vinay] You know-

– [Zubin] It’s during COVID-

– [Vinay] I gotta say the same thing, which is for me “The New York Times” was the paper of record. I always get the paper Sunday. NPR, I loved it, you know, and then COVID comes, and I see a bunch of very well-educated liberal elite reporters living in cities where they can live their whole lives on remote work basically ignoring 85% of the country, ignoring all of Western Europe, and continuing the most narrative that’s hell-bent on ruining children’s lives for what goal? To marginally reduce the probability that they ordering Uber Eats will get sick. And then, because, I mean, isn’t that the structural bias? These are people who went to top universities. They live in liberal elite cities. They are-

– [Zubin] Yeah.

– [Vinay] Mostly remote workers. So of course, for them, for those of us who’ve been showing up to work every day this whole pandemic, like myself, you know, they’re terrified at that idea, and they’re putting out, basically at this point, I think they’re just total failures. I don’t even know what to say.

– [Zubin] Yeah, no, I mean, we’ve said our piece, man. I think people will, you know, people who listen to the show, they either are kind of aligned with that, or they disagree, and they’re listening for arguments to make back, which that’s great. That’s what you want. If you disagree, go, like you said, go research it, tell us what you think, you know, have your own channel, because that that’s the other thing, man. Like we were saying earlier, people are so scared to say what they think, but they’re perfectly willing to criticize. They’re perfectly willing to sit in comments, and go, “This guy wants to murder babies,” and it’s like, well, no, no, how about this? You feel so strongly, go create a YouTube channel, and then they’re, you know, and go and communicate what you’re saying, because you know what, people will listen. You can grow it. I know I have experience in this. It’s not rocket science. You don’t have to be smart to do this. You just have to be passionate.

– [Vinay] I can promise you, I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends. I’m gonna have so many op-eds and stuff coming out in the next few weeks. It’s gonna be-

– [Zubin] Nice.

– [Vinay] Merciless.

– [Zubin] Nice, nice.

– [Vinay] But I really think, I really think the reason people snipe is those who can’t do tweet, you know-

– [Zubin] Snipe, yeah, they tweet.

– [Vinay] Those who can’t do tweet, you know? They can’t, yes, they can have a single barb. They can’t string together those barbs into a coherent op-ed. They can’t go on YouTube, they can have a YouTube channel. I encourage them to. I’m gonna enjoy watching you stagnate on 100 followers. I love it, I love it!

– [Zubin] Dude, it’s so true. I’ll say this last thing. Do you have a second? Because this is the last thing I wanna say, okay. So while we were doing this whole show, I was thinking about this paradigm that I was listening to Iain McGilchrist, who’s a Scottish guy, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist. He wrote a book called “Master and His Emissary” about the right hemisphere, and its emissary, the left hemisphere. Now, it used to be that people thought the right hemisphere was the silent hemisphere. It’s not responsible for speech. It’s all emotion, and you know, it’s kind of squishy. It’s a little feminine, because people are sexist, and you know, the left is what grasps the world with the right hand, is what does math, and science, and is about language, and all of this. Well, it turns out none of that is true. What’s really true is the right is actually the contextual holistic engine of intuition that brings, that works relationally, and that the left actually is more of what we use as a tool of the right to break things down and kind of grasp at them and reduce things to its parts. So when you have a lesion, when you destroy the right hemisphere, the person tries to create wholes out of parts. It tries to make sound bites into reality. It tries to use bureaucracy to rule, and the right is the opposite. The right sees things only in context. It only listens to the three-hour Rogan. It only listens to the hour and a half VPZD to hear the two actors in their context as part of a larger whole. And what McGilchrist argues, and I agree, is that societies, as they head towards ruin, and the end of individual civilizations, the left brain be comes more and more dominant. It forgets that it was the emissary, and it tries to become the master, and you get technological bureaucracies that reduce things to parts, and that’s where you get people tweeting these little sound bites, but they can’t string together an hour conversation in context that doesn’t make them look idiotic. And honestly, the more you talk about like, well, what’s going on with these bureaucrats at Princeton, it’s their left brain, the ascendancy of the left brain. And I really would say watch any interview Iain McGilchrist has done about this. It will convince you that we need to be much more aware of the right brain and behave like right brain creatures.

– [Vinay] I love it, let’s end with that. I gotta jump to another Zoom.

– [Zubin] All right, brother, a joy. Guys, you know what to do. Sign up, check out VP’s stuff, I’ll put links. I love you, we are out.