WTH is going on with breakthrough infections? Dr. Marty Makary explains why renewed panic over COVID-19 is unwarranted
Episode #113 | July 28, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Dr. Marty Makary
Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.
Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell Is Going On? Marc, what the hell is going on?
Marc Thiessen: Well, we're talking about breakthrough infections. So, this is the new COVID panic, right? We've got these Texas democrats who are fleeing the state, they flew on a plan without wearing masks and they got breakthrough infections.
Marc Thiessen: And so now all of a sudden people are saying, "Oh my gosh. The delta variant. It's so infectious, it's so dangerous that even people who are vaccinated are coming down with COVID. We've got to lock down again. We've got to have mask mandates on. Maybe we shouldn't open schools up again. We've got to bring back the pandemic restrictions," and it's just a load of BS.
Danielle Pletka: So, I think that first, you are right of course that there's a ton of BS, as there has been from the get-go in discussions about this, but I do think that the White House has caught on to something. And it's something that is at once medical but also highly political, and that is the notion that there are two Americas. You said it. Others have said it, but the White House also likes to say it, right? There's vaccinated America and there's unvaccinated America.
Danielle Pletka: Now what you're talking about in terms of kids is unvaccinated America, but what the White House is really trying to promote is the notion that everybody's going to have to go back in to all the horrible lockdown and it's all because of a bunch of rubes who won't get themselves vaccinated and of course, we know who they are. Right? They're people who voted for Donald Trump. So, I think this is going to be very interesting. Yes from a medical standpoint, but as you rightly say, mostly not in terms of illness, not in terms of people who are coming down with this new variant, but in terms of what is being pushed on people because of it.
Marc Thiessen: I want to talk about the political side of it in a second, but I did some digging on
2 the effectiveness of these vaccines and if you look, I've dug into the CDC data. As of July 12, 2021 there've been a grand total of 5,492 Americans hospitalized with breakthrough infections. That's out of 159 million people who've been vaccinated in this country, and of those 5,492, 791 have died of COVID-19. So you've got a death rate of 0.005%. Put that in perspective. I looked this up. Your chance of dying in a lightning strike is 0.007%. If you're vaccinated, you have a better chance of dying from a hornet or wasp sting, a dog attack, a car crash, drowning, sunstroke, choking on food than you do of dying from COVID-19.
Marc Thiessen: And by the way of those hospitalizations, almost all of those people are older people, elderly, or have immunocompromised or have underlying conditions. There was an Israeli study of patients hospitalized with breakthrough infections. They found only 4% had no comorbidities. So, the people who are getting sick today and having back outcomes, if you're vaccinated from COVID-19, are people who are immunocompromised, who are sick, who are older, who have underlying conditions. If you are vaccinated and you're basically a healthy individual, you are basically bulletproof. You are not going to die. You are not going to get hospitalized. For you, the pandemic is over. It's over. There is a pandemic of the unvaccinated that's happening in this country, and some people are not getting the vaccine because they have natural immunity, because they've already had COVID. Other people are choosing not to do it, and that's their choice, but their choice is also to put themselves at greater risk of COVID. And so, why should kids in America have to wear masks in school or not go to school because some people chose not to get vaccinated and put themselves at risk?
Danielle Pletka: So, this is a genuine question. You've looked into all these numbers. I've looked into a lot of the data about whose been vaccinated and who hasn't been vaccinated. There's a good Kaiser Family Foundation study out about that, if anybody is really interested in digging into them, but what do you think? Why is there this weird urge to reinstate the restrictions that existed at the peak of the COVID pandemic, when there was no vaccine? For the Biden Administration, that says failure. For the economy, that says failure. What do you think it's all about?
Marc Thiessen: I think a couple things are going on. Number one, I think a lot of people got in touch with their inner Stalin during the pandemic, right? A lot of these local officials and particularly-
Danielle Pletka: Who knew there were so many people who had an inner Stalin?
Marc Thiessen: There's lots of them. People like telling other people what to do. There's a subset of the population that just likes telling people what to do, and they loved-
Danielle Pletka: It's staggering. I was shopping the other day and I walked into the store and the woman said, "Put on hand sanitizer." And I said, "No. I'm allergic to hand sanitizer," which I actually am, and she said, "Well then you can't come in." And I was like, "But there's no one else in the store and that's not actually a rule."
Marc Thiessen: And also, you can't get COVID from surface transmission.
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3 Danielle Pletka: Exactly.
Marc Thiessen: It's not even how it's transmitted!
Danielle Pletka: I know, but what's wrong with people?
Marc Thiessen: They love the power of telling people what to do, and then you have the panicked people who they're just terrified. It's funny what a difference there is between the United States and Canada, right? So our Northern neighbor, they look just like us, they speak English just like us, they're no different than us, but they've got these COVID restrictions, they've got the borders shut, and the polls showed something like 80% of the population agrees with all these restrictions. I guess that's what you get when we said, "No taxation without representation," and the loyalists who went to Canada said, "No, we're fine with taxation without representation." They don't have quite the same rebellious streak that we do in America.
Danielle Pletka: Well.
Marc Thiessen: I just think there's a lot of people who like to tell other people what to do, and the pandemic gave them an excuse. Then the people who need the pandemic as a justification, and this is Biden, this is Bernie Sanders, this is all the Democratic Socialist crowd in Washington, the pandemic was their pretext for all this government spending. Right? Biden passed $1.9 trillion dollars in his first weeks in office in a party line vote, which it turned out we didn't need to spend because the pandemic was essentially over by then. But no, it's their justification for all this government spending, so it's a combination of the inner totalitarian in a lot of people and the inner socialist in a lot of people. How's that?
Danielle Pletka: I don't like either of those inner people, and I will say the pandemic has ripped the mask off, if I may use that heinous term, it has really ripped the mask off a lot of people who I think are secretly desirers of diktat over the rest of our nation. So, let's get into the politics because I do think this is also a big part of it. One of the things that I think is fueling this desire to have the mask, no mask, go back to school with masks, not go back to school at all, go back to the office, not go back to the office at all debate is this question of Democrats are the good guys. Democrats are the ones who went and got vaccinated. Look at Massachusetts. Look at New York. Look how great they are and compare them to South Carolina, those rubes who are all resisting. And what is the common denominator? We know what the common denominator is. It's that those rubes, those cretins, they voted for Donald Trump and now they're not getting vaccinated because they think their precious bodily fluids are being compromised in some way -à la Dr. Strangelove- and what is absolutely fascinating to me, and I talk about this a little in our interview, is this deep dig into the data that our colleague and T did about the polling on who is not getting vaccinated by state because it turns out that by state, who is not getting vaccinated is not necessarily Republican voters.
Danielle Pletka: It's a lot of Black voters. It's a lot of Black residents in South Carolina, in Florida, in California, and their numbers are staggeringly different than the impact that there has been on them. I'm not going to dictate why it is that the Black community in
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4 America feels hesitation. I'm sure that there will be people who say that it is a history of racism. The one thing you can say is it's not because of their innate conservatism. These are not for the most part Trump voters. These are people who are vaccine hesitant, and I don't understand why politicizing it is helping them.
Marc Thiessen: So basically the solution to vaccine hesitancy is critical race theory. So look, I think it's a mix. I don't necessarily agree with Stirewalt's analysis. Number one, he's right about African Americans. So, the only ethnic group in this country or racial group in this country that has the lowest vaccination rate is African Americans. I think it's less than a quarter are fully vaccinated, right? So that's a key constituency of the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party, and this goes back to Kamala Harris, who's now the most senior elected person of color in this country. Back in the fall, she was out there saying, "I don't trust the Trump vaccine." Right? "I'm not going to put that Trump vaccine in my body. I don't trust anything Donald Trump says," and Biden basically echoed that, so they created this vaccine hesitancy.
Marc Thiessen: So you've got the image of the first African American woman running for vice president saying, "Don't trust the Trump vaccine." So, I think a lot of people listened to that, and it's hard to undo that kind of damage once you've done it. Maybe she should have the humility to come out and say, "You know what? I was wrong. The vaccines are safe. I was politicizing it. I'm sorry." So yes, they're responsible for their own constituency. However, I don't agree that Trump voters are not vaccine hesitant or more vaccine hesitant.
Danielle Pletka: Oh, no. I wasn't trying to say that because I think there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy among poor white Americans for a whole variety of reasons, but at the end of the day, and this is what they have in common. It's not who they voted for. It is the fact that they are poor. The lesser educated are in fact the less vaccinated.
Marc Thiessen: Yeah. So, there was a Post-ABC news poll, just to put the numbers out there, that showed that while 86% of Democrats say they've received at least one dose, only 45% of Republicans have, and while 6% of unvaccinated Democrats say they aren't likely to get vaccinated, 47% of Republicans who are unvaccinated say they probably or definitely will not get the vaccine. So, there is a greater vaccine hesitancy on the right than there is on the left. But I'll tell you something, one of the reasons for that, or at least one of the ways we could be combating that, is maybe give Donald Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed. The Biden Administration, I get that they hate Donald Trump and he's given them plenty of reasons to hate him, but on the principle that even the blind squirrel gets an acorn once in a while, Operation Warp Speed is the greatest public health achievement in human history. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that, and that's an achievement of the Trump Administration.
Marc Thiessen: So, they did a public service ad with all the former presidents, Bush, Carter, Obama, Clinton, all saying, "Get the vaccine." The only one they didn't ask to do it was Trump. Now, maybe he wouldn't have done it. Maybe January 6th, they say that's more important, but if you're arguing that it's Trump supporters who are not getting vaccinated and they're the ones holding us back, wouldn't it be smart to say, "Hey, Trump supporters. If you trust Donald Trump, get your Trump
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5 vaccine." Right? Give him credit.
Danielle Pletka: Are you sure they didn't ask him, Marc?
Marc Thiessen: I am, 100%. They didn't ask him. I know that.
Danielle Pletka: Well, that's stupid.
Marc Thiessen: It's been reported.
Danielle Pletka: That's unbelievably dumb.
Marc Thiessen: So, the one former president who actually could play a role in convincing that portion of the population to get vaccinated, they won't give him credit for it, and they won't ask him to help because of their hatred for Donald Trump. Again, people have their reasons for their hatred for Trump, but he actually could do some good here, but they just are so filled with loathing for him that they won't give him credit. Biden even tried to steal credit for the vaccine. There was a speech he did the other day. "Well, it was developed with science that was developed over decades under Democratic and Republican administrations." I mean, come on. We've done podcasts about this.
Marc Thiessen: We had Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed on, and what he was explaining was that vaccine development usually takes years, if not decades, because it's sequential. You have to go through the phase one trial, then the phase two, then the phase three and then only if it's fixed, then you get the FDA approval process which takes a long time, and then only once its FDA approved do you start scaling up manufacturing, getting it out to people. What they did was basically, instead of making it sequential, they did it all at once. They ordered the vaccines even though they didn't know they were going to be approved so that when they were ready, we could get them out.
Marc Thiessen: And so as a result, right now we're in a situation where those of us who are vaccinated, I mean literally just a year after this virus hit our shores, a little over a year, we're going back to our normal lives. That's because of Operation Warp Speed. Give the man some credit for what he did and employ him to go out to those people who are vaccine hesitant on the right and say, "Go get your vaccines." All they have to do is ask.
Danielle Pletka: But bottom line, it's going to be a choice and there are going to be people who are not vaccinated, and if we're going to stop our entire economy, and our entire nation, and our entire education system over those who choose not to get vaccinated, we are going to be in a lot of trouble next time there's a virus that comes along. Or frankly, the flu that comes along. Anyway, to talk about this, to talk about delta, to talk about whether we're going back to school or not is our recidivist guest. Dr. Marty Makary, is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Carey Business School. He's an autho The Price We Pay: What Broke American Healthcare- and How t Dr. Makary back with us today.
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6 Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.
Marc Thiessen: Well Marty, welcome back to the podcast.
Dr. Marty Makary: Great to be with you, Marc and Danielle.
Marc Thiessen: We're thrilled to have you back. So look. The news that the six fully vaccinated Texas Democrats fleeing their state came down with COVID anyway has focused a lot of attention now on breakthrough infections, and we're starting to hear from people that, "Oh my God. The pandemic is worsening. The delta variant is so infectious. We need to return to COVID restrictions. We need to have indoor mask mandates." Some parents are even bracing for the teachers unions to use this all as a pretext to keep the schools closed in the fall. Should we be panicking about breakthrough infections?
Dr. Marty Makary: No. That is not our problem, and let me tell you, what's going on is we've got two different things happening, two separate things happening in America, and people are conflating the two. One is we've got outbreaks among non-immune people in some communities, and those are real outbreaks. Mostly in a younger population than in the past, so we're not seeing the same surge on hospitalizations, but they're real. And then separate from that, people who are immune, mostly those vaccinated, are seeing breakthrough infections. Not most people vaccinated, but of those breakthrough infections, we're seeing more in the vaccinated population than in those with natural immunity, and those are mild cases. It's like the common cold or asymptomatic, and I think we just have to remember our battle has never been against the sniffles. It's been against death and disability, and hospitals being overrun, and on that front we're still fine, and you should feel good if you've got immunity.
Danielle Pletka: Marty, first of all, thank you so much for joining us again. I think there's a lot of confusion about this, because what has happened, and not just in the United States, is that there's been this huge conflation of infection and risk. You called it the sniffles, but at the end of the day when someone gets COVID alpha, beta, gamma, delta, lambda, and probably whatever is in between that I missed because I didn't study Greek-
Marc Thiessen: Lambda, Lambda, Lambda. Delta, Delta, Delta.
Dr. Marty Makary: That was my frat.
Danielle Pletka: Thank you. So, people are full of fear and my sense is that the government hasn't done a great job in educating people about what these distinctions are, which is causing part of the problem here. Section 1A of my question is, if you think you're going to get it anyway even if you're vaccinated, then of course you would ask the question, why should I be vaccinated? What do you think?
Dr. Marty Makary: Well, if the choice is between getting vaccinated or just getting the infection, if that's the decision point you're at, the vaccine is about 50,000 times safer. If you are not immune, and I keep saying that as opposed to saying those who are vaccinated, I talk about the immune, because one of the greatest failures of our
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7 medical leadership has been ignoring natural immunity from prior infection. So that's just a little preface to how I'm describing this. If you're not immune in America, it's about 5% of seniors, and it's roughly 30% of adults in America, you should be worried. You should be worried.
Dr. Marty Makary: If you're in that group and you're high risk, you're more advanced in age, you're not a 30 year old healthy person, you should be worried because right now delta is ripping through the United States in ways nobody saw because of its contagiousness. And so, we thought we were in a really good place with COVID, and then what happened is something no one expected to happen, a massive, massive epidemic in India, and out of that emerged an entirely new variant. And so that's what we're dealing with right now.
Marc Thiessen: Just to put this in perspective for people. I was just looking at the CDC data, and so as of July 12th, there were a grand total of 5,492 Americans who've been hospitalized with breakthrough infections out of 159 million people who have been vaccinated. I know we're not factoring natural immunity in. 791 people dead. That is a death rate of 0.0005%. I mean, is it fair to say that if you are vaccinated or if you have natural immunity, the pandemic is over for you? You're not going to die.
Dr. Marty Makary: That's true.
Marc Thiessen: You're not going to get hospitalized.
Dr. Marty Makary: That's right. You're good to go, and you should feel good, and you should live a normal life with the one exception that if you're in an area where there's an active, big outbreak, you may want to be a little careful around those who are non-immune but otherwise you should feel good. I would also add to that Marc, any data from the CDC pretty much has major problems, and one of those issues is that when they talk about the hospitalized with COVID, so we have routine testing of everyone who walks in the doors of the hospital, absolute screening, by the way it violates CDC guidelines because the CDC says you really should not be testing those who are vaccinated who have no symptoms. They've been saying that for a long time.
Dr. Marty Makary: So, we're testing every single person that walks in. Guess what? If you're immune you're going to fend off the infection if you get it, and you might have a virus particle or two sitting in your nose, and the PCR test is so sensitive with the 30 cycle threshold, it is so sensitive it can pick up one dead virus particle. You have no risk of disease or transmission. You're going to light up as positive. So, those are people counted in your statistic. I just point that out because we're over testing those who are fully vaccinated and immune right now.
Marc Thiessen: So, that data is actually overstating the risk, 0.0005%?
Dr. Marty Makary: That's right.
Marc Thiessen: So it's even lower risk than that in reality?
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8 Dr. Marty Makary: That's right, that's right.
Marc Thiessen: Wow.
Danielle Pletka: All right, wait. So, this is a complete counter narrative to what we're hearing. So, my favorite medical professional, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others have been suggesting over, and everybody knows why I'm so derisive of him and his love of fame, but he has suggested, the White House has begun to suggest my own State of Virginia and Marc's State of Virginia has begun to suggest that people should go back to mask wearing. Los Angeles has mandated that everybody indoors needs to wear masks again. So, what are we talking about realistically? What I'm hearing from you, Marty and what I just heard from Marc in terms of stats, is that's ridiculous. What I'm hearing from the press, from the White House and others is oh my God, light your hair on fire, COVID is back.
Dr. Marty Makary: Hopefully I rank somewhere in the top 10 by the way in your top doctors. I'll take rank number three or four after Fauci, that's fine with me. So I, as you know, was calling for the lock downs before the pandemic hit. I was scared. I was really scared, and then quickly said, "Look. We've got to have an open society and live with this thing in a safe way." And then really when the mandates were coming on for anything, vaccine mandates or mask mandates, I was saying, "Look, but the idea of mandating things, once we got down to a very low level of infection in the late spring a few months ago, I was against the mandates. Now, I've got to be honest with you. I'm starting to think that there's a lot we don't know with delta.
Dr. Marty Makary: We're in some uncharted territory, and in an area of an active outbreak, for a short period of time until we have the data, if people want to wear masks or business leaders who have a small, dense indoor setting without good ventilation, I'm not as opposed to the idea as long as we have exit criteria. I think where we're getting into real problems right now is first of all, by having on the restrictions like masks longer than we needed to and we did that in June and even in May, We've politicized it now. So, people are too desensitized. They're not going to do it, and if we ask people to do something without hard data, we're just going to ignite a firestorm and it's going to hurt our credibility in the future. We might need people to wear masks in five years if we see some new virus emerge. So, there is a lot with the delta that's uncharted and now I'm wondering, in an area of an active outbreak, if I were in a crowded church, would I wear a mask even though I'm vaccinated? I might.
Marc Thiessen: But here's the thing, Marty, and I want to turn to kids in a minute because you've written a great piece on this but before we do that, obviously there's some people who are immunocompromised and the vaccines don't work for them, right? And there's some people who have preexisting conditions, health conditions that make them more susceptible and they don't want to get the vaccines. Putting those people aside, people who are getting sick right now, I think it's something like 99.5% of deaths are people who didn't get vaccinated. 97% of hospitalizations are people who chose not to get vaccinated. If you're choosing not to get vaccinated now, before when there was a shortage of vaccines, this was not an issue of choice. It's now an issue of choice. Why should people who have been responsible and gotten COVID vaccines have to have
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9 their lives turned around and go back into turtle mode and pandemic restrictions because of people who are making bad choices?
Dr. Marty Makary: Yeah. Now, good point. Look, this is why right now I would say that I would strongly recommend a mask in an area of an active outbreak, but the mandate does have issues and that is the very issue. In the United States, if you're susceptible to COVID, that is you're nonimmune, you're doing so at your own individual risk and society is not going to shut down for your sake because you chose to go down that path. Kid are such low risk that that's a whole separate issue, so that's not a reason to keep things shut down.
Marc Thiessen: Let's talk about the kids because you had a great piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day, and you point out that out of the 600,000 some odd Americans who died with a COVID diagnosis code in their record, only 335 of those were kids under 18, and there's no data showing whether the COVID was actually the cause of death. We're now starting to see parents are bracing for the teachers unions to start pushing for, "Oh, delta variant is so dangerous. We've got to delay school reopenings. Every kid has to wear a mask." Teachers are not going to want to go back to schools and we're going to have this whole start again in the fall. Is there any justification for keeping kids out of school and not starting schools, or even requiring kids to wear masks in school?
Dr. Marty Makary: Well, even the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC have said, "Look. Kids can do some mitigation like distancing and other things, but they've got to be in school, even if you cannot achieve the mitigation," which is pretty remarkable. To see the CDC say that, which is what we've been saying the whole time, right? That is sure, you can take precautions and do things in schools but they've got to be there. They've got to be in the classroom, and so that was the first time we heard from it. Now as you know, when I heard at the end of the spring the teachers unions and the politicians at the CDC, which is the political appointees at the CDC say, "Oh, we expect kids to be in person in the fall," I knew this was just going to be a battle royal, and that was posturing, and you're seeing it now with the masks too.
Dr. Marty Makary: I think one reason they're saying, "We want kids to wear masks in school, even if they're two years old," is because once the vaccine is approved they're going to use the vaccine as a condition to take off the mask, even though kids under 12 wearing masks has zero data. How is there no data? The NIH has $41 billion dollars a year and 20,000 employees. How did nobody study this? There's no data in kids. The other thing is, do healthy kids die from COVID? No one knows. Ask Fauci. Ask the CDC director. Ask anybody. Have any healthy kids died of COVID? No one can tell you because that number, 335 deaths in kids under 18 the whole pandemic, the whole year and a half, no one has verified.
Dr. Marty Makary: The CDC has never picked up the phone to call each of those families or the doctors who cared for those kids and get the history. Figure out, are all of those stats clustered around a comorbid condition, or set of comorbid condition? That's to me unremarkable that we put restrictions and stole the livelihoods of 50 million American kids for a year and a half without verifying the data. That, to me, is unbelievable.
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10 Danielle Pletka: You make a really important point which is that there's so much data worldwide and the unwillingness to pursue it to its logical end seems almost political. You mentioned how everything has become politicized. One of the fights that's going on right now in Washington is this political fight in which the great danger to Americans is all of these awful conservatives and Republicans in these Southern states who have not gotten vaccinated, and they're going around and making everybody sick.
Danielle Pletka: I sent Marc a couple weeks ago a really great piece by Chris Stirewalt who's a colleague of ours at AEI, who actually went and looked at these numbers in these Southern states, and all of a sudden when you go and look at them, what you see is, "Oh. I'm sorry, it's not just the Republican voters in those states who are doing this. In fact, it's not at all the Republican voters." In California, 29% of vaccinations have gone to Hispanic people, but they account for 63% of cases, 48% of deaths, and 40% of the population. In the District of Columbia, Black people have received 43% of vaccinations but they make up 56% of cases, and 71% of deaths, and 46% of the population. That's not a MAGA problem. That's a social problem, and I'm not quite sure how we get past this. What are your thoughts about this whole North, South, Republican, Democrat, COVID carrier, not carrier problem?
Dr. Marty Makary: It's unfortunate to watch because I can tell you at the hospital, we've got nurses that don't want to get vaccinated and they're not conservative. Remember, nurses see a lot of complications in medicine of anything, right? They're the ones at the bedside and they're the ones there comforting the patients who are dealing with complications, so they're especially attuned to them. We've got a lot who are saying, "Look. I don't want to do it." Now, that's a bias that we have in medicine. We, doctors, take care of our health the worst because we tend to know everything that can go wrong, but I don't see the political aspect of it.
Dr. Marty Makary: I will say that there is a community think in general, right? So if all your friends are getting it, you're more likely to do it, and in areas where there's low uptake of the vaccine, you're less likely to take it. But no, it's a big concern right now the way that we're demonizing people who choose not to get it, and I'll tell you what's behind some of it, is ignoring natural immunity. What I continue to say is one of the greatest failures of our public health leaders, because if you ignore the contribution of natural immunity, the road to getting to 85% or 90% population immunity is a road of mandating, forcing people, getting every two year old vaccinated and demonizing people who get in the way. When you see it that way, you don't see that, hey you know what? A lot of the country right now has very high population immunity. They're bulletproof, and when you don't recognize natural immunity you say, "Hey. These people that refuse to get it, they're in the way of us eliminating or eradicating this pandemic." That's a false construct.
Danielle Pletka: I think the problem here, Marty, you're talking about nuances among healthcare workers, among the naturally immune, and I want to also be fair to the government here because of course, it's not up to the government to accommodate every nuance. It's not up to the government to think about the doubtful and the populations who somehow are unwilling because they see the downside as nurses, or because they've had relatives die of other vaccines, or for
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11 whatever reason. That's not the government's role. I think the problem here is that there's this effort to vilify, to turn into monsters people who somehow have doubts about this, and I'm not sure that this is going to be effective because I'd love to hear your answer to that question, but I'd also love to hear your answer to this question. Because, delta is not going to be the last variant, is it?
Dr. Marty Makary: We don't know. Delta may be here for years because it is so contagious, it quickly crowded out all the other variants, and it will be the variant in the United States for the foreseeable future. By the way, it's hard for the virus to keep mutating to be more contagious. That's a more difficult mutation. The virus mutates all the time. The vast majority of mutations are downward mutations, so the more contagious it gets, the higher the bar is and the harder it is to become more contagious than that. So delta, I'm hearing virologists say that they think this might be the seasonal virus that's around for a long time. Now, let's hope it mutates in a way that's more contagious but less virulent, which is an option which sometimes helps get it down, but your question is around those who are vaccine hesitant.
Dr. Marty Makary: If we want to deal with the hesitant, let's stop getting celebrities and politicians to do commercials and doing lotteries like California is doing. Let's get the full FDA approval. The full FDA approval is not something we have right now because of an absurd reason, and that is it's based on two different things. One is the safety and the other is the stability testing. That's something that takes more time. We don't need the stability testing information. We don't need that approval on stability testing. We don't need to know that it sits on the shelf of a doctor's office for six months and the expiration date should be X date. We're already giving it out, and by the way, we can get the stability testing once they have that data. But it's safe. That box has been checked. Go ahead and issue a full authorization now.
Dr. Marty Makary: I bet you 99% of Americans didn't even know there were two levels of authorization from the FDA. Emergency use, and full approval. And now we're all living in our little technical world of, "Oh, this is how we do it over here." You know what? Issue the full approval. We've got 180 million Americans who have gotten it. Safety profile is probably safer than any other medication they approved this year, and that'll help get people over this hump I think.
Marc Thiessen: So Marty, we basically got two Americas right now. We've got the immunized, not vaccinated but immunized both from previous infection and from vaccines population, for whom the pandemic is over, right?
Dr. Marty Makary: Yeah, yeah.
Marc Thiessen: I think it's safe to say that. The pandemic is done, we're back to normal. Then we've got this subset of the population that is not immune either by choice or because of immunocompromised or all the rest of it, where the pandemic is very real and there's actually a pandemic going around. That's our little bubble here in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, those two bubbles exist but they're in a different ratio, right? And you talked about how the delta variant which came here resulted from the fact that India had this great epidemic that broke out. How important is it for us to now that we've basically gotten every American who's
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12 wanted to get the vaccine can have the vaccine, to pivot towards helping other countries get immunized? Because what we've seen from India is that when a new variant forms because of a pandemic in a faraway land, it comes home to us and affects us here at home. I mean, how important is it for us to focus on getting other countries immunized?
Dr. Marty Makary: Yeah, really good point Marc, and I wrote a piece in the Washington Post two accinating Americans. It must What I'm basically getting at is that here we are debating if we should give third doses and immunizing five year olds for whom we don't even know if a healthy five year old has ever died from COVID in the United States. We don't even have that data from the CDC, and here we are saying, "They have to get two doses maybe in order to go to school." I mean, that's the level of debate we're at. And meanwhile, healthcare workers, a senior nurse overseas doesn't even have any vaccine and so what we're doing by hoarding vaccines and throwing millions into the trash, which we did on the FDA's order because it expired, we've thrown millions of doses in the trash. We should be addressing the threat of new variants emerging overseas by getting not only the vaccine over but the logistics.
Dr. Marty Makary: The logistics take from the logistics experts I just interviewed for the piece, several months to years. As a matter of fact, we couldn't even pull it off with nursing homes. We got the vaccine, there was a month delay in just getting the vaccine to the nursing homes. They were supposed to be first. So, we're letting the world hang to dry. We're saying, "Hey, we've got a plan." There's a big announcement, "To give out 50 million doses. Where are they?" By the time they get there for some places it's going to be late after their epidemic. So, America is seen in the world as a land of waste and excess, and what we're doing right now is certainly fulfilling that impression.
Danielle Pletka: So long story short, we've talked about this, we've talked to you twice about the challenges that we're facing, the problems with the FDA, the problems with CDC, the problems with the government. Vaccine reluctance, new variants, okay. Let's look forward for a second. The one thing that this summer brought to the American people was light at the end of the tunnel. Right? No more masks indoors, no more masks in restaurants, no more limitations, concerts, sports. So many of the things that we've missed. Kids in school together. What do you predict we're going to see in September?
Dr. Marty Makary: Well right now the modeling is showing that the delta variant is going to peak somewhere between late August and early September, and by the way, we're seeing more variation in the models than we've seen before in terms of timing. You're going to say, "How could we see more now? They were so off in the past." Well, they were kind of uniformly off in the past. Now we're seeing modelers with good track records, and now we've got those track records to use, come out with some different projects. Some see it extending through the fall. I think this is going to roll over sooner than some of these models show, but this is going to be a period where you're going to see a lot of headlines. You're going to see a lot of fear, you're going to see a lot of draconian policies come back in certain parts of the country. Ironically in the parts of the country where people need it least. Right? You're going to see it in some of these blue states
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13 where the vaccination rates tend to be higher.
Dr. Marty Makary: It's going to be a mess for the next month and a half and then we're going to see it roll over. Now, Scott Gottlieb thinks we've got more population immunity now than people may appreciate and we're probably going to see this roll over a little sooner than some of these models are suggesting, but it's going to be ugly because the peak is going to be right around the opening of school. And then you're going to start to see all this last minute, "Hey, based on all this crazy new information and these new headlines, we're going to change the policy and keep the schools shut down, and require vaccinations among kids," which we could see an approval for kids say five to 12 as early as September.
Dr. Marty Makary: And even the anticipation of that approval could give teachers unions a reason to say, "Hey, no in person learning." It's going to be ugly. We've got to brace up. It's going to be ugly and I think Marc, you said it best in that there's two Americas. If you're vaccinated, you now are living in a world where there's a seasonal virus that is very mild called COVID-19 that could give you very mild symptoms season to season, and that's okay. Our battle has never been against the common cold. It's been against death.
Marc Thiessen: It sounds like COVID, it's not going to be eradicated for a long time. It's going to be around, but it's going to be as you say more like the common cold and if you're vaccinated, less dangerous than a flu. Right? Yet, it's dominating our political discourse about public health in a way that I guess is understandable considering what we've gone through for the last year, but at what point are we going to get some balance back where COVID is not dominating every discussion about how we can function as a society? At some point, aren't we going to have to learn this is our new reality? COVID is there, it's not going away, it's going to be around. We have protection against it, get vaccinated if you're vulnerable, and go ahead and let's start going back to normal not just in our activities every day, but also just let's stop obsessing with it. Is that ever going to happen?
Dr. Marty Makary: The obsession part, not in the next few months. It's going to be ugly because people are conflating the outbreaks among nonimmune, which are small, limited, regional and some of those are very real, and breakthrough infections which are nothing to worry about. Right? That's the downgrading of COVID from a serious threat down to a minimal cold/flu type symptom setting or asymptomatic. By the way, we've got right now in the United States four seasonal corona viruses that have circulated for decades, and they cause mild symptoms. It's not COVID-19, these are other corona viruses, and they collectively comprise 25% of the cases of the common cold. There's seasonal coronaviruses. COVID-19 is probably going to become the fifth seasonal coronavirus, but it's got a very scary title because we got burned and we had a really bad epidemic.
Dr. Marty Makary: So, I don't know if we're going to learn that we need to live with COVID-19 and not be afraid of it when we have immunity, and for those of you who are pissed off and just thinking, "Gosh. We're going to have to live with this forever. For the rest of our lifetimes, we're going to have a seasonal mild coronavirus called COVID-19." Well you can thank the gain of function researchers for it, right? The
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14 other coronaviruses came from nature, and by the way it's not the first time there's been a lab leak in China by the way. I was doing some research.
Dr. Marty Makary: The year after SARS went away, it totally went away, there was a SARS outbreak among lab workers in a Chinese lab. In 1977, the Chinese were found injecting an influenza strain into their military recruits, which is what we call a challenge trial, that is you give them an experimental vaccine and then give them the infection to see if it works, well that strain was from about 25 years prior. There's no way it lives 25 years. Influenza is too flimsy. It only can live in a lab frozen for 25 years, so they pulled it out of the lab. By the way, that virus in 1977 got out. It was an H1N1 strain of flu, and killed 700,000 people that year.
Dr. Marty Makary: So, there's a long track record here and I just don't understand personally, and sorry to offend you Danielle because I know you're a big fan of Dr. Fauci, he was going around the country. Even if the dollars he was donating to the Wuhan Virology Institute, which ironically we submitted a grant at the same time from my research team at Hopkins, to identify the cause of Alzheimer's disease. We think we're onto it. That was rejected. We find out later the money was going to Wuhan. Even if the dollars were not going directly to splicing the spike protein and doing the gain of function, which is what he's arguing, he was giving lectures promoting gain of function research 100%. They're on tape, they're out there. We've seen some of them on Fox. I would say if I were him, "Gosh, I feel horrible I was promoting this practice. Should never be done. 100% never, never, never. I'm sorry. This was an honest mistake."
Dr. Marty Makary: I think Dr. Fauci has good intentions but where's the humility to say, "Look, I got this horribly wrong?" I'm a doctor. I'll tell you when I take care of patients, if something goes wrong, and it does happen, American healthcare is messy, if I tell that patient, "Look, I am sorry. I take responsibility. This should not have happened. I want to be here right with you every step of this process from here on out, I feel terrible," I'll tell you. Patients are incredibly forgiving. The public is very forgiving of medical professionals, and that's the approach. People are hungry for honesty and humility right now.
Danielle Pletka: Oh, Marty, I'm sorry. Where do you live? Honesty, humility? Please. Well, at least from you we've gotten a lot of both and thank you so much for being willing to share your time with us again. This has really been a wonderful conversation, and I hope illuminating to our listeners who really enjoy this sort of frankness and openness about an issue that deserves more frankness and openness.
Marc Thiessen: And honesty. And honesty. Gosh, don't we need honesty?
Dr. Marty Makary: That's right.
Marc Thiessen: Thank you Marty.
Danielle Pletka: We sure do. Thanks a ton.
Dr. Marty Makary: Thanks, guys. Great to be with you.
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15 Marc Thiessen: So, one of the things I want to pick up on is this whole idea that we're going to have this battle royal in the fall about opening schools. As Marty just pointed out, that the delta variant epidemic is going to peak in August and September, which is right when schools are opening. You can see this coming. The teachers unions are going to use this to squeeze out for more money , "We've got to put masks on two year olds. I can't teach in the classroom, we're going to have to go back to online learning." He had a great piece in the Wall Street Journal, and I just want to lay this data out. 600,000 Americans who have died with COVID diagnosis on their record, 335 were children under 18. That's according to the CDC data, and we don't know whether that was the cause of death. They just had a COVID diagnosis code. They could've had asymptomatic, which most kids are asymptomatic.
Marc Thiessen: Marty's team at Johns Hopkins did a study of 48,000 kids and what they found was a COVID mortality rate of zero among children without a preexisting medical condition. So if you are a kid without a preexisting medical condition, you basically have a zero mortality rate from COVID-19. The idea that we're not going to open our schools or that we're going to make these kids wear masks while they're running around in the schoolyard is just mind boggling to me.
Danielle Pletka: Look, we talked about this during the intro. These are people who are either A, on the teacher side desperate not to teach, or B, on the regulatory side desperate to keep kids out of school because they are absolutely incapable of making a cost benefit analysis about this, about what it's like to keep kids in school with masks on in the heat of August, about what the impact of keeping kids out of school who are full of fear about what might happen to them. We have spent most of this year and last year listening to people tell us that we have to listen to the science, but now that has just gone by the wayside. Right? Now what with have to do is listen to hysteria, politics, rumor mongering, special interests, unions, and I think that a lot of people share our feeling that we are just bloody sick and tired of it.
Marc Thiessen: Well, I agree with you 100% but that's why you listen to this podcast, so you get the truth. You get Marty Makary and he tells it like it is. Look, folks, if you're vaccinated or if you're immune because of prior infection, the pandemic is over. Go back to your life. Send your kids to school, go to work, have fun, go to concerts, go on vacation, go to restaurants if you can get a table because the Biden Administration is paying people not to work, and so a lot of these places can't open, but that's a whole other topic. I refer you back to our podcast on inflation with Michael strain the other day, but enjoy your life. One way to enjoy your life is to listen to this podcast, rate us, review us, tell Dany why she's wrong, send her an email. See? I jumped in and stole your thunder.
Danielle Pletka: I never get those emails Marc.
Danielle Pletka: Everybody, thanks for listening and like you, we are going to enjoy our summer. So Marc and I are going to be off for the next few weeks and we will be back with you fresh, tanned, rested and ready, just like Richard Nixon for the new academic year at the beginning of September. Take care, everyone.
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