Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program,
where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, my friend Dan Dennett died about 10 days ago. I was traveling and then I got sick and couldn't record, so I'm just now getting an opportunity to say a few things about him.
As I'm sure all of you know, Dan was an extraordinarily productive philosopher. He really distinguished himself among philosophers by taking science seriously. This is evident throughout his books, but his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea in which he argues that Darwin's notion of natural selection was simply the best idea anyone has ever had. He's really a wonderful bridge between philosophy and science, and it's among many that Dan built.
One often hears philosophy as a discipline denigrated, especially by scientists and technologists, and there's even an implicit denigration in some of Dan's work, and in some of mine as well. I think it's worth clarifying this. Dan often approached philosophy as a kind of handmaiden to science,
and he was definitely not alone in doing this. On this view, the chief purpose of philosophy is to clear up conceptual confusion and to spot the many forms of learned error and well-trained ignorance that develop even in science so that we can get on with the work of actually understanding the world. The philosopher Bernard Williams once said that the problem with this approach to philosophy is that philosophy can't do what science does, that is produce new knowledge.
So it gives the impression that philosophy is just what scientists sound like when they're off-duty. And I understand this criticism as well. It's a little hard to say what philosophy is or should be, really. It's been many things historically, and I agree that as an academic discipline, there are many backwaters and dry patches that one need not explore, or exploring them one shouldn't
get stuck there. Generally, my view of philosophy is that it's not so much its own discipline at this point, as it is clarity of thought with the special purpose of making sense of our lives, and of our knowledge of the world. Its purpose isn't to do the work of science, or of history, or of journalism, or of any other field in which we produce knowledge. Its purpose is to think clearly about what the discoveries in those fields mean, or might mean.
The point of philosophy is to see how all the puzzle pieces fit together. I'm not sure that Dan would have agreed with that, but he certainly spent a lot of time working on the part of the puzzle that contains biology and psychology and cognitive science. I didn't get to spend that much time with Dan in person. We attended several conferences together over a couple of decades. Perhaps the first was the second Beyond Belief conference at the
Salk Institute in 2007. We went to Ted together and see a lot of the Lossi Days in Mexico, where we participated in a weird debate, which pitted him and me and Christopher Hitchens against Rabbi Schmooley, Boateak, Robert Wright, Dinesh D'Souza, and Nassim Talib, none of whom made a bit of sense. Really, if you want to see some brains totally misfire, watch with those guys had to say on that occasion. The podium was set in a mock boxing ring, and we were standing in front
of 5,000 mostly religious and I think mostly bewildered Mexicans. Niels Lise was an honor to share the stage with Dan and Hitch. Dan and I also went to various atheists and free thought conferences together. Actually before Mexico, we taped a conversation with Hitch and Richard Dawkins in Hitch's apartment. That was before an atheist conference in DC. Video of that conversation is still available on YouTube, and the transcript got worked up into a book titled The Four Horsemen, to which the
inimitable Stephen Frye wrote a preface. I think the last time I actually saw Dan might have been eight years ago, a Ted, and he was always great company. Beyond wanting to discuss serious ideas, he just loved life. He loved good food and wine and music and the beauty of nature. He was a big guy with a very big appetite for living, and it was infectious. However, like many of my professional friendships, most of my relationship with Dan took place over email, and I spent the better part
of a day and night last week rereading this correspondence going back 20 years. It was frankly a little alarming to see how much I'd forgotten. Reading this had a strange effect because I realized at some point that it was not so much reminding me of Dan as it was allowing me to relive my primary experience of him, because again, most of our relationship was a matter of exchanging these emails in the first place. So I read through hundreds of emails and relived a lot of fun and not so fun
moments with Dan. I saw the moment Dan, Richard and I consciously inducted Hitch into our circle. Apparently people had been referring to the three of us as the three horsemen of the apocalypse, which I don't actually remember, and we decided that Hitch would be the perfect fourth, which of course he was. I saw the planning that went on for a wonderful dinner we had at Hitch's apartment in Washington before which we recorded that two-hour conversation. I was amazed to see how excited
Dan was to be doing this. He really was having a lot of fun. So reading this correspondence gave me a second helping of my friendship with Dan and with many others, with Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins and Hitch. In many cases, there were several of us on various threads together. I just came away so grateful to have had these guys in my corner. Looking back at all these exchanges, I can see that I was often tempted to be more pugnacious than would have been useful. Dan especially came to my
rescue and I had forgotten pretty much all of these interventions. Dan was in his mid to late 60s when we had most of our correspondence and I was in my early 40s. As I said, there were often others on the thread, Richard and Steve and sometimes our mutual agent, John Brockman, Richard and I tend to be pretty similar and wanted to say things as intemperately as we think them. And Dan was always the voice of moderation and there were definitely times when I needed to hear
that voice. The encouragement and the criticism and the congratulations when things went well, all of these guys gave me a lot and Dan gave me a lot and I'd forgotten how much. As I said, most of our correspondence came earlier on during the four horsemen slash New Atheist period where we had a bit of a good cop, bad cop routine going. Dan was the good cop and Richard hitch and I were the bad ones and I think he liked it that way. Needless to say, he still caught a
lot of our bad press. Most people treated us like a foreheaded atheist. However, in truth Dan's contributions to New Atheism were different. In his book Breaking the Spell, his purpose wasn't to prove religion wrong or to denounce its evils rather he wanted to explain why so many people persist in defending the indefensible. He argued that it wasn't that so many people sincerely believe in God but rather they believed in belief and even many atheists believed in belief.
Now Dan and I were both capable of overreacting to criticism and to what we perceive to be unfair attacks. As our review our emails, I see we each did manage the other to be more measured in our responses than we often managed in our first drafts. We would occasionally show each other essays and letters to the editor. Needless to say, all of this admonishment is somewhat adorable given that when we fell out over free will we gave each other both barrels, both in public and in private
and you can read the public version of that on my blog somewhere. I believe it's all there including his initial review of my book Free Will to which I reacted badly. It took us about two years to bury the hatchet and you can hear how fully we did that in a conversation I recorded at the TED conference in 2016 which again I think might be the last time I ever saw Dan in person and you can hear that conversation on episode 39 of this podcast. Dan and I didn't agree about
free will. I'm not even sure we agreed about what we disagreed about. Nor did we agree about other topics in the philosophy of mind like the hard problem of consciousness and like many of my smart friends Dan had no interest in meditation but we both loved reason and science and the other principles that produce real intellectual life and political freedom and I will definitely miss
Dan's voice. My heart goes out to Susan, his wife and the rest of his family and to his many friends and students who were much closer to him than I was and I'm very sorry for your loss. Okay there are just a few things going on in the world at the moment. Campus protests, Iran, no doubt I will talk about all of that soon. Today I'm speaking with David Wallace Wells. David is a best-selling science writer and essayist who focuses on climate change, technology
and the future of the planet and how we live on it. David has been a national fellow with the New America Foundation, a columnist and deputy editor at New York Magazine. Previously he was at the Paris Review and now he's a regular columnist for the New York Times. He is also the author of a much celebrated book on climate change titled The Uninhabitable Earth. We covered a lot of ground here. We talk about the pollution of our information landscape, much of it through the lens of COVID.
We discuss the false picture of reality that so many people acquired during COVID, and now the various countries fared during the pandemic, our preparation for future pandemics,
how we naturally normalize danger and death, then we move on to climate change. We talk about the current global consensus, the amount of warming we can expect, the effects of air pollution, quite apart from warming, global versus local considerations, Greta Thunberg and climate catastrophism, growth versus degrowth, the role of market forces, carbon taxes, the consequences of political stagnation, the U.S. national debt, the best way to attack the candidacy of Donald
Trump. I thought David had a very good idea on this front as you'll hear, and we cover a few other topics. And now I bring you David Wallace Wells. I am here with David Wallace Wells. David, thanks for joining me. My pleasure, good to be here. So how did you get into journalism? I associate you with New York Magazine and the New York Times. Are you currently affiliated with both or
is it just in New York Times? Just the Times, yeah. I write a weekly piece for the opinion sections basically, a column because I was a newsletter and I write a column for the magazine once a month and some features too. And I've been there for almost two years now. Right. For a long time before that at New York. And before that a somewhat bumpier road, I worked at Slade, I worked in book publishing, I worked at the New York Sun, this New Yorkon newspaper in New York. And yeah, just in the
Paris Review is a deputy editor at the literary magazine for a while. And I like the Paris Review, especially those iconic interviews with writers. Yeah, they're incredible. Yeah, that was, you know, one of the best part of the job was I did one with William Gibson, but I edited a bunch of them, and they're also much more collaborative than you may think of the outset. So you're basically writing it with the writer, it's being interviewed all the time. Nice. And how would you describe your
political orientation? You know, I, about 10 years ago, I was writing a profile of this, this guy Ben Kunkel, who's a, was one of the founders of N++1 and is a pretty left-wing guy. And as it happens, also pretty concerned with climate, which I became later on. And he asked me the same question during the, during the reporting. And I said, you know, I, I think I'd have to call myself a neoliberal. And he just like rolled out of his chair laughing thing like how ridiculous it could be
for someone to call themselves a neoliberal. You know, I'm a child of the 90s. I grew up in, I was born in 82 and grew up in New York in the 90s. And I think on some animal level, I processed all of the meta narratives of that era quite deeply. So I was, you know, a sophisticated enough teenager to think that progress wasn't inevitable, you know, prosperity and justice weren't laws of the universe. But that over long enough timelines, we were kind of moving in the right direction
and that the US was part of that story. And I've had like a lot of people, a kind of a bumpier last decade or decade and a half where a lot of those assumptions seem much less safe to me to make. And the world seems much messier and more complicated than I thought it was, both domestically and internationally. And probably it's also meant that I've moved quite a bit to the left of where I
was when I described myself as a neoliberal 10 or 12 years ago. But I also think of myself as someone who is pretty resistant to tribal thinking and like team-based thinking about the world. And spend a fair amount of time, I think, trying to interrogate anything I see in myself as a
kind of doctrineary position or perspective. And that means often getting irritated and frustrated with people who I think of as political allies because I don't think they're being quite serious enough about asking themselves the hard questions. You know, I want to cover a bunch of topics here which are on the surface they seem unrelated, but they're all connected to what many of us perceive to be our degrading capacity to talk
about problems and implement solutions. There's a political dysfunction, there's a a failure to converge in any kind of reasonable time frame in a fact-based discussion on a statement of what's happening in the world. It's kind of a shared reality. So let's start with the information landscape which you probably agree. Many of us perceive it as just astonishingly polluted at this moment. And the one problem is that any attempt to clean it up
is considered to be censorship by at least half of our society. I mean now we're taking an American perspective here although this is probably true across much of the world.
And I wouldn't say that censorship is never a problem, but many people consider any effort to contain algorithmically amplified lies and however consequential there's a step toward some kind of dystopia and even to worry about misinformation and disinformation as I've begun to do in these previous sentences among Republicans certainly is just to be branded some kind of elitist
stooge at this point. These are just not problems. So I'm just wondering how you view, I mean there's the media and social media side of this and then the political sides right and the rise of populism especially. How do you view the current moment and what's
it like to navigate it as a journalist at the times? I think it's a big mess. When my colleagues are you know people in this sort of mainstream establishment media talk about on these issues, they often do talk about disinformation and they're talking about the distortions of social media and the way that it inflames many of our sort of intuitive tribal feelings about the world and the state of the world. I tend to think that the changes that we've seen over the last five years
are kind of bigger and more fundamental than that. I you know 20 years ago people worried a lot about American culture trending and a you know kind of idiocracy dystopia direction. We worried about the the dumbing down of our population of our culture and you know I think there's certain ways in which that's undeniably unfolding. On the other hand I think in the last five or 10 years as this incredible explosion of pretty high-minded, pretty serious curiosity you know in other parts of
the new media landscape. So you can see certain algorithmic problems when you're looking at you know Twitter or TikTok but when you look at what's happening on YouTube or podcasts it seems to me like we just have a huge new population of people who demographically and professionally a half generation ago would not have been really intellectuals. Now playing the role of intellectuals in public but also many of them just processing news from the world on their own and you know on
some level that has to be progress and it has to be a good thing. When I think about you know just imagining the equivalent like Silicon Valley elite from 20 years ago they were just not you know listening to three hour podcasts about you know some 17th century event or like you know the the path of the plague through Europe or whatever whatever it is it just was a very different kind
of more business centered culture and that's true of more traditional business centers too. And now I think almost everyone of some education and sort of status thinks of themselves as a thinker and thinks of part of their job as figuring out the state of the world in the future and that is
you know like I said you kind of have to count it as progress. On the other hand it's meant that it's possible for many of us to treat those conversations which are in many ways abstracted and separated from the the way the real world is unfolding as though those conversations are the real world and not to confront ourselves or be confronted with contrary facts or contrary
arguments. And so we have this combination of forces where we have many people thinking and talking and much more sophisticated and informed ways but producing just an awful lot of I think pretty damaging narrativeization and mischaracterization of all the shifts that we're living through. And you know it's maybe because of what I cover and what I write about it's also because of you know the recent history that we've all lived through but I think of this I guess primarily in terms of
the pandemic where it almost seemed like every month I was both arguing with journalists at places like the New York Times about how they were describing the pace of the pandemic and the course of the pandemic and what it's sort of required of us and also arguing with contrarians who seem to be
far too extreme in their rejection of establishment wisdom and establishment understanding. And I don't know given the information landscape that we've landed in now in 2024 against the political backdrop in which all of that's unfolding whether we can get back to a place where
you know we have to argue from real facts with one another but it does seem like a quite quite distressing situation where you know you have pretty prominent people with pretty large followings and whose followings have grown a lot over the last five years talking about the net harm that
vaccines have done to the population or you know on any number of points about the course of the pandemic really really I think overcorrecting for some of the real oversights and shortcomings of conventional public with public health messaging but overcorrecting in ways that I think are you know
have left us in a in a worse place and you know there we could talk about some of the particulars there but in the big picture it's like half of states I think of past laws restricting the ability of public health officials to impose any behavioral restrictions in the in the face of a future
pandemic independent of how transmissible or lethal that pandemic might be you know reasonable reasonable people can say can take issue with the way that the American pandemic was handled but like the idea that we should do absolutely nothing in the face of all possible future pandemic
threats just seems to me to be just a horrible overcorrection and a real indictment of how you know how narrow minded narrow mindedly we're all thinking about what we just went through and the lessons it really offers us yeah well well let's look at this through the lens of
COVID because I think that's it was transformational on on multiple fronts and you know I think diagnostic of much that ails us I mean you sound more sanguine about the signal that's in the noise than than I feel on most days I mean when you know when thinking about you know what what I
continue to refer to is podcast to stand and substachistan you know these yeah the main places of alternative media where you can see the virtually complete erosion of trust in in our institutions you know more or less you know just the evidence of it just clocks in you know minute by minute
you know in all of these conversations and so that even I you know the most esteemed journal on earth what you work for the New York Times has very little status out there in the wilds of podcasts and and YouTube and I mean it's just it's or it has negative status yeah yeah I mean
it's it really is you know you would be referred to it's you know sneeringly as a source I mean just to you so COVID is a good place to start because I think it is true to say that if you pulled the audiences of the biggest podcast I mean you start with Joe Rogan and work your way down
I think you would find a totally bewildering inversion of reality and it would be believed with you know something like you know religious zeal which is to say that if you I mean I don't obviously don't have these data but I would better you know if you could find me a casino like where I could
place this bet I would I would wait your a lot on it if you pulled Rogan's audience I think you would find that a majority believe that COVID was basically a non issue it was just at the end of the day not really much worse than the flu and you know who knows really how many people died from it
I mean that was surely the data massively exaggerated lots of people died you know with COVID and not from COVID including people getting hit by buses whereas many many people possibly many millions of people have been killed by the vaccines right I mean the vaccines have
been a just a disaster and one that was really just engineered to not only harm us in some strange way and and produce windfall profits for the in the fariest pharmaceutical companies but really it was they were tools of social control right somebody over in Davos just decided one day that they
were going to figure out how to subvert democracies globally and get people to bend the knee to all kinds of or wellian strictures that we acquiesce to perversely it is maddeningly and to our shame and you know what you need are the you know the renegades like RFK junior to reboot the system
from someplace outside it where all establishments are distrusted you know eternally we need we need the Snowden's of the world to leak everything and the the Vivek Ramaswames are the world drive out the money lenders and this is just it's just corruption institutional corruption if
it as far as the I can see and the whole covid story the lesson to learn from the pandemic is that it was just a colossal act of self harm and nothing literally nothing is as the New York times would say it is right that I think is well over 50% of the audience believe something like that
I mean you know feel free to react to that but I just and this is an audience that is you know arguably this is an audience that is on any given day considerably bigger than any other audience that you could name these are podcast episodes where the numbers of listeners you know the end
of the the week or the end of the month exceed you know the finale of game of thrones right I mean this is just enormous numbers of people listening to these long form conversations yeah and you know at a baseline I would say I agree with just about everything you said in your and your perspective
on on at all and I think it's really you know damaging and and worry some a few things to mention one is you know a lot of these fears as they were expressed especially early on in the pandemic about this sort of or wellian takeover really have not come to pass in any meaningful way which is
to say even taking seriously the possibility that somebody might have been trying to get you to take a vaccine for some nefarious future purpose or they were trying to lock you in your home for some you know out of some sense of you know social control all of that pressure disappeared relatively
quickly we are not living in the world that you know Naomi wolf warned us about we're not living in a world in which we're being pinned down and syringes forced into our arms every six months we're not being tested as we walk out the door we're not being told that we can't leave our homes
we're not being told we can't go to school the long term vision that was offered as this kind of this is a stepping stone a global stepping stone to a kind of new totalitarian order just as obviously not come to pass there was a period of time in 2020 when our lives were restricted to
some degree but I think even in remembering that history we often overstate how significant and how intrusive those restrictions really were and how politically divisive they were if you look at the data all through 2020 red states and blue states across the board imposed roughly the same
level of restrictions they all close schools at the same time they all restricted social gatherings at the same time they all issued mask advisories at the same time by the fall of 2020 there were some difference starting to emerge between red states and blue states but it was relatively small
and if you look at the mobility data that Google and others have assembled people were still moving around at some nowhere between 90 and 98 percent of what they've been doing before the pandemic we remember that time now so many of us as a period of intense government directed lockdown
and mostly it wasn't that mostly it was a culture of fear partly cultivated by public officials I think for good reason but you know partly cultivated them by them but also embodied and instantiated by individuals who were largely scared and I think in retrospect we've made this
collective mistake and this is the big point I want to make is this is not just like an information problem about what Joe Rogan says about the pandemic it's a problem at the level of the consumer too so many people have revised their own memories of the pandemic or have a distorted memory of that
period and think of it as a much more aggressive much longer lasting much more restrictive regime then we really had I think to sort of pin the blame for all of the disruption on someone else as opposed to really reckoning with what it meant that given the facts and we all basically
did know the facts we did know roughly what the fatality rate was we did know what the age queue of the disease was all of those things were publicly available in the winter of 2020 you know as early as the first data coming out of China all of that has been really quite
remarkably vindicated in the years since responding to that set of facts and that set of data most of us had a really quite panicked response even if we knew that you know I'm 41 years old even if and I was you know whenever 37 when when the pandemic had even if I knew that the risk of
dying given an infection was incredibly low for a 30 healthy 37 year old male I was still scared to get the disease and part of that was because I was spending time with my father-in-law who is immunocompromised and older but part of it was just pure pandemic fear and I think a huge
amount of what we remember as the emotional social and political disruptions of 2020 are or word projections of that fear which we don't want to acknowledge and we want to blame someone else for and so we've kind of collectively decided and again this is not just you know in sub-stakistan
it's among you know good liberals I know in Brooklyn we decided that we went too far and that if we had the chance to do it again we would do things differently we'd be much more open and much more voluntary and you know that is I think a bad lesson to take going forward especially
if we're going to apply it to potential future pandemics that could be considerably worse but it's also just at the level of truth telling delusional but the audience I'm talking about for the most part didn't feel that same fear I mean they were not they were not afraid of
the disease or they're not as afraid of the disease as as you were in in Brooklyn or wherever you were but they were quite afraid and remain so of the vaccines that was the thing that really spoke them the idea that these novel vaccines who are doing who knows what to your DNA which now
may have yet killed millions even tens of millions and that information is being suppressed by the powers that be I mean that that's where this has gone for that audience I think that's absolutely true but I think it also tells you something about the timeline which is to say that the real
partisan gaps opened up with behavior and response to the disease not in 2020 but in 2021 you started to see them in the fall of 2020 but then they really opened up with the arrival of vaccines and then there was another bump when there was a consideration they were never really implemented
but a consideration of vaccine mandates on later on in 2021 and I agree that that is the thing that now dominates it's the sort of it's the looking glass through which our our memory of or the prison through which our our memory of the of the pandemic has been has been distorted
and I think it's I think it's I mean from my perspective the vaccines are and were a miracle we could have actually gotten them a lot faster but even getting them within 10 months or 11 months counts as one of the great achievements in human history when you look not just in the US but
all around the world whenever the vaccines arrive they you know if they were taken in great enough numbers they essentially eliminated the pandemic in one in one go in in the UK for instance they had much worse two big initial waves they were much worse than we had in the US and they got the
vaccines and basically haven't had anything comparable since the US is a little bit of a merkeer picture because we we had you know less successful vaccine uptake and yeah to your point it's just you know it's just if we if we can tell ourselves stories that involve something like 10 15 20
million vaccine deaths if we can even entertain that idea without feeling like the world is contradicting us we're in a really bad place and that's the place that we're in right now and I think some of the natural features of covid played a role here I think that you know it's
significant that the fatality rate was something like 1% at the population level it's change is based on the demographic structure of the population but something like 1% which means that even if you knew 100 people who got sick probably you may only know one or two people or even zero people
who actually died from it and allows you especially as a survivor on the other side of the pandemic to look back and think it was not that big a deal but of course we know we know not just from official covid deaths and death certificates we know from the excess mortality studies that the
US has lost something like 1.1 1.2 million people that we would not have lost in the absence of the pandemic we know that it's almost entirely driven by covid 19 because the waves of those excess deaths matches perfectly the wave of the waves of infection as they pass through the country
as they pass through states as they pass through local communities you know there's no reason that if the problem were locked down that we would be having huge surges when there was a wave of infections and not a week later when people were still locked in their homes but the number of
infections were lower it's just indisputable that this was a major disease it was primarily punishing us because of how novel it was how inexperienced our immune systems were but you know it proved at the global scale to be incredibly punishing best estimates there's something like 25 or
30 million people died and best estimates are that those vaccines as they rolled out save several multiples of that number of lives which means this is really one of the great medical biomedical and political and social interventions in the history of the world and exactly why the people
who turned against it turned against it is a incredibly complicated deep question I'm sure you have lots of thoughts but I would just start by saying you know as a counterfactual it's interesting to consider the possibility that the vaccines were approved before the election before you know
before the Biden Trump election you know there's there's some reporting I think plausible that the approval was delayed at a fear that it would be used in a political way but probably the original timeline would have meant the vaccines were given approval just before the election
it's possible given the margins of that election that Donald Trump might have benefited you know to the to to a re-election on the basis of those approvals and then how the country particularly the sort of you know exactly I don't know exactly how you want to characterize on the political spectrum
what you're calling sub-stakast and it's you know it's some mix of center right and fringe including and you know and some just just fringe independent of a particular political ideologies but exactly how those people would have responded to to the vaccine if Donald Trump was president
and his people were designing the rollout is I think it's a really important and interesting counterfactual history to consider I think it's quite possible that we'd be living in a much less pandemic divided nation than we are now yeah but that's not to say that there's much that we could do
now or even in retrospect if we could take a time machine back in time to really change the course of that or that we might want to I mean would it have been worth a second Trump you know second term to have you know support for vaccines among Republicans at you know 75 instead of 55
percent I don't know y'all though the few times that Trump has tried to take credit for the vaccine in front of a loving audience he was instantly rebuked by that audience which is most it even more remarkable because it's he is such a tribune of the whole movement that almost anything
he says becomes a cause for them here and the fact that they can't they can they can like follow him almost anywhere but not to the vaccines is really quite remarkable yeah on the other hand you know I would just say as a as a baseline important to keep in mind 95 percent of American seniors got
at least one shot by the end of 2001 2021 and we know it's it's probably higher than that but the CDC actually stopped counting at 95 percent because they they don't want to like over promise and they think that the data might get a little unreliable at that level but it was it was it surpassed
the threshold of 95 percent of American seniors the the risk of this disease was concentrated in seniors in a quite dramatic way the age skew is you know for an eight year old it's like thousand times more deadly than for an eight year old right and so like in a certain logical
way those are the people that we needed to get and we got almost all of them in the calendar year in which we we began rolling out vaccines and so we can compare ourselves to other countries in terms of vaccination uptake especially among the middle age we fell way behind which is why
when Delta came so many more Americans died than other in other countries but on some of like our first job here was to protect the elderly and even in spite of the partisan dynamics even in spite of the vaccine skepticism we got the vast vast vast majority of the most vulnerable people
some protection on a relatively fast timeline and so one of the things that we're talking about I think at least I'm talking about is the way in which these questions and these debates almost separate from the facts on the ground not just in terms of do we acknowledge how many people died of COVID
do we acknowledge how how many people took vaccines but how many of the people who are expressing vaccine skepticism now took the vaccines the data suggests quite a large share and you know and are we treating the distortions of our discourse that sort of ugliness of our of our public
discourse around these issues as a substitute for the data that we know we have about who actually got the shots and I'm just as appalled and horrified and scared about what the state of you know scientific discourse and public trust is as you are but I also think there's some reasons to think
that when you look at the actual you know behavioral data not just with vaccines but how much people are moving around how much social distancing people are doing at various points in the pandemic there was actually less division and less hostility to behaviors that we could take to protect ourselves and protect those around us than than it seems on the sort of narrative surface.
And do we still think the punchline was that something like 1.2 million Americans died unnecessarily what what what what you wouldn't have died from COVID something like 300,000 more died than needed to die based on vaccine hesitancy and something like three to four million lives were saved in the end by the vaccine. Is there those numbers square with what you think you know?
Yeah the one the what the first number is the one that I think is a little complicated to assess I was like how do we think about that death toll was that how much of that was avoidable? You know how much who do we can what other countries do we compare ourselves to in the heat of the spring and summer of 2020 a lot of people were willing to say that the entire pandemic was Trump's fault and that every American death was was on his desk and on his responsibility.
You know Joe Biden said you know any any president who's presided over a couple of 100,000 American deaths does not deserve to be president and Joe Biden has now presided over about 750,000 American deaths. So I think a lot of those narratives that we told ourselves at the outset of the pandemic were politically naive, epidemiologically naive. And it means that many of you know many of the deaths that we saw were probably on some level unavoidable. We shouldn't look at the scale
of COVID death and say all of that is a sign of our national failing. The question of exactly what share of that 1.2 million is was avoidable. I think people are going to be debating for generations. My own sense is yeah probably something like something like the share that you suggested maybe a little bit more if it's if it's you know maybe 500,000 of the 1.2 million could have been avoided. But you know hardly any country in the world really thrived and succeeded in ultimately
containing the disease even until the arrival of vaccines. Those countries which were celebrated in 2020 as being the most successful at limiting the spread of the disease. They ended up in a better place than the US did or the UK did but they didn't end up in a place that you know they defeated the pandemic. They everybody suffered. And one of the things that's most remarkable to me about that is that you see you know political blowback even for those leaders in those countries who
who did quite well. So just into Ardern and in New Zealand you had to resign. I mean not just because of her COVID policies but you know she she was incredibly popular in 2020 and then by 2022 was incredibly unpopular in that country. There was a political backlash against Xi Jinping and China that was powered in part by the the COVID lockdowns there just from an epidemiological bit level like China did well in containing the virus but there was heat he suffered a huge backlash there
you know across across the world Canada did relatively well but Trudeau has suffered you know it's there's almost nobody who came out a hero at the level of national leader almost anywhere in the world whether they were somebody who suffered through a brutal pandemic or someone who
managed a relatively easy one no matter what level of suffering or what kind of suffering countries went through almost all of them looked at their leaders and said like we don't like around this guy's running things and I think that gets back to something I was saying earlier which
is the way in which we're trying to make sense of the disruptions and suffering that we all went through over the last couple of years in part by pinning blame on someone some discrete authority partly out of hopes that we could get them out of office or kick them out of power or at least
learn our lessons so that in the future we wouldn't listen to people like them and you know I think the universality of that feeling across the world shows that it doesn't say all that much about how individual leaders manage things it says a lot more about how hard it is to live through a pandemic
how much we don't actually want to do that and how much we want to pretend that it was possible to avoid but what about the response of Sweden which was much maligned at the time as being reckless and then much celebrated as being at worst equivalent to what we did I mean
they were they did not lock down in the way that we did and and you know as far as excess mortality viewed from this distance of hindsight what do we think about Sweden well I would say for sure the initial criticism was overstated it turns out that even in 2020 before the arrival
of vaccines Sweden died a lot less than the United States did and I think that is a really important distinction to make in thinking about all of these questions it's like how do we do before the vaccines and how did we do after the vaccines because in the big sweep of the pandemic the most
important factor in determining a country's outcomes was how many people got sick before they were vaccinated and how many people got sick after they were vaccinated and in 2020 Sweden did considerably worse than its neighbors which are its natural comparisons by every measure of COVID and excess
mortality so I think 10 times as many Swedes died as Norwegians something like that level compared to Denmark and Finland and Iceland are also much better after the arrival of vaccines you know things leveled out so that depending on the database that you look at the ones I trust there are
still a little behind those countries they're still doing a little bit worse than their peers but it's in the same rough band there are other analyses including ones that the Swedish government has put together that suggests that they actually outperformed their neighbors but like I said I
think the better models there suggest something like slightly below the performance of their of their peers but there are a lot of complications and caveats that are important to acknowledge when telling the story one is the one that I mentioned that you know you really do need to divide the
experience before vaccines in the spirit experience after because if you get the whole population vaccinated on day one and the pandemic goes on for several years like that's going to make a big difference another is that Sweden talked about its pandemic response as hands off and it was in
some ways most of their guidance was offered as guidance but some schools did shut down and Sweden some stores did shut down there were travel restrictions people did move around a lot less much of that was voluntary in the sense that the police weren't going around ticketing people when
they left their homes in the same way that they were in other parts of Europe but they also weren't doing that much in the United States they're isolated incidents here and there of people getting ticketed for being in parks or beaches there was a period of time in the late spring of 2020 when
in some US states and municipalities there were some sort of surveillance of that kind but by and large we did the same thing we told people that they shouldn't move around much or socialize and then we didn't do much to enforce those rules when you when you look at some of the data that's
been examined by there's a the Oxford Blvd. Next School of Government they've done a international comparative study of covid mitigation measures and they look at I think it's like eight or ten different categories of restrictions you know Sweden is not unusually open in the spring and
summer of 2020 it's a little bit more open than some of its European neighbors it's about as open as the US is and so their experience there was less confrontational it was less patronizing in certain ways than the US was but at the level of individual behavior and how it was
guided and policed I think there's actually considerably less difference between the two countries then we've told ourselves there was and they had other natural advantages that you know they don't have a ton of people coming in and out of the country in the same way that the US in at the level
the US does they have high levels of social trust all the all those things played a role too but I think in the big picture you'd have to say Sweden did not have the disaster that was predicted at the time but it is also not necessarily a model for how a country like the US could operate in part
because we're not so far from them and their policy is as some of the Sweden advocates want to make us believe and in part because the US is just a different and more complicated country to manage um then Sweden is and in thinking about the comparison of the US and Sweden I just want to raise
one particular anecdote which I think is really illustrative and that is that in May of 2020 in May Anthony Fauci was interviewed on CNN by Chris Cuomo and Chris Cuomo said you're losing the argument people are getting tired they're sick of staying at home they're not going to do this much longer
what do you say to them and Fauci said you're right we are we can't do this indefinitely and everybody ultimately has to decide for themselves when they return to their normal life and what level of risk they're comfortable with and this is not in 2022 it's not even in 2021 after the
vaccines it's in like month three of the pandemic I think you know fewer than 100,000 Americans had died at that point and you have the person who is the face of the quote unquote lockdown saying very publicly this is all voluntary and I know that I'm not going to convince everyone now we all took
messages from Fauci later on as more hard line and more you know more confrontational than that absolutely and he was not always that deferential to the judgment of individuals but it's a reminder that a huge amount of this pandemic timeline that we remember as you know authoritarian dictatorial
lockdowns directed from the top by Tony Fauci it just wasn't that way you know I hear Bill Mar talking about a two-year lockdown it's like he didn't miss a recording a single show and yes he did it for a while without an audience but that's a way of keeping one another safe and
adjusting to a you know epidemiological environment that's threatening and maybe we maybe we wouldn't want to do it in exactly the same way the next time we can talk about those lessons we can talk about what we might have learned or what we could do better but I think as it's just a
baseline we should remember that the country as a whole navigated this pandemic as libertarians not as you know figures in an orwellian nightmare and many of us chose to stay at home and live in fear and some people still are staying at home and living in fear and some of them even have good
reason to but overall we made decisions on our own we processed information on our own and then we got really angry because we weren't happy with the world that we were living in not because someone like Anthony Fauci or Donald Trump who is the president of the time was coming around to
our houses locking thousands of people up you know now in doors shut like they did in China nothing like that happened here and we may feel that our lives were really restricted limited in many ways they were but to your point earlier it was not an orwellian nightmare in the same way
that I think many of us kind of falsely now remember it to be do you think we learned anything from the pandemic that would allow us to respond better next time or do you think we're actually degraded our capacity to respond if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation
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