Special Episode: Dr. Paul Offit & Tell Me When It’s Over

are so many more to come. If you'd like to see the full list of books we've already covered and those that we'll be covering later this season as a part of the series, check out our website this Podcast will kill You dot Com, where you can find a link to our bookshop dot org affiliate account. Under the extras tab on our bookshop page, there are a bunch of TPWKY lists featuring books we've read for our regular episodes. Memoirs about Health and Disease, a list of fiction books

about disease. Should we do a book club on disease themed novels? Is anyone out there a member of a book club on disease themed novels? Because that sounds like so much fun? And also on our bookshop is of course a book club list where you can find all of the books we're featuring in this and last season's TPWKY book Club series. As always, we'd love to hear from you about how you're in joying these episodes, whether you have any book suggestions for future episodes, favorite episodes

so far. Whatever your thoughts are, send them to us via the contact us form on our website. All right, let's get into the book of the week. Doctor Paul Offitt joins us to discuss his recent book, Tell Me When It's Over and Insider's Guide to Deciphering COVID myths and navigating our post pandemic world. Frequent listeners of the podcast are no doubt familiar with doctor off It's name.

We've mentioned a few of his previous books in some of our episodes, such as his book Vaccinated, One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases, which tells the story of Maurice Hillman, who developed many of the most common vaccines in use today. Or maybe you've heard us mention Deadly Choices, How the anti vaccine movement Threatens Us All, which takes readers through the history and rise of anti

vaccine sentiment. And doctor Offitt is somewhat of a public health celebrity, appearing on popular news programs championing the life saving power of vaccines. Off Its titles and credentials are

almost too long to list. The Maurice Hillman, Professor of Vaccinology, Professor of Pediatrics at the Pariland School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, member of the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and so many others. But perhaps one of his biggest accomplishments is as co inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, which has prevented hundreds of

thousands of deaths around the world. Off It's passion for communicating about the power and safety of vaccines, as well as combating the miss and disinformation undermining public health efforts takes shape in his newest book about the COVID pandemic. In the aptly name Tell Me When It's Over, Afa takes readers through what we have learned about the COVID pandemic and stars COVID two, the virus at the center

of it all. He breaks down where this virus originated, dismantles the lab leak conspiracy theory, discusses some of the ways that the public lost confidence in US government institutions during the pandemic. Explores this new flavor of anti vaccine sentiment that took hold during COVID and which has really only grown since, and presents ways that we can fight against the rise in anti science and regain public trust.

The COVID pandemic revealed how we can accomplish incredible feats by investing time and resources into public health, giving us a safe and effective vaccine in record speed, But it also showed the gaps in our system, how myths and disinformation can quickly fill a knowledge foroid, and how crucial it is to learn how to communicate our science to the public, including when science doesn't know it all or gets it wrong. COVID is here to stay, and unless we do something about it, so is this rise in

anti science and anti vaccine sentiment. Let's get into this interview right after this break, Doctor Offitt, I really can't express how excited I am to be chatting with you today. You are a huge public health hero of mine and the incredible and impactful science can communication work that you do, especially when it comes to vaccines, and not to mention your work on developing said life saving vaccines, it is simply amazing. So thank you so much for being here.

really got to watch this up close. And in many ways the book was cathartic. I don't know if you remember, with the way it played out in twenty twenty. Aside from having nothing right, we didn't have anti virals. To October, we didn't have monoclonals. Still in November, we didn't have vaccines stil December, so ate nothing other than avoiding human to human contact. And then in April, the Trump administration was convinced that hydroxy cleric when was our ticket out right.

This was going to be the magic medicine that was going to make it all go away. And so the government bought almost thirty million doses of hydroxychloric WIN and successfully twisted the arm of the FDA to authorize it without any evidence that it worked, without any evidence that it worked to either treat or prevent the disease. You certainly already knew about the safety issues, which were potential harder rhythms, and so they approved it, and that scared people.

It scared me, I wrote an op ed for The New York Times, saying, fearing in October, surprise, here the Trump administration successfully twisted the arm of the FDA to approve it drug that didn't necessarily work to treat it preventzies. That's their job, I mean, the job of the FDA is stand to stand between pharmaceutical companies and the public

and protect the public. So now you know you're scared about how the vaccine's going to play out, right, I mean, the Trump pulled Stephen Hahn into his office and in an invective, Leyden Tirade said, I want this vaccine out before the election, which was the beginning of November. And were that to be true, then you wouldn't have that two month safety follow up that you have for pretty much every vaccine after the last nose, which wouldn't be

till December. So the Hans still to his credit, stood up to him put it on their website this is what we're going to do. But people still didn't. Now you've really had a critical loss of trust in the FDA. Country after country, state after state stood up and said we're going to have our own vaccine advisor committees. Trust us. They didn't trust the Vaccine Advisory Committee. And so it

was a really turbulent time. And between that and a number of what I think were communications errors, including not trivia ones that occurred after that, I just this was a catharsis. I just had to get this book out. I feel much better now, thank you for letting me write it.

of biological and clinical characteristics. And then eleven months later, using a technology a messenger RNA that we never used before, we had no experience with that technology. We're with the vector virus approach by Johnson and Johnson. You had two large clinical trials and then the in February of twenty twenty one, you had a large J and J. Johnson and Johnson trial that showed that the vaccines were effective,

remarkably effective. And then over a period of six or seven months, we immunized seventy percent for the US population a million people a day, two million people a day, three million people a day. And then, and I think that I think that was the most significant scientific and medical accomplishment in my lifetime. And I'm old, so my lifetime includes the development of the polio vaccine. I think

it was amazing. Actually, then we hit a wall and by mid twenty twenty one thirty percent of this country did not want to get vaccinated. Ultimately, three hundred thousand people lost their life because they didn't trust us. They didn't trust the FDA, didn't trust the CDC, they didn't trust other public health agencies. Why what happened? How did we lose that trust? And I think that's why I wrote the book What happened? How do we lose it? And how can we get it back.

few decades. But now post COVID and during cod we're seeing a drop in vaccine compliance rates unlike anything previously witnessed. What do you think is unique about this decline and why was COVID this perfect storm to grow anti vaccine in anti science sentiment.

you didn't have to convince people. I would think that it was real and the vaccine clearly worked and it was safe. It wasn't absolutely safe, but it was pretty darn safe, the mRNA vaccines. It was my caroditis within four days of those two, which was generally self resolving and short lived. But in the scheme of things, considering it was a novel technology for a novel virus, we I never really saw the other shoe drop. So so you had you had your ticket out of this pandemic,

and nonetheless people rejecting. And I think the reason was because you're right. I think the anti vaccine movement is stronger. They're better funded, and they're stronger, and I think it all has to do with this, which is politics. I think they're there. Although there's always a political implication for vaccines because they require support, you know that they you're going anything I think that requires funding public funding is going to be political, but it doesn't have to be partisan.

But this was partisan, you know. On the left, anti vaccine activity was always you know, just don't inject me with anything with a chemical name, you know, so which is pretty much water of course has a chemical claim. And on the right it was this libertarian I don't want the government to tell me what to do. That is the current politics, which is federal government off my back. And and so that's where all the money came from.

Eric Trump at you know, Donald Trump's son stood up at one of the brollies and said, if you don't want to get a vaccine, know that the Republican Party has your back, which is amazing because it was the Trump administration that created this vaccine with Operation Warp Speed. And yet, if anything, Donald Trump distanced himself from arguably his greatest accomplishment. So they're they're very well funded, they're more active than ever, and I think that at the

heart of it is mandates. I think when we mandated that vaccine and people lost their jobs and people couldn't go to the bar they wanted to go through, the restaurant they wanted to go to, the sporting events closed down, you know, schools closed, travel was restricted. People felt that, you know, they were mandated to wear masks, mandated to get a vaccine, and that leaned into this libertarian left hook.

And this is what you have, a well funded, sort of libertarian anti vaccine campaign that has now been embraced by the right.

that's part of the argument that people have made. Right there's DNA fragments in this vaccine that will alter your genome and or that the mRNA can you know, can enter your nucleus and get reverse transcribed and then enter your DNA and that would be the best news for gene therapy ever, if that actually was possible with this m RNA vaccines. But you know, so it's very easy to get that notion out there that this vaccines can

do harm. The CDC director in two thousand and nine was a man named Richard Besser, and that's when we had this wine flu pandemic, and he was great. He was out there every other day, every third day, in front of the media, answering their questions. This is what the vaccine is, this is how we're going to distribute it, this is how it's made, this is what the virus is doing. This is where the virus is now, there's where this is where we expect the virus is going

to be. He was the model of how you communicate what we were doing and why we were doing it. So I saw him at a National Foundation of Infectious Disease meeting a couple of months ago and I said that to him. I said, you were great, you were a model. He said, thank you. I could never do it today. Two reasons politics and social media.

spreading disinformation with climate change. Of course, the fossil fuel industry doesn't want to lose profits as a result. Of changing policies, and that's more or less the same thing with big tobacco. As soon as that link about lung cancer and cigarettes came out, it was like, let's quash this pretty clear motivation there. But I feel like identifying the drivers of the anti vaccine disinformation campaigns it's not as straightforward. So how can we categorize some of those drivers?

current mantra. I think it just fits into their zeitgeist. I'm not sure that there is any financial motivation, but there's certainly a lot of money to support it, I mean more so than there is. You know, there was an article ramonograph by a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and they had what they called the disinformation doesn't, and so it was twelve people or groups that accounted for about seventy percent of the misinformation it

was out there. Their funding was often the same. They all got pretty much funding from the same source, which was the dietary supplement industry, which in many ways is the same thing, because there are two. As a matter of medical freedoms, we don't want the FDA telling us what we can or can say, because when we say things like, you know, this will make your prostate smaller or this will make your immune system better, we want to be able to say that even though we have

no evidence that that's true. And so the f HE sort of pushes back and doesn't really let you say that. You have to be vague or right. It supports pro sate health, im you and heal you, heart health, whatever, and so they really are in many ways aligned with this group, which also likes to make claims that are unsupported.

the evidence for this, or there's a strong relationship. And I kind of wanted this as like a very roundabout way of getting to my question, which is sort of about the way you think that scientists are trained in how to communicate with the public or the popular media, and how we can do better with that.

the discussion section is full of caveats. Right, I really can't say this or this or this because my data limit me in terms of what I can say about that, and so we're always very careful. That's number one that doesn't come off well, at least in a popular press or in the media, because it sounds like you're wishy washy. It sounds like you're not sure of what you're saying. The other thing is is just the nature of the scientific method, which is that you formulate hypothesis, and then

you can do two things with that hypothesis. You can reject it or not reject it, but you can never accept it, which is to say you can never prove never because the null hypothesis is paramount, and you can't ever accept the n all high positive. So I mean so as as an example, as a little boy, I watched the TV show Superman, which was black and white, and Christopher Reeve was it was before Chris Reeve was

George Reeves. And you know, he flew. And when you're five years old and you're watching TV, TV does not lie, and so so you know he tie it. He'd had his cape and his hair would fly, and he would look at the city below and he would fly. So what I did was I went in the backyard and on a small chair, I stood up, and I put a towel around me and put my hands in front of me using the interlocking thumb grip, which I thought was critical to the whole experience because that's what he did.

And I jumped a few times and didn't fly. You know, spoiler alert, I didn't fly. Now I could have done it a million times, that wouldn't have proven that I couldn't fly, it would only have made it all the more statistically unlikely. I could have done it a billion times, ten billion times, because the scientific method does not allow me to say I can't fly, the least not without a plane, but I can't fly. And so I can say that, and I think you have to get used

to that. So, for example, you can't say the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. All you can say is that there are eighteen studies that have been done in seven countries on three continents, involving hundreds of thousands of people at the show that you're no more likely to develop autism if you've gotten the vaccine if you haven't. That's what you can say. And so I had to testify once in front of Dan Burton's Committee Office of Government

Reform about that issue. Andrew Wakefield had just published his paper. He was on the other side. I was on the side of good trying to explain what we knew about MMR vaccine or what we knew about autism. And Colleen Boyle, who was great from the CDC, you know, she got up and she explained what the early data showed in terms of there was no association, no statistical association with those two things. But Dan Burton heard weakness in that,

and he said, so you can't tell me. You can't tell me it doesn't cause it, do you, because you have and I quote an out in the back of this thing and so and so that you know, it's hard that you have to get used to that at some level that you are saying things that at some level scientifically you can't say. And for scientists that's hard.

He said to me, I used a thoughtful smart man, he said, you know, I've had people say to me, people in the medical field or the scientific field say to me sort of on the side, as if this is our secret. You know that we're trying to hide this, that you know this what this may well have leaked from a lab and you know it's it's frist has never happened. Never has a pandemic virus ever been created

in the laboratory. Two is all the evidence is on the other side, right, I mean you hear you have the western section of the Hunah seafood market where there were dozens of animals that were sold illegally in very close, unsanitary conditions, and the kinds of animals, you know, red foxes, raccoon dogs that can catch and transmit a virus like SARS Kobe two. I mean SARS one was an animal to human spillover event in two thousand and two. Mers

was an animal to human spillover event twenty twelve. I mean, you know, it's not like the black plague was you know, created in the medieval biocontainment lab. You know, it's just these things that are invariably animal the human spillover events, and you have have you know, the sort of pictures that were taken of that western section of the market that were sent to to people in the United States, media people in the United States, so you see how

unsanitary those conditions were. And the Chinese really did look at for genetic evidence of this virus, SARS Kobe two virus in things like the machines that kill the animals, you know, the brushes that brushed the animals, or the tables in which the animals were sacrificed, were the you know, the the other the cages themselves, and found the evidence of SARS Kobe two virus there, So it's creating a lab.

Then what the laboratory person had to do was then travel nine miles to to where this Muhan seafood market was across the yankste River and then deposited in a place exactly where you would expect an animal to human spill over vent to occur. So this is not a scientific countries. I mean, you don't have you know, the clear smoking gun. I mean, you don't have like a raccoon dog standing up like at the end of crime and punishment and saying it was me that killed the

seafood vendor. Right, So you don't have that, but you have a confluence of evidence that tells you it's all on one side. And actually, my best, the best comment I've heard is that this is a promiscuous virus. I mean, it's if you were trying to target it to humans, it's targeted to at least three dozen other animal species. And so the line was if this was created in the lab, it was created by an underperforming graduate student. I like that.

their relative is dying in a hospital. This person will be simultaneously tweeting about microchips or tweeting about fatal side effection. The vaccine, Like, where does that cognitive dissonance come from? Maybe that's just like a philosophical question that we can't answer, but it's just something that I find really hard to kind of like grapple with.

those conspiracy theories become more more attractive. So, for example, to me, the biggest one occurred in July of twenty twenty one, when thousands of men go to Provenstyle, Massachusetts to celebrate the July fourth holiday, and seventy nine percent were already vaccinated. Nonetheless, there's a COVID outbreak, so three hundred and forty six men who were in attendance got COVID, all of whom had been vaccinated, four were hospitalized. So

that's a hospitalization rate at one point two percent. That's a vaccine working very very well, right, I mean, to do vaccines doing what you wanted to do, keeping out of the hospital. The other three hundred and forty two had mild or asymptomatic infection, which when the CDC reported this, the headline in MORBIDI Imortality Weekly report was breakthrough infections. They called these asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections breakthrough infections,

as if this vaccine had failed. I mean, breakthrough was a very negative word. Whereas the goal of this vaccine was to keep you out of the hospital. The goal of this vaccine was to prevent serious infections, and the vaccine was doing exactly that. I mean, you if you watch Brett Kavanaugh, for example, Supreme Court Justice. You know he's entering the Supreme Court chamber. He routinely screen and found to be positive is around the same time, and

they called that breakthrough infection. If you watch the way that the CNN carried that story, you thought the man was fighting for his life. I mean, Lindsey Graham actually had again, because this is mid twenty twenty one, it's two dose vaccine. Time he gotten two dose of vaccine, he had a three or four day illness that was characterized by sinusitis, and he said, and I quote, this would have been much worse if I hadn't been vaccinated. Right,

Lindsey Graham got it exactly right. And how often do you get to say that.

I think we were fulled in a sentence. In December of twenty twenty, when those two large clinical trials were presented with fires or MODERNA you know, fives or forty thousand person modernity thirty thirty thousand, you know, placebo prospective placeical control trials, the efficacy was ninety five percent against severe disease. It was also ninety five percent against mild disease. And the reason is is those were three month studies.

Those participants had just gotten their second dose. That's why it was so good. So six months later, five studies showed that protection against severe disease was holding up well in the ninety percent range, but protection against mild it had faded to fifty percent. That had to happen. And see that in combination with mandating vaccine. You have to get this vaccine or else you don't get to go

to work. And then people would did it. They got the vaccine, then they had a mild illness that said, say, the CDC told me that this vaccine was going to protect me, and now it didn't. I'm having this breakthrough illness. I mean it really angered people actually who watched away. For example, Rhando Santis his stump speeches would often say you you all know the CDC told us this vaccine was going to work, and it didn't. Well, it did,

It worked to prevent severe disease. Actually, if you look at the way that they're currently messaging the flu vaccine, the CDC, it's exactly right. Their slogan is wild to mild.

your doctor, you know, should I get this vaccine. There was a story I tell in this about a nurse name or an intensivist named Britney Kobe in Alabama, who you know, who would often see people come into the hospital had unvaccinated, you know, suffering and dying. And she said, the question that I always asked was did you talk

to somebody about this, somebody in the healthcare profession? And the answer was invariably no. And so I think, you know, if you looking, for example, people over sixty five, they're certainly more likely to it's the older you are, the more like you are to be a Republican to the older you are, the more like over sixty five, you're more likely to watch watch Fox News. But misinformation isn't destiny.

I mean, they're also very likely to be vaccinated. There's ninety five percent of people over sixty five or vaccinated because they because we have Medicare in the United States and so they often can get healthcare. And I think that's that's key. But I think it is fixable. And the story I tell is one of Aila Stanford, who's an African American surgeon in Temple, the Temple University, and she with her own money, formed something called the Black

Doctor's COVID Consortium. So with you know, many of her colleagues. She went into North Philadelphia, a predominantly black and brown community with little contact with the healthcare system other than an emergency basis, and she just sat in people's living rooms and tried to convince them of why they should

get the vaccine. So they're seeing someone who looks like her, who they therefore trust, and eventually, you know, they didn't if they said no, she'd come back again, or she'd come back again, and she ultimately vaccinated fifty thousand people in North Philadelphia. She's a hero. She is an American hero. I just wish that there were a thousand Alea Stanford's who could get out there and do what she did,

because I think that's the solution. I mean, yes, the CDC and the FDA should explain in detail what they're doing and why they're doing it, and yes, I think local and state government should do that, but I think that that Alas Stanford represents the solution to this problem, which is we have to find who those people are in those communities that are pressworthy and then get them the resources they need to get into those communities and tell people why vaccination is important.

communicate information to the public. Where you know, we learn about how vaccines work, we learn about how epidemiological studies work, how clinical trials are carried out, but we don't necessarily learn how to explain that to someone who you know isn't sitting next to us in the same classroom, or

even explaining it to them. And so how do you think this these sort of opportunities can be improved upon at every level, from like training, to development of these programs to execution right, Well.

think I do think that. So. For example, if you see the CDC recently change their guidelines in terms of how long one should quarantine associated with being infected, and they said something that made a ton of sense, which is one a fabrill day. See why that makes sense to me is that the virus occurs in two stags. This is true for all viruses. But so the first thing is the virus replication stage, right, reproduce itself over and over again. Then what happens is the immune response stage,

which is when you get symptoms. It's when you make antibodies against this virus or or you have cytotoxic T cells to kill virus infective cells. That's when you have symptoms. So, now as the symptoms increase, because the symptoms are based on your immune response trying to eliminate the virus, virus replication decreases. So their argument is, and it's a reasonable one, if you have one a febrill day, if you've been febrill you had fever, wouldn't make sense that the immune

systems abating. And if the immune system is abating, it doesn't that tell you that virus replication is really not a critical part of the disease process anymore. So you're much less likely to be shedding virus. That makes sense rather than saying, you know, quarantine for seven days, ten days, fourteen days. Because first of all viruses don't replicate on the basis of the metric system of the lunar month, So wouldn't it make sense there's just pegg it to

the person rather than to this arbitrary number. So I like that, but explain it. I mean, get out there and explain it, because else what you have then other people trying to explain it for you that may not understand it as well.

As we head into this election year, what public health discussions do you think that we'll hear more about or will be central to campaign issues?

and Conway said it best. Well, we have our alternative facts, the birth of the term alternative facts, which somehow is acceptable. And I think with that erosion in trust with science is becoming now just sort of another voice in the room. Anything is possible. And I think we just saw that. We just saw people denying the impact of this virus when one point one million people died, When three hundred thousand people lost their lives because they chose not to

get vaccine, because they chose to lose their lives. I mean, that's a frightening time worse. I think, you know, have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of legislation that have pushed back on vaccine mandates, masking mandates, isolation or quarantine procedures, and vaccines. I mean, these are the important weapons in public health that are being stripped away at some level. We want freedom, but we don't want protection, and I fear that's kind of where we're heading. So what changes

all this, I think again, I'm an optimist. I mean I'm a Philadelphia Eagle season ticket holder, so by definition, I'm an optimist. But I do think these things have to occur very early on where we educate people about science and educate people about, you know, how to think critically,

and I think some of that is gone. I don't maybe see I think I became a better critical thinker as a scientist than when I was an MD. When I was just doing clinical work, I think I was more of an anecdotal thinker, more of a pattern recognizer. I think once I moved into a basic scientist working on rodaviruses, I think I became much better at sort of hierarchically establishing burdens of proof, well, you know, formulate

a hypothesis, subjecting those proofs to analysis. I became a clearer thinker somewhere in there, but I'm not sure I've learned that in medical school.

whether that's people who don't believe in evolution. There's this kind of false equal footing debate that doesn't really exist because the science has already been debated over decades of peer review, over decades of conferences, and basically what science actually does. And I think that we have now gotten to the point where it's not even just a two sides debate, but it's science versus a thousand different agendas. And I agree that I really worry about what that's

going to look like in the future. And I feel like if we say that training students and creating these critical thinking courses in younger students, that I mean, how many generations then will it take for this to make an impact in policy. That's that's I think one of my big worries about this.

the criteria on which you based your conclusion. Did you do that, was it internally consistent, was it was it robust? Did you do the right controls, et cetera? And that's what you you wanted that you wanted to hear that because that's how your scientific studies got better. That does not work well in a public health arena. It doesn't. And I think the best example of that for me, well two recent examples, but one is the bivalid vaccine.

I mean the bivalid vaccine. Was the thinking was reasonable, right? Omicron BA one, the original omicron came into the country in December twenty twenty one. It was an immune evasive strain. Even if you'd been naturally infected or vaccinated with alpha or delta, you weren't particularly protected against mild disease from omicron. So shouldn't we include omicron in the vaccine? Perfectly reasonable?

So the thinking was right, let's do a half a dose of the ancestral strain half a dose of one of the omicron variants, which became BA four BA five. Not a bad idea didn't work out. I mean, if you looked at the data that were presented to our committee in June of twenty twenty two, it didn't look like immunologically, you were more likely to develop an immune response, a neutralizing antibody response to this omicron variant if you got the monovail vaccine, if you've got the bivalid vaccine,

because of imprinting. That's what happened. So I was a NOVA vote. I voted no for that. Now the next day the government bought one hundred and five million doses of Visor's vaccine. You know, but remember I'm in an advisory committee, so we just give advice, so you know, as anybody who's in medicine knows, people don't have to follow your advice. But and then the clinical studies were done. There was one in the US, one in the UK, one in France showing that you were no better off

getting the buiveil vaccine their monomail vaccine. So I said that, I mean, I said that nationally. I wrote a perspective piece for the New England Journal Medicine that said that, and it was published at the same time that David Hoe in Columbia or and Dan Brooke in Harvard published their paper showing there was no difference immunologically in those two vaccines in inducing an immune response likely neutralized and

protective immune response against the omicron variant. Okay, that's okay, it's okay not to get it right the first time. You learn as you go, there's always a learning curve. It's invariably steep with this kind of it's a novel virus, it's a novel vaccines strategy, it's a novel disease. We're trying to learn as we go, and so explain that we didn't get this exactly right, but we've learned, and so you don't see bivilent vaccines anymore. But that's not

what we did. What we did was we kept saying it was better because we wanted it to be better. And when I was saying, you know, publicly that it's not better, not worse, boosters boost it's a value for people who are in hig risk groups. You know, I was hammered by public health officials who were really angry at me because what had I done, I'd gotten off the bus. It's a divisive time you're on the bus

or you're off the bus. And they felt I mean, because we wanted people to be vaccinated, and I get that, but don't misrepresent the data because you're only going to lose trust not only the public but scientists who see what the data are. So just be honest and know that you're not going to get it right, but see that the fluidity of that, the fluidity of scientific discovery, of learning as you go, is disconcerting to the public.

I mean, I think if you ask people, do you think we're going to know more about science or medicine fifty or one hundred years from now than we know now, I think everybody would say yes. But when it comes to your disease or our pandemic, they want to believe you know everything you need to know right now, and if you don't, then you got it wrong that I don't believe you anymore.

first of all, it's a manufacturing residual. It's not at all surprising anything that's made from cells, and that's certainly the plasmad DNA that is the beginning of the process of mRNA vaccines. That doesn't just completely disappear as you go through the manufacturing process. There's nanogram levels of fragmented DNA, as it is true of in any vaccine that has made from cells measles, MOPS or bella of our cellar ronavirus,

all those have small fragments of DNA. And in fact, we eat foreign DNA all the time, assuming you eat anything made from plants or animals on this planet, which is pretty much everybody, which ends up in your circulation, by the way, and it fragments much larger and in quantity is much larger than here ever getting into vaccine. But anyway, so he put it out there right, DNA fragments can can essentially insert themselves into your DNA and cause cancer. So explain that. Now you can explain that.

You can explain how you know the cytoplasma doesn't like foreign DNA. It's hard to get across the nuclear membrane of a non dividing cell. Well, then you have to insert yourself into DNA, which you know requires some sort of enzyme like an integrace. But so you can. So I was on CNN right with Brianna Killer, and you don't have much time. You got about four minutes to explain why Joseph Ladappo is wrong. But don't don't be afraid to do that. Try and explain the science simply.

Don't just say so. The FDA, when they dealt well, this is fine, I mean this, they said, you know vaccines are carefully tested for safety, we know you know, we know that this exists. But so when they do that, when they don't express the science, explain the science, they're basically saying trust me, and and people don't trust you, so when you give them something to hang on to, even if they don't necessarily understand all those words, they

like integrace. You know, an enzyme like an integrace, but it is an English sort of sounding thing, right, integrate into something. So just I say, don't be afraid of that. Don't be afraid to say that. People appreciate that. I think they appreciate not being talked down to by making it too simple.

scientists come in. That gave rise to conspiracy theories. I mean, that kind of inability to let FORNT or other researchers come in. I think it's in us. I do think as I sort of talked about the end of the book, I mean, when nine to eleven happened, we all held each other and hugged and cried. We were all in this together. I think that was also true when Pearl

Harbor happened. I think we do at some level see ourselves as part of a larger group, and we have to if we're going to move forward, we have to see ourselves as part of a larger group. There's nine million people in this country who can't be vaccinated, for example, because they're immune compromise. They depend on those around them to protect them. Do we have any responsibility to them?

Of course we do, and I think we have to just kind of do our best to sort of emphasize that we are part of a whole, we benefit from being part of a whole, and just make it clear that that's true. So I don't know, I mean, I think we'll see how the next the story of the next pandemic is told. But there will be a next pandemic. We've had three pandemic viruses in the last twenty years. There we're not that far from the next one.

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