Nightmare of Our Own Creation

reactions to put together a travel ban. When asked by doctors scientists whether or not a travel ban is actually a preventative medical measure right if it is effective in containing COVID nineteen, their responses. Know what actually is effective outside of a racist and politically engineered travel ban is instead putting together quarantine protocols for all people that are coming into the United States, not just those that are

foreign travelers. But if you are a fucking American citizen and have been abroad and are coming back to the United States, then you either need to show your proof of vaccination, a recent negative COVID test, your booster information, and in fact fucking quarantine because what has been proven to work is taking the measures that the CDC had outlined back in twenty twenty that actually do work. Right.

What we have learned is that we are in fact a global community, whether or not we want to function like one at all. And the reality is this is that before these bands and restrictions go into place, covid omicron has already done laps around the fucking globe. So maybe you would think that we would learn something from our past transgressions because of the Trump administration and actually be informed by science and by medicine in the way

that this administration said that it would be. Except that's not. What's happening is that again we are having very tepid responses. We had a very botched rollout vaccination program. And look, you have roughly close to sixty percent of the country right being vaccinated, but we also know that it's twenty five percent of the country that is never going to get vaccinated, and we also know that, yes, Donald Trump

is to blame for that. One of the questions that I had asked of Glenn Kirshner earlier this week was if in Mark Meadow's book, right that we learned that Donald Trump knew days before he was around then candidate Joe Biden, and around reporters on Air Force one and just knowingly in the Rose Garden spreading, spewing COVID nineteen. How come he is not being held criminally liable or civilly liable right for doing so. Where we are right now is in a nightmare of what I believe to

be our own creation. And why do I say that, because there were opportunities, there were even opportunities post Donald Trump, for us to do better, for us to come together as a globe battling this health pandemic and recognizing that, you know what, pharmaceutical companies making billions upon billions of dollars while millions upon millions of people are dying. Maybe

isn't where we need to put our energy resources. That maybe instead, as soon as we were able to have the properties, the intellectual properties that would make the RNA, that would make the vaccines that we are readily using in high income countries, that we would decide as a global community that no one pharmaceutical company should have a monopoly on making money when we have a virus that is ravaging the fucking globe that literally had us as

a world shutter our doors for months and months on end, thinking that we didn't even know. We're washing fucking cardboard, We're putting on plastic gloves and double masking and being afraid to cross the street and cross somebody's path. Do you remember all of the ways that we were acting in twenty twenty because we didn't know what the fuck was going on? But now, given all the information and research that we have been provided with, we are still acting in ways that are very knee jerk and as

if we have had no experience. Over the last almost

two goddamn years. South Africa and their scientists did their due diligence because they have very advanced genome projects right to be able to detect this new variant, and instead of being celebrated for their transparency, right for their initial documentation of how this virus is working in people in those that are infected in these nations, we shut o our doors and then we turn around and we continue on with bullshit policy that was created to protect corporations

and not protect people. And this is again where I'm talking about trips, right, I'm talking about the international property decision that was made that says that you can't share right that we can't avoid out because the intellectual property that was created via Faiza and Maderna is theirs and theirs alone. But these are government funded, fucking pharmaceutical companies.

And we're in a global health pandemic. So when India and South Africa request, right eight months into the pandemic, for there to be a waiver to this policy program so that they can receive all the information that is necessary to begin to manufacture a vaccine to say their country, But instead we're waiting on the philanthropic desires and the charities of higher wealth nations who are responsible for the economic, spiritual, emotional damage that has been done to these nations through

their greed and extraction. And now they can't be bothered to do the right thing, and there's no way to legally compel them to do so because they're the ones that are writing the rules, that are telling other dictating how other people are going other countries are going to live by them. How does that make sense? And how

does that not piss us all off? Because we see exactly how the fucking ultrawealthy get away with so much goddamn shit in America, and it's the same thing that high wealth nations do to the lower wealth nations around the globe. Greed is what is driving all of this. It is not the sanctity of fucking life that the GOP had the audacity to tweet out last week as it pertained to Rob Wade, because it's sure as fuck wasn't about caring about the sanctity of life of the

four teenagers that were gunned down in Oxford, Michigan. It's sure as fuck wasn't caring about the sanctity of life when celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucking murderer. It's sure as fuck is not caring about the sanctity of life when you are advocating for people to put themselves in harm's way when you yourself are covered and protected. It is vicious, it is cruel, it is criminal, and yet no one

is being held accountable. You know, I mentioned a couple of days ago, once again the president of Brazil, Bulsonado, whose Senate was investigating him criminally. It will most likely not go anywhere because their government is so corrupt, but so the fuck is ours. Where is the investigation into

who should be responsible? This was not an act of fucking God This was an act of negligence, of gross negligence on the part of the former twice impeach disgrace president of the United States, who him himself became a vector for this virus and once again is just able to get away with whatever the fuck he wants. And you want to tell me to continue to have hope and feel like we are moving in what direction exactly?

We are just gobbling up the Greek alphabet in the way that pac Man gobbled up those little beads, right, just going around, munch, munch, munch. Here we go until Amikron turns into whatever the next fucking disastrous outcome will be.

And what kills me and what our guests coming up, doctor Abduel el Sayed will say, is we could have been done with this, like we didn't have to have Alpha and then Delta and now Amikron, right, because we could have I just the other day, I was laying in bed and I can't stop my mind from moving,

and I'm thinking to myself, what would have happened? Where would we be right now if Hillary Clinton had been president, if the response of what we could do in this country was to come together as patriots, right if we were told from the jump, we will get through this, and we will do so together as one nation. Right, if we had started fucking, you know, tying ribbons around trees and shit, right like they used to do for the soldiers, and we did that in recognition, right and

showing a force of empathy. And then finally, if the vaccines then had come and been rolled out, that we collectively as a nation would be celebrating, right, our ability to overcome That's what I imagine would have happened in my head. But you know, maybe I'm just creating a fantasy, because it's not as if Mitch McConnell would have died. It is not as if, you know, death santists wouldn't

have been around. So I'm assuming that they would have found some way, But at least they would not have had a leader in the White House that was champion inning death right. So without that leader, without that megaphone cajoling his cult, maybe Republicans would not have decided that their response to a global health pandemic would be to

tell their constituents to literally go play in traffic. I remain, you know a lot of days beside myself where I just get caught up, and I think about how things could have been so drastically different if fifty three percent of white women didn't vote against one of their own. I think about, you know, Ethan Crumbing, the high school

shooter that murdered four of his classmates. And I think about the letter that his deranged mother wrote to Donald Trump saying that she would rather be grabbed by the pussy than fucked up the ass by the federal government. And thank god Donald Trump for giving me my guns, because I guess he was in the room where it happened, where the Constitution was being written. This is American extremism. And you know, folks want to tweet and want to say, oh,

this is going to be Christian Sharia law. Leave the fucking Islam culture and out of all of this. This has nothing to do. You don't need to make comparisons to other places, right, this is what America has always done. But you see, when you keep people ignorant of their fucking history purposefully so, just in the same way you don't teach enslaved Africans how to read, right, because then they become educated and you really realize that education is power.

And the more that they learn about the constitution and the rights of this country, the more that they're going to ask, well, am I am I a man too? Am I a woman too? Am I a citizen too?

Where the fuck are my rights? So we always love to compare what is happening to America to the worst that has happened in other nations, when we can just compare it to the founding of America, where we can take any fucking generation and pull out and see where we have always run on the space of violence, of ignorance, being bliss. Over seven hundred thousand Americans are dead, and you have Republicans in this country still calling this a hoax.

Over seven hundred thousand Americans are dead. And as we move through the holiday season, seven hundred thousand families and friends have missing people at their dinner tables, in their living rooms, Gifts that won't be put under the tree because of virus ravage them. But we have Republicans who believe that the world is suffering right now as a way to unseat them from power. That's how self serving

and egotistical and disgusting these people are. Like I said yesterday, this does not end well, folks, because I there is no nothing to point to in our history that tells us that, oh, we can have peace, peaceful transition. America doesn't know peace. America only knows bloodshed, war violence. It's what is celebrated. You know, every time that I see somebody with the sticker on their card talking about go ahead and take it, and it being a picture of

an ar fifteen. Everything about America is based on some fucking stupid cowboy John Wayne bullshit, right, And really what it is about, if we really want to unpack, it is about white male fragility, right, toxic masculinity masquerading as patriotism. But we've all bought into the lie. We've all been force fed that story. And so you see these fragile white men boys arming themselves because that is the only

way that they feel a sense of power. And one must ask themselves a question that Tony Morrison asked so many moons ago. If you have to stand on somebody else's neck in order to feel taller, what does that

say about you? But you see, so long as they have an active political party that is giving them their targets, revving them up in the same way that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and Moe Brooks and others at the stop the Steel Rally revved up that crowd and then pointed them in the direction of the Capitol Building and said, go take your country back. These people, every single fucking one of them, are responsible. Our murderers have blood on their goddamn hands. We are in a place of despair.

We are witnessing the fracturing of a nation state, the anxiety that you feel, the uneasiness, the grief, because we are all vacillating through those It is how you process death, the stages of grief. And we're still at avoidance where we want to pretend that this shit isn't happening. But regardless of whether or not we pay attention or not, it is and how it ends, I still believe is up to us. But in action is not an option. Burying our heads in the sand is not an option.

Pretending that something is a hoax when it is killing your neighbors, your friends, and your colleagues. It's not an option. Who do we want to be? What's the legacy we want to leave behind? Because I sure as hell know that I'm not going down without a fight, and I don't think any of you who listen to wok af on a regular basis are either. But what about the people around us? We bear a responsibility to spread the word and to wake people the fuck up. That's the

burden of being woke. That's a burden of being conscious, is to then find the ways in which you can spread that word, because without that collective action, without that low level lift, we're gonna be swimming in a sea of the debris of our democracy and I don't want to see that. Coming up next is my conversation with our friend returning guests, doctor Abdul el Sayed. Folks, I am so excited to welcome back to wok A. It

has been a little bit of time. Welcome back to doctor Abdul el Sayed, who is the host for at Crooked Media's America Dissected pod and is our public health the doctor. If you are not following him on Twitter railing against our public health system, railing against what is happening to our democracy, then you are missing out on really great content. I feel like there is not a day that has gone by when we haven't had bad news.

But I will tell you that the day after Thanksgiving, when my phone my parents phone because I was home for the holiday alert. Alert Alert, we have a new variant. I just want to get what your reactions were, because mine was I wanted to throw the phone out the window. I was just like, dear God, right like, you know, we're struggling. We've been we've been stuck at a certain number of vaccinations in this country we have given to

the world. But I will go into my feelings about what it is that that should have a look like a versus where we are right now. But what was your reaction to that breaking news? Now? It was DAYJAVU all over again. I remember back in back in the summer when we'd heard about Delta, and the reality of this is that these these variants, they are a natural course of a virus if and when we don't do

what we can to address it. And so, you know, the knowledge of a new variant that you know could potentially be and circumstantial evidence suggests is more transmissible, could potentially escape some of our immune mechanisms, that that really

is super frustrating. And then when I heard about the response that the administration had had gone forward with, it just seemed to be the same kind of knee jerk reflex response that that fails to make up for the fact that we in this country have not been able to mount a real public health response to this virus from the get whether it was anything as simple as contact tracing or mass scale antigen testing, or the ability to upgrade our genomics or valance, or to have a

logical approach to screening and quarantining people who come from

outside this country. Don't just blanket banned people. What you do is you make sure that if they're coming in that they're quarantine for a certain period of time, which of course is what other countries who've had a far better response I've done, And so it is just deeply frustrating to see our country making the same mistakes over and over again, even as the consequences of our failure to get our vaccines abroad in a meaningful way, to

invest in manufacturing capacities abroad so that people can make their own vaccine have rendered a yet again a new variant that we're now contending with. And of course it's a global pandemic. So what happens across the world, it's going to come back to hit us. And this is happening again. You know, I feel a duel like this is it is just to me that we haven't learned

anything over the past year. That's how I felt about the the knee jerk reaction because I said, when we have doctors and scientists in South Africa that are doing their due diligence and being transparent right about this is what this is what we have found. This is what we are seeing. And we knew that when that announcement came out that yes, omicron had already been in seven nations in Africa, but it had also already traveled to Europe.

And so it's it's it's we continue to make decisions that are based around politics, right, and who in fact is expendable, but who is our ally that we want to be buddy buddy with. And I'm like, to me, how do they continue to justify right? Like it isn't

just public sentiment. Oh, we see this because we know that once it we we know that once something is discovered, wherever it is, if it is in Wuhan, China, if it is in Italy, if it's in South Africa, if it's going to get here, right, So why is it that you think that they continue to make these decisions and then are not made to be accountable or responsible for giving us the public the why. Yeah, that's a

really important point, Danielle. I mean, the reality of this is that they wanted to look like they were doing something to make it for the fact that we have not, through the course of this pandemic, been doing the very thing that we should have been doing from from the get and these kinds of basic public health infrastructure pieces, whether it was ramping up our genomic surveillance early, whether it was putting in place a thoughtful quarantining approach that

would apply to anybody coming over because of course, the thing about these travel bans just just to take a little bit of a bye way here, the thing about these travel bans is they only applied to non citizens. But it's not like citizens. Somehow we're potentially being infected with amicron. And here's the thing about it, is not like whatever capacities Omicron has, one of them is not

reading your passport. And so if you create a policy that then incentivizes people who could be infected to hurry on home because they could be next, all you're doing is activating the potential for that to happen, and unfortunately, right we have not been able to do the very basic things well from the jump when it came to this pandemic. Now, look, a lot of that is because of who was president when this pandemic first occurred, and a lot of that is, you know, set the pathway forward.

And you know, I talked to my public health colleagues all the time, and they tell me just how overworked

and under supported they really are. And so it's very hard once we started this pandemic on the back foot, to catch up and really to move beyond where we were at the very beginning, because people are leaving the public health profession in groves and yet and yet we are trying to make up for our failure to do the very basic public health things well by putting in effect pr over it and looking like we've done the

thing that we're supposed to do. Travel ban was not a thoughtful policy in the beginning, especially in the context of an ongoing debate about whether or not US taxpayer funded companies should be required to give their intellectual intellectual property out to other countries to allow them to manufacture a life saving vaccine. In the context of a pandemic. Now, look, you know, you could argue, well, look it's a company, they don't have to give their private intellectual property out

to anybody. Well that's not entirely the case. When this company was founded by the US government intended to protect us, and our failure to do that thing, our failure to manufacture enough of our of our vaccines abroad, has left people without the vaccines they need and left them not trusting what they have that's coming from our country. And that's an important point here, don't forget right, there is context for this. South Africa is one of the hardest

hit countries by the HIV pandemic. And yes, it is a pandemic. We don't call it that simply because we devalue the lives of the people who were infected by it, whether there were they were LGBTQ people at home or

black people abroad. But it was a pandemic and it was There was a long history of the US denying our antiretrovirals to people living abroad, until, of course, there was a negotiated agreement to allow South African corporate companies to manufacture their own antiretrovirals, which is when the population there started to trust them. And so you know, folks are pointing to well, South Africa has enough vaccine and it is really just vaccine hesitancy. Well that's not entirely

the case. There's a path dependency to vaccine hesitancy. People don't just become hesitant. They become hesitant because of long histories of medical chauvinism and denial of basic human rights when it comes to medications in a pandemic. And yeah, that may keep them from trusting you the next time around. And here we are the next time around. You know.

It was it was you know last week when I was for the first time talking mentioned trips right, because I kept saying to myself and for folks with a reminder, it is trade related aspects of intellectual property rights trips. And I kept saying to myself, there is no way that in these G seven meetings, in these you know what I now are referring to as global publicity stunts, right to make us all believe that our world leaders are actually working together that both India and South Africa.

In October of twenty twenty, petitioned right the global community like the High Wealth Nations to say we need you to void trips so that we can have the capacity. And we're not sitting around waiting on your charity and your philanthrop be of good heart for you to do what it is that you're telling the world. You'll say that you'll do the EU said for for months, Oh, we're going to provide x amount of hundreds of millions of doses. We're going to provide this, that and the

other thing. And every time I see Biden on the news, he talks about how the US has done more than everybody else, but nobody else has actually shown up. So how is it that they can continue to not have a voked a conversation on something that is necessary? And all I say, and what you've been saying on social media, it's just great. This is this is capitalism. This is the world being run by the Wall Street Gordon Geckos of the world that are going to just continue to

make money off of death. You know, the point that you're making is spot on. Look, you know, we know for a long time, if you give a man of fish eats for a day, if you teach a man of fish eats forever. This is not about giving vaccine to other people. This is about doing what we should have done from the very beginning and empowering them to

make their own vaccine in the first place. And the only reason we are not doing that is because of these international patent agreements, which there is precedent to break in the context of a global pandemic. We've done it before, and the only reason we're not doing it is because of the lobbying of major pharmaceutical corporations, both of the United States government and of European governments abroad, who tell us that somehow the innovation that we've come to expect

won't happen if we violate these agreements. But here's the problem is that that innovation occurred in government funded laboratories. Maderna. Maderna was a government funded project, and when they applied

for their patent, you know what they did. They excluded folks like doctor Kismikia Corbett, right, the NIH government scientist who were so critical in that discovery, because they knew that if that pattern was under the titles of government scientists, that it may complicate their ability to operate as a private corporation. And what we're seeing here is the problem of that handoff, and it happens all the time here at home as well. This is not is not something

that we don't we don't face here at home. Sure, vaccines are free, and look, if you are not vaccinated and not boosted yet, you better go on and make sure you can do that thing. Okay, You know nobody tells you that the will will say miss an opportunity to tell you vaccinate. Please please get your vaccine. That being set right, how many medications are mission critical for people's lives that people go it out simply because some

corporation has put an absurd dollar value on it. You know, insulin. The patent for insulin was sold for a dollar by the folks who discovered it in in Toronto. They sold it for a dollar and their reasoning was that insulin belongs to everybody. Right, this is a human discovery that can empower diabetics to live a long, healthy life. How could we put it behind our own greed? And now you routinely see corporations spike the price on insulin simply

because they can because people need it, right. That's what economists call an inelastic demand, meaning they know that people are going to pay what you ask them to pay because they have to, and so they just exploit that day in and day out, and that affects people at home, and right now, it's affecting people abroad, and it's affecting their trust in the very vaccine simply because they say, well, look, you have a long history of Nicolin diming me for the things that I need to live in my life.

Why do I trust what you're sending over? And if we were just to allow these the South African or Indian base manufacturers, who, by the way, everybody tells you that they don't have the capacity to do this, they make a lot of the generics that we take here at home. They have fantastic capacity. And frankly, if you walked into a laboratory in the United States, most of the folks who are going to see are going to be coming from abroad. Right They're folks whomibert here in

the first place. So I'll tell me that they're not smart enough for capable enough to do it, right, we're just denying them the capacity to do it, simply because Maderna wants to continue to make billions in profit. And

that's exactly what they've made already. And I'm perfectly okay with that, just don't do that at the cost of people getting their medications in the first place, and don't allow it then to take that money that you've made to the lobby the very government that created you, right for policies that that that ultimately harm people and keep

this this mission critical medication out of their hands. And so we've really got to rethink the way that we regulate corporations that that that that make money off of government funded research projects that that wind up becoming pharmaceuticals

that people need. You know, I just find you know, it just is I'm so disgusted, right and there are sometimes when I'm just at a loss for words, and you know, when I recognize that everything that is playing out on the world stage right now with high income nations versus low income nations, it is the same shit that plays out every day in America right where you have the wealthy one percent that are able to make decisions to withhold, to grind to a halt like anything

that they want, right because they have the resources to do it, and we the rest of us are just at their whim, at their mercy, right you have. You know, I said this the other day on social media said, you know, you have how much would it take, you know, how much money would it require in order to vaccinate the world right in order to get you know, all of these shots. And I asked that question as we had wall to wall coverage of the billionaires of the

world in a space race. Meanwhile, people are dying, right, over seven hundred thousand people in the United States have died, millions have died worldwide, right, and we're continuing to wring our hands and pretend like we haven't learned, like we haven't learned anything, Like we don't get what is at the core of this. And I said, the travel ban,

what is at the core racism? It is it is the colonizer's mindset, right, and it is and we are looking again at these nations who have been extracting for generations, extracting from these places, and then when they are in need, and it's not just their need, it's a global need. There's there's no acknowledgment of that, you know, Danielle. I was when I said that I'm okay with them making billions, I actually take that back, Like this was a government

funded research project. We the American taxpayers invested in the time and the effort and the money that it took to employ really capable scientists to devise a way to leverage MR and a technology to create vaccines for emergent pathogens. The federal government should be in the business of taking this the next step and making sure that everybody has it here and abroad. Because here's the thing about it, right, here's the thing about right that we should care about

other people in other countries simply because they're people. We should we should care that a child in India or an elder in South Africa has their vaccine against a pandemic disease that has killed millions of people. We should care about those people because they're people. But here's the thing. You don't even have to care about those people. You just have to care about yourself. Because here's the right.

Our failure to invest in getting those vaccines out there, the vaccines that we bought and pay for as taxpayers, means that the virus, the virus variants that are ever evolving in unvaccinated bodies abroad, are going to come back and take lives at home. Right. That was the whole

point of the investment, was that that didn't happen. And we're failing that simply because now we're saying that, you know what, we can give it to some corporation to manufacture it, make billions and billions of dollars off of it. So maybe there's some someday they're CEO can figure out how to devise a rocket to take a nine year old man of space. And uh and and meanwhile, we're not even a compli the end that we set out for, which is to protect people from deadly pathogens that evolve

and uh and so we're failing. And this system where we assent to the idea that some major pharmaceutical corporation has to control the intellectual property that we all invested in as failing us. It's failing us here, it's failing people abroad, and all of that is coming back and

redounding to the detriment of all of us. You know, I want to ask you to you know, with regard we're being told by doctor Fauci, by Rachelle Wilenski, by others that we won't really know the machinations of Amicron for about a month, right a month to six weeks, that is how long it will take to do the research to understand the data and then to make that

and share it with the public. But there are some real, real fears, and I want to get you know, from your colleagues that you're talking to on a regular basis, what are some of the fears that we need again, because I want to shake the shit out of people. I want people to recognize that it matters what is happening across the pond, around the world, because we are

a global community. And if twenty twenty didn't show that to you, then twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two and all the years that we continue to be in this right, it will keep hitting you on the head and until you get it. So just tell folks, you know, what are some of the things that you are hearing from your colleagues. Well, I want to stick to the facts on this here. You know. The hard part about science is that it is a process. It's not a

body of knowledge. Nobody can pull out the coronavirus book and be like, we turn to page three hundred and fifty two and be like, all right, here's the omicron variant. Here's what's happening with it. This is new. We are dealing with it, and so science is a process by which we understand the world by asking questions and testing hypotheses, and so I do think it's important for us to

be prudent about what the science is tell us. That being said, a lot of the circumstantial evidence that we are getting from just a very simple biochemical analysis of this variant suggest to us that it's taken all of the greatest hits of COVID nineteen, all of the worst aspects of beta and delta, and added some on top, so that this variant has the potential to be both more transmissible and also more likely to escape our immune response. I want to be clear about something, though it's not

likely to fully escape our vaccines. I don't want folks leaving this interview saying, ah, well, this variant is gonna render our vaccines ineffective. No, that's not true. It's it's

just possible that it might render them less effective. And it's not a good thing, simply because most folks now right are in the process of having been either doubly vaccinated or on their way to getting a third vaccination, which, by the way, let me just say it again, if you haven't gotten your booster please do get your booster. But but if that's the case, then it has the compac to really create yet another surge in our country. Now here's the other side of it. We don't know

how severe this variant is going to be. And if you look at if you permit me to personify a non living virus for a second, if you're a virus, your goal is to spread as many people as possible. You don't really care if you make them really sick. You just care that you infect as many people as possible so you can replicate yourself as many times as possible as the goal. Right, And so it makes sense that a virus would evolve toward transmissibility. That just makes

you better at being able to affect more people. But it also makes sense that the virus would evolve for reducing severity, because after all, if you're too severe, you kill too many hosts and then you don't spread. And if you're also too severe, then you change the host behavior because they get really sick and they tend to be bedridden and not want to go and spread the virus. So what a virus tries to do, in effect, is

to evolve away from severity and toward transmissibility. And so we've got some early circumstantial evidence that suggests that cases of amicron are relatively mild, which is something to hang your hat on. But again, none of this is rigorous. We've got to wait for the science because science is the process, is not a body of knowledge, and circumstantial evidence is just that, it's just circumstantial. Here's the thing, though, we should be over with this pandemic. We could have

been over with this pandemic if we were willing. The way to think about a vaccine is like putting a blanket on a fire. Right. You can't just slowly feed the blanket of the fire, because then the blanket just becomes something that the fire eats, versus right throwing the blanket on the fire all at once. That's what we should have done when it came to COVID nineteen. That's what we could have done when it came to COVID nineteen.

We just did not do that thing. We did not do that thing because we were unwilling to put the well being of people abroad ahead of the profits of major corporations. And we did not do that thing because we have, unfortunately a strain of pseudo fascism in this country that says that if Deer Leader didn't say it, it's not true. And so it's made itself opposed to

everything from science to journalism and anything in between. And and so you have a large swath of our country that just denies that the pandemic is even a real thing, even though they want to blame I don't know, doctor Faucune whomever else for its emergence in Wuhan, But it's not a real thing, and you shouldn't take it a safe and effect of vaccine to treat it. This is

the logic. So we're being unfortunately prolonged in our experience of this pandemic because of the failure to get this vaccine abroad and the failure to take on the strain of anti science in anti logic in our own country at home. You know, it's just it truly is depressing. But I have to say, you know, once again, I'm always so appreciative when you make the time to join us on woke f to just bring some you know, clarity to where we are, because I feel like a

lot of people feel crazy. I know that I did when I saw the breaking news, and so to really contextualize how we got to this place. It's not enough to just for me to just figure out these differ frent tactics that are mostly pomp and circumstance in pr but to really honestly understand how we got here right and that it isn't just like Donald Trump being negligent or Bolsonato being negligent and not caring about their people, but it's an entire ecosystem that is based around capitalism

and greed that has gotten us here as well. Doctor abduel El sayed, thank you so much for making the time to join Woke f and we hope to have you back again soon. Hey, it's always a privilege, and I hope that's sometime I get to come on and I don't have to talk about, you know, bad things that kill people like I want to talk about some China lollipop. Some day. Maybe we'll get there, maybe in twenty twenty four, just kidding. Oh goodness. On that note,

I appreciate you, folks. That is it for me today on Woke F as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.