7 Experts: Unmasking The Science You Aren’t Hearing On TV | COVID-19 Facts from the Frontline

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(somber music)
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– This may be one of the more
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important podcasts we’ve done.
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We all know we’re living in extraordinarily intense times,
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the most intense most of us have experienced,
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at least in our adult lives.
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The challenge that we’re experiencing today
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are as intense as we’ve ever seen,
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and the challenge is not only people are dying,
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but people are dying alone.
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Families can’t visit with their family members
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because of understanding of the virus
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and our concerns about how it could spread.
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And we’re living in a world where,
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quite frankly, we’ve made decisions
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that are also affecting
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not just the people that have already passed away
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but also are gonna affect people in the future,
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and also the ways we’ve responded to this virus
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are having gigantic effects around the world.
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There are people all over the world
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that are having all kinds of challenges.
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90% of brain surgeries haven’t happened.
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I could go through a whole list,
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but the feeding problem
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is one of the things I’m most concerned about,
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and people moving into poverty,
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which leads to deaths as well.
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The World Food Organization that the UN sponsors is saying
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maybe 265 million people might go hungry this year,
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almost double what normally happens.
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I wanted today to see if we could go on
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kind of an exploration, if you will,
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a journey, not a trip.
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A trip’s predictable.
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A journey you might be surprised.
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And I’ve been on a journey
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because I care so much and I know you do too.
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What does this mean?
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I have my own parents
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that are my mother and father in law,
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but they’re in their 70s.
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I adore them and obviously extreme concern,
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so I started to immerse myself
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in every detail I could find on the science of this.
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And as I did,
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I came across a set of doctors, Nobel Prize winners,
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professors of epidemiology,
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some of the most qualified people in the world
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that we’re bringing up new facts that we have today
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that are very different than we made the decisions
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to shut down the world economy.
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Science is about
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as new facts come forward make new decisions,
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but sometimes the momentum
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of the story and the fear takes us over.
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– I think cases become a big issue for clinical reasons.
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Unfortunately, there’s a huge amount of politics
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in all of this everywhere.
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I think that, unfortunately, science is difficult
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and you can’t make promises,
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and I think that there was a dynamic here
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and a dynamic which I found very anti-scientific
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that lead to decisions being made.
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The World Health Organization has a record of exaggerating
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and I think they do this deliberately
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because they fear that the public won’t pay attention.
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The total number of excess deaths
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reported by a website called EuroMOMO
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up till today is 160,000, maybe 170,000.
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Basically that’s about the same number of people
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who died in an excess way
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in the flu season of 2017, ’18.
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So basically my guess is it’s going to be
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maybe one and a half times more excess deaths.
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Excess deaths are very important
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because if I’m very sick
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and then I’m laid with a corona death
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that’s fine, except I won’t die again next month.
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So basically if you look at the total deaths
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each person is only counted once,
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whereas if you assume that everyone who dies of corona
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is extra, you’re overcounting.
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– One of the challenges is that when people were looking
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at all the numbers that were coming out of the TV
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and they were doing the death rate,
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the case fatality rates,
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they were looking really,
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and this is, I’ll call it
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a rookie 101 mistake in epidemiology,
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in that you don’t take the incident rate
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to figure out the case fatality,
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you look at the prevalence.
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And it was stunning to me that all the media
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would put on these so called experts
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and not raise this issue
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as to why the case fatality rate
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is just completely and absolutely overstated.
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Yes, we as citizens need to be responsible
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and we need to think about what we do
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and how it impacts those around us,
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but we shouldn’t be so fearful
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that we decide to live in a bubble
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and hermetically seal our home
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in hopes that we never get anymore diseases ever again.
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That’s just nonsense.
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– I would submit that we’re pivoting towards a time now
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where we have to ask ourselves questions
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about who are we, what is our country,
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are we losing personal liberties,
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if we’re going to use contact tracing,
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what does that look like?
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Does that look like voluntary use of our form
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or is it gonna be involuntary?
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Are there gonna be drones that swoop and watch us?
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We need to be very careful
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because in the end, when we’re all said and done,
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we’re looking at a respiratory virus,
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a single-stranded RNA virus.
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We’ve dealt with these before.
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And we know that 40 to 50% of people who get it
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may not even know they had it.
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We know another 40, 50% that get it
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will skate through it.
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We know that we’re probably gonna,
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at the end of the day, end up somewhere
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between one out of 1,000 patients dying from it.
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– It’s interesting because when I was
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doing the research originally,
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I remember in late February
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I was watching everyday because I’m concerned
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that the death rate shot up 600% in one day,
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and I’m no epidemiologist, but that didn’t make any sense,
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I’m talking about the world death rate.
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And then I dug in and finally found the labs
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that said they could change the diagnostic procedure
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to no longer having to do a test
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since as late as February,
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and that’s why the number of deaths shot through the roof
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because anything they suspected as COVID,
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they listed as COVID.
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And then a few weeks ago, as I know you know,
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the CDC made it formal in the US
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that you don’t need to do a test,
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just if you suspect it.
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But there’s actually even, as I understand from you,
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economic incentives by the hospitals
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’cause some have been reclassified
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as COVID-19 deaths after the fact,
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and what is that financial incentive they’ll share with us?
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– We were basically being advised as physicians
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as to how to correctly complete a death certificate
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if COVID-19 was involved directly
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or perhaps even presumptively or probably
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or peripherally involved.
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I was coached and massaged to utilize COVID-19
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as a factor in the causation of death
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even if I hadn’t checked a COVID-19 test,
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even if I hadn’t had an interest in one.
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And right around that time,
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Dr. Burks from Washington, D.C. was saying
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that nobody’s going to die with COVID-19,
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if they have it, they’re dying of it.
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And that was about a silly a thing as I have heard
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because if a person gets hit by a bus
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and over the first two hours
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of examination in an emergency room
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we learn that both of their lungs are collapsed
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but also some baseline laboratory works
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addressed the fact that there was a low hemoglobin
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but also a COVID-19 test happened to be positive
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in the PCR form of it,
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it would be absolutely ridiculous to put down COVID-19.
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On the one hand, part of my life
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is in the trenches practice and primary care
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and then I come down to the capital
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where I see this partisan battle for power.
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And the best way to power
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sometimes is to keep people frightened
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and then tell ’em who to blame,
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and after you’ve done enough of that
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then sort of step up and raise your hand and say
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but follow me, I’ll take care of you.
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That’s sort of a typical formula in the world of politics.
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And I think sometimes when these things happen,
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we don’t recognize them at the time,
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it’s when we look at them through the retrospectiscope,
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so I really think the crisis is pivoting.
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– If you look at the case fatality rate,
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the number of people who die who get it,
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it’s over 3% when you get to 70 and over.
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That’s a real risk.
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– [Tony] Yes.
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– Look at 60 and under, it’s less than 2/10 of 1%,
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or about less than twice the flu,
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but really what you need to do
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is protect people who are over the age of 70.
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Protect them from the risk they would have
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if they were exposed to the virus
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’cause they’re in that 3 to 5% death rate
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from getting the disease.
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On the other hand, most of the economy
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is driven by younger people, 95 to 97%,
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and they don’t need to be protected.
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We made that mistake early on
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in looking at the data from China
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and we will probably come back and regret it,
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but you could really open up the whole economy
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and not have much increase in the risk.
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The problem is without the economy open,
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we’re having more deaths of despair
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than we are deaths from the COVID virus.
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– Now what we’re seeing is the collateral damage of COVID
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is way outweighing the disease itself.
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I can tell you about suicide cases personally,
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23-year-old.
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I can tell you about anxiety, depression, alcoholism,
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all in my community that are sky-rocketing now
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because of COVID.
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So I think the conversation has to switch now
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to how do we get the economy going again
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because the collateral damage of the economy shutdown
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is becoming far worse than the virus itself.
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– We took a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm
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and to tell the truth
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and we looked at our numbers and we had
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some of Stanford’s preliminary data was out.
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We were looking at these different studies
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and we’re saying
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the epidemiology of this disease is similar to flu.
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And have we ever shut down for flu before?
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We haven’t.
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Does it make sense to shut down the economy,
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to have folks not have work,
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not be able to support their families?
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Influenza is a very dangerous disease.
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I’ve had folks in their 30s and 40s die from influenza
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when I used to work in the ER,
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so as Dr. Erickson said influenza is very serious,
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but we are familiar with influenza,
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so we say it’s just a flu.
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So whenever you have something
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that you’re unfamiliar with, you have lots of fear,
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and then trying to change people’s narrative,
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their mindset,
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with new data is very, very difficult
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because they have that old mindset.
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– I’m an infectious disease physician,
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and my sort of understanding,
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and not also disease modeling,
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my understanding is a disease like this
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spreads quite widely
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and so the numbers didn’t quite add up.
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So that’s why we put that study together.
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And we sampled a group of well over 3000 people.
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We used a test kit that by now
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has been vetted very carefully
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and we know exactly what it tells us.
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One thing that I was hoping that our study would do
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is reduce that uncertainty.
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We were living with such an enormous amount of uncertainty
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and I think that uncertainty
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was really getting people worked up.
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And like many here,
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I wish this were not a political issue,
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I wish this were an area where we could come together
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and say okay we need to count all false deaths
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because the coding is not something that is reliable.
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We need to understand the issue about immunity.
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We need to understand the issue
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about the age distribution
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and the differences across ages.
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And these are some of the very key priorities
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that will help us really learn how to deal with it.
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We have to start wrapping our head around
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making decisions in a more informed way.
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– The whole purpose of this is to honor those
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that have already put their lives on the line for us,
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so many doctors and nurses.
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I cry just thinking about it.
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So many police officers, first responders,
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people driving trucks so that we can
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still have our livelihood and our life
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and be with our families that get taken for granted.
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I know most of you don’t take them for granted,
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but I hope in the midst of this
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we don’t lose track of all that they’ve done for us.
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Please remember we human beings are pretty damn resilient.
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We’ve been around 200,000 years.
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We’ve experienced every kind of change in the environment,
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every kind of microbe,
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every kind of challenge you could imagine,
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and here we still stand for better or worse,
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hopefully for better.
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And just remember life is meant to be lived.
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And sometimes we can get overcome
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by the drama by what we see and hear every moment
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and by dealing with real challenges that we forget
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that this life is still meant to be lived.
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So whether it be winter, spring, summer, fall,
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whether it be in tough times or good times,
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I hope you’ll find gratitude and joy and love
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with the people that you love
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and you’ll continue to grow and continue to expand.
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So no matter what happens economically,
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what happens in the environment,
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there’s a quality of life
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waiting to be lived and enjoyed by you
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by just finding things to be grateful for
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in the midst of challenge.
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That’s I think how we stay resilient,
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that’s how we keep moving the ball forward,
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that’s how we serve our children,
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our family, and our friends.
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So live fully, live with passion,
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and hopefully until we meet again, God bless.
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(soft tender music)