tv Nina Burleigh Virus CSPAN June 13, 2021 2:02pm-3:11pm EDT
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regarding the constitution after it was ratified and later professor stephen brown recounts the presidential inauguration of george washington that took place in manhattan on april 30, 1789. find more information at good-- book tv.org or consult your program guide. now here is nina burleigh with her thoughts on the u.s.
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government's response to covid-19. >> welcome, officially. this is a series of live online presentations from experts devoted to advancing science over pseudoscience. media literacy over conspiracy theories and critical thinking over magical thinking. my name is leon ward and i'm delighted to be your host appeared i may stand up comedian and author and a cohost for the point of inquiry podcast and if you are so inclined you can find out more about me and my work at very funny lady.com. here before we get going i have a couple reminders for you. the coronavirus resource center continues with reliable news. yesterday they shared a piece from the "new york times" about how epidemiologists are carefully returning to everyday life.
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there is a piece debunking three covid 19 conspiracy-- conspiracy theories and also an interesting piece about how the world failed covid. if you have not already, i think you would be well served to round out your reading list by subscribing to skeptical inquirer magazine with two ways to do that, the digital and print version. bonus, print subscription gives you access to the digital version so you can get either or both at skeptical inquirer.org appeared now, if you are new here, here's the deal, the flow of the evening is easy. you get to keep doing what you are doing because we can't see you and i want to introduce our guests and after which we will open it up for your questions. at the bottom of your screen you'll see a q and a icon, place to type your questions in the form of a question and if you
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miss any of the talk tonight it's being recorded and will be available at skeptical inquire or.org. now off we go, our guest is a reporter and author including the "new york times" bestseller the fatal gift of beauty, italian trials of amanda knox as she most recently covered america at newsweek. her writing has appeared "rolling stone", new yorker, time, "new york times" magazine she has appeared on many tv shows including real time with bill maher, "good morning america" and msnbc, cnn and npr and teaches very lucky students at nyu author of parks journalism institute and her
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work is incited in hundreds of scholarly articles, so here to talk with us about her latest book "virus" vaccinations with the cdc and hijacking of america's response to the pandemic. please welcome nina burleigh. nina, feel free to take it away and share with us. >> thank you for that wonderful introduction. i am super honored to be here and to be asked to address my i guess fellow skeptics. i'm a big fan. i was thrilled to be asked to come here tonight, so thank you for the introduction. i guess what i will start with is why this book, people have
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come up to me, friends and colleagues, why did you do this like we readiness the entire time, did you start in march 2020 and the answer is no. actually did not start writing until i got a call from a publisher around thanksgiving and he said i want someone to write a 50000 word book, in book world that is short, a 50000 word book on vaccination, and i said you know i am intrigued. obviously i have been paying attention like everyone else, but i will do it if you let me due to other things. one is allow me-- i don't want to say events, but it's a kind of a vent, allow me too explain and remind people what happened
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with the cdc and the former administration and their handling of this crisis, allow me too do that in the second thing i want to do is talk about the conspiracy theory that this virus spawned in the sort of allegiance to those conspiracy theories in the chest the sizing of the conspiracy theories in this country and why that was, what they are and why people attached themselves to them, so he said yes, go ahead so basically what this is is a story about what just happened to us in a political sense, but
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also a social sense and it's a story about science and the triumph of science in this era of rampant scorn for expertise and attachment to conspiracy theories and diy kind of science or pseudoscience. to start off with i made a little powerpoint or slideshow here for you so we can have some pictures to look at other than my book cover in my and i hope it entertains you while we look through this. as i said, the goal was first one of my goals was to remind people what happened, what happened, what was going on in the former administration when
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the virus landed on our shores and why was it that in march and april 2020 i had to leave new york. those who could left and i had a place outside the city. why was it that we couldn't get on top of it having been warned in january? and i'm not-- as leon mentioned i covered the former administration and covered politics often on for a long time so i'm very aware of the political power poles that were foundation of the former administration and i watched in march and april as everyone here i'm sure did in horror as we saw that there was not going to be any activity from the government in terms of helping the states. they were throwing it to the
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states in the universe of competition and also just the images of april, the horrible images that you would normally see after a tsunami in bangladesh where you had forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks because there was no way to keep them and the trenches dug in the fields in the bronx during the horrible month. i'm not one of the people who saw this as accidental-- i never sought that-- thought that so even when i was watching what was happening in new york city and to the rest of the country so the first thing i want to do is explain to you and i think is going on. you will be remembering some of these pictures, but i want to
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read-- refresh your memory. i had an assistant working with the microbiology phd students who when she started the project she was mainly there to talk about the science to help me understand the vaccines and the genetics, but i asked her to make me a timeline of events and she almost immediately sent me an e-mail and said my god i feel like i'm being pelted with wtf all over again and that's actually why we need to remember this because it happened so fast and we were in such a panic and have never had anything like this happen to us as a society before in our generation and i will get to that generational thing in minutes, but we were not able really all of us to understand what was happening. i started my book explaining what was happening at the cdc
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and the former administration and the explanation that i have for this is that there were two poles to the power that administration. one of them was the religious zealots, the white evangelical christians who got the man into office, the votes from the other churches and they are the first pillar, so everyone knows what this picture is, germ phobia having hands laid on him pretending like he's god, so these people got him into office and he absolutely needed to pay them back. how did he pay them back? he pay them back by putting them in charge of the public health agency. so, you had a czar hhs price
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before him. alex a czar is an evangelical christian and he was the sponsor of the-- the white house cabinet prayer meetings that were bible study meetings held weekly in the white house. he was the sponsor of the. these are things i didn't actually know. everyone knows about pence, obviously in tents was in charge of the covid plan. what i didn't understand when this was happening is that redfield is an evangelical christian and so is burke. redfield and burke are actual medics unlike alex. there you see him at the cdc on that horrible day when trump said i like the numbers low when
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they were trying to figure out what was going on with the testing. redfield is an evangelical christian. brooks is an evangelical christian. they aligned themselves with the moralizing you know, homophobic aides fight. burks actually did work for obama. they have done good things in the aids world, but they are people who ultimately believe there are supranational power are in charge of things and that's exactly what this former guy wanted. he wanted to pay back evangelical christians by putting them in charge-- what is it mean we put someone like pence in charge of public health or a czar? as soon as the former guy came in and they turned their attention to fighting abortion,
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making sure the-- [inaudible] the hhs website had a button on its front page that people could go to called religious liberty complaint budget, you could click on it and they would help you if you didn't want-- [inaudible] or do medical things involving gaze, so when the virus landed, there i was on moral issues, not on potential virus communion. those people were-- [inaudible] they were in charge so here is redfield in charge of the cdc and on this day march 6, this is the day when trump-- the former
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guy and a alex azar or blathering on about how anyone can get a test, 4 million tests are coming out and millions of people will get tested and anyone in the world especially in new york where it was starting-- you couldn't get a test. you could not get a test even in urban areas, so this is-- i'm going to move on. at the other pillar was these extreme pre-marketeers, the extreme in the ideology represented by some extent to jared kushner, but not solely him, obviously there are many other people involved, low tax, leave us alone, don't regulate
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us group of ideologues in those people aligned with the evangelicals and that of course was the basis for the power-- political power that the former administration had. [inaudible] the trump administration started immediately cutting deals with groups putting jared kushner in charge of operation air bridge which was this kind of you know, they were bringing ppe in on government airplanes implementing private companies set the prices. they refused-- the government
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refused to act as a sole purchaser-- again, because they wanted competition. they wanted the states to compete. trump literally said in a phone call with the governors early on , we will-- price always matters, price is always an issue. this is where his headworks. they wanted to make-- they recognized it as an opportunity, i believe, they looked at is as an opportunity as an opportunity to a proof that government wasn't needed, private industry could handle this and be to enrich certain people and some people did get rich and elizabeth warren and chuck schumer tried to get information about these no-bid contract-- i don't think it's been fully explored and i don't think it will be fully explored because the insurrection has taken--
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[inaudible] those are the two ideologies, the two pillars and they are, of course, equally anti- science in their own way picked evangelicals of course you know why they are antiscience, free marketeers, hard-core overman ideologues are anti- science in the sense that they don't want anyone telling them what to do with let's say industrial waste or anything, really and they are antigovernment means they are obsessed with the concept of state bureaucrats so here you have-- [inaudible] still calling for you know fauci's beheading, these are estate matters. state smashers are really the
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free market ideologues and religious zealots. i went to move on to even though these two ideologies really, really cause this administration to mishandle-- massively mishandled the pandemic early on , there is a really, really good story to be told here about this vaccine. it's a positive story. it's a story about science and we already know it's succeeded in the cdc is saying you don't have to wear masks indoors if you're vaccinated. we are crossing a line and it's all thanks to efforts-- layers and layers of science that has been done over the years.
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i went to talk a little bit about the vaccine and what it is , what happened here. i don't know how much-- i assume some of your listeners are scientific or science oriented. i don't know how much you know about the history of vaccines, but the first vaccine-- you know, for millennia since the species has existed have been subject to infectious diseases and only 250 years ago or so we didn't have any beginnings of any kind of way to fight back and the first vaccine of course was the cowpox vaccine, cowpox is the weaker version of smallpox and i love this. this is a cartoon from the late 18th century when people were
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starting to get vaccines and vaccine, the word vaccine comes from cow because that's what they were doing. they were literally taking this cowpox and scraping little pieces into people's skin and they would become immune to the cell pox which was devastating at the time, but many people then as now they were conspiracy theories about vaccines and this is a cartoon about how people were turning cow like after they had the vaccines. that's the beginning of vaccines for 250 years, vaccines have advanced with many, many more vaccines. obviously children get like 15 now, but vaccines were based on a platform that has not really changed since the 18th century
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invention. weekend virus, dead virus injected and creates antibodies. what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. there were, of course, many accidents along the way. i go into in the book and those accidents and those mistakes lead to especially the polio issue in the 1950s there was a terrible accident, factual error and children were injected with actual live virus, so again 250 years of the weekend virus and then along comes the covid, the coronavirus and an entirely new platform is invented or probably not telling you anything you haven't read about in other
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newspapers, but this is just the "new york times" or you know explain so many times, not going to go deeply into it except to say it's an absolute milestone. it's going to change the way that we fight the virus is going and it's not a miracle, but it's an amazing testament to the advances especially in the last 20 years in genetics medicine. so, let's see here are called on a second. i know what i want to tell you. the success of the mrna vaccine really is due to one thing the former administration disliked which is it through tons of money at the companies and said figured out, make the sermon, if
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it works we will pay you and if it doesn't work we will pay you and they listed some of the problems that could arise and that provoked a platform had been known to science for a while, that provoked deplatform from sitting in on the shelf to actually being tested in clinical trials rapidly, so we now have this kind of record timeframe literally they had this mrna strand three days after the chinese sent over a dynamic map of the covid virus and now 11 months later they are putting in people's arms and it works. normally, clinical trials can take 10 or 15 years before the fda will approve things. they did this right and it had--
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it has enormous implications for going forward in the future of medicine, so this is the triumph of science even in this era of anti- expertise and data manipulation which we will talk about. they threw money at the vaccine and it worked-- they didn't throw much money at therapeutic's, but what happened? they did throw enough money at them so that they had certain cocktails and i have a section called cocktail hour because who got the cocktail? well, the former guy here is ripping his mask off when he came out of the hospital having been given the drug cocktail.
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ben carson got the cocktail. christie got the cocktail. rudy giuliani got the cocktail. all of these men who were in the age group and the obesity level that was really, really vulnerable to be killed by the virus so we watch that play out in the summer. meanwhile, there were people in california-- how many people were in the hospital hallways gasping their last breath and how much money with they have paid for that kind of access? but, that's how it played out and we know that. this is just remind you some people got the cocktail and some people did not. now i just want to give you a little literary deviation here.
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instead people started to attach themselves to these notions, what i call the experience of the seriously theory explosion. documented on fracking started meeting people to talk about bill gates and 5g and how bill gates isn't behind, this is part of a plan to reduce the human population by 80% because the leak understand the world cannot continue as it is with this. they planned it to get rid of a bunch of people. i kept hearing this over and over again from different people out in the backwoods of ohio. when he started working on this book, i had a young man
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who spent a lot of time on the internet do a listing of all of the conspiracy theories that were live and kicking on reddit and other places on the internet. and of course the great reset which is is a slogan to think we are moving forward and we are going to figure out wealth and equality. going to start being a more green. it's a slogan that was immediately picked up and taken as something much more sinister. i never watched fox news i happen to turn on last night and laura was on. literally said the great reset. she was talking about brussels
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is controlling america or something. these slogans come whoever made that muppet is still using them i think davos and the british government were talking about they are sort of tone deaf. no good ideas, the davos folks do not understand. this is how it looks to the conspiracy minded. that is where the conspiracies. there are many, many unified they throw a lot of things as everyone knows. we've got bill gates, we got the illuminati, i did not realize this but that meant actual attacks on 5g. many got what's his name the actor blanking on his name right now, woody harrelson jumped on 5g, this is why you're getting sick.
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we have kind of an awesome ability to spread these things, i visited the internet but the gullibility and the fact people will prefer to believe those things over what found she is talking about. part of it is of course the echo chamber. i guess she lost her job over this but for a long time there calling it a hoax until it came impossible to keep denying it. i think you still will find people it's just as bad as the fluid nothing worse that's thanks to the echo chamber here. but this is where we are at as a society. half of us are many, many people believe in the big lie about the election. they believe in these kinds of
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stories about what we know, what violence tells us is going on. so the conclusion i came to about why people are so willing to resist science and what we are told about what's going on, has to do actually with the success of the science the success of the vaccine. in 1900 the life span of the average american the average lifespan was 48 and 49 for men and women. that's our great-grandparents generation. now if you're born 2019 you can expect to be 79 or 80. why are people living so much longer? why is the number changed? one reason it changed so dramatically is that we have
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vaccines for these diseases that used to kill children in huge numbers. if you were born in 1900 or stay tuned 1920, you would not have gotten probably to adulthood without having witnessed a sibling die or have a very traumatic infectious disease. names we cannot even pronounce crew do not even know what they are because our children have never had to have these things. we do not know what they are. we do not know what it feels like to watch our children die before very eyes. or be traumatized for life by memories of horrible diseases. we don't understand that. we do not have that anymore. and so being that we are spoiled in some ways by the very success of these vaccines
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which of course we have a fairly significant section of parents, not a majority but a significant number of parents who will refuse to take these vaccines until at their children take them. i think in some ways the very success of the vaccination, the very success of the medical science has created a spoiled dy i generation that just thanks that she thanks we should have the vaccine it might mess up my genetics. you can find anything on the internet. people look on the internet and they say all trust that before trust the experts. so the mask issue, everybody knows how that played out. again the former administration does not
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necessarily get full blame for what happened with the masks because the doctors were early on saying you do not really need the mask. and then we did need the mask and they change course and the fact it wasn't clear in the beginning gave a lot of ammunition to this notion of we don't really need the masks. however, as everybody remembers the mask i definitely saw i was in pennsylvania and ohio traveling around last summer, the mask became like a bite inside. everything was politicized including the cdc numbers, which we now know they were not trying to stop them from getting involved with the political people, at the very end it mattered so much of them that these numbers look low. so anyway the numbers were not low.
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lots and lots of americans died it's over 5000 is important out could up to 900,000. and even birx admits that wasn't necessary, did not have to be that way. we are a sophisticated society. again the public health itself has been not something that's ever been a priority in this country, military spending in this country with the discretionary budget usually 40 -- 60% of the discretionary budget is going to the military. three to 6% of the american discretionary budget over the last 60 years has gone to public health. what actually did we need to be defended from in 2020? not the chinese, not the
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russians, not isis but you knew what we need to be defended from. so lastly i'm just going to say one of the things i thought a lot about was how would we deal with the future viruses. we are told there's going to be many, many more saying it can happen any time. obviously we are more prepared with a new platform that can rapidly be ramped up. and of course with we don't forget this particular pandemic we may have better prepared leaders. but last week know this week but w.h.o. came up some recommendations. they found crucial shortcomings in the global response. they had recommended that the w.h.o. be more active, more proactive, more involved in shutting down travel.
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and being equipped to investigate early on what kind of virus may be calling epidemic so they could head off a pandemic. and of course that would be a big change if everybody came together buying the boy chose others and organizations going to address these issues wide event like this would. but again i have to say my sense is that for a large segment of the americans, not the majority but many are really enamored of the facebook bureaucrat in somebody and brussels has abraham was saying less site telling us what to do. remains to be seen what kind of lessons we will be taken from this. and with that i think i will let you ask me some questions, i've got a little bit over my time but not too much and got
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about 20 more minutes i think. >> no, nina you are great on time. and thank you so much for that presentation. we can stop screen sharing whatever you would like. i apologize it took me a second to pop back in here. i was checking in with bill gates is infatuated with my every move now that he's getting divorced. there are some things we mentioned and we will get to questions. he reminded me of the great reset i remembered when i thought that was turning my iphone on and off. because disconnecting from the matrix is a huge deal for me. i run but reading your book you talked about one of the chores are what people thought would help them during the pandemic was pinning a toad to
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their collar and laughed at that nice at-home way to make an to get to for one that i pinned nay toad on if i printed is it a kiss is that how they sold it? probably not. [laughter] that is what popped into my head. we have got some really, really cool questions. i will say folks her book, nina's is out next tuesday the . you would be well served to grab this book. when i tell you we started reading it and i've got to be honest i do not read a lot and more. do audiobooks but i sat and read it and 50 pages just flew by. there were moments it was funny cut to the bone phrases, and i said and i will say this publicly at this designate the bestseller list i think when you to reevaluate how the during the whole bestseller thing. it was so good especially
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first chapter when he went to the timeline. it was almost triggering. like oh my gosh that's what happens, we lived through that. that is a thing and i'm glad you opened with that because i don't think we should forget the way you wrote about we sort of forgot in our collective historical memory about the spanish flu. yeah were not gonna talk about that, that didn't happen. we were caught flat-footed here. we cannot afford to forget. as you said, we have got more stuff coming. and we have to keep these lessons and be prepared, thank you, thank you, thank you for this work you're doing. we do have some great questions. first filling we been doing this so long at almost a family affair, thank you susan for your first question. susan says hello to nina. she's actually interested if
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you have a quick comments about what is currently going on in the middle east as you have lived and worked there as a journalist covering the settlements. high notes we talked about all to my but susan jumped in there with that question. >> i know isis and is asking with that she knows my book unholy business is about the relic trade and the use of relics and archaeology to make land claims in israel by the nationalist the religious and nationalist. when i was there, i've not been there for many years, that time they were fighting already, they always were. idf had to protect it from the religious right. at that time it did not seemed like it was going to end well. i would not have expected it to last this long actually.
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but it also note these issues are inflamed by political leaders there regularly. showing up there and that started that very timely conflicts for the right in israel. >> thank you, thank you be so willing to talk off-the-cuff on that. >> i appreciate it. victor rivera wants to know, hey victor, this could be a whole separate discussion, what are the red flags you see for future pandemics? >> well, obviously the problem of forgetting this one. as you mentioned, alia, there are no memorials to victims of
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the spanish flu. we do not tend to look back at these types of events. and we are facing because of claimant, man's activity, our species involving ourselves with other animals we are facing these orphic viruses all the time. her back on airplanes all the time, we are eight linked species, more links than we ever have been physically but also by the internet and by our phones. that to me suggests we actually might have a transformative change here. the internet has allowed us for the first time to recognize this is a species
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wide event. that we are seeing in real time everyone around the world is experiencing the same exact thing. we are all vulnerable and exactly the same way. so i think that maybe that would kind of lead to a kind of collective response next time. but again if you're watching fox news, we do not want to be collective. that's one of things i did not get into was the administration rejecting any interaction with the international buys including the w.h.o. why we can get the test early on because they scorned it. anyway victor that is the red flags there are some good flags and some not so good. >> indeed thank you. this leads me to it actually two of sue's questions. do we have a workbook in place
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to prevent a future pandemics? i don't know if we can prevent one as we can manage better. i don't know if we can prevent it. so back to your point i don't think we can prevent. there were workbooks. there was a pandemic plan that they dispensed with. there i was on contraception, abortion, moral stuff not on there might be this unbelievably, unexpected event where the people who had written the pandemic playbook i think it was called under the obama years actually been paying attention to it. they knew this was a possibility. there is a playbook. there is a playbook for what to do and they were not following it. they were not following it they were not even communicating with the pandemic preparedness experts who were a resource that they could have been working with
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from the beginning. those people recognizing what was going on, i interviewed them they did not who to contact in the administration to pick up the phone and say here's what you need to do. >> that was you calling the white house press one for proper pandemic response, press two for when the vaccination will be out. there is that of that happening. check from canada wants to know was this fiasco a former guy thing? i am with you i won't say his name i refuse. i was calling and he who must not be named but that's an insult to harry potter fans everywhere. but was this fiasco alaska i think? or what a different republican president handled this different? >> i know there are people saying, even right now, this was something that probably would have been mishandled no
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matter what. we just not have, we do not have our act together as a government. we do not have to work as a government and concert policymakers. but i don't agree with that at all. if you had a leader that said i believe in science but the mask on. or a leader who said theme is going to be sole purchaser were going to get all this stuff. they did not do any of this. they did not do any of it. they just let it roll. cynically i believe they probably looked at actuarial tables and said we could probably lose a bunch of people. that's another thing i get into. he had cocktail for white that rich guys and he had nothing for the brown poor people who were gasping for air by the millions around the world by
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the hundreds of thousands of people in this country who could often live in circumstances where they did not have the money to even go to the hospital. that is the medical system here. he could have a whole conversation about why people did not go to the hospital. they know they are uninsured. they go to the hospital the going to get hit with a massive bill. that is one thing you could've done in the government. they did actually they said they were not supposed recharging people. but the hospitals weren't telling people that they wanted their money. the "new york times" covered that they were still suing people. anyway that's off the >>. i would not say one 100%, 80% is on the former guy and those people i described you as the pillars of his power. yes there are certain proms of the system here, especially with the public health system. but as you can see every bit
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is getting vaccinated right now. that is because they put everything behind it. that with the power of the u.s. government behind it. the biting and menstruation came in several doing this. and you know what? i don't think they wanted to do that they chose not to do that because they did not want people to see how we had the government can be a force for good. >> right. i like you my native new yorker. former epicenter of the epicenter. and just sitting here watching the daily press briefings going are they really make an estate fight for this like it's thunderdome are you serious? it was unbelievable. like the government did not work did understand its power and chose not to do it. this is a question right off of what were talking about. the cdc messed up testing and why? are they unprepared way before the last guy? i know you talk about this in your book. what used to be the gold
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standard, they were it. >> they didn't mess it up. look, they turned down the early test models from the w.h.o. that were working. they did not get on the stick about it. once they did they mess them up. they could have asked the fda to do a workaround. they could've used some of those test apparently but they didn't. they did jump on the other guy but it was a good idea. they did emergency authorize that. they do not donate workarounds for the public health agencies are trying to use commercial product. why? i would like to know as well. we know that he likes the number slow he said it is got to read syndrome he said that. there is no debate he did not
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want the people to be tested for it so yes the cdc screwed up on their invention but there were workarounds and they did not involved with them. >> thank you, thank you. eddie, hey eddie good to see you out there. steno, jiminy thoughts on how the coronavirus actually came into existence? >> that is a good question. i interviewed david wellman who is a stanford virologist. he is one of the people who thanks it is possible that the wuhan bat experiments are the source. not that this was deliberate but things happen and labs. in this conversation about that was not something we can have when the former guy was
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running the show. there's conspiracy theorists and nobody wanted to jump on board. now they can discuss among these experts. i think the jury is still out. what i believe she can't rule that out the way the w.h.o. team did when they went over there. you can't say this did not happen this way. but again the virology community not interested in having this conversation. because first so if you are the virologist at the wuhan lab, how do you have that conversation millions of people died if this was an accident furthermore there labs all over the world they would have to change their way of doing things. i don't think they are motivated to do that. you cannot rule that out. but the jury is still out,
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obviously it could have jumped from an animal into a another animal they just haven't very of intermediary was. long story short i am open to the lab leak idea. and i don't think it's the conspiracy theory. >> okay gusher of so many questions, thank you guys. i love this audience you guys a very smart, thoughtful, great listeners and great questioners that's what i can read the smallness of the type a or in the q&a box. that is a fun question do you get former guy from nicole wallace? or is it the other way around? >> i don't know where i got it. i started seeing it on twitter. i thought biden said it first. i thought biden said the former guy. whoever set it great. >> thank you for sure.
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wants to know should be shut out travel alerts from india? >> i do not know how to answer that. obviously i think it seems like a good idea. the w.h.o. again the recommendations this week w.h.o. should have the ability to say stop flying out of that country right now, but i think there was discussion about whether that was not such a good thing if you had to lock everybody into their country locked down. i do not know. a person think it support a good idea to kind of isolate where the big corruptions are. because again it's mutating in the body. that is why we need to have these vaccines. the really good question is, should there be no ip and
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should every country in the world have access to these amazing new vaccines? courses are probably have to be frozen and these developing countries are not going to have the ability to keep this thing as cold as it should be. so anyway the long answers i do not know if they should be locking them into. i certainly don't think it's a good idea for them to be in the air to becoming and delivering a lot of people into the center of new york city. >> write five minutes of my house the jfk airport. carl has a question. going to partially answer because i have something to offer. given answer that's great. carl wants to know your advice dealing with a business partner and their passionate decision to remain unvaccinated even though were in the business of bringing people together in singing
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workshops thank you for your great work. i will awful to carl the speaker we had a couple of weeks ago, nick west wrote a book called about the rabbit hole. he had similar really, really wonderful thoughtful step-by-step advice about how you talk to these folks. lindsey understanding is not going to happen overnight. they are very entrenched in their thought process and how the first step really has to be communication. i really do recommend his book and that episode which is available on youtube, nina feel like a crack at the question i would love to what you have been to say. so thank you answer that better than i could have listened to that. i don't know. what i tell people is, and i have friends who are organic rejecting admits going to mess
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with my dna or is not natural. my response of them is look, you do not even understand what the vaccines some of you have rejected for your own children you don't even understand the world was like, you cannot imagine what they have done for you. you are living in a world that is benefited by that. you are lucky and kind of spoiled that's how i address that. giving them those facts. now of course writes, i've had discussions with my friends again i know people who have had longer weirder reactions to the second shot that i did. i didn't feel good for a day but i have had friends who it's going on pretty bad for a little bit longer. we've had discussions like we really don't know what this will have done to us in ten years. geez maybe we are all going to
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have like contracted something our bodies will have reacted oddly to it. i feel really confident that is not going to happen based on what i understand as a layperson. having talked to a lot of people about this vaccine. i think it is amazing, it is safer than the actual viruses in some ways concept anyway. >> well thank you, thank you for that. i know we are at the top of the hour. i do want to get to at least one more question if you don't mind. it is one that i have as well. you mentioned this in the book and in the presentation it's almost frightening in a way and thank you jack holmes for this. sit it seems that humanity to a certain point has not come very far. it appears that many americans are trapped in the past, do
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you agree? our reaction to this is not any different than the londoners. you said you were reading that book i wrote it down summer, daniel defoe's, we are the same people where we not better? >> again i'm not an evolutionary psychologist or whatever area study is that would look into our reactions to things that happened are affected by our species history things that happened was that don't happen to us anymore. but i would have to think there's an instinct in us to again it's that magical thinking the residual things go back to our primal. we can't do anything about it you are helpless.
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you to start or looking to your astrologer, that is going on all the time. it's asking why do people still have religion? why are we still looking to a guy in the sky for help? >> thank you. and you know what customer i lied i do have one from . >> i'm good me to it me too. right after this for me is my personal cocktail hour. becca love that it's cocktail day by the way. i am in chicago also only 7:00 o'clock here, well within cocktail hour. >> for sure. ask away. >> okay i won't go too much further down the path but collin had a great couple of questions. do you expect us to have annual vaccinations for
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covid-19, 20, 21, 37 hike bingo whatever it is. [laughter] >> we're certainly going to have to take a booster shot. her going to have to take a booster shot because the virus is inert inside the body the more people who have it the more it is mutating. then the mutations become immune or they are evolving. look what's happening india right now. they're making at their furnaces creating something new, yes were going to have to get shots like the flu i guess. it is not going to be eradicated no is not going to be eradicated. the predictions were in the beginning i think are still saying this that at some point it will be like a cold, it won't be killing us and will not be congealing our blood and causing these massive immune reactions that kill
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people. but we are a ways from that. will there be a covid 20? i don't know. hopefully they're not going to come annually. >> a year off would be nice. >> are wintering anew? who knows the world's going crazy because of man's activity on this planet. we are moving toward electric cars little bit dependence on also fuel there are just so many of us. so yes. >> there are so many of us yet i am single, could someone please figure that out for me would be doing there? [laughter] nina, i really went to thank you for sharing your time and your expertise and for writing such a wonderful peace. again, buyers everyone it comes out next week. i think you would be well served to add it to your
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reading list. and again to everyone in the audience if you miss anything the recording of this event will be available tomorrow at skeptical inquirer.org. my thanks again to you, nina and to the inquire the center for inquiry, our producer and of course to you the audience for spending your time with us. my name is leanne, thank you. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> two nights on book tv in
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prime time, history professor christopher elias provides a history of political gossip to the lies of j edgar hoover, joseph mccarthy and roy cohn. neuroscientists russell explains what happens in the human brain that makes habits hard to break. former new york city police department commissioner bill wratten reflects on his more than three decades in law enforcement and offers his thoughts on policing in america. yale university history professor elizabeth hinton, examines police violence and social unrest. and steven kunin former undersecretary for science at the department of energy during the obama administration argues the science behind climate change is not settled. and is leading to bad policy.
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that all starts tonight at 6:55 p.m. eastern. find more information @booktv.org, or consult your program guide. connect cspanshop.org is on c-span's online store per there's a collection of c-span products, browse to see what is new. your purchase will support our nonprofit operations produce all of time to order the congressional directory with contact information for members of congress and the biden administration. go to cspanshop.org. >> now on c-span two book tv more television for serious readers. >> good evening everyone. with the new york historical societyou president and ceo. i am thrilled toie welcome you to tonight's virtual program, the
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