 You have written multiple times over the past couple of years about what the experience with the pandemic and with lockdowns and with EUAs and whatnot, how that is setting the stage, or you look forward to a future where a lot of democratic norms and a lot of personal liberty, economic liberty, you name it, ends. How are you feeling about the health of the body politic? Has the COVID experience kind of weakened us so that we're going to be more sheepish in the future, or has it kind of kicked in a set of kind of cultural antibodies? You were talking earlier with us about how now people are as likely as not to say screwed you to whatever the government says. Where are you on this kind of concern right now? Yeah, I'm very worried about what's outlined in that piece, and just think about it. We still take our shoes off in the airports. I mean, I don't know if that has done anything, or has any net expected value, versus the thousands of hours that we've had. It has caused an enormous amount of personal embarrassment, but beyond that. Beyond that time. That has accomplished much more than that. I mean, that is a good thing for the country to be doing. But we still do it. What's the argument in that piece? The argument is that we have a situation where who decides that their emergency powers end? It's the governor. It's the president. The president has announced that this emergency will end in May. If you have a situation where an elected official decides when they get to have massive powers, and they decide what the emergency is, and the media can shape our impression of the emergency, perhaps with misleading statistics or misleading anecdotes, how might that be misused? I think the potential for misuse is tremendous. That piece outlines a hypothetical scenario, I hope it never happens, that the governor of a small state around an election says, hey, the hospitals are filling up with cases, and we have to declare we're going to stop motor vehicles, because we can't just have extra car accidents in the hospital. We don't have the space, or other restrictions they could place, restrictions that could happen around voting, or election cycles. I think we have underestimated the threat of these powers to be used by an unscrupulous actor. And I think no matter where anyone sits on the political spectrum, you can all imagine somebody you don't want to have the power to declare unlimited emergency powers. And I think we should be more cognizant of that. This is from February 28, 2023. So yesterday, California just ended. Governor, I should be more specific, Gavin Newsom ended the state of emergency, because that's the situation we're in is that one person has the ability to do that with no democratic check on their powers. And I agree with you that this is a looming threat coming out of this that needs to be taken seriously. And I hope there's more kind of focus and effort, especially at the state and local level, since that's where these things seem to drag on and on again. Why should a state of emergency be able to just endlessly persist until the person who declared it says it's over? It seems like there should be a regular check-in maybe from the legislature to say, OK, are we really still all on the same page here? I mean, I know that the California legislature has the power to do that, but it's almost got to be baked into the state of emergency itself. Or else I'm afraid that we really are going to fall into that sort of trap whenever the next catastrophe hits. Absolutely right. No, I couldn't agree more with you. Yeah, and that's a place where the kind of structural reform where every state of emergency, no matter what, has a sunset clause, whether it's two weeks or 30 days or 90 days, or that it has to be renewed. God, you have to do that when you lock people up on psychiatric holds in California. You got to drag them in front of a court at least to keep them after a certain point. And the principle there is when you deprive people of liberty, there must be some check on your ability to deprive them of liberty. And what we did in the pandemic was in many ways we deprive people of liberty and some core human liberties, the liberty to go and visit your child when they get chemotherapy and have both parents be there. We deprive them of that liberty. We deprive them of liberty to go to shops and restaurants and go out. And there has to be checks on those sorts of deprivations. We all agree there was a COVID-19 emergency. But does anyone think there's an emergency for healthy 12 to 15-year-olds in 2023 February? I think I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who can genuinely look you in the eye and tell you there's an emergency. But if you were to imagine if there's people talking about whether or not there's an escape of bird flu or something like that, if that were really to happen in this year, I think we'll be totally destroyed. I mean, you'll just see some states doing the exact opposite of other states. There'll be fierce political contention around this issue. There'll be revolt from a huge chunk of the citizenry over any action, even an action that is actually the wise action for a different risk that's totally different. People may revolt over. I think we are so weak and vulnerable. So there's two parts of the question. One is, how can they rebuild the trust? Trust in a moment takes decades to re-accumulate. The second thing is what can an individual do? The second part first, what can an individual do? I mean, I used to also trust the CDC and my trust is shattered. And so what that means is every time I make a personal medical decision, I have to do a lot more homework. And so I have less and less trust in experts and I don't like to live that way. I mean, I'd like to have some trust in institutions and experts. It makes my life harder to go decide if the byvaling booster is right for me and figure out who I can follow and not follow. And I'm somebody who's trained in evidence-based medicine. You know, I'm trained in this sort of stuff, but it's still work. So I lament that. And I think we all are going to have to think of ways that we can work on that for the building trust back. I think we can talk about some structural fixes, but it's going to take decades. I mean, I think that the harms were done. It's going to take decades. Most of my fixes are, you know, the CDC look at their roles. Their job is to keep track of the death statistics and also to tell you what you ought to do. We need separate groups. I mean, the people keeping track of the statistics, just keep track of statistics and report statistics on a website that any American can download. They made mistakes in their statistics. You know, they were incorrect about the number of kids who are dead and they had to provide a revision. And of course their errors always go in the direction of their policy. And so an observer might say, this is not a random error. This looks like bias. Like you're lying to me to get me to do what you want me to do. And the only way to do that is to build a firewall. So the people who try to advise you are different than those keeping the statistics. I think there needs to be a third group, which is the group that sets out to evaluate the policies. And they should be separate from the group that institutes the policies. The CDC says schools should wear masks. And by the way, our new study that we published in our own journal says that that was a good idea. I mean, what am I to think? I mean, you said to do it, you did the study and you put it in your own journal and it has tons of flaws. We need separate checks and balances in public health, just like we do have in government. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Vinay Prasad about U.S. public health, mRNA vaccines and future threats that the precedent set by COVID emergency measures might pose to our civil liberties. You can check out the full conversation by clicking on the link in the description and catch these conversations streamed live to Reason TV every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern. See you next time.