 I always say that, you know, people don't believe me, but I always say that, you know, I'm a progressive on these issues. I lean more to the regulatory issue and I've written two books on how it could be done. But I mean, over the years, I mean, I guess disappointment after disappointment makes you worry that they won't be able to get their act together even in a perfect world. In those months, when you watch Trump in the press conferences, you may have felt more uncertain and more nervous because he discussed it so flippantly. COVID's no big deal. Just maybe some, maybe bleach will help. Maybe light will help. I mean, he's speculating in front of national audience. And so of course that's going to be unnerving when people are seeing casualties and hospitals overwhelmed. He doesn't give you the feeling of somebody who's following all the details. And you do worry that he had secondary motives, which is obviously he was facing a reelection. I think the combination of the most divisive president in human history, an election year. And I think that's a recipe for disaster. But the reason I particularly put maybe more blame on Fauci is presumably he defines himself. He's the adult in the room. And yet he didn't want to have debates. I mean, look at how they demonized Jay and Martin. He quenched opposition. He put out his own statements that DeSantis reopened schools in the spring of 2020. That was the right decision, but he opposed those. And so, I mean, I expect more from people who are the adults in the room. For me, it's an obvious point that when you're facing a situation you've never faced before and making decisions that are larger than have ever been made in human history and unprecedented, that that's an opportunity where smart people will have the most disagreement, not the least disagreement, it's the least settled. And I think what you need is, and I suspect maybe this applies to war too. I mean, if I had a bunch of generals around a table, I want somebody there to argue why we're not doing the right thing. So I can hear the counterarguments and think about it. And even if I do what I'm gonna do anyway, I do it knowing some things that I might have been blind to. I think Scalia famously used to have a clerk whose only job was, they disagreed with him, but they provided a balance. In science, it's so desperately necessary. I think that to me, the failure of scientific debate has been the greatest failure around the pandemic. Podcasts, this video that you're all doing, you, we all did a better job than universities. I mean, Stanford, Harvard, my own institution. I can't think of a single debate we've had on visitor policies, masking in the hospital, school closure, masking in communities, vaccine uptake in policies. We've had zero debates. I'm in the Department of Epidemiology. Who should be debating this? It's not the universities and why are universities not debating it? I think that's part of a broader trend where ideas that people disagree with are viewed as violence and not something to contend with and outwit and persuade. And I think that's a huge problem. So you had Fauci and Collins. They had a point of view, a policy they wanted to advance. Debate would threaten to reveal their errors and they chose to quelch debate. I wanna point out one more thing. They're in a unique role. They're both somebody who's a pundit on TV telling you what we should do with schools and they're the head of the agency that gives scientists their funding. Our funding is dependent on their institution. And so any scientist who may feel like they disagree has to weigh the professional repercussions that they at least believe could happen in their mind. And I think in the future, no one should hold both those jobs. If you wanna be a pundit, be a pundit but don't control the NIAID budget. But it's structural and systemic. If it wasn't Fauci, if it wasn't Francis Collins, it's likely we would have still had similar mistakes made because when you have centralized control and centralized power and centralized knowledge, the possibility of bias and of just bad decision making being really negative, the consequence of that are much more likely. I totally agree. I mean, as much as I do blame them and I do blame them at a personal level and I do think some of them should be fired and I've written that. But I think you're right, that it is a structural problem and you could have replaced them with other actors who would have made similar, if not worse or different comparison. Yeah, I mean, we've replaced one president with another and error continues. So let's meet the old boss or meet the new boss the same as the old boss. Part of my impression was that one of the saving graces here in the United States was the fact that we do have this federalist system where different states could try different approaches. So we had Ron DeSantis here in Florida trying something else radically different than what California where I was living at the time was doing and was in contradiction to the CDC guidance and with the vaccine question I don't think DeSantis is necessarily anti-vaccine but Florida is certainly taking a different approach in terms of what it's state level agency is recommending for different ages in terms of the vaccine. And so I just wonder if that given the current state of the CDC and the FDA if that is part of the answer is continuing to devolve power down from them just make them less powerful give them less authority to impose mandates issuing guidance or keeping track of statistics is one thing but imposing any sort of either mandates or gatekeeping is where we really seem to run into problems especially once you get up to the federal level where you're talking about 330 million people. That's a superb point and I just I mean, I totally agree with you that if you want to strip them of powers I will support that and I was the opposite view maybe five years ago but I just want to point out one way that kind of backfired was the school reopening because Biden came into office and he said he wanted to reopen schools within a hundred days and not even high schools and he had difficulty because a lot of local typically left of center jurisdictions decided that they want to keep them closed for the rest of the year despite the fact teachers were getting the vaccines first and so decentralized authority can lead to innovation because I think Florida did more things right than California but it can also lead to chaos because I think San Francisco schools is an unmitigated disaster. Do you have a personal politics and how does that factor into your kind of framework and approach to these types of topics? Well, I'm a lifelong Democrat I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter and so to see my side get these issues steadily incorrect has been catastrophic. I mean, we got, we're the side that's supposed to say we care about poor disadvantaged minority children. We did the single greatest discriminatory action in quarter century, which was close their schools for 18 months and guess what? They all got COVID anyway and most of them got COVID before they got vaccines because uptake is so poor in that age group because the data is so weak. And so what have we done? We're the group that says we're, you know we believe in scientific principles. The same people who say that are critical of the Cochrane report on masking because it didn't yield the conclusion they want. And so I guess COVID-19 has been a profound disappointment that my side has any moral or scientific superiority over any other side. And now I'm without a party. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Vinay Prasad about US 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.