 The substance of the case you were making, which was that, first of all, you had been infected by COVID before and so presumably had natural immunity to the virus that as far as we knew at the time was as good or better and that's only been borne out by the evidence since. I wanna just pull up a little bit of your Wall Street Journal op-ed. You said that these coercive mandates violate basic principles of medical ethics. Informed consent is likewise required is required for medical decisions in all adults of sound mind. This is arguably the most deeply rooted doctrine in contemporary medical ethics. First, could you talk about informed consent and then I have a follow-up question about vaccine mandates as a, the broader concept of vaccine mandates beyond the COVID vaccine. Yeah, so informed consent in a nutshell is the notion that adults of sound mind have the right to accept or decline proposed medical interventions after receiving adequate information about the risks, benefits and alternatives to those treatments. And they have the right to make those decisions on behalf of their children who are too young to consent and even in people who are incapacitated and can't give consent because they're in a coma, we still have to obtain informed consent for medical interventions from a proxy from a family member or from someone who's been appointed a conservator or power of attorney. And this doctrine goes all the way back to the early 20th century, but that one of the landmark articulations was of course the Nuremberg Code following the Nazi doctor trial where about a dozen, a couple of dozen Nazi physicians were tried for crimes against humanity for basically doing gruesome experiments on death camp prisoners without those prisoners consent and the world responded with horror. Some of those doctors actually received the death penalty and hung about half a dozen of them were convicted for capital crimes. And the Nuremberg Code grew out of the experience of the Nuremberg trials and the very first principle articulated in the Nuremberg Code is the principle of informed consent for medical research, which was later applied in federal law to also requiring informed consent for all medical interventions and even for medical tests, speaking of testing, we can't run tests on patients in most circumstances without gaining their informed consent. Would there ever be a situation where a vaccine mandates would not violate medical ethics in this kind of emergency type of situation where there's a, let's say in a deadlier pandemic, a more effective vaccine, how do you, how do those factors change the calculation if at all from an ethical viewpoint? So in my view, they don't. So I am an opponent in principle of vaccine mandates across the board. I think prior to the pandemic, I might have been more open to some of these. They're usually theoretical, hypothetical, really deadly virus, everyone is at risk, which already is not a real world scenario because really deadly viruses tend to burn out very quickly. They tend not to produce epidemics or pandemics because they kill people too quickly before they can spread. So viruses come in two flavors. Low mortality viruses that are very contagious and can spread across countries or across the world. And high mortality. So examples of much higher mortality viruses that burn out rather quickly, the Ebola virus would be a good example of that, right? Much more concerning infection fatality rates than COVID, but only very time limited localized outbreaks that can be usually be contained much more easily than something like COVID, which is basically impossible to stop. It's okay. But where does something like smallpox work? So yeah, smallpox would be somewhere in the middle. Smallpox is probably the strongest example for vaccine mandates would be smallpox. It's got about a 30% mortality rate so it can produce epidemics, not necessarily pandemics, but it certainly can produce regional problems. The argument I think when it comes to something like smallpox, even then it falls apart because if you have a virus that's deadly enough and you have an intervention that is sufficiently effective, you have a sterilizing vaccine that protects the recipient, you're not gonna have to mandate it to people. People will voluntarily take it if it's clearly and obviously good for their health. And those that don't are not necessarily putting other people in harm's way because if the intervention is as effective as this hypothetical scenario describes, then the people who want that protection can have it available to them in the form of the vaccine. So there's- There's a natural rebuttal to that so frequently. I think about this in the context of smallpox, but also polio because actually when my son was an infant prior to being eligible to getting vaccinated against polio, we live right next to Hasidic South Williamsburg. And so this was actually kind of an interesting thing because we had a few cases of polio detected in New York City and detected in Rockland County right around the time when I had a baby in my arms who had not yet been vaccinated against polio. What do you say in terms of the, what do you say to the immunocompromised or people with really, really small infants or even if they want to opt into that protection, they're for whatever reason unable to do so at that time? I'm sure you've considered this at great length. Yeah, absolutely. So I think bodily integrity and bodily autonomy are sufficient overriding goods that accepting some degree of risk in order to maintain bodily integrity and bodily autonomy in order to avoid abuses of power is important for us as a society as a whole. I don't think we wanna live in a society where anyone has the right to force another person to inject something into their body that they may or may not want. And there may be circumstances where the time limited use of force to quarantine contagious people that are symptomatic might be warranted because that's a time limited infringement on civil liberties that may be justified for the sake of protecting other people. But the kind of scenario that you describe, we're still talking about infinitesimally low risks of acquiring a disease like polio in the current context. And so I just don't think that very small theoretical risk justifies forcing vaccines on the Hasidic Jewish community, for example. Yeah, fair enough. I'll also say that one consequentialist argument of all this, like just having seen it all play out is the way that these heavy handed mandates were implemented, which I was against from the beginning as well, is that predictably people don't like it and now they're more distrustful of vaccines on the whole. And I think that's put us in a very dangerous situation, especially given that we now learned about all this laboratory manipulation of viruses. Like who knows what's coming and this is unfortunately like a very real issue that we have to all think about both on a policy level and also a personal level, like what we're gonna do if that God forbid happened. I think to your point, Zach, there is this interesting unintended consequence that all three of us seem to be storing in the very front of our minds, but that for whatever reason, our policymakers haven't really stopped to consider, which is that you do squander public trust and you might in fact find yourself in a situation many years down the road where you wish you hadn't done that. I actually think that to your point, Erin, with the specific Hasidic example and these relatively few polio cases that were detected in the wastewater in New York City and surrounding areas, we did actually see in Rockland County where there's a really, really big Hasidic enclave exactly what you were talking about earlier, which was a voluntary vaccination drive where a bunch of Hasidic moms seeing the news about this polio outbreak were like, oh crap, a bunch of my kids aren't vaccinated and just immediately hopped into action and went to these local vaccine drives and very quickly got their children vaccinated recognizing that up until this point, polio isn't really something that circulates in the US and hadn't really been a realistic fear, but now that there are a few cases that have been detected, now they're choosing to protect their families and no government coercion was necessary in order to get that outcome. In fact, all the government did in this case was say, this is available to you, here's the news as to the wastewater detection, here are the news as to where this is circulating and if you would like to, you can come to this place and get this free vaccine available to you and people decided to opt into that of their own volition, which I think is a really heartening case study. That is a beautiful real world example of good public health functioning well and relying on the goodwill and the trust and the civic mindedness and the other directedness of most Americans, including people that might naturally because of cultural or religious reasons have skepticism about the need for those things. And we don't have to coerce parents to help their kids brush their teeth, right? Or to feed their kids or to take them outside once in a while so they get sunlight because most parents want to do the best thing for their children and their children's health. When you start forcing things on them, going back to the discussion of masks or you mandate a vaccine for an illness that they're not at high risk from and that vaccine has potential side effects or adverse consequences, you squander precisely that trust and that civic mindedness of voluntarily complying in situations in a sort of other directed community minded spirit. And I think that is a, situation you described is a perfect contrast to what we actually did in COVID and you see the different results and you see the different attitudes that both of those things fostered in the community. And I think it becomes pretty clear that, we can come up with hypothetical scenarios that might incline us to believe, yeah, we should force this on people. But if you see how that actually plays out historically in real world examples, I think it becomes very clear that that's not the way to go with public health. Thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Aaron Cariotti about the return of COVID mandates and his book, The New Abnormal. You can watch another clip from that conversation right here or the full conversation over here.