 COVID because I think that what happened last year is an amazing illustration, an amazing illustration of what the regulatory state actually does to us and what are the consequences and what are the costs of the regulatory state and what the contrast is with the free market and I thought that really looking at 2020 and looking at the response to COVID is a laboratory for the effectiveness or in this case the ineffectiveness, the disaster, the motorist disaster that is the regulatory state. It's a little petri dish and I really haven't seen anybody do this. Anybody take apart what happened in 2020 in the context of this is what government does it. This is what government does to you in a sense as an extreme. But this is what the regulatory state does to you every single day. This is what a regulatory state does to you on a regular basis. This is what the regulatory state, this is the situation the regulatory state creates. Thank you Jonathan. You know if you write a little something I'll send it to Leonard and wish him your best which I think he'd appreciate. The regulatory state is a killer. The regulatory state kills people, makes people sick. Freedom is the solution to any kind of health problem, any kind of pandemic, any kind of disaster like that and we saw that last year with large and it's shocking to me that almost nobody's talking about that and it's shocking that the lessons we're going to learn, the lessons the culture seems to want to learn from COVID that we need more government. Government is the solution. The government can solve our problems. We can expect bigger government, more intervention, more involvement, more engagement, more regulations coming out of COVID than we had before. When the lesson we should be learning is the exact opposite. So I want to take two things. Now I know I've talked about this many times over the last year but it's good to have it all together. It's good to talk about it all in a particular context. It's good to bring it together, all the facts that we've kind of accumulated over the last, over the last year and kind of present them all in the same place all at once. I love this in some form, in some way, at some point I have talked about and discussed. So we're going to talk about two things. We're going to talk about testing and vaccines and in the context of the regulatory state and what the regulatory state is responsible for and not and how that has impacted the world and how that has impacted us and how that has impacted the probability that people get COVID, get sick from COVID, die from COVID. Before we do that, I just want to remind people if you do like the show, like it, don't forget to press the like button. Before you leave, it again helps the algorithms on YouTube and of course you can use the super chat to ask questions, questions of $20 or more. Get priority, it's a way to support the show and of course a way to also get your question answered and be engaged on these questions. So please use the super chat, you can also use youronbookshow.com slash support to support the show. All right, let's jump into COVID regulatory state and let's start with testing. Now I want to talk a little bit about, you know, okay, so we'll talk about a bunch of different things regarding testing, but let's start with the fact that every epidemiologist will tell you and the best in class standards of epidemiology and of dealing with the pandemic are that one should test often, test frequently, isolate those who are sick, isolate those who are positive, try to trace the people who might have been exposed to the person who's positive and isolate them or test them and then isolate them. This is how you deal with the pandemic, it's 101, it's the basics and it really is what the CDC had in writing as their plan going into this pandemic. Every single plan dealing with the pandemic starts with test, trace, isolate. Now to be able to test, trace, isolate, first you need a test. Now what's interesting is that in middle of January, the Chinese researcher in a Chinese lab actually published the genome of the virus and he put it up online and made it accessible to other scientists. Now the Chinese government penalized him for that and kicked him out of the lab for a while, but it's due to heroism of some Chinese researchers like that that we know and we got to know as much as we did about the virus as early as we did with some significant consequences. But the genome of the virus was known in mid-January. Almost immediately a number of labs around the world started devising tests to deal with the virus. One of the first tests was produced by the World Health Organization and that is a test that was used in Europe and some other countries. In South Korea the government invited, the regulatory agencies I guess responsible for health in South Korea invited private companies to design and deploy tests and they gave them the information and they said run with it and design tests and South Korea had a test was started to testing very early on together with Taiwan and some other Asian countries. All based on tests that in South Korea at least the case was that were designed by the private sector. In the United States the CDC rejected the test that was developed by the WHO even though it was an effective test and started to design its own test. It set very ambitious standards for its own tests, standards far greater for efficaciousness for being able to deal with viruses after they mutated. All kinds of standards were way too high. As a consequence, one of the consequences was that the test failed early on. It was a disaster, the agents that were being used were polluted were no good then they kept on trying and basically what happened was testing in the United States got delayed by about 45 days because the CDC refused to let other labs including university labs including biotech labs refused to let all of them develop their own tests. They let the private sector develop tests while it tried to develop its own test and failed. Now there are a couple of theories on why I tried to do this and I don't have an answer, I have no idea. You know one theory would suggest that they were infused with Trumpism and therefore did not want a test from overseas and they did not want a test from the WHO because of the resentment of it has to be American made, the whole idea by American. That would be one. Other explanations have more to do with the bureaucracy itself and them wanting to create their own tests and pride at the CDC and the scientists wanting to make it their own and wanting to make it the best and be the best in the world and the two might be connected and the two might add to one another and there might be other explanations that we haven't heard yet but the fact is that the CDC failed massive regulatory failure and the CDC did not do what you'd expect we would do in America which is utilize the fact that we have hundreds of labs in this country. We have dozens and dozens of biotech companies in this country. We have dozens and dozens of labs at universities in this country all that could be working on a test and instead of incentivizing the private sector instead of motivating the private sector to design and build the test and allowing them to deploy that test in which case we could have been testing in early February and maybe, maybe, maybe got a handle on this early enough so that we could have contained it and stopped it or at least flattened the curve dramatically and never got into the position of granting politicians the power to shut our lives down. It would have had massive consequences to our lives, massive consequences to saving lives and massive consequences to the economy and yet in spite of the fact that we had a Republican president spy, the fact that we had a Republican Senate and Republican appointees and political positions in positions in the regulatory agencies, the regulators relied on government for the solution, relied on the regulations for the solution and did not, did not access the private sector, did not access markets for the design deployment of testing capability. One can only imagine what would have happened if they had done that. Of course it would have required another step by the regulators and that is to actually approve the tests and not set standards that are so ludicrous, so crazy that testing becomes impossible or too expensive or too cumbersome or too bureaucratic to actually do. I saw a tweet today, let me see if I can get this tweet, oops where is it, put it somewhere, oh there it is. I saw a tweet today by somebody whose wife is actually an emergency room physician in New York and who suffered the worst of kind of the spike in COVID cases in March. He wrote that he ordered some at home COVID tests but the FDA hurdles are amazing despite it being a six pack of tests, you're required to have a COVID symptom to order and after testing you have to chat with a live provider who reads your results despite the fact that it's not much different from home pregnancy tests that you can do yourself. So even today, a year, a year, just over a year, since the CDC, the FDA, the Health and Human Services Department knew of the existence of this virus, a year since the first tests were developed in other countries, 400,000 deaths attributed to COVID by the officials at the CDC, they obviously think it's a serious thing, they still are creating massive amounts of bureaucracy, restraints, constraints, an ability to test, imagine you had a test at home that you could deploy with saliva, easily read like a pregnancy test and it wasn't super sensitive, but imagine it was such that it told you if you were super contagious or contagious at all, because when your viral load is low, you're not very contagious, when your viral load is high, you are very contagious, as they would tell you if your viral load is high and then you would stay home if you were positive and you would go out without worry if you were negative, and you could do this theoretically every day, there are tests out there that cost a dollar a day, but the FDA won't approve it, why? It's not sensitive enough, but we don't need sensitive tests, that's the whole point, we need tests that tell us if we're contagious or not, and here again the regulatory barriers are killing people, literally killing people, and nobody seems to care, nobody's talking about this, nobody's up in arms about this, I mean we could have again if we had those kind of tests, let's say it would have taken until the summer to get a test like that, but by the summer it was developed out of a company out of Massachusetts, then we would be able to take control of this test, we would be able to take control of this test as individuals, somebody writes the tests were 80% accurate, but 80% accurate is great, it means that a significant number of people who would go out into the world not knowing if they were positive, a significant number of them would know, and it wouldn't stop it completely, but it would reduce the load dramatically and save tens of thousands of lives if not hundreds of thousands, so just the failure on testing is resulting in tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people dying, I mean right now the tweet was one story hood, but another story hood was that you can buy these home tests at CVS and the test itself costs $15 and you can buy it and I think it has again multiple you can do multiple tests for $15, but the government doesn't allow the pharmacies to sell these tests, doesn't allow the pharmacies to sell these tests unless you also buy an app and if you add the app and the test and everything else that you need, the cost of the test is $50, now $50 is a significant amount of money for a lot of people, now you've lost the whole benefit of having at home tests, somebody says if you feel sick, yeah if you feel sick get a PCR test which is accurate, at least much, much more accurate than these antigen tests, these fast antigen tests, but you can go and get a PCR test if you feel sick, now even those are not 100% accurate it turns out and if you test positive you just stay home until you test negative, so I'll get to the vaccines I promise, but just in terms of regulation and testing the fiasco is of you know massive proportions, it's hard to believe that you know imagine 4,000 people a day are dying from COVID and you know the government because of this regulatory fiasco nobody cares, now imagine if private enterprise had done something that was causing 4,000 people to die a day, I mean private enterprise the market is blamed for any little thing, if just a few people die of something that the private market does, I don't know a plane accident or I mean oh my god the investigations, the lessons learned, the market failure, what about this massive unprecedented government failure and nobody seems to care and this goes of course to the fact that we live in a culture that trusts government and believes in government and what it doesn't believe in what it doesn't trust is the private sector at all and when government screws up it gets all the slack in the world because you know why because the government is ultimately motivated by you know motivated by what by the public good by the common good by altruistic motivations and therefore you know if it screws up that but it meant well, they meant well, see but business, business is motivated by making money, business is motivated by selfish motivations by self-interest and that cannot be tolerated so even the smallest breach the smallest problem becomes massive, massive so it turns out that we could have had the right testing testing would have made this problem much much much smaller many many tens of thousands of people would be alive and we would be much safer and ready in a much better condition and have much more time for a vaccine to kick in but here's the thing about the vaccine the vaccine in and of itself is a massive regulatory failure people can talk about operation warp speed but it is with it's basically at the end of the day a complete another disaster as I said before on a show Joe Biden is now saying oh we're gonna do a hundred and you know a hundred shots in a hundred day a hundred million shots in a hundred days well but that's the rate we're at today which is pathetic we're doing 5.3 doses per hundred people right now at this pace we all maybe vaccinate all of the United States within a year if things go well that's pathetic it's particularly pathetic when you understand when the vaccine was developed and when we could have started now imagine a world with no FDA oh with an FDA restricted to prosecuting fraud and nothing else well it turns out that I told you about the genome being published by a Chinese scientist in in the middle of January of last year but a year ago well within a weekend after their publication Moderna had developed a vaccine within a month following that they had produced a vaccine certainly by late spring and early summer they had done what are called phase one trials on a vaccine and come to the conclusion that it was safe now imagine a world with no FDA or an FDA again focused on just fraud imagine such a world what would happen well as soon as the vaccine was deemed by the company as basically safe still risky because the numbers were limited then companies could have gone out to people to individuals and said look we've got a vaccine we think it works the science is solid we've tested it it seems safe still risks but if you want to try it out we're willing to give it to you while we do you know whatever tests our you know private testing labs would require us to do in order to get full certification by these private labs the privatized FDA and you voluntarily would go and get vaccinated or not and if you did you would feel free right you would go out there into the public you wouldn't have to and maybe you actually got a thing that you could show businesses saying I don't need a wear mask because I've been vaccinated or maybe not but you could go to work you could fly on airplanes and you could at least see feel safe about yourself you could interact with older people because you would feel safe about you and imagine that over the next few months data came out and as the data came out about how safe it really is and how efficacious it really is more and more people would sign up now talk about a study you would have here hopefully millions of people signing up and the study would be massive and instead of waiting until November to consider authorizing it and then wait another three weeks to show the world you're really thinking about it which is what the FDA did so it only approved it in mid-December you would have had people starting to take the vaccine in large numbers starting in maybe may or maybe June and by the end of December you would have had a significant portion of the American population vaccinated you would have known whatever side effects they were and they weren't and you would know you know what the path forward is and we would be over this very quickly but no you cannot as an individual get a vaccine unless the FDA tells you it's okay to get a vaccine the FDA has no incentive to do that quickly their incentive is to show the world that they do a good job that they are not too risky that they are not they care about human life because when does that person at the FDA loses job when somebody dies because of a yes answer that they gave or somebody gets sick because of a yes answer that they give if some drug turns out to not be effective or to have awful side effects that's when they lose their jobs they never lose their job when they say no if they say no to a cancer drug that's gonna save hundreds or thousands of people's lives nobody's gonna fire them because nobody will know that those people's lives could have been saved if they say no to a vaccine then everybody goes oh yeah the FDA is being cautious it's going to be cautious 400,000 people have died even if they don't lose their jobs they get bad press they none of them want to be and some of them do lose their jobs I mean they don't want to be in a position where they're being blamed for approving a drug that turns out to be bad so they air on the side of caution it's built into them in sense structure there's even if they're very you know very good people and and and want to do the best job possible and really care about human life and all of that their incentive structures just as an institution is built to prevent them from doing a good job tens of thousands of people have died but that's the status quo so nobody cares but if somebody gets sick because of vaccine oh my god people rip their hair out because that's not the status quo somebody gets side you know side effects so it's it's it's truly it's again I don't understand a culture that is so concerned about how many people have died again the official numbers of I think 400,000 and going up all the time whether it's over reported or not I will leave that to a different discussion but official numbers than numbers that should motivate people should motivate the media should motivate just people right the official numbers 400,000 and yet nobody cares about the fact that these many of those people could have been vaccinated in the summer and not have died nobody questions the regulatory design of our government and nobody extrapolates well this is going on a covert maybe this goes on every day every year all the time with regard to hundreds of other diseases and maybe maybe many many people are dying from cancer and other diseases that don't have to now what are we told we're told oh but we need the FDA because if you don't have the FDA there might be fraud so they might be bad tests sold you mean like the one the CDC developed but yeah okay so somebody might just create a box with nothing in it pretend it's a test well I'm okay with having a government agency whose only job is to catch fraudsters to catch fraudsters not to prevent fraudsters to catch fraudsters and if they devoted all their energy and all their focus just to catch fraudsters they would do a pretty good job at it I think we could get rid of the fraudsters but how long would fraudsters really exist in a marketplace with competition I mean one of the one of the groups that have a strong incentive to catch the fraudsters are the competitors or the good guys the good companies the pharmacies who are selling the product they would investigate I mean there's so many ways you can catch the fraudsters yeah generally maybe not a good idea to buy a testing kit online from an unknown vendor who you've never heard of and nobody is willing to back and the same with drugs imagine a world in which you had competition to approve drugs to recommend to doctors and to hospitals and to pharmacies and to healthcare providers yes this drug we think is really efficacious really good and there was competition with different agencies and different maybe CVS at its own unit because it wouldn't want to sell a drug at CVS that didn't actually work so they had their own testing labs and it would have to compete with Walmart and it would have to compete with who knows who else would have these testing labs and then you would be able to see who gets it right consistently who doesn't and that would give you a competitive advantage imagine if that were the case and the focus was on patients and curing patients and getting drugs and patients and disclosing information imagine if you actually got it the information seat that said you know this drug actually does help disease X but just note that it might cause you why and hear the probabilities and you we advise you talk to your doctor about this you and your doctor make the decision about whether you should take it or not imagine that well obviously for if a test was 50% accurate it would be like flipping a coin of course you wouldn't take a test that was 50% accurate because that just means it's either right or wrong right there's this it's meaningless and it of course it depends accurate in what sense does it give for positive false negatives of the equally weighted false positives or false negatives yes it's a coin flip of course so it's you know it's stunning that the the market free market solutions to this the the the the are so obvious and so easy to imagine that but yet nobody does nobody wants to and we live in a culture that wants to rely on anything important on the government when it's exactly the opposite the things that are most important to us we should not rely on force again the only thing government is good at because it's the only thing that is uniquely governmental the only area where we need a monopoly is on the use of force it's on the use of for retaliatory force it's to protect us but other than that as we know markets work and there's no doubt in my mind that we could have had this vaccine months and months and months ago there's no reason so many people have died from COVID no many no reason why so many people have been sick with it it's the regulator's fault it's government's fault and that's where the blame should be put it's the CDC it's the FDA it's the people who manage the CDC the FDA the Trump administration the Biden administration it's their fault they did this to us this is a government catastrophe on a scale that is rare and what is truly shocking is that nobody's blaming them for what they've done to us what we need today what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that men's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes women's or mystic revelations any man or woman who values his life and who does not get want to give in to today's cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads all right before we go on reminder please like the show we've got 163 live listeners right now 30 likes that should be at least a hundred I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it but but at least the people who like it you know I want to see I want to see a thumbs up there you go start liking it I want to see that go to a hundred it all it takes is a click of a click of a thing whether you're looking at this and and you know the likes matter it's not an issue of my ego it's an issue of the algorithm the more you like something the more the algorithm likes it so you know and if you don't like the show give it a thumbs down let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes but if you like it don't just sit there help get the show promoted of course you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support on patreon or subscribe star or locals and and show your support for all for for the work for the value hopefully you're receiving from this and and of course don't forget if you're not a subscriber even if you even if you just come here to control or even if you're here like Matthew to defend marks then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up you'll know what shows are on when they're on you'll get notified right so yes like share subscribe support like share subscribe support there you go easy do one or all of those please