 COVID has been an unmitigated governmental disaster. Everything the government basically has done from the beginning of COVID from the beginning has been a disaster, both the Trump administration and the Biden administration and the Trudeau administration and the Johnson administration. Everybody has been a disaster. Even Sweden didn't quite get it right. And it truly is sickening looking back just the degrees and the levels and the number of errors that have been made and the number of people who have died for no reason. And the number of people whose lives have been turned upside down for no reason. It's the number of kids whose development has been retarded for no reason. So there's this article in Barry Weiss' Stubstack about it says how to save science from COVID politics. Well, I can tell you how to save science from COVID politics. It's the separate science from politics. And the article points out all the ways in which COVID was politicized. Yes, but that's what happens when you have the government involved in science. It's what happens when you have the government involved in medicine. It's inevitable. It cannot not happen. It has to happen when government is involved in medicine, when government decides how many hospital beds are okay to have. When government decides what drugs they're gonna pay for and what drugs they're not gonna pay for. When government decides what should get emergency authorization, what shouldn't get emergency authorization and what is an okay drug and what isn't an okay drug. When government decides these things, bad stuff is going to happen instead of letting scientific knowledge develop, be judged, be evaluated by scientists and then by the marketplace. You get politicians deciding or you get scientists to become politicians because that's how they keep their jobs and that's how they get prestige and that's how they get on Fox News, on CNN News, on New York Times or whatever you wanna call it. So everywhere, everywhere that government has touched this virus from the beginning, it has made it a disaster. So what are the lessons learned? So this is what, these are the lessons learned from this doctor. I guess Dr. Vinay Prasad who wrote this article for Barry Weiser's sub-stack. I recommend it. Let me do this like I've been doing recently. We'll put this up. There it is. How do I fix that one second? Fix that, we'll put that there. How to save science of COVID politics? 10 crucial lessons from Dr. Vinay Prasad. So let's look at these lessons because the funny thing is almost all of them are things that we talked about in 2020. So first, identify the most vulnerable. From the beginning, from the first data that came out of China in February, March of 2020, it was understood completely and then reaffirmed. There's more and more and more and more data came. That this was a truly unique disease, a disease like we had never seen before. In that, it affected the old in the kind of proportions that just haven't been seen. An 88 year old has 8,700 times the risk of death. As compared to an 80 year old, 8,700 times. The rational thing to have done even with a government involved in healthcare is to protect the vulnerable, is to focus in on who's vulnerable, who can die and protect them and not do anything to those who are not vulnerable. We're not gonna die from this, we're not gonna go to hospitals, which means the young. So it was obvious from the beginning that, I mean, this graph is pretty amazing. I mean, hospitalization, right, zero to four years of age. There's just, nothing happens to them here. But look at the differences. Once you get to the 85 plus, that's where the action is. 65 you could argue. But if you're under 20 years old, this virus was never an issue. And yet we shut down schools. We force kids to wear masks. We give them vaccines and then we boost them. None of which is necessary. None of which is necessary. I mean, maybe giving some of them vaccines, not a lot of harm, but then boosting them, what for? It's just a waste. But either vaccines, I'm not convinced of, for kids. Now, the US government hasn't authorized vaccines for under five. Yeah, because they're unnecessary. What are they protecting them from? They don't go to hospital. They don't die. So identify the most vulnerable, old people. Protect the most vulnerable. That's easy. Put in whatever you need to do to protect old people. And if the government's gonna spend gazillion, and I said this in April, May, June, July of 2020, if the government's gonna spend billions of dollars, let's spend them on getting meals, old people. So they don't have to go out doors, you know, whatever it needed to keep them isolated. But instead, the great governor of the great state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, sends old people with COVID back to nursing homes where they kill the rest of the people in the nursing home. And still, to this day, nobody seems to realize the extent of that evil. Johnson in London did the same thing. I think they did the same thing in New Jersey. It's just unbelievable. Just unbelievable. And no consequences. I mean, Cuomo is gone, but he's not gone because of this. He's gone because of sexual harassment allegations that might or not, you know, probably true, but who knows. This is the real crime he committed. This is the thing he should have suffered in hell for. Yet nobody cares. Because we live in egalitarian, you know, we don't wanna treat people differently. And we don't care. People don't care. People actually don't care that people are dying from COVID, unfortunately. And then, of course, Cuomo tried to cover it up and lie about it afterwards. And then when the vaccines came out, instead of the US government going, oh, get everybody vaccinated, everybody vaccinated, get 12-year-olds vaccinated, the only group that it was important to get vaccinated, that, you know, resources, again, given that the government is involved, resources should have been deployed at getting them vaccinated to the old people, right? It's still true that in the United States, 12% of Americans are now vaccinated in the 65 and older group. And 43 are unboosted. It's because we're too busy thinking about kids and vaccinating kids who don't need the vaccine. And then we're boosting young kids. And almost nobody thinks, well, I shouldn't say that. Significant number of doctors don't think that's necessary. I see, I think it's ridiculous. And then, once you identify and protect the vulnerable, leave everybody else alone. The way he puts it in the article is, liberate the least vulnerable. College kids, school kids, students of all types. Remember, we saw those pictures of them going to the beach in Florida? Good. I mean, make sure they don't go back to their grandparents. Isolate the grandparents, but let the kids live. It says here that the risk of a person ages 15 to 24. Dying of COVID or even with COVID. Now, this is for a healthy vaccinated college kids. If you're not healthy, protect yourself. But this is for a healthy vaccinated college kid. The risk of a person of age 15 to 24 dying of COVID if you're vaccinated is 0.001%, not 0.1%. Not 0.01%, 0.001%. It's absurd. And as I said from the beginning, this is sacrificing the young to the old. This is egalitarianism, run amok. This is paternalism of the old, wanting to feel like everybody's in it with them, I guess. But it's parents and it's some young people. I mean, as I've told you many times, I've been to college campuses where outdoors, kids are walking around with masks. Voluntarily, they don't have to. And it tells you something about the culture of fear that we live in. A culture that is taught kids from when they're very young to fear the world, to fear reality, to fear life. And as a consequence, they can't handle. They cannot handle any of this. By the way, the risk of side effects from COVID for that age population is still lower than the risk, of dying from a risk of a severe case of COVID. Indeed, you know, what do you call it? The inflamed heart that you get, that younger people get when they take the mRNA vaccine. The risk of them getting it from the vaccine is actually lower than the risk of them getting it when they get COVID. So the vaccine stone is unbelievably safe. But the probability that something bad is gonna happen to these people, even these kids, even unvaccinated, is very low. Very, very, very, very, very low. And to mandate it, myocarditis, myocarditis, yes. To mandate it, to not allow them to go to school unless they have it. Then to mandate that they wear a mask, have no wear a mask in class, have their wear masks while they're going to school, it's just sickening, just sickening. All in the name of some form of sick egalitarianism. When we know it's old people, but we don't wanna treat old people and young people differently somehow. Children, young children. This is the fight for normalcy, particularly for children. Children, you know, from pre-K, pre-kindergarten, having to wear masks in school, not being able to enjoy other people's faces, to be able to communicate with other people, people say, children are resilient. No, they're not. How do you know that? Resilient to what? Yeah, they'll live with it, but is it good? And why? Who are we helping? Who are we saving here? They've had two years at school canceled, disrupted education, and they have to wear these stupid masks all the time. It's just absurd. When the risk again is minimal. And if you're worried about the parents, then the parents should get vaccinated and the parents should take care of themselves. And in some occasions, the parents could keep the kids home. But you penalize an entire generation of children because you care about some parents? Let the parents figure it out. You know, you can learn from other countries. Sweden did a lot of things right, something's wrong. It didn't protect its old. So it had very high death rates relative to other Scandinavian countries. But all because of, you know, they didn't protect their old and they managed COVID spread in the, again in the old age, various old age facilities. It spread there. They didn't pay attention to that. They didn't test the caregivers. And that's how they got high death rates. But again, among young people, among healthy people, among people who were outside without masks, going to restaurants, going all over the place, nothing happened. Sweden was a model. Now, Sweden also got their vaccinations. Very high rate of vaccinations. A lot of countries are now vaccinating kids under 12 at all, right? Some are not giving second doses to adolescents who might be susceptible to myo. I always, I can't pronounce these words. Myocarditis, so they're only getting one dose because it's a second dose that causes the swelling of the heart. One dose is better than nothing. No way to stop testing kids completely for mild symptoms and only keeps them out of school if they feel sick. Just like you always have. You've always kept kids out of school when they feel sick. So go back to normal. He argues about running randomized trials, running different things and different things. I think it's way too status to do that. It's still a way too status to approach. But I can understand from his perspective, which is a status collectivist perspective, why that makes sense, right? Don't promote shoddy studies on all sides. We got a lot of shoddy science during COVID, a lot. And the CDC was responsible for quite a bit of it. Trying to scare people. Anything that scared people, they approved. Even though it was shoddy science. Anything that relieved people's fears they didn't like even if it was good science. You know, lesson learned, don't ignore inconvenient facts. That's a lesson for life, right? A lesson for living, a lesson for reasoning. Don't ignore the science. For example, the fact that people who had COVID have some immunity against it. Maybe they only need one dose of the vaccine. Maybe they don't need any doses of the vaccine. But look at the science. Again, everybody needs two doses and a booster. No, they don't. My wife who had COVID early doesn't need two doses and a booster. Now she's got them because it's the only way she can travel freely and actually get into places and live a life and the vaccines are not too scary. But why do it? Because you have to treat everybody the same. You have to treat everybody the same. Tell with the facts, tell with reality. I mean, this has been done. This is what happens when government is involved in science. Government is involved in these kind of decisions. Of course, natural immunity is real. Nobody denies natural immunity. It's just a question of how efficacious is it? And natural immunity plus one dose of the vaccine is better than just natural immunity and better than two doses of the vaccine. Why won't they allow that? Why can't we make decisions based on a case-by-case basis? Why does it have to be a one-size-fit-all? And the reason it has to be a one-size-fit-all is because you don't have to think. You don't have to treat people like individuals. It can just treat everybody the same. You can be a real egalitarian that way. Don't stifle debate. That's a big one. Because one thing we saw is a trampling on debate, inability to suggest different ideas, suggest different proposals, suggest different lines of research, suggest. But you post stuff on Facebook. It disappears. You post stuff on Twitter. Joe Rogan's stuff disappears off of Spotify. A lot of the stuff that was posted was junk. A lot of the stuff that was posted was misinformation. A lot of it was false. But who gets to decide those things? I mean, yes, science in the end. But a lot of the stuff is not clear-cut. And a lot of this is going to be decided by people, by people making choices. And if you think something's misinformation, argue against it. Present the facts. Present an alternative. Present the research. Show that it's wrong. The weapon against misinformation is good information. The weapon against false speech is truth. It's reality. The weapon against bad science is good science. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. 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