Dr. Makary’s 9/11 Commission-Style Report on U.S. Covid Response
CLAY: We’re coming up on one-year anniversary of the Clay and Buck show. We appreciate all of you supporting us all across the country and continuing to download the podcasts in record numbers. We also certainly appreciate all of our guests, including Dr. Marty Makary, who is on the phone with us right now. Doc, I appreciate you coming on. We had dinner on Friday. I don’t know if you’re still in Nashville or not, but I talked about this at dinner; I’ll say the same thing on the radio.
You have been one of the foremost advocates for truth in all of this covid mess of anyone out there and the work that you’ve done is really important, and I kind of teased this. But you and a lot of other people who have been similarly of the opinion that from a medical perspective and a scientific perspective our response to covid in terms of lockdowns — schools, shut downs, all of that– made very little sense. You guys are working on a big report to analyze this and help to contextualize the errors in public policy that we made during the covid era. Can you explain exactly what’s going on there, what you’re working through, and what you hope to be able to produce?
DR. MAKARY: Sure. Absolutely. And thanks for having me. It was good to see you last week and congrats to you and Buck on one year. Awesome show. I enjoy listening to it. So our take on covid, myself and several other experts around the country is that the American people just want honesty. Just shoot it to ’em straight. You don’t have to be parental and say, “Don’t ask questions. We didn’t go through our normal process at the FDA, ignore these complications.” People just want it honest.
So we are getting together a document, several scientists from around the country, that will be a sort of 9/11 Commission-style assessment record on the pandemic response. It’s not personal and it’s not political. It’s scientifically objective. So Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff and several people who have been following covid closely with an independent scientific objective mind we got together and we are putting together this document.
BUCK: Dr. Makary, it’s Buck. I see you got a piece up as Newsweek, “Why America,” and, by the way, when your document comes out we’re hoping to be one of the places that is blasting it out as far and wide as possible so we’ll be talking to you more about that because this is what needs to happen, there needs to be effectively an after-action report that looks at all that went wrong.
Because I think now, Dr. Makary, people understand that lockdowns had not just a cost in learning loss, in psychological damage — which was enormous — but also enormous economic costs which people are just now really starting to see and feel. But you wrote a piece in Newsweek, “Why People Don’t Trust the CDC,” and you went on to talk about the process recently of CDC recommending covid-19 booster shots for 5- to 11-year-olds. Can you just tell everybody who you laid out in this Newsweek piece? Because I’m used to them doing dishonest stuff, but even this time I’m like, “This is jaw dropping.”
DR. MAKARY: (chuckles) Well, Buck, they hit rock bottom with the booster recommendation at the CDC in kids 5 through 11. If you look at what they actually said, and in that Newsweek article I pulled the exact quotes from the meeting, the doctors were talking like it was a group of marketing executives at Levi trying to sell jeans to more people. They talked about the importance of having a consistent recommendation with older kids. They talked about the importance of a simple message.
They talked about the importance of not confusing the public. They actually had almost no data. They had 140 kids of data, and beyond that, there was no clinical data within those kids. They just saw an antibody bump. And so he they recommended boldly boosters for 24 million American children with just data on 140 kids. Now, that’s the sort of stuff people have no tolerance for.
And I found one doctor even said at the meeting, “We have to strongly recommend this in order to get more people vaccinated, in order to get the data so we can understand where we are going.” So look, I put all those quotes from the meeting directly in the article because we need public accountability. People need closure and understanding why they’ve been lied to for so long.
CLAY: I just wanted to ask you from a medical perspective. I want to use a guy like Justin Trudeau as an example. Justin Trudeau is otherwise, just by looking at him, relatively young, relatively healthy. I believe he has now had four covid shots, and he has tested positive still for covid twice. If you think about this from a medical perspective and take it away from covid, is there any other…? And I’m putting “vaccine” in quotation marks here.
Is there any other vaccine that you can think of that someone would take four times in the space of 18 months who is otherwise — like Justin Trudeau — relatively young and relatively healthy, and still get the virus that he got the shot for four times in the space of 18 months? This seems extraordinary from a medical perspective. You’re actually a doctor. Is there any analogous situation you can think of in modern history that would reflect what’s going on right now when it comes to the number of people who’ve gotten four shots for covid and still gotten it potentially multiple times?
DR. MAKARY: Not with the same vaccine. We’re still using the Wuhan-strain vaccine. What we should be doing if we want to give people a booster or there’s a new variant yet to come, is they should be getting Covaxin, which is a vaccine that’s very effective. It’s traditional, it’s an inactivated vaccine, an inactivated virus that gives you protection to the entire surface of the virus not just the spike protein.
But it’s been sitting at the FDA for six months as if the FDA does not want it to be out there. So we’re given probably the wrong vaccine. Omicron will land in your nose and replicate fast and give people symptoms before the immune system kicks in. That’s why it gives a mild common cold-like illness or sore throat to most people. You can get a thousand vaccine doses with the Wuhan-strain vaccine; it’s not gonna protect you against that.
CLAY: When I hear you say that, how come no other doctors are saying this?
DR. MAKARY: We’ve got vaccine fanaticism. You’ve gotta be either pro or anti. If and if you’re not on the bandwagon… You know, I’ve been told by people that if you say anything about natural immunity, it could result in some people choosing not to get the vaccine. So we have this sort of McCarthyism right now in medicine where people are saying where people are saying, “Don’t talk truth. Just get on the vaccine bandwagon and talk about it until you’re blue in the face and get the whole world vaccinated as many times as possible.”
Some people would have you get vaccinated every Monday morning when you show up for work, but that’s not gonna help prevent the transmission of covid. What helps prevent the transmission of covid is natural immunity, and a study last week in the New England Journal of Medicine again showed natural immunity is more effective and comes out on top. We don’t want people to get the infection, but that’s why we’re seeing cases in protection change. We’re seeing the dynamics change where hospitals are empty and people are getting protection against severe disease.
BUCK: We’re speaking to Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. He’s also the author of The Price We Pay. Doc, I remember in New York City in June of 2020, there was a lot of talk about — so two years ago almost to the day — serology testing to see how many people had gotten infected. And at that point — June of 2020, two years ago — about 20% of New York City had already had covid.
Fast-forward two years. I never hear anybody talk about serology testing anymore to really get a sense of how widespread infection has been in the community here in America across the country. Do we have really estimates on it? ‘Cause I start to feel… I mean, I’m on covid… I think I actually had it a third time. I’ve definitely have had it twice as shown in tests and everything else.
CLAY: (chuckling)
BUCK: I had a third time where I thought maybe I had it and people are now saying they think the tests might not catch it the same way they had thought previously. Anyway, but if someone asked me, I’d say, “I think about 80 to 90% of the country has at least had covid once.” Is that a fair estimate? That’s just me shooting from the hip. But what do you think? Do we know?
DR. MAKARY: I think that’s the correct estimate because it was 75% as of February, and Omicron has been circulating in high velocity since then. So it’s probably 80 to 90%. In seniors, it’s well over 98, 99%. The problem is that the FDA is meeting right now and about to vote on vaccines in kids under 5, down to six months of age. And they’re ignoring the fact that 75% of those kids had covid as of February so it’s probably 80 to 90% now. So there’s this bandwagon effect, and here’s what they do.
They undercount infections because they’re just looking at the confirmed cases. We know there’s 20 to 50 cases for every one that we got documented with the CDC. They’re undercounting infections that make the infection fatality rate look more dangerous, and they undercount vaccine adverse events which makes the vaccine look safer than it really is.
Without those two numbers, how can anyone make an honest recommendation on vaccinating a healthy young kid? Ask someone who’s pushing vaccines in healthy kid: How many healthy kids have died of covid? They can’t tell you. How many healthy kids have had an adverse event to vaccines? They can’t tell you. So how are we pushing this with such vigor?
CLAY: That’s exactly what we talked about right before you came on, Dr. Makary. What would you tell people out there? There are a lot of them listening to you right now. Five- to 11-year-olds, I told people exactly what I chose, which is my 7- and 11-year-olds are not getting the covid shot. That’s my choice as a parent, but I just want to be clear with everybody. I don’t have a kid under the age of 5.
If I did, there is a zero percent chance that we would be getting the covid shot for my children under the age of 5. You don’t have kids yourselves yet, but what would you say to anyone out there listening to us right now with kids 11 or under and certainly, as you mentioned, with the CDC about to go to 5 and under, what would you tell them about that choice?
DR. MAKARY: Well, I would echo what the doctor at the CDC said who voted against the groupthink when she voted. She said, “Vaccines are not without potential complications, and we don’t have the data we need yet.” If a kid has a comorbid condition and has not had covid, I would encourage vaccination. But if the kid has an immunosuppressed condition — a special disease, the kid is somehow massively overweight and has something called the metabolic syndrome — get the kid vaccinated if they haven’t had covid. For healthy kids, I don’t think there’s a compelling case out there right now.
BUCK: Dr. Marty Makary, always appreciate you bringing the expertise, sir, and keep us updated on this project with you and some other big brains in the medical world looking at what really happened with covid, ’cause we cannot let people forget, especially as judgment will be passed on many of these policies in just a few months.
DR. MAKARY: Great to be with you guys. Thanks.
CLAY: He really does do fantastic work. Encourage you to check him out on Twitter. We’ll share his Twitter handle in the event that you are a parent out there and you’ve been looking for sane medical advice. He does fantastic work advising, by the way, Glenn Youngkin, the new governor of Virginia and helped to ensure that kids didn’t have to wear masks there.
