BUCK: We are joined by our friend, Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. He’s got a great piece in the Wall Street Journal, “The Exaggeration of Long Covid.” Dr. Makary, great to have you back, sir.
DR. MAKARY: Good to be with you guys.
BUCK: So, let’s start with this. You tell us about… You put it in context here in your piece in The Wall Street Journal what is and is not true about long covid and how worried or not worried people should be. But it’s also the first time I’ve seen anybody start to attach a price tag to this, $1 billion to what you call “the long covid medical-industrial complex.” Doc, what is going on here?
DR. MAKARY: Well, look, long covid is real. But in the U.K. study, it was only 3% of people that had covid and it declined rapidly in another study that just came out. We’re getting more research on it. And some of these studies show that there’s really no difference between having long-haul symptoms after covid versus any other infection like the flu. If you’re not working out or eating well and you’re sick for a week, you’re probably going to be weak at four weeks. That’s not long covid.
That’s just the medicalization of ordinary life, and Dr. Fauci and the crew at the NIH are obsessed with long covid. They spent $1.2 billion to try to study it, and that has yielded zero. There’s been no return on that investment. And the CDC tries to say, “It’s not 3%,” like we know from the U.K. study, “It’s 20% of people,” as if one in five Americans are going to be struck by this long covid lightning and then be disabled for life. That’s just not true. It’s dishonest and it exaggerates the truth.
CLAY: Dr. Makary, appreciate you coming on. Love the piece in the Wall Street Journal today. I’m not sure if you’ve seen yet, but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says that essentially Florida is going to be empaneling a grand jury to investigate potential fraud in the covid shot. And so, I’m curious, from your perspective, can you remember a situation like this where a drug has been — we were all told that the covid shot, the covid vaccine initially would prevent you from getting and stop the spread of covid. And basically, the government mandated it, and then it came out that that was not actually true. Can you think of any other examples of drugs like that that the government got involved in, in any kind of similar way?
DR. MAKARY: No. Gosh, if you misbehave in any way as a pharma company with filling out the forms or reporting your follow-up data, you get major, major penalties and treated differently by the FDA. I mean, these guys are strict regulators with every pharma product except the covid vaccines. You basically have the FDA commissioner — our nation’s top medication regulator — advertising the covid vaccine. It’s in his signature. In his email. He puts tweets out saying that it may even prevent long covid, not just transmission, with no supporting data. So when you have a top regulator promoting it that much, saying things that if a pharma company said, they would be fined for making a claim outside of their approved indication. You’ve got a very cozy relationship that just does not add up.
DR. MAKARY: You know, my friends tell me there was a similar example during World War One with one of the military companies and the government. But beyond that, I don’t know of anything. I mean, this is outrageous what’s happened. Global immunity given for just this one vaccine? How does the pharma industry have total immunity for covid vaccines, but not for the flu shot or RSV shot or other shots? And they’ve never reported pharma has never reported back their post approval data. They’re supposed to do safety monitoring after a drug is approved. It’s in the agreement. It’s a formal arrangement. They’re noncompliant. They haven’t reported it, and let’s be honest. We all know that no one wants to look at vaccine complications in this — public health officials or this – -administration because they don’t want to know the result.
BUCK: Speaking to Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, and Dr. Makary, you know, I was just in a I was just in a government office this morning; there are a lot of people double masking. And it seems to me like we’re now entering this realm. And, you know, I was on a plane recently and they said to everybody, “Respect someone’s decision to mask.” That was they made some announcement over the PA, and still in a lot of doctor’s offices, they require you to put a mask on when you go in. What is it going to take for people to just to give this up? I mean, to finally realize? Like, how can we get because I honestly think that doctors are at the heart of this and there should be enough room now for them to speak honestly. They’re not in that same fear of losing their medical licenses. I’m amazed at how few doctors have come out and said publicly, “This is idiotic. Everybody needs to stop with the charade.”
CLAY: I’d say it’s a fantastic question. So as we look ahead, the other thing that that seems a bit, I think, clarifying — and you may have more recent data than we do, and thanks for coming on. We’re talking Dr. Marty Makary. Parents are still saying, basically, especially for young kids, “We’re not getting this covid shot for our kids.” I think at least 90%, if not higher, of parents are rejecting this shot. As someone who has worked in medicine for a long time, I bet you can’t remember a scenario like that or that many parents have been rejecting a quote-unquote “advice from experts.” What does that tell us about the underlying sort of position of many people about these covid shots in general?
DR. MAKARY: Well, it tells us that public health officials have screwed up by crying wolf too many times. You know, flu shots are down this year from the normal flu season pre-pandemic, and we’ve got a really bad flu season now. Why are fewer people taking the flu shot? Because they’ve cried wolf too many times. And when it comes to children, they did it with no supporting data. With children, no one can tell you in the United States how many healthy children have ever died of covid, if any.
So if the CDC director can’t tell you and public health officials and Fauci can’t tell you, how on earth do they have so much absolutism in recommending a vaccine for which we know at least some people have died when you don’t know the risk benefit calculation? I don’t understand the lack of humility. It’s turned people off. And the reality is that some people may benefit from some interventions, but they’re not even going to get them because of the public health trust being in the toilet.
CLAY: Great question.
BUCK: Is that…? Are we on shot five now or is it four — and if it’s not five, when does it become five?
DR. MAKARY: (chuckles) Well, look, let’s be honest. If it were up to some people, you’d be getting a booster every Monday morning when you show up at work. But what they’re calling “fully vaccinated” is getting the bivalent, the new Bivalent vaccine, which is an Omicron specific vaccine, and having had the primary series. They’ll consider that fully vaccinated. Now, the Bivalent data, I’d love to see it. There’s no randomized controlled trial.
Instead of Dr. Fauci spending $1.2 billion to study long covid, which has yielded nothing, how about doing one randomized controlled trial on the Bivalent vaccine before blasting it out to the world? They got a problem. They bought 171 million doses, but only 40 million have been used after three months of them hammering it into the American public to get it. So, they have a stockpile problem. If they want to fix that problem, produce some good clinical data, and then people will trust them.
BUCK: Can I ask you, Doctor, do you think they actually could…? Let’s say they were just going to be totally honest about it and they showed the clinical data. But do you think it would be strong or would it be like, “Mehhh, it’s not really that good of a shot”?
DR. MAKARY: I think it would probably be like the flu shot this year probably reduces symptomatic infection by about 20% with the major strain. It doesn’t work against the other strains. That’s probably what it might show. I might recommend it for a person who is high risk and has not had covid this year, if — (crosstalk)
BUCK: So we’re talking flu shot, right, Doc? We’ve gone full circle now. This is basically like the flu shot, but for covid.
DR. MAKARY: It’s similar. I think the data would be similar to the flu shot. But the Bivalent vaccine, if we had good data, I might recommend it for high-risk people, a person who’s not had covid, which, I don’t know if anyone exists who’s not had covid anymore.
CLAY: (laughing) Last question for you, Dr. Makary, and I appreciate you coming on. When you see that there are some cities recommending that kids be put back in masks, how infuriating is that to you as someone who actually looks at the science?
DR. MAKARY: Well, all you have to do is look at the test scores and the rates of depression and anxiety, or talk to a child and ask them if they’re happy or sad covering their face for a year and a half. The sad part about this whole thing is the New York Times or any one of these other so-called news organizations could have sent one reporter to Europe and maybe covered any one of the tens of thousands of schools that have been open free and clear without masks or cover.
Or cover the WHO or the European CDC recommendations, which specifically say, “Do not cover the faces of children with masks during covid because of the downstream psychological harm.” I wish anyone would have covered that instead of making it sound like you’re promoting misinformation by pointing out the harms. Masks in schools have had no impact on transmission. It’s been well-studied in the Spanish and the Finnish study. U.S. public health officials are just choosing to ignore those studies.
CLAY: Democrats are the party of anti-science now. I don’t think there’s any other way to convey it.
BUCK: Doc, thanks for being with us. Appreciate you, sir.
DR. MAKARY: Good to be with you guys. Thanks.
From pistachio Crème Brûlée to Brussels Sprouts, is this man ever happy?
Watch Clay and Buck analyze what's different about this Trump transition.
Eric Hovde speaks out over concerns about his race against Tammy Baldwin.
Clay's loving Trump's cabinet picks so far.
The former New York Times reporter explains his transformation.