CLAY: We’re joined now by our friend Dr. Marty Makary at Johns Hopkins University. He’s done a fabulous job pushing back against so many of the prevailing narratives during covid, helped to advise both, I believe, Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin, two men who have been extremely rationale in responding to the emotional impact of covid out there. Member of the National Academy of Medicine, has a New York Times best-selling book, The Price We Pay.

So, Dr. Makary, I want to start with this question because my wife actually asked me this. We were discussing — I’m sure you saw — that they’re starting to roll out the new covid boosters. And as a part of the new covid booster, one of the questions that Buck and I have been asking for a while is; so, can you just jump ahead, if you never got the original covid shots, can you just get a booster since it’s now designed for covid that’s closer to what we have now?

And the answer, according to the Biden administration is no. Does it make sense? Like let’s, pretend. I’ve never gotten a covid shot. Let’s pretend that suddenly I was like, you know what? I should have gotten a covid shot and I want to get the updated booster. Does it make any sense at all that I would get the shot that’s been out for almost two years that we know has no impact on covid now? Is that rational, logical at all from a shot perspective?

DR. MAKARY: It makes about as much sense as saying you can’t go to college unless you return the book to the librarian from third grade. There’s no association whatsoever. So, this is paternalism.

CLAY: Yeah. That was my thought.

DR. MAKARY: Yeah. Paternalism.

CLAY: I can tell my wife. She was like, that seems like it’s the right answer. This is totally illogical and makes no sense.

DR. MAKARY: Well, I would advise against someone like yourself, Clay, from getting the original Wuhan vaccine at this point. You’ve had covid I think twice. At this point there’s a concern about what we call the multiple booster strategy because of this thing called immune imprinting. Now, these are theories. We don’t know for a fact if there’s a downside to multiple boosters, but there’s a big paper in the journal Science, one of our top journals, that says that people who got the multiple boosters actually did a little worse against Omicron.

BUCK: Dr. Makary, it’s Buck. Is that similar to original antigenic sin?

DR. MAKARY: It’s the same concept but it’s a little different. With some infections, the subsequent infections are worse. We don’t see that with covid.

CLAY: So, what you said is something super fascinating. I think Alex Berenson mentioned it with us. This study suggested that people who had gotten the covid shots and gotten the boosters were actually more likely to get covid than people who had not. And tying in with that, Jill Biden, who has gotten — Dr. Jill Biden, not Joe — four shots, has just in the last 10 minutes announced that she’s tested positive for covid again.

BUCK: She must have forgotten all the mitigation she learned in medical school, Clay, Dr. Biden. Anyway, Dr. Makary, what do you think of this?

DR. MAKARY: Well, look. If it were up to the Biden administration, you might be getting a booster every Monday morning when you show up at work. And what some of us are saying is that let’s look at the data. Let’s look at the data in Science magazine and some of the other articles that are saying people who had the infection, when they get multiple boosters on top of that, they’re a little worse.

So, it may be that people should get the Omicron-specific vaccine that’s coming out in a few weeks. But we don’t have any data. So, how is Ashish Jha in the White House telling everybody as they are, everyone must get this vaccine, it’s very important? We haven’t seen any data at all. So, I mean, is that unreasonable? Now, some people might say with the flu shot we don’t see data.

That’s different. That’s tried and true. It’s a traditional vaccine platform of the protein code. It’s not an mRNA vaccine. MRNA vaccines have a one in 5,000 dose serious adverse event rate, from the German study, and we don’t even know what strain’s gonna be floating out, out there, in a couple months.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University medical school. Dr. Makary, what you’re also probably seeing, I’m sure, the Fauci showing up — Fauci interview showing up all over the place these days where he’s essentially saying what we’ve been saying here all along, would be his out, which is just, you know, the information changed. Does the medical community…?

I mean, are more people coming out and reaching out to someone like you, for example, and finally seeing the light here that Fauci and Walensky and Birx claim to know the answers at different points and shut down dissent, and now that they basically got everything wrong and people are seeing that, their response is, “Oh, it was evolving.” They didn’t tell us it was evolving as it was evolving.

DR. MAKARY: Well, Dr. Fauci, you know, he’s stepping down in December. And it’s not because the tennis club starts in January. New hearings are gonna start on Capitol Hill. People are angry, and they want closure at some of these giant failures that he’s had. By the way, he’s called all the shots. He said yesterday on Fox that he talks to the director of the CDC every day.

He has never disagreed with anything coming out of the CDC. So, he’s been calling the shots. And he’s failed to warn us of the pandemic a couple days before the lockdowns, all said he was, old people shouldn’t take a cruise when many of us were out there sounding the alarm telling us to get ready. He failed to recognize that children are essentially spared of the severity of covid, especially healthy kids beyond the risk of influenza and RSV.

And he failed to recognize natural immunity, which meant hundreds of thousands of lives were ruined, they were fired. And he showed no humility. So, he’s been slow, he hasn’t mobilized the research dollars to answer the big questions early on. That’s his job. His main job, his number one job is to give out research funding. Well, we’re telling everyone to wash their hands like crazy for months.

Do that research. It takes about 12 hours to do the study. Get one of your fancy BSL-4 labs — the NIH has four of them — and do that experiment. He didn’t do the research on hand washing versus airborne, on natural immunity, on the booster strategy, on the dosing between the first two intervals, and on the adverse event rate of the vaccine in children, including myocarditis. That stuff was untouched. I think that was his greatest failure.

CLAY: Dr. Makary, you and many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration every single day are being more vindicated in real time. Twenty years from now — Dr. Fauci’s 81 — I hope everybody listening around is still around here. I hope Buck and I are. I hope you are, Doc, I hope everybody out there listening is. Dr. Fauci is 81. He’d be 101 if he was still alive. A generation from now, what is history saying, do you think, about our response to covid and Dr. Fauci’s leadership of that response?

DR. MAKARY: Well, we got lucky during covid — and I don’t say this lightly — but the infection fatality rate was two-tenths of 1%. In the world of global pandemics, it was a mild pandemic. What happens if we get an infectious pathogen with an infectious fatality rate of 20% or 30%? Now, we’ve had a lot, and we’re gonna have more. We’ve had Ebola, Zika, SARS, MERS, polio, I mean, just in the last generation. We’re going to have more. The question is now, will anyone trust what’s coming out of the CDC or health authorities? I don’t think so. I think now people have lost complete faith and trust. We need fresh leadership. We need humility. People need a closure, and I hope we can get it.

BUCK: Do you think we’re gonna run into any of the completely pointless, useless policies of the past reinstituted in blue cities, Dr. Makary, or even some blue states in this upcoming cold and flu season, which is what we used to call it now, I guess covid season as well? Or is your expectation that enough people now realize… I mean, I honestly think that some of the dumbest public officials in the country are public health officials. So, it has been remarkable to see that play out.

DR. MAKARY: Well, what concerns me, you know, Philadelphia started school again with masks on.

BUCK. Oh, my God.

DR. MAKARY: And Boston, up until the last day of June, never removed their mask mandate, ever, during the pandemic, for K through 12. So, unfortunately, the vulnerable populations, the defenseless, the children, people who are poor and minority communities have disproportionately borne the brunt of these covid restrictions while public health officials are in their second homes and on Zoom living a great life with their kids at country clubs and with private tutors. That is the untold story of the pandemic. And I hope people see the social inequity of it all so they can, you know, remember it for the future.

CLAY: Dr. Makary, this news is out. We mentioned Jill Biden. But I think this is interesting. Georgetown University — Buck, you and I were talking about Georgetown earlier, one of the top Jesuit institutions in the nation and one of the top universities in the nation in general. It’s requiring all of its students to wear masks in indoor classes still. Dr. Makary, this is an elite academic institution. When you see a school like Georgetown making a decision like this basically in your geographic region — you’re just up the road a little bit — what do you think?

DR. MAKARY: Well, it’s embarrassing because I went to Georgetown for my surgical residency.

CLAY: I didn’t even know that.

DR. MAKARY: How long are they gonna do this for? I mean, first of all, they’re ignoring all the studies. The Finnish study, the Catalonia study, the Tracy Hoeg study from UC Davis, all showed no difference in viral transmission when students in classrooms wore masks. Now, they also have a vaccine and booster requirement there. So, what are they doing? They’re torturing these poor students. Alumni are upset. They’re calling in. And there’s no end in sight for some of these folks. I think people need to speak up.

BUCK: Why do you think they’re doing it at Georgetown, Dr. Makary? What is the mentality? Are these people — is it like a mental illness now that they can’t let this go, or do they just view it as political allegiance and obedience training? It’s hard to believe that the people at Georgetown University are such morons that they actually think masking up students is going to do anything.

DR. MAKARY: Well, I think there’s this culture within the medical community and among academic elites that “I’m tougher on covid than you are, that I have a more myopic focus on stopping all virus transmission, and I’m gonna stomp out this virus because I’m strong on covid.” And so when you have a view of public health that does not consider health, it only considers one virus, where the cure is worse than the disease, where we’ve ignited a mental health crisis — and that’s exactly what’s happening with young people.

That’s what I think is happening right now. It’s sort of like somebody at work that says, you know, “I like to come in at 7 a.m., so why don’t we meet at 7 a.m.?” And next guy says, “I’d like to come in at 6 a.m.”, and the next person is, “I like to come in at 5 a.m.” Nobody likes coming in at those hours. We’re just trying to one-up each other. Go to the doctors’ conferences that I’ve been to. I’ve been to six major, large doctors’ conferences with thousands of people, this year, no one’s wearing masks. Maybe 5, 10%. So, what does Georgetown know that doctors don’t know?

CLAY: Yeah. Thank you so much for all the work you’ve done, Dr. Makary, ’cause I know speaking out has been challenging, but I really do believe the vindication that we’re seeing every single day for what is occurring in this country, you’re a big part of why we’re getting that vindication. Thanks for all the work.

DR. MAKARY: Thanks so much, guys.