Dr. Marty Makary: How About Follow the Data?

BUCK: We’ve got Dr. Marty Makary with us now, Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and the author of The Price We Pay. Dr. Makary, great to have you back, sir.

DR. MAKARY: Great to be with you.

BUCK: So, you’ve got some updates for us I understand on a little something called natural immunity which — despite what the CDC has led a lot of people to believe — is a real thing that really matters.

DR. MAKARY: (chuckles) Well, the test of time has caught up with the deniers and we did this giant study out of Johns Hopkins. My research invited people in, we tested their blood, and what we found is that if you had covid in the past, 99.3% of those people had circulating antibodies, and those antibodies were present almost two years after infection.

So, the debate is over. Now it’s time to just recognize, are we really following the science, or are we following politics? Because I hear about high-level meetings in the government among public health officials and they’re basically political meetings. Should we agree to this or not? And it’s like, how about follow the data?

CLAY: So, what’s gonna happen now, Dr. Makary? Are we just gonna go…? All the people who were saying vaccine mandates, mask mandates, as they’re all just disappearing, are people just gonna pretend that that never happened? I just don’t know, like, where we go from here, right? Like I’m in L.A., Buck’s in New York City, there are places that are saying, “Hey, we have to see your vax card.” Is it just gonna disappear and then people gonna be like, yeah, well, as if it never happened? In your mind where does it go from here?

BUCK: Well, people are angry. They’re not willing to just say, “You know what? You really screwed up society for two years. We’re just gonna forgive you and move on.” People want honesty. They want some accountability. This was the biggest public health intervention in human history. You had a Johns Hopkins study come out two weeks ago evaluating the effect of that giant intervention. And basically, Fox and Wall Street Journal were the only places that covered it.

CLAY: Amazing.

DR. MAKARY: People are seeing through it.

BUCK: Dr. Makary, when are we gonna be able to get a sense, do you think it is possible for us to get a sense of what the actual exposure to the American people of this virtue was? I mean, I remember in the early days there was serology testing being done to get a sense of just antibody levels in the general population.

And in New York City alone in June of 2020, if I recall correctly, 20% in June of 2020 of the city had already had — you know, had had covid at that point in time. Do we have any way, do you think we’ll be able to get a sense as to how many people in this country have actually had covid at this point? ‘Cause it strikes me as a very important part of the data to see whether any of this mitigation stuff, any of the lockdown strategies had really any effect at all.

DR. MAKARY: Yeah. You’re right. It was 20% just a couple months into the pandemic of people in New York and then it was one-in-two Americans by the end of the year according to a Columbia University study after Year One. So — and the people who are unvaccinated, most of them have natural immunity. What people don’t realize is almost 90% of those truckers in Canada are vaccinated. The ones that don’t, I can almost guarantee you they’ve got natural immunity. So that’s the reality. People are… You know, they want to move on. They know the reality’s in the data.

BUCK: Do you have any sense…? What do you think is the percentage of the American people? Does anyone know or can anyone do a study? Do you think 80% of the country, 70% of the country’s been infected? Do we have any idea?

DR. MAKARY: We don’t. I think it’s 90 to 95% have either vaccinated or natural immunity. Remember when Omicron was ripping through the population, we were documenting half a million to three-quarters of a million cases a day. And were only capturing one in three to one in five cases. So we were adding almost 1% of our population or half of 1% per day in that group that has natural immunity.

There’s very few people left. When you talk about kids, you know, and this rush to get every 6-month-old vaccinated, they’ve all been exposed actually and it changes the calculus. They won’t break down these studies that they put out by those who had the infection in the past. And that’s why, if you remember, Denmark had the study nobody could explain that the unvaccinated had lower rates of transmission. Well, that’s because they had more natural immunity.

CLAY: Dr. Makary, what’s gonna happen in your mind, with schools? What should happen, what will happen? Obviously, we just played a clip of Las Vegas schoolteacher announcing the kids don’t have to wear masks anymore. There has been discussions, and some states have already said they’re going to mandate if, like California, that kids have to all get the covid vaccine. What do you think will happen, what should happen as it pertains to kids and covid shots and masking going forward?

DR. MAKARY: Well, I think most of the country is just saying, “We’re done. Look, we made tremendous sacrifices. We’re not gonna be playing these games about if you get vaccinated then you can stay in school like they did with masks.” They see through the phoniness of a lot of this stuff.

They know that population immunity is high, and they know that healthy kids are virtually resilient to this severe illness. So I think people are just gonna reject it all except in the pockets of the country where you’ve got people like Sonia Sotomayor who truly believed that a hundred thousand kids were in the hospital, and those politicians are gonna try to cater to those people.

BUCK: Speaking to Dr. Marty Makary, author of The Price We Pay, and professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. Dr. Makary, what is your assessment right now…? When someone says to you mRNA technology in the fight against covid, what do you want to say to them?

I just kind of wonder here, what has the data really shown us in terms of, is it protective against infection from Omicron at all? Is it only protective against hospitalization and death? Do we have a sense as to at what level? That discussion has also fallen away as a lot of the mask mandates and some of the mania seems to be fading around it.

DR. MAKARY: Well, I hope one of the takeaways is people, I hope, realize you cannot just believe what pharma is saying. And they can do some amazing things. There’s good scientists there and they develop good products. But when the messaging comes out, “Hey, we have a new variant. Just take another dose of our vaccine that we invented for prior variants — and, by the way, we’re going to create another vaccine specific to Omicron.

“But just take another dose of what we have now until we come up with another one and then take…” I hope people see through this. The vaccine trial in kids 6 months to 5 years failed. It was a randomized controlled trial. It failed. There is no difference. And instead of saying, “Hey, let’s scrap this and move on and try something different,” what they did is they told the FDA, “Please approve this, and just trust us.

“We’ll get a third dose by the time this is out there, and that will help you.” I think people are seeing through this right now. They want to move on. And it’s not just this. It’s all of it. It was the whole groupthink, surface transmission, the barbaric hospital visitation policies, school closings, the narrow dozing interval was too short, cloth masks, ignoring natural immunity, boosting people, all of it. People are sick of all of it.

CLAY: Dr. Makary, what would you tell parents, because there still are parents who are listening to us that are trying to decide — because there’s a lot of pressure being put on them; you know this — to go get their kids vaccinated for covid. This may turn into the next battle royale before all is said and done. I’ve been open.

I think my kids have had covid. I’m not going to get… I’m not anti-vax, but I’m not getting my young kids the covid shot. I don’t think they need it. I think they’ve likely had it, given that both myself and my wife have had it. What would you tell the average parent out there about their kids, especially young kids?

DR. MAKARY: Well, I would tell them to follow the science because in Pfizer’s own vaccine trial in kids 5 through 11 it said that no kid who had covid in the past got covid. So regardless if they got the vaccine or not they were immune. So if they have natural immunity, nobody should be getting a vaccine if they’re young and healthy. For kids who have a comorbidity, I do believe in vaccinating those. Those are the high-risk kids, and those are the kids that benefit from the vaccine.

BUCK: Dr. Makary, before we let you go, are we, by the summer, gonna have to think about a lot of this stuff coming back, a lot of these debates coming back in November, December? Or do you think enough of the medical community and just the American people in general have seen this for what it is — not everybody, but enough — that we’re not gonna have to have these battles again?

‘Cause I worry — I’m here in New York City — that, come November, right after the elections, all the sudden they’re gonna say, “Time to put those masks on everybody! Just in indoor settings, just for a while, maybe two masks, maybe get a booster. We’re gonna make you get a booster or we’re gonna fire you.” can see it all happening again. Do you think that’s a concern we should have?

DR. MAKARY: Yes. And I’ll tell you, I saw the school debate coming last spring when the teachers unions were saying, “We’re just gonna get to the end of this year and then we’ll be good for the fall and we believe school should be opened the fall,” and I said, wait a minute. They are gonna come up with new arguments. And you’re going to see a bump in cases in the fall, guaranteed.

Just like we are with influenza and parainfluenza and rhinovirus and every other virus that circulates year to year. And some media gonna report that we just had a 400% increase in covid this coming November and that’s gonna be a headline even though the cases went from two to eight per 100,000 and there’s high population immunity. So, yes, I think we need to learn our lessons and prepare for a rational argument.

BUCK: Dr. Makary, author of The Price We Pay, Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. Dr. Makary, always illuminating, sir. Thanks for spending some time with us.