Dr. Makary on the High Cost of Ignoring Natural Immunity

BUCK: We gotta bring the good doctor to you, my friends, Dr. Marty Makary. He is now an adviser to Glenn Youngkin, the governor of, Virginia, on covid matters. He’s from Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and is the author of a fantastic op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which is up, linked to ClayAndBuck.com right now on this thing called natural immunity that I think we should all have a little conversation about  with a true expert who’s honest. Dr. Makary, great to have you back.

DR. MAKARY: Great to be with you guys.

BUCK: I just want to let you… You know, we want to give you the ball and let you run with it here, Doc. You’re the expert. The reality that we can all see is natural immunity is undermined through Fauciite proclamation and the Biden regime pretends like it basically doesn’t exist. Tell us what we found out about it and how it factors in — natural immunity factors in — to what’s going on now with covid.

DR. MAKARY: Well, the data has finally caught up with these bad hypotheses and policies ignoring natural immunity. We’ve got a giant study that came out from New York and California showing that natural immunity was three times better in preventing hospitalization than vaccines and five times better in preventing you from getting the infection.

Our Johns Hopkins team has a big study this week again showing durability of natural immunity. And I can tell you from the inside circles two other big studies are coming out in the next few weeks. Natural immunity is now a hundred percent scientifically sound, durable, effective, and better than vaccines.

Public health officials have been afraid to say so you see ’cause they don’t want people to just get the infection. I get that. But let’s be honest, because we’ve ruined careers — and when we fired those with natural immunity ’cause they didn’t have vaccines, we ended up firing those least likely to spread the infection at the workplace.

CLAY: Dr. Makary, thanks for coming on with us and for the work you’re doing in Virginia as well as the editorials you’ve been writing at the Wall Street Journal, which are phenomenal. I just put up your most recent editorial. I’d encourage people to go read it, tag you in it as well. Is a big part of this now — and I love it ’cause you’re saying, “Hey, these people need to be rehired who had natural immunity that lost their jobs.”

Will we see public health authorities adjust their opinions now even though this data has been out there for a long time, or do you think…? I’m concerned about, what I’m seeing is people are doubling and tripling down on the vaccine and still not acknowledging what the data tells us about natural immunity. Buck has had covid twice, I’ve had covid twice.

I feel like I’m in very good shape based on all the data. Yet if I were to go to New York City, I can’t go to a restaurant without showing a vaccine card. I don’t have the vaccine so I can’t get in. Same thing could happen in Los Angeles. How in the world are these new results that are so widely distributed going to change the public policy, and do you think it actually will?

DR. MAKARY: Well, unfortunately, I don’t see the humility required of public health officials to accept this. They have dug in for two years arguing that it’s an unknown how long natural immunity lasts or if it’s better. Well, now we have all of the data. They did not do the research themselves. Other researchers like my own group had to do it, and now it’s a settled science.

If they just showed some humility and said, like most doctors do in their day-to-day practice, “Hey, there’s new data coming out. I had the wrong hypothesis. We need to change the strategy,” I think people are hungry for honesty right now. Look at all these companies hiring back workers.

Boeing, Amazon, Delta Airlines, Amtrak, the State of Connecticut state workers. We’ve got hospitals that fired nurses for having better immunity — that is natural immunity — and then they were so short of staff like MultiCare , they called in covid positive nurses to say, “Come and work, even though you’re sick with covid. We’re that strapped for nurses.”

BUCK: Doc… We’re speaking to Dr. Marty Makary. He’s the author of The Price We Pay, and it did hit the New York Times best-seller list. So let’s get more copies of it out there, folks: The Price We Pay from Dr. Marty Makary. We need the truth to get out there, and that means supporting people who are telling you it. Doc, kind of related double question here.

One is you deal with the “Oh, but get the vaccine even if you have natural immunity,” ’cause then Fauci always poses this as it’s like super immunity. Can you look at the reality of whether that’s true or not. I wanted you to address that talking point, and then beyond that I just want to know, I remember when I was told early on with the vaccines that you want to wait while because your body already has antibodies.

So remember the CDC had this wait 90 days or something like that guidance? I might be told soon in New York City that I’m supposed to get a booster. I just had covid about 10 days ago. How am I supposed to think that…? What happened to the old, “Wait a while before you get your shot because you already had antibodies”? So I got a twofer for you.

DR. MAKARY: Well, Buck there’s absolutely zero scientific data to support a booster in somebody who had the infection and has natural immunity. Zero. And most of the booster policies, as you know, are not driven by data. The only part of that recommendation is older and high-risk people. Young people don’t get boosters in other countries.

Sweden just said they’re not even gonna give young, healthy people the primary vaccine series, let alone a booster. We had the FDA bypass their experts to push the booster authorization — and when they say, “Oh, you know what? You’re too stupid to understand the details. Just go ahead and get the vaccine, even though you have natural immunity”?

The data are very clear now from the study last week: The risk of somebody who has natural immunity getting hospitalized is three per 10,000. That’s identical to the risk of somebody with hybrid immunity — that is vaccine and natural immunity — so getting the additional vaccine dose did nothing to change the numbers on hospitalization. That’s the honest data.

CLAY: Dr. Makary, we get a lot of questions from parents out there. There now is a push to get children younger than 5 vaccinated. When you hear those pushes, when you hear those arguments from public health authorities, what do you say to parents out there that are listening to us right now about the danger to their children and about whether it makes sense for them to get the covid shot, the covid vaccine?

DR. MAKARY: Well, first of all, Omicron is gonna burn through the population so fast that we even have Dr. Fauci acknowledging that everybody will get it. So if Omicron is nature’s vaccine for those who have not had access or been eligible for a vaccine, what are we doing immunizing those already immune? Now, in general with kids, I’d say, “Look, if the kid is healthy, then you can get the vaccine. But just remember that no healthy child has ever died of covid, that we know of, documented, that’s out there in the literature. If the kid has a risk factor and has not had natural immunity, then it may make sense.

BUCK: Dr. Makary, what is it gonna take, you think, for more people from within the medical community to come out and speak… See, what’s fascinating is we’re at that point now where I don’t hear anyone saying, “Oh, the numbers that Makary is pointing out on natural immunity are wrong or this is a fraud or this isn’t true.” We’re at this level now where the facts are the facts, Fauci has been wrong about almost everything.

People who listen to this show know that’s how I feel but that’s how the actual data shows. When are we gonna have more people come out and speak the truth about this? Because it’s not over. I mean, they’re still doing crazy stuff in the schools’ Fauci’s talking about a three-dose vaccine regimen for kids. It’s impossible… I just know from reality it’s impossible to know the long-term effectual of a three-dose regimen for children when they haven’t even had a three-dose regimen that they could study in kids for, what, more than a couple of months? The whole thing just seems crazy.

DR. MAKARY: Yeah, it’s disappointing. I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of doctors that are saying what I’m saying. A lot of them. But they don’t have the platform of Meet the Press and State of the Union — and every program with an FCC license that Dr. Fauci goes on all the time — and they’re saying, “Look, the groupthink got a lot of stuff wrong.”

They got the surface transmission wrong. Blocking loved ones from saying good-bye to their dying family member. That was a human rights violation. All the doctors in hospitals were complicit in that. They got natural immunity wrong from our leadership. They got boosters in young people wrong. The WHO and European CDC is giving totally different guidance, and we don’t hear about that stuff.

In Europe — many places in Europe — you can’t even get the Moderna vaccine under age 30. They restrict it because of myocarditis in young people. So I think a lot of doctors on the ground are on board with the data and what I’m talking about. But from our leadership, we have a small group of doctors making all the decisions.

My biggest concern moving forward is the death data is not accurate, and you’re gonna continue to see these inaccurate numbers that are not deciphering “for covid” or “with covid,” and it’s gonna make it look like there’s a higher death toll than there is in reality, and people are just gonna point to that if they want restrictions in place forever.

CLAY: How inaccurate do you think the data is, Dr. Makary, ’cause you look at some of these numbers coming out, the difference — finally people are discussing it even some left-wing, I would say, media, the difference — between being hospitalized with covid and being hospitalized because of covid is around 50-50, which would suggest that about half of the people that are dying that have been attributed directly to covid are actually dying of other things. What data are you seeing in terms of percentages there?

DR. MAKARY: (chuckles) You’re right. The media just runs with this. I believe that Sonia Sotomayor really did believe that 100,000 kids were in hospital, many on ventilators. She believed that because she’s listening to NPR, whatever else she’s listening to. Look, I talk to doctors all the time, and we think somewhere between 50 and 65% of cases attributed as being “from covid” are not really from; they’re just incidental.

The thing is, that number is massively growing because Omicron is more and more likely to be an incidental finding — and one study found out there was only one death out of 52,000 Omicron cases. That’s the Kaiser, Southern California study. That does not add up with the death numbers we’re seeing. The two just cannot be reconciled, so we have a data problem right now.

CLAY: Dr. Marty Makary, incredible work. Encourage you guys to go follow him. I just tweeted out his Twitter handle. Go grab it, follow it, imagine what the world would look like — certainly what the world would look like in the United States — if we had had him in charge instead of Dr. Fauci. I appreciate all the work you’re doing in Virginia. Thanks for making the time with us.

DR. MAKARY: Great to be with you, guys. Thank you.