Public Health Media Club - TIME for COVID

A truly atrocious article from TIME Magazine. The epitome of COVID memory hole, "return to normal" gaslighting. These people must be stopped. 

Co-produced with Public Health is Dead.

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Daniella, Public Health is Dead  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Public Health Media Club. I'm Daniela.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

I'm MJ.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

And today we are doing a listener-sourced article.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Yes. Shout out to everyone who completed the poll that Daniela posted. Was it on Blue Sky or Instagram?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Both. Yes. Thanks, everyone.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

We have a wild suggestion.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

We have Time magazine with a piece entitled The COVID-19 pandemic will be over when Americans think it is.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

You're going to lose it. Neither of us have read it.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

You're going to have-I think so.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

I think your listeners know exactly what's going to like tick all your boxes.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Oh, yeah. I think my listeners absolutely are like, well, that's going to be a disaster. This is by somebody named Stephen Phillips. I have not heard of this person.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

So generic.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

John Johnson.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Stephen Phillips. Two first names.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

I don't know who this person is, but I just clicked his name. He is an MD and an MPH. And then I briefly Googled him just now, and then I saw Exxon Mobil come up. And my uh spidey senses are tingling.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

This has to be one of the most telegraphed. Should we do this? We've done this with all the previous episodes. Let's do this again. What do you think is gonna be in it? I bet we get it like beat for beat.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

There's gonna be justification for dropping all COVID protections. There's gonna be we need to open up the economy and people are already immune, quote unquote. Whatever that means. So there's no problem. And we can just forget that this ever happened. Okay? Okay, go spend money. That's kind of what I think it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Do we even have to read it? Maybe this is the first episode we just have a part one because we don't even need to read it to know what it's gonna be about.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Did I miss anything?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I mean, depend on how unhinged this author is. Maybe he'll bring up like the learning loss thing again. He'll probably bring up like people still masking is probably something that he brings up. Yeah, it depends on how far right this guy swings, which I guess we don't know that much about him.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

No, we don't. And I don't even know if that's the same Steven Phillips that I saw when I Googled.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

So that's true. It is a very generic name. Two first name. Well, let's start with this. What's your impression of the times? Or is it time? It's time, no plural.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Uh, my impression of it, like a very long-standing old school, like legacy magazine kind of vibe. I remember when I was a kid in Zimbabwe, one of the school projects we had to do was like cutting out bits from different news sources, and one of the magazines I got was Time, and I think that's like my strongest memory of it growing up. It was like cutting out some article about Slobodan Milosevich, the like Yugoslavian dictator. Okay, interesting. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

As someone in the States, I think you're right, it is like one of those long-running mainstream legacy media. From what I can see in the last few years, they are definitely, in my opinion, trying so desperately to stay relevant, but choosing all the wrong strategies.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Instead of rising to meet the moment, they're doing the New York Times, the Washington Post strategy of like, let's just put a lot of centrist slop out there and you know, cater to the masses, quote unquote, whatever the masses is.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Actually, recently I saw they had added our friend RFK Jr. to their Time 100 health leaders. And it was the most sanitized little write-up about him. Like, what? This person is single-handedly taking a sledgehammer to public health, and he gets this nice tidy little write-up.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

It's not the first time I'm gonna pretend to be Time magazine for a minute.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

I think their justification is, well, we want to see who has the most impact on the world. And obviously, RFK Jr. has a lot of impact. Negative impact. However, the issue is how they sanitize it. Like you said, it's like you're not framing it correctly. If you're gonna include RFK Jr. as like a health leader, you need to be very clear like what the effects that he's having. And the fact that you don't recognize it means that you failed. You failed as a journalism source. You're completely surrendering in advance to like the current regime, which absolutely unsurprising.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

I just looked it up. Can I read a bit about how they framed him?

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Okay. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has raised questions about vaccine safety.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

I'm gonna stop you right there. I don't need to hear any more. Raised question is a choice. That is a very specific phrase instead of I don't know, set fire to the forest. I don't know. There's so many other phrases that they could have used instead of raised question.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

They do say like it contradicts population immunity about his like views on immunization. But then the ending line, two months into his role, Kennedy is already having an outsized impact on US healthcare.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Outsized impact instead of absolutely destroy or total demolition.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Yeah, so I think I know what's coming in this episode. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, I don't know what it is with these legacy media. They think the way forward is like centrist brain rot slop instead of like meeting the moment. Because boy, is there a moment to be met right now.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

They could do something, but they choose not to. And it's really disappointing.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Yeah, support your indie media people. There is a lot more spine in indie media.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

You would think when fascism arrived, news media like this would they rise to the occasion. No, just roll over.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Bend the knee embarrassingly quickly. Let me add this. We haven't read this. However, you can tell a lot by the title alone. And I sort of want to dig into the title before the two of us read the full article. Okay. The title is The COVID-19 pandemic will be over when Americans think it is. This title is wild because to me, too many Americans think the pandemic is over, hence the state that we are in today. Who is this article addressing? We, the public health conscious people who understand the ongoing weight of the pandemic, we are in the minority. So what is this article talking about?

SPEAKER_00 6:14

It was written in early 2023, if that provides a little extra context, where I think more people were unsure about what they thought. And I think this really serves to kind of push those people who were unsure into oh, well, everyone thinks it's over, so it's over.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

I feel like if this article was published today, like in 2026, you can make the argument that, oh, 2025, we saw the lowest number of COVID death in 2025. It's still a lot. A lot of people died from COVID last year, but you can make the argument that it's dipped far past 2020 and 2021 levels. This was published January of 2023, which means it's a month after 2022. 2022, more than 200,000 people died in the states alone from COVID. So this guy wrote this article after 2022.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Right? Like, damn.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Who is this for?

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Not even like cold yet. Chill. Yeah, it's really wild. And I mean, in public health, we often talk about survivorship bias, where yeah, like, okay, well, there are a lot of people who have died. Just because fewer people died doesn't mean it stopped being like harmful. There's just fewer people to kill. And look at some of the long-term effects. Like, interesting. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

I love that Jimmy Carr joke. Jimmy Carr is a British comedian, for those of you who don't know. He had his joke where he asked the audience, How many of you think we overreacted to COVID? And he'll wait a beat and he'll say, like, yeah, the survivors think so.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Does he still make that joke?

SPEAKER_01 7:41

I don't know, but he made it in just when lockdown ended.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Oh, okay. In the UK.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

But yeah, that always resonated with me. Well, yeah, of course you think we overreacted. You didn't die.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

You're still here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Anyway. Well, do we even do a part two?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

I don't know. Just yapping. Well, we'll read it. We'll come back. We may just replay the first half of this for the second half.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

All of our predictions came true. Okay, well, listeners, for you it'll be a few seconds. For us, it will be a few weeks. But we will be back for part two after both of us have read, digested, and themed.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

And cried.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

See you in a few seconds. Daniela, what the f did I just read?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

It was quite mind-bending. I'll put it that way.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

This man needs to be banned from writing anything about public health going forward. Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

It was pretty bad.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

I hated almost every word of this. You let me know if I'm off base. This piece reads like it's written by someone with the knowledge of a mediocre white man and the confidence of a mediocre white man.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Yeah, I'd agree. It read like AI chewed a bunch of stuff up and spat it out. Like chewed up a textbook and spat it out, but with no understanding or context. But it's worse because it's not AI. Like this actually came out of a man.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

I did get like mansplaining vibes. This is what happens when someone who knows a little bit about something tries to deliver something because he's given like a word count and a deadline. So he's like, Well, I gotta I have to write something.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

I gotta fill the space. Yeah, it's giving undergrad essay.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Oh, I think there are some really good undergrad essays. Let's not put this there. I mean, it's not a long article, so should we just like go in order from the top?

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Okay. I'll echo the sentiment that I said in the first episode of Public Health Media Club. Close reading and critical reading is such an important skill that's very much lacking in the general populace. If you approach this article with that part of your brain turned off, it will read as reasonable, which is why it's like kind of dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

To illustrate that, first sentence.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

I know the first sentence. The first sentence I've like underlined so many times.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Do you want to do the honors? Read the first sentence of this article.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Okay. When will the COVID-19 pandemic end in the US? Which is question mark.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

And then the next sentence. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Well, I have problems with the first sentence.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

I know you do, but read the two sentences together.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Is it over when the president says so? By scientific consensus, or when the public thinks so?

SPEAKER_01 10:15

What are your thoughts already?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

A pandemic can't end in one country.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

The entire premise of the whole thing in that first sentence is just wrong. What?

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Pandemic means global. Pan as in Pangea, you know, that the concept that says all.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Yeah, it's just immediately self-contradictory and like so focused on the United States. Like the United States is not the world. You can't end a pandemic in the United States. I read that and I was like, oh my god, here we go.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

A lot of people think the United States is the whole world, which is kind of a problem. And we see that in the first sentence. But this is what I mean. Like, unless you're close reading, that sentence wouldn't even trigger anything.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Right?

SPEAKER_01 10:52

You're just like, oh, you know, when will COVID be over in the US? But he used specifically the word pandemic, which is what makes it contradictory with the US. The next sentence is not much better. The next sentence is, is it over when the president says so by scientific consensus or when the public thinks so? These three items being put in the same list is a subtle tactic to neutralize the items relative to each other. Without any extra adjectives or descriptions, the reader can only assume that the writer is presenting these three options as equal, and that is problematic. The fact that scientific consensus is on the same list as when the president says so presents scientific consensus as just another opinion. When in fact that's not how scientific consensus works. It's not just another opinion.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yep, agreed.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

We're two sentences in. Any other points?

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Yeah, then he goes, historians of pandemics think it's mainly the latter. So I click the link where he's highlighted his historians of pandemics, and it's a couple of historians, first of all. But it's also about the 1918 flu pandemic, which you're comparing apples to oranges because back then the world was so different.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

This is apples to like dogs.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

The world was so different. I don't think you can compare the end of that pandemic and how this one will end because just the dynamics of the world are very different. People, for example, are on flights all the time now, and that wasn't the case in 1918. I think I looked it up. There's like a hundred thousand, more than a hundred thousand flights a day in the world.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Sounds about right.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

In 1918.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

Were there planes?

SPEAKER_00 12:30

There were planes, but people were not, there were no commercial flights. It was like, I think military and people with a lot of money. There weren't the same dynamics. You weren't breathing in airports around people. Those people weren't going into communities all the time. Like it's just a completely different world. And so to present this like, well, when people think it's over, historians say this happened in 1918. Like, what? How is that relevant?

SPEAKER_01 12:54

It's a subtle tactic that you see a lot in, I guess, modern writing or modern journalism, where they would use a link to strengthen their point, fully banking on the fact that people won't click that link. The fact that it's underlined blue is like, oh no, no, no. I did my research. There's stuff behind this. It's a very subtle tactic that a lot of mainstream media and like modern journalists are exploiting. The fact that people won't click on it. Because to be fair, it's a lot of work. We are how many sentences in and we already have so much to say. Close reading takes a lot of work. Again, highlighting the point that if you're not doing any close reading, like a lot of these things will just go over your head. The last sentence of the first paragraph I've highlighted. Here's my proposed definition, Colon. The country will not fully emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic until most people in our diverse nation accept the risk and consequences of exposure to a ubiquitous SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

What's wrong with that, MJ?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Tell me you don't know anything about public health without mentioning the word public health, right? Like this is peak ignorance, I guess, for lack of a better term. This man wrote this a month after 2022. And I cannot emphasize this enough. This is not 2026. This is a month after 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the US alone from COVID. It's such a wild statement.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Oh, I was gonna say, like, the thing that irks me about this particular sentence is Yeah, what jumps out at you? It won't be over until people accept the risk and consequences of exposure to a ubiquitous virus.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

Like, yeah, oh my God.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

You can only accept risk if you understand risk. But public health leaders, public health institutions have not done a good job of explaining what the risk is. I mean, I know many people who are like, oh, I'm fine with the risks, I'm okay with it, but also at the same time refuse to read anything or understand what the risks are. So it's like, how do you do a risk assessment without assessing the risk? Here, he's kind of doing the same thing of like, this is the case, so you just have to accept it without explaining what the case is.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

I also think the problem is even more fundamental than that, because the term accept exposure and its consequences is very easy to clown on because usually when we talk about accepting exposure, it is applied to things where there's something to be gained. For example, I accept the risk of biking in the city, which is a very dangerous activity in Los Angeles, because I'm trying to go to a bookstore, right? There is like a payoff. I'm accepting the risk of doing this somewhat dangerous activity because I need to achieve a goal. In this case, what is there to be gained? What is the payoff? What is the payoff of accepting the risk? There's no like concrete, like, we need to do this so we can achieve this. Like, do you know what I mean? There's nothing to be gained from this.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Yeah, actually, throughout the whole thing, he never actually says what the benefit is. He keeps talking about, oh yes, the benefits of going back to normal, the benefits of this, but doesn't actually say what that is.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

Yeah, to keep it vague.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

And I think it's because his idea of like normal is the hyper-consumerist capitalist like buy bye-bye, spend, spend, spend. Presume. Yeah, that has been driving this kind of push back to normal. So I think he doesn't actually say it, but what I am understanding, and it makes sense that he was involved with Exxon. He used to work for Exxon.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Yeah, we should do this now. So we try to look up this guy, and first thing, it's really hard to look up this guy because his name is so generic that we actually had trouble finding out who he is. Steven Phillips. But we eventually tracked him down. Do you want to do the honors?

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Sure. So this is Steven Phillips. He has an MD and an MPH.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

It's one of those.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Yeah, it's giving bonus MPH. I think he went to Stanford according to his LinkedIn in like the 70s.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

So long ago.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Then worked at ExxonMobil Corporation, which also kind of raises red flags about like what are your actual interests? Yeah, and then yeah, his MPH was from UCLA, but it was very hard to find that out. And I don't know when he did that, what he did there, whether it was one of those fly in, fly out kind of programs.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

Grab and go sort of deal, like one year. Another funny thing, in looking up or trying to look up who this guy is, in August of 2022, so like just a few months later, he wrote another piece in Scientific American, another op-ed. The title of this op-ed in Scientific American, The New Normal for COVID calls for a new narrative. Which tells me maybe, maybe he has an agenda because you're publishing such similar articles in multiple places.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Did you look at what his previous publications in time were? Hold on, let me read to you. Okay, we start in 2022, in January 2022. Why 2022 is the year we learn to live with COVID-19?

SPEAKER_02 17:40

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

It's time to rethink your COVID-19 risk tolerance, March 2022. The key policy we need to end the pandemic is being ignored. This is the phase of the pandemic where life returns to normal, August 2022. And then we get to ours. Yeah. Like he's been going at this.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Perhaps he's part of the. I mean, a lot of people were part of this group. The what's his name?

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Jay Jay Battacharya.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

In my head, I call him Jay Battacharlatan.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Oh, that's actually really good. That's much easier to remember than his actual name. And uh, I frankly don't care enough about him to know his actual name, so that's referred to him as that from now on. It seems like he has an agenda, and I'm not surprised that he has an agenda, that he's pumping out all these things. So, fun guy, you know? Great dude. Sarcasm intended. Anyway, to wrap up my thought about the term accept exposure and its consequences, I made an analogy because I live in America. I linked this to something that plagues America often. Listen to the following sentence. It's time for Americans to accept the exposure and consequences of bullets. To accomplish what? We're accepting the exposure to getting shot by a random, unstable person. To accomplish what?

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

What is the end gain for this? There's no gain. There's no upside.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Good analogy. Yeah. Like what for? Why are we being told to accept this risk?

SPEAKER_01 18:57

This guy is asking us to do a risk-benefit analysis without benefits. It's just risk.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

But buying things, MJ.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Yeah, we gotta keep the economy going so the shareholders can have some profits. Okay. Another problem about the statement that I flagged. I'll read the sentence again. Here's my proposed definition: this country will not fully emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic until most people in our diverse nation accept the risk and consequences of exposure to a ubiquitous SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The statement, it's so subtle, but it's there. This statement assumes that COVID's presence is immutable because it will not fully emerge until people accept risk. It implies that there's no other way to address the virus because of the use of the term until. The only way for this to go away is if people accept the risk. It completely sidesteps the public health conversation, fully ignores all the possible things that we could do, completely shuts that down, and just assumes that, well, COVID is an immovable thing that we cannot do anything about.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yeah, it's really fatalist fatalistic, what's the word?

SPEAKER_01 19:58

It is fatalist.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Defeatist? Like, oh, there's this thing. We can't do anything. Oh well. And that's just pretty much the opposite of what public health has been trying to do throughout its existence. Is yes, there are these massive, difficult problems, but imagine if we just kind of like threw our arms in the air about HIV.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Oh, you know, the virus is here to stay.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Oh well, we're not gonna do anything about it, I guess. Like, no, there've been really aggressive and well-funded campaigns to In the past. Yeah, in the past. That's a hole.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Wow, she just rolled her eyes. What full 360?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Uh just because of how bad it is now. But yeah. Fully funded projects and campaigns to try to eliminate new cases of HIV, provide everybody who is living with HIV with the medication required so that they are okay and also so that it isn't passed to other people. Like there are difficult things that public health has attempted and does, but when it comes to COVID, it's almost like, oh, well, it's here, can't do anything about it.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Well, not fully emerge until people accept risk.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Right. Like you could put in any other disease and it would sound really messed up.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

It definitely would. Like we've done so much with TB. We just did our TB episode. We've done so much with polio, malaria, even some scientists engineered a mosquito that stops the transmissions of malaria inside the mosquito. Like things are possible with science.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Right. Imagine.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Imagine, you know, gutting funding in the third act of a global pandemic. Surely no country would do that. God. It's a nightmare. Yeah, it never ends. Anyway, the first sentence of the second paragraph. Oh my god, we're in the second paragraph. Okay, hold on.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

We're gonna be here all day.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

The first sentence of the second paragraph. I want to stick with the rhetoric of listing things because I feel like list is a very easy example of how to use rhetoric to manipulate things. So, first sentence of the second paragraph. The signal of the pandemic phase end is not the disappearance of the virus, the attenuation of accumulation. COVID-19 disease to interruption of transmissions, the solving of long COVID, diminishing emerging variants, or the pronouncement of a political or public health leadership, it is instead when mass of Americans move from avoiding to accepting exposures and its consequences. Now, this is another tactic of using lists to nullify the items in the list. Each individual's item's weight is diluted when you include them in a long list. If the list was split into separate sentences, this paragraph will read like an absurd poem. Let's try this. Okay, let's read this sentence, but it's split out into sentences instead of all bunched together in one list. Ready? The signal of the pandemic phase end is not the disappearance of the virus, period. Already I'm like, it's not? I feel like if the virus disappeared, that's the clearest signal. If for some magical reason COVID-19 disappears, I would say that's the end of the pandemic, right? Hands down. Yeah. But you don't notice that because it's a long-running sentence. So your brain just keeps going. The comma doesn't stop the thought.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

And your brain kind of turns off.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Yeah, it turns off when you have a long list of sentences. So I'm gonna read the rest of it. And you see how absurd this is. The signal of a pandemic phase end is not the disappearance of the virus, period. The signal of a pandemic phase end is not the attenuation of acute COVID-19 disease. Period. The signal of the pandemic phase end is not the interruption of transmission. Period. The signal of the pandemic phase end is not the solving a long COVID, period. The signal of the pandemic phase end is not the diminishing of emerging variants, period. The signal of the pandemic phase end is not the pronouncement of the political or public health leadership, period.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Do you see how absurd that is when you split it out?

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Yeah. It's like hammering you over the head with things that if you thought about would actually contribute to that. But anyway.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

All of these things are great. Why aren't we doing any of these things?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

And I noticed that this is the only time, I think, in here that he mentions long COVID. And I think that's such a key like we knew about long COVID when he published this in 2023. And people were talking about it in 2020 even. Like, I'm not getting better. Something is wrong.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Definitely in 2021, it was well established.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Absolutely. And so, like, to not include that in any of his discussion about when this ends, and really, I mean, we'll get into this, but really just focusing on death as the only bad thing that can happen, and not kind of hold on, what's going on with long COVID? And is it a good idea for everybody to be just like reinfected with COVID forever and ever and ever and ever? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Oh man. Okay, you do the next part. I'm coming down from a high.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Okay, the next thing I have highlighted is he talks about having an agnostic evaluation of the evidence and science. And I've written, show me where.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

I flag that too.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Because he doesn't. He doesn't really provide any. He just like in the rest of this talks about like deaths a little bit, but then really just kind of shoves his opinion through this like pseudoscientific language.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

They frame their opinions as fact, which is a big no-no for anyone out there, frankly. Like, you shouldn't frame your opinions as fact. I flag the sentence for another reason. Notice their word choice. Agnostic evaluation. He is setting the tone that he is being rational.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

This is the mansplaining coming out.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

This is a preemptive parry because any later criticism on this article would be starting from a position of disadvantage because he is taking the guise of reason, and it presumes any criticism would be coming against his place of reasons. It's like a preemptive thing that he's doing. God, this guy sucks. Anyway, the next sentence that I flagged is I think the third paragraph. Quote, but a recent national poll demonstrates a strikingly divided public not ready to make peace with the virus. Colon. While nearly half say that they have returned to their pre-COVID life, one third still believe this is more than a year orway or never. End quote. This may be the most egregious sentence in this article. Their word choice make peace is wild to me.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Yeah, I underline that.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Of all the word choice he could have used, he chose the one that implies the virus is some sort of Catholic guilt that you need to like unhealthily reconcile with. Because what do you make peace with? When do you use the term make peace?

SPEAKER_00 26:09

With things that you can't do anything about. I also underlined like pre-COVID life. Just thinking about like my experience in British Columbia where we didn't really have lockdowns. We didn't, actually.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Oh, actually, I don't know what Canada did to enlighten me.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Yeah, well, in different parts of Canada, because we're broken up into provinces, like different rules applied.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Where I live, we didn't have lockdowns. And Bonnie Henry, who was or is the provincial health officer, so the person who kind of like was making all the rules, has said recently, like last year, or 2024 or five, anyway. She has said that she's really proud that we didn't have lockdowns. And people have sort of had this revisionist like perspective on it, which has been really interesting to see because we were kind of asked to stay home. There was like bars and restaurants and things were like closed for sitting inside for a while, but then reopened like so much stuff. Schools were open in June 2020 before there were even vaccinations. Like children were back in school. Yeah, it was just really wild to see the kind of revisionism that happened. But yeah, like return to their pre-COVID life. I think for a lot of people, that was really early. A lot of people didn't have like super restrictive lockdowns. People talk about it like we were padlocked into our houses. Like that's not what happened. It was like challenging and difficult for a lot of people, but it wasn't this kind of hyper authoritarian like entrapment. I don't think that's the right word, but like it's not like we were never allowed to go outside or do anything. And it's yeah, it just feels like there's this imposed that was the worst time of our lives when we couldn't leave our houses, kind of idea that yeah, it's just really difficult to kind of, I don't know, have conversations about because people have revised how it was in their heads.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah, it's definitely something I've seen here in the States as well, where I'm gonna say it like conservatives are so like this is taking away my rights, like my freedom is being infringed. And I'm like, you have DoorDash and internet access. Please calm down. You could still go to the grocery store because that had to stay open, right? When they were complaining about these things of like, oh, I have to stay at home with my family. The actual authoritarian government, China, is the one I'm thinking of. They actually locked people like straight up. Like, that's the overstep. America and Canada didn't get anywhere near that, even remotely. There are stories in China, multiple people died because they were dialysis patient, but they were locked in their homes. That's what an authoritarian government does to watch conservatives freak out over like a stay-at-home order is sad and funny to me.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Like, I think in Canada, I'm trying to think of like what some of the more extreme things were. And I think in Quebec or in Montreal, people were getting like there was a curfew. People were getting ticketed for being outside after a certain time.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Oh no, a ticket.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

I mean, it was really, I think, challenging, especially for people who were homeless. Sure. There were a lot of people just like having parties anyway, you know? And like, yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

The British government got in trouble because they had a party during lockdown.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Yeah, Boris Johnson.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

I don't want to discount anyone's actual experience, but the upper middle class people who makes a lot of noise on social media, like that's what irritates me.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Exactly. That's who. And it's the people who had to go and be the essential workers in the grocery store without appropriate protections. And then, oh no, you got long COVID, sucks to be you. Meanwhile, like back then they were being called heroes and all of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Okay, so that lasted so short. Okay, we have to move on.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

Yeah, we do.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Next paragraph. Since the omicon strain achieved predominance in early 2022, and now with over 500 substrain in circulation, the risk-benefit balance has progressively tilted in favor of planning for and accepting exposure for most non-high-risk Americans. In this schema, people aged 65 and higher immunocompromised or frail with chronic disease constitutes high risk for serious disease. The remaining significant majority of the population is non-high risk. And quote, what the f is non-high risk? Just say moderate or low risk.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

But also, my question that I've written there is non-high risk. Okay, substitute moderate, substitute low. For what? He never says, like, are you talking about dying? Are you talking about long COVID? Are you talking about all of the damage that we knew in 2023 was happening? Hmm? What are you talking about, guy?

SPEAKER_01 30:33

No, no, no. No need to elaborate on that at all. My pet theory is that they avoided the words moderate and low risk because that term implies that there is still risk, but non-high risk gives the false impression that there is no risk because non sounds like no.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Oh, I see. Yeah, for sure. I could see how people could read this and be like, that's not me.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Yeah, non-high risk. Do you want to break this? There's so many things wrong with this sentence.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Oh, go ahead. I just wrote for what? Question mark, question mark, question mark.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Yeah, that was the main thing. Risk-benefit balance. We talked about this already. There is no benefit, it's just risk.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

Yeah, there's no good that comes of getting COVID.

SPEAKER_01 31:09

So he set up all this, and then he moves on to his four arguments for why we need to quote live with the virus, each of which more laughable than the last. Alright, do you want to start with this?

SPEAKER_00 31:21

The first one decreased virulence and non-high-risk people. So blah, blah, blah. He goes on about how Omicron is one-tenth the severity of the prior Delta variant. Which is, I think, so connected to that whole conversation about, oh, well, Omicron is mild. Mild, mild, mild, mild, mild. Like it's that just like, oh my god. But then even for the last episode, it wasn't the last episode, one of the episodes I did, the one called Bad Press.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Good one, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Thank you. Part of our conversation with Julia Doubleday was about that the media really, really ran with the idea that Omicron was mild. Because it was being compared to Delta, which came before, which was a lot of people died. It was really, really dramatic. But then comparing Alpha to Omicron, they're actually similar in severity. Like there was some research that we had kind of pulled up to look into that. And like that's never talked about. It's only ever compared to Delta, which was like the worst. But then you kind of look at, okay, well, the ones that came first were not that different from the severity of Omicron. And so it's really interesting to me that he like continues to push that and talks about fatality rates a lot. And so I checked. And this was 2023. He says that fatality rates, so people dying from COVID is lower than that of the seasonal flu for non-high-risk people. So again, all these caveats. And so maybe that was true at that time. But I I checked to see if like what the situation was now, and it was actually so hard to find. And I was looking at Canada stuff because I'm in Canada and I wonder if it's different in the United States. But first it was really hard to find. So for the flu, since the end of August, and these were only reported deaths, the end of August 2025, 462 people have died reported for COVID since the end of that same time. So since the end of August 2025, also reported, 844 people have died. So it's like close to double the number of people who have died from COVID versus a flu, which is interesting. And then it also says that most of those people were over the age of 65. So I guess that is his high-risk people. But all that to say, just like people love to compare COVID and the flu. Oh, it's just a flu. But the flu kills people. COVID also kills people. And as the most recent data I can find, COVID has killed more people than the flu. So this comparison is really strange to me that people continue to make it because I think they just don't know.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

Yeah, that was my biggest complaint about this argument. I made this point years ago and I continue to stand by it. First, COVID is not like the flu. It simply isn't. Um I don't know what to tell you. It's like saying the flu is kind of like the cold. The flu is not like the cold. Second, you said this and I fully agree. The flu is pretty bad, actually. Like people say that as if the flu doesn't kill people. And I'm like, even if that COVID is like the flu, which it isn't, but let's say the COVID is like the flu, it's still bad. Like there's a reason why we have seasonal flu vaccines. It's not a cold. The author is very much talking like he's part of like the upper class of like people dying is just an inconvenience to me. Okay. I have a rant.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 34:21

The argument about high risk versus people who are not high risk. The argument fundamentally misunderstands how public health works. Viruses do not respect man-made boundaries. By asking a broad segment of society, the quote-unquote low-risk people, to do essentially nothing, you are creating a scenario where the virus is allowed to exist in the reservoir of these low-risk people, and thus putting high-risk people in the danger of exposure and infection.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

So from a philosophical perspective, this is deeply problematic and regressive. This approach is a shared mentality with a lot of conservative politics. You are individually responsible for your own health.

SPEAKER_00 34:57

Oh yes, he even says that.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

There's no collective effort, everyone for themselves. This is not how you build a functioning society. Why are we asking people who are more vulnerable to do more work?

SPEAKER_00 35:08

To take on all of the risk, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

It's so backwards. Like, shouldn't those who are low risk, those who have the capacity to do more, contribute more to the collective public health effort? Like, this is akin to like not taxing the wealthiest people in our society, but like asking low-income people to be like, oh, you better fill out your tax form, right? Otherwise, our IRS is gonna get you. I'm like, why are you not taxing the people with yachts? Like, it doesn't make any sense. You see that same paradigm here with public health, with like a virus. It's like, no, no, no, only like the really vulnerable people need to worry about this. And that's just so backwards.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Absolutely. And I think it also assumes that the people who are low risk now will forever be low risk.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

People age. Hello.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

People age first, and then it's almost like I've heard someone described it as like getting in a car crash. Like you get in a car crash once you get up and everything is okay, like your car still runs. All right, keep going. It doesn't reverse the damage that may have happened.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

Yeah, the car has been hit.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Yeah, you don't know what that damage is. People aren't testing, people don't like you can't feel some of the damage that happens. You can't feel when you get a blood clot necessarily. You can't feel when your immune system is damaged. You can't feel like neurological impacts or cognitive impacts like physically. And so I think there's a very weird thing going on where people think, oh, I don't feel any different. I got better. But you don't know. Maybe the next time you get COVID, you're gonna have a heart attack after that. I just read an article, I think it was published yesterday in The Guardian about someone who lost their hearing after COVID infection because the inflammation like made their eustacean tubes like stick together or something. And it's been documented in literature that COVID can cause hearing loss and hearing damage. And like all of these things that can happen, just because you're low risk once doesn't mean a thing is not gonna happen to you next.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Yeah, and taking that car crash analogy, everyone age. I feel like people forget that people age. You get into that car crash when you're 20, you shrug off the whiplash. You get into that car crash when you're 30, or when you're 40, when you're 50. You know, my knees are making sounds now. They weren't making that sound before. People forget that age is a thing for some reason when discussing things like this, you know?

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Right. And it also makes me feel I just feel so bad for kids because a lot of children are not vaccinated.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

Thanks to the anti-vaxxers.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Yeah, like uptake for COVID vaccinations is strikingly low. So low. And so kids are getting in these proverbial car accidents over and over. And how many times are they expected to have accepted the risks to use this guy's language, getting COVID throughout their schooling until like they don't even set the risk.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

Their parents set the risk, which is very scary.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Yeah. By graduation, how many times have you been hit in this car crash?

SPEAKER_01 37:54

And one day those kids will be 30. Ah. The next thing that he brought up, what's point two that he said?

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Serious disease heavily concentrated in high-risk people.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Here we go again.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

This frustrated me. This was one of the ones that where I had written a lot or scribbled a lot. Was that he talks about this is a population where our resources and attention must be focused. We can't forget them. These are the people who must not be left behind at the exact same time as making the argument that this is indefinitely gonna happen and personal action will have the greatest impact, blah, blah, blah. But it's just this very strange way of trying to sound compassionate, like, oh, we can't forget them, those high-risk people, at the same time as being like, but we must go ahead anyway.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

This sounds like one of those. Do you know Black Adder Goes Forth? It's like the Rowan Atkinson comedy.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

I know Black Adder, but it is goes forth different from Black Adder.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

Oh, it's just the fourth season of Black Adder. Black Adder is like a British comedy series, but it gives the same vibe as a general telling people to go over the hill. Well, yeah, you obviously feel fine about us going over the hill. You're not going over the it reads like, oh, we must remember the sacrifice of these soldiers while I sit like 20 miles behind the trench.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

That is exactly what this is giving. Again, from the bad press episode, it there's like, do you know Shrek? Lord Farquad.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Where he's like, Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to take. You're like, okay.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

That's like Donald Trump right now. This is conservative ideology, but just applied to like public health. You are responsible for your own health. No need for any collaborative effort to protect everyone, every man for themselves, which is, in my opinion, very conservative-coded philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Yeah. He goes on, he's like, conflates the flu with COVID as well. He says the risk of serious COVID disease for non-high-risk who is the majority of people, he must reinforce, is comparable to other familiar communicable diseases such as the flu. And then he also says, as well as traumatic causes such as motor vehicle accidents, where they don't have any control. So he's putting these things together like you don't have control over whether or not you get in a car accident, which you can do things to minimize, and we do. We have traffic lights, we don't encourage people drinking and driving. Like there are things in place. With this, he's basically just advocating for a free-for-all. We must accept. You don't have any control. Which isn't really true. So yeah, he's just tying these things together to I don't know what the term for this fallacy is, but it's kind of like everyone has it, everyone's doing it, therefore it must be normal.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

I don't know the name of that fallacy either, but it always irks me when people use that argument of like, well, the majority of us are fine, or like, oh, this doesn't impact the majority of us. And I'm like, listen to how absurd that is if we swap out the example. We don't need seat belts. Most of us drive carefully. It's like that's not you sound like such an asshole when you say that. Where's your empathy?

SPEAKER_00 40:43

And okay, not to be ageist, but this guy went to medical school in the 70s. Like, he's gotta be in his high-risk population that he seems to not care about.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Well, he's being paid a lot, I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

Yeah, that Exxon mobile money.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

He has a word count and a deadline. Okay. What's the next point that he made?

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Inability to control exposure and transmission.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

He doesn't engage with any research.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

No public health here.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

No, like there are many ways we can do this. He's basically just like, well, we can't lock down forever, so we can't do anything about it.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Hello? Vaccines, masks, hello?

SPEAKER_00 41:19

Right. Nothing about vaccination, nothing about respirators, nothing about cleaning the air, nothing about any of the like science around this. And he's just like, this is futile.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

This is how I know he doesn't know anything about public health.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

He literally says, trying to avoid exposure is futile. Like, what?

SPEAKER_01 41:35

That word choice is absolutely disgusting of a word choice. Like trying to do anything is futile.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Resistance is futile. Reminds me of the AI conversations. Can't do anything about it. And you're like, mmm.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

We can't do so many things about it. And this reminds me of one episode that I did in the past. It was a silly episode. We were reviewing The Last of Us, the TV show from like a public health perspective. Have you seen the show?

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Yes. And why don't they use respirators?

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Oh yeah. In the first episode of season one, they were depicting a scene about the origin of this fungus. And it was in Indonesia.

SPEAKER_02 42:07

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

And then they asked like a scientist of like, oh my god, can you look at what this new fungus is? This is so funny to me. And it reminds me of this because the scientist was like, Oh my god, this fungus is so bad. It's so dangerous. And then the guy said, So what should we do? And this person looked him dead in the eyes and said, We should bomb the city. It reminds me of this. It's like, oh, we have this uh virus that's like making its way across the globe. What should we do? Nothing. I don't know what lone jump coach this guy had, but the leap from transmission control didn't work to accept exposure is wild to me. What a leap.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

Yeah, that's not even a leap.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

That's like You switch sports. That was another egregious paragraph.

SPEAKER_00 42:52

Yeah, like we don't have time to go into every single thing.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

No.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

But he basically refutes the concept of public health in here.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

And then four. This is the last one. Highly protective population immunity against serious disease.

SPEAKER_01 43:07

Oh, here we go. The classic.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Okay, the one reasonable thing he has said in this entire thing is we are unlikely to reach classical herd immunity thresholds that drive elimination.

SPEAKER_01 43:17

Because of people like him.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

Exactly. I was gonna say that. Like, this is a reasonable thing to say, but only because of assessing the situation and looking around. But we had maybe a chance of doing this.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

We had a shot, I think.

SPEAKER_00 43:32

Early on.

SPEAKER_01 43:33

End of 2020, we had a shot.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Early on, we did. When we had access to vaccinations, people were still willing to do stuff. We hadn't gotten into this like ridiculous It's a political thing. Masks are the worst thing that has ever happened to me, kind of nonsense. We did have a chance. But yes, now that it's just constant mutation, constant transmission, constant everywhere. Yeah, no, we're not gonna get to herd immunity because everybody is always. Sick. But what was annoying and interesting in here was he doesn't talk about long COVID here, which is what I would have expected. That people are getting sick, many people are getting sick.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

This argument we've seen repeatedly, it was championed by the Maha people in the United States of like, oh, herd immunity by exposure. And this guy's is touting that same point, that same stupid point. It goes to show that he doesn't even understand the nature of herd immunity because herd immunity is achieved when the majority of people are immune, protecting the minority of people who cannot achieve immunity. This doesn't happen by letting a virus infect everyone. This happens with conscious active effort through vaccination.

SPEAKER_00 44:41

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 44:41

Yes. If you say to achieve herd immunity, we first need to infect everyone, you have completely defeated the purpose of herd immunity.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Precisely!

SPEAKER_01 44:49

Because the point of immunity is that we don't have to get infected at all. That's the whole point.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

And I don't understand how anybody who thinks that they know anything about public health can advocate for infection as a means to As a model? No. There are bad things that happen with infection every time. And he also does do the very irritating, like shifting of the goalposts to hybrid immunity. So when they realized, oh, herd immunity isn't gonna happen, they were like, hmm, okay, let's try, let's try hybrid immunity. Okay, guys, just trust us, trust us. If you get sick, if you get infected, and you get vaccinated, it's great, it's great. This is exactly what we were trying to do. Like, no, you weren't. You fed it up, and now you're trying to cover your ass.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

You just failed the first time. Yeah. Oh boy. Here's a sentence that really irritated me. It's towards the end. After three years of imposition, followed by gradual easing of lockdown, quarantine, isolation, testing, vaccination, and masking, how does the holdout one-third of the country move from the current obsolete but ingrained avoid exposure paradigm to the endemic accept exposure reality? This not only has significant medical, public, and mental health implication, it will also accelerate the return to a fully functioning and dynamic society. Tell me that you are being paid to write this without telling me that you're being paid to write.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

I know. Oh my god, the word choices.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

So many word choices that are problematic.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

Like imposition? What about protection? The hold-out one-third?

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Like we don't want to get COVID and we are unreasonable for saying that.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

Right? After seeing what had happened so recently as well, and continuing to see like the ongoing damage that it causes, like how is that unreasonable? And he calls it obsolete. And how do you get people to accept exposure? And then also talks about mental health implications, which find to be very frustrating because people often complain about, oh, well, people who are still trying to protect themselves from COVID and protect their communities from COVID have mental health problems. And what? You would never describe, oh, you're drinking clean water. Mental health. Like, no.

SPEAKER_01 46:54

Yeah, the word choice obsolete, that entire sentence, obsolete but ingrained of avoid exposure paradigm to an endemic of sub-exposure reality. It reads like propaganda. It reads like what a politician would say when he is on the pulpit trying to like browse the rabble, if you will. Also, this is something that is just a general pet peeve. How does someone living to avoid exposure affect you? Like, genuine question. How does someone who wears a mask and avoid crowded spaces, how does that affect you? Only a white man has the audacity to be like, I don't like the way how you're living your life. You know what I mean? Like, why does that affect you? So what this person is wearing a mask. Why does that bother you so much?

SPEAKER_00 47:31

I know, right? I think there's so much unresolved stuff that people have. They don't like to be reminded that this is ongoing. They don't like to think about how I really don't know what it is. I wonder, I feel like a lot of people who get mad about masks are also a lot of the same kinds of people who have lived a comfortable life their whole lives. Have been born in North America. The worst thing that has happened has been getting stuff stuck in traffic and being late.

SPEAKER_01 48:01

It's such an affront to them.

SPEAKER_00 48:02

People who have lived incredibly comfortable lives. This like minuscule reminder that somebody else is in a mask reminds them of perhaps one of the difficult times in their life. And they just have no capacity, maybe have no capacity to like hold or understand that no, actually, many different people in the world have experienced much harder things. Maybe trying to stay alive is something that I don't know is worth wearing a mask for. I don't know if this is being very clear, but I'm just like a lot of the resistance that I've experienced seems to come from people who haven't really at least not in the grand scheme of things, really struggled. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

I would echo that. Again, we don't know. This is just all our hypothesis and opinion, but I echo that feeling. Like I've been mocked for wearing a mask three times, and they're all by white men. Not even people I know, just like strangers on the street.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Random strangers, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

They're all white men who would like mock me for wearing a mask. And is that representative of something? Like, I don't know, but I could see the connection of like you have lived in privilege your entire life, that other people's behavior of protecting themselves is somehow annoying to you to the point that you feel like you need to say something. If you think it's ridiculous I'm wearing a mask, you are allowed to feel that way. But the fact that they voiced it to a stranger on the street is absolutely wild to me that they feel the need to do that. So I don't know, but I think your observations are not off base. Like it's usually people who have privilege.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Yeah, it's obviously not everyone. But yeah, in my experience, it has been white men and also white women who have something to say, and it's often like just kind of being an asshole for no reason. Like one guy coughed at me, one woman, and often in medical settings, which is also messed up. Like people with power. One kind of front desk person was like, Oh, you don't have to wear that in here. Actually, yes, I do.

SPEAKER_01 50:00

Also, why do you care?

SPEAKER_00 50:02

Yeah, and yeah, kind of just like struggling with doctors as well. Like I had a cardiologist, not a cardiologist, what was he?

SPEAKER_01 50:08

Internal medicine, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Something, something. I don't remember what his title was. But anyway, he was very much like COVID doesn't spread in hospitals.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

Yikes, dude.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

Hello?

SPEAKER_01 50:18

Medical board? This board, this like removed this guy's license. Do you know what like iatrogenic infections are? Hello, sir?

SPEAKER_00 50:25

Right? No. And the thing is that it's just there's so much, I don't know what's going on in hospitals either. It's the same kind of like resistance to masking, to doing anything to prevent it.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

So, yes, as someone who knows a lot of doctors, because I'm married to one and therefore I'm privy to a lot of their conversations, doctors are the worst public health people.

SPEAKER_00 50:43

But they love to talk about it and like they know they sure love to talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 50:48

I will say, most of them will not bring it up. One is not polite, and also it's like not really good patient interaction. So the good doctors, even if they think it, they won't say anything. So the fact that your guy said something is really egregious because he should have kept that to himself, even if he thought about it in his head.

SPEAKER_02 51:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

Anyway, yikes. It just screams like conservative politics adjacent of like transphobic, xenophobic. For some reason, I need to comment on your way of life, even though it has nothing to do with me. Anyway, so this article was a mess.

SPEAKER_00 51:19

I know. And yeah, basically, all I have where we stopped to the end is just circling language choice. They're confused, health alarms, fearful, anxious, confused, blah, blah, blah. And then, like, now you must be courageous to accept the exposure policies and the benefits of the new prayer. Like, all of the language choice.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

I flagged all those words too. And in our last episode of Public Health Media Club, we talked about everything's tuberculosis by John Green, in that he had this concept that I really love, which is people keep trying to give disease meaning. You can so see that in the last chunk of this article where he uses those highly emotional words. And he's setting up like devil versus angel comparison. Again, like this is why close reading is so important because if you have that part of your brain turned off, you'll just be like, Oh yeah, maybe they are kind of crazy for thinking X, Y, and Z. Maybe like I am being courageous for not wearing a mask for some reason. Like, close reading is such an important skill, and unfortunately, it just takes a lot of effort and time. If you read things quickly, you're not gonna pick these things up.

SPEAKER_00 52:21

Yeah, so what do you give this in the end?

SPEAKER_01 52:24

Wow, this might be I think this might be the worst one yet. This one made me like physically sick.

SPEAKER_00 52:29

Yeah, I also think it is bad, but I think it's worse because it was written in 2023.

SPEAKER_01 52:36

Yes, the timing of it is wild.

SPEAKER_00 52:38

Because it was trying to push people into accepting risk. Don't worry, no problem, keep going.

SPEAKER_01 52:43

Like 200,000 people died last year. Who cares?

SPEAKER_00 52:46

It's egregious to read in 2026, but at the time it was published, the damage this probably did because it's also published in time, which is one of these like prestige legacy media mainstream media is dead.

SPEAKER_01 52:58

We have established that.

SPEAKER_00 52:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:59

Uh negative eight out of ten.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Yeah, if negative ten is like the Alex Jones Joe Rogan level.

SPEAKER_01 53:06

Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 53:06

Yeah, at least the sentences make sense.

unknown 53:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

That's true. It's coherent. Yeah, and to wrap up, I have a final thoughtslash rant.

SPEAKER_00 53:15

Yes, please.

SPEAKER_01 53:16

Here is the ultimate problem that I have with this article and the mentality that it represents. And I would love to hear your thought on this because you might disagree with me on this. The notion that viruses and infections change over time and that public health should also change over time, that is a valid notion. The notion that when a disease is endemic, we treat it differently than how we treat an active pandemic is also a valid notion. The problem is they're not offering any solutions. That's the fundamental problem with this piece. Their solution is to just get sick, which is not a solution. The article spent so many words arguing about how people need to move on in an attempt to distract the reader from its fundamental deceit, which is the author's position is to do nothing. The COVID pandemic blew several core assumptions about how we live our lives wide open. And with that came countless opportunities for us to reassess how our society is structured and build a better future going forward. This article and the people that it represents wants to reject all those learning opportunities and just regress back to a status quo that does not work for many people. For what? A return to normal sounds awful when for many of us, normal sucked. My example is always remote work. The pandemic made people realize how stupid it is to go into the office five days a week for many jobs. Obviously, some jobs you need to go in person, but not all jobs. And pandemic also made people realize dang, our streets are much nicer without cars. And wow, instead of parking lots, turning them into like outdoor dining spaces is actually kind of nice. There's so many things where because of the pandemic, we changed how we do things. But instead of saying, Oh, because of this shift, let's try to build from this point forward and like change how we do things, these people just want to go backwards, and that's so backwards for lack of a better term to me.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

Yeah, you're making me think of a piece that I recently it was published in April of 2020. So a month into the sort of global declaration of like an emergency. And it's really creepy. I'll send it to you. It's really creepy to read now in 2026 because it says prepare for the ultimate gaslighting. Did you ever read this?

SPEAKER_01 55:23

No. I was too busy dealing with actual gaslighting.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

So but it was essentially a warning.

SPEAKER_01 55:30

Very prescient.

SPEAKER_00 55:31

Absolutely. He's like, beware of what's coming. You're gonna be swindled into going back to normal. You're going to be told so much money is gonna be pumped into, making you forget what you're actually seeing and making you think that before this was a good place to be. And it's he nailed it. It's really, really well written, I think. And I want more people to kind of go back to it because I do feel like at the time, so many more people were like, hey, we can live differently. It was a time of opportunity of hey, we could change things. It doesn't have to be the way that it was. And slowly, slowly, slowly, all the things that he sort of outlined in this came true to the point where it's just like, I feel there are just a few people left who still are like, hey, what?

SPEAKER_01 56:16

Yeah, what happened to remote work?

SPEAKER_00 56:18

Yeah, what happened to any of the things that we were thinking could be possible? So many accommodations that happened for disabled people were very possible. This made clear that yeah, we could do it. And then it was just like, actually, we don't want to anymore. Everybody back to the office.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

You can tell who benefited from this by who wrote those pieces, like this piece, we gotta return to normal. And again, worked for ExxonMobil. You can tell like who's backing this movement.

SPEAKER_00 56:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:45

But yeah, like that's my ultimate problem. Like, he spent a bunch of words offering no solution. His solution is just do nothing and just get sick.

SPEAKER_00 56:53

And that's pretty much what most public health institutions and leaders have been saying.

SPEAKER_01 56:57

Like, just we tried.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

Okay. We tried. Continue.

SPEAKER_01 57:02

God, what a terrible piece.

SPEAKER_00 57:04

Yeah, it's actually really bad. I regret wasting printer ink.

SPEAKER_01 57:07

Oh, yeah, you printed it out too. Well, don't do that next time.

SPEAKER_00 57:10

Maybe we'll pick something that's actually kind of good next time. Maybe.

SPEAKER_01 57:13

Anyway, listeners, remember that things could have been better.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

Things could have been better. So thank you for suggesting this for us, everybody.

SPEAKER_01 57:25

We'll do another poll. Yeah. Thank you for listening to Public Health Media Club. We'll catch you next time.