01:36 John Heilman Aloha and namaste, everyone, and welcome to InPolitik with John Heilman, a puck in Odyssey Joint, featuring lively, in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the corridors of power in America, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture. 01:49 You may dimly recall that a couple days after Labor Day, 01:55 not long ago in any normal world, but ancient history in the head-spinning hyperdrive one that we currently inhabit, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared at an oversight hearing conducted by the Senate Finance Committee and received a bipartisan thrashing that would have been deeply painful to witness if it weren't so richly deserved 02:15 supremely necessary and stunningly revealing. 02:20 For a lot of folks, in fact, it was the moment when the penny finally dropped on just how totally screwed the country's public health system has become in just half a year since the conspiracy theory peddling. 02:33 Anti-vax, settled science denying, bear carcass transporting, dead whale decapitating, brain worm boasting scion of America's most fabled democratic dynasty took over the Department of Health and Human Services. 02:47 But as screwed as you think America's public health system, and therefore America's public health, may be under the auspices of RFK Jr., I have a newsflash for you. 02:59 It's far more screwed, like way more screwed... 03:02 than you even think. 03:04 Or at least that is my semi-informed, well, not that well-informed impression. 03:10 So it's an impression that I wanted to test by running it past one of the leading authorities on public health in this or any nation, world-class epidemiologist, regents professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Michael Osterholm. 03:31 Now, as it happens, there was another good reason to get Michael Osterholm on the show. 03:35 Two days before RFK Jr. had his time in the barrel in the Senate, Mike published a new and incredibly important book, the title of which is The Big One, How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics, all of which is why we are so lucky to have him on the show today to talk not just about the many and varied infirmities of RFK Jr. and the parlous state of America's public health system in the Trump 2.0 era, 04:00 but the stuff that we need to be doing and naturally aren't doing to get ready for the next pandemic. 04:07 Oh, also, how close to the mark my assessment is of how well and truly fucked we are. 04:14 A verdict that will surely surprise you as much as it surprised me on this all new episode of The Politics with John Heilman that's coming at you in three, two, one. 04:25 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We announced this week, CDC announced, that 76.4% of Americans are suffering a chronic disease. 04:36 And my uncle was president, it was 11%. 04:38 In 1950, it was 3%. 04:43 And we're the sickest country in the world. 04:46 We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world. 04:51 And yet we spend more on health care than any country in the world. 04:54 We spend two to three times what European nations spend. 04:59 We spend nearly as much in our country for health care as all the other nations in the world combined. 05:08 And yet we have the worst health outcomes. 05:11 We've lost six years in lifespan and longevity to Europe in the past 20 years. 05:18 Our girls are hitting puberty six years earlier than historically. 05:23 Our young men have sperm counts that are half of what they ought to be. 05:29 They have testosterone levels that are half of what they ought to be. 05:32 We have diabetes that is now endemic, not just epidemic, it's everywhere. 05:39 38% of teens are now diabetic or pre-diabetic. 05:44 When I was a kid, it was zero. 05:46 and the autism rates which the president is particularly concerned with have dropped from less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in every 31 kids today. 06:00 John Heilman Okay, so the inimitable, that voice, you know it anywhere. 06:06 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 06:10 Last week, sitting down, did a big briefing about the Maha agenda with a bunch of his people. 06:18 Took a couple questions from reporters. 06:20 He's still doing cleanup from that Senate hearing that he did that was so disastrous for him. 06:24 And we are here with someone who never needs to clean up after himself because he rarely makes a giant mess. 06:29 Michael Osterholm. 06:29 Michael, good to see you. 06:30 How are you doing, man? 06:31 Michael Osterholm Thank you. 06:31 It's good to be back with you. 06:33 John Heilman Thank you. 06:35 I think like there's that I picked that clip because it's so it's so perfectly encapsulates one of the problems with one of the many problems with Secretary Kennedy. 06:48 the mixture of true claims, you know, we do spend, you know, more than any other developed country on our healthcare system. 06:57 We do have worse health comes than a lot of those places. 07:00 And other things he says in there is mixed in with, and again, I'm no expert, but things that just, I even, I know are bullshit and things that sound like bullshit. 07:11 And so I want to start with this question. 07:13 Is America the sickest country in the world, Dr. Osterholm? 07:16 Michael Osterholm Well, clearly we're one of the sickest. 07:18 And when I say one of the sickest, there are those countries that have life expectancies today that are still in the high 40, early 50 years of life. 07:25 And that's because they're in low-income countries with really very significant health challenges that we don't see. 07:31 When you look at the high-income countries, we are really at the bottom of the list. 07:35 But what Secretary Kennedy doesn't share with you is that we do have reasons why there are so many problems. 07:41 One is obesity. 07:42 Two is obesity. 07:43 Three is obesity. 07:45 And when you look at the issues there, so many of the chronic diseases that we deal with occur when you have the intersection between obesity and long life otherwise because you don't die early from these other conditions. 07:58 The other part of it that is, I think, a challenge is that no other country in the world does the kind of medical procedures we do to try to not prolong life or necessarily, in some cases, end disease, but basically provide some type of support or comfort. 08:13 What am I talking about? 08:14 go look at knee replacements, look at hip replacements, look at some of the things that are much more of a luxury item that we see here in this country than in many other countries. 08:23 Countries that you'd have to get in line and take years before you're able to access those care. 08:29 So one of the challenges we have with Mr. Kennedy's comments are the fact that, as you pointed out, some of them actually have factual basis. 08:37 Others, far from it. 08:39 For example, just something as simple but yet as complicated as autism. 08:44 The autism experts have sounded loud and clear over the course of the past six months that this increasing rate of autism in kids is very much an artifact of reclassifying how we call autism. 08:56 You know, it's not due to some new finding... 08:59 that can be blamed on a third party, such as a chemical or necessarily any kind of food product, etc. 09:08 So I think the challenge we have with him is that trying to understand what is fact and what is fiction is virtually impossible. 09:15 So you just pretty much have to take most of it as fiction. 09:17 John Heilman I mean, I don't want to stray too much into the realm of psychology, but things like bipolar disorder was a thing that you never heard about when I was 10 years old. 09:26 Now, I know what bipolar disorder is. 09:30 So there's been an alarming rise in bipolar disorder. 09:33 Because we didn't have bipolar disorder before. 09:36 Gluten allergies is another thing. 09:38 I never heard about gluten when I was a kid growing up. 09:39 Never. 09:40 I mean, no one talked about gluten in the 70s and 80s, let alone in the 50s and 60s. 09:44 Now it's like, hey, we talk about gluten sensitivity. 09:48 One of the other things that he said there struck you as most... 09:51 tendentious of the stats. 09:53 Because I mean, the things about sperm count, about girls hitting puberty earlier, about 70, I mean, I know there's a chronic disease problem in America, but 76.4% of Americans have chronic disease. 10:07 I mean, if true, I'm stunned, but it sounds like a lot. 10:12 Michael Osterholm Well, again, it's all in the definition of what you call a chronic disease and what that means. 10:17 I mean, how many people are taking statins today for their cholesterol because they have high cholesterol? 10:23 One would argue that that's a disease process and that therefore you have to count that as a chronic disease issue in terms of atherosclerosis and the possibility for heart attacks. 10:33 And so I think that just that one example is, again, with an aging population. 10:39 Remember, we're aging. 10:41 And when you overlay obesity on that, which is the cause of so many conditions, whether they're related to the diabetes issue, they're related to heart disease. 10:50 There's new data suggesting they have a lot to do with mental health issues. 10:54 And the other problem is that today we have a very rapidly increasing recognition of mental health. 11:00 And the fact of the world that we live in today is not the world that our grandparents grew up in in that regard. 11:07 You know, I happen to be very well versed in what happens on college campuses. 11:11 And, you know, when I started college 50 years ago, basically very few students sought out mental health support. 11:18 You know, the idea that they had today in many campuses around the country reporting as high as 50 percent of students are routinely seeking mental health therapy. 11:27 Important. 11:29 I'm glad they're doing it. 11:30 But the point of it is, why is that? 11:33 And you could argue that some would say that's a chronic disease problem. 11:37 Well, it's because the world we live in is very different and how we recognize that in the old days, you and I would just tighten up the belt and do it. 11:44 OK, now today, you know, people seek that out and I'm glad they do. 11:48 But that's an example of what he does. 11:50 He mix and matches facts in such a way as that, as I've said, with regard to at least his work on the vaccines, there's one choice here. 11:59 Either you can believe in science and the goodness that it's brought over the course of the past hundred years, or you can believe in magic, smoke and mirrors. 12:07 And that's a large part of what his message is. 12:10 John Heilman Right, and just not to beat a dead horse about this, but if you take the combination of whether it's mental health or whether it's physical issues, we now know what a problem is that we didn't have a name for previously. 12:24 We've had better diagnostics. 12:27 with the social changes that you'd pointed to the rental health thing on college campuses, partly it's because we're now diagnosed with some of those problems better. 12:37 Partly it's because there's now a less social stigma to seeking help for it. 12:41 So if you're using, so the data, like, oh my God, 12:44 Man, kids today are a lot crazier than they used to be. 12:46 It's like, well, no. 12:47 Actually, they were just as crazy before. 12:49 But now we know what those different categories of craziness are. 12:52 And I'm being a little bit gloom about this. 12:54 And we've also told them that they should seek help. 12:57 So they go and report the problems in a way that they didn't when we were taught that these things were shameful. 13:03 Michael Osterholm No, you're absolutely right. 13:04 And I think when you think about this concept of life expectancy, it's kind of a little bit of a challenge because it's basically how long do people live? 13:13 Well, if two people live 75 and 78 years respectively, they've got a life expectancy of about 76.5. 13:20 But if two people are born, one dies at age five and the other one dies at age 65, the average life expectancy is 30 years. 13:30 And so we for so long had a population where we lost so many of our young individuals that life expectancy was less. 13:37 Today, these people are becoming old. 13:39 They didn't become old in large numbers 100 years ago or 50 years ago. 13:44 And I think that's one of the things that people fail to remember is that because of that, there are diseases that come with just being old. 13:50 John Heilman Right. 13:51 And you just highlighted fantastically for me my degree of ignorance or short-sightedness. 13:57 Because as I cited the 76.4% of Americans with chronic diseases, I would never have said I have a chronic disease. 14:04 I don't believe I do have a chronic disease. 14:06 But I have high cholesterol. 14:07 I take a statin every day. 14:09 So I'm pointing out that it didn't even occur to me that what – because he does the scare thing of, oh, my God, chronic disease is on the rise. 14:17 Yeah. 14:17 And as you know, statins are one of the great miracle drugs of our era. 14:22 For less than a dollar in a day, we pop you to get statin every day. 14:28 And my cholesterol drops, and no one worries about it. 14:31 I really don't have the disease as long as I take the statin every day. 14:33 Michael Osterholm Right, right, right. 14:35 And I would also add for you and I both, some people would suggest that our mental health status is probably worth evaluating. 14:42 So you and I are in the same boat on that one. 14:44 John Heilman Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. 14:47 So the thing that I heard you say the other day when you were on, we're going to talk about your book in a little bit, but when I heard you on TV the other day, you started out, it was right after the Kennedy Senate hearing, that kind of shit show that we saw. 15:00 And you said, I don't think people understand the severity, the breadth, the depth of the public health crisis that we are now in the middle of in the United States. 15:12 And you pinned a fair amount of that on the new leadership of our public health system. 15:17 And I was like, I wanted to hear more about a lot of things you said, including that. 15:20 Michael Osterholm Well, I welcome the chance to have a discussion with you about it. 15:24 This period that we're in right now is by far the darkest time for public health in my 50 years in the business. 15:31 And let me just use some examples why. 15:33 You asked about the United States, but let's just start at a global level because we've had such an impact in the last six to eight months because of the United States on global health. 15:43 We have watched the demise of USAID. 15:46 We've watched the demise of PEPFAR. 15:48 PEPFAR, a program, has saved millions and millions of lives with HIV and malaria and tuberculosis in so many countries in the world. 15:57 And talk about goodwill and soft diplomacy. 16:00 Oh, my gosh. 16:00 And when you look at that, these are pennies a day that we were paying to keep people alive, healthy, 16:05 then therefore earning a good income and supporting their communities. 16:10 That's all going to go away. 16:11 And John, we're going to be back to seeing as many deaths in Africa as we once saw here in this country in the 80s. 16:17 And there was a time period in the mid to late 80s. 16:19 I would go up to five funerals a week in this country for that. 16:23 So I think that's number one. 16:25 We're now pulled out of the WHO. 16:26 We no longer have any relationship with them. 16:29 Why is that important? 16:31 Because so many disease outbreaks that ultimately cause us great harm start on some distant country across the ocean. 16:37 And by attacking it there, we actually save ourselves a lot by coming here. 16:43 You know, when Ebola takes off in Africa, you know, we're not expected to become a problem here. 16:48 And so that's the first thing. 16:50 We have basically shooed ourselves into a position of not impacting on global health, which is going to pay off for the bug in a big way. 16:59 In terms of domestic, you know, again, we have watched the demise of our federal public health system. 17:06 The CDC, state and local health departments under a great challenge right now from a funding standpoint. 17:13 If we had a crisis today at CDC, they've already cut the bench so deep that it would be a huge challenge. 17:20 Do you know that today, after four different administrations have made major efforts to incorporate bio-related activities into national security, we, for the first time, do not have anyone in the White House with any expertise in biopreparedness, nobody on the Security Council. 17:38 I mean, this is... 17:41 This is like saying, we decided as a cost containment measure, we're going to run O'Hare Airport without air traffic control. 17:47 Good luck. 17:49 John Heilman Or taking anybody off the National Security Council who knows anything about nuclear weapons. 17:53 Michael Osterholm Exactly. 17:54 You're right. 17:54 Like what are you talking about? 17:55 Yeah. 17:55 I mean, so I think that the challenge here is that, you know, and let me just for our listeners here, you know, I've had a formal role in every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan. 18:06 I was involved with the HIV AIDS Commission. 18:08 back in the 1980s even in trump one i was a science envoy for the state department working around the world in 2017 and 18 to get ready for a pandemic i guess i didn't do so well on that one but but you know again i've had a role my comments are not partisan i am just a member of the public health army here i'm a private in that and so this is not partisan that's what i hope that the public realizes this is about a true clarion call to say we're in deep trouble 18:38 John Heilman Well, if you're a private, I'd like to know who a five-star general is, but okay, fine, fair enough. 18:41 Like you can do false modesty if you want. 18:45 So I guess I asked the question of when President Trump decided to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, what was your, on the basis of what you knew about him, what was your reaction to his appointment and what was your expectation for what we'd see? 19:04 And then we'll get to what we have seen. 19:05 Michael Osterholm Well, let me just say at the outset that on the night of the election, I realized, of course, that Mr. Trump had won. 19:13 And already knowing that Mr. Kennedy was deeply embedded in his campaign and had been very helpful, and there had been discussions about how he would help clean up the health problems of the country, I assumed that he would likely be the nominee. 19:25 And so I actually went over that night the old 2025 document related to public health, and I kept thinking to myself, my God, this is going to become reality. 19:35 In mid-November, I actually wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times and said, wake up, world. 19:41 He's going to take your vaccines from you. 19:42 Do you realize what is about to happen? 19:45 And I think there was a fair amount of complacency at the time. 19:48 Well, that can't happen. 19:49 That won't happen. 19:50 He won't do in the CDC or the advisory communication practices. 19:54 Well, by March and April, it became abundantly clear that was going to happen. 20:00 And so we started an effort here in Minnesota called the Vaccine Integrity Project, which was all about trying to understand if CDC lost all credibility and the ACIP was basically gutted, who's going to fill in with that? 20:14 Because it's such a critical part of our everyday lives in terms of recommending vaccines and when should get them, who should get them, et cetera. 20:23 John Heilman Yeah. 20:23 And just for a second, Mike, just we should say for the uninitiated, ASIP, 20:29 ACIP stands for Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. 20:34 That's the federal agency that it's like a panel that provides recommendations on vaccines here in this country. 20:43 And the CDC uses those recommendations to create the countries, the U.S., like adult and childhood immunization schedule. 20:52 Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. 20:53 Just pick up. 20:54 Michael Osterholm And so our group took it upon herself actually to do a focus group in six different locations around the country to understand what, from a public health perspective, from a vaccine enterprise, what would need to be done. 21:07 One of the things we came up with quickly is that ACIP, 21:10 had always been the actual resident source of information on how well the vaccines were working, the most current data, etc. 21:18 They weren't doing it. 21:19 So we actually embarked upon that using the very same protocols that CDC would use. 21:26 And fortunately, we did do that because when it came time to make recommendations for COVID influenza and RSV vaccines, which we should be receiving now, 21:35 In fact, the medical societies, which they themselves had also always provided recommendations. 21:41 So, you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics for Kids, you know, the OBGYNs for pregnant women, the immune-compromised adults for the infectious disease side of America. 21:51 But they didn't have that access to that updated data. 21:54 Our group took it upon itself, and we identified over 1,750 abstracts of information about these vaccines and did this very, very extensive review. 22:04 We then packaged those and handed them to each of the societies to say, here, you can use these. 22:09 And when the Academy of Pediatrics came out, they said their new recommendations were based on the data that we helped provide them. 22:15 And so we saw at that time that this was going to be a major challenge. 22:21 But I think what you've seen with the Vaccine Integrity Project is also we don't have to just sit there and wring our hands. 22:26 There's things we can do. 22:28 John Heilman Right. 22:29 OK. 22:30 I want to go deeper on the COVID stuff, but we got to take a quick break. 22:33 We're going to do that. 22:34 We're going to come back and talk about all of this more with Dr. Michael Osterholm. 22:38 Not private. 22:40 Michael Osterholm, at least a colonel, at least a sergeant major, something. 22:44 Come on. 22:45 We'll take a break. 22:46 We'll be right back. 22:54 Chris Christie You looked at that appearance before Congress, and it just confirms what all of us around this table have known for decades. 23:00 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a foolish man full of foolish and vapid ideas. 23:07 And that was on display again this week in front of Congress. 23:12 And I really don't want to hear about Bill Cassidy, because he is a co-conspirator with the President of the United States for putting this wholly unqualified man in charge of 25% of all government spending. 23:22 Without Cassidy's vote, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would not be it. 23:26 And maybe he's feeling some guilt from what he did. 23:29 But I'll tell you this, the President did this. 23:32 He knows, the President's smart enough to know, RFK Jr. doesn't belong in that job. 23:36 But after he won, he wanted to show everybody, I can do whatever I want to do because this Senate will be compliant no matter what I do. 23:45 And I'll put the greatest vaccine and public health denier of the last 20 years in charge of public health America. 23:51 It's a human middle finger, George. 23:53 John Heilman So that was former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on this week with George Stephanopoulos. 23:58 That was the Sunday election. 24:00 after that Senate hearing where RFK Jr. got pummeled. 24:05 And there he is. 24:05 He's saying that Kennedy's appointment to lead HHS is basically Donald Trump giving, I don't know, like the establishment, you, me, all of us, I don't know, give everybody a giant middle finger. 24:17 Which is something to ponder, Michael Osterholm, when you consider the importance of that agency to the nation's health. 24:25 But look, I'd say Chris Christie is a pretty good psychoanalyst of Donald Trump. 24:29 But you would agree, I believe, wholly unqualified for this job. 24:33 Yes? 24:34 Yes. 24:35 Wholly unqualified. 24:36 Okay. 24:38 Michael Osterholm I think Chris Christie said it well. 24:39 You know, I'm not into the political issues. 24:41 John Heilman No, I understand. 24:41 I understand, but he's unqualified. 24:42 Michael Osterholm But I have to say everything that Chris Christie said from a science public health standpoint is on the mark. 24:48 John Heilman Totally. 24:48 So I think that's right. 24:52 When he did that testimony, we saw a lot of clips about it on cable. 24:56 What I always get caught up with, I'm going back to the very top in some ways of the podcast, is the bullshit. 25:02 I mean, so for example, and I know you've called him out on this before, but RFK said in that hearing something he said repeatedly, which is that there's only been one... 25:13 one ever in history, one study of childhood vaccines using what's called a randomized control trial, right? 25:23 That's where half the kids get the vaccine, the other half gets a placebo. 25:27 And then, you know, we look at the results and we consider those results reliable, like gold standard science, gold standard data, right? 25:34 And that is just... 25:36 As I said, bullshit. 25:38 Because, Mike, as you have pointed out, there have been like 500 or 525 or 511. 25:44 511 maybe is the number. 25:46 Randomized control studies done or something like that. 25:49 Yeah, 511. 25:50 Yeah. 25:52 I mean, that's just beyond unqualified. 25:54 That's just fucking lying to people about a pretty important thing. 25:58 Michael Osterholm Well, we have made that information available to him on multiple occasions prior to his testimony. 26:02 So he knew about it. 26:04 And in fact, for the 12 childhood vaccines that we routinely use, there have been 511 what we call randomized controlled trials. 26:11 This is where part of the group got the actual vaccine. 26:14 Part of the group got an inert substance like saline. 26:17 And we did not know who got what. 26:21 They were randomized. 26:22 And then at the end of the study period, we looked to see among those that did get the vaccine, how did they fare against those that got the placebo or the saline or whatever. 26:32 And these studies all clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of these vaccines. 26:36 The other thing that he does, he keeps talking about so many doses of vaccine that kids receive today. 26:42 What people don't realize, this is the least amount of vaccine that any child's gotten in our history. 26:47 Why? 26:48 Because in the old days, the vaccines were made up of particles that had a lot of junk on it. 26:54 I mean, basically it's viral debris. 26:57 And so one smallpox shot gave you much, much more in the way of antigen challenge to your body than all the vaccines we have today. 27:05 And so, again, he keeps relying on this old, scary tactic that, you know, you don't know what's in these vaccines. 27:11 But we do know. 27:12 And they're the cleanest, safest, you know, injections we've ever had. 27:17 John Heilman So it's like either he's a liar or he actually believes there's some part of me that thinks he's in the grip of some of these theories that are basically like because he uses that kind of. 27:26 He's like, there's the orthodoxy. 27:28 There's the scientific establishment. 27:29 They all say this one thing. 27:31 But there are these other studies over here that undermine all of that, which is very kind of conspiracy thinking, kind of the framework of conspiracy theorizing and being seduced by that way of thinking. 27:43 And in fact, there's one particular moment in that hearing we've been talking about that 27:49 like vividly illustrates what I'm talking about here. 27:52 So it relates to COVID. 27:55 And Kennedy was being questioned by John Cornyn from Texas, I believe. 28:00 And he just rattled off this whole litany of things he said that the American people had been lied to about related to COVID. 28:09 So let's listen to that right now. 28:11 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Senator, I mean, we were lied to about everything. 28:14 We were lied to about natural immunity. 28:18 We were told again and again the vaccines would prevent transmission. 28:23 They'd prevent infection. 28:24 It wasn't true. 28:26 They knew it from the start. 28:27 It wasn't true because that's what the animal studies and the clinical trials showed. 28:31 We were told that there was science behind cloth masks. 28:35 The CDC allowed the teachers union to write the order closing our schools, which hurt working people all over the country and then pretend it was science based. 28:49 John Heilman Now, Mike, you and I talked a lot about COVID on television and elsewhere during the pandemic. 28:57 And I don't think you lied to me about everything. 29:00 I don't think the government, the CDC, the FDA, I don't think they all lied to me about everything. 29:06 And that's not to say that everything that I got told, everything I heard from authorities and experts was accurate. 29:14 People get stuff wrong. 29:15 It's complicated. 29:15 And I'm sure you got stuff wrong. 29:17 That's inevitable. 29:19 But what do I know? 29:21 Maybe I was lied to about everything. 29:23 So I'm curious what you say to that. 29:26 The litany of things. 29:27 His basic thing is, he defends a lot of the things he's doing right now by saying, 29:31 The CDC was captured by industry. 29:33 Everyone's in the pocket of big pharma. 29:35 It's all totally corrupt. 29:36 We have to stop all of that. 29:38 And really what he plays on in a very big way is the notion that everyone has this perception among the people who support him that there was just this big lie about COVID that he throws out a lot of facts or a lot of assertions and it makes it a lot of long lists. 29:54 What do you make of all of that? 29:56 Michael Osterholm Well, this is, again, an issue of there are partial truths to some of this information and many falsehoods. 30:02 And to try to tease those out with him is virtually impossible. 30:06 But in fact, you must never forget, science is not truth. 30:12 Science is the pursuit of truth. 30:14 And we learned a lot during COVID. 30:15 For example, no one initially, and I surely didn't, understood the full breadth of what was gonna happen with the variants and how they would change the picture. 30:25 For example, let me just go to schools because he talks about that. 30:29 In the first year of the pandemic, 197 kids died in this country from COVID. 30:35 And there were not major school outbreaks everywhere. 30:37 And people concluded in several very well done papers that kids were just at less risk for COVID and not to worry. 30:46 You know, we could go ahead and do things. 30:48 Well, when the new variants Delta and Omicron came along, that changed completely. 30:53 And do you know that we ended up having, at that time, over 1,900 deaths in kids overall, of which 87% occurred in year two and three, because suddenly things changed. 31:07 Now, that wasn't a lie to talk about what we first observed versus what we ultimately observed, but it was helping people understand these things are likely going to change. 31:16 I think the issue on the vaccines, the vaccines, if you go look at the studies, were never meant to prevent transmission or infection as an outcome of their use. 31:26 It would be ideal if that happened, but in the early days of the reported out vaccine effectiveness for two months' worth of data, everybody said, look it, nobody seems to be getting sick, and surely there's protection against serious illness. 31:39 I wish we had, and I recommended this and didn't get very far, what if we had every month 31:44 taken this cohort and reported out, okay, this month, instead of 94%, it's 87%. 31:50 And this month is 79%. 31:52 And we can see this waning immunity that would likely occur. 31:55 We see that with other coronaviruses. 31:58 We could have easily said to the public, yeah, you're probably going to need a booster in six or 12 months, okay? 32:03 And then there are people who would have said, well, you didn't lie to me. 32:05 You kind of gave me a forecast. 32:07 We could have done a better job on things like that. 32:09 But his idea that we just out and out lied is simply not true. 32:14 And in our book, we go into that in great detail. 32:16 John Heilman Right. 32:17 Well, this is where the transition, you know, towards, into the book is a good, we start to talk about that because what you guys do in the book is you sort of, the starting point is, 32:29 COVID was a really big deal. 32:31 You once said it was kind of like the 9-11 of public health. 32:34 And you look back on COVID. 32:36 And so I think with clear-eyed perspective, you just gave one example of a way that things could have maybe been done better during COVID. 32:43 Because I do think that part of the reason that Bobby Kennedy has any support whatsoever is because there is a kind of sense... 32:51 Not that there was, forget about the conspiracy theory, nutty fringe. 32:54 I just mean among a lot of people that were kind of like, you know, we went too far. 32:59 They kept the schools closed too long. 33:00 They weren't totally honest with us. 33:02 There is a, rightly or wrongly, there's a kind of broad, pervasive sense that people don't feel like the government was on the level with them about COVID and that things were not handled quite as well as they should be, right? 33:16 So the first question about that is, when you look back, as you do in the book, 33:20 and say, what did we get right during COVID? 33:22 What did we do well? 33:23 And what did we get wrong during COVID that we should never do again? 33:27 Michael Osterholm Well, let's just take what went right. 33:29 The fact that we had the vaccine that we did have finally at one year is simply remarkable. 33:37 You know, this is kind of like building the Panama Canal in two weeks. 33:40 It was remarkable. 33:42 And it saves millions and millions of lives. 33:44 And for those that didn't take the vaccine, many more of those people died than people who took the vaccine. 33:50 And I think that's one thing we have to get across. 33:54 I think in terms of the challenges, again, it was really understanding what was happening and anticipating it. 34:01 You know, I can just tell you that early on in the pandemic, I got canned pretty hard. 34:06 And you may recall this because they said, look how scary he was. 34:09 I was on Joe Rogan in early March. 34:11 And I said, I think we can see 800,000 deaths in the next 18 months. 34:16 And man, my colleagues were probably my severest critics at that point. 34:20 And you know what? 34:21 18 months later, we were at 750,000 deaths. 34:25 And what we didn't do is anticipate that this could last for months and months and not just a couple of months. 34:31 We were approached more like hurricane response. 34:34 It's hell for 18 hours, but then we can go into recovery. 34:37 And why did that matter? 34:39 Well, because, first of all, what did we do in the very earliest days of the pandemic? 34:43 We locked down. 34:44 Now, that by itself is a horrible term because 41 states basically in March said, okay, somehow we're limiting your activity. 34:54 But many of them were like Minnesota, where in a state here we had a stay-at-home order. 34:59 Sounded pretty significant until you realized 82% of the workforce was considered essential workers and therefore exempt from it. 35:06 And by June, all these, except for one state, all these basic lockdown-type things were done. 35:17 I raised that issue and said in a piece I wrote in the Washington Post in early March, don't do lockdowns. 35:23 Why? 35:24 Because can you do this for three years? 35:26 No, you're not going to be able to. 35:27 And the Chinese proved that. 35:28 When they did lockdowns for more than a year and then opened up everything, they had millions of deaths. 35:34 They just occurred later, not as early. 35:36 My whole approach was, what's the most important thing we can do to protect people's lives? 35:41 Have good medical care. 35:42 If you get COVID, if you go to a hospital that has 140% census at that point, I'm telling you, it's going to be a horrible disaster at that place. 35:52 If you have a hospital that's 85%, 90% full, you've got a much better chance of living. 35:57 And so what if we had done snow days? 35:59 where when we saw in our community every day you had a number what was the bed count in your community for those hospitals and if you got to 85 90 please for the next two days two weeks slow down okay if you can cancel major events do it and then try to get that number back down it was in a sense managing the virus in a way that we couldn't control it but we could try to manage how we responded now that simple point that i just made 36:25 led us to be really criticized because people today with revisionist history say, oh, well, the public health people locked us down for two and a half, three years. 36:33 Look what it did to our economy. 36:35 No, actually, they didn't. 36:37 A lot of local choices made about various activities, restaurants that weren't even based on government. 36:44 They were just based on people's unwillingness. 36:46 The schools were the same way. 36:48 It was many parents who said, I don't want my child exposed to this virus, didn't send them to school. 36:53 So I think that's the challenge we had is how to, in a crisis, be able to provide the people a rationale for what you're doing to search for the truth as part of science. 37:05 John Heilman So one of the realities of the RFK era at HHS was 37:13 There are a lot of things that are going on there that trouble a lot of people in public health. 37:17 Essentially, the quashing of government support for the MRNA technology, which I think the consensus is that 37:33 Without it, we never would have gotten the COVID vaccine. 37:35 Millions of more people would have died. 37:37 That is the scientific consensus out there. 37:38 There's ranges of how many people it's saved, but it's always in the millions, always in the millions worldwide, right? 37:45 Yep, absolutely. 37:46 So now RFK is shutting that down. 37:49 And there's a political question, which is, why is Donald Trump allowing him to do this, given that Operation Warp Speed was one of his great successes, and he's undermining his own legacy? 37:58 I don't want to discuss that with you. 38:00 I want to discuss with you, how bad is it, what's happening? 38:03 Well, it's terribly bad. 38:05 Yeah, the potential consequence of it. 38:07 Yeah, right. 38:07 Michael Osterholm Well, let me just say right off the mark here, you know, the thing that keeps me awake at night with one eye open is the next pandemic. 38:16 Right. 38:16 And as I tried to illustrate in the book, the next one could be much worse. 38:21 We could have a coronavirus that has the infectiousness of COVID, highly infectious. 38:28 But that COVID only, and I say this with pain, killed one and a half percent of the people. 38:33 If you look at SARS and MERS, two other coronaviruses we've dealt with in the last 25 years, they killed 15 to 35 percent of the people that got it. 38:41 And today we actually have viruses in the wild that have the receptor sites or the ability to actually be transmitted like COVID and have the ability to kill like SARS or MERS. 38:53 Imagine if this pandemic had been 25% case fatality rate, not 1.5%. 39:00 All the sets the same. 39:02 So why is that important? 39:03 Because from a pandemic standpoint right now, if you look at influenza, which is the other virus that is still there waiting for another pandemic, and if in fact that influenza pandemic started today, we have enough capacity globally to make influenza vaccine for about one quarter of the world's population in 15 months. 39:23 John Heilman Is that low? 39:25 Michael Osterholm Well, that's really low. 39:26 I mean, because we're growing in chicken eggs, largely. 39:28 We're still in 1950s technology. 39:30 We should be investing in much more. 39:32 But if you had an mRNA vaccine, which could very easily be as good, if not better, than our current influenza vaccines at preventing illness and infection, we would have enough vaccine likely in the first year to vaccinate the world. 39:48 I'm telling you, the difference between those two scenarios is millions and millions of deaths. 39:52 And yet we took that particular tool off the table for no other reason other than a personal issue. 40:01 Because anything they've said about mRNA is just simply not true from a negative perspective. 40:08 John Heilman When you say it's a personal issue, what is your understanding of why this is happening, of what it is? 40:12 I mean, I understand... 40:14 RFK Jr. is a vaccine skeptic kind of across the board. 40:18 But we know that the mRNA technology isn't just about vaccines. 40:20 It's about there are people using that technology to pursue cures for cancer and cures for all kinds of things. 40:25 The scientific community is like, this is super important. 40:28 Even if you didn't have any relationship to vaccines, this technology is potentially revolutionary across the field of applied medicine. 40:36 So what is it that makes RFK Jr. so hung up on this? 40:41 Michael Osterholm Well, you know, for him to say that, you know, the vaccine's killed many more people than it's saved is just so ridiculous that it's face value. 40:49 But I think what's happened, and this is my own conclusion, it may not be real. 40:54 Early on, when the vaccine was first available, people couldn't wait to get it. 40:58 Red and blue states, they clamored to get the vaccine. 41:01 Then as time went on and the pandemic continued in a way that brought more and more what people thought was oppression of their everyday lives, they started to equate that with the vaccine, you know, mandates for vaccine. 41:14 You can't tell me what to do. 41:16 Don't tell me what to do. 41:17 And there was really a very negative sense about the vaccine. 41:21 That's why towards the end, you know, the red states had much, much lower rates of vaccination with much higher death rates. 41:28 Well, then when the pandemic was over with, there was still this kind of grudge against the vaccine for what it represented. 41:36 But now we didn't have a pandemic, so I can't get upset with that. 41:39 So why can I get upset? 41:40 Well, I just think this vaccine is dangerous. 41:43 And I think it kind of transferred with the vaccine platform, not because of specific problems, but because of what it represented during the pandemic. 41:51 And that's what they're operating on. 41:53 That's the whole point of what they're doing right now to minimize the positive and accentuate what they call the negative of the vaccine. 42:03 John Heilman Okay. 42:03 We got to sneak in one more break, but then we're going to come back and really dig into the book, Mike, which you just started to hint at there. 42:11 The title of which to remind everybody is the big one. 42:14 So we're going to talk about the big one, what it might look like, what we should be doing right now to prepare for it. 42:21 But we're not, which is scary as hell. 42:24 But everyone out there, you're not going to want to miss this conversation. 42:27 So stick around. 42:39 Soundbite I thought you said that once we could grow it, we could vaccinate against it. 42:43 We tried using dead virus combined with several adjuvants to boost immune response. 42:47 And? 42:47 No protective antibodies, a lot of dead monkeys. 42:51 Can you get to the part where there's good news? 42:53 Now we have to try a live attenuated virus. 42:55 Like with polio? 42:56 Exactly. 42:57 The only danger with a live virus is the possibility that it will revert to wild type and kill the host. 43:02 When do we know about that? 43:05 I'll ask the monkeys. 43:07 As of right now, the mortality rate is fluctuating between 25 and 30%, depending upon underlying medical conditions, socioeconomic factors, nutrition, fresh water. 43:20 With the new mutation, we are predicting an R-naught of no less than four. 43:26 And without a vaccine, we can anticipate that approximately one in 12 people on the planet will contract the disease. 43:36 John Heilman We are back with Dr. Michael Osterholm. 43:37 And Mike, that was a scene from Steven Soderbergh's incredibly prescient and incredibly scary. 43:44 2011 movie, Contagion. 43:47 And there you had Lawrence Fishburne playing a senior CDC official. 43:52 First, he's talking with a colleague about how bad things are getting. 43:55 And then he's explaining to a bigger bunch of colleagues about just how horrible the threat is that they're facing with this outbreak of this highly contagious, super deadly virus that the movie's about. 44:07 And your book... 44:09 written as you write a lot of things with your co-author, Mark Olshaker, is called The Big One, How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. 44:18 And in the prologue of the book, you describe the moment when COVID first came on your radar. 44:24 It's December 30th, 2019. 44:26 You get a call from a colleague who says she's just gotten some vague, kind of sketchy intel about it. 44:31 viral outbreak of some kind in Wuhan, China. 44:35 And the question that occurs to you, you write, is, is this the big one? 44:41 You know, the nightmare scenario that every epidemiologist fears. 44:44 And look, I'm from California. 44:46 So like that phrase is resonant for me. 44:48 Every time the birth moves a little bit in LA, everybody has that same feeling. 44:54 Is this the big one? 44:55 That's the same question. 44:56 Are we about to get the big one? 44:57 Are we about to fall into the sea? 44:59 So tell us about what the big one is that you were worried about then, which COVID did not become, and that you've written this book to try to prepare people for now. 45:11 Michael Osterholm Yeah. 45:12 Well, let me just say, and I talk about it at the very beginning of the book, because I went through some real mental gymnastics early on myself. 45:20 You know, I had been involved with both SARS and MERS. 45:24 In 2003, I was still spending half my time at the Department of Health and Human Services, filing my 9-11 assignment there on bioterrorism, and I was involved with SARS. 45:33 And while it surely was a challenge with some people who were basically super spreaders, the vast majority of people did not spread the virus. 45:42 That's why we were able to bring it under control. 45:44 Right. 45:45 Same thing happened in 2012 with MERS, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, the coronavirus that came from camels. 45:51 in the Arabian Peninsula, and I was serving as an advisor of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. 45:57 And so I was on, over in Saudi Arabia, working on this issue as well as an outbreak that occurred in Seoul, Korea. 46:05 Again, now 35% of the people died with MERS, but at the same level of infectiousness where it wasn't very infectious. 46:12 When we got the first reports out of Wuhan that this was a coronavirus, I was actually quite excited because I thought it might very well be influenza, which would be very hard for us to stop. 46:24 So you were like, by God, this isn't going to be as bad. 46:27 OK, we can we we can shut this one down. 46:30 We get right. 46:30 Got it. 46:30 Just like we did with SARS and MERS. 46:32 We can shut this one down. 46:33 It's not going to be a global pandemic. 46:35 It's a problem right now. 46:37 But then within the period of the first seven to 10 days, we had enough reports and we were having frequent conversations with colleagues in China, Hong Kong, Singapore. 46:46 And it was clear we were seeing a lot of what we'd call asymptomatic transmission, people who were not yet sick transmitting the virus and causing severe illness. 46:55 And it was clearly a major airborne disease that a lot of people were spreading. 46:59 It was spreading very quickly. 47:02 And so at that point, I put a statement out actually on January 20th on our website and said, wake up world, this is going to be a pandemic. 47:09 And this is why, even though it's a coronavirus, we're not going to put this one back in the bottle like we did SARS and MERS. 47:15 Well, so that carries over into the book. 47:18 And for the reader of the book or your listener here, 47:22 We actually used a way to kind of help you understand what was happening by doing a fictional scenario that is very realistic. 47:31 I mean, down to the fact I can tell you how many miles it is between different cities in Kenya and so forth. 47:37 And an emergence of a highly infectious, highly pathogenic coronavirus and what it would look like in the world. 47:45 So when we get into mandates, we get into communication, we get into all these things. 47:49 The scenario follows along as what would have happened so that people can get a sense this is what it would really look like. 47:56 And I think that that has been helpful for people to see the many, many challenges we have. 48:03 Once this is out, this is what we call a virus with wings. 48:07 Once this virus is out, even a week or two, we're done. 48:09 Remember how we worked hard to fortify the Western coast of the United States because it was in China. 48:15 Right. 48:15 What happens? 48:16 It comes via Italy, China to Italy, Italy to New York city. 48:19 You know, we forgot about the other shore. 48:21 John Heilman Right. 48:25 Yes. 48:27 So you lay out this. 48:28 So the scenario here is the big one is what you just said. 48:33 The big one that we fear is the, 48:36 you know, a death rate at, like you said, MERS was 35%, right? 48:40 35% death rate. 48:41 Something like a 35% death rate with the kind of transmissibility, infectiousness of one of those. 48:46 Michael Osterholm And could I add a sub-note here is the fact that in this scenario, we're only at about 10% case fatality. 48:52 We're not even at the lower boundary of SARS and MERS. 48:55 And yet, something similar. 48:57 John Heilman In the scenario you lay out in the book. 48:58 Michael Osterholm Yeah, yeah. 48:59 But that's seven and a half times higher than what was our COVID pandemic. 49:04 And I can tell you, seven and a half times increase the number of deaths, it would be a real tragedy. 49:10 John Heilman Right. 49:10 What kind of number would we be looking at there? 49:12 You'd be thinking about deaths on a scale of? 49:15 Michael Osterholm Seven and a half to 10 million minimum. 49:18 Right. 49:18 Seven and a half to 10 million. 49:19 We'd run out of coffins. 49:21 John Heilman Right. 49:22 So what aren't we doing that we should be doing? 49:25 Michael Osterholm Well, you know, this is where we really have a two-fold issue here. 49:30 One is the pandemic itself. 49:32 But you know the other one, John, that really concerns me, and today is a very appropriate day to remember this, 9-11, is biopreparedness in general. 49:41 Right now, there are countries all around the world, but more specifically, there are splinter groups. 49:46 There are basically non-state actors that are doing a lot of work in the bioweapons area. 49:55 And we have nothing right now for bioweapons preparedness. 49:58 We have basically jettisoned all of that. 50:02 I mentioned earlier about the White House. 50:03 Nobody there. 50:05 HHS, no expertise there in that sense. 50:08 You know, even DOD. 50:10 And so suffice it to say, I'm worried about a pandemic, but I'm worried right now. 50:15 We've never been this vulnerable to a bioweapon attack ever. 50:18 Right. 50:19 And, you know, we surely learned what even a minor attack could do after 9-11 with anthrax. 50:25 And so what we need to do, first of all, is just prioritize around what are we needing for ways to stop these. 50:33 And the one, two, three, four ordered things are vaccines, vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. 50:39 And yet what we continue to do is fund vaccines, like we're funding the Sunday church picnic every year. 50:46 You know, we go from year to year. 50:48 We don't have a long term plan. 50:49 There's no aircraft carrier model in our portfolio. 50:53 And yet I tell you, because our center actually is in charge of what we call vaccine roadmaps for influenza and for coronaviruses for the world. 51:02 You can go to our website. 51:03 It's supported by a number of groups. 51:05 And we can tell you that there really is potential technology coming down the road that could take these off the table. 51:12 And if an outbreak does occur, we could quickly respond. 51:15 A pandemic or a bioterrorism attack occurs, we could do that. 51:19 But we're not investing in this. 51:21 And yet, if you look in the last century, you know, microbes have killed many, many, many more than all our wars have. 51:27 And so I don't want to minimize what the Defense Department needs or War Department. 51:32 You know, I don't want to say that. 51:33 John Heilman Don't do that. 51:34 Don't give into that. 51:35 Don't do. 51:35 I heard you say. 51:36 Michael Osterholm Well, I was kind of doing it. 51:37 I was kind of doing it in a mocking voice. 51:39 John Heilman OK, good. 51:39 OK, fine. 51:40 Michael Osterholm Edit that out. 51:41 Yeah. 51:42 OK, edit it out. 51:43 John Heilman We don't say we don't say Gulf. 51:44 We don't say Gulf of America on this show either. 51:46 Michael Osterholm That's fine. 51:48 I don't know where that's at. 51:50 But the point of it is that if we had a much greater investment, and the thing that's so challenging is the vaccine that is now being funded by NIH, those two inside guys who suddenly got $500 million for an old vaccine model that has been shown not to work 52:08 very well at all for decades ago. 52:12 And all of us in the flu world and the coronavirus world were saying, what is this about? 52:17 And yet they had no scrutiny. 52:18 They just got $500 million to do this. 52:21 Meanwhile, they take the $500 million from the whole area of 52:25 of the coronavirus work and mRNA and influenza work. 52:29 And I can tell you right now that mRNA is not the final answer. 52:32 There are even better vaccines potentials coming down the road, but we can't invest in them one year or two years at a time and at a minimal level. 52:41 And what's happened, a lot of the people who have been involved with this vaccine research are no longer funded because of the cuts that were made by Doge. 52:48 John Heilman Right. 52:49 There's just, I mean, when it comes to public health on this scale, right? 52:54 I mean, the mRNA technology, you know, the advances in it that are driven, that were driven by Operation Warp Speed, it's not like there's things that we do, you know, 53:06 Mike, there are things we do in medicine and healthcare where we have a largely private healthcare system and there's lots of innovation that takes place in the pharmaceutical industry and elsewhere that doesn't need government support. 53:18 But in these areas, right, without at least a benign 53:24 Health and Human Services Department and an administration. 53:26 If you have a malign one, one that's adverse to it, that's opposed to it, it really just can't happen, right? 53:34 It's not like private industry can't just pick up the slack here. 53:38 Michael Osterholm You know what? 53:39 When's the last time you saw a private industry decide to build an aircraft carrier, takes 12 years to do it, and then puts it up for sale? 53:47 That doesn't happen. 53:49 Okay, if you're going to do something like that kind of investment, that's got to have the capital investment of government. 53:54 But it's a government good that's going to happen if you have those vaccines like weapons. 53:59 I mean, think of them just like weapons. 54:00 They're weapons against microbes. 54:03 And that's what we're not investing in right now. 54:05 You know, from a defense standpoint, it'd be like, you know, investing in new and better slingshots. 54:12 You know, that's what we're doing today. 54:16 John Heilman I asked this question. 54:18 It's become my new go-to question for everybody. 54:21 It applies to any field, any field of endeavor, any profession, anybody in the world right now. 54:29 It used to be at the beginning of Trump 2.0, I would get asked when I was identified or recognized in public, I would get asked a question I heard a million times back in, sorry, at the beginning of Trump 1.0, 2017, right? 54:44 I used to never get this. 54:45 It used to always be like, hey, I like you on Bill Maher's show. 54:47 Then it became, hey, man, thank you for the work you're doing. 54:51 Are we going to be okay? 54:54 Are we going to be okay? 54:56 Trump 2.0, the question is, 54:59 hey, really appreciate the work you do. 55:01 How fucked are we? 55:03 Like the premise has shifted from not are we going to be okay to I know we're not going to be okay, but how bad is it going to be? 55:11 So I asked this question to you, Michael Osterholm, in the face of the almost inevitable, big one's coming. 55:17 We just don't know when. 55:18 So how fucked are we? 55:21 Michael Osterholm I don't know. 55:23 But I'll tell you that 55:25 I have enough doubt about our capacity to respond to even minor blips in public health crisis today that if it does happen any time in the immediate months to years, we are in big, big trouble. 55:42 We're in very big trouble. 55:43 And that's what I said and have been saying for some months. 55:46 It's not just about the vaccines. 55:48 It's about the whole cutting of the infrastructure. 55:50 It's putting people in charge that have absolutely no basis for any kind of scientific expertise, and it's just the opposite. 55:59 It's that smoke and mirrors and magic. 56:01 And so I think that we're in very, very big trouble. 56:05 Our only hope, I think, is that we see a resistance develop. 56:10 I think our group that's working on the Influenza Vaccine Integrity Project is there, where we pick up the ball and run with it anyway. 56:17 And we do it in such a way as it can be complementary to what is in the government domain right now. 56:26 And more importantly, though, when the government doesn't come through like they didn't for the ACIP, we'll step up and do it. 56:33 And it's almost, I'd say, a government in absence, you might say, coming to help out. 56:40 John Heilman Right. 56:41 So among... 56:42 That's a good answer and enlightening and fair-minded. 56:48 Among your colleagues, are you regarded as an optimist or a pessimist? 56:54 Michael Osterholm Well, you know, I'm an optimist in the sense that I do believe that these vaccine technologies can be realized. 57:01 John Heilman Oh, no, I mean on this question of how, like, because if I said, hey, like, where do you rank among your peer group? 57:10 Or when you say, I don't really know how fucked we are. 57:14 Does that put you at the high level of optimism or the high level of pessimism? 57:18 What's the feeling out there? 57:19 Michael Osterholm I would probably be seen by most of the high level of pessimism. 57:22 That's what this book is about, though, is about what the challenges are. 57:27 I think the difference, though, is that I don't end it by just saying we're in big trouble. 57:31 I end it by saying, but this is what we can do about it. 57:34 You know, I mean, today is actually a really hard day for me in the sense that, you know, 9-11 is hard for a lot of people. 57:42 But, you know, you've heard me talking about this for several years. 57:45 We needed a 9-11 commission on COVID. 57:49 John Heilman Right. 57:49 Michael Osterholm Absolutely needed it badly. 57:50 Oh, my God. 57:51 John Heilman Such a good idea. 57:52 Michael Osterholm Such a good idea. 57:53 And, you know, I was still at HHS part-time when the commission got started, and I watched a very bipartisan, nonpartisan approach to... 58:04 A lot of challenges were identified, mistakes made, no finger pointing, just how can we fix it? 58:10 How can we move forward? 58:12 You know what, John? 58:13 We're never going to know ever, ever what happened in Wuhan. 58:17 Was it a lab leak or was it a spillover? 58:19 And I think it's one of those topics, though, that consumes us yet every day. 58:25 And I keep saying, get over it and move on, because we're going to have the potential for spillovers or lab leaks in the future. 58:32 What the hell are we doing to get ready for them? 58:35 And yet, look at what we're doing. 58:36 The most energy in Washington right now around a pandemic is trying to figure out who to blame for Wuhan. 58:44 John Heilman It's crazy. 58:45 And it's a brilliant idea. 58:46 You may have advocated for it elsewhere and I just missed it. 58:50 I have. 58:51 But I'm sure. 58:52 Not breaking news here. 58:54 But I really do think about it because it's like after Nelson Mandela came back to South Africa and they had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it's like, 59:01 Having a commission where people can come forward and say, there will be no retribution, just tell the truth so we can all know what really happened and then we can all move on. 59:10 That's exactly it. 59:11 COVID is the same. 59:12 COVID would be the same thing because so many people are, all the conspiracy theories would go away if there was a credible... 59:19 Truth Commission basically was like, let's just get it all out there. 59:22 There will be no consequences. 59:24 There will be no retribution. 59:26 We need to be able to get to the point where the country says, like with 9-11, where they say, okay, this is definitive. 59:31 We know what went right. 59:33 We know what went wrong. 59:34 And we can now move on into the future to try to make ourselves safe and healthy going forward. 59:38 That would be... 59:39 Michael Osterholm And I was part of a group several years ago, Philip Zucklow Ledet, who was the overseer of the 9-11 commission report. 59:49 And we tried to get Congress to support a bipartisan review of this and basically do just what you just said. 59:57 And there was zero appetite for it. 60:00 And we will pay a price for that because there are so many lessons we could have and should have learned. 60:05 And I regret that. 60:08 And I just have to say, in terms of this book, when I get asked what I think of it, quite to the contrary to most people's thinking, this is a love story for me. 60:17 It's about a plan to make this a better world for my kids and grandkids. 60:21 And I only wish we could do that. 60:24 John Heilman Well, hey, look, I'd say, broadly speaking, when I speak to doctors and people in your field, by and large, most people think we're pretty fucked. 60:32 And many of them just throw up their hands and go, I don't know. 60:37 But you, at least on this front, are laying out a positive vision. 60:41 Michael Osterholm Well, I think both long-term with the plan, but also with the Vaccine Integrity Project, I mean, we're delivering right now. 60:49 And we're not going to give up. 60:51 We have a motto at our center. 60:53 We will bend and we will bend, but we will not break. 60:57 And that's where we're at. 60:59 John Heilman I mean, that's about we'll bend, we'll bend, but we will not break. 61:03 It sounds like a motto for a yoga studio, too. 61:06 Listen, Dr. Michael Osterholm, thank you for doing the work of God out there, even when no one in the entire administration was willing to listen or give you the credit you deserve. 61:16 Michael Osterholm Well, thank you, you know, and I appreciate your podcast. 61:19 You bring a frankness and an honesty to this that I love. 61:23 Thank you. 61:23 John Heilman That's the only way I know how to play it. 61:25 See you later, man. 61:26 Take care. 61:26 That was really great. 61:27 Take care. 61:28 Bye-bye. 61:28 Michael Osterholm Thank you. 61:29 Bye-bye. 61:29 Thanks. 61:37 John Heilman Impolitik with John Heilman is a Puck podcast in partnership with Odyssey. 61:40 Thanks again to Dr. Michael Osterholm for coming on the show and putting up with the foolishness and the nonsense spouted by a medical ignoramus. 61:49 like me. 61:50 If you enjoyed this episode of A Politics with John Heilman, please follow us, share us, rate us, and review us on the free Odyssey app or wherever you have a tabasco in the splendor of the podcast universe. 61:58 I am John Heilman, special correspondent for Puck. 62:00 To read my stuff along with the reporting and analysis of all my fabulous Puck partners, go to puck.news slash jheil, j-h-e-i-l, 62:09 and subscribe, please. 62:10 Speaking of my colleagues, John Kelly and Ben Landy are executive producers of Impolitik. 62:14 Lori Blackford is our guest wrangling guru. 62:17 And Bob Tabador is our very own Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, Steve Albini, and the Bomb Squad all rolled into one. 62:25 Flawlessly producing, editing, mixing, and mastering the show, all by his lonesome and in no time flat. 62:31 From all of us to all of you, a little mashup of a pair of late greats, my mom and Bob Marley. 62:36 Don't get arrested, don't get dead, and don't give up the fight.