“We now have vaccines that protect children from diseases that used to wipe out or cause traumatic illness… We’re spoiled. We don’t actually know what’s on the other side of this shield modern medical science has created.”

Nina Burleigh is a best-selling author, journalist and lecturer. Her latest book, “VIRUS: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic”, is a brisk, real-life thriller that delves into the malfeasance behind the American pandemic chaos, and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

Nina Burleigh explains why vaccine hesitancy has been caused in part by a lack of Republican leadership with many in the party enabling or propagating misinformation around the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. She details some of the mistakes made by the Trump administration during its COVID response and how it resulted in unnecessarily high death counts. Burleigh notes the game-changing nature of the mRNA vaccines, the first widely experienced example of this breakthrough biotechnology. Despite many of the major errors, she acknowledges the difficulty governments face in striking a balance around lockdown measures.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

Spotify | Amazon | Google | Stitcher

SPEAKER

Nina Burleigh

Author

VIRUS

FULL BIO

MODERATOR

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - Intro and background

5:53 - Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation

15:50 - Trump administration’s COVID response

25:38 - Evaluating the WHO

31:28 - mRNA technology

35:05 - Misinformation echo chambers

37:42 - Finding balance in a government response

41:41 - Continuing COVID impact

TRANSCRIPT

Rev.com

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie, I'm the Managing Director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. Our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conferences, which we're excited to resume in September of 2021, here in our home city of New York for the first time, but that goal is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.

John Darsie: (00:45)
We're very excited today to welcome Nina Burleigh to SALT Talks. Nina Burleigh is a national journalist and author most recently of Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic, in addition to many other best-selling books. That's her most recent book obviously, which is highly relevant today. She's most recently covered America under Donald Trump as a National Politics Correspondent at Newsweek, she got her start in journalism covering the Illinois State House in Springfield, and has reported from almost every state in the continental US, and has been based in Italy, France, and the Middle East.

John Darsie: (01:22)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci who is the Founder and Managing at SkyBridge Capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. With that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:31)
Well, Nina, first of all, congratulations on the book. I'm going to hold it up here, I like holding up the book of my friends. Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic. Which is obviously one of the tragedies of our time. Book is fascinating, it's a quick read, but you really go into all of the things that we did wrong.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:57)
So, before we get there though, tell us a little more about your background. You're talking to us from your friend's kitchen in beautiful Michigan, you're from Michigan, right? Tell us where you're from and tell us how you grew up.

Nina Burleigh: (02:11)
Well, first of all, I have to correct our millennial on the pronunciation of my name, it's Burleigh like a football player, not Burleigh.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:20)
Good, good, I love the fact that you corrected him, okay, -

Nina Burleigh: (02:24)
Thank you.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:24)
... because let me tell you something, he gets fan mail and I don't get any fan mail. So I just have to tell you, I'm very happy that [crosstalk 00:02:29].

John Darsie: (02:29)
I split the difference, I started Burleigh, and I said, maybe it's Burleigh.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:33)
By the way-

Nina Burleigh: (02:33)
I noticed you did that.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:33)
... on all of these names, [inaudible 00:02:37] and he's always pronouncing it perfectly and I'm stumbling over myself. So I'm very joyous right now. Continue, Nina, please.

Nina Burleigh: (02:47)
Yeah, so okay, so it's Nina Burleigh, I am a Midwestern, born and bred. I grew up in, as Anthony said, spent lots of my childhood here at Southern Michigan. Played a lot in the woods and just learned to swim here and learned to hang out at the library because there was nothing to do. So it started me off on my writing career, I have strong roots here.

Nina Burleigh: (03:18)
In the Midwest, I got started in journalism as you said, at the Associated Press in Springfield, Illinois, when state capitals still had state houses filled with press rooms with lots of media. Especially Springfield being one of the big states like Albany, tons of corruption, lots of competing interests, and they're microcosms of what's going on in Washington. So I really got a strong grounding and I think covering and understanding the issues of our time as they were developing.

Nina Burleigh: (03:54)
I go all the way back to the Reagan years, and in my view, that period really was the turning point for a lot of things in our country, including how labor was treating, the unions started to go down, and this growing disrespect for expertise, especially scientific knowledge, by the industries because industry of course wanted to make sure that let's say if you were RJ Reynolds, that there would be competing voices against the notion that tobacco and cigarettes cause cancer. Then of course after that, you get to the climate change era which we're in now, in which companies like Exxon have bankrolled these contrarian scientists who will speak up for the 3% of the scientific community that thinks that climate change is not happening and it's not caused by fossil fuels.

Nina Burleigh: (05:01)
So this is stuff that's been in my purview, is covering politics over the last couple decades. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. I could talk on at length about my career, but let's... whatever you want to discuss, Anthony, I'm game.

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:21)
All right, well let's go right to the book, then. Okay, the book, Virus, it's a brilliant story of the science of the virus and the history of vaccines and treatments. You and I know each other, you were on Mooch FM with me and we were talking about the phenomenon in the last 150 years as a result of vaccines. We've extended our lifespan, we're living healthier, and people are taking this for granted. Why do you think 25% of the adult population are vaccine deniers?

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:53)
By the way, my wife gets very mad at me, I might add, because some of her friends are actually college educated and will not take the vaccine. I look at them like they're imbeciles, and she gets very mad at me, but go ahead, I'm sorry. [crosstalk 00:06:06].

Nina Burleigh: (06:06)
Well, you know what? But that observation is very important, what you just said, because when we think of science deniers, we think of [inaudible 00:06:18] and people who didn't get very... they're low information, voters or people who will believe conspiracy theories over science, and so on, and we tend to think that they may be aren't as educated. In fact, that 25%, Anthony, a significant percentage of it, maybe not the majority, but a percentage of it certainly is among the educated. I call them the granola crunchy educated people. I've got friends in my circle like that too, where they won't say they aren't taking the vaccine because they know it's not cool, but you can tell where they're at because they won't say anything when you're talking about the vaccine. They go silent, look a little sheepish. Those are the people who believe that chemistry or chemical, manmade things are not as healthy as natural things.

Nina Burleigh: (07:14)
The answer to that, and for my book, I interviewed people who are in this world of medicine and the culture of science and society, the answer is, look, everything you eat is made of chemistry and chemicals. Bananas are chemical, and so and everything has genetic material in it. So that's the answer to them. You don't have to be chemo phobic to look at the world. So that's one segment of it. Maybe not the largest group, but it is a significant percentage.

Nina Burleigh: (07:48)
The other are low information, low information populations. Again, the low information population's in the white communities in the South, let's say, and some urban areas, black and Latino. There are very low vaccination rates among blacks and Latinos, and I think in New York still unfortunately.

Nina Burleigh: (08:12)
Then overall of this, the big umbrella is that you have or had a leader and have leaders still in political elected leaders in the House and the Senate. Of course, the former guy, I'm talking about who's not a leader. He's a leader in name still, but I don't think he's much of a leader, he doesn't exercise leadership, he is defacto a leader, who persist in refusing to correct, to lead their people and to say to correct these pieces of misinformation and to say, "You know what? This is actually really good. In fact, I got it and so did my children." I'm talking about the former guy. They won't step up for science, they don't want to step up for science because part of their MO, and I guess we can talk about the whole Republican Party behaving this way at this point, is to inject doubt into the fact-based world so that you can continue to press on with a big lie like the election lie.

Nina Burleigh: (09:26)
Okay, so that, we're talking about this distrust, the scorn for expertise, that there's always been that stream in Americans. Americans are, we're DIY, we're common sense, ride off in the sunset with the horse, I can fix it myself. That's a myth, but the 2016 election, the 2015 election really brought into the light this world of alternative information that people were living by, and literally making life decisions on. I can talk about some of the people I met at the Republican National Convention in 2016 whose decision making process was based on such false information that I almost wanted to stop. I almost wanted to stop reporting and start correcting them because I was worried about them. I didn't understand where these streams of miss and disinformation were coming from.

Nina Burleigh: (10:27)
The virus descends upon America at a point in time when we have this phenomenon of disinformation, misinformation, silos of information, and this giant challenging effect that's going on everywhere, and the refusal of people to agree on a fact-based reality. My book is I think what I tried to do was memorialize what they did, how this came about, what the last administration did and didn't do. Then also to really celebrate the science, the triumph of science here in the face of all this, that we then got this manmade miracle of a vaccine that's enabled us all to walk around without masks now.

Anthony Scaramucci: (11:20)
So let's set the record straight, just you make it very clear in the book. How successful have vaccines been in the modern era?

Nina Burleigh: (11:31)
Okay, so vaccines have been... I mean, we've had vaccine... the first vaccine comes around 250 years ago and it for the smallpox. Before 250 years ago and throughout the entire history of the human species, we had no defense against infectious diseases, nothing, only luck, or you could pray to your god or you can wear garlic or you could... it was sheer luck and supernatural belief. Then this vaccine comes along 250 years ago, they start to fight off, they start to be able to defend against smallpox. Then in the next century, microscopes get invented and humans begin to be able to understand, oh, there are these tiny little things that are in the bodies of cholera victims and tuberculosis victims. Gee, maybe we can attenuate those and you use those as a way to, similar to the cowpox, smallpox vaccine, what doesn't kill you will make you immune. So they would put these dead or weakened viruses and bacterias into people, and that was the vaccine. That is essentially what the platform of the vaccine has been up until this year.

Nina Burleigh: (12:48)
Then we have the 20th century where the developments of vaccines become more and more rapid, more and more effective, and also, mass produced. First big mass vaccination program in the United States, the polio vaccination program in the '50s, which they unfortunately hit a hiccup. One of the companies made a bad batch and they actually injected live virus into kids and that is one of the streams of vaccine... that provokes one of the streams of vaccine distrust that exists to this day.

Nina Burleigh: (13:25)
The vaccine technology or vaccines have like all science, it moves forward in fits and starts. Science, it's not perfect, it is, you experiment and as the data comes in, you alter your understanding. So vaccinations throughout the 20th century are history of these leaps forward, accompanied by on the margins, side effects that were scary, or ineffective vaccines, but overall, Anthony, and this is what we talked about before on your show. Overall, they have been a massive success story. We can see that in, if you were born in 1900, your lifespan in America was 48 and 49 for men and women. It's now 80, so we've doubled our lifespan. Now, of course some of it has to do with antibiotics and the type of food we eat, but most of it, a huge percentage of it has to do with the fact that we now have these vaccines that protect children from diseases, the names of which we can't event pronounce anymore, that used to wipe out or cause traumatic illness that people would remember for a lifetime if they survived it in children. Now we don't have that.

Nina Burleigh: (14:54)
So what's happened is, we have people walking around like your friends who are like, "I don't think I need the vaccine, it's not organic enough," and my friends who are that way, but even educated people walking around going, "Eh, I think I'll decide whether I want to do this or not because it doesn't seem like such a bad..." because we're spoiled, we actually don't know what's on the other side of this shield that modern medical science has created for us.

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:20)
I want to go to the politics again for a second because you're mentioning... it's a weird thing, the former administration wants to take credit for Operation Warp Speed. The supporters of that administration want to take credit for it, yet a very large block of those supporters do not want the vaccine. So, I don't understand that at all, I can't get my arms around that. I was wondering if you could help me with that. Go ahead, Nina.

Nina Burleigh: (15:51)
So, Anthony, I'm the... sometimes we get in conversations about the supporters of the former guy and we all just start to sputter in incomprehension because there's no logic to it. There's no logic to this blind following of the leader except for accepting that people do follow leaders blindly. I guess that's what's going on here, because they have turned off the rational logical side of the brain and they're just giving into this emotional reaction to this guy whose behavior and statements, they seem to admire so much.

Nina Burleigh: (16:34)
So no, they should get some credit for Operation Warp Speed, I mean they definitely... Operation Warp Speed was, they threw billions of dollars at these pharma companies and they said, "You, you, you, and you, and you, and you," they picked six of them. No big contracts, nontransparent but hey, it was an emergency. They said, "We're going to give you the money whether it works or not. Make a lot of it, if it works, if it doesn't work, you're still going to get to keep the money. By the way, we're going to shield you from litigation. So it worked, it worked great, they made this. It is a medical milestone.

Nina Burleigh: (17:11)
Now this had been on the drawing board for about 15 years but in medicine in America, the FDA has to approve things and these clinical trials can take years. They call it the Valley of Death in the medical world. They bumped it into Warp Speed and yay, it worked. The problem was, they did that, what they weren't going to be able to distribute it widely because the ideology of the former administration that held sway in their actions was that government should be shrunk to the size of pinhead. They weakened the agencies, and that they didn't really want to activate all the levers of government. They didn't want people to see all the government can do this for you, because they preferred that it be shown that private enterprise can do the job just as well.

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:08)
So let's go to the malpractice that took place, the public policy malpractice in the... How many lives could've been saved and what were some of the big missteps at the beginning of the pandemic that you write about in the book?

Nina Burleigh: (18:22)
Sure, well okay, we know from Deborah Birx, who was one of the administration top officials in this issue, that she has this since not being in the administration, that 100,000 Americans was probably what the number should've been, in terms of how many people were going to die of this. Instead, we're closing in on 600,000. Something went wrong. What was it?

Nina Burleigh: (18:54)
I think the early missteps were as we know, the... Well, the greatest misstep, the malfeasance that lasted throughout the year was that they put public relations above public health. He liked the numbers low, I like the numbers low, remember that? What's what he said. I like the numbers low.

Anthony Scaramucci: (19:22)
He didn't want to test people, he didn't want to bring the cruise ship in off the coast of California.

Nina Burleigh: (19:27)
He said that in relation to the cruise ship.

Anthony Scaramucci: (19:28)
He didn't want to increase the numbers of people, yeah.

Nina Burleigh: (19:30)
But he did, he said it also at a... the context of that comment had to do with the, they were at the CDC and this is actually how I open my book, this incredible scene where he's standing there with the MAGA hat and he's making up these numbers like, "Well, four million tests are going to be available to people at the end of the week." There was no such thing, there were not going to be four million tests. In the same press conference, because he has Tourette's syndrome and he blurts out whatever he thinks, which is great because you can track what's going on. He said, "I like the numbers low, I don't want the sick people coming off that cruise ship out there and put them in so we'll have higher numbers of COVID." Well, COVID was already stalking the streets and rooms at homes and hospitals and nursing homes, of New York State by then, and there were no tests to stop it. So that's the number one, that was the first error and first really preventable error.

Nina Burleigh: (20:31)
Then you had the masks issue, which they can share the blame for that with the WHO and other top officials because they were early on, the doctors were not... they were worried about running out of masks themselves so they were saying don't wear masks. They didn't fully understand that this is an airborne virus and that masks really do help. So they were like, eh, don't wear them. Then [inaudible 00:20:54] changed their mind, those who were opposed to any kind of government restrictions related to this crisis seized on that as a, hey, you know what? Look, they don't know what they're talking about.

Nina Burleigh: (21:09)
Again, that's people don't understand how science works. The doctors thought that it was not airborne and that you didn't need it, and then they realized it was. Well then they told you to do it. So you either have a science person in the White House standing next to you who respects that and who can explain it, and it is easily explained, or you have somebody like a man in a red hat on TV every night going, "Look, the scientists don't really know what they're talking about. You know what? I know what's going on and by the way, I'm not going to wear one. They tell you to wear one but I don't think I'm going to wear one." That's not leadership. He was a leader but he wasn't acting as a leader.

Anthony Scaramucci: (21:50)
What do you think the big lessons were from all of this?

Nina Burleigh: (21:55)
Oh boy, well, the big lessons are hopefully that you have somebody in the White House. Look, this is the richest country in the world, we are equipped to deal with these types of things, we have experts all over. What you needed was somebody in the White House who had a scientist on speed dial who could activate what was needed, and he didn't. He puts Mike Pence, evangelical in charge of the COVID response. Birx, Redfield, Azar, the head of the HHS, these are evangelical Christians, Anthony. Not that they're not... well, Azar is a pharma exec, but the other two were actually medical people but ultimately they will call on the supernatural in the end. You needed somebody... like what they've put in there today. There's a guy that the... sorry, the science advisor to Biden is an expert in genetic science.

Nina Burleigh: (22:55)
Genetic science is the future, genetic science has in leaps and bounds in the last two decades begun to change how medicine works. This mRNA vaccine is the first widely experienced example. A fruit of all of that knowledge, but it's really hard to understand for the average person. It's like a separate language. I mean, I had a microbiology PhD student at Standard helping me with this book just to keep talking to me, doing genetics for dummies because it's really hard to understand when you start looking at it. You can visualize it, DNA, RNA, made of proteins on a strand, but it's hard to understand it. So you need somebody who really knows what it is and knows what these things are and knows how to speak in that language. Then you need somebody who respects that and says to that person, "You tell the public or you tell me what I need to tell the public. Then you tell the public what the scientists and the medical community are telling you." That's number one.

Nina Burleigh: (24:01)
Number two, what would be another lesson? I mean, to me that's the first lesson. I think the second lesson is, this has to be a global response. We're not there yet but we again, we're the first generation of human beings who carry these things around with us, every single one of us understands using this little machine we have in our pocket, that every other human being on the planet was experiencing the same thing that we were experiencing in real time. We could see that, we can see it right now, we can click on and see what's going on in India or in Africa. It's in real time, we have so much data and so much information that we can't really walk away from this moment without recognizing that we're a linked species. We are one species on this planet and if we can't have a global response to something like... This was a global catastrophe like an asteroid hitting us or like climate change. If you don't start thinking in global terms about responding to challenges like this, you're not going to get out of them. You're always going to be down in the ditch with the lowest, the weakest.

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:14)
Well, one of the problems is, as you talk about a global response, and this feeds the conspiracists, this feeds [crosstalk 00:25:23]. Normal people in the establishment can make mistakes. As an example, the WHO, the World Health Organization, this probably wasn't its shining moment. Talk a little bit about that and your assessment of it in the book.

Nina Burleigh: (25:38)
Well, you mean about the WHO or about just this-

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:42)
Yeah.

Nina Burleigh: (25:42)
... sense of-

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:43)
Yeah, it didn't cover itself [crosstalk 00:25:44].

Nina Burleigh: (25:44)
... [crosstalk 00:25:44] paranoia about global [crosstalk 00:25:47]?

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:46)
Well, there's a combination of things going on. The WHO had some missteps, they had some missteps related to China, they had some missteps related to the protocols, and then that fuels the conspiracy even though they were perhaps, let's call them honest missteps as we were trying to understand what was going on.

Nina Burleigh: (26:04)
Yeah, well I mean the UN, UNISEF, the UNHCR, the WHO, all of these global bodies represent to a certain segment of Americans who supported the former guy, this sensation of our national entity is crumbling, the walls are crumbling, we're no longer a nation, we're now part of this world government. I'm old enough to remember when they were paranoid about black helicopters flying over Wyoming that might be coming from the UN. So this stream of paranoia remains very strong and the former guy provoked it. He also attached himself to it, they immediately when they got in there, immediately started disengaging from these world bodies. They got out of a bunch of them even before the virus, they were disengaging from UNISEF and complaining about the UN taking too much money and so on.

Nina Burleigh: (27:04)
Then the WHO, here comes this crisis that is a public health crisis, it's a global pandemic, and they fail to first of all, to get this mask things straight. They're giving miss or inconclusive certain information, and they are slow to respond. I mean, the whole China thing, the government, our government thought that there was something fishy about the Wuhan lab. They had been getting information for years that the bio safety maybe wasn't particularly up to snuff from their people over there. So they immediately seized on that because you had this Sinophobic, Peter Navarro and Pompeo and these people who had been just banging these drums about the Chinese and we need to stand up to the Chinese. So they did not like the way the WHO went along with what the Chinese were saying about what was happening. To their credit, I mean the Chinese did release the genome quickly, they did admit that there was something going on in January. Was it happening there earlier? I don't know, they claim that there were some sick lab workers but we have seen no proof of that yet.

Nina Burleigh: (28:23)
The point is, the globalization of the world is inescapable, we can't... the reason this thing is a pandemic is because we are linked, everyone is on airplanes all the time, the supply chains are messed up from COVID because we are so into... there are ships sitting in ports over in, I don't know, Portugal or China or Italy that can't go anywhere because there have been people locked down. So we are completely interrelated.

Nina Burleigh: (28:56)
I get why people object to, let's say the way the Chinese government operates, the authoritarianism, the intrusiveness of their... I mean, they'd lock down and they did get rid of their pandemic in a month or two, it was back to normal because of these extreme bio surveillance measures that they instituted, which we would never put up with here. I get that, but I think that when you're faced with a pandemic or global challenges, we need leaders who will sit down with other leaders and put that kind of thing aside and go, let's move on and let's talk about what we can do together to protect ourselves. One of those thing is, let's all get together and share this vaccine. I think that Biden trying to approach the patent issue, it's weak, he's not going to get around, they're not going to get around it because there's so much money in pharma, but people have to come together and look at this.

Nina Burleigh: (29:58)
I know it sounds Pollyanna-ish and like singing Kumbaya and so on, but sooner or later, we have to admit that we are one planet, one world, and it's very small, it's very small. We can have wars all the time and we can fight over borders and so on, but these types of species-wide challenges, we need leadership that will look at that and be willing to negotiate and compromise and work together on these types of issues.

Anthony Scaramucci: (30:29)
Well, I really appreciate it, Nina. I'm going to turn it over to John who has questions from our audience and his own questions. The title of the book, Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic, it's a great read, great invested research in it. With that, I'll turn it over to John, who has now learned how to pronounce your name, Nina, which makes me very happy.

Nina Burleigh: (30:56)
[crosstalk 00:30:56].

John Darsie: (30:56)
Nina Burleigh, it's a beautiful name and I'm proud to now be able to pronounce it correctly.

Nina Burleigh: (31:01)
Thank you, John.

John Darsie: (31:03)
But you talked about mRNA vaccines and we should all be thankful for the fact that there was this intersection between research that had been taking place on mRNA vaccines for the flu vaccine, for cancer research, and the perfect application for the coronavirus pandemic. Could you talk about the future of mRNA vaccines and just the potential that they have unleashed, in terms of vaccinations and treating a wide variety of diseases?

Nina Burleigh: (31:29)
I read a lot about it. I think in the book I address it a little bit. I mean, in terms of the possibility. They're even talking about the possibility that this could deal with the common cold, but it is a milestone, it's not as much of a milestone maybe as antibiotics, but it is up there with it because it's a synthetic, manmade little strand that they inject into your system. It's transient, it doesn't change your DNA, transient means it dissolves, it goes away. All it does-

John Darsie: (32:08)
It doesn't make you grow a third arm or leg or anything.

Nina Burleigh: (32:10)
It's not going to change, it's not going to make us grow a third arm, it's not going to make your... as my friend, nutty friend Naomi Wolf is running around saying it's changing women's menstrual cycles or other people are saying it's... god, I get emails now because I had this piece in the Time, an op ed piece, if you put something in the Times, you get this tsunami of responses because that's how many people are looking at it. All the responses that weren't sent to my private email were from anti-vaccine people saying, "You don't know what you're talking about. I know that people are dying of this. There this sensation that..." well anyway, we could talk about that more, these misinformation silos, but in general, yeah, I talk about it a little bit, I read more about it.

Nina Burleigh: (32:59)
I didn't put it all in there, but yes, it's going to change because it is a completely new platform. When we say platform, we mean the previous one was a attenuated virus or a attenuated bacteria platform, to this synthetic molecule, mRNA platform that changes... that tells your cells to make a response to a very specific part of a virus or in general, they're going to be able to do this again and again and again. They're going to be able to do it with other viruses, if another pandemic comes along, if another virus or another imminent or threatening pan... threaten let's say hopefully they'll be able to stop it from becoming a pandemic because they will be able to look at these genome and in this case within three days of the Chinese sending the genome over, within the three days the NIH had this mRNA figured out. They knew what they had to put in within three days.

Nina Burleigh: (34:06)
So I can envision at some point in the future there will be factories that will be able to... you'll just be able to farm up AI, I'll just turn it on and they'll start producing these vaccines within hours. I think that that's the future, and it's exciting and amazing. We should be optimistic about it.

John Darsie: (34:25)
Yep, god willing. You talked about your piece in the Times created all this vitreal that got sent to your private email and obviously that's unfortunate, but there's also an element on the right side of this, the right wing media machine led by Fox News and other outlets that are even more extreme these days, are partly to blame for sewing doubt in the vaccines, in the pandemic in general.

Nina Burleigh: (34:50)
Absolutely.

John Darsie: (34:51)
Calling it a hoax, things like that. How much of a role does that right wing media machine and social media, frankly, and the echo chambers it creates, contribute to the circular nature of a lot of these unsubstantiated conspiracy theories?

Nina Burleigh: (35:05)
I like the way you said circular because it just made me think of circular firing squad. That's actually what they're doing because they're killing their own people who are watching and participating in this. It's a huge part of it. I mean, I don't watch Fox News, I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I turn it on now, I am just blown away because these people are... Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are not ignorant and yet they're spewing this stuff out there to millions upon millions of people who take what they're saying as fact.

Nina Burleigh: (35:43)
So one night I had the TV on and I saw Laura Ingraham just rattling on about faceless bureaucrats in Brussels telling us what to do. I'm like, what are you talking about? Where are the people in Brussels telling us what to do? People in Brussels haven't even gotten out of their lockdowns yet. This was us, we made this vaccine here in America and our government put this out there. Our governors were forced to do state-by-state responses, lockdown or not, because the federal government wouldn't step up. So we're the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

Nina Burleigh: (36:21)
All of this, yes, the social media, the echo chamber, the siloed off information or misinformation, it's dreadful. I don't know what you're going to do about Fox, I really don't, because I think Roger Ailes, I always say this. Roger Ailes was the tumor and Fox News is the cancer, that it's going to take a generation to get cured of because I don't know. I honestly don't know how they're going to get beyond this, unless the government goes back to regulating that kind of information and we don't live in that kind of society, so.

John Darsie: (37:00)
As a country, the United States has always prided itself on freedom and an extreme free ideology as you write about in the book. The pandemic exposed some of the dangers of that, on the other hand, you have more authoritarian type societies, whether it be in China or other places that maybe were able to have a better pandemic response because of the heavy handedness of the way the government operates. How do you find the balance between those two? Obviously unfettered capitalism and the extreme free ideology that you talk about probably isn't practicable when you have to deal with situations like a global pandemic, but at the same time, people don't want government so heavy handed in their lives the way it is in somewhere like China. So, how do you find a balance between those two going forward?

Nina Burleigh: (37:44)
Well, it's tough, and that's why I'm a journalist and not a policy maker. I'm not Ron Klain, I'm not Biden, obviously I'm not working for them or in that business. As I've covered them over the years, I've become more sympathetic to people who are in those situations. I used to just like to take hot shots at them and look at what they were doing wrong and now I think it's really hard, that's a really hard question.

Nina Burleigh: (38:11)
My answer would be, moderation in all things. Try to find the middle road, try to bring people back around to a fact-based reality, that's the main thing, communications. Look-

John Darsie: (38:31)
Do you think the pandemic is going to change global democracy in the United States and elsewhere where you're going to see more government intervention, more government spending to [crosstalk 00:38:40]?

Nina Burleigh: (38:40)
Well, I don't know. I think obviously that's happening here right now. I mean, the Biden Administration is responded to being the opposite of the antigovernment ideology of the former administration. Now it's, let's throw as much money at this as we can. They're going macro, they're going to throw money at infrastructure, they're throwing money at the social services and so on. We're not getting [inaudible 00:39:03] out of it, which they could've started to but they could've moved the ball on that maybe, but in this country yes, we're swinging to the other side, at least for the moment. Let's see what happens in election 2022.

Nina Burleigh: (39:18)
But I was just talking to some friends of mine, Norwegians and Swedes, and this, what's going on there? I mean, those are societies where the people are much more trusting of each other. That was my, I lived over there lecturing, the months before the pandemic I spent in Norway. We talked a lot about government and democracy. In those societies, one of the reasons they don't have the problems that we're having here at least in terms of the rise of the right, and the breakdown of the democratic processes, is that people don't think that if the other side wins, they're going to be wiped out. There's a trust in your fellow citizens that we all are in this together, we want our country to thrive. Of course now, there is a rise, the right is rising in Germany and in Sweden, and they're having a crisis in Sweden. Part of those crises have to do with the lockdowns and the Norwegians and the Swedes have reacted against the lockdowns.

Nina Burleigh: (40:19)
I mean, so is this... and the French. I mean, you see people, they're just sick of it. They did start off saying, we're confident and that Macron is going to... they're going to figure this out. So they for the first two lockdowns in Paris, people were dealing with it, but then they had rolling more and more lockdowns and people started to resist. So as far as the west and these western democracies, it is a huge challenge to these leaders to figure out what to do. If they don't have the vaccine or they're going to keep telling people to lockdown. We are not going to do bio surveillance the way the Chinese do it, nobody would sit still for that. I don't think any of us would.

John Darsie: (41:03)
Last question I have for you is, the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on communities of color, and also there was socioeconomic issues. Poorer people died and suffered more from COVID than wealthier people, as well as communities of color suffered more. They're also among the most vaccine hesitant, communities of color, frankly. Why do more people of color first of all, die and suffer from COVID-19? How do we educate those portions of the population and build trust with them, in terms of accepting vaccines and the treatments that we need to mitigate these types of pandemics moving forward?

Nina Burleigh: (41:42)
Well, we know that the poverty and diabetes and those types of comorbidities and obesity go together, so there was a lot of that. A lot of communities of color, people work on the front lines. We could all leave our jobs and work from home, if you work at McDonald's or you work at a grocery store checkout, you can't just go and stay home. So they were on the front lines and I mean those are the main reasons. They're frontline workers and they also had a lot of comorbidities, they also tended to live in multi generational households.

Nina Burleigh: (42:26)
As far as the low information or the misinformation that they distrusted the vaccine in communities of color, I think that can be addressed over time. I think the churches, the pastors have to speak out, and as people become... it's really something that has to be dealt with from inside the community but with the help of urging of allies within the medical community.

Nina Burleigh: (42:57)
I will add that I just saw today, I think it's in the Times, red states are COVID states now. They actually are mapping it and they can see that it's really rising in these red states. It's not rising in the blue states, it's going up in all of these pockets, it's absolutely correlative to the support of the former guy. So I think you're going to see that tip a little bit, and I don't know what effect that's going to have on the 2022 election, but I think really the more that these smaller communities or these remote communities or the low information communities start to see that within their communities, oh my god, there's a refrigerator truck outside of our rural hospital, like in that Wisconsin town that the Times did a feature on a while ago, where suddenly all of these people in this little town that had been anti-mask are being fork lifted into refrigerated trucks right before their eyes. I think if... how sad that it's come to that and didn't have to come to that because if they're looking to their leader down there in Florida, their leader, all he has to do is stand up and say, "Get the vaccination," and say it over and over. It would make such a difference, it's such a simple thing, right?

John Darsie: (44:15)
He got the vaccine himself but refuses to encourage.

Nina Burleigh: (44:19)
[crosstalk 00:44:19].

John Darsie: (44:19)
He refuses to encourage his supporters to protect themselves in the same way he did. I think it's a perfect analogy for his presidency, not [crosstalk 00:44:27].

Anthony Scaramucci: (44:26)
What about all the Fox News' hosts? They all got the vaccine, and then they [crosstalk 00:44:31].

John Darsie: (44:31)
[crosstalk 00:44:31].

Nina Burleigh: (44:31)
Similarly, absolutely.

Anthony Scaramucci: (44:32)
It's very upsetting.

John Darsie: (44:34)
Well, Nina, it's fantastic to have you on. Obviously we love hosting these talks to educate people and your book I think did a great job at just looking at the science, looking at the facts of the pandemic, and drawing a series of conclusions, but it's also challenging as you mentioned, for policy makers to find that right balance in a country that values freedom and liberty the way we do in the United States, but to also make sure we protect people and protect the group. But thank you so much for coming on and doing this and helping to educate people.

Nina Burleigh: (45:01)
Thank you so much for having me.

Anthony Scaramucci: (45:02)
Nina, thank you. I'm holding up the book again, Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic. Thank you again for being on SALT Talks.

Nina Burleigh: (45:13)
You're welcome, take care, guys.

John Darsie: (45:15)
Thank you, thank you, everybody, for tuning into today's SALT Talk with Nina Burleigh. Just a reminder if you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous SALT Talks, you can access them on-demand on our website, it's salt.org/talks, or on our YouTube channel, which is called SALT too. Please spread the word about these SALT Talks in particular, we think these relating to public health and the pandemic are extremely important, that people learn if they're unfamiliar with the science or the vaccine or they're hesitant to watch talks like this and learn.

John Darsie: (45:44)
We're also on social media, Twitter is where we're most active at SALT Conference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook as well. On behalf of Anthony and the entire SALT team, this is John Darsie, signing off from SALT Talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.