1011: Dr. Anthony Fauci | The Science and Politics of Public Health

1011: Dr. Anthony Fauci | The Science and Politics of Public Health

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[00:00:00] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Now you're asking me what keeps me up night. Now it's the same thing. It's another respiratory born outbreak that's highly transmissible and that has a degree of morbidity and mortality that can be very, very disruptive and painful because when you're talking about pandemics, it's gotta be something that easily is spread from person to person.

And the easiest way to do that is through the respiratory route.

[00:00:33] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, four star general hacker, gold smuggler, or economic hitman.

And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode Starter Packs is a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, and cyber warfare, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show doctor and former medical advisor to the president to multiple presidents in fact. And Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the most famous slash infamous people in the world as of the past few years.

It is rare that someone has become such a hero to some and such a villain to others love him or hate him. This is a great conversation about pandemics public health, COVID-19. Just as you might expect, what you might not expect is that this conversation is mostly not political. We just don't get into the contentious weeds on everything yet still keep things interesting and relevant, in my opinion.

Alright, here we go with Dr. Anthony Fauci. It seems like you were born to be a public health official with your father being the neighborhood pharmacist and delivering prescriptions on your Schwinn bike back in the day. Did you have designs on this kind of career early in the game?

[00:02:12] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No. Uh, Jordan, I, I don't think I could say that I had designs on this kind of career.

What I did feel, you know, both at the time, vaguely though I probably didn't recognize it, but. Later when I retrospectively reflected on it, the fact that my father was sorta in the, in his pharmacy, a mom and pop shop in a working class section of Brooklyn, the pharmacies that are, were very different than the industrial CBS and Walgreens type pharmacies that we have now.

The neighborhood pharmacist was kind of like the surrogate doc of the neighborhood. He was a combination marriage counselor, uh, person who advises parents on juvenile delinquent children, uh, gets prescriptions filled, and he felt a kind of responsibility to the neighborhood. We're talking the forties and the fifties now, and I was at the time, you know, seven, eight years old, nine years old, 10 years old with my, as you mentioned, my Schwinn bicycle delivering prescriptions.

The one thing that came through to me was my father's commitment to service to the community because. Quite frankly, with no disrespect for my father, he was a terrible businessman in that, you know, people could not afford sometimes to pay for the prescriptions. So he would put it on a tab, and often if they were not well off financially, they couldn't pay and he would just absorb the cost, which made the pharmacy not a particularly profitable business.

I mean, could you imagine today going into a pharmacy saying, I can't pay, but gimme the prescription anyway? Yeah, it would never happen. Yeah. So service to the community was sort of ingrained in me, and that was subsequently enhanced by the nature of my education, you know, with the Dominican nuns in elementary school and then the Jesuit priest in high school whose motto was service for others.

So in answer to your question, it wasn't like I foresaw this as my advocation later on, but I think the seeds. Of what drove me to public health and public service were probably planted in those very early years in the Bensonhurst and Dica Heights. Mm-Hmm. Section of Brooklyn, New York.

[00:04:32] Jordan Harbinger: It sure seems that way from the reading of the book that you were kind of, I mean, aside from your, uh, little foray into basketball, you were kind of headed in, in a more or less straight line, by the way.

Five, seven white guy playing basketball with big Dr. You don't hear that too often anymore that that's a relic of the of the times.

[00:04:50] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Indeed, indeed. And that's why I described it as such. It was a very important, enjoyable period of my youth that playing in a very competitive New York City high school basketball.

But being a fast five seven point guard today is an anomaly that would never happen. Right, right.

[00:05:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Maybe if you grew six to 12 inches you could, you could still do. Yes. Do you still ball?

[00:05:15] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I go one-on-one occasionally. Funny, you know, playing horse with my wife up in the gym. Uh, I used to go half court games in medical school and when I was doing my fellowship, but right now it's tough to get a group of people who are so busy to get to play.

So I just shoot around. I'm on the faculty now at Georgetown University and they have a great athletic center, the eighth center, and so I go up there to work out a bit, and every once in a while I'll just shoot around.

[00:05:41] Jordan Harbinger: So somebody might walk in there and if you're wondering who the. Five, seven man with white hair shooting hoops is, it could be Dr.

Fauci. That's kind of, that's a double take, I think, for a lot of people. For sure.

[00:05:53] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah. It's kind of fun. Yeah.

[00:05:55] Jordan Harbinger: Dealing with the students. I love them. They're probably not screaming at you. Speaking of which, I know you were attacked in the eighties. This is stuff most people my age don't know because we weren't watching the news back then, but you were attacked a lot in the eighties, pretty viciously for not doing enough about the AIDS virus to sort of put it into a simple container.

And, and one of your harshest critics back then actually later said that you were the one true hero from the government with respect to the AIDS epidemic. And I, I know that you'd been quoted it possibly before. Covid is saying that your career and end, indeed, your identity was sort of defined by the fight against HIV.

[00:06:30] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, that is true. Uh, it was defined by aids. Uh, it's a memoir, as you mentioned. I'm elder, you know, an 83-year-old person. Did you almost say elderly? Yeah, I almost did. You don't have

[00:06:41] Jordan Harbinger: to do that to yourself.

[00:06:42] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah, I mean, but I'm 83. I'm a young 83. But Covid is a very small fraction of my career. I mean, most of it is defined by what you mentioned earlier is hiv aids.

You know, I spent over 40 years in the AIDS battle from the very difficult years in the beginning to the triumphs of the drug. But the point you're making about the activists, I'm glad you pointed out because it's a major part of the book that contrasts and compares the attacks on me in the AIDS years and the attacks on me.

Now, back then, the underlying reason for the confrontation with the AIDS activist community was that the scientific community and the regulatory community in the form of the NIH and the CDC and. FDA were treating HIV. The way they successfully treated a bunch of other diseases where the people who would be dictating how things were done were the scientists and the regulatory people.

And they had very rigid criteria. For example, for entry into clinical trials, entry criteria, exclusion criteria, a long time to get a drug approved, measured in years and years. That worked very well for diseases in getting interventions that was safe and effective to the American public. But when you had a disease that was a brand new disease, the likes of which we had never seen before, where these desperately ill young, almost exclusively gay men who had been previously healthy, were suffering and dying within 10 to 15 months of the clinical diagnosis.

So this slow, rigid, kind of measured response to the outbreak did not work well for HIV, but the scientific community, understandably, but inappropriately said, we know what's best for you because we've done this before. Mm-Hmm. And the gay community was saying, well, not so we wanna sit at the table with you.

We wanna be part of the discussion of what the right agenda would be for clinical trials and for regulation. And when the scientific community didn't listen to them, that's when they became provocative, iconoclastic, disruptive, and Confrontative. Most of the scientific community pulled back. Withdrew even more from them.

[00:09:10] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:09:10] Dr. Anthony Fauci: And as I described in the memoir, one of the best things that I've ever done of the things in my half a century career was to put aside the theatrics of the demonstration and listen to what they were saying. And what they were saying was making absolutely perfect sense. And I decided that if I were in their shoes, I would be doing exactly what they were doing.

So I, you know, I can best describe it by saying, it's kind of like John Lewis, the iconic civil rights leader, said, mm-hmm. They made trouble, but they made good trouble. So the AIDS activists were making good trouble. What you're seeing today with the vitriol and the ad homi attacks on scientists is not good trouble.

Mm-Hmm. That's just pure ad hominy to try and discredit and undermine the scientific and public health community. We're not perfect by any means, and we've done things that we could have done better. To attack the community with no purpose, but to undermine them is infinitely different than the pushback by the AIDS activists in the 1980s.

A big, big difference.

[00:10:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's, I was gonna jump into some of this later, and I suppose we could, but some people really hated you under Bush because of the aid stuff. Then it was Ebola under Obama, Trump because of Covid Biden, because of the Covid vaccines. What do you hope people will hate you for next, Dr.

Kaji?

[00:10:42] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, uh, you know, I, I don't know how to answer that. I, the one thing that has been consistent with me is that I have done everything I can with whatever abilities I have and energy I have to put all of my energies into trying to preserve and protect. The health of the American public. Sometimes that's in circumstances that are very charged and sometimes people react.

And as I mentioned, the reaction of the gay community in the eighties was a very positive and value added. Mm-Hmm. Reaction in contrast to what you saw at that congressional hearing a few weeks ago, which was just pure circus.

[00:11:21] Jordan Harbinger: I, I really do think that a lot of those hearings now are designed to create social media clips for the politicians because they've essentially become Instagram influencers in many ways.

Or news clip influencers, which I don't think is healthy for public discourse. But that's a whole different rant from me, I suppose.

[00:11:39] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, you're absolutely correct. I mean, you are totally correct that if you look at things like the congressional hearings, the supposed purpose of it

[00:11:49] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:11:50] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Was to take a look at potential lessons learned about how we might do better in preparedness and response.

For the inevitability of another and the next outbreak be that a year from now or 20 years from now. But that's not what took place. What took place was just, as I mentioned, pure ad hammi demen, pure vitriol.

[00:12:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It doesn't seem like it makes it easier for people to do their jobs. I wonder how did what you experienced during the outbreak of hiv aids inform your response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Right? Because it seems like uhoh new disease, we gotta act fast. I, we didn't act as fast as we could have or should have during hiv aids. Was that kind of like, let's not make that mistake again? Was there thought to that?

[00:12:36] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, you always learn from your experiences, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's right.

Hopefully, and, and we try very much to learn from our experiences. There are a lot of lessons learned, some positive lessons and some painful lessons. I mean, for example, even though in the mid to late eighties it was eminently clear that HIV was the cause of aids. There were some otherwise qualified scientists who went rogue and started saying that HIV didn't cause aids.

They were AIDS denialists. And they said, well, AIDS is caused by abberant sexual behavior that has nothing to do with the virus. And when you try and treat them with drugs, it's the drugs that are hurting them. And the virus is no essentially benign. And that led to in another country, namely South Africa, to have the South Africans who were sort of ambivalent about providing drugs for their people to latch onto the denialists from very good institutions like Berkeley and Stanford and others had to say, well, the scientists don't think that AIDS is caused by HIV, so we don't have to give drugs to our people.

People who've done modeling studies showed that during that period of time when Tao Mbeki, who is the president of South Africa at the time, and their Health Minister Monte, they said that we don't wanna give drugs because we, we don't think the virus causes HIV mm-Hmm. And approximately 300,000 South Africans unnecessarily died preventable deaths because of denialism.

Fast forward 40 plus years, and you have people that say you don't need to wear a mask. The vaccine kills you worse than the virus kills you. Right. And then you have a substantial segment of people who actually believe that.

[00:14:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:14:31] Dr. Anthony Fauci: And test assess the data that it is more likely for you to die. I'll be hospitalized with COVID if you are a Republican living in a red state than if you're a Democrat living in a blue state.

And that completely crazy that a person makes a decision about something that could impact their safety, their life, the fact that they might be hospitalized or die based purely on ideological concerns As a person who's not political at all, you know, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm, I'm a physician and a scientist.

It's very painful for me to see people choosing to not implement or apply an implementation that could be lifesaving to them or to their families.

[00:15:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it was really shocking. Well, we saw people saying, Hey, it's the ventilator that's killing you. And it's, well, wait, aren't they only putting people who are close to death on ventilators because they can't breathe and it Well, no, the hospitals are killing you.

And when I was reading your book and doing research about the hiv aids thing. It was really scary how similar these pandemics were. It was people telling you in the eighties calling you saying, Hey, don't waste too much time on this HIV thing. It's probably gonna go away in a few months. Like magic. They also called it grid gay related immune deficiency.

In other words, who cares? It's a bunch of gay guys. Stop wasting your time on it. I mean, talk about politically incorrect disease nomenclature. It was just really the denialism was there, like you said, the kooky theories that were there, like you said, and. I looked up some sham cures all present with covid just like it was with aids.

And it's really amazing to see once you know the history, 'cause if you were thinking I'm gonna do this sham cure for Covid, but you would then you go look at anything having to do with AIDS in the eighties, you just kind of look at the stack of stuff you bought from Thailand on your desk and throw it immediately in the trash because it's the same nonsense.

[00:16:31] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yep. No, you're absolutely correct. History repeats itself and in fact, if you go back even further to 1918, pandemic flu about people, some of whom refused to wear a mask, some of which mm-Hmm. Refused to have social distancing and how, how that came back to really bite them back then because they didn't want to be told what to do.

[00:16:53] H.R. McMaster: Mm-Hmm.

[00:16:54] Dr. Anthony Fauci: And there was some really interesting studies of one city that actually shut down and had physical distancing compared to another city that actually said to heck, let it rip. You know, let it go through. It's not gonna bother us. The death rate and the hospitalization rate in one versus the other was stunning.

Very similar to what we're talking about now.

[00:17:15] Jordan Harbinger: I was looking at some stuff about germ theory a few months back and how doctors delivering babies who had just been at the morgue touching a dead body, they were like, oh, this is a bunch of bs. I mean, it's really, you just see this cycle of like denying science and not bothering to change your ways and it's sort of, I guess no surprise that they say science advances one funeral at a time.

Yeah. It just depends on whose funeral it is. A lot of unproven drugs with aids, although that part I kind of understand, right? If you have AIDS and you're not able to get any treatment and somebody says, Hey, just dilute bleach in water and drink it every hour, I guess, you know, you, you try what you can.

'cause you don't wanna die. That's the only thing I can sort of understand.

[00:17:54] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, you know, I have to maybe just put an editorial on that. Sure. Is that true when there's desperate nature, but that's what the clinical trial process is about. Mm-Hmm. To get a clinical trial to prove. Or not whether a drug works, whether it's effective and whether it's safe.

One of the things that we did with the help of the activists because, or the clinical trial does not meet everyone's needs because not everybody can be in a clinical trial. And as long as you're going in the direction of trying to get data that would either prove or disprove the safety and efficacy, that's a positive thing.

But in the meantime, you might want to have access to these drugs and people who, for one reason or other, could not get into the clinical trial either because of exclusion criteria, because of geographic considerations. And that's why we started the Parallel track program, which I described in the memoir where it was the first foundation for compassionate use where if people could not get into a clinical trial that the drug would be made available to them.

Outside of the clinical trial or in parallel, that's why we called it a parallel track, and that would not count against the data in the trial. So you would not disturb the pristine nature of the clinical trial. But at the same time, you'll allow the accessibility of these potentially, but unproven life-saving drugs to people who could not be in the clinical trial.

[00:19:29] Jordan Harbinger: I know that you were in charge of prepping the United States for bioterrorism, like smallpox, anthrax. How prepared are we for something like that? Because when I look at how people wouldn't do sort of some of the simplest things for Covid when we didn't know what we were dealing with, it seems like if we had a major bioterrorist attack, a bunch of people would say it's fake.

A bunch of people would say it's a false flag. A bunch of people would say it's China. A bunch of people would say, it's not actually happening at all, and you should actually just go outside and get more sun, even though you're supposed to stay inside. Whatever it is. I mean, that it, it's not looking good as far as,

[00:20:03] Dr. Anthony Fauci: yeah.

You know, when you talk about preparedness and response, uh, generally for clarity, like to break it up into two categories of two buckets. One is the scientific response and preparedness, and the other is the public health preparedness and response. Mm-Hmm. Scientifically, if you were to grade us for Covid, OVID, we were a plus because we put decades.

Of investment in basic and clinical research over a period of time that allowed us, when the sequence of the SARS COV to two was made available, we were able to start a vaccine trial with a very adaptable platform. And Immunogen and an IMMUNOGEN is just the business end of the vaccine. We were able to do that within a few days of the appearance in a public database of the sequence, and then in a completely unprecedented way.

We went through the phase one, two, and three components of the clinical trials and were able to demonstrate in less than 11 months in studying tens of thousands of people in randomized placebo controlled trials that the vaccines were is safe and highly, highly effective to the tune of more than 90%.

To say that is unprecedented is a profound understatement because usually something like that takes seven to 10 or more years, usually more than that. So already when you look at the data, the vaccines have saved millions of lives in the United States. The Commonwealth Fund did a study over a couple of year period during the middle of the outbreak to show that vaccinations saved 3 million lives, 18 million hospitalizations, and about $1.1 trillion in healthcare costs.

And the Europeans and others did the same thing. Mm-Hmm. And that saved about 14 million lives internationally. So it was just extraordinary that not only is an incredible accomplishment, but just think what would've happened if we didn't have a vaccine And it took five to seven years to get it. How many more deaths?

There would've been so scientifically we did well. What we really need, and you alluded it to it when you would introduce the topic, what we really need to do is to take a look at what our public health preparedness and response is. Mm-Hmm. You know, the fractionation of the response between the local public health and the federal public health response, the antiquated way we collect and distribute data with some local public health components, still using fax machines and not being able to get things online in real time.

When you compare that, what goes on in countries like Israel, the UK, and South Africa, they're way ahead of us in getting real time information in an outbreak. And in fact, during the height of the outbreak, more often than not, I was on this screen that I am with you. Mm-Hmm. Talking to my colleagues. In the middle of the night, or very early in the morning in different countries in Israel, uk, South Africa, Australia, to find out what they were doing because their healthcare system allowed them to get information in real time, which was very difficult for us.

Hopefully the CDC recognizes that that is a problem and are doing everything they can to correct that.

[00:23:44] Jordan Harbinger: I do think my favorite nickname for the vaccine was the Fauci oci. That one was pretty creative. I don't know what, you must have been hearing this in real time and thinking like, really? Yeah. Surely some of this was massively stressful.

We'll get into that a little bit. It just, before we do that, during the Zika virus outbreak, you lamented that partisan politics might affect the next disease breakout, and it might get even worse. And I'm paraphrasing here, but man, did that come true? Yeah. With Covid, I, it was just really sad to see. I know you're working like 14 to 16 hours a day for much of your career, especially during the pandemic.

I know you've kids as well. Did you ever think like you worked a little bit too much at the expense of family and maybe even your sanity? I

[00:24:27] Dr. Anthony Fauci: don't know about the sanity, but certainly the

[00:24:29] Jordan Harbinger: mental health. How's that? Yeah,

[00:24:31] Dr. Anthony Fauci: mental health. I, I, I admit that I'm guilty, that I'm not, I. The poster child for a good work life balance.

But that was really kind of the circumstances I found myself in and that I chose to be in. Yeah. Because you know, if you look at my career, it's bookended by the extraordinary tragedy of the early years of HIV on one end of the early part of my career, and in the December of my career by the most impactful outbreak that we've seen in this planet in over a hundred years.

And in the middle is the diseases that you mentioned. You know, the pandemic flu of 2009, Zika, Ebola, the anthrax attacks, chicken guna, multiple drug resistant tuberculosis. Oh yeah. There was always some crisis or semi crisis, which actually did put me in a position where I had us make sacrifices and uh, certainly I would've wished I.

That I was able to spend more time with my family, with my wife and my children. Fortunately for me, I had a partner who I describe in the book, Dr. Christine Grady, who's my wife, who's an amazing person, and who actually was a great support for me for what I had to do, and just went the extra mile to make sure that the family unit, you know, functioned really well.

And we did some interesting things about timing so that we could be together, even if it was at very odd hours of the day and night. She was very good. Making sure we stood together as a loving family.

[00:26:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There's a funny anecdote in the book where you two decided to run a marathon together and you were like, well, let's hold hands across the finish line.

And she's like, actually, I love you dearly. And then she just smokes you and finishes several seconds before you, which I think says a lot about your relationship and her personality in one tiny little anecdote.

[00:26:25] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know, she's great. I mean, I throw that anti anecdote because she is amazing. I mean, she's a wonderful person and I still think we have, uh, the intensity of a love affair that started 40 years ago.

But she's a great athlete and she's in good shape.

[00:26:39] H.R. McMaster: Mm-Hmm.

[00:26:39] Dr. Anthony Fauci: And when we got to the end, I was sort of like, oh my God, I'm in such great pain. We were at 26.1 miles. Yeah. And we did that. We were running together and chatting for that period of time. We did a great time in the, in the Marine Corps marathon. We did it in three hours and 47 minutes.

And in the New York Marathon, we did it in four hours, in six minutes. Except wow. That both times she was about 15 seconds ahead of me because just at that last 10th of a mile, she would say, I'm sorry, but I gotta give it my all. And she took off. Wow. And you're right, she smoked me at the end. That's,

[00:27:14] Jordan Harbinger: it's really funny and it's even better that you told that anecdote in the book instead of, you know, being embarrassed about it or something like that.

I think it's quite funny. In part because of Covid, you're now one of the most recognizable, famous slash infamous people in the world. And I know that's not probably why you signed up for the position that you did, but for example, one reason why we're not doing this in person was because the publicist that I spoke to had said, I, I said, look, I'll fly out there, we'll do this.

She said, actually, the security situation is such that it's, it's gonna be a huge pain to get you cleared, and then your camera crew cleared, especially if they're local. And I thought like, wow, okay. I didn't really think about that. Usually I just show up with guys with equipment and nobody's gotta look through the bags and do a background check, but, and maybe I'm a pretty sketchy guy, so I guess I can't blame 'em, but it sounds like there's, it's pretty serious, more so than it is with most guests of, of this podcast.

[00:28:05] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah, that's true. I mean, over the last couple of years, you know, related to the fact that I had to, in order to preserve my own. Professional integrity and my responsibility to the American public. I had to, under certain circumstances, publicly disagree with the President of the United States. Mm-Hmm. That immediately triggered a tsunami of hate against me by people who have a tendency to do hateful things.

Yeah. Like storm the capitol and do things like that. So I became the target. The thing that's, that people need to understand. I have a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States, and I took no great pleasure in having to contradict the president He wanted desperately for this outbreak to go away.

Mm-Hmm. The way flu goes away when March comes in the beginning of April, he wanted it to disappear. My relationship with him in the beginning was actually quite good. We had a very good rapport together. You know, I kind of described it as maybe, you know, two people from New York City. You know, one from Queens.

Mm-Hmm. One from Brooklyn. You know, we had that New York rapport with each other and we got along very well. But what he started to see that this outbreak was not gonna disappear and it was gonna sort of interfere with the economy and certainly with the election cycle, he began to say things that just were frankly not true.

He would say it would disappear like magic. And then I would have to say, when the press asked me, no, it's not gonna disappear like magic. In fact it's even getting worse. And then when he realized it wasn't gonna disappear like magic, he would evoke, invoke some magic elixirs. Like, okay, hydroxychloroquine is the answer.

That's gonna be the thing that's gonna work. And when the reporter has asked me, I have to say no. Unfortunately that's not the case. It's anecdotal. It clinical trials show that it doesn't work. And in fact, it could be harmful. You know, it's interesting, as I described in the book, is that he did not take as much offense as that as one would might've thought.

He maintained our good rapport. It was the people around him that became infuriated with me for what they thought I was undermining him, which was not my intention. I had no antipathy towards him, and I had certainly no intention of underlying him, but I felt it was my responsibility to the American public to tell the truth.

That's when the threats started to come in. Mm-Hmm. That's when the White House themselves tried to discredit me. I mean, the communications people at the White House did opposition research on me and started to say things to the press that I didn't know what I was talking about, which is mind boggling when you think about that you are working in the White House and the White House comms team telling reporters that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Yeah. Which is

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Fauci. You are in a position where, well, actually you, your whole career was pretty much spent in a position where you have to often give bad news to powerful people. Stuff they don't want to hear. And I assume you have some way of typically avoiding damaging those relationships while also being effective because otherwise you couldn't really do your job.

I mean, a lot of people, yeah, they wanna shoot the messenger. You've experienced that. But I feel like a lot of people just tell powerful people what they wanna hear and then try to slime their way around. But I eventually they're gonna get found out. And that's, yeah, that's it.

[00:34:28] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, I describe in the memoir the first time I was getting ready to go into the White House to advise a president.

Mm-Hmm. And I had a close friend, much older than I, who had spent six years in the Nixon White House. And he gave me some advice that I would hope that I would've felt this way without his advice, but his advice helped me and fortified it. And he said exactly what you were alluding to. He said, whenever you walk into the White House and now Jordan, I've been in the White House hundreds and hundreds of times.

He said, whenever you walk in the White House and you go under that awning in the lower level of the West Wing, just whisper to yourself, this may be the last time that I'm gonna walk into this building. Because it's such a awesome and heady place that your natural instinct is you want to get invited back again.

I see. So that might get you to tell a president or the president's advisors something that you think they may want to hear as opposed to telling them what might be an inconvenient truth. Mm-Hmm. So I said to myself, that's what I'm gonna do. And I did that. I did that with Ronald Reagan. I did that with George HW Bush, with George W.

Bush, and after a while. People begin to respect you because they know that you are going to be truthful to them. So instead of the messenger getting shot, it just got more and more rapport and respect for the different administrations. It was only when we got to the Trump administration that when I said that more his staff than him were very offended by it and started to really try and discredit me.

I mean, Peter Navarro writing an editorial in USA today saying everything I'm saying is wrong, and the comms people essentially going along with that. I mean, that to me was, you know, an example of, yes, I'm gonna tell the truth, but you know, if you want to get rid of me, then get rid of me. But I'm not gonna tell you something because I think you want to hear it.

[00:36:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think it seems like you. Would know as a, as a physician, you just have to know, look, the entire country and the world kind of are relying on you to figure out how to stop this pandemic. So your feelings, Mr. President or people in the room with pre like that just comes, that is a distant second to like figuring out how to stop this thing from killing a million more people.

[00:37:07] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Absolutely. I mean, the main goal, I mean, people ask me, you know, how, how do you tolerate that? What you need to do, Jordan, is you need to focus like a laser beam on what your purpose is and what your goal is. And if your purpose is to preserve and protect the health of the American public, then stick with that goal.

And if something conflicts with that, then you're gonna have to push back on it. And that's exactly what I did when I was saying that these magical elixirs don't

[00:37:38] Jordan Harbinger: work. You've had a complete ish loss of privacy since Covid and that it seems like that's not likely to stop. I mean, I know you're at Georgetown now, so maybe it will slow down a little bit.

I, I wonder how you adapted to that over the past few years. 'cause of course it's not always good, right? For every standing ovation at a restaurant, you got people who wanna kill you with anthrax. Real or fake?

[00:37:57] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, I think, I, I don't think the numbers are correct. I think there are many, many, many more people who want to applaud you and thank you for helping save them and their families and their mothers.

It's the people who are against you are very loud. Yeah. And very persistent. And it sounds like there are a lot of them, but they're very, very loud and persistent. But getting to your original point, it's even worse than you think because. Both myself and my wife and my children we're very private people.

Mm-Hmm. You know, uh, I don't really alike all the attention at all. It's there, you know, it's nice when people are complimenting you and thanking you for saving them and their families, but I much would rather be a private person. And you're absolutely right. Your privacy is completely destroyed because, you know, wherever you go, people recognize you.

Almost invariably they're complimentary to you, but every once in a while you get somebody who just blasts off about why you're, you know, vaccines are killing, killing people, and you're killing people with vaccines and things like that. That's not pleasant, but you just have to accept. That's part of it.

[00:39:06] Jordan Harbinger: I know with aids, a lot of people, like we discussed earlier, were sort of against you. You know, you're evil standing up, heckling you, but there was no internet, there was no social media back then. Do you think that's been kind of the big driver of this?

[00:39:19] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know. What you can do is that if you get 10 people who love you and one person who doesn't like you, that person isn't heard by very many people.

But when that person amplifies their effect in social media and sending things on the internet and likes and non likes and things like that, before you know it, the impact and the damage that one troll person can do is enormous. And it looks like it's much bigger than it is. And you get this impression, wow, look at all that chatter on the, and people like clickbait, people are not gonna click on something that is, oh, you know, we had an interesting time.

And people said hi to Dr. Fauci and said, thank you. Yeah. But when somebody threatens to kill you, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. That's what happens. And that's the completely negative aspect that social media amplifies so many things that are negative.

[00:40:21] Jordan Harbinger: When it comes to Covid, what did some of the, I guess so-called Kooks get right.

Did they get anything right? Even if they got it broken clock is right twice a day style. Did they get anything? Did they happen to be right on anything?

[00:40:34] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Oh yeah. I mean, uh, the fact that we were not perfect in what we did. We did the best we can for the purpose of saving lives. No response under such difficult circumstances is gonna be perfect, and that's why you have lessons learned to reflect on what you've done.

I think there were several things that I think we need to think about. Shutting down when you were having three to four to 5,000 deaths per day was the right thing to do. Our hospitals were getting overwhelmed. We had freezer trucks in front of hospitals because you couldn't accommodate all the bodies in the morgue.

The real issue that we should examine now as retrospective lessons learned is how long did you, should we have kept the schools closed? I for one, very early on, after a few months, said, we should try as best as we can to as safely and quickly get the schools open. Mm-Hmm. But yet you saw there were some schools that were closed for a year or more, and there were gonna be deleterious collateral effects.

So as you said, the people who complained, there was a kernel of truth in some of that. Also, the potential negative effect of mandating, I mean, you had a mandate in the beginning, but the idea when you mandate in a divisive society that sometimes has the counter effect of people not wanting to do it. So we've gotta reexamine the whole issue of mandates.

There was a positive aspect in that it saved lives, but we've gotta look at what the negative aspect is and says what was the balance between the positive and the negative aspect. There's no doubt it saved lives. I, there's no doubt. But we need to carefully look at what some of the negative consequences are.

[00:42:25] Jordan Harbinger: What happened early on with the mask guidance? I, I think that's sort of one of the reasons that it, people got tripped up and made a lot of folks suspicious. It looked like it's really hard to get to what even happened. 'cause it's, it looked kinda like flip-flopping in a way because it was confusing.

[00:42:40] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know, it, it certainly was confusing, uh, Jordan, but it wasn't really flip-flopping because when you have a moving target and information is evolving before your very eyes, the scientific process, which is a process to gather information, data, and evidence, and then make your decision based on that. In the very early months of the outbreak, what was not appreciated was that the virus was spread essentially by asymptomatic people.

And that aerosol was important. And what we thought in the beginning was that first of all, there was a shortage of masks. So to take masks away from the healthcare providers who really needed them, it was felt ultimately incorrectly that we didn't wanna tell people they had to wear masks in January because the healthcare providers needed it, number one.

Number two, there was no evidence that masks outside of the, of the hospital setting were protective. And thirdly, there was this lack of appreciation that there were people who were spreading it, asymptomatically and there. So we said, you don't need to wear a mask very quickly. When it became clear that A masks do protect, B, there's no shortage of masks, and the virus is not just spread by people sneezing and coughing.

It's spread merely by talking to somebody or singing. So that's when it became clear. Now given the evidence we have now weeks later, a month or two later, that's when we said, you've gotta be wearing a mask in an indoor setting. That was interpreted by some people as flip-flopping. Yeah. What it really was, using the data that we had in February and early March.

Which was different than the data that we had in January.

[00:44:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think, I think when things move so quickly, it's very hard to you really, any sort of change in the in direction seems like flip-flopping, especially if you are not following the real science quote unquote every single day, which is your job.

But for a lot of people, like, you know me sitting here with my parents, it's like, well, wait a minute. Didn't you say last month we shouldn't do this. Now we gotta buy these and they're not available. And that was kind of scary, I think. And when people get scared, they make these emotional knee jerk decisions that in large numbers, and that was kind of a disaster.

[00:45:12] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah. There was one other thing about masking Jordan that was also a problem, is that when the CDC finally said, we should all wear masks in an indoor setting, the president gets up and says. The CD. C recommends you should wear a mask in an endo setting. Me, I'm preferring not to wear a mask, which immediately politicized, masking and masking should not have been politicized.

So if you wore a mask, you were interpreted as being anti-Trump. If you didn't wear a mask, you interpret it as being pro-Trump. So the ridiculous situation evolved where masking became a political statement, and we know that you see people fighting with people who were wearing masks that don't come into my store with a mask or don't come into my store without a mask.

It became a political football, which is so ridiculous because mask. Is it intervention that is known to save lives? There's no doubt about that.

[00:46:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there was a lot of masking going. For example, in, in Asia, if you have a cold, it's kind of just one of those things where people with good manners will just pick up a mask and go, ah, I got a stuffy nose and so I'm gonna wear this today.

On the subway or in the train, you know, the AT work, there was a kind of a culture of doing that when you're not feeling well. So they didn't have this same issue, and of course they weren't maybe as tuned into the day-to-Day drama that we have here in the United States. I know during Covid, people thought you were the one making the policies, and I, I guess I admit I was probably one of those people, but you were just more of a communicator of those policies, is that correct?

[00:46:48] Dr. Anthony Fauci: So the history prior to Covid is that I had been communicating to the American public for decades on hiv aids, on pandemic flu, on Zika, and on Ebola. I was the constant because other directors of CDC or directors of FDA or other government people, they came and they went. They came and they went,

[00:47:10] Jordan Harbinger: mm-Hmm.

[00:47:10] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I was there for a half a century and the director for 40 years. So the natural thing is that when you wanted to articulate to the American public what one should or should not do, I became the voice of, and the communicator of these policies. And as you said, immediately everyone incorrectly thought that I alone made these policies.

And you could see it from the responses from some of the congressional figures where they would put me before a committee and say, when are you gonna give us our freedom back? Like me? I mean, when did I take away your freedom? You know, I was just communicating what the policy of the CDC and what the policy of the Coronavirus task force was.

I wasn't making that policy in a vacuum.

[00:47:58] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like from everything that I looked at, and there's a obviously a metric ton of information on this. In 2020, we just didn't have sufficient evidence to see where COVID-19 could have come from. We just weren't sure. And, and, but unless I misunderstood you, it sounded like in the congressional hearing, it sounded like you suggested it would have a natural, or sorry you were restating this in the congressional hearing, but back then it sounded like you suggested it would have a natural origin and that was the thing, right.

The bat at the wet market and yada yada. Why not back then just say, Hey, we don't know. Especially once China started to block international investigations and look like they were kind of covering things up to some people, they probably think you put your finger on the scale towards this not being a lab leak.

[00:48:38] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, that, I mean, if you really listen carefully, I've always had an open mind. Yeah. But I've said it is more likely 'cause there's no evidence at all that there's a lab leak. It's just circumstances. There's no concrete evidence. Does that mean it didn't happen? Oh, of course not. We don't know what it is, and that's why we keep an open mind.

[00:48:56] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:48:56] Dr. Anthony Fauci: But when you look at what the evolutionary virologists, not just people in the United States who worked for the government, people from Australia, from the uk, from the European Union, from Canada, looked at it carefully and said, with an open mind that it isn't definitive. So we keep an open mind, but we think the actual virological, geospatial and epidemiological data strongly suggests, but don't prove that it's a natural occurrence.

Mm-Hmm. But having said that, since it isn't proven, you have to keep an open mind that it could be one. Or the other.

[00:49:36] Jordan Harbinger: So is there a potential possibility that gain of function research at the Wuhan lab is to blame for COVID-19? That's the question everybody keeps asking you and

[00:49:44] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah, but that's because, you know, gain of function is, is a meaningless term.

Okay. You know, what do you mean by

[00:49:49] Jordan Harbinger: gain of a function? Tell us what it is. I think a lot of people don't know.

[00:49:53] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah. I mean, because gain of function is a generic term that doesn't tell you anything. I mean, you make a vaccine for influenza, you use gain of function, you get the virus to grow better in eggs, you make insulin from recombinant DNA technology that's gain of function of an e coli that's spitting out insulin.

It's when something is done that has the capability of enhancing the potential of a pandemic pathogen to spread more readily and to cause more harm. Now that could have been done somewhere in China, but the place that it wasn't done was in the lab that the NIH indirectly funded through a indirect grant to a New York firm.

Because when you look at the viruses that was studied under that grant, they were the word phylogenetically, which really means precursor wise was so different than what SAR Cov to two turned out that no matter what you did to those viruses, they would not have become SARS Cov to

[00:50:57] Jordan Harbinger: two mm-Hmm. But

[00:50:57] Dr. Anthony Fauci: yet, in the beginning, people said, well, the NIH was funding a small grant, $120,000 a year in China.

That's the lab that the virus came from with absolutely zero proof. Mm-Hmm. Of that it was just stated that that was the case.

[00:51:15] Jordan Harbinger: So I know I'm gonna sound like somebody at the congressional hearing, and I'm trying to rephrase the question in real time, but here we go. Do you support an investigation into the lab leak theory, or is it a kind of a waste of time at this point?

[00:51:26] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, no, no, no. I think you've gotta keep both possibilities open. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we have good data about, not definitive, but good data that it likely was a natural occurrence. The only way you're gonna find out about lab leak is you gotta have open transparency with the Chinese, and given the degree of hostility and confrontation that we have right now, I'm not sure that we'll ever get that kind of cooperation.

[00:51:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think, and again, I'm paraphrasing, you said something like even when they're not hiding anything, they've not been that forthcoming.

[00:52:01] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Oh, absolutely.

[00:52:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:52:02] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I mean, it's a whole idea of saving face. I mean, for example, when COVID became apparent. They went into the market and got rid of all of the illegal animals that were not supposed to be there.

That gives you a big clue. Yeah. You know, as to, wait a minute. Hold on here folks. Why did you do that? And even in, you know, if you go back to 2002 and 2003, when the first SARS became available, we were, um, aware of it in the Quang Dong Province of China. They were saying it's just an unusual flu.

[00:52:40] Jen Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:52:40] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Because they didn't want the embarrassment of a brand new pathogen coming from their country. Right. Which, you know, there's nothing to be embarrassed that happens. Just the way the 2009 swine flu came from an area in the border between Mexico and California. Those things happen. But in order to essentially shy away from that, they were denying that it was a new virus until it got to Hong Kong.

And then it spread through the rest of the world. But that's just the way they are. They're, they're very secretive about things.

[00:53:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It, do you see this, the Chinese Communist Party as a danger when it comes to pandemic precautions and international cooperation?

[00:53:24] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know, I can't comment on that because I don't know what they are doing or what they're not doing.

Okay. So it would be difficult to me, I mean, when you use the word Chinese Communist, I mean obviously that's a negative thing. You know, Chinese Communist, we're not exactly strong allies of that kind of ideology. Right. I just don't know what's going on with them. And that's why I say keep an open mind.

'cause I don't have any idea what's going on in other labs in China. So that's the reason why you've gotta keep all possibilities open.

[00:53:53] Jordan Harbinger: What do you make of the World Health Organization, seemingly in the beginning at least, not putting much pressure on Beijing to come clean about, to cooperate with a real investigation?

Does that

[00:54:03] Dr. Anthony Fauci: concern you? Well, you know, anytime there's lack of cooperation in a transparent way. That bothers me. I mean, I'm not so sure what WHO could have done. You know, WHO is not a very powerful organization. You know, they're at the mercy of the member states, so it isn't as if they have any direct authority.

Certainly we would've loved for them to have put more pressure, but I'm not sure that would've made any difference.

[00:54:30] Jordan Harbinger: All right, time for a quick word from our sponsors, the Spike Protein of Capitalism. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help. How easy is it to scroll through Instagram?

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There's a fellow by the name of Peter Dasik, and he sort of smoke screened, in my opinion, the world by, first of all, he immediately dismissed the lab leak and then sort of says, Hey, the virus didn't even start in China. Uh, it seems like, were we just supposed to take that guy's word for it? Despite the surmounting evidence and research and the World Health Organization got stifled for like a year before a proper investigation.

I don't know, are, are you familiar with that, this guy?

[00:57:19] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah. I mean, obviously he, he got himself into some trouble by things that were perceived or really a conflict of interest in some of the things that he said. Mm-Hmm. And he has gotten himself into some serious difficulty, as you know, is his institution and himself had been de barred from NIH funding.

[00:57:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's, anyway. Do you ever think we will find the source of this virus, given the environment and the time elapsed since its origin? I don't know much about how you investigate these things, but it seems like it's long gone.

[00:57:46] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know, I don't know. We would hope that if it's a natural occurrence, we'll be able to figure that out.

You know, it wasn't until more than 10, 15 years after the discovery of HIV did we find out that it actually originated in the chimpanzee. So it's not unusual not to find the origin for years and years, years later. One of the things that is gonna essentially mitigate against that is the fact that the Chinese went in right away and cleaned out that market.

So maybe the evidence that was there, if it was there, if it was there. Is gone

[00:58:23] Jordan Harbinger: now. Would you say that Covid was the most challenging time of your career, or do you think it was the AIDS thing? I know there's a recency bias, but I'm curious what you think.

[00:58:30] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know, I, I think in some ways you can compare and others you can't.

So when you say challenging, you know, from a public health standpoint, to have 1.2 million people in the United States die is Yeah. Is tragic. But in hiv aids, I was personally every day taking care of desperately ill people.

[00:58:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:58:50] Dr. Anthony Fauci: For years watching them die. And you know, as I described in the book, probably getting accumulation of post-traumatic stress from trying to do a good job caring for your patients.

At the same time, it feels like you're putting just the bandaid on the hemorrhage instead of actually stopping the hemorrhage. That was personally very painful for me. So

[00:59:13] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, I was looking for headshot. My team was looking for headshot for you for this, this episode where we have our artist draw you afterwards and some of the, they were like, you want us use this one?

And there was one where you're about my age and you're checking out this guy who's an AIDS patient and he, it just looks like you're handling an African child who's emaciated and malnourished, except it's a grown man. It's really kind of terrifying.

[00:59:40] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah, there were hundreds of those. Jordan, that's just one.

[00:59:44] Jordan Harbinger: Being literally hands on with that would just be quite terrifying. What do you think you would've done differently with respect to Covid? Just knowing what you know now with the benefit of hindsight?

[00:59:53] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, I just mentioned a few of them. I mean, yes. You know, if I knew in the beginning what I know now, there would've been much more of an emphasis right from the get go about masks.

Mm-Hmm. I'm not so sure it would've been accepted, because I say, yes, we would've done it in January. Could you imagine if we had said when there were two or three patients that have died and maybe 20 that were infected, that by the way, we want everybody to wear a mask. I mean, they would've looked at us like we were crazy.

Yeah. But that's something that we probably would've done earlier. And then also to reexamine the amount of restrictions we put on, and not only the amount, but the duration of the restrictions. I think that would've been done differently.

[01:00:31] Jordan Harbinger: What keeps you up at night knowing that a pandemic, especially a respiratory pandemic like this is happening or was happening?

Uh, just because covid, well, I guess we're technically still in one. It's just not as sort of urgent, but it doesn't mean the next one won't be a, a month from now.

[01:00:45] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, you know, Jordan, it's interesting because let's go from the beginning and go backwards. Before Covid for literally decades, people, journalists, radio hosts like yourself, a number of people would be asking Dr.

Fauci, what keeps you up at night? What's your worst nightmare? Yeah, and I'm on record for saying this hundreds of times. What keeps me up at night is the emergence of a brand new virus, likely from an animal reservoir that's respiratory born, that has high degree of efficiency of transmissibility and has a degree of morbidity and mortality that can have a major impact on civilization.

And sure enough. Covid was the answer to my nightmare and my worst possible nightmare. Now you're asking me what keeps me up night. Now it's the same thing. It's another respiratory born outbreak that's highly transmissible, and that has a degree of morbidity and mortality that can be very, very disruptive and painful because when you're talking about pandemics, it's gotta be something that easily is spread from person to person.

And the easiest way to do that is through the respiratory route. I don't know when that next pandemic is gonna occur, whether it's gonna be two years from now or 50 years from now. That's one of the real dicey elements of preparedness because you've gotta be perpetually prepared for something that you have no idea when it's gonna occur.

That's a pretty high bar to ask people to be constantly on edge.

[01:02:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:02:28] Dr. Anthony Fauci: For something that might not happen in your lifetime,

[01:02:31] Jordan Harbinger: how prepared are we then for the next pandemic, in your opinion?

[01:02:35] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I think we're better prepared now 'cause there have been some lessons learned than we were with COVID. I think scientifically we're quite well prepared.

I think we still have a way to go to tighten up that public health system and get it to be less fragmented. So I think we have a ways to go in the arena of public health, but I think we're doing quite well in scientific preparedness.

[01:03:00] Jordan Harbinger: I know some people, uh, I was looking at this and it was almost comical.

People were saying, oh, well, Fauci colluded with Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook to censor speech related to Covid. And there were some emails or something that were redacted in the pile that we saw in this foia. This Freedom of Information Act request. I don't know if this is something you're even able to say, but what's redacted there?

Because I know the stuff is out that redaction is outta your hands and people focus on that. Like, oh, it must be something super bad if it's blacked out.

[01:03:28] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know Jordan, it's ludicrous. Yeah, because with the email was essentially Mark saying, how about I have you on a podcast and see if we could help encourage people to protect themselves by getting vaccinated and doing things that they can to intervene and protect themselves and their family.

It was pure altruistic, somebody somewhere started redacting things like email addresses and words that were harmless words. So all of a sudden that got construed in a fantastical way that I was trying to influence social media to say things that I wanted them to say. Which was, you know, if it wasn't so stupid, it would be funny.

But, but that's the source of this trying to influence social media.

[01:04:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think that's kind of how it comes across when you look at it and look at the context. I was just very curious about that. 'cause I, I would normally not ask somebody what's redacted because it's redacted. However, it didn't really seem like important things were actually, could possibly have been redacted.

Made no sense.

[01:04:38] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I know. And, and that I, I think, you know, and I've said this to the Congress, I mean, I think that in some respects the government is their own worst enemy when they redact things that are harmless. You immediately incite suspicion that you're redacting something that is incriminating. Right.

When it's like a silly word,

[01:05:00] Jordan Harbinger: right? It's like, it's like a, I'm gonna meet you at blank and we're gonna handle the blank. And what it is is like pizza shop and lunch. Yeah. And it's like, just leave it in there. You're making us look terrible. You have no idea. I don't want people to know where we eat lunch.

Yeah. It's, it really comes across, there's a whole world of possibilities. And at some point the American public is just assuming the wor, well, large numbers of us are assuming the worst. And it's just like it turns into some sort of television drama.

[01:05:26] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Indeed. I

[01:05:26] Jordan Harbinger: mean, it, it is fuel for conspiracies. So this isn't really your problem anymore, I suppose.

But it seems like we're always a few. Dairy workers or farm workers away from another pandemic. And I'm, by the way, I'm not blaming dairy workers or farm workers. Those people work their butts off. I'm just saying they're on the front lines of this and they're working with animals all the time. So is this kind of just media hype, or should we be doing more to make sure we're not incubating the next pandemic and it's some dairy farm in the us?

[01:05:54] Dr. Anthony Fauci: You know, Jordan, it's my opinion as an outsider person now, that we really need to be testing the farm workers more for asymptomatic infection and find out the extent of spread. It's understandable why they don't want to be, because the farm owners, the dairy cow farm owners don't want the federal government, you know, coming in telling them what their business should be.

But there comes a time when what happens on the farm could impact what happens in the rest of the country. Mm-Hmm. So they were leaning now towards giving them resources to do the kind of testing themselves. Maybe in an anonymous way so that you don't, because many of those workers, you know, are fearful that they're undocumented and they're gonna wind up, you know, getting into trouble.

Oh yeah. If somehow they get identified and that's one of the reasons they don't want to be tested. So we gotta figure out a way how to alleviate fears and concerns, but get the appropriate public health information that we need.

[01:06:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. I'm I looking at H five N one, that's kind of the thing that I'm worried about coming down the pipeline.

Can you tell us a little bit about that? 'cause I, I honestly don't know much about H five N one or why it's dangerous.

[01:07:11] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yeah. H five N one is an influenza virus. Influenza A, it's infects chickens and is highly pathogenic to chickens. You know, it goes back to 1997 when the first H five N one was in Hong Kong and they had a cull.

I. Every single chicken in Hong Kong to get rid of it. Then it came back, you know, in 2003 and 2013, et cetera. It just keeps on coming back. The somewhat alarming aspect of it is that it has maybe their benign hundred cases in individuals, humans over couple of decades. So it's really very unusual for it to jump species.

I don't know what the number is, 900 or 90, I'm not quite sure. But there's a number of cases that jump species from a chicken to a human. It doesn't spread at all, or it's certainly not efficiently from human to human. But when a human is infected, the mortality is close to 50%. Oh, wow. So that's scary.

Yeah. So right now, H five N one has gone and infected another species. Interestingly, dairy cows. It makes them ill temporarily with a mild illness. Decreases the production of milk and then the cows apparently recover. But farm workers spread it among the cows and back and forth. So what the concern is that if it keeps spreading in that circuit between farm workers and cattle and cats on the farm and chickens on the farm, that sooner or later it's gonna mutate to be able to efficiently go from human to human and at a high mortality.

That's what the concern is.

[01:08:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That is scary. And we don't have a vaccine for that, or there's no reason to make one yet, or, or what?

[01:09:01] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, we do, but we only have a, about 150,000 doses, but we have the capability of getting 150 million in about six months. So you know, this dates back when I was the director of the institute, we made a stockpile of H five N one vaccine that's still available.

It isn't perfectly matched to the current virus. Enough to have some cross reactivity, but right now there's over a hundred thousand doses that we could use. Right now.

[01:09:30] Jordan Harbinger: If you were running things, would it, is it a good idea to vaccinate those farm workers with that supply of vaccines? Or how does it work?

[01:09:37] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, that you know? Yeah, Jordan, that's a good question. That gets to the point of why I think it's important to do widespread testing event.

[01:09:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:09:45] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Because if it's spreading beneath the radar screen, then you might want to vaccinate them. If it's only three out of, you know, a thousand farm workers who've gotten a mild illness, you might say, well, maybe it's not necessary to do it.

That's why it's very important to do sero surveillance, to get a handle around to what the extent of the spread is, not only among the cows. But among the dairy

[01:10:12] Jordan Harbinger: workers surveillance, that's something Americans love. Yeah, you got, you got all the buzzwords today. Um, yeah, and of course that means testing farm workers and people who are close to the animals.

Just for people who are busy writing me an email, one thing I've heard from credible sources is that you've been offered jobs in pharma, private equity, I think, to earn something like 30 times your salary at the CDC, but you never took those jobs, even though you've probably had those offers for decades.

Why?

[01:10:42] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, for what I was doing for that half a century that I was at the NIH and for the almost 40 years that I was the director of the institute, was something that I think is priceless Jordan. And that is getting involved in being the leader of a great group of people. You don't do it alone. You're just leading a team that did things.

Developing life-saving drugs for HIV to put the PEPFAR program together. To develop vaccines for RSV to be part of the team that developed a lifesaving vaccine for Covid. I mean, to me, the gratification that you get out of saving essentially millions of lives and being part of the team that's worth any kind of millions of dollars of salary doing something else.

So I would take a government salary any day and have the experience that I experience, rather than making $5 million a year, you know, doing something that's good, but not at the level of gratification that you get when you're saving people's lives.

[01:11:50] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like having that meaning is very important to you.

It's one of your core values. Yes. From the outside looking in.

[01:11:56] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[01:11:58] Jordan Harbinger: What do you want your legacy to be in so much as you actually have a choice in the matter?

[01:12:02] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, that's, I like the way you put that. Others will decide my legacy. Whether or not what I did was value added to humanity, I think it was.

But let others judge that. What I wanna be remembered for is that in the 54 years that I was doing this, that every single day, without exception, I gave it 110%, and I always left it all out on the court. And if you remember me for that, I'm fine. The legacy issue, fine. Let others figure that one out.

[01:12:34] Jordan Harbinger: Are you ever gonna retire?

I mean, you, you said you're a young 83, but now you're what? A professor at Georgetown? Well,

[01:12:40] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I don't know. I'm, I'm still energetic. Mm-Hmm. Thank goodness.

[01:12:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:12:43] Dr. Anthony Fauci: I'm healthy. I'm still passionate about teaching and about public health, and I just love being in the atmosphere of students on the Georgetown University campus.

It's just an experience I had not had before. Because at the NIH you're surrounded by physicians, scientists, and specialists, and people with multiple levels of degrees. But when you go to a university, you're dealing with 18, 19, 20, 21, 20 2-year-old people who have fresh ideas, thought provoking, sometimes naive, sometimes off base, but always exciting.

I really like that.

[01:13:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I suppose that keeps you young, although it would make me feel old when someone says, yeah, I remember seeing you on TV when I was 13 and now they're in a class that you're teaching. Yep. Uh, what do you think of being played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live? I bet you never saw that coming.

[01:13:36] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Oh, no. Not even close. That was kind of funny. I've always been a great admirer of his acting capability and the fact that he portrayed me was really sort of like, boy, this is really getting surreal here.

[01:13:48] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. I bet. Before you go, there's an interesting leadership principle you talk about in your book where when you joined N-I-A-I-D, you said, I refuse to make any big sweeping changes.

Until I really understand the organization. And I think a lot of leaders, they join an organization and then they make big changes just to show like, Hey, I'm in charge. I'm new here. I gotta move some stuff around and make, put my imprint on this place so everybody knows what's what. You didn't do that.

[01:14:14] Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, I think that's a really bad idea.

I mean, if you wanna make meaningful changes and have the institution reflect your vision, you've gotta really understand the institution. So for the first six months or more of my tenure of that almost 40 year tenure, I got to learn every single aspect of the institution, every division, every program, every lab, every branch, travel around the country to our grantees to understand the granting process.

And then once I really got my arms around it, then I started to figure out ways that we can do it better. I just felt very strongly to just parachute in there and say, okay, we're gonna change this, this, and that. I think that would've been presumptuous and likely instead of being value added, it could be actually destructive.

[01:15:09] Jordan Harbinger: Dr. Fauci, thank you so much for your time today and uh, I look forward to seeing you at the next Illuminati meeting. That's what everybody thinks when I talk to people of your stature, so might as well, might as well turn it into a runner.

[01:15:20] Dr. Anthony Fauci: Alright, Jordan, thanks an awful lot. Really great being with you.

[01:15:25] Jordan Harbinger: Here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, general HR McMaster. On the greatest threats to the United States

[01:15:33] H.R. McMaster: War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions.

From the perspective of

[01:15:50] Jordan Harbinger: the other, do you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security?

[01:15:55] H.R. McMaster: Absolutely, Jordan. They are. And you know, our average church is doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia's masterful at this. When we were attacked on nine 11, you know, Al-Qaeda.

Didn't target Democrats or Republicans. Right? Right. They targeted Americans. And I think it's time to really demand real reforms. You know? And, and if teachers unions are, are an obstacle, we've gotta tell 'em, Hey, you can't strike reform anymore and we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information that based on your predilections, the fact that, you know, if you are of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network and so many of a different political persuasion watches a different one, many

[01:16:40] Jordan Harbinger: Republican senators, you're

[01:16:42] H.R. McMaster: creating two different realities.

We're doing this to ourselves, Jordan, we gotta stop. You know, we gotta stop it. So let's think about, let's work together to make our republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy

[01:16:59] Jordan Harbinger: for more including general hr, McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change.

Check out episode four 10 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right. Wow. That's one for the bucket list, I suppose. Now, I know some of you are disappointed I didn't jump down Dr. Fauci S throat about COVI and masking, but it is my policy on the show not to treat people like crap. So I do hold people to account where necessary.

I hope we've threaded that needle here a little bit. Frankly, a lot of that has already been said before and I wanted to try to do something new and interesting. I do expect to hear a lot from people who hate Dr. Fauci, although I gotta say, I find it ironic that the people who are supposedly the biggest proponents of freedom or liberty on both sides of the aisle.

Are the ones who get the most triggered by speech that they disagree with. And this is not just a left wing thing, it's not just a right wing thing. I hear from both sides. Y'all are insane. This is not a political show. I don't think it's political to say that Anybody with two eyes could see that. Y'all know where I stand on the science of public health.

And it does seem dangerous to make it harder for public health officials to tell us important things because they might get attacked literally by crazy people trying to mail them anthrax. So thank you to Dr. Fauci for doing the show. Unfortunately, we couldn't do it in person because I'm a security risk, but I acknowledge that I'm here for it.

All things. Dr. Fauci will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I also implore you to check out our newsletter. Wee bit wiser. Each newsletter is oriented around one super brief, practical takeaway.

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