YouSaid · the spoken record

Donald G McNeil Jr

lines on the record: 61
first: 2024-01-08
most recent: 2024-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think we have to find a much better way to handle antibiotics, not feed them all to animals as much as we do, and maybe use them in mixes and maybe use them in injections rather than in pills for various reasons. I worry about that. I do not have the answer. I mean, yes, I worry about fungus. Yes, I worry about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But viruses are the, you know, there are many, many, many viruses. We do not have names for that we haven't even discovered yet that could come popping out of the animals that we interface with. And those are the obvious candidates, although you never know which one.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the only way, the best way I look like an idiot is to go try to predict the future. So, I mean, I've noticed that when real doctors, public health experts, are asked this question, they used to say, flu. Flu is going to be the next big one. Definitely I'm worried about H5N1, avian flu going human to human. And then only one doctor I knew, Ian Lipkin, used to say, I worry just as much about coronaviruses. And he turned out to be right. Now, when you ask him that question, they say, well, it might be flu, it might be a coronavirus, it might be a paramyxovirus, it might be a rhino virus, it might be an adenovirus. They cover all bases. I mean, I definitely worry about antibiotic-resistant infections. And, you know, any kid who's got an ear infection, you may notice that they end up with, you know, one drug is tried and then that doesn't work another drug is tried another drug. Well, if you don't find the drug that works, if you eventually get an ear infection that no drug cures, a lot of kids are going to lose their hearing. And in theory, get sepsis. And, you know, this is something that kills a lot of people in hospitals right now.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'd say we're worse prepared because we're still very polarized and it's going to take a while before we get over that polarization. So I think if another disease came along that were equally unlethal, as in maybe it's only going to kill 1 to 2% of all the people involved, I mean, unless we see the zombie disease with blood running out of people's ears and people dying in the streets, I think you're going to get exactly the same kind of doubt, the same kind of skepticism about vaccine, the same kind of disbelief in the disease, because we've gotten more polarized about this stuff. So no, I'm quite despairing about that right now.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, told them to resign. And so did AG's cousin, Sam. And, you know, they wanted a resignation. They wanted to hang him out to dry. And I thought, this is very bad and it's panicky and it's cowardly and it's not the way the times used to run. It's not what their grandfather would have done, you know, who was in charge when I was there. And I think it's sad. I think since there hasn't been another really big awkward scandal like that in a couple of years, maybe they finally learned to calm down. Maybe they've learned not to conduct all these floggings in public. Maybe they've learned to handle things a little more discreetly. But I don't really know. I'm not there anymore and I don't have any insight into how it happens. We'll just wait for the next scandal to come along.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote James a note saying I was very glad he'd written it. He wrote me a very nice note back. James and I knew each other when he was a reporter a long time ago before he was Jerusalem Bureau chief and before he went off to the Atlantic. And so if we knew each other slightly in the newsroom. And I had heard that he was still hurt and upset by what had happened to him. And I wrote to him and said, hey, you want to take a walk? And so we did take a walk and have a drink on Roosevelt Island. And he told me later that that our discussion of what happened to you versus what happened to me helped him resolve to write that piece, which was nice. I was very glad to hear everything in detail because it was shocking and yet not yet surprising because what happened was that AG Solsberger initially stood behind him and then with the criticism not letting up, AG panicked and turned on him.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the New York Times. This is very Maoist. Let's beat it, beat a confession out of the employee and then fire him. And that's something new. Judy Miller in the war of Iraq. The Times got into this Maya culpa thing and they decided that every time somebody raised a charge against somebody at the paper, they needed to be investigated publicly and flogged publicly. And very often there was a rush to judgment. And the fact that in my case, even though they'd investigated the whole thing for a couple of weeks back in 2019, they rushed to say, you know, we want you to resign, you know, just literally over the weekend. And I got a lawyer.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cutting the babies' umbilical cord and then putting a lump of goat dung or llama dung on it to dry it up are really dangerous. And so I became the old fuddy duddy defending Western medicine and saying, no, you don't put goat thung on umbilical cord stumps. And I wish I'd never gone on that trip. Yeah. As it turns out, I wish I'd never gone on that trip. But did I think the New York Times would treat this kind of thing seriously? No, I thought the New York Times, I mean, one of the nicest things about working for the New York Times for 40 years was of all the institutions in this country, it was run by grown-ups and really intelligent grown-ups. And many of them, when I started, were veterans of World War II or veterans of the Korean War, and the newsroom was run by people who'd been former foreign correspondents. And they knew a serious mistake from a Tempest in a teapot. I mean, you know, people were fired. People were taken off beats. People were suspended. People were punished. But there wasn't this whole atmosphere of public flogging.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, had I never asked the question, had I never used the forbidden word in asking the question at lunch in Peru? Had I decided not to go on the second Peru trip? You know, I had done it the year before and the students loved me. And then I came back and I gave the same lectures, but the students had a different set of leaders who were all about, you know, how to grow up to be a righteous anti-colonialist and how to believe in Indigenous medicine. And Arnt Schamann's fantastic. And, you know, isn't ayahuasca great? And I'm there.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The times panicked. They would not let me on the day the article came out tell the truth. I mean, and I misread the situation. I thought this is ridiculous. This is the Daily Beast. It's a joke and it's an article that has no sources other than anonymous teenagers. Why would the Times or the Washington Post even pay attention to it? But instead, they thought it was this big deal and it ultimately led to them asking me to resign a few days later. And I think, unfortunately, there has been a fair amount of panic in the management of the New York Times. And I'm hoping they're growing up.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote 20,000 words on medium because you can't say briefly what happened. You have to understand the background of my work as a union activist at the times. You have to understand the fact that it was I was undone after a 40-year career by an article in a reg like the Daily Beast that was sourced to anonymous teenagers based on a trip that had been taken in Peru two years before that had been completely and thoroughly investigated by the New York Times. And they knew the circumstances under which I had said the forbidden word. It was to ask a question as to whether or not somebody else had said it. And all the other accusations against me that I was a racist were false. You know, no, I wasn't laughing at a shaman. No, I was not excusing blackface. No, I was not doing any other things I was accused of doing. And they panicked.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sadly, no. People are going to say, you can't make me do it. And the answer is, well, you and your friends are going to die, or maybe you're going to pass the disease down to your grandmother. Or maybe your kids are, yeah, enough of you take this baby, you can't make me do it. Attitude and more Americans are going to die.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite tough people. They were like generals who occasionally had to order, hey, this unit number here, you are going to fight a suicidal rearguard action to protect the retreat of the larger army. And all you guys are going to die. And I feel terrible about it, but I'm saving 100,000 lives here. And that's kind of what public health is about when you don't have an epidemic that's under control.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become very unpopular like me and you believe in more surveillance. And as it's about tech, it's actually about telling people I am putting you in a hotel room for two weeks. You are not going to leave the room. You are going to open the door once a day and I will hand you a bag of food and you will hand out your garbage. And then we're going to close the door and lock it again. And you're going to stay in there until we know you can't spread your lethal disease in our country. It's not about tech. It's about the willingness to be able to quarantine people when they are dangerous to others. And my excuse for it is how do you save the most lives? That's what this whole book is all about. How do you save the most lives? Sometimes you do it through brutal measures. I mean, you know, the heads of the CDC have all gone to medical school in the United States, and they've been taught, you know, you've got to be a sweet doctor, you've got to have a great bedside manner. In the old days when infectious diseases rampaged, so this population all the time, the people who are in charge of the equivalent of the CDC, this was a surgeon general, were actually...”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Running the technology. The police have to catch you the minute you get off the plane and say, handbe your cell phone, you are downloading this app. All right. And we are going to pay attention to this app, which says you are in your hotel room and you are going to stay in that hotel room for two weeks, never coming out. If your phone stays still for too long in that hotel room, we're coming to the door to make sure that you haven't left the phone behind and gone out on your own. It was not the technology. Contact tracing is all about human contact.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me because we realized we needed a lot of doctors. We could do that again during a pandemic. But is that going to pass Congress? I doubt not. And I'd love to see it happen.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Global pandemic response team? I certainly hope so, but it would require passing laws that the current Congress has no interest in passing. It essentially means we have to create something like the Pentagon. We have to be able to create a federal response task force, not just the federal investigations task force, which is what the CDC is. I mean, they're like the FBI, but without guns, without handcuffs, without powers of arrest, and a tendency to publish scholarly papers instead of cracking heads. And you want somebody who's able to say, okay, we're taking over all the hospitals in New York City right now, and you Mount Sinai are going to treat COVID cases and you, Memorial Sloan Kettering, you were going to handle births and deaths and cancer and this like that. You know, we need to be able to say we need to draft $30,000 today. Now, during the Korean War, we could draft any doctor under the age of 51. There was a doctor's draft act. Doctors in those mass units were actually former civilians who've been drafted into the Army.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't see it happening. I mean, unfortunately, I mean, I've been covering the WHO for more than 20 years, and their response to COVID was really better than their response to any previous disease. really blew it on the big Ebola outbreak of 2014. They just didn't even declare an emergency for months and months. But their response to COVID was really right from the very beginning. TETROS held a press conference every day saying there is a window of opportunity to control this disease and other countries should do what countries that are suppressing it have done, meaning the United States should follow China's example. Oh, he didn't want to say the United States should follow China's example. He should say this window of opportunity is there, but that window is closing. And he said that every day he began to sound like a broken record, but he was right. And we were mired and denialism and we didn't have tests.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, sorry. Well, I mean, who else but the WHO? Obviously, you don't want the United States running it. You don't want China running it. You don't want Russia running it. You don't want Iraq running it because these things will all be politicized. You want some sort of, but fortunately in this case, unlike in many others, the entire world is at stake. We have essentially a common interest. Nobody wants to die of name your disease. And so they all have an incentive to get together and they can fight about budgets. They can fight about responsibility. They can fight about the politics of diseases, whether or not you want to focus on.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With everybody played nicely with each other and they weren't all setting up competing Ebola treatment units that they were all working together and dividing up the tasks. Some people take care of burial, some people take care of treatment, some people take care of hunting for cases, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's crucial. And, you know, Bill Gates has been calling for this for years, saying we need a global response.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Against the day when that would come to their town. That's exactly the opposite of the response we needed. We did not need governors all over the country competing with each other to look for PPE and masks and things like that for their hospital employees. We needed to be able to fight disease the way we fight wars. If Connecticut gets invaded, you know, nobody says, well, it's up to the state of Connecticut to drive off the Japanese Navy. No, the entire country responds from the Pentagon. We need the same sort of capability, and I devote a whole chapter. Yeah, we do. So do we need that on a world front, as Ron Clain says? Yeah, that would be great. I mean, right now, you have a response, but it's really that the WHO asks for help. And as happened in Ebola, many organizations like Doctors Without Borders and ALIMA and some others come in, but also the United States came in, France came in, Britain came in, and the WHO had to sort of cool.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, he's absolutely right. The WHO basically provides diplomatic cover for doctors that get recruited from all over the world to go into countries because they don't have a gigantic responsive task force. I mean, but my argument in the book was, you know, neither do we have that in the United States. The CDC is essentially a detective agency that can investigate an outbreak and give advice, but it then becomes up to either private doctors or the state health care departments to actually do the response. The CDC doesn't have the powers to do that because the Constitution was written in a day when diseases traveled at the speed of a horse-drawn wagon. So I think we need a rapid response capability in the United States, which we do not have. We have to have a way to stop letting private healthcare stop the effect of the response, as in when New York City was desperate for ventilators and people to staff them in the very early days of the pandemic, hospitals all over the country were hoarding their ventilators.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure there will ever be a vaccine for HIV. The measles vaccine that was invented in the 1960s still works, the same vaccine, because the measles virus does not mutate very much. The flu virus mutates fast enough so that we need to change the vaccine every year in order to get a take. HIV mutates, it's not that the virus itself mutates, it's the envelope of the virus and the things that act as shields to anybody's mutate so fast and produce so many variants that we can't make a vaccine that pierces those protective shells and neutralizes the virus. So I don't see that we'll ever make a vaccine because the virus mutates so fast. It's like trying to, I don't know, shoot a bullet at a rabbit that's racing all over the place or something like that. You just can't hit it. It moves too fast.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is now beginning to slowly drop even in Africa right now, not because people are on prep, prep hasn't worked very well, not because people use condoms, not because people are practicing abstinence, not because people got enough circumstances, not because any of the other interventions work, but because a lot of men are on AIDS drugs now, and the AIDS drugs not only save their life, but they suppress their level of virus enough so that they don't pass it on.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, it's 40 years later we still don't have a vaccine for AIDS. The closest we have is prep, either by pill or by injection, and it basically gives you enough circulating drug in your system so that if you do happen to be exposed to somebody who has AIDS, you won't get it. And if you have AIDS or HIV and your levels will be suppressed enough so that you won't pass it on. So it functions like a vaccine, even though it's not a vaccine. To me, the most important thing that happened in the history of AIDS, and I played a small role in this, is that the Indian pharmaceutical companies came along and drove the prices of the drugs down from $15,000 a year to less than $100 a year. And that allowed things like PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plans for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria to raise money and start buying those drugs. And when you, I mean, AIDS.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AIDS in the beginning when it was discovered in the United States, top scientists very confidently predicted that we would have a vaccine, we'd have a test within a year and a vaccine within two or three years.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so in the case of AIDS, I mean, I don't think nobody paid attention to AIDS. AIDS got headlines for years and years and years now. It doesn't anymore, but we're 40 years in.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the vaccines were a miracle. I mean, I never expected they would get a vaccine basically from zero to arms in nine months, really, is what it did. The previous record holdup was four years for the Mumps vaccine. I mean, that was science and that was kind of the one part of the whole scientific enterprise that was not fettered by the rumors and the craziness that Operation Warp speed was given $11 billion and essentially left alone to do what they could and two very smart people were put in charge of it, the guy who used to be in charge of vaccines for GlaxoSmith's Klein and an army general who was a specialist in logistics. And they got that vaccine going. I mean, they made hundreds of millions of doses on spec, ready to go if the test showed that it worked. And there it was ready. So if everybody had accepted that vaccine, if everybody had, you know, if the lies hadn't been told, if it hadn't been.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, social media is just the medium. It's like, you know, before there was the internet, there was paper. And paper was pretty good at spreading crazy ideas in the old days. Before that, there were whisper campaigns, you know, before there was paper. So I'm not worried about the medium, except that it allows you to reach a lot more people and you had fewer editors filtering the stuff as you did during the days with newspapers. But yeah, when the rumors and the denialism comes from the very top, from people that much of the country looks up to, maybe not the elites on the coast and look up to Donald Trump, but a good deal of the country looked up to Donald Trump. And he's saying, you know, it's all going to go away. It's not really a threat or it's all China's fault. Yeah, people are inclined to believe him. To lose 1.1 million people in the greater scheme of the American population is not that much. It's one-third of 1%. But we lost a million people, and I think we could have gotten away with losing only 500,000 if we'd had better.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, all right. So, I mean, what's his appeal? And he's got that, you know, Kennedy good looks and that Kennedy cranky voice and all the other things about it. And he was previously very good at environmental studies. But on this topic, he's gone absolutely kooky in my point of view. And he puts forth all sorts of extremely dangerous conspiracy theories”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, what's the attraction of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If his name was Robert F. McNeill, Jr., he would not be as McCand did eight as he is. If his, you know, Smith, Swisher, pick a last name.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Natural immunity is the path through the graveyards, but that's the tough way. And if you've got a better way to end it without having a third of your population die, that, you know, I think you ought to take that method.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equivalent of a man with a gun, and you don't get to say, Oh, it's my body and I can do anything I want with it. No, that just doesn't fly.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their attitude is you can't tell me what to do Well, you know, the Supreme Court actually decided this back in 1905 in the case of Jacobson versus Massachusetts when there was a Lutheran pastor who said, I have a religious objection to having a vaccine. And the Supreme Court said no, you have to have the vaccine. And it's not based on religious freedom at all. It's based on the police power of the state. The state can't take away your gun if you're sitting in your house not using it. But if you walk down the street shooting at people, the police power of the state allows them to take away your gun because using it to harm people. If you are outside your house infecting people with a dangerous lethal disease like smallpox in those days, the police are allowed to take away your gun as in they are allowed to give you a smallpox vaccination. That's what the Supreme Court held. The argument is that it's fine if you want to be a libertarian if you're not endangering anybody else. But when you're carrying an infectious disease, you are endangering other people. You are the”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are absolutely renegade. All right, libertarians, first of all, libertarianism is not actually a religion. It's a political belief.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea that you can't question anybody's religious beliefs or that it's a get out of jail free card is just plain not true. And, you know, the freedom of philosophy, as in philosophical objections to vaccines, does not go back to the First Amendment. The whole notion of religions covering vaccines is a canard. I mean, all religions are in favor of vaccines because the only reason it exists is to save life. The top Jewish scholars, the top Islamic scholars, and the Vatican have all ruled on vaccines and they have all come out strongly in favor of them again and again and again, literally over the centuries. So you have occasionally you have some priests, some rabbi, some minister saying I'm granting exemptions from my flock. These are renegade points of view.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is the religious nature of a vaccination? Is a root canal a religious act? If you had appendicitis, taking your appendix out be a religious act? Vaccine, I mean, you cannot claim a religious exemption from wearing a seatbelt. You cannot claim a religious exemption in some states from wearing a motorcycle helmet. You can't claim religious exemptions for almost anything that we understand because state legislators understand how seatbelts work. They understand how helmets work. They don't understand vaccines, how vaccines work, so they have this kind of mysterious boogeyman, well, something maybe, and you shouldn't question anyone's religion. Well, we question people's religion all the time. Every major religion in the world used to practice human sacrifice. All the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, are founded upon Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son. Well, we do not allow human sacrifice anymore. There is nowhere in the United States that you can sacrifice somebody to your favorite God, regardless of what religion you belong to and get away with it. You will be charged with murder. We don't even allow people to engage in polygamy in this country, and polygamy is the normal standard in the Old Testament and used to be one of the centerpieces of Mormon.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I mean, it's called a seafood market, but actually it had other stuff in it. I mean, it had wild animals in it, including raccoon dogs and other things that had been known to be reservoirs for coronaviruses before. This is the way MERS started. And then when you look at the environmental samples that were taken in the market, there was a very high percentage of virus in those samples. And then a lot of the work that Michael Warraby has done that showed that there were not a lot of cases in Wuhan before the first Wuhan market. I mean, yeah, the supposed patient zero was somebody who was hospitalized on December 8th. Well, it turns out, and that would be earlier than the case in the market. But it turns out he was hospitalized for oral surgery on December 8th. So he wasn't necessarily patient zero. There's been a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of people sure of things they couldn't possibly be sure of if they look into the details of each claimed fact.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. And anybody who claims to be sure that they know one side or the other had better put up or shut up because I really don't think anyone has the answer. My feeling now is that There are arguments to be made on both sides. Clearly, stuff was going on in that lab that was coming close to the line, but whether the jump actually took place there or not, I think I don't know, but I think it's probably the less likely alternative for all sorts of reasons. I mean, one, as in the beginning of all of the epidemics, the doctors who noticed the outbreak, who were emergency room doctors in hospitals in Wuhan, who had no incentive to cover anything up, and all they knew was their patients were dying and some of them were getting sick and they raised the alarm. And they all said it's centered on this market.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A vaccine to it. That's the core of gain of functional research. It's very controversial, but I'm not saying, oh, it should all be, it should be banned forever, because same way nuclear weapons research is really controversial and really dangerous, but you have to do it.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, a great deal of it is political theater now. I mean, Fauci has been before Congress between dozens and hundreds of times testifying, and he was grilled over this whole issue. The thing about gain of function research is there's some very semantic distinctions between what's, quote, gain of function research and what isn't. So some of this is a distinction without a difference. And so you could answer the question truthfully, no, we were not funding gain of function research in this case. Gain of function research is something that it's like nuclear weapons research. If you're going to make a bomb, if you're going to drop a bomb on somebody, you want to know if that bomb works. Well, testing bombs is really dangerous work, but you kind of have to do it. And with viruses, if you want to make a vaccine to a disease you don't know can infect people, you may have to make that virus dangerous to see how easily it could become dangerous to see whether or not it's worth making.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. They won't explain how they think they know. So it's not very useful information. I mean, take our word for it from a government agency is not the most reassuring thing you can hear.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try to keep an open mind to all theories. I mean, I did check out the HIV genes and the snake genes stuff. You check these things out, but what you choose to believe is what seems to be the preponderance of the evidence.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big deal. Not news as far as I'm concerned. If it had been a brand new virus and it had started inside the lab, my guess is it would have affected dozens of people because when there have been lab leaks in the past, they tended to hit the lab workers and their families. You know, the last leak of SARS killed a family member of somebody who was in a lab in China. So that, I mean, that's what happens when you have a lab leak.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't see that they found anything. The fact that somebody says, well, we think with low confidence that it was a lab leak, it's like, well, okay, tell us how you know that. What was your information? Did you get something? Did the National Security Agency pick up something on a satellite transmission? Do you have somebody who secretly worked there? There was no information. So I didn't think anything of it. The same way that revelation that three of the scientists, you know, fell sick a couple of months before. I thought, well, okay, fell sick with what? It was the height of flu season in a bad flu year. And later it comes out, well, they might have had typical virus. And I thought, okay, so three people in a lab with hundreds of people, because it's a big building, get the flu during flu season.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you look into something that happens? How would the Chinese look into something that happens secretly inside the United States government? They'd have to have really good signal interception to find people having an email saying, let's not tell the Chinese, we blew up the this, or they'd have to have a mole inside the government. And presumably we don't have somebody who was there inside Xi Shengli's lab at that moment. It was being done. All we know is, you know, more work was being done than we knew about at the time.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That virus came from a cave where miners bat guano diggers actually had died after digging bad guano and died of what looked like a viral pneumonia. So that undercut a crucial premise of the paper that said there's this famous paper called the proximal origins COVID-19 paper by those scientists I talked about, which said this virus is so different from any known dangerous coronavirus that no lab would have chosen to play with it to see if they could make it into a human pathogen. This undercuts that premise. If they knew that that was a virus that had come out of a cave where people had died, it would be a perfect candidate for looking at and doing gain-a-function type experiments on in order to see. But they never mentioned that.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But by that point, they were still quite kooky and they were mixed up with all the stuff about HIV genes and snake genes. A year later, more than a year later, I wrote a piece saying, hey, we have all sort of without agreeing among ourselves, we have all just sort of just to ignore the Lab Lake theory. And I said, it's worth looking into. I'm not saying I believe it, but I'm saying it's very clear the Chinese have not told the whole truth. And the most interesting fact that I saw was that RATG-13, which was the virus that was That the Wuhan lab disclosed it hadn't its”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I heard it later I was shocked. I mean, these were scientists that I trusted. And I. Rewrote that chapter in my book just in August when I found out that happened. And then I sent a copy of the new chapter to all four of them saying, hey, I comment, please. Only one of them wrote back to me, and he wrote very long, very defensive, very, we didn't lie to you emails. But my feeling is, well, you didn't out and out lie, but you left out a really crucial element of the debate you were having among yourselves. And his response was, it would have been reckless for us to tell you that.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This could have been inserted. I mean, one of them said all you need to do is put in 12 base pairs, and another one replied, yeah, but I didn't tell McNeil that. And one of them said, McNeil sort of nailed it But let's not tell.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If this had been, because what I was asking them was, and I didn't know they were together, I was asking them separately, but they were comparing my emails to them, I said, is there any way to tell if a virus has been manipulated in a laboratory? Are there base pairs missing that you would expect to be there? Are there inserts that you recognize as inserts as anything? Because I didn't know if, you know, with the equivalent of CRISPR, if you chop up a virus and insert something, whether or not it leaves traces or not. And they said, essentially, it would be possible to do it, but had that happened, we would be able to see it and there is no evidence of it. But they were still debating among themselves, hey,”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT