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

“Lie to me, but they left out the fact that they at that time were worrying about the possibility that it was a lab leak. I see. And they started putting me off back then in early February.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investigations, hints, rumors, In February. There were rumors, and they first appeared in very, you know, sort of conspiracy-oriented websites. There were suggestions that it was a lab leak from China, but the only evidence they had was that it was in Wuhan, where there was also a lab. And I heard a rumor from one of the editors ask me to check it out that there was a possibility that the US government was looking into this. So I wrote to a number of evolutionary virologists that I knew. Now you have to understand, there are not a lot of evolutionary virologists in the world. I mean, this is like Einstein in, you know, earlier nuclear physics. There are not a lot of people you can go to. Tony Fauci is not an expert in this stuff, so he's not somebody I would have asked the question of. He's an infectious disease expert. But I was writing to people like Christian Anderson and a number of others that had been sources of mine before. And I did not know it, but they were all on a Slack channel together. They didn't.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, does a lot of things were going on here, and it all looks much clearer now, four years later than it did at the time. At the time, there were all sorts of crazy rumors circulating about the virus that it had snake genes, that it would have HIV genes inserted. And all of us science reporters were running around trying to debunk each one of these things. Because it's hard to tell when somebody publishes a paper whether or not they know what they're talking about or not. So you have to call experts. The experts I talk to said it appears to have started in the market. I still think the most likely explanation is that it did start in the market. I do not have, no one has definitive dispositive proof on either side. I think this is going to be one of those questions like, you know, was Cuba involved in the assassination of JFK or was Alger Historically a spy that we're not going to get the answer to until an autocratic state opens its files. China says we know it didn't come out of the lab. We want to know, well, how do you know what were the lab records? Exactly what work was being done in that lab. They're not answering that question. So all we have is all these.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Execrable, and I particularly got bothered by the idea that he had to have secret service protection because he got regular death threats, including white powder sent to his house.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of anti-elitism in this country. There always has been. I mean, I feel it sometimes too because I get tired of being talked down to by elites, even though I work for the New York Times and I went to Berkeley and, you know, but there's also, I mean, Fauci ended up personifying the elites. And Fauci's real offense was not the advice about masks, his offense was that he contradicted Donald Trump when Donald Trump was saying completely fallacious things about the virus, hoping that he was pushed the stock market back up and it would just go away. And he was saying, it's just going to go away. You know, it's just going to wash through the population and disappear by summer. And anybody who's followed these things know, no, it doesn't disappear in summer. Flu does every year, but flu's been with us for hundreds of years. And this is new, and we don't know what it's going to do this summer. And when Fauci would say things like that, it would piss off the Trump supporters. And, you know, what can you do? Then they began to latch onto, Fauci lied about mass, thought she lied about this and stuff. And I just found that.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get confused and you change the things you say as the facts change, as scientists do. I mean, look, normally as a reporter, I was just writing stories and sort of reporting what had recently been said. During the pandemic, I was suddenly on the daily podcast.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, most people wouldn't get flu shots if their companies didn't make it easy. When I go get a flu shot at CVS, it's not like I'm waiting in a line of 50 people. But yeah, I'd say in general, most people kind of, you know, you get tired of it. You get sick of it. Pandemics are terrifying in the beginning. And then it's like, you know, a Halloween movie. You'd be just thinking to, oh no, not another teenager with the chainsaws in the garage or sort of thing. You begin to get tired of this stuff. So people were fed up after six months and now it's four years. So I understand. But it's a continuing threat and it's worth the trouble of one shot that takes, you know, half an hour of your time at a drugstore.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we don't talk about an endemic, but that's what it is. It's now essentially become like flu. I know we're going through a fourth season of it, but if you look at the statistics, it's responsible for 3% of all deaths in the United States. And this is now in the middle of flu season, COVID season. So this is, I mean, everybody's got it, but very few people are hospitalized or die from it relative to previous years. But I am kind of shocked how casual people have gotten about it because I just noticed the other day only 17% of the United States has gotten the last COVID booster. Only 33% of all people over age 65 have gotten it. And to me, that's just nuts. I mean, it's a disease you should pay attention to. It's become like flu. You know, you're not at very high risk unless you have immunocompromised or you're very old or”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Abdul El Sayed is making the progressive case for America First, and he's trying to settle the Democrats ideological battle.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comes down to the dreaded E word electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability concept on”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is Ron Claim. My question for Donald is in the area of pandemic response. Donald, as you know, contrary to what most people believe, the World Health Organization is not a pandemic response organization. It does research. It does regulation, but it's not the responder. As we've seen in many major outbreaks and epidemics, when there is a big outbreak in a country, the country's national healthcare system can be overwhelmed and it needs help from outside. There's really no global organization to do that during Ebola. The UN launched a response effort. It didn't really work. And a variety of Western nations had to step in and help. Do you think there should be some global pandemic response unit? If so, who should run it? Where should be housed and how should be structured? Thank you.”
2024-01-08 · On with Kara Swisher · COVID Lessons Learned with Donald G McNeil Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT