Now, from the Signature Bank Studios, this is Chicago's Morning Answer with Dan Proft on AM 560, The Answer.
Top of the morning, Dan Proft here. Senator Rand Paul tweeting over the weekend before attending the Derby. The COVID cover-up goes all the way to the top. Fauci funded the Wuhan lab. Senior intel officials hid classified evidence from the president. Scientists were silenced. Millions paid the price. The DOJ has until May 11th, two weeks from today, to prosecute Fauci before the statute of limitations runs out. I'm not letting this go. The American people deserve justice.
Well, the problem at the DOJ level is that Fauci has a preemptive, decade-long pardon in his back pocket from the big guy. Remember, he got that pardon on the big guy's way out the door. So, it may have to be, as Steve Hilton in California has suggested, state-level prosecutions of people like Fauci who may have legal exposure but have that pardon for anything that would be federal in terms of criminal charges.
This, of course, after last week when a former NIH official, Fauci lieutenant David Morens, was indicted and accused of concealing emails about potentially risky virus research. Interestingly, Paul Thacker, who's an investigative journalist for RealClearInvestigations among other outlets, and he writes in scientific journals too, had talked recently about evidence he has that Fauci directed staff to destroy emails, so that would potentially be legal exposure, but again, he has that pardon in his back pocket.
Nonetheless, that skepticism, to be generous, that anger, persists in much of the country, as it should. Drew Holden, who's the managing editor of Compass, writing over at his Substack: In the beginning, the information about the virus and its danger were hazy. Leaders and everyone else were scared by what was to come. It can feel uncharitable to look back critically at the pronouncements and decisions made at the time considering that. But these were not forgivable missteps or slight miscalculations. The failures were era and generation-defining.
And he doesn't just blame bureaucrats and elected leaders, but also this was another example of a media failure, along with Biden's health, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with Russiagate, so many. He writes, does Holden, the legacy media became water carriers for the use of government force and the hall monitors of lockdowns and mask mandates and all manner of other restrictions. I fear we're already forgetting just how wrong the press and its collective cadre of experts were about combating a pandemic, how misleading legacy media reporting on the science was, and the attendant harm suffered across America as a result.
Yes, there was much these individuals couldn't have known at the time, so why did they act like they did? Why did they act like they did? Including those in the pharma community who are actually supposed to be men and women of science. That's a good question. And you know, there's supercuts recirculating online of all of the contradictory statements that were made specifically by Fauci, but Fauci is a representative of so many in the academic public health community, in pharma, and of course the civilian press corps and politicians who did the same. Fauci, remember, on mask-wearing: This is not rocket science. We know exactly what we can do and what we should be doing. Please, wear a mask.
No reason to be walking around with a mask. I often myself wear two masks. There's the email from you concluding I do not recommend that you wear a mask. Everybody should be wearing a mask. When they're outside, people should not be walking around with masks. I wear a mask when I'm outside. You don't need a mask when you're outside. Wear a mask at all times when you're outside. So, you get the gist.
And mask-wearing for kids under five, same sort of deal. I can't count how many parents have called me and said, 'Look, my kid can't wear a mask. It's really hurting him.' Or parents telling me that their kids didn't learn how to read or have verbal problems as a result of them masking. It has costs. It absolutely has harms. And there's no evidence of it working. Obviously, children who are older than two years old should be wearing a mask. Mask mandates for children under five? And going back to what I said before, all of that is in the context of at the time for the first time... children under five? There's scientific evidence for that? Excuse me? Mask mandates for children under five? There's scientific evidence supporting that? There was no study that did masks on kids before. You couldn't do the study. Children of a certain age greater than two years old should be wearing masks. No study, but you couldn't do it, but they should be. So says the man who claims he alone is science.
Which is why the new book from our next guest is particularly timely. Dr. Jeremy Levin is the founder of Ovid Therapeutics. He's a former president and CEO of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries. His new book, Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust. An age of distrust, exactly. Dr. Jeremy Levin, thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it.
Dan, it's a pleasure. Good to be with you.
Good to have you. And so, speak to the distrust that spiked exponentially during COVID, and you know, the hangover of distrust is still there.
Yeah, it didn't start there unfortunately, Dan. It started way before that, but you're quite right. I actually edited a book of every single organization in 2020 just to show how confused everybody was. And it's actually called Biotech in the Time of COVID-19. Amazing record. You give a lot of credit to the president for pulling together Warp Speed and saving millions of lives. Unfortunately, 1.3 million people did die. But the blowback from that now is quite clear as we went into the new administration. We were facing, I think, a situation in which so much distrust would be generated over that period of time. And a lot of myths were created, a lot of stories were created. And the result is really simple. People started taking apart, literally piece by piece, the very organizations that could save us in the next pandemic, because by the way, there will be one. And that's all something we have to address. So, I appreciate you addressing it. I think it's critical.
Yeah, and I mean, part of this is just a bit of a reckoning, you know, from people who were very public-facing, not just Fauci, but certainly including him, to say at minimum, something you never hear in the political realm, you know, like, yeah, I said some things that were contradictory. We were groping in the dark a bit. I made some mistakes. If in retrospect, knowing what I know now, I would have not advocated this, or I would have advocated that. But you just don't have any sort of cathartic, substantive conversation from people who made those mistakes, who said things that were contradictory, providing some sort of explanation and cleansing, if you will, with the public.
Yep. Dan, it's like the fog of war. You know, a lot of people were making pronouncements. And I can forgive them a lot of that. But making pronouncements which are not factual was a bad thing to do. You, me, and others, you know, how do you understand what this thing is sweeping across the borders? You can't even see it. Kids are getting sick, others are not getting sick. Some people don't believe in a vaccine, others do believe in a vaccine. And in that milieu, that distrust started to take hold. And it's a pity. I'll tell you why it's a real pity, Dan. It's a pity because the blowback from that is beginning to undermine one of the greatest national strategic assets that we have, which is biotech, which is why I wrote that essay and that book. Bottom line is, you know, there's millions of patient years of life which have been saved through that industry. And if we're not careful, that industry is going to be disassembled. Innovation won't stop. It will migrate to another country. And then we're going to be in a situation which resembles what we are right now with the rare earths and solar panels, and I don't want that, and I don't think anybody does. And by the way, if I...
Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.
By the way, just so you understand, I'm a farmer, and I know what biotech does. I know what it does to corn. I know what it does to wheat. We are the best in the world, period. I'm a doctor. I know what it does to medicine. We are the best in the world. And so, we've got to get rid of this distrust, focus on building this industry, and making this country just what it should be, the leader in all these areas.
Yeah, I know, I think, you know, most reasonable people would agree with that, and you've seen from the Trump administration a reasonable posture. I mean, he's had the pharma CEOs in. There's been discussions on everything from drug prices to Obamacare coverage that has included pharma CEOs. So, it's not like they've been exiled. But you can do two things at once. You can continue to encourage the innovation you're talking about, and at the same time have some effort made to try to reestablish trust by admitting where you've, you know, the moments in which you failed. And that's just, we seem like it's one or the other, and it's sort of the same thing with RFK Jr., and it's like you're either anti-vax, or you're pro-vax. Well, no, I'm sort of, I'm not anti-vax, but not going to be blindly pro-vax, particularly after COVID. And so, I just, I want an explanation. I want the details. I want to hear that we have done peer-reviewed clinical studies into this, and this is what we found, and here's the full disclosure of the benefits and the risks. You know, like what a reasonable person, the kind of information a reasonable person would want, or at least an approximation based on the best available science.
Totally agree. You know, you mentioned something really important, and that's drug prices. So, I just want to pivot to that if it's okay. You know, and the hidden stuff that you and I don't know. It's absolutely insulting to me, to you, to a patient that they walk up to a counter at CVS, Walmart, or whatever, and they have to shell out cash. That's number one. They've just been punished with a disease. Now they got to get punished in their wallet. The next is that then everybody says, 'Well, it's all about the pharma companies.' And what's really hidden, and Dan, this is hidden, is that underlying all the stories about price increases, and then blaming, putting that squarely on the pharma shoulders, is partially correct, but the real story is what you don't see. And that's really the PBMs, that invisible middleman who takes about 50% of the price rise. And that's exactly going back to what you said. Let's be real. Let's see the facts. Disclose everything. Be transparent.
Yeah, and actually, and you've had some high-profile discussions of PBMs because that's been Mark Cuban's hobbyhorse of late too. So, that's generating some attention on these middlemen, and whether or not, and pharma companies owning PBMs, and sort of, is it really a middleman, or is there just sort of self-dealing there? What do you say to that in terms of how we should understand that relationship?
Actually, no pharma company owns a PBM. There were like 15 or 16 of them. They were really competing and trying to reduce costs. This is 10, 15 years ago. Then the insurance companies figured out that these were a great deal to make profits without anybody knowing it. And so, they bought them. Now there are about five which control nearly all the lives, and they're owned by insurance companies.
I'm sorry. Yeah, insurance companies, not pharma companies. Yeah, thank you.
