Ross Douthat

They are embedded in communities, towns, cities, families.

They, too, want to go to Thanksgiving dinner, everything else, right?

And you already mentioned briefly the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that you and other fringe epidemiologists, right, put out arguing for essentially a strategy that tried to bring back normal life while protecting the elderly.

Isn't that really hard to do?

Yes.

It's really hard to do.

So how would you have done it as against a strategy that basically said, to protect the elderly, we have to limit circulation in the general population?

Let's establish that the early months of the pandemic, frankly, terrible mistakes were made.

But isn't there though at some level

trade-off where people in charge of public health in the United States could look at the period 2020, 2021, and they could say, number one, we did not do the kind of draconian lockdowns, right, that parts of Western Europe, Australia, other places did.

Parts of the U.S.

opened up.

We did have a certain kind of COVID federalism, right?

That was real.

Second, we did eventually get

A vaccine.

It arrived sooner than a lot of people had expected.

And at that point, a lot of old people got the vaccine and became more likely to survive COVID.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah.