Ross Douthat

And then there were people who said, this vaccine doesn't work at all and it's going to kill millions of people itself, which I assume you would agree that's incorrect.

I agree that's incorrect, yeah.

So part of what happened with public health authorities, right, is that they were concerned about the wilder

crazier sort of outsider narratives.

And there's a question here that I wrestle with a lot, which is once you yourself are a kind of outsider critic, how do you maintain your own equilibrium and not get pulled into

the wilder world of conspiracy theories, because that happens to a lot of people.

They start out with a reasonable critique of an establishment.

They discover something the authorities have gotten wrong, and then they move from that to a worldview where the authorities are always wrong about everything.

But...

Don't public health authorities at some level have to take their own side in the argument?

They're very good at taking their own side.

Well, but now you're a public health authority.

So this is a question about how really everyone involved in Trump administration public health sort of approaches their job, right?

So let's take the COVID vaccine.

I think, again, it's fair to say that the

efficacy of the COVID vaccine, the need to make it universal, the need to mandate it, was dramatically oversold by the Biden administration and by public health officials.

And this created a lot of suspicion and paranoia around the vaccine.

At the same time, my own reading of the evidence is that the vaccine was very good for older people.

And it was good that lots of older people took it, and it would have been better if more older people took it.

And