Justin Hart: The Cochrane Mask Study, Failed COVID Predictions, and Fallout From ‘Useless’ Pandemic

“When we saw their statistics and their projections, and the needs that they projected in the States, and the types of deaths they projected even early on and how you could see that they were wrong, right away we knew we were dealing with a very, very different beast. They had no concern for science or accuracy. It was all about the panic,” said Justin Hart, author of “Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane.”

“When the threat of mortality comes down from so many avenues, over every medium, over every channel … everyone is telling you: ‘You’re going to die if you don’t take these interventions that we recommend,’ it does crazy things to society.”

Hart realized early on in the pandemic that what people were hearing from health agencies and the media didn’t match up with the data, so he started RationalGround.com to provide the public with reasoned evidence and fact-based analysis about the impact of COVID-19.

“We know from inner workings that Vivek Murthy and Jen Psaki of the White House—they were personally working with Facebook and Twitter to [get what] they wanted taken down,” says Hart.

Hart discusses the fallout from the pandemic, from child suicides to economic devastation to government censorship and surveillance. We also look at the recently released Cochrane mask study and what the data shows.

“From all of the studies they reviewed, especially towards masking, they found there was no significant evidence whatsoever that masking would stop a viral pathogen,” says Hart.

Interview trailer:

Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/justin-hart-the-cochrane-mask-study-failed-covid-predictions-and-fallout-from-useless-pandemic-policy_5066651.html

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Justin Hart, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Justin Hart:

Jan, thanks for having me on. I’m glad to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Justin, I’ve really enjoyed visiting your website over the last few years, Rational Ground. I always found it to be a place where I knew I could get some new information that was heavily backed by data, and this has been a little bit difficult over the last while.

Mr. Hart:

We launched that website in the summer of 2020. Before then, we were posting on our own blogs or a lot on Twitter. But, all of a sudden, the waves started coming again, and we realized that the policies they had implemented early in the pandemic weren’t going away anytime soon.

And so, we pulled together a group of folks, kind of like a Battlestar Galactica group of ragtag experts, analysts, moms, and dads.

We put together Rational Ground as a response to the stringent policies that we’re still enacting and that are harming ourselves and especially our kids. As the fall year of the school year came about 2020, we realized that we were going to have to get organized and really have a strong response. I’m glad you enjoyed that, but we definitely pulled together some yeoman’s work to make that happen.

Mr. Jekielek:

I also just recently finished reading your book, which traces some of the work you did in Rational Ground and some of the things you discovered along the way. You basically dedicate a chapter to a policy or a chapter to an issue; quick chapters, quick summaries, I like that. But when you come out the other end of this book, you realize, “My goodness, did anything work? Was anything successful?”

It reminded me of a tweet I put out back in October of ’21, and I’ll just read it to you, and I want to get your reaction. “It just struck me: we’re witnessing, in real-time, the spectacular, accelerating failure of the ‘governance by expert class model,’ its follies laid bare daily, even as its proponents double down on touting its benevolent inevitability. And it also struck me: in this lies hope.”

Mr. Hart:

That’s really insightful. What happens is there’s the science. “This is what science tells us.” But as soon as it gets inserted into public policy, all bets are off. Things become a little bit wacky. The impacts that people projected they have no idea about. But I think you’re right. I say at the outset in my book, I say, “I’m not a healthcare expert. I don’t pretend to be one.”

And I say, “I normally wouldn’t insert myself into someone else’s domain.” But, Jan, they had no problem inserting themselves into my domain, my kid’s education, my healthcare, my barber shop. And so, I hope they will forgive me if I check the math, because that’s sort of my forte.

And when we checked the math, we realized it was completely off and that they were based on these very rigorous, stringent policies like stay-at-home orders and quarantining healthy people. We said, “Something is absolutely amiss here. We’ve got our policy really wacky.” When the experts in a particular domain like science prove themselves to be real follies in the expertise around public policy, that’s when disaster ensues.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s also this very interesting nuance. Sometimes you can have an expert, and that expert is an expert in a very, very specific field. And maybe they really are an expert. But to have that expert crafting the public health policy overall would be kind of insane, because how could they possibly know? That is not their job. Their job hasn’t been to try to integrate all of the science with the social outcomes that are likely to result from certain types of policy.

Mr. Hart:

Yes. You think about masks, for example. That’s always a touchpoint of great contention over the last three years. But even if masks were 100 per cent effective—flashback, breaking news, they are not—even if they were, it’s unclear whether mandating that for an entire public is the right policy in general. When you put these mandates that infringe on people’s individual rights, you’re typically breaking something, and when you break something, it’s hard to earn it back.

I think that panic and the threat of mortality were bludgeons that our health overlords, as I sometimes call them, used against the populace to get their way. They really do. If I think about it, I often tell my team, “Put them in the best light. What is their best intention? What is the best interpretation that you have of this thing?” Maybe their implementations, these policies that they nailed down on top of us, maybe they really did think they were going to help.

But, in the end, you have to go with the evidence, and you always have to stick with your rights. If you see the government coming after you with a bludgeon and they’re coming first to take away your rights, if you stick your neck out against that, you can’t go wrong. You’ll probably end up on the right side of the equation.

Mr. Jekielek:

I definitely want to talk about this new Cochrane mask study, this meta-study of 78 different studies. I know you’ve been talking about it, and it settles the science much better than anything up to now. We’re going to talk about that.

But before we go there, I want to go back to this thing that I was observing back in October of ’21. All of these policies are failures, and it’s almost unbelievable. We could go through your book chapter by chapter because it’s basically policy by policy. But which 10 come to your mind?

Mr. Hart:

We can go sequentially. First of all, they got the transmission of the disease wrong. They felt that it was primarily coming over droplets, that it was coming over a specific set of all people. We now know that it’s likely a very aerosolized disease. They got that wrong. You then go on to their projections around mortality.

At one point, the WHO predicted that this was going to be a mortality where three out of a hundred people would die. Dr. Fauci got in front of Congress and he mixed-up terms around the fatality rate of people that actually test positive for COVID and are sick and those that have it and have no idea. He predicted that one out of a hundred people would die.

Video:

The flu has a mortality of 0.1 per cent.

Sure. This has a mortality of 10 times that.

Mr. Hart:

We now know it’s a factor lower than that. In fact, for the vast majority of people, 85 per cent of the country under the age of 65, their mortality, that is, their risk of dying, is lower than that of influenza. Meaning that they’re more likely to die if they catch the flu. Now, when we go onto the next part, they predicted that we were going to have massive overruns on hospitals, and stagnation of people getting pitched there at the ER. Our ERs are still down today.

In fact, hospitals are struggling to retain any sort of economic viability because people are still scared to go there. The impacts on that are paramount. Then you think about the silly things they implemented, like plexiglass. They implemented that countrywide. Every single 7-Eleven, even your schools, turned into what looked like a bank teller with this bulletproof glass in front of them.

It was disconcerting. It was disorienting. And it turns out it was completely useless. The CDC came out and very quietly removed that recommendation for retail and for schools in March of ’21. Not a lot of people know that because they realized, “Oh, this is actually preventing a lot of airflow, and it’s also another place you have to clean.”

You go on to the next intervention, perhaps the most stringent being the stay-at-home orders, the lockdowns, and the closing of businesses. Our first clues that something was wrong were from oncologists who called us and said, “Either COVID has cured cancer or something else is happening here altogether,” because they were seeing half as many patients in the spring of 2020 as they were the year before.

It was not because people weren’t getting cancer. They were. They were just too scared to go out and seek treatment. The impact of that, we’re still feeling, and we’ll see that trickle in here now for years as people discover late-stage cancers that they could have caught early on.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, it wasn’t necessarily just treatment. It was also just checking to see if you had prostate cancer, for example.

Mr. Hart:

Exactly. Those regular checkups. Even 50 per cent of young infants and children missed immunizations over that time, because a lot of primary care physicians had closed down their shops except for emergency issues. The list goes on and on. The quarantining of children for the slightest exposure was perhaps the most damaging of the policies that they implemented. Almost everyone agrees that that was wrong.

While most of the schools were closed down in the spring of 2020, when we came back to school in the fall of ’20 and then the winter of ’21, and then through the next year, the big issue became exposure to COVID. In fact, I would say that the fall and winter of the ’21/22 school season was far more frustrating and just dreadful for families than it was from earlier times because, at that point, there was a policy implemented almost across the nation that if your kid had the slightest exposure to anyone that had a positive case, they would have to stay home for 10 days.

This is what made it personal for me. I’ve got eight kids. I’ve got a Brady Bunch family, and we have three kids that are under the age of five. From the time that Thanksgiving came around in 2021, we had kids at home for the entire rest of the year missing school, not because they were sick, but because some student had a positive test that came back, and the entire classroom had to go home for 10 days. A dreadful experience.

Mr. Jekielek:

I just want to remind our viewers, because I was actually just speaking with an Uber driver about this earlier today. Unlike influenza, COVID or coronavirus or CCP virus, as we call it at Epoch Times, has a very interesting characteristic, which is that children don’t transmit it, and they also are at extremely low risk from it. In fact, at some of the low ages, it’s statistically zero. It’s just unbelievable that these interventions, which obviously are going to have an impact, happen in this type of a context.

Mr. Hart:

And it would have this great psychological effect on kids. One in five children came up with ideations of suicide, especially young women. You think about just the years of education that got lost. Look, Jan, you and I were adults when policies and politics got inserted into our lives. We try to deal with it. Hopefully, we’ll bring it to the ballot box the next time it comes around. Our kids don’t have that luxury. They also don’t get those years back.

I was over at a friend’s house, and he’s talking about the impact on kids. His child, who was then in second grade, was coloring a target type of coupon book, and there were all these pictures of kids and everything else. And he was dutifully taking a marker and putting a mask on all of the kids’ faces because he thought that’s how they should be. The psychological impact on our kids thinking that they’re a vector of disease when, as you pointed out, there’s really very little evidence of that. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that they become a brake on the disease.

It’s astounding what sort of clawback we’re going to have to do with these kids. The results are in. We’re seeing with the mass studies that the mass scores have gone back now by a decade as far as the improvements that we used to see. I talked to our preschool teachers where we had our kids. They’re now in kindergarten. They’re seeing rampage rages of biting because kids didn’t learn those key social cues due to their faces being masked. Also, consider this. We believe from two studies that were done that we probably missed about 250,000 cases, Jan, of potential domestic abuse, child abuse, and spousal abuse.

Why? Because it’s typically sharp-eyed teachers and administrators who catch those things and call those out, and kids weren’t in school. And then, when kids get back into school, how many bruises on mom’s face did we miss because masks were required at drop off? Those are things where you don’t think about the impacts, but those are very real and very lasting.

Mr. Jekielek:

Scott Atlas, when I first met him, was saying, “It’s unforgivable that, as a society, we use children as shields for adults,” and I could never shake that thought.

Mr. Hart:

It really is devastating. Our team was fortunate enough, and this is where we kind of got our claim to fame later, we were the main support team for Scott Atlas when he was at the White House. We were approached by several of his colleagues at Stanford, saying, “Scott needs some help here. What can you do?” Pro bono, every morning from July of 2020 to the end of that year, we would get calls from Scott, we would get texts from him, and the team would go to work. “He’s going to St. Louis. He needs to know what are the excess death rates there? What are you seeing, as far as cases are going?”

He had very little support. Whereas the stalwarts, who had entire teams, like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, were producing massive documents every day. We tried to meet that. Eventually, our charts would make it to the presses, where President Trump would laude them, and Scott Atlas would handle the press there. We were very proud of the work we did there. But you can talk to Scott, and you realize just the complete surprise he had at the lack of quality and the lack of real prowess there was at the White House.

To put it bluntly, I had a conversation with Scott one time, and again, I was trying to find the best interpretation. What’s the kindest interpretation I could find for why Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx aren’t turning the ship around? Scott had been completely successful in decimating the instigations of the lockdowns and school closures. Why aren’t they changing policies as we get closer and closer to that vital election? I said, “Scott, maybe they’re just having trouble saving face.” That was my interpretation.

He said, “No, Justin. You need to know these people, unfortunately, are not smart. Some of them are dumb.” I’m like, “Oh, no.” It really is the case that while these people have been experts in their field, they probably are behind the ball on the latest information, especially when it comes out so quickly and when their policy implications are so vast. So, that was a really eye-opening experience that both Scott and our team had.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s jump to this Cochrane mask study. What does this study tell us?

Mr. Hart:

Seriously, it’s been a very contentious issue. It’s because it’s the most recognizable, and it impacted almost everybody everywhere, especially when they had to wear it for a long time.

Mr. Jekielek:

You talk about, in the book, how masks essentially became talismans like a type of virtue signaling tool.

Mr. Hart:

Right. In fact, all the evidence leading up to the pandemic, up to 2020, showed no efficacy whatsoever for these masks. Even with the high-quality N95 masks in a healthcare setting, there was no stringent evidence showing that they provided any benefit as far as curbing respiratory viral pathogens. When we got to the pandemic, we went through all of these pieces.

The Cochrane report came out in early 2020 and did a review of about 10 to 12 of these things. Now, they’ve expanded that in the last few weeks to include about 78 different studies. We’re looking at interventions like masks, washing of hands, and physical distancing.

From all of the studies they reviewed, especially around masking, they found there was no significant evidence whatsoever that masking would stop viral pathogens and curb that sort of thing. In fact, they found just the opposite. That the interventions were oftentimes very hard for people to implement.

Here’s a headline. This is in the Santa Barbara News. “Masks are the chief ally of the disease. The masks become a veritable incubator of bacteria.” That was written in 1918. We knew a hundred years ago, when they tried to implement masking to stop the Spanish flu, that they didn’t work as a policy implementation. We’ve just forgotten the past. We’ve tried it again and again.

It’s understandable why it was there. Even the author of the Cochrane Times, Tom Jefferson, admits that. This became basically some type of SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], some type of gimme to these politicians who wanted a tool that they could use and get up on the pulpit and say, “Cases are going up. You’re not masking hard enough. Oh, look, cases are going down. Thank you very much, folks, for masking.”

Because they felt helpless in the face of this very, very hard disease to stop spreading, they wanted to have tools at their disposal.

Masks became a scapegoat. A talisman, as actually one of the NIH reports put out. This report on masking came out and said, “There’s very little evidence that we could show that they help in a healthcare setting, but maybe they could work as a talisman.” I don’t want that in my scientific literature. I certainly don’t want them implemented as policies to mask my two-year-old and my five-year-old.

Mr. Jekielek:

But they also became something like a political statement, bizarrely.

Mr. Hart:

Yes, I suppose it’s an outward expression of an inward faith. It became a very strong virtue signal for people, especially for our young adults who were going to college. A generation ago, my parents, who went to college in the 60s, would have thumbed their noses at any type of government intervention that made them wear this mask.

But for our kids today, the kindest interpretation I have is that the risk of them of being captured on social media in the wrong place with the wrong implementations, not wearing a mask, not social distancing, that risk was far greater to their being than having to stick their neck out and go against the grain. That’s why people complied, it was an actual virtual signal.

It felt good to help other people. But again, once you implement a policy that is your requirement to do to help other people, even though you are not sick, there are serious ethical issues involved, and it does intimately disrupt those interactions we have with each other day to day.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re just reminding me of something you wrote in the book and I’ll quote it, “Fear of living life is with us now.” I had a guest on the show, Lenore Skenazy, who runs an organization called Let Grow. She observed that there is this very weird safetyism in our society where people always gravitate towards the side of safety, as opposed to the side of adventure. The point being that safetyism, that strange development, suddenly went on steroids in COVID. I’m not even sure how we will recover from this.

Mr. Hart:

It’s going to be a different difficult path to claw back that normalness that we so crave. Politicians are very averse to anything that hints at mortality, at risking someone’s imminent demise. Even over in England, they’re having a trial right now concerning a couple of city streets, because they’ve had multiple injuries of people looking at their cell phone while walking down the street and running into poles and signposts because they’re not looking where they’re going.

Instead of curbing that and having people learn from their mistakes, they’re putting pads around the poles, so that people don’t harm themselves when they run into them. We all live in a padded cell. And in fact, if you weren’t an agoraphobe or if you were right on the cusp of that before the pandemic, you almost certainly are an agoraphobe now, and that’s not easy to win back. Because we rewarded that sort of virtue signaling so strongly, it became part of our society. Now, it’s going to take us a little bit to pawn that off there.

But this is nothing new. We can go back 400 years to a real plague, the one that took over Europe in the 1600s, The Plague, which would take one out of three lives. But the panic that ensued around that was pretty amazing as well. There’s an author from the 19th century, Alessandro Manzoni, who wrote The Betrothed, a book about two lovers trying to find their way in the time of plague in Milan. People were panicked back then, and he read through their journals. He uncovered some real journal entries from the 17th century.

An old man was in a church. It was rumored throughout the city that outside forces were coming in, and they were washing the walls with infected water and anointing the pews with this infected dirt as well so that it would spread the disease and take over the City of Milan. That was the fear induced by the rumor mill.

One gentleman is at the front of the pew at church, and someone sees him brushing off the pew and assumes that he was anointing the bench. He yells out, “He’s anointing the bench. He’s anointing the pew. He’s spreading the disease.” A crowd took the man outside, and the journal entry concludes, “I do not think he could have survived very much longer.”

We saw that panic on planes, in schools, at school boards, and in confrontations. When you instill that fear into society, crazy things happen. Manzoni mentions in his book, “The fear of the disease besought and took over the minds of the people more than any damage that the disease itself could have done.” That is true for this pandemic too.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s a journalist in the UK, Laura Dodsworth, who is able to document how so-called nudge units in the UK government were sowing fear into the population. We know, even through looking at the Twitter files and some of the work that has been done on the Missouri versus Biden case, that there’s censorship happening around certain types of material.

And on the other side, there’s the manufacturing of consensus happening around other ways of viewing the pandemic and what you should do in response. There was this fear, but it seems like this fear wasn’t entirely accidental. It wasn’t just necessarily a natural byproduct of people panicking.

Mr. Hart:

In his book, Dr. Atlas talks about an incident where he had an encounter with Dr. Fauci in the hall, and he questioned him. He says, “Don’t you think people are scared enough?” Dr. Fauci replied, “No, they’re not nearly afraid enough.”

That is terrible public policy. Where I come from in San Diego, our local health director, the unelected Wilma Wooten, came to the pulpit at the end of 2021 and said, “You should just assume that everyone you meet has COVID and treat them as such.

Video:

Assume that everyone has COVID-19. So that’s my advice, not only to parents that are sending their kids from out of state. That’s my advice for everyone throughout San Diego County, throughout the state, and throughout the nation.

Mr. Hart:

We would see these accounts again and again. You remember these terrible videos of grandparents hugging their grandkids through these plastic draperies. One account I know for sure that I want to find justice for was the incident with a woman named Franca Panettone.

Franca’s in Florida, 49 years old, and she’s mentally disabled. She has Down Syndrome, and she’s had it her entire life. Of course, she’s largely non-verbal. Her sister is her life vein, she helps her, and she is her legal healthcare representative. She contracts what we think is COVID early in the pandemic.

She’s taken to a hospital. There at the hospital, she’s separated from her sister, and because of the policies of that hospital and the panic of that day, her sister and her family would never see her again. She was taken to the back. For the next 10 days, she suffered not knowing what was going on, having no one there to validate her to support her. They later learned, Jan, this chokes me up, by reading the notes on her file, that she was so distressed she tried to get out of her bed multiple times.

They strapped her to the gurney, a Down Syndrome woman, midlife, cut down. They watched her die over FaceTime from the parking lot. There is no justice until we find that justice for Franca Panettone, because we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Those policies caused fear, and it rippled through society. Every single industry was devastated. That’s the next mode we’re in. We’ve got to have accountability and transparency on these things and justice for Franca.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m remembering one of these modelers that basically grossly overestimated how many deaths there would be being interviewed. I can’t remember who it is right now, but they were being very unapologetic. Like, “Yes, I overestimated, but it happens.”

Mr. Hart:

Yes, it is frustrating. Those were some of the first people we went after because we’re math guys. When we saw their statistics and their projections and the needs that they projected in these states and the types of deaths they projected, even early on you could see that they were wrong right away. We knew we were dealing with a very, very different beast. They had no concern for science or accuracy. It was all about the panic. They really did feel like if they could instill enough fear in people, they would go at it.

I had some friends in Orange County. They texted me saying, “Justin, both my parents have died now, neither from COVID. One died from a blood disease, the other one from an undiagnosed cancer. They were too scared to go out and seek treatment.” Early on in the pandemic, my team got access to a host of death certificates, redacted of personal information. We found what they died of, and this is in the summer of 2020. We looked at 700 of these things.

There was one phrase that kept coming up, and it’s something very common when you find someone who was in a nursing home in their last months of life. It said, “Failure to thrive.” And that denotes what a lot of these people experience, especially when they are suffering from Alzheimer’s. They rely on human interaction. When that is yanked from them, their life is shortened dramatically.

Mr. Jekielek:

Before we continue, I want to touch on something you mentioned, that you’re a math guy, but you’re not a scientist. But you do have an acumen, and there is a way that you got into creating Rational Ground. So, give me the background here.

Mr. Hart:

My background is I’ve been a chief marketing officer for several companies. I’ve been a chief data officer, and my forte is I’m a funnel doctor. A funnel is something that all business people recognize, right. You have certain people that come to your website, and they then leave their emails.

We’re now getting down in the funnel, and you approach them with more interesting things about your products and services. They become an opportunity for you to convert them to a customer, right. So, it goes from a lead, as we say, to a customer very quickly.

That’s very much how the CDC looks at their numbers when they talk about people that get infected, people that test positive, people that go to the hospital, and people that die. If you know how those things are calculated and what you should expect, generally, it’s almost a universal rule on these things.

And then, you look at what they projected early on. That’s when I knew something was broken because I knew funnels. When I looked at their numbers, and then I looked at the raw data, I said, “Someone has really got their thumb on the scale here, because this is not what the numbers say.”

We would bring all sorts of practitioners from different fields to take a look at this. We had insurance agents. We had people that were looking at cell phone data. We had people that were looking at UV rays because they’re engineers of cement bridges that are being built, and they knew exactly what was transpiring down to the Nth level, and we all lent our expertise.

But beyond all that, you don’t need a degree in anything to push back on policies. Again, there’s the science, and the problem is that we decided to give the reins for who makes the policy to the people who determined the science.

Dr. Fauci, and Dr. Collins, the head of the NIH, not only influenced the policy of what sort of implementations and interventions should be used, they also determined the grant money that would go out from the NIH. What were your chances of getting a paper or a proposed study approved with funding from the government if it didn’t toe the line on their particular narrative? Like natural immunity, for example.

We now know from uncovered FOIAS that Dr. Fauci and other influencers were telling them to completely dismiss a hundred years of epidemiology 101, which is that if you get infected with a disease, the impact of that disease down the road is likely lessened, and you have some really, really good strong antibodies in your body to deal with it.

They completely dismissed that notion and said, “Everyone must get vaccinated.” That decision alone may have huge, huge ramifications. We know from replete evidence and even in the trials of young kids who have had the disease and then get vaccinated, that their systems can go; tilt, joint pain, high fevers, because the body’s already producing a lot of this stuff. They’re young, so it produces a lot more than us in our old age here. And then, their systems just can’t deal with it. So, it starts sending it throughout the body.

Now, a lot of that is probably over my skis, and a little bit beyond my pay grade as well, to understand what’s happening there. But given the track record, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, vax efficacy, natural immunity, and everything that they did that was wrong—with their trajectory, I wouldn’t bet on them for sure. I would bet on the guys who are saying there may be some serious harms in the vaccine.

Mr. Jekielek:

There are some very prominent doctors right now calling for a pause of the deployment of these genetic vaccines until a much more thorough review is done. Going back to children, there has never been a case for vaccinating kids, given that their risk was extremely low. Even I know that at this point. There is also quite a bit of data showing that these companies that created the vaccines were aware of substantial harms that weren’t publicized.

Mr. Hart:

Professionally, I’m a demographer. I rely on immense surveys of the population. I’ve worked for presidential campaigns. I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies helping them understand, “Here’s what the public is saying. Here’s what that means.”

When the surveys come back now and they show that a very large percentage of people know someone who has been harmed by the vaccine, and when you see the details come back as to who is getting the latest bivalent booster, the population that is getting it is very low.

I don’t think we’ve even reached 20 per cent right now as far as 18-year-olds and older who have gotten that vaccine. And for that newly approved vaccine for infants and toddlers under the age of five, it hasn’t even reached 10 per cent. Something is afoot. People are sick and tired of the multiple boosters they’re required to get. They think it’s a bit of cry wolf, or it’s something more replete. The word has gotten out, and there are some serious known personal damages that people are recognizing or maybe they themselves have experienced.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m going to read something else from the book.”The virus of the mind has done more damage than the virus ever did.”

Mr. Hart:

Yes. In my own family, and I think a lot of people can relate to this, there are contentions. There are people that are more attuned to risk, and people that are less attuned to risk. I’ve got parents who are elderly, and it became a real confusion as to what they should do. A lot of times, this became very political, which automatically divided the entire public immediately.

Republicans are against masks. Democrats are for them. But I think it goes a little deeper. I’ve now given dozens of interviews on this book, and I have one good friend who’s in big strong conservative radio talk shows. I’ve known him for years. I’ve gotten him exclusive interviews, and for some reason, he was the one holdout to give me an interview.

I DM’d him the other day. I said, “When are we going to do the show? I’ll send you a book.” He says, “Justin, I can’t. I think you’re causing more harm. I think your attitude has actually caused deaths.” That’s a perfect encapsulation of what we’re experiencing. It cuts across boundaries.

One of my closest friends now is Jennifer Sey. She’s this spry former athlete. She was the 1985 U.S. gymnastics champion. She went on to be a very successful marketing officer for Levi’s. She was set for the top job, and then she gave it all up because she knew that her kids counted and that they weren’t putting them back into school.

She put down a golden parachute to exemplify what she wanted to do. She’s now my friend. She was a lifetime Democrat. I have more Democrat friends, and more friends on the other side of the political aisle than I could ever count. Now, my lines are blurring too because I knew a lot of people that didn’t step up.

There’s an old rabbinical story that’s passed down through the ages, and it goes like this. “The people in those days were very wicked, which is why God sent the flood, and the people who didn’t make it onto the boat, which were many, when the waters rose to their knees, they pulled their children to their waist. When the waters rose to their waist, they put their children in their arms. When the waters rose to their neck, they put their children on their shoulders, but when it rose even further, they put their children under their feet so they could survive.”

When the threat of mortality comes down from so many avenues and over every medium, over every channel, everyone is telling you, “You are going to die if you don’t take these interventions. You’re going to die if you don’t take these interventions that we recommend.” It does crazy things to society. Some of them are funny and humorous.

I did some interviews for the book with executives from the toilet paper industry. I was a little curious, why did we all run out of toilet paper? I remember doing the run on Costco and getting my big Kirkland swab like everyone else there, so I could have enough for the stay-at-home orders. It turns out, if you’ll forgive the phrase, we do half of our business at our businesses. The type of supply chain-quality TP there is very different from the soft cushy bear stuff that we’re used to at home.

When you cut that off, all of a sudden, the manufacturers had to scramble to produce more of the cushy bear stuff. What’s funny is now that the pandemic is over, they’ve got all of these big reams, the things you might see at a stadium mounted into the stall there. What are they going to do with them? Well, the marketing guys, like myself, they’re really smart, and so they came up with this great idea.

Charmin forever. They’ll send you the metal stand with one of those big rolls. You can mount it right next to your little latrine there, and there you go, toilet paper for a month. No problem. Those sort of impacts are things we didn’t think about.

Take another interview that we did with engineers across the Vegas Strip. One engineer, Michael Hurtado, talked about how he spent the entire spring of 2020 with his team walking the floors of his hotel in Vegas that was then empty. They had to go into every single room every week and tend to the loo, turn on the shower, make sure the sink isn’t clogging up, because otherwise when things are back and open, it could be Legionnaire’s disease or worse. Plus, the plumbing systems of these hotels were designed for at least 10 to 15 to 20 per cent occupancy all year round.

They count on that amount of water flowing to keep things flushing. So, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Michael and his team walked the halls of the Ahern properties off the Vegas Strip, going room to room. All work and no play makes Michael Hurtado a very dull boy in Vegas, and we would see that again and again in industry after industry, the impacts that no one ever saw when you turn the lights on.

Just consider this. How many experiments were completely trumped and stowed away or killed altogether because all of the animal specimens, like rats, had to be put down in the spring of 2020? Years of data wiped away. How many diseases will be foregone because we stopped those experiments?

Mr. Jekielek:

How is it possible that we implemented these terrible policies that were almost ubiquitously just bad ideas, policy after policy after policy? But some people will say, “Well, this was the “plandemic.” It was all actually a big plan from the beginning.

This is what we would call a moderate virus by pandemic standards, but we took these really disproportionate measures.” Other people might say, “The panic happened, and there’s just a lot of opportunists in the system. They took advantage.” Where do you lie on this?

Mr. Hart:

I’m more towards the latter only because I don’t think our governments are that smart. You’ve heard these implementations that somehow the vaccine contains microchips, and then when the 5G networks go out, they’re going to turn us all into zombies. That’s literally a theory out there.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’ll have to tell you, I have not heard this one.

Mr. Hart:

That one’s a great one. It’s fun to go down that rabbit hole, but don’t go down that rabbit hole. But the bottom line is that’s not happening because our government is just not smart enough to make that happen. So, I tend to lean towards the moment that they’re conniving and absolutely going after power if they see that gap. In this case, it was instilled by an immense fear that we were going to lose everything and everyone was going to die. They saw that moment to insert themselves. Even the World Economic Forum admitted a few weeks ago that they were immensely pleased when they said jump, most of us in the world said, “How high?”

That’s unfortunate because I think it’s amazing what we’ll give up for the security that we think we’re getting, and we actually didn’t get any of it.

They tried to implement the same policy for everyone across the board. They tried to protect everybody and ended up protecting no one.

In the end, they probably saw the breach in the wall and said, “That’s our moment. Send in our army, send them in surreptitiously, but let’s get them in there.” And now, they’re well positioned. There’s a good feeling of people wanting to say, “I want to put this in my rearview mirror.”

Right. Even my good friends and family members are telling me, “Justin, so glad that you’re talking about some other things other than COVID.” They hear me repeating myself. Maybe they’re sick of it a little bit. But at the same time, what people failed to realize there was the battle against the disease, but there was another movement afoot which was implemented throughout the policies.

Those same tactics, stay-at-home orders, testing for whatever else, physical implementations, government override of your rights, those are just tools. Those are tactics. They will pull those straight out of their dormant toolbox any day for the latest boogeyman that they think is required to curb this all together. For climate change, any one of those policies could easily be implemented.

Heck, it took the climate people four decades to convince us and put into law that what we exhale was killing the planet. It took them four weeks to convince us that what we were exhaling was killing grandma. The next thing is going to go even quicker. Masks for climate change, we guarantee you, coming up.

Mr. Jekielek:

Masks for climate change. I suppose anything is possible these days.

Mr. Hart:

You’re breathing CO2 at me right now, Jan. I can feel it over here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh gosh.

Mr. Hart:

I have to be careful. Let’s whisper a little more. I’m a tenor, and by one study, tenors exude more air. That was an actual study in the middle of this whole thing. Someone drove the world insane, right, and we started doing studies around which section of the choir would be more infected than the other. We decided to mask them all just to be safe.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about this, because society did go crazy. There were some unbelievably authoritarian policies that were implemented. There are emergency orders still in play which allow all sorts of suspension of rights, even if those aren’t as heavily in play. What’s to prevent this from happening again?

Mr. Hart:

Very little, unfortunately, because Pandora’s Box was unleashed. I was a huge supporter of President Trump. I predicted he was going to win in 2016, much to the chagrin of many of my friends. When the pandemic happened, we all sort of agreed to a two-week pause in life to try to curb this thing. What we know, right?

I remember that fateful day, March 29th, 2020, three years ago, when President Trump got up to the pulpit in the Rose Garden. Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, Vice President Pence, and the rest of them all there and said, “We are extending the federal recommended lockdown for another 40 days.” I tweeted out, “He just lost the election. He just lost the election.”

I’m saddened that I was right on that, because I knew even just demographically, if just 3 per cent of the population over the age of 65 decided to stay home and not vote for anyone nor Trump, he would lose. Because we rely on some of those demographics to carry us over the board there. But I also knew that this was going to unleash Pandora’s Box.

There were 50 governors, 3,200 unelected health directors, and 13,000 school districts across the country that had their own policies. It’s a mess out there. You could go county to county. Your restaurant could be 500 feet from another restaurant in another county. You are closed down, but they can take people right up to the counter. It made no sense whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I don’t think any of that’s going to be fixed until we get something at the top that can go in and take a look at all the wrenches that have been thrown in the works down below. We’re going to need some really strong leadership at the top to figure out what’s going to happen because, right now it’s still a mess. Emergency orders are there.

Take Hollywood, for example. This is a perfect example of how I don’t know when they’ll ever be out of the pandemic. I don’t know if you know this, but every single movie set still tests to the Nth degree, with PCR tests as well, and they’re incentivized to do so. They employ tens of thousands of people now whose job is just for COVID safety.

If you’re an actor, you actually get a little bit of a stipend if you’re called in for a last-minute little role. You have to go and get a PCR test. They’ll throw 100, 150 bucks at you. That’s good money in the pocket. It’s incentivized in totally the wrong way. A lot of the reason why these emergency orders are still in place is because our hospitals are still recovering. They need these reimbursements in big ways.

When you shut down the most profitable parts of the business, and this is again my kindest interpretation of what happened at the hospitals, any administrator worth his salt is going to say, “You just took away everything that makes my possible profitable and keeps us in business. What am I going to do? Elective surgeries? I can’t do those things.” And so, what happens? They almost go under for all this reimbursement money.”

In fact, in October of 2020, they lobbied again for the CMS, which handles all the reimbursements for hospitals, to get government money. They asked, “Can we make an observation bed? For someone who we think is here for COVID, can we make that a COVID patient?” They replied, “Sure, you can make that a COVID patient.” Well, $39,000 in the pocket right there.

These are actual equations in their brain that say, “How do I stay in business?” So, those emergency powers are going to stay in place, especially as we go through rocky times, although I hope they’ll curb down here in the next few months. We’ll see how it goes.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to mention something that I like to remind people of, which is that one of the consequences of all these policies was the biggest upward transfer of wealth in history, essentially to the richest people in society.

Mr. Hart:

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had a couple of really big clients. One was providing golf excursions for baby boomers. Dead. Next one was an online system for parents to evaluate which school to send their college kids to. Dead. And then the third one was a high-end vacation club for families. By the time the spring was gone, I had no clients to speak of. I had lots of time on my hand, which is kind of why I dove into this.

But, if I was still a chief marketing officer at a tech company, I might have kept my mouth shut, because it might have impacted my job. I might have been kicked out of there for all of my finagling out there. I can’t imagine some people that really had to keep their mouth shut, otherwise, they’d lose their job entirely.

You can look at people who are in the white labor classes whose laptop class kids could enjoy the refreshments of the backyard, a big pool, and bring out the laptop. They may bring in tutors. That’s an incredible amount of success that they’ve had in their lives, and to give that all up to go against grain is a tough call to make there.

But you definitely see that when you look at LA, for example. During the first lockdowns of the stay-at-home orders from school when they went virtual, a third of all the students in the LA Unified School District never signed on to a single class.

I don’t think that’s because they were lazy or indolent or just skipping school altogether. “Ah, we’re doing virtual school. I can skip it.” No, it’s because they were probably taking care of things at home because their mom is gone. She’s working. Their dad is gone.

He’s working because he’s an essential worker, and they’re at risk. What a crazy scene we put ourselves into. It drove this entire wedge into a caste system, and if you’re lucky to end up on one side of the fence, one side of the tracks, you had a pretty easy pandemic. In fact, it was probably nice. Maybe your family took off and went to Mexico for a month.

Mr. Jekielek:

You could pat yourself on the back saying, “Look, we’re sheltering in place. We’re doing our part.”

Mr. Hart:

Yes, it’s unfortunate how it pitted us against each other, and I think about that immense transfer of wealth. While Etsy shops suffered, the big store shops flourished. We’re going to see the impact of spending all that money to save the rest of the world when things come to bear here, so it’s not going to be pretty.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s look at accountability. There is a new Republican Congress that is promising accountability. There’s a whole select committee on government overreach. There’s the COVID select committee. The Energy and Commerce Committee is looking at pandemic policy and its impacts. There are many areas where accountability can be found, so how is that going to happen?

Mr. Hart:

That is our entire story for the next several years, truth and accountability. We have to know what transpired. There has to be immense daylight on all these things. I remember my own personal social media accounts were taken down in the summer of 2021. I had no idea.

We come to find out later that there was an actual director of the FDA who is now working for Pfizer, Scott Gottlieb, who personally asked Twitter to take down my account. We know from the inner workings that Vivek Murthy and Jen Psaki of the White House, were personally working with Facebook and Twitter to call out balls and fouls and strikes for what they wanted taken down.

Video:

We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.

Mr. Hart:

What a pressure to put on things there. What we tend to find is that we need to have that transparency to find out what were all the mistakes that were made, but also we need transparency on how these decisions were made. Who decided that natural immunity should be discounted? Who decided that based on all the evidence we had up until March and April of 2020, that masks work, and we implemented them?

Who decided on Remdesivir as a five-day treatment that extended the stay of hospitals and skewed the stats? There are all these details that a lot of us have forgotten, because we’ve known so much now and learned so much over the pandemic. All of those need to be brought to bear. There was a recent article from a very prominent scientist who does great work, Emily Oster. She talked about how there was a need for…what’s the term I am looking for?

Mr. Jekielek:

Amnesty.

Mr. Hart:

Emily Oster, who is this fantastic author, and a very astute statistician, wrote this article for The Atlantic that there was a need for amnesty. First, that’s an admission that someone did something wrong. But also, her story is very illustrative of this issue. She and her team had all the data on masking kits.

They had very closely tracked schools in Florida, North Carolina and New York down to the district level to find out what were their policies, and then what were the caseloads. Once she came out with the pre-print, it turns out that the schools that had more masking actually had more cases, but she stopped right there.

The pressure was too immense in the scientific industry to go against the grain. She dropped it, submarined the data, and it just kind of stopped there, stagnant. Before we have amnesty, we need to have accountability. When you have people like Leana Wen, who is a prominent physician who was on CNN almost every day, talking about how the unvaccinated should have fewer rights. They should be kept at home.

And now, she’s come out and admitted that was probably wrong. It was wrong to mask kids. I welcome her to, as we say, team reality. Leave team apocalypse, folks. Come to team reality and realize what has really occurred over the last three years. But there’s a caveat.

Before you get amnesty, you must never have an influence on public policy again. I tell my team, “Don’t expect Dr. Fauci to be frog-marched against the wall somewhere after this whole thing. No, but we should make sure he never has influence on public policy again. Go about your retirement. That’s fine. But you should never again influence these policies that caused our children immense harm. We’re not going to have that.”

Mr. Jekielek:

If you were going to give some advice, and I’m sure you’re going to be asked for what to do, like some very specific and very obvious laws that should be passed to prevent the climate lockdowns. I’m not saying there are going to be climate lockdowns, but as you suggested, there could be climate lockdowns.

Mr. Hart:

The investigations really have to steer into these questions, as you say. Example; Jim Jordan has this select committee looking at the weaponization of the DOJ—how the DOJ was actually targeting parents who were getting rowdy at school board meetings and tagging them in their systems with a domestic terrorist tag. It was uncalled for, untoward, obviously outside influence helped to do that. He’s going to be tearing that apart and looking distinctly at that.

I hope, and my recommendation is that he takes it a step further, and he brings those parents up, and he says, “So tell us, what were you yelling about there at the school board?” You’ll find a lot of it had to do with COVID. Or think about the massive hearings we’re going to have on all sorts of things around commerce and industry. The recession that we’re probably experiencing right now, a lot of that had a direct impact from COVID.

I was a big booster of the conservative causes at the end of last year, 2022. Looking at the election, I thought there was going to be a distinct red wave, until 10 days out from the election. I looked at the mail returns and I said, “Oh no, we’re in trouble. I think COVID has killed the red wave.” And the reason why is that 17 states completely upended the way that they did mail-in ballots.

Here in California, every single home gets a ballot now in the mail. In Pennsylvania, if you wanted an absentee ballot in 2016, you had to show a doctor’s note that you were an invalid at home. It went from 200,000 absentee ballots to two million ballots at home. On the day of the election, you can look at the contested Senate election between Oz and Fetterman.

Dr. Oz had about 2.1 million people come out to vote for him on the day of the election. Fetterman had only about 1.7 million people come out to vote for him, but he took advantage of the new mail-in ballot laws. Whether there was finagling or misgivings or real issues with those ballots, I don’t care. He was better at collecting those than Oz was, and he won the election. 17 states experienced that. They haven’t rolled those back, and we’re going to have some real issues. Only Georgia and a few other states have had some real success in rolling those things back.

As far as other legislative implementations, we need to look to places like Florida, where Governor DeSantis has allowed counties, for example, to declare emergencies, but only for a short period of time, and then it needs to be reviewed. Otherwise, that emergency declaration will be wiped away. Or his patient’s Bill of Rights.

Again, justice for Franca. We are not going to allow an America where you do not have the right to see your loved one pass away into the next world next to their bed. Those are things at the federal level where we can feel very strongly about. Also the impact on children is something we need to consider very strongly. The median age, the average age of death for COVID, was 80 years old. The average age of death for the Spanish flu was 29 years old.

If this was a pandemic where those being impacted were millennials and younger, we would have had a very, very different reaction. I don’t know what I would do then. I know I would still stick by my rights. I know it would probably be even tougher then. But in the end, we have to look at our rights that were infringed, our rights to free assembly and religion.

How did we give those up, and give them up so readily? My own church and other churches all came to the conclusion that you were going to go home and you were going to participate in church and do it over Zoom class. The body of Christ in the Christian church for almost all Christian churches across the country and the world became an experience of Zoom.

What a terrible, terrible situation. I can attest to the physical ailments. I can attest to the projections of cancer deaths because they miss screenings. I can attest to the types of suicides that you might see because of unemployment. That may be, in the end, more devastating than anything else.

Mr. Jekielek:

Team reality and team apocalypse. I’ve had a lot of discussion about divisive language, and we’ve talked about the pandemic of the unvaccinated. Does it really make sense to create these categories?

Mr. Hart:

For purposes when they’re coming at you with war, it was easy to designate that. These are more rhetorical and strategic sort of categories. There were debates. At one point, I thought that fighting the masks was just going to get us consternated every which way, and that we should probably just drop it all together. But in the end, I’m glad we fought to die on that hill. It became a symbol in some cases.

Mr. Jekielek:

A talisman.

Mr. Hart:

A talisman, right. But we’ve got to find some way to heal these things. What’s interesting is it’s amazing how quickly political dogmas dissolve across a pair of families when the same people are coming after both of your kids in the same way. Understanding that impact is going to be tantamount, especially when we’re talking about legislation. We’re adults. We’ll try to deal with it as we can, but our kids they’re going to need some protection from the harm we instilled on them.

My wife just recently had an incident with our child when I dropped her off at kindergarten. She had a stuffy nose. She went in, and she blew her nose, and our kindergarten teacher is a very smart woman, but I know she’s nervous about this whole thing. And so, she had her mask during the day.

Our daughter later came back and said, “Yes, I wore a mask at school today.” We didn’t want that. We told her, “Please don’t mask our kid in the future,” and that was it. My wife posted about it online. And all of a sudden, the vitriol she got was amazing, astounding, and embarrassing. It was just awful. It was wrenching. It was horrible.

We look at that and we say, “Is that what we’re still facing now? Is this the America that we’ve come out to? We’re going to have to find ways to bridge that divide.” Again for people that are making the journey, that’s what this book is for. It is for those people that maybe haven’t been with us all this whole time, but also for those people that are just starting their journey back now. I want them to catch up to speed with what’s going on. It’s for that one neighbor of yours who’s still in his car, double masking alone.

Just put it on his windshield, it will be right there for him.

The idea is that we’re going to have to find ways to bridge those divides because they’re deep. Maybe as the old Broadway song goes, “Time heals everything,” and we’ll be able to make good with that. But I’m afraid these same tactics are now part of the tool belt of the authoritarians in this world, and they’ll pull those straight out to use against us at some future point.

Mr. Jekielek:

Justin, it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you finally on camera here. And again, I’ll be reading your content over at rationalground.com. The book, of course, is Gone Viral. Such a pleasure to have you on.

Mr. Hart:

Thanks, Jan. Great to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thank you all for joining Justin Hart and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

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