‘The Bill Walton Show’: Surviving COVID-19 With Jay Richards

Weeks after Jay Richards, co-author of “The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe,” joined “The Bill Walton Show,” he contracted COVID-19.

Now recovered, Richards rejoins the show to talk about his personal experience with the virus, the discussions he had with front-line health care workers, and why they don’t wear the masks that the rest of us wear.

>>> What’s the best way for America to reopen and return to business? The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, a project of The Heritage Foundation, assembled America’s top thinkers to figure that out. So far, it has made more than 260 recommendations. Learn more here. 

Richards also looks at how vaccines will start a whole new debate in this country.

Read a portion of the transcript, lightly edited, below or watch the full episode above.

Bill Walton: Welcome to “The Bill Walton Show.” Today, I’m here with my friend Jay Richards, who’s the executive editor of The Stream and co-author, with Douglas Axe and William Briggs, of “The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned the Pandemic Into a Catastrophe.”

Well, we were very skeptical about the lockdowns, very skeptical about masks, and also very skeptical about how lethal the virus was. Well, a couple of weeks after we did the show, Jay got the virus. He was a genuine COVID-19 patient and went through the whole process. And Jay’s back today to talk about what that was like and how he feels about things right now. Jay, glad you’re with us.

Jay Richards: Thanks, Bill. I know we talked right when the book came out. And it’s funny because I wrote the book with two co-authors, as you mentioned. And all of us said, “We’re writing about this from the third person because none of us [have had COVID-19].”

I mean, we knew people who had gotten it. In fact, we knew of people who had died at least with it, maybe from it. But we hadn’t experienced it ourselves.

And sure enough, right after the book comes out, for some unknown reason—because I’m basically a hermit staying in my house—I managed to catch it.

Walton: Now, did any of the three of you wish you had had it so you’d have some authority when you wrote the book?

Richards: Honestly, not so we would have authority, because the reality is the arguments are the same either way. I mean, statistics are statistics either way. But I thought it would be nice to have been able to have experienced it from the inside, because we had to just sort of read about it or ask people.

Now, I’ve seen it from first person, and have seen the workers on the front lines, and I’ve experienced at least what it’s like for me. Of course, different people have different symptoms, but at least I knew what it was like for me, sort of, I think, representatives for somebody my age.

…

Walton:  So, the politicians have reacted by making it even tougher to congregate. What did you learn that would give you a point of view about that?

Richards: Well, certainly this is a respiratory virus. And so what’s happening right now is similar to what happens during flu season. So of course they’re going to be not merely by cases, let’s just talk about actual cases that need to be treated, right? So I do think there’s an increase in that, as would be expected with a respiratory virus.

The problem is that the way we’re coding this now, we don’t actually know what’s happening with the flu because the way the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [tracks it]… In fact, the CDC quit tracking this on the website recently.

And so it looks like we may be counting lots of cases as COVID-19 cases that could very well be flu cases. Or at the very least, we’re not really tracking the flu anymore. And so what I suspect is going to happen is we’re going to have this conglomeration that’s going to follow the regular cold and flu season pattern that’s going to include all the traditional common colds. It will include influenza, it will include COVID-19.

And we’ll see that as a kind of respiratory pattern that’s existed since we’ve been keeping records, is that you have deaths go up, hospitalizations go up. There’s no reason to think the hospitals are going to be overrun.

In fact, here in D.C., I can tell you this because this is my experience, I ruptured my quad tendon almost two years ago when we were living in District of Columbia on the first Friday in February. And the first two hospitals turned my ambulance away. And so I had to go to the third one. And I said, “Well, what’s going on?” They said, “You really don’t want to get injured on the first Friday of the month in Washington, D.C., because people cash their checks, they get drunk, and they end up in the emergency room.” So this happens.

Walton: Why haven’t I heard about that on 6 o’clock news?

Richards:  No, you never hear about the “first Friday.” I know. And so nobody’s tracking that. The reality is that when you have something, it’s going to hit emergency rooms. There’s no reason to think they’re going to be completely overrun.

Walton: I keep struggling to find out what’s real, what isn’t real. If you take a look at cold and flu deaths for the last decade, and you just do a chart across time, what do they average—200,000; 250,000 a year?

Richards: Well, if you include pneumonia.

Walton: OK.

Richards: Yeah, you got to include pneumonia.

Walton: And then also if you track that over time, you also see the vastly disproportionate numbers among people 75 and over.

Richards: Of course, yeah. That’s right.

Walton: So how is this different from that?

Richards: It is very similar. I mean, this has always been the thing that people bristle when you say, “Well, let’s look at the flu.” The reason we look at the flu is that the flu is essentially what more or less accounts for the annual variation in deaths once you control for things like population growth and things like that is how bad the flu season was.

And [COVID-19] is really not the flu, it’s the flu plus pneumonia and complications. This is very much like that. It’s, of course, a different virus, but it’s a respiratory virus. It’s much more dangerous for people over 70 or 75 with co-morbidities.

In fact, it’s 1,000 times more dangerous for people like that than it is for the school-age children that we’re making use Zoom. And so that’s just a fact that we now know. And so the idea that policy wouldn’t change based upon that fact, it boggles the imagination.