Speaker 1: there is massive, massive blowback now against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director
of the NIH, because he said yesterday it would be reasonable to require proof of vaccination
to fly domestically right now to fly back to the United States, you need a negative test
to fly and depending on where you're coming from, vaccination to go to other countries, you often
need vaccination. But there is no domestic airline vaccine requirement right now. It's something
that's been talked about for a while. Dr. Fauci, without saying he's recommending it, without
saying it's going to happen, in fact saying it's probably not going to happen, said well, wouldn't
be an unreasonable thing to do. He appeared on CNN yesterday and was asked about this,
and he answered the question. Let's take a look. Speaker 2: Will you recommend to President Biden?
There should be a requirement for vaccination for domestic travel. You know, I'm not going to tell
you that for the simple reason is that I don't want to be publicly telling what I'm recommending
to the president because if then the president doesn't do it, I don't want to make it. Look,
he's going against that. The president makes all recommendations, all discussions. And as a group,
we make a decision about what's best to do. There are pros and cons to that. I mean, you've
got to ask yourself why it is. You're making that requirement if you're making it a requirement for
vaccination for people to get on planes who were coming into the country, that's understandable.
You don't want to bring more cases into the country. But if you're talking about requiring
vaccination to get on a plane domestically, that is just another one of the requirements
that I think is reasonable to consider. And I think that's what you're talking about when
you heard me make a comment. You know, there's requirements that you might want to get if you
want to get into college where you want to go to a university or you want to work in certain places
when you make vaccination a requirement, that's another incentive
to get more people vaccinated. If you want to do that with domestic flights, I think that's
something that seriously should be considered. Speaker 1: So he says it should be considered and
it's reasonable, and people went absolutely crazy about authoritarian Foushee. Now in a moment,
I'll talk about that requirement. But he even said after the controversy exploded,
it it's not a likely thing to actually happen. So this was later on CNN after the
controversy blew up. Let's take a quick look. Speaker 2: Everything when that comes up as a
possibility, we put it on the table and we consider it. That does not mean that it is
going to be likely to happen right now. I don't think people should expect that we're going to
have a requirement in domestic flights for people to be vaccinated. When I was asked that question.
I gave an honest answer. It's on the table. OK, so Speaker 1: what is actually logical here in terms
of what might be achieved with such a domestic airline travel mandate? I am actually ready to say
we are unlikely to vaccinate our way out of the pandemic at this current point,
because Omicron is both so contagious and has a significant amount of vaccine
evasion. If we got to 100 percent vaccination, maybe, but the point of the vaccines right now
is to keep people from getting very sick. Omicron, it appears, is less severe. And what that means,
we have to be very specific about what we mean, but it means that as an individual Omicron,
if you are vaccinated. It is likely to cause less serious illness than Delta, it seems,
right now. But if you are unvaccinated, you are still quite likely to get very, very sick from
Omicron. So the point of a vaccine requirement to get on planes in my mind would not be to end
cases because it doesn't seem like that's what it would do. But it would be to prevent people from
getting really sick and to prevent the medical system from getting overloaded to that point.
Minnesota emergency physician Andrea Rowland Fisher says the people ending up in the ICU
are overwhelmingly unvaccinated and Speaker 3: folks that are vaccinated
and unvaccinated. What's the kind of breakdown from your estimation of what you've been seeing?
I would say the vast majority of people coming into the ICU are those that are unvaccinated.
There are a very few percent of people that are being admitted to the ICU that have been fully
vaccinated. But usually those people are high risk people that have critical illness anyways and not
healthy people that are fully vaccinated. Speaker 1: OK, so you hear it there. So the point
here is we would do this because it would get people vaccinated when we looked at the polling
early in the vaccine mandate discussion that was required to go to a movie theater. Would that make
you go and get vaccinated now? Most people said no. If you got 100 bucks for getting vaccinated,
would that make resistant people going now? Most of them wouldn't, but a requirement to
present proof of vaccine to fly domestically, something like 40 percent of those not yet
vaccinated said that would make me go and get vaccinated. So if the question is, would it work,
it seems that it would. And it seems like it would also make a very, very big impact. There's a very
good Twitter thread from Dr. Craig Spencer, who talks about all the COVID he's been seeing
in the E.R. and what the cases are like on the basis of vaccination status. And he says
the patients with a third booster have had mild symptoms mostly sore throat,
a ton of sore throat fatigue, muscle pain, no difficulty breathing, no shortness of breath.
The patients with two doses were still what would be considered mild, but they were more fatigued.
More fever, more coughing, more miserable, still mostly OK. Those with one dose of JNJ and COVID
felt horrible fever for a few days or more week. Tired shortness of breath cough, but
still didn't need oxygen. And then for those that had to be admitted, Dr. Craig Spencer says
almost every single one was unvaccinated. Profound shortness of breath, oxygen dropping from walking,
needing oxygen to breathe regularly. And so we have to understand that increasingly the
vaccine is a tool to not get really sick. And to keep the hospitals not overloaded
so that if you need to go for a car accident or for whatever else, you're going to be able
to get the care that you need. So are they going to do the domestic vaccine requirement?
I would bet no at this point in time. But the people flipping out on Fauci,
it's not up to Fauci, and Fauci is even saying it's not a likely thing to happen. So
as usual, much ado about very little today at 6:00 p.m., we've got the last viewer and
listener Town Hall of the Year. I hope you'll join us on the Pacman Live YouTube channel
through the 31st. If you get a full price yearly membership at join Pacman dot com, we will send
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going to take a quick break. What a program we have for you today, quite frankly.