Dr. Nicole Saphier on Masking the Friendly Skies

BUCK: We have a fantastic guest — an expert, in fact — joining us now, Dr. Nicole Saphier, a full-time practicing physician here in the in New York City area where I am. She’s also a Fox News contributor and best-selling author of Make America Healthy Again and Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against Covid-19. Dr. Saphier, first-time on the show. Thanks so much.

DR. SAPHIER: Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

BUCK: So, what is your feeling on the back-and-forth now on the plane mask mandate? And also, what is it with all these epidemiologists who are wearing loosely draped cloth masks on their faces in the airport and thinking that it’s some kind of protest?

DR. SAPHIER: Yeah, it’s really… We laugh about it because it is such a disgrace what is happening right now in the back-and-forth, but it’s really quite devastating in terms of public health and just our overall trust of our public health entities. Pre-covid I would say that I was a huge supporter and proponent of the CDC and FDA.

Unfortunately, as we have seen throughout the course of the last two years, the political nonsense that’s happened. You know, the big issue with masking, it’s divisive, undoubtedly. But at the end of the day it really should just be scientific. It’s not about being Republican or Democrat or too cautious or not cautious enough.

But the bottom line is we have failed as a scientific community to prove or really disprove that masks work. And just like people who are refusing to fly when there was a mask mandate, the people who are now refusing not to fly because the mandate’s been removed, they’re both being dramatic and certainly not science driven.

CLAY: Dr. Saphier, first of all, thanks for coming on. This is Clay. I wish we could go back in type and sort of make public health decisions more rationally. One of the things that will happen whether we like it or not is 20 years from now there will be big, massively best-selling books likely to be written about the way — and beyond certainly — the way we responded to covid.

What do you think those books will be saying about many of the choices we made, whether it was masking, whether it was taking kids out of school, whether it was social distancing? In your mind — and I know it’s always hard to judge in the middle of historical moments. But is history going to say, “Hey, you know what? The United States did a really good job responding to covid,” or for the most part are we going to say, “Most of the things that we were prescribed to do didn’t really have that much of an impact”?

DR. SAPHIER: Well, as someone who actually wrote a book about the politicization of science and the way that we handled it —

CLAY: In fact, let me give you… Before you answer, let me go ahead and tell everyone out there listening all about this book. It’s called Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against Covid-19 and there’s also Make America Healthy Again. Historically we say what?

DR. SAPHIER: Well, Make America Healthy Again, just so you know, is a pre-covid book. Panic Attack came out during covid. And I wrote about it, and it’s the exact same issues that we’re dealing with. What we have failed to do from an American public health standpoint is we failed to prove that a lot of our measures actually worked.

And actually, looking back retrospectively, when it came to lockdowns and keeping kids out of schools, all of those, we have showed that there’s more damage than there’s actually benefit. And maybe we could have excused some of these measures that were done in haste in the first three months, in six months, when there was an unknown, when we didn’t know much about the virus.

We didn’t have the ability to test for it; we certainly didn’t know how to treat it. In fact, some of our treatments turned out to make things worse. And we didn’t have vaccine for it. Now fast-forward to two years in. That excuse is no longer there anymore. We have over 95% of our country has some level of immunity. Boosters, tests, treatments are all readily available.

Now is the time that we should have been having more freedom and tailor our actions to individual risk. These blanket universal mandates have no place in the United States anymore, and the biggest fumble in my opinion when it comes to how we responded to this pandemic is how we are still continuing to fight to keep some of these mandates when it’s been proven over and over again that they did not work.

BUCK: Dr. Saphier, one of the troubling realities of the pandemic this whole time in terms of the conversation about it and the policy discussion has been the number of doctors that — Clay and I both have this experience — who reach out or have been reaching out now going on two years saying, “I know that this policies is counterproductive” or “I know that what Fauci has said about this is untrue.

“But I don’t want to lose my medical license” or “I don’t want to have my peers or even my hospital,” let’s say, if you have admitting privileges, “turn against me publicly.” Do you feel like that is changing? Because I’m surprised at how few doctors are willing to come out now…? I mean, obviously you do. But how few doctors willing to come out and say a lot of medical establishment was wrong, owe us an apology to the American people, and needs to come clean about what was right and what wasn’t.

DR. SAPHIER: Well, more than two-thirds of physicians in the United States are employed by someone, and that person that employed them tends to be a large entity full of administrators who really kowtow to a lot of political movements. And unfortunately, we did allow a lot of political intervening in health care from when this restricted the elective surgeries in the beginning which resulted in people dying, as well as stuff that we’ve seen with the Affordable Care Act, which have allowed them to just completely destroy, in my opinion, the American health care system.

Unfortunately, what has happened that is that physicians all of a sudden were told that they weren’t allowed to prescribe certain things, we go way back when to hydroxychloroquine because that became so politicized. But it wasn’t so outlandish to think that someone may try hydroxychloroquine for this new illness that we had no means of treating. We had pre-existing data that hydroxychloroquine did have some anti-viral effect and actually it had been studied in the original SARS virus.

So for people to say we have no way to treat this virus, maybe we just try them with a long-standing, well-known, hydroxychloroquine. Whether it works or not, we don’t know yet but there’s always a risk versus benefit. But because President Trump touted it, all of a sudden, physicians were told you are not allowed to prescribe that medication.

Ultimately the data showed that that medication really didn’t work as well as many of the other treatments that we have now for covid-19, but at the beginning we could have at least tried. And now we dealt with the ivermectin and also we’re dealing with… Look at New York and New Jersey where the governors of the states have said health care workers have to be boosted.

Forget just the vaccine mandates, they have booster mandates for health care workers. And if there’s a medical exemption where the health care work doesn’t get the booster, they have to be tested weekly. Well, I can tell you what’s happening right now in these health care institutions. You have nonboosted employees who are having to cover shifts for boosted employees who have covid.

So as soon as vaccinates and boosters stopped preventing infection and their main role was to decrease severe illness and prevent people from being hospitalized, these mandates should have gone out the window. But unfortunately, they couldn’t let it go and they’ve continued to push them and we have seen health care works as well as first responders lose their job over anti-science mandates.

CLAY: Dr. Saphier, one of the moments when… You mentioned early on maybe in March and April, the, quote, unquote, experts — for a lot of people listening right now — that ended when all of these same experts said, “Yes, we need to have lockdowns. Yes, we need to have people social distancing,” and then they simultaneously endorse all of the BLM protests.

After being furious at people from protesting lockdown, they then came out and said, “Well, yeah, covid’s going on, but we don’t have any issue with hundreds of thousands of people marching close together all throughout the streets of America” after they had locked down so many people. That was, I think, for many people the beginning of this being super political in nature. Will we ever trust in this country people listening and the nation as a whole the, quote-unquote, public health experts again?

DR. SAPHIER: I think unfortunately we are going to have a very long road to get back just a modicum of the public health trust. I blame that solely, to be honest, on the CDC and a lot of the advisers to the president, because they had one role. They really had one job in the last couple years. Their job wasn’t to create policy or be spokesperson for the United States or any of that.

What their job was to do was to collect data and put forth good trials to determine what we can do as a nation and as individuals to lessen our individual and collective risk of covid-19. But they didn’t do that. Unfortunately, none of the decisions that have been made have been data driven at all. You’re talking about the Black Lives Matter protests.

Well, what about the fact that people…? They started shutting everything down and they started locking playgrounds so children couldn’t even go play outside. And yet they had to quickly start opening bars and restaurants because, well, that was gonna be allowed, but children still we aren’t allowed to go on playgrounds, and churches we aren’t allowed to open ’cause you couldn’t sing.

Unfortunately there was far too much hypocrisy that went on. None of it was data driven and here we are over two years into it and the CDC still has zero studies to even reference for the whole airplane-mask mandate debacle that we’re dealing with and that’s because they didn’t run any! Imagine if they did. They could have proven or disproven that the mandates work or didn’t work, and a judge wouldn’t need to be striking this down.

We wouldn’t have to be going and appealing. It would have fallen to the whole scientific consensus. But they didn’t do that! They didn’t do that. They had one job and they failed. And if I were to fail a hundred percent in my job, I would be fired. Why they’re not fired I don’t know.

BUCK: Speaking to Dr. Nicole Saphier. You all should go check out her books, she’s got two of them out there, Make America Healthy Again and Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science and the Fight Against Covid-19. Dr. Saphier, where do you think we’re gonna be as a country when it comes to covid policy? I mean, I think we’re gonna have probably covid cases in the fall, right?

I don’t think anyone believes it’s going away entirely. But going into the election, what do you think the position of the more extreme mitigation, masking, lockdown voices in the medical — and, let’s be honest, the Democratic — community? What are they gonna be saying then?

DR. SAPHIER: Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes I can’t understand what’s even coming out of the president and vice president’s mouth as is right now. But what I can tell you when it comes to the near future with covid-19, these blanket harsh restrictions — as it currently stands with the current variants and the wide availability of testing and boosters and treatments.

Iit does not seem that any of the universal restrictions have any place in our future public health policies. I think that it needs to come down to individual risk assessments, and people who are considered higher risk should talk to their physicians, get boosters, wear high-quality masks when they’re in congregated indoor settings.

But for the rest of the population, especially those with hybrid immunity where they’ve been vaccinated or boosted and have already recovered from covid-19, there’s ample data that demonstrates that that’s very strong protection. And if you want to get stronger protection, get a booster. It’s all risk-benefit. We cannot live our lives without risk.

If we spend every day avoiding risk, we are risking not living our lives. Life is not about getting to zero risk. That’s why we are able to get into cars every day. That’s why we eat fatty foods sometimes or I have an Oreo at night. Everything comes with risk. But that is what life is all about. And when it comes to covid-19, it is about the entire population. It is about determining what your individual risk is.

BUCK: Dr. Nicole Saphier, everybody. Doc, thanks for being with us. Hope you’ll come back.

DR. SAPHIER: Thanks for having me, guys.