Omicron Panic, Natural Immunity, Fluvoxamine, & More (w/ Dr. Marty Makary & Dr. Vinay Prasad)
What this video covers
Recorded in December 2021 — deep in the COVID-19 pandemic and before either guest held government office — this episode of Zubin Damania’s “VPZD Show” brings together Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Vinay Prasad for what the host bills as a “science & reason” debate on the issues of the moment.
The two physicians push back on what they describe as one-size-fits-all public health messaging: universal boosters, school quarantines, and the dismissal of natural immunity. On boosters, they quantify the tradeoffs: citing CDC data, they note a fully vaccinated American faced roughly a 1-in-26,000 chance of hospitalization — reducible to 1 in 260,000 with a booster — while questioning what benefit a healthy young person gets from a third dose given myocarditis risk. They cite North Dakota’s breakthrough data (average hospitalized age 73, average death age 80) and a German study in which no healthy 5- to 17-year-old died of COVID, with 100% of deaths occurring in those with pre-existing conditions. They mock the absolutism of college booster mandates — UMass Amherst required boosters for all students — and Damania’s running joke about a “Fauci bobblehead” for ten boosters.
On therapeutics, they contrast the antidepressant fluvoxamine — which they say showed promise in trials — with the expensive antiviral molnupiravir, and revisit the controversies around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Makary also describes his Johns Hopkins team’s Medicare-data study of COVID mortality risk factors being rejected by eight journals without explanation, and the trio discusses a New England Journal myocarditis paper in which, they say, one of 134 patients — a 22-year-old — died. They also take up gain-of-function research, cloth masks (which the episode frames as a distraction from more meaningful risks), and chemotherapy drug shortages.
The episode is a time capsule of the contrarian-physician discourse of late 2021 — and a preview of the arguments both men would later carry into federal health leadership under the Trump administration. (Prasad would later serve as director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.)
Key points
- Makary and Prasad question universal booster recommendations and the handling of young people and college students under COVID rules.
- They argue natural immunity was undervalued and that population risk-benefit analysis was poorly communicated.
- They discuss myocarditis risk and the socioeconomic harms of pandemic policies.
- They contrast fluvoxamine’s low cost with molnupiravir’s price, and revisit the hydroxychloroquine/ivermectin fights.
- They criticize gain-of-function research and what they call “fear-based” public health messaging.
- They describe cloth masks as a distraction from more meaningful risks, and note chemotherapy drug shortages.