Welcome to the Mona Charin Show. Delighted that you could join me today. I am thrilled to welcome a special

guest this week, Dr. Atul Gawande. He is a noted author and a professor at Harvard Medical School,

a former assistant administrator of USAID, a contributor to the New Yorker, and of course, a leading surgeon.

So, Dr. Gwanda, thank you so much for being here.

You're awesome to include me. Thank you.

So one of the things that I would like to go over with you, we will get to what is going on with

USAID, what is going on with the HHS and the leadership of RFK Jr.

But before we do, I thought since you had the experience of being on President

Biden's COVID-19 advisory board, I would love to just go back to the pandemic for a few minutes.

Oh, people love going back to the pandemic and remembering all of that.

Because when people talk about it now, there seems to be this hardening conventional wisdom

that, you know, well, certainly we know that the lockdowns were a mistake.

And certainly we know that Fauci screwed up by telling

people not to wear masks when, in fact, masks were a good idea.

And that seems to sum up, and by the way, I think it's true that that mass guidance was wrong and they subsequently

acknowledged that. And the lockdowns did definitely go on too long in some blue jurisdictions.

Schools were closed too long. That was an issue, but there is such a gap in terms of the other mistakes that were made.

So just returning to the COVID-19 response, what do you say about the lessons of how we handled it, what we should take away?

Well, one of the things is, I think some of the most basic facts around what happened during

COVID are now currently in dispute. Did COVID kill anybody, for example? We, God. We're having that debate.

So let me just start with.

This was the first global reduction in human life expectancy in 70 years.

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