Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show

as a frequent guest, Joel Zimberg. He's a director of Public Health and American Well-Being

Initiative at the Paragon Health Institute. He is a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute,

and he's an associate clinical professor

of surgery at the Mount Sinai Icon School of Medicine. Earlier, he had been the senior

economist and general counsel at the White House Council of Economic Advisors. This was from

2017 to 2019, and he has been a key contributor for City Journal throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,

and he continues to cover public health, medicine, and economics for us today.

So, Joel, thanks very much for joining us again.

My pleasure.

So, you know, I'd like to start off with the new word that's

coming at us from every source, the so-called tripledemic, which refers to the circulation,

which is going on right now of three diseases, COVID, the flu, and the common respiratory virus

RSV. You know, they may have also noticed a familiar course listeners from the public health

bureaucracy and the mainstream press, imploring us again to wear masks and take extreme precautions before

seeing family. And some have even called for the reimposition of mask mandates. So as you wrote for

City Journal in a recent piece, it's, in your view, safe to ignore this kind of triple-demic hype.

So what prompted this new round of hysteria, really, as you describe it, and why has it been so overstated?

Well, I think what's happened is that you, first of all, you've had a situation where for the

previous few seasons, you had an artificially low level of respiratory sensitional virus,

the RSV that you referred to. And you've also had an artificially low level of flu, so influenza.

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