9, 12, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23.

This is Deep State Radio.

Coming to you direct from our Super Secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of

Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to a special episode.

I am David Rothkoff, your host, and I am very pleased to be joined today by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Lori Garrett, one of the world's real experts on global public health issues.

And we seem to be in a moment where that kind of expertise is missing in some respects from the top of our government,

places where you might want to find it, and much in need.

So I'd like to begin with Lori by asking you where you think we are in the life of this

coronavirus story. I'm starting to see some articles saying that people think it may be peaking, but again,

a lot of what's been written and said about this has been hard to believe or based on wishes more than facts.

So where do you think we are?

The notion that the epidemic is or will peak was based on a mathematics model done by a group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

It was purely speculation and they were drawing from available Chinese data which we know is very poor for quite a number of reasons.

So there is no evidence at this moment of anything close to a peeking event or even a plateau event anywhere in the world.

Every place where this virus has broken out, it's still a growing expanding problem.

The Chinese situation is fully out of control and the Chinese have tried

absolutely everything in their book including all the devices of repression that are brought to bear by the Communist Party in any crisis, any situation considered destabilizing to Chinese authority all the way to sort of

textbook public health efforts that we would execute here under the same

circumstances but this virus is defying efforts to control it and we should keep in mind as we watch what China is going through that we would not be able to do almost any of the things they are doing. You know,

democracy has a funny way of getting in the way when what's what you think you

need to do is to slap everybody under quarantine, stop all movements, cease all freedom of activity, and kill off a virus by killing off liberty and freedom in a population.

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