In many ways, Dr. Fauci's failure to properly handle the pandemic response with COVID was inevitable. Men like him - according to my guest Peter Suderman of Reason.com - believe in the general infallibility of the bureaucratic process. They think that by following a mechanical paperwork process that they will come to the best, safest, and correct conclusions. These public health bureaucrats also hold a paternalistic view of the average citizen and that those citizens need their protection. 

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Perfection. We all strive for it. Some more than others, but we all look to be better versions of who we are. In medicine, we tend to be high achievers so we want to 'conquer' parenthood. Being perfect isn't any more possible in parenting than it is in medicine. Human relationships are messy and raising children up to be the best versions of themselves has no handbook. The push and pull of you trying to get your kids to be who you think they should be is often at odds with who they think they should be.

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The most important question we have to ask ourselves is who should get the vaccine? The question comes down to who should get the vaccine, or rather, who shouldn't get vaccinated?

This is where Dr. Noorchashm argues that anyone who has had COVID-19 and cleared the disease should not get vaccinated. A near immunological certainty is that once you have cleared a viral infection, you have immunity that is at least if not more robust than immunity you can acquire from a vaccine.

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We're talking about COVID and our American Independence Day from SARS-CoV-2 on June 1, 2021.

The first thing I need you to do is look down and if you're wearing a red shirt, take it off. Not just one sleeve, take it all the way off. Likewise, if you're wearing a blue shirt, I need you to do the same thing. There are no red teams or blue teams here. We're just Americans.

It's time to open up.

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Today's episode strikes right to the heart of the reason I started this podcast - the injustice of maintenance of certification. If you're a doctor, you know all about the unfairness of this system which requires more money, paperwork, money, testing, money, time away from patients and families, and money. It contributes to physician burnout. For patients, it is why your doctor might retire early, look stressed out, or be unavailable when you need him or her most.

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Health care, according to today's guest Dr. Eric Bricker, is filled with euphemisms. One you hear a lot is value based care. The claim is that we need to restructure insurance plans to reward health systems that provide care focused on outcomes instead of activity. Conceptually, it makes a lot of sense that you would reward the people providing superior outcomes with better pay. Unfortunately, this scheme has been tried before and failed. It's unlikely the outcome will be any different this time around.

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Today, we depart from our pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 to discuss what was easily the number one killer of colonial Americans in the Revolutionary War - infectious disease. It is estimated that battle casualties totaled 5-6,000 while disease (infections like small pox and the like) killed between 40-50,000. The toll paid by the civilian population was even worse as loose estimates put the death toll at 100,000 from infection. 

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Advocates for vaccine passports are multiplying by the day. But rest assured, this a bad idea. Not only will they be impractical, they will be useless in a few short months before the passports could really be developed and adopted. In the show, I will lay out the case for passports and then explain why they are bad idea from a practical and civil liberty perspective.

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My guest today is Dr. Vatsal Thakkar who developed an app to take away the pain for patients and health care professionals trying to file out of network insurance claims. Lots of care is provided outside of insurance contracts which requires people unfamiliar filling out insurance paperwork to do so. Thakkar created Reimbursify which does all the filing automatically and eliminating a huge pain point for these practices and their patients.

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There is so much evidence right now that shows that the virus spreads and bursts into regional epidemics independent of local measures to contain it. This doesn't mean that masks do not work for individuals to prevent infection or protect others. However, it is pretty clear that laws don't affect much in the spread of the virus. Comparing states to one another shows that there is little difference in the extent of outbreaks based on their policies - but more dependent on where the state is located.

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