Episode 15: Phil Kerpen on School Masking, the CDC and Dr. Fauci Unmasked

Phil Kerpen goes into detail on the problems with listening to CDC guidance, the disastrous Fauci and Birx lockdowns, and the possibilities of indefinite masking in certain parts of the country.
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Ian Miller: (00:27)Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We've got a special guest today, Phil Kerpen the president of American commitment principal at the committee to unleash prosperity frequent Fox news contributor, and, and also a CDC critic. So we'll we'll get into that. Welcome to the show, Phil. Thanks so much for doing this.Phil Kerpen: (00:47)Hey, Ian, my pleasure. Great to be with you.Ian Miller: (00:49)Yeah. so I wanted to start with kind of where we we've started a lot with these conversations, which is, you know, what were your initial thoughts about COVID where you immediately skeptical about, I mean, how severe it was any of the policies we were doing or were you concerned, you know, what was, what was your response?Phil Kerpen: (01:08)Well, you know, I thought the it's interesting. I thought the most striking feature of the early data out of China was the extreme age skew in all of the data. And, you know, I remember telling my kids in like January and February of 2020, this really doesn't affect kids. It's nothing you have to worry about. It's not gonna ha have any effect on you. And of course I was incorrect only because of the way it was mediated by bad government policies. But you know, it became pretty clear pretty early on that the policy response was going to be, you know, catastrophically off course poorly targeted, poorly designed that it was being politicized in an extremely destructive way. And so, you know, normally I work on kind of economic issues, taxes, spending, regulation, that kind of stuff, but it was kind of obvious that all the usual stuff they care about was about to become largely irrelevant because we didn't have government, you know, forcibly shutting down people's businesses and schools and kind of destroying their lives. And so I've been on kind of this two year detour trying to fight all of this stuff and unfortunately with a lot less success than I would've liked, especially when Trump administration was in. Cause I had a lot of pretty good ties there and for the most part, they, they didn't listen to much of what I have to say. Unfortunately,Ian Miller: (02:33)That is, it's funny. You mentioned that, cause that was my next question for you. So you know, obviously you have a lot of contact with politicians and, and especially in the Trump white house early on. So what do you think, what is your opinion or, or what was your sense of what was going on inside the Trump white house with regards to COVID policy? Did they kind of unquestionably accept the, the Fauci Burke's lockdowns or was there concern that these would have other impacts or, you know, what, what did you think their sense was early on of what the policies were gonna do?Phil Kerpen: (03:03)Well, you know, I think the first of all, they had a team that was very poorly designed for dealing with this virus. And, and this has continued to this, to this very day, but I mean, they had people whose experience and expertise really was from fighting HIV and just a completely different type of virus, you know, for, for a sexually transmitted infection, you can actually do contact tracing and it has some value even, even for that, it it's you know, limited, but it has some value for a highly infectious respiratory virus it's completely absurd. And yet they took kind of this whole mentality, this whole model. And I think that the Burkes hire was kind of the key bad hire of the Trump administration because they took this, this sort of paradigm that really didn't fit at all. And they tried to use that as the foundation of everything that came after.Phil Kerpen: (03:55)And I actually think that Trump had some reasonably good instincts fairly early on. You might own, remember when he said