Kevin Roche on coronamania

When it comes to COVID, Power Line's go-to source for making sense of the subject is Kevin Roche, who brings his years of experience in the health care field to his very useful website, healthy-skeptic.com. Scott Johnson follows Kevin's work closely on Power Line (here, here, and here, for example), but we decided it was time to hear from Kevin directly in podcast form.

Among his other pithy phrases are, "Coronamania thrives in darkness," a nice twist on the pretension of the Washington Post, and also, "you can't spell 'pandemic' without panic."

In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the latest on the "Delta variant," the misperceptions of the so-called "breakthrough" infections among the vaccinated, what vaccines actually do, how the CDC has squandered its credibility with its constantly shifting messages that seem in large part to be politically driven, and several other aspects of the COVID scene (including the lab leak hypothesis). One important takeaway: COVID is here to stay, and we haven't yet come to grips with a serious long-term adaptation strategy. It's almost as though our public health bureaucracy and some political leaders like the crisis atmosphere—and license to spend huge amounts of money—COVID has provided. Never let a crisis go to waste, as someone once said.