Appearing on Wednesday’s CBS Mornings and CBS Mornings Plus, infectious disease expert and Covid-19 pandemic TV mainstay Dr. Michael Osterholm stopped by to hawk his new book The Big One and, despite the best efforts of the CBS co-hosts to have Osterholm answer for the public health community’s failures during Covid that caused their credibility to crater, Osterholm repeatedly took aim at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Instead of considering why so many Americans have flocked to Kennedy or why there’s such a forceful Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement, Osterholm blasted anyone not on board with the “science” as victim of “disinformation,” “magic,” and “smoke and mirrors” that will have deadly consequences.

The interview started off on a humorous note with Dokoupil remarking he was ubiquitous during the pandemic, but they had not spoken in-person given the lockdowns.

But niceties aside, Dokoupil dove into wondering “how likely is” another pandemic, to which Osterholm wasn’t political in answering. Rather, he explained the infectious nature of bats in China, giving us another reminder to not go looking to eat them. 

Dokoupil has usually been a rare legacy media mentioning how public health failed during the pandemic (see here and here), but it was co-host Nate Burleson on this occasion that ran through some of the more ridiculous lockdown restrictions and wondered why these happened.

Check out Osterholm’s lackluster answers, only confirming rules such as six feet of social distancing and cloth masking were off kilter and no contrition (click “expand”):

BURLESON: You talk about the lessons that we’ve learned from COVID and looking back on it, there’s things that we can even look back on and second guess now, like wiping down groceries. You mentioned the hygiene theater, the Plexiglas or the six-foot rule. Why were we so focused on the wrong things during COVID?

OSTERHOLM: You know —

ADRIANA DIAZ: Are those wrong?

OSTERHOLM: — well, they were wrong in the sense that there was enough understanding to say, for example, this is an airborne disease. Airborne disease means six feet was irrelevant. It was about what — how the virus carried in the air. Imagine walking down the street today in New York City, and you smell cigarette smoke, and you realize the person is 35 to 40 feet in front of you, but upwind. That’s an aerosol.

BURLESON: That’s a great example.

OSTERHOLM: That’s how this virus was moving, and we needed to give people that information to say you have to wear a special kind of mask.

BURLESON: Yes.

OSTERHOLM: The one that we call an N95.

BURLESON: N95.

OSTERHOLM: How many people wore chin diapers? How many people wore surgical masks that provided little protection or —

BURLESON: Or nothing at all?

OSTERHOLM: — or nothing at all, and that was the best tool we had at the time. But people, unfortunately, the public health community couldn’t get together to understand that. And just to summarize it, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization who in two years into the pandemic, resigned and left. In her departing interview, she said the biggest mistake we made was not getting it right on the air with what happened with COVID.

Fill-in co-host Adriana Diaz went down Osterholm’s preferred route, asking “what needs fixing the most to prepare us for what you call The Big One.”

This gave Osterholm the excuse to not discuss why Americans have abandoned government health agencies and pivot to declaring America “in a free fall” with “a public health system that’s being destroyed overnight, and it’s one that, rather than believing in science and all that it has accomplished over the last hundreds of years, we’re now talking about magic, smoke and mirrors, and the inability to deal with things now also impacts our ability to plan for the future.”

“[T]he vaccines that we need for future pandemics were just basically taken off the shelf by this administration and said we’re not going to fund the mRNA vaccine technology anymore. Things that have no basis in terms of science, at least...We always need to be, you know, looking at change and how to get better and how to improve...[W[e know a lot of what we need to do and we’re not doing it, and at this point, we are gutting public health as we know it,” he later concluded.

As mentioned, Osterholm returned for an appearance on the Plus show. The difference here, though, was it was all arrogance, all the time.

Dokoupil tried to offer hope the public would be better prepared for another pandemic, applying a sports analogy: “So you would think this is game two of the season? We just had one five minutes ago. You know, like in — does that not make us more ready, not less?”

Osterholm didn’t buy it, lecturing the public for “completely ignoring the lessons that could have and should have been learned from the past pandemic” and arguing the federal government failed to have a true “9/11-like Commission following the pandemic to say what went right, what went wrong,” and “how could we make it better[.]”

CBS News medical contributor and fellow Biden transition official Dr. Celine Gounder was around for this segment, giving Osterholm a softball about Kennedy’s public health leadership.

Of course, Gounder and Osterholm tag-teamed to lecture the American people about having climbed into bed with a man they despise instead of concede or consider why the public has roundly rejected them from 2020.

Notice how, in the second exchange, Gounder and Osterholm lamented too many Americans view “science” as “an ideology itself” (click “expand”):

 GOUNDER: Yeah. So, Mike, we know that public health is our front line defense against the next big one. We’re seeing this massive meltdown now at the CDC. The director has been fired. Multiple leaders have resigned. There’s a real crisis of confidence also in the CDC with critics like Secretary Kennedy saying the CDC has lost credibility. How do you think the agency can realistically win back the public’s trust?

OSTERHOLM: First of all, we have to recognize we’re in freefall. I’ve never known a time in my 50 years in public health like this. Where — where is the leadership that can take on the mis and disinformation? Right now, we have two forces out there working against each other. One is science that has brought us all the benefits of increased life expectancy because of reductions of illness over the last 50 years and then we have magic — smoke and mirrors, and those two are in competition right now. And what Mr. Kennedy represents is the magic smoke and mirrors and that is misinformation that is making the public think that he’s helping, when in fact he is actually causing great harm. And not just for now, but as we talk about the pandemic preparedness, as you so well know, one of the most important things we need are better vaccines for these future pandemics. He ceased all the funding for this critical initiative to do that. So it is an issue. I don’t know what it’s going to take to change this dynamic, but I can tell you the world has to understand and specific to the U.S., this is about literally science versus magic.

GOUNDER: Now there is, to — to your point, there’s a growing concern that science is taking a backseat to politics and some people actually think science is an ideology itself. What needs to happen for people to understand the scientific process and for that scientific process to remain politically independent?

OSTERHOLM: Well, first of all, let me make it very clear the public will understand the impact of this, because we’re going to see more disease. We’re going to see more people dying needlessly. We’re going to see outbreaks that don’t get detected early because we don’t have a public health system in place. We’re going to see vaccines that have saved so many lives for so many decades. Suddenly not available, that will begin to play quickly in the public. They’ll see that it’s going to be a direct impact issue. I hope it doesn’t take that to get to this point where we understand the importance of science, the fact that science, by the way, is not truth. Science is the pursuit of truth. We have to keep reinforcing that message that this is what we’re all about is trying to find what are the things that will save lives, make people’s lives better. And right now, we’re challenged.

To see the relevant CBS transcripts from September 3, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).