Sam Harris argued that if the coronavirus killed children at higher rates there would have been less tolerance for vaccine skepticism during his appearance on the "Uniting America with John Wood Jr." podcast Thursday.
"In one way, we got very lucky that COVID wasn't worse than it was. It could've been much, much worse. It could've been ten times as deadly or fifty times as deadly and we would've lived through, or many of us wouldn't have lived through, something truly awful," Harris said.
"Had COVID been worse, you know. Just enough worse to really get our attention, to really be undeniable, we would've had a different political conversation around it. There wouldn't have been the same kind of vaccine skepticism," he continued.
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"Leave COVID exactly as it is, but just make it preferentially dangerous to children rather than to old people. Right, you just flip that around, the variable of age. If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousand, from COVID, at a rate of whatever it was, one percent say. But it was pretty much all kids, we would have had a very different experience," Harris said.
"And the patience, there would've been no f**king patience for vaccine skepticism, right. And everyone would've recognized, this is not my body my choice. This is you're not gonna kill my kids with your ignorance."
Harris said if children died at higher rates from the virus and if the vaccines were more effective at stopping the spread of the virus, there would have been less patience for criticism of the vaccines.
"In some sense we got unlucky at how benign this was and how mysterious it could yet seem because you can run the argument: well did he die from COVID or with COVID? He was eighty years old," he said.
"I'm saying that there are changes in the real world that could have happened and could yet happen that would've been immensely clarifying," he continued.
Harris said that despite his comments, he was not hoping for a worse outcome, but argued it would have been clarifying.
"I'm not saying I wish for those things, because those are pictures of worse suffering for people. But had those things been in place, I just don't think we would've witnessed the same kind of shattering of our society around this particular variable," Harris said.
Harris previously defended Twitter's censorship of the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story despite admitting that such action constituted a "conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump." He also said Trump was worse than Usama Bin Laden.
