Abdul reflects on how important public opinion—and its shapers—have been to the pandemic. He then talks to Chris Jackson, a pollster and Vice President at Ipsos, about their weekly pandemic public opinion poll and what it tells us about where we are and where we’re going.

Transcript

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: America Dissected is brought to you by Marguerite Casey Foundation, which launched the Freedom Scholars Award last fall in partnership with Group Health Foundation. The award is a three million dollar investment in social and economic justice scholarship that will help shift balances of power in our society. Dr. Ruha Benjamin is a 2020 Freedom Scholar and author, a professor at Princeton University and the founding director of the Ida B Wells Just Data Lab. I asked her about her new book on virality and the ripple effect that public opinions have on the concept of justice.

Dr. Ruha Benjamin: If this virus is teaching us anything, it is that something almost undetectable can be deadly and that we can transmit it without even knowing. Doesn’t this imply that small things, seemingly minor actions, decisions and habits could have exponential effects in the other direction: affirming life, fostering well-being and invigorating society? In this work, I’m trying to recoup the potential of virality, harness it for more liberatory ends and make justice itself contagious.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: That was Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a Marguerite Casey Foundation 2020 Freedom Scholar. To learn more about her work and the award program, visit www.Caseygrants.org/freedomscholars.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Governors of Texas, Nebraska and Mississippi announced that they’re ending all COVID-19 restrictions. Meanwhile, President Biden announced that there’s be enough doses to provide every single adult American their vaccines by May. And the Senate just passed President Joe Biden’s 1.9 trillion dollar COVID-19 relief package, though with serious concessions to right-wing Democrats. The House will vote to pass the bill today. This is America Dissected. I’m your host, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Remember two weeks ago when we all watched as Texas was devastated by a polar vortex that knocked out its electric grid, froze water pipes across the state and destroyed homes? It was yet another taste of how climate change is going to fundamentally change lives. In Texas, with its Lone Star energy grid, got hit especially hard. It’s easy to blame this on the unseasonably cold weather, but it’s more about a long-running pattern of decisions made by elected leaders in Texas, like Governor Greg Abbott, who have prioritized profits over the lives of people. And last week, Governor Abbott announced another decision that will put the lives of Texans on the line:

[clip of Governor Abbott] Effective next Wednesday, all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100%.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Just like Texas’s deep freeze is a consequence of terrible decisions, so is so much of what we’ve suffered through this pandemic. It’s yet another reminder that though we call this the coronavirus pandemic, the main character in this horror show isn’t actually the virus. The main characters are the people making decisions that propel it. We live in a democracy, never mind what a bunch of white supremacist terrorists think about it. And in a democracy, in theory, at least, the people should decide who their leaders are, forcing those leaders to abide by their will. So when politicians like Greg Abbott arbitrarily decide to wag the dog, to draw attention away from the mishandling of one crisis by mishandling another, to end the mask mandate despite case transmission rates that are far higher than they were last summer, we have to ask ourselves: why? Beyond the crisis of COVID-19, we’re facing another crisis we tend to forget about because election season is behind us. It’s a crisis of democracy itself. Increasingly, a small but vocal minority gets to decide too much of our public policy. They’ve captured the Republican Party and Republican politicians. And though they’re no longer dictating federal policy on the pandemic, thanks to President Biden’s victory, they still drive policy in a lot of states, putting countless more millions of lives at risk. So today we wanted to step back and ask: what does the public really think about COVID-19? What are their hopes, fears and worries? Ipsos has been polling Americans every single week since the pandemic started about just that. And today we talk to Chris Jackson, who’s leading that polling, about what it tells us about where the public is and where they hope we can go. After the break.

[ad break]

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Our guest today is Chris Jackson, he’s a pollster with Ipsos, and they have been monitoring public attitudes to COVID-19 and the response, and everything from vaccinations to physical distancing. So we’re really excited to have him on and give us an insight into where the people are when it comes to COVID-19 and where we’re going moving forward. Chris, thank you so much for taking the time.

Chris Jackson: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be with you.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Well, Chris, let’s get started. What do you think in your mind are the big top lines that people ought to be paying attention to when we think about public opinion and the pandemic?

Chris Jackson: Well, I think it’s important for people to understand how to separate the actual behavior and signal of what people are doing, from the noise that I think tends to dominate a lot of the coverage or the discussion. So, for instance, from our survey data, we can see that almost all Americans are wearing masks when they leave the home. They’re taking a lot of these sort of basic preventative steps to protect themselves. And of course, I don’t think Americans are perfect in any way, shape or form in doing this, but it’s not the situation where you see a lot of times where there’s, you know, these hordes of people going maskless that are sort of doing bad things. Certainly those people exist, but that’s not the majority. That’s not even like a large minority. It’s a small minority of people. Most Americans are trying their best to muddle through this as best they can. And most Americans are, you know, struggling really with this. And I think that’s the other thing to take away from this is, even you referenced in a recent episode, you know, we’re all at our wits end, we’re all really sort of reaching the end of our rope with this one year under the pandemic. And we’re seeing that, I think, coming out in sort of people’s sentiments and in sort of their ability to sort of deal with other things. And it certainly shows up in our polling data.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: You know, one of the interesting things that sometimes we forget is that what makes news news is in the word news: it’s new. And usually the news tends to highlight the uncommon and so we’re left with the perception that the uncommon is actually everything, because that’s all we hear about in the media. And so this is really helpful because I think if you were just watching sometimes the news, you’d think that nobody wants to wear masks and nobody wants to get vaccinated and everybody wants to go about their merry way like a pandemic is not happening. But really from the data, it seems that most people, rather predictably, feel like we do. Right? And so that’s really helpful. There are a couple of things I want to, I want to pull out here. You’ve guys have been doing this poll for some time, and so you’ve been able to really capture some of the trends in public opinion. What are some of the more surprising changes since the poll started that can tell us a little bit about how attitudes are starting to shift right now?

Chris Jackson: Yeah, we’ve been tracking public opinion on the pandemic since pretty much the beginning. We actually—Ipsos is a multinational company, so we’re active around the world so we actually started doing research on the topic in February of last year when it was apparent that it wasn’t contained in just China and was instead sort of getting around the world. And in the United States, we started our Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Tracker. Essentially, we had a conversation with Axios the day after the NBA canceled their season and we’re like: well, this is serious, we should probably start getting something in the field. Assuming, like I think everyone did, that a couple of weeks it’d be done and then here we are a year later and we’re still tracking public opinion. I think there’s a couple of things. I think it’s about—the real story of this pandemic is not that there’s a single story that covers the entirety of the last year, but that there’s been phases. Right? And there was in last March and April, there was sort of the lockdown and panic phase where everyone freaked out and we saw the largest behavior change in American history since probably World War Two—when these huge swathes of Americans stopped going into the workplace, lots of people were laid off, those layoffs disproportionately affecting people who were Black and brown and people who are sort of working low income jobs, whereas more affluent, more highly-educated people who also, incidentally, tend to be whiter, were able to essentially move to work from home. And then that sort of morphed into this period over the summer where the pandemic became a political issue and we started seeing real divergence between Republican and Democratic behavior on a lot of issues, including things like wearing masks. Right? Where you see 90+% of Democrats say they wear a mask versus 50% to 60% of Republicans. Large differences in this. And that really maintained up through Election Day. And then since the election, there’s been sort of a redoubling of concern about the pandemic as we saw the huge spike in cases over the holiday. And then now we’re just starting to see some glimmers of hope of people sort of seeing maybe there’s an end coming, and as part of that I think it’s important to underline what you were just talking about, that most Americans are looking forward to getting the vaccine or wanting to get the vaccine. You know, in our sort of most recent data, it’s essentially about 70% of Americans say they want to get it basically as soon as they can. Another 10% or so are like: yeah, I’ll get it, I’ll probably wait a couple of months, but I’ll get it. And then only about 20% are saying that they’re not going to get it at all. Right? So it’s not like a huge number of people who are rejecting it. And it’s really the story of the pandemic in chapters almost, that it’s not really a single story, but it’s been the sort of evolving conversation over the last year.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: You know, that’s really powerful and there are a couple of questions that I really want to dig in on. You know, to use an analogy from my neck of the woods, it’s almost like Donald Trump’s impact on the public conversation and public opinion is like a medicine—it’s like a poison, right? That you are taking. And once that poison is withdrawn from the public conversation, the conversation seems to shift. So I guess my question is: you know early in the pandemic and during the tenure of Donald Trump, did we see an increased politicization in mask wearing and then did that go away after he was defeated and then left office?

Chris Jackson: I mean, Donald Trump, love him or hate him, has always had a superpower in his ability to shift the agenda of conversation. And that’s one of the things I think is—when you’re a pollster, you sort of realize that most Americans don’t really have really deep, deep perspectives on issues of policy. Right? They have values, they have things they believe in, but things that are sort of more detailed policy people sort of take the cues from their leaders. And Trump has always been extremely gifted at signaling what he wants his followers to do or believe on a particular topic and essentially changing the conversation around that. Particularly in sort of the absence of any one sort of pushing against him that comes from sort of the same side. And he definitely had an impact on views of the pandemic early on. You know, there was a period sort of earlier on where concern—levels of concern with Republicans and Democrats were relatively close. Republicans were never quite as concerned as Democrats, but they were certainly higher, and the president definitely was effective at leading Republicans to have a lower level of concern, to prioritizing reopening the economy over public health, and to sort of not do things, basic protective things like wearing a mask or staying home and not going out to eat or going out to do stuff. There were huge differences in behaviors, but bipartisanship—and you can connect a lot of that to the messaging that the president was sending, I think, very effectively to those supporters. Now, again, that base, that base of people who sort of followed his lead is only about 35% of the country, right? It’s not an overwhelming majority of the country. I think that’s something that’s important to keep in mind. It’s just 35% can be very powerful when you also have, you know, 35% of the country that’s just basically not involved, right? There are sort of people who don’t vote and aren’t involved at all. So, you know, it’s not a majority, but it’s certainly enough to make a big, big impact.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: You know, it’s fascinating because, you know, you’re right about his capacity to just clearly message an agenda, and the impact that even that small amount can have on the conversation that we’re having about a global pandemic. We interviewed a group that looked at this pandemic in global context and their biggest takeaway was that the misinformation coming from government was one piece of why America’s response was so anemic. The other interesting question that I think is really critical right now is, of course, we’re in the middle of a race between the variants and our capacity to vaccinate, and vaccine hesitancy really is a serious challenge that we’re facing and very much could mitigate our ability to bring this pandemic to its knees. Because we know we need to take, we need to get about 70% to 90% percent of people vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity. And the hard part of that is about 20% of them are ineligible because they’re under 16, which gets us to 80%. And if 30% of people are vaccine hesitant, we’re now looking at only 50% coverage. Now, vaccine hesitancy has changed. That would follow that as more people, you know, get vaccinated and have a good experience, which we know is bolstered by the data, that that’s going to spread via word of mouth and people are going to become less hesitant. How have vaccine attitudes changed with time as you’ve been doing this polling? And what does that tell us about what needs to happen to actually address hesitancy?

Chris Jackson: Yeah, I think that’s a fascinating question. There’s been lots of changes in how people are viewing the vaccines over the past six months, nine months since the vaccines became sort of a real thing. Right? Something that actually existed. And like putting aside people who are sort of anti-vax, who sort of have a very complicated set of beliefs that sort of drive that behavior, when we’re sort of talking about more of the mass public, vaccine hesitancy is really—once you sort of cut past a lot of the descriptors and a lot of the rationalizations—is really just fundamentally about fear, right? It’s about not knowing what’s going to happen and being afraid that the vaccine may be worse than the illness itself, because you just don’t know. And I think there was a lot of, a lot of noise that was about the vaccines early on. Certainly President Trump didn’t help it when he was sort of talking about the vaccine, as, you know, sort of a miracle cure and there’s sort of this patina that he was trying to push it for political ends, you know. But really since the vaccines came on the market, since the election happened, we’ve seen a pretty steady uptick in interest in getting the vaccine. And then particularly once people started getting access to it themselves and hearing, like you were just saying, those positive stories, a lot of that fear is starting to dissipate. Right? And we’ve done a series of interviews, long form interviews with people, the same individuals over the past six months, and it’s fascinating to talk to these people because last November you talked to them and they’re like: I’m not getting the vaccine, I don’t trust it, it was developed so quickly, it was scary, it’s going to make you worse. To now like we’re talking to them and they’re literally in line to get the shot and they’re like: everyone else I know gotten it, it seems to be fine, I want to be able to get back to normal, I’m getting it, I’m doing it. Same individual, right?  And you’re watching their attitudes change. And a lot of that’s just about the normalization of it in society. And a lot of it’s about the reinforcing message that this is OK, that this is safe, that this is not going to make it worse. Right? And I think that’s sort of our duty as people who have platforms is to sort of like you were saying earlier, is to just be really clear and consistent with sort of your communications about it so that people have a better understanding after they listen to us than before about what’s going on and what they should be doing.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: I really appreciate that message about a clear and consistent communication, and I don’t want to keep dumping on the media here because I work for a company called Crooked Media and CNN, but in your polling, it shows that people tend to trust public health officials more than the media. But most of their message flows through the media, much of it as a function of gatekeeping by the media, because mundane messages tend to be mundane and so they’re not covered as news. How do we address this? How do we make sure that that we are getting information out to the people who need it? And have you all thought about the way that you guys deliver your polling to try and get around this?

Chris Jackson: Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. I think it’s one of the sort of ‘the questions of our time’ is like how do we talk to people in a way that is authentic and trustworthy, and people believe that we’re putting their interests ahead of necessarily our own. Because that’s fundamentally what it’s about at the end of the day. And I think with the media, there is this sort of interesting pattern of—it’s much like views of Congress where if you ask Americans about Congress, they hate it. Congress is the worst. But if you ask about their specific congressperson, they’re usually pretty OK, right? They’re usually pretty all right. Same thing’s true with the media, right? If you ask a person about the media, it’s bad. Nobody likes them. But if you ask them about the outlet they watch. Right? You know, NBC or Crooked Media or The New York Times or whoever: well, I really like them, they’re good, they do good stuff. Right? So it’s about people in these specific—reporters and these specific channels doing a good job, being transparent about what they do and do not know, and being sort of consistent about it and not necessarily worrying about sort of the bigger picture of it. But for us, when we’re talking about public opinion, it’s also about being honest about our level of certainty of information, and being honest about what the limits are in what we know and do not know. Right? I don’t have a crystal ball to sort of see the future. Right? Everything I do is, by definition, looking at the past. I interviewed people last week, last month. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. And I think a lot of people will talk to pollsters, assuming that we are able to predict the future and we can’t. No one can really. And I think that’s one of the key things that’s important is just to be very, very honest about what your information allows you to say about the world, so that people can sort of draw those conclusions. And also, one last thing is just to understand that your perspectives are not necessarily going to be the perspectives of the person that’s listening to you. People are coming from all sorts of different walks of life so you’re going to need to be able to meet them where they are to an extent. Right? So you can’t just give them a bunch of information that they don’t even understand or care about. It’s got to be in their own language.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: You know, one of the interesting questions right now is about how quickly we open up, we become a bit more lax about some of the restrictions that have been put in place mainly at the state and the local level to mitigate transmissibility. And one of the interesting things here is that we’ve seen for the last six to seven weeks a steady decline in cases—that changed last week— but there was a steady decline. People didn’t really change their behaviors much, though, over that six to seven weeks of time. And despite that, we’re seeing a lot of both political pressure on governors in particular to become a bit more lax, and also that these governors are often complying. Where is the disconnect, do you feel, between people’s actual behavior and the demand for some of these things, versus the political pressure and the choices that are being made at the very top that are changing the supply of some of these things despite the lack of demand?

Chris Jackson: Yeah, I don’t think that there is ever going to be sort of a perfect answer for that question, because we’re all so, so tired of this pandemic. Right? We’re all done. We’re all ready to be able to get back to our lives. And we all definitely want to have things open back up. And I think where that tension exists is people who recognize that these restrictions are still necessary to protect health, versus people who don’t necessarily even care. Right? And what our data shows is right now, most people are still on that side of public health, on that side of wanting to protect public health. But there is still that very vocal minority, 20% to 30% of the population that hasn’t cared from the beginning. They haven’t really changed their position. They have not cared from since last year, and they still don’t care. And I think those people are driving a lot of that pressure you’re seeing. And then it’s sort of getting a little bit of oxygen just because of how exhausted the rest of us are. Right? And how tired the rest of us are, you know, because it is, it has been very hard. And, you know, especially if you’re running a business, it’s been extremely hard. We do a lot of research with businesses and small businesses, and the stories we’re getting from them about the sacrifices they’ve made over the last year to keep the lights on is just, you know, it’s heartbreaking. Right? And, you know, it’s real, and they’re not, they’re not easy choices. Right? There’s not a perfect answer. But I think a lot of the energy, a lot of the heat, is really being driven mostly by those people who were against lockdowns in the first place. Right?  And they’re not people who were for it and now they’re against it. Right? They’re not people who are changing their minds. It’s people who are actually pretty consistently opposed.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah, that is that is helpful to understand. The new COVID-19 variants are some of the biggest concerns that people have: 77% in your last poll are quite concerned about these variants. How does that impact the way that people are engaging in certain behaviors, are people who are more concerned more likely to stay home, more likely to get vaccinated? Or is there some disparity in that or some inconsistency in that?

Chris Jackson: I think there is some inconsistency, and I think that’s because people don’t really know what they’re supposed to be doing different. Right? That the new variants, does that mean I should be wearing two masks, that mean I should be staying home more, does that mean—like what does that actually mean? I think that Americans, it’s pretty clear in our data that Americans aren’t really sure what to be doing about the new variants, different than what they’ve been doing all along. Our data certainly shows that the number of people who are double-masking when they leave the home continues to increase. It’s about 25% now, which is a minuscule amount compared to the 90% who are wearing a single mask when they’re going out of home, but still, you know, it’s an increase in that sort of protective measure. But I think that’s one of those places where Americans don’t really know what to be doing and I think that even extends to sort of what the end of the pandemic looks like. How do we sort of go from lockdown, staying at home, wearing a mask, to like post-pandemic world? Nobody really knows what that looks like. Nobody knows what that path is and they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing during that time. And I think that’s one of the big question marks we’re going to have to, we’re going have to figure out the answer for the next six months.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: You know, it’s interesting, right? Because what you’re surfacing is the natural way we think about what’s happening around us. Right? If-then. If this happens, then I should do this. Where the variants are hard because there’s not a specific variants response that we’re supposed to take, except for do the same things we were doing, just do them better and faster. Right? And so it flummoxes a bit of our natural want to respond in the way that naturally, because this thing is happening, I should do X, and we’ve been doing X now for a year. And it also in some respects undercuts the thing we need to do, which is to say: I’ve been doing this for the last year and yet these variants are coming and I’m really afraid of that, maybe what I’m doing doesn’t work. When in fact, actually this is the time to be doubling down. That’s a really important point that you’re making about the lack of sort of clear response to something like this. I want to ask one more question. We know that the pandemic has taken a disproportionate tolls on people of color in our country, and that’s both in terms of lives and in terms of livelihoods. How do respondents of color look at the various questions we’ve talked about potentially differently because of their experience? And, you know, as we think about vaccine hesitancy, engaging particularly with the black community that has suffered at the hands of exploitation by the quote unquote “science” means that you can’t just tell Black folks to trust the science. We have to be a lot better about that. What can we glean from your polling about a) some of the concerns that are particularly facing people of color, and b) the right way to be taking the conversation forward with communities that have been traumatized by science and scientists in the past?

Chris Jackson: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. We’ve seen that throughout, you know, even the very beginning of the pandemic we saw that Black respondents were much more concerned about the pandemic than white or Hispanic respondents. They certainly bore outsized damages, particularly in sort of the early months, which honestly the rest of the country sort of caught up on now in a somewhat depressing fashion. But they still continue to be much more concerned about the pandemic overall. But as you were noting, Black Americans are a little bit more hesitant about getting the vaccine than white or Hispanic Americans are. And there’s a lot of history and legacy about why that’s the case, but it’s real and legitimate. And what our data has shown us is one of the key sort of factors in helping people that have, I think, legitimate concerns get past that is about having trusted people talking them through the process, vouching for it, and helping get them through this. So, for instance, when President Obama got the vaccine, that I think moved the needle with the Black community more than sort of any messaging campaign has recently. And I think that’s essentially—it’s almost at a retail level, right? Of individuals that are known and trusted, essentially vouching for and saying: this is OK, this is safe, this is fine, we should do this. Right? Not the government, not sort of well-meaning outsiders, but people that are in these communities helping bring them along and helping them understand the value of and understand the safety of it. I think that’s the big sort of thing that will help move people that aren’t going to be reached in sort of the mass advertisement campaigns that we’re seeing right now.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: That’s, that’s really helpful. Chris, one last question. We always ask everyone: how have you been spending your time, this pandemic?

Chris Jackson: Work. Lots and lots and lots of work. We’ve been doing probably two or three new polls a week since the pandemic started. So, you know, I have, I think I probably have a better insight to the American psyche now than I did a year ago, for better or worse. But, you know, and I think that’s been, that’s been helpful for me because it’s been a way to help sort of the public, help America, right? Is by sharing the voice of the people, sharing sort of their experiences and their knowledge and helping get that out there. I think it’s, you know, it’s a way that people can be heard, right? And be seen metaphorically. And particularly in these sort of crises, that’s, I think, really important that, that regular Americans are seen and heard. And that’s not just sort of experts talking to experts all the time.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. Well, we really appreciate you and your work and coming on here to share it with us. And we hope that we can connect sometime in the future. But thank you again for your polling and for your exposition on what it can tell us about this pandemic and where we go from here. That was Chris Jackson. He’s a pollster with Ipsos. You can hear their work. New polls come out every week at Ipsos.com. Chris, thank you so much.

Chris Jackson: Pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: As usual, here’s what I’m watching right now: Case transmission rates have flatlined at October levels since last week, as more transmissible viral variants spread across the country. With past hotspots like Texas reopening, will we see another jump in cases? With three vaccines now available and President Biden’s pledge that every single adult will have access to a vaccine by the end of May, that remains the question of a deployment. From the jump, our anemic public health infrastructure has been a central challenge to everything from testing to tracing to vaccinations. Will our deployment capacity ramp up fast enough to get those vaccines and arms? The other important question here is how people will deal with differences between different vaccines. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has several advantages: it’s only one shot and it doesn’t require storage at frigid temperatures like the others. Now, many of you have heard that the J&J vaccine is just 72% effective, compared to effectiveness in the 90s for its counterparts. I need you to know, we cannot compare apples to oranges on these. These vaccines went through trials at different moments in the pandemic. Pfizer and Moderna, when cases were low, and J & J when cases were high. Here’s why that matters: when you do a vaccine trial, you compare two groups, one randomized to receiving the vaccine and one to placebo, and you compare the probability of getting the disease among both groups. You don’t really know if the people who didn’t get sick in your trial didn’t get sick because of the vaccine, or because they just weren’t ever exposed to the disease in the first place. The likelihood that they’re never exposed goes down when transmission increases, which makes it really hard to compare vaccines that were tested during different moments in the pandemic. There’s also the fact that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was tested while the new variants of concern were spreading, meaning it was effective even while these variants were spreading among us. Importantly, that doesn’t mean that Pfizer and Maderna are not effective against the variants, just that they were studied before the variants had really penetrated. So here’s the bottom line. Every single one of these vaccines is effing fantastic. Please take whichever one you can get access to first. And if you want more of a breakdown on this, I hope you’ll check out my recent post at The Incision. Incision.substack.com. That’s it for this week. Next week, we talk to Dr. Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer at Partners in Health, about why it’s absolutely critical that we don’t just get all of America vaccinated, but the whole world. If you like the show, I hope you’ll tell others, make sure to rate us and subscribe, and you can rep us by picking up your America dissected swag today. Our Science Always Wins hats are back, along with our super soft sweats and Tees. Crooked.com/store.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: America Dissected is a product of Crooked Media. Our producer is Austin Fisher. Veronica Simonetti mixes and masters the show. Production support from Tara Terpstra, Lyra Smith and Alison Falzetta. The theme song is by Taka Yasazawa and Alex Sugiura. Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer, Sandy Girard and me: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, your host. Thanks for listening.