Covid: The Path not Taken - DarkHorse Podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough
Dr. Peter McCullough is an academic internist, cardiologist, and a trained epidemiologist located in Dallas, Texas. He speaks with Bret regarding what a wise response to Covid would look like.The McCullough Report: https://www.americaoutloud.com/the-mccullough-report/Find Dr. McCullough on Twitter: @P_McCulloughMD--- Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon. Please subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channe...
I have the distinct honor of sitting today with Dr. Peter McCullough, who is an academic internist, a cardiologist, and a trained epidemiologist in Dallas, Texas.
Dr. McCullough, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thanks for having me on.
So I have been aware of your work now for I don't know how many months.
You have become a kind of celebrity in heterodox doctoring circles in light of your position on COVID and its treatment.
This is obviously a very fraught landscape with a lot of What I regard as political landmines that are getting in the way of good doctoring and good science.
And I was hoping to talk to you about what you see from your position in medicine.
Well, I'm coming up on two years like you, Brett, of really a singular focus on the medical problem of our lifetimes.
And I think a lot of what you just described is a convergence of so many human emotions, including personal fear of infection in oneself, as well as pain and suffering and isolation in loved ones.
And then to see the twists and turns in what medical physicians and medical staff and ancillary personnel believe about the pandemic as they receive information through the media.
Well, if I might, I'm hoping to start somewhere else.
I'm watching doctors like you, who are doing what I consider to be the fundamental job in medicine, which is to scientifically evaluate phenomena, whether that is a patient who has a mysterious set of symptoms, or whether that's a pandemic about which we are learning the nature of the pathogen.
Doctors are supposed to be scientists, and that means that they don't simply dispense wisdom from on high.
What they do is they use, often informally, a version of the scientific method to discover the nature of a phenomenon and then learn how to effectively treat it.
And doctors like you have been learning about COVID, as we all have, But those who have reached a conclusion that is at odds with the public health narrative are, I'm struggling to find an alternative term, but seem to be gaslit.
You're being told effectively that the pathogen you're confronting isn't what you think it is, and I'm wondering what that looks like from your perspective.
Well, what you describe is what's called inferential thinking, that we're always drawing inferences From a series of observations, and with a new problem like this, there's an unfolding new series of observations that come out basically almost every day now, right, or every week and month that we learn new things.
So, we actually change our conclusions based on what we've learned.
In many ways, it's one of the most exciting times in medical science that I've witnessed in my entire career.
The excitement is extraordinary.
And the tensions are great, because there's always tensions as we are humbled by finding out that maybe what we had previously thought now has, you know, it's not supportable, that we're on the wrong track, and now we need to change.
Science is ever-changing, and you're right.
Doctors who are treating patients, you know, have to employ science based on making inferences, but they also have to employ the art of medicine.
This idea of having a medical hunch And following it to its conclusion, the best we can therapeutically, because people are dying.
And that's the reason why we could not wait for large randomized trials, which take two to five years, and then guidelines, which take, you know, many years after that.
The Institute of Medicine says, from the time something is fully understood, and we have like a prevention or a therapy applied, it takes 17 years for full implementation.
We obviously didn't have that.
We didn't have 17 days to wait.
to treat patients with COVID-19.
So, I've been involved, as you implied, very early on with the early treatment response that's gained a tremendous amount of attention, including, you know, basically historic U.S.
Senate testimony, multiple state Senate testimony, you know, treatment networks all over the United States.
And then, in the last year, turned my attention to vaccine safety and efficacy because, like many doctors, a large number of Americans We're volunteering for the first of its kind vaccine program.
And, you know, the response is not uncommon.
You know, the very first doctor who put a polio patient on the iron lung machine, which actually saved many lives in the polio pandemic, he was thrown off a staff.
I mean, the history is replete with this.
Every doctor who had a first innovation or had a first observation on something that was a breakthrough, whether it be on the efficacy side or the safety side, has been basically what you said, gas lit.
So what I say is, if the gas lighting is going on, it means we're on the right track.
Yeah, flack over the target.
All right, so there are a number of things I want to ask you about in the brief time I've got you.
Can you tell me, if we step back to, let's say, February of 2020, How dangerous a disease is COVID?
And then the same question for the present day to a doctor like you who has experience and all the tools necessary at their disposal.
For an infection, there probably is no other infection that we now understand is so amenable to risk stratification.
How can the same viral infection be fatal in an octogenarian And have it be less than a common cold in a kindergarten-aged child.
The principle of that's called risk stratification.
It's actually probably due to the density of ACE2 receptors in the human body.
The virus actually gains entry into the human body through the ACE2 receptor, and to a lesser extent, the TMPRSS2 receptor.
It turns out that we have a lesser density of ACE2 receptors in older individuals, those who are smokers and diseased.
But the number of receptors doesn't matter in terms of entry, but the number of receptors that actually exist, since they're destroyed by the entry, the sheer number provides protection against basically a catastrophe in the lungs, the sheer number provides protection against basically a catastrophe in the lungs, what's called the respiratory We also know that the proclivity for blood clotting increases over time.
There's thousands of determinants of coagulation.
And the very unique thing about this virus is that the mode of death is micro blood clots that occur throughout the body, the lungs, and there are fatal thrombus.
thromboembolic consequences.
Almost every autopsy I'm aware of, Brett, has shown the lungs are filled with blood clots at the time of death.
So, it's the idea that risk stratification is so huge, and so it can be very deadly in an octogenarian, and it's completely benign in a school-aged children.
That risk stratification must be applied with every single inference we make in the pandemic.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
And it is obviously at odds with a public health response that seems to be one size fits all, almost to a cartoonish degree.
The idea that vaccines are inherently the right response, that the fact that these vaccines are incredibly novel at a technological level, they are a marvel, but
They are novel and the idea that we should be interested in immediately Vaccinating the entire world if we can reach them with these novel technologies effectively dragging the entire human species into a what I would call a an irresponsibly uncontrolled experiment seems preposterous.
I mean as you point out Very young healthy children are effectively at zero risk from COVID.
Is that a fair statement?
It's a fair statement.
We've looked at, obviously, we're at now in the last two meetings with the FDA on the pediatric and adolescent vaccination in September and October of 2021.
There's a general recognition through May That 40% of children have already had COVID-19.
That's through May.
That's before the Delta outbreak.
The Delta outbreak was huge in the United States.
You know, it was two-thirds of the peak of our pre-vaccination peak.
And we know there, it actually seemed to prey upon the young.
And so my estimate would be, I would put a number on it, 80% of children now that are in the discussion for vaccination have already had COVID.
And now the CDC in the last week has acknowledged that they don't have a single case of someone who has recovered from COVID, getting it a second time and passing to anyone.
So it's basically over with.
We have now, the CDC estimates are generally for the United States, 148 million Americans through May are immune that they actually have had COVID-19 and they have natural immunity that's now supported by over 120 studies.
That's been, by the way, accumulated on the Brownstone Institute website, 120 studies supporting natural immunity.
It's a one and done phenomenon.
The only confusion that exists out there is a second positive test that can happen as a false positive test and some early confusion on the original CDC assay not being able to distinguish between flu and COVID-19.
But in terms of scientific reality, one only gets COVID-19 infection once.
The immunity is robust, complete, and durable, just like SARS-CoV-1.
They're 90% similar as the virus.
That natural immunity is going to carry us.
And you're right, the public health response has not been along the lines of risk stratification as it is with other vaccines.
We don't carpet bomb the entire population for the meningococcal vaccine.
It's kids who go to college and live in dormitories get the meningococcal vaccine.
Americans don't have a problem with that because it's safe and effective and it's appropriately risk stratified.
The same thing with the pneumococcal vaccine.
We give the pneumococcal vaccine to seniors because they're at risk for pneumococcal pneumonia.
We don't give it to children because they're not at risk.
The same risk stratification principles for other vaccines should have always been applied to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Yes, it looks to me, and of course I'm a scientist, not a medical doctor, but it looks to me like every normal medical standard and convention has been thrown out.
That effectively, the standard of care is not based on the kind of scientific deliberation that you would imagine would have to be at the foundation.
That the right to informed consent is nowhere in evidence, and that we are effectively... Well, if this was a scientific question rather than a medical question, I would say something has started with the conclusion and worked backwards, which is the greatest scientific sin that there is.
And in this case it has the added horror of putting human health and well-being in jeopardy and I'm not sure the problem is that that what I've just said Seems to me quite uncontroversial actually just the simple facts of what we are doing the idea that anybody would think to vaccinate children who are safe from this disease is
With a vaccine, even if we did not have any evidence of harm, which is not the case with these vaccines, the idea that anybody would vaccinate people who are at no risk, who have a long life ahead of them, many of whom have already had a disease that provides robust immunity, the idea that we would expose them to any risk at all from vaccines that are so new is preposterous.
And yet, when I look at the explanation for why we're doing that, It's in vague, almost childish terms, right?
The idea is somehow that vaccines are good and that you are, you know, you are doing something for your child by inoculating them without anything that looks like an adult risk-benefit analysis.
So, what has happened such that the interface between the public and medicine now looks more like PR and customer service than it does like science and medicine?
One of the most flagrant examples of what you just mentioned was recently CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta appeared on Sesame Street and was with another CNN correspondent effectively seducing children into taking the COVID-19 vaccine without presenting a fair balance between the potential benefits and risks of the medical product.
You know, we have laws in place.
We have pharmaceutical That Americans get a fair balance of benefits and risks.
And you're right, that's been abrogated in this case.
There's been a giant abrogation of medical ethics, of pharmaceutical vigilance and regulatory principles.
And it's extraordinarily dangerous.
I think historians will write about this for years to come.
How did America go off the rails?
I recently had dinner with Scott Atlas.
We spoke at a symposium together.
And Scott used that term over and over again.
He said things are off the rails.
We're not following any of the general rules.
Well, what could have been different?
That was your question, Brett.
What could have been different?
What could have been and should have been different is teams of doctors.
We should have had teams of qualified doctors Working along four principles, and I presented this to America when I testified in the US Senate in November of 2020, I said, listen, we should have had a team that was totally focused on reducing spread of the illness.
Great.
A separate team focused on early treatment.
Yet another team focused on in-hospital treatment.
And then a final team focused on vaccination.
Those teams should have been gathered, they could have met virtually, and they should have given at least weekly or monthly reports with evidence reviews and scientific updates.
You know, we're not having any formal evidence reviews and scientific updates in these in the three and four important areas called the four pillars of pandemic response.
I ultimately published that.
Well, I can tell you, if we had The right committee structure in place, and for vaccines, we obviously should have had a Data Safety Monitoring Board, a Critical Event Committee, and a Human Ethics Board.
I think that the mortality signal emerged on the vaccines January 22nd, where we had 182 deaths.
The eyeball estimate was 150 deaths total for a giant vaccine program.
We know that's the number for all the vaccines combined in the United States, 278 million shots.
We already had a mortality signal January 22nd, I think a Data Safety Monitoring Board, and look at this, and I chair Data Safety Monitoring Boards for the NIH, Big Pharma, In-Vitro Diagnostics.
I, you know, I've done this a dozen or so times, actually a couple dozen times.
I know what I'm talking about.
I've shut down, with my committees, Big Pharma programs.
I mean huge pharma programs.
Our vaccine program would have been shut down in February for excess mortality.
And America would have been very similar to the swine flu vaccine in 1976.
It would have been, listen, sorry, this generation of vaccines didn't work out.
Let's do a deep dive.
We probably would have found that there were susceptible people.
We now know that it's the seniors who die with the vaccine.
Analyses from Rose and McLaughlin have shown 50% of these deaths occur within 48 hours, 80% within a week.
There's nursing home studies from Europe and Scandinavia that show when they actually review the charts in the seniors, at least 40% the doctors have concluded are directly due to the vaccines.
The vignettes are severe reactions, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, blood pressure dropping, and then death within a day or two, whether it's basically a cardiopulmonary collapse due to overwhelming production of the spike protein or a thromboembolic death or a bleeding death a few weeks whether it's basically a cardiopulmonary collapse due to overwhelming production of but they are clearly biologically related to the vaccines.
Now we're seeing actually in obituaries.
There's an obituary from Washington State, a young woman, where in her obituary it states that she died of vaccine-induced thrombocytopenic purpuria.
There's actually now new vaccine deaths.
Choi and colleagues published a death of a myocarditis death in a 22-year-old Korean And, you know, these are young people dying and now their obituaries and their case reports are basically describing the vaccine-induced fatal illness.
You know, our tolerance, by the way, for new biologic or medicinal products and death is about five cases, gets a black box warning, 50 cases, it's off the market, doesn't matter if it's causally related or not, it's off the market, and then a deep dive in terms of safety.
What went wrong?
There's no assumption of causality and on three occasions now we've seen the CDC put on their website that they've reviewed the deaths and they just summarily dismissed them as none of them being caused by the vaccines and I can tell you scientists in my circle don't don't buy that at all.
So what you're describing is an apocalyptic failure of the multiple layers of failsafe that are supposed to protect us from such things, but I know because I've been following this story that this doesn't even begin
To get to the horror of it, because not only do we have a failure to remove this product from the market, even with a safety signal that's orders of magnitude bigger than it would need to be to alert us to a problem under ordinary circumstances.
But we are turning civilization upside down and playing with the idea of mandates to essentially bully anyone who wishes to protect themselves or their family from this product which, as you're describing, it shouldn't be on the market in the first place.
Anybody who wishes to protect themselves from it is going to be stigmatized and punished, is going to actually have civil liberties removed in order to get them to accept it.
And so, you know, this is a failure that has, it has breached the walls of medicine and is now toppling the most basic elements of our societal agreement with each other.
And I must tell you, it's setting off Every alarm bell that I've got, and I know from inside of medicine, that picture is even more stark because, you know, for example, most people don't really know what myocarditis is.
They don't know how to evaluate it when they're told Yes, there has been a certain amount of myocarditis in young people, but they tend to recover, so it's not such a serious concern.
What do you as a doctor think when you hear a claim like that?
Well, let me just say that, you know, your comments regarding, I think, death after the vaccine being this charged issue.
I think Americans and people across the world would say, listen, COVID-19 is a bad illness.
I'm willing to put up with almost anything to help everybody get through it.
I'm willing to take a vaccine to help everybody get through it.
But people aren't willing to sacrifice their lives for this.
And that's what they're being asked for.
They're being asked to say, listen, take a vaccine.
And even though it's rare, you could lose your life.
And then people are saying, well, how rare is rare?
And I can just tell you the mortality rate by all expert analyses is unacceptably high.
We're at 18,000 people in the CDC, U.S.
VAERS system.
About half of those are domestic Americans that have died with the vaccine.
There is very good work done with the CMS data suggesting the underreporting factor on this is about five.
So, if you take 9,000 times 5, we currently are at some number that is, you know, 45,000, 50,000, and that's conservative.
It could be greater than that.
That's underreporting, by the way, via projections from CMS, where we know someone's died.
But you can imagine That the under-reporting of people who, you know, there's commotion at the time of death, I've seen this in my circles, and unless somebody retrieves the vaccine cards and sits down at the VAERS system and starts to make an entry, or unless somebody's on the rolls of CMS, it may not actually be recorded.
So we have it, yeah, we have a situation where there is this now cavalier type of situation with respect to death.
And you ask the question, who's making the decision on the mandates?
Do they care whether or not there'll be some deaths among their employee population?
Do they care if there's gonna be some deaths in the student population?
Does anybody really care?
And we're not seeing any care or concern among those who are making the decision on vaccine mandates.
And I think that's what's frustrating.
I mean, you know, we have mandates, by the way, for college kids to take the meningococcal vaccine.
You've never seen college protests or lawsuits over the meningococcal vaccine.
I'm a doctor.
We take hepatitis B vaccine and flu vaccine every year.
You don't see us outside protesting these vaccines, but you'll see massive protests.
People are walking away from their jobs because they know they could die with the vaccine.
Once the word got out that people could die after the vaccine, in fact deaths were occurring in large numbers, that was by mid-April.
But rates of vaccination in the United States plummeted in mid-April.
They absolutely plummeted.
The word got out.
It doesn't matter what was on Twitter or on major media.
People were talking to one another.
Everyone knew.
And then we saw a degree of really kind of gross, distorted incentives.
The vaccines are purely researched.
Doctors cannot promote them.
Doctors can't say, doctors need to be completely neutral on the vaccines, as well as the hospitals and anybody in a position of authority, because they're investigational.
If I would have promoted the vaccines, I would have violated the Nuremberg Code, which is a principle of bioethics.
I tell you, I'm a researcher, Brad, If I told my patients, listen, you have to be in my diabetes research study, and I forced them into it through using my pressure and coercive tactics, or if my hospital did that to my patients and forced them into research for diabetes, for instance, you know, we would be sanctioned.
We'd be put up before all kinds of ethics board and be sanctioned.
So good doctors never promoted the vaccine.
They just could actually try to provide fair, balanced information.
That's the only thing that good doctors, good health systems, good health professionals could do.
Now we have the situation where there's the non-fatal syndromes, myocarditis, you mentioned them, where the FDA agrees that the vaccines can cause myocarditis.
They agreed in June, based on a universe of 600 cases, 200 cases that were reviewed, It was clear it was in younger children.
It was serious.
90% required hospitalization.
In fact, they had syndromes, chest pain, signs and symptoms of heart failures, markedly elevated cardiac troponins, a higher that we see in a heart attack, far greater than we ever see with minimal troponin elevations with COVID patients in the ICU.
And these children required observation.
Some, about a quarter in the FDA review, already had some incipient heart failure.
They had abnormal echocardiograms.
I infer left ventricular dysfunction.
They needed actually Dr. David P.
We had in the New England Journal of Medicine this summer, we had a fatal case reported.
Now we've had a fatal case from Korea.
Dr. David P.
And then to go fast forward from 200 cases at the FDA and CDC agreed on in June to 11,000 cases in VAERS.
And I can tell you, these are the ones that are certified.
I've actually reported myocarditis cases as a doctor in VAERS, and you get called by the CDC, and the CDC officer, you go down, you go over all the reports, you go over all the lab reports, and there's an agreement that, in fact, the vaccine caused myocarditis.
Tracy Hogue reported from UC Davis now thousands of cases using VAERS and V-safe ages 12 to 17, explosive myocarditis after the second shot of messenger RNA vaccine, boys way more than girls.
And in fact, Tracy's estimates are that the real rate of myocarditis is at least 50% greater than what the CDC ever projected.
She still found 86% required hospitalization.
And the most shocking thing to the Hogue analysis was that a child age 12 to 17 is more likely to be hospitalized with myocarditis than taking your chances with COVID and ever getting hospitalized with COVID.
And And the Hogue analysis, as well as a parallel analysis by Ron Kostoff looking at death, which is even more important, Death after the vaccine at any age group is more likely than actually taking your chances with COVID-19 and dying of COVID.
And the reason why that's important is what's called determinism.
When one takes the vaccine, it's a 100% chance they're exposed to the to the fatal exposure or the injurious exposure.
If one takes their chances with COVID-19, it's not 100% they're going to get the illness.
Matter of fact, many patients dodge COVID-19.
Many have already had it, so they're naturally immune.
They can't be injured again with getting the respiratory illness.
So, you can see how this wager is levered.
Both of those analyses were presented by external reviewers to the FDA at the meetings, the adolescent and childhood meetings in September and October, and they weren't disputed.
So this is really extraordinary.
These analyses now, no one is disputing these analyses.
It's a better proposition to defer on the vaccine and then manage COVID if it comes up.
It's a better proposition if you do it blind.
You have described the importance of stratifying by age, but there's also stratifying by other risk factors.
And if you're looking at a healthy child, the point is they have almost no risk.
It's not that they can't contract COVID, but the likelihood that it's going to hobble them in any permanent way is effectively zero.
So we can stratify this such that we can just take a large group of people, people to whom we owe our deepest commitment to protect them, and just simply eliminate them from the experiment.
And yet we are not doing it, which I find... I'm looking for a synonym for ghastly, and I can't quite find one.
Let me ask you this.
I know a bit about things like heart damage from work I did many years ago on the dynamics of telomeres and various tissues in the body.
When someone tells me that young people have had serious damage to the heart, but that they recover from it, My first thought is they may recover from it in the short term but it is not that they have not been robbed of longevity.
Is that a fair statement as a doctor?
Does it strike you that patients, young patients who have had myocarditis but leave the hospital are going to have, if we were to treat them as a group statistically, are they going to have normal lifespans or are they likely to be vulnerable to other phenomena as they get older?
Well, let's look at this.
I've recently been asked to lecture on myocarditis.
I'm a cardiologist.
I practice both internal medicine and adult cardiology.
And so, I want to quote a paper by Arola and colleagues from Finland.
Now, this is several years ago before COVID, but it's in this childhood group that you mentioned all the way up through adolescence.
And the rate of, and Finland had everybody.
They had everybody who develops myocarditis.
The background rate is four cases per 1 million per year.
And in the United States, we roughly have half of the population below age 50.
So we have 160 million people below age 50 in the United States.
In the analysis from VAERS by Rose and myself, and I know you featured this on a prior Broadcast that we showed that the myocarditis, by the way, after the vaccines is a skewed distribution, but the tail goes all the way up to age 50.
So this applies.
So in the United States, our background case is four cases per million, and we have 160.
So it's four times 160.
We should basically have 640 cases of myocarditis per year.
That is a background rate.
I've told you so far our VAERS system has 11,000 cases.
11,000.
So we are far beyond the background rate.
What we know is in an analysis by Avolio, so very similar last name, that the spike protein itself is the injurious element of the vaccine.
And the cell type that actually looks like it's the cell involved in myocarditis is called the pericyte, which is around capillaries in the heart and the cardiomyocytes.
And then your question is, wait a minute, if the kids take some heart damage, and even if it's transitory, is there a long-term risk?
In a paper by Tashopi and colleagues in Circulation Research in 2019, looking at myocarditis before COVID, but this myocarditis in general that comes through parvovirus, it comes through various forms of adenoviruses, etc., the rate of permanent damage and things going poorly over time in this group of people is about 13%.
And that number Brett is high I can tell you 13% if that holds for vaccine induced myocarditis and I anticipate it will.
I think that is an extraordinary number of young individuals, that is going to have permanent heart damage we're talking about the development of heart failure.
The need for heart failure medications, risks for cardiac death, and things we have to do about that, including implantable defibrillators, some children going all the way to heart transplantation.
There shouldn't be a single case of excess case of myocarditis out there.
Not one case is acceptable, let alone be sitting on 11,000, and now with school vaccine mandates for children, you can see that number is going to skyrocket.
11,000, which is again a VAERS number, which every analysis that has been done tells us that VAERS is dramatically underreported.
It's a very conservative system.
So, this is an extraordinary harm that is being done.
Am I right so far?
Well, we haven't talked about this, but I was on national TV in June when the FDA and CDC reviewed myocarditis, and they said two things that I think was completely incorrect from a public health perspective.
And, you know, I'm trained in public health.
At this point in time in my career, I have over 650 publications in the National Library of Medicine and PubMed.
I'm an editor of a major cardiology journal, former editor of another journal.
I'm the principal editor of my own textbook.
I am in academic medicine right now, and anybody you're talking to COVID-19, I imagine I'm probably At the top of the academic pile right now of scholarship.
I can tell you those two statements by our public health officials who are junior to me in their scholarship and accomplishments.
Both of those statements, I think, are reprehensible.
They said and reckless.
They said that myocarditis is mild, and they said it was rare.
Well, it wasn't mild then because 90% of the kids are in the hospital.
By regulatory standards, anything that causes hospitalization, as you know, is a serious adverse event.
It's never classified as mild.
Never.
And then they said it was rare because they took 200 cases and they divided it by the universe of people who got the vaccine.
Well, we can't do that in safety because we didn't assess everybody for myocarditis.
So we don't know if it's rare.
And when we see a signal like this in safety pharmacovigilance, we use the term tip of the iceberg.
So I was on national TV saying, listen, it's not mild because the kids are being hospitalized.
And two, it's not rare.
It's the tip of the iceberg.
And boy, was I right.
Being at now 11,000 cases in VAERS.
And you're right, it's underreported.
And interestingly, it's who reports it.
There's a paper that's published in the American College of Pediatrics.
that asked the question in 2016, who reports to VAERS?
And you know who reports to VAERS?
The answer was about 14% of the time, it's actually the patient or the patient's family that reports to VAERS.
86% of the time, it's another entity that actually really was concerned that the product In this case, the vaccine caused the problems.
That means doctors, nurses, people administered the vaccine, the pharmaceutical companies who received this, and they're concerned about their products.
So, I have to tell you, this VAERS data is real, and I've heard people say that, oh, anybody can report things to VAERS.
I filled out the VAERS sheets, Brett, and I'll tell you, every single page says, warning, this is falsification, is punishable by I tell you right now, the VAERS system, 11,000 cases, that's serious and the number almost certainly is going to be much larger.
If this underreporting relationship exists, in fact, that number of five on mortality, it may be greater for myocarditis because if you look at the registrational trials in children, the one by Frank and colleagues, for instance, in the adolescents, 40% of the kids who get the vaccines develop fever as high as 40 degrees.
They have muscle aches, body aches.
They feel very sick after shot number one and shot number two.
That constitutional syndrome could actually mask some chest pain that would be missed myocarditis.
So, as I am as a clinician who's seeing this, I can tell you right now, I am suspicious the rates of myocarditis are going to be astronomical.
All right, so you have just described a catastrophic picture that is itself the tip of a different iceberg because what people really need to think carefully about is we are mandating or we are considering mandating for children who have essentially no risk from COVID, but that's not even the full extent of it.
A child who gets COVID has very little harm that comes to them.
As far as we know, a healthy child walks away with what, if a vaccine could accomplish it, would be considered miraculous, which is essentially perfect immunity to the disease going forward.
And we would be vaccinating them to prevent them from catching the disease that would prevent them from developing this robust, broad immunity to COVID until later when it does become a threat when they're older and the disease is more dangerous to them, right?
And we would be doing this and when you really push people and you say, why are we vaccinating children for a disease that does not threaten them?
The best answer that comes back is terrible.
The answer is that effectively this is to control the pandemic.
Now, we can argue all day about whether or not this actually does control the pandemic better than children contracting COVID having very low symptoms and walking away with permanent immunity.
But what we can't argue is that that rationale effectively borrows health from young people to protect the old and infirm.
And so you mentioned the Nuremberg Code before.
And unfortunately, I think we really need to think about what's going on in those terms.
No healthy society takes health from young people in order to protect the old and infirm.
That is not an acceptable ethical trade.
And yet we are doing it without discussion, which suggests that something, that effectively the bottom has dropped out of the bucket.
The idea of medical ethics has all been subordinated to a reckless, top-down campaign focused on a single remedy that we now know, as amazing as it is at a technological level, is composed of unfortunate features and full of design failures.
You mentioned the spike protein.
That was a very poor choice of a protein to alert the immune system to the chemical nature of COVID because the spike protein is itself dangerous, right?
Now, I've gotten in trouble.
I've been quote-unquote fact-checked for that being said on Dark Horse.
But of course, this is what you're telling us.
That the spike protein is actually doing damage I've been fact-checked by fact-checkers.
They actually stopped.
You know why, Brett?
Because I quote the literature.
and that we would do this to children for no benefit to them is simply unconscionable.
You know, I've been fact-checked by fact-checkers.
They actually stopped.
You know why, Brett?
Because I quote the literature.
I cite the literature, and I ask the fact-checkers to go ahead and review that paper and make that paper even more prominent on the internet.
And they obviously, they drop me like a hot potato because they know I'm dead on with respect to the citations.
So I hope they actually pull a volio.
They pull the finished paper.
In fact, they should.
They should be able to do this, and we'll be laser focused.
Let me just say a couple things.
You mentioned this term of medical ethics.
Nuremberg Code says, under no conditions should anyone receive any pressure, coercion, or threat of reprisal.
For having something injected into their body as we apply it to vaccines in this setting of research.
And that's what actually happened in Nazi Germany with the Nazi research program.
And then the second one is the Declaration of Helsinki.
There's six of these cornerstones of bioethics that our Office of Human Research Protections in Washington actually holds.
The second one is the Declaration of Helsinki that indicates that everyone should receive informed consent.
And recently, I was on the Diane Andrews Show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and she reminded me of the Tuskegee program in Macon County, Georgia.
In Alabama, I'm sorry.
And what was done there is roughly 600 African-American men were recruited into a study of syphilis, and they were told that the study was going to prevent syphilis, They weren't told whether or not they had it at baseline.
They were given, effectively, placebos.
And this program, Brett, went from 1932 to 1972.
1932 to 1972.
It turns out in the mid 1940s, penicillin became available.
The investigators of the program didn't make penicillin available to those who had syphilis.
They let the men give it to their wives and then give it to their children.
And this program, Brett, who was it run by?
It was run by the CDC.
It was run by the Public Health Service and the CDC.
Do you know that there were Senate hearings?
There never were any apologies.
Some people stepped down.
It ultimately in 19 early 1990s former President Clinton had to step up and formally apologize now to the spouses and the progeny.
Of those in the Tuskegee experiment and say we're sorry for this and give reparations.
The CDC and the FDA is running the US COVID-19 vaccine program.
I'm not seeing anybody interested in saying they're sorry.
I think this is going to be taken.
This is just like Tuskegee over and over again.
I think this is very similar to the Nazi doctor crimes and all the same techniques are being used.
Propaganda, false information given by those in position of authority, and then malfeasance, which is actually wrongdoing by those in position of authority.
You get signs and symptoms of this.
You know, there's been a couple FDA officials, they just can't stomach anymore, and they've resigned.
In fact, Dr. Gruber, who actually signed the biological licensing agreement for Comirnaty BioNTech, she resigned seven days after she signed that biological licensing agreement letter.
As an example, one of her colleagues did as well.
Frances Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health.
He's retiring.
I'm telling you right now, this is the medical Super Bowl for the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC.
There should be zero resignations.
These people ought to be absolutely triumphant in their victory of a public health program, and yet they're heading for the exits.
This really ought to tell you something about where we are going right now.
You're right, the bioethical principles are off the wall.
Historians will record.
Do you know the World Health Organization recently said By assent, a child showing up to school by assent is actually agreeing to the COVID-19 vaccination.
My child certainly isn't, I'll tell you that much.
Yes, you know, I've been wrestling with the Nazi parallel and the Tuskegee parallel myself, and I feel, I think like many people do, an absolute obligation not to invoke those things unless it is absolutely warranted.
But the problem is It's not a perfect parallel, but it's certainly the closest thing that we've got, right?
The vaccination of children under false pretenses is very Tuskegee-like, and this time race is not the issue, but nonetheless, I don't see how there is any ambiguity on this point at all.
And what I don't understand is, I don't think you need to be all that informed or all that smart to see the problem with vaccinating children who are not threatened by this disease.
Right?
It's not that complex.
And once you find out that that's what we intend to do, It should open your eyes to all of the other things that are wrong with what we are doing.
So, for example, the vaccine program is riding on the claim that we don't have alternatives.
Now, at the beginning of COVID, we really didn't know what to do, but that's no longer the case.
We have learned a tremendous amount about how to treat it and how not to treat it, and so Let's say that the vaccines were off the table and you had, let's say that the environment was hospitable to using every tool at your disposal.
How empowered do you feel as a doctor to treat a vulnerable patient who shows up with a positive test but is not yet very sick?
Every doctor should feel fully enabled to treat this illness, just like a pneumococcal pneumonia, just like influenza pneumonia.
Come on, we do this as internists, as family doctors, as medical specialists, and I've done it from the very beginning.
I testified under oath.
I have never denied I can tell you as a doctor, I took an oath.
I took an oath to do the best I can.
medical judgment because we knew the Chinese were telling us right out of the gate that this could be fatal in some individuals.
I can tell you as a doctor, I took an oath.
I took an oath to do the best I can.
I would never let someone acquire a fatal illness and do nothing.
I just never would do that.
That's called failure to treat.
That's called malpractice.
So I want to stop you there because I think people will not necessarily know what you're talking about.
What you're talking about is that actually the quote-unquote standard of care involves essentially sending you home if you're not sick enough to require medical help.
We do not treat those who have just tested positive.
because it is not acknowledged that we have useful tools.
Is that fair? - It's a situation where we know that the illness takes two to four weeks to become fatal.
We know this now, and we may not have known it in February of 2020, but we know it now.
And so, we also know with every infection, when we start early, we have the best chances of quelling the infection before it becomes fulminant and ultimately fatal.
Do you know for bacterial infections, we actually had From the time the patient presents to the time the first antimicrobial is administered, that's actually a quality metric.
The same thing should exist for COVID-19.
Now, the interesting thing about COVID-19 is not everybody needs treatment.
We have estimates that roughly 25% of the population needs treatment from COVID-19.
We know that from an Iranian study by Mokhtari and colleagues, over 30,000 individuals with COVID-19, we've looked at the Iranian program, Which is a hydroxychloroquine-based program.
It's enormously successful.
They can give relatively brief courses of hydroxychloroquine plus other drugs in combination to individuals who are at high risk.
Now, risk stratification is so sophisticated by this point in time, any listener can go to the Cleveland Clinic website, type in their age, their medical problems, and they can actually calculate their risk of hospitalization and death with COVID-19 at the time they're testing positive.
This is so easily risk stratifiable.
So, I've always said in the first paper I published on this, the American Journal of Medicine in 2020, and then the follow-up in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, December of 2020, these are the most frequently downloaded and utilized papers in all of the treatment of COVID-19.
They were the basis for the very first treatment protocol to Americans and to people worldwide that was supported by a physician organization that's chartered in every state in the United States, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Now, we've been ahead of this.
We've been ahead of every other group on this using what's called sequence multi-drug therapy provided to Americans either through their doctors, through referring doctors, or through telemedicine services.
So, getting back to the issue of a patient in front of me who's sick with COVID-19, the first step is risk stratification.
If I have somebody who's clearly over age 50 with medical problems, the risk of hospitalization and death rises to greater than 1%.
That's a threshold to start doing something.
We take somebody let's say over 65 with heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, obesity, that's common.
We could end up with risks of 20 to 40% for hospitalization.
That's clearly enough to do something on day one, as opposed to day 14.
So, I testified actually in the U.S.
Senate in November, and I did comment about what you said.
The very first set of NIH guidelines that came out, and the NIH is not a guidelines organization.
I want your listeners to know this.
They are not in the guidelines business.
They are not in the business of giving treatment recommendations, but they tried.
And prior to that, the Infectious Diseases Society of America had three or four versions of guidelines.
Both the NIH and the IDSA focused on inpatients.
It was clear their focus on inpatients.
They had no approach for outpatients.
What the NIH said I thought was particularly impressive, and historians will write about this, they specifically said if a high-risk patient gets COVID-19, they go home, they do nothing, they literally wait until they can't take it anymore and they can't breathe anymore, they They go to the hospital and you still do nothing, still do nothing until the point of requiring oxygenation.
And at that point in time, then the first milligram of remdesivir can be given.
I can tell you that is the type of situation I can tell you as a senior doctor who's treated many patients with COVID-19, that I would take that guideline and tell them, listen, that is going to cause harm to the population.
It is a harmful document.
We'd be better off without it.
We'd be better off without other sources of guidance and just go with AAPS, use risk stratification, and start treating patients and prevent the hospitalization and prevent death.
I've always said this.
There's only two bad outcomes, hospitalization and death.
It's clear.
I think if people knew they could get COVID-19 but make it through at home, that home treatment would always win because of these principles.
We shortened the infectivity period from 14 days down to four days, 14 to four days, and that we reduce the intensity and duration of symptoms.
The drugs aren't perfect, but we need four to six drugs in combination.
Single drugs don't work, by the way.
We need four to six drugs in combination, just like with HIV, just like with the hepatitis, the other viral infections.
And that by that mechanism, we allow the virus to terminate in the house and not let it spread elsewhere.
If we let it brew in the house for two weeks and then there's a panic to the clinic or the hospital, We infect other care workers, family members, etc.
So every hospitalization in the United States has actually been a super spreader event.
Recently, Aaron Rodgers was criticized because he got COVID-19.
Well, I may mention, and I'm going to mention, I'm going to go on Joe Rogan shortly and basically recap this, that Aaron Rodgers did the right thing.
He did the exact same thing I did.
I had COVID-19.
What did I do?
I got it home.
I got involved in a multi-drug treatment protocol.
I was in research, so I was doing swabs every day.
Aaron probably wasn't, but I shortened my infectivity down to four days.
I proved that.
I did all my contact tracing.
So did my wife.
We didn't spread it to anyone, and we were done.
And then on the back side of this, now we're naturally immune.
Now Aaron Rodgers can return to the Packers, and he can never get COVID-19 again.
And he can never spread it again.
That's very different than taking a vaccine.
If he would have taken a vaccine, he clearly could have gotten it anyway.
And somebody who's vaccinated clearly can spread it to others.
And our CDC director and all the data suggest that, in fact, that's the case.
Okay, so the central thing for me, I've been trying to understand what I'm seeing and this terrible public health response to an admittedly bad but manageable disease.
And I can't escape the following thought, and you almost stated it right there.
You said we would have been better off without the guidelines.
Now, my sense is that you could have a good, proper response, you could have an incompetent response, or you could have something else.
And the problem is that so much of what I see, when I dig a little bit into the evidence, I find that our response is not only incompetent, but it is very often the inverse of what would be the responsible thing to do.
So, for example, not treating people until very late in the progress of COVID disease, that is the way to ensure that what treatment you offer is least effective, right?
It's a terrible recommendation.
It's the inverse of the right thing.
The idea that vaccines are the way to control this disease.
Again, these vaccines are not capable.
They are, at best, feeble.
The effectiveness wanes very rapidly over time.
They cause disease in their own right.
These are not the right tools.
We have other tools, and we are not recommending their use.
You mentioned various drugs that work.
Do you want to name a few that you think are useful here?
Let me just comment on your, your interpretation of public health responses.
Scott Atlas's book is out and he's been on TV.
I've personally, you know, had dinner with him and we went over it.
You know, he was on the inside.
He actually met with the public health officials.
He was at these meetings and I was shocked with what I heard.
He said that our public health officials, the ones we see on TV, Throughout the course of the pandemic, they showed up to meetings with no scientific data.
They had not reviewed manuscripts.
They were not prepared.
Scott said he was the only person showing up with new studies interpreting what was going on.
I was flabbergasted.
I said, Scott, is it true that it's actually incompetence?
That America is suffering basically gross incompetence by our public health officials?
And he said, yes.
Well, I have to say, I think you're both wrong.
I think this can't be explained by incompetence.
Incompetence would give you something like a random set of recommendations, right?
Perfect incompetence would give you a random set.
Instead, what we have is closer to the inverse of the right recommendations, right?
The failure to recommend vitamin D supplementation is glaring.
The amount of COVID that could be prevented and controlled with vitamin D is large.
The safety of vitamin D is clear.
And even if it didn't work, even if we were incorrect about this, the collateral benefits for supplementing vitamin D, especially during the winter, are clear enough on their own.
So, we're not doing that.
We now have randomized controlled trials, which we are told, bizarrely, are the only kind of evidence that is acceptable.
We have evidence that fluvoxamine is effective against COVID, and yet I see no evidence of a rapid move to add that to the standard of care.
It's almost as if something has focused on a single solution for reasons that aren't medical or epidemiological, and it is going to rewrite whatever evidence it runs into.
It's going to dismiss and rationalize away every alternative to that one prescribed remedy, And so, you know, I don't mean to contradict you.
I just think you're being more cautious than the evidence warrants here.
We are looking at something beyond incompetence.
Well, you know, I was giving, and to be fair to Scott Atlas, I was basically giving you his interpretation.
I was at a symposium in Columbus and somebody asked him that very question.
They said, you know, is it really incompetence?
Or is it the inverse?
Is it something really worse than that?
And his answer was, he does think that those in positions of power in the public health do want the crisis to end.
And they are doing, in a sense, they do have good intentions.
And he did say that specifically, I was in the audience, I listened, and I imagine his book says the same thing.
But he's very clear about the instances of incompetence and simply not following the data.
But when you get to the inverse, what you're really getting to, Brett, you're getting very close to an adjective, which is nefarious.
Meaning, are people actually intentionally trying to do harm?
And the book to point to there, I wrote one of the introductions, is COVID-19 and the Global Predators We Are the Prey by Peter Bregan.
And I have to tell you, I think it's number one in a lot of the medical book listings right now.
It has a thousand citations of evidence.
This is a factual book.
It's basically non-fiction, and it's laying out what almost certainly is, according to Bregan, nefarious intent.
There is intent to make things worse, And you know I gave my interpretation to Tucker Carlson earlier this year I was on I said Tucker listen I'm just a doctor seeing this, but I think there is intentional suppression of early treatment.
A promotion of masking, lockdowns, isolation, fear, suffering, hospitalization and death in order to mass promote the vaccine.
That was my interpretation.
Now, many months ago, and I gave Americans that interpretation on TV.
So I'm aligned with you.
It's more than just innocent incompetence.
Well, that that there is an agenda.
There is absolutely no doubt about it.
There is a vaccine agenda that is being carried out.
So I want to introduce... I don't know what's going on, and I'm agnostic about the intent behind it, but I think there is a kind of middle ground explanation that fits the agnosticism, and that is we have something like the inverse of the policy that you would recommend if you were really trying to help patients and end the pandemic.
That can't be explained by incompetence.
It could be explained by a public health response built around a remedy that does not update.
In other words, if you got really excited about these vaccines before you knew how feeble they were and how many design flaws they have within them, and you just never checked in with whether or not these were still the best treatment, you could end up
Disrupting the recognition of alternative tools that work as a result of, you know, absolutely unacceptable, indefensible commitment to a single remedy that, frankly, is making, you know, is part of a profit-making endeavor.
So, you could do that without the intent to make things worse.
Now, I'm not saying there is no intent to make things worse, and I think you point to something else that we need to be thinking about, which is COVID, the disease, and the pandemic is a real phenomenon.
And then there is a question of the political apparatus and what use it's putting it to.
And so, the idea that, you know, masking is everywhere despite quite ambiguous evidence about how effective it is, That lockdowns are also likely not appropriate in this case, not effective.
That if you were going to use quarantine, you could use a different strategy.
That that might be the political apparatus riding on the reality of COVID and doing something, yes, I would argue quite nefarious, but that it is not medically nefarious.
It is politically nefarious and masquerading as a medical policy.
And I, you know, again, I'm not telling you that I think I know what's taking place here.
I'm just telling you I think we need to parse very carefully that we do have evidence this isn't incompetence.
That may mean it's nefarious.
It could be partially nefarious.
It could be somewhere in between, but that at the very least people need to be aware that the thing that is telling them what is in their interest and what is in our collective interest is misleading them and that can very clearly be seen in failure to recommend vitamin D to a population that is almost certainly deficient.
It can be seen in the recommendation of vaccination for children for whom it does not provide a medical benefit and pretty clearly provides the opposite.
It can be seen in the policy of sending people home until they're so sick and have been delayed so long that they can't be effectively treated.
All of these things are strong indicators that whatever authoritative voice that is, it has been captured or destroyed and that we must listen to people like you who have experience on the ground and say, This is how you treat COVID.
This is what we see in patients.
And, you know, you can't listen to those authorities because that's not what they are.
Well, it should be unsurprising that, you know, academic physicians who have experience treating COVID-19 have robust publication track records in COVID-19.
It should be unsurprising that they would have a superior position in terms of recommendations than a public health official.
It's just what it is.
I mean, public health officials are not treating patients with COVID-19.
They are not really on the vanguard of cutting-edge science.
I mean, I am, like many you've interviewed, I am in innumerable symposiums and involved in information interchange all over the world Right now in our public health officials aren't Americans know that because we've seen no window to the outside world.
And to speak to your interpretation of political intent.
You know there must be some political intent with the public health response because it's so different in every country.
So if it was all about the medical problem we would settle on some uniform standards, but you know in Sweden where things have been wide open to begin with.
And you go I just got a message from Cyprus the island of Cyprus now where they are completely in total lockdown masking 24 by seven inside outside with severe penalties.
One must get a text message approval.
to leave one's house in Cyprus, and they have hardly any COVID.
I was on Chris Saucedo's news show a week or two ago, and there was a report that in Taiwan, there's more vaccine deaths than there are COVID deaths.
The same thing is true in Australia.
So you know that somehow the agenda involves vaccines.
To the complete and total end, the vaccines will cause more deaths than COVID, and the vaccines will be carried out to the complete end here.
Where the vaccines, in the end, will become more of a problem than COVID.
You can already see that in low-prevalence countries.
You can also see a very interesting trend emerging.
In the least vaccinated parts of the world, there's the least threat of COVID, including Central Africa, for instance, where the vaccination rates are 6%, and they're basically breezing through COVID, whereas you get to places like Gibraltar, the UK, Iceland,
Now, you know, now America and Canada are emerging, wherever we are vaccinating more intensely, we have a much greater problem with COVID.
To this day, I'm shocked as an American, we're one sixth of the US population.
We still have more cases and more COVID-19 deaths than any country in the world, and we have the top medical system in the United States uniquely.
You know, we have 5600 hospitals, 2200 acute care centers, 300 medical schools.
Do you know that not a single major medical institution has their own unique research protocol.
We are two years into this and it's shocking that there's no Harvard treatment protocol for COVID-19.
There's no Mayo Clinic treatment call or Duke treatment.
They have their own individual protocols which they actually showcase for their research and innovation for every medical problem under the sun.
Suddenly in COVID-19, our academic intelligentsia is zero on COVID-19.
I think it's shocking.
I think it's absolutely shocking.
It's people like me and Merrick and just a few independent leaders broke through to the world on how to treat COVID-19, and our major medical schools have fallen flat.
Right.
So the normal process in which there would be protocols coming out of the top medical schools is nowhere in evidence.
And somehow, bizarrely, even though it is widely understood that we have a regulatory capture problem involving pharma, the assumption of most people seems to be that there's not even an average level of pharma corruption with respect to COVID, but that the level of corruption the assumption of most people seems to be that there's not even an I
I don't understand why anyone would assume that what they were seeing is a pure public health response, rather than at least leaving open the possibility that some of the nonsense that we're seeing and some of the paradoxes that we're being told to accept
uh are the result of of corruption that we know exists on any other you know in any other year and well well just to answer that you know it may be systemic and so i think a lot of the rooting of this is going to be looking at the federal payments that have come into medical centers that have come into medical practices from the federal government through a variety of programs
In a sense, COVID relief funding that could be auditable with respect to the FAQs and potentially the instructions of use for the funds.
Which involve, you know, support of the federal efforts, support of the vaccine program, support of the narrative, if you will, on treatment of COVID-19.
So it may be that the medical schools actually would want to try an innovative protocol, but they felt that the federal funding may be threatened if they did so.
In fact, they should just stay on track with use of NIH guidelines drugs like remdesivir and dexamethasone.
And they felt that somehow it may actually all tie back to the The federal funding.
Listen, there are so many bright people at these institutions.
I can't imagine that there wouldn't be a doctor who would want to try anti-androgens or try fluvoxamine or wouldn't try to.
There are so many young people who want to get grants and they want to get notoriety.
How could there be no interest in getting notoriety in treating the biggest public health problem of our time?
The biggest public health problem of our time, where almost all of medicine is self-sabotaging, and so it would be easy to stand out.
But the social pressure and the political pressure not to, I believe, is explanatory.
Hopefulness that ultimately historians will sort this out.
I must tell you I have a fear that the crime here is substantial enough that there will be a huge investment in preventing historians from ever figuring out what happened.
I hope the historians are up to the challenge.
I know you have to go.
I want to be very respectful of your time.
I do have one last thing I'm going to ask you about.
Your paper with Jessica Rose revealed another oddity of the COVID pandemic and our academic, scientific, and medical response to it.
Can you say what happened with that paper and how unusual it is in your experience?
The paper is a descriptive analysis using the VAERS system and just the domestic U.S.
cases.
Jessica Rose, who's a top-notch viral epidemiologist, and myself, so I'm a cardiologist, so we had the two skill sets to analyze the data.
And it's just describing the cases of VAERS, largely the age and gender distributions.
It's non-controversial.
It's not comparative in any way.
And Jessica made the author decision to submit it to Current Problems in Cardiology And that journal, when a paper is submitted, there is, in a sense, an editorial dialogue of whether or not the paper is of interest to the editor.
And she has that dialogue showing it's of interest.
It's kind of a welcomed paper to the journal.
And then it goes through the peer review process.
And it went through the peer review process, was accepted.
And through that, you know, there were publication fees paid, publication contract, copyright, color figure fees paid.
I know because I paid them, Brett.
I told Jessica, I take care of the finances on the paper.
All of this is signed and sealed, contracted.
Then it's cited in the National Library of Medicine, so that's a done deal.
The paper is part of medical history.
It's in the record books now, and then when it's out there for several weeks and heavily utilized as we approach the first meeting, the pediatric meeting on vaccination age 5 to 11, that's where this paper would really be germane for those researching the meeting, We were shocked to learn that, without any notification of us, that the publisher Elsevier had taken it down out of PubMed.
The citation is still there, but they've taken it down.
It says temporarily withdrawn.
Then we got a notice from Elsevier saying that they're withdrawing it because they believed that they didn't invite the paper to begin with.
So I reviewed the contract.
I said, can they really do that?
It was obvious that paper was welcomed, invited.
We got the editorial dog.
If they didn't want the paper, Brett, they would have said, we're not interested.
It's not invited.
Don't, you know, they would have told us to go somewhere else.
They obviously didn't do that.
And they wouldn't have sent it to peers.
It's a preposterous explanation.
It wouldn't go through.
But I did look over the contractual aspects of this, and they could have withdrawn it if they found scientific invalidity.
If they found something that that later on they do have the right you know every so often the science is wrong.
You remember the Lancet paper on hydroxychloroquine which is a fraudulent paper and was found out afterwards and it was taken down, they could have done this if they said oh it was a fraudulent paper.
We didn't have the right data, what have you.
That wasn't the excuse.
So of interest, we asked Elsevier, we said, listen, are you sure you want to do this?
Because it's obvious there's a lot of ramifications there.
Elsevier is the biggest publisher in the world.
They said, yeah, we're sure we want to do this.
And we said, OK.
So we're in the process of filing a lawsuit against Elsevier.
It's going to be very costly to Elsevier.
proudly touts itself as the intellectual descendant of Galileo's publisher, which I find fascinating in this case.
Well, Elsevier is going to be absolutely slaughtered on this, and I can make that a promise.
And because it's not only breach of contract, but it's tortuous interference with the business of academic medicine, where our business is to disseminate scientific information.
So this is going to be taken to the highest levels.
We'll have U.S.
and litigators in the Netherlands.
This will draw more attention to the paper than whatever the stakeholders were.
There obviously were stakeholders that did not want this information to get to the public before the FDA pediatric meeting.
And through the discovery of this, Brett, we will find out who the stakeholders are.
Well, I'm looking forward to finding out with you.
Let me ask you this, you said you have 600 plus publications to your name?
I have, if you search me in PubMed, I think I'm at about 660 peer-reviewed publications in PubMed.
And there's a sizable fraction where I'm either the first author or the senior author.
So I can tell your listeners right now, I'm in the upper echelon of all published physicians in the world right now at my age.
And I publish broadly in medicine and I know what I'm talking about.
I'm an editor myself.
And how often have you seen something like this?
This does not happen.
This is effectively, it is academic malfeasance.
It's wrongdoing by Elsevier right now and they are basically caught red-handed in what is censorship on a very important topic to the world right now.
Alright, well, I'm gonna let you go.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
Please continue to fight the good fight on all of our behalf, and I look forward to our next opportunity to chat.
