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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
26:02
How California Mishandled the CCP Virus | Dr. Jeffery Barke
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Time Text
You have been vocal about the way California is handling the virus.
Can you tell us about your ideas?
You may remember that California was one of the first states to completely shut down our economy.
And it's not so much that they shut it down that a lot of people had a problem with.
We were scared about what happened in New York.
It appeared that the health care system was going to be overwhelmed.
So everybody around the country was like, oh my goodness, we don't want what happened in New York to happen here.
So the governor shut down the economy.
But he did so in a very arbitrary way that pissed people off.
Rather than use some metrics that might actually make sense, like actual people getting ill or hospital capacity.
Why do you think you have some problems with his approach of, like, how they are measuring?
And so they have these color codes.
They have, like, these four color codes.
That make no sense.
Why doesn't it make any sense?
Because it's based on cases.
So can you explain that?
Cases meaning how many people have tested and they're positive.
That's a case.
It has nothing to do with whether or not that person is ill.
So you can manipulate case count.
Just do more testing.
And the cases will go.
And what about the virality?
Does that have an impact?
Are they thinking, okay, if you have this many cases, then it could get to...
Well, that's the idea, but it's not the reality.
So you don't see hospitalizations or deaths follow case count.
You know, here's the thing about science.
Science isn't precise and science isn't set in stone.
So there are a lot of scientists that have different perspectives and different ways of looking at the data and thinking about this virus.
Why are they not enough differing opinions when it comes to the policymakers?
Science has become political and opinions that differ from the mainstream media get banned.
The CCP virus has disrupted our way of living in California.
My guest today is Dr.
Jeff Barkey.
He's a board-certified primary care physician and author of the book, COVID-19, A Physician's Take on the Exaggerated Fear of Coronavirus.
He will discuss how California is handling the virus and what we can do to minimize the harm caused by the pandemic.
Welcome to California Insider.
Great to have you on the show.
Nice to be here.
Thanks for having me back.
We want to talk to you about California and how California handled the coronavirus, is handling the coronavirus, which we call it CCP virus.
It should be called that.
One of the things that I have seen is that all the governments around the world, when the coronavirus, CCP virus came, They all really started panicking and caring about their people.
Yes.
We didn't see that in China.
Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party, which is in charge of ruling China, what they did was they welded the doors, they shut down their cities, they welded the doors of the people, they treated their citizens in a horrible way.
They also didn't tell us about the pandemic, didn't tell us that it would go person to person for a while.
They lied to us.
They also cut our supplies to the PPEs.
But now, you have been vocal about the way California is handling the virus.
Can you tell us about your ideas?
California is not unique.
There are other states that have done a very poor job as well.
Michigan is one of them.
But California, I think, is leading the pack in their terrible response to coronavirus.
You may remember that California was one of the first states to completely shut down our economy.
And it's not so much that they shut it down that a lot of people had a problem with, because early on, I get it, we didn't know a lot about this virus.
We were all scared.
We weren't sure what was going to happen.
You may remember we were told that, you know, for two weeks we'd shut down to flatten the so-called curve.
We were scared about what happened in New York.
It appeared that the healthcare system was going to be overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed to the point that the military brought in a hospital ship.
The Army Corps of Engineers built a hospital, I think it was at Javits Center.
Neither one of those facilities were used because we got scared.
But the capacity never was a problem.
So everybody around the country was like, oh my goodness, we don't want what happened in New York to happen here.
So the governor shut down the economy.
But he did so in a very arbitrary way that pissed people off.
So he created this essential non-essential list, if you will.
So he said, for example, that marijuana dispensaries were essential, so he allowed those to be open.
He said liquor stores were essential, so he allowed those to be open.
Now, maybe some people agreed with that because at least we had alcohol to quell our anxiety in the evening, right?
But then he also said that churches were non-essential.
Even to this day, technically, churches continue to not be allowed to be open.
And then he had the gall to shut some of the Orange County beaches.
Of all places where it's probably the safest, you have fresh air, you have sunshine, vitamin D, easily spaced between people.
But he had the gall to shut down Orange County beaches.
But there was that photo that kind of went viral.
It showed how the beach was fully packed with people.
And it looked like people were not really distancing.
Yeah, except those pictures were fake news.
So those were old pictures of the beach.
They weren't actual pictures of what was going on on the beach.
So the governor acted in a way that I believe was arbitrary.
And capricious.
And that's what really upset people.
So we shut down.
Then we allowed some stores and restaurants and so forth to open up again.
Mom and pop stores were closed down, but big box stores were allowed to be open, hurting the people that needed those jobs the most.
So then we opened back up.
And now, once again, the governor is playing games with California.
So rather than use some metrics that might actually make sense, like actual people getting ill or hospital capacity...
Why do you think his approach is not...
You have some problems with his approach of, like, how they are measuring.
And so they have these color codes.
They have, like, these four color codes.
That make no sense.
Why doesn't it make any sense?
Because it's based on cases.
Right.
So can you explain that?
Cases meaning how many people have tested and they're positive.
That's a case.
It has nothing to do with whether or not that person is ill.
That person could be asymptomatic, for example, as many younger people are.
It has nothing to do with the number of hospitalizations and even nothing to do with the number of deaths.
So you can manipulate case count, just do more testing.
And what about the virality?
Does that have an impact?
Are they thinking, okay, if you have this many cases, then it could get to...
Well, that's the idea, but it's not the reality.
So you don't see hospitalizations or deaths follow case count.
What we're seeing now is a lot of the people that are now testing positive are younger people.
If you look at the CDC's own statistics, not my interpretation of it, but the actual statistics, the survivability of the virus, if you're 20 years or younger, is 99.997%.
What does that mean?
That means, you know, you're pretty young, maybe not less than 20, but even at your young age, you have an excellent chance if you get this virus of surviving.
I wouldn't even be worried about you.
So we need to put that into context.
So, for example, especially with children and opening schools.
So in all of the United States, 200,000 plus deaths.
How many are children?
Well, less than 15 years old.
There's only 72.
Now don't get me wrong, every one of those 72 deaths is a tragedy.
But if we compare that 72 to other things, like influenza, 2019-2020 influenza season that's going on now, 125 deaths in children.
It's twice as many as COVID. Have we ever closed our schools because of influenza?
Have we ever required the masking of healthy children because of influenza?
So now that we've established that younger people have very, very low risk of COVID-19, now we're shifting.
So now the teachers' unions and those with power over schools say, well, it's not about the health of the children.
It's about that children could spread this virus to at-risk adults.
That's just simply not true, too, and there's been multiple studies.
There was a study published in The Atlantic, came out maybe two weeks ago.
The Atlantic is not exactly a right-wing journal, and they looked at schools throughout the United States.
I think they studied 200,000 kids in 47 states, and their conclusion?
There's no evidence that children are super spreaders, as the kind of term is used, and there is little, if any, evidence that those kids are spreading the virus to at-risk adults.
In fact, the opposite seems to be happening.
Do you think the governor and his team that are in charge of coming up with these policies, what type of data are they looking at?
Do you think they have a perspective that's different from what you're seeing?
Well, I'll tell you, the governor, I don't know what he's thinking.
And I think it's driven by pressure from those that support him.
And the most important constituency that supports him Is the CTA and the teachers' unions.
So they provide them with a lot of funding.
They have the most important vested interest for keeping the schools closed or open.
But what about the scientists?
He has to have some scientists around him or people that are telling him, hey, and the health departments that are saying, hey, you know what, this is what we should do.
Is he getting...
I don't know who scientists are.
I mean, I keep waiting for his phone call.
He hasn't called me yet.
There's a lot of really smart scientists.
And, you know, here's the thing about science.
Are we looking at different facts and data or are we interpreting the same data?
Science isn't precise and science isn't set in stone.
So there are a lot of scientists that have different perspectives and different ways of looking at the data and thinking about this virus.
And the problem is, is if you don't agree with the mainstream media, the Dr.
Fauci's of the world, then your opinion is shut down.
You're banned.
You're banned on Twitter.
You're banned on YouTube.
You're banned on Facebook.
And they don't want to hear.
So you may be familiar with a recent group of scientists, three of them, that came out and put out this, what's it called?
The Great Barrington Declaration.
Great Barrington Declaration.
I think that's the right word, is a place in Massachusetts.
And there's a scientist from Oxford, there's a scientist from Harvard, and there's a scientist from Stanford.
And they came out and they said, listen, we've gone about it wrong.
The lockdown has created so much suffering in this country.
We think that there's a better way, a way very similar to how Sweden has handled this.
And that is a risk assessment way.
You take the most vulnerable in the population, and we know who they are.
You just look at the CDC data.
As a matter of fact, if your audience goes, this is what I do to find it.
You type in CDC COVID-19 deaths by age, and you click search, and you'll see the CDC data.
It's quite clear and fairly easy to read.
You can look at different age groups, the survivability and the death rate, and you see disproportionately as you get older, 65, 70, that's where the death occurs.
In the younger population, it's not much more dangerous than influenza.
So these three epidemiologists say, risk assessment, we protect the most vulnerable and we do so aggressively.
We're extra careful with them.
But the rest of us, we let us go about our lives, living our lives fairly normally.
And the idea is a lot of us are gonna get exposed to the virus.
We'll either be asymptomatic or we'll have mild symptoms and we'll recover.
And when we recover, we'll then be immune and we'll provide protection for the most vulnerable.
The only other way to do it is continue this draconian lockdown while we wait for the savior of the vaccination.
And that may come, but it may not come.
And you may remember, this was years ago, I think this is actually the path forward.
When we had HIV-AIDS, right?
When somebody got HIV in the 80s, it was a death sentence.
And it was made most famous when the famous basketball player Magic Johnson got AIDS and everybody was frightened.
Players, at least initially, didn't want to play with him and basically had to retire from basketball.
That was right about the time that the antiviral cocktails were coming on the market.
Magic Johnson is still alive today, right?
You don't even hear about AIDS anymore because we have a series of antivirals that if you get HIV, you take and And your life expectancy is normal.
And within a few years, we no longer can detect the virus in your body.
I think we're going to see that with COVID. We saw a glimpse of that with President Trump, right?
74 years old.
He had aggressive treatment early in the course of his treatment.
He had two specific treatments that I think made a big difference.
One was remdesivir.
Remdesivir, although there's been a recent study that puts a little bit of a cold towel on its use, but nonetheless, the concept is good.
Remdesivir is a viral RNA analog.
So it's sort of like if you were building a big Lego feature right here and I gave you a defective Lego block.
And you put that Lego block on and then you couldn't build on top of it.
That's what remdesivir does to the virus.
And then he had an antibody, monoclonal antibody cocktail.
Fancy words, monoclonal.
So we clone the cells From the body that manufacture the antibodies, so they're making identical antibodies, and those antibodies are against the spike protein of the virus.
So you have these antibodies that are grabbing onto the spike protein, preventing that virus from replicating, along with this defective Lego block, if you will, And President Trump is 74 years old.
He's in a high-risk group.
He recovered, and within a week, he's back out and doing his rallies and so forth.
So you're saying that science is not set in stone, but a lot of people, unfortunately, I think they believe that science is set in stone.
When something comes out, they believe in it.
When Dr.
Fauci or some of the others in authority say something, they believe it, like there is...
No questioning it, and there aren't differing opinions.
Now, why are they not enough differing opinions when it comes to the policymakers?
And why are they not invited or listened to debate?
Are they debating that?
Some.
So President Trump put Scott Atlas on his Corona Task Force team, and you've seen what's happened to him.
He gets beat up because he has a slightly different opinion than the other doctors there.
What about in California?
Do you think there's any...
I don't know.
I mean, you know California is, at least in the legislature, they have a supermajority.
And so the Democrat Party controls the legislators in California.
So I don't know who Governor Newsom looks to for medical advice.
Certainly not me or people that think like me.
And so he has a singular, narrow perspective on the science, and he's not listening to anybody else.
Do you think this issue has become political?
Like people are, certain people believe this way and other people believe in that.
It's horrible that science has become political, but yes, science has become political.
And opinions that differ from the mainstream media Get banned.
So, you know, I've put out some videos.
I've had some pretty strong opinions.
I don't agree with a lot of the approach, but when I publish a piece or I record a video, it's often banned on Facebook.
It's banned on YouTube.
Twitter shuts me down and worse.
I mean, I don't know if you spend any time on Twitter, but it is a cesspool.
I get Twitter haters like you can't believe.
I had a Twitter header recently that said he hopes me and my entire practice, I'll get COVID and die, so I'll stop giving off my opinion.
Where do you think this fear comes from?
This is fear, right?
It is fear, yeah.
Because they think that by what you're saying, it may affect them and they may end up getting there.
It's really fear-based.
It's a neurosis.
It's really a psychosis, if you will.
And it's natural.
When you have a lot of fear, you don't think clearly.
And when you act based on fear, you're acting based on pure emotions.
You often don't make good decisions and you don't make decisions that are helpful.
And that's what we're seeing a lot of people do.
And this fear is being contributed by the mainstream media.
If you watch standard cable TV at night, you won't hear any good news.
You'll be told when the death count went down, what was the focus on?
The focus was on case counts going up.
So there's never any good news that there's abundant hospital capacity.
That less people are getting sick than ever before.
And yes, there are some areas where case counts are going up, but what they don't tell you is most of those elevated case counts are younger people that do really well with the virus.
They also don't tell you that there is effective early treatment for the virus as well.
And a lot of us that believe that there is effective early treatment, of course, we're called quacks.
Hydroxychloroquine has been a big political football as well.
And it's very unfortunate.
So this fear is fed because bad news sells, right?
That's part of it.
If it bleeds, it leads kind of thing.
What about masks?
Listen, the mask hill is not a hill I want to die on.
I think if somebody wants to wear a mask, I don't have a problem with that.
And I respect that.
And I always...
I mean, I always carry a mask around with me.
I have one in my pocket.
So if a store requires that I wear a mask or there's people around that are uncomfortable that I don't have a mask on, I'll put a mask on because I don't want to be disrespectful.
The science is very sketchy on masks use.
How is it sketchy?
Well, up until this pandemic, we've never required masking during any other infectious disease, including really bad influenza seasons.
Influenza virus is about the same size as COVID-19 virus.
There's been multiple studies in the past that look at mask use And protecting against both influenza and common cold.
And the conclusion is masks don't really help.
There's a recent, this is now maybe a week old CDC report that came out where they looked at people that got infected with coronavirus and they then followed them to see how many of them were masked through a questionnaire.
Then they looked at a case control, a group that didn't get coronavirus.
And what they found is 85% of the people that got infected by coronavirus reported the regular use of masks.
So it showed right there that even with diligent mask use, you can still get infected whether you wear a mask or you don't wear a mask.
So the science suggests that masks play little role.
New England Journal of Medicine even had a piece, I think it was in July, and you can look it up.
New England Journal of Medicine, masks don't work.
Google it.
You'll find it.
It's still available.
And look at their Twitter feed from about the same time.
And their article showed that masks are not effective.
There was a line from the article that was quite striking.
It said something like, the best use of a mask is to reduce fear, but not necessarily to protect you from the virus.
And their Twitter post on the subject basically said the same thing.
Jeff, I've seen people, I want to find out about this, because I've had friends that told me that their husband got it, and they were with them for an extended period of time, and they didn't get it, and a bunch of their family members got it.
And do we know enough about this virus?
You know, we know enough about this virus that now is the time where we need to bring together scientists of differing opinions to have a civil, robust debate about the path forward.
So your example is perfect, and I see multiple patients like that.
Families where one person in the family gets the virus and nobody else does, suggesting that there's other forms of immunity besides the antibodies that we can measure, such as T cell immunity, that could offer us a path forward to herd level of immunity without needing a vaccination.
And I've written about this, and I think it's important that all perspectives be heard respectively.
So because I don't agree with the mainstream media doesn't make me wrong.
Maybe I am, but maybe they're wrong too.
And the way science works is you have to...
Because everybody's wrong in science, right?
Everybody's wrong, right?
Everybody's wrong.
That's the thing.
We're always trying to prove each other wrong and we move the bar a little bit further to understanding, never understanding perfectly.
And so this notion that there's only one way and we should follow it religiously and then exclude and censor opinions that don't agree, that's not science.
That CCP perspective where they shut down...
So the Chinese Communist Party is a style of dealing.
It seems like we're following what the Chinese Communist Party did in our own way.
It's so funny.
I saw a meme recently that Sweden is thinking of instituting radio-free Sweden in America because they're in many ways acting in a way that we should be acting with more freedom and more liberty and individual liberty than we're allowing in our country.
And it's unfortunate.
What recommendations do you have to policymakers?
I think policymakers should be gathering differing opinions and sitting those folks down in the same room to have a robust discussion, and they're not doing that.
Opinions that disagree with the mainstream media are being excluded.
Scott Atlas now is being banned from the standard news channels because he's saying things that are differing.
Dr.
Fauci and others.
They should be embracing him.
They should be having Dr.
Fauci.
So what's the fear?
Is that somebody would make a recommendation and people may not wear masks?
Or what will happen?
I don't know.
People may not follow the protocols.
We're so fear-based right now.
I don't know why they're not inviting differing opinions to To broaden this perspective, because there's a lot of great ideas out there about how we should approach this.
And the other part is that, to me, it always, you know, why can't we come together?
And, you know, if it's supposed to try wearing masks, everybody wear a mask for two weeks and see what happens.
Right.
You know, and as a nation, it seems like we're just so far apart that we are using the virus to fight each other.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening.
And, you know, on the front lines, I treat COVID patients Almost every day, I started a patient yesterday on medication for COVID, and I'm seeing success.
I'm seeing good results.
This is a virus that for many is very scary, but it shouldn't be, especially if you take care of yourself, if you take some supplements, and you get help if you get infected early in the mild stages of this virus.
I've treated dozens of patients.
I have not had one patient that needed hospitalization.
I'm either lucky or good.
I don't know which, but I'm happy for either one.
Do you recommend people to get tested right away as soon as they have some sort of system?
I'll tell you what I do is I don't really care so much about testing.
I treat patients based on symptoms.
We're seeing a lot of false positives and false negatives.
So if a patient of mine has symptoms consistent with COVID-19, Regardless of the test result, I'm going to treat them because I believe it's important to treat early in the mild stages, and that way we prevent them from escalating.
Sort of like this.
Think of it as cancer.
So if we catch cancer early, breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, we're pretty good at treating it.
If we catch it late after it's spread, it's a much more difficult task.
If we treat COVID early with the mild symptoms, we're pretty good at treating it.
If we wait until they're so sick that they're ready to go to the emergency room in the hospital, it's a much higher bar to try to effectively treat them and save their lives.
So as soon as people have somewhat of a symptoms, they should quickly go get tested and just go for treatment.
Or call a doctor that knows how to treat this disease.
That's what I recommend.
And I've written about this.
Yeah, tell us about your book.
So I put together a series of essays that I've written over the last month or so, and I put it together in a book, and I'm pretty proud of it.
It's a little bit controversial because it's not the standard way of thinking about COVID-19.
It's available on Amazon.
It's also available directly through my publisher.
I'm really proud that Dennis Prager wrote the forward to this book.
And I got the sage Larry Elder to write a blurb on the back as well.
And so I'm proud of it because it puts together a group of essays that I think if people read it, they'll get a different way of thinking about it.
It's not necessarily right or wrong, but that's the way science works.
People put out hypotheses about what they think is right, and then they test that hypothesis.
And most of the time, they're wrong, right?
Most of the time, they're wrong.
It's like the vaccine that all these companies are trying to come out with, and we keep hearing about some failures and some successes, and that's the way science works.
But you learn something in the process.
Each time you learn something, you get a little bit better.
You get a little bit better until you get the right recipe.
Well, thank you.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
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