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Feb. 9, 2024 - Epoch Times
01:02:51
[FREE EPISODE] Harvey Risch: Why Are Vaxxed People Getting COVID at Higher Rates Than the Unvaxxed?
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Somehow in the last two years, we've been led to believe that you didn't need to measure actual immunity, you could measure antibody levels instead.
Today I sit down with Dr.
Harvey Risch, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
The vaccines have done damage to the immune system such that it makes people more likely to get, over longer term, more likely to get COVID infections, more likely to get other respiratory infections.
We discuss how much of our policies over the last two years were based on flawed science, from lockdowns to the vaccine rollout for children.
And we reflect on the recent passing of Dr.
Vladimir Zelenko, who pioneered the use of early COVID treatments.
Doctors all over the country are now prescribing these sorts of treatments, mostly quietly, for fear of losing their medical licenses.
I'm sure by now there's a quarter of a million Americans who have been treated successfully with these medications.
They know that they were treated with these things and they worked.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr.
Harvey Risch, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be with you.
I want to kind of do a catch-up from our last conversation many months ago, looking at the newest information around vaccine efficacy in children, for example, because these vaccines have now been authorized in the U.S. for six months and above.
And also, you wrote a Pretty remarkable tribute to Dr.
Zelenko who recently passed.
I want to discuss that and your thoughts about him and his work.
Let's start with the genetic vaccines being authorized for six months and up.
Well, so these vaccines were not shown to have efficacy in the 6 months to 5 year old children or the 5 to 12 year olds for that matter.
They were looked at with what's called immunobridging studies, which measures antibody levels.
And what we've learned over the last two years is that antibody levels are not very good proxies for immunity, that you really only know about the effects of a vaccine when you study the outcomes that you're trying to prevent, either infection or hospitalization or mortality.
And those were not outcomes that were studied for children.
They only had their antibodies measured.
And as much as you think that an acute increase in antibody levels reflects immunity, Or a certain kind of immunity, it's not really enough to know how well the vaccines work.
So it's a supposition.
And that supposition doesn't stand the evidential standard for other things, but somehow in the last two years, we've been led to believe that you didn't need to measure actual immunity, you could measure antibody levels instead.
And I think that is not well established Criteria or substitution that, certainly for adults, antibody levels have not shown to be that strong of a correlate with protection from serious outcomes, for example.
And also, these antibodies actually wane pretty quickly.
I mean, they've been shown to wane in adults.
What's the situation with children?
I don't think we know that very well yet.
Of course, antibodies have to wane.
If they didn't wane, then our blood wouldn't flow.
It'd be all clogged up with antibodies, every infection we've ever had.
So they wane, but there are memory cells in the immune system, the memory B cells, that go into quiet rest in the bone marrow, ready to be alerted to start making those antibodies when challenged with the same or very similar infection.
And so you expect them to wane over time, but that doesn't mean a person loses immunity.
That's the point, that there's memory, and T-cells as well have memory for making their immune antibodies and immune function, once again, when necessary.
So is this functionality the same with natural immunity from natural infection and the vaccines, or how does that play out?
It's roughly similar.
Natural immunity It is diverse.
The immune system makes antibodies to every provocative component on the surface of every offending molecule.
And so the viruses have a number of different proteins and carbohydrate things basically sticking out of the surface, including the spike protein and others, and the immune system sees all that and makes antibodies for all of that.
What are called neutralizing antibodies that bind to the virus and help to terminate their life and survival in the human.
However, the vaccines only make a very narrow range of antibodies to the spike protein because the vaccines are making spike protein, are making the body make spike protein, which is not the same as a whole virus being seen by the immune system.
So it's a much narrower range of antibodies that's made Post vaccine.
And the problem with that is, of course, that when the spike protein changes because of new strains of the virus, that the ability of the immune system to make antibodies that correlate to the new strains becomes reduced to the point where it may be almost ineffective over longer periods of time.
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Well, so how does that look right now?
I mean, the vaccines that we have were designed for, I guess, the initial variants, pre-Delta variant.
And now we're at Omicron, which is actually quite different.
So that's a very good point.
Up to Delta, the changes in the spike protein were relatively few.
And so the antibodies that were made for the original strain had enough of a benefit against Delta that there was still some reasonable amount of immunity.
For Omicron, things went haywire.
That Omicron started off with more than 50 changes to the spike protein, and then the subvariants of Omicron had 30 more or more than that.
So it's a very different spike protein compared to, it has the same overall structure, but because the way of the angles of all the different parts of it changed because of all the mutations, then the antibodies don't bind so well.
And in particular, the old antibodies that are made from the original strain that see the new spike protein, they bind, but not strongly enough, so they're not neutralizing anymore.
What that means is they become interfering antibodies instead of neutralizing antibodies, and that's the reason I believe that we've seen what's called negative benefit, negative vaccine efficacy over longer time, over four, six, eight months after the last vaccine dose, that one sees the benefit of the vaccines turn negative.
And it's because the body, the immune system is still making antibodies to the original strain which aren't neutralizing the new strains and the new strains therefore are protected from the immune system trying to make new antibodies to the new strains because some of the places where it would make We're buying those new antibodies are blocked by the old antibodies from the original strain that were made but not effective.
You're saying that the effect is negative.
Now what does that practically mean?
So what this means is that one sees this in the UK Public Health UK data that through March, when they stopped reporting this in March, but into March of this year, they were reporting infection rates per 100,000 population people according to vaccine status and by age.
And they compared People who had been triple vaccinated, who had a booster, with people who were completely unvaccinated by age group.
And what they showed is above age 18, in every age group, the rates of symptomatic infection in each age group were approximately three-fold higher in the vaccinated people than the unvaccinated people.
Now, you could say, well, vaccinated, unvaccinated people live different lifestyles, and so they're likely to get infections more one way or the other.
I think you can rationalize almost anything doing that, but that still wouldn't account for a threefold difference.
It might account for one and a half fold, something like that, as we epidemiologists believe.
So there's still a higher rate of infection Post some amount of time after each dose.
So after the second dose of the mRNA vaccines, it looks like they provide a benefit against symptomatic infection for maybe, for most people, for maybe 10 to 12 weeks.
After the first booster, the third dose, that drops to six to eight weeks.
After the fourth booster, it may be as short as four weeks before the efficacy wears off and begins to turn negative.
So the bottom line is you become more susceptible to infection after, in this case, say the fourth booster, after four weeks.
Is that right?
Correct.
And in fact, the first week or ten days after each dose, you're more susceptible to infection also because it takes that amount of time for the immune system to process what it's doing.
The vaccines have an initial...
Kind of reducing effect on the immune system that it's like the immune system goes into shock for a week after the vaccine and then it comes out of that and the benefit occurs then and then that benefit lasts for a variable amount of time, 12, 10, 8, 6 weeks depending on which dose booster of the vaccine we're talking about.
This is very important.
I haven't talked much about this with folks on the show yet.
There's this first week during which You're actually quite susceptible to infection, not just by coronavirus, but other things too.
And this isn't, I mean, generally talked about from what I know.
Well, there's been a very strange anti-scientific Publicity propaganda campaign against talking about this.
And the reason is that we've seen conflated the idea of what's the best the vaccine can do with what the vaccine does in real life.
When one does a randomized controlled trial, if you know that a drug can't possibly work for two weeks after it's given, and you ask what's the best that the drug could do, then you say, well, I'm not going to count the first two weeks because we know it can't work in those two weeks, right?
That's okay if you're looking for efficacy, but if you're looking for hazard, Those first two weeks count.
If you take a drug and you say, I'm going to just hole up in my house for two weeks until it's safe to go out because of this drug, people count that.
That's the experience you get when you take a drug or a vaccine.
So what they've done is they've misrepresented the theoretical efficacy of the vaccines with the practical one and therefore have eliminated that period of time when these vaccines are actually available.
For causing increased risk of getting infections.
And they have certainly not told people stay home for 10 days after you get your vaccine, you know, until it's safe to go out, so to speak, because of that period.
And one sees this in a lot of data that in the first seven days that the benefit is slow to accrue and there's other infections in addition to COVID that have been occurring in those people.
So are you saying that they're measuring vaccination status only after that period of one or two weeks?
They're calling people vaccinated after, depending on the study, the manufacturers say 10 days or two weeks after receiving the vaccine, yes.
So doesn't this create some sort of a Spurious data or something of this nature during that time, because people will have been vaccinated, and then who knows what happens during the first week, but all those people would be classified as the unvaccinated.
Is that right?
They are classified as unvaccinated, and they have higher risk of becoming infected, which puts more COVID hazard into the unvaccinated people spuriously.
That's right.
That's incredible.
Well, we've spent two years living with plausibility and being claimed it was science.
And it's a problem when laypeople can't tell the difference between plausibility and science.
They believe the plausibility is science, but it's not.
Science is when you actually go and you make the measurements and you study the people and you see, like in a randomized trial or a non-randomized but controlled trial, you see what actually happens in people and you acquire enough studies with enough evidence, then you've done your science.
Just saying that something should work because we have a biological mechanism is plausibility.
I think this concept of plausibility being used as efficacy?
Well, a substitute for evidence.
As a substitute for evidence.
Okay, explain that.
Well, we've been told that social distancing reduces transmission risk.
Mask wearing reduces transmission risk.
Lockdowns reduces transmission risk.
These are all plausibility arguments.
What do the studies show?
The only way to know whether these things do that are by actually doing good, high-quality studies.
Nobody's done a study of social distancing that I know of.
Certainly not a good one because it's very difficult to measure in large numbers of people, consistency over time and so on.
You can figure out how would you actually try to do a study like that.
The masking studies, masking has two different outcomes of relevance.
The first is, what benefit does masking have for the wearer?
And the second is, what benefit does masking have for source control, meaning the people around the wearer?
And the importance for us as a society, as a government who has an interest in protecting us, is source control.
That if you wear a mask to protect yourself, that's a treatment question.
That's your individual choice.
It has no bearing on the rest of society.
You're not putting the rest of society at increased risk because of that choice.
Whereas if you're wearing a mask to prevent you spreading infection that you didn't know you had, That's where the government has a potential compelling interest.
However, the studies for that, there's only three or so of them, and they show at most a very slight benefit, which has been taken to task by a number of scientists.
So it looks like, at best, there's very, very weak evidence, if not no evidence, that wearing masks work to help with source control.
And that's the science part.
So the plausibility is you put something in front of your face to stop things getting out of your nose and mouth.
It looks like it should block it, but it would be like putting up a chain link fence to block ping pong balls from going through.
Okay, so we have plausibility in mask wearing, plausibility in social distancing.
Where else do we have this plausibility?
Lockdowns.
Okay.
Lockdowns have never been used in the history of pandemics.
Quarantines have been used in pandemics.
Quarantines sequester people who are sick, you know, who are potentially transmitting the infection.
Lockdowns lock down everybody Mostly healthy people.
And all this does is it delays the inevitable.
That lockdowns will prevent transmission, except within the family.
If somebody in the family has got it, then everybody in the household is likely to get it.
But outside of that, all they do is prevent the re-emergence of the infection until the lockdown is eventually released.
And then the population is sitting there as a sponge, ready to soak up all that infection because they have very little immunity.
And that's what happened in Australia, for example.
Right.
And so now we have these three areas, but now plausibility and vaccines.
Let's take this to the next step, because this is what you're talking about.
How does that work exactly?
Well, the vaccine question requires a level of expertise that's really not my area as an epidemiologist.
But we've learned a lot about What the vaccines do in terms of how they function, in terms of how the immune system responds, in terms of whether that response is beneficial or harmful, how that can change over time, and so on.
There's been a lot of measurement and understanding of all of that, and what we see is that it's a complicated story with nuance The risk-benefit calculations depend on age, that the infection itself has more than a thousand-fold difference from old to young in its risks of serious outcomes and death,
and that dramatic change in risk means that what might be a positive-benefit-risk equation in elderly people is not a positive-benefit And so all of this has to be worked out in a knowledgeable and objective way with all this information for the person at hand, so to speak, for the consideration of the age, gender, comorbidities, chronic diseases, and so on, of the individual who's considering this.
So, I mean, basically you're saying that at this point, because as we mentioned, the virus has changed considerably from the beginning when these vaccines were designed, Basically, it becomes a plausibility argument for the use of the vaccines right now?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, at the basic level, people think vaccines save lives, we'll use them.
Period.
Vaccines are good.
And I think for a lot of the childhood vaccines, that is on average the prevailing viewpoint.
And so people accept this is just another vaccine, therefore it must be good.
Now, people forget that there were numbers of vaccines that were pulled off the market.
The dengue fever vaccine was pulled off the market.
The SARS-CoV-1 vaccine never made it anywhere.
The MERS vaccine, I think, also.
These were self-limited vaccines.
Pandemic, so to speak, that did not require vaccination.
And there's been, and the vaccinologists know this better than I do, that there's a numbers of vaccines that were pulled off the market because of adverse events that they caused and not providing enough benefit.
So it's not an all-or-nothing idea that vaccines are uniformly good.
They have benefits and hazards, like most things, especially in medicine.
And one has to evaluate that trade-off.
That's what doctors are supposed to be for, is evaluating trade-offs for their patients and helping the patients understand and with informed understanding as to how to figure out what the risks are and how they could best manage them.
So what's the bottom line with, at the moment, with the state of the data, you know, the sort of the state of the art data that's out there when it comes to the risks for children and the vaccination of children to protect them?
In my opinion, healthy children and adolescents should not be vaccinated.
There's children and adolescents who have serious chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, immune compromise, chronic kidney disease, cancer.
That's a different question.
They require a personal evaluation to see what their hazards are.
We know from the study of the Italian data from studies elsewhere that young children, five to 12 years old, have about a one in a million chance of dying from COVID, unvaccinated, have a one in a million chance of dying from COVID. So the vaccines we have seen have much greater risks of serious adverse events and death Even if they're rare, it's infrequent, but it's not zero.
And so the question is, which of these rare events would you choose to have?
A rare event from the vaccine that's maybe 10 or 50 fold larger than a rare event from getting COVID. And so even though both are uncommon, one is much larger than the other.
So me as a public health person, I say you choose the one with a lower risk of the same or similar outcome, even though both are infrequent.
So even though most children could probably be vaccinated without that much harm, still there are going to be some.
And if it's your family and it's your child, you know, it's 100 percent, not zero, not one in a million.
And so those people have to pay attention to that and make rational calculations based on the fact that Dying from COVID or having a very serious outcome from COVID in very young children is essentially less likely than being struck by lightning, by being, you know, injured or killed in an automobile accident or something like that.
Those are risks we kind of take for granted in society, put out of our mind because they're so infrequent.
The same would be true for COVID. It's in that range of things.
So, given all the information you just gave me, and also, you know, especially this element that we've been using antibody production as kind of, I guess, a proxy for efficacy of the vaccine in the first place, how is this that these things got approved?
Well, these various government scientific agencies like FDA, CDC, and so on, have very highly trained scientific people doing the work.
However, they are in a very narrow employment field, and that means That if they want to move up in their employment pyramids, that most of them won't eventually be able to do that to become department chairs and heads and things like that.
They have to go outside the government institutions and the only place for that is pharma.
And so if they make decisions that are against their pharma You know, the companies that they regulate, then they have no opportunity to move up, you know, by and large in their employment.
And so people are reticent to do that.
Sometimes it happens, but by and large there's a psychological force on people to be compliant in these agencies.
The second thing that we've observed is that Dr.
Fauci has put in the approval panels of these agencies many people who have conflicts of interest with pharma.
No university, no IRB would allow an advisory committee to make decisions with all that conflict of interest, but apparently in NIH there's no pushback from that because the ethics department is apparently run by Dr.
Fauci's wife.
And so what we've seen is capture of all these regulatory approval panels and the EPA is another one where this has happened, that there is a lot of regulatory capture in all these scientific agencies.
And it's a problem That it's going to be difficult to solve because the people who are actually doing the work, you know, are very well trained and highly efficient and expert at doing their jobs and just don't see that they're doing anything untoward compared to the actual evidence that's out there.
What that really means is that they are selectively looking at evidence without doing a representative sampling of all the evidence that they should be paying attention to.
And that's how they can come up with decisions with evidence favoring one side or the other by ignoring evidence that they don't want to consider by calling it weak evidence or poor quality evidence that using subjective methods and evaluating evidence you can get rid of the stuff that's inconvenient.
You know, it's interesting you mentioned the EPA. Of course, there's this recent Supreme Court decision.
I'm guessing this is what you're getting at.
So tell me about what you're seeing here.
Well, I think that what we've seen is the growth of the administrative state that I believe was established by Woodrow Wilson and his known elitism against the general population.
And it grew with FDR to the point where the massive administrative state of the United States now is a virtual additional arm of government.
Now, I believe if you read the Federalist Papers, you'll see that it was philosophically established that Congress is the only one who has the power to make laws, that Congress can't delegate making laws to administrative people, that basically the administrative state was set up to do work to bring to Congress so that Congress could make the laws.
But what happened is they started making the policies and the laws in Congress abdicated that responsibility even though it was illegal to do that.
And that's what the Supreme Court finally pushed back on, that it said the EPA can't be making such a wide policy, a policy that has national implications.
EPA can make minor policies that are in the realm of what administrative bodies should be doing, but not ones that are tantamount to congressional law.
Our mutual friend Jeffrey Tucker argues that this decision, Gorsuch's opinion, has broad ramifications well beyond the EPA and to other agencies.
What are your thoughts?
Well, not being an attorney, I can't really tell because a lot of these things play out on the details of the case, but the general principle seems right and seems that our administrative state has had a massive overreach in terms of making policies that are tantamount to law between CDC,
FDA, and so on with their policies about recommendations for drug use or drug not use and so on, which become de facto Policies and laws across an entire medical establishment, you know, I think that I'm hoping that the court will take this up and look at these and see whether these agencies are really entitled to be making what are tantamount to laws that the Congress should be making.
I want to jump back to COVID directly.
And so recently, you've been critical of this JAMA study about vaccination, basically modeling and vaccination rates and so forth.
So tell me your thoughts here.
You know, I started my PhD career after medical school in mathematical modeling of infectious epidemics.
And this is right at the time of the toxic shock syndrome epidemic.
And I was trying to get data from all the states through the CDC to be able to model this.
And I started doing that.
Then I was in touch with one of the state epidemiologists who told me, oh, by the way, about a third of the states aren't actually submitting their data to the CDC. And so I realized pretty quickly that with four parameters in a model, I could fit anything.
That means that what matters most are the assumptions in the model.
Now, the modeling that we've seen for COVID That you were talking about assumed a vaccine efficacy that was constant over time.
And we had a discussion earlier today about how vaccine efficacy is small or zero for the first seven to ten days, then rises quickly to its peak benefit, lasts for 12, 10, 8, 6 weeks, Before heading down to zero and then can go negative after that period of time, depending on which dose of the vaccine we're talking about.
This is totally different than an assumed 50 or 75 or 80 percent or whatever percent efficacy over all time Across all people.
So the assumption that the vaccine efficacy is constant is a fatal flaw in these models.
So how does this change the result, I guess?
Well, if you assume that a vaccine prevents 75%, say, of infections, of symptomatic infections, over all time, And what it does, really, is it prevents 75% for about six weeks, and then about 40% for about another four weeks, and then 0% after that, and it's negative after that.
You can see that it's a great overstatement of the benefits of the vaccines, and so the number of people whose infections you've prevented or hospitalizations you've prevented or deaths you've prevented is going to be dramatically overstated with that model.
Have you seen studies that look at this in what you feel is a reasonable way?
I think that it's very difficult to do credible modeling studies that, because there's so much room for selection of these assumptions, the numerical parameters that goes into these models has a lot of room for subjectivity, that even the studies that go and say, well, we reviewed all the studies that measured that and we took an average of that and so on, that's what we used.
That adds a little bit of plausibility to it.
But it's still, modeling is only suggestive.
It's not convincing evidence.
And so I take issue with the seriousness of the claims that these models prevented 20 million deaths or something like that when the assumptions were unverified and inaccurate, as I've said.
So let's switch gears and let's talk about, you know, Dr.
Zelenko recently passed.
And you have a lot of thoughts about this, so tell me.
Well, Dr.
Zelenko was a hero to our society that he was in the front lines, in the trenches of treating COVID patients at the very beginning of the pandemic.
He lived and practiced in a community in upstate New York that when the pandemic happened, Patient after patient started coming to him.
And he had no idea really what was going on other than that it was this potentially serious upper respiratory infection.
And so he started investigating the literature.
He found that the Koreans, the South Koreans, had been using hydroxychloroquine apparently effectively.
That he knew that zinc could work.
There were some kind of equivocal evidence, zinc lozenges and all these things that had made the rounds about flu maybe a decade ago that people had tried and didn't work very well, but maybe might be beneficial.
And that Dr.
Roux in France had been using azithromycin also and thought that was beneficial.
And so he said, let's use all three at once, that they can be used at the same time.
And that was his initial recipe.
And what he found is, quite dramatically, the people that he started treating were recovering in two, three, four, five days.
When he got to them early, in two, three, four days after the symptoms started, and put them on these regimens.
These are what he called high-risk people, people with older age or obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, same things we talked about before.
Those people he treated and they did very well in very short time.
So he treated 400 patients and only one was hospitalized and that person started the medications too late and didn't even finish them.
They started after five days and so on.
So with that kind of a dramatic record, he started telling other doctors that this was working and he, in fact, sent information to President Trump to the point that President Trump got up and in March of 2020 made a public statement that this medication or this regimen may be beneficial.
Game changer, as he said, or something like that.
This was claimed to have politicized Outpatient treatment.
However, that was a false claim.
It was a convenient claim, again plausibility, because it was already known before Dr.
Zelenko had even discovered that hydroxychloroquine works, that the French, in fall of 2019, had already started taking action against hydroxychloroquine.
The Minister of Health in France in September or October of 2019 changed the status of hydroxychloroquine from over-the-counter to prescription only, citing fake Genetic evidence of harm when there was no such evidence.
You know, this is a medication that's been used in tens of billions of doses in hundreds of millions of people for more than half a century to know how safe it is, among the safest medications on the planet, and suddenly this was genotoxic?
You know, this is nonsense.
So there was already moves afoot to limit this That pharma knew this stuff worked, and some in the medical community know that it worked, and they had to take action to prepare the field for patent medications and vaccines that would eventually show up.
And so this was before Dr.
Zelenko had even discovered hydroxychloroquine, let alone.
However, that did not deter him.
He kept treating his patients.
And he had treated 1,200 patients, very similar results.
It got to the point where he had treated a few thousand patients.
And, you know, you would send your grandpa to him because he was the one who was succeeding when every other doctor said, stay home and if you can't breathe, go to the hospital.
And he said, no, come here, I'll treat you, you'll get better with a $20 treatment.
And that's what he did, and he stuck to his guns because he knew he was right.
That his force of personality, his character, was such that when you know what the truth is, we're talking about scientific truth, not personal spiritual truth, but scientific truth, nature is speaking louder than lies Being told a suppression against it.
And he, kind of like I, have stuck to the same truth that the scientific evidence shows what it shows.
If somebody had presented him with credible studies showing that it didn't work for what he's saying it does work, then he would have reevaluated just the way I would reevaluate.
But that has never happened because the medication works for this usage.
And he stayed with that in spite of all of the suppression of all the, you know, de-platforming and all the censorship and all the negative things that were said about him because of his force of personality was such that he knew he was right and he stuck to that and battled this to the end of his life.
So, you know, and I know that you're not doing COVID treatment, but how much of an impact did his protocol have on some of these other groups that are doing the early treatment?
Well, towards the end of January, Dr.
Ben Marble reported on his telemedicine group that they had treated 150,000 people with negligible numbers of deaths.
There's probably 50,000 or 100,000 people who have been treated with hydroxychloroquine-based regimens, and ivermectin for that matter, and other telemedicine groups.
I'm sure by now there's a quarter of a million Americans who have been treated successfully with these medications.
They know that they were treated with these things and they worked.
But basically, so are you saying that it was Dr.
Zelenko originally sort of developed this formulation that everyone else picked up?
I just don't know.
He did.
I mean, I think that Peter McCullough, in his two papers on early outpatient treatment, elaborated on the Zelenko protocol.
Dr.
Raou in France had a very similar protocol that was...
Developed at the same time in parallel with Dr.
Zelenko.
They both have the same basic structure, hydroxychloroquine, maybe ivermectin, azithromycin or doxycycline as an antibiotic, zinc, vitamin D, maybe vitamin C. There are steroids to be used.
And now we've got a whole bunch of other drugs that also work.
In the same time frame that can be used that there's evidence for.
So outpatient treatment is a reality and it's up to the clinician to use what they're able to use based on what pharmacies will fill and what they know works.
And this is a remarkable state of affairs compared to two years ago when we were searching for medications and only the Zelenko protocol started things off really.
What an impact Well, a quarter of a million Americans is a big impact.
It's relatively small compared to the damage that's been done on the country by the infection and the vaccines.
But still, that's still a lot of people whose lives were saved, basically.
So what about these places that did lock down, like Australia, like New Zealand, experiencing huge surges in basically COVID cases and so forth?
But we've been told not to count cases, right?
Because it's really just symptomatic infection that matters.
So, you know, what are they in for here?
Well, I've said that cases don't matter altogether.
I've been saying this since the very beginning of the pandemic, that you don't manage a pandemic from the cases, you manage a pandemic from what happens to the cases, which is hospitalizations, mortality, maybe long COVID, that That's what you need in order to know whether what you're doing is good or bad.
And the cases, if anything, give you information about population immunity.
So more cases with no deaths is actually a good sign because you know, at least for that strain of the infection prevalent at that time, you're generating a large amount of immunity which allows people to go back to normal life.
So that populations like Australia, New Zealand, places that had strong lockdowns, they displaced when they became available to have all these large waves of infection after they opened their lockdowns.
What this means is two things.
One is that instead of getting exposed to the original strain of the virus, they got exposed to what was the strain in circulation at the time they reopened the lockdowns.
So if the lockdown is six months later, that would matter.
If the lockdown is a month later or three weeks later, maybe not so much.
It also allowed those populations, those countries, to wait until some newer method of treatment or prevention becomes available.
So if you lock down for a year until vaccines became available, then you could suddenly mass market vaccines in an attempt to prevent infection or damage from infection going on when you reopen.
But that really didn't happen all that much.
And as we've seen, the vaccines are a complicated story and not necessarily, you know, clear benefit for many people in the way that they were mass marketed to entire populations.
So the gist of the lockdowns is that It's not really a strong benefit and created a lot of non-COVID harm and damage to the society economically, psychologically, educationally for children,
adolescents, college students in trying to cope with two years of lack of involvement with their peers, their educational experiences in real world, not on video and so on.
It's done incredible economic damage to middle America, so to speak, the people whose livelihoods have been terminated because of government policies that were counterproductive in the long term.
But I guess my question is, so, you know, a place like Australia, okay, they delayed, they had very, very strict lockdown policies for a long time.
They did successfully prevent the virus from circulating for a while, but now it's circulating like crazy.
I mean, basically, right?
Right.
Given this reality, what can they expect at this point?
Because they've been told, the population has been told that we've won, we have the right policy.
Well, every country says we have the right policy because they're in control of the microphone.
I think Sweden is the only one that actually has some semblance of claim to that.
Maybe North Dakota or South Dakota.
Places that didn't really lock down.
I think that what we know is that in spite of bad policy, these medications still work.
That people who May have been vaccinated or not and are getting COVID and are having serious COVID can still and should be treated with hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and the other medications ASAP after they become symptomatic.
You get people like Tony Fauci Who got COVID after his fourth booster.
So a lot of good his boosters did.
Well, of course, he didn't run to the hospital because claiming that the boosters helped for that.
So he got symptomatic COVID, treated himself with Paxlovid.
That didn't work well enough.
And he had Paxlovid rebound, which made his second bout of COVID more symptomatic and harder to get through than the first one.
And just very quickly, what is Paxlovid rebound?
In somewhere between 10 and 15% of people who are treated for COVID with Paxlovid, if they're only treated for five to seven days, that after a few more days, that percentage of people will have a, the infection recurs.
That it doesn't completely go away.
There's enough of the infectious virus still in the person that when the Paxilvid is stopped that that virus regrows and becomes a second symptomatic infection and in many cases, many instances, is more symptomatic, harder to tolerate than the original one that the Paxilvid treated.
Now, the FDA never approved Paxlivid for a second course.
It approved it for a five or seven day course, and that's the official approval.
So to use it twice, or to use it for 10 days or something, is off-label.
Right?
Not approved for that.
And nevertheless, that's what people have been doing, I think.
Whereas, had they used hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and all the other things that we know work, they could have done that from the beginning, cost them $20 instead of $700 or whatever Paxilvid costs, and would have worked as well or better.
And in general, does not lead to rebound as long as those medications are used until symptoms disappear.
So it's interesting that you mention off-label, because from what I understand, the vast majority of drugs are actually used off-label, but this has sort of become some sort of anathema in the popular consciousness.
Right, this is another plausibility.
The argument that off-label means unproven.
Well, of course, it's unproven because doctors find lots of things work for various uses that were never contemplated originally and never had large randomized $10 million trials to show that they worked.
And doctors are not going to say, oh, I can't use it because it's never been proven.
They use it because they've had massive personal experience in treating patients with these drugs that work for them.
That's how medicine works.
That's how medicine has always worked and this is how individualized medicine works when the doctor is treating the patient and not treating a policy, so to speak, you know, a protocol from the hospital or a medical group that says you can only use these medications for this outcome when doctors know what they've been using their whole careers.
And so it's a false assumption to say that everything must be used on label or not, that drugs are freely available to be used off label, and the doctor and the patient take the risk, and mainly the doctor, because if it didn't work, the doctor would have risk of being sued for something that didn't work out.
But that rarely happens, because doctors have experience knowing that these things work.
Or they inform the patients that maybe there's only a 30% chance that this will work, but it's worth a try if you think that you want to take that risk.
That's informed consent.
That's how the practice of medicine should work.
How much do you think this growth of the administrative state that we discussed a little bit earlier is connected to this weird centralization of basically medical procedure Well,
I think that, maybe if I could philosophize, I think our whole society is stuck on trying to document everything and trying to claim that everything's objective, when in real life, in the professions, there's still a lot of subjectivity.
I think that it's very hard to be confident that when you go to a doctor and the doctor is making a diagnosis because his subconscious is telling him that this looks like it fits a pattern of this kind of disease and not that kind of disease, even though if I really had to quantify it and I have to run 20 biochemical tests and do these invasive procedures to prove that what my hunch is telling me is likely,
I think that that level of subjectivity feels uncomfortable to people now, whereas we trusted doctors before.
And it's a lack of trust in our society that's causing the urge to documentation for proof of everything and I think that's a problem that if you can't trust doctors or you can't trust professionals you rely on objective proof instead and that kind of subverts the whole body of knowledge In a field that's gained from the expertise, why professions are professional.
It's not because they went to school and got a degree and suddenly they're stamped out and know how to do everything.
That, you know, it comes with a lot of his professional experience that builds, you know, there are better doctors and worse doctors.
Better doctors have more nuance and understanding of their fields from long experience and Understanding which things worked and which didn't in subtle ways that matter to patients and provide more likelihood of better outcomes that are very hard to quantify.
But it kind of becomes a vicious cycle, doesn't it?
Because on the other hand, there is this lack of trust, but after these two years, a lot of people say this lack of trust has been earned because of a lot of decrees, a lot of being told things are one way, turns out they're a different way.
You know, policies changing without reasonable explanation.
And frankly, you know, there was, I think, there was this recent congressional testimony from Deborah Birx where she's, as far as I can tell, she said we kind of did it on a hunch.
I mean, those are my words.
She said we hoped it would work.
Right.
Right.
We made a policy hoping that it would work.
Well, right.
There should be a lot of mistrust in institutional mistrust.
Government mistrust, agencies mistrust.
However, at a personal level, if your doctor told you, when you asked the doctor because you were sick with COVID and would you prescribe hydroxychloroquine, and the doctor said to you, I'd rather you die than I prescribe you hydroxychloroquine, you got a problem there.
There's a problem for the doctor in the medical field.
There's a problem for the patient in using that doctor.
And so on.
And this is not an arbitrary thing.
I've heard instances of this early in the pandemic that doctors were being threatened.
Their careers were being threatened.
They're still being threatened.
Doctors who treat patients early are being threatened by their medical licensing boards against using these medications Without evidence, without evidence of harm.
And so there's very great reason to understand that even doctors who are not functioning as doctors but as representatives of state agencies this way are not doing it voluntarily.
And sure, they're being silent about it and saying, and choosing, I can't stand up for doing the right thing because I'd lose my job, I'd lose my career.
Well, you know, I mean, that might have flown in 2020.
It doesn't fly today because I know dozens and dozens of doctors who've quit their jobs and their hospitals over these policies and taken up telemedicine careers and are doing just fine and have the freedom to practice the medicine they want to.
So, you know, what was once a limitation that Doctors couldn't find a way of getting out of now is no longer the case.
Whether doctors see that or not, it's because, you know, they're kind of stuck in their blinders, largely, and are just hoping it'll all go away.
You know, I mean, I don't think there's much they feel they can do about it.
So this is the thing, right?
There's a lot of doctors out there that actually believe that some of these medications, which have helped a lot of people, don't work because it's been, for lack of a better term, essentially there's been a large-scale media effort You could call it propaganda to demonize these things as opposed to allow doctors to figure things out based on the literature available to them and their knowledge of the patient,
which would have been the traditional norm, right?
Well, I know hundreds of doctors through email who are using these medications just kind of quietly as best they can.
And their patients receive that benefit and there's no need for them to publicize it if their role is to treat their patients.
The problem is patients finding out about them that they can get treated this way and finding pharmacies that are willing to fill these prescriptions.
There are pharmacies who are willing to do that.
And there are ways of getting the prescriptions filled so that they don't trigger all these warning bells from the chain pharmacies, for example, and so on.
This is practicing medicine in a totalitarian tyranny is really what this boils down to.
People are creative and ingenious and figure out ways to get around the limitations and treat their patients and cure their patients, basically, and treat them properly so that the patients recover.
That's the bottom line.
So we're getting back to Dr.
Zelenko here, I guess.
Yes.
Well, he was more public, I think, because he was in the early stage where doctors didn't know that this would work, and he felt it was important to get this information out.
And he did not realize, like most of us didn't realize, that there was this move afoot, even before he even knew about hydroxychloroquine, to suppress it.
And so he didn't realize that this was going on until well into the period when he was being told and I was being told that all these non-randomized but controlled trials were anecdotal.
That anything that wasn't a randomized controlled trial was anecdotal.
This is a science falsehood, you know, that again It's plausible to think that anecdotal, but anecdotal just means junk science to the people who say that.
And it's not true, because calling something junk science is not science.
If you want to take apart a study and say this study has a fatal flaw because it only recruited 8% of the eligible people, or any of the other myriad ways that one can distort scientific studies, that's how you say a study is poor quality.
But not just throwing a pejorative label, junk science on something, anecdotal on something, you know, that has no meaning.
That's not scientific criticism.
It's slander.
Yeah, right.
It's slandering the science.
That's right.
It's very interesting to think about how these methodologies that were developed, essentially they're being developed by trying safe drugs that are known to be safe, relatively, that have a plausible method, a plausible efficacy.
They might work, they're relatively safe.
And just basically trying it out with a patient to see if it helps, right?
I mean, that's how it worked.
Well, we've been doing that from antiquity, right?
I mean, how do we even know what foods are safe to eat?
We've been doing that over the whole human species, right?
You build up a culture of institutional knowledge that accretes over time, builds up over time, to have that knowledge of what works.
There's only, you know, over a long enough time it will become known that hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, these other things work.
You cannot suppress it, the truth, eventually, no matter how much money, how many billions of dollars that pharma pours into this suppression, that it eventually will become known and they will have to maintain the suppression indefinitely in order to keep it from becoming more widely known.
As we finish up, I understand that the genetic vaccines are being redesigned for these new variants, Omicron and newer variants.
Any final thoughts?
Well, I think that by the time they become available, they'll already be out of date.
That the reason that flu vaccines could be redesigned every year is because flu influenza and some other respiratory diseases follows the northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere difference where the southern hemisphere was six months ahead of us.
And so the virus strains that were prevalent in Australia, for example, In their summer, we could use to make vaccines for our winter or their winter to our winter.
And so that gave six months lead time to be able to do that.
However, with COVID, we don't really have that so much.
And so we're having to use the infections now to make vaccines now.
When, by the time the vaccines are out in two or three months, that those infections will be gone and it'll be new infections, new strains that'll be around.
So already original Omicron is mostly gone.
The second strain of it is mostly gone.
We're now into BA4 and BA5. BA5 is overtaking BA4 and now it's BA5.2, which is overtaking BA5. You know, it's like you blink and there's a new strain out and it only takes a few weeks If it's a little more infective, and being more infective doesn't necessarily mean it's intrinsically more infective.
What it means is it escapes the immunity that was created by the previous strain or the vaccine.
So, and this is why herd immunity is a real thing, But it can be transient if the virus evolves fast enough so that it escapes even from herd immunity.
So herd immunity can be good for the current strain, but if the new strain is so radically different, it can escape from that.
And that's why you can have multiple waves even when you get herd immunity.
So you can get herd immunity and it can go away also.
And that's what you have to learn how to manage and how much getting the infection with Original Omicron prevents BA5. Well, it does to some degree, but BA5.2, maybe it'll be a little less, you know, and so on.
Maybe six months from now, Omicron won't be useful anymore.
But maybe people won't get deathly ill from it.
The main thing is that these new strains are not more toxic than the earlier ones.
That's by and large how we got to Omicron.
This is Muller's Ratchet, the theory that viruses over time evolved to be more infectious and less toxic because the viral niche that Viruses multiply best at is when people congregate in large groups.
And they can only do that when they're not so sick that they're staying home.
So that means that people have to be symptomatic, coughing and sneezing and things like that, or flushing public toilets or whatever, that spreads the infection well, but not enough that they're sick, that they have to stay home because of it.
So there's an optimal niche that viruses seek to achieve by being infectious but not very toxic.
So, you know, what do you expect, you know, based on what you've seen now?
You know, the virus mutates very quickly.
We just talked about that.
Vaccines aren't very effective, you know, especially for young people.
What's the way forward?
So what I think is we're seeing two things.
Number one, It's my opinion I'm not saying this based on scientific studies but it's my opinion based on discussions with my virology and vaccinology colleagues that the vaccines have done damage to the immune system such that it makes people more likely to get COVID over longer term not the short-term vaccine benefit period but after that more likely to get COVID infections more likely to get other respiratory infections and that That damage has made an
environment, a large-scale environment in the population for the viruses to evolve faster into more of these strains, which is causing the pandemic to be prolonged.
So it's done population damage to the quality of our immune responses by that.
I think that's one problem.
So I think that these recurring, annoying strains will be continuing.
I think That they're going to be relatively low-level, like Omicron.
That they're all Omicron-derived.
That they're not likely to go very far backward into being damaging.
Even BA5, which is said to be a little more intense symptomatically, getting more into the lungs, having a little bit more people hospitalized, has not shown major increases in mortality in places like South Africa, Portugal, other places that have had their BA5. Pandemic waves and it's gone down after that.
So I'm optimistic that these will continue but at kind of low-level waves and bumps over time as the thing evolves and makes its way.
And I think that We have to recognize that these infections are at the level of flu or cold or other respiratory infections that we tolerate in daily life, that we don't disrupt our whole societies over these things, that we don't declare emergencies over these things, that if we declared an emergency over something that killed half a million people year in, year out, which is way more than COVID has done And it's two years that it's been with us.
That level would be an emergency, yet we don't do that.
Half a million people die every year in the United States from tobacco-related diseases.
And that's not a pandemic.
That's not an emergency.
The government's never done anything about that.
Well, if half a million deaths per year from one cause isn't an emergency, why are we declaring an emergency over something that may lead to 10,000 deaths per year or 50,000 or something like that?
That's similar to traffic accidents or influenza or other things that we tolerate as a society without calling it an emergency.
That's where we are.
That's where it's likely to stay.
And that's why we are not in an emergency now and we're not likely to be in an emergency going forward.
And maintaining it as an emergency is an abuse of our constitutionally defined rights that is valid when you're in a real emergency.
If we were in a war, you could understand that.
A shooting war, you can understand that, but not at a time when you have an infection that's causing something that's at the same level of things that we tolerate in daily life in our society.
Just before we finish up, can you just qualify what you mean by half a million?
Because I think the official number is, I think, double that or more?
So the official number, the last I looked, was about one or 1.1 million of COVID-associated deaths in the United States over the two years or so of the pandemic.
And so about half of those are from COVID and half are with COVID, according to three or four studies that have looked at that.
And so that means of the half a million deaths from COVID over two years, half of that per year.
So 250,000 per year for the two years that have been deaths from COVID in the United States.
So that compares to the half a million deaths from tobacco related causes year in, year out in the United States.
And we don't do anything about tobacco-related deaths.
Our government and our society tolerates it for some strange reason that thinks that it's self-inflicted when people get addicted to it for factors outside of their psychological control.
But in the end, you're basically saying that early treatment can prevent a lot of those deaths anyway.
Correct.
Most.
The great majority.
Well, Dr.
Harvey Rich, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.
Very nice to be with you.
Thank you all for joining Dr.
Harvey Risch and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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