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June 13, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:06:59
Dr James Todaro
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Welcome to the DelicPod with me, James DelicPod.
And before I announce this week's incredibly excited guest, I just wanted to remind you that freedom isn't free.
And neither in an ideal world of my podcast.
So please, will you remember, if you can, to support me on my Patreon.
And then I will do even more of this stuff and I will love you even more.
And we'll all be happy.
Free me from the evils of the mainstream media and enable me to do my thing for you.
This is going to be a great podcast, I know.
My guest is Dr.
James Todara.
You look about 12, James, may I say.
How old are you?
I'm actually in my mid-30s, but if I came on with no facial hair, I would look even younger.
Yeah, you're young anyway.
James, I'm really looking forward to this because I know we have a shared interest in hydroxychloroquine.
Which is a kind of bit of a weird obsession to have, isn't it?
But it's also, I mean, in my view, and I was trying to explain this to a colleague of mine, hydroxychloroquine is like the key to all mythologies.
It's so important in this coronavirus pandemic.
Would you agree?
I think it has tremendous potential.
I think that there's a lot of evidence out there for its efficacy if it's used very early in outpatient care.
I think that a lot of the big organizations, institutions have been studying it wrong and are coming out with either fake data entirely, which we'll get into, or wrong use cases for it.
Yeah.
Now, before we go on, I ought to establish you are a medical doctor, aren't you?
That's correct.
I graduated from Columbia University in New York, which is where I got my medical degree.
And I know that you're involved in blockchain and you're using your kind of medical qualifications to create a business.
Are you also a doctor as well?
Do you treat patients still or not?
So I wear two hats.
So I went through residency in ophthalmology.
I've become an ophthalmologist.
That's actually when I took a step away, though, from practicing clinical medicine.
Simultaneously with that, over the last six, seven years, I've been doing a lot of investments into blockchain, financial technology.
And so that became so substantial that that really became my focus.
All the meanwhile, staying abreast of what was going on in the medical world, which is why COVID-19, novel coronavirus, caught my attention back in January.
Are you, like me, a bit of a COVID skeptic, if you like?
You think that this is kind of a bit of a, well, like a massive overreaction to what is essentially probably not worse than seasonal flu?
Now more yes than before, but let me clarify.
So when I first saw this virus spreading in Wuhan, this is back in January, you know, there's really three questions that came to my mind.
How infectious is this virus?
You know, how fatal is it?
And what can be used to treat it?
Is there a treatment of prophylactic for it?
To me at the time, based on the way it was spreading, it was very infectious.
I was like, okay, so this is probably going to come to Europe and the US and have a huge impact on either the economy, the health, or maybe both.
Number two was, is there a treatment prophylactic for it?
That's when, along with a colleague, we proposed, we wrote the first paper proposing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus.
And then the next question was, how fatal is this really?
And I tweeted out about three months ago now, back in March, that we probably won't know exactly for a couple more months what the real infection fatality rate of this is.
At the time, it was reported between somewhere 3% to 10%.
Which is terrible for a highly infectious virus.
But if it turns out to be lower, then that's different.
And so I think what we've seen, and that's why a few colleagues and myself put out a second report in April saying, okay, I think we have a better idea of the infection fatality rate based on serology testing.
It's far lower than what we thought.
It's closer to 0.2%.
So, you know, maybe a little bit worse than a bad flu season going forward.
And so today, I think we can even see that more clearly, is that it actually does have a much lower infection fatality rate.
The CDC came out with their own estimations of it and it landed around 0.24%.
It took them a month later than our research, but they still came out with that saying about the same thing.
So I think in a lot of ways it's overblown.
Can these viruses always mutate one way or another, become worse, become, you know, less lethal?
Yes.
And I think it's going in the direction of actually becoming less lethal because that's the way viruses like to spread.
They spread better by not killing you, but by you being out there spreading it to other people.
And I think that's what we've seen during this.
Could it mutate to something more fatal?
Possibly, but it's kind of not the natural path of evolution of viruses.
So we're pretty much on the same page.
I'm interested, I hadn't realized that you published the first paper on hydroxychloroquine as a potential.
I mean, I'm familiar with a, I wrote about this for Breitbart, and what I found was that there was a 2005 paper on, you must have read this, on how hydroxychloroquine was being used as a treatment for SARS, which is basically coronavirus mark one, isn't it?
Yep, yep.
Yeah.
So was that what inspired you or was it the anecdotal reports coming out of China where I think they've been using it there as well?
It was actually a combination of all those.
First of all, as a physician, I was very familiar with hydroxychloroquine.
One of the main side effects is visually.
But that's after five years of using the medication, not after a small prophylactic treatment course.
So I started seeing a combination of all.
So there's a 2005 study looking at its efficacy in SARS-1.
There was anecdotal reports coming out from China and South Korea, where it's being used in their treatment guidelines.
There was in vitro evidence of its efficacy in primate cells.
And then, you know, all this together, what really was surprising to me is I had not heard a single thing about it mentioned in the mainstream media or by, you know, a lot of researchers.
It was all remdesivir.
Or, you know, some of these other, you know, on patent medications.
And so that was very surprising to me.
And my colleague, Greg, as well, who co-authored the paper with me, he had been doing research on the antiviral effects of chloroquine for about a decade.
So he was very familiar with the medications.
Well, we teamed together, put out that report.
Elon Musk tweeted it out, I think a day or two later.
And then about three or four days later, the president's talking about it in a press.
So it's all your fault, basically?
This controversy is apparently all my fault.
It all came from our report which was published in a Google Doc that was taken down by Google and is still found by Google.
And so was your report published in any of the medical journals or was it kind of an independent thing?
It was totally independent.
So I'm very familiar with the medical process of publishing, and it's slow, particularly that early in the pandemic.
Later on, it became the standard to publish a preprint and kind of let the public dissect the manuscript and the research, as opposed to waiting for a peer review process, which we've seen Fail in the hugest ways just this past week or two.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll come to that.
We'll get into that.
But so we did not want to wait a month or two for a journal to review this and then potentially even reject it.
Then you submit it to a new journal and it's a long process.
And so what we felt, and this was in the middle of a pandemic, you know, people are becoming sick.
We didn't know how bad this pandemic could be.
And so we actually just published it as literally a Google document.
And that Google document, that link went viral.
It had millions and millions of views.
And then a day or two later, Google took it down.
They never told me why they took it down.
It's still down to date, which is really surprising considering that this was really the first widely disseminated paper that triggered a lot of research all around the world from very smart clinicians and stuff and clinical trials by the World Health Organization.
And you still can't really read that original document.
It's up in other places now, but In its original form, it's still deleted by Google.
I'm fascinated to hear that your friend, Greg, your colleague, he's been researching the antiviral properties of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for 10 years.
So what's he discovered?
I mean, is it, for example, is it because it's a zinc ionophore that it works or what?
That seems to be the predominant thought from his research.
I would love to go into that more, but I have from him, because his research into it, into another condition, is still very active.
And so it's, you know, it's kind of all private at this point.
But based on that research, looking at it in treatment of a different virus is, you know how we saw a lot of similarities to how it could be effective for this virus as well.
Yeah, but so can you just explain to kind of us non-medics what a zinc ionophore is and why this might be the reason it works?
Yeah, so I think to be simply stated, you know, hydroxychloroquine can almost open up a channel and carry zinc through into the cell, okay?
And by doing so, zinc can inhibit the replication of this virus within the cell.
So the way viruses work is they attach to a cell, then they enter, and they use that cell's machinery to make millions of replications of itself, and then the cell bursts open or releases those.
If you can stop the replication of the virus within the cell, which zinc can do, Then you can prevent it from spreading and, you know, essentially stopping the virus.
That's why we're, you know, we want to look at it in very early use before the virus is already, once it's already spread throughout your entire body, you know, you already have your cytokine storm maybe in effect and your inflammatory response and you're already going downhill.
But if you can stop the replication in those very early and just those, you know, handful of cells that are maybe contaminate the virus, you know, I think it has a good amount of potential for that.
So what do you understand about hydroxychloroquine?
That if used in conjunction with zinc in the early...
Well, it can act as a prophylactic, number one.
So that's still actively being researched.
So we proposed that as well in our original paper back in March.
And there was a study that just came out from Minnesota that was looking at as post-exposure prophylaxis.
This was just hydroxychloroquine, no zinc.
It was a kind of an online, considered a randomized controlled trial, but was conducted online where they sent the medication to the patients who thought they were exposed to the virus and to see if it worked.
Based on that study, it showed that didn't work, but there's some concerns in, because there's such a long period of where you are asymptomatic with this virus.
That a number of these people could have already been infected and really needed more of a treatment course of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc, as opposed to just a very short, few-day course of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic.
But based on that study, it says no.
I wouldn't say that's the strongest data, and there's a good amount of active research going on right now.
So I would say we don't know the answer for sure to that.
It does seem, though, that zinc amplifies the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine based on some of the evidence that's out there.
You know, medicine is all about working with the evidence you have.
You know, it's very rarely black and white.
And so everything I'm saying is just based on what we know today.
Could this change in a week or two with another study, one way or another?
Of course.
But based on what's available, it does seem like zinc can help.
And, you know, originally I was a little bit skeptical of zinc, honestly, because I thought maybe you had enough zinc in your body already where hydroxychloroquine can use your natural levels of zinc to still perform the same effect.
But potentially zinc, by boosting your levels of zinc a little bit by supplements, maybe that's necessary.
And maybe a number of people are actually low in zinc, and that could harm as well.
Yes, so it's possibly useful as a prophylactic, but you think it's more interesting as if you get it in the early stages of coronavirus, that it can disrupt the cytokine storm maybe?
So I think that it's actually very interesting, not just in early treatment, but as a prophylactic.
I think it's interesting in both.
If you have a medication prophylactic, I mean, we stop the virus in its tracks and it's game over.
You don't even really need a vaccine, potentially.
I think that the best shot of it working is Either as a prophylactic or in very early treatment.
So this is within just a few days of, you know, becoming infected with the virus.
This isn't something where you are hospitalized and they're deciding to put you on a ventilator or not and they give you hydroxychloroquine.
You know, I guess I'm skeptical and I've yet to see, you know, evidence that it works that late.
There's anecdotal evidence, but based on the studies available, I would say it most likely does not work in those late stages of disease.
Which is interesting because that's what most people are studying.
Yes, that's a good point.
So since you published that Google paper that Google's now censored, have you seen lots of other studies and have you heard lots of anecdotal evidence which supports your thesis?
Basically, once we put out this paper, we became, I don't want to say the word famous, but we became almost a hub of information on hydroxychloroquine studies.
So I get hundreds of messages a day from people that are We're good to go.
Two, two and a half months ago that basically compiled all the evidence, all the studies for and against hydroxychloroquine, which was very popular.
I converted that Google document into a website which I call medicineuncensored.com and that is where you can go find all the recent studies on hydroxychloroquine, again for or against, as well as breaking news related to COVID-19 and censored content.
Excellent.
And what are you hearing?
You're a doctor, so you must have loads of medics in your circle of acquaintance and beyond.
Even I, as a non-medical journalist, have spoken to a number of doctors who say, this is a no-brainer, that I've got a protocol.
It involves hydroxychloroquine, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, I think, maybe.
And they think it works for my patients.
Are you hearing this?
Is there a certain frustration that there seems to be some kind of, well, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there seems to be an industry which wants to squash hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment?
When COVID-19 was really the The focus of the entire nation.
Now, I think its attention has been diverted quite a bit.
And I think we're in the summer months and, you know, this pandemic isn't turning out maybe as dangerous as people had thought.
But back in March, April and May, when governors were prohibiting Physicians from getting these prescriptions fulfilled at pharmacies, that was terrible.
I mean, here you have physicians where they went through seven, eight years of medical training and know these patients well, know the risk factors, know the risk factors of this medication, which has been around for 65 years and prescribed millions of times.
We're not being allowed based on a governor, a policymaker, who thought that this medication was bad.
There are many physicians very frustrated with it.
You, of course, have your other group of physicians who will...
Usually they're ones not necessarily treating patients, but the ones that just see what the mainstream media is putting out there.
And as you said, there was a very orchestrated attack on hydroxychloroquine, really from within a week after my co-author and I put out that first paper.
Huffington Post, Washington Post...
Politico, they all put out articles attacking it, mentioning both myself and my co-author.
And really, ever since then, there seems like there's been this attack from the World Health Organization, Dr.
Fauci, and the media on hydroxychloroquine.
And that kind of all culminated, I think, with the Lancet study, which we'll get into in a bit.
Yes, we're warming up to the main event.
I'm just throwing these teasers every now and then.
I know.
I'm loving it.
I'm loving it.
It's building.
It's like going to see a DJ and he's working up the crowd and he's soon going to play the floor filler.
Have you had a lot of grief yourself?
Have you become a target for hatred and things like that?
So, it's very interesting.
Since this was a grassroots effort, there's been a tremendous amount of grassroots support.
You know, I've had my Twitter account grow by about maybe 25,000 to 30,000 followers in the past couple of months.
And there are very smart people on there that are in direct communication with me, usually through direct messaging, which I encourage.
That's why I leave my direct messages open.
I love hearing from all these very smart, independent researchers around the world.
And they've been critical to putting all the information together for a lot of my discoveries.
Well, I put the information together, but they're all bringing it to me.
So I can't say that there's been a lot of targeted attacks on Twitter, on social media.
It's all really just banned from mainstream media articles.
It's just those professional organizations that are attacking and smearing, basically, or attempting to smear my reputation.
It's very interesting.
So I had received a medical degree from Columbia University.
I'm a physician.
Almost not a single one of those mainstream articles will just call me a physician or say Dr.
James Todaro.
The way they phrase it is, you know, James Todaro, a cryptocurrency investor who tweets about having a medical degree or claims he's a doctor.
Like something, you know, just a little ways to discredit you, you know.
You know how it is.
I totally know how it is.
I'm astonished that...
I used to think that there were elements in the mainstream media which were not bought and paid for.
But it seems now the entirety of the mainstream media, including conservative mainstream media, is part of the...
I hate to use the word conspiracy, but it's promoting the agenda of people who don't want hydroxychloroquine to be a thing.
Can I just rewind a second?
Sure.
You've trained as a doctor in America.
How much freedom do American doctors have to decide what is suitable for their patients and what not?
Because I'll put this in context.
There's a doctor on my Patreon group who said, if I'd known what I know now, about our national health service.
I would never have become a doctor because I have these kind of functionaries, this system telling me what to do, often against what I consider the best interests of my patients, that they are bullies, technocrats who actually are just following orders from on high.
I don't get any freedom.
Is that true in America as well?
It's becoming worse.
So I'm an ophthalmologist, and one of the reasons I actually specifically went into ophthalmology, did my training in eye surgery, is because it's one of the few medical specialties, surgical subspecialties, where you actually do still have a lot of freedom.
Oftentimes, you can own your own practice and really control how you treat your patients.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, though, who are just becoming more and more integrated into corporate hospital systems, what you're saying describes their situation, where it's basically on high from how many patients you can see in a day, how many you're supposed to see in a day, what the treatment should be, the risks you can take, and how you care for your patients, which is very sad, but that is, I'd say, similar to your system over there in Europe.
And is it dependent on what state you live in?
I mean, presumably if you live in a blue state...
I always get confused with the red and blue.
Blue is...
Blue, Democrat, red, Republican.
Yeah, yeah.
So I imagine it was mainly the blue state governors who were banning hydroxychloroquine.
Am I right?
That's correct, yeah.
I'll find the narrative.
Oh, kel surprise.
Because what, they didn't want people taking the Trump drug, even if it worked.
Of course.
Of course.
It'll kill you.
Come on, James.
It'll kill you is what we heard, right?
I read that in The Lancet, I think.
And The Lancet is the world's second most important medical journal, so it must be true.
But we're not going to get there yet.
So, I mean, that must be awful.
If you're, say, a family doctor and you've got this...
You know your patients and they love you and they respect your clinical judgment.
And...
You've got an elderly patient with maybe various, you know, in a high-risk category, and you think, I'm going to save my family friends, my patient's arse, by giving him hydroxychloroquine and zinc and whatever.
And suddenly you've got this governor, probably with no medical experience, who's read something in HuffPost, and suddenly says you can't give it to...
I mean, isn't that...
Aren't lives potentially being jeopardized by this refusal to allow this drug to be used?
Of course.
Of course.
It's incredibly frustrating.
There are a few physicians within the U.S. who were able to skirt those rules.
For instance, in New York, I don't know if you're familiar with Dr.
Zelenko, but he's a family practitioner in New York.
Who created what he calls the Zelenko protocol, which is a combination of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc in early treatment of COVID-19 patients.
And he does it outpatient.
I think he starts the medication regimen on people even before the positive tests come back because, again, it's so critical to start that medication early.
And he's, I think, found pharmacies that were willing to prescribe this or to give this medication to patients.
And I think he's done that even outside of New York.
Don't quote me on that.
But I think because of a lot of the interstate telemedicine.
So in the States before this pandemic, if you were a physician in one state, you really couldn't care for patients in another state, even through telemedicine.
Those borders broke down when it became clear that, you know, we needed physicians to be able to treat patients all over the country to try to diversify the, you know, to mean supply versus demand, which I've been saying for years, but finally it came to that.
And so I think he's been able to treat patients even outside of New York with this and find pharmacies who either will overnight you the medication or, you know, he knows the right pharmacies that will actually give it to you.
So there are a few physicians that are going above and beyond to try to care for their patients, but these governors are making it very challenging to do so.
So we've got the situation, have we, whereby there are certain states which are, let's say, lax on the prescription, where pharmacists are lax on the prescription of hydroxychloroquine, and you've got to have access to those or your stuff because you can't get pharmacists in your own state to provide it.
That's correct.
And it was actually really sad.
So this was again more in March and April when this was, but I had a ton of direct messages from firefighters, medics who were contacting me saying, hey, I think I've been exposed.
My doctor either won't prescribe adroxychloroquine because of what the governor said, or I can't get the prescription filled at a pharmacy.
Can you do it?
I'm in Michigan.
I'm an ophthalmologist.
And so I tried to connect them with physicians who maybe could, but it was really sad.
Yes, what's that movie about?
I keep forgetting its name, the movie about the AIDS drugs, where they're trying to have to go down to Mexico.
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club?
Yeah, yeah, that one.
Yes, Dallas Buyers Club.
It's a bit like that, isn't it?
You've got this kind of monolithic system, which won't allow people to choose what drugs they have, even though they know that they're effective.
Yeah, so you're not the first one to raise the parallels between that HIV pandemic and then this one.
Yeah, yeah.
You seem a very level-headed guy, James.
You don't sound to me like a kind of conspiracy theorist or kind of tinfoil hat wearer.
You seem to be, you know, you're prepared to consider both sides of the argument.
I'd like to think so.
I mean, you know, I majored in chemistry.
I went to medical school.
I like to just look at the evidence that's available and base it off that.
Whether something's called a conspiracy theory or not, that means almost nothing to me.
It's just based on the evidence.
And it's amazing how quickly something goes from a conspiracy to a retraction, as in the case of the Lancet study.
But that's my thing.
I just want to look at the evidence that's available.
I think we can wait no longer, James.
I think we have to go on to the Lancet study.
Tell me about LancetGate as it's become known.
Yeah, hashtag LancetGate.
So the Lancet study, when it first came out May 22nd, It was really a study in 96,000 patients, supposedly an observational study where it's supposed to be collecting real-time data analyzing these patients who received hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine plus or minus azithromycin versus a control group in treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients.
The study came out showing that you had about twice the risk of dying from COVID-19 if you received hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine.
These results were immediately broadcasted through the mainstream media.
You had CNN, you had MSNBC, everyone saying, okay, we were right.
This medication kills you.
The president probably almost died from taking this medication prophylactically earlier.
And that was it.
Then you had Dr.
Fauci saying similar, basically like, okay, now we can say that hydroxychloroquine is a lost cause based on the Lancet study.
And then just over a weekend, so the study came out on a Friday.
By Monday, the World Health Organization had supposedly done their due diligence on this study and halted clinical trials worldwide in, I think, about 17 different countries.
These are clinical trials, controlled clinical trials.
They didn't receive any data saying that this medication was harmful from those trials.
But based on the Lancet data, this world-renowned journal by Harvard, studied by Harvard researchers, We're going to halt all these trials.
The results of the study didn't make sense to the, as you, I guess, call me more level-minded people, the objective researchers out there.
Because, you know, does hydroxychloroquine work late in hospitalized patients?
Again, like I said earlier, probably not.
Does it increase your risk of dying?
Does it double your risk of dying?
Highly unlikely.
So that was very suspicious to Dr.
Raul, who's conducting a lot of research and treating patients with hydroxychloroquine in France, as well as Dr.
Zelenko and independent researchers.
And I think they've been called amateur sleuths on Twitter.
This did not make sense.
And so a lot of us began a deeper dive into the data.
And that's when things started to not add up.
You had So the way they intentionally obscured the data, instead of telling how many hospitals were included in each country and where they're getting this data from, they just actually put it in the broadest category possible, which was how many hospitals or patients are coming from a certain continent, okay?
So the broadest classification they could because that's the easiest way to hide the data.
Australia is both a country and a continent, and so it's easy to cross-reference the data that they had in Australia versus how many patients were actually hospitalized at that time.
And the numbers didn't add up.
They were reporting more deaths from COVID-19 than there even were in Australia.
And that was one of the first pieces of the puzzle.
And they quickly corrected that and said, oh, you know, we just accidentally designated a hospital that was in Australia and it should have been in Asia.
Our mistake, you know, we fixed that.
No problem.
Lancet supported them and said we did not change the conclusion at all.
Study's still good.
You know, results still on.
But there's other data that didn't make sense either.
When I took a dive into it as well, it was North America.
They were reporting that they essentially had patient encounters for almost every single patient in the US who had COVID-19.
And to be able to do that is almost impossible.
That's a database that doesn't exist to be able to capture that many patients in all these individual hospital systems, all with different electronic medical records.
And then also their data from Africa didn't make a whole lot of sense either.
They were supposedly reporting that there was, you know, advanced electronic medical record systems at these hospitals in Africa with, you know, cardiac monitoring, advanced continuous cardiac monitoring to catch these arrhythmias.
And so it was just, you know, Each of these inconsistencies just didn't make sense to us.
And what they hid behind, so a number of people were coming out saying, okay, release the data.
You know, there's enough red flags here that we want to see the data and audit ourselves, or at the bare minimum, having an independent agency audit it.
And The Lancet and the authors came back with, well, we have data exchange agreements with hospitals, we can't release that data, and it's really unnecessary.
We fix the one problem, which is Australia data, the rest of it is good.
To me, there were enough red flags where I actually thought this study was just fake at this point.
At first I thought it was probably a lot of fake data or some manipulation of the data, but now I was just like, I think it's just fake.
And so I was like, let me look at this corporation that is supposed to be the black box analyzing and then collecting all this data, Surgisphere.
And that's when the story got really weird.
Based on my experiences, I'm both a physician, I've interacted with a number of different medical databases.
I'm also a tech investor, so I'm very familiar looking at startup tech companies.
Surgisphere looks like a startup tech company.
Their website doesn't have any real history of research, it's all use cases, and this looks like a tech startup.
So it doesn't look like a database that's supposedly managing or has 240 million patient encounters from 1,200 hospitals.
So I was like, who is this team behind this that's creating this software for artificial learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence?
And there really wasn't much of a team, actually.
There's no team on the website.
It's all linked to one guy, this Dr.
Sapan Desai, based in Chicago.
If you go to LinkedIn, there was five employees.
And their LinkedIn looked like it was attempting to be active.
It had been around for a number of time.
Four of the employees had just joined the company two to three months ago.
That was the rest of it.
Before then, it looked like it was just the founder.
They didn't have any real medical experience.
There were two businessmen, and then there were two freelance science writers, although one of them was science fiction, so I guess if you want to call that science, then sure.
And then if you look into their subsidiary companies, Quartz Clinical, which was on their main page of the website too, that's the subsidiary company I think that's analyzing or doing all this very sophisticated analysis of this data.
There's a promotional video from I think just last year that has, you know, it's one of those videos where you're at a trade booth and it's kind of professionally shot and you're in front of your booth and you have the founder talking about this exciting software they have.
And then you have the director of this, you know, young woman who's the director of sales comes on the screen and is saying, you know, what we're doing here at Surgesphere and blah, blah, blah.
And it says Surgesphere, director of sales, you know, Turns out she's actually an adult model and a little more erotic than that.
And then if you look at the digital footprint of this company, Surgisphere, which is why I went to the Internet Archive and said, okay, what was this company doing, say, two months ago or six months ago?
It's been around since 2007.
It was actually weird.
It's not in the Internet Archives.
It actually says this URL has been excluded from the archives, which is unusual.
One thing is to just not have a website in their database.
It's another thing for it to actually have been intentionally excluded.
Which is strange.
And so I did a little bit of like, you know, just researching what does this phrase mean?
When does this happen?
It's usually when either the company inserts specific text codes into their website to help prevent the Internet archives from kind of using their automated crawlers to find this website and take a historical snapshot of it.
Or the company requests that data be removed from the internet archives.
So one way or another, this company or someone was trying to hide what this company was saying, let's say two months or four months or six months ago.
And then, even beyond that, though, you know, it didn't add up.
So, you have this Dr.
Safan Desai, who publishes frequently.
He has, if you look on PubMed, he's published about, you know, close to 40 publications over the last five years.
Here he has this massive database, and he's never used it, besides one study that he published in the New England Journal of Medicine looking at cardiovascular drugs and COVID-19 on May 1st.
That was the first time this massive database was used.
This database should be coveted by researchers all around the world.
This is a huge breakthrough, but it wasn't used by anyone, not even himself, which is crazy.
And, you know, there's, you know, and then the, yeah, that's probably all the main highlights on Surgisphere that I discovered.
And so what I did is I collected all those, put them in a paper, and published it on my website, medicineuncensored.com.
So I published that May 29th, which is before any of the kind of mainstream journals or magazines put out their own investigations into Surgisphere.
And it circulated on Twitter.
It got a lot of attention on Twitter.
And then You know, the following week, you had the Guardian's deeper dive in the surgesphere.
And I put a lot of pressure on The Lancet to retract this article, which they did, which was good.
They didn't really do much of an apology or recognition for, I guess, all the independent researchers out there who caught this glaringly fake study that, remember, got past the World Health Organization A 200-year-old prestigious journal, The Lancet, involved Harvard researchers, and yeah, it's incredible.
So you must have some, well, okay, first of all, suppose you are Richard...
Yeah.
Suppose you are the editor of The Lancet, or editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Richard Horton, who I think has been in that job for 25 years, and you get this study coming from this company, Surgisphere, with this apparently blockbuster information, and based on a sample of, I mean, an extraordinarily large sample, 96,000 patients is a hell of a lot, Do you think, I mean, okay, suppose you'd written such a paper.
Do you reckon you'd have got it passed into the Lancet just like that?
I mean, how does it work?
Oh, absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Especially because I wrote a paper on hydroxychloroquine three months ago.
But even without that, no way.
No way on earth.
Yeah.
Well, I need you to explain to me, presumably there ought to be a vetting process, to get into the Lancet.
I mean, am I right in thinking apart from the New England Journal of Medicine, it's the most influential, revered medical publication there is?
I mean, to get there is a big deal, right?
Of course, of course.
The New England Journal of Medicine made the same mistake, by the way.
But yeah, it's very difficult.
So there's a very rigorous peer review process, supposedly rigorous peer review process, that goes into analyzing the data, making sure the conclusions make sense, and it all adds up.
It's actually funny that two days before the study was published, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, put on Twitter saying the peer review process is very much, is very strong.
It's because someone had criticized how the peer review process is.
This is, remind you, two days before the study comes out about how the peer review process had been breaking down.
Richard Horton targeted him and said, no, the peer review process is incredibly strong.
We have, you know, 17, we have, you know, this number of peer reviewers who are doing this full-time.
This is their only job and, you know, And then two days later they put out an article that's totally fraudulent that supposedly gets past their entire peer review process and Twitter figures it out later, I guess.
Do you have any theories on what's going on here?
You know, I don't know if I want to dabble into the conspiracy side too much, but it's very strange, is it not?
I mean, if you just look at the dots and you connect them yourself, it's all public.
It's weird that a study like this could get past so many researchers, organizations, and result in such a huge impact, all because, you know, some guy with some tech startup says, I have data.
And, you know, are you really going to say, like, I mean, this guy wasn't even, he, you know, Dr.
Sapan Desai, the surgery guy, he's not like a prestigious Harvard researcher.
He hasn't built some huge reputation.
He's, you know, he published a lot, but nothing of maybe a ton of consequence.
So why, who was he that supposedly these authors are trusting?
You know, and if you look at the original Lancet article, I think it even says that the authors, Dr.
Mehra, Harvard clinician, as well as Dr.
Patel, had access and can verify to the accuracy of the data.
There's going to be, everyone's going to point the blame.
I think the authors are now saying that they couldn't see the data, you know, it was all controlled by Surgisphere and Dr.
Sapan Desai, but I think that they kind of attested to seeing this data and that it was accurate.
But it's all very strange that it got by so many people.
And tell me another thing.
This has puzzled me, that I expected this story to be all over the mainstream media, that, you know, look, we've really made a mistake here, that we bigged up this study and said it was the deal-breaker of hydroxychloroquine, and now it turns out the whole thing is fraudulent.
Okay, The Guardian, to its surprising credit, covered the story.
But I looked in the papers, and instead of this being written up, There was, they went in on another study which seemed to publish suspiciously close to the retraction of the Lancet study, this time I think from Oxford University, saying, oh no, hydroxychloroquine has definitely failed all our patients too, and lots of them have died.
Somebody even had a go at me for this.
Somebody had a go at me on Twitter saying, will James Dellingpole now retract his support for hydroxychloroquine, like my opinion counts anyway.
But they were brandishing this latest study as, you know, clearly I was wrong.
And I said...
I think I would rather wait till this study has been dissected by you know on the internet by people who understand these things because what was happening and I think this happened with the with the Lancet study as well the media was very eager to jump on the headline story that this this study said this and again with the Oxford study that they this study says this and here are some doctors confirming that it says this but actually In the
days since, already suspicions are being raised about the quality of this study.
Have you looked at this study?
I have looked at it.
So it's definitely not taking as strong of a position as the Lancet study, where it's not saying there's a significantly increased mortality of this.
It's simply, I think, saying that there was found to be no benefit between these two.
Again, the Oxford study looked at late treatment of this disease.
But I think you raise a really good point on something, which is it was amazing how shameless a lot of these professional, academic physicians who have been criticizing hydroxychloroquine for so long, so many of them did a very detailed thread analyzing the Lancet study themselves right when it came out and then praised its results.
So this is incredible.
This is what we've been saying.
C-hydroxychloroquine kills you.
You were right.
All to be proven wrong within two weeks in a retracted article, they're so shameless that within 24 hours of a new article coming out, they do the exact same thing.
You'd think that, okay, maybe you should either sit this one out Or maybe give it a few days to actually look at the data yourself instead of doing a superficial analysis.
You're supposedly Harvard-trained and Ivy League-trained.
I mean, do your due diligence.
Don't just, you know, summarize an article and then say, see...
And so, yeah, I agree.
I think these results need to be dissected, need to give it a couple of weeks.
Again, if the results hold up, that it doesn't work at late stage, it's not going to be a surprise to me.
What I think is surprising, though, is how quickly this study came out right after This Lancet scandal.
It's almost as if they're trying to bury that story.
And it's funny because if you look at the mainstream news and all the articles, the title is not hydroxychloroquine study retracted.
It's, no, two coronavirus studies retracted.
They're trying to minimize or disconnect hydroxychloroquine from all this.
It's just a bias.
It's all dripping in bias, but I guess that's just the way it is in the mainstream.
So I think we can probably agree that this is no longer a medical debate, or increasingly anyway, it has become a political one.
A lot of it's about Donald Trump, isn't it?
So there's definitely good physicians and smart, independent researchers out there that I think are looking at this objectively, but largely in the public space, it's purely political.
It's amazing that a 65-year-old medication could be this political, but it has, and it is.
And those lines are drawn, and there's kind of a few people that cross both sides and look at it objectively, but you're definitely not going to see that in most of the mainstream channels.
Yes, one of the points we haven't made actually, and I'm sure you can fill me in very briefly.
Hydroxychloroquine, you say, it's been used for 65 years.
If you take low doses, what are the side effects?
What can it do to you?
Again, like I said earlier, so one of the side effects can be vision loss.
It's cork and retinopathy where it can harm your central vision.
That takes a fairly substantial dose over five years to have any effects.
That's one of the main ones.
The other one that's really gotten a lot more attention though recently is the cardiac side effects.
So, you know, will it give you a heart attack?
And so the way it works is hydroxychloroquine can prolong your QT interval.
And so what is that?
So on EKG, and most people have seen EKG, at least in the movies, where you have kind of the spikes up and down.
And so there's certain, between those spikes, there's certain distances.
It's called a QT interval.
If that interval gets too long, your heart can go into arrhythmia.
Again, that doesn't mean you'll die.
We can go into an arrhythmia, and unless that arrhythmia is corrected, either by stopping the medication or maybe getting some other therapy, then you could, in theory, experience a heart attack and even cardiac death.
Extremely rare.
Very, very rare.
A handful of cases that have been reported over the last, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.
And it's usually, if this arrhythmia does occur, it's usually caught by physicians because a patient will be like, oh, you know, I'm feeling palpitations or something doesn't feel right, I'm tired.
They go to the doctor, they do an EKG and say, oh, you know, this interval is too long, let's stop the medication and give you something else.
And then they improve and they get better.
So that's why it's so surprising that, you know, The president, under heavy medical supervision, was looked at as he was going to die.
The only thing that's very interesting is, so rheumatologists call hydroxychloroquine, they've called it a daily multivitamin for lupus.
That's the way they look at this medication, because they hand it out to so many different patients.
And they don't do EKGs on their patients before giving this medication.
Most of them don't.
Some do, I'm sure.
But a lot of them don't.
Because cardiac risks are so small that it's not really one of their primary concerns.
And so to see this...
Potential side effect blown up the way it has in the media.
It's incredible.
But to get to your original question, if you take this at low doses for a long period of time and you've been examined by a doctor and known not to already have any risk factors for developing this cardiac side effect, you'll probably be fine.
Besides maybe some GI distress initially and stuff like that.
And President Trump, I know that you Americans take great care of your presidents.
I mean, you know, you have a medical team whose job it is to keep the president alive.
So I don't know how many medics Trump would have at his beck and call, but I imagine that if he were really putting himself at risk by taking a kind of an unsuitable medicine, they wouldn't let him do it, would they?
Of course.
That's the other funny element is people are like, oh, he's crazy.
He's just, you know, taking this medication like he just like prescribed it himself and took it.
He clearly has a medical team that he talked to and they at the bare minimum said, well, you know, it could help.
It almost certainly won't hurt.
So, you know, we would either recommend taking it or you could take it.
And that was probably how that discussion looked, as opposed to them saying, no, you absolutely should not take this, but here we'll give you the prescription if you absolutely demand it, which is the way I think the media portrayed it.
Yeah, yeah.
What can you tell me about Anthony Fauci?
I mean, yes, what can you tell me about Anthony Fauci?
So I have no inside knowledge, but I would say that he was very excited about remdesivir's study when that first came out, which showed no mortality benefit.
So that's essentially Big Pharma's drug, right?
That's Gilead's drug.
Very excited about those results.
He seems very excited about a potential vaccine for this.
That seems to be one of the big plays that's coming down.
You know, there's so much conflict of interest, I think, at those high levels.
It's, you know, when you have, you know, almost 20% of the NIH task force for making recommendations on COVID-19, who are either invested in or employed by Gilead, so essentially by Big Pharma, who are making those decisions, you know, you have huge conflicts of interest.
When you have Bill Gates meeting with these people regarding a vaccine, With his control and power, there's a lot of influence going on behind the scenes.
And for something like hydroxychloroquine, you don't have that.
You're not going to make money off it.
Even the pharmaceutical company that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine, they can't even profit much off this medication's success.
And so you don't have anyone championing these repurposed drugs But you have everyone on the other side who are very high up, you know, that are very interested, I think, in big pharma success or the success of a vaccine.
Yes.
Do you not find that the world divides at the moment between, and I see this a lot, for example, from our government in the UK. There are lots of people invested in the notion that this coronavirus thing cannot be considered over until a vaccine appears.
And this is the narrative where we're fed.
And I imagine that this is the narrative that Fauci is pushing in the US as well.
So there's that faction, which includes the World Health Organization, Big Pharma, which is a very powerful industry.
Who else haven't I said?
Well, Fauci, his equivalents in the UK. Politicians generally seem very sold on the idea.
And then you've got sceptics like me, and I imagine you, who are thinking, well, saying, knowing even, A, it's going to take a very long time, if ever, before we get a vaccine, and B, and this is where I think hydroxychloroquine is so relevant, we already have a potential treatment, cheap, readily available.
And I think a lot of us sceptics are asking the question, well, is there maybe an industry which doesn't want hydroxychloroquine to work because it's off patent and therefore no one can make money out of it and it renders the need for a vaccine unnecessary?
Absolutely.
I mean, that's, I think, a huge concern for these companies.
I think when hydroxychloroquine, you know, the first information, clinical evidence of its success came out, I think Gilead stock actually went down, you know, some percent pretty much right after that.
So there was definitely a direct, you know, Inverse relationship between hydroxychloroquine success, I think, and big pharma success.
I think Dr.
Fauci just a few days ago or last week kind of is starting to backtrack a little bit on a second wave of this virus and maybe, but for a long time, that's still the, I think, the main, the main narrative.
Is that, you know, this doesn't go away.
We're essentially going to have to do this in and out of quarantine, isolation, until a vaccine is developed.
You know, like you said, a vaccine takes time.
You know, I think it's accepted by somehow people that we can make a vaccine for everything.
That's not true.
There's a lot of things that we, you know, a lot of viruses we cannot make a successful vaccine for.
Even the flu vaccine, you know, it's More effective some years than others.
I'd say some years it might not be even effective at all.
There's not really randomized controlled trials of a vaccine every year.
They just kind of pick strains that they think are going to become predominant and then put it in the vaccine and hope that it prevents it.
But, you know, what I would say is if they do come out with a vaccine very soon, I'm going to be extremely concerned about both the efficacy of it as well as the safety of it.
Like, you know, there aren't going to be, you know, there's not going to be time to do long-term trials and safety monitoring or something that comes out within six months.
Will this, you know, if you do catch coronavirus, will it worsen it or will, you know, make you more susceptible to maybe a mutated strain of it?
I don't know.
And they don't know either.
And so if this vaccine does come out, let's say early 2021, which I think is the soonest it possibly really could be widely, you know, distributed, Then, you know, I'd be very concerned about the safety of it.
Well, why is it hard to make vaccines?
Because, I mean, I think probably if you'd asked me when I was younger, I would have imagined that, yeah, doctors are amazing and they can do this amazing shit and they can cure stuff.
I mean, it's why they're called doctors.
And there was these industries that are here to help us.
And why is it hard?
Harder than I thought when I was younger.
Yeah, so doctors do have that, but really it's all about reducing chances a lot.
And that's kind of what a vaccine does.
You know, for viruses that can mutate a lot, which, so there's certain types of viruses that can mutate very easily.
Not to get too much in the science of things, but if it's a single-stranded RNA virus, those are susceptible to the most mutations, because basically they don't audit their own replication that well.
Just kind of everything, all the viruses that come out of each round of replication is almost like a first draft.
So it's got a bunch of different errors.
And so this DNA can mutate and can then change the way the virus infects you, which receptors it attaches to in your cells, which machinery it needs to replicate.
And so when you have a virus that mutates like that, you have a vaccine that maybe protects against one strain of that virus, but not another one.
And so when you then prevent one strain from taking over, All you're kind of doing is letting another strain then become the prevailing strain.
And so, you know, the concern is always, you know, will that other strain then be the more lethal one?
Are you basically eliminating the less fatal one and letting the more fatal one kind of infect everyone and go that?
Or is there some cross immunity between the two?
Maybe this, you know, by giving some immunity to one strain, maybe that does help prevent the other strains from We don't know, but it kind of varies one virus to another.
But that's why a lot of these vaccines for something like influenza, which mutates in different strains every year, that's why it's not always effective.
I think I've almost answered my question before I even answer it, because I referred to my younger, more innocent self.
But just explain something to me.
Okay, so before all this started, I was a climate skeptic, and I spent a long time looking into this, and I was familiar with The failure of models, for example, of how a scientific establishment can actually be completely wrong on something and yet all the academies can put out this one particular view as if it were true.
So I'm familiar with the kind of the corruption of the intellectual corruption of academe and so on.
But up until this year, I genuinely believed that Doctors were completely ethical and that stories about Big Pharma being almighty and incredibly influential and possibly corrupt were just conspiracy theories.
But I mean, tell me about this.
Okay, so for example, that Oxford study, you've got doctors with lots of credentials after their name, putting their name to this and coming up with quotes saying this proves that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective.
And yet, you only need a cursory glance at this study to realize it was almost designed to fail, that the doses of hydroxychloroquine were way beyond the safety zones.
And that in itself sets up a red flag for me as a kind of, you know, as a non-medic, but even I can see this is wrong.
So tell me a bit about the world of big pharma and doctors.
Yeah, I mean, it has to make you suspicious, right?
Because here the people, the physicians, the researchers on this medication, who were the first to first discover its potential use case, and then in the south of France, who's treating, you know, treated thousands of patients with this, Didier Raul.
Didier Raul.
Yeah, exactly.
The World Health Organization creates their own protocol, which is completely against what anyone in the know is actually doing.
Why?
What did you know?
They didn't know anything.
They didn't come up with it in the first place, but they did it in a...
Like you said, it looked like it was designed to fail.
And so why would they waste three months?
It's been almost three months since my colleague and I put out that first paper.
And we have still yet to get a well-designed, randomized controlled trial using hydroxychloroquine early treatment of COVID-19.
Three months!
Instead, we have a bunch of either fake studies entirely or studies looking at end-stage disease, which is not the right use case for it.
So it's got to make you suspicious of what's going on in the scenes, what the motivation is to study this disease or this treatment in the wrong way.
We've already established that you're a level-headed young man, but has the experience of the last three or four months opened your eyes to something that you hadn't realized existed before?
You know, I've always been, you know, There's a famous saying in blockchain, Bitcoin, it's called do your own research.
And I've been invested in it for a long time.
And so I'd say that comes to medicine too, is you have to do your own research.
If you're trusting headlines, news headlines, and talking personalities on TV, I hope you're not making real decisions based off that information because there's a good chance that it's either misrepresented or actually just entirely wrong.
And I've known that for a long time.
This, I would say, definitely is a great example of it, what's been going on these last three months.
Yes.
By the way, do you know why President Trump sort of adopted hydroxychloroquine?
I mean, do you think he'd read your So, from what I heard is after my colleague went on Ingram Angle, so Laura Ingram's show, to talk about both our paper as well as the results that were coming out from Dr.
Raul's lab.
My understanding is she took the evidence for hydroxychloroquine and actually met with Trump.
And discussed what was evolving with this.
And I think to him and his team, it's not always just him.
There's a team there with physicians and researchers.
And I think that there was maybe enough evidence where it said, hey, this could potentially work.
And that's essentially what he said.
He said, you know, it could be a game changer.
And I think that it was a little bit appealing because No, I think that he kind of always thought maybe this virus was a bit overblown, the fatality of it was, and he wanted to keep the economy strong and keep people at work and in their jobs.
And so I think that there was kind of, you know, a couple of advantages to supporting further investigation into this medication.
Yes, but do you not think there is an industry out there which wants the lockdown to continue?
Yes.
Yes, there is.
What's their motivation?
You know, there's a big election coming up in November.
And so, you know, depending on the state of America, how things look is probably going to play a role in how people vote.
I'm trying not to get too political here and try to just remain neutral.
But I think that there are interests in both sides where if the economy is still locked down, if no one has jobs, you're going to have kind of a lot of people that are dissatisfied with the state of America, right?
Whereas if the economy is going strong, if people are back at work and things are thriving, then they'll be happy.
You know, they'll be happier with the way things are.
And the state of economy often determines the elections.
So a lot of political plays, I think, on both sides.
But yeah, you know, the effect, the state of America, whether there's a lockdown or not, I think affects the election.
Can I, okay, can I just outline a scenario to you, which I think will probably make sense to you?
We talked at the beginning about my colleague who asked me, why do you care so much about hydroxychloroquine?
I mean, you know, why should I care about any drug?
The reason seems to me very simple, that if hydroxychloroquine is an effective prophylactic and also is capable of stopping you dying if you are an at-risk category of Of coronavirus, then suddenly coronavirus ceases to be a big deal.
It's just like any other medical condition that comes and goes that is treatable.
What that means furthermore is that the lockdown is entirely unnecessary and all the measures that have been taken by governments are a complete waste of time.
And I think that maybe there are lots of people who can't handle the truth, in fact don't want the truth to come out.
Is that fair?
Yes, that sounds fair.
That is terrifying.
That is really scary.
James, thank you so much for being on my podcast.
You know, I sort of found you randomly on Twitter, and I was thinking, well, he could be quite interesting, or he could be better than that.
But you've been great!
You've actually given me chapter reversal.
And I hadn't realized, because I'm really shit at my...
I don't do my homework.
I prefer these things to be kind of natural and stuff.
I'm just surprised you didn't go out during the hydroxychloroquine paper, right?
Yeah, exactly.
That's really good.
So thank you, Dr.
James Todaro.
And hey, good luck with your crypto.
Do you invest in crypto as well?
Yes, yes, I do.
Oh, okay.
Well, briefly, where do you see Bitcoin going?
So I think that, you know, one of the value propositions of Bitcoin has always been a censorship resistance and be a money supply that could not be hyperinflated.
And so what we've seen is a lot of, you know, printing of money, which is kind of, again, the value proposition for Bitcoin.
So I think over the next two to three years there I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is going to do extremely well.
Short term, it's always tough to say with these markets.
I think it's kind of been trending with the stock market.
But I think the next two to three years is going to be very good for this space.
And maybe hopefully I'll be on this show in six months or a year or so talking about that.
That would be great.
I'd love to have you back, James.
It's really good.
We'll do a crypto next time.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Thank you.
Take care, James.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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