Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins Joe Rogan to debate COVID-19 vaccines, highlighting myocarditis risks in young males (16–24-year-olds) post-vaccination—though 16x higher from infection—and their waning effectiveness against variants like Delta and Mu. Gupta defends vaccines as studied therapeutics with a 0.5% mortality rate but acknowledges reporting gaps, while Rogan questions mandatory childhood vaccination, citing rare severe cases and natural immunity’s strength. Both agree obesity (42% U.S. prevalence) and poor metabolic health drive severe outcomes, yet vaccines remain the crisis’s primary focus. The conversation also turns to lab leak theories, China’s opacity in SARS/COVID investigations, and vaccine-induced reactions in previously infected individuals, leaving Rogan skeptical of long-term benefits despite Gupta’s data-driven arguments. [Automatically generated summary]
A few months ago, it was pretty rough with the tents and all the homelessness stuff, but they moved those folks into hotels, and they've purchased some hotels.
I wanted to have you on, first of all, because I really respected that you made this change of opinion publicly.
When you were first talking about marijuana, you were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit, and it was really just a recreational drug that was possibly or probably harmful.
But then, upon further examination, you publicly changed your position.
And in doing so, you actually examined all the scientific evidence that pointed to, for many people with diseases, many people that are on chemotherapy, many people with some serious ailments, marijuana can be very beneficial.
And you talked about that, and I really admired that.
Because that takes a lot of courage.
Because a lot of people, when they have an idea and they proclaim it publicly, they double down.
And they just...
You know, use confirmation bias and whatever, you know, echo chamber news sources they can get to sort of confirm their initial position, and you didn't do that.
And I thought that's a real thinking person who is trying to honestly figure out what's going on instead of just working on being right.
Well, look, I appreciate that, and it was very illuminating for me, because I think the way that we become a more knowledgeable society, I think, sometimes surprises people.
I do think, and maybe this will dovetail even to a little bit of what's going on now, but the thing is that...
When you looked at the, so if you were just to look at the bulk of evidence around cannabis at that, and I'm talking, I wrote this Time Magazine article back, you know, this is probably 12, 13 years ago, and I looked at the bulk of evidence and you say, okay, I'm going to just look at the 400 most recent papers.
I'm going to read the abstracts.
I'm going to dig in deep on some of them.
And 94% of them were basically the hypothesis was, where's the harm here?
Show me the harm, right?
The hypothesis was not, show me the benefit.
That was only true for about 6%.
So right away, you're dealing with a sort of very biased sort of set of data.
And that's one stream up.
Now, if you're just looking at papers, you're like, well, this one potential lung harm, this one possible addiction, this one gateway, you know, you're seeing all those individual studies.
But at a broader level, one step upstream, you realize that most of the studies that are getting funded are designed to look for harm, right?
So when I saw that, that was the first time I thought, well, why are the studies that are getting out there, why are they all designed to look for harm?
Then I started looking at other countries and some really good research out of places like Israel in particular.
A guy named Raf Mashulam, who's 91 years old now.
He was the first guy to ever isolate THC and then synthesize it.
He's been doing this work forever.
He may get the Nobel Prize before he dies for his work in this.
They were talking about the use of cannabis for all sorts of ailments, including refractory seizures in kids.
And that one really got to me for a couple reasons.
One is that I think when you're trying to do studies on things like pain, it's hard.
It's a subjective thing, right?
And so you think, how do you really have conclusive proof that this is working the way that you think it is?
Someone says their pain is better, and that's important.
But how do you measure that?
A little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having seizures is a much more specific sort of metric.
And it seemed to work really well in kids who did not respond to existing seizure drugs, which was kind of amazing to me.
To me, in some ways, that wasn't just a medical issue at that point.
It was a moral issue because nothing worked for these kids.
And they were thinking about even compounding veterinary medications for them.
And these parents are like, you know, in their kitchen sinks, stirring up, you know, cannabis, trying to get the formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture they could put underneath the kid's tongue.
And it was working.
And, you know, I did stories on these kids and they were emblematic of thousands of more kids.
These weren't just anecdotal stories.
And that's when I said, you know, there's something here.
But I got to tell you, when I wrote the article saying I changed my mind on this, you know, you hit send at night and then you wake up in the morning and I work at a university.
I'm a practicing physician.
You know, I live in that world.
And part of me did wonder, like, what is the response going to be?
I felt very comfortable with what I had written, what I did not know, Was how it would be received.
One thing I tried to stay away from whenever I wrote about this was I felt like it was a little bit of a trap to get into the moral equivalency of things.
Like, I think things should just stand on their own two feet.
Well, it's better than this, right?
What you're saying is true.
I feel like alcohol can be a sledgehammer to the brain.
I really do.
If you think about the way alcohol affects the brain, very different than the way cannabis affects the brain.
And that part of it is true.
But the idea that it could be a medicine in particular, I mean, you know, I think that that is really...
quite striking and it's a plant, you know, and there's all these things.
And I listen, like I said, I listen to your podcast and I listen to Brett and I listen to others and I get the points that they're making about that in terms of can you look to the earth to heal?
And oftentimes you can, you know, we've been given a lot of things, but I think that with cannabis in particular, the evidence, I'm not the first to say this, obviously, but People have been saying this for a long time.
Maybe the timing was right, but two decades ago people were saying this.
Three decades ago people were saying this.
This was on the formulary in the United States in the 1940s, post-Reefer Madness, which I think was like 1936 or something like that.
People were already saying, hey, wait a second.
This could be used to treat addiction.
This could be used to treat, you know, even Parkinsonian-like symptoms.
There was all these things that they were putting out there.
And then it went through this cultural sort of assassination for a while, which was wild to sort of reflect on historically.
Also, he owned paper mills, and he owned forests filled with trees they were going to chop down to make paper, and it would have cost him millions of dollars to convert all that to hemp.
So this evil fuck, when he decided to demonize this particular plant because of the textile, because of the commodity of hemp, and he blamed it all on the psychoactive plant And then named it after a Mexican slang for wild tobacco.
Well, it shows you how dangerous it is when the press is lying, when they're inaccurate, when they're allowed to print things and publish things that aren't true, that the echoes of that, as I said, could last for, you know, 90, 100 years.
But I think the uncomfortable feeling that you get from the paranoia, when it goes away, you're left with an understanding of maybe what are these things that you have issues with.
And maybe if you could shore up those aspects of your life, you wouldn't have maybe these underlying feelings that you're suppressing and ignoring for the most part until you get high.
I think you'd like to get your life to a place where when you get really high, you don't feel bad.
It is weird, though, because I do see the, you know, I read, you had Michael Apollon on, I saw a while ago.
Yes, a couple times, yeah.
I read his book, How to Heal Your Mind, and I've talked to him about this stuff, and I interviewed even the guys who are doing some of these psilocybin trials now and stuff, and it's really interesting to me, you know?
Yeah.
In terms of, you know, your own personal growth when you're taking some of these substances, I'm not there.
I still have, you know, I had that paranoia and it really, it kind of bothered me.
And then you get this, I was told, you get sort of a biphasic.
You get the first sort of hit, and then it goes through your liver, and then you get a second hit, which can be very hard to manage, is what I was told.
If you eat it, I used to enjoy eating it and then going into the sensory deprivation tank because you'd close your eyes and you have these wild visions.
So you're not hallucinating with your eyes open, but when you close your eyes, you're seeing some wild visuals that I don't know what is responsible for those.
Yeah, I definitely think it opens up some aspect of your mind that tends to favor creativity.
Carl Sagan had a really fascinating quote about marijuana.
Carl Sagan was a huge marijuana enthusiast, and his quote was essentially something to the lines of, he believes that there are thoughts that are available to you when you are smoking cannabis that aren't available otherwise.
I, you know, when I was only semi-joking about the fact that I wrote some stuff down that I thought was brilliant, what I kind of realized in retrospect is that it's there, but I'm inhibiting it.
I'm worried about putting it down on paper.
I don't think it's going to be very good, or I don't think it's going to sound very smart, or whatever it might be, and it never gets out there.
And then all of a sudden, I don't care, and I'm putting it out, and then I read it in retrospect, and I'm like...
You're on this major television news network talking about science and medicine.
And you're a practicing physician that works for a hospital.
You have affiliation with the university.
There's a lot going on with you where you're scrutinized and you're a public person.
So there's these constant eyeballs on you and you have to be very aware of saying something that'll be preposterous or people are going to diminish your viewpoint because, oh, but he said this and look at that.
You can look at you in an unfavorable light very easily.
I think that the biggest concern I have sometimes is that people aren't forthright with me.
About what?
Whatever it might be.
It's not that I'm trying to not disclose something, but I think sometimes when I'm having conversations, people behave a certain way around me, they say certain things around me, around whatever the issue may be.
They feel like they have to act a certain way around me.
There was a study that came out last summer, I think, that said scientists are increasingly perceived as arrogant.
And that bothered me.
I found that jarring because, you know, some people are arrogant, obviously, but I think as a general rule, if you say, hey, look, this group of people is arrogant, and they're also the group of people, like with this pandemic, that we want to listen to, but if we see them as arrogant and we don't want to be taking instructions or feel like it's too didactic or too top-down, there's not enough of a conversation going on, that's a problem.
Not that I'm strategically trying not to be that way, but I think that that's just not who I am.
I think when you are a person that is discussing something that It's affecting millions if not billions of people.
You have millions if not billions of opinions that are coming your way.
And when you have spent an enormous amount of time studying an issue and you're discussing this issue with people that have spent almost no time studying it, maybe read a few things online or watched a YouTube video, I think it's very easy to get arrogant.
It's also very easy to appear arrogant to try to stifle or to dismiss or diminish the opinions of people that don't agree with you.
And it is a very common thing when someone is constantly being questioned or constantly being pressured, and you can see it unfold.
A good example.
I don't mean to pick on her, but the White House secretary, that Jen Psaki lady, she has, over time, adopted an increasingly more combative tone with people that are questioning her in the press.
And, you know, she comes off a lot of times as arrogant.
I think that arrogance comes from this constant pressure of being questioned, constant pressure of being scrutinized and criticized, and she's standing up on that podium and she wants to stop it!
Stop it in its tracks!
And so that sort of tone comes out of that and unfortunately it does the opposite of what it's intended.
It's intended to sort of silence critics, but it just emboldens them and it makes them more enthusiastic about asking more grading questions and more questions that are going to be more irritable or irritating and get under her skin more and try to get more of a reaction like that from them.
So the people who are asking Jen Psaki questions, I guess the question is, are these legitimate questions or are they just doing it to get under her skin?
There's also an aspect of playing a little game, trying to say something that you don't really have an answer to.
Not really trying to have a rational discourse, but also it's a terrible place to have a conversation.
Like one person's on a podium, they have a microphone, you're wearing a mask, you're yelling things out.
There's a bunch of other people behind you that also want to ask questions.
It's not a good way to communicate, right?
So she's under the gun already.
And then she's also responding to these people As a representative of the president, but she's not the president.
So she's not elected, she's hired, she's a press secretary, and we know from previous experiences, those people don't last.
Like, Trump went through a gang of them, right?
It was pretty funny watching these poor people just having to deal with answering the press that were freaking out about the shit that Trump would say.
I think that, like, going back to, you know, just you and I having this conversation, I mean, I think that there can be real conversations about these important topics, right?
And they don't have to be...
It is insightful to see how people think about this, not just what they think about this.
I think that it's just...
Everyone says it's so polarized now, and you can't disentangle anything from politics, and I think that's true.
And it's not just this pandemic, you know?
I mean, even prior to this pandemic, science and politics were not neatly cordoned off from one another.
There's always been these sort of things.
But I've never seen it quite like this.
Nor have I. I think the question is, when people raise these issues, are they trying to start shit, or are they actually having a legitimate question?
I had this guy, Joe, the other day who our air conditioning broke at the house.
This guy comes over to the house to fix it.
Nice guy.
Probably in his mid-70s.
Has a mask on.
He goes and fixes the air conditioning.
And when he's walking, I'm walking him out, and I don't know if he knows who I am or anything, but it turns out that he does.
And he says, hey, you mind if I ask you a question?
I said, sure.
He says, do you think I should get the vaccine?
This is just a few weeks ago, okay?
I said, yeah, I think you should get the vaccine.
And he says, well, the reason I ask is because I got this stent, you know, in one of the blood vessels, and I'm worried about clotting.
And I said, oh, yeah, well, there was some news reports about clotting.
I can see why you'd think that way.
But here's the thing, you know, your risk of clotting is, as it turns out, 80 times higher from the disease COVID rather than from the vaccine.
Really, you know, the clotting risk was primarily among postmenopausal women, and it was primarily the adenoviral, the Johnson& Johnson type vaccines.
You didn't really see it in the mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna.
But the risk is there.
But clotting is a real concern with this disease, which is weird, to the point where some people say we shouldn't even call this a respiratory disease as much as a vascular disease.
Which I think is really, I mean, this is, we're learning here.
I mean, this is a novel virus.
We don't get to see that very often.
Novel.
People focus on the word virus, but the word novel is really important here.
I mean, when is the last time you did something for the first time?
When's the last time you experienced something for the first time?
What happens when you have something novel?
What you automatically do is you bring your own worldview to it.
Coronavirus from China.
Oh, well, that's going to be like SARS. I remember SARS back in 2003. This is going to behave like that.
So you automatically put this in that box.
Wrong box to put it in.
Oh, it's looking like a pandemic.
I'm going to put this in the H1N1 box.
That was the last pandemic in 2009. That would have been the wrong box as well.
This thing didn't have a box of its own.
It behaved totally differently.
But the air conditioning guy, you know, he's worried about the clotting.
And I tell him this.
And he says, he thanks me.
And he says, well, I really appreciate that.
I've been trying to get an answer on this.
And part of the reason why is my daughter died last week of COVID. This is my air conditioning guy telling me this.
How old is he?
He's in the mid-70s.
So, which, I mean...
Yeah, it was just hard.
Somebody tells you his daughter died.
And it's a week later and he's working again, which in and of itself was like, I don't think I could do that, go back to work.
I mean, he was grieving still.
And his daughter died.
And they weren't vaccinated.
Now, they're not following the news reports.
I mean, they're working.
They got their lives.
And it's not something that they, like, this is the hill I'm going to die on as far as vaccines.
They're not those people.
They're just living their lives.
But she says to him before she goes on the ventilator, please get vaccinated.
And then she dies.
And so he's now telling me that he wants to get vaccinated, but he's worried about this clots.
He's been calling his doctor's office.
He hasn't gotten a call back yet.
And I'm the first person he has seen since this all happened, the first doctor he's seen.
And so he asks me and I tell him.
And, you know, am I going to get pissed off at the anti-vaxxers after spending time with that guy?
No, I'm not.
Because there are some who are, going back to the same thing, some who are just starting, want to start shit.
They're just trying to sow chaos and doubt and for no good reason.
Chaos is the metric, as you've talked about on your podcast.
But this guy, he wants to do it.
He understands the consequences of not.
He just watched what happened to his daughter.
He's worried about his stent in his leg.
There's all these things.
And we've got to communicate that to people.
If we're going to ask the country to do something, if you're going to ask the country to get vaccinated, if you're going to ask the country to get boosters, which is the most recent thing, you've got to explain it well.
If you're going to ask kids to get vaccinated, why?
Why are you asking kids?
Because everyone says, well, aren't they far less likely to get sick and all that?
But I think, you know, like in any given year, I think what, some 500 children have died of COVID. In any given year, you know, you may have similar numbers of flu.
But I mean, the conversation about children, let's just stay on this one for a bit.
What studies are there about children and the dangers of being vaccinated?
Because there was a study that came out recently about Young boys, in particular, that young boys face a higher risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than they do from getting COVID. I'm not sure that's right.
I think you could make a strong case that it's correlated, you know, I mean, given that it happens.
And then what they found was that So after the first shot, it was about 0.8 per million rate of myocarditis.
But after the second shot, it went closer to 6, 5.8 per million myocarditis rates.
So still very low, but definitely like if you see a number like that jump, especially between the first and second shot, you've got to pay attention to that.
But then you've also got to look at what is, as you point out, the risk of getting myocarditis with the disease COVID as opposed to the vaccine.
Now keep in mind, 16 times higher sounds like a lot, but we're still talking about 5 out of a million versus now maybe just under 100 out of a million.
So it's still really rare.
Now, the one thing I will say about the vaccinated patients who got myocarditis is that they were all treated.
Myocarditis can be a really frightening thing.
They can develop chest pain, shortness of breath, things like that.
And I think the only way we can know long-term things To be perfectly honest, of any of these aspects of the vaccine, the only way we can know long-term stuff is with the passage of time, you know, for certain.
The idea that your son could get vaccinated, and most likely he would have been fine if he got COVID, and that your son could catch myocarditis and have permanent heart problems.
But when you talk about 33% of people having persistent symptoms at last months, I just feel like we define...
I think we're allowed to have a nuanced conversation about this.
We measure things in terms of life and death.
And I get that.
I mean, it's easy.
It's public health.
That's the way the numbers get presented.
And frankly, that's our fault as well in the media to just say, this is how many people have died.
When that study from Scripps came out, and I think Brett or somebody on your show mentioned it even the other day, and they said, hey, look, we should probably start thinking of this thing as a vascular disease, not a respiratory disease, because, you know, I'm a neurosurgeon.
When I first heard that this respiratory pathogen could cause isolated loss of smell, I thought to myself, like, the fact that they can't smell, that's not the end of the world.
I get that.
But how is it doing that?
Why is it causing strokes in young people?
Why is it causing all these other organs to have problems?
You know, it's really weird.
And this gets back to the novel nature of this virus.
We don't know a lot about what this virus does to the body.
We probably shouldn't just think of it as another type of pneumonia or cold because it's clearly doing something else.
A cold wouldn't just cause isolated loss of smell.
Flu wouldn't even do that.
And then so many people developing long-term symptoms.
When you say long-term symptoms, what do you think is going on there?
Is this a result of overall poor health in general, lack of vitamin supplementation and exercise, and just a robust...
Immune system and just a person who's eating poorly sedentary lifestyle like what is causing their body to have this sort of reaction where some people get through it quite easily Young people in particular my children my children got through it.
It was like the worst was like it was like a day and my other one had a headache for a day and And, you know, thankfully, I think most people are that way, right?
So should we be making decisions based on the small amount of people that have these long-term symptoms and not instead addressing why do these individuals have these long-term symptoms?
And is this something...
That's inherent to their own biology, their own lifestyle choices.
Is that what the consequences are coming from?
Or is it coming from this very serious disease?
Like, shouldn't we look at it in terms of what does this do to healthy people?
And if these people are not healthy, what can we do to make them healthy so that they could have a more robust immune system and a more, you know, a more favorable outcome?
Instead of just thinking we should vaccinate kids, all kids.
Because I'm worried because I know one of my friends, his good friend that he grew up with, his daughter was 14 years old, got vaccinated and had to be admitted to the ICU because she had some sort of a cardiorespiratory issue from the vaccine.
Wind up dying because she had to get on immunosuppressant drugs to deal with a heart transplant and then got pneumonia.
This is a very rare case, right?
Very rare.
But if you're going to bring up anecdotal evidence about people that have long-term fatigue and consequences, you also have to bring up these anecdotal tales of people that have lost friends and loved ones to being vaccinated.
It's a young lady who apparently followed all the rules, was wearing a mask all the time, was very disciplined, was going to college, was one of the first people to...
You know, at her college, get vaccinated, and she had a terrible reaction.
Now, obviously, if you vaccinate millions and millions of people, you're going to have a certain percentage of them that have a bad reaction, just like if you give peanuts to millions and millions of people, some people are going to die.
I have a friend who was a long hauler and what his issue was, I'm most sure, was that he was training while he was sick and didn't know and he's a fighter and just kept going and kept training while he was sick and didn't allow himself to rest and it just got worse and worse and he would take a little time off and then push it again and he wound up having symptoms that lasted for months.
I mean, that part of it, I think, is an important part of the discussion as well, just because, you know, we often do just define things in terms of life and death.
And the virus is just weird.
There's a lot about this virus I still don't understand.
I don't know what this virus does to the body exactly.
But I do think that when you think about something that's causing such a change in your vascular system...
I mean, the way that so many different organs are affected in the body is through the blood, you know, and the idea that the blood is somehow affected by this virus or your vascular system is, I think is, you know, we're going to learn a lot about that.
I mean, the risk reward proposition on the vaccines for young people, if that's the question.
You know, I think that the FDA and these other organizations will look at this data and make some recommendations.
And there's probably going to be people who say, look, in the end, I just don't think it's worth it for my kids.
What I would say is that, you know, if you're concerned about a specific issue like myocarditis, look at the data and just sort of say, hey, what's the risk-reward proposition for vaccine versus risk-reward proposition for the disease?
Don't take my word for it.
Look at that data.
We are getting better at actually having data because more time has passed now.
And then also keep in mind, as you've talked about on the podcast, that you could still be someone who's perpetuating the pandemic because you could potentially still be spreading this virus.
I think we're going to get to the point where we can actually have this pandemic under control.
Well, you know, obviously you're aware that you can spread it when you're vaccinated.
In fact, this most recent outbreak that we had at the Comedy Store was spread by a vaccinated person and put a bunch of people, you know, out of business, very sick, and two of them in the hospital, who I think they were both vaccinated.
Obviously, vaccinated people can catch it and vaccinated people can spread it.
I totally agree with that, and I want to talk to you about that because I wrote a lot about this, but just on this point of the vaccination, again, I don't think that it's either or with this.
I think that, so you're eight times, according to this new data that's coming out, eight times less likely to get infected if you have been vaccinated.
So, now they're saying that, you know, six to eight months after the vaccine, there's some evidence that against mild infection, the vaccine's effectiveness wanes, which probably means you're more likely to get infected.
So, that's probably the case.
So, it's not indefinite, and I think that's part of the reason they're recommending boosters for some people.
Because the FDA just declined the recommendation of boosters and the two top people resigned because they didn't think that the science was there to recommend boosters, right?
They recommend it for people over 65, people who are vulnerable because of pre-existing conditions, things like people who they think will get quite sick if they were to get a breakthrough infection.
So, look at it this way.
If you look at the number of people hospitalized with COVID in the country, 95% of them are unvaccinated.
And, I mean, there was a study that was out of England, and then there was another one out of Israel where a large percentage of it was a great population.
But you've got to remember something, though, Joe, is that once you start getting the vast majority of people vaccinated in a society, then the total number of people who show up in the hospital with COVID are likely to be vaccinated.
But if you have a lot of people who are showing up in the hospital, over 100,000 at one point in this country that are in the hospital with COVID, 90% plus were unvaccinated.
Now, once we get to a higher vaccination level or a higher immunity level, the ratio will flip just because more people will be vaccinated.
But I think the question they were asking as part of this booster discussion is, who are the 5% that are vaccinated and still get sick enough to end up in the hospital?
And what they found was that they tended to be older.
They tended to be people with certain pre-existing conditions.
They had already made a determination that people who were immune compromised We should get a booster shot.
So there was all these various things.
They did not do, you're right, across the board recommendation for everyone to get boosters.
They don't think the data is there to sort of support that yet.
They think the vaccines do work pretty well for people who aren't vulnerable for these reasons.
They came back and they said, hey, look, what we really meant was that we think boosters are going to be necessary because we're seeing what's happening in Israel.
We're seeing what's happening in the UK. We want to be ready.
We want to make sure pharmacies have boosters and we don't go through the whole thing when vaccines first rolled out where people couldn't get them.
That's not how they approached it.
And I think the FDA, at least a couple of people who are very senior people within the vaccine office, basically said, we feel pressured.
And that's not how we should be conducting science policy.
And they left as a result.
I can see.
I can see the problem with that.
This should have been something that was just data-driven.
And if you're going to make recommendations to the country on something like this, You've got to justify it.
You've got to explain it.
It can't feel too didactic, and it felt very top-down.
Because in the middle of a pandemic, you would think that the people that have already worked on this and have been working on it for quite some time are extremely valuable, for whatever reason that's forcing them to step down like that.
It concerned me a lot, and I, you know, look, I spoke up about it even at the time, and I said there was two problems here.
One is that clearly the FDA and the CDC were not even part of some of these discussions, at least not some of the career scientists over there.
They weren't even part of the discussion because they were surprised when suddenly the White House Coronavirus Task Force was saying boosters.
And so some of these folks who are the actual scientists who are looking at this data trying to make these determinations were obviously blindsided by that.
That's not good.
But the second part of it that I think was even a bigger concern was What was the data then?
How do you justify this?
And that's a problem.
I think that, like, okay, my parents are in their late 70s.
They're living in Florida.
They've been pretty good throughout this, but I think they would benefit from boosters.
My dad lives with some chronic disease.
They're at risk.
And so, yeah, I think they should get boosters because a bad breakthrough for my dad would be a problem.
He could get really sick and, you know, might need to be hospitalized or even die.
If I were to get a breakthrough, I'm less concerned.
I'm a healthy person, you know, generally speaking.
I don't think it would be a big problem for me if, you know, a breakthrough infection.
I don't think it would happen, but if it did, it would be less of a problem.
Ultimately, there may be a case made that I need to get a booster too.
But right now, I feel like the vaccine works pretty well for me.
That feeling of saying that I feel like if I got infected, I would be okay.
Why is that okay to have that feeling if you've been vaccinated and not have that feeling if you're unvaccinated?
If you are not concerned about a breakthrough infection because you feel like your immune system is strong enough to handle it, why is that not okay for someone who is especially a young person Let's think of a young male who's 18, 19 years old who is in this risk of myocarditis versus COVID, getting the vaccine shot.
Why wouldn't it be okay for that person to make that choice?
And what is the argument against just vaccinating vulnerable people like your parents and my parents who have also been vaccinated?
And taking care of them and protecting them and not having this entire across-the-board population vaccination strategy.
Johnson& Johnson really didn't start doing it till March.
So we're seeing this.
I mean, if you look at vaccines overall, leave aside the flu shot for a second, just say vaccines.
Most vaccines do require a prime, maybe sometimes a couple shots that sort of prime your immune system, and then eventually you get a boost, and it sort of boosts it so that you get long-lasting protection.
You see that with a lot of childhood vaccines and other vaccines as well, even some that we take as adults.
That's not unusual.
I think what the question really is, is when does everyone need a boost, like me, for example, and younger people, and is there a right interval for that?
You remember in the fall of last year, they wanted to authorize these vaccines really fast.
Just get them out there, put them out there.
And they pushed back and said, no, we're going to wait for two months at least of safety data because the vast majority of side effects occur within the first 42 days.
Again, I don't know about this 19-year-old woman, and I'm sure that there are some stories like that.
But I think that that data has held up.
I mean, there's been some 6 billion shots now given around the world of this vaccine.
So in addition to the clinical trials, which were tens of thousands of people, you have a lot of real-world data now over the last 8 to 10 months.
You could make the case that these are some of the most studied therapeutics anywhere on the planet, which is not surprising because everyone on the planet will ultimately need these or take these, you know, so you get billions of pieces of data.
It was just at this celebration a couple of weeks ago.
I don't know if he got COVID there or whatever, but this maskless celebration has a breakthrough, dies from COVID. The odds of that happening to a healthy child are very, very low.
Yes, but I think people in their 50s, if you look at the data of people who get hospitalized with these breakthrough infections, they do fall into very specific categories.
What I'm saying is your attitude about not being concerned because you have antibodies and you think you would get through it even if you had a breakthrough infection, that is the exact same attitude that a lot of young people have where they don't want to get a shot because they're worried about the consequences, even though they're incredibly small.
They can happen, but they're not, despite this particular story, the person who died of it, in my age group, they're not very common.
At some point, if there's more evidence that the vaccine's effectiveness is waning even more, you're seeing people my age getting it, that's like a more common thing, then I would consider that.
Some would suggest I get a booster shot because I work in a hospital, right?
I'm a healthcare worker, and I don't take care of COVID patients specifically, but there can be COVID in the hospital, obviously.
My patients are neurosurgery patients, so it's a little different.
But yeah, I think it's a fair point, but I certainly wouldn't look at that and say this is a reason for children not to get vaccinated.
But if there is a study that shows that young boys in particular are more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine than they are to catching COVID, Is there a study that shows that?
Yes.
Let's find it.
Find that study where it says young boys more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine than to COVID. We were just talking about it.
I mean, the myocarditis data, I know, which is what a lot of people have focused on, It was about 16 times higher with the disease than with the vaccine.
But my point is, the same attitude that you have about not being worried if you catch it because you're vaccinated, a lot of people have that, not being worried if they catch it because they're young and healthy.
Here it is.
Boys more at risk from Pfizer jab side effect than COVID studies suggested.
U.S. researchers say teenagers more likely to get vaccine-related myocarditis than end up in the hospital with COVID. So if you have a child and you read this, don't you think that you would be hesitant to vaccinate a child that would most likely cruise through COVID with no issues, specifically if they're healthy boys?
The children with boys age 12 to 15 with no underlying medical conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in the hospital with COVID over a four-month period.
I think when you raise that point, that's always going to be a fair point because until we have it four to six times.
The absolute risk versus the relative risk, it's a real thing.
But I think if the question you're saying is, look, I'm worried about myocarditis, period.
How likely is my child to get myocarditis from the vaccine versus from COVID? Okay, not just, hey, how likely are they end up in the hospital period from COVID, but just how likely are they to end up with myocarditis?
I think, you know, like if you were to ask the question, how likely you'd end up in the hospital after a vaccine versus how likely you end up in the hospital after COVID? That would be a fair comparison.
Because it says the data suggests that boys 12 to 15 with no underlying medical conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis.
Then ending up in the hospital with COVID. Ending up in the hospital with COVID for anything, right?
It seems like the likelihood, according to that study, for young boys age 12 to 15 is far more likely to get myocarditis from the vaccine than you are from COVID. There's not a lot of kids who go to the hospital for COVID. You're right about that.
Yeah, so here's the myocarditis data specifically, which showed that it was a 16 times higher risk of myocarditis among patients with COVID-19 as compared to the vaccine itself.
Right, but you could get infected and thousands and thousands of people have and are still spreading it, right?
My point was that your attitude, which is a totally reasonable attitude of not being concerned about a breakthrough infection, is exactly the same way a lot of people feel about their children.
And I appreciate the conversation around this, but I think that, you know, we have to apply the same degree of certainty and confidence across the board, right?
When I tell you that I am not concerned about getting a significant breakthrough infection, I mean that because I know that the people who do get these significant breakthrough infections Are people who are more vulnerable and elderly, right?
That's what I'm talking about with the certainty, Joe.
I'm not saying 100%, but if you look at the vast majority of people who have breakthrough infections that end up in the hospital, You can start to see who is most vulnerable here.
So, in that circumstance, why would you want to vaccinate young people if the risk of being vaccine injured is four to six times more likely than being hospitalized for COVID under, for any circumstance, according to that?
Okay, but let me say, what is another reason for young people to get vaccinated?
Besides that, is there any other benefit to it?
I mean, we're in the middle of this pandemic.
If we know that people who don't have immunity, even if they don't get sick, can still catch this and spread it, and that the majority of spread was coming through people who did not even have much in the way of symptoms.
You take care of yourself, and you got sick still, right?
I mean, like you say, you're more aware of your own body.
But I think whatever it was, either because people weren't getting tested or they didn't feel they had symptoms, unlike with a lot of respiratory pathogens, you're usually transmitting it when you're sick.
You're coughing and you're sneezing and that sort of stuff.
A lot of this spread happened through asymptomatic people.
Let me just finish one thing, because I think that Because I really want to address this kids thing, and I think about it a lot.
Can kids, is there benefit to vaccinating kids in terms of decreasing the overall transmission of the virus?
That's the thing.
It's not perfect by any means.
I'm not suggesting that.
We know you can still potentially be a carrier and spreader even if you've been vaccinated, but it's a lot less likely.
So if we're serious about bringing this pandemic to an end and giving as many people immunity as possible, is there benefit to vaccinating young people?
I think there is.
That's another reason.
I think there may be some protection overall, although I think they're far less likely to get sick.
I am going to look at that study, but I'm telling you that we're comparing very small numbers regardless, right?
Right.
When you're talking about one to two in a million versus four in a million, these are small numbers.
So the absolute risk of these things are all small.
But the idea that that they could be helpful in terms of like, I feel like we could bring this pandemic under control, not extinguish it completely.
Probably this virus is here to stay, but we could bring it under control.
And I think if the more people that have immunity, the better.
At some point, you know, you have to sort of, I think, look at the risk reward propositions.
And I promise you, I will dig into that study.
I'm not sure.
I think that was the Guardian newspaper.
I've looked up a bunch of studies on myocarditis specifically, especially when I was thinking about getting my kids vaccinated.
And that's what I found.
You're right, that was across the board, but this was really up to 24 years old because you weren't seeing a lot of myocarditis in people who were older.
Why is that?
I think it has to do...
It was primarily boys, too.
I think it has to do with how much your body responds to the vaccine, how much inflammation you sort of have in response to the vaccine.
When you feel miserable after the vaccine for a day or two, it's because...
Because that study on the spike protein that they did at the Salk Institute, I'm sure you're aware of that, that showed the spike protein is responsible for the deterioration of blood vessels.
I mean, the Salk, and they were the same ones who then classify this potentially as a vascular disease as opposed to a respiratory disease for that very reason.
They think that there's these receptors that are really, you know, predominantly in your blood vessels that do get, you know, that the spike protein is binding to.
So that's a concern.
And obviously your blood is going everywhere in the body, which is why so many organ systems are affected.
So do you think that the injection, if it does inadvertently hit a blood vessel or some sort of a vein, and then it goes straight into that, that It's possible that could be what's going on with people.
I mean, what you're injecting into the body is a signal, a messenger RNA signal that is then telling your muscle cells to make some of the spike protein.
And then your body reacts to the spike protein it just made by creating antibodies, these proteins that So you're essentially, the body is the vaccine-making factory here.
If you inject it into the bloodstream, does the muscle even get to make the spike protein?
I'm not sure.
Because you need these muscle cells to actually get the signal.
So I'm not sure why that would cause a problem specifically, but it does seem to.
It could be a concern if you're injecting this directly into the bloodstream, which is why they have to do it carefully.
Like specifically the new Merck has a new therapeutic that's coming out and Pfizer has a new therapeutic that's coming out and monoclonal antibodies which have been observed to be very effective.
But when healthcare companies, when companies like pharmaceutical companies have a direct vested interest in ignoring certain aspects of studies because it might somehow or another inhibit their profit or scare people off of their drug, doesn't that scare you?
So this is back in 2000. Yeah, look, I mean, even when the first vaccine data came out before it was reviewed, I think we had to be skeptical.
And I was, you know, I mean, when they first said 95% protective, I mean, that's huge.
You don't typically hear about vaccines being that protective.
And by the way, it was supposed to take four years and they did it so fast, you know, so...
Yeah, you have to do a lot of homework.
I had to dig deep on some of that stuff.
And I think it's the same thing with the Merck.
If this medication holds up, and the data is, you know, they review it and it's true, I think it's pretty significant.
You know, it reminds you a little bit of like Tamiflu, that we talk about the flu, but this would even be potentially more effective than Tamiflu is for the flu.
I'd love to talk to you about that, too, because one of the things that saddens me deeply is these hospital workers who risked their lives during the pandemic to treat people with COVID, most of them were exposed.
A lot of them got COVID and they have the antibodies and now they're being forced to either get vaccinated or they get fired.
Those are good tests, but I talked to Mercy, your nurse, and those tests she got from the hospital, you go and get the over-the-counter tests, and she'll be the first to tell you.
She doesn't use those because they sometimes don't work, or they'll give different results.
You could do it at your house when you're brushing your teeth and you know that day if you're contagious or not and we don't do that and I've asked Joe and there's there's not a good answer but one of the answers that I keep getting if I can explain this well is Is that if you think about the purpose of an antigen test, like me taking an antigen test benefits who exactly?
It benefits the people around me, right?
Well, I'm healthy, so I'm not sick, so now I just want to know, am I spreading this to other people, right?
Well, going back to what I said earlier, I think there's a lot of people that are just not aware of how their body's functioning because they're eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew and sitting around doing nothing.
The antigen test, the way that they regulate that is as a public health tool because they're saying this is good for the public health, whereas the PCR, you know, the specific gold standard test, they say that's an individual test because that tells you they have presence of virus.
I'm just telling you that that's sort of the answer you'll get as to why these antigen tests are not as widely available.
People haven't known how to use them.
A guy named Michael Minna, who has done a lot of writing on this, He was saying early days that we should just have antigen tests available for everybody every day.
They could do this, at least till we get through the worst of the pandemic, until we get it under control.
That's how you know.
If you're contagious, you don't be around people that day.
The only thing I would say when it comes to Merck, the therapeutics, and when it comes to testing, and I know how you feel about this, I'm getting an idea of how you think about this, is that the testing is obviously testing you to see if you have the virus.
The therapeutic is to treat you because you have the virus.
I still think it'd be better not to get the virus.
And then you get COVID, so then you get the robust immunity that's imparted from having the actual disease itself, which is far more complex and comprehensive than you're getting from the vaccine that targets one specific protein, right?
So why, if I've already gotten through COVID and I was really only sick for a day, and then five days later I was negative, and I do have the natural antibodies now, why would I take a chance in getting vaccinated on top of that?
Why would you say that when you're talking about a drug that's been given out to billions and billions of people?
A drug that was responsible for one of the inventors of it making the Nobel Prize in 2015. A drug that has been shown to stop viral replication in vitro.
You know that, right?
Why would they lie and say that's horse dewormer?
I can afford people medicine, motherfucker.
This is ridiculous.
It's just a lie.
But don't you think that a lie like that is dangerous on a news network when you know that they know they're lying?
Rogan telling his 13 million Instagram followers that he was treated with several drugs, and he included ivermectin on the list, a drug used for livestock the FDA and the CDC warned against using to treat COVID. Turns out I got COVID. Look, they put a yellow filter on me, too.
The thing about it is that what people were doing, as you may know, when they had the original trial, they showed that the plasma concentrations that you needed to be antiviral, antiparasitic, it's a very useful tool.
Same thing with a lot of medications, by the way, that they can be very effective for one thing but not as effective for something else or not as effective at the same dose.
What they were finding in some of these trials was that to get the plasma, the blood concentrations high enough, you had to take very high doses that were more in line with the blood.
You know what happens, Joe, I think, is that that virus really burned through that population.
My uncle died during that spring surge of COVID. So when you get a significant spread, going back to the natural immunity thing, you do get a fair amount of natural immunity out there.
Well, that's a huge number, but I think even if you looked at what happened in the UK, and you saw that significant spike a few months ago, and then it came down really rapidly...
What would account for that?
I think what accounts for that more than anything is that a lot of people were exposed.
They got natural immunity from it and that started to bring the numbers down.
But I think what they were showing, and again, I feel badly about this whole horse to warmer thing, but that's not a good way to have portrayed that to you.
There was one study that he talks about, and I listened to him on your podcast, and I don't know if this is a study that he showed you, but the one that he was referring to on your podcast was one that did look promising.
The only problem with the study was that people were also getting dexamethasone, which is a steroid.
And we know dexamethasone can be effective for people who have COVID in terms of preventing them from getting really sick.
I mean, this is the same sort of thing we talked about with the myocarditis thing, which I still, you know, I want to come back to that as well.
But when you have a significant inflammatory response, if you can, like to the disease in this case, if you can knock down that inflammatory response, then it can prevent you from potentially getting very sick, which is how the steroids seem to work.
I think what happens is that, again, people expect a certain level of certainty in saying how effective they are, or they're going to be a panacea for things, and nothing is.
Have you ever seen the doctor online who vapes through a mask?
There's a doctor that he thinks that masks are silly and they're really only for surgery and that really they're just to stop spittle and particles from falling out.
He's like, these cloth masks that people are using, his argument is essentially like, watch this.
And I have made the case many times that if you're going to wear a mask, you probably should wear a high-quality mask, like a KN95. That's what I carry around with me, is a KN95. Can you see the difference between that?
If we're going to do that, we should first of all encourage them to get healthy because getting healthy will prevent a lot of things, like heart disease, which kills way more people than any disease.
I mean, what we're dealing with with COVID is 95% of the people have four comorbidities that die, right?
When you're dealing with heart disease, you're just getting heart disease, right?
Some of it is obviously you're born with it.
You're born with certain predetermined conditions that you have no control over.
But there's a lot of people that are making poor life choices.
We don't say anything to those folks.
To tell them that an injection of a pharmaceutical drug is the answer to their problems, I think is not true.
It's not accurate.
It is a band-aid on one problem, but the overall metabolic health Is poor, and that's one of the reasons why their body's in decline.
When you're dealing with people that have four comorbidities, outside of genetic conditions, we're dealing with so many lifestyle choices in this country.
There's people that are just not exercising, are not drinking enough water, are not taking vitamins, are not being healthy, are not making healthy choices.
These things should be encouraged above and beyond, because this is the...
Those are the things that can get your body to a place where it can be better.
It'll perform better.
You'll think better.
You'll feel better.
You'll have better relationships with people.
Your life will work better because you're not in this constant state of decay.
There's been thousands of discussions and almost no discussion of the fact that 78% of the people that wind up in the hospital for COVID are obese, right?
Yeah, I think, right, and 113% in the ICU and whatever.
It's a much more likely to end up versus those.
Yeah, this needs to be addressed.
Joe, we spend $4 trillion a year on healthcare in this country.
70% of the diseases are probably totally preventable, and most of that is lifestyle.
And most of that even more specifically is diet.
So I think there's always been, again, going back to the nuance of these discussions, people say, hey, look...
You know, you can't shame people who are obese.
And no, nobody's saying shame people who are obese.
They're saying there's a real problem in this country.
If we spent 1% of our healthcare budget on actually helping people get fit and making sure they had healthy food and whatever it may be, it would go a long way.
The problem with this expression, you can't shame people, is that it's been distorted down to the point where even bringing up the fact that someone is obese is shaming them.
And doctors and nurses, they need to be talking about this stuff with their patients.
I write a lot about this in the book.
Even the microbiome, like what you've eaten in the morning, could probably have some impact on how you might fare if you were to get the disease later on that night.
I mean, 80% of our immunity is in our gut.
The gut-associated lymphoid tissue.
So there's a lot, you know, that we need to be doing.
I mean, what struck me about this pandemic is that wealthier countries, almost across the board, got hit harder than poorer countries.
And there's certain, you know, the demographics, you know, whatever.
But if you just compare country to country, wealthier countries, you think of malaria, tuberculosis, you think of poorer countries with fewer resources.
With COVID, it was wealthier countries.
And there's a few reasons why, but we're not healthy.
And it's really stunning when you go back and you look at what people looked like in the 1920s and the 1930s and you compare it to what people look like today.
But my point is, that's a very different thing, calling him a long hauler, Because I think that if he just sat around and did nothing, he would have bounced back from it very quickly.
Whereas an obese person, they just have a hard time with all diseases.
I still watch CNN. Look, I think news organizations have a very specific...
Function in our society.
It's a very important function, and it's to tell people what's going on, to inform people.
When they lie about things like that, it's so pointless to me.
Because it's not like I don't have a platform to tell people that you lied, and it's not that people don't figure out very quickly that it's a lie, but we already have Probably the highest level of distrust in mainstream media than we've ever had ever in our lives.
I don't know if that's because of Trump calling everything fake news.
I don't know if it's because of people exposing things that some parts of the news that weren't accurately displayed or depicted.
I don't know what it is, but I have a great deal of respect for journalism.
I think real journalism is incredibly important.
But I think there's an issue today where too much emphasis is put on ratings.
Too much emphasis is put on sensationalism, exaggeration, hyperbole, changing the headlines in order to get people to pay attention.
This is dangerous, I think.
I think we need real, hardcore investigations, objective journalism, where people just tell stories for what they are.
This is what they are.
Let's examine what the actual news is and let's distribute it to people for the greater good of mankind.
Yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, that's what CNN does.
I think that for the most part, that's what Fox News does.
But when we get ideologically conflicted and distort these narratives in order to sell clicks, in order to get people to tune in, like that to me is...
Not just dangerous, but foolhardy.
Because it changes the way people view the news.
They don't view the news like they viewed the news when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, if you watched CNN or if you watched any news source, you assumed that what they were telling you was the truth.
There has probably never been a higher level of distrust in mainstream news than there is today.
It's become much more opinion-based, especially some shows.
You know, there's a lot of editorializing, even the way that things will be presented with modifiers.
You know, it was just this, or, you know, can you believe X? So you've kind of given a way to think about this.
I think, not that I want to bring this up again, you know, the whole ivermectin thing, but I think that the reason the FDA put that out there saying, you know, this is...
And then there's the guy from jujitsu that had a heart attack and And two strokes.
And I was like, Jesus Christ.
Like, I got nervous about it.
And I also got nervous that some of these things are being underreported.
Because when I talked to some of these people, I was like, was it submitted to the VAERS report?
No, they weren't submitted to the VAERS report.
So I'm like, how many people have had adverse reactions that were submitted versus not submitted?
And I do know that some of the people that submit things to the VAERS report, they're not telling the truth.
They're making things up.
Whenever you have an open forum like that, you're going to get a lot of bullshit, right?
So who knows how much of it is true and how much of it is not.
So then I started researching therapeutics and talking to people about therapeutics and the conversation with Dr. Pierre Corey and Brett Weinstein and there's many schools of thoughts on this.
Some people think everyone should get vaccinated.
Some people think we should only vaccinate the very vulnerable and what we should do is concentrate on improving the metabolic health of the general population and having therapeutics in place.
Yeah, older people, fat people, I think a lot of those folks.
My real concern is this urge to vaccinate children, and I don't know what kind of data we have on the long-term effects of this, and I don't know what kind of data we have.
When you look at this study that shows that the 12 to 15-year-old boys are four to six times more likely, or is that the number?
So again, I don't know that we've settled this whole myocarditis thing, maybe we won't today, but I worried about this, okay, because I have kids.
So, you know, the thing about a pandemic, it's not just me reporting like I go to Haiti and I report on an earthquake.
I'm living this as well.
And I... Joe, I did deep dives into this, and the myocarditis thing specifically came up.
And what I found was that there's a certain background rate of myocarditis, there's a certain rate that people would get from the vaccines, and there's a certain rate that they would get from the disease itself.
I think this virus is probably here, just like there's descendants of the 1918 flu pandemic that still linger.
We now have it under much better control.
By the way, flu still kills up to 60,000 people a year.
I think this virus is here to stay, but it will be a more inconsequential virus.
Let me put it that way.
Part of getting there is to really bring down the amount of transmission.
If you could see the virus, you would see it being sort of a viral storm.
You know, you'd actually see that we're being showered in virus, kind of like your vaping guy over here.
You know, it's just a lot of virus out there.
So if you have more and more people who have immunity and the virus runs out of places to go, not perfect, again, eight times less likely to get infected, not perfect, But eventually it starts to really wither down.
And I think having more and more people immunized helps that.
So this idea that somehow, you know, kind of like antibiotic resistance, you could be developing resistance to the vaccines because the types of viruses that are then allowed to...
Because the vaccines target a very specific protein, that some of these variants that are more aggressive, like particularly the Delta or whatever one they are, that the virus will then propagate through selection of more aggressive variants.
Yeah, and I think that was me because there was two separate occasions where I was around a lot of people that got sick.
One time in the green room of a concert where everybody got sick but me.
I mean, everybody.
And then another time where my whole family got sick and I didn't get sick.
But I did feel like shit.
There was two days where I was working out and I was like, something's going on.
During normal activities, I felt fine, but then under exertion, I felt a diminished capacity for work.
Like when I was doing workouts, I was like, God, I feel draggy.
I knew something was going on, so I've done that before, and I've gotten myself sick by being a meathead.
That was years past, but now when that happens, what I do is I just basically go through the motions very lightly, and I break a sweat, stretch out, and get out of there.
So I get...
The benefits of exercise, you know, with the endorphins and you get your circulatory system pumps and your respiratory system pumps and you get a good little, you know, you get some activity, but no stress, no strain.
And I did that for two days and I was good.
But the second day was the same thing.
I was like, something's going on.
My whole family got COVID during that time period.
Yeah, my older kid didn't get it, but she knew that we had it, and so she didn't come by, but we're good.
But I knew that I had encountered it, and that my immune system had fought it off.
And I think I probably, I mean, I like to think that I probably would have fought it off in Florida, too, if it wasn't for getting hammered and staying out at 3 in the morning playing pool.
Hey, you know, you texted me when I asked about the natural immunity thing, and I think you're raising a really good point about natural immunity.
I think the issue a little bit, Joe, and this is more just because I care about you, is that we don't have good data on how long the natural immunity lasts.
So if I said, and then you're going to ask me how I know, which I get, but if I said you're likely to have longer-term immunity, there was a study that came out of Kentucky.
You know, it strikes me that so many people are moving towards these really abbreviated things, like there was Quibi, you know, like, we'll do this in two minutes.
And even that 21-year-old thing that made all the 21-year-old guests you had on the show, or no, it was a friend of yours, I think, that you were, he asked you, should he get vaxed?
But then afterwards you said, hey, look, what hasn't been explained well is exactly why he should get vax, beyond the fact that he's likely to recover well, but could he be potentially someone who is a source of spread?
And that sounded like, from what you said, that was of concern to you, right?
Well, that was one of the things that Fauci had said.
Like, you know, he responded to me saying that if you only are concerned about yourself, But that if you're talking about spreading it to other people, that's, you know, your responsibility to the community is different.
I've had quite a few friends that were sick and weren't sure if they got COVID, and then we brought them in here four or five months later and gave them an antibody test, and it turns out they had had it.
Yeah, I found one place that said it was claiming it was due to that, and then I found other places that said that the doctors didn't know exactly why she had died.
Yeah, the family says that it's 100% from the vaccine, that she got vaccinated right afterwards, and they didn't want to submit it to the VAERS. You know, there's a lot of hesitancy amongst hospitals and doctors in submitting things to the VAERS because they don't want to contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
She's 19. She had a heart transplant one month after developing what her doctors believe is myocarditis following her second dose of Moderna.
So what's really sad is she gets the heart transplant and then the immunosuppressant drugs caused her to succumb to pneumonia and then she dies of pneumonia.
You know, I... I mean, how do you just...
There's no chance she would have died from COVID. I mean, a fucking infinitesimally small chance.
That's that's the difference That's the only job I have I feel like when I listen to you and even this conversation now is a very authentic conversation And I think it's that's all I have you don't have we don't have enough of that overall in society So if I'm authentic I can tell people don't take my advice Take the advice of people who are professionals.
If you know that they're lying about you and you see that, you go, okay, well, what are they saying about Hunter Biden?
What are they saying about Russia?
What are they saying about Syria?
How do I know if they're telling the truth about all these other very important things when this insignificant thing of a dumb comedian taking a medication?
Yeah, no, I looked at that, and I think these things are definitely worth looking at.
I really do spend a lot of time reading these studies and trying to make decisions and judgments on my own, in part for my own family and myself, my parents.
I mean, when you say the thing about people getting really sick and having strokes after a vaccine, For my parents, who are probably listening right now, they're in their late 70s, that's going to scare the shit out of them.
But the blood concentrations you needed in those studies that they, you know, that Pierre talks about as well, were much higher doses in order to get the antiviral effect, at least in the lab.
So if you're trying to replicate that in the body, you're probably going to need higher doses.
So, I just like, in terms of how you think about this, like, the vaccine has a lot of data behind it.
There's obviously some terrible stories, which I'm going to look at here.
I had not heard about, for example, this 19-year-old.
But for the most part, it has a lot of data behind it that shows that it is safe and that it's effective in terms of keeping people from getting super sick.
Because I know that people are going to bring this up.
I am very aware that these rare anecdotal stories, like this woman who's 19 years old, you can't take that as the Absolute, this is what's going to happen to people.
These rare stories of this poor young lady.
I'm very aware that these are unusual.
But that gives no comfort to the family that lost that daughter.
And what bothers me is at 19 years old, when it bothers me at 19 years old, especially when you look at her and she's very fit and young, Highly unlikely she would have had a problem with COVID. Yeah, I agree.
The flu vaccine is a yearly sort of thing, but if you look at things like hepatitis or you look at other vaccines, you get boosters of some of these things.
These places are recommending that natural immunity, they say, as you said, and I asked the question about natural immunity, it can be very protective.
In other cases like SARS, you know, immunity lasted a long time.
There was a study out of Kentucky showing people who had had natural immunity, their reinfection rates versus people who had natural immunity plus the vaccine.
And they found that the reinfection rates were twice as high in those who just had the natural immunity.
I started kickboxing after I did Taekwondo or during and then after.
The last three fights that I had were kickboxing fights and I was Aware that, first of all, I was suffering some issues, like really bad headaches, but also I was aware that people around me that I had known had been fighting for years were starting to slur their words and were starting to exhibit diminished behavior, like diminished cognitive...
Cognitive function, clearly.
Like, there was something about it.
And then, you know, that term punch drunk has always been around, but we really didn't understand CTE until, you know, the early 2000s.
And then the concussion movie, and then, you know, people started doing examinations and all these different studies of people post-mortem.
We have an understanding about brain damage now that we didn't have when I was a child.
Because the APOE-4, whatever the issue that some people have versus some people don't, where it leads you to be more susceptible to CTE and various issues that people have from repeated head trauma.
They don't know.
You know, you don't know if it's going to affect you like it affects some people.
I know fighters that have been fighting for 10, 15 years, and hardcore, and they're fine.
It is my main moral dilemma about being involved in martial arts and commentating.
And it's not that I don't respect the decision of the athletes to pursue a dangerous but ultimately insanely rewarding lifestyle choice and career choice.
It's not that.
And I understand that the glory that these people receive, the highs that they achieve are impossible for mere mortals like myself to comprehend.
That is a fact.
When you're dealing with Israel Adesanya, when you're dealing with Conor McGregor, when you're dealing with Dustin Poirier, when you're dealing with the elite of the elite, like what they experience upon victory is probably Most of us will probably never understand it.
Probably never understand it.
But it is my personal belief that most of them stay too long.
I mean, some people have likened some of these sports, like football, you know, where you're taking a lot of blows to the head, like, you know, the Coliseum days where people were fighting.
Not a valid comparison in terms of that, like the servitude part of it, but the idea that you're putting yourself at real risk in order to entertain others.
You can choose not to, but this is why I draw the distinction.
I feel like there's a great danger in a lot of things that we celebrate, whether it's BMX riding, people who do skateboarding and do a lot of fucking jumps and flips and fall and hit their head.
People get concussions from soccer.
There's a lot of CTE from soccer.
I don't know if you're aware of that.
There's a lot of things that people do where there are long-term consequences for short-term gains.
So for a lot of fighters, they have to figure out how to navigate those waters with just mitigating the amount of damage that they get.
I think when I look at fighters overall in general, one of my favorite examples Of someone who's done a fantastic job of mitigating risk is Floyd Mayweather.
And the reason why he's been so good at it is because, first of all, he's very intelligent and he recognized early on that defense is of primary concern.
It's the most important thing.
Defense is the most important thing.
Floyd Mayweather is probably the least hit boxer in the history of boxing.
It's incredible how good his defense is.
And because of that, he's managed to get to...
I mean, he's in his 40s now.
And when you hear him talk, there's no evidence of decline.
He's fine, and he still maintains his physical ability.
He's doing these kind of freak show boxing matches now.
But he's just doing that because he can make enormous amounts of money with relative low risk.
In my opinion, he's the smartest boxer of all time.
Because he's managed to...
Take fights where he's almost guaranteed victory and make hundreds of millions of dollars doing so.
Full blast and clash into each other and hope that they survive and that the other person falls.
Floyd Mayweather's approach is like some four-dimensional chess game with like, you know, he's just got far more comprehensive understanding of movement and boxing and like what happens when you do this and then I do that and then what's your natural response after that?
He's two, three, four, five, six steps ahead of the average boxer.
But it's because of work.
It's because of thinking.
It's because of having his, you know, his uncle was Roger Mayweather and his father was Floyd Mayweather, the guy who fought Sugar Ray Leonard back when Leonard was in his prime.
Yeah, his father was an amazing boxer.
So because of that, he's got this lineage and he's got this, you know, he's a part of like an incredible boxing lineage.
World War C, COVID-19 pandemic and how to prepare for the next one.
But honestly, why would you think that I should get vaccinated on top of having natural immunity from overcoming COVID? I think your protection is really good right now.
I mean, if you look at the Israel data, you know, it's maybe 6 to 16. There was one study that said even up to 23 times better in terms of neutralizing antibodies.
I think we don't know how long it lasts.
That's the only thing.
I mean, you're going to keep checking your antibodies, and so you'll probably know.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you start to look at the, like, specific numbers, you know, the Kentucky study just showed you had a higher rate of reinfection if you were not, if you just had the natural immunity and you didn't get vaccinated.
So if you wanted to say, hey, look, I want to be done with this, there's a good chance between a prime Which was your COVID infection, in this case, and then a boost, which would be the vaccine, that you'd probably have really long-lasting protection.
Can I say that 100%?
No.
But I'm basing that on just the data from other vaccines and looking at what's happening with these antibodies overall.
And the blood samples of them, to show whether or not they have antibodies, that would be a very good thing to know.
Those blood samples were not released to the WHO. They did not allow people into the lab.
So, like, if you were to say to me, hey, just de novo, before I knew any of that, how do you think this thing started?
I would have said it probably started from animals to humans, because that's how they usually start.
But why is there such cover-up?
And they were buying PPE, including from the United States, in the fall of 2019. There was a study that just came out that said they were likely buying reagents for PCR testing.
In the summer of 2019, maybe that was for something else.
We don't know.
We just don't know.
And China has not been very transparent, even going back to the days of SARS. They waited a long time before they actually alerted the world on this.
Did you read the e-mail leaks, the e-mails from Peter Batsik and all the different discussions that they had about their concerns, that they were responsible for this through gain-of-function research?
They applied for a grant to specifically insert a furin cleavage site, which is that particular part of the virus that raised so much concern.
Yeah.
I mean, look, the thing is, this gets back to the same thing I think we're dancing around a little bit, which is I don't know sometimes what to do with this.
It's highly suspicious.
I think of this sometimes the way I think about my teenage kids.
They're not telling me everything here.
Now, do I automatically assume they're totally guilty of everything I think they're guilty of, or is there something else going on here, you know?
I think China has not...
Part of being prepared in my World War C book is that we have to have a world health organization that's actually empowered to be able to do things.
It's to beholden, I think, to China.
And there was a letter that came out from Peter Daszak in February of last year that he wrote in The Lancet, along with a bunch of other people, saying, This thing, you know, this is ridiculous to suggest that this had somehow been bioengineered at a lab.
When you see Fauci being grilled by Rand Paul and he denies that they were doing gain-of-function research, what are your thoughts on that?
Because by any definition, that was gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function research is Taking a virus, we should probably Google the exact definition, but what my impression is that gain-of-function means you're imparting new ability to this virus to infect humans, right?
The idea is that you're juicing it up and making it more contagious, right?
But if the NIH was giving funding to EcoHealth Alliance, and EcoHealth Alliance was funding that kind of research, and then Fauci is not being honest about that.
I think the NIH is clearly funding EcoHealth Alliance, and EcoHealth Alliance is clearly giving grants to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Here's how they answer the question when I ask them, including Francis Collins, who's the head of the NIH. They define gain-of-function research as this.
You have a known bad contagious pathogen, and you're going to essentially use the backbone of another known bad pathogen, and you're going to splice them together, essentially.
You're taking one thing that you know to be bad and contagious and splicing it with something else that you know to be bad.
That is, you're expecting this to be worse than what you started with.
If you're taking a novel virus and you don't know how contagious this is, and you're basically saying, look, I want to isolate the spike protein on this new virus.
I'm going to put it on the backbone of something I do know.
If we instead abandon any sort of nomenclature that might be problematic and say, were they doing experiments to make viruses more contagious to people?
Were they doing experiments that could lead to viruses being more contagious?
Yes.
I think that that's right.
That is research that is done to try and figure out, I mean, a lot of these pathogens they examine, they're not contagious.
They put the spike protein and they put some component of the virus onto the backbone of a known thing and it doesn't do much.
So they say, we don't have to worry about this.
But it could turn into a situation where you take a component of a new virus, you put it on the backbone of a known virus, and it does lead to something much more contagious.
And that's what a lot of people are concerned about here.
I mean, you know, there was the part of those emails, as you know, Joe, were emails that were sent to Fauci in January of last year, where Christian Andersen He subsequently wrote a paper saying, hey, those changes that we saw, I thought that was clear evidence of bioengineering, but now I've seen evidence of those same abnormalities in existing naturally occurring viruses.
So now I don't think that's the problem.
But it's going back and forth, and frankly, we may never know for sure.
It's really complicated, and the problem is for someone like myself, who doesn't have any education in the matter, I'm reading these analysis back and forth and back and forth and trying to figure out what's what.
I don't like the way Fauci responded when he was asked by Rand Paul.
Well, yeah, and that kind of conversation, I feel like doing it from a far distance, they're both at these tables, Fauci's over here, Rand Paul's over here.
What I would like to see is Fauci and Rand Paul on a podcast.
I get labeled that way because of my position on guns and some other things, but I'm very pro-choice.
I'm very women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights.
I'm even universal healthcare, universal basic income.
I think we're going to come to a point in time where I think Andrew Yang has some really good points about automation and elimination of jobs.
And I also think that we should take into consideration, like, where do our tax dollars go?
And if people just had their basic needs met.
Would that give them more of an opportunity to pursue innovation and creativity and other goals?
Or would that, you know, with a negative perspective, would that encourage people to be lazy?
I mean, I think it's something to be considered, like, whether or not people who are ambitious would always be ambitious.
I don't know.
I think there's a certain amount of discussion to be had about all these topics, but my parents were hippies.
I grew up in, I mean I lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11 during the Vietnam War.
And the hippies were, I mean that's like a formative period of my youth and I'm always going to be open to anyone's choices.
I want people to live their life As genuinely and authentically as they feel represents who they really are.
That's why I'm left-leaning.
And that's why I've never voted for a Republican, ever.
One of the things that gets lost on the left is law and order and then the importance of discipline and encouraging discipline and encouraging hard work and rewarding hard work and commending people for that.
And this victim mentality drives me fucking crazy.
That's what drives me crazy about the left.
This idea of like weaponizing victimhood and making it so that people are excited about the fact that they have Certain things that are holding them back.
I just think that's not empowering in any way, shape, or form.
And that's one of the main issues I have with the left.
With COVID-19, it went to just people who had the disease, it added about 200 more cases per million, okay?
And then if you talk about the vaccine for the first shot, it added about another case per million, and the second shot added around 5.8, around six cases per million.
So really, the comparison is the disease versus the vaccine.
Listen, this is one of the things that I like about this podcast.
You and I came into this podcast not totally knowing each other, not knowing exactly what to expect and wondering how much adversity and how much antagonistic conversation would take place, and very little.
Let's do it again, and if there's any concerns that you have that you feel like things are being misrepresented or misinformation is being distributed, I am very open to discussing things.
I'm not dogmatic.
I have my questions, and I'm willing to push back against things, but I'm open to being wrong, and I'm very open to talking to people, especially...
A person like yourself that is very knowledgeable and a really nice guy.