Alex Berenson, banned from Twitter in August 2021 for calling COVID vaccines "therapeutics" and questioning mandates, reveals internal emails showing White House pressure—including Joe Biden’s claim that vaccine debate was "killing people"—and plans lawsuits against the administration and Andy Slavitt over First Amendment violations. He cites VAERS underreporting, myocarditis risks in young vaccinated individuals, and disputed efficacy claims like 20 million lives saved, while comparing mRNA vaccine push to China’s zero-COVID strategy and New Zealand’s post-vaccine outbreaks. Berenson admits errors on herd immunity but argues systemic suppression of skepticism, regardless of vaccine safety, eroded public trust in institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
They said that was my fifth strike and that I was not allowed to tweet anymore and my account was not available to anybody.
All the previous tweets were gone.
The 300,000 people, too bad.
So I sued them in December.
And it gets interesting and tricky.
So other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia, actually all these companies, and said, you know, you've banned us.
I just want to be able to use your platform.
I haven't done anything wrong.
And the companies say, we can do whatever we want.
We can ban you.
We can attach labels to your tweets, this, that, and the other.
And there's a law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
It's a federal law from 1998, I want to say, maybe 96, that basically was intended for two purposes.
Purpose one was We don't want these companies to get sued over stuff that people are saying on them.
So in other words, I go on and I say, you know, terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan.
Or I say terrible things about my ex-wife.
Whatever.
Or I say, you know, go shoot the president.
Whatever it is that I'm saying, I'm saying something that's harassing or hateful or illegal.
We can't expect...
A bulletin board or Facebook or Twitter or whoever to police all that stuff.
There's too much of it.
It's not fair.
So we're going to give them complete protection from that.
And that makes total sense, by the way.
You can't have these people policing everything that's uploaded or downloaded.
It's not within their capability.
The second idea was we want these folks to be able...
To give their users a better experience.
And so we're going to give them some protection, limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted.
Meaning, let's say I'm posting tons of pornography, and I'm posting it to a Christian website that's advertising itself as a family-friendly place.
The idea was the 230 is going to allow me to take action against that user in good faith for harassing or objectionable content.
So I'm going to be allowed to ban stuff or to age restrict it.
And that was really intended when you look back at the statute for pornography especially.
Okay.
What happened was the companies, with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is the federal judges in California, which is where most of these companies are based, California and the West Coast, managed to get...
Bigger protection.
And this really, this was happening for a while and then it really happened in 2015. There was this case where a group of Sikhs, you know, an Indian minority group, the government of India went to Facebook and said, we don't like these people.
They're protesting against us.
You got to ban them.
You got to ban their group website.
And Facebook said, okay.
And pulled them.
They sued Facebook.
They said, this is not right.
And by the way, this was a classic example of a government not wanting dissent.
The Indian government didn't want to deal with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it.
The Ninth Circuit said, that 230 protection that allows you Complete immunity, if Alex Berenson says, you know, here's naked pictures of my ex-girlfriend, that also allows you to ban whoever you want, whenever you want.
They called it first party, third party.
They said there's no distinction in the statute between the immunity you get for this defamation that Alex might be doing versus your own decision to ban these people who don't want to be banned.
And ever since then, 230 has been a beast.
And every time somebody has sued, the companies have said, Look at Sikhs versus Facebook.
We win.
And that's basically been how it's been.
They've been allowed to do whatever they want.
And so, by the way, I know I'm not even talking about my case yet, but this is the legal background.
So sometimes when conservatives say, hey, we need to ban 230, we need to repeal 230, That's actually not true.
You just need to have the courts interpret 230 the right way, which is you don't get to sue Facebook or Twitter for these defamatory or harassing or illegal posts that other people are putting up.
But at the same time, they shouldn't have blanket protection for their own decisions.
So they've had the best of both worlds.
They call themselves publishers when they want.
And as a publisher, I have the protection to publish who I like, not publish who I like.
But I'm not a publisher from the point of view.
I'm more like a telephone company if somebody does something bad over my airwaves.
I had emails from a guy inside Twitter named Brandon Borman, who is a pretty senior executive.
He was their vice president of communications, telling me explicitly, hey, we know what you're saying.
We are in favor of encouraging debate about COVID. That was in 2020. And then in early 2021, he even went on to say, we're encouraging debate about the vaccines.
And we don't think you're doing anything wrong.
So I said...
Not only are they violating my rights as an American and the California constitution actually has additional free speech protections and I think they're violating those too.
They're specifically, they made these promises to me.
They modified their contract with me.
And there's a broader point that's important to everybody.
When they say we have a COVID misinformation policy or we have a election misinformation policy or, you know, pretty soon they'll probably have a climate change misinformation policy, whatever these policies are that govern what you can and can't say on their platform.
They have to follow those.
So even if they say their contract – and, you know, if you sign up for Twitter, you know, you click on something at the end and you've signed a contract with them basically.
And that contract is written by their lawyers.
It's very favorable to them, very unfavorable to you as the user.
They're modifying that.
Okay?
That was our argument.
They are modifying that when they put out a COVID-19 misinformation policy.
They don't have to have a COVID-19 misinformation policy.
They could say, hey, we're Twitter.
We're going to ban you whenever we want for whatever reason.
But they did have that policy.
And our argument was they have to now follow it.
And the judge, his name is Judge William Alsup.
He was in California.
And he is not a Trump appointee.
He's not a George Bush appointee.
He is a Bill Clinton appointee known for being a smart guy who kind of plays it down the middle.
He, in April of this year, just a couple months ago, said, I think Berenson's got a case.
I'm going to allow this lawsuit to proceed.
I'm not going to dismiss it.
And that was a major event, you know, in sort of the point of view of internet law.
Because, again, even though I did have these communications with Borman that other people don't have, this broader issue...
Of whether or not these platforms, when they tell you, we're going to have this strike policy, we're going to do these things, do they have to follow that?
That's the question.
Again, if the argument is, I'm Twitter or I'm Facebook, I'm all powerful, I operate under 230, and I'm going to kick you off whenever they want, they've got to tell people that.
Instead, it's like, well, as long as you play within the rules and you color by our guidelines, it's okay.
And the judge doesn't allow everything to proceed, which from my point of view is sort of unfortunate.
He didn't allow my big claims on the First Amendment or my California claims to proceed.
And frankly, I still think there's a chance...
Whether it's me or, you know, it's not me, but whether it's somebody else going forward might be able to have a good claim on California constitutional law.
Because, again, Twitter is based in California and the California Constitution is even more protective of free speech than the U.S. Constitution.
It actually says, for example, the way it's been interpreted in California, the California Constitution, if you own a mall...
You have to let people come in and protest.
Even if they're, you know, like from the Vietnam War on, even though that's a private facility, you, because you're running this place that's open to the public and that a lot of people who, you know, go to, it becomes almost a public facility for the purposes of the California Constitution.
And my argument, my lawyer's argument is Twitter is...
Twitter is a huge public space.
It's referred to itself as a public square many times.
It should be forced to do the same thing under California law.
And if the federal law, if 230 blocks that, now we have an issue of, you know, does the federal law go too far and sort of hurt First Amendment protections?
But put all that aside.
Judge didn't allow any of that stuff.
But what he did allow was my breach of contract claim to proceed, and he did something else, Joe.
He said, this guy's going to get discovery.
So discovery is a legal term.
It means that the two parties have to exchange information in a civil lawsuit.
And it's actually kind of amazing, if you think about this, that this is how this works.
The lawyers for Twitter were going to go to Twitter and say, you've got to give us all your documents where Alex Berenson is named, whether that's internal or whether that's Pfizer emailing about him or whatever it is.
And we're going to hand that over to his lawyers so he can help sue us.
And I had to do the same thing.
I mean, for me, it's not a big deal.
You know, it's like me and my phone or whatever.
And then he said, the judge said...
I would get to depose two Twitter executives.
And that could be anybody.
He didn't put any limits on it.
So that could have been like Jack Dorsey.
Okay?
So if you're a big company, that's a nightmare for you.
You do not want that.
You do not want to have to go through discovery.
You do not want to have to go through depositions.
You just want...
You want a lawsuit to go away.
Okay?
So...
And my position was...
Look, the judge gave me this stuff.
I'm not backing off.
I want those depositions.
I want this discovery.
And I want the right to make it public.
And so Twitter, I did not think we were going to be able to settle.
But Twitter and I, in June, we had this long mediation, and I can't sort of talk about how that went specifically, but I can tell you that at the end of, well, July 6th, they reinstated me to the platform.
We settled.
I guess you could argue they didn't apologize, but they acknowledged they were wrong to have taken me off last August.
And, and this is the really good part, since then I've been publishing internal documents where Twitter says that they came under pressure from the federal government to ban me.
So, this to me, so people said when I settled, and it's funny, it was actually people on the right, they said, this guy, he took all this money to sue Twitter.
He didn't care.
He just wanted to get back on the platform.
He just wanted to be able to tweet.
He wanted some money from Twitter.
That's what he got.
He promised you he'd get discovery.
He didn't get it.
Nothing's ever going to happen with this.
Well...
Screw those people too, okay?
Because I've now been publishing documents that show that the White House wanted me banned.
And that is the biggest part of all of this, okay?
That's where the story is going now.
That people inside the White House...
And this is Twitter employees talking to each other about a meeting that they had in April of 2021 before Twitter had ever done anything to me where they said that the White House said, why is this guy still allowed to tweet?
And at that time, they were saying to each other, these Twitter employees, we think he's fine.
We don't think he's doing anything wrong.
Well, you fast forward to July of 2021, just over a year ago, and Joe Biden says anybody who debates the vaccines, if social media platforms allow that, they are, quote unquote, killing people.
And then less or barely a month after that, four hours after that, I should say, Twitter puts a strike against me.
They begin the process of deplatforming me.
Six weeks later, they deplatform me.
So my position—and I'm going to sue.
I've said I'm going to sue the White House, and I'm going to sue a guy named Andy Slavitt, who's named in these documents, who was working at the White House at the time— My position is that there are people inside the Biden administration who violated my rights as an American citizen, violated my First Amendment rights, tried to get Twitter to suppress me personally.
It's not clear from the documents that they had anything specific.
They, I mean, the term they use is misinformation.
So vaccine misinformation.
And in fact, they specifically said, again, this is according to these Twitter employees who are talking about this meeting, that I was influencing persuadable people.
So you got to remember.
You've got to remember what the landscape was last year.
The beginning of the year, January through June, it was, hey, we're going to vaccinate a lot of people.
This is going to go away.
And yeah, there's people like Berenson who are out there talking about this VAERS data and they're talking about side effects and they're a pain in our ass.
But ultimately, all those mouth-breathing anti-vaxxers, they're going to see their buddies die and they're going to see how well this thing works.
And we're going to get 90 or 95% of the country vaccinated.
Okay, we're going to win.
And so there was pressure from the White House, but they felt they were in a really good position.
A lot of people have been vaccinated, and it did look like the vaccines worked for a period of time in the spring.
I don't know if you remember, but cases, especially in Israel, Israel was always the leader on this.
Cases in Israel went down almost to zero.
They'd been in the thousands.
And then they went to zero.
Deaths had been, you know, close to 100 a day in Israel.
They went to zero.
Okay.
That was the spring.
That was April.
They were upset about me and people like me.
You know, disinformation, misinformation, to me, it's journalism, okay?
If I'm pointing to you to government statistics and data, and I'm saying, here's questions, and I'm saying, here's some questions about the clinical trial and how long it went and who was included in it and whether or not it actually shows the vaccines work as well as you've been told, that's journalism.
One man's reporter is another, you know, is another man's disinformation specialist, okay?
Just like one man's terrorist, another man's freedom fighter.
That was April, May.
Then something happened in June and July and August.
The worst case scenario from the point of view of these people.
What happened was cases started to go back up in Israel, in the UK, and then in the US. And they had known if they had any sense that the vaccines weren't going to be permanently protected.
But I guarantee you they did not think that that was going to happen in a matter of months.
And that set them up to do two things.
First of all, they were going to start to push for boosters, okay?
Now maybe if all you watch is MSNBC, you could get convinced that boosters were, you know, that was always a part of the plan.
Almost nobody who got a vaccine in, let's say, February or March or April thought that they were going to need another one by the end of the summer or the fall.
So they knew that they were changing the narrative.
Second, mandates.
And this was really the worst part, Joe.
This was, we are going to tie this to your job.
We're going to basically force almost every American adult of working age to get one of these who isn't self-employed or who isn't an illegal immigrant.
Like, they don't have to get it.
But most Americans who work are going to need this for their jobs.
And every healthcare worker and every government employee, I mean, they pushed a lot of people last fall.
And the anger they stirred was intense.
And, you know, still intense.
At that point, I was a problem for them.
I'd been a problem in the spring, but I was a problem in the summer.
Because it was starting to look like I was right, and it was starting to look like this wasn't going to be something you could just...
I don't know if you remember the shot in a beer, the lotteries.
There was all this sort of quasi-coercive crap going on in the spring.
By the summer of 2021, it was different.
It was...
You want to fly?
Maybe we're going to make you get vaccinated.
They never did that, but they talked about it.
And in Canada, they actually did do it.
You want to work?
You're damn well going to need to be vaccinated.
You want to go to a restaurant?
You want to go to a movie in New York City?
You're going to need to be vaccinated.
You want your kids to go to school?
Guess what?
We're going to make you get them vaccinated.
That was talked about, too.
They don't even want to pretend they said that.
But everybody from Gavin Newsom on down said that.
So I was a problem for them.
And Twitter cracked.
Twitter had defended me.
And they clearly internally, at least into April, did not think I was saying anything wrong.
And I can tell you, I did not change my reporting standards.
I did not ever say anything.
I did not talk about...
I always stuck to the data.
Twitter cracked.
They banned me.
And now we know that the White House was leaning on them.
But unfortunately, now we're at a whole different set of questions, unfortunately.
So where do I go?
Where do I go on Twitter and the Biden administration?
Well, I'm going to keep pushing.
I mean, I'm going to sue.
I have my lawyer, James Lawrence, who I really like, who You know, who handled my lawsuit against Twitter.
And we're going to be putting together a case against, again, the Biden administration.
The only question, you know, you got to do it.
You got to make sure it's right.
You got to make sure it's nailed down.
You know, which documents do we include?
What are our legal arguments?
We have people, very smart lawyers who want to be involved in this and help.
You know, do we sue in New York?
Do we sue in D.C.? A lot of different questions.
But that's going to happen.
And then, so that's A. But the other question, unfortunately, we're done talking about whether the vaccines help stop infection or transmission.
We know the answer to that.
They don't.
There's two big questions now.
One is, do the vaccines actually increase your risk of getting Omicron?
And do they increase or decrease your risk of serious illness if you do?
And in some ways, because Omicron's pretty mild, and because we've all gotten it at least once, maybe twice, Assuming nothing terrible happens to the virus itself going forward, in other words, assuming the virus doesn't somehow mutate again to become more virulent, it's going to be what we thought it was going to be two years ago, which is ultimately winds up as a cold for everybody.
It's just another, you know, virus that you get from time to time.
And eventually they'll stop counting the cases and they'll stop counting deaths, in part because they don't want to admit the vaccines do nothing.
So the easiest way to move past that is to just stop collecting the data.
And you can already see the data is being collected less frequently.
It's certainly being publicized less.
So that's question A.
And I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful basically that we will get to a point where whether or not the vaccines do any good, the virus itself is essentially, you know, not a big threat.
Not that it doesn't kill some people, but that it's not a big threat societally.
Okay.
But there's a bigger, even bigger issue that no one will talk about right now.
And that is what is happening to all-cause mortality and to birth rates in countries that use these mRNA and DNA COVID vaccines very heavily.
So essentially Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the United States, Canada, there is this notable increase in death rates in a lot of countries.
And in the last couple months, although the data is less clear, there's been a notable decrease in birth rates in some of them.
Now, I don't want to overstate this.
I'm not talking about, like, deaths are doubling or tripling or births have gone to zero.
When I say notable increase, I mean it looks to me, and I actually just wrote a substack on this that I posted Thursday morning, all-cause deaths might be up 10%.
And when I say all-cause, that's literally what it sounds like.
It's like, how many people died in Germany this week?
How many people died in the UK this week?
And other countries are better at collecting this data than we are.
They collect it more rapidly.
They publish it more rapidly.
And then, you know, some people are still dying of COVID, a few.
So how many, when you X out those deaths, you just say, if nobody died of COVID, would all cause deaths still be above normal?
And the answer is yes.
They'd be about 10% above normal.
Now, I don't know whether 10% sounds like a lot or a little to you.
Sounds like a lot.
It's enough that for COVID, COVID caused a 10% increase.
We shut down the world for that increase.
And 10% in the U.S., really.
Less worldwide.
With births, the data's a little more kind of all over the map, but what's so striking is birth rates in some of these countries started dropping almost exactly nine months to the day after they started mass vaccinating women of childbearing age.
Now, we know the vaccines can cause some menstrual irregularities and it looks like they can cause a drop in sperm count.
It's not clear whether that's temporary or not.
It's possible that this is just sort of a temporary thing and births will come back to normal.
Let's hope.
But that's where I'm going.
On the data, that's what I'm pursuing.
I'm pursuing...
Is this happening?
It appears to be happening.
Next question, why is it happening?
And you can come up with plenty of explanations that don't involve the vaccines.
For example, you could say, well, I think deaths are increasing because during the lockdown, people didn't go to the doctor.
They didn't get medical care.
Maybe they didn't get exercise.
They put on 20 pounds.
That's increased their risk of a heart attack.
And so now we're just seeing this downstream effect.
You could say, well, I think deaths in people who are 30 are increasing because those folks, you know, they were forced to be home.
Now they're making up for it by partying a lot more.
They're doing drugs or they're drinking and driving.
And so those kinds of deaths are increasing.
So there are stories you can tell that don't involve the vaccines to explain this.
But my argument is...
We need to be talking about this, and the same people who were screaming about deaths during COVID need to be acknowledging this and looking into the reasons why.
It is true that when you have these extreme heat waves, especially in Europe where they don't have air conditioning, some old folks are just going to die, basically.
You know, they're going to be in their apartments and they're just not going to be able to get out of bed and they're going to die.
But that's not what you're talking about.
You're talking about these stories where it's like some 30-year-old had a heart attack.
They have engaged in the last several years in a coordinated effort to sort of present stories in a way that I don't think ever really happened before 2016, before Donald Trump was elected.
So these people, when Trump beat Hillary, it was a shock to the system.
They couldn't believe that America had betrayed them this way.
And there's a famous Onion headline from 2015. The Onion is always the best.
And the headline was something like, Hillary Clinton tells America, don't fuck this up for me.
And there was a sort of idea there was going to be this baton death march where it was going to end with our first female president.
God help it.
It didn't matter that no one on earth liked her.
She was going to be the president.
And it didn't work out that way.
And these people decided, if this country is stupid enough to elect Donald Trump, we can't trust it.
And we better work together to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
So you saw really coordinated stories about how Russia had elected Trump, which turned out to be complete nonsense.
And then, you know, Mueller was going to take Trump down.
And they...
I don't know whether they had actual meetings over that stuff, but when COVID came along in 2020, they did have actual meetings.
There was something called the Trusted News Initiative, okay?
The Trusted News Initiative was a group of organizations, which I think at the time actually didn't initially include Twitter, which is sort of interesting.
It included Facebook and the Washington Post and the BBC and Reuters and a lot of other news organizations.
And it was, we're going to combat misinformation together.
This was a mistake.
News organizations should not be working with one another to set the agenda.
They're better when they're independent, chasing their own stuff.
And this is now happening with climate change.
It's clear.
The same people...
Who, you know, who were wrong about Donald Trump and Russian collusion, who were wrong about lockdowns and COVID and the effect of school closures, and I would say wrong completely about vaccines.
Now we can talk about where we actually stand right now, but fine.
They think that climate change is an existential threat.
They have convinced each other that climate change is an existential threat.
And, oh, by the way, they also think that, you know, like, letting hundreds of thousands of people out of jail would have no effect on crime rates, which turns out not to be so true either.
But, so they are going to present the same stories over and over again.
They're going to find, you know, they're dying for a good hurricane.
They would love a good hurricane to hit New Orleans or Miami, but they haven't been able to get one in 20 years.
So they're stuck writing about, you know, flash floods in St. Louis or whatever.
They're going to look for any extreme weather event they can, and they're going to talk about how it's all climate change related and the, you know, sort of the...
The ultimate example of this is trying to blame some random heart attack on climate change.
It's nonsense.
You know, pretty soon they're going to be blaming fentanyl overdoses on climate change.
They just...
And it is.
You're right.
Like, this didn't happen until the last few years because they didn't do this.
So the fact that I can get something that's widely spread and I can have this podcast and have conversations with people like you and some other controversial folks that have been telling the truth and have been suppressed, it's great.
And you do need, like, these, you know, when you have war reporters in Ukraine, okay, or you have reporters willing to spend a month chasing a story, really doing high-end news work is expensive and difficult and it requires editors and requires trained, you know, there's a skill to it, a legit skill to it.
And there's only so many organizations that can do it.
And how we break them out of their monoculture, I don't know.
One of the sad things about this is that there are many stories you could write, for example, about the vaccines that wouldn't necessarily be like, all the vaccines are terrible and they're going to kill you all.
You could have written about, you know, like whether or not enough old people were included in the clinical trials.
OK, that would have been a legitimate question that once upon a time, the New York Times would have seen we can write stories questioning the development and pricing, let's say, of the vaccines.
We can question whether the United States should be putting tens of billions of dollars in profit into the companies, you know, when this is a public health emergency.
And those would have been legitimate questions.
But because it became so politicized and polarized and ideological, they fell down even on asking those questions.
You don't hear legitimate stories about the numbers of people that have suffered strokes and blood clots and all the various ailments and people that have pacemakers now, they're in their 30s.
It's like four cases in Japan, two cases in Turkey.
It's what you would call in epidemiology or medicine a signal event.
It's a signal that should be followed up on.
By the way, you never see these case reports coming out of the U.S. because U.S. doctors are I think they've decided it's not in their career interest to write too much about vaccine side effects.
So to me, okay, that doesn't mean that a million people are going to get type 1 diabetes following the mRNA vaccinations.
What it means is these are really biologically active compounds that we've given to a lot of people, and we owe it to them to figure out what some of these dangers might be.
Do you think that maybe with time, as more of these instances arise and more people come forward about their injuries and all the ailments that they've acquired since being vaccinated, that this will somehow or another bring people back to where they were before, where they're very skeptical about pharmaceutical companies and what they do with their studies and how they disseminate that information?
I think the cultural issue with the Donald Trump thing, as you brought it up before, I think that emboldens people and it makes them justified in their actions, that the overall good is more valuable than being completely square with all the data.
Well, I think these guys operated in a day before the internet, and they became accustomed to these sort of patterns of just, like, repeating a narrative over and over again, and then this is the official story, and that's what they did during the HIV crisis, that's what they're doing now.
It's the same thing, but now people will go back and pull up clips and make these little edits.
Well, if I knew at the time that shutting down would have such a dramatic effect, On controlling the spread, obviously, we would have shut down earlier.
There were those who say, you shut down destructive things by disrupting the economy.
unidentified
And others say, well, if you save so many infections by shutting down, why didn't you shut down two weeks earlier?
But I don't regret saying that the only way we could have really stopped the explosion of infection was by essentially, I want to say shutting down, I mean essentially having the physical separation and the kinds of recommendations that we've made.
unidentified
You've been a big fan of Cuomo and the shutdown in New York.
You've lauded New York for their policy.
New York had the highest death rate in the world.
How could we possibly be jumping up and down and saying, oh, Governor Cuomo did a great job.
I think it makes it, and this is, like, I'm not an expert on what, I don't think they can subpoena him or the process is much more complicated if he's not a federal employee.
They have to negotiate and get him to testify.
Remember, there's three separate issues for Fauci, right?
Now, he's probably got actually the best defense on that one, right?
Because that's about, you know, we didn't know exactly what was happening and I didn't make the decision.
I just made my best recommendation.
It was these governors who did it and we all agreed.
It's okay.
But nonetheless, he could get some heat for that.
And then the third issue is the vaccines, right?
And that one's interesting because NIH, National Institutes of Health, they were basically a direct partner with Moderna.
Not on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but there are two mRNA vaccines.
And, you know, the federal government, you know, was basically more than a handshake partner, a partner of Moderna on that vaccine.
And so there's going to, assuming we ever start asking real questions about what the data shows about the vaccine, he might be on the hook for that too.
Now, as my lawsuit with Twitter shows, If you sue, the civil litigation process is very powerful.
It's not as powerful as a subpoena from a prosecutor.
It's still very powerful.
You get these companies to hand over documents so you can see what they were thinking.
And for the most part, it's actually kind of hard to believe, but the companies do comply with this.
They will, whether it's because their lawyers make them or whether it's because they don't really know what they're giving you or whether it's Because they actually believe in, you know, the American justice system.
That's probably the least likely.
They give you the documents so you can actually see them.
No litigation or immunity means no liability means there's no...
A, there's no way to get the documents and B, the really good trial lawyers aren't interested because there's no money for them.
It also means Wall Street doesn't care because Wall Street...
From their point of view, if there's no liability issue, it's not going to hurt the company's stock.
So they don't care either.
So two very powerful forces that could help kind of keep the companies on a straight path are gone.
It was so strange to me to watch people blindly believe the pharmaceutical companies given their history.
Given the history that they have of being fined insane amounts, causing tens of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented, causing the opioid crisis.
All the things that we know that they lied about, hid data, distorted data.
And yet still people were getting Pfizer tattoos.
Yeah.
It was a strange thing to watch, this sort of...
What does Robert Malone call it?
Mass formation psychosis?
And people are like, that's not a thing.
But what about...
Forget what he called it.
That thing is clearly real and happening.
We saw people that just put all of their...
All of their suspicions, all of their misgivings aside from the past, and now blindly trust the same organizations that they had widely disparaged just a few months before that.
But what I'm saying is people were primed to believe.
One more.
This is from somebody on the left.
This is a woman named Molly Jongfast, who was like the voice of the terrified Brooklyn left throughout 2020. This is what these people thought of the vaccine.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I told myself as I spent my first Thanksgiving without any of my 70-something parents in the hope of keeping them safe.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I told myself as I look ahead to what will be an even lonelier Christmas.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I tell my father who hasn't seen his grandchildren in months.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I silently mouth as I look into my children's bedrooms as they stare into the blue lights of their computer screens, deprived of school, friends, family, and what used to be called normal life.
Now, that wasn't my 2020, okay?
And I suspect it wasn't yours either.
But for these people who had terrified themselves about COVID, who had told themselves that, you know, COVID really was the Black Plague, they needed to believe in something.
And they believed in the vaccines.
And let me tell you, even now, it is hard for them to accept the truth.
I mean, I have friends that were against my perspective initially, and they thought that I was being ignorant and foolish, that I was believing conspiracy theories, and now they're like, fuck, how did I buy into it?
The same people, and some of them are vaccinated, and some of them have real problems now because of the vaccine.
And I know a lot of people that got vaccinated had zero issues.
None.
And I know a lot of people that got vaccinated that never got COVID. And they're okay.
They're fine.
And I think that's most people.
And if you looked at the overall positive net benefit of the vaccine, I think it saved lives.
And I think there's a legit case to be made about that.
I've actually been meaning to write a substack about that because I think it's important that people understand that.
But that doesn't mean that this benefited anybody under 50 or 60. And unfortunately, certainly with the myocarditis, which is this heart infection you can get that can actually be quite dangerous and in some cases deadly to younger people, especially men, the risk is the other way.
The younger you are, the worse the risk seems to be.
So here's what we should have done.
First of all, we should have tested the vaccines for longer.
And we should have made sure that we tested them on old people who are the most at risk.
We didn't do either of those things.
But okay, they wanted to get this out very quickly in the winter of 2020, January 2021. Fine.
They should have said, okay, we think we have something good here, but because it's been tested for such a short period of time, And because the technology is so novel, we're going to limit its use to the people who are really at risk from COVID. We know who those people are.
You know, over 70, maybe if you're under 70 and you're really severe comorbidities, go get your vaccine, can't hurt you.
The rest of us, we're going to wait and we're going to see.
And probably if they had done that, they could have had whatever benefits they did have last year without any of the problems that seemed to be getting worse.
And again, this is why we have to talk about all-cause deaths, okay?
Because those numbers shouldn't be where they are right now.
Now, these people that were convinced early on that the vaccine was the savior, and that, you know, these people would have resisted that narrative, that you were going to vaccinate the older folks and the other people are going to wait.
But there was also this narrative that kept being promoted, safe and effective.
Those were the two words that they used, you know.
And it was so prevalent.
It was everywhere.
And if you resisted that, somehow or another, you were an enemy of the future.
You're an anti-vaxxer!
Yeah, you're an anti-vaxxer, which is a...
That pejorative that they used over and over again, it's like...
It didn't matter if you had every other vaccine there was.
If you didn't believe in this one thing that you stated, and I think accurately so, that you should think of more of as a therapeutic, it's a gene therapy, correct?
Well, there were certainly people that were resisting the idea that it was a leaky vaccine, which was crazy, because there was already indications that people were...
And remember in the early days, it was breakthrough infections are very rare.
It was breakthrough infections.
These were these aberrations, these rare outlier cases, and they're not to be taken into consideration.
And now, all of a sudden, it's just the norm.
And they've changed the goalposts in this weird way where everybody just didn't want to admit that they were wrong.
So I wrote a substack a few days ago where I said we need a name for this phenomenon.
This phenomenon of I don't really – I used to be somebody – I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I used to think, hey, if the government says this is a safe drug or safe medicine, I'm going to take it if my doctor tells me to.
I believe in the system broadly.
I know it's not perfect, but I believe in it.
And a lot of people, including me, now don't believe in the system broadly.
And there needs to be a name for that.
The way I described it is, you're on the plane, the plane's taken off, and you suddenly realize that the guy, the cockpit, the captain, the voice you heard coming out of the cockpit, is the voice of somebody who you saw doing some shots.
The night before in the bar.
And it's like, oh man, maybe I'm not as safe as I thought I was.
Not that he's drunk right now, but maybe I'm not as safe as I thought I was.
It's the knowledge that the system is run by humans.
Humans that have a very clear interest in pushing a very specific narrative and they pushed it early on and One of the things you'll find about people in the media that's really bizarre They have a complete total unwillingness to admit any incorrect information They won't admit that they've made mistakes.
They won't admit that they were incorrect They won't admit that they were misled or confused or just flat-out wrong Because if they do, it opens them up to liabilities.
It opens them up to not being trusted.
It opens them up to saying, well, if you're the expert and you were wrong, well, you're not an expert.
Yeah, but you're always going to have people who hate you.
They're always going to be there.
And they're not going to want to forgive you.
That's just them.
That's on them.
Now, if I don't like someone but someone comes out and says they made a mistake, I admire that because I think that's an admirable human quality.
The ability to swallow your pride and also the ability to want to be forthcoming with truth.
And just say, this is where I am.
This is who I am.
This is what I did.
I shouldn't have done that.
And I recognize that.
And if I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry.
Or if I misled you, I'm sorry.
If I gave you information that made you act in a certain way or go and make a certain choice because you thought that I was informed and I was correct...
I feel like you have an obligation if your job is to distribute the truth.
That's what you're doing.
If you're a journalist, if that's what you're doing, if you're a pundit, if you're someone on television and you're speaking from a position where you supposedly have some sort of authority or at least some sort of reasonable research basis to say these things.
But when Joe Biden says a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and if you're not vaccinated, you're going to be sick or dying, and you're going to fill our hospitals, it was...
It was demonizing a lot of people for a personal medical decision.
It's wrong.
Not allowing Novak Djokovic to play in the U.S. Open because he's not vaccinated.
I mean, it's really crazy that we want everyone held to the same standards, but we're still not telling people to lose weight.
I mean, if the government cared about you, they would say, hey, you know, one of the things we found out 78% of the people who are admitted to the ICU with COVID are obese.
Well, the conversation that I had with one of my friends who's a doctor, and it was a very quiet conversation, where he was like, I can't tell people what I really think about these things.
I cannot.
I can't say it.
I can't talk about the people that I've treated that have had real issues after being vaccinated.
I can't.
You know, I can tell you that I know a lot of people who got COVID who really got fucked up by it, really bad.
But I can't tell you that most of them were fat and old.
I can't say that.
I can't say you, a guy who works out six days a week, you're probably going to be okay.
You, a guy who regularly takes vitamins, has all sorts of things you do for your health, You are supposed to be treated the same way as that fat old guy, which is bonkers.
And one of the things that drove me nuts about when they were so mad at me about COVID, forget about the fact that CNN literally used a filter on my face to make me look jaundiced.
We've showed side-by-side clips of the original video that I posted on Instagram, which is just me standing in front of my sauna with my iPhone going, I feel pretty good.
And then they took that and put it through a filter that made me look yellow.
Listen, there's data, and this is one of the sort of storylines that I need to pursue going forward.
You're talking about what's going to happen.
There's this whole behavioral psychology movement that governments and private NGOs funded.
It started a few years ago, but it really took off with COVID. This idea of how do we nudge and persuade people?
How do we get healthy people to stay home?
Because they're not really at risk and some of them are aware of that.
So is the best way to try to scare them?
Is the best way social pressure?
Is the best way to shut stuff down so they just can't go anywhere?
How do we get people without actually doing sort of Chinese style?
We're just going to take your rights away.
How do we get people to surrender their rights?
I don't think I've said this to you in the past, but the email that I got was just a couple lines a few months ago that stuck with me more than any of the, you know, obviously a lot of people contact me over the last couple years.
This guy said to me, he said, I thought love and hate were the two most powerful emotions, but it turns out I was wrong.
And there's a certain level of anxiety that many people in this country already had.
And they had a hard time with just regular, everyday life before the pandemic.
And then the pandemic came along and that shit got ramped up to 11. And we got to see a lot of very frail, psychologically frail people completely fall apart.
And you saw them on Twitter calling people that were unvaccinated.
And, you know, look, I think, as in a lot of things, the Europeans have found sort of this, you know, it's 15 weeks or whatever.
There's reasonable ways you can do this.
But I think you, I mean...
I'm consistent.
I didn't want to force people to be vaccinated, and I don't want to force people to have an abortion or not to have an abortion.
And I hate abortion, okay?
Anybody who has kids knows that anybody who's seen the sonogram...
Abortion is murder.
It's the murder of a living child, okay?
It doesn't mean you can ban it.
I wrote something about this a few months ago, the day after that decision got leaked.
Just because it's horrible...
Doesn't mean you can ban it.
And, you know, all I ask, I guess, of myself is to try to be consistent ideologically.
And, you know, if I don't believe that I should have vaccinated, you know, that I should have to be vaccinated, Or that you need to be vaccinated because I want you to be, then it's the same thing with abortion.
It's a personal decision, even if I think it's a horrible one.
I guess the one thing people would argue with me about is that I'm not consistent about drugs, that I'm anti-drug use.
And you know, you and I had this conversation with Dr. Mike Hart from Canada, and I brought you on here because even though I am a proponent of cannabis, I'm a regular user of cannabis, I think you're correct.
And that is, in many ways, in opposition to my desire to have it legalized.
I think it should be legalized, because I think people should have the choice and the decision.
But for me, it's not that problem.
For some people, it clearly causes schizophrenic breaks.
It's doing something.
At the very least, there's a correlation between cannabis use and, I think, edibles in general, or in particular, rather.
I think there's a connection, and I've personally witnessed it.
I've seen it.
I know people that went over and didn't come back.
You know, my problem with cannabis use and with sort of drug use in general, whether it's cocaine or methamphetamine, is that these drugs have risks that most people use We're good to go.
But it doesn't stop me from eating peanuts either.
I'm not allergic to them.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like we need reality and we need data and we need all the truth laid out in front of us so that we can make informed decisions.
You can't make informed decisions if the truth is hidden.
You can't make it if these inconvenient truths bother some people and they would rather you deny reality and, you know, remove facts from the conversation.
Well, that's why I admired the way you handled that and that's why I admired the way you handled COVID because I know the pressure that was on you was substantial.
It is shitty to realize that there are people who, you know, who will let their political views or their feelings about.
I mean, and I feel strongly.
I feel strongly.
First of all, I feel strongly right about the lockdowns and right about the vaccines.
I also feel strongly that even if I'd been wrong, it's my right as an American to be wrong and to be publicly wrong.
And I feel like taking people's rights to, you know, whether it's to go outside and play in a playground or the choice to be vaccinated on, that is just as wrong as can be.
Even if it works, it's wrong.
OK, unless, I mean, if you're dealing with something that's going to kill, you know, 98 percent of the world or whatever.
By the way, then you wouldn't have to have any rules.
People would stay inside, you know, till the end of time.
But it was striking and upsetting to me that people who I'd known for years would say to me basically, screw you.
I don't like the way you think.
I don't like the way you've been talking about this.
And I'm not going to talk to you anymore.
I mean, that's your right.
But God, like, what does it say about what our relationship was?
Now, I didn't know if that was the case, but one of them was a fit guy who was in his 50s, and the other one was in his 40s.
It was weird, and it got me like, whoa.
And then it brought me back to all of my thoughts that I'd always had about pharmaceutical companies and studies, and what I understand from talking to people.
From talking to researchers when they would describe how they were allowed to throw out studies that didn't fit their narrative.
And that they would do 10 studies and then they'd have two bias studies that showed, you know, oh, 100% effective because, you know, two people got it in the control, but four people got it in the COVID. So that means, you know, it was weird fucking, it was weird monkeying of data.
The opposite.
Two people got it in the...
But the weird monkeying of data that they're allowed to do.
It's not, like, transparent.
Then I talked to John Abramson, and John Abramson told me that when...
And this is where it got really strange.
Like, John Abramson was explaining how these studies work.
And he was explaining how they're funded.
And you just realize all the shenanigans that take place in these things.
And how they're allowed to manipulate data.
Yeah.
And also that the scientists that are doing peer-reviewed research on the data, they don't get access to the raw data.
They get access to the data from the review by the pharmaceutical companies.
You're trusting the people that make the product to give you the data instead of the scientists having access to all the data and them being able to make their own informed decisions.
So there's a, and I, you know, I don't like talking about stuff when I have not read it myself, when I haven't sort of reviewed it myself, but there's a, one of the people in the Pfizer trial, there's a case report, I believe she had a heart attack and died.
And it was a few days.
I would love if we could pull it up, but I can't remember it.
She had a heart attack and died after the second shot, I think it was.
And the reviewers said...
I think they said, you know, she had had, maybe she'd had, you know, cardiac disease before.
We're classifying this as not related to the vaccine, okay?
So the way that works is when the FDA then publishes the report on their sort of like review of the vaccine, and when the pharmaceutical company, when Pfizer writes about it, when their researchers write about it for the New England Journal of Medicine, they say...
There were X deaths in the trial.
None were related to the vaccine.
And only because there was this FOIA request of the FDA, a Freedom of Information Act request of the FDA, that forced the FDA to disclose lots of documents, including these documents that showed the underlying cases of the people who had died, do we know that Okay, the reviewer said this wasn't related to the vaccine, but in fact, it was really just a few days after that second dose was given.
Now, do I have her autopsy report?
No.
I don't even know if an autopsy was done.
I don't know more than what they said.
But the reason I mention this to you is this is an example of how you make problematic data go away.
Your researcher, for whatever reason, says, I don't think this was related to the vaccine.
It didn't happen five minutes after, and this woman did have heart disease, and sometimes people have heart disease, have heart attacks, and die.
I classify this as unrelated.
By the time it gets to the public through the FDA, All you hear is there were no deaths related to the vaccine.
And technically, nobody's lying because that's what the reviewer said.
We just don't know and wouldn't have known if not for this Freedom of Information Act request.
Maybe it's more complicated than that, and maybe there was somebody who—well, we know there was somebody who had a heart attack and died post-vaccine, and it was pretty close, but the company just decided to say, no, it wasn't related.
Yeah, we don't want people to know about our research.
So, okay, here's the thing.
It is possible, Joe, and I would actually say it's likely that this is a coincidence, okay?
People – CJD is very rare.
About three – actually, last year, I think the numbers have been going up slightly, but about 400 or 500 people a year in the United States get it, okay?
There's 350 million people in the United States, 330 million.
That's one per million, maybe a bit more.
But we vaccinated everybody, okay?
So some people are going to wind up getting CJD or being diagnosed with it.
And at this point, no one can prove that there's a relationship there.
And here's the thing about VAERS. You can make that argument about practically any case in VAERS. Even if it's five minutes after, you could say, well, this person, they were going to have a heart attack anyway.
Now, at some point, if enough doctors who are sort of medical experts in a field write enough case reports and there's enough of an outlier, with the myocarditis, okay?
Myocarditis in young people is rare.
And there were so many extra cases following vaccination that even the CDC and the FDA and Rochelle Walensky and all the vaccine fanatics, they couldn't argue about it anymore.
They had to admit that this was a problem, that this was happening.
But for something like strokes especially, the more common the illness is, Even if there's a big increase, any one case, it's going to be hard to argue.
And the increase has to be really big before it stands out.
So if you had Peter Hotez or some vaccine advocate on, he would be saying to you, well, Joe, I'm really sorry your friend's had strokes.
But we can't know that that's related to the vaccine.
And Berenson, that Berenson character pointing at the VAERS data, he was just putting out things to try to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
It's so weird to hear you say these things because it sounds so logical, but it's more acceptable now for some strange reason.
It seems like the tide is turning and then the numbers of people that are upset about the fact that they had been misled and the fact that the data was somewhat I mean, absolutely filtered.
It's such a confusing time because I don't remember a time where there was this much pushback against data, this much pushback against analyzing something that could be a significant factor in the rest of people's lives.
I mean, again, I do think there's It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the next few months and years because there are people and not a small number of people who are angry now that they were forced to be vaccinated.
They feel they were forced, right, at risk of losing their jobs.
But, you know, here's how we know, or here's how I know that the zeitgeist has changed more than people even admit publicly.
Look at the data on kids.
Look at how few children under five have gotten this thing since it was approved in June.
And I don't know if Jimmy can pull up the number, but 95% of kids under five have not gotten a single shot.
And what's even more stunning to me is that even in that group, that 5% group that got the first shot, 80% of those kids didn't get a second shot yet, even though most of them are eligible at this point.
So 99% 99% of children under 5 are not vaccinated against COVID. And you're a parent, I'm a parent, if we believed that that was good for our kids, or even not bad for them, we'd go do it tomorrow.
People have these belief systems that they've adhered to, and they don't want to let it go.
And that gave them comfort during the early days of COVID, and it's going to be a slow erosion of that faith that they have.
And I don't know what's going to turn the tide for everybody, but I feel like in the future, when the dust settles and we get a chance to look at this accurately, I think people are going to have a very different view than they had when this all was going down.
It's not an accident that both in the U.S. and the U.K., and Israel, deaths went up in January 2021 because there is this period of time after you get the first shot, you are definitely more vulnerable.
That's why you don't vaccinate for the flu in the middle of flu season.
Probably because we gave it a billion-person target of people who all had the exact same immunity.
No anti-N antibody immunity, just the spike and a very specific version of the spike.
We gave the virus a target and the virus, you know, it's going to mutate in the way that it gets the greatest benefit.
All right.
So the vaccines are now useless.
They're useless now.
There was this moment in January of 2021. I don't think they did any good because, again, you have that first month or the first couple weeks of where infections actually appeared to rise.
Maybe it's technically the United States or maybe it's actually Biden himself.
I'm going to sue Andy Slavitt.
I'm going to say they violated my First Amendment rights by attempting to Twitter is a private company.
So, again, we can argue about what the California Constitution might give, what rights it might give me.
But putting that aside, the First Amendment does not apply to private companies, right?
So Spotify, they want to carry you or they want to carry me or they want to carry Rachel Maddow or whoever, right?
They're a private company.
They have the right to do what they want.
Twitter, the argument is Twitter is just a bigger version of that.
So if they want to dump me, they have the First Amendment right to do that.
And again, we can argue about whether California actually stops them from doing that, but put that aside.
The federal government doesn't have the right to stop me from speaking.
Unless I'm screaming harassment at somebody for six hours, then I'm committing a crime.
But it doesn't have the right to stop me from being outside and speaking or speaking in my house.
I have the right for freedom of speech.
And when whoever it was in the White House told Twitter, and again, we could pull up the exact language, but Twitter employees said to each other after this meeting, They had a very tough question about why Alex Berenson is still on the platform.
The discovery that I have obtained in this lawsuit doesn't include the names of certain Twitter employees.
So Twitter, for example, if it was Jack Dorsey, I would know.
But junior employees, I don't care who said it.
In other words, I'm not in this to damage some junior Twitter employee.
So I don't care whether it was person X or person Y. I know he or she worked for Twitter.
I know they were having a Slack channel conversation.
And I know this is what they said.
So my argument's going to be – and by the way, I have more discovery on the way.
I keep publishing new documents.
You know, last week or just a couple days ago, I published something showing that Oliver Darcy of our favorite network, CNN, went to Twitter to complain about me and basically tried to get me banned.
It was me saying stuff that people didn't like that they call misinformation and then they go to Twitter and say, this guy's using your platform for evil.
You need to do something.
Or are you going to do anything about it, Twitter?
When The Atlantic wrote that article about you, the wrongest man of the pandemic, how many of those things that they said turned out to be absolutely true?
Here's the problem with that term scientific evidence, is now that we know where the evidence is coming from and how the evidence is actually being relayed to the people that are reviewing the evidence, it's not raw data.
Well, this is a legitimate—I think it was a terrible idea, but this was the argument.
The argument was, we know these work, and we have a couple months of data showing that they're not dangerous, and so it's unethical to deny these people who took a risk, you know, because we don't—you know, when they went into the trial, we didn't know how well the vaccine would work.
Now we know it works.
We have to allow them to be vaccinated.
And since we're rolling this out to everybody, as a practical matter, they're going to go get the vaccine anyway.
So we might as well offer it to them.
And the FDA agreed with that.
But what it meant was we don't have any long-term safety data that's really clean.
And now that all these – the strokes, the myocarditis, and worst of all, this increase in all-cause deaths that no one has been able to explain – Now that this stuff is piling up, if we had this group, if we had continued the trials and said to those 20,000 people who'd gotten the placebo, you can't get the vaccine.
We need you to continue to be in this control group so that we can compare your outcomes to the vaccinated people for the next five years.
I'm sorry.
We just need you to do this.
It's important for it's important because we're going to give this thing to a lot of people and we need a clean group.
We would be able to say, OK, right now, if 50 people in the vaccinated group had died of anything and 100 people in the placebo group had died of anything, I'd feel pretty confident saying to you, hey, vaccines are pretty safe.
Even if it was 50-50.
Say, okay, you know what?
Yeah, we have this weird thing happening with all these deaths, but in this really good sample, there doesn't seem to be any problem.
You know what?
So Berenson's just, he's just firing flares, okay?
On the other hand, if it was 100 people who'd been vaccinated had died and 20 in the placebo group, then we say, this is not good.
And we really need to look at what might be causing this, whether or not the companies want us to or not.
The problem is we don't have either of those.
We don't have any of those because we blew up the placebo group.
So we are operating in a – it's not an information vacuum.
It's worse than that.
This is why, if you were a doctor in 1965, if you were somebody who operated on lungs, or you were an oncologist of any kind, You knew.
You knew that cigarettes were poison.
Okay?
You'd seen too many cases.
All right?
By the 50s, the late 50s, the early 60s.
And the epidemiology was very clear.
All right?
Cigarettes are not good for you.
You smoked for a long time, they're not good for your lungs.
Because the risks are seemingly marginal, although a marginal risk over a huge group of people can still be a lot of injuries and death, because it's not just that the companies don't want to do any research, it's that the governments...
Encourage this.
So they're not going to want to find out the answer.
I mean, I wrote something like this a few weeks ago where I said, the problem for the public health authorities is that even announcing an inquiry, even saying, you know what, we're concerned about this rise in all-cause deaths, we're going to look, would throw into doubt the last 18 months.
I mean, there's been some reports, you know, so like, you know, the UK government reports the data each week and they break it out.
The Australian government has been reporting the data monthly and they actually have said, you know, here's the baskets, right?
So here's the people who died of diabetes and that's been a big increase.
Here's the people who died of Alzheimer's, that's been a big increase.
Beyond that, no, not really.
There's not been this...
You know, I sort of outlined what would have to happen.
This is a national level problem.
So the analogy that I use is like, so there are some problems that like you can solve as a person.
There are some problems you can solve with like civil litigation and regulation.
There are some problems that you need a subpoena and a gun and a badge to solve, right?
And then there's problems that are bigger than that.
No, despite what Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone or Chris Evans can't fly to Ukraine and get the Russians out.
That's a national level problem, which requires a government or group of governments to figure out.
The vaccine issue is now a national level issue, right?
It would require enormous data collection, somebody in charge asking the right questions, and a decision that we're going to find out the answer, even if it's really unpleasant.
Maybe it won't be unpleasant, maybe it will, but we're going to find out the answer.
I can believe they have post-COVID symptoms, but that's not what we're talking about mainly when we're talking about long COVID. It is a group of I get in trouble, but I'm just going to say it because it's true.
It's a group of middle-aged women, generally, with anxiety disorders or, you know, other moderate psychiatric syndromes who oftentimes had other sort of ill-defined, whether it was fibromyalgia or irritable bowel, you know, this is stuff that's been...
That doesn't really get worse or better.
It kind of comes and goes.
It's not easy to define or treat.
These are the people who say they have long COVID. Not always, but mostly.
And it is very hard to connect those illnesses, whether it's fatigue or uterine fibroids or whatever the...
Whatever the syndrome of the week is with serious strokes and heart attacks and the stuff that actually kills people.
Now, when we talk about myocarditis, what is the data in terms of people who got COVID and got myocarditis versus people who got vaccinated and got myocarditis?
Is that, you know, there's very high rates of myocarditis in people who got COVID. So the problem is, you know, when you really dive into the data, it's not clear.
I'm not even going to argue.
Let's just assume that's true.
Here's the real problem.
The problem is the people who get myocarditis after getting COVID are old, generally.
People who get myocarditis after a COVID vaccine are young, generally.
So, once again, it's an issue of why did we vaccinate these people who aren't at risk from COVID with a shot that is bad for them?
The default should have been, this is a technology that has been used in a few hundred, a couple thousand people in clinical trials In the last five years, we've been unable to advance any of these drugs out of phase one or two testing.
Why on earth are we telling a healthy 20-year-old or 10-year-old or 30-year-old who's at zero risk of serious complications from COVID to get this shot?
And it shouldn't be, by the way, it shouldn't be to make grandma feel better.
You do not make people get medical care to make somebody else's life better.
Wild shit, because with what we know about the potential risks of the vaccine, giving that to a child who's already compromised doesn't seem like a wise choice anyway.
There's cases of shingles and sort of bad psoriatic arthritis, bad, in some cases, rheumatoid arthritis.
These are all autoimmune conditions.
So your body is attacking itself.
Your immune system is going haywire, going into overdrive.
Well, what does the vaccine do?
The vaccine is designed to encourage your immune system to ramp it up in case you are infected with COVID. So is it possible that that is having off target effects in some people?
Again, as you said, we're not all the same.
It's not everybody has a peanut allergy.
Maybe some people, for whatever reason, have these bad autoimmune reactions.
Now, there's another theory that it is simply the spike protein that your body – you make the vaccine, makes your body produce the spike protein.
And so if – what we were told, and I believe the CDC has now taken this off its website, is that the spike protein would be very, very localized.
So they're now admitting that that's not always true.
And maybe the spike itself, even if it's unconnected to the rest, the coronavirus can have especially heart problems.
So those are sort of the two primary theories.
What I will say is this is where like, you know, like an A-team of immunologists and virologists and people who are like specialized in organic chemistry, like this is where we need those people to be operating outside of Pfizer immediately.
And to be coming in clean and to be really looking for what the answer is.
And maybe the answer is, you know what, we've looked for a year and we really actually don't think the vaccines cause any of these problems.
But I would feel way better if it weren't the same people who'd been saying since December of 2020, the vaccines are perfect, saying that.
You know, one theory is that the analogy that I've heard is that so, like, if you're a young athlete, for example, you know, you're the equivalent of a fast car, right?
So, you know, if the engine is going to blow, it's going to be more obvious in the case of a car that's, you know, 10,000 RPMs a minute, you know.
Than, you know, most of us who are semi-sedentary.
So that, you know, essentially that there's going to be other people who've had heart damage.
It just hasn't shown up.
Now, I want to say one positive thing about the myocarditis, which is, you know, the studies that have been done seem to show that after a few months, you don't see long-term heart damage.
Now, I would say...
I would say, you know, have they looked really, really hard?
They haven't looked really, really hard, but they've looked pretty hard, and they seem fairly confident that whatever, you know, adverse impact doesn't necessarily last that long.
I'm actually amazed how many people will come back to me and quote me something that I said like two hours.
I'm like, wow, you listened to the whole thing.
I think ivermectin...
First of all, I don't think it's particularly dangerous, and I think anybody who wants it should be allowed to use it under a doctor's care.
I don't think there's a great theoretical justification for it, and I think that the data, when they've tried to do prospective trials...
You can go look at a bunch of people who got it and say, oh, they did really well, and we're going to find an equal group of people who didn't get it and see how they did.
But there's always a little bit of...
There's always a little bit of cloudiness around how good that data really is.
The best way to do it is to take 1,000 people, say, I'm going to give 500 of you ivermectin and 500 of you nothing, and we're going to see how you are a week later.
And there have been a couple of those trials done, and they haven't shown great results for ivermectin.
There may be an ideal dosing level, but if the drug broadly works...
Look, if you take antibiotics, if you have some nasty infection, you take antibiotics, you skip a day?
You know, you skip day six out of the 10 days or even day four and days eight or whatever, you're going to get infection cleared up.
If a drug broadly works, it works, okay?
And you can start to argue about, you know, the dosing wasn't perfect.
People have to make guesses going in.
And, you know, as far as I, and I have done some work on this, The people who conducted those trials discussed the correct dosing with some of the very big ivermectin advocates on the way in.
So they didn't get the results that the ivermectin people were hoping for, and now the advocates say that the trials weren't properly conducted.
I think in this case – Because once they brought up the – the way I understood it is once they brought up the fact that Paxlova was a protease inhibitor, then people started saying, yeah, well, yes, but so is ivermectin.
But you can't – if you're going to say ivermectin works because it blocks entry of the virus into the cell, which I think was the original theory, and then some other drug comes along that works really well and has a different mechanism of action, It seems to me bad faith that all of a sudden you say your drug is just like that other drug.
I mean, people have said to me, look, here's this paper showing that it does have this effect as well.
Again, this is a level of complexity of sort of...
I would say virology complexity that I don't claim to be an expert.
I don't claim to be able to say, having read this paper, I can tell you that ivermectin works as well as a protease inhibitor as Paxlovid did and does.
What I can say, this is what I am good at, Joe, is saying, you guys are changing your story on this.
Well, there was a pretty good retrospective trial where they looked at two groups of people with Omicron.
And once again, they had very positive results for the Paxlovid group.
Now, if you want to say to me, you just said to me, that's not a good kind of trial to do.
You discounted all the positive ivermectin trials that had that kind of study where you go back and look instead of going in at the beginning and then measuring the two groups.
I will say to you, you're correct.
But what we don't have for ivermectin that we do have for pexlovin is a prospective trial with the same good results.
I've seen recent articles that have started to promote this narrative that Trump is to blame.
Yes.
Because he fast tracked the COVID vaccines.
Which is really fascinating, because if the COVID vaccines were what you were reporting, not you, but what these people were reporting, that means it's safe and effective.
So why are you upset that he fast-tracked something that was proven to be safe and effective?
See if you can find some of those articles, because it's just started to roll out.
And to me, that...
Knowing that the government did come in contact and even CNN came in contact with Twitter about you, I wonder what kind of influence is causing these new articles to be released.
Trump White House, this is on Politico.
Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for COVID-19 emergency use authorization, House report fines.
Trump officials tried to bully FDA over COVID treatments, House panel says.
This is The Guardian.
So this is a recent narrative that it's one of those, you know, trusted news source initiative, weird things that you just, like, you realize that, okay, there's a signal.
The really good research that's been done suggests that it doesn't...
The T-cells that you gain don't work very well against Omicron, which is another reason that I think that this notion that the vaccines give you any help against severe disease is nonsense.
And one of the things that you see, if you look at New Zealand and Australia, which are very interesting cases because those countries locked down hard, right?
New Zealand's a couple little islands.
Australia's a big, big island, continent-sized island.
They were able to control COVID for two years, right?
Really control it.
And so they had almost nobody who was infected.
You know, they were going to be the great success story.
The ones that showed how terrible Donald Trump was, how terrible I am.
They got through it with no deaths.
No deaths in 2020, almost no deaths in 2021. Then they got everybody vaccinated.
They win.
There's only one problem.
They've had terrible COVID outbreaks the last seven, eight months, basically continuing the whole time.
And bad in January, which is their summer.
Bad in May, June, July, August, their winter.
And a lot of deaths.
Now, not as many deaths as we had.
I mean, I'm talking about relative population.
Not as many deaths as we had at our peaks.
Not even close.
But this is Omicron.
Omicron is less virulent.
And it's gone on and on and on.
And they've had a bad flu outbreak.
And their hospitals have been pretty overwhelmed.
And their all-cause mortality has been terrible this year.
So if you want to tell me that they are the great success story, it doesn't look like it did a year ago.
It does not look like there's any free lunch.
It looks like you're going to get your COVID outbreak.
If you lock down hard, eventually you're going to have to let up and you're going to get COVID. It's very interesting.
Here's another fascinating thing that you never hear about.
Chinese, okay?
And we don't really know what's going on in China.
We never have...
And who knows if we ever will.
But they were first.
Then they got scared.
They locked down really hard.
They've been basically isolating themselves for two years.
Two things.
They have completely avoided the mRNA vaccines.
Completely.
They've had contracts to have those vaccines in their country for more than a year.
They've refused.
They haven't given anybody mRNA vaccines.
They, for whatever reason, are continuing to stick with this, to my mind, bizarre strategy of zero COVID. So, at some point, I mean, presumably, they're going to have to let it out.
And it will be very interesting to see what their experience is without the mRNAs.
Whether they have a lot of deaths, a few deaths, we will see.
You were never involved in any real significant controversies about the things that you reported or data or you being called a grifter or promoter of misinformation and disinformation.
The shitty part has been, you know, the personal stuff with my friends, and it hasn't been great for my marriage either, but as a reporter, it's been great in two ways.
First of all, first of all, I have all these great stories and no one else writes about them.
So I get to, I mean, it's like, it's like this is the most important story in the world and I'm coming at it and like there should be 15 people out there, good investigative reporters who are competing with me to break news about the vaccines and everything else.
And there's none.
So if you're a whistleblower, you've got some data from a health insurance company, you're coming to me.
You're a pilot, you want to talk about somebody who dropped dead in a cockpit, you're coming to me.
You've got nobody else.
And by the way, you folks, if you're out there, I'm very findable.
Well, so I don't know what the data is on fighter jet pilots.
I mean, and I'm...
Here's what I know.
A lot of pilots didn't want to get vaccinated last year, and a lot of them did under pressure.
And at least one major airline, disability claims are way up this year.
Now, from pilots, I mean.
Now listen, that may be because they're just sick of, you know, being screamed at by passengers or whatever, and they want out.
But it's certainly an interesting data point.
So, just to go back to the reporting question.
So, first off, I feel like I've got a great story and I have a big audience that's interested.
I mean, you know, it's not a Joe Rogan size audience, but it's a good audience.
And, you know, some of those people are willing to pay.
You know, my sub stack, most people who subscribe don't pay, but enough people pay that, you know, I'm doing well.
Which, by the way, I think is one other reason that a lot of people at the New York Times and elsewhere don't like me because, you know, the idea is if you ever leave the Times, you know, you're never going to be able to support yourself as a journalist.
So that's A, is that I have this great story to myself.
But B, and you may have had this experience too.
I was talking to somebody about this a few days ago.
So there's a reporter, I think his last name is Ryan, Ben Ryan.
And he's a science journalist, and he's gay, and he's been writing a lot about monkeypox.
And he's gotten kind of upset with the public health authorities.
You see it on Twitter.
He's, you know, why aren't you telling the truth?
Why aren't you telling gay men who are most at risk?
Didn't we learn anything from HIV? And he's gotten some pushback.
And what I was saying is what I think he has seen is what I've seen and maybe what you've seen.
If you are telling the truth, if you're doing your job, And you believe you're telling the truth and trying to get the word out on whatever the issue is.
And people start lying about you and attacking you personally and calling you a grifter.
It doesn't make you want to stop.
It makes you want to push.
Because it becomes personal.
You're attacking my skills.
You're attacking my integrity.
You're attacking my family in some cases.
I'm not backing off.
I know what I'm doing.
Look, right or wrong, and I think I've been pretty right, I've done this to the best of my ability for the last two years.
And I am not going to let somebody say, you know, I'm not going to let somebody intimidate me.
The number one thing I was wrong about that I can remember is that in 2020, in the summer, I thought that we might be getting close to herd immunity.
I thought there was this possibility, because the waves seemed to come and go without everybody being infected, that there would be this sort of – people speculated there would be what was called cross-T cell immunity, that people who had been exposed to other coronaviruses couldn't get sick with SARS-CoV-2.
And that that's why, you know, in New York, there had been this big fall off in cases.
And that's why in the Sunbelt states, there was a big rise and a big fall.
That turned out not to be true.
Basically, everybody had to get infected with SARS-CoV-2, either the original or Delta or Omicron.
When you take away people that are already on death's door, when you take away people that are already morbidly obese, I think amongst the people that died, there was a significant number, like a huge number, that had at least four comorbidities, right?
So look, there was a group of people who have COVID on their death certificates who didn't die from COVID, right?
Right.
Then there's this bigger group of people who were in this group, who wouldn't have died today if they didn't have COVID, but who weren't very healthy.
And how many of those people were there?
There were, I mean, a lot, but those are still people who died from COVID, you would say, I think.
But here's what's so screwed up about the excess mortality.
I know I keep coming back to this, and I know it's sort of complicated and mushy.
In 2020, in early 2021, the people who were looking at the numbers the hardest were all saying the same thing, which was, okay, we got all these people dying.
COVID's going to go away and we're going to have fewer deaths for a while because COVID pulled forward.
They actually referred to it.
There's a company called Service Corporation of America.
It's the biggest funeral home operator.
They own like 15% of funeral homes in the United States.
They call it pull forward.
What they were talking about was pulling death forward.
So, COVID was killing people who were going to die in 2022 in 2020. You were going to die in 2021. COVID killed you in 2020. So, they were actually sort of warning their investors, we're getting more funerals now.
We're going to get fewer funerals later.
That didn't happen.
We have excess deaths now, even though people predicted we would have fewer deaths now.
So the AAVs, actually, by the way, look a little bit better now against COVID. It looks like they, like, interestingly, if you got one dose of J&J, your protection wasn't as great initially, but it looks like it lasts longer.
They kind of look like better vaccines as vaccines.
They definitely can cause what's called thromboembolic events.
They can cause nasty, nasty clots in people that lead to strokes.
You know, this is another great question that if we had a real investigative reporting community would be asked.
Somehow, for reasons that are not clear to me, the mRNAs won.
Okay?
They won commercially.
They won in public view.
Normally...
Public health authorities wouldn't take a strong position on one vaccine versus another, but they did in this case.
You basically can't get J&J anymore in the U.S., and you can't really get the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe.
So what it is is it delivers DNA to your cells, this virus.
It's a cold virus.
It delivers it to your cells.
Your cells process that DNA into RNA, actually, and then cause your body to produce the spike.
So whereas the mRNA is a little bit of this mRNA, which is actually not the same RNA that's in nature.
It's been modified in a specific way.
That's inside a tiny little ball of fat.
That then delivers that RNA to your cells that causes you to make the spike.
The outcome is the same in both.
Both the DNA and the mRNA vaccines cause your body to make the spike protein.
That was the great...
Innovation.
We're going to turn your body into a little cell or into a little factory to make the spike protein.
The Novavax vaccine, by the way, is actually just them injecting the spike protein into you.
And then the other vaccines are more old school, where it's basically just the virus itself that's been changed so it doesn't replicate, and that's injected in.
I mean, anybody who's going to be vaccinated has been vaccinated at this point.
There's not a big audience.
And, you know, it's funny.
Every, I would say, I guess a few times a week, I get emails from people that are like, hey, can you tell me about Novavax?
And I'm sort of like, I don't have time to talk about this because nobody's getting it.
The public health authorities...
They don't want Novavax.
They don't want the J&J or AstraZeneca.
They certainly don't want Covaxin or the Chinese vaccines.
They want you to get mRNAs.
And look, I think it should be clear to everybody at this point, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I would love to know, I would love to be a fly on the wall when Pfizer is talking to the NIH about why that is.
I think that they got fooled by the clinical trial data in November and December of 2020, and then they got fooled, as you said, by the Israeli data and the British data in the spring.
If you look at what Fauci said, what Walensky said, I mean, what they said wasn't that different than what our friend Rachel Maddow said.
You know, like, Fauci was talking about elimination of the virus.
And they were all talking about herd immunity.
And that's just a remarkably stupid thing to have said in the light of what happened.
So like with the, you know, when the Canadians wouldn't, I mean, you know, Canada's a bigger country than the United States, they wouldn't let unvaccinated people on planes.
They were clearly trying to punish those of us who are unvaccinated, force us to do this.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's, you know, if somebody, this got taken out of context, I said it, maybe I said it to you last year, but even if I were wrong about all of it, it would be good that there's somebody on the red team, right?
It'd be good that there's somebody raising these questions.
From the point of view of society, it would be better if I were wrong about all of it.
It would be better if we had no COVID right now and the vaccines actually worked.
And I were saying to you, you know what, Joe?
I was wrong.
I'm going to end this show by going to the vaccine clinic and getting a vaccine.
Instead, I feel one of the best decisions I've ever made is not being vaccinated.
You know, with this vaccine, okay?
I got all the normal childhood vaccines.
I think it's really bad...
That journalists have lost their skepticism about either tech or the pharmaceutical industry.
It's bizarre to watch because these are the people that are supposed to be uncovering corruption and undue influence and following the money and they just didn't do it.
And I think the rise of independent journalism, and that's one of the reasons why I praise Substack so much, and giving people like yourself and other independent voices who are legitimate journalists who do the work and really are chasing down the truth of the story and not this culturally convenient narrative.
At the time, employees said internally they did not believe I had broken the company's rules.
I've taken a pretty close look at his account and I don't think any of it's violative, said an employee wrote on the Slack conversation a few minutes after the really tough question about why Alex Berenson hadn't been kicked off.
Journalists are supposed to be inconvenient to the powers that be when the powers that be are not doing what they're saying they're doing and that are withholding information or are being unduly influenced by massive amounts of money.
So it's Regnery, which is a real publisher, but conservative.
They actually want me to write another book, which I would love to do.
I don't have time right now.
sort of about how screwed up teenagers are these days and whether it's, you know, ADHD drugs or whether it's, you know, bad over parenting or whatever it is that's causing these terrible anxiety disorders among teenagers, which I think is a really good book. bad over parenting or whatever it is that's causing these And I would like to write, you know, because in some ways it ties into COVID, right?
It's like the great lie of COVID is if you just listen to us, everything will be fine.
No one will ever die again.
And this is sort of what we tell our kids, right?
Like, we can make everything perfect for you.
There's a pill for this.
Hey, you don't like your gender?
We'll just change it for you.
You know, you don't have to be anxious.
And unfortunately, that's a lie.
And when they realize it's a lie, it makes them more anxious.
So that's a book Regnery wants me to write.
But no, you know, Simon& Schuster or Putnam, all these places that publish my earlier books and my novels, I don't think they're going to publish anything for me anymore.
It's captivated by our current culture in a weird way that I don't think I've ever seen before.
I never thought I would see.
I thought that the ethics of journalism was always supposed to be objective analysis of data, and if it's inconvenient and uncomfortable for people, that's sort of the point.
The thing that I said when, you know, I got famously canceled when I had Eric Weinstein on the podcast and he said, I can't vote for Biden.
I just can't.
And he was like, I can't vote for Trump.
And I said, I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.
I didn't vote for either.
But I said that because I realized that Biden was...
He's deteriorating in front of our eyes, and to deny that was crazy.
And now that we're seeing it, we're seeing him fall down walking upstairs, we're seeing him ramble on in these run-on conversations, forget where he is, come off stage, try to shake hands with people who aren't there.
There's something really, really wrong.
And if he was Trump, they would be on the top of every building with bullhorns, screaming to remove him from office.
And these people are all blacking out from all the gaslighting.
I think that the problem is human nature tends towards tribalism, and we have these people on one side that think that Trump is the devil and that having him in place, regardless of whether or not his economic policies were more effective, that Trump is bad for our culture and bad for society and divides us.
I think they're right though, aren't they?
Yes, yes, and that's what I've said, and that's why I didn't want to have him on.
It probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
I just don't want to be involved in that.
I don't want to be involved in helping political figures.
I think Tulsi Gabbard should be president.
She's the only one that makes any sense to me.
I think she's a powerful, independent voice who speaks her mind on a variety of subjects and makes a lot of sense, exhibits real leadership capability.
See, I don't know, really, as I hear you say, I realize I know almost nothing about That's the problem is that everybody has this thing in their head, oh, Tulsi Gabbard's crazy.
Okay, why?
Why is she crazy?
And wouldn't you be crazy if you were her?
Wouldn't you be crazy if you've experienced what she's experienced?
Just how the DNC tried to shut her out and wouldn't let her debate?
I'm not aware of that. - So this was just a few weeks ago.
Alex Jones had this documentary that came out about him.
I think he was involved in the making of it and Glenn interviewed him about it and said basically something like, I'm not here to really push you about Sandy Hook.
I may have the language wrong.
I don't want to say exactly what he said.
But my impression was that he certainly didn't challenge him in the way that was proper for a journalist to...
You know, maybe I have a visceral reaction to Sandy Hook because we live, you know, like 15 minutes away from there on the other side of the Connecticut, you know, on the New York side of the border.
But, like, that happened, okay?
And it's pretty terrible to have done what Alex Jones did about that.
I think it's terrible that he said it and I think he thinks it's terrible that he said it and I think he was also going through a mental health breakdown and You know Alex has had problems in the past with substances and he's had problems with he He's a guy who had significant head trauma when he was younger.
And I attribute that to some of the issues that he has.
And I think excess drinking also attributed...
And it's also the fact that he keeps finding things that are true.
The problem is you find things that are true and you're alone.
And that's what I think Alex was.
He was alone.
You know, Alex, when I first met him, was a guy who was showing up at George Bush rallies.
And calling him a criminal.
And this is when Bush was running for president.
And that's when I, at first, was aware of him.
This is when he was protesting against what they were doing with the World Trade Organization, where they were stopping any kind of dissent where you couldn't even have a WTO badge on your backpack with a line through it and go and cross these lines.
And he also was the first to expose the agent provocateurs and that they use government agents to smash buildings and light things on fire so they could say this is not a peaceful protest and then they could go in with force and stop the protests.
He exposed a lot of things that are true.
He told me about Epstein's Island.
When I thought that was the craziest fucking thing I'd ever heard from him.
You know, when someone like him tells you there's an island that they take influential people and they have sex with underage people, you'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
And then if you told me years later that the guy, Epstein, would, first of all, go to jail for doing that very thing, for having sex with underage people, Then, still be able to court people like Bill Gates and be able to have them and travel with them and go places with them and then years later he would be suicided in some way where all the cameras stopped working and no one ever got brought to justice for it in any significant way and
that years after that Ghislaine Maxwell would be arrested, that she would be tried, that she'd be convicted and that the list of the people That engaged in this illegal activity would never be released.
I would say that is a banana republic bullshit thing.
That's not going to happen in the United States of America.
And, you know, I mean, as I said, he's, you know, I always keep quoting my own stuff.
I wrote this a few weeks ago.
He's ruined journalism, right?
He ruined it because he made it all about him.
And the idea was, we'll do whatever we have to do.
We'll go with any rumor just to get him.
And, of course, it didn't work.
And now I fear, and we'll find out more about this raid last month, but I fear he's ruined, I guess it was earlier this month, but he's ruined law enforcement.
You know, those guys have even, you know, they have real strict ethical guidelines because the stakes are so high.
And, you know...
To raid the ex-president and possibly future president's house because of some boxes of papers he took home, you better have...
I hope they have more than that.
I mean, I do.
Because Trump has a way of making everyone crazy and making people violate their own standards.
I hope and expect to have a lot more to say from the Twitter documents very soon.
I believe, I've sort of promised it and I do think it's going to happen.
I'm going to be suing Biden and Andy Slavitt.
We'll see what happens with that.
And the book, if you can find the final remaining copy of Barnes& Noble, it's Pandemia.
But look, I hope at this time next year, or whatever time, I hope obviously I'll come down and I'll come on with you anytime, we are talking about sort of...
Twitter and big tech and all that stuff.
I'd much rather be talking about that than some, you know, wave of deaths, you know, all-cause mortality.
Let's just hope that goes away.
I truly would love for that not to be a story in a few months.
unidentified
As would I. As would I. Alex Branson, thank you very much.