Big Pharma EXPOSED w/ Dr. John Abramson | PBD Podcast Ep. 351
John David Abramson is an American physician and the author of the book "Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It."
Dr. Abramson has worked as a family doctor in Appalachia and in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and has served as chairman of the Department of Family Practice at Lahey Clinic.
Dr. Abramson is a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow and is on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he teaches primary care and public health policy.
01:56 - Patrick explains how the pharmaceutical industry has helped save his father's life.
4:06 - Dr. Abramson explains how his position has changed on the COVID-19 vaccine from 2022 to today.
25:49 - Dr. Abramson discusses his role in helping get the COVID-19 vaccine developed during Operation Warp Speed.
33:18 - How other countries are fighting back against Big Pharma.
44:09 - Why the FDA isn't forcing Big Pharma to release results on the adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccinations?
1:02:25 - If Robert F Kennedy Jr's opinions on Anthony Fauci and vaccines are credible.
1:30:28 - Should patent laws be changed for pharmaceutical companies?
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
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Okay, today, episode 351, we have with us Dr. John Abramson.
He's an American physician and the author of books, Overdosed America, The Broken Promise of American Medicine and Sickening, How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and How We Can Repair It.
He has worked as a family doctor in Appalachia and in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and has served as chairman of the Department of Family Practice at Leahy Clinic.
He was a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow and is on the clinic faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he teaches primary care and public health policy.
Graduated from Harvard College.
1974, he received a BMS from Dartmouth Medical School, followed his MD with Brown Medical School.
He has appeared on more than 65 national television shows, including two pre-interstance on Today's show, as well as Dr. Ross.
But today, what's more important is he's been on Joe Rogan and he's been on Lex Friedman, and he's written op-ed pieces for New York Times, LA Times, and others.
And I'll read the last part here on what he did, what his book, the kind of influence his book had.
So in September 2004, when he published Overdosed America, The Broken Promise of American Medicine, just one week later, Vioxx was withdrawn on the biggest drug recall ever, but not before it had already killed between 40 to 60,000 Americans, despite providing no better relief than inexpensive over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs.
So having said that, Doc, it's great to have you on the podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me.
So we got a lot of things I want to cover with you.
I got some things what Big Pharma have an issue with.
I've watched your podcast with Lex.
I thought you guys did a great job.
I thought he did a great job trying to be fair.
And it was a perfect time because it was February of 2022, three months after he had interviewed the CEO of Pfizer, I believe, two or three months.
And I wonder how much your position changed because when I was listening to that one versus today, and you know, the great thing about medicine is it's constantly evolving.
And my experience with medicine has been my dad's 81 years old and he's still alive because of folks from your industry.
If it wasn't for folks in your industry, he wouldn't be alive today.
One of the best examples of the pharmaceutical industry, not only the pharmaceutical industry, the health, the doctor industry, Ken Langon, which I'm sure you're familiar with, Billionaire Home Depot.
There's a NYU, I believe, even has a hospital named after him.
And he's in his mid-80s, early 80s, I want to say.
He looks like he's 70, but he's, oh, shoot, I'm off, 88 years old.
And in his book, I Love Capitalism, he tells a story on how his dad, I believe, died at 60 or 62 years old.
Can you search to see what age Ken Langon's father died?
He died at 60 or maybe even 58 years old.
And he says, all my dad needed was blood thinners.
If my dad had blood thinners, he would be alive today.
He says, I'm 80-some years old because I've been taking blood thinners for so many years.
That was a simple little invention that, you know, patented that they came up with, and that helped my, you know, my dad would have been around today.
Or we would have lived longer.
So there's a lot of positive things in it, but there's also a lot of people filled with egos who hate to be wrong because let's face it, in our space, like I was a financial advisor working on Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, and I went to Transamerica World Financial and I would sit with people who are doctors.
If I tell you which professional knew the least about money, it was doctors.
Doctors knew nothing about money.
And every time I asked him, I said, this is all you got?
I do.
Man, how is it that smart people like you don't have your finances in order?
He says, just because we're doctors, everybody thinks we know everything, and we don't.
We don't know everything about money.
So how much has your position changed from February of 2022 when you were with Lex?
At that time, we were still all learning about the side effects of vaccine.
You guys on that podcast talked about vaccine.
You were talking about how you had taken a vaccine.
You're somebody that pro-vaccine.
You had gone through it.
And then conversation came about censorship because of what Joe was going through at the time with Spotify and all that stuff.
And you said, I think I'm less inclined to anti-vaxxers being allowed to speak freely on social media platforms than those who are qualified to talk about it.
How much of what you talked about then has changed two years later being today?
Good question.
So I think there's two questions there.
One is about vaccines.
The other is about the risk of having people conclude that what I'm saying is don't take medicine.
Medicines don't work.
They're not worth the money.
Shut it down.
That's absolutely not my position.
And if I can tell you a little story, I had a life-threatening illness.
I had a recurrent ventricular tachycardia that got progressively worse over about eight years.
And I got to the end of the line.
I was stuck in the hospital on IV lidocaine.
If the dose was turned down, I would go into ventricular tachycardia.
I had had three failed ablations, and it was the end of the life.
How old were you?
It was last year, 15 months ago.
I got transferred into one of the teaching hospitals at Boston where they do a very complicated procedure.
They go in the groin and do a regular, as if it were a regular ablation.
And at the same time, another doc goes through the chest wall and threads a little catheter into the lining of your heart so that two electronic monitors can work at the same time and they can find the source of the arrhythmia in three dimensions.
When you just go in the groin, you can just get it in two dimensions on the surface.
You don't know how deep it is.
And my problem happened to be right on the outside of the heart.
They would have had to perforate my heart to get it from the inside, but they got it from the outside.
Six-hour procedure by two world-class docs, and they saved my life.
The next day, a cardiologist comes into my room and starts telling me I should be taking more cholesterol-lowering medicine.
And I said, wait a minute, that's not the issue and the study.
He knows you're a doctor.
He knows I'm a doctor.
I don't know whether he knows that I write about this and that I've written articles about it, but he knows I'm a doctor.
And I say to him, look, the study that you're citing is not a good study.
It has bad endpoints.
And he said, well, if you restricted the endpoints to good endpoints, it would cost the company too much to do the study.
And I said, well, that's not my problem.
That's the company's problem.
If they can't do the study, then they shouldn't be selling the drug.
And then I said, besides which, do you know, I'm looking him in the eye, and I can also see the monitor.
I don't know that I'm cured yet.
And I'm watching the heart monitor as the tension rises.
And I say to him, do you know that when peer reviewers review articles for the best journals, JAMA, the New England Journal, do you know that those peer reviewers don't get to see the real data from the studies?
They just get to see the data that has been put into the 10-page manuscript that was submitted to the journal.
And the peer reviewers don't know what happened in the study.
Do you know that?
And he said, yes, I do.
And I said to him, if you know that the evidence that doctors have to rely on, the evidence in evidence-based medicine, has not been vetted with a thorough independent analysis of the data, how can you possibly present yourself as a learned intermediary and recommend these treatments to other doctors and to your patients?
And that was the end of the conversation.
What did he say to you?
He just, I can't remember, but he didn't.
Now, is this a cardiologist?
I mean, you wouldn't just go to any cardiologist.
Is this a well-known cardiologist you went to, or is it just a cardiologist?
No, no, no.
I'm in one of the world-class teaching hospitals at Harvard.
Okay.
Yeah.
So he's a trusted guy that's going through this.
So for you, why don't you, as a person that's going to a Harvard hospital, why don't you trust him?
Why don't you take his recommendation?
Because he knows that he doesn't have access to the data that he is drawing his conclusions from, and yet he's willing to make recommendations with inadequate data.
Why is he giving it to you?
Don't know when you're a doctor.
He knows he doesn't have the data.
He knows nobody has the data.
You have to be in litigation to get the data.
He knows that, and yet he's willing to participate in this system where peer review is meaningless, yet doctors have to practice in accord with so-called evidence-based medicine.
So who is he, whose orders is he following?
Is this the FDA?
Is it the hospital's guidelines?
Is it whose guidelines is he following?
Yeah, good question.
So what he's following is really, there was this wonderful book written by a nuclear physicist turned philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in 1962, wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
And what he showed is that when there are experts who rely on a certain body of knowledge, you can't, you're not allowed to become an expert unless you adhere to the unwritten rules of the legitimacy of the science.
And this is coming to play in American medicine.
The docs, even the academic leaders like the cardiologist I was talking to, believe that somehow there's this magical transformation of non-vetted data into real evidence that he should trust and recommend for his patients and for the doctors he's teaching.
What appears to be the truth of the science is sociologically determined.
It's not scientifically determined.
Can I ask you a question?
As I was reading that part, you know, I read a summary of your book and what you were saying here.
And I was trying to convert it into an understanding for the common man.
I'd like to know if you think my understanding is correct.
So Pat writes a book, a deep research book.
I am the first person, so I see the whole book, all of his research, all of his appendices, and I write a book review.
You write what's called a peer review.
Most people think, well, another learned doctor must have gone through everything and is writing a peer review.
But in fact, you wrote your peer review only on my book report.
You never read Pat's book.
Is that a good understanding of what you're describing for the common person?
It is, but it's worse.
Let's translate Pat's book and the review into clinical practice guidelines, which doctors have to follow.
They get presented in court if things go awry.
The people who write those clinical practice guidelines are relying on the studies that have been published in the journals.
Those studies have been peer-reviewed, but the data hasn't been analyzed.
When the guidelines are written, the experts who write those guidelines just have access to the articles that are published.
They don't have access to the real data.
So to go back to your analogy, you'd be writing, if I relied on a review, that wouldn't be good.
But if I relied on Patrick's references, which is what the experts do who write the guidelines that tell doctors how to practice, that doesn't work either because that's not independently analyzed data.
God, this is crazy.
So now I write the book review, five other doctors do a peer review of my book review, and then a six doctor has access to that and only that and starts writing the how-to procedure for emergency rooms and doctors to perform.
You've got it.
So let me go back to the question.
None of those people go back to Pat's original book.
But Pat's original book isn't going to be good enough.
They don't, but that's not good enough because what Pat has relied on, being a meticulous researcher, is the articles that have been published in the academic literature.
In medicine, those articles, the peer review is a sham.
So it's all built on sand.
So he may have written his book.
Wait a minute.
Researching.
All the papers are all built on sham.
All the papers are peer-reviewed.
The peer reviewers don't have access to the data.
The drug companies own the data.
Okay, so then let me go back to the question I was asking you.
So you're on the inside.
We're not.
Okay.
Okay.
But for you, you know, within your space, just like there is within politics or within the military, there are anti-establishment generals or colonels or lieutenants.
You know, like if you watch the movie Sent of a Woman, that was an anti-establishment colonel, right?
You know who I'm talking about.
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, phenomenal crushed it, right?
So, okay, you go in the political side, there's anti-establishment candidates.
Some would say Kennedy's more anti-establishment.
Some will say, I'm talking John F. Kennedy, not RFK, but even RFK could be anti-establishment.
Some may say Trump may be anti-establishment.
There's anti-establishment candidates, right?
But then there's the establishment side.
You were part of the establishment for many years, right?
And let me kind of ask the question, push back, tear my argument apart, whatever you want.
That's the whole reason why we're having this conversation.
One may say you were establishment.
You practice.
You follow the guidelines.
You follow the laws.
You follow the rules.
You followed all that stuff.
Did you, during COVID, Doc, at all have a moment where you're like, what the hell is going on here?
Like, what are they forcing down people to take this with this much research?
And we don't have the right kind of research.
And look at the numbers that's coming up and why are they not willing to release this?
Why are they putting such a long time for us not to get the data on this?
Why is it that we can't sue these guys?
Why is it, was there ever a moment during COVID for you where it's like a tipping point?
Yes, there was.
But let me just go back and finish up our last conversation about peer review.
There was a wonderful article.
It was published in the New England Journal, actually, and it looked at the terms of the contracts between academic medical centers and the drug companies.
So only about a quarter of the studies are done in academic medical centers.
The rest are done in for-profit by for-profit research companies.
But the ones that are done in the academic medical centers are going to be the highest quality studies.
50%, literally 50% of those contracts gave the drug companies the right to write up the results of the research, and the authors were suppressed to the point where they had the right to suggest revisions, but they couldn't make revisions.
The drug company controlled the article.
50%.
Who allows that?
You can't do that without the help of the government, though.
You don't need the government.
What you need is a market that's not functioning because the drug companies had pulled so much research out of the academic medical centers and the academic medical centers needed that money.
Managed care was coming in while this was happening.
They didn't have a lot of money in their pocket.
They needed to attract that research money as much as they could.
They ended up with about 25% of the research.
But it was the market because the contract research organizations were willing to abide by those regulations.
The academic medical centers had to.
So it was a dysfunctional market that was allowing the drug companies to write up 50% of these articles, and the peer review was a sham.
There was no way to get to the bottom of it.
Yeah, but isn't there a chairman of the board or a committee that's going to come in and say, what the hell are you guys doing?
Because at this point, that means the doctors and the writers are slaves to these big pharmaceutical companies.
And those are the ones that are making the big decisions for them.
And they're telling them what to do.
Is that kind of what it comes down to?
That's what it comes down to.
So I was at a medical meeting, and I was sitting near an editor, not editor-in-chief, but a major editor of a major journal.
And the meeting was over, and we got up to walk out.
And I said to him, Listen, why don't you guys demand the data from the trials that you're going to publish?
It's pretty simple.
The data's there.
They could deliver it to you.
It's a thing called the clinical study reports like 3,000 pages long.
And they've already done it.
They could deliver it.
You could require it with the manuscript.
And he said to me, before I took the next step, he said, requiring that data would be a death spiral for the journal.
And what he's saying is if we require data and other journals don't require the data, the companies won't submit their big articles to us.
And a major part of the income of the journal, a major part of the income of the journals comes from selling reprints back to the company for their drug reps to hand out.
And in 2005, 41% of the Lancet's income came from selling reprints.
That's the less data there is.
So he was admitting to me in sort of poetically economic language that they're in the business, the financial model that they're in is selling reprints back to the drug companies.
And they can't behave in a way that's going to decrease their sales of those articles.
At what point were these data, like was access to data available, and did an event happen to cause this data to be hidden?
For example, you know, when you think about some of the acts that they come up with, every industry has all these acts in the financial industry, Investment Company Act of 1940, all this other stuff, right?
So there's one here where in 1986, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, right?
NCVIA became law.
And what this did is it waived any liability for pharmaceutical companies and vaccine manufacturers for injuries or death caused by vaccine.
86, that's roughly 40 years ago, a little less than 40 years ago, right?
Okay.
Was there a time where data was available to the consumer to know and researchers and doctors to look at where big pharma came in, hired a lobbyist firm to work with a Congress or Senate to pass something that that data doesn't need to be available to the public again?
No, it evolved slowly because the drug companies were doing this, but they didn't have complete control of the situation because 80% of the research was being done in academic centers.
So the academic docs were seeing it.
So this situation developed slowly.
And now there's an organization called the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, the 13 biggest general medical journals in the world, they would be the body that would do this, but they've been tiptoeing in place.
Who's funding them?
They're the journals.
They are the journals.
So who's funding them is the sale of reprints and their subscribers.
Who owns them?
Their own.
We're looking at them right now here.
Parent Organization and International Committee of, so it's themselves.
It's International Committee of Journalism.
Vancouver Group formerly.
Okay.
So they're purely not releasing all the information because they're worried it could hurt their top line revenue.
Correct.
It'll hurt their impact factor.
It'll hurt their reprint sales.
Some of these journals are nonprofits.
The New England Journal is a nonprofit.
The Journal of the American Medical Society.
How many of these guys are out there?
How many of these journals?
Oh, there are a million journals, but these are the 13 big ones.
So the 13 big ones, are they all independent nonprofits?
No.
No, the Lancet's owned by Elsevier.
So if none of them are giving the data, then they're all on the same page together.
And why is that?
Is it kind of like, you know how they say, you know, every single media company is really owned by five families?
You know how you read those kind of articles that come out.
Are the same people running these 13 different organizations?
Or no, they're all 13 separate?
Basically, there are some journals that are different.
The British Medical Journal, it's now called the BMJ, is different.
But they're not as commercially involved.
But the biggest journals are playing in this financial arena where the editors have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize their profits.
And they're doing it.
Yeah, but who's exposing them?
Who is calling them out?
Who is challenging?
Like, for example, at least if I have a New York Times, I got a New York Post, right?
If I got a WAPO, Washington Post, I got a Washington Times, right?
And they're going to be opposing each other in a business side.
If I got a Forbes, I got a Fortune, I got an entrepreneur, I got an Inc., I got a business week, I got different guys that maybe will be challenging each other.
I got CNN, I got Fox.
I got MSNBC.
There's competition, right?
You mean to tell me there's nobody that's calling these guys out to their Patrick, that's why I'm sitting here.
The mainstream media has put the lid on this.
Nobody's covering it.
Nobody is covering this.
It's a tragedy.
And we haven't even started to talk about the cost and the poor health of Americans that is largely tied into this.
This is market failure.
Milton Friedman, the ultimate capitalist, said that there are three things a government should do.
It should preserve law and order.
It should enforce private contracts.
And it should make sure markets work.
He said that in 1962 in his book, Capitalism and Freedom.
And if we would go back to those three principles and apply them to the pharmaceutical industry and what's going on in healthcare, we would take a giant step forward away from this.
So it sounds like you're saying that the business model is all wrong, because if I'm creating a medical journal, I'm not getting paid subscriptions from a bunch of doctors that want to read that.
What you're saying is the most of them that if I publish articles that are in line with what the pharmaceuticals want, they say, hey, thanks for the nice article.
Thanks for everything that goes with that.
I'll take 10,000 copies of it, and then I'm going to go give them to my sales reps to hand them out to America's allergists if I'm making an allergy drug.
You're saying that's the business model.
It's not thousands and thousands of doctors paying subscriptions.
If it was, Forbes would compete with Fortune and business people would subscribe to one or the other based on what they think is better information.
You're saying that they're really not operating publications.
They're operating printing services that are reprinting articles for the medical establishment driven by the pharmaceutical company.
Correct.
There is some subscription fees, but they're not the major thing.
The major thing, the major sources of income are selling reprints and selling advertising to the manufacturers.
But then to me, this is what it comes down to.
Who has brass to call them out?
Who has brass to talk about it?
And why don't the mainstream media people talk about it?
For example, yesterday, today we reacted to Charles Barkley being pissed off.
Are you a football guy?
You follow the NFL?
Okay.
He's pissed off about the fact that one of the main games was on Peacock.
Okay, and I think it was, what, Miami Dolphins against Kansas City or whichever game was it?
I was pissed off, too.
Okay, so you know what, to me, you know what I said?
I said, I love it.
And let me tell you why.
Because it kind of validates your point.
He was pissed off saying, how could you do this?
And I understand it's all about money.
Apparently, they got $110 million from Peacock.
By the way, Peacock got up 23 million viewers that watched it.
Record-breaking ever, right?
But why am I happy about it?
This is why I'm happy about it.
And Connor, it's going to go back to you.
Because these Peacocks, Amazon's, Netflix of the world, they rely on monthly subscription fee.
They don't rely on advertisers.
They rely mainly on monthly subscription fees.
Okay, cable TV relies on what?
Advertisers.
And we know who's their biggest advertiser.
I think cable TV is staying in business for three different reasons.
Sports, boomers, and big pharma.
Okay.
So the more they step away, the less big pharma can control.
Just the other day, Travis Kelsey, they reported, if you can pull this up, Rob, that Pfizer, you know how much Pfizer paid him to do the COVID vaccine commercial?
$20 million.
$20 million, right?
$20 million.
So for every one of these guys, and you're seeing their top-line revenue, what they're doing, who's not afraid of them to call them out?
Who's not afraid of big pharma, the journals, what's taking place to just come out and say, guys, you're getting exposed.
Who's that person or organization?
It's you and it's other people who are trying to get to fill in what mainstream media is not willing to do.
Mainstream media is not willing to talk about this.
So Travis Kelly gets $20 million and he also has this relationship with Taylor Swift and God knows how that unfolded.
But here's the story, to get back to your question about COVID.
I was with the program during the early phases, during Operation Warp Speed, when the Republicans were throwing money at the drug companies, tons of money, to get it out, to get the vaccine out most quickly.
We didn't know how bad this was going to be.
It wasn't, you had to look and see if there were real warning signs, but it looked like it was safe, at least in the short term.
And I was with the program.
But now we've had three different boosters coming on, and Travis Kelsey's on TV advertising the third booster.
There's been no randomized control data to support the use of those boosters.
Now, that's just not okay.
The FDA is approving these boosters with all the advocacy of the CDC and the experts who speak on TV saying get the boosters.
And we just don't know what the effect of the boosters is.
We can go into the details of it if you want, but we don't know.
I'm of a certain age and I had a heart condition.
Hopefully it's cured.
I'm worried.
I got the boosters, but I don't have data.
You got all three of them?
I got all three of them, but I don't have data that tells me it's okay.
Why did you get them?
I got them because the arrhythmia that I had that's now suppressed could be reactivated with COVID that went to the heart.
Arrhythmia that you had that could be reactivated that went to the heart.
Yeah.
Tell me what that means.
So I told you this story about being in 15 months ago, yes.
Yeah, and having this arrhythmia.
You did an angio went up and also from the front.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So I was at death's door.
I mean, I made my piece.
I was ready to go.
And this is serious business.
I'm in a different risk benefit situation than most people are.
I'm also 75.
So I'm in a different risk-benefit situation.
So without randomized control data, just with antibody data and observational data, the second booster was actually approved with antibody data.
Pfizer's vaccine was approved with antibody data from eight mice.
And Moderna did much better than that.
They had antibody data from 10 mice.
This is the second vaccine.
We have twice the data, sir.
Well, not twice.
It's about 25% more.
Yeah.
I'm telling the truth, and the FDA is letting this go on.
And the CDC is picking it up.
So there's no data.
There's not data that it's bad.
There's not data that it works.
And I'm going to play my odds by getting the booster, knowing that I don't know what I'm getting.
But you're young.
You guys are young and healthy.
And you may look at this situation and say, wait a minute, there's no data.
We don't know long-term effects.
We don't know if it prevents hospitalizations or serious illness.
And you're not likely to get seriously ill if you get COVID.
And you may decide, I'm going to pass until they get some good data out here that I can decide on.
I never got it.
So I didn't get it.
My wife didn't get it.
Our kids didn't get it.
But my dad, who's 81 today, he got the vaccine and got all the boosters.
So did my nanny, who lives with us, been with us for 14 years.
She's in her 60s.
They chose to get it, and we totally supported them.
And we ran an insurance company where we had to decide what guys wanted to do.
And I said, you do what you want to do with your body.
I'm healthy.
And I got COVID.
My wife got COVID.
We all went through it.
It was, you know, the process we went through.
But 70% of America is vaccinated.
If you type in, Rob, what percentage of Americans are vaccinated?
I want to say it's somewhere between 67 to 71% are vaccinated.
You may know these numbers better than I do.
Can you zoom in a little bit?
What percentage of Americans are vaccinated?
70% of Americans are give or take vaccinated.
Okay, if you get to older folks, the percentage is higher.
Higher, right.
So based on what you know now, and you 75 years old, you said, I accept it.
I made the decision.
This is serious business, right?
15 months ago, this may be it for me, right?
You're 73, 74 years old.
So now that you know what you know, where do we go wrong?
What mistakes did we make?
Who should have never taken it?
All the late night show forcing everybody to take it and military being forced to retire or else.
And, you know, Bill Maher the other day is like, I took one for the team.
I never wanted to take it.
He had Seth McFarlane on.
He's debating him.
He had Jimmy Kimmel on.
He's debating him.
All of these guys were forced to.
We had a guy that was a colonel before in the military.
He got kicked out because they didn't want to take the vaccine.
He's sitting here telling us the story.
How many of those stories do we have to hear?
Where did we go wrong when it comes down to the vaccine?
Well, let's go do the last first.
It's very simple with the boosters.
If we're going to have a booster campaign and we're going to recommend that Americans get it and we're going to use public media, public service media to advertise it and try to create an imperative, you need randomized controlled trials.
That's what science is.
So the first booster was done on observational data from Israel.
One out of 17 people took the booster.
Israel approved the booster early, and it was a perfect situation where you could do a randomized control trial.
It was not known whether it worked or not.
Israel was first in line, and they could have easily gotten hundreds of thousands of people to go into a randomized control trial and could have produced data early.
That's not what Pfizer did.
I think it was Pfizer.
What they did is they harvested data from the electronic medical records and they compared the death rate from COVID in the people who chose to get the booster to the death rate from COVID in people who did not choose to get the booster.
And they found that there was a 94% lower COVID death rate in the people who chose to get the booster.
That was published in the New England Journal.
It became evidence-based medicine.
Everyone had to get a booster.
And that was the truth, the scientific truth, and you couldn't challenge it.
What came out just recently is that when you look at that same population of people, 94% fewer deaths from COVID and 94% fewer deaths from non-COVID illnesses.
In other words, those people were 94% less likely to die of anything.
They were healthier.
You can't do an observational study because the people who choose to get a shot are different than the people who choose not to get a shot.
Now, the FDA knows this well.
I mean, this whole thing about hormone replacement that went crazy in the 80s and 90s, we got it wrong.
And women, millions of women took hormone replacement therapy, increasing their risk of breast cancer.
And now it turns out dementia as well, because it was observational data.
And the women who took the hormone replacement therapy were healthier because they were going to be healthier in the first place.
And you could say that you could find the women who are going to be healthier by just seeing which ones chose to take hormone replacement therapy or not.
So the FDA has been through this many times.
They know that observational data are not reliable.
I don't get it.
Why the FDA does not insist on randomized controlled trials when they approve new vaccines and tell people they should get them.
So let's ask this question.
Okay, so FDA is an organization that regulates and approves American companies, American pharmaceutical companies, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
We have 195 countries, give or take five, right?
What other countries are stricter?
There's only two companies that, if you were to say, well, the dollar thing is really in there, you know this, you've spoken about this, New Zealand and us.
You know, New Zealand did it in 1980.
I want to take give or take when they're like, yeah, you know what, moving forward, we can advertise on TV.
And U.S. is saying, hey, there's a big difference between big pharma and nicotine and cigar company, a cigarette company.
Why do we drop Marlborough?
Why aren't we not doing Winston?
What's the big difference?
Well, you know, because over here, this actually can help.
The other one cannot help.
Okay, fine.
That's your argument.
Great.
I don't agree with it, but fine.
But there's 193 other countries that can sit there and say, no, let's make the best educated decision.
There is not a level of big pharmaceutical profits being made there like we are.
What are they doing?
What are you noticing other countries doing that are saying, no, no, we're not with this?
Who is fully against the way we've been handling pharmaceuticals in America?
Okay.
So New Zealand's the other country that does direct-to-consumer advertising.
So it's interesting to compare the two.
New Zealand has a very active pharmaceutical, national pharmaceutical program.
They oversee which drugs are approved and they evaluate the comparative effectiveness of different drugs.
So this is a good test.
In the United States, because we're the wild west of drug marketing and TV advertising, we spend by far the most on drugs of any of the wealthy countries.
New Zealand has direct-to-consumer advertising.
They spend the least of the wealthy countries on their drugs.
So even though the countries have access to the same data, the national drug policy makes a huge difference.
And this is where we may disagree, but there needs to be some kind of Federal or quasi-governmental oversight of the information that the doctors and the public gets about drugs.
We don't have that.
We're the only wealthy country that doesn't have that.
So that we've got the same bad information.
And I don't know why the other countries haven't insisted on randomized control trials, but we've got the same bad information.
But in the United States, it's much more effective at convincing doctors and patients to take the drugs without getting the information that New Zealand's going to offer to their citizens.
If you ask the average fairly informed person and you just gave the description you had of New Zealand, the average informed person in America, I would think would say, wait a minute, what you're just describing in New Zealand, isn't that what the FDA is supposed to be doing?
What's the difference between – am I right?
So what's the difference between what the FDA really does and what is happening in New Zealand?
Okay, this is really important.
The FDA's job is to evaluate data about new drugs and to determine which of those drugs have a statistically significant efficacy and no evidence of harm that's greater than that.
Excuse me.
And ultimately improve them for general use.
Approve them for general use, and doctors can't prescribe the drugs unless they're approved by the FDA.
But the FDA does not inform doctors about how that drug compares to the best existing therapy and how many it doesn't inform doctors about where that drug fits into optimal therapy.
That's not the FDA's job.
Other countries have another organization that does that.
We don't.
So is that what you're describing New Zealand does?
Yes.
Yes.
And we're tiptoeing into it, but the political headwinds, I think, are going to sink it.
The FDA approves drugs.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is claiming the right to evaluate the efficacy, the benefits and harms in the real world of clinical practice to determine whether they're going to cover the drugs that the FDA approves.
And we can talk about a cover, you mean CMS.
Most people know what CMS is.
Oh, CMS.
They make decisions that affect my Medicare, Medicaid, and my costs.
So you're saying CMS says, hey, we'll cover this drug for skin allergies of some sort.
We're going to cover it.
So CMS says you're going to cover it, and then a bunch of retired people say, yay, it's covered by Medicare.
Now I can take that drug, correct?
Correct.
That's CMS.
CMS.
And CMS is claiming the right, and it's been supported in court to say that drug has not been proven to be effective for this population, and therefore we're not going to cover it either for general use or for any use.
And we're headed towards a political confrontation on this.
So let me see if I translate that.
So CMS is saying, if we don't think this drug is good for the skin allergy, we're not going to prove it.
We're not going to pay for it.
Translation, taxpayer isn't going to pay for it under Medicaid for all these retired people, I mean, Medicare for all these retirement people that have Medicare.
In fact, there is a showdown coming because, are you about to say this is what the FDA thinks its job is, and that's where the showdown is between CMS and FDA?
No, there's something else.
No, there's no question that the FDA, that's not the FDA's job, and it's important to understand that.
Where's the showdown there that you're talking about?
The showdown is going to come.
There's a new drug to treat early Alzheimer's disease called LeChembi.
And this drug could cost so much that it actually equals the total amount of money that Medicare Part B spends annually on drugs.
It's cost $26,000 a year and another $82,000 for clinical oversight and monitoring.
CMS is saying, we're not going to cover this drug unless you collect data in a registry so that soon we'll know how effective this drug is.
The clinical trial upon which the FDA relied showed that it was statistically significant, but it didn't reach, the efficacy didn't reach being clinically significant.
And the FDA's job is to do it on statistical significance, statistical significance, not clinical benefit.
So CMS is taking this problem, which could cost the taxpayers a fortune, $40 billion a year.
And CMS is saying, okay, FDA approved it.
We're going to cover it, but we're only going to cover it if doctors put the data in a registry.
So that sounds like good public policy.
What happened is CMS has a registry that's going to collect the data that they need to figure out whether the drug's working and whether it's doing more good than harm.
CMS has developed those criteria.
In the label, it says you should enter your patient in a registry, but it doesn't say enter them in the CMS registry.
It says enter them in the AlzNet registry.
The AlzNet registry is sponsored by the Alzheimer's Foundation.
The two biggest contributors to the pharmaceutical contributors to the Alzheimer's Foundation are the two drug companies that are making these new drugs that are fantastically expensive.
And the AlzNet registry is going to pay doctors, pay doctors $2,500 for signing up for this and $300 per visit for every visit that they register in the AlzNet registry.
So the AlzNet registry is going to buy its way over the CMS registry.
And now this drug company sponsored organization is going to be determining what data they collect and how they're going to report it.
So you know what this makes me think about is the following way.
So you're saying the only people that really have access to everything, all the data, is the pharmaceutical companies, right?
They have the data.
And in litigation, Patrick, which is why I'm sitting here, because I spent 10 or 12 years in pharmaceutical litigation.
In litigation, as an expert, you sign a confidentiality agreement and you get access to the computer hard drives from the drug companies.
You get everything.
And I know what's in there.
And that's how I learned how important this stuff is.
Because I know you guys are sitting there saying, this guy Abramson is telling this wild story.
How the hell do I know that?
I mean, it's just a crazy story.
And why isn't it told me?
Oh, no, no, I believe it.
I just wonder why it has it.
So for example, financial industry.
Okay.
What's the one word stockbrokers cannot use with their clients that gets them in trouble?
It's a G-letter word.
Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, I guarantee you a 12% rate of return, da-da-da-da-da, on this mutual fund, right?
Okay.
Okay, you coughed.
I'm coughing, Tom.
You're next.
So hopefully you're ready for it.
You want me to cough or you're good.
Yeah, wait a minute.
So the question becomes the following, right?
There's this thing called the stock market.
You can go out there and tell me how well your stock is doing, but the stock market tells me how well you're doing.
And there's this thing called quarterly earnings that I can go quarterly earnings and say, hey, your quarterly earnings, you expected to do this.
You missed the mark.
And your stock goes 5% drops for a day.
And hey, here's what they're doing.
Hey, such and such is shorting your company.
Kathy Wood or XYZA.
You know, Carl ICON is shorting AIGN.
They want the CO to be fired.
Oh, shit.
You know, whoever was short.
Was it Carl Icon was shorting?
Whoever the CEO was at IG, right?
And Pershing Square was shorting Herbalife.
So there's big players.
There's big players.
That's Ackman, I believe, and Ackman and ICON got into it.
Correct.
But there's at least we, the public, sees it and says, wait a minute, what was that all about?
Why is this stock doing this?
Hey, you know, I'd like to recommend you investment company act of America Mutual Fund with American funds.
This fund has been around since 1934.
Can I see the prospectus?
Sure.
Here's what the prospectus looks like.
Okay, this year was a big drop-off.
What happened last five years?
Your five-year rate of return isn't 12%.
And then you have to explain yourself.
And, you know, the financial advisor does.
Why isn't somebody enforcing big pharmaceutical companies to give data on exactly what happened with these COVID vaccinations?
What happened with the results?
How many injuries do we have?
What really took place?
Everybody is just trying to delay it, right?
Delay it, delay it.
And even recently, the story comes out with Anthony Fauci saying the fact that, where is the story?
I think it's this one right here, saying the fact that Fauci's former boss concedes COVID lab leak was not a conspiracy theory.
That's just a story that came out yesterday, right?
And Fauci is out there using the legendary line, which I don't recall.
Dr. Francis Collins, do you know Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, testified in a closed-door session with the House Coronavirus Subcommittee, admitting that the COVID lab leak theory was credible.
This marks a significant shift from his earlier characterization of its very destructive conspiracy.
House Republican leading the hearing revealed that Dr. Collins acknowledged the credibility of the leak hypothesis, contradicting Fauci's previous stance.
They also accused both doctors of using their influence to pressure researchers into favoring a natural origin theory over the lab leak theory regarding COVID's origin.
I mean, people are sitting there saying, wait a minute, we bought that it wasn't.
We bought that it wasn't.
So why isn't there an organization or institution that's forcing these guys to give us the data?
Okay, two answers.
One is there's an Office of the Inspector General report that was filed in January of 2023.
The Office of the Inspector General found that there was a grant from the NIH to EcoHealth in 2014.
And some of that money went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But Obama had put a ban on gain of function research.
So they couldn't do gain of function research.
EcoHealth filed its reports with the NIH through 2017.
When Trump came in, he lifted the ban on gain of function research, meaning making viruses more virulent and more dangerous.
He lifted the ban.
And EcoHealth stopped filing reports to the NIH.
And there are no reports that were filed after the gain of function ban was lifted.
And the NIH had to know that they didn't have the reports.
And this Office of the Inspector General, you can Google it, report is out there.
So we were funding research and we didn't know what the research was doing.
So let me ask Sarah.
So you just answered what happened in that case.
In the financial services industry, prospectuses are everywhere and it's law.
They have to be out there.
And people that saw the popular movie The Big Short, you can see Michael Burry, the somewhat challenged but genius from San Jose, California, says, I've read the full report.
I know the mortgages are in here.
I looked at several samples, and ultimately the Steve Carroll character takes the same report, goes down to South Florida and checks out some neighborhoods.
So in the financial services industry, the answer is the law is that in some of these perspectives is the complete data is available.
You just answered what happened with that particular report.
The question is, what is preventing what law is there or is there enrichment poorly that this information is not available to maybe a research physician like Michael Burry that wants to look at it?
So where is that problem?
Right.
Now we're narrowing in on the real problem.
And the problem is that the drug company's job, their executives because they're paid largely in stock options and stocks, their investors, the private equity firms, the hedge funds, their job is to maximize the profits that are derived from the pharmaceutical industry.
Sure, and this is the moral hazard.
But where's the law that would say, hey, if you're going to have this research report and they're going to be peer-reviewed, somewhere there has to be the Magna Carta, the Rosetta Stone, the original research and stuff that goes with it.
How is that not available?
Is there no law that says it has to be?
It's not available.
One of the slides I sent you was Pfizer talking about data, and they're saying scientific data, the drug company, Pfizer, owns the data.
They're not going to release the data.
And furthermore, they admit very bluntly that the purpose of the data is to support their marketing, not to improve the health of Americans, but to support their marketing.
So the business side of this has taken over, and the scientific oversight has been whittled away by the profit motive, the profits that are going to the academic medical centers and to the academic researchers and to the drug companies and to the journals and to the nonprofits that are accepting pharmaceutical money.
And what we've got is this massive market failure where money is coloring what doctors think they know about health care.
And this is a real problem.
I mean, you guys tell me you're much more into financial markets than I am.
But my understanding is that when you get a market failure of this magnitude, you need government to come in and straighten it out.
Got it.
So in financial services, I'm one of the big banks, Bear Stearns, and I own the data that was in that mortgage, that mortgage fund, that covering fund, basically, you know, a mutual fund of all the mortgages.
But the law says that I had to make all that data available.
I own the data.
I own that this is my product that I'm selling to people, this mutual they're buying.
Okay, what you're saying in pharmaceuticals, Merck may own the data, but there's no law out there that says Merck has to make that available to other doctors or anybody for expansion.
That's exactly right.
So no president on the left or the right has forced them to give that data to the public.
That's right.
Okay, so let's go back to this.
There's the problem.
When I'm looking at this here, do you trust Dr. Anthony Fauci?
Do I trust him?
I saw Dr. Fauci get out over his skis with the initial vaccine, saying it was safe when it had only been used for two months and nobody could know whether it was safe.
I think they implied that it would decrease transmissibility and that would justify the mandates.
I think that was not in the data.
So I think at that point, I thought he was like an overly zealous Boy Scout who thought he was doing the right thing by overselling beyond the knowledge the vaccines.
At this point, with the boosters not having any randomized controlled trials, I don't know what's going on there.
Something's going on there.
I don't know what it is.
How the U.S. government can allow the FDA to accept, to approve these boosters and to market them as actively as they do with no randomized controlled trials completely escapes me.
I don't get it.
You know what confuses me a little bit?
I'm curious to know what you'll say about this because when I'm looking at the data here, the same person we're talking about, NIH director Francis Collins, formalized collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Military Science in 2015 under Obama, according to the book, and shared a photo that year of him with the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences president, okay?
And they're explaining what's going on here.
And then, you know, Fauci's kind of like, I don't want to, you know, I'm not involved.
We're not doing anything.
Function isn't happening.
You've seen the Rand Paul asking him over and over and over and over and over again.
Here's who I'm at with this year.
At that time, you know, everybody is saying there's no way this warp speed, Operation Warp Speed is going to get done.
There's no way this is going to take a year and a half.
Kamalo Harris, would you ever take the vaccine under Trump?
I would never take it.
I would never take a vaccine that's not tested.
This is our vice president saying this on TV.
And then what happens?
Election is done.
Two days later, the vaccine is available.
But after the election, exactly two days later.
And then who promoted it to the world?
Everybody on the left.
Sold it to the world.
And if you didn't, Twitter took your videos down.
YouTube took your videos down.
YouTube wouldn't let Peter McCullough stuff stay up.
Whether it's Malone, whether it's all of these guys.
Military took a job.
From your world, the industry you're a part of, that all supported what Fauci was doing, and Fauci was God to people in the medical world.
He couldn't do anything wrong in the face of anybody because God forbid, if you at all said anything Fauci did wrong, you would potentially be a Republican.
You can't be a Republican, Doc.
If you're labeled as a Republican, that's a curse word to somebody like you, maybe, right?
You're coming from Harvard.
I went to a Harvard OPM program.
This is when I realized I will never go back to Harvard.
Let me explain it to you.
I'm at a Harvard OPM program for three weeks.
It's an owner-president management program, okay?
I didn't go Harvard NBA like you went to Harvard 1974, Harvard College.
It's part of Harvard.
I've never been anything with Harvard.
It's just one of those executive programs I go to.
Guess what?
Debate is taking place while I'm there?
The legendary debate, Trump against Hillary.
I'm in Chow Hall.
You know where Chow Hall is, on the business side, the Asian billionaire who, the restaurant, the Chow where everybody eats, it's called Chow Hall.
His name is Chow Hall, right?
Not Chow like military Chow Hall when I was in, I thought that's what it was called, but no, it's called his name, Chow Hall.
His picture is even in there.
I say, let me go watch this debate.
I go in there and watch a debate.
I'll see all the teachers, all the professors that work at this incredible institute called Harvard.
And 100% of them booed Trump.
And 100% of them cheered for Hillary.
You know what I realized happened to Harvard?
They're all deaf because they're all around the same people that all agree with them.
Here's an institution with $60 billion of endowment cash sitting there for them who all agree with each other.
That's when I realized that's no longer a university.
That's an echo chamber.
It's not a university.
And this is why when you're thinking there's so much about the people and all this other stuff, unfortunately for myself, you're like, well, now that everybody's not allowed to come to school and on campus, do we still have to pay the same amount of tuition to come to school?
Because we're not using boarding.
We're not using this.
You still do.
I said, wait, you still want the students to pay for that?
Yeah.
So during COVID, the level of force from the left, the level of you do this or else, the level of silencing of the people that simply disagree with you.
And by the way, it wasn't even non-doctors and non-experts.
There was a guy in Bakersfield, this one doctor that was telling, I'm just asking questions.
Why are we doing this?
Why am I supposed to put this death as a COVID death?
This was not a COVID death.
But no, you're supposed to categorically put it.
The video gets 15 million views.
Two doctors sitting there.
Video is taken out 24 hours later.
So it's not like during that time, you know, it was just the non-health experts that were being silenced.
It was anybody that disagreed with Fauci's position was being silenced.
Now it's 2024.
Do you have anything to say about how the left mishandled COVID, led by Fauci's policies?
Because Fauci is the one that was telling everybody what's the right thing for us to do and trust the science and wear three masks.
We're taking pictures with masks.
Then the pictures, cameras comes off.
Everybody takes their masks off.
People are not dummies sitting there saying, wait a minute, don't patronize me.
Don't make me do something you don't want to do, but behind closed doors, you're doing it because it's a political party.
That's where I saw in a, you know, regular world.
I'm running an insurance company at our event.
We have 10,000 people at our event.
Half are Democrats, half are Republicans.
But everybody was like, what the hell is going on here?
These are valid concerns.
Your thoughts.
Absolutely.
There is a bias on the left to support public health measures.
It's a bias.
There's also something going on with drug company money.
And let me tell you a story that will make some news in the beyond.
The story comes from the Boston Globe, but it hasn't gotten out, and it is very newsworthy, and it addresses exactly the question you ask.
Claudine Gay just got fired as the president of Harvard University.
She had plagiarized, which I think, I'm not an expert on this, but I think that meant missing quotation marks and not citing references.
And that's not a good thing.
An academic should not do that.
You sound like you're defending her, though.
Let me finish my story.
You won't be ready to pounce on me.
Okay.
I promise.
She gets fired, and Alan Garber, who's been the provost of Harvard, gets appointed the temporary president.
Okay?
So that's what happened.
Those are the facts.
Alan Garber's salary as provost has been about $940,000 a year.
I assume it's market value.
I don't have a complaint.
Since 2017, he's been on the board of two pharmaceutical companies.
He's the provost of Harvard University, and he's been on the board of two pharmaceutical companies.
And his annual salary from these two board positions is more than his salary from Harvard.
It's $960,000.
One of those two companies is Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
They're selling their drug that is a revolutionary drug that decreases the pulmonary consequences of cystic fibrosis by about 14%.
And they're selling this drug for $322,000.
It costs them to make less than $6,000.
So we've got the provost of Harvard University in a position of direct conflict of interest in talking about the public health consequences of this.
Now, this hit me hard because I was teaching, I'm not on the faculty anymore, but I stepped down a year ago.
But I was teaching healthcare policy at Harvard for many years.
And one of the case studies we taught all the first-year students at Harvard Medical School was if Medicaid ran out of money, the students in each seminar group, if Medicaid ran out of money, what services would you cut to have the least impact to engage the students with this?
Great question.
Yeah.
And do you cut out eyeglasses every other year?
Do you cut out transportation to doctors and so forth?
What they didn't talk about is that Vertex's drug costs $322,000 and costs $6,000 to make, and somebody ought to be negotiating with these guys to get a fair price.
Is that a dosage or an annual?
Annual.
So $360,000, if you have got one, if you've got this terrible rare condition, it's $30,000 a month or $360 a year.
It's a little bit less, probably $28,000 or $27 a month.
But that was an annual figure.
And it costs $6,000 to make.
Yeah.
Yes.
And the hepatitis C drugs that cost $1,000 a pill, $84,000 for a course of treatment, and they cost, they're sold for $1,000 in India where it's generic.
So what we've got is this enormously unfair, hyper-profitable situation.
We've got the provost of Harvard, who's now the acting president of Harvard, sitting on two boards.
And in healthcare policy, they're not teaching that you can't let the market set these prices.
They have monopolies.
But that makes sense to me why Harvard would put somebody like that as the board.
That makes sense to me.
Because Harvard's no longer a university.
Harvard's no longer to me as a university.
It makes sense for me to put somebody there that owns them, which is another big for.
Rob, can you pull up the article of the top 10 most expensive?
And I want to validate what he's saying.
Here's the top 10 most expensive drugs in America as of January 15th per year.
Hemgenix, $3.5 million per one-time dose.
Okay, let me say that one more time.
$3.5 million per one-time dose.
Go to the next person.
Go to the next one.
Okay.
Elevidis, $3.2 million.
You can go to the next one.
I don't disagree with this, and the price is awful.
It is important to point out that these are one-time treatments.
I totally get it, but you're still $3 million.
$3 million.
Oh, my God.
This next one, Sky Sona, $3 million.
You can't keep going, Laura, just to kind of show the numbers.
So when he's saying $300,000, some people are like, that's a lot of money.
It's a one-tenth of many of these other $2.8 million.
There's plenty we can go through here.
But again, to go back to the question you made about, I'm trying to see the point you were trying to make.
So were you trying to say, you know, because Claudine Gay was a DEI hire.
That's what she was.
She was a DEI hire because she was a woman and she was African American.
And nowadays, you get extra points when you hire somebody with DEI because the money people are very happy with you when you do something like that.
There's a big feud right now, United Airlines CEO is talking about the fact that their pilots, the goal is to have 50% of them be women and of color.
Why do we care about hiring based on women and of color?
What if these girls don't want to be pilots when they grow up?
What if there's a bigger percentage out of 100 kids, 100 boys, say 30% want to be pilots when they grow up?
100 girls under the age of 12, maybe 3 want to be pilots when they grow up.
Why are you trying to change that if that doesn't make sense?
So that's my problem with Harvard.
But let me go back to it again.
Everything I just said, you still haven't answered my question.
The market on the left looks at Fauci as God, as he can't do anything wrong.
And they're so afraid to criticize him.
The only person that did, they kicked him out of his party and his family even pretty much disowned him.
His name is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I don't, did you read the Fauci book he wrote on, did you read the case against Anthony Fauci?
Yeah, if you read it, the first words in that book are a quote from me.
The first words that the pharmaceutical industry has taken over the knowledge that doctors have in the introduction.
What did you think about the book?
What did you think about the book on things he said about Fauci?
I think that RFK is a very smart guy.
He works really hard and he gets a lot of things right.
But in my opinion, he doesn't have a firm grasp of his own desire to prove his points, his confirmation.
Such as when he was on Joe Rogan's show in June, he cited an article that he claimed said that vaccinations have never saved any lives.
And I looked that up because that didn't sound right.
And it's not right.
He cited the article wrong.
But our RFK Jr. works so fast that it's very hard to keep up with him in real time.
So nobody can debate him.
And I don't blame people for not debating him because he's bringing in new data.
If he would stick to what he said on the Rogan show, then I think I'd debate him.
If he was locked into that position.
What does that even mean, though?
I don't understand what you just said right there.
So you're now probably bringing up that Dr. Paul Hotez was not willing to talk to RFK because that was going on.
And I remember that.
What do you mean if he sticks to what he said to Joe Rogan?
No, no, no.
You put the two things together.
It's impossible to debate RFK Jr.
Why is that in real time?
Because he's a voluminous reader and he's interpreting things.
Sometimes when he interprets articles, there's bias that he interprets the article to confirm what his previous business said.
But you guys do that more than he does.
Who am I, you guys?
Do you mean the opposite side, right?
Everybody does.
No, timeout.
I spent a lot of time in litigation.
You cannot do that in litigation.
You'll get torn apart by the drug company lawyers.
By the drug company lawyers.
So has Anthony Fauci ever said anything incorrect when it comes down to citing studies and research and gain of function and any of that stuff?
Has he ever said anything incorrect?
Has any big pharma company sued Anthony Fauci?
I don't think so.
Why not, though?
Because his bias is selling COVID vaccines.
That's exactly the point.
So that's the part where that's exactly the point I'm trying to make.
How is it that the guy that's been in, he's been the director of NIH for how many years?
36 years, 38 years?
I don't know what the numbers are a long ass time, right?
He's been there for a long time.
So why is he so protected?
Why is he so protected?
Why is he so protected that the guy is pretty much?
They should make untouchables too and have him be in a cast with a handful of other people, because he's untouchable.
I don't blame you for having that opinion I have some of that opinion but I think what what Fauci has been doing, has been good for the pharmaceutical industry.
I agree, and I think we I want to take this up a level, because you guys are talking about the prospectuses and and how the, the financial companies, the banks and so forth Their job is to maximize their profits and they make these prospectuses.
And if they don't tell the truth, they're in deep trouble.
By law.
By law.
Yeah.
Correct.
The pharmaceutical industry is different than that because their job is to maximize their profits just like the money guys.
And they're doing it damn.
They buy guys like him out.
And they can't buy an RFK out.
And that's why, you know, can you imagine an RFK as an independent guy who the mainstream media didn't want to have him on?
He got all the traction that he got from doing podcasts.
Right.
This guy's father got assassinated and his uncle got assassinated.
And his father would have been a president and his uncle was a president.
And they were probably the most beloved anti-establishment Democratic president family of all time.
You know, they fought against the establishment.
Today's Democrats don't fight the establishment.
They defend the establishment.
It's a very weird dynamic.
So I feel like his family changed and they became establishment.
And to me, RFK is like, listen, guys, I'm following my dad's legacy.
I'm following my father's, my uncle's legacy.
So to me, when he went around talking and nobody wanted to debate him, it's exactly why.
He said, because he's so well read that his opponents fear him.
They know he will school them.
That's not fair, Patrick.
You don't think so?
That's not fair.
Okay, push back.
I'm open to it.
A, I agree with about 70% of what RFK has to say.
He's a smart guy.
He's articulate.
He's committed.
And that 70% I respect tremendously.
B, he controls any debate because he's read more articles far and wide, but he's not censoring himself enough.
If he would have fact checkers to check the positions he's taking before he goes public with it, then there'd be something.
Perfect.
So how about we do this?
You just made a basis for it, right?
So are you friends with Paul Hortense?
Are you in communication?
Okay.
So would you debate an RFK in a long-form podcast, let's just say with Joe, you go on Joe because both of you guys have been there as well.
And there's a two or three fact checkers sitting there the entire time fact checking you and fact checking RFK.
Would you be open to that?
No, because you can't go fast enough.
This is what I was saying before, but I took it out of context and you didn't understand it.
He went on Joe Rogan's show, I think last June, and he made a number of cases.
I haven't thoroughly analyzed the whole tape, but I saw one instance where he was definitely wrong.
What I'm saying is that's his position as of June 2023.
If he wanted to debate based on those positions, don't bring in 100 new articles that you've interpreted that nobody can possibly check in real time because it takes hours.
But if he stayed, like in a deposition, when I was doing litigation, the lawyers would say, you can only talk about what's in the four corners of this report.
If what he said on Rogan, if the claims he made on Rogan was a report and he had to stay within the four corners of that report, then I'd debate him.
It just would tell me the other guys, your opponent is more prepared and well-read than you.
No, no, he's reading far and wide, but he's the one who's the arbiter of what it says.
It doesn't, you can't read everything, Patrick.
You're right.
I agree.
No, no, I don't dispute it.
You can't.
So he's out in the lead.
He's very fast and he's very smart.
But he's looking for things that confirm his biases and he's making some mistakes.
Yeah, I mean, you're saying he's making mistakes.
So, okay, so you say 70-30 RFK.
Where do you put Fauci at?
You can put him like that, 70, 30.
What do you put Fauci when he talks?
I don't want to put a number on it, but I— Is it higher, or do you trust Fauci more than RFK?
No.
No, no, no.
I've seen this fall apart.
No.
Okay, then I think Fauci is exposed to real risk here.
How?
He's protected.
rfk is not protected i don't how is rfk protected Who protects RFK?
Honestly.
Nobody.
Nobody.
Nobody, but nobody.
Who protects Fauci?
Right.
There's an entire institution that protects Fauci.
He's protected by mainstream media, celebrities, big pharma.
Do you see who the bully here is?
We're on the same page.
It's all going to break.
Whatever your issue is, whether it's Republican, Democrat, in government, out of government.
I'm not at all Republican, Democrat.
Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell are best friends.
That's not a Democratic-Republican thing.
That's exactly.
They're best friends.
They're just given stories how close those two are.
That's right.
This is not.
No, it's about pharma making money.
I'm with you.
We've got to get our eyes on it.
But I get that.
But I think the part where people look away is, you know, on the, for example, okay, everybody, none of us had a clue who this guy was, except for people that were in the space.
If you're in the space, okay, or people that were maybe older above 60, and you remember in the 80s with AIDS.
Yeah.
And you're like, okay, I remember this guy's name was Ron and AIDS where, you know, that drug and, you know, they were selling the NZT.
And then, you know, by the way, later on, there was a movie.
AZT, which is.
NZTs and the purchase inhibitors.
NZT is from the movie Limitless, but they got the name NZT from AZT, that Fauci.
Anyways, so you're like, oh, okay, I don't know that.
Well, maybe he's a noble guy.
And then all of a sudden, people are coming out that work with him.
And here's what he went.
Okay, I mean, everybody talks shit about everybody.
Fine.
I don't need to buy.
No, but there's a, yeah, you guys just don't like the guy.
You're just hating on the guy.
I say, oh, no, this guy could be a dark guy that's bot that's defending everybody.
Motive.
Now we got to find out what this guy's really all about.
Then everybody flipped because the hypocrisy kept showing up with who this guy really was all about.
So now let's go to a different part.
Fines, okay, pharmaceutical and fines.
I pulled up how many, what type of fines these guys have paid.
Okay, if you want to pull this up, Rob.
Biggest fines at the highest level is $3 billion.
That's Glaxo, Smith, Klein.
And this was, again, off-label promotion, kickbacks.
Same thing they paid for.
Most of them are the same thing.
Pfizer in 2009, $2.3 billion.
Same thing.
Off-label promotion, kickbacks.
Johnson.
Let me just say something.
I consulted to the FBI and the Department of Justice on that case.
In 09?
Yep.
Really?
Yeah.
They came to you or you went to them?
I went to them.
Oh, wow.
I did civil litigation.
Most of that was about a drug called Bextra, which was like Viox.
And I was in civil litigation about that.
There were 10,000 people.
It wasn't as big a drug as Viox.
There were, I think, 47,000 people in the Fiox litigation.
And I knew about what happened.
And I called the DOJ Blind and said, I know something about this drug, but I can't tell you because I've signed that confidentiality agreement.
And they sent out a, I don't know if it was a federal marshal to deliver a federal subpoena to my house.
And they said, you will be at FBI headquarters at such and such a date, and you will bring your computer.
And I went and I told them what I knew, what I had learned in civil litigation.
They keep their cards close to their chest.
They were really up to date.
They were crackerjack lawyers.
And that was the end of the discussion.
And six months later, I read in the paper that there was a $1.195 billion fraud case that Pfizer pled guilty to fraud, and they paid this fine.
Now, a very important fact here is that Pfizer pled to a felony in this case, but Pfizer didn't take the hit.
A subsidiary took the hit.
And that's the way this game is played.
So when these big fines are meted out by the Department of Justice, the companies have subsidiaries take the hit.
So the parent company isn't at risk of getting banned from Medicare.
And so the CEOs don't go to jail, and the drug companies aren't at risk of losing their Medicare business.
And there's very little disincentive not to try to get away with this because rarely do the fines add up to the amount of ill-gotten profits.
I wonder, and by the way, there's multiple billion.
Let me see.
One, two, three, four.
There's five fines that Eli Lilly, Abbott Laboratories, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Pfizer, Glaxo, these guys paid that's over a billion dollars.
And you got a bunch of other ones here as well, Amgen, you know, another Glaxo, TAP, Sereno, Merck, Purdue at 601.
I can't list all of these guys, right?
They're getting fined.
But to them, they're sitting there saying, I don't really care.
You know, we sold this pharmaceutical for so much money.
A penny's on a dollar to make it.
We're selling it for $5,000.
We'll pay the fine.
Go ahead if it makes you happy.
With what happened the last four years, do you think we're going to have something coming up where it's an actual accountability record-breaking type of fine that we've not seen before?
Or do you think nothing's going to happen to these guys?
I don't see it happening.
I see it's a game.
It's just business.
It's business as usual.
Unless people go to jail or unless companies are barred from participating in Medicare, it's not going to stop.
Their job is to maximize their profits.
And if there's a $2 billion fine, so be it.
Are you following this new thing they're talking about at Davos, the Disease X that World Economic Forum talked about?
It could kill 20 times more than COVID-19.
Have you followed any of this or no?
Yeah, they just started talking about it this week.
It's this Disease X that it just came out a few hours ago.
World leaders to meet discuss threat of hypothetical disease X pandemic in Davos that could kill 20 times as amount of people as others.
How concerned are you for someone that has been in this space?
You said your age earlier, 75, and you had a procedure last year where you're dealing with a cardiologist and doing certain things to you where you were kind of worried saying this could be it for me.
How worried are you of the next pandemic, of the next virus that can be deadly?
Does that at all concern you or do you think it's just they're trying to sell fear porn to us to find ways to sell us another pharma or another shot?
It's both.
It's both.
I'm worried.
I mean, I don't know where COVID came from.
It might well have come from the lab.
It may well have come from gain of function research.
It might not.
It could have come from natural sources.
And you got to worry about that stuff.
But I'm equally worried about the pharmaceutical companies exaggerating the risk and tinkering with the threats so that they can make more money.
If the profits of the pharmaceutical company, this goes back to the filings with the SEC and the financial prospectuses, if that doesn't get straightened out and if the pharmaceutical industry doesn't have to present its real data to doctors and the public, this stuff is going to keep going on because their job is to maximize their profits.
And as long as they're not held accountable by anybody, they're going to keep doing what they're doing.
And I write a book, you know, it's got to be five years behind the times by the time it gets into print.
And the litigation takes 10 years, and it takes a long time.
But we're not making progress.
Pharma's moving faster in their direction than we can catch up to them.
So who is we that can do something about it?
Is it a pro ⁇ because to me, you know, I sat there and I said, okay, where can you hurt these guys where maybe they're going to wake up and be like, oh, shit, that's actually going to be felt.
First thing you think about is, okay, what if they can't advertise on TV anymore?
What if they can't pay Travis Kelsey $20 million?
What if they can't do something like that?
Does that hurt their pockets a lot?
Because when you look at their budget about how much money they spend every year on advertising, Skyrizi, $383 million last year, RINVOK, however way you pronounce these words, $351 million.
Dupic sent $307 million.
I can give all these, they're spending so much money advertising every year.
Do you think if they stopped and said, listen, moving forward, no more, the only country can do it is in New Zealand.
We're also green.
It's not going to happen.
We are a capitalist nation, but you're kind of messing up.
You did not gain a lot of credibility during COVID.
No more advertising for you guys.
Is that enough of a pain to these guys?
I don't think it's going to happen.
A good lawyer explained to me that our First Amendment is different than the First Amendment in other countries.
And because you mentioned it before, because there are beneficial uses of drugs, unlike cigarettes, you can't ban the advertising.
But that doesn't matter because you could make the advertisements say how much better Skyrizi or any drug, not to pick on Skyrizi, is better than the best available therapy.
And how many people you have to treat to have one person get a result that you couldn't get with the other drugs.
And how much it costs in the total drugs that are sold for how much it costs to have one person improve.
You could put all that into an ad so it was genuinely educational.
So you don't have to take on a constitutional issue.
You can just make them present data that is the rational data that doctors and patients need to make a good decision.
And we don't have a government, and we were talking about this before, we don't have a government organization that does that, but you could do it if they want to advertise.
Then you've got to tell the truth.
They would need to be an organization that can't take a penny from a pharmaceutical company.
You know what I'm saying?
It almost needs to be something where, because immediately who's going to be knocking on their doors?
Hi, this is John Doe.
I'm a lobbyist representing XYZCOM.
We love your work.
And that's happening again with another lobbyist.
Absolutely.
It would be like the registry for Lakembie, and it's taken over by the Alzheimer's Association.
So I think the answer to your question is we're in a deep hole here.
We've got 1.1 million Americans are dying above and beyond the deaths in the other wealthy countries because our health and health care is so inferior.
1.1 million people a year.
That's 3,000 a day.
It's like a 9-11 every day.
And for this health care and health, we're spending an excess $2.3 trillion a year.
I know you're worried about the military-industrial budget collusion and the military budget.
I'm all with you.
We're wasting three times more than the entire military budget.
And our health is just falling further and further behind.
It's a national crisis.
Mainstream media won't cover it.
It's a crisis.
I mean, it's like 9-11 dominated our consciousness for years and years.
This is happening every day to Americans.
And we've got to address it.
No, we're on the same page here with You sit there and you think about what direction we're going right now and all these different fears they sell us about.
Hey, you got to be careful with this.
Hey, you got to be careful with it.
I'm like, yeah, you know what?
You're imposing yourself too much on me.
By the way, from your eyes, specific individual or organization, okay, who do you think is enemy of the state?
Meaning, if you were to say, well, I think the World Health Organization doesn't have the best in mind for us, or NIH or Fauci or Big Pharma or this or that, who would be the ones that the average person watching is saying, I got to watch those guys.
Who would you say that top?
You've got to watch them because they're bad or because they may be helpful.
Both.
Well, I think the World Health Organization is generally on the right side of things.
They don't have access to perfect data, but I don't see them.
The World Health Organization is on the right side of things.
I think so.
You think so?
Do you think World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, and Cedros, they're on the right side of things?
I don't know about them.
Do you think Cedros, Tedros, who runs a World Health Organization, he's on the right side of things?
I think they're generally on the right side of things.
They would say, they do say that 80% of cardiovascular disease can be prevented by lifestyle modification and being able to participate in a healthy lifestyle.
They're not trying to get everybody on statins and the other cholesterol-lowering drugs.
They're taking a genuine public health perspective about how can we optimally improve health and not having our go-to position being relying on pharmaceuticals.
Who else?
Who else, good or bad, to look out for?
I think Public Citizen does a good job of analyzing what's going on in American medicine.
And there are organizations like the Therapeutics Initiative out of the University of British Columbia does a great job of analyzing medicines as best they can because they don't get the data.
They're not in litigation.
So there are organizations, Farmed Out does a good job.
There are organizations that are trying to look at this critically, but we're shut out.
They and I are shut out of the mainstream media and we're missing.
All there is is this enormous financial push from pharma to convince people and their doctors that the way to better health and more fulfilling lives is through better biotechnology.
And that's just not the case.
Some people benefit.
I benefited from better biotechnology.
But on the whole, we're not spending our money the right way.
We should be spending 20% of our health has to do with health care, but we're spending almost all of our money on drugs and devices.
And that's not the way to get better health.
We're letting the market allocate the research funds so that 96% of the information that doctors get is about drugs and devices and 4% is how to make Americans healthier.
We need research, and the reason for that is because the research about how to make Americans healthier doesn't make money for anybody.
It's going to cost the pharmaceutical industries money.
And we need some way to get the knowledge that doctors believe is the appropriate range of knowledge to represent what the doctors need to know about how to make people and their communities healthier.
I would disagree with that a little bit.
It sounded like you were done, so I apologize if you want to cut you off there.
There is going to be a rational player in our White House at one point.
And that rational player is going to look at the Social Security and Medicare and those trust funds that are bound to wear out, right, and to go broke.
And they're going to be looking around and saying, how do we get lifestyle information to seniors so that everything in life isn't just, well, the health that'll go to my doctor and get a pill.
And there's going to be people talking about it about how do we get ahead of lifestyle and why are we allowing soda in schools.
A lot of good things are going to come out of this to say, hey, you know what?
Overweight as a kid, as overweight as an adult, as obese as a senior, as a diabetic patient.
And you're on somebody's spreadsheet today because that's a good thing.
Oh, wow, Zempeck.
We'll take care of you.
Right?
Well, somebody's going to be in the White House and somebody's going to say, hey, we've got to get lifestyle is a very sensible investment and it's going to save a lot of this Social Security and Medicare so we don't go further into debt and we can take it.
Somebody's going to be standing out there.
Let me go to Pat's question back to you.
Who do you think, obviously it's you, you're talking about the media knocks me down, the mainstream media.
Well, the mainstream media is taking pharmaceutical ads.
So I'm sure they're told not to cover your book and not to interview you.
Okay.
You know, to me, that makes sense.
There's no conspiracy there.
It's a left-right analysis of an economic decision.
Who are the enemies of pharma?
When pharma looks out there, who do they feel are their enemies?
Like who do pharma fears?
Right.
Who do they fear?
That's a good list.
Who are they?
Yeah.
Pharma fears this discussion happening more broadly.
For what reason specifically?
We've covered a lot of things.
For the reason that they now control what doctors believe is good health care.
And they do not want to relinquish that.
So data going public that everybody can inspect peer reviews that are true peer reviews going back to data.
No, we don't want that.
What else don't they want?
An epidemiologically balanced research agenda.
They don't want that.
So they don't want rules and constructs into the research and everything back there.
Well, not rules and constructs, but instead of spending 96% of our research money as allocated by the market, because that's where the profit is, the maximum return on investment, we should be allocating our research money based on what Americans need to be healthier.
And they don't want that.
That's what I meant, and I used the wrong words.
But that's the second question.
So far, let's see what else he's going to say, Tom.
Go forward.
What else would you say to that list?
Okay, ask the question again.
What does the big pharma fear the most?
They fear anything that's going to cut into their profits.
And any politician who takes a stance that's going to cut into their profits is going to come up against enormous resistance from the drug companies.
Two-thirds of the legislators in both parties take money from the drug companies.
This is not a partisan issue.
Republicans?
I fully agree.
Yeah.
And I hope that your listeners come away from this not thinking, did the left win or did the right win?
We lost if they're thinking that.
The only thing we saw is the left promoted the vaccine like no other.
Mainstream late night, celebrity, talent, Hollywood, sports.
They promoted it like no other.
Like they were hardcore preacher pastors.
There was a religion of taking the vaccine and they were prophets promoting it.
Patrick, I agree.
Without qualification, I agree.
But it has to do with pharmaceutical profits.
That is where the breaks are off.
And until there is enough public understanding in the healthcare professionals and non-healthcare professionals about how this is disserving the American people, there are 1.1 million excess deaths.
We're wasting the equivalent of the federal budget deficit every year on health care.
And until the people Bring that to the public consciousness, pharma's money is going to control the debate.
So, when you say that people were out marketing COVID, I agree with you 100%.
And if they're going to market COVID better through Republicans, they'll do that.
And if they're going to do Democrats, they'll do that.
They're just interested in the city.
They don't care who it is.
They don't care who's going to be able to.
They just want to promote the product.
Right.
I agree with you.
Right.
And what we got to do going forward is get rid of this left-right dichotomy and figure out what's going to be right for the American people.
And how can we get Americans talking about what's the way to handle this where you've got a crisis?
Do you think our patent laws, you know how they kind of kept going back and forth, changing it?
It used to be 20 years, the two senators or congressmen, one of them was a Republican, one was a damn, they lowered it to 14 years, then they brought it back up to 20 years.
And then you know how they're able to, by manipulation of evergreen and changing slight few laws, you know, a few things about the patent or the drug to extend another 18 years on patent.
You think patent laws need to be changed?
You think Congress needs to take a look at the patent laws?
Yes, I do.
And the patent thickets, I mean, the pharmaceutical folks are light years ahead of who's ever trying to catch them on these issues.
The drug price negotiations, they'll do a little bit, but they're mostly for show.
And pharma is crying like they're going to, you know, get their privates busted.
No, it's going to cost, in real terms, the money pharma is going to lose on the price negotiations is going to cost us about two significantly effective drugs over the next 30 years.
But they're arguing that we're going to kill them.
We're going to kill them with the price of insulin being $35.
That insulin is no better than the cheapest insulin for type 2 diabetics, but we can't even have that discussion.
Well, I love the fact that you're going around and I respect you for pushing the envelope, questioning even some of your own positions that you may have over the years as somebody that's a reputable doctor, beloved doctor where you're at, and coming out and saying, hey, here's what I think is going on.
Here's what I think is wrong with the industry.
I don't think enough people are doing what you're doing.
And I applaud you for it.
And I got a lot of respect for you doing that.
We need more men and women like you in your space that are willing to do that because it's not easy.
Because a part of it is kind of like, what are you doing, guys?
This is our little shtick that we have.
Don't do that.
Don't expose us.
You're like, no, guys, I'm doing this for integrity.
I'm at a phase of my life that I'm not doing this for money.
I really want to find a way to impact the next generation.
And I respect that.
I think we need more people like that.
Thank you.
The book, Sickening, link will be below.
Rock, put it in the chat, in the description, in every place that you can have.
How big pharma broke American health care and how we can repair it.
I am all about studying this topic, especially from somebody who's qualified, questioning things, who's going to give you and I a different perspective.
If you haven't yet, order this copy, click on the link below, go order the copy of Sickening.
Doc, appreciate you for coming in.
Once again, really enjoyed it.
Thank you for having me, Patrick.
But for people like you, this information stays in a soundproof chamber.
We want to make sure the world is reading and investigating because they may see an angle that we're not even thinking about ourselves.
