Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 5, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes

01:47:06

20200505_Tue_Barnes

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	The British are coming!
	The British are coming!
	You are about to be part of the street today.
	And one more round for us.
	America first!
	And the top!
	What's your country?
	Tonight on American Countdown on day 30, day 40, day 50, day 60, day 70, depending on where you are in the world of the shutdown, the lockdown across American society, across much of the Western world, to defeat a virus that turns out to not be anything like the Spanish flu and definitely not the to defeat a virus that turns out to not be anything like But something more analogous to the Asian flu of 1959 or the Hong Kong flu of 1969.
	1969, the instead of the pandemic panic that was meant to be produced from this virus, what we have is a panic policy response that has led to massive loss of liberty and potentially economic opportunity and life itself around the world as what we have is a panic policy response that has led to massive loss of liberty and potentially economic opportunity and life itself around the world as
	So in that context, tonight we'll have James Todaro on a doctor or a trained medical as a medical doctorate degree from the University of Columbia, as well as does economic and business advice and is able to integrate that information in a meaningful manner to talk about hydrochlorine, to as well as does economic and business advice and is able to integrate that information in a meaningful manner to talk about hydrochlorine, to talk about some of the medical and evidentiary based lack of response and some of the political shutdowns
	But in that same capacity, tonight resolved that if we follow the money Fauci and friends have favored Big Pharma, Over for COVID responses rather than cheaper, easier, more effective alternatives because of the money.
	Indeed, we'll be getting into that in some detail.
	But first, let's take a trip down memory lane as we examine the models and the models inaccuracies.
	Remember, in January and February of this year, Fauci himself was publishing articles that would ultimately be published in March in the New England Journal of Medicine that would, in fact, he himself would make public comments and public interviews and public statements and public representations to the president.
	Not to worry that this was not anything to be unduly reactive to, that this COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic would be analogous probably to a severe flu or maybe like the Asian flu or the Hong Kong flu of 1959 and 1969 respectively.
	Which had a mortality rate, lethality rate about three to five times worse than a severe flu season.
	But nothing to overreact or over respond to.
	That was his official position.
	Remember you had Mayor D'Estazio in New York City telling people to go out even in early mid-March.
	You had Congresswoman Pelosi inviting people down to Chinatown to celebrate the Chinese New Year and other holidays in Chinatown in San Francisco in March itself.
	You didn't have The media asking any of the Democratic candidates for the Democratic nomination to the presidency any question about the virus throughout the late February debates.
	Suddenly there was a radical reversal in mid-March.
	That radical reversal followed the model predictions and forecasting of two institutions predominantly and primarily.
	That would be the Imperial College in the United Kingdom and the IMHE out of the University of Washington in Seattle.
	Those models would do two things.
	First, they would say that this pandemic is reason for panic, that it is like the next plague, that it was going to kill millions in America.
	It was going to kill half a million in the United Kingdom alone.
	It was going to kill 100,000 in Sweden.
	It was going to kill millions and tens of millions around the world, that it would be equivalent to the Spanish flu or worse.
	and its rate of lethality and of its impact on civil society.
	Not only that, those same modelers forecast what the solutions were, what the cures were.
	And they recommended cures that had never been utilized in the history of medicine, that had never been utilized in the history of quarantine.
	They recommended quarantining healthy people, not ill people, but quarantining healthy people.
	They recommended mass house arrest.
	They recommended social distancing standards of six feet or more.
	They recommended a wide range of so-called remedies that had never been applied historically, nor could be found as being justified by any empirical evidence, any empirical example, or by anything within the medical literature.
	Those models suddenly triggered a radical reversal by the governments of both the United Kingdom and the United States, which were soon followed by governments across the Western world.
	Why is it that those models got accepted?
	Why is it that their remedies were recommended by the policy makers and decision makers?
	Well, that would tie to who was backing those models, who backed the universities and institutions that those models were coming out of, both in terms of problem and in terms of solution.
	And that would be Bill Gates.
	Bill Gates is a major donor at Imperial College.
	He effectively helped create the IMHE at the University of Washington with his large donations.
	And Bill Gates had extraordinary influence at the World Health Organization.
	Extraordinary influence with Mr. Fauci, with Deborah Birx, with family ties, financial ties to both of them.
	political affiliations and associations with both of them.
	He had effectively co-opted and corrupted our entire public health infrastructure around the Western world.
	If you looked up who donated money to the World Health Organization, almost tied for first with the United States' entire government, is Bill Gates by himself.
	That's the degree of influence.
	That's the scope, the scale of Bill Gates' influence.
	So much so that Politico reported in 2017 from various whistleblowers deep concerns within public health academia for Bill Gates' disproportionate influence over public health around the world.
	For Bill Gates' pronounced agenda, Obsessed over overpopulation for which he believes the solution is vaccines for which he's suggested a good pretext to develop the popularity for vaccines would be a pandemic.
	pushing these pandemic panic policy responses through these models and the ability to get those models accepted by key policy decision makers terrified to counteract the white lab coats and their dictatorial decrees that led to the politicians issuing edicts and mayors and governors as if they were dukes and princesses of a royal family of ancient era.
	That is how we got there.
	So let's go back to documenting and detailing how poor these models were at predicting things.
	As we discussed last night with Scott Adams, the signs of loser think are anyone that tries to use models to project long-term events in complex circumstances.
	That is exactly what these models do.
	Another sign of loser think is someone using straight-line thinking, saying that because something has been going at this rate, it will just continue to go at that rate without considering countervailing factors.
	Another sign of loser think is the conformist herd think of experts predicting things that are novel or new and complex in their environment.
	All of the signs of loser think were present in the way in which these models were done and have been done.
	So in that context, in the contours of that context, let's go back and take a trip down memory lane as to the charts that were developed.
	First let's start look at chart number 35.
	One of the big debates and controversies throughout this entire process was whether or not the virus would take the path of what is known as an S-curve or whether it would take an exponential curve.
	So an exponential curve just goes straight up, whereas an S-curve tends to go up and then flat lines and then comes back down.
	A traditional virus takes an S-curve path.
	It initially has a rapid rate of growth, then it flattens, then it declines, creating the same bell curve that most all viruses follow, but more along an S-curve line than a constant continuous exponential line.
	In that same context, let's look at what they predicted.
	Let's look at chart number 31 or 37.
	And what you see is what they predicted for the United States was this endless exponential growth that unless unless we fix things right away, it was just going to go vroom.
	And it was they use straight line logic and bad models to forecast their outcome.
	So they basically had something like image number 26.
	They said this was going to be our future unless we immediately took remedial action.
	We were going to be a live show of the walking dead unless we took the action that they told us to take, even though these actions were completely ahistorical and often counterintuitive given the known evidence concerning viruses, particularly airborne influenza-like viruses.
	So in chart number one is what they told us initially.
	They said, hey, for health care system capacity, If we don't take these radical measures, the healthcare facilities are going to get flooded, our hospitals are going to get overcrowded by a ratio of 2 to 1, 4 to 1, 5 to 1, 8 to 1, 10 to 1, depending on the state and the locality.
	That's why we started building hospitals inside convention centers, started building hospitals at football fields, started building hospitals at public parks like Central Park.
	And President Trump, they demanded that he send ships up that were medical hospitals to service the excess capacity that they said that were going to be predicted.
	That's what the so-called flatten the curve was supposed to be all about.
	It was supposed to just be about health care system capacity, not about waiting for vaccines, not about waiting for recommended therapies, not waiting for years and years for something to occur that may never occur, that may be more counterproductive than effective, that may involve coercive conditions that the American populace and people do not want.
	Rather, it was, hey, let's just make sure our hospitals are OK.
	So the other prediction in that vein, they predicted both for Great Britain and the United States.
	We look at chart number two, they predicted the deaths per day per 100,000 population.
	They ultimately predicted, hey, in April and May, we're going to see this massive number of deaths.
	We're going to have half a million in Great Britain in just a couple of weeks.
	We're going to have more than two million deaths in the United States in just a month or so.
	That's what the models were forecasting.
	That's what they said was going to happen.
	But as we see in chart number three, the COVID-19 model projections grossly misrepresented reality from day one.
	They projected and predicted things that were never coming true.
	They were using data inputs and assumptions that were notoriously false.
	We see that when we compare the models to the actual outcomes.
	So if we look at chart number four and we look at the IHME model, that's the Bill Gates-backed University of Washington model that both Fauci and Birx convinced the president to go along with and said this is what would happen unless he took radical action.
	Well, their prediction was, in terms of just hospital beds that would be needed, 70,000 or more.
	They kept going, first it was 76,000, then they admitted maybe it was 60, then they admitted it was a little under 60.
	It turns out, in fact, they never even approached the total.
	Their new projection was okay, maybe it would actually be $17,000 or $20,000, end up even being less than that.
	The model said here, the results were way down here.
	We never exceeded hospital capacity in the country, period.
	They end up not even using the excess capacity that they built at Central Park, they built at the Javits Convention Center, they built at convention centers and football fields and facilities all across the country.
	Never even needed, never even utilized.
	And similarly we see with Alabama.
	They predicted there was going to be 26,000 hospital beds that were going to be needed.
	Instead the number was less than 2,000.
	It was way down here instead of the projections that said way up here.
	The same pattern we see again.
	Chart number six with Colorado.
	They said it was going to be 8,000.
	Again, it's going to be this endless exponential rise that's going to just traumatize our healthcare system in America.
	Instead, it stayed at this really low, flat S-curve kind of rate that just kept going down and down.
	They were off by a ratio of almost 10 to 1, in some cases almost 100 to 1, depending on the location or jurisdiction across the country.
	Remember when New Orleans and Louisiana was going to be a Katrina-sized debacle for President Trump because of the COVID-19 concerns there?
	There again, they predicted almost 7,500 hospital beds would be needed in Louisiana, most of which they said would be needed in New Orleans.
	Well, they turned around.
	They ultimately admitted that only they would need about 300 or 400.
	So the number was way down here instead of way up here.
	This was the same error they made over and over and over by city, by county, by state, all across the country.
	Imperial College made the same errors, as we'll get to later, across the globe.
	Indeed, if we look at the across the country in chart number nine, we see these big debacle.
	They're saying, man, we're going to you're going to hospital beds all across the country over probably maybe over 100,000 within weeks.
	Instead, the numbers stayed way down here, just took a little less curve and then flattened and then went down.
	The big endless exponential growth never happened.
	They were wrong.
	Only real question is whether they were lying or whether they were just incompetent.
	If we go to chart number eight, we also see who was dying.
	As New York City admits, and by the way, this is an interesting little preamble.
	This just goes back to April 1st.
	The same data has been true throughout the month and since then.
	And what they made a point of in the New York City health report, the daily data summary, they said all the data in this report is preliminary and subject to change as cases continue to be investigated.
	What does that little phrase up at the top mean?
	It means, by the way, a lot of these deaths may not be COVID deaths.
	So we're going to just do a little CYA just in case we get into trouble down the road.
	We'll just put this on here now because the CDC is telling us to.
	The federal government and state government refund facilities are telling us to.
	But, for now, we'll just tell you that maybe these numbers aren't the real numbers.
	In terms of the numbers, maybe far less.
	They're given no monetary incentive to deflate the numbers.
	They're given every monetary incentive to inflate the numbers.
	And what does this show in terms of how many people with no underlying conditions had died in New York of the thousands that were then reported in New York City?
	Under the age of 18 that had no serious underlying conditions.
	Zero.
	18 to 44.
	And all of the people in New York, millions of New Yorkers in that age group, how many had died with no underlying conditions that were even attributed to COVID-19?
	Only two.
	as of April 45 to 64 nine people 65 to 74 zero people 75 and over even three people in other words as of April 1st of the thousand plus deaths only 14 came from people that did not have serious underlying conditions and to give you an idea of what those underlying conditions were their lung disease cancer immunodeficiency heart disease kidney disease liver disease these are not minor underlying conditions
	These are death-inducing underlying conditions.
	So what they were admitting is that almost nobody was dying from COVID-19 directly by itself.
	That they were dying from COVID-19 may have been a triggering factor, may not have been a triggering factor.
	We won't know in time.
	We may never know because of the way the data was encouraged to be manipulated by the incentives that were created.
	But when we look at the underlying numbers, if you were told, hey, by the way, and throughout the entire month of March, only 14 people died in New York City with no underlying conditions even attributed to COVID-19, would that be a reason to panic?
	No.
	That's why that data was mostly repressed by the institutional media.
	In the same context, we have a real-life comparison, an analogy to Sweden.
	Imperial College predicted that Sweden would have 60,000 deaths by now and 100,000 deaths before summer.
	Unless they did what Imperial College demanded they do, which was shut down their civil society and shut down their economy, impose these arbitrary social distancing tests and limits.
	Well, we'll take a look at what Sweden actually did.
	We look at chart number 10.
	It recorded the degree of social activity based on phone activity.
	The bottom left has Sweden's chart, and you can see Sweden stayed up in the red.
	Sweden kept on being active and active and active.
	It continued to be out and about.
	They tracked and traced phone activity and were able to see that Sweden maintained the same level of social activity publicly that they normally did, if anything, even more than normal during this time period when everyone else was shutting down and their social activities was shrinking dramatically.
	So what happened in Sweden?
	Well, let's take a look at chart number 11.
	The number of daily reported COVID-19 cases adjusted per million population between the United Kingdom and Sweden.
	We see the United Kingdom before the lockdown occurred, Sweden had a worse outbreak than the United Kingdom.
	Sweden is in Stockholm.
	It's a major travel location.
	It has a large immigrant population.
	So Sweden had a bigger problem prior to the lockdown in the United Kingdom than the United Kingdom did.
	But after the lockdown, guess whose problem got worse?
	The United Kingdom's problem got worse.
	The United Kingdom's excess death rate went up.
	The number of confirmed cases went up.
	The number of COVID deaths per million went up compared to Sweden, which actually saw a pattern.
	If we look at chart number 12, we see Sweden sort of goes up and down and ultimately starts to flatline, whereas the UK continually was worse than Sweden after its shutdown than Sweden was before.
	Indeed, they've made adjustments and similar adjustments across the states in the United States.
	Someone did a comparison of what they call the RO.
	The RO is the amount of reproduction rate of a spread of a virus, a replication rate of the virus.
	So if a person can spread it to two people or more, they call that RO 2.0.
	Only one person, 1.0.
	Go with most viruses to get it as low as possible.
	Well, if we look at the national RO and we compare it to, say, New York and California versus states that shut down later, like Florida and Tennessee, states that never shut down, like Iowa and Arkansas, and includes Sweden in that map, what we see is that, in fact, those places that never shut down, in fact, those places that never shut down, either experienced a better or comparable result in reducing the spread rate and transmission rate of the virus throughout this entire one-month time period.
	So they're all basically going down together.
	The shutdown didn't produce any degree of decline when the countries and states that did not shut down saw the same or better rate of decline of the spread of the virus.
	It is useful to remember in that capacity a critical chart, which we'll put up now, There's a chart number 15, which identifies when states close down.
	Remember they're Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Utah, Wyoming, never shut down.
	Meanwhile, many other states, Missouri, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, only shut down for a shorter period of time and much later than the others.
	In the same capacity, whereas California, Nevada, Illinois, New Jersey, New York all shut down very early, what do those states have in common?
	They've experienced some of the worst outcomes compared to the states that did not shut down, both in terms of measured by the timing of the shutdown and measured by those places that never shut down at all.
	Indeed, if we look at the compared to what they projected, they projected in April.
	Remember, the first two weeks of April was going to be a disaster.
	It was going to be a debacle in New York City where the hospitals were going to be over flooded.
	They were not going to have enough ventilators.
	They were not going to have enough ICU beds.
	People were going to be dying at record rates.
	That's not what happened.
	The model said it was going to go up, up, up.
	We look at the daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for COVID-19-like illnesses.
	Chart 16.
	We see it continue to decline.
	Flatline and then decline.
	Flatline and then decline.
	Not the endless exponential growth that they predicted.
	They were wrong and they were way wrong.
	In fact, we have increasing data from Italy.
	The same pattern developed.
	We look at chart number 17.
	We'll see in Northern Italy four major provinces, Bergamo, Codogno, Cremonio and Lombardy.
	And what we see is that they documented, they tracked when the virus rate started to decline based on their available data.
	And what they found is that it actually started to flatline and decline in mid-February in each region.
	Why is that significant?
	That rate should have been declining much later if, in fact, The shutdown had any effect in Italy.
	In other words, the rate began to decline, the rate of the transmission of the virus, the rate of hospitalizations, the rate of deaths.
	When you adjust for the time and the date of infection, that infection rate began to decline, flatline, and then decline before the shutdown even began in Italy.
	That's critical.
	So in other words, what we saw in Wuhan, what we saw in Iran, we saw again in Italy, and we would see replicated here in the United States, which is shutdowns have no impact really whatsoever on the virus's spread.
	Places that did not shut down experience the same or comparable or better rates of decline of transmission of the disease, death rate from the disease, hospitalization rate from the disease, as those places that do shut down.
	And those places that do shut down experience a decline before The shutdown occurred.
	So the shutdown could not have been the causal, consequential factor in the reduction of the virus in that area if the virus started to decline before the shutdown even happened.
	In the same context, we can be reminded of some of how bad the projections were by another state of Ohio.
	If we look at chart number 18, we see these exponential endless growth rates.
	That's what they were predicting was going to happen.
	Those numbers on the very bottom, that's what actually happened.
	It basically just took a little bump up and then flatlined and then declined.
	The endless exponential rate in the blue and the red never occurred.
	But it's what the models told us was going to occur.
	Again, if a model can't even be right in the near short-term future, it's someone to ignore in the future moving forward.
	Same thing in chart number 19.
	We see what the amount of rate of daily new cases they predicted would have this dramatic rise.
	It never happens.
	It just stays flat.
	And if we look at actual hospital capacity, if we look at chart number 20, looking just the hospitals in Arizona, We see that, in fact, the hospitals suffered a dramatic decline and have been suffering from substantial undercapacity, not overcapacity.
	This includes the emergency rooms, this includes other parts.
	I remember when I first started talking about this, way back in mid-March, people thought I was spreading a conspiracy theory when I was getting this intel and information from friends who are nurses and doctors and have access to hospital administrative information.
	That is why the chart, like chart 21, is, you know, does it in a nice dramatic way.
	It projects what they said would happen with strict social distancing in the red.
	And you see the actual infections in the blue.
	See how pretty much flat it is?
	It goes up a little bit, hits an S curve, flat, flat, and then ultimately it's going to start declining later on in the month.
	And this is what they predicted.
	They predicted it was going to have this dramatic exponential rise.
	That exponential rise never happened.
	Same thing in chart 22.
	We'll see what they predicted, the number of ICU units that would be needed.
	You have the red endless exponential curve, another yellow endless exponential curve.
	One was they predicted.
	They even weighted, they included more data in the yellow one.
	That was later data and they still got it wrong.
	And they got it wrong by a factor of eight to one.
	You see the real ICU rate was just modest growth, flatline growth, S-curve growth, not an exponential endless growth rate.
	We see the same thing in chart number 23 and the change in intubations in New York.
	You can see Governor Cuomo's smiling face next to it.
	And you see he was talking about how this would dramatically skyrocket.
	Instead, it went up like an S-curve, flat like an S-curve, and then fell precipitously like most viruses have, like this virus did.
	The models were way, way wrong.
	We see a similar chart.
	If we look at chart number 24, they looked at all the excess deaths.
	And they found that in Europe, the excess deaths were about 50% higher than last year, this time period.
	And there's some controversy over using last year.
	If you use a broader range of years, this data comes out to a closer to even number.
	But even if you use that, look at which country has one of the lowest rates.
	Sweden.
	Sweden is only up 18% compared to last year.
	The rest of Europe is up 50% compared to last year.
	So in other words, the countries that are shutting down, they're experiencing more excess deaths.
	Well, there might be a reason for that, and it isn't COVID-19.
	The reason is the shutdown itself.
	If we look at chart number 25, we can see what's been happening in the United States.
	The same pattern reoccurs if we look at tested cases and the day-to-day percentage changes in that.
	We see initially an S-curve upward rate, you know, 20-30% growth rate in cases.
	Then it flatlines and it's just been going down, down, down, down, down ever since.
	That's the day-over-day change.
	They said it would go like this and instead it went up flat and then down.
	Similarly, if we look at all caused deaths in England in the United Kingdom, chart 27, we'll see that in fact the number of deaths in England is actually on par with some of their severe flu seasons in 2000, 1998 and 1996.
	We see it's on par and again the UK is experiencing a three times worth excess death rate than Sweden is that never shut down.
	That's the comparison, that's the contrast of consequence.
	Indeed, if we look at overall deaths from influenza, pneumonia, and COVID from the CDC in chart number 28, going back to 2013 in March and April, we see that there are about a quarter of a million deaths on average, between a quarter of a million and 300,000 pretty much every year for influenza-like, pneumonia-like deaths, like COVID-19 is.
	288,000 in 2019.
	And the number for the same time period in 2020 is less than that.
	So the United States has not experienced any excess mortality as they predicted and forecast.
	Indeed, there is no 2 million extra people dead, as was being predicted by the doomers and gloomers.
	If we look at chart number 29, we see a similar pattern of what the Imperial College predicted for Sweden.
	And it had these charts and this disastrous outcome was coming.
	Instead, it's just been down here all the way through.
	In fact, we'll be talking tonight with someone who did a comparison of the flu mortality rate and the COVID-19 mortality rate based on antibody prevalence from serological studies and surveys, of which there are more and more around the world and around the country, confirming and corroborating this information.
	And what he looked at is he looked at for all ages, COVID-19 was only slightly more deadly than the severe flu season, 2018 being a severe flu season.
	And in fact, what was extraordinary was how parallel it was with the only main difference being that for young people, COVID-19 is even less threatening than the flu.
	So if you are under 60 years old and you do not have any serious underlying medical conditions, you're more at risk from the flu, from a severe flu season, than you are from COVID-19 according to the latest available data.
	Indeed, if we look at the reproduction number in chart number 31 across Europe, we find the same pattern across Europe that we saw across various states in the United States compared to Sweden, which is we see a complete decline no matter what their policies were.
	So indeed, the countries like France and Spain that had some of the harshest policies ended up with a higher reproduction rate, a worse spread of the disease than did those countries like Sweden that imposed no shutdown at all.
	If we look at chart number 32, we can see that this was indeed in many ways something we could predict and forecast.
	If you go back to SARS, you see that SARS had a breakout in some parts of the country early in January and February, then declined, then spiked.
	In March and April, like many flus do, and then disappeared from the scene.
	And so this, based on this, they were predicting the same pattern would reoccur in the United States and in the world, and that is in fact what it has done.
	We've seen a steady decline in the United States.
	We're starting to see a decline in other parts of the Western world, just as the SARS data would have forecast.
	Why was this data ignored by the modelers?
	Who and what is their actual motivation in that context?
	If we look at confirmed COVID deaths per million people across Europe in chart 38, We see if you look at comparable nations like Belgium, France, United Kingdom and Sweden.
	Guess who's at the very bottom of that chart?
	The best outcome, Sweden.
	And they didn't even anticipate the best outcome.
	They thought they would have a worse outcome.
	But maybe we'll get a chart like this for the murder hornets that are coming to the United States.
	We look at chart number 33.
	Maybe they'll predict the same thing.
	If we do nothing, everyone will die.
	But if we stay inside for years, everybody will be okay.
	When we come back after the break, we'll be talking with James Todaro about how the data got so compromised and the modelers were so wrong.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're gonna have James Todaro.
	You can follow him on Twitter at James Todaro, T-O-D-A-R-O-M-D.
	That's James Todaro at the T-O-D-A-R-O-M-D on Twitter.
	Has been a great source of information during this panic about the pandemic.
	in response to it, someone who has a medical degree from Columbia University and does a wide range of other work in empirical economic analysis as well.
	In fact, if we put up chart number 30, he was the one that was co-author of producing this critical chart, comparing the flu mortality rate during a severe flu season to the COVID-19 mortality rate based on available data showing how comparable and analogous it is, particularly for those without underlying medical conditions comparing the flu mortality rate during a severe flu season to the COVID-19 mortality rate based So, James, glad you could join us.
	Thanks for having me, Robert. - One of the How did you come about creating the chart that compares the flu mortality rate and the COVID-19 rate?
	Could you explain that to people in the sense of the utility of serology studies, the prevalence of the infection, how we can use that to project information, and we can try to estimate the number of COVID-19 deaths to compare it to?
	Sure, of course.
	So, I'd say first I'll take a quick step back.
	To me, when I started following this pandemic in January, the two most important questions to me was, is there a therapeutic to treat this pandemic?
	Which is why we wrote that initial paper on hydroxychloroquine in mid-March that got a lot of attention and inspired over 150 clinical trials of the drug.
	And the second most important question to me was, what is the true infection fatality rate of this disease?
	Because that really makes the world of difference in deciding how to act.
	And to me, the way this virus is spreading, it seemed far more contagious than the previous estimates of the actual fatality rate.
	And this became more apparent when they actually discovered that the first death in the U.S.
	was not in late February.
	Autopsy studies showed it was actually in early February, and that person contracted the virus through community spread, which shows that the virus was actually present in mid-January.
	We didn't ramp up testing in the U.S.
	until about mid-March.
	There was a large gap there where this virus had a chance to spread, and it looked highly contagious.
	So when the first serology studies were published in mid-April, so about two, three weeks ago, I looked at them.
	I looked at the data, and they made sense.
	But the false negatives, the false positives accounting for this, the prevalence of this disease in California, which both those studies were in California, the Stanford one and the USC one, Show that there's a far greater percentage of people that have been affected with this than the current estimate, which I think was like 0.1% or 0.2% at the time, if you base it on positive tests.
	Those studies were ripped to shreds by mainstream media, academics.
	They criticized the actual test, antibody test that was used.
	They said it was, you know, not FDA approved and so hence it's garbage.
	They criticized the randomness of the sampling.
	In medicine, you never have a truly random sample.
	People that are participating in the studies all behave differently and have different motivations.
	Was their randomness perfect?
	No.
	But to me, the numbers made sense.
	The studies looked sound enough where I think those numbers were closer to truth than the previous predictions.
	And those studies showed that it was about a 0.2% infection fatality rate based on projecting the prevalence of the disease throughout that community.
	So what we did is we took that, we did some calculations based on the ages of deaths, what percent of what age groups die and stuff, and what we calculated was that for people that are younger, that are under 50 or so years old, this is not that much different than the flu.
	For older people, people with comorbidities, Yes, this is a bit more lethal, I would say, than the flu.
	But the main thing here is the amount of spread of this disease.
	You're going to have more, I think, infections than with the flu, so you're going to result in greater fatalities, which is what we've seen.
	But for each person, for your risk of dying from this, it's actually incredibly low, particularly if you're young and healthy.
	Exactly.
	I mean, the only way you could sort of increase the death rate is if you did the kind of things that our governments have done.
	So if you decide that, well, we're going to label all deaths COVID-19 deaths, even if they're just presumed and untested.
	Something we've never done in the cases of the flu.
	Like the flu data, they use samples to study it and survey it.
	Most of the people they estimate to have the flu, 97% of them, are never tested for the flu.
	Of those people that they estimate, when they estimate deaths, they estimate excess deaths.
	People that would not have otherwise died given their medical condition and life expectancy under their view over a whole year.
	That's usually why it takes a year or two for there to even be a meaningful assessment or medical determination as to what the mortality rate is.
	And from the get-go we saw illegitimate comparisons.
	They were comparing, for example, the death rate amongst people who had confirmed tests They used as their pool who had confirmed tests for COVID-19 and then how many had died and we're gonna take a rate of that and that was like three to five percent depending on the region and we're then we'll compare it to the estimated number of people who have the flu and the number of people who are excess deaths from the estimated number of the flu.
	So they were using two different standards for each of those because the COVID-19 deaths were a much higher number than we usually do for excess deaths for the flu in terms of how that's estimated.
	In the same way, the estimated number of people who had the flu, of course, was much larger than the number of people who have confirmed tests for the flu.
	If we were using the same standards, then the flu death mortality rate would be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of people who have confirmed tests for influenza have mortality from influenza because that's who gets tested.
	We don't do random broad-scale tests and trace for influenza each year like is being propounded and proposed now for COVID-19.
	So it was from the get-go they were trying to mis-analogize data and information that was always intended to induce a panic button.
	That was the common uniting theme and a lot of the data that you were putting out there was counter that narrative.
	And so we saw a lot of institutional suppression.
	As you mentioned, Santa Clara does their serology study to look at how many antibodies are present that show you had COVID-19 before.
	And they come back and the Stanford people associated with John Ioannidis, one of the best biostatisticians in the world, who's being completely ignored in this process outside of an occasional YouTube interview or Wall Street Journal piece, they're saying, hey, look, this is what it is.
	And all of a sudden, Stanford comes under ruthless criticism.
	We have these incredibly ludicrous models from Imperial College and IMHE who have no history whatsoever of any success.
	Imperial College, indeed, has a notorious history of extraordinary error.
	They would be like betting on the person who loses every single bet recommendation for a year, and then you go in and put all of your money you've ever had on them.
	Whereas you have someone like Ianidis who has been proven right again and again and again and again.
	He was one of the people to create the problems and document the issues with replication errors and studies.
	And yet he is somehow completely sideswiped, completely blacklisted from institutional media coverage and actual honest data and information is suppressed and not shared.
	And you're right, the other thing about that is they're critical of the serology studies out of Santa Clara, then USC produces basically the same information, then they start getting the same information in the study out of Boston, then the similar information out of the serology studies in New York City, which already replicated a lot of the results from Iceland, from Germany, from Italy.
	Their serology studies kept saying over and over again that like almost all flu-like driven diseases and viruses, the actual infection rate is usually going to be at least 10 times higher than the confirmed test rate.
	And now it's turning out when we look at both the Diamond Princess, where we already had a petri dish of an example, a perfect in-house lab to discover a closed environment for how this disease would spread.
	83% didn't get it.
	At least 70% did.
	But all Gianni and Edith did originally would say, you know what?
	The IFR, the actual fatality rate from this infection, if we adjust for the demographics of the Diamond Princess, would suggest something about like maybe double a severe flu season, but somewhere around a severe flu.
	And then we have the USS Roosevelt, similar kind of data again, different demographics, so the mortality rate's even lower, which we would expect to see and witness.
	And now the serology studies and surveys are documenting the same thing, and increasingly charts like yours and forecasts like yours were a lot better than the models that our politicians have been pushing and propagating, sadly.
	Thank you.
	And to add to that, I would want to add the Bakersfield doctors as well, who did, I'm sure you know, the YouTube interview looking at their sample of 5,000 or so patients, and how many people they tested, and what they saw to be the actual prevalence of this disease, and they were hammered.
	Absolutely hammered.
	Hammered for theoretical conflicts of interest.
	Hammered for, again, not having random sampling, saying that they were mainly taking people or testing people who maybe already had signs of the disease, so they're going to have much higher rates.
	When if you actually listen to what they say, they've had, they tested mass amounts of people that their employer said, hey, go get tested.
	We just want to make sure that no one's coming to work with this disease.
	You have no symptoms or anything like that.
	So is it a perfectly random sample?
	No, of course, you can't get that.
	But their studies also came up with a prevalence that was in the neighborhood of 3-7%.
	Similar with a lot of the USC studies and Stanford studies.
	And as I'm sure you're aware, their YouTube video was taken down and they were attacked by mainstream media.
	But now we're starting to see a shift.
	It seems like just following this pandemic from January, it seems like the mainstream is kind of consistently a couple weeks or maybe even more behind on a lot of this.
	Because I saw a Washington Post article, I think just yesterday or the day before, Where they're finally acknowledging that these serology studies are showing this disease as much more prevalent.
	I think Cuomo in New York, it was hard for them to refute that evidence, even though they could refute maybe some other researchers and studies in the Bakerfield doctors.
	The Washington Post article, instead of looking at this as a very good thing, it's very good that this is highly spread, low fatality rate, they looked at the glass as half empty.
	It was the, I don't know if you could pull up the title, but it's something along the lines of antibody studies confirm that this is more lethal than the flu.
	That's the argument, and they're still working their way down to the flu, but we just dropped about 5% all the way down to maybe 0.5% and even lower, but that's the way they wanted to spin that story.
	Exactly.
	And the other way they were doing it when the serology studies originally came out, the spin was, oh my goodness, look at all the infections!
	They're everywhere!
	While pretending that the mortality rate somehow was flat.
	As the infection rate went up, somehow the mortality rate went up with it.
	I remember debating with people at this way back in early March, based on your data and information and others, saying, look, as we discover the infection rate is in fact much higher because of the high rate of asymptomatic cases, because of simply the nature of influenza, That there's going to be at least a 10x ratio.
	There has been almost every case we've ever had influenza.
	And that's conservative.
	I mean, the CDC estimates that for each person who gets a confirmed test, there are 100 people who get the flu each year.
	So 10x was not like some radical prediction.
	It was that even if we're 10 times lower than the normal flu, we're going to have a fatality rate that's 10 times less than they were talking about.
	And to your point, by the way, but their headlines were either, hey, by the way, it's worse than the flu, misleading, or it was infections everywhere, walking dead is coming to your town next week.
	Yes, and the one thing I would add that I kind of factored into my kind of general idea and models predicting the spread of this was something that I tweeted out in early March, and it's something that I thought about for a long time, where the way viruses usually work is they tend, especially single-stranded RNA viruses, so coronavirus is a single-stranded RNA virus, which means it's very susceptible to mutations, a lot of mutations.
	And this can actually be a good thing in some cases, because the goal of this virus is to spread.
	The goal of the virus is not actually to kill you.
	If it kills you, that's actually bad, because the virus doesn't have a chance to infect more people.
	If you're very sick from this virus, you're now sitting at home and not infecting more people.
	So the goal of the virus is to kind of keep you walking around healthy, going to work, so it can continue to spread.
	That's just the way these viruses evolve.
	And so I tweeted back then, I was saying it's highly likely that this virus is going to mutate into a likely less severe strain, but certainly into a more contagious strain.
	And there's just a study that came out today, a pre-print, I don't think it's peer-reviewed yet, but it's an interesting study that looked at the strains that are now present and kind of dominating in areas of New York and California and how they're different and far more contagious than the ones that were coming out of China initially.
	And so that kind of also factored into my modeling that this is going to be a widespread infection with a low fatality rate.
	I think one of the things that you emphasize, that they've sort of been a lot of misleading information about the idea that viruses mutating means viruses getting worse.
	When in fact, frequently when viruses mutate, they actually become less deadly in the process.
	Could you explain that?
	Yeah, so for a lot of those reasons I explained.
	So imagine you're a virus, right?
	And you've infected an individual.
	How are you going to spread?
	Because viruses aren't really live organisms.
	They require a host.
	They require you to live in someone.
	And so that virus now wants to live in other people.
	It wants to keep you relatively healthy.
	It wants you to go to work and shake hands and cough, you know, occasionally cough with other people, but it does not want you to be bedridden.
	That's not how it spreads.
	And so the viruses that do that, that keep the person relatively healthy, only mildly ill, are the ones that dominate.
	Because those spread the fastest.
	The viruses that are lethal, that kill you very quickly, they don't spread.
	You die, and then that's it.
	In other words, for viruses to survive, they need to be highly contagious and as less deadly as possible.
	Generally, yes.
	There is a theoretical possibility of mutating into a situation where you have a virus where you can be asymptomatic for a long period of time, yet still contagious, and then turns out to be lethal.
	That's always a concern, but it doesn't really happen that way generally, and I don't think you would expect that to happen.
	Exactly.
	The other aspect of this public dialogue and discussion has been about what therapeutics might be helpful and useful.
	And in that capacity, that was about a month ago.
	I mean, you were talking about hydrochlorine.
	Other people were talking about it.
	Well, you were talking about it.
	Got a lot of other people looking at it.
	And I started to see a PR war on hydrochlorine and other those kind of alternatives.
	And in particular, when I started seeing things like You know, Duke University Hospital will help test potential treatment for COVID-19, although that's optimistic.
	And then I find out it's remdesivir and not hydrochlorine that they're going to be looking at, given their institutional relationship with the NIH, given their institutional relationship with Big Pharma.
	And then you have the same dynamic in terms of Dr. Fauci and his connections and correlations even to the Wuhan lab funding and bioweapons that's been controversial.
	We have people like the AAPS letter advising governors to rescind their executive orders concerning hydrochlorine, but we've only seen some success.
	There's litigation now having to pen.
	And one of the things that you pointed out Was the panel of COVID-19 treatment guidelines financial disclosure for companies related to the COVID-19 treatment diagnostics.
	And you have all a lot of these people who are in critical decision-making roles about advising treatment that actually have relationships to Jaleed, Jaleed, Jaleed, Jaleed, Jaleed all the way through.
	About 20%.
	Exactly, about 20%.
	And so it's like a screaming conflict of interest.
	The deep irony is they're attacking a couple of Bakersfield doctors who know they're gonna get ramrodded because they were willing to challenge and contest the institutional narrative because they want to see their patients get necessary care and not have to worry about treating people for child abuse and domestic violence.
	They're the ones who are accused of being motivated by money while people clearly that have an evident ongoing conflict of interest are making decisions about Well, you can't go with hydrochlorine, which is about 10 times cheaper and has no patent on it, and has 80 years of success in treating malaria and other things.
	You've got to instead rely on remdesivir.
	I think I pronunciated that right.
	Remdesivir.
	Whatever the pronunciation is.
	You've got to do the more expensive big pharma one, where there's a patent, where the actual testing, as you pointed out, doesn't even really support the suggestions being made.
	Can you talk about that?
	Yeah, so when my co-author Greg Rigano and I published the first paper in the U.S.
	to outline the science, mechanism of action, in vitro evidence, and the use of hydroxychloroquine in South Korea and China, when he first published that paper on March 13th, I didn't know the war that I was getting into.
	After Elon Musk tweeted out the paper and it went viral, we then had further confirmation of our theory that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for coronavirus from the studies coming out of the south of France, so Dr. Didier Riel.
	I broke that study on Twitter and that also went viral.
	My co-author went on Fox News and talked about it, and the next day President Trump was talking about hydroxychloroquine in a press conference.
	And the mainstream media just attacked this treatment.
	And to an outsider, it doesn't make sense.
	First to start off where this medication caused you to go blind.
	I was able to quickly dispel that theory because I'm an ophthalmologist and I've seen many patients who are on hydroxychloroquine and their risk of blindness is very low and only happens after about five years of treatment.
	Hopefully not going to be on hydroxychloroquine for five years for coronavirus.
	Then it evolved into the cardiac risks of this disease and how it is dangerous.
	It'll give you a heart attack and there is a small risk of prolonging a certain interval in your heart that can cause cardiac arrest.
	It's extremely rare.
	Like you said, this is a 70-year-old medication that is being used all around the world.
	Rheumatologists call this a daily vitamin for lupus patients.
	And they don't take EKGs before prescribing this to patients.
	Not saying that's the right thing or the wrong thing to do, but it's a very widely used safe medication.
	Mainstream media makes it look like it's the most dangerous medication.
	Then you have the couple in Arizona who drank fish tank cleaner and that was in every headline about hydroxychloroquine or every article about hydroxychloroquine was how this medication people are now self-medicating with fish tank cleaner and we're going to see a lot of deaths from that.
	And so there's been this general attack.
	And then, as you saw, our Google document, which inspired over 150 trials of this medication, global surveys of physicians actually treating patients with COVID-19, voted that hydroxychloroquine is the most effective treatment available for treating this disease.
	Despite all that, you can't go on Google and read our original document on this medication because it was taken down.
	I mean, it's incredible.
	And then you see the comparison of the attempts to promote the patented alternatives with people with stock market investments and connections to it.
	Connected to Duke, connected to Fauci, connected to people at the NIH.
	And it's extraordinary.
	It's predictable.
	I mean, there are people that were telling me this about a month ago saying, Bob, buy your lead stock.
	You know, this is the way this is going to go.
	Big Pharma really runs American public health.
	And I saw the media attacks on a very, on what everyone was saying, that was looking at this saying this was promising with minimal downsides and a lot of potential upsides compared to something else, which when you look at the actual study, as you pointed out, the study that Fauci was citing doesn't really support the propositions that he's talking about.
	Can you talk about that side of the level?
	Yeah, it was very interesting seeing him give that kind of mini press conference where he was smiling and very proud of this study.
	And based on the way it was presented, you would have expected a lot more benefit from this treatment.
	It didn't show any mortality difference, so no mortality benefit.
	It reduced your stay in the hospital by, I think, four days.
	but didn't change the outcome, life or death didn't change that at all.
	Remdesivir is actually not even a good option for a widespread pandemic, because it's likely most effective early in the disease, but you can only get it in the form of an IV.
	So for early treatment, are you gonna go into the hospital, sit in the hospital and get an IV, remdesivir, when you start off with a very mild form of the disease?
	No, the ideal treatment would be some form of pill like hydroxychloroquine.
	My suspicion is studies coming out and there's one that's already done that showed that it's probably not terribly effective in late-stage disease.
	I think Gilead is now focusing more on early-stage disease.
	But it's not really an ideal treatment for this.
	Yet it is the golden child of the mainstream media, of Fauci.
	And it was also very interesting how this study, I think it was published in The Lancet, where the World Health Organization accidentally leaked the abstract showing of a study saying that Remdesivir was actually no clinical benefit.
	That study was kind of not published until Fauci came out with his positive news, and then that study was then released.
	The timing behind it was very interesting.
	And you have essentially two conflicting studies of randomized controlled trials, one saying that it is beneficial, one it's not.
	Extraordinary, especially when you compare it to all of, I mean, I've had reports from nurses at nursing homes and hospitals saying that the benefits of the other treatment work better, of the anti-malarial drugs work better, which you pronounce better than I do, but the nature of that is so much more worthwhile to research and develop and support, and instead there's been a media war on it, there's been an institutional war on it, and whereas there's been this celebratory treatment,
	Based on limited trials, which have, as you note, contradictory data, that even if you, in the most generous interpretation of the data, doesn't anywhere near justify the kind of statements being made in support of it, propoting it, not even to mention the conflicts of interest, and to not even mention the expense issue between the two different drugs.
	And isn't there something like a 10x difference between the cost of one versus the other for the ordinary patient?
	So, Gilead hasn't come out with their exact price of Remdesivir, but there's been investment firms, analytics, the people who are looking at it, because Gilead stock is really rising and falling based on Remdesivir.
	That's when people say, oh, that's not really that important.
	Yes, no, it is.
	That's what shareholders are looking at.
	And so they expect that it'll cost around a thousand dollars per treatment course for Remdesivir.
	Hydroxychloroquine is, you know, a couple of dollars.
	Wow.
	That is the degree of difference.
	So yeah, when we come back right after the break, we'll have one or two more questions for James to get into.
	If we follow the money, does that partially explain what's happening in terms of this treatment?
	and what kind of sound policy might we have moving forward by the president and others.
	The British are coming.
	The British are coming.
	You are about to be part of the race debate.
	A warm, warm, warm, warm.
	America first.
	There's a lot.
	What's your country?
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're with James Tadaro.
	You can follow him on Twitter at JamesTadaroMD, T-O-D-A-R-O.
	He was one of the first people to break the benefit of potential therapeutic treatments for COVID-19 that led to a worldwide inquiry and investigation to it, and then a big media, big pharma suppression of its utility and benefit compared to their own patented, much pricier alternatives.
	In this context, so you've seen the insanity of sort of the shutdown response in terms of the models incorrect predictions and producing fear porn on a mass scale to induce people into a constant state of hysteria and terror to where they're running around screaming at people whether they're wearing their
	They get nervous if they're jogging with a mask, whether someone else 20 feet away doesn't have a mask, where they're afraid of people playing t-ball in the park, afraid of people swimming by themselves even, people paddleboarding by themselves, people surfing by themselves.
	All these things have driven a sort of a contagion of paranoia and hysteria in the public mindset while crushing the economy and depriving a lot of people of their core civil liberties.
	While needed and potentially beneficial therapeutics, are being suppressed in favor of patented big pharma alternatives where people have lined up lobbyists and financial ties to those making decisions at key and critical junctures.
	What do you think will be, do you think we'll start to get as the models have collapsed, as the serology studies increasingly show the erroneous assumptions they had from the inception, Do you think some of the politicians will feel enough political and public pressure to back down from this extreme shutdown reaction and response moving forward?
	I think so.
	Yeah, I think that we'll see.
	Antibody studies are ongoing.
	They continue ongoing.
	They're showing this high prevalence and there's a lot of people, you know, I get messages every day on Twitter where people are saying, why aren't we getting back to work?
	Look, this looks like it's not as fatal as we previously thought.
	We want to get back to work.
	And there's a lot of reasons for people to get back to work, for even hospital systems to open up to more elective surgeries now, and just to get the whole economy going.
	There's a huge incentive to that.
	That's what people want.
	And I think they'll put pressure on them, especially during the summer, as I think things will continue to calm down.
	And in the same context, do you think we'll start having a more evidence-based approach as doctors push back, as people file lawsuits in terms of what therapeutic treatments are recommended?
	Will the ordinary doctor, the ordinary patient, the ordinary person be able to overcome this sort of big pharma-induced, big media impact in terms of recommending therapeutic treatments for COVID-19?
	You know, I want to remain optimistic, but it's tough.
	I know when the FDA came out with their warning about hydroxychloroquine, I think that was about a week or so ago, it was really unfortunate because it discouraged a lot of the people from participating in these clinical trials that are ongoing on hydroxychloroquine.
	So on the one hand, you have the FDA, Fauci, saying, well, we need randomized controlled trials of this drug to show it's effective.
	But then they do something that discourages those randomized controlled trials from happening.
	And so it's really just almost like an orchestrated push to not let this drug really get its fair chance as a treatment.
	And has any of this sort of surprised you?
	Someone with a medical background, someone with an economics understanding, has what our politicians have done and public health officials going through this.
	Because to me it's been shocking mostly because of how unprecedented and unparalleled it is.
	How ahistorical this reaction is.
	We've never quarantined healthy people in mass before to avoid a novel virus we don't even fully understand or have data of and are projecting some of the most insane assumptions that have ever been projected of any virus.
	They didn't even project them.
	If the bubonic plague came today, they wouldn't have necessarily done these kind of projections.
	How much of this has been surprising in watching the public debate and dialogue take place?
	It honestly hasn't surprised me a whole lot.
	There's, you know, a lot of people that just, you know, unfortunately, you know, watch CNN, Washington Post, and they may not even read an article, but they catch the headline, and then they are convinced that that is the truth.
	And they so much so that they'll even go to Twitter and post that comment or something, thinking that they have some great insight, which is the same insight as 20 or 30 million other people, and has often been wrong throughout this Pandemic, as well as the World Health Organization, which I've tweeted about that as well.
	It's been extraordinary.
	In other words, I think if anything, I think more and more people will wake up to the danger of deferring to experts just without, especially deferentially, without question, without skepticism, without criticism.
	I hope so.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I hope that happens.
	I think you'll see parallel narratives taking place where you'll see the institutional narrative will be further deepened with the institutional supporters.
	But you'll have more people than before who will second-guess and question and establish.
	Like if the next pandemic like this occurs, I think of it as the 1976 swine flu.
	Like what pushed back on rushing vaccines, trusting authorities about whatever recommendation, they end up getting that all wrong.
	The pandemic scope was even worse in terms of their projections and models and then they've rushed a vaccine that ended up Killing people, end up causing neurological damage to thousands.
	Now, I'll give the media credit.
	They've managed to never mention the 1976 public experiment on this during this entire pandemic policy response discussion.
	Nor the fact, like most people when I talk to them, do not know that the 1958 Asian flu was five times worse, ten times worse than the flu and the ordinary flu and its death rate.
	We didn't do anything like this.
	1968, Hong Kong flu.
	Uh, the same thing.
	Had a five times, uh, the flu death rate.
	Killed over 100,000 Americans.
	We still didn't do anything like this.
	We didn't even do this during the Spanish flu.
	There's people that would think that, I'm seeing these people compare and they're saying, well, the Spanish flu, the people that really took the strongest measurements back, bounce back quicker economically.
	And I'm like, none of them shut down their businesses anywhere.
	Unemployment went down during the Spanish flu, not up.
	We didn't.
	This is totally novel and unprecedented and unparalleled what our policymakers are pushing upon us and propagating to us and based on the weakest possible evidence that has been completely debunked in the lived experience of people watching it.
	So I hope there's more reasonable skepticism and questioning of experts so we don't have a repeat of the Milgram experiment in a lifetime.
	I think there is.
	I mean, this is America.
	Remember, there's a lot of free thinkers still here.
	And I can tell that even from my Twitter followers.
	I've grown, I don't know, 15,000, 16,000 followers in the past few weeks.
	And these are people that are interested in finding the truth and really have an open mind.
	That's what I would say is probably the most important part.
	You don't even have to have the best math background.
	You might not even need to have a medical degree.
	But if you have an open mind and you're willing to kind of look through data and kind of feel where the truth is in this, I think you can do it.
	And you'll be probably much closer than a lot of the epidemiologists or experts who have those conflict of interest.
	They're looking at either political agendas or financial interests.
	You can't just blindly trust these people.
	Well, I think that's a great note to finish on.
	Thanks for being with us, James.
	Everybody can follow him on Twitter at James Todaro.
	T-O-D-A-R-O-M-D.
	Has constantly great information and insights and has been key and critical to some reasonableness and free thinking in this COVID-19-84 experiment we've been undergoing.
	Thanks for being with us, James.
	Thanks.
	Thanks so much for having me, Robert.
	Take care now.
	Yep, you too.
	Indeed, if we look at what's happening in the contemporary environment, we could have in fact, and there were people like James, forecasting from the very inception that there was a countervailing narrative available to us.
	Let's go back to one of the people that was the first to alert me to these questions about the institutional narratives to come, and that would be Israeli Nobel laureate Michael Leavitt.
	Who explained, who talks about Israel and China, and what he predicted and forecast, as this Jerusalem Post article goes into detail on, he was able to forecast, even before the Chinese government understood it to be the case, what the likely progress of this COVID-19 virus would be.
	He suggested it was going to have an early exponential rise, but then quite quickly would become an S-curve, and then would flatten and decline.
	And he was able to forecast almost to the right percentage what the death rate would be in Wuhan, China, back in February, before the virus had even reached its peak.
	His predictions, if you applied the same analysis, and I started to do so, to Iran, to Italy, to the United Kingdom, to Sweden, to New York City, to parts of the United States, If you forecast that same trend in the first 30 days, you would see this rapid rise, then quickly an S-curve like flattening, and then a quick precipitous decline to where the death rate would be growing in the single digits by the second month of its meaningful deathly impact in any local community.
	You could accurately forecast almost everybody, almost everywhere.
	Indeed, the only places that were deviating were places that were experiencing more excess deaths because of the shutdown, not because of the virus itself.
	Indeed, in that same context, John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford of both epidemiology and biostatistics, published all the way back in March, before almost anybody was shutting down, with the title, Coronavirus Disease 2019, The harms of exaggerated information and non-evidence-based measures that he was seeing all around the world.
	And indeed, as we stand here a month and a half later, Johnny Anidis has been prescient and proverbial in his predictions, whereas the modelers have been disastrously wrong.
	Meanwhile, let's take a look at one of those modelers.
	That would be government scientist from Imperial College, Neil Ferguson.
	Well, he had to resign today because he had been breaking the lockdown rules to have an affair with another woman who was married to somebody else.
	That's the kind of moral compass and direction that this individual had.
	Emblematic of people like Chris Cuomo, like George Stephanopoulos, people lecturing other people while they themselves are not abiding by their own imposed rules.
	Another article today from Julie Kelly on the failed experiment of social distancing that explains that the history of science, sadly, is littered with bad experiments gone horribly wrong.
	The great social distancing experiment of 2020, when it is over, will likely be toward the top of that list.
	Going into details about how until COVID-19 there was no agreement in medical literature that any form of extreme social distancing would in fact, or systemic across the society social distancing, would in fact deter or reduce the transmission of any deathly rate of any influenza airborne-like disease.
	And there's more and more evidence, of course, as we went through at the beginning of the show, that social distancing has not achieved that outcome or benefit.
	Similarly, another top Israeli professor showed that if you just applied basic statistical analysis, you would realize that the same thing his Israeli colleague, the Nobel Laureate winner, Michael Levitt, documented, you would see the same flattening S-curve-like growth and then decline almost anywhere in the world, regardless of mitigation measurements taken.
	He predicted the same thing and has been increasingly correct.
	Isaac Ben-Israeli, as this article details, In both that publication and in town hall.
	Israeli professor shows virus follows fixed pattern.
	And indeed it does and it did.
	And this was true independent of and separate from any mitigation measurements taken.
	No matter when a state or region shut down, no matter whether if a region or state shut down, the same pattern of the virus continued.
	The virus would have its early exponential growth when it reached a susceptible population, then it would start to flatten out, then it would decline.
	One of the possible reasons As James Todaro, the MD, was describing, is because, in fact, viruses want to survive.
	In order to survive, they need to mutate.
	And the way in which they mutate is to become more infectious, but less deadly.
	And that would, in fact, explain the high rate of asymptomatic people when they are tested for the virus.
	And as the Asia Times predicted, this Israeli professor offers an alternative coronavirus prediction.
	And much like James Todoro, his prediction turned out much more prescient than the modelers that our public health officials and politicians are relying upon.
	In the same way, we have known now for the better part of a month, as this article details in RT, a cure worse than the disease.
	UK lockdown, this is just the United Kingdom, could cause 150,000 avoidable deaths, more than the virus has even meant or could likely stop.
	That has been known from the inception.
	Similarly, in the same vein, an article, an actual useful article to some surprise in the National Review called, Shut Up!
	The Experts Explained, talking about how the experts who continue to attack Alex Berenson, an independent reporter just documenting the data and documenting the stories that he was receiving and reviewing, showed that the models are, quote, not crystal balls.
	And indeed, that they were likely wrong.
	He has been proven right again and again and again, while the prognosticators that the propagandists pushed in the modeling world proved presciently wrong again and again.
	Similarly, as this article from John Ziegler Today in Mediaite goes through, contrary to the media's narrative, California's virus story should make us rethink extreme lockdown.
	He goes into detail about how, in fact, the evidence is that California experienced COVID-19 much earlier than they believe that they did.
	Some cases may be going back to December, but clearly within January and February, due to the relationship between China and California, particularly coastal California, San Francisco and Los Angeles, our biggest Chinatown in America, is of course located in San Francisco, going back to century-long immigration patterns into the United States.
	And as the details of the serology studies first from Santa Clara from from a Stanford professor and then in Los Angeles from USC and now more in addition and then the Bakersfield doctors and there's been more along the same path proving the same pattern that the serology surveys conclude that in fact the virus peaked Even before any form of shutdown could have impacted it in California.
	Meaning the shutdown had no material impact on the actual course of the virus.
	And in that same vein, the impact of the social control mechanisms and economic devastation inflicted in ways that can never be recovered or recuperated from In the same regard, it's good to go back to April, when, as a group of doctors got together and wrote, 8 Reasons to End the Lockdowns Now.
	from pandemics, both in terms of looking at this policy being currently instituted by Governor Grusom of California and any future use of it as we move forward as well documented in that media column.
	In the same regard, it's good to go back to April when a group of doctors got together and wrote eight reasons to end the lockdowns now.
	And that was back almost a month ago.
	And they went into detail about how the curve had already been flattened in almost every significant jurisdiction and how it was nowhere near the doom and gloom predictions of the propagandists and those propagating that agenda.
	That economic collapse and unemployment were destroying families.
	That, in fact, the healthcare system was under capacity, not oversaturated.
	That suicide will kill easily more people than COVID-19.
	That the mortality rate from COVID-19, one of the key issues that James has been on top of now for months, was greatly overestimated by the model's predictions and forecast.
	That children, they talked about way back in April, are at almost no risk from this disease.
	And we have even more evidence and more information of that over the last week.
	Where it turns out children simply do not get this virus, that the risk of it is tiny, miniscule, that the rate of getting the flu is 10 times more deadly for a child than this one is according to the most available data, and that in fact in addition they don't appear to even spread it in any significant number.
	They note that protective physical equipment was widely available, And that the authorities now should know there's clear evidence that the benefits of a indefinite lockdown nowhere near justify the cost of the lockdown.
	In the same way, we've had the ongoing useful comparison of Sweden, which is even the New York Times had to admit in a recent article, quote, life has to go on.
	How Sweden has faced the virus without a lockdown.
	Documenting and detailing all the activity that continues to take place in Sweden.
	And as the article admits, Sweden's death rate of 22 per 100,000 people is the same of that as Ireland, which has earned accolades.
	Ireland has done this aggressive shutdown approach and it has achieved no better outcome than Sweden.
	And the Sweden outcome is substantially better than the United Kingdom, substantially better than France, substantially better than Spain.
	Substantially better than Italy that did do these extreme shutdown policies.
	As they note, in fact, if you went out into the streets in Sweden, you would find people thronging the bars, the restaurants, crowded parks, drinking in the sun.
	And as we note, sunlight has been again confirmed as good for people involved in this virus.
	That sunlight helps kill the virus.
	Vitamin D has always been good, and there's more and more evidence that vitamin C and vitamin D are good for you, as in fact, in some cases, in some places, people are using it as a form of treatment.
	By contrast, as this article details, years of life are likely to be lost due to just the psychosocial consequences of COVID-19 mitigation strategies based on Swiss data from a group of Swiss doctors published in a medical publication.
	They talk about the effect of it will be that an average person will suffer substantial years of life lost due to the psychosocial consequences of these measures.
	Indeed, that for at least 2% of the population, on average, they will lose almost 10 years off of their life expectancy.
	A far more severe and substantial outcome than the virus itself could cause or inflict.
	So that's the environment in which we live today, in which reasonable science and logical data is rejected in exchange for political propaganda, motivated by partisan agendas and personal self-enrichment.
	And that is why we're seeing one therapeutic recommended and another one demeaned, when the one being demeaned is more affordable, more accessible, more proven, more documented, and likely more beneficial than the one that is being promoted and propagated.
	In the same way, we see models with insane assumptions and ridiculous policy prescriptions that have no historical merit or are rooted in the data, that are continuously and consistently disproven every single day, in America and around the world, still getting relied upon and pushed and propagated, while those putting out reasonable data estimates, reasonable projections of what is going to occur, those who are consistently predictive, like the Israeli Nobel laureate, completely discarded, completely ignored, completely blacklisted.
	Those like our guest tonight who publish reasonable articles about potential therapeutic interventions and inventions in this process, they have their materials removed from the internet altogether.
	Disappear from Google.
	Disappear from Google searches.
	Disappear from Medium.
	Disappear from Twitter.
	Disappear from YouTube, like the Bakersfield doctors.
	Now you can see that at BAN.VIDEO where it is still up because that is the place that still believes in free media, free press, and free thought in America.
	We need more free thinkers like James Todaro, more free press platforms like BAN.VIDEO, and in that same respect
	We recommend that you support our sponsor, our sponsor, InfoWarsStore.com, which continues to make available a wide range of supplements, a wide range of things like storable food, a wide range of products that are good for you, that are advantageous for you, that are more affordable to you than you can often get anywhere in the public marketplace and market space, particularly in this time where those who prepare are those that are the best equipped and most able
	To defend themselves and be ready for whatever comes down the political pipeline.
	So we recommend it.
	Infowarsstore.com is what makes it possible for independent press and independent platforms to support and strengthen free thought, free speech, and free ideas, and to continue and to maintain a free America in this panic-induced civil shutdown that we're experiencing today.
	And in the bottom half of the hour, we'll take your calls as you, the jury, get to participate in this process in a meaningful way, at least with this platform on this show, compared to what's happening in a lot of our legislators and executive branches who are ignoring the public's will and ordering and issuing edicts like they're a modern-day Duke of Normandy or something.
	You can call in.
	The number is 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	Or you can dial in internationally at 512-646-1776.
	8-9-2-5-3-9.
	That's 8-7-7-7-8-9-2-5-3-9.
	Or you can dial in internationally at 512-646-1776.
	That's internationally at 512-646-1776.
	We see sort of the insanity of some of the things that are happening across the country today.
	And we're seeing things like, let's take a look at the lines for the food pantry in South Africa, that parallel what we saw in Los Angeles and other places, but are even worse and more severe.
	As 130 million people, according to the leading world hunger people, look at that line.
	Those are people waiting just to get enough food to survive for the day.
	That's the line.
	And that's South Africa, which is one of the more well-developed, wealthier parts of countries in Africa.
	That line just goes on and on and on.
	So the next time somebody wants to lecture you on social media about, oh, if you want to reopen the economy, you must want grandma to die.
	Well, just tell them if they want to keep the economy shut down, they apparently want 130 million people to die.
	Apparently they will.
	And most of whom are children, most of whom are poor.
	So, do they want to kill over 100 million to save, and if you multiply the life expectancy, the life years, you're talking about 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 70 years taken away on their lives compared to just changing the cause of death on the death certificate of people with three morbid co-conditions at 81 years old, the average age of the person who has died from COVID-19 in the United States and most of the West, according to the latest data.
	Compare that to the people that are in that long, long line just to get enough food to survive tomorrow in one of the wealthier parts of Africa.
	This is why they're saying 130 million people sit on the edge of extreme starvation.
	Because of the shutdown of the economy and civil society in the West.
	That's its cost.
	That's its consequence.
	And that is real.
	It's not just the quality of life that it impairs, it's life itself that it deprives people of around the world, including the most vulnerable who deserve the most protection.
	Children at the very beginning of life, stripped of it because somebody wants to feel like a proud Karen in their little suburban home after an afternoon of wine.
	In the same context, as we look at what's happening, people in Michigan protested this past weekend where Governor Whitmer continues to issue her edicts.
	Queen Whitmer continues to feign the role of royalty over her public audience in Michigan.
	Let's take a look at clip number eight as people explain why it is they're out there protesting.
	It's about the simple need to feed their family.
	Tell me, how has this lockdown been affecting your life?
	He can't work.
	We have seven kids to feed.
	So how are we supposed to do that?
	And we can work safely too.
	I work outdoors.
	She's banned that employment right now.
	We have a desire to get back to work.
	We can get back to work safely and still maintain all of the social distancing regulations.
	We're just waiting on a freedom to be restored that's obviously been taken away.
	She wants to make us wait for three more weeks.
	She doesn't want us to go back to work.
	Well, how about you kids?
	You want to be locked indoors for three more weeks?
	No!
	Will you go?
	Are you guys tired of being at home?
	Yes!
	You want to go to the library?
	Yes!
	You want to go to the store?
	Yes!
	Yeah.
	I like it.
	We can't see our friends!
	Hey buddy, how you doing?
	Good.
	Do you want to go outside and play?
	Yeah.
	My question is, how are you enjoying your free trial of socialism the last couple weeks?
	It's terrible.
	There's no food at the store.
	Have you been to the store?
	Yes.
	There's no meat.
	So what are we gonna eat?
	We got some mouths to feed.
	Just a few.
	So what's your favorite food?
	Uh...
	Sausage.
	Sausage.
	And don't you want your mom to be able to buy sausage in the store?
	Yeah.
	And isn't it bad that she can't right now?
	Yeah.
	Don't you want your favorite food back?
	Yeah.
	Guys, listen to him.
	He wants his favorite food back.
	Give the kid his sausage.
	It's sausage.
	It's not candy.
	What's your favorite food?
	Sausage.
	You like sausage too?
	Where did all of our freedoms go in the last couple weeks?
	Yeah, totally.
	Did she have any right to take them?
	No!
	You think we'll get them back?
	Yes!
	We're not going to back down, are we?
	No!
	Never!
	That's the mindset mentality we're having to deal with, where people are having to protest in order to feed their families, just as people in South Africa are having to line up around the block.
	Instead, we get things like this from video clip number five, which we'll show until the break and then come back to part of it, in which in Wisconsin, a parent just let their child go play with a neighbor and this is the response they got.
	Let's take a look at clip number five.
	Hi, Amy.
	Hi.
	I'm Deputy Everhart with the Sheriff's Department.
	So, are you aware that we're in a stay-at-home order right now?
	Yeah, obviously.
	By the government?
	Yes, I am aware.
	Okay, you're aware of that?
	I am aware.
	I don't need to explain that to you?
	No, you don't need to explain that to me.
	Okay, because I can if you need me to.
	You can because your officer was just here two weeks ago and he explained it to me that you guys weren't enforcing that order.
	Oh, we're about to.
	Okay.
	Do you understand it though?
	Okay, so why are you here?
	Because your daughter is going to play at other people's home and you're allowing it to happen.
	They were over here as well, so are you here?
	They've been talking about it.
	I understand.
	So either you can acknowledge it or you can argue it.
	I'm acknowledging it.
	Okay, stop having your kid go by other people's home.
	Okay, I acknowledge it.
	Anything else?
	Nope, that was it.
	Apparently there was some other issue.
	I acknowledged it.
	I acknowledged it.
	Anything else?
	Yeah, I need your last name.
	Amy, what's your last name?
	Is there a reason you're asking for it?
	I'm adding you to the screen so we can document that we had contact with you.
	Is there a reason for it?
	Yep, because you're violating a state order.
	That's what I'm talking about.
	If you let me finish, that's what I'm explaining to you.
	Because you're violating an order, I haven't violated an order.
	We're going to have documentation on our screen with your name because we're here talking to you about that, that you said you just acknowledged.
	Okay.
	I would like to see the law that requires me to give you that information.
	All right.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're going to listen and take some calls from you, the jury, and get your insights and your discussions about this.
	Let's go to Brad in Pennsylvania.
	Well, you're like yourself.
	You've got to be scratching your head about what Bill Barr is doing in Washington.
	I mean, he sits there and pretends to be engaged and acting like he's doing something.
	Trump, if he had any power at all, he's got to remove him and put somebody in there that can take action.
	What's your take on that?
	No question.
	I think there's sort of open issues with Bill Barr.
	And I want to believe that Barr will take meaningful action.
	I want to believe that his rhetoric, that his walk, will be as good as his talk.
	But the countervailing narrative to that is Barr's long history as an establishment institutional insider.
	As someone who knows how to talk a good game, but knows how to walk a different kind of game.
	So far he's made three big promises.
	He said he's going to go after big tech for its antitrust policies involving manipulation of the public square, interference in elections, and stripping competitors of meaningful access to compete on any equal or even level.
	He has promised he is going to go after these mayors and governors who are routinely, regularly, and now flagrantly violating the core civil rights of people all across America.
	Dallas salon owner today was jailed for seven days for doing what?
	Simply operating her salon.
	We have a SWAT team raids being done on people's bars just for opening up for a brief period of time.
	We are in a world and a society where the great black market activity that they're doing raids on is people getting their hair done at home.
	That's the kind of inanity and insanity that we face today when they're getting these kind of tanks and guns to round people up for.
	Have you been cutting hair at someone's home?
	Have you been serving somebody a beer?
	Has your kid gone over to a neighbor's house?
	Have you been playing t-ball in the front yard with your daughter again?
	Did you take a swim this morning?
	Did you go surfing in the afternoon?
	Tell me you didn't go paddle boarding or out on your lake, out on the lake boat.
	That's the mindset and mentality that's been consumed.
	And Attorney General Barr again promised he's going to take meaningful action there as well.
	And in the third place he promised meaningful action as he said he was going to remedy the systematic corruption at the top of the FBI and the Department of Justice evidence in the Completely wayward prosecution of General Flynn.
	We've seen the same pattern repeat itself in the prosecution and punishment of Roger Stone.
	We've seen it in the excessive, disproportionate treatment of Paul Manafort.
	All of these people, their only real crime was being associated and affiliated with President Donald Trump.
	We're seeing repeated efforts By politicized prosecutors in key parts across the country, from Washington DC to the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, targeting people because of their political associations and affiliations, not because of any truly criminal activity.
	And yet, here again in all three places, we've heard big talk.
	from Attorney General Barr.
	We haven't seen any law.
	Nobody has been prosecuted yet.
	Even people the Inspector, the Obama-appointed Inspector General of the Justice Department like James Comey and Andrew McCabe that were recommended and referred for criminal prosecution were never prosecuted by Attorney General Barr.
	So he's promising that John Durham is digging into it.
	He's going to take action.
	He's going to have remedy.
	It's right around the corner.
	He writes aggressive letters.
	He does good press conferences.
	He talks a good game in the press.
	But to date, he has not taken meaningful action.
	And you're right.
	If he doesn't take meaningful action by summertime, it's time for the president to find an attorney general who will.
	The president needs generals who are following him and aligned with him, not constantly betraying him and undermining him.
	So I hope Attorney General Barr proves his worth, but I am not overly confident that it will occur.
	So thanks, Brad, for your for your call and your inquiry.
	Next, we're going to go into a little bit of a part of a documentary that's currently a documentary series that's out there that might help explain the background of why it is and what it is that we're witnessing and how the model somehow completely converted these politicians into not only adopting the absurd assumptions that went into the models we're going to go into a little bit of a part of a documentary that's currently a documentary series that's out there that might help explain the background
	Using the very methodologies that Scott Adams wisely called loser think, those models being accepted, embraced, and pushed for the most radical solutions also pushed by those same modelers, and the only thing they had in common between the modelers and the public.
	public health officials and the politicians promoting it and propagating it at a disproportionate level, especially when you include the press in that context, was one Bill Gates.
	So this documentary starts to go into some of the details, and we'll show part of it now about how Bill Gates came to such power in the first place.
	So let's take a look at video clip number two.
	Hello, I'm Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft.
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	Who is Bill Gates? - A software developer?
	A businessman?
	A philanthropist?
	A global health expert?
	This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates' unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research, and vaccine development.
	And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people.
	Because until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally, we still won't be fully back to normal.
	Bill Gates is no public health expert.
	He is not a doctor, an epidemiologist, or an infectious disease researcher.
	Yet somehow, he has become a central figure in the lives of billions of people, presuming to dictate the medical actions that will be required for the world to go back to normal.
	The transformation of Bill Gates from computer kingpin to global health czar is as remarkable as it is instructive.
	And it tells us a great deal about where we are heading as the world plunges into a crisis the likes of which we have not seen before.
	This is the story of how Bill Gates monopolized global health.
	You're tuned in to The Corbett Report.
	Until his reinvention as a philanthropist in the past decade.
	This is what many people thought of when they thought of Bill Gates.
	In the case of the United States versus Microsoft, the U.S.
	Justice Department contended that the software giant had breached antitrust laws by competing unfairly against Netscape Communications in the internet browser market, effectively creating a monopoly.
	Bill's first concern was that the prosecution could potentially block the release of his company's latest operating system, Windows 98.
	You asking me about when I wrote this email, or what are you asking me about?
	I'm asking you about January of 1996.
	That month?
	Yes, sir.
	And what about it?
	What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996?
	I don't know what you mean concerned.
	What is it about the word concerned that you don't understand?
	I'm not sure what you mean by it.
	We're going to be working together on Microsoft Office, on Internet Explorer, on Java, and I think that it's going to lead to a very healthy relationship.
	So it's a package announcement today.
	We're very, very happy about it.
	We're very, very excited about it.
	And I happen to have a special guest with me today via satellite downlink.
	And if we could get him up on the stage right now.
	Police and security guards in Belgium were caught flat-footed today by a cowardly sneak attack on one of the world's wealthiest men.
	The target was Microsoft chairman Bill Gates arriving for a meeting with community leaders.
	Watch what happens when a team of hitmen meet him first with a pie in the face.
	Gates was momentarily and understandably shaken, but he was not injured.
	The hit squad piled on with two more pies before one of them was rustled to the ground and arrested.
	The others, for at least the moment, got away.
	Gates went inside, wiped his face clean, and made no comment.
	He then went ahead with his scheduled meeting.
	No word on the motive for this attack.
	But once reviled for the massive wealth and the monopolistic power that his virus-laden software afforded him, Gates is now hailed as a visionary who is leveraging that wealth and power for the greater good of humanity.
	In the 22nd century, a book will be written about the entrepreneur of the 21st century.
	I'm sure that the person who will foremost come to the mind of those historians is certainly Bill Gates.
	I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Bill Gates is singularly, I would argue, the most consequential individual of our generation.
	I mean that.
	Our next guest is one of the richest and most generous men in the world.
	Please welcome Bill Gates.
	At a time when everyone is looking to understand the scope of the pandemic and how to minimize the threat, one of the best informed voices is that of businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates.
	The process by which this reinvention of Gates's public image took place is not mysterious.
	It's the same process by which every billionaire has revived their public image since John D. Rockefeller hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee to transform him from the head of the Standard Oil Hydra into the kind old man handing out dimes to strangers.
	Don't you give her a dime, Mr. Rockefeller?
	- - - - - Thank you, sir.
	Thank you very much.
	I consider myself... Thank you for the ride.
	I consider myself more than amply paid.
	Bless you!
	More to the point, John D. Rockefeller knew that to gain the adoration of the public, he had to appear to give them what they want.
	Money.
	He devoted hundreds of millions of dollars of his vast oil monopoly fortune to establishing institutions that, he claimed, were for the public good.
	The General Education Board.
	The Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research.
	The Rockefeller Foundation.
	Similarly, Bill Gates has spent much of the past two decades transforming himself from software magnate into a benefactor of humanity through his own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
	In fact, Gates has surpassed Rockefeller's legacy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation long having eclipsed the Rockefeller Foundation as the largest private foundation in the world, with $46.8 billion of assets on its books that it wields in its stated program areas of global health and development, global growth, and global policy advocacy.
	And, like Rockefeller, Gates's transformation has been helped along by a well-funded public relations campaign.
	Gone are the theatrical tricks of the PR pioneers.
	The ubiquitous ice cream cones of Gates' mentor Warren Buffett are the last remaining holdout of the old Rockefeller handing out dimes gimmick.
	No, Gates has guided his public image into that of a modern-day saint through an even simpler tactic.
	Buying good publicity.
	The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spends tens of millions of dollars per year on media partnerships, sponsoring coverage of its program areas across the board.
	Gates funds The Guardian's global development website.
	Gates funds NPR's global health coverage.
	Gates funds the Our World in Data website that is tracking the latest statistics and research on the coronavirus pandemic.
	Gates funds BBC coverage of global health and development issues, both through its BBC Media Action Organisation and the BBC itself.
	Gates funds world health coverage on ABC News.
	When the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer was given a $3.5 million Gates Foundation grant to set up a special unit to report on global health issues, NewsHour communications chief Rob Flynn was asked about the potential conflict of interest that such a unit would have in reporting on issues that the Gates Foundation is itself involved in.
	In some regards, I guess you might say that there are not a heck of a lot of things you could touch in global health these days that would not have some kind of Gates tentacle, Flynn responded.
	Indeed, it would be almost impossible to find any area of global health that has been left untouched by the tentacles of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
	It was Gates who sponsored the meeting that led to the creation of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, a global public-private partnership bringing together state sponsors and big pharmaceutical companies whose specific goals include the creation of healthy markets for vaccines and other immunization products.
	As a founding partner of the Alliance, the Gates Foundation provided $750 million in seed funding and has gone on to make over $4.1 billion in commitments to the group.
	Gates provided the seed money that created the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a public-private partnership that acts as a finance vehicle for governmental AIDS, TB, and malaria programs.
	When a public-private partnership of governments, world health bodies, and 13 leading pharmaceutical companies came together in 2012 to accelerate progress toward eliminating or controlling 10 neglected tropical diseases, there was the Gates Foundation, with $363 million of support.
	When the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents was launched in 2015 to leverage billions of dollars in public and private financing for global health and development programs, there was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a founding partner with a $275 million contribution.
	When the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases, there was the Gates Foundation, with an initial injection of $100 million.
	The examples go on and on.
	The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's fingerprints can be seen on every major global health initiative of the past two decades.
	And beyond the flashy multibillion-dollar global partnerships, the Foundation is behind hundreds of smaller country- and region-specific grants – $10 million to combat a locust infestation in East Africa, or $300 million to support agricultural research in Africa and Asia – that add up to billions of dollars in commitments.
	It comes as no surprise, then, that, far beyond the $250 million that the Gates Foundation has pledged to the fight against coronavirus, every aspect of the current coronavirus pandemic involves organizations, groups, and individuals with direct ties to Gates funding.
	From the start, the World Health Organization has directed the global response to the current pandemic.
	From its initial monitoring of the outbreak in Wuhan and its declaration in January that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, to its live media briefings and its technical guidance on country-level planning and other matters, the WHO has been the body setting the guidelines and recommendations shaping the global response to this outbreak.
	But even the World Health Organization itself is largely reliant on funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
	The WHO's most recent donor report shows that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the organization's second largest donor behind the United States government.
	The Gates Foundation single-handedly contributes more to the world health body than Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, and the UK combined.
	What's more, current World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is in fact, like Bill Gates himself, not a medical doctor at all, but the controversial ex-Minister of Health of Ethiopia, who was accused of covering up three cholera outbreaks in the country during his tenure.
	Before joining the WHO, he served as chair of the Gates-founded Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and sat on the board of the Gates-founded Gavi the Vaccine Alliance and the Gates-funded Stop TB Partnership.
	The current round of lockdowns and restrictive stay-home orders in Western countries were enacted on the back of alarming models predicting millions of deaths in the United States and hundreds of thousands in the UK.
	Imperial College in London released a COVID-19 report, and that's where most of our U.S.
	leaders are getting the information they're basing their decision-making on.
	The report runs us through a few different ways this could turn out, depending on what our responses are.
	If we don't do anything to control this virus, over 80% of people in the U.S.
	would be infected over the course of the epidemic.
	With 2.2 million deaths from COVID-19.
	That 2.2 million deaths also doesn't account for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed.
	From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction.
	You must stay at home.
	Enough is enough.
	Go home and stay home.
	A statewide order for people to stay at home.
	The work of two research groups was crucial in shaping the decisions of the UK and US governments to implement wide-ranging lockdowns and, in turn, governments around the world.
	The first group, the Imperial College COVID-19 Research Team, issued a report on March 16th that predicted up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the US unless strict government measures were put in place.
	The second group, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Bill Gates's home state of Washington, helped provide data that corroborated the White House's initial estimates of the virus effects.
	Estimates that have been repeatedly downgraded as the situation has progressed.
	Unsurprisingly, the Gates Foundation has injected substantial sums of money into both groups.
	This year alone, the Gates Foundation has already given $79 million to Imperial College.
	And in 2017, the Foundation announced a $279 million investment into the IHME to expand its work collecting health data and creating models.
	Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, has become the face of the U.S.
	government's coronavirus response, echoing Bill Gates' assertion that the country will not get back to normal until a good vaccine can be found to ensure the public's safety.
	If you want to get to pre-corona virus, you know, that might not ever happen in the sense of the fact that the threat is there.
	But I believe with the therapies that will be coming online, with the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right back now.
	Beyond just their frequent collaborations and cooperation in the past, Fauci has direct ties to Gates projects and funding.
	In 2010, he was appointed to the leadership council of the Gates-founded Decade of Vaccines Project to implement a global vaccine action plan, a project to which Gates committed $10 billion of funding.
	And in October of last year, just as the current pandemic was beginning, the Gates Foundation announced a $100 million contribution to the National Institute of Health to help, among other programs, Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases research into HIV.
	Also in October of last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to stage Event 201, a tabletop exercise gauging the economic and societal impact of a globally spreading coronavirus pandemic.
	It began in healthy-looking pigs months, perhaps years ago.
	A new coronavirus.
	The mission of the Pandemic Emergency Board is to provide recommendations to deal with the major global challenges arising in response to an unfolding pandemic.
	The board is comprised of highly experienced leaders from business, public health, and civil society.
	We're at the start of what's looking like it will be a severe pandemic.
	And there are problems emerging that can only be solved by global business and governments working together.
	Governments need to be willing to do things that are out of their historical perspective.
	For the most part, it's really a war footing that we need to be on.
	Given the incredible reach that the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have into every corner of the global health markets, it should not be surprising that the Foundation has been intimately involved with every stage of the current pandemic crisis either.
	In effect, Gates has merely used the wealth from his domination of the software market to leverage himself into a similar position in the world of global health.
	The whole process has been cloaked in the mantle of selfless philanthropy, But the Foundation is not structured as a charitable endeavor.
	Instead, it maintains a dual structure.
	The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation distributes money to grantees, but a separate entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, manages the endowment assets.
	These two entities often have overlapping interests, and, as has been noted many times in the past, Grants given by the Foundation often directly benefit the value of the Trust's assets.
	One of my favorite parts about my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly.
	My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world.
	So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have.
	But I am surprised by one thing that they do have.
	Coca-Cola.
	Coke is everywhere.
	In fact, when I travel in the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous.
	And so, when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home, and I'm thinking, well, we're trying to deliver condoms to people, or vaccinations, you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder, how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places?
	And if they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing?
	Indeed, why can't they have the same degree of political, economic, social control as Koch or Microsoft did?
	That's what they did.
	Who is the true puppet master behind the screen?
	Who is indeed behind the curtain, the true string puller, behind the politics of pandemics, behind Mr. Fauci, behind Deborah Birx, behind the Imperial College and the rest?

▲