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May 15, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
34:02
Critical Analysis of COVID-19 Response 'the goalpost keeps moving' | Ep. 37
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It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought us to the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers in which Thomas Paine explained by rational principles the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the powerful Kingdom of England and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and he explained it in ways that were understandable to the people, to all of the people.
A great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we are able to reason, we're able to talk to each other, we're able to listen to each other, and we're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani.
I'm back with you with Rudy's Common Sense.
And today we are very, very honored to have Dr. Stephen Greer.
Who is a doctor and a really accomplished and very good doctor, but also has been in a number of other fields, including investment banking and investment and business.
So he brings a broad perspective to this, and I think you've seen him on television talking about this, and it's a very valuable perspective.
And let's get right to it.
Dr. Greer, welcome to Rudy's Common Sense.
We're so honored to have you.
You've been very articulate and very strong in giving your opinions and your advice, and we'd love to have you share that with our audience.
But tell us a little about your somewhat unusual background.
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
I've been a big fan of yours.
Yes, so as we were just chatting, I grew up in Ohio, went to medical school at Ohio State, but I became a New Yorker for 20 years when I started to do my surgery residency at NYU.
And then I was a finance major in undergrad, which was unusual at the time.
Now there's a whole lot of MBA MDs and stuff.
But so I went into Wall Street as a as a sell side analyst covering stocks, writing the research reports on biotech medical devices.
So I know the industry side of it.
Then I became a money manager, a portfolio manager at Steve Cohen's hedge fund, and then ran several hundred million at Merrill Lynch.
And then Merrill Lynch, you know, bit the dust with the economic collapse of 2008.
But so it does give me a different perspective on American medicine and so forth than the
doctor.
So tell us, I guess we might as well get right to the present situation and then we can talk
more generally.
So all of a sudden we're faced with this new virus, novel coronavirus.
The political leaders really don't know anything about it.
So they have to turn, responsibly, they have to turn to the scientists and the doctors for the advice about how to handle it.
So how is it being handled?
Let's say from the decision to close down the American economy and the world economy.
Was that necessary?
No, it's not necessary.
It doesn't work either.
So going way back to March 9th.
Please, I would like you to do it in your sequence.
Yeah.
And then so I've been saying this for a long time.
People are fine.
Is Anthony Fauci immediately impressed me as someone who was in over his head.
He was saying policy matters.
He's a scientist at best.
He's really been a bureaucrat for the last several decades.
So why was he giving advice on how to handle a catastrophe like this?
And and he started to act, you know, I've got these models that show 200,000 deaths and I make models as a Wall Street guy.
And I knew his models had to be lame at best.
And sure enough, we communicated by email.
He was he was totally making it up.
He didn't even have any models at all.
And now now we know that those models were bad.
But I saw that right away.
But the concept that Another doctor in Congress was on Tucker, and he said the same thing, and I forgot his name, you would know him, is the goalposts have moved.
First, we wanted everyone to stay at home to flatten the curve and prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Well, we achieved that.
Now they're moving the goalposts to trying to have nobody contract the virus, which is stupid, idiotic, and it won't work.
80% or more of all the people in New York—Governor Cuomo said this the other day—everyone in New York who's contracting the virus, guess where they got it?
At home.
They're being quarantined and they're still getting it, okay?
So this mitigation, which is a euphemism for house arrest, is not going to work, and it's futile, and I highly suspect there's political agendas or people who want to see the economy bad to hurt Trump.
The only logical reason to keep people at home is if you have a political agenda because it has no basis in science whatsoever.
So how do you deal with it?
Here is a way to deal with it.
When you have a pandemic and you've got only certain people at risk, like the elderly, they're immunocompromised, you go after them and you protect the nursing homes and you protect them and you don't do it to everybody.
Well, they did the opposite.
Governor Cuomo sent all the infected people to the nursing homes and killed them.
I mean, this is just all wrong.
All wrong.
So the way going forward is we open businesses and so forth and screen certain people, but not everyone needs to be tested.
We protect the elderly and the people with cancer and that sort of thing.
And then we go back to life because fortunately, we're starting to see that the virus does have a very, very low death rate amongst most people.
It's a light switch.
It's either really bad or really benign, depending on probably a genetic switch that deals with this thing called the ACE receptor.
And that's why we'll get into that later.
So for most people, 90 some percent, it's looking like you won't even know you had it.
So handling it right now is the dumbest possible way to handle it.
And fortunately, some states are opening up again.
Governor Cuomo could put locks on everybody's door and not let anyone come out, and it won't do any good.
Why wouldn't people staying at home?
It makes sense that it would reduce somewhat, since they're home and they can't spread it to the person in the grocery store.
Except they're not.
Okay, except they're not.
In what way is that?
Well, people are leaving for the grocery store.
Of course, like me.
Every single New Yorker has a dog, okay?
Now, I lived in a high-rise for 20 years.
High-rises, you all take the same elevator.
The air shafts through those emergency stairs.
There was a kid smoking pot 20 floors below me.
You can smell.
So, you cannot quarantine people.
You walk by the same door van.
So, it's a joke to say that you can quarantine people in high-rises, okay?
They're too clustered.
You can't do it.
And we see it now.
Cuomo admitted the other day that everyone... He was actually quite shocked when he read the report.
He even looked that way on television.
He said, I can't believe that the majority was contracted at home.
Yeah.
Because it defied the rationale of what they had done.
So I assume what you're saying was... When this first started, since I handled many emergencies, I always began by making a chart of where are the biggest problems going to be, and I put my resources where the biggest problems were.
That's kind of the theory I use for reducing crime.
I also used it for dealing with West Nile virus, anthrax.
So the biggest problem, as you say, is with the elderly.
So their death rate is roughly 60 and over.
Would that be where you would start?
I believe that's about right, yeah.
So 60 and over, and then it becomes worse if they have underlying conditions.
What percentage of the overall fatalities roughly is in that category?
I think in New York, a huge percent of the total deaths are 70, 50, 60 or more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then as you get younger, it goes down except for this new situation, which may or may not be connected involving the very young.
So most of your resources should have been put in the 60 to 100 category.
And the first thing you'd focus on are the nursing homes because that's where they're All together and likely to spread it to each other.
So why the failure?
Why the failure to make that common sense?
What I'm saying to you now is not science, it's common sense.
Yeah.
Why the great failure to make that analysis?
I think part of it was just your bungling ineptness of a government like Albany.
But the other part of it is there's this extreme Elderly bias against the elderly in the health care system, whereas they don't deserve to live.
They've lived a long life and they don't deserve our research.
So they're viewed as expendable to start out with.
And if you're Governor Cuomo and you have a mandate of we've got to reduce the hospital beds, blah, blah, blah, and get these people out of the hospital, be damned.
I don't care where you put them.
And that was the mentality and it was conscious.
It wasn't an accident.
He said, I don't care if you're infected.
You will accept them, Mr. Nursing homeowner, Mrs. Nursing homeowner, or else we'll come down on you hard with our health department.
So that knowing would kill people.
I believe, we were talking about this earlier on your radio show last week, was your exact job, U.S.
Attorney, is the only one I think that has the clout to do anything about it.
This needs to be investigated.
In my opinion, it's crime.
It's manslaughter.
You're not allowed to kill people as the doctor.
And so Cuomo needs to be investigated for manslaughter, U.S.
Attorney.
And after you and I spoke, there's already been calls for that exact thing.
I forgot her name.
The Republican Assemblywoman in New York.
She was on Fox.
I forget her name.
Nicole Malliotakis?
Yeah, yeah.
And then some officials in Long Island.
So the word's getting out there, but this is going to be a scandal beyond the Moreland Commission.
You know, I'll remember.
Well, this was, I mean, this was, if you could make a wrong decision, This was about as obviously a wrong decision as possible.
Even if you don't know the niceties of crisis management, which I teach, but I also teach common sense.
So you're given a report.
This group is the most at risk.
This is the least at risk.
I mean, suppose we had concentrated our resources on the 60 and over.
We had housed them in the right way.
In other words, use the—the president gave them a very large ship.
They demanded it at one point.
They were dying for it.
And then they never used it.
And then the governor, I think quite wisely, opened up Javits Center.
I don't know how many beds there, but my recollection is at least four or five hundred that could be segregated.
So I once did a plan for New York in case we got smallpox.
I hope they still have it.
But we could have handled it in some of the hospitals that have now been closed, some of the schools that have been closed.
We never were really at risk of not having hospital beds.
So I always thought both the mayor and the governor were exaggerating that to get resources.
Then they got the resources.
So if an older person is infected, why not put them in the usual kind of isolation that we put people with contagious diseases?
There's no good explanation for it.
Just a dumb decision.
We could say it was even intentional.
You know, you know the crime.
If it was sort of an accidental bumbling, he accidentally hit somebody on the road, it's manslaughter.
If you knew it, that's that's murder.
OK, I think they knew what they were doing.
They didn't care.
And and so, yeah, the simple solution would be to take three nursing homes in New York, say you are going to be designated to accept only infected patients.
And then start doing it that way.
That's one way to, you don't even need the Javits Center.
Just, you know, make some hospitals designated as sick.
And then those get the proper care.
See, nursing homes are not hospitals.
Most people think they are.
They're legally just apartment buildings with assisted food and so forth.
So they do not have in the slightest the capability to handle a problem like this.
Everyone in Albany and Cuomo knew that.
So, Going forward, and this is what they should have done, is set aside certain nursing homes, give them the proper staff, the proper equipment, and treat the patients with medications.
Don't just let them get a fever and die.
Give them hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, plasma, okay?
And if you do those things, there really shouldn't be many deaths.
I'm sorry to interrupt this very, very interesting interview, but when you take a short break, we'll be right back.
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So now let's get to Hydroxychloroquine.
And I got myself kind of involved in that dispute quite by accident.
Two doctors that I know, because right at the very beginning, I talked to some doctors just to find out what was going on.
And two of them said, I don't have patients yet.
But I think that malaria drug would be helpful here.
He was thinking theoretically.
Because it works to slow down a virus.
It works to improve your immune system.
It's a very good prophylactic for malaria.
It works remarkably well for two or three other illnesses.
Rheumatoid arthritis, I believe.
They were making the whole case.
And also, it's a no-risk drug.
We've had it for 50 years.
No risk doesn't mean it doesn't have side effects.
No risk means we know the side effects and we can prescribe around them.
So if I have arrhythmia, you don't give it to me.
But most people don't have arrhythmia, so they can have it.
Then several doctors started to put out studies, including Dr. Zelenko, who's been made into, well, been attacked, let's put it that way.
But I looked at his records and his records are remarkable in terms of you give it right away.
Then the French doctor, the Chinese records, Italian doctors.
It's being used in Europe now as a almost as a anticipatory medicine.
The prophylactic they're giving it, yeah.
Yeah, prophylactic, particularly if you come in, we had this problem with anthrax.
People would get tested for anthrax.
They'd have certain mild symptoms.
Everybody thought they had anthrax.
So they got tested, but the test wasn't coming back for four days.
And if you wait too long, then the...
the antibiotic is useless.
So they would, we would give the antibiotic anyway.
Same thing here.
So why, why the battle against hydroxychloroquine?
What, what?
Pure politics.
It's, we're living, we're living in a time where the far left will destroy the economy,
kill people, do whatever it takes to get power.
It's a, it's a, 102 years ago we had the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
And it tried, people don't know this, but it tried to come here to the United States.
And they were just saying they were buying, you know, so we have this radical Bolshevik Revolution point three, 3.0.
And so if making hydroxychloroquine looks stupid and silly, if it hurts Trump, then they'll do it.
That's the other thing Cuomo has done.
I had a hunch, and I was talking to Joe Piscopo about it, and then I confirmed it, and now other people have confirmed it, is these drugs are not being given.
If you look at the chart of all the death rates in Detroit, San Francisco, whatever, and then way up here is New York.
There's no biological reason the people in New York would be 100 times greater death risk.
It's the way they're being treated, plus the death rates are being fudged, too.
They're not being given these drugs at Elmhurst and Wyckoff and these hospitals.
And they're actually laughing at it, mocking it, for political reasons.
And so the way it works is there's enough evidence, as you said, it's a safe drug, it's on the market, we know that.
There's no downside to giving it.
And there's plenty of observational quality research.
It's not just, it's not anecdotal.
People use the wrong word.
And so it's observational published studies.
So it'd be unethical.
In the world of medicine, when you've got therapy A and B and one isn't working, it's unethical to keep giving the placebo in a cancer trial.
You stop the trial early.
That concept.
It's unethical to not give this drug.
So that's the long and short of hydroxychloroquine.
It's become a political football.
And I think President Trump realizes that.
So he's staying quiet on Remdesivir.
If you want to kill Remdesivir, Have Trump say something.
Now, Remdesivir has shown some utility, some facility for dealing with it, but Fauci wasn't very enthusiastic about it.
Fauci and his lab helped create it with his funding, so that's his pet project.
But he was playing it down just to lower expectations or whatever but the reality is the study that got it approved so far was in the sickest of the sick and you know the drug when you give it earlier will I guarantee you be highly effective and like the antibody antibiotic you're giving for anthrax or what have you it will be highly effective as a prophylactic I believe you could make it in pill right now it's an IV So, when Gilead makes this as a pill and you can give it to a lot of people, that's going to be the future of remdesivir for this disease.
A lot like Tamiflu is for the influenza.
They're similar viruses.
They're single-stranded RNA viruses.
So, I have high hopes for remdesivir, but they're starting with baby steps, trying it out in the people who are near death and so forth.
Does it also, is it also basically free of dangerous side effects that can't be managed?
That's a newer drug so we don't know quite yet and that's why they're being more conservative about it.
Because when you start to give it to anyone who walks into the ER room and then you may realize, oh my gosh, we're hurting them.
So there's, unlike hydroxychloroquine, there is a reason to be a little slow and So what would you recommend right now about the reopening of the economy to the president or let's say to the places that are holding back like New York, California, the Democratic governors are holding back?
If I were advising President Trump right now, I would Have a focus on the elderly and the immunocompromised and have special nursing homes for them and so forth.
So start home quarantining the most vulnerable.
Then get the people at risk, nurses, doctors, get them to test.
And if they have an antibody test, then they can probably feel like they're safe.
So then you start to get this workforce that has antibodies so they're immune, okay?
And if it's Nebraska or something where the rates are really low, you can open those up much faster.
And that's how I would go ahead.
And what about restaurants and department stores and baseball?
What would you do with that?
The rest of our economy, the rest of our life, really.
I think sports is an important part of our culture and we can do a lot of them without people in the stands.
It's all about TV revenue anyway.
So just have baseball games without stands, fans, what have you.
Definitely golf should be back.
There's no reason golf should not.
I agree with you, doctor.
I would see if you're going to give me a note that would say you're going to prescribe it for my mental health.
So it becomes an essential.
Yeah.
Well, golf is an important... I know it's an essential for the president.
I don't know how he's... I don't know how he's doing what... This is the longest he's ever gone not playing golf, even when he ran.
Down here in Florida, it's a big economy and that's what everyone does when they're retired.
And so talking about mental health, you take their golf away, they're stuck in their homes and they're going crazy.
So it's important.
It's the only way people get out of the house, and it's a big industry, and it also drives tourism.
So, Florida needs to open up the golf... I live on a golf course.
I'm looking out at one hole.
They got rid of those noodles, you know, the thing that was preventing the ball from going in, and now they've got... So, golf is coming back.
Are they playing across the street?
Are they playing?
Some people playing?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So, one of the things that will be very useful, In the period of time when hopefully we open up and wait for a return, if it's going to happen, is if we studied what happened and could figure out what do we do right, what do we do wrong.
Was it really necessary to stop people from 20 to 55 from going to work?
What's the risk in somebody 20 to 55 years old who doesn't have any serious condition?
What's the risk they run that they're going to get this disease and that it's going to be fatal?
It's as great as just about anything else, right?
I mean, there's always a risk.
Right, yeah.
A, there's always a risk.
of death and cancer and heart disease.
People die.
And unfortunately, you can't stop it.
So you've got to put it in perspective, number one.
And if the overall risk to the 35-year-old worker or whatever is the same as it is for dying of the flu or cancer or something, then you don't do anything about it, period.
And in the fall, from now going forward, you just focus on the risky patients.
And so if you see a spike in the fall and right before the election and they try to hype it to prevent the election from happening or something, you can't, you can't allow that.
There's no scientific reason for it.
And from what we've seen so far, there's no evidence.
Okay.
Anthony Fauci and everyone who wanted us to do what we've already done.
He can't sit there now and point to a single piece of data that says, see, I was right.
Quite to the contrary.
Everyone in New York is getting it, even though they've been mitigated, which is a euphemism for health arrest.
So, there's no evidence that it worked.
That's what we can learn.
It doesn't work.
Well, let me ask you a somewhat parochial question.
Why is it so much worse in New York?
On every measurement, whether we talk about death or contracting the disease or nursing homes, elderly people.
Florida has a lot of nursing homes.
They lost about 300 people.
We've lost 6,000.
In nursing homes.
It's not biology, it's politics.
And there was a prediction by the great scientists about a month ago that Florida was going to mimic New York.
In other words, it happened in New York, now it's going to happen in Florida, particularly because of their elderly population and because they hadn't been closed down properly.
So why New York?
What, what, what, how do you see and you'd have to, you'd have to kind of take the metropolitan area, New York, Northern New Jersey, Southern Connecticut.
There's only one explanation for it.
It's not a biology or a medicine.
It's, it's how it was handled from a policy standpoint.
Uh, and then on top of that, the death rates are inflated because there'll be doctors.
This is a fact.
It's not a conspiracy.
The doctors are being told to fill out the death forms.
As virus caused, even if they don't even have a test.
So what's the motivation for that?
Get more funds?
I don't know what, but I don't believe the death rates are as high.
Anthony Fauci today said, I think the death rates are higher than being reported.
No, I think the death rates are lower than being reported.
I think they're inflating them in New York.
Look at the chart.
There's no explanation for it.
Well, you could argue that there's an explanation for why there might be more infection in New York.
Yes.
But you can't argue for why those infections are more fatal than somewhere else.
It's the same virus in New York and in Florida.
To your point, look at apples to apples.
The same type of patient.
Nursing home Florida, nursing home New York.
We just do it on a per capita basis.
And whoever has more per capita seems to be doing something wrong in the stage from the time that you contract it until the time you either die or are cured.
Look at how Texas, Governor Abbott, DeSantis, Florida, and Cuomo, New York handled nursing homes, and you'll get to the answer.
Well, Doctor, this has been really... So, you're going to publish your book, Medical Advocate, right?
Yeah.
You going to send me a copy of it before?
Sure, sure.
Can I sneak one out of you?
Hey, I wanted to tell you something else.
Please, anything.
The virus, it explains Anthony Fauci's behavior.
This is now out in Newsweek, and Anthony Fauci in 2011 in the Washington Post admitted to it in an op-ed, so what I'm about to tell you is totally true, is the NIH, under his guidance, was manipulating, engineering, creating man-made viruses such as Ebola, such as this SARS that escaped from the Wuhan lab.
They were made in a lab.
Anthony Fauci, it's very controversial, so he had to write an op-ed in the Washington Post about it, okay?
So, and that With our four million dollars of funding and the Wuhan lab, this virus almost certainly was indeed made in a lab.
And Anthony Fauci is guilty.
And he's saying, oh, my gosh, you know, we better shut down the country because I'm going to kill a bunch of people.
I think that's a lot of what's going on there.
And the the program was shut down in 2014 by President Obama.
What happened in 2014?
Ebola.
OK.
And 2014 Ebola is another engineered virus.
So then Anthony Fauci in the early days of the Trump administration in 2017 took advantage of the opportunity and restarted his pet project of these virus labs, okay?
So Anthony Fauci caused this, I'm telling you.
I mean, that's all right.
It's all documented.
Read the Newsweek article.
Well, it is a matter of real concern that he invested our money in the Wuhan lab, which was found by the State Department just recently to be very disorganized, not very well run.
They actually found some instances of workers there becoming infected.
The circumstantial evidence that it comes from the lab is pretty darn strong.
I mean, you have a lab in the middle of where this all emerges, that has all these bats, that has been working on making the, you know, the super virus.
You have a wet market that doesn't sell bats.
No one bought a bat there.
They don't like bats in that part of China.
So who brought it there?
The laboratory brought it there.
So it's highly unlikely that it comes from any place else but the laboratory.
And I guess it would be very embarrassing for Fauci if, even if it turns out to be accidental, an accidental escape from the laboratory, it'd be very embarrassing for him if he essentially paid for it.
When there were these warnings within the Obama administration, it's not worth doing this.
He argued that it was worth doing this because if we ever get a virus like this, we'll know how to handle it.
The other argument was, well, we may get a virus like this because you created it.
And just recently, a couple days ago, a Johns Hopkins and Harvard doctor came out against it.
So any rational Dr. PhD, whatever, said this is too risky.
It's crazy.
And oh, by the way, it's probably a violation of the Geneva Convention.
But Fauci got it.
And once it was killed in 014 by President Obama, he revived it, Fauci did.
That's why man behaves the way he behaves.
His fingerprints are all over this.
Well, Doctor, this is very, very illuminating.
We'll be back checking with you.
I'm afraid this isn't going to be over.
This has now become not just a health issue, but a major political issue, unfortunately.
And that probably has a lot to do with why we are where we are.
But thank you for casting light on it and being brave enough to tell us your opinions.
Be back.
Pleasure.
Take care.
Stay healthy.
Thank you.
Well, that was a very interesting interview.
I think it puts a lot of things in perspective and raises a lot of questions, but all very important ones that aren't being raised in the media, which is not really helping us to try to understand how this happened so we can prevent it from happening in the past.
This is Rudy Giuliani, and we'll be back very, very soon with another edition of Common Sense.
Thank you.
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