Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Drew Pinsky dissect President Biden's G7 Parkinsonian symptoms, contrasting them with Trump's energy while debating the 25th Amendment and media bias as a "Praetorian guard." They scrutinize Pfizer's alleged fertility suppression, Johnson & Johnson's $700M talc settlement, and Ozempic's severe risks like sepsis, drawing parallels to the Fen-Phen scandal. Finally, they critique Bill Gates' methane-reduction investments as scientific hubris, arguing that commercialized obesity treatments and irrational certitude threaten public health more than simple aggression ever did. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, it's Friday, which means it's time for another Roundtable extravaganza,
and joining me are two Rubin Report veterans.
One, a professor of health policy at Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and the other, an addiction medicine specialist and host of Ask Dr. Drew, Dr. Drew Pinsky.
I feel that for a moment I should put on my glasses too, otherwise I really look like the dumbest of the three of us, which is true, but people shouldn't know that just by the glasses, right?
Okay, we're gonna just dive into a couple interesting things happening this week, not purely political, just a little bit of the cultural stuff and some COVID stuff and some science stuff and some Ozempic stuff, which I don't know that we've talked about Ozempic on the show before, but I thought you guys would be perfect for what I wanted to dive into today.
So first, I just wanna show you, we're gonna show you two videos here.
I think there is, I'm not sure if there's audio on them so we can talk over them, but these are Biden at the G7 yesterday.
And something is going on with this guy, and I'm gonna try to do this without being glib
since I have two serious guests on the show, and just take a look at this.
I practice straight internal medicine now, and most of what I do, in fact, is geriatrics.
And so when I look at, again, I don't know him, I'm not his doctor, but there are certain things that as physicians we can sort of observe and describe, like a rash or a certain behavior, or in this case, what you describe, Dave, as the slow motion.
He has motoric slowing.
He has rigidity.
He has what's called a mask-like faces.
The other day we saw him standing with this wild, stuck smile on his face while everybody else was dancing.
So when you add up the motoric slowing, the rigidity, the mask-like faces, those are called, I'm describing what we see.
By the way, Dave, I just gonna say, I worry more about, you know, people are very worried about what they're seeing and the slowing and all this stuff.
But listen, if he is taking medication, because sometimes he moves around a little better, and that's usually medication.
And those medicines cause very strange cognitive changes.
So I almost worry about that more than some of the things that people are worrying about in their common discourse about what's going on with Joe Biden.
Right, and Drew, you sort of hit this, but we're all sort of sympathetic to someone of a certain age with all the time zones and flying and pressure and everything else.
Even if he was cognitively 100%, and again, we're not diagnosing him, you'd still accept some level of, we've all had jet lag, you fly to Europe, you have jet lag.
Well, then let me ask you guys one other thing on this, not on the medical side, but purely on the political side.
It strikes me that it's fairly obvious, let's say that he's probably on medication or that there's a small group of people that know what's really going on here.
This seems not to be hyperbolic, like it could be the biggest political scandal in 50 years or something like that, since Watergate, if that actually is the case.
Does that sound totally off the reservation to you, Jay?
Okay, so like you can go back in American history and look at FDR, right?
So the press and the White House hid his disability from the American public.
And, you know, suppose that the American public had known, would they have like undermined?
I mean, the guy obviously was cognitively still all there, like he was making decisions sharply to the end of his life.
The difference here, there was also, like, I think you can go back and look at Ronald Reagan, right, toward the end of his time as president.
There were allegations of this, and, you know, there was some question, but this strikes me as, like, qualitatively much, much worse than either of those two, right?
The FDR wasn't cognitively, there was no question about its cognitive capacity.
Ronald Reagan, by the end, you could start to say it slowed, but I didn't Again, I was young then, so maybe I wasn't seeing it, but I didn't see anything close to this.
Here, what we have is, in real time, if you have elderly parents or grandparents and you've seen this, you don't really need to be a doctor to say, look, something's not right.
Well, right before we started, Drew, I mentioned to Jay that I spent a lot of time with my grandmother who had dementia in her later years, and I was taking her to geriatric doctors and to the cognitive people and all that.
And so much of what I see in him is the same thing.
The rigidity in the hands, you mentioned something about that, but also the emotional dysregulation, which you see with Biden in a lot of these speeches, where it sounds sort of monotone and then he starts screaming out of nowhere.
Listen, Jay mentioned two historical antecedents, but there's one more egregious one, which was Woodrow Wilson, who was in bed brain-dead with a stroke, massive stroke, and his wife ran the government for three months.
So what was our takeaway from that?
Did we learn anything from that experience as a country?
Or we just went, oh well, moving along, move on.
I don't know.
It seems like we've been challenged by this.
And there's an interesting thing in what Jay was just sort of shining a light on.
Which is, we are living a lot longer now, a lot better.
And so we're gonna have older people, look at our Congress, in positions of power and decision-making.
And look, for Jay and my profession, there are things in place to make sure we don't stay in too long for what happens to us when we're aging.
There should probably be something like that in place for our government leaders too, given the reality of people living so long these days, and reasonably so.
And as Jay said, it's human beings in these positions, no one else.
I don't know exactly where you guys are on Trump's support, and that's actually largely irrelevant.
The reason I thought that was interesting is if you just look at his ability to joke and be irreverent and silly and not disappoint, and the energy and all of that.
I mean, he's definitely a great entertainer, and you can see that.
And Drew, I completely agree with you.
He is cognitively just, you know, I don't know if you wanna say all there, depending on your opinion of all there for Trump, but I'll say this, is like, there's nothing, there's no deficit at all.
Like, you're not worried that, what you're worried, you may be worried about what his policies are or whatever, but you're not worried at all about his, Again, you're shining lights on little interesting things here.
And isn't that what leadership is?
This is a very striking difference, the physical movement difference.
We've had Trump on once, and I don't wanna say too much, but perhaps there's been a little contact recently.
Stay tuned on that.
Let me just mention one other thing on this, on the media side, because you guys remember a couple of years ago when Donald Trump, on a rainy day, walked down those stairs.
No, not stairs, he walked down a ramp Slowly, and everyone was on CNN, 25th Amendment, we gotta get rid of him, versus how the media covers Joe Biden.
That I think we can connect to a lot of things that you guys do specialize in on the COVID side and misinformation and all that.
That to me is the craziest part of this, that the media is pretending that we all don't see a thing that we all very obviously see, Drew.
Drew, I appreciate the kind words, and the devastating takedowns, insane.
But actually, let me just push back just slightly on the media.
Although I do share your hopeful take, there is some aspect of it that's just, if you have a political leader that the media like, The media actually is really important to hold political leaders, especially our presidents, to account.
If they are allowed to do whatever nonsense they want without being held to account by the media, it's very difficult to get the American public to pay attention to it.
A lot of the nonsense during COVID happened because, especially after Biden got into office, with the vaccine mandates and all that, normal media, if you'd had a president they didn't like, they would have questioned a lot of the things they did.
Instead, they were like a Praetorian guard for Biden, with the censorship, with all kinds of things that normally, I think, what Americans would just look at and say, are you kidding me?
And I think it's very dangerous that the media has taken sides in this way.
It would be much, much better for the Republic if the media were a reasonable constraint on the behavior of Democratic presidents, and they're not.
And by the way, the best argument for what you just said there would be that Donald Trump, for whatever his flaws were during COVID and whatever anyone might think about warp speed and everything else, he never mandated the vax.
But had he mandated the vax, the very same media that was telling you that you had to get vaccinated, would have said that it would have killed you.
You're both nodding in agreement on that.
So why don't we move this to the next COVID topic?
Because this is absolutely wild.
Dr. Mike Yeadon, who is one of the former vice presidents of Pfizer, is now saying that the COVID vaccines were actually designed to reduce fertility.
Take a look at this.
unidentified
If you've followed me, you'll know I spent over 30 years in research in the pharmaceutical industry and biotech.
Intentional Harm?00:15:57
unidentified
I trained in toxicology and I worked with colleagues designing experimental molecules that we hoped would become medicines.
That gives me the credentials to stand, as it were, in the shoes of the designers of these vaccines and answer the question, what were you thinking when you made these design decisions?
Now, you can go and watch any of my interviews, but I'll cut to the chase.
And you may not believe it, but I am sure, not slightly but sure, these materials were designed intentionally to harm, maim, and kill, and to reduce human fertility.
That is my verdict, and I can stand it up, I will be in court, Supreme Court in Costa Rica very shortly, and I'll be using exactly this argument that I will give the detail.
Okay, so first, I don't see, I don't think he's right.
I don't think that, specifically in one point, he's not, he can't, I don't, like in my experience with drug developers and others, I don't see that any of them would intentionally design a molecule in order to create infertility, and that just doesn't ring true with me.
I don't see anything in the sort of the makeup of the vaccine that, just from this molecular sequence or whatever, that screams out this is going to cause infertility.
I don't, just none of that, that particular thing doesn't make sense.
But it may, like the question of does it cause infertility, right?
Does it cause birth defects?
Those are empirical questions that are actually often answered after you've rolled the vaccine out, because the randomized trials don't have pregnant women in them.
They generally don't have, they don't ask that kind of question.
So that's why I don't, I think he's being hyperbolic in ways that I don't agree with.
I do agree with one part of this, although maybe there's some of the spirit of it, in the sense that I think that the regulatory agencies have been very, very slow to look at these kinds of side effects from this vaccine.
And they were motivated in large part because they thought that if people thought that there were these kinds of side effects, or if they actually identified these kinds of side effects, no one would take the vaccine.
I don't understand why that would be a bad thing.
If one were to find that there was fertility defects caused by the vaccine, then you should not be recommending it to pregnant women, to women that are trying to get pregnant, or just generally to younger people.
It would make no sense to do that, right?
So that would not be a bad outcome.
And yet the regulatory agencies, because they were afraid that it would cause vaccine hesitancy, I believe, that's the motivation, did not Act as rapidly as they should have and as rigorously as they should have to identify the side effect profiles of this vaccine like they would normally for other drugs and products.
It makes sense in that exactly what Jay is saying.
It's that the intent part doesn't ring true, but if it does so as a matter of fact, well, you can look back at design and say, well, they should have at least known this was going to do that as part of the design.
And so I kind of get that.
But Dr. Hayden's been around hyperbolic with a lot of ideas for a little while here.
This isn't the first one.
But I'll tell you, there are three things that I would like answered.
And by the way, keep your eye on Joseph Freiman.
Have you interviewed him yet?
No, he really is very careful in his criticism, and they're quite accurate.
John Campbell recently highlighted his stuff, and it was really quite, quite good.
But there are three things that I'm concerned with.
One is, it's becoming increasingly evident the spike protein is the pathogenic piece of the virus.
Why are we pushing so hard on a vaccine?
I understand why you created the vaccine to begin with, but once it becomes increasingly clear that the spike protein itself is pathogenic, Why are we pushing so hard on that particular form of vaccine when there are whole viral vaccines out there that don't have so much spike protein, number one?
Number two, why do we continue to push on vaccinating young males where we know they're at no risk of Omicron and some real risk of myocarditis?
And then finally, the third question is, okay, now we're actually admitting their excess deaths, something you couldn't admit five minutes ago, but we could all see it.
Let me connect this to something else because there was a lawsuit involving Johnson & Johnson.
And of course, Johnson & Johnson, they were the ones that put out the non-mRNA vaccine.
And then it sort of got pushed out of the way once mRNA became the thing.
But they are now in a massive, they just had a massive, massive settlement on baby powder of all things.
Check this out.
From Reuters, Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay $700 million to settle an investigation by 42 U.S.
states and Washington, D.C.
into its marketing of baby powder and other talc-based products blamed for allegedly causing cancer.
The settlement resolves charges that Johnson & Johnson misled consumers into believing that its talc products, which sold for more than a century before stopping, were safe.
Reuters, Johnson, oh, sorry, that's it.
So they've settled for $700 million here.
I mean, you know, in light of everything that has happened over the last couple of years, I'm pretty sure everyone watching this has Johnson & Johnson baby powder in their house, whether you've got a baby there or not.
It's just the stuff that you use for all sorts of stuff.
Post-haircut, you might use it.
Jay, I mean, is this just another thing?
Like every year, we're just gonna wake up and go, boy, everything that we trusted, every organization, every product, it all was faulty.
Well, part of the problem is that for something like that, it's hard to know, right?
Because it's so pervasive.
There isn't a controlled study.
It's just a very difficult question to answer.
And there are very likely things in our environment that we use that are harmful that we don't know about.
We learn ex post that they're harmful.
The issue then is like, what do we do about that?
You know, life expectancy were going up before the pandemic, regardless of all of these environmental exposures.
So I don't think, again, you need to panic about these kinds of things.
But at the same time, you shouldn't automatically dismiss them out of hand.
And especially central, like the government, the public health authorities, should not be gaslighting people that think they're injured around this.
Again, I'll just bring it back to the vaccine, like the experience with the COVID vaccine.
There were legitimately COVID vaccine-injured people.
that wanted to talk to each other, get some kind of compensation from the government, at least some acknowledgement that they were harmed, and the government went out of its way to tell them that they weren't actually COVID vaccine injured, to suppress their Facebook groups so they couldn't speak with each other, and to tell people that the vaccine was entirely safe, when they had no way of knowing it was entirely safe.
Even after the randomized trial was done.
Drew, you mentioned Joe Fryman, who's a fantastic scientist.
He reanalyzed the COVID vaccine trials for the mRNA to see what the rate of adverse events were.
He found a 1 in 800 measure of serious adverse events in the randomized trial.
I mean, what's one of these things where like, okay, you're in the middle, it's December 2020, everyone's scared to death about COVID.
You have this product that all of a sudden has promises to reduce the symptomatic infection rate by 95% for a couple of months.
The question is, how do you use it?
1-800 is a big number.
Now, serious adverse events doesn't mean necessarily killing you.
In fact, what it means is like, you know, severe reactions.
Rarely it'll get you in the hospital, but it's not something you want to ignore, right?
But it's much higher, as Drew said, than most vaccines that are on the market.
So the question is, how do you use that thing?
How do you use that product?
The reasonable way to use it is to say, look, let's look at the high-risk people for whom this product might, the benefits might outweigh the harms, and recommend it for them, carefully, You know, making sure it's not like, you know, too aggressively and with informed consent.
And for younger people, for whom the benefit almost certainly does not outweigh the harms, don't recommend it and certainly don't mandate it.
But I would, to follow what you're asking, look no further than your food sources to look for things that have been covered by lobby groups and scientists and Various kinds of campaigns to manipulate into you into yummy, yummy foods that are not good for you.
So it's all over the place.
But the courts are not the harbinger of truth.
They're not there to determine the truth or falsity of a claim.
And so this talc causes cancer is still questionable.
It's just that they made a calculus that they should settle as opposed to try to see this through.
And there might be something there, but it reminds me of many, many claims that have been taken against companies where massive, massive liability has been alleged or determined by the court that have really very little to do with the truth.
Drew, it's funny because I remember recommending my mom take it at one point in the late 90s or early 2000s, and when the thing came on the news that it was causing heart attacks, she's like, why are you trying to kill me, Jay?
You didn't have her change her will right before that, did you?
All right, let's connect this to a drug that is absolutely on the market right now, which I suspect will not be on the market forever, which is Ozempic.
Of course, this is the weight loss drug that basically every celebrity is on right now.
Jillian Michaels went on Sage Steele's podcast and talked a bit about that.
unidentified
You will plateau on this drug.
Not an opinion.
Fact.
Fact.
Google that.
I'm encouraging you to Google.
Don't trust me.
Google it for yourself.
You will plateau on the drug.
Your body is homeostatic, which means over time it's seeking a balance.
is a hormone, incretin, it's a hormone. So when you are giving the body a hormone exogenously,
over time the body is like, "Oh, I'm going to stop making this on my own. Oh, I'm going to develop a
tolerance to this." And you will plateau on the drugs.
Google it.
Now then, what are you going to do when they stop working physiologically?
Do you think you're going to get off of it?
Because you will gain all of the weight back.
All of the meta-analyses show us this.
Google it!
It's not my f***ing opinion, okay?
So here's the bigger problem.
Now when the drug stops working, If you choose to get off of it, because it's also very expensive, you're handcuffed to this drug for the rest of your life, Google it.
Okay.
So, we get off of it.
You've got a couple of issues.
Fact.
There is, quote, let me quote Peter Atia, hopefully he's more credible than Dr. Terry Dubrow, he will tell you that in his practice, according to the DEXA scans he does with his patients, he sees muscle loss at a, quote, alarming rate.
He uses these drugs as a last resort and he won't even put patients on them until he does a DEXA scan to make sure that they're not older and in a dangerous position where they can't afford to lose muscle mass or bone density.
You're going to begin to hear about people who died on Ozembic and Manjaro.
I know of one case I just found out last night, it's a very high-profile case here in Los Angeles, was a bowel obstruction from one of these drugs.
And the bowel obstruction is how people are dying.
In addition to these bowel obstructions and bowel rupture, they're getting septic from the... and it's very rapid for some reason.
In addition, I'm seeing gastroparesis, which is an inability of the stomach to move, and that's a horrible condition once it develops.
And then finally, as Jillian said, sarcopenia.
And sarcopenia, she mentioned Peter Ortega, his whole focus on not allowing sarcopenia to happen as we age, because it is one of the highest predictors of aging poorly, longevity, and having difficulty as we age.
You mentioned cost-benefit analysis or benefit-harm analysis.
You were a fringe epidemiologist back during the COVID era.
It strikes me that obesity is a particularly dangerous area for drug intervention because of the fact that it's so common You know, I think, what is it, like 40% of the American population or more are obese, adult population are obese.
And because people so desperately want to fix it.
And so it's really easy to take advantage of people.
So this drug, Ozempic, it was first used in diabetics.
There were good reasons to use it in diabetics, and it kind of worked for diabetics.
The expansion of it to use for the entire population wide, it's not at all surprising that you're gonna see Portions of the population that take it have these side effects, have some side effects that we didn't anticipate, and some of which we did anticipate.
I'm reminded of an earlier weight loss drug, Fenfen.
Yep.
And that's the same exact drug.
It was very, very popular for a while until there was a major side effect identified with lung... Cardiac.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden, it was like, okay, this was just poison that was put on the population.
Right, so again, as the layman here, this just, to me, is just like another one where you're both exactly right.
They are going to end up saying that there's all of this side effect, nobody should be on this, but Drew, can you talk a little bit about how does this stuff go from being a niche medication for something To then, what then happens in the system after that, that it then just gets commercialized to everybody, as Jay's talking about?
Violent agreement in favor of moderation and humility.
I don't understand how we got to this point where physicians think that they know how to solve all of the, we barely know how to care for our patients as best I can tell.
Again, I can tell you guys as the layman, and just anecdotally, I once, many, many years ago, I had anxiety when I was getting on planes, and I went to a doctor to try to get something, I don't know, like Xanax or something, and he told me I had time shift disorder, and tried to give me some other prescription, and I noticed that his, I kid you not, Drew, you'll love this one, his stapler was from Prozac.
And I thought, this is absolutely insane.
This is like, the stupidest drug version would be if you went to, I know neither one of you are endorsing this, but if you went to buy marijuana and the guy gave you crack, like it's just absolutely crazy.
First off, you guys see me on Twitter, you know how much I enjoy steak and cooking and all that, and I've largely been doing the carnivore diet, which has been unbelievably good for me, and I've had my blood tested, and it's all good, and I'm not recommending it to anyone.
But it's interesting to me that here's the man who owns the largest amount of farmland in the United States, Bill Gates, who now wants to, as he said, do something to cows so that they either don't burp or fart as much, or that we'll just get off meat altogether.
Either way, I sense he's going to profit a lot from one of those things.
I mean, I think that the issue here is just How do you explain the behavior of someone like Bill Gates, right?
So he has a career where he's like this arch capitalist and everyone thinks he's an evil guy because he's like monopolized.
But then he turns into this philanthropist and finds success in the public eye as being the good guy.
What you have is this like weird scientific, the scientific isn't the weird thing, but this mindset of engineering solutions to problems that are complex social problems that require careful like understanding of all the trade-offs and what his instinct is always seems to be in both his philanthropy and his capitalist work before is to like a very, very simple technological solution
which runs roughshod over all of the subtleties and often ends up causing more harm than good.
I mean, I think in this case, I don't know, maybe his technological breakthrough is a good one,
I have no idea, but I don't think that I'm not gonna be eating any of those cows if I can avoid it
So he's going to invent something, or I guess he has already, or is investing in this company
that's going to do something to cows so they don't burp and fart as much,
and that will be either the meatweed or it will be the artificially engineered meat.
that he will also somehow profit from.
By the way, this is the same guy who created Microsoft's Windows, which as you're right, he got into a major antitrust lawsuit over it, but that was the thing that put viruses on computers, and now he's supposed to be in charge of our viruses of our bodies.
Because I really, since Drew credited you, I'll do the same thing, that one of the reasons I did not go crazy on COVID on this show was that you were either the first or second expert that I had on, and you were kind of sobering.
So I was like, let me just pace this thing out a little bit.
But it seems to me that, to your point, guys like Bill Gates are looking for problems all the time, and they will do things not knowing, well, okay, the cow can't burp anymore, maybe we've now somehow changed its molecular structure, and the meat that you're going to be eating is going to do God knows what to you.
When I say science, I don't mean actual science, which I love, which I think is a fantastic way to learn about the world and improve the world.
I mean, I mean, capital T, capital S, science with a, you know, trademark sign.
That's, that's the problem.
Like, you have this, like, something that wears the skin suit of science and promises, it's like these hucksters promising you, just let's build a monorail, it'll solve all our problems.
I mean, you know, like, I just, it just comes across that way.
It's like someone who, like someone who's like, wants to sell you something rather than Really grappling.
These are real problems.
These are not things that we can just ignore, but whatever we choose to do is going to come with trade-offs.
It's not going to be magic, and he's promising magic, and I think that that is what makes me uncomfortable watching him.
It made me uncomfortable watching him during the pandemic, and it makes me uncomfortable watching him talk about cows and methane.
Yeah, I want to just highlight that again and also say that, you know, science is a procedure, it's a process, it's a way of trying to uncover the truth in the world.
And my friend Harvey Reich distilled it down to one phrase that I thought was so exactly right on.
He goes, look, it's just a scientific process.
It is an instrument that tells us the null hypothesis is either informative or non-informative.
That's science.
That's it.
The null hypothesis either told us something or it didn't tell us something.
And we build from there.
And I wanna say one other thing about Jay being so measured at the beginning.
I had the same experience, Dave, early on.
Although I've noticed his Twitter feed has become a little more lively lately.