All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 29, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:13:06
Pandemic Policies and Public Health Mistakes: Dr. Robert Redfield Speaks Out – SF504
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Thank you.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Hope you had a fantastic Thanksgiving, and I hope you are ready to give praise and thanks for a brilliant and educational conversation with Dr. Robert Redfield.
Dr. Robert Redfield was one of Fauci's colleagues and acolytes who came out and spoke publicly against Fauci.
He believes that there is potentially a risk of a new bird flu pandemic, not just, excuse me, because of a hunch he's got, But because of extraordinary ongoing gain-of-function research around bird flu, he also brilliantly exposed that Fauci's attitude to what gain-of-function actually means is part of the kind of generalized deception that we experience during the pandemic period,
i.e., They don't believe that it's gain-of-function research if you change a mammal or bird or, you know, ornithological virus into a human one, only if you start with a human one and all of that.
It's a really interesting and fascinating conversation, and it's brilliant to get insights from someone who knows how the system works.
If you're watching this on YouTube, get over to Rumble.
And if you're not on Awake and Wonder yet, become one, because then you'll be able to see things like this.
My amazing conversation with Jonathan Pajot.
I love this moment.
There's a whole slew of texts, we call them the Enochian texts, the Enochian tradition, that discuss how before the flood the humans made partnerships with these entities, these demons, and these demons taught them all these skills.
And the skills brought about corruption and that these skills brought about a kind of arrogance, this kind of pride that brought about the end of the world.
So the end of the world before the flood was caused by this This humans making some kind of deals with demons and then receiving technical skills and creating a society that fell apart.
Okay, without any more nonsense, let's get into my conversation with Dr. Robert Redfield, virologist, former director at the CDC, medic and scientist who understands at depth What went on during the pandemic, both politically and medically?
You're going to enjoy this conversation.
Thank you so much, Robert Redfield for joining us on Stay Free.
It's such a pleasure to see you, sir.
Good to see you, Russell.
We encountered one another briefly in a conversation with Bobby Kennedy and a group of people that were talking, it seemed primarily, about addiction.
Now we're going to have, hopefully, a wide-ranging conversation about the influence of Big Pharma on American health policy and the impact, therefore, of Big Pharma on the American population.
Firstly, I reckon I'd love to go in with a bold question.
Given you your former position and authority, given the assent of Bobby Kennedy and other not comparable figures, but affiliated figures, assuming that there is confirmation for Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makari et al., do you think that in 12 months' time people might say that the measures taken by the American government when it came to the COVID pandemic Actually did more harm than good when it comes to vaccines,
lockdowns, masks, public division, impact on people receiving treatment from anything from diabetes to cancer to heart conditions.
Still, when people talk about it in legacy media, they are almost...
Dying to say, yeah, but millions of lives, this is someone like Bill Maude, but millions of lives were saved by the vaccine.
How do you think, you know, not history will regard the decisions that were made during the pandemic, but, you know, the very near future in 12 months with the kind of information that's likely to be exposed, the kind of studies that are likely to be undertaken if Jay Bhattacharya becomes the head of the NIH, and the sort of general shift in the conversation now that the legacy media no longer has the stranglehold it once did?
You know, Russell, I think it would be an honest review of the policies and looking at them from a bi-directional point of view, that there were some policies that have benefit, but there were some policies that actually were not of benefit to public health.
You mentioned some of them.
The mandate of the vaccines was not in the public health interest.
The closing of the schools was not in the public health interest of K through 12s.
The closing of business to the degree that occurred was not in the interest of society.
So I think there'll be an honest understanding, sort of an over heavy handedness of some of these government policies.
It should have been more open, honest debate about them prior to their implementation.
I think the vaccine Warp Speed's vaccine was an important accomplishment that really was driven by President Trump.
I mean, he's really the reason why it happened.
And it did, in fact, save some lives of those of us that are highly vulnerable, over 65, for example.
But I don't think it was prudent to mandate the vaccine, particularly for those individuals that were not at high risk for bad outcome, those of us under 50, for example.
So hopefully there'll be an honest review.
I know myself as a CDC director, I'm very open about acknowledging the mistakes that were made.
I think the closing of industry, the closing of the schools, The over-heavy-handedness of mandating a vaccine, these were all significant public health mistakes.
Wow.
Do you think that we'll come to say that maybe closing schools was a mistake?
Do you think we'll come to say that vaccinating kids was a mistake unless they had sort of serious comorbidities?
Do you think that we'll come to regard that as a mistake?
Yeah, I think the idea of how the vaccine should have been deployed, it should have really been prioritized for high-risk individuals, particularly those over the age of 65, and as you mentioned, maybe younger individuals if they had very significant medical conditions.
I'm not in favor of the current CDC recommendation that has now recommended the COVID vaccine for children down to the age of six months.
I don't see the purpose of it.
The vaccine does not prevent infection.
It prevents serious illness and hospitalization and death.
And all of those are not something that people that are under the age of 50 are really at any subsequent risk for.
So I think there should be more rigorous debate about this, but I think the broad use of the vaccine in the general population, to me, was not indicated.
Have you heard like I have, Doctor, that potentially some studies that have been undertaken but are unlikely to be published indicate that with significant sample sizes, maybe up to 12,000 kids, There's an indication that children that were vaccinated have a significantly higher risk of a bunch of behavioural and heart and respiratory conditions than the non-vaccinated group of a study that
could be two groups, one size 2,000, one 10,000 that is being withheld right now.
I wonder if you've heard about that study.
Well, Russell, I haven't seen those studies.
I have seen some data that, of course, some of the mRNA vaccines were associated, for example, with myocarditis, pericarditis in adolescence.
I do think it's important that there's transparency about the safety profiles of these vaccines and people that do have data.
It should be made available for the public to review.
No vaccine is 100% safe.
There clearly are some significant side effects from the mRNA vaccines, and I think that data should be put in the public domain so it can be critically reviewed.
But I haven't seen the data you're referring to.
Yeah, I suppose that's it.
One of the things that I've recently started to consider is safety and, you know, what the conditions, what the clinical conditions are that determine safety, i.e., was it just that there were some checks on 100 kids five days later?
Or is it, you know, thousands of kids years later?
And obviously in the case of COVID vaccines, we don't have the time frame to even consider that.
And due to the nature of Operation Warp Speed and whatever motivated it to be undertaken at that speed, I suppose legitimately, the fact is that there was an unfolding crisis that there was some obligation to respond to in one way or another.
Probably, in 2024, those of us that didn't get any vaccines at all and regarded the entire exercise with scepticism aren't looking back thinking, I wish I'd gotten vaccinated, even if we had, like, you know, I did COVID two or three times and, you know, by and large did my best to obey regulations that I strongly disagreed with.
Do you think that sort of anecdotal and personal response is relatively fair, Doctor?
Well, I think it's going to be obviously critical to look at that mostly, again, I come back to the COVID vaccines in particular.
They really were never approved because they prevented infection.
So first people have to realize it's not a typical vaccine.
It doesn't prevent infection.
The vaccines were approved because they prevented serious illness, hospitalization, and death.
And therefore, if you're not at risk, For serious illness, hospitalization, and death, you can argue that the vaccine may not be something that you should focus on for yourself.
And I think this is where there were mistakes that there was sort of this blanket view that, you know, let's vaccinate everybody.
There should have been much more focus on vaccination of the vulnerable.
The other thing I'll say about the vaccine that's really important is that the current COVID vaccines They're non-durable.
That means like when you take a vaccine like for polio or measles, that vaccine will provide long-term protection, one year after another, 10 years, so maybe longer.
When you take the COVID vaccine, there's probably only a four to six month period where you're adequately immunized and protection from that vaccine.
So someone like myself that unfortunately is over the age of 65, I'm 73, I have a little type 2 diabetes.
I have hypertension.
I'm slightly overweight, although I'm trying to get that under control.
So you could say that I have risk factors for a bad outcome.
And so I can tell you now I've received my 9th COVID vaccine.
Now, I don't use the mRNA vaccine.
I like the killed protein vaccine.
I think it's a smarter vaccine to use.
But I do think this is all going to be revisited.
And sadly, I think the public health community has lost, you know, a lot of credibility and a lot of trust.
Because of some of these recommendations which I think when they're critically re-reviewed, they're not based on science.
Even though people said they were based on science, they really weren't based on science.
They were based on an opinion that somehow certain people believed having this vaccine was better than not having it.
And again, I think for highly vulnerable people, it really made a difference, older people in nursing homes.
But then again, the caveat is not just to be vaccinated, but to be adequately vaccinated.
When I was the senior public health advisor for Governor Hogan in the state of Maryland after I left CDC, one of the things that I noticed right away was we had increased mortality and hospitalization in our nursing homes.
And so the state of Maryland, very rapidly, When the vaccine got approved in December, between December and January, we pretty much vaccinated all of our nursing home individuals.
And we saw immediately a reduction in the hospitalization and death from COVID. But around April, May, I started to see more and more reports of nursing home residents being reported in hospitalization and death.
And so I said, well, wait a minute, maybe this vaccine's not durable.
And we went in and evaluated the immunity of a number of individuals in the nursing homes to see if they had durable response, and we found out that two-thirds of them no longer had a measurable response.
So the fact that this vaccine is not durable is also something that's not been adequately addressed.
This is not a vaccine.
If you do need it, To protect yourself against serious illness and hospitalization, this is not an annual vaccine.
This is a vaccine you probably need two to three times a year to stay adequately vaccinated if you're going to use it to try to prevent serious and hospitalization deaths.
So I don't think the public health community has really We pulled out and articulated this vaccine properly.
And as a consequence, it's added to a lot of distrust, I think, about the role of the vaccine in general.
We can't continue this on YouTube because it's about to get exciting.
We're about to start talking about the next pandemic, virology, the manipulations, the actual signatures in microbiology that make it pretty clear that this must have happened in a laboratory.
It's an amazing conversation.
We also talk about the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry, I think the mistrust is primarily predicated on when you describe it in the way that you have done, a vaccine that needs to be topped up from people that are particularly vulnerable and exposed to the risk, which sort of seems like it's a small percentage of the population.
Actually, and that it doesn't prevent transmission.
It's almost impossible to recall the fervour and fever that accompanied the advent of those injections, which included talk show hosts dancing next to vaccine costumed dancers.
Shaming commercials, telling that you were putting your family members at risk if you didn't take the vaccine, for which there is, of course, no justification, no clinical data at all.
And, in a sense, the entire campaign ought to have been conducted in much the way that you and I have conducted this conversation.
Rather sombre, Modest claims made in a cold and practical way.
I think it's the concomitant hysteria and madness that has exposed to us the nature of the relationship between pharmaceutical companies, the state and regulatory agencies.
The public would have to be insane not to consider that there might have been a profit motive at play on behalf of Pfizer, a regulatory motive in play when it came to the state, And indeed, a degree of either biases, some combination of bias, ineptitude and willingness to be swayed within the regulatory agencies.
Now, that's why I think it's so brave that you are someone that Bobby Kennedy criticised in some of his public addresses in both print and verbally, vocally.
That has come forward in support of Bobby and has participated with Bobby Kennedy in the new approach to American health that may be all good in the event that he is confirmed as the Secretary of...
The HHS. What was it, Doctor, that led you to move from inside the regulatory establishment to being so brave and outspoken?
What was the turning point?
What was the inciting incident?
Well, I think, Russell, it was important for me, obviously, to Become Judge Bobby Kennedy's view, for example, on vaccines, not from some newspaper article, but from meeting and talking to Bobby Kennedy.
And I always felt that Kennedy was never anti-vaccine.
But I hadn't talked to him, so being able to talk to him and really look at it.
And Kennedy, to me, has got a really important perspective on vaccines, what we've already discussed.
What he's really about is transparency and honesty and asking questions about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Some people in the establishment, as you would say, in the regulatory establishment, they think the mere willingness to ask the question Is this vaccine safe, or does this vaccine work, automatically qualifies you as anti-vaccine?
No, it doesn't qualify you as anti-vaccine.
You're asking a question.
You want to see the data.
Let's look at the data in a non-emotional way.
You've already hit on a very important point.
A critical review of the COVID vaccine is going to show much of these public policy decisions that were made about the use of vaccine, although they said they were done by science, They really weren't.
They were done by opinion.
Now, what influenced that opinion?
Some people's opinion was influenced because they were trained in other virus diseases where they're used to seeing vaccines work, like measles and polio.
Some of it could have been biased because if you said there could be some personal interests that were not appropriate for them to use that in their public policy recommendations.
But Kennedy to me was first and foremost a man that wanted honesty, transparency, openness about debate.
You know, the scientific community and public health community should not be nervous about debate.
That's what science is about.
If we really have the data, then what are we worried about debate?
You find when people get emotional about debate, it means they really don't have the data.
It's an opinion that they're trying to push on to other people.
So I think Kennedy is rock solid.
First, I think he's going to get confirmed.
Secondly, I think he's a breath of fresh air for health care in America.
I'm a big advocate of his idea to make America healthy again.
I believe, most importantly, first and foremost, that he believes it's possible Doesn't help someone to believe something that's not possible.
He believes it's possible, kind of like his uncle when his uncle said he was going to put a man on the moon in 1962 by the end of the 60s.
Kennedy believed it was possible.
And of course he led our nation to act and we put a man on the moon by 1969. Bobby Kennedy really does believe That we can make America healthy again.
And we're in trouble in our country, because we're looking at a nation now where over 50% of us are obese, including children.
All right?
And we had a country that over 50% of us had diabetes or hypertension or reactive airway disease, chronic disease.
It's time for us to turn this around, whereas when we went back, say, in the early 60s, it was probably 3% of us were obese.
Now it's over 50%.
It's time to turn around health.
As I said to you before when we were in Philadelphia, America has created what I call a sick system.
We're really good at taking care of sick people.
The whole system is motivated by sickness.
We need to transform our health system in a disruptive way so it becomes a health system.
How do we keep our population healthy?
And I think that's what Kennedy's about, and I think he'll succeed.
I think he's got some really important insights to some of our health issues, particularly as related to obesity.
And how to really try to address that more effectively.
So that's really what made me get excited about Bobby Kennedy is that I see that he has a vision of seeing that making America healthy again is possible.
And he's willing to go out there and lead our nation on a path to move towards making America healthy again.
And you know, as someone that has 14 grandchildren, I'd like to see America more healthy, all right?
I don't want to see my grandchildren go down the same path that I'm currently seeing where my children's generation is right now, and they're in their 30s and 40s, where chronic disease is there.
When I was CDC director, you know, President Trump would ask me why so many people died of COVID. There was 1.2 million people we lost in the United States, and other countries like Taiwan lost less than 10,000.
Why did we lose so many people?
And the reason we lost so many people is we're a sick nation.
And the COVID virus knew better than most viruses how to exploit chronic disease.
Many people don't know this, but COVID is really not a lung disease.
COVID is really a disease of the blood vessels.
And those of us that are older, our blood vessels aren't as resilient as they were when we were, say, 30 years old.
And so it exploits that and ends up causing greater poor outcomes in people because of microcoagulation, disease in the blood vessels that could cause infarct, stroke, pulmonary emboli, etc.
So I think Kennedy's on a quest.
You know, I'm 100% in on it.
When you ask me what really made me decide to be aggressive in supporting him is because first I felt he was maligned.
He's not anti-vax.
I can't read a newspaper article about Bobby Kennedy that doesn't start by saying he's against vaccines or he's controversial vaccines or he's going to take away vaccines.
All of that's not true.
It's disinformation.
He wants honesty about vaccines.
He wants to see the data on how we recommend vaccines.
And the same thing, I think Kennedy's got some great insights on why our nation is obese.
I don't think it's because we eat more.
I don't think it's because we exercise less.
I think he's probably right on to something.
It's because of what we eat is not as healthy for us as it was 50 years ago and been dealing with highly processed foods, you know, and dyes and pesticides.
And so really looking at that, I think he can make fairly rapid improvements in health, particularly those that are under the age of 20 so that they don't go down the same path the rest of us.
So I think it's really I think worth a lot of people, independent of their political belief, to really look and get behind Kennedy on this issue of let's make America healthy again.
We can't make this content without the support of our partners.
Here's a quick message from them now.
The war against free speech is in full swing.
We are the vanguard, bravely fighting back.
Rumble's the home of this channel, Stay Free, and a leader in defending the fundamental human right of free speech.
They've joined X to sue a cartel of advertisers and ad agencies who conspire to block ad revenue from going to the platforms.
Recently, they've launched Rumble Premium.
This, I think, is going to be a game changer for all of us.
It's an ad-free viewing experience with great perks for viewers and creators.
Rumble Premium will give you the ability to dive into your favourite content on your mobile or desktop or smart TV and savour every uninterrupted second of my content.
Why don't you upgrade to Rumble Premium today?
Support my free speech and the free speech of other content creators on this platform.
Please go to Rumble now.
Rumble.com forward slash premium.
And if you use the code BRAND, you'll save $10.
And Rumble will be aware that our stream is creating great converts.
So that's Rumble.com forward slash premium.
And do use the code BRAND to save $10.
Anyway, there's a link there at the bottom of the screen now.
We're posting it in the chat.
Join up with...
Your broad diagnosis, the problems of the pandemic, aside from what I've already declared, institutional corruption, the undue influence of big pharma, is somehow, as a result of your country being sicker,
even the profitability of sickness is undergirded by warped ideological ideas like allowing Big food and big pharma to have too much impact and influence over the way that America is legislated when it comes to matters of public health around food,
the types of food that are promoted, the types of food that are supplied for people on welfare, the type of agriculture outside of the regulatory organisations associated with health and the regulatory agencies that are associated with agriculture similarly seem to be biased towards systems that may not have been concocted to act in this way,
but in practice Actually do in creating a surfeit of subsidized food that are bad for people, drugs that benefit from people being chronically ill rather than metabolically healthy, which I know is what sort of Casey and Callie Means are pushing for, and thank the Lord that their influence has become so significant in government.
But the underlying idea that the most powerful interests in America benefit from Americans being sick is archetypally something that Played out before in an adjacent but somewhat distinct field in so much as the fentanyl crisis that I know your family has some personal experience of it appears was loosely speaking generated by irresponsibility and a requirement to prescribe medications that there was already a suspicion were not effective in the ways that they were effective and
perhaps were downright detrimental in certain ways Spurred on only by the avarice of, in particular, the Sackler family and Purdue in particular.
But in the broadest terms, those are not distinct attributes to that particular company and that particular family.
But it would seem to me, at least, a kind of driving ideal behind Big Pharma and this nexus of interests that coagulate around it.
So having experienced...
The impact of the opioid crisis and how that was perhaps to say engineered is a little strong, but certainly once that opioid crisis was unleashed and we now know how it was, the kind of influence that family doctors We're subject to what their motivations might have been, the kind of trials that were conducted, the trials that were not conducted, the information that was amplified, the information that was concealed.
It's led to, obviously, the fentanyl crisis that has affected your family.
I've visited a few detoxes and treatment centers in your country since I've been here on this trip, Doctor.
And, you know, the fentanyl crisis is sort of ongoing and pretty real and wouldn't have happened if you didn't have such a rampant and avaricious pharmaceutical industry.
How did that personal experience within your family affect your perspectives on Big Pharma when it comes to the opioid crisis in particular?
Perhaps the pharmaceutical industry more generally, because if those are their motives in that area when it comes to dealing with pain, then what are their motives when it comes to dealing with any problem?
Yeah, it's really a sad mark, really, in medicine in general.
I thought I understood addiction.
I spent my life, my productive early medical life treating men and women living with HIV infection from the early 80s all the way into the present time.
And many of my patients, particularly in Baltimore, had comorbidities with drug use disorder.
When I was chairman of medicine in one of the local hospitals, I had a division of addiction medicine, so I thought I really understood addiction pretty well, but I didn't really understand it at all until it came into my own family.
And as you mentioned, I almost lost one of my children from cocaine that was contaminated with fentanyl.
And then when I became CDC director, obviously President Trump had a deep commitment to drug use disorder and wanted to see a more effective response.
We lost 80,000 people that year when I was CDC director.
And so I really started looking into this.
And the first thing that I was, I was shocked.
Truly shocked.
Here I was a very educated doctor.
You know, I was vice chair of medicine for Maryland, chair of medicine in another hospital.
And I was shocked to learn that there's about a 3% risk to 5% risk of addiction to opioids from a single prescription of Percocet.
And I found, and I go back and think of my own child's life, when he had oral surgery and had his wisdom teeth removed, the first thing that Dennis did was give him a month's worth of Percocet.
And then I think about other injuries that my children had over time when they broke a bone or had a bad sprain, and the first thing the orthopod did was give them Percocet.
And I all of a sudden learned, as now a 60-year-old doctor, that that decision was really one of the most Dangerous decisions you could make because you're talking about giving someone a prescription that puts them at three to five percent at a lifetime risk of opioid addiction.
So it's really sad how the medical community didn't really get into this late.
And then when I was in my, when I was Vice Chair of Medicine at Maryland, that was when there was this huge move in the 90s, you remember, that we had to do the, I think it was the fifth or sixth vital sign.
What was that?
What was your pain score?
And everybody had to ask everybody what their pain score was, as if pain is something you shouldn't have.
And everyone started using more and more narcotics to treat pain.
I remember CDC director, I had one town in West Virginia that we investigated that had less than 3,000 people.
And the local drugstore distributed more than 20 million prescriptions for opioids.
In one town, all right, of less than 3,000 people.
And so there was obviously nobody was paying attention to the store.
So it was not only the physicians that I think, you know, failed to recognize the harm that was done by overuse of these narcotics.
But then again, you had here you had a pharmacy That there was only 3,000 people.
We had a DEA. We have all these groups supposedly overseen.
How does this one pharmacy put out 20 million prescriptions in a year?
It shows you that everybody was kind of asleep at the switch.
And unfortunately, what we ended up with is a terrible, terrible group of individuals that now have the struggle with addiction.
When I was CDC director, we were very aggressive in trying to change those norms that would teach orthopedists and dentists that they don't need to use narcotics.
for their tooth and they don't need to use narcotics when someone breaks or sprains a bone and really try to make people aware I mean I got a lot of criticism from some groups because they felt I was trying to take away pain medicine from them I wasn't if you're you know in stage palliative care and dying we want you to have pain control but that's not to say we should be randomly prescribing these drugs That really were life altering.
I'm convinced my son's introduction to opioids was his wisdom teeth distraction.
All right.
Which then, you know, 20 years later almost cost him his life when he was using cocaine that happened to have fentanyl with it.
So I think we have to be honest in medicine.
It's not just the COVID vaccine and closing schools And closing businesses that were not optimal and were in a, you know, I think in retrospect were bad policy.
Clearly there was a lot of bad policy in medicine about how you control paint.
I mean, you know, and one of the biggest things that I think really helped to bring on the opioid crisis that we have today is that whole group that decided to give us the sixth vital sign, which is to make, you know, every time you go in the hospital, what's your pain score?
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Oh, you have pain?
Okay, let's give you something for pain.
I'm kind of thankful as a doctor for whatever reason, and I don't know why, I never liked giving patients medicine for pain.
I wasn't against it, but I think in my entire medical career, I've probably written less than 10 prescriptions for a controlled substance.
And most of them were for a dear friend of mine who was a patient with HIV infection.
who basically fell five stories off a ladder and broke his back in about a gillion places and he was just in such pain all the time he couldn't live his life and we finally worked it out that I could manage him and he could manage his pain with about 15 Percocet a month.
Right?
But in my whole career, I very rarely knee-jerk to the answer was opioids.
But you raise an important issue because the physicians were involved.
Because they weren't thinking clearly.
There wasn't enough debate.
The policymakers were involved because they were passing these rules that hospitals would be docked if patients had high pain scores that weren't dealt with.
And obviously the pharmaceutical industry was very involved in this.
How could you sell 20 million prescriptions to a pharmacy that only has 3000 patients.
Everyone had to be involved.
In a sense, it was a legalization of trying to create drug dependency.
Very sad chapter in our life.
Very sad chapter in medicine.
You know, it's almost as sad as I remind people in the 1960s, our medical journals used to advertise cigarettes.
Even though some doctors tried to say, you know, maybe cigarettes aren't good for you, and maybe we should give up cigarettes.
But it didn't stop certain medical journals that are very prominent from taking the advertisement dollars that they could get by putting an ad for Chesterfields or Marlboros in a medical journal.
I mean, it's hard for people to believe that, but that was just, you know, in the 60s, that was routine.
So, you know, I think it's good to step back and realize that, you know, a lot of these decisions haven't been perfect.
And this is, again, why I think Kennedy is going to be a breath of fresh air.
You know, I think he's committed.
He's passionate.
He's got great common sense.
Great common sense.
And he can begin to chart a path of how do we make America...
How do we make America...
We can't bring you this content without the support of our partners.
Here's a message from one of them now.
Let's be honest.
Most K-cup pods are serving you mouldy, pesticide-laden rubbish.
Chains like Dunkin', they're stinking the place out with their stale coffee and expecting you to say cheers.
1775 Coffee makes sure you don't have to drink a chemical soup when you want a caffeine lift.
1775 Coffee steps in to slap The mediocrity right out of the competition.
Their K-cup pods are filled with single-origin, high-altitude beans, hand-picked by people who know what flavour actually is.
It's coffee that will slap your brain fast awake.
Faster, in fact, than a government scandal.
Who doesn't need an injection of this new caffeine inflection?
Kamala Biden?
Get this stuff down here.
You've got a choice of medium roast, dark roast and mushroom blend.
Yeah, actual mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi to boost your brain power as well as giving you an immediate lift.
Because let's be honest, if your coffee isn't strong enough to overthrow a small government, what's the point?
This coffee is for people who don't want a participation trophy.
This is coffee for winners.
Go to 1775coffee.com, grab your 24-pack and tell Corporate Coffee to take a hike.
That's go to 1775coffee.com, grab your 24-pack and tell Corporate Coffee to take a hike.
Caffeine that will help you overthrow the powerful.
He also hates corporate corruption and that's always the aspect of these problems that I've intuitively felt is significant because, you know, I'm not surprised because of the type of material I consume that cigarettes were advertised in medical journals and whilst the fentanyl crisis Maybe a chapter in American life is also part of an ongoing book and the problem is perpetuated in ways that are observable
and traceable in so much as the tobacco companies that saw their business model ruined as a result of eventual legislation or some prohibition around the use of and advertising of their product migrated to food and Started to ensure that food was addictive and intoxicating in precisely the same way that tobacco is.
In my senses, my diagnosis, and again, I'm not a doctor, you are, but the patient I'm attempting to assess here in triage is the corporation of America itself.
And I would say that what appears to be happening is the exploitation of essential qualities or essential traits, perhaps is a better word, or phenomena.
Like, where there is pain, there is a remedy for pain that can become profitable.
Where there is emptiness, there's the perpetuation of food that seems fulfilling but is not the bread we need.
When it comes to a pandemic health crisis, there's a rush to serve the converging interests of a state.
That needs the ability to regulate, and corporations that require the possibility of profit, and big tech organizations that were willing to become sensorial in order to not be demonopolized.
What I would say as a new Christian is that what undergirds this set of problems is a lack of principles.
A lack of a spiritual perspective that over time has been eroded and extracted from American life.
Most people, I don't know about most people, but enough people in positions of power now are, it seems to me, Regulating and legislating, either in ways that are entirely unconscious or in some cases evil.
Certainly when it comes to the outcomes, there are evil consequences in all the issues we've talked about today.
Diet, poor metabolic health, the handling of a pandemic, the opioid crisis.
Evil, I suppose, always indicates intent, but my own experiences and reading as a Christian leads me to believe, as well as my previous experiences as a media commentator and as an activist and as a drug addict prior to that, that evil is indeed at work.
How do you look at these issues as a Christian?
Man who surely therefore read Ephesians and the dicta that there are dark powers operating.
How do you feel about the general drive to replace ethical and theological morality with sets of centralized bureaucratic powers that lay claim to the powers that the God that they continually attempt to annihilate once laid claim to?
The ability to prescribe what is good and what is bad and what our behaviour should be and what interests should be served and what our values should be.
And certain taxonomies that might be regarded as stable.
The family, the nation, maleness and femaleness.
How do you feel as a Christian about what you've experienced in these places?
And do you ever reflect that these matters may not be unfolding as a result of ineptitude?
Or oversight, but as a result of an evil intention.
You know, it's first, to hit at the beginning, one of the biggest problems that I've seen in medicine, and you mentioned it earlier, is the incentive for the players, say pharma, and unfortunately some health systems, insurance companies, and maybe even some providers, is the incentive health?
Or is the incentive money?
Is it money?
Is it dollars?
And again, I think as sort of a consciousness for Kennedy, you know, to throw in on the American public as we try to make America healthy again, the focus ought to be health, right?
And the truth is, at the end of the day, if we make our nation healthy again as a nation, We will have resources to do other important things that our nation would need to do, whether it's invest in education, invest in the ability to address issues like homelessness.
But right now, the system is, if you will, I think, perverted in that it does see the dollar sign As something that is driving a lot of the system.
And it's counter-cultural to say, well, wait a minute, maybe the dollar sign shouldn't be driving this.
Maybe the health outcome should be driving this health.
You know, I am a Catholic and I believe in God.
I think it motivates me, you know, probably every day of my life.
It's one of the reasons I'm optimistic that we can make America healthy again.
Because I've always felt that not just with Bobby Kennedy, it's possible to make America healthy again, but I've always felt that, you know, with God, all thing is possible if we just put our commitment there and we stay in line and try to move things forward.
I do think you are right that a lot of the incentives that have driven a lot of the decisions have unfortunately been made in the absence of a moral framework.
And hopefully we can try to reinforce the importance of these decisions being made in the context of a moral framework.
And I think it's obviously a very important part of my life.
You know, it's one of the reasons I said I'm optimistic.
I've always felt that the science is a gift from God.
And if we use it properly, that it will help provide solutions.
Obviously, medicine is an important gift.
Again, if it's used properly.
But I think you're right, Russell.
There's people that are motivated by different things.
And, you know, I do pray that more and more of our leaders are grounded in a moral framework as they make these decisions, not just a financial framework.
Yeah, because that financial framework, you know, that kind of literal materialism, that worshipping of the false idol, as surely as if it were Molokov Baal, does appear to bring about evil outcomes.
I'm just sort of glancing at my Bible here because I was looking for, in Peter, I read today about, like, sort of, The kind of seeming superlatives of the claim that God can achieve all things, exceeding...
There's a sort of a famous phrase in Peter that's about how God can bring about absolutely the best outcomes.
Where was that?
Where did I see that?
I'll find it in a minute.
But I also wanted to ask you, can you hear me, Doc?
Thank you.
I just wanted to ask you...
Thank you, sir.
I also wanted to ask you about, like, given that Bobby Kennedy has come up so much in this conversation, like, one of the things that struck me when I was sort of perusing his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was how apparently outrageous some of the claims were.
And among them, the idea that...
Well, just to learn that certain vaccine, and in particular mRNA technology, had emerged from biodefence, that the pandemic response was something of a military operation.
Indeed, most of the people that headed it up were military, and I suppose when you're dealing with social control, the involvement in the military is not surprising, but it's surprising when it's being presented as a health crisis.
I was interested to hear that you at least are open to the idea that COVID itself could have its origins in North Carolina as part of a secret biodefence program.
That's the kind of thing that would get you thrown off of Facebook and right out of Twitter not so long ago.
I wonder if you could elaborate on that idea for us, Doctor.
Yeah, well, I'm of the view, I'm a virologist by training, and when a zoonotic virus comes into humans, like when SARS did in 2003, from a bat to a civet cat, or like MERS in 2012, from a bat to a camel, when the virus finally got into humans, it really never learned how to efficiently transmit among humans.
So as we sit here today, there's less than 10,000 cases of SARS, even though that's 20 something years ago.
And the same thing with MERS. There's less than 10,000 cases, even though it's, you know, 10, 11, 12 years ago.
These viruses didn't learn how to go human to human efficiently, right?
But when COVID came, It was really one of the most efficient viruses to go human to human, probably almost as infectious as measles.
And again, I'm a virologist by training, so that made me, you know, my head go back.
Wait a minute, how'd that happen?
Because that's not what normally happens.
When my colleague Tony Fauci said this was spillover, I said, Tony, I don't buy it.
As a virologist, if it was spillover, this virus would be struggling to learn how to go human to human.
This virus already knows.
I think it had to take a detour in a laboratory and be taught how to do that.
And of course the lab in Wuhan had published papers in 2014 that they actually succeeded in teaching coronaviruses how to infect human tissue in humanized mice.
So I wasn't even speculating.
They had published they actually succeeded in doing that.
So I was then of the view that the most likely origin of COVID Was that it was a virus that was manipulated in a laboratory to teach it, educate it, how to infect human tissue.
And then, unfortunately, that virus escaped.
Now, I never said or intended to say, if I misspoke, that it was created in North Carolina.
What I did say is the scientists in North Carolina Actually, we're working with the scientists in the Wuhan lab.
And they actually taught the scientists in the Wuhan lab how to do some of this genetic engineering.
And whether or not some of the samples went from North Carolina to Wuhan or back and forth, I don't know.
We'd have to see what the scientists at North Carolina say.
But clearly, the University of North Carolina was involved in the science.
of COVID back with the Wuhan laboratory.
I think the actual leak of the virus initially into humans occurred in Wuhan.
I mean, we know that somewhere between August and October of that year, that's when the virus started to infect.
And we started to see a lot of new illness in the Wuhan population, as you know.
I mean, literally hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of people were infected.
I always say that in September of that year, 2019, three things happened in the Wuhan lab, which to me were suspicious.
One was they changed the leadership of that lab from the civilian leadership to the military leadership, because it was a dual-use lab.
It was a military civilian lab, and they sort of put the civilian no longer in charge, and they put the military gentleman in charge.
The second thing they did was they deleted the records of all the bat virus sequences they had for coronaviruses.
Which is a very odd thing for a research group to do, to delete their research.
But you could see it might be something somebody did if you wanted to trace the sequences of the current virus and try to see where it might have come from.
And then the third thing they did, which was very suspicious, was that they let a new contract for the Wuhan lab to redo the ventilation system in the lab.
Which to me was the most important telling sign that something went wrong.
All right?
And then if you look, and some of this is unfortunately still classified, hopefully President Trump will finally, even though Congress voted unanimously to declassify everything, Biden hasn't done that.
But hopefully it will all get classified and the American public can get a better sense of all the information that John Radcliffe and I and others know about some of the early events in the August, September, October timeframe.
But clearly that's when the pandemic really started to hit.
The other thing that was interesting was in October, the Wuhan, the city of Wuhan sponsored the military games.
So militaries from all over the world went there to compete, track and field games.
But the Wuhan government restricted and didn't allow any spectators.
That's highly unusual for them to have like the Olympics there, like people from all over the world, and they only let the athletes and no spectators, all right?
And you know, very rapidly after that, they started shutting down that city.
And literally quarantining millions of people, I think ultimately 20 million people.
I mean, the pandemic really was on fire in Wuhan area.
So I don't want people to think, I think the virus was created in North Carolina.
I don't think that.
I think scientists in North Carolina were working with scientists in the Wuhan laboratory, all right?
And this is where I've tried to always say, I don't blame China For the creation of this virus alone, that this research was participated with scientists from the United States.
Also, I've said that it was funded by NIH. Contrary to some of the comments that have been made publicly, it was also funded by DOD, it was funded by the State Department, and it was funded by USAID. So the United States government helped fund this research.
Where the Chinese government is really accountable and culpable, in my view, is that when the pandemic started, they didn't adhere to the International Health Regulation.
I tried to bring my team into China in the first week of January.
I didn't get a permission from my team to go in.
The President, Trump, actually called the President of China at my request and asked our team to go in.
We still didn't get invited in, okay?
Well, that's a true violation of the International Health Regulation.
And had China Allowed our team to go in and work with my counterpart, George Gao, and we were good friends.
And he wanted our help, but he told me he didn't have the authority to invite me in.
We needed to get permission from higher up in the Chinese government.
We would have learned in the first two weeks of January that this virus was highly infectious.
Human to human.
The Chinese government and CDC told me in the first week of January that this virus was not efficiently transmitted human to human.
Because they thought it was like SARS and MERS. They said it's not transmitted human to human.
Second thing they told me is that there isn't a symptomatic infection.
There's only symptomatic infection.
Well, that's important because that led our policy when this epidemic started.
We went ahead and I diagnosed about 14 people in late January, early February in the entire United States with this new virus.
And of those 14 people, we had over 800 contacts.
And we evaluated those contacts and we only found two that had COVID. Both were spouses.
But you have to ask the question, how did we evaluate the contacts?
What we did was we asked them, were they sick?
Because China said there's no asymptomatic infection.
So if they weren't sick, we didn't do anything.
We didn't test them for the virus.
Had we tested them for the virus, I think we would have learned right away that this virus was highly infectious.
It didn't cause symptoms in young people.
There's a lot of people that are asymptomatic, and it would have changed our whole public health policy and how we responded to the epidemic.
It wasn't looking for sick people and trying to isolate them.
It was actually expanded diagnosis and testing.
Which we learned finally when the Diamond Princess happened.
The Japanese were very cooperative and they allowed our CDC to go in and work with them on that ship that was in Japan at the time.
And we learned very rapidly about half the people on the ship were actually infected.
Even though most of them had no symptoms at all.
So where China has responsibility is they didn't follow the treaty that they signed on international health regulations.
But it's important that we realize that the research that was being done was research that there was cooperation between the U.S. government and the Chinese government in doing that research.
Now, I would argue that research was ill-advised.
I'm not an advocate that we should be trying to make viruses more pathogenic for humans.
I don't think we need to do that.
It's called gain-of-function research.
I think we've got enough problems without creating something that's more problematic.
This is where Fauci and I totally disagree.
He became sort of the poster child for gain-of-function research.
And truthfully, Russell, I'm sort of the poster child for a moratorium on gain-of-function research because I think it's ill-advised.
Yeah, I mean, increasingly and particularly after what we as a planet endured during that period and how many unanswered questions are drawn attention to and highlighted just from listening to you in the last...
10 minutes, let alone the conversation in its entirety.
It seems like moratorium is a sensible consideration because I didn't know that about like China had a treaty.
I was aware that there was, you know, I was aware about DARPA and the involvement between American institutions and American financing and funding.
Like, you know, and even I smiled when you said gain of function because During that period, we all became sort of autodidacts in areas of medicine and science that just seemed unthinkable.
And in fact, the way that this pandemic intersected with the media, I think, is one of the things that's changed the world in the last few years.
Thank you, Doctor.
Can I say one thing here?
I think it's important because there's a little bit of a game being played with language.
When I talk about gain-of-function research, because Dr. Fauci has testified that he was not involved in gain-of-function research, according to the National Academy of Science definition.
And what the National Academy of Science defined, gain-of-function research, and I think you'll see what the irony in this is.
They define gain-of-function research.
If I start with a pathogen that's not pathogenic for humans, And I teach it how to be pathogenic for humans.
That's not gain-of-function research.
You have to start with a pathogen that's already pathogenic for humans and make it more pathogenic for humans.
And that's the argument that Tony uses when he says, I didn't do gain-of-function research because COVID-19 was not pathogenic for humans until they made it pathogenic for humans.
Now you see how ridiculous that is?
Yeah, even there, with the most basic question, there is a deception being practiced.
How you could not see it as a gain of function, that it gains the ability to become infectious to human beings when previously it was only infectious for bats, for example, seems like willful duplicitousness.
Yeah, I'm very upset by it because the other reason, because I was in this debate from the beginning and I obviously got a lot of threats and a lot of people don't like me in the scientific community because of my position, but I was very upset because something is simple when I argue the spillover We had no real evidence for it, even though that's what Fauci was promoting aggressively.
And I had a lab leak, which I thought was more likely, and was arguing for that.
But we never had an open debate about it, transparent debate.
You know, scientifically, that's what science does.
We normally debate things transparently.
It became sort of a closed issue and Lancet published, you know, that letter saying anybody who thought like I was a conspirator.
And then they did the article, Proximal Origin, that said anybody who thought like I was a conspirator.
That was a conspiracy.
Okay, in setting up the ultimate argument, okay?
Because the truth is, it was more likely.
And the thing that bothered me the most about it, and there's a lot of issues if you want to go into the detail in the virology, but it's more than you probably want to do.
But I will tell you the one simple thing to get most people to understand.
If you take COVID-19 That my people of a different point of view, a spillover, are saying went from a bat to humans and now is one of the most infectious human viruses.
I'm saying it went from a bat to the laboratory and then into humans from infection.
If you take that virus right now and you ask the question, can it infect bats?
The answer is it hardly can infect bats.
So how'd that happen?
If this is a bat virus, how'd that happen?
And I'll tell you how it happened when they put in the furin cleavage site, which is again has a lot of signatures in it that make you suspect that this was manipulated in the laboratory.
When they put in that furin cleavage site, it changed the receptor of the COVID virus away from the bat receptor.
So it no longer likes the bat receptor, but it loves the human receptor.
So I would argue with my colleagues that say they're scientists and they're open-minded.
I'd say, well, how do you explain that?
How do you explain that?
SARS can still infect bats.
MERS can still infect bats.
Why can COVID hardly infect bats?
And the reason is, is because the receptors were changed so they can infect humans.
Yeah, that sounds like gain of function all day long, that people were amending it and adapting it.
Had it not been adapted artificially or through interventionism, it would continue to affect bats.
And it's pretty clear that the reason you can't have that conversation transparently as you advocate for, Doctor, is because by having that conversation, you have to implicate all sorts of individuals and institutions.
And instead of Science being the warp speed heroes that they were temporarily regarded to be during that period when we were invited to see Anthony Fauci as a kind of playboy hero of science.
It seems that they are directly culpable for the problem that they, in retrospect, only moderately and perhaps even ineptly half solved.
One of the reasons it's really important as you think this through and decide what you do in the future is that we're not finished with pandemics.
And people know that I'm worried about the next pandemic.
And the next pandemic that I'm worried about is a bird flu pandemic.
And we now know there's four amino acids that need to be changed in the receptors to get bird flu to infect humans efficiently.
Now, I argued that we didn't need to know that, but some scientists in 2012 did the research and figured it out, and then they decided they had to publish it.
I argued that we shouldn't publish it because I didn't want some I don't want a bioterrorist or somebody to get a map on how to make this virus highly infectious for humans.
But it was published.
And Tony even wrote in the Washington Post, I think with Collins, he may have been a co-author, that if we do gain a function research, because it's so important, In predicting how to do things, they believe, I don't agree with them, that even if we got a pandemic, it's worth the risk.
Well, I think we did it.
I think we got a pandemic, and it's not worth the risk.
The reason I say this is right now there's more amino acids that have to change to make bird flu infected for humans.
It's currently now in 28 species in the United States from birds to different mammals.
It's not really learned how to go mammal to mammal.
It's infected over 50 people so far, but it still hasn't learned how to go mammal to mammal.
It's just like most zoonotic viruses.
It's struggling to learn how to go mammal to mammal in a non-avian host.
But it turns out There are scientists now that are trying to teach it how to infect humans.
Why do you want to teach bird flu how to infect humans?
Now they'll argue because they have to know how it changes so they can be prepared for when it happens.
I'll argue we'll deal with that if and when it happens and we don't have to help make it happen.
Yeah.
Particularly, you would think if one lesson's been learned from the last few years, it would be precisely that one.
And if that lesson isn't being learned, I can't imagine it's a result of ignorance, but recalcitrance, deliberate disobedience, and I have some ideas as to what the motive for that disobedience might be also.
Yeah, a lot of people, you know, this is where I get criticized because my colleagues, a lot of people see the financial future of science, this gain-of-function research, being very important to fund their labs, to fund their universities.
And they say they believe it's important for improving the human condition.
I challenge that.
I think it's really potentially very, very risky.
And I do think we went through, you know, we don't know exactly how many, but I suspect about 20 million people died from COVID. And it's been estimated about $35 trillion of wealth it cost us.
That's a big price to pay for a couple of experiments in a laboratory to try to make a virus learn how to infect humanized tissue.
Yeah, and it could be a much higher price as ultimately paid.
Dr. Redfield, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for this wonderful conversation.
Thanks for your patience in educating us in a variety of complicated subjects, and thank you for your willingness to share the personal and spiritual side of the challenges that you face, not only as a physician and as a scientist, but also as a man.
Thank you.
Thank you.
God bless you.
Thanks, Russell.
Well, thank you very much for joining us.
We will be back next week with more fantastic content.
If you can't wait that long, why would you?
Get over to Locals, Become an Awake and Wonder, and watch this conversation with Jonathan Pagiot.
This is the sort of education you require if you're going to understand reality at depth.
Check it out.
The thing about Jesus' story and the Gospels that's difficult is that they're so non-literary.
And people like literary.
They want, you know, they're very matter-of-fact, very simple.
All the Bible stories are like that.
They don't describe interstates.
They don't describe, you know, the yearnings of people's hearts, you know, like if you read some ancient poem.
They just say what happened.
And because of that, people can, in some ways, it's almost too simple for people's minds.
But if they take the time to unpack what's in the story, then they realize that all their epic poems are gathered into that one story.
Everything that they care about, all the interstates that they are attached to, are kind of folded into the story of Jesus, but they're not made explicit.
And so people can read it and not notice what's actually happening.
Well, thanks very much for joining us.
We'll be back next week, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
Many switching, switch on, switch on.
▲
Export Selection