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April 3, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
55:36
Minority Harm with Dr Hooman Noorchashm

Dr. Hooman Noorchashm wants people to know that he’s a staunch supporter of the new vaccines but with one very important warning: people who have already been infected could be at risk of serious injury, including death.

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We have a very special guest today.
I'm going to call him my friend because I really enjoy corresponding with him, but this is the first chance that we've had to meet in person as it were over Zoom.
But his name is Dr.
Huma Noorchasm, and did I pronounce it right?
That's all I've done.
Yeah, that's all right.
Perfectly fine.
You know, it's the easiest pronunciation is Norchasm, Robert.
Norchasm.
And I know, because he's on a list, we have a CHD that has about 240 doctors and scientists on it, and they're constantly debating You know, all the issues that we're concerned about.
And he is a recent addition and has cost a big store.
One, because he's brilliant.
He's very combative.
He's very, you know, has strong beliefs that are different than in many subtle and direct ways than other people who are on that list.
And he's very, extremely prolific in his writing, but also very, very compelling.
It's been really enjoyable listening to you, even though he's attacking me many times.
He did one attack on me on Medium, but I really enjoy it because it's the kind of thing that ought to be happening in our democracy, where we can debate complicated, difficult issues.
We can do it civilly and politely.
And we can have science-based debates.
And that's what ought to be happening all around.
And that's what we try to do on The Defender.
And I urge you to follow Manor Chazam because, you know, he's very smart about this.
And he may be taking positions that you don't agree with.
But, you know, he has the courage to debate them and defend them.
And let me give you a little background.
Dr.
Oman Norchism, he is an MD and a PhD.
He is a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctor of Medicine also from the University of Pennsylvania.
I'll just read you some of his appointments, his faculty appointments.
He's an attending physician, Department of Surgery, Philadelphia, VA Hospital.
He also is a professor of surgery, Division of Cardiotherapy Surgery, Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia.
He has a lecturer on surgery at Brigham and Young's in Boston.
He's an instructor in surgery at University of Pennsylvania.
He's an assistant professor of surgical research at the University of Pennsylvania.
And he has innumerable awards.
And I thank you for the story of how you kind of started questioning some of the orthodoxies of medical products anyway.
And I'm going to get into the vaccines because, you know, he has a very, very different view than I do.
In some respects.
You got into it because of an injury that affected your wife.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure, absolutely.
First of all, I want to thank you for having me on your program.
It's really a privilege to be here, and I appreciate all the kind words that you directed at me.
I do think that this is a very, very important conversation at this time in our history.
I think, you know, our nation, as you know, is very much binary and divided right now.
We all live in this pro and anti space.
Everyone seems to be pro something and anti something.
And I think recovering the center is where healing is going to happen.
And this is going to have to be based on ethics and reason and science and empathy for each other's pain.
And so, yeah, you're right.
I mean, I have the academic pedigree that you described.
You know, I'm basically an establishment guy.
I went to Penn Medical School, MD-PhD, under a National Institutes of Health grant with the medical scientist training program.
Which I think some of your relatives in the past had something to do with establishing at the NIH. And I subsequently was funded by the NIH for about over 10 years doing immunology research.
Joined the faculty at several pretty high-level academic medical centers, including Harvard and Thomas Jefferson and Penn.
And so my perspective as an immunologist is what it is.
And I'm happy to engage in that discourse with respect to vaccines, with respect to immunity in general.
But, you know, I think what sort of has brought me into this space and in conversation with you is that because of this very sort of personal experience that my family had, I got tuned into something sort of deeper that's going on in our system.
And that is this idea of our system somehow being able to tolerate minority harm.
Harm to minority subsets of people simply because in some utilitarian calculus, the majority are benefiting.
So in other words...
We're talking about vulnerable subsets of people.
Vulnerable subsets of people, you know, and in fact, like, you know, I think this is not a new thing in American history.
You've had, we've had examples all the way starting from slavery to how American Indians have been treated in America where minority subsets of people, you know, in the past, potentially on the The basis of their ethnicity have been discriminated against and sort of, you know, been harmed actually, because there was some majority benefit calculus there that was benefiting the majority of the rest of society.
And I think this concept has crept into medicine.
So my wife was a woman who had an occult uterine cancer that was associated with symptomatic uterine fibroids.
And women have this problem at a rate of about 1 in 400.
And there's a practice called morselation.
In fact, on the 23rd, so this coming Monday, there's a movie coming out about my wife, my late wife, Amy Reed.
Her name was Amy Josephine Reed.
She basically had the same academic pedigree as me, was a member of faculty at Harvard Medical School.
And that cancer that she had was undiagnosed.
And this practice basically converted it into a stage 4 cancer.
So it was a dramatic and catastrophic complication.
And it was happening on a systemic level.
It was affecting 1 in 400 women on a global scale practice.
So her and I started to engage in activism.
Basically, it's a machine that they put inside of you that basically...
And instead of removing the cancer, slice and dice it and spread it throughout our body.
That's basically, well, so they don't, if they know that it's a cancer, they wouldn't use it.
The problem is that when there's an unknown cancer in there, when there's an occult cancer in there, they, you know, the act of mechanically morcelating, it spreads the cancer all over and causes a stage four cancer.
So it takes a curable stage 1 cancer to an incurable stage 4 cancer.
And this was happening at a rate of 1 in 300 to 400 to women who basically had these uterine fibroids that were symptomatic.
And the gynecologists were assuming that these are benign.
So this happened to Amy and, you know, her and I got plunged into this very big public health fight.
And you can look it up.
I mean, it's very well publicized.
The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the cancer letter, they covered it quite extensively.
And, you know, unfortunately, in 2017, my wife passed away and we have six kids.
Our youngest kid was Ryan, was four at the time of Amy's passing.
My oldest was 14.
And so we engaged in a lot of activism and we were able to change the practice.
We fully engaged head on the establishment and the FDA. And we were successful at it.
Now, we didn't have to deal with some of the issues that the vaccine space has to deal with, which is that there are very strong federal protections favoring the vaccine industry.
We didn't have to deal with that layer of protection.
So I think that had some to do with our success.
But my perspective really shifted from...
And I think...
I tried to crystallize this with you when we had a conversation, Robert, on the phone.
I don't know if you recall, but...
There's this idea that majority benefit is what guides evidence-based medicine.
So in other words, when people talk about efficacy of a product or a practice, they're talking about majority benefit.
So I think the framework that I sort of, and this has sort of been born out of this ridiculous and awful crucible that my family fell into, is that when I think about evidence-based medicine, I think about efficacy, which is essentially synonymous with majority benefit.
So if something is effective, some series of metrics have been used to demonstrate majority benefit.
And when people talk about safety, we're talking about minority harm.
Because you see, if minority harm actually was not minority harm, if it was majority harm, you would never actually have that product on the market.
So really, we're talking about minority harm Being the definition of safety science in general, in medicine, right?
The problem is, right, because majority benefit plugs directly into democracy and into the market-based economy that we have, there's a lot of money in majority benefit.
There's not as much money in minority harm.
And so the two things that have to be essentially on equal footing, efficacy and safety, Have essentially been dominated by efficacy being the dominant sort of force.
So efficacy and majority benefit are routinely in medicine overriding minority harm and safety.
So if something makes money, if something is beneficial to the majority, if the majority prefer it, our system is designed to accept that more and endorse it more and protect it more.
Than it is likely to fend for safety.
And I think the vaccine space is a dramatic example of that.
I mean, the vaccine space is a...
I mean, look, how absurd a notion that any medical therapy would be perfection incarnate, right?
I mean, think about it for a second, right?
When you put federal protections on any product that says you can't give liability signals from the court system to that industry, you're essentially claiming perfection in a fallen world that we live in.
Right?
Like, it's like, oh, this product is perfect, right?
Therefore, you can't give it any liability signal.
We're going to protect the living hell out of this.
Because what are we protecting?
What we're protecting is this idea of majority benefit that's plugged directly into both marketing and money, right?
And some degree of sort of like groupthink in a way, right?
That everyone thinks it's good to do this, right?
So...
Let me...
You kind of amplify that paradox a little bit, which is that in 1986, when they passed the Vaccine Act, they gave all these companies immunity from liability.
They did it because Wyeth had gone to the Reagan administration and to my uncle, who was then chairing the health committee.
And to the other senators and congressmen and said, look, we are getting killed on this diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine.
We're paying out $20 in the injury downstream liability for every dollar that we're making from sales.
And their question was, well, why don't you make it safer?
And they said, you can't.
It's impossible to make them safer.
Vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.
And that phrase, unavoidably unsafe, is in the preamble to the statute.
So the statute says because these products are unavoidably unsafe, we have to indemnify them.
And it's exactly what you're saying.
You know, they didn't assume perfection.
They said these are, in fact, these are, it was ironic because they're saying, These are so dangerous, we have to give them perfection.
But what it did is it removes any incentive for the companies then to go out and make them safe.
It's interesting.
What you're describing essentially meets the legal definition of negligence.
Because if you know something is unsafe and you're going to protect it, that's by definition negligent.
It's unfortunate that they sort of term it that way.
When I think about harm, when I think about medical harm, You know, in medicine, when I was training at Penn in my residency program, the way we thought about complications were we classified them as unavoidable or avoidable, right?
There are such things as unavoidable complications, right?
Let's say you're driving down the street, for example, right?
And you have your seatbelt on, your airbags, right?
And some car just crashes right into you accidentally, right?
That's sort of an unavoidable situation that you're in, right?
Or let's say you're doing an operation, right?
And, you know, someone's blood pressure spikes high and their blood vessel, their aorta ruptures, right, on the operating table.
That's sort of a, that's a complication for sure.
It's an unavoidable complication.
The word harm, harm, implicit to harm, is the concept of avoidability.
And I think, you know, the idea that we live in a fallen world, in a world where things are not perfect.
And in reality, what we are as humans is we are risk management machines, right?
So the way we operate, right, is we manage and minimize risk to ourselves, to our families, to our society, to our world, right?
And that's essentially like when I look at the work that you've done over the years.
And, you know, when you first contacted me, I went back and looked at all the stuff that you've done.
And I mean, I view you as like a risk management guy.
I mean, you're basically looking for places where things fall through cracks and you're trying to sort of hedge against that risk by using the legal system or whatever platform you have to do so.
But I think we all do that.
Fundamentally, every family, every person wants to minimize risk to themselves, to their families, to their cities, to their towns.
The idea that we could actually minimize risk entirely to zero So we can get something to perfect, right?
I think it's a fundamentally flawed idea, right?
But what we can be is we can be honest and ethical, right?
So we can say, you know, here's a risk, right?
We've done everything.
We know this risk.
We've done everything in our power to identify who's at risk and to mitigate this risk.
And then we're going to subject it to this utilitarian calculus, right?
Because, look, utilitarianism is one of the achievements of Western civilization.
Without utilitarianism, you have a monarchy, right?
You have a totalitarianism, right?
Where minorities are governing the...
We need utilitarian ethics.
We need a democratic society.
However, you can't say just because the majority prefers something, we're going to screw this minority subset of people, right?
And we're going to take all their legal protections away from them.
We're going to dehumanize them.
We're going to turn them into slaves.
We're going to put them on reservations, right?
Or we're going to take their occult uterine cancers and morselate the living hell out of them.
Or we're going to take this family whose kid got vaccine injury and we're just going to say these people are crazy.
All of them are just crazy, right?
You can't do that.
In this country, you can't do that.
It's incompatible with sort of the constitutional framework that's sitting out there, right?
So, you know, I believe people who say they're vaccine harmed.
And I know that this idea that we create these protectionist structures that basically block out minority subsets of people, so they have no rights, are frankly evil.
I mean, I don't know what other word to...
I don't mean to get too philosophical and veer off the beaten path here.
Going back to your question, where does my perspective come from?
It's very simple.
The idea of minority harm Is something that we need to carefully consider in our society?
Because if we don't, we're going to create all these structures that harm minority subsets of people, Robert.
And after a while, we're going to hit this inflection point where the harmed actually become the majority.
When the harm become the majority, then your society falls apart.
Then people are going to crawl up the walls of the United States Congress and try to overthrow it.
You can't create a society and institutions that ignore minority substance of people who are being harmed and take away their rights and then expect that that society over time will stay stable.
I want to get to your letter to FDA, which I think is really important.
The FDA, of course, wants to ignore this kind of complaint, but I think it was a hard thing for them to do to ignore you because of your credentials and your history.
And at least they responded to you.
But I want to read for our listeners.
One of the introductions, which is kind of an obligatory disavowal of the anti-vax movement, which we see every year, but it also illustrates the background of your assumptions and how you come into this.
What you say is, I want to be very clear that I am an ardent supporter of President Biden's plan to vaccinate 150 million Americans in 100 days.
And that my letter is not to be abused by political, uninformed, or conspiratorial forces attempting to dissuade the American public from being vaccinated, nor by those whose binary approach to the pro-vaccine position renders them incapable of grasping the problem of, quote, minority harm, unquote.
I do believe that it is the patriotic duty of every American who can reasonably and safely be vaccinated to do so as soon as possible in order that we may save our nation from this pandemic peril that is threatening our very existence.
And, you know, I'm actually glad that you wrote that.
And I think, you know, one of the things, like what I try to do when I speak to people is I say I'm not anti-vaccine.
I want safe vaccines.
And I think it's really I'm not a crazy person.
I'm a mainstream person, and my concerns are the legitimate concerns of a mainstream person who shares values.
With, you know, with the audience.
But I would challenge you on this a little.
And this is, to me, is one of the problems with the, you know, the vaccine rollout.
And we don't give, we don't advise people ever to not take vaccines.
We don't give people advice.
We give people information so that they can make, as you say, an individualized risk assessment.
And the risk assessment for 150 million Americans are different from everybody.
And a lot of that is because this disease that we're trying to prevent has categories of risk that are kind of very well defined for different subsets and different demographics and particularly different age groups.
So if you're under 55, the risk from COVID is effectively zero.
Whereas if you're over 55, and particularly when you get into the 75 to 85, there is a dramatic risk from this disease, dramatic, deadly risk that could be as high as 7%.
And so the assessment ought to be different for those groups of people.
There's other complications too, because you say, I would say, if you're under 55, There's an argument to be made that you should not get a vaccine because I'm making this argument.
I'm just being a devil's advocate that you should not get a vaccine because the vaccines do have risks that are pretty, you know, fairly well documented.
And the risk from COVID, you know, may be much lower.
Not only that, but we You may get a much more robust, long-term, durable immunity from the disease, from having the natural disease than you will get from the vaccine.
That is true with every other vaccine that we know about.
For sure, for sure.
You have a wider range.
In other words, you're more likely to get protection from emergence strains of the vaccine.
You know, there's a wider range of protection and probably a much more durable protection, longer term, et cetera, robust.
And if you get vaccinated.
And so the issue then becomes, should I get vaccinated to protect an older person because of, you know, I'm less likely to pass it.
If I'm a child, do I get it to protect my teachers at school?
And that is a huge ethical question.
I agree.
And you put somebody at risk.
It's the old trolley car metaphor.
If there are seven people standing on this track and one guy is going to get hit, one guy is on the siding and seven people are going to get hit by the trolley car and you're standing at the switch.
Do you have a right to switch it to the deciding and kill that guy?
You know, and does government particularly have a right to demand that that person enter the risk rather than put those other people at risk?
And it's an old ethical question.
And usually the answer is you don't want government making those decisions no matter what.
People have to assess their own risk.
So that's what I would say is one of the conundrums with this vaccine is That is most troubling to me is this big drive to vaccinate the very young who essentially have zero risk from the disease.
And it's kind of a hazy argument that is deliberately obfuscated and made opaque, you know, where they're saying, you use the word patriotic, and that makes me worried because they're telling people, you need to do this for the herd, for the group.
And it may not be in your interest to do it.
Some of these vaccines, according to the Phase 1 trial for Moderna, 100% of the people got injured.
21% got serious.
I mean, hospitalization or medical intervention required in the high dose group, 6% in the low dose group.
This is a very reactogenic vaccine.
It is.
It's one of the most powerful vaccines we've ever made.
And, you know, the mRNA nature of it has to do with that.
And there's no question.
I mean, this is a very immunogenic vaccine.
So, I mean, you know, did you want to continue on your train of thought?
Because I want to get to your letter, but I'd love to hear your reaction to that, you know.
I do.
So I'll prefix it, Robert, by saying, you know, I don't think...
Oh, let me add one other thing.
You know, one other complication to that formula.
We don't even know how well this vaccine prevents transmissibility.
So that's another, you know, now you're asking people to do, to take a risk who are young, who have zero risk from the illness, benefit older people.
And it may be that the older people don't even benefit.
So, you know, that's another ingredient to that risk assessment that just makes it even more complicated to answer these questions.
So I think the idea that there are different groups that have variable susceptibilities, differential susceptibilities, from a mortality perspective alone is absolutely true.
So that I agree with.
So I just want to clarify one thing.
I do think that the medical ethical principle of patient autonomy That trumps all things in this discussion, meaning that no one should ever be strapped down or threatened with loss of their liberties or their employment because they are refusing a medical therapy.
For their education?
Or their education.
That's a direct violation of, you know, the principle of patient autonomy.
That's one of the pillars of medical ethics, right?
So no one should...
I'm not an advocate for forced vaccinations, right?
I am an advocate for sort of public education about immunology, right?
And I have to say that, you know, one dimension that I don't hear in any of the discussions that I'm part of is this idea, and I know that this gentleman, what's his name, Geert van der Bosch from Geneva.
So, you know, there's this idea that's out there that we should stop vaccinating.
He's saying we should stop vaccinating everyone because the vaccine is introducing this selective pressure that's going to create more dangerous variants.
You know, I think there's partial truth to that, but the one risk category that people don't think about when they think about the different risk categories, the mortality issue is one thing, right, that you pointed to.
Like 55 and over, 65 and over are highly susceptible to infection and to mortality and to complications.
You know, kids in school are not.
But the one element that has a societal impact actually is that every single naturally infected person, every single naturally infected person is literally a factory for new mutations.
So really where the variants are coming from The variants are coming from every individual and every community and every sort of city where people are naturally infected.
So the idea that natural infection, we can somehow sort of let natural infection rage through our communities And expect that we won't have emergent properties and new variants.
I think we need to, you know, everyone who's rationally thinking about this needs to sort of step back, take a deep breath, and say, wait a minute.
So if Jack Smith's infected and everyone around him is infected, every one of these people is a factory for new mutations.
I mean, all these new variants are coming from somewhere.
It's not like there's this pool of variants sitting out there, right?
Let me challenge you on that, okay?
And what you're saying is correct.
The more activity, the more organisms that are out there, theoretically, the greater chance that you will produce mutations because it's numerical.
It's not just theoretical.
It's a real thing.
Right.
It's numerical.
However, I would say this.
It may be that the worst kind of mutations are coming from vaccinated individuals.
And this is for the same reason that when you use subtherapeutic antibiotics, that's when you produce superbugs.
Because you're wiping out the organisms, the strains that are the easiest strains, the most common strains to wipe out.
And the ones that continue to survive, even if there's only a few of them, are essentially superbugs.
So you've got a few of them in your nasal pharynx.
Those ones that survive are the superbugs.
And we know this is what happened with the pertussis vaccine.
You had pertussis A, which the vaccine prevents, but there was a much more dangerous pertussis B. And all of a sudden now we have epidemics of pertussis B because the vaccine forced those particular mutations.
And if you look at just evolutionary theory, There's a doctrine called type replacement that says that the most common organism, the most common strains of any pathogen are always the less injurious, because if you're a pathogen, You want a healthy host.
You do not want to injure your host, because you want your host walking around, shaking hands, kissing people, having sex, being sociable, because then you get to spread.
And those are the ones that are the most common ones.
So it's always the least deadly strains have become most common.
They out-compete their brethren who are killing people.
But when you get rid of those strains, You then open up the ecosystem, which is the nasal pharynx, or the rare strains, which are, according to biological theory, are going to almost always going to be the most virulent and the most deadly.
So I would say what you're saying, what you're saying is not, it's not, there's a Another way of looking at that.
So I guess, look, I think that you're not incorrect.
I would say that when you think about evolution and selective pressures versus the source of variance, right?
There's no question that selective pressures under certain circumstances are dominant selective forces for evolution of new variants and dominance of new variants.
But these parameters interact with each other.
So in other words, the source of mutation is Interacts with selective pressure.
And depending on how large one is versus the other, one could become dominant over the other.
So you're absolutely right.
So I mean, there's definitely the role of selective pressure in selection of phenotypes in evolutionary biology or in immunology and infectious disease is definitively correct.
I mean, you can have a A massive selective pressure that's selecting for more virulent strains, and therefore, those become dominant, right?
And that's, I think, what Van der Bosch is pointing to, and I think I'm hearing echoes of that same argument in what you just described.
But I think that there's...
I didn't hear him talk about that, but I didn't...
I wasn't completely clear on his arguments, and I've seen analyses of his arguments that...
Agree with some of the stuff that he was saying.
But, you know, he said a lot of the things that were more speculative.
I guess my fundamental point, Robert, is that you have selective pressure interacting with variant source.
And depending on the circumstance and the size of each one, One is more dominant over the other.
And I think that in a pandemic scenario, where you have potentially 9 billion or 8 billion people susceptible to all being infected because there is no baseline level of endemic immunity, that that force is going to be so large in terms of generation of these new variants that what will end up happening if we just let naturally this process occur What we'll have is just this impenetrable,
dense variety of now-living mutants that'll just be impossible to break through.
So, you know, I think we have to think about the inflection points in how these forces interact.
And I think my tendency is to think that in a pandemic situation, the absolute number of factories for mutations dominates over any particular one individual selective force.
So the Cochrane Collaboration has done a series of studies on the flu vaccine.
There's a group of those studies that show that people who are...
We're vaccinated for the seasonal flu, have no immunity from that vaccine against the pandemic flus that come every few years, right?
The bird flu, the swine flu, H1N1, H1N5, etc.
The people who got a natural flu infection have much more immunity.
So that again goes to, you know, is vaccination Is mass vaccination really the solution or do you want young people as much as possible to get natural infections and have a much broader range?
Of immunity that maybe will protect against all those strains that are constantly mutating and give them really robust, durable...
Or because if you give the vaccine and then it mutates, then you have to get the new strain.
Listen, you're absolutely right.
And I think that people who are naturally immune...
Look, my own sister got...
My sister's a surgeon, right?
She got a COVID-19 infection, her whole family, right?
And natural COVID-19 infection.
Her hospital is, you know, again, I don't want to get her into trouble, but basically people are pressuring her to get vaccinated.
She got an IgG screen.
She has IgG.
She had a pretty robust symptomatic disease.
There's no way in hell she's going to get that vaccine because, you know...
I think what you're saying is absolutely true.
It's fundamentally a dogma in immunology.
This is a fundamental fact in immunology that if you have a natural infection, you're more robustly immunized than if you just get immunized against this one specific moiety.
So you're absolutely right.
But look, here's the ethical conundrum.
And again, it comes down to the minority harm issue, right?
Is look, what is the cost of population level natural immunity?
There's no question, natural immunity is superior, very likely in the vast majority of people, to vaccine immunity.
That's sort of a no-brainer.
You mentioned that there are studies done.
Any immunologist worth their salt would tell you that that's probably true.
If you get immunized with the whole virus, you're more robustly immunized than if you're vaccinated against just one protein from the virus.
That's absolutely true.
But let's think about the cost.
Of achieving a population that's naturally immune versus a population that is immunized with the vaccine in terms of the mortality cost, right?
And I would submit to you that, look, the COVID-19 disease kills a minority subset of people.
Unless we want to say, oh, the COVID-19 is not real or whatever, which I, I mean, it's just- I would never say that because I don't think it's true.
I think it's very real.
As a baseline, SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic virus.
The COVID-19 pandemic is real, and it's killing a minority subset of people up to half a percent, right?
Half a percent, right?
Half a percent is the cost, is the minority subset number, right?
Now, that's juxtaposed against probably like a 0.05% or 0.01% vaccine harm So you have two minority subsets of people, both of whom will be harmed.
The vaccine probably does help that larger minority subset.
And it harms the smaller minority subset, for sure, right?
So how do we balance the good of these two minority subsets that we're dealing with?
The vast majority of us are fine when we get SARS-CoV-2, right?
And so I think fundamentally, that's the question.
And let me put a finer point on that question.
Because our experience here in the United States is of a virus that is much more deadly than almost any other country in the world.
And why is that?
Why are we losing 1,500 people for every 100,000 when Cuba is losing only 14 and Africa is losing only one?
And there's a lot of factors, younger population, but one of those is Is that there's been a deliberate effort in our country to not look at the benefits of therapeutic drugs.
Absolutely.
Oh, my goodness.
And the problem is we literally have an institutional resistance where, you know, nothing's getting published on those.
Doctors are discouraged from using them, punished, even jailed for using them, and losing their licenses and all of this other hard show.
In order to have that one-track solution, which is it's either vaccination or the disease, and that should not be our choice.
We should be doing real risk assessments, and we should be doing early intervention.
What would the numbers be like if Tony Fauci had not created a system where nobody gets treated until they get in the hospital?
Where for the first three weeks that you get that virus, you're getting ivermectin, and you're getting hydroxychloroquine, and you're getting corticosteroids, and you're getting antibodies, and you're getting, you know, Zithromax, and all of these combinations of drugs that appear to be very, very effective that The doctors all over the world are saying this is working.
And we are the country that doesn't allow it.
And we have the most catastrophic impacts from this disease in any other country.
I don't know how Tony Fauci, people are saying he's a success story when he has engineered the worst outcome in the world here.
Robert, if you go back and look at some of the stuff that I wrote early in this pandemic, I think Tony Fauci's approach to this pandemic has been disastrous.
Fundamentally, COVID-19 is an inflammatory disease.
What the NIH effort focused on with anti-replication agents and vaccines At the cost of anti-inflammatory therapies is a massive blunder.
And I tell you, I've communicated with Janet Woodcock about this when she was at Operation Warp Speed.
You know, you can go back in my Medium blog post and you'll see one of the first drugs that my colleagues and I attempted to test was cyclosporine.
And cyclosporine is a classical generic drug.
It literally costs like 12 bucks for a 30-day course, right?
And it suppresses, it dampens activation of T cells, okay?
I'm working on it with a mentor and colleague, Carl June, who's the guy who invented CAR T cells at Penn, and a good friend of mine at Baylor.
Finally, we were able to start these two small clinical trials But, you know, in truth, the dominance of the vaccine and anti-replication efforts, these were all Fauci's sort of prejudice.
And I wrote an article about this called Fauci's Prejudice.
If you go back...
Oh, I need to go.
Yeah.
I mean, look, you know, I totally agree with you.
You know, I think the therapeutic, you know, objective has been an absolute disaster.
The therapeutic search for a therapy has been an absolute disaster.
Yeah.
And I think the blame, whether it's been intentional or whether it comes from his professional prejudice from the HIV pandemic, the blame squarely rests on Dr.
Fauci's shoulders because he essentially has ignored anti-inflammatory therapies.
And, you know, I've written extensively about this.
I was communicating directly to Janet Woodcock about this right from day one.
You know, in fact, March 24th is the first time I communicated about cyclosporine with them.
So, I mean, I totally agree with you.
All the way from the beginning where our president was completely ignoring the fact that this thing is real, up until now, where we're just dominantly focused on the vaccine thing.
It's just been a disaster.
But that's not to say that the vaccine doesn't have a role here.
No, no, but it's just impossible to make a risk assessment because you're not looking at all the options.
And it shouldn't be either you get a vaccine or nothing.
It should be...
Let's look at these other options.
Let's figure out the true risk from this vaccine if you're actually treating patients early.
I don't want to exhaust your time because I want to talk about Janet Woodcock and about your letter because it's the most important thing.
I think you have really...
Laser focused on an issue that, you know, goes right to the risk assessment for minority groups.
So will you tell us about the letter that you sent to Janet Woodcock and that whole kind of narrative of what happened?
Yeah, absolutely.
So look, I think we're doing something unprecedented here, Robert, and you and I have talked about this.
The most unprecedented aspect of what we're doing here.
It's not the speed of the vaccine.
I mean, look, this mRNA vaccine is a testament to American exceptionalism, okay?
And I'll tell you why.
In under a year, we've deployed a technology that is the equivalent of putting a rover on Mars, putting a man on the moon, right?
That technology itself It's an American achievement.
We should be proud of it.
But it's not a panacea.
What we're doing here is we're deploying a vaccine.
We've never done this before.
In the history of vaccine science, in the history of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of maybe the Gardasil issue that you had mentioned to me, but again, that was a much smaller scale.
We've never ever Deploy the vaccine smack dab in the middle of an outbreak where about 20 to 30% of the population is already infected.
Just think about that for one second, right?
You go to a doctor's office and you say, I have the sniffles.
They would never give you the flu shot.
You go to your doctor and you say, my kid had the chickenpox.
They would never give that kid a zoster shot, or most docs, most reasonable docs, when you already had the chickenpox.
But here we are, right now as we speak, somewhere around 30 million Americans, maybe more, have been infected or have asymptomatic infections currently.
And we are literally indiscriminately vaccinating all of these people, right?
What that means is that we're taking people who have the virus all over their bodies.
They're naturally infected.
And we're boosting their immune response using a very powerful vaccine.
And these vaccines are powerful, right?
These vaccines, when you said these vaccines are reactogenic, I would go as far as to say that they're more than reactogenic.
They're antigen specific, highly effective, and they mimic the virus in a way that activates the living hell out of the T cells, right?
Now here it is.
If you have a total body infection, a natural infection, these T cells that you activate will go into every single one of your tissues and attack it.
And you know, I think what we're going to be seeing, and the concern that I raised with Dr.
Woodcock, was that if you don't know whether this is safe to give to people who are naturally infected in a setting where a vast proportion of the American population is already infected, we are making an error.
It's an error.
It's a deadly error, right?
So what we need to do, you know, just like we put a Mars rover on Mars and a man on the moon, we need to exclude people at the very least.
You know, this vaccine has already rolled out, Robert, as you know, millions of people are getting it every day.
But at the very least, it is our duty, it is our government's duty, or it's the marketplace's duty, frankly, right?
To say, stop, we are not going to indiscriminately vaccinate people who are already infected, at the very least.
I mean, every single other issue about the academic points about the vaccine or any other safety issue is fine.
This thing is just a no-brainer.
This is low-hanging fruit.
You do not vaccinate people indiscriminately who carry a natural infection.
It's a clear and present danger.
And yet we're doing it.
We're doing it, you know?
And then we're calling all these people who are dying and having complications, true, true and unrelated.
Yeah, you know, Jay Barton Williams, 36-year-old, otherwise healthy guy with an asymptomatic infection down in Memphis, Tennessee, an orthopedic surgeon who was just seven weeks out from his wedding, he had an asymptomatic infection, gets two Pfizer shots, one, two, dead, right?
Are we just going to accept that?
Our Martin Hagler who died.
Well, yeah, I don't know what his history, I mean, you know, I don't know if he was infected or not.
He probably was.
I mean, he's, you know, he's a socialite, right?
He was a very healthy guy who was kind of a party guy and out on the top.
I'm not making any assumptions about him.
I don't want to spread any misinformation about whether he was infected or not.
But I would say that it's highly likely that he was.
Hank Aaron, Larry King, you know, all these people.
And my point to Dr.
Woodcock and to Dr.
Marks is, look, the clinical trials did not assess People who have recent or asymptomatic infections, and especially in vulnerable categories, the elderly, the frail, people who have cardiovascular diseases, you know?
And so here we are, we have this massively inflated subset of people who have natural infections, and we are indiscriminately vaccinating them.
We should stop doing that.
And if Pfizer and the FDA and Moderna and Johnson& Johnson don't take steps to do it, I think the public should.
I think the consumer, the American consumer is one of the most empowered species in world history.
The American consumer has to demand, must demand, screening before vaccination so that no person who's recently infected gets indiscriminately vaccinated.
The problem is the American consumers are not going to realize this because this issue is censored.
And what you're saying about it, you know, you will be shut down as soon as you get a public audience, as you already know.
Let me ask you this, because...
I hope not.
You know, I wrote letters to...
We wrote letters to Peter Marks, who's, you know, the top guy at FDA and he's head of CBER, which is, you know, the biologics division.
And we said, this was back in August, we said, look, in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they have Pegylated nanoparticles.
And there's a certain number of the American public who's already been exposed to polyethylene glycol.
And those people have antibodies to it.
And a certain percentage of them are potentially going to have anaphylactic reactions.
And he wrote us a letter back that seemed very irresponsible for a regulator.
He said...
You should talk to the companies.
Well, he should talk to the companies.
I'm not going to pay attention to it.
We wrote to the companies and of course they ignored it, but you had kind of the same experience here, right?
With Peter Marks.
Well, so Peter Marks responded to me on the day that they were running the Pfizer hearing.
So I literally have emails from Dr.
Marks, and I got an email from Dr.
Bill Gruber, who's the senior vice president of Pfizer's vaccine development.
And essentially, they put on the record...
When they got your letter, they were both in the same room with each other.
It was actually, you know, it was all a Zoom meeting, right?
Because everything's on Zoom.
But it was during that hearing, because I wanted Dr.
Marks to raise the issue of recently infected people getting indiscriminately vaccinated.
And essentially, the answer I got is that this is not a concern that our clinical trials have had a small number of asymptomatic infected people, and it's not an issue.
To which I said, you know, number one, it's not powered enough, and number two, you haven't put susceptible groups with recent infections in it.
Explain that to some people.
Now, what you mean, it's not powered enough.
I think there's only 300 people who were prior to the whole show.
That's right.
That's about 300 people.
So, you know, that means that if the incidence of harm is one out of 500, Right?
Which is like an astronomically high rate of...
It's like a million people.
A million people will die.
Yeah.
Basically, I mean, it's one in 500.
It's more than a million if the rate is one in 500 if you're vaccinating the entire U.S. population.
But, you know, it's like, you know, if one in 500 are susceptible and you only test 300 people out, the chances statistically that you've missed the event, the signal, are very high.
So what you need to do is you need to actually power up...
And also...
The people who were in those trials were not people with comorbidities.
We don't know how many of that 300 were elderly.
If you get that body-wide inflammation and you're a teenager, you probably can weather it.
But if you've already got vein problems or cardiac problems and you're 70 years old, then it can kill you.
You know, and Robert, the thing about it is that this virus goes to the heart.
It goes to the vascular endothelium.
It goes to blood vessels.
So when the viral antigens stick around there, if you activate an immune response that targets those organs, you know, you can get like a kid with an aneurysm and suddenly the aneurysm blows after a vaccine and you wonder, well, it's not related, right?
It's not related to the vaccine.
It can't be.
Well, it could be because the virus goes to the blood vessel.
And if there's actually a laxity in the blood vessel, In an aneurysm, and the immune system attacks that laxity, the blood vessel ruptures.
You know, that's just sort of, you know, or let's say the heart.
If the heart gets targeted, right, you suddenly die of heart block.
Is heart block a vaccine-associated complication?
And that's the other thing, you know, that I think it's very highly likely, and you know this, you know, you've talked about this, I know, and you wrote this very nice letter to Biden.
About how their surveillance systems are an absolute disaster.
Because, you know, most of the response to these vaccine-associated complications has been, by the public health officials, it's true, true and unrelated.
You know, it's catastrophic.
It's abolishing vaccine injury by fiat by just declaring them unrelated.
You can do that because a vaccine injury doesn't leave a fingerprint.
There's no...
A heart attack that you get immediately after vaccination, if you do a full autopsy and full chemical analysis, there's no way that you can figure out.
You know, I would say that the way to find out is to actually analyze these people for evidence of past viral infection.
So you can look for IgM in their blood.
You can actually do PCR for DNA on their tissues.
There are ways, you know, if you have a good forensic pathologist and if the hypothesis is that these people who are having these complications are the recently infected, you can find evidence for, you know, viral and bacterial disease.
DNA and protein.
And I would urge anyone who's listening, who may be a pathologist of concern, to actually look at that.
Like these forensic pathologists, these autopsies that they're doing, it's not sufficient to say, oh, this guy had a heart attack.
You got to go in that tissue and look for DNA from the virus.
You got to go in the body fluids and look for IgM, which is evidence of natural infection, you know?
So I think there are ways to do it if you really want to answer the question.
I just don't think they want to answer the question.
Well, listen, Dr.
Neutra, we're coming up on the hour.
I hate to let you go because this is fascinating.
And I really, really am grateful to you for being, for your courage and having this debate.
And, you know, for just to have rational discourse with somebody who doesn't agree with everything that you say is such a pleasure nowadays because it's all verboten.
Let me ask you one personal question.
I think that I may have had, and my whole family may have gotten coronavirus not last December, but the previous December.
And we all got sick from the, you know, very, very similar symptoms.
We don't have antibodies.
Is there any way that we can find out whether or at least have a suggestion about whether or not we have some kind of, is there some other signal that you can get detected?
So you've had an antibody measured then?
Yeah.
So if it's been over a year, chances are that the viral antigens are out of your system.
I think the basic science, at least from animal studies, says eight months is about the inflection point where the viral antigens are pretty clear.
So that's the first time I would suggest considering getting the revaccination.
You know, I think if you don't have IgG, there are some people who don't make IgG, you know, and sometimes the vaccine does force it.
So, you know, in cases like yours, I would suggest possibly, if it's been over eight months after your infection, you know, getting at least a single shot of the vaccine.
That's what I would recommend.
There's no other way really to detect whether you actually had...
Were you tested at the time or were tested?
No, it was before we knew about the coronavirus.
Yeah.
So, you know, I have a series of friends and people who've communicated with me who have exactly the same picture.
They think they had it, but they can't be sure.
I mean, is it possible that it was something else?
I guess it is.
It would be very unusual for your whole family not to have mounted an IgG.
You know, usually like when I've seen it, it's like clusters of people.
You have like 10 people who get it and there's one person amongst them that doesn't have an IgG response.
Yeah.
That was the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, and we can talk about it at some other point, but this idea of why do people need two shots?
What's this two-shot thing about?
If a person has had a recent infection over eight months ago and their antibodies are waning, the idea of giving one shot, in fact, is reasonable.
These are all sort of nuances of it that we can discuss over time, hopefully.
Dr.
Human-Nutrazen, thank you very, very much for joining me, and thank you for continuing to be a voice for reason and for ethics and for good science in our society.
Thank you very much.
Robert, thanks very much for having me.
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