All Episodes
Previous Next
April 16, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
54:01
Censorship and Death of Journalism with Alex Berenson

Alex Berenson was a reporter for The New York Times and has authored several nonfiction books and fictional spy novels. Berenson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discuss censorship and journalism.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Our guest today is Alec Berenson, a heroic figure in my view today.
And Alec is an American writer.
He has a dozen spy novels about the CIA. He is, and he's the winner of an Edgar Award.
Most people know him as a New York Times writer who's covered Bernie Madoff.
He's covered the financial sector.
He's covered drugs and pharmaceutical industry for the New York Times.
And he has kind of, I would say, taken a big risk and destroyed his relationship and made himself a pariah During the corona crisis by actually trying to cover the truth.
And he's done it very, very well.
And he's absolutely been savaged and brutalized by the institutions that used to celebrate him.
The Atlantic Monthly, the Daily Beast, and all of these other institutions.
So I'm reading from here.
I have a Wikipedia page now, Alex, and as you may know, Wikipedia is not a good place to get information about something.
No, it is not.
And you know, I've been involved, I almost litigated against them, and I've been working with Gary Null, who did litigate against them, and it's very hard to sue Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is completely subsumed in this pharmaceutical paradigm.
And anybody who promotes vitamins, anybody who promotes alternate medicine, integrative medicine, functional medicine, people who promote chiropractors or nutrition, they are all, their reputations are absolutely, it's just defamatory entries about them.
You can't sue them because of the way that they're set up.
But Gary Null has figured out a way to sue the individual editors who are responsible, and they all meet in this kind of editing room.
The top guys meet in this editing room, and they're the ones who control how Wikipedia handles the appeals.
You can get your buddy to go on your Wikipedia page and take off the defamatory stuff.
But it will instantly set off a trigger somewhere where they will come back and fix it to defend you again.
And so there's an editing room where those ultimate decisions are made about whether to uphold your edit or to discard your edit.
Well, they claim that it's sort of all crowdsourced, but it isn't really.
But, you know, I've given up basically on Wikipedia.
You know, hard science, hard science and hard medicine had managed to avoid, mostly avoid this kind of...
Groupthink, you know, doctors have to treat people ultimately, so they do need good, hard scientific evidence, or should anyway.
But even there, it's getting harder to avoid the influence of the groupthink.
I mean, as I said to you in our email, I strongly suspect we would disagree about a lot of things because, for example, you know, I don't really think there's great evidence, you know, to support a lot of the You know, the natural medicine remedies that you're mentioning or being a chiropractor or things like that.
You know, I tend to believe in medicine as has been practiced for, let's say, the last 100 or 120 years in the United States and the UK and, you know, Europe, and that we've made these great strides because we have relied on Randomized controlled trials and safety databases and independent regulators.
And we force doctors to justify what they're doing.
I mean, I think if you look at the history of medicine and, you know, in another life, I'd like to, you know, be an MD who writes sort of history of medicine books because I think it's fascinating.
You know, for a thousand years, doctors did terrible things to people because they didn't really have any scientific control to see if what they were doing made sense.
And, you know, finally, in the 1800s, they decided they were going to stop, you know, you know, putting leeches on.
I mean, that's not a good example.
This leech is going to actually work something, you know, drilling holes in people's heads or whatever.
And so so I always try to come at things from the data and and the and the and the published papers.
I don't necessarily know that we would agree on everything or even a lot of things, but But I think with these new, you know, these vaccines that are, you know, that are on the market right now, you know, although they're not even fully approved and that tens of millions of Americans are getting and that, you know, hundreds of millions of Americans are being encouraged to get and billions of people worldwide, we have done this in just a crazy way, in my opinion.
Well, you know, I was interested when you had that response to me, and we had this kind of repartee where you said, I'm not sure, you said, I doubt if I agree with many of the things that you stand for, and I said, I doubt if you know what I believe.
And I can, by the way, I will say now that I've been on the, you know, sort of whipped by the Atlantic and stuff like this, I can see better why you would say that, because, you know, they're writing a caricature of me.
Right, and And I've had that since 2005, you know, of people misrepresenting my views and not allowing me to respond.
And all of the characterizations of me are done by people who are very hostile to kind of my endpoint.
And my endpoint is science.
I got into this.
I'm an attorney.
I've argued hundreds and hundreds of cases.
I know what science is.
I've had, you know, the best experts in the country up on the witness stand.
I was examining them about peer review and about placebo-controlled and randomized trials.
And I know how science is supposed to work.
I love science.
I got into my field because I love science.
I wanted to be a scientist when I got out, when I grew up.
And the thing that got me onto the vaccine issue was a woman came to me with an 18-inch pile of peer-reviewed science and said, I'm not going to leave here until you read these.
And I started reading, you know, just the abstracts and quickly realized that what we were being told about vaccine safety and efficacy by the medical authorities, by the medical establishment, the regulatory authorities, the Pharmaceutical companies that there's a vast delta between that narrative and what the actual peer-reviewed science was saying.
And that set me off on this.
I didn't have, as far as I knew, anybody in my family or anybody that I knew who was vaccine injured.
It was a scientific journey for me.
And, you know, we don't, I'm on any vaccine.
I'm agnostic about all of the things that you talked about there.
I, you know, a lot of things, my initial approach is that everything is a voodoo until I see actual science that it works.
And by the way, you know, you and I talk about peer-reviewed science, but peer-reviewed science is not a deity either.
And a huge amount of the peer review, even Richard Horton from the Lancet and Marsha Engle, who is a long-term editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and all of these other editors from JAMA and from the major journals are all saying it's all fixed now because the pharmaceutical industry controls those journals.
And you cannot get, and I know this, if you write something that challenges that paradigm, you are going to have it retracted if it ever gets published.
And you know, we've watched scientists after scientists have these brilliant studies.
Chris Axley, who's done all the studies on the aluminum, he's the world's authority on aluminum, and he's now in the doghouse, and all this stuff has been retracted.
I mean, that is something I know nothing about.
And I'm basically...
I think I told you, or I think I say it in the booklet, my gut is that the standard childhood vaccines are pretty safe.
But I will admit, I have not read that 18-inch trial of stuff.
That's just been my gut because they've been around for a long time.
And I know people say the vaccine schedule has grown, and obviously that's true.
But, you know, the basic principle has been In the literature or in discussion among doctors for more than 200 years, you try to improve people's immunity by priming their immune systems.
That makes sense to me as somebody who's not a trained vaccinologist.
I really don't want to...
To, you know, to in any way imply that I'm endorsing your views on the other vaccines.
Not because I know that you're wrong, but because I've done basically no work on them.
And so, and my gut as somebody who, I guess, came out of the liberal, you know, Northeastern establishment is, you know, vaccines basically work.
At least the standard ones basically work.
Where I'm a cynic is about, and by the way, those standard vaccines are low profit products.
They're not a big part of the pharmaceutical industry.
As opposed to what we've...
Oh, you're saying that's not necessarily true.
Again, that's something I have not really looked at.
Prior to 1989, the vaccine schedule changed in 1989, and it was because we passed the law in 1986, giving the companies complete blanket immunity from life to life.
Well, it was a gold rush.
We went from three vaccines I took as a kid to 72 doses of 16 vaccines.
And, you know, one of the things people say is, like what you just said, is that they've been around a long time.
They must be safe.
By the way, the profits from those vaccines went from 187 million to 6 billion a year or revenue.
So it is a major profit center.
Let me ask you about the issue that I really want to talk to you about.
What is the acquiescence in the press, in the collaboration, in the press, in the liberal establishment, in people who I grew up with who were just relentless defenders of the Constitution, human rights groups, environmental groups, all the people who believe strongly in democracy and civil rights.
What is it about the human brain that allows them to ignore what's happening right now?
You know, that is a great question, and I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, in a way, that's an even more fundamental question.
What is happening and has happened to the press, you know, both to, I would say, both to legacy media and to these new, you know, tech giants and social media companies.
What has happened to them in the last few years?
You know, why is it that they are engaged in this incredible group thing?
And You know, look, I think you can blame Donald Trump for part of it.
I mean, I think he accelerated this.
And as we know, Donald Trump would go up and speak to reporters and spew falsehoods.
I mean, that's unquestionable.
He did that chronically.
But, you know, politicians have done that forever.
I think I think I think More aggressively.
And the media became much more oppositional and much more openly aligned with the Democratic Party than ever before.
And culturally, the media has become, you know, very, very...
It's culturally left.
And look, you can say that's a good thing.
You can say it's a good thing that gay people can marry in this country and that open racism is not tolerated.
Those are good things.
Women can get an abortion without having to go in a back alley.
That is something that shouldn't happen in the United States of America, in my opinion.
I don't like abortion any more than anybody else, but making it illegal doesn't stop it, okay?
So, you know, we have made giant strides, I think, in cultural progress in the last 50 years.
But at some point, the media stopped saying that both sides, you know, should be heard in these debates, whether they're the cultural ones or the political ones.
And Trump made that much worse.
And with the coronavirus, I mean, it sort of all exploded at once because this was a perfect issue to beat Donald Trump over the head with because he's not very empathetic and, you know, and he's not, you know, to the extent he has leadership strengths, they are that he's sort of irreverent and will do things that other people might not do, like, you know, like have Kassim Soleimani killed, right?
That was something that Barack Obama could have done and didn't, and Donald Trump did it, and it seems to have more or less worked out to the good in the Middle East.
But Donald Trump is not what anyone would call a steady leader, and he's not what anyone would call empathetic.
And so this crisis, they were able to beat him over the head for things he had done and things he hadn't done.
And essentially that's why he lost the election, I think.
I mean, I think it's pretty clear at this point that he probably would have won if not for the coronavirus.
And so that meant making the coronavirus crisis as bad as it could possibly be.
And that meant the endless death counting and without telling people who really died, you know, that really, unless you are extremely old or extremely unhealthy, you have to be extremely unlucky to die from the coronavirus.
That's just a fact.
Without telling people that, you know, lockdowns, there's essentially next to no evidence they've done any good in the United States, that there's very little evidence that masks do any good, that all this public health, that all these measures had very, very little science behind them, either before March of 2020 or in the year since.
I mean, you're starting to see some pushback because, you know, people are like, what happened to Florida?
Why isn't Florida, you know, filled with dead old people?
And the reason is that lockdowns Don't seem to matter once this virus gets at all endemic, right?
So unless you're New Zealand and you lock down really hard and really early and close your borders, you just have to live with it.
And so that happened last year, and it supercharged this process that the media had gone through.
And it's everywhere now.
So George Floyd dies.
It's terrible.
But there are riots in cities following that.
And we're not allowed to describe them as riots.
They must be described as mostly peaceful protests.
There were protests, too.
There were rallies, but there were riots.
No one was allowed to say that.
I don't understand that.
You were allowed to protest George Floyd's death, but you couldn't protest the lockdowns.
If you did that a month before, you were a mouth-breathing, Neanderthal racist.
My opinion is that you should be able to protest both those things and hopefully not riot over either one of them.
So the media has become more and more Willing to push its more and more obvious biases on people.
And the Times has done some things I would never have expected it to do.
They've surreptitiously edited stories that have already run, you know, because you can do that on the internet.
You can change something afterwards.
And unless somebody is watching very carefully, it's going to pass by without notice.
The Washington Post did the same thing in an absolutely absurd way where they rewrote the lead of an article about Kamala Harris After she became Biden's nominee for vice president to make it much more powerful, much more friendly to her.
And they just didn't tell anybody.
So I do think, I think the media is in crisis.
And I think the reason that people, you know, me and Glenn Greenwald and even somebody like Joe Rogan, why, you know, why Look, I should not have the voice that I have here.
I'm nobody right now.
I don't work for the New York Times anymore.
I haven't for a decade.
I wrote a bunch of hopefully pretty good spy novels, and then I wrote this book about cannabis.
The Times is a global news organization.
But they're not covering this the right way.
They're not asking the right questions, whether it's about any of the non-pharmaceutical interventions or about these vaccines.
And neither is the Washington Post, and neither is CNN, and neither is MSNBC. And people feel desperate to have somebody like me, even if they sometimes think I'm wrong, even if I say things that are stupid, sometimes even if I go too far, even if I'm sarcastic when I shouldn't be, just to have somebody with a real journalistic background asking questions they are desperate for.
How much of that media bias, particularly in the mainstream media, do you think is linked to pharmaceutical advertising revenues?
I mean, I think only a small amount, honestly.
When I worked for The Times, I covered the drug industry for a number of years, and I was allowed to write whatever I wanted.
Nobody who reads those stories would say that I was a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry.
And honestly, that's where my skepticism about the vaccines comes from, right?
Because it doesn't come from an anti-vax background.
It comes from a cynic about big pharma background.
And to me, again, these products are very different than traditional vaccines, and they were moved through the pipeline incredibly fast, you know, basically less than a year from invention to going in people's arms.
And the normal procedures that exist for a reason were not followed.
And journalists should be asking questions about that, even if the ultimate answer is these vaccines are, you know, are very safe overall and we need them to defeat COVID, which I think the jury is out on both of those questions still.
Even if those answers prove to be yes, the questions about how quickly they were moved through the pipeline have to be asked, and nobody has.
Here's an example of the way the conspiracy theorist believes this works.
Well, Bill Gates is paying off all these journalists and all these academics.
And, you know, they're all getting all this money from Bill Gates, and they all think the same.
Well, it's more complicated than that, right?
It's not like Bill Gates is giving the editor of the New York Times $2 million on the QT to say something nice about the vaccines.
That's not how it works.
What Bill Gates has done over a period of decades, and what George Soros has also done, they've done this very smartly, is they've slowly built up an infrastructure, sort of a self-reinforcing academic media, They're doing it because they think their policy points are right.
But if you offered a journalist a million dollars and said, you know what, I want you to write story X, Y, or Z, I think most journalists at the New York Times would say no to that.
They wouldn't buy that.
They view that as contemptible and corrupting, and they wouldn't do that.
But if you said to the same journalist, Come to my conference in Telluride this spring, and we'll fly you back and forth, and we'll put you in a hotel, and you can have a couple thousand dollars because you're going to have to take a week off or whatever it is.
That's something I can take, probably.
I mean, most journalists would be okay taking that.
And that's not buying me.
That's not, oh, I didn't take a million dollars from you.
What it is, is it's putting me in a world where everybody's thinking the same way.
And if I'm not very careful, I'm pretty soon not going to know what I don't know anymore.
And I think one reason that the response to Tell Your Children was so vigorous and angry and why some of my reporting on the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines has been so vigorous and angry is these people legitimately have no idea what they don't know.
And with the vaccines, Once those headline figures came out in November of this is 90 to 95% efficacious, nobody stopped and looked at what the trials had actually shown, who'd actually been enrolled, what the side effect profile actually was.
So when I come out and say, all of you are saying that there's Absolutely no issues here about pregnancy.
Not infertility, but active pregnancies.
Yet, when you look at the only animal studies that were done, there were significantly more pregnancy loss, or there was more than double the pregnancy loss in rats that got the vaccine than that got a placebo.
They didn't know that.
Okay, that's buried on page 50 of some briefing booklet that only about, you know, three journalists in the world looked at.
And I happen to be one of them.
So people, it's much easier to say that I'm a conspiracy theorist and here I am with RFK Jr.
spreading conspiracy than saying, you know what, like, I didn't actually know that.
What did the companies do to follow that signal up?
And the answer appears to be they did nothing.
And so maybe that's a cause for concern when you see these miscarriage reports showing up in VAERS. So when you don't know what you don't know, it's a lot easier to shoot the messenger than to actually try to hear the message.
Have you been on Joe Rogan?
I have.
I've been on Rogan twice.
Once to talk cannabis and once about the COVID in general.
Let me ask you about Tony Fauci.
Tony Fauci, you know, and I've known Tony Fauci for years, and he's always been a villain to me.
I've met with him on vaccine issues.
I've seen the corruption in that agency, and also just the failure.
He came in in 84, and he presided.
He's in charge of preventing autoimmune allergic diseases and studying them.
And those diseases exploded under his watch.
He's never studied them.
Instead, he transformed his agency, the National Institute for Allergic Infectious Disease, into an incubator for pharmaceutical products.
That's virtually the only thing that it does now.
It's a $7.6 billion budget.
He gives away 13 times what Bill Gates gives away every year.
And it's all the developing new drugs, many of which he has the patents on his, personally, but his underlings and his agency.
He's failed upward.
We had one of the worst records for COVID of any nation in the world.
We're killing 1,600 per million.
Cuba is killing 14 people per million, one thousandth of who died here, etc.
What do you think of his performance?
I don't think it was up to him.
That's the problem.
So I think that Tony Fauci is a bureaucrat, okay?
He's a senior-level bureaucrat, but he's a bureaucrat.
It wasn't his job to decide whether to shut the country down.
And it wasn't his job to decide whether to close schools.
His job is to tell policymakers who speak for all of us and who have to balance all our competing interests, here's what I see as the risks and benefits of courses A, B, C, and D. And then even if one path might lead to more COVID deaths, if it leads to better outcomes for children, that's something that has to be considered.
But Fauci really seemed to only care about one thing, which was containing COVID. And that's his job.
But we didn't let Oppenheimer decide whether to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.
That was the president's job.
So the failure...
Look, do I think it's pretty clear that Tony Fauci never met a camera he didn't like?
Is it amazing to me that you can find him on On, you know, every podcast, you know, ever invented?
Yeah.
Does it make me wonder when he actually has time to read any papers or review any science?
Yes, it does.
Is it clear that, you know, he, you know, until COVID, he basically seemed to care mostly about HIV and none of the other stuff that you're talking about?
Yeah, I mean, I think all those things are true, but to me, that's To call him the villain is to give him too much power.
He shouldn't be the villain or the hero.
But one more thing about him, again, it's not just podcasts.
He's very clearly willing to talk to reporters at length.
He's very, very, very good at getting his side of the story out.
And he also, it seems clear to me, that when HIV happened in the 80s, And he was demonized because people, you know, people were dying.
He understood that, you know, body count can trump almost anything and that these stories are inherently political.
And so he doesn't want to be the villain.
He wants to be the hero and he's very good at making himself the hero.
But it was, you know, Donald Trump or, you know, if there'd been a different president, a different president who should have said, I'm in charge.
You give me advice.
I'm in charge.
I will make the final decisions, you know, to the extent you can within a federalized system where governors are also making decisions.
And by mid-April, certainly, at the latest of last year, when it was clear that this virus, however serious it is, and it is serious, it does kill people, it certainly has led to excess deaths in the United States in the last year, that this virus could not overwhelm our hospital system,
that it could not kill enough sort of young, healthy people to have any impact on the food chain or anything like that, that we could manage this going forward as a medical problem Somebody needed to say to Tony Fauci, that's what we're going to do.
We're not going to make this a societal problem.
We're going to manage this in the medical system, and we should have stuck to that.
But it wasn't up to him.
It shouldn't have been.
It kind of was up to him.
Well, yes, but it shouldn't have been.
It shouldn't have been, right.
I made the same decision.
Metaphor that you just did with Hiroshima and my uncle, President Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis had 13 people on his excom who were the world's experts in diplomacy and statecraft and warcraft and spycraft and they all gave him advice and all of their advice was you go into Cuba.
You either go with the military or you drop a bomb.
He listened to them.
And he said, let me see the aerial photographs.
And he questioned people.
And he tried to find voices outside of XCOM that had other ways of thinking about it.
And then he made his own decision, which was, we're going to do a quarantine.
We're not going to go into Cuba.
And it worked out.
We didn't have nuclear war and nuclear winter.
Yes.
You know, unfortunately, with Fauci, he was given the power that you say, you know, nobody consulted an economist and said, you know, there's a whole school of economics that started in the 1980s.
It says, what happens when you downsize, you know, large corporations and you create massive unemployment?
What does that do to the social health?
And what they found was At every point, unemployment kills 37,000 Americans.
That's when the population was half.
So you're talking about 50,000.
Nobody ever said, if we create 25 points of unemployment, is that going to give us more deaths than coronavirus?
And what's it going to do for future generations?
Nobody made that assessment.
It's really quite extraordinary.
Yes, I completely agree.
It is extraordinary.
It's an extraordinary failure.
You know, I read a study last week that was very interesting to me because you were mentioning about lockdowns.
There's no science that says locking people down is going to stop the spread of an infectious disease.
And there's a lot of indication, you know, I heard yesterday people gained 10 to 20 pounds during lockdowns.
That's not a good, that's bad for, you know, for dads that, you know, you don't go in the sunlight, you don't have sports, you're depressed, all of these stress.
But this was a peer-reviewed study that came out of Canada and they looked at Two different sets of states.
They looked at Minnesota and Wisconsin, which are neighboring states, and that's completely different.
Minnesota had a very, very strict lockdown policy.
Wisconsin did not.
And then they compared Florida to California, which was a really stark, stark outcomes, because Florida has more elderly.
California had 33%, percentage-wise, more deaths among the elderly than Florida.
Yes.
You know, and they were both kind of equal for the space that didn't lock down.
All the metrics actually did better.
I mean, I guess one thing that I wonder about and I don't fully understand yet is So the public health authorities have been demonstrably wrong about a lot of things in the last year, the lockdowns most especially, but certainly I think people would now agree that school closures are a mistake.
We can argue about masks, but there's not great evidence for masks.
You can sort of try to look at one state versus another state.
It's very hard to tell who has mask mandates and who doesn't.
Why is it that all those mistakes have Haven't led to more skepticism about the COVID vaccines, which are really more intrusive than anything else.
So the most intrusive thing you can do to somebody is inject them with a drug or a vaccine against their will.
If you're a psychiatric patient, a doctor has to get a court order to do that to you, because we know how intrusive it is.
And that's right.
And yet these vaccines, which again, Basically, the mRNAs are based on technology that has never been used in any therapeutic product before.
And that really was tested in mere hundreds of people before all of this began last year.
And that the company that is a leader in it, Moderna, had sort of missed its deadlines for years and years and years because working mRNA is much harder than the sort of 50,000-foot picture makes it seem.
Why is it that journalists...
Didn't at least read the briefing book and say to themselves, wow, these side effects, this is not a joke.
These look pretty bad.
And let me maybe do a little research on what mRNA is and how this is injected into the body and what is this lipid nanoparticle that protects it.
And, you know, what are some of the risks here that the clinical trials, even a large clinical trial, might not have found because we only had a couple months of safety data, and for many of the subjects in that trial, only weeks of safety data.
And, you know, is it smart?
And then the flip side of that is, at this point, we know who dies from COVID, okay?
And we know that people under COVID You know, certainly people under 20, but even up to 30, 40, you know, even 50, if they're reasonably healthy, are very low risk, okay?
Your risk, you know, listen, if you're 40 and morbidly obese, you can die from this.
If you're, you know, certainly if you're 60, if you have any kind of chronic condition, you have some risk.
Not a huge risk, even at 60, but some risk.
Well, that's certainly true.
Maybe, given what we now know that we didn't know a year ago when we felt, you know what, this is going to kill 10 million Americans and we need to rush You know, nothing can be permitted to slow the development of these vaccines.
Well, guess what?
Maybe this is not the flu, but it is more in keeping with a bad seasonal flu than with the Spanish flu, much less something like Ebola, okay?
So if you put it on a spectrum, you'd certainly say the death count is much closer to a seasonal flu than to the Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people around the world, right?
So, maybe we should think about this and we should at least ask some questions and ask about the regulators.
And one thing that happened, Robert, that shocks me.
Okay, so some hackers got in to the European Medicines Agency and they hacked some documents about You know, where the regulators were talking to each other about some of the political pressure that they faced to approve these vaccines very quickly and about the political pressure that the FDA faced and some questions that they had about the manufacturing process of these vaccines.
Those have basically not been reported.
And the excuse is, well, we don't want to encourage people to steal documents.
Well, let me tell you something.
If that...
I didn't steal the documents.
And no one is claiming that the information in them is not correct.
But this has become now this convenient ideological thing since the Hillary Clinton emails where if the data that comes out of a leak is problematic to your cause ideologically, you just say it's a leak.
And the reason I can tell you that I know that this is pure ideology is you will find journalists, there was a guy on a well-known Washington Post reporter, I believe it was the Washington Post, a year or two ago begging people who worked for the Trump administration Or the Trump Organization, or both, to leak documents to him.
Okay, which is, I mean, actually, in a way, that's more problematic, because you're asking for specific things from specific people.
So the EMA had real questions.
Certainly, they were concerned about the political pressure that they knew that they were going to face, and that story didn't get reported anywhere.
And what about the The suppression of news, for example, YouTube videos of doctors who are saying, you know, here are treatment doctors who have, you know, like Peter McCulloch has 600 peer-reviewed publications, more than anybody in his specialty, who's saying, I've treated thousands of patients and here's what's working for us.
And by the way, I published this In the Journal of American Medical Association.
And here's a peer-reviewed publication by one of the highest gravitas journals in the country.
I'm going to take four slides out of that peer-reviewed publication and explain so that doctors in the hospitals and elsewhere know how to treat their patients prior to getting them to the hospital.
And that thing was taken off.
No, it's very problematic.
Yes, a hundred, no, thousands.
And people who suffer injuries were removed because...
No, I think that's incredibly problematic.
And look, I've stayed away from HCQ and ivermectin.
I have not reviewed those studies.
My impression is that...
You know, there's sort of basically more hypothesis generating than hypothesis proving that, you know, it's a lot of open label stuff and that when people have tried to run randomized controlled trials, they haven't gotten great results.
But again, that's not something I've looked at, okay?
And I like to look at stuff where there's RCTs, okay?
But what you're talking about is different, right?
It's not the question of whether or not these work.
It's the question of whether or not we're allowed to talk about them.
Whether we're allowed to talk about treatments that aren't the vaccine.
And to me, it's very problematic when YouTube is removing videos.
Even stuff that might be outright conspiratorial.
Because the solution to speech is more speech.
And most people, they're not going to go too far down a rabbit hole.
And if they do, hopefully they'll come out.
Most people eventually probably will get bored with whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is.
The problem becomes when you...
This supposedly neutral platform company.
Start to hold yourself out as the arbiter of all that is truthful and holy.
And you say, I'm not going to let you post your video.
And it's not just going to be this wacky conspiracy stuff.
It's going to be, as you say, doctors talking.
I mean, to me, one of the craziest examples of this was when YouTube pulled something that Scott Atlas had said, a video that he had made.
At the time, he was an advisor to Donald Trump.
I don't care what he says.
If it's crazy, people should hear it because they should know that's who's talking to the president.
And if it's not crazy, they should hear it.
Okay, so that's YouTube, right?
Then we have Facebook.
Facebook is suppressing information related to these vaccine side effects, but they're also suppressing groups, right?
So people are trying to get together and maybe protest to reopen a city or a state.
You know, that's too negative or, you know, or violent.
They will, they'll pull it.
Okay, let me tell you, as somebody who's gotten death threats on Twitter, social media is a cesspool for stuff like that.
And once again, it is only, you know, people who are speaking out against causes that Facebook likes or is supporting that are getting punished that way, as far as I can tell.
Then we have Amazon.
Amazon has made it basically impossible to self-publish much about COVID or vaccines.
And I've been very lucky, right?
Ever since the Elon Musk thing back in June, I've had access to Amazon.
They do not want to fight with me and have me go on TV and complain, so they let me publish.
But I am fortunate in that most people do not have that.
So all of these places...
Or, you know, they are censoring, they are suppressing, they are putting their thumbs on the scale to a greater or lesser degree.
And it is incredibly problematic.
And to me, it's going to drive people who wouldn't be conspiracy theorists to becoming conspiracy theorists.
First of all, let me just say, let me put another seed in your head.
Meryl Nass is a really accomplished doctor who publishes a lot of stuff.
She's done a spreadsheet of all of the peer-reviewed that have just been done on ivermectin and on hydroxychloroquine and when you go through it, it's very very convincing.
There are literally hundreds of studies on those.
Did you follow it all The sabotage campaign where they...
The piece in the Lancet that the Lancet had to retract.
Jam out the New England Journal of Medicine.
Actually, the New England Journal of Medicine, I think, was the one that did the Brazilian study where people died and the Brazilian government actually filed indictments for murder.
I guess the people who had conducted that study, because they were using five times the lethal dose of hydroxychloroquine, apparently the purpose was to discredit it, and all three simultaneously, which never happens, published on these studies, and then two of them had to retract them, and the third one should have Retracted it as well.
And there was silence in the media about that.
You're right.
And to me, the number one reason that that happened that way was Trump, again, it was a way to punish Trump.
He was seen as a supporter of HCQ. And so attacking the drug was attacking him and making him look foolish.
And they were so excited to do that, that they forgot that the data wasn't real.
Now, I mean, since then, people have said to me, well, the real reason this has happened is that these are cheap treatments and drug companies can't make any money off them.
And that's why they don't like them.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I mean, it is true that there is a tendency in medicine to use the newest, most expensive product that's got a pharmaceutical sales force behind it.
You know, the joke is that, you know, for the first few years of the patent, it's the greatest thing ever.
the next few years, it's okay.
And then as the patent is wearing off, you find out all the things that were terrible about it all along, and you're on to the next great thing.
Now, again, although I'm a cynic about the drug industry, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and the industry has certainly created products that are lifesavers for millions of people over the years.
I don't think anybody can disagree with that, whether it's AIDS, drugs, or statins, or even antidepressants have helped a lot of people.
But what's important is to be honest about the efficacy profile and the side effects.
And it is up to the regulators to make sure the companies are doing that, because they will always tend to hype.
And it is up to the press to make sure the regulators are doing their job.
And both the press and the regulators have failed in the case of these vaccines.
Let me point out one more thing about the vaccines.
Again, the COVID vaccines is what I'm talking about.
These are not approved.
They are authorized under an emergency use authorization.
Okay, so what's the first word in that?
All right.
Where is the emergency?
Okay, I just got back from Florida.
There is no emergency in Florida.
There is no emergency in New York.
There is no emergency anywhere.
And there are also supposed to be no approved treatments if you're going to have something that's allowed under an EUA. And it looks to me like the monoclonal antibodies are actually approvable, fully approvable, if the companies would start that, you know, would push that process along.
Because they've really been shown to reduce death, unlike the vaccines.
So here's another thing, okay?
You said that what you'd really like to see is overall health status of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people.
You said that sort of early on.
I mean, I think that's basically impossible as a practical matter to get to.
What you can get to, though, what you should be able to get to is all-cause mortality, right?
So you should be able to say, here are the number of people who died of any cause after getting the COVID vaccine in this trial or in this large epidemiological real-world study versus the people who didn't.
Because if the vaccine saves half the people dying from COVID, but You know, if it saves 50 people from dying from COVID, but 100 have strokes, that's not a win.
And yet, nowhere can I find any all-cause mortality data, aside from Just a handful of people who died in both arms of the clinical trials.
I'm talking about the Israeli data.
I'm talking about the British data.
They are not publishing all-cause mortality data.
And I don't know if that's because they don't have it or if it's because it doesn't look good.
I suspect in some cases they do have it.
But that to me, that's why am I the only journalist asking?
Okay, why aren't all these very good drug industry reporters?
You know, there's a place called Stat News.
It's very good.
They know what these questions are.
Why aren't they asking?
And if the answer is, you know, there's a slight advantage to the vaccine, or you actually know the unvaccinated population had slightly fewer deaths, whatever it might be, let's get the answer.
Let's ask the question.
I don't know if you know the history of this, but the reason that we don't have that data is because they have a dysfunctional surveillance system.
And everybody agrees that in 2010, CDC commissioned, because they were under pressure, a study and a pilot program to switch to a machine counting system.
And they did a A pilot program at the Harvard Pilgrim.
Do you know about this?
Yes, I've heard about this, but go on.
Well, they did a pilot program at Harvard Pilgrim, which is one of the smaller HMOs, and they use this new machine counting system, which does a cluster analysis.
They take all the data from the HMO, which has all the vaccines you've ever received, down to lot number and batch number, And it has all your medical claims.
You then later get diabetes or arthritis or developmental disorders or are buying EpiPens.
It knows that.
And so they did a cluster analysis and they could connect certain vaccines to certain injuries with precision.
And they came back and they said, okay, here's what we've learned.
First of all, this works like a charm.
And CDC's plan was to roll it out to all the other HMOs.
He said, we are seeing injuries, not one in a million serious injuries, but one in every 40 people who gets a vaccine.
You know, but we can make this system works and we're going to be able to get all those injuries.
And CDC immediately killed that program because they don't want a, you know, and in fact, the study was done by AHRQ, the Agency for Healthcare Research, which is another HHS agency.
And they worked on it for three years and came back and said, this works like a charm.
In the report that AHRQ handed in, they published, it says CDC stopped answering their phone once we showed them this data.
And they were not able to accept it.
I have not read the paper, but it sounds like I should.
The study is called Lazarus, and it's 2010.
It's a peer-reviewed published study.
I mean, look, we saw an example of this yesterday.
There's no question that VAERS and the voluntary surveillance systems miss a huge number of events.
I don't know if they miss 99% or 95% or 90% or 80%, but they miss a huge percentage of events.
Let me just tell you one other anecdote, and I don't know if you've heard this, but what you said that got us into this conversation is correct.
What you need is all-cause mortality.
You know, I'm suing Merck for the Gardasil vaccine, and when you look at the Gardasil vaccine, there are all kinds of deaths in the vaccine groups.
There are suicides, there are car accidents, and then there are just a range of deaths, you know, autoimmune disease and strokes or all this kind of thing, and you have to count all of them.
In the placebo group, there was no deaths.
What they'll say is, well, a car accident isn't a vaccine death.
You don't know that.
Right.
Because that person could have had a seizure.
They could have been depressed.
There are a lot of things that can happen.
And you have to count 100% of them.
And then you have to compare them with background rates or with placebo group.
And you can do that.
No, I mean, yes.
As you say, the companies will find any excuse to say that death is not linked to the vaccine.
And it's easy because vaccine injuries don't leave it.
And none of them leave a fingerprint.
Right.
Right.
Oh, when Aaron died, I did an article that said he's part of a number of deaths that we're seeing immediately after vaccination.
You know, it was a fair article because he had gone up to convince Black people to vaccinate.
That's right.
He said, look, it's safe, and then 17 days later, he dies.
It was a fair observation.
I didn't say the vaccine killed him because you can't say that.
There's no fingerprint.
But I did say he's part of a bunch of people dying right after the vaccine and used all the reports coming from Gibraltar and France.
The New York Times does a report saying Kennedy is wrong, and this was everywhere around the country, but the initial one was the New York Times, the Fulton County coroner's office said it was his death.
It's unrelated to the vaccine.
I've been fact-checked across the world and called a liar, so I called up Fulton County coroner.
And they said to me, we don't know what The Times was talking about.
We never saw the body.
We never did an autopsy.
We never did a postpartum.
They were just lying.
And so-- I mean, what's stunning to me is that there are cases that somebody literally seizes after five minutes after the vaccination and gets taken to an ER and to a hospital And those cases The CDC or the state health authorities or the companies will say are not provably related.
I mean, if those aren't going to be considered vaccine-caused deaths, I don't know what is.
That seems crazy to me.
But let me just give you just a real-world example of the problems with the voluntary system that hit me yesterday.
So...
The British and the Europeans are trying to figure out what's happening with the AstraZeneca vaccine and this very unusual situation you have where your platelets go down and you have blood clots and it looks like the vaccine is causing some kind of immunogenicity and the antibodies are attacking your platelets and people are having these terrible...
Thromboembolic events.
They're dying of stroke.
They're dying of what's called DIC, which is a horrible way to go.
There's these issues around blood.
And these are young people, and these are events that should really stand out.
Last week, one week ago, the British, which is the home of the AstraZeneca vaccine, AstraZeneca is a British company and has distributed more of that vaccine than anybody else.
They said, we're not really seeing a problem here.
We see 30 reports of events and seven deaths out of 18 million cases.
Okay.
So, you know, 30 out of 18 million, you know, maybe it's a little more than you expect, but you can't say anything.
Okay.
This week, one week later, they came back and said, Okay, now we've seen 79 events out of 20 million cases, including 17 deaths.
So if you do the math, that would imply that there were 50 cases in the last week out of only 2 million doses and 10 deaths.
But that's not what happened.
What happened was finally doctors in the UK are really paying attention and they're not missing any events.
And so most of those 50 probably were previous So what I'm saying to you is even this very rare condition that's very dangerous, that you would expect doctors not to miss, a majority of the cases were missed until last week.
So you can't come up with a better example of the limitations of a voluntary surveillance system than that.
And, you know, is that happening in the U.S.? Is it happening in Europe?
Are we going to see a bump in, you know, these thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic events now that doctors are looking for them?
I would be surprised if we don't.
Yeah, doctors are under a lot of pressure not to report them.
But, you know, but I think at some point the pressure flips the other way, right?
Where the families start to ask questions and you as a medical professional feel compelled.
And I hope that's going to happen now.
Alex Berenson, thank you so much for joining me.
Tell people how they can follow you, how they can support you.
Sure.
So I'm on Twitter, Alex Berenson, and I have to say Twitter has been pretty good.
They haven't been perfect, but they've been pretty good about letting me talk.
And so I appreciate that.
that.
And I say that, you know, every time I talk about internet censorship, I have to say Twitter has been pretty good to me.
In terms of the booklets that I've written, I've written these four unreported truth booklets.
The one that might be of most interest to your audience is the most recent one.
It's called Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and Lockdowns Part 4 Vaccines.
It is a look at the science and the data behind the mRNA vaccines.
And I talk a little bit about AstraZeneca and J&J2.
And the other booklets, the first one is about death counts, The second one is about lockdowns.
The third one is about masks.
But the fourth one, which just came out about two weeks ago, is about vaccines.
And I hope people find it interesting.
And thank you so much for having me on.
And I feel like we've had a good conversation.
We haven't agreed about everything.
There's certainly things I'm not going to convince you of and vice versa.
But we've had the kind of conversation that people don't have enough anymore.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You know, we need debate and discussion.
It's the sunlight, it's the oxygen for democracy, and the fact that it's being choked off is killing our democracy.
Yes.
Thank you very much, Mr.
Kennedy.
▲
Export Selection