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May 6, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
01:03:40
Contact Tracing and Vaccine Safety with Dr. Eileen Natuzzi

Dr. Eileen Natuzzi is a retired acute care and trauma surgeon with a masters in public health. In 2020, she was on the front lines for the San Diego County Department of Public Health on COVID contact tracing, case infection, and outbreak investigation.  Natuzzi is also involved in Global Health work in the South Pacific, specifically Solomon Islands.

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I'm very excited to have on here today a physician who I've relied on a lot over the past year for advice.
She's somebody who has worked for government health agencies, Dr.
Eileen Natuzzi, who is a retired acute care trauma surgeon with a Master's in Public Health.
And for the past year, she's worked for the San Diego County Department of Public Health on COVID contact tracing.
On case infection and outbreak investigation, and she's involved in global health work as well, particularly in the South Pacific and specifically in the Solomon Islands.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Where are you now?
Are you in San Diego?
I am.
I actually live in Encinitas in North County, San Diego.
And I can see all the military medals behind you in that case.
Is that from a family member or...?
That is how I got started going to the Solomon Islands.
My mother's brother was in the Navy, and he was killed during the Battle of Savile Island when his ship, the Quincy, sank.
And his remains were never recovered.
And so I actually kind of just made a trip there when I was teaching in Fiji, because basically nobody from the family had ever been there.
And that was sort of my introduction to the people of the Solomon Islands, the healthcare issues with the Solomon Islands.
And I've had a 16-year relationship with them and traveled there two to three times a year to work.
My uncle served in the Solomon Islands during World War II. And he was, this is President Kennedy, who was a skipper of a PT vote.
And his T-boat went down in the Blackett Strait, was cut into by a Japanese destroyer, and then he swam.
Two of his crew members were killed.
One of them was badly burned.
And he swam, he had been on the Harvard swim team, and he swam with all of them six miles to a nearby island.
And he pulled one of those, the soldier who was, the sailor who was killed, he pulled him with a strap between his teeth, the lanyard, And brought them to the island and saved them.
And then they actually, they were there for several days.
He was declared missing in action and then killed in action.
His father thought he'd been killed.
And then he, the Japanese were looking for them.
They were watching, hiding in the palm trees, watching the Japanese patrols all day.
And one day two Solomon Islanders came by in the dugout canoe And we're collecting coconuts from the island.
And they were resentful of the Japanese presence on their islands.
And my uncle carved his coordinates on a coconut, which they hid in their canoe.
And they paddled 21 miles to the British base, naval base, and they gave that to the British commander.
And it ended up, my uncle gave But then he invited those two Solomon Islanders to his inauguration when he became president.
He also invited the commander of the Japanese boat that had cut his ship until I got to meet that commander on inauguration day.
But he invited the two Solomon Islanders, but the British governor of the Solomon Islands, Was embarrassed because none of them, he didn't consider them presentable because they were really fishermen.
He chose two other Solomon Islanders to stand in for them.
And my uncle is really furious about that.
But it's one of the things I think that it really gave my uncle this strong commitment that America should be on the side of colonial people around the world.
And put him at odds with his own CIA and his own military.
Years later, and I don't mean to be doing all the talking on this, I won't be talking, but I'll just tell you the end of this story.
My brother, Max, went to the Solomon Islanders with Captain Ballard, who was the captain who found the Titanic.
He was on an expedition to actually find PT-109, and they found little parts of it very, very deep in the blackest race.
While my uncle, Brother was there, and this was probably in the late 80s.
He ran into one of the Islanders who had rescued my uncle, and he was wearing an orange shirt.
My brother has a picture of himself with him.
He was wearing an orange shirt that said, I saved JFK. And when he realized, when he was introduced to my brother, He hugged them.
I guess they're very, very demonstrative people.
And he hugged them and just cried and cried and cried, just trembling and crying.
My brother was crying.
And he said it was one of the most moving moments of his life.
Yeah, actually, I think their names are Kamana and Gassa, if I'm not mistaken.
They both died.
They've both since passed.
One of them died.
He died, I think, maybe only four or five years ago.
Yeah.
But they used to, you know, every year, the 7th of August, there's a memorial that's held at the American Monument in Haniara, and they would bring those guys out.
So they would bring them in from the western province where they lived, and they were sort of the, I don't want to say modern day, but the U.S. equivalent of the Coast Watchers because of what they did for your uncle.
So yeah.
You know, our relationship, the American relationship with the Solomon Islands is quite strong.
I think it's even stronger.
I think they have an even deeper love for us than they do for the crown, than for the queen.
When John Kerry visited in 2014, he drew a bigger crowd than the queen did.
He didn't beat out the, you know, the Duke and Duchess, but...
So Americans are really well respected in the Solomon Islands, and I think World War II really helped them move towards getting independence from Britain.
So...
I mean, I just, you know, I've been out to the Western Province.
I've been to Kennedy Island to, you know, the former Plum Pudding Island.
It's a great place to go scuba diving and snorkeling.
It's probably some of the best scuba diving.
Not only beautiful wreaths, but also great wrecks that you can dive.
So, you know, for me, it got started going there because of my uncle, who I'd never met, and then it just kind of built into working with the physicians there and the nurses there on building their healthcare capacity, because they're so resource-limited.
Yeah.
Well, I was on Samoa, I guess, two years ago.
I met with the Prime Minister, and, you know, right before the big measles outbreak there.
I don't know if you know anything about that, but that was very interesting.
And it's still pretty unclear what happened.
Let's talk about kind of the role of government agencies.
You know, what you do and You know, the issues that you see with the tracking and tracing.
So, I mean, I've since stopped working for the county, and that's why I can speak pretty freely.
Otherwise, I would have to get permission to talk about anything that we did.
Number one, this was the first time I've ever worked for a government agency, which for me was a huge eye-opener.
You know, I worked in, I was a private practice, you know, trauma and acute care surgeon.
So I was kind of my own boss.
And although we had our own regulations within healthcare, I've never, you know, sort of worked for the government.
I will say this.
I think San Diego County did an excellent job of pulling together their contact tracing, Case investigation, outbreak investigation.
And they called it, the program was called T3. It still is.
The program is still ongoing.
We had about 500 people.
Working on the COVID response.
And part of that was a team of contact tracers who literally all they did was talk to people who were exposed to somebody who had COVID. And then there was the case investigation team and I kind of worked on the case investigation team where we would speak with people who tested positive.
And then there was an outbreak team which I eventually moved into doing and that was more sort of Putting together the pieces of the puzzle and identifying who's got a problem, you know, what businesses need counseling, who needs an on-site inspection, and who doesn't.
So I kind of moved through the whole gamut.
I worked with great people.
I have to honestly say the people I worked with within the county, my co-workers, all wanted to do a really good job.
The problem with any, I think, any of these government bureaucracies is they're kind of like trying to turn a Panamanian tanker with a paddle.
It's a slow move.
It's a slow change.
And so although we had good protocols, there was another physician and I who would recommend, let's take a different approach here.
We might get more valuable information if we do this.
And there was a lot of resistance to that.
It's as though we took our marching orders from the CDC and nothing else.
So there was a lot of filtering down that came from CDC into California Department of Public Health and then down into the county departments of public health.
So we were incredibly well resourced.
I mean, the amount of money that must have gone into the Contact tracing program, you know, was in the millions.
And I think part of the reason why we did so well is we're a border town.
We're a border county.
And there was a lot of concern about people coming across the border from Mexico with COVID and how to handle that.
And two of our hospitals along the border, close to the border, were pretty heavily inundated with people that probably came across the border to get care.
And the hospital systems kind of manipulated what happened with, you know, lockdown and opening up because they would say, oh, you know, our census is still too high.
We can't, if you open up, you're going to overwhelm our census, our ability to take people in.
And part of that was that certain hospitals were inundated and certain hospitals they didn't want to transfer people to.
You know, we could have transferred people so that we didn't have what was referred to as the COVID hospitals down south.
So the county kind of played into that.
Public health had to interface with our county representatives on sort of the political side of things.
Like I said, it was a slow to move and slow to change bureaucracy, despite our trying to make good arguments in favor of changes.
One of the things that we proposed was, instead of reporting cases Our case investigators ask people what symptoms they have, and we could classify people as asymptomatic, mild, moderate, severe disease if we looked at the symptoms and broke them into those categories.
And that was the thing we lobbied for, was let's start reporting classified symptoms.
Degrees of cases, as opposed to total number of cases, which sounds scary.
Let's say 15% were asymptomatic, 25% were mild.
20% were moderate, and 5% were severe, or whatever the percentage breakdown is.
That gives you an idea of what your disease is doing, as opposed to just that big huge gap between, you know, we had 2000 cases today, and we had 15 deaths, but what happened in between?
And that they just didn't want to do that.
You know, we proposed that and there didn't seem to be any interest in doing it.
And yet the data was there.
We could do it very easily.
It was really different than any other disease in history because people were not being classified or counted on based on symptomology.
They were Being counted based on positive PCR tests or antibody tests, and there was a lot of uncertainty in those tests that critics said were being dialed up to these high amplifications that would find a lot more cases.
And what was your experience with that?
Yeah, I mean, the reporting that we got came in from numerous labs.
They were the public health labs.
Most of them, the cycling threshold, the cycle threshold was set at about, I think it was around 32 to 35.
That's a fairly high cycle threshold.
And I think that there has been a trend to move it down to around 28%.
Which would mean your caseload would look lower, because you redefined the disease, what was positive.
And then we had to deal with the antigen tests.
When the antigen tests came out, as opposed to the PCR tests...
You mean the antibody tests?
No, no.
These were antigen tests.
So these were the rapid non-PCR tests.
And there was an issue with that, in that if you were symptomatic, if you were sick and you got a positive antigen test, these SOFIA antigen tests, Then we would say that's a positive test because the person has symptoms and they test positive with this particular test that isn't very sensitive, nor is it very specific.
The real dilemma was when somebody tested positive with that, but they have no symptoms, what do we do with them?
And they became classified as presumptive.
Because we didn't know.
So there were all of these, we started getting these layers later on as people chose to, we ignored, by the way, we ignored antibody tests.
Those weren't even collected.
They didn't even come into the data at all.
It was either PCR or these antigen tests.
Why is the antibody test, is that unreliable to them?
There are varying degrees of antibody tests.
You can get some that will actually quantify what your antibodies are because people now want to know what their response to the vaccine is.
So I believe it's LabCorp has a quantification antibody test.
The most reliable ones are probably to get the IgG and the IgM as opposed to an IgG antibody test alone.
Those tend to be a bit more reliable, but you sort of want to look at your lab and see what your lab's reputation is.
And I've actually been tested a number of times at LabCorp because I've been participating in a study that requires me to go and get antibody tested periodically.
And I think that their lab is a good lab, but I don't get it.
Mine don't come quantitative.
It doesn't tell me how many antibodies I have.
It's either a yes or no test.
Let me ask you just a side issue.
Have you heard that there may be an issue with vaccine shedding?
Yeah, I've heard this.
And, you know, it's kind of floated around.
And I actually looked at the document, this Pfizer, the Pfizer protocol document.
I can't put anything together scientifically about it.
So I can't, I can't tell you whether it's true or not.
Except I actually, I just read a study this morning about There's endotheliitis and spike proteins shedding from the virus, and that is probably what has contributed to these, and passing through the blood-brain barrier, by the way, and that's probably what's contributed to some of the neurologic things that we're seeing with COVID-19.
The strokes, maybe some of the central venous thrombosis, you know, all of the thrombotic things that we saw when people actually had COVID. By the way, I wrote to the author of that paper.
I'm really obnoxious.
I write to the authors of all these papers and I ask them, I tell them, great paper.
I have one question.
That's my standard email.
And I said, have you looked at this with the vaccine?
Is the vaccine, where are these spike proteins going?
Are they crossing the blood-brain barrier?
They must be, if we've seen these central venous thrombosis cases.
So where are they going?
And nobody seems to know.
And the answer is always, no, we haven't looked at that.
It's almost as though nobody wants to look and find out, but it's very easy to do.
Just radio label a bunch of spike proteins, inject them, and see where they go.
And if they're going all over the place, And they're not being destroyed, then it could, you know, it could be an argument that we have endothelitis happening in people who are post-vaccine.
So I can't, I don't know about the shedding.
But, you know, and it is something that I was thinking about this morning.
I'm like, I don't know how to find that answer.
Let me ask you this on that line.
If you knew somebody who says, you know, I... Was around people, somebody who, I think my wife got vaccinated and had splitting headaches for two days or my husband got vaccinated and suddenly I got a period where I got a strange period, strange bleeding, spotting, something like that.
If you, and that person wanted to know, was it from shedding from the vaccine?
Is there a test that would indicate, for example, if you took an antibody test, Would they suddenly have antibodies?
Would they develop antibodies from the shed proteins?
I mean, I guess you could.
I mean, immunologically, it would make sense if this foreign antigen were to get into your system.
You breathe it in, let's say.
I guess you could have antibodies.
The question would be, which population of antibodies would you have?
Because if you're around somebody who's shedding, And you've just been exposed to something and you breathe it in, let's say.
The antibody that's going to be the first one to respond is probably going to be IgA, which is the one that tends to be in our airways.
But you could do a panel of antibodies and determine whether that person, if that person's positive, then they have been exposed.
The key is that you want to know what their antibody status is before that.
And if these are random events, it's difficult to be able to say, well, this person before her husband was vaccinated was negative, but she turned positive after her husband was vaccinated.
She had no other contact with anyone else.
You could say it's possible.
Yeah.
And is LabCorp the place that you would go to for that?
Or an IGA panel?
Well, I don't know if they can do an IgA panel.
That's the problem.
I know they can do IgG, and I know they can do IgM.
And IgM is more of an acute, so that, you know, of your antibodies, IgG is sort of your historic antibody.
You've been exposed to this.
IgM is sort of more like an acute phase antibody.
IgA and IgE are quite specific to a location where you have a response to But an IgM and an IgG panel will tell you whether your body reacted recently to the COVID virus.
The IgG and the IgA.
If they have IgA, I would get it.
But I would also say IgM and IgG are the ones I know that you can get from LabCorp.
Okay, let me ask you this, because, you know, there's a big argument in our community that, you know, I really don't know what to make of it, but the issue of asymptomatic transmission.
Yeah.
And the Chinese did this study of 11 million people and they could not find any asymptomatic transmission.
But you ought to be able to answer this question since you were right in the wheelhouse of looking at whether.
So did you find asymptomatic transmission when you were doing this track and tracing?
I would have to honestly say it was incredibly rare that somebody really truly was asymptomatic.
Really rare.
Yeah, I think the real issue with asymptomatic transmission was more an issue of how we were diagnosing cases PCR is exquisitely sensitive and it doesn't know the difference between live versus dead virus.
So you swab the back of somebody's nasopharynx and you find dead virus and they're declared positive.
So it was partially testing and partially people's recall of symptoms that I think contributed to what we quickly defined as asymptomatic transmission.
I think that needs to be revisited at some point in the future.
Break this down for me.
You're finding somebody who got sick.
And are you asking them, who do you think you got this from?
No, actually, if I was calling somebody who tested positive, so that was the tip-off.
The tip-off was you kind of went on the radar of the Department of Public Health because you tested positive.
Your testing site had to report you.
Let's say I then would reach out to that person and And I would, you know, number one, start the conversation by saying, how are you doing?
Because I think the most important thing is, make sure the person's okay.
And then we would go through a series, I would go through a series of questions, well, you know, do you mind sharing what your symptoms are?
And that person would potentially offer what their symptoms were.
And then I would Kind of ask additional symptomatology to sort of complete what the symptoms were for that infection.
And then we talk about risk factors.
And then who's in the house with you?
Is there anyone high risk in the house with you?
And I have to honestly say, I sort of tailored how I talk to people because I wanted more a message of education as opposed to interrogation.
And by the end of the conversation then, we could chat about, you know, did you go shopping?
And I would ask, do you have any idea where you got this?
And some people would know.
They'd say, yeah, you know, I went to a party and somebody there was sick and they called me and said, I better get tested.
And so I got tested or I got sick and then I got tested.
So we would eventually find out potentially how that person got the virus.
And that data was pulled into outbreak investigations.
So the system...
Would kind of call together people who were at a common sight.
So, you know, let's say people who went to a particular restaurant or store or an event or prison for that matter.
And that would be declared an outbreak then if it met this mathematical criteria.
And the outbreak then would be looked at.
One of the things that I heard again and something that was floating around Our community, that a lot of the super-spreader events initially, you know, that you heard about during the first four or five months or even into the summer, that they were not happening at events that were of rallies or riots,
you know, whether it was drama or BLM, that they were happening at places where there was food and beverage served.
Did you...
Was that consistent with your experience or not?
Oh, yeah.
And I had a big debate with one of my supervisors about that.
I said, how can you say that this is because we started reopening when we had thousands of people yelling in the street, protesting and whatnot?
Did that not have some impact?
And they said no.
They said no.
The arrow that showed where our cases were going up in June and July was where they said the reopening occurred and not protests on the street or not rallies or anything like that.
So it really was sort of laid on, you know, it was almost as though we kept this argument to stay shut down.
Well, but the question I was asking was a little different, which is, Some people were suggesting that it was not transmissible by air or particulates, but it was transmissible through the gut.
In other words, that it was coming from a place where there was beverage or food served.
What is your impression of that?
Actually, just to disclose, I had COVID when I first returned from the South Pacific.
I kind of flew back just as the country was shutting down.
And my first symptoms were nausea, and then I went on to diarrhea, and then I started to get fevers and feel kind of crappy.
I never got seriously ill.
So I do think that there is more spread than this concept of, you know, of just being a respiratory virus.
And most respiratory...
The use are respiratory, too.
That was clearly just respiratory.
Yeah, look, when I interviewed people, they had respiratory symptoms, but they also had systemic symptoms away from respiratory.
And many said, I was nauseous, I couldn't hold anything down, I had really bad diarrhea, I had abdominal discomfort.
So it wasn't just respiratory.
All right, let me ask you another controversial question.
Sure.
We have looked at all the mass studies.
Yeah.
We have not been able to find any mass study that shows that, you know, a placebo-controlled study, and most of them are flu, but there's a lot of them, even in medical settings, like hospitals where there's a 1991 study,
a very big study from England, and there's a Royal Hospital of Surgeon Study in 1982, where the surgeons literally, in half the surgeries, they took off the mask, and the infection rate went down when the mask came off, ironic, paradoxically.
So we have not been able to find any study, any placebo-controlled study that indicated masks work.
But I want to tell you that I have a friend who is a very good friend of mine, Who was in a party with, and this is anecdotal, so it doesn't really mean anything, but there were eight people in the party, two of them were not wearing masks, and the two that were not wearing masks both got COVID. And the six that were wearing masks didn't.
So he was, he came out of that experience saying, I think the masks do work.
But what's your, what is your observation?
So my observation, actually David and I have talked about this a lot, is I think it depends upon the mass.
Quite honestly, if we're going to have a mandate that everybody needs to wear a mask, give people the right mask to wear.
The ones that the studies have clearly showed filter out viral particles.
The problem is those masks and 95 masks are pretty miserable to wear.
So I think, you know, and then this concept of, well, you need to wear two masks.
I think that's sort of crazy, but the more layers you add, the more potential filtration.
I agree with you.
I don't think that the science is definitive on whether masks work or not.
And, you know, there's some people that say, oh, well, when you wear a mask, you're not touching your eyes, you're not touching your face.
So you're potentially not spreading virus, you know, by touching your mucosal areas and whatnot.
The best studies that I saw were done in healthcare systems using specific types of masks as opposed to the cloth ones that people wear, the homemade ones that people wear on the street.
Those probably have some impact.
I don't know whether we're ever going to get any studies that are going to look at The common man wearing a mask on the street.
I can tell you right now, I have never worn a mask outside this entire pandemic.
Ever.
Even after I had my bout with COVID, I would go out for my walks and I never wore a mask.
I'd wear a gaiter in case somebody got really nervous around me or something and I could pull my gaiter up.
But other than that, it seems my own personal feeling, and I'm not going to fault somebody for wearing their mask outside, is we don't need them outside.
There's enough air movement outside that you just don't need them.
Let's talk about bears.
Yeah, okay.
There's for people who don't know, I think most of the people who follow me do, is the Vaccine Adversive Reporting System.
It is the surveillance system that is operated by CDC that is a voluntary system in which doctors are required, supposedly, to support, to report vaccine injuries.
As you know, there was a 2010 study called Lazarus.
That was the lead author.
It was financed by the Agency for Healthcare Research, which is a HHS agency, where they actually went to a HMO, Harvard Pilgrim HMO. It was one of the medium-sized HMOs.
And they did machine counting analysis, what they call a cluster analysis.
And that's not a voluntary system.
It's a system where you take the HMO data.
The HMO has all the vaccine data down to batch and lot number, or every vaccine.
And then you can look at the insurance claims, which are also in that same database.
Different people may, so they make claims for food allergies or EpiPens or diabetes medication or rheumatoid arthritis or seizure medication.
You can then do a cluster analysis and look and see whether these injuries are commonly associated with certain vaccines.
And really, that's a very, very efficient AI system.
And so the Agency for Healthcare Research looked at The actual vaccine injuries using that machine counting system, they compared them with the injuries that VAERS was reporting and found that fewer, fewer than 1% of injuries got reported.
At that time, CDC was saying that one in a million vaccines resulted in an injury, but the Lazarus study found, which was done by Harvard scientists, found that It was actually 2.6%, so it's about 1 in 40 individual vaccinations resulted in an injury.
So that's just an introduction, but I know that you have a lot of thoughts on that issue.
Yeah, I think, first of all, that Pilgrim Health that did the study, they're actually one of the vaccine safety data link sites.
Yeah.
Internationally, the vast majority of vaccine safety is voluntary reporting.
And so our only sort of active surveillance is this vaccine safety data link.
And it's got nine sites throughout the country.
I just love this because I think it has nine HMOs that are putting data.
And I think there's 10 million people or more in that database.
And there was a database that was created by Congress and then was operated by CDC specifically to look at vaccine injury.
And that database has all the vaccine records of 10 million people and it has all the injury claims.
So if you look at the HMOs that are involved in that.
And incidentally, let me add one thing.
CDC will not allow any independent scientists in that database.
And that is the big problem.
That's what we've been saying for years.
Let us into the database.
Open it up to independent scientists and we can really answer these questions about vaccine.
And CDC actually transferred it after.
In 1999, they did their own study that found an 1135% Increased risk for autism among kids who got mercury vaccines in their first 30 days of life.
And when they saw that signal, they said, we can't let anybody else see this.
And they took the whole database, transferred it away from the federal government to a private company called AHIP, A-H-I-P, and it's American Health Insurance Plan to So that it now is privately controlled so that you can't foil it.
You can't, you know, do a freedom of information.
They made it insusceptible to the freedom of information.
So go ahead.
I didn't mean to talk so much.
So here's my issue with this, with our active surveillance.
If you look on a map and where are these sites, these HMOs are located, the vast majority are on the West Coast because they're Kaiser.
Kaiser is one of 50% of the sites.
There's One on the East Coast, which is Pilgrim.
There's two in the Midwest.
One is a research center.
It's not even an HMO. And then in the South, in what we call the Stroke Belt, there is no site.
It's the CDC. So there's no HMO. There's no one...
In our area of the country, the stroke belt in the southeast, where strokes and cardiovascular disease is the highest, diabetes is the highest, obesity is high, there's no one Collecting data on active surveillance on vaccine injuries in that part of the country.
So I look at our vaccine safety data link as being geographically, economically, and racially biased.
It is a failure at doing what we want it to do, and that is to give us a good spectrum of who's hurt and how they're hurt.
The additional thing that I find so interesting is in 2010, when President Obama was rolling out the Affordable Care Act, everybody had to get an electronic health record.
Everyone, even doctors' offices had to get electronic health records.
Everybody had to be collecting information electronically.
So why is it we can't get real-time information from every hospital In this country, if we have all been told to use electronic health records that would report vaccine injuries.
There's no reason why we can't do it, except for the interconnectivity.
One electronic health record doesn't talk to the other one.
Simple solution is you create nodes.
You create information nodes, like the beacon program, which is kind of obsolete now, where health systems allow their information to come in.
You can't download it, but it can come in and it can be collated, and you can say, Huh, interesting.
We're seeing more myocarditis now than we've ever seen before.
I mean, we really are missing the boat in improving our vaccine safety during this massive, massive vaccination during an active pandemic.
We should be collecting every bit of information we can, and we have all the right ingredients to do it.
We have all the right ingredients to do it.
The electronic health record system that Obama put in place should have been utilized for it.
Well, let me make this suggestion that the reason we're not doing that is deliberate, that they want a system that is designed to fail.
And this isn't speculative because the Agency for Healthcare Research, when they did that Lazarus study in 2010, they had a pilot system The CDC at that time had planned.
They said, if it works, we're going to roll it out to all the HMOs.
And it does exactly what you're saying, which is do real-time machine counting, cluster analysis, artificial intelligence counting.
And when CDC saw the numbers that came out of that study, at 2.6%, 1 in 40 people were being seriously injured by vaccines.
CDC shut down the whole program and decided we're going to keep this system that we know doesn't work.
Everybody is criticized because otherwise we're going to have to make a terrible, terrible admission about the safety profiles and the risk profiles of these vaccines.
And in fact, the Agency for Healthcare Research, when they did the report on the project, Last lines of it, and anybody can look this up, it's in the Lazarus study, Lazarus 2010, says the CDC officers who were in charge of rolling out the program and were supervising our program were no longer available by phone call.
We tried to call them, they would not return our call.
So as soon as they got that data, holy cow, it's not one in a million, it's one in 40.
You know, they shut down the system.
So I don't think, you know, listen, Tony Fauci has been planning.
He says he and Bill Gates have been planning for a pandemic for 20 years and they've done all of this intricate planning.
They've done the war games and the simulation.
What is the first thing that you would do if you knew you were going to roll out a quick vaccine?
You would put in place a surveillance system.
That actually functions, and that's the one thing they didn't do, because they do not want to know the risk profile of these vaccines, and it's very, very disturbing.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to think it's not a nefarious thing that it's a, you know, trying to turn a Panamanian tanker with a paddle.
But at the same time, it is quite incredulous to me that all the components are there.
I find it even more shocking that we have spent so much time talking about the groups that have been adversely impacted by COVID infections.
And they aren't being surveilled at all unless they voluntarily report.
You know, the newest...
We don't even know how many deaths occur after vaccination.
No, I don't think...
That is stunning.
You can't say...
Yeah.
After the day after the Moderna vaccine is administered to people between 65 and 75, or 75 and 85 years old, and we are getting...
You know, 50 deaths per 100,000 people.
We don't know that.
Knowing that number is so critical for assessing the safety of the individual vaccines and so critical for assessing the vaccine safety, you know, and comparing the risk in different age groups and in different, you know, comorbidity cohorts.
Sure.
People who are obese, people who are obese.
And you need to be able to do that for individuals to make informed choices and saying, look, my chances of dying from this vaccine are one in a thousand, and my chances of dying from COVID are two in a thousand, and therefore I'm going to take the vaccine.
Those are the kind of assessments people need to be able to make.
And instead, they're hiding the ball.
Yeah.
I mean, look, we don't even have informed consent.
These vaccines, it is not needed for an emergency use authorization.
People who get vaccinated are given a flyer, but they're given the flyer after they get the vaccine.
And that flyer is the one that describes what the side effects are.
So it's sort of incumbent on the person who's going to get their vaccine to do kind of pre-research about it.
And I think that this sort of canned vaccines are safe and they're effective, this drives me crazy.
It absolutely drives me crazy.
We need to stop Dumbing the conversation down.
I've actually written to Rochelle Walensky.
I write to everybody.
And I basically said, you want to sell vaccines?
You need to start getting honest with safety information and data so people can make an informed decision.
You know, I think the J&J, I think personally, I think J&J is being thrown under the bus.
Yeah, I really do.
I think, you know, it's like we need to look like we're doing a good safety job here.
So let's take J&J and throw it under the bus and we'll go with the mRNA vaccines.
And I actually listened to all the ACIP hearings about the J&J vaccine, and they say, oh, the mRNA vaccines, we don't see this thrombosis.
Baloney, we do see this thrombosis, and we are seeing thrombocytopenia.
In fact, I've actually counted up, where's my little list here?
I've counted up 96 cases of thrombocytopenia.
In theirs, and I read each of the reports, and I throw out a platelet count that is not less than 100.
I don't consider that thrombocytopenia.
So, you know, they're there.
But during this ACIP meeting, the discussion...
And what percentage of those are Johnson& Johnson versus Pfizer?
Well, that's the interesting thing is none of them are J&J. Those are Moderna and Pfizer thrombocytopenia cases.
I mean, it doesn't really tell us anything because those are the most common vaccines as well.
And you really need to know, you know, you need to know the cases per 100,000.
That's what you need to know.
Well, yeah.
I mean, look, the analysis by the CDC is always observed versus expected cases.
The problem is, I think what we're looking at is we're looking at a constellation of presentations of what I call endotheliitis.
That's what we're looking at.
So the central venous sinus thrombosis cases that J&J got smacked with, there are three of them, by the way, from Moderna, and there were some with Pfizer.
Those cases are...
We found VITS, so vaccine-induced thrombocytopenia.
Those...
That VITS is just part of what I think is a spectrum.
I think there's also anti-endothelial cell antibodies.
And all of these things then add up to a generalized inflammation, possibly of the inner lining of the vascular system, so that people clot.
And you may not have thrombocytosis, limited lower platelet count initially, because it could be that the antibodies are just damaging your endothelium and you're forming clot.
So myocarditis is another endothelitis.
It's another form of inflammation of the lining of our vessels.
It just happens to be the biggest one in our body.
And so I think we're looking at a constellation of things that are sort of kind of like a post-vaccine virus.
Multi-system inflammatory syndrome.
You know, we talk about this miss in children.
I think that there's a post-vaccine kind of a miss that's happening within the vasculature.
Is it that the spike proteins are going and attaching to the endothelial cells and then the immune responses against those endothelial cells?
Are we doing a clotting?
Clonal expansion of certain antibody populations or certain plasma cell populations so that we're going to be potentially heading towards what's called the monoclonal gammopathy of uncertain diagnosis.
Those things can head into multiple myeloma.
There's more questions than there are answers.
We currently have people at the CDC who don't want to answer those questions.
There are a few people out there doing science that are trying to answer them.
But I think we need to commit to funding those studies.
I mean, I just heard, what's his name, Offit, talking about how excited he is that kids 10 through 15 are going to be able to get vaccinated.
You know, Pfizer does this study with 2,400 kids.
Well, that's not even enough power to be able to diagnose whether a vaccine is going to cause MIS in kids, multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, because it's far more rare in Then what the study volume is going to give you.
So, you know, I think it's insane that we don't know what the safety is in adults, and we're now going to start moving into vaccinating kids.
Who's driving this?
You know, it's the tail wagging the dog.
The pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer's driving this.
Pfizer wants that additional market.
And I'm not sure that ethically, I think ethically, physicians need to start speaking out and saying, hold on a second here.
Do we really need to do this?
And if you're going to say that you're concerned about this multisystem inflammatory syndrome, it occurs in 2.4 out of 100,000 kids.
Should we really be vaccinating them without knowing whether it's going to have an increase and what the longevity is going to be over time for those kids?
So I'm very concerned about expanding the vaccination program out to children.
We don't even know what the impact on the- I saw Biden on TV this week and he kind of acknowledged that kids don't really get sick from COVID. But he said that they need to take it anyway, and parents need to be giving it to them anyway to prevent the spread to adults.
What's your reaction to that?
I mean, there's two questions.
One is the ethical question.
Can a government compel somebody to take a risk in order to save somebody else?
That's a very important ethical question.
And the other question is, are kids really a threat?
From the spread.
How much of that spread?
And you've seen this.
How much that spread is coming from children?
You know, I think we've made them a threat.
We've claimed that, you know, people get it from kids, but I just don't see it.
I didn't see it.
I mean, I think I could count on one hand how many children I had who tested positive that I had to interview their parents.
You know, young kids, obviously, that you wouldn't be interviewing them.
You know, I think that the concept of I'm not defending them, but I think what they're saying is that kids are fomites.
We've known that kids could bring a cold home and stuff like that from school, but I'm not sure that we can justify vaccinating children for a disease that they don't disproportionately suffer from in order to protect ourselves.
I think we have to begin to draw a line, and I hope the parents begin to say, Hold on a second here.
I want the ability to make the decision whether my child is going to get vaccinated or not.
I mean, you know, the train has left the station on the vaccination program in the United States, and we're sending it out into other countries as well, too.
And I think that the criteria for vaccinating a full population is different depending upon where you live and what your health system has to offer.
Ethically, I would have a very hard time talking to a family member of mine and convincing them to have their child vaccinated with an experimental vaccine, a vaccine that's emergency use authorization only, and that has only been tested on 2,400 kids.
That's not enough.
That's not enough power to that study to determine safety.
Yeah, you know, one of the things that Peter Doshi found, and who's an associate editor of the British Medical Journal, When he did the analysis of the Pfizer Phase 2 trials was that the people who are disproportionately injured are the people who are younger and most robust.
I have not done that kind of analysis of the numbers, but that's very alarming if we're now going to give it to children and if they may be more vulnerable to a vaccine injury than Because they have no vulnerability to COVID, essentially zero.
Why would you give somebody an intervention that has a higher risk profile than the disease that you're trying to prevent?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of the fundamental problem I have.
Look, those of us that are older, our immune systems are slightly weakened, and we're not going to have that same robust response to a vaccine that a younger person would be.
I can tell you, of the myocarditis cases that I have found, the majority of which are in Moderna and Pfizer, there are some J&J ones.
I think there are three cases.
The average age is 30.
The majority, more than 50% are young men.
And these guys get pretty sick.
They get better, but they get pretty sick.
There were some cases where the person was intubated in the intensive care unit.
Most of them undergo a cardiac catheterization.
And then eventually, when they find that that's normal, they go on to get an MR cardiogram.
And that's when they diagnose the myocarditis.
So a lot of the thrombocytopenias...
Those sort of immune-mediated endothelitis problems, those are happening in young people because they have a robust immune response.
And when you look at the serious adverse events, because I do a screenshot of them over time.
I've been tracking them since January.
There's been a shift towards more serious events in younger people.
You're absolutely correct in saying that.
As we vaccinate more young people, initially it was the older population because that was the target, the high-risk group that was being vaccinated.
Now that we move into the younger groups, we're seeing more and more complications, and we're seeing a filtering of deaths down into the younger group as well, too.
CDC needs to talk about that stuff.
And I badger the heck out of them periodically if there's, you know, they put up data on pregnancy and said that the vaccine was safe and that the spontaneous abortion rate was not a signal.
Well, it was.
Because they left out one whole section of the VAERS data.
And I said, when you add in this VAERS data that you mentioned in your paper but didn't put in your calculations, this is a signal.
What section of VAERS data did they leave out?
They left out...
So the paper actually looked at their V-safe data.
So V-safe is this voluntary kind of app reporting system.
And they created a population, the V-safe pregnancy group.
And so they used the data for that.
But they mentioned in the paper...
That there were 200-some-odd pregnancies with spontaneous abortions.
I think there were 64, if I'm remembering correctly off the top of my head, in VAERS. But those numbers were not in the calculations that looked at what the observed spontaneous abortion rate was.
How many do you recall there being 200?
200?
Gosh, I'd have to look at it.
I can't remember off the top of my head.
There were, I think, around 200 or so.
There were a good number.
The majority of them occurred within the first trimester.
And normally, first trimester spontaneous abortions are about 80%.
But the percent in...
80%?
80% in normal, in a normal...
80% of spontaneous abortions happen in the first trimester.
But...
In the vaccine population, 96% occurred in the first trimester, which suggests an increase in number of first trimester abortions, potentially.
I actually wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine Correcting that.
And they still haven't made a decision whether they're going to publish it or not, probably because they send my letter off to Tom Shimabukura at the CDC, who was the lead author of the paper, and he'll argue about it.
And probably, you know, whether it'll get published, I don't know.
But it puts them on notice.
I mean, I believe in putting them on notice and saying we need accurate data.
What about the issue of pathogenic priming?
You know, of antibody immune enhancement.
The idea that if you, you know, they didn't have the animal studies, which they did originally in the coronavirus, when the animals produced a very robust antibody response, they thought they hit the jackpot.
And then when the animals were actually challenged, were exposed to the live virus, they had this systemic inflammation and a lot of them died.
And the problem is, do you think that's happening or do you think that's something that we may see a year or two from now?
Yeah, it's really hard to say.
I mean, could that be what caused some of the deaths in our seniors early on in vaccination program?
Because, you know, in skilled nursing facilities, senior living situations, so many people were COVID positive.
Is it possible that somebody was COVID, you know, had been exposed to COVID and then got the vaccine and, you know, died?
Those deaths weren't really looked into because the big problem is the causality, being able to say the vaccine caused this death.
They don't accept that there's a temporal relationship to it, but That is part of causality.
And we don't have a test.
We need like a biomarker to be able to say, boom, this is the vaccine that did this.
So I don't see evidence when I look at cases, but I have to honestly say, Bobby, the numbers have gotten so high that it's almost impossible for me to review the VAERS narratives for, you know, the meat of what's going on.
To be able to get a sense of what the situation is.
And not all of these various reports obviously include whether the person, one, tested positive for COVID or had previous COVID infections.
And that needs to be looked at.
I mean, that needs to be drilled down.
We need to know that.
I mean, if you look at the experience with the dengue vaccine, Dengue vaccines.
You know, that was a huge problem.
People who had previous Dengue, they did fine with the vaccine.
But the people who'd never had Dengue before got sick from it if they were exposed to Dengue again.
So that's just kind of...
Could that be happening?
The whole breakthrough infection thing, we need to look at that.
We need to see why are these people getting infected?
Sure, they could be that 5% that don't fit the efficacy calculation, or is there something else going on?
And the CDC is holding their cards closed on that.
They put the numbers up, but they're not putting up the demographic information.
And that drives me crazy.
I want to see the demographic information.
What age are these people?
What race are these people?
What are some of their comorbidities?
Are they obese?
That's what epidemiology is.
And maybe they're doing that in the background now.
But if you want people to buy into your vaccine program, you need to put that information up.
And so for me, my entire sort of shtick in this whole massive vaccination campaign is safety, safety, safety.
I don't need to hear any more about efficacy.
I don't need to hear any more about real-world effectiveness.
I want to hear about safety, and I want to hear about durability.
Because those are, to me, the two most important things at this point in time.
Any new therapeutic, you need to know, is it safe?
Is it effective?
Can it be reproduced?
And is it durable?
We need that information.
The American people need that information.
And I think until we get that information...
There should be no mandate of someone having to take the vaccine.
No mandate.
One other little point I want to make is the media has sort of been towing the line on this antagonism between people who vaccinate and people who don't vaccinate.
People who choose not to vaccinate for whatever reason.
Waiting to see better data, never going to vaccinate, or just not ready to vaccinate.
The New York Times had a headline in one of their articles that said, it's going to come to hand-to-hand combat.
What kind of a dynamic does that set up?
There was some stupid clothing store was selling a t-shirt that said, vaccinated, and underneath it it says, because I'm not stupid.
There is a dynamic being set up that is, I think, dangerous.
On top of everything else that we've gone through, on top of our political chisms and everything else, this dynamic of vaccinate versus not vaccinate.
Vaccinate, you're smart.
Unvaccinated, you're stupid.
If Biden wants to do something, he needs to kill that.
He needs to squash that.
He needs to say no more of this language.
And stop referring to people as anti-vaxxers if they choose not to take a vaccine.
You know, the fighting.
I mean, I'm eventually expecting to see a news story about somebody who is...
Oh, you know, they're already criminalizing it in there.
You know, you had 12 attorney generals yesterday who were threatening the internet platforms that they've got to stop allowing people to report vaccine injuries.
It's very, very strange.
The world that we're living in.
They'll throw me off then because I put stuff up like that every now and then and then they put a tag on it and I get back at them.
I've created all my own bogus tags and I put those up periodically.
Their fact checking is off.
Eileen Natuzi, where can people find you if they want to follow you?
Actually, I'm on Instagram.
EileenDLD.
And I, you know, basically, sometimes I just throw stupid stuff up there, pretty pictures, whatever, things going on in my garden.
A lot of times, though, what I would do is I'll really sort of do a deep dive into the data and correct something or clarify something.
You know, I'm not going to tell people what to do.
People need to make their own decisions.
That's what it's all about, is learning about something, demanding safety, looking into whether there's durability and making that decision yourself as to what you want to do.
Eileen Natuzzi, thank you very, very much for joining us today, and thank you for all you do.
You're more than welcome.
You're the current reigning champion on Medical Trivia with Bobby Kennedy.
We'd love to have you back another time.
All right, guys.
Okay, thanks for having me.
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