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Dec. 23, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender
31:03
What Government Should Have Done with Former HHS Official Paul Elias Alexander

Former HHS Official Paul Elias Alexander discusses solutions and setbacks to the US government's response in the past two years.

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My guest today is Dr.
Paul Alexander, PhD.
He has an expertise in epidemiology and teaching epidemiology.
He's a former assistant professor at McMaster University in evidence-based medicine.
He's a former COVID pandemic Evidence-based synthesizer, evidence synthesis advisor to the WHO in Washington, D.C., and a former senior advisor to the COVID pandemic policy in the U.S. government, HHS. He worked and was appointed in 2008 at WHO as a regional specialist epidemiologist in Europe's regional office in Denmark.
And he worked also for the WHO in Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Poland.
He's worked as a government epidemiologist for Canada for the past 12 years.
And he also has worked on TB control and infectious disease control across Asia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and all over the world.
You have an extraordinary...
CV, Curriculum Vitae, I invited you on here because you wrote an extraordinary article in October, I think it was October 28th, 2021, in Brownstone Institute.
And to me, it's the most useful summary of all of the studies that are relevant to vaccine efficacy.
It's 37 studies at that point.
That talk about the efficacy of the various COVID vaccines.
I one time read an obituary that C.S. Lewis, the kind of theologian, wrote about a friend of his where he described his friend who had died recently as honest as the daylight.
And when I read that description, I thought, you know, gosh, I'd really love for somebody to apply that phrase to me at some point in my life.
This article that you wrote, The Power of It, was really just incredible because what it is a very clear statement of what we do know and what we don't know about vaccines and without any prejudice, without any bias from one side or the other.
But in the end, it's a very devastating picture of this vaccine.
You don't say that it causes antibody and an enhancement, because we do not, or at least when you wrote this, we did not have that evidence.
It's just a very good summary of the best studies that are out there on vaccine efficacy.
And I know that you wrote this in part, Because there were lawyers all over the country, and I know that you work with Peter McCulloch and with Pierre Corey and Professor Harvey Rich, who are kind of the leading lights and treatment, and that a number of people were relying, attorneys began relying on your expertise, and you were motivated at some point to put together, to simply put together all of the studies in one place.
So will you tell us what the science says?
Thank you very much again, Mr.
Kennedy, and it's indeed an honor for me here.
Look, the reality about it is we have seen this explosion of infections in UK, Israel, Seychelles, Gibraltar, Iceland, Norway, etc.
So, including the United States, there was an outbreak in Barnstable, Massachusetts, that kind of caught everybody off guard because it showed that 74-75% of the vaccinated people were infected.
At that time, it was a seminal study that a company that published in the Lancet.
It was about an outbreak in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
And in that particular study, nurses were locked down for a period of time due to an outbreak.
And what we found at the end of the study were three or four important findings, which was one that double vaccinated people can and do Do become infected too.
Let me just lay the groundwork.
These were nurses in a hospital.
They were frontline workers and they were tested prior to getting vaccinated.
So they had PCR tests and they had tests of the levels of cultures in their noses.
Prior to getting the vaccine, then they received the vaccine.
They were then locked down because there was a surge.
And they were locked down for several weeks.
And that allowed a unique situation where you could look at, where you could examine the efficacy of masks You could examine the efficacy of vaccination against transmission.
And you could also look at what was happening, whether vaccinated people were getting sick or not, and what was going on in terms of their capacity to transmit that virus to other people.
So that's just the laying groundwork.
So what would happen?
Well, what I think the interesting things that we are finding in these studies, in that study, the one in similar, there was one in Israel by Chitrit, and there was one in Finland.
These three nosopomiel outbreaks in these three institutions, Vietnam, Israel, Finland, showed us that A, these nurses had masks and PPE. So that's a big problem.
That was not the principal finding.
But embedded in these papers, you are told that they wore masks and PPE. So that should be a concern.
It's not even laid out as a finding.
But to me, that is an important finding that is hidden.
That's number one.
Number two, it showed us that double vaccinated people spread.
In this Ho Chi Minh City study, they found that the phylogeny of the nurses...
The genetics of the virus, the infections, were all the same.
And that tells us, different from the community, it tells us that they all spread it amongst themselves.
That's a key finding.
They were not just disseminating.
They were not just double vaccinated, but they were spreading it.
They were spreading it.
That's the key.
It's not just they were double vaccinated, got infected.
They were transmitting.
And They found that the nurses harbored about 251 times viral load in the nasopharyngeal passage than earlier strains, the alpha strain, etc.
So it was a huge, huge problem because it demonstrated from that study and the bond stable that we have a problem.
And around that time, if you recall, Rochelle Walensky, CDC lead, came to the microphone to tell everyone, put back on the mask.
Because those studies were beginning to frighten everyone.
But right now we have these 37 studies that show us, it's not my words, this is the evidence.
It shows us that the vaccine doesn't hit the Delta.
The Delta bypasses the immunity from these vaccines because what the public still doesn't understand is the vaccine is comprised of the contents from the initial Wuhan strain in March of 2020.
That's gone a long time now.
So if your friend tells you, John, I'm going to take a vaccine tomorrow.
I have my appointment.
You should be able to tell them today, you know...
What you're going to take is going to be worthless because we have a study that told us that the Pfizer vaccine loses 40% antibodies per month.
That means after three months, you effectively have no immunity.
You're back to zero.
And people are not understanding this.
So when you're talking about let's continue running the vaccine clinics here, the public doesn't understand that you are getting something that in two months the vaccine, the efficacy wanes.
So it's a devastating situation and nobody's being told the truth.
And we are set up now with this routine.
Look, Israel is now prepping for a fourth booster and there are indications that the UK has started a fourth booster.
We don't know how the human immune system is going to respond to that level of boosting.
It could be catastrophic and that's why I put it together.
A lot of lawyers asking me, we need something for the court because of all these vaccine mandates.
So I said, okay, this is the evidence.
Put it in your legal document and argue your case because the evidence is clear.
The vaccine is...
I'm not here to talk about against vaccines or for vaccines.
The Barnstable study, because that's my hometown.
That's where I live.
I have my house there, and I was raised in Barnstable.
And that study, which is called Brown et al., there were 469 cases of COVID, and 74% of them were fully vaccinated.
And that was the first real shocking indicator that the vaccines were not protecting people against COVID. Yes.
Yes.
At the same time, we had a good study in Wisconsin by Rhinosma.
And what they were actually showing us is that the vaccinated and the unvaccinated carried the same level of viral load.
And also, we were seeing in the studies that the cycle count threshold, which is, and I know you know what I'm talking about, the TCR test, the number of cycles, To amplify the piece of virus from the swab.
The lower the cycle count is our proxy measure of how infectious you are.
And we know once you have psychocomb thresholds like 24 and below, that person has a massive load and very infectious.
Anything over 30, we know that you're probably not infected with COVID. You might be testing positive, but that's viral junk and fragments.
And we've been arguing that 95% Of all of these infections from last year and even this year are really not positive COVID. We can have that discussion another time.
I'm probably going to write about it.
The PCR test is a devastatingly flawed test.
But back to the vaccines, the reality about it is this.
Our concern is that Because of the, not just that the vaccine has failed, because you mentioned something earlier, the antibody-dependent enhancement.
And I think that is the issue for us, because we are seeing that the vaccinated is getting so infected.
In time, we might progress to more than just infection.
Now, if the vaccinated...
Let me just explain this to people who don't know what antibody-dependent enhancement is.
This is the big fear that everybody, including Tony Fauci and Paul Offit and Peter Hotez, talked about at the beginning, is that every COVID vaccine that had ever been made before, coronavirus vaccine in history, had made the animals that coronavirus vaccine in history, had made the animals that they gave it to sicker.
So when they first gave them the vaccine, it provoked a very robust antibody response.
And the vaccinologists thought, we hit the jackpot.
We got what we wanted.
We're getting a great antibody response.
But then when the wild virus comes back around, instead of resisting it, it facilitates, it amplifies its impacts, and it ended up killing the ferrets.
And it's much, much, the vaccinated get much sicker than the unvaccinated.
This was the big rock that everybody wanted to avoid.
Now the problem is, That Pfizer discontinued its study and blinded the placebo group in six months.
Yes.
And a lot of critics say the reason they did that is because they wanted to hide any evidence of an antibody-dependent enhancement.
So now we won't, we'll never see it in the data.
And what I'm going to ask you now Is there evidence anywhere in the world that we are seeing anybody dependent on Hanson, or is the jury still out on that?
Well, I would think, Mr.
Kendi, I like your explanation there.
I would think, yes.
When you look at the UK data, the UK data every week it gives us is probably the most granular data.
And it is showing us that the vaccinated is becoming, not is becoming, is routinely much more infected than the unvaccinated person.
Moreover, We are seeing that the vaccinated person in places like Israel, 60-65%, those are the ones being hospitalized.
In England also.
And the unvaccinated also.
So there is the chance now, what we are seeing is the vaccinated is spreading.
To the unvaccinated.
And I think to really answer your question, we have to touch on the concept of the original antigenic sin.
And I think to answer this antibody-dependent enhancement, we have to admit, or we have to be willing to look at that concept To try to explain the data.
And I think based on the data, what we are seeing now, we could actually explain that antibody-dependent enhancement is occurring.
Because the priming, the initial exposure to the pathogen is subverting the immune response so that the proper immune response is not happening in the vaccinated person.
And when you do bump up against that pathogen again in the environment, Your immune system is fighting this wrong and the response is catastrophic because you are getting more and more infected as a vaccinated person and your lungs are getting sicker and sicker and sicker.
And the problem is if we go by what the vaccine developers told us, they told us that our vaccine is suboptimal.
And this is a problem.
I don't know why they would bring a suboptimal vaccine that is non-sterilizing in the first place.
Because therefore, you would never ever be able to get out of this pandemic.
In fact, What we fear is if the initial exposure that the person had was a systemic exposure.
So if my exposure was vaccine to this SARS-CoV-2, I was not infected before.
I went and I took the vaccine as a good civil person.
You told me, take the vaccine, let's help each other and all this stuff.
I went and I took it.
So my first exposure is the vaccine.
The way the immune system operates, the immune system, when I take that vaccine, is faced with a choice.
Do I go to normal?
Because normally this virus, which should land, will land in my nostrils, my nasopharyngeal pastures, or my oral cavity.
The normal response is what we call the cytotoxic natural killer cell response.
Where those cells, CD8 plus cells, are zoned to the respiratory tract, the lung, et cetera, to deal with a respiratory pathogen.
Now, if my first exposure, though, was vaccine, and I have spike in my blood now, in my circulation, and it has produced antibodies for me, my immune system is We'll get that signal that there's something wrong, something taking place systemically.
It will divert my response, my first response, my initial priming to my circulation.
So the problem with using the original antigenic sin to try to explain this is that that first exposure prejudices.
That's the issue.
It biases your immune system.
To that direction for the rest of your life for that pathogen.
So that when you do bump up against SARS-CoV-2 in the environment for the first time, which you will, because we are within, we have pathogens circulating, that virus would land in your nasopharyngeal as normal.
The proper response, which is the cytotoxic immune response, Which will send the proper immune response cells, the CD8 cytotoxic natural killer cells, to clear the respiratory tract and kill the virus.
That is not happening, or at least at a much lower level, because the immune system has been biased and primed towards antibodies.
So even when you do get exposed in the wild, your immune system is getting signals that, look, my first exposure was vaccine.
And I produced antibodies and antibody response systemically because that was the signal I was getting.
Now you are getting exposed in the environment, in the nasal passage.
But I'm thinking, let me continue going the antibody response.
and the immune system will continue churning out antibodies in the circulation and not the proper cytotoxic cells at the respiratory tract where it is needed.
And it is at that point you have virus now in the nasopharyngeal.
You don't have the proper CD8 plus cytotoxic cells wiping them out.
And they're beginning to proliferate.
And they're beginning to-- your virus is replicating.
And your respiratory tract is getting sicker and sicker.
Your lungs are getting sicker and sicker.
So in other words, your immune system by the vaccine gets subverted or primed or prejudiced in the wrong direction.
And when you do get exposed, your immune system cannot react Optimally the way it should.
And therefore, those people we are seeing in the UK and Israel have been vaccinated.
It is because you were vaccinated.
You're trying to formulate this hypothesis to explain the data.
You were vaccinated.
Your immune system did mount an antibody response.
However, when it did do that, you actually biased the immune system lifelong.
Sort of clarify this with another concept, which is we've been told that if everybody gets the vaccine that we'll have herd immunity, which means the virus will stop spreading because the pool of people among whom it can spread has been reduced dramatically.
But what you're saying opens the possibility That the vaccine can permanently prevent us from obtaining herd immunity because You're going to have continually having these new variants come along and that the vaccine is so specific to that one variant and that one immune response that we don't get the lifetime immunity that could protect us against all variants and over a longer period
of time.
And so it actually could prevent us and make this virus go on forever.
And that's kind of what you're saying, right?
Yes, and I would echo something that Dr.
Vanden Bosch has been explaining.
The antibodies that we are producing, what we would call from the vaccine, the vaccinal antibodies, We are functioning to suppress and out-compete the other antibodies that our immune system produces, your innate antibodies and your naturally acquired antibodies.
And it is that out-competing and subversion that puts the vaccinated person in a devastating situation.
It is as though you become almost defenseless, and it's the argument to the children.
The vaccinal antibodies suppress the innate antibodies the children bring, the children come with and pre-activate it.
That is why children do so robustly and well against COVID and a host of other viruses, a host of other pathogens.
They have an innate immune system, unlike us, that is so vicious and potent that it will vanquish anything.
And the evidence is there and accumulating that we run the risk with vaccine because the vaccinal antibodies function to suppress the innate antibodies in children.
And that would mean that at that point, you will have children defenseless against not just SARS-CoV-2, but other pathogen out there.
And it could be catastrophic.
So that is why we've been writing, like I wrote that op-ed, In Brownstone about two months ago and the title was Dear Pfizer, Leave Our Children Alone and Parents Must Consider Their Children Already Vaccinated.
And I laid out studies that showed, biological studies, molecular studies that showed children actually have a molecular basis of immunity already.
Because of the ACE2 receptor limitation in their nostrils, children lack the apparatus to become infected.
And we know that by a study by Patel et al.
We understand why children have been spared.
We know this.
We know their innate immunity is pre-activated and primed.
Unlike an adult.
So, in other words, you would be creating a disaster to touch children.
In fact, if you leave children alone, children will have no problem with SARS-CoV-2.
None.
With none of the variants.
We have a situation now where this is so mild, so non-lethal.
Yet infectious, that it is almost as though if you let it run and you allow healthy, you don't stop it, but you don't promote it, but you allow people to live lives normally, naturally and harmlessly, be exposed.
Little children, young people, healthy people, their immune systems can handle it.
And Omicron will be no problem.
It has shown that already.
It is so mildly.
Some experts are saying the symptoms are less than even common cold.
So, you know, Mueller's ratchet.
As time has gone by, the virus is responding to the pressure we're putting on it, the pressure from the vaccine program, the pressure from the lockdowns, every single thing we do.
The virus responds, detects, senses, and it responds.
So now the virus is mutated down, mild, and it will continue.
Let me just point this out, because this is a law of biological evolution.
When a virus or an infectious disease, any infectious disease, strikes a naive population, the first surge, the first infection is by far the deadliest.
And then after that, through various mechanisms, even without any attempt to control the virus, the virus will quickly evolve into a much less pathogenic or virulent, dangerous form.
The reason for that, there's two reasons.
One is that when it hits the naive population, the most susceptible individuals are eliminated, are killed.
So the second surge hits the population that is more biologically fortified just naturally against the virus.
Secondly, and most importantly, these are organisms that are evolving rapidly.
You know, in some cases, thousands of times a day, they're breeding, so they're constantly mutating and evolving.
And the mutations that are the least dangerous are the ones that have the most advantage selectively.
Why is that?
If you are a parasite, You want your host to be healthy, to be happy, to be socializing, to be having sex, to be playing with people, because that's the way you spread.
The last thing you want is to kill your host, because then you're dead, and you don't want to debilitate your host or make him sick, because then he's not spreading your progeny to the rest of the population.
So the mutations that quickly get the most That progressively they're always the ones that are least less and less deadly.
And that ultimately all of these organisms reach a stasis with the population where they ultimately just stop killing people because the ones that don't kill or sick at anybody Are the ones that out-compete all of their brothers and sisters?
Well, you know, Mr.
Kennedy, I couldn't even explain it better.
And you know, like, what people should know is, I believe, OC43, which is one of the coronaviruses that circulate.
We have four mild coronaviruses that we live with for the last umpteen years.
And we're not talking about the serious ones like MERS and SARS-1 and this.
But OC43 as an example, I believe it came about as a pandemic in 1880 or so.
So like 150 years ago, it had different waves across time, different pandemics.
And the thing about it is OC43 obviously historically killed a bunch of people, but over time is exactly what you just said.
Antibodies, we develop antibodies.
They mutate.
Antibodies mutate.
They keep mutating downwards, mild and mild.
And over the last period of time, decades, this particular coronavirus lives with us endemically.
And it's very benign.
It causes mild common colds.
Whenever you get a cold every year, chances are it's one of the coronaviruses, the four mild coronaviruses.
So our argument is this would...
This SARS-2 would eventually get there based on what we're seeing now, especially with the advent of Omicron.
So, again, it has to go back to what we were arguing before.
When I was in the administration and I got a lot of heat and a lot of slander and stuff, it was because my argument at that point was, I had joined in May.
Scott Atlas joined in August.
We had the same focus, similar to Bhattacharya did at Stanford, which was you properly, properly protect the vulnerable in your society If that is the only thing you ever do, that will come for success.
But you see, the problem is we've never properly protected our elderly in nursing homes or in long-term care facilities.
And it was like killing fields there in the United States and in Canada.
Many of our people died, our elderly parents and grandparents.
But here's the key.
If you could properly secure a population, the vulnerable in your population, take care of them, Protect them.
And we knew that we had early outpatient treatment so that if the elderly in a nursing home got infected, you could provide treatment and you could clear that virus in the two-week period, they will become naturally immune and they will not go to hospital.
Because from the time an elderly person touches the emergency room door, their 28-day mortality rises to about 40%.
So strongly protect the elderly.
Use outpatient treatment, early treatment, as needed, but allow the complete rest of society, as normal as possible, to live normal lives taking reasonable, sensible precautions.
Don't touch it.
Don't interfere with it.
Don't lock down.
Don't close schools.
Don't do anything.
Let me ask you one more question.
We've run out of time, but what is your understanding of this?
We're seeing the death rate in the United States was 22,000, roughly, per million population.
In Europe, it's roughly 1,900 per million population.
Nigeria, 14 people per million population.
They use ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
The most vaccinated countries in the world, Gibraltar, has 2,900 per million population.
And we're seeing this around the world that the more vaccinated a country is, there's a direct correlation between the levels of vaccination and, number one, the infection rates, but also, I believe, the mortality rates from COVID. And so how do you explain that?
Could that be an antibody-dependent enhancement, or are we seeing something else?
Yes, well, the reality about it, well, yes, I agree.
I think it is antibody-dependent.
It's the only thing that we can bring to the situation to try to explain that data, such that the vaccinated person, because of the pressure, here's the key, Mr.
Kennedy, if this vaccine, I don't support it, But I'm saying, if you brought this vaccine to us and it was a sterilizing vaccine that it prevented transmission, the only way we could stop or we could calm a pandemic is to break the chain of transmission.
These vaccines cannot.
They could not and they cannot.
So 100%, we will never, ever, ever get to herd immunity, population herd, with these vaccines.
And The problem here is when we vaccinate someone or population, we are putting pressure on the virus that's circulating, but not complete knockout pressure.
We are just poking the virus, and it is that suboptimal pressure.
It's not that we have a vaccine that will wipe it out.
We're teaching it bad tricks.
Yes, and it's responding to that suboptimal pressure by naturally selecting Resistant variants.
Resistant variants.
And that is what is driving the infection, and it will not end.
Thank you very, very much, Dr.
Paul Alexander.
Thank you for all of your work and for your incredible scholarship.
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