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May 14, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
29:28
Russian Vaccines with Riley Waggaman

Riley Waggaman discusses vaccines in Russia with RFK Jr in this episode.

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Hey everybody, my guest today is Riley Wagaman, who is an American writer who lives in Moscow.
He was until recently a senior editor at RTTV. He's lived in Moscow since 2013.
And he's written some piercing articles, not only on, that I haven't read, but anything like this before, about Russia's Sputnik vaccine.
I'd say you're probably the world's expert on that as far as anybody's concerned.
And also the links, the very peculiar and surprising links between Russian oligarchs and the World Economic Forum.
And I wanted to have you on to give, because you have unusual views about all these things and you have an unusual knowledge base.
So tell us a little bit about how you ended up in Moscow.
Well, I started my writing career after college, worked in Washington, D.C., writing about U.S. politics, got extremely burnt out within a year, and I just sort of ended up migrating.
At first, I was in the Czech Republic, and I just sort of kept migrating east, and I found myself actually first in Bashkortostan, which is a republic in Russia, and I did a little bit of I did what all young Americans do when they don't know what to do.
They teach English, right?
So I taught a little English in Bashkortistan.
And this happened.
And once I arrived in Russia was when the Ukraine crisis started, the original Ukraine crisis, Maidan.
So I was like, wow, this is so crazy because I sort of came to Russia to get away from the world, you know?
And now I'm sort of back in the center of all this geopolitical craziness.
And I guess I should write about it.
So I ended up just moving back to Moscow and starting to write again, just on Russia-related issues.
And just as an American, I thought that I had some value to add to that debate and discussion.
So I've been here basically ever since.
Well, give us the briefing on the Sputnik vaccine.
The Sputnik vaccine is really a fascinating drug, especially because I feel like, especially in the West, you almost hear nothing about What's really behind this?
How it was developed?
Is it safe or not?
And it's such a fascinating, just the sort of chronology, if you trace it back to where it really started.
It's interesting because you actually can, I would say maybe where it was sort of born was with the Ebola crisis, which is actually a lot of the drugs that we see now, like remdesivir, right, go back to The Ebola, Ebola, Africa.
And basically what happened was you have this center is called the Gamaleya Institute, which is run by the Russian health ministry.
And in 2015, they went into Africa and they said, we're going to make the magic serum to cure Ebola.
We're going to do this.
and we have this amazing viral vector vaccine platform, this is gonna be the cure to Ebola.
And basically what ended up happening is that it was a total flop.
They barely tested it.
And so when COVID came around, they basically just took this vaccine and said, "Okay, now we're just gonna reconfigure it and it's for COVID and it works beautifully and it's safe and effective." And it came out in record time, We're talking about they announced, I believe that they announced that they started working on it in, I want to say, early March.
And trials started...
Phase one trial started in June and it was approved in August.
So, I mean, it's not dissimilar to the other vaccines on the market, but it was done in such an incredible timeframe and with so little scrutiny and so little transparency.
And when you just get into how this vaccine, like who was really behind it, the incredible links to big pharma, it's just like a whole, you could write a whole book I remember Putin took it publicly to show the public it was safe.
Well, so Putin held off for many months, actually.
Interestingly enough, when he first announced that he got vaccinated, for some reason he didn't disclose which vaccine it was, because at the time there were several options available.
I think that Russia also allows a few of the Chinese vaccines, and also Russia has these It has like Epivac Corona and Covivac, which are these very strange, they're sort of these like niche vaccines that were made in small batches that were barely ever tested and just sort of The whole thing, I mean, the whole vaccine scene in Russia is very, very peculiar.
Yeah, and then with actually a funny story about Putin is that, you know, they started doing this nasal spray, right?
The Sputnik nasal vaccine, intranasal.
And so Putin allegedly volunteered to get this vaccine.
And when he spoke about getting this vaccine as part of the trial, he said that it was administered to him in a powder, which doesn't make any sense because it's a liquid.
Why is Vladimir Putin talking about putting powder up his nose?
It's supposed to be a liquid.
It was this whole scandal.
And Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, had to come out and say, Vladimir Putin misremembered.
Of course, it wasn't powder.
It was a liquid.
So it's very, very weird.
So many weird stories.
We complain a lot about the lack of transparency in this country, the lack of good surveillance systems and data collection, but at least some of that is public.
How public are those data?
Yeah, it's such a good question because, well, for example, you have the VAERS system in the United States, which obviously is deeply flawed, but the advantage is that it'll show you that there's a problem, right?
Russia doesn't have a VAERS. There's zero transparency in Russia.
In fact, according to the Russian government, there has not been a single recorded serious post-vaccination complication in the country.
It's incredible the stories I can tell you.
The Russian government recently was asked by a lawmaker, so a member of the State Duma, like a member of Congress, that would be the analog of the United States, He said, can we please have the most recent phase three trial data for Sputnik V? And they said, we cannot release that because it's a trade secret.
We can't give you the most recent data because it's a trade secret.
And it's confidential.
There was another request, I believe also from another, a different lawmaker, saying, can we just see how many people who took Sputnik V and died?
Like, how many deaths, whether it was connected to the vaccine or not, can we just, do we have this data?
Can we see it?
And they said, we can't release this data because it would be inappropriate and it would discourage vaccination.
These are official statements from the Russian government.
Are they pressuring people to take the vaccine like they do here?
Yeah, so this is also another big, I think, misconception.
A lot of people think that a vaccine was totally voluntary in Russia, which is not true at all.
So the first compulsory vaccination policy was actually imposed here in Moscow in June 2021, and it was basically 60% of your workforce from certain sectors, like catering and different sectors of The economy had to be vaccinated.
And then this policy spread.
And then what's so interesting is they had Duma elections, so like federal elections for the legislator.
And they waited until right after these elections finished.
And then they imposed compulsory vaccination on the entire country.
So everybody adopted it right after elections because they knew how unpopular it would be.
I mean, we're talking about a situation, for example, in Moscow.
Before this compulsory vaccination policy, I think it was something like 1.8 million people had gotten at least one dose of the vaccine.
So this was June, mid-June 2021.
And now it's something like 6.5 million.
So most of the people who've been vaccinated in Moscow's capital did it after these compulsory policies, which by the way, expanded.
So they started with 60%.
Then they said, you know, 75, then 80.
There are some parts of Russia where they said, if you want to work You have to get vaccinated.
They did it for also obligatory, if you're like above the age of 60, you either get the vaccine or it's self-isolation at your home.
You can't leave your home unless you're vaccinated, basically.
So they did it for students, they did it for healthcare workers.
There was many, many ways that they coerced people into getting this a shot.
What age do they be giving the vaccine to kids?
They are, although it's not compulsory.
So Russia's actually behind on sort of giving it to kids.
So they just started vaccinating basically under 18s to 12-year-olds, I believe, starting in January.
So they're way behind the West on this one.
And they're just now starting studies with 12 kids.
To six.
But it's started.
And I'd have to say, though, in very small numbers, I haven't seen huge amounts of it.
Because Russians don't want this value.
How do Russians communicate that?
You know, their protests, their letters to the editor, social media.
Because in our country, we're dealing with censorship, so it's hard for people to even express their displeasure.
There's a huge amount of censorship in Russia on this topic, I would say.
So basically what's happened is there's media censorship, but also there's professional censorship.
So for example, healthcare workers, anyone working in healthcare is threatened with losing their medical license or getting in trouble with authorities if they speak out against, you know, if they raise any concerns, etc., etc.
And there's a prominent group here in Russia called Doctors for Truth.
And I'm sure, you know, there's sort of organizations like this all around the world who have held conferences and they even invite the authorities to come to these conferences and discuss these issues with.
They're totally open, transparent.
And they're just saying, you know, how can we allow this when we don't know the long term effects of this?
It doesn't seem to be very effective.
And there's actually lots of evidence that it's actually quite dangerous.
For example, because there's no VAERS in Russia, they have created there was a group that created sort of unofficial VAERS where people would submit possible deaths linked to the vaccine using media reports and they would try to confirm it and they would list on this website.
The Russian government shut this website down.
They pulled the plug on it and so now it's not hosted in Russia anymore.
They had to move it out of the country.
So there's a huge, huge problem with just being able to talk about these issues openly and Russians primarily use Telegram to talk about it.
There's very popular Telegram channels on the internet that are devoted to reporting adverse events.
So yeah, I think it's very similar to the United States.
And so how do you know that there is widespread displeasure?
Is it from reading the Telegram account or are there actually demonstrations and Facebook or whatever?
So I would say that unlike maybe other parts of the world where you'll see demonstrations in Russia, the way that they've been resisting is just they don't abide by the COVID rules.
For example, a lot of them have actually been rolled back at this point, but No one really took the mask rules seriously unless they were strictly enforced in like the Moscow metro or in certain places.
Social distancing was a joke.
Nobody cared about it.
And when you would speak to people about the vaccine, I mean, in Russia, it was possible to even buy fake QR codes, you know.
And people would take QR codes from like dishwashers and irons and use them to like get into buildings because they would just, you know, look at the QR code and say, okay, you're vaccinated and you get in.
I think it's just, it was a different, you know, different culture, different way of sort of resisting the tyranny.
Most countries, we know what the death per million rate is.
For example, in the United States, it's 2,800 per million.
In some African countries, like Nigeria, it's as low as 14 per million.
I think China says that it's around 10 per million.
What does Russia say?
You know, I don't even, it's been so long since I've even looked at that data, but I'll tell you this, Russia has seen record mortality, a high mortality level that hasn't been seen since World War II. Now, it's much, much lower than it was in 1945, but we're talking about Mortality that's worse than even in the 90s when you had total socioeconomic collapse.
There was a recent report I saw just last week saying that the number of registered pensioners, so people who are officially receiving pensions from the Russian government, the number has decreased the most since the early 90s.
So we're talking about somehow, and I have multiple theories on how this happened, but the Russian government was pumping records amount of money into healthcare when COVID hit.
I mean, they really poured the cash in.
Truly.
And yet we're seeing record mortality, many, many credible reports of, in general, healthcare just going straight down the toilet.
And I think that it's connected in part with the vaccine, but also because what happened was, like in many other parts of the world, is that they canceled routine care.
They said, okay, now, you know, regular checkups and screenings are canceled because we're so overwhelmed.
And so what does this lead to?
I think it's had a huge impact on health.
And also, the problem is that you have these situations in Russia, they have these things called red zones, which is where the severe COVID cases are sent to the special ward in the hospital where no one, family members can't go see them, no one can touch them.
And if you're just this If you're alone, you're an elderly person who doesn't have any family, who's going to look after you?
Who's going to care for you?
There's an amazing example of this.
A Russian guy from the city of Tomsk, his grandmother was sent to one of these COVID wars.
She had Alzheimer's.
She was put in this war where no one took care of her.
She was lying in feces and urine.
He pretended to be a doctor.
He put on a hazmat suit, took a camera and went in to visit her and like changed her diapers and cleaned her.
And he was like, why aren't you guys taking care of this patient?
And they're like, you know, whatever.
They'll die anyone.
No one cares.
And she ended up dying.
And the Russian authorities tried to extort this guy.
They're like, we're not going to give you your grandma's body if you talk about this.
I mean, it's really, really bad.
And I don't think that's a specific, you know, isolated case.
I think that was happening.
There's other examples of this.
And I hear stories like this even in Europe, like even in developed countries in Europe, they do stuff like this.
What is the vaccine schedule like before COVID in terms of mandating, you know, the standard childhood vaccines?
Like in our country, children are essentially required to take 72 doses of 16 vaccines.
And it's enforced in many states at the school level where children cannot attend the school unless they can show compliance.
How does that work in Russia?
There is a vaccine schedule.
I don't know the number of vaccines, but, and they're also, they have like the, what is it called, the Montu reactions that you have to do sometimes.
For example, you know, I have a son here in Russia and he had to do one of those to, you know, make sure they doesn't have TB and they do things like that.
I don't think it's as intense as it is in the United States, but they definitely have it.
What's actually very interesting in Russia is before COVID hit, they, I mean, they talk about, first of all, putting The COVID vaccines on the schedule.
In the last several years, they keep bringing up how they want to put more and more vaccines on the COVID schedule.
I've read reports about it.
Actually, really interesting is one of the big pushers for sort of increasing vaccinations in Russia across the board, not just with COVID, is this woman, Veronica Skorzova, who actually was in your book on Fauci.
She's the former health minister of Russia, and she was on this global preparedness monitoring board.
with Fauci and you know this board was funded by Gates and you know has ties to the WHO and the World Trade Organization and she played a really integral part in the Ebola vaccine that later became Sputnik V and she's also played a really active role in basically just pushing vaccines in general 10 years into the past and straight up through today.
So it's very interesting.
What is the relationship between Russia and particularly the oligarchs you've written about this and the World Economic Forum and These global quasi-governmental agencies like SAPI and CAVI and the Global Pandemic Preparedness Board All of these quasi-governmental organizations that
were created by Gates and the pharmaceutical industry to push vaccines.
What is the relationship between the Russian government and the Russian oligarchs?
Well, I think the best example is, again, going back to Sputnik V, serves as a perfect illustration of this very strange connection between the World Economic Forum and also this sort of global vision for global health and Russia.
Basically, one of the main sponsors of Sputnik V is this guy named Herman Gref, who is the CEO of Sparebank.
It's Russia's largest bank.
It's also a majority owned by the Russian government.
And until very recently, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
And this guy, in February 2020, went public.
So this was before really COVID even had arrived in Russia in any meaningful way.
He went to the media and he said, I have...
Two important announcements to make.
The first is that I'm going to start giving out grants to develop COVID drugs.
And the second one is that I'm going to start developing facial recognition technology that recognizes people even when they're wearing masks.
For some reason, that was a big priority for him, right?
And he was like, our Chinese friends have already done this so well, so we're going to consult with them and see what they say.
I mean, it was just so weird.
And this is February 2020.
So what ended up happening is that Hermann Gref and Speerbank poured money into what later became Sputnik V. He teamed up with Alexander Ginsberg, who is the head of the Gamalea Center.
Hermann Gref claims that Speerbank helped with the production and also with technology transfer of Sputnik V. And he also claims that he was one of the first people in the world to receive the vaccine.
He says that he received it in April 2020.
To put that in context, the first official phase one trial, which was just a few dozen people, was in June.
And this is like one of the richest, most important guys in Russia.
And he's claiming that he took this experimental vaccine months before, we're talking about two months before it was even conceived, like two months after it was even conceived, right?
What's really interesting, too, is that in May of 2020, So, a month after Hamon Gref takes this highly experimental Sputnik V, not even called Sputnik V yet, Spearbank creates a subsidiary called Immunotechnologies.
And this sister company is basically charged with handling the production and distribution of Sputnik V. So, we're talking about Russia's bank.
Sputnik V is like a banker's drug.
Connected to a guy who sits on the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
And so, Spearbank, Herman Gref, was in charge of distributing the first 9 million doses of Sputnik V around Russia.
I mean, it's such a bizarre story.
And what people also need to understand, I mean, another really fascinating link here, getting back to the World Economic Forum, is that the main, later the main financer of Sputnik V was the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which is Russia's sovereign wealth fund.
And it's run by this guy named Kirill Dmitriev.
Kirill Dmitriev is a really interesting fellow.
He is actually, I believe he's Ukrainian by birth.
I think he was raised in Kiev.
But anyway, he went to the United States, got this amazing education.
He went to Stanford.
He went to Harvard Business School.
He worked for Goldman Sachs.
He worked for McKinsey.
He comes back to Russia and he heads this sovereign wealth fund.
This guy is also a young global leader, class of 2009.
And he does these amazing...
Just so people know, that's Claude Schwab's in-house education group with Justin Trudeau and Macron and all of these people who took us down this path to tyranny.
Here's another really fascinating thing about the whole Sputnik V, World Economic Forum, Russian Direct Investment Fund link, is that Very shortly after Sputnik V really came into existence, so this was in July 2020,
so a month before the drug was announced, Kirill Dmitriev, our young global leader, alum, announces that the Russian government has partnered with our farm, which is a Russian pharmaceutical, which is going to be creating AstraZeneca's vaccine.
So basically what ended up happening is that the Russian government is invested in AstraZeneca's vaccine and it's produced here in Russia and it's exported and right now they're actually trying to register it and what people don't realize is that the original plan was to create a combined vaccine,
a cocktail, which was one dose Sputnik V and one dose AstraZeneca and they speak about this openly and they had this whole cooperation agreement with AstraZeneca that came out in December 2020 and They later even announced they were glowing about doing joint trials with Moderna and Pfizer.
You know, this whole idea that there's like this vaccine war and that Russia was being treated so unfairly, I think is a lot of smoke and mirrors.
I mean, some of it.
I mean, obviously there was some competitiveness here because, you know, you got rubles that you can lose, but there was very, very close cooperation.
And a perfect example of this, again, going back to July, is that there was this rumor that Russia had hacked We're good to go.
Let's talk for a minute about the Ukraine.
You know, everybody in our country is kind of wondering what is happening in Russia.
Has the Ukraine crisis affected Putin's popularity?
He's become much more popular in Russia.
He's become much more popular.
Do you have to be careful when you talk about Putin in Russia?
Me, personally, I don't think so.
What I would say about the situation, though, in Ukraine, though, is with sort of being careful, it's a weird situation because in Russia, the Russian media cannot describe what's happening as a war.
They have to refer to it as a special military operation.
So if you refer to it as anything else, you can actually get fined.
And if you are, you know, if you have multiple strikes, they can actually...
Take you off the air or close down your website.
And that's happened already a few times with some of these few outlets.
Some of them you would describe as there's theories that they're basically, you know, these sort of outlets that push these Western agendas and, you know, are sketchy to begin with.
But, you know, I'm against all censorship.
So I think that it's unfortunate that...
And of course, obviously, you're having huge censorship in Ukraine, huge censorship in the United States.
I mean, the way that I see this Personally, it's so sad to see how this conflict has made it so difficult for people to talk to each other about really, really important things.
It's really scary.
It's really scary how they're putting down this new iron curtain, basically.
That's what scares me the most.
As we talked about before the show, I don't have a clear position on the Ukraine.
I hate propaganda.
And I hate war.
I think it should be a last resort.
And I'm not convinced that this was a last resort.
You know, I think we all have the sense that you can't talk about this.
You can't talk about it rationally.
You can't ask questions.
And it's the same dynamic.
We saw with the American press during the run-up to the Iraq War, where anybody who asked common-send questions was vilified and marginalized and gaslighted, and we've overthrown a number of Dictators, we were told we had to go into Syria, and the blowback from that, really, 2 million refugees out of Syria into Europe really destabilized Europe, destroyed democracy in Europe, ended up with Brexit.
And, you know, we ended up in a war in Afghanistan.
And again, because of a propaganda drive, it lasted for 20 years, cost $4 trillion, and yielded nothing of interest, nothing of value for the United States, the same as the War Never Act.
So, you know, we need to be asking questions before we go into wars.
And it doesn't seem now like any of those questions are being asked or answered.
Speaking as someone who, I mean, I live in Russia...
I have family here.
I want the best for everyone.
I'm not even super political at this point, I gotta say.
I'm so jaded by everything.
But what I would say is, you know, my concern about this war is that I understand Russia's grievances.
I think that Russia has a lot of legitimate grievances.
I think that the way that Russia has been treated is totally hypocritical and even counter, you know, counterproductive and almost, in some ways, sort of suicidal.
I mean, I see that, in my view, Washington's response to this crisis is making it worse, and that concerns me.
There's obviously responsibility on Moscow's side as well.
What concerns me, though, is if I was speaking as someone who lives in Russia and loves Russia, is where's the exit ramp for Russia where The situation after this is better than before, and that's what really worries me because I can see this dragging out for years or sparking something much larger.
Theoretically, I could see this really morphing into something much larger than a regional conflict.
In many ways, I think it already is.
It's taken on global elements economically, absolutely.
Just so that people can hear a different point of view, can you just briefly outline Russia's major grievances?
Well, Russia's...
I mean, if you spoke to...
I think Russia would say, look, we've had a situation where you have...
A NATO expansion that basically doesn't really make any sense from a security perspective.
We've tried to negotiate with this.
We've tried to reason with you guys.
You keep pushing us.
We've said that there's going to be...
And before this started, they did issue this basically warning saying that we reserve the right to respond if this keeps happening.
With the situation in Donbass, they'll say there's been a horrible situation in Donbass for the last eight years.
And this crisis has not been resolved, and we don't feel like the key of government in Washington is acting in good faith, and we reserve the right to settle this on our own terms.
I tend to agree with you, Bobby.
I think that there were probably other ways of dealing with this, or at least less destructive ways or less risky ways.
But you have to sympathize.
I mean, what if we had a similar situation, you know, on the border with Mexico?
You know, if there was a Basically a simmering conflict going on for eight years, a hostile military alliance moving up on our borders.
You know, it's not a matter of condemning or not, but I think there needs to be understanding.
And this idea that, you know, Russia is this crazy wild bear that's out of control, I think this is not a responsible or intelligent way of looking at this conflict.
And there needs to be some sort of understanding before we can hopefully Find peace because we desperately need it.
I mean, I'm scared.
I really am scared for what this could lead to.
Riley Wagerman, thank you so much for joining us and we hope to hear more from you in the future.
Thank you.
I really appreciate the invite.
Thank you.
I'm a big fan, so really an honor.
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