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May 27, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
22:52
Monkeypox with Dr Robert Malone

Should we fear monkeypox? Dr Robert Malone gives us the update.

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Hey, everybody.
I'm really happy to be joined today by Dr.
Robert Malone, who is my friend, my colleague, and I am one of the many presidents of his fan club.
And we're going to talk about monkeypox.
And I want to say that I just called...
Bob, to see where he was and whether he could do this.
And it's 1.30 in the morning where he is.
He's on a catamaran in the middle of the Mediterranean.
And he said, let me put on some clothes and we'll talk for a few minutes.
So thank you very, very much for joining me.
Please apologize to your family, Jill, for...
for me doing this extraction, this very quick extraction.
I wanted to talk to you about monkey pox because you did this, I think, a very, very sober kind of and useful description of monkey pox at a time when there's this, of course, this souped up, hyped up hysteria about monkey pox.
And it was really kind of reassuring and And, you know, it's nice to read science rather than...
I mean, the big question is, should people be scared of monkeypox?
And the answer is no.
Even if you happen to be at one of these, what I presume were raves in Spain or in Europe, there seems to have been two parties that occurred.
It had a lot of people in them.
And the people that have been infected basically all tracked back to one of those two parties or were contacts of somebody who was at one of those two parties.
So thank you, Bobby, for the intro.
And it's my pleasure to be here.
And I can tell you that Jill would not have allowed me to jump out of bed if it was anybody other than...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
that was giving the call to duty.
But I'm glad to do what I can.
And thank you for that.
One of the things that you mentioned, I don't know if this is still true, but most of the people who contract in monkey pie is a very, very hard disease to catch.
It has a very low RO, as you point out.
And the people who have generally have been people who had very, very intimate contact.
I think most of them have been male homosexuals who were engaged in sex with a person they apparently got it from.
Is that still true? - Yeah, that's what I understand.
The last I heard from the WHO, which I believe was one night ago, was that we have a total of 200 cases in the world in this outbreak at this point in time.
They were all individuals essentially, or the vast majority were individuals who were men who have sex with men who had been at one of these two parties.
I believe, as I recall, it was Belgium and Spain, and they've all radiated from those two points.
And it's true that the virus can be spread by respiratory droplets.
That does not mean that it is a respiratory virus in the same way that the coronavirus is.
And I think it's real easy for folks to get, since we've been through all that we've been through over the last two and a half years, to immediately assume that this is a highly infectious pathogen, such as coronavirus.
Just to compare, the Omicron strain has a reproductive coefficient.
Now, this is kind of wonky stuff, using these epidemiology terms, although we're all epidemiologists, it seems now.
In the case of the Omicron strain, we have an R0 of 7 to 10, which means on average, without any other mitigation, if I am infected with the Omicron virus, I will on average infect 7 to 10 other people.
In the case of monkeypox, The R-naught is something like one or less.
That means that on average, I will infect one person or less than one person in an open population just interacting with each other.
Usually when you get down to an RO of one, it's usually a signal that the epidemic is over.
Precisely.
And so we don't have an epidemic here at all.
What we have is a outbreak that is easily traceable.
And when you have a viral infection that has that small of an infectious pressure, the way that that is typically handled is through outbreak tracing.
So tracing of individuals that are infected or have been in close contact.
And then, as I believe the government in Belgium has implemented, Quarantine of those individuals who've been infected.
Now, when people hear quarantine or isolation right now, they're all hyper-acute and they think, oh no, they're going to put everybody in their house and no one can go shopping like we've all been through with the lockdowns.
That's not at all what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is rational public health policy where people, because You continue to be infectious for about 25 days until the crusts that form in the lesions, like as if you had chickenpox, only in monkeypox it tends to be on the hands in humans.
But you do form crusts, and those are full of virus, and until those are healed over, you're still highly infectious.
There is not apparently an uninfected transmission, in other words, a prodrome, like there is to some extent with coronavirus.
With monkeypox, you start off with influenza-like symptoms.
You develop typically a rash or itchiness in your hands, and then you develop a systemic infection, which can include a cough.
Point is that as you develop symptoms, that's when you become infectious.
So we don't have people walking around spreading virus unknowingly when they go to the shopping center or you shake hands with them or whatever.
They pretty much present with the symptoms, and that's when they become infectious, and they remain infectious for about 25 days.
So it's rational public health policy to do contact tracing to find out who's been in touch with who, who's been at those parties, and whether or not they're already infected and And if they are, they need to stay home immediately.
And their family members should use precautions, you know, gloves, gowning, personal protection when they take care of their loved one or their friend who is in quarantine.
But it doesn't mean that they have to go in a full respirator suit and all the full nine yards.
Unfortunately, there has been Some fear propagated inappropriately by the press.
And in this case, it's really easy to trace it.
One of the things that I noticed just as I was getting on the plane, I've been kind of bouncing around.
I went to the Better Way conference last weekend, and I flew out from Dulles, and I was watching CNN on the television.
In the airport lounge, and I saw the pitch on monkeypox, and I saw them using legacy smallpox images.
And I was very familiar with that because I actually worked quite a bit for the Army on smallpox and the smallpox vaccine.
So I know about this particular vaccine, by the way, that the government is repurchasing for the stockpile, which is a smallpox vaccine, has some cross-reactivity.
To monkeypox.
But CNN was posting smallpox pictures as if that was images of monkeypox.
And then we had Gavi.
I'm sure you're very familiar with Gavi, the Global AIDS Vaccine Initiative that is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And they posted a whole piece on monkeypox in which they cited a 10% mortality rate.
So they were saying 1 in 10 people will die of it.
That is absolute fear porn.
In the same article, they listed the statistics from the World Health Organization with reported cases of monkeypox unverified reported to the World Health Organization that said that there was only a 3.4% mortality rate.
So right there, we got Gavi in, you know, clear...
Inflation, frankly, I think that the term for this is disinformation on the part of both Gavi and CNN. If we define disinformation as Incorrect public health information provided to achieve some political objective, not merely misstating the facts, but apparently intentionally misstating the facts to achieve some sort of an objective.
That appears to be what we have going on right here just based on what they're saying.
Now, I recommend to your viewers There was two articles by Helen Branswell in STAT News.
I've known Helen for a very long time.
I actually was a source for her during the Ebola outbreak with her investigations about the Ebola vaccine.
And she took the time and made the contacts to interview the CDC's specialist.
On monkeypox, who said to her it was a 1% mortality or less, and that we really know very little about this virus because it's so rare that people get infected and have significant disease.
This has never been considered a major clinical problem.
If I can go on just a little bit, we had an outbreak of monkeypox here in the United States in 2003.
And that was caused because monkeypox is not actually just a virus of monkeys.
In Africa, it infects a variety of rodents also, including something called a pouched rat.
And those had apparently been imported into the United States.
I don't know if people thought pouched rats were cute and they wanted to have them for their little child or whatever, but they brought them in and somehow these African pouched rats got in contact with prairie dogs that live in the Great Plains and up through the Rockies. but they brought them in and somehow these African pouched And these prairie dogs, as you know, live in close communities.
And apparently monkeypox spread like wildfire through the prairie dog towns in the United States.
But there were very few cases in humans associated with that.
I guess people don't generally think that prairie dogs are cuddly companions that they bring home to their child.
And so we didn't have a major outbreak.
I don't recall there being any deaths.
If there were, it was very, very few.
I don't think there were any deaths.
So we've all seen this as a country.
We've experienced a monkeypox outbreak.
Now, one of the things that people ask is why monkeypox?
And I guess some people are inferring that talking about monkeypox is somehow might be considered racist.
And there's some lines drawn about surreptitious meanings of monkeys.
The reason why monkeypox is named that is because in 1958, it was discovered, first discovered in a group of monkeys.
And so that's why I got the name.
This is a virus that's indigenous to Africa.
It's been infecting humans in Africa for years and years and years.
And there are periodic small outbreaks.
It's never gone into any kind of a global epidemic or anything like that.
And there's two clades.
We all know what clades are now because, again, we're all virologists in addition to being epidemiologists.
So there's two groups of genetically related monkeypox generally circulating in Africa that have infected humans.
One is the Congo clade.
That's the more severe.
The other one is the West African clade that's less severe clinically.
And that's the one that has infected all these people that were in these two rave parties.
So in sum, this is not a major pathogen of humans.
It's not highly infectious.
And yes, there was something like Event 201 that was held almost a year ago to the date, a tabletop planning exercise focused on monkeypox.
And actually, I mean, one of the sinister coincidences with that is that they were dealing with a Monkeypox epidemic that they acknowledged had been a laboratory-altered monkeypox to make it much more virulent and much more deadly and that it was released by a terrorist group.
Yep.
Well put.
And a good summary.
But a key summary.
In that scenario planning, which they do from time to time, it's essentially, as you pointed out in your wonderful book, The Real Anthony Fauci, these war game scenarios are fairly frequently done.
And they were presuming essentially a mock-up of smallpox.
They were presuming a virus that had been altered so it was both more pathogenic and more infectious.
And that is, I have been carefully listening to my jungle radar, my coconut radar, about what's going on here and whether there's any evidence that this is anything other than The West African strain, is there any evidence of it being genetically modified?
And all I hear back is no, this is the standard West African clade, and there's nothing indicating that it's been tampered with.
And so the advice and comment from the CDC's lead on monkeypox, as captured by Helen Branswell, still applies.
So, just a whole lot of unnecessary fear.
Yeah, and I'm not going to keep you much longer, but I just, I wanted to comment on one thing, and you may have no observation on this, but I, it was a posting that Dr.
Meryl Nass, who, you know, we both know, and who's very, very reliable, and she's a bioweapons expert who actually is in Sweden now, with a, in that hospital, having broken her hip, her pelvis yesterday, and We send her our prayers.
She pointed out that 1958 outbreak, and I could be wrong about this, because I just read this casually, and I didn't know I was going to be talking to you, but the 1958 outbreak in the Kolbe's monkey colony actually occurred in Denmark in a captive colony that was being subjected to the polio vaccine.
And that was the first recorded episode of Monkey Box, and it was what they call the Eastern African Glade.
So it was the West Italy Glade.
And then there was speculation, because as you know, a lot of these viruses, there are hundreds and hundreds of viruses that are endemic to primate communities, and they are at equilibrium in those communities.
In other words, maybe when they infected that community, 10,000 generations ago, they were deadly.
But over time, viruses reach an equilibrium with the target organisms because it's not in the virus's interest to kill or injure the organism.
They want their host to be healthy and having sex and having social interactions.
And then the target organism also...
The ones that are more vulnerable die.
So you reach this natural equilibrium.
And when that same virus jumps species, it can be, you know, very dangerous or damaging to the new group of primates, if as a human being...
It has a very, very different impact.
And that apparently is what some people suggest happen with HIV when it jumped from Bonobo chimpanzees to human beings, that it's rather harmless in the Bonobos, and people believe that it's injurious to MSO. That was one observation.
The other minor observation suggests even if you have a A case fatality rate or an infection fatality rate, that is 1%.
If you're looking at African populations which suffer higher levels of poverty and poor nutrition and a lot of Western populations, you may get an even much greater with many diseases, for example, measles.
Infection fatality rate in African populations is far, far higher than it is in Western populations.
So that's just another consideration that, you know, we should look at before we all panic.
So I guess what you're saying is that the WHO 3.4% probably has a selection bias in that you don't report mild cases to the World Health Organization, but it could be that it partially reflects...
The African origin in most of those reports, which comes from a population that generally may not have the advantages of a Western diet, or in the case of coronavirus, maybe those are disadvantages of the Western diet, but I take your point.
Yeah, complex, even that 3.4% needs to be really carefully considered because it's not proven.
Those are presumed cases.
They're not verified.
I think all in all, we hear monkeypox, we think smallpox, and we forget cowpox and camelpox.
Cowpox was Edward Jenner's origin in theory of his reinventing the smallpox vaccine, which had been previously used something similar in China historically.
But the baseline observation, it is important to remember these things because it gives us more historic context.
The story goes that Jenner observed milkmaid's We're fair skinned.
They didn't get the pox when they did get smallpox.
Smallpox was not universally fatal.
That's another thing we forget about.
We see these horrible pictures and we think in our minds we're all going to die.
But in fact, cowpox is a great example.
It was circulating all the time in milkmaids who were in very close contact with the cows that they were milking.
And it would make them so they were immune to smallpox.
And so they would never have the scars from smallpox, healing from smallpox on their bodies.
And so that was, in theory, why he had that great insight.
But my point is...
And what he did was he lanced a boil from a cow, took out the pus, and injected it into...
I think he slit people with a scalpel and rubbed that pus in there to give them immunity to the smallpox vaccine.
That was the theory that he was operating under.
Yeah, so point being, we hear pox, we think either chicken pox, which is unrelated, but does have vesicles, or we think smallpox, but in the spectrum of the related pox viruses, They are generally not very pathogenic in humans.
There's a camel pox also that may have been the origin at some point of the recombination that gave rise to smallpox.
But we become very fearful of this because we have these associations that we make.
And then they're further exacerbated by the press, basically hyping things, I guess, because it will build viewership.
And so they're trying to build their audience share, I guess.
Or maybe they're reflecting some initiative nefarious from some governmental or non-governmental agency.
I have no idea.
This one is not a major threat to us.
200 total cases worldwide.
And even as I recall yesterday, the President of the United States, even though he's given two, I believe, prior press conferences that kind of increased everybody's anxiety, he even seems to be messaging that people shouldn't overreact to this.
And I think that we all just need to take a deep breath.
We've been through a lot of trauma over the last couple of years and recognize that most of these things are not major threats to us.
We've been living with them for centuries.
And even, as you know, you and I think both agree, the coronavirus threat was also very overhyped.
And yes, some people died from it.
Most of those deaths were avoidable with early treatment.
And we don't have to live in fear.
And we should be very careful to keep from allowing others to weaponize fear as a way to control or manipulate us.
Because that's, I think, what's happening in this case.
Robert Malone, thank you.
Go back to bed.
Apologize to Jill for me.
Enjoy your vacation in the Caribbean again.
It looks like the boat is fairly stable, but of course, there is the concept of relative motion, and you may be rocking violently right now, and we wouldn't know it because the camera's rocking with you.
Okay, Robert, and thank you.
Thanks for the opportunity to be on your podcast and the honor.
I look forward to our next conversation.
Good night, Robert.
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