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Oct. 5, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
45:38
Alex Berenson on Wins Against Pharma and Tech

Alex Berenson discusses recent victories against Big Pharma and Big Tech with RFK Jr in this episode. For more info read Alex Berenson's Substack: https://substack.com/profile/12729762-alex-berenson

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Hey everybody, most of you know my guest today, Alex Berenson.
For those who aren't familiar with his background, Alex is an American writer and former New York Times journalist.
He was a reporter for the Times and has authored several thriller novels and a book on corporate financial filings.
He was born in New York, grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, graduated from Yale in 94 with a bachelor's degree in history and economics.
In the fall of 2003, in the summer of 2004, Aronson worked covering the occupation of Iraq for the New York Times.
He then covered the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, specializing in issues concerning dangerous drugs.
Beginning in 2008, Alex reported on the Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scheme scandal.
He is now a pariah among his former journalistic colleagues because he has integrity and an inclination to tell the truth, even when it doesn't suit his career or professional interests.
And we're all very, very grateful to that, Alex.
The reason I wanted you on board, there's a couple of reasons.
I mean, the stuff that you keep cranking out is amazing.
And it's so well researched and so reliable.
I love to read your post because, you know, you're very, very disciplined about making sure that you got your facts right.
The really interesting thing that's happening now is your Twitter case.
And particularly the recent revelations that show that the White House Actually, use your name in telling Twitter, you got to deplatform this.
And that just seems like an open and shut, clear cut First Amendment violation.
And I don't see how they get out of it.
But anyway, tell us what happened.
Sure.
You know, as you know, and people watching this know, last year there was a lot of pressure on social media companies about the vaccines.
And, you know, I had, in 2020, taken a position, really, that the lockdowns were a mistake and that school closures were a mistake.
And, you know, I think a lot of people on the right actually supported me pretty strongly.
And then the vaccines came out, the COVID vaccines came out in December 2020.
And I initially really wasn't strong.
I didn't have a strong feeling.
I thought, oh, this is, you know, this is probably a good thing, probably going to help end this epidemic.
But as I, you know, I'd covered the drug industry for the Times for a long time, so I was pretty familiar with the games that they played.
And I pretty rapidly, especially in clinical trial design and testing, and I pretty rapidly came to the conclusion that the vaccines really hadn't been very well tested, despite the size of the clinical trials.
And so I, you know, the early rollout, I, you know, I raised questions about in Israel, and I quickly became, you know, there was this disinformation dozen that you were a part of, I think.
And I was not part of that, but I was like the 13th person who became a focus of the White House.
And in some ways, I think I was more of a focus because I did have this background of credibility and because I used my Twitter feed in a pretty pointed way.
I'm a writer by train, so I would be sarcastic and I would make fun of people like Andy Slavitt for posting 85 tweet threads.
This is stuff that, you know, I think somebody like you didn't necessarily engage in that kind of voice.
And I think that they didn't like my voice.
And so in April of 2021, we now know, or I now know, there is a meeting that happened To discuss what the White House likes to call disinformation or misinformation, which to my mind is just, from my point of view, presenting facts about the vaccines that they didn't like.
And look, I think there are other people out there who posted stuff that probably went too far, and in some cases wasn't true or was highly speculative.
I try not to do that.
But whether it's disinformation or misinformation or malinformation, the most important part of that word is information.
And, you know, in the United States, as far as I'm concerned, we have a right to say what we think and debate, even if we're wrong.
And in some cases, even if you're lying, as long as you're not harassing people or hurting people, you have the right to speak.
Whether that right extends to a platform like Twitter is a different issue, but certainly the government shouldn't be trying to curtail your right to speak.
So...
In April 2020, they have a meeting at the White House to talk to Twitter, and my name came up specifically as somebody who they were focused on as putting out information about the vaccines they didn't like.
And this appears to have put Twitter in a bad position because Twitter had been assuring me Privately, that what I was doing was okay.
And they'd done that in May of 2020.
They'd done that in December of 2020.
And they'd done it again in March of 2021.
Let me interrupt you, Alex, because I have a question about that.
How did you even engage?
I mean, you know, I was doing stuff with Twitter and Instagram.
Nobody ever had a conversation with me.
They just took me off.
Sure.
So, great question.
You know, if you're the...
You know, the head of a big company, or if you're a big public figure, you're going to have some kind of channel to Twitter.
They're going to reach out to you, probably, or your PR people are going to find a way to contact them.
I didn't have that, actually.
Jack Dorsey just suddenly began following me in May 2020, and at the same time, Twitter's vice president of corporate communications...
Contacted me and said, hey, let's have a conversation about what you're talking about.
We don't want to censor.
We don't want to censor you for sure.
And we had these sporadic conversations.
They weren't long, but it was when the vaccines came out and I realized I was going to be questioning them, I wanted to make sure they would know that.
And then again in March of 2021, I had a short conversation with them because they were again tightening their policies.
So in April, Twitter's internal people were having communications with each other saying, you know, we don't actually think he's violating our policies.
Yeah, he's saying stuff, but he's careful about it, and he's sort of coloring within the lines.
And the White House was focused on me.
And the language that they use is the White House asked, or I can't remember if it's asked or demanded, it's in what I posted, but the White House wanted to know why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off the platform, which is clearly targeting me.
Now, I guess what the White House is going to say when we sue them is, well, we didn't demand it, we just asked.
To which I say, when the cop says, sir, can you get out of your car?
Do you think you have a lot of leeway in that question?
So Twitter was in this position where they were under a lot of pressure, but they didn't seem to believe that I'd done anything wrong and they'd been having these conversations with me.
So you fast forward to July of 2021, about a year ago, and the pressure's increasing even more.
And I think the reason the pressure was increasing even more is that The smarter people inside, a few smarter people inside the White House and inside the companies, inside Pfizer and Moderna, were realizing that the vaccines weren't working nearly as well as they'd hoped.
There was evidence out of Israel that they were already declining.
So what did they start to do?
They started to say, we're going to need to boost, and we're going to need to mandate.
And both of those were going to be very unpopular things to do.
But boosters, a mandate is more than boosters, right?
But Mandates, a lot of the country viewed that as an infringement on their rights, totally understandably.
And as for boosters, you're asking, you told people these are vaccines.
The common perception is that a vaccine is something that's going to last forever or at least a long time.
Now you're telling them they needed another shot a few months later.
So they know there's going to be pressure.
This is not going to be great for them.
And their response is, we need to turn up the heat even more.
And on July 16, 2021, I think?
And a few hours later, Twitter locks me out for the first time.
About a month after that, I am banned permanently from Twitter.
I then sue them in federal court in December of 2021, saying you shouldn't have banned me.
You made me these assurances.
I didn't do anything wrong.
Look at what I said.
Everything I said is accurate.
Those claims, as you know, I know your claim did not survive the motion to dismiss and you're now appealing it.
But these claims against social media companies have a very, very hard time because social media companies say, well, there's this thing called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and that gives us essentially carte blanche to do whatever we like in terms of banning decisions.
And if you don't like it, sue us, but we're going to win anyway.
In my case, the case was heard by a federal district judge for the Northern District of California, a Clinton appointee, not a Trump appointee, not a Republican judge.
And he said, look, Berenson seems to have shown, at the least, that he has these communications with a Twitter executive, and they seem to have been in the process of sort of modifying their contract with him.
And so he's got a breach of contract claim that I'm going to allow to move forward, and I'm going to allow very wide discovery of what they were talking about to third parties.
But he said, you know, the big claims, the big First Amendment claims, the claims that Twitter's a state actor, I'm going to throw those claims out.
Okay, so this led to an interesting position for me, which was I could have...
Let me interrupt so people understand, because the term state actor is a term of art.
And what it means, so that people understand this, is that the First Amendment, if you own a printing press, you can print anything you want.
It can be lies.
It can be the truth.
It can be anything.
Nobody can stop you.
Nobody can tell you which writers to host.
Who you can fire, who you can, who you can de-platform.
And Twitter, essentially, the law looks at Twitter as just a big printing press.
It's privately owned.
The state has no right to tell them who and who they cannot fire or de-platform.
The problem is, if a state or federal official orders them to censor people, And at that point, they become a surrogate of the state, and the way that we refer to that is a state actor, and the state is not allowed to censor you.
You know, just so people understand when you say state actor, the theory is that in your case, they were acting as a surrogate for the federal government in censoring you, and they weren't.
And at that point, the First Amendment is implicated.
Yes, so I would, yes, that essentially the federal government has deputized them.
So I would push back a little bit on the printing press analogy, especially because Twitter's a California company.
There is a question under California law, certainly, of at what point does a private company become a public forum and have to allow all speech, even speech it doesn't like.
California's constitution has even stronger free speech protections than the U.S. constitution.
And for example, shopping malls in California are not allowed to ban political speech.
And this is something that has been litigated over and over again, and it's very clear.
And so one of the arguments we made was that, look, under California's constitution and California case law, Twitter is clearly bigger by far than the biggest shopping mall.
It should be required to allow me that way.
And if it's not going to because of federal law, because of Section 230, that creates a different constitutional problem.
I still think that that claim can potentially be successful and certainly should be argued again in California courts, but it has not been successful, and it was not successful in my case.
So the argument that, again, because these platforms are essentially...
I mean, Twitter has referred to itself previously, although they don't anymore, as a public square.
They are functioning as this very...
Broad platform, and they can't start discriminating on speech.
But that said, that claim didn't survive either.
So that left me, and the state action claim didn't survive, actually, because at that time, we didn't have this evidence.
And in fact, the judge dismissed those claims with prejudice, which is another legal term, meaning you can't refile.
Even if you get new facts, you can't refile.
Now, I wish he hadn't done that, but he did.
Nonetheless, it was a big win for me in April because he allowed my case to move forward on these narrow claims, these breach of contract claims.
And most importantly, he allowed discovery.
And discovery, again, people may not know sort of the ins and outs of how civil litigation works.
Discovery means that under penalty of law, you have to turn over documents that are relevant to your case to the other side.
It's actually a pretty amazing thing to make people do.
So basically, you have the right to, you know, I had the right to find out whether Twitter had been talking to other third parties, because in that way, I would help make my case the breach of contract case.
And, you know, I also had to turn over certain information to Twitter too.
Then there's something called depositions, where you actually get to question people under oath.
So the judge allowed me to have discovery of Twitter and to take depositions.
And frankly, I thought we were going to roll right ahead into that phase of things.
As part of federal litigation, once you survive a motion to dismiss, there's a mediation element.
And that means you get either a retired judge or a lawyer, somebody who's got legal training, and they try to bring the two sides together.
Because from the judge's point of view, the best case is a case that settles.
And most cases do settle.
So, you know, they view a trial as expensive and time consuming and you want to settle these cases if you can.
And I came in with, I would say, pretty aggressive demands.
I can't really talk about them specifically, but I came in with pretty aggressive demands.
And as I said publicly in June, which is just two months ago, I'm not going to settle this case unless Twitter essentially agrees to turn over all the third-party discovery that it would have to turn over otherwise.
And lo and behold, a month later, I did settle the case.
And a lot of people, people on the right actually said, oh, this jerk, he raised all this money to fight Twitter and he promised he'd never settle the case.
There he is.
He settled the case.
He just took money from Twitter.
He's just a grifter.
You're never going to hear another word about this.
Well, last week, I published documents that come out of the case.
And those documents show that Amazingly, what we talked about to go all the way back, that in April 2021, the White House was asking for my head on a platter.
Now, what do I do next?
Well, I can't sue Twitter again.
Twitter, that lawsuit, that ship has sailed.
I'm back on the platform.
That case has settled.
But...
I can now bring a claim directly against the White House and against people in the White House or who were in the White House at that time for trying to abridge my free speech rights.
And there's something called a Bivens claim.
And this is just something I'm starting to learn about.
But essentially, a Bivens claim is Look, I have this constitutional right, even if there's nothing specific in the law that gives me a tort, my constitutional right is so powerful, I have to be allowed to sue the government on my own behalf, and I have to get injunctive relief if I win, and maybe monetary damages.
We'll see.
But that's the next phase of this very clearly.
Yeah, just to kind of compare our experiences, We sued.
I have a couple of suits in this area.
One, I have a direct suit against Elizabeth Warren, who asked Amazon to stop selling a book that I wrote the introduction to by Joe Mercola.
Oh, yeah, she did.
You know, I'm in that letter, too.
That's right.
So we're going through the courts on that.
Of course, we expect it to get a motion.
We expect...
The lower courts to dismiss it.
We've now gone up to the Court of Appeals.
And then we have our Facebook.
CHC has a Facebook case, which they got deplatformed from Facebook, my organization.
So I'm representing them on that case, along with some other really great lawyers.
And we argued, I guess, last month in front of the Ninth Circuit.
And that case, and we got three judges who And one of them seemed friendly.
One of them was, like, poisonously hostile to us, just angry, angry, hostile.
It was a Republican judge, and, you know, I don't know why, but he was hostile.
And then...
One who was indeterminate.
So we're waiting for that decision.
Do you have any sense of when that will be handed down?
Oh, you don't know.
You don't know.
It could be six months.
It could be, you know, a week from now.
But, you know, one of the things, the judge who was hostile to us, you know, we went in there and said, we said, look, the White House was telling them to do this.
It told them, it told Facebook, To take down everybody who's on the disinformation dozen, and I'm at the top of the disinformation dozen.
Not only that, but Janet Pisaki, the communications director for the White House, specifically mentioned me in a White House press conference as somebody who was promoting the kind of disinformation that they were asking the social media to take down.
So We're not suing the public convention, which is what you're doing right now.
On that case, we're suing Facebook.
We didn't sue the White House.
With Facebook, not only the White House told them to take us down, but Adam Schiff told them to take us down, and Elizabeth Warren told them to take us down.
And when we said that to the judge, the hostile judge ridiculed us and said, well, Congress tells people to do the same things all the time, that it has no power to make them do, and there was no threat behind that.
And what I said to the judge is these are the same two senators who are publicly threatening to break up the company and to revoke their Section 230 immunity.
You mentioned Section 230.
This is an extraordinary law that says that even if somebody defames you on that site, so somebody says something that is overtly lying, defamatory about you, you may have a lawsuit against the guy who said it, but you cannot sue the site. you may have a lawsuit against the guy who said You cannot sue Facebook or Twitter, so they're not responsible for any kind of, you know, poison they put out.
By the way, I agree with that part of 230, because how could Facebook or Twitter monitor a trillion tweets?
That part I agree with.
Right, okay.
But Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren are threatening to take that away from them.
It is, as you just pointed out, this is what I said to the judge.
I said they're considering this legislation.
That is an existential threat to that company.
You know, you cannot say that that company is not conscious of what is not feeling the threat of what Congress says to them.
If you don't take them down, we're going to take away your Section 230 immunity.
That is a genuine threat.
They ridiculed us because they said, well, they didn't specifically mention your organization and have an explicit threat.
Next to that.
Now, that's never been required by law, but that is now because of the panic of the pandemic.
They're trying to make sure that, you know, the judges are doing things they never did before to really go out of their way to make sure to protect these organizations, these platforms, when they try to censor people who criticize government policies.
Yes, and as the Wall Street Journal pointed out when they wrote an op-ed about the documents that I had disclosed the other day, and this is something that's funny, you may feel totally different.
This idea, what if the White House was telling people who had views it didn't like about climate change?
Or about Ukraine, right?
There really is no...
If this is the principle that the White House is going to meddle with people who are putting out information it doesn't like, there's no reason it has to be restricted to COVID or the vaccines.
And it could be a position you totally personally agree with.
For all I know, you think every car in the country should be...
It should run on, you know, vegetable oil or whatever.
But it doesn't matter.
That's not the point.
The point is that the government should censor.
I think the Ukraine issue, because they're already doing that.
Right.
And I think the Ukraine issue is a really important one.
There was self-censorship in the media.
During the Iraq War, as you know, the New York Times apologized for Judith Miller's reporting and everybody was kind of subsumed in the orthodoxy that Saddam Hussein is bad and we gotta get him.
And anybody who says anything else than that should be shut up and silenced because they're an enemy of the public.
They're doing the same thing with the Ukraine crisis right now.
And it's really dangerous.
It's really, really dangerous when government can get these platforms to censor dissent or to censor anybody who criticizes any government policy.
It's a license for governments to commit atrocities.
Yes, I totally agree.
And so, I mean, there's so much more we could say about this.
I mean, one thing that's been stunning to me and really disheartening So, okay, I survived the motion to dismiss.
That's April.
Kind of a big deal.
You know, nobody's really survived any of those.
Huge deal.
You know, maybe, maybe not.
It doesn't mean I've won the lawsuit or anything.
Nobody writes about it.
Politico writes one piece about it.
You know, the right-wing media writes a little something about it, not too much.
Okay, okay, I thought it was kind of a big deal.
But, whatever.
Last month, I get back on Twitter.
They released a statement that they shouldn't have banned me.
You know, they made a mistake.
My tweets were not violative.
They put me back on.
First person to have gotten back on that way.
Really, as far as I know or anybody knows in the history of these platforms.
I mean, they've put people back on, but never under the threat of a lawsuit.
A lawsuit that survived an MTD. Okay.
And they acknowledged that I was wrong.
I'm sorry, that they were wrong.
Again, nobody...
I worked for the New York Times for 10 years.
They don't write about this.
All the people who wrote stories when I was banned saying, oh, this vaccine conspiracy theorist who is banned, they don't write about it.
Nobody writes about it.
And my friends, I guess they're not really my friends anymore.
My former friends at the New York Times and elsewhere in the media basically don't contact me.
Okay.
Now, last week...
Last week, I put out these documents.
And I have more documents.
And I'm going to release more documents.
But just what I put out already.
At a White House meeting, I am named as somebody who needs to be deplatformed.
Because of information I'm putting out.
You can say I was right.
You can say I was wrong.
I was right, by the way.
Right about basically all of it.
But it doesn't matter, right or wrong.
I was functioning as a journalist.
They targeted me.
A few months later, Twitter banned me.
The only comparable thing I can think of is Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
Now, obviously, that was a bigger deal at this point.
But that's the only thing I can think of that's comparable.
Still, no one is writing about it, except in the right-wing media.
It's incredible to me that that's where we are.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, just to clarify again something that you've been saying all along, but people should understand.
The First Amendment protects your right to tell a lie.
Whether you're right or wrong, it protects your right to be wrong.
It is irrelevant whether what you said is right or wrong or good information or bad information.
It is protected by the First Amendment.
Now, by the way, it doesn't protect everything.
You can't harass people.
I can't sit outside your house and play my radio speakers all night long.
There are things that free speech is not an absolute infinite right.
There's a private right.
If you defame somebody, people can sue you.
And the other prohibition is the Supreme Court dicta that you can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
If you're going to do something that is going to provoke or advocate violence, that, you know, there is a consequence of that.
The government has a right to step in and stop the incitement of violence.
But absolutely nobody is claiming that I did any of those things.
This is my talking about the vaccines in a way that people didn't like.
Period.
Let me ask you this.
And the term vaccine misinformation has nothing to do whether that is truth or falsity.
It is a euphemism.
For any statement that departs from government proclamations and government orthodoxies, and that's all right.
Let me ask you this, because you had a kind of unique seat in the stands watching the Elon Musk take over of Twitter.
And also, your insight was interesting to me to watch because I don't know Musk and I don't know Jack Dorsey, but Jack Dorsey's been the one guy who has seemed, in his public statements, as parsimonious as they have been, but has seemed really uneasy with the censorship.
Yes.
So yeah, I mean, look, I don't really have insight into Dorsey personally, but I will.
One theory that my lawyers and I had as we were discussing a settlement with Twitter and sort of finding them surprisingly willing to budge on stuff, and again, I can't be more specific, but was that we were talking about deposing Dorsey.
You know, that was something that I thought we should do.
And that perhaps Dorsey had things he wanted to say that he would be prevented from saying as a result of, you know, his fiduciary duty to the company or an employment contract or whatever.
That under a compelled deposition, he would have actually been able to say.
I have no idea if that's true or not.
It was just a theory that I had.
Now, unfortunately, one thing that in any settlement we were always going to have to give up was depositions.
You can't compel somebody to testify under oath in a case that's settled.
So there will be no deposition.
Well, unless the new lawsuit goes forward and we're able to depose Twitter execs as part of that.
So we'll see about that.
So I do wonder about Dorsen.
In terms of Musk, and I've said this publicly, look, I think Elon believes in free speech.
I do.
I don't think it's a great thing for the world that we would be dependent on this billionaire for our free speech.
Especially because Tesla has a huge market in China.
You know what the Chinese think of free speech.
I would like to believe that If Elon owned Twitter and the Chinese government said to him, hey, you know, we don't like what you're doing with this, you know, make up your mind whether you're going to be allowed to sell cars in China or not, he would say, go get bent.
But, you know, he's not...
The ideal situation is not that we're dependent on Elon Musk.
It's that Twitter gets recognized, to my mind, as a public utility that essentially has to allow all the speech in the world.
Whether we get there or not, I don't know.
By the way...
It was this very, very strange outcry in the liberal media when Elon was going to take over Twitter saying we can't have a billionaire running our communications.
What about Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison and Bill Gates?
And Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post.
Yeah, who owns the Post, which was apoplectic about Elon.
Yeah, yeah.
No, the left has really not distinguished itself, and I know that this has been upsetting to you, and it's upsetting to me too, but you must feel it very personally.
It's baffling to me.
It's really baffling that You know, it's what my cousin said to me one time, we were talking about, you know, somebody who had gone off the rails and he said one day we were all eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and thinking we're on the same page and the next day you wake up and, you know, who are these people?
I grew up believing that free speech was sanctimonious, that we ought to be protecting the poor and vulnerable in our society, and these COVID countermeasures were really just a war on the poor.
They just obliterated.
They were, as I say in my new book, A Letter to Liberals, it was a pajama party for the wealthy.
They got to order DoorDash and Uber and And their kids were watching, you know, were doing remote learning and the whole family.
For me, it was wonderful having my kids home for a year.
If you were a Black in Compton or Harlem, it was a nightmare where the police come in and they cut the rims off the basketball court so you can't go out where you don't have the computer, you know, the laptops in your house.
And, you know, child abuse...
It's the only indicia of poverty that actually where the data improved.
All the other things, suicide, alcoholism, depression, mental illness, everything else.
And the only reason child abuse got better is because child abuse is reported by the schools.
That's right.
It was an artifact of data collection.
And what we really did is we took those kids who were abused and we locked them at home with their abusers and 55% of teenagers in this country, black and white, reported being abused during the pandemic of emotional abuse or physical abuse.
So this was just, you know, there was many more children died of color across the globe, 200,000 kids, many more than died from the pandemic.
They were being killed by the lockdowns, by the We're catastrophic for the poor.
What's funny, funny is the wrong word, but what's funny is, you know, people on the left, you see them just starting to talk about this.
I mean, mainly they don't want to talk about 2020 at all, which is very interesting.
But you see there's sort of this consensus, the schools must never close again.
That was a mistake.
And, you know, these few people who are left, you know, on Twitter and elsewhere who are sort of complaining that the country's moved on, even the left is largely mocking them at this point.
But that...
And I guess that's as close to a reckoning about lockdowns and school closures as we may get.
But that reckoning hasn't spread at all to the vaccines, right?
So people still...
And yet, I think in their heart of hearts, almost everybody knows the vaccines basically failed.
That at best, they worked for a few months last year, but they are totally ineffective against Omicron.
I mean, look at what the uptake is right now, and look at how few people are getting their young children vaccinated.
So there's this weird disconnect over what you're allowed to say about the vaccines and what I think a lot of people feel.
And it will be interesting to see over the next couple of years how that plays out.
Yeah, that will be really interesting.
How do you unravel an orthodoxy?
That's a real kind of just is a subject of great interest to me just because it's so much a part of human nature is to embrace orthodoxy, follow a strong leader, and then, you know, make yourself impervious to any information that challenges your worldview.
And I think a lot of that predisposition to embrace orthodoxy is hardwired into us.
From the 20,000 generations that human beings spent on the, you know, wandering the African savanna and these tiny groups following a strong male leader and with being the only key to survival.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's a scary world and everybody dies at the end.
And so you need to believe in something along the way, something and someone.
Yeah.
Let me ask you, I'm going to let you go.
This has been really powerful.
Thank you, Alex.
Let me ask you just about one other thing that I know you've been following, which is the Denmark decisions.
Now, I want to mention this about Denmark.
For many, many years, CDC's position is that Denmark has the best data reporting system and virtually all of the vaccine decisions are Are based in one way or another, and sometimes almost completely on Danish data.
And so now the Danes have said, holy cow, we should not be vaccinating children.
And so tell me what your take is on that.
Well, my take is they've been pretty...
It's very interesting.
The left, as you say, the CDC in Denmark, I say, you know, the left in Denmark, you can find stories in the New York Times talking about how the Danes had wonderful vaccine uptake in the first, you know, in the first wave last year and how they all wore masks and they had tremendous social cohesion and they have government trust.
And that's why everything works so wonderfully there.
Look, in reality...
The Danes are pretty healthy people.
And so, you know, as we know, sort of the number one, well, the number one, you know, mortality risk with COVID is age, but the number two is obesity and sort of general cardiac and cardiovascular unhealthiness.
So, you know, they did reasonably well, and then they did go get vaccinated, and they enjoyed what I call this happy vaccine valley for a few months last year.
But lo and behold, In December and January, December 2021 and January 2022, as Omicron came to town, they had a huge wave.
And they had a lot of deaths, and they've had another wave since then.
And I think that they are well aware that the vaccines don't work very well against Omicron.
And they know that any risk for kids, even if it's a small risk of myocarditis or other potential long-term problems, is just completely unacceptable.
And so that's basically what they've said.
You are not going to be allowed to be vaccinated as a child or anybody under 18 unless you have some sort of severe condition that would put you at high risk from COVID and you have a consultation with a pediatrician.
That's where the United States should be, by the way.
If we're not going to completely pull these vaccines from the market, basically for any...
I would say...
I mean, I would extend it far past 18.
I'd extend it to 50 or so, probably.
Anybody who's not morbidly obese or at really high risk from COVID for some reason, who's under 50, these vaccines should be black boxed for, and basically nobody should be allowed to get them at this point.
Look, you could go even further and say they should just be pulled entirely, but I'm trying to reach some kind of reasonable suggestion.
And are we going to get there?
Or are we at least going to follow...
Because I think other European countries will follow the Danes.
Are we at least going to follow the Danes and hopefully other European countries on this?
I hope so.
But you're right.
They're pretty data-driven.
They're smart.
They have a comprehensive national health insurance system, so they know what's happening in the country.
The Danes have good data on schizophrenia and cannabis, by the way, which is, as you know, another pet issue of mine.
So...
And these countries that are sort of 5 to 10 million people that are well run, it's sort of like a handful of people can be in charge of collecting this data.
And so it works pretty well.
And it's still a big enough data set that you can draw meaningful conclusions from it.
Well, we used to have a good data system in our country.
Our data's terrible!
It's terrible now!
Everything else in the U.S. healthcare system.
I would argue it was deliberately sabotaged, and that's not theoretical or conspiracy theory I can show you.
But, you know, one of the interesting things, the last thing I'll just mention to you, and I don't know whether you have any comment on it or not, but it came out this week that Pfizer...
As you know, Pfizer is the only company that has an approved vaccine, an FDA approved vaccine.
But the FDA approved vaccine, which is the Cominardi vaccine, is not available in the United States of America.
The Comanardi vaccine is identical to BioNTech vaccine, which is available, but that one is still under emergency use authorization.
Yes.
It should be illegal because you can't get an EUA when there is an available approved one.
Yep.
They wanted something approved so that they could tell everybody, oh, there's an approved vaccine, you got to get it.
Yep.
Even though it's not available here.
But it was kind of a shell game.
Yep.
It was pretty clearly related to the mandate push last summer, but yes.
It justified the mandate push because everybody said, oh, it's approved now, and now we can mandate it.
But what they didn't tell you is the approved one's not available, and they will never be available.
And we said, ISIS at the outset, they will never let an approved vaccine be available in this country, because the second they make it available, we can start suing them.
Under the VICA, the new vaccine would go through the VICA system.
And under VICA, you have to go to the vaccine court first, but you can't sue them for product liability.
You can sue them for fraud.
And that's what we're doing with CardiCell cases.
And they committed fraud.
We know the fraud they committed with the Daguerreys, who are all of these people who got badly injured and were hidden.
And that is fraud.
And if I get in front of a jury with Matty Daguerreys' story and tell people who got those kind of neurological injuries, tell the jury...
About what Pfizer did, Pfizer is going to be bankrupt overnight.
So it cannot allow a single EUA vaccine or a single approved vaccine in this country.
And it told, we now know that they told FDA that they were never going to get an approved vaccine available in this country.
And it's because they don't want to get sued.
They can't afford it.
I mean, so this is an area that I'm not, you know, I don't claim to be anything close to an expert on.
I mean, it's clear to me that they prefer the current situation where they are sort of completely immune from any liability at all.
It's also been very clear to me that they don't want to sell the approved vaccine in the U.S. I'm not trying to disagree with you.
I'm just trying to tell you I don't really have much to add to the story that you're telling me because this is something I'm not an expert in, but it sounds plausible.
Let me just finish with a short plug for my substack, which is Unreported Truths, where I did write about the Denmark stuff just a few days ago, and actually today I wrote about something that you and the Defender wrote about last year, which is the case of a woman who Who developed a CJD, which is a terrible brain disease, literally days after her second Pfizer dose.
Now, there's no proof there was a connection.
I think her daughter believes there's a connection, but she's now unfortunately died.
But what was interesting to me, because I'm not going to write about something that you wrote about nine months ago just for the sake of it.
What's interesting to me, or it's actually even further ago than that, Is that the doctor, one of the doctors who treated her, several of the doctors who treated her, wrote up a case report on this and put it in a poster that HCA, which is a giant healthcare, a giant hospital company, the biggest for-profit hospital company in the United States, if not the world, put up on its website.
They actually put up a case report of this woman who'd gotten CJD and died after getting an MRA COVID vaccine, which surprised me that they put it up.
But lo and behold, People started paying attention to this thing, this case report, and HCA pulled it.
So that is actually my newest substack.
It is about this case report of this woman being pulled.
And to me, so somebody said to me, well, do you believe that the mRNA vaccine caused this?
And I'll tell you the truth.
I don't know.
I suspect it probably didn't, okay?
Because CJD is very, very...
Rare, thank God.
But it does happen.
And if you just look at sort of the number of people we vaccinated, there are going to be some number of people who develop this in the weeks or months after being vaccinated just by chance.
What I do care about is that this company, after allowing its physicians to write about this, suddenly decided it was too hot to handle.
And so when I called HCA or I emailed HCA and said, hey guys, what happened here?
Well, they've now claimed they're going to put it back online.
So let's hope they do.
So that's a small victory for free speech over censorship.
Okay, so...
I want you to tell our audience how to find you on your Substack.
Alex's Substack is one of the ones that I follow religiously.
We don't always agree with each other.
We don't always agree, but we don't have to, right?
So it's alexberenson.substack.com.
Also, if you search for unreported truth Substack, it should come up.
But sometimes the search engines do funny things, but you can always get to it at alexberenson.substack.com.
And as I tell people, you can pay for it or you can subscribe for free.
Basically, the product is much the same.
Most people do subscribe for free, which is okay by me.
I want the largest audience possible.
But enough people have decided to sort of support me and support the movement that I know I can support my family, which is very nice considering I don't think I'm going to be working again at the New York Times anytime soon.
Yeah, so, and I think it's important for our movement, for people who care about democracy, about public health, and about just integrity and good government to support the people who are taking a stand on that and getting punished for it.
You've lost a lot of income, you've lost a lot of career prospects, and I would encourage all of our audience to subscribe to the extent you can also pay for Alex's subset.
Thank you, Alex and Aaron.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Let's talk again soon.
Yes.
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