ExpressVPN: Right now you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or go to https://ExpressVPN.com/PIERS and get four extra months for free. US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Junior was never going to be a conventional leader, having run independently for President as a vaccine skeptic and a talisman of the ascendant alternative health movement, which sees big pharma as corrupt and processed foods as poisonous. And last week RFK announced that he is cutting half a billion dollars in funding for MRNA vaccine research, the technology behind the Covid vaccine. So, six months into the tenure of the most controversial health secretary in US history, Piers Morgan is joined by former evolutionary biology professor Brett Weinstein, physician scientist and former assistant secretary for health Brett Giroir and Professor Dave Explains host Dave Farina to debate whether RFK is Making America Healthy Again - or quite the opposite. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS OneSkin: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PIERS at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Fighting Inside the Beast00:04:16
He is in a very lonely position, being inside the belly of the beast fighting this battle.
And I don't think there's anyone better positioned to address these things than Bobby Kennedy.
The mRNA platform, though it is brilliant in its conception, is fatally flawed.
The COVID mRNA vaccine was highly effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
We know it does not prevent acquisition of the illness.
You know, there is no such thing as a free lunch with a vaccine.
I mean, where to begin?
Brett just basically peddles conspiracies to generate a cult following online.
I'm a little alarmed that both of them had anything positive to say about RFK.
I don't think that there is really anything positive that you can say about him.
He's been a complete train wreck.
The U.S. Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was never going to be a conventional leader.
He ran as an independent candidate for president as a vaccine skeptic and a tanners man of the ascendant alternative health movement, which seems big, which sees big pharma as corrupt and processed foods as poisonous.
After softening his position in Senate hearings, RFK announced last week that he's cutting half a billion dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine research.
That was, of course, the technology behind the COVID vaccine.
Well, President Trump is unsure.
You were the driving force behind Operation Warp Speed, these mRNA vaccines that are the gold standard.
Now your health secretary is pulling back all the funding for research.
He's saying that the risks outweigh the benefits, which puts him at odds with the entire medical community and with you.
What is going on?
Research on what?
Into mRNA vaccines.
We're going to look at that.
We're talking about it and they're doing a very good job.
And, you know, that is a pass with Operation Warp Speed was, whether you're Republican or Democrat, considered one of the most incredible things ever done in this country.
Well, others who served in Trump's first administration are less ambiguous.
Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams said this.
And this idea, again, helps us develop vaccines and new treatments for everything from cancer, melanoma, which my wife has, to HIV, to better flu vaccines and Zika.
These are advances that are not going to happen now.
People are going to die because we're cutting short funding.
It's also fair to say that RFK Jr. has been criticized by some of his own supporters for so far not going far enough.
The ban on pharmaceutical advertising on cable television has not materialized and won't be happening anytime soon.
Many of his high-profile announcements have been posing at ice cream parlors and fast food chains to celebrate them removing colored food dyes or frying their burgers in beef tallow.
Not exactly a revolution, albeit I agree with it.
So six months into the tenure of the most controversial health secretary in modern U.S. history, we're debating whether RFK is making America healthy again or perhaps the opposite.
To debate this, I'm joined by Brett Weinstein, a professor of evolutionary biology and host of the Dark Horse podcast, and by Brett Jira, who's the physician, scientist, and former Assistant Secretary for Health in the first Trump administration.
Well, welcome to both of you.
Brett Weinstein, are you pleased or disappointed with what RFK has done so far?
I would say I am pleased and disappointed, but not with Secretary Kennedy.
I understand that he is facing a labyrinth that those of us on the outside do not understand.
And I know him personally.
I know he's moving as fast as he feels that he can in the direction that he feels he must take us.
It is frustrating on the outside to watch how slowly this is moving, but he's clearly making moves in the right direction.
What's interesting to me is he's clarified a few things that have grown in mythology about him.
He said he's not against all vaccines, which I think was a thing that began to gather momentum when his name was being mentioned for this job.
Why mRNA Isn't Total Solution00:08:38
So he's not an anti-vaccine guy, but he is very skeptical about certain vaccines, notably the mRNA vaccines used to combat COVID.
Now, I have to say that independently, I've had a very, very top experienced oncologist in the UK, in London, one of the best in the country, who's expressed exactly the same concerns to me for a long period of time about the mRNA vaccine.
So they weren't all mRNA, but the ones that were, he's been very concerned about that.
What do you feel about that particular issue?
Unfortunately, the mRNA platform, though it is brilliant in its conception, is fatally flawed.
And although there are arguably applications where it might be useful, something like the treatment of a deadly cancer, it is not appropriate to vaccinate against a relatively mundane disease like COVID.
The reason that it isn't is that the platform itself carries hazards at its core that at the moment we have no technological fix for.
So the myocarditis and pericarditis that showed up as a result of COVID vaccinations are inherent to the platform, not to the messenger RNA that was delivered inside these shots.
It would, in my opinion, be almost certain to show up irrespective of what foreign protein was encoded by the vaccine in question.
And it would be no service to the public if we were to allow vaccines that have this flaw to be deployed only to discover years later that people had been injured and died because of them.
In simple layman's terms, is the issue with mRNA that in an effort to provide immunity against COVID-19, it damages and reduces your general immunity in many people?
No, I would say it's actually much worse than that.
That's true.
But the problem is that the design of this platform is to induce your own cells to make a foreign protein which gets displayed on the surface of those cells.
That's as intended.
But because there's no targeting mechanism to lead it to happen only in certain tissues, it can happen haphazardly around the body, including in places like your heart.
And what that triggers is your own immune system to see those foreign proteins and conclude the only thing they can, which is that those cells have been virally infected.
And the right response, the response, the natural response of the body is to take virally infected cells and destroy them.
So the idea that we get myocarditis from the COVID shots is really standing in for a much starker reality, which is that inflammation, myocarditis, is the symptom of damage to the heart done by our own immune systems in response to the cells in the heart producing a foreign protein and triggering our immune system to attack them.
Okay, Brett Gerard, thank you for your patience on this.
What is your response?
First of all, the same question to you.
Do you think the RFK Jr. is so far doing a good job or are you concerned about the job he's doing?
I have to agree with my debate partner here is that I'm both pleased and somewhat disappointed.
I think he's done a spectacular job in highlighting some of the underlying fundamental health issues of Americans and many people in higher income countries, and that is poor nutrition, poor physical fitness.
I think everybody can understand that the obesity crisis and poor nutrition not only is important for diabetes and overweight, but it's important for things like even dementia and neurodegeneration.
So he's done a great job with that.
I think he's been excellent on nobody wants petroleum food dies.
I mean, we need to really tie that up.
So I think these are very positive.
I also think his focus on assuring that there are no conflicts of interest at major physicians has been very good.
And he's uniquely charismatic and can bring this message to the American people.
I am disappointed, however, in his overall tenor and approach to vaccination and his lack of, I would say, enthusiastic support early on for things like measles vaccination when there's an outbreak.
And I do not agree with his position recently to cancel the mRNA contracts for research.
I think we do have a disagreement here.
I think we now have a billion people worth of evidence that shows that the mRNA vaccine for COVID in a pre-immune population, I'm not talking about a 20-year-old young man now who's had COVID twice, because I think we can all agree that boosting those kind of individuals is higher risk than it is benefit.
But in a pre-immune population or people who are elderly or debilitated, that the COVID mRNA vaccine was highly effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
We know it does not prevent acquisition of the illness.
I do not think it's a flawed platform.
We do see myocarditis independent of the platform.
The AstraZeneca vaccine, the adenovirus-based vaccine had similar myocarditis.
And I believe, and I think the evidence would point to the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch with a vaccine.
And when you're going to immunize with a spike protein or components of COVID, that this is not a platform-specific side effect, but something you get across platforms as you can get it with a native disease.
I do agree that mRNA is not the total solution.
It has certain characteristics.
And the characteristic that I'm most interested in in the fact that it is a rapid response platform.
The reason why it was the first out of the shoot for COVID is because a candidate vaccine can be developed in a short period of time, in a matter of weeks, and the manufacturing is quite reliable.
In other words, in contrast to typical flu vaccines that require hundreds of millions of fertilized chicken eggs that you have to inoculate with the actual virus and then purify the virus out of that, mRNA is much more standard in its chemical manufacturing.
So it is a rapid response platform.
So if we have an unknown new pandemic, or if we have a highly mutated avian influenza strain, or God forbid, we had a bioweapons attack with a strange chimeric kind of virus, the mRNA platform is really right now our best fast response platform.
And we need to keep that in our back pocket.
I'm not an mRNA for everything, but that is his unique characteristic and why we need to support it.
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Navigating Pandemic Risks and Chances00:03:49
You know, I met one of the people behind the AstraZeneca vaccine, one of the Oxford guys, and he said to me that we really dodged a bullet.
He said, because if COVID had had the death rate, particularly with young people, of something like the Black Death, then it would have been an exponentially much more serious thing.
And that maybe the lessons we learned from the COVID pandemic will be extremely useful in dealing with the next thing that comes.
And his prediction was that we were, and I'll come to you here, Brett Weinstein, that it is highly likely that we're going to have to deal with another pandemic of some sort, and it could be a lot more serious next time.
But the lessons we learned with this actually could be very beneficial.
Would you agree with that?
No.
I think the chances that we will deal with another pandemic are actually unfortunately tightly correlated with our cryptic bioweapons research disguised in the U.S. as dual-use research.
Were we to put dual-use research to bed, the chances of a serious pandemic that requires an intervention like a rapidly deployed mRNA vaccine is actually surprisingly low.
And the stories that we use to justify such a response do not turn out to endure scrutiny.
So, for example, the 1918 flu pandemic would not happen again today for two different reasons.
One, many of the people who died were actually victims of a bacterial pneumonia that we can now treat with antibiotics.
And two, aspirin was at the time a new wonder drug.
And the dosages that were given to people who contracted the flu are doses that are now understood to be fatal.
So if we rerun the tape of history and we say, how often do diseases leap from nature that require a radical intervention?
The answer is it's been a very long time since it's happened and the likelihood of it happening again in an era where we are circulating globally and therefore we all have natural immunity to the diseases that we tend to encounter at some level or another.
The chances that we encounter something that requires us to put the world on pause and deploy a vaccine at lightning pace are low.
I would also point out that, yes, in one sense, the mRNA platform solves a question, a pharmacological question, in that it can be deployed very rapidly.
On the other hand, it carries a defect in its heart even beyond the tendency to trigger the immune system to attack your own tissues.
And that is that the very nature of the platform requires the presentation of a very narrow antigenic set, which means that the viruses that we are confronting have a relatively easy problem to solve evolutionarily.
Unlike natural immunity, where you become immune to an entire virus, your immunity to a single antigen is something that evolution can easily sidestep.
So what we tend to do with a narrowly targeted platform like mRNA is drive the evolution of the virus, which may even prolong a pandemic.
Brett Jira, you mentioned there the measles outbreak, which of course was in Texas and then spread to 40 other states.
Your belief is that not enough children, I think, were getting their vaccines.
How tricky is that for someone like RFK Jr. to navigate?
Measles Victims and Vaccine Beliefs00:02:28
And how did he navigate it in your estimation?
Well, it's a fact that the outbreak was primarily among people who are not immunized.
I mean, measles is a highly contagious disease, one of the most contagious diseases, sort of walk in the room and you can catch it if you're not immune.
And there were, you know, likely legitimate reasons, you know, religious-based reasons that many of the people were not immunized.
In my following of that, though, and I think we all understood it, it took quite a while for the secretary to advocate.
And even then, he advocated somewhat weakly for the measles vaccine and instead went on to tangential issues like vitamin A or other things to combat measles, which are in no way equivalent to the efficacy of a vaccine.
So I think he wound up probably being in a reasonable spot after several weeks of sort of being wishy-washy on the issue.
And again, I'm a pediatric ICU physician.
I have treated measles.
I've buried children with measles.
And vitamin A, you know, in the middle of Africa, where there's vitamin A deficiency.
Yes, there's an epidemiological association, but to somehow equate those types of treatment with the efficacy of the vaccine is just not true.
So he certainly, I think he wound up in a reasonable place with this, but it took a while to get there.
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Adjuvant Safety and Mortality Costs00:15:04
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Yeah, I mean, Brett Weinstein is an interesting test case, I felt, for RFK Jr. because his initial reaction was not to promote the vaccine, certainly publicly.
Then he about faced when some children died.
And I assume he was fearful of this getting out of control.
And at that point, he did advocate for the vaccine.
What did you make of that of that journey he went on?
Well, again, I think he's in an impossible position.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of vaccine technology, both its benefits and its hazards.
And I must say, although I am more vaccinated than almost anybody you know, as a tropical biologist, I've been vaccinated against a great many diseases, including things like rabies.
My children are fully vaccinated.
And in 2020, my wife and I published a book in which we argued that vaccines were one of the three greatest medical triumphs that modern medicine has to champion.
I have become aware that we have several vaccine platforms, none of which are especially safe.
Each has its own defects.
And therefore, the correct position should be one of great caution.
When do we have a disease that is sufficiently serious and a vaccine that is sufficiently safe that the cost-benefit analysis argues in favor of it?
Now, it is true that measles is dangerous in a modern context, but what Secretary Kennedy is highlighting is that a lot of that has to do with the vulnerability of the population.
The ill health of the population renders it vulnerable and may force us into using a vaccine in order to limit the harms.
But that comes at a massive cost.
And long term, the right answer is to fix the health of the population so that diseases like measles are again rendered controllable by other means.
I just think that's a naive view.
It's a really naive view.
You're not going to create populations that are healthy enough that they will not catch measles when they're young children.
You're not going to create a population that's healthy enough that Ebola is not a fatal disease.
I certainly agree that one of the principal causes of mortality in COVID and probably why the U.S. has such a horrible mortality rate is because the underlying health of our country, right?
The healthier people are going to have a much better outcome, but you're not going to get to a point where something like measles that affects and kills children, not going to kill hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S.
I mean, it kills over 100,000 children a year around the world.
If we did not have vaccination in the United States, maybe that's 200 or 300 or 400, but that's way too many children to die of a disease that is completely preventable, almost 100% by a vaccine.
So I agree with the premise.
I agree with the premise.
The healthier we are, the more we are resistant to disease.
But to think that it's going to make us immune from these really severe diseases like measles, it's not going to happen.
So I want to respond to that.
It seems to me that you are confusing the issue of how contagious measles is with how dangerous it is.
And I agree, you're not going to prevent people from catching measles simply by having them in excellent health.
The question is what happens to them after they catch measles?
And your point about the number of kids who would die of measles, I think we have to reevaluate in light of the poor health of our children.
But even if the number was 200 a year in the U.S., let's say, you have to compare that with the harm done by the vaccines in other regards.
For example, the production of allergies, how many kids die of asthma that is the result of an allergy that is triggered by an adjuvant in a vaccine.
And let us just say.
I disagree with that set of facts because I absolutely disagree that the long-term effects of something like a measles vaccine, this has been well studied, trying to make a link between an adjuvant and a vaccine and long-term asthma is just not there.
And I think we fundamentally are going to disagree with that.
And I am not confusing contagion with seriousness.
I am a pediatric ICU physician.
I have treated measles.
I have seen measles deaths.
I've had people on ECMO for measles.
It is a serious disease, even in a healthy population.
Now, again, people who say we're going to have 100,000 deaths in the United States, they're completely overblowing it, right?
The health of our population is not going to equate us to the rest of the world where measles primarily deals with children who are undernourished, poor nutritional status, but we're still going to have three-digit kind of deaths in the United States.
And that's unacceptable for a preventable disease like measles.
And I think even RFK would agree and has agreed that measles is one of the vaccines that he is supportive of, as opposed to others where he may not be.
Well, I think his general position.
Well, I think that's clear because he came that I share, which is any vaccine that is net beneficial in a properly controlled study is a valid one.
And I would agree also if measles turns out to reduce all-cause mortality, if the measles vaccine turns out to reduce all-cause mortality, then I think there's a very strong argument in favor of it.
But the problem is that when one digs into the literature on the safety of these things, one does not find the properly controlled studies that would give you an idea of how many people we lose as a result of the vaccines as compared to how many people we lose as a result of the disease.
Okay, let's switch gears slightly.
Brett Gira, I want to talk about something we probably all agree with in the Maha movement, which RFK is pushing.
And that's his desire to remove certain chemicals, dyes, and additives from the food supply chain and to get America off its over-reliance on ultra-processed food.
You know, I always cite the example that I've got a place here in LA.
I come here a lot.
I love it.
I love America.
I love Americans.
But in England, if you buy a loaf of bread from a supermarket, within about seven days, it starts to mold.
Clearly, you can see it molding.
In America, you can have the same loaf of bread or type of bread, and a month after you open it, it's still absolutely fine.
That's not normal, and that's not healthy.
And if you look at America's general health, obesity rates and so on and so on, I'm 100% behind RFK in trying to get America to wean itself off so much ultra-processed food and these dyes, which are used everywhere.
What is your view?
Well, I'm in strong agreement with that.
I think the data on ultra-processed foods is pretty clear in that we don't know the exact factor, but if you take the same calorie, the same protein, the same carbohydrate, the same fat, and you put people on a diet where it's ultra-processed versus not, they gain weight and lose health on the ultra-processed foods.
And they either maintain their weight or lose weight on the natural whole foods.
So this is clearly true.
And I think this could be one of his biggest triumphs is to wean America off of ultra-processed foods, starting in schools where it's really a major issue.
The dyes, look, I think there's not sort of direct correlations between many of these and terrible outcomes in health.
But let's just face it, if you don't need to have a petroleum-based dye in your foods, why should we do that, right?
We should have natural products.
But clearly, this movement, and it's not going to turn around in a year or two.
But as the Assistant Secretary for Health, I was the head public health person in Trump one administration.
And clearly, nutrition, obesity, and I always want to throw in something that he does personally, but maybe does not emphasize as much publicly, is physical activity is the second part of that.
It's proper nutrition.
And it doesn't mean you have to be a gym rat for three hours a day.
It's walking.
It's gardening.
It's doing something that provides you movement.
And when you combine those two, you lower all your cardiovascular risks.
You improve your mood.
You decrease depression.
You reduce neurodegeneration.
So all good things will come from that.
And I think we, I hope, I hope on the other side of the debate, we can agree on this point, because I do think it's a critical point that the Secretary is emphasizing and championing.
Yeah, and Eric Weinstein, I mean, he is RFK, a fine figure of a fit man for, what is he, 70 now?
I mean, he looks great.
He obviously practices by example, but I just think you're missed off.
It's a no-brainer, isn't it?
I mean, are you completely behind him?
Oh, this is, I'm not a huge fan of the term no-brainer, but this is well beyond that.
So my training is as an evolutionary biologist, and I think it is fair to say that the farther we are from the environment for which we are adapted, the more unhealthy we're going to be.
And you can just look at the issue you point to with respect to bread rotting on the shelves.
We've solved a supply chain problem at the expense of our health, and reversing it would no doubt improve health substantially.
But I would also say that same logic applies across the board, that really, in one sense, the processed food question isn't different than the vaccine question.
What we have, you know, it is not part of your natural environment to have aluminum injected into your muscles.
And what is the consequence for your health?
It's negative.
What does the science say?
Well, mostly the science wasn't done.
So we are left with an absence of evidence, which is not evidence of absence for the harms done by this.
I would say in general, being healthy is a matter of restoring a natural environment to the extent we are capable of doing it.
And I'm all for it in any realm where we are pushing in that direction.
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Brett, here's the finally this issue of...
Sorry.
Go on.
Please respond.
I think the analogy breaks down when it comes to vaccines.
And I certainly agree that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity in almost every regard, if you survive the original disease, right?
And I argued very strongly that people who had COVID should not be forced to get a vaccine.
In fact, the vaccine was less effective than natural immunity once you survived.
But we do have this issue, right, that in order to become naturally immune, potentially large swaths of the population will wind up in the hospital or, you know, in the morgue.
So I just wanted to put that.
I think it's a little bit of a different situation than ultra-processed foods versus natural foods.
Again, conceding for certain that if you have natural immunity, that is the gold standard immunity, right?
That's going to be much better than any vaccine immunity.
It's going to be much better than adjuvant immunity.
It's just the cost and the price that you're willing to get there on.
Well, it seems to me that we are in a position to reach useful.
We're in a position to, I'm Brett, by the way.
We're in a position to reach useful agreement here.
We know how to study the question.
You know, if I'm wrong and injecting aluminum into your muscle is not dangerous, that's a scientifically easy thing to establish.
And the fact that we haven't done the work properly is conspicuous.
But in the absence of proper evidence as to what happens when you do inject aluminum, you have to ask the question about whether or not the net impact of a vaccine based on an aluminum adjuvant is beneficial.
And you can't look just narrowly at the disease.
You have to ask the question for the public who doesn't know what an adjuvant is.
An adjuvant is an additive that is put into a vaccine that causes your immune system to become alarmed so that it reacts to the antigen that has been injected with it.
Now, that works fine on paper, but the problem is the aluminum adjuvant is not specific to the antigen in any way.
Your immune system knows that it's on high alert, but it doesn't know what it's alert to.
And so is this connected to all of the proliferating allergies that we see in younger people today?
Is this causing people to have asthma, a disease that is very serious and from which many die?
Junk Food Rhetoric vs Reality00:16:11
We don't know the answers to those questions because they haven't been properly studied.
But my expectation as an evolutionary biologist is that injecting aluminum into the body is a radical intervention.
And even if it was beneficial with respect to the disease to which you are being immunized, the net impact could very well be negative.
Brett Weinstein, you know RFK, as I said earlier, he made a big pledge that he would ban big pharma from advertising on television.
$5 billion is spent every year pushing pharmaceuticals on American television.
Only one other country in the world, New Zealand, allows it.
And it's very tightly regulated.
But this ban, he now says, won't happen.
How frustrating has he found it to reach that wall when he comes to such a big pledge?
He is in a very lonely position being inside the belly of the beast fighting this battle and running up against roadblocks that were entirely theoretical until he got there.
Now, I don't think there's anyone better positioned to address these things than Bobby Kennedy.
His career as a lawyer has put him in close contact with industry and its ability to capture regulatory apparatus.
But he is dealing with something that is profoundly powerful.
And in fact, what many don't realize is that the advertisements on American television are not primarily about convincing people of something.
They're primarily about buying influence over those entities so that they cannot report accurately on pharmaceutical hazards.
So we are, in a sense, flying blind because somebody has engineered blinders for us.
Yeah.
Eric, Gerard, in conclusion to this, it's early days, but are you optimistic that if he remains in this post for the rest of the Trump term, the RFK can have a transformative effect on American health?
Will he make America healthy again?
If that's directed at me, I am very hopeful about that because as I said, I haven't gone exhaustively through all his positions, but I am very supportive of the great majority of them.
And I think they're hitting at the core of America's health problem.
I also think, having worked directly with President Trump many, many, many days before the pandemic and during the pandemic, that he will empower people to do the right thing.
And if Secretary Kennedy speaks directly to the president and there is a need to ban such advertisements, the president's going to support him because the president is fearless if he's convinced that something is right to be done.
My main concern with, and I think Secretary Kennedy is uniquely charismatic and can speak to the American people in a way that perhaps I've not seen anyone in a cabinet position do.
My concern is on his and his vaccine sort of policy instances that I think will have adverse effects on overall vaccination.
It will cause poor health related to those diseases.
And again, with mRNA, I'm concerned about the rapid response in the national security issues.
You know, pandemics may not be too likely.
And I agree with the other Brett here that maybe it's overstated about the risk, but we just did have one, right?
And it killed millions of people around the world.
And so we do need to be prepared for that.
We do need to be prepared for offensive bioweapons.
Again, before I went to the light side, I was on the dark side.
I ran the science office at DARPA.
I'm very familiar with foreign bioweapons programs and the bioweapons threat.
But overall, I am positive about Secretary Kennedy.
I think he's on target on most of the most important health issues.
I'd like to convince him to change his position and move on vaccines.
And then he would be, I think, a historically successful and impactful secretary.
Well, thank you to both my Bretts.
There were no Ericss, just to be clear.
And there were definitely no no-brainers.
That was a very brainy debate.
And I appreciate you both joining me.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, listening to my previous two guests and here to give his verdict on whether RFK is making America healthy again is Dave Farina, the host of Professor Dave Explains.
Well, Dave, welcome to Uncensored.
Thanks for having me.
Your response to what you were just listening to.
I mean, where to begin?
I mean, I'm familiar with Brett Weinstein.
I'm not familiar with his opponent, but I know, you know, I've dealt with him and his brother.
They're a peas in a pod.
Yeah, Brett just basically peddles conspiracies to generate a cult following online.
A lot of what he said was absolutely ridiculous.
He went on a tirade about, you know, aluminum-based adjuvants not being tested.
Absolutely not.
They've been tested rigorously.
They're shown to be safe.
The levels of aluminum are comparable to what are ingested through breast milk by children, stuff like that.
It's just basically his whole shtick is just kind of like, I'm just asking questions and look at all these things.
And there's just absolutely no basis for it.
I'm a little alarmed that both of them had anything positive to say about RFK.
I don't think that there is really anything positive that you can say about him.
He's been a complete train wreck, antithetical to the idea of public health in every way, shape, and form.
So I'm sure that we're going to get into the specifics of how that is the case.
Well, I've got to say, I've interviewed him a number of times, RFK Jr.
I went into it thinking that everything I read would mean I would have a crackpot in front of me espousing crackpot ideas.
Actually, I didn't get that feeling from him.
And I've watched very carefully the way that he has performed so far.
The measles crisis was interesting because he took a bit of time, but then came down and publicly endorsed the vaccination, which I think surprised people.
I completely agree with him that America needs to wean itself off over-processed food.
I think he's right to try and get Americans fitter.
America has shocking health rates, really, comparative to, say, Asian countries.
The obesity rates are alarming.
So there are lots of things where I find myself nodding to him.
What is it about him that concerns you so much?
Because obviously you don't agree with what I just said, but what concerns you so much?
So you just asked three separate questions, so I'll answer each of them.
Number one, he absolutely is a crackpot.
He has pushed miasma theory, terrain theory, pushed ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine.
He promotes raw milk.
He continues to push lies about vaccines causing autism, just all manner of blatant pseudoscience.
And he's leveraging his position to have this essentially is like a repeat of Stalin backing Lysenko, where you have this sort of state-sanctioned pseudoscience trying to usurp actual science.
And that's what we're seeing with all of the layoffs, discarding the entire vaccine safety panel.
You have even top experts like Peter Marx saying, and I quote, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
So he's just surrounding himself with yes men that will promote pseudoscience.
He's even threatening to ban federal scientists from publishing research in respected journals, demanding they publish in the state-sanctioned alternative.
So this is all driving scientific talent out of the country, preventing people from emigrating here to be part of the scientific community.
It's very disastrous, the pseudoscience.
But then speaking to what you said about vaccines and ultra-processed foods, his vaccine rhetoric is directly responsible for deaths.
And you guys have been focusing on the Texas outbreak, but let's not forget the Samoa outbreak, where he is absolutely 100% directly responsible for 83 deaths over there.
He is the one who went over there, met with anti-vaccine advocates, and pushed this false narrative about the outbreak being due to a vaccine rather than actual measles.
83 deaths on his head, no remorse.
Over here in Texas, right?
Obviously, he, you know, when he gets cornered, he's going to backtrack and say, oh, no, no, no, by the way, you know, MMR is fine.
Everybody should get it.
But he's the one pushing all these long debunked conspiracies about the autism thing, which goes all the way back to Andrew Wakefield, the massive fraud from your neck of the woods.
And then to go to ultra-processed foods.
Look, this is the one thing where it's like, yeah, junk food is bad for you.
Are we going to give this guy a medal for saying that junk food is bad for you?
Everybody knows that, right?
I mean, it's like, what is like, it also speaks to the hypocrisy of the right as well, though, because, you know, not like this huge fan of Michelle Obama or anything, but she had an initiative to make school lunches more healthy.
And Republicans jumped on her.
Federal overreach, big government, all this stuff.
And now RFK comes around and says, oh, yeah, by the way, junk food is bad.
And everyone's clapping and cheering like he's some kind of messiah.
What is the plan here?
Ban fast food, ban soda, ban ice cream.
I don't think that his orange boss would be too pleased if McDonald's is outlawed.
So what's the end goal here?
This is just rhetoric to try to make it seem like he's on the side of the public when he just absolutely isn't.
He pretends to be this bulwark fighting against big pharma and everybody in the private industry.
But as soon as he gets the reins, as soon as he gets the keys to the castle, what does he do?
He guts all of the federal institutions that are meant to protect the public against the private sector.
Thousands of layoffs at the FDA, at the CDC, all right, the entire vaccine panel.
What's happened to the vaccine panel?
He replaced them with Robert Malone, all these other frauds.
Then if these vaccines are no longer recommended, then low-income families, low-income children don't have access to them for free anymore.
So all of this rhetoric about not wanting to take vaccines away from people, it's actually specifically what he's doing.
So all of it is a facade, all of it.
When you take a specific, for example, like mRNA vaccines, you know, I've heard exactly the same rhetoric that R.F. Kennedy Jr. says about this from a top UK oncologist.
I mean, literally one of the best in the country.
He absolutely concurs that there are genuine issues about the mRNA vaccine.
And I would just use that as an example where COVID in many ways did reveal that science is an ever-evolving thing, that sometimes people take implacable positions that turn out to be completely untrue.
I remember the scientists collectively assuring us that if you took the vaccine, then you could not transmit the virus.
And then it turned out that was nonsense.
Early on, they said, you know, you shouldn't use masks.
Then they became mandatory and so on.
And then later, it looks like masks weren't that helpful anyway, et cetera.
So science evolves and it moves.
And I guess my overview would be: if the experts have been so expert in America in terms of health in the last 50 years, why is America so unhealthy?
Okay, again, that's like three different questions.
First of all, what you're attributing to the scientific community is actually just a couple of things that Biden said offhand, right, in terms of not, you won't get infected, things like that.
That's not what doctors said.
So, okay, leaving the why Americans are so unhealthy thing for later.
Just we should talk about MRNA vaccines because you just had Brett Weinstein on and he is one of the main purveyors of all these lies and conspiracies about, you know, fabricating all of these millions of deaths and all these other things.
His opponent was a little more reasonable in terms of discussing the COVID vaccines.
So in terms of like, we absolutely cannot deny the efficacy and the success in saving millions of lives for these COVID vaccines, especially at this lightning speed in which they were produced, where other therapies did fail.
So to talk as though that's not true is ridiculous.
But then looking at this 500 million cut for future, you had a clip of someone else talking about all of these other alternate therapies that we're not going to get anymore because this was cut.
I mean, this is absolutely indefensible, right?
There is a kernel of truth to some of the rhetoric about the mRNA vaccines in terms of the, it was the uridine, pseudouridine, the N-methyl pseudouridine swap, which is responsible for the spike protein lingering longer than we expected.
It's sometimes found six months later in muscle tissue and things like that.
So that was a bit unexpected.
But how do you, and by the way, all of the side effects have been completely overblown by frauds like Brett Weinstein, completely fabricated all of these, you know, the myocarditis and all this stuff, just complete false rhetoric, right?
So it's not that there's nothing there, right?
We can talk about why is this spike protein hanging around longer than we expected to.
But how do you answer that question?
You do more research, right?
You study it.
You don't gut the FDA and CDC.
You don't have billions of dollars of budget cuts.
You don't push brilliant scientists out of the country and prevent other brilliant foreign scientists from coming into the country due to RFK's policies and Trump's attitude towards immigrants.
It's just a complete mess.
I mean, it's a deterioration of the American scientific community right before our eyes.
And RFK and Trump, the Trump's administration are directly responsible for it.
That's really all there is to it.
As far as what was the last question.
But on that big picture, the big picture point was about why if the experts have been so expert, why is America so unhealthy?
I mean, look, it's poverty, right?
America is absolutely unique among the world powers in terms of number one, not having affordable health care.
Not having access to healthy food, not having access to affordable health care.
This is what's driving health concerns.
So if we want to address these things, obviously we have to figure out how to make healthcare better.
And so that involves standing up to health insurance industries and things like that.
But also just kind of taking it more seriously.
If we want to understand, right, RFK pushes this, you know, this explosion in chronic disease, 54% prevalence, and it's all magically lined up with 1989 and the vaccine schedule and junk food.
It's complete rubbish.
I mean, we obviously we know junk food isn't good for you, right?
That's not news.
And okay, what are you going to do?
Like enforce laws that prevent people from manufacturing and eating fast food?
Good luck with that if you want to try that.
But more importantly, why don't we research the genetic basis for a lot of these diseases?
Things, certainly behavioral and neurological diseases are largely genetic.
And then even stuff like obesity has a very large genetic component.
Why aren't we researching that more?
And then just ultimately, economics, I mean, I'd say post-World War II, just America has become this venue where, you know, the oligarchy is just consistently vying for supremacy here, specifically being that U.S. is the, you know, at the moment remains, I believe, the premier global power.
That may change soon or is already in the process of changing.
But that's why we see this continued transference of wealth from the masses into the oligarchy.
And that's going to generate incredible amounts of poverty.
And with that, you don't have access to healthy food.
You don't have access to health care.
That's the main problem.
That's what we should be focusing on.
Okay, Dave Farina.
Gutting the Sick Care System00:06:01
Thank you very much.
Well, listening to all that was Brett Jira, one of the two people I interviewed earlier, who stayed on just to listen to what Dave had to say.
Brett, what's your response to that?
Well, I agree with a lot of what was said.
I mean, it's hard in a debate format to jump on everything that's being said by the other Brett, but things like, you know, adjuvants have been studied forever and they're not linked with these catastrophic consequences.
The mRNA vaccines have saved millions of lives.
Yes, we can always improve our vaccine safety monitoring, but the vaccine safety monitoring, particularly the prospective one that's throughout the health systems that report to the CDC, is pretty good.
And they saw myocarditis very early.
Myocarditis is real.
It's not due to mRNA vaccines.
It's a class effect, probably related to the spike protein that we saw with adenovirus.
And so I agree.
I certainly agree that stacking the ACIP panel, the vaccine panel at CDC and eliminating all inputs from scientific societies like IDSA is just a way to guarantee that the result that he wants, the secretary wants on vaccines is going to happen and to put some modicum of legitimacy there because, well, the ACIP said this is what we should do, but he's already stacked the ACIP with people who have pseudoscientific beliefs.
I do want to say one thing about America being unhealthy, and I want to foot stomp a lot of what you said.
One factor that I think is very important is you have to change the reimbursement system.
We have a sick care system that reimburses for sick care.
I will happily reimburse you to amputate somebody's leg who has diabetes and vascular disease, but we don't put the money prospectively into access to preventative care, access to healthy foods.
So the entire reimbursement system almost guarantees that we maintain a sick society and it doesn't support the maintenance of health.
And in addition to everything that was said, which I agree with, that reimbursement system absolutely needs to be changed to be a health-promoting system and not a sick care system.
Just finally, Brett, Dave painted a pretty apocalyptic picture of how he views RFK Jr. running America's health.
I detect you're not quite as grim-faced about it, but what would your response be to Dave to maybe reassure him?
So I can't reassure him because I don't know, right?
I don't know how this is all going to turn out.
Having been assistant secretary and work for someone who I think is an outstanding secretary, Alex Azar, who is very smart, understood how to make things happen, no craziness whatsoever, very science-based.
I think a secretary is going to have an opportunity to do maybe two or three things.
And that's going to be it, maybe two or three or four things.
And I'm trying to support the things that I think are very important that could be beneficial.
And if this secretary did nothing else but work on nutrition, raise nutrition as a national priority, elimination of dyes, I think that could be very helpful for the country, right?
On the other hand, instilling vaccine hesitancy, fear of vaccines, pseudoscience on the headlines, like the mRNA vaccines are killing more people than they help, gutting the scientific system that are at our agencies.
These could be catastrophic, right?
And that's why we're having this discussion here.
So my goal is to help promote what I think is in the best public health's interest.
He is our secretary.
And until he is not our secretary, which may be in three and a half years or maybe tomorrow, Trump does fire people.
While he's our secretary, I want to promote and support the things that I think are beneficial for public health.
And I want to come on shows like this to argue with things that I think are detrimental.
The whole vaccine policy, his whole tenor about vaccines, his whole gutting the scientific infrastructure about vaccines, I think is highly detrimental and could be catastrophic.
Dave, final word to you.
I agree with all of that.
The only thing I would emphasize is that this veneer of concern about nutrition and public health, it's a facade.
It's just a smokescreen to... to make people think that he is actually concerned with the masses when he's really just there to implement this agenda.
He's just gutting all these federal institutions.
It's very much aligned with what Trump and Musk were trying to do with Doge, right?
Going in, trying to pretend that they're cutting all of this waste when in reality, they're just gutting the institutions that have any ability to regulate the private sector.
It's all in line with this continued transference of wealth from the general public into the oligarchy.
And RFK is right in line with that as much as he tries to portray himself as the polar opposite of that.
It is what he is.
You know, Trump was asked recently in an interview, you know, he eats so much fast food.
Is he a good example?
He said, well, all the people who've been lecturing me about eating fast food have passed.
And then he did a big smirk.
I'll just leave this with that.
Because one thing's for sure, Trump is ridiculously healthy for a guy of nearly 80 who's had the diet he's led.
Maybe the lack of alcohol might be the key, I think, to why he may be as healthy as he is.
But we shall see.
Thank you both very much.
I appreciate it.
War on Common Sense Ends00:00:51
Hello and welcome.
We'll begin with some breaking news.
Woke is dead.
The war on common sense is officially over.
Canceled celebrities are emerging from Twitter jail.
Virtue signaling has been outlawed under punishment of mass ridicule.
And we are finally free to call a spade a spade.
So what was the cause of death?
How did the silenced majority finally win?
And what exactly is going to take its place?
Woke is dead is my definitive story on the rise and fall of woke, as well as the common sense heroes and PC villains who have dominated news and culture across 10 years of madness.
It's also my personal roadmap back to a less divided world.
A world where we can agree to disagree, where debate triumphs over censorship, and where common sense is king.