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March 31, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:31:14

Live with Dr. Harvey Risch! Viva Frei LIVE!

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	We're live, and that's my four seconds late, people.
	You know how much I hate that.
	We have maximum 90 minutes, and we've got to be maximum effective with the 90 minutes that we have because, look, I have more questions than I know what to do with, but they're strategically placed in my brain.
	Dr. Harvey Risch, people, life is a circle, and it goes full circle, and sometimes you don't even know what happens.
	When I was able to get confirmation that Dr. Risch would come on the show, I said something about this.
	I remember him.
	I remember reading about him.
	Didn't fully appreciate it.
	I go back to some of my private messages from 2020, August 2020, where I was having a discussion with a friend about the Rona, as we called it at the time, about challenging the official narrative.
	And I cited one Yale epidemiologist, Dr. Harvey Risch.
	And the person with whom I was discoursing said, oh, the guy who got called out by his Yale colleagues for an article he published in Newsweek.
	And now, full circle, I've got the doctor here, and my goodness, does the truth tend to come out over time?
	It's going to be an amazing, amazing stream, and I'm going to start by reading Dr. Rish's biography?
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Biography.
	And then we're shutting this down on YouTube and we're going to rumble so that we can actually have the discussion that needs to be had so I can ask the questions I need to ask.
	On the one hand, without feeling soft censorship.
	And on the other hand, so that the video doesn't get taken down for what YouTube might consider to be medical misinformation from a Yale professor epidemiologist with over 400 peer-reviewed published papers so that YouTube doesn't make that determination for Dr. Risch.
	We're just going to avoid that discussion altogether.
	But very quickly, while everyone trickles in, go to Rumble now.
	I'm going to read the bio, then we're going to bring in Dr. Risch, so I won't have to ask him too much of his history.
	Dr. Harvey Risch is a professor of epidemiology at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.
	Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California, San Diego, and PhD in mathematical modeling of infectious epidemics.
	For anybody who wants to dare challenge his expertise, his degree of knowledge to ask the questions he's asking.
	From the University of Chicago, after serving as a post-doctorate fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatics at University of Toronto before coming to Yale.
	Dr. Risch's research interests are in the areas of cancer, etiology, prevention, and early diagnosis, and in epidemiologic methods.
	And we're just going to scroll down here.
	Dr. Risch is the author.
	What did I just do?
	Of more than 400 original peer-reviewed research publications in the medical literature, and those research papers have been cited by other scientific publications more than 45,000 times.
	Dr. Risch is an H-index of 100, I don't know what that means, and is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences and Engineering.
	Please note, the Telegram channels Dr. Harvey Risch and Harvey Risch are fake.
	Okay, that's as much of an intro as we're going to do here, people.
	I see Dr. Rish in the background.
	I'm going to bring him in.
	I'm going to remind everyone.
	We're going to be going to...
	Yeah, like this is better.
	We're going to go to Rumble now, people.
	I am going to remove YouTube from the link and hope that I don't shut down this stream.
	Fingers crossed, people.
	I'm going to go and remove...
	A post was created, deleted on YouTube.
	Remove.
	Let's just remove it.
	Now, save changes.
	Dr. Rish, you can still hear me, correct?
	Correct.
	Now, I'm going to go to Rumble.
	Make sure that this is Rumbling on Rumble.
	I've only done this once before with Dr. Francis Christian, actually.
	Okay, let's just refresh on Rumble.
	Make sure we're still good.
	Come on, please.
	I'm going to press play.
	It looks like we're good.
	And I'm going to leave the chat open so I can see what's going on.
	Is someone telling me?
	Someone says, works on Rumble.
	Good.
	Dr. Risch, sorry about that.
	Thank you very, very much for coming on.
	And I've got so many questions.
	I don't know where to start, but just briefly, elevator pitch for anybody who doesn't know you.
	I mean, I went through your bio, but let the world know who you are if they don't already know who you are.
	Well, aside from...
	What you read about my PhD in infectious epidemic modeling after medical school and my training in epidemiology at the University of Washington.
	You know, I've done epidemiologic methods and I've taught epidemiologic methods for 40 years to PhD students and MPH students both in Toronto and at Yale.
	And for me, what we've been talking about in the last two years of the pandemic is not an infectious disease only.
	The use of treatments for disease is in pharmacoepidemiology, whether a drug works for its intended purpose and what its hazards are.
	And that's something that I've studied in other contexts perfectly well, and that's what epidemiologists do.
	I even teach a course called Litigational Epidemiology, which is also about drugs and devices and how they're viewed in a litigational framework, of which I've done consulting for various cases, both on plaintiff and defendant side, for the last 10 or more years.
	So I'm thoroughly familiar with dealing with infectious epidemics.
	How they work in the population, what herd immunity is, and all that.
	And my colleagues at Yale just didn't do due diligence to figure out what I was about when they made their assertions about me.
	There's so much more that's happened since then.
	That's ancient.
	Well, that's what I'm saying now.
	Because your whole career itself could be a subject for discussion.
	But you came to the fore, at least of public conscience.
	Consciousness, I should say, in the context of this pandemic.
	How many decades have you been in the practice of epidemiology for?
	It's been like four decades?
	Four decades.
	That's correct.
	Okay.
	And now, without getting into your practice, your career, let's just break into COVID.
	COVID occurs and you start seeing things happening.
	What are you doing at the beginning of COVID?
	And what's the evolution throughout in terms of what you start seeing within the medical community?
	Like, what were you doing right before COVID happens?
	When COVID starts to occur, what was your involvement in following the developments?
	And what was your experience with that?
	Okay, so personally, I was freaking out like everybody else.
	But at the same time, I'm a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.
	The academy formed a committee to help advise.
	The governor about how to end the lockdown in Connecticut, you know, the two weeks to flatten the curve in that business.
	And so each of us on this committee were trying to think of out-of-the-box kinds of methods that weren't apparent.
	And we had a very diverse committee, aside from epidemiologists and clinicians.
	We had a clinical psychologist.
	We had some physicists.
	Airplane engine engineers, people who design jet engines and know how the airflow works in airplanes.
	We have all sorts of interesting people, you know, thinking on really clever, creative ideas.
	And my task in this was to study early patient treatment, early outpatient treatment.
	And I quickly observed that the studies that were reporting on hospital treatment of hydroxychloroquine and its lack of apparent benefit in that context We're being misrepresented both in the science literature and in the lay literature as being ineffective for treating outpatient early COVID.
	And at first, I thought this was just sloppy reporting.
	But after a while, I saw it was systematic and looked to be intentional.
	And as doctors very quickly in the epidemic and the pandemic recognized two things.
	Number one, that outpatient disease Is a viral replication process, meaning that it's a flu-like illness.
	People get fevers, muscle aches, headache, sore throat, runny nose, cough, tiredness, and so on.
	That's typical of any of a number of respiratory viruses as to how they present.
	But after about seven or eight days in a small fraction of people, they go on to progress to a florid pneumonia, where the immune system debris fills up the lungs.
	And those are two completely different illnesses that are treated differently with different treatments.
	And one cannot by any means extrapolate from anything that does or doesn't work in the hospital to things that do or don't work in outpatients.
	And yet this was being done quite dramatically and made me think that there was something systematic that was being perpetrated in order to try to block outpatient medication treatments.
	At the same time, we were also recognizing But there was a gigantic difference in serious risks in elderly people versus young people.
	And that has played out to this day that we know there's a thousand-fold or greater risk in the oldest old for dying from COVID versus the youngest young, so to speak, children.
	And yet our society has not recognized that, the public health.
	Functions and administrations have not recognized that in the one treatment, you know, one vaccine for all campaign that we've been subjected to for a year and a half.
	And that and the other big lie of the pandemic, which is that natural immunity is insufficient and not as good as vaccine immunity or doesn't even exist.
	And everybody has to be vaccinated, even if you've already had COVID.
	Those are the big lies of the pandemic that we think.
	And if I could just back up actually to the beginning for a second, you're on a committee, the purpose of which is to determine, decipher, plan early treatment for outpatient treatments.
	Well, that was my role in it.
	Others were talking about how to manage distancing if that turned out to be useful.
	And people were trying to think of staggered work shifts and other kinds of ways of keeping people apart, but letting them still function normally as far as possible.
	And this is a formal committee within what body, within what organism?
	The Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.
	So the state of Connecticut had its own captive committee of experts to advise it, and we were formed in parallel.
	To try to think of more creative and non-standard kinds of approaches that might also be used.
	Okay, and so one of the theories or one of the medications that you're contemplating for early treatment in outpatients, which we're going to make this distinction clear and thorough in the context of this discussion, versus inpatient, once you're already so sick, you're hospitalized.
	Your role here, your objective is to find effective or...
	Just explore treatments for outpatients in early infection to prevent hospitalization.
	I guess the one question is, why does hydroxychloroquine even come up as a discussion at this point?
	Why is that even a thought of a medication that might work given its historical use?
	So the most proximal reason is that Dr. Zevzelenko had been using it quite effectively since cases were occurring in his Monroe New York community where he's living at the time and practicing at the time and was treating patients with a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine,
	azithromycin and zinc and vitamin D and a few other things and was having extraordinarily good results with essentially nobody dying and very few even being hospitalized.
	And so he reported this to President Trump and he was very public about this, but this was only the most recent.
	This is an event of something that goes back to at least 2005, where the Koreans, and I think the Chinese, had already been exploring the use of chloroquine in respiratory viral infections, and so there are papers from then.
	And Dr. D 'ye Rowe in Marseille, who had also, in parallel with Dr. Zelenko, been using these medications and studying this in his small Hospital and outpatient practice in Marseille, you know, that he's the expert infectious disease person in Europe.
	And so he was using it successfully there also.
	And so they were outspoken about this.
	And so this is the first thing that made people start to think about hydroxychloroquine at that time.
	I think your mic is off.
	I'm an idiot.
	Sorry.
	In a nutshell, because we've all heard hydroxychloroquine, we hear HCQ.
	I mean, I think I understand in a nutshell what it does, but without getting into too much detail, what is the theory as to how hydroxychloroquine could, in theory, help in the early stages in outpatient treatment?
	Well, all these medications have multiple ways that they seem to work.
	And I'm not an expert in the basic biology of these things, but my understanding is that hydroxychloroquine is one of a class of molecules that helps zinc to go from outside cells to inside cells, and in particular, the cells lining the inside of the lungs, where the virus, the older versions of the virus at least, tend to replicate in addition to the nose and the mouth and so on.
	And so this replication is stunted by zinc, and what the zinc does is it blocks the enzyme that the virus uses to make copies of itself.
	Now, the zinc has to get into the cells, and because it's a charged molecule and cells don't like to let things with electrical charges through, it needs to have assistance.
	Hydroxychloroquine does that.
	It kind of shepherds or helps the cell to admit the electrically charged zinc molecules to get in to do what they do.
	That we know.
	And historically, hydroxychloroquine had been used to treat lupus, I understand.
	There was another one.
	Well, malaria is.
	It's classic usage.
	It's been used for 60 or 65 years across the world.
	Probably tens of billions of doses in hundreds of millions of people, in frail elderly, in pregnant women, in infants, children, basically everybody.
	Universally, it's regarded as one of the safest medicines used in common practice.
	It's also, in more recent times, been used widely for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and so on.
	There's even a report of it helping in boldness.
	It's very widely safely used.
	Doctors know that there are a few contraindications with a few infrequent but other medications, a few people with genetic conditions who might be at increased risk of adverse events.
	But in general, it's construed to be a very safe medication, even on its cardiac effects, which it may have in some people a very small effect on slowing the heart rhythm just a little.
	And that is not a toxic reaction for the overwhelming majority of people who take this medication to the fact that doctors do not generally do EKGs on everybody who gets this medication unless they have some reason they think somebody's high risk.
	But doctors know how to prescribe this, and so it's a very safe medication.
	So we've heard that.
	I don't want to call it a talking point because that sort of undermines what it is.
	We've heard that point.
	This medication has been around for six decades.
	It was regarded as pretty much as safe as any medication can get, if not among the safest of medications out there.
	Hundreds of millions of doses, we've all heard it.
	The question then is this.
	The two doctors, Zelensky, not Zelensky, I might be mixed up.
	Zelenko.
	Zelenko, sorry.
	There's names on my head for obvious reasons.
	Zelenko and the French doctor in Marseille.
	That's right.
	When are they doing these?
	When are they using it?
	When are they employing it?
	Is it in the context of COVID, like right from the beginning?
	Or, I mean, before it started getting blocked?
	Or were they able to use it throughout?
	I think it was, they started in probably in March of 2020, as I recall.
	I don't remember exactly when during the month, but Dr. Rue published a paper, an introductory paper with 42 patients, where he had looked at hydroxychloroquine, With and without azithromycin in a very small study, but that was very provocative.
	It provided enough data that I could reanalyze it a way that I was more comfortable with and showed a very dramatic benefit of the medications.
	It's what started me thinking about a more general review of the topic, which is what I published at the end of May of 2020 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
	That paper got a bit of notice.
	It had an allometric score of 7,000 and was downloaded by more than 90,000 people and looked at by more than 150,000.
	It's the most attention-gaining paper of any paper ever published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
	And this was only at a time when there were five studies of hydroxychloroquine.
	Now there are 10. They all show exactly the same benefit, dramatic benefit, cutting risk of mortality by 75%.
	At least.
	If I may ask, that article that you published in May 2020, what was the conclusion of it?
	What was the data that you analyzed in it?
	So the data were five studies, not very extensive, but all consistent, showing a benefit in reducing hospitalization and mortality risks with hydroxychloroquine used within the first five days or so of symptoms, and generally with.
	Azithromycin or doxycycline, another antibiotic, and zinc in some cases.
	Not every study had all medications in it.
	You have to kind of take the literature.
	What you get is what you have to work with.
	Nevertheless, there was a very, very clear pattern in those studies that was virtually definitive and is certainly now definitive for the benefit of this medication used in these protocols when used early.
	And you said it had a rating of 7,000.
	I don't know what that means.
	Explain to those who might not know what that means, what it is.
	This is a, you know, the publishers, publishing companies deal with this.
	They score scientific papers as to the attention it gets on social media and quotations from elsewhere.
	And so I don't even know the arcane way that they get it.
	But this was a very high score, especially in a technology journal.
	Does it include, and I'm not saying this to be a jerk, does it include negative reviews?
	Were people citing your article, your publication, saying, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he's a quack and you should ignore him?
	No, not at that time.
	In fact, I don't think they distinguished, but there was very little of that at that time.
	And as I said, my colleagues had never actually treated a COVID outpatient and were not epidemiologists.
	Some of them were modelers, but...
	And some of them are, you know, are hospital academics, but they had never actually treated COVID outpatients.
	They had no experience with the drug.
	They had not reviewed the literature.
	They had not shown that these studies were bad.
	They were correct to say that this was kind of thin evidence.
	I agree with that, that there wasn't a huge amount of evidence at the time that I drew the conclusions, but the conclusions were pretty obvious.
	And there was no downside because this medication is so safe.
	I said at the end of that essay in the Newsweek op-ed that I published shortly thereafter that there's really no downside in using it because if it turns out that it didn't work because it's so safe, there's no loss.
	You know that you've tried everything that you could possibly try in a crisis.
	You don't just stand by twiddling your thumbs in a crisis.
	You try the things that you know are safe that don't make things worse.
	Well, if using this had suppressed some other medication that could have been better, then it could have been worse.
	But there were no other medications at the time.
	So it was very clear there would have been a benefit to trying this in a more wide-scale use.
	Now, of course, there were doctors that were actually using this at that time, in spite of everything that was going on.
	And there have been all throughout the pandemic, at least in the United States.
	And so, for example, Drs.
	Fareed and Tyson in Southern California treated more than 10,000 patients with very few deaths, two deaths, I think, at the most, or maybe fewer.
	Dr. Zelenko treated more than 3,000 patients in New York.
	Dr. Proctor in Texas, more than 1,000 patients.
	And then you have Ben Marble, Dr. Marble, who set up the MyFreeMD.com website for telemedicine.
	Where he has doctors in almost every state or every state in the country treating COVID outpatients by telemedicine for the last year and a half.
	And he's reported in his Senate testimony in January that his group had treated more than 150,000 COVID outpatients with four deaths.
	Okay.
	And using hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other things to do those treatments.
	And so, you know, is this a case of don't believe your lion eyes here?
	Or is this the reality is that these medications work, they're very safe, and they're overwhelmingly effective.
	And, you know, whether you think all of those 150,000 were high risk, they certainly not all would have recovered on their own.
	Probably 75% would have recovered easily on their own.
	But, you know, nobody's got a mortality.
	Benefit four out of 150,000, you know, in any form of any treatments of any kind that we know, including vaccines, remdesivir, or anything else.
	So for that to be a standard, you know, to use for the efficacy of this drug is just, you know, astronomically good and the real world evidence that there is that this thing works.
	Well, I mean, and that's another thing we'll get into, the distinction between safe and effective, whereas even if one were, like, my argument will be, even if you want to argue that it's an absolute anomaly, total coincidence that they had only four deaths in 150,000, one thing's clear, there were, unless you want to say all four of those deaths were caused by hydroxychloroquine and whatever the other medications were, whether or not it's effective, at the very least, it's safe.
	And then the question is, why would they be...
	Why would anyone be suppressing a potential outpatient early treatment with something which, argue about the effectiveness, you couldn't necessarily argue about the safety of it.
	Now, you said when you first published the paper, no one was treating you like a quack, no one was ostracizing you.
	That suggests that at some point they started doing that.
	When did you notice, if you noticed, that you started becoming something of a pariah within the community for your position on HCQ?
	Well, I've never been a pariah, and I've never been ostracized.
	And I think that, in part, people who know me, know me as an obsessive scientist.
	My colleagues think that I'm a pain in the butt.
	But they've also remarked in the same conversation where one said that to another, the same email, they said, yes, but Harvey's almost always right.
	And so they know that my standards for science are obsessive.
	And that's what I've stuck to all along.
	That, you know, nature speaks, and my job is to translate that into English as a scientist.
	And so that's what I do.
	And could I be wrong on occasion?
	Yes.
	But almost always I've not been in all of the things that I've studied.
	And so that's what I have to bear on this.
	And I think that that reputation is understandable by at least the scientists that I interact with.
	And so I think that people kind of perceive that.
	In general, I'm not very flamboyant or theatrical about this.
	I just try to say what I understand of the science to be and kind of let the chips fall where they do as far as the science.
	That's how nature is.
	And you basically, you have to cope with what nature tells you and try to interpret it as objectively as possible.
	And so I've done that without extrapolating too far in any direction.
	And I think that's kind of kept the criticism.
	Relatively mild in the scheme of some of the major smearing criticism that's going on over this whole pandemic.
	Well, we're going to come to the smearing campaigns.
	We're going to come to a lot of other, you know, not conspiratorial thoughts.
	I mean, legitimate questions as to why public health, why Fauci, why the media took the position they took on HCQ.
	But just pulling up an article, Dr. Risch, you can see this, right?
	Yes.
	This is from the Yale News.
	This might not have been the article I wanted to pull up.
	The article where it stated that members of the Yale, I don't know if it was the medical community, signed a letter taking a position contrary to yours.
	And this was what the media then subsequently ran with to say, yeah, some epidemiologist who doesn't know anything about infectious diseases.
	He's touting HCQ, but members of his faculty have denounced his behavior.
	The dean of Yale, to his or her credit, I don't know who they are, but to their credit, said, we're not here to stifle debate and stifle discussion.
	Dr. Risch has an impeccable reputation, cited your publications, but when you see this letter being signed by other Yale faculty members, I won't say condemning you, but saying we don't...
	Sorry, go for it.
	Criticizing.
	Criticizing.
	First of all, who were the members that signed it?
	What were their credentials, if we're going to argue authority?
	And what happened before, during, and after that letter?
	Well, first of all, I'm not going to argue authority, because authority might have an effect in the media and in the court, but it has no effect in science.
	It should have no effect in science.
	What matters is the science itself.
	Secondly, I think...
	My dean for expressing what has been a long tradition at Yale since at least the 1974 Woodward Report that saying Yale is a scholarly community that values free academic exchange of ideas and we support that no matter how contrarian an opinion might be as long as basically as it's an academic opinion this is what we're about and you know he was saying that About me,
	and I'm saying that about my colleagues.
	My colleagues who criticize me have every right to make their opinions heard about what they think is right, and let's let the ideas inherent in both points of view come out and be addressed, you know, in science.
	That's what we're supposed to be doing, and so I take no offense.
	I don't think very much of the quality of their science, but I take no offense in what they do because that's what we do at Yale, and in fact...
	President Salovey, in a different context, has repeated that affirmation that we are about free academic thought and speech, and that's what makes us a scholarly community.
	And this is one of the reasons that I value being a scientist at Yale, because we have that in spite of all the prevailing political wins and so on, you know, and we certainly have our political issues, but in general, we are able to speak academically to the best of our abilities, and that's really important.
	Fantastic.
	I thought it might have been a bigger deal at the time.
	I certainly know from my own discussions with friends and family, a lot of people who wanted to discredit anybody suggesting that hydroxychloroquine could be an effective early treatment said, yeah, sure.
	One Yale epidemiologist with 40 years experience said one thing, but his faculty members criticized him for that.
	When did you start noticing the active campaign against hydroxychloroquine as a As a discussion subject?
	Well, it wasn't a discussion subject.
	It was a non-discussion subject.
	The campaign was for the media not to cover it at all.
	Or when it covered it, to cherry-pick the hospital studies that show no benefit and ignore all the studies and the ones that subsequently came out involving tens of thousands of patients showing the benefit that the general legacy media refused to cover.
	This was a very clear trend, but it actually predates when President Trump even said anything, because already in, I think, October of 2019, the French Minister of Health reclassified hydroxychloroquine from over-the-counter in France, it's just something you can buy in the store yourself, to prescription only, and she did this based...
	On bogus information claiming that this medication was genotoxic.
	Can you imagine saying hydroxychloroquine is genotoxic when it's been used in tens of billions of doses in hundreds of millions of people and never showing any teratogenicity, never showing any cancer cause, never showing anything related to genotoxicity and reclassifying that?
	So this happened before the world knew there was a pandemic coming.
	If I may, just for clarity, genotoxic means cancer-causing or just damaging to genes?
	Damaging to genes.
	So when you damage genes, it can do any of a number of things.
	But one of the things that people fear is that it damages what's called regulatory elements of genes, which are the parts of genes that control whether genes get expressed and make proteins and do things.
	So genes just sitting there in your cells, in the nucleus of your cells.
	Don't do anything and not a worry until they start doing things.
	And so turning the genes on or turning off genes that are protective can have very damaging effects if they're done at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
	And so things that are genotoxic can do that.
	They can also affect sperm cells, the DNA in sperm cells and oocytes that become reproductive problems.
	You know, causing birth defects.
	Those are the kinds of things one would worry about.
	And there was no evidence whatsoever that this medication had any relationship to any of that.
	And nevertheless, this was the cited claim for this when it was changed in status in September or October of 2019.
	This wasn't even announced until January of 2020, still well before the world knew that there was this big pandemic coming.
	And then there was another paper that came out in February of 2020, that must have been written in January before everybody knew there was a pandemic, called The Magic of Randomization and the Myth of Real-World Evidence.
	It was published by four British statisticians in the New England Journal, and it was an entire lying screed against my entire discipline of epidemiology.
	It was a paper that purported to show that randomization makes every randomized trial perfect, and that anything that isn't randomized is junk science.
	And this is a complete, utter scam on science to believe this and basically express the idea that plausibility is not science, that we have lots of things that people believe that are plausible that have no relationship to the actual science of things, and this falls into that category.
	So this happened before there was knowledge of a pandemic coming.
	And the first question...
	Were you aware at the time of this decision in France, and I think the subsequent one in Australia, or did you become aware of what they had done only after the pandemic broke out and you started looking into hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment?
	I only found out about this maybe a year later, maybe in fall of 2020, when more of this became, you know, more public knowledge that, you know, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that requires an investigation.
	You know, even FOIA requests to find out what people have been saying to each other that's private, but that they've been operationalizing.
	So, you know, this isn't conspiratorial.
	We're talking about evidence for things, not hypotheses about what people are doing.
	Okay.
	I mean, it's fascinating.
	So you discover...
	I've seen Dr. Malone talk.
	I think it's Dr. Malone.
	Fairly certain it is.
	Talk about what was going on in foreign countries of pharmaceutical...
	Stockpiling of HCQ, certain pharmacies being looted of HCQ.
	Australia, I forget when they moved either to ban it or to change it from over-the-counter to prescription.
	When you first start looking into hydroxychloroquine as a potential early treatment, this is in, now we're in May 2020.
	Were you aware of any of these happenings or did that only come out after you started looking into it and then you realized?
	There might be something more to this story than meets the eye.
	So the New England Journal paper on the magic of randomization really very quickly said something's going on here that isn't right.
	And I didn't know what.
	I couldn't put my finger on it yet.
	Because it wasn't addressed to any particular medication.
	What it was is addressed to a whole class of medications, namely the generic ones, that could not have any large organization put up enough money, like $50 million, in order to do randomized trials.
	So that was basically a shot to cripple generic medications going forward for early authorization, emergency authorization approvals.
	By the FDA to be put into use for the pandemic, basically clearing a path for pharma companies to mount EUA applications for medications and vaccines, where they had to show randomized trial evidence, which costs a large amount of money, and only profit-making ventures can afford to do that.
	You know, the first major signal that I didn't completely understand for a while yet in 2020 until the year progressed and I started seeing more of this happening.
	And I think I might not be totally clear, and if I'm not, I presume others might not be.
	The article said, what was the conclusion of that study?
	You said randomization is the only way to do studies?
	Correct.
	Basically saying that if a study isn't randomized, it's not real science.
	What does randomized mean in the context of scientific research, scientific studies?
	Okay.
	So in a randomized trial, the subjects who agree to participate are randomly assigned either to the active treatment or to a non-active treatment.
	It could be placebo.
	It could be no treatment.
	Something like that.
	Or sometimes there's multiple arms, but the basic idea is they're randomized to two possibilities.
	Otherwise, everything else is the same.
	In theory, they're blinded so that neither the subjects nor the doctors evaluating them for their outcomes know which treatment they got.
	And the study is followed up by an independent data monitoring board so that the investigators can't, in theory, make changes to the study design.
	That allow them to peek into the workings and the results to try to end the study if it's showing benefit or end the study if they don't want it to show benefit and things like that.
	In theory, those are protections.
	But the idea of randomization is that when you randomize between the treated and the placebo people, that it balances out everything else in the study.
	It means that if there's a difference that you see in the outcomes, that it has to be due to the treatment.
	Versus the placebo, that is plausibility, but it's not science.
	And the reason it's not science is that randomization takes a very large number of people in the treatment groups in order for the randomization to work.
	In other words, when you see the New England Journal publish a study, randomized trial of 32 patients on some medication and 35 patients on placebo, that is junk science.
	That is not a randomized trial.
	It's true it was randomized, but the problem is That they had 70 patients approximately in total.
	You have 12 outcomes in total, 6 in treatment group and 6 in the placebo group or something like that.
	Those are not large enough for the randomization to work.
	You can imagine, if you flip a coin 10 times, what's the chance you'll get 6 heads and 4 tails?
	Easy, right?
	You can't have a randomized trial with 6 outcomes in one group and 4 in the other.
	It happens by chance.
	So in order for randomization to work, you have to have hundreds of people in each of the outcome groups.
	In other words, how many deaths occurred or how many infections occurred in the treatment group, in the vaccine group versus the placebo group.
	You have to have hundreds of events in each of those outcome groups in order for the randomized trial, for the randomization to have done something.
	If you don't have that, the trial is not randomized.
	It's not adequately randomized, and it becomes no better than A non-randomized trial and, in fact, may be worse because epidemiologists who do non-randomized trials know that they have to adjust for what we call confounding factors: age, sex, other conditions and characteristics of subjects, and so on.
	We know that we have to adjust for everything in the world to make our subjects comparable, whereas in a randomized trial...
	That's inadequate in its randomization.
	Those investigators never adjust for anything.
	They don't know that they have to adjust for things.
	And so those trials can be worse than non-randomized trials.
	And if I understand this correctly, then the alternative to randomized would be, I'm going to treat 1,000 patients coming in displaying symptoms of X with medication Y, and I'm going to see the results.
	That would be not randomized, but that would just be a study based on treating 1,000 patients with symptoms with, let's say they had COVID symptoms, with hydroxychloroquine.
	That would not be a randomized test?
	That would be what this study was saying is not worth very much anymore?
	Well, not quite.
	We're still talking about a controlled study.
	So the study would be, the doctor says to the thousand patients that come in, I think you should go on hydroxychloroquine.
	And the patient says, well, I don't know if I really want to use drugs.
	I haven't heard so much about that.
	I'd rather not.
	So you get...
	300 patients who choose not to be on hydroxychloroquine, 700 who choose to be on hydroxychloroquine.
	You don't know exactly why they made those choices, but it's still controlled because you can compare whether they get hospitalized between the patients who did and didn't take the medication.
	Now, what we've learned over the course of the pandemic is in studies like that, people who choose to take the medications are sicker.
	They have more other chronic conditions.
	And they think to themselves, essentially, I'm not doing so well with this.
	I better take the medication.
	The people who choose not to take the medication think, I'm not doing so badly.
	This is like a flu, okay?
	Maybe I'll try not to take the medication.
	And so these tendencies are what you observe by looking at the characteristics of the people who did and didn't take the medications.
	And because of that...
	All of these studies have a hurdle to show benefit.
	In other words, the patients who got the medications, the patients were sicker and more likely to do worse, and you have to surmount that before you even show benefit.
	And so this potential criticism of these non-randomized studies goes in the wrong direction.
	These studies have to do even better in order to show the amount of benefit that they do show versus a randomized trial that was large enough to be good enough.
	So there's a whole body of literature of these non-randomized but controlled trials that show how good this works.
	Okay.
	When do you start putting the pieces together in your mind here with respect to hydroxychloroquine in particular?
	Well, by June of last year, it was very clear there were 10 studies that had addressed it.
	Now we have national studies in Saudi Arabia and Iran.
	The Saudi study had 7,900.
	Patients seen across the country over a two-month period or so.
	The Iran study had 29,000 patients seen across the country in outpatient clinics.
	The patients in those societies have national unique identifiers.
	They're completely followed up by their health care systems for hospitalization and death.
	There's no touchy-feely subjective involvement in evaluating those outcomes.
	We know exactly which medications they took.
	We know what their comorbidities are.
	Those studies are very strong, non-randomized, but controlled studies.
	And they both, and all of the studies altogether show a 75% reduction in mortality when used in the first five or so days of symptoms.
	Okay, now, one of the earliest talking points I remember coming from, I believe it was from Fauci himself and from the MSM, which, you know, repeated it afterwards, was that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective, and they even said it was not safe because they were administering, from what I understood, I think I understood this much from RFK's book, they were administering extremely high doses in inpatients who were already at a point where they were probably...
	Not going to do very well regardless.
	And that was the basis of treating inpatients with extremely high doses of hydroxychloroquine at a point where they were probably going to pass anyhow, to use that as the basis to say, it's not only not effective, it's dangerous.
	Did I misunderstand that, or was that an accurate description?
	That's an accurate description.
	One of the Brazil studies did that and used excessive doses, I believe it was chloroquine.
	And there's now some potential, I think, criminal activity against the investigators who should have known better than to use such high doses in those very sick patients.
	It's totally apples and oranges, as I've said.
	Outpatient disease is a totally different disease than hospital disease.
	Requires different treatments.
	And no one's saying that hydroxychloroquine necessarily works, although there's some studies, some large studies, that have shown if you start using it in the first day or so of hospitalization, it still has some benefit.
	But I'm not even laying a claim to that.
	I'm basically saying uses as an outpatient medication.
	Here's my question.
	Fauci, he's not dumb.
	Some people might think he's unintelligent.
	I don't think he's unintelligent.
	But these are distinctions which even a Schnuck lawyer can understand.
	How is it conceivable that medical professionals and the highest medical professionals who are dictating policy either confound or fail to distinguish?
	On the one hand, not just the actual details of those studies, but the distinction between inpatient, which is people who are already having trouble breathing, probably already old, probably already, I'm not saying this, but I mean overweight, suffering from the various comorbidities that brought them to hospital.
	We know the stats.
	How do they not make that distinction?
	Or do you have the impression that it was deliberate confounding by the highest up there for ulterior purposes?
	Well, I can only conclude exactly what you said, that there was a deliberate misrepresentation of the science here based on claimed plausibility.
	You know, these claims that people like Fauci and Collins and others have said have a certain degree of plausibility.
	The fact that scientifically they're false was never addressed because nobody ever asked them those questions.
	Maybe Rand Paul started asking good questions of Fauci eventually.
	The scientific questions about hydroxychloroquine were never addressed to these people, other than their disdain for it.
	Meanwhile, as they manipulated the climate and misrepresented what remdesivir did, when Dr. Fauci said, we don't need to dot the I's and cross the T's.
	We know how this is going to turn out.
	What he was doing is heading off media discussion of the study that came out from either China or South Korea the same day, showing that remdesivir didn't work.
	Actually, and again, if RFK is correct, RFK Jr., not only did remdesivir not work, it was apparently extremely toxic, and it was actually...
	Whether or not the people at that point of their advanced stage of COVID would have died anyhow, there were rumorings at the time, and I remember hearing them, and I remember what I thought about the rumors.
	Remdesivir was killing people.
	Intubating them was killing them.
	Putting them on respirators was killing them.
	Actually, counterintuitive, but the total wrong thing to do.
	I mean, on those three issues, I guess intubation and ventilation are one category and remdesivir.
	Did people at the time or were doctors at the time saying this isn't working, this is actually making it worse?
	Were they saying, oh, they were going to die anyhow, so no biggie?
	Who was speaking up about that, if anybody, at the time those treatments were being administered?
	So publicly speaking out about it, I don't know.
	I have...
	A doctor email group of about 250, basically primary care and outpatient specialty physicians who have emailed me, among the 90,000 plus people who've emailed me over the last couple of years, talking about these medications and their experience in using them, that they are the ones that do hospital treatments, basically try not to use remdesivir.
	But again, that's not my area of expertise.
	I think that there's evidence of harm that it causes, but there may be some evidence of benefit.
	It's weak.
	It's not very clear cut.
	And there were perverse incentives made by the government to give hospitals more money if they used remdesivir, to give hospitals more money if the patients died.
	So these created perverse incentives for not treating hospital patients well.
	And this has been a big problem during the whole pandemic.
	We're going to get to those incentives because I remember hearing those rumorings at the time and I remember thinking what I thought at the time and now I feel like I've been thoroughly blackpilled in terms of what actually went down.
	First things first, on Remdesivir.
	I'm going to pronounce it wrong.
	Remdesivir.
	That's a new medication?
	No.
	It was used for Ebola and was seen to cause harm.
	In the patients who took it for Ebola, it was shelved for a while and then brought out at the beginning of the pandemic to be used for hospital patients.
	It's an infusion, so its main usage initially was in hospital patients where you could do infusions.
	Do we know who owns the patent on remdesivir?
	Gilead.
	So, people can do their own research from there.
	Gilead owns the patent on remdesivir, and I'm not going to do that search now, but I'm certainly going to do it afterwards.
	Although I think it's been done before by smarter people than me.
	The incentives that you just mentioned a few seconds ago.
	Early on, we were hearing that there were incentives for hospitals.
	I don't want to call them bonuses, but there were payments made or prices per patient admitted with COVID.
	I don't know how they factor it, but like...
	Amounts per patient that died with COVID.
	And now, from what I'm understanding, what's the word I'm looking for?
	Incentives to use remdesivir.
	Do you have first-hand knowledge of that, and can you dispel any of the rumors or confirm any of the rumors as to what those financial incentives to hospitals in fact was?
	I have no direct knowledge of this, only what people have reported to me.
	The reporting mainly...
	Because it's so inflammatory, it's only been in one direction.
	But it is that there are incentives for additional payments that can be quite substantial on the orders of $10,000 to $50,000 or more per patient for these actions that are not shown to be beneficial in the survival of patients in the real world.
	And so, you know, I mean, you've heard of the countless Patients now who've been hospitalized and want to take ivermectin and the hospitals deny them and refuse them.
	And even at the point of a court order to give ivermectin, the hospitals refuse.
	The hospitals are not refusing because they think that it's going to kill the patients to give them ivermectin.
	The hospitals are refusing because they have an incentive for the patient not to get better.
	And this is a big problem.
	People think this.
	People know this.
	Whether you have proof of this.
	I don't have proof of this.
	Basically saying what people have told me, so take it for what that's worth.
	But I think it's still a real issue that needs to be more fully investigated.
	And when you say you're just repeating what people have told you, I presume, and I don't want to get anyone in trouble, the people who told you are not people on the street, but rather they are practitioners who are treating inpatient and outpatient, actual practitioners.
	Actual practitioners, nurses and doctors who treat hospital patients, yes.
	Okay, that's fascinating.
	It's going to confirm a lot of things that people were hearing that they were told were conspiracy theories at the time.
	I'm not giving you data, okay?
	So I can't vouch for this as not being a conspiracy theory, but I'm just confirming what I've heard that this has been going on.
	I think you have to think about this a little more in terms of the fear-mongering that not only the general public has been subject to, but doctors.
	And hospitalists have been subjected to.
	So, for example, doctors are afraid to go into the rooms of COVID-infected patients.
	Doctors are afraid that COVID patients who breathe room air are going to infect everybody who goes in and out of the room.
	So they put people on intubation in order to control the airflow to keep the patients from breathing the room air so that nobody gets infected, so they can actually come up to the patient and...
	Tiptoe up, see what's going on, tiptoe out.
	I think that you have a lot of different reasons that are based on fear and anxiety about managing this whole pandemic that aren't necessarily at the direction of some bullying agency at the top of this chain controlling all of this narrative.
	I think that there's lots of reasons why things happen.
	And they all seem to align in one direction, but it's not necessarily that they're all caused by the same ordering from the top.
	I use the term conspiracy theory colloquially.
	It just means people planning together to do something.
	It has taken on an entirely different term, specifically for the purposes of discrediting anybody who believes in what is being referred to as a conspiracy theory.
	But the financial incentives we remember hearing about at the time Trump was talking about them.
	The financial incentive to use remdesivir in particular, how does that work in a hospital setting?
	Well, the hospitals basically want every hospital patient to go on remdesivir unless the patient has a very explicit contraindication.
	But by and large, they put patients automatically on remdesivir, COVID hospital patients automatically on remdesivir.
	Now I'm not talking about somebody who's got a bicycle accident fracture is in the hospital for that and test positive.
	I'm talking about people who have Pulmonary involvement that basically look like they're hospitalized for COVID, which is about half of people that are hospitalized with COVID.
	And so those patients who are sick, what we call sick as far as severe illness in the hospital, those are the ones who are candidates for remdesivir.
	And Dr. Rish, I just actually stumbled on a comment in the rumble chat.
	Did people understand correctly that some of the doctors or doctors were putting Patients on respirators to prevent their infected breath from circulating in the hospital?
	That's my impression.
	Never even thought of that.
	I'm neurotic, and I would never have even gone that far to think about that.
	I think that doctors and nurses were afraid to be aggressive about external respirations, in other words, bagging patients with the squeeze.
	Respirators or letting them breathe room air that they thought these people were spreading the virus to everywhere.
	And as bad as the illness was in the patients that they were seeing, they were afraid of getting that.
	So this was even in that the doctors and nurses, healthcare workers didn't really perceive how much benefit they had achieved in their immunity from having had COVID.
	Once they got vaccinated, they didn't perceive how much benefit they got from the vaccination.
	They were still afraid.
	Because we've been fear-mongered for two years over this, that everybody's going to die who gets COVID.
	And this fear-mongering has been the exact method both in the media.
	It's natural for media to fear-monger because that's what sells media.
	The yellow journalism of classic times is fear-mongering.
	And so for that method to be ramped up by the government in order to control its messaging and its policies has been the standard affair here.
	And widely used throughout, and government agencies have been pandering this fear like the CDC, FDA, NIH people, and so on, have been doing this in order to control the message much more tightly.
	All right.
	Ivermectin, we didn't really talk about, but I mean, I guess if we can talk briefly about ivermectin, your analysis of ivermectin as a treatment, what does that do in a nutshell?
	And what has been your analysis of whatever studies you've read on that as an early treatment?
	So ivermectin looks to be about as good as hydroxychloroquine when used in adequate enough doses.
	And there's less evidence for ivermectin.
	There's fewer studies.
	That have studied ivermectin in outpatients than hydroxychloroquine studies.
	But the magnitude of the benefit shown in those studies is very similar between the two drugs, both for risk of hospitalization and risk of mortality.
	Now, just like in the early period of hydroxychloroquine, you had these small randomized trials popping up that were fake studies done by conflicted investigators using the tobacco company playbook.
	To mount fake evidence to claim that something isn't the way it really is, you have fake studies coming out looking at ivermectin now.
	And in fact, the one from Brazil that just was published in the New England Journal yesterday that had actually come out in August of last year.
	And people knew all of the failures of this study that purports to show a very small benefit of risk of hospitalization and risk of mortality in this ivermectin study in Brazil.
	It has virtually fatal flaws in that study as well.
	For example, that study did not ascertain whether the people on placebo in the study had actually been using ivermectin before they got into the study.
	Ivermectin was widely used in Brazil in the time that this study was done.
	And outpatients, it's an over-the-counter medication there.
	And so they never made that a criterion for exclusion or inclusion into the study as to whether people had actually been using ivermectin.
	And it was very common at the time.
	And this serves to put the placebo patients into the active trial realm of their exposures, meaning that it would reduce the benefit shown in the study by a large amount.
	The placebo patients were highly sampled at a time before the gamma Strain of COVID, SARS-CoV-2, was common in Brazil.
	Now, the earlier strain was a lot less lethal.
	The gamma strain was the most lethal of all of the COVID strains.
	It came out a little later in 2021, and so more of the ivermectin patients had gamma, more of the placebo patients.
	Had the before gamma, and this was not controlled or adjusted for in the analysis either.
	And then there's a plethora of other more minor issues in this study that really invalidate the study.
	So these are the kinds of issues.
	And you see some of the same investigators who were involved in the fake hydroxychloroquine studies now being involved in these fake ivermectin studies.
	And this is the issue that there's a lot of money being put.
	To carrying out what are essentially fake studies to try to disprove that these medications work.
	It's part of the whole protocol that when you have a generic medication, just think that hydroxychloroquine in the United States costs 40 cents a tablet.
	That means you can treat COVID for $5.
	Ivermectin in the United States costs a lot more than that, but not impossible.
	It's a few hundred dollars.
	In Brazil, ivermectin for a whole treatment costs $5.
	You've got these treatments that are not making anybody any money.
	And therefore, if a patient has a choice, would you rather take a treatment that costs you $3,000 like remdesivir or one that costs you $5 or $10 or even $300 like the generic medications?
	It's pretty obvious that 99 times out of 100, people are going to take the cheap generic medications that are shown to work.
	And this destroys the economic playing field of these patent medications.
	And you know that when you fight a war, that basically you get ignored until you get over target.
	And once you get over target, there's a much bigger threat, and that's when you get attacked and you get smeared.
	And so the fact that ivermectin is being smeared a lot more now, that hydroxychloroquine was smeared in its infancy, so to speak, was because it's very clear that these drugs actually do work.
	And so this is what you're seeing now and why one has to know that these randomized trials are not what they purport to represent, that you have to take them apart.
	As I teach my students, you cannot believe what investigators say, what the authors say in a paper.
	You have to read the paper for yourself, try to figure it out, and figure out what the paper itself is saying, not what the authors are saying.
	And conceptually, I mean, I know that ivermectin, it's a Nobel Peace Prize winning medication, but that is for treating parasitic infections like river blindness.
	Conceptually speaking, what does ivermectin do?
	I've heard the term prophylaxis.
	I don't know what it means, but how does ivermectin work in respect of minimizing, I presume, the replication of the coronavirus in humans?
	Well, so ivermectin has the same mechanism as hydroxychloroquine.
	And shepherding zinc molecules, ions, into the insides of cells to block the virus replication enzyme.
	But it has another 10 or 15 other mechanisms that would be beneficial to suppressing the virus.
	This is a little beyond my level of expertise.
	Others have figured this out.
	There are questions about, does the concentration of ivermectin in the doses that people take, is it enough to do these things that one sees in laboratory experiments?
	I, as an epidemiologist, like laboratory studies.
	I love theories.
	But to me, what matters is empirical data.
	That nothing speaks to me until you get to, did you try it on humans?
	Did you try it in a way that the human studies are valid?
	And what do those studies show?
	So everything is motivation until you get to the human data.
	And so I'm a full empiricist.
	And for me to say, I look at...
	These randomized trials, these controlled, non-randomized trials, and see what they show.
	And that's how I draw conclusions about whether these drugs effectively reduce risks of hospitalization and mortality.
	They do.
	Empirically, these studies are very good.
	Do they have flaws?
	Yes, some of them have flaws.
	Sure, some of them were...
	Ignored or rejected because they had supposed ethical flaws that they started recruiting patients before they were authorized by their IRBs to do that.
	These are not scientific criticisms.
	If you're going to say this study shouldn't be analyzed because it had an ethical lapse of a few days in its recruiting, that's not a scientific criticism.
	I can stick a knife in this study and wipe it out without actually dealing with combating its science.
	But on the other hand, I've made the case, and you've heard me in this discussion now, saying that hospital patients and outpatients have to be treated differently and have to be analyzed differently.
	And it's that the event of hospitalization is what I would call a gateway event, that it signals a different disease happening in the patient.
	And therefore, studies have to look at hospital patients and outpatients separately.
	And not all studies have done this.
	And in fact, some of the websites that do all of the reviews, the C19 meta websites, so there's one for hydroxychloroquine, one for ivermectin, and for another 20 or 30 drugs, looking at all the evidence for these medications very systematically, unfortunately, don't separate hospital from outpatient.
	They separate early from late in the disease.
	That's kind of getting there, but not good enough.
	And so for me, what I've done, My own research is to take the studies that have exact, explicit data on outpatients, all the studies that I can find that aren't fatally flawed, and examine those.
	All the studies that have looked at risks of mortality in outpatients, take those, analyze those.
	And that's how I, as an obsessive, simple-minded kind of scientist, evaluate what I think the evidence is.
	And the evidence of that is very clear, that both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin show benefit.
	Have you read RFK Jr.'s The Real Anthony Fauci?
	I haven't gotten to read it.
	I understand that I mentioned a little bit, at least in Chapter 1, but I haven't read it yet.
	My only question is whether or not Dr. Fauci is, in fact, as evil as the book depicts him.
	You start noticing these things.
	You start asking questions.
	Your underlying conclusion as to why there was this, let's call it, well-orchestrated campaign.
	To demonize hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin at all costs, and to push remdesivir, and I guess to push vaccines as the ultimate catch-all solution to this.
	I mean, what is your ultimate takeaway from all of it?
	Well, I think this is all economic.
	I think that the financial interests of the companies surmounted the actual objective science.
	To the point where they were callously indifferent to all of the deaths that occurred before the vaccines came out.
	That basically the shareholder benefits of the companies trumped the deaths that were occurring while these generic medications could have been used, while we knew that these things worked and could have been employed, and we lost half a million or more.
	People unnecessarily to this illness that could have been treated when we had official CDC and other government pronouncements saying, you got this COVID?
	Stay home.
	Drink fluids, take Tylenol.
	If you get to the point where you can't breathe, then go to the hospital.
	There's no other disease in human knowledge, human history, where we treat it by being passive like this.
	And especially in the context where we have medications.
	So this paradigm can only be viewed as an orchestrated campaign not to treat these people in order to either defer until we had the high price spread, so to speak, the vaccines or other expensive patent medications, or to use those deaths to stir up more fear to maintain the fear climate for the benefit of policy.
	I mean, and I presume you heard, as we all did, you know, doctors in Canada, politicians in New York coming out and saying, I think it's like late 2021.
	We don't even know who was hospitalized with versus hospitalized from COVID.
	We really should get that data down.
	I mean, does that not make your head spin, hearing the people in power have these musings a year and a half into a pandemic where this should have been the first question, not the last question to be asked and answered?
	Well, we've had all sorts of questions about death certificate codings along the way.
	The CDC changed the rules in July of, was it 2020, about deaths from versus with COVID for how doctors were supposed to code death certificates.
	Then they stopped counting COVID deaths in vaccinated people unless they were hospitalized.
	There were all sorts of shenanigans.
	That have gone on about the COVID mortality in the United States.
	I think that from my viewpoint as an empirical scientist, I want to see how things change over time, over short spans of time, because things at least should remain reasonably consistent during that.
	So for example, the last three months or the last six months, not much should have changed and therefore one can see the declining mortality now.
	Versus the peak in mortality with the Delta variant last fall as being indicative of a radical change in our pandemic circumstances.
	The UK data are a little more objective.
	I don't know the ins and outs of those data so well, but at least they publish a lot more on a weekly basis and one can look at those data and how they change every week and their comparisons.
	My problem is, I mean, looking at it from the outside is Yeah, you want to compare it over time.
	But when they continually, literally change criteria, change definitions in real time, if now they're saying, okay, well, we've changed death from COVID, so the number is going to go down compared to what it was six months ago because we were just including all deaths.
	Well, I mean, you can manipulate all of the results for whatever the political reason, for whatever the reason whatsoever.
	And so I don't even know how you can track things over time when they're literally changing the rules of the game over time.
	Well, that's been inherent in the whole pandemic, that randomized trials have all of this fiddling around with the techniques for subverting a randomized trial, giving too large a dose of the medication or too low a dose, not accounting for the time it takes to get the medication to the patients, stopping the trial early, not being blinded.
	The patients know which medication they're actually on.
	You know, there are all sorts of shenanigans that can be used to not vetting the patients, not knowing who the patients actually are because you're doing it on the internet and you don't even know whether the patients are real patients or their shills being manufactured by, you know, like troll bots as patients, you know, and so on, that all this stuff can go on in the context of a so-called randomized trial that you wouldn't even be able to understand.
	With the way the trials are reported in the publications.
	So to cite these things and claim that they're gold standards, and then it turns out that there's one hospitalization in each arm, and they're claiming that the drug has no benefit when, in fact, the trial is underpowered to show a benefit.
	And that's a completely different conclusion.
	A trial that is uninformative is a different conclusion than a trial that shows the drug doesn't work.
	And these studies were claiming the drug doesn't work when, in fact, they were uninformative.
	So you have all these shenanigans going on in these trials, and this applies to the coding of death certificates and the coding of death, the VAERS coding of deaths from the vaccines, all of these different topics.
	There is meddling, and it's very hard to get the truth out of all this.
	For objective scientists, we see the tip of the iceberg, and it's very difficult to see what's going on in the iceberg itself.
	Alright, now speaking of virus, we have to talk about the big V word.
	What is your impression of the process that was followed in order to come to this vaccine?
	Let me back up one step further.
	Scientifically, medically, I know they changed the definition.
	Does the COVID shot, does the COVID jab satisfy the criteria for what a vaccine is or ought to be?
	First of all, at a technical level, the three Genetic vaccines are what would be classified mechanistically as gene therapy.
	They're not vaccines in the classical sense.
	A vaccine in the classical sense is basically a molecule that stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.
	The genetic vaccines are indirect.
	They don't do that.
	They stimulate cells to make substances that make the immune system react to those substances.
	There's a number of problems with that whole process, one of which is that the dose of the substance that stimulates the immune system is uncalibrated.
	So when you inject a certain amount of genetic material, it goes into cells, but how much the cells make of the antigen that the immune system responds to is not determined by how much you inject exactly.
	So the dose is uncalibrated.
	And secondly, The molecules that these vaccines use are spike protein, which is a toxic protein in itself, and has all these unwanted, potentially harmful effects in a non-trivial fraction of people who get vaccinated.
	So, you know, you have to do risk-benefit calculations for everybody who would think about taking these vaccines.
	And as I said earlier on, there's a thousand-fold difference.
	And mortality risk between the oldest and the youngest people in the country.
	And therefore, that has to be factored into whether people take the vaccines or not.
	And now, I've heard Dr. Malone talk about it.
	I'm sure other people have heard it, but explain it like we're all five, a spike protein.
	What does that mean?
	The virus on its surface makes proteins.
	These are very large molecules that stick out, that Stick to parts of cells that allow the virus to push itself or be sucked into the inside of cells to use the cell's genetic machinery to reproduce the virus.
	So the virus has to get inside of cells to work, to reproduce.
	It does that by having this sticky two-sided tape, so to speak, on its outside.
	These spike proteins are one of that process.
	Stick to cells and fool the cells into thinking that to bring the whole virus inside the cell.
	Now, these spike proteins in doing that don't just do that because when they stick to other things besides the cells in the respiratory tract, in the nose, in the pharynx, in the lungs, if they get into the bloodstream, they stick to almost every cell in the body that they can attach to.
	And that's the problem when they stick to...
	Cells in the nervous system, when they stick to blood cells, immune cells, and so on, that they can damage those cells by what they do, and that becomes the problem.
	And the issue of that potential risk, does that have to do with how the vaccine or how the shot is administered?
	As in, like, some people were saying, well, if it's done properly, it sticks to the muscle, but sometimes it goes intravenous.
	Is that risk of damage from the spike protein making its way throughout the body?
	Regardless of how the shot itself is administered?
	So probably yes, although I've conjectured.
	When I was in medical school, we were trained to give injections by inserting the needle, pulling back on the plunger, seeing if there's blood, if there is, pulling out and trying a new place.
	If there's no blood, then pushing in to do the injection.
	However, I've seen dozens and dozens of videos of people getting vaccinated, and not one have I ever seen.
	We're pulling the plunger out to see whether they're in the bloodstream or not.
	I've had flu shots for the last 30 years annually for myself.
	I don't know whether that was a good idea or not, but I've had it.
	And I think maybe once or twice out of all that time have I seen the person actually pull the plunger out to see if it was in the bloodstream or not.
	Whether this matters or not, I can't really address.
	Is there some fraction of people that would get some of the injection into the blood this way?
	Probably.
	Is it a large number?
	That I can't address.
	It could happen.
	However, one of the things that people don't really understand, both in science and in law, is the difference between things that could happen versus things that do happen.
	What matters is how frequently.
	Things that can happen are essentially irrelevant if they're exceedingly rare.
	So, you know, could we have a solar eclipse tomorrow?
	Yes.
	But is it going to?
	Probably not.
	The idea that things that can happen are risks is a wrong idea.
	It's things that do happen, meaning that they happen commonly enough that we worry about them.
	So does this conjecture about getting into the bloodstream happen?
	As it can happen or it does happen, that I can't address because we don't know the frequency of this.
	So that's basically hypothetical at the moment.
	What's not hypothetical is that the spike protein and the vaccine does go around to all different parts of the body.
	This was shown in the animal studies that were carried out for the Japanese regulators of the Pfizer vaccine and show that after 48 hours, the vaccine accumulates in the ovaries.
	And in other parts of the body, in places that we were led to believe it doesn't.
	We were, you know, the manufacturers have said that the vaccine basically sits in the muscle and will get into the lymph node.
	And that's as far as it goes, but that's obviously not true.
	The amount of damage that's caused by the vaccine getting around through the body is not that common, but it does happen.
	And the problem is that we live, our public health administration is what I call, An engineering health design.
	In other words, that its policies strive for something that works 99% of the time or 99.9% of the time.
	If it does that, wouldn't you think that something that works 99.9% of the time is a really good policy?
	So the answer would be yes, but if I built a bridge that one car out of every thousand flew off the side into the river, would I consider that bridge to be well enough designed?
	The answer is probably not.
	So if you have a vaccine that works 99.9% of the time safely, when you administer it to 200 million people, you're still going to have a large number of people who are harmed by it.
	And that's really what the problem is, that you need virtual perfection in these things.
	And we don't have it with these vaccines.
	We've had much better perfection.
	In the previous vaccines, like the flu vaccines and so on, that are in general use, and many of the childhood vaccines that are in general use, we have much better safety information compared to the COVID vaccines.
	And now, I presume you're tracking these statistics or the reports coming in through VAERS and all the other studies.
	Do you have any idea, any assessment preliminary findings as to what the...
	Risk rates are varying by demographic?
	The VAERS is a signal-generating system, not an analytic system.
	Now, most of the work that I've done over the last decade has been involved with FAERS, F-A-E-R-S, which is the FDA's Drug Adverse Event Reporting System.
	Parallel and comparable to the VAERS.
	And the FDA has specifically said that one should not do analytic studies of the reports in the FAERS, that they're only signals that if you see things that shouldn't be there, then that gives you information to follow up in real studies.
	And I think the same thing applies to the VAERS, that you can't rely on the reporting, that even the deaths.
	The deaths are likely to be under reports.
	The other things are likely to be under reports.
	But they are still really only signals.
	They don't have denominators.
	We don't know what rates are.
	We don't know what the risks are for those things.
	And it's not really scientific to extrapolate from those other than to raise anxiety signals saying, look, we've got 20,000 deaths reported in VAERS from these vaccines.
	We don't have 20,000 deaths from all other vaccines combined over the last 30 years.
	At least, proportionally speaking, in the VAERS, something is going on that we need to address.
	Now, if we as a society don't address that, then there's got to be reasons for that.
	But the signal is there.
	That's actually a fascinating way of looking at it.
	The signaling is there.
	The response, the retorts that everyone likes to say, well, on the one hand, a lot of people say even the reports to VAERS are a fraction of a percent of the actual results because people are reluctant to, people don't know about it, people don't correlate the two events.
	But then the response from the VAERS side of it is, oh, we've looked into it and without even doing an autopsy or whatever, we've determined there was no correlation between the death claimed and the vaccine event.
	In your knowledge and your experience, do you know what goes into the, I don't know who does the investigation, but who investigates the death reported under VAERS?
	Do you know what goes into that process?
	Well, the VAERS reports are initially triaged by staff.
	VAERS is managed, I think, jointly between FDA and CDC.
	And so they have staff who are trained to read these reports, try to filter out the frivolous ones, the inappropriate ones, and so on, and leave in.
	And they basically leave in the great majority.
	And what they do is they just enter the information verbatim that's typed into these reports, and that's what gets into the record.
	And then...
	It's up to basically the eye of the beholder, whoever wants to go through the various reports and see what's in them in the text sections to see what people said and decide for themselves about whether these are causally related to the exposures.
	Now, having said that, I'd point out that in fall of 2020, I believe, CDC made a statement that it had access to eight Databases, not just VAERS, but insurance and health plan databases that it was going to use to monitor the vaccines.
	And then it claimed it was going to be transparent about all those data.
	And you probably know as well as I do that the CDC has basically not revealed any of the data for any of those things.
	That the attorney, Tom Renz, got access to some of the Department of Defense data and put out some summary statistics.
	about adverse events in those data.
	Those are still being interpreted.
	It's a little bit frightful if what those data show turn out to be true.
	But nevertheless, there's all this data that the CDC has and has done exactly the opposite of what it said.
	It's hiding those data.
	So you don't have to rely on VAERS.
	You can rely on these other data and see more objectively.
	These are data where the medical record systems Captured who got vaccinated and when and who got what other treatable conditions that they had visits to their providers over or diagnoses over and what they paid claims over and so on.
	So all of this is a lot more objective data.
	And have you had any firsthand knowledge of the, I won't say allegation, but the claim that overall deaths from insurance companies has increased 40 percent?
	Have you had any personal knowledge of those statistics?
	Well, the CDC is actually...
	Release some of those data, and it shows exactly the same thing.
	Well, that's going to terrify people.
	Now, Dr. Risch, for neurotic individuals like me, and there's a lot of people out there who are fixated on, I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek, but like, you know, pure bloods, I don't like that term, but people who think that this vaccine, if you've gotten it, on the one hand, can be switched on and off for other reasons, reproductive reasons.
	There were some studies, or there were some...
	Pontificating from scientists as to creating a vaccine that can do that.
	There's people who are afraid it's going to have gene-modifying consequences later on.
	Of the plausible potential risks versus the ones that are more outlandish or untenable, and the proximate timeframe within which those might occur, do you have any, I won't say an opinion, or do you have anything to say about that or specify so that it would quell people's concerns or make them more nervous?
	Well, I have my anxieties just like you do.
	I think we're in pretty uncharted waters here.
	And I think that we're just going to have to watch and wait and hope.
	I think that there can be a grain of truth to many of these things.
	But we're back into the can versus does difference.
	In other words, that whether this vaccine can get into the germline in some cells.
	Whether that matters or not, that's an anxiety question, but not a science question yet, because we don't know whether that's common.
	We don't know how much that's expressed.
	This is why, as I say, I'm an empiricist.
	I'm going to wait to see what actually gets reported in population-based studies or large studies and try to make sense of it that way.
	You have to have a certain degree of intellectual pause and just say, I'm going to put that stuff on hold.
	Until I see more convincing data one way or the other.
	The one thing that I would say is we've been given this gift of Omicron, and Omicron is the end of the emergency, at least for now.
	The fact is that Omicron has approximately a quarter to a fifth the mortality risk that Delta had, that it is very infective and very mild for the great majority of people.
	That people who've been vaccinated are getting it anyway, that the vaccines really don't do a very good job against it, that they help for a few weeks, and then they switch directions and they predispose people to be more likely to be getting Omicron.
	Whether that's good or not, you know, nobody wants to get sick, but the illnesses in those people are very mild in general.
	And, you know, even if people get sick from this, there's hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, Vitamin D and, you know, all the other things that are available to treat in the people who get very sick, which is very few.
	So Omicron is giving herd immunity to our population.
	And even Omicron and its progeny, the BA2 variant strain and so on, they're all Omicron-like.
	They're all going to be for the foreseeable future to the degree that they're still around.
	They're not, you know, Omicron as a whole is going down dramatically in the U.S. It's going to be the pseudo-vaccine, so to speak, that gives everybody herd immunity or gives the population herd immunity.
	Now, whether Omicron goes away 100% or whether it stays very low level, it's difficult to predict.
	Whether we get a new variant in the fall that creates a wave, it's entirely possible.
	My guess is that it's going to be derived from Omicron, and therefore it's going to succeed only to the degree that...
	The immunity from Omicron doesn't work well anymore against it.
	And that means that it's going to stay very infectious, but it's unlikely to become a severe illness just the way Omicron became less severe from its predecessors.
	And so whether we get a wave in the fall or not, I'm not expecting it to be anything like the emergencies that we've had with the previous strains to Omicron, the Delta, Gamma, and the original strains.
	So I'm very optimistic that we are 90 to 95 percent out of this pandemic and that basically we're out of the emergency and that all the restrictions should be lifted.
	Everything, masking, vaccines, everything should be lifted at this point.
	In fact, it should have been lifted in February.
	We knew all of this and that we're being basically abused as people because we trade our rights for our safety in the time of a war or a pandemic.
	We do that voluntarily because we know what the risks are.
	But when those risks are being misrepresented and we're being fear-mongered, we give up those rights inappropriately, and that's a form of political abuse.
	And I'm not a rights-over-everything person.
	I think that there is a tension between rights and population health.
	But I think we're at the point now with Omicron that the population health is guaranteed, is virtually guaranteed, and therefore it's time for the rights to be given back, which are our inherent rights.
	And that if we don't get them back, it's an abuse of those rights.
	Our Supreme Court in the U.S. has said the biggest contributor to the abuse of human rights is the indefinite prolonging of emergency.
	Actions by governments.
	The three Supreme Court justices said that last year, I believe, and this is exactly where we are now, that it's time to end the emergency, use whatever methods we still need to cope with the degree that we can manage Omicron as a medical condition and not a pandemic one.
	We have the flu every year.
	We don't make that a pandemic.
	We have 500,000 deaths.
	A year from smoking-related diseases, we don't call that an emergency and make that a pandemic.
	We're way less than that now for COVID, and so on the standards that we've already set for what a government-compelling interest is, we're out of the emergency, and we shouldn't consider it that.
	Fantastic.
	Now, Dr. Rich, there's so much more that we can still do, but we said 90 minutes today, and can you come back on and we can go some more on this, especially as more data, more information comes out?
	Sure.
	Happy to.
	Awesome.
	And where can people find you?
	I'll post your links in the bottom section, but on Twitter?
	I have no social media, except I do have a Telegram channel that I had to put up because there were the two fake ones that you mentioned earlier, put up by somebody else.
	I would say Google Rish and Yale, Y-A-L-E, and you'll find my page there, and it has my Telegram channel there, and that's the easiest way to find me.
	Excellent.
	Use DuckDuckGo or something else.
	They're all compromised now.
	We know DuckDuckGo is DuckDuckGone, as we say.
	Thank you very much.
	We'll do this again because there's still a lot more.
	Things will change and we'll have more to talk about.
	Thank you very, very much.
	Stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone on Rumble, hope you liked it.
	Clip away and share away any soundbites that you want the world to know.
	It was fascinating.
	And let's do this again.
	Stick around, everyone else.

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