How Big Pharma Broke America and How We Can Repair It by John Griggs and Joe Rogan. How Big Pharma broke America, and how we can repair it. How big pharma is one of the only two countries in the world that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise. Why do they do it? And how can we stop them? Joe and John talk about this and much more in this episode of the Joe Rogans Experience, a podcast by day, and by night, an all-day podcast by night all day, all day. This is a podcast about a topic that in this current era is very intriguing and very important for people, and this is the subject of how Big Pharma is breaking America. We talk about how they broke the US healthcare system, and what we can do to fix it, and why they should be allowed to advertise in the ads that make people want to go to the doctor. And we talk about why we should allow them to do so. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and tell a friend about this podcast! and tell us what you think about it in the comments section below! Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and if you re a fan of the show, please leave us a review and/or a review! if you like it, please consider recommending it to a friend! Cheers, Joe & John! - xoxo - Joe Timestamps: 3:00 - How BigPharma Broke Us? 5: 6:00 7:30 - What we can fix America? 8: How big pharmaceutical companies broke us? 9:15 - How bigpharma? 11:00 | How we can make America better? 12:30 13:30 | What we should fix it? | How big Pharma broke US healthcare? 15:00 How we need to fix America 16: How they broke US health care? 17:00 Can we fix it ? 18:40 - How we fix our health care system? 19: How do we fix this? 21:00 What s the best way to fix the US? 22:00 Is Big Pharma better than other countries? 23:00 Are we doomed? 26:30 How big enough? 27:00 Should we fix the problem?
00:00:42.000They sent me copies of the audiobook, but it's in these weird WAV files and when you have to turn your screen off or it shuts off the sound.
00:01:11.000So the United States and New Zealand allowed drug companies to advertise.
00:01:15.000But New Zealand has very active oversight of its pharmaceutical program.
00:01:20.000Active oversight of the evaluation of the efficacy of the drugs and whether the pricing of the drugs is reasonable.
00:01:28.000So it turns out that even though we in New Zealand allow drug advertising, New Zealand spends the least per person amongst developed countries, and we spend the most by far.
00:01:40.000So, has there ever been a conversation, like whether it's publicly or privately, that you know of where they've tried to stop this?
00:01:50.000Is this one of those things that once it gets into play, once there is a law that allows pharmaceutical drug companies To sponsor or to advertise are we doomed then because then the amount of money that's involved in advertising and when you see those brought to you by Pfizer those CNN commercials and when you see the Whether it's for allergy medications or antidepressants the sheer volume of money that's involved in
00:02:21.000It seems like extracting that from our system would be very difficult to manage because they're going to fight tooth and claw to keep that in.
00:02:31.000So, as best I understand it from the lawyers who do understand it, in our Constitution, The advertising of prescription drugs falls under the free speech mandate of our Constitution.
00:02:50.000And some things you can control the advertising of, cigarettes and alcohol.
00:03:00.000They can be recreational, but there's no But with drugs, there is an absolute benefit.
00:03:07.000And because of that, they qualify as protected under the First Amendment.
00:03:12.000However, that said, The floodgates were opened and it's clear that the drug company is going to spend as much advertising, however many billions of dollars they want, to make as much money as they can.
00:03:26.000But there's nothing that says that drug ads need to be allowed, that we need to allow them to be misleading.
00:03:36.000You've never seen a drug ad that you have to treat 323 people with Trulicity for a year to prevent one cardiovascular event.
00:03:45.000They tell you Trulicity for diabetes prevents cardiovascular events in diabetics.
00:03:51.000But if they said you have to treat 323 people To get one better and the other 322 aren't going to have a cardiovascular benefit, then you'd be delivering information that people can use.
00:04:03.000And if you said that you can't play violins or have family picnics while you're reciting all the side effects, Then people would listen to the side effects.
00:04:15.000So I think the key is that the drug companies know how to use the ads, very skillful, to manipulate people on an emotional level.
00:04:44.000How many people do you need to treat in order for one to get better?
00:04:47.000I think if that information were included in the ads, they'd be much less the...
00:04:54.000The cost benefit of the ads would be reduced or the benefit cost ratio would be reduced for the drug companies and then they wouldn't advertise so much.
00:05:04.000But right now they can make these ads that make anything look great and make people want them and make people go to their doctor and ask for them and they make a ton of money.
00:05:13.000Yeah, it just doesn't seem like it should have a place.
00:05:18.000Advertising, in terms of the way they're advertising, not just showing something in a print form, like there is a new medication that stops the damages of high blood pressure, whatever it is.
00:05:33.000What they're doing is they have these theatrical representations of the most beautiful and wonderful life where people are dancing in wheat fields and delivering picnic food while everybody laughs and cheers.
00:05:48.000They're clearly fucking with people's heads and they're using psychology.
00:05:52.000They're not doing it in a way where they're trying to objectively, coldly rely facts And have people see these facts and recognize that this has benefit to them.
00:06:04.000No, what they're doing is they're trying to get people excited about the possibility of living a life like they're seeing.
00:06:10.000When they're relaying these facts, they're doing it with music, they're doing it with joyous dancing.
00:06:19.000It's really wrong because you're not selling a car.
00:06:22.000If you want to do that to sell a car, it doesn't bother me at all.
00:06:25.000But you're doing something that people who have health problems are really thinking that they're going to wind up like these people in this video.
00:06:36.000You're manipulating them to the point where you're getting them to bring things up to their doctor, things about antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication or all kinds of stuff that people could just ask for.
00:06:49.000And it seems insane that of all the countries on Earth, there's only two that allow it, and as you're saying, one that allows it pretty much unchecked.
00:07:00.000And I'm in total agreement with you, Joe.
00:07:03.000I don't think we're going to get rid of drug ads.
00:07:06.000But I think we could make the drug ads – you could ensure that the drug ads leave people with an accurate understanding of what the benefit of the drug is going to be.
00:07:20.000But don't you think if you have any ads, there's going to be room for fuckery?
00:07:24.000And there's going to be – I mean if you have any ads, they say, OK, well, no theatrical representations.
00:07:34.000Like, when they say these side effects at the end, when they list off the side effects, it's crazy the way they're talking about death and suicide.
00:07:44.000You may have suicidal thoughts, like, oh, what?
00:07:55.000I just think that it's not gonna happen that we get rid of them.
00:07:59.000But if we made them tell the truth and if we did studies that looked at the messages that people actually take away from these drug ads and made sure that the messages were accurate, that it would be an improvement.
00:08:21.000I think they're so baked into our Constitution.
00:08:25.000The right to advertise is so baked into our constitution that it's not going to happen.
00:08:31.000But I do think that if you made the ads tell the truth about how the drug compares to other therapeutic approaches, how it compares to taking charge of your lifestyle, What the real cost is,
00:08:48.000If you made the ads communicate an accurate picture of the role of that drug in therapeutics and the price, the relative price, that it wouldn't be so bad.
00:09:12.000So I think the energy ought to be to figure out how to deliver a constructive message.
00:09:18.000It seems like, but if you did have a constructive message and it was comprehensive, you'd need like a half-an-hour infomercial.
00:09:24.000It wouldn't necessarily fit inside a one-minute advertising.
00:09:27.000If you're talking about the benefit of different lifestyle choices, if you're talking about diet and exercise and how it affects the way these things interact with the body and what's the actual cost, Co-pay.
00:09:42.000If you have all those factors in, how are you going to squeeze that into a one-minute ad?
00:10:19.000So I think you and I share one common thought that we're not on one side or the other and that pharmaceutical drugs have some amazing benefits.
00:10:28.000And they've been incredible for mankind in so many different ways.
00:10:37.000Like unchecked profit, unchecked where you have so much money that you can influence the way things are regulated, you can influence the way things are promoted by health officials, where you just have full reign with your ability to distort information and to cover up the damaging and detrimental effects of these drugs.
00:10:59.000And that's where I think we agree about pharmaceutical companies, what they've done in terms of Whether it's lying about studies, lying about the addictive properties of these drugs, it's been absolutely horrific.
00:11:15.000But as well, some pharmaceutical drugs are amazing.
00:11:44.000And in our largely unregulated system, uniquely unregulated healthcare system, pharmaceutical system amongst developed countries, we allow the drug companies to control the information that flows to doctors and patients.
00:12:08.000And the amount of accountability that drug companies have, so like, you know, we've talked before about Pfizer and that, what was the one drug where they had the largest settlement ever, the largest penalty ever?
00:14:04.000They keep their cards close to their chest.
00:14:06.000And six months later, I read in the newspaper that the Department of Justice had found the company had committed a felony and they were dealt the largest fine in U.S. history,
00:14:24.000the largest criminal fine in U.S. history.
00:14:27.000So I know what happened, but I can't tell you.
00:14:31.000You can't tell me because of the confidentiality agreement?
00:14:40.000You can read what the Department of Justice—you can read the Department of Justice press release, and I would encourage anyone who thinks this story is too crazy to be true to just search Department of Justice and Baxter, And they'll see the story that I just told.
00:14:53.000But none of the real data is available as far as like what they lied about and nothing?
00:15:06.000They were going to pay the amount of the fine, this enormous exorbitant amount, and in the deal it was that the actual details of it would not be divulged?
00:15:31.000When a drug company sponsors a clinical trial and they do the analyses and they write up a manuscript and they say what happened and they send it to a medical journal and it gets peer-reviewed and doctors are trained that they should Read and trust peer-reviewed articles that are well-conducted.
00:16:19.000It's insane and doctors don't know this.
00:16:22.000They're taught this paradigm of evidence-based medicine where good doctors practice evidence-based medicine and that's based on the peer-reviewed articles published in medical journals and the clinical practice guidelines and the doctors don't know that the peer reviewers didn't have access to the data and couldn't perform their independent analyses and The experts who write the clinical practice guidelines don't have access
00:17:39.000They figure out the conditions and exclusions of the people who are in the trials.
00:17:43.000And they do what they can to exercise their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, which is to make this thing come out with data that's going to sell the drug.
00:17:54.000And then after they've done all of that, they own the data.
00:18:01.000How did that ever become the way that system is set up?
00:18:07.000What steps were not put into place to protect people from the kind of fraud that's possible when the pharmaceutical drug companies are the ones who are relaying the data in their interpretation of the data to the peer reviewers?
00:18:24.000I think we drifted into the situation.
00:18:28.000And what made it so important, so destructive to American healthcare is that we don't put a limit on what the drug companies can charge so that our prescription drugs, our brand name prescription drugs cost three and a half times more The same brand name prescription drugs in the other OECD countries,
00:18:52.000Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
00:18:55.000So we have a price that is making this manipulation of data, some people would say BS. The price drives – it creates an enormous incentive.
00:19:09.000And then we don't have what's called health technology assessments.
00:19:13.000So we have no governmental or quasi-governmental oversight that compares the value of new drugs in terms of the therapeutic value and the economic value to old drugs, to older drugs, other available therapies.
00:19:32.000Inform coverage decisions and inform physicians about how best to apply the new therapeutics.
00:19:39.000And we also don't allow—this one is just mind-boggling—we don't allow government-funded cost-effectiveness studies, and we don't allow cost-effectiveness studies to be used in government-funded health care.
00:19:57.000So we've created this situation where the prices are sky high, where the knowledge is not being overseen, and where the cost-effectiveness is not, the government is not allowing cost-effectiveness to get into our dialogue in the way it should be.
00:20:14.000And we're essentially like playing a professional basketball game where the players are calling their own fouls.
00:20:21.000They're paid to win and they're calling their own fouls.
00:20:44.000They're drowning in information and they're under more and more pressure.
00:20:48.000And it's just so they don't understand this.
00:20:52.000Were you aware of how twisted the system was before you started doing this litigation, before you started going over the peer-reviewed papers and finding out where they did it?
00:21:04.000Were you aware of how the system was set up?
00:21:08.000After I finished my residency in family medicine, I did a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship for two years.
00:21:14.000And that was a wonderful training in epidemiology and research design and statistics.
00:21:20.000That's where I got these skills that I came back and drew on.
00:21:24.000But family medicine is very hard in an academic environment.
00:21:28.000The purpose of the fellowship was to train academics in family medicine to increase the prestige of family medicine, which seems like a good idea.
00:21:36.000But family medicine is very difficult in an academic environment because the family docs are low man on the totem pole in the hospital and all the specialists.
00:21:47.000Specialists often don't treat them with the respect they deserve.
00:21:50.000And I decided that my calling was to go be a doctor in a smallish town.
00:22:25.000Whose child died, 14, 17-year-old child died from taking Vioxx, eight samples of Vioxx.
00:22:35.000But Vioxx came along and there was an article in the New England Journal That Merck had sponsored and it said it was safe and was advantageous, not because it was any more effective, but because it reduced the risk of serious GI problems.
00:22:49.000And then there was another article in the New England Journal of Medicine that fessed up to cardiovascular problems, but the review article said I knew that...
00:23:17.000That was crazy because there were only 53 serious GI events, which was the whole reason for selling this $2 billion-a-year drug, was that it was safer on the GI tract, and there were only 53 events.
00:23:32.000So the idea was that that was better than non-steroidal anti-inflammatories?
00:23:36.000Exactly, because it didn't upset the stomach the same way.
00:23:40.000And the science was elegant, and it might have worked, but it didn't.
00:23:43.000And in changing that balance, it made the blood more likely to form clots.
00:23:50.000The physiology was a little more complicated than just stomach or no stomach.
00:23:54.000And is something like this, the issue is the size of the trial, because you could have 10 people and none of them can have a problem, but you could have 10,000 people and you could have quite a few problems.
00:24:07.000So you have to make this study as large as possible so you get all this biological variation between human beings where different things affect different people in different ways?
00:24:18.000And you can have a study of 8,000 people where you leave out three heart attacks And you flip the statistics and claim that there's not a cardiovascular risk.
00:24:33.000And you couldn't tell the fraud from the article in the New England Journal.
00:24:37.000Merck had submitted this data to the New England Journal and they did what peer reviewers do, which is not have the data but make sure that the article makes internal sense.
00:24:52.000Gave a little bit more insight into the cardiovascular problems, but they blew it off as the play of chance because there are only 70 events, and that was crazy.
00:25:01.000And at that point, I was sitting in my office at lunchtime reading, taking a break between sessions, reading this article, and I said, that's it.
00:25:10.000There's something so wrong going on here that it's beyond my comprehension.
00:25:17.000So an article was published in JAMA two weeks later that had a footnote that led to an FDA website that had enough data to see that Merck had been fraudulent about the heart attacks.
00:25:33.000And when I saw that, I said, I'm going to leave practice and I'm going to figure this out.
00:25:39.000And I worked for two years on a book called Overdosed America.
00:25:42.000It was published in 2004. And it had the Vioxx story in it.
00:25:47.000And a week after that book was published, Vioxx was pulled from the market.
00:25:56.000Merck had done a second study that showed the same thing, that the risk of strokes and heart attacks and blood clots was doubled.
00:26:04.000And at that point they had to pull it because they were hiding the data on this first study.
00:26:08.000Now the second study came along and it was clear that the jig was up for them.
00:26:13.000And how long have they been prescribing and distributing Vioxx at that point?
00:26:17.000It came out in May of 99 and that was September of 2004. Wow.
00:26:24.000So between 20 and 25 million Americans had taken Vioxx and between 40 and 60 thousand Americans had died Died from the cardiovascular consequences of Vioxx.
00:26:38.000In the same ballpark as the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.
00:26:42.000Died from taking this drug that was no more effective at treating arthritis or aches and pains than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories and caused 40,000 to 60,000 deaths.
00:26:55.000And what was the punishment for Merck?
00:26:59.000Merck, there were 27,000 plaintiffs in the litigation and they were awarded $4.7 billion.
00:27:06.000Merck sold $12 billion worth of Vioxx in the four and a half years it was on the market.
00:27:11.000So they paid the plaintiffs $4.7 billion and the Department of Justice fined them a little bit under a billion dollars.
00:28:56.000There's slaps on the hand, but usually when the fines are announced by the Department of Justice, the stock goes up because the shareholders are happy to have this burden off.
00:29:06.000It's interesting that both of those drugs, Vioxx and the other one...
00:29:54.000Our physicians' knowledge landscape became dominated by all the people who were dying from GI bleeds, and we had to switch those people from ordinary non-steroidals to Vioxx and Bextra and drugs like that.
00:30:11.000And so you can't tell us exactly what Pfizer did with Bextra, but it was enough to – it was $23 billion?
00:30:41.000I'd have to refresh my memory and I might not be able to tell you even if I did.
00:30:47.000But with Vioxx, we have the data on Vioxx because it did go to litigation in open court.
00:30:55.000And it's clear that they removed three heart attacks that were critical that flipped the statistics and And that's how they sold $12 billion worth of a drug that more than doubled the risk of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.
00:31:12.000Trevor Burrus And these companies are obviously – they don't get disbanded.
00:31:26.000It's very rare for somebody to go to jail.
00:31:28.000And even when they plead guilty to a felony, it's often a – I don't know why this happens, but the Department of Justice allows a subsidiary of the parent company to take the hit so that if there's another flagrant foul, the subsidiary gets – it's called disbarred but prohibited or excluded from the Medicare program.
00:31:51.000The parent company doesn't even take the legal – doesn't get like the legal foul counted against them.
00:32:01.000And so this has obviously all been set up by the pharmaceutical companies.
00:32:07.000They've arranged this somehow or another with the Justice Department or whoever's prosecuting them.
00:32:14.000No, but I mean as far as like these regulations, like how is it possible that they would allow them to have such egregious violations where people die And they also have all these safety nets in play to make sure that people don't go to jail and make sure the parent company doesn't get hit with the fire.
00:32:33.000I mean, that doesn't seem like it's not negotiated.
00:32:37.000It's going too far to assume or to assert?
00:32:56.000Joe, I'm not an expert at what happens at the level of the Department of Justice, but I have a lot of experience about what happens in civil litigation.
00:33:03.000Same drugs, same situation, but civil litigation.
00:33:06.000And a lot of times, the plaintiff's lawyers will settle, they'll make a settlement, and oftentimes bury the data, agree to bury the data in civil litigation.
00:33:17.000And I've been on the inside of some of those decisions.
00:33:21.000And the plaintiffs' lawyers are representing the interests of the people who were injured, and they're trying to get the best deal for them.
00:33:32.000And it's hard to get a jury to understand this.
00:34:22.000Neurontin had been approved for two uses.
00:34:25.000One was as a second-line seizure drug and one was for post-herpes zoster pain.
00:34:34.000Those were the two indications for which Neurontin was approved.
00:34:38.000And let me preface this by saying Neurontin or Gabapentin is still the sixth most frequently prescribed drug in the United States.
00:34:46.000So a lot of insurance companies sued Pfizer for misrepresenting marketing drugs.
00:34:56.000Neurontin off-label use for general pain, mostly.
00:35:01.000Some migraines, some bipolar disorder.
00:35:04.000But Kaiser was the only plaintiff that the judge who was overseeing this litigation allowed because Kaiser creates like a bottleneck through which information comes to doctors.
00:35:18.000So in the other insurers where doctors are getting information from all over the place, the attorneys couldn't prove that Pfizer's marketing had misled the doctors, but they had the opportunity to prove that it had misled the doctors in the Kaiser Health System to prescribe this drug.
00:35:35.000The short of it is that there was a six-week trial.
00:35:38.000I testified in it and would love to talk about that, but that Pfizer, the jury found that Pfizer had committed fraud and racketeering.
00:35:48.000It was the first RICO charge against a drug company.
00:35:52.000It's in civil litigation, so they're not going to RICO jail.
00:36:00.000But when the jury heard the story, and I got to explain it to him, I got to explain it to him standing at an easel next to the jury box as close as I am to you, and explain one of the tricks that Pfizer used to mislead doctors.
00:36:17.000So occasionally it comes out, but again, nobody went to jail.
00:36:21.000What was the trick that Pfizer used to mislead doctors?
00:36:24.000So what they did, this actually is something that I wanted to talk to you about, because it has to do with how you feel about hydroxychloroquine not being approved or not being embraced as a therapy for COVID. What Pfizer did to mislead doctors was there was a randomized controlled trial,
00:36:51.000and it was Neurontin against placebo for the treatment of diabetic painful neuropathy.
00:36:58.000And the guy who did the trial faxed them the results and said, it doesn't look like Neurontin works.
00:37:06.000And Pfizer rejiggered the results, so instead of looking at the comparison between the change in pain level between Neurontin and the placebo group, which wasn't significant, they just looked at the pain level of the people who took the Neurontin.
00:37:23.000And the pain level went down from the beginning of the study to the end.
00:37:27.000But it went down to the placebo group almost as much.
00:37:30.000But when they just showed the Neurontin arm of the randomized controlled trial, which is no longer a randomized controlled trial, they misled doctors and claimed that it was effective.
00:37:44.000So in hydroxychloroquine for COVID, to change the subject a little bit, people get better.
00:37:53.000And that's good when people get better.
00:37:56.000But it's like one arm of a randomized controlled trial.
00:38:02.000I firmly believe that people who want to take hydroxychloroquine, if they get COVID, should be allowed to take it, and they should talk to their doctor, and there should not be this propaganda against it.
00:38:25.000And whether there's a causal relationship or not is the question.
00:38:30.000So if you take 20 people and put them on ivermectin and 19 of them get better, you can't conclude that the ivermectin played a causal relationship.
00:38:45.000I think you can surmise that the ivermectin didn't hurt them if they get better.
00:38:51.000And on the situation that you've talked about, is it okay to talk about this?
00:39:04.000Well, the issue that was really bizarre was that I listed a laundry list of things that I took, and they only focused on ivermectin.
00:39:11.000I talked about all sorts of things that are generally accepted to be effective, like monoclonal antibodies.
00:39:18.000Which I'm now hearing, now I need to find out if this is true, but someone posted that, here I'll try to find it, because it was so weird that I couldn't believe it was true, but that someone in the Biden administration, that they're trying to actively block the distribution of monoclonal antibodies,
00:39:38.000and that someone from Florida is accusing that.
00:39:44.000Accusing the Biden administration of doing that.
00:39:59.000They're saying that they're not effective with Omicron, but they're very effective with Delta, and a lot of people still have Delta.
00:40:06.000It's not like Delta went away, but they're blocking the use of monoclonal antibodies.
00:40:10.000The suspicion is that the Florida Surgeon General sends a terse letter to Health and Human Services concerning monoclonal antibodies.
00:40:18.000Dr. Joseph Ladapo says the state-facing life-threatening shortage of treatment options.
00:40:23.000The idea is the primary concern is the reason why they're doing this is to encourage vaccination only as the only way to treat COVID is to get vaccinated.
00:40:33.000If you don't get vaccinated, you have no other options.
00:40:36.000If you do get COVID and you take monoclonal antibodies, they're extremely effective.
00:40:40.000What was bizarre to me was that I listed off Z-Pak, prednisone, monoclonal antibodies.
00:40:50.000I talked about vitamin IV drips that I took.
00:40:53.000All these different things that I took and I got better really quickly.
00:40:57.000And it became this thing that seemed to be a concentrated effort to demonize and mock this one type of treatment by connecting it to veterinary medicine.
00:41:32.000I can't deny that money played a role.
00:41:34.000I think that the control over the situation, wanting to be in control over the situation also plays a role.
00:41:42.000So the truth is that the NIH has not ruled one way or the other.
00:41:45.000They looked at the data and they said there's not enough data to rule on whether ivermectin is helpful or not.
00:41:53.000If it were a brand name drug at this point, The drug company would do a study that was big enough to show that it's helpful or not, and the question would be over.
00:42:03.000And they are doing that with Pfizer has a new antiviral drug that they're going to release that's similar to what people say ivermectin does.
00:42:13.000Whether that does or not, I don't know.
00:42:14.000Yeah, but that's getting back to our original discussion.
00:42:18.000When there's money involved, You can do the studies.
00:42:21.000And you can make them big enough to make small differences statistically significant.
00:43:46.000Whatever shenanigans are going on, it seems to be there's There's some sort of conspiring against the distribution of monoclonal antibodies.
00:43:55.000And I think it's got to be because of its effectiveness.
00:43:59.000It may be because we can't test fast enough to make a decision.
00:44:03.000It exposes our deficiency on the testing side.
00:44:08.000Well, also, the vaccines were only – you can only get an emergency use authorization if there's no effective treatment.
00:45:53.000I mean the problem they have with that, with monoclonal antibodies, in that you don't have to necessarily be vaccinated for them to be effective.
00:46:02.000The whole idea, the binary approach has been, everyone needs to get vaccinated.
00:46:06.000They keep saying it over and over again, even in light of Omicron, where it shows that it's a vaccine escape variant, or the vaccines aren't effective with it, even though it's mild.
00:47:11.000And it's going to take two to four weeks in before you know what the real damage is.
00:47:18.000So that it may be that the extremely high volume—and we broke the record of cases in a day yesterday— It may be that it certainly looks like it's less virulent.
00:47:32.000But it may be that the higher number of cases is going to create real trouble.
00:47:39.000Because of the strain of the healthcare system?
00:47:42.000Strain of the healthcare system and because we don't know yet how many people are going to get seriously ill and whether the unvaccinated people are going to get more seriously ill than the vaccinated people.
00:47:56.000The data that I'm seeing suggests that that's true.
00:48:48.000Are they not reliant on pharmaceutical drug companies or political entanglements in any way?
00:48:55.000I don't think you can take it out of political entanglements.
00:48:58.000When we look at the FDA and ask the same question, you can see that 61% of the FDA's budget for human products is paid for by the drug companies.
00:49:16.000So that's not hard to connect those dots.
00:49:19.000I'm not sure about the influence on the CDC. So when you look at data, do you always have to take it and put it through a filter of, I wonder what's really going on here, and I wonder how much influence is being exerted on these results?
00:50:02.000This is unfolding in real time, and you got to kind of gestalt the whole situation.
00:50:07.000And much like when I was practicing family medicine, you often don't have all the facts you need to make a decision.
00:50:14.000You got to What are the positives and negatives?
00:50:18.000What are the risks of just going one way than the other?
00:50:21.000And it may turn out that you called it wrong, but you've got to make your best call in real time.
00:50:26.000Now, when you were practicing family medicine and you had to make these calls in terms of medications that you prescribed for patients, how did you do it where you were at least reasonably assured that you were making the right call?
00:50:45.000In the beginning, I trusted the literature.
00:50:48.000I was a hotshot, residency-completed, certified family physician who had done a two-year, essentially, MPH program.
00:50:58.000It was a master of science where I took the courses.
00:51:01.000And I thought I knew a whole lot about medicine.
00:51:05.000And as time went on, that was 1982 when I went into private practice.
00:51:09.000As time went on, it was clear that things were going off the rails.
00:51:14.000I remember I went to a continuing medical education lecture at our local hospital, so-called Grand Rounds at the local hospital.
00:51:21.000And that's the thing that good doctors do is they go and you sort of get a sandwich and you talk to your friends and you get a lecture from an academic doc.
00:51:31.000And I went to a lecture And the guy gave the lecture about a pain drug, and the pain drug had been withdrawn two days before.
00:51:42.000He gave this lecture about why we should prescribe this pain drug, which had been withdrawn because it was causing severe adverse effects.
00:51:52.000And I realized that he had signed his contract to get paid to give that lecture, So he was going to give his lecture, come hell or high water, even though the drug had been withdrawn.
00:52:03.000And at that point, the light went on that this is a commercial proposition that we've got going, that the academics who are coming out to Beverly, Massachusetts to give us a lecture at the Beverly Hospital are getting paid to do that.
00:52:19.000And that we can't trust everything we see.
00:52:22.000And then from there, that was maybe mid-1980s.
00:52:27.000From there until 2001, when I saw that article in the New England Journal of Medicine, I The awareness of the financial manipulation, the commercial manipulation of what we were basing our decisions on had become just overwhelming.
00:52:56.000I think the first phase was 1987. Before that it was known that you could, but there was kind of a gentleman's agreement that you wouldn't.
00:53:05.000And then there was another step that had to do with decreasing the amount of information you had to deliver.
00:53:14.000And you could see our advertisement in men's magazine or men's health or whatever.
00:53:20.000And it was that second step that discharged responsibility for providing information to another source that opened the floodgates.
00:53:33.000So you have gone through a process of understanding the influence that money and the pharmaceutical drug companies have on the data and the way doctors perceive medications.
00:53:54.000And then I was fortunate enough to get on the inside of the We're good to go.
00:54:28.000And what he was talking about was the trials for COVID vaccines.
00:54:33.000And that in one of the trials for COVID vaccines where they had 22,000 people who took the vaccine and 22,000 people who took a placebo.
00:54:41.000The people who took the vaccine, one person in that 22,000 had died of COVID. The people that took the placebo, two people had died of COVID. So because two people is double one people.
00:54:57.000They decided to say that it's 100% effective.
00:55:10.000If two people die out of 10,000 and one person another, there's no way that's statistically significant.
00:55:17.000Right, but is it possible that that's what they said and that they're manipulating data like they did with Vioxx, or is he misinterpreting it?
00:55:26.000I can't believe that anybody beyond a high school education would have done that.
00:55:31.000I can't believe it either, but is there room for fuckery where they could manipulate data to say something like that?
00:55:43.000They do manipulate data, and generally it has to do with presenting relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction.
00:55:55.000So in the case, let's say you got the story that Robert Kennedy relayed correct, that your numbers are correct.
00:56:04.000So the relative risk reduction would be 50%.
00:56:10.000You've got two people on one side and one person on another.
00:56:13.000You've reduced the risk of mortality by 50%.
00:56:19.000The relative risk is 50%, which is an equally outrageous claim.
00:56:25.000The absolute risk reduction is 1 out of 10,000, 0.01%.
00:56:33.000And a lot of times the relative risk reduction will be presented when the real information that people need is the absolute risk reduction.
00:56:41.000Yeah, that's the problem with both sides, right?
00:56:44.000It's the problem with both these pharmaceutical companies to distort information but also the people that distort what the pharmaceutical drug companies are saying to make it seem more outrageous.
00:56:57.000And that's what I'm concerned with when I keep hearing people repeating what he said and he was on the Jimmy Dore show and that's where I listen to that particular assertion.
00:58:16.000There's so much to sort through, especially when you're someone like me who doesn't have an education in this and you're just trying to like read these studies and listen to people talk and trying to figure out what's what.
00:58:49.000For the four years before the COVID pandemic, that many people were dying in the United States because our health and healthcare are so inferior to the other wealthy countries.
00:59:03.0001,300 people a day dying because our age-adjusted mortality rate, which allows you to compare different countries of different ages, is so much worse than the average of 10 wealthy countries.
00:59:18.000And our healthy life expectancy Has gone down from 38th in the world in 2000 to 68th in the world in 2019. We rank 68th in the world in healthy life expectancy.
00:59:40.000The health of Americans is just abominable compared to the other wealthy countries.
00:59:51.000You know, devastating health situation.
00:59:55.000We're spending an extra $1.5 trillion a year.
00:59:59.000We're spending 7% more of our GDP on healthcare than the other wealthy countries are.
01:00:05.000And 7% times a GDP of $22 trillion is $1.5 trillion a year.
01:00:12.000So whatever you think of President Biden's Build Back Better plan, and I'm not getting into politics here, but it's $1.5 trillion, $1.7 trillion that over 10 years that he's arguing for, and this is 10 times that much money that we're pissing away each year while Americans' health ranks 68th in the world.
01:01:23.000They can't control that problem with peer reviewers not having the data.
01:01:26.000But they can do Governmental or quasi-governmental, it's called health technology assessment, where they determine the medical value of new drugs and the economic value of new drugs and make recommendations about covering new drugs.
01:01:47.000And they also control the price of drugs.
01:01:51.000Because with our allowing brand name drugs to be three and a half times more expensive than in the other developed countries, we're creating such an incentive to distort the medical knowledge.
01:02:08.000So we've got a Wild West situation where the drug companies pay PR people and the lobbyists to create this illusion that their innovation is our only hope for a long and healthy life, when that's rarely true.
01:02:25.000In terms of new drugs, new molecular entities that are approved, about one out of four is actually an improvement over a previous drug.
01:02:34.000But in the United States, we don't know that because there's no oversight.
01:02:38.000In the other countries, they're evaluating it.
01:02:41.000So when, for example, insulin analogs come along and replace human recombinant insulin, and they start to jack up the price, and there's no evidence that it's better for type 2 diabetics who use 80% of the insulin in the United States.
01:02:59.000Doctors are bombarded with marketing materials that say you've got to give your type 2 diabetics insulin analogs because it's more physiologic and it reproduces natural insulin function.
01:03:10.000And in the other countries that have health technology assessment, they're saying there's no evidence that it's superior to recombinant human insulin, so use that first.
01:03:18.000If your patient fails on recombinant human insulin, if they have idiosyncratic problems with low blood sugar or anything else, you can use it as a second line drug, but not a first line drug.
01:03:28.000But we're essentially playing this game without, it's like professional athletes not having umpires.
01:03:36.000Now, when you said, you said 68th, United States ranks 68th?
01:03:45.000Yeah, healthy life expectancy is probably the best single measure of the overall health.
01:03:51.000It's how many years you live in good health.
01:03:53.000So if you live to be 86, And you had kidney disease for the last six years that compromised the quality of your life for 50%, then your healthy life expectancy would be 83. So it integrates longevity with the time you spend in good health.
01:04:09.000And do they calculate the factors involved in that?
01:04:12.000How many of the factors are calculated?
01:04:20.000Like recreational drugs, nicotine, alcohol, like what are the factors that lead us to be so poorly represented there?
01:04:28.000Right, so one of the issues that I'm sure you've heard of is the diseases of despair that Professors Deaton and Case, Professor Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize winner and his wife is a professor at Princeton as well.
01:04:45.000They wrote a book about diseases of despair And how non-college educated white Americans are having an epidemic of drug overdoses and suicides and liver disease.
01:05:03.000And that it has to do with the economic context that the...
01:05:10.000Wages and quality of life are not as high.
01:05:13.000That people's expectations about how their lives are going to unfold and having families and living independently and owning a house have gone down.
01:05:23.000And that all that adds up to these diseases of despair causing 100 deaths out of 100,000 workers.
01:05:34.000White Americans, and they chose ages between 50 and 54, but you could take any age group.
01:05:43.000But the important fact here, that's true, and that's awful.
01:05:48.000But the increased death rate in that group is not 100 per 100,000, but 400 per 100,000.
01:05:55.000And the other 300 deaths have to do with cardiovascular disease and diabetes and all the things that die of.
01:06:03.000But those folks are exposed to the social pressures that are compromising their health.
01:06:11.000This is a long answer to your short question.
01:06:14.000So my opinion, what I tell you as a medical fact, I stand by.
01:06:21.000My opinion on this is that since 1980, the United States has had a radical growth in economic inequality.
01:06:31.000That essentially the share of the income pie has been so distorted to the wealthy that it's like the average family living at the median income level of $55,000 with 2.6 people in their household.
01:06:50.000If they were getting the same share of the income pie that they got in 1980, As they are now, they would have $20,000 more a year.
01:07:01.000But as it stands now, that $20,000 is transferred from people who are working hard and trying to keep their kids in clothes and pay their bills to the top 1%.
01:07:12.000So it's like the working people in America are donating $20,000 per family to the top 1%.
01:07:20.000And that's having a disastrous effect.
01:07:24.000This is kind of an interesting sidetrack, right?
01:07:28.000Because now we're talking about economics.
01:07:30.000But is there a way that that could be switched?
01:07:33.000Is there a way that that could be somehow or another re-diverted?
01:08:15.000You could do it with inheritance taxes.
01:08:18.000The problem people have with taxes, whether this is accurate or not, is that no one trusts the government to do well with that money.
01:08:27.000No one trusts the bureaucracy and the nonsense and red tape that's involved in our over-bloated government to the point where they're like, yeah, I'd be more than happy to give them extra money because I know they're going to do with it very good things.
01:09:07.000The union membership is down by two-thirds.
01:09:11.000And some of the laws that have passed about right to work and so forth have made it harder for unions to hold their grip.
01:09:20.000But in 1952, we had the professors Deaton and Case that I referred to a minute ago from Princeton.
01:09:29.000They coined the term blue-collar aristocracy, that in the post-war years, in the 35 years after World War II, The blue-collar Americans were living well.
01:09:44.000They were getting, as our economy grew after World War II, blue-collar workers were getting their fair share.
01:09:52.000And the economist John Kenneth Galbraith attributed this to the countervailing power of government.
01:10:00.000So you've got business on one hand, trying to make money, and In those years, business had a broader definition of their primary responsibility.
01:10:29.000In 1980, 1981, when President Reagan was inaugurated and he said government's not the solution, it's the problem, and the libertarian economists were given great sway, we moved towards this anti-regulation free market ethos that led to this massive distribution of Maldistribution of wealth.
01:10:57.000So the French economist Thomas Piketty says the United States now has what is probably the greatest inequality of wages, of income from labor, that's ever existed in the history of the earth.
01:11:29.000And what we've got is social media that is making money from inflaming the extremes and drowning out the center that's trying to get to reasonable solutions.
01:11:56.000And it's being used by the vast majority of people and it's being used through algorithms which favor what is more inflammatory, what people gravitate towards, what's going to get your eyeballs and get your clicks.
01:12:11.000And we're really not designed – we don't have the discipline to handle it.
01:12:15.000We're not designed emotionally or intellectually to be able to mitigate the influence of this stuff.
01:12:26.000So is there maybe – Maybe there could be a way where companies could make it a very public part of their policy that they pay great wages and that they take care of their workers and that they do this because they recognize that they also have a responsibility to do well for the community and not just make money but do this and proclaim it publicly in a way that people would gravitate towards their
01:12:57.000business as opposed to a business that's I agree.
01:13:08.000And in order to make that transition, you've got to make the private equity investors and the stock investors and the institutional investors Happy along the way because they want to see every last time that you can squeeze out of the proposition.
01:13:22.000And if they don't get it from that company, they'll get it from another company.
01:13:24.000Well, if they don't get it from those managers, they'll get new managers.
01:13:27.000So in sickening, we get to the same place in healthcare.
01:13:36.000I can tell you what's wrong, but how the hell do we fix it?
01:13:40.000And we fix it with exactly the solution that you've proposed, that the constituencies that are affected need to move into positions of power in society.
01:13:50.000So we've got the constituencies are the doctors who are not getting good information.
01:13:59.000And the doctor's got to understand that this is a very serious problem and that they're trusted to be learned intermediaries to apply medical science in the service of the patients, and they can't do it under these circumstances.
01:14:13.000And we've got businesses, non-healthcare-related businesses, that are paying a fortune for their health care and losing their competitiveness, and they should be in on this.
01:14:25.000And most of all, we've got consumers who want the best health.
01:14:29.000But in order for each of those constituencies to become competent political activists, they've got to understand what's going on.
01:14:59.000There's these people that really don't have anything to look forward to, and this is what alleviates some of their horrible feeling is to just get drugged up.
01:15:09.000And the drug companies were very willing to make a buck doing it.
01:15:39.000So you would go to this pain management center, you go to the doctor and you say, hey doctor, my back is killing me.
01:15:44.000The doctor said, well you needed some OxyContin, son.
01:15:47.000And they would write you a prescription.
01:15:48.000You would literally go right next door and they would have the pills for you.
01:15:51.000And they also did not have a digital database.
01:15:55.000So you could go to Jamie and get a prescription from Jamie and then leave him and then go to another doctor, Mike, right down the street and get a prescription from him and you could do it all day long and people were doing this and then they were selling these pills on the Oxycontin Express.
01:16:12.000They drove it straight up into Kentucky and Ohio and You know, wherever the highway took it.
01:16:17.000And they were seeing how there was a direct chain of events where these people were going to these pill mills, stockpiling all these pills, and then they were selling them into these other states and making a lot of money.
01:16:30.000So you see the synergy between the folks whose lives aren't working out the way they wanted to, and they're miserable, and maybe they're miserable because of back pain, or maybe they're miserable because life doesn't have the meaning they hoped it did.
01:16:42.000And you have the drug company, which is telling doctors that they've got a new product that's less addictive.
01:16:49.000It's so much less addictive that you can treat non-cancer pain and not get into trouble with it.
01:16:56.000That it lasts 12 hours, but they know it doesn't last 12 hours.
01:17:00.000And when it wears off before 12 hours, they tell the doctors to increase the dose because that means they're not taking enough, not that their drug doesn't last 12 hours.
01:17:08.000And that it can't be abused and people are crushing it and putting it in a straw and shooting it up and so forth.
01:17:16.000So you've got the drug company that's an actor.
01:17:19.000And you've got the social circumstances where people are hurting, whether it's medical hurting or spiritual hurting or whatever you want to call it.
01:17:30.000And without the appropriate oversight of the drugs The faucet, the spigots turned on.
01:17:38.000And that's, in this country, has been one of the most egregious offenses by the pharmaceutical drug companies is distorting the data on the addictive properties of opiates.
01:18:29.000I thought I saw that they were literally attributing 100,000 deaths.
01:18:33.000They were saying it's the number one cause of death between people age 18 to 49, which is insane that we're not hearing about this, because it's such a large number of people.
01:18:43.000This should be something that's on the news every day.
01:18:45.000It should be something that terrifies folks.
01:18:53.000So the drug overdose death top 100,000 annually for the first time driven by fentanyl.
01:18:59.000So it's all kinds of drug overdoses, but drug overdoses are the number one cause of death between people 18 to 49. But Joe, here's the problem.
01:19:09.000Drug overdoses are the number one cause of death.
01:19:13.000But that accounts for only a quarter of the excess deaths in that age group.
01:19:50.000These other countries, I mean, I'm not totally familiar with France and what their food choices are like, but do they rely as heavily on fast food as we do?
01:21:04.000The thing about the government stepping in and being this regulatory body that oversees it is like we actually need someone to oversee them as well.
01:21:13.000I wish someone could think of how to do it.
01:21:15.000But we need to recreate the center with authority so that you can't make a whole bunch of money selling fat food to poor people.
01:21:26.000And you can't make a whole bunch of money lying about your drugs and getting them covered by Medicare or private insurance.
01:21:39.000I mean, the divisions in this country are...
01:21:42.000Are predictable and it's because the center doesn't hold.
01:21:46.000Yeah, that's – it's pretty – it's pretty – It's confusing and it's disheartening because you look at this and you go, there's no clear way out of this.
01:22:01.000There's no real clear path where we just pass this law or elect this person and all of our problems are going to go away.
01:22:09.000These are compounding problems that seem to be getting worse every year.
01:22:31.000And when the constituencies that are coming out on the short end Learn.
01:22:37.000They need to learn about what's going on and then become...
01:22:41.000They can't be politically active until they understand what's going on.
01:22:45.000And I am hoping that the six years I dedicated to writing this book will help people to understand that the health care that they're getting, which we believe is the best in the world, It's the worst among the wealthy nations.
01:23:43.000How we can repair it is by the constituencies that are affected becoming knowledgeable and politically active.
01:23:53.000If the consumers who want to be healthy And instead of putting their hope in Adjahelm to reverse Alzheimer's disease when there's no evidence that it does that, if the consumers Would understand that 80% of their health comes from how they live their lives.
01:24:56.000That's just having the government pick up the money.
01:24:59.000That doesn't help to contain the costs.
01:25:01.000It makes it better for somebody who needs insulin.
01:25:04.000But it doesn't help to contain the costs or rationalize the use of insulin, insulin analogs and human recombinant insulin.
01:25:13.000So the consumers need to represent their interests.
01:25:16.000And their interests are to live the longest, healthiest lives they can.
01:25:21.000It's not to get the most expensive medicines.
01:25:23.000It's not to invest so much money in medical innovation that we can't invest in social services.
01:25:29.000It's to live the longest, healthiest lives that we can.
01:25:33.000Business, fair business people who want to run an honest business, pay their employees a decent wage and make an honorable product, they're getting ripped off.
01:25:47.000And they need to get into this in some kind of buyer's trust to control the price of the new drugs.
01:25:55.000Say, we're big enough now, so we're just not going to buy your new drug at that price.
01:26:01.000So how are drug prices regulated currently?
01:26:04.000Like, say, if Pfizer comes out with this new medication that's an antiviral medication for COVID, how do they decide how much each pill costs?
01:26:28.000If you charge, you know, a billion dollars per pill, you're not going to sell many and you're not going to make much money.
01:26:35.000But they will price their drug to determine how much money they're going to make, to maximize the money they're going to make.
01:26:43.000And so they have to realize that if you make it too expensive, everyone can't afford it.
01:26:48.000So you have to make it just expensive enough so that they can maximize their profit and the most amount of people can afford it?
01:26:54.000No, that's too kind because it's not a real market like that because most of the drug is paid for by insurance.
01:27:01.000So people, it's not Adam Smith's economy where you go and buy the bread or the beer from the one who's selling quality products for a fair price.
01:27:13.000The consumer is only worried about the copay, or most consumers are only worried about the copay.
01:27:18.000So what you do is you get a pharmaceutical benefits manager, a middleman, and you say to them, we'll give you a rebate, which really means kickback.
01:27:34.000If you place this drug that doesn't have therapeutic advantage over less effective drugs higher in the formulary so it has a lower copay, we'll give you, the PBM manager, a rebate.
01:27:47.000So it's this whole other level of chicanery that's going on.
01:27:52.000So, the drug company is thinking about how are they going to get their drug.
01:27:58.000It's not how do we price this so consumers can afford it so we sell a high volume.
01:28:03.000It's how do we get this drug marketed to PBMs, pharmaceutical benefits managers, so that they'll let us give them a rebate and have an advantageous tiering.
01:28:16.000The thing that's missing in this equation is nobody's saying, wait a minute, there's a ceiling on this.
01:28:39.000It's crazy, and it gets crazier because when the Democrats passed—it was H.R. 3, the Democrats in the House passed the drug Medicare negotiation bill in 2019— That they would negotiate the price of 25 to 50 of the most revenue-consuming drugs.
01:29:01.000And the CBO said that that would cost $456 billion in pharmaceutical profits over the next 10 years.
01:29:13.000Went into this spasm of saying this is going to be a nuclear winter for drug innovation and you're not going to get the drugs that you need to be healthy.
01:29:21.000Meanwhile, the drug companies, instead of $456 billion in 10 years, had just spent $577 billion in cash buying back their own stock to jack up their stock prices between 2016 and 2020. So they're out there saying,
01:29:39.000if you control our drug prices, you won't have any more innovative drugs, and they're buying back their stock.
01:29:45.000And since 2020, they have another $500 billion in cash that they're going to use to buy startup companies and inflate the price of the new drugs that are coming online.
01:29:56.000There's so many layers of fuckery that you have to pay attention to with all this stuff.
01:30:15.000But what you do need to know is that the drug company is in the business of making money, and they do it very well, and they will continue to do it ever better until they're stopped.
01:30:28.000And we might as well stop them sooner rather than later.
01:30:40.000But for all those folks out there who are afraid of what I'm saying because I'm going to destroy the market, the market's going to get destroyed if this keeps going.
01:30:50.000And if you believe in the market, you better get it to work.
01:30:54.000Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, wrote in 1962, he wrote a book called Capitalism and Freedom.
01:31:01.000And he said there's only three legitimate functions of government.
01:31:05.000To preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, and number three...
01:31:16.000Is to ensure that private markets work.
01:31:20.000Law and order, enforce contracts, ensure that markets work.
01:31:32.000When the drug companies commit fraud and felonies and whatnot, they pay their price, take their slap on the hand and move along.
01:31:40.000So is the fear that if you punish Pfizer more robustly or more fairly, as a lot of people would think, that they're going to go under and they're not going to make medicine anymore and then people are going to die or their quality of life is going to deteriorate because there's not going to be the innovation,
01:31:59.000the medical innovation that leads to these pharmaceutical drugs they need?
01:32:03.000That's what Pfizer would like you to believe.
01:32:08.000There's plenty of money to be made, honestly.
01:32:10.000But if Pfizer really wanted to be a responsible corporation, they would say, let's have health technology assessment.
01:32:20.000So our drugs are tested fairly and are used appropriately.
01:32:26.000And if the medical journals wanted to be responsible players in this nexus, they would say, let's insist that the data from the clinical trials is available to the peer reviewers.
01:32:42.000So, in the case of Vioxx, let's say this.
01:32:44.000Let's just say, for instance, what do you think would happen?
01:32:47.000What if, when that went down, a bunch of people went to jail?
01:32:53.000I mean, they went to jail for 25, 30 years.
01:32:55.000What if the company got stripped of all of its assets?
01:32:58.000What if all that money was funneled to the victims?
01:33:01.000What if they made, you know, a public display of, like, real punitive damages?
01:33:09.000Do you think that would have changed the way the pharmaceutical drugs operate in this country, the way the pharmaceutical companies operate?
01:33:33.000Absolutely it would have changed behavior.
01:33:35.000And if the people who masterminded the OxyContin scandal were at risk not just of losing their last eight billion or whatever it is, but going to jail, that too would change it.
01:33:50.000But we've got this sort of system where it's somehow, you used a term that was like an agreement, but somehow this isn't working properly.
01:34:08.000There's not what Milton Friedman said, is that the government needs to make sure that law and order is maintained, that private markets work.
01:34:18.000Now, when you see the way the system is established currently with pharmaceutical drug companies, with just the whole medical industry, and you see the future, where do you think it's going?
01:34:34.000Like, is it going to continue to deteriorate?
01:34:37.000Do you think there's some hope that we will have some common sense regulations that are put into place to try to Move this into a more beneficial direction, or do you think people are just going to continue to make as much money as they possibly can, extract it from the system at their own personal gain,
01:35:19.000But they're going to make $36 billion.
01:35:21.000They're going to make $65 billion in two years.
01:35:25.000Now, they're going to make that money with most of their doses being sold in the first world.
01:35:31.000They and Moderna both declined to actively participate in creating the development of the capacity to manufacture drugs in underdeveloped countries.
01:35:42.000So in May of 2021, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the World Health Organization got together and said, we need $50 billion right now To get vaccines to the third world,
01:36:02.000and we need to get 40% vaccination rate in the third world before the end of 2021, which we're now at, or we're going to have $9 trillion in economic losses from COVID spreading and from variants that emerge out of under-vaccinated countries.
01:36:23.000Now, there were 17 individuals at that point who had made $50 billion from the vaccines.
01:37:43.000And they offered to release their patent, but they didn't make any effort to help any country with the know-how that's necessary to put the patent into action And build a plant to manufacture the drugs.
01:37:59.000So Pfizer said it's dangerous for them financially?
01:38:11.000I assume that he was referring to it will decrease innovation down the line because we won't make so much money that we won't be able to innovate.
01:38:44.000But I would not count my chickens on that one because I think you're going to have a huge population of vulnerable people and without them being vaccinated and with all those doses going to the first world for first dollar,
01:39:00.000it's like we're building this huge swimming pool and we've created for ourselves a no-peeing zone in the swimming pool And we think we're going to be just dandy because we are allowed to swim in the no-peeing zone and we're going to get dirty.
01:39:12.000Now, the ivermectin proponents and hydroxychloroquine proponents, they point to that as the wide distribution of ivermectin in Africa because of river blindness and dengue and yellow fever and that it's a very cheap generic drug that's commonly distributed.
01:39:27.000They also say that in India as far as Uttar Pradesh, like how they have essentially eliminated COVID. What do you think about that?
01:39:37.000Well, first let me say that I've said a lot of bad things about drug companies.
01:39:42.000Merck was the most respected drug company for seven years in a row, starting in 1987. And during that run, the CEO, Ivermectin, was developed by Merck during that run.
01:39:53.000And the CEO, Dr. Vagelos, Made a program with the World Trade Organization to give ivermectin away to the areas of Africa that were at risk of river blindness.
01:41:22.000I don't think so, but this is a very easy problem to solve.
01:41:26.000I mean, you've got a natural experiment.
01:41:29.000Usually you say for better or worse, but for worse, Africa has a very low vaccination rate.
01:41:34.000I think it's 8%, up from 6% to 8%, but a very low vaccination rate.
01:41:39.000You could go in there and do a randomized controlled trial where you gave 100,000 people ivermectin At whatever interval the proponents think would be effective, and give another 100,000 people a placebo, and you'd have your answer pretty quickly.
01:42:10.000The NIH is on the record, to their credit, of saying that there's not enough evidence to say it does not work and there's not enough evidence to say it does work.
01:42:20.000So that's certainly an invitation for somebody to fund a study.
01:42:24.000The problem is even if they did fund it, like you were saying before that these studies, the vast majority of them are funded by these pharmaceutical companies.
01:42:33.000Why would they do that for a study for a drug that's generic?
01:42:37.000That would be a good role for government, wouldn't it?
01:42:41.000It would be a good role for government.
01:42:42.000But again, the entanglement between money, politics, the pharmaceutical drug companies and the influence that they have and lobbyists, there's so much to fucking clean up.
01:43:00.000I think I have a little more faith than you do.
01:43:04.000I think if there were a government-funded study, if the NIH said we're going to fund a study, a massive study, and it's an ethical study because we don't know whether ivermectin works or not, Sometimes you can't do it.
01:43:19.000I mean, you can't give monoclonal antibody or a placebo because monoclonal antibodies work.
01:43:25.000But this would be an ethical study because we genuinely don't know the answer to the question.
01:43:39.000There was a government-funded study called the Diabetes Prevention Program done in the 1990s.
01:43:46.000They took people at very high risk of diabetes, so-called pre-diabetics, and they randomized them to a control group, to a group that got treated with the diabetes drug metformin, or to an exercise group.
01:44:01.000And you couldn't mask the exercise group, but everybody got a placebo pill.
01:44:07.000So the question was not, does this drug, which was on patent at the time, does this drug help to prevent diabetes, high-risk people from developing diabetes?
01:44:48.000We went on to develop these fantastically expensive diabetes drugs instead of programs to get people to make the lifestyle changes that that study showed you can get people to make and they're effective at preventing diabetes.
01:45:00.000Now, what are the steps they take to get people to make lifestyle choices?
01:46:20.000So you're kind of acting like a psychologist in that way.
01:46:23.000Well, I would like to say family doctor, but...
01:46:26.000Right, but you're talking about the psychological aspect of motivation.
01:46:31.000What stops people is procrastination, laziness, and then self-sabotage.
01:46:38.000They're feeling and not being told what to do by their father, being beaten up by their brother, whatever it is.
01:46:45.000But yeah, one-on-one, it was pretty successful.
01:46:48.000But the point is not that I claim to be a good behavior modification guy, but that in this randomized controlled trial, Where people were randomly assigned to go to these counselors and have these sessions, I forget, one every fourth week or something,
01:47:05.000and then they tapered down and then they turned into group sessions, that it worked.
01:47:09.000They lost weight, they started exercising, and they prevented diabetes.
01:47:16.000I think the idea that it doesn't work and doctors can't motivate people to change, I think that's drug company You're a word that ends in E-R-Y. You said it already.
01:47:36.000Yeah, I think that's the healthcare systems controlling things and trying to make more money.
01:47:41.000I don't know about if I agree with you on that because I think it's just there's a problem with human nature and you know, I've been around fitness and involved in martial arts most of my life and There's always been an issue getting people motivated.
01:47:57.000There's always been an issue with people self-sabotaging.
01:47:59.000There's always been an issue with discipline and It's a very difficult thing for people to acquire discipline.
01:48:04.000And that's one of the reasons why people like David Goggins or Cameron Haynes or these incredibly disciplined people that talk about it are so appreciated.
01:48:16.000Because the motivation of listening to a guy like Goggins talk about discipline, it actually, you can impart some of it or rubs off on some people and get you to throw your sneakers on and go for a run.
01:48:28.000It really will get someone to sign up at a gym and maybe get some of those first baby steps going and develop some sort of a habit.
01:48:37.000It's one of the most difficult things to do to motivate people that are sedentary into changing the way they live their life.
01:48:43.000It is, but again, this is a randomized controlled trial.
01:48:47.000I think most of the science we see is commercially motivated and it's biased and so forth.
01:48:52.000This was a randomized controlled trial.
01:48:55.000And these people lost, I think, 10 pounds and sustained it.
01:49:00.000And they exercised five times a week and sustained it.
01:49:03.000The difference in there, though, is that these random, this trial, these people are part of a trial, and they're also recognizing that, you know, they're getting a wake-up call because they're pre-diabetic.
01:49:14.000So they're realizing, like, hey, do I love my children?
01:49:22.000Like, the time is now, and you're also now a part of a trial.
01:49:26.000So there's a thing where you're in a group and, you know, you sign up for it.
01:49:30.000Now you're part of this thing with a lot of other people and they're giving you these steps and you start taking them and then you see positive results.
01:49:47.000But if it's being in a trial, I think you raise a good point.
01:49:53.000But maybe we should put everyone in a trial.
01:49:55.000Maybe that's what the social science says.
01:49:57.000I think everyone should belong to some sort of an organization, like a local community gym that has exercise programs and classes and things like that.
01:50:08.000And I think if there's something that we could do, you know, there's this—people are—they hate the concept of socialism, and I understand why, but— If there was anything that I think that we could benefit from, like our taxes go to things that we all agree are important that aid the community.
01:50:26.000That is kind of a socialist thing, like the fire department.
01:50:30.000It has nothing to do with how much money you make, right?
01:50:34.000The fire department is there to put out fires.
01:50:40.000I think there would be extreme benefit if that same sort of thing was in place for nutrition and the same sort of thing was in place for exercise.
01:50:50.000That was a part of being a part of this community.
01:50:54.000Part of being a part of this community is you have access to the gym.
01:50:58.000As far as all the other luxuries and all the things that people want, televisions and cars, you got to work for that.
01:51:04.000But just the basic necessities of life, nutrition and to enhance your experience as a person, exercise and education and especially exercise in terms of like a group dynamic because then it gets everybody motivated because you're doing it with a bunch of other people in class.
01:51:49.000So you say, well, we don't have the money for it.
01:51:52.000It costs $20 billion a year to do that for everybody who needs it.
01:51:56.000Well, it happens to be that we're wasting about that much money by giving insulin analogs instead of human recombinant insulin to type 2 diabetics.
01:52:05.000And if we just spent that money rationally in helping people to straighten out their lives and exercise and prevent the disease and feel better, We'd be a much better society.
01:52:16.000But as it unfolds, Big Pharma controls so much of how doctors think the best way to treat diabetics is that they're taking that $20 billion and they're spending it on insulin that is more expensive, like 11 times more expensive than is necessary.
01:52:33.000I don't understand this insulin thing.
01:52:46.000So you got to go back to 1982. In the 70s, genetic engineering was coming along.
01:52:55.000The scientific infrastructure for genetic engineering of drugs was coming along.
01:53:03.000And once they figured out how to insert human DNA code into E. coli bacteria or yeast or whatever the organism they wanted to use was, once they figured that out, they wanted a drug.
01:53:16.000And the obvious drug was insulin, because people who have diabetes were using insulin that came from cattle and pigs.
01:53:24.000And it was a pretty easy sell to say, look, this bioengineered insulin is pure We're good to go.
01:53:47.000Which is exactly like human insulin, amino acid for amino acid.
01:53:53.000And more than 90% of the insulin prescriptions flipped over very quickly when bioengineered insulin came out in 1982. Unfortunately, there was no evidence that it was superior to animal insulin.
01:54:09.000And the Cochrane reviews that came out afterwards said no difference.
01:54:38.000It was a lot more expensive than the animal insulin, but not very expensive.
01:54:41.000So the innovators said, well, now what do we do?
01:54:46.000We got this insulin and it's cheap, and now how are we going to make another buck to make our investors happy?
01:54:52.000And in 1996, they came out with these Insulin analogs that are just slightly changed and amino acid or two are changed and supposedly they more closely mimic the actual natural secretion of insulin in the body.
01:55:36.000Beyond what medical science showed was beneficial, but they could claim that the insulin analogs could get you down there more safely with less hypoglycemia.
01:55:50.000They hired an advertising firm, and they sold this standard of getting hemoglobin A1c down to 7, that that was good control, even though there wasn't evidence of medical benefit.
01:56:08.000And the manufacturers created bonus programs if doctors had a certain percentage of their patients controlled like that.
01:56:16.000And then nonprofit organizations like the National Committee for Quality Assurance Adopted that standard and they certify outpatient healthcare providers as being high quality and they define that as a high quality issue to have a standard of a hemoglobin A1c of 7 or less.
01:56:39.000And then a study came out in the New England Journal that showed that diabetics who were more tightly controlled had a higher risk of dying, published in the New England Journal.
01:57:12.000Meanwhile, we're not doing the exercise program that you know would not only prevent diabetes, but heart disease and stroke and everything else, and people would be happier and their families would be better and the community would be better.
01:57:30.000And when you extrapolate, when you look at where we're at, and then you go to 10 years from now, 20 years from now, it seems like the direction we're on, this is only going to be worse.
01:57:42.000It's only going to get more entangled.
01:57:53.000It's going to be accelerated because these drugs, the vaccines and the drugs for COVID are going to be effective, I hope.
01:58:02.000But why should a company be allowed to charge a government $25 for a vaccine when it cost them about $3 to make and much of the technology was done by the NIH anyway?
01:58:21.000Why should Pfizer be selling $65 billion worth of vaccine when their profit margin, one of the stock analysts said their profit margin after the first year or two is going to be 60 or 80%.
01:58:37.000Because they spend so much in lobbying and so much in political contributions and they're nonpartisan in their political, bipartisan in their political The Democrats get paid and the Republicans get paid.
01:59:50.000And I think we should have more than one drug available.
01:59:53.000But what you're saying makes a lot of sense that there's no evidence that this is beneficial, it's superior, but yet they've sold this to people based on no science and for extreme amounts of profit.
02:00:10.000When you wrote this book, while you're writing this, is there any moment where you're, because I'm looking at this book and I'm hearing you talk and there's an incredible amount of data that you have to go over when you're doing something like this.
02:01:08.000I don't want to use the word conspiracy.
02:01:11.000But the drug companies are working with the journals and selling them back reprints or buying back reprints of the articles.
02:01:22.000And the journals part of the deal is not to ask for the data.
02:01:26.000And the academic medical centers are working with the drug companies and giving them more control than you would think academics would give to private industry because they're making money.
02:01:37.000The institutions are making money and the researchers are making money.
02:01:44.000And the physician societies, the professional organizations, are getting paid by drug companies.
02:02:25.000The market failure is so comprehensive that it's got all the parties' impression of how medicine should be run in the United States going in their direction.
02:03:39.000When a drug company does a clinical trial, they do what's called—they get all the patient forms and truckloads of data, and they put them on electric—they digitize it.
02:03:52.000And then they produce what's called a clinical study report.
02:03:57.000It doesn't have the raw data in it, but it has all the data tabulated.
02:04:04.000And as I got along in litigation, I got pretty good at reading these clinical study reports.
02:04:10.000You know, in maybe 10 hours or 20 hours, I could figure out what happened, what didn't happen.
02:04:14.000And occasionally, I needed to go back and have a statistician get the primary data.
02:04:18.000But what I'm saying is that there's no reason in the world why medical journals wouldn't require the clinical study report to be submitted with a manuscript for publication.
02:05:12.000Because you have to substitute that money then, right?
02:05:15.000How do you – like if someone already has this incentive and they're making this profit, how do you get them to abandon that profit for the greater good of mankind when they figure it – you have that diffusion of responsibility aspect of it because there are so many doctors and so much money and there's like,
02:06:09.000So doctors are the same way, and if they're making this money, From these pharmaceutical companies?
02:06:16.000Well, most of them are not making money.
02:06:18.000You know, they may take some lunch and they may take a trip now and then, but they're not making—most of the doctors are not making big money.
02:06:24.000Most of the doctors is just incentivized by other methods.
02:06:28.000Because the drug companies have taken over what they think is evidence-based medicine.
02:06:34.000Most of them are trying to be good docs.
02:06:36.000And they're just naive to the influence that the drug companies have on these journals, like you were perhaps in the 80s?
02:06:47.000That's scary because that means that they think that they're acting in good faith and that they're doing a good job and they're using evidence-based medicine and, in fact, they're getting manipulated.
02:07:30.000And there's an organization called the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors that's in a perfect position to just say stop it.
02:07:39.000We'll all stop it together so no journal is disadvantaged by demanding the data.
02:07:46.000How much of an impact do you think that would have?
02:07:48.000I mean, it seems like this manipulation of data in order to ensure profits is a part of their business model.
02:07:56.000It's a part of the way they act and operate.
02:07:58.000And a lot of this is because of this constant growth paradigm where every year, and this is what scares me about these current years, because of the amount of money that's being generated by the vaccines.
02:08:12.000How do you tell them, like, what if COVID goes away and there's no need for these vaccines anymore?
02:08:18.000How do they recreate these golden years of profit?
02:08:37.000I'm not sure it's that much of a problem.
02:08:39.000I mean, this is a windfall profits for COVID. But they're sitting on $500 billion right now.
02:08:47.000That money is probably going to be used, at least in large part, to buy drugs in development by smaller pharmaceutical companies, startups and companies that are funded by the NIH to do research.
02:09:02.000But they'll be finding other targets to aim drugs at.
02:09:07.000And I think that's where you get Adjahelm, the story.
02:09:10.000Have you talked about that on a podcast?
02:09:17.000Adjahelm is a drug for Alzheimer's disease that got approved a few months ago, despite the fact that the FDA Advisory Committee voted 10 not to approve it.
02:09:37.000And the reason why the 10 voted not to approve it is because the studies showed that it did not have a clinically meaningful benefit.
02:09:46.000It decreases amyloid plaque in the brain, which is associated, not necessarily causal, but associated with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and progression of Alzheimer's disease.
02:09:57.000So this drug decreases the accumulation of the amyloid plaque, but it doesn't make a significant improvement in clinical status, and it has about a 33% incidence of brain side effects,
02:10:29.000They did a backdoor move where the FDA said they weren't going to approve it because it hadn't shown efficacy.
02:10:35.000And there was some back-channel communication between FDA and one of the people in Biogen, executives in Biogen, which is the manufacturer.
02:10:43.000And they came up with this scheme to have it approved on a I don't know if it was emergency use or some accelerated approval.
02:12:34.000And NPR covered it in a favorable light?
02:12:36.000Well, they reported a true fact, which is that it reduces amyloid, but they didn't pick up that there are 27 studies that have been done that the FDA wrote a memo about of drugs that reduced amyloid, and none of them improved Alzheimer's.
02:12:52.000And they also didn't talk about, was it 33% of the adverse side effects?
02:13:12.000It's like that's the problem that we really worry about when it comes to pharmaceutical drug companies, that they're going to do things like this.
02:13:18.000And they're going to use their influence to push stuff like that through.
02:13:21.000And they're going to do it because they are a profit-generating machine.
02:13:24.000And that's what scares me about the amount of power and money that they've amassed during the COVID years.
02:13:36.000Also, their social status has changed.
02:13:41.000They've gone from being, in many people's eyes, a pariah because of things like Vioxx, because of the opioid epidemic, to being a savior of a public health crisis.
02:14:21.000When you look at their history, they're serial abusers.
02:14:27.000People say that drug companies are too greedy and blah blah.
02:14:31.000The problem is that their job is to make money.
02:14:34.000That's what their job is and they do it.
02:14:37.000And if the American people and the American government let them do it, shame on us.
02:14:45.000So clearly there has to be some sort of course correction, but how do you do that when these pharmaceutical drug companies have so much influence?
02:15:15.000Almost all Americans are getting ripped off and harmed and physically harmed, economically harmed and physically harmed, by what's going on.
02:15:25.000And if democracy is going to work, we've got to be able to make progress.
02:15:42.000Especially when it's such a large part of our life.
02:15:45.000You know, medicine and healthcare and being able to go to the doctor and find some sort of a viable solution to whatever your health issue is for you or your family.
02:16:00.000I mean, just trusting your doctor, it has a lot of health benefit to trust if you have a doctor you trust.
02:16:07.000And now people look at me and say, wait a minute, you're throwing a wrench in all this and you're getting people not to trust their doctor.
02:16:13.000And, you know, I guess it's true a little bit, but let's move to a higher state here.
02:16:19.000Well, I think you have sympathy for the doctor's position as well because you were in that shoe once.
02:16:52.000Yeah, I've thought about ways other than having healthy people come on the podcast and influence people and sort of motivate people.
02:17:00.000I've thought of ways that I could contribute to that and I'm not exactly sure other than like opening up a chain of gyms and making it free for people.
02:17:09.000I don't know what else I could do to sort of inspire people to do things.
02:17:13.000Maybe put together some sort of an online program that's free where it allows people to Check in with other people that are in the same sort of situation and motivate them to participate and have readily available classes and things you could follow along online in a free form like a YouTube type deal?
02:17:51.000I think if you and other people like you who are social influencers, who understand that individual responsibility is just so important here, worked with that program.
02:18:04.000That maybe together you could make—you could get something done.
02:18:12.000Just something has to be done other than just some people are motivated and some people are, you know, they're self-starters and they get going.
02:18:23.000I think we have to—I think most people are at least— Partially aware of how much of a benefit it would make to their life if they exercised and took care of themselves.
02:18:35.000I don't think people are aware of that number, that 80%, that 80% of your health is how you live your life.
02:18:40.000Yeah, it's not the next drug innovation.
02:18:43.000The next drug innovation may help some people.
02:19:44.000Do you get concerned at all about the reports of myocarditis and pericarditis and the adverse side effects of the vaccines as reported by VAERS and anecdotal reports from people who either know people that have had bad side effects or what have you?
02:19:59.000Well, the truth is you got this on my radar screen with your interview with Dr. Gupta.
02:20:06.000And I did the best research I could and I found that...
02:20:27.000So the top line, I'll explain Israel data below afterwards.
02:20:35.000But this is data from the CDC. And it's looking at boys aged 12 to 17 and 18 to 24. And this is per million kids who are vaccinated.
02:20:45.000So, by CDC's data, you prevent 5,700 in 12,000 cases.
02:20:51.000You prevent 215 hospitalizations in 530. You prevent that many, 71 and 127 ICU admissions, which are serious, and two deaths in the younger age group and three in the older.
02:21:04.000The VAERS data says that the risk of myocarditis in that same population is 56 to 69 for the younger kids and 45 to 56. The VAERS data I wanted to corroborate because that's voluntary reporting.
02:21:24.000So there's Israeli data that was published in the New England Journal, and Israel has a good data system for their national health system.
02:21:36.000And the Israeli data came out and said out of this million people in each age group, 151 will develop myocarditis and 109 in the older group.
02:21:48.000So why is the Israeli data so much higher than what the VAERS has put out?
02:21:53.000Is it underreporting on the VAERS side?
02:22:04.000And then we could find out If kids were admitted to the hospital with myocarditis, we'd know that.
02:22:10.000And we only know about hospital admissions.
02:22:12.000We don't know about people that have shortness of breath and chronic fatigue and issues that are associated with myocarditis where people don't get treated or don't get medical treatment or don't get diagnosed.
02:22:25.000So that's an issue that I can't address.
02:22:27.000But on that slide, the point that I wanted to make is that myocarditis is a significant issue And if the CGC data is correct, not about myocarditis, but about the benefits, that the benefits don't outweigh the harms of myocarditis,
02:23:28.000But that's where myocarditis is the issue, right?
02:23:30.000I was reading this thing about myocarditis, about when people develop the type of myocarditis that they've had from vaccine injuries, significant swelling of the heart tissue, that over time, this could be a significant issue in their life.
02:23:59.000So if you ask me, which I was hoping you wouldn't, if you ask me, do I think kids should get vaccinated?
02:24:09.000I think my response would be that at this point in time, It looks like in the future we're going to say that it was better to get vaccinated than not.
02:24:23.000To 12, to age 12. But here's the thing about these children, when you're saying deaths and hospitalizations, but deaths in particular, they're all with comorbidities.
02:24:33.000And many of these comorbidities are lifestyle related, right?
02:24:37.000Many of these comorbidities are kids that are grossly obese or that have all sorts of health problems that are associated with that 80% that you talked about, the way they live their lives and the food they take in.
02:24:48.000That seems like an easier prevention and then you avoid the possible, even though it's a small number, If you're dealing with healthy children, that's what's so scary.
02:24:59.000Because if you're dealing with healthy children that seem to be getting myocarditis, a lot of them, I was watching this video on TikTok that was removed for whatever reason because it had millions and millions of views, but it was a 14-year-old boy that was in the hospital who was talking about his case of myocarditis,
02:25:17.000It was a personal account of a kid who got vaccinated.
02:25:20.000The thing is, if it's affecting healthy people that aren't at risk from COVID, like the number of kids that are at risk from dying of COVID is fairly small, right?
02:25:34.000And those kids, the vast majority of them have comorbidities.
02:25:38.000I haven't seen that data, but I believe it's true.
02:25:40.000I believe that's the data that I saw, was that they can't account for, I don't know what the number is, but very, very few kids have died that didn't have something significantly wrong with them.
02:25:52.000So that's what scares people, the idea of vaccinating a child that's not at risk, that's a healthy child, because you've mandated this for all children.
02:27:20.000So I was saying earlier that 1,300 Americans die every day because our health and health care is so inferior to the other developed countries.
02:27:31.000Sixteen thousand kids die every year in our country above the death rates in the other developed countries.
02:27:40.000An excess sixteen thousand children die a year.
02:27:47.000Some of it's guns, some of it's traffic accidents, and some of it's general health.
02:28:20.000You know, we've raised so many issues in this that I think people are going to have to dissect this and take notes and go through your book, of course, which is not out yet.
02:28:47.000And, you know, I think slowly over time with conversations like this with you and with people reading your book and getting the kind of information that you worked so hard to put out, we're going to get a better sense of what's going on.
02:28:58.000Because I think it's very hard for people, as it was, you know, for you being, you know, a young doctor and learning this kind of the hard way.