Ep 650 ｜ COVID Comeback, Depression Meds & Alzheimer’s Scandal ｜ Guest： Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 5 minutes
Words per Minute
179.37238
Summary
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. He has been one of the most important voices in pushing back against the destructive policies that we have seen over the past few years. And now that we are seeing universities and cities, districts, public schools, re-implement policies that have been proven to fail, I wanted to get his perspective.
Transcript
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Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. Today we are talking to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
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You've probably seen him over the past few years doing interviews on COVID and the terrible
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response of many states to COVID by placing draconian restrictions like lockdowns, shutting
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down schools, mask and vaccine mandates. He is an epidemiologist and a professor of medicine
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at Stanford University. He has been one of the most important voices in pushing back
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against these destructive policies that we have seen over the past few years. And now
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that we are seeing universities and cities, districts, public schools, re-implementing
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some of these mandates that have been proven to fail, I wanted to get his perspective.
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So we are going to talk to him about that, what the response should have been and should
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be. We are also going to talk about this study that recently came out about SSRIs, depression
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medications, and why they are so ineffective. It is apparently because this theory of chemical
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imbalance is causing depression is actually not true. So he's going to give us his response
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to that. And then we are also going to talk about this terrible story of this Alzheimer's
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medication fraud and what that means, what happened there and what the consequences are
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and what accountability should look like. Then he's going to give us some recommendations
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for how we can reform public health and how public health entities can win back public trust.
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As always, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com
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slash Allie. That's goodranchers.com slash Allie.
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So the theme that you are going to hear in this conversation is that science is not God. Scientists
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are not infallible. That's what I kept on taking away from what he was saying about how science
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changes, how it evolves, how it should evolve based on facts, based on the information that
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we have. And when someone like Tony Fauci says before Congress that I am science and anyone
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who disagrees with me disagrees with science, that is extremely, it's symbolic, it's representative
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of where our public health entities, where the scientific community, if you will, has gone.
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It's gone from trying to find the facts and trying to come to conclusions based on those facts and then
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communicating those conclusions truthfully to the public to really a kind of scientism, a kind of
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religion, basically asserting that scientists who have a particular position, if that position is
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held by those who are in power, is infallible and it's indisputable. And this is the danger,
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of course, of replacing God with anything, but particularly of science. People say that we
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have to trust the science. We should follow the science. But look, science is created,
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investigated, and discovered by human beings who are fallible. And ultimately, all of science,
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all of the world was created by a God who is infallible. So we cannot place the same faith
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in science or so-called science as we do in the God who is immutable, unchangeable, who is the
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authority over what is and what isn't, what's good and what's bad, what's right and what's wrong,
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what's true and what's false. And we have seen the deadly consequences of switching the God of
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Scripture with the God of science over the past few years. So today, with Dr. Bhattacharya,
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we are going to talk specifically about what those consequences have looked like and where we have
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so disastrously got it wrong and how we can, in the future, get it right. So without further ado,
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here is epidemiologist and professor, Dr. J. Bhattacharya.
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Dr. Bhattacharya, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
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Yes. So you were dubbed in the beginning of COVID and looking at our COVID response as the
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anti-lockdown voice. Of course, you had a lot of conservative media who wanted to talk to you and
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gain your insight. And then you had some left-wing media who opposed you and who, I don't know if
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they really scientifically disagreed with you, but they didn't like your message. Tell us what it has
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been like over the past couple of years kind of being deemed the voice of anti-lockdowns during COVID.
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I mean, for me now, it's a source of pride. I think I was right in 2020 and it's been the right
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strategy. I have to say, it's been shocking to me to see the political polarization. I spent my
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career writing scientific papers. I would write papers that go into journals and 15 to 50 people
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would read it and be all excited about it. And then in 2020, to all of a sudden be thrust into
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the national spotlight over what I thought of as just basic epidemiology is still absolutely stunning
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to me. It's been, I mean, in many ways, it's been very, very difficult. Like a lot of my lost
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friends, Stanford hasn't really treated me all that well. But I've also had the opportunity to meet
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some incredible people and to participate in some of the most important policy decisions that I will
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ever have the privilege to participate in. So it's been good in that way.
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It's been interesting. I'm sure that you didn't think that you were going to be thrust into the
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middle of a political debate when you were given your epidemiological position, right?
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I mean, I'll know the pandemic is well and truly over when I no longer get invited to podcasts,
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Charlie. Right, right. I know. It's a sign of the times that I messaged you on Twitter to have you
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come on. But I'm thankful for it. For those who may not know, can you just kind of summarize what
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your position has been on the COVID restrictions that have been implemented, especially the ones that
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you and I both would agree are draconian, like shutting down businesses and schools?
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Yeah. So basically, the key idea that motivated me throughout the pandemic is first, you have to
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get good data on who are actually at risk from COVID in terms of bad outcomes. And if you look
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at the data from the very early days of the pandemic, it was very clear that it was really
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older people and certain people, some chronic conditions, but mostly it's older people that
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face an elevated risk of mortality. I did a study early in the pandemic measuring the mortality rate
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of the disease. And there's a thousandfold difference in the risk of dying. Maybe like if
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you're over the age of 70, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 percent, very high risk, especially if you're in a nursing
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home of dying if you get infected. Whereas if you're younger, it's very, very low. People under the age
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of 70, maybe 99.95 percent survival. And this was before the vaccine. So there's this huge gradient
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in risk in terms of the bad outcomes from the disease. Same time, the lockdowns themselves that
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we adopted, especially the more draconian ones, are absolutely deadly, right? So just take children,
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right? We've locked children out of school in so many states and actually many places around the world
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did this. And yet we know from a huge literature that precedes the pandemic that this is actually
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very bad for the health of children throughout their entire lives. Children that skip even short
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periods of school have shorter, less healthy, poorer lives. That's essentially what we've consigned a very
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large number of our kids to. And for young adults, the psychological effects are just devastating of
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these. One in four young adults seriously considered suicide in June of 2020. So my position has been
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that it's not ethical to harm young people to protect them against a disease for which they face
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very low risk by lockdowns. We should not be doing lockdowns for younger people. Whereas for older
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people, what needs to happen is very creative engagement with public health professionals to
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understand how to protect them. Focus protection of the old. So those are the basic two tenets of how
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I've been thinking about the right policy. Pay attention to epidemiological risk stratification,
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lift the lockdowns, focus protection for the old.
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Just to emphasize what you're talking about when it comes to consequences on children, there have been
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several studies now that have been published in the past year proving this. The Telegraph reported on
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one study that showed that COVID lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly.
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And I'm sure that it wasn't just the lockdowns, but it was also probably the masking of their
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teachers and even their parents, whether it's daycare, kindergarten, first grade teachers,
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the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists raised fears that the gaps of being witnessed now
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could widen in coming years. The disparities are 79 or it says, sorry, the Office for Health
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Improvement and Disparities show that 79.6% of children who received a review last autumn at the
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expected level in all five areas of development measured. But of course, that is down from years
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prior. And so tell me what you think about the consequences that I don't even know if we've begun to
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see the full extent of the consequences that we are going to see on child development,
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on language development, on their ability to normally socially interact and communicate
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with one another. That really makes me nervous as a mom.
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I mean, it makes me nervous too, as a dad. I mean, although my kids are a little older now,
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but other than, you know, they face their own challenges as a result of the lockdowns.
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The effect on young kids is almost incalculable. Like, how do you teach a kid to read over Zoom?
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I mean, that's essentially what we decided we're going to do for a very large number of kids.
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And, you know, it's not even, it's not, it's, it's, it is one of these things where like,
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you think, okay, well, it's just a couple of years, we can fix it. But, you know, those are
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crucial time in the development of children. Fixing it is a major challenge. It may not be
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possible for many kids. And the level of disengagement, really, it wasn't equal throughout
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society, right? It's, it's poor families. It's, it's, it's minority families that pay the,
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the bigger cost of this. You know, if you, if you were, if you had to, both parents had to work,
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or if you were a single parent household, what do you do when you, you know, you're, you have a young
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child, you have to work, um, and there have to go out, learn on Zoom. Um, and, and, you know,
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and, and lots and lots of, uh, of what happens for development requires children to be in community
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with other children, which just normally happens during schooling, during, during just, it's part
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of the, the way that kids learn is by, by being with other adults, being with other kids. Um, and
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so it's not surprising that we're seeing this. And, uh, the only question in my mind is how do we,
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how do we address these deficits that we caused? Uh, I, I mean, I, I, I think we absolutely need to
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have an all hands on deck try to approach to try to fix this. It's, it's a major, major problem.
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Whether it's possible is not clear. Yes. And to your point about this disproportionately impacting
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communities that we would typically call marginalized or however you want to describe it,
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special needs kids, of course, for the brunt of this, I talked to a lot of speech therapists that
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listened to this podcast that their job was basically rendered impossible because they were
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forced to wear masks when they are trying to teach, whether it's a toddler, young kid, or whether it's
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an older kid with special needs, autism, whatever it is, how to pronounce words. It's impossible. I mean,
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it's impossible. The, I mean, the biggest aspect really of speech therapy is showing, not just
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allowing them to listen to how a word is pronounced, but showing them how to pronounce the words.
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I don't know if those kids are at, even if we have all hands on deck, I'm not confident that those
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kids are ever going to be able to make up for the time and the care lost. And it's strange to me how
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that has become almost a partisan position. Maybe it's not anymore, but it certainly was that you
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were deemed uncompassionate. If you said, Hey, there are going to be some long-term consequences for
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these underserved communities over here. I mean, the American Association of Pediatrics
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actually put out a position saying that there was no evidence of deficits caused by masking. I mean,
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I was absolutely stunned. Like, how do they know? And for older kids, for kids in middle school or
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high school, the learning deficit is shocking. Grade school even, you have like fourth graders who
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can do math barely at a first grade level. You know, you have, you know, not surprising given that
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we've disrupted three years of schools in some places. You have like kids that just, you know,
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they don't know how to read very well. It's, it is, yeah. And again, it's, it's, it's, it's very,
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very unequal. If it's young, it's, it's older, I'm sorry, it's, it's poorer people, poor families,
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working class families that have had a much more difficult time making, making sure that the kids
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don't have these deficits. And I don't, I just, I mean, I look at the devastation caused by the
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school closures and I am absolutely, I worked actually in summer and early fall of 2020, I
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helped with this lawsuit. I advised this lawsuit that the governor DeSantis had decided to open
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the schools in Florida in 2020, in fall of 2020, issued this order. And he was sued by the Florida
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teachers unions. And, you know, they actually had trouble finding an expert on, on, on, on,
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on our side to say, look, it's wrong to close the schools. And so there's one of my proudest moments
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is like, I got to help with that lawsuit. We, we actually lost like, cause the, the, in the,
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in the sort of like the district court. And I mean, I was just shocked cause I mean, it was clear
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that the judge didn't understand the science at all. It didn't really fully appreciate the importance
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of keeping schools open. And we finally won in, in the Florida court of appeals. So the school
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stayed open. Well, again, one of my proudest, proudest moment is to be, be able to help with
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Well, it does seem like the many of the so-called experts and certainly bureaucrats, people in
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charge, teachers unions really don't care about the facts available. Still after all this time,
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you've got San Diego school district saying that they are going to re-implement the mask mandates.
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Look, we've got data upon data showing that mask mandates don't actually lower the case level.
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They don't actually bring down the fatality rate. I mean, that is not even arguable at this point.
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And of course, I've seen you retweet David Zwick. He is a journalist who has talked about the CDC
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studies that said that they prove that mask mandates in schools work and how faulty those studies are.
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They don't actually prove what the summary of the studies say that they prove. And so it really,
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we're still back to these teachers unions, to these administrators, these politicians,
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just wanting to quote, do something, whether or not there is any benefit. And there's not,
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there's actually only harm to these kids. And it's really hard for me to understand at this point,
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It's, I'd say, if you go back to before 2020, there was an excellent literature on the effectiveness
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of mask mandates in slowing the spread of flu. Now flu spreads in similar ways to COVID. It spreads
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via aerosolization events. You know, you breathe, your breath contains tiny, tiny particles that sit in
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the air forever, moisture particles that contain the virus. And so if you're in a poorly ventilated
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room, when that, when those aerosols come out, the aerosols are like clouds, droplets like rain,
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the masks may stop the droplets, but they don't really stop the aerosols. If you wear glasses and
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your glasses get fogged up when you breathe through a mask, that's an aerosol escaping it, which, and
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so there are a dozen randomized trials from before the pandemic with the flu, good high quality
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randomized trials that found that mask mandates in community settings, and actually even, even
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sometimes in, in hospital settings, have a very difficult time slowing the spread or stopping the
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spread of, of the flu. That was the, that was the science before the pandemic. Nothing's changed.
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The two randomized trials that have been done since the pandemic started, both in adults,
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not in children, found very small or zero effects of protection by masking. And we still,
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to this date, have not a single randomized study that shows that masking in children actually stops
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the disease spread. And, you know, there's lots of reasons to think it doesn't. Children are not
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particularly good at wearing masks, especially young children. The World Health Organization doesn't
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recommend masking children below the age of six, but, you know, you have New York City masking toddlers
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up until just a couple months ago. And, you know, the European CDC doesn't recommend masking kids
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below the age of 12 on the basis of that might cause them some harm. I mean, and if you look at the,
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you know, districts that wore masks, that mandated masking kids versus districts that didn't,
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you find no difference over and over again in these, whenever you do a careful study that doesn't
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cherry pick the data. So I just don't understand what science people are looking at when they
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demand mask mandates. It's as if they have told themselves a story about how effective they are,
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but that just isn't consistent with what the scientific data show.
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You've been in epidemiology for several decades, for a long time now. So you must have been familiar
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with Anthony Fauci. Maybe that you've worked with him before. I don't know if you have, but certainly
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you said that you've been at Stanford for 35 years. I'm sure that you knew who Anthony Fauci was,
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his work in the AIDS epidemic. Tell me your reaction to, or what you think about his leadership
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and his response to COVID over the past few years. Does it surprise you at all?
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I mean, I had a lot of respect for him at the beginning of the pandemic. I have on my bookshelf a
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textbook that he edited, Harrison's internal medicine, which is sort of the, the, one of the
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key texts in training, training, uh, internal medicine doctors that, that I read when I was,
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when I was in training in medical school. Um, and, uh, of course he's, he's had this incredibly long
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career where he's played such a, an important role in, um, in, in, in so many, uh, parts of American
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science. Uh, during the pandemic, I have been absolutely shocked by his leadership. Uh, and,
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and, and, and I, I don't know how to say this in a polite, more polite way. I mean, I just, I think
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he is a, he's, he's a failed leader. Uh, you know, uh, probably the, the, to like the worst moment was
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I saw, uh, him talking with Senator Paul, I think in a Senate hearing where Senator Paul was just asking
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questions. Um, and he, Tony Fauci's response was, well, if you're, if you're questioning me, you're
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not simply questioning a man, you are questioning science itself. Yeah. I, uh, that kind of hubris
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is absolutely shocking to me. Like you can't, you cannot have anybody, uh, uh, at the top of the
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American scientific bureaucracy thinking that he himself, the science beyond questioning. And, uh,
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what he's done is he's the, the, the, the, if you want to characterize exactly the kind of action
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he's done, he believes that he is right beyond all question. And then anyone challenging him is
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therefore on the fringe and dangerous. And he's acted in ways essentially to create this illusion
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of consensus, scientific consensus around the, his policy preferences, which are, which are essentially
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locked down, um, in, in, uh, in, and, uh, and delegitimize or push to the edge or call fringe,
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uh, anyone who, who disagrees with them, even if they have, uh, you know, sort of good scientific
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data and arguments. Uh, it's not the way that, uh, a scientific, uh, like a, like science bureaucracy
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or public health ought to behave. I mean, um, uh, public health can't work unless it's truly rooted
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in science. Um, and the scientific discussion around what the right policy is, is not, there's no
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consensus there hasn't been, even though, uh, the media and Tony Fauci has pushed this idea that
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there is. Yeah. And I think that that's to me is the biggest disappointment. He has violated the
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norms, the ethics, the, the sort of like sacred obligation of scientific leaders to permit that
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scientific discussion to happen. He's essentially killed science around the science of COVID as a
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consequence of his hubris. Right. Well, he has to have the same knowledge that you do, especially
00:22:08.060
when it comes to masking. And it seems like he did. In the beginning, there was this March,
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2020, I believe interview where he basically said, look, you can wear a mask if it makes you feel
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better, but we can't rely on it really to stop the spread of it. And that seemed like a pretty common
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sense position with what we knew about COVID. But then that really changed. Not only should you
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mask, but you have to double mask, even if those two masks are, you know, only the cloth masks,
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which we know don't have a great, um, they're not very effective. Um, and so it was interesting to see
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his positions change so much based on, I'm not sure what the politics of it, whatever the CCP was doing,
00:22:45.820
that's another disturbing aspect of it that we have tried to actually, in some ways, model our response
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to what the CCP has done, which is still locking down millions of people in Shanghai today. Um, and so I
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wish I knew a little bit more about what went on the behind the scenes and in those conversations
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where he decided that he was going to reject and ignore the science and the studies that we both
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know that he knew about in favor of mask mandates and policies that we know were ineffective.
00:23:14.340
I mean, on mask, it's really funny. Like he, he, uh, nearly in pandemic, as you say, Ali, he,
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he said, uh, that, that mask mandates work, uh, that, that masks don't work. Um, and I mean,
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there he was reflecting what the prior literature said with the, with these high quality randomized
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studies, then he changed his mind and then admitted to lying before a noble lie in order
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to preserve high quality, uh, masks for medical personnel, which is horrible.
00:23:40.520
Okay. So that itself means that, that, you know, if, if you have a public health leader who admits
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to lying to you, that, that just demolishes the trust that people will have in you. I mean,
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it's, it's stunning to see that people haven't responded. I mean, I mean, I actually, that's
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not true. Many, many people now distrust him. Uh, and I think that the start of that was that,
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that admitting that he was lying then. But the funny thing, the ironic thing is that actually
00:24:02.720
in February, 2020, his position on masks that they don't work was not a lie. That was the truth.
00:24:09.360
That was what the medical literature was saying at the time. In fact, when he said he was lying
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later, that itself was a lie. Um, so I, I just, it's, it's a, it's a funny, it's a funny,
00:24:22.020
funny thing. I mean, uh, in public health, you have this like sacred obligation to tell the public
00:24:25.660
the truth, uh, all the way across, or you lose your credibility, uh, you know, to the best you know,
00:24:29.780
I mean, you could be wrong. I mean, that's a lot, like it's very easy to be wrong. And when you have
00:24:33.340
a rapidly changing science that we have, um, but, and, and, and the public will forgive you,
00:24:38.300
but to, to lie knowingly and then admit to lying knowingly and then lie about lying.
00:24:56.440
I don't understand why Donald Trump didn't fire him, why he was able to stick around as long as
00:25:02.640
he did. Donald Trump made a statement in a, um, a speech yesterday, um, that he just did the
00:25:10.480
opposite of everything that Anthony Fauci said. But of course, that's not true. That's, that's
00:25:14.140
actually not a true statement. Unfortunately, even though I personally think there were a lot of good
00:25:18.660
parts of the Trump presidency, to me, one of the shameful parts was how much he listened to Deborah
00:25:23.540
Birx, uh, Birx and Anthony Fauci and allowed them to lead in the way that they did. I mean, that
00:25:29.520
kicked off the terrible and draconian COVID response that we've had.
00:25:35.460
Yeah. I mean, I, I actually sort of had a front row seat in this cause my friend, Scott Atlas,
00:25:40.180
Dr. Scott Atlas. Oh, you have. Oh, fantastic. Um, uh, he, he, uh, you know, president Trump actually
00:25:47.600
selected him in July as, as, as his personal advisor on, on COVID policy. Um, but he brought him in,
00:25:54.020
in, in the context of the leadership of the COVID, uh, the COVID commission by Deborah Birx and of
00:26:00.860
course advised and, and, and, you know, led behind the scenes by Tony Fauci. Uh, both of them, I think
00:26:07.100
were actually selected by vice president Pence and, uh, you know, uh, to Scott, uh, Atlas, he tried to,
00:26:14.320
he, he tried to bring me, uh, Martin Kulldorff, uh, Joe Latta, who's now the surgeon general of,
00:26:20.200
of Florida, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, uh, this, this very prominent pediatrician from troughs, um,
00:26:26.280
into the white house to advise the president just to have a meeting with him, just like to tell him,
00:26:30.720
look, there are scientists out there that disagree with Tony Fauci and the, and the lockdowns. And
00:26:35.100
you know, I think Trump's instincts were in that direction. That's why he hired Scott to, but the
00:26:40.680
problem was that, you know, you're the president of the United States. You've decided in the middle of
00:26:45.880
a war to change strategies. You, you bring in a new general and then you leave the old generals
00:26:53.060
around to destroy the reputation of the new general we bring in. I mean, you know, Tony Fauci and Burks
00:26:58.040
were using their media power to absolutely demolish the reputation of Scott Atlas during that, in that
00:27:04.920
summer, because they viewed him as a mortal threat to their authority, which he was right. Uh, and in fact,
00:27:11.680
if you read Debbie, Debbie Burks book, she admits that she essentially worked to manipulate the
00:27:16.420
president and get lockdowns in place successfully. She's averted the president of the United States,
00:27:23.000
asserted her authority over and above the president of the United States. Um, and, uh, I have to tell
00:27:29.340
you in terms of like Donald Trump himself, uh, the shocking thing to me is that, is that, you know,
00:27:36.320
the, the, the, he didn't fire them. He didn't fire Burks and Fauci, even though I think he might've
00:27:40.480
wanted to, because he was afraid that if he did, he would not get reelected. Um, that's not in my
00:27:48.520
mind, an excusable thing, right? The, the, the, the health of the American public comes above and
00:27:53.300
beyond the, uh, the, the, your reelection camp. Even if you lose reelection, you should do the right
00:27:58.160
thing on such a critical point. Um, and, uh, I, it's a, it's a huge disappointment to me that he
00:28:04.060
didn't, uh, he, he, he, he, he suspected and very strongly understood that, that they were advising
00:28:10.400
him incorrectly and still he left them on because if the, the political advisors were telling him
00:28:16.420
and he, he agreed with the political advisors that if he fired them, he would lose the election.
00:28:20.280
That's not, that's not acceptable to me. Yeah, of course. And I think the only people that really
00:28:25.440
would have cared about that were the people that weren't going to vote for him anyway. I don't think
00:28:30.260
it would have made that much of a difference. You wouldn't think this about Trump, but he actually
00:28:33.520
does care a little bit more than you'd think what people on the left think everyone wants to be
00:28:39.700
liked. I think that's a normal thing, but I think that that's kind of what got him is that he did not
00:28:44.460
trust his instincts there and he didn't go the direction of that people like you or Scott, Scott
00:28:50.720
Atlas would have advised. Um, let me read a little segment by Deborah Birx. She said,
00:28:56.200
I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the
00:29:01.800
vaccines and it made people then worry that it's not going to protect against severe disease and
00:29:06.280
hospitalization. Um, and then, so she said, so she's basically admitting she, uh, another part of
00:29:13.360
what I would call the manipulation or kind of how she communicated things to the public and to the
00:29:18.660
media versus what she really thought, um, is that she thought that the vaccines really weren't
00:29:24.980
going to be very effective. And yet they sold them, they sold them as if they were, I mean,
00:29:30.080
we heard over and over again from the media, from Anthony Fauci, from Joe Biden, from Rachel Maddow,
00:29:36.900
that if you get this vaccine, you will not get the virus and you won't spread it. That's why a lot of
00:29:42.780
people got it. And not only that, that's why a lot of companies mandated it. And people lost their
00:29:47.320
jobs over this because of this assertion that the vaccine was going to stop the disease in its
00:29:54.260
tracks. That's obviously not what happened. What do you make of that? Uh, she's lying. All right.
00:29:59.660
So she, she, uh, uh, I'll just tell you, like if she, if she actually believed that she would have
00:30:04.020
come out strongly against the mandates, uh, in 2021, um, I'll tell you like when, um, the, the science
00:30:11.180
and the timeline of the science is really important here in December of 2020, what we knew was based on
00:30:18.240
two very large randomized studies done, uh, actually three large randomized studies done,
00:30:25.740
um, on the J and J vaccine and the two mRNA vaccines. Um, from those, the, the end point
00:30:32.460
of those studies was not prevention of severe disease. In fact, they didn't enroll enough
00:30:38.300
patients to actually measure whether there was a statistically significant effect on a reduction
00:30:44.100
of severe disease. It wasn't even prevention of transmission because the studies actually didn't
00:30:48.760
look at transmission and the studies didn't look at whether people had any infection at all. It
00:30:54.200
didn't, it didn't actually have as an end point, the prevention of all infection. It had as the
00:30:58.280
end point, the prevention of symptomatic infection. Well, this disease that can spread asymptomatically,
00:31:04.160
um, that that's true. Um, so what that means is that like, you know, you, you know that it's
00:31:10.720
preventing symptomatic infection for about three or four months. That's what the randomized studies
00:31:14.320
showed, uh, in December of 2020, uh, that left you with having to make a guess. There's two
00:31:20.840
epidemiologically meaningful endpoints here. One is prevention of severe disease and the other is
00:31:25.980
prevention of transmission, right? Uh, I heard Burke say this, they, they made a guess based on hope
00:31:32.760
that would stop transmission. Now, why is that important? If it stops transmission, then that means
00:31:38.540
and the protection lasts a long time, then that means the vaccine can be used essentially to
00:31:43.880
suppress the spread of the disease effectively to zero, as long as sufficient number of people get
00:31:48.180
vaccinated. You heard Burke's Fauci say this, we just need to get 60, 70, 80%, uh, you know,
00:31:54.980
the number kept going up, uh, uh, of the population vaccinated and the disease will go
00:31:59.340
effectively. They were implying that the disease would go away because they assumed not based on the
00:32:04.360
evidence, but based on, on an extrapolation from a trial, um, which turned out to be false, that it
00:32:11.460
would stop transmission. In fact, as soon as it hit the real world, it was clear that it didn't stop
00:32:15.740
transmission. You know, you had a heavily vaccinated societies like Israel very early on, March, April,
00:32:21.400
May, I forget exactly the timeline of 2021, uh, seeing very large COVID spread, large amounts of COVID
00:32:27.900
spread. The myth of vaccine doesn't stop spread as we found out, uh, you know, sort of to our detriment
00:32:32.960
here. Um, so that means that the vaccine can't be used to stop the disease from spreading. It can't
00:32:38.660
be used. It can't even be used for herd immunity, uh, in the same, unless, unless you force people to
00:32:43.620
get vaccinated every three or four months. Um, and even then it's not clear because then there are
00:32:47.580
multiple boosters may not actually stop the spread of the disease for very long. It might be diminishing
00:32:51.400
returns to that. Um, so you have this like situation where they extrapolate, including Debbie
00:32:56.480
Burke's above and beyond what the evidence actually showed. On the other hand, um, the protection against
00:33:02.080
severe disease. Actually, I extrapolated there. I wrote an op-ed in December of 2020 in the Wall
00:33:06.940
Street Journal with Sinatra Gupta of Oxford. We are, we argued that the vaccine should be used
00:33:12.120
to protect older people against severe disease, essentially to use the vaccine as a way of, of
00:33:18.040
focused protection of the old. That extrapolation turned out to be right. The vaccine does actually
00:33:24.420
decrease the odds of dying or going to the hospital if you get infected. And, um, it was, I mean, if,
00:33:31.080
if, uh, what we, we argued in that Wall Street Journal article was you vaccinate older populations,
00:33:35.840
that's as good as protections you're going to get that we have available to us and then
00:33:40.280
lift the lockdowns, right? You've essentially done perfect focus protection, as good as
00:33:44.140
focus protection as we possibly can do. And then we lift the lockdowns. Um, uh, that was
00:33:50.120
the right way to use the vaccine. Um, it, it turns out because it does actually protect
00:33:54.480
against severe disease. Uh, I think the FDA and Trump, uh, White House should have been
00:33:58.940
calling for a vaccine trial that actually had a very large number of older people in
00:34:04.440
it to see if it could protect against severe disease. We could have made that decision much
00:34:08.820
more confidently in December of 2020. But it seemed clear to me that if it protects against
00:34:12.820
symptomatic infection, then it must also protect against severe disease, you know, hospitalizations
00:34:18.160
and deaths. And so that, that turned out to be right. And it turns out to be more durable.
00:34:21.940
Like I think eight, nine months after the vaccine, you still are getting pretty good protection
00:34:25.700
against severe disease. Uh, although I think it does diminish after a certain, uh, you
00:34:29.240
know, certain, um, maybe, you know, nine months to a year. Uh, I mean, in any case, the right
00:34:33.640
thing then is to do is to, is to lift the lockdowns, uh, you know, vaccinate the old, lift the lockdowns.
00:34:40.300
Instead, we had this crazy policy of continuing the lockdowns for the force vaccinating people,
00:34:47.820
violating their informed consent. As you said, Ali, like people losing jobs, um, you know,
00:34:52.540
their, their, their religious conscience violated because some, you know, some of these vaccines
00:34:56.000
are developed using fetal cell lines. Um, you know, I just, I think one of these, it's, it was,
00:35:00.520
it basically tore society in two, created an underclass of people out of people who were just making
00:35:06.240
decisions that, that they viewed as good for their health or, or consistent with their values. Um,
00:35:12.340
and, and, and really undermined, uh, the authority and trust that people had in public health.
00:35:17.060
Yes, definitely. Now, what do you make of the concerns around heart issues, myocarditis? Do you
00:35:25.960
think that is being overblown or do you think that is a sincere concern and a reason for people in a
00:35:32.760
particular age group not to get it? Yeah, the, the evidence is abundantly clear from everywhere
00:35:38.660
where these mRNA vaccines have been used, uh, especially in young men, the risk of myocarditis
00:35:44.540
is elevated. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart, uh, the, the, uh, heart muscle. Um, and,
00:35:51.220
uh, you know, it can be deadly. It's, it certainly can be debilitating. Uh, it is very clearly a side
00:35:56.420
effect of this vaccine. Uh, the, the estimates I've seen range between one in a thousand people,
00:36:00.940
a young men who get the vaccine to one in say 5,000. Uh, it's, it'll be somewhere in that range
00:36:06.060
who have, uh, myocarditis as a consequence of having got the vaccine. Uh, if I were in my early twenties,
00:36:14.260
as a young, and a young man, I would worry about that. I mean, cause the protection I get against,
00:36:18.660
against severe disease from the vaccine isn't actually all that important because I have very
00:36:24.220
low risk if I were in my twenties, um, from get dying. If I get COVID, whereas one in a thousand
00:36:29.740
to one in 5,000 of, of, uh, myocarditis is actually, I mean, I don't, I don't, I just don't want that.
00:36:34.340
Uh, and it turns out that, um, you know, it doesn't protect you against getting COVID.
00:36:38.360
So you still get the risk of myocarditis from COVID too. So it just doesn't, it doesn't,
00:36:43.640
it makes no sense to mandate it, uh, for a population for whom it's not clear whether
00:36:48.280
there's a net positive benefit. Now we heard, uh, Dr. Peter McCullough, when he was on Joe Rogan,
00:36:54.520
he said then that from the knowledge of the information that he had at that point, that
00:36:59.280
natural immunity was permanent. Now we know that that's not true. I know many people who have
00:37:03.980
gotten COVID twice. What is the benefit of natural immunity? Would you say that it is
00:37:09.380
better than the protection that you get from the vaccine? Or is it something that should be
00:37:14.260
totally discounted? Like it seems like the public health experts have done.
00:37:19.300
Yeah. So, um, in October, 2020, when I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, this idea to lift the
00:37:24.680
lockdowns and do focus protection of the old, um, that the, it was very clear from the, the biological
00:37:30.440
literature that, and the immunological literature, that there was actually pretty significant protection
00:37:36.060
provided by recovery from COVID, right? You, you, uh, you have all these immune cell response,
00:37:41.940
immune responses, including T cells and B cells and antibody production, um, that, that October,
00:37:47.980
that, you know, that lasted up to six months already, um, that protected you against, in fact,
00:37:52.760
even all against reinfection. Um, up until Omicron, there were all these studies that suggested,
00:37:58.940
like in, in, you know, the, the, the disease hit in Italy very early, right? Uh, there was a study
00:38:04.000
in Italy tracking people who had got COVID very early in the pandemic over a full year. And they
00:38:10.880
found that only three in a thousand had been reinfected over the course of that year. Now,
00:38:16.220
um, when Omicron hit the, even people who had previously infected and recovered, uh, started getting
00:38:23.240
infected again. Um, so Omicron evades natural immunity and it also evades the immunity provided
00:38:29.820
by the vaccine. Like a lot of people that are vaccinated, uh, got, started getting sick. Uh,
00:38:35.160
actually I got, I got, uh, I got Delta. So I, I had the vaccine in April of 2021 and then I got,
00:38:40.720
uh, COVID in August of 2021. Um, uh, so it, you know, the vaccine didn't provide,
00:38:45.980
protect against infection, even, even in the early days before Omicron, but certainly after Omicron,
00:38:50.360
you had this vaccine immune evasion. The key thing is it, although it, you had a probability of
00:38:58.120
getting sick, even though you've been previously infected and recovered, the risk of severe disease
00:39:03.560
in Omicron was actually low, uh, lower than the first time. Most people, the vast majority of
00:39:09.400
people who get it the second time are less likely to end up in the hospital, less likely to die from
00:39:14.660
it the second time. And that's going to be true for the rest of your life. I think, I mean, you're
00:39:17.860
going to, you're going to get this disease over and over and over again for the rest of your life
00:39:21.320
if there's other immune evasion variants. Um, but it seems to me like what is permanent is the
00:39:26.920
protection against getting very, very, very, very sick. If you've had the COVID before it recovered.
00:39:32.060
It's just sad knowing all that we know. I mean, the information, the facts that you're talking
00:39:47.220
about really are available to everyone. There seems to be something in the minds of both just
00:39:51.960
the general population and those who are in charge, experts, whatever. I'm not saying it's
00:39:58.200
completely nefarious on everyone's part, but there seems to be, um, an inability or unwillingness
00:40:05.020
to see that which is true. Either it's for political reasons or they've convinced themselves
00:40:10.120
that this is the, um, these are the right politics or this is the compassion, uh, compassionate
00:40:16.420
position to take when it comes to mask mandates and vaccine mandates. But really when you look at the
00:40:21.940
consequences of it, especially on young people, on vulnerable people, when it comes to
00:40:26.140
mask and vaccine mandates, even at universities and the public school system, it's really sad to me.
00:40:32.480
I think one of the saddest parts is that no one is going to be, certainly right now, no one is being
00:40:37.200
held accountable. And I'm just not sure if anyone is ever going to be held accountable. I mean, you're
00:40:42.160
talking about people who have died. I mean, I'm not saying that it is prevalent, that it is happening
00:40:47.960
every day, but have died from taking this vaccine or they have adverse health outcomes from taking the
00:40:54.740
vaccine that was mandated. They were going to lose their job or they weren't going to be able to go
00:40:59.560
back to college because of this. And it just kind of seems like people are throwing their hands up in
00:41:04.120
the air and not only that, they're willing to do it again. That's really scary to me.
00:41:10.460
Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, the, the fact that the, that, uh, public health bureaucrats have ignored
00:41:15.520
science on, on natural immunity. I mean, essentially they've spread misinformation on natural
00:41:19.860
immunity, the effectiveness of mass of, uh, the, the fact that there is this enormous risk gradient,
00:41:25.340
the, um, uh, the, the, they've overstated the effectiveness of the vaccines in terms of
00:41:30.940
stopping disease transmission and spread. Um, all of these things are, uh, I mean,
00:41:36.780
it's been absolutely shocking for me to watch, uh, cause these are not really all that controversial
00:41:41.960
in the medical literature. Uh, instead what you have is, um, you have like even like prominent
00:41:47.480
doctors trying to like toe the propaganda line instead of like reflecting what actually the
00:41:53.260
medical literature is saying in order to push their preferred policy. Um, it's a shocking
00:41:59.100
violation of, of the public trust. Um, I, I, I, you know, I think, I think, uh, maybe what,
00:42:06.060
what you're, what you're getting at, and I completely agree with, and I don't really don't have a great
00:42:10.580
answer is how do you regain that trust? How do you, uh, reform the public, uh, the medical profession
00:42:16.220
and the public health so that it becomes worthy of that trust again? Um, I think the first thing,
00:42:22.240
and I just have, still haven't seen it, is an open acknowledgement of error that, that look, uh, we,
00:42:29.320
we, we, we were trying our best when we made mistakes. I'll have to say like they, they, a lot
00:42:33.560
of the people, especially in the public health bureaucracies acted in ways that were not, I just
00:42:38.940
hard to impute good faith to them. Um, I think a lot of them were mistaken in good faith about the
00:42:45.140
science. Um, but then they were low to admit that they were wrong. And, and then they pushed
00:42:50.520
policies, like just take natural immunity, like immunity after COVID recovery. That was a basic
00:42:55.260
fact. Uh, you could see it in the data and yet they pushed it, uh, ignoring it. They called it a
00:43:02.100
conspiracy theory. Anyone who talked about natural immunity, I mean, for the first time, probably in
00:43:07.160
epidemiological history, someone who talks about natural, natural immunity was pushed to the side
00:43:13.120
as some kind of crazy kook. Yeah. I mean, I actually don't love the term natural immunity.
00:43:17.680
It's more, it's COVID recovery, like immunity after COVID recovery, but, but I mean, cause it's
00:43:22.060
that the natural immunity might be a little bit ambiguous, but I, but I agree with like, you know,
00:43:25.540
I think with like, with like HIV, you know, you get infected, you don't get immunity, but for the
00:43:29.820
vast majority of viruses, certainly respiratory viruses, certainly for all the coronaviruses,
00:43:33.760
you get infected and you provided protection against, uh, both reinfection and against severe
00:43:39.740
disease, uh, for a long time. Uh, you know, like you, you've had coronaviruses for sure. If you're
00:43:45.920
for, for a human other, they're like four or five, uh, coronaviruses that are in common human
00:43:50.320
circulation. Uh, you probably had it first when you were little, very little. And then, um, you
00:43:55.520
recovered from it was a cold. And then the next time you got, it was, you know, another cold and
00:43:59.120
another cold, another cold. The problem with this virus was that it was, you know, it was, it was
00:44:03.660
novel. Like we are most people, you know, the vast majority of us didn't have any protection
00:44:07.520
against it really. Um, and so, and some of us reacted very, you know, when we got infected,
00:44:12.820
we had this like horrible viral pneumonia. Um, and, uh, you know, for, and some it led to death.
00:44:18.840
Uh, it was most severe because we were immune naive. The, the population now is no longer immune
00:44:24.740
naive. Uh, the vast majority of the population has been infected and recovered. And of course the
00:44:29.500
vaccines provide protection against severe disease. Um, the, uh, by denying basic science,
00:44:35.760
they pushed forward policies that have incredibly socially divisive, harm the lives of millions and
00:44:40.740
millions. Uh, actually in the lockdowns themselves caused death and destruction on a level that that's
00:44:46.240
just unimaginable. Like, uh, yeah, I think there was an estimate that, um, uh, you know, we, we,
00:44:51.440
with all this economic destruction we caused with these lockdowns led to a hundred million people
00:44:55.740
around the world thrown into dire poverty, less than $2 a day of income with, with millions and
00:45:01.820
millions of children starving as a consequence. Um, uh, you know, I think that the UN actually put
00:45:07.580
an estimate in early 2021 that a 230,000 children had died of starvation as a consequence of the
00:45:12.940
economic dislocation caused by lockdowns in South Asia alone. Um, yeah, I mean, I thought,
00:45:18.440
so these lies have had consequences on the lives of so many really, really negative ones.
00:45:23.680
And wow, this is, I mean, this is a Christian podcast. And so one thing that we heard within,
00:45:27.900
uh, some people in the church was that these mandates, um, these policies that we would call
00:45:33.740
draconian were all about loving your neighbor. Well, there's always a flip side of that. When
00:45:38.700
you're talking about kids thrown into poverty, when you're talking about some of the consequences
00:45:41.900
that we talked about in the beginning, the increase in child abuse that we saw in this country,
00:45:46.220
not to mention, I'm sure what also, um, was seen worldwide, that doesn't seem like a very good way
00:45:52.320
to love your neighbor. Um, I want to stay in this theme of the distrust of public health institutions,
00:45:58.840
um, that we are seeing that really has grown over the past few years. I wouldn't have described
00:46:03.820
myself as someone who is distrustful or really questioned what doctors or epidemiologists or
00:46:10.300
Anthony Fauci says, because I don't have a medical degree, but over the past few years,
00:46:15.600
I am one of millions and millions of Americans who have started to question the recommendations that
00:46:21.560
we are getting from the people who call themselves public health experts. And it seems like there,
00:46:26.040
um, are new studies and new stories every day that kind of reaffirmed that suspicion and that lack of
00:46:32.000
trust that a lot of us have. One of them recently was about the effectiveness of SSRIs in treating
00:46:39.700
depression. So for those who don't know, SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
00:46:45.960
These are typically the, um, medications given to people who have depression because we have been
00:46:51.900
told for a very long time that chemical imbalance and low serotonin is what causes depression.
00:46:56.720
And there was a study that came out in the, in, uh, the journal of molecular psychiatry that said,
00:47:02.580
well, not really, it's not really a chemical imbalance. It's not really about low serotonin
00:47:07.440
and all of these medications that have been given to people for depression probably haven't been
00:47:12.360
working for a lot of people because the premise was wrong. So, I mean, again, you're talking about
00:47:18.040
something that has had massive, massive consequences on people based on what seems like kind of faulty
00:47:23.940
science. What is your take on all of that? I mean, when I went to medical schools in the mid nineties,
00:47:30.100
um, one of my professors told me, you know, half of what you're, we're teaching you is not true.
00:47:34.600
Uh, the problem is, you know, you're not going to know which half until much later. Um, uh, you know,
00:47:40.880
it's science does change. Uh, like we think about science as this like, uh, exalted knowledge of a,
00:47:48.180
a source of ultimate truth. Right. Um, but it's not, uh, what it is, is provisional knowledge. Like,
00:47:55.720
okay, given what we know and what we've seen based on like open discussion and, and, and experimentation
00:48:01.660
and, and testing, here's our, our, our guests. Now, like the idea that, uh, serotonin, uh, uh, uh,
00:48:10.160
low levels of serotonin are, that are really at root of, you know, the dark times of the soul people
00:48:16.160
have, um, can have during depression always seemed to me is like overly simplistic. Um, and so I, in
00:48:23.500
some sense, I'm not surprised that there is, there's a revision of this view. There's got to be more to
00:48:28.200
depression than simply low serotonin levels, or you can just, you know, I mean, or, or SSRIs would
00:48:32.420
have fixed, fixed all depression. And in fact, depression levels are quite high still. Um,
00:48:37.320
that doesn't necessarily mean that if you're on SSRI, it won't help you. I mean, I think a lot
00:48:41.340
of people have been helped by SSRIs. And as you say, Ali, a lot of people haven't been, um, I think
00:48:46.420
right, the right way to think, look about that, of that result is that we do not understand in any
00:48:51.560
really truly deep way what causes some people to be depressed. And, and, um, you know, the, the,
00:48:57.880
the, the, uh, a way to address it is multifaceted. Uh, and I think, uh, uh, a drug may not be the way
00:49:04.940
to, to, to help it for, for many people. I think as, as many people who've been on SSRIs have found
00:49:09.120
out. Um, and I think, uh, like expecting the healthcare system to solve those kinds of problems,
00:49:15.840
uh, you know, with 100% certainty where we just don't understand in any deep way exactly
00:49:21.480
what causes them, um, is, is, is, I think he's asking too much. Uh, we exalted science. We put
00:49:27.020
it as the, as, as, as the, as the sort of the highest source of all truth. When in fact, um,
00:49:32.320
if you look, if you do science, uh, for living really, which you, your, my impression is one
00:49:36.940
of humility before how much we, uh, how much we don't actually still know. Um, there's a lot we do
00:49:41.800
know, uh, but there's a lot we don't know. Um, and what makes science exciting and fun is this,
00:49:47.480
I, at this thing where you can like discover together as a community, what is true and what
00:49:53.160
isn't. You can have these, these fun fights with people tempered by data, tempered by experiment that,
00:49:59.580
that slowly reveal, you know, how, how the world works. Um, and I think that that's, that's the
00:50:05.700
spirit in which I look at that study. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, um, uh, the, the problem has
00:50:11.400
been the last 20 some years or 20, 30 years is we've overemphasized this chemical imbalance idea as a
00:50:17.160
source of knowledge about what this, what, what caused it. And before that it was the Freudian
00:50:21.020
idea, you know, it was like, what happened to you when you were little, uh, you know, with,
00:50:24.120
with your, your, with your, how your mom treated you or something. Um, uh, I mean, all of these like
00:50:28.780
simplistic ideas cannot possibly encapsulate why, uh, we have depression, why we have the, you know,
00:50:35.280
it's, these, these are like, uh, big human things. And to pretend we have a mechanistic, uh,
00:50:41.880
understanding that that's comprehensive to, to, to, to explain it all is, is always seemed to me as
00:50:48.340
hubris. Speaking of hubris, to me, a lot of scientists exhibit a lot of hubris in saying
00:51:06.740
things like trust the science, follow the science, and then marginalizing or intimidating anyone who,
00:51:15.260
as you said, bringing their own facts to the table, their own data, their own perspective to the table
00:51:20.400
disagrees with what the majority opinion in the scientific community is. People are kind of pushed
00:51:27.240
to the side as crazy or as kooky or as dumb for questioning things like masks or particular
00:51:36.760
side effects of, uh, the vaccine. Of course, there were people who 20 years ago were even saying,
00:51:43.720
hey, this whole idea of low serotonin levels being the sole driver of depression is probably not right.
00:51:50.700
And they were cast as crazy as quacks. That seems to be a big problem from my perspective
00:51:57.780
in science in general, that eventually science seems to come around and catch up to what some,
00:52:04.800
you know, that people were saying, some dissenters were saying, but it takes a, it takes a lot. It
00:52:10.020
takes a lot of courage for people like you to kind of stand against what people like Anthony Fauci are
00:52:15.140
saying when it really shouldn't, it really shouldn't take courage. Like you shouldn't really be worried,
00:52:18.940
not you in particular, but no one should be worried about losing their job for saying,
00:52:23.620
hey, here's what the science says. It's leading in a different direction. That to me shows that
00:52:29.960
it's become less driven by facts, less driven by data and more driven by, I don't even know,
00:52:35.660
politics, power, money, pharmaceutical companies. All I know is that it doesn't seem to be about
00:52:41.740
the wellbeing of the people that the scientific community is supposed to be serving.
00:52:46.740
I mean, there's, uh, all of what you said is entirely true. I mean, it's like, and it's,
00:52:52.600
it's not like that it's new. Um, there's this famous physicist named Max Planck who, uh, who,
00:52:58.540
uh, had this wry observation about how that's, he said, science advances one obituary at a time,
00:53:04.460
right? The idea is that, um, that, uh, there's this power structure within science and people at the
00:53:10.480
top of the hierarchy. I mean, there's a lot of ego. It's not even money of many people. Um, you know,
00:53:16.120
they, they, they want to be seen as the smart ones. Um, the, the wise ones and, uh, challenges
00:53:21.780
from, from, uh, to their, to their, uh, uh, uh, intellectual authority are, some of them react
00:53:27.980
very negatively to it. Like, you know, in my case, for instance, um, when we wrote the Great
00:53:31.760
Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH at the time, the National
00:53:36.900
Institute of Health, actually someone I admired, I mean, I'm, I'm Christian and he's been an outspoken
00:53:41.780
Christian in a, in a position of, of authority inside science. Um, he wrote an email, uh, to
00:53:48.160
Tony Fauci four days after we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. We were on October 4th
00:53:52.860
and October 8th. He wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me, Sunetra Gupta, who's one of the
00:53:57.380
world's best epidemiologists at University. And then Martin Kulder, one of the world's best
00:54:02.000
biostatisticians at Harvard University called the three of us fringe epidemiologists. And then
00:54:06.700
he called for a devastating published takedown, uh, of us. Uh, and then I started getting calls
00:54:12.020
from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus rip. In effect, why did I want to
00:54:15.240
kill people? Right. Of course. That's what they do. And I saw quotes from Tony Fauci and
00:54:19.520
effectively willfully, uh, sort of misinterpreting what we were arguing for in the Great Barrington
00:54:26.400
Declaration, which is focus, focus protection. They organized a media campaign to smear us and
00:54:30.940
destroy us, uh, in order to maintain the illusion that they were right, that they're, that they
00:54:35.840
had this, like this consensus behind them in favor of lockdowns when in fact, the consensus
00:54:40.480
never existed. The way that top scientists behave sets the tone for, um, for, for this
00:54:48.080
kind of behavior. I mean, here in this case, they explicitly created a propaganda campaign
00:54:52.400
in order to, in order to keep the, the public illusion that they, that they, that they, uh,
00:54:58.380
that they were reflecting a consensus of science, um, intact when in fact, there never was
00:55:03.900
one. Um, and I, I, I took, I've got to show you, I have a, uh, a card that I got, uh, that
00:55:09.520
now has, uh, here we go. It has fringe epidemiologist on it. There you go. Now you wear the title
00:55:14.820
proudly. Wow. It's, it's hard to even put into words how destructive that kind of attitude
00:55:20.960
and those kinds of actions are. And yes, Francis Collins has been held up as kind of a, a hero,
00:55:26.440
not just of science, but of the faith within Christian churches. I mean, he made his rounds
00:55:31.640
to different churches during COVID talking about the life-saving, you know, the life-saving
00:55:35.920
and also almost like the spiritually salvific power of like wearing a mask and forcing vaccines
00:55:42.260
and things like that. So that was very disappointing. Um, just to end, I want to get your thoughts
00:55:47.340
also on this Alzheimer's drug scandal. This was published, um, in science and it looked at this
00:55:55.020
six month investigation that, uh, provided really strong support for, um, the fact that this drug
00:56:01.760
and many of the drugs used to treat Alzheimer's, um, that the data had been manipulated to look like
00:56:08.600
they're actually more effective than they are when really they almost have a 100% failure rate.
00:56:15.520
So we're talking about hubris and power and money and all of those things really coming together
00:56:20.420
in one story, again, affecting disproportionately negatively the most vulnerable people among us,
00:56:27.420
beloved grandparents who suffered and died from Alzheimer's who put their hope in these drugs
00:56:32.220
and were told, Hey, maybe there's a good chance that they could work. And of course they failed.
00:56:36.120
What's your take on this story? Uh, so, uh, this is, this one's even worse than the SSRI.
00:56:42.020
The SSRI story is, is, is normal science. Like we, you, you, you have a new discovery,
00:56:46.240
which overturns an old idea, right? That's normal science. Um, here, what you have is, uh, a century
00:56:53.020
old idea, uh, that, that what causes dementias or at least one of the major causes of dementia is
00:57:00.820
the, uh, development of plaques, amyloid plaques in your, in your, in your, in your, in your brain
00:57:06.600
that cause the, the kind of like loss of loss of memory and loss of, uh, all the, all the things
00:57:12.020
that are connected with, with dementia and Alzheimer's. Um, that idea was, it was century
00:57:17.780
old, right? And, uh, when I was in medical school, I was taught that, that this was potentially a cause
00:57:22.460
of a lot of dementias, but you won't know unless you do an autopsy after someone's died to see if
00:57:27.580
those plaques existed. Um, that this was in the nineties, but since what happened over the, over,
00:57:34.000
over the nine, after the nineties was that, uh, people developed scanning methods to measure
00:57:39.280
the presence of, of amyloid plaques. Um, and there was a study done, I think 15 years ago,
00:57:46.740
16 years ago, published in a very prominent journal, um, that, that documented these plaques
00:57:53.520
were very common. Um, uh, it turns out that those, that study, which was again, published in a very
00:58:00.440
influential journal, had a big influence on solidifying this, this amyloid hypothesis as a
00:58:05.680
cause of Alzheimer's, um, used fake data. Like they just, they, it was, it was fraudulent.
00:58:11.180
The study was just pure fraud. Uh, that, that, that's come out. That's, that is exactly the,
00:58:16.240
the, what the, what's happened, what's happened recently. Like that, that the exposure of that
00:58:20.340
study is fraudulent has just come out. I mean, that happens in science too, right? You know,
00:58:24.280
people, again, you publish a paper in a top journal, all of a sudden you're, you, you, you get
00:58:29.480
invitations to conferences, you get grants, you get, you know, uh, uh, your, your social status rises
00:58:34.860
among other scientists. Um, you, you know, you get tenure. Um, and, uh, what's, what's happened
00:58:40.760
with, what the problem there was that that study by confirming the century old hypothesis led drug
00:58:48.000
developers to try to find drugs that could reduce the level amyloid in your brain. And, uh, so we have
00:58:55.720
a decade and a half of these, of drug developers who very successfully created drugs that do that.
00:59:00.820
But then when they run clinical trials on them, they don't actually help people in terms of,
00:59:06.740
you know, the, the, the, the slow deterioration of memory, the, the, all of the, the, the real
00:59:11.580
problems that come from, from, uh, from dementia that, that, that, uh, that turns out those drugs
00:59:17.500
just don't work. So essentially the main problem is that that paper led to a decade and a half of,
00:59:23.620
of, of, of a dead end, um, with, you know, billions of dollars thrown into, to research,
00:59:28.960
trying to address this amyloid problem. When in fact, the problem still is, how do you, um,
00:59:35.060
how do you care for, how do you treat someone who's, who has this slow deterioration of the
00:59:41.540
memory, the capacity to function in society that comes with Alzheimer's and with dementia?
00:59:46.520
Yes. Oh, sad. I know this has been really hard to read for people who have had people in their
00:59:51.320
lives who have suffered from Alzheimer's and maybe even took these drugs with the hope that they were
00:59:55.220
going to help. Um, this is a big question, but to close this out, if you were in charge
00:59:59.520
of all health, just health in general in the United States, I mean, we're talking about
01:00:06.080
you can make decisions for how the pharmaceutical companies run, for health policy, for how science
01:00:13.640
is developed and then published and communicated to the media, what would be your biggest reforms?
01:00:19.860
Like if you were put in charge and all of all of it, you got to make the decisions,
01:00:23.360
how would you change things so that the public could trust the public health system and the
01:00:30.860
entities involved again? Because right now the distrust is really high.
01:00:36.320
That's funny, Alec, because the, the, the, the, the key thing is, uh, is that I would make myself
01:00:40.720
not in charge. Um, you, you have to, you have to have a very wide diversity of voices for a topic as
01:00:47.020
complicated as that. And so the first thing I would do is I would bring in people that disagreed with me,
01:00:51.660
uh, to, to, to sit there and to tell me I'm wrong. Um, uh, you, uh, in terms of like the,
01:00:58.100
in terms of like, I think there's like several different kinds of issues around this. So for
01:01:01.980
instance, take the NIH, the NIH funds the research of, of very many biologists and medical doctors
01:01:08.660
and scientists who are working on, on health issues. Um, it's, it's really clear from the COVID
01:01:14.100
pandemic that what's happened inside the NIH is that a very small number of people, uh, have decided that
01:01:20.760
they know exactly what the right, what exactly where, where, where all the right scientific
01:01:25.340
investments are going to be, what, what's likely to produce the right, right results. Um, instead of
01:01:30.800
diversifying the ideas that they support, even supporting ideas that they may not think are
01:01:35.020
promising because you know, they, they, they may be wrong. Um, uh, they, they've focused all their
01:01:40.560
money and attention and not the Alzheimer's example is a good example on one set of hypotheses that you
01:01:45.580
create this like concentrated power structure. Um, and I think that needs to be disrupted. Um,
01:01:51.040
it met funding and science should be very similar to funding in, in like in the tech world where you
01:01:55.960
have, you know, you don't know which company is going to work. And so what you do is you fund,
01:01:59.560
uh, a very large number of companies. You expect many of them to fail, right? Cause you don't know in
01:02:04.640
advance. Uh, you, you diversify the portfolio. I think that kind of diversification desperately needs
01:02:09.560
to happen in science funding, uh, in public health. Um, I mean, there just needs to be a
01:02:17.060
recommitment to science and a recommitment to the values of, of the, of the public and an absolute
01:02:23.800
commitment to never telling a noble lie again. The purpose of public health isn't to manipulate
01:02:29.040
behavior of the public. The purpose of public health is to work with the public, give them as
01:02:33.820
good information as possible to know, and then understand the needs and desires of the public so
01:02:38.920
that, uh, that together it can create, uh, situations where health can happen. Um, the,
01:02:44.820
the, the current idea in public health, so clearly this priesthood who knows better about how to manage
01:02:51.940
you and manage the public. Um, and they'll tell you what to do and they'll be very disappointed when
01:02:56.460
you just, when you disagree with them or don't obey them. Um, and I'll tell you another thing in
01:03:00.920
public health, it's become clear to me is that, uh, so many people on in professional, uh,
01:03:06.940
physicians and public health are, are on the left. Now that by itself is not wrong. It's not bad.
01:03:12.120
There's nothing wrong with that. Um, the problem is that, that many of them look down on people on
01:03:17.480
the right. It's become a political position for them as opposed to professional position.
01:03:22.240
And that, uh, and what's happened on is this political divide in public health whereby, you know,
01:03:28.720
if, if you are being dictated to lecture to by people who are don't, you don't agree with
01:03:34.280
politically and look down on you because of your politics, you're not going to respond very well,
01:03:39.100
completely understandable. Um, and so what's happened is you have this like political divide
01:03:43.660
in public, but this, this public health where, um, uh, where half the country just doesn't agree
01:03:48.800
with this, just will not trust you because they think you're looking down on them. Um, you have to
01:03:54.820
diversify public health so that it has, uh, it reflects America. You cannot have one political
01:04:00.160
stripe in charge of basically every aspect of public health. Uh, and which is where we are.
01:04:05.300
Uh, and so if public health is going to regain the trust of America, it has to look like America,
01:04:09.160
uh, ideologically, I think, uh, I wouldn't have said that before the pandemic, but it's clear that
01:04:13.980
what's happened is, uh, public health, uh, cannot communicate with, with, with, uh, with red America
01:04:19.340
in a way that's trustworthy because they don't are unable to, I mean, in principle, they could,
01:04:23.640
if they respected, even if you disagree with someone, you can respect them. But it seems to me like a lot
01:04:28.420
of public health just doesn't respect people they disagree with politically. Um, and I just,
01:04:33.160
you just can't have that. So I would, I would work very hard to reform that. Medicine also needs to
01:04:37.400
return to evidence-based medicine. I mean, it's, uh, through the pandemic, it's become a tool of
01:04:42.220
propaganda and of, of dissemination of public health messages, message, uh, medicine for it to work,
01:04:48.520
doc patients have to trust their doctor as looking after their interests, not just for the public
01:04:52.760
interest. Um, and I think that's been a big problem in medicine is that, uh, is, is that a lot of
01:04:57.820
patients no longer trust doctors because they think that the doctors are up for something else other
01:05:03.220
than their own, uh, health and wellbeing. Yep. Yep. That's absolutely true. Well, thank you so much
01:05:08.300
for those recommendations and thank you so much, um, for your insight as well. I really appreciate it
01:05:13.720
as well as just for your, um, your courage, your willingness to kind of get in the public arena
01:05:18.720
and defend the scientific position. I really appreciate it.