RFK Jr. The Defender - April 03, 2021


Minority Harm with Dr Hooman Noorchashm


Episode Stats

Length

55 minutes

Words per Minute

158.86691

Word Count

8,833

Sentence Count

534

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

16


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Noor Chazam joins Dr. Kelly to discuss his views on vaccines and their use in the treatment of chronic conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and Type 1 diabetes. Dr. Chazom is a cardiologist, surgeon, and professor of medicine at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Philadelphia. He is also a lecturer in Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Assistant Professor of Surgery at The Perelman School of Medicine. He has been a member of the CHD, and is a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post, Slate, and the New York Times. He is the author of several books, including "Vaccine: The New Science of Resistance," and he is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the Atlantic. He has also been a contributor to NPR, NPR, and NPR Worldwide. Dr. Norchasm is a professor of surgery at the VA Hospital in Philadelphia, and a lecturer at the Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Boston, and he also is a lecturer on Surgery at Brigham and Young s in Boston. We talk about how he got into medicine, and why he thinks vaccines should be used in chronic conditions, and how they should be given the same treatment as other forms of medicine, such as chemotherapy, radiation, and other treatments. This episode is sponsored by the National Institute of Occupational Therapy at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease and Immunology, the National Heart Disease Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, in Bethesda, Maryland, and Harvard University, among other places in the nation s flagship facility in the United States, to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in need of care and their ability to get access to the care they need the most of what they need most of it, the most effective treatment. Learn more about your ad choices and access to high-quality, affordable and accessible care, including the best practices, the best equipment, the cheapest and the most affordable options, at the cheapest possible accommodations, everywhere you can get the best of the best places to help you access the best services, the fastest and the cheapestest practices in the cheapest practices, cheapest cheapest possible training and support you can access the most efficient practices, and most affordable practices, everywhere in the world, everywhere and everywhere you get it all you can find it all, wherever you go, and get the cheapest, cheapest, affordable, fastest and cheapest, fastestest of it all of it is most affordable, cheapest


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We have a very special guest today.
00:00:03.000 I'm going to call him my friend because I really enjoy corresponding with him, but this is the first chance that we've had to meet in person as it were over Zoom.
00:00:16.000 But his name is Dr.
00:00:20.000 Huma Noorchasm, and did I pronounce it right?
00:00:23.000 That's all I've done.
00:00:24.000 Yeah, that's all right.
00:00:26.000 Perfectly fine.
00:00:27.000 You know, it's the easiest pronunciation is Norchasm, Robert.
00:00:30.000 Norchasm.
00:00:31.000 And I know, because he's on a list, we have a CHD that has about 240 doctors and scientists on it, and they're constantly debating You know, all the issues that we're concerned about.
00:00:48.000 And he is a recent addition and has cost a big store.
00:00:53.000 One, because he's brilliant.
00:00:55.000 He's very combative.
00:00:57.000 He's very, you know, has strong beliefs that are different than in many subtle and direct ways than other people who are on that list.
00:01:08.000 And he's very, extremely prolific in his writing, but also very, very compelling.
00:01:17.000 It's been really enjoyable listening to you, even though he's attacking me many times.
00:01:23.000 He did one attack on me on Medium, but I really enjoy it because it's the kind of thing that ought to be happening in our democracy, where we can debate complicated, difficult issues.
00:01:38.000 We can do it civilly and politely.
00:01:41.000 And we can have science-based debates.
00:01:44.000 And that's what ought to be happening all around.
00:01:46.000 And that's what we try to do on The Defender.
00:01:50.000 And I urge you to follow Manor Chazam because, you know, he's very smart about this.
00:01:57.000 And he may be taking positions that you don't agree with.
00:02:02.000 But, you know, he has the courage to debate them and defend them.
00:02:06.000 And let me give you a little background.
00:02:09.000 Dr.
00:02:10.000 Oman Norchism, he is an MD and a PhD.
00:02:14.000 He is a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctor of Medicine also from the University of Pennsylvania.
00:02:24.000 I'll just read you some of his appointments, his faculty appointments.
00:02:29.000 He's an attending physician, Department of Surgery, Philadelphia, VA Hospital.
00:02:36.000 He also is a professor of surgery, Division of Cardiotherapy Surgery, Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia.
00:02:43.000 He has a lecturer on surgery at Brigham and Young's in Boston.
00:02:47.000 He's an instructor in surgery at University of Pennsylvania.
00:02:52.000 He's an assistant professor of surgical research at the University of Pennsylvania.
00:02:59.000 And he has innumerable awards.
00:03:06.000 And I thank you for the story of how you kind of started questioning some of the orthodoxies of medical products anyway.
00:03:18.000 And I'm going to get into the vaccines because, you know, he has a very, very different view than I do.
00:03:26.000 In some respects.
00:03:29.000 You got into it because of an injury that affected your wife.
00:03:35.000 Can you tell us a little bit about that?
00:03:37.000 Sure, absolutely.
00:03:38.000 First of all, I want to thank you for having me on your program.
00:03:42.000 It's really a privilege to be here, and I appreciate all the kind words that you directed at me.
00:03:47.000 I do think that this is a very, very important conversation at this time in our history.
00:03:52.000 I think, you know, our nation, as you know, is very much binary and divided right now.
00:03:56.000 We all live in this pro and anti space.
00:03:59.000 Everyone seems to be pro something and anti something.
00:04:02.000 And I think recovering the center is where healing is going to happen.
00:04:07.000 And this is going to have to be based on ethics and reason and science and empathy for each other's pain.
00:04:14.000 And so, yeah, you're right.
00:04:17.000 I mean, I have the academic pedigree that you described.
00:04:21.000 You know, I'm basically an establishment guy.
00:04:23.000 I went to Penn Medical School, MD-PhD, under a National Institutes of Health grant with the medical scientist training program.
00:04:31.000 Which I think some of your relatives in the past had something to do with establishing at the NIH. And I subsequently was funded by the NIH for about over 10 years doing immunology research.
00:04:43.000 Joined the faculty at several pretty high-level academic medical centers, including Harvard and Thomas Jefferson and Penn.
00:04:50.000 And so my perspective as an immunologist is what it is.
00:04:54.000 And I'm happy to engage in that discourse with respect to vaccines, with respect to immunity in general.
00:05:00.000 But, you know, I think what sort of has brought me into this space and in conversation with you is that because of this very sort of personal experience that my family had, I got tuned into something sort of deeper that's going on in our system.
00:05:16.000 And that is this idea of our system somehow being able to tolerate minority harm.
00:05:22.000 Harm to minority subsets of people simply because in some utilitarian calculus, the majority are benefiting.
00:05:31.000 So in other words...
00:05:32.000 We're talking about vulnerable subsets of people.
00:05:35.000 Vulnerable subsets of people, you know, and in fact, like, you know, I think this is not a new thing in American history.
00:05:41.000 You've had, we've had examples all the way starting from slavery to how American Indians have been treated in America where minority subsets of people, you know, in the past, potentially on the The basis of their ethnicity have been discriminated against and sort of, you know, been harmed actually, because there was some majority benefit calculus there that was benefiting the majority of the rest of society.
00:06:02.000 And I think this concept has crept into medicine.
00:06:05.000 So my wife was a woman who had an occult uterine cancer that was associated with symptomatic uterine fibroids.
00:06:13.000 And women have this problem at a rate of about 1 in 400.
00:06:16.000 And there's a practice called morselation.
00:06:18.000 In fact, on the 23rd, so this coming Monday, there's a movie coming out about my wife, my late wife, Amy Reed.
00:06:25.000 Her name was Amy Josephine Reed.
00:06:26.000 She basically had the same academic pedigree as me, was a member of faculty at Harvard Medical School.
00:06:31.000 And that cancer that she had was undiagnosed.
00:06:35.000 And this practice basically converted it into a stage 4 cancer.
00:06:40.000 So it was a dramatic and catastrophic complication.
00:06:43.000 And it was happening on a systemic level.
00:06:45.000 It was affecting 1 in 400 women on a global scale practice.
00:06:49.000 So her and I started to engage in activism.
00:06:51.000 Basically, it's a machine that they put inside of you that basically...
00:06:57.000 And instead of removing the cancer, slice and dice it and spread it throughout our body.
00:07:03.000 That's basically, well, so they don't, if they know that it's a cancer, they wouldn't use it.
00:07:07.000 The problem is that when there's an unknown cancer in there, when there's an occult cancer in there, they, you know, the act of mechanically morcelating, it spreads the cancer all over and causes a stage four cancer.
00:07:19.000 So it takes a curable stage 1 cancer to an incurable stage 4 cancer.
00:07:24.000 And this was happening at a rate of 1 in 300 to 400 to women who basically had these uterine fibroids that were symptomatic.
00:07:30.000 And the gynecologists were assuming that these are benign.
00:07:33.000 So this happened to Amy and, you know, her and I got plunged into this very big public health fight.
00:07:39.000 And you can look it up.
00:07:40.000 I mean, it's very well publicized.
00:07:41.000 The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the cancer letter, they covered it quite extensively.
00:07:47.000 And, you know, unfortunately, in 2017, my wife passed away and we have six kids.
00:07:52.000 Our youngest kid was Ryan, was four at the time of Amy's passing.
00:07:56.000 My oldest was 14.
00:08:00.000 And so we engaged in a lot of activism and we were able to change the practice.
00:08:04.000 We fully engaged head on the establishment and the FDA. And we were successful at it.
00:08:11.000 Now, we didn't have to deal with some of the issues that the vaccine space has to deal with, which is that there are very strong federal protections favoring the vaccine industry.
00:08:20.000 We didn't have to deal with that layer of protection.
00:08:23.000 So I think that had some to do with our success.
00:08:26.000 But my perspective really shifted from...
00:08:30.000 And I think...
00:08:32.000 I tried to crystallize this with you when we had a conversation, Robert, on the phone.
00:08:36.000 I don't know if you recall, but...
00:08:38.000 There's this idea that majority benefit is what guides evidence-based medicine.
00:08:47.000 So in other words, when people talk about efficacy of a product or a practice, they're talking about majority benefit.
00:08:56.000 So I think the framework that I sort of, and this has sort of been born out of this ridiculous and awful crucible that my family fell into, is that when I think about evidence-based medicine, I think about efficacy, which is essentially synonymous with majority benefit.
00:09:16.000 So if something is effective, some series of metrics have been used to demonstrate majority benefit.
00:09:22.000 And when people talk about safety, we're talking about minority harm.
00:09:28.000 Because you see, if minority harm actually was not minority harm, if it was majority harm, you would never actually have that product on the market.
00:09:35.000 So really, we're talking about minority harm Being the definition of safety science in general, in medicine, right?
00:09:41.000 The problem is, right, because majority benefit plugs directly into democracy and into the market-based economy that we have, there's a lot of money in majority benefit.
00:09:51.000 There's not as much money in minority harm.
00:09:53.000 And so the two things that have to be essentially on equal footing, efficacy and safety, Have essentially been dominated by efficacy being the dominant sort of force.
00:10:05.000 So efficacy and majority benefit are routinely in medicine overriding minority harm and safety.
00:10:12.000 So if something makes money, if something is beneficial to the majority, if the majority prefer it, our system is designed to accept that more and endorse it more and protect it more.
00:10:25.000 Than it is likely to fend for safety.
00:10:29.000 And I think the vaccine space is a dramatic example of that.
00:10:32.000 I mean, the vaccine space is a...
00:10:33.000 I mean, look, how absurd a notion that any medical therapy would be perfection incarnate, right?
00:10:39.000 I mean, think about it for a second, right?
00:10:41.000 When you put federal protections on any product that says you can't give liability signals from the court system to that industry, you're essentially claiming perfection in a fallen world that we live in.
00:10:51.000 Right?
00:10:52.000 Like, it's like, oh, this product is perfect, right?
00:10:54.000 Therefore, you can't give it any liability signal.
00:10:57.000 We're going to protect the living hell out of this.
00:10:59.000 Because what are we protecting?
00:11:00.000 What we're protecting is this idea of majority benefit that's plugged directly into both marketing and money, right?
00:11:07.000 And some degree of sort of like groupthink in a way, right?
00:11:10.000 That everyone thinks it's good to do this, right?
00:11:13.000 So...
00:11:13.000 Let me...
00:11:18.000 You kind of amplify that paradox a little bit, which is that in 1986, when they passed the Vaccine Act, they gave all these companies immunity from liability.
00:11:32.000 They did it because Wyeth had gone to the Reagan administration and to my uncle, who was then chairing the health committee.
00:11:41.000 And to the other senators and congressmen and said, look, we are getting killed on this diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine.
00:11:50.000 We're paying out $20 in the injury downstream liability for every dollar that we're making from sales.
00:12:00.000 And their question was, well, why don't you make it safer?
00:12:03.000 And they said, you can't.
00:12:06.000 It's impossible to make them safer.
00:12:08.000 Vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.
00:12:12.000 And that phrase, unavoidably unsafe, is in the preamble to the statute.
00:12:17.000 So the statute says because these products are unavoidably unsafe, we have to indemnify them.
00:12:24.000 And it's exactly what you're saying.
00:12:26.000 You know, they didn't assume perfection.
00:12:29.000 They said these are, in fact, these are, it was ironic because they're saying, These are so dangerous, we have to give them perfection.
00:12:37.000 But what it did is it removes any incentive for the companies then to go out and make them safe.
00:12:46.000 It's interesting.
00:12:47.000 What you're describing essentially meets the legal definition of negligence.
00:12:50.000 Because if you know something is unsafe and you're going to protect it, that's by definition negligent.
00:12:54.000 It's unfortunate that they sort of term it that way.
00:12:57.000 When I think about harm, when I think about medical harm, You know, in medicine, when I was training at Penn in my residency program, the way we thought about complications were we classified them as unavoidable or avoidable, right?
00:13:11.000 There are such things as unavoidable complications, right?
00:13:15.000 Let's say you're driving down the street, for example, right?
00:13:18.000 And you have your seatbelt on, your airbags, right?
00:13:21.000 And some car just crashes right into you accidentally, right?
00:13:24.000 That's sort of an unavoidable situation that you're in, right?
00:13:26.000 Or let's say you're doing an operation, right?
00:13:29.000 And, you know, someone's blood pressure spikes high and their blood vessel, their aorta ruptures, right, on the operating table.
00:13:35.000 That's sort of a, that's a complication for sure.
00:13:38.000 It's an unavoidable complication.
00:13:39.000 The word harm, harm, implicit to harm, is the concept of avoidability.
00:13:46.000 And I think, you know, the idea that we live in a fallen world, in a world where things are not perfect.
00:13:53.000 And in reality, what we are as humans is we are risk management machines, right?
00:14:00.000 So the way we operate, right, is we manage and minimize risk to ourselves, to our families, to our society, to our world, right?
00:14:08.000 And that's essentially like when I look at the work that you've done over the years.
00:14:12.000 And, you know, when you first contacted me, I went back and looked at all the stuff that you've done.
00:14:16.000 And I mean, I view you as like a risk management guy.
00:14:22.000 I mean, you're basically looking for places where things fall through cracks and you're trying to sort of hedge against that risk by using the legal system or whatever platform you have to do so.
00:14:35.000 But I think we all do that.
00:14:37.000 Fundamentally, every family, every person wants to minimize risk to themselves, to their families, to their cities, to their towns.
00:14:45.000 The idea that we could actually minimize risk entirely to zero So we can get something to perfect, right?
00:14:52.000 I think it's a fundamentally flawed idea, right?
00:14:55.000 But what we can be is we can be honest and ethical, right?
00:14:58.000 So we can say, you know, here's a risk, right?
00:15:03.000 We've done everything.
00:15:04.000 We know this risk.
00:15:05.000 We've done everything in our power to identify who's at risk and to mitigate this risk.
00:15:09.000 And then we're going to subject it to this utilitarian calculus, right?
00:15:13.000 Because, look, utilitarianism is one of the achievements of Western civilization.
00:15:17.000 Without utilitarianism, you have a monarchy, right?
00:15:20.000 You have a totalitarianism, right?
00:15:22.000 Where minorities are governing the...
00:15:26.000 We need utilitarian ethics.
00:15:29.000 We need a democratic society.
00:15:31.000 However, you can't say just because the majority prefers something, we're going to screw this minority subset of people, right?
00:15:38.000 And we're going to take all their legal protections away from them.
00:15:40.000 We're going to dehumanize them.
00:15:41.000 We're going to turn them into slaves.
00:15:42.000 We're going to put them on reservations, right?
00:15:45.000 Or we're going to take their occult uterine cancers and morselate the living hell out of them.
00:15:49.000 Or we're going to take this family whose kid got vaccine injury and we're just going to say these people are crazy.
00:15:55.000 All of them are just crazy, right?
00:15:57.000 You can't do that.
00:15:59.000 In this country, you can't do that.
00:16:01.000 It's incompatible with sort of the constitutional framework that's sitting out there, right?
00:16:06.000 So, you know, I believe people who say they're vaccine harmed.
00:16:11.000 And I know that this idea that we create these protectionist structures that basically block out minority subsets of people, so they have no rights, are frankly evil.
00:16:27.000 I mean, I don't know what other word to...
00:16:31.000 I don't mean to get too philosophical and veer off the beaten path here.
00:16:37.000 Going back to your question, where does my perspective come from?
00:16:42.000 It's very simple.
00:16:45.000 The idea of minority harm Is something that we need to carefully consider in our society?
00:16:52.000 Because if we don't, we're going to create all these structures that harm minority subsets of people, Robert.
00:16:57.000 And after a while, we're going to hit this inflection point where the harmed actually become the majority.
00:17:03.000 When the harm become the majority, then your society falls apart.
00:17:07.000 Then people are going to crawl up the walls of the United States Congress and try to overthrow it.
00:17:11.000 You can't create a society and institutions that ignore minority substance of people who are being harmed and take away their rights and then expect that that society over time will stay stable.
00:17:24.000 I want to get to your letter to FDA, which I think is really important.
00:17:32.000 The FDA, of course, wants to ignore this kind of complaint, but I think it was a hard thing for them to do to ignore you because of your credentials and your history.
00:17:43.000 And at least they responded to you.
00:17:47.000 But I want to read for our listeners.
00:17:52.000 One of the introductions, which is kind of an obligatory disavowal of the anti-vax movement, which we see every year, but it also illustrates the background of your assumptions and how you come into this.
00:18:06.000 What you say is, I want to be very clear that I am an ardent supporter of President Biden's plan to vaccinate 150 million Americans in 100 days.
00:18:15.000 And that my letter is not to be abused by political, uninformed, or conspiratorial forces attempting to dissuade the American public from being vaccinated, nor by those whose binary approach to the pro-vaccine position renders them incapable of grasping the problem of, quote, minority harm, unquote.
00:18:36.000 I do believe that it is the patriotic duty of every American who can reasonably and safely be vaccinated to do so as soon as possible in order that we may save our nation from this pandemic peril that is threatening our very existence.
00:18:51.000 And, you know, I'm actually glad that you wrote that.
00:18:54.000 And I think, you know, one of the things, like what I try to do when I speak to people is I say I'm not anti-vaccine.
00:19:02.000 I want safe vaccines.
00:19:04.000 And I think it's really I'm not a crazy person.
00:19:10.000 I'm a mainstream person, and my concerns are the legitimate concerns of a mainstream person who shares values.
00:19:21.000 With, you know, with the audience.
00:19:24.000 But I would challenge you on this a little.
00:19:27.000 And this is, to me, is one of the problems with the, you know, the vaccine rollout.
00:19:31.000 And we don't give, we don't advise people ever to not take vaccines.
00:19:35.000 We don't give people advice.
00:19:37.000 We give people information so that they can make, as you say, an individualized risk assessment.
00:19:45.000 And the risk assessment for 150 million Americans are different from everybody.
00:19:51.000 And a lot of that is because this disease that we're trying to prevent has categories of risk that are kind of very well defined for different subsets and different demographics and particularly different age groups.
00:20:06.000 So if you're under 55, the risk from COVID is effectively zero.
00:20:14.000 Whereas if you're over 55, and particularly when you get into the 75 to 85, there is a dramatic risk from this disease, dramatic, deadly risk that could be as high as 7%.
00:20:27.000 And so the assessment ought to be different for those groups of people.
00:20:34.000 There's other complications too, because you say, I would say, if you're under 55, There's an argument to be made that you should not get a vaccine because I'm making this argument.
00:20:48.000 I'm just being a devil's advocate that you should not get a vaccine because the vaccines do have risks that are pretty, you know, fairly well documented.
00:20:58.000 And the risk from COVID, you know, may be much lower.
00:21:04.000 Not only that, but we You may get a much more robust, long-term, durable immunity from the disease, from having the natural disease than you will get from the vaccine.
00:21:18.000 That is true with every other vaccine that we know about.
00:21:21.000 For sure, for sure.
00:21:23.000 You have a wider range.
00:21:26.000 In other words, you're more likely to get protection from emergence strains of the vaccine.
00:21:35.000 You know, there's a wider range of protection and probably a much more durable protection, longer term, et cetera, robust.
00:21:42.000 And if you get vaccinated.
00:21:45.000 And so the issue then becomes, should I get vaccinated to protect an older person because of, you know, I'm less likely to pass it.
00:21:53.000 If I'm a child, do I get it to protect my teachers at school?
00:21:58.000 And that is a huge ethical question.
00:22:01.000 I agree.
00:22:01.000 And you put somebody at risk.
00:22:04.000 It's the old trolley car metaphor.
00:22:10.000 If there are seven people standing on this track and one guy is going to get hit, one guy is on the siding and seven people are going to get hit by the trolley car and you're standing at the switch.
00:22:24.000 Do you have a right to switch it to the deciding and kill that guy?
00:22:29.000 You know, and does government particularly have a right to demand that that person enter the risk rather than put those other people at risk?
00:22:37.000 And it's an old ethical question.
00:22:38.000 And usually the answer is you don't want government making those decisions no matter what.
00:22:45.000 People have to assess their own risk.
00:22:47.000 So that's what I would say is one of the conundrums with this vaccine is That is most troubling to me is this big drive to vaccinate the very young who essentially have zero risk from the disease.
00:23:02.000 And it's kind of a hazy argument that is deliberately obfuscated and made opaque, you know, where they're saying, you use the word patriotic, and that makes me worried because they're telling people, you need to do this for the herd, for the group.
00:23:22.000 And it may not be in your interest to do it.
00:23:26.000 Some of these vaccines, according to the Phase 1 trial for Moderna, 100% of the people got injured.
00:23:35.000 21% got serious.
00:23:37.000 I mean, hospitalization or medical intervention required in the high dose group, 6% in the low dose group.
00:23:43.000 This is a very reactogenic vaccine.
00:23:46.000 It is.
00:23:47.000 It's one of the most powerful vaccines we've ever made.
00:23:49.000 And, you know, the mRNA nature of it has to do with that.
00:23:53.000 And there's no question.
00:23:55.000 I mean, this is a very immunogenic vaccine.
00:23:56.000 So, I mean, you know, did you want to continue on your train of thought?
00:24:02.000 Because I want to get to your letter, but I'd love to hear your reaction to that, you know.
00:24:08.000 I do.
00:24:08.000 So I'll prefix it, Robert, by saying, you know, I don't think...
00:24:12.000 Oh, let me add one other thing.
00:24:15.000 You know, one other complication to that formula.
00:24:19.000 We don't even know how well this vaccine prevents transmissibility.
00:24:24.000 So that's another, you know, now you're asking people to do, to take a risk who are young, who have zero risk from the illness, benefit older people.
00:24:35.000 And it may be that the older people don't even benefit.
00:24:38.000 So, you know, that's another ingredient to that risk assessment that just makes it even more complicated to answer these questions.
00:24:47.000 So I think the idea that there are different groups that have variable susceptibilities, differential susceptibilities, from a mortality perspective alone is absolutely true.
00:25:00.000 So that I agree with.
00:25:02.000 So I just want to clarify one thing.
00:25:04.000 I do think that the medical ethical principle of patient autonomy That trumps all things in this discussion, meaning that no one should ever be strapped down or threatened with loss of their liberties or their employment because they are refusing a medical therapy.
00:25:24.000 For their education?
00:25:27.000 Or their education.
00:25:28.000 That's a direct violation of, you know, the principle of patient autonomy.
00:25:32.000 That's one of the pillars of medical ethics, right?
00:25:34.000 So no one should...
00:25:36.000 I'm not an advocate for forced vaccinations, right?
00:25:39.000 I am an advocate for sort of public education about immunology, right?
00:25:45.000 And I have to say that, you know, one dimension that I don't hear in any of the discussions that I'm part of is this idea, and I know that this gentleman, what's his name, Geert van der Bosch from Geneva.
00:26:01.000 So, you know, there's this idea that's out there that we should stop vaccinating.
00:26:07.000 He's saying we should stop vaccinating everyone because the vaccine is introducing this selective pressure that's going to create more dangerous variants.
00:26:13.000 You know, I think there's partial truth to that, but the one risk category that people don't think about when they think about the different risk categories, the mortality issue is one thing, right, that you pointed to.
00:26:25.000 Like 55 and over, 65 and over are highly susceptible to infection and to mortality and to complications.
00:26:33.000 You know, kids in school are not.
00:26:34.000 But the one element that has a societal impact actually is that every single naturally infected person, every single naturally infected person is literally a factory for new mutations.
00:26:46.000 So really where the variants are coming from The variants are coming from every individual and every community and every sort of city where people are naturally infected.
00:27:01.000 So the idea that natural infection, we can somehow sort of let natural infection rage through our communities And expect that we won't have emergent properties and new variants.
00:27:14.000 I think we need to, you know, everyone who's rationally thinking about this needs to sort of step back, take a deep breath, and say, wait a minute.
00:27:22.000 So if Jack Smith's infected and everyone around him is infected, every one of these people is a factory for new mutations.
00:27:29.000 I mean, all these new variants are coming from somewhere.
00:27:31.000 It's not like there's this pool of variants sitting out there, right?
00:27:34.000 Let me challenge you on that, okay?
00:27:38.000 And what you're saying is correct.
00:27:40.000 The more activity, the more organisms that are out there, theoretically, the greater chance that you will produce mutations because it's numerical.
00:27:55.000 It's not just theoretical.
00:27:56.000 It's a real thing.
00:27:57.000 Right.
00:27:58.000 It's numerical.
00:27:59.000 However, I would say this.
00:28:01.000 It may be that the worst kind of mutations are coming from vaccinated individuals.
00:28:07.000 And this is for the same reason that when you use subtherapeutic antibiotics, that's when you produce superbugs.
00:28:16.000 Because you're wiping out the organisms, the strains that are the easiest strains, the most common strains to wipe out.
00:28:24.000 And the ones that continue to survive, even if there's only a few of them, are essentially superbugs.
00:28:31.000 So you've got a few of them in your nasal pharynx.
00:28:35.000 Those ones that survive are the superbugs.
00:28:38.000 And we know this is what happened with the pertussis vaccine.
00:28:42.000 You had pertussis A, which the vaccine prevents, but there was a much more dangerous pertussis B. And all of a sudden now we have epidemics of pertussis B because the vaccine forced those particular mutations.
00:28:59.000 And if you look at just evolutionary theory, There's a doctrine called type replacement that says that the most common organism, the most common strains of any pathogen are always the less injurious, because if you're a pathogen, You want a healthy host.
00:29:27.000 You do not want to injure your host, because you want your host walking around, shaking hands, kissing people, having sex, being sociable, because then you get to spread.
00:29:37.000 And those are the ones that are the most common ones.
00:29:39.000 So it's always the least deadly strains have become most common.
00:29:45.000 They out-compete their brethren who are killing people.
00:29:48.000 But when you get rid of those strains, You then open up the ecosystem, which is the nasal pharynx, or the rare strains, which are, according to biological theory, are going to almost always going to be the most virulent and the most deadly.
00:30:07.000 So I would say what you're saying, what you're saying is not, it's not, there's a Another way of looking at that.
00:30:18.000 So I guess, look, I think that you're not incorrect.
00:30:23.000 I would say that when you think about evolution and selective pressures versus the source of variance, right?
00:30:32.000 There's no question that selective pressures under certain circumstances are dominant selective forces for evolution of new variants and dominance of new variants.
00:30:44.000 But these parameters interact with each other.
00:30:47.000 So in other words, the source of mutation is Interacts with selective pressure.
00:30:52.000 And depending on how large one is versus the other, one could become dominant over the other.
00:30:57.000 So you're absolutely right.
00:30:58.000 So I mean, there's definitely the role of selective pressure in selection of phenotypes in evolutionary biology or in immunology and infectious disease is definitively correct.
00:31:09.000 I mean, you can have a A massive selective pressure that's selecting for more virulent strains, and therefore, those become dominant, right?
00:31:19.000 And that's, I think, what Van der Bosch is pointing to, and I think I'm hearing echoes of that same argument in what you just described.
00:31:28.000 But I think that there's...
00:31:29.000 I didn't hear him talk about that, but I didn't...
00:31:32.000 I wasn't completely clear on his arguments, and I've seen analyses of his arguments that...
00:31:41.000 Agree with some of the stuff that he was saying.
00:31:45.000 But, you know, he said a lot of the things that were more speculative.
00:31:50.000 I guess my fundamental point, Robert, is that you have selective pressure interacting with variant source.
00:31:57.000 And depending on the circumstance and the size of each one, One is more dominant over the other.
00:32:03.000 And I think that in a pandemic scenario, where you have potentially 9 billion or 8 billion people susceptible to all being infected because there is no baseline level of endemic immunity, that that force is going to be so large in terms of generation of these new variants that what will end up happening if we just let naturally this process occur What we'll have is just this impenetrable,
00:32:30.000 dense variety of now-living mutants that'll just be impossible to break through.
00:32:36.000 So, you know, I think we have to think about the inflection points in how these forces interact.
00:32:42.000 And I think my tendency is to think that in a pandemic situation, the absolute number of factories for mutations dominates over any particular one individual selective force.
00:32:56.000 So the Cochrane Collaboration has done a series of studies on the flu vaccine.
00:33:01.000 There's a group of those studies that show that people who are...
00:33:08.000 We're vaccinated for the seasonal flu, have no immunity from that vaccine against the pandemic flus that come every few years, right?
00:33:21.000 The bird flu, the swine flu, H1N1, H1N5, etc.
00:33:26.000 The people who got a natural flu infection have much more immunity.
00:33:31.000 So that again goes to, you know, is vaccination Is mass vaccination really the solution or do you want young people as much as possible to get natural infections and have a much broader range?
00:33:47.000 Of immunity that maybe will protect against all those strains that are constantly mutating and give them really robust, durable...
00:33:55.000 Or because if you give the vaccine and then it mutates, then you have to get the new strain.
00:34:03.000 Listen, you're absolutely right.
00:34:04.000 And I think that people who are naturally immune...
00:34:07.000 Look, my own sister got...
00:34:08.000 My sister's a surgeon, right?
00:34:10.000 She got a COVID-19 infection, her whole family, right?
00:34:14.000 And natural COVID-19 infection.
00:34:16.000 Her hospital is, you know, again, I don't want to get her into trouble, but basically people are pressuring her to get vaccinated.
00:34:23.000 She got an IgG screen.
00:34:24.000 She has IgG.
00:34:25.000 She had a pretty robust symptomatic disease.
00:34:28.000 There's no way in hell she's going to get that vaccine because, you know...
00:34:32.000 I think what you're saying is absolutely true.
00:34:35.000 It's fundamentally a dogma in immunology.
00:34:38.000 This is a fundamental fact in immunology that if you have a natural infection, you're more robustly immunized than if you just get immunized against this one specific moiety.
00:34:49.000 So you're absolutely right.
00:34:51.000 But look, here's the ethical conundrum.
00:34:54.000 And again, it comes down to the minority harm issue, right?
00:34:56.000 Is look, what is the cost of population level natural immunity?
00:35:02.000 There's no question, natural immunity is superior, very likely in the vast majority of people, to vaccine immunity.
00:35:08.000 That's sort of a no-brainer.
00:35:10.000 You mentioned that there are studies done.
00:35:12.000 Any immunologist worth their salt would tell you that that's probably true.
00:35:16.000 If you get immunized with the whole virus, you're more robustly immunized than if you're vaccinated against just one protein from the virus.
00:35:26.000 That's absolutely true.
00:35:28.000 But let's think about the cost.
00:35:30.000 Of achieving a population that's naturally immune versus a population that is immunized with the vaccine in terms of the mortality cost, right?
00:35:43.000 And I would submit to you that, look, the COVID-19 disease kills a minority subset of people.
00:35:50.000 Unless we want to say, oh, the COVID-19 is not real or whatever, which I, I mean, it's just- I would never say that because I don't think it's true.
00:35:58.000 I think it's very real.
00:36:01.000 As a baseline, SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic virus.
00:36:04.000 The COVID-19 pandemic is real, and it's killing a minority subset of people up to half a percent, right?
00:36:10.000 Half a percent, right?
00:36:12.000 Half a percent is the cost, is the minority subset number, right?
00:36:17.000 Now, that's juxtaposed against probably like a 0.05% or 0.01% vaccine harm So you have two minority subsets of people, both of whom will be harmed.
00:36:32.000 The vaccine probably does help that larger minority subset.
00:36:40.000 And it harms the smaller minority subset, for sure, right?
00:36:44.000 So how do we balance the good of these two minority subsets that we're dealing with?
00:36:49.000 The vast majority of us are fine when we get SARS-CoV-2, right?
00:36:52.000 And so I think fundamentally, that's the question.
00:36:55.000 And let me put a finer point on that question.
00:37:00.000 Because our experience here in the United States is of a virus that is much more deadly than almost any other country in the world.
00:37:10.000 And why is that?
00:37:12.000 Why are we losing 1,500 people for every 100,000 when Cuba is losing only 14 and Africa is losing only one?
00:37:21.000 And there's a lot of factors, younger population, but one of those is Is that there's been a deliberate effort in our country to not look at the benefits of therapeutic drugs.
00:37:32.000 Absolutely.
00:37:33.000 Oh, my goodness.
00:37:35.000 And the problem is we literally have an institutional resistance where, you know, nothing's getting published on those.
00:37:43.000 Doctors are discouraged from using them, punished, even jailed for using them, and losing their licenses and all of this other hard show.
00:37:54.000 In order to have that one-track solution, which is it's either vaccination or the disease, and that should not be our choice.
00:38:01.000 We should be doing real risk assessments, and we should be doing early intervention.
00:38:08.000 What would the numbers be like if Tony Fauci had not created a system where nobody gets treated until they get in the hospital?
00:38:19.000 Where for the first three weeks that you get that virus, you're getting ivermectin, and you're getting hydroxychloroquine, and you're getting corticosteroids, and you're getting antibodies, and you're getting, you know, Zithromax, and all of these combinations of drugs that appear to be very, very effective that The doctors all over the world are saying this is working.
00:38:40.000 And we are the country that doesn't allow it.
00:38:43.000 And we have the most catastrophic impacts from this disease in any other country.
00:38:48.000 I don't know how Tony Fauci, people are saying he's a success story when he has engineered the worst outcome in the world here.
00:38:59.000 Robert, if you go back and look at some of the stuff that I wrote early in this pandemic, I think Tony Fauci's approach to this pandemic has been disastrous.
00:39:12.000 Fundamentally, COVID-19 is an inflammatory disease.
00:39:16.000 What the NIH effort focused on with anti-replication agents and vaccines At the cost of anti-inflammatory therapies is a massive blunder.
00:39:29.000 And I tell you, I've communicated with Janet Woodcock about this when she was at Operation Warp Speed.
00:39:33.000 You know, you can go back in my Medium blog post and you'll see one of the first drugs that my colleagues and I attempted to test was cyclosporine.
00:39:42.000 And cyclosporine is a classical generic drug.
00:39:45.000 It literally costs like 12 bucks for a 30-day course, right?
00:39:48.000 And it suppresses, it dampens activation of T cells, okay?
00:39:52.000 I'm working on it with a mentor and colleague, Carl June, who's the guy who invented CAR T cells at Penn, and a good friend of mine at Baylor.
00:40:00.000 Finally, we were able to start these two small clinical trials But, you know, in truth, the dominance of the vaccine and anti-replication efforts, these were all Fauci's sort of prejudice.
00:40:11.000 And I wrote an article about this called Fauci's Prejudice.
00:40:14.000 If you go back...
00:40:15.000 Oh, I need to go.
00:40:17.000 Yeah.
00:40:18.000 I mean, look, you know, I totally agree with you.
00:40:20.000 You know, I think the therapeutic, you know, objective has been an absolute disaster.
00:40:26.000 The therapeutic search for a therapy has been an absolute disaster.
00:40:29.000 Yeah.
00:40:29.000 And I think the blame, whether it's been intentional or whether it comes from his professional prejudice from the HIV pandemic, the blame squarely rests on Dr.
00:40:39.000 Fauci's shoulders because he essentially has ignored anti-inflammatory therapies.
00:40:43.000 And, you know, I've written extensively about this.
00:40:45.000 I was communicating directly to Janet Woodcock about this right from day one.
00:40:49.000 You know, in fact, March 24th is the first time I communicated about cyclosporine with them.
00:40:54.000 So, I mean, I totally agree with you.
00:40:59.000 All the way from the beginning where our president was completely ignoring the fact that this thing is real, up until now, where we're just dominantly focused on the vaccine thing.
00:41:09.000 It's just been a disaster.
00:41:11.000 But that's not to say that the vaccine doesn't have a role here.
00:41:14.000 No, no, but it's just impossible to make a risk assessment because you're not looking at all the options.
00:41:19.000 And it shouldn't be either you get a vaccine or nothing.
00:41:23.000 It should be...
00:41:24.000 Let's look at these other options.
00:41:25.000 Let's figure out the true risk from this vaccine if you're actually treating patients early.
00:41:31.000 I don't want to exhaust your time because I want to talk about Janet Woodcock and about your letter because it's the most important thing.
00:41:39.000 I think you have really...
00:41:43.000 Laser focused on an issue that, you know, goes right to the risk assessment for minority groups.
00:41:49.000 So will you tell us about the letter that you sent to Janet Woodcock and that whole kind of narrative of what happened?
00:41:56.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:41:57.000 So look, I think we're doing something unprecedented here, Robert, and you and I have talked about this.
00:42:03.000 The most unprecedented aspect of what we're doing here.
00:42:06.000 It's not the speed of the vaccine.
00:42:08.000 I mean, look, this mRNA vaccine is a testament to American exceptionalism, okay?
00:42:13.000 And I'll tell you why.
00:42:15.000 In under a year, we've deployed a technology that is the equivalent of putting a rover on Mars, putting a man on the moon, right?
00:42:24.000 That technology itself It's an American achievement.
00:42:28.000 We should be proud of it.
00:42:30.000 But it's not a panacea.
00:42:32.000 What we're doing here is we're deploying a vaccine.
00:42:35.000 We've never done this before.
00:42:37.000 In the history of vaccine science, in the history of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of maybe the Gardasil issue that you had mentioned to me, but again, that was a much smaller scale.
00:42:48.000 We've never ever Deploy the vaccine smack dab in the middle of an outbreak where about 20 to 30% of the population is already infected.
00:42:58.000 Just think about that for one second, right?
00:43:01.000 You go to a doctor's office and you say, I have the sniffles.
00:43:04.000 They would never give you the flu shot.
00:43:06.000 You go to your doctor and you say, my kid had the chickenpox.
00:43:10.000 They would never give that kid a zoster shot, or most docs, most reasonable docs, when you already had the chickenpox.
00:43:15.000 But here we are, right now as we speak, somewhere around 30 million Americans, maybe more, have been infected or have asymptomatic infections currently.
00:43:25.000 And we are literally indiscriminately vaccinating all of these people, right?
00:43:30.000 What that means is that we're taking people who have the virus all over their bodies.
00:43:35.000 They're naturally infected.
00:43:37.000 And we're boosting their immune response using a very powerful vaccine.
00:43:42.000 And these vaccines are powerful, right?
00:43:44.000 These vaccines, when you said these vaccines are reactogenic, I would go as far as to say that they're more than reactogenic.
00:43:50.000 They're antigen specific, highly effective, and they mimic the virus in a way that activates the living hell out of the T cells, right?
00:43:59.000 Now here it is.
00:44:00.000 If you have a total body infection, a natural infection, these T cells that you activate will go into every single one of your tissues and attack it.
00:44:09.000 And you know, I think what we're going to be seeing, and the concern that I raised with Dr.
00:44:14.000 Woodcock, was that if you don't know whether this is safe to give to people who are naturally infected in a setting where a vast proportion of the American population is already infected, we are making an error.
00:44:27.000 It's an error.
00:44:28.000 It's a deadly error, right?
00:44:30.000 So what we need to do, you know, just like we put a Mars rover on Mars and a man on the moon, we need to exclude people at the very least.
00:44:38.000 You know, this vaccine has already rolled out, Robert, as you know, millions of people are getting it every day.
00:44:43.000 But at the very least, it is our duty, it is our government's duty, or it's the marketplace's duty, frankly, right?
00:44:49.000 To say, stop, we are not going to indiscriminately vaccinate people who are already infected, at the very least.
00:44:56.000 I mean, every single other issue about the academic points about the vaccine or any other safety issue is fine.
00:45:03.000 This thing is just a no-brainer.
00:45:06.000 This is low-hanging fruit.
00:45:07.000 You do not vaccinate people indiscriminately who carry a natural infection.
00:45:11.000 It's a clear and present danger.
00:45:14.000 And yet we're doing it.
00:45:17.000 We're doing it, you know?
00:45:18.000 And then we're calling all these people who are dying and having complications, true, true and unrelated.
00:45:22.000 Yeah, you know, Jay Barton Williams, 36-year-old, otherwise healthy guy with an asymptomatic infection down in Memphis, Tennessee, an orthopedic surgeon who was just seven weeks out from his wedding, he had an asymptomatic infection, gets two Pfizer shots, one, two, dead, right?
00:45:37.000 Are we just going to accept that?
00:45:39.000 Our Martin Hagler who died.
00:45:42.000 Well, yeah, I don't know what his history, I mean, you know, I don't know if he was infected or not.
00:45:46.000 He probably was.
00:45:47.000 I mean, he's, you know, he's a socialite, right?
00:45:48.000 He was a very healthy guy who was kind of a party guy and out on the top.
00:45:54.000 I'm not making any assumptions about him.
00:45:55.000 I don't want to spread any misinformation about whether he was infected or not.
00:45:59.000 But I would say that it's highly likely that he was.
00:46:01.000 Hank Aaron, Larry King, you know, all these people.
00:46:05.000 And my point to Dr.
00:46:07.000 Woodcock and to Dr.
00:46:08.000 Marks is, look, the clinical trials did not assess People who have recent or asymptomatic infections, and especially in vulnerable categories, the elderly, the frail, people who have cardiovascular diseases, you know?
00:46:21.000 And so here we are, we have this massively inflated subset of people who have natural infections, and we are indiscriminately vaccinating them.
00:46:29.000 We should stop doing that.
00:46:30.000 And if Pfizer and the FDA and Moderna and Johnson& Johnson don't take steps to do it, I think the public should.
00:46:39.000 I think the consumer, the American consumer is one of the most empowered species in world history.
00:46:46.000 The American consumer has to demand, must demand, screening before vaccination so that no person who's recently infected gets indiscriminately vaccinated.
00:46:58.000 The problem is the American consumers are not going to realize this because this issue is censored.
00:47:06.000 And what you're saying about it, you know, you will be shut down as soon as you get a public audience, as you already know.
00:47:14.000 Let me ask you this, because...
00:47:16.000 I hope not.
00:47:17.000 You know, I wrote letters to...
00:47:19.000 We wrote letters to Peter Marks, who's, you know, the top guy at FDA and he's head of CBER, which is, you know, the biologics division.
00:47:32.000 And we said, this was back in August, we said, look, in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they have Pegylated nanoparticles.
00:47:43.000 And there's a certain number of the American public who's already been exposed to polyethylene glycol.
00:47:51.000 And those people have antibodies to it.
00:47:54.000 And a certain percentage of them are potentially going to have anaphylactic reactions.
00:47:59.000 And he wrote us a letter back that seemed very irresponsible for a regulator.
00:48:05.000 He said...
00:48:07.000 You should talk to the companies.
00:48:09.000 Well, he should talk to the companies.
00:48:10.000 I'm not going to pay attention to it.
00:48:13.000 We wrote to the companies and of course they ignored it, but you had kind of the same experience here, right?
00:48:18.000 With Peter Marks.
00:48:20.000 Well, so Peter Marks responded to me on the day that they were running the Pfizer hearing.
00:48:24.000 So I literally have emails from Dr.
00:48:26.000 Marks, and I got an email from Dr.
00:48:28.000 Bill Gruber, who's the senior vice president of Pfizer's vaccine development.
00:48:32.000 And essentially, they put on the record...
00:48:35.000 When they got your letter, they were both in the same room with each other.
00:48:38.000 It was actually, you know, it was all a Zoom meeting, right?
00:48:42.000 Because everything's on Zoom.
00:48:43.000 But it was during that hearing, because I wanted Dr.
00:48:47.000 Marks to raise the issue of recently infected people getting indiscriminately vaccinated.
00:48:53.000 And essentially, the answer I got is that this is not a concern that our clinical trials have had a small number of asymptomatic infected people, and it's not an issue.
00:49:01.000 To which I said, you know, number one, it's not powered enough, and number two, you haven't put susceptible groups with recent infections in it.
00:49:08.000 Explain that to some people.
00:49:09.000 Now, what you mean, it's not powered enough.
00:49:12.000 I think there's only 300 people who were prior to the whole show.
00:49:16.000 That's right.
00:49:17.000 That's about 300 people.
00:49:18.000 So, you know, that means that if the incidence of harm is one out of 500, Right?
00:49:23.000 Which is like an astronomically high rate of...
00:49:26.000 It's like a million people.
00:49:28.000 A million people will die.
00:49:30.000 Yeah.
00:49:30.000 Basically, I mean, it's one in 500.
00:49:32.000 It's more than a million if the rate is one in 500 if you're vaccinating the entire U.S. population.
00:49:36.000 But, you know, it's like, you know, if one in 500 are susceptible and you only test 300 people out, the chances statistically that you've missed the event, the signal, are very high.
00:49:46.000 So what you need to do is you need to actually power up...
00:49:49.000 And also...
00:49:51.000 The people who were in those trials were not people with comorbidities.
00:49:56.000 We don't know how many of that 300 were elderly.
00:50:00.000 If you get that body-wide inflammation and you're a teenager, you probably can weather it.
00:50:06.000 But if you've already got vein problems or cardiac problems and you're 70 years old, then it can kill you.
00:50:15.000 You know, and Robert, the thing about it is that this virus goes to the heart.
00:50:20.000 It goes to the vascular endothelium.
00:50:22.000 It goes to blood vessels.
00:50:24.000 So when the viral antigens stick around there, if you activate an immune response that targets those organs, you know, you can get like a kid with an aneurysm and suddenly the aneurysm blows after a vaccine and you wonder, well, it's not related, right?
00:50:37.000 It's not related to the vaccine.
00:50:38.000 It can't be.
00:50:39.000 Well, it could be because the virus goes to the blood vessel.
00:50:41.000 And if there's actually a laxity in the blood vessel, In an aneurysm, and the immune system attacks that laxity, the blood vessel ruptures.
00:50:49.000 You know, that's just sort of, you know, or let's say the heart.
00:50:52.000 If the heart gets targeted, right, you suddenly die of heart block.
00:50:55.000 Is heart block a vaccine-associated complication?
00:50:57.000 And that's the other thing, you know, that I think it's very highly likely, and you know this, you know, you've talked about this, I know, and you wrote this very nice letter to Biden.
00:51:05.000 About how their surveillance systems are an absolute disaster.
00:51:09.000 Because, you know, most of the response to these vaccine-associated complications has been, by the public health officials, it's true, true and unrelated.
00:51:17.000 You know, it's catastrophic.
00:51:18.000 It's abolishing vaccine injury by fiat by just declaring them unrelated.
00:51:23.000 You can do that because a vaccine injury doesn't leave a fingerprint.
00:51:27.000 There's no...
00:51:28.000 A heart attack that you get immediately after vaccination, if you do a full autopsy and full chemical analysis, there's no way that you can figure out.
00:51:38.000 You know, I would say that the way to find out is to actually analyze these people for evidence of past viral infection.
00:51:45.000 So you can look for IgM in their blood.
00:51:47.000 You can actually do PCR for DNA on their tissues.
00:51:53.000 There are ways, you know, if you have a good forensic pathologist and if the hypothesis is that these people who are having these complications are the recently infected, you can find evidence for, you know, viral and bacterial disease.
00:52:06.000 DNA and protein.
00:52:07.000 And I would urge anyone who's listening, who may be a pathologist of concern, to actually look at that.
00:52:12.000 Like these forensic pathologists, these autopsies that they're doing, it's not sufficient to say, oh, this guy had a heart attack.
00:52:18.000 You got to go in that tissue and look for DNA from the virus.
00:52:23.000 You got to go in the body fluids and look for IgM, which is evidence of natural infection, you know?
00:52:28.000 So I think there are ways to do it if you really want to answer the question.
00:52:31.000 I just don't think they want to answer the question.
00:52:34.000 Well, listen, Dr.
00:52:35.000 Neutra, we're coming up on the hour.
00:52:37.000 I hate to let you go because this is fascinating.
00:52:40.000 And I really, really am grateful to you for being, for your courage and having this debate.
00:52:46.000 And, you know, for just to have rational discourse with somebody who doesn't agree with everything that you say is such a pleasure nowadays because it's all verboten.
00:52:57.000 Let me ask you one personal question.
00:53:01.000 I think that I may have had, and my whole family may have gotten coronavirus not last December, but the previous December.
00:53:14.000 And we all got sick from the, you know, very, very similar symptoms.
00:53:18.000 We don't have antibodies.
00:53:21.000 Is there any way that we can find out whether or at least have a suggestion about whether or not we have some kind of, is there some other signal that you can get detected?
00:53:35.000 So you've had an antibody measured then?
00:53:38.000 Yeah.
00:53:38.000 So if it's been over a year, chances are that the viral antigens are out of your system.
00:53:43.000 I think the basic science, at least from animal studies, says eight months is about the inflection point where the viral antigens are pretty clear.
00:53:51.000 So that's the first time I would suggest considering getting the revaccination.
00:53:54.000 You know, I think if you don't have IgG, there are some people who don't make IgG, you know, and sometimes the vaccine does force it.
00:54:01.000 So, you know, in cases like yours, I would suggest possibly, if it's been over eight months after your infection, you know, getting at least a single shot of the vaccine.
00:54:12.000 That's what I would recommend.
00:54:13.000 There's no other way really to detect whether you actually had...
00:54:17.000 Were you tested at the time or were tested?
00:54:19.000 No, it was before we knew about the coronavirus.
00:54:23.000 Yeah.
00:54:24.000 So, you know, I have a series of friends and people who've communicated with me who have exactly the same picture.
00:54:28.000 They think they had it, but they can't be sure.
00:54:30.000 I mean, is it possible that it was something else?
00:54:32.000 I guess it is.
00:54:34.000 It would be very unusual for your whole family not to have mounted an IgG.
00:54:39.000 You know, usually like when I've seen it, it's like clusters of people.
00:54:42.000 You have like 10 people who get it and there's one person amongst them that doesn't have an IgG response.
00:54:48.000 Yeah.
00:54:51.000 That was the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, and we can talk about it at some other point, but this idea of why do people need two shots?
00:55:00.000 What's this two-shot thing about?
00:55:03.000 If a person has had a recent infection over eight months ago and their antibodies are waning, the idea of giving one shot, in fact, is reasonable.
00:55:13.000 These are all sort of nuances of it that we can discuss over time, hopefully.
00:55:19.000 Dr.
00:55:19.000 Human-Nutrazen, thank you very, very much for joining me, and thank you for continuing to be a voice for reason and for ethics and for good science in our society.
00:55:32.000 Thank you very much.
00:55:34.000 Robert, thanks very much for having me.