In this episode, Dr. Robert Malone joins me to talk about the monkeypox outbreak, and why we should not be worried about it. Dr. Malone is a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and a member of the Kennedy Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He is also the president of the JFK Fan Club, a group dedicated to the memory of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. who was killed by a monkeypox-causing virus in 1963, and who is a dedicated advocate for public health efforts to fight the spread of monkeypox. This episode is dedicated to his memory, and to the many people who have lost a loved one to monkeypox, and whose lives have been devastated by this disease. Thank you, Bobby, for being here, and for all the support you've shown, and thank you to Jillian for letting me do a quick extraction of this episode. Thanks, Jillian, for the call-in extraction, and thanks, too, to Bobby for being willing to jump into action and join me for a few minutes of time to help me talk about monkeypox and the Kennedy Fan Club. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy the episode, and that you enjoy it, and don't forget to share it with your friends, family, family and loved ones! And thank you for being kind enough to send us your thoughts and stories about the outbreak. , and your support, and your love, and all the love, support, support and support, all of which is so appreciated. - I appreciate it, thank you, and appreciate you, so much love, love, appreciation, and respect, and peace, and appreciation, you're all so much, and so much gratitude, and love, etc, etc., etc. - Mentioned in this episode of the podcast, MRS. - Robert Malone, M.A. - R.S. (Robert Malone, R.M. Malone, and the rest of the crew. . Robert F. Malone - Robert F Kennedy Jr., R. M. (Bob Malone, Sr. (John Kennedy Jr.) - Robert Kennedy Jr, Jr. ...and so on and so on & so much more! - Bob Malone, Jr., etc., and so forth, etc.. , etc., - Thank you for listening to this episode I hope it's a good one.
00:00:00.000I'm really happy to be joined today by Dr.
00:00:04.000Robert Malone, who is my friend, my colleague, and I am one of the many presidents of his fan club.
00:00:13.000And we're going to talk about monkeypox.
00:00:15.000And I want to say that I just called...
00:00:17.000Bob, to see where he was and whether he could do this.
00:00:21.000And it's 1.30 in the morning where he is.
00:00:24.000He's on a catamaran in the middle of the Mediterranean.
00:00:28.000And he said, let me put on some clothes and we'll talk for a few minutes.
00:00:33.000So thank you very, very much for joining me.
00:00:36.000Please apologize to your family, Jill, for...
00:00:41.000for me doing this extraction, this very quick extraction.
00:00:44.000I wanted to talk to you about monkey pox because you did this, I think, a very, very sober kind of and useful description of monkey pox at a time when there's this, of course, this souped up, hyped up hysteria about monkey pox.
00:01:01.000And it was really kind of reassuring and And, you know, it's nice to read science rather than...
00:01:09.000I mean, the big question is, should people be scared of monkeypox?
00:01:14.000Even if you happen to be at one of these, what I presume were raves in Spain or in Europe, there seems to have been two parties that occurred.
00:01:28.000And the people that have been infected basically all tracked back to one of those two parties or were contacts of somebody who was at one of those two parties.
00:01:58.000One of the things that you mentioned, I don't know if this is still true, but most of the people who contract in monkey pie is a very, very hard disease to catch.
00:02:07.000It has a very low RO, as you point out.
00:02:11.000And the people who have generally have been people who had very, very intimate contact.
00:02:17.000I think most of them have been male homosexuals who were engaged in sex with a person they apparently got it from.
00:02:25.000Is that still true? - Yeah, that's what I understand.
00:02:28.000The last I heard from the WHO, which I believe was one night ago, was that we have a total of 200 cases in the world in this outbreak at this point in time.
00:02:40.000They were all individuals essentially, or the vast majority were individuals who were men who have sex with men who had been at one of these two parties.
00:02:49.000I believe, as I recall, it was Belgium and Spain, and they've all radiated from those two points.
00:02:58.000And it's true that the virus can be spread by respiratory droplets.
00:03:03.000That does not mean that it is a respiratory virus in the same way that the coronavirus is.
00:03:10.000And I think it's real easy for folks to get, since we've been through all that we've been through over the last two and a half years, to immediately assume that this is a highly infectious pathogen, such as coronavirus.
00:03:23.000Just to compare, the Omicron strain has a reproductive coefficient.
00:03:29.000Now, this is kind of wonky stuff, using these epidemiology terms, although we're all epidemiologists, it seems now.
00:03:36.000In the case of the Omicron strain, we have an R0 of 7 to 10, which means on average, without any other mitigation, if I am infected with the Omicron virus, I will on average infect 7 to 10 other people.
00:03:54.000In the case of monkeypox, The R-naught is something like one or less.
00:04:02.000That means that on average, I will infect one person or less than one person in an open population just interacting with each other.
00:04:13.000Usually when you get down to an RO of one, it's usually a signal that the epidemic is over.
00:04:24.000And so we don't have an epidemic here at all.
00:04:28.000What we have is a outbreak that is easily traceable.
00:04:33.000And when you have a viral infection that has that small of an infectious pressure, the way that that is typically handled is through outbreak tracing.
00:04:44.000So tracing of individuals that are infected or have been in close contact.
00:04:49.000And then, as I believe the government in Belgium has implemented, Quarantine of those individuals who've been infected.
00:04:58.000Now, when people hear quarantine or isolation right now, they're all hyper-acute and they think, oh no, they're going to put everybody in their house and no one can go shopping like we've all been through with the lockdowns.
00:05:11.000That's not at all what we're talking about.
00:05:14.000What we're talking about is rational public health policy where people, because You continue to be infectious for about 25 days until the crusts that form in the lesions, like as if you had chickenpox, only in monkeypox it tends to be on the hands in humans.
00:05:35.000But you do form crusts, and those are full of virus, and until those are healed over, you're still highly infectious.
00:05:44.000There is not apparently an uninfected transmission, in other words, a prodrome, like there is to some extent with coronavirus.
00:05:54.000With monkeypox, you start off with influenza-like symptoms.
00:05:59.000You develop typically a rash or itchiness in your hands, and then you develop a systemic infection, which can include a cough.
00:06:10.000Point is that as you develop symptoms, that's when you become infectious.
00:06:14.000So we don't have people walking around spreading virus unknowingly when they go to the shopping center or you shake hands with them or whatever.
00:06:24.000They pretty much present with the symptoms, and that's when they become infectious, and they remain infectious for about 25 days.
00:06:32.000So it's rational public health policy to do contact tracing to find out who's been in touch with who, who's been at those parties, and whether or not they're already infected and And if they are, they need to stay home immediately.
00:06:48.000And their family members should use precautions, you know, gloves, gowning, personal protection when they take care of their loved one or their friend who is in quarantine.
00:06:59.000But it doesn't mean that they have to go in a full respirator suit and all the full nine yards.
00:07:07.000Unfortunately, there has been Some fear propagated inappropriately by the press.
00:07:13.000And in this case, it's really easy to trace it.
00:07:18.000One of the things that I noticed just as I was getting on the plane, I've been kind of bouncing around.
00:07:23.000I went to the Better Way conference last weekend, and I flew out from Dulles, and I was watching CNN on the television.
00:07:34.000In the airport lounge, and I saw the pitch on monkeypox, and I saw them using legacy smallpox images.
00:07:45.000And I was very familiar with that because I actually worked quite a bit for the Army on smallpox and the smallpox vaccine.
00:07:53.000So I know about this particular vaccine, by the way, that the government is repurchasing for the stockpile, which is a smallpox vaccine, has some cross-reactivity.
00:08:35.000In the same article, they listed the statistics from the World Health Organization with reported cases of monkeypox unverified reported to the World Health Organization that said that there was only a 3.4% mortality rate.
00:08:53.000So right there, we got Gavi in, you know, clear...
00:08:58.000Inflation, frankly, I think that the term for this is disinformation on the part of both Gavi and CNN. If we define disinformation as Incorrect public health information provided to achieve some political objective, not merely misstating the facts, but apparently intentionally misstating the facts to achieve some sort of an objective.
00:09:24.000That appears to be what we have going on right here just based on what they're saying.
00:09:29.000Now, I recommend to your viewers There was two articles by Helen Branswell in STAT News.
00:09:38.000I've known Helen for a very long time.
00:09:40.000I actually was a source for her during the Ebola outbreak with her investigations about the Ebola vaccine.
00:09:48.000And she took the time and made the contacts to interview the CDC's specialist.
00:09:55.000On monkeypox, who said to her it was a 1% mortality or less, and that we really know very little about this virus because it's so rare that people get infected and have significant disease.
00:10:09.000This has never been considered a major clinical problem.
00:10:14.000If I can go on just a little bit, we had an outbreak of monkeypox here in the United States in 2003.
00:10:20.000And that was caused because monkeypox is not actually just a virus of monkeys.
00:10:27.000In Africa, it infects a variety of rodents also, including something called a pouched rat.
00:10:35.000And those had apparently been imported into the United States.
00:10:39.000I don't know if people thought pouched rats were cute and they wanted to have them for their little child or whatever, but they brought them in and somehow these African pouched rats got in contact with prairie dogs that live in the Great Plains and up through the Rockies. but they brought them in and somehow these African pouched And these prairie dogs, as you know, live in close communities.
00:11:01.000And apparently monkeypox spread like wildfire through the prairie dog towns in the United States.
00:11:08.000But there were very few cases in humans associated with that.
00:11:13.000I guess people don't generally think that prairie dogs are cuddly companions that they bring home to their child.
00:11:19.000And so we didn't have a major outbreak.
00:11:22.000I don't recall there being any deaths.
00:12:54.000And yes, there was something like Event 201 that was held almost a year ago to the date, a tabletop planning exercise focused on monkeypox.
00:13:07.000And actually, I mean, one of the sinister coincidences with that is that they were dealing with a Monkeypox epidemic that they acknowledged had been a laboratory-altered monkeypox to make it much more virulent and much more deadly and that it was released by a terrorist group.
00:13:35.000In that scenario planning, which they do from time to time, it's essentially, as you pointed out in your wonderful book, The Real Anthony Fauci, these war game scenarios are fairly frequently done.
00:13:49.000And they were presuming essentially a mock-up of smallpox.
00:13:54.000They were presuming a virus that had been altered so it was both more pathogenic and more infectious.
00:14:01.000And that is, I have been carefully listening to my jungle radar, my coconut radar, about what's going on here and whether there's any evidence that this is anything other than The West African strain, is there any evidence of it being genetically modified?
00:14:19.000And all I hear back is no, this is the standard West African clade, and there's nothing indicating that it's been tampered with.
00:14:30.000And so the advice and comment from the CDC's lead on monkeypox, as captured by Helen Branswell, still applies.
00:14:42.000So, just a whole lot of unnecessary fear.
00:14:45.000Yeah, and I'm not going to keep you much longer, but I just, I wanted to comment on one thing, and you may have no observation on this, but I, it was a posting that Dr.
00:14:55.000Meryl Nass, who, you know, we both know, and who's very, very reliable, and she's a bioweapons expert who actually is in Sweden now, with a, in that hospital, having broken her hip, her pelvis yesterday, and We send her our prayers.
00:15:12.000She pointed out that 1958 outbreak, and I could be wrong about this, because I just read this casually, and I didn't know I was going to be talking to you, but the 1958 outbreak in the Kolbe's monkey colony actually occurred in Denmark in a captive colony that was being subjected to the polio vaccine.
00:15:39.000And that was the first recorded episode of Monkey Box, and it was what they call the Eastern African Glade.
00:15:50.000And then there was speculation, because as you know, a lot of these viruses, there are hundreds and hundreds of viruses that are endemic to primate communities, and they are at equilibrium in those communities.
00:16:04.000In other words, maybe when they infected that community, 10,000 generations ago, they were deadly.
00:16:12.000But over time, viruses reach an equilibrium with the target organisms because it's not in the virus's interest to kill or injure the organism.
00:16:24.000They want their host to be healthy and having sex and having social interactions.
00:16:35.000The ones that are more vulnerable die.
00:16:38.000So you reach this natural equilibrium.
00:16:40.000And when that same virus jumps species, it can be, you know, very dangerous or damaging to the new group of primates, if as a human being...
00:16:54.000And that apparently is what some people suggest happen with HIV when it jumped from Bonobo chimpanzees to human beings, that it's rather harmless in the Bonobos, and people believe that it's injurious to MSO. That was one observation.
00:17:10.000The other minor observation suggests even if you have a A case fatality rate or an infection fatality rate, that is 1%.
00:17:20.000If you're looking at African populations which suffer higher levels of poverty and poor nutrition and a lot of Western populations, you may get an even much greater with many diseases, for example, measles.
00:17:37.000Infection fatality rate in African populations is far, far higher than it is in Western populations.
00:17:44.000So that's just another consideration that, you know, we should look at before we all panic.
00:17:51.000So I guess what you're saying is that the WHO 3.4% probably has a selection bias in that you don't report mild cases to the World Health Organization, but it could be that it partially reflects...
00:18:07.000The African origin in most of those reports, which comes from a population that generally may not have the advantages of a Western diet, or in the case of coronavirus, maybe those are disadvantages of the Western diet, but I take your point.
00:18:24.000Yeah, complex, even that 3.4% needs to be really carefully considered because it's not proven.
00:18:38.000I think all in all, we hear monkeypox, we think smallpox, and we forget cowpox and camelpox.
00:18:48.000Cowpox was Edward Jenner's origin in theory of his reinventing the smallpox vaccine, which had been previously used something similar in China historically.
00:19:01.000But the baseline observation, it is important to remember these things because it gives us more historic context.
00:19:09.000The story goes that Jenner observed milkmaid's We're fair skinned.
00:19:15.000They didn't get the pox when they did get smallpox.
00:19:57.000And what he did was he lanced a boil from a cow, took out the pus, and injected it into...
00:20:06.000I think he slit people with a scalpel and rubbed that pus in there to give them immunity to the smallpox vaccine.
00:20:15.000That was the theory that he was operating under.
00:20:17.000Yeah, so point being, we hear pox, we think either chicken pox, which is unrelated, but does have vesicles, or we think smallpox, but in the spectrum of the related pox viruses, They are generally not very pathogenic in humans.
00:20:36.000There's a camel pox also that may have been the origin at some point of the recombination that gave rise to smallpox.
00:20:44.000But we become very fearful of this because we have these associations that we make.
00:20:50.000And then they're further exacerbated by the press, basically hyping things, I guess, because it will build viewership.
00:20:59.000And so they're trying to build their audience share, I guess.
00:21:02.000Or maybe they're reflecting some initiative nefarious from some governmental or non-governmental agency.
00:21:18.000And even as I recall yesterday, the President of the United States, even though he's given two, I believe, prior press conferences that kind of increased everybody's anxiety, he even seems to be messaging that people shouldn't overreact to this.
00:21:36.000And I think that we all just need to take a deep breath.
00:21:40.000We've been through a lot of trauma over the last couple of years and recognize that most of these things are not major threats to us.
00:21:49.000We've been living with them for centuries.
00:21:52.000And even, as you know, you and I think both agree, the coronavirus threat was also very overhyped.
00:22:26.000Enjoy your vacation in the Caribbean again.
00:22:29.000It looks like the boat is fairly stable, but of course, there is the concept of relative motion, and you may be rocking violently right now, and we wouldn't know it because the camera's rocking with you.