Stay Free - Russel Brand - Pandemic Policies and Public Health Mistakes: Dr. Robert Redfield Speaks Out – SF504

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:03:16.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:03:19.000 Hello there, you awakening wonders.

00:03:31.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:03:33.000 Hope you had a fantastic Thanksgiving, and I hope you are ready to give praise and thanks for a brilliant and educational conversation with Dr. Robert Redfield.

00:03:42.000 Dr. Robert Redfield was one of Fauci's colleagues and acolytes who came out and spoke publicly against Fauci.

00:03:49.000 He believes that there is potentially a risk of a new bird flu pandemic, not just, excuse me, because of a hunch he's got, But because of extraordinary ongoing gain-of-function research around bird flu, he also brilliantly exposed that Fauci's attitude to what gain-of-function actually means is part of the kind of generalized deception that we experience during the pandemic period,

00:04:14.000 i.e., They don't believe that it's gain-of-function research if you change a mammal or bird or, you know, ornithological virus into a human one, only if you start with a human one and all of that.

00:04:28.000 It's a really interesting and fascinating conversation, and it's brilliant to get insights from someone who knows how the system works.

00:04:34.000 If you're watching this on YouTube, get over to Rumble.

00:04:37.000 And if you're not on Awake and Wonder yet, become one, because then you'll be able to see things like this.

00:04:41.000 My amazing conversation with Jonathan Pajot.

00:04:43.000 I love this moment.

00:04:44.000 There's a whole slew of texts, we call them the Enochian texts, the Enochian tradition, that discuss how before the flood the humans made partnerships with these entities, these demons, and these demons taught them all these skills.

00:05:00.000 And the skills brought about corruption and that these skills brought about a kind of arrogance, this kind of pride that brought about the end of the world.

00:05:08.000 So the end of the world before the flood was caused by this This humans making some kind of deals with demons and then receiving technical skills and creating a society that fell apart.

00:05:23.000 Okay, without any more nonsense, let's get into my conversation with Dr. Robert Redfield, virologist, former director at the CDC, medic and scientist who understands at depth What went on during the pandemic, both politically and medically?

00:05:40.000 You're going to enjoy this conversation.

00:05:41.000 Thank you so much, Robert Redfield for joining us on Stay Free.

00:05:44.000 It's such a pleasure to see you, sir.

00:05:46.000 Good to see you, Russell.

00:05:48.000 We encountered one another briefly in a conversation with Bobby Kennedy and a group of people that were talking, it seemed primarily, about addiction.

00:05:58.000 Now we're going to have, hopefully, a wide-ranging conversation about the influence of Big Pharma on American health policy and the impact, therefore, of Big Pharma on the American population.

00:06:13.000 Firstly, I reckon I'd love to go in with a bold question.

00:06:16.000 Given you your former position and authority, given the assent of Bobby Kennedy and other not comparable figures, but affiliated figures, assuming that there is confirmation for Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makari et al., do you think that in 12 months' time people might say that the measures taken by the American government when it came to the COVID pandemic Actually did more harm than good when it comes to vaccines,

00:06:46.000 lockdowns, masks, public division, impact on people receiving treatment from anything from diabetes to cancer to heart conditions.

00:06:55.000 Still, when people talk about it in legacy media, they are almost...

00:07:01.000 Dying to say, yeah, but millions of lives, this is someone like Bill Maude, but millions of lives were saved by the vaccine.

00:07:07.000 How do you think, you know, not history will regard the decisions that were made during the pandemic, but, you know, the very near future in 12 months with the kind of information that's likely to be exposed, the kind of studies that are likely to be undertaken if Jay Bhattacharya becomes the head of the NIH, and the sort of general shift in the conversation now that the legacy media no longer has the stranglehold it once did?

00:07:33.000 You know, Russell, I think it would be an honest review of the policies and looking at them from a bi-directional point of view, that there were some policies that have benefit, but there were some policies that actually were not of benefit to public health.

00:07:53.000 You mentioned some of them.

00:07:54.000 The mandate of the vaccines was not in the public health interest.

00:07:58.000 The closing of the schools was not in the public health interest of K through 12s.

00:08:02.000 The closing of business to the degree that occurred was not in the interest of society.

00:08:07.000 So I think there'll be an honest understanding, sort of an over heavy handedness of some of these government policies.

00:08:18.000 It should have been more open, honest debate about them prior to their implementation.

00:08:24.000 I think the vaccine Warp Speed's vaccine was an important accomplishment that really was driven by President Trump.

00:08:34.000 I mean, he's really the reason why it happened.

00:08:37.000 And it did, in fact, save some lives of those of us that are highly vulnerable, over 65, for example.

00:08:45.000 But I don't think it was prudent to mandate the vaccine, particularly for those individuals that were not at high risk for bad outcome, those of us under 50, for example.

00:08:56.000 So hopefully there'll be an honest review.

00:09:00.000 I know myself as a CDC director, I'm very open about acknowledging the mistakes that were made.

00:09:06.000 I think the closing of industry, the closing of the schools, The over-heavy-handedness of mandating a vaccine, these were all significant public health mistakes.

00:09:19.000 Wow.

00:09:20.000 Do you think that we'll come to say that maybe closing schools was a mistake?

00:09:24.000 Do you think we'll come to say that vaccinating kids was a mistake unless they had sort of serious comorbidities?

00:09:31.000 Do you think that we'll come to regard that as a mistake?

00:09:34.000 Yeah, I think the idea of how the vaccine should have been deployed, it should have really been prioritized for high-risk individuals, particularly those over the age of 65, and as you mentioned, maybe younger individuals if they had very significant medical conditions.

00:09:52.000 I'm not in favor of the current CDC recommendation that has now recommended the COVID vaccine for children down to the age of six months.

00:10:02.000 I don't see the purpose of it.

00:10:04.000 The vaccine does not prevent infection.

00:10:06.000 It prevents serious illness and hospitalization and death.

00:10:11.000 And all of those are not something that people that are under the age of 50 are really at any subsequent risk for.

00:10:17.000 So I think there should be more rigorous debate about this, but I think the broad use of the vaccine in the general population, to me, was not indicated.

00:10:30.000 Have you heard like I have, Doctor, that potentially some studies that have been undertaken but are unlikely to be published indicate that with significant sample sizes, maybe up to 12,000 kids, There's an indication that children that were vaccinated have a significantly higher risk of a bunch of behavioural and heart and respiratory conditions than the non-vaccinated group of a study that

00:11:00.000 could be two groups, one size 2,000, one 10,000 that is being withheld right now.

00:11:05.000 I wonder if you've heard about that study.

00:11:09.000 Well, Russell, I haven't seen those studies.

00:11:11.000 I have seen some data that, of course, some of the mRNA vaccines were associated, for example, with myocarditis, pericarditis in adolescence.

00:11:20.000 I do think it's important that there's transparency about the safety profiles of these vaccines and people that do have data.

00:11:30.000 It should be made available for the public to review.

00:11:36.000 No vaccine is 100% safe.

00:11:38.000 There clearly are some significant side effects from the mRNA vaccines, and I think that data should be put in the public domain so it can be critically reviewed.

00:11:47.000 But I haven't seen the data you're referring to.

00:11:50.000 Yeah, I suppose that's it.

00:11:51.000 One of the things that I've recently started to consider is safety and, you know, what the conditions, what the clinical conditions are that determine safety, i.e., was it just that there were some checks on 100 kids five days later?

00:12:06.000 Or is it, you know, thousands of kids years later?

00:12:10.000 And obviously in the case of COVID vaccines, we don't have the time frame to even consider that.

00:12:17.000 And due to the nature of Operation Warp Speed and whatever motivated it to be undertaken at that speed, I suppose legitimately, the fact is that there was an unfolding crisis that there was some obligation to respond to in one way or another.

00:12:30.000 Probably, in 2024, those of us that didn't get any vaccines at all and regarded the entire exercise with scepticism aren't looking back thinking, I wish I'd gotten vaccinated, even if we had, like, you know, I did COVID two or three times and, you know, by and large did my best to obey regulations that I strongly disagreed with.

00:12:54.000 Do you think that sort of anecdotal and personal response is relatively fair, Doctor?

00:13:01.000 Well, I think it's going to be obviously critical to look at that mostly, again, I come back to the COVID vaccines in particular.

00:13:10.000 They really were never approved because they prevented infection.

00:13:14.000 So first people have to realize it's not a typical vaccine.

00:13:17.000 It doesn't prevent infection.

00:13:19.000 The vaccines were approved because they prevented serious illness, hospitalization, and death.

00:13:23.000 And therefore, if you're not at risk, For serious illness, hospitalization, and death, you can argue that the vaccine may not be something that you should focus on for yourself.

00:13:36.000 And I think this is where there were mistakes that there was sort of this blanket view that, you know, let's vaccinate everybody.

00:13:44.000 There should have been much more focus on vaccination of the vulnerable.

00:13:48.000 The other thing I'll say about the vaccine that's really important is that the current COVID vaccines They're non-durable.

00:13:58.000 That means like when you take a vaccine like for polio or measles, that vaccine will provide long-term protection, one year after another, 10 years, so maybe longer.

00:14:09.000 When you take the COVID vaccine, there's probably only a four to six month period where you're adequately immunized and protection from that vaccine.

00:14:20.000 So someone like myself that unfortunately is over the age of 65, I'm 73, I have a little type 2 diabetes.

00:14:28.000 I have hypertension.

00:14:30.000 I'm slightly overweight, although I'm trying to get that under control.

00:14:33.000 So you could say that I have risk factors for a bad outcome.

00:14:37.000 And so I can tell you now I've received my 9th COVID vaccine.

00:14:43.000 Now, I don't use the mRNA vaccine.

00:14:45.000 I like the killed protein vaccine.

00:14:47.000 I think it's a smarter vaccine to use.

00:14:49.000 But I do think this is all going to be revisited.

00:14:52.000 And sadly, I think the public health community has lost, you know, a lot of credibility and a lot of trust.

00:14:59.000 Because of some of these recommendations which I think when they're critically re-reviewed, they're not based on science.

00:15:08.000 Even though people said they were based on science, they really weren't based on science.

00:15:13.000 They were based on an opinion that somehow certain people believed having this vaccine was better than not having it.

00:15:22.000 And again, I think for highly vulnerable people, it really made a difference, older people in nursing homes.

00:15:29.000 But then again, the caveat is not just to be vaccinated, but to be adequately vaccinated.

00:15:34.000 When I was the senior public health advisor for Governor Hogan in the state of Maryland after I left CDC, one of the things that I noticed right away was we had increased mortality and hospitalization in our nursing homes.

00:15:48.000 And so the state of Maryland, very rapidly, When the vaccine got approved in December, between December and January, we pretty much vaccinated all of our nursing home individuals.

00:15:59.000 And we saw immediately a reduction in the hospitalization and death from COVID. But around April, May, I started to see more and more reports of nursing home residents being reported in hospitalization and death.

00:16:16.000 And so I said, well, wait a minute, maybe this vaccine's not durable.

00:16:21.000 And we went in and evaluated the immunity of a number of individuals in the nursing homes to see if they had durable response, and we found out that two-thirds of them no longer had a measurable response.

00:16:33.000 So the fact that this vaccine is not durable is also something that's not been adequately addressed.

00:16:39.000 This is not a vaccine.

00:16:40.000 If you do need it, To protect yourself against serious illness and hospitalization, this is not an annual vaccine.

00:16:48.000 This is a vaccine you probably need two to three times a year to stay adequately vaccinated if you're going to use it to try to prevent serious and hospitalization deaths.

00:16:59.000 So I don't think the public health community has really We pulled out and articulated this vaccine properly.

00:17:07.000 And as a consequence, it's added to a lot of distrust, I think, about the role of the vaccine in general.

00:17:13.000 We can't continue this on YouTube because it's about to get exciting.

00:17:16.000 We're about to start talking about the next pandemic, virology, the manipulations, the actual signatures in microbiology that make it pretty clear that this must have happened in a laboratory.

00:17:28.000 It's an amazing conversation.

00:17:29.000 We also talk about the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry, I think the mistrust is primarily predicated on when you describe it in the way that you have done, a vaccine that needs to be topped up from people that are particularly vulnerable and exposed to the risk, which sort of seems like it's a small percentage of the population.

00:17:58.000 Actually, and that it doesn't prevent transmission.

00:18:01.000 It's almost impossible to recall the fervour and fever that accompanied the advent of those injections, which included talk show hosts dancing next to vaccine costumed dancers.

00:18:19.000 Shaming commercials, telling that you were putting your family members at risk if you didn't take the vaccine, for which there is, of course, no justification, no clinical data at all.

00:18:28.000 And, in a sense, the entire campaign ought to have been conducted in much the way that you and I have conducted this conversation.

00:18:37.000 Rather sombre, Modest claims made in a cold and practical way.

00:18:44.000 I think it's the concomitant hysteria and madness that has exposed to us the nature of the relationship between pharmaceutical companies, the state and regulatory agencies.

00:18:55.000 The public would have to be insane not to consider that there might have been a profit motive at play on behalf of Pfizer, a regulatory motive in play when it came to the state, And indeed, a degree of either biases, some combination of bias, ineptitude and willingness to be swayed within the regulatory agencies.

00:19:20.000 Now, that's why I think it's so brave that you are someone that Bobby Kennedy criticised in some of his public addresses in both print and verbally, vocally.

00:19:32.000 That has come forward in support of Bobby and has participated with Bobby Kennedy in the new approach to American health that may be all good in the event that he is confirmed as the Secretary of...

00:19:47.000 The HHS. What was it, Doctor, that led you to move from inside the regulatory establishment to being so brave and outspoken?

00:20:00.000 What was the turning point?

00:20:02.000 What was the inciting incident?

00:20:05.000 Well, I think, Russell, it was important for me, obviously, to Become Judge Bobby Kennedy's view, for example, on vaccines, not from some newspaper article, but from meeting and talking to Bobby Kennedy.

00:20:22.000 And I always felt that Kennedy was never anti-vaccine.

00:20:28.000 But I hadn't talked to him, so being able to talk to him and really look at it.

00:20:33.000 And Kennedy, to me, has got a really important perspective on vaccines, what we've already discussed.

00:20:39.000 What he's really about is transparency and honesty and asking questions about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

00:20:47.000 Some people in the establishment, as you would say, in the regulatory establishment, they think the mere willingness to ask the question Is this vaccine safe, or does this vaccine work, automatically qualifies you as anti-vaccine?

00:21:04.000 No, it doesn't qualify you as anti-vaccine.

00:21:06.000 You're asking a question.

00:21:08.000 You want to see the data.

00:21:09.000 Let's look at the data in a non-emotional way.

00:21:12.000 You've already hit on a very important point.

00:21:14.000 A critical review of the COVID vaccine is going to show much of these public policy decisions that were made about the use of vaccine, although they said they were done by science, They really weren't.

00:21:25.000 They were done by opinion.

00:21:27.000 Now, what influenced that opinion?

00:21:29.000 Some people's opinion was influenced because they were trained in other virus diseases where they're used to seeing vaccines work, like measles and polio.

00:21:41.000 Some of it could have been biased because if you said there could be some personal interests that were not appropriate for them to use that in their public policy recommendations.

00:21:53.000 But Kennedy to me was first and foremost a man that wanted honesty, transparency, openness about debate.

00:22:04.000 You know, the scientific community and public health community should not be nervous about debate.

00:22:10.000 That's what science is about.

00:22:12.000 If we really have the data, then what are we worried about debate?

00:22:17.000 You find when people get emotional about debate, it means they really don't have the data.

00:22:22.000 It's an opinion that they're trying to push on to other people.

00:22:25.000 So I think Kennedy is rock solid.

00:22:28.000 First, I think he's going to get confirmed.

00:22:29.000 Secondly, I think he's a breath of fresh air for health care in America.

00:22:33.000 I'm a big advocate of his idea to make America healthy again.

00:22:39.000 I believe, most importantly, first and foremost, that he believes it's possible Doesn't help someone to believe something that's not possible.

00:22:48.000 He believes it's possible, kind of like his uncle when his uncle said he was going to put a man on the moon in 1962 by the end of the 60s.

00:22:56.000 Kennedy believed it was possible.

00:22:58.000 And of course he led our nation to act and we put a man on the moon by 1969. Bobby Kennedy really does believe That we can make America healthy again.

00:23:08.000 And we're in trouble in our country, because we're looking at a nation now where over 50% of us are obese, including children.

00:23:15.000 All right?

00:23:16.000 And we had a country that over 50% of us had diabetes or hypertension or reactive airway disease, chronic disease.

00:23:26.000 It's time for us to turn this around, whereas when we went back, say, in the early 60s, it was probably 3% of us were obese.

00:23:34.000 Now it's over 50%.

00:23:36.000 It's time to turn around health.

00:23:39.000 As I said to you before when we were in Philadelphia, America has created what I call a sick system.

00:23:46.000 We're really good at taking care of sick people.

00:23:50.000 The whole system is motivated by sickness.

00:23:54.000 We need to transform our health system in a disruptive way so it becomes a health system.

00:24:00.000 How do we keep our population healthy?

00:24:03.000 And I think that's what Kennedy's about, and I think he'll succeed.

00:24:05.000 I think he's got some really important insights to some of our health issues, particularly as related to obesity.

00:24:13.000 And how to really try to address that more effectively.

00:24:17.000 So that's really what made me get excited about Bobby Kennedy is that I see that he has a vision of seeing that making America healthy again is possible.

00:24:27.000 And he's willing to go out there and lead our nation on a path to move towards making America healthy again.

00:24:35.000 And you know, as someone that has 14 grandchildren, I'd like to see America more healthy, all right?

00:24:41.000 I don't want to see my grandchildren go down the same path that I'm currently seeing where my children's generation is right now, and they're in their 30s and 40s, where chronic disease is there.

00:24:56.000 When I was CDC director, you know, President Trump would ask me why so many people died of COVID. There was 1.2 million people we lost in the United States, and other countries like Taiwan lost less than 10,000.

00:25:10.000 Why did we lose so many people? 0.95

00:25:13.000 And the reason we lost so many people is we're a sick nation.

00:25:17.000 And the COVID virus knew better than most viruses how to exploit chronic disease.

00:25:25.000 Many people don't know this, but COVID is really not a lung disease.

00:25:29.000 COVID is really a disease of the blood vessels.

00:25:33.000 And those of us that are older, our blood vessels aren't as resilient as they were when we were, say, 30 years old.

00:25:40.000 And so it exploits that and ends up causing greater poor outcomes in people because of microcoagulation, disease in the blood vessels that could cause infarct, stroke, pulmonary emboli, etc.

00:25:53.000 So I think Kennedy's on a quest.

00:25:57.000 You know, I'm 100% in on it.

00:26:00.000 When you ask me what really made me decide to be aggressive in supporting him is because first I felt he was maligned.

00:26:09.000 He's not anti-vax.

00:26:10.000 I can't read a newspaper article about Bobby Kennedy that doesn't start by saying he's against vaccines or he's controversial vaccines or he's going to take away vaccines.

00:26:20.000 All of that's not true.

00:26:21.000 It's disinformation.

00:26:23.000 He wants honesty about vaccines.

00:26:26.000 He wants to see the data on how we recommend vaccines.

00:26:31.000 And the same thing, I think Kennedy's got some great insights on why our nation is obese.

00:26:39.000 I don't think it's because we eat more.

00:26:42.000 I don't think it's because we exercise less.

00:26:45.000 I think he's probably right on to something.

00:26:48.000 It's because of what we eat is not as healthy for us as it was 50 years ago and been dealing with highly processed foods, you know, and dyes and pesticides.

00:26:57.000 And so really looking at that, I think he can make fairly rapid improvements in health, particularly those that are under the age of 20 so that they don't go down the same path the rest of us.

00:27:09.000 So I think it's really I think worth a lot of people, independent of their political belief, to really look and get behind Kennedy on this issue of let's make America healthy again.

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00:28:34.000 Join up with...

00:28:35.000 Your broad diagnosis, the problems of the pandemic, aside from what I've already declared, institutional corruption, the undue influence of big pharma, is somehow, as a result of your country being sicker,

00:28:52.000 even the profitability of sickness is undergirded by warped ideological ideas like allowing Big food and big pharma to have too much impact and influence over the way that America is legislated when it comes to matters of public health around food,

00:29:09.000 the types of food that are promoted, the types of food that are supplied for people on welfare, the type of agriculture outside of the regulatory organisations associated with health and the regulatory agencies that are associated with agriculture similarly seem to be biased towards systems that may not have been concocted to act in this way,

00:29:27.000 but in practice Actually do in creating a surfeit of subsidized food that are bad for people, drugs that benefit from people being chronically ill rather than metabolically healthy, which I know is what sort of Casey and Callie Means are pushing for, and thank the Lord that their influence has become so significant in government.

00:29:48.000 But the underlying idea that the most powerful interests in America benefit from Americans being sick is archetypally something that Played out before in an adjacent but somewhat distinct field in so much as the fentanyl crisis that I know your family has some personal experience of it appears was loosely speaking generated by irresponsibility and a requirement to prescribe medications that there was already a suspicion were not effective in the ways that they were effective and

00:30:18.000 perhaps were downright detrimental in certain ways Spurred on only by the avarice of, in particular, the Sackler family and Purdue in particular.

00:30:27.000 But in the broadest terms, those are not distinct attributes to that particular company and that particular family.

00:30:35.000 But it would seem to me, at least, a kind of driving ideal behind Big Pharma and this nexus of interests that coagulate around it.

00:30:45.000 So having experienced...

00:30:48.000 The impact of the opioid crisis and how that was perhaps to say engineered is a little strong, but certainly once that opioid crisis was unleashed and we now know how it was, the kind of influence that family doctors We're subject to what their motivations might have been, the kind of trials that were conducted, the trials that were not conducted, the information that was amplified, the information that was concealed.

00:31:13.000 It's led to, obviously, the fentanyl crisis that has affected your family.

00:31:18.000 I've visited a few detoxes and treatment centers in your country since I've been here on this trip, Doctor.

00:31:25.000 And, you know, the fentanyl crisis is sort of ongoing and pretty real and wouldn't have happened if you didn't have such a rampant and avaricious pharmaceutical industry.

00:31:38.000 How did that personal experience within your family affect your perspectives on Big Pharma when it comes to the opioid crisis in particular?

00:31:47.000 Perhaps the pharmaceutical industry more generally, because if those are their motives in that area when it comes to dealing with pain, then what are their motives when it comes to dealing with any problem?

00:32:00.000 Yeah, it's really a sad mark, really, in medicine in general.

00:32:06.000 I thought I understood addiction.

00:32:09.000 I spent my life, my productive early medical life treating men and women living with HIV infection from the early 80s all the way into the present time.

00:32:20.000 And many of my patients, particularly in Baltimore, had comorbidities with drug use disorder.

00:32:29.000 When I was chairman of medicine in one of the local hospitals, I had a division of addiction medicine, so I thought I really understood addiction pretty well, but I didn't really understand it at all until it came into my own family.

00:32:43.000 And as you mentioned, I almost lost one of my children from cocaine that was contaminated with fentanyl.

00:32:50.000 And then when I became CDC director, obviously President Trump had a deep commitment to drug use disorder and wanted to see a more effective response.

00:33:03.000 We lost 80,000 people that year when I was CDC director.

00:33:08.000 And so I really started looking into this.

00:33:10.000 And the first thing that I was, I was shocked.

00:33:14.000 Truly shocked.

00:33:15.000 Here I was a very educated doctor.

00:33:18.000 You know, I was vice chair of medicine for Maryland, chair of medicine in another hospital.

00:33:23.000 And I was shocked to learn that there's about a 3% risk to 5% risk of addiction to opioids from a single prescription of Percocet.

00:33:39.000 And I found, and I go back and think of my own child's life, when he had oral surgery and had his wisdom teeth removed, the first thing that Dennis did was give him a month's worth of Percocet.

00:33:51.000 And then I think about other injuries that my children had over time when they broke a bone or had a bad sprain, and the first thing the orthopod did was give them Percocet.

00:34:07.000 And I all of a sudden learned, as now a 60-year-old doctor, that that decision was really one of the most Dangerous decisions you could make because you're talking about giving someone a prescription that puts them at three to five percent at a lifetime risk of opioid addiction.

00:34:30.000 So it's really sad how the medical community didn't really get into this late.

00:34:36.000 And then when I was in my, when I was Vice Chair of Medicine at Maryland, that was when there was this huge move in the 90s, you remember, that we had to do the, I think it was the fifth or sixth vital sign.

00:34:50.000 What was that?

00:34:50.000 What was your pain score?

00:34:52.000 And everybody had to ask everybody what their pain score was, as if pain is something you shouldn't have.

00:34:57.000 And everyone started using more and more narcotics to treat pain.

00:35:02.000 I remember CDC director, I had one town in West Virginia that we investigated that had less than 3,000 people.

00:35:14.000 And the local drugstore distributed more than 20 million prescriptions for opioids.

00:35:22.000 In one town, all right, of less than 3,000 people.

00:35:27.000 And so there was obviously nobody was paying attention to the store.

00:35:31.000 So it was not only the physicians that I think, you know, failed to recognize the harm that was done by overuse of these narcotics.

00:35:44.000 But then again, you had here you had a pharmacy That there was only 3,000 people.

00:35:50.000 We had a DEA. We have all these groups supposedly overseen.

00:35:54.000 How does this one pharmacy put out 20 million prescriptions in a year?

00:35:59.000 It shows you that everybody was kind of asleep at the switch.

00:36:03.000 And unfortunately, what we ended up with is a terrible, terrible group of individuals that now have the struggle with addiction.

00:36:14.000 When I was CDC director, we were very aggressive in trying to change those norms that would teach orthopedists and dentists that they don't need to use narcotics.

00:36:25.000 for their tooth and they don't need to use narcotics when someone breaks or sprains a bone and really try to make people aware I mean I got a lot of criticism from some groups because they felt I was trying to take away pain medicine from them I wasn't if you're you know in stage palliative care and dying we want you to have pain control but that's not to say we should be randomly prescribing these drugs That really were life altering.

00:36:54.000 I'm convinced my son's introduction to opioids was his wisdom teeth distraction.

00:36:59.000 All right.

00:37:00.000 Which then, you know, 20 years later almost cost him his life when he was using cocaine that happened to have fentanyl with it.

00:37:09.000 So I think we have to be honest in medicine.

00:37:13.000 It's not just the COVID vaccine and closing schools And closing businesses that were not optimal and were in a, you know, I think in retrospect were bad policy.

00:37:26.000 Clearly there was a lot of bad policy in medicine about how you control paint.

00:37:34.000 I mean, you know, and one of the biggest things that I think really helped to bring on the opioid crisis that we have today is that whole group that decided to give us the sixth vital sign, which is to make, you know, every time you go in the hospital, what's your pain score?

00:37:48.000 One, two, three, four, five, six.

00:37:50.000 Oh, you have pain?

00:37:51.000 Okay, let's give you something for pain.

00:37:53.000 I'm kind of thankful as a doctor for whatever reason, and I don't know why, I never liked giving patients medicine for pain.

00:38:04.000 I wasn't against it, but I think in my entire medical career, I've probably written less than 10 prescriptions for a controlled substance.

00:38:13.000 And most of them were for a dear friend of mine who was a patient with HIV infection.

00:38:18.000 who basically fell five stories off a ladder and broke his back in about a gillion places and he was just in such pain all the time he couldn't live his life and we finally worked it out that I could manage him and he could manage his pain with about 15 Percocet a month.

00:38:39.000 Right?

00:38:40.000 But in my whole career, I very rarely knee-jerk to the answer was opioids.

00:38:48.000 But you raise an important issue because the physicians were involved.

00:38:54.000 Because they weren't thinking clearly.

00:38:56.000 There wasn't enough debate.

00:38:57.000 The policymakers were involved because they were passing these rules that hospitals would be docked if patients had high pain scores that weren't dealt with.

00:39:07.000 And obviously the pharmaceutical industry was very involved in this.

00:39:11.000 How could you sell 20 million prescriptions to a pharmacy that only has 3000 patients.

00:39:19.000 Everyone had to be involved.

00:39:22.000 In a sense, it was a legalization of trying to create drug dependency.

00:39:30.000 Very sad chapter in our life.

00:39:32.000 Very sad chapter in medicine.

00:39:34.000 You know, it's almost as sad as I remind people in the 1960s, our medical journals used to advertise cigarettes.

00:39:43.000 Even though some doctors tried to say, you know, maybe cigarettes aren't good for you, and maybe we should give up cigarettes.

00:39:50.000 But it didn't stop certain medical journals that are very prominent from taking the advertisement dollars that they could get by putting an ad for Chesterfields or Marlboros in a medical journal.

00:40:01.000 I mean, it's hard for people to believe that, but that was just, you know, in the 60s, that was routine.

00:40:07.000 So, you know, I think it's good to step back and realize that, you know, a lot of these decisions haven't been perfect.

00:40:14.000 And this is, again, why I think Kennedy is going to be a breath of fresh air.

00:40:18.000 You know, I think he's committed.

00:40:20.000 He's passionate.

00:40:21.000 He's got great common sense.

00:40:24.000 Great common sense.

00:40:26.000 And he can begin to chart a path of how do we make America...

00:40:31.000 How do we make America...

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00:41:58.000 Caffeine that will help you overthrow the powerful.

00:42:00.000 He also hates corporate corruption and that's always the aspect of these problems that I've intuitively felt is significant because, you know, I'm not surprised because of the type of material I consume that cigarettes were advertised in medical journals and whilst the fentanyl crisis Maybe a chapter in American life is also part of an ongoing book and the problem is perpetuated in ways that are observable

00:42:30.000 and traceable in so much as the tobacco companies that saw their business model ruined as a result of eventual legislation or some prohibition around the use of and advertising of their product migrated to food and Started to ensure that food was addictive and intoxicating in precisely the same way that tobacco is.

00:42:51.000 In my senses, my diagnosis, and again, I'm not a doctor, you are, but the patient I'm attempting to assess here in triage is the corporation of America itself.

00:43:07.000 And I would say that what appears to be happening is the exploitation of essential qualities or essential traits, perhaps is a better word, or phenomena.

00:43:21.000 Like, where there is pain, there is a remedy for pain that can become profitable.

00:43:28.000 Where there is emptiness, there's the perpetuation of food that seems fulfilling but is not the bread we need.

00:43:34.000 When it comes to a pandemic health crisis, there's a rush to serve the converging interests of a state.

00:43:43.000 That needs the ability to regulate, and corporations that require the possibility of profit, and big tech organizations that were willing to become sensorial in order to not be demonopolized.

00:43:59.000 What I would say as a new Christian is that what undergirds this set of problems is a lack of principles. 1.00

00:44:09.000 A lack of a spiritual perspective that over time has been eroded and extracted from American life.

00:44:18.000 Most people, I don't know about most people, but enough people in positions of power now are, it seems to me, Regulating and legislating, either in ways that are entirely unconscious or in some cases evil.

00:44:32.000 Certainly when it comes to the outcomes, there are evil consequences in all the issues we've talked about today.

00:44:38.000 Diet, poor metabolic health, the handling of a pandemic, the opioid crisis.

00:44:47.000 Evil, I suppose, always indicates intent, but my own experiences and reading as a Christian leads me to believe, as well as my previous experiences as a media commentator and as an activist and as a drug addict prior to that, that evil is indeed at work. 0.78

00:45:03.000 How do you look at these issues as a Christian?

00:45:09.000 Man who surely therefore read Ephesians and the dicta that there are dark powers operating.

00:45:16.000 How do you feel about the general drive to replace ethical and theological morality with sets of centralized bureaucratic powers that lay claim to the powers that the God that they continually attempt to annihilate once laid claim to?

00:45:36.000 The ability to prescribe what is good and what is bad and what our behaviour should be and what interests should be served and what our values should be.

00:45:43.000 And certain taxonomies that might be regarded as stable.

00:45:46.000 The family, the nation, maleness and femaleness. 0.99

00:45:51.000 How do you feel as a Christian about what you've experienced in these places?

00:45:56.000 And do you ever reflect that these matters may not be unfolding as a result of ineptitude?

00:46:04.000 Or oversight, but as a result of an evil intention.

00:46:10.000 You know, it's first, to hit at the beginning, one of the biggest problems that I've seen in medicine, and you mentioned it earlier, is the incentive for the players, say pharma, and unfortunately some health systems, insurance companies, and maybe even some providers, is the incentive health?

00:46:35.000 Or is the incentive money?

00:46:38.000 Is it money?

00:46:39.000 Is it dollars?

00:46:41.000 And again, I think as sort of a consciousness for Kennedy, you know, to throw in on the American public as we try to make America healthy again, the focus ought to be health, right?

00:46:54.000 And the truth is, at the end of the day, if we make our nation healthy again as a nation, We will have resources to do other important things that our nation would need to do, whether it's invest in education, invest in the ability to address issues like homelessness.

00:47:15.000 But right now, the system is, if you will, I think, perverted in that it does see the dollar sign As something that is driving a lot of the system.

00:47:31.000 And it's counter-cultural to say, well, wait a minute, maybe the dollar sign shouldn't be driving this.

00:47:38.000 Maybe the health outcome should be driving this health.

00:47:42.000 You know, I am a Catholic and I believe in God.

00:47:46.000 I think it motivates me, you know, probably every day of my life.

00:47:52.000 It's one of the reasons I'm optimistic that we can make America healthy again.

00:47:58.000 Because I've always felt that not just with Bobby Kennedy, it's possible to make America healthy again, but I've always felt that, you know, with God, all thing is possible if we just put our commitment there and we stay in line and try to move things forward.

00:48:14.000 I do think you are right that a lot of the incentives that have driven a lot of the decisions have unfortunately been made in the absence of a moral framework.

00:48:28.000 And hopefully we can try to reinforce the importance of these decisions being made in the context of a moral framework.

00:48:41.000 And I think it's obviously a very important part of my life.

00:48:46.000 You know, it's one of the reasons I said I'm optimistic.

00:48:49.000 I've always felt that the science is a gift from God.

00:48:54.000 And if we use it properly, that it will help provide solutions.

00:48:59.000 Obviously, medicine is an important gift.

00:49:02.000 Again, if it's used properly.

00:49:05.000 But I think you're right, Russell.

00:49:09.000 There's people that are motivated by different things.

00:49:12.000 And, you know, I do pray that more and more of our leaders are grounded in a moral framework as they make these decisions, not just a financial framework.

00:49:25.000 Yeah, because that financial framework, you know, that kind of literal materialism, that worshipping of the false idol, as surely as if it were Molokov Baal, does appear to bring about evil outcomes.

00:49:37.000 I'm just sort of glancing at my Bible here because I was looking for, in Peter, I read today about, like, sort of, The kind of seeming superlatives of the claim that God can achieve all things, exceeding...

00:49:49.000 There's a sort of a famous phrase in Peter that's about how God can bring about absolutely the best outcomes.

00:50:01.000 Where was that?

00:50:02.000 Where did I see that?

00:50:03.000 I'll find it in a minute.

00:50:04.000 But I also wanted to ask you, can you hear me, Doc?

00:50:09.000 Thank you.

00:50:10.000 I just wanted to ask you...

00:50:11.000 Thank you, sir.

00:50:12.000 I also wanted to ask you about, like, given that Bobby Kennedy has come up so much in this conversation, like, one of the things that struck me when I was sort of perusing his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was how apparently outrageous some of the claims were.

00:50:29.000 And among them, the idea that...

00:50:32.000 Well, just to learn that certain vaccine, and in particular mRNA technology, had emerged from biodefence, that the pandemic response was something of a military operation.

00:50:43.000 Indeed, most of the people that headed it up were military, and I suppose when you're dealing with social control, the involvement in the military is not surprising, but it's surprising when it's being presented as a health crisis.

00:50:52.000 I was interested to hear that you at least are open to the idea that COVID itself could have its origins in North Carolina as part of a secret biodefence program.

00:51:05.000 That's the kind of thing that would get you thrown off of Facebook and right out of Twitter not so long ago.

00:51:12.000 I wonder if you could elaborate on that idea for us, Doctor.

00:51:18.000 Yeah, well, I'm of the view, I'm a virologist by training, and when a zoonotic virus comes into humans, like when SARS did in 2003, from a bat to a civet cat, or like MERS in 2012, from a bat to a camel, when the virus finally got into humans, it really never learned how to efficiently transmit among humans.

00:51:44.000 So as we sit here today, there's less than 10,000 cases of SARS, even though that's 20 something years ago.

00:51:52.000 And the same thing with MERS. There's less than 10,000 cases, even though it's, you know, 10, 11, 12 years ago.

00:51:59.000 These viruses didn't learn how to go human to human efficiently, right?

00:52:06.000 But when COVID came, It was really one of the most efficient viruses to go human to human, probably almost as infectious as measles.

00:52:18.000 And again, I'm a virologist by training, so that made me, you know, my head go back.

00:52:23.000 Wait a minute, how'd that happen?

00:52:25.000 Because that's not what normally happens.

00:52:27.000 When my colleague Tony Fauci said this was spillover, I said, Tony, I don't buy it.

00:52:33.000 As a virologist, if it was spillover, this virus would be struggling to learn how to go human to human.

00:52:40.000 This virus already knows.

00:52:42.000 I think it had to take a detour in a laboratory and be taught how to do that.

00:52:48.000 And of course the lab in Wuhan had published papers in 2014 that they actually succeeded in teaching coronaviruses how to infect human tissue in humanized mice.

00:52:59.000 So I wasn't even speculating.

00:53:01.000 They had published they actually succeeded in doing that.

00:53:04.000 So I was then of the view that the most likely origin of COVID Was that it was a virus that was manipulated in a laboratory to teach it, educate it, how to infect human tissue.

00:53:23.000 And then, unfortunately, that virus escaped.

00:53:26.000 Now, I never said or intended to say, if I misspoke, that it was created in North Carolina.

00:53:34.000 What I did say is the scientists in North Carolina Actually, we're working with the scientists in the Wuhan lab.

00:53:42.000 And they actually taught the scientists in the Wuhan lab how to do some of this genetic engineering.

00:53:49.000 And whether or not some of the samples went from North Carolina to Wuhan or back and forth, I don't know.

00:53:57.000 We'd have to see what the scientists at North Carolina say.

00:54:00.000 But clearly, the University of North Carolina was involved in the science.

00:54:05.000 of COVID back with the Wuhan laboratory.

00:54:10.000 I think the actual leak of the virus initially into humans occurred in Wuhan.

00:54:17.000 I mean, we know that somewhere between August and October of that year, that's when the virus started to infect.

00:54:26.000 And we started to see a lot of new illness in the Wuhan population, as you know. 0.60

00:54:31.000 I mean, literally hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of people were infected.

00:54:36.000 I always say that in September of that year, 2019, three things happened in the Wuhan lab, which to me were suspicious.

00:54:47.000 One was they changed the leadership of that lab from the civilian leadership to the military leadership, because it was a dual-use lab.

00:54:54.000 It was a military civilian lab, and they sort of put the civilian no longer in charge, and they put the military gentleman in charge.

00:55:03.000 The second thing they did was they deleted the records of all the bat virus sequences they had for coronaviruses.

00:55:12.000 Which is a very odd thing for a research group to do, to delete their research.

00:55:19.000 But you could see it might be something somebody did if you wanted to trace the sequences of the current virus and try to see where it might have come from.

00:55:28.000 And then the third thing they did, which was very suspicious, was that they let a new contract for the Wuhan lab to redo the ventilation system in the lab.

00:55:41.000 Which to me was the most important telling sign that something went wrong.

00:55:47.000 All right?

00:55:48.000 And then if you look, and some of this is unfortunately still classified, hopefully President Trump will finally, even though Congress voted unanimously to declassify everything, Biden hasn't done that.

00:55:59.000 But hopefully it will all get classified and the American public can get a better sense of all the information that John Radcliffe and I and others know about some of the early events in the August, September, October timeframe.

00:56:18.000 But clearly that's when the pandemic really started to hit.

00:56:22.000 The other thing that was interesting was in October, the Wuhan, the city of Wuhan sponsored the military games.

00:56:30.000 So militaries from all over the world went there to compete, track and field games.

00:56:37.000 But the Wuhan government restricted and didn't allow any spectators.

00:56:44.000 That's highly unusual for them to have like the Olympics there, like people from all over the world, and they only let the athletes and no spectators, all right?

00:56:55.000 And you know, very rapidly after that, they started shutting down that city.

00:57:00.000 And literally quarantining millions of people, I think ultimately 20 million people.

00:57:04.000 I mean, the pandemic really was on fire in Wuhan area.

00:57:09.000 So I don't want people to think, I think the virus was created in North Carolina.

00:57:13.000 I don't think that.

00:57:14.000 I think scientists in North Carolina were working with scientists in the Wuhan laboratory, all right?

00:57:20.000 And this is where I've tried to always say, I don't blame China For the creation of this virus alone, that this research was participated with scientists from the United States.

00:57:36.000 Also, I've said that it was funded by NIH. Contrary to some of the comments that have been made publicly, it was also funded by DOD, it was funded by the State Department, and it was funded by USAID. So the United States government helped fund this research.

00:57:54.000 Where the Chinese government is really accountable and culpable, in my view, is that when the pandemic started, they didn't adhere to the International Health Regulation.

00:58:06.000 I tried to bring my team into China in the first week of January.

00:58:12.000 I didn't get a permission from my team to go in.

00:58:15.000 The President, Trump, actually called the President of China at my request and asked our team to go in.

00:58:22.000 We still didn't get invited in, okay?

00:58:25.000 Well, that's a true violation of the International Health Regulation.

00:58:28.000 And had China Allowed our team to go in and work with my counterpart, George Gao, and we were good friends.

00:58:36.000 And he wanted our help, but he told me he didn't have the authority to invite me in.

00:58:41.000 We needed to get permission from higher up in the Chinese government.

00:58:45.000 We would have learned in the first two weeks of January that this virus was highly infectious.

00:58:54.000 Human to human.

00:58:55.000 The Chinese government and CDC told me in the first week of January that this virus was not efficiently transmitted human to human.

00:59:07.000 Because they thought it was like SARS and MERS. They said it's not transmitted human to human.

00:59:12.000 Second thing they told me is that there isn't a symptomatic infection.

00:59:17.000 There's only symptomatic infection.

00:59:19.000 Well, that's important because that led our policy when this epidemic started.

00:59:24.000 We went ahead and I diagnosed about 14 people in late January, early February in the entire United States with this new virus.

00:59:34.000 And of those 14 people, we had over 800 contacts.

00:59:38.000 And we evaluated those contacts and we only found two that had COVID. Both were spouses.

00:59:46.000 But you have to ask the question, how did we evaluate the contacts?

00:59:50.000 What we did was we asked them, were they sick?

00:59:53.000 Because China said there's no asymptomatic infection.

00:59:56.000 So if they weren't sick, we didn't do anything.

01:00:00.000 We didn't test them for the virus.

01:00:03.000 Had we tested them for the virus, I think we would have learned right away that this virus was highly infectious.

01:00:12.000 It didn't cause symptoms in young people.

01:00:15.000 There's a lot of people that are asymptomatic, and it would have changed our whole public health policy and how we responded to the epidemic.

01:00:22.000 It wasn't looking for sick people and trying to isolate them.

01:00:26.000 It was actually expanded diagnosis and testing.

01:00:29.000 Which we learned finally when the Diamond Princess happened.

01:00:33.000 The Japanese were very cooperative and they allowed our CDC to go in and work with them on that ship that was in Japan at the time.

01:00:41.000 And we learned very rapidly about half the people on the ship were actually infected.

01:00:46.000 Even though most of them had no symptoms at all.

01:00:49.000 So where China has responsibility is they didn't follow the treaty that they signed on international health regulations.

01:00:57.000 But it's important that we realize that the research that was being done was research that there was cooperation between the U.S. government and the Chinese government in doing that research.

01:01:09.000 Now, I would argue that research was ill-advised.

01:01:13.000 I'm not an advocate that we should be trying to make viruses more pathogenic for humans.

01:01:21.000 I don't think we need to do that.

01:01:23.000 It's called gain-of-function research.

01:01:25.000 I think we've got enough problems without creating something that's more problematic.

01:01:32.000 This is where Fauci and I totally disagree.

01:01:34.000 He became sort of the poster child for gain-of-function research.

01:01:39.000 And truthfully, Russell, I'm sort of the poster child for a moratorium on gain-of-function research because I think it's ill-advised.

01:01:48.000 Yeah, I mean, increasingly and particularly after what we as a planet endured during that period and how many unanswered questions are drawn attention to and highlighted just from listening to you in the last...

01:02:06.000 10 minutes, let alone the conversation in its entirety.

01:02:09.000 It seems like moratorium is a sensible consideration because I didn't know that about like China had a treaty.

01:02:17.000 I was aware that there was, you know, I was aware about DARPA and the involvement between American institutions and American financing and funding.

01:02:24.000 Like, you know, and even I smiled when you said gain of function because During that period, we all became sort of autodidacts in areas of medicine and science that just seemed unthinkable.

01:02:35.000 And in fact, the way that this pandemic intersected with the media, I think, is one of the things that's changed the world in the last few years.

01:02:44.000 Thank you, Doctor.

01:02:46.000 Can I say one thing here?

01:02:47.000 I think it's important because there's a little bit of a game being played with language.

01:02:55.000 When I talk about gain-of-function research, because Dr. Fauci has testified that he was not involved in gain-of-function research, according to the National Academy of Science definition.

01:03:08.000 And what the National Academy of Science defined, gain-of-function research, and I think you'll see what the irony in this is.

01:03:17.000 They define gain-of-function research.

01:03:19.000 If I start with a pathogen that's not pathogenic for humans, And I teach it how to be pathogenic for humans.

01:03:31.000 That's not gain-of-function research.

01:03:33.000 You have to start with a pathogen that's already pathogenic for humans and make it more pathogenic for humans.

01:03:40.000 And that's the argument that Tony uses when he says, I didn't do gain-of-function research because COVID-19 was not pathogenic for humans until they made it pathogenic for humans.

01:03:52.000 Now you see how ridiculous that is?

01:03:54.000 Yeah, even there, with the most basic question, there is a deception being practiced. 0.90

01:04:01.000 How you could not see it as a gain of function, that it gains the ability to become infectious to human beings when previously it was only infectious for bats, for example, seems like willful duplicitousness.

01:04:16.000 Yeah, I'm very upset by it because the other reason, because I was in this debate from the beginning and I obviously got a lot of threats and a lot of people don't like me in the scientific community because of my position, but I was very upset because something is simple when I argue the spillover We had no real evidence for it, even though that's what Fauci was promoting aggressively.

01:04:38.000 And I had a lab leak, which I thought was more likely, and was arguing for that.

01:04:46.000 But we never had an open debate about it, transparent debate.

01:04:50.000 You know, scientifically, that's what science does.

01:04:53.000 We normally debate things transparently.

01:04:55.000 It became sort of a closed issue and Lancet published, you know, that letter saying anybody who thought like I was a conspirator.

01:05:02.000 And then they did the article, Proximal Origin, that said anybody who thought like I was a conspirator.

01:05:08.000 That was a conspiracy.

01:05:10.000 Okay, in setting up the ultimate argument, okay?

01:05:13.000 Because the truth is, it was more likely.

01:05:17.000 And the thing that bothered me the most about it, and there's a lot of issues if you want to go into the detail in the virology, but it's more than you probably want to do.

01:05:25.000 But I will tell you the one simple thing to get most people to understand.

01:05:30.000 If you take COVID-19 That my people of a different point of view, a spillover, are saying went from a bat to humans and now is one of the most infectious human viruses.

01:05:43.000 I'm saying it went from a bat to the laboratory and then into humans from infection.

01:05:49.000 If you take that virus right now and you ask the question, can it infect bats?

01:05:56.000 The answer is it hardly can infect bats.

01:06:00.000 So how'd that happen?

01:06:02.000 If this is a bat virus, how'd that happen? 0.99

01:06:05.000 And I'll tell you how it happened when they put in the furin cleavage site, which is again has a lot of signatures in it that make you suspect that this was manipulated in the laboratory.

01:06:14.000 When they put in that furin cleavage site, it changed the receptor of the COVID virus away from the bat receptor. 0.76

01:06:21.000 So it no longer likes the bat receptor, but it loves the human receptor.

01:06:26.000 So I would argue with my colleagues that say they're scientists and they're open-minded.

01:06:32.000 I'd say, well, how do you explain that?

01:06:34.000 How do you explain that?

01:06:36.000 SARS can still infect bats.

01:06:39.000 MERS can still infect bats.

01:06:41.000 Why can COVID hardly infect bats?

01:06:44.000 And the reason is, is because the receptors were changed so they can infect humans.

01:06:50.000 Yeah, that sounds like gain of function all day long, that people were amending it and adapting it.

01:06:54.000 Had it not been adapted artificially or through interventionism, it would continue to affect bats.

01:07:01.000 And it's pretty clear that the reason you can't have that conversation transparently as you advocate for, Doctor, is because by having that conversation, you have to implicate all sorts of individuals and institutions.

01:07:11.000 And instead of Science being the warp speed heroes that they were temporarily regarded to be during that period when we were invited to see Anthony Fauci as a kind of playboy hero of science.

01:07:22.000 It seems that they are directly culpable for the problem that they, in retrospect, only moderately and perhaps even ineptly half solved.

01:07:35.000 One of the reasons it's really important as you think this through and decide what you do in the future is that we're not finished with pandemics.

01:07:45.000 And people know that I'm worried about the next pandemic.

01:07:48.000 And the next pandemic that I'm worried about is a bird flu pandemic.

01:07:52.000 And we now know there's four amino acids that need to be changed in the receptors to get bird flu to infect humans efficiently.

01:08:00.000 Now, I argued that we didn't need to know that, but some scientists in 2012 did the research and figured it out, and then they decided they had to publish it.

01:08:10.000 I argued that we shouldn't publish it because I didn't want some I don't want a bioterrorist or somebody to get a map on how to make this virus highly infectious for humans.

01:08:21.000 But it was published.

01:08:23.000 And Tony even wrote in the Washington Post, I think with Collins, he may have been a co-author, that if we do gain a function research, because it's so important, In predicting how to do things, they believe, I don't agree with them, that even if we got a pandemic, it's worth the risk.

01:08:40.000 Well, I think we did it.

01:08:42.000 I think we got a pandemic, and it's not worth the risk.

01:08:46.000 The reason I say this is right now there's more amino acids that have to change to make bird flu infected for humans.

01:08:52.000 It's currently now in 28 species in the United States from birds to different mammals.

01:08:59.000 It's not really learned how to go mammal to mammal.

01:09:02.000 It's infected over 50 people so far, but it still hasn't learned how to go mammal to mammal.

01:09:07.000 It's just like most zoonotic viruses.

01:09:10.000 It's struggling to learn how to go mammal to mammal in a non-avian host.

01:09:14.000 But it turns out There are scientists now that are trying to teach it how to infect humans.

01:09:29.000 Why do you want to teach bird flu how to infect humans?

01:09:32.000 Now they'll argue because they have to know how it changes so they can be prepared for when it happens.

01:09:39.000 I'll argue we'll deal with that if and when it happens and we don't have to help make it happen.

01:09:45.000 Yeah.

01:09:47.000 Particularly, you would think if one lesson's been learned from the last few years, it would be precisely that one.

01:09:54.000 And if that lesson isn't being learned, I can't imagine it's a result of ignorance, but recalcitrance, deliberate disobedience, and I have some ideas as to what the motive for that disobedience might be also.

01:10:10.000 Yeah, a lot of people, you know, this is where I get criticized because my colleagues, a lot of people see the financial future of science, this gain-of-function research, being very important to fund their labs, to fund their universities.

01:10:28.000 And they say they believe it's important for improving the human condition.

01:10:34.000 I challenge that.

01:10:36.000 I think it's really potentially very, very risky.

01:10:40.000 And I do think we went through, you know, we don't know exactly how many, but I suspect about 20 million people died from COVID. And it's been estimated about $35 trillion of wealth it cost us.

01:10:54.000 That's a big price to pay for a couple of experiments in a laboratory to try to make a virus learn how to infect humanized tissue.

01:11:02.000 Yeah, and it could be a much higher price as ultimately paid.

01:11:05.000 Dr. Redfield, thank you so much for your time today.

01:11:07.000 Thank you for this wonderful conversation.

01:11:09.000 Thanks for your patience in educating us in a variety of complicated subjects, and thank you for your willingness to share the personal and spiritual side of the challenges that you face, not only as a physician and as a scientist, but also as a man.

01:11:22.000 Thank you.

01:11:23.000 Thank you.

01:11:24.000 God bless you.

01:11:24.000 Thanks, Russell.

01:11:25.000 Well, thank you very much for joining us.

01:11:27.000 We will be back next week with more fantastic content.

01:11:30.000 If you can't wait that long, why would you?

01:11:32.000 Get over to Locals, Become an Awake and Wonder, and watch this conversation with Jonathan Pagiot.

01:11:38.000 This is the sort of education you require if you're going to understand reality at depth.

01:11:42.000 Check it out.

01:11:43.000 The thing about Jesus' story and the Gospels that's difficult is that they're so non-literary.

01:11:48.000 And people like literary.

01:11:51.000 They want, you know, they're very matter-of-fact, very simple.

01:11:55.000 All the Bible stories are like that.

01:11:57.000 They don't describe interstates.

01:11:58.000 They don't describe, you know, the yearnings of people's hearts, you know, like if you read some ancient poem.

01:12:04.000 They just say what happened.

01:12:07.000 And because of that, people can, in some ways, it's almost too simple for people's minds.

01:12:13.000 But if they take the time to unpack what's in the story, then they realize that all their epic poems are gathered into that one story.

01:12:21.000 Everything that they care about, all the interstates that they are attached to, are kind of folded into the story of Jesus, but they're not made explicit.

01:12:32.000 And so people can read it and not notice what's actually happening.

01:12:35.000 Well, thanks very much for joining us.

01:12:37.000 We'll be back next week, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.

01:12:40.000 Until then, if you can, stay free.

01:13:04.000 Many switching, switch on, switch on.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - November 29, 2024

Pandemic Policies and Public Health Mistakes: Dr. Robert Redfield Speaks Out – SF504

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