The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1756 - John Abramson

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Hello, John.

00:00:14.000 Joe.

00:00:15.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:16.000 So this is obviously a subject that in this current era is very intriguing and very important for people.

00:00:27.000 Big Pharma.

00:00:28.000 And this is the subject of your book.

00:00:30.000 How Big Pharma...

00:00:32.000 What is the heading?

00:00:34.000 How Big Pharma Broke America?

00:00:36.000 Is that what it is?

00:00:37.000 I actually have a copy of it for you.

00:00:39.000 Oh good, because it's not available.

00:00:40.000 I tried to get it in the...

00:00:42.000 They sent me copies of the audiobook, but it's in these weird WAV files and when you have to turn your screen off or it shuts off the sound.

00:00:52.000 All right.

00:00:52.000 There you go.

00:00:53.000 Sickening.

00:00:53.000 How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and How We Can Repair It.

00:00:58.000 So how did they break American healthcare?

00:01:00.000 What happened?

00:01:00.000 How did we get so deep in?

00:01:02.000 And how is it that we're one of only two countries on earth that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise?

00:01:08.000 Well, let's start with that question first.

00:01:10.000 Yeah, let's do that.

00:01:11.000 So the United States and New Zealand allowed drug companies to advertise.

00:01:15.000 But New Zealand has very active oversight of its pharmaceutical program.

00:01:20.000 Active oversight of the evaluation of the efficacy of the drugs and whether the pricing of the drugs is reasonable.

00:01:28.000 So it turns out that even though we in New Zealand allow drug advertising, New Zealand spends the least per person amongst developed countries, and we spend the most by far.

00:01:40.000 So, has there ever been a conversation, like whether it's publicly or privately, that you know of where they've tried to stop this?

00:01:50.000 Is this one of those things that once it gets into play, once there is a law that allows pharmaceutical drug companies To sponsor or to advertise are we doomed then because then the amount of money that's involved in advertising and when you see those brought to you by Pfizer those CNN commercials and when you see the Whether it's for allergy medications or antidepressants the sheer volume of money that's involved in

00:02:21.000 It seems like extracting that from our system would be very difficult to manage because they're going to fight tooth and claw to keep that in.

00:02:30.000 Absolutely.

00:02:31.000 So, as best I understand it from the lawyers who do understand it, in our Constitution, The advertising of prescription drugs falls under the free speech mandate of our Constitution.

00:02:50.000 And some things you can control the advertising of, cigarettes and alcohol.

00:02:56.000 There's no beneficial use of those.

00:03:00.000 They can be recreational, but there's no But with drugs, there is an absolute benefit.

00:03:07.000 And because of that, they qualify as protected under the First Amendment.

00:03:12.000 However, that said, The floodgates were opened and it's clear that the drug company is going to spend as much advertising, however many billions of dollars they want, to make as much money as they can.

00:03:26.000 But there's nothing that says that drug ads need to be allowed, that we need to allow them to be misleading.

00:03:36.000 You've never seen a drug ad that you have to treat 323 people with Trulicity for a year to prevent one cardiovascular event.

00:03:45.000 They don't tell you that.

00:03:45.000 They tell you Trulicity for diabetes prevents cardiovascular events in diabetics.

00:03:51.000 But if they said you have to treat 323 people To get one better and the other 322 aren't going to have a cardiovascular benefit, then you'd be delivering information that people can use.

00:04:03.000 And if you said that you can't play violins or have family picnics while you're reciting all the side effects, Then people would listen to the side effects.

00:04:15.000 So I think the key is that the drug companies know how to use the ads, very skillful, to manipulate people on an emotional level.

00:04:27.000 And we don't have to settle for that.

00:04:30.000 You want to advertise drugs?

00:04:32.000 Okay, let's decide what facts need to be told about this.

00:04:37.000 Is this better than other therapies?

00:04:39.000 Is this better than lifestyle intervention?

00:04:42.000 How much does it cost?

00:04:44.000 How many people do you need to treat in order for one to get better?

00:04:47.000 I think if that information were included in the ads, they'd be much less the...

00:04:54.000 The cost benefit of the ads would be reduced or the benefit cost ratio would be reduced for the drug companies and then they wouldn't advertise so much.

00:05:04.000 But right now they can make these ads that make anything look great and make people want them and make people go to their doctor and ask for them and they make a ton of money.

00:05:13.000 Yeah, it just doesn't seem like it should have a place.

00:05:18.000 Advertising, in terms of the way they're advertising, not just showing something in a print form, like there is a new medication that stops the damages of high blood pressure, whatever it is.

00:05:33.000 What they're doing is they have these theatrical representations of the most beautiful and wonderful life where people are dancing in wheat fields and delivering picnic food while everybody laughs and cheers.

00:05:44.000 That should be illegal.

00:05:45.000 I mean, it's manipulation. 0.98

00:05:48.000 They're clearly fucking with people's heads and they're using psychology. 0.94

00:05:52.000 They're not doing it in a way where they're trying to objectively, coldly rely facts And have people see these facts and recognize that this has benefit to them. 0.97

00:06:04.000 No, what they're doing is they're trying to get people excited about the possibility of living a life like they're seeing.

00:06:10.000 When they're relaying these facts, they're doing it with music, they're doing it with joyous dancing. 0.99

00:06:18.000 It's bullshit. 0.99

00:06:19.000 It's really wrong because you're not selling a car. 1.00

00:06:22.000 If you want to do that to sell a car, it doesn't bother me at all.

00:06:25.000 But you're doing something that people who have health problems are really thinking that they're going to wind up like these people in this video.

00:06:36.000 You're manipulating them to the point where you're getting them to bring things up to their doctor, things about antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication or all kinds of stuff that people could just ask for.

00:06:49.000 And it seems insane that of all the countries on Earth, there's only two that allow it, and as you're saying, one that allows it pretty much unchecked.

00:06:58.000 Right.

00:06:58.000 That's exactly right.

00:07:00.000 And I'm in total agreement with you, Joe.

00:07:03.000 I don't think we're going to get rid of drug ads.

00:07:06.000 But I think we could make the drug ads – you could ensure that the drug ads leave people with an accurate understanding of what the benefit of the drug is going to be.

00:07:20.000 But don't you think if you have any ads, there's going to be room for fuckery?

00:07:24.000 And there's going to be – I mean if you have any ads, they say, OK, well, no theatrical representations.

00:07:29.000 They're gonna go, whoa, okay.

00:07:31.000 What about music?

00:07:31.000 Can I have music?

00:07:32.000 Like, what about the way people talk?

00:07:34.000 Like, when they say these side effects at the end, when they list off the side effects, it's crazy the way they're talking about death and suicide.

00:07:44.000 You may have suicidal thoughts, like, oh, what?

00:07:47.000 Why is it like that?

00:07:48.000 Right, and why is the dog wagging his tail?

00:07:50.000 Yeah, why are you saying this while this lady's dancing? 1.00

00:07:53.000 Like, you know, what?

00:07:54.000 Yeah, I'm totally with you.

00:07:55.000 I just think that it's not gonna happen that we get rid of them.

00:07:59.000 But if we made them tell the truth and if we did studies that looked at the messages that people actually take away from these drug ads and made sure that the messages were accurate, that it would be an improvement.

00:08:13.000 So you're just being pragmatic.

00:08:14.000 You're just saying, realistically, we're so far fucked, we're never going to remove these ads. 0.94

00:08:20.000 It's worse than that. 0.97

00:08:21.000 I think they're so baked into our Constitution.

00:08:25.000 The right to advertise is so baked into our constitution that it's not going to happen.

00:08:31.000 But I do think that if you made the ads tell the truth about how the drug compares to other therapeutic approaches, how it compares to taking charge of your lifestyle, What the real cost is,

00:08:46.000 not what your co-pay is.

00:08:48.000 If you made the ads communicate an accurate picture of the role of that drug in therapeutics and the price, the relative price, that it wouldn't be so bad.

00:09:00.000 I agree 100% with you.

00:09:02.000 It makes no sense.

00:09:03.000 Doctors know how to read medical journals and they should be deciding what's good for people.

00:09:07.000 We don't need the TV ad to tell us that.

00:09:10.000 All that said, it ain't going away.

00:09:12.000 So I think the energy ought to be to figure out how to deliver a constructive message.

00:09:18.000 It seems like, but if you did have a constructive message and it was comprehensive, you'd need like a half-an-hour infomercial.

00:09:24.000 It wouldn't necessarily fit inside a one-minute advertising.

00:09:27.000 If you're talking about the benefit of different lifestyle choices, if you're talking about diet and exercise and how it affects the way these things interact with the body and what's the actual cost, Co-pay.

00:09:42.000 If you have all those factors in, how are you going to squeeze that into a one-minute ad?

00:09:46.000 Well, maybe you can.

00:09:48.000 But maybe it needs to be a two-minute ad.

00:09:50.000 Maybe the law needs to be that you need a two-minute or a five-minute.

00:09:53.000 Maybe make it as boring as possible so at the end of the day they hate the drug.

00:09:57.000 Now you're on the right page.

00:09:58.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:59.000 But you could standardize it.

00:10:00.000 This is how the drug compares to therapeutic alternatives.

00:10:03.000 This is how it compares to lifestyle.

00:10:06.000 This is what it costs.

00:10:07.000 This is how many people you need to treat in order for one to benefit.

00:10:11.000 You could make that standard.

00:10:12.000 So just like the drug label that the FDA approves.

00:10:16.000 It's standard.

00:10:17.000 You know where to find stuff.

00:10:19.000 So I think you and I share one common thought that we're not on one side or the other and that pharmaceutical drugs have some amazing benefits.

00:10:28.000 And they've been incredible for mankind in so many different ways.

00:10:33.000 The problem is unchecked capitalism.

00:10:37.000 Like unchecked profit, unchecked where you have so much money that you can influence the way things are regulated, you can influence the way things are promoted by health officials, where you just have full reign with your ability to distort information and to cover up the damaging and detrimental effects of these drugs.

00:10:59.000 And that's where I think we agree about pharmaceutical companies, what they've done in terms of Whether it's lying about studies, lying about the addictive properties of these drugs, it's been absolutely horrific.

00:11:15.000 But as well, some pharmaceutical drugs are amazing.

00:11:20.000 Correct.

00:11:21.000 Both things are true, right?

00:11:22.000 Both things are true, and I think there are two important points to be made.

00:11:27.000 One is, this may sound impolite, but the primary function of the drug companies is to make money for their investors.

00:11:35.000 And we've got to get over the illusion that somehow their purpose is to serve our health.

00:11:41.000 The purpose is to make money.

00:11:44.000 And in our largely unregulated system, uniquely unregulated healthcare system, pharmaceutical system amongst developed countries, we allow the drug companies to control the information that flows to doctors and patients.

00:12:03.000 And that's what has to change.

00:12:06.000 That's what has to change.

00:12:08.000 And the amount of accountability that drug companies have, so like, you know, we've talked before about Pfizer and that, what was the one drug where they had the largest settlement ever, the largest penalty ever?

00:12:24.000 Pfizer, it was an arthritis drug.

00:12:27.000 And what did they do?

00:12:29.000 Like, what was their, what was the, I want to say error, but what was the lie?

00:12:36.000 Like, what were they selling versus what was reality?

00:12:39.000 So, I can't tell you.

00:12:41.000 I know, but I can't tell you.

00:12:44.000 I spent about 10 years, a little more than 10 years in litigation as an expert in the national drug cases.

00:12:51.000 And when I served as an expert, I got to see all the documents.

00:12:56.000 So there would be like 20 million documents in a case.

00:12:59.000 And I could see the science, and if I needed a statistician to do a reanalysis of the primary data, I got that.

00:13:06.000 I got to see how the marketing people strategized to exploit the science to create the most profit.

00:13:15.000 I got to see how they marketed it to doctors, how they wrote the articles in the medical journals.

00:13:20.000 And I did that in the case of Pfizer.

00:13:25.000 Plaintiffs' attorneys hired me to analyze the situation.

00:13:29.000 So I wrote a report and it got submitted to the court.

00:13:33.000 And Pfizer's behavior was, in my opinion, so outrageous that I picked up the phone and called the Department of Justice.

00:13:42.000 And said, I know a lot about this drug, but I can't tell you because I've signed a confidentiality agreement as an expert.

00:13:50.000 So the Department of Justice and the FBI sent me a subpoena and said, you must come with your computer and tell us what they did wrong.

00:14:00.000 And I did.

00:14:03.000 And that was the end of it.

00:14:04.000 They keep their cards close to their chest.

00:14:06.000 And six months later, I read in the newspaper that the Department of Justice had found the company had committed a felony and they were dealt the largest fine in U.S. history,

00:14:24.000 the largest criminal fine in U.S. history.

00:14:27.000 So I know what happened, but I can't tell you.

00:14:31.000 You can't tell me because of the confidentiality agreement?

00:14:33.000 Yep.

00:14:33.000 Wow.

00:14:35.000 And this—well, we can read it, right?

00:14:37.000 We can—well— No.

00:14:39.000 No?

00:14:40.000 You can read what the Department of Justice—you can read the Department of Justice press release, and I would encourage anyone who thinks this story is too crazy to be true to just search Department of Justice and Baxter, And they'll see the story that I just told.

00:14:53.000 But none of the real data is available as far as like what they lied about and nothing?

00:15:01.000 Nope.

00:15:01.000 Nope?

00:15:02.000 Wow.

00:15:03.000 Nada.

00:15:03.000 So how is that possible?

00:15:05.000 Was it some sort of a deal they had?

00:15:06.000 They were going to pay the amount of the fine, this enormous exorbitant amount, and in the deal it was that the actual details of it would not be divulged?

00:15:18.000 That's correct.

00:15:20.000 And it's even more serious because the drug companies own the data from their clinical trials.

00:15:28.000 It's so serious, Joe.

00:15:31.000 When a drug company sponsors a clinical trial and they do the analyses and they write up a manuscript and they say what happened and they send it to a medical journal and it gets peer-reviewed and doctors are trained that they should Read and trust peer-reviewed articles that are well-conducted.

00:15:50.000 And that's how the system works.

00:15:54.000 The peer reviewers and the editors of the medical journals don't get to see the data.

00:15:59.000 They have to take the word of the drug companies that they've presented the data accurately and reasonably completely.

00:16:08.000 And you only get to see it in litigation.

00:16:11.000 You know, five years later, when When it doesn't matter because everyone's formed their opinion.

00:16:18.000 That seems insane.

00:16:19.000 It's insane and doctors don't know this.

00:16:22.000 They're taught this paradigm of evidence-based medicine where good doctors practice evidence-based medicine and that's based on the peer-reviewed articles published in medical journals and the clinical practice guidelines and the doctors don't know that the peer reviewers didn't have access to the data and couldn't perform their independent analyses and The experts who write the clinical practice guidelines don't have access

00:16:52.000 to the data.

00:16:53.000 So the data is only held by the pharmaceutical companies.

00:16:56.000 They release their analysis of the data?

00:16:59.000 Correct.

00:17:00.000 And then the peer reviewers do everything based on the analysis of the data that was released by the pharmaceutical companies.

00:17:05.000 That's correct.

00:17:06.000 That's insane.

00:17:07.000 That's insane.

00:17:09.000 And docs don't understand it.

00:17:10.000 They don't understand that they're getting manipulated, that the control of the knowledge has been turned over to the drug companies.

00:17:18.000 And the drug companies, they pay for, I think, 86% of the clinical trials.

00:17:23.000 They design them.

00:17:24.000 First, they decide what they're about, and they're about the things that are going to make money, obviously.

00:17:29.000 They're not about the things that are going to make people healthy.

00:17:33.000 They're not prioritized that way.

00:17:35.000 But they design the studies.

00:17:37.000 They figure out the doses.

00:17:39.000 They figure out the conditions and exclusions of the people who are in the trials.

00:17:43.000 And they do what they can to exercise their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, which is to make this thing come out with data that's going to sell the drug.

00:17:54.000 And then after they've done all of that, they own the data.

00:18:01.000 How did that ever become the way that system is set up?

00:18:07.000 What steps were not put into place to protect people from the kind of fraud that's possible when the pharmaceutical drug companies are the ones who are relaying the data in their interpretation of the data to the peer reviewers?

00:18:22.000 How was that ever acceptable?

00:18:24.000 I think we drifted into the situation.

00:18:28.000 And what made it so important, so destructive to American healthcare is that we don't put a limit on what the drug companies can charge so that our prescription drugs, our brand name prescription drugs cost three and a half times more The same brand name prescription drugs in the other OECD countries,

00:18:52.000 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

00:18:55.000 So we have a price that is making this manipulation of data, some people would say BS. The price drives – it creates an enormous incentive.

00:19:09.000 And then we don't have what's called health technology assessments.

00:19:13.000 So we have no governmental or quasi-governmental oversight that compares the value of new drugs in terms of the therapeutic value and the economic value to old drugs, to older drugs, other available therapies.

00:19:32.000 Inform coverage decisions and inform physicians about how best to apply the new therapeutics.

00:19:39.000 And we also don't allow—this one is just mind-boggling—we don't allow government-funded cost-effectiveness studies, and we don't allow cost-effectiveness studies to be used in government-funded health care.

00:19:57.000 So we've created this situation where the prices are sky high, where the knowledge is not being overseen, and where the cost-effectiveness is not, the government is not allowing cost-effectiveness to get into our dialogue in the way it should be.

00:20:14.000 And we're essentially like playing a professional basketball game where the players are calling their own fouls.

00:20:21.000 They're paid to win and they're calling their own fouls.

00:20:24.000 It's craziness.

00:20:26.000 And that's why I wrote this book.

00:20:29.000 I've been fortunate enough to be in this unique position as a family doctor for 20 years and then as an expert in litigation.

00:20:39.000 And I understand how this works.

00:20:41.000 And the docs, they're trying hard.

00:20:44.000 They're drowning in information and they're under more and more pressure.

00:20:48.000 And it's just so they don't understand this.

00:20:52.000 Were you aware of how twisted the system was before you started doing this litigation, before you started going over the peer-reviewed papers and finding out where they did it?

00:21:04.000 Were you aware of how the system was set up?

00:21:06.000 It came in two stages.

00:21:08.000 After I finished my residency in family medicine, I did a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship for two years.

00:21:14.000 And that was a wonderful training in epidemiology and research design and statistics.

00:21:20.000 That's where I got these skills that I came back and drew on.

00:21:24.000 But family medicine is very hard in an academic environment.

00:21:28.000 The purpose of the fellowship was to train academics in family medicine to increase the prestige of family medicine, which seems like a good idea.

00:21:36.000 But family medicine is very difficult in an academic environment because the family docs are low man on the totem pole in the hospital and all the specialists.

00:21:47.000 Specialists often don't treat them with the respect they deserve.

00:21:50.000 And I decided that my calling was to go be a doctor in a smallish town.

00:21:55.000 And I did that for 20 years.

00:21:57.000 But I had this Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship training always in the back of my mind.

00:22:02.000 And as we got through the late 90s, it became clear that the drug companies were influencing what was in the journals.

00:22:11.000 And then the drug...

00:22:13.000 Do you remember the drug Vioxx?

00:22:14.000 It was an arthritis drug.

00:22:15.000 I have a friend who had a stroke after taking Vioxx.

00:22:19.000 Yeah.

00:22:20.000 So...

00:22:21.000 Yeah.

00:22:22.000 I got a letter from a mother...

00:22:25.000 Whose child died, 14, 17-year-old child died from taking Vioxx, eight samples of Vioxx.

00:22:35.000 But Vioxx came along and there was an article in the New England Journal That Merck had sponsored and it said it was safe and was advantageous, not because it was any more effective, but because it reduced the risk of serious GI problems.

00:22:49.000 And then there was another article in the New England Journal of Medicine that fessed up to cardiovascular problems, but the review article said I knew that...

00:23:17.000 That was crazy because there were only 53 serious GI events, which was the whole reason for selling this $2 billion-a-year drug, was that it was safer on the GI tract, and there were only 53 events.

00:23:29.000 It was an anti-inflammatory, right?

00:23:31.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:23:32.000 So the idea was that that was better than non-steroidal anti-inflammatories?

00:23:36.000 Exactly, because it didn't upset the stomach the same way.

00:23:40.000 And the science was elegant, and it might have worked, but it didn't.

00:23:43.000 And in changing that balance, it made the blood more likely to form clots.

00:23:50.000 The physiology was a little more complicated than just stomach or no stomach.

00:23:54.000 And is something like this, the issue is the size of the trial, because you could have 10 people and none of them can have a problem, but you could have 10,000 people and you could have quite a few problems.

00:24:07.000 So you have to make this study as large as possible so you get all this biological variation between human beings where different things affect different people in different ways?

00:24:17.000 That's part of it.

00:24:18.000 And you can have a study of 8,000 people where you leave out three heart attacks And you flip the statistics and claim that there's not a cardiovascular risk.

00:24:30.000 Okay.

00:24:30.000 So they just...

00:24:31.000 It was fraud.

00:24:32.000 It was fraud.

00:24:33.000 And you couldn't tell the fraud from the article in the New England Journal.

00:24:37.000 Merck had submitted this data to the New England Journal and they did what peer reviewers do, which is not have the data but make sure that the article makes internal sense.

00:24:46.000 They published the article.

00:24:47.000 And then this review article came along.

00:24:50.000 And they...

00:24:52.000 Gave a little bit more insight into the cardiovascular problems, but they blew it off as the play of chance because there are only 70 events, and that was crazy.

00:25:01.000 And at that point, I was sitting in my office at lunchtime reading, taking a break between sessions, reading this article, and I said, that's it.

00:25:08.000 I've got to figure this out.

00:25:10.000 There's something so wrong going on here that it's beyond my comprehension.

00:25:17.000 So an article was published in JAMA two weeks later that had a footnote that led to an FDA website that had enough data to see that Merck had been fraudulent about the heart attacks.

00:25:33.000 And when I saw that, I said, I'm going to leave practice and I'm going to figure this out.

00:25:39.000 And I worked for two years on a book called Overdosed America.

00:25:42.000 It was published in 2004. And it had the Vioxx story in it.

00:25:47.000 And a week after that book was published, Vioxx was pulled from the market.

00:25:52.000 It wasn't my doing.

00:25:56.000 Merck had done a second study that showed the same thing, that the risk of strokes and heart attacks and blood clots was doubled.

00:26:04.000 And at that point they had to pull it because they were hiding the data on this first study.

00:26:08.000 Now the second study came along and it was clear that the jig was up for them.

00:26:13.000 And how long have they been prescribing and distributing Vioxx at that point?

00:26:17.000 It came out in May of 99 and that was September of 2004. Wow.

00:26:24.000 So between 20 and 25 million Americans had taken Vioxx and between 40 and 60 thousand Americans had died Died from the cardiovascular consequences of Vioxx.

00:26:38.000 In the same ballpark as the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.

00:26:42.000 Died from taking this drug that was no more effective at treating arthritis or aches and pains than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories and caused 40,000 to 60,000 deaths.

00:26:55.000 And what was the punishment for Merck?

00:26:59.000 Merck, there were 27,000 plaintiffs in the litigation and they were awarded $4.7 billion.

00:27:06.000 Merck sold $12 billion worth of Vioxx in the four and a half years it was on the market.

00:27:11.000 So they paid the plaintiffs $4.7 billion and the Department of Justice fined them a little bit under a billion dollars.

00:27:21.000 But nobody went to jail.

00:27:23.000 Well, not only that, they're still making profit.

00:27:26.000 That's profit.

00:27:28.000 They – Merck – excuse me.

00:27:32.000 Vioxx, they probably made a small profit.

00:27:35.000 They took in $12 billion.

00:27:37.000 They had research and development costs.

00:27:50.000 Joe, it's crazy.

00:27:52.000 And Merck's chief scientist saw the data from that first study where the three heart attacks were omitted.

00:27:59.000 And there's an email that the Wall Street Journal published from March 9, 2000, when they opened up the data on that.

00:28:08.000 And the email, I'm paraphrasing, but the email said something like, it's a shame, but the cardiovascular effect is there.

00:28:16.000 But the drug will do well, and we will do well.

00:28:22.000 Oh, God.

00:28:25.000 That's written down.

00:28:26.000 It's written down.

00:28:26.000 And no one goes to jail for that.

00:28:28.000 No.

00:28:28.000 I mean, that is insane.

00:28:30.000 I mean, imagine any other thing that you do that's fraud that causes 40,000 deaths?

00:28:37.000 Is that what you're saying?

00:28:37.000 Between 40 and 60. Imagine any other thing.

00:28:40.000 Any other thing that you would sell.

00:28:41.000 Imagine if that was like Oreo cookies or, you know, whatever.

00:28:46.000 It's unheard of.

00:28:47.000 It's unheard of, and that's why it continues.

00:28:51.000 Because there's not adequate oversight.

00:28:53.000 And there's no consequences.

00:28:54.000 There's consequences, but...

00:28:56.000 There's slaps on the hand, but usually when the fines are announced by the Department of Justice, the stock goes up because the shareholders are happy to have this burden off.

00:29:06.000 It's interesting that both of those drugs, Vioxx and the other one...

00:29:11.000 What's the other one?

00:29:11.000 The one where Pfizer was awarded or...

00:29:15.000 The biggest fine?

00:29:16.000 Yeah, the biggest fine.

00:29:17.000 Bextra.

00:29:18.000 And Bextra is also an anti-inflammatory?

00:29:20.000 Yeah, it's the same class.

00:29:21.000 It's a cousin of Vioxx.

00:29:22.000 There's a lot of those out there.

00:29:24.000 There's a lot of dealing with inflammation.

00:29:27.000 Inflammation is very common to medicate against.

00:29:31.000 Yes.

00:29:31.000 I mean, people have aches and pains.

00:29:33.000 They have rheumatoid arthritis, and they have aches and pains.

00:29:37.000 So people take a lot of those drugs.

00:29:39.000 The question is, how can you make them better than the generic drugs that cost next to nothing that you can get over the counter?

00:29:47.000 So they exaggerated the GI problem.

00:29:52.000 Suddenly, the...

00:29:54.000 Our physicians' knowledge landscape became dominated by all the people who were dying from GI bleeds, and we had to switch those people from ordinary non-steroidals to Vioxx and Bextra and drugs like that.

00:30:11.000 And so you can't tell us exactly what Pfizer did with Bextra, but it was enough to – it was $23 billion?

00:30:21.000 No, no.

00:30:22.000 $1.195 billion.

00:30:25.000 Oh, okay.

00:30:26.000 Fine.

00:30:26.000 So that was the largest fine ever?

00:30:28.000 At that time.

00:30:29.000 And this was – was there deaths involved with Bextra as well?

00:30:35.000 No.

00:30:41.000 I'd have to refresh my memory and I might not be able to tell you even if I did.

00:30:47.000 But with Vioxx, we have the data on Vioxx because it did go to litigation in open court.

00:30:55.000 And it's clear that they removed three heart attacks that were critical that flipped the statistics and And that's how they sold $12 billion worth of a drug that more than doubled the risk of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.

00:31:12.000 Trevor Burrus And these companies are obviously – they don't get disbanded.

00:31:16.000 They don't get dissolved.

00:31:18.000 They're still in business and the same people are still running them in many cases and no one goes to jail.

00:31:25.000 Correct.

00:31:26.000 It's very rare for somebody to go to jail.

00:31:28.000 And even when they plead guilty to a felony, it's often a – I don't know why this happens, but the Department of Justice allows a subsidiary of the parent company to take the hit so that if there's another flagrant foul, the subsidiary gets – it's called disbarred but prohibited or excluded from the Medicare program.

00:31:51.000 The parent company doesn't even take the legal – doesn't get like the legal foul counted against them.

00:32:01.000 And so this has obviously all been set up by the pharmaceutical companies.

00:32:07.000 They've arranged this somehow or another with the Justice Department or whoever's prosecuting them.

00:32:12.000 No, that's going too far.

00:32:13.000 That's going too far.

00:32:14.000 No, but I mean as far as like these regulations, like how is it possible that they would allow them to have such egregious violations where people die And they also have all these safety nets in play to make sure that people don't go to jail and make sure the parent company doesn't get hit with the fire.

00:32:33.000 I mean, that doesn't seem like it's not negotiated.

00:32:37.000 It's going too far to assume or to assert?

00:32:41.000 Like, what's going too far?

00:32:43.000 Um...

00:32:45.000 It didn't happen that way organically.

00:32:47.000 It didn't like, this seems like the best way to do it.

00:32:50.000 This is going to protect American people the best.

00:32:52.000 We're going to make it so that you don't get in trouble.

00:32:55.000 Yeah.

00:32:56.000 Joe, I'm not an expert at what happens at the level of the Department of Justice, but I have a lot of experience about what happens in civil litigation.

00:33:03.000 Same drugs, same situation, but civil litigation.

00:33:06.000 And a lot of times, the plaintiff's lawyers will settle, they'll make a settlement, and oftentimes bury the data, agree to bury the data in civil litigation.

00:33:17.000 And I've been on the inside of some of those decisions.

00:33:21.000 And the plaintiffs' lawyers are representing the interests of the people who were injured, and they're trying to get the best deal for them.

00:33:32.000 And it's hard to get a jury to understand this.

00:33:36.000 Now, I did participate.

00:33:38.000 I testified in a federal court, in a federal trial, where Pfizer...

00:33:44.000 I apologize to Pfizer for their names coming up a lot.

00:33:48.000 And they're all the same.

00:33:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:51.000 So I'm sorry, Pfizer.

00:33:53.000 Sorry, Pfizer.

00:33:54.000 Sorry, Pfizer.

00:33:54.000 Yeah.

00:33:55.000 You do make boner bills. 1.00

00:33:58.000 Do they work?

00:33:59.000 Yeah, they're great.

00:34:00.000 They make other stuff too, right?

00:34:02.000 Pfizer makes a lot of good stuff.

00:34:03.000 Let's turn this into a drug ad right here. 0.99

00:34:05.000 We're going.

00:34:07.000 Okay, but go ahead.

00:34:08.000 Pfizer.

00:34:09.000 Kaiser Health Plan, the biggest HMO, sued Pfizer.

00:34:14.000 For fraudulently marketing Neurontin when Neurontin, Gapapentin, was still on patent.

00:34:21.000 And what is Neurontin?

00:34:22.000 Neurontin had been approved for two uses.

00:34:25.000 One was as a second-line seizure drug and one was for post-herpes zoster pain.

00:34:34.000 Those were the two indications for which Neurontin was approved.

00:34:38.000 And let me preface this by saying Neurontin or Gabapentin is still the sixth most frequently prescribed drug in the United States.

00:34:46.000 So a lot of insurance companies sued Pfizer for misrepresenting marketing drugs.

00:34:56.000 Neurontin off-label use for general pain, mostly.

00:35:01.000 Some migraines, some bipolar disorder.

00:35:04.000 But Kaiser was the only plaintiff that the judge who was overseeing this litigation allowed because Kaiser creates like a bottleneck through which information comes to doctors.

00:35:18.000 So in the other insurers where doctors are getting information from all over the place, the attorneys couldn't prove that Pfizer's marketing had misled the doctors, but they had the opportunity to prove that it had misled the doctors in the Kaiser Health System to prescribe this drug.

00:35:35.000 The short of it is that there was a six-week trial.

00:35:38.000 I testified in it and would love to talk about that, but that Pfizer, the jury found that Pfizer had committed fraud and racketeering.

00:35:48.000 It was the first RICO charge against a drug company.

00:35:52.000 It's in civil litigation, so they're not going to RICO jail.

00:35:57.000 The damages were tripled.

00:36:00.000 But when the jury heard the story, and I got to explain it to him, I got to explain it to him standing at an easel next to the jury box as close as I am to you, and explain one of the tricks that Pfizer used to mislead doctors.

00:36:17.000 So occasionally it comes out, but again, nobody went to jail.

00:36:21.000 What was the trick that Pfizer used to mislead doctors?

00:36:24.000 So what they did, this actually is something that I wanted to talk to you about, because it has to do with how you feel about hydroxychloroquine not being approved or not being embraced as a therapy for COVID. What Pfizer did to mislead doctors was there was a randomized controlled trial,

00:36:51.000 and it was Neurontin against placebo for the treatment of diabetic painful neuropathy.

00:36:58.000 And the guy who did the trial faxed them the results and said, it doesn't look like Neurontin works.

00:37:06.000 And Pfizer rejiggered the results, so instead of looking at the comparison between the change in pain level between Neurontin and the placebo group, which wasn't significant, they just looked at the pain level of the people who took the Neurontin.

00:37:23.000 And the pain level went down from the beginning of the study to the end.

00:37:27.000 But it went down to the placebo group almost as much.

00:37:30.000 But when they just showed the Neurontin arm of the randomized controlled trial, which is no longer a randomized controlled trial, they misled doctors and claimed that it was effective.

00:37:44.000 So in hydroxychloroquine for COVID, to change the subject a little bit, people get better.

00:37:53.000 And that's good when people get better.

00:37:56.000 But it's like one arm of a randomized controlled trial.

00:38:00.000 And there's...

00:38:02.000 I firmly believe that people who want to take hydroxychloroquine, if they get COVID, should be allowed to take it, and they should talk to their doctor, and there should not be this propaganda against it.

00:38:13.000 My issue is with ivermectin.

00:38:15.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

00:38:15.000 I apologize.

00:38:18.000 Similar issue.

00:38:19.000 Is it similar?

00:38:21.000 Yeah, similar issue.

00:38:22.000 So people are going to get better.

00:38:25.000 And whether there's a causal relationship or not is the question.

00:38:30.000 So if you take 20 people and put them on ivermectin and 19 of them get better, you can't conclude that the ivermectin played a causal relationship.

00:38:45.000 I think you can surmise that the ivermectin didn't hurt them if they get better.

00:38:51.000 And on the situation that you've talked about, is it okay to talk about this?

00:38:55.000 Sure, yeah.

00:38:55.000 On the situation you've talked about where you were derided for taking ivermectin, I think that's out of bounds.

00:39:03.000 That's not fair.

00:39:04.000 Well, the issue that was really bizarre was that I listed a laundry list of things that I took, and they only focused on ivermectin.

00:39:11.000 I talked about all sorts of things that are generally accepted to be effective, like monoclonal antibodies.

00:39:18.000 Which I'm now hearing, now I need to find out if this is true, but someone posted that, here I'll try to find it, because it was so weird that I couldn't believe it was true, but that someone in the Biden administration, that they're trying to actively block the distribution of monoclonal antibodies,

00:39:38.000 and that someone from Florida is accusing that.

00:39:44.000 Accusing the Biden administration of doing that.

00:39:46.000 Which to me sounds insane.

00:39:49.000 Well, we've got a...

00:39:50.000 Here, the Florida Surgeon General says that Biden administration is actively preventing monoclonal antibody treatments.

00:39:58.000 But...

00:39:59.000 They're saying that they're not effective with Omicron, but they're very effective with Delta, and a lot of people still have Delta.

00:40:06.000 It's not like Delta went away, but they're blocking the use of monoclonal antibodies.

00:40:10.000 The suspicion is that the Florida Surgeon General sends a terse letter to Health and Human Services concerning monoclonal antibodies.

00:40:18.000 Dr. Joseph Ladapo says the state-facing life-threatening shortage of treatment options.

00:40:23.000 The idea is the primary concern is the reason why they're doing this is to encourage vaccination only as the only way to treat COVID is to get vaccinated.

00:40:33.000 If you don't get vaccinated, you have no other options.

00:40:36.000 If you do get COVID and you take monoclonal antibodies, they're extremely effective.

00:40:40.000 What was bizarre to me was that I listed off Z-Pak, prednisone, monoclonal antibodies.

00:40:50.000 I talked about vitamin IV drips that I took.

00:40:53.000 All these different things that I took and I got better really quickly.

00:40:55.000 But they focused only on ivermectin.

00:40:57.000 And it became this thing that seemed to be a concentrated effort to demonize and mock this one type of treatment by connecting it to veterinary medicine.

00:41:10.000 Yes.

00:41:11.000 I'm completely with you.

00:41:12.000 It was bizarre.

00:41:13.000 Yeah.

00:41:14.000 And motivated clearly also.

00:41:17.000 You've got to think of how to be motivated by money because that drug, ivermectin, is a generic drug.

00:41:24.000 It's very cheap.

00:41:25.000 You get it for like 30 cents a dose.

00:41:27.000 Yeah.

00:41:28.000 Yep.

00:41:32.000 I can't deny that money played a role.

00:41:34.000 I think that the control over the situation, wanting to be in control over the situation also plays a role.

00:41:42.000 So the truth is that the NIH has not ruled one way or the other.

00:41:45.000 They looked at the data and they said there's not enough data to rule on whether ivermectin is helpful or not.

00:41:53.000 If it were a brand name drug at this point, The drug company would do a study that was big enough to show that it's helpful or not, and the question would be over.

00:42:03.000 And they are doing that with Pfizer has a new antiviral drug that they're going to release that's similar to what people say ivermectin does.

00:42:13.000 Whether that does or not, I don't know.

00:42:14.000 Yeah, but that's getting back to our original discussion.

00:42:18.000 When there's money involved, You can do the studies.

00:42:21.000 And you can make them big enough to make small differences statistically significant.

00:42:25.000 And you do that by manipulation.

00:42:27.000 And occasionally you go to court.

00:42:30.000 You do that by...

00:42:32.000 96% of the research that's done in the United States, clinical research, is about drugs and devices.

00:42:41.000 And most of that is paid for by the manufacturers.

00:42:43.000 Drugs and devices?

00:42:44.000 Medical devices.

00:42:46.000 Artificial hips and pacemakers and the like.

00:42:49.000 But the point that I'm making is that it's like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight.

00:42:56.000 And he keeps looking, looking, looking.

00:42:57.000 And someone comes along and says, why do you keep looking there?

00:43:00.000 And he says, that's because that's where the light is.

00:43:03.000 The keys aren't there, but that's where the light is.

00:43:05.000 That's where the money is.

00:43:07.000 The money is in new therapeutics, so-called innovation, new therapeutics.

00:43:13.000 It's not in looking about which drugs make you healthier.

00:43:17.000 Right.

00:43:17.000 It's not in generic repurposed medicine.

00:43:19.000 No, nobody's funding that.

00:43:21.000 Right.

00:43:21.000 So you're not getting an answer to the question that you have a right to answer?

00:43:26.000 Well, it's strange to me that monoclonal antibodies do have an emergency use authorization.

00:43:31.000 The emergency use authorization seems to be that, for whatever reason, that drug, these monoclonal antibodies, is being dismissed.

00:43:43.000 It makes it more difficult to get.

00:43:46.000 Whatever shenanigans are going on, it seems to be there's There's some sort of conspiring against the distribution of monoclonal antibodies.

00:43:55.000 And I think it's got to be because of its effectiveness.

00:43:59.000 It may be because we can't test fast enough to make a decision.

00:44:03.000 It exposes our deficiency on the testing side.

00:44:08.000 Well, also, the vaccines were only – you can only get an emergency use authorization if there's no effective treatment.

00:44:16.000 Mm-hmm.

00:44:17.000 Well, if there's an effective treatment, like a wide distribution of monoclonal antibodies.

00:44:22.000 I mean, according to Dr. Peter McCullough, who was on here, he said there's enough monoclonal antibodies for every person in this country.

00:44:30.000 He says it's not a shortage of supply.

00:44:31.000 It's a shortage of distribution.

00:44:33.000 And he believes it's by design.

00:44:35.000 Well, they're going to make a lot of money.

00:44:38.000 Yeah.

00:44:39.000 Regeneron would.

00:44:40.000 Yeah.

00:44:41.000 Any of these new drugs, and I hope they're effective.

00:44:46.000 It looks like some of them will be.

00:44:47.000 Beyond the monoclonal antibiotics.

00:44:49.000 Like the Pfizer antiviral and...

00:44:51.000 And Merck, yeah.

00:44:52.000 And Merck as well.

00:44:54.000 We don't have all the data yet, but I hope they work.

00:44:57.000 Right.

00:44:57.000 But they're going to make a ton of money.

00:44:59.000 They're going to break our healthcare system because they only work when you treat people early in their disease.

00:45:04.000 You can't wait until people get sick enough to need a $700 or $3,000 drug.

00:45:12.000 You've got to treat everybody who gets sick in order to have the benefit.

00:45:16.000 Right.

00:45:16.000 But why would they stop monoclonal antibodies from being distributed?

00:45:22.000 It seems like they can make money with those too, right?

00:45:24.000 They can.

00:45:25.000 Maybe there's more money elsewhere.

00:45:26.000 I don't know.

00:45:27.000 I don't know what's going on in that black box.

00:45:29.000 The only thing that makes sense to me is that monoclonal antibodies, it doesn't seem to matter whether or not you've been vaccinated.

00:45:35.000 Like, if you're sick and you get those, for a lot of people, that seems to do the trick and you get better.

00:45:43.000 Maybe that's the problem.

00:45:45.000 No, no.

00:45:47.000 Do you don't think that's the problem?

00:45:49.000 I think it's a problem if you can't get good therapeutics to people.

00:45:52.000 That's not what I mean.

00:45:53.000 I mean the problem they have with that, with monoclonal antibodies, in that you don't have to necessarily be vaccinated for them to be effective.

00:46:02.000 The whole idea, the binary approach has been, everyone needs to get vaccinated.

00:46:06.000 They keep saying it over and over again, even in light of Omicron, where it shows that it's a vaccine escape variant, or the vaccines aren't effective with it, even though it's mild.

00:46:16.000 I don't think you can say that yet.

00:46:18.000 They haven't been saying it.

00:46:19.000 No.

00:46:20.000 It looks like people who are boosted have significant protection against Omicron.

00:46:24.000 From severe illness.

00:46:26.000 But no one's getting severe illness from Omicron.

00:46:28.000 There hasn't been a single death in the United States that's attributed to it.

00:46:33.000 We're early.

00:46:34.000 Well, yeah, we're a month in.

00:46:36.000 But there was one death in Texas that they initially had attributed to it, but they backed down from that.

00:46:41.000 The person had pretty significant comorbidities.

00:46:44.000 Mm-hmm.

00:46:45.000 We're still early on that.

00:46:46.000 I would stay tuned.

00:46:48.000 I wouldn't make that judgment yet.

00:46:49.000 But it's a month in?

00:46:50.000 It's a month in, but the number of cases has been going up logarithmically.

00:46:54.000 But if it was a month of Delta, we would have some pretty significant deaths.

00:46:57.000 You can kind of assume that this is less, and this is what's been widely reported, that it's less virulent or less damaging than Delta.

00:47:10.000 Yes.

00:47:11.000 And it's going to take two to four weeks in before you know what the real damage is.

00:47:18.000 So that it may be that the extremely high volume—and we broke the record of cases in a day yesterday— It may be that it certainly looks like it's less virulent.

00:47:32.000 But it may be that the higher number of cases is going to create real trouble.

00:47:38.000 I don't know yet.

00:47:39.000 Because of the strain of the healthcare system?

00:47:42.000 Strain of the healthcare system and because we don't know yet how many people are going to get seriously ill and whether the unvaccinated people are going to get more seriously ill than the vaccinated people.

00:47:56.000 The data that I'm seeing suggests that that's true.

00:48:00.000 What data is this?

00:48:02.000 It's from CDC. Is there data that you trust more than other data?

00:48:09.000 Is there data that you think in terms of different organizations that release data that's more compromised, that's more objective?

00:48:17.000 Yeah, it's hard.

00:48:18.000 It's really hard.

00:48:21.000 As painful as it may be, the CDC is going to have The broadest access to data.

00:48:30.000 It doesn't mean it's all trustworthy, but you got to look at that data.

00:48:35.000 What influences what their assertions are when the CDC releases data?

00:48:40.000 I mean, what is influencing their choices?

00:48:45.000 Are they purely independent?

00:48:48.000 Are they not reliant on pharmaceutical drug companies or political entanglements in any way?

00:48:55.000 I don't think you can take it out of political entanglements.

00:48:58.000 When we look at the FDA and ask the same question, you can see that 61% of the FDA's budget for human products is paid for by the drug companies.

00:49:07.000 That seems like a lot.

00:49:08.000 It's a lot.

00:49:10.000 And it might seem like it might have some effect.

00:49:12.000 Yeah, maybe a little bit.

00:49:15.000 That's horrible.

00:49:16.000 So that's not hard to connect those dots.

00:49:19.000 I'm not sure about the influence on the CDC. So when you look at data, do you always have to take it and put it through a filter of, I wonder what's really going on here, and I wonder how much influence is being exerted on these results?

00:49:35.000 Absolutely.

00:49:36.000 And when you ask me, what do I rely on?

00:49:39.000 Is there a source I rely on?

00:49:40.000 And the answer is you've got to look at all the data.

00:49:43.000 And then you've got to understand that virtually everyone who's publishing data has a bias.

00:49:51.000 And so you got to try and subtract that out.

00:49:54.000 I mean, there are people who are anti-vax and have a bias, and there are people who are pro-vax and have a bias.

00:49:59.000 So it's hard.

00:50:02.000 This is unfolding in real time, and you got to kind of gestalt the whole situation.

00:50:07.000 And much like when I was practicing family medicine, you often don't have all the facts you need to make a decision.

00:50:14.000 You got to What are the positives and negatives?

00:50:18.000 What are the risks of just going one way than the other?

00:50:21.000 And it may turn out that you called it wrong, but you've got to make your best call in real time.

00:50:26.000 Now, when you were practicing family medicine and you had to make these calls in terms of medications that you prescribed for patients, how did you do it where you were at least reasonably assured that you were making the right call?

00:50:43.000 Well, it changed over time.

00:50:45.000 In the beginning, I trusted the literature.

00:50:48.000 I was a hotshot, residency-completed, certified family physician who had done a two-year, essentially, MPH program.

00:50:58.000 It was a master of science where I took the courses.

00:51:01.000 And I thought I knew a whole lot about medicine.

00:51:05.000 And as time went on, that was 1982 when I went into private practice.

00:51:09.000 As time went on, it was clear that things were going off the rails.

00:51:14.000 I remember I went to a continuing medical education lecture at our local hospital, so-called Grand Rounds at the local hospital.

00:51:21.000 And that's the thing that good doctors do is they go and you sort of get a sandwich and you talk to your friends and you get a lecture from an academic doc.

00:51:31.000 And I went to a lecture And the guy gave the lecture about a pain drug, and the pain drug had been withdrawn two days before.

00:51:42.000 He gave this lecture about why we should prescribe this pain drug, which had been withdrawn because it was causing severe adverse effects.

00:51:52.000 And I realized that he had signed his contract to get paid to give that lecture, So he was going to give his lecture, come hell or high water, even though the drug had been withdrawn.

00:52:03.000 And at that point, the light went on that this is a commercial proposition that we've got going, that the academics who are coming out to Beverly, Massachusetts to give us a lecture at the Beverly Hospital are getting paid to do that.

00:52:19.000 And that we can't trust everything we see.

00:52:22.000 And then from there, that was maybe mid-1980s.

00:52:27.000 From there until 2001, when I saw that article in the New England Journal of Medicine, I The awareness of the financial manipulation, the commercial manipulation of what we were basing our decisions on had become just overwhelming.

00:52:47.000 And I couldn't practice.

00:52:50.000 When did they start advertising drugs on television and in magazines?

00:52:55.000 So it came in in phases.

00:52:56.000 I think the first phase was 1987. Before that it was known that you could, but there was kind of a gentleman's agreement that you wouldn't.

00:53:05.000 And then there was another step that had to do with decreasing the amount of information you had to deliver.

00:53:14.000 And you could see our advertisement in men's magazine or men's health or whatever.

00:53:20.000 And it was that second step that discharged responsibility for providing information to another source that opened the floodgates.

00:53:33.000 So you have gone through a process of understanding the influence that money and the pharmaceutical drug companies have on the data and the way doctors perceive medications.

00:53:49.000 Exactly.

00:53:50.000 And it was two stages.

00:53:52.000 One is a practicing family doc.

00:53:54.000 And then I was fortunate enough to get on the inside of the We're good to go.

00:54:28.000 And what he was talking about was the trials for COVID vaccines.

00:54:33.000 And that in one of the trials for COVID vaccines where they had 22,000 people who took the vaccine and 22,000 people who took a placebo.

00:54:41.000 The people who took the vaccine, one person in that 22,000 had died of COVID. The people that took the placebo, two people had died of COVID. So because two people is double one people.

00:54:57.000 They decided to say that it's 100% effective. 0.99

00:55:00.000 That seems like Bullshit, right? 0.93

00:55:05.000 I don't know what Robert Kennedy's looking at, but you cannot say that. 1.00

00:55:09.000 That's ridiculous.

00:55:10.000 If two people die out of 10,000 and one person another, there's no way that's statistically significant.

00:55:17.000 Right, but is it possible that that's what they said and that they're manipulating data like they did with Vioxx, or is he misinterpreting it?

00:55:26.000 I can't believe that anybody beyond a high school education would have done that.

00:55:31.000 I can't believe it either, but is there room for fuckery where they could manipulate data to say something like that?

00:55:43.000 They do manipulate data, and generally it has to do with presenting relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction.

00:55:55.000 So in the case, let's say you got the story that Robert Kennedy relayed correct, that your numbers are correct.

00:56:04.000 So the relative risk reduction would be 50%.

00:56:10.000 You've got two people on one side and one person on another.

00:56:13.000 You've reduced the risk of mortality by 50%.

00:56:16.000 You wouldn't say 100% effective.

00:56:18.000 No.

00:56:19.000 The relative risk is 50%, which is an equally outrageous claim.

00:56:25.000 The absolute risk reduction is 1 out of 10,000, 0.01%.

00:56:33.000 And a lot of times the relative risk reduction will be presented when the real information that people need is the absolute risk reduction.

00:56:41.000 Yeah, that's the problem with both sides, right?

00:56:44.000 It's the problem with both these pharmaceutical companies to distort information but also the people that distort what the pharmaceutical drug companies are saying to make it seem more outrageous.

00:56:57.000 And that's what I'm concerned with when I keep hearing people repeating what he said and he was on the Jimmy Dore show and that's where I listen to that particular assertion.

00:57:09.000 See if you can find that.

00:57:12.000 Maybe there's a clip where Robert Kennedy Jr. is describing how they labeled the COVID vaccine as 100% effective.

00:57:22.000 I know I listened to it on Jimmy Dore's show, but I listened to it and I was like, I have to talk to John about this.

00:57:28.000 There's no way that's real.

00:57:31.000 Let's see.

00:57:32.000 Is it possible that there's that much shenanigans going on that they would say something like that? 0.98

00:57:37.000 No, it's ridiculous.

00:57:38.000 Nobody who had any training at all in the health professions would believe that it was 100% effective. 0.84

00:57:46.000 So that's nonsense.

00:57:47.000 It's just so unlikely.

00:57:49.000 Well, if it was, because they never, didn't they say it was in the high 80s?

00:57:54.000 They didn't even say it was 100% effective when they first released the vaccine.

00:57:58.000 Yeah, high 80s.

00:58:00.000 I've seen 91% before the antibody levels went.

00:58:05.000 Would they be able to say 100% effective at reducing death?

00:58:09.000 Only if there were no deaths.

00:58:10.000 Right.

00:58:11.000 Right.

00:58:11.000 If there's one death versus two, that's not 100%.

00:58:13.000 That's not 100%.

00:58:14.000 Right.

00:58:14.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:58:15.000 Yeah.

00:58:16.000 There's so much to sort through, especially when you're someone like me who doesn't have an education in this and you're just trying to like read these studies and listen to people talk and trying to figure out what's what.

00:58:26.000 There's a lot of noise.

00:58:28.000 There's a lot of noise.

00:58:29.000 And a lot of the noise is distracting us from the real issues.

00:58:34.000 We got real trouble in the United States.

00:58:39.000 For the past two years, about 1,300 people a day have died of COVID. That's bad.

00:58:45.000 We can talk about things we could do or should do, whatever.

00:58:48.000 That's bad.

00:58:49.000 For the four years before the COVID pandemic, that many people were dying in the United States because our health and healthcare are so inferior to the other wealthy countries.

00:59:03.000 1,300 people a day dying because our age-adjusted mortality rate, which allows you to compare different countries of different ages, is so much worse than the average of 10 wealthy countries.

00:59:18.000 And our healthy life expectancy Has gone down from 38th in the world in 2000 to 68th in the world in 2019. We rank 68th in the world in healthy life expectancy.

00:59:40.000 The health of Americans is just abominable compared to the other wealthy countries.

00:59:47.000 And for this health...

00:59:51.000 You know, devastating health situation.

00:59:55.000 We're spending an extra $1.5 trillion a year.

00:59:59.000 We're spending 7% more of our GDP on healthcare than the other wealthy countries are.

01:00:05.000 And 7% times a GDP of $22 trillion is $1.5 trillion a year.

01:00:12.000 So whatever you think of President Biden's Build Back Better plan, and I'm not getting into politics here, but it's $1.5 trillion, $1.7 trillion that over 10 years that he's arguing for, and this is 10 times that much money that we're pissing away each year while Americans' health ranks 68th in the world.

01:00:37.000 This is a disaster.

01:00:39.000 It's ruining our country.

01:00:41.000 We can't go on like this.

01:00:43.000 Now, what is the best country when it comes to healthcare?

01:00:49.000 France is good.

01:00:50.000 The best changes a little bit, but there's France, the UK is good, Japan does well, Switzerland does well.

01:00:58.000 And what do they do different than what we do, other than some of them have socialized medicine?

01:01:05.000 Well, let's take that apart a little bit.

01:01:07.000 But what they do differently is what I'm writing about in Sickening.

01:01:14.000 What they do is they oversee the integrity of the medical knowledge that reaches doctors.

01:01:22.000 They can't control the journals.

01:01:23.000 They can't control that problem with peer reviewers not having the data.

01:01:26.000 But they can do Governmental or quasi-governmental, it's called health technology assessment, where they determine the medical value of new drugs and the economic value of new drugs and make recommendations about covering new drugs.

01:01:47.000 And they also control the price of drugs.

01:01:51.000 Because with our allowing brand name drugs to be three and a half times more expensive than in the other developed countries, we're creating such an incentive to distort the medical knowledge.

01:02:08.000 So we've got a Wild West situation where the drug companies pay PR people and the lobbyists to create this illusion that their innovation is our only hope for a long and healthy life, when that's rarely true.

01:02:25.000 In terms of new drugs, new molecular entities that are approved, about one out of four is actually an improvement over a previous drug.

01:02:34.000 But in the United States, we don't know that because there's no oversight.

01:02:38.000 In the other countries, they're evaluating it.

01:02:41.000 So when, for example, insulin analogs come along and replace human recombinant insulin, and they start to jack up the price, and there's no evidence that it's better for type 2 diabetics who use 80% of the insulin in the United States.

01:02:56.000 There's no evidence that it's better.

01:02:59.000 Doctors are bombarded with marketing materials that say you've got to give your type 2 diabetics insulin analogs because it's more physiologic and it reproduces natural insulin function.

01:03:10.000 And in the other countries that have health technology assessment, they're saying there's no evidence that it's superior to recombinant human insulin, so use that first.

01:03:18.000 If your patient fails on recombinant human insulin, if they have idiosyncratic problems with low blood sugar or anything else, you can use it as a second line drug, but not a first line drug.

01:03:28.000 But we're essentially playing this game without, it's like professional athletes not having umpires.

01:03:36.000 Now, when you said, you said 68th, United States ranks 68th?

01:03:40.000 68th.

01:03:41.000 And that is for overall health?

01:03:45.000 Yeah, healthy life expectancy is probably the best single measure of the overall health.

01:03:51.000 It's how many years you live in good health.

01:03:53.000 So if you live to be 86, And you had kidney disease for the last six years that compromised the quality of your life for 50%, then your healthy life expectancy would be 83. So it integrates longevity with the time you spend in good health.

01:04:09.000 And do they calculate the factors involved in that?

01:04:12.000 How many of the factors are calculated?

01:04:16.000 Is it obesity?

01:04:17.000 Is it drugs?

01:04:20.000 Like recreational drugs, nicotine, alcohol, like what are the factors that lead us to be so poorly represented there?

01:04:28.000 Right, so one of the issues that I'm sure you've heard of is the diseases of despair that Professors Deaton and Case, Professor Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize winner and his wife is a professor at Princeton as well.

01:04:45.000 They wrote a book about diseases of despair And how non-college educated white Americans are having an epidemic of drug overdoses and suicides and liver disease.

01:05:03.000 And that it has to do with the economic context that the...

01:05:10.000 Wages and quality of life are not as high.

01:05:13.000 That people's expectations about how their lives are going to unfold and having families and living independently and owning a house have gone down.

01:05:23.000 And that all that adds up to these diseases of despair causing 100 deaths out of 100,000 workers.

01:05:34.000 White Americans, and they chose ages between 50 and 54, but you could take any age group.

01:05:43.000 But the important fact here, that's true, and that's awful.

01:05:48.000 But the increased death rate in that group is not 100 per 100,000, but 400 per 100,000.

01:05:55.000 And the other 300 deaths have to do with cardiovascular disease and diabetes and all the things that die of.

01:06:03.000 But those folks are exposed to the social pressures that are compromising their health.

01:06:11.000 This is a long answer to your short question.

01:06:14.000 So my opinion, what I tell you as a medical fact, I stand by.

01:06:21.000 My opinion on this is that since 1980, the United States has had a radical growth in economic inequality.

01:06:31.000 That essentially the share of the income pie has been so distorted to the wealthy that it's like the average family living at the median income level of $55,000 with 2.6 people in their household.

01:06:50.000 If they were getting the same share of the income pie that they got in 1980, As they are now, they would have $20,000 more a year.

01:07:01.000 But as it stands now, that $20,000 is transferred from people who are working hard and trying to keep their kids in clothes and pay their bills to the top 1%.

01:07:12.000 So it's like the working people in America are donating $20,000 per family to the top 1%.

01:07:20.000 And that's having a disastrous effect.

01:07:24.000 This is kind of an interesting sidetrack, right?

01:07:28.000 Because now we're talking about economics.

01:07:30.000 But is there a way that that could be switched?

01:07:33.000 Is there a way that that could be somehow or another re-diverted?

01:07:40.000 Absolutely.

01:07:41.000 What would that way be?

01:07:42.000 Absolutely.

01:07:54.000 Transferring that money to the wealthy people, you simply do it with tax policy.

01:07:59.000 If you can't do it pre-tax, you can do it with tax policy.

01:08:04.000 And how would you do that?

01:08:06.000 You would give them a tax break?

01:08:07.000 Or you would tax the rich more?

01:08:10.000 What would you do?

01:08:10.000 You'd pull some of that money back.

01:08:12.000 And you could do it with tax credits.

01:08:13.000 You could do it with tax rates.

01:08:15.000 You could do it with inheritance taxes.

01:08:18.000 The problem people have with taxes, whether this is accurate or not, is that no one trusts the government to do well with that money.

01:08:27.000 No one trusts the bureaucracy and the nonsense and red tape that's involved in our over-bloated government to the point where they're like, yeah, I'd be more than happy to give them extra money because I know they're going to do with it very good things.

01:08:41.000 I agree.

01:08:43.000 And what we got, we got because we don't trust the government.

01:08:48.000 And how we get to some middle ground on this, I hope you're smart enough to figure it out because I'm not.

01:08:54.000 No, definitely not.

01:08:55.000 But we've got to get to a middle ground.

01:08:58.000 The working people in the United States are getting a raw deal.

01:09:01.000 Do we achieve some sort of a better state with unions?

01:09:06.000 Absolutely.

01:09:07.000 The union membership is down by two-thirds.

01:09:11.000 And some of the laws that have passed about right to work and so forth have made it harder for unions to hold their grip.

01:09:20.000 But in 1952, we had the professors Deaton and Case that I referred to a minute ago from Princeton.

01:09:29.000 They coined the term blue-collar aristocracy, that in the post-war years, in the 35 years after World War II, The blue-collar Americans were living well.

01:09:42.000 They were making a fair wage.

01:09:44.000 They were getting, as our economy grew after World War II, blue-collar workers were getting their fair share.

01:09:52.000 And the economist John Kenneth Galbraith attributed this to the countervailing power of government.

01:10:00.000 So you've got business on one hand, trying to make money, and In those years, business had a broader definition of their primary responsibility.

01:10:11.000 It wasn't just to make money.

01:10:13.000 It was to be responsible in the community and take care of their workers and their consumers.

01:10:17.000 Now it's to make money.

01:10:19.000 But Galbraith identified this countervailing power of the government when there was a balance.

01:10:26.000 And we don't have that balance.

01:10:28.000 That's what's gone.

01:10:29.000 In 1980, 1981, when President Reagan was inaugurated and he said government's not the solution, it's the problem, and the libertarian economists were given great sway, we moved towards this anti-regulation free market ethos that led to this massive distribution of Maldistribution of wealth.

01:10:57.000 So the French economist Thomas Piketty says the United States now has what is probably the greatest inequality of wages, of income from labor, that's ever existed in the history of the earth.

01:11:11.000 Wow.

01:11:12.000 We're out there.

01:11:13.000 And I agree with your reservations, Joe.

01:11:16.000 I'm not happy, I don't think anyone's happy with the government, right, left, or center.

01:11:20.000 We got a problem.

01:11:21.000 But you need some referee in this to represent the public's interest.

01:11:27.000 And we don't have one right now.

01:11:29.000 We don't have one.

01:11:29.000 And what we've got is social media that is making money from inflaming the extremes and drowning out the center that's trying to get to reasonable solutions.

01:11:42.000 Yeah, whether it's by design or not.

01:11:44.000 Whether it's just human nature that's sort of filtered through this medium of social media.

01:11:50.000 It's a strange medium, right?

01:11:52.000 And it's one we're not accustomed to.

01:11:54.000 We don't have any history in it.

01:11:56.000 And it's being used by the vast majority of people and it's being used through algorithms which favor what is more inflammatory, what people gravitate towards, what's going to get your eyeballs and get your clicks.

01:12:11.000 And we're really not designed – we don't have the discipline to handle it.

01:12:15.000 We're not designed emotionally or intellectually to be able to mitigate the influence of this stuff.

01:12:22.000 It's very confusing for people.

01:12:24.000 I am total agreement.

01:12:26.000 So is there maybe – Maybe there could be a way where companies could make it a very public part of their policy that they pay great wages and that they take care of their workers and that they do this because they recognize that they also have a responsibility to do well for the community and not just make money but do this and proclaim it publicly in a way that people would gravitate towards their

01:12:57.000 business as opposed to a business that's I agree.

01:13:08.000 And in order to make that transition, you've got to make the private equity investors and the stock investors and the institutional investors Happy along the way because they want to see every last time that you can squeeze out of the proposition.

01:13:22.000 And if they don't get it from that company, they'll get it from another company.

01:13:24.000 Well, if they don't get it from those managers, they'll get new managers.

01:13:27.000 So in sickening, we get to the same place in healthcare.

01:13:34.000 How the hell do we fix this?

01:13:36.000 I can tell you what's wrong, but how the hell do we fix it?

01:13:40.000 And we fix it with exactly the solution that you've proposed, that the constituencies that are affected need to move into positions of power in society.

01:13:50.000 So we've got the constituencies are the doctors who are not getting good information.

01:13:57.000 They think they are, but they're not.

01:13:59.000 And the doctor's got to understand that this is a very serious problem and that they're trusted to be learned intermediaries to apply medical science in the service of the patients, and they can't do it under these circumstances.

01:14:13.000 And we've got businesses, non-healthcare-related businesses, that are paying a fortune for their health care and losing their competitiveness, and they should be in on this.

01:14:25.000 And most of all, we've got consumers who want the best health.

01:14:29.000 But in order for each of those constituencies to become competent political activists, they've got to understand what's going on.

01:14:39.000 And right now they don't.

01:14:40.000 They don't.

01:14:57.000 This is what's going on.

01:14:59.000 There's these people that really don't have anything to look forward to, and this is what alleviates some of their horrible feeling is to just get drugged up.

01:15:09.000 And the drug companies were very willing to make a buck doing it.

01:15:13.000 Yeah.

01:15:13.000 Have you ever seen the documentary, The OxyContin Express?

01:15:17.000 No.

01:15:18.000 It was on Vanguard.

01:15:20.000 And it was essentially they showed that Florida had created this situation where they would have these pain management centers.

01:15:30.000 That were essentially just pill mills.

01:15:32.000 The Pain Management Center was connected to a pharmacy that only had pills.

01:15:37.000 They only served opiates.

01:15:39.000 So you would go to this pain management center, you go to the doctor and you say, hey doctor, my back is killing me.

01:15:44.000 The doctor said, well you needed some OxyContin, son.

01:15:47.000 And they would write you a prescription.

01:15:48.000 You would literally go right next door and they would have the pills for you.

01:15:51.000 And they also did not have a digital database.

01:15:55.000 So you could go to Jamie and get a prescription from Jamie and then leave him and then go to another doctor, Mike, right down the street and get a prescription from him and you could do it all day long and people were doing this and then they were selling these pills on the Oxycontin Express.

01:16:12.000 They drove it straight up into Kentucky and Ohio and You know, wherever the highway took it.

01:16:17.000 And they were seeing how there was a direct chain of events where these people were going to these pill mills, stockpiling all these pills, and then they were selling them into these other states and making a lot of money.

01:16:30.000 Right.

01:16:30.000 So you see the synergy between the folks whose lives aren't working out the way they wanted to, and they're miserable, and maybe they're miserable because of back pain, or maybe they're miserable because life doesn't have the meaning they hoped it did.

01:16:42.000 And you have the drug company, which is telling doctors that they've got a new product that's less addictive.

01:16:49.000 It's so much less addictive that you can treat non-cancer pain and not get into trouble with it.

01:16:56.000 That it lasts 12 hours, but they know it doesn't last 12 hours.

01:17:00.000 And when it wears off before 12 hours, they tell the doctors to increase the dose because that means they're not taking enough, not that their drug doesn't last 12 hours.

01:17:08.000 And that it can't be abused and people are crushing it and putting it in a straw and shooting it up and so forth.

01:17:16.000 So you've got the drug company that's an actor.

01:17:19.000 And you've got the social circumstances where people are hurting, whether it's medical hurting or spiritual hurting or whatever you want to call it.

01:17:27.000 And it's just a recipe for disaster.

01:17:30.000 And without the appropriate oversight of the drugs The faucet, the spigots turned on.

01:17:38.000 And that's, in this country, has been one of the most egregious offenses by the pharmaceutical drug companies is distorting the data on the addictive properties of opiates.

01:17:50.000 Absolutely.

01:17:53.000 It's a scary thing when you find out how many people.

01:17:56.000 There was a statistic that was just released that from people 18 to 49, fentanyl was the number one cause of death.

01:18:07.000 100,000 people died in this country from fentanyl.

01:18:11.000 That are ages 18 to 49. Extremely potent opiate.

01:18:15.000 And most of it recreational.

01:18:17.000 Right?

01:18:18.000 Most of it is like from cut.

01:18:19.000 All of it.

01:18:20.000 Yeah.

01:18:21.000 It's hard.

01:18:21.000 I don't know if it's 100. I think it's 100,000 deaths total.

01:18:24.000 And fentanyl is a major proportion of those 100,000 deaths.

01:18:28.000 Oh, that's not what I thought.

01:18:29.000 I thought I saw that they were literally attributing 100,000 deaths.

01:18:33.000 They were saying it's the number one cause of death between people age 18 to 49, which is insane that we're not hearing about this, because it's such a large number of people.

01:18:43.000 This should be something that's on the news every day.

01:18:45.000 It should be something that terrifies folks. 0.99

01:18:47.000 That's actually the way you said it.

01:18:49.000 Say it again?

01:18:49.000 It's the way he said it.

01:18:50.000 Oh, so what is the actual number?

01:18:52.000 The way the headline reads is...

01:18:53.000 So the drug overdose death top 100,000 annually for the first time driven by fentanyl.

01:18:59.000 So it's all kinds of drug overdoses, but drug overdoses are the number one cause of death between people 18 to 49. But Joe, here's the problem.

01:19:09.000 Drug overdoses are the number one cause of death.

01:19:13.000 But that accounts for only a quarter of the excess deaths in that age group.

01:19:20.000 What are the other three quarters?

01:19:21.000 The other three quarters are the cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer.

01:19:30.000 And that's the problem, is that we do such a poor job in the United States of preventing preventable disease.

01:19:39.000 We're last amongst developed countries in preventing preventable disease.

01:19:45.000 Does that have to do with our diet?

01:19:47.000 I mean, it has to have some sort of an impact.

01:19:49.000 Absolutely.

01:19:50.000 These other countries, I mean, I'm not totally familiar with France and what their food choices are like, but do they rely as heavily on fast food as we do?

01:20:00.000 I don't think so, but it's easy to...

01:20:03.000 I think we can get a quick and dirty answer by the rate of obesity.

01:20:07.000 Forty percent of Americans are obese.

01:20:10.000 And that's way above any other developed country.

01:20:13.000 And we're going to be at 50% within the next 10 years or so.

01:20:17.000 So it's a whole way of life.

01:20:20.000 And I know about health care.

01:20:23.000 I know what is wrong with health care.

01:20:25.000 I know what the drug companies do.

01:20:27.000 But it's the food industry and it's every industry.

01:20:30.000 And I totally understand when you say, you know, but government screws up and they get bossy and they overstep their authority.

01:20:40.000 It's true, but you need a referee.

01:20:43.000 The center doesn't hold here.

01:20:46.000 We need to get a center that holds.

01:20:50.000 So that we get common values, so that we could talk about our shared and common values instead of what splits us apart.

01:20:59.000 Right.

01:21:00.000 The question, right, from the Watchmen, who's going to watch the Watchmen?

01:21:04.000 Yeah.

01:21:04.000 The thing about the government stepping in and being this regulatory body that oversees it is like we actually need someone to oversee them as well.

01:21:13.000 I wish someone could think of how to do it.

01:21:15.000 But we need to recreate the center with authority so that you can't make a whole bunch of money selling fat food to poor people.

01:21:26.000 And you can't make a whole bunch of money lying about your drugs and getting them covered by Medicare or private insurance.

01:21:33.000 It doesn't work.

01:21:35.000 The center's not holding.

01:21:36.000 And we're paying a price.

01:21:38.000 Our country...

01:21:39.000 I mean, the divisions in this country are...

01:21:42.000 Are predictable and it's because the center doesn't hold.

01:21:46.000 Yeah, that's – it's pretty – it's pretty – It's confusing and it's disheartening because you look at this and you go, there's no clear way out of this.

01:22:01.000 There's no real clear path where we just pass this law or elect this person and all of our problems are going to go away.

01:22:09.000 These are compounding problems that seem to be getting worse every year.

01:22:13.000 Yes.

01:22:13.000 And I love this conversation.

01:22:17.000 It's been broad.

01:22:18.000 We've got a little bit away from my area of expertise.

01:22:22.000 No, but I'm glad you expressed yourself in that way because I think you made some really good points.

01:22:26.000 Well, thanks.

01:22:26.000 But in healthcare, I know how we can do it.

01:22:30.000 We've got a case in point.

01:22:31.000 And when the constituencies that are coming out on the short end Learn.

01:22:37.000 They need to learn about what's going on and then become...

01:22:41.000 They can't be politically active until they understand what's going on.

01:22:45.000 And I am hoping that the six years I dedicated to writing this book will help people to understand that the health care that they're getting, which we believe is the best in the world, It's the worst among the wealthy nations.

01:23:01.000 We're getting ripped off.

01:23:03.000 It's a way to transfer wealth to the wealthy.

01:23:06.000 And Americans are paying the price.

01:23:08.000 And we've got to wake up and take control of it.

01:23:11.000 Trevor Burrus That's the case with the healthcare.

01:23:12.000 That's the case essentially with everything you're talking about.

01:23:16.000 It's a transfer of wealth issue as much as it is a healthcare issue.

01:23:19.000 Yes, exactly.

01:23:20.000 But we cannot make progress until people understand the problem.

01:23:26.000 And that's what I've dedicated myself to.

01:23:29.000 That's the contribution that I can make.

01:23:31.000 Well, the hopeful aspect of your book is this part and how we can repair it.

01:23:36.000 Correct.

01:23:37.000 So it's how Big Pharma broke American healthcare and how we can repair it.

01:23:42.000 So how can we repair it?

01:23:43.000 How we can repair it is by the constituencies that are affected becoming knowledgeable and politically active.

01:23:53.000 If the consumers who want to be healthy And instead of putting their hope in Adjahelm to reverse Alzheimer's disease when there's no evidence that it does that, if the consumers Would understand that 80% of their health comes from how they live their lives.

01:24:13.000 And 80%.

01:24:14.000 80%.

01:24:16.000 And now some of that has to do with social context that people who live in disadvantaged circumstances can't just turn around.

01:24:26.000 They can't just decide to go jogging five times a week.

01:24:29.000 So it also has to do with inequality.

01:24:32.000 We've got to address that.

01:24:35.000 But consumers say, look, we're not getting a fair deal.

01:24:38.000 We're paying a fortune for our health care.

01:24:39.000 Our wages aren't going up because so much money is going to health care.

01:24:42.000 And our out-of-pocket costs are out of sight.

01:24:45.000 We're not going to take it anymore.

01:24:47.000 And that doesn't mean settling for a government program that says the copay for insulin will be $35.

01:24:55.000 Because that's just shifting.

01:24:56.000 That's just having the government pick up the money.

01:24:59.000 That doesn't help to contain the costs.

01:25:01.000 It makes it better for somebody who needs insulin.

01:25:04.000 But it doesn't help to contain the costs or rationalize the use of insulin, insulin analogs and human recombinant insulin.

01:25:13.000 So the consumers need to represent their interests.

01:25:16.000 And their interests are to live the longest, healthiest lives they can.

01:25:21.000 It's not to get the most expensive medicines.

01:25:23.000 It's not to invest so much money in medical innovation that we can't invest in social services.

01:25:29.000 It's to live the longest, healthiest lives that we can.

01:25:33.000 Business, fair business people who want to run an honest business, pay their employees a decent wage and make an honorable product, they're getting ripped off.

01:25:47.000 And they need to get into this in some kind of buyer's trust to control the price of the new drugs.

01:25:55.000 Say, we're big enough now, so we're just not going to buy your new drug at that price.

01:26:01.000 So how are drug prices regulated currently?

01:26:04.000 Like, say, if Pfizer comes out with this new medication that's an antiviral medication for COVID, how do they decide how much each pill costs?

01:26:14.000 Right.

01:26:17.000 Is they get together and they decide how can they maximize the amount of money they make.

01:26:23.000 And that's a price.

01:26:25.000 The equation is price times volume.

01:26:28.000 If you charge, you know, a billion dollars per pill, you're not going to sell many and you're not going to make much money.

01:26:35.000 But they will price their drug to determine how much money they're going to make, to maximize the money they're going to make.

01:26:43.000 And so they have to realize that if you make it too expensive, everyone can't afford it.

01:26:48.000 So you have to make it just expensive enough so that they can maximize their profit and the most amount of people can afford it?

01:26:54.000 No, that's too kind because it's not a real market like that because most of the drug is paid for by insurance.

01:27:01.000 So people, it's not Adam Smith's economy where you go and buy the bread or the beer from the one who's selling quality products for a fair price.

01:27:13.000 The consumer is only worried about the copay, or most consumers are only worried about the copay.

01:27:18.000 So what you do is you get a pharmaceutical benefits manager, a middleman, and you say to them, we'll give you a rebate, which really means kickback.

01:27:32.000 We'll give you a sizable rebate.

01:27:34.000 If you place this drug that doesn't have therapeutic advantage over less effective drugs higher in the formulary so it has a lower copay, we'll give you, the PBM manager, a rebate.

01:27:47.000 So it's this whole other level of chicanery that's going on. 1.00

01:27:52.000 So, the drug company is thinking about how are they going to get their drug.

01:27:58.000 It's not how do we price this so consumers can afford it so we sell a high volume.

01:28:03.000 It's how do we get this drug marketed to PBMs, pharmaceutical benefits managers, so that they'll let us give them a rebate and have an advantageous tiering.

01:28:16.000 The thing that's missing in this equation is nobody's saying, wait a minute, there's a ceiling on this.

01:28:21.000 This drug is not worth this.

01:28:23.000 So that the end result is that between two-thirds and three-quarters of global pharmaceutical profits come from the United States.

01:28:33.000 Wow.

01:28:33.000 Two-thirds to three-quarters.

01:28:35.000 Oh, my God.

01:28:37.000 That's crazy.

01:28:39.000 It's crazy, and it gets crazier because when the Democrats passed—it was H.R. 3, the Democrats in the House passed the drug Medicare negotiation bill in 2019— That they would negotiate the price of 25 to 50 of the most revenue-consuming drugs.

01:29:01.000 And the CBO said that that would cost $456 billion in pharmaceutical profits over the next 10 years.

01:29:13.000 Went into this spasm of saying this is going to be a nuclear winter for drug innovation and you're not going to get the drugs that you need to be healthy.

01:29:21.000 Meanwhile, the drug companies, instead of $456 billion in 10 years, had just spent $577 billion in cash buying back their own stock to jack up their stock prices between 2016 and 2020. So they're out there saying,

01:29:39.000 if you control our drug prices, you won't have any more innovative drugs, and they're buying back their stock.

01:29:45.000 And since 2020, they have another $500 billion in cash that they're going to use to buy startup companies and inflate the price of the new drugs that are coming online.

01:29:56.000 There's so many layers of fuckery that you have to pay attention to with all this stuff.

01:30:01.000 There is. 0.97

01:30:02.000 I've laid it out. 0.99

01:30:04.000 You want to know how much fuckery there is? 1.00

01:30:06.000 I know how much fuckery there is, and it's in that book. 0.99

01:30:09.000 And you don't need to know all these facts, $577 billion and $456 billion. 0.95

01:30:14.000 You don't need to know those.

01:30:15.000 But what you do need to know is that the drug company is in the business of making money, and they do it very well, and they will continue to do it ever better until they're stopped.

01:30:28.000 And we might as well stop them sooner rather than later.

01:30:32.000 And we need the drug companies.

01:30:34.000 We need them to commercialize medical science.

01:30:36.000 I'm not for socializing this.

01:30:38.000 I think we need a market.

01:30:40.000 But for all those folks out there who are afraid of what I'm saying because I'm going to destroy the market, the market's going to get destroyed if this keeps going.

01:30:50.000 And if you believe in the market, you better get it to work.

01:30:54.000 Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, wrote in 1962, he wrote a book called Capitalism and Freedom.

01:31:01.000 And he said there's only three legitimate functions of government.

01:31:05.000 To preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, and number three...

01:31:16.000 Is to ensure that private markets work.

01:31:20.000 Law and order, enforce contracts, ensure that markets work.

01:31:25.000 That was very radical at the time.

01:31:27.000 We're failing on all three.

01:31:30.000 We're not enforcing law and order.

01:31:32.000 When the drug companies commit fraud and felonies and whatnot, they pay their price, take their slap on the hand and move along.

01:31:40.000 So is the fear that if you punish Pfizer more robustly or more fairly, as a lot of people would think, that they're going to go under and they're not going to make medicine anymore and then people are going to die or their quality of life is going to deteriorate because there's not going to be the innovation,

01:31:59.000 the medical innovation that leads to these pharmaceutical drugs they need?

01:32:03.000 That's what Pfizer would like you to believe.

01:32:05.000 There's no reason that that's true.

01:32:08.000 There's plenty of money to be made, honestly.

01:32:10.000 But if Pfizer really wanted to be a responsible corporation, they would say, let's have health technology assessment.

01:32:20.000 So our drugs are tested fairly and are used appropriately.

01:32:26.000 And if the medical journals wanted to be responsible players in this nexus, they would say, let's insist that the data from the clinical trials is available to the peer reviewers.

01:32:42.000 So, in the case of Vioxx, let's say this.

01:32:44.000 Let's just say, for instance, what do you think would happen?

01:32:47.000 What if, when that went down, a bunch of people went to jail?

01:32:52.000 All the people that knew the data.

01:32:53.000 I mean, they went to jail for 25, 30 years.

01:32:55.000 What if the company got stripped of all of its assets?

01:32:58.000 What if all that money was funneled to the victims?

01:33:01.000 What if they made, you know, a public display of, like, real punitive damages?

01:33:09.000 Do you think that would have changed the way the pharmaceutical drugs operate in this country, the way the pharmaceutical companies operate?

01:33:17.000 A hundred percent.

01:33:18.000 So that could have just one case like that, a very large public case like Vioxx where you said up to 60,000 people died because of fraud.

01:33:28.000 Right.

01:33:28.000 That could have changed the course.

01:33:32.000 Absolutely.

01:33:33.000 Absolutely it would have changed behavior.

01:33:35.000 And if the people who masterminded the OxyContin scandal were at risk not just of losing their last eight billion or whatever it is, but going to jail, that too would change it.

01:33:50.000 But we've got this sort of system where it's somehow, you used a term that was like an agreement, but somehow this isn't working properly.

01:34:04.000 Yeah, there's too much shenanigans.

01:34:06.000 There's not consequences.

01:34:08.000 There's not what Milton Friedman said, is that the government needs to make sure that law and order is maintained, that private markets work.

01:34:18.000 Now, when you see the way the system is established currently with pharmaceutical drug companies, with just the whole medical industry, and you see the future, where do you think it's going?

01:34:34.000 Like, is it going to continue to deteriorate?

01:34:37.000 Do you think there's some hope that we will have some common sense regulations that are put into place to try to Move this into a more beneficial direction, or do you think people are just going to continue to make as much money as they possibly can, extract it from the system at their own personal gain,

01:34:54.000 to the detriment of all of us?

01:34:56.000 I think it's the latter.

01:34:58.000 Look at the vaccines.

01:35:00.000 Pfizer is going to sell $36 billion of vaccine in a year.

01:35:06.000 The previous highest selling drug in the world was $20 billion.

01:35:10.000 And what was that?

01:35:11.000 That was Humira.

01:35:13.000 That's another story we could talk about another time.

01:35:16.000 We'll come back.

01:35:19.000 But they're going to make $36 billion.

01:35:21.000 They're going to make $65 billion in two years.

01:35:25.000 Now, they're going to make that money with most of their doses being sold in the first world.

01:35:31.000 They and Moderna both declined to actively participate in creating the development of the capacity to manufacture drugs in underdeveloped countries.

01:35:42.000 So in May of 2021, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the World Health Organization got together and said, we need $50 billion right now To get vaccines to the third world,

01:36:02.000 and we need to get 40% vaccination rate in the third world before the end of 2021, which we're now at, or we're going to have $9 trillion in economic losses from COVID spreading and from variants that emerge out of under-vaccinated countries.

01:36:23.000 Now, there were 17 individuals at that point who had made $50 billion from the vaccines.

01:36:30.000 17 people made the $50 billion.

01:36:34.000 But nobody came forward with the $50 billion.

01:36:37.000 It didn't happen.

01:36:38.000 And now we see Omicron coming back to bite us.

01:36:42.000 Could Omicron have been prevented if the $50 billion appeared and this program of global vaccination were underway?

01:36:52.000 I can't promise that.

01:36:55.000 But maybe the next one, I don't know what the next Greek letter after Omicron is?

01:36:59.000 No, I don't.

01:36:59.000 I don't either.

01:37:00.000 But the next one maybe would be prevented.

01:37:03.000 But there's no indication at all that the drug companies are serious about getting into this.

01:37:08.000 Well, there was also an issue where the drug companies did not want to release the patents to construct these mRNA vaccines.

01:37:15.000 So they didn't want to make it so that they're available for people to make in other countries.

01:37:20.000 And they were trying to say that they didn't have the technology or the ability to.

01:37:24.000 That's precisely right.

01:37:26.000 And it was even worse than that.

01:37:30.000 Pfizer, to their credit, was honest.

01:37:32.000 And they said, no way.

01:37:34.000 It's dangerous to give that out, to give that information out.

01:37:38.000 Moderna didn't quite tell the truth.

01:37:40.000 They said, yeah, we'll give the patent out.

01:37:42.000 We're good global citizens.

01:37:43.000 And they offered to release their patent, but they didn't make any effort to help any country with the know-how that's necessary to put the patent into action And build a plant to manufacture the drugs.

01:37:59.000 So Pfizer said it's dangerous for them financially?

01:38:02.000 Is that what they said?

01:38:04.000 That was the whole quote from the CEO. That it's just dangerous?

01:38:08.000 It's a dangerous idea.

01:38:10.000 Huh.

01:38:11.000 I assume that he was referring to it will decrease innovation down the line because we won't make so much money that we won't be able to innovate.

01:38:19.000 But that's just my assumption.

01:38:22.000 Now what do you make of places like Africa where they only have like 6% vaccination rate, but they have less cases there than anywhere?

01:38:31.000 I don't know what's going on, but I don't think it's stable.

01:38:35.000 A lot of people have antibodies in Africa and it's unclear because those cases were never reported.

01:38:42.000 It's an unknown.

01:38:43.000 It's a very interesting mystery.

01:38:44.000 But I would not count my chickens on that one because I think you're going to have a huge population of vulnerable people and without them being vaccinated and with all those doses going to the first world for first dollar,

01:39:00.000 it's like we're building this huge swimming pool and we've created for ourselves a no-peeing zone in the swimming pool And we think we're going to be just dandy because we are allowed to swim in the no-peeing zone and we're going to get dirty.

01:39:12.000 Now, the ivermectin proponents and hydroxychloroquine proponents, they point to that as the wide distribution of ivermectin in Africa because of river blindness and dengue and yellow fever and that it's a very cheap generic drug that's commonly distributed.

01:39:27.000 They also say that in India as far as Uttar Pradesh, like how they have essentially eliminated COVID. What do you think about that?

01:39:37.000 Well, first let me say that I've said a lot of bad things about drug companies.

01:39:42.000 Merck was the most respected drug company for seven years in a row, starting in 1987. And during that run, the CEO, Ivermectin, was developed by Merck during that run.

01:39:53.000 And the CEO, Dr. Vagelos, Made a program with the World Trade Organization to give ivermectin away to the areas of Africa that were at risk of river blindness.

01:40:09.000 And you've got to tip your hat.

01:40:10.000 Times have changed.

01:40:11.000 The next CEO was a master of business, not a scientist, and we got Vioxx.

01:40:17.000 That's how radically things changed.

01:40:19.000 But for river blindness, I believe you just give two pills a year.

01:40:24.000 So it's pretty unlikely that a population taking two ivermectin tablets a year would be protected.

01:40:32.000 But the idea was not that.

01:40:33.000 The idea was that ivermectin is prevalent there and that they were giving out ivermectin to people like in prophylaxis.

01:40:40.000 I know they did that in India.

01:40:43.000 I'm not sure.

01:40:44.000 Supposedly they're doing that in Japan as well.

01:40:46.000 It's confusing because the thing about the ivermectin proponents is they are...

01:40:52.000 I'm trying to say this charitably.

01:40:54.000 They're as culty as the people that think that everybody should get triple, quadruple boosted.

01:41:00.000 Yes.

01:41:01.000 Like, on both sides, there's a binary view of things.

01:41:06.000 And, I mean, I've heard people say that ivermectin is great for even curing issues that the vaccine injuries have...

01:41:14.000 Like, vaccine injuries.

01:41:16.000 Like, things that the vaccine has done.

01:41:18.000 Take ivermectin for that, too.

01:41:19.000 I'm like, well, is that...

01:41:21.000 Is there data on that?

01:41:22.000 I don't think so, but this is a very easy problem to solve.

01:41:26.000 I mean, you've got a natural experiment.

01:41:29.000 Usually you say for better or worse, but for worse, Africa has a very low vaccination rate.

01:41:34.000 I think it's 8%, up from 6% to 8%, but a very low vaccination rate.

01:41:39.000 You could go in there and do a randomized controlled trial where you gave 100,000 people ivermectin At whatever interval the proponents think would be effective, and give another 100,000 people a placebo, and you'd have your answer pretty quickly.

01:41:55.000 But it's not being done.

01:41:57.000 Well, there are randomized controlled tries that are currently being done, right?

01:42:02.000 Isn't there one in, was it North Carolina or South Carolina now?

01:42:05.000 I think there's...

01:42:08.000 I think the answer is yes.

01:42:10.000 The NIH is on the record, to their credit, of saying that there's not enough evidence to say it does not work and there's not enough evidence to say it does work.

01:42:20.000 So that's certainly an invitation for somebody to fund a study.

01:42:24.000 Yeah.

01:42:24.000 The problem is even if they did fund it, like you were saying before that these studies, the vast majority of them are funded by these pharmaceutical companies.

01:42:33.000 Why would they do that for a study for a drug that's generic?

01:42:37.000 That would be a good role for government, wouldn't it?

01:42:40.000 Yeah.

01:42:41.000 It would be a good role for government. 0.95

01:42:42.000 But again, the entanglement between money, politics, the pharmaceutical drug companies and the influence that they have and lobbyists, there's so much to fucking clean up. 0.95

01:42:58.000 I have a little more faith. 0.94

01:43:00.000 I think I have a little more faith than you do.

01:43:04.000 I think if there were a government-funded study, if the NIH said we're going to fund a study, a massive study, and it's an ethical study because we don't know whether ivermectin works or not, Sometimes you can't do it.

01:43:19.000 I mean, you can't give monoclonal antibody or a placebo because monoclonal antibodies work.

01:43:25.000 But this would be an ethical study because we genuinely don't know the answer to the question.

01:43:30.000 It's a very simple study to do.

01:43:32.000 And if that study were done by the government, Funded by the government.

01:43:36.000 I think you'd get an honest answer.

01:43:38.000 Let me give you an example.

01:43:39.000 There was a government-funded study called the Diabetes Prevention Program done in the 1990s.

01:43:46.000 They took people at very high risk of diabetes, so-called pre-diabetics, and they randomized them to a control group, to a group that got treated with the diabetes drug metformin, or to an exercise group.

01:44:01.000 And you couldn't mask the exercise group, but everybody got a placebo pill.

01:44:07.000 So the question was not, does this drug, which was on patent at the time, does this drug help to prevent diabetes, high-risk people from developing diabetes?

01:44:17.000 It wasn't that.

01:44:18.000 It was, what's the best way to prevent diabetes?

01:44:22.000 Nothing, metformin or lifestyle.

01:44:25.000 And it turned out that lifestyle was the winner by far.

01:44:29.000 Lifestyle had a 58% efficacy rate of preventing diabetes.

01:44:37.000 Metformin had, I think, 39%.

01:44:39.000 Lifestyle was significantly better than metformin.

01:44:42.000 Now, the results of that study were fairly reported.

01:44:46.000 They weren't implemented so well.

01:44:48.000 We went on to develop these fantastically expensive diabetes drugs instead of programs to get people to make the lifestyle changes that that study showed you can get people to make and they're effective at preventing diabetes.

01:45:00.000 Now, what are the steps they take to get people to make lifestyle choices?

01:45:05.000 It's common sense stuff.

01:45:06.000 One-on-one counseling.

01:45:08.000 You come back frequently.

01:45:11.000 As a family doc, this was one of my favorite things to do, to try and get people to make change.

01:45:16.000 And my program was, I would say, look, lifestyle is the best way to fix what you got.

01:45:25.000 And here's a program that's easy and will gradually get into the exercise so you don't get an athletic injury.

01:45:31.000 And why don't you come back in a month and tell me how you're doing?

01:45:34.000 And I knew when they came back in a month that 9 out of 10 of them would not have done a friggin' thing.

01:45:39.000 But I knew that.

01:45:40.000 That's part of the therapy.

01:45:42.000 That's not a failure.

01:45:43.000 Now we've got a good discussion going.

01:45:45.000 Okay, what did you learn that was preventing you from doing it?

01:45:49.000 Now let's keep going.

01:45:51.000 And that works.

01:45:53.000 It works on 1 out of 10. No, no, no.

01:45:57.000 No, Joe, that's what this Diabetes Prevention Program study showed.

01:46:01.000 This is a randomized controlled trial.

01:46:03.000 So you essentially imparted motivation to these people?

01:46:07.000 It wasn't I personally.

01:46:08.000 In my patients, no, I got them to understand what their resistance was.

01:46:13.000 And to confront their resistance.

01:46:16.000 How'd you do that?

01:46:18.000 Every person's different.

01:46:19.000 Right.

01:46:20.000 So you're kind of acting like a psychologist in that way.

01:46:23.000 Well, I would like to say family doctor, but...

01:46:26.000 Right, but you're talking about the psychological aspect of motivation.

01:46:31.000 What stops people is procrastination, laziness, and then self-sabotage.

01:46:38.000 They're feeling and not being told what to do by their father, being beaten up by their brother, whatever it is.

01:46:45.000 But yeah, one-on-one, it was pretty successful.

01:46:48.000 But the point is not that I claim to be a good behavior modification guy, but that in this randomized controlled trial, Where people were randomly assigned to go to these counselors and have these sessions, I forget, one every fourth week or something,

01:47:05.000 and then they tapered down and then they turned into group sessions, that it worked.

01:47:09.000 They lost weight, they started exercising, and they prevented diabetes.

01:47:13.000 It works.

01:47:16.000 I think the idea that it doesn't work and doctors can't motivate people to change, I think that's drug company You're a word that ends in E-R-Y. You said it already.

01:47:29.000 No.

01:47:29.000 You said it earlier.

01:47:30.000 Did I? Yeah, you said it.

01:47:31.000 All right.

01:47:31.000 We're going to call you out on that.

01:47:33.000 Just a slip.

01:47:34.000 I'm a bad influence.

01:47:36.000 Yeah, I think that's the healthcare systems controlling things and trying to make more money.

01:47:41.000 I don't know about if I agree with you on that because I think it's just there's a problem with human nature and you know, I've been around fitness and involved in martial arts most of my life and There's always been an issue getting people motivated.

01:47:57.000 There's always been an issue with people self-sabotaging.

01:47:59.000 There's always been an issue with discipline and It's a very difficult thing for people to acquire discipline.

01:48:04.000 And that's one of the reasons why people like David Goggins or Cameron Haynes or these incredibly disciplined people that talk about it are so appreciated.

01:48:16.000 Because the motivation of listening to a guy like Goggins talk about discipline, it actually, you can impart some of it or rubs off on some people and get you to throw your sneakers on and go for a run.

01:48:28.000 It really will get someone to sign up at a gym and maybe get some of those first baby steps going and develop some sort of a habit.

01:48:35.000 But it's very difficult.

01:48:37.000 It's one of the most difficult things to do to motivate people that are sedentary into changing the way they live their life.

01:48:43.000 It is, but again, this is a randomized controlled trial.

01:48:47.000 I think most of the science we see is commercially motivated and it's biased and so forth.

01:48:52.000 This was a randomized controlled trial.

01:48:55.000 And these people lost, I think, 10 pounds and sustained it.

01:49:00.000 And they exercised five times a week and sustained it.

01:49:03.000 The difference in there, though, is that these random, this trial, these people are part of a trial, and they're also recognizing that, you know, they're getting a wake-up call because they're pre-diabetic.

01:49:14.000 So they're realizing, like, hey, do I love my children?

01:49:17.000 Do I want to see them grow up?

01:49:18.000 Do I love my parents?

01:49:20.000 Do I want to be around them?

01:49:21.000 Yeah, you have to do something.

01:49:22.000 Like, the time is now, and you're also now a part of a trial.

01:49:26.000 So there's a thing where you're in a group and, you know, you sign up for it.

01:49:30.000 Now you're part of this thing with a lot of other people and they're giving you these steps and you start taking them and then you see positive results.

01:49:36.000 Right.

01:49:36.000 A lot of people are pretty diabetic.

01:49:38.000 I mean, sometimes I hear the number even in the, like, above 50 million Americans.

01:49:44.000 Is it really that high?

01:49:45.000 Yeah, I think so.

01:49:47.000 But if it's being in a trial, I think you raise a good point.

01:49:53.000 But maybe we should put everyone in a trial.

01:49:55.000 Maybe that's what the social science says.

01:49:57.000 I think everyone should belong to some sort of an organization, like a local community gym that has exercise programs and classes and things like that.

01:50:07.000 That would help a lot.

01:50:08.000 And I think if there's something that we could do, you know, there's this—people are—they hate the concept of socialism, and I understand why, but— If there was anything that I think that we could benefit from, like our taxes go to things that we all agree are important that aid the community.

01:50:26.000 That is kind of a socialist thing, like the fire department.

01:50:30.000 It has nothing to do with how much money you make, right?

01:50:34.000 The fire department is there to put out fires.

01:50:36.000 Your taxes go to the fire department.

01:50:38.000 Everybody agrees that's a good thing.

01:50:40.000 I think there would be extreme benefit if that same sort of thing was in place for nutrition and the same sort of thing was in place for exercise.

01:50:50.000 That was a part of being a part of this community.

01:50:52.000 You have access to healthy food.

01:50:54.000 Part of being a part of this community is you have access to the gym.

01:50:58.000 As far as all the other luxuries and all the things that people want, televisions and cars, you got to work for that.

01:51:04.000 But just the basic necessities of life, nutrition and to enhance your experience as a person, exercise and education and especially exercise in terms of like a group dynamic because then it gets everybody motivated because you're doing it with a bunch of other people in class.

01:51:22.000 I couldn't agree with you more.

01:51:24.000 And that's, we're talking about recreating the center here.

01:51:27.000 And the fourth chapter in that book is called Insulin Inc., Inc.

01:51:32.000 like incorporated.

01:51:33.000 And what I show is that you could do that program that you're talking about.

01:51:39.000 The CDC has funded a small program.

01:51:41.000 It has 15,000 people in it.

01:51:43.000 And it's working through YMCAs and through community organizations.

01:51:48.000 It's working.

01:51:49.000 So you say, well, we don't have the money for it.

01:51:52.000 It costs $20 billion a year to do that for everybody who needs it.

01:51:56.000 Well, it happens to be that we're wasting about that much money by giving insulin analogs instead of human recombinant insulin to type 2 diabetics.

01:52:05.000 And if we just spent that money rationally in helping people to straighten out their lives and exercise and prevent the disease and feel better, We'd be a much better society.

01:52:16.000 But as it unfolds, Big Pharma controls so much of how doctors think the best way to treat diabetics is that they're taking that $20 billion and they're spending it on insulin that is more expensive, like 11 times more expensive than is necessary.

01:52:33.000 I don't understand this insulin thing.

01:52:35.000 So how did that get through?

01:52:38.000 How did this narrative that this one type of insulin was superior get through even though it's far more exorbitant?

01:52:46.000 Right.

01:52:46.000 So you got to go back to 1982. In the 70s, genetic engineering was coming along.

01:52:55.000 The scientific infrastructure for genetic engineering of drugs was coming along.

01:53:03.000 And once they figured out how to insert human DNA code into E. coli bacteria or yeast or whatever the organism they wanted to use was, once they figured that out, they wanted a drug.

01:53:16.000 And the obvious drug was insulin, because people who have diabetes were using insulin that came from cattle and pigs.

01:53:24.000 And it was a pretty easy sell to say, look, this bioengineered insulin is pure We're good to go.

01:53:47.000 Which is exactly like human insulin, amino acid for amino acid.

01:53:51.000 That was a pretty easy sell.

01:53:53.000 And more than 90% of the insulin prescriptions flipped over very quickly when bioengineered insulin came out in 1982. Unfortunately, there was no evidence that it was superior to animal insulin.

01:54:09.000 And the Cochrane reviews that came out afterwards said no difference.

01:54:14.000 Not at all, just more expensive?

01:54:16.000 It sounds cooler because it's genetically engineered.

01:54:18.000 Yeah, and we control the price.

01:54:20.000 There aren't many companies that make insulin, so the price is sort of cartel-ish.

01:54:26.000 The next cell was much harder, so they did the human recombinant insulin, and that cost like $21 a vial or something.

01:54:36.000 You know, this is not very expensive.

01:54:38.000 It was a lot more expensive than the animal insulin, but not very expensive.

01:54:41.000 So the innovators said, well, now what do we do?

01:54:46.000 We got this insulin and it's cheap, and now how are we going to make another buck to make our investors happy?

01:54:52.000 And in 1996, they came out with these Insulin analogs that are just slightly changed and amino acid or two are changed and supposedly they more closely mimic the actual natural secretion of insulin in the body.

01:55:09.000 That was a challenge.

01:55:11.000 And that's one of the most fun stories that I discovered while I was writing this book.

01:55:15.000 I didn't know about this before I was writing this book.

01:55:17.000 I think?

01:55:36.000 Beyond what medical science showed was beneficial, but they could claim that the insulin analogs could get you down there more safely with less hypoglycemia.

01:55:47.000 Am I making sense?

01:55:48.000 Yes, yes.

01:55:48.000 Okay, so they sold this.

01:55:50.000 They hired an advertising firm, and they sold this standard of getting hemoglobin A1c down to 7, that that was good control, even though there wasn't evidence of medical benefit.

01:56:03.000 And that's how it happened.

01:56:04.000 That's standard.

01:56:05.000 That became standard insulin care.

01:56:08.000 And the manufacturers created bonus programs if doctors had a certain percentage of their patients controlled like that.

01:56:16.000 And then nonprofit organizations like the National Committee for Quality Assurance Adopted that standard and they certify outpatient healthcare providers as being high quality and they define that as a high quality issue to have a standard of a hemoglobin A1c of 7 or less.

01:56:36.000 There was no evidence.

01:56:38.000 There was no evidence.

01:56:39.000 And then a study came out in the New England Journal that showed that diabetics who were more tightly controlled had a higher risk of dying, published in the New England Journal.

01:56:47.000 That didn't change anything.

01:56:49.000 And it hasn't changed until 2018-19-20.

01:56:56.000 It's been that image in doctors that high-quality medicine means treating your type 2 diabetics with insulin analogs.

01:57:04.000 Instead of $21 a vial, we're talking about $330 a vial at the peak.

01:57:10.000 That that's standard medical care.

01:57:12.000 Meanwhile, we're not doing the exercise program that you know would not only prevent diabetes, but heart disease and stroke and everything else, and people would be happier and their families would be better and the community would be better.

01:57:25.000 And that's what's happening.

01:57:27.000 That's how we got here.

01:57:30.000 And when you extrapolate, when you look at where we're at, and then you go to 10 years from now, 20 years from now, it seems like the direction we're on, this is only going to be worse.

01:57:42.000 It's only going to get more entangled.

01:57:44.000 That's correct.

01:57:44.000 Unless we make a vast, very dynamic course correction.

01:57:50.000 It doesn't appear that we're going to.

01:57:51.000 I mean, now it's going to get worse.

01:57:53.000 It's going to be accelerated because these drugs, the vaccines and the drugs for COVID are going to be effective, I hope.

01:58:02.000 But why should a company be allowed to charge a government $25 for a vaccine when it cost them about $3 to make and much of the technology was done by the NIH anyway?

01:58:19.000 Why should we allow that to go on?

01:58:21.000 Why should Pfizer be selling $65 billion worth of vaccine when their profit margin, one of the stock analysts said their profit margin after the first year or two is going to be 60 or 80%.

01:58:33.000 So why is that?

01:58:35.000 What kind of deals have been made?

01:58:37.000 Because they spend so much in lobbying and so much in political contributions and they're nonpartisan in their political, bipartisan in their political The Democrats get paid and the Republicans get paid.

01:58:49.000 And we're in this charade.

01:58:51.000 We almost had an opportunity to have some effect controlling drug prices.

01:58:55.000 And we came up with this plan to limit the price of insulin, the copay for insulin, for $35 when you're using the wrong insulin.

01:59:05.000 Just get some experts together and decide which insulin you should use.

01:59:09.000 And this is obviously just one drug.

01:59:10.000 I'm sure there's probably countless other versions of this.

01:59:12.000 Yeah, this is a particularly egregious story because there's only three major manufacturers of insulin.

01:59:17.000 So they could really act as a cartel in bringing their prices up.

01:59:21.000 And this animal insulin, how is that extracted?

01:59:24.000 Crush up the pancreas. 1.00

01:59:26.000 So you kill animals? 0.98

01:59:28.000 No, no.

01:59:28.000 The animals are killed.

01:59:29.000 They're in the slaughterhouse.

01:59:30.000 The pancreas is already there. 0.90

01:59:32.000 So is it pigs?

01:59:34.000 Yeah, pigs and cows. 0.94

01:59:35.000 Pigs and cows. 0.64

01:59:36.000 Yeah.

01:59:38.000 Because obviously there's ethical issues with that too, right?

01:59:42.000 As far as people who are vegans who don't want to be using...

01:59:46.000 I'm all for drug development.

01:59:48.000 There should be options.

01:59:49.000 It's great to have options.

01:59:50.000 And I think we should have more than one drug available.

01:59:53.000 But what you're saying makes a lot of sense that there's no evidence that this is beneficial, it's superior, but yet they've sold this to people based on no science and for extreme amounts of profit.

02:00:05.000 Yes.

02:00:05.000 That's a good summary.

02:00:07.000 That's not good.

02:00:08.000 It's not good.

02:00:10.000 When you wrote this book, while you're writing this, is there any moment where you're, because I'm looking at this book and I'm hearing you talk and there's an incredible amount of data that you have to go over when you're doing something like this.

02:00:25.000 Does it ever fill you with despair?

02:00:31.000 No.

02:00:32.000 No.

02:00:32.000 It was a challenge to figure it out.

02:00:35.000 And what I ended up with I could have written a long book.

02:00:40.000 I could have written a 900-page book like Robert Kennedy.

02:00:44.000 It would have been a lot easier.

02:00:46.000 It would have taken me one or two years instead of six years.

02:00:48.000 It's harder to edit it?

02:00:50.000 It's harder to tell your story in short.

02:00:53.000 And to make it digestible?

02:00:55.000 Digestible, but tell the story.

02:00:59.000 But I got to a breakthrough in this book when I figured out what's really happening.

02:01:06.000 Is that there's a nexus of influence.

02:01:08.000 I don't want to use the word conspiracy.

02:01:11.000 But the drug companies are working with the journals and selling them back reprints or buying back reprints of the articles.

02:01:22.000 And the journals part of the deal is not to ask for the data.

02:01:26.000 And the academic medical centers are working with the drug companies and giving them more control than you would think academics would give to private industry because they're making money.

02:01:37.000 The institutions are making money and the researchers are making money.

02:01:44.000 And the physician societies, the professional organizations, are getting paid by drug companies.

02:01:51.000 They're taking drug company money.

02:01:53.000 They, in large part, oversee the guidelines that are made.

02:01:58.000 So that we've got this nexus of confluent interest that's feeding at the trough of drug company money.

02:02:07.000 And that's called market failure.

02:02:11.000 And market failure doesn't correct itself.

02:02:13.000 You need government.

02:02:15.000 You need to break this up.

02:02:17.000 It's like a trust buster.

02:02:19.000 It's like breaking up Microsoft.

02:02:25.000 The market failure is so comprehensive that it's got all the parties' impression of how medicine should be run in the United States going in their direction.

02:02:40.000 And we need an umpire.

02:02:44.000 If I give you magic powers, you could fix everything.

02:02:51.000 Like, John, you have the best ideas.

02:02:54.000 I'm the king of the world.

02:02:55.000 Do whatever you want.

02:02:56.000 How do you fix this?

02:03:01.000 First you make data transparent, pre-publication.

02:03:05.000 Once an article's published, the cows are out of the barn.

02:03:08.000 That seems simple.

02:03:10.000 And not only that, that seems like no one can argue against that.

02:03:13.000 Right.

02:03:13.000 But the journals don't have an interest in doing that.

02:03:17.000 How so?

02:03:18.000 Because a big part of their gig is to sell the reprints back to the drug company.

02:03:25.000 So would the solution to that be the government funds the journals so that the journals don't operate on profit?

02:03:33.000 I think that's a step too far.

02:03:36.000 I don't think you have to go there.

02:03:38.000 There's an intermediate step.

02:03:39.000 When a drug company does a clinical trial, they do what's called—they get all the patient forms and truckloads of data, and they put them on electric—they digitize it.

02:03:52.000 And then they produce what's called a clinical study report.

02:03:57.000 It doesn't have the raw data in it, but it has all the data tabulated.

02:04:01.000 It's like 3,000 pages.

02:04:03.000 And they do that.

02:04:04.000 And as I got along in litigation, I got pretty good at reading these clinical study reports.

02:04:10.000 You know, in maybe 10 hours or 20 hours, I could figure out what happened, what didn't happen.

02:04:14.000 And occasionally, I needed to go back and have a statistician get the primary data.

02:04:18.000 But what I'm saying is that there's no reason in the world why medical journals wouldn't require the clinical study report to be submitted with a manuscript for publication.

02:04:31.000 No reason in the world.

02:04:33.000 And if the ordinary peer reviewers who aren't adept yet at going over those things, they could hire statisticians that were.

02:04:41.000 They've already been done.

02:04:43.000 There's very little redaction that's necessary, but let them redact if there's some commercial process or something.

02:04:49.000 It's a no-brainer.

02:04:51.000 They exist.

02:04:52.000 I mean, that's what makes it even crazier.

02:04:54.000 So you can fix that with clinical study reports, and then you can request the individual patient data if you need to.

02:05:03.000 You could fix the professional societies and say, okay, docs, you want to have a society?

02:05:08.000 Don't take drug company money.

02:05:10.000 Boy, how hard is that though?

02:05:12.000 Because you have to substitute that money then, right?

02:05:15.000 How do you – like if someone already has this incentive and they're making this profit, how do you get them to abandon that profit for the greater good of mankind when they figure it – you have that diffusion of responsibility aspect of it because there are so many doctors and so much money and there's like,

02:05:32.000 I'm not helping anything.

02:05:34.000 I'm not hurting anything.

02:05:36.000 That's what they think.

02:05:37.000 But let's break down the function of those professional societies and let's figure out how to fund them.

02:05:43.000 Doctors are making good salaries.

02:05:45.000 Maybe they could pitch in some money.

02:05:46.000 Maybe you could have a match plan with the government.

02:05:49.000 I don't know.

02:05:49.000 The problem with the idea of good salaries is even really wealthy people want more money.

02:05:56.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:05:57.000 Guys like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, they still want more money.

02:06:00.000 They have hundreds of billions of dollars, together at least, and they still want more money.

02:06:05.000 This is a thing that people do.

02:06:08.000 They never just go, I'm good.

02:06:09.000 So doctors are the same way, and if they're making this money, From these pharmaceutical companies?

02:06:16.000 Well, most of them are not making money.

02:06:18.000 You know, they may take some lunch and they may take a trip now and then, but they're not making—most of the doctors are not making big money.

02:06:24.000 Most of the doctors is just incentivized by other methods.

02:06:28.000 Because the drug companies have taken over what they think is evidence-based medicine.

02:06:34.000 Most of them are trying to be good docs.

02:06:36.000 And they're just naive to the influence that the drug companies have on these journals, like you were perhaps in the 80s?

02:06:44.000 Yes, that's exactly right.

02:06:47.000 That's scary because that means that they think that they're acting in good faith and that they're doing a good job and they're using evidence-based medicine and, in fact, they're getting manipulated.

02:06:57.000 That's exactly right.

02:06:58.000 That's terrifying.

02:06:59.000 It's terrifying.

02:07:00.000 And that is because of the journals.

02:07:03.000 The journals are playing a role.

02:07:04.000 The professional societies are playing a role.

02:07:07.000 The pharmaceutical drug companies are clearly playing a role.

02:07:10.000 Yeah.

02:07:10.000 That should be, in your opinion, in my opinion, that should be illegal.

02:07:14.000 Do you agree with that?

02:07:16.000 That should be regulated.

02:07:17.000 In terms of like, well, the that being the hiding of the data and the showing their assessment of the data to peer review.

02:07:27.000 Yes.

02:07:28.000 That seems crazy.

02:07:29.000 Seems crazy.

02:07:30.000 And there's an organization called the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors that's in a perfect position to just say stop it.

02:07:39.000 We'll all stop it together so no journal is disadvantaged by demanding the data.

02:07:45.000 And they won't do it.

02:07:46.000 How much of an impact do you think that would have?

02:07:48.000 I mean, it seems like this manipulation of data in order to ensure profits is a part of their business model.

02:07:56.000 It's a part of the way they act and operate.

02:07:58.000 And a lot of this is because of this constant growth paradigm where every year, and this is what scares me about these current years, because of the amount of money that's being generated by the vaccines.

02:08:12.000 How do you tell them, like, what if COVID goes away and there's no need for these vaccines anymore?

02:08:18.000 How do they recreate these golden years of profit?

02:08:22.000 They don't.

02:08:23.000 So what do they say to their shareholders?

02:08:24.000 When the shareholders are like, hey, why are the profits down so low?

02:08:27.000 What's going on with the stock?

02:08:29.000 Like, this is a real problem with money being integrated into healthcare, right?

02:08:35.000 It is.

02:08:36.000 I don't think it's...

02:08:37.000 I'm not sure it's that much of a problem.

02:08:39.000 I mean, this is a windfall profits for COVID. But they're sitting on $500 billion right now.

02:08:47.000 That money is probably going to be used, at least in large part, to buy drugs in development by smaller pharmaceutical companies, startups and companies that are funded by the NIH to do research.

02:09:02.000 But they'll be finding other targets to aim drugs at.

02:09:07.000 And I think that's where you get Adjahelm, the story.

02:09:10.000 Have you talked about that on a podcast?

02:09:12.000 No.

02:09:12.000 What is that?

02:09:12.000 That's a good story.

02:09:14.000 Excuse me.

02:09:17.000 Adjahelm is a drug for Alzheimer's disease that got approved a few months ago, despite the fact that the FDA Advisory Committee voted 10 not to approve it.

02:09:31.000 One to abstain.

02:09:34.000 And the FDA approved it anyway.

02:09:37.000 And the reason why the 10 voted not to approve it is because the studies showed that it did not have a clinically meaningful benefit.

02:09:46.000 It decreases amyloid plaque in the brain, which is associated, not necessarily causal, but associated with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and progression of Alzheimer's disease.

02:09:57.000 So this drug decreases the accumulation of the amyloid plaque, but it doesn't make a significant improvement in clinical status, and it has about a 33% incidence of brain side effects,

02:10:15.000 brain swelling, brain bleeding.

02:10:17.000 Swear to God.

02:10:18.000 And they approve this.

02:10:19.000 I can't make this up.

02:10:21.000 And the FDA approved this?

02:10:22.000 The FDA approved it.

02:10:23.000 Why'd they do that?

02:10:26.000 It's a story that's unfolding.

02:10:29.000 They did a backdoor move where the FDA said they weren't going to approve it because it hadn't shown efficacy.

02:10:35.000 And there was some back-channel communication between FDA and one of the people in Biogen, executives in Biogen, which is the manufacturer.

02:10:43.000 And they came up with this scheme to have it approved on a I don't know if it was emergency use or some accelerated approval.

02:10:56.000 Accelerated approval.

02:10:57.000 Because there was no other therapy for the disease.

02:11:01.000 But it was just they made it up.

02:11:08.000 So three of the advisory committee members quit.

02:11:13.000 They said, we're not going to work.

02:11:15.000 We're not going to do this for you anymore.

02:11:17.000 And there are two parts of that story that are just—three parts that are just mind-boggling.

02:11:23.000 One is the price of this drug, which is shown to have significant harm and no benefit, is $58,000 a year.

02:11:31.000 $58,000 a year.

02:11:33.000 It was projected.

02:11:34.000 It hasn't taken off.

02:11:35.000 It was a bridge too far.

02:11:37.000 But it was projected to increase the total cost of Medicare Part D by 150%, single-handedly.

02:11:46.000 It was approved.

02:11:48.000 Number two is that a survey was done of Americans who heard about the Agile Helm issue, and 60% of Americans believed that it worked.

02:12:04.000 Even though there was no evidence that it worked.

02:12:06.000 This is really scary.

02:12:08.000 What is this based on?

02:12:08.000 What is their 60% based on?

02:12:10.000 Where did they get the information from?

02:12:12.000 It was probably press releases from the company about reducing amyloid plaques.

02:12:17.000 And maybe some news reports?

02:12:19.000 Yeah, it came through the media.

02:12:21.000 And the press releases, so they were reported on MSNBC or what have you?

02:12:26.000 I can't say that for a fact.

02:12:28.000 Some networks?

02:12:30.000 Some sort of media?

02:12:32.000 Yeah, NPR covered it, actually.

02:12:34.000 And NPR covered it in a favorable light?

02:12:36.000 Well, they reported a true fact, which is that it reduces amyloid, but they didn't pick up that there are 27 studies that have been done that the FDA wrote a memo about of drugs that reduced amyloid, and none of them improved Alzheimer's.

02:12:52.000 And they also didn't talk about, was it 33% of the adverse side effects?

02:12:56.000 Right.

02:12:57.000 That's a lot.

02:12:58.000 Yeah.

02:12:58.000 It's actually 41%, but you correct it down to 33 because 8% in the control group had side effects.

02:13:04.000 So I'm trying to be fair here.

02:13:06.000 That's so nice of you.

02:13:08.000 Thank you.

02:13:11.000 It's so crazy, man.

02:13:12.000 It's like that's the problem that we really worry about when it comes to pharmaceutical drug companies, that they're going to do things like this.

02:13:18.000 And they're going to use their influence to push stuff like that through.

02:13:21.000 And they're going to do it because they are a profit-generating machine.

02:13:24.000 And that's what scares me about the amount of power and money that they've amassed during the COVID years.

02:13:31.000 Correct.

02:13:32.000 Correct.

02:13:33.000 And political influence.

02:13:34.000 A lot of political influence.

02:13:36.000 Also, their social status has changed.

02:13:41.000 They've gone from being, in many people's eyes, a pariah because of things like Vioxx, because of the opioid epidemic, to being a savior of a public health crisis.

02:13:52.000 That's exactly right.

02:13:54.000 Six months before COVID was heard of, The drug industry stood at the bottom of 25 industries in terms of public approval.

02:14:03.000 The lowest it had ever scored since 2001, since they've been doing the statistics.

02:14:08.000 And suddenly, after the vaccines came out, Moderna and Pfizer were in the top 10 most respected corporations.

02:14:19.000 That's wild.

02:14:20.000 That is wild. 0.98

02:14:21.000 When you look at their history, they're serial abusers.

02:14:27.000 People say that drug companies are too greedy and blah blah.

02:14:31.000 The problem is that their job is to make money.

02:14:34.000 That's what their job is and they do it.

02:14:37.000 And if the American people and the American government let them do it, shame on us.

02:14:45.000 So clearly there has to be some sort of course correction, but how do you do that when these pharmaceutical drug companies have so much influence?

02:14:54.000 Like, they don't want to do this.

02:14:55.000 They're going to resist this tooth and claw.

02:14:57.000 So how do you do this?

02:14:58.000 They're going to claim that they can't innovate if you take a dime away from them.

02:15:02.000 They'll spend nine cents proving that that's not true.

02:15:07.000 The way you do it is in the last chapter of the book.

02:15:12.000 You've got to build this coalition.

02:15:15.000 Almost all Americans are getting ripped off and harmed and physically harmed, economically harmed and physically harmed, by what's going on.

02:15:25.000 And if democracy is going to work, we've got to be able to make progress.

02:15:30.000 Democracy is a sham.

02:15:31.000 If we can't make progress on this, which is so obvious, then how are we going to govern ourselves?

02:15:39.000 It's a good question.

02:15:42.000 Especially when it's such a large part of our life.

02:15:45.000 You know, medicine and healthcare and being able to go to the doctor and find some sort of a viable solution to whatever your health issue is for you or your family.

02:15:56.000 It's a huge part of our lives.

02:15:58.000 Absolutely.

02:15:58.000 And trust your doctor.

02:16:00.000 I mean, just trusting your doctor, it has a lot of health benefit to trust if you have a doctor you trust.

02:16:07.000 And now people look at me and say, wait a minute, you're throwing a wrench in all this and you're getting people not to trust their doctor.

02:16:13.000 And, you know, I guess it's true a little bit, but let's move to a higher state here.

02:16:19.000 Well, I think you have sympathy for the doctor's position as well because you were in that shoe once.

02:16:24.000 I was.

02:16:24.000 Yeah.

02:16:27.000 Well...

02:16:29.000 This is bleak.

02:16:31.000 I was hoping that maybe you had some sort of impossible solution to this that would be easy to implement.

02:16:38.000 Well, I do, and you do too, which is 80% of our health is determined by how we live our lives.

02:16:44.000 I think that's a very important message.

02:16:46.000 And let's take responsibility for ourselves and the people we love.

02:16:49.000 Yeah.

02:16:52.000 Yeah, I've thought about ways other than having healthy people come on the podcast and influence people and sort of motivate people.

02:17:00.000 I've thought of ways that I could contribute to that and I'm not exactly sure other than like opening up a chain of gyms and making it free for people.

02:17:09.000 I don't know what else I could do to sort of inspire people to do things.

02:17:13.000 Maybe put together some sort of an online program that's free where it allows people to Check in with other people that are in the same sort of situation and motivate them to participate and have readily available classes and things you could follow along online in a free form like a YouTube type deal?

02:17:35.000 Yep.

02:17:36.000 So the CDC has this project going on with local YMCAs and other such institutions.

02:17:45.000 And they had 15,000 people in it, and I don't know how many are in it now.

02:17:49.000 And they're getting good results.

02:17:51.000 I think if you and other people like you who are social influencers, who understand that individual responsibility is just so important here, worked with that program.

02:18:04.000 That maybe together you could make—you could get something done.

02:18:09.000 Yeah, that might not be a bad idea.

02:18:12.000 Just something has to be done other than just some people are motivated and some people are, you know, they're self-starters and they get going.

02:18:23.000 I think we have to—I think most people are at least— Partially aware of how much of a benefit it would make to their life if they exercised and took care of themselves.

02:18:35.000 I don't think people are aware of that number, that 80%, that 80% of your health is how you live your life.

02:18:40.000 Yeah, it's not the next drug innovation.

02:18:43.000 The next drug innovation may help some people.

02:18:45.000 Some of the new drugs are fabulous.

02:18:48.000 Drugs that contain HIV-AIDS and drugs that contain hepatitis C. I think history is going to show that the vaccines fit in that category.

02:19:01.000 Maybe they won't.

02:19:02.000 I could be wrong.

02:19:03.000 We don't know the end of this story.

02:19:05.000 But some drugs work.

02:19:08.000 Out of all the drugs that are approved, One out of eight are actually new drugs, and the rest are reformulations and extended care.

02:19:18.000 But one out of eight are actually new molecular entities, they're called.

02:19:22.000 But only one quarter of those actually have been shown to be a meaningful clinical advance over other drugs.

02:19:31.000 So three-quarters of the new molecular entities that are approved have not been shown to be a meaningful improvement over the older drugs.

02:19:40.000 And they're just pushing these for profit?

02:19:43.000 For profit.

02:19:44.000 Do you get concerned at all about the reports of myocarditis and pericarditis and the adverse side effects of the vaccines as reported by VAERS and anecdotal reports from people who either know people that have had bad side effects or what have you?

02:19:59.000 Well, the truth is you got this on my radar screen with your interview with Dr. Gupta.

02:20:06.000 And I did the best research I could and I found that...

02:20:11.000 Do you have that slide?

02:20:14.000 I think it's the first slide in the slides that I brought.

02:20:22.000 Jamie's going to find the slide.

02:20:23.000 Here we go.

02:20:24.000 Well, maybe it's the second slide.

02:20:26.000 That's it.

02:20:27.000 So the top line, I'll explain Israel data below afterwards.

02:20:35.000 But this is data from the CDC. And it's looking at boys aged 12 to 17 and 18 to 24. And this is per million kids who are vaccinated.

02:20:45.000 So, by CDC's data, you prevent 5,700 in 12,000 cases.

02:20:51.000 You prevent 215 hospitalizations in 530. You prevent that many, 71 and 127 ICU admissions, which are serious, and two deaths in the younger age group and three in the older.

02:21:04.000 The VAERS data says that the risk of myocarditis in that same population is 56 to 69 for the younger kids and 45 to 56. The VAERS data I wanted to corroborate because that's voluntary reporting.

02:21:24.000 So there's Israeli data that was published in the New England Journal, and Israel has a good data system for their national health system.

02:21:33.000 So the Israeli data I trust. 0.88

02:21:36.000 And the Israeli data came out and said out of this million people in each age group, 151 will develop myocarditis and 109 in the older group.

02:21:48.000 So why is the Israeli data so much higher than what the VAERS has put out?

02:21:53.000 Is it underreporting on the VAERS side?

02:21:56.000 It's probably underreporting.

02:21:59.000 Most Americans know what a computer is.

02:22:02.000 We could computerize this data set.

02:22:04.000 And then we could find out If kids were admitted to the hospital with myocarditis, we'd know that.

02:22:10.000 And we only know about hospital admissions.

02:22:12.000 We don't know about people that have shortness of breath and chronic fatigue and issues that are associated with myocarditis where people don't get treated or don't get medical treatment or don't get diagnosed.

02:22:25.000 So that's an issue that I can't address.

02:22:27.000 But on that slide, the point that I wanted to make is that myocarditis is a significant issue And if the CGC data is correct, not about myocarditis, but about the benefits, that the benefits don't outweigh the harms of myocarditis,

02:22:46.000 but they're not that far away.

02:22:49.000 They're maybe half as much.

02:22:52.000 They maybe nullify half.

02:22:55.000 Can we look at that slide again, go over the...

02:22:57.000 So if we looked at hospitalizations prevented...

02:23:03.000 You're preventing more hospitalizations than you're causing myocarditis.

02:23:09.000 And the myocarditis in the kids tends to be Not disastrous.

02:23:17.000 Well, how do we know that?

02:23:19.000 That's from the Israeli data.

02:23:20.000 They had 129 people.

02:23:23.000 Right, but we don't have long-term studies on that.

02:23:25.000 We don't.

02:23:26.000 No, that's fair.

02:23:27.000 That's absolutely fair.

02:23:28.000 But that's where myocarditis is the issue, right?

02:23:30.000 I was reading this thing about myocarditis, about when people develop the type of myocarditis that they've had from vaccine injuries, significant swelling of the heart tissue, that over time, this could be a significant issue in their life.

02:23:46.000 The answer is we don't know.

02:23:47.000 We can't know.

02:23:48.000 Time has not gone by.

02:23:50.000 And the reason why I made that slide is to say, A, you are raising the issue is really important, and it ain't over.

02:23:57.000 It should be considered.

02:23:59.000 So if you ask me, which I was hoping you wouldn't, if you ask me, do I think kids should get vaccinated?

02:24:09.000 I think my response would be that at this point in time, It looks like in the future we're going to say that it was better to get vaccinated than not.

02:24:21.000 Even for children?

02:24:23.000 To 12, to age 12. But here's the thing about these children, when you're saying deaths and hospitalizations, but deaths in particular, they're all with comorbidities.

02:24:33.000 And many of these comorbidities are lifestyle related, right?

02:24:37.000 Many of these comorbidities are kids that are grossly obese or that have all sorts of health problems that are associated with that 80% that you talked about, the way they live their lives and the food they take in.

02:24:48.000 That seems like an easier prevention and then you avoid the possible, even though it's a small number, If you're dealing with healthy children, that's what's so scary.

02:24:59.000 Because if you're dealing with healthy children that seem to be getting myocarditis, a lot of them, I was watching this video on TikTok that was removed for whatever reason because it had millions and millions of views, but it was a 14-year-old boy that was in the hospital who was talking about his case of myocarditis,

02:25:15.000 and they deleted the video.

02:25:17.000 It was a personal account of a kid who got vaccinated.

02:25:20.000 The thing is, if it's affecting healthy people that aren't at risk from COVID, like the number of kids that are at risk from dying of COVID is fairly small, right?

02:25:32.000 Correct.

02:25:32.000 800 kids have died.

02:25:34.000 And those kids, the vast majority of them have comorbidities.

02:25:38.000 I haven't seen that data, but I believe it's true.

02:25:40.000 I believe that's the data that I saw, was that they can't account for, I don't know what the number is, but very, very few kids have died that didn't have something significantly wrong with them.

02:25:52.000 So that's what scares people, the idea of vaccinating a child that's not at risk, that's a healthy child, because you've mandated this for all children.

02:26:01.000 Yeah, I'm not saying mandate.

02:26:02.000 Right.

02:26:03.000 Absolutely not.

02:26:05.000 But that seems to come up with this.

02:26:06.000 And this is what I'm concerned with is the influence that the pharmaceutical drug companies have with this extreme desire to earn profits.

02:26:14.000 Well, obviously, there's a whole segment of our country that you could vaccinate and extract enormous amounts of profit from.

02:26:22.000 That segment is children.

02:26:23.000 And the way to really get that to go is to mandate it.

02:26:27.000 Now, they're mandating it in California.

02:26:29.000 They're trying to mandate it.

02:26:30.000 I think they backed off of it because of lawsuits.

02:26:33.000 They were trying to mandate it for school.

02:26:36.000 Like, you have to get vaccinated to go to public schools.

02:26:38.000 Which seems, in my mind, to be kind of fucking insane because you're not mandating health.

02:26:43.000 You're not mandating dietary choices. 0.95

02:26:45.000 You're not mandating exercise.

02:26:46.000 You're not mandating this 80% of how you live your life, which could affect so much Of the quality of life for these kids for the future.

02:26:55.000 You're not doing that, but you're saying that they have to take this pharmaceutical drug.

02:27:02.000 I can't argue with you, Joe.

02:27:03.000 You know, I think the right thing to do is to give the parents the best information you can get to them and let them make a decision.

02:27:10.000 But if I— And then also make sure that the parents are actually getting the best information.

02:27:14.000 Right.

02:27:15.000 But if I haven't made you depressed enough yet— Oh, no.

02:27:18.000 Yeah, this one's bad.

02:27:20.000 So I was saying earlier that 1,300 Americans die every day because our health and health care is so inferior to the other developed countries.

02:27:31.000 Sixteen thousand kids die every year in our country above the death rates in the other developed countries.

02:27:40.000 An excess sixteen thousand children die a year.

02:27:47.000 Some of it's guns, some of it's traffic accidents, and some of it's general health.

02:27:53.000 But it's an appalling number.

02:27:56.000 You and I... You got me into the myocarditis issue.

02:28:00.000 It's a fascinating issue.

02:28:01.000 I don't think it's black and white.

02:28:03.000 I think it's open and more information will come along.

02:28:06.000 But 16,000 extra American children dying every single year.

02:28:12.000 That's...

02:28:13.000 There's nothing gray about that.

02:28:17.000 It's horrific.

02:28:18.000 And I think...

02:28:20.000 You know, we've raised so many issues in this that I think people are going to have to dissect this and take notes and go through your book, of course, which is not out yet.

02:28:29.000 It'll be out February 8th.

02:28:31.000 February 8th.

02:28:32.000 And it's called Sickening, How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and How We Can Repair It.

02:28:39.000 Anything else to add to this, John?

02:28:41.000 No, thank you for the opportunity.

02:28:42.000 My pleasure.

02:28:43.000 And thank you for all your hard work and putting this together.

02:28:45.000 It's much, much appreciated.

02:28:47.000 And, you know, I think slowly over time with conversations like this with you and with people reading your book and getting the kind of information that you worked so hard to put out, we're going to get a better sense of what's going on.

02:28:58.000 Because I think it's very hard for people, as it was, you know, for you being, you know, a young doctor and learning this kind of the hard way.

02:29:07.000 And piecing it together.

02:29:07.000 And I really, really appreciate that you did that.

02:29:10.000 So thank you very much.

02:29:11.000 Thank you, sir.

02:29:12.000 Go get it, folks.

02:29:13.000 It'll be out February 8th, and I will put this on my Instagram and let everybody know.

02:29:17.000 Thank you, John.

02:29:18.000 Thank you so much.

02:29:19.000 All right.

02:29:19.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 30, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1756 - John Abramson

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