The Joe Rogan Experience

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

00:00:16.000 Welcome to America.

00:00:18.000 It's great to be here, like, my 25th time.

00:00:21.000 25th time recently?

00:00:23.000 No, I mean, I was last here in November, actually.

00:00:27.000 Yeah, I was here in November.

00:00:29.000 But I have, you know, my closest family outside my immediate family, who unfortunately have all passed away now, are in California.

00:00:36.000 So, you know, since I was a kid, I'd probably come over and meet them and, you know, come over to San Jose and, like, every other year.

00:00:43.000 So, for people who don't know who you are and what you do, could you please just tell us your credentials and what your occupation is?

00:00:51.000 Yeah, so I'm a consultant cardiologist.

00:00:54.000 I qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland in 2001, so I've been a practicing physician now for well over 20 years.

00:01:01.000 My initial early career, Joe, is I specialized in interventional cardiology.

00:01:06.000 So in layman's terms, that's keyhole heart surgery, stents, if you like.

00:01:10.000 And then over the past few years, for different reasons, which we'll probably get into, I focused more of my work on prevention.

00:01:19.000 And how did you become this controversial COVID character?

00:01:24.000 Well, it's interesting.

00:01:26.000 I think controversy with me probably started many years ago.

00:01:32.000 Probably I became sort of, I broke into the mainstream around sort of 2011 initially because I wrote an article which was a front page commentary in the Observer newspaper, which is part of the Guardian Group in the UK. Basically, as the cardiologist was saying,

00:01:48.000 you know, why are we serving junk food to my patients in hospitals?

00:01:53.000 And that was after I'd met with Jamie Oliver, who I'd written to.

00:01:56.000 So that's how I kind of started campaigning on the issues around obesity at that point.

00:02:00.000 And not long after that, Joe, I then went into a deep dive to try and understand why we had an obesity epidemic, so what was driving that, what was the role of cholesterol in heart disease, overprescription of statin,

00:02:16.000 saturated fat, and essentially that culminated me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013, October, Basically, which was titled, saturated fat is not the major issue, and suggesting we should be focusing on sugar.

00:02:28.000 We got it wrong on saturated fat.

00:02:29.000 We're over-medicating millions of people on statins.

00:02:32.000 Cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease.

00:02:36.000 And that's really where I sort of broke into the mainstream.

00:02:41.000 BMJ Press released it.

00:02:42.000 It was front page of three British newspapers.

00:02:44.000 I was on Fox News Chicago, CNN International.

00:02:47.000 And that's really when I started my kind of activism and to try and fight back against medical misinformation and a kind of deep understanding that what was driving poor health for many, many people was biased and corrupted information that was coming from two big industries,

00:03:06.000 big food and big pharma.

00:03:08.000 And that's fairly controversial still today but backed up by data now.

00:03:15.000 The talk about saturated fat and the fact that sugar is terrible for you.

00:03:19.000 Now that we know because the New York Times published that expose of those initial scientists that were bribed, I believe it was in the 50s or the 60s.

00:03:31.000 Do you know the whole story?

00:03:32.000 Yeah.

00:03:32.000 Of course you do.

00:03:33.000 Where they were basically given about $50,000, which is not that much money, to ruin everyone's idea of what's good and bad for you.

00:03:43.000 Because they demonized saturated fat in order to preserve sugar.

00:03:49.000 They were paid off by the sugar industry to do this.

00:03:52.000 Yeah, absolutely, Joe.

00:03:53.000 That's really the heart of the problem.

00:03:56.000 I would describe it as the corporate capture of medicine and public health.

00:04:00.000 And it's been going on for decades.

00:04:02.000 Yet, I think only now, and certainly we'll get into it around the COVID vaccine stuff, I think only now more people are really becoming aware of it.

00:04:10.000 And I think one of the things I discovered when I looked into the whole issue about saturated fat and sugar, etc., Is, you know, in the sort of 50s, 60s and 70s, there were two scientists who were really at war around what was driving heart disease because heart disease really started to increase in the United States from 1920 and peaked around 1960 and 1970 in terms of death rates from coronary artery disease.

00:04:32.000 And Ancel Keys was the American physiologist from Minnesota who said that saturated fat was a culprit.

00:04:39.000 And then there was John Yudkin, who was a British endocrinologist, nutrition scientist, who basically said that it's sugar.

00:04:48.000 But because the sugar industry was so powerful, they were able to put all of their resources and energy into supporting Ancel Keys, who did take money from the sugar industry, who later emerged.

00:04:57.000 And silence John Yudkin.

00:04:59.000 And for decades we were under his false belief that it was saturated fat that was a big culprit in heart disease.

00:05:04.000 And the other thing to add into this, which wasn't fully accepted or known at the time, was the now acknowledgement of the impact of smoking.

00:05:15.000 So, you know, it was, it took about 50 years between the first links between smoking and lung cancer that were published in the British Medical Journal before we had any effective regulation on tobacco control, you know, tobacco control interventions, government interventions.

00:05:33.000 And now we know that when you look at the decline in death rates, specifically death rates from heart disease, in the last four or five decades, almost half of that, Joe, can be attributed to reduction in smoking.

00:05:49.000 So these are things that weren't really fully accepted and understood at the time.

00:05:53.000 And the reason for that, and this is really interesting, is the tobacco industry adopted a corporate playbook You know, I call it a dirty tricks corporate playbook of planting doubt, the cigarettes were harmful, confusing the public, denial,

00:06:09.000 and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists.

00:06:13.000 So when there was people, doctors and public health advocates saying smoking is a problem with the heart, scientists were paid to write articles in medical journals saying it's not smoking, it's stress.

00:06:23.000 People who smoke are more stressed and it's nothing to do with the cigarettes.

00:06:26.000 So, you know, this is history repeating itself in a way.

00:06:29.000 And denialism, and this is another thing I find quite fascinating.

00:06:33.000 I mentioned this in some of my lectures as well.

00:06:36.000 As late on as 1994, the CEOs of every major tobacco firm went in front of US Congress and swore under oath they did not believe nicotine was addictive or smoking caused lung cancer.

00:06:50.000 Right?

00:06:51.000 So, you know, all of that was thrown in.

00:06:53.000 So once I kind of, as a practicing cardiologist, as a regular frontline jobbing doctor who was seeing, since I qualified, more and more people getting sick, more chronic disease, I started to think, hold on, is there something we're doing wrong as a medical profession?

00:07:07.000 Are we giving the wrong advice?

00:07:09.000 What's actually going on here?

00:07:10.000 And when I did that deep dive and went into the root cause of it, I then realized that, you know, the system, unfortunately, had become increasingly corrupted.

00:07:19.000 Over many, many years by these powerful commercial entities whose only interest for legal reasons is to abuse profit for shareholders, not to look after your health.

00:07:31.000 Yeah, that's all they really are responsible for.

00:07:34.000 When you did this and you started to talk about diet and health and the misconceptions or misinformation about diet and health, what was the pushback like?

00:07:48.000 It was huge.

00:07:50.000 I think, you know, for me...

00:07:53.000 So when I published a piece in the British Medical Journal, so it was October 23rd, I'll never forget this, 2013. It got a lot of attention.

00:08:03.000 At this stage, I'm what we call a specialist registrar in cardiology.

00:08:07.000 So I'm not a consultant.

00:08:09.000 I'm not top of my grade yet.

00:08:10.000 I'm finishing my training.

00:08:12.000 I'm almost a fully-fledged cardiologist.

00:08:15.000 I'm doing intervention, keyhole art surgery.

00:08:18.000 And the first thing that happened to me, Joe, which I haven't really spoke about publicly before, is, imagine, front page of three British newspapers, a lot of attention, and a lot of people were happy because suddenly, you know, the front page headline was, butter is back.

00:08:32.000 Cardiologist says, eating butter does not cause heart disease, right?

00:08:35.000 I know that brings a smile to your face, and I know why.

00:08:37.000 I mean, you know, who doesn't like eating butter?

00:08:39.000 But it was true.

00:08:40.000 It was what the facts told us at the time.

00:08:41.000 So I published this stuff.

00:08:43.000 But I also, what I did at the time, In that 800-word editorial, I basically also went for one of the most prescribed drugs in the history of medicine, which are statin drugs.

00:08:55.000 Because I had to make the link of everything.

00:08:56.000 So if saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, but we know saturated fat can raise cholesterol, that means cholesterol isn't that important.

00:09:04.000 And if cholesterol isn't that important, why are we giving all these people statin?

00:09:08.000 So I was able to scientifically and rationally put all that jigsaw together.

00:09:13.000 And in that piece, one of the things I wrote is I said that the side effects of statins are underrepresented in clinical trials.

00:09:22.000 And the side effects usually are things like muscle aches and fatigue.

00:09:25.000 And this was also part of my clinical experience as a cardiologist.

00:09:28.000 I was seeing way more people, anecdotally, although I've managed tens of thousands of people in my career in terms of patients, I was seeing way more people with side effects from statins I had diagnosed than what was actually in the published literature, what was coming through in the medical journals where doctors were being told side effects are rare,

00:09:45.000 less than 1% chance of getting fatigue or muscle symptoms.

00:09:48.000 I was seeing about 20% and there was a reference that I used in my article which suggested a recent study in the community in the United States which suggested that one in five patients probably get side effects from statins.

00:10:04.000 Can I stop you for a second?

00:10:05.000 Yes.

00:10:05.000 Is it because those side effects, fatigue, muscle soreness, things like that were fairly mild?

00:10:12.000 Is that why they were underreported?

00:10:14.000 Great question.

00:10:15.000 So now we know the reason.

00:10:17.000 So first and foremost, when a patient complains about side effects, I ask them, is this interfering with your quality of life?

00:10:25.000 So, if they say yes, by definition, from their perspective, it's not mild.

00:10:29.000 It's something that's really just making them feel pretty, pardon my language, shitty.

00:10:33.000 But the reason, Joe, that they were not reported, and that came out later on, this is something I didn't know as a medical student, as a qualified doctor, as a specialist.

00:10:45.000 Is, until then, is a lot of the clinical trials that are conducted that drive guidelines, these randomized trials where you give patients, you know, one group gets the statin and one group gets a dummy pill and they don't know whether they're getting the dummy pill or the statin and then they're followed up and you see whether they have less heart attacks and what side effects they get.

00:11:05.000 Is that there's something called the pre-randomization running period.

00:11:09.000 So before the trial actually starts, people are enrolled.

00:11:13.000 And then if you get side effects, you are taken out of the trial before it starts.

00:11:19.000 So what happens is the end result of those trials is therefore biased towards people who didn't get side effects.

00:11:29.000 And then even then, you know, so there's a big under-reporting issue now.

00:11:33.000 And they have no responsibility to report the people that were removed that also got side effects?

00:11:38.000 Well, so what they do is very interesting.

00:11:40.000 They get around it.

00:11:41.000 It's slightly sneaky.

00:11:43.000 In one of these trials called the Heart Protection Study, 36,000 people were removed from the trial before it began, one of the largest statin trials.

00:11:49.000 And what they did was they mentioned this, but they said they used the word non-compliant, suggesting that the patients didn't take the pills.

00:11:58.000 Oh, wow.

00:11:59.000 But that doesn't make sense because if you're going to enroll into a trial, Joe, you're probably going to be someone who's enthusiastic to be part of this trial.

00:12:07.000 So they use this broad umbrella term non-compliance.

00:12:10.000 And some of them may well have been non-compliant.

00:12:12.000 People say, I don't really want to take a pill.

00:12:14.000 I've been taking this for weeks now, whatever.

00:12:16.000 But actually, later on, when you look at real-world data, you know, certainly in the United States, a larger study called a statin survey done in the United States basically reveals that within about a year of people being prescribed statins, 75% of them will stop taking it.

00:12:31.000 And when you ask them why, 62% of those 75% that stopped taking it said they got my side effects.

00:12:37.000 So there's a huge discrepancy there.

00:12:39.000 So I was using my clinical experience, understanding how the trials are run.

00:12:43.000 I wrote this piece, and this is really fascinating, Joe.

00:12:46.000 So I'll get on to the second part of this in a second.

00:12:51.000 At the same time, John Abramson, who I know you've interviewed, he wrote a piece in the BMJ at exactly the same time as me, which was specifically about, should we be giving more people statins?

00:13:04.000 So people at what we call low risk of heart disease, which would essentially mean, because there were mutterings from guideline bodies saying, maybe we should give more people statins to prevent heart attacks.

00:13:14.000 And what that would have meant in reality, Joe, if it was taken up, We're good to go.

00:13:34.000 And it was an analysis of the data, proper rigorously, you know, and both our piece, my piece was peer reviewed, so was his.

00:13:40.000 And in his article, he basically said, listen, if you're low risk of heart disease, then your risk of the benefit of statins is really, really negligible.

00:13:51.000 About one in 140 chance of it preventing you having a heart attack or a non-fatal heart attack or a non-disabling stroke over five years based upon industry-sponsored data still.

00:14:03.000 So there's still a bias there, but even when you look at that, it's still very marginal.

00:14:06.000 It will not prolong your life.

00:14:07.000 But he also referenced the same reference I put in, saying from a community study, actually one in five people get disabling side effects.

00:14:15.000 I'm going to come on to that story later because it's really interesting.

00:14:17.000 Disabling?

00:14:18.000 Yeah, disabling or debilitating.

00:14:21.000 Maybe debilitating or serious enough for them to feel not well.

00:14:24.000 Let's put it that way.

00:14:25.000 But yeah, it's semantics.

00:14:27.000 But yeah, it depends how you define it.

00:14:28.000 But I would say quality of life limiting, I think, is probably more accurate.

00:14:32.000 Is that how they defined it as non-compliant?

00:14:34.000 Because these people experience these side effects and they're like, I want to get out of the trial.

00:14:37.000 So that was non-compliance?

00:14:39.000 Yeah, I mean, they didn't specifically say that, but that's clearly probably what happened, most likely.

00:14:45.000 So he writes this piece.

00:14:46.000 We both reference the same side effect profile, which is massively more than all of what doctors have accepted or been told as gospel truth from all these big impact medical journals.

00:14:57.000 But lots of things happen in terms of pushback.

00:14:59.000 So the first thing that happened to me is the very next day after I'm in the news, I get...

00:15:05.000 Well, actually, I'll tell you something more interesting.

00:15:07.000 So I go on CNN International.

00:15:09.000 So I'm a junior doctor at this point in the British National Health Service.

00:15:13.000 And I'm in the green room, about to go live on air for CNN, to debate with a professor, who I won't name, at Imperial College, who is a very big proponent of Stalin's.

00:15:25.000 And I'm about to go on air, and he basically, he meets me there, and he's like, he's almost frothing at the mouth.

00:15:32.000 He's really angry.

00:15:33.000 I'm really angry with what you did.

00:15:35.000 And I was like, I've never met this guy before.

00:15:37.000 And he started repeating this mantra, basically.

00:15:41.000 He basically said, for every one millimole lowering of LDL cholesterol, which is what statins do, you have a 20% reduction in heart attacks.

00:15:47.000 And he said almost like a religious mantra.

00:15:49.000 He kept saying the same thing again and again and again.

00:15:51.000 And I stayed calm.

00:15:53.000 I said, listen, you know, I think this merits debate.

00:15:55.000 I think there's a big problem of overprescription of statins.

00:15:57.000 I don't think that everybody should be taking statins.

00:15:59.000 I think it has a role in some people.

00:16:01.000 And he kind of calmed down.

00:16:02.000 We went on air.

00:16:03.000 And the discussion really focused on the fact that, you know, this cardiologist here is saying it's okay to have steak.

00:16:09.000 Do you agree with him?

00:16:10.000 And, you know, and the discussion ended up being quite reasonable.

00:16:14.000 But I got a little bit of a kind of like, you know, I felt almost there was a veil threat.

00:16:18.000 You know, this guy's a very powerful guy.

00:16:20.000 You know, in the cardiology community, in the scientific community in London, everybody kind of knows each other.

00:16:26.000 You know, this kind of person, things could happen where people like that could potentially, you know, have conversations and wreck your career.

00:16:32.000 But I was, you know, for me, I'm just committed to the truth.

00:16:35.000 So I kind of, you know, I didn't know what was coming.

00:16:38.000 The very next day, in my hospital, I get a phone call, and I just started working there a couple of weeks earlier as what we call an interventional fellow.

00:16:46.000 So I was the main guy who was being trained up to be the next, what we call, interventional cardiologist.

00:16:52.000 So they choose people I was selected in this university hospital to be the guy that essentially does the procedures and operations with supervision to become completely independent.

00:17:01.000 And I was doing, you know, I started doing stents and doing stuff independently, and I was good at it.

00:17:06.000 So I get a phone call from the secretary of the medical director and she says, you know, Dr. So-and-so, I won't name him, you know, would like to meet you.

00:17:19.000 And I just got a feeling that it wouldn't be good.

00:17:21.000 And I spoke to, you know, when I published this piece, because this, it's called Croydon University Hospital, went in the news, a lot of the staff were really proud.

00:17:30.000 Like, I had, you know, the nurses and secretaries coming up to me and saying, thank you, well done, it's so great to see this in the news, and we're really proud of you, and you represent a hospital and this kind of stuff.

00:17:40.000 And I said, well, the medical director wants to see me.

00:17:43.000 He said, oh, no, I'm sure he wants to congratulate you.

00:17:46.000 And I wasn't quite sure.

00:17:48.000 So I go up to his office.

00:17:50.000 Never met this guy before.

00:17:52.000 He opens the door, doesn't shake my hand.

00:17:55.000 He's literally red in the face.

00:17:58.000 And he says, come in, sit down.

00:18:01.000 I sit down.

00:18:03.000 And he looks at me and he says, do you know your duties as a doctor?

00:18:08.000 I've been speaking to the General Medical Council about you.

00:18:11.000 Now just for the audience here, General Medical Council are the regulatory body that control doctors' licenses to practice.

00:18:18.000 They can remove your license to practice, right?

00:18:20.000 And I'm sitting there going, okay.

00:18:23.000 He says...

00:18:25.000 Tell me, what have you done?

00:18:27.000 You know, I've read this article and this is a tweet here, you know, saying that statins are overprescribed, blah, blah.

00:18:33.000 And I talked him through it and he goes, are you telling me that our nurses can tell our cardiac patients that they can eat butter?

00:18:42.000 Now, it sounds ridiculous, Joe, now, right?

00:18:45.000 But he was really serious about this.

00:18:46.000 So I calmly just spoke, said, listen, this is a thing that got me.

00:18:51.000 I said, listen, I've written this in the British Medical Journal, one of the highest-impact medical journals in the world.

00:18:55.000 This was peer-reviewed, and I think there is a scientific case here.

00:18:59.000 And I just talked to him, you know, without getting emotional.

00:19:04.000 And it was really interesting.

00:19:06.000 By the end of the conversation, he said to me, he said, I very much hope that in 10 years from now, I can tell my grandkids that I sat opposite the man, the cardiologist that busted the myth of saturated fat causing heart disease.

00:19:21.000 Wow.

00:19:22.000 Right?

00:19:23.000 So you turned him?

00:19:24.000 I did.

00:19:26.000 So I did.

00:19:27.000 I felt I did turn him.

00:19:28.000 I thought, okay, you know, this is a power of the truth and you stand your ground and you talk respectfully to people and you can potentially turn them.

00:19:36.000 What happened over the next few months, though, was something I never could have predicted, but really shaped me in many ways to be the person I am today.

00:19:48.000 This story had legs, so it kept dragging on in terms of, you know, there was a lot more stories now in interest about butter and saturated fat.

00:19:56.000 In fact, there was a front page, I don't know if you remember this, Time magazine.

00:19:59.000 There was a 2014, there was a front page story, It's Butter Back?, And it was triggered by my article because a journalist called me and spoke to me.

00:20:06.000 I wasn't quoting the article in the end, but he said, listen, we're going to look into this.

00:20:09.000 And they got lots of different nutritional scientists and made the case that butter was fine, probably okay in terms of heart disease.

00:20:15.000 But what happened after that was because I'd also attacked statins, you know, and of course a huge industry, I think, well, let's just try and give some context here, Joe.

00:20:26.000 The statin industry, or the cholesterol-lowering industry, I mean, it's a trillion-dollar industry.

00:20:30.000 There's a lot of money, a lot of people make money from the fear of cholesterol and the prescription of statins.

00:20:35.000 In fact, there's estimates now that globally, in terms of prescriptions, up to one billion people I prescribe statin drugs.

00:20:44.000 In the United States, it's at least 30 million people taking them, probably more.

00:20:48.000 So I had really said essentially that most of those people don't need to take the statin.

00:20:53.000 And more than that, I said we should tell patients honestly and break down the information the way they can understand and say, listen, if you're low risk of heart disease, you haven't had a heart attack, Your benefit of statin is 1%, right?

00:21:06.000 And when you tell people that, most people, Joe, don't want to take the pill anyway.

00:21:09.000 So I said, this is about ethics and evidence-based medicine.

00:21:11.000 So I kept that discussion going.

00:21:14.000 And then one of the cardiologists, the lead cardiologist in the department, he came up to me one day, a couple of months later, and said, listen, I think I was on Channel 4 News talking about it or something.

00:21:23.000 And he said, listen, you know, I respect your opinion, blah, blah, blah.

00:21:26.000 However, you can't keep saying this publicly.

00:21:30.000 And if you do, then there may be an issue about your job here.

00:21:34.000 So I kind of thought, okay, well, and I'm not saying anything wrong.

00:21:37.000 Something else came up.

00:21:38.000 I was quoted in another article.

00:21:40.000 And then, you know, I had had a job in this place, Joe, for one year.

00:21:44.000 This is my interventional fellowship, you know, doing the specialist training, final stages to being an interventional cardiologist.

00:21:52.000 And I then got a letter out of the blue four months into the job saying that we have decided to discontinue your fellowship and you've got two months notice.

00:22:05.000 Was there any reason?

00:22:06.000 No, but it was clearly because of this.

00:22:09.000 They don't have to give you a specific thing that you violated?

00:22:12.000 No, there was no reason.

00:22:14.000 Because the thing is, and I don't say this to blow my own trumpet, I've always prided myself on my clinical care.

00:22:21.000 In over 20 years, which is unusual, and I'm sure some of it's luck, I've never received a single complaint from a patient.

00:22:27.000 And I get on with my colleagues and the staff and everything.

00:22:30.000 So there was no reason, but he basically said to me, off the record, it was because of this.

00:22:34.000 And clearly someone higher up had had a conversation, I suspect, right?

00:22:39.000 A journalist who's a Guardian journalist who I knew also when I told him about this at the beginning, he said, Asim, you know, just be careful because, you know, I've seen this happen before.

00:22:49.000 You know, the pharma companies are very powerful and someone will just need one phone call to the CEO and they'll say, shut this guy up.

00:22:55.000 And we'll get onto other stuff later that's been quite similar.

00:22:58.000 But yeah, sorry, go on.

00:22:59.000 But can you please tell us, like, what is the mechanism?

00:23:02.000 How do statins work?

00:23:03.000 And what does it do to lower cholesterol?

00:23:06.000 Yeah.

00:23:07.000 So for many years, there's been this misconception that high cholesterol is one of the most...

00:23:16.000 One of the most important risk factors for development of heart disease.

00:23:20.000 So I broke down the data and I've published a lot on this stuff to look at it properly.

00:23:24.000 And Joe, the association of cholesterol and heart disease came from something called the Framingham Study, which was in Massachusetts, started in 1948, carried on for several decades, where they followed up 5,000 people.

00:23:38.000 And many risk factors for heart disease came from that correlations, which were then validated, like things like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, even smoking.

00:23:46.000 And high cholesterol.

00:23:48.000 Now, what's interesting about framing them is when you look at the associations of total cholesterol and heart disease, it was only there when your total cholesterol, the significant association, was only there if it was over 300 milligrams per deciliter.

00:24:03.000 Very few people have total cholesterol that high.

00:24:06.000 And we have to also understand that most of your cholesterol is genetic.

00:24:10.000 80% of your cholesterol is genetic.

00:24:12.000 80%?

00:24:13.000 80%.

00:24:13.000 Because cholesterol is a really important molecule in the body.

00:24:16.000 It's important for maintaining cell membranes.

00:24:21.000 It's an important role in the immune system.

00:24:24.000 Hormones.

00:24:24.000 Hormones, vitamin D synthesis, all of that stuff, right?

00:24:27.000 So it's genetic.

00:24:28.000 You can alter it with your diet, the components of it, something called triglycerides and HDL, so-called good cholesterol, right?

00:24:34.000 So the total cholesterol was not a very good indicator.

00:24:37.000 So if it was very, very high, there was association.

00:24:39.000 But what's interesting about that is almost all of those people had a genetic condition which gave them very, very high levels of cholesterol.

00:24:45.000 It's called familial hyperlipidemia.

00:24:47.000 It affects one in 250 people, right?

00:24:51.000 And then at the very other end, from Framingham, the very low levels of cholesterol, less than 150 milligrams per deciliter, or 4 millimoles in European terminology, there was almost no heart disease.

00:25:01.000 So again, there's genetic factors there.

00:25:03.000 So basically, people with genetically low cholesterol tend to not develop premature heart disease.

00:25:09.000 Another interesting caveat, most of that data on the development of heart disease was only up to people who were 50 or 60. And what wasn't publicized is that once you hit 50, as your cholesterol dropped in Framingham, your mortality rate increased.

00:25:25.000 Never really discussed.

00:25:26.000 So I looked at all of this, so that's interesting.

00:25:28.000 But I think the thing that really sort of was a nail in the coffin for me in understanding the association of cholesterol and heart disease was very weak, was William Castelli, who was one of the co-directors of Framingham, a cardiologist, in 1996 did a full summary of Framingham.

00:25:45.000 And he said this, he said, unless you're, because, you know, you're going to talk about, you may be thinking, okay, hold on, there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

00:25:52.000 So he specifically focused on what we call LDL, bad cholesterol.

00:25:55.000 And he said, unless your LDL cholesterol is above 7.8 millimoles per liter, which is something like, Joe, it's probably, yeah, at least 300, pretty much around 300 milligrams per deciliter.

00:26:09.000 It has no value in isolation in predicting heart disease.

00:26:12.000 So what they determined from framing them was your risk of heart disease as one of the risk factors was your total cholesterol divided by your HDL, the good cholesterol, the ratio.

00:26:24.000 So that's the first thing.

00:26:27.000 So the association of cholesterol and heart disease is quite weak, first and foremost.

00:26:30.000 The second question is, when you try and prove that there is a biomarker that is causal in heart disease, you want to show that if you lower it, then there is a difference in heart attacks and strokes, for example.

00:26:43.000 And only in 2019, more recently, I co-authored a paper in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine with two other cardiologists, and what we did was we looked at all the drug trials at lowering cholesterol, To find out,

00:26:58.000 is this true?

00:26:59.000 When you look at it in totality, not cherry-picked evidence, is there a correlation with lowering LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol and preventing heart attacks and strokes?

00:27:07.000 And this is based upon randomized controlled trial data.

00:27:09.000 So this is the most robust evidence you can get.

00:27:12.000 Joe, no clear correlation.

00:27:13.000 It was BS. The whole thing was BS in that sense.

00:27:16.000 Like, it's very weak, if anything.

00:27:19.000 So that means, so then the next question is, well, hold on, how do statins work?

00:27:23.000 And that's the question you asked me earlier.

00:27:25.000 And it's a great question.

00:27:26.000 It's a really important one.

00:27:27.000 Statins do have a small benefit, but one of the properties of statins, which isn't talked about, is they have anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting benefits.

00:27:36.000 So even though they lower LDL cholesterol, the real benefit in preventing heart attacks and strokes is through that mechanism.

00:27:44.000 But when you break it down, as I said before, your risk is, you know, the benefits are about 1% if you're low risk of heart disease.

00:27:50.000 But if you've had a heart attack, and many patients I see have had heart attacks and they automatically put on statins, And the cardiologists rarely even check their cholesterol, because in the cardiology community, we kind of knew that.

00:27:59.000 It was like, it doesn't matter what your cholesterol is, let's put them on a statin, because the trials show there are benefits.

00:28:04.000 But what are those benefits when you break them down in absolute terms?

00:28:07.000 This is really crucial and important.

00:28:09.000 And this isn't cherry-pick stuff.

00:28:10.000 This is what all the evidence shows, and it's been peer-reviewed, etc., If you've had a heart attack, the patient comes to me, Doc, shall I carry on this statin or I've been put on this statin or I'm getting side effects?

00:28:20.000 I say to him, listen, let me just explain to you the benefits first so that you don't have an exaggerated fear of stopping your statin and you also don't go around with the illusion of protection thinking that's the only thing I need to do now.

00:28:34.000 Over a five-year period, if you take your statin religiously and don't get side effects, right?

00:28:39.000 Because remember, the trials took out people with side effects.

00:28:42.000 So best case scenario, your benefit of a statin is 1 in 83 for saving your life.

00:28:50.000 Right?

00:28:51.000 And one in 39 in preventing a further heart attack.

00:28:54.000 A lot of people find that quite underwhelming.

00:28:58.000 Another way of looking at the statistics, Joe, and this is important for populations, looking at those trials.

00:29:04.000 And what I'm about to tell you, when I talk at conferences to doctors and general practitioners, and there's like a gasp from the audience, right, when I tell them this.

00:29:12.000 And this is published in the BMJ. So in the randomized trials, you look at an average.

00:29:18.000 If I ask you that question, right, you've had a heart attack, let's say for example, and statins are one of the most prescribed drugs or the, you know, miracle cure or whatever, one of the most potent beneficial drugs in the history of medicine.

00:29:31.000 If you take a statin for five years, having had a heart attack, in that five-year period, how much would you think or hope it would add to your life expectancy?

00:29:42.000 You've literally survived a heart attack, right?

00:29:45.000 And now you've been given this pill, which your doctor is telling you, you must never stop.

00:29:48.000 This is going to save your life.

00:29:49.000 How much would you hope it would add to your life expectancy over a five-year period, over that period?

00:29:54.000 You know, we can incrementally.

00:29:55.000 25%, 30%.

00:29:57.000 Yeah.

00:29:57.000 Okay.

00:29:58.000 So a few years.

00:29:58.000 I've had a few years extra.

00:29:59.000 Yeah?

00:30:00.000 Want the answer?

00:30:01.000 Yes.

00:30:02.000 Just over four days.

00:30:05.000 Four days?

00:30:06.000 Four days.

00:30:08.000 Maybe those are great days, though.

00:30:10.000 Well, no, fair enough.

00:30:11.000 Absolutely.

00:30:13.000 And the reason I'm mentioning that is when you look back over the last few decades and people talk about what has driven down death rates from heart disease, there's this assumption it's been the mass prescription of statins.

00:30:26.000 Millions of people are taking statins.

00:30:28.000 But the evidence suggests there's a separate analysis done.

00:30:31.000 They looked in European countries, high-risk and low-risk people of heart disease over 12 years.

00:30:34.000 Was there a reduction in heart disease death rates because of statins?

00:30:39.000 And the answer was no.

00:30:40.000 And that doesn't mean that the data is fraudulent.

00:30:43.000 It's been misrepresented.

00:30:45.000 But if you accept, say it's a four-day increase, right?

00:30:48.000 But these are in people who didn't get side effects who were adherent to statins.

00:30:52.000 And real world data tells us, Joe, even people who've had heart attacks, maybe 50% of them will stop taking it just within a few years, mainly because of side effects.

00:31:00.000 You can understand why that hasn't had an impact on the population.

00:31:04.000 But think about that.

00:31:06.000 This is one of the most powerful, lucrative drugs in the history of medicine.

00:31:12.000 And this is how marginal, let's be polite here, how marginal the benefits are.

00:31:19.000 Now, once this information has been out there, and it's been published, and you've had these talks, and people are aware of this, what has been the reaction?

00:31:30.000 And has there been any change in how it's prescribed?

00:31:34.000 So after this publication, the BMJ initially, and then I had to get another job, right?

00:31:42.000 So I lost that job in that hospital.

00:31:44.000 I then ended up working for free, briefly, in another NHS hospital, cardiology department there.

00:31:48.000 I worked for free.

00:31:50.000 Doing one day a week because I had another role with health policy, which I'll come on to, you know, that they were paying me some money and I didn't want to stop seeing patients.

00:31:58.000 So I was working for free in one hospital for a year in a cardiology department.

00:32:04.000 In sort of March 2014, I got a phone call, in fact an email initially, from the editor of the British Medical Journal.

00:32:14.000 And she said, Asim, you know, let's have a meeting.

00:32:18.000 I think I went to meet her.

00:32:18.000 And she said, there is a man called Professor Sir Rory Collins.

00:32:23.000 Professor Rory Collins is probably considered in the world the lead statin researcher.

00:32:29.000 He's at Oxford University.

00:32:30.000 He got his knighthood from the queen because of his work on statins.

00:32:35.000 He has said that you need to retract Abramson and Malhotra's papers because there is a significant error on the side effect issue and this is going to cause harm.

00:32:44.000 People are going to stop their statins.

00:32:46.000 And she said straight away, no, I'm not going to retract it, but we're very happy if you would like to send a critique in and we'll publish it.

00:32:53.000 But for some reason he decided he didn't want to do that.

00:32:55.000 So this back and forth was going on and then out of the blue he decides, whether it was him or somebody else, to go to The Guardian newspaper.

00:33:03.000 And I get a phone call from The Guardian and the BBC, which again was headline news, that what Abramson and Malhotra had done, which became a news story, front page of The Guardian, was so damaging in terms of their error on the statin side effects issue that people will die,

00:33:20.000 essentially.

00:33:20.000 This is almost as bad as they were trying to make parallels with Andrew Wakefield and the whole measles, mumps, rubella issue that happened many, many years ago.

00:33:30.000 That was the scientist that lost his license because he linked the MMR vaccine to autism, right?

00:33:35.000 So they were trying to create that kind of frenzy.

00:33:37.000 And I'm like, whoa, this is okay.

00:33:39.000 So I went on BBC and I stood my ground.

00:33:43.000 And that, I think, put the BMJ under pressure.

00:33:47.000 And then the next thing that happens is, I remember I was with my cousin in New York, I'll never forget this, and I get an email, a press release from the BMJ, which I knew was gonna, you know, and this is, to be honest, it's an attack on one's credibility.

00:33:59.000 But the BMJ then decided they were going to send our articles for an independent review whether or not they should be retracted.

00:34:07.000 Joe, just to put things in context here, that's potentially career destroying in the sense that if my article got retracted, it got so much publicity And I genuinely believe what I said was correct, but it gets retracted.

00:34:18.000 Then your credibility is undermined pretty much forever.

00:34:21.000 And your careers, you know, it would be career destroying for me.

00:34:24.000 I'm at the beginning of my career.

00:34:26.000 So I was on trial, essentially, for two months, if you like.

00:34:29.000 And, you know, that was, it was tough.

00:34:32.000 It was very, very tough.

00:34:34.000 There was a panel, they convened, they asked me to, you know, send in responses and then whatever else.

00:34:38.000 I didn't know what was going to happen.

00:34:40.000 And then I think it was August 2014. I remember it broke the news and it was, you know, I got an email and basically the panel had come back 6-0, unanimous in our favor.

00:34:50.000 Wow.

00:34:51.000 There was no call for retraction.

00:34:52.000 Because John Abramson went through a lot during that period as well.

00:34:55.000 I know you interviewed him.

00:34:56.000 Yes.

00:34:56.000 And we talked and whatever else.

00:34:58.000 When that happened, Joe, there were two things I could have done.

00:35:00.000 One was, wow, this is like too much.

00:35:02.000 I don't think I can handle this.

00:35:03.000 I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to hide away and just keep a low profile.

00:35:08.000 But I thought, no, you know what?

00:35:09.000 This is about ethical evidence-based medical practice.

00:35:12.000 There were some corrections that needed to be done, some caveats that they added in into the papers around the side effects issue.

00:35:19.000 So I carried on this campaign.

00:35:21.000 I carried on publishing in other journals, kept talking about transparent communication, ethical evidence-based medicine, statin over prescription.

00:35:27.000 There are other things we couldn't be doing in terms of lifestyle, right, which are going to be more powerful, you know, whether it's low-carb Mediterranean diet, exercise.

00:35:35.000 Why are we not focusing our attention there rather than just giving people...

00:35:38.000 All these pills that they think is going to protect them from heart attacks, and in most cases it doesn't.

00:35:43.000 And in that journey, and this went on for a few years, this is where things got really interesting.

00:35:50.000 So to answer your question, yes, there was a lot of backlash.

00:35:54.000 It was tough.

00:35:55.000 There was a bit of smearing going on.

00:35:57.000 But I realized then, you know, as a public health advocate, that You've got to have a thick skin and grow a rhinoceroside.

00:36:07.000 Those are the words from a man called Simon Chapman.

00:36:11.000 Simon Chapman is a professor of psychology in Australia.

00:36:15.000 He was considered the lead campaigner in making sure there was tobacco control in Australia.

00:36:20.000 He wrote a paper talking about his 38-year career in public health advocacy and gave 10 lessons.

00:36:25.000 One of those lessons is this.

00:36:28.000 As soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you will be attacked, sometimes unrelentingly and viciously.

00:36:38.000 So grow a rhinoceros hide.

00:36:40.000 And I thought, you know what, I'm up for it.

00:36:42.000 I'm up for it.

00:36:43.000 So many more people came out of the woodwork to support me.

00:36:45.000 Other doctors said, you're right.

00:36:47.000 And I thought, this is about truth and transparency.

00:36:50.000 About ethical medicine and highlighting all the corruption and the conflicts of interest.

00:36:55.000 One of the things that Professor Collins hadn't been made apparent is his department had taken over 200 million pounds at Oxford for doing research into statins from the drug industry and they also kept the data commercially confidential.

00:37:12.000 So most of the publications and guidelines that were coming on statins were emanating from that department where no one had been able to independently verify the data.

00:37:20.000 And he is quoted in The Guardian saying, only problematic side effects from statins affect 1 in 10,000 people.

00:37:28.000 So I thought this is something.

00:37:30.000 This doesn't add up.

00:37:31.000 I think these are biases, conflicts of interest.

00:37:33.000 I'm not saying that he was deliberately malicious, but I think there's a huge conflict of interest there that is clouding his judgment.

00:37:40.000 Plus, he's not a clinician.

00:37:41.000 He doesn't see patients.

00:37:42.000 So there's all of those things that I think limit his ability to really look at the evidence properly.

00:37:50.000 You really couldn't make this up, 2016. So he's campaigning saying side effects are almost non-existent.

00:37:54.000 I get a phone call from the Sunday Times journalist, a guy called John Ngo Thomas, great guy.

00:37:59.000 And he said, Asim, you won't believe what I found out.

00:38:03.000 Because the reason this came out in 2016, they decided to republish.

00:38:08.000 So what Colin said, he says, there's a lot of discussion about statins and side effects.

00:38:12.000 We're going to reanalyze our own data again.

00:38:14.000 And look into this.

00:38:15.000 So they published this piece in the Lancet in 2016 and they basically said the same thing again.

00:38:19.000 Side effects statins are rare, less than 1% maybe get some mild muscle aches, that kind of thing.

00:38:23.000 A week later this journalist calls me and he says, I found something really interesting.

00:38:30.000 What is it?

00:38:31.000 He said, in the United States there is a genetic test It's called Statin Smart, which is the company, Boston Heart Diagnostics is a company that is marketing this, has a license to market this product.

00:38:46.000 And on their website, the genetic test, the co-inventor of this genetic test is Professor Rory Collins.

00:38:55.000 And on their website, they're selling this test to basically try and figure out who's likely to get side effects.

00:39:00.000 So you do this test and it tells you whether or not you're likely to get side effects from specific statins or not.

00:39:06.000 And it says 29% of all statin users are likely to get significant muscle symptoms or side effects from statins.

00:39:14.000 Whoa!

00:39:15.000 And he did a Freedom of Information request to Oxford University.

00:39:18.000 I published on this with John Abramson, actually.

00:39:20.000 We did this in one of the paper we wrote later on.

00:39:23.000 And Oxford University came back and basically said that he asked them, how much money have you taken from selling this device?

00:39:30.000 And it was something in the order of the university had received £300,000 and Professor Collins's department had received about £100,000.

00:39:41.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:39:43.000 So, in one sense, he's saying side effects are non-existent.

00:39:46.000 Yeah, he's co-invented a test to try and detect who's liked to get side effects.

00:39:50.000 And on the website, it got taken down after that, interestingly.

00:39:52.000 You know, we published it and we highlighted this.

00:39:56.000 But it's like, hold on, they're kind of making money from both sides here.

00:39:59.000 And for me, it just highlighted, you know, this was all really, for me, like a symptom of a system failure where...

00:40:08.000 You know, there are all these concealed conflicts of interest.

00:40:12.000 People are being selective with the information they put out.

00:40:15.000 And ultimately, at the root of the problem, Joe, is that these big, powerful pharmaceutical companies, these corporations, have more and more control and unchecked power over these institutions.

00:40:26.000 There are conflicts of interest, but people don't know about it, right?

00:40:29.000 And when you tell people that story, when I give talks and lectures, and I bring that up, it's just pin-drop silence.

00:40:35.000 People are just shocked.

00:40:36.000 Some of them are angry.

00:40:37.000 They feel they've been deceived.

00:40:38.000 Like, how is this acceptable?

00:40:41.000 Yeah, how is it acceptable?

00:40:44.000 What has been the response after that?

00:40:48.000 So I think there's been a big shift.

00:40:50.000 I think more doctors are aware now.

00:40:53.000 Something unprecedented happened around that time.

00:40:56.000 Our health watchdog, National Institute of Clinical Excellence, had recommended that, after all this publicity, that general practitioners should be financially incentivized to prescribe statins for people at low risk of heart disease, even though this data was very clear.

00:41:12.000 And I'd been on the TV and carried on that campaign and talking about this stuff.

00:41:17.000 And the Union of General Practitioners, the British Medical Association's General Practitioners Committee, actually revolted.

00:41:24.000 This has never happened before.

00:41:24.000 And they said, no, we're not going to accept this.

00:41:26.000 And they had to make a U-turn.

00:41:28.000 So that, for me, was a victory based upon this sort of campaigning that I'd been part of.

00:41:35.000 But now, more recently...

00:41:38.000 With all these excess deaths that are happening, our chief medical officer a few months ago came out and suggested that one of the reasons there's been these excess cardiac deaths is because people aren't taking their statins, which was then refuted because Carl Hennigan, who's the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford,

00:41:55.000 he's non-conflicted.

00:41:56.000 They don't take any money from the industry.

00:41:58.000 Very rigorous guy in terms of the way he does his analysis and his department showed that that wasn't the case.

00:42:06.000 And, you know, I think that maybe was part of a distraction.

00:42:09.000 But there is still now a push again to get more people on statins.

00:42:13.000 And I suspect a lot of it is because, you know, if you think of the business model of the drug industry, it is to get as many people taking as many drugs as possible for as long as possible.

00:42:28.000 In 2018, I am asked to go to the Cambridge University Union by the BMJ to be part of a team to debate with AstraZeneca.

00:42:37.000 And I end up debating with the CEO of AstraZeneca.

00:42:39.000 And the motion put forward, which was debated in Cambridge University, was from them, we need more people taking more drugs.

00:42:48.000 That was their motion.

00:42:52.000 And it was just, yeah.

00:42:54.000 So that's their business model, Joe.

00:42:56.000 People need to understand what we're up against here.

00:42:58.000 But that isn't the solution to good health.

00:43:00.000 In fact, over-medicated population now is a public health crisis, even pre-pandemic.

00:43:06.000 One estimate from Peter Gosher, who's a co-founder of the very prestigious independent Cochrane Collaboration, In the BMJ suggests that the third most common cause of death now globally, after heart disease and cancer, is prescribed medications.

00:43:22.000 What your doctor prescribes for you, mainly because of avoidable side effects.

00:43:27.000 And these are avoidable because the decision-making and the prescription Often doesn't involve informed consent, and when you tell people the full benefits and harms in absolute terms of drugs, mostly they're more conservative, they're less likely to take the pills.

00:43:41.000 But also the information that doctors are using to make clinical decisions are based upon these industry-sponsored trials where they keep their data commercially confidential, which ultimately means that the safety and the benefits are grossly exaggerated.

00:43:59.000 Yeah, John Abramson explained to me how peer review is done on trials that are coming straight from pharmaceutical drug companies.

00:44:07.000 That you don't really get access to the data itself, you get access to the pharmaceutical companies analysis of that data.

00:44:15.000 Yes, that's absolutely true.

00:44:17.000 That sounds insane.

00:44:19.000 It is, completely insane.

00:44:20.000 Completely insane.

00:44:21.000 That sounds so obviously compromised.

00:44:24.000 It's not scientific, really.

00:44:26.000 It's not ethical.

00:44:27.000 And I'm a believer in true democracy.

00:44:30.000 It's not democratic.

00:44:31.000 When I tell my patients, I have conversations with my patients about this stuff all the time, and I just ask them what they think, and they're shocked.

00:44:37.000 Most doctors, even I, was not aware of this, Joe, until I really looked into it properly.

00:44:42.000 I was the conventional doctor doing his job, who took the publications in The Lancet, in the New England Journal of Medicine, as gospel truth.

00:44:53.000 Biblical gospel truth.

00:44:55.000 Never questioned it.

00:44:57.000 And now, I look to people like John Ioannidis, who you may be familiar with.

00:45:03.000 So he's a professor of medicine at Stanford.

00:45:05.000 He's the most cited medical researcher in the world.

00:45:09.000 He's considered a medical genius, very high in scientific integrity.

00:45:12.000 And he wrote a paper, 2006, I think it was, in PLOS One, which was entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

00:45:22.000 And one of the things he writes in there with his own mathematical modeling of the reliability of research, and this is fascinating, he says, the greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true.

00:45:38.000 Wow.

00:45:40.000 So, in your estimation, is this just a fundamental aspect of unchecked power and influence where the industry exists primarily to make money?

00:45:55.000 They provide these drugs.

00:45:58.000 Many of them are beneficial.

00:46:00.000 But their overall goal is not public health.

00:46:04.000 Their overall goal is making exorbitant amounts of money.

00:46:08.000 They have a responsibility to their shareholders.

00:46:11.000 They have a responsibility to the corporation.

00:46:13.000 And that responsibility is to make more money.

00:46:17.000 And they will do what it takes to do that, including compromising physicians, compromising researchers, compromising journals, And that this is just, there's not a lot of recourse.

00:46:32.000 For the person like yourself that steps out, you stick your neck out there and you get attacked.

00:46:38.000 And fortunately for you, you had all your bases covered and the data was so obvious that you were able to survive this.

00:46:48.000 But for the most part, most physicians, most doctors, most clinicians, they don't want to get involved in that.

00:46:56.000 And so they toe the line.

00:46:58.000 Yep.

00:46:58.000 I think you've hit the nail on the head.

00:47:00.000 So let's give it some context here as well.

00:47:03.000 So yes, legal responsibility to provide profit for shareholders, not to give you the best treatment.

00:47:09.000 But the real scandals are that those with a responsibility, Joe, to scientific integrity, academic institutions, doctors, medical journals, collude with industry for financial gain.

00:47:24.000 And quite often, and I know you discussed in detail around the whole Vioxx scandal with John, but quite often, the way that these big corporations operate as legal entities, I'm not pointing fingers at people within them.

00:47:39.000 I met Pascal Sauteris.

00:47:41.000 I had dinner with him, who's the CEO of AstraZeneca.

00:47:45.000 He even sent me a book afterwards to my home address.

00:47:48.000 He knows where I live, so I better be careful.

00:47:50.000 Yeah.

00:48:11.000 And he says that as these legal entities quite often in the way they conduct their business actually fulfill the criteria for psychopath.

00:48:17.000 So callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to experience guilt, deceitfulness, conning others for profit.

00:48:27.000 And we have precedent.

00:48:28.000 We have history of that.

00:48:29.000 Between 2003 and 2016, most of the top 10 drug companies paid fines totaling about $33 billion for illegal marketing of drugs, hiding data on harms, manipulation of results.

00:48:46.000 And, you know, and when those crimes were committed, in most cases, they end up making more profit from sales of the drugs than they do from the fines.

00:48:54.000 So there's no incentive to stop doing what they're doing.

00:48:57.000 And ultimately, you know, the patients suffer.

00:49:00.000 But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here because someone might say, well, hold on, Dr. Mahatra, but aren't the drug industry responsible for all these life-saving treatments and blah, blah, blah?

00:49:09.000 And yes, they are.

00:49:10.000 But the question is, what is the net effect of them?

00:49:13.000 So if you look at in the last 20 years, so I'll just give you some examples here.

00:49:18.000 Between 2000 and 2008, of the 667 drugs approved by the FDA, only 75% of them were found to be copies of old ones.

00:49:29.000 So the drug companies will change a few molecules here and there on an old drug, rebrand it, rename it, patent it, make lots of money, and then they move on to the next one.

00:49:37.000 So there's huge waste.

00:49:39.000 Only 11% of them were found to be truly innovative, as in a therapeutic clinical benefit over the previous drug.

00:49:44.000 So there's all this waste.

00:49:46.000 In France, Something similar.

00:49:49.000 Between 2000 and 2011, of almost 1,000 drugs were approved by their regulator.

00:49:55.000 Again, most of them were copies of old ones.

00:49:57.000 But about double the amount of drugs, Joe, 15% of those drugs were approved, were found to be more harmful than beneficial, compared to about 8% that were therapeutic benefits.

00:50:06.000 So what does that mean when you look at it in its totality with the waste and the harm?

00:50:09.000 The overall net effect of the drug industry, in my view, on society in the last two decades has been a negative one.

00:50:21.000 Wow.

00:50:22.000 That's hard to swallow.

00:50:24.000 And you know one of the reasons it's hard to swallow?

00:50:26.000 There's something socio-cultural which we don't talk enough about.

00:50:29.000 So a lot of people believe in medicine and think it's an exact science, but it's not an exact science.

00:50:36.000 It's an applied science.

00:50:37.000 It's a science of human beings.

00:50:39.000 It's a social science.

00:50:40.000 It's a constantly evolving science.

00:50:43.000 We're taught in medical school 50% of what you learn is going to turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation.

00:50:51.000 The trouble is nobody can tell you which half, so you have to learn to learn on your own.

00:50:56.000 And you have to stick your neck out because you're going against...

00:51:01.000 Whatever the narrative is.

00:51:02.000 You do, but that's, you know, ultimately for me, everything I do is motivated by that patient in front of me in the consultation room.

00:51:09.000 You know, that person suffered unnecessarily.

00:51:11.000 You didn't need to be there.

00:51:13.000 All of these external factors influence their health, whether it's an ultra processed food environment, whether it's a pill, taking a pill they don't need.

00:51:21.000 And we see that.

00:51:22.000 We now see that in the world.

00:51:25.000 United States, you've lost two years off your life expectancy in the last few years.

00:51:29.000 In the UK, since 2010, Joe, we've had a leveling off, a stalling of life expectancy and an increase in people living with chronic disease.

00:51:40.000 So for me as a doctor, I think to myself, hold on a minute.

00:51:43.000 You know, fine, this is multifactorial.

00:51:45.000 But if we as a profession collectively were doing everything right according to the best available evidence, why are our patients getting sicker?

00:51:53.000 Don't we have a responsibility to understand why and then do something about it?

00:51:59.000 Yeah, I would imagine you do.

00:52:01.000 So for me, that's what drives me.

00:52:04.000 And one of the things I was thinking about as well, I've come up with this new term, and it's a derivation of something called commercial determinants of health.

00:52:13.000 So I like this definition, commercial determinants of health are this, strategies and approaches adopted by the private sector to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health.

00:52:25.000 And that can apply to medications, it can apply to ultraprocess food, which is addictive for a lot of people.

00:52:33.000 But what I've come up with when you think about the drug industry and what Dr. Robert Hare talks about psychopathic is something called the psychopathic determinants of health.

00:52:42.000 You know, Richard Horton, who's the editor of the Lancet, actually came to one of my lectures in London recently, and then he referenced me talking about this in one of his pieces.

00:52:49.000 It wasn't a completely positive piece on me, I'll be honest with you.

00:52:52.000 It was a little bit of a subtle hatchet job.

00:52:54.000 But he talked about, you know, Malhotra talks about the psychopathic determinants of health.

00:52:59.000 If you think conceptually, Joe, we talk about these very powerful entities that have a big influence on our lives, and if they are psychopathic, It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that's going to have a downstream effect on society that's going to be negative.

00:53:15.000 Culturally.

00:53:17.000 People staying silent when they should be speaking up.

00:53:21.000 I've been contacted by doctors who agree with me privately but say I wouldn't say that.

00:53:26.000 Or...

00:53:27.000 And this is what we're having to deal with now.

00:53:31.000 They've got more power than they've ever had, I think, Joe, over our lives and influence.

00:53:35.000 And if a psychopathic entity has so much power and control over our lives, of course it's going to be negative.

00:53:43.000 And we need to basically fight back.

00:53:45.000 So this sort of established your hesitancy to just believe whatever the narrative that's being described by the industry, by the medical industry.

00:54:00.000 So you had questions.

00:54:03.000 Now coming into COVID, did you have those initial fears or questions about the vaccine?

00:54:16.000 At the very beginning, I had a little bit of skepticism about the efficacy of the vaccine because we know traditionally vaccines for respiratory viruses like influenza are not that great.

00:54:30.000 So with all of this knowledge and background knowledge, I honestly treated vaccines, or the word vaccine, like holy grail.

00:54:39.000 Despite all of this stuff around over-medicated population, all these pills people are taking, whether it's blood pressure pills they don't need, or statins, or even diabetes drugs that don't have much benefit for them, and come with side effects.

00:54:50.000 For me, still, within all of that, vaccines are amongst the safest.

00:54:53.000 So I never conceived of the possibility at all, actually, Yeah.

00:55:18.000 You know, I deferred to vaccine specialists and immunologists and people I thought that, you know, didn't probably have conflicts who were all saying this is fine.

00:55:26.000 So I hadn't looked at it in that much detail.

00:55:28.000 And I just made the presumption that this was going to be safe.

00:55:32.000 Don't know how effective it was going to be, but it was going to be safe.

00:55:34.000 And as a result, and some of it was also, you know, so during the COVID pandemic, I was very outspoken making the link between obesity and poor COVID outcomes.

00:55:45.000 In fact, to the point where, you know, I was getting pretty mad that there wasn't enough coverage on this.

00:55:49.000 Like, we've got this pandemic that affects, you know, disproportionately affects the elderly.

00:55:54.000 There's no doubt about it.

00:55:55.000 At the very beginning, it was particularly devastating for older people.

00:55:58.000 But there was like a thousand-fold gradient difference in risk if you were young versus old.

00:56:03.000 Like even now, even early on, you know, John Aedes, Jay Bhattacharya, they did these analyses essentially suggesting that for younger people, it was actually less lethal in the flu.

00:56:11.000 But for older people, very old people, it was quite bad at the beginning.

00:56:15.000 So I noticed this link with obesity and I said, listen, this is my work over many years.

00:56:20.000 One of the things I also advocate for is for people to understand that if you change your diet, just within a few weeks, depending where you're starting from, you can potentially even send your type 2 diabetes into remission.

00:56:31.000 You can reverse the most important risk factors for heart disease.

00:56:34.000 So I knew that if people were told that when this virus was, you know, when the pandemic started, this was an opportunity.

00:56:42.000 Actually, we already had this slow pandemic of chronic disease, which we hadn't effectively curbed anyway.

00:56:46.000 This is a great opportunity for government to say, listen, guys, now this is a time to sort your diet out, take vitamin D, you know, really just optimize your immune system.

00:56:56.000 And it wasn't happening.

00:56:57.000 So, but in all of that, I looked at all of the risk as well.

00:57:01.000 And it was clear that this was, you know, not very risky for people who were my age, you know.

00:57:08.000 I'm 45 now, so I was, what, 43?

00:57:12.000 You know, 42, 43 when the whole vaccine rollout started.

00:57:16.000 My father, who was a retired general practitioner, but vice president of the British Medical Association, very prominent doctor in the UK... He, and this gets into the emotional side a little bit, because, you know, I think this is relevant.

00:57:32.000 He was very keen that I take the vaccine.

00:57:34.000 And I think it was because he had an exaggerated fear for me, right?

00:57:39.000 Like many people had.

00:57:41.000 We'd lost our mother just a few years earlier.

00:57:43.000 I lost my brother when I was young.

00:57:45.000 So I was his only surviving immediate family member.

00:57:48.000 And he had this, and he was, I assume you need to take the vaccine.

00:57:50.000 No, please, please, please.

00:57:51.000 I said, Dad, you know, I don't really need it, you know.

00:57:53.000 No, no, no, take it, take it.

00:57:54.000 This went back and forth.

00:57:55.000 I said, okay, fine.

00:57:56.000 I'll have it.

00:57:57.000 But I thought anyway, as a doctor, I'm going to take it.

00:58:00.000 I'm going to protect my patients.

00:58:01.000 You know, let's see what happens.

00:58:02.000 So I took the vaccine.

00:58:03.000 And then about a month later, a film director friend of mine, Gurinder Chadha, you might be familiar with some of her work, Bend It Like Beckham.

00:58:10.000 It's a movie she did.

00:58:11.000 Blinded by the Light, which is about Bruce Springsteen.

00:58:12.000 I did quite well over here.

00:58:14.000 So she was sending me all this stuff, saying I see him and watch her about the vaccine.

00:58:17.000 And it was kind of blogs and it was stuff saying like, you know, microchips, depopulation agenda, fertility problems.

00:58:23.000 I said, Gurinder, to be honest, I was polite.

00:58:25.000 I said, I don't think there's any real good evidence here.

00:58:27.000 I think there's a scam on Gurinder.

00:58:29.000 And I said, you know, I think you're high risk.

00:58:30.000 You're type 2 diabetic.

00:58:31.000 You're overweight, etc.

00:58:32.000 I think you should have it.

00:58:34.000 So she said, great.

00:58:35.000 You know, she trusts me.

00:58:36.000 So she took the vaccine.

00:58:37.000 And then she tweeted it out.

00:58:38.000 And the next thing, I'm on Good Morning Britain in February 2021, asked to tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was higher amongst people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

00:58:48.000 I think it's probably similar in the States as well.

00:58:50.000 One of the reasons for that as well, by the way, Joe, is that a lot of people from those backgrounds are from poorer backgrounds and understandably they have less trust in government.

00:59:00.000 You know, they're the neglected people in society in many ways.

00:59:03.000 So you can see why they felt that way.

00:59:05.000 And I went on Good Morning Britain.

00:59:06.000 I didn't point fingers and said, my God, these people are crazy, whatever else.

00:59:09.000 I said, listen, let's understand that there are rational reasons why people don't want to take the vaccine.

00:59:13.000 Look at the history of the drug industry for the last several decades and the amount of fraud.

00:59:17.000 I think they wouldn't expect me to say this.

00:59:19.000 I said, think about all the fraud they've committed.

00:59:21.000 I understand that.

00:59:22.000 But I said, having said that, when you look at traditional vaccines, they're some of the safest.

00:59:26.000 And that's kind of pretty much where I left it.

00:59:28.000 At a time, Joe, when we were only in the UK, At that point, there was only the recommendation for the vaccine to be given to people at high risk.

00:59:36.000 I never expect, even then, like friends were calling me and the younger people said, no, you don't need to take it.

00:59:40.000 If you're under 50, you're fit and healthy.

00:59:41.000 No, no.

00:59:41.000 Even at that time.

00:59:42.000 But this is just for high risk people.

00:59:44.000 So I took it.

00:59:45.000 I swallowed the pill.

00:59:47.000 And then, yeah, I mean, things changed very dramatically within a few months.

00:59:53.000 Did you have any adverse side effects?

00:59:56.000 I did.

00:59:58.000 I did.

01:00:00.000 And again, I didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but now I know the mechanism of harm.

01:00:05.000 It makes sense.

01:00:06.000 So I'm very much into my fitness, Joe.

01:00:09.000 I captain sports teams at school and university.

01:00:12.000 I'm an obsessive exerciser every day.

01:00:15.000 I don't feel good if I haven't gone to the gym and done something almost every day.

01:00:18.000 I started noticing within a few weeks that my energy levels started to get depleted quite significantly.

01:00:24.000 My sleep was disturbed.

01:00:26.000 And then I went into clinical depression.

01:00:29.000 I was diagnosed with clinical depression.

01:00:32.000 Didn't take any pills.

01:00:33.000 It was probably mild to moderate over a few months.

01:00:36.000 So when you say diagnosed with clinical depression, what's the parameters?

01:00:41.000 Like how is that defined?

01:00:43.000 Yeah, so clinical depression, you usually have to have a number of symptoms that are persistent for at least two weeks.

01:00:50.000 So these are things like something called early morning wakening, low mood, lack of energy, negative thoughts for the future.

01:00:59.000 There's lots of different criteria.

01:01:01.000 And one of my family friends actually is a psychiatrist.

01:01:05.000 And I spoke to him about it.

01:01:07.000 And he said, yeah, this is depression.

01:01:10.000 So, yeah.

01:01:11.000 But the one thing I noticed more than anything else is my energy levels were, I couldn't, like, I'm a very active, energetic guy, and I just couldn't leave the house.

01:01:18.000 I couldn't leave the couch.

01:01:20.000 I was completely depleted.

01:01:23.000 And what do you think, like, you believe is a side effect of the vaccine, but what's the mechanism?

01:01:30.000 Well, we know now one of the problems with the vaccine is that the spike protein, and there's different theories around this, from the vaccine that's injected into the arm, gets distributed throughout the body and can be there for up to four months.

01:01:45.000 And what happens is it causes either direct, and there's published data on this, a direct toxic effect to the tissues or an autoimmune reaction.

01:01:54.000 So we're talking about the brain, the heart, the kidneys, the liver, the ovaries, and the testes.

01:02:00.000 And that's probably the mechanism of action.

01:02:02.000 And in fact, this is not, you know, interestingly, you know, one of the side effects from a World Health Organization endorsed list, which I reference in my peer-reviewed paper, which we'll talk about later, actually puts in there psychosis as one of the side effects of the vaccine.

01:02:19.000 And there are case reports and people who went psychotic, actually, because of it.

01:02:23.000 A significant number?

01:02:25.000 Well, we don't know.

01:02:27.000 We don't know the exact numbers, but the reanalysis of Pfizer's own trial by independent researchers published in Journal Vaccine, in the clinical trial itself, one of the severe adverse effects in the clinical trial was psychosis, at least in one patient.

01:02:43.000 So for you, with your case, how long did you suffer from these symptoms?

01:02:50.000 About three months.

01:02:51.000 I went to a psychologist.

01:02:55.000 I didn't want to take pills.

01:02:56.000 So I went to a psychologist.

01:02:58.000 I had cognitive behavioral therapy.

01:03:00.000 I started to just focus on going back to the basics, getting good sleep, resting, etc.

01:03:05.000 And I came out of it.

01:03:06.000 You know, I came out of it slowly.

01:03:08.000 I got my energy levels back.

01:03:09.000 Took about three months, three to four months.

01:03:12.000 Did you experience any cardiology issues?

01:03:16.000 Was there anything with your heart rate?

01:03:19.000 Was there anything with your immune system?

01:03:22.000 No.

01:03:23.000 No, I didn't, Joe.

01:03:24.000 I had two doses.

01:03:24.000 I didn't get any of that stuff.

01:03:26.000 No, I didn't.

01:03:28.000 But then what happened was...

01:03:31.000 Just when I'm coming out of the clinical depression, I'm starting to feel better.

01:03:35.000 And I told my dad about it.

01:03:36.000 We were very, very close.

01:03:39.000 So he knew everything that was happening.

01:03:41.000 One of the things, by the way, when people go into clinical depression, one of the symptoms is suicidal ideation.

01:03:51.000 As in, thoughts about committing suicide.

01:03:54.000 That's actually one of the symptoms.

01:03:55.000 And I remember going for a walk with him.

01:03:58.000 I was feeling so low.

01:04:01.000 And, you know, I went up to visit him in Manchester and I just said to him, I said, you know, I'm having a thought of just, you know, going and jumping in front of a car.

01:04:13.000 It was fleeting.

01:04:14.000 I wasn't going to do it.

01:04:15.000 But I knew that I was that depressed that I was even, to have even that thought entering your mind.

01:04:21.000 But anyway, I'm a resilient, tough guy.

01:04:24.000 I knew I was going to get better.

01:04:26.000 I just had hope.

01:04:26.000 And I got better slowly with time.

01:04:29.000 And when I came out of it, that's when a real sort of tragedy hit me again.

01:04:39.000 Because me and my dad were still also mourning the loss of my mum.

01:04:41.000 It had only been about two and a half years since my mum died.

01:04:46.000 And I'll never forget this, July the 26th, 5 p.m.

01:04:50.000 2021, my dad calls me and he says, Asim, I've got chest discomfort.

01:04:56.000 And in medicine, if you're a good doctor, 80% of your diagnosis comes from the history.

01:05:02.000 If you listen to your patient, then you will get the diagnosis just from that discussion.

01:05:08.000 If you know, you know, from symptoms, you know, you can usually, and he said, and what he described sounded cardiac, which is typically, he said, he's a doctor, but he was obviously a little bit concerned.

01:05:17.000 I said, tell me about it.

01:05:18.000 He said, I said, how bad is it out of 10?

01:05:20.000 He said, like six out of 10, feeling a bit sweaty.

01:05:22.000 I've got an ache in the center of my chest.

01:05:24.000 I said, is it going anywhere?

01:05:25.000 I said, yeah, into both shoulders.

01:05:26.000 And for me, I was like, okay.

01:05:27.000 Didn't sound like an over massive heart attack, but it was concerning.

01:05:30.000 I said, how long have you had it for?

01:05:32.000 He said, I've had it for probably at least 20 to 30 minutes.

01:05:35.000 I said, okay.

01:05:36.000 I said, Dad, you need to call an ambulance now.

01:05:39.000 I don't want to scare him.

01:05:40.000 I said, you need an ECG straight away.

01:05:43.000 You need an EKG to see whether this is an acute heart attack, but you need to call an ambulance.

01:05:47.000 And he was reluctant.

01:05:49.000 I don't know why.

01:05:50.000 The NHS was under pressure.

01:05:53.000 He thought that maybe it was nothing major.

01:05:57.000 And I said, no, listen, hopefully it's nothing major, but you need an ECG. You need to call an ambulance 999. And he didn't want to do it.

01:06:03.000 So it was a back-and-forth conversation.

01:06:04.000 I called one of his best friends who lives near him.

01:06:06.000 He was a doctor as well.

01:06:07.000 I said, listen, you need to go and see Dad.

01:06:09.000 And he was busy with something, but he said, listen, I'll call him.

01:06:11.000 And in the end, what he did was he called two of his neighbors, who were both doctors, who happened to be home.

01:06:17.000 I think they'd finished work.

01:06:19.000 And so I get in the shower.

01:06:22.000 I said, listen, I'm going to get on the train and come up.

01:06:24.000 I get in the shower, come out of the shower.

01:06:27.000 I call him back, you know, because I was just changing, getting ready to get on the train.

01:06:32.000 And there's no answer.

01:06:34.000 I keep calling.

01:06:35.000 No answer.

01:06:38.000 Then one of his neighbors, a doctor, she answered the phone and she's hysterical.

01:06:44.000 And she says, Asim, your father's had a cardiac arrest and we're doing CPR. Now, I went into kind of cardiology, tried to take control of the situation, be as calm as possible mode.

01:06:55.000 And I said, tell me what happened.

01:06:56.000 He said, well, we walked in, we saw him.

01:06:59.000 He was a little bit sweaty.

01:07:00.000 My husband's anaesthetist, he was there.

01:07:03.000 He'd already called an ambulance, you know, called 999, and was on the phone.

01:07:07.000 And while he's on the phone to the ambulance, my dad just keels over.

01:07:11.000 Now, Joe, I've done a lot of work and even published on out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and what determines survival.

01:07:19.000 And if you are gonna have a cardiac arrest, if you are unlucky enough to have it, you are super lucky if it's witnessed by two doctors Who are going to do CPR and an ambulance has already been called.

01:07:32.000 And we know the ambulance response times in the UK have, and I've published on this stuff, is almost within 8 to 10 minutes in these sorts of calls, they will be there.

01:07:40.000 And your chances of survival are high in that situation, right?

01:07:44.000 You've got CPR, it's witnessed, and they usually get a defibrillator on you within 10 minutes.

01:07:48.000 You've got probably more than a 50% chance of surviving.

01:07:53.000 Ambulance didn't show for 30 minutes.

01:07:55.000 And I remember just FaceTiming them.

01:07:59.000 And they put the cardiac monitor on.

01:08:01.000 It was a flat line.

01:08:02.000 And I said, there's nothing to do here.

01:08:04.000 They carried on.

01:08:04.000 I said, no, just stop.

01:08:05.000 I've led cardiac arrest teams, so I know there's no point just jumping on his chest now.

01:08:09.000 There's nothing that we can do here.

01:08:10.000 And it was shocking beyond belief.

01:08:13.000 I couldn't understand it.

01:08:15.000 My dad was a very fit 73-year-old.

01:08:17.000 I consider myself quite athletic.

01:08:20.000 And he would out-walk me when we were going for walks during lockdown.

01:08:23.000 He was very active mentally.

01:08:25.000 He was on TV talking about lockdowns and whatever else.

01:08:28.000 And it didn't make any sense.

01:08:30.000 So two things happened.

01:08:32.000 First and foremost, I organized a post-mortem.

01:08:33.000 But they then also investigated, like, how has this happened?

01:08:37.000 Why has it happened?

01:08:37.000 It's taken 30 minutes to get there.

01:08:40.000 And this links back to some of my earlier work in terms of speaking out and, if you like, being a whistleblower.

01:08:46.000 So I get contacted about two weeks later because I tweeted it out.

01:08:50.000 You know, my dad was a well-known doctor.

01:08:51.000 It was a big news story in The Guardian, you know, the mayor of Manchester who was friends with him.

01:08:55.000 I mean, my dad was a wonderful human.

01:08:56.000 He said, you know, we've lost one of the kindest souls to ever walk the earth.

01:08:59.000 I mean, he was that kind of human.

01:09:00.000 He was that well-loved and liked by people.

01:09:04.000 And I got a phone call from somebody senior in the health department, linked to the government, called NHS England.

01:09:12.000 And she was crying.

01:09:14.000 She was a nurse, senior nurse, and she knew my dad.

01:09:17.000 And she said, Seema, something I've got to tell you.

01:09:19.000 I said, what is it?

01:09:20.000 She says, the Department of Health, the government, had known for at least for several weeks throughout the whole country That ambulances were not getting anywhere close to their targets for treating people for heart attacks or cardiac arrest,

01:09:36.000 but had made a decision to deliberately withhold that information.

01:09:43.000 And for me, that was quite upsetting because if I had known that, if we had known that, I wouldn't have asked him to call an ambulance.

01:09:54.000 The nearest hospital was like a five-minute drive, Joe.

01:09:58.000 Somebody would have taken him there.

01:10:01.000 Even if he had a cardiac arrest en route, they would have been able to get to a diffibrillator and he probably would have survived.

01:10:06.000 So I thought, this is, you know, I need to do something about this.

01:10:08.000 People need to know.

01:10:09.000 Because it was still kept hidden.

01:10:10.000 So I, with a journalist in the UK called Paul Gallagher with the Eye, I've done a lot of work with him, a great journalist.

01:10:16.000 He then started doing freedom of information requests, getting information from the ambulance service, trying to find out what happened, et cetera, et cetera.

01:10:23.000 And we determined that this was the case, that there was all these delays and had been going for a long time.

01:10:26.000 And then I wrote an article in the Eye newspaper.

01:10:29.000 It became a BBC news story.

01:10:31.000 But just before I published it, I contacted a cardiologist who I consider to be one of the good guys, Joe.

01:10:38.000 And again, I won't name him.

01:10:40.000 I think it's unfair to name him.

01:10:41.000 And I said, Prof, I call him Prof, I said, I just want you to know this is what's happening.

01:10:46.000 You should be aware of this.

01:10:48.000 And I'm going to, you know, get it out to the public.

01:10:50.000 People need to know, you know, this is a big problem because it might change things a little bit.

01:10:54.000 It's not, but at least we highlight the problem and try and find solutions and people then in these similar situations.

01:10:59.000 One of the interesting things is this nurse that called me said to me that two weeks earlier her own husband was playing soccer and came back from soccer with chest pain.

01:11:12.000 We're good to go.

01:11:26.000 You know, so she knew this stuff and didn't, you know, obviously call an ambulance.

01:11:30.000 So I told this to this professor of cardiology in a text message.

01:11:33.000 And you know what he replied to me?

01:11:36.000 Asim, I wouldn't publicize this if I were you.

01:11:39.000 You're only going to make yourself enemies.

01:11:41.000 And I want to do whatever I can to help you get a job back in the NHS, right?

01:11:45.000 Because by this stage, I wasn't working in the NHS. I was only doing private care.

01:11:49.000 And I said, Prof, what about our duty to the public and to patients?

01:11:53.000 No answer.

01:11:54.000 Why am I telling you this, Joe?

01:11:55.000 Remember earlier on I talked about the so-called psychopathic determinants of health?

01:11:59.000 Yes.

01:11:59.000 There is a cultural problem in our profession where people are afraid to speak out for their patients even if it's something that's important and true.

01:12:09.000 So what does medicine become when doctors can't even speak the truth?

01:12:12.000 But I didn't care.

01:12:13.000 For me, this was more important than anything.

01:12:15.000 So I got this out.

01:12:16.000 And it became a new story.

01:12:17.000 And I was interviewed by the BBC. And after that, all these stories started coming out.

01:12:22.000 I made the so-called injustice visible through the mainstream.

01:12:26.000 But it still bugged me.

01:12:29.000 How did my dad have a cardiac arrest?

01:12:31.000 So his post-mortem findings came back.

01:12:35.000 And two of his three major arteries were severely narrowed, right?

01:12:39.000 Critically narrowed.

01:12:40.000 90% in what we call the left anterior descending artery, the most important artery to the heart, and the right coronary artery.

01:12:45.000 And I thought, this is weird.

01:12:48.000 I knew my dad's lifestyle inside out.

01:12:50.000 I knew his cardiac history inside out.

01:12:51.000 There was no cardiac history.

01:12:52.000 He had something called a calcium score done a few years earlier.

01:12:55.000 He had blood flow to his arteries were all normal.

01:12:58.000 This is a guy that only two years earlier on a badminton, I was Manchester champion, schools champion in badminton, right?

01:13:06.000 Singles badminton.

01:13:06.000 I don't know if you've ever played it, but it's a very, it's like playing basketball.

01:13:09.000 For a cardiovascular system, it's really heavy.

01:13:12.000 And for the first time in, God knows, probably about 30 years, he beat me in the first game, 15-1.

01:13:19.000 And I was like, my God, how's my dad beating me here?

01:13:21.000 You know, we were very competitive with each other.

01:13:23.000 I mean, it was, we played for an hour and almost at the end of the hour, Joe, I got back in, it was like tied.

01:13:29.000 I ruptured my Achilles, right?

01:13:31.000 It was that bad.

01:13:32.000 And I was about to tweet and just share, I'm really proud of my 73-year-old dad.

01:13:35.000 He literally almost beat me in badminton, right?

01:13:37.000 He was that fit, so it didn't make any sense.

01:13:40.000 So, severe narrowings, and I'm just, okay, what was it?

01:13:45.000 Was he really stressed?

01:13:46.000 You know, stress, by the way, severe psychological stress can cause these sorts of issues with the heart, but again, didn't buy it.

01:13:55.000 And then October, November 2021, I get alerted from a cardiologist friend of mine who's one of the smartest cardiologists in the country, I think.

01:14:05.000 I mean, he's a brilliant mind.

01:14:06.000 And he sends me an abstract from Circulation, a cardiology journal, done by Stephen Gundry, who's a cardiothoracic surgeon, I think, based in New York.

01:14:15.000 And I read this abstract, and I'm like, wow.

01:14:19.000 And what he found was he'd been following up several hundred people in their 50s with a test that he does called the PULSE score, which correlates the blood test, and it measures markers of inflammation in the blood,

01:14:35.000 Joe, which have been validated and correlated with heart disease risk and heart attack risk.

01:14:39.000 And what he found was that within 8-10 weeks of these patients taking the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, mRNA vaccines, Those markers of inflammation in the blood had increased to a level where their risk of a heart attack went from 11% at 5 years,

01:14:57.000 just within 2 months, to 25%.

01:15:00.000 To give it context, if I today decided I was going to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, eat junk food, You know, hammer it all night, not sleep.

01:15:14.000 Stop exercising.

01:15:16.000 I couldn't even get a close to increasing my risk that much in two months.

01:15:20.000 Now, it's one bit of data.

01:15:22.000 And of course, in medicine, which we've talked about is not an exact science.

01:15:26.000 You never rely just on one bit of data.

01:15:28.000 You look at other bits of data as well.

01:15:30.000 And what kind of picture does all the information start painting?

01:15:34.000 So at that point, I was like, okay, now I can understand.

01:15:36.000 There's something now that fits with what happened to my dad.

01:15:39.000 But if this is real, this is going to be a problem because I know you're essentially, for populations of people who may not know they've got a little bit of mild furring that isn't going to cause them a problem for 20 years, suddenly you're going to get an increase in heart attacks much more quickly.

01:15:54.000 Then what happened was I got contacted.

01:15:56.000 It all happened within a few weeks.

01:15:58.000 A journalist, I think it was from the Telegraph or the Times, I can't remember, asked me to comment on the fact that there'd been an unexplained increase, about 25% increase in heart attacks in Scotland in hospitals that people can't explain.

01:16:10.000 So I said, Dr. Mohocci, what do you think is going on?

01:16:13.000 And then the third thing that happened was I was a whistleblower from a prestigious university in the UK, contacted me, a cardiologist.

01:16:22.000 And he said to me, he was very upset.

01:16:24.000 He said, it seems something I've got to tell you.

01:16:26.000 I don't know what to do, but I need to tell you this.

01:16:28.000 I said, what is it?

01:16:28.000 He says, This research group had accidentally found, with the use of coronary imaging techniques, so this is specialized high-tech scans of the arteries of the heart, that in the vaccinated, there was increased inflammation of the arteries of the heart,

01:16:45.000 and it wasn't there in the unvaccinated, which again would increase heart attack risk.

01:16:49.000 But they had a closed meeting and said, we're not going to publish these findings or talk about it further because it may affect our funding from the drug industry.

01:17:01.000 And I, at this stage, Joe, I was like, okay, now I've got three bits of data.

01:17:05.000 There's enough here for me to at least ask the question.

01:17:08.000 So I go on one of the more semi-mainstream news channels in the UK is called GB News.

01:17:14.000 And I went to them.

01:17:15.000 I said, listen, something I want to talk about.

01:17:17.000 I said, you know, I've done stuff with them before.

01:17:19.000 And basically, and they said, come on, let's talk about it.

01:17:21.000 So I talked about this on GB News and it went viral, you know.

01:17:24.000 And I didn't say stop the vaccine or whatever.

01:17:26.000 I said, listen, there's a signal here that needs to be looked into.

01:17:29.000 We've got these unexplained heart attacks happening.

01:17:32.000 We've got this evidence from circulation.

01:17:35.000 I've been told by this whistleblower.

01:17:38.000 Let's look at this a bit further.

01:17:41.000 And what happened then was just so bizarre.

01:17:45.000 It was almost around the same time.

01:17:48.000 It may have been just after that, Joe.

01:17:51.000 Our Secretary of State for Health, Sajid Javid, gets up in Parliament and says, I've decided we need to pass legislation.

01:18:00.000 To ensure that all healthcare workers get vaccinated, and if they don't, they lose their job.

01:18:06.000 Now, we've never done that in this country.

01:18:07.000 I know you've had maybe mandates for other things.

01:18:09.000 We never mandate any medical intervention in the UK. We've never done that before.

01:18:14.000 I thought, this is odd.

01:18:15.000 I said, right now, first and foremost, by this stage, Joe, we knew it wasn't stopping transmission, right?

01:18:20.000 It probably wasn't going to stop infection either.

01:18:22.000 You know, the narrative kept changing.

01:18:23.000 We were told it was going to stop infection.

01:18:24.000 Now it's going to prevent you having severe disease.

01:18:26.000 You know, it kept changing.

01:18:28.000 I said, this should be an individual choice now.

01:18:30.000 There's no, you know, healthcare workers are not protecting their patients by being vaccinated.

01:18:35.000 They may be protecting themselves.

01:18:36.000 We'll get into that data shortly.

01:18:38.000 But they're not protecting their patients.

01:18:40.000 Therefore, there's no reason, you know, we shouldn't mandate this.

01:18:42.000 So then I literally launched into this.

01:18:45.000 I was still, interestingly, at that point, getting mainstream media interviews because people wanted to talk about what happened to my dad and the ambulance delays.

01:18:52.000 So I went on BBC News.

01:18:54.000 And I got it in there.

01:18:55.000 I said, by the way, guys, you know, because I said, Dr. Marchand, what's behind our healthcare crisis?

01:19:01.000 I said, well, you know, we've been talking about this for years.

01:19:04.000 We've not tackled prevention.

01:19:05.000 We've got this obesity epidemic, right?

01:19:07.000 And that's putting more and more stress on the system and has been for a long time without any more resources.

01:19:12.000 We've got an over-medicated population.

01:19:13.000 We've not dealt with that, you know.

01:19:15.000 Up to one in five people over the age of 65 are hospitalized, Joe, because of side effects, right?

01:19:20.000 I said, but there's something else we should talk about as well.

01:19:23.000 We could lose 80,000 jobs in the NHS if we mandate this vaccine and people decide not to take it.

01:19:29.000 And that will be a disaster, but it's not scientific and it's not ethical.

01:19:32.000 And then they would kind of cut me off at the end and then I was on Sky News, so I kept doing this.

01:19:36.000 And then I thought, you know what?

01:19:37.000 I don't just believe in public health advocacy.

01:19:40.000 I'm somebody also that does things behind the scenes.

01:19:42.000 I meet politicians.

01:19:43.000 I've worked with people in very senior positions in the health service, in health policy.

01:19:47.000 I've had roles with those people.

01:19:49.000 I believe in dialogue and conversations and giving people the benefit of the doubt and understanding they may be ignorant or have the illusion of knowledge.

01:19:55.000 Let's have a conversation with them.

01:19:57.000 So I call up the chair of the British Medical Association.

01:20:01.000 And I was in America at the time.

01:20:03.000 Because I live alone now, right?

01:20:04.000 So I lost all my family.

01:20:05.000 And my closest family are in California.

01:20:08.000 And they said, it seemed just come and spend a couple of months with us.

01:20:11.000 So I get to the States around the end of November 2021. And the first thing that happens is I get an email from a very prestigious medical body I'm associated with.

01:20:20.000 I won't name them.

01:20:22.000 And they say, Dr. Malhotra, we've received a number of anonymous complaints from doctors that you are spreading anti-vax disinformation.

01:20:31.000 Purely upon that interview on GB News where I said there's a signal, we need to look into it.

01:20:34.000 That's all I did.

01:20:35.000 So I was like, Jesus.

01:20:37.000 You know, really?

01:20:39.000 And it was obviously stressful.

01:20:40.000 I had to respond and it took a month and they left me with a warning at that point.

01:20:43.000 But I realized something else was going on here.

01:20:45.000 So I called up the chair of the BMA. His name's Chand Nagpal.

01:20:49.000 And I said, Chand, I need to talk to you.

01:20:51.000 And he listened for two hours.

01:20:53.000 I talked him through every bit of data that I'd come across and things about the vaccine.

01:20:57.000 He said, Asim.

01:20:58.000 He said, I'll be honest with you.

01:21:00.000 He said, nobody I've spoken to in health policy, my colleagues, appears to have critically appraised the evidence as well as you have.

01:21:10.000 Most of them are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC. Wow.

01:21:19.000 Now, that is replicated.

01:21:23.000 If you remember, Jo, Rochelle Walensky, former chair of the CDC, she said in an interview, former director of the CDC, that her optimism from the vaccine came from CNN. Right?

01:21:36.000 And that CNN news report, right, that she was referring to, Jo, was almost verbatim a reproduction of Pfizer's own press release.

01:21:49.000 That's a great journalism.

01:21:50.000 Well, it tells you something else.

01:21:52.000 I think that we shouldn't underestimate the impact of the mainstream media in influencing people's decision-making, even people who you think should have better information or know better, right?

01:22:03.000 And that's what it showed.

01:22:05.000 So he said, listen, okay, Asim, I'm with you.

01:22:08.000 The medical or colleges and the BMA anyway didn't support mandates.

01:22:11.000 They were kind of silent about it.

01:22:12.000 They weren't proactive.

01:22:13.000 There was a few campaigning doctors in the UK and an organization called Together Declaration that got involved in it.

01:22:19.000 And I went on the full offensive, you know, through social media, through mainstream media, and said we need to get this overturned.

01:22:24.000 I had people, nurses and doctors, who were almost in tears, contact me who were unvaccinated.

01:22:29.000 And I said, listen, hold firm.

01:22:30.000 You know, they passed this in Parliament.

01:22:32.000 Most of the MPs voted for it.

01:22:34.000 It was going to be in legislation.

01:22:36.000 And I said, hold fire.

01:22:37.000 This is not going to happen.

01:22:39.000 Do not get vaccinated if you don't want to get vaccinated.

01:22:42.000 And literally last minute, like a week before this was going to come into effect where people would lose their jobs, the chair of the BMA was speaking to Sajid Javid after speaking to me and all these people campaigning, and we got it overturned.

01:22:56.000 Wow.

01:22:57.000 And, you know, for me, one of the most satisfying things I've been involved with is helping to save, in effect, these tens of thousands of jobs in the NHS, especially because it wasn't scientific, it wasn't ethical to do so.

01:23:10.000 And because it wasn't scientific, and because there was now evidence that it didn't stop transmission, and it probably wasn't going to stop infection, What was the narrative that you were given as to why this should still be promoted?

01:23:29.000 Well, there wasn't really anything, Joe.

01:23:32.000 It didn't make any sense to me.

01:23:35.000 The chief medical officer was still saying the same thing, though.

01:23:38.000 So he was still tweeting out, even before they decided they were going to, you know, even after they overturned this mandate decision for healthcare workers, he was tweeting out, the best thing you can do as a doctor to protect your patients is get vaccinated with a COVID vaccine.

01:23:54.000 Yeah.

01:23:55.000 It didn't make any sense.

01:23:56.000 It was almost like...

01:23:58.000 To be honest, the kind of narrative that was coming out was essentially the narrative of the drug companies, but coming through so-called credible voices.

01:24:08.000 It wasn't in keeping with the evidence.

01:24:10.000 It didn't make any sense.

01:24:12.000 So yes, then I decided at that point, I'd started to really critically appraise the data properly.

01:24:17.000 I thought...

01:24:18.000 There's a big mountain to move here.

01:24:20.000 It's not an easy one.

01:24:21.000 You know, I've just gone on TV and questioned about heart side effects and suddenly one of these medical bodies I'm affiliated with is, you know, coming after me.

01:24:29.000 So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna do my best to, what can I do here?

01:24:34.000 Historically, Joe, over the last 10 years, I've published a lot in different medical journals and I only write stuff which I think is important, you know, disseminating the truth, something I believe is important for the public and for patients and even for doctors.

01:24:45.000 And almost every time I've published something, and I kind of became good at this, is I've got it into the mainstream news.

01:24:51.000 Whether it's about, you know, the harms of excess sugar or the statin thing or cholesterol or low-carb diets or whatever, or the harms potentially of vegan diets, right?

01:25:00.000 I've done lots of these things.

01:25:02.000 And I thought, let me try and publish this in a medical journal.

01:25:05.000 And I thought carefully, like, it wouldn't be easy to publish something like this, even if what I'm saying is factually correct.

01:25:10.000 So I went to a journal called the Journal of Instant Resistance.

01:25:13.000 It's not well known, but it's a credible journal.

01:25:16.000 And I spoke to the editor.

01:25:18.000 Often you just say, listen, is this something you're interested in?

01:25:20.000 What do you think?

01:25:21.000 They'll say, no, Asim, just forget it.

01:25:22.000 And she was very open, right?

01:25:24.000 And she was very pro-vax, actually, at the time.

01:25:26.000 She was a bit shocked with what I was telling her.

01:25:29.000 But she respects me.

01:25:30.000 She knows my work over a number of years.

01:25:31.000 Said, listen, you know, let me look at it and I can at least say that I'll send it for a peer review, right?

01:25:37.000 There's no guarantees of anything, but I can send it for a peer review.

01:25:39.000 So, send me what you've got.

01:25:40.000 So, I spent several months.

01:25:41.000 I wrote this piece, Joe.

01:25:43.000 It was 10,000 words.

01:25:44.000 That was the other thing.

01:25:46.000 Most journals wouldn't accept that many words.

01:25:47.000 And I'd written that and it was in two parts because I thought...

01:25:52.000 People have been so indoctrinated with this narrative.

01:25:55.000 I need to walk them through it as someone who was vaccinated, who went on Good Morning Britain, right?

01:26:01.000 I'm one of you.

01:26:02.000 I'm not, you know, it'd be less easy to attack me.

01:26:06.000 And to walk them through my journey in understanding how the data, new data had emerged that made us think differently about what we were told at the beginning.

01:26:14.000 And to break it down in absolute terms.

01:26:17.000 What are the benefits and what are the harms?

01:26:19.000 My dad's story was included in that.

01:26:21.000 And then the part two was how we got it wrong Why we got it wrong?

01:26:28.000 And what are the solutions moving forward?

01:26:31.000 And this journal also doesn't take money from industry.

01:26:34.000 So that's why it was non-conflicted.

01:26:35.000 It was open access.

01:26:36.000 I wanted this to be free.

01:26:37.000 A lot of these journal articles are paywalled.

01:26:40.000 You have to subscribe, etc.

01:26:41.000 So I wanted it to be free to everybody.

01:26:42.000 That's the reason I went to this journal.

01:26:44.000 Yeah, I have a role.

01:26:45.000 People have somehow attacked me and saying, oh, he's on the editorial board and stuff like that.

01:26:48.000 Yeah, I have a role as a kind of advisor, this non-paid role, whatever.

01:26:52.000 It's kind of because I've done work on this area.

01:26:54.000 Like, what kind of articles should we be looking at?

01:26:56.000 So, you know, they don't normally accept articles from people who are on the editorial board, but they said, listen, you know, we'll let you do one as a one-off.

01:27:03.000 But the peer review process was very rigorous.

01:27:06.000 I've never been through a rigorous peer review.

01:27:08.000 Back and forth, lots of changes, etc., etc.

01:27:11.000 So I published this article, September 2022. And, you know, what was...

01:27:20.000 Let me just summarize it, Joe.

01:27:23.000 The reality is this.

01:27:27.000 In my whole career, looking at all of the drugs and knowing about many different drugs that are prescribed, I've never seen something, when you look at the data, which has such poor effectiveness and such unprecedented harms in my career.

01:27:44.000 It's like nothing I've ever seen before.

01:27:48.000 Which was simultaneously promoted heavily.

01:27:51.000 Not just promoted, coerced.

01:27:54.000 Yeah.

01:27:54.000 Mandate?

01:27:56.000 So, the key bit of data, right?

01:27:59.000 People say, oh, lots of data, cherry-picking, blah, blah, blah.

01:28:02.000 Just one bit of data alone should be enough to people to stop and think, oh my God, this is just unbelievable.

01:28:08.000 So, in the summer, towards the end of last year, second half of last year, the journal Vaccine, peer-reviewed, this is like the highest impact medical journal for vaccines, right?

01:28:20.000 Yeah.

01:28:20.000 They published a re-analysis of Pfizer and Moderna's original double-blinded randomized controlled trials.

01:28:27.000 So this is the level, the highest quality level of evidence.

01:28:30.000 Okay, with all the caveats, drug industry sponsored, all that stuff, right?

01:28:33.000 But still what we call the highest quality level of evidence.

01:28:35.000 Done by independent researchers.

01:28:38.000 Joseph Freeman from Louisiana, he's an ER doctor, clinical data scientist, associate editor of the BMJ, Peter Doshi, Robert Kaplan from Stanford, right?

01:28:48.000 Some very eminent, in terms, eminence of integrity, right?

01:28:52.000 I'm not for eminence-based medicine, but I'm for people who have eminence of integrity, right?

01:28:56.000 They published this reanalysis.

01:28:58.000 And what they found was this.

01:29:01.000 In the trials that led to the approval by the regulators, we'll get into regulators in a minute, around the world, you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from taking the vaccine, hospitalization, disability, life-changing event, than you were to be hospitalized with COVID. So what that means is,

01:29:22.000 It's highly likely this vaccine, mRNA vaccine, should never have been approved for a single human in the first place.

01:29:29.000 And that rate of serious adverse events, Joe, is 1 in 800. And it's at least 1 in 800 because that just covers the first two months of the trial.

01:29:38.000 In general, what happens is drug companies design trials where they choose people who are less likely to get side effects, so they're generally healthier.

01:29:46.000 Right?

01:29:46.000 And then because it's the first two months and I found a mechanism of harm with accelerated heart disease, like my dad died six months after two doses of the vaccine, and we have autopsy studies now showing that that can happen several months after.

01:30:01.000 Yeah, it's just beggars belief.

01:30:04.000 And that, you know, I published this information and then it's been an evolution.

01:30:08.000 So the question now, I think people, what we want to do, like we talk about statins, right?

01:30:12.000 Same sort of thing, same sort of concept.

01:30:15.000 What is your individual benefit in absolute terms?

01:30:18.000 So there's a table, actually.

01:30:20.000 I shared it with Jamie earlier.

01:30:23.000 I don't know if we can bring it up because I think it'd be nice to see it.

01:30:25.000 So the UK government only earlier this year, about two or three months ago, I think it was the first country in the world to publish that substantial data.

01:30:34.000 They released information looking at per million people vaccinated versus per million people unvaccinated by age group, okay?

01:30:42.000 During the Omicron strain, right?

01:30:45.000 So this is UK government data.

01:30:47.000 So table four, it says numbers need to vaccinate for prevention of severe hospitalization, okay?

01:30:51.000 From two doses of Pfizer.

01:30:53.000 So if you look at the first column, Joe, if you're 70, you have to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person being hospitalized with severe COVID. If you're 60, 5,700.

01:31:05.000 You start getting lower.

01:31:06.000 Age groups, 30, 87,600, for example.

01:31:09.000 If you're 20 to 29, well over 100,000 people.

01:31:13.000 I mean, this efficacy level, effectiveness level is just...

01:31:20.000 If it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable.

01:31:22.000 And this is just to prevent severe hospitalization.

01:31:24.000 Yes.

01:31:25.000 Again, it does not stop infection.

01:31:27.000 It does not stop transmission.

01:31:29.000 Absolutely not.

01:31:29.000 And so there is some benefit of preventing severe hospitalization?

01:31:36.000 Well, yes.

01:31:37.000 But the thing is, this is what we call non-randomized data.

01:31:39.000 And remember earlier on, I said to you that if you were unvaccinated, In general, you were higher risk than people who were vaccinated.

01:31:46.000 Something called healthy user bias, right?

01:31:49.000 So Carl Hennigan, who's the Director of Center of Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford, and also a general practitioner, talked about the fact that he had a couple of patients who had terminal cancer, for example, and didn't get vaccinated.

01:32:00.000 And then they end up dying of COVID because they were already sicker.

01:32:03.000 What I'm saying to you, Joe, is this is likely an exaggerated benefit.

01:32:08.000 But when you balance that against the harms, which are consistent of at least 1 in 800 after 2 doses, and there is some evidence that the more doses you have, the higher those harms become, it becomes a no-brainer.

01:32:20.000 Now, if I was to ask patients this, even older patients this, if I would give them that information in that way, most people would not take it.

01:32:28.000 So, there's the informed consent issue.

01:32:31.000 But then there is the fact that, you know, we consider vaccines to be completely safe, traditionally.

01:32:37.000 1-800 is a very, very high figure.

01:32:40.000 We've pulled other vaccines for much less.

01:32:42.000 1976, swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a debilitating neurological condition called Guillain-Barre syndrome in about 1 in 100,000 people.

01:32:52.000 Rotavirus vaccine pulled in 1999, suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in kids in 1 in 10,000.

01:33:00.000 This is at least 1 in 800. I mean, it's a no-brainer.

01:33:02.000 So the question then is, why have we not paused it?

01:33:05.000 What's going on here?

01:33:07.000 And I think the barrier that we've got, Joe, to deal with, with a lot of people who are not enlightened or is awake or familiar or understanding this information, it's a psychological barrier.

01:33:18.000 It's not an intellectual one.

01:33:22.000 This is willful blindness.

01:33:25.000 You know, a concept, a psychological phenomenon, which we're all capable of in different circumstances, where human beings turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety, and protect prestige and fragile egos.

01:33:41.000 So we've got to deal with that.

01:33:43.000 And we can see this happening historically.

01:33:47.000 This has happened in many different circumstances.

01:33:51.000 Look at Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, for example.

01:33:54.000 People kind of knew, but they didn't want to really talk about it or they didn't want to...

01:33:58.000 But eventually the truth comes out, and then we have to deal with the fallout of it.

01:34:03.000 The Catholic Church and child abuse, paedophilia, right?

01:34:07.000 So many people knew, but they buried their heads in the sand.

01:34:10.000 We're dealing with a very similar psychological phenomenon.

01:34:13.000 But the other phenomenon we've got, and I think we shouldn't underestimate it, is the one of fear.

01:34:19.000 Right.

01:34:20.000 So just a few weeks ago, Isabel Oakeshott, who's a journalist in the UK, she had access to WhatsApp messages between the Secretary for Health and other people in the cabinet.

01:34:30.000 And it was a front page of the Telegraph newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic.

01:34:35.000 And one of those messages revealed...

01:34:40.000 We have to frighten the pants of the public.

01:34:44.000 Something along those lines.

01:34:47.000 Right?

01:34:47.000 So they wanted to create this fear.

01:34:50.000 To force compliance.

01:34:52.000 To force compliance.

01:34:53.000 And when you're in a state of fear, psychologically, Joe, two things happen.

01:34:57.000 One is you're more likely to be controlled.

01:34:59.000 And that's what they wanted.

01:35:01.000 But also, it inhibits your ability to engage in critical thinking.

01:35:06.000 And many people are still under fear.

01:35:08.000 And I'm a numbers guy.

01:35:12.000 I think numbers are important.

01:35:13.000 I think when I have conversations with patients, I want to break numbers down in a way that they can understand.

01:35:17.000 So we all had a very grossly exaggerated fear.

01:35:20.000 Many people did.

01:35:20.000 Maybe not you, Joe.

01:35:21.000 But many people did of the virus at the very beginning.

01:35:24.000 I did at the beginning.

01:35:25.000 Yeah.

01:35:25.000 One survey in the US suggested that 50% of American adults thought that their risk of being hospitalized with COVID was 50%, 1 in 2. When the real figure at that time was about 1 in 100. In fact, I did a subsequent analysis in my paper because a lot of my paper also focused on the fact of lifestyle and obesity and all those things we can do to improve our immune system.

01:35:50.000 And at the very early stages, you know, Wuhan strain in the UK, looking at middle-aged people, the risk of hospitalization if you were an obese, sedentary smoker from a poor background, socioeconomic background,

01:36:05.000 class, was about 1 in 350, something like that.

01:36:10.000 If you were active, not overweight, non-smoking, you know, healthy diet, all that kind of stuff, Your risk of hospitalization was almost four to five-fold less, so one in 1,500.

01:36:24.000 Wow.

01:36:24.000 Yeah, massive difference.

01:36:26.000 So again, that reinforces...

01:36:27.000 That is not the way it was described.

01:36:29.000 No, not at all.

01:36:30.000 So those figures are important because without understanding the numbers involved, the public and doctors are vulnerable to exploitation of their hopes and fears by political and commercial interests.

01:36:47.000 And that's what happened.

01:36:50.000 Wow.

01:36:56.000 What do you think history's gonna look back on this and learn?

01:37:00.000 How is this going to be viewed?

01:37:03.000 Do you think that the full narrative is going to get, because this is an extraordinary time, because in this extraordinary time there's options available like this podcast, where you can go on and you can say these things and they'll be received by millions of people and articles will be written and different shows will take clips from this and discuss it and it can change narratives.

01:37:29.000 Do you think there is any hope that something like this, which was such an event where, I don't know what the full numbers of people worldwide who were administered this, do you know what the numbers are?

01:37:44.000 I don't off the top of my head, Joe, no.

01:37:46.000 But it's billions.

01:37:47.000 Yeah, 100%.

01:37:48.000 Billions of people.

01:37:49.000 Yeah.

01:37:51.000 When we look back at this in the future, is this a cautionary tale?

01:37:57.000 Is this something that you think they would like to do again and again and again?

01:38:04.000 Because the prophets have been extraordinary.

01:38:07.000 Like, the prophets...

01:38:09.000 From this, this has probably been the most profitable thing the pharmaceutical drug companies have ever been involved with, if you talk about a time duration.

01:38:19.000 $100 billion Pfizer have made from this vaccine, which in my view should never have been approved for a single human.

01:38:25.000 Not even old people?

01:38:27.000 Not even...

01:38:28.000 Great question.

01:38:30.000 Great question.

01:38:31.000 So, I think there is a case to be made, Joe, at the very beginning, during the original strain, the Wuhan strain, when it was particularly terrible, that the older people, over 70s, and the vulnerable, may have had more benefit than harm.

01:38:46.000 I think that there's a good case to be made there.

01:38:48.000 Okay?

01:38:49.000 So, is this all vulnerable people?

01:38:52.000 Older people plus obese people.

01:38:55.000 What about people with immune systems that were compromised already?

01:38:59.000 Yeah, so the only problem with the immune systems that are compromised already is that for the effectiveness of a vaccine, you need to have a reasonably good functioning immune system.

01:39:07.000 So people who have compromised immune system, it's a very gray area about how much benefit they get.

01:39:11.000 But let's just say, let's just for argument's sake, say yes.

01:39:15.000 The benefits outweighed the harms in those groups.

01:39:18.000 Okay.

01:39:19.000 I think that becomes irrelevant when you've got a serious adverse event rate which is so high, which normally, irrespective, even if the benefits outweigh the harms.

01:39:28.000 And also, what about the informed consent side?

01:39:30.000 So let's say, for example, we calculated that actually your benefit from the vaccine in preventing you being hospitalised with COVID was, say, 1 in 200, right?

01:39:39.000 But then I said to you, Joe, so your benefit's about 1 in 200, but...

01:39:42.000 The harms seem to be, at least early on, so the short-term harms are 1 in 800, at least.

01:39:48.000 Now, we can make an individual choice, but my guess is, and my own experience with patients, even with that information, where there's still, you can argue, the benefits outweigh the harms, The harms are so significant in terms of numbers that most of those people, Joe, would choose not to take the vaccine.

01:40:05.000 Does that make sense?

01:40:05.000 It does make sense.

01:40:06.000 And then also there's this false narrative that was repeated continuously, continuously during the beginning, which was this was going to stop the infection.

01:40:16.000 This was going to stop you from getting others sick.

01:40:19.000 You were going to do this for other people.

01:40:21.000 And this was going to get us out of this.

01:40:23.000 Because everybody desperately wanted the pandemic to be over.

01:40:27.000 It was a psychological manipulation.

01:40:29.000 And there was also the emergency use authorization in America, where they were allowed to distribute this vaccine with no liability.

01:40:39.000 They didn't have to worry at all about being sued for adverse side effects, and they essentially silenced any talk of any sort of alternative treatment.

01:40:51.000 Because if there is a treatment That's offered.

01:40:54.000 If there's an effective treatment, then they no longer can justify the emergency use authorization.

01:40:59.000 Is that correct?

01:41:00.000 Absolutely.

01:41:01.000 You know, but this thing, even the limited liability stuff, it wasn't publicized.

01:41:05.000 It wasn't in the mainstream media.

01:41:06.000 It wasn't discussion points in the CNN saying, you know, just to let everybody know if you get injured by the vaccine, Pfizer are not liable.

01:41:13.000 Why was that not discussed?

01:41:14.000 Right.

01:41:15.000 The whole narrative that has been shaped by these corporate interests is very clear.

01:41:21.000 I'm sure you've seen the compilation videos, the brought to you by Pfizer videos, where you see Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer and everyone brought to you by Pfizer.

01:41:30.000 Yeah.

01:41:31.000 Yeah.

01:41:32.000 There's your answer.

01:41:33.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:41:34.000 Well, at least you don't necessarily have that the same way in the UK. You have more of a socialized form of medicine and you don't have advertising for pharmaceutical drugs on television.

01:41:46.000 No, we don't.

01:41:46.000 We don't.

01:41:47.000 But I think it's more behind the scenes.

01:41:49.000 It's like influencing the regulators and stuff.

01:41:51.000 So in effect, it's still pretty bad.

01:41:54.000 The clinical decision-making is more subtly driven by these commercial interests.

01:41:59.000 Well, just with who controls grants and who controls funding and also being ostracized from the community.

01:42:07.000 Yeah.

01:42:07.000 You don't really have a voice.

01:42:08.000 I think we're living...

01:42:09.000 I mean, these times are unprecedented, Joe.

01:42:11.000 I've never seen anything like this.

01:42:13.000 And, you know, to come back to your original question about how people are going to look at this, I see this as an opportunity.

01:42:19.000 You know, as Einstein said, you know, in every crisis lies opportunity.

01:42:23.000 I think this is a time where we are literally fighting for humanity.

01:42:26.000 We're fighting to free the world from corporate tyranny.

01:42:30.000 And I think the way we've got here in some ways was predictable because of that unchecked power.

01:42:37.000 And I think because everybody has been somehow affected by the vaccine, whether they took it or not.

01:42:43.000 If they took it, they may either have suffered a side effect or known someone that suffered a side effect or later on become familiar with the fact that they were kind of conned or duped and saying they were going to protect other people.

01:42:53.000 Or if they didn't take the vaccine, they were gaslighted.

01:42:56.000 They couldn't travel.

01:42:58.000 People lost their jobs.

01:43:00.000 And it's affected everybody pretty much in the world.

01:43:03.000 So I think this truth, this expose, if you like, of this truth will help people understand that actually, and this is what people like me are doing and people like yourself, is really to just highlight that this is a system failure.

01:43:20.000 You know, this is...

01:43:24.000 We've got here by stealth, we've got here because a lot of people don't understand these system failures that they would not find acceptable.

01:43:33.000 For example, why does the FDA take 65% of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry?

01:43:40.000 Why does the regulator in our country, which by the way the British Medical Association chair didn't know until I gave a lecture and was shocked when I told him that 86% of the funding of the MHRA in our country comes from pharma.

01:43:51.000 People would find this unacceptable.

01:43:54.000 But that also means there are solutions.

01:43:56.000 There are solutions moving forward where people can feel more confident in the information they're getting.

01:44:02.000 Even doctors is likely to be clean or as clean as possible and closer to the truth when it comes to knowing the absolute benefits and harms of medications.

01:44:11.000 So that ultimately means, you know, changing the law, Joe.

01:44:15.000 We've got here because of unethical, unjust, unscientific laws, if you like.

01:44:20.000 And when I look and trace the roots of it all, this really started the acceleration of this process.

01:44:29.000 Started from maybe well-intentioned, I think, neoliberal economic policies adopted by Ronald Reagan in the 80s and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. 1992, I think it was George Bush Senior that then allowed the FDA to take money from the drug industry.

01:44:47.000 Before that, that was essentially through public funding.

01:44:51.000 Academic institutions, most in the UK now get most of their funding from pharma when it comes to medical research.

01:44:56.000 Before, in the 80s, they didn't.

01:44:58.000 So I think when people understand that, you know, John Ioannidis also wrote this great paper a few years ago called How to Survive the Medical Misinformation Mess.

01:45:06.000 And he talks about the fact in the United States, and you spend almost $4 trillion, more than $4 trillion on healthcare, you know, 18% of your GDP. He says that 20-50% of healthcare activity in the United States is inappropriate,

01:45:23.000 wasteful, and harms patients.

01:45:25.000 Eventually it gives no benefit.

01:45:27.000 And he said one of the reasons for what drives this is that the first thing is most, you know, first thing is most published research, much if not most published research is unreliable, not useful to policy makers and not good for patients.

01:45:42.000 But the second bit is most healthcare professionals, most doctors are not aware of this.

01:45:48.000 They're not aware of these system failures.

01:45:50.000 Don't make the assumption that your doctor knows about this.

01:45:53.000 And then they lack the critical appraisal skills to understand the evidence and then translate it into a way that patients can understand.

01:46:00.000 And this is part of conditioning.

01:46:01.000 We're not conditioned in medical school to think in these ways about informed consent, about understanding the data properly.

01:46:06.000 It's not difficult.

01:46:08.000 So there needs to be a shift as well culturally.

01:46:12.000 People need to understand that good health in general doesn't come out of a medicine bottle.

01:46:17.000 What determines your health are social conditions, right?

01:46:21.000 The conditions in which we are born, we grow, we live, we age, we work.

01:46:26.000 Understanding the impact of severe psychological stress and how that can shorten your lifespan, right?

01:46:31.000 So, for example, a very good paper published in Nature in 2012 by Elizabeth Blackburn, who was a Nobel Prize winner, and Lisa Eppel, a psychologist in California, was called Too Toxic to Ignore, and they talked about the impact of psychological stress on genes that control the aging process and disease.

01:46:50.000 And one of the things that was really startling to me when I looked at it Is that if you are a mother of a disabled child, The chronic stress associated with that is the equivalent of 10 years of aging.

01:47:02.000 Wow!

01:47:03.000 If you're a victim of severe psychological abuse as a child or sexual abuse, the extreme men can knock off 20 years of your lifespan because the disease process, what happens to the gene's epigenetics, manifests itself later on.

01:47:17.000 I think these things are important to discuss, Joe, as well, because it helps us also try and think about how do we create the conditions in society for everybody Where they have an opportunity To be the best version of themselves, and what do I mean by that is have optimization of mental and physical health.

01:47:35.000 Now, that brings me on to, you know, what is health?

01:47:39.000 I'm not a big fan of the World Health Organization these days because I think they've been corrupted by these commercial entities as well, right?

01:47:45.000 You know, most of their funding now comes with strings attached, according to Margaret Chan, the former director, director general of the World Health Organization, you know, second biggest funder of the World Health Organization.

01:47:56.000 You've talked about this before, Bill Gates.

01:47:59.000 Who's heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks, McDonald's and Coca-Cola.

01:48:05.000 So the World Health Organization, unfortunately, are not independent.

01:48:08.000 However, let's say something positive about them.

01:48:11.000 They have this great definition of health.

01:48:14.000 A state of complete mental, physical and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

01:48:24.000 So if we start from that place of that definition and understand it and also realize that you can't have optimal mental health without having optimal physical health and you can't have optimal physical health without having optimal mental health because it's interlinked, I think we then branch out and we think about how can we create those conditions so that people have,

01:48:44.000 for example, the right wages.

01:48:47.000 If you're in a low-pay, high-demand, low-control job, The impact on your health is effectively a death sentence.

01:48:55.000 These are the kind of discussions we need to be having politically and in the medical establishment and with the public as well.

01:49:03.000 One of the things you're doing now is you're helping people that may have been injured by the vaccine.

01:49:11.000 And what is available to people?

01:49:14.000 It's a great question.

01:49:15.000 Honest answer is it's a moving space.

01:49:18.000 So my work has been traditionally in looking at how we combat chronic disease through lifestyle.

01:49:25.000 Many of the people who are vulnerable to vaccine injuries are the same people who are vulnerable to COVID, right?

01:49:30.000 So people who have, you know, conditions or who are obese, for example, or overweight.

01:49:34.000 So one of the things I've been doing with vaccine injuries patients myself is actually implementing these lifestyle changes, like eat real food, you know, do 30 minutes of moderate activity a day.

01:49:44.000 Let's really focus on your stress levels.

01:49:46.000 And a lot of these people are getting better because of that.

01:49:49.000 But there's a lot of uncertainties.

01:49:50.000 Are there any other drugs?

01:49:52.000 You know, I know that, you know, at the FLCC conference, which I'm attending in Dallas and speaking at, You know, at the moment, there are doctors there that are producing protocols that seem to be working, observationally, whether it's vitamin infusions, the lifestyle,

01:50:07.000 even the use of ivermectin apparently seems to be helping some patients as well, which is really interesting.

01:50:12.000 What does it help?

01:50:13.000 Well, it has some mechanism, apparently, which seems to alleviate the damage from the spike protein.

01:50:20.000 I mean, that's the theoretical benefit of ivermectin.

01:50:23.000 Theoretical.

01:50:23.000 Theoretical, but it's being used, and because it's extremely safe, it's one of the safest drugs we have, I think it's not unreasonable in those people who are resistant.

01:50:32.000 So I think we need to think about that.

01:50:33.000 But the problem, Joe, as well, is that because the establishment is ignoring what is now a pandemic of vaccinated people, We can't devote as much resources as we'd like into research and into managing these people because a lot of these people,

01:50:50.000 you know, these patients are being gaslighted still by their doctors.

01:50:53.000 And that's a big issue.

01:50:55.000 I mean, even last week, there was an interesting case that was reported in the BBC where a young 32-year-old fit and healthy psychologist in the NHS took the AstraZeneca vaccine.

01:51:07.000 We used that initially in the UK as well.

01:51:09.000 And within 10 days, he died of a severe stroke.

01:51:14.000 And the death certificate, the wife fought for, I mean, kudos to her.

01:51:19.000 She fought for him and for justice for him.

01:51:22.000 And the death certificate said he died of natural causes.

01:51:25.000 So ultimately, it went to court and the coroner confirmed that this was absolutely likely caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine.

01:51:35.000 So these sorts of discussions, we need to keep having them.

01:51:40.000 Why do you think at this point there's still such an incredible reluctance to blame anything on the vaccine?

01:51:49.000 Because people will, with any other medication, people on any other medication, it seems like it wouldn't be so easy to dismiss.

01:51:56.000 Like, when people got strokes with Vioxx, people weren't saying, oh, come on, you just had a regular stroke.

01:52:04.000 The Vioxx didn't have anything to do with it.

01:52:06.000 But with this, you do see that narrative.

01:52:09.000 Like, you know, hey, he had a heart attack seven days after he was vaccinated.

01:52:14.000 Well, people have heart attacks.

01:52:17.000 There's no consideration for a novel treatment that has been administered to hundreds of millions of people in this country.

01:52:25.000 No consideration to maybe that had a factor.

01:52:28.000 In fact, they actively try to ignore that as a possible factor.

01:52:33.000 And I have talked to so many people that have had either similar situations to yours or worse, where they had an adverse effect from the vaccine.

01:52:43.000 And these anecdotal stories of people and their doctors' reluctance to admit or to even consider that it had anything to do with that is quite shocking.

01:52:56.000 The indoctrination on vaccine safety, Joe, is so, so deep, historically and with this, that even educated people think they're being objective.

01:53:08.000 I think what's made this worse is that many of these doctors and many people themselves, one, they've had it, they bought into the narrative, and we have to also have, we have to think empathetically and compassionately With them in the sense that I think we have to have that conversation and that understanding that changing one's mind in general is actually for many people quite an emotionally traumatic experience.

01:53:37.000 But really if you think about it and you know we are strong enough and mature enough to be able to you know understand what's happened here and to try and move forward constructively.

01:53:51.000 But for most people The kind of discussion we're having now about all of these system failures and the corruption and people being harmed and, you know, this vaccine that almost certainly I think quite likely these drug companies knew already about the harms before they were rolled out.

01:54:07.000 That's why they got immunity from getting sued if people got vaccine injured because they knew.

01:54:12.000 It's a lot to take in, Joe.

01:54:14.000 It's much easier to bury your head in the sand and to ignore this willful blindness.

01:54:19.000 It's an easier route to take than to confront these truths.

01:54:22.000 But we have to confront the facts because if we don't, it's only going to keep happening.

01:54:27.000 But there's also other people who are doing the work for the man.

01:54:32.000 And that's where it gets weird to me when it comes to this.

01:54:35.000 And this is something that I've never seen before.

01:54:37.000 But I have seen with the vaccine is that there are people that because of their own personal choices or because of whatever positions they initially asserted, initially pro-vaccine or tried to tell people to get it or tried to be influential,

01:54:55.000 These people are so reluctant to change course.

01:55:00.000 I'm not talking about medical health professionals.

01:55:02.000 I'm talking about journalists.

01:55:04.000 I'm talking about people in the public eye.

01:55:06.000 I'm talking about influencers and celebrities that have initially stated that you should go do this.

01:55:13.000 I'm doing this.

01:55:14.000 You should do this.

01:55:15.000 Those people are still carrying water for the pharmaceutical industries to cover up their own Either incorrect assumptions and assertions or whatever reason they want to do it.

01:55:27.000 They're doing the work for them.

01:55:29.000 Like when you see if someone talks about having some sort of a vaccine adverse side effect, they're attacked.

01:55:36.000 I've seen people get attacked.

01:55:38.000 I've seen people talk about someone they know that got sick or even died and they'll get attacked.

01:55:47.000 It's very strange because it's become much more of a medical issue, and it turned into a tribal issue.

01:55:55.000 And in this country, it's very separated in terms of ideological You have your Republicans and you have your Democrats, your right-wing people and your left-wing people.

01:56:05.000 The right-wing people are more reluctant to take it.

01:56:08.000 They're more reluctant to believe.

01:56:10.000 They were, you know, they were seeking alternative treatments.

01:56:13.000 Some of them were ineffective.

01:56:14.000 And then you had, and unfortunately, a lot of those people were unhealthy to begin with.

01:56:18.000 And then you had the left-wing people who were all in.

01:56:21.000 They were getting Pfizer tattoos.

01:56:23.000 They were showing photos of them getting vaccinated.

01:56:26.000 They were posting their little stickers got vaccinated.

01:56:29.000 They had their little hypodermic needle emoji in their little bio.

01:56:35.000 It's wild shit because it became a tribal identity signifier.

01:56:41.000 It was a signal that you were sending out to other people that you were on the right side.

01:56:46.000 You've done the right thing.

01:56:48.000 Yes.

01:56:48.000 I think there's an element for sure in this that those people who are indoctrinated believe that they have done a good thing for society.

01:56:59.000 They believe they have done the right thing.

01:57:01.000 And I think they thought that when they did it initially.

01:57:04.000 So that's why they're reluctant to relinquish that and to say they got duped.

01:57:08.000 Yeah.

01:57:08.000 But, you know, it takes...

01:57:09.000 There's a...

01:57:10.000 The school I went to, Manchester Grammar School, where, you know, I think it shaped me.

01:57:14.000 I'm very proud of the school I went to.

01:57:16.000 Our motto, it was in Latin, Saper Aude, dare to be wise.

01:57:21.000 It takes courage to change one's mind and to admit that you may have been wrong.

01:57:26.000 So it's not an easy thing for people to do.

01:57:29.000 It's the right thing to do.

01:57:30.000 It's about living virtuously.

01:57:31.000 As doctors, we're also taught if evidence changes, we need to change the evidence.

01:57:35.000 But not everybody feels comfortable doing that, Joe.

01:57:38.000 And I think that some of it is probably fear of getting attacked.

01:57:41.000 I mean, I know some celebrity figures that privately, you know, I won't name them, who are completely, you know, I agree with you, Sam, keep going, we support you, etc.

01:57:49.000 Thank you.

01:57:50.000 And they send me all these...

01:57:50.000 But they won't come out and speak out.

01:57:53.000 Even if half a dozen well-known celebrity figures, Joe, came out simultaneously and said, we are very concerned this vaccine is causing harm.

01:58:05.000 Please suspend it following an investigation.

01:58:08.000 I think this issue would probably end overnight.

01:58:12.000 It honestly doesn't take that many people of prominence to really speak out.

01:58:16.000 And I don't know if you've watched the movie She Said, which is around what happened with Harvey Weinstein.

01:58:24.000 No.

01:58:25.000 And this is corroborated.

01:58:27.000 Obviously, movies can sometimes be fictional, but this is very accurate.

01:58:31.000 And one of the things that comes out in that film is that all these women who had suffered at the hands of Harvey Weinstein...

01:58:40.000 When the journalists went to them, I think it was New York Times originally that broke the story, they were all very, very scared of speaking out on their own, like they would get attacked and, you know, he was so powerful and all of that influence.

01:58:53.000 But what the journalists did is that they got several of these women, and they basically were honest with them, saying, listen, so-and-so is going to say it as well.

01:59:00.000 You're not just going to be alone.

01:59:02.000 And the line was, when they jump, they all jump together.

01:59:10.000 I think we're getting there.

01:59:12.000 We have to just keep speaking the truth and letting go of the outcome because it's the right thing to do.

01:59:18.000 If there are people out there who have a voice, who have a platform, and I know some of them, by the way.

01:59:23.000 I'm talking about some really big-name celebrities.

01:59:30.000 I've had the exact same experience.

01:59:35.000 I've had it privately.

01:59:37.000 I've had it through messages.

01:59:38.000 I've had it through emails and texts.

01:59:40.000 A lot of it privately.

01:59:41.000 A lot of people don't even want to write it down.

01:59:43.000 They just want to tell you.

01:59:44.000 And a lot of them have stories.

01:59:46.000 The amount of people that I know That have come up to me privately to tell me about their own vaccine industry, injury rather, and about how they've been either ignored or dismissed by their physician, how they've sought other doctors out and the reluctance of admitting that this was somehow or another connected.

02:00:06.000 They want to think of the vaccine as being an overall absolute positive, a miracle of science.

02:00:13.000 This is what got us through this.

02:00:15.000 Sure, there is always going to be some side effects.

02:00:18.000 Because you're administering to a massive amount of people.

02:00:21.000 That's the narrative they get from their doctor.

02:00:23.000 Yeah.

02:00:24.000 And we shouldn't underestimate the scale of what we're dealing with.

02:00:27.000 I recently went to South Africa on a bit of a speaking tour, trying to engage with politicians and speak to the media and give lectures to doctors.

02:00:37.000 And the person that invited me there, Joe, is a chap called Jay Naidoo.

02:00:42.000 Now, Jay was a trade union leader.

02:00:46.000 He was considered as the chief orchestrator of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

02:00:53.000 He served in his first cabinet, and he contacted me a few months ago, and I was a bit overwhelmed, because I was like, he's a South African elder, he's one of the most powerful voices in Africa, and he said, listen, Asim, I followed what you've been doing, you know, thank you, and I was like, wow, you know, I support you, and what can I do to help, etc.,

02:01:08.000 etc., And what he said to me, and he also said this recently on GB News, he said, Asim, what we are dealing with here, the scale of the problem, the battle we have, is far bigger than what we fought in terms of apartheid.

02:01:25.000 And this is a guy at the age of 36 who thought he was going to be killed, who had people with AK-47s looking for him.

02:01:32.000 Because during that time, it was pretty horrific what happened to ethnic minority dissidents in South Africa.

02:01:38.000 People were put in prison and then they were murdered in prison.

02:01:40.000 I mean, that's what we're talking about here.

02:01:42.000 He said, this is far bigger.

02:01:45.000 Well, I mean, it just is by numbers, right?

02:01:47.000 Because it's the world.

02:01:48.000 And it's also this industry that is so huge.

02:01:53.000 There's so much money involved in this.

02:01:56.000 And there's so many people, particularly after it's already been administered, they don't want to harm the industry.

02:02:00.000 Like, this is already done.

02:02:02.000 The last thing we want to do is decrease profits even more.

02:02:05.000 Yeah.

02:02:06.000 So let's figure out a way to raise the profits up to a similar level that they achieved over the last few years, and how do we do that?

02:02:13.000 And here's an interesting thing that's come out recently.

02:02:16.000 In the United States, the original vaccine is now no longer approved.

02:02:21.000 Yes.

02:02:22.000 And why is that?

02:02:23.000 I don't know.

02:02:25.000 They've got this bivalent, which is a newer type.

02:02:28.000 It's the same thing though, Joe, I think.

02:02:29.000 I don't know what they're doing.

02:02:31.000 I don't fully understand it, to be perfectly honest with you.

02:02:34.000 But I think what's going to happen is they are still going to keep using it in the winter, like with the flu vaccine.

02:02:41.000 They're just going to add it in.

02:02:42.000 Here's the COVID vaccine for you, which is the same stuff.

02:02:45.000 So I don't think it's an acceptance that, you know, we've realized there's a problem we're going to just slowly introduce something else.

02:02:52.000 I think it's the same problem.

02:02:54.000 I mean, on that note, though, Switzerland and even Germany now are essentially stopping the use of these vaccines.

02:03:02.000 And I think what we must be very aware of, Joe, is that we shouldn't let them slowly phase out this vaccine.

02:03:11.000 It may end up happening here as well.

02:03:13.000 As if nothing ever happened and they move on to the next thing.

02:03:17.000 Because that's what they've done with other drugs in the past.

02:03:20.000 You know, I was involved in a case in the UK with a drug that was used heavily here as well.

02:03:24.000 It's called alteplase.

02:03:25.000 It's a clot-busting drug.

02:03:27.000 And it's used for strokes.

02:03:29.000 Emergency is used for strokes.

02:03:30.000 And I got contacted by a whistleblower.

02:03:32.000 Many years ago, who then published a letter in The Lancet, who basically looked at the data on which the drug was approved and said it was flawed.

02:03:40.000 There was evidence of potential fraud.

02:03:43.000 And eventually this went up to the regulator.

02:03:45.000 It got publicized in The Lancet.

02:03:46.000 I helped him get it on BBC News and Channel 4 News.

02:03:49.000 If it didn't get there, I don't think it would have got the attention it needed.

02:03:53.000 And ultimately the regulator got involved and I was peripherally aware of the investigation, if you like, into this drug.

02:04:01.000 And I was getting informed by people there that they didn't really know what to say or what to do.

02:04:06.000 They couldn't really answer the important questions he asked them about the regulatory approval and data which was clearly obviously showing significant harm and hardly any benefits in terms of causing brain bleeds and probably several thousand people died unnecessarily because of it.

02:04:20.000 And what they did was, it was one of the quality markers in hospitals that the hospitals would be remunerated if they used this drug in a timely fashion.

02:04:32.000 They just removed it.

02:04:33.000 One day from the website of this being a quality marker of care, it was removed.

02:04:39.000 And it just stopped being used and then they moved on to something else.

02:04:43.000 It never got publicity that actually we likely shouldn't have ever approved of this in the first place and the information that we used was potentially fraudulent or flawed and therefore they just carry on.

02:04:58.000 So we must be very careful, we must be aware, Joe, that they potentially could do this.

02:05:04.000 Now, it's already kind of happened.

02:05:07.000 You didn't use this in the US, but in many European countries, one of the vaccines that was used at the beginning for COVID was AstraZeneca.

02:05:15.000 By the summer of 2021, most European countries had suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine.

02:05:22.000 They stopped using it.

02:05:23.000 But no one really knew about it.

02:05:25.000 They kind of heard there was a few cases about rare blood clots or whatever, right?

02:05:29.000 Reporting the news, very, very rare blood clots.

02:05:30.000 And then suddenly they stopped using it.

02:05:32.000 It wasn't well publicized.

02:05:34.000 And then I found out only a few months ago, because I focused on the mRNA Pfizer vaccine, I didn't look at AstraZeneca.

02:05:40.000 I got contacted by some people in India.

02:05:44.000 It was being used, so it was suspended in European countries because of these quite significant common serious adverse events.

02:05:51.000 It was used, continued to be used even now in India under a different name.

02:05:55.000 It's the same vaccine.

02:05:56.000 It's called Covishield.

02:05:59.000 When I saw that, I was shocked.

02:06:01.000 So I went to India, gave some lectures over there, engaged with mainstream journalists over there who know me and see me as a credible voice in lots of areas, whether it's, you know, heart disease or diet or heart stents or whatever.

02:06:15.000 And I said, I need to get this into the mainstream media.

02:06:17.000 So I basically gave a lecture and up until the summer of 2021, there was a paper published.

02:06:23.000 I can't remember.

02:06:23.000 It was one of the, I think, immunology journals.

02:06:25.000 And it basically said, at that stage, the AstraZeneca vaccine was worse than Pfizer for cardiovascular effects.

02:06:32.000 Worse than Pfizer.

02:06:34.000 So I got this into the mainstream into the Times of India.

02:06:37.000 And what's really interesting about this, and it links into something else in South Africa, I didn't know.

02:06:42.000 I went there just because I wanted to help people.

02:06:43.000 I was giving lectures, but I had people coming up to me after my lectures, like widows crying, saying...

02:06:50.000 A nurse, I remember, came up to me and said, my husband, who was fit and well, had this.

02:06:53.000 And no one, you know, he basically dropped dead of a heart attack two weeks later.

02:06:57.000 I know this is what it was.

02:06:58.000 Thank you for everything you're doing.

02:06:59.000 I got it into the Times of India, and it got some publicity for the first time in that country.

02:07:04.000 And I wasn't aware.

02:07:06.000 I didn't do it for this reason.

02:07:08.000 I then met a very prominent lawyer in India who was involved in a case where a young activist has accused one of the richest men in India who was involved in the rollout of the COVID vaccine.

02:07:23.000 I wouldn't agree with what he said.

02:07:25.000 I'm just going to tell you in a second.

02:07:26.000 But he basically, through social media, this young activist said that this guy has committed mass murder.

02:07:31.000 So this man is suing for literally millions of pounds, this young guy, who's like a nutrition scientist who doesn't have much money, on this saying that this is defamatory, the vaccine is safe and effective.

02:07:47.000 And, you know, the accusation from this young activist was that this guy should have known or knew and why did he support the use and made a lot of money out of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

02:07:55.000 So I meet this lawyer and the case is ongoing and they weren't really getting anywhere until he puts in front of the judge an article in the Times of India where me, the British cardiologist, has said this is a big problem and this was suspended.

02:08:13.000 And he said it completely turned the judge.

02:08:16.000 You could see that he turned his eyes lit up and he was like...

02:08:19.000 The reason I'm saying this, Joe, is that even the judiciary, you know, this is the battle we face.

02:08:24.000 So many people have been indoctrinated, there are so many biases here, that one of the ways that we combat this, and I think your platform is probably one of the most important potentially in the world on this, let's not underestimate that, Is disseminating this truth,

02:08:40.000 traditionally it's been through legacy media, who are failing the public at the moment, right?

02:08:45.000 They are acting in ways that are anti-democratic, they're being economical with the truth, they are deliberately suppressing information.

02:08:51.000 Is, you know, what we are trying to do here, if we want to revolutionize healthcare, we want patients and public to get a better deal, we want a better democracy, is we make this injustice visible.

02:09:04.000 That's what Mahatma Gandhi said.

02:09:06.000 You know, how did he get the British colonialists out of India?

02:09:09.000 You know, how did he expose everything they were doing was wrong, make the injustice visible?

02:09:14.000 And traditionally, the most effective way to do that is through the mainstream media.

02:09:19.000 But the legacy media, I think people are losing trust.

02:09:22.000 Even smears and attacks have happened to me after I went on the BBC to talk about statins and then, you know, mentioned, I don't know if you know about this, but it was a few months ago, I mentioned that excess deaths could be because of the vaccine.

02:09:33.000 Got a lot of views, like 25 million views on Twitter.

02:09:37.000 But there was a backlash immediately where The Guardian newspaper, who I've written 19 opinion editorials for over the years, including three front page commentaries for The Observer, went for me and undermined my credibility.

02:09:48.000 There was a quote from a cardiologist saying he doesn't have a career in cardiology.

02:09:50.000 It's just ridiculous.

02:09:53.000 The comment section in the Guardian initially and even the Times newspaper that did something similar were largely supportive of what I was doing.

02:10:01.000 So there's a disconnect here and I think the legacy media are losing out.

02:10:05.000 I think they're in big danger.

02:10:06.000 And I think one of the things that you do, Joe, is because you have these conversations, you're willing to hear different points of view.

02:10:11.000 That's what people want, Joe.

02:10:13.000 That's what people really want.

02:10:14.000 And people ultimately, they want access to the truth.

02:10:17.000 And they want to do the right thing.

02:10:19.000 You know, they hate to see injustice.

02:10:21.000 So we keep making the injustice visible and we will win this.

02:10:23.000 I don't know if you're aware of this, but there was a, I believe it was a Facebook post where, I don't remember what organization put it up, but they, it might have been a news organization.

02:10:34.000 It was, do you know anyone that died from COVID? Like, what are your stories of people who died from COVID? And then underneath it, people started posting all their loved ones that died from the vaccine and all their loved ones that had debilitating injuries from the vaccine.

02:10:52.000 And it was a massive post.

02:10:55.000 It was thousands and thousands and thousands of comments.

02:10:59.000 Obviously, Unverified.

02:11:01.000 Anecdotal.

02:11:02.000 You don't know what...

02:11:03.000 I mean, it could be all disinformation.

02:11:05.000 Who knows?

02:11:06.000 But the shock of seeing that printed...

02:11:09.000 And this was early on.

02:11:11.000 This was when people were still very much on the narrative that the vaccine was getting us out of this, the vaccine was safe and effective, and only fools and conspiracy theorists were willing to risk their lives and not participate.

02:11:26.000 And it was pretty stunning.

02:11:29.000 That feeling I get, that's the same I get from conversations with people where they tell you about their uncle, their friend, their this, their that, their brother, their son.

02:11:41.000 They tell you about these injuries and then they tell you about the struggles of getting people to connect them to the vaccine.

02:11:48.000 They talk about how they've tried to get it in the VAERS report and the unsuccessful attempts to do that.

02:11:54.000 Even though the VAERS report is pretty extensive with vaccine injuries.

02:11:59.000 It's the whole thing seems like there's a lot of people that don't want to talk about it but have stories and feel very fucked over.

02:12:11.000 It's exactly the experience I've been having.

02:12:13.000 You know, wherever I go, I speak to...

02:12:16.000 I'm always curious about what drives people and their health, etc.

02:12:20.000 And on this vaccine issue, Joe, whether it's a cab driver or a shopkeeper when I was in South Africa, when I was in India, over in the States, almost everybody has a story, Joe.

02:12:28.000 Everybody has a story to tell.

02:12:30.000 That's important.

02:12:31.000 Now, you're right.

02:12:31.000 We can't always be definitive that it's, you know, the vaccine.

02:12:35.000 But coming back to the basics of what we learn in medicine, 80% of your diagnosis comes from the history.

02:12:39.000 So listen to the patient and most of the time they will give you the answer.

02:12:43.000 Something like this, as you just discussed, It was recently published in a journal called BMC Infectious Diseases, a high-impact journal, and it was a survey conducted, interesting analysis, of American people.

02:12:55.000 The sample size wasn't massive.

02:12:56.000 I think it was about 3,000.

02:12:58.000 And the calculations that were done suggested, when they extrapolated up, That there may well be up to 1 million serious adverse effects from the COVID vaccines in the United States in 2021 alone and 278,000 fatalities,

02:13:17.000 right?

02:13:17.000 Just from this survey where people knew of somebody or maybe had an injury who died.

02:13:23.000 That's very telling.

02:13:24.000 It's important information, I think, to have a discussion about.

02:13:27.000 Now, this paper, only a couple of weeks ago, April the 11th, was retracted because the journal was put under pressure.

02:13:35.000 Not because they had committed some fraud or whatever else.

02:13:38.000 There was no real good reason given.

02:13:43.000 You can't draw causal inference from this paper, which was...

02:13:48.000 In the paper anyway, I mean, the people who wrote it saying, of course you can't say it's causal, but it's still important that this is the level that there could be.

02:13:56.000 They said there was.

02:13:57.000 It could be that high.

02:13:59.000 We need to have these discussions.

02:14:01.000 And also, if there's such a disconnect, Joe, between how patients and the public feel, and they are now not trusting or believing the medical establishment, that's not good for medicine.

02:14:10.000 It's not good for democracy.

02:14:11.000 It's not good for government.

02:14:15.000 For societies to flourish constructively and progressively, people need to be able to trust each other.

02:14:23.000 And you can only trust each other if you believe people are telling the truth.

02:14:27.000 So we are heading down a very dangerous path Until we can release the world from this corporate tyranny, this is the battle we face.

02:14:38.000 The one of truth versus money, materialism, and dare I say in some ways psychopathy, and spiritualism.

02:14:47.000 And we need to go back to understanding what does it actually mean to be human?

02:14:51.000 What does it mean to be a good human?

02:14:54.000 What does it mean to lead the good life?

02:14:56.000 And that is underpinned by also basic values, honesty, integrity.

02:15:01.000 You know, empathy, compassion, courage.

02:15:04.000 This is what we need to be teaching.

02:15:06.000 There's a cultural issue here.

02:15:07.000 I think that's what's led us a little bit and it's hindering us to making progress because these people, as you know, even your friends and celebrities, why don't they just be brave enough to just come out and speak the truth?

02:15:19.000 Because there's real consequences and they can avoid those consequences by just not talking.

02:15:24.000 They don't feel like they have that much of an ability to change things.

02:15:28.000 They feel like this machine is massive and dangerous and scary.

02:15:34.000 I think we shouldn't underestimate the power of speaking the truth.

02:15:37.000 I'm somebody that has, you know, in recent months, I know you've had him on your show a few times, and it makes sense to me why he says Jordan Peterson, right?

02:15:43.000 So, you know, we have to accept it's not safe to speak the truth, but it's even less safe to not speak the truth, because the problem isn't going to go away.

02:15:52.000 It's only going to get worse.

02:15:53.000 It isn't even about being virtuous or courageous.

02:15:55.000 For me, it's about being rational.

02:15:57.000 It's about being rational.

02:15:58.000 So we need to keep having these conversations and hopefully with time, situation, people will, you know, I think more and more people are speaking out, more doctors are speaking out.

02:16:07.000 Certainly when I started, you know, I was one of the lone voices.

02:16:10.000 There are people like Peter McCullough who's been brilliant on top of this for a long time.

02:16:14.000 But more and more doctors now, more and more people speaking out.

02:16:17.000 I feel most for my profession.

02:16:19.000 I'm more worried about them than anyone.

02:16:21.000 I mean, of course, my patients are being harmed, but in terms of the trust that has been eroded, We have to accept it.

02:16:28.000 The trust has been eroded.

02:16:29.000 It's going to take time to regain that trust.

02:16:33.000 But the longer the medical establishment ignore the fact that they are essentially slaves to corporate tyrannical and often psychopathic entities, as long as they continue to ignore that,

02:16:50.000 our patients are going to suffer more and more.

02:16:55.000 You touched briefly on one thing that's very disturbing that I think we should probably talk some more about, and it's an increase in overall mortality.

02:17:05.000 The increase in overall mortality is pretty unprecedented, correct?

02:17:11.000 Yes.

02:17:12.000 So this has been going on, has been in the news or getting some attention certainly for the last several months.

02:17:18.000 And when you look at excess deaths, a significant proportion of those, if not most of them, are usually cardiovascular, heart attack and strokes, obviously my area of interest.

02:17:31.000 The question is, what's causing it?

02:17:34.000 And with heart disease, of course, cardiovascular disease, it's a multifactorial, you know, condition.

02:17:42.000 Some of it for sure, and I actually predicted this interestingly before the vaccine came onto the scene in my mind, I knew that because of lockdowns and the psychological stress associated with it and people's diets getting worse and being sedentary and stuff, I predicted that there probably would be over time an increase in heart attacks,

02:18:00.000 certainly more vulnerable people.

02:18:01.000 And I think there is definitely a role to be played there, Joe, in this.

02:18:05.000 Also, drinking.

02:18:06.000 Much more people drank during the pandemic.

02:18:10.000 Alcoholism increased.

02:18:11.000 Yeah.

02:18:11.000 These things will absolutely, you know, and mental health obviously got worse.

02:18:15.000 So, you know, there's going to be people.

02:18:17.000 I haven't looked at this, you know, but I suspect some of these are going to be people with suicides have gone up, that kind of thing.

02:18:22.000 I'm sure that's going to probably be a contributing factor.

02:18:24.000 Lack of screening and medical attention during that time.

02:18:27.000 Yeah, a little bit of that.

02:18:28.000 Not so much because I remember I said that modern medicine itself only gives marginal benefits actually to most people.

02:18:34.000 I think the emergency care stuff, for example, people not getting timely treatment in emergencies for sure, like people having cardiac arrest, etc.

02:18:42.000 But then what's driving the increase in cardiac arrest, which we've seen, right?

02:18:45.000 So that's the question.

02:18:49.000 What proportion of those excess deaths are because of the vaccine?

02:18:54.000 And there isn't much data out there that's reliable.

02:18:59.000 But Professor Norman Fenton, who's a Professor of Risk at Queen Mary University, Emeritus Professor of Risk, very well published, very respected mathematician, you know, statistician, Professor of Risk.

02:19:12.000 We're good to go.

02:19:37.000 Well, in the UK, absolute numbers are about 120,000 excess deaths since 2021. What is the percentage over a normal year?

02:19:48.000 I can't tell you off the top of my head, Joe.

02:19:50.000 I can't break down the percentage specifically for you.

02:19:55.000 I mean, separately in my paper, one thing I looked at was the increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest that happened in 2021 after the vaccine rollout versus 2020. And that was in the region of something like 14 to 20% increase,

02:20:12.000 which was, you know, quite significant.

02:20:16.000 And is it universal or is it uniform in all the states that rolled out these vaccines, this increase in excess deaths?

02:20:26.000 Yeah, the problem is the data has not collated that, you know, we have to rely on what government, government figures.

02:20:32.000 So certainly in the UK, it does seem to be pretty consistent in most places.

02:20:36.000 Is it proportionate to places where there was a very low number of vaccinated people?

02:20:41.000 Yeah, so if you look at countries across the world, there is definitely a correlation with highly vaccinated countries and excess deaths.

02:20:52.000 The one caveat, though, which is interesting, and I can explain that, is there hasn't been any significant increase in excess deaths in Sweden, and they're very highly vaccinated.

02:21:04.000 Although the excess deaths are maybe one of the lowest in the world they're still probably higher than you would expect after a pandemic when a lot of vulnerable people would have died and therefore your excess death rate should be in the negative and they're not in the negative so that means that they are still higher than you would expect and I've been to Sweden and given lectures and spoken to cardiologists and they're seeing these vaccine injuries so why is Sweden doing better?

02:21:27.000 As I said earlier, a lot of the vulnerabilities to vaccine injuries are people who had poorer baseline health.

02:21:32.000 The same people are vulnerable to COVID. A lot of the excess deaths are still also in the countries which had high obesity rates.

02:21:39.000 So looking at COVID, and let's not underestimate or forget about this, 90% of the deaths globally from COVID happened in countries where more than half the population were overweight or obese.

02:21:53.000 And when you understand the mechanism of harm of the vaccine, which is basically increasing inflammation in the body systemically for a number of months, if you've already got a baseline problem of a little bit of chronic inflammation, it's just going to make it worse.

02:22:06.000 So it makes sense from a biological perspective why people who are also vulnerable to COVID are also more vulnerable to vaccine injuries.

02:22:14.000 And Sweden's baseline health is a lot healthier.

02:22:17.000 A lot of the Scandinavian countries, they are generally healthier.

02:22:21.000 They have lower social inequalities.

02:22:24.000 Something very interesting is that the bigger the gap between the rich and the poor in countries, that's a big risk factor for ill health as well.

02:22:32.000 Because there's something called status anxiety, Joe.

02:22:36.000 When you have a big gap between rich and poor, everybody is comparing themselves to each other.

02:22:43.000 And that causes stress.

02:22:46.000 Chronic stress is an element.

02:22:47.000 There's a lot of interesting research on this.

02:22:49.000 Whereas in the Scandinavian countries, they're much more equal societies, socioeconomically.

02:22:53.000 And that probably also makes them less stressed and healthier.

02:22:57.000 That makes sense.

02:22:59.000 Clearly.

02:23:00.000 And also dietary choices, health choices, the stress, drug abuse that oftentimes comes with impoverished people.

02:23:09.000 Yes.

02:23:09.000 Yeah.

02:23:10.000 Absolutely.

02:23:11.000 The whole thing is just so extraordinary and it's so hard to gather up the information and it really takes having a conversation with someone like yourself over hours to really just lay out The landscape.

02:23:27.000 So that people can understand that.

02:23:29.000 I think that's also part of the problem with getting this narrative out there.

02:23:34.000 That it requires someone to commit to listening to someone like yourself talk for a long time to get a real understanding of what are the mechanisms that could be causing these problems, what are the vulnerabilities that the system has that they would allow this to take place in the first place.

02:23:54.000 It's all very complex.

02:23:56.000 Yeah.

02:23:57.000 I mean, so again, that goes to like, what are some of the solutions here?

02:24:00.000 So there's a very interesting approach structure used in Thailand called the triangle that moves the mountain.

02:24:08.000 And the mountain is considered like a social problem that is thought to be very difficult to move or change.

02:24:14.000 So how can we simplify this complex problem so we focus on the right things to move forward rather than think, become apathetic or think, oh my god, this is too big.

02:24:24.000 Where do we focus our attention?

02:24:26.000 So the triangle that moves a mountain has three components.

02:24:29.000 One is the information, clean, clear evidence disseminating that information, the truthful information, right?

02:24:35.000 Then it's the social movement, empowering people who are educated to make noise and to educate each other about what's going on.

02:24:45.000 And then the third one, maybe more challenging, is political involvement, because ultimately the politicians, they have the power.

02:24:51.000 Over laws, over protecting the public, in this instance, from the excesses and manipulations of pharma, right?

02:24:59.000 So that's how that mountain can be moved.

02:25:02.000 And that's something I have almost done intuitively.

02:25:09.000 Over the years, learning from other activists.

02:25:12.000 But, you know, if you take the issue of sugar, for example, Joe, you know, I was very prominent in highlighting the harms of excess sugar, doing my own investigation, getting it out through the mainstream media.

02:25:23.000 But also...

02:25:25.000 Having that conversation, getting into, you know, politicians and getting to Parliament.

02:25:29.000 Ultimately, you know, I was the first science director of this organization called Action Sugar.

02:25:34.000 Got lots of scientists together, broke the mainstream news, got lots of media involved.

02:25:38.000 It became a campaign.

02:25:39.000 We were basically the front page of the Daily Mail when we first launched our campaign, which for me was a big win, was Sugar is a New Tobacco.

02:25:46.000 That was it.

02:25:47.000 That's all people need to know.

02:25:47.000 Front page, Daily Mail, 2014. Boom.

02:25:51.000 Right?

02:25:51.000 And then everything took off from there.

02:25:53.000 Where, you know, the Secretary for Health at the time, Jeremy Hunt, I met him.

02:25:58.000 And what happened, even though that was a relatively right-wing government, you wouldn't think this would happen, it resulted, because of that media attention and the dissemination of that information, that sugar was harmful and we've been manipulated by the food industry, it resulted in us introducing tax on sugary drinks in the UK,

02:26:14.000 which was a big win.

02:26:15.000 And again, why that's important is we talked about big tobacco earlier.

02:26:19.000 Do you know what the biggest healthcare breakthrough has happened in the last 40 or 50 years in the Western world?

02:26:29.000 Taxation of cigarettes.

02:26:30.000 Really?

02:26:31.000 50% of the decline in smoking, sorry, in heart disease death has happened because of smoking.

02:26:36.000 But it only happened when there were regulations imposed.

02:26:40.000 So in public health we call about addressing the affordability, the availability, and the acceptability of cigarettes.

02:26:52.000 So public health education campaign, affordability taxation of cigarettes, and availability public smoking bans.

02:26:58.000 But the impact of these public health interventions, Joe, are huge.

02:27:02.000 So Helena, Montana, 2002, they introduced a public smoking ban.

02:27:08.000 You couldn't smoke in public places.

02:27:09.000 Within six months, 40% decline in admissions with heart attacks.

02:27:15.000 Because passive smoking increases platelet activity and clodibility of the blood.

02:27:19.000 So suddenly you've removed that from the environment.

02:27:21.000 Passive smoking?

02:27:22.000 Yes.

02:27:22.000 What do you mean by passive?

02:27:23.000 As in, say you're smoking now, and I'm inhaling your fumes.

02:27:28.000 Oh, secondhand smoking.

02:27:29.000 Secondhand smoking, we call it passive in the UK. And within 30 minutes of that, studies were done to show that it increases platelet activity in terms of your blood becomes more clottable, just within 30 minutes of passive smoking.

02:27:41.000 Really?

02:27:42.000 Yes.

02:27:42.000 You remove that from the environment and suddenly massive reduction.

02:27:45.000 When the law was rescinded because of the tobacco lobby, within a few months, the heart attack levels went back to what they were beforehand.

02:27:53.000 So that shows you the impact of it.

02:27:55.000 And eventually, obviously, we won that battle.

02:27:56.000 Same thing happened in Scotland.

02:27:57.000 17% decrease within one year of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests after the smoking ban.

02:28:02.000 So these are the important interventions like public health.

02:28:05.000 Now, if we apply the same thing to food, You know, we tax ultra-processed food, we make healthy food, real food more affordable.

02:28:12.000 Knowing the science of dietary changes on health, you could probably, within the space of a few years, probably, in the right way, theoretically, half the death rates from heart disease.

02:28:24.000 So, you know, we need to think in these terms.

02:28:27.000 And coming back to what we said earlier about the sociocultural phenomenon of the perception amongst people about modern medicine being the saviour, From 1850 to now, to 2014, right, in America, there's been an average increase in life expectancy of 40 years.

02:28:46.000 When they did surveys of public health students and asked them how much of those 40 years was because of modern medicine, the response was they thought 80% of those 40 years was because of modern medicine and healthcare.

02:28:57.000 So 32 of those 40-year increase in life expectancy.

02:29:00.000 So average age was 40 of death or whatever, 1850, and now it's what, 79. Do you know what the real figure was from modern medicine?

02:29:08.000 About three and a half to five years.

02:29:10.000 Most of what increased life expectancy in the last 150 years, whatever, has been through public health interventions.

02:29:17.000 Safe drinking water, seat belts in cars, safer working environments, better sanitation, smoke-free buildings, in some ways better nutrition in some senses because of all these nutritional deficiencies that killed people through defective immune systems.

02:29:34.000 And that's a conversation we need to start having again.

02:29:36.000 You know, most of what determines your health happens outside the doctor's consultation room.

02:29:42.000 And that is a socio-cultural phenomenon we have to also address because that also would help policymakers know where they should be devoting their resources.

02:29:51.000 If they want to be improving health.

02:29:53.000 But a lot of them are bought into, even Bill Gates.

02:29:55.000 I suspect Bill Gates.

02:29:56.000 I know you may have your own opinions on him.

02:29:58.000 I think a lot of his issues is one of ignorance and even the illusion of knowledge.

02:30:03.000 He's equated advances in technology through engineering or tech with medicine as well.

02:30:11.000 And what I tell patients and what I tell doctors, usually if something's more expensive as a new drug, it's probably least likely to be effective for you.

02:30:19.000 So we have to have those conversations with doctors and with the public.

02:30:26.000 Modern medicine has a role, but there are massive limitations.

02:30:29.000 And the way we are managing chronic disease, which is the big problem in American health care, your diabetes, your high blood pressure, heart disease, all that kind of stuff, cancers...

02:30:38.000 Is with pills that have very marginal effects of benefit, come with side effects, don't improve the quality of your life, and simultaneously, because of the illusion of benefit, distract policymakers and individuals from focusing on these more effective,

02:30:54.000 simple lifestyle changes.

02:30:58.000 And that's where we should be focusing our attention.

02:31:01.000 So what do we do?

02:31:03.000 Well, we have that conversation.

02:31:04.000 We disseminate the information.

02:31:05.000 One of the things I, again, I try through multiple media mechanisms, through lectures, through, you know, podcasts, through mainstream media, is to get that information out there.

02:31:13.000 And a few years ago, I was lucky enough to co-produce a documentary film.

02:31:19.000 It's called The Big Fat Fix and it covers a lot of stuff we discussed about how we got it wrong about saturated fat and how, you know, and part of that story, Joe, I co-produced it with a chap called Donal O'Neill who was a former international athlete who got very interested in the lifestyle stuff because his dad suffered a heart attack who was a soccer player and he's like,

02:31:39.000 why did he have a heart attack and he realized it was, you know, low-fat diet, high-carbohydrate, all that kind of stuff.

02:31:45.000 And he made a movie called Cereal Close.

02:31:46.000 So we made this movie, and what we did was we went back to the origins of where the Mediterranean diet came from.

02:31:52.000 Because a lot of the problems with obesity now, and I know you've discussed this with other people, is because of flawed dietary guidelines.

02:31:57.000 Low-fat, high-carb, ultra-processed food, etc.

02:31:59.000 Lower cholesterol, that's what we should be focusing on.

02:32:01.000 And it's driven this obesity epidemic.

02:32:04.000 So we went back to the original village where the Mediterranean diet originally came from.

02:32:08.000 It's called Pioppi.

02:32:09.000 Not many people know it.

02:32:10.000 It's a southern Italian village.

02:32:11.000 And we went there to meet those people, look at how they live.

02:32:14.000 And they're not a wealthy community.

02:32:17.000 They're quite poor, actually.

02:32:18.000 Seaside village.

02:32:20.000 Average life expectancy over 90. They're not taking lots of pills.

02:32:23.000 Like, what's going on here?

02:32:25.000 And their diet was devoid of, traditionally, of ultra-processed food.

02:32:29.000 Very strong sense of community.

02:32:31.000 If you look at these blue zones around the world where people live, you know, have healthy life expectancy, not just living with chronic disease, a long life and a healthy life.

02:32:40.000 You know, the common denominator, Joe, other than the fact they didn't have ultra-processed food and all that kind of stuff, they were active, they were outdoors, etc.

02:32:47.000 They weren't pounding in the gym.

02:32:48.000 They were just out walking in the hills, right?

02:32:50.000 Was they had a very strong sense of community.

02:32:52.000 They looked after each other.

02:32:54.000 And that plays into our greater understanding of the impact of stress on health.

02:33:01.000 And that's something, again, which isn't being addressed properly because it's now well established that if you have chronic stress, it's equivalent as a risk factor for heart disease as being a type 2 diabetic or being a smoker or having high blood pressure.

02:33:16.000 But it's not being addressed.

02:33:17.000 And I manage a lot of patients by addressing their stress and going to the root.

02:33:22.000 Most of them have severe stress who've come with heart attacks.

02:33:24.000 It hasn't been dealt with.

02:33:27.000 And I don't want to digress too much.

02:33:29.000 So we made this documentary film just to get people to understand that most of the lifestyle factors is what you need to do moving forward and we crowdfunded it because initially we went to the BBC. They wanted editorial control and started suggesting new things and we said, you know what, we don't want this to be influenced by any entity that isn't going to be open to telling the full truth about lifestyle,

02:33:49.000 even if it means taking on and exposing all of the sugar industry manipulations.

02:33:59.000 Luckily for us, the New York Times covered it, Men's Health gave it a really positive review, and we premiered in the British Parliament.

02:34:05.000 And that had a really powerful impact.

02:34:07.000 I had members of Parliament coming to me after it, congratulating me on it.

02:34:10.000 And one of them, we wrote a book as well, called Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour Party.

02:34:16.000 At that time, he was the opposition, it's like the Democrat Party, he was like the deputy leader.

02:34:19.000 This guy, he'll admit this, for most of his life when you see him is massively obese.

02:34:24.000 Like he was known as like, probably looked as one of most obese politicians you will see.

02:34:29.000 And about a year after he'd read the book and seen this documentary film, because it premiered in Parliament and there were MPs talking about it, etc.

02:34:37.000 He calls me up.

02:34:38.000 I didn't know him.

02:34:39.000 He messaged me, in fact, on Twitter.

02:34:41.000 And he said, listen, I want to tell you something.

02:34:42.000 He said, I read your book and I've struggled with obesity all my life.

02:34:45.000 And I followed your low-carb Mediterranean diet.

02:34:49.000 He said, I've lost 100 pounds in a year and I've sustained it and I want to talk about it.

02:34:55.000 And he then has been a poster boy, and he'd influenced other politicians.

02:34:59.000 And what happened as a result of that, Joe, is that we then got the sugary drinks tax as well.

02:35:03.000 So I think all these things, you know, don't underestimate the power of your speech, who you're speaking to, and the power of the truth.

02:35:11.000 And now, we've now decided, because of all of this mess we're in, this bubble needs to burst of corporate tyranny, movies and documentaries can be very powerful to...

02:35:21.000 You know, in 60 minutes to really change the way people think if you convey information in the right way.

02:35:27.000 So we're now about to...

02:35:29.000 I'm announcing it here, obviously, with you for the first time because we've been in discussions.

02:35:32.000 We're doing a new documentary which we're going to get crowdfunded because we want to be free of commercial influence.

02:35:38.000 Which really helps expose all of these system failures of pharma, regulatory capture, but also give people tools as individuals about how they can improve their health.

02:35:48.000 The questions they should ask their doctor, you know, do I really need this test or procedure?

02:35:53.000 What happens if I do nothing?

02:35:54.000 Are there any alternatives, anything simpler or safer options?

02:35:58.000 And it will educate doctors and hopefully within that 60 minutes we can have a massive, massive impact.

02:36:03.000 And I'm going to, you know, we need, obviously we're going to get it crowdfunded to make it high quality, etc.

02:36:07.000 We probably need about half a million dollars.

02:36:11.000 And I shared with Jamie actually that we've done a little 90 second promo kind of trailer or video just to get people understanding what we're about to do.

02:36:20.000 And the title is, are you ready for it?

02:36:24.000 First Duno Farm.

02:36:27.000 That's very catchy.

02:36:32.000 I don't know if we're able to just...

02:36:34.000 From the creators of Serial Killers.

02:36:39.000 In 1986, Ronald Reagan made it easier for American pharma companies to make more money.

02:36:47.000 And in 1992, George Bush allowed them to spend some of that to directly finance the FDA. By 1999, drug giant Merck had falsified their own research to usher a new arthritis drug onto the market.

02:37:06.000 Vioxx would kill an estimated 55,000 Americans.

02:37:11.000 But that was just for starters.

02:37:14.000 In the last two decades Big Pharma has been fined tens of billions of dollars.

02:37:22.000 But the deception continues.

02:37:26.000 When they are free to deceive, who can you believe?

02:37:31.000 Please give a very warm welcome to Dr. Asim Mahathra.

02:37:38.000 They paid fines that were minuscule in comparison to the profit that they made.

02:37:44.000 And nobody got fired and the system just continues to do the same thing.

02:37:48.000 Nothing has changed to stop them committing these crimes again.

02:37:52.000 Top executives should be held personally accountable so that they would need to think of the risk of imprisonment when they consider performing or acquiescing these crimes.

02:38:12.000 That looks great.

02:38:14.000 One of the things that happened when vaccine injuries first started being discussed, particularly myocarditis, there was a lot of confusion because particularly I was confused because I was told by multiple sources including very credible people that there was a high risk Particularly with young men of myocarditis because of the vaccine.

02:38:39.000 Then all this data came out that said there's actually more myocarditis from COVID than there is of the vaccine.

02:38:49.000 What's the real story there?

02:38:51.000 The real story is that during the first year of the pandemic, Joe, and in fact Israel looked at this, a few million people, they published a paper, which again I referenced as well, which is the best available evidence, is there was no significant increase in myocarditis from the virus compared to other viruses.

02:39:10.000 So why did they say there was and what was the data that they used?

02:39:14.000 I think, well, there was an over-diagnosis of myocarditis.

02:39:20.000 So one of the papers that was published in Nature, and I know this because I know some of the authors, and I know somebody close to one of the authors, and I don't think they did this deliberately.

02:39:28.000 I think they were fed into this perception that they needed to highlight the harms of COVID and it was affecting the heart, is that they weren't strict with their criteria of what myocarditis is.

02:39:40.000 So, for example...

02:39:42.000 One of the markers of inflammation of the heart muscle is something called troponin.

02:39:48.000 Troponin also goes up when you have a heart attack.

02:39:50.000 It's used to diagnose heart attack, but you don't use a single marker on its own to make a diagnosis.

02:39:54.000 It's what's the history, what are other tests showing, what is the likely diagnosis.

02:39:59.000 If you are, and this is something I've come across throughout my whole career, if you have any infection in the body or you're under stress, you have pneumonia, it's quite common that your troponin, which is a marker of inflammation of the heart, which doesn't necessarily mean myocarditis,

02:40:15.000 by the way, will go up.

02:40:18.000 What they did was, if you were in intensive care, in this study, the way that they over-diagnosed, they basically just used people's troponin to make a diagnosis of myocarditis rather than actually, is this truly myocarditis?

02:40:29.000 So there was a massive over-diagnosis of myocarditis that wasn't myocarditis and that inflated the numbers.

02:40:36.000 When people have looked clinically at the criteria of what myocarditis is, with use of MRI scans and echoes and all that kind of stuff, and the history, it doesn't show any significant increase compared to other viruses.

02:40:48.000 And by the way, I have a personal story here.

02:40:52.000 When I was 11 years old, I lost my older brother.

02:40:54.000 He was 13. And he died because of viral myocarditis.

02:40:58.000 So I know how devastating this can be.

02:40:59.000 I'm not undermining the fact that this can be really devastating.

02:41:02.000 Within a week of having basically a stomach infection, he went into crashing heart failure and died and had a cardiac arrest.

02:41:09.000 So it's something I have an interest in and I know about and I've managed many people with myocarditis.

02:41:14.000 So there isn't any significant increase.

02:41:16.000 Or if there is, it's minor.

02:41:18.000 When you look at the data on myocarditis after the vaccine, certainly in younger people, under 40, one of the recent publications suggested it probably is even maybe 28 times more frequent.

02:41:34.000 But let's give a caveat here, Joe.

02:41:38.000 It can be in a way comparing apples and oranges.

02:41:41.000 So the vaccine myocarditis in general, what's diagnosed when people are admitted to hospital, isn't the same as viral myocarditis, which traditionally about a third of those people who get it will die when they get viral myocarditis.

02:41:57.000 A third will have some impairment of heart muscle pump function and a third will have, you know, some kind of breathlessness, not feel well, go to hospital and everything will normalize within a space of few weeks and they'll live a normal, long, happy life.

02:42:09.000 With the vaccine myocarditis stuff...

02:42:12.000 It's a little bit more...

02:42:14.000 What concerns me more is that a lot of people will get some mild initial issue with the vaccine, inflammation of the heart muscle, but probably through other mechanisms of the vaccine later on can suddenly have arrhythmias and suddenly drop dead.

02:42:28.000 And I suspect many of these athletes that are unexpectedly dropping dead have got some subclinical myocarditis.

02:42:36.000 Even if, let's just say for argument's sake, Joe, even if COVID myocarditis is more common than other viral myocarditis, right?

02:42:46.000 May well be true.

02:42:47.000 Let's just say it's true for argument's sake.

02:42:49.000 That doesn't mean that taking the vaccine is going to protect you.

02:42:53.000 There's no data saying it's going to protect you from COVID myocarditis.

02:42:58.000 And actually may be additive.

02:42:59.000 It may make things worse.

02:43:02.000 So...

02:43:04.000 If you've had COVID and you have natural immunity, one bit of research revealed if you have the vaccine after having natural immunity, certainly within the first three months, you are almost three times more likely to get side effects.

02:43:20.000 So there are two different discussions going on here.

02:43:22.000 One is how common is COVID myocarditis?

02:43:24.000 Fine.

02:43:25.000 Let's establish that.

02:43:26.000 The question is, does the vaccine protect you from it?

02:43:29.000 Or make things worse.

02:43:31.000 And almost certainly, with all we know now, when it comes to heart disease or the issue about myocarditis or heart attacks, the vaccine is, you know, the cure is worse than the disease.

02:43:47.000 Do you know how many people tried to get me to get vaccinated after I got sick?

02:43:51.000 It was stunning.

02:43:53.000 Smart people.

02:43:54.000 People that I knew very well.

02:43:55.000 Including doctors.

02:43:56.000 Including Sanjay Gupta.

02:43:58.000 They were telling me that it would give me initial protection.

02:44:02.000 And I remember being so confused because I had known at that point, there was already studies showing that natural immunity was very disputed because it was against the narrative, but that natural immunity was several times better at protecting you from additional infection.

02:44:22.000 And my friend, who's a brilliant man, who is very much a vaccine proponent, Said, yeah, but you'll get more protection.

02:44:30.000 And I said to him, hey, man, I got over this in three days.

02:44:34.000 Like, what are you saying?

02:44:36.000 I've been sick from the flu for longer than that.

02:44:38.000 Like, I'm very fortunate in that I have access to good health care and medicine, and I'm very healthy, and I work out every day, and I take a lot of vitamins, and I do a lot of other things for my health.

02:44:51.000 Sauna and cold plunge, all these different things.

02:44:54.000 I'm very healthy.

02:44:54.000 I work at it all the time.

02:44:58.000 So this thought that I'm going to take a chance on something that I didn't take in the first place because the vaccine that I was supposed to...

02:45:07.000 Let me tell you my story.

02:45:08.000 The UFC had allocated a...

02:45:12.000 A certain number of doses of the Johnson& Johnson vaccine for all of their employees.

02:45:17.000 We were operating during the pandemic, in the heat of the pandemic, and we would do these audience-less events.

02:45:25.000 So there would be no audience.

02:45:27.000 It would just be the staff.

02:45:28.000 Everybody would be tested.

02:45:30.000 You would be tested before you got on your flight.

02:45:32.000 You'd be tested again when you got there.

02:45:34.000 They had an amazing bubble.

02:45:36.000 Amazing COVID bubble and occasionally a crew member would test positive.

02:45:41.000 They'd shut everything down or not a crew member rather but a corner member of like one of the fighters groups.

02:45:48.000 That fighter would no longer be able to compete even if they tested negative.

02:45:51.000 So they were really rigorous about this.

02:45:54.000 So they said, hey, you know, the vaccine's out and we have a bunch of it.

02:45:59.000 Do you want to take it?

02:46:01.000 They didn't mandate it.

02:46:02.000 They just asked me.

02:46:03.000 I said, sure.

02:46:04.000 I said, I'm coming in for the fights and we would do these at the Apex Center, which is a very small arena that the UFC has constructed that they do some of their smaller events at.

02:46:13.000 So I go there, I call this guy who's the head of the thing, and I said, hey, I'm here.

02:46:20.000 Can I get the vaccine before the show?

02:46:22.000 And he said, yeah, let me get right back to you.

02:46:25.000 We'll set that up.

02:46:26.000 So he calls me back and says, okay, there's an issue.

02:46:28.000 We have to do it at the clinic.

02:46:31.000 Can you come back on Monday?

02:46:33.000 And I said, I can't.

02:46:35.000 I'm busy.

02:46:36.000 I have to go back.

02:46:36.000 I got to go back to Texas.

02:46:38.000 But there's another event coming up in the future.

02:46:42.000 I'll be back here again.

02:46:43.000 This time I'll come a day early and I'll just get the vaccine.

02:46:46.000 During that time period of me returning, two people I knew got strokes and they pulled the vaccine.

02:46:54.000 So they pulled the Johnson& Johnson vaccine, and then I went, whoa.

02:46:57.000 So from all that I knew about Vioxx, because I had a friend who had taken Vioxx and gotten a stroke, and I knew about the court case, I hadn't had the conversation with John Abramson yet, but I was very aware of the deception and very aware of how they hid the data and that they knew about it in advance.

02:47:16.000 They knew it was going to cause these problems.

02:47:19.000 So I started getting nervous.

02:47:21.000 And then I started talking to different physicians and doctors who would devise these immunity boosting protocols.

02:47:28.000 And this is how you prevent viral infections and ionophores and zinc and IV vitamins and this and that.

02:47:36.000 And I was like, I don't know, man.

02:47:39.000 Now I want to ride this out.

02:47:41.000 So now I'm really concerned and confused.

02:47:45.000 And then I had a few friends that had gotten it.

02:47:47.000 And some friends that got it real bad.

02:47:50.000 And then some friends that just had nothing.

02:47:52.000 I mean nothing.

02:47:54.000 Like one of my friends, she got tested because she had to go somewhere for a wedding in, I believe it was the Virgin Islands.

02:48:03.000 And so she had to get tested to fly.

02:48:06.000 And, oh my god, you're positive.

02:48:08.000 She's like, what?

02:48:09.000 I'm positive?

02:48:10.000 Like, yeah, your PCR has tested you positive for, and this is the early days of the PCR where they did multiple cycles.

02:48:17.000 I think they were doing, what were they doing, 40 originally?

02:48:22.000 And then she got tested again.

02:48:24.000 She was positive.

02:48:25.000 She never had a single symptom.

02:48:27.000 And then I started looking at how many asymptomatic people there were.

02:48:30.000 And they were saying something in the neighborhood where like 60% of the people were asymptomatic.

02:48:33.000 I'm like, what is this?

02:48:34.000 Is this gonna kill everybody or is this nothing?

02:48:36.000 Like, what is this?

02:48:37.000 And then someone else would get it and they'd get really sick and they'd be fucked up for a couple weeks.

02:48:41.000 So it was very...

02:48:43.000 I was not committed one way or the other.

02:48:46.000 I was still on the fence about this.

02:48:49.000 But as time went on, I just sensed the fuckery.

02:48:53.000 I sensed the propaganda.

02:48:55.000 It was just, there were so many people that were trying to coerce you.

02:49:00.000 Celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, fuck your freedom, take it, fuck your freedom.

02:49:05.000 Everybody was telling you to take it.

02:49:06.000 And I was like, man, this seems like a cult.

02:49:08.000 This seems like something's going, but I didn't want to dismiss medicine.

02:49:12.000 I didn't want to dismiss the whole thing.

02:49:14.000 What disturbs the shit out of me is that after I got better, CNN, MSNBC, all these mainstream news things are mocking me for taking horse medication.

02:49:27.000 They're saying, he took horse medication.

02:49:29.000 He took horse dewormer.

02:49:31.000 Literally taking a drug that's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.

02:49:36.000 Literally taking a drug that's been prescribed billions of times.

02:49:40.000 Taking a drug that was invented by the guy who won the Nobel Prize for inventing that drug.

02:49:47.000 It has one of the best safety profiles of any known drug, but it's generic and it's cheap.

02:49:54.000 It was real cheap.

02:49:56.000 And I didn't just take that.

02:49:58.000 I listed a bunch of other things I took.

02:50:00.000 Z-Pak, monoclonal antibodies.

02:50:03.000 I had IV vitamin infusions multiple days in a row.

02:50:06.000 I got better quick.

02:50:08.000 Nobody cared that I got better quick.

02:50:09.000 All they cared was I didn't get vaccinated.

02:50:12.000 What's the best way to shame him Let's point to this one thing that he took and mocked this person for taking this foolish medication.

02:50:19.000 They even changed the color of my face on CNN. I put a video up of me saying that I had to cancel shows.

02:50:27.000 Dave Chappelle and I had a big concert coming up that weekend, and I said, we have to postpone it because I have COVID. But in the video, I was like, I feel fine.

02:50:35.000 I had COVID three days ago.

02:50:37.000 I had one bad day.

02:50:38.000 The second day I felt pretty good.

02:50:39.000 Today I feel great.

02:50:40.000 And all they wanted to talk about, like constantly, every hour, was me taking horse dewormer.

02:50:48.000 It was in Rolling Stone.

02:50:50.000 It was in all these things.

02:50:51.000 Horse dewormer.

02:50:51.000 Rolling Stone had an article.

02:50:53.000 Gunshot victims are waiting in line to get to the hospital because so many people are overdosing from horse dewormer.

02:51:00.000 100% horseshit.

02:51:02.000 Printed in the Rolling Stone.

02:51:04.000 Not only that, but they used an image.

02:51:06.000 This is Oklahoma.

02:51:07.000 They used an image.

02:51:08.000 This is supposedly in the summer that this was happening.

02:51:11.000 They used an image of a bunch of people waiting in line wearing winter coats.

02:51:17.000 Because that wasn't from that.

02:51:19.000 I believe they were waiting in line to get vaccinated for the flu.

02:51:22.000 It was another stock photograph they used of people waiting in line at the hospital.

02:51:26.000 It had nothing to do with horse dewormer.

02:51:29.000 This was tweeted by Rachel Maddow.

02:51:32.000 This was tweeted by many online prominent influencers and journalists.

02:51:37.000 Like, look at these fools taking this horse dewormer.

02:51:42.000 And it wasn't until I read Robert Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, that I got a sense that this is a playbook that they have used forever.

02:51:50.000 They offer one solution.

02:51:53.000 This one solution is patented.

02:51:55.000 This one solution is controlled by these pharmaceutical companies, and it's very expensive, and they make a fuckload of money from it.

02:52:03.000 Whereas anything that's off-label, anything that's generic, is dismissed.

02:52:08.000 They rig the test to make it look like they'll give you far more, like what they did with hydroxychloroquine.

02:52:15.000 I don't even want to go into this.

02:52:16.000 You can read it in the book, but...

02:52:18.000 My whole journey on this is like, first of all, how did I find myself in this, right?

02:52:23.000 I'm a comedian and a cage-fighting commentator.

02:52:26.000 How am I on CNN all the time?

02:52:30.000 And all they're doing is mocking a medication that I took very deceptively.

02:52:35.000 No, out and out lying.

02:52:37.000 Not just deceptively.

02:52:38.000 Just out and out lying.

02:52:39.000 Saying that I took veterinary medicine.

02:52:42.000 It was so strange.

02:52:45.000 It was so strange to be in the center of that.

02:52:48.000 And also to be someone who got over it very quickly, where there was no discussion.

02:52:52.000 There was no like, hey, Joe Rogan got over this really quickly.

02:52:56.000 What is he doing differently than most people?

02:52:58.000 That had COVID and had terrible outcomes.

02:53:01.000 There was none of that.

02:53:02.000 There was no real concern.

02:53:04.000 Like, hey, is he doing something that we could all do?

02:53:06.000 Maybe some people like Aaron Rodgers, who is allergic to one of the key components of the mRNA vaccine.

02:53:14.000 He literally is allergic to it.

02:53:16.000 If he takes it, it could be bad for him.

02:53:18.000 So isn't there something those people can do?

02:53:21.000 There wasn't even that.

02:53:22.000 It was just mockery and shame.

02:53:25.000 And it was also...

02:53:27.000 A very distorted understanding of the actual landscape.

02:53:31.000 They thought they were CNN, and CNN was huge.

02:53:34.000 CNN is the news.

02:53:35.000 CNN is a gigantic corporation.

02:53:37.000 They have a big building, a whole deal, giant sign.

02:53:40.000 They didn't understand that this podcast is ten times larger than them.

02:53:44.000 And it was exposed during that whole thing, where they just made this terrible chess move.

02:53:49.000 They just ran out in the middle with their king.

02:53:54.000 And that's how I found myself in the middle of all this.

02:53:57.000 That's how I found myself having conversations with Peter McCullough and Robert Malone and now you and a lot of other people.

02:54:04.000 John Abramson, a lot of other, Brett Weinstein, a lot of very intelligent people that weren't crazy.

02:54:10.000 They weren't tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists or QAnon believers.

02:54:13.000 They were just intelligent people that had looked at all the data and had said, I think we're being lied to.

02:54:23.000 How do you feel about it now, looking back?

02:54:25.000 I'm so glad I didn't take it.

02:54:27.000 But in terms of the backlash that you got, Joe?

02:54:29.000 It's great.

02:54:30.000 Exposed them.

02:54:32.000 Everyone who did it is gone now.

02:54:34.000 Brian Stelter's gone.

02:54:37.000 Jim Acosta's gone.

02:54:38.000 Rachel Maddow, she was dogmatically, in an evangelical way, saying that you're not going to get infected if you get the vaccine.

02:54:45.000 I mean, has she accepted that she was wrong?

02:54:47.000 She has buried her head in the sand.

02:54:49.000 She has never said a word about it.

02:54:51.000 You talk about the corporate playbook.

02:54:52.000 You're absolutely right.

02:54:54.000 There's a framework of how big corporations exert their power.

02:54:58.000 And part of that, obviously, is the political environment.

02:55:01.000 And that's another issue, right?

02:55:03.000 Why do politicians take so much money from big corporations?

02:55:05.000 Why are they allowed to do that?

02:55:07.000 All political parties, certainly both Democrats and the Republicans, take money from big pharma.

02:55:12.000 That's unacceptable.

02:55:13.000 Capturing the preference shaping, capture of the media, philanthropic organizations like Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

02:55:20.000 Capturing the knowledge environment, so funding medical education, sponsoring doctors' conferences.

02:55:27.000 You've got the limited liability of the legal environment.

02:55:29.000 Then you've got something called opposition fragmentation.

02:55:32.000 So that means essentially attacking and smearing those who are calling out their bullshit, who are questioning the narrative.

02:55:40.000 And you were caught in that, Joe.

02:55:42.000 But I'm sure you know this.

02:55:45.000 Take it as a backhanded compliment because the fact that the mainstream media went for you in that way, probably orchestrated by Pharma, I have no doubt, behind the scenes in some way, directly or indirectly, meant that they were worried about what you were saying and the people that were hearing it.

02:56:00.000 And I also, because I've been in this space as an activist for a long time with the whole statin stuff, You know, in some ways, people say to me, Asim, how are you doing?

02:56:11.000 How are you dealing with all of this stuff, coming out with a vaccine?

02:56:13.000 I had colleagues saying to me, you might lose your medical license.

02:56:15.000 And I said, well, the truth is more important.

02:56:16.000 But also, compared to what I went through with statins, Joe, I don't want to undermine it.

02:56:20.000 This is a walk in the park.

02:56:22.000 As soon as I got attacked in The Guardian and The Times, I saw that as a sign of progress.

02:56:27.000 You know, because Gandhi said, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

02:56:36.000 So what you did was tremendous.

02:56:39.000 And in fact, it's interesting.

02:56:42.000 It sounds like your intuition ultimately is what led you to not have, combined with obviously those people that had strokes, it was something that made you a little bit reluctant to jump.

02:56:52.000 But not initially.

02:56:54.000 Initially, I called.

02:56:55.000 I was ready.

02:56:56.000 I remember the phone call.

02:56:58.000 I was like, hey, give it to me.

02:57:00.000 I'm here.

02:57:01.000 I thought of it like a flu shot.

02:57:03.000 I thought of it like everything else.

02:57:05.000 I've always been very pro-vaccine.

02:57:08.000 But people like Sanjay Gupta as well, I honestly think a lot of this is grounded in ignorance and the illusion of knowledge.

02:57:16.000 So what happened was many doctors and the public were then sold on this new phenomenon called hybrid immunity.

02:57:24.000 If you've had COVID and you have the vaccine, you have extra immunity.

02:57:29.000 I think it was a way to get people to get vaccinated.

02:57:31.000 It was absolute bullshit, honestly.

02:57:34.000 And that was published, I think, in The Lancet.

02:57:36.000 And that makes me think about something else.

02:57:39.000 I think if we start from a position, and it may sound quite extreme, but this comes from somebody I call the Stephen Hawking in medicine, John Ioannidis.

02:57:49.000 If we start from this position of most published research findings are false, Right?

02:57:55.000 And the greater the financial interest, the less likely the research findings are to be true.

02:57:59.000 If we start from there, then we get to maybe have a better understanding, a more precise understanding of what we should consider reliable.

02:58:11.000 The Lancet, the irony of all of this is this publication about hybrid immunity was in The Lancet.

02:58:16.000 Richard Horton is the editor of The Lancet and for all intents and purposes, I met him a few times, I think he's a good guy, he came to my talk in London.

02:58:24.000 He published a piece in 2015, just to highlight all the symptoms that we are suffering at the moment of the downstream effects of the psychopathic determinants of health.

02:58:36.000 He published a paper in 2015 where he had attended A meeting organized by the Wellcome Trust in the UK of some of the top scientists in the world.

02:58:47.000 He said it was Chatham House Rule, so he wasn't naming who these people were, but they were very eminent medical scientists.

02:58:53.000 And in this editorial, you can look it up online, he said from this discussion, one of the lines was, possibly half of the published medical literature may simply be untrue.

02:59:05.000 And he concluded saying, science has taken a turn towards...

02:59:09.000 This is the editor of The Lancet.

02:59:11.000 Science has taken a turn towards darkness, but who's going to take the first step to clean up the system?

02:59:18.000 By this stage, with the statins saga and other things that were going on, I tried to lobby.

02:59:27.000 I went to Parliament.

02:59:28.000 I spoke to people.

02:59:29.000 I spoke to some very prominent politicians.

02:59:30.000 I went to the European Parliament.

02:59:31.000 I said, the situation is so bad that we need an inquiry.

02:59:34.000 You know, honest doctors can no longer practice honest medicine.

02:59:39.000 And coming back to what we said earlier, I think the whole COVID vaccine saga, with all these ridiculous things like you're more likely to get side effects if you've got natural immunity, yet people were being told about hybrid immunity.

02:59:52.000 The fact that, you know, there was a coercion, there were mandates, the fact that they've made so much money out of something that it's so poorly efficacious yet has such big side effects.

03:00:03.000 I think this is our moment, Joe.

03:00:05.000 Honestly, this is the moment.

03:00:06.000 That we expose the whole system and then we rebuild.

03:00:10.000 Well, that would not be possible if it wasn't for courageous people like you.

03:00:16.000 So, thank you.

03:00:18.000 Thank you for sticking your neck out, for all that you've done, for being so eloquent and so articulate about this and being so knowledgeable and your ability to recall and express this In clear terms, it's so needed.

03:00:34.000 It's so powerful.

03:00:35.000 And I really appreciate you very much.

03:00:37.000 Thank you, Joe.

03:00:38.000 And thank you for being a warrior for the truth because you're not afraid of having these conversations and even continuing to have these conversations even after all of that debacle with Spotify and Robert Malone.

03:00:51.000 And I remember watching it and just thinking, this is just unbelievable.

03:00:54.000 You know, the BBC had a commentator on saying, That Joe Rogan interviewed known anti-vaxxer Robert Malone.

03:01:02.000 And I thought, what?

03:01:04.000 This guy was involved.

03:01:06.000 He had the vaccine and was involved in the original technology of the development of mRNA.

03:01:10.000 He owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology.

03:01:14.000 And he was vaccinated.

03:01:15.000 And he had a horrific side effect from the vaccine.

03:01:19.000 And that's what sort of radicalized him.

03:01:23.000 Thank you very much.

03:01:24.000 I really appreciate you.

03:01:25.000 Please tell people your social media, your website, so they can find more.

03:01:29.000 Sure.

03:01:30.000 On Twitter, I am Dr. Asim Malhotra.

03:01:32.000 My website's just drasim.com.

03:01:35.000 Instagram lifestyle medicine doctor.

03:01:37.000 And yeah, that's about it.

03:01:40.000 And you know, if when people, you know, when they see the podcast and they're interested, of course, in, you know, our documentary film, we're going to be interviewing the likes of John Abramson, Rita Redberg, she's the editor of Jarmatone Medicine, as agreed, Jay Bhattacharya, some really big names in American healthcare,

03:01:56.000 very credible people.

03:01:58.000 Really to do the most important, I think, the best documentary you can know holds barred and exposing all of this commercial corruption, but also giving people solutions.

03:02:06.000 Well, when it comes out, we'll be happy to come over.

03:02:09.000 Thank you very much.

03:02:10.000 Thank you.

03:02:10.000 Bye, everybody.

Joe Rogan Experience #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra

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