American Thought Leaders - How Bad Scientific Research Gets Through Peer Review: Dr. Joseph Varon

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Dr. Joseph Varon is a critical care physician, medical professor, and president of the Independent Medical Alliance (IMA), formerly the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Their mission is to provide and advocate for patient rights, informed consent, and medical transparency, and they’ve played a major role supporting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.“Hopefully, now with the new NIH director, we'll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of health care expenses,” he says.Varon has contributed to more than 950 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the editor-in-chief of multiple medical journals, including the newly launched Journal of Independent Medicine. In this episode, we dive into the IMA’s recent work.“When you have, let’s say, a paper that has 20 authors and out of those 20 authors, more than 90 percent of them are on the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes a product that you are studying, that’s a conflict,” says Dr. Varon. “If we don’t do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we’re doomed. We’re really doomed.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

When you have, let's say, a paper that has 20 authors, and out of those 20 authors, more than 90% of them are in the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes the product that you are studying, that's a conflict. Dr. Joseph Varon is a critical care physician, medical professor, and president of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly the FLCCC. Their mission is to provide and advocate for patient rights, informed consent, and medical transparency, and they've played a major role in supporting Secretary Kennedy. Hopefully with the new NIH director, we'll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of health care expenses.

Varun has contributed to more than 950 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the editor-in-chief of multiple medical journals, including the newly launched Journal of Independent Medicine. If we don't do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we're really doomed. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Joe Varane, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me again.

Well, there is a crisis in research and reproducibility of research as we speak, and some people would even say corruption of research. You're trying to tackle this head on. What is it that's happening? Well, there is no question that unfortunately, most of the research is being taken hostage by a variety of interests, pharmaceutical industry, political interests. there are so many things. And what we're trying to do is just to get true science out there without any outside influence. That's very difficult, because if you think about it, conflicts of interest are present everywhere.

When you look, for example, at the number of peer reviewers that have some kind of conflict of interest that pertains to pharmaceutical industry, more than 80% of people that review papers for a journal have some kind of conflict of interest. So it's very difficult to have a clean board. What's an example of a conflict of interest that's common? Let's say that you speak for a pharmaceutical company and you promote one of their products. And then you get a paper that has to do with that product. So more likely than not, you will accept that paper just because you work for the other guys. You get

money that's being paid to you as a result of your interactions with that particular pharmaceutical company. Conflicts can also be unconscious as well. You might not be thinking to yourself at that moment, because I work for them, I'm going to accept it, right? Correct. I mean, there's going to be a timeframe where you will not realize that you have a conflict. I mean, you don't realize it because you've been doing it as part of your normal way of doing things, but if you think about it, in reality, you have an important problem and you have to recognize them. Trying to get people to

recognize that they have a conflict of interest is even more difficult because you know many journals what they do is they say just disclose your conflict of interest. That's just not good enough. I'm sorry that's not good enough. If you get a stipend from a pharmaceutical company or stuff like that just putting it as an addendum to the article that's not good enough. Where does this crisis of reproducibility come from? Years of manipulation of data, years of manipulation of studies by Big Pharma. You just say that so blanket, but explain that to me.

I mean, it's not as easy as it means, but when you have, let's say, a paper that has 20 authors, and out of those 20 authors, more than 90% of them are in the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes the product that you are studying, that's a conflict. And the fact that you disclose it, you say, we are members of this company, that's not good enough. Well, there's this famous saying that I always forget who it's attributed to. Maybe it's Mark Twain that if you're financially motivated to see a particular outcome or to not see a particular outcome, then you will tend to go in that direction. There is no question about it. Throughout the years, we have seen all these kind of randomized control clinical trials that are funded by particular entities.

That when they start seeing that things are not going their way, they change the outcomes. In the middle of the study, they change the outcomes. And just explain what that means. They change the outcomes. So what they look is, you know, you're looking for specific points to show, let's say that a drug works or doesn't work. And they say, okay, we're going to look at A.

But then in the middle of the study, they say, you know what, it looks't work. And they say, okay, we're going to look at A. But then in the middle of the study, they say, you know what, it looks like we're not getting A, so let's change A and make it B. That's not right. That's not right. There's still a whole lot of papers that are being published across thousands of scientific journals, some of greater impact, some of less impact. How do we even know what is good? Because presumably some of it's still good. Well, in the past, we used to look at the impact factor. And the impact factor is a number of times that a paper gets referenced in that particular journal. The problem is that you can't even manipulate that. I can go ahead and write a paper and cite that same

journal multiple times so that at the end of the year, the impact factor for the journal goes up. So those are things that are easily manipulated. They're not right. These are the things that, as a scientist scientist make me very uncomfortable. What's your solution? I know that this is part of what you're actually trying to do with the independent medical. What the Independent Medical Alliance has done, as you well know, were all about science and advocacy. That has been our two major things. What I have been pushing for from the very beginning was the creation of a journal, of an independent journal, a journal that is unbiased. And you're going to say, well, it's very difficult to get rid of all the biases and conflicts and stuff like that.

But I try to do it as best as I can, trying to keep as transparent as we can. The things that are particular about the Journal of Independent Medicine, which is a journal of the IMA, is that it's a journal that is not sponsored by pharmaceutical industry or any other kind of industry. It's basically self-funded. We fund our journal. It's a journal that accepts all sorts of scientific papers, but we accept them in a way that nobody knows who is the person writing the paper until the very end.

Because I don't want to have any bias, so we have what I call a double-blinded method. What that entails is if you send me a paper, and let's say I know Jan is such a nice guy that I know that everything he writes is good, so therefore I'm just going to accept whatever comes with his name. Well, what I do is I take away your name from the paper. We actually have a whole system where we remove your name from the papers. We remove what institution you are affiliated with. There is no way to identify you. No way to identify you whatsoever.

I send that to reviewers, the external peer reviewers, and we have a board of more than 50 people from pretty much all over the world that will look at your paper in a constructive way. I mean, we're not trying to reject things. Now, the reviewer doesn't know who you are, and then they give me feedback, and the feedback is either accept,

accept with some changes, requires a lot of changes, I need to see a revision, or definitely reject. We try to make sure that we include all sorts of topics, even though at the beginning, as you remember, we were mostly COVID. Now we do pretty much everything. And I am very interested in the use of repurposed drugs. So we encourage the submissions of papers that have to do with repurposed drugs

and some of the other things. But we have editorials. We have original investigations. We have reviews, systematic and narrative reviews. Some people want to learn more about a particular medication. Well, we have those things done. We also have an area of legal aspects. Some people have manifested interest in knowing more about the legality of A, B, or C. Well,

we have that. We have a forum where you can have even people who are not health care professionals can submit to you a good paper that may be their own personal experience with the health care system. My goal is to be able to have this journal as an avenue for those scientists that have been censored, have been neglected because they don't follow the narrative, but that have good science to be able to get their papers published. We've interviewed before about this, but for the benefit of our new viewers, I'd love them to understand how it is that you came to be in this role.

Well, first, as you remember, my background is in six different specialties. I'm an intensive care doctor, internal medicine, pulmonary emergency medicine. I have been in administration for quite some period of time of hospital intensive care units and stuff like that. When the pandemic first hit us, I mean, we have people dying. We don't know what to do. So that's when we created the FLCC where Paul Baric, Pierre Cori, myself, you know, we're talking at three o'clock in the morning coming up with all sorts of ways in which we can fix people. As the time progresses, I mean we're using everything that we

learned in our patients. And at some point in time, I don't know if you remember, I worked 715 continuous days taking care of patients. I mean, every time we heard that something was safe and effective, initially we tried it because we believed the establishment. We believed that they were telling us the truth. And then we found the hard way that some of these things were not safe, were not effective. I remember the first time that Dr. Fauci says, we have a cure for COVID. And he had said that use remdesivir.

Oh my gosh. I ran to the first patient we could. We tried the remdesivir. And the patient didn't do well. And then the next patient didn't do well. And we recognized that that was not working. So on that sense, we start working so much on this alliance that we start recognizing that not only the issues

that we have are just in COVID, they're everywhere. And many of us start opening our eyes. And last year I was asked to take over the presidency and chief medical office of the FLCCC then. I said I'll be happy to do this because it's a passion for me. I really think that if we don't do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we're doomed. We're really doomed. And what do you make of the new appointments at HHS and in the sub-agencies and the current

approach, which is frankly quite controversial? Well, to be honest with you, I think that we know what doesn't work, because that is what we had before. So I think that we know what doesn't work, because that is what we have before. So I think that we, at the minimum, the current administration deserves the benefit of that out. I mean, what do I believe? I mean, I try to always stay in the middle. I don't go one side or the other side or one party or the other part now.

But there are some things that at least call my attention. Do I believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism? The answer is, I don't know. My kids were vaccinated against that. But when you start hearing that there are populations out there that don't get vaccinated against things like the Amish population, that they don't have autism, you wonder.

And as a scientist, what I do in science is, when I have a question, I study it. So recently, as you know, RFK instructed the CDC to do a study looking at whether or not vaccines cause autism. Well, what impressed me the most is that immediately following that, the American Academy of Pediatrics said absolutely not, we don't need to do a study

because we know that they are safe. I don't know if they are or they're not, and I know that there are a lot of parents out there that don't know if they are or they're not. If I was the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, I would say, yes, go ahead, do the study. Because if indeed we are correct and there is nothing here, at least you're going to put a stop to all of this stuff. But so that's an example of what the current administration is doing, which I think is, I would applaud that. I

mean, they are now trying to get an area that's gonna deal specifically with vaccine related injury, which again, it's an area that a lot of my colleagues do not believe that even exists. And I'm telling you about people that are board certified and have bunch of diplomas in their worlds. Yet what I see in my office today, I see more than 50% of patients that

come to my office have vaccine-related injuries. So the efforts of the current administration, I think that they are going the right way. I want to see the science so that I can then make an informed opinion as to whether or not, I mean, is there a relationship between A and B? Because that's what a real doctor should do, not just take things for granted. And for many years I took things for granted. And again, the classic example is when we were told that COVID vaccines were safe and effective.

I was out there advocating the use of vaccines. I'm sorry about that. That's the truth. And you know, within a couple of months I said, hey, they're not effective because I'm seeing a lot of vaccinated people that are coming to my unit and they start sick, if not sicker than the usual. And then I started to realize that a lot of people were having side effects, so I said, they're not safe. And as a thinking human, I changed my mind. I changed my, and there is nothing wrong with that. I mean, actually, what annoys me is that a lot of people

within the system, they are refusing to change their mind. It's their way or no way. They're not willing to even have a discourse or talk with each other to see what's going on. I mean, I have many conversations with some of my colleagues, which were very uncomfortable. They don't believe in 90% of the things that we do. How do you explain that 50% of the people in your practice have some form of—I think it's COVID vaccine injury, right? Is it because they know that you are one of the doctors

who can help them? Is that why? Well, there are several reasons. One is that you are correct. But as you know, I've been featured in more than 4,000 television interviews for the last five years. So I'm very visible and a lot of people have seen that. And I have particularly looked at populations at risk, people that will do whatever they're told to. Those are mostly minorities. So I have a lot of minorities that come to my office after we have discussed some of the issues that are going on.

And the other thing that you should also remember is that we're truly now going through what I call the real pandemic. The pandemic that we had before was just COVID. Now we have the pandemic of people that got vaccinated and are having the side effects related to COVID. And it's unreal I mean you spend a day with me in my office and you will see and the promise if you come out and And say these things like what I've tried to talk about some of these things in in some of the

National TV stations They will ask you these questions and then at the time that the interview comes out, obviously, anything that has to do with vaccine-related injury has been deleted from the interview because it's not convenient. I'm just telling them what I'm seeing. I'm not making a point. They are good. They are bad. It's like, look, this is what I'm seeing. Just to be clear, what makes you so sure that these are COVID vaccine-related injuries? The first thing that makes me think that this is a vaccine-related injury is the temporal relation to the vaccine. Most of these patients never had any issues whatsoever, nothing. They get the vaccine and within a period of time they start having symptoms. That's the first.

Then we look at surrogates of spike proteins, so the spike protein antibodies. And when you start seeing somebody that has symptoms and spike protein antibodies more than 25,000 or some, it should be less than 0.8, the normal one, more than 25,000, you say, hmm, this is probably right. But what actually confirms it is when we use some of the therapeutic modalities that we have developed at the IMA, and patients start getting better, so then you have confirmed the diagnosis

and you have confirmed the effectiveness of what you are doing. And it's very rewarding. As a healthcare provider, sometimes I tell my patients, this is what I went to medical school for. The average patient that I see in my office has been seen by anywhere between 15 and 20 doctors before they come to me. Of which two of them are probably psychiatrists or

psychologists because people think that they're crazy and they're making things up. So when you have the opportunity to work with these people and make them better, that's the best kind of payment that I can have. I want to touch a little bit on conflicts or related things. I mean, FLCCC and now IMA is known for being very pro-ivermectin. That's of course part of how it's been portrayed, even negatively. Would it be possible for your journal to say anything bad about Ivermectin? It could be if we find it, but so far we have not found it. We stumbled upon Ivermectin, and we found that it's good not just for COVID, but some other things. I had a patient that drove from Nebraska to Texas to see me recently that she had an unusual

illness, had been treated by many, many doctors. Nobody could figure out anything. And she came to see me just because she wanted to have some ivermectic prophylactically. So we put her on prophylactic ivermectin prophylactically. So we put her on prophylactyphyrmectin so that whenever she traveled and stuff like that was quote unquote protective. Within two weeks, she calls me and says, I've never felt this good in my life.

I said, what do you mean? Yeah, I mean, I've tried all these other medications for her primary illness. No improvement. She's using the ivermectin for other reason, and she feels better. So I put her on ivermectin for other reasons and she feels better. So I put her on ivermectin and this is a woman that was almost bed bound. Now she's doing a perfectly normal life. What I'm saying is there's enough power here that we have seen

some cases of people that are doing well with ivermectin for cancer that either you use it as a secondary agent like a complementary, or let's do a study. I mean, let's see if this really makes a difference. Well, and as I understand it, there are studies that actually do show positive action. Absolutely. Of ivermectin for cancer, which nobody knew about. I mean, I knew about it as a river blindness drug. Of course, you know, what a Nobel Prize for that. But you know, it's a drug that, as you know, is one of the top 10 drugs in the World Health

Organization's emergency list of drugs. When there are catastrophes, one of those drugs is ivermectin. Ivermectin has been safely given to 4 billion people around the world. I mean, it's safer than aspirin. I'm encouraged to see that some around the world. I mean, it's safer than an aspirin. I'm actually encouraged to see that some of the states are now thinking about giving it over the counter if you need to. And there is nothing wrong, you know, I come from Mexico. In Mexico, kids get de-parasited.

I mean, they take anti-parasitic medications once a month or so, stuff like that. And they sell these medications without prescription, without anything, and nobody gets into major trouble. But again, as a scientist, I would like to see some good scientific data that shows it. But just like it was mentioned this morning, there is no money on that.

See, there is no big pharmaceutical company that's gonna come and make a lot of money out of doing a study, so there is no funding for these kinds of studies. Hopefully now, with a new NIH director, we'll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of healthcare expenses. I want to go back to the journal. You have a peer review process with the new journal. I've also heard that there's inherent problems to the peer review process in the first place, something I hadn't thought much about. How are you mitigating these other challenges? Well, some of the challenges have to do with making sure that the paper is assigned to somebody that

knows about the topic. Because, you know, many times when you don't know about the topic, you just say accept or reject because you don't know anything about it. So I want- Do people do that? Oh, yeah. I mean, you have no idea. I mean, I review for God knows how many journals and it's very, very challenging.

Sometimes I said, why did they send me this? I mean, I have no clue what this is all about. And many reviewers, instead of sending a letter to the editor, says, you know what, I don't know what this is about, they will just say, accept or reject. So that's one thing. The other mitigating is I make sure that anybody that works as a reviewer for us has absolutely no current conflict of interest with any pharmaceutical industry. That's very important to me, that I want to do. Now many of our reviewers are part of our fellowship program.

So you're talking about people that are well recognized within their own specialties and they are instructive. I mean, if you look at the instructions that I have for the reviewers, it probably works as instructions that I have for the authors, because I go over every specific topic. I mean, I do want them to look at everything critically, and not critically to destroy a paper. I want them to help the author be able to construct a better paper, even if they think that this

is a paper that should not go into a journal. Now at the present time, my rejection rate is about 60% at the present time. But again, we are very early. We just have one issue that has been published out. The second issue comes up next month. It's full. the third one is already in full as well, so we are Actively trying to make sure that we have good quality of papers. I also want to make sure that

the papers are of different Topics I mean I wanted to remove the FLCCC, you know I wanted to remove the FLCCC. I wanted to get the COVID away, even though we still get a lot of papers that have to do with COVID because we are in the post-pandemic time frame. In the vein of what IMA is trying to accomplish, you've come up with these four pillars. Explain to me what that really means. You hear about these kinds of sort of kind of summarized vision and things like that. But people wonder, what does it really mean? Explain to me these four pillars. One of the pillars has to do with transparency. Well, what

does that mean? Well, first of all, we're being transparent ourselves. For example, in the journal, if you are a person that wants to look at the raw data of a paper, you have the right to do that. We actually have a process by which you can look at the raw data, make sure the statistics were done correctly. I mean, that's as transparent as you can get. Just out of curiosity, in many cases, people refuse to provide data when a paper or an outcome is questioned. That strikes me as odd. Like you would think that you would rush to do such a thing or that it would be expected. Exactly what you're describing would just be the norm.

Correct. And if you remember, there was one pharmaceutical company that specifically said that we could not look at the data for 75 years. It's like, why do you need to hide your data for 75 years? That doesn't make any sense. Our journal, for example, and again following one of the pillars which has transparency, you can look at the peer reviews if you want to. If you really want to, I will show you the peer reviews, who reviewed, why they reviewed, what they did. So you know that everything is legit.

The other pillar has to do with empowering patients. And by empowering patients, I'm talking about education, education, education. I believe that if there is a risk for anything, there needs to be a choice. So my primary goal and the goal of the organization is to make sure that people know the good, the bad, and the ugly of whatever intervention they're going to receive. But they need to also understand what's going on with their primary illness. Another one of our pillars has to do with the process of primary education. I mean, we have made it sound like being ill is normal.

No, there's nothing normal about it. I mean, we need to go back to the elementary schools and start teaching kids what is good, what's bad, and how can you prevent things. I'm not telling you don't eat that donut that you like, okay? I'm telling you don't eat it every day, but once in a while, there's nothing wrong. Remember, we live in a country that is supposed to have free speech and freedom of choice,

and I'm a big believer of that. I see, as a pulmonologist, I see a lot of patients that smoke. And we do have a discussion about tobacco cessation and education and stuff like that, but sometimes at the end of the day, they need to make a choice on the basis of their own wishes. And I'm not gonna fight, I mean, that's a fight that should have been fought early in life. Not when you have somebody that has been smoking for 30 years.

Because at that time, you're just fixing an illness. You're not preventing an illness. And prevention is one of the primary goals of the organization. Where do you think you can make or where are you already making the biggest impact on this chronic health epidemic? Prevention, prevention, prevention, prevention. With simple interventions. This morning you heard Dr. Marek talk about the use of vitamin D. Simple little thing.

Vitamin D going out on the sun. How difficult can that be? I mean, early in the pandemic, if you remember, we found out that the people that were coming to the hospitals were those people that had low levels of vitamin D, and those were the ones that were dying. So simple interventions, prevention, keep your vitamins.

If you're a person that has a chronic illness, you already have it established, keep it under control. Diabetes, I mean, so common diabetes. So keep your sugar under control, but it's not a matter of keeping your sugar under control by keep on injecting insulin or popping pills. What I do with my patients, I put a continuous glucose monitor on them and I tell them, you go ahead, you eat, and then you're going to see.

Just the fact that you know that after you ate a banana, your sugar sky's up to 400, will make you not eat a banana next time. I mean, those are the things that people don't understand. Education is more important than treatment. For me, it's more important that my patient knows that maybe a sandwich doesn't bring their blood sugar as high as a single banana. Some people are very slow to change their minds, not as quick as you. For example, there's a food pyramid that's used in this country that I've come to believe

is almost the opposite. I think there's a South Park episode about this, actually. It's not exactly the opposite, but something quite different. To actually change, have people realize, wait a sec, the low-fat yogurt isn't the solution or the low-fat milk isn't the solution. But I've come to believe that I've lived that way. It almost feels like there has to be more than just education. But it's a culture that needs to change. The whole culture has to change. I mean, all these low fat fads, they're a joke. I mean, they don't recognize that by decreasing the amount of fat, you have to increase the

amount of carbohydrates, and you're actually making things worse. So how do you change that? And I know that I go back to the same, but it's education. I mean, if you can start educating people at an earlier age, I'm not telling you about trying to educate people like us at this point. I mean, because we're going to have all that resistance of decades of being taught that low fat is good, or that a low sugar product of whatever kind of thing is better on, you know, not having sugar or having fats, or what we've been told that,

you know, meats are bad and that they're going to give you all sorts of bad things. Now, you can do it through science, but for, in order to do that, you're going to have to have a couple of nice trials. And then trying to convince our colleagues is very difficult. One of the things that I have seen in the last few years is the use of statins. I know that you have covered this in the past, but in the 1950s, walking around with a cholesterol of 350 was okay. In the 1970s and 1980s, we're working around with a cholesterol of 250.

Was okay. Now you have people walking around with very low cholesterol because the moment your cholesterol goes over 200, they are already putting you on a statin. Instead of telling you, you should go exercise. You should go ahead and do other things. No, you take your statin because we need to have a low cholesterol. What they haven't recognized is that there are studies today that show that the lower the cholesterol, the more likely you are to develop dementia when you grow older because

your brain requires cholesterol. So the biggest question I ask people, you want to be demented or you want to be heart healthy? And heart healthy? And heart healthy is not a pill. Heart healthy is an attitude, is knowing what you eat, knowing how to exercise, knowing those kinds of things. If we can, as a society, understand that, trust me, our healthcare costs are gonna go way down.

You are gonna have less bypasses, you are gonna have less people having heart attacks, less people on respirators and stuff like that. The other corollary is there is messaging out there, and in some cases, very powerful messaging that's acting to maintain the status quo, even when it's very problematic. And that's a problem because when you are confronted with 20 television advertisements every hour that deal with medications to bring down the cholesterol, for example, or that deal with some other stuff,

and there is not one advertisement that tells you, hey, maybe you should go out into the sunlight and take your vitamin D, then you know that we have a problem. The US and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that actually allow advertisement of medications, stuff like that, on TV. That's wrong. I was listening to a comedian the other day, and the comedian says, you know what, I want to go on this drug.

And the reason why I want to go on this drug and the reason why I want to go on this drug even though I don't need it is because everybody's happy on that advertisement, everybody's smiling and the kids are coming around. That's what we are bombarded constantly on that culture, like I call it, and that's what we need to change. Got it. Well, Dr. Vraron, this has been a fascinating interview. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Again, the goal of the Independent Medical Alliance is to get to the root of this and see if we can modify these variables so that we have modify the these variables so we can have a healthier

America. I know it's difficult I'm actually I'm actually feeling good about it and I have a feeling that we are at the right time in history where we can make a change and that's the goal. Well, Dr. Joe Varane, it's such a pleasure having you on again. It's a pleasure, Jim. Thank you all for joining Dr. Joe Varane and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.