American Thought Leaders - New Official Pandemic Report Recommends Against Use of COVID Vaccines: Dr. Gary Davidson

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

In January, the western province of Alberta in Canada released a 269-page report—the first of its kind—examining the information and data that informed its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.“Doctors felt pressure to do things they didn’t agree with. We need to have good autonomy where a physician is doing things safely, but they’re allowed to treat their patients in what they believe is the best for them. It still has to be regulated. You can’t just have everybody off on their own, but it has to be done,” says Dr. Gary Davidson, an emergency physician and primary author of the report.“I was asked to form a task force. There’s people on the task force that are more aligned with how I saw it or how I think, and then there were people invited to join who are not aligned with how I think or see it.”The report found that pandemic lockdowns, masking mandates, and vaccine mandates all failed to achieve their intended results.“There’s just so much data out there. The Nordic countries did a huge study—millions of people, showing that if you’re under 50 years old, and if you don’t have any really good reason, you probably shouldn’t get this vaccine,” says Davidson. “And so that’s what we recommend doing in Alberta.”The views expressed in this video are those of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Doctors felt pressure to do things they didn't agree with. We need to have good autonomy where a physician is doing things safely. They're allowed to treat their patients in what they believe is the best for them. It still has to be regulated. You can't just have everybody off on their own, but it has to be done. In January, the Canadian province of Alberta released an extensive 269-page report, the first of its kind, assessing the province's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was asked to form a task force.

There's people on the task force that are more aligned with how I saw it or how I think. And then there was people we invited to join who are not aligned with how I think or see it. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Gary Davidson, who led the task force that made the report, to discuss its findings and recommendations. There's just so much data out there. The Nordic countries did a huge study, millions of people, showing that if you're under 50 years old, you probably shouldn't get this vaccine.

And so that's what we recommend doing in Alberta. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Gary Davidson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me. It's a privilege. You were the head of a task force that looked at the province of Alberta and Canada's pandemic response. And one of your findings was that the response, if I may say, wasn't grounded in science. What would you say are the most significant findings, the most important things for people to know? Well, I think the important points that come

out of it that people are picking up on the most are the talk about therapeutics, so how it was treated or how it wasn't allowed to be treated, the vaccines, how they were done, or what they were supposed to do or what they did, how they're developed and maybe any side effects to them. And then probably the third largest thing people talk about is the effect of the lockdowns. And we call them NPIs, non-pharmaceutical interventions, masking, lockdowns, closures, that kind of thing. So those are the three big areas that people seem to want to talk about the most. Well, so then let's start with that. Let's start with lockdowns or NPIs. You were actually a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration,

so clearly you had some thoughts about lockdowns ahead of being commissioned to do this report. Tell me about what you found. Well, of all of the three I've mentioned, lockdowns are the ones that I probably, from a scientific or medical standpoint, knew the least about. And so I had to do a lot of reading. And early on, probably the first thing, before we talked about lockdown, I believe it was March 17, 2020, Alberta was kind of locked down. We closed the borders and had instituted some kind of lockdown. Masking actually didn't, it was starting to be

talked about but we'd been told the whole time that masks didn't actually help like a simple mask or especially a cloth mask or something like a turtleneck. They didn't help from that. You can look in the training manual from Alberta Health Services 2018 and you can look in there and it talks about how to protect yourself from respiratory illness. And it shows four masks, two simple masks or a surgical mask and two N95s. And it just, if you turn the page in the manual, next page just says, don't waste your time using a simple mask or a surgical mask. They don't protect you. So that was what we knew. And then as we watched it, as we started from a municipal standpoint, bringing in mask mandates or mask bylaws in the cities and then the counties and

then the whole province. And the argument that went around, there were some people that worked in the area, occupational health and safety, that says, these masks don't work. You're wasting your time. And N95s only work for a very short period of time. They have to be fitted to you and they have to be used in the environment they're meant to. You take an N95, fit it to me, and if I talk to you while I'm doing it, it'll probably break the seal every time I say something. So they can only be used in certain places, in certain ways, and under the proper guidance. And you have to put them on right and take them off right, and you can hang them on your rearview mirror and use them again tomorrow. In our report, we looked at that, and we actually asked worldwide experts on this that have written papers on masking,

whether they work in this environment or not, on lockdowns, whether they actually help or not. We looked at triangulation, so we'd compare, how did our outcome compare to Sweden, where they had none of these things? They didn't close any schools. They didn't mandate anybody to do anything, because legally they couldn't, I understood.

I've talked to the chief medical officer of health who was for Sweden at the time, Anders Tegnell, a great guy. And if you look at it, their outcomes are better than ours. And they have social medicine, so you can compare apples to apples. It's hard to compare Alberta to somewhere in the state sometimes because the medical system is very different. But you can compare us to a Nordic country I think fairly clearly and showing that they didn't really have much impact and you could look county to county in the States there's lots of states that let the different counties or different regions do whatever they felt was best and if you look county to

county many of these states showed there's really no difference whatever the county did and then they start talking about the best thing was to have good filtration, good air movement, you know, putting things up on kids' desks actually stopped the air movement, caused air to swirl, didn't clear out properly and actually caused worse outcomes in some studies. So what came of it is it didn't really seem to matter what people did as far as lockdown and masking. It didn't have much impact. Before the decisions were made in Alberta, there was two large studies that were both peer-reviewed in medical journals that just showed that it didn't really have any difference.

In fact, if you wore a fleece mask like a turtleneck or a neck warmer, like we have in Canada when you're skiing, it actually made it worse. Because then it took droplets and broke them smaller, aerosolized them, and they hung in the air longer, making it more dangerous. But I personally was skiing during this time, and if you just pulled up your neck tube and you went up the ski lift, you could get on.

If you didn't have it on, they'd throw you off and take your ticket away. It was completely anti-science but this is what was pushed and so this is what our study talks about is like didn't really appear that these things made much difference having said that there are times when mass absolutely important respirators which are in 100s which we use them for very serious things we use them in 95s we use them for very serious things. We use them, N95s, we use them in the hospital, and that's where they're meant to be used in a controlled medical environment, and they have their place. To say that masks don't work is not true, but how masks work... Don't work for some

things at different times, right? Right, yeah. They have to be used how they were studied to be used for, more importantly. And they just were kind of willy-nilly it seemed, and that's not how you do things like that. That's not scientific. So essentially, your finding was that this broad use of masks and this broad use of lockdowns is used, but it didn't have the desired impact in somehow affecting the transmission or the virus or the infection rates and so forth. But it did have some other kinds of effects obviously, right?

You know, we heard from lots of people with respiratory illness that couldn't wear masks. They just couldn't breathe well. I know that from people firsthand. People who had been traumatized in the past felt very afraid or felt overwhelmed wearing a mask. You know, I was talking to a speech therapist in Alberta and the increase in speech therapy consults when the masks rolled out were substantial to say the least. Because children learn from watching you, listening to you and learning how to speak. They mimic us and they lost that and the impact that had.

It's interesting whether related or not, but the CDC moved the milestones for children back after all of this because our kids were back, weren't meeting milestones, they just shifted them back. That's interesting. Is that because of what we did or why? What other confounding factor could it be? But there's also this element of shutting down the economy I thought I should mention. If you're running a small business and you could leave open Walmart and Costco and Home Depot but shut down the smaller entities, it was horrible.

So you, and I've mentioned this before, you can go in Alberta government's dashboard and look at accidental deaths and suicides on there and watch every time we lock down and look what those numbers do. It's a massive impact. You can't ruin somebody's life and it not impact. It's interesting. It's very easy to find. There's a study that shows that related in the United States, for every percentage number increase in unemployment, the suicide rate goes up substantially. So that's an unintended consequence of the lockdowns that I don't think we considered, to be honest with you. There's this idea that when you're considering any intervention, you need to look at the cost and benefit ratio or something like that. How does that fit in here? Well, I'm not sure. I don't see anywhere it did, to be honest with you. I'm

not sure if we looked at the negative outcomes of masking the population and childhood development or locking down businesses and looking at suicide rates or accidental deaths and overdoses i'm not sure if it was considered i couldn't find anywhere where it was it was mentioned or talked about in our research we read hundreds of papers and read through hundreds of pages of data and i didn't find where it was talked about which is interesting because alberta did have a pandemic response plan in place that they just kind of discarded. And it had all of that. It looked at all the aspects of society, community, economics, and we just discarded it for this one that was done in many, many jurisdictions

and wherever that came from. One thing that you did mention is that the people who are making decisions weren't working with the whole range of information that they would need to be able to make these decisions. Would you say that's right? Our mandate was to do a data review. So we looked at data sources, data resources, how it was got to us, who gave it to us, who analyzed it, who applied it, how they apply it, were they qualified and did it work the way they thought. That's what we were asked to do. We looked at these different areas. And so we've talked about a few NPIs, vaccines, therapeutics, you know, governance and data flow and modeling

and the governing bodies and things like that. And so when we looked at it, and especially in the governance and data flow, we can't say that we had a consensus when certain people weren't allowed to say things or you weren't allowed to share certain data. So it appeared that only certain data sets were given to the decision makers to make decisions in a very critical time. People weren't making decisions based on all of available data. Like I talked about the masking information. We had all these peer-reviewed scientific research papers written on masking, showing how they work and how they don't, and it was just, you couldn't talk about it.

So decisions were made on very scarce data. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background. Well, that's a big story. As far as what I do, I'm a physician, emergency physician. I've been doing that for a number of years. I've been a physician since, well, 20 years now. I've been an emergency physician for about 16 years. I head a zone of emergency medicine in central Alberta. I was there for four years. I grew up in a home where doctors, lawyers, and politicians were all the same horrible people. So I became a doctor. Family members who were lawyers and politicians. So we've done it all to my father's chagrin. But that's how I grew up. So very skeptical, but this is where we went. Because of that though, I've always been happy to look at the alternative options. You know, I don't just take what you tell me.

I'm a very skeptical person at best, which goes well with being an emergency room physician. You don't want an emergency room physician that just takes everything at face value or people aren't going to do well. I have to be a skeptic. I have to think that's not true. I got to find out what's really going on. I've got to investigate and we have to do it really quickly. So by nature, you need to be a skeptic. You know, we were talking earlier, my daughter had cancer in 2012. We were in a year in a children's hospital in Calgary. Fantastic people, just a great facility. It was amazing. Went from stage one to stage four, being treated as good as we could

under normal medical conditions. And at the end of the year, we would just go home. There's nothing more we can do. Enjoy your time together. I'm sorry and we went out of country spent a lot of our own money and other people actually gave money to her cause and we did a lot of alternative treatments but I'd spent the years sitting beside her in the Children's Hospital with my computer looking up not only what she was on and reading every study on it all the chemo agents and how they affected people and the studies that were done

to reading any alternatives that were out there and what studies were done on them and did they work and was it true or not so when this time came i kind of had a plan in my head and i said okay let's do this and so we went out of the country, did some alternative treatments. And yeah, today she's 28 years old teaching school in another country, as healthy as me or probably more. And there's a lot of factors in that. But if I just said, I guess this is all there is, then that would have been all there was. So that's my nature. You actually suffered some consequences for thinking out of the box. I did. I treated quite a number of COVID patients just on my own. I treated them properly.

I let them know this was off-label. I wrote proper prescriptions. I followed protocols that were studied that had thousands of people in their studies, so that was well-researched. And I got in trouble for that a few times, warned that I couldn't do things, that I was causing people not to comply or what have you, and I understood that. But I would do it that way again. Because for me, morally, if I believe there's something I can do for you, and you come in, and I just say, well, go home.

I'm sorry, nothing I can do. I couldn't live with myself. There's not enough money in the world that could assuage my conscience doing that. So I actually got in trouble once for recruiting a patient out of my department, which is funny because I did it all for free and I didn't know I was recruiting. I definitely wasn't going around recruiting anybody, but it was a patient who I knew well, came in very sick. And I just said, man, like here. And he filled a prescription at a pharmacy that didn't want to help, and they sent it back, and it got up the chain, and I got hauled in and told I couldn't do that anymore.

And I just said, how do I tell people just to go home, I'm sorry if you die, but I'm not going to help you, just because it might cost me something. I didn't recruit out of the emergency department anymore. I don't even know what that means, but I didn't quit treating patients. We actually in 2021 drove to Texas because if you remember in March, Dr. McCullough was before the Senate and they were talking about treating, whether it was a good idea or not, or whether we should lock down. And I was watching this real time.

I was watching the Texas dashboard, just like you watch Alberta dashboard, how many cases, deaths and everything. And I was watching the dashboard and he said, if you let us treat people, we can decrease your hospitalization by 85% in four weeks. And I said, I want to see this. Because at home, we were being told there's nothing you can do. This is quite early on. And I drove around Texas. I wanted to see. because at home we were being told there's nothing you could do this is quite early on and I drove around tech because I wanted to see places wide open we were in restaurants I got pictures of it all we were in airplanes that were packed we were in airports and malls everything's packed and I'm watching the dashboard and I'm out of the country the whole time and they dropped it actually in four weeks I believe it went down by 89 percent

and and I can promise you they weren't locking things down. And so I came home and I decided at that point, driving through Montana, I had a conversation with my wife and I said, you understand that we may lose everything doing this? And she said, that's okay. I couldn't have done it otherwise. So yeah, it takes more than one person to do that. So we did. We did it until they made it illegal for me to write prescriptions to help them and then I couldn't any longer.

I find it quite interesting, one, that this study was commissioned at all because I'm not aware of many governments having done anything like this. I mean, perhaps I'm literally, I looked, I'm not aware. But in the second part that you were chosen to head this task force. So tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, I find that amazing myself to be really honest with you. I'm just an emergency room physician from a small city and small province and small part of the world. And at the time our current premier was in the media and we met at a political function where she was doing media and

my wife was toying me into every political event she could because we knew we had to be involved because of where our province was going. And so we actually connected and conversed a lot. We had meetings with decision-makers that she would was part of and then when she became our premier she asked me to do this and I believe she knew that then I would do what was honest regardless of what it showed because not everybody wants to know and I'm sure she knew the report wouldn't come out saying we did just a smashing job and that's a lot of courage for a

politician. I had way more courage than I had. Let's talk about therapeutics. So what did the report find about the use of them? Yeah that one's... And just to be clear therapeutics are things that you would use just to treat the disease. Right. So there's two parts of therapeutics. There's the things that we were allowed to use, the things that we were told we could use, things that were used by the medical establishment, and things we couldn't use. So we looked at them. Not all of them, of course, there's lots of things, but we looked at the ones everybody knew about. So the medications we weren't allowed to use were things like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine, vitamin D was even discouraged, which I don't

even understand that. And we looked at the recommendations against them. And if you, anybody can look up the recommendations against ivermectin, for instance, and there's, I think, 10 studies they used to recommend against it. And none of them actually said you couldn't use it. They just said more study needs to be done. So they said, well, we think because it's dangerous, and I don't even know what that's based on because it's by far the most safe drug I've ever prescribed. They recommended against it.

I was taken back by that because if you read the studies they use it doesn't actually say that but the recommendation does and that confuses me. In a time when we had people dying and needing something why wouldn't we try it? It's so safe. You know I could give you a 30-day prescription for ivermectin and you could accidentally take it all today and it probably wouldn't hurt you. You might get a tummy ache and some GI symptoms, but tomorrow you'd never know you did it. Not good. I don't recommend you doing that, but that's how safe it is. If you did 30 days worth of Tylenol or Advil or Benadryl or anything you could find at 7-Eleven or in the corner store,

it wouldn't work out well for you. I can promise you that. I don't know of another medication over the counter or prescription I could do that with. I can give it to just about anybody. It interacts with almost no medications and has almost no side effects. That crazy dose overdoses. So there was a false story that came out. Somebody was interviewed in the States. It went into Rolling Stone saying that the emergency department in some state was overrun by ivermectin overdoses. Completely fabricated story, completely retracted. It wasn't true. There is a famous short clip of a video of two physicians in the UK talking about an ivermectin study.

And it is on YouTube right now. And I watched that and they talked about this study and how it seemed to be the results were co-opted by whoever's paying for by the study. That one's quoted often, that study, even though it's probably not true. So I knew all of these things and so I was, why we stopped ivermectin and why we keep telling today even that it's a dangerous drug. I don't even understand where that comes from. Well, it's also odd because, you know, me having worked in many other parts of the world, including in Africa, it's just a very common thing that a lot of people take available in unlimited quantity across the counter because it saves a lot of lives. I mean, that's how I knew it before all this happened. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, if you recall

recently, the FDA actually had to recant all of their social media stuff about you're not a horse. If you remember that one, they actually had to take it all down. They didn't lose the lawsuit, but they agreed to take it all down over a lawsuit. Why did they ever do that in the first place? I don't have any idea. You know, so those are the drugs that we couldn't use. Then there's drugs that we were supposed to use, like remdesivir, which has a long history. That first came out as an AIDS drug many years ago that had a horrible safety profile. You know, and that's one of those studies that showed 53% of the people given ended up with kidney failure. Then it was rolled out as a treatment for this

that I don't understand. And so when it was recommended to use it, we just used the drug company's material to say, here, just use it, it's safe. It's like their sales brochure using it as science. Well, that's a strange way of doing that. Vitamin D, they recommend it against. I have no idea why. Vitamin D, you know, people are all, probably everybody in Canada should be on it just because we're so north. Those are just some

examples. What's the bottom line finding? The bottom line finding is that we stopped the use of medications that are safe, very safe. We recommended medications that are probably not safe, and I don't know why. And the science we used for it didn't seem to even show that. You know, hydroxychloroquine, the dose recommended for COVID was exactly the same dose that thousands of people in Alberta get every day for the rheumatoid arthritis. But it was also incredibly dangerous. I don't even understand how you can even say that. But there was this fraudulent study done where they give toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine and showed it was deadly, which of course I would expect.

There was a false study done that was put in Lancet, it was completely fabricated, that was used to shut it down in Alberta. It was retracted two weeks later, but it was used and it's still circulated. People forgot that it was retracted. And then what about the COVID vaccine usage? This was the third thing you mentioned as being a very significant finding. Well, I believe down here in the United States, they just had a committee just published a 570-page report on the vaccines and fairly critical of them. And what we found was Pfizer's own research data. So if you look in their data, and it's publicly available, 44,000 people enrolled, 22,000 people were vaccinated, 22,000 people weren't.

They didn't vaccinate anybody who was pregnant, anybody over 65, or anybody who was sick. That's nobody that's going to have problems with COVID. That doesn't make any sense. Those aren't our target audience. But that's who they did. In that, if you look at it, more people died of all causes in the vaccinated arm than the non-vaccinated arm, which should shut it down. All cause mortality is huge in vaccines because sometimes we're not thinking that might even be a side effect, cardiac or what have you. But turns out it down. All-cause mortality is huge in vaccines because sometimes we're not thinking that might even be a side effect, cardiac or what have you. But it turns out it is. That's why you have to do all-cause mortality in a vaccine study. And then 272, 270 young women got vaccinated

who weren't pregnant and became pregnant during the surveillance period. And of the 270, it appears that 238 from their own data, 238 charts were lost. So over 80% of them. 88% of the other charts were lost. Why did they lose these charts? Why would you do that?

That seems very strange. But then even out of the 32 that they didn't lose, from what we can see from Pfizer's own data, there's only one normal birth. I don't know how you'd say that was safe. I don't know about effective, but you couldn't say safe from either of those things from their own data. So I have that paper before we put a shot in anybody's arm in Alberta. And I got a little bit of trouble for creating vaccine hesitancy. I'm thinking, well, let's just take a sober second look at this if it's any good. And then now we can look at Pfizer surveillance data that had to be released. They had 44,000 problems shortly. Most things happened four days after the shot. There

was 1,123 deaths in their own surveillance data. They withdrew a rotavirus vaccine not too many years ago, over four deaths. The V-safe data from CDC, 10,000 people who got the shot were voluntarily asked to record all their symptoms and side effects after the shots. 7.7% of the people that got vaccinated in this, CDC's own data, needed medical attention, some of them severe. But more importantly, the vaccines were never studied to stop transmission, and I think we all know now they didn't. Everybody who got vaccinated probably got COVID, as far as I know. So they didn't stop transmission. And I think we all know now they didn't. Everybody who got vaccinated probably got COVID as far as I know. So they didn't stop transmission. So my question is, why did I give it to a child who in Pfizer's own data, incredible number of kids that got myocarditis and the V-safe data. And there's a Thailand study doing cardiac MRIs, even

on children that have no symptoms showing a massive number of them actually had myocarditis didn't know it. There are some real problems with that vaccine and so if it didn't stop transmission and it had any risk of poor outcome for a child and it didn't and then you know the chance of them dying from COVID was so low why did we do that and why are we still doing that? I don't understand that. So that's what we found. And that's just looking at their own data. And that's looking at our data, Alberta surveillance data. And there's a Cleveland Clinic study, which I know people have talked a lot about, but massive study. And they show that the more vaccines you had, the more likely you were to have a poor outcome. There's just so much data out there. The Nordic

countries did a huge study, millions of people, showing that if you're under 50 years old and if you don't have any really good reason you probably shouldn't get this vaccine. In fact you need to go to your doctor and talk about the risks and benefits to see if you actually need it or not. And so that's what we recommend doing in Alberta is the Nordic countries are very similar to us geographically in every way so I think that would be fairly reasonable to use their study or do it ourselves. Explain to me how this team worked you know to reach these conclusions that you did.

So I was asked to form a task force there's people on the task force that are more aligned with how I saw it or how I think. And then there was people we invited to join who were not aligned with how I think or see it. But the premier thought it would be very important to have a balanced task force so that we're not criticized by being over here or over there. Most of the people we invited didn't want to be part of it. So we ended up with a little bit smaller group than we wished. I'll be honest with you, it was a huge job and I thought, I don't know how we'll do this.

So very fortunately, we were able to reach out to world-renowned people in their field and say, can you help us with this? So they shared with us a massive amount of studies, massive amount of research and data in NPI area, in different areas. So we were able to resource world renowned people in those areas. And you can look at our references, hundreds of references we quoted.

Many people are in there that we're very grateful to. And so our little team was able to tap into a broad group. And we sat down with people that agreed with us in this area and didn't agree in that area. That's how it should be. And there's a disclaimer. Even the people that we list in our contributor list, it says right there, just because they're a contributor, agree to have their name, doesn't mean they agree with the whole study. That's so important.

I'm not going to say whether I agree with the whole study or not. I'm the final author. But there's times when I defer to somebody that knew much more than I did. As long as they had the references, they could show me the studies, and we could quote them. We could use it. I didn't want anybody's opinion. And that was the only criteria. So yeah, that's how we kind of expanded our team. One of the criticisms I've seen basically made about the study itself is that it cherry-picked certain types of studies to show preconceived outcomes. They should share those studies and share the imbalance. I think that would be fair to say. We compared our data to all around the world and you know I

didn't do a Google search on what I wanted to see. I want to know what was out there. So when we find data I then look for the research that went behind it. I would love to have a open and honest public debate on these things and we can bring the people that we had that helped us and they can share because they're the most qualified in that field to debate that science and I think they'd be more than open to that as well and recently the Stanford Medical School in California had a great review panel of the pandemic policies. And I was there. It was amazing. So we had world-renowned scientists from all around the world. Well, indeed, and this is

where we met. Yeah, that's right. It was at this event, which I thought was also kind of a first of its kind. Yes. What is happening with this study now? It's been around, you know, as we're filming, it's been around for a couple of weeks, I think. You know, there's been criticisms. There's been quite a bit of praise as well. What do you know as far as what the premier is doing with it? Well, my job was to write it and to give it to them. And what they do with it is up to them completely. We have a lot of recommendations in there. Of course, I'd like to see them take all the recommendations and implement them all. But that's not up to me. I just want to present them to them. We review it because if we have another pandemic, how are we going to respond? And are we going to

do it the way we did it or do it differently? So maybe just give me the thumbnail of the recommendations that the report has. So I mean just kind of going through the chapters governance and data flow we're talking transparency. We can't be doing things in a secret. We need full transparency so that real-time we can see if it's working the way we want it to be working. So that's that chapter. The NPI, so masking the lockdowns, you know, like the Alberta's pandemic response we had set up that we didn't use. It looked at all aspects of society to make sure we weren't having unintended consequences in the economic area or child development not having to do with the virus so broad-based look at that before we do something there we've got the modeling chapter which is we modeling was used to predict how things

would go and we've looked at the modeling used to predict ICU beds and things and you know it's a best, and sometimes it's way off. And that's a hard one to say, because after the fact, we can always say, oh, you're really wrong here. But I think they were trying to do what they could with what they had. But again, just be careful how we use modeling. You know, don't overemphasize it when it's just really your best guess, your best prediction. And then we've got natural immunity in vaccines. So natural immunity was just dismissed, which has been shown now in multiple studies.

So the natural immunity is most likely superior, if not as good as. And it was easy to get an antibody test, which doesn't show all of your response, but enough of it to have an idea. But we couldn't use that. You had to use some places, a vaccine passport or whatever you want to call it, to get into things. Well, why couldn't we show natural immunity? So let's count that in. Let's scientifically watch natural immunity.

And then the vaccines or recommendations are basically to follow the Nordic countries. And anybody under 50, the risk benefit ratio doesn't make any sense. And unless you have a real good, compelling medical reason, and after discussing with your doctor, health care provider, what the risk benefit for you is, it isn't recommended for you. For therapeutics, let's do real time. If there's another pandemic, let's enroll the doctors, enroll the patients. Let's watch real time whether something's safe, dangerous, effective or not.

And we can do that really quickly. And so these things need to be set up now so that we're not panicking to set them up then. And so those are the recommendations kind of going through the chapters. And I may have missed quite a few of them because there's quite a few. But generally, that's what we recommend. And so what about mandates? What were your recommendations around mandates? Right. What we think is really important, what we recommend is there needs to be patient autonomy. I can't force a medical procedure or treatment on you now, and we shouldn't have done it then.

And when we say force, if I say you're going to lose your job unless you get a medical procedure, that just doesn't sound ethical. So we need to strengthen. That's what we're recommending. Doctors felt pressure to do things they didn't agree with. We need to have good autonomy where a physician is doing things safely. They're allowed to treat their patients in what they believe is the best for them. It still has to be regulated.

You can't just have everybody off on their own. So that's what we would like to see, both for the patients and for the physicians. What would you say are some of your most significant recommendations? Well, there's a huge talk about consensus, that there is an international consensus. And I've talked to hundreds of scientists and doctors around the world now that weren't allowed to speak. You can't have a consensus if some of the people aren't allowed to talk. And so we have a chapter on the regulatory bodies that oversee all, and this needs to happen. We need to be regulated. We can't have people doing crazy stuff that aren't safe. But sometimes it seemed like you had to follow a certain set of

pre-scripted talking points. That's not science. And if we need to have closed meetings with all the doctors in Alberta, all the scientists in the world, feel free. If you don't want the public to hear it and be afraid, but at least have them. Didn't see that happening. So we really want there to be free and honest discussion about things like this so we don't see that happening. So we really want there to be free and honest discussion about things like this so we don't do this again. One of my the tenets of practicing medicine is honesty. I have to share with you all I know about something. So if I believe this might harm you or might help you and I withhold that, I'm not being a good physician. We need regulatory bodies.

But I think maybe something needs to be done there. You know, medication. People have to remember that 75% of the medication prescriptions I write for pediatrics are off-label. We don't study them in children. We can't. It's not ethical. But when you have a pandemic and there's also an instantly,

I need something right now, why don't we start a study where all the physicians who would like to use this medication over here, show me your research, present how you think it, you know, the safety profile, the risk benefit ratio, and then let's enroll you in a study. Let's give the physician, these are your parameters in which you do this. That's how you have to follow it up. Patients have to be allowed to share their experiences, just like kind of like the V-safe data with CDC. Write on your app how you feel today, how your outcome is, are you better or worse?

And let's watch this real time. Very quickly, we could see if the medication is dangerous, helping or not helping. So that's one of the recommendations. I'd like to do that so that we can rapidly find if there's off-label use or repurposed medicine that work. There was lots of this going around the world. It just wasn't done in Alberta. So I think that would be important. That's recommendations. Vaccines. We just need to have open, honest communication.

Like, I want to share all the risks and benefits with my patient before they take any therapy or any medication and that's normal in everything I do. So it should have been done I think a little differently with the vaccine. So vaccines are an unusual product in the sense that you're giving them to healthy people right as opposed to people who are already sick. So it changes the calculation quite substantially. Because you're giving something to a healthy person, if they think there's even a small risk, they might decide against that. But for the technology to work to achieve herd immunity, you need to have a substantive number of people actually take it. So there's this kind

of active decision made to perhaps downplay the risks because, you know, ostensibly for the greater good. Well, the perceived risk when COVID first came, I remember hearing numbers, huge percentages of people were going to die. And so then at that point, almost anything that works, let's do it. And when you have a pandemic, you do obviously take more risks than you normally would. I understand that. So then let's have active surveillance that's open to the public so that real time we can watch how it's going. But when you use the word herd immunity, you can only attain herd immunity if you have a vaccine that stops transmission. This one was never studied to and never shown to and obviously doesn't stop transmission. So you can never find herd immunity with a vaccine that doesn't stop transmission. That makes no sense.

So I'm not a vaccinologist, but that's what I understand from what we read and who we talked to. From my own reading of the report, you put a huge emphasis on transparency. Well, yeah, exactly. Like for using new medications in a pandemic, let's enroll the doctors, let's enroll the patients. We can watch it on a computer now, real time. Is it working, not working? Is it dangerous or not? I can tell you that very shortly. Should have done you know ventilators there's one we were told early on you know if you have to give them over a certain amount of

oxygen they got to capture their airway so you're not spreading the virus everywhere turns out the ventilators were causing barotrauma on people's lungs because it was actually a an oxygen carrying problem with your blood not necessarily with your lungs it was was a very interesting thing. And it was actually doctors down in this country that saw that and started questioning whether we should be ventilating everybody. And so we changed that practice, maybe slowly, but we still changed it. We saw that, no, we shouldn't do that. But when you first started off, we didn't know. But it's the real-time analysis that's done transparently in the open that allows people to see really quickly.

We can't shut it down. And that's what we asked for, basically, in all of this. You lost your job during the pandemic. How are things playing out for you now? Well, I sort of lost my job and sort of didn't. I actually got very sick. I got pneumonia. I get pneumonia quite frequently due to medical issues that I've had long ago. I have moderate restrictive lung disease, so I'm quite susceptible.

And I got quite unwell and was unable to then go back to work. But I got in a bit of trouble for my stance and had a little bit of a disagreement with my regulatory body. And we worked through that. And I have my license, and I'm practicing. I'm not practicing emergency medicine right now. And I'm mostly just finished the report.

So that's what I've done mostly for the last couple of years. But I would do what I did over again, because I believe that above all, we do what's right, regardless of our cost. I'm not aware of another such report being published at this point. Are you? I saw New Hampshire, the state down in the United States, did a similar report a few weeks ago, fairly short report, 37 pages. I read through the summary of it, but I didn't read the whole report myself. I just think... Well, I mean, this is a lot more than 37 pages. Yes, a little bit more thorough.

And then the report that was done down here, I understand, was just on the vaccines, wasn't on the whole response. So, yes, as far as I know, it's the only one. I just think it's a testament to the courage of our current premier in government to look at how did we do? Did we do it right and should we do it differently? There's a lot of courage involved in that, and I appreciate that. It's like I was mentioning an M&M round in medicine, mortality and morbidity round. If we have an outcome that we don't expect, something went wrong, we sit down, we're not pointing fingers. I'm not telling you you made a huge mistake, but we can't do this

again. So what went wrong? Do we use the wrong tools, the wrong something, or is it just what happened? And so that's, this is an M&M round we did in the province of Alberta and we want to look how we did and could we do it better in the future. What has been the response from your peers or the doctors around the world, perhaps the Nordic countries, perhaps the US? I don't do social media. I watch very little media of any kind. Since the report came out, I've had lots of people send me articles.

I've read them all. They're good. And I think some of them have been quite balanced. Some of them are not as much. And it's fine that's good that's public discourse I think it's it's great if if somebody feels that the report missed something bias or I miss something I want to know about it I had a great letter from somebody on vaccine regulations in Alberta and And that was fantastic. Appreciate those kind of things.

So this is all very important. And even the negative media, it's great. I read the articles. I look for if they're taking some science out of the report and then comparing it to other science and saying, you know, we got it wrong. And that's really important because that's part of it. That's part of the report is now the public discourse after. A little bit of name-calling, which I don't think is constructive. And that's part of it. That's part of the report is now the public discourse after. A little bit of name calling, which I don't think is constructive, but, and that's okay. The people I've talked to,

I think it's been, for the most part, positive. And yeah, it's good. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one of the listed contributors to the report. He's been nominated to head the National Institutes of Health in the report. He's been nominated to head the National Institutes of Health in the US. What's your reaction to that? I'm honored to even have his name on there, I'll be honest with you. I feel like we're the, I'm the small team from small-town Alberta and he's world renowned and we had lots of people on the report like that. He's an amazing scientist and was very helpful in showing us some of

the information that we needed to do this. The fact of what he's being nominated for down here to head up such a monumental task for sure is amazing and I wish him absolutely the best and absolute honor to have ever spoken to him and to to have worked on this to the degree we did there was some reporting shortly after which we actually we had to issue a correction ourselves and our reporting there was one Author who was removed from the report. Can you just explain to me what happened there? Yeah, so dr Connolly is a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary. So we like I say we sat with many people

We would find a paper and we would contact the author if we could and if they would talk to us we would and he was one of them so we talked to him on his area of expertise and I offered I said I'm happy to put your name in the bibliography or the bios if you wish to so send us your bio but I want you to be able to read the report before it comes out and you can agree to it even though there's a disclaimer just because you're listed or even quoted in here doesn't mean you agree with the report in any part other than what we talked about even. But unfortunately, he wasn't able to get it. We had a lot of security on it before it came out, so it wasn't leaked or what have you. And we withdrew his name,

but unfortunately there was some change in staff that was looking after the report, and it didn't get changed. And so I apologized to him, and we've talked about it since, and I'm super grateful for him taking the opportunity to talk to us, and I'm really sorry that his name was put on there and he didn't want it. I'm the final author on that, and I take responsibility for that. It's nobody else's fault. What is next for you now that this is published? I know this is something you must have been working on for quite some time. I mean, it was commissioned, what?

November 2022. Yeah, so just a little over two years ago. Right. So what happens now? Yeah, we actually booked a holiday, my wife and I, and we booked it six months ago, but we left the country a day after the report came out. I know it looked really like I was running away, but anyway, so we're still not home from our holiday, and I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I am practicing medicine to a small degree, and we have lots of other things we're involved in, but we'll see where this goes. I don't know. I'm not sure, but I look forward to whatever it is. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Any final thoughts as we finish? No, I really appreciate taking the time. It's been a lot of work writing this report. I really enjoyed it, and I hope that it makes a difference. I really do. And I hope it opens public scientific discourse above all. Well, Dr. Gary Davidson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. I appreciate your time. Thank you all for joining Dr. Gary Davidson and me on this episode of American Thought

Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.