Ask Dr. Drew - Alex Berenson: Why Did Pfizer Spend $14 Million For A Super Bowl Ad About Cancer? – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 325

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Pharma giant Pfizer reportedly spent over $14,000,000 for a 60-second ad during the 2024 Super Bowl, promoting a website about breakthrough cancer medicines. “This isn’t about products, people!” writes Alex Berenson. “This is about feels. And science. And how science makes us feel!” Alex Berenson covered the drug industry as a reporter for the New York Times. He is an Edgar Award–winning writer of bestselling thrillers, and a freelance journalist. His book “Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives” is his own investigation into the pandemic. In it, he asserts that our response to it “has been an epic overreaction driven by a disastrous confluence of public and private interests – all of them purporting to ‘follow the science.’” Follow him at https://alexberenson.com and https://alexberenson.substack.com 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • COZY EARTH - Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets & clothing made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW for a huge discount at https://drdrew.com/cozy • PROVIA - Dreading premature hair thinning or hair loss? Provia uses a safe, natural ingredient (Procapil) to effectively target the three main causes of premature hair thinning and hair loss. Susan loves it! Get an extra discount at https://proviahair.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome, everyone. I am delighted to welcome Alex Berenson today back to the program. You can follow Alex, AlexBerenson.com, B-E-R-E-N-S-O-N. Also on Twitter, at Alex, or on X, at Alex Berenson and Alex Berenson, I think it is.substack.com, it's called Unreported Truths. He was a source of clarity of thought during the hysteria of COVID, actually wrote a book called Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government's Rights and Lives. There it is. And boy, that looks more prescient than ever.

We're going to get into it with him. We're also out on the Twitter spaces. And of course, as always, I'm watching you guys on the Rumble Rants and the retweets. Let's get right to it. Our laws as it pertain to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous.

I'm a doctor for f***'s sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying. You go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time.

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we have some awesome news. You can save up to 35% off Cozy Earth right now. But hurry, this offer will not last. Go to CozyEarth.com, enter my promo code Drew at checkout for up to 35% off on your first order. That is CozyEarth.com, promo code Drew, C-O-Z-Y-E-A-R-T-H, CozyEarth.com, code D-R-E-W. Thank you for joining us today. Alex Berenson, the guest. I'll give you the particulars again on X, Alex Berenson, AlexBerenson.com, and then AlexBerenson.substack.com,

Unreported Truths and the Pandemia. There is the book. Please do get it and read it. Welcome, Alex Barrinson. I was just thinking before I got you in here, Alex, that you were a source of solace and sanity for me during the pandemic. So thank you for that. Thank you for having me on, really.

I know we've talked a few times, but it's always a pleasure. Well, thank you so much. And I've got a lot of stuff I want to ask you today. But before the mic's heated up, you mentioned that you were writing about Pfizer. And I thought maybe I'll start with that Super Bowl ad. Is the $14 million they spent on the ad, is that for the totality of the production and the time? Or is that just one or the other? That is just so, you know, the Super super bowl seven million dollars for a 30 second ad you

don't get a discount for uh for buying two um so there's 14 million for the time you know that they've licensed the queen song they spent you know they spent another million or two probably producing it um and uh yeah i've actually written two sub stacks about this because i found it so fascinating their effort to sort of tie themselves essentially you know you remember in 2021 Anthony Fauci was was was brutally and correctly attacked for saying essentially I am science but he actually said when I look back he said I represent science and that's why they're attacking me and you know that ad was Pfizer saying we're science, you know, 175 years, look at all the science-y, science-y science that we've done.

And the irony, the great sad irony is that Pfizer is actually a really third-rate drug company. You know, for their size and for the number of scientists they have, for their revenues, they've produced very little in the way of important drugs over the life of that company. And I say that as somebody, this was first obvious to me. This is what I wrote about in the first stack. Compared to Merck, for example, which is another big drug company, Merck introduced the first statin. Merck has a very, very, very successful cancer drug, an important cancer drug called Keytruda now.

Pfizer has really never had a drug like that. Pfizer's most important drug, you would argue that, I mean, they had a drug called Lipitor, but Lipitor was just another statin that they were very good at marketing. Their most important drug arguably was Viagra. And look, Viagra, as I joke in the piece today, in the Unreported Truths today,

Viagra has probably saved some marriages. It's probably also destroyed some marriages. But Viagra, you know, it's not a cancer drug. So when Pfizer tries to take on this mantle of we are the scientific leader, you know, we're the heirs to Einstein, it's just a joke. It's just sort of a wish fulfillment. They had Vioxx, did they not? Wasn't Vioxx their product? No, that was Merck. Ironically, Pfizer had a drug called Celebrex, and Celebrex wasn't as toxic as Vioxx because it wasn't as good as Vioxx. It wasn't as Cox-selected. Cox-1-select selected as Vioxx. So it didn't work as well. I should say COX-2.

It wasn't as good a COX-2 inhibitor. And so Murph got in more trouble. Yeah. In fact, I was telling somebody, I was telling Mark Gergos, I was talking about, because he, I guess, was in on that case. And I said two things.

I said, A, I have patients that have never been the same since they took that medicine off the market. For some of my arthritis patients, it was sensational. And then I said, wasn't it the case that it only killed like about eight people? I mean, that we could connect it to? And why are we not making a fuss about the deaths now and its products that might be causing death why

why don't we have the same level of concern for more than eight deaths so i will say that's actually a very interesting question the estimates were that vox had had caused i believe was 150 000 heart attacks and 40 000 fatalitiesalities. And that was a construct. Hang on. That was a construct for the case. You know, it's a law. There were eight documented cases, as I recall. You are absolutely correct about that.

I was a big VIAX prescriber, and it's not like we saw lots of heart attacks, right? We didn't see anything. I didn't see anything. And what I have seen recently, it's a lot of myocarditis and a lot of arrhythmias and things that are, and some very strange coronary disease that has me very concerned. So you are absolutely correct about that, Dr. Drew. That was an estimate. And this is, you know, this is actually very relevant to the vaccine question, right? So heart attacks are very common in the United States.

Vax was very heavily prescribed. People made a guess based on there was a trial where Merck tested Vioxx against placebo because they wanted it to be approved for colon cancer prevention. The trial was actually called Approved. And that gave clean data against placebo showing that Vioxx caused heart attacks. And that's what led Vioxx to be pulled from the market. But you are correct that when the lawyers showed up, and Merck ultimately, I think, funded a settlement to the tune of about $5 billion, there weren't as many people who could prove that they had had heart attacks caused by Vioxx as had initially been estimated based on

that trial. And I think what that tells you is in the real world, it is so hard when you have a common event and you have a drug or a vaccine that's commonly given to parse out what's happening. And we have that even more with the vaccines. And the vaccines don't have a clean clinically or clean placebo controlled trial because the trials from 2020 were all blown up in early 2021 and that is to some extent that is working to Pfizer's advantage it is working to Moderna's advantage is working to the government's advantage because we're all fighting with dirty data on top of that, I'm of the opinion that the pathogenic component of all of this is the spike protein itself. And now you've got COVID and the vaccine intertwined, and it's very hard to parse these things out. And thank you for bringing it back to the tune of, I think we ought to use

that phrase more often, to the tune of. And finally, we're both some kind of time traveler that we use that phrase. But finally, what Geragos was telling me, because this is the part I find interesting, and I think you'll find interesting, which is that I said, they apparently had some data where they observed some heart attacks. And I said, well, how did they decide that the heart attacks were not related to the Vioxx? And their response was, well, they had a guy. They had a guy that went in and looked at it. And guess what we're doing now with the VAERS data and the research on vaccine? The FDA has a guy. And he goes in and tries to do something that can't be done. And we have a case that was exemplary to that end. And so what are we supposed to be doing here?

And what is wrong with the FDA? Well, I mean, in a way, it's even uglier than that, right? The companies run the clinical trials. And they select the investigators or they hire the contract research organizations. And look, I think there are very good, very honest scientists in there. There can also be scientists who either don't want to fight with the companies, they're more jobs going forward and they know if they fight too much with the companies, they may not get more research jobs going forward. And so let's say somebody has a, you know, an event in the trial and you break the blind and it turns out that person was on the drug or on the vaccine. Well, the company and the investigator determined whether they believe that was related or not. And so sometimes the companies put pressure on the

investigators to say, you know what, it was three weeks later, it was a heart attack, but yeah, the person had, you know, they had high cholesterol before. I don't think it was related and so even even and i do think the that that generally our system uh of clinical research is pretty good but but if you're not honest there are places to play games well i i would just say this my profession was the object of all kinds of scrutiny, or let's not call it scrutiny, manipulation by the drug companies. And even very, very mild contact with a drug rep has been shown to cause bias in how we prescribe.

To the point now, we are not allowed to accept a pen with a drug name on it how is it not the case that somebody who is doing research with a co-worker who will one day hire them how is that not creating bias and yet a freaking pen is supposed to bias me a professional who's trained not to be biased by the way tell me how that works i i think i think you're correct you just have to look someone has to pay for drug research and discovery. And, you know, the companies do it. And they are correct.

Creating a drug, bringing it to market takes a very long time. You know, from the very first, you know, you have the first receptor you find, the first molecule you discover. Now, with these, you know, monoclonal antibodies and in big molecules biologics it's even harder someone has to pay for that and the f it's not the fda or the cdc that pays for it it's the companies that pay for it and so i think we just have to hope that there are ethical people in there to me i think in general early stages, the companies are willing to see that there are problems and stop discovery. The problem comes late in the game. When you have a drug that is close to being marketed or that is on the market where they've put substantial resources in, at that point, they're going to – and by substantial resources, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in some cases.

They're going to do what they can to protect those drugs. And usually they have a story to tell. For Vioxx, just to go back to that, because that's a case you and I both know, the story was there are people who have stomach problems who can't tolerate aspirin or ibuprofen, and this drug enables them to live with less pain and not have ulcers. And that's a good thing. And yes, we saw some extra heart attacks in our clinical trials, but that's because naproxen is so good at preventing heart attacks. That was always Merck's position on this. And it's very interesting.

This is 20 years later, Dr. Drew, and you are out there essentially arguing that VAR shouldn't have been pulled. Okay, so these questions get complicated. I think in the case of the vaccines, it's really problematic. And here's why. Okay, we do have some institutional checks and balances on drugs, right? We have trial lawyers out there who are looking for drugs that cause problems and are willing to sue about them. And you know, that costs Merck money. We have an FDA that sometimes will push back or at least cause the disclosure of more data. We have a media that asks questions. Well, guess what? I mean, when I worked at the New York Times, none of those things when it comes to vaccines in particular, there is no, there's no liability. The FDA, the head vaccine regulator at the FDA

was literally, no joke, no exaggeration, Dr. Peter Marks, the guy who came up with Operation Warp Speed. And the media was entirely in the tank for these vaccines, both because they hated Trump once Biden was elected and the vaccines were available, They wanted COVID to end. And because the word vaccine has this sort of magic power over everyone. And so all the sources of checks were not there. Yeah, I am quite aware. In fact, it's interesting. I don't know if you know Joseph Freiman, but he's done some great research and some great work. And he did an interview with the FDA with his research team. If you look at one of my older episodes with him, he actually played us some of the tape. And Marks is in there.

And a rheumatologist, a pediatric rheumatologist from out here at UCLA said, look, I sent a VAERS report in a month ago or something. I had a seven-year-old that died the next day within 24 hours of the vaccine. I've not heard from the FDA. There's the actual interview. This man's saying you didn't follow up on the pediatric bill. And if there's surveillance. I filed a VAIL and I'm a UCLA pediatric specialist.

This is just the end of one. But February 25th, I filed a VAERS report on a seven-year-old patient who had a cardiac arrest following his first Pfizer vaccination. It was about 30 hours after he got the vaccine. I didn't receive any follow-up about it. The patient died about eight days later i submitted another email offering to update the you know the report with the death of the patient uh it's been two weeks now i still haven't heard anything so i'm wondering if there's keep going no no keep going more extensive

because i don't want to just fair space surveillance for cases like this you got to hear it i would think that if the death of a seven year old following the vaccine is not meriting follow up, either the system is totally overwhelmed or there's there's something wrong with the reporting system. I want to play you some of the responses to this, and then you can email us about something. Well, here are the Details of each of them in many cases.

Be followed up within And then you can email us. But does that sound right, Steve? Yeah, but they should be followed up within a matter of days, actually. So just drop me

an email or Rich, and then we'll send it to our surveillance group. That's our surveillance group. To make sure that it didn't... I got it. Anyway, he goes on to say, maybe something fell through the cracks.

And Bambi goes, yes, something fell through the cracks. And you should be shitting yourself because of it. You should be falling on your sword. You should be mortified that that could happen even. Instead, it's well we'll get we'll get around to it they usually get around quicker and you send me an email we'll get to it it's insane it's insane

no it's a seven-year-old kid goes into cardiac arrest i mean that that you should have a like a team on the ground within 24 hours right i i look look there's no question the vaccines are the mrnas that is uh you know they're cardiotoxic to some people they cause autoimmune responses in some people um you know i think we're going to be arguing for a long time about how many people that is and the mechanism of action i think you know you you make a case that it's the spike you know sort of on you of overproduction of the spike. I think there's a legitimate argument out there that it maybe is a lipid nanoparticle, that that may have something to do with it also,

that they really don't know exactly what the perturbations that that may cause in people, especially with repeated injection. I'm aware. We covered this stuff later, but I'm telling you, the more I zero in on it, the more the spike protein looks like the culprit, which is why one of the questions I have is, there are whole virus vaccines out there like Covaxin. Why aren't we doing other vaccines except for the ones that creates the pathogenic protein? Why don't we offer something else if the vaccine is so important, which again, I don't understand that for an illness that has A, no risk to young people, B, good treatments. We have Paxivit, we have

all kinds of stuff. And what are we doing? Why are we doing that? And let me just say, let me just add one little wrinkle on this. I'm so conflicted. You said earlier about the cost of phase three trials and whatnot. And look, as an internist, guess what we do? We try to increase longevity and treat medical illnesses with medicine. That's what we do. And we rely on the drug companies. And they're mostly been an incredibly good partner

in all this. And it's very, and I actually, I wonder if there's a difference between the US and the European companies, but that's something you can address. But it's very hurtful to me. It kills me to have to take aim at them because we need them, and we need their money for the phase three trials,

and we've been great partners all these years. And now what's going on? It feels to me like the government has adulterated so much of this. That's what it feels like to me. I mean, honestly, I think the companies are what they've always been. Look back 30 mean, honestly, I think the companies are what they've always been. You know, look back 30 years, right, when they were able not just to hand out pens, but they would take you guys to, you know, they take you to Aspen for a week, right? And, you know, and basically, there was semi-open bribery for prescriptions. That's kind of been pushed aside now. So no,

I don't think the companies are better or worse than they've been. I mean, Purdue Pharma, you know, that company came around in the in the in the 1990s. You know, it was when it really started thalidomide, that drug is 60 years old, the companies have always been problematic actors. The difference again, specifically with the vaccines is that all the other safeguards are gone. And, you know, and here it's very interesting. You mentioned it, like the potential of Covaxin or whole virus vaccines. It's clear that the U.S. government wanted the mRNAs.

Okay. There was a very, the NIH was in business, in literal business with Moderna. Okay. And Pfizer is a U.S. company. And, you know, and there was this idea, sort of, they were the national champions. AstraZeneca, which had a DNA vaccine, that's an English company. Of course, all the other vaccines, really the inactivated virus vaccines, those were Chinese and Indian. The Russians had their own vaccine. But the mRNAs were really American vaccines, even though BioNTech was a German company. And there was an idea that they were going to be our national champions.

Now, one thing drug companies don't like to do, they'll do it on occasion, but they don't like to do is they don't like to run head to head trials, right? Where you compare one drug against another drug to see which one. I've noticed. You noticed that, right? The U.S. actually, when it came to COVID, had a unique opportunity, essentially to force the companies into one big trial. Because what they could have said was,

we're not going to pay for any vaccine that isn't tested in, let's say, a six-way clinical trial that would include the Johnson & Johnson, that might include Novavax, that might include an inactivated virus vaccine. Let's do this. Let's get a head-to-head-to-head trial. We didn't do that.

And I think the reason was primarily speed, but it was also that the U.S. really wanted the mRNA vaccines. And I don't know if you remember, you probably remember, you probably do remember, there was this idea, we're going to swap, it's software mrna is the software of life we're going to be able to swap out whenever there's a new variant we'll be able to introduce a new vaccine within weeks and this is such a revolutionary technology this is going to change medicine and those the worst thing that could have happened was what did happen which is November 2020, you have these results that seem to show that this thing can really end COVID, that these vaccines can really end COVID, and people lost their minds over it.

Yes, they did indeed. Jimmy Dore showed me about 30 different appearances by Peter Hotez on CNN. And it's just, it's so sad to watch the distortions and the thinking and the backpedaling and the, oh my God. At first I was like, okay, he changes mind. Fine. I get it. And then it's like, oh boy. Oh boy. It gets weird and patronizing.

So, hmm. What I'm noticing right now is that there's spiraling on both sides, like things are getting weird in both directions. Have you noticed this? That's why I was anxious to talk to you. You've always been the nice core. And I went through your X thread this morning. I'm like, I want some center data. And I didn't find it there. You're too busy writing about Pfizer and about Super Bowl ads. But it's kind of getting upsetting that people are

going nutty in both directions. I'm really glad to hear you say that because it does disturb me that you have people, you know, there were so few of us early on who, you know, who stood up, you know, against the lockdowns, against, you know, against the school closures in 2020, all that stuff in 2020, and then who early on stood against the vaccines. And there are people who, to me, really didn't have loud voices, really didn't stand up against the consensus early on stood against the vaccines. And there are people who, to me, really didn't have loud voices, really didn't stand up against the consensus early on. And some of those people are now making just absurd claims about the vaccines, okay?

And I guess, I don't know if they genuinely believe it. What's that? It doesn't help things. I think it doesn't help things. This whole notion that people are lying, it's like, I don't think people are lying. They're either motivated in sort of their change and their messaging, or they believe it. I don't think it's lying.

They don't know, like, I want to deceive people. No. I think you're right. I hope you're right. But there's just no evidence that the vaccines have killed 17 million people, 20 million people. I mean, just look at global death counts and you can see this. By the way, I don't think the vaccine should be on the market. I've said that for, you know, a quarter of a year.

You know, early on, I thought maybe they had some utility in people over 70 and maybe people 50 to 70 who had serious chronic conditions. Certainly since the vaccine started failing in the summer of 2021, I have been among the most aggressive people saying these things don't work. Since Omicron came around in early 2022, I've said they should be pulled. So I think my credentials are... And we have treatments. What's that? And we have treatments. And we have treatments.

We have a mild illness and we have treatments if it goes bad. And so here's where I'm confused now. First of all, A, are there excess deaths in the world? I don't think anybody's agreed on that yet. So number one, is that the case? And number two, this is a more disturbing thing, which is people are tweeting, so 3,000 deaths this week from COVID. I'm like, what? How is that possible? You go walk into any hospital, there's no COVID patients. Walk in the ICU, no COVID patients. So it must be very elderly in the nursing homes or something. Well, why aren't they getting Paxlovid? Why aren't they getting treatment? What's going on here? Or is this just bullshit and they're dying of something else? Well, so it's a very, very interesting question.

So again, my credentials as somebody who's been on the forefront of mRNA skepticism are pretty good, Dr. Drew, and I don't think I can defend them. So, here's what I would say. If you look at deaths in the US, for example, deaths are now about 10% higher than they were before COVID, okay? Some of that is deaths of despair pretty clearly especially in people under 50 there's more drug overdoses still there's uh you know there's some alcohol deaths there's you know the u.s is going in a bad direction in a lot of ways and that's some of the deaths however there's

also some there's some deaths of people you know 65 and older and it's a little hard to know what's driving that as you say it looks like you know if you if you believe the numbers it's about 75 or 100 000 people are going to die of covid this year but nobody goes in the hospital so what that suggests is you know maybe if you have two weeks to live you're exceptionally vulnerable to getting a case of covid and that's what goes on your death certificate but so maybe maybe at like the very end of life, it's, it's shortening people's lives a little bit. And then, then there's like, so you subtract those, you know, you say there's a hundred thousand deaths of despair, extra and other deaths.

Maybe there's a hundred thousand weird COVID deaths that are happening in really elderly people. And there's another 100,000 deaths, okay? Are some of those deaths vaccine injuries? Possibly. I think the best evidence the vaccines caused excess deaths actually came from Europe in 2022. In late 2022, they vaccinated a lot of people and they didn't have much COVID and they had a bump,

not a huge bump, but a real bump in deaths. OK, it didn't last. You know, it lasted about four months and then it went away. And so to me, the temporal relationship there is pretty telling. But that was we're not talking about millions of deaths. We're talking about tens of thousands of deaths so so is it possible that the vaccines have done some damage where they're killing i don't know 50 100 000 people a year in the u.s i i don't it's it's to me that is possible but the data is just way too dirty to to to to know and when i say oh there's absolutely no way they killed 17 million people

it's absolutely impossible people say well how many they killed and i say look i know the vaccines killed some people because you know if you look at cutter for example or south korea they've done autopsies where they directly link the vaccines to deaths in young people okay so so we know the vaccines killed some people but if you're going to ask me is it a thousand or is it a million i truly don't know and i'm not going to guess okay that that's where i'm at uh and uh and the one thing that bothers me though it wasn't eight it's not eight it's it's way more than the Vioxx story. And that was an international scandal, eight. So whatever. The other thing that's happening on the other side

is I'm seeing all this data on saving children's lives and saving pregnant women's life. And every time I read those stories, the two things, I don't know if you've read those papers, two things. It's always data from 2020 forward, which yeah i i

believe it was very effective i do i believe it worked at the beginning i don't think it's doing anything right now so why are we still talking about what happened three years ago number one and um oh damn what was the other part of that for me uh well anyway to address that it'll come to me while you're i know i totally agree you know here's another you raise a really good point which so let's i agree the vaccines in 2021 when they you know when they briefly actually worked they did save some lives the problem is the lives they save for almost exclusively elderly people right very elderly Very elderly, very sick people. So the same people who die from COVID now, okay? The people who seem to be the most injured by the vaccines, at least proportionally, are young people. So once again, you have a problem where the good the vaccines may do

is not on the people they may injure. And instead of being honest about that, and instead of saying to people under 50, you know what, you can wait, you don't necessarily have to ever get this vaccine. And if this vaccine had been rolled out properly, that is if in early 2021, we had said, we're going to give this to people 65 and up, you know, we're going to prioritize people 75 and up everyone else, except if you're at incredibly high risk from COVID, because you weigh, you know, 500 pounds, you don't have to take this, we're going to get more safety data and then we're going to tell you i believe the vaccines probably never would have been given to people under 50 okay so there's another trick yes we have this problem uh but i remember the other trick i

wanted to point out to you which is that that I saw this in the pregnancy data, which is between the vaccine and then unvaccinated, there was higher hospitalization in the unvaccinated group. Okay. Nowhere did they document that the hospitalizations were due to COVID. Nowhere. So you have an increase in hospitalization. Who knows what is in there? Because you don't get hospitalized for COVID. I can't say that enough.

It doesn't happen. And so I knew immediately that whatever they're being hospitalized for, it wasn't COVID. And I raised that with people like, oh, come on. You think they're going to put that data in? Find me where in the study it says they were hospitalized for COVID. It's not there. It doesn't happen. You're correct.

And so this is the problem. The And so, but this is the problem. The problem of this age issue is the problem. This is the original sin of COVID, okay? That in 2020, in March, 2020, they, and in this case, there is a real they. It's the public health establishment. It's the WHO. It's, you know, it's Bill Gates. They wanted lockdowns, okay?

They were desperate for lockdowns. And they knew that if they were honest and said, look, you know, if you're under 50 and you're not in terrible health, like this is not going to kill you, right? They wouldn't say that. And that set the stage for everything that followed, including the lies about the vaccines. And here's the problem. People know it now, right? So nobody got the 2022 booster and less than nobody got the booster last fall. So they've done real, they again, but it really is, there's a they, they've done real damage to public health, just in the united states but i think worldwide

well isn't it interesting that it's the same playbook we keep hearing that this is the hiv playbook and on that playbook which i was executing in the 80s you were not allowed to say that was limited to risk populations you had to say for 10 years we said everybody everybody is going to get this thing and in africa it was we were watching it you know move move around in heterosexual and so we had genuine fear it was going to happen but there was an absolute party line you do not mention the risk populations wasn't it interesting that ultimately in the u.s it was really gay men said we're not being helped by this we're the ones at risk here you should target us to to encourage healthier behaviors well they they almost made the same mistake with monkeypox it almost was all over

again like you can't like there are there you know certain infections infect certain kinds of people with certain kinds of conditions it's medicine there's medicine is things happen to old people that don't happen to young people think you have pediatric populations that don't happen to adult pot it's just medicine medicine. And we're in such a weird state right now that we're not even allowed to talk, to discuss the biological human reality. I have to take a break, Alex. I'm way over this break time I have to do, but we're going to talk some more. Alex Berenson with me. Follow him on X. Alex Berenson will be right back after this. Are you one of the millions of American women and men

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Go to drdrew.com slash TWC for 10% off. That is drdrew.com slash TWC for 10% off the medical emergency kit. Welcome back. Alex Berenson is my guest. Alex, go ahead and let's get him back in here so I can finish up our conversation. I interrupted you. You were trying to say something at the end there. Do you recall what?

I do not. You went to the hair ad and I thought to myself, that's one problem I don't have. That's good. We should have a barber that we sent out. Oh, goodness. Okay. So it's just all so, I'm so conflicted in my feelings. I have the same kind of conflicted feelings about the pharmaceutical companies who have been wonderful sources of life-saving medication.

That just is the case. By the way, do you want to answer my question? Is there any difference between U.S. and European pharma companies? I don't think so. I mean, frankly, the U.S. is the biggest market for all these companies, right? And by far the most profitable. So they all play the same games um uh you know it's funny because merck again merck was considered the company right it was considered the most scientifically adept the most serious um and then they went out with vioxx and

you know sold the drug that was that was pretty problematic and you know and they they all have the same incentives i I think, unfortunately. And so COVID is no longer creating hospitalization in spite of this continued sort of chanting that it does. I challenge people to go in hospitals and find COVID cases. And we have good treatments. We have Paxivir. We have monopinibir. There's a third one coming.

And these treatments really, really, really work. And you can argue about early treatment, fine. Most people don't need any treatment. That's the fact. A vast majority of people don't need any treatment. And while packs of it has only been shown in the 65 plus population, I've seen it used in younger populations, it still works. And are there risks with it? Rebound seems to be the only risk and a bad taste in the mouth. But the point is no one's going to the hospital. There's no reason for it. And so this notion that we're saving people from severe COVID flies in the face of the effective treatments that the pharmaceutical companies have come up with.

Yes, I totally agree with that. Again, I think the world has moved past COVID. It's funny with my sub stack, right? With unreported truths. I have this audience of people that's very interested in COVID. I'm still interested in COVID and in the vaccines in some ways. But you know, people, as we as we are in our fourth year of this, I'm, I, it's not all I write about, I write about lots of other things that are of interest to me now um you know drugs in general so i mean illicit drugs and sort of the u.s attitude towards those the baby bust is something i've been writing

about and and you know i think it's very interesting um uh but but there are the world has sort of moved past covid aside from some short liners who really want to say the vaccines, you know, have killed millions and millions of people on very little evidence. And then this group of sort of long COVIDians who basically don't want to ever work again and thought that COVID was going to be their ticket to that and are very frustrated that they're not. I will, I will say, I think there is one very, very big issue going forward, or two issues. One is that the mRNA platform is clearly problematic and cannot be moved into, for example, a flu vaccine or an RSV vaccine where it's being trialed in both of those illnesses without really good testing, long-term safety data. We failed to do that with COVID. We don't know how dangerous the mRNA platform is going

forward and how dangerous it may be upon long-term use. And again, if the issue, for example, is that this fat envelope that the mRNA is delivered in is problematic, then your total load of vaccine is going to make a difference. So in other words, if I've had four COVID shots and five RSV shots, that's nine shots in terms of side effect, right? So that's something that I think the regulators really need to think about. They need to clamp down on this platform going forward. And it'll be interesting to see if they do that because I think politically it's a little difficult for them to admit doing that. It means sort of admitting that they rushed the COVID jabs.

And then the second issue- Of course they did. Of course they rushed it. Of course they rushed it. Yes. Of course they did. But knowing you rushed it and admitting you rushed it- It was a good idea.

It was a good idea to rush it. I thought it was the right thing to do. Now do the proper research. That's all. Now do the proper research. The second issue is pandemic preparedness. And my somewhat radical position on this is we should not have any pandemic preparedness. I think it's pretty clear that pandemic preparedness probably caused COVID.

And if we continue to mess around in caves in China, and if we continue to mess around with gain of function in the quest to see how dangerous we can make things, there's only downside to this. I think a lot of virology is essentially out of control. And I think these folks are too sort of deep in their own heads and too financially incented to admit that. And from my point of view, pandemic preparedness should consist of having a bunch of gloves and masks, even though masks don't really work, they make people happy. And, you know, maybe doing basic research into antivirus. But the idea that we should be playing around with these viruses, and by playing around, again, I also include the basic, let's go into a cave where nobody's going to go and see if we can find a bat that has some nasty

virus. I think that's a mistake too. I think it should all stop. I think it should be outlawed by international treaty as a crime against humanity. And I think the idea that the WHO and the Sam Bankman freeds the world and Bill Gates are trying to encourage this and claiming, oh, we need to get in front of the next pandemic. You know, Dr. Drew, the truth is COVID almost certainly came out of a lab. If you don't count COVID, we haven't had a serious respiratory virus pandemic since 1918. I think I like our odds a lot better with no preparedness than preparedness. H1N was pretty bad. I had the pleasure of having that illness too.

And that was a severely toxic illness and it killed 300 000 people and you know it was it was for real uh so it came and went i mean it came and went because they made because the obama administration didn't tell anybody about it and that was my point in the in as as kova was unrolling. I said, hey, everybody, we just had one 10 years ago. It was brutal. It killed a lot of people. And you don't even know it happened. And now we're going to go from not knowing it's going on to ruining our lives over this.

And the outcomes are predictable. You mentioned the baby bust. And you talked about deaths of despair. Super, 100%. I saw it coming. I saw it coming, and that is the result of what we did with COVID. Hang on, Susan, you were trying to talk to me. I'm sorry, I can't.

Okay. That's the result of... If we allow these nitwits to have like a $5 or $10 billion a year kitty to prepare for the next pandemic, there's no question in my mind we're going to get one if we let that happen. It will leak through another lens. It just will. It's interesting. But you mentioned the baby bus. I want to talk about two of these sort of untoward consequences. One is the baby thing. And since you're writing about that, I'm going to have you talk about that a little bit. But the other thing is I feel like medical

journals have been adulterated in some strange way. It's just odd. The way things are being constructed, the things that are being published, I don't know if you've done any thinking in that zone. I think about some of the studies that weren't being published and some of them were great and excellent and finally got studied and should have created more in that direction, but didn't. It's very, very odd. Right. I mean, you're absolutely correct.

This hit me really hard in 2020, in the fall of 2020, because there was a study that some Danish researchers had done about masks. A very good study, a randomized controlled study where they'd sent people masks. You know, this was before universal masking was happening, but COVID was happening. This was the summer of 2020 in Denmark. And it essentially had a null result that showed that masks could not, you know, didn't seem to work against COVID infection. And they had a terrible time getting it published. Eventually, I think they got it published.

It wasn't. You forget. You forget. You weren't on this side of that. The New England Journal had agreed, and it was waiting for it, and telegraphed that they were going to publish it. And then all of a sudden, they weren't.

And then Jambis announced they're picking it up, and then they weren't. It was Annals of Internal Medicine. Annals of Internal Medicine finally published published it and the same thing with the bangladesh study same thing yep they could they couldn't get it in the lancet they couldn't get it in any jam eventually the annals of internal medicine to its credit published it but it took them four months uh yeah it was it was bad and there's actually another mask study that came out in 2022 that that also showed a failure that i hadn't even heard of because it was bad. And there's another mask study that came out in 2022 that also showed a failure that I

hadn't even heard of because it was suppressed is the wrong word. It did get published, but it got no attention. And you're right. Look, I've talked to physicians about this. The peer review process, when you have a politicized profession peer review is politicized and so even if the study is very good and can't really be challenged in a uh you know in a in a scientific for scientific reasons even if the epidemiology is good and no one can question you know the mouse models that they used or whatever it will get slow walked or possibly not published at all if the conclusion is not what people want to hear.

Yeah. And in your book, In Pandemia, does this all get reviewed if people want to dig into the book? I don't know. So it's funny. The book came out in December 2021. And so, you know, in some ways, everything, nothing much has changed since then. It's really sad. I would say the vaccines look worse now than they did then.

But, and I'm back on Twitter. I was off Twitter at that time. I'd been banned. And then I sued Twitter and forced it to let me back on. That was before Elon took over, which by the way, was something else the media absolutely refused to cover, surprisingly, or not surprisingly, but disappointingly. But so it's in pandemia. It's funny, this is the longest I've gone without writing a book-length work in about, in almost 20 years as a writer. You know, when I worked at the

New York Times, I wrote fiction. That sounds weird, wrote i wrote some novels in the second half of my career and then i wrote more novels and then i wrote uh you know a book about cannabis that we've talked about and then i wrote pandemia and since 2021 i've only been writing unreported truths it's funny i work harder for myself now than i ever did for the new york times i write four times a week basically every week because i have this pretty large audience and I feel they're paying me and they want me to write, but it doesn't give me the energy or the space to write a book. And I do think there's a need for another book about the pandemic and about the total failure, long-term failure of the mRNA platform that we seem to be seeing. And it's like I need a second brain or I need to tell the people on Substack on a reported truth hey give me six

months let me work on a book because it's an important book. Somebody's put together all the excesses of the government and the silencing all the stuff that hopefully comes out in Biden versus Missouri so because that is really the sort of egregious aspect of the whole pandemic when people were harmed by our government and silence and speech was attacked it just was it's a dark chapter that needs to be looked at you don't want to because they were they were more than complicit. They were active in it. I mean, we need to get it out there, though, so people can really look at what happened. Because I don't think that people really,

everything's so siloed. I don't think they really know how bad it got and what extraordinary people were harmed and lost jobs and really, really high level professionals of extraordinary credentials with spotless records. These were their targets. And that needs to be

brought out. I mean, it's just ridiculous. And the fact that they're mostly right. Have you had to adjust course on anything? What have you gotten wrong? Because I think of your cannabis thing, it's like, hey, pretty much got all that all right. Pandemic, pretty much got all that all right. So where do you get gotten wrong? Because I think of your cannabis thing. It's like, hey, pretty much got all that all right. Pandemic, pretty much got all that all right. So where do you get things wrong? So what I got wrong, the most notable thing I got wrong was in, and I don't count, by the way, saying, oh, you know, 100,000 people might die in March 2020.

I mean, nobody said a million people. But beyond the fact that the county, you know, is a cocktail. But nobody was putting out numbers. Nobody, also nobody thought we would have a single count for three years, right? That's not how we count the flu or anything else, right? We, we start the clock again each year. And so, so not counting that, I got, one thing I got wrong was I had been reading about sort of cross immunity in summer 2020. And I did think it was possible that maybe 80% of the population wouldn't get infected with COVID.

Because you saw these sort of bursts, whether it was in New York or whether it was in Arizona, where you had very big spikes and then then they passed very quickly on their own. But that turned out to be wrong. Everyone wound up getting infected with COVID. So I was wrong about that. That's the number one thing I got wrong. I'm trying to think of something I got wrong with the vaccines. You were focused on a lot of Israeli data.

Remember that? You were reporting a lot of Israeli data. Remember that? You were reporting a lot of Israeli data before anyone over here heard it. And some of that got a little sideways, didn't it? No, what I would say was, so what happened was, and this is something that also doesn't get talked about, in retrospect, although also at the time,

when you give people the first shot, there's this clear suppression of immunity. So the very worst spike of COVID in the US, in the UK, in Israel too, actually, came in the winter of 2021, in January 2021, when people were getting their first COVID shot. And in part, actually, that's because of something we were talking about off air where people would go, just the opening of a nursing home to give people shots meant that a protected population was suddenly made vulnerable, right? And so some of those people got COVID for environmental reasons, but there was also a spike in those first couple of weeks, which the vaccine proponents never admitted. And they also didn't admit that when you're looking at a vaccine that only, a quote unquote vaccine that only works for six months, if it has negative effectiveness the first two weeks, that's a real negative and you have to

count that. But so there was a spike and then you had what I called in pandemia and what I've called ever since the happy vaccine valley. So for one to six months after that first shot and, you know, and zero to six months after the second shot, you actually have vaccine effectiveness. Right. And that's that was the spring and summer of 2021. That's when the vaccines, you know, they save some lives. That's when they thought, you know, people actually thought we can make COVID go away and then the vaccine stopped working. Okay. They create this crazy, unnaturally high level of antibodies. Those antibodies go away.

The vaccines stop working. And so there was a period in the spring of 2021, when I thought, you know what, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe scenes actually work. This is not going to look very good for me if they work. And what I had to tell myself, which turned out to be correct, was we don't have the data. We didn't do studies for long enough. We don't know. And this seems very strange to me that you're going to be able to keep this incredibly high level of antibodies for long enough to matter. And that turned out actually to be right. But when people, just like you said a few minutes ago, when people run these studies claiming that a lot of lives were saved they always talk about

2021 that's the only period that's the only period when you can say i was wrong because if you look at the totality of the last three years i was not wrong and they censored all the people that knew what the hell was going on so we we didn't we couldn't get any answers because they censored every doctor and you and anybody who had common sense. Sorry, I had to pile on. Susan is still angry.

I started vaccinating babies. Like what? Yeah, still vaccinating babies. And it's very hard to understand why based on current data, not old data. I get it. There were children that died. I get it. There were children that died. I get it.

There was some benefit. It's a pediatric decision. By the way, the other thing I realized, Alex, is that most of these public health officials are pediatricians, and they're trying to make decisions about adult medicine. I can't make decisions about kids, especially young kids. I don't know how to do that. They have a different risk tolerance.

They're a very different way of looking at things. Yeah, and we want to talk about censorship. I go further than that. Okay. What, what, and I know we're short on time. I would say that you become a public health doctor because you want,

I think, I think a lot of them have a hero complex. Okay. You know, I'm going to save society. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know,

I'm going to show these people, you know, the way out, they're going to listen to me i'm gonna you know i'm gonna show these people you know the way out they're gonna listen to me and you know there's nothing more dangerous than somebody who thinks they're doing something that you don't want them to do to you for your own good and uh social ill social evil social evil is always done in the name of good. I'll remind everyone that Robespierre's committee was called the Committee for Public Safety. So there you go. Susan, what do you want to ask about there? What's going on with Alex's lawsuit and censorship?

Did you guys talk about that? A little bit. We did not. So I sued Twitter. And that was in 2022. People said, oh, this is a dumb lawsuit. He can't possibly get past the motion to dismiss. It's going to get thrown out.

Guess what? It survived the motion to dismiss. I settled with Twitter. I got put back on Twitter. I got documents from Twitter showing that Scott Gottlieb, who was formerly the head of the FDA and was a Pfizer board member, was campaigning for my removal. And then Andy Slavitt, who was a senior White House official, the senior advisor to the COVID response when he was at the White House and afterwards was campaigning for my removal from Twitter.

And ultimately, you know, they forced Twitter to remove me. I've now sued. I sued Sl Slavitt, I've sued Gottlieb, I've sued Albert Bourla, who is the chairman of Pfizer, and I've sued the Biden administration over that unconstitutional, you know, it's a violation of my First Amendment rights. It's a public-private conspiracy called the 1985-3 conspiracy. And I've sued the private defendants in that case for tortious interference, in other words, for violating my contract with Twitter. The case is in federal court in New York City, and it's sort of on hold right now. We've filed some motions. The defendants have filed some motions.

The judge, and the judge will do what the judge will do. I hope, obviously, she'll rule in our favor. The judge appears to be waiting for Missouri v. Biden and a second important Supreme Court case called NRA v. Volo, which is about how, it's another case about how much um in this case new york state officials can pressure a private companies to uh to to try to get an outcome they want so in the nra v volo case the state of new york tried essentially to get insurance companies to drop the nra as a defendant because it didn't like the nra and the the Second Circuit, which includes New York State, which the Federal Circuit that includes New York State, said that's okay.

That case has now been appealed to the Supreme Court. I think it should be overturned. Believe it or not, the ACLU actually thinks it should be overturned, because, you know, if the state of New York can do that to the NRA, maybe the state of Texas will do that to Planned Parenthood. You know, So when those two cases are decided, when Missouri v. Biden, which is obviously the big free speech case, is decided,

and NRA v. Volo, which is more about, again, state power and trying to disempower political views you don't like, when those two cases are decided, I expect we'll get a decision in Berenson v. Biden. It could come before, but that's sort of what my lawyer and I are expecting at this point. Please come back when that comes through. I can't wait to hear how that goes. I'm so proud of you. And then, Caleb, you flashed a question up there. I'm not sure I caught it. Yeah, I'm just curious about, Alex, because a flashed a question up there. I'm not sure I caught it. Yeah, I'm just curious about, Alex, because a lot of people go on this journey and they kind of start, or at least recently have started with looking suspiciously at mRNA. And then they've gone to the next step, which is to look suspiciously at all vaccines and all vaccine science. Have you crossed over that bridge?

Are you anywhere on that bridge right now? I have not. And a lot of my readers want me to. And my feeling about it is life is too short. And it's one thing people always say, oh, or people on the left say, he's an anti-vaxxer. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. My kids have all been vaccinated, including some of them have been vaccinated since I started raising questions about the mRNAs. I'm an mRNA skeptic. I'm a pharmaceutical industry skeptic.

I frankly think we should probably end vaccine immunity, certainly for newer vaccines, because it's no longer, these are totally different products than they were in 1986 when the vaccine immunity was given. But I am not an anti-vaxxer. And honestly, there are so many people fighting on that issue, and positions are so entrenched. I like to investigate stuff where I think I can actually find new facts and make a difference, and I don't see how I could possibly do that in this case.

So I've avoided it. And the big complaint is checks and balances. That's the big complaint, that there's no checks. And to me, that was RFK's position too. It's your position, makes sense to me. And I'm not anti-vax either, and I will never be because I've helped people with vaccines. I've seen it. I know how this works. But I would like some sanity in the system, some balances. The immunity where it comes in always,

and we have homelessness because of qualified immunity in our public officials. Because they can let people die on our streets and doesn't mean none of them. And eight are dying every day in LA County. No county officials are being held accountable because they can't be. So that's a problem. Yes. I mean, we have a sorry go on finish your thought i'm sorry we have this little delay here that makes it look like we're interrupting each other we have a we have a very

robust drug discovery system in this country despite the fact that the companies don't have liability protection for drugs they don't need liability protection or they certainly don't need complete liability protection for vaccines especially They don't need liability protection, or they certainly don't need complete liability protection for vaccines, especially these vaccines that work in totally different ways and that are far, far from 100% effective. These should be regulated as drug products, in my opinion. What I was always led to believe, and I guess this is wrong, was, well, you know, these vaccines are, they lose, they can't get any money. The vaccines are not a way to make money. So they have to be protected, they can't get any money, the vaccines are not a way to make money, so they have to be protected or they never do the research

on the vaccine, that's turning out to not be true. In 1986 that was true, that's not true of the HP, I mean Gardasil was a multi-billion dollar product, the COVID vaccines, Pfizer made tens of billions of dollars on, no yeah, when it was

we're going to have eggs, you know, and the flu it was we're going to have eggs you know and and and the flu vaccine and we're going to sell it for three bucks then it was actually a problem but it's just a totally different landscape around new vaccines alex i'm going to let you go even very kind with your time and your thoughts and always great to see you again and come back here best of luck with this suit i can't wait to see you again and come back here. Best of luck with this suit. I can't wait to see you. Go get the book. Support Alex by getting the book. Yeah. And it's Pandemia and Pandemia.

And the subtext. Unreported truths. And the subtext. I'll talk to you soon, Dr. Drew. Thank you. Take care of yourself. You betcha. Happy Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day, indeed. We have a second guest. He was one of our first guests on that was censored. Oh, is that rightored when his book was taken off of Amazon right at the very beginning of the pandemic. And we got a hold of him. And we were doing Dose of Dr. Drew.

And I remember having him. He's like, I got to do it before my kids come home. And he was like... I remember there being like a white wall behind him. Yeah, and then you'd hear the kids and he's like, I got to go now. That's really funny. He's got a white wall behind him. Yeah, and then you'd hear the kids, and he's like, I got to go now. That's really funny. So, yeah, and he's got a bunch of other books.

But I think he got censored from Twitter after that, and then he, you know, for being rational and asking questions. You know, it's just ridiculous. Anyways, sorry. Yeah. Did we address everything you wanted to address, Susan? Yeah, I wanted to hear about his suit. Okay.

Was that what you were pointing out on the phone or something? Okay. You got to come right here. I know, honey. I know I texted you, but you just didn't get the mail. Got it. So we have another guest, and this is going to be a complete change of topic. We're just doing this as a little add-on here

for those of us in California in particular. Yeah, my ballot is right here. I do my mail-in ballot. I know there's all kinds of consternation about that. But Vice President of Communications for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. As I remember, Howard Jarvis was Prop 13, if I remember right. Susan Shelley, also a member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. You can find her on X at Susan underscore Shelley.

And Shelley is S-H-E-l-l-e-y uh and susanshelly.com is where you can find more please welcome susan hey welcome thank you so much for having me it's a pleasure to be with you and i want you to know you're going to have to do some uh convincing of me which is an opportunity for you because i I read Prop 1, we're talking about homelessness for those of you not in California. And I read Prop 1, I thought, well, it's not perfect, but it's something. And it's going in the right direction, at least in terms of treating these conditions that are creating homelessness. It's the first time you were able to put homelessness and mental health on the same printed anything. You're just not allowed to

put those two things together. And that's gotten people to now see through all that and realize how insane that is. But why is Prop 1 not a good idea? Well, for several reasons. First, it's $6.38 billion of borrowed money, which is $12 billion when the taxpayers finished paying it back in 30 years. And what does it buy? It buys 6,800 treatment beds

and about 4,300 housing units. So if you just do the math, that's an awful lot of money for not as much benefit as you would expect for the kind of spending commitment that that is. Let me ask.

I want to ask. They keep saying beds, and I couldn't find anything in the in fact this is what concerned me in the in the documents that voters get that describe what these beds are going to provide are they psychiatric beds are they halfway houses is this just more places for poor social workers to do things they're not trained to do where Who's going to pay for the doctors and nurses and policies and procedures and things we require in California to run a hospital? Is any of that in there? Well, you have put your finger right on it. First of all,

they're not hospitals. They're in the category of housing, which means they're under housing first, which means no one can be required to be in treatment to receive the housing or the bed or anything. It's the community care model. It's not hospitals. The governor could ask for an IMD waiver, an IMD exclusion waiver, which I know you're familiar with. That's the part of Medicaid that says you can't be reimbursed. No federal matching funds for mental health care in a facility with more than 16 beds. So we could get a waiver from that and we could spend $6 billion building hospital facilities and they won't do that. So they're going to build community facilities unspecified. They are borrowing the money. It's a blank check. The state will decide later what they're going to build. And as far as operating this, now here's the part that I think will persuade you.

It is robbing money from the county mental health services funding. It is taking that money from the millionaire's tax that passed in 2004, which was supposed to fund county mental health services, additional and new and innovative services, not just replace the existing budget. I didn't say it was going well, but what they're doing is they're taking the funding from it. So they take it in four different ways. The first way is that under the Mental Health Services Act, the state would get 5% and the counties would get 95%. The state doubles its

take under Prop 1 to 10 percent and of the remaining funds that the counties have they're required to spend 30 percent on housing programs which is we can talk about what those are in a second but when you spend money on housing you lose the federal matching funds so that's the third way that they're losing money is they lose the federal matching funds and the fourth way is that whatever places, that's what the legislative analysts called them, unspecified places for treatment, the state builds with the borrowed money, the counties are responsible for funding the operations. So the first thing that's going to happen if this passes in March is in November, the counties are going to start putting tax increases on the ballot and saying,

we don't have enough money for suicide prevention programs right because we have to spend it on all of this so that's that's really what's wrong with it it it would not be that much money to build hospitals and run them it really wouldn't uh and and i am just keep over and over telling these officials they are running hospitals without doctors and nurses. Social workers are not trained to do this work. They can't even assess, because they're not medical, whether there are medical needs or psychiatric needs to a certain extent. They are wonderful at what they do, but it is literally like asking a physical therapist to do orthopedic surgery.

It's not, they're wonderful, and it is not what they are trained to do. And this is an insanity. This is an insanity. And I would love to hold these officials responsible for the deaths that are going on eight a day in LA County in particular. This to me is just unconscionable. If that were actually a hospital,

just because it doesn't have walls doesn't mean it's not a place where people get medical care. There's a hospital without walls with no doctors and nurses. If there were such a place with walls, who would be getting sued? What kind of criminal action

would be taken for the negligence? It's just, you think about it, it's just, it goes, it's mind boggling. And yet we can't get the, when I talked to a group of county officials, national group of county officials, I called them all essentially murderers, negligent manslaughter,

because they're sending in people that are not trained to do the work. They're like, what? I didn't know. It's just how it was when I got the job. Yeah, okay, we'll change it. We're bringing the right people in to do the job. And we need armies of people.

And we could do it, but it's gonna take a lot of work. And it's not even that expensive. That's the thing that gets me. And you could build six. Go ahead. If we borrow $6.38 billion to not build hospitals, then what are we going to do to build hospitals?

They don't want to build hospitals, but that's what's needed. How does it even work within the setting of the extreme shortfall, the extreme budgetary shortfall this year already? I was excited to see it. And then I was like, oh, look, Drew, they're doing something about the homeless finally. And then I heard you on KBC with John Phillips and I heard what you said and I went, oh, we go again I see I don't know like when they had the they used to have a thing where you could roll over your tax that your property taxes if you're over a certain age and sell your house and you know in California and then they had this proposition it looked really good for seniors but it took away the good part and I was, you got to read to the very bottom and read the fine print.

Even the fine print doesn't give you, you have to think of the things that are necessary. In this particular case, it's just too much to, but I agree. 6,800 beds is not worth $8 billion. Well, if it's $3 billion to run them for 10 years or something, I mean, then we could get people through these things. I mean, they were kind of pointing it at the veterans in the thing. It was like, it's going to help the veterans. Are the veterans going to get most of this or no? Tell me about that.

Here's how this is divided. $4.4 billion goes to build the unspecified places for treatment, and $2 billion goes for housing into the same program that is currently buying hotels and converting them with the optional services down the hall that no one's required to use. And what they've done, they're concerned that they're having trouble getting neighborhoods to approve having these built in their area, so they took away the ability for communities to approve it. So there's ministerial streamlined approval for converting hotels to housing in which the residents can still be using hard drugs because of housing first,

which is the state principle that's in law from, I think it's SB 1380, if I remember right, from 2016, written by Holly Mitchell, now on the board of supervisors, running for re-election. I can't wait. i can't i can't wait till we get the the fatality rates within walls it's going to be no different than outside maybe worse inside because they're really free to do your thing but but very much do you have that data yet but but what about the veterans you didn't say what what's going on nothing two two billion dollars two billion dollars of the of the bond goes to housing one billion of that is reserved for veterans but it is going to build a total of 2300 housing units and as of january 2022

there were 10 400 homeless veterans that's the previous point in time count so this is just window dressing really it's they If they wanted to help veterans, they would spend the whole $6 billion helping veterans, but they're not. They're just putting enough of it in there so they can save veterans in the commercial and veterans on the ballot, and you won't be surprised to hear that veterans poll very well when they use that language. Right, of course. And is this going to be built over the VA in Westwood or something? Do they have a spot yet where they don't have to worry about it's already federal lands? I don't think they've gone that far. They've just, they said 4,350 units, I believe, and about 2, vote for units for veterans.

It's hard not to. Even if it's not with treatment, it's really hard. It's true. Given how much is just out of control on our streets, I imagine the average person is going to go, well, we got to do something. Well, what if the success rate is 50%? You know what I mean?

What success in success rate? 4,300 homes for people and only 50% of people actually stay in them or it works out for them. How do you know what the success rate is going to be? The number gets smaller and smaller. 100,000 homeless people in the street in LA.

It's just not that much. We can look at the numbers from Project Roomkey and the numbers from Project Homekey, and we don't have a report showing success on these policies. And yet this is doubling down on the same policies, not changing them, but funding the same program that is converting this housing. And by the way, it all has to be built in accordance with prevailing wage rules which means it will be as expensive as humanly possible to build each of these units and this we're seeing in los angeles right this we're seeing in los angeles under the 1.2 billion dollar bond that the voters of la approved for homeless housing it was supposed to be 10 000 units i think now they they think it will be 7,500 on a good day, but some of them

are costing $800,000 each to build. Right. I'm aware of that. Yeah. That's just not the way to solve this problem. Well, Susan, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us and people will have to make their own decisions. It is up to the voters. And where can people find more? They can find more at the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association website at hjta.org. You can see what HJTA thinks of this measure. It's recommending a no vote on Proposition 1. And you can find me at the Los Angeles Daily News, dailynews.com, and on Twitter at Susan underscore Shelley, S-H-E-L-L-E-Y.

Thanks, Susan. Appreciate it very much. Thank you, Dr. Drew. And so you betcha. Tomorrow, Caleb, I think we have more great guests coming our way. We have Zuby, Rob Henderson, his new book, Troubled. Willie Soon, Tess Laurie, Brett Weinstein, Dave Rubin, Kevin Bass with Dr. Victor, which can be a really interesting conversation.

Kevin has been now kicked out of medical school. I think he, I hope he sues because I got a lot of thoughts about how egregious he was treated, but we'll find out the whole story here. So, and we appreciate y'all being here. Brett Weinstein is a big deal, guys. We'll get the chance to talk to him

and it'll be very interesting. I'm a biologist by training, so I'd love to pick somebody's brain like that. Follow us at AskDrDrew on Twitter. Updates for shows and guests are there. Do follow us on the Rumble channel. Subscribe, tell a friend. Let me look quickly at what you guys are saying

on the re-stream. A lot of you are not from California, so you're not coming in on this. Happy Valentine's, as Molten Salt says, happy Valentine's Day. Susan, it's for you. Now they love me over there. And,

Re, Caleb's in there screaming Re. What's that, Susan? On your mic. On your mic, I don't hear you you YouTube's trying to figure out who I am and asking if I'm jabbed YouTube is what is that I I was jabbed by the way I was jabbed three times because the first time I got an early vaccine right at the beginning. We were going to Europe. Yeah, and we were going to go to Europe. And you hadn't had COVID yet either.

Drew was supposed to get it. I hadn't gotten COVID. So I got the vaccines at the beginning when all the 80-year-olds were getting it. And I didn't tell anybody because I wasn't supposed to. But anyways, I also got a booster because Because we had to fly to New York. And I wanted to be able to go out to dinner. We have a place in New York. So we like to go back and forth.

And then we also were going to Laguna. And I like to go to dinner. And you had to show your vaccine card. Except Dana Point. Dana Point was a bastion of freedom. Then we went to Greece. Thank you, Dana Point, California. We went to Greece and had more COVID tests, I mean, in a week. We were getting a swab every five minutes.

Like every other day, yeah. On a cruise. Like they go, okay, it's two o'clock. Everybody in your room, we're going to. First ship post-COVID out of Athens, Harvard. Yeah, so we went. We had a great time. Nobody had COVID on the entire ship.

We all made it back alive and then hey when i went to did special forces that's like a year later right i had to be quarantined for a week in a hotel right and whenever you did television every day with tv you try to do teen mom and you couldn't we couldn't do the skank fest because you had to do teen mom the next week everybody got it at the skank fest too but anyways i was like no sorry skanks can't have dr drew he has teen mom coming up but if you work in hollywood or you want to go out to dinner like old people do travel to europe old people was brutal about this and i i honestly it was just really hard to watch how stupid it was you know but we still you know showed our vaccine card every time and um you

know it was just so irritating but we did it and fortunately i didn't have any side effects drew did and we we douglas did he looked terrible douglas did yeah a couple family members i didn't i wouldn't let him get boosted because he got so sick from the vaccine but you know i may have lost a tooth i'm not sure oh yeah. I had a weird infection on my tooth. That's right. But I had to yank it out. Hard to say.

I know. Isn't that sexy, everybody over on Rumble? It was awesome. But anyways, I did get the vaccine. If I didn't have to, I'm not saying I would.

So there we go. You know, because I'm a pretty hearty soul and I think that if I had caught COVID, I probably wouldn't have gotten as sick as I have. I've had COVID five times, so the vaccines didn't do diddly. Right, of course.

You know. Well, kept you out of the hospital. Yeah, well, I'm, yeah. You wouldn't have been in the hospital, trust me. I needed my papers. My papers had to be updated so I could roam around the world. So Zuby has been a source of solace and sanity through this. And he and I have changed little DMs here and there,

but I've never really spoken to him. Carola has talked to him, and I look forward to talking to him tomorrow. So join us tomorrow at three o'clock. Zuby's our guest. We'll see you here. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only.

I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.