Ask Dr. Drew - Dr. Clare Craig: These Beliefs About Viral Covid Are NOT Supported By Evidence – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 301

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

Dr. Clare Craig is the author of “Expired: Covid the Untold Story” and a Diagnostic Pathologist who worked in the NHS. She studied medicine at Cambridge University, moving to Oxford for her final ...three years of clinical training. After qualifying, she practiced in the NHS for 15 years, specializing as a diagnostic pathologist and becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists. She was the day to day pathology lead for the cancer arm of the 100,000 Genomes Project, and led research and development projects at Genomics England. She is co-chair of the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART.org) who are a voluntary body of professionals educating the public on COVID issues. Follow Dr. Craig at https://x.com/ClareCraigPath 「 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 • 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. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • COZY EARTH - Trying to think of the right present for someone special? Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets & clothing made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW to save up to 40% at https://drdrew.com/cozy • 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 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should 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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 It is my distinct privilege today to welcome Dr. Claire Craig. She's a pathologist. She has a book. It's called Expired, COVID, The Untold Story. She has an extensive, there it is right there, a background working as a pathologist and a researcher. She was at Cambridge and then Oxford, been with the NHS for a long time,
Starting point is 00:00:20 and she has now moved to the 100,000 Genomes Project and more recently to the HEART Health Advisory and Recovery Team, HEARTgroup.org, I think is where you can get through to that. I just signed up for that myself. I don't know if you all caught her on John Campbell's webcast, but I found her testimony there extraordinarily compelling and I thought I must get my there extraordinarily compelling. And I thought I must get my hands on Dr. Craig, which we have done. And I look forward to talking to her after this. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started
Starting point is 00:00:58 this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f**k'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.
Starting point is 00:01:17 We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Ladies and gentlemen, it is the holiday season and our friends at GenuCell Skincare want to give you the gift of younger looking skin with their best sale of the year. For the first time ever, get over 60% off our favorite skincare bundles at GenuCell.com slash Drew. GenuCell has so many products that Susan and I love. GenuCell's XV Moisturizer. It locks in moisture, making dry spots a thing of the past. It's especially great with the colder weather coming in. And with its
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Starting point is 00:02:41 I'm very excited to get into it with our next guest. Let's bring her right in here. She's very kindly agreed to join us at 11 o'clock at night in United Kingdom time. Dr. Craig, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you ever so much for the invite. Really good to be. So let's just walk people through sort of a little history, if you don't mind. What you were doing professionally at the time when COVID hit, what you saw evolving, what you thought at the time, and when you threw the penalty flag.
Starting point is 00:03:21 Something's not right. Sure. So I'm a doctor and I was a diagnostician working in the labs doing testing of various different types, specialists really and I ended up working for the 100,000 genomes project on the cancer arm so I was doing sort of centralized diagnostics and working alongside public health I went actually for a bit into AI cancer diagnostics but from May 2020 I was homeschooling four children in lockdown. That's what I was really doing. And we started to get increasingly concerned about how the testing was being run because this was my area of expertise and I could see that it was being done in a logical manner. And that was really my only worry at the time. And I waited till the kids went back to school in
Starting point is 00:04:07 September and then had a chance to dig into the data so I looked at the data and decided used it to see if I could first of all show that there was a problem I was concerned about about too many tests coming back positive and then secondly to show that the people who are testing positive in the summer didn't have the same characteristics as those who had been hospitalized and dying in the spring. So hospitalized and dying people in the spring were more likely to be black. They were more likely to be hypertensive and diabetic. And there's all sorts of characteristics of a COVID patient. And in the summertime, those characteristics were lost. And so that showed that the testing had gone wrong. We started just giving out random positives. And so I thought, what do I do with this information? You know, I
Starting point is 00:04:50 feel like it's important to say something, but I don't really want to put myself out there. But I was persuaded to put my photo up, put my name up and call it out. And I was so naive. I honestly expected one of two responses. Either they would say, oh, no, you're wrong because of X, Y, and Z. We've already looked at this. Or they would say, oh, yeah, OK, we haven't realized that. We'll correct it. And that would be that. And what actually happened was I got attacked, not in the real world, just online. And then lots of other professionals who had had concerns in their field contacted me and sort of you know reached out in a supportive way but also to say that they'd had this concern or that concern and I was left sort of slightly lost
Starting point is 00:05:37 thinking well how do I tell if these people are genuine and if they're telling the truth or if they're just outliers and they're slightly odd so I had to sort of go back to first principles and work through all of the things they were saying and gradually learned more and more and felt like I had to speak about those things as well as the things that I was an expert in and ended up setting up this heart group in January of 2020. Okay on, hold on. You've leapt through quite a bit of material there. I want to tease out some of this stuff.
Starting point is 00:06:11 First of all, you said that they were reporting random positives. Explain to people why the initial risk factors for Alpha and Delta COVID, and particularly COVID that you would test for, I'm assuming people that are sick, suddenly broke down. What was your insight in that? Okay. So medical testing, people put a lot of faith into, but it's not perfect. If it was perfect, you wouldn't need doctors and you wouldn't need testing specialists because you could just go and get tested and you know what was wrong. And the key to getting a test right is first of all testing the right people okay so if you go and take say a prostate cancer test and you test it on school boys then any positives you get back you'll know
Starting point is 00:06:58 we're just testing errors because they're too young for prostate cancer whereas in an older population you know it has a different meaning so you have to be very wary of who you're testing in the first place right so it's what it's the way the way we talk about is that that's the the probability of a positive test impacts the accuracy of the test which people don't appreciate but that is absolutely the truth, correct? Yeah. Keep going. And then with every test, you have a choice between do you want to find every single possible case or do you want to find only the definite cases? And there's an overlap. There's like a gray area in the middle. So in the book, I describe this talking about dogs and say, okay, let's imagine
Starting point is 00:07:45 you had a test and it was a simple test of the height of a dog and you want to find the Great Danes. So you could put the height really high and you would only find Great Danes, but there'd be some Great Danes that you would miss because they were shorter, or you put it really low when you find all the Great Danes, but you've got a whole load of other big dogs that you've caught up in that test result as well. So it's always a balance between one and the other. And that's what we're trained to understand as the sensitivity and the specificity of the test, correct? Right, exactly that. Yeah. And at the beginning of an outbreak of an infectious disease, the concern is that you rapidly roll out a test first of all you
Starting point is 00:08:27 want something that's available as quickly as possible and that it's very sensitive you want to find any possible problem and then the idea is that over time you can refine it so I you know I kind of I understand why you would start with the PCR test. The labs are all ready to do that. You just swap in and out what you're testing for. You can rapidly upscale it. And I can have some sympathy with the fact that when it was set up, it was set up to be very, very sensitive. But you can't keep testing like that over the long term
Starting point is 00:09:01 because it was so sensitive, the way they set it up that a sample that had only three or four viral particles in it which is enough like which you could find in a single aerosol in the air that would be enough to call a positive which means that people who are breathing contaminated air could test positive, even when they're completely healthy. It means people who've breathed in virus and their immune system's dealing with it, and they will never be infectious to other people, and they will never get a symptom, will test positive. And so the test, the positive results had no clinical meaning. Because from a clinical point of view, you want to know one of two things. You have either the question of, here's this sick person coming into hospital, and we want to know why they're sick.
Starting point is 00:09:50 And you have a separate question of, well, you know, we've got people who are contacts, we want to know if they're infectious. And the way it was set up wasn't the right for either of those questions. It was set up to find anything and everything. And that it was so sensitive that the problem you'd have would be in an intensive care unit where the air has got virus in it, inevitably, because some of the patients will be sick. And other patients who are breathing that air are going to test positive. And when you've got patients who are dying, when we're dying, our immune systems are not as good as they normally are fighting off viruses.
Starting point is 00:10:27 And if you're testing like crazy, you might find virus in people who are dying that wasn't really the cause of their death, that wasn't really a problem for them at the time. It was just that their immune system's not working properly. And there was, at the time, I do remember there being some conversation about this, this sort of this concentration of PCR sort of people, you know, started discussing it.
Starting point is 00:10:51 It was dismissed out of hand. I mean, nobody took that conversation seriously at the time. Did, were you eventually listened to as someone who comes from the public health, the NHS, from this department? Literally, it was your expertise and no one's listening. No, so nobody listened to me. But moreover, in our country, we've got a national body who are charged with screening testing. So they are responsible for the ethics and the rollout and the running of mass screening programs. And they were not consulted at any point. They were just completely kept at arm's length from the whole setup because they'd be saying the same thing that I'm saying. It was done in the wrong
Starting point is 00:11:36 way. It was done to magnify positive test results. You wouldn't have done anything differently if you wanted more positive test results right of course all right and so there we are with that issue which was the testing uh and so you immediately knew something was um not right uh interesting it's so interesting to me that there's sort of three there are two aspects to abandonment of our usual concern about sensitivity and specificity echoed in our abandonment of our risk-reward sort of analysis of every therapeutic, whether it's pharmacological or non-pharmacological intervention we did, we abandoned risk-reward analysis. And there was a similar kind of lack of willingness to go back and refine the testing and the production of the vaccine. So there were three
Starting point is 00:12:35 incarnations of this same hysteria and complete abandonment of our normal practices as physicians. So I would ask you, it's kind of leaping ahead again, but my question would be, do you agree that there are echoes of the same phenomenon here, just in a different context? And B, what the hell happened to us? What happened to us? How did this, and it persists.
Starting point is 00:13:03 I completely agree. And I think the whole thing could be seen as the failure of checks and balances and the failure of feedback loops and so you know we have all sorts of things in place within medicine within science and also within politics in the sort of public debate that allow for correction of error and and that extends to you know the media the political opposition you've got just free speech and debate in the in the public domain um and then you know within science you've got the journals you've got um people just speaking freely and all of these things were broken but they they were deliberately broken, a lot of them.
Starting point is 00:13:47 The censorship was deliberate, and the way the politics were set up was deliberate, and it's the same in every single country. It's not like some of them got it right. Well, let's stop with that. You're saying something. Now, I want to drill into that, because at first you were sort of describing what happened, right?
Starting point is 00:14:05 It was broken. Yes. And then you're saying, oh, wait a minute. It was broken by a deliberate process. I'd love to know what the heck was going on. Really the sort of source material on that, because I understand there were a lot of people hysterical doing what they thought was best and deliberately broke a lot of things because they were i've started to see the world as dumb and smart and because because it's gotten too complicated because they were dumb uh but but it was throughout the world
Starting point is 00:14:38 that's the part to me i get how my country gets dumb and maybe you could understand how uk can be dumb, because we do dumb stuff over here, but how did the world sign up for this? And do you agree with me that that's a viable question about this? And do you agree with me it was just dumb? Yeah, I agree on both. And I think, you know, part of it is that we are so connected as a world now. And so, you know, social media does have that effect that it does have a global reach so i think part of it is that part of it i mean part of it when i'm saying that there it was it was actively so there was active censorship there was active rules and
Starting point is 00:15:18 legislation put in place that made it very hard for people in the media to do their jobs they couldn't hold people to account the way they normally would. And so then the question becomes, well, why did that happen? And I think, you know, you're sort of touching on this idea that it could have come from fear in those people who were putting those things in place because they felt like it was the right thing to do. And obviously it could also come from malice.
Starting point is 00:15:42 And I've kind of, you know, balanced, sort of toyed with these ideas all of this time, how much of it was competence, how much of it was, you know, obviously, there's arguments for both. And I kind of have come to the conclusion that for now, the question I'm really interested in is what got everyone else to go along with it, right? Because you can have bad things happen or bad people try and do bad things, but you have to have the consent to go along with it. And I think that's the key.
Starting point is 00:16:13 So that's really interesting. Yeah. So I have arrived in a, I'm still not sure what happened, particularly what happened to our profession. It was just startling to me what happened to us. But it continues to happen to us, frankly. We're still in this weird state where you can't have reasonable conversation with our peers. It's very odd. But I've kind of arrived at the same place where I become a bit of a student of history all of a sudden. I find myself reading
Starting point is 00:16:43 about earlier 20th century Russia and 1790 France and places where mobs have got going. When the mob is afoot, I'm reading about it now. And much to my, I guess, surprise and dismay, lo and behold, these are not such common things throughout the historical sweep, even though in our lifetime we've not really been exposed to it. I think we thought we sort of concluded it with the Second World War, you know. But no, lo and behold, this seems to be a feature of humanity and societies, at least in their current frame. What are you thinking? Absolutely. thinking um absolutely and and that is very very frightening aspect of it because when you look at
Starting point is 00:17:27 it with a through a historical lens you realize that it's innately human and that and that you know a lot of it's to do with fear fear is incredibly powerful and gets people to um it captivates people and it keeps them going for years in a state of irrational thought. And obviously, when other people are surrounded by other people who are fearful, that becomes almost contagious. And, you know, there's all sorts of examples that we can pull out the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witch trials. You know, there's all sorts of examples of hysteria where often in those examples the solution came from outside you know there were little pockets of problems going on in the world and an external force was what resolved it which of course this time around we haven't got that you know the whole world is swept up in this
Starting point is 00:18:17 and so it has to sort of come from this has to come bottom up I think and I think it is coming bottom up I'm kind of optimistic compared to where I was why well I think that um people are starting to talk they're starting to speak I feel like the fear has subsided in more and more people and they're wondering what just happened you know and i think there's also something where by there's been a lot of hyperbole and there's been hyperbole on both sides and i think that people are getting sick of hyperbole on both sides and wanting to try and understand where the nuance lies and so once we're at that point, we can start to have grown up conversations again, I hope. You dropped in, I hope, on the heels of that. Are you finding it more so? Again, I worry,
Starting point is 00:19:18 I'm so, you know, I've lived my life identifying with this profession, I was shocked at the way my peers behaved from the moment this thing started. And I continue to be shocked at some of the continued, the aggressiveness, the lack of collegiality, what a friend, somebody interviewed named Joseph Freiman called the irrational certitude. I mean, we are trained to be rationally uncertain at all times, to constantly be skeptical and particularly questioning ourselves and our sense of the ascension to the truth through
Starting point is 00:19:59 evidence-based experimentation. But there is all this crazy, irrational certitude still amongst our peers. What do we do with that? So I think this is the hardest challenge, really, I do think. The medics are going to be the last to wake up, I think. Great. Wonderful. I know. I know. I think it's because, understandably, doctors outsource some of their thinking. I mean, we all outsource some of our thinking. You know, we all rely on different experts to help us understand the world in different ways.
Starting point is 00:20:36 And doctors have a lot of knowledge that they have to keep up to date with. And so they have sources that they turn to to help them with that. Yes, and authorities. We turn to to help them with that. And authorities, we turn to authorities. Yeah. And if we come along and pull that rug out from underneath them, they're left with so much work to do. Now that was true at the beginning of the COVID problem, but now that we're three years in, they've also got to rethink everything that happened in that three-year period.
Starting point is 00:21:06 So that's even more work in terms of rewiring their brains and understanding the world through a correct lens. And I can understand that fear of having that security taken away from you. I do kind of get it. Well, not only that, I come from that. I am that. You know, I read my journals with great voraciousness and leaned on them heavily and admired my peers and colleagues up the food chain
Starting point is 00:21:41 who I could turn to, including Anthony Fauci was my hero pretty much my whole career. And now I'm learning that there is an adulteration all the way along. And it's shocking to me. It's shocking. And I still want to believe,
Starting point is 00:21:54 I still want to return to my native state, which is something happened to Dr. Fauci for a brief period of time. And now he's going to return to the mean where he's always been. Or the New England Journal of Medicine is going to start to publish data that isn't just going one direction.
Starting point is 00:22:12 Seems to be this, I'm not, but as long as I see the data only going one direction, I know there's a problem. At no time in the history of my career, reading the medical literature, the data goes back and forth until you sort of reach a consensus and it starts to coalesce around something we call the truth. Now, the lead articles go one way. The only publication out here that has sometimes started to publish stuff that was unpopular was the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Starting point is 00:22:41 And I kept the very month that they published it. It was like last spring because it was so different than everything else that everyone had been publishing up to that point where they entertained the possibility that Budesonide might have some utility in early COVID. I mean, if you said that before, you would have been condemned as some sort of witch doctor.
Starting point is 00:23:02 Are you seeing that in the British journals as well? And are there any that are coming around from your standpoint? And then finally, do you worry that it is the influence of pharmaceutical money or something that is adulterating things? Yeah, so it's the same in all the journals. I mean, the BMJs have a couple of all right pieces and they have the rapid responses. So you can actually speak relatively freely in debate in a way that isn't filtered. So that that's better than nothing. But it's not it's not what we need. And I think if you what's interesting, looking at how the journal articles are written, is it occasionally you'll get a paper where the results are not what they
Starting point is 00:23:45 were expecting and are not supportive of the sort of official worldview. And what you'll see in these papers is that in the abstract and in the introduction and the discussion, there'll be all this sort of quoting from the scriptures. You know, it'll start off with, COVID's killed millions of people. They explain it away in the discussion. I see it. I see it all the time. They're like, oh, it's got to be considered in this context, and this is probably why it's false.
Starting point is 00:24:11 They explain their own results away rather than just presenting the data, which, again, when I read that stuff, I go, all right, what's going on here? What is going on? And so then you might share the data which is showing something important and people who don't want to see that will just quote some line from the discussion saying well they said it didn't matter you're like well i don't care right oh my god i've not spoken to another colleague yeah i've not spoken to the colleague that sees this as clearly as i do it. We must read a lot of the literature. I read a lot and I keep my eye on it.
Starting point is 00:24:49 I always have. It's just like breathing to me. And I've noticed exactly this. Again, not Annals so much. Annals of Internal Medicine, God bless them. They kind of go back and forth between publishing some interesting things and then just stopping
Starting point is 00:25:02 and again, going back to the party line. But they don't tend to explain things away the way the more the canon does, the way New England Journal and the way JAMA. JAMA particularly, it goes way overboard to explain problematic data away. Yeah. And there's all sorts of data that's missing from these studies. There was one study where they plotted the vaccine effectiveness on this graph. And they had a variety of different graphs over a long time frame. And at the point where the vaccine effectiveness hits zero, and obviously went then below zero, meaning that it was making things worse, they just removed that part of the line and the peer reviewers let it through. And there were some studies, there was a study on the length of menstrual cycles after the vaccine where the graph
Starting point is 00:25:50 was that was with this paper is just completely unreadable it's out of focus and you can see through the blur that there are some women who had were bleeding for months and months on end right which was the story that was the story we don't care what's happening to the women that were fine and it's just in this blurry graph with no mention of it in the rest of the paper and so you know the peer review process is completely broken they're not they're not calling out the missing things they're not correcting how it's done they're not actually sort of you know making sure that people are sort of doing their best work. I mean, that's the idea, isn't it? And that's not happening at all.
Starting point is 00:26:30 We're trying to ascend to the truth, which is an impossibility. It's a process. And I've seen a lot of minimization, like X number of young males get myocarditis, which is a very small number. And it's only five out of a thousand. And it's a very small, very small, very small. Nowhere, and this is the part that jumps out at me. Yes, it's a small number. Now, please, if you wish to point that out, give me the data on how many males of that age have long-term medical consequences from infection with COVID so I can do the risk-reward analysis. Well, of course, the data is approaching zero for young, healthy males on the COVID side. And one per some tens of thousands or whatever, of which half in a year have persistent myocarditis.
Starting point is 00:27:27 That is breathtaking to me. That is breathtaking that that circulation article was not a headline everywhere for every doctor to think about. And every time they gave a vaccine and every time somebody went to college and was mandated to have the vaccine that they put their school on notice
Starting point is 00:27:44 that if I end up with persistent myocardial damage, I will sue the shit out of this institution because the probability of me needing this vaccine is zero. The probability of me protecting somebody else is zero. Why are we doing this? I'll let you comment. Obviously, I know how you know. I completely agree. That is how you determine that, you know, whether an effective vaccine is worth taking. You want to know the risk benefit for that individual. These were not effective vaccines. So that actually that balance doesn't matter anymore because it's not stopping you getting COVID. So if you're getting COVID anyway, then the risk from COVID is irrelevant to that equation actually. And the thing that was really, really bad is that the papers who were,
Starting point is 00:28:28 which were looking at the myocarditis rates, they needed to report on four rates. They needed to say, well, what was the rate in the uninfected, unvaccinated? What was the rate in the infected? Exactly. Yes, exactly. And then infected and uninfected, vaccinated. And they never, ever did that they never never
Starting point is 00:28:46 never get that data never get that data but but i i would argue i'm willing to concede that what you just said about the efficacy of the vaccine is a debatable point i'm willing to concede that what i'm not willing to concede is that the risk to a 20-year-old male of COVID is anything other than zero, a healthy male. It's just, that's what it is. Also, there's no debate about whether you're protecting anybody else. You are not. But in terms of, I'm interested that you pointed out that data about vaccine efficacy going down below zero. That is the Austrian data, right? Is that the data you're talking about? Where they showed a 70% improvement. This is the fourth vaccine. This was the second booster. They showed a 17% improvement in infection rate, which again, we can argue about how they documented that,
Starting point is 00:29:45 what they mean by that, number one. And then number two, after six months, it went down below zero, meaning you were more likely to get infected. Is that the data you were talking about? Actually, no. The data I was talking about was from just second dose data. This has been going on for ages. It's the same game played again and again and again and and one of the things we noticed really early on in 2021 um i didn't mean to be talking about the vaccine so much but anyway let's talk about the vaccine early in 2021 we noticed that every country that was rolling out the vaccine was getting a massive surge of covid and we waited and waited and thought well you know maybe this is coincidental because it could
Starting point is 00:30:25 have been and so we'll say well which country's next is it going to happen there and it did and it did and it did and it just kept going in that same way with Japan and South Africa being the last to go months later and same story and in the meantime at the beginning of 2021 researchers were actually being quite open and honest about what the impact of the vaccines was. And what they were reporting was a 40 percent increase in the infection rate in the first two weeks after vaccination. So there was this risk period after you had the jab before there was any alleged protection. And all of the scientists and all the public health people were ignoring this two week period in their calculations. Now, of course, if you are more
Starting point is 00:31:10 likely to get infected earlier on, and there's only a certain percentage who are susceptible to any one variant, then all you're doing is making the cases earlier. And you can then look later on and it will look like you've had an effective vaccine, simply because the people who were going to catch it have already had it, and they're immune now. So you can create this statistical illusion just by ignoring that two-week period. And they've all ignored that two-week period. Sometimes they ignore three weeks. And it didn't just happen after the first dose. It happened after the second dose, it happened after the third dose. And it makes sense that it would happen, right? Because what you're doing is injecting this instruction into the body to make a foreign protein all over
Starting point is 00:31:53 the place in many, many cells. And the immune system is very, very busy dealing with that, which makes you more vulnerable to any infections that are in the air because your immune system is not able to do its day job at the same time because it's doing something else. And we know this because we're in that early period as well. Other viral infections are much more likely. So people are getting shingles, they're getting EBV, they're getting CMV. So these are some of those viruses,
Starting point is 00:32:22 the viruses that are dormant in the body. And so you've knocked the immune system sideways. It can't keep these latent viruses at bay and they reappear. Is that something, is that, I'm not familiar with that notion in relation to vaccines generally is that the is that true or is it specific to this vaccine so i i wasn't either i mean literally we were just looking at the evidence as it was coming out but obviously then asked that question and there are papers of influenza vaccine doing the same thing in children so people after influenza vaccines are much higher risk of other respiratory viral infections so you know overall your risk of respiratory viral infections gone up even though influenza might have gone down um so you know there is there is other evidence but i think these
Starting point is 00:33:18 vaccines in particular are um you know they really give such an enormous hit to the immune system because of the volume of foreign protein that's being made. So a couple of things. I'm going to take a little break here for a second, but I think it's so interesting that you mentioned the Spanish Inquisition in relation to these historical moments. And I keep pointing out, it's sort of a simple way of addressing
Starting point is 00:33:51 our present behavior as the people that silence, the people that do the, what's the word I'm looking for? Were you science of the people? The stupid me, I can't think of the word. But any of, what is it? Censoring. Censoring about the people.
Starting point is 00:34:10 The people that do the censoring are never the good guys, number one. They're never the good guys. And if you want the most clear example of someone who was at his historical moment promoting severe misinformation, misinformation that absolutely challenged the nature of reality. He was so wrong. His name is Galileo Galilei.
Starting point is 00:34:36 He was an absolute, absolute misinformant, daring to say that the earth revolved around the sun, which ran against everything, including the very nature of reality itself, as far as the church certainly was concerned. Thus, the Spanish Inquisition came and silenced him. We all look at that as a good thing now? You want that? You want to be a part of that? Is that what we think is a good way to participate in our present moment? I don't know about that. The other thing is you said something about where is this coming from? I forget what that was exactly in relation to what we were talking about just a moment ago. Where is-
Starting point is 00:35:25 I guess it was the, again, the censoring and whatnot of the journals and where this is all still kind of. So let's take a little break. We got to hear from the people that really support us here. The book is called Expired. I suggest you check it, get it now,
Starting point is 00:35:44 Amazon, wherever you get your books. The book is called Expired. I suggest you check it, get it now, Amazon, wherever you get your books. There it is. You can also follow Dr. Craig and her organization at hartgroup.org. I've just signed up myself. And Twitter is forward slash Claire, C-L-A-R-E, correct? Not A-I-R, A-R-E, yep. Craig Path for the pathologist. And we'll be right back after a few minutes here. Hang with us. If you're trying to figure out the right present for someone, you will not go wrong with gifting the most comfortable sheets,
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Starting point is 00:38:53 Claire Craig is here. Again, heartgroup.org and heart is H-A-R-T. She's going to tell us about that in a little while, more about that organization. But I want to get back to something, a couple of things you said that I wrote down. down and i said i was going to talk about where does this come from which i will but you also said i didn't want to talk about vaccines so before i forget what did you want to talk about so the book actually doesn't cover vaccines so the book um
Starting point is 00:39:19 originally i i um decided to write it in 2021 when I had this problem that I could talk to somebody about one particular aspect of what had happened and persuade them and, you know, sort of they'd understand it. And as they walked away from me, I could sort of hear the cogs turning and you know that it didn't fit with everything else and it would just leave them and you'd be back at square one and i thought we've got to you've got to actually have people's concentration span for a period in order to explain this to them because it's you know there's a fair amount of complexity in what's happened from the just you know just just even from any one aspect of what's happened i thought well that's a book so i tried set up there's a name the way. There's a name for that phenomenon. I don't know if you write about it in the book. I haven't read your book yet, but it's called the backfire effect.
Starting point is 00:40:10 At least that's how it's characterized in this country. Yeah, where like, for instance, you can convince somebody that's an anti-vaxxer that they should be vaccinating their child for measles by going through the evidence very carefully. But when they walk away, they will get the measles vaccine, but they'll become more powerfully anti-vax against all other vaccines. So there's a backfire effect it's thought of.
Starting point is 00:40:35 And there's debate about whether that really exists and how it exists. But is that what you're writing about here? So I don't write specifically about that, but there is a fair amount of psychology in there because i think you in order to understand what's happened you do need to understand how humans behave and think and and how that was manipulated actually and what fear does you know i think all of that's really critical to understanding it what i also did was take specific beliefs that are quite integral to what how people what people make how people make
Starting point is 00:41:06 decisions about how to behave so those beliefs things like it's that the disease is only spread through close contact and that asymptomatic is a thing and that lockdowns work you know each of these beliefs and start with where people were at right so start with what you know why they believe what they believed and then take them gently through which bits of those were wrong and why people were getting them wrong and sort of come out the other end thinking okay well maybe that one was you know not quite as clear-cut as I thought let's move on to the next one so what I really wanted was not to run away because that was the problem we've had isn't it that people have become more and more polarized and they can't listen to each other because it's foreign language this causes
Starting point is 00:41:49 entrenchment that's been my goal too yep yeah and so it's a challenge and what happened in the end was I wrote too much because all that explaining made too many words so I just pulled the vaccines I thought well actually you know I've got book now, which talks about lockdowns and masks and the virus and how it's spread without actually being that controversial these days. You know, those topics are sort of on the table. So I'm kind of hoping that's a sort of way in for people. You know, you can share it with your mum or your auntie or whoever. And I've done that.
Starting point is 00:42:22 You know, I've shared it with people who are scared and were still scared and they are not scared at the end of reading it. I hope you'll publish the vaccine piece of it. But in that one, I think it's a little bit harder sell, a little more complicated too. And what the backfire literature shows is that, and this is all the persuasion literature as well, which is in order to change somebody's mind with these kinds of, I always think about flat earthers as the ultimate sort of version of this. In order say, convert a flat earther to understand the world, you have to address not just the facts, but their worldview and their social context for having that worldview. In other words, if I become suddenly skeptical about flat earther, and I don't mean to pick on that population, but I'm sympathetic to them because I was essentially that when it came to medicine
Starting point is 00:43:25 and I had to address my worldview too. But if you suddenly, you're entrenched in that social environment and you share ideas with people, suddenly those relationships are in jeopardy and you could get condemned by them for having alternative points of view, which is really what happened.
Starting point is 00:43:47 And so like for me, I'm still struggling with, like I told you, Dr. Fauci's adulteration, whatever that was, I still don't know what that was, or that pharmaceutical companies really have some sort of control over the publishing, over the journals. I still struggle with that. How do you get people to change their worldview? Yeah, I think we're being helped along a little bit with this because what you're describing there is people who want to be part of a group, right? You want to have that connection. And the more, as time goes on, our groups are being divided and more and more different planes and more and more different dimensions. And actually, the end point of that, people have to realize
Starting point is 00:44:33 that they won't agree with other people 100% about everything. And so once you've got to that point, you think, well, I don't need to agree with you about absolutely everything in order to have a conversation with you. I don't even agree with myself from a few years ago. Right. Because if you did, no scientists, scientists have to be able to change their mind. And so that's a healthy position to be in is to say, look, it's okay for people to have different viewpoints and for us to learn from each other and and but it requires a certain amount of self-confidence and you know I do hear what you're saying around people wanting to wanting to be surrounded by reinforcement and
Starting point is 00:45:19 that partly comes from fear as well you know when you're when you're scared evolutionarily our brains want us to check whether the fear the danger is still there um and so you know if there is a danger still there if there's a snake or something you can just look and decide well it's there it's not there that's it that's it it's over but when it's a fear of something that's invisible that becomes really difficult and people end up with know, obsessive thinking and intrusive thoughts. And it does take over. And, you know, you end up hunting out for the next hit of fear to reassure yourself that you're right to be being afraid.
Starting point is 00:45:56 So you're on the news looking at how many cases there were that day or whatever it is that's telling you that your fear is justified. And, you know, that's telling you that your fear is justified. And that's exhausting. And hopefully, people are running out of energy for doing that. But there's always some new fear, isn't there? That's a problem that people can be reignited with other fears about other things. Well, it does seem like there's something about the historical moment that our tendency towards what some have called mass formation or mass hysteria or mob or whatever you want to call it. There's something about our present moment that seems to make the human psyche fertile for that sort of thing. I can't imagine humans are always like this.
Starting point is 00:46:42 It seems like there's something about our current situation but do you have any theory about that well i i guess part of the theory is that whole sort of thing about cycles through history that you know humans are probably most immune to that type of behavior when they've just been through it unfortunately you know you come out the other end that's interesting i like that they've been inoculated, unfortunately. You know, you come out the other end. That's interesting. I like that. They've been inoculated. It's good. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:12 Actually, you just reminded me of this awful thing that happened where people who were attacking us and were being paid to, I think some of them, were also writing articles about how to do it. And there was one article where they talked about this technique called pre-bunking so this pre-bunking idea is that you immunize people's thinking so you take um you know you want to predict a particular idea truthful or not and you can predict what the other side might say about it. And so you take a small part of what the counter argument would be and sort of poison it. You publish something that's going to make people think, oh no, that's rubbish. I've already seen that little thing,
Starting point is 00:47:57 so I know I can dismiss that. I don't have to do the work. And that way they won't engage with the truth. It's a guy named Cialdini that wrote a book called Presuasion. And that's the technique they're getting into there. Presuasion, you pre, you know, sort of persuade the individual or make them more likely to be persuaded with some suggestions, let's say. The other thing you said that's still ringing in my head is that these moments through history usually stop when there's an outside force that comes in uh and unfortunately i suppose that's
Starting point is 00:48:32 true i mean certainly napoleon was one of the forces that stepped in in france and i suppose lenin was one of the forces that stepped in and i mean there's all these awful things that happened i i want to believe that we're not going to have to go through that to get these things to settle down in our current moment is do you worry about that are you still positive enough that we're going it we're getting at it from the ground up quickly enough that there will not be some crazy outside force um no I am worried about that actually you know I, I think we have sort of lost a grip. And, you know, I think there are reasons to be concerned.
Starting point is 00:49:11 And what we are able to do about it often feels painfully slow, really painfully slow. But then on the other hand, you know, there's that sort of metaphor of throwing your pebbles at the dam and one day it will break and it will just go like that. And I think there is something about the sort of exponential nature of the waking up that it still feels horizontal, but it might turn at any point. Like a hockey stick. I want to go back to the lockdown uh issue that's in the book um i noticed that
Starting point is 00:49:48 a friend of mine sent me some dad some uh testimony from boris johnson where he was like i should have locked down i can't believe what a by bollocks did i what a maniac i am for not locking down that seemed to me like backwards movement. What was that all about? Do you agree with me? Yeah. We've had a lot of that recently in the UK because we've got our very, very expensive, very, very long-winded COVID inquiry going on in England.
Starting point is 00:50:17 There's actually a parallel one going on in Scotland, which is actually turning up some truth. But the one in England is just solely focused on this idea of it should have been earlier and harder and they won't discuss the harm. It's just ridiculously biased. So yeah, so that keeps getting into the press, this ridiculous story of should have been more, should have been earlier, shouldn't have been harder. The reality is that what the modelers were predicting was that everybody would be susceptible which is
Starting point is 00:50:45 a ludicrous suggestion from the outset equally susceptible equally susceptible and equally uh as dangerous for all age groups yeah yeah and all in one wave you know not not this idea that okay we're all susceptible over the course of a decade it was we're all susceptible now and it's going to spread like wildfire and so everyone has susceptible now and it's going to spread like wildfire until everyone has had it and it's going to overwhelm all the services. When, you know, it's not this sort of idea that it was a novel virus.
Starting point is 00:51:13 It was a coronavirus. We know about coronaviruses. They are seasonal. They come in surges, they peak and they go away again. And we know about airborne respiratory viruses. We know an awful lot about influenza and its behavior is slightly odd but it's very very well recorded and has been for hundreds of years and yet they were pretending it was like a measles virus so with measles the example that's often used is the faroe islands which had a sort of 65 year gap
Starting point is 00:51:41 between outbreaks so that anyone over the age of 65 on the second outbreak was immune but everybody else caught it all at once because measles spreads like that but this is not how respiratory viruses spread because they're ubiquitous everybody they're around you or that they fill the air and a proportion of people 10%, are susceptible to each wave. And that susceptibility rises and falls and away it goes again. And there were tons of papers on this. You know, this wasn't sort of, this wasn't like a mystery. People had written about for influenza, if there was a man-made influenza virus leaked from a lab. What would the scenario be? And they had plotted
Starting point is 00:52:26 out what would happen. And the baseline was that between 10 and 15 percent of the population would catch it. And that's, you know, that it was known that is what would have happened. Anyway, based on their crazy assumption of 85 percent of people catching it in the first wave, the peak would have been in July. And so we were told we were going to squash the sombrero and slow the spread, squash the curve and make the peak later. So the peak had to be later than July 2020. And it was not later. It was all over. It was all over very, very quickly. And it was all over very, very quickly because it was spread through the air so that's why it was everywhere all at once and why you know it didn't spread through just close contact the way that they were imagining it did yeah right people still don't understand that it's it's six feet is meaningless it's more like
Starting point is 00:53:19 60 feet and probably somebody who walked through your room or whatever a few minutes before, not the person in your proximity. Or even someone down the road, sick in bed, pumping out virus. It goes into the air and it moves through the air. We saw this with SARS-1. So with the SARS-1 epidemic, there was an outbreak in some Hong Kong apartment blocks. So there were sort of six tall apartments in a hexagon shape. And based on the wind currents,
Starting point is 00:53:50 somebody predicted that the infection was going to spread from these ground floor apartments up to top apartments in three of the blocks. And that's exactly what happened. You know, it spread through. SARS-WAD, it's basically the same. You know, it's got the same name for a reason so we knew that that is what would happen and yet we had to pretend it was all about
Starting point is 00:54:11 human behavior and close contact when it never was and so one of the things going back to sort of saying let's not worry so much or let's admit we can't know about the malign intent how much of it there was and who it was what we can know is that huge swathes of persuade persuasive people in positions of authority and doctors believed the stuff so you think well why were they believing and they believed it because of quite an interesting story which goes way back right so we go way way back to germ theory and miasma theory to start with so you've got this sort of miasma theory idea that disease is spread through bad smells and people would carry the sort of smell smelling things to prevent the disease and the germ this theorists... This is before 1850. This is throughout much of medical history.
Starting point is 00:55:08 Right. And then in 1850, there was this tipping point where the microscopes invented, and they started to say, actually, we think it's germs. And the germ theorists were fighting for about 30 years to be heard. And when that happens, when you've got the sort of politicized science, the scientists
Starting point is 00:55:25 who are not being heard start to become a bit more extreme in their beliefs, because they're shouting louder, they're trying to say, you know, this is really important. And then there was a tipping point, and people said, okay, you're right. But they brought along with them some beliefs that were not really evidence-based, and they went a bit beyond where the evidence sat. And in 1910, there was an important public health official called Charles Shapin in Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island. And he was evangelical about germ theory. And specifically, he wanted to rid the world of this idea that you could catch anything through the air. He thought miasma theory was not just wrong, it was completely wrong.
Starting point is 00:56:10 And so even though he admitted that you could find germs in the air, that, you know, he'd found them, they were there. He came up with some kind of excuse saying, well, these germs were either not enough or they weren't virulent for some reason that he couldn't explain because he just wanted the belief that it was close contact to be pushed through and part of that evangelism came because he was correctly believing that if you separated hospital beds in infectious disease wards there was less spread of disease on those wards. So there was something about, you know, even with aerosol spread, it's higher dosages if you're near people. So he got that right. But because he knew that, he sort of went so much further to say that there was no such thing as airborne spread. And to be honest, he was a slightly strange man. He had sort of obsessive compulsive disorder. And he describes in in his book this fear he has of other
Starting point is 00:57:05 people's saliva how they they lick their finger and then turn the page and then he has to turn the page and he has to touch you know handles and things that other people have touched that might have their saliva on them and he's the one that came up with this idea of mouth spray he calls it that will fall within six foot of a person. And so as long as you are six foot away, then you'd be protected from this mouth spray. But it's literally, these were the sort of delusional beliefs of a guy with obsessive compulsive disorder. That's where it really originated from. It's not from an evidence base at all. And to be honest, I don't want to sort of be too hard on the guy because in his book, he also has paragraphs where he says, well, you know, I sort of have done a bit broad brush here.
Starting point is 00:57:52 I've made lots of assumptions about lots of diseases behaving in the same way. And of course, we've got to keep investigating and learning and there'll probably be more nuance than I've said. And we're over 100 years out, so we can't really blame him because what have we been doing for the last 100 years to actually find out more about this? And there must be something weird in the human psyche that we believe that somehow smells are a sign of something and that only spit transmits something. And we got it all mixed up with the masking the masking was just so wrong it just the aerosol aerosols get through everything they just do yeah and and it's not at all clear there was really any body fluid transmission to speak of you kissed me the morning i had covet susan and you didn't get it shocking you know and yet you ran out of the room
Starting point is 00:58:42 appropriately and didn't come back i didn't hear you i kissed you the night before no no that morning christmas eve all right whatever the point is we we've been just we're a primitive man in terms of how we've been thinking about these things and again the odd thing is our colleagues uh glomming glomming onto it yes things are now that we know it there's a three-day incubation period. You really can't catch it until the third day you're sick, right? Well, no, it's a more complicated than that. But be that as it may, things that were, the certitude about everything should be questioned, including asymptomatic spread and six feet and masking and all these things were just nonsense for the most part. And I've heard you say, Claire, that you were afraid during the early part of this pandemic.
Starting point is 00:59:29 I was not afraid, but I conceded. I conceded to the government. I said, okay, you're preparing for the worst case scenario. You have a lot of responsibility. I guess I got to concede and be a good citizen. But I looked at the Italian thing and I said, that's not us. That is not the American system. There's something wrong with their system. There's something about the kind of people that are getting sick there
Starting point is 00:59:47 that we need to look at. The Chinese thing looked like total communist propaganda to me. So I was never scared. But you were scared at the beginning. How did you switch from, why were you scared? How did you switch from scared to not scared? So, yeah, I'm quite embarrassed about that really because even that chinese propaganda i completely fell for for that i believed it i thought that people were dropping dead in the street and um yeah i guess i was just swept up with the the hype and the the you know it was it was in constant as well wasn't it the news was just all the time um and I was also checking the news and checking the data every day and um I I guess the diamond princess stopped me worrying so much about me but I was still worried
Starting point is 01:00:34 about society and the health service and my parents and then um in the summertime when things were not going back to normal and it was kind of, you know, over, that wave was over, there was no COVID around and people were still being told to be afraid. And we had, we had posters up my street saying COVID has not gone away. Like, well, it had. So that, that kind of got me sort of waking up. And then I guess the, the testing thing was thing was you know that was the tipping point for me but um and and and it meant that I was being introduced to a lot of people like you so people
Starting point is 01:01:13 who had been watching the whole way through and could then show me little things that I had got wrong like really little things so things like the body language of the announcements from Boris Johnson where he's sort of squeezing his knuckles together like he's not actually happy with what he's saying you know he's there's something that i just wasn't picking up on because i was scared that but people who were not scared were sort of more skeptical and seeing these things well there was this weird phenomenon going on if If you dared to question everything, you were a bad person and wanted to kill grandma. That was the craziest thing at all. Or at best, you were somebody
Starting point is 01:01:50 that was such a profound individualist, you couldn't adjust anything, even wear a talisman over your mouth to protect other people. I mean, this was the insanity. It still goes on. Still, you hear, see stuff like that. And it's just,
Starting point is 01:02:05 we need to fight back and tell them to shut the hell up. That's stop it. It's insulting. Stop it with the insulting nonsense. What's that?
Starting point is 01:02:15 So, we'll take some calls here. Go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say at medical school, when you're taught, when you go to medical school,
Starting point is 01:02:24 obviously you learn a lot of facts, but they like to teach you through stories because people learn better through stories and um and there are villains in the stories of medical school and i don't know if your villains were the same as mine but in my medical school there was we have um a story of a doctor who killed a lot of his patients right harold shipman so he's like a really bad doctor but worse than him was an anti-vax doctor and worse than that was anyone that spoke out during an epidemic we were taught this at medical school you know if you're stepping out of your lane during an epidemic you're a danger to the public and you're the worst kind of doctor there is
Starting point is 01:03:01 and so all of my colleagues have been indoctrinated with these beliefs about, you know, these are the baddies in medicine and they don't want to be one. There is a whole other line of, I figured I could talk to you for a couple of hours, a whole other sort of topic, which is what happened to public health and why public health is so distorted. And there is just a lot of hammers running around looking for nails, it seems to me. Josh, go ahead there. You're on the mic. is so distorted and there is just a lot of hammers running around looking for nails, it seems to me. Josh, go ahead there. You're on the mic. Hey, Dr. Drew. Hey, man.
Starting point is 01:03:46 So the thing with this is I feel like a lot of it has to do with you're asking a question, and the question that seems to be asked is, could something have been done differently? And I feel like once that question is asked, someone has to answer that question. So someone has to say, okay, this is what could have been done differently, and there doesn't seem to be anyone saying that on the other side um so i feel like i think you're i think you're framing it i think you're framing it actually in a very
Starting point is 01:04:11 important way i think i think that's actually and it's actually kind of a clement way of of sort of framing things which is gee and it's sort of how i felt at the time which was my goodness there's a lot of potential for really serious stuff here. Some people are, these guys, how would I feel if I were the governor of a state and I was responsible for 8 million people or whatever? And how would I prepare for the worst case scenario? I agree with you. I agree. But the problem I had, oops, I lost my connection here. The problem I had was that it went on for two years. I noticed you said you sent your kids back to school
Starting point is 01:04:49 in September of 2020. We were locked for two years here in California, two years. And that had profound effect on the wellbeing and development of young people, profound. It was, speaking of risk reward analysis, and again, it was like highly predictable i mean extraordinarily predictable that it would have the effect it has had and yet they didn't seem to care because all they cared about was this one thing yeah i mean we did lock down again
Starting point is 01:05:17 when all the harms had been measured and you know laid out and there were no longer hypotheticals um and so and yeah but the effects it's had on young people is just appalling it's really really appalling and the you know there are some people only just sort of noticing it now even people who work with young people who sort of saying there are some odd things about the emotional immaturity of these cohorts you're like yeah no shit of course there are right exactly you're no kidding but but you but to uh josh's point now what what should we have done or what could we have done which might we have done differently and i understand that's you know it's easy to to you know look at be armchair quarterbacking from from the future but there were people suggesting other ways of
Starting point is 01:06:04 doing things and the ways that were suggested actually, in now retrospect, would have been much better. So how can we understand that kind of historical sort of frame? Like, well, what are people supposed to do? Which I think is a good question because it helps us prepare for the next one. Okay, so there was a lot of work done around what you should do. You know, pandemic plans had been written and had been thought about very, very carefully and had been followed in the past with no detrimental effects. And we're just completely disregarded. So, like, you know, we can write as many plans as we like,
Starting point is 01:06:43 but if they want to disregard them, they're going to disregard it. So like, you know, we can write as many plans as we like, but if they want to disregard them, they're going to disregard them. And we've got the situation here where our currently head of the UK Health Security Agency, which is our public health bodies, Dicklessne, she is now saying, well, masks don't work and never worked. And at the beginning, she said they don't work and they never worked. And in the middle, she said, you've all got to wear one. Like, well, what do you do with people like that you know that's that's not what we need we need people who actually stick to the truth throughout um and so i think it's a it's it's only a difficult question because we're talking about not having people in authority who are prepared to do the right thing that's all that you need and the right thing includes sticking by the values of our society the values were all overturned you know we have
Starting point is 01:07:31 sort of basic principles around the precautionary principle and first do no harm and informed consent and bodily autonomy and adults protect children not the other way around that's all you need to do just stick to those principles and then in terms of fear of another pandemic, I mean, that has been completely hyped up and unnecessarily hyped up because the reality is you've got two scenarios. One scenario is the infection is airborne and you cannot stop it.
Starting point is 01:08:02 And even if it was horrifically deadly, if you cannot stop it, then there's no point trying to. And at the other extreme, you've got close contact transmission. So like gastroenteritis, which is spread through the fecal-oral route. And we now know exactly what happens with that because we've done the experiment right we've locked down and what happened to gastroenteritis is that it carried on appearing at the at the emergency room at about half the rates it was before so it didn't go away completely so you can slow the spread but actually the spread of gastroenteritis is already incredibly slow and all the modeling that was being used around, you know, close contact
Starting point is 01:08:45 transmission, would say it would take 14 weeks to get to all the rural areas of our country before peaking. So if you're slowing the spread beyond that, then you're just saying, well, we're going to have months and months and months of disruption for what? So you know, those are the two extremes. And in neither case would lockdown make sense. Lockdown doesn't make sense. And besides which, lockdown is harm. You are causing harm and you're then responsible for that harm. And so you don't do it.
Starting point is 01:09:26 You know, Caleb, I sent you a video of the way the media was reporting this in the early days. Do you have that accessible by any chance? The kind of parroting of the same sloganeering and nonsense? Did you just send it to me just now? No, I sent it a couple of earlier in the day. But if it's not accessible, we'll bring it in tomorrow or the next day. Because it's so astonishing when you look at the nonsense that was being repeated by the press with the exact same language, word for word, the same thing by every single person around the clock for months on end, that all of which turned out to be nonsense. And no one, the people are starting to send these videos around. I suggest you look at them. And no one from the media is looking at themselves and saying, huh, how did we get to that point? It looks like somebody sent them their talking points. It's so incredibly
Starting point is 01:10:18 consistent and so absolutely categorically wrong. And no one's saying, why did we do that? How did we do that? What do we do different next time? Nothing like that seems to be going on. So that worries me. You reminded me of that moment when Rochelle Walensky describes how she heard about the trial from CNN and got all excited
Starting point is 01:10:43 about how brilliant it was. You're like, hang on a minute. You are the CDC director and you're not looking at the evidence. You're not looking at the evidence and making a sound decision based on it. You're listening to CNN and getting excited. That's hugely problematic. Yes, yes, it is. I remember that moment.
Starting point is 01:11:05 Susan, are you laughing at something or? It is hugely problematic. It is hugely problematic. Well, Claire, you did not- I love her choices of words. I know, it's very British and very sounds, we sound dumb here by comparison. And again, I see the whole world now is smart and dumb.
Starting point is 01:11:25 And that's why I've just distilled things down to their basics. They're right and they're wrong. They're smart and they're dumb. That's it. I'm getting too, I got too into the weeds on every single topic. Okay, hang on a second.
Starting point is 01:11:40 I want to just respond to something on the Rumble Rants. IED says, Pax Levid Drew passes out Paxlovid to his elderly patients like candy. No, I do not. No, I do not. I've used a fair bit of it early on, about three variants ago, when the consequences in elderly patients
Starting point is 01:11:57 were not like the Alpha and Delta, but were getting a little more severe. I was having people get quite sick and it was working remarkably. And in that particular phase, I was seeing a little more severe. I was having people get quite sick and it was working remarkably. And in that particular phase, I was seeing a little rebound. I used it again last spring when people were having a certain kind of COVID I was seeing, which people were as prostrate with high fever. And again, the packs of it worked in six to 12 hours. No rebound in that population. And now I'm not using it at all because this is a upper respiratory fraction
Starting point is 01:12:30 of a respiratory virus. And worse yet, Pfizer in its infinite wisdom has decided to increase the price of Paxavit to $1,300 per course of treatment, which clearly is not worth the... And by the way, something, Claire, we used to talk about four years ago all the time, which was the cost-benefit analysis, literally cost, literally dollars spent or pounds spent.
Starting point is 01:12:58 I don't see any of those conversations anymore, at least not in relation to COVID. It's really odd. That was everything in every single publication was, well, this looks good, but it's not worth it because of the cost. Absolutely. And the thing is that that's so fundamental to healthcare because, you know, resources are finite. And if you don't, if you're spending on one patient, then you're potentially not spending on another. And that's exactly what's happened is the money has just been splashed on this and other people with other conditions have been left behind. And furthermore, the economy as a whole has been destroyed. And we know that wealthier societies are healthier societies, right? So longer term, you've damaged
Starting point is 01:13:43 health just by destroying the economy. Of course. And then what we've done with our kids and education and development and social development and telling them they're going to kill their family if they crawl out of their bedroom, just unbelievable stuff.
Starting point is 01:13:55 But anyway, so I hope you will let us talk to you when you decide to put the vaccine book out or when you're ready to talk about vaccines because there is expired now, which is masks and lockdowns and the early evolution of our excesses and how we did not remain consistent with the values upon which our society is based. And I've come to understand that maybe some people don't even understand what that is or did not understand what that was that we have relinquished in the course of this,
Starting point is 01:14:31 as Dr. Victory says, debacle. So if we left anything out, is there anything you wanted to address that I missed? So I would just say that in the book, it covers a whole plethora of subjects. So it starts off with biology and then there's a little bit of math thrown in, but there's actually a fair bit of history in there because I think that's how you you know that's how we actually get to grips on this is looking at it through a lens of history and understanding the whole trajectory of it um anyway yeah i would yeah next time we talk about mobs and vaccines okay and you're welcome anytime whenever you're ready to do about it to to talk about that, I am ready to go. Again, it is heartgroup.com, Claire Craig Path, C-L-A-R-E,
Starting point is 01:15:11 Craig C-R-A-G Path on Twitter. And we appreciate the work you've done and thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. Now you get to go to bed. We've kept her up late enough, well past midnight in the UK. And coming up for us, we've got a lot of interesting things coming up tomorrow.
Starting point is 01:15:27 We have Michelle Effendi. We're talking about Denise Aguilar, who's someone who has an amazing life history. And she's now become an advocate. You're going to love that story. Zhao Ying Summer's coming in on the 21st, which is Thursday. That's going to be early. Comedienne. Comedienne.
Starting point is 01:15:47 And Brad Williams. Comedienne. And Brad Williams also. That'll be early. Miniature size. At noontime. And then we'll get Dr. Li-Ming Yan back in here and Emily Kaplan,
Starting point is 01:15:56 who I think you'll like hearing from next week. A lot of great stuff still coming as we roll into the new year. And coming up in the new year, Sean Baker talking about the- Meat. Meat, yes. And about the excesses
Starting point is 01:16:08 of some of the dietary recommendations. Brian Kilmeade agreed to come in on the third. Jim Brewer on the fourth. Roseanne coming in on the 10th. And Dr. Paul Alexander that same week. And- I like how your voice gets louder when you say, Roseanne.
Starting point is 01:16:21 I did see- You're excited. I was very excited. So I was on Roseanne's show. We had a good time. I don't know if that's aired yet on her podcast. I think that's coming up. So look for me there. And until then, Susan, thank you. Caleb, thank you.
Starting point is 01:16:34 No, thank you. No, thank you. We will see you tomorrow's Wednesday. So we're going to be at our 3 o'clock hour normal time. And then again, reminder that Thursday is at noon. So we'll see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock hour, normal time. And then again, reminder that Thursday is at noon. So we'll see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock Pacific time. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky.
Starting point is 01:16:52 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.
Starting point is 01:17:27 Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

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