Ask Dr. Drew - Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: What Is The CDC Hiding Behind FOIA Redactions? – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 229

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

In response to a FOIA request, the CDC released documents about their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)… but why are nearly half of the pages redacted? “The CDC does not want the public to see the details of the deliberation that produced their social media and other propaganda to advertise the MMWR study,” tweeted Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “Nearly all of that is redacted in the FOIA dump.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Follow Dr. Bhattacharya at https://twitter.com/drjbhattacharya 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • 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 • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.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. 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 「 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 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are very pleased today to bring our friend Jay Bhattacharya back. Of course, Dr. Bhattacharya is a Stanford professor who was, who is, from my opinion, has become the poster child of the excesses of the pandemic. The fact that they chose to attack him says everything I need to know about how far they went from ethics and the truth. Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

He's a multiply awarded teacher at the medical school. And recently he was interested in some FOIA documents where the CDC released documents about their mmw are the morbidity morbidity and mortality weekly report and the redaction suggests a scandal of significant proportions we will get into that more hope for your calls dr. J Bhattacharya after this our laws as it pertained 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*** 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. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. You can spend thousands of dollars trying to look a few years younger or you can skip all of that hassle and go with what works genucell skincare genucell is the secret to better skin in fact you might have witnessed the astonishing effects of genucell during a recent unplanned moment on our show when just a little genucell xv restored my skin within minutes right before your eyes. That's how fast these products work. I know I'm a snob about the products I use on my face.

Everybody knows it. Every time I go to the dermatologist's office, they're just rows and rows of different creams. And then when I get to the counter, they're overpriced. All kinds of products that you can all find at GenuCell.com. Susan and I love GenuCell so much, we've created our own bundles so you can try our favorite anti-wrinkle treatments, correcting serums, and ultra-retinol creams. Just go to Genucel.com slash Drew. Use the code Drew for an extra discount and free priority shipping. Again, that is Genucel.com slash Drew. G-E-N-U-C-E-L dot com slash D-R-E-W.

Back. A reminder that next week our shows will be on Monday and Tuesday at 3 o'clock Pacific. And on Tuesday, Kelly will join us for Dr. Joseph Latipo, the Surgeon General for the state of Florida. There is the upcoming guest there. And remember, Tom Rent's coming back on June 28th to give us an update on his findings on the EcoHealth Alliance. Today, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, you can follow him on Twitter, drjbhattacharya. I'm going to spell it for you, B-H-A-T-T-A-C-H-A-R-Y-A. I dare you to say that twice.

And he, as I mentioned, is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and for daring to suggest that there might be other ways of handling this pandemic other than draconian lockdowns. He was literally targeted by officials in our government. And we now have the smoking gun emails where all of that was made explicit. Dr. Bhattacharya, welcome back. Oh, I don't have his sound. I can't hear him. Can you hear him, everybody? One second. He's there, Dr. Bhattacharya. Can you hear me okay? I'm not hearing it for some reason. There you are. Now we got you.

All right. I don't know what happened but i got you back all right excellent indeed uh so yeah i this the you know i know i noticed since the last time i talked to you a couple things uh one is i saw anthony fauci talking about the great barrington declaration defending himself for having been ridiculous in his efforts to silence people associated with it, alleging that you were alleging, just let it rip. Just let this thing tear through the population. Don't do anything, which could not be further from what this declaration suggested. Yeah, we were calling for focus, protection of vulnerable people. I mean, I don't know if he read the declaration.

That's like the most important idea in the declaration is that we know that there was a huge difference in the risk of severe disease from old to young. Young people, very, very, very low risk. Old people, much higher risk. So we were calling for focus, protection of vulnerable people. You know, I can give you a concrete thing. If we'd followed it, what would have done better? And I think everyone, even Tony Fasci would agree.

If you remember the early days of the pandemic, Drew, that we sent COVID-infected patients to nursing homes. Why do we do that? Because the goal was protecting hospital systems. What if instead the goal had been protecting lives of people, specifically people we knew to be at risk, older people? We never would have sent COVID-infected patients to nursing homes. I think this idea that a call for focused protection is let it rip, I think it actually costs lives. Oh, absolutely. Well, no doubt. And now we have the IEA, the International,

what is their actual title? I can't find it. It's an economics consortium. Dr. Steve Hanke from Hopkins, sort of lead author in this essentially book entitled, Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on COVID Restrictions. And it is damning. What did you think about that report? I mean, it is a meticulous study of every single evaluation of the lockdowns. I think it's mainly focused on the spring 2020 lockdowns to try to say, okay, were they necessary?

And if you put yourself back then, you can remember there were these projections from the Imperial College model. Models. Neil Ferguson. Models. Neil Ferguson. Models. Yeah. Basically, they have these models where people are like lab rats. And if you keep people apart like lab rats, the disease can't spread. And oh, gosh, you've solved, you've saved.

I think the estimate in the US was 2 million people would die within a month or two. We didn't lock down in March 2020. And when you look at actually what actually happened when you compare places that had draconian lockdowns versus the places that didn't like you're more like sweden the estimates you find according to uh you know dr hanky who who did conducted this meticulous evaluation is that in the u.s the early spring lockdowns maybe save 4,000 lives. And they're not even saved.

It's like, you know, put into the future by a couple of months when people got COVID. And so, you know, that, and you have to put that against the absolutely devastating harms the lockdowns have done. You know, people skipping cancer treatments, locking kids at home with abusive parents, domestic violence, people dying at home with heart attacks. You have all these like excess deaths that you see now that are the long tails of those lockdowns from depression, you know, fentanyl overdoses and so on. Well, they make a, yeah, they make a very big issue of the mental health consequences,

which I was screaming about at the beginning. It was highly predictable. I mean, just how about the 8 to 15-year-olds? Let's take a 9-year-old and tell them to hide under their bed, shelter in place. And if you come outside, you're going to kill your parents or your grandparents and then isolate these kids from other peers. It is disgusting. How they could not have known that was going to have horrible effects is just, they were just on some sort of evangelical manic run of some type, right? You know, what happened, it's like, it's as if they forgot that health is a lot more than

just the avoidance of a single infectious disease. And that we have ethical obligations in medicine and in public health not to divide people against each other. I mean, like what public health did, it basically reinforced the idea that we're biohazards and that we have to treat each other as biohazards. I mean, you know, you have to have community. We have to have people interacting with each other. Kids have to play with each other.

I mean, is that a complication? I didn't realize that you had to go to medical school for learning that, but apparently people that go into medical school forgot that for a while. And you're right, Drew. It was absolutely 100% predictable that they would have these harmful effects on the psychology of kids and of actually basically everybody.

And we're seeing that play itself out now yeah yeah for sure everybody i mean but kids it's just it was devastation it's ridiculous and then the economic effects and of course the most at risk are the ones that carried the biggest burden of all this it's just it and and as i want to sort of put a little focus on something you said at the beginning of your uh uh statement about the models and the lockdown, which was that maybe save 4,000 lives during a certain window, 4,000 lives that were going to be lost from COVID down the road anyway, or that were lost to COVID down the road anyway. So that 4,000 lives that they preserved across a two- month window were not preserved indefinitely.

No, it's, it's basically kick the can down the road at great cost. Right. And now you could make an argument, let's just steel man this, like you can make an argument to say, okay, well, kicking the can on the road might make some sense because well, we're just waiting to get the vaccine. And if we just kick the can down the road long enough, the problem is like the longer you do the lockdown, the more those harms we talked about to human health happen. It's not like it's, they die down over time.

They get worse and worse and worse. So, you know, like I'll give you a, again, you don't have to do this hypothetically. You can look, look what happened in China when they did zero COVID. It was a tremendously. Ridiculous. You know, authoritarian kind of way they did, went went about like there was stories of locking up apartment buildings. And so people couldn't get out because of a single COVID case. And then when a fire broke out, they died in the fire.

When you got a positive test case in China, you would be thrown into this like quarantine facility for weeks. They'd kill your dogs and cats that were pets because they'd be afraid they were afraid like your dogs and cats would have COVID. Um, I mean, it was, it was an absolute draconian policy and what happened? Everyone in China got COVID. Right, right. And they let it rip anyway. Now I, I guess, you know, one of the things I've been toying with was trying to, not toying with, but trying to, again, from a steel man perspective and give the best possible spin on these things,

think about the way we might have interfered with Alpha and Delta, which was really the much more serious illness. Omicron was altogether a different phenomenon, even though we didn't really acknowledge that until we were six months into the Omicron, but that's a separate matter. But, you know, I kind of feel like the vaccines, while they were overhyped and overstated and were not as effective as possible, I kind of feel like they probably did interrupt the sort of the march of the pandemic at that time. And I can, again, say maybe some of the distancing maybe did a little something, something, but not much. I mean, after all, we were focused on six feet distancing when we knew this thing aerosolized and goes 30 to 60 feet.

So what, and we knew that the surgical masks were useless and yet we're whatever. But, but the point being is I do think we probably did take some measures and you could even steal man, uh, say well during the alpha delta they kind of surprised things okay and they continued to try to suppress it with omicron and then let it run but that wasn't alpha delta it was omicron that they let run i mean there's there's some benefit to those things it seems to me yeah so i mean like like let's let's like so alpha happens in early 2021 and delta happens later in 2021. By then we have vaccines, right? So like what's the optimal policy?

Like it's a vaccine that we now know, and actually I should have suspected then, that doesn't stop you from getting or transmitting, but does reduce the probability of dying. So what's the right thing to do, right? But hang on, hang on. I want to push back a little bit. It does have some effect on contagion in the first three months doesn't it or am i misreading that

so it interrupts something it interrupts something right i mean it's not a zero pushes off into the future when you're going to get it um okay fair enough fair enough so so like so so the issue is like what's the right way to deal with it, to use a technology like that to save human life? The right way to do it is like vaccinate older people, the ones who are at the highest risk of dying, because that, you reduce the risk of dying the most. For younger people, I mean,

there's side effects to this thing. I don't know what they all are. And the benefit is pretty small because the risk of dying from COVID is pretty small for children, for instance. So don't make that a priority. Make that something where you can go talk to your doctor if it's right for you. And then let people go back to their life. So like the China, we take your steam out, steel man arguing for China. We had the vaccines, China had the vaccines in January 2021. Why did they wait until 2022 to really start vaccinating in earnest and then go to zero COVID for a full year? They basically left their

population vulnerable. You see this also, by the way, in Australia, where they claimed credit for getting rid of the virus from the island for 2020, then the vaccine comes and they wait until like late September to really get their vaccine campaign started in earnest. So for a full, you know, nine months, they had their population under lockdown for nothing. Well, why all the focus on vaccinating children? That's still mysterious to me, the extreme push. I understand if parents want it and, you know,

people want to get vaccinated, they should, but this extreme push for young people seems hard for me to understand. I mean, I thought long and hard about this because it doesn't make sense from a medical point of view, really, because what you're saying is take this risk of myocarditis or whatever. It's not an enormous risk but some for basically no benefit so why would you recommend that i think there's two things like one is people thought early on that but it was like 2021 20 early 2021 the vaccine would stop transmission for a long time they didn't have a basis for thinking that the randomized trials didn't show that but they

they hoped like i saw a clip of the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky saying, oh, when she saw this, she hoped that it would last, like, you know, the measles vaccine lasts forever. They were wrong, right? And so if, but if that's true, if you think that that's true, then you basically can get herd immunity if a sufficiently large fraction of the population is vaccinated. That means you have to vaccinate kids to get there. And they're like basing policy on that. But even that, I think, is unethical, Drew, because now you're asking kids to take a risk that they don't need to take in order to benefit other people.

We as a society generally don't do that, which is adults that take the risk for kids, not the other way around. Right. And then the other thing- Would you come up with an idea why they're doing this? I mean, I think they thought they, they just, they were like hoping that the vaccine would be better. The other thing is a psychological thing. I mean, you basically, public health basically made it so that everyone's a biohazard, right? And kids, especially we close

schools on the idea that they're like super spreaders. I saw a Biden advisor, Andy Slabert, send out a tweet at one point saying that the kids were like mosquitoes uh vectors of disease um oh my god and so you have this like notion the kids are unclean and now you have this technology that can make them clean just vaccinate them it's like baptism by vaccine um and i think there's it wasn't like a lot of it wasn't actual scientific medical thinking it was just a reaction to panic and fear that the public health itself yes yes it's exactly that and and they but i yet i'm still seeing ads and commentaries i mean look last week i think it was there was that study that came out that showed that most of the

transmission of omicron was in the home from children, which maybe, I mean, look, children transmit a lot of viral illnesses. You talk to any parent of a seven-year-old who's going to preschool, a lot of stuff comes home. And by the way, they locked us in the home. Where else were we going to get Omicron except in the home where we were locked? But be that as it may, what was that? Was that a legitimate study? And they were using it as a reason to mandate childhood vaccination. Okay, so that study, I looked very carefully at it because it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. First of all, it's based on like a temperature-taking app, right? So you have to decide you're going to

report it. And then, you know, like, I don't know about you, Drew, but like when my kids were little, I would take their temperature occasionally, but I never take my temperature, even if I have a fever and everything. I just don't do it. You can see it in their data. Mostly it's like people are taking it. And the key outcome in the app was, did the kid have a temperature before an adult in the house? They didn't check for a single person to have COVID. They were just looking for who had fevers first. So they didn't even know that they had COVID in the study,

either person. And from that they concluded the kids spread the disease to adults. You know, it contradicts a whole body of evidence, like very careful evidence with contact tracing and genetic sequencing of the viruses in Iceland and elsewhere that found that actually kids are not super spreaders.

They can get the disease, they can spread the disease, but they're not like particularly high risk of spreading the disease compared to adults. It's just not true. And then I want to circle back to the IEA publication. Tell me more about what you thought of that because that to me is, I think, well, the way people are, they're so weird

in their cognitive dissonance. I feel like this should be the last word on lockdowns, but I'm afraid it's not going to be. Well, I mean, you know, when you have very strong prior that it works, and actually not just a prior that it works, you have a very strong interest in making, like you're, Tony Fauci, you recommended a lockdown. Now these like, you know, geeky scientists come along and say, oh, you've, Tony Fauci, you've recommended a lockdown. Now these, like, you know, geeky scientists

come along and say, oh, it didn't work. But you've, like, plunged the world into, like, all, you know, huge amounts of problems that cause a question. You don't want to believe that you did nothing. That's the cognitive distance I think you'll see. But any fair reading of this piece, this book by this group,

you'll leave the same conclusion that they did, right? That when you carefully study comparing places that had the lockdown and didn't, that you see basically very little difference in the spread. And their reasoning is very simple. You know, when you have a disease that's going around like this, people don't like, they won't do nothing, right? They probably will, you know, go out less. They'll probably be careful to be around, you know, grandma when they're sick. They'll take measures without a lockdown, reasonable measures that make sense in their own lives.

The lockdown, what it does is it basically says, even if the measure is unreasonable for you, that you're going to, you have to go see, you know, your parent is dying in a hospital. You know, that's a risk I'll take. But the lockdown says, no, you can't do it. Your mom has to die alone, right? That is the kind of thing the lockdown does. It makes, forces people to take unreasonable measures that the allies would not have taken to protect themselves. Whereas if you just have a more reasonable policy, like in Sweden, say, look, it's really high risk for older people. Be careful around them when the disease is spreading. People will take care. And that's what the conclusion is. You must be familiar with Larry Brilliant, the smallpox expert.

I know him. I interviewed him. Yeah, I interviewed him right at the beginning of the pandemic and he said very clearly because we don't need lockdowns he goes this has been studied in smallpox when people see illnesses they naturally distance they naturally pull away they naturally do the right thing there's no never been a need for lockdown but but they used it if you remember the big justification for it oh what is this now uh This is the tweet that the doctor mentioned a minute ago. Oh, this is that tweet. But I want to point out, though, as it pertains to natural distancing versus mandates, they used the fact that they were convinced that asymptomatic so-called spread was a major problem with the with the pandemic i i

still don't know that there was asymptomatic spread was there let alone using it as a reason to just shut down the world so okay so i think i don't think it was a reason to shut down the world i do think that there's some evidence of asymptomatic spread and i don't i think like if obviously if you're symptomatic you're more likely to spread the disease per interaction you have with somebody um then you're if you're symptomatic, you're more likely to spread the disease per interaction you have with somebody. Then if you're asymptomatic, you're much less likely. But because you're asymptomatic, you may have many more interactions

because you don't know that you're sick. Whereas if you're symptomatic, you'll stay home and not expose other people. So there's like some math here where like, the probability of any interaction resulting in the disease spreading if you're asymptomatic is very, very low, but you may have multiple interactions, more than if you had a fish symptom. So, but it's not a reason to lock down. In fact, it's quite the opposite, right?

So, like, for instance, would you recommend masks if you know it's an aerosolized virus? I mean, not, like, you know, your glasses fog up, that means the aerosols are escaping out the top, right? You wouldn't do that. If the virus is going to basically spread almost everywhere, then you want to use the measures you can to protect the people that are most vulnerable because those measures are harmful. And so the fact that it's asymptomatic spread, what that means is you want to structure the measures to focus on the most vulnerable. It doesn't justify a lockdown. It justifies focus protection. It says double down on protecting vulnerable people. So I'll give you an example of

what you could do. You know, like airplanes have great ventilation. That's why the disease doesn't spread there. Upgrade the ventilation in nursing homes. We've sent $6 trillion. Why didn't we just have a massive ventilation upgrade program in like June 2020 or something to upgrade nursing, or even 2021? That would have been smart. That's the implication of asymptomatic spread. And by the way, let's remind ourselves,

that is precisely what the Wuhan COVID virus lab did on the heels of the whatever happened magically. As they upgraded, they turned their ventilation system into something appropriate for that virus. Yeah, I mean, like there's so much we could have done if we hadn't had the idea that lockdowns were going to protect the vulnerable people. This is why, like you started the segment with Tony Fauci saying, I wanted to let the virus rip. You know, the problem was like, they had this like, they just lacked all creativity. The people that were in charge of this, they did not think creatively. And they thought the only way to protect vulnerable people was lockdown. Instead of thinking creatively of like, okay, how do we, maybe let's offer hotel rooms to

older people living in multi-generational homes. When, when, you know, when Johnny's sick, uh, ma grandma calls local public health, local public health offers the hotel room for a few days. Right. We did that for homeless people. We didn't do that for, for grandma. Um, we organized COVID only shopping hour, but why not home delivery for groceries for older people living at home? Why don't you like, we just, we didn't think creatively enough about how to protect the vulnerable. Not only that, how about the improvisation we normally do to manage an illness when we don't

have well-known therapeutic options? We start doing stuff. We start trying things and we were prevented from doing anything. Now, I don't know if you saw this, this Annals. Annals is finally publishing stuff about early treatment and here fluvoxamine and budesonide works. And fluvoxamine was an early suggestion. We could have been doing these things. We could have tried all kinds of things, but instead you were told, don't do anything, send them home, bring them back when they're not breathing fluvoxamine i mean like that would also treat the depression at the same time i mean i just or protected the brain maybe from some of the neurological stuff that follows uh follows covid you know really that sigma one receptor is very powerful i think like you know there's

vast wisdom in like low in in doctors trying things out. And rather than trying to learn from that, we said, no, you'll lose your license. It's ivermectin as horse pace. Don't you dare. You have a disease that's really deadly to some people. And you have doctors that want to help them. They don't really know what to do. But they're trying things out.

And they're sharing information saying, OK, this works. This works. This doesn't work. And you tell them, if you trying things out and they're sharing information saying, okay, this works, this works, this doesn't work. And you tell them, if you try things out, you're going to lose your license. That was so short-sighted. Lose your job. Certainly lose your job because everyone was in these. I didn't know how many people were employees until the pandemic, and I realized that's another problem that medicine has. But Caleb, put up the Michael Sanger book cover if you could, because they became so

enamored with lockdowns because of their colleagues from Pandemic Inc. They'd been wargaming with their Chinese colleagues, and they were given this graph. I don't know if you could, I'm going to have Caleb put it up there. See that yellow line? That's the graph they were giving, and when it flatlines is when they claim they had controlled COVID by inducing complete lockdowns. It was going up till they locked down and then it was flat. That is a total lie. It was complete fiction. And then when it was picked up by Lombardi, Italy, that's when we decided we got it. That's when the New York Times editorial board said, we have to lock down. Why do they even have an opinion? Who are they to talk about medical interventions?

But that was the sequence, was they were convinced they were hoodwinked by their Chinese counterparts. Then when Lombardi did it, and by the way, the Lombardi politician that did it published a book on the heels of it saying that he did not actually intend to change the COVID pandemic

so much as this was an opportunity to bring Chinese-style government to bear in Italy, which he was a huge fan of. And that was why we followed in the lockdown lockstep. Is that crazy? I mean, in February 2020, there was a World Health Organization mission to China to assess the Chinese response to the January 2020 lockdowns. They came home from that mission, and they said the lockdown worked.

And that changed the world. Yep, I agree. That was where they became evangelists. They're like religious about this rather than scientists and clinicians. And Jay, since we last talked, I've noticed that this is exactly where the opioid pandemic went. It was the same thing. These evangelists went out there. Pain is what the patient says it is.

No American should ever feel pain. Now 96% of the Vicodin in the world is prescribed in Vicodin in the United States on the heels of that crazy, crazy idea. And they capture the VA, they capture the medical societies, they capture the joint commission, they capture the professional society, they capture all of that as a mandated standard of care. And now we have the opioid pandemic. It was the same playbook with this one, exactly the same. And at the core, there's always an evangelical physician. If Deborah Birx was an evangelist, she went around the country evangelizing, evangelizing for

lockdown. And if you talk to people that were at the White House at the time, no such policy was being really systematically thought about. She did it on her own. And in her book, she calls herself a hero for having done so. So I really wonder how she feels now in the heels of this IEA publication, if she still has the same evangelical furor that she had for what she had done, or maybe she's having second thoughts now the fog of war is lifting, maybe. But listen, I have to take a little break here. You mentioned the World Health Organization. I want to get on to that topic after the break. I'm sure you're aware of the One Health Alliance

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I do not give financial advice and previous performance is no guarantee of future performance. Visit birchgold.com slash drew to get your free info kit on gold. That is B-I-R-C-H-T-O-L-D dot com slash D-R-E-W. And we thank you. We are back with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. And before the break, I was asking about this new, I can only call it a, I don't know, scandal is not the right word, but it's alarming me, which is on the heels of these excesses and the damage done, it feels like the people that perpetrated these excesses are taking the position that we just turn the page, just move on, don't worry about it, just keep moving, keep walking forward. Don't look behind. And if we don't look behind, we're not going to have an ability to adjust and

not make these mistakes again. Along the heels, or on the heels of this seemingly desire to sweep everything under the rug, the World Health Organization sweeps in and wants to usurp powers, sovereign powers, above all other elected officials and all other national leaders to be able to do exactly what we just went through for any reason they so care, they so choose. And they are adding multiple layers to this where concerns about the well-being of animals and concerns about the climate could supersede your health needs and those of your patients. What are we getting into with them? So the idea that the World Health Organization seems to have is that we weren't able to coordinate internationally enough.

There were countries that didn't fall in line. Sweden, my God, they were like recalcitrant outlaws of the world during the pandemic. And so we need a stronger treaty that basically binds countries to do essentially what the World Health Organization is recommending when the next pandemic hits. So there's this like one health idea that then also expands that beyond just simply pandemic management, but to like, you know, sort of changes in governance and so on so that we change how we, you know, like our food systems and a whole bunch of other systems to reduce the likelihood of pandemics emerging. Now, that sounds all fine. I mean, that also sounds great, like great flowery language. But the question is, what does it actually mean?

So for instance, if you go look about like concretely what they mean by this One Health thing, they have just had a panel where they talked about how to predict uh and reduce the likelihood of zoonoses that is viruses or pathogens spreading from animals to humans um so you have to so now the problem the irony here is that it might actually be it's a program like this that led to the pandemic itself, right? We had this, the U.S. funded, the U.S. NIH, Tony Fauci's NIAID funded a large-scale program going back a decade or more to try to see which viruses were likely to make the leap to humans from animals. And so they would send scientists to bat caves in China, pull the viruses out of the bat caves where very, very few people were, bring those viruses into labs like in Wuhan,

actually also to some extent in the United States, and then do experiments on them and ask, okay, are these viruses likely to make the leak? What if that program actually led to the leak of this virus in Wuhan? That's certainly possible. It might even be likely. And so, you know, like you have a program that the World Health Organization is like blithely saying, okay, let's go into all the bat caves of the world and pull the viruses

out in the labs. Do I know that the labs that they're going to pull the viruses into have sufficient security to protect against a leak? This virus leaked out of a Taiwanese high security lab in 2021 doing research on the virus. So, yeah, I just think this is one of these things where like it sounds like a good thing. But then as soon as you look into the details of it, it actually sounds kind of scary. I'm not even sure it sounds like a good thing but then as soon as you look into the details of it it actually sounds kind of scary i'm not even sure it sounds like a good thing i mean it's it's putting if i understand it correctly putting while i'm a big advocate of the well-being of animals it's putting the well-being of animals on equal footing with humans and i'm not sure if i want my children on the same scale on the same footing as as a flounder i'm not sure of that and i don't know if fish are

in within there i'm not sure if fish are in their spectrum but maybe i don't want the same as a as a chipmunk either even though i have great respect for for nature and and other mammals i don't think that's right from the standpoint of health management and And by the same token, they want the ability to declare climate a pandemic priority. It's something at the same status. And again, now here we go again, relying on models. And models are what got us into trouble in this pandemic. And now that we have real hard data, people are not willing to look at it. It's the oddest thing ever. This is, I really, I'm in the upside down all the time now, Jay. I'm so confused.

But you tell me, straighten me out. No, I agree with you, Drew. It doesn't make sense. So like the set of people who might know what to do about climate, it doesn't include me. I mean, it doesn't include people like me. It's not epidemiologists. It's not, frankly, an epidemiological problem. It's a very different problem of a very different nature.

The idea that we can sort of put under one umbrella all of the problems of the world, and then get all the pointy-headed epidemiologists together to design a solution to it, after the last three years, who really can believe that? And yet the people who designed the strategy of the last three years, they're giving themselves awards. They're like negotiating treaties. They have political power. It's going to take a concerted pushback by sensible people. And I think frankly, a political pushback in order to make this not

happen. You know, like there's, there are are some things like, so for instance, poor countries, they don't want to have to be under the thumb of the World Health Organization. When they're negotiating these treaties, it's the poor countries that are pushing back saying, look, are you sure what you're going to be doing is right for me, right for us? I'll give you give you one again this is not a poor country but like a medium income country uh south africa south africa has pretty good labs uh and they use it to detect omicron when it first comes out early and what does the world what does the rest of the world do is the developed world do we punish them by stopping flights in and out of south africa but you know we're basically asking the whole world to take their sovereignty and hand it over to the World Health Organization as if they're like some

group of wise people who can like manage the world's problems effectively. And, you know, that's just not something that I want to happen, at least not without like a considerable amount of like scrutiny over exactly what systems they have in mind, what they want, what they put in not something that I want happen, at least not without a considerable amount of scrutiny over exactly what systems they have in mind, what they put in place. And I don't believe, based on their track record for the last three years, they're competent to do what they say they want to do. I don't know that anybody is. And again, the fact that they are putting their sovereignty above the independence of elected officials and

they specifically remove civil and liberties and rights from their little document i it's super crazy um it's interesting do you do you ever watch the videos that john campbell does that nurse phd uh educator he he lately has been going uh i mean, he has that sardonic British wit, but he is seething, it seems to me, and he's brought up these issues as well. This morning, he was going over the lockdown failure document and just like, you know, why are we, why is there any more debate about this is sort of what he's saying. saying and i i i want i'm dying to talk to you talk to him ever i've never talked to him i've watched him on youtube several many times i've he he seems like a very very like the kind of guy where it's like you know let's just

look at the evidence and see what there is to see and like if there's something wrong with it then i'll say that and if i actually what i love about him is when he's wrong, he'll say it. It's beautiful. And by the way, that was something I was, until two years ago, very accustomed to. That's what my peers did. It's what I did. It's what I trained my residents to do. I don't care if you're wrong. I just care that you learn.

You have a backup plan. You tell me you're thinking. And you're going to be wrong a lot of the time. That's the way it goes. That's the way medicine is. It's very, oh's very oh my god so anyway so here we are um i also wanted to get into this uh morbidity and mortality weekly report uh issues and the foyer request tell me what happened there okay so in 2021 the uh the cdc touted this massive study, it wasn't even massive, like 7,000 patients, where they claimed that the vaccine essentially prevented you from being hospitalized. I mean, just to be very careful, I pulled up the thing that they said. Let me just read to you exactly what the CDC propaganda said about this study. They said, they wrote, unvaccinated people with a

previous infection were five times more likely to have a positive COVID-19 test compared to vaccinated people. And then on the same sort of banner, they say, it's a study of hospitalized patients with symptoms similar to COVID-19. Okay. Now, a normal person reading that would say, well, if I get vaccinated, I'm five times less likely to be hospitalized. But in fact, when you look at the study, the study, what it did is it just looked at hospitalized patients. Well, how do you do a study that purports to say what's the probability of going into the hospital from being vaccinated by only looking at hospitalized patients? What they did is they took hospitalized patients with cold-like symptoms, respiratory symptoms,

and they ask the percent vaccinated, and then they test for COVID. And so either you have symptoms of pneumonia that has nothing to do with COVID, or you have symptoms of pneumonia having to do with, either having to do with COVID or not having to do with COVID. The only question is, are you vaccinated against COVID? Either way, you're in the hospital. So, you know, it's a really kind of a funny study that didn't sort of back up, that didn't like, it wasn't replicated by other studies that would have much more solid methodology they put the study out and they put this propaganda in 2021 in order i think really to encourage people to be vaccinated um but you know you shouldn't back you didn't do that kind of thing on a on a shaky study you should do that on solid studies right um so there was a whole

bunch of people writing them in saying writing to them saying like really smart people saying yeah are you sure you guys got this right? There are all these methodological problems. And then the CDC, I wish I could tell you, Drew, what they did. Because when people now did a FOIA, a Freedom of Information Act request to the CDC to try to find out what their response was to all of these questions about the study, how did they arrive at this very misleading propaganda from the results of the study, the people that, you know, journalists asking for these basic questions that the CDC ought to be able to answer, these aren't like, you know, top secret documents about, you know, the war in Ukraine. These are like, you know, these are like science, scientific questions. The CDC responds by redacting almost all of that

communication. So we just know that the smart people asking them methodological questions about this really crappy study, and then the CDC basically hiding from the American public what their answer was and what led them to sort of issue the propaganda they did. Do we have a problem? This is not specific to the CDC. I'm asking generally of the editorial process of the medical literature. Do we have a problem? This is not specific to the CDC. I'm asking generally of the editorial process of the medical literature. Do we have a problem with the editorial either quality or perhaps they've been captured or perhaps they're just fearful like everybody else has been during this pandemic? Is there something wrong with the way the leading magazines the medical literature are being evaluated from an editorial perspective i i think the answer to that is unequivocally yes

i mean i've been publishing for decades the last three years i mean i published a bunch of papers but like it's it's the the editorial processes have been i don't know how to like capture this like you have to have a particular party line and that makes it easier to get your paper in, much, much easier to get your paper in. You don't have a party, that party line, if your research, whatever your findings are, don't happen to correspond to the narrative of how to stop the COVID from spreading or whatever, the mass work or whatever, you're going to have a very, very difficult time getting your papers published. And if you do have your papers published, there's systematic attacks, nitpicking or trying to get your papers retracted. A very large number of papers that have sort of

counter-narrative get published, go through peer review, and then exposed or retracted because they don't meet the narrative. And then there's like papers that meet the narrative that are so obviously poor from a methodological perspective. Like I'll give you one example. There was a study published early in the pandemic, I think by the Journal of the American Medical Association or New England Journal and one by Lancet, a separate one by Lancet,

reporting to show that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work based on some database analysis. It turns out the doctors that published that study made up the database. They couldn't prove the database actually existed. It was an entirely fraudulent database. And the journals had to retract that study. Like very, very high quality, probably high quality journals, high prominent journals retracted these studies. But not till after all the headlines that said, major study shows hydroxychloroquine doesn't work. Now, I don't really think hydroxychloroquine, the evidence that it works is very good. But I will say this, like, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't,

as a medical journal, because you believe that, publish crap science. All that does is undermine the reputation of the journal and undermines the confidence the public has in the pronouncements of the journal going forward. You have to, no matter whether you believe or don't believe in some idea, you have to hold to the very highest standards when you're publishing papers. You're saying, okay, I've gone through some process. And they just haven't done that during the pandemic. It's been very, very difficult. I'm used to seeing articles go back and forth i don't know if drew

can still hear me but like they had an obligation like an ethical obligation to when they say that something is is right they've they've gone through peer review to sort of stand behind it even if they're getting attacked um and they have an obligation to publish things that are outside the narrative and they just haven't they've been very reluctant to do that. There's a, maybe when Drew's back we can talk, but there is a separate process. Can you hear me? Oh, hooray, you're back, Drew. You hear me now? Okay, we got a new microphone. I just grabbed a mic from other side of the room, but go ahead and tell me what you were saying.

Yeah, so there is, I mean, I think I agree with you entirely, Drew, that the publication process is, in many ways, it's wrapped itself around the narrative rather than trying to, trying to, like, publish the scientific results regardless of the narrative. There have been, there's a separate process, this open science process, right, where, like, you can publish a journal article, an article before it's gone through peer review. And that actually has allowed some of the counter-narrative stuff to come through.

Like that book that you mentioned about the lockdown assessment, that actually came out earlier through this open science process. And so you could see and evaluate for yourself the quality of this, even outside of the journals trying to lock the door from results like that. So's been like I think both good and bad I think the bad is the journals have shown themselves to be in an inadequate in

policing and and really sort of vetting the quality and especially the CDC that mmw are that the CDC I used to want to like that was a life goal of mine to publish in there it would be like a would be like a marker of success. Badge of honor. At this point, I'm just ashamed of having our national health agency, this public health agency, behave in such an unscientific way throughout the whole pandemic. Yeah. Very, very, very weird.

And now we have the current CDC director saying that she made decisions about whether to allow people to gather in football stadiums or whatnot based on what her friend was doing in neighboring states. And if you saw that little interview, this caught my attention. This, this very volume and number, uh, all of a sudden had some really interesting questions in it that the, of the, of the sword I had not seen in three years, so keep an eye on Annals of Internal Medicine, I almost feel like the editors there are, are, I, I, I, I don't know, alive or willing to, is, is, is it, I, I, you know what, it's interesting. I, it's a great journal is historically a great journal, but it was like getting a little bit, um, I don't know, it's kind of tedious. They'd have themes that would run through the whole thing. And if the theme wasn't something I wanted to read about, the whole journal was lost on me. And, uh, no,, no. Right now, you know, really interesting question.

Comparing efficacy and safety of, wait, wait, hold on. Oh, challenges in estimating the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination. What volume and issue? It's using observational data. Let me just give this particular article, which was, why aren't we doing age match controls going forward on the vaccine recipients? Why are we just not, why are we not even doing that? They were just asking the question in a journal.

Like Sweden does it, but just the United States, the CDC doesn't do that. Like, so, so obvious, like I would have produced at least some actionable information. That published,

by the way, the Danmark study, which was the first real randomized study. Yes, it did. And that study found no effective masks in this randomized study. It turns out that those authors tried to shop that study around to like Lancet, New England Journal, JAMA, and they found no one would take the only randomized study. I will tell you, I remember as that was coming, because there was all this excitement about the Danish study. We're going to finally get this great high quality study.

And it was going to be published in the New England Journal. It was set up for publication there. And suddenly, no. And then I heard, oh, JAMA is going to publish it. And then no. And then Annals published it. And by the way, that wasal my dear annals started looking uh superior to the rest in my mind but this one is uh may 23rd may 2023 volume 176 susan number five

volume 176 number five and in this the first time an entire journal it's not all covet stuff but they're asking questions that seem unfettered on you know normal medical literature you know questions and and reasonable studies addressing those questions um i if you wouldn't mind i would like to take some calls i think i'm making sure that i got to everything i wanted to get did you say may 26 175 number 175, number five? No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, I said May 2023, volume 176, number five. Annals of Internal Medicine. God bless them. So here they are.

So I'm going to get some calls here if you don't mind. Are you up for that? Sure. Okay. All right, let's do it. This is Johnny. Let's see what Johnny wants to ask us. And again, you guys raise your hand

and I'll bring you up to the podium. Sorry about the mic. I don't know what happened. Who cares? You wisely have a backup who's ready to hand. I have one too many mics sitting around. Johnny, you have to unmute. There you are.

What's up? I'm going to ask, you know, I'm unclear. Why should there be like Nuremberg trials for what's been going on? It just seems there's been no consent. The way that people have been injured and then

kind of, you know, insisted that they continue to get shots, it's just unbelievable to me. All right. so hold on. So I will say one thing about that. I'll let Dr. Bhattacharya answer, which is that you start threatening people with really serious consequences. We're not going to get the kind of healing and consensus

and evaluations that we want to prevent. Really what we want is for this not to happen again, more than anything else. Retribution, I think, never ends up in a good place. But what do you say, Jay? No, I agree with that. I mean, I think there's a lot of people that have been hurt, absolutely, and I can feel it in the people that write to me that they want justice but i think the best way to get justice is an honest evaluation of what has happened the mistakes that were made like it's just like after a patient dies you have this morbidity and mortality conference the idea isn't to like point blame the idea is to say here's what went wrong and so you learn the lessons and

you're absolutely right true because the problem is like you have a lot of people that i think they were well intentionintentioned. Honestly, I don't think that they were like Dr. Evil trying to do bad things. Of course. Of course. But that's always the way it is. That's how evil things get done. People try to do the right thing, but they get screwy on it.

But okay. Yeah. And then you say Nuremberg 2.0, and then their hackles go up, and they'll never admit anything wrong, and you never learn anything. It's not like these people are – there's so many of them. You can't – and there are many of them. I mean, a lot of them are like – they're not bad people, and they're very, very bright. They just got this very wrong. And so what you have to do then is do an honest assessment of what went wrong.

I wrote a document called the Norfolk group document. You can go to Norfolk group.org to find it. It's 80 pages of questions that any honest COVID commission would answer. It's like what an M and M report would look like. If you were going to do one for, for the COVID response. Where do you say that again? Where do we get it?

Where do we get it? N-O-R-F-O-L-K group at G-R-O-U-P.org. Norfolk group.org. And yeah, it's just, it's, I run with like seven of my best friends and we, we, we have, I mean, it's a blueprint for what an M&M conference would look like. I think that's the best way to get justice. Like to do an assessment. Your hand is up there. You got to unmute yourself.

Yes. I guess just to piggyback off with that um last gentleman question so you don't seem to think that this was done intentionally i mean given it just seems like so many doctors saw things and you know were trying to raise alarms and they were hushed and then I was kind of curious what you guys feel about being up under the who now hearing that there's another pandemic that'll be coming how concerned are you about that?

We did address that it is mortifying to us what they're angling for. But go ahead and address her issue. There is lingering, I'll tell you what, Jay, there's lingering in the background this question.

I'm with you. Our peers, I've never met a group of people that really want to do right more than our peers, even when they get it wrong. They aim to, and they got weird, and there was all kinds of psychology that got going here. We could dissect the psychology all day and it was rampant. There was a problem. But in the background is this question of pharmaceutical capture. RFK Jr. has raised that as sort of the organizing motivational factor that's skewing things

so significantly. I don't, I, something's going on there, but I don't know that that's the main issue. What do you think? I think that that's opportunistic. I do think that there's capture. I agree with him on that. But I think that that was an opportunistic thing, right? So like the people that worked on the vaccine, they didn't think of themselves as like evil. They thought of themselves as like potentially solving a major epidemic, right? So it's, but what happened is you have fear

at broad in the population, in part induced by public health and also virus obviously. And then a lot of like people opportunistically chimed in in ways that really was dysfunctional. So we were just talking about the journals. Why would the journals' editors act this way? They thought they were helping public health

by reinforcing the narrative, rather than just doing their job of publishing science, evaluating publishing science. is it intentional i mean it's it's it's it's just what's one of these things where like a lot of bad things happened as a result of of not necessarily bad intentions but like a bad of opportunity opportunistic behavior in the in the face of things that shouldn't shouldn't have happened the, let's say it's a lab leak. Why did that happen? It happened because there were a bunch of people that thought we could predict when

the next pandemic was going to happen by going to bat caves in China and pulling them out. Right. That's a good thing. Not because they want to destroy the world. Yeah, right. Yeah, so it's a much more complicated thing than if you have a super villainain and then you just send Superman to go kill the supervillain. No, you can't do that here. It's not like that.

Yes, that's so true. It's kind of comical to think of it that way. And there may have been some bad actors within it. But again, going back to the opioid pandemic, it was the same thing. The drug companies were duplicitous they weren't they weren't out to do they were they were motivated to make money but they had an opportunity created by the pain management world who thought that the drug company was their perfect ideal partner to help them save the world from

pain and off they went to destroy tens of thousands of lives, maybe hundreds of thousands. Yeah, certainly. I think that what you need is then it is not like Nuremberg too. What you need is systematic reform. So there's an another side, like,

so like a checks and balances, we do this with our government, right? So like the judicial branch checks, the executive legislator, we have to have some other side. It's not like you can get rid of the drug company interest, but you have to have like an independent FDA that's not funded like in large part by the drug companies. You have to have a CDC that has a much broader set of people in it than just, you know, pointy

headed epidemiologists who want to contain disease and don't care about, you know, psychiatric illness or something. You have to have a reform that allows multiple minds, people disagree, to have a way to disagree with each other constructively at the heart of public health. And that's, I think, to me, that's the central reform we need. Yeah, I think that's an excellent idea.

And there's actually, unfortunately, a wrinkle in the Constitution when it comes. My sons of the lawyer was pointing this out to me, that the wrinkle is that in an emergency, the public health is given complete and total authority. And that is a problem. That's a bug, not a feature. And like you said, we need something that's able to mitigate that, push back against it. There's just so many excesses. I, by the way, I don't think I raised this with you, but I noticed that a lot of the state public health officials were pediatricians. And of course, pediatricians are the vaccinologists.

They're the ones dealing with vaccines most of the time. And they did not have good judgment when it come to an adult illness. They had bad judgment. They weren't trained to have judgment about adult illness. And I think that was another thing that sort of came out during this pandemic. And because they were unfettered in their authority, that judgment came through in ways that harmed people completely agree i mean like what okay so i have two hats i have i wear the hat of a doctor or the hat of an economist and i noticed early in the pandemic if i wore the economist hat i'm not allowed to talk what i mean what expertise does an economist have about you know like devastating the world economy and what

health what consequences it will have on the health of the population. I mean, you just need – these are very, very complicated questions. You need – and they're very hard. There's no one person that can actually grok the whole of it and make wise choices. You have to have hard conversations with people, lots of different kinds of expertise in order to get the right answer. And the idea that public health has the expertise to order the world and figure out exactly the right thing to do, it's just wrong. It's just, and I don't see how anyone can look at the last three years and come to the conclusion.

The World Health Organization's new treaty is a move in the wrong direction, but it's also an opportunity though. I mean, you mentioned RFK Jr. I think it is really great that both parties now have candidates, prominent ones that oppose the lockdowns. We're going to have that conversation during this presidential election season. And I think both parties need to come to grips with the fact that about the harms, like once everyone agrees that the lockdowns were a disaster, and I think we're headed there. Again, both parties. Then we can really make progress. You know, like the Iraq war.

At first, everyone, it was like bipartisan agreement in favor of it. And now I think people in both parties agree it was a disaster, right? So I think that's where we're headed with these lockdowns. I don't...

You're mouth to God's ears. I have to interject. I think in the political arena, I think they're going to stay away from it i i feel like they always rfk won't avoid it you know i mean well maybe just won't you don't think so because it always seems like they just ignore it jay is telling us something because he knows to santos i think he's i think he's telegraphing something I mean you know uh I mean it is it is like the central part okay one of his major arguments for his for his run right is like he managed Florida

Florida has lower all-cause excess deaths through the pandemic than California does and they kept schools open they kept businesses open Disneyland was closed a Disney World State open in in you know 2020 um so you have you have like an argument on the republican side and on the democratic side you have rfk jr who's like the anti-lockdown idea is the center of his campaign he wrote that major book you know the real throne he found yeah i know i just feel like it's never talked about like in well i i that's why we talked to jay because he has exquisite judgment and i'm gonna put my bet on what he's saying it makes me feel better if nothing else and i'm gonna hope

that we do we do get there and and i and we've talked to rfk jr and he he's not afraid to talk about anything that's for sure he'll talk about it you know and i'm i keep thinking about it so i'll go ahead oh no sorry go ahead i mean i keep thinking about ram. Oh, go ahead. Oh, no, sorry. Go ahead. I keep thinking about Ram Yogendra, who said that the, you know, politics aren't coming into play because people are getting disabilities from the vaccine and we don't want to have to cover people who have lost their ability to work

and, you know, how it becomes, you know, a big... Financial thing. Financial problem, yeah. And yeah and i like i just don't think i feel like there should be some protection because you know people took the vaccine knowingly that they were gonna help the better good but then it destroyed people's lives some people and there's no coverage like i mean if you can't work you should be able to get disability. Bigger topic. Donald, do you have an opinion about that? I mean, I do think that we have been very stingy with the vaccine relief fund.

I mean, other countries have actually compensated vaccine-injured people. In the U.S., we basically gaslit vaccine-injured people and not disperse very much of the money from those funds. I mean, I think, you know, it's, we absolutely owe people that obligation to like recognize when they actually have been hurt by a product that maybe you were forced to take, right? Because of the mandates or something. So yeah, I agree with Susan about that.

I know, when you're forced to do something and it doesn't turn out well, they should protect you. Barry? Barry, you're a speaker there. Go ahead. Yes. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me.

And Jay and I banter sometimes on Twitter, but maybe this is a question for Drew. Do you think with this whole pandemic thing that fear played a large part in people actually getting sicker? Because it's, you know, like our public health director in L.A. here would say, you know, if your lips are turning blue, call the paramedics. And didn't offer any other suggestions. And it really, it was a terrible way to do things, quite honestly. So Barry, they did not, one of the things that drove me absolutely insane during the Alpha and Delta hours days was the fact that they were, public health was not using its platform to educate people on how to manage the illness when they got sick, what to ask their doctors for, what a monoclonal antibody is, what steroids could do for you, what budesonide is, and maybe something as crazy as fluvoxamine

because there was some good data on that. Nothing, zero. And of course, monoclonal antibodies were exceedingly effective at that stage in the pandemic. Silence. Florida puts together mobile vans where they're distributing monoclonal antibodies, has huge success, and then the monoclonal antibodies are withdrawn from florida they actually are shut down it was the most bizarre thing i've ever ever it was just reprehensible i've never seen anything

like this so i was taking issue with the fact that public health seemed uninterested in health number one and then number two yes they were using fear and fear may not have had a direct result on medical illness. I guarantee you it affected the mental health catastrophe we're seeing right now, particularly in younger kids. Like I said at the beginning of this conversation, you take a nine-year-old, you tell them shelter in place. Every night our mayor was on TV saying shelter in place. That is what you tell people when a nuclear bomb is on route to your house, shelter in place. Then if you go outside, you're going to kill your parents and your grandparents and you're nine years old. You don't think that's going to have mental health consequences. The hell were these people thinking? It's disgusting. Jay. Amen, brother. I mean,

that's exactly right. I mean, it just, we had, we. I mean, we basically used fear as a public health tactic. I had always thought that public health had an ethical obligation not to cause fear in the population, to reduce fear, to give people tools to deal with fear, like real science-based tools to deal with the threats they face. We did the exact opposite, and we have seen the consequences of it in the popular. People are still – okay, I mean, this is – I probably shouldn't say this, but I just will. Like my in-laws, my wife's parents in their mid-80s, they're still – I think they've come out of their house three times in the last three years.

They're not going to come to my son's graduation. mean i just it's just it's heartbreaking i can't blame them i mean it's public health that caused that fear uh and and you know they're vaccinated i mean it's just it's just heartbreaking to watch terrible that that is awful yeah i am gravely concerned about the way they did this but uh as much of a fan of anthony Anthony Fauci as I was and how helpful he was during the AIDS pandemic, we did use fear back then. And I see now his tactic back in the 80s was to use fear in the AIDS. I didn't recognize it at the time, and we congratulated ourselves for changing very difficult-to-change behaviors, but we used fear. You have sex with somebody, you're going to have sex with every person that person ever had sex with. Remember

all that? That was explicit fear. And high school students were damaged by that. If you talked to somebody who was in high school during all that, they will tell you it was traumatic for them. It was a problem. It was not healthy for them. And so he seems to like to use fear for lack of a better way of saying it he seems to use it as a technique and here it just went into full throttle and it's a terrible idea like it's a like i think that that's such an important point true and i want to like put an underline on it like the you does then is, okay, maybe you have some short-term gains in getting people to take something seriously. But what it does is it also, in addition to the psychological problems it causes, it stigmatizes

people. It creates stigma around the disease that you wouldn't otherwise have, which then hurts people. In the HIV days, I think that fear-mongering actually hurt HIV, like, with, it actually hurt gay men, because now they're stigmatized as a source. And here, during COVID, with that stigma, it was like, you know, young people are vectors of disease, mosquitoes, like mosquitoes. I mean, we stigmatize children.

You know, and I think that that fear-mongering is a deeply unethical tactic that public health uses, because we have in our hindbrains, it's like built in a scare of infectious disease, fear of infectious disease. You know, like you read all the ancient books, like they have this, you know, like lepers are the bad guys, you have to expel them from your presence. Civilization is essentially like an undoing of that so that we can be in community with each other, you know, sort of, you know, benefit one from being near each other. And public health undoes that essentially in order to combat this disease. It was deeply unethical and deeply counterproductive.

Yeah. Fear is not, particularly not panic. And I blame the press as much as I blame the public health community. The public health community was using it as a conscious tactic. The press were using it to capture eyes and whip it into full-fledged panic. They should be, they should evaluate themselves. And of course they won't either. Jay, you've been very kind with your time, very generous. I can talk to you all day. There's such conversations and I appreciate you coming back and talking to me every once in a while.

It's a big deal for me. So thank you. Oh, it's a, it's a, I've always told you, Drew, it's just like an honor to talk to you. I've looked up to you for a very long time. So, oh my goodness well that's uh that's uh that's i i don't know that i've had a higher uh you know uh feeling about something and then you you telling me that that's a big deal to me so thank you and and i look up to you sir and uh you've like i've said repeatedly you've become the poster child for the excesses of this thing that they chose to attack. You is all you need to know about how off base they were, how far in the wrong direction they had gone.

So, well, if I can do anything, as I always say, please call upon me. I'm happy to support you any way I can. And we'll look for Jay on Twitter at DRJ. Run for president. Bhattacharya. Yeah, go run for president. Or at least, how about senator or governor or something here in California? Uniquely unsuited for this kind of thing.

I wouldn't wish that on my best friend. So am I. People keep asking me the same thing, but I get the impulse. We're desperate for leaders that are thoughtful and honest and not prone to excess. I think there's some interesting people running for president in both parties. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I hope so.

Well, I'm just interested. I really appreciate RFK stirring the pot, and I think DeSantis is doing the same thing, bringing stuff up that we wouldn't be talking about otherwise, and I think it's so important and so refreshing. So here we are. Now, Jay Bhattacharya, everybody, thank you so much. Thank you. Take care.

You betcha. And Susan's taking a deep breath. Why? What's up? You were censored today by your microphone. What happened? I know. Lyle in there on the 12th. That's Monday. Joe Latipo on the 13th. I blame it on Caleb's new baby. And so we're only doing two shows next week, guys. Is that

correct? I believe that is true. Yeah. Because Caleb has a wedding yeah look at that yeah all of my all of our millennial age friends had to put off their weddings during the pandemic so now all of a sudden everyone's getting married i have so many weddings this year it's it's time the ones that survived through the lockdowns they're like okay i guess we can get married now. So it is Monday and Tuesday. Oh, interesting. I have some scheduling I've got to work with since we are doing a Monday show.

No one told me about that. That's at three o'clock, is it, Caleb, on Monday? It's on a schedule. It's not on mine. Caleb's at three o'clock. You've been reading it every day. Yes, the show with Lionel. Yeah.

Lionel and Mark, yes. Yeah. I've actually been saying it's on uh joe i've been talking about joe latipose and i've been saying wednesday for that one but it's actually gonna be tuesday all right uh thank you we've been watching again caleb anything going on restream or on rumble rants i should know about susan i know you were in there talking to the guys somebody on youtube heard me talking goes who was that was that woman? All right, we'll put Susan's picture up alongside me here so they can know who she is. I want people to get help,

you know, it just breaks my heart. Yeah, this has been an unusual experience. And I was thinking about, you know, kids that are sort of young adult age, how would it have been different if there was a war for them? Same. It would have disrupted their lives just as much as if there'd actually been a war and or if they even had to serve in a war it would have been just as disruptive as it actually was so you have to learn it is like a war so you have to learn so and hopefully we've come out of it uh again i like you i'm looking to improve also go to exit the who.com and sign the petition even though it's passed just because and check where your congressman

is and write a letter. Great. Express yourselves. Appreciate it very much. We'll be here on Monday at 3 o'clock. See you then. Thank you so much. 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.

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