Ask Dr. Drew - Heart Scars & Kids With Myocarditis: Dr. Vinay Prasad on mRNA & CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Vote – Ask Dr. Drew - Episode 138

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

“Incompetence,” says Dr. Vinay Prasad, responding to reports of today’s vote by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that will decide if COVID-19 vaccines should be added to their childhood vaccine schedule – a list that is often required to attend public school. “It will be a catastrophic error if they add it,” Dr. Prasad continued on Twitter. “They will do more in a single day to erode routine vaccination than 25 years of a devoted, irrational movement.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, MD MPH is a practicing hematologist-oncologist and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. He studies cancer drugs, health policy, clinical trials and better decision making. Clinically, Dr. Prasad cares for patients with a wide range of benign hematologic and malignant conditions. Follow Dr. Prasad at https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH Website: https://Vinayakkprasad.com Plenary Session Podcast: https://twitter.com/Plenary_Session 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • 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 10% off 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. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. 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. 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She served as CMO for Whole Health Management, delivering on-site healthcare services for Fortune 500 companies. She holds a BS from Duke University and her MD from the University of North Carolina. Follow her at https://earlycovidcare.org 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 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

Welcome, everybody. Today, we will be interviewing one of my very favorite physicians, certainly in social media, that's for sure. I recommend strongly you follow him on Twitter. I'll get you that Twitter. It's V Prasad, P-R-A-S-A-D, M-D-M-P-H, V Prasad, M-D-M-P-H. Dr. Vinay Prasad, he's an oncologist. I found him before the pandemic.

He had a podcast called Plenary Sessions, and he just evaluated medical literature there, and I always admired the way he could penetrate. When people read better than me, I listen to their podcast. There it is, Plenary Sessions. And he has a tremendous ability to penetrate medical literature, and so I was learning a lot from him.

So naturally, when the confusion hit around COVID, I turned to him for some clarity, and he has been a source of that ever since. And he's very kindly been on the show a couple of times. That I had not seen him, or maybe yesterday, had not seen him use yet the sociology of science. We're going to get into that. And that's so much of the craziness right now is this sociological phenomenon, not the

science. So let's get right to it. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this right. 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.

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. We'll be right back. feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. And as always, Kelly will be in here in just a second. And I believe tomorrow we are doing calls. We've got a lot. We at one point had a very special guest set up, but she can't quite make it, I think. Is that true, Caleb? Is that still in play? Not yet, but we might have an announcement for that next week. Also, we know that coming up on the 24th, that it's Dr. Kelly Victory with Dr. Pierre Corey. Okay, that's coming up 24th. Tomorrow, we'll take calls

to sort of process all this we've been doing to, and predictably, of course, there was a shitstorm following Robert Kennedy, and we can talk about that. Would you agree with it? You disagree with? Again, we're just trying to bring things to the light. We're trying to have public discourse. We're trying to get the public square open again and begin to have conversation. Today, it is Vinay Prasad. Again, I will repeat his Twitter handle because I urge you in the strongest terms to go now and follow. It's V. Prasad, P-R-A-S-A-D, M-D-M-P-H. Vinay is a hematologist, oncologist, associate professor in epidemiology and biostatistics at UC

San Francisco, studies cancer drugs. He treats oncological patients and hematological patients. And he has a podcast with ZDogg as well. Caleb, do you have that one up? I don't have that image yet. We didn't promote that one recently. I'll look for it. Z is, again, another guy I admire, very practical, very good, great judgment, good practicing physician. And the two of them together make a great pod.

So let me bring, without further delay, Vinay Prasad. There you are. Let's get that podcast out there. Let's push that out. What is the title again? I've forgotten. VPZD is the show with ZDogg, and I also host Plenary Session. Thanks so much for listening.

It's about medical evidence. You're right. No, Plenary Session. Thanks so much for listening. It's about medical evidence. You're right. No, Plenary Sessions, I listen to medical podcast and philosophy podcast when I come upon people that can penetrate the literature better than me

because I'm good all the way through the pandemic. Caleb, I froze a second over here. Are we okay still? Yeah, this always tends to happen with these topics. It's an internet. It's not actually on your end. It's some internet issue,

but I'm trying to work through it. All right, so somebody from China is trying to break us up. So I have a bunch of different kinds of questions. I've been slowly putting the pieces of the, uh, it was very mysterious to me and, and now it's starting to, there was a reason it was mysterious and I'm starting to uncover what actually was happening. And I feel like you've been sort of evolving too, in terms of understanding what we're dealing with here and some of the

excesses. I want to talk about that in a second, but before I do, there's kind of a bigger thing you and I have never talked about, and I want to just quickly get into that. You have a master's in public health, correct? That's right. When did you receive that? When did you receive that? I received it during my last few years of training, 2014, I think. And I don't know when I'm frozen, whether I just keep going, Caleb, or what's going on. Just keep going, okay? Yeah, go ahead and keep going. I'm trying to resolve it. It's not really clear what it is, but you're actually still clear on spaces, so people can still hear you. Okay, okay. So in my day, people

rarely got public health degrees. They were sort of people interested in being government officials or being, you know, certain, you know, in bureaucracies. That's what they wanted to do. They did not want to practice medicine. I noticed in the late 90s, all of a sudden, the MPH started popping up after everybody's names. What do you think that motivation was and what was your motivation? That's a good question. I think there are diverse motivations for why people are doing the MPH.

One reason is the honest reason, which is these days all careers in medicine are an arms race. Students have more publications and similarly more degrees than they had 20 years ago. The other reason is there are a lot of people who are genuinely interested in public health issues. I think those have taken on huge societal importance, things like tobacco, things like chemicals and pesticides, things like policy around pandemics, which we didn't see coming, I think, in 2014. And then the third reason is there's a lot of people who are foreign medical graduates who do MPH, I think, to get into the U.S. residency pool. In my case, I was somebody who was already doing health policy research, and I was already interested in that. I knew my career was going in that direction.

For me, the MPH was a chance to sort of solidify some statistical skills and get a little bit more of a contextual background for some of the research I would be doing. It's been a great help, I think, these last six, seven years. But I think I'm also different than a lot of people who have the MPH. I mean, I think I disagree on some issues with some people. Well, one of the things I have noticed that has started to come up, particularly under some of the regimes of certain public health officers, is that they seem to have been relatively untrained in epidemiology, categorically untrained in medicine and medical judgment making, and totally preoccupied with equity of outcome. And in the middle of a pandemic, to be totally, completely preoccupied with the equity

of outcome for a 17-year-old healthy male and a 75-year-old obese diabetic female, these are not the same thing, and they're not going to the same places. They're going to have different outcomes. What am I seeing there? It's something that seems to have bled into all of the rhetoric, and it's just nonsensical in the middle of a pandemic, as best I can tell. Yeah, I mean, the way I would put your concern in my mind, and tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but I feel like it's the one-size-fits-all nature of their thinking that troubles you. And this is the one-size-fits-all nature that's been there from the original vaccine series to the booster, even to Paxlovid, which is supposed to be for high risk individuals and has been tested in an unvaccinated population. And they're trying to

extrapolate data to lower and lower risk populations. I think one of the things your listeners are intuitively aware of is that the risk to an 18-year-old and the risk to an 88-year-old, they're not just a little different, Dr. Drew. They're hundreds or a thousand times different. It is a huge difference in risk between a young person and an old person. I do think one of the original sins was everything had to be one size fits all. Lockdowns had to be one size fits all. Masking policies had to be one size fits all. Vaccination has to be one size fits all. Lockdowns had to be one size fits all. Masking policies had to be one size fits all. Vaccination has to be one size fits all. And now this perpetual booster has to be one size fits all. They can't seem to take off that hat and allow them to think that maybe we need different policies for different people depending on their situation. I do think that's an original sin. And we almost saw it happen with monkeypox. They were starting up that same kind of thinking. How do you get a population treatment to them and vaccinate them unless you identify

them and educate them? And let's do this. The fact that they had to say, no, no, everybody's at equal risk. What? It's the most insane thing I ever heard. And thankfully, people started shaming them. Down here, we saw a lot of continuing down that same path of one size fits all for clearly something that had broken out in a risk population. Yeah, it's a great example. The men who have sex with men community still is. But I heard people say things like, when schools reopen, monkeypox is going to have outbreaks everywhere. That was nonsensical. They had no basis for saying that. And it was the same COVID fear mongering about schools that was brought into monkeypox. I mean, sometimes I think that some people just want to keep schools closed. I don't know what their motivation is. They're

constantly looking for things to cry about the sky's falling, but that's a great example. Sometimes in public health, you have to state who is actually at risk so those people in that community can take it very seriously and do the right things. Still under this same umbrella, Paul Offit came out and said, you know, I'm kind of concerned about young males. There's a signal there. I'm worried. And he was immediately dismissed. And then a journalist, finally a journalist did her job and said, Dr. Walensky, what do you think about this? And Walensky went, oh, he's a great resource for us. But we are just, and this was something she said into a microphone live in front of a journalist, which was, we're going to stick with 12 and above because we just thought we needed to simplify our messaging. I took my breath away.

Simplify messaging is how we determine what appropriate populations to treat people or vaccinate people but I think that that was a profound admission that they are so committed to that one size fits all mantra that they cannot tolerate the fact that maybe a 20 year old man needs different advice than an 80 year old woman. And that's okay. You know, it's not so hard to tell apart a 20-year-old man and 80-year-old woman. We've been able to do it for a long time and we can give them different advice. We do for so many other things. This is no different. I don't understand it.

Do you have a theory? It's just, again, I've been slowly coming up with bits of information about things that have me baffled, but this one still has me baffled. So I think if you really ask me, why do I think they are so aggressively pursuing their policies in young populations at low risk with very poor data, and that's what they're doing, why does that happen? I think number one, groupthink. You know, Dr. Drew, doctors are trained to go with the flow, to not push against established authority. We're selected for that.

That's what it takes to become a doctor. And I do think these people are subject to grouping. Number two, I think when you move into the political arena, it's so easy to become a political against the political flow. And I think many of these people are not political, are not principled enough. I also think that people talk a lot about conflict of interest, financial conflict. I don't think they quite have their finger on exactly the problem. I'm confident that Pfizer and Moderna are not actively paying

people in the administration at this moment. They're not doing that. I don't think so. But we do have a problem with revolving door. Many of these administrators, when they leave public service, they're going to work for and consult for the pharma companies that they are regulating right now. We've seen that with prior FDA commissioners who now sit on the board of director of Pfizer's, and we've seen that with a former FDA commissioner who works in a venture capital firm that has modernized. So there is going to be some revolving door. And I think it's natural for people to think about what's my job down the road. And that is a potential bias. And then the last part is sometimes never ascribe to malice what incompetence will explain. And sometimes people are just incompetent. They're not trained to be the people setting broad, sweeping vaccine policy in a once in a 50-year pandemic, they were never trained for that or prepared for that. They have no compass to guide them, and they're making mistakes the way anybody who might make mistakes. And so I think incompetence is also a factor. So those

are the things I put. I think structural problems in the conflicts, the groupthink, and even incompetence, I think. Incompetence has been on full display in a lot of the policymaking, particularly in this state. Absolutely. Just grotesque incompetence. And they should be apologizing for the depth of the stupidity and the misery they cause people. But anyway, I digress. Can I say one thing about the apology? Actually, the apology, I think you have a good point.

One of the things it takes to bring trust back to institutions is to apologize for things you got wrong. Recently, we saw Anthony Fauci saying that he wasn't directly responsible for school closures. And to some degree, it's true. I mean, he's not the politician who made those choices, but he has to take ownership of the fact that he was the one who came forward and suggested it. He recommended it. He gave dozens and dozens of interviews where his rhetoric led people to believe it was a wise thing to do.

And he was instrumental in school closures. So if he wants to say now that that was a mistake, he should own the fact that I made a mistake. And, you know, it's OK to say I made a mistake. School closure was a mistake. People who promoted it should just say I made a mistake. School closure was a mistake. People who promoted it should just say, I made a mistake. I'm sorry. And that might help a little bit better than saying I had nothing to do with it, which we know you're gaslighting us. We heard the tape. What are we trained to do clinically? And by the way, the number one way to help avoid a malpractice lawsuit, you immediately fess up to errors. You say, yep, I did it. Here's the course we're going to take. Here's what the mistake was. I apologize. Can I make it right? But no, we don't get any of that. So you were one of the first to point out, speaking of incompetence, that they dismissed some of the more competent

FDA regulators. They were summarily sort of tossed out. Anybody that wanted more data, wanted more science, God forbid, was essentially thrown out of the organization. Tell us about that. They weren't fired, but they were put in a situation where they felt resignation was their only option. And that's because they specifically say the White House placed extreme pressure on them. These are career vaccine regulators. Their goal in life is to make sure vaccines that come to market are done absolutely as safely as possible. That's what they believe in. They've dedicated a career to that.

They felt so much pressure from the White House to approve, once again, a one-size-fits-all booster policy for everyone over the age of 12 and up that they thought the evidence wasn't there and they would rather resign than be complicit in the White House action. I think there's a couple of things we have to admit. One, when the prior president was in office, people were very concerned that the White House would put pressure on FDA to make actions. And we wanted an independent FDA. When this president is in the White House, because he's supposedly, you know, on our team, we allow this, but we need to preserve the independence of the FDA.

I think it's important, no matter who's in the White House, they shouldn't be pressuring the FDA. And I think the loss of Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, as you point out, it's a tremendous loss. You're losing decades of experience, decades of knowledge. And unfortunately, you're losing, I think, the two smartest people at the FDA on vaccine products. And now you're left with, I think, the second string doing the decision making, and that's not good. Not good. And you mentioned, I think it was today or yesterday, the sociology of science at work. What did you mean by that? Yeah. I mean, I think that we have to be honest that right now they are endorsing in this country, you know, a bivalent booster for kids five and up. 86% of kids by the CDC's own estimate have had and cleared COVID-19. Many have just had Omicron. I think if you're

honest, you have to say there is substantial uncertainty that this new booster, when given to a six-year-old who's already may have had a couple of shots and already may have had COVID a couple of times, the idea that this shot will benefit that six-year-old is very, very uncertain. And yet you see over and over from the administration that it's not uncertain, that it's actually very certain. They don't have that data. I mean, anyone who's following knows they have reported no human data in children. They authorize the new bivalent booster based on mouse data. They've press released some data of antibody titers. They haven't told us the numbers of those antibody titers. Antibody titers, a measurement, how much antibody in your bloodstream, that's not an endpoint people care about intuitively. It's what we call a surrogate endpoint. It's a stand-in endpoint. Historically, in medicine, it doesn't always correlate with what you want. I think when I say the sociology of science, I say, what does it take for many, many people in science to all get behind the story that you got to do this, you have to do this, there's no room to debate, there's no doubt,

when the facts on the ground are substantial uncertainty. That, to me is a paradox that can only be explained by, you know, broader cultural forces and the sociology of where we are in the moment. Yeah, I can't believe you also take on, you know, there's four other sort of, you know, one is masking in these kids and the damage or whatever. We don't know what that's doing or not doing. You know, why isn't there a rush to do the proper studies on kids, on young males, on the masking? Why aren't they rushing to do those studies?

Is it they just don't want to spend the money? And therefore, and again, the cozy relationship with the drug company, they're not interested in spending the money either. What is it? Let's pull the two apart. So let's just talk about masking for a second. United States is different than the World Health Organization, than UNICEF, than most European nations, which is that we, our CDC and American

Academy of Pediatrics, recommend masking kids between the ages of two and four. And until even as early as early September, before a federal judge basically prevented the Biden administration from enforcing that in Head Start, they were doing that in Head Start programs in this country. I think we have to ask ourselves, when we're the only nation among our peer nations that's masking a two-year-old in Head Start, which by the way, is a program for the most vulnerable children in America, we have to ask ourselves, why are we the only ones doing it? Are we so brilliant that we know a two-year-old can wear a cloth mask and slow the spread of COVID? Or are we making a mistake because we have become mask zealots?

The moment I think Donald Trump decided not to wear a mask, the mask became almost the MAGA hat of the extreme left. And we had a sort of religious devotion to the mask. We're pushing the mask down to two. I can tell you, having reviewed the evidence, there is no credible evidence that supports masking a two-year-old. And that's quite obvious to people. I think if people get that, that that's probably not going to be a high value strategy. And in fact, it's so poor value that the Europeans won't do it. There might also be a downside. We don't know. We've never had an experiment where we mask so many very young kids for so long. The downside might be on their language acquisition, their socialization. I've heard people say something like, you know,

a child who is born blind still learns to speak, ergo there can be no damage. That's a fallacious, that's a false argument. I mean, obviously people who are blind are speaking, but people who can see can learn a lot about your emotion from reading your face. There's more to communication than just the sounds that are coming out of your mouth. So, you know, when I hear that kind of ridiculous rhetoric and I see the American Academy of Pediatrics, they continue to recommend on their website to this moment that you should mask two yearolds in areas of times of high community spread. They just had a conference, Dr. Drew, where there are many, many photos of them going unmasked at dinners. And so they don't even practice what they preach. And so, okay. So my point about the mask issue is you're asking me why it happens. I don't think anyone's getting rich from big cloth mask. I think it's a zealotry. It's a fundamentalism. It's your brain can't think rationally because you're so wedded to your tribe. It's tribalism ahead of science.

Wow. And the fact people call it science and try to demonize the opponents, make it seem like the person who questions masking a two-year-old, that they are somehow promoting misinformation, that's a very dangerous place to be. Now let's talk about the shots, the vaccines. Here, I think Pfizer is making, they're going to make $100 billion. They're making hand over fist money from their two COVID-19 products, Paxlovid and the vaccines. And Moderna is making a lot of money too. And when companies are making so much money, public regulators have an obligation

to ask them the tough questions, which is prove to me your shots helping older people, but also prove to me your shots helping younger people and prove to me you couldn't do it safer. Maybe a 20 year old could take a lower dose. Maybe they could space the doses further apart. Maybe they only need fewer doses than an 80 year old. You could do studies of all of these things. And then you could also make Pfizer do studies just in people who've had COVID. Most of our studies are in people who've never had COVID, but you know what? It's hard to find any of those people anymore because almost all of us had COVID. And so obviously, like any drug product, it might be different if you hadn't recovered from the disease than if you haven't had it. And that's another relevant thing. So why don't we push them to do those studies? And I think that's where the corporate capture comes in.

That's where the money comes in. And that's where the incompetence comes in and the group thing. I think it's not all. It's not just purely about the money. We should never underestimate the power of incompetence. I think that's a key message I have. I think that's a good point. But again, whenever I'm just baffled and astonished, I know there's a little more there and I'm searching for it. So as usual, I erode into Kelly's time here. I'll bring her in just a second. But my last question to you is, what the F happened to us? What happened to our profession? Is it just those forces at work that you've just mentioned? And I don't know.

I'm surprised at us. Yeah, I'm surprised. I think we were on a recipe for disaster. The last 15 years, the movement to silence your opponents, de-platform your opponents, cancel your opponents, that's been growing stronger and stronger as a cultural force. Rather than engage with your opponents, rather than show us why your opponents are wrong, don't let them talk has been a cultural movement. Also, the other sort of force that happened was, this is the first time I think in our entire lives that rich professor types in the United States actually feared for their own safety. During

Ebola, during other prior outbreaks, they could rest assured that they were thousands of miles from the action. It could never affect them. But now you have academic professors literally fearing for their own safety. And the moment you had that, fear can rot your brain. It can rot the reason portion of your brain. It can make you do all sorts of misguided things out of fear. And I think that was a root cause. And then the rise of the technology companies, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Prime, Uber Eats, Netflix, these companies thrive the more you're at home, the more you're kept away from other people. They thrive on capturing more of your attention. And if the same pandemic had happened 10 years ago, when these companies weren't so powerful, I'm confident our response wouldn't have been the same. And then finally,

the eternal truths of human nature, which is, we think we can, sorry, but the last thing I'd say is just, the eternal human truth is in the face of mother nature, we think we're only a cloth mask away from eradicating the virus or that, a few actions on our part and we can tame mother nature. And that's often a fallacy.

It's a fallacy and I understand them grabbing for it in the face of fear, but why their judgment cave to fear with a, you know, a 5% or a 2% fatality rate. I, that was surprising to me. The most astonishing question I got when I had Delta was, were you afraid? Were you afraid? I'm like, as a 62 year old man, it's like, yeah, it's a bad illness. It was sucked. I had long COVID. It's like, I had H1N1 too when I was 50, and I'm going to tell you, that was worse. That was worse.

And you're going to die? It's like, no, I had one, maybe a 2% fatality rate. When a doctor tells you, I mean, if I get cancer and I see you and you tell me you have a 99% chance of cure, I ain't worried about that. I'm even thinking about that 1%. That's a great point. I mean, you know, for somebody with testicle cancer, we often have cure rates in the high 90s and people breathe a sigh of relief

and we're all thinking optimistically, whereas this is one of the times we have, you know, in some ages it's actually even higher than that, 99.99% chance of being alive and well a little bit later, and still people are panicking. But, you know, Dr. Drew, it also speaks to the fact that this is a generation of people that really, professor types now in the academy, they haven't faced much risk in their lives. They weren't born at a time of a draft. They've never lived through a Great Depression. They

haven't faced much risk at all. And their entire risk calculator is broken. The same way people raise their kids, they don't let their kids go to the top rung of the jungle gym. Our calculators are broken about risk. Yes, I agree. And I've noticed those that sort of from my era, we were kind of shaking our head. We were dealing with a pandemic that had 100% fatality rate. That was different. It was different when everybody died no matter what you did.

Yes, that was a different thing in 1985. And we sort of had that in our background to think about. That's why we were sort of bewildered by some of this. But anyway, we have to take a little break. I'm going to get Kelly in here. Vinay Prasad. Let's see. Do we have your website up there?

It's vinayprasad.com. The VPZD show, of course. The Plenary Sessions is the other podcast, a little more medical academic typically. And let's see, and the Twitter handle is vprasadmdphd. Did I get that right? MDMPH. What did I see? MDMPH.

MDMPH. There you go. All right. We'll take a little break. Be right back. Consumer price index yet again going up. Stock market in turmoil. What's our government doing to quell the surge of inflation that is gutting American families?

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Some platforms have banned the discussion of controversial topics. This episode ends here. The rest of the show is available at drdrew.tv. There's nothing in medicine that doesn't boil down to a risk-benefit calculation. It is the mandate of public health to consider the impact of any particular mitigation scheme on the entire population. This is uncharted territory, Drew. And welcome, of course, Dr. Victory.

I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but there was just an announcement in a couple of tweets I saw that they have approved the vaccine for the childhood vaccine program. What do you guys call that? The vaccine... Yeah. It was the advisory

committee on immunization practices that was meeting today to opine about whether or not to add the COVID vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule. And it has really profound implications that they have done that. Here's that. Go ahead. There's two programs. So there is the childhood immunization schedule that hasn't yet happened, but there's something called vaccine for kids program, which is a program that when the Biden administration stops paying for this vaccine,

that poor kids will be able to get it for free. They added it to that. But your point is, are they going to someday try to add this to the immunization schedule? And I think they've made it clear in their slides, they're headed in that direction. So I do think we could have that conversation, but just to point of clarity, they haven't done it yet, but they're headed in that direction. That's what all their slides say. Okay. I figured I wasn't saying what I thought I was saying. No. Well, first of all, Dr. Prasad, thanks for joining us here today. A lot to unpack in the first 30 minutes of your conversation with Drew. And I want to talk about all of these things, including the vaccines and whether or not they're going to move forward with

that, adding it to the vaccine schedule. I want to talk a lot about adverse events, but before I do, I want to weigh in a little bit on the conversation with regard to, quote, what has happened with public health. I do not have a master's in public health, but I have extensive experience and postgraduate training in public health, including from the Harvard School of Public Health. And what I have seen over the years is that schools of public health have become far more concerned with things like social justice, inequities in healthcare, healthcare disparities, things like gender issues than they are in things like statistics and epidemiology.

The average graduate student in a master's degree program in public health doesn't really understand the studies. They are far more, as I said, concerned about social justice issues. As you saw in my little intro there, one of the drums I've been beating from the beginning is that public health is very different than when you and I are practicing one-on-one medicine with a patient in our offices. One-on-one medicine, that patient is your sole concern, the outcome for that patient. When you put on your public health hat, it's very different.

And they are obligated to consider the impact of any particular mitigation, whether it's school closures, masking, shutting down businesses, limitations on travel, whatever it is. They are obligated to consider the ramifications of that on the entire population. And not just, by the way, the entire population with regards to a particular virus. They should have been considering the social impact, financial impact, spiritual impact, psychological impacts, and they didn't. There was an abject failure of public health officials with regard to their obligation. And that's the part where, you know, I don't know, you said you trained back, you know, in 2014.

I don't know how it was then, but there's been a huge change, I think, in the past five, six years. You agree with that? So I agree with many of the points and principles you're saying, and I put a couple things differently. So one point you're saying are the sweeping things that they did at a population level. Did they account the collateral damage and all the potential side effects? Did they not have people from different domains to weigh in? I 100% agree with you that we needed a broader discussion. We need to include people from economics and from many other domains to think about all

the collateral damage. But I'll go even beyond you on that. And some of the things they did simply didn't work. They didn't actually slow the spread of the virus. And they're not good at evaluating the medical evidence on those points. So that's even if you don't think about the collateral damage, it's just not working on the face of it. To your point about the movement in public schools and the culture there, I think that part,

I have a little question, which is, I'm not sure which is the chicken and the egg in this situation, because the types of people who go into public health are often extremely left of center people, and the left of center has moved even further left over the last 10 years. Those are the kinds of people that seek MPH. So I'm not necessarily sure it's the school that teaches them that, or those are the ones going into it. Whereas people who are more centrist or right of center may go into fields like economics. I don't know the answer to that question. But your point is well taken that when you have a pandemic and an unprecedented response,

you have to think about all domains from inflation to supply chain, to education, to educational outcomes, and not just monolithically about the virus, not just solely about the virus. have to think about all domains from inflation to supply chain to education to educational outcomes and not just monolithically about the virus, not just solely about the virus. And I think they did make that mistake. Well, fair point, by the way, about it may just be the left-leaning people. And you jumped ahead to what my next question was going to be about the idiocy of many of the policies. We have known for decades that masks do almost nothing. If anything, I normally would just say absolutely nothing, but almost nothing to stop the spread of a respiratory virus. I have said over and over again from the very beginning and was my first ban from Twitter was for saying that social distancing

is an entirely made up construct, does not exist in any book on public health, epidemiology, virology, pandemic management, or anywhere else. It's a made up construct. Yet all of the sudden, we have stickers on the floor at the Walmart saying, walk this way, and stickers telling you where to stand at the airport six feet apart. Absolute insanity. We've known from the beginning that not everyone was at equivalent risk from this virus, yet they brought, as you well pointed out in your open, they painted with a broad brush these mandates that acted as if a 12-year-old kid in middle school was at the same risk as the 78-year-old debilitated person in a nursing home. And that was something that I hadn't seen

before this particular pandemic. As Drew pointed out, they were about to do the same thing or were trying to do the same thing with regard to monkeypox. And fortunately, that was shut down relatively quickly. But I don't give our fellow physicians, I don't give them sort of a pass on why all of a sudden the people who I sat next to in virology are absolute mask zealots all of a sudden. I'm saying, what are you kidding? I mean, you saw it, I'm sure, you're in California of all places.

What happened to our colleagues? All of a sudden, you know, social distancing, you know, removing every other chair in the waiting room. Are you kidding? I mean. And Kelly and I have now spoken to people. This is a very interesting point. Here's what I'll say about it. I was gonna say, Kelly and I have spoken to people. This is a very interesting point. Here's what I'll say.

Kelly and I have spoken just quick, quickly. Go ahead. Finish you. Oh, no, no. What I was going to say is to Dr. Victory's point. One thing to say is how many different things did we actually do? We probably did a hundred thousand different things from things like roping, taking the net, the rims off basketball hoops,

pouring sand into skate parks, taping up playgrounds, telling people don't go outside. Incompetence. I saw an article, yeah, in San Diego that there's a UC San Diego professor who pleaded with surfers not to go surf because the COVID could spread in the sea breeze. We masked kids, we masked adults, we recommended cloth masks rather than other types of masks. We didn't do any randomized studies to further evaluate our knowledge. We recommended six feet of distance. I think Dr. Victory's correct that that six feet is absolutely invented. And I think there's a broader point here, which is that if you want to think about idiocy, there's no shortage of idiocy. There's 100,000 things we did and probably 99,000 didn't work.

They were just stupid things to do. Now, the things that were more plausible, we should have conducted well-done studies to assess whether or not they work. We shouldn't have just said to do it. We should have studied it. And we didn't do any studies in high income nations on non-pharmacological inventions in a cluster design. There's only one or two, and they're mostly run in low income nations like Bangladesh and one from the Guinea. And then to your last point, yeah. And then, you know, to your last point about why did this happen? You know, I think you're hitting on something which is like the mask of zealotry in particular, that became something very, something that the United States took on a life of its own more than other nations. And I do

think it's related to Donald Trump in a lot of ways. And I say this is actually as somebody on the political left, I'm one of those people on the political left. But Donald Trump was so influential that people who opposed him merely opposed him to say the opposite of what he said. So when he said reopen schools in early July of 2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics did a 180 and actually tried to put a lot of restrictions in place that made it harder to reopen schools. When he famously didn't wear a 2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics did a 180 and actually tried to put a lot of restrictions in place that made it harder to reopen schools. When he famously didn't wear a mask, liberals, I think, doubled down on the mask philosophy. And so when you ask why did this happen, it's because a lot of scientists were thinking with their political hat and not with their science hat.

And I do think the evidence is generally quite weak. And we have published a paper on that and that's forthcoming in the peer review literature, but it's previously been published as a working paper. And so I do think the evidence is weak. And there's a reason why Fauci didn't recommend it when he went on 60 Minutes the first time, because it was not part of pre-pandemic guidance. Yeah, I think it's actually worse than I think than you lay it out, because even when the studies that were done, Duke University did a study in August of 2020 on cloth masks and showed that cloth masks actually made it worse,

that they caused the droplets to aerosolize. When you cough, the droplet hits the cloth mask and breaks into a zillion smaller pieces that can travel further. Brown University and MIT did a study and proved that there was no difference between six feet and 60 feet in terms of the spread of the viruses. Those studies never saw the light of day. They were deep six. Anybody who said anything contrary to the narrative was shut down, censored. And that's a topic I want to get into too, the whole impact, really what impact did the profound censorship, cancel culture have on people? The fact that I certainly was mercilessly censored from the very beginning, but I think it really, for the first time in my entire professional career, was I finding

myself occasionally self-censoring, afraid to actually say something because I'm thinking, is it worth posting this tweet? Because it's certainly going to get me kicked off. Even when the tweets weren't really of any question at all, it was my statements about some of the medications, for example, and the fact that some of these medications that I'm not even allowed to say on this show are FDA approved and have been for decades. I mean, those are irrefutable facts. But stating them on Twitter was enough to get me banned. Have you been censored at all during this pandemic?

No, I don't think I have been censored at all during this pandemic? No, I don't think I have been censored. But, you know, I guess what I'd say is this, you know, even hearing you talk about some of these things, I share a lot of your views and I disagree with you a little bit, but I want to live in a world where somebody like you, who I disagree with a little bit about some of these things, is free to speak her mind. And I'm free to speak my mind and we're free to engage and we'll play the war of ideas and let's see whose ideas persuade the most people. And I think that's what America has always meant. And so I am deeply troubled by the censorship. I know it exists. I haven't been the victim of it. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem. And I think that's something people need to realize just because you haven't been

the victim of it doesn't mean it's not a problem. You know, so to your point about why does it happen? What I want to say about it is this. When you make unprecedented policy decisions in the face of an unprecedented threat, which is what happened. I mean, we've never, to my knowledge, locked down as much of society, sealed borders as much as we've done, shut down air travel, and changed the lives of children in the history of the the last two centuries, this is the greatest thing we've ever done. It is natural that scientists, doctors will disagree. If there is a future calamity, and we are doing things we've never done before, smart people will have different views. We need a space where it's okay. We have to allow them to talk about it,

have debates. You talk about the social media platforms. They're terrible in many ways because you have to be very sophisticated if you think you can police the bounds of acceptable debate. And I don't think they have the sophistication. They have often very junior people making that call. That's an abuse of power. But there's another type of problem we faced in this pandemic, which is that legitimate institutions like universities did not actually hold debates. I'm not aware of any debates about school closure at a university like Harvard or Stanford or Yale or Princeton. I'm not aware of many debates about lockdowns or masking or policies around children. These are profound issues that universities did not have a debate on. I'm not aware of many situations in the last 25 years where universities said, we're not going to have a debate on sweeping public policy. And that to me is part of a culture of, it's not censorship, but it's part of the cancel culture. Why does Stanford not want to have a debate on lockdown? Because they fear that somebody is going to criticize them for, quote, both sides in it or giving false legitimacy. But it's not

false legitimacy. It is a legitimate debate. We've never locked down a society before. We should talk about it, whether or not that's the right call. And so I think beyond the problem of social media is a culture where people cannot say, you know, Dr. Victory, I like what you said here. I didn't like what you said there. I respect you to be able to speak it. And I hope that I'll persuade people where we disagree. You know, that's, I think, fair rules of debate. And that's what Drew and I have been talking about from the beginning. It really was the genesis of this show was the fact that prior to COVID-19, robust, vigorous debate was a cornerstone of medicine.

That was how we always did things. We had morbidity and mortality meetings every month. We're behind closed doors. You'd get and duke it out with people and say, well, did you consider this? And what about that? Or what were you thinking? Hadn't you read this study? And that was really the cornerstone of medicine.

All of a sudden, this was the first time in my career, as I said, that that wasn't allowed and that you really couldn't have that debate. And you're exactly right. Those institutions of higher learning where you would have expected to have that robust, vigorous, respectful, but robust debate and that wasn't happening. I want to ask you, you more than anybody I know have been out there talking about some of the issues with regard to vaccine injuries, specifically cardiac injuries. Just as I was getting ready for Drew to bring me on today, I got a thing popped up on my screen that Mississippi State University is sad to announce an 18-year-old freshman football player has just dropped dead. Rarely a day goes

by that some young, previously very healthy athlete drops dead. And when I say drops dead, it's not a euphemism. I mean, tips over from a standing position to the ground, dead right there. What do you think is going on? and what can you say about the research you've done with regard to cardiac events related to this virus or vaccine? Yeah, okay, that's a good question. And I guess here I might be a little bit different than your point of view on this, which is that I think it is abundantly clear that the mRNA vaccines, particularly when given close together, particularly dose two of the Moderna product, particularly in boys between the ages of 16 and 24, can cause clinical myocarditis,

which is typically crushing substernal chest pain and cardiac injury, and people can be hospitalized. And that has been shown in dozens and dozens and dozens of series. I think it's very difficult to ask whether or not deaths are increased. There is not the same quality of science. I think we should investigate it, but I'm not comfortable making any claim on that just yet. I think anecdotes are always problematic because there've always been stories of people who something bad happened to them. It's hard to know the cause. There are many things in life. But to your point, which is, should we take this cardiac signal seriously? And by that, I mean, clinical myocarditis in boys of this group, I think the answer is, yes, we need to

take it seriously. And the goal of public health is to try to minimize the harms of this. And that means we should be robustly thinking about different doses, limiting the number of doses if somebody's had COVID-19 already, spreading out the doses further apart, perhaps favoring the Pfizer product over the Moderna product. I think we have to be very careful. These anecdotes, like the anecdote you mentioned, I think certainly require careful study, but it's not easy to attribute things like this to one thing or the other. Could it be the temperature? Could it be dehydration? Could it be this? Could it be that? It's very difficult. But your point is well taken that if the question is, do you need to take safety seriously? The answer is yes. I think that's true. And we do have proof of cardiac

injury in the form of myocarditis. Well, I think just as a scientist, we look at patterns. And so you're correct. No one individual death could be attributed to a vaccine. There's no way you could say that. But if you look at the patterns and the fact that even the International Olympic Committee, if you look back at their data well before COVID, they were reporting somewhere in the range of 29 athlete deaths on an annual basis of sudden death, most of them ultimately attributable to cardiac issues, 29. We were seeing in the range of 200 per month globally. The question I have there, though, is the denominator might be growing, I guess. I mean, honestly, the reason it's so tricky is how many

athletes are there and what's the rate with which we are actually capturing the event. In the past, we might have just missed a lot of events. And so, yeah. But again, we always get to the same point. We all agree, more data, more data. Why isn't there an urgent press push for the data? You know, Australia has a 17% increase in all-cause mortality. Why? Why isn't that an emergency in that country to take a look and figure that out?

The other thing I just realized, I'm seeing a clinical signal that I had not thought about until recently. I'm seeing a lot of odd supraventricular arrhythmias that require treatment, like either meds or ablation, and coming out of nowhere without any congenital, no valvular defects, no congenital problems. And it just occurred to me, I was thinking, oh my God, that's an awful lot of that. I'm wondering if the cardiological world is gonna start to, within their discipline, start to look at this thing. And if not, I mean, why aren't they?

If not, are they afraid to say something? There are, Drew, there are over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts now written on this very topic uh specifically supraventricular tachycardias uh cardiac dysrhythmias that are attributed potentially to the vaccine the question always was was the vaccine or was it the virus itself and that's why the relatively recent study out of Thailand is so compelling because that Thai study looked at 301 patients between the ages of 13 and 18, did antibody studies, showed that none of them had evidence of having had COVID. They did extensive cardiac

workups on these kids prior to vaccine. None of them had any cardiac anomalies. And then within, immediately within days after getting vaccinated, 29.4%, 30% of them had cardiac abnormalities following vaccination. That was an MRI, right? I've got a few thoughts for you on these topics. Okay, a few thoughts. One, the Thailand study. Okay. The Thailand study and a new study from Switzerland are both looking at what we talk about subclinical myocarditis, myocarditis that may affect the heart, but without chest pain. And the number I think that's the better figure from these papers is about two to 3%, which is still a hundred times more than the clinical myocarditis. But that 30%, I wouldn't hang my hat on that number. I'd put a 2% to 3%. But to your point, Dr. Drew, about excess death,

what I say about excess death is the following. When a country says our deaths are up 10%, that means the number of deaths that they actually count minus expected deaths. What's an expected death? You've got to model a population that's aging and make a prediction about the deaths. And that varies year to year. And that is a type of modeling. And modeling, as we know, is not a perfect science. So I always put a grain of salt next to excess deaths. Your point about tachyarrhythmia is interesting. I think it should be investigated. I'm not there yet to say I believe it's implicated. I do think subclinical myocarditis is a concern. I think it's at least two orders of magnitude more common than clinical. And I think we should also stress one thing. You don't have to find more safety problems to say we

should do something about the problem we know about. You know, we have one problem that no one will argue with. Clinical myocarditis is linked to the vaccine. CDC admits it. The EMA admits it. Now is the time to try to lower that problem and look into other potential problems, but you don't need to evoke a second problem to act upon this one. I would submit to you, and I agree with you, it's upwards of 50% of the myocarditis caused by the vaccines is subclinical, meaning they don't have symptoms. Oh, it's more than that. I would submit that as far-

I would submit- Maybe a lot more. I would submit that that's far more dangerous. Yeah. And that's what's so dangerous. Because when people have chest pain, you know what they do? They go to the doctor. They go to the doctor.

They get evaluated. When people have injury to their heart and they don't have any symptoms, sometimes the first symptom is sudden death. Sometimes the first symptom is that it's rinsing out. I would say the ones that have symptoms where they go with crushing substernal chest pain, months later on MRI, they still sometimes have late gadolinium enhancement, which is a very poor prognostic feature. I do think in our lives when we exercise very hard, it's possible we have some cardiac myocyte damage that the body can repair.

So I'm not ready to say that the worst one is the one you don't feel. I'm still probably thinking the worst one is the one that you feel really badly. But I agree with you that it is a problem that it is a hundred times more common subclinically. I also want to make one more point. The US FDA, they asked Pfizer to do this study. That study is not yet, it's not yet reported. Why is the US FDA not putting pressure on the company to generate the data? And so, so if you were to ask me, I would say the people who are having the crushing pain, I'm more worried about those boys than the ones that don't feel anything, but I am still worried about the people who don't feel anything. I want to study this.

And I think the most important point of all of this to bring it full circle though, Dr. Prasad, is that we are talking about a group of people, let's recall, whose risk from COVID itself was so low, the risk of a bad outcome, right? So you're talking about risk of myocarditis, cardiac cardiac injury whether it's clinical meaning they have symptoms of it right now or it's subclinical meaning the injuries happening it's there but they don't have things like chest pain yet to show it and we don't know down the road what's gonna happen we're talking about this happening in a group of people

whose risk from the actual virus was to minimis. Let me expand on that a little bit more. The additional point that you can make on that point is that after you've gotten dose one, you've gotten a huge reduction in severe disease. You have a huge protection. Each additional dose, two, three, four, and where are we going to be in 25 years? 24, 25? There's diminishing returns from the benefit of the product, but the risk of myocarditis, we have not yet seen a floor. From booster studies, we see that there's still a sustained risk from each dose. So your point is well taken. These kids are at low risk at baseline. As the variant becomes less lethal, that risk is even lower. As they've had and cleared COVID, that risk is even lower. And as they keep talking about the additional dose, the upside is even smaller. So at some point, we're going to have to think, have this conversation, when is enough enough? When is the right balance struck? Yeah, you're right. So now that we're talking about vaccines and vaccines in low-risk groups, let's bring us back around to this question about whether or not the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is going to opine or suggest to the CDC that these vaccines

be added to the childhood immunization schedule and why that's important. Currently, there are no- They're paving the way for that, I think, yes. Correct. Yes. 100%. Just to clarify for our viewers, there currently are no FDA-approved vaccines for COVID. All of them are available only under the EUA, the Emergency Use Authorization. For children. For adults, they got the full approval. They got the approval. Well, for Comirnaty, they did, but Comirnaty is not available in the United States. So there are, do I maintain? They converted Pfizer from EUA to full approval, didn't they? I think so. Yeah, Pfizer got biological licensing agreement.

But the reason this is important, and the reason I just want everyone to understand, the reason this is such a critical thing that's happening right now as we're having this discussion is that if this gets added to the childhood vaccine schedule, the vaccine manufacturers will enjoy blanket liability protection. They cannot be sued even by an adult because of the National Vaccine Injury Protection Plan that was passed back in 1986. If a vaccine is on the childhood immunization schedule, the manufacturers have zero liability, zero exposure, even if that vaccine is also given to adults. And that's why I believe

they've been pushing so hard to get these vaccines. I have a different problem with it, but that I'm concerned about, which is that when you add it to the schedule, the CDC says that we don't mandate. That's technically true, but not truly honest because people follow their lead. So it will lead to mandates. I also think that many parents, you can see it in the statistics, perhaps even the majority of parents, especially for under five, they're not doing it. We have like a 6% uptake rate. So I do think there's going to be a tension between potentially a mandate and what parents want to do. I think it would be a mistake in a number of ways if they were to add it. I've said

as much. One is that this list of the vaccines that they recommend on schedule should really focus on the vaccines that are absolutely essential, like the MMR vaccine, and not focus on vaccines where there is a substantive debate. And if you lump the two together, you may get some people who take and walk away from every single vaccine. For sure. For sure. A catastrophe of vaccination

by lumping these two together. No question. And so I think they are playing a dangerous game. I think your point is well taken that they are working in this direction. Your point is well taken that this vaccine has more of a dialogue to be had, I think, than other vaccines.

Our European counterparts in Denmark, they're no longer vaccinating kids. They've said the kids' risk is too low. So we have to acknowledge our role as an outlier nation. We have to be very careful that we don't erode some of the gains we've gained over the last 20, you know, the last 50 years by pushing for this vaccine. Vinay, you and I are to have a very special burden, which is now we have AB 2098 in California, which if we, if we were pediatricians and we did not demand the standard of care, we would not be allowed to explain to our patients why we have issues with the standard of care,

lest we have our license potentially encumbered, because we will have violated 2098 if we discuss with a patient why we have concerns about the CDC standard of care. That's a violation of 2098. The bill is stupid. It was a stupid bill, and it's a political bill that's being done to make a political point. But I actually think my reading of the literature was that they already had some of these authorities in the medical licensing process. They did.

This is not actually granting them authority. So they're doing this just to draw attention to the fact that they care about this issue. I think it's a big mistake that people on the political left are making to portray every question in science as misinformation, bad people versus the truth, which we alone have. If you portray science that way, you're not a scientist because you don't understand life is complicated. It's messy. The truth is elusive. Things are fastly changing. And you're also demonizing your political opponent. You're making science political. That's a big mistake. And so I disagreed with the bill. I'm not sure it's going to actually lead to any real world problems. I think it will be litigated to the

Supreme Court. I suspect they're going to lose if it gets there. And so I think they don't want to really enforce it because they're going to lose the Supreme Court case. But it's all a stunt. It's a political stunt. We need to acknowledge, and I think this is your point, Dr. Victory, in times of crisis, when states take unprecedented action, smart people, well-intentioned people will actually disagree. We need to have those debates. We can't try to bury those debates. No, and I agree with you 100%. I have been called a vaccine zealot in the past. I have written, prolifically spoken most of my career on the importance of vaccines. And I agree with you, we are at real risk of driving vaccine hesitancy because we have taken a vaccine, shoved it through. I said from the very beginning when Trump called it Operation Warp Speed, I said, no, no, no, that's a really, how about Operation Thoughtful and Well-Researched vaccine? Because Warp Speed is really a bad thing to suggest. There's a reason the average vaccine

takes six to eight years to come to market if it ever makes it to market at all. And I think that what we are seeing here, there's no question in my mind that many people will paint with a broad brush their concerns about vaccines. We're already seeing it up in your neck of the woods. Marin County has one of the lowest vaccination rates for things like polio. You've got young, you know, these, you know, 20 and 30 year old, new parents who are too young to remember that we had a sitting president in a wheelchair from polio. Polio is the real thing and it will come back. It is coming back. So I agree with you from a public health perspective, just the damage we've done to confidence in our vaccines programs

is profound. I agree with that. And I also think that the one size fits all also does a disservice to elderly people, because it is possible that the 80 year old in a nursing home does benefit from additional booster doses if they haven't had COVID. And we're so distracted by trying to enforce a college mandate where it doesn't make any sense. We've forgotten about the 80-year-old in the nursing home. We should have our laser focus on that person. So I think you're right. It has these broader spillover effects. Can I ask a quick question about Kelly, really quick, to that very point, because that's my population I've been dealing with in recent years. Paxlovid, I have found to be very useful in elderly population. Boosted, previous COVID, whatever the

case may be, it really, I mean, it works and it works fast. Seen a lot of rebound, seen a lot of rebound. And early in its distribution, I noticed doctors were using it in young people. In fact, my own daughter, who's 30 years of age, got it and had a really interesting, immediately was better in 48 hours, which is what I've seen from Pax, but it's like sort of extraordinary. But she, but I've seen, again,

like I said, a lot of rebound and she did not get a rebound. She got reinfected in two months as though the full immune, she didn't get the benefit of the full immune response.

And I thought, wow, that's kind of interesting. Here we are in younger people. We don't know what we're doing with this drug.

We kind of know over 65 and we're gaining experience with it, but we really have no idea under 65. So that's the point I think is key, which is that this administration had the ability to make Pfizer do the right study, which is a huge study, lots of ages and people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated. Right now, the proof they've demonstrated is if you're unvaccinated and at high risk and you'd never had COVID, Paxlovid works great. But in this country, you've either had COVID or vaccinated or both. And so the data is not very relevant for us. The United Kingdom

is running a study. It's called Panoramic. It's huge. It will be the answer to the question. It will tell you if it works in an 80-year-old and it'll tell you if it works in a 28-year-old. We're going to get that answer. And I can promise you, if that study shows it doesn't work under the age of 50 or 65, this administration will have spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money on something that doesn't work. It's going to be a big scandal. They should have made Pfizer do the study before they spent $5 to $10 billion on this product. Yeah, I would say that across the board, about the vaccines, about the boosters, about remdesivir and about a lot of other things that had a paucity of safety data and study,

any research behind them. We're talking about the myocarditis and cardiac injuries, which are happening in real time and we're seeing the results, I believe, of some of them. The thing that concerns me probably more are the latent things, the impact that the vaccines appear to be having on the immune system, for example, overall suppression of immune response, and specifically the risk that is going to put people at for increase in cancers. We're already seeing a significant uptick in cancer rates around the globe in highly vaccinated populations. I haven't heard any other credible explanation for that other than as a result of the vaccines. People forget that the first-

I'm not with you there 100% yet. Okay. Okay. I guess I'd say that one of the differences also, the lockdown and the shutdown and people not seeking medical care for a few years, it's very difficult for me to entangle. I've seen many people claim that there is more health concerns globally. But remember, we're dealing with the three, many things. One, lingering effects of COVID. Two, lingering effects of our lockdown policies and closure and economic damage from that, and then also some of the side effects of medical products. I have no way to disentangle these

things. I'm not there yet, but I haven't closed my mind. I'm not there, though. No, I agree with you. Clearly, there are confounding factors. It may be the lockdown. It may be stress over global warming. I don't know. I can tell you that we know if you compare the bench studies that show suppression of the immune system and you look at places around the world like Sweden that did away with their lockdown very, very early on or never had a lockdown, and they also are having upticks in their cancer rates. In the same way as we look at what's causing the significant decrease in birth rates around the world, normally when people are locked down, can't go to work, can't travel, can't

go to school, you see an increase actually in birth rates. We're seeing the opposite. Those are things that, again, as a scientist, as I say, we're supposed to look at things with a different perspective. Also, you know, once upon a time when people were left alone, there were few things to keep them entertained.

But now everyone is glued to this. They're glued to their phone. And so I really don't know what people were doing during lockdowns and why, you know, we're great to be fine. And I do think there's some anthropological data that people, when they're severely stressed, like when there's food shortages, when there's famines, when there are plagues, humans tend to reproduce less. There's sort of that anthropological data there.

We have a super chat. I want to put it up here. Sorry to interrupt you guys, but Caleb alerted me that somebody put up a super chat. want to put it up here sorry interrupt you guys but uh caleb alerted me that somebody put up a super chat we'll see what that is sure i suspect there is it true that come community vaccine is not available it's the fta approved one from pfizer others are eway only what who's going to answer that kelly will answer that yeah yeah this was sort of i i believe a sleight of hand by the fda uh they came out and said that they were going to fully approve the Pfizer and Moderna products, the Comirnaty, and they did. Comirnaty is FDA approved.

The issue is there is no Comirnaty available in the United States. When you go and get that vaccine, you are getting the vaccine that was approved only under the EUA. In a separate document, the FDA said, there's no difference between the EUA available vaccine and Comirnaty. What they wanted to do was allow the vaccine manufacturers to use up their huge stockpiles of the non-FDA approved material, which is sitting there so that they didn't have to waste that. So I stand by my statement that there is no FDA approved- Is it the same product or you think it's different? Is it different in some way? What is it different? Well, they're saying they are not

pharmaceutically different, but they didn't allow Pfizer to go back and label the other ones as Comirnaty. We don't know. I don't know about you, but I haven't found Pfizer or Moderna to be particularly forthcoming with data. So I maintain there is no FDA approved vaccine available for COVID in the United States. Now, if you go to Europe, you can get Comirnaty, great. But if you ask the guy at the Walgreens or the CVS or at your doctor's office, show me the vial, what you will get is a vial EUA approved only. It is not Comirnaty. That's interesting. This was an FDA's play at a pan. I didn't know that, but I see what you're saying.

I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. I don't look into that. I didn't know that. No, and they did it specifically. They did it specifically, Drew. Kelly, we have to wrap up in about five minutes. I'm going to hand to you, Kelly, to keep going about five more minutes.

Okay. Well, two things, Bena. The two things, they wanted to allow them to use up their stockpile. And remember, anybody who gets those and has an ill effect, an adverse effect, cannot sue. They're because they got an EUA product. If they had gotten Comirnaty, an FDA approved product, the vaccine manufacturer has liability. The EUA products have no liability associated with them. This was absolutely purposeful. My understanding is that they have no liability in both cases. They just have no liability. But you're saying they do have liability for a BLA approved vaccine? Yes, once the vaccine is,

if the vaccine is FDA approved, but not yet on the childhood vaccine schedule, then there's liability. That's where the window of liability is. That's why in the United States, they are hell bent on making sure that the EUA doesn't expire before those vaccines get officially on the childhood

immunization program, because otherwise there will be a window in which people could sue the vaccine manufacturers. This is something I know a lot about and have spent a lot of time working on. And this was purposeful in my mind as sleight of hand by the FDA, primarily, as I said, to three things, to allow the vaccine manufacturers to use up their stockpile of EUA shots, to continue to give them blanket immunity. And thirdly, because they knew that if they said it was FDA approved, they would get some uptick in vaccine confidence that there would be, they estimated, in fact, they said this in their report, they estimated two to 3% of people would go on and get vaccinated who hadn't been vaccinated previously,

because the thing that was, that they were waiting for was quote FDA approval. I see. I will have to look into it. I don't know these facts myself, but go on. Any last questions? No, no, no, no, I just think... Let Vinay go. Let him go. Let him out. We do have another, one more super chat. It's Dr. Prasad. Unconfirmed accusations that the MMWR weekly data is recoding. I'm going to read this as it is. Data freeze and recoding and alleged ICD-10 code swaps for COVID and cancer. Dr. Prasad, have you heard anything about that? I don't know about that, but I will say a few things about MMWR since the listener asks. This is the CDC's journal. And throughout the pandemic, you can go to my sub stack, Manai Prasad's Observations and Thoughts,

and I've taken many, many of their articles and I've held it to rigorous scrutiny. They publish a lot of low quality evidence. And then the other point I think is that they have previously had some errors in the number of children deaths that they've had to correct through a coding error. So they have also made errors at the CDC. But in terms of the specific claim about ICD-10 codes, I'm not aware of that. But I would say I don't think highly of MMWR. I'm going to leave the pandemic with a very poor opinion of that journal and a very poor opinion of CDC statistics. That's for sure. And one more question. C. Coker versus Austin.

Dr. Victory is correct. This was proven in a lawsuit. So the case is C-O-K-E-R versus Austin Coker. Dr. Prasad, as always, thank you. You've been very, very kind and gracious with your time. And we've enjoyed every second of this. I know I'm speaking on behalf of Kelly as well. Kelly, I don't know if you want to say any final words.

No, just thank you very much. Again, I will reiterate what both of us said early on, which is robust, vigorous debate is so critical. And I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate Drew making this platform available for me as well, so that we can have these discussions. I think smart, passionate people can have these discussions and learn a lot from each other. So thank you for being here and thank you for sharing your wisdom. And I think it's interesting that the audience was very engaged with their questions and thinking and listening. And so that speaks, that's the ultimate goal is we want other people to sort of see how this is done and to be thinking more broadly about this and not to just accept these things at face value because it's your team. There's a lot going on here. It's very complicated.

And we will continue to try to uncover what we can. And let's see. We'll go to V Prasad MD MPH at Twitter and also give us that Substack one more time. It's Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts on Substack. Thank you so much. And plenary session. Thanks for having me. The other podcast we put, you betcha.

We'll see everyone tomorrow for a call-in show. Thanks, Kelly, as always. Great job. Thank you. Thank you. 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 a replacement for your personal doctor,

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