Ask Dr. Drew - Hidden In $1.7 Trillion Spending Bill: MORE Censorship Of Physicians. Dr. Joel Zinberg Discusses Omnibus’ Risky Limitations of Off-Label Prescriptions – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 173

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

“1 in 5 prescriptions are written for an off-label use” writes Dr. Joel Zinberg. But a section of the new spending bill could take away a physician’s ability to use their clinical judgement when writing prescriptions – and CA’s AB2098 could muzzle doctors’ speech even more. Dr. Joel Zinberg – an expert on the crossroads between medicine and law – discusses LIVE on Ask Dr. Drew. Dr. Joel M. Zinberg, M.D., J.D. is a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is a native New Yorker who recently completed two years as General Counsel and Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President. He practiced general and oncologic surgery in New York for nearly 30 years at the Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine where he is an Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery. Dr. Zinberg taught for 10 years at the Columbia University Law School as a Lecturer in Law where he created a course on the legal, policy and ethical issues surrounding organ transplantation. He received his J.D. degree from the Yale Law School, his M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and his B.A. in economics with High Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from Swarthmore College. Learn more about Dr. Zinberg at https://cei.org/experts/joel-zinberg/ 「 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. 「 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

Everybody, today we're going to be speaking with Dr. Joel Zinberg. He is a physician and an attorney. He got his law degree from Yale and his medical degree from Columbia. He is also had an economic degree from Swarthmore. He and I sort of were around the same kinds of institutions at around the same time. So I'll be interested in talking to him. He is, amongst other things, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a native New Yorker who recently completed two years

as general counsel and senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisors in the executive office of the president. He wrote an article that caught my attention in the Wall Street Journal. The FDA wants to interfere in the practice of medicine. Apparently, a little-known provision in the omnibus bill is going to make it impossible to practice medicine essentially because they're going to forbid us

from doing what our judgment calls us to do for our patients. You'll have to see what he has to say about that. And I've got many other things and many other concerns to bring to him and we will do it right 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. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. We'll be right back. style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com

for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. 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. Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need.

TD, ready for you. And as always, we are out on Twitter spaces and we'll be watching you at the restream as well as the Rumble Rants, where you guys are kind of quiet now, but Susan will be there monitoring you guys. Uh, Dr. Zinberg is what we call a overachiever. In addition to his Yale law school and Columbia medical degree, he became a cancer surgeon and, uh, spent 30 years at Mount Sinai where he was an associate clinical professor of surgery, been involved with health policy, uh, law and medicine for his entire career taught Taught for 10 years at Columbia and was a law school lecturer at the law school. Taught a course in legal policy and ethical issues surrounding organ transplantation.

And he's been with the State Board of Professional Medical Conduct and on Mount Sinai's Ethics Committee so we can get into all that stuff we normally got into with Dr. Cariotti. Please welcome Dr. Joel Zinberg. Dr. Zinberg, welcome. Thank you for having me. So let's start with the article. I've got a million things that are going to come to mind for me to ask you about, and I apologize if it's a bit of a Rorschach, but your training and expertise is in things I've been thinking a lot about these days, not the least of which is now that we are confronted in California with AB 2098, where it is essentially risking our license to discuss anything as it pertains to COVID vaccine, COVID treatment, that is outside of so-called standard of care, we could lose our license.

And having been through the opioid pandemic, I was fighting against the standard of care for more than a decade and watched it kill thousands of people. So I bristle when anybody sort of mandates standard of care cooperation, but be that as it may. Let's start with your article. The FDA wants to interfere in the practice of medicine. Tell us what you were thinking there. Well, so, you know, most people have heard the fact that this was an enormous bill, 4,150 pages. It's going to spend $1.7 trillion, but they didn't

know that there are 19 lines in there. It's about page 3,000 something or other that could potentially change the way we practice medicine. And the reason I say that is because they now are going to try to restrict the utilization of medical devices if the FDA decides that they don't want you to use it for that particular purpose. And prior to that, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act had been pretty clear that once something is approved, the FDA would not regulate the practice of medicine. You could use it for anything you liked. And they were very clear they were not going to interfere in the practice of medicine. And this is an attempt to change that. And it's in response to a particular case, which if you like, I can get into. But it's a very disturbing trend that I think is going to interfere with the physician-patient relationship. It's going to interfere with patient autonomy, and it's going to interfere with medical innovation.

I would argue that the trend has been underway for some time and we are now underwater of the tsunami of what our practice, our profession has become. So just to clarify for listeners, the FDA has nothing to do with the practice of medicine other than what companies are allowed to bring to market and under what conditions. What we then do with them are based on our training, our experience, our judgment, and what's best for the patient. That's it, period. Now, and it's very common for us to use off-label medication of all types for all kinds of situations. Now they want to get in the middle of all that. And when COVID hit, one of the really interesting things I noticed was that there was a distinct difference between my surgical colleagues like yourself and the medical folks, the so-called cognitive practices, in that the cognitive practices all froze in place.

They just froze and took all orders from on high. And all my surgical colleagues who are accustomed to making their own decisions when they open the surgical field, improvising, doing what's right. No one interferes once the surgical field is presented to the surgeon. That's always been the domain of the surgeons. This though, if you're saying they're going to start to mess with how we apply medical devices, this is their way. Finally they found their way in to the world of surgery. Well, yeah, look, this is a situation that is very troublesome because I think it's not

going to simply be medical devices. Once this precedent is set, I think the FDA is then going to try to expand it to the use of drugs. And the fact of the matter is that one in five prescriptions in this country are written for off-label use. And just so your viewers understand what that means, when the FDA approves a drug, it approves labeling for a specific indication. And it may be more than one indication, but there's always at least one indication. And when you use it for a use or an indication that's not part of that label, that's called off-label uses. But there's nothing that restricts your use of that.

There never has been. And specifically within this statute, there is a section that's applicable to devices that says they will not interfere with the practice of medicine. You can use devices off label. And what this new 19 lines does to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is it repeals that section. It now says if the FDA decides that something is too risky or it's not effective, et cetera, they can ban that use.

And I would suggest that that's really an awful situation because it creates a possible chilling effect. It's going to keep people from utilizing things when they discern a potentially beneficial use because they're worried that somewhere down the line, the FDA is going to come along and say, you know, you shouldn't have been using that. And then people will be somehow penalized for that. And that's how medicine advances. We look at existing drugs. We say, hey, this might work in this other setting. Let me try that. When you do try that, you say it worked and you and your colleagues may try it one or two more times. And if it seems to be efficacious without too many side effects, you then try utilizing it in studies. And when you complete and publish those studies, people begin to realize

that maybe this is good and that can become the standard of care. And that's incredibly common in fields like oncology, in fields like pediatrics. In oncology, most of the standard treatments are drugs that are off-label or combinations of drugs that are off-label. And in pediatrics, where it's too expensive and difficult to conduct studies because of various federal regulations, they're using drugs that were approved for adults in pediatric population all the time. So do you really want to chill that? Do you want to create a situation where a drug that or device that we know is approved for one use, but would be helpful, maybe even essential in another use, is banned. And this all comes out of this case, Judge Rottenberg Center versus the FDA.

It's a 2021 case in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the D.C. Circuit, where the FDA had published a rule in 2020 that banned the use of an electrical stimulation device that was used by the center for self-abusive patients, people who were doing things like banging their heads or biting themselves, mutilating themselves. And this was the only effective treatment that could keep them from doing it. The FDA published this rule and then the center and the parents and families of these patients had to go to court, even though they had told the FDA this is the only thing that's effective. They had to go to court to get the court to strike down that FDA rule because it was very clear in the statute that they were allowed to use this off-label. Meanwhile, the FDA had continued to allow its use in multiple other areas to treat all sorts of addictions like smoking and drug use,

but they wanted to ban it for this one use where it was the only treatment that these families found was effective in keeping their loved ones from hurting themselves. So I'm just concerned with where this is all coming from and trying to understand what we are into here. Do you think that some of the reason for somebody thinking this was a good idea, do you think it had something to do with the black eye that many suffered for trying to repurpose medications, which I literally cannot name today because if I name for, I've used a million times. And now suddenly that became this weird political phenomenon. Do you think, Caleb has to actually push up on the screen

here in front of me that these things are not effective in the treatment of COVID because they didn't even put their name out, Caleb. I'm not going to mention the name. You can't say the name, but I can put it in a disclaimer. So those are the rules. Okay, put it in the disclaimer. All right. But my question is, did that create the energy around which people like the FDA felt they had to now begin to determine bureaucratically how medicine is practiced, that somehow that was such a dangerous move that people had made, that something like that, an off-label use of a substance that

is so dangerous could never happen again. Well, no, I don't. I think that's part of the story. But I think the bigger story is the FDA tries in many ways. And by the way, I think the FDA is in most regards is an admirable organization that most people in this country admire and it does a good job. But they try in multiple areas to control use of drugs and devices, to control how medicine is practiced. And this was not the only instance. And by the way, this effort to control this particular device started in 2016 when the FDA first proposed banning this device, and it took them until 2020 to do it. So what do I mean by

that? I mean, for example, we found out early in the pandemic, there are things called laboratory developed tests, which is when an academic laboratory, like my hospital, Mount Sinai, like University of Washington, they came up with tests for COVID. And there's an ambiguity in the law about who regulates these laboratory-developed tests. The FDA has always insisted that they have the right to do it, but those tests are actually regulated under another branch of the law by a different agency, under a law called CLIA. And the laboratories have always said, look, we are allowed under CLIA to develop these tests. We are a reputable organization. We're filled with high-powered

academics. They've done, generally speaking, a very good job. They had all of these tests ready to go in February of 2020. And the FDA insisted that it was going to, instead of looking the other way, which it regularly does for these tests, that now that you actually had a real emergency use for these tests to test for COVID, it said, no, you can't use those tests. You've got to use the CDC test, which has been developed, which took an entire month for people to realize was a flawed test. So we had basically no test in this country for a month at the outset of the pandemic because the FDA and the CDC were trying to sort of assert this authority to control everything. You have other areas like this limits on off-label use. For example, the FDA has always

insisted that drug companies or their representatives can't promote or even talk about off-label uses, even if everything they say is true. And this was the subject of a 2012 lawsuit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which happens to be located in New York, where the FDA had actually criminally convicted a drug company representative who was talking to a physician and mentioned an off-label use, even though everything this physician said was true. And the court struck down that conviction saying it's a violation of the First Amendment, that they cannot regulate if everything he says, the representative says is true and is not misleading. So this is all of a piece in, I think, the agency's efforts to control things. And it's just one area where I think they've kind of overstepped. Initially, they overstepped the statute. Now that the statute's been amended,

they, I think, are overstepping common sense. And, you know, if you want to talk about the two drugs, which you were talking about there, which sort of like Lord Voldemort, they do not speak their names. It's kind of the, you know, this was actually an illustration of the system working. People were desperate at the outset of the pandemic for drugs that would work. And they had a hypothesis about these drugs. These drugs had been used in other instances where you wanted to depress the immune response. And that was initially seen to be the problem with COVID. People had a very exuberant immune response. That was caused, that sort of inflammation was what was causing many of the medical problems, even leading to death. And these drugs had been used in that setting before. So there was a reason

to try them. It wasn't some crazy guy coming out of the forest and deciding let's try to use these. There was a reason. People attempted to use them. There were studies. And when studies came out, it seemed that the drugs probably don't work. So people stopped prescribing them.

This is exactly how medicine advances. You have an intuition, you form a hypothesis, you test out that hypothesis, and you either accept it or reject it. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I've been saying for quite some time that clinical is what leads the research. We've gotten in this time in the world of evidence-based medicine, which everything has to have an evidence basis before you are allowed, so to speak, to use this in a clinical setting. And my question would be, is this really, again, part of a process that's been going on for a long time where insurance companies have been dictating what we can do with patients and for how long now hospitals have set up with evidence-based

pathways clinical pathways that must be followed if physicians are being trained algorithmically not trained to think critically improviseise, think outside the box, use scientific method. None of that is any longer prioritized in the process. And quite, in fact, it seems to be actively suppressed in some way. And isn't this really just part of that tyranny of what started as something relatively benign, evidence-based medicine? Well, look, you know, when you look back and see how the FDA evolves, and it's been evolving for over a century,

you see that there's an incremental advancement of their powers over time. So they started back in 1906, there's the first Drug Act. They have very limited powers. Then in the 30s, 1938, the original Food and Drug Act, they gained powers to regulate for safety purposes. And arguably, those are good things in the sense that up until that point in time, you had proliferation of ineffective and often dangerous medications and things coming to market. And in fact, many of those statutory additions were in response to sort of catastrophes that happened. So the 1976 was in response to thalidomide. And there was a problem in the 30s with a sulfonamide preparation that was performed. There was basically antifreeze and hundreds of people died. So it's not that these were unimportant additions or that there should be no regulation. But the question is, once the thing is on the market, you've made a determination

that the thing is, I would argue, the most important thing is that it's safe. But they've added efficacy. That's fine. But once you've made that determination, let the process then go forward that people have some professional autonomy to make these advancements. I mean, at the end of the day, who do you trust more to make the medical decisions? Do you trust them? Agency bureaucrats in Washington or should a patient trust their physician? Because they are making these decisions in concert. They're trying to decide what's best for me in my particular circumstance. And if you're in a circumstance where, let's say, nothing has worked and you now are casting about for a solution and the physician says, you know, maybe this this worked in this other setting. Can't we try it here? Let's see. Are you okay with that? The patient says, yes. Why should the government be intervening in that sort of situation? And,

you know, that's really what we're looking at here. And it's, you know, there was others who agree that this is a problem. Senator Johnson, Ron Johnson has introduced a Right to Treat Act that would actually, it's very explicit. It bans any federal agency from interfering with the practice of medicine. And it's saying that they can't regulate the use of an approved drug if it's going to be used off-label. That's the sort of thing I think would be helpful if we're able to get that enacted. That sounds like finally a little bit of pushback. But moving away from the FDA again, do you agree with me that a lot of this is this algorithmic infringement that started as a good idea as evidence-based medicine and just became something that the insurance, the insurers, the hospital administrators, and eventually the educators used as a cudgel and something

that's actually taken over and away from how we were trained? Well, I think, you know, I think these things become sort of slogans, sort of like a virtue signaling in medicine. I'm only following the science. This is evidence-based or this is value-based care. And all the things, you know, for example, if you're talking about value-based care, almost all of the proposals and trials in that area have proved to be failures. Everyone, you know, it sounds like something should be great. Who could be against value-based care? Of course, I want to only promote treatments that are good value for patients and better

value than some other type of treatment. But in the end, the sorts of things like accountable care organizations and all sorts of experimentations and HMOs and things like that, they end up not panning out. They give inferior care and they don't save money. They don't do what they're advertised, even though in theory they sounded good. And in fact, they are in many cases, the exact opposite of evidence-based or scientifically based care because they're adopted with no testing. They're adopted as if, you know, it's obvious these would work. And that's exactly what we decided to go away from in the 20th century in medicine.

We decided to be more scientifically based. But to be scientifically based it requires that you give people some freedom it requires that you allow them to use their initiative it requires that you allow them to experiment is the wrong word but to at least advance some interesting ideas and then improvise improvise improvise is the word. That's what you're doing. But right. I mean, you've spent too much time with your surgical colleagues. You need to reach across to the ICU and see what's going on on medicine where everything is dictated by bureaucracy. They aren't they aren't permitted to use their judgment. But I can tell you, for example, one of the examples I cited in the Wall Street Journal article of an off-label use was erythromycin.

So erythromycin, your viewers might know, is an antibiotic. But people began to notice that it ICUs to advance motility, keep people from having things regurgitate back up, and to facilitate oral feeding. So that's an example of something that's used off-label because people were aware of what maybe seemed initially like a side effect. But then they said, hey, let's figure out a way to use this for a beneficial purpose. Another example I gave is rituximab, which is a drug that's used for lymphoma, which is a malignant condition of cancer, but it's now used for benign hematological conditions.

You want to encourage people to have the initiative to look and see where else these things might be used without having to resort to going back to the FDA and saying, oh, please, after 10 years of studies and millions of dollars, can I use it for this other indication? Right, right, exactly. So I'm going to ask you to step even further away from the FDA for a second and wonder if you have any opinion about the bill here in California that I mentioned at the opening, AB 2098, or if you have any familiarity or if you'd like me to basically give you the provisions of that bill. You can fill me in on exactly what you're asking. That would be helpful. So this is a new bill signed by our governor that the Board of Medical Quality Assurance here in California can take punitive actions, including removing the license of physicians who are found to have offered any opinion or discussion in informed consent that wasn't specifically laid out by the standard of care as specified by the CDC.

So for instance, if you had a 35-year-old patient and you were to say, you know, the CDC recommends you get this, they're saying it's safe and effective, they mandate you get this, but you know I've seen some supraventricular arrhythmias and I'm concerned, I'm watching, I've never seen anybody having severe problems from COVID,

but just want you to know that part of the informed consent is I see this thing evolving that may be a problem. I would lose my license for doing that. Right. No, this is what I thought you were talking about. Yes. No, I've actually written about this and I think it's a tremendous step backwards. And aside from the fact that, you know, what becomes the standard of care? How do we define standard of care? In this country, it's generally defined at the state level, and states have different standards, particularly from malpractice purposes. But generally speaking, it's what would a reasonable physician say? And another standard is what would a reasonable patient want to know?

And that may not be what the CDC says. And in fact, if we've learned anything through the pandemics, the CDC has been way behind the curve. They've been inaccurate often, they've been misleading often, and they've done a terrible job communicating things. And they've, so, you know, things like school masking and failure to acknowledge that there's something called natural immunity after you got COVID and that the natural immunity was just as good. And in some case, some studies even better than the vaccine immunity. CDC has really fallen down here. And to set them up as the arbiter of what is the standard of care is awful. And the reality is medical practice is difficult. Each patient is different.

They have specific circumstances. And for example, if you were a pediatrician talking to a child's parents and you wanted to tell them whether you think they ought to get the COVID vaccine or not, you have to be able to say just the things you were talking about that, hey, CDC recommends this. However, we know that COVID is almost 100% a mild disease in children. And unless if you have a healthy child who doesn't have underlying medical conditions, the risk of COVID is minuscule for you. Why shouldn't you be allowed to say that without risking your license? So I think that is a terrible, terrible situation. I mean, the CDC has been promoting things like childhood vaccines and COVID with virtually no evidence that it's helpful.

Yeah. And I had the good fortune of speaking to the president of the Board of Medical Quality Assurance. And she was an attorney. She was lovely. Her dad was a urologist. And she was very reassuring. But I woke up the next morning thinking, yeah, until somebody else steps into her position, they have this law to use however they wish. And the other thing, I have seen many circumstances across my career where the standard of care was established by really outlying evangelists. And again, I always point at the opiate crisis as where that started. We had people in pain medicine that believed they were saving the world from all pain they got the va's ear they invented pain as the fifth vital

sign the the joint commission followed the va the hospital boards the state boards followed the jaco and all of a sudden assessing a pain scale was more important than pulse because of some evangelist way downstream who were believe they were doing almost a religious, um, had a religious cause to, uh, pain in this country. And more importantly,

the, and more importantly, the result of that is an opioid crisis. You had, right. And that was the standard of care standard of,. Right. That was the standard of care. If you didn't follow that, you were doing wrong. You were actually, not only were you encouraged to write, you were penalized if you didn't do, if you didn't follow that standard of care, if you didn't write enough pain medications, and all of the incentives. And this is what I think a lot of people who make health policy in Washington don't understand. And it's something I was very privileged when I was at the Council of Economic Advisers to work with health economists who really

did understand that you have a lot of unintended consequences when you make these policies that seem to make a lot of sense, you know, in theory, but in fact, don't work. And what was the incentive structure in the pain is the fifth vital sign? The incentive and part of that process was they would ask patients, were you asked about pain? Were you satisfied with the amount of pain medicine you received? So what message does that send to practitioners? It says, be very liberal prescribing your pain medicine. That's the incentive. That's the unintended effect. And then as a result, we're sloshing around with opioids, and then you have an opioid crisis. Standard of care was you left with 60 pills in your pocket that was the standard of care whether you're whether a dental office internist office

er whatever it was but they were um there was you know you say there was punitive there was terrible punitive that this is what happens is the regulatory bodies and the professional agencies adopt the standard of care. And so now I'm running a chemical dependency program in a freestanding psychiatric hospital, fully accredited. When Jayco comes in and my heroin addicts, three days into heroin withdrawal, have an unhappy face, they demand I give the heroin addict opiates. Demand it. And then I get hit by the Department of Mental Health, the hospital, the insurer, the state board, all come in because a heroin addict in withdrawal does not have a big happy face in their misery.

And this is the level of insanity that we had going there. And that was just on my unit. The other insanity was whenever my opiate-addicted patients, when they were brought, you know, gaffed on board and were doing well and sober, were taken out without exception by our peers. That's how they died for 10 years all around me, our peers killing them by practicing the standard of care.

So on one hand, I'm trying to do something that violates the standard of care because it's so insane. And on the other hand, the standard of care is killing patients by the thousands just around me. And so I absolutely bristle when people bring up the standard of care. I think it's a disgusting standard that can't be allowed in our practice. But physicians have become so used to becoming algorithm followers, employees, bureaucrats. They're not like you guys in surgery, who no one has interfered with in the OR yet.

But we are interfered with every minute. Well, I know that I know there's technical details of what how you do your procedures and getting somebody the OR is a whole other thing. And what you do afterwards. Yes, I know that's all controlled. But the point is that you at least have some autonomy and ability to improvise that's being eroded everywhere. And it's used, the defense is, well, there's not an evidence basis to it. And I, which is another thing I've seen as somebody working in addiction medicine, I've seen the evidence basis and the fads come and go

for the, based on evidence basis. And I've seen people get hurt by evidence-based medicine over and over and over again. And so it's, again, pardon me if I don't enthusiastically run to follow all evidence-based medicine immediately. And, it's, again, pardon me if I don't enthusiastically run to follow all evidence-based medicine immediately, but you're being forced to. Right. No, but look, I think the bigger problem here is the so-called evidence-based medicine is not really evidence-based. And this goes for, unfortunately, a lot of the fads we're seeing now that are being forced down our throat in medicine.

Someone gets a bright idea. They may publish a small article and then suddenly everyone cites that same article over and over again. I mean, going back to the pain thing, the original push to prescribe more pain medicine was essentially started by a case report with about a dozen patients, which was a poorly conducted case report on top of that. That's what started this whole push. The actual start, if I can interrupt, was the Porter and Jick letter to the editors at the new england journal it wasn't even a study it was a letter to the editor and the porter and jick letter was quoted millions of times and it was nothing it was zero then there was a study there was also a zero study it was the one i think you're referring to where yes while treated in the hospital people didn't

develop addiction. Yes, we got that. We're all pretty clear on that. But that became the basis. For the evangelist, though, again, it's somebody in there gets it in their – doctors shouldn't have religious views. Correct me if I'm wrong. They shouldn't feel religiously about their views. They can have religious views all day.

But they shouldn't. They should not. There should be no – I don't know how else to describe it. I just call it evangelism. Physicians who are evangelizing cause trouble. It really goes bad almost every time. And look, we had evangelists for lockdowns in the COVID situation and it harmed people, a lot of people, and nobody was able to, and they got control of the governors and the regulators, and all of a sudden, all that was going wrong with kids and schools begged no issue. And not at all clear that that evangelist was right, but because she was an evangelist, she was able to go out and convince people on the political and regulatory side.

That's how we get into trouble in medicine today, it seems to me. No question that there was a push to turn this into a single standard that would be dictated from Washington and that this was what everyone should follow. And the fact of the matter is, multiple studies, including one that I have forthcoming with my colleagues at CEI and at the Paragon Health Institute, where I'm the director of the public health and well-being, is going to show that the states that did less aggressive measures did as well health-wise as the states like California and New York that were extreme in their lockdown measures.

So you did no better health-wise, but you crippled the economy. You kept kids out of school with resulting huge decreases in their test scores. And that's something that's not going to go away. It's going to impair these kids' lives. They're going to earn less over their lifetime. They'll have less achievement over their lifetime, all because someone decided this is the way to go, based on no studies.

And it was based on computer models that themselves were completely flawed. And people pointed this out very early on, but no one would listen. And when you had people like Jay Bhattachary and the people and his colleagues who pushed the Great Barrington Declaration, which said, don't impose these generalized lockdowns,

try to focus your efforts on the most vulnerable groups, groups like the elderly that we knew right from the start were far more vulnerable, that had an infection mortality rate that was a thousand times higher than younger people. because they were going against the orthodoxy. They were going against the religious zealots who said, we have to lock down, that's the way to go. Listen to everything that certain saints in Washington were saying. And therefore, we had a terrible economic downturn, terrible educational outcomes, precisely because we were not following the science. We were pretending it was the science, and that became the religious dogma.

Yeah, the religiosity. And it's all clear, not only the lack of developmental resources for kids in education, but the mental health consequences were absolutely predictable, 100% predictable in the risk reward analysis about what they were doing that they did not take into consideration. But now that I've been seeing email chains and talking to people who were actually in the rooms when these decisions were being made, clearly there were rogues.

They were evangelical rogues that went off and did whatever they wanted and did not have the full support of the commission that was being organized there in Washington. And that's, I think we're going to find out more about that as time goes on. And the email chain suggests that while there was no evidence base for lockdown, somehow the leaders were hoodwinked by the Chinese Communist Party and the policies they carried out there and convinced our leaders that they were absolutely fail-safe, which was any physician should have known that a respiratory virus cannot be contained that way.

But to me, that's sort of what happened. Do you have any other insights into that? No, I mean, from the outset, no one knew what was going on in China. And anyone who thought they did was really absurd, was ridiculous to think that you did. And of course, we still don't know the origin of the virus. So that's a kind of a different story, but really the same story. And now you're seeing just the reverse. China has finally figured out that, hey, maybe this complete lockdown stuff doesn't work.

And you're seeing hundreds of thousands of illnesses and deaths. And those are just the ones they're acknowledging. It's probably substantially higher. They probably had many more cases and deaths initially than they told us about. And they probably have many more cases and deaths now that they're not telling us about.

But anyone who trusted that as an example of what we should follow in this country was foolish from the get-go. And anyone who said it was vilified. But you'll find that, you know, states... Or destroyed. Right, yeah, or destroyed. But states like Florida, for example, where they actually had a common sense governor, Governor DeSantis, who very early on relaxed the lockdowns and then forbade school districts from imposing some of these mitigation measures and required that they stayed open,

they did just as well. And on educational and economic grounds, they did much better. So I think we have our answers. And this has been studied innumerable times now, including this study we have coming out. And, you know, we show that people who lived in those states didn't care for it. Many of them moved out of the lockdown states and moved to the freer states. Is there anything we should be doing as a profession? Is there, you know, we have a tendency not to stand up for ourselves. Is there something we should be doing? Well, look, I think there has been something that you were pointing out.

There's been a consolidation in medicine for one of a better term where individual practitioners are a vanishing breed everyone is now part of a bigger group and they're being bought up by hospitals and those hospitals are merging so you have decreasing numbers of competitors, decreasing numbers of independent practitioners with the result that everyone becomes an employee and when you're an employee rather than a professional you're serving two masters and it becomes harder for individual physicians to be effective advocates for their patients. And I think that's a disturbing trend. And if the Biden administration really

wants to do something good in the antitrust sphere, why don't they start looking at consolidation in hospitals and consolidation of healthcare and do something to reverse that. I think it will be to everyone's benefit, to the patient's benefits, to physicians' benefits, and to the taxpayers' benefits who won't be overpaying for monopolistic hospital systems. Dr. Zimberg, I appreciate it. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we wrap this up? Well, look, I hope that efforts of people like you and the readers of the Wall Street Journal and Senator Johnson with his right to treat bill will be successful, and this can be reversed, and we can kind of restore the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship and the ability of physicians to be good advocates

for their patients and patients to take advantage of that. I'm hopeful. It may take another few years to do it, but I remain an optimist. Well, I appreciate the optimism. I appreciate your efforts. Appreciate your articles. It's cei.org. Anywhere else you'd like to send people? They can look at the Paragon Health Institute too, where I'm the, as I mentioned, I'm the director of one of the initiatives. Excellent. Thank you so much, sir. And for the rest of you, we will come back with calls after this.

GenuSeal has so many products that Susan and I love. Their XV Moisturizer locks in moisture, making dry spots a thing of the past, which is especially great with the colder weather, of course. And with the immediate effects, too, you can see these results in as little as 12 hours. Guaranteed or your money back. Susan loves Genucel's Vitamin C Serum, the new deep-correcting serum with lactic acid that hydrates your skin

and reduces fine lines while preventing future wrinkles from forming. Don't believe me? Listen to Susan. I am a snob when it comes to using products on my face. The dermatologist makes a ton of money from me. But when I was introduced to GenuCell, I was so happy because it's so affordable and it works great. I was introduced to the Ultra Retinol Cream, which I love at night. All the eye creams are amazing. People notice my skin all the time, and I'm so excited because it's actually working. Take advantage of this New Year's promotion by going to GenuCell.com

and getting 60% off now with a complimentary gift set when you subscribe to my favorite package at Genucel.com slash Drew. All orders are upgraded to free shipping for the rest of the season. Use code Drew at checkout for an extra 10% off your entire order. That is Genucel.com slash Drew, G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com slash D-R-E-W. My guest is Philip Patrick. He is a precious metal specialist, trains at University of Redlands. He has spent years as a wealth manager at Citigroup, and his current position is with Birch Gold Group. So gold has always been somewhat of a safe haven, particularly in times of great turmoil,

much like our present moment, I imagine. Gold has always traditionally been a safe haven asset. Gold specifically has always been about wealth preservation, right? Gold has always held its buying power. You can look at as far back as you'd like in history. In biblical times, one ounce of gold would buy somebody 400 loaves of bread. And today it does the same thing. So it's a store of value.

But I would say in times like this, as you mentioned, it's particularly important when you're dealing with things like 40 year high inflation, you know, the air that's coming out of a stock market bubble. These times in particular tend to drive gold and silver up quite significantly. If things are different, the solution needs to be different as well. So I encourage everyone to get informed. And we have a lot of good information here to help your listeners. Just a reminder, I am not a financial advisor and I do not give out financial advice nor investing advice. Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five-star reviews, and thousands of satisfied customers. Check them out now. Visit birchgold.com slash drew and secure your future with gold. Do it now.

All right. We're on restream watching your comments. And of course, we're out on the Twitter spaces taking your calls. Support our sponsors that support the show. Oh, yeah. Hey, Drew, did you know that gold's gone up 300 points since we started advertising for Birch Gold? I hadn't seen that. It must have been because of your foresight.

I don't know. I don't know. I know Genia's had some big sales, but thank you to everybody who's supported our sponsors. We're even going to have a guest on because and they said that if I had them on, they would buy some Genia's sell.

Let me bring Janice up here. Raise your hand if you want to Twitter spaces. We're taking your calls there. We may have some interesting Twitter spaces news coming up one of these days soon. We'll let you guys know if that happens. But raise your hand, and then I just bring you up. You'll have to unmute your mic there, Janice. There you are.

Hi. Hi there. I know a lot of people, and including myself, with all the stuff, a lot of us see the Pfizer execs over in the UK that immediately admitted that they did not test for the vaccine for transmission and all that. We don't know where the communication breakdown occurred, whether it was Pfizer to the government, the government to the health officials, or so on. But a lot of people feel that we've been deceived about the effectiveness of the shot okay where where should our anger be directed at is it either uh that's an interesting

yeah jazz i'm going to put you on hold because you're you're using your speakerphone turn it to like oh can you use it to your regular phone maybe that'll be better let's see yeah take it off speakerphone is that better it's a really interesting question though i mean who should we piss that um i i think you should be pissed at anyone. All right. Is that better? You're much better, but I'm not going back.

Okay, just mute yourself. Okay, just mute yourself. He'll talk to you. All right, I'm going to mute her. So it's a great question. Now, who should we be pissed at? So the drug companies just do what the drug companies do. You know what I mean? I mean, they see a market. They think they have a good product. They stand by it. They did their research. The research seems a little that there might be some wrinkles in there that we need to revisit. Mostly, so think about it this way. Mostly, the research that was done was beneath the standard that we would normally maintain to approve a vaccine. Now, what you should be asking for is, okay, it was an emergency.

We rolled it out, got it, did what we had to do, took a little more danger than usual. Now, let's roll back and fill in what we should have done in the first place. A, no one's doing that. B, there are questions. And rather than addressing and answering these questions, all you get from your regulatory organizations, your government, whether you said something about the UK, I don't know if you're there or here, is get the vaccine, get the vaccine, get the vaccine, which seems unsophisticated, disingenuine. You have to be able to be open to two thoughts. You've got to be open to two thoughts, maybe three thoughts. One, it was an emergency. We rolled this thing out fast and took a lot of risks we wouldn't normally take.

Two, turned out it helped older people. The data is looking really good for older people without a lot of adverse event. Now, might we have to revise that? We might, of course. But it looks like this was very helpful to older people. And that was the group whose lives were endangered. That's whom we really needed to help. And it looks like we did

it looks like we did should we continue to vaccinate them i don't i don't see the evidence for that but but you know my clinical experience has been nobody got hurt a lot of people got help that's been my experience i don't see the advantage of continuing to vaccinate just yeah anybody now because it doesn't work with a new variant yeah but they could come up with a you know a new variant and then it may be causing problems with the booster there's concerns that if there are going to be side effects we might see it and there are concerned that it has an inverse relationship to preventing the virus actually it actually make you might make you more likely right it doesn't keep you from getting sick and we know for sure everybody else doesn't keep you from getting sick.

It doesn't keep you from transmitting, which is what most people are angry with, that they were fed that line as the justification for horrific mandates that were discriminatory. I would like somebody to look back on all this and to apologize where it's appropriate it's what our government should do never does it doesn't seem to be capable of doing it and answer the questions about what's going on in the younger populations are there increase in all-cause mortality is there more sudden death if maybe it's slight maybe it's's a lot. Maybe it's a little. I don't know. And what's causing it? Is it COVID? Is it vaccine?

Is it COVID plus vaccine? What is it? They won't even ask the question. That you should be angry. To me, the sum total, you should be angry at these regulatory agencies for pushing things that they don't have the science to substantiate their position and having done lots of things wrong that they should be looking back on and sort of acknowledging and apologizing so we don't make those mistakes again seems humbly to me call me crazy uh let's see russell here russell go ahead We hear you. Hello?

Hey there. Dr. Drew? Yeah. Hey, I had a quick question about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Have you seen any data to suggest there are differences in the reported adverse effects because it's not mRNA? They took it off very quickly because of very few bad events. Just a few dozen. I think ultimately there were a few hundred.

And I was one of these people. I had a bad reaction to it. And they took it down very quickly. Okay. Why? What are you thinking? Oh, no. I was just with some of the questions around the mRNA vaccines. I got the Johnson & Johnson.

That's the only one I got. I got it twice. So I was just wondering if there were less adverse effects long-term. It's not at all been studied. It seems to be a closed book on that one. And they're not even asking the questions about mRNA and long-term effects really either. I don't know that anyone's

really looking into that meaningfully. So these are all sort of unanswered questions. But it was a consumptive coagulopathy and a transverse sinus thrombosis that was really triggering

the concern with the J&J vaccine. You might look, if we come a time when we need another vaccine, Covaxin is an excellent vaccine. It's been approved finally here. Now it has to be manufactured.

But that's the vaccine I would recommend and I would take if you're in the younger populations particularly. Okay? Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, I just would like to know more about, I'd like to understand what's going on. There's so many questions still. Now, there was an article, I just read a giant review article today on the pathophysiology around COVID, and it was good. It was a very good article.

It was very thorough about things like myocarditis and clotting problems and the cytokine storm. I think we know that COVID does that. The question is, does post-covid do that for how long does it do that those they really didn't have a time horizon these things which are really the questions that need to be answered in other words should we be doing something to mitigate risks over time once somebody's had covid uh this is deb i guess it's deb. Your hand is up, but you're, there you are. Hi there. Hi there.

Ma, I have two questions. Have they changed or tweaked the formula from the very beginning formula? Number one, that's first question. What do you mean by formula? What do you mean by formula? Because they have differing, we now have a bivalent vaccine, we have different vaccines. But they haven't changed the technology. Okay, technology.

Okay, it just seems like a lot of this is happening this past year as far as the sudden deaths goes. And it didn't seem like that was happening the first year of the vaccine. So that's why I was wondering if they changed the, you calling it technology, I'm calling it a formula. No, but there are people that have suggested that the boosters have been more the problem than the vaccine, the original vaccine series.

There is data like that flying around. I don't know what to believe yet. Again, the medical literature is all over the place on almost any topic related to COVID right now. But it does appear, originally the big concern for myocarditis was after the second Moderna vaccine. Again, that's for whatever reason,

what seemed to, you know, Moderna's a higher concentration of the of the of the vaccine essentially and the thinking was well it's just creating a worse reaction that's why we're seeing the macroditis but then they started seeing it after the pfizer booster as well and after the pfizer initial series so i don't know i don't know what to make of all that again is Again, is it in people who've had COVID that are getting the reaction? Because pretty much everyone's had Omicron now. And how much risk should we take,

given that Omicron is a pretty mild illness in the vast majority of cases, particularly in young people? These are the questions that have to be answered and have not been yet. So very concerning. This is Sibiliaia I'm getting that right I'm sorry I was connecting CBO thank you for letting me speak I have muscle activation syndrome and I know it's a new condition that was recently added to the codes and it's been only really studied for the last 20 years but part of that study was also rediscovering

systemic mastocytosis and how it can progress from muscle activation syndrome so conditions to those kind of neoplasms. How can we help you today? What's the question? One of the things that I have been noticing is that I wasn't vaccinated but when I had COVID my muscle activation syndrome went into

complete remission. That's interesting. But when I went away, when I actually started feeling better, my muscle activation symptoms, especially the GI symptoms, came back, the IBSD and everything else. So I know Dr. A. French has done some study

on long COVID and muscle activation syndrome, and there have been some research that was just looking at how COVID affected people with mast cell activation syndrome that have shown also similar other people having gone to remission with even things like asthma. So it might be worth looking into those channels. Just wanted to share that, and i'll post a link to that as well very interesting maybe somebody who knows something about that will we'll uh we'll take a

look into that that's a excellent idea uh whoops josh we're gonna get you up here josh what's going on hey dr drew hey there um you know it's really interesting listening to you about standard of Hey, Dr. Drew. Hey there. You know, it's really interesting listening to you about standard of care. And I was thinking in mental health, the standard of care is the CBT-DBT. And, you know, psychoanalysts look at that and they say, this isn't good enough. And I know from my experience looking at both psychoanalysts, I'm not in psychology, but looking at both psychoanalysts and CBT, which is the standard of care, the standard of care feels like a cult. So the CBT feels very sort of, it doesn't really feel like there's cure there. I mean, there's short-term cure,

there's short-term cure. So if you go to, you know, if you're in psychoanalysis five times a week, so for five years, Josh, think this through. So yeah, you go to, let's say you go three times a week for five years to improve your symptomatology versus you go for CBT once or twice a week for a month and your symptoms are resolved for the moment. Who benefits from the most from one paradigm versus the other? Well, obviously, CBT is getting money here. Right, and the insurance. Yeah, the insurance.

So they dictate. They dictate what kinds of care is possible. And you notice that if somebody's going to get psychoanalysis, that's sort of looked at as like more recreational or spiritual development or something, and you pay cash for it. But it changes you. You pay cash for it. Yes.

Of course it does. It really works. It really does work. Well, so so anyway you would pay cash for that but but to your point it is a really interesting history here i've told you before to please look into this history there's a book by dr lieberman called shrink i strongly recommend you read it because it discuss discusses the history of how american psychoanalysis psychoanalysis dominated psychiatry for 50 years

or 35 years anyway, here, well, maybe 50 years, in the United States, unlike in any other country in the world. People have this fantasy that something like in Austria and Germany or France, that psychoanalysis was the dominant thing. It was popular in those places,

but they dominated here. And they made lots of mistakes. They hurt lots of people. They destroyed the National Institute of Mental Health, which they destroyed the state hospital system. They were the first, they became actually the first post-structuralist, I think. They destroyed the state hospital system.

They destroyed so much in the name of their wisdom as psychoanalysts. And I will tell you just personally, it's one of the reasons I don't become a subject in psychoanalysis as much as it fascinates me. I've looked at what psychoanalysts have done, and I'm not impressed. In any event, it took a long time before medicine, again, returned to American psychiatry. And then there became an overzealotry around medication because there was this renewed push for psychiatrists to be doctors and doctors used pharmacology to affect physiology. And the physiology of the brain was the big, you know,

sort of the call of the day in the decade of the brain back in the 90s particularly. I'm not sure what the name is here. You guys have lots of interesting screen names. This is never, never again is now. Hi there. Hi. Hi, Dr. Drew.

My name is Tina. Hi, Tina. First of all, I wanted to say I really enjoyed the interview you did with Edward Dowd. I think the actuarial data is probably some of the most solid data we can look at to see the beginnings of, you know. What's going on. I have a degree in biology. I worked in research for five years. And then I worked in pharmaceutical sales for 12 for a major player and very much understand package inserts, adverse events, contraindications, etc. I also, during the time I was in pharmaceutical sales, understood the very real concern of black box warnings and not to give things to pregnant women. My specialty was in cardiovascular drugs. My son was coerced to get vaccinated. He was 18. He was a high school athlete. And after the second shot, he had major cardiovascular adverse events. And we were gaslit for almost a year.

By whom? Who gaslit you? The medical community. It couldn't have been the vaccine. He must have had this one before, but as a varsity football player and an athlete all his life, he had to have clearance and exams. And he went from being a robust six foot three, 230pound lineman to clutching his chest and barely able to take out the trash and in extreme pain. And this, you know, he's now diagnosed. And this was early 2021. He was, high school job was at a retirement home.

So that is why an 18-year-old was vaccinated very early in the game. So my point is this. Before you make your point, I'm going to ask a couple of questions. Was that Moderna? Did you get the Moderna vaccine? It was Pfizer. And was the reaction after the second or after the booster? After the second.

He's only vaccinated twice. And it was almost within hours and within days. And, you know, I have definitely seen this a number of times and it's exactly what you're describing. And it's been in older and younger people. This, and this is not, I'm not talking about diagnosed myocarditis. I'm talking about this. I don't know what else to call it, but long COVID people get weak. They can't walk. They get short of breath. They get chest pain. They can't, they can't go a block down the street for many, many months. It usually gets better, but it is disabling for long periods of time.

And I've seen quite a bit of this. So I'm just mortified that your son was gaslit about it. It's just awful. There he is suffering with this. Well, yeah, he would be in the ER and I was not allowed to be with him. And so I would, you know, sit in the parking lot sometimes until 3, 4, 5 in the morning. And he would be sent away telling, they would tell him he was having panic attacks. Oh boy.

And, you know, because the EKGs were coming back normal, nobody, you know, they didn't want to look and do things like d-dimer test or troponins it took a naturopathic doctor um about eight nine months later to finally step in and diagnose and treat and by the way not that we would have been able to do anything diagnostically because there really isn't a set of diagnostic criteria for this yet but but that's why i sort of call it you know vaccine induced long covid because it's the only way i can understand it i've been sending cases like your it's the only way I can understand it. I've been sending cases like your son's over to Dr. Patterson, and they've been doing a lot of the inflammatory markers in the brain and find significant correlation between the vaccine-long COVID and the COVID-long COVID. So these things are biologically looking similar many times. Yes. I will also say that, so I sold ACE inhibitors as one of the

portfolio and you're familiar with the ACE cough. I myself had COVID in early 2021 and it was very strange the way the fever progressed over the course of several days. And the cough I had immediately reminded me of an ACE cough. So my mind went into, there was a cardiovascular. This is a cardiovascular. And I will tell you, I had the same reaction. I was very sick with an alpha or delta. I don't really know which one. But I had a fever of over 102.

I was climbing stairs, and I took my pulse, and it was 60. And I thought, oh, this thing gets the heart. There's no doubt about it. Something is happening in my heart. I don't know what. Maybe it's just the AV node, but this is definitely cardiac active in the heart. Absolutely.

And my son could be sitting and he went, like I said, football athlete on the line. Yeah, I get it. His heart keeps racing 110. You might look at the interview we did with Dr. Ryan Cole, who's trying to figure out the pathophysiology of all this. Did you see that? Yeah, I did. I've listened to Dr. Malone, McCullough. I was on this in early 2021, and my greatest frustration was not being able to convince

others to look at this critically and clinically. They thought, who am I to speak? I'm just a mom. My degree in biology did not carry weight against the message from Fauci, CDC, the WHO, et cetera. So another thing that really frustrated me was that when I looked for the package insert, I asked multiple pharmacists.

They didn't have a copy of the package insert, which meant to tell me informed consent couldn't be given. And I looked around and these shots, because you don't know what the adverse events, contraindications, et cetera, are. And none of the physicians could answer that question either. And I kept saying, what would the Hippocratic oath of first do no harm? And we essentially have sacrificed tens of thousands of young adults and children at the altar of big pharma for money Pfizer's profits are through the roof

and we're going to see thousands and millions of people suffer and my son I look at my son as a canary in the coal mine and I am I want to applaud you for bringing this into the mainstream I suspect you're having to hold back somewhat I hope I'm saying that isn't problematic, but I want people to recognize. I'm actually not holding back because I really feel like certainty is the enemy. We got to be prepared to accept the science as it comes. The only thing I'm having trouble with right now is that it's not coming. They're not asking the questions, and that's astonishing to me i mean just what what knocked damar down at the buffalo game tell us yeah what was that he's fine now what was it and then this

issue you brought up which is the most troubling and i don't know if you've heard me talking about it but i've been saying it for six months now how in the world am i supposed to give informed consent and by the way if i even attempted attempted in California, I could lose my license because we have this AB 2098 that prevents us from saying anything other than the so-called standard of care. Which is a violation of the constitution first amendment. I mean, you know, so I, I'm looking at all of this and I can only come to one conclusion. COVID was not introduced. The vaccine was not introduced to help us with COVID.

COVID was introduced to inject as many people potentially with this agent. And that puts me in the conspiracy realm. But everything from the get-go, I've been looking at follow the money. Yeah. I understand why you would say this. everything from the get-go I've been looking at follow the money. Yeah. And I am, I, I would, I understand why you would say this. I would caution you to try to stay with the evidence.

And I understand why you would feel this way. I mean, I get it. And Susan, I think you feel this way sometimes too, but, but I mean, it's a mother's cry for help too.

It's like, I mean, I'm just, I have three kids and I didn't want them to have the vaccine we were going to travel and and I had to wait until they lifted the mandate to have that booster to get on an airplane and only one of my kids got it but I I was just so not I I didn't want to get another one and Drew didn't want to you know he obviously has the worst response so far but it's just like no there's nobody listening it's it's the weirdest thing well but let me just say it's what's your

name again is it tina it's tina and i would say that people have been asking the question there are thousands of doctors asking the questions like mccullough like malone yeah like jessica rose like jennifer margulis like Jennifer Margulis, like Dr. Corey. There have been brave doctors asking this. And yet the marginalization of their voices, the downplaying of their questions, the character assassinations that they've endured. We've all been there. So here are the people I want you to keep an eye on.

Here's what I want you to do. Because I want to dampen your going in a direction. I want to kind of dampen it. I like her. I like her too, but I think she has the capability to give herself a more sophisticated view of the landscape. And John Campbell is a great resource. You can listen to his thing. Mulhatra, Dr. Mulhatra is asking great questions.

Look, follow what he's doing. Everyone gets a little excited when they start realizing, when they start seeing what's going on. Everyone needs to kind of calm down. But I would urge you in particular to look at all the email stuff that's come out on the Twitter files in the last couple of weeks. Because if you really follow that, it takes you away from the money and back into the world of power and evangelism people who want to be it may be and certainly drug

companies as you know is someone to work from they always blow wind into the sails of whatever doctors are doing and manipulate it and push it but it's the doctors that start it and do it. Think about it. When you're back when you were, you know, before you could voice the particular ACE inhibitor on anybody, those doctors had been thinking about it, reading the literature, had their peers in academic positions pushing them, you know, before they started listening to you.

And then, go ahead. I launched a drug, multiple drugs. I launched multiple drugs, but I launched a drug for irritable bowel syndrome. And we had a handful of side effects. And that drug was pulled from the market. I know, I didn't like that drug. I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

The Z drug? Yep. The Z? Okay. When it worked, it worked very well. But when it came out with a few side effects, and this is the other thing that is really troublesome to me, there is no medical liability or accountability with big pharma when it comes to vaccines. If you have a reaction, you are SOL. And the number of reported adverse events with these mRNA shots, and I'm not calling them vaccines, I'm calling them shots, because they do not align with the traditional definition of a vaccine.

The side effects reported in VAERS is through the roof. And that's another marker. Safety markers have been completely overlooked by the three-digit agencies. And that is... I'd like an answer. I'd like an answer for that. And if it is because of the coziness with the drug company, that's what Robert Kennedy thinks.

I don't know. There is a coziness there. Yes, I agree. But I don't know. My only experience with this is the opioid crisis, and it was a little bit different. The drug companies got blamed in the end, and let's's be fair they ended up taking the heat for it but it was really my peers that perpetrated the whole thing thank you tina i really appreciate your calls uh let's see here

uh susan should we kind of wrap things up here are we how are we take another call all right more call we'll take somebody named susan and then you'll be mad at me because i said that yeah i'm no i'm not i'm okay with it. Oh, the person I asked just disappeared. I feel like I'm coming out. I like hearing these calls this week. This is Zeus. There you are. Got to unmute yourself. Hey. Hey there. Hey. Dr. Drew, I had a question for you. So science is a very important part of this whole thing. It obviously has been from the beginning.

But scientific experimentation, right? I mean, whenever you're doing an experiment, your whole goal is to try to eliminate down to one variable, right? To control as many variables as you can. You're talking about really clinical science, right? And so you want to control as many variables as you can you're talking about really clinical science right and so you want to control as many variables as possible yeah so and i look let me preface this by saying i'm just a midwestern pleb i'm uh i'm nobody but you know i did go to school and i do understand science to an extent um why in this pandemic, like no other, did we increase the amount of potential variables by allowing the counter for deaths to become to potentially have a lot of different things?

We weren't dying of COVID, but it was dying with COVID. And I mean, wouldn't that introduce a lot more potential variables and be flawed science? For sure, right? Because we don't know what we're looking at if we're looking at deaths, right? You think you're looking at one thing, but there may be other things in that bucket of so-called deaths from COVID. And that adulterates the entire data set. But the reason, in my opinion, that happened is there was a general agreement on behalf of insurers and hospitals and the government that they were going to call a lot of things COVID in order to keep the hospitals open.

Otherwise, thousands of hospitals would have not been able to operate and kept them and closed them. So things that were sort of COVID adjacent got COVID money. thousands of hospitals would have not been able to operate and kept them and closed them. So things that were sort of COVID adjacent got COVID money. And that was the motivation for that. But there was sort of a, it was more than a wink and a nod. There was an agreement that that would sort of be how we keep the hospitals open. Problem is it just kept going.

Well, let me ask you this so if we can agree that there was another motive um that wasn't necessarily science the exact true science of it and how can we at this point and i just heard you say and i'm i agree with you that you know you're waiting for this science to come out and you want to speak and the the scientific you know what what, what, what is the science say, but how are we ever going to get that answer? And how can we trust anyone with the doctor's credentials, with science credential, with as a researcher, as a scientist, when I didn't see science, I saw, I saw ideology. I saw a Scientologist, saw people chasing religion. I didn't see the scientific experiments. I didn't see that process being executed.

Why should I believe that that's going to happen moving forward? My friend, you unfortunately represent what will be one of the great fallouts of this entire experience. You deserve more. You should ask for more. But I totally understand how you feel. And you are not alone. I don't feel that way. I'm not saying I'm with you,

but I understand why you would feel that way. And millions of people do. And that may be one of the greatest. There are so many untoward fallouts from this last three years. That is just one. And my hope is that at least the the medical community can re-establish some sense of trust in what uh and grow up here what we're doing how dare you not you what is

your point now all right we got to kind of wrap up here um because you and i have a bunch of work to do susan so uh we appreciate all the effort caleb has revised the website so please do take a look at that it's yeah we have lightning fast he spent he nearly killed himself doing it yes baby's still safe though baby's still safe oh yeah he's oh yeah he lived through it uh and let's can we go through the the week schedule here a little bit oh yeah we got a lot of people lined up yeah it's a very popular dr drew yeah so we have uh a lot of people lined up. Yeah, it's a lot of stuff coming. You're very popular, Dr. Drew. Yeah, so we have, where's my calendar? So, let's see.

Can you help me? There we are. We have Jeffrey Tucker. That's tomorrow. With Kelly. We're doing a special non-COVID, more political. It kind of goes into COVID a little bit. Well, it is COVID, but it's not a medical professional

he wrote an article i said i want to talk to this guy it sounded interesting we're doing a fifth show for the month and we're gonna maybe one day have a uh what would you call it a d fuck it bucket unfuck it bucket we're gonna start focusing on how to unfuck it that that is what we are doing and then on wednesday we're going to be a little bit later we're going to start focusing on how to unfuck it. That is what we are doing. And then on Wednesday, we're going to be a little bit later. We're going to be at four o'clock. With Richard Orso. Richard Orso. And he should be very interesting.

Then we're not here. We're going to do Thursday? Yeah, but Thursday. Not this Thursday. Thursday is Jeff D. Oh, shoot. No, we're not doing it. This is the Thursday we can't do.

Yeah. That's right. And then we have next week. I booked it though sorry caleb dr ryan cole coming back here on the first he's back with us again and then the following well we have a dell big tree on tuesday brooke jackson on february 22nd we got a lot of stuff coming these are very interesting people i didn't know dell big tree was maybe oh you know what deist is on the second sorry Sorry. That's the guy.

Yeah. The gold specialist. I want to learn more about that. She keeps saying gold specialist. He's from the Mises Institute. We're going to have a little talk about economics and ideologies around economics versus what the evidence suggests, how homo economicus actually works. Yeah. And Drew likes that stuff.

I am really interested in it. And also, um, sorry, I screwed up the date, but I'm trying to get my head back after this crazy week. Um, and I didn't know,

uh, I didn't know Dell big tree was confirmed yet, but everyone would, would probably be very excited to see him on the show coming up. So I guess that is confirmed now. I'll put that on the list soon. Yes, it is.

And one of our, uh, fans requested him and said that he gave us a shout out and she thinks that drew and and he would have a good um good chat and he they've been trying to be on the show for a long time and he has a big he has a lot of stuff coming out so um senator ron johnson is on the 8th. And we're working on. Susan is booking actively. Susan is making some announcements today.

We're working on Schellenberger for the 7th. Michael Schellenberger. No, it's true. I think he's booked. I mean, I have him in the calendar. Schellenberger? The senator. Yes, we do.

No, no. Johnson on the 8th. Ron Johnson is booked. And then we no. Johnson on the 8th. John Johnson is booked. And then we also have Jackson on the 22nd. Those three big names that Susan just dropped. I don't know if we were supposed to announce those yet. So just FYI. Why not?

I don't have that confirmed in my calendar, but he is a senator. So we will. No, I got it from Kelly. She's been kicking some butt over there. Okay. So we will confirm. We will confirm. We don't want to waste everybody's been okay good good okay over there okay so we will confirm we will confirm don't we don't waste everybody's time thank you for being here thank you guys some good ones coming uh you guys have been nice and i've been seeing your comments over there and i've

tried to ring in here and there and then also over at the restream how's that been at the rants rumble rants they're they're over there controlling themselves i love that's what they said i said they i saw that they said they were doing that, and they did. And I appreciate that. They're not being... We got to get the unfuck it bucket thing together on our fifth show for Kelly. Yeah. We want to have a segment called the unfuck it bucket, which we were laughing at.

How do we unfuck it? Right. In other words, how do we undo some of the things that have been done by all this? And how do we get our compass going in the right direction for everybody. Can't get things, get people healthy and happy and moving in the right direction. So we will look forward to more of that and we'll see you. Sorry,

Susan, what's that? If you're listening. Thank you, Emily Barsh. Emily Barsh, thank you for your bookings and help and producing. It's been great.

Tomorrow is four o'clock Pacific time. We will see you then. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here.

Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.