Ask Dr. Drew - How Are The World’s Smartest People Being Fooled By COVID Panic? Jeffrey A. Tucker (Brownstone Institute) Speaks w/ Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 206

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Jeffrey A. Tucker (founder and president of the Brownstone Institute) returns with Dr. Kelly Victory to discuss Big Pharma’s influence over healthcare in America, the upcoming 2023 Presidential Elections, and a recent Brownstone article that questions why so many of the world’s smartest people – on both the Left and the Right – appear to have been fooled during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Suddenly, in 2020, some of the smartest people in the world — James Surowiecki, Naomi Klein, Nassim Taleb, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, and so many more that you can name — stopped being smart,” writes Toby Rogers. “This happened all across the ideological spectrum. The test was simple — apply all of your smart social, economic, and political theories to the Covid response and vaccines… They all failed completely and catastrophically.” Jeffrey A. Tucker is founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Follow him at https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker and https://brownstone.org/ 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. 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 and https://twitter.com/DrKellyVictory. 「 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

As you're aware, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a conflict today and had to cancel at the last minute. And so we sat around all yesterday on Easter thinking, who could we bring in here that would be equally as entertaining to all of us? On his last visit, he certainly was so. And Susan said, what about Jeffrey Tucker? I'm like, absolutely. Anytime he wants to come back, love to talk to Jeffrey. We'll see what he's got to say. If you don't know, and things have evolved yet again since we last spoke to him, so I'll be very interested to get his thoughts. He is, of course,

founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, senior economic columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and throws thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, speaks widely on economics, technology, social philosophy, culture. Perfect person to help us tackle what's going on here. And, of course, one of the big questions is the panic and how are so many people, let's call it what it was, sort of maybe persuaded it's not a strong enough word, duped into it. What happened?

What happened to us? We're still trying to put those pieces together. We'll start right after this. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor. 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. And, of course, it's a special Monday show. Dr. Kelly Victory joins us today. We'll have a show tomorrow at noon, and then we will be away the rest of the week and pick up again next week. The sort of title for today's program was,

How Are the World's Smartest People Being being fooled by COVID panic and propaganda? Another way of saying how did they get duped? How did they get persuaded? One more time on Jeffrey. He is president and founder of the Brownstone Institute. Let me see if I can. He's interested in discussing pharma's influence over health care, which we'll sort of substitute today for what RFK no doubt would be talking about.

You can follow Jeffrey on Twitter at Jeffrey, that's J-E-F-F-R-E-Y, Tucker, T-U-C-K-E-R. One word, brownstone.org is where his writings are. And as I said, tomorrow at noon, we have Dr. Thomas Binder, who is a intensive care physician, a hospitalist, who was put in a psychiatric hospital for raising questions about some of what caused the smartest people to be fooled. He spoke up, and guess what? He was hit with a sledgehammer. So please welcome Jeffrey Tucker.

It's so nice to be here. I'm embarrassed, mort mortified i'm mortified that i've been substituted for robert f kennedy that's it's outrageous i hope you have more has had a beat on this problem for uh a long time before most of us were even aware of it that's right uh we're hearing a weird uh sort of uh crackle here caleb i'm sure you're hearing that as well can we just forge? Do we need to do anything? Yes, there was something odd. Are you still there, Jeffrey? Yeah, you might have switched it.

It's like a loose connection. Yeah, it seems like there's a loose connection that must have happened right before you came on air. I'm going to cut over back to you. Yeah, I'm going to open up a different browser. Okay, good. Perfect. Perfect.

That's Susan's go-to. And Susan came running in here at the last second. Those of you who are on Twitter spaces heard her because she was stuck in L.A. traffic. Oh, yeah. Which is, I mean, that's really, I mean, you were traveling, what, noon and still bumper-to-bumper traffic. No, I think there was a car that flipped over the side on the 210 so it took me up the one 710 it was faster um and then there was another accident there's just a couple of accidents i see you got bad luck yeah yeah oh there's jeffrey again you

back yeah how does this sound better much Much better. Beautiful. Awesome. 100%. Awesome. Completely resolved. See? I'm glad I said something. Well, so for troubleshooting for the future, this is Chrome instead of Firefox. Okay. Fair enough. Let me back off for a second and just ask what has been on your mind lately before we sort of launch into the stuff we want to discuss. Are there things, since we have last talked, I have, you know, Kelly has very kindly booked a lot of people that I've interviewed, some of whom I've really agreed with, but every one of them, I learned a new little piece of the puzzle. It's just extraordinary, all the things that were not apparent to us when this was all

happening. And I can sort of put, I can piece together sort of an understanding or I hate the word narrative, but I can understand this sort of as narrative, what went down, why it went down, why the extraordinary sort of mass formation psychosis, that's another matter. That's the one we want to talk about. But what else has been on your mind of late? Well, Dr. Rue, I can't get my head out of March 2020, unfortunately. I keep taking it apart almost, certainly day by day, but even hour by hour. And I very recently discovered and isolated the actual day in which they came to Trump and even

learned what it is that they said to him to cause him to pull the trigger, as we know. Under the official story that you hear from Birx and Kushner and Pence and some of the other stories, he was completely naive about the virus. And they went to him on the 14th and 15th of the weekend and said, look, it's really bad. You have to lock down the country. He said, oh, I didn't know. OK, I'll give you two weeks. Well, I don't think that that's true.

I don't think that whole story is right. And there's been a number of things that have bothered me about that story. One is that on the 12th was the day that he blocked all travel from Europe. That was a dramatic decision. We didn't even know the president could just decide that you can't come from Europe

and Australia and the UK. So there was something already brewing in his head. You remember that press conference that night? He accidentally said that he was blocking all goods too, which the White House had to correct the next day. So something had already changed. And then on the 13th, that was a very critical day because that was the declaration of emergency. It was also the day of the World Health Organization declared this to be a pandemic. But very, very crucially, the Department of Health and Human Services shipped out a classified PDF that laid out an org chart for how the pandemic would be handled. CDC and NIH were going to be charged with operations, but policymaking was transferred

over to the National Security Council. So that was really without precedent in American history, never before has anything remotely like this happened. But if you look at the org chart on that day, March 13th, it clearly puts the National Security Council in charge. So the idea that Trump was just bumbling around naively and then is surrounded by Pence and Kushner and Scott Gottlieb and others on the weekend, and then they decided to issue that March 16th edict

that all indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate should be closed. That was the exact words of the edict on March 16th. But the idea that he had to be talked into that on the weekend, that otherwise it was a surprise, can't be right. Either that or he didn't know anything. But actually, if you look back at his Twitter account,

you'll notice something very interesting. On March the 9th, which would have been, I think that would be a Tuesday, he had tweeted out that this was just a flu and that people die from the flu all the time and that pandemics come and go. He goes, you know, the bad viruses come and go and we'll figure it out and it'll go away and it's it'll go away and just grow up everybody just shake it off on the 11th

he tweeted out something completely different he said that all the powers of the federal government were going to be used to combat this virus okay so that's a and you know between between the 9th and the 11th, something dramatic happened to him. And so I, what I've mapped out in my article on the topic is that I think I know what happened now. And again, I can't prove this necessarily because a lot of it is classified information. As you see, once the National Security Council takes over something, it's suddenly buried in secrecy. But I think what happened to him is that Fauci and Michael Potager and a handful of others came to him and said, Mr. President, you have this virus all wrong. This is not a textbook virus like you were used to. This is very likely a bioweapon

from China, and therefore it has to be dealt with very differently. The good feature of this from your perspective is that we did sequence the virus back in January when China was still, Chinese scientists were still sharing information with us. We snagged the sequence and already we're working on an antidote for it. So by the summer, we'll be able to manufacture hundreds of millions of vaccines, distribute them to population, protect the population. And Mr. President, while there have been great presidents in the past, Lincoln, FDR, Wilson, and so on, nobody will have done anything remotely as extreme and wonderful and glorious as this.

You will have locked down the population, protected them from a Chinese bioweapon, a country you despise, and then under a warp speed arrangement, you will have distributed the vaccine to the masses of the population. And if that doesn't sweep you into a reelection, you will have distributed the vaccine to the masses of the population. And if that doesn't sweep you into a reelection, nothing will. So I think that's what they said to him on the 10th. So that was the 10th. And that's when he changed his outlook on things. And so he fully expected in his mind, his goal was to protect everybody from the virus.

So minimizing cases, they got, that's point one, minimize cases as much as possible, isolate, close everything. And then- Two weeks though, right? Yeah. And they said two weeks, but they came to him less than two weeks later after his announcement that maybe he wants an Easter opening, which was longer than two weeks later after his announcement that maybe he wants an Easter opening, which was longer than two weeks. So that was his way of broadcasting the fact he was open to a longer period. That wasn't an opening goal. And they came to him and said, Mr. President, we need another 30 days. We're just not quite there yet. And if you open now, you're going to be blamed for every new case and every death will fall on you and you'll lose election.

Right. So then he granted another 30 days. And he didn't really catch on to what was going on around him until for sure, until June, really. And recall that throughout the months of April and May, he was railing against the states that were opening up. You can't open up without White House permission. We have an opening plan for you. Follow the rubrics, and we've got all this stuff worked out, and so on and so on. So then he changed his mind and realized he'd been fed a bunch of baloney. And that's when he was watching Fox News and saw Scott Atlas on TV.

He gave him a call and said, look, I need a second opinion around here. So Scott Atlas showed up, and they spent some loving, interesting days and nights together where Scott Atlas told him basically that this is, in fact, a textbook virus. There is such a thing as natural immunity. The gradient risk of the virus is not anything like what Fauci told the Senate on March the 11th. So he's wrong. And these people are not following the science. The actual science says something very different from what you think. So, so that's when Trump changed his mind.

And once Trump changed his mind, he thought that the rest of the world would change with him. Right. He was like, oh, forget about COVID. This dumb right it's just okay right but but by then he had completely lost control of everything and he never really issued an opening up edict comparable to his edicts of the March 13th and March 16th so anyway doctor right my best scenario that kind of fits particularly the the most fascinating part though is when he changes his mind that that's the part i'd like to someday have some deconstruction on like what happened there because certainly when he did change his yeah when he did change his mind now we have burks running off by herself and evangelizing for lockdowns in all the states and then the states running amok like california and whatnot and anything trump said at that point

they did the opposite if you remember trump was saying hey take it easy i don't think you need to stay locked down we're locking down and so that was it That was where it really spiraled into an insanity. And I'm guessing that people who – we've got to think about that moment in the pandemic too because that's when they really started working on the panic. Because I remember – well, it was actually well underway before that. The press was just in this frenzy to the word grim and staggering. Those words were on their lips every other sentence. The press was just in this frenzy to the word grim and staggering. Those words were on their lips every other sentence. And I don't know even what they were talking. And I kept saying, when we get up in the hundreds of thousands, what word are you going to use?

That's when it's actually going to be staggering. What word do you guys plan to use? And it just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And it's now at a point where it's like they can't let go of it, almost like some sort of it's become almost an identity or something or a religious orientation. Is that what I'm seeing? Yeah. It became an ideology very quickly on. I mean, really, it was March 10th was sort of the turning point.

That was when the press started warning everybody and saying, this is the end of the world. And New York Times was already on board with the idea of panic. And they ran their famous article on February 28th called, To Take on the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It. But that was not quite two weeks earlier. But the rest of the press began to catch on over the following two weeks. And then by the 10th, panic was the watchword of the day. It was like, do whatever they say. This is the end of the world. And so on it went.

Yes. I had someone in a newsroom, a a news director come up to me in a local newsroom here in los angeles and say this is a and he said it by the way about six months after like maybe in the fall he said well this is an extinction event correct this is extinction for the human species i was like are you are you was like, what, what have we done to get your virology from Hollywood, presumably. But in all these Hollywood movies, there's always a virus that's widespread and deadly. Well, it turns out in the real world, those things operate really in a trade-off relationship. I mean, the more prevalent something is, the less severe it is, and vice versa. Because we evolved with viruses, and this trade-off is just part of what exists.

We can go into that or not. And there's a condition there called latency. But generally, something is going to... To be fair, if somebody really believed it was a bioweapon that maybe had combined both those features, which I'm sure if you're making a bioweapon, that's what you're planning to do,

I get where people would be frightened. But then the evidence was the evidence and and now here's the other thing we've learned i'm going to go to break in just a second and bring kelly in here but we also learned that there was a an extraordinarily developed pandemic inc pandemic inc that was developing uh they were doing war games and they were deeply involved with each other these were professionals that were dedicated in their life to preparedness and execution of pandemic. That has never existed before in medicine or anywhere else. That is a new professional, that is a new group, that's a new society. They were ready, they could not wait to pull the trigger. When you're a

hammer, the whole world is a nail. And they were deeply involved with their Chinese colleagues. So when the thing hit, they were persuaded by the Chinese colleagues. Caleb, you know what I want to show here. I want to show Jeffrey the graph. That the Chinese colleagues showed our scientists as what was documented per the effectiveness of their lockdown procedures. They convinced our scientists that locking down was the only way to go. It absolutely categorically worked.

And it just let us look at our data. And I'll show you the graph in just a second when Caleb gets it up there. Do you see the yellow line, Jeffrey, on the front of this magazine, of this book by Michael Singer? That yellow line is the line that our scientists saw. The virus is going up, up, up, and then they lock down and it flatlines throughout the country, which is total BS.

It's complete and total, total BS. So they believe that. Yep, it was a political maneuver. That's what it looked like. It looked like they were doing something political because there was no medical indication for what they were doing no one had ever contemplated that medically it was something to impress their up the up authorities or whatever then we have found through talking to michael singer who wrote that book we were just looking at

that in italy the the politic the politician in charge of Lombardy, which is the first, I guess you'd call it district, in the world to lock down after China, that politician, he wrote a book after he locked down Lombardy, and in that book explained that he really didn't think he could do anything for COVID, but he was a Sinophile, and he wanted to bring Chinese-style governing to the Italian peninsula. And this was his opportunity. And that was why he locked down. Unfortunately, when the rest of the world saw that lockdown, that's when

people followed suit. That's when it actually sort of unfolded. So there was these elements operating at the same time. That's right. And Trump had several conversations with Xi Jinping, and in each conversation, Xi emphasized the fact that he'd defeat the virus through lockdowns. And let us not forget that the World Health Organization sponsored a kind of junket tour of Wuhan and five other cities that that commenced on February 16th and lasted the better part of a week during which time they got a kind of Potemkin village tour of the glory of lockdowns and the World Health Organization released on I'm trying to keep this date straight, it might have been February 26th or 28th, they released a report written by the Stanford-trained American epidemiologist who was working for the World Health Organization at the time, that said that China defeat the virus through brutal lockdowns.

Now, on that trip was Clifford Lane, who is Fauci's assistant at NIH. So the U.S. signed off on that report, and that was distributed very widely in late February. So everybody thought that lockdowns were the way to deal with the virus, because that's what China showed everybody. My friend Jay Bhattacharya says that in absence of that report, that the lockdowns would never have come to the US, but it was the blessing of the World Health Organization of pandemic planning and lockdowns that brought them to the US. You're right that they were never part of pandemic planning.

In fact, they were never part of the CDC's plans, really. But there was a kind of industry that had developed gradually over the previous 15 years with all the germ games and all the rest of it. The Constitution and medical science and everything was never part of that. It was always about putting into gear all the government agencies and lines of authority and generals running around, the usual bit. And they were germ gaming this up until the last moment, all the way through November and December of 2019. Two months into what we know now, in retrospect, was the spread of this virus throughout the United States and Canada. So it was a fait accompli that this was going to happen. Once Fauci and Farrar were on the phone in the first week of February and they

decided to contact the military about this and national security about this because for fear of a lab leak, right? And then it was just a matter of time. And Trump was actually the last one to know. They finally just came to him, listen, you marionette idiot, you need to shut up about how this is a textbook virus and get on board with us. And he said, Oh, okay. Uh, that took them the better part of a month between February 4th and, um, and March 10th to finally get their, their ducks lined up. And then next thing, you know, uh, is the end of all, uh, uh, rights, liberty and, uh, uh, and, and science itself.

Wild. All right. We're gonna take a little break. And as always, liberty, and science itself. Wild. All right, we're going to take a little break, and as always, I learn, every interview I learn something, and this has been a very interesting piece of that history, again, putting the pieces of this puzzle together. And last time we were here, we were talking about Birx's biography, where she still

unrepentantly enthusiastic about the lockdowns that she brought upon the world, But I'm wondering if she continues to feel that way, but we got to take a quick break. I want to bring Kelly Victory in here. Got a lot more to talk about. Jeffrey Tucker in the house with us. Follow him at thebrownstone.org or also on Twitter, Jeffrey Tucker. We'll see you in a minute. Springtime is here. And personally, I can get red and irritated skin during these months, especially when I travel. But now I have an extra layer of protection thanks to GenuCell Skin Care. GenuCell's Ultra Retinol, formulated with

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Some platforms have banned the discussion of controversial topics. If 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 Kelly, welcome back. And you're here with Jeffrey Tucker. Hey, Jeffrey Tucker, so happy to have you here today.

Thank you for spending your afternoon with us. Lots to ask you about. And by the way, I don't know what exactly your academic background is, but I never fail to be impressed when somebody who I presume wasn't formally scientifically trained is able to succinctly and quite accurately summarize some things having to do, for example, with virology. You are spot on that despite what Hollywood would lead you to believe, we don't have big, bad viruses that are fatal to 80% of the population and travel rampantly. You came to the conclusion that the average individual for scientists, for whatever reason, couldn't, which is that we've known, we've always known that as viruses mutate, they become highly

contagious and less severe. If a virus wiped out the entire population that it came in contact with, it would die and wouldn't spread. That's the nature of viruses. So good on you. Right. You know, my training is in economics, but when this pandemic hit, the very first thing I did was, well, I read about the subject of viruses. And one of my favorite books called Cell Biology for Dummies on Amazon. And I, unlike most intellectuals outside of medicine, actually spent some time with that book. And that took me to the works of Sunetra Gupta, who's just this great theoretical epidemiologist who wrote a whole book. I think her name of the book is something like, Should We Fear Pandemics? I mean, you know, and she discusses the dynamics. Again, prevalence

trading off with severity subject to latency. And that's all discussed in her book. So it was one of the most frustrating things for me was that once people are codified as intellectuals in whatever field they're in, they think that there's nothing else to learn. So when the pandemic hit, you had historians and economists and sociologists and anthropologists and everybody blah, blah, blah, blah about the subject without ever having to take it out an afternoon to actually learn about the subject and what they're commenting on. It was outrageous

and intellectually irresponsible in the extreme. These are the world's smartest people and they can't be bothered to pick up a book? Well, I have said from the beginning of this, Jeffrey, I really hope that the next crisis involves something like international financial markets or commodities pricing or something I know nothing about so that

I can opine incessantly and argue with people like you who have advanced degrees and spent their entire career studying and writing on this. I really, it will be titillating and I can't wait, but that's for the next crisis. There's no question. The intellectuals were the great menace over the course of the last three years, The great menace. They devastated us. They shocked us. They endorsed segregation. They endorsed mass quarantines against all public health experience. They demonized, stigmatized.

Early on, they were stigmatizing anybody who got COVID. You know, like, oh, what did you do wrong? Were you at a super spreader event? Did you fail to wear your mask? And so on and so forth. And then they demonized you for having doubts about the medicine that the government had just invented the day before yesterday. Shooting it up in your arm. I'm not so sure.

Wait, now you can't go to the library, the theater, or a bar or a restaurant because you're a poisonous person. This really happened in our times. It was brutal and ignorant and medieval. And we just threw out all of our rhetoric about human rights and went straight back to the 19th century, really, to the Middle Ages. Why are so many people not seeing this or not studying it or not apologizing or taking responsibility? It feels like it's a small group, like the three of us, that are trying to come to terms with this that was exactly as you describe it. And by the way, in addition to piling on to Kelly's desire to talk about a topic we don't know,

I love the people who learned how to pronounce the name of a medication and an hour later had very strong opinions about how it should or should not be used. That to me was the highest level of comedy and tragedy, unfortunately. But back to the original question. What do we do to get everybody to kind of examine what they've done here? Just to roll it back just slightly, why did so many of our intellectuals fail us? And I came to the conclusion very gradually

that the reason for this is that what intellectuals are actually good about is not knowing stuff, but they're very good at reading the room. And it became clear from the middle of the march what position you're supposed to take, right? It became very obvious. Well, as a responsible intellectual with career aspirations, I know exactly what I'm supposed to say. So I don't care what a first-year medical textbook says about viruses. That's of no interest to me. I've already figured out what I'm supposed

to believe. The other question is, why are they so good at reading the room? And why should that matter? The reason is that their professions are not very fungible in an economic sense. In other words, we like to think that a tenured professor at an Ivy League school is the freest person in the world, free to speak his mind, right? Oh, he's got all the job protection, a high salary in the world. Everybody loves him and respects him. He can say whatever he wants. Wrong. You say the wrong thing in our times, you get canceled. And what does canceling mean? It means being toppled from your perch of power and with no net. You have nowhere to go. All these people imagine themselves to be just one or two sentences away from being homeless and

unemployed. That makes them the most risk-adverse crowd imaginable. Those are our intellectuals. Those are our intellectuals. They're terrified of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. So what they do is they spend all their time figuring out how to read the room and say the right thing for purposes of career advancement, protection, and so they don't face that dreadful fate of landing in a community college somewhere teaching nine hours a week, right? And I understand that. I understand that. I mean, I get it. But unfortunately, the population was trained to respect these people and believe that what they're saying is their best estimation of the truth. And the media exploited their craven careerism to panic the population ever more.

And this went on months and then even years. It's appalling. Now, as to why we're not seeing a rethinking, as far as I'm concerned, the world fell apart in March 2020 and hasn't been put back together again. We're still seeing the consequences every day from this. The fact we had to use Easter potatoes instead of Easter eggs over the weekend was a good indication of that. We're seeing the effects of it in inflation and the effects of the dollar and world trade. The decline in living standards, decline in life expectancy, it's all an outgrowth of these lockdown policies and everything that followed from it.

I think one of the reasons we are not seeing anybody, not too many people anyway, coming forward and saying I was dreadfully wrong is because they were so wrong they can't admit it. So the memory hole is a lot more convenient than intellectual honesty. So I think this could go on for years and years. Well, I do think, you know, to quote Mark Twain, it's far easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled. You start with that. But now I believe that these people know they were fooled. You don't need to convince them. They know it. But you are correct. I believe that this is cognitive dissonance on steroids. They don't want to admit it because acknowledging that you were a fool,

acknowledging that you were duped, acknowledging that you bought into it, hook, line, and sinker, and that you foisted it upon others and perhaps shamed people or severed ties with family members or friends, lifelong friends, and that you stood on this moral high ground, ever shrinking moral high ground, but you stood on it. It is hard for people to acknowledge and be willing to say it. It is a rare person, I think, who can stand up and say, I bought into this. I was terrified. I did not well control my fear. And I'd like to talk with you more about fear in and of itself as a huge driver of what happened with this pandemic.

But I think it's also a, it's really a failure of character in my mind that someone cannot stand up and say, I made these decisions, I was wrong. And I think the fundamental consequences of admitting they were wrong, whether those are legal consequences, financial consequences, career reputation consequences, I think at this point, I think you're right, are just too vast for most people to be able to swallow it. And let's not forget that the COVID cult, the ideological group gathered around this sort of groupthink of restriction and control and the great three tests of compliance and lockdowns and the masks and the vaccines,

they are absolutely brutal towards anybody who steps outside of the narrative. So look what happened to, what's her name, Leanna Wynn. I think she's a doctor who used to write for the Washington Post. Maybe she still does. But she began to rethink things. Like maybe schools should be open and maybe we don't need to have masks on the kids. Maybe we actually don't need to fear COVID. Maybe the risk gradient is

not as homogeneous as we thought. She started saying these things and then she was scheduled to be a speaker at some conference, some medical conference, something like that, and she was shouted down and cancelled and, like, I think ultimately prevented from speaking. So they deal as brutally with anybody within their ranks who dissents as a military would deal with a deserter. They get a bullet in the head as a lesson to other people. Yeah. I think I have boiled it down to this, and I think you're right. This is a trifecta. That's one piece of the trifecta. To me, you have to begin with fear because fear is what causes people, drives people to what I call their

intellectual and emotional basement. Fear is controlled by the most primordial, least developed part of the brain. You are incapable of truth cognition when you are in that place of fear. You go to your reptilian brain where you freeze or fight or flight that part of your brain to get the vast majority of people in a place of fear. You take these academics, as you said, and you elevate them. You give them the thing that is most intoxicating to them, which is power and a platform. You give them carte blanche to repeat the, okay, so that these little petty tyrants are out there and are so pleased with themselves. No one ever listens to them. They're

incapable of actually doing anything, which is why they're stuck in an academic institution. And you elevate them. And then the third part of the trifecta is what I said, you just laid out, which is then, and then you absolutely decimate anyone who steps out of line. So you need all three of those components, the fear, the elevation of the petty tyrants, and then the ability to use censorship and cancel up and not to use a cudgel? I noticed the other day I saw an interview with Dr. Fauci where somebody was saying, well, how do you feel now about Dr. Bhattacharya's declaration? The Great Barrington Declaration. The Barrington.

The Great Barrington Declaration. And he goes, you mean just letting it rip and kill people? Letting the virus rip all over the place? And I thought, oh my God, that's not at all what they were talking about. But he's cartoonized these people. He's made them into cartoon characters with simplistic ideas that are worthy of a cartoon character so they could smush them yeah uh if you wouldn't mind let's just let's take a quick uh uh pause on that point because uh uh there's literally no person in the planet even for thousands of years who's ever believed in let it rip as a philosophy that that

that implies a complete lack of rationality all right correct so nobody advocates a lack of rationality um just as an example uh long before this pandemic if you read any magazine uh designed for older americans who are vulnerable to the flu or respiratory infections or whatever. They all recommended that during the flu season that they stay relatively isolated, that they avoid large-scale events, that they protect themselves from the seasonal viruses.

So that's not let it rip. That's using your brain. And that's really what the Great Branson Declaration was advocating. It wasn't a new plan. It was to codify and add some scientific rigor for what has long been the habits of people in the presence of pathogens with which we have evolved and learned how to deal with. So let it rip is not, let it rip would be something like if your great grandmother's inside and she's a little bit nervous about a flu, that you just show up and say, no, you have to get the virus.

You know, that... Right. And nobody ever advocated that. You know, we want to use our intelligence and our rationality. In this case, rationality would have dictated that those who are not vulnerable

to medically significant outcomes should, in fact, meet the virus, or I should say, put it another way, go about their lives normally, even at the risk of meeting a virus. I'm sorry, you know, but we meet viruses all the time. We live in a world of pathogens. That's just what, and our immune systems adapt to that because there's nothing more dangerous to human life itself

than immunological naivete. It's a disaster for us to constantly stay away. In fact, that's why we have such a pandemic of RSV right now and why so many people are unhealthy. We went for two years by hiding from the pathogens, which doesn't make us more healthy. It makes us sicker and more vulnerable than ever. So that's what the Great Brantum Declaration recognized, was that we have a delicate dance with pathogenic spread. And that this particular virus, which we knew from February, if not earlier, had a huge gradient of risk that was mostly concentrated on the end-of-life plus co-morbidities cohort

of the population. Those are the people that should have been protected themselves while the rest of the population got infected. Now, maybe I shouldn't have used that word, gone about life normally, okay, and the virus circulates among people that are not facing medically significant outcomes from, during which time we work on therapeutics, which we failed to do, and figure out how to tackle this virus. What do you do when people are sick? You figure out how to make them well. That would have been a nice thing to think about at the time. During that time, you develop what's called herd immunity.

Now, what is herd immunity? It just means that the R0, which is the transmission rate of the virus, falls below zero so that not everybody has to meet the virus. It means that the virus stops circulating at the same, it becomes endemic into the population so that this live virus that would otherwise be a threat is not a threat simply because most of the people already have immunity to it.

And now the cohort that's in danger of medically significant outcomes can go about their business normally. And that process would usually take two or three months. That's a normal. And then the seasonal waves come and you repeat it until the virus becomes endemic, as in fact it has. In fact, it's the biggest out,

I'm gonna stop my rant here in just one second here. But the end result of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID is exactly what it otherwise would have been, which is that it is endemic in the population. We're mostly protected through natural immunity since everybody was exposed. We just prolonged it painfully while destroying rights and liberties and our economic prospects and health along the way. That's the only thing that was really achieved through all these glorified mitigation efforts that we tried.

I agree with you. Yes, we left a smoldering crater where our economy and civil liberties used to be to end up in the same place that we would have anyway with an endemic virus. One of the things I really want to ask you about, Jeffrey, is your thoughts about, if we go back to my trifecta, you've got a population necessarily driven irrationally and unscientifically to a place of great fear by overstating their actual risks, by denying the presence of natural immunity, denying that they were drugs to treat this. So you've got a population in huge fear. You've got a population

of petty tyrants who've been elevated above their natural standing to have authority. And then on top of it, you have the buy-in and the collusion of big pharma and the mainstream media in order to provide the propaganda arm. So when we look at your recent article that you posted, how is it that the world's smartest people got this wrong? In your mind, who actually got it wrong? Who made a mistake versus who lied? There's a difference.

Yeah, there's a big difference. You're very clever and you have a way of putting things much more concisely than I do. But you're right that those are different demographics, right? There were some people that were paid liars in the pay of pharma or afraid of losing NIH grants and that sort of thing. And those, maybe you could just sort of look at financial career renters, but there was a whole other, a completely different group out there. And those drive me crazier that they just went along with the panic out of just sheer ignorance.

And people who should have known better and would have known better if they had just taken a few minutes to think seriously about it. I mean, for God's sake, all throughout the month of February 2020, we had mainstream publications that were writing good, solid things, coherent, clear thoughts about this virus. And I include their slate and Psychology Today, even the New York Times in the middle of February was still making sense on this issue. The information was out there, and certainly after the Diamond Princess experience, we should have understood something about risk gradients. So there was really no excuse, but I swear to you, the intellectuals are the laziest

people. I feel like I'm ranting against intellectuals tonight, but they are the laziest bunch. Society has entrusted them to think big thoughts and important thoughts. They are lazy, fearful bunch. And in my cohort of economists, which you would think the economists would be 100%, They just sat back and watched it all unfold. And then when they got around to it, pronounced it all good. I'm sorry. I'm just pretty unforgiving.

I have to say I'm relatively unforgiving about this whole point. Because a lot of these people are really respected and admired and followed their works for years, some of them writing gigantic treatises on how the world should work. And then this virus comes along and they throw their books in the trash and just go along for the ride. I don't know. They ought to have their licenses taken away, actually. No, this is how I feel about my colleagues, Jeffrey. The most distressing thing of the entire pandemic for me, perhaps, is that I have seen the soft underbelly

of medical training and academics and understand that my own colleagues, these are people who I would say to people, I'd run into them and say, we sat next to each other in virology class. For the love of God, you know that a mask doesn't stop the spread of this. Or my own colleagues removing every other chair in their waiting room to socially distance, whatever the heck that may have constructed. With their logistics. With their potions, with their incantations. But they are still, we still have large percentages of our colleagues, Kelly, who are not just vehemently unwilling to concede that what happened was anything other than what categorically had to happen, needed to happen, was thus saith the Lord wisdom. And at the same time, they are still aggressively on the attack of anyone who dares to converse about anything other than that this was a glorious success. And that's the part that really bothers me. We've got to have the ability to look at this and to really get honest about it and at least look at

the science and if people can't be persuaded okay but don't attack people who are trying to ascend to the truth yeah you know one thing i've changed my mind about over the course of three years of studying this whole thing is the power of big pharma like that i was a little bit blind to that. I tell you why I was blind to it was because on February 20th, a writer for the Washington Post, whose name I just escaped him briefly, writes Fauci a note and says, why are we locking down? Why are we locking down? Is this to wait for a vaccine? And Fauci responds, no, it is not. We do not need a vaccine to get out of this pandemic. We're going to get out of it by driving the R0 below one and then it'll gradually go away on

its own. When I saw that email exchange, I was convinced by that, that pharmaceuticals are never part of the mix. Now, I was clearly wrong about that. They were part of the mix from the middle of January and arguably were driving the entire COVID response, both in terms of its policies and then also in terms of its rhetoric. And then that was by means of pharmaceutical control that the entire industry of public health and medicine also went along with it. So I don't really understand why Fauci gave that answer that he did, but whatever it was, it was deflection because he knew early on that Big Pharma was involved in this. And I really, I denied that Big Pharma because

there's a lot of people who said from the very beginning, oh, it's all about the Big Pharma, the vaccine. I was like, no, it's not. Well, it probably was. So I've changed my mind about that. Well, I have always had a very healthy distrust for big pharma, I have to say, so I wasn't caught off guard by that. But I will tell you, the tangential very bad actor that I was caught off by, and I'm not sure how to deal with it today, is the issue of our medical journals these scientific journals that are and so that i have to tell you in the past i always you know patted myself on the back for doing my own diligence not you know being very intellectually curious going to the lancet the journal you know the jama the british medical journal all of the big the top journals not the throwaways. And now I really did not understand just how corrupt those were and how dangerous it is when the science, quote unquote, itself has been corrupted.

When the studies that come out are corrupted, you cannot lead public health if you have nowhere to go for good data. And those journals, Jeffrey, are all owned by big pharma and the conflicts of interest go so deep that I don't know how we as medicine ever find our way out of this. All throughout the pandemic, I was very much in contact with a lot of really good scientists who were doing very serious work on a whole variety of topics, whether it was about vitamin D or the failures of masking or the failures of lockdowns. They could not get their stuff published.

You know, the Cochrane Review held on to that meta-analysis by Tom Jefferson at Oxford for, what, eight, ten months before they even went to come with it? The mask review. The mask review. The mask review. Yeah, and then when they finally did go to print with it, a New York Times reporter, I think it was a New York Times reporter, started harassing the Cochrane Review editor,

and they basically didn't quite entirely repudiate the study, but repudiated the language of the study. Like they tried to thread the needle, say, well, it's not really what it says. No, this is the problem. In the past, when I would read literature that wouldn't comport with my clinical impressions, I'd go to the literature more carefully and I'd think, well, maybe I'm just seeing a biased selection, or maybe I'm really not seeing this, or maybe the literature will catch up, which is common. The literature is often six to 12 months behind what we're seeing clinically. Now, when I see these extremely rosy or, you know, sort of reports that just do not comport with what I'm seeing,

I immediately assume they're not publishing the other data. So I don't know what to do because I've heard so many stories of people being unable to publish the data that doesn't go along with the so-called narrative that questions things the way it always has. And the fact that I only see things go in one direction does not make me feel good. It makes me feel uncomfortable that there's something going on. And this is an extraordinary turn of events. Well, you know, for the better part of two or maybe three years, clinical experience with this disease was disparaged and put down and considered to be pointless anecdotes. Why do we care what the doctors and their patients, you know, their experiences?

That doesn't mean anything to us. We have to wait for the RCTs. Now, the RCTs can only be done by a gigantic university with the huge grants from FTX or whatever's funding your study at the time. And it takes, right? And it takes months. You have to run the data, you have to run the regressions. And it's a big deal to run an RCT. Okay. they say it's the gold standard. Well, okay, when the RCTs came out that actually contradicted any of the main stuff, then it was hard to publish those too. So we now know it wasn't that they were just waiting for the RCTs

and disregarding clinical experiences, that they had a doctrine in mind from the very beginning, and they're waiting for the science to catch up to it. The doctrine was not defined by evidence or knowledge or much less, God forbid, experience, clinical experience. Who cares about that? That means nothing to us. I think it's really interesting that the first great truth-tellers and all this kind of stuff

were actually doctors seeing patients. I mean, they figured this out pretty early on. You know, this was, for most people, very mild respiratory infection that should be dealt with as doctors have long been trained to do with respiratory infections. And they said that. Now, a lot of them were harassed within an inch of their life, and that's still going on now, for having contradicted the prevailing line. But the idea early on was, look, we don't care about getting people sick. We care about locking down the

population and keeping everybody away from the virus, and then bludgeoning the population until they get the vaccine. That's the priority. Everything else is a distraction. The other thing that's perhaps... I'm sorry, finish your thought? It's just appalling and I get emotional talking about it. There's so many scandals here. I do. I think another unique component to this had this been a crisis not involving medicine was that you have involved in this largely group of physicians and physicians ha are are vulnerable because you can threaten their livelihoods unlike if you're an economist

somebody might ridicule you and make fun of you. You might not get any clients going forward if you're a stockbroker or if you're an attorney who makes, you know, who loses his cases. But when you're talking about this, physicians were threatened. You're going to lose your license if you talk about ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. We're going to strip you of your ability to be on staff at our hospital. And it is happening today and not just to a handful of people. There are people who are good friends of this show, including people like Peter McCullough, who have just been hounded, John Littell and others who have just had their lives turned upside down. And so there's a unique component that physicians were in a vulnerable position

and many, many of them, 80 80 i'm sure you know this is one of the changes in healthcare unlike when drew and i were training 80 of physicians are now employees of a large hospital or of a medical group so when your livelihood is is being threatened i think that also played a role so it was it wasn't any one of these things. I think it was the proverbial perfect storm, to use an overused analogy, but it was the perfect storm here, I think. And so your point is that when you lose your license, it's not as if you lose your job at one firm, so you have to go to another firm correct this correct this is everything and it's uh basically a career ruining uh move meaning your life is ruined correct correct if you you know you

don't just lose your job you didn't lose the case that you that you litigated you don't lose some clients um you you lose your your entire everything you spent your entire life training to do. And for example, even those people like Peter McCullough, who have been stripped of their board certification, they still technically have a license, but no hospital will put you on staff if you're not board certified. Insurance companies won't reimburse if you're not board certified. So you might as well have removed the license because you have fundamentally rendered that individual incapable of practicing their specialty or practicing medicine. It is a unique thing to physicians. And I think that that did play into this particular crisis.

It surely did. Now, it doesn't have to happen to too many, right? It only needs to happen to half a dozen high-profile cases, and it sends a message to everybody else, comply or die. But do we have any kind of estimate of how many physicians were somehow professionally displaced or disrupted as a result of these kinds of edicts. Oh my, it's got to be a very, very large number. Yeah, a large number. I've talked to many, many, many. I know that I defended myself against seven separate complaints against my license

in multiple states during this past three years. And although I did it successfully each time, it is debilitating. It's exhausting. It's financially taxing. It's emotionally just, it's hard to even explain how, and you have to drop everything. Yeah. And bring out the research and literature and defend yourself and build a court case, quite literally. And I don't know if you're aware, anyone is capable of doing it at any time for any reason, anonymously or otherwise, no matter how spurious. They take it as though it's, again, something dropped in, you know, as egregious as anything else. Yeah.

Don't give it up. No one wants it. It's true. know the name of the person who complained. As egregious as anything else, yeah. Don't give him no idea, Drew. It might explain why things have become so predictably canned in our experiences these days with doctors.

I try to stay away from them, as everybody should, but when you need them nowadays, the very first question is, do you have COVID? It's true. Probably. Well, how do you know? Have you taken a test? Well, no. Well, you need to take a COVID test. It's like, gee, can we talk about somebody other than COVID? Well, let me ask one more question. Are you vaccinated? I'm sorry. Why does that actually matter? Well, if you're not vaccinated, you need to get that done immediately.

It's like, are we going to get through this protocol here first so we can actually talk about what may or may not be wrong with me? But instead, it's like three years of this wild incantation of gibberish. I don't know when it's ever going to end. I guess, as you say, this is the sort of risk-averse way to practice medicine, right? You just make these incantations, and then you get through that before you can actually start talking about medicine. Incredible. Yeah, it's been awful.

One last thing. I see our clock is winding down, but I did want to kind of pick your brain since you have a very broad purview on things. We are seeing big changes elsewhere, meaning outside of the United States. Clearly, there were areas of the country like Sweden that never bought into the vast amount of this idiocy. They never locked down. They didn't close their schools. But now you have countries like Switzerland has absolutely dropped all recommendations for COVID vaccines. The UK has dropped all recommendations for COVID vaccines in children and absolutely for pregnant women. Germany, likewise, most of the Scandinavian countries have stopped pushing these vaccines on healthy people under the age of 50, but not here in the United States. Boy, safe and effective.

Get your whole punch card and get a free Slurpee. Get your 10th booster. What do you think is going on with that? Again, it has something to do with Big Pharma. They just cannot let it go. The US and Israel were their test cases. A country like Australia went nuts about COVID, but then they got over it, and now everybody pretends like nothing ever happened, and everybody in the whole place has just forgotten about

it. It's like, yeah, that was dumb. And nobody cares about vaccines, lockdowns. Remember they were doing rolling lockdowns and everything? It's just gone. The U.S., we have these administrative bureaucrats who are almost entirely captured by a big pharma, and that includes NIH and the CDC, deeply embedded.

That's why the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world today that still requires vaccines for to come and visit the Statue of Liberty. You know, you've got to be vaccinated even now. And I think this is one of four countries in the world that does this. So I have friends of mine who used to come here, you know, twice a year who haven't visited in three years and still can't get in. So it's just deeply tragic. moving patriotic songs about human rights and freedom, where at least I know I'm free and all these things, that this has all been turned on its head.

And in terms of the COVID response, it remains really just one of the most extreme countries in the world even now. And even with the end of the emergency declarations, they're not going to touch that EUA for the vaccine. That's still untouched. In a piece of legislation passed by the Congress, the authorization for the EUA for the vaccine got transferred out of the emergency declaration so that even the end of emergency is not gonna change that. And I don't know when this travel restrictions

are going to end. And there's still a lot of professions that absolutely require it. And habitually, a lot of civic groups and meetings are still vaccine only. So this country is sort of weirdly strange about this subject in a way which most countries in the world are not. And it's really-

Jeffrey, if your friends want, if your unvaccinated friends want to come and visit you here in the States, just tell them to walk across the southern border. That's the workaround. You tell them to pick them up down in one of the border states. You are quite right. There are, I mean, you talk about in most of healthcare, most healthcare settings, you are required still to have a vaccine to be working, most hospitals. And we are at a time of unprecedented sort of exodus from healthcare. We are down hundreds of thousands of physicians and healthcare practitioners. This is not a time, just like in the military and in law enforcement, this is not a time

to be, I think, people signing up to be in the military recruits are down, I think, 83%, I heard recently. We're about to see the reinstitution of the draft as a result of these vaccine mandates. I mean, think about that. Sometimes I just wonder, I'm sure you do this too, I'd like to imagine ourselves 20, 30, 50 years hence looking back at what happened over these three years. thing that people will notice is that during this once-in-a-century pandemic, this grave pandemic, that healthcare spending declined by a third. Three hundred hospitals furloughed, nurses, healthcare spending just collapsed, and doctors left, and the entire American sector of healthcare in general just went from near bankruptcy to now just mass exodus as a result of the vaccine mandates. And it's like, what kind of pandemic is this? What actually

happened? Guys, what went wrong in 2020 to 2023? Something absolutely dreadful happens. Let's rethink. That's why I don't think that the COVID ideology and the mainstream line on this thing is really long for this world. It just doesn't make any sense. I just, it's not a compelling story. It's just a big bundle of myths enforced by payouts and bludgeons and intimidation, but it just doesn't really have the ring of

truth anymore. Yeah. Your mouth to God's ears. Go ahead, Kelly. I was just going to say, the clock's winding down, and so I wanted to give you the last, if there's anything else on your mind. If people aren't following and reading the brilliant pieces that come out of the Brownstone Institute, they need to. There's always something really thought-provoking there.

So I appreciate that. But, Jeffrey, please, if there's anything else, great to have you back with us. And I hope you'll do it again. You always have eye-opening insights for me. I'd love to come back because we're discovering new things every day and that's part of why I love what I do. But we're investigating every day. There's a lot of us and we share information.

We're trying to crack this nut. I feel like we're making progress, but still, there's so many unknowns. And I do not believe that we can really just move on from this without developing a fuller, more robust understanding of what happened to us. Because until we get that, we really cannot heal as a country. We cannot regain our liberties. We need a truth wherever that leads. But we need to keep investigating, keep researching,

and we're doing it every day. Before we let you go, as a result of some of the investigation we've been doing, we end up talking to a lot of scientists who have come from China, people who study China. And so my producer and wife has gotten very exercised on the topic of China. And I think she had a question for you. Susan, do you want to ask your question. Oh, great. No, I just wanted to have a conversation about what happened over the weekend and how you were talking about Chinese propaganda and how, you know, we were sold all this stuff. And basically Taiwan was having military exercises near Taiwan and they were reporting it as, oh, it's just, you know, we're, we're trying to make, you know, Xi is trying to make a better tomorrow or whatever. And I could just tell it was written by, well, it was written by a Chinese person, but, but I could tell it was done on a holiday because there aren't a lot of news reporters out there, you know, on a Easter Sunday ready to

report. And I was just curious what your take was on that. Because I've always known that China was going to do something eventually. And I think it's here. I seriously do. Nobody seems to care. Well, they should. I really do. The destabilization of the world in light of the COVID lockdowns and everything that followed has been deeply troubling.

And I find it just absolutely incredible. The COVID response in China should have led to the disruption of the Chinese Communist Party. It should have led to a rotation in office, at the very least, for Xi Jinping. It was a disaster for him. But thanks to the West's response to this, it became his moment of greatest triumph. I mean, he exported a brutal strategy for dealing with a common respiratory virus to almost the entire world, with the exception of a handful of nation states. That's something that a statesman in our lifetime has never achieved before. And it was the West that made that possible.

And it's a tragic thing for China and especially for all the countries around it. Their imperial conquest of the region, if not the world, is closer to becoming a reality now than it was five years ago. Happy with that, Susan? Good times. Well, yeah. But it's like, okay, what's next? And where's he going next? And when are we going to be affected by this again? And why are we not more proactive and trying to avoid anything for the

future? You know, we're just kind of sitting back and waiting and, and then. As far as we know. As far as we know. I don't know anything. All anybody can care about is that we keep the dollars,

the international reserve currency, as long as that's true, then nobody cares at all. But I mean, that may not be long for the world either, because we've got the BRICS nations just all kind of ganging up on the U.S. I really do think that this is the end. These days really represent the end of everything you would once call the American Empire. And some aspects of that are probably good, but it also means that also will coincide

with economic regression, stagflation, and a reduction of cultural influence around the world. and reduction of cultural influence around the world, and unfortunately, a dramatic decline in those ideals for which America has long represented for, really, the whole world, the Declaration of Independence and, again, all those patriotic songs and everything. So this is kind of a new dark age, and I wish there was something we could do to stop it. We're doing all we can.

I do know this. If we do nothing, that's a guarantee that the bad guys are going to win the struggle. So, you know, we should all. I call it the book of Revelation 2023 edition. That's my. I'm going to push back on both of guys though because I can remember words like that coming out of people's mouths in 1979 and 1980 and I remember

sitting down and the whole country had to watch Jason Robards in the movie The Day After because Ronald Reagan was going to cause a nuclear holocaust for sure and so I'm going to let history be my guide and push back and say I don't know certainly you're right if we don't direction, but we have a history of doing

so. And I'm going to put my bet down on that. I hope you're right, Dr. Drew. I want you to be right. I live with this guy. I'm going to act as if you're right. How about that? There we go.

Act as if. It's a good way to go. More cynical than that. All right. Jeffrey Tucker, we appreciate act as if it's a good way to go as if more cynical than that all right uh jeffrey tucker we appreciate you as always and i hope you'll let us bug you to come on in here and share more new ideas with us as they come along it's always my pleasure and ask me anytime thank you so much thank you sir jeffrey tucker everybody brownstone.org is where you want you to go and then kelly for you and i i think we have a little time away from one another is that accurate is that what i'm seeing we are back oh you're here tomorrow okay oh good oh my god so this is great aren't you wait i was a guest tomorrow she's not here tomorrow i don't think she was here

tomorrow either oh okay i'm back i'm back i can be but i'm back on the 18th, I think, right? Monday. Yes. Monday, right? Yes. No, that's Tuesday. That's a Tuesday. With Naomi Wolf. I'm back on the 18th with Naomi, yes. And then we've got Seema Hatra coming back, which I'm super excited about the following week.

And hopefully, possibly Robert Malone. I think Naomi is on the 17th, if I recall. No, she's the 18th. Guys, I'm starting to get scared that this is going to become part of our brand, that at the end of every show we don't know what's coming out, because this is very consistent. Let me do two things. I know what it is.

Do you have Gutfeld on Tuesday? We're not going to discuss our schedule right now. I got their direction from, I heard what Caleb is telling us in his kind way. Listen to this. Two things. Two things. A, I'm going to talk to that intensivist who was put in a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland tomorrow. I can't wait to talk to that guy.

It's the saddest story I've ever heard. I'll find out more details. And that's going to be interesting. Tomorrow at noon, different time than usual. And then just two minutes, you and I for a second. As time goes on, I'm getting less worried about the vaccine myself because there's less, I really feel like the, and you can correct me on this, but I'll just tell you where my head's at lately, because the really stuff I was seeing when I was concerned was after

the first booster. That's when I was starting to see stuff, particularly in young people. And it made it really difficult to make a recommendation on what young people should do. I feel like we're at the point now where Omicron is benign enough, the vast majority of people, young, are not even thinking about it anymore. And older people, we can kind of make nuanced decisions about depending on their underlying medical conditions and how old they are and that kind of thing. So I have found myself being less emotionally concerned about the vaccine. Am I right or you need to set me straight? Well, here's where I see it.

I think you are correct because of the weakening of the virus and the fact that so few, the reality of it is that it's really akin to a common cold right now. Very, very, I mean, I can't remember the last time I had a patient or even knew of somebody who needed to go to the hospital, let alone be admitted for COVID. So you are correct that people, that the interest in the boosters is therefore dropping off. It is waning. And there's no question that the data, they're very clear that adverse events seem to occur very quickly following the boosters. The problem, Drew, is that these things are additive. They're cumulative. We know that the lifespan of the spike proteins, the lifespan of the mRNA exceeds any potential efficacy of the vaccine.

So there are people, you have the first wave of adverse events, which is those people who develop a blood clot or develop myocarditis. But there's the late stuff. There are all these people where we just don't know what percentage of the population is suffering from suppression of their immune system and is going to have new onset cancer and on and on and on. Yeah. Okay. of their immune system and is going to have new onset cancer and on and on and on. Yeah. So now we're

worrying about... You actually confirmed what I was feeling, but you also confirmed what we now need to worry about, which is why we're going to continue analyzing and looking and seeing what's going on here. So I'm sort of in the same zone, you and I. All right.

We will be back together with Naomi Wolf. And she has lots of stuff. Maybe. We'll see. Here we go. There goes our brand again. I think we're doing an earlier show that day. Is that correct?

We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Don't you worry. I'll announce tomorrow once we get all straight. Kelly, can you come earlier? I just confirmed with Godfell. We'll do it later. Not on the show.

Kelly, I'll see you next week. Thank you, guys. We'll see you tomorrow at noon. I will see you. Sounds good. Take care. 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.

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