Ask Dr. Drew - “Major Suppression” Of Adverse Events By CDC: Dr. Harvey Risch & Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 126

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

“Not only have we seen major suppression of information about adverse events by FDA, CDC, governments in general… but this isn’t new,” says Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch. “There are all these games that get played to hide the adverse events.” Dr. Harvey Risch is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale. He provided testimony to the US Senate regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and has spoken widely about his opposition to masking, vaccine mandates, and the reliability of PCR tests – along with his research on COVID prevention and treatment with existing drugs. Dr. Risch fought vaccine mandates for city workers in New York, saying that those who have recovered from COVID-19 are better protected by natural immunity. Despite his long history of work in epidemiology, Dr. Risch’s statements about alternative COVID treatments were criticized by his peers, who wrote an open letter in August 2020 signed by 24 doctors at the Yale School of Public Health. But Dr. Risch has continued voicing his concerns about masking, mandates, and the ever-growing list of COVID-19 variants – and government missteps that he believes have worsened the pandemic. Find Dr. Harvey Risch on Telegram at https://t.me/HarveyRischMDPhD Dr. Risch recently joined The Wellness Company, a new healthcare / telemedicine company, available at https://twc.health/ 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 SPONSORED BY 」 • 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 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 15 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 「 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 - After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew's iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don't need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue's lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew's Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato's Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew's streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with 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

Very interesting, exciting show. We are, Dr. Kelly Victory and I are joined by Dr. Harvey Reich. Dr. Reich is a Caltech graduate, then UC San Diego School of Medicine, and then more graduate work in Seattle, and finally a Yale professor of epidemiology, both in the college at Yale and as well as the medical school. So this should be a very interesting conversation. Dr. Victory knows Dr. Reich very well. And he is, the thing we said to set this one up is

i want you to listen to dr reish and that's what an epidemiologist sounds like not a lot of the data stuff that you have bantering around on the internet these days you're going to hear what a real epidemiologist sounds like and and i know what that is because i've been around occasionally during my career and it really it'll catch your attention you'll understand when somebody really understands the numbers uh let's uh get to dr reese right now our laws as it pertain 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 help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more 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. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook born in Vegas.

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responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. And welcome, everybody. I know a lot of you are here today to hear Dr. Risha's ideas and notions and analysis of what we've been through. I just wanted to point out something I've been saying for the last couple of days. I did have the opportunity to speak to the president of the Board of Medical Quality Assurance here in California.

I had a very reassuring conversation with her regarding AB 2098. I did wake up the next day with a bit of agita thinking, what happens when she's no longer the president, somebody I can actually reason with. But she was very thoughtful, did hear me out. My fear more than anything else on that particular bill is the reliance on standard of care. Standard of care is something that changes massively and can sometimes be very wrong and very dangerous. I will just point to the standard of care that I was witness to when I arrived at the psychiatric hospital in 1985 to really over to really uh do their medical services i ended up being the chief of their services ultimately but i acquired dozens of patients that were the object of the standard

of care at the time which was taking a pic and hammering it above the eye and swiping it back and forth disaster that was the standard of care somebody won the nobel prize for that nonsense uh also uh shoot what was the other thing I wanted to point out about something I've been, well, I'm sure it'll come to me as we go along here. I'm very anxious to talk to Dr. Reich today. Let me tell you a little bit about him. I gave a little bit of his training in the opening thing. Dr. Reich's writings can be found at, okay, can you put it, oh, yeah, by the way, I'll

just point it out here. CDC does state that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective and they reduce your risk of severe illness. This program features medical professionals discussing controversial medical topics. Always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health. And I can't say that strongly enough. I am so upset by the centralization and the mandates and the doctors and patients need to work together on behalf of the patient. That is the fundamental principle of medicine. And that has been sort of cast aside during this thing, amongst other things.

And just so everyone knows where I'm at these days, I'm awash in differing opinions about where we are and where we've been. As Dr. Victory and I cull through all these varying opinions, I feel like I've filled in the gaps of what made me so confused in the early part of the pandemic. But I'm getting a little bit more confused about where I am now. We'll get to that with Dr. Risch. Again, you can find Dr. Risch at his Telegram channel. Do you have it to put up there, Caleb? Because when I say it, it's going to sound very

weird. It's t.me slash Harvey Risch, R-I-S-C-H, M.D., Ph.D. t.me slash Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. And Dr. Risch, and again, he works at the Yale School of Public Health as well as the School of Medicine, a professor emeritus of epidemiology. His research Health as well as the School of Medicine, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology. His research interests were more in the area of oncology and its epidemiological methods, which is a, you know, data right now is a massive, you know, large data is a big thing in oncology right now. Dr. Reich provided testimony to the US Senate

regarding COVID pandemic, and he has spoken widely about his opposition to masking and vaccine mandates. And in fact, he has spoken widely about his opposition to masking and vaccine mandates. And in fact, he has COVID right now. I hope I don't divulge anything about your medical history that you're not planning to divulge, but we do appreciate you being here and suiting up and looking so good. So thank you for joining us. Thank you. Great to be with you.

So I think I'd rather start with, I'd like to start with very broad strokes, which is essentially what just happened? What is your sense of what we have been through? And as we do some sort of essentially looking back, you know, essentially an MM, a morbidity mortality report on what happened, can you characterize that? Can you encapsulate for us as we get into this conversation? Well, standing on one foot, I think this would be difficult to encapsulate,

but I think we've basically been through a social revolution that was catapulted because of the creation, a man-made creation of a modified natural virus that got into the general public, either intentionally or accidentally, we don't know that yet, that wreaked untold havoc in people's psyches and in their medical circumstances and how we responded to it. And there were a lot of factors at play, some of which we have pretty good ideas about, some we can only conjecture. And we are gradually putting the pieces together as time and information accrues. And so it's very difficult to characterize this as an elephant. We're still looking at the trunk and the legs and the tail and so on and trying to make sense of the whole thing. Yes, the myth of the wise men, everyone's looking at a different

part of the element. Well, here's something that I've noticed that I, through talking to people who were sort of there on the ground and were silenced actively during the early part of the pandemic, one of the key sort of moves seemed to have been our public health leaders talking to Chinese public health leaders and believing those public health or whatever they were, epidemiologists or virologists, believing them that wherever they got this idea of zero COVID, wherever they got this idea of lockdown, that A, this was the way to approach it, a rational approach, and B, it was working. That seems like the error number uno. Like, how did that happen to these very smart people? And how did it happen? Let's just start

with that. Well, I think Deborah Birx has talked a little bit about that in her book, as understand that I haven't read it, but I understand from what people have told me that there were individuals in the Trump administration who had liaison to Chinese officials and were getting information from China. to have lockdowns in general populations for combating pandemics. Our history is one of quarantines. And that means housing people who are actively infectious in temporary circumstances or in their homes or something like that until they recover, not putting the whole general population under lockdown. Whereas apparently there is a cultural history of China of having done that. And so for the Chinese to have picked up on that, you know, might be more natural for them, but it's totally foreign for us. How that got to the United States can only be understood by someone or some entity trusting Chinese advice, trusting Chinese traditions and applying them to us. The reason for that, I can't say. How big of a mistake was that? What would have been a more rational approach?

And I guess there's two parts to this question. What would have been a more rational approach? And why didn't they at least contemplate the risk reward of what they were doing? That's the thing that's so mysterious to me. You could see the damage ahead. They went ahead without any contemplation, it seemed, of risk. Well, at the beginning of the pandemic, remember two weeks to slow the curve? I mean, I think that we all thought that maybe it was reasonable just for a very brief respite to hold off until we had a better idea of what to do and then to plunge in and go do it. However, those two weeks turned into two months and turned into years in some places without

thought of the damage that that was causing and without good measures of how to measure that damage. In all the different spheres where it was causing damage, both economically, psychological, medical, and so on, there were not very good public health metrics for measuring all of that damage. And whether it was intentional not to measure it or whether it was just poorly measured, it wasn't done. And so it was basically pushed out of consciousness

with the obsessive focus on COVID cases at all costs. Now, I've maintained for more than two years that case counts in COVID are irrelevant, that pandemics are not managed by counting the number of cases. They're managed by looking at what happens to the cases, meaning hospitalization risks, mortality, and perhaps long COVID. Those are the things that you have to look at and manage and figure out how to reduce. But if getting COVID turns out to be not a big deal for 99.8% of people who get it, then that's not the number that you want to be counting. And in fact, what that does tell you is that if large numbers of people are getting it and nothing much is happening to them after they

get it and recover, then that's telling you about population immunity, about the fraction of the population that's actually helping to keep the rest of the population from getting the infection. But so case numbers are not how you manage a population, a pandemic. We needed to have been looking at hospitalization and mortality. And of course, hospitalization has been misrepresented and mortality too for a long time as being from COVID when it was with COVID, that we've had a hard time telling the difference. There have been now a few studies, three or four studies that have looked at both of those outcomes and have shown approximately, depending upon which year they were done,

that some half of people who were being hospitalized and being tested positive with COVID had COVID, but that wasn't the reason for their hospitalization. And same for mortality. Now in the Omicron era, of course, it's more like 80% of the people who test positive with COVID are not in hospital for COVID. From the perspective of an epidemiologist, well, two things. Again, I have so many questions for you.

Is it realistic to assume that a respiratory virus would have sustained immunity such that things like herd immunity could be achieved, number one? And number two, what happened to your colleagues? What happened? So if you can answer both those for me, I'd appreciate it. Okay. So as it turns out, we've had herd immunity multiple times already in this pandemic. If you have a simple infection that gets transmitted from one person to another and people either recover or die and nothing else changes in the population or with the virus, say, then what you'd get is a bell-shaped curve that grows exponentially, then goes into linear growth, then peaks, and then goes back down. That's the standard epidemic curve. Herd immunity is defined as when the epidemic peaks.

This was defined by McKendrick in 1927. Herd immunity actually occurs all the whole time during the pandemic. It's the ability of the population to have immunity to resist more cases of the infection. But it's defined to have one place in particular at the top when the infections are peaking and starting to go back down. And that doesn top when the infections are peaking and starting to go back down. And that doesn't mean the infections are gone. That doesn't mean the pandemic is gone. It means that it's on the way to going. Now, this has happened four or five times already over the last two years because things have changed and it wasn't just a simple infection. The major driver of this was that the virus changed. And that means that

the immunity that people once had to the original strain was reduced when new strains arose with mutations that were less sensitive to the immunity developed by the earlier strains. And so we had more peaks of the curve, and they again peaked, and they went back down, and again, herd immunity was achieved for each of those waves. And this has happened multiple times. Herd immunity happens. We have it. It's beneficial for when it happens, but it isn't the whole answer to solving how to manage the pandemic. Fortunately, you know, we're in the Omicron era now, which is a much better circumstance for herd immunity and how it's grown and where the

population is at the present time. Now, as to my colleagues, one of the nice things that I value a lot about Yale is we have free academic freedom. And so my colleagues are free to say and think whatever they want, no matter the evidence, they can say whatever they like. I'm free to say what I like. I've been a very careful scientist for the 40 years of my career. I don't think I've changed in any regard during COVID. And so that's what I've done. My colleagues made statements about me that were essentially irrelevant. They did not do due diligence. They did not understand that my, they accused me of not knowing anything about infectious diseases without knowing that my PhD was in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, infectious epidemics, and I published on that and so on.

And to talk about medication use is something that I've done for 40 years of my career. I've both researched and taught pharmacoepidemiology at Yale. This is just a natural part of my expertise. And so read what I write in science and then decide my science versus theirs, and you can enjoy your own conclusions. And is it at all realistic to try to do anything with a respiratory virus? In other words, that virus, a respiratory virus just eventually does what it does, no matter what we do. Is that not true? No, it's not quite true. If you make vaccines that don't

totally throttle the virus, that don't suppress it, what happens is you select for mutants that escape the immunity and you prolong the pandemic. What you need to do is to have a vaccine that's given well in advance of the pandemic itself so that people have the immunity before they even get hit with the virus. Then you have half a chance of battling it. But when you drive vaccines and use vaccines in the middle of the pandemic, it can be completely counterproductive as we've seen with the growth of multiple mutant strains that have just been going on and on and on. I think we lucked out, honestly, with Omicron because it's generally, medically speaking, so mild compared to the previous strains. So that in itself can have led to prolonging the pandemic. Lockdowns also tend to prolong the pandemic. And whereas treatments that work, medications that

work, can be used to shorten the pandemic if the other things don't interfere. And so the development of early treatment has been a continuing need throughout the whole pandemic. One last question before I bring Dr. Victory in here and take a little break, which is that my understanding was you said that the vaccine were driving the evolutionary pressures that were creating variants. My understanding was most of the variants of note came out of people who were sort of chronically infected, people who had immunosuppression and whatnot and couldn't clear the virus. And the virus literally was able to, in a given individual, mutate. Is that a false idea?

I think all of these are theories right now. We don't really have good data. One thing I would say is that every infected person makes tens or hundreds of thousands of mutant copies. If you think that the enzyme that replicates this virus makes a mistake in one in 100,000 bases and there's 30,000 in the virus and it makes trillions of copies that every person is making radical numbers of mutants. Every time a person gets sick, they're making radical numbers of mutants. So what matters is whether those mutants get out of the person and infect the new person.

And that happens when the new person doesn't have immunity. And that happens, I guess, when a person's own immune system allows it to get out so that the new mutants aren't being suppressed in the way that the original virus that invaded that person are being suppressed because of the immunity being developed by the immune system. So you have all of these factors that impinge on this. I tend to think that Omicron came out approximately March, April of 2020, and was kind of silent for most of the first year of it being around. And so that was before the vaccines. So my guess is that Omicron was not a result of the large-scale deployment of vaccines and came before, but others may have come in part from

the vaccines. Honestly, I think these may have come in part from the vaccines. Honestly, I think these are kind of academic questions at this point. Speaking of an academic question, I have one more. I'm sorry to keep doing this. And Kelly, I'm sorry for keeping you in the green room there. If your theory is correct that these evolutionary pressures on the virus are caused by the vaccine and the immune response that doesn't crush the virus, as you said. Same thing must then be true of therapeutics, I'm imagining, as we know in oncology and in bacterial infectious diseases. If you don't really clobber the bacterium, it finds a way out. I'm imagining it's the same thing with this virus. So whatever treatments we apply have got to be very effective. And is something like Paxlovid sufficient to meet that demand? Well, so that's a question mark. Even the

other medications is still a question mark. You know that in treating AIDS, we don't just use one medication. It's a combined two, at least. And that's the way viruses are, that they're tougher to treat than bacteria, kind of. But still, we have ways of doing it. And I think it takes combined recipes to deal with them to really- Well, Paxlovid is two meds. Paxlovid is two meds, right? It's two medications. That's right. But the second one just enhances the first. It isn't really an antiviral per se. It changes the granzyme activities.

Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. We will take a quick break. Dr. Harvey Reich is here with us. I am watching you guys on the Restream, and I'll be checking that out. I invite you over to Rumble as well. We've got a lot more

territory to cover and I'm going to bring Dr. Kelly Victory in after this brief break. For a long time, I've been talking about the holy grail of skincare, GenuCell, and the amazing results that both Susan and I have seen. I'm a big fan of GenuCell's Silky Smooth XV. It's a moisturizer soaked right into my skin instantly, and with its immediate effects, I saw fine lines and wrinkles visibly disappear within 12 hours. Susan loves GenuCell's vitamin C serum. Infused with the purest vitamin C, absorbs to the deepest layer of the skin, thanks to GenuCell's proprietary skincare technology. I am a snob when it comes to using products on my face. The dermatologist makes a ton of money for me.

But when I was introduced to Genucel, 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. And right now, Genucel has bundled my favorite products and Susan's for you to try today for up to 60% off retail pricing. That's right. Save up to 60% on my favorite GenuCell products today. Just go to GenuCell.com slash Drew to see what's in our bundles and receive an extra

10% off at checkout when you enroll in their personal concierge at checkout. That again is GenuCell.com slash Drew. G-E-N-U- again is Genucel.com slash Drew, G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com slash D-R-E-W. Some platforms have banned the discussion of controversial topics. This episode ends here. The rest of the show is available at drdrew.tv. There's nothing in medicine that doesn't boil down to a risk benefit calculation it is the

mandate public health to consider the impact of any particular mitigation scheme on the entire population this is uncharted territory drew and we continue to travel in that uncharted territory. I was thinking about cancellations. Wherever Kelly goes, the cancel is said to chase her down. But Dr. Victory, let's have you give you a chance. I'm sure your engine has been revved up and in idle. So engage the gears and let's let you have a chance at Dr. Reich. Terrific.

Thanks. And thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Reich. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. You and I have been communicating for the last two plus years of this pandemic, and you have talked me in off the ledge more than once during this debacle, I have to say. As Drew teed it up in your intro, your background as an epidemiologist, frankly, to be clear, you have forgotten more about epidemiology, study design, research templates, statistics than I have ever known.

You are brilliant at that. And frankly, I've learned a tremendous amount from you about that. One of the things I would love for you to spend a few minutes talking about is you and I and the group that we work with every single day are looking at studies and commonly saying, well, it's a lousy study. It's a flawed study. It's got bad. Talk in lay terms as best you can about that component. So much of the quote science that's out there right now, so many of the studies that whether it's the CDC or the FDA or the, you know, that, that the people in the mainstream roll up, you know, run up the flagpole and say, I see, here's this study that shows whether it's

talking about the safety and efficacy of vaccines or the inefficacy of the, you know, shall not be named therapeutic drugs or whatever it is. Talk just about, because the average lay person doesn't have my background, let alone your background in understanding what, how you look at a study and why so many of the studies that are being quoted as proof of something, proof of efficacy or safety, for example, of the vaccines. What is it that makes them flawed or put it into categories of study flaws? Well, I've been teaching my PhD epidemiology students for close to 40 years that when you read a study, you don't believe what the authors say for their conclusions, at least not at first. You have to read the whole study, including the appendices

and supplements, everything that you can find, including the conflicts of interest, and with a suspicious mind, that you basically have to say, what's the matter with this study? And you try to figure out what the authors did and work through everything and see if it all makes sense. See if this part over here makes sense with that part over there. Everything's consistent and seems appropriate and reasonable and compared to what you already know about what the study is about. And then if you can't find anything that really is seriously wrong, then you could start to admit the study might have some validity. The next thing to do is to look at the study results again a little more carefully

and draw your own conclusions from them, because the conclusions that you draw from a study might not be what the authors say at the end of their conclusions. And in fact, what you see in the lay media is typically quotes from the end of the author's conclusions from the abstract because reporters never understood the paper, never got into the depths of it, never read it and thought about it. And in fact, many times, conclusions in papers are not exactly consistent with what the author's actually found. Sometimes the typical one for the last two years is we found no evidence of some such relationship, whereas what the study actually found is we did not have enough evidence to

say whether there was a relationship or not. And that's a big difference that studies that are underpowered, that don't have enough subjects, or where the relationship was of too small a magnitude to show up easily can't be studied well in studies. And that doesn't mean that the study shows that the relationship isn't there. It just shows that the study wasn't good enough, big enough, strong enough, or whatever to do it. And so there are all these inexact conclusions that appear in studies that one has to understand for oneself when doing the science. Medical science has become a wild west in the last two years because medical journals have

had strong economic motivations to pass along messaging that is consistent with the entities that fund them. For example, the amount of pharma advertising and support of medical journals is enormous. And medical journal editors like Richard Horton of Lancet and Marcia Angel, who was a past editor of the New England Journal, have said publicly that they felt constrained not to publish material that went against pharma interests and only to be consistent with pro-pharma results. Well, that's not objective medicine. It's not objective science when that happens. And so this has driven many papers into the preprint literature, what's called MedArchive is one source and SSRN, and there's a number of these that basically put

papers up available for anyone to read with the proviso that they're not peer-related, peer-reviewed. But peer-reviewed today also has a lot of messaging bias. And so you can't rely on peer review to decide on the quality of the study. You have to do that for yourself. And scientists basically have to read every study, decide for themselves what's good or bad about it, and go from there. And it really is what I call a wild west. Well, because I don't know about you, but I can't think of another time in history when there's been so much reliance supposedly on studies, and partly it's because of the access to the internet uh the only thing worse than than not having access to information however is having access to what you

believe is legitimate studies or legitimate conclusions because i don't think there's a day that goes by that our group doesn't say here's a new study and it's flawed, but it's being quoted and used as the reason. And if you're like Drew and myself who are in California, where they've now passed this disinformation law, the stuff that they're quoting and relying on frequently is this junk science. It's very, very scary. We've talked briefly about the lockdown and we know hopefully, you know, why we have never used lockdowns before in the West to control pandemics. They're devastating and we're living the outcome of that. Go to some of my other favorite, my other favorite mitigation schemes, masking. Talk a little bit about, you know, everybody knows my feelings about masks to control respiratory viruses. From an epidemiologic standpoint,

did you ever see evidence that masks would be helpful in controlling this pandemic? And if I could follow on that a little bit, I've been very curious about the studies that were used to substantiate masking, particularly of school children. Those studies seem completely spurious to me, and yet knowledgeable people push those out as evidence of what they should be doing. Can you also address that, if you don't mind? I appreciate it. I'll try.

So really more fundamental than all of that is that we spent two or two and a half years being bombarded with plausibility and being told it was science. And this is a philosophical issue that is a very serious one because people think what they've heard over the last two and a half years is science. Dr. Fauci says, I am the science. And he's said nothing scientific for the last two and a half years. What he said is plausibility. So the idea that if you put this cloth or paper or whatever material mask in front of your nose and mouth, and that's going to prevent the virus from going through it or around it,

it's a plausibility argument. It looks like you put something in front of you and it blocks what goes through. But in reality, what you're talking about is putting up a chain link fence and hoping that it blocks mosquitoes. You have to understand that the only way that these theories can be made into science is by studying them in people. Now, I love theories. I use biological theories in all of my research all along. I've made up some myself and studied them and tested them in studies of, you know, case and controls of humans. The only way that you know whether a theory is true or not is by extensive testing it in humans.

And the lab scientists kind of pass on that step and they believe in their lab studies and they don't think epidemiology is worth anything. Whereas we epidemiologists know the limitations of epidemiology. We do high quality studies as best we can and we then validate or invalidate the theories or provide evidence, pro and con at least, on theories. That's where the science is. When you go into the lab and you do measurements on a theory, that's where the science is. The theory is the motivation for the science, but it's not the science. The testing, the experiments, and the population studies are the science. And so what we've seen of these studies looking at masking, masking has two potential benefits. One is for the wearer. Does wearing a mask reduce the likelihood

that the wearer is going to get sick or very sick or so on? The second is what's called source control, which is, does masking people keep an infection from spreading to other people? Those are two very different things. If you're wearing a mask for your own benefit, then it's up to you to choose whether you want to wear the mask or not. If you're the one who has control of your own treatments. There has no bearing on anybody else. Whereas if wearing a mask limits the amount of infection spread, then the state, the company, the school, whatever, has some sway, some interest in deciding whether people should wear masks or not. There are only, to my knowledge, about three studies that have looked at source control in the COVID era for masking. And all of them show either zero

or very negligible amount of benefit in reducing the spread of infection from mask wearing. So the evidence is quite weak for source control benefit. It's possible. My own kind of ad hoc idea about this is, if you're wearing a mask and you're infectious and you meet somebody on the stairs in the hall and you have a 15-second conversation with them, the probability is that the mask has some benefit because it pushes what you exhale out the sides rather than directly in front. And if you're only there for 15 seconds, that has it mixed in the surrounding air and gotten to the person in front of you, whereas it would have if you were breathing straight at them. But if you're in a room for 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes and the air is all mixing, it doesn't matter whether it goes out straight or goes out sideways because it's still going to mix

in the air and everybody else in the room is going to get it unless there's enough air changes per hour that the mixed air would still be exited before most people breathed it. So to that degree, masks might have a very small and transient benefit in source control, but in the general usage that we've come to think about, for longer-term exposures, they probably have very little, if maybe zero. Yet, yes, and yet there's still, at UC Berkeley, you know, Drew, UC Berkeley is requiring students to wear masks this fall if they haven't been vaccinated for the flu. I mean, it's just, you can't make this up. We have taken on.

Where are they getting that from? I'm really trying to maintain my equanimity on all this stuff and try to understand people's point of view who push these sorts of ideas. I swim in it when I try to figure it out. I can't figure it out. I want to figure it out so I can understand what we're dealing with. But where do they get these ideas from? Well, I have an idea of where this comes from.

But that idea perhaps stalled on August 11th. The idea was that university policies are being driven by their corporate attorneys, by the attorneys who are basically human, you know, their personnel attorneys that deal with hiring and firing and all those kinds of questions. And these attorneys were telling the institutions that if anything bad happens, you need policies that show that you were actually doing something that was publicly looked at as being beneficial to prevent the things that actually did happen. So what this means is that the universities were developing policies that were driven by the so-called suggestions of CDC, WHO, and other formal public health agencies that had some sense of public authority.

And so when a university, if somebody got myocarditis from taking the vaccine, the day after that they had their second dose that the university mandated, the university would say, well, we mandated vaccination because the CDC said that people should be vaccinated and we're just following their guidance. So this is the just following orders defense that they were instructed to do. Now, the strange thing about that is that on August 11th, CDC put out a public statement saying that from their evidence, the vaccines do not prevent, well, I should say two doses of the vaccines do not prevent transmission of the infection. And booster doses provide only transient benefit that wanes over time.

And what they're saying basically is that the vaccines have failed to prevent transmission in the population of this virus. That removes the vaccine mandates rationale that's coming from the CDC. Nevertheless, some universities like Harvard have continued to maintain vaccine mandates. And in fact, Harvard just started including the half new booster vaccine as part of its mandate for all students incoming and continuing students, which makes no sense and has no justification because the CDC is saying that it doesn't prevent transmission in any tangible way. So much of my, yeah, so much of the thought bubble over my head is about, it's sort of, you know, this big question mark all the time. And so as it pertains to this policy that you've actually, I appreciate that point of view because that's

makes sense to me. It's like, okay, that's probably what's going on. What I don't understand though, is why don't academic colleagues who know better raise their hand and go, but this is not science. At least be honest about what you're doing here and don't give the impression that this is somehow good policy. No one, I don't hear anyone from the medical or the scientific community at these institutions, or maybe they are. I just don't hear it. Is that true, or should they be? There was a letter at, I think it was Columbia, where an assistant professor raised a question about the vaccines and provided all of this evidence, you know, pages of the current evidence, including CDC's statement now. And it was signed by at least 80 faculty members in the medical

school and the arts and sciences school. Okay. Okay. Support. Well, the concept though, the concept that once the CDC has, and I've made this argument many times, once the CDC now openly acknowledges, just as the vaccine manufacturers do, that the vaccines do not stop you from contracting COVID. They do not stop you from transmitting COVID. And the best, although it's on very shaky data, they say that it will decrease the severity of your illness. Well, that's up to me if I wanted to decrease the severity. Again, that's similar to the wearer of the mask. It's my personal choice. If I don't care, if I think that I will handle the virus just fine on my own, then how can they justify mandating a vaccine to decrease my risk of getting hospitalized. That's my choice. And I think that that's an argument that you have been making compellingly.

I'm not sure how they're getting around that. Well, that was actually the Jacobson case from 1905, the Supreme Court case, where Cambridge, Massachusetts had a smallpox vaccination law. And this man, Jacobson, said, I don't want to do it. I want to pay the fine. We'll even pay the fine. And then he went to court over it. And the Supreme Court found that he was guilty and had to pay the fine. And in doing so, it created four criteria for reviewing the interest of the state in forcing mandates for vaccination on people. These criteria are very close to what in the legal realm is called strict scrutiny. And among them, it's that the vaccination has to be known to work, medically speaking. It has to be narrowly tailored, which means it only

applies as closely and as necessitatively, some word like that, as possible. And it can't be arbitrary and capricious. And that might've been the case for the smallpox vaccine at a time when smallpox had about a 30% mortality in the early 1900s. It certainly does not apply in the COVID era, and it certainly does not apply in the Omicron era, when the mortality is less than two-tenths of a percent, and it's virtually all among high-risk people. And we've lost on arbitrary incompletions because it doesn't take into account natural immunity from having had COVID in the first place and so on.

So it's not narrowly tailored. People who've had natural infection with COVID don't need vaccination in order to be protected from transmitting it to others. And yet all of the vaccines ignore natural immunity. So what we have now is the criteria for establishing when a mandate might actually be reasonable for a government to consider that it would have a compelling interest, and all of that has been flouted by governments, by government agencies, by universities, by some large companies, by cities and against their police departments and other city employees and so on, all disregarding all of that legal theory for no apparent reason other than perhaps fear, the fear that's been generated in the officials, in the people that they serve, and so on. I think that that's been

the problem. Is there a solution to that? What was your question, Drew? I was saying, is there a solution to that? If the overreach and the hysteria and the people that should be more dispassionate and careful in their policies, we need a solution to that. We do have a solution to that, but we don't have a way of putting it into effect. The solution to that is not to have a virtually 100% captive media that's putting out fear-mongering, fear porn, as they say, 24-7, that that has terrified the population. You're all going to die unless you get X. You're all going to die unless you get vaccinated. You're all going to die unless you lock down.

You're all going to die unless you lock down. You're all going to die unless you buy my product. I mean, this has been, the media has been acting as an agent of both the government and the pharma for at least 20 or 25 years. And it's just so paralyzing now to try to get people information that basically says, look, this could be a serious infection, but for most people, it's not. For most people, it's uncomfortable. It's a pain in the neck to get through the sore throat and the cough and the running nose and the muscle aches and temperature and all this stuff. But most people get through it okay. And, you know, and we have medicines to treat it. And if you're really at high risk, you can consider vaccines,

discuss that with your doctor and so on. So the fear should be drained out of this. And if we only had rational discussions that weren't so biased by all of this propaganda, then people wouldn't be so afraid of everything. Well, thus we are here trying to do exactly that. But let me just ask Dr. Kelly, one quick follow-on,

because he was mentioning pediatric illness and stuff, and I've been swimming in that lately. I listened to a sort of a podcast, essentially, from the American College of Physicians today, and it was the most bizarre thing. To a person, every person went, well, I'm an infectious disease, adult infectious disease doctor, and I'm a mom, and I vaccinated my kids, and I'm a cardiologist, and I'm a mom, and I vaccinated my kids, and I'm a cardiologist,

and I'm a dad, and I vaccinated my kids. That is not how medicine is done. That's not how science is done. And finally, one woman who was an infectious disease doctor said something that I caught my ear, and I thought, ah, there is something. She was quoting data on the likelihood of death from common childhood illnesses and comparing it, and those that we vaccinate ubiquitously, and comparing it

to the probability of death in a pediatric population for COVID. And her claim, I don't know if this is accurate or not, I was listening just before we came on the air here. Her claim was that they are similar, that it's similar to, I know, I know, so I'll let Dr. Reish answer it. She was saying that, and I think what she was confusing was the death rate from, say, measles in a population that is largely vaccinated versus a death rate from COVID from an unvaccinated population or was something like that? But I'll let Dr. Reich answer this. Well, that would make sense. I didn't listen in, so I don't have my fingertips on those data. What I would say is that the mortality in young children from COVID,

children who are healthy, who don't have comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes, immunocompromised, a history of cancer, chronic kidney disease, things like that, normal healthy children, the mortality from COVID is as close to zero as there are numbers. That means less than one in a million. The chance of dying from COVID in such children is less than the chance of getting hit by lightning. Those are risks that we take in stride in our society. We don't think twice about them. The risks of adverse events from the vaccines are higher.

And so both things are relatively uncommon. That means if you vaccinate 20 million children, you're going to have a few hundred who have serious adverse events from the vaccination and maybe some deaths. Whereas in those 20 million children, you're going to have at most a handful, and it's going to be along the lines of the high-risk children who could die from it or get hospitalized from it. So both are rare. That's the problem, that when you consider a rare outcome of type 1 and a rare outcome of type 2, you're going to say, both are rare, I can ignore both of them. And so if I feel better, if I feel I'm protecting my child, then I'll go for a rare outcome type 2, because that way, I think I've actually done something that protects my child. Well, it might not, and it might be the

course. But because both are rare, nobody's paying attention to which is greater or lesser. And so on an individual basis, it hardly matters. On a population basis, it matters. On a policy basis, it matters. Dr. Victory. And that's a good segue. I think certainly Drew knows, and I am not anti-vaccine. I'm very pro-vaccine.

I've spoken and written prolifically on the importance of childhood vaccines. What I have concern about is these particular vaccines because of the complete paucity of safety data behind them, the lack of testing, and because never before in the history of medicine that I'm aware of have we offered a therapeutic or mandated a therapeutic to groups of people on whom it was never tested, including everything from pregnant women to people with autoimmune diseases, people who'd already had COVID and on and on. So the question you saw in my little lead-in piece, I really have been harping about the cost benefitbenefit or risk-benefit analysis that is a cornerstone of medicine. In your estimation, did COVID vaccines ever make sense? Did it ever comport with the risk-benefit analysis? Go back

to, you know, in March of, you know, when they first were rolled out, did it ever make sense in your mind? And does that have any kind of age breakdown? So I'll pile that on top of you. Yeah. It depends on who you're planning to give the vaccines to. If you're talking about high-risk people or elderly people who are to some degree at high risk by virtue of age, then there's a discussion that needs to be taken to try to evaluate accurately the risks and the benefits. If you're talking about people who you presume to be at low risk because they have none of these comorbidities and are not elderly, then the risk-benefit equation has already been kind of settled because you already know that they're at low enough risk that the vaccines don't apply to them.

The argument that one person should take a vaccine, even if it's harmful to them, so that some other person is protected is spurious, in my opinion, because that other person can take the vaccine and protect themselves if the vaccine works for that purpose. I think that there's been a lot of irrationality in this, and I just don't know how to get to the bottom of understanding how people make rational decisions. My problem with what I've learned over the past few months is not only have we seen major suppression of information about adverse events by FDA, CDC, governments in general, but this isn't new. I've been reading Mary Holland's book on the HPV vaccine, and it's like it was a playbook for what's happened in COVID that the suppression of information about adverse events has been ongoing.

Part of that is that the studies that are used to look at safety in randomized trials have been what I would call corrupt studies. Not that they were bad studies, but what they did is they looked at, say, a vaccine with an adjuvant versus the adjuvant by itself. Now, if you're doing an efficacy study, that makes sense because that says, does the vaccine actually convey a benefit that's attributable to the vaccine and not the adjuvant? But if you're doing a safety study, that study tells you nothing about whether the vaccine plus the adjuvant is But if you're doing a safety study, that study tells you nothing about whether the vaccine plus the adjuvant is safe. It only tells you whether the vaccine is safe with the adjuvant

compared to the adjuvant itself. But if the adjuvant isn't safe, you have no information. And this was the standard study that was done throughout the HPV trials. And I'm not sure whether it was done in COVID or not, but you get the idea that there are all these games that get played to hide the adverse events of these vaccines. It's not just in COVID, it's predated that. And now we've seen that the Israeli government has struck a committee to look at adverse events in their society from the Pfizer vaccine that was widely used in Israel. The committee, it took a year for this committee finally to get going in December of 2021. It provided results in May of 2022 to the government. The government sat on the results for two months, and then what leaked out was a video of a

conversation between government people saying that we have to be very careful about how we release the results of these data because it could create legal circumstances where we're going to get sued. And the reason for that is that there were all these adverse events, and we told them, in spite of knowing about these adverse events, to go and still take the vaccines. So that was bad enough. But then you had the lead advisor in the Israeli government for the COVID pandemic testify to the FDA, speak to the FDA, and misrepresent the adverse events in Israel, saying that there were no or negligible numbers of adverse events from the vaccines in Israel when she apparently had read this report and knew that there were

adverse events in the government materials. So this malfeasance seems to be traditional for vaccines and makes you wonder why the government is doing this. All governments, not just ours, are suppressing information about vaccine adverse events and what the implications are of that. Is it that there is a number that they're willing to accept? And that it's very much like when Ford used to calculate how many deaths would occur if they put the gas tank in a certain part of the car. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Everyone is freaking out. We got to get things back open.

What's the number of adverse events? What's the incidence? How do we figure that out? They're in a pretty tough situation. It's not zero and it's not a million. And how do we come up with that sort of, how do you come up with the philosophical ethics that substantiate that? And how do you come up with a sort of a medical number, a policy that is reasonable?

So you've hit the nail exactly on the head. You're speaking exactly like a public health person, not like a clinician. And that's what public health people do. They have to evaluate that trade-off. But we do have other benchmarks in society where we've done that. And for example, we know that there are 50,000 or 40,000 traffic fatalities every year in the US, and we don't really do much about that. We take that in stride as part of the way we allowed driving to occur. And so that number is already a ballpark of acceptability. What's worse, however, is that there's half a million deaths from

smoking-related diseases year in, year out in the United States. And we also have never had any serious policies to deal with smoking mortality. And in fact, the government won't ever touch that because smokers die at the time they're collecting social security. It cuts their average lifetime short by about 10 years. And that mortality and stopping of social security payouts gives the government, saves the government $80 billion a year, $80 billion a year in saved social security payments that it would have to raise taxes on everybody a lot. And they don't want to do that. So instead, government $80 billion a year, $80 billion a year in state Social Security payments, that it would have to raise taxes on everybody a lot, and they don't want to do that. So instead, they tolerate half a million people, 500,000 people a year, year in, year out, dying from smoking-related diseases. Well, if we're not willing, if we take that in stride, we're not

willing to do anything substantial about half a million deaths per year. COVID doesn't even come close to that. You know, we've had a million deaths over two years, and half of them weren't even from COVID. They were with COVID. So this is no emergency. There is something chilly in what you're saying, because you've taken what I've said, and you've upped it another notch. And it makes me think about the reality that many of the people making these decisions aren't clinicians. They're sociologists. And so literally making these decisions. They're actuaries. They're actuaries. Yeah, actuaries.

You're being generous. That's chilling. It's chilling to think that these are people that will not consider the kind of clinical decision making that clinical people are trained with. And strictly speaking, think in terms of these broad sweeping numbers, it's sort of chilling and disgusting at the same time. But even the question you posed, Drew, is a little bit different. I would say to Dr. Reich, the question with regard to what are the acceptable losses,

to use a military term for this, it would be one thing if you're talking about, okay, this is a smallpox vaccine, which is 99 point whatever percent effective at preventing someone from contracting smallpox. What are the acceptable losses in that case with regard to adverse events or chickenpox or measles or mumps? But when you start talking about the, frankly, complete lack of efficacy of the COVID vaccines, it doesn't stop you from contracting the virus. And it doesn't stop you from transmitting the virus. In that case, to me, what are the acceptable losses? What is the acceptable adverse event rate? It's pretty dang low. It's not the same as if you had a vaccine that was profoundly effective and impactful at stopping you from contracting the darn thing. Do you agree with

that? No, you're absolutely right. It's a risk-benefit analysis. And we've only known, the benefit has been presumed to be non-zero, and the risk hasn't been evaluated. It's only been recently, I think, the scientists at Johns Hopkins that tried to evaluate the risks of all the lockdowns, you know, in terms of health and economics, to get a handle on how much risk there's actually been perpetrated in the names of lockdown, for example. It's very difficult to evaluate things when the government or scientists controlled by the government tend to underestimate damage by orders of magnitude in order to purvey a product that is being distributed because of a paternalistic we know better than you and we're not giving you

informed consent viewpoint of the government. I think that public health has been toxically paternalistic over the last two and a half years, that there's a reason to think that for elite people with knowledge to think that they know better about the science, but they don't know better about the ethics and they don't know better about each person's circumstances, and they don't know better about each person's moral values and judgments, and so on. And so what we've had is the CDC pontificating, telling people, messaging that they want people to hear by, in other words, fear-mongering, to control their behaviors. Both my colleagues at Yale and many other places have been doing study after study after study on how do we improve and reduce vaccine hesitancy. The studies are all

talking about how to manipulate people to take up more vaccine doses instead of the studies asking, is it right that people should be taking the vaccines in the first place? It's like they're on some other planet, that they think that the whole problem is communication. Dr. Walensky said, after a review of the CDC recently, why the CDC has failed, because their communication strategies were weak. Well, that's bizarre. They communicate perfectly well. It's what they communicate that's the problem. And the communication that they put out is nonsense against science, using weak science,

cherry-picked bad results and so on, and claiming and doing this for political and pharma and other reasons and having nothing to do with the actual realistic scientific evidence and understanding and people's values as to how they want to conduct their lives. So, you know, to say it's just astonishing that the amount of hubris in the public health administration, thinking that they know everything and therefore they have the right to be paternalistic and to tell people what they should hear in order to control their behaviors, is tyranny. That is not how our society is supposed to be run. I want to ask you one question before we get to the final segment about the new bivalent vaccines, because I think a lot of folks watching have had questions about that. I'm not a vaccinologist,

but I had predicted very, very early on that the original vaccines would fail just because of the way they were designed based on the single spike protein and the likelihood that that spike protein would mutate. Now they've rolled out these brand new bivalent vaccines, including still a portion of the original Wuhan spike for reasons unclear, and now including some portion of the BA4 and BA5 sub-variants of Omicron. And tested them, by the way, on a total of eight mice. So we got that going for us. But where do you stand on these new vaccines, the bivalent ones, whether you think they have any value whatsoever and why they are continuing to push these. I mean, they are doubling down on get your new bivalent vaccine. Where do you think this is going?

And don't forget all of those eight mice got COVID. I know. So I'm not optimistic that these vaccines will do much. I think that in the current time, when BA.5 is still the dominant variant that's around, that the vaccines will have a little bit of benefit after the two weeks after the dose. So we know that for 10 days to two weeks after dose, the vaccines actually reduce, are not beneficial. They actually increase risk of getting infections. But if you get through that, then that's when they start to provide benefit.

It's likely they'll provide benefit for about a month after the dose. For fourth or fifth dose people, it'll probably be about a month, six weeks before they also start losing benefit and it goes to zero or goes negative for benefit. But at the same time, what we're seeing is the CDC has already provided data showing that the BA.5 variant, the major one in circulation now, has started to decline. It's reached its peak and is starting to decline. And what's pushing against it is BA.4.6. And what this means is if you look at the rate

that BA4.6 has been growing, it estimates to be by sometime between the beginning and the end of December of this year, that BA4.6 will be the majority. It'll be more than half of infections if they're still around will be BA4.6. Now, at the same time, a lot of people have had BA4, BA5, maybe the earlier Omicrons to some degree also. And that means there's a lot of population immunity now from BA5 and related. And nevertheless, BA4.6 is still increasing in spite of that context where people have either some degree of vaccine immunity or natural immunity to BA5, which tells me that the new vaccine will not be very strong against BA4.6. And so this means that by the time, if we're going to have a fall-winter

wave, and it's not certain that we will, but if we do, the end of december and into january it's likely to be a ba 4.6 wave and the vaccines will already be more than a month or two months old for people who've taken them and will be useless and so the this is just something that's that is just not going to matter one width and only puts people at further risk of more doses of the vaccine. See, Drew, I told you. No, I know. I was just thinking, I know. I know how you feel about this. And I was just thinking about no effect that the cellular immunity has no benefit. And I know, Kelly, you think there may be an active downside,

but we can't even make a case for cellular immunity from this bivalent vaccine. That's beyond my ken at this point. We'll learn about that. Yeah, I think, as Drew knows, I have just huge concerns, as I think you do too, Dr. Riesch, about not only lack of efficacy, but the potential downside, the fact that you're at higher risk for contracting COVID at certain portions, and fact that you're at higher risk for contracting COVID at certain portions. And frankly, I think at higher risk for contracting a lot of other things, development of cancers, and God only knows what. We just don't have the time. I mean,

this is why the average vaccine is six to eight years at a minimum in testing, because it takes that long to have some sense of what the downstream neurologic impacts could be, autoimmune impacts, reproductive impact, and on and on. Drew, I know you want to talk a little, but you want to go to therapeutics. So do we have time to talk about that? I'll let you guys do that. But we do. We have about 5, 10 minutes. And let me just state my position. And Caleb, do we need to head over to Rumble right now, or can we stay where we are? You guys, you can go ahead and keep going

as you're going right now. And if it gets to be too much, I'll clip it off later. Okay. Well, it's explained to everybody. So we are trying to, let me just. I think this is more for people that are going to see the replay. Okay.

If we clip the YouTube. So if you come to YouTube and it ended, head over to Rumble and you can see the entire conversation. And the reason being is we are trying to play nice with YouTube. They very kindly have given us some parameters. And one of their sort of absolute sort of lines in the sand is talking about early therapeutics. And they actually would let us talk about it if I pushed back really hard. I don't feel like that's my job. I'll state my position and I'll let you guys go have your conversation. I prefer to recuse myself and just state the following,

which is that I've seen therapeutics, lots of it used. I've treated lots and lots and lots of COVID. And there is a striking difference clinically between these early treatment modalities you guys are going to discuss, where I've seen lots of people who took these things and who were moderately ill and continued to get more sick. I've seen people who were mildly ill take them and get well. And I think to myself, they probably would have anyway. Versus I've deployed a lot of Paxlovid now. And that the next day, almost without exception, people are better.

And that's it, period. They are just, boom, dramatically better. And nobody goes to the hospital. And I've just done a lot of that. I'm talking about primarily older population. We really don't know what we're doing with the deployment of Paxlovid in younger people. My own daughter got it and was better right away,

but then magically got COVID again. Didn't have a rebound. She got reinfected very quickly, which I thought was interesting. There may be something there about how the immune function is altered by these strong therapeutics. But I just clinically have seen a dramatic difference between things that I'm thinking, I'm not sure it did anything, and something like a monoclonal antibody or Paxivir, where I was like, including myself, I took monoclonal antibodies, it was instantly better.

I mean, like during the infusion, it was striking. These striking changes versus maybe changes. And maybe you guys can push around know, you know, push around, you know, what the math is of maybe why I'm seeing that, or maybe why I'm biased the way I am guys have at it. Well, yeah. And I really want to hear your take on all of this, Dr. Rish. I would say, Drew, I think, you know, right now, since Paxlovid's been around, people haven't been hospitalized with COVID anyway because we got into the milder Omicron strain. So the mass of people being hospitalized in the first place. There are some bad Omicron. But in general.

I've seen alveolar filling. I've seen PEs. I've seen some nasty stuff from Omicron. So it's not without. It's just generally much better. Much better. But I'd say, you know, I have treated many people, not certainly as many as people like, you know, Pierre Corey or Peter McCullough and some others, but I've treated an awful lot of folks using what we knew early on were very, very effective treatments, things like

hydroxychloroquine. And let's face the idea of using hydroxychloroquine, You know, the CDC and NIH published papers back in 2005 showing that hydroxychloroquine was effective against SARS-CoV-1 from 2003. So it wasn't like this was a novel idea, but I'd really like to know from Dr. Riesch, you know, you've been involved in this from the beginning, the use of ivermectin, the use of hydroxychloroquine,

the cocktails that have been put together, including those of ivermectin, the use of hydroxychloroquine, the cocktails that have been put together, including those things, plus, you know, steroids and, you know, fluvaline. And I'm going to have Susan jump in here. I'm going to have Susan jump in here. And by the way, corticosteroids, I have seen them work very well too. And I took them myself when I was sick. But Susan, do you want to make a little parameter here? Maybe for Facebook, let's call it the H word or the I word. From going forward, just because it triggers everything. Okay. Okay. You said it three times in a row. We're in big trouble now.

Okay. Well, if I evaporate, if I vaporize, you'll know what happened. But Dr. Reich, from your perspective, how would this pandemic have played out had we not had the therapeutic nihilism that we have that we have lived through? If we actually had been allowed to use these medications, how do you see this thing playing out, having played out? Well, I have to answer it in a way that says, what evidence do we have now that I could say would have applied to what would have happened earlier in the pandemic. So the evidence we have now is that studies have been done on the efficacy of these medications over the last two or two and a half years. And now we have a much better average idea of how much they work in the magnitude. And so we can take those magnitudes

and estimate what would have happened early on if we had been using them. I would say that there's a number of different circumstances. First of all, my interest in understanding the medications is do they reduce risks of hospitalization and mortality? I'm not concerned about what they shorten illness, whether they people become test negative or any more subjective kinds of outcomes. My outcomes of interest are only hospitalization and mortality and only for outpatient use. Now, my colleagues have looked at inpatient use,

hospital use, and they have their results. That has not been an area that I have explored in any depth. So I'm not gonna comment about that, just outpatient use. That's the first step, basically, and prevention use, which I've looked at to some degree also, which I'll comment about. Now, the H medication has been studied in 10 studies by now that include more than 40,000 patients across the world. And averaging the results of those studies

shows that it reduces risk of hospitalization by close to 50% and reduces mortality by about 75%. These studies are mostly the medication plus zinc in some of them. One or two had an antibiotic with them. But you have to understand that you don't just treat people with one medication and or zinc. Doctors treat patients by throwing everything they think is necessary and appropriate and safe to use. And that's usually more effective than just the base medication itself. So these studies would be, to some degree, an underestimate of the benefit. But they do show that the H medication reduces risk of hospitalization by half, about, and mortality by three quarters. That is a large amount.

I just reviewed similar studies. that have looked at the I medication and show that it reduces risks of mortality and hospitalization both by about half. So that's the ballpark we're talking about. These medications don't totally remove the possibility of more serious outcomes, but they do reduce them substantially. The medications can be used with each other. So you can use both H and I at the same time and presumably obtain even more benefit. They can be used with antibiotics. They can be used with zinc. They can be used with steroids, either inhaled steroids or systemic steroids. Doctors do this day in, day out, who treat these illnesses when they treat them aggressively. And the other thing is, it also depends on what the nature of the strain is that's being treated. And I agree that Omicron is generally much less risky from the point of

mortality than the original strains through Delta. That doesn't make it zero, but it makes it less risky for healthy people. And I should also say vitamin D. There's very good evidence that having been taking vitamin D for most people in most of the world reduces their risk of dying from COVID, regardless of everything else. So vitamin D is just something that everybody needs to take. Anyway, that's the ballpark of this. And whether this would have changed the outcomes of the million people who died with or from COVID over the two years, I think that it's pretty clear that on average, it would have cut the mortality from COVID, which is maybe half of those, by half to two thirds or three quarters, something in that

ballpark. So we're still talking about large numbers of people, maybe 200,000 people, 100,000 people, something along those lines. Would they have ended the pandemic early? Probably not. But then again, the pandemic isn't ended and won't end if the virus is endemic, which it probably is and will be. So this is a tapering off. And the question really is, how do we manage it the best way we can? And the answer is, you treat patients as patients. When they come to you and they want help, you give them help and you don't say, go home. And when you're about to die, go to the hospital. That was the completely wrong thing to do. It was an inhumane, psychopathic thing to do based on misrepresentation of the science. Now, I could go through all the details about why I think what I do about these various studies and

why what the FDA and the CDC has said about studies is absolutely wrong from a scientific point of view. We've been facing 30 years of the fraud of evidence-based medicine. And I'm not the first one to say that evidence-based medicine is a fraud. It's, again, a plausibility argument that you think that randomization cures all medical research ills. It doesn't. It's a fraud. And the reason for that is that randomized controlled trials, if they're large, they can provide good evidence. But large means that they have more than 50 or 100 outcome events in each arm of the treatment. So the treatment group has more than 50 or 100 people who got the outcome.

The placebo group has more than 50 or 100. That's a study where the randomization will work. Everything else is junk science, basically. And so we have a whole collection of randomized studies that are essentially meaningless. And the ones for the H medication that were done early in the pandemic to try to say that it was useless for outpatient treatment were useless studies because it had three hospitalizations in one group and one hospitalization in the other group.

Randomization is useless, okay? That happens by chance. That's a totally meaningless number. It's not evidence whatsoever. And the fact that it might have had 600 or 1,000 or 5,000 people who got the medications doesn't make it a large study because the outcome events are what matters. So I'm getting off in the weeds a little bit in this scientifically, but the point is that these were very bad studies that are being cited because of this messaging that evidence-based medicine, so-called randomized trials, are the only kinds of evidence that need to be considered. And that's the exact opposite of the true science.

Well, no, you're exactly right with regard to these. Let me just say, Drew, with regard to these studies, some of the other studies used toxic doses of the eye medication. Some of them started both the eye and H medication way too late in the course of the hospitalization. Some of them only used it for a matter of two or three days versus the, you know, what we know works, which is five to seven days at a minimum. So they were flawed. These studies were flawed in many, many ways. And that's why I asked that question early on in the interview. Where were you going to go, Drew? Well, I was going to say, can we go, can, if people want to get more into the weeds, can they find it on your sub stack or your telegram, I guess it's called? I have the telegram. Also, the earlycovidcare.org has got a lot of information on these studies. And I'll also say that this new medical healthcare startup that I'm involved in,

the wellness company, is also compiling large volumes of these original scientific papers for people to review, for doctors to review, to put it all out there in public and let people try to understand the evidence in trying to obtain quality healthcare. We have to wrap up in just a couple of minutes. Yeah, that's the same website that I'm associated with. I'm sorry. The first one he was saying, earlycovidcare.org is the one you put up for me every week.

Got it. We're on the same. Got it. We have the same website. And one last thing. The wellness thing. One last thing for me before we wrap up is that, you know, you mentioned the psychopathic behavior of our colleagues. And I often have wondered at times if just giving somebody something and following up properly was sufficient to change the course of this pandemic.

This idea of just sending people home until they couldn't breathe, that was just breathtaking. But you've made that point. Kelly, go ahead. I was just going to say, truly from a public health perspective, this was such a squandered opportunity to educate people about the simple things that they could have done to decrease their risk from COVID. Obviously, you can't do anything about your age. So if your risk factor is that you're in your 70s or 80s, you live with that. But the idea of supplementing vitamin D, given how common vitamin D deficiency is, and we know that most people's levels aren't high enough for taking zinc, losing weight, given the huge risk that obesity is the single greatest risk factor for a bad outcome from COVID.

And it was a tragic, squandered opportunity. Does the name of your new company, Dr. Riesch, this wellness company, is it focused on overall wellness? Is it focused specifically on COVID? What's the focus of that? It's actually both. Its aim is to provide unfettered independent medical care, that doctors are going to be free to use their best experience and judgment and to remove corporate medicine, to remove all of those exogenous state influences on medical care and let doctors just be doctors the way doctors have been through much of history. And that's what patients want. And they want to know, they want to be able to trust their doctor and not that there's, you know,

an attorney sitting behind the doctor telling the doctor what they can and can't do or say. And that's just, it will include care. What a novel and it's just stunning. I can't understand the idea. It's such a strange idea. Doctors and the patient working together in the best interest of the patient.

Wow, weird. So guys, I have to wrap this up. Go ahead. Dr. Eash, I'm sorry. What do we come to in a society where we have to reinvent the obvious? Yes. Yeah, well, it has been a very bewildering experience, but talking to people like Dr. Rich

have helped me get my head around. I mean, today specifically, one of the things that jumped out at me was the understanding what's going on in college campuses. That was like, I couldn't understand it. Now I'm starting to understand it. I'm sure there's more to it, but it kind of starts to make sense. Susan, any last minute from your camp? No, that was great. Yeah. Really interesting. And Caleb, you'll have the various websites and things up on drdrew.com. Yes. Anyone. And if they're listening to this as a podcast, they can just go to drdrew.com slash 9142022. That's drdrew.com slash 9142022 and find any links. And I'll also be updating it in the next 24 hours with any links that are sent by the guests and i know i'm going to go dig a little

deeper into what dr rish was talking about and dr victory is regularly exposed to i'm starting to understand why you have the uh position you do dr dr victory because you are regularly exposed to doctoration thoughts like that. And I am still, I must tell you, I feel like I have a weight on my chest a little bit trying to navigate my way through all this. Because you walk away and then I read other things and it's a very bewildering landscape right now. Just imagine how patients and the public feels. It's just very, very difficult. But I do appreciate you being with us and expanding my understanding of these things. I really kind of want to bring Dr. Rich

back to tell you the truth, because I do want to get into the weeds on some of this stuff. But I won't force the issue right now, but we hopefully can invite you back sometime soon. Love to. Happy to. Okay. Thanks so much for joining us. And he has COVID right now. Go take the tie off and lay back down in bed. And he's still able to function.

Look at that. I know. His brain's working right. Trouble. Yeah, my brain did not work right when I had COVID. So good for you. If this is your brain on COVID, I want to encounter it off COVID too. All right, guys.

Thank you so much. We have to wrap it off COVID too. All right, guys, thank you so much. We have to wrap this all up. We are out tomorrow. Dr. Victory, we are back with you next Wednesday. And let me see what that is. Dr. Bhattacharya. Yes, Dr. Bhattacharya. Yeah, who I think is going to be one of the poster child children of this uh pandemic and just just uh just a actually i think badachari is on the 28th oh really who's next week kayla no hold on maybe not my calendar says he's next week i had i had him next week i think he's he's the 21st dr badachari didn't get it we will we will be on a slightly different setup uh are we going gonna try to do a show on monday susan uh i don't know you have it set up on tuesday early you want to do a show early on tuesday it looks like yeah so we'll be back on tuesday caleb live from new york live from new

york it's going to be er it's it's uh okay it's live from new york it's asked dr drew with kelly victory um but uh caleb we're gonna have to do early early on Tuesday and then usual time on Wednesday and Thursday. Okay? Sounds good. Okay. Thank you, guys. We'll see you next Tuesday. It'll be probably noontime Pacific and then back 3 o'clock next Wednesday for Dr. Bradshaw. Don't miss that.

Thank you, Dr. Victory. And thank you, Dr. Victory. See you on Wednesday. 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

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