Ask Dr. Drew - Poison Train of East Palestine: Pedro Gonzalez Exposes Politics Behind Norfolk Southern Disaster w/ Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 193

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Pedro Gonzalez exposes how political forces ignored looming threats that led to the Norfolk Southern 32N disaster in Feb 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio, and the safety breakdowns that contributed to the derailment and hazardous chemical spill. ••「 PHOTOS & SOURCES: https://drdrew.com/392023  」•• “The cars that derailed carried hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride, a toxic and flammable chemical used to make polyvinyl chloride or PVC that is extremely carcinogenic, ” Gonzalez tweeted. “Five of the cars that derailed contained a combined 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride.” Pedro Gonzalez is a senior writer at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and a senior fellow at the American Principles Project. He is also the recipient of the Haggerty-Richardson Fellowship at the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Lincoln Fellowship at the Claremont Institute. Follow him at https://twitter.com/emeriticus/ and read his posts at https://contra.substack.com/ 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She served as CMO for Whole Health Management, delivering on-site healthcare services for Fortune 500 companies. She holds a BS from Duke University and her MD from the University of North Carolina. Follow her at https://earlycovidcare.org 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

Different topic, but certainly warrants health attention. The so-called poison train of East Palestine. Pedro Gonzalez shows us how political forces led to the Norfolk Southern disaster, where multiple chemicals were spilled. We'll talk about gases and liquid chemicals as well. And I was reading the list in an article I was reading, and it didn't mention carcinogenicity, but it all seems carcinogenic to me. And we'll take a look at that. Five of the cars that derailed contained a combined 115,000

gallons of vinyl chloride, which to my understanding, polyvinyl chloride is a carcinogen. So we'll talk about that with Pedro Gonzalez, senior writer at the Chronicles. We'll get right to it. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre the psychopaths start this right he was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography btsd love addiction fentanyl and heroin ridiculous five months i'm a doctor for i'm just saying you go to treatment before you kill people i am a clinician i observe things about these chemicals let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it,

I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. We'll be right back. team, your favorite player, or your style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. And as I'm preparing to talk to our guest, Pedro Gonzalez, it just occurs to me that we live in a time where it is so hard to find accurate information. We are hopefully going to get some from Pedro today. Again, it is astonishing to me that you have to really work hard to get at the truth

in today's day and age. Pedro is a senior writer at The Chronicles. He's a senior fellow at the Chronicles. He's a senior fellow at the American Principles Project. He has written about how the political forces is what led to the Norfolk Southern 32N disaster on February 2023 in Palestine, Ohio. Safety breakdowns that contributed to that derailment and of course hazardous chemicals and God knows what the full consequence will have been from that we're going to bring Dr Kelly victory in here fairly quickly but right now let's bring in our guest Pedro Gonzalez welcome thanks for having me

so as I was saying I am looking for exposition here what tell us from your perspective what happened there well that is a small question uh that requires a very long answer and i think we could probably take the entire show because going back to what you just said the first thing that i encountered while trying to actually find something out about this this incident and by the way i live in ohio i live about just under two hours away from east palestine uh that's how the locals pronounce it by the way i've been here for a few years in ohio and i was actually corrected by the locals because i i pronounced it the wrong way there's a midwestern pronunciation to these things but um perfect right the that was really the thing that struck me and

the part of the reason why I wrote this story is that it was really difficult to know what exactly had happened. And I thought that by going to East Palestine and talking to locals, talking to business owners, talking to people that live just a few yards or within a mile of ground zero, I would get answers. And I really came away with more questions. This is a town of about 5,000 people in the middle of the heartland. It's quintessential forgotten America. Something really big has happened in the backyard of this little community. And the people who

live there feel in the dark about what's going on. it initially it was I mean things have improved because of all the media attention now that there's been a kind of you know a forced correction to what had initially gone down so now it's a little bit better I suppose but I spoke to people whose homes were surrounded by these blue containers with black tarps over them you know and as far as they can guess those are filled with contaminated material and they are contaminated soil and other things. But if they go to the cleanup crews who are milling around in their front and backyard, pumping stuff out of the streams that run through the town that literally run through the backyard to the people that I've

spoken with, the answer they'll get from the cleanup crews is, we can't talk to you. The mayor himself, Mayor Conaway, is really in a similar position. This is someone who is trying to do well, someone who is part of this tiny community, like an actual member of the community. He's also felt in the wind and in the dark about what happened here. We can obviously get into the details, but I think that's really important to stress that there has been a breakdown, not just in the level of, you know, our infrastructure and how that's eroded over the years, but also in just our basic ability to communicate

and react in a time of crisis where, again, something has happened and the people in whose it's happened are really feel like they're in the dark and they don't know who to trust now is the you know you keep hearing rumors that this thing was somehow nefariously caused it wasn't just a breakdown of infrastructure what's your opinion on that no i as far as I can tell I mean this is I'm honestly fact is often more not just stranger but more horrifying than fiction I think that's an interesting thing about the conspiracies that we spend to you know make things into to sound more sensational than they actually are well I mean the truth is pretty sensational pete budaj said something like you know well east palestine isn't a big deal because this sort of thing happens all the time that's true but it's on the one hand it shouldn't be you know the way things are and what

is right what we're told the most advanced country in the world so you think that we would have first world infrastructure right where this is not actually something that happens all the time. But when you actually, you know, kind of take in that statement, you're telling me that this happens all the time. I've only just found out about this, that this is a common thing where you have trains that are loaded with really dangerous chemicals that just spill into small communities and people have no idea that this happens every single day or several times a year, thousands of times a year. There are thousands of derailments every year. And one thing I noticed, or I mean, I'm sure you notice this too, is that in the wake of

this, there was an uptick in people just kind of paying attention to derailments. And so if you're on Twitter, you probably saw viral videos of a derailment in Arizona, Texas, whatever. And in some cases, these are trains that are carrying toxic chemicals and and there was actually I think shortly after the derailment in East Palestine there was two more in Ohio and the most recent one it was initially feared that it was also carrying toxic chemicals the area was evacuated hazmat teeth were hazmat teams were called it I mean this is actually worse than a novel about it. It's

interesting because there's actually a novel that was written that's very similar to what happened in East Palestine. It's called White Noise. And some of the locals, from my understanding, actually participated in the film adaptation of White Noise. So there was a CNN headline. It was something like, the residents of East Palestine are now part of a, of a story they helped write. Um, but what's actually horrifying is the fact that we're in a country that's run by people that have just decided this is how you're going to live. You just have to accept this.

I mean, that to me is actually worse than hostile aliens invading and forcing this on us. It's the people that you trust. It's a hard thing to swallow, exactly. I'm just curious, you know, in the past when I've, you know, when I've been on other news agencies and things and had to cover events like this, there were always attorneys swirling around. There was always Aaron Brockovich and these liability attorneys really swarming these places.

Are we seeing that kind of thing go on here too? Aaron Brockovich did show up but this is actually another interesting aspect of this is that i mean think of your environmental protest right like the numerous pipeline protest groups you know you've got celebrities standing in solidarity instagram hashtags all this stuff right basically something that's happening somewhere in the heartland or in flyover country becomes a national issue when it's somehow resonant with the left's understanding of environmentalism and social activism. Then you have Bono fundraising for pipeline protesters or whatever.

But that's not happening in East Palestine. These people had to kick and scream to get people to pay attention to them. And then when people did start paying attention to them, the reaction from people like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg was initially just to blow them off and basically say, tough luck. This happens all the time. You're not special. And the reaction from the left, which again, they're supposed to be the ones that care about the environment, they're the ones that are supposed to care about social justice.

This is really a story about how the corporate capture of regulatory agencies has made us all less safe. This sounds like something that's out of a left-wing thriller novel right they don't care right why don't they care I mean I mean they're a different reason but it mean one thing and I know that it's it's really um like you said it's it's difficult to swallow this but he's Palestine is it's white working-class America it's not a place that really incurs the kind of you know that the sympathy that the left would have because you know these are i mean this is trump country when i went there there was you know there was in the downtown i would argue that we don't we i

would argue we don't even know if the left would have sympathy i'm going to predict they would if the press would report it it really is the press non-reporting that doesn't even give the left an opportunity to have an opinion about it, right? I mean, it's crazy. You're right. Obviously, there was this kind of, the media did a terrible job of covering it initially,

but at the same time, when we started to pay attention to it and when people like Tucker Carlson started to pay more attention to it and to talk about it, the left's reaction was the opposite. It was sort of like the right is trying to politicize this. But that's a symptom of our time, right? Isn't that the symptom of the time of Tucker Carlson? It's like if Trump said something, you have to say no.

If Tucker Carlson says something, you have to say the opposite. And that is a really unfortunate example of how things are working in this country today. All right, well, I have a bunch more questions, but I want to get Dr. Kelly Victory in here because I do want to get into some of the health aspects of this. And is anybody reporting on what's in the soil and the water and what to think

and how many parts per million are likely to cause cancer and this kind of stuff? I'm sure you've got some of that in mind. So let's get Kelly Victory in here after this quick break. Be right back. I think you know how much susan and i love our genu cell skin care and how easy it is to try our one-of-a-kind customer packages bundled with our favorite products susan realized the other day that one of our kids stole some of our deep correcting serum from our stash if you will we had no idea that the lactic and hyaluronic acid combo is so great for adult acne,

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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. Dr. Victory, let's get into this. All right. Welcome, Pedro. Thanks so much for being here. This is a really important topic to me, not only as a disaster specialist with an extensive history in public health, but also because I am an Ohio native as well. I grew up, spent most of my life in Cleveland and I've got a lot of family throughout the

state of Ohio. In addition, I teach a class on leadership in times of crisis. And I am just shocked at the real failures of leadership during this particular crisis. So I'm going to start at a high level and then get more granular, if you'll allow me. You mentioned, and I find it likewise incredible, that public health officials, including Pete Buttigieg, would make the claim that it's no big deal. This stuff happens all the time. The concept of this level of disaster, of potentially fatal or critically impactful disasters happening, and it's reflective of our infrastructure issues. What kinds of discussions have you had? What have you learned about this in terms of, is this actually a daily occurrence? God knows, I've

seen trains going off the rails. It certainly sounds like many, many times, and it seems to be happening more often. Where are we from your deep dive in this with regard to the quality of our infrastructure and specifically with this issue around trains? Yeah. Ralph Nader gave a comment at the Intercept, and he basically described this industry as one of the most, that the regulatory industry when it comes to transportation and railroads is utterly captured. It's completely incapable of being improved and made safer.

This is, according to guys like Nader, which I mean, what I found seems to confirm that. That basically the railroad companies like Norfolk Southern are really, really good at fighting legislation that is designed to make the transportation of hazardous materials safer, but from Norfolk Southern's point of view, less efficient and cutting into their bottom line. And I think that you can look at East Palestine and kind of see what this looks like on the level of the community. And so the train derailed on February 3rd, and that's kind of when the story begins,

right, for most people. But that's not actually true. The train broke down at least once on the night of February 1st. And so I think that's important because the reports say it broke down at least once. Did it break down more than once on February 1st? And why did it keep rolling after it broke down at least once. Did it break down more than once on February 1st? And why did it keep rolling after it broke down? The crew, when they spoke to CBS News, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they said they were afraid of retaliation from Norfolk Southern. And the consensus among the crew was that the train was too...

Basically, the issues with it were related to its size. This, this thing was, uh, 151 cars, 18,000 tons, just a behemoth. And the crew said that this has kind of become common in the industry and it shouldn't be because we shouldn't be hauling trains that are this long. And at the same time that this has become common, uh, the industry has also seen tons of layoffs. So basically there are fewer people that are able to make sure that these trains are even safe to operate. And you've got one person doing,

wearing like three different hats and they're overworked, they're tired. Can I ask a question? Yeah, go ahead. I get the understaff, but what is it about, this is pure ignorance on my part, what is it about the length of a train that makes it unsafe?

It's the physics. physics the physics of it physics but if they're on a it's on a straight is it the turning radii that gets i mean it's just you can put engines throughout the the you know why is it why is multiple engines and multiple cars pushed together on a single strand different than three different trains because because of the mass the inertia the mat the mass of of a train that much weight moving at a certain speed it's going to number one pile up and go further uh and be spread further if in fact it crashes if it stops or if it breaks okay got. Got it. Correct. And just the amount of toxic material that's being, you know, there's a reason that we don't allow, for example, even an 18-wheeler to transport toxic materials on certain interstates or over a bridge or through a tunnel because the results could be disastrous if that single

18-wheeler were to crash. Now you've put 150 18-wheelers worth of stuff, of toxic soup, on this thing. So it is beyond a potential disaster. So I'm sorry, Pedro, go back to where you were telling a good story here. No, no, and there's so much there right by the way three months before this derailment President Norfolk Southern president and CEO Alan Shaw was in DC where he snapped a picture with Pete Buttigieg and he put posted on a LinkedIn and the caption is about basically how Norfolk Southern is committed to social justice and corporate responsibility Of course, they're subscribed to ESG and all that stuff, but it's a lot of kind of feel-good

You know, we're in Washington to sing praises to mother earth. But in reality, the Washington post actually obtained documents that show that the trip to Washington, uh, was also Norfolk Southern raising alarms over, uh, proposed regulatory changes regarding breaks that again would make the train safer, but from Norfolk Southern's perspective, specifically safer when it comes to preventing derailments, by the way, but from Norfolk Southern's perspective, well this would take too much time to implement, it would cost way too much money, and ultimately it would mess with the supply chain and our ability to move freight around the country. That was three months before the train derailed.

And before that, I mean, go back to 2012. In New Jersey, there was a really similar derailment where 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride spilled. And that happened amid a streak of other derailments. And so it kind of spurred the wheels of change in action under the Obama administration. But industry pressure managed to hamper the ability of even in action under the Obama administration, but industry pressure managed to hamper the ability of even Obama. Again, this goes beyond Republicans and Democrats. The Obama administration was not able to actually get the reforms it wanted because of industry pressure.

A very similar thing happened under Trump. As far as we can tell, Biden hasn't been much better on this issue on this issue either obviously and you know his reaction to it says everything but going back to you know east palestine so february 1st you have the first red flags and then on the night of february 3rd there there's all this i'm sure you've seen these videos of the train passing uh behind businesses and residences about 20 miles outside of east palestine from where it would derail, where it shows that there's flames and sparks flashing underneath one of the cars. This is captured across basically as the train is traveling closer and closer to East Palestine. But according to investigators, the crew was not notified that something was wrong with

an axle until it was just outside of East Palestine. You have to really put this in the context of just systemic failure. The investigators correctly noted this was 100% preventable, that it was shockingly preventable at every stage, and yet it happened. And unfortunately, Buttigieg is right. This actually kind of seems to be part of our infrastructure. No, and let me interject here. You're exactly right, Pedro. There are these early warning safety systems in place, but a safety system is only as good as your ability to act on it and have it reported to you. It's not dissimilar. And I don't want to, you may know that Drew and I do a lot of talking about COVID and what's going on with the pandemic.

Again, you know, we have an early warning sign in place with the VAERS system, but they ignore it. If you put a warning sign in place, whether it's video or alarms, and you don't alert the people who are actually driving the train that something is going on, that safety system is essentially useless. So here you have this 150 car long thing, behemoth, as you called it, rightly so, powering on towards a residential area. And just to answer Drew's question again, it's not just the mass, but the velocity, the centrifugal force. If something goes around a curve, the length of the whip is increased. The velocity of the last cars are grossly, greatly increased as you go around a curve.

I don't know where this thing ultimately finally went off the rail. Let's talk about that next. What is the maintenance of the actual track itself? What do they know? What caused this? Was it a failure of an axle? Was it a failure of the track? Was it an issue of speed, you know, velocity around a curve? Why did it go off the darn rail? So the, the investigation, again, this goes back to the issue of just the lack of our ability to communicate and react to these incidents. The train derailed on February 3rd, but the investigation that told us that basically an alarm had gone off pertaining to an axle issue, and I mean, that's as vague as it is right now, there was an axle issue. That report was not released until February 23rd and we and then this another report related to how the the cars were

vented because if there was the week we're gonna get into this but the whole question this is the most controversial thing basically the decision to dump the chemicals in East Palestine and then do a controlled burn, right? Well, again, we didn't know until March 1st, according to a union rep, that a lot of the first responders who were involved in that whole thing, I mean, this is really harrowing. It's another aspect of the story that hasn't been told. According to this union rep, several of the people that were involved in that emergency effort were not provided with the proper PPE. They were not given the proper protective equipment. One person who spoke to this union rep, this rep sent a letter to Governor Mike DeWine

on March 1st. And according to him, there were people that were experiencing extreme nausea and headaches and were asking to go home because obviously they felt terrible and they didn't feel safe and and basically they didn't get any answer what one person asked if he could if he could get off the scene and his supervisor gave him an answer to the effect of I'll get back to you but he never did and then for days after dealing with this they had nausea and headaches and stuff and of course Norfolk Southern responded by saying, you know, that's not true. Everyone had proper PPE. But I mean, it's basically their word versus somebody else's word. Well, COVID has taught us how people use proper PPE. I mean, they're using their PPE until it's

time to get a drink of water or until it's time to have a snack. And then they're used to pulling it down. If anything, the COVID behavior has sort of adulterated what they might have done there. But I want to go back to really quickly, because I'm just reading about these chemicals. These are very seriously dangerous chemicals. Do we know how bad the contamination got in the soil or the water? I'm just reading the Environmental Protection Agency does not allow for more than two micrograms per liter of vinyl chloride. I'm guessing there must have been much higher concentrations in various sources of certainly water. Well, before we go there,

let's talk about what happened, this spill, why they dumped it, dumping it and then deciding to get it into the soil, you know, the soil, because that's where I really want to go next, Pedro. You know, from a they made a decision. They you know, somebody made a decision that the this toxic, to make it a controlled, their word, not mine, because this was the least controlled thing. Why in the world would you make a decision to explode something, to set it on fire without evacuating everybody for miles and miles and miles around beforehand. They didn't do that. So talk about how that decision got made. Well, if you look at DeWine's statement, so train derails on February 3rd. And by the way, when it derailed, this is one of those things that's so murky.

There were people on scene and people in the town who reported a horrible smell in the air. Mayor Conaway said, as far as we know, as far as we can tell, and as far as we're being told, none of the cars carrying chemicals have been punctured or whatever, ruptured. But he described a horrible smell. There was a girl that I interviewed. Her name is Zusa. She, uh, cause it derailed around 9 PM and you know, these people had no idea what happened. They just heard sirens. They heard, they heard commotion, but she knew something was wrong when her nine year

old son with asthma began vomiting. And when she had difficulty breathing and their house was filled with this horrible smell. And so at 3 AM she, she and her son fled and they'd been actually staying across the border in Pennsylvania for much of the time. They still haven't gone back home because they don't feel like it's safe and they don't trust the people that have been hired to conduct the testing. But so many people said this, even the fire chief of East Palisade, and I tried to talk

to them and they didn't want to give me a comment, which I can understand. But I wanted to talk to them because the fire chief said to reporters early on if you don't have to come to East Palestine don't and he said that right after saying as far as we can tell the air is safe however if you don't have to come here don't like this doesn't inspire confidence right and and as soon as it derailed the train was on fire I saw video from people that actually work at Norfolk Southern or sorry there was video that was posted by Norfolk so the employees where you could see that other cars were on fire and and I mean everyone you know has that gigantic black mushroom cloud imprinted on their memory now but there was it was burning before that and and so again it gets the

question of what stuff already you know in the soil or whatever before the so-called controlled vent? But as far as the quality of the soil and the water and all that, this is all stuff that's in the air. And it doesn't help that Norfolk Southern brought in organizations like the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health. This is a private contractor. They've been involved in everything like from the BP Gulf of Mexico spill to a number of other similar kind of corporate disasters where there's an environmental incident. And then, you know, they have to prove that it's safe. And so they bring in agencies like the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health to conduct testing.

But they're controversial because every single time that they get brought in, they always say everything's fine. There's an article in the New York Times about it. And the New York Times actually documents all these different crises that they've been involved in where they say the same thing. It's safe. It's totally fine. Including-

Is there an organization that's more reliable? I think it's just difficult to get over that, that public perception of you're just kind of here to tell us what Norfolk Southern wants to hear. And obviously, to make matters worse, I'm sure you heard heard people were being asked to sign hold harmless agreements right most locals interpreted to mean if I get cancer in a few years I can't hold you responsible and then what's that what I was just say remember you know we've got we've got lawsuits going on now for exposures at Camp Lejeune to contaminated drinking water that happened back in the 1980s. It can take decades for people to really realize the profound health effects.

So, yes, Drew, we're looking at those five chemicals that were on board, including vinyl chloride, highly toxic, and ethylene glycol. But vinyl chloride, when exposed to heat, turns to phosgene gas, which was a chemical weapon, you may recall. It's not just each, there are five chemicals on board, but when they become exposed to things like water, heat, soil, they can turn into other compounds that are equally or more toxic. So the idea that these people were told early on, first of all, not evacuated before this, quote, controlled burn, which that's not controlled if you left everybody in place. And then we're told immediately that everything was safe to go back when the people are experiencing hellacious what percentage of people Pedro in your experience being there what percentage of people were having either were aware that there was

something very bad going on and we're actually having symptoms from this even if it was just feeling lousy almost everyone I spoke with described something whether it was a rash a rash on their body or on their hands whether it was like a low-grade headache the last time that I was there right before I published the story I was told by a reporter that his colleagues had actually gone over to the town nearby called Negley. It's about three miles away because they had reports of a kind of chemical smell coming from a stream. And they described it as paint thinner. And when they were done covering it, they all came back with headaches. And so that's the most common thing I'm hearing is that people just kind of report this persistent kind of headache. And the rashes seem to be kind of going away

but i spoke to a business owner and gave me really you know a typical story was that when they came back to open their business it was filled with this awful smell uh i mean an important part of the story is not scaring people more than they already are right but but the questions that they ask reflect that you know what about all the product in my store? Do I have to get rid of this stuff? I have no idea. What's the guidance on this. Right. And so she said that when, when she and her son came back into the store to open it after the evacuation order was lifted, uh, there was this horrible smell and that her eyes and throat really burned. And that she said for days afterwards, her son could still smell it. It's this terrible, irritating odor. And I heard that from so many people that I spoke with, whether it's at the shop or in their home, especially the people that

live really close to Ground Zero. I spoke to one business owner who has not reopened their shop since the incident because they don't feel comfortable doing so. They didn't want to go into details why, but that was it. So this is kind of like a waking nightmare for these people. And it's made all the worse by the uncertainty. And Kelly, as miserable as that all is, I still, what I worry about is some of these hydrocarbons can rip through the biological material and clip dna on their way through and now you've got cancer or enough clips of enough dna uh and you

get you got a really serious problem and that won't show up for quite some time and all several of them i've been reading about are quite capable of doing this so it's it's really the horror again we don't want to frighten these people but that's what worries us is what's to come. No, rightly so. And I think you've got to know, back to this issue of the politicization of it, you know, if two, you know, dolphins show up on the beach, you know, the left goes nuts. You know, God forbid you endanger some species of bird or there's some, you know, environmental contaminant that is, you know, affecting birds, you hear some species of bird or there's some environmental contaminant that is affecting

birds, you hear all about it. But we have now this disaster. Clearly, people are having acute symptoms of nausea, vomiting, headache, rashes. But the bigger issue is, Drew, as you're saying, is what are the long-term impacts? And we have people, you know, Mike DeWine is a Republican governor of the state of Ohio, came down and was the first to say, you know, it's safe. And I thought, really, if you believe it's safe, then frankly, the right thing, and I posted this on social media, Pedro, within days, I said, if you think it's safe,

then out of an act of goodwill, know governor dewine move your family and yourself down there for a few months you bathe you bathe in that water you drink that water um as a as a show of good faith you know there's i don't know if you're aware the idea of um toasting when people you know glasses together that's you know medieval concept it came from because of the fear that your your friend your your colleague had poisoned you with hemlock so you'd bash your glass into there's hoping to spill some of your into theirs and then say to your health you drink first to your health and that's what I would say to these guys who are claiming it's safe. Good. You first. You know, this is just hellacious.

No, that's so well put. And I think I know that we were talking about using categories like left and right. But in this story, I tried to show that this is actually something that goes beyond left and right, Republican and Democrat. So, you know, going back to what I'd said earlier to kind of show you what I mean about capture of regulatory agencies. So the Obama administration was obviously undermined in their attempts to reform transportation safety. And then, like I said, three months before the wreck,

you have Norfolk Southern in DC raising alarm over a proposal. It wasn't about breaks. It was actually for mandating that in most cases you have at least a certain amount of crew members who are involved when a train is transporting hazardous materials. Norfolk Southern argued that that would be too cost prohibitive for them to implement. Under the Trump administration, you have the repeal of safety regulations regarding breaks. You know, it's just this runs through every it doesn't matter who's in the White House. The lobbyists get their way.

And I think on a much smaller level that has almost kind of a comedic effect. You know, you have Troy Nels, this Republican from Texas who gets angry at J.D. Vance for telling people, look, I don't want to scare you. By the way, I think he did such a great job because JD was trying to do two things, not scare people more than they're already scared and also not take at face value what these contractors at Norfolk Southern has brought in to say everything's fine. He's trying to kind of stalk a middle ground, which I think is really, you know, he deserves a lot of credit for that. And so his recommendation was

just drink bottled water for now, because there's a lot of it, you know, it's being provided to you in large quantities. So why not? It's the least that you can do to keep yourself safe, right? Troy Nels freaks out. He says that it's so irresponsible to say that, to ask people to drink bottled water instead of tap water. And if you look at donations for Troy Nels, he's received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the transportation sector, from donors in the transportation sector, which of course includes railroads. And he's also received money directly from Norfolk Southern. So even if, and the problem with this is that even if Nels is actually being sincere, which is, I mean, that's really bizarre if that's actually

true. It's just impossible to take him seriously because of the amount of money that flows into campaign coffers from this sector and from companies like Norfolk Southern, which donates to Republicans and Democrats. Wow. I'll tell you, I don't even know where to take this. I feel so badly for these people, you know, with regard to, go back for a second to this issue of having done this, you know, exploding this thing, setting it afire without having done, it doesn't appear that they did any of the sorts of modeling that should have been done prior to doing that in terms of, you know, where is this thing likely to go? How big a, you know, cloud are we likely to produce? You know, how far, where's the wind? How, how far an area should we

be evacuating? It's my understanding that they only evacuated about a mile radius. Is that correct? There was, so there was two. Yeah, it was, it was a one mile evacuation within a mile. And, but it was done in two phases. There was like an initial evacuation on the morning of February 4th. And the original plan was to allow the trains to burn out until Norfolk Southern deemed it safe for firefighters to move in and finish extinguishing the flames. But then there was reported a change in one of the cars carrying chemicals, and then that's where the concern was that there would be a kind of a chain reaction where one car would detonate and then all of the others would go too.

And if you read Mike DeWine'sine statement you get the impression that the decision to vent came from Norfolk Southern because the wine seems to kind of defer to their expertise and again this is an issue that's been so controversial because according to mayor Conaway Norfolk Southern promised that the trains would not start rolling through East Palestine again until everyone had returned to their homes and was basically, you know, that life had returned to normal. Everyone said, including Conaway, that as soon as the evacuation or the mandatory evacuation order was lifted on the night of February 8th, trains began rolling within five minutes. And that infuriated locals.

Conaway was furious and told the reporters exactly that. I was told that we would get people back in their homes before it was business as usual for Norfolk Southern. That wasn't the case. Wow. Yeah. I mean, there's really quick, there's also the question of soil encapsulation. The fire chief of East Palestine said that when the train runs through, there's this

kind of like bad smell in the air. I've heard that from locals too, that when the train runs through, there's this kind of bad smell in the air. And I've heard that from locals too, that when a train runs through, there's a bad smell in the air. Well, it might have to do with the fact that Norfolk Southern just kind of buried a lot of the contaminated soil and then put tracks over it. And I spoke to a local that actually works in landscaping, in particular he's he his company does solar remediation and and so what that means is it from from his perspective when you have something like this what you're supposed to do is mix the soil with concrete lime or cement to basically trap the contaminants that they can't leach off into bodies of water Norfolk Southern didn't do that as

far as anybody can tell they just dumped the soil and it put the tracks over and then started rolling trains through that's what i was just going to ask about the soil because normally you would either we we know this stuff has already leached into into groundwater we know it'll go further uh to the lower water tables um it's the nature of hydrocarbons and i was hoping i was going ask you, what are they doing for soil mitigation? Many people would have suggested that they dig down X number of feet and haul off all of that soil entirely. You know, it is contaminated. Or at least test. It should be easy to test, right?

Kelly, it should be very easy to just drop down there and test. Let's see yes or no. It's okay or it's not okay. Right. But they know that at least X number of feet of soil have been contaminated. So you know you're going to have to haul out at least some component or should be

if they're actually burying it and then you take it off and you bury it somewhere in the middle of the desert, somewhere where there's no residential areas around. So you're saying that they simply dug it down and essentially tilled it into the soil great water table yeah and in Norfolk Southern Norfolk so then response to that criticism doesn't inspire confidence and it's it basically they say that they moved the soil, but they're going to take more steps to properly remediate it.

They're really good with these statements where they'll use this kind of language that comes very close to admitting that you're right in your criticism. I guess they probably have a lot of experience when it comes to this kind of stuff. But basically, the statement does not inspire confidence because they don't say we removed the soil. They just said, look, we did what we had to do on the night it happened, and we're going to fix it in the future. But the question is, if Norfolk Southern has to rip up the tracks to excavate that contaminated

soil, are they going to do that? Most locals don't think so. Well, certainly with the capture of the regulators, and again, this is a common topic for Kelly and myself. We've been worrying about this as it pertains to the regulatory capture with the pharmaceutical industry. So, and I noticed that Vivek Ramaswamy is sort of pointing out that corporate capture or corporate coziness with agencies and government throughout our society, not just these two major industries. So I'm suspicious that we're seeing symptoms of something that is maybe greater than we knew's got to be attorneys swirling around here,

and there's got to be liability in what you're describing here. Do they not understand that? Do they feel so confident with their government sort of protectorate that they're not going to get into trouble? I don't understand. They really should be rushing to protect themselves, it seems like. As of the time that I published it, there were 15 lawsuits but I was aware of there are 15 lawsuits there I think it's it's called a mass action lawsuit that locals are trying to put together and you're right though it does seem like Norfolk

Southern is confident that it's going to come out okay and it's just going to be business as usual and that might actually that might actually be the case and at least one person i spoke with who lives in east palestine um said something to that effect and and they were i could kind of tell that they were a little bit sad about i mean for obvious reasons but it was basically a sense of we're not going to get justice because they always, when this happens, you know, the big corporation always gets rid of it. In many ways, Norfolk Southern is like-

Well, but there are, maybe, you know, insurance resources or slush funds that are put to the side that are ready for this kind of thing. And so they don't really have to- Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's- Wrinkle it all, they just move on.

Yeah, and like I said, it's so easy to see Norfolk Southern So they don't really have to wrinkle it all. They just move on. Yeah. And like I said, it's so easy to see Norfolk Southern as a perfect villain that always survives things like this. I mean, its top shareholders include Vanguard Group and BlackRock. It is really part of the vampire squid family that Matt Taibbi used. The term he used to describe Goldman Sachs. It's part of that. This big leviathan that's just unstoppable and always emerges unscathed. Maybe they pay out a settlement of a couple million dollars, but at the end of the day,

that's chump change for these people. That has to change. So here we are four plus weeks into this. Pedro, where are the people of East Palestine? Have the vast majority gone back? Are most people like the woman you were describing who's living off in Pennsylvania? Where are the people? So I published the story in late February, and by that time...

Sorry, I'm trying to remember all the people I spoke with. By that time, it kind of looks like life is returning to normal. But at the same time, I think it's just the character of the locals that they don't like to complain. So for example, the store owners who had a sign on their window that said closed until further notice, the only thing they would tell me

was that their business was closed because of the crash. That was it. But they just didn't want to talk to me. And the sense that I get from a lot of people is they really just want to try to get back to normal and they don't really want to complain. But Zusa, the girl that I spoke with, with the nine-year-old boy, she had still not returned home. She was still staying in a hotel and there was this whole issue where basically her housing costs were being subsidized. But once the tests came back clean for air and water for East Palestine, the housing help went away.

And so she's been trying to fight that because she does not feel safe going back home because she lived within the one mile radius of where the train derailed. And so she just doesn't feel like it's safe to go back home. And she actually had a really bad experience with the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, where she got into a nasty argument with one of their toxicologists who told them that they can't connect any of the symptoms people are experiencing to the air quality in East Palestine. And I managed to get a comment from her that said basically that because I wanted to confirm that.

And of course, that's at odds with people that are saying that they're experiencing headaches and they're smelling things that are foul and stuff. And so I couldn't tell you what percentage of the town is back in their homes and back in business. But the people of East Palestine are resilient. The model of the town is where you want to be. And I think that says everything about this type of American community. It's people that are rooted. It's people that are living here for family, for community. It's because it's home and they're not gonna go anywhere.

And people like ZUSA are fighting to come back home, they just want accountability. No, and you are right, these are hardworking blue collar people, largely conservative, and they want to get back to work and what they know is working and providing for their families. That is definitely how they for their families. That

is definitely how they're wired there. That said, it seems to me that they would really benefit from bringing in an outside consultant. I agree with Zusa. I wouldn't trust anything that somebody provided the person, this is the fox guarding the hen house. You've got the people investigating the thing, putting their stamp of approval giving you the green light all safe all clear when they actually are bought and paid for by Norfolk Southern so it sounds is there been any effort to bring in an outside consulting firm or outside experts to actually do soil sampling water sampling air sampling to give these people a sense of confidence

that actually things are in fact safe? That I'm not sure of. I'm not sure of any attempts by locals. I mean, I wouldn't doubt it if that it's happening, but at least when I was on the ground and reporting and stuff and asking questions, I was not aware of anything like that, any kind of grassroots effort to bring actually

independent contractors in to test stuff. The EPA did set up a base of operations in downtown East Palestine the day before the last time I visited. I was told by locals who are... The town talk was that the building that they rented out was rented for six months. And when I asked the EPA, are you going to be here for six months? The answer I got was, we're going to be here as long as we have to. And I think this is another important aspect of the story. I was told about blue collar Norfolk Southern workers. I met one of them.

I met obviously the EPA people who I spoke with. And basically you get a sense of, a lot of these people are from Ohio. And you get a sense of people are just trying to fix this and get on with their lives. And it's a community that's trying to come together. And the reason I'm saying that is because of how polarized things are, I heard about Norfolk Southern workers who are blue-collar that were actually being treated badly by people that they're close with. How could you work for this company? I think it's really important to try to look beyond that because this is so much bigger than that.

This is really a story about the norm in American life, which is that corporations can basically get away with murder by capturing the agencies that are supposed to hold them accountable and regulate them and make them safer. But obviously that's not the case. Well, one of the things I found absolutely abhorrent, and I've done a tremendous amount of work with FEMA during my career, that their first claim was that this didn't fall within FEMA's sort of bailiwick. This wasn't in their wheelhouse because they do things like, you know, they do things like hurricanes and floods. And I thought, if this doesn't fall in FEMA's,

in a wheelhouse, then we have a big problem. That was literally drew their excuse. And this is a group of, you know, the people of East Palestine, by the way, I'm, you know, very, very sympathetic to the fact that this didn't happen in Martha's Vineyard. These aren't people who have a bank account or a piggy bank where they can say, you know what, I'll just pick up and go for a month and go live at the Four Seasons over in Pittsburgh, or I'll go take my family and go to the West Coast for a month. These are people who are very, very middle America. They don't have the wherewithal to necessarily go and stay and be able, even if they thought they'd get reimbursed, they don't have the ability to go and stay at a hotel miles and miles away and go to restaurants for three meals a day

for an extended period. So without FEMA coming in and making those, you know, those funds available and without the federal government doing that and Norfolk Southern doing it, I mean, these people are somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They've got to go back to their homes, even if they're contaminated. What's next? What's your plan? Are you going back down there to revisit? Are you following up with these folks? Do you have a way to follow up with them? Yeah. I'm keeping in touch with them. When I published the story, I sent it to them and I plan to go back up there to follow up because I mean, this is, I was happy that I published it almost two or three weeks after the fact, because it was right around the time that the media was sort of moving on from East Palestine and people were kind of moving on to the next thing in the news cycle.

Right. But when I went back, there was still, you know, there's still cleanup crews. There are still these blue containers filled with contaminated material. There were still semi-trucks that are transporting it in and out of town. It hasn't ended for these people. The uncertainty hasn't gone away. As resilient as they are and as optimistic as a lot of them are who I spoke with, this is still a reality for them and it's going to persist for some time. So yeah, absolutely. I plan to follow up. The impression that I get from these people is that they're not going to stop.

As much as they're the kind of people that think of themselves as, we're not going to complain and we're just going to get on with our lives, I also think that they're going to try to hold someone accountable and try to get justice for this. I see an awful lot, maybe because I see so many things through the lens now of the recent COVID pandemic, but I see an awful lot of overlaps just in terms of culturally and, you know, in the same way that we have all of these people who are harmed by the vaccines and they're being ignored. These people are ignored. They're marginalized. they're being ignored. These people are ignored.

They're marginalized. They're silenced. Nobody's covering it. We don't have the mainstream media bringing, highlighting what has happened to these people in East Palestine the way that you would have expected, given this is an enormous environmental disaster. Likewise with COVID, we're not seeing really the light exposure of what's happening to people. And there's just a dismissiveness that's happening in our government officials to the suffering that was inflicted upon these people. This wasn't even a natural disaster, people. This wasn't a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood. This was a disaster that was foisted upon them by a corporation that makes millions and billions of dollars and that people aren't being held accountable, I think is really reflective of something very dark, very sinister that's happening yeah you don't like i said you don't need conspiracy theories with like aliens and and reptile people i mean the reptile people are running the government

and and uh maybe those maybe those conspiracies had sort of a an emotional valence that had a ring of truth for people i did i will say i will i will admit ped, that I did post, and again, I started my post with the word conjecture. In other words, this is not founded in fact. Conjecture. What if this spill in heavily blue-collar, unvaccinated East Palestine was actually to sort of obfuscate or confound the variables of people getting cancer and autoimmune diseases and lots of other problems. Is this actually, because it's so easy given some of what we're seeing in the behavior, it's very easy to go down that rabbit hole of, wow, is there something even worse going on than, as you said, just the reality? Well, I'll say there are two things to that that are really important,

I think. One is the fact that people are even open to that actually reflects how deeply we distrust the government and the people that are in charge of this country, which I think shows you how unhealthy the status quo is. The fact that we're like the fact even like I would be open to even considering something like that because I actually think the people that are running this country are that bad and they're that cynical or that vile, but they would actually do something like this to their own people. And I think that also contributed to this perception that maybe the reason why Pete Buttigieg and Biden ignored East

Palestine was because it made them look bad. Maybe the derailment made our transportation czar, who was, as the people of East Palestine are dealing with this stuff, what's he doing? He's talking about how there are too many white people working in construction. So I think it absolutely is plausible that part of the reason he ignored it is because it makes him look bad. And again, all of these things, the ideas we come up with, the plots and all of these alternative theories, they all reflect a truth. And the truth is that most Americans feel like the people in charge of this country either don't care about them or hate them yeah certainly a lot of people feel that way

and that they can't trust the press which is supposed to be the source of information to understand what's what's out there and what how to make their choices as uh as the governing body of the people Pedro we got to kind kind of roll to a halt here. Thankfully, we're not a 150-car train because it would take an hour and a half to slow down, it sounds like, properly, in any event. But we really thank you for coming here and sharing your insights with us.

The year can be followed at at ameriticus ameriticus yeah ameriticus e-m-e-r-t-i is that a what is ameriticus what is that it's a play on uh a word for uh uh reckless aramite very it's very when i created my twitter in 2017 i was i wasn't thinking that i was going to become a media personality so and you were clever. You were clever. And then the Substack, give us that address. Contra.substack.com. And so I'm the political editor at Chronicles Magazine, but this story was published at my Substack, which you can subscribe to at Contra.substack.com.

Pedro, thank you so much. Fantastic. Thank you. Well done. And Kelly, I'm going to keep you for a minute. Our producers have impressed upon me that we should make attempts to take calls at the end of every show. See how people feel out there.

If that's cool for you. Let's see where people take their pulse on some of this stuff. This is Detest. Let's just get a couple quick quick calls in here detest there you are oh and usually the mic will mute itself again and there it goes now you got to unmute it again there you go we're getting close just the microphone is in the lower left hand corner there and it's also very non-responsive there you are all right all right all right all right yeah i'm so sorry no problem um so i i always wondered like there's this whole like like uh jeffrey epstein type of

deal going on and you're not part of that and i'm not part of that like i'm not thinking about it much but what is your like whole take on that like because you're kind of in the end if you know what i mean um i'm gonna i'm gonna we're gonna talk about it like you're not here and we're gonna put you back in the speaking from the speaking not because there's any problem with you asking the question it's really i really don't know anything i've heard a couple of rumors and kelly you you may know something more than I. I've heard a couple of rumors that he was an intelligence operator and that he was getting pictures of people in compromising positions and videos, and that's why he had lots of money, and that's why he had lots of video

equipment, and that he's got lots of material. Now, I don't have any idea if that's true or not. I heard various rumors about who he was working for, and I even heard that he may have been a counter espionage for somebody who thought he was working for him. So what have you heard, Kelly? I've heard much of the same. I think there's no question. It's undeniable that there were a lot of very, very powerful people who were involved in what he was doing and with whom he has, he has a compromising information,

likely video and certainly evidence of their having been there, who he was working for. I can't say he, he clearly, as far as I'm concerned, you know, spoiler alert, he did not commit suicide.

I can tell you, I think, I think that's become increasingly, increasingly a concern. And I don't know if you noticed Bill Gates' wife on her way out was sort of reporting that Bill Gates had a weird preoccupation with Epstein's lifestyle and who he was. And I have heard that he had a way of sort of reeling people in. You know, he would use other celebrities who he'd get chummy with and then reel people in. Just have lunch.

Just let's go talk about it. And I guess he was a very charming guy. Come to my island sometimes. I'll fly you out there. You could see how easily people would get sucked into this stuff. Absolutely, because you're in company of other celebrities. But all you had to do is end on his guest list. And many of these people, as you said, whether it's Bill Clinton or Bill Gates and many, many others, had their name not only on the Epstein guest list once or

twice, but many of them dozens of times. So I have no doubt that he was able to collect a lot of compromising material on people. I have no clue. I have heard no credible, I should say, I've heard no credible evidence for who it is. This actually was. And not only that, I have no, and I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel like I'm reporting pure rumor to you, and I have no idea what's real and what's not it's not even my opinion it's just rumor but it is disgusting it is disgusting that is for sure

uh kane you are up hey dr drew it's kian kian how you doing hey i'm doing all right um so i've got a fun one for you guys this is gonna go to go, um, probably into Kelly's bucket. Um, I'm an engineer. I work for the government. Uh, I'm a cybersecurity engineer. I recently canceled my health insurance. Um, cause I feel like the doctors that I want to see are not going to accept insurance. Um, I kind of go more along the lines of

holistic care and stuff like that. I just want to float an idea by you guys to get your opinion. I think what the world needs right now is honest answers, as you have mentioned before. My thought on that is this.

I feel like accountability and the fear of punishment and life-changing consequences may hinder transparency. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, people are afraid of being harmed or hurt. They're afraid. And they are of the unknown, too, just what might happen. Are you suggesting, Ken, that people won't come forth and say, for example, what happened with the pandemic or with something else because they are fearful that their complicity or their involvement in it may put them in harm's way? Yeah, exactly. Because, kelly you mentioned before in your bucket that um accountability

is important and i agree but um i think that people are fearful to come forward with answers it's i agree ken it's one of the reasons i fear when people go you know say things like you know in prison so and so in prison so and so that you say that once and those people are going to shut up they're going to have attorneys that tell them to shut up and we're never going to get to the accountability it's going to be a big attorney speak thing but i think it's why i think it's why you started to see and you have seen over these past uh couple this past year or so you've seen people quit their jobs at the fda quit their jobs at the cdc all sudden robert CDC. All of a sudden, Robert Redfield's very anxious to testify in front of Congress. This is what I call it. These are people scrambling

to get on the right side of history. These are people scrambling to say, no, no, no, no, no. I know I said that at the beginning, but I quickly, you know, I'm over here now to try to sort of mitigate that risk. And I think the people who are truly in harm's way are the people like Fauci who keep doubling down and saying, no, no, no, and absolutely won't acknowledge it. The people who come forward on their own and don't have to get subpoenaed into court

to tell the truth, you're always better off coming forward and saying, I'd like to give this information up. Then the court of public opinion looks kindly on you, as does the law. It's when you continue to double down and only finally perhaps tell the truth when you've been subpoenaed or arrested that you really are in harm's way and you're at risk. So I think it's kind of a fine line.

And, Kian, can I give you one piece of advice? You ready? Please get catastrophic coverage. I was just going to say that I am, I am fully, I fully endorse your plan. It's just, if you get in a car accident or a head injury and you end up in a ventilator for six months or whatever, you need a hospital for some right. For long periods of time, I understand you can also just declare bankruptcy but you can't believe how shitty your care can become yeah if you're if you're the resources aren't there to cover it so just just the insurance was supposed to be catastrophic here it's insurance against catastrophe and so for decide a number that's a cap you don't want to go beyond twenty thousand hundred thousand whatever you feel you can cover, and then get insurance for above that.

It's very cheap. Yeah. Cool. All right? All right. Thank you. If you're a woman, I'd say if you're going to get pregnant, too. That all is in there.

It's all in there. All right. Well, shall we kind of wrap? I know. I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking now, if I was your mom. Oh, goodness. This is all so disturbing to me kelly i it's all so super disturbing it really is that well that we're we're finding out all these things that about

our business about other people i look the railroad is a key component of the supply chain i i support the railroads i want them to thrive but i don't want them to hurt people it's this weird world we're living in now when you can't hold two thoughts together that are a little bit different. But I'm telling you, it is overwhelming. And as Pedro said, this is reflective. The fact that people would even consider or that I would even post that tweet about, you know, wow, could it be this nefarious, is because it's reflective of the amount of distrust that people have now in the government, of the powers that be, of big industry, certainly big pharma. Is that just on the right? Is that just on the right or is it on both sides? I don't think so. I think it's on both sides now. And by the way, you know, Pedro did kind of gloss over,

I thought it was a bigger issue, the fact that this movie had been gloss over I thought it was a bigger issue the fact that this movie had been made I think was a Netflix movie that had been made with almost an identical storyline drew it happened in a rural town in Ohio where there's this toxic spill and the government comes in and you know covers everything up and people are I I mean, it's white noise, I think is the name of it. It is eerily. Look, there's another one. Another similar film is called Chernobyl. You know, this, this is, our government is starting to behave like these, these other centralized authorities and that we should all be suspected.

It's very upset about that. Everybody. So with that, we'll all go have a nice weekend we'll all have a good weekend hopefully uh kelly i'm so glad you're here on both these shows today coming up uh 14th michael singer he has a snake oil science regarding how what's going on in china uh dr catch up with him yes dr gad sat on march 21 Maccas, William Maccas, tell us about that. Yes, he's a Canadian oncologist who's going to be reporting on his experience with increased incidences of cancer and his concerns about cancer risk related to the COVID vaccines. By the way, I just found a really good resource. I think she was Canadian talking about women's reproductive issues.

And her data looked good. So I'm once again getting confused about whether there is a problem with reproduction. Is there a problem? So we've got to keep watching the data. And this is another area that people have controversy. And we're just trying to figure it out, guys. So stick with us. One day we will find the truth.

One day. Thanks, Kelly. Have a good weekend. And for everyone else, we'll see you next Tuesday, 3 o'clock. Thank you. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only.

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